But the New York Times on a phone is not particularly more or less addictive than the same content on a piece of paper. Nor does reading it on a phone cut anyone off from the rest of society any more than focusing on the printed paper or a book or a Walkman.

If the problem is games, social media, or porn, why don't we identify those as social problems and try to fix them? Rather than blaming the device.

Oh! It definitely is, and it was engineered to make it more. The comments make sure of that, then you've got the alerts for Breaking News, the sense of urgency in animated visuals with shiny colors. Of course, the NYT in a phone is far more addicting.

I’m confident that people watching porn on suburban trains isn’t the problem.

Naming the device where we consume addictive content is just a convenient shorthand.

If we just stuck to the same NY Times articles we would have read in the paper that would be fine. But very few of us have the will power to pick up our device and not wonder into social media apps.