Roughly a decade has passed since experts began to appreciate that social media may be truly hazardous for children, and especially for teenagers. As with teenage smoking, the evidence has accumulated slowly, but leads in clear directions. The heightened rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among young people are measurable and disheartening. When I worked for the White House on technology policy, I would hear from the parents of children who had suffered exploitation or who died by suicide after terrible experiences online. They were asking us to do something.

The severity and novelty of the problem suggests the need for a federal legislative response, and Congress can’t be said to have ignored the issue. In fact, by my count, since 2017 it has held 39 hearings that have addressed children and social media, and nine wholly devoted to just that topic. Congress gave Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, a hero’s welcome. Executives from Facebook, YouTube and other firms have been duly summoned and blasted by angry representatives.

But just what has Congress actually done? The answer is: nothing.

Everyone knows that Congress struggles with polarizing issues such as immigration and gun control. But this is a failure on a different level: an inability to do something urgent and overwhelmingly popular, despite the agreement of both major parties, the president, and the large majority of the American population.

[Read: The Perils of ‘Sharenting’]

As someone who witnessed this failure firsthand, I am pained to admit that our government is failing parents, teenagers, and children. Congressional dysfunction cannot be reduced to any one thing. But one fact stands out: For a decade and counting, not a single bill seeking to protect children has reached a full vote in the House or Senate.

It is easy to read this and want to give up on Congress entirely. But what we voters and citizens need is a mechanism to force congressional leadership to make hard commitments to holding votes on overwhelmingly popular legislation. Whatever power public opinion and moral duty may have once had, they are no longer working.

The story of child-protection legislation in recent years could be taught as a reverse civics lesson, where bills that have the support of the president, the public, and both houses of Congress fail to become law. It would almost be reassuring if we could blame partisanship or corporate lobbyists for the outcome. But this is a story of culture war, personal grievance, and petty beefs so indefensible as to be a disgrace to the Republic.

During my time in the White House, no meetings were more painful than those with parents whose children had been killed or committed suicide after online bullying or online sexual exploitation. Parents, in more pain than any parent should have to endure, would come in bearing photos of their dead children. Kids like Carson Bride, a 16-year-old who died by suicide after online bullying, or Erik Robinson, a 12-year old who died after trying out a choking game featured on TikTok.

The case for legislative action is overwhelming. It is insanity to imagine that platforms, who see children and teenagers as target markets, will fix these problems themselves. Teenagers often act self-assured, but their still-developing brains are bad at self-control and vulnerable to exploitation. Youth need stronger privacy protections against the collection and distribution of their personal information, which can be used for targeting. In addition, the platforms need to be pushed to do more to prevent young girls and boys from being connected to sexual predators, or served content promoting eating disorders, substance abuse, or suicide. And the sites need to hire more staff whose job it is to respond to families under attack.

All of these ideas were once what was known, politically, as low-hanging fruit. Even people who work or worked at the platforms will admit that the U.S. federal government should apply more pressure. An acquaintance who works in trust and safety at one of the platforms put it to me bluntly over drinks one evening: “The U.S. government doesn’t actually force us to do anything. Sure, Congress calls us in to yell at us every so often, but there’s no follow-up.”

“What you need to do,” she said, “is actually get on our backs and force us to spend money to protect children online. We could do more. But without pressure, we won’t.”

Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer of Facebook, made a similar point to me. Government, he says, is too focused on online problems with intangible harms that are inherently difficult for the platforms to combat, like “fighting misinformation.” In contrast, government does far too little to force platforms to combat real and visceral harms, like the online exploitation of minors, that the platforms could do more about if pushed. This is not to let the platforms off the hook—but government needs to do its job too.

Some of the bills that emerged in the 117th Congress, in 2021 and 2022, sought to strengthen the protection of teenagers’ privacy online. The case for such legislation is not hard to make—lack of privacy makes targeting possible. Senators Ed Markey (a Democrat from Massachusetts) and Bill Cassidy (a Republican from Louisiana) were prominent sponsors of one such bill, named the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act.

Enacting a stronger children’s-privacy bill also seemed a good fallback if Congress should, once again, fail to pass a general privacy law protecting everyone. Whatever promise there may have been for passing such a law last year began to disappear after a nasty fight between Senator Maria Cantwell, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee and her three counterparts, Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the chair of the House Commerce Committee; Roger Wicker, the ranking Republican on the Senate committee; and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the Republican ranking member on the House committee. The latter three co-drafted a privacy bill, with special protections for children, but they did it without Cantwell, and she opposed the bill and refused to introduce it in the Senate. The bill was then promptly roadblocked in the House by the State of California (California feared elimination of its own privacy law and did not want to lose its ability to pass future laws on the matter).  California convinced then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in early September, to announce her opposition, all but ending any chance of passing a general privacy bill. The deadlock over general privacy was its own tragedy, but it made a children’s bill a natural and seemingly attainable alternative.

A bolder approach to protecting children online sought to require that social-media platforms be safer for children, similar to what we require of other products that children use. In 2022 the most important such bill was the Kid’s Online Safety Act (KOSA), co-sponsored by Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Marcia Blackburn of Tennessee. KOSA came directly out of the Frances Haugen hearings in the summer of 2021, and particularly the revelation that social-media sites were serving content that promoted eating disorders, suicide, and substance abuse to teenagers. In an alarming demonstration, Blumenthal revealed that his office had created a test Instagram account for a 13-year-old girl, which was, within one day, served content promoting eating disorders. (Instagram has acknowledged that this is an ongoing issue on its site.)

[Read: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine]

The KOSA bill would have imposed a general duty on platforms to prevent and mitigate harms to children, specifically those stemming from self-harm, suicide, addictive behaviors, and eating disorders. It would have forced platforms to install safeguards to protect children and tools to enable parental supervision. In my view, the most important thing the bill would have done is simply force the platforms to spend more money and more ongoing attention on protecting children, or risk serious liability.

But KOSA became a casualty of the great American culture war. The law would give parents more control over what their children do and see online, which was enough for some groups to transform the whole thing into a fight over transgender issues. Some on the right, unhelpfully, argued that the law should be used to protect children from trans-related content. That triggered civil-rights groups, who took up the cause of teenage privacy and speech rights. A joint letter condemned KOSA for “enabl[ing] parental supervision of minors’ use of [platforms]” and “cutting off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.”

It got ugly. I recall an angry meeting in which the Eating Disorders Coalition (in favor of the law) fought with LGBTQ groups (opposed to it) in what felt like a very dark Veep episode, except with real lives at stake. Critics like Evan Greer, a digital rights advocate, charged that attorneys general in red states could attempt to use the law to target platforms as part of a broader agenda against trans rights. That risk is exaggerated; the bill’s list of harms is specific and discrete; it does not include, say, “learning about transgenderism” but it does provide that “nothing shall be construed [to require a platform to prevent] any minor from deliberately and independently searching for, or specifically requesting, content.” Nonetheless, the charge had a powerful resonance and was widely disseminated.

Sometime in the late fall of 2022, Chairman Pallone made the decision not to advance children’s privacy or children’s protection bills out of his committee, effectively killing both in regular session. Pallone (and his Republican counterparts) argued that passing a children’s privacy law would take the wind out of the sails of some future effort to pass a comprehensive privacy bill (for which, I note, we are still waiting). When it came to his reasoning for killing KOSA, Pallone mentioned the concerns of the special interest groups—his spokesman pointed out to me that “nearly 100 civil rights organizations had substantive policy concerns with the bills.” There was, finally, as his staffers freely admitted, as a form of payback involved—a desire, shared by McMorris-Rogers, to punish Cantwell for having blocked the adult-privacy bill. A spokesman for Pallone insisted to me recently that “there was never a path forward for either COPPA or KOSA” based on the opposition of unnamed members of Congress and the civil rights groups, and that “young people will quickly age out of age-specific protections” anyway. (I note that civil rights groups don’t actually have voting rights in Congress.)

There was, in fact, one last path forward in 2022. Senator Blumenthal managed to get KOSA inserted in the early draft of an end-of-year spending bill, subject to the sign-off of House and Senate leadership. It was, however, promptly and shamelessly removed by Mitch McConnell, presumably to avoid giving Democrats the win. This mess of infighting, myopic strategy, and political maneuvering meant Congress failed to do anything to protect children online last year.

To be sure, there was and is, to be sure, a serious, substantive debate to be had over KOSA. Teenagers do have privacy and speech interests; but parents have interests as well. As a teenager, I resented anything that seemed like censorship or parental oversight; as a parent, I feel differently. Reasonable people can and do disagree over the balance that should be struck. But at some point, in a democracy, the vote needs to be called. Polls show that 70 percent of Americans and about 91 percent of parents want stronger legal protections for children online. If a majority, indeed a supermajority, of Americans want stronger protection for teenagers online, it is simply wrong to never call a vote.

I am well aware that part of the power of leadership and committee chairs lies in their control over the holding of votes. But that doesn’t make it less horribly undemocratic, and it is in these “non-votes” that the power of corporate lobbyists and special interests really makes its mark. That’s why what we need is some mechanism for a popular override—say, if legislation attracts more than 50 co-sponsors, leadership must hold a floor vote, win or lose.

It doesn’t help that there has been no political accountability for the members of Congress who were happy to grandstand about children online and then do nothing. No one outside a tiny bubble knows that Wicker voted for KOSA in public but helped kill it in private, or that infighting between Cantwell and Pallone helped kill children’s privacy. I know this only because I had to for my job. The press loves to cover members of Congress yelling at tech executives. But its coverage of the killing of popular bills is rare to nonexistent, in part because Congress hides its tracks. Say what you want about the Supreme Court or the president, but at least their big decisions are directly attributable to the justices or the chief executive. Congressmen like Frank Pallone or Roger Wicker don’t want to be known as the men who killed Congress’s efforts to protect children online, so we rarely find out who actually fired the bullet.

The American public has the right to be angry: Things are not okay. That said, other parts of government have done what they can.  The White House and FTC have tightened oversight using existing authorities. Some states have passed their own child-protection legislation, and this fall, 44 state attorneys general sued Instagram (Meta) alleging that the site knew its site was dangerous but promoted it as safe and appropriate anyhow. Both the children’s-privacy bill and KOSA were reintroduced this year, and the latter has picked up 48 co-sponsors, including prominent progressives like Elizabeth Warren. While vocal detractors remain, the major LGBTQ groups no longer oppose the legislation.

At this point both parties, the president, and the public want a law passed—which is why we need a commitment to hold a floor vote in both chambers. Protecting children is a fundamental role in any civilized state, and by that measure we are failing badly.

Americans are feeling pinch of high interest rates, forcing them to hold off purchases of homes, cars, even groceries.

My youngest daughter presided over a stack of sticker sheets, sorting the best from the least inspiring. There were pumpkins and ghosts and black cats, but upon the discovery of a set of skulls, she stopped and pointed to a shape on the page she couldn’t identify. “What’s that?”

In general terms, it was a hexagon. More specifically, it was a coffin. I told her it was a special box dead people are buried in (thus its presence among the skulls). She put the sticker set on her stack of keepers.

I was pleased she had taken the news about coffins and skulls so smoothly. This is the peculiar magic of Halloween, the dizzying juxtaposition of the genuinely frightening with whimsy and make-believe. If most major holidays commemorate particular events (think Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July), Halloween memorializes the occasion of death.

Halloween is a cultural institution with an ancient inheritance: It may trace its roots to pagan celebrations of the autumn harvest and the hailing of winter, accompanied by a thinning of the boundary between this world and the next. The holiday also seems to have been influenced by the Christian solemnities of All Saints’ Day—a traditional observance that began as a day of dedication to Christian martyrs—and All Souls’ Day, devoted to the faithful departed. Whatever Halloween’s precise pedigree, it has a consistent historical association with death and the dead.

Death haunts all of the holiday’s typical motifs: It is the core of horror tales and movies, the threat of monsters and witches, the premise of ghost stories, and the source of skeletons, skulls, and tombstones. Human bones in particular have long represented mortality in art: Medieval European artists often included depictions of skeletonized corpses and grinning skulls in memento mori pieces, intended to remind observers of the fact of their eventual death. Later funerary art and architecture in Europe sometimes integrated the image of naked bones into tombs, mausoleums, and headstones, with the same aim as medieval memento mori works—to put onlookers in mind of their own destiny.

[Read: Adult Halloween is stupid, embarrassing, and very important]

People of the past were no more likely to die than we are today—the odds for everyone have always been 100 percent. But denizens of prior centuries were typically more exposed to the brutal realities of death than we are. In her exploration of American dying, The Good Death, the author Ann Neumann writes, “What’s different today is that our experience of death is a simulacrum, a myth, a romance where our loved one gives us a last meaningful look, then slips into a long sleep … Part of the reason we don’t know how people die is that we no longer see it up close.” We modern Americans tend to be comfortably removed from death, in other words, by the professionalization of care for the dying—Neumann points out that 80 percent of Americans die in facilities such as hospices, hospitals, and nursing homes. In this context, death recedes into an abstraction, something distant and anesthetized, devoid of the immediate experience of mortality.

Such estrangement from death leaves people bewildered and unprepared for the realities of dying, Neumann writes. But it also robs us of a certain clarity that the memento mori artists, with their grim preoccupations, grasped very well. Life is short and death is final, and all mortal glory is fleeting. We all labor under a death sentence. The fact of death ought to induce intentionality in our ways of living.

Halloween is no approximation of the firsthand experience of death. But it does foreground the visceral fear of death (occasionally via viscera itself). And it offers an opportunity to engage playfully with the idea of dying, through community celebration rather than solemn contemplation—or jarring confrontations with violence in headlines and images of brutal killings at home and abroad. Halloween’s reminders of mortality may be less explicit than artworks directly aimed at promoting virtue among the living, but they’re perhaps just the right inspiration for a culture as removed from death as we are. The skulls present the idea of mortality, and the jack o’ lanterns and costume parties make it approachable to a society that rarely spares time to consider the passing away of all things.

So enjoy the scares and the silliness, the heady mingling of humor and frivolity with fear and suspense. As the earth prepares for the dormancy of winter, so too can we prepare—in subtler ways than our predecessors—for the eventual end we’ll all meet, something to keep in mind when we wish one another Happy Halloween.

The publicly traded company is disappearing. In 1996, about 8,000 firms were listed in the U.S. stock market. Since then, the national economy has grown by nearly $20 trillion. The population has increased by 70 million people. And yet, today, the number of American public companies stands at fewer than 4,000. How can that be?

One answer is that the private-equity industry is devouring them. When a private-equity fund buys a publicly traded company, it takes the company private—hence the name. (If the company has not yet gone public, the acquisition keeps that from happening.) This gives the fund total control, which in theory allows it to find ways to boost profits so that it can sell the company for a big payday a few years later. In practice, going private can have more troubling consequences. The thing about public companies is that they’re, well, public. By law, they have to disclose information about their finances, operations, business risks, and legal liabilities. Taking a company private exempts it from those requirements.

That may not have been such a big deal when private equity was a niche industry. Today, however, it’s anything but. In 2000, private-equity firms managed about 4 percent of total U.S. corporate equity. By 2021, that number was closer to 20 percent. In other words, private equity has been growing nearly five times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole.

[James Surowiecki: The method in the market’s madness]

Elisabeth de Fontenay, a law professor at Duke University who studies corporate finance, told me that if current trends continue, “we could end up with a completely opaque economy.”

This should alarm you even if you’ve never bought a stock in your life. One-fifth of the market has been made effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators. Information as basic as who actually owns a company, how it makes its money, or whether it is profitable is “disappearing indefinitely into private equity darkness,” as the Harvard Law professor John Coates writes in his book The Problem of Twelve. This is not a recipe for corporate responsibility or economic stability. A private economy is one in which companies can more easily get away with wrongdoing and an economic crisis can take everyone by surprise. And to a startling degree, a private economy is what we already have.

America learned the hard way what happens when corporations operate in the dark. Before the Great Depression, the whole U.S. economy functioned sort of like the crypto market in 2021. Companies could raise however much money they wanted from whomever they wanted. They could claim almost anything about their finances or business model. Investors often had no good way of knowing whether they were being defrauded, let alone whether to expect a good return.

Then came the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. From October to December of 1929, the stock market lost 50 percent of its value, with more losses to come. Thousands of banks collapsed, wiping out the savings of millions of Americans. Unemployment spiked to 25 percent. The Great Depression generated a crisis of confidence for American capitalism. Public hearings revealed just how rampant corporate fraud had become before the crash. In response, Congress passed the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These laws launched a regime of “full and fair disclosure” and created a new government agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, to enforce it. Now if companies wanted to raise money from the public, they would have to disclose a wide array of information to the public. This would include basic details about the company’s operations and finances, plus a comprehensive list of major risks facing the company, plans for complying with current and future regulations, and documentation of outstanding legal liabilities. All of these disclosures would be reviewed for accuracy by the SEC.

This regime created a new social contract for American capitalism: scale in exchange for transparency. Private companies were limited to 100 investors, putting a hard limit on how quickly they could grow. Any business that wanted to raise serious capital from the public had to submit itself to the new reporting laws. Over the next half century, this disclosure regime would underwrite the longest period of economic growth and prosperity in U.S. history. But it didn’t last. Beginning in the “Greed Is Good” 1980s, a wave of deregulatory reforms made it easier for private companies to raise capital. Most important was the National Securities Markets Improvement Act of 1996, which allowed private funds to raise an unlimited amount of money from an unlimited number of institutional investors. The law created a loophole that effectively broke the scale-for-transparency bargain. Tellingly, 1997 was the year the number of public companies in America peaked.

[From the November 2018 issue: The death of the IPO]

“Suddenly, private companies could raise all the money they want without even thinking about an IPO,” De Fontenay said. “That completely undermined the incentives companies had to go public.” Indeed, from 1980 to 2000, an average of 310 companies went public every year; from 2001 to 2022, only 118 did. The number briefly shot up during the coronavirus pandemic but has since fallen. (Over the same time period, the rate of mergers and acquisitions soared, which also helps explain the decline in public companies.)

Meanwhile, private equity has matured into a multitrillion-dollar industry, devoted to making short-term profits from highly leveraged transactions, operating with almost no regulatory or public scrutiny. Not all private-equity deals end in calamity, of course, and not all public companies are paragons of civic virtue. But the secrecy in which private-equity firms operate emboldens them to act more recklessly—and makes it much harder to hold them accountable when they do. Private-equity investment in nursing homes, to take just one example, has grown from about $5 billion at the turn of the century to more than $100 billion today. The results have not been pretty. The industry seems to have recognized that it could improve profit margins by cutting back on staffing while relying more on psychoactive medication. Stories abound of patients being rushed to the hospital after being overprescribed opioids, of bedside call buttons so poorly attended that residents suffer in silence while waiting for help, of nurses being pressured to work while sick with COVID. A 2021 study concluded that private-equity ownership was associated with about 22,500 premature nursing-home deaths from 2005 to 2017—before the wave of death and misery wrought by the pandemic.

Eventually, the public got wind of what was happening. The pandemic death count focused attention on the industry. Journalists and watchdog groups exposed the worst of the behaviors. Policy makers and regulators, at long last, began to take action. But by then, much of the damage had been done. “If we had some form of disclosure, we probably would have seen regulatory action a decade earlier,” Coates told me. “But instead, we’ve had 10-plus years of experimentation and abuse without anyone knowing.”

Something similar could be said about any number of industries, including higher education, newspapers, retail, and grocery stores. Across the economy, private-equity firms are known for laying off workers, evading regulations, reducing the quality of services, and bankrupting companies while ensuring that their own partners are paid handsomely. The veil of secrecy makes all of this easier to execute and harder to stop.

Private-equity funds dispute many of the criticisms of the industry. They argue that the horror stories are exaggerated and that a handful of problematic firms shouldn’t tarnish the rest of the industry, which is doing great work. Freed from onerous disclosure requirements, they claim, private companies can build more dynamic, flexible businesses that generate greater returns for shareholders. But the lack of public information makes verifying these claims difficult. Most careful academic studies find that although private-equity funds slightly outperformed the stock market on average prior to the early 2000s, they no longer do so. When you take into account their high fees, they appear to be a worse investment than a simple index fund.

“These companies basically get to write their own stories,” says Alyssa Giachino, the research director at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. “They produce their own reports. They come up with their own numbers. And there’s no one making sure they are telling the truth.”

In the Roaring ’20s, the lack of corporate disclosure allowed a massive financial crisis to build up without anyone noticing. A century later, the growth of a new shadow economy could pose similar risks.

The hallmark of a private-equity deal is the so-called leveraged buyout. Funds take on massive amounts of debt to buy companies, with the goal of reselling in a few years at a profit. If all of that debt becomes hard to pay back—because of, say, an economic downturn or rising interest rates—a wave of defaults could ripple through the financial system. In fact, this has happened before: The original leveraged buyout mania of the 1980s helped spark the 1989 stock-market crash. Since then, private equity has grown into a $12 trillion industry and has begun raising much of its money from unregulated, nonbank lenders, many of which are owned by the same private-equity funds taking out loans in the first place.

Meanwhile, interest rates have reached a 20-year high, posing a direct threat to private equity’s debt-heavy business model. In response, many private-equity funds have migrated toward even riskier forms of backroom financing. Many of these involve taking on even more debt on the assumption that market conditions will soon improve enough to restore profitability. If that doesn’t happen—and many of these big deals fail—the implications could be massive.

[Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean: What financial engineering does to hospitals]

The industry counters that private markets are a better place for risky deals precisely because they have fewer ties to the real economy. A traditional bank has a bunch of ordinary depositors, whereas if a private-equity firm goes bust, the losers are institutional investors: pension funds, university endowments, wealthy fund managers. Bad, but not catastrophic. The problem, once again, is that no one knows how true that story is. Banks have to disclose information to regulators about how much they’re lending, how much capital they’re holding, and how their loans are performing. Private lenders sidestep all of that, meaning that regulators can’t know what risks exist in the system or how tied they are to the real economy.

“Everything could be just fine,” says Ana Arsov, a managing director at Moody’s Analytics who specializes in private lending. “But the point is that we don’t have the information we need to assess risk. Who is making these loans? How big are they? What are the terms? We just don’t know. So the worry is that the leverage in the system might grow and grow and grow without anyone noticing. And we really don’t know what the effects could be if something goes wrong.”

The government appears to be at least somewhat aware of this problem. In August, the SEC proposed a new rule requiring private-equity fund advisers to give more information to their investors. That’s better than nothing, but it hardly addresses the bad behavior or systemic risk. Nearly a century ago, Congress concluded that the nation’s economic system could not survive as long as its most powerful companies were left to operate in the shadows. It took the worst economic cataclysm in American history to learn that lesson. The question now is what it will take to learn it again.