In a talk Tara Roberts gave at the 2019 Storytellers Summit (a project of National Geographic), she shared how, as a young girl, she spent many nights hidden under her blanket with a book and a flashlight, reading and imagining. She especially loved fantasy books, and her favorite was A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle. She dreamed of having adventures just like Meg. In fact, she wanted to be Meg. It wasn’t until she was older that she realized…there are no Black girls in A Wrinkle in Time. There are no Black girls going on adventures in any of her beloved childhood books.

Tara is a storyteller, an adventurer, and a traveler. She was a fellow at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab and an editor for magazines and books for girls. She founded her own magazine and also spent a year backpacking around the world to find and tell stories about women social entrepreneurs. 

Her biggest adventure came in 2016. Tara was at the Smithsonian National Museum of African History and Culture and saw a photograph of Black women in wetsuits and learned they were part of Diving With a Purpose (DWP), an organization that trains divers to work with archeologists and historians to find and conserve slave shipwrecks throughout the Middle Passage. DWP is a predominantly Black organization that has trained more than 500 divers since their inception in 2003. Its mission is to “help Black folks, in particular, find their own history and tell their own stories.”

An estimated 12.5 million Africans were forced onto ships during the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries, according to Nafees Khan, a professor in the College of Education at Clemson University and adviser to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. What does that mean in numbers? 36,000 voyages, between 500-1000 shipwrecks, and 1.8 million people dead. Staggering.

Tara decided to join DWP so she could write the stories of the scuba divers she worked with; people who chose to volunteer their time to document this critical, but mostly invisible, part of history. Her goal, she says, is to “reimagine and reframe the origin story of Africans in the Americas and to tell stories that humanize and bring empathy, nuance, and complexity to their human journey.”

What began as a blog series for National Geographic became a podcast series called “Into the Depths,” where she chronicles her adventure with DWP. She was also featured in the March 2022 issue of National Geographic. She is the first ever African-American female explorer to be featured on its cover.

Tara says working with the slave shipwrecks has been a life-changing experience. “I am transported to a place of hope and possibility. I begin to see a way of interpreting one of the most painful parts of American history through a new lens, with a loving perspective, and with the possibility of repairing a deep wound—of closure. And that feels revelatory,” she writes in her National Geographic story.

[NOTE: This is a REALLY cool pic because: “the research team later returned to the site of the wreck to scatter soil from the land of the enslaved people who died there.”]

Back at the Storytellers Summit, Tara wrapped up her talk by imagining a girl in the future, someone just like her, under the blankets with a book and flashlight (or maybe an iPhone or other fancy sci-fi light device), but instead of reading a fantasy novel, she’s reading about an adventure discovering “valuable treasure in the form of stories”—seeing herself in the pages of the book, seeing where she comes from, seeing her ancestors, feeling her roots.

What nine-year-old girl asks for a pair of cold water waders for Christmas? 

One who loves being at the beach searching for treasure, that’s who! In fact, treasure hunter Molly Sampson and her older sister Natalie both asked for the waders. Inspired by their father’s love of fossils, one of their favorite family activities is searching for them at Calvert Beach, near their home in Prince Frederick, Maryland.

On December 25, 2022, bright and early on Christmas morning, Molly, her sister, and her father went to the beach to look for fossils. Molly was hoping to find some sharks’ teeth to make into a necklace, but she found something too big for a piece of jewelry.

Seventeen-year-old Logan Lane is a senior at Edward R Murrow High School in Brooklyn, NY, but her story starts in 6th grade when she got her first smartphone. Like most teenagers, she dove head first into social media, using the phone at all hours and falling asleep scrolling through it. Logan carefully watched girls on Instagram—not girls she knew in real life—and observed how they crafted their popularity by posting very intentionally: they wore make-up and nice clothes, posed in flattering ways, and wrote clever captions. Logan was both fascinated by their behaviors and repulsed. She decided to create her own social media persona, becoming a sort of anti-instagrammer: basically she would post not-so-flattering pictures of herself. But what looked like a rebellion against the social media scene actually fueled the same addiction.

Although Logan took an occasional break from her phone, it wasn’t until she entered high school that she began to truly question her relationship with it. 

Some of her new schoolmates were some of those popular Instagram girls and things got weird. As she says in an interview with podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro, her real identity collided with her social media identity. She began to feel compelled to act the way she portrayed herself on Instagram. 

A split identity like this is not an unusual phenomenon when so much socializing happens online. Neither is a skewed sense of social emotional norms. For instance, spending most of your time socializing on a phone means missing nonverbal cues like body language and facial expressions. Making friends and navigating healthy relationships get tricky, too, when phones are involved. It’s easier to be unempathetic, self-centered, and just harsher when you don’t have to interact face to face. Talking to someone in the same space at the same time becomes more foreign and can feel awkward. The overuse of social media can also lead to online bullying, shorter attention spans, and low self-esteem. Despite the word “social” in its name, it can actually make teens feel lonelier.  

This was true for Logan. By the beginning of the pandemic, she was on her phone almost twenty-four hours a day. She began to spend a lot of time feeling jealous of her peers and down on herself. She couldn’t sleep and she got actual indentations on the pads of her fingers from scrolling so much.

So two years into her high school career Logan made a choice. She walked into her parents’ room, put her phone in their drawer, and that was that. Her social circle got smaller. She began to read a lot more, sew and crochet, go to bed earlier, sleep better, wake up earlier, and enjoy simple things like having dinner with her family. 

Then Logan met a girl at a concert who had an old-school flip phone. The girl liked to read. She liked to experience things in real time. Logan’s world lit up. She and her new friend met up the next week and walked through the art and music section of the public library and then went to a farmers’ market. Simple and fun. Soon after that, they decided to form the Luddite Club.