Author: Kelsey Myers

Ryan Lochte’s life appears to have taken a different turn in a parking lot somewhere in Gainesville, Florida. That’s where the story of his transition into college coaching actually started, according to reports from earlier this month. A former Olympic legend agreed to take an assistant coaching position at Missouri State for thirty-four dollars an hour after having a casual conversation and making a connection. When compared to twelve Olympic medals and a career that once brought in over a million dollars annually from endorsements, it’s a startling figure. But you have to go back to the University of Florida…

It’s ironic that Reese Witherspoon, who barely completed one year of college, is best known for portraying Elle Woods, a woman who storms the halls of Harvard Law School with a pink laptop and an iron will. Hollywood, as it usually does, got in the way after she enrolled and showed up. Nashville, Tennessee, where Witherspoon was raised, is a city that moves slowly but produces people who are eager to get somewhere. By most accounts, she was the type of student who took everything seriously at Harpeth Hall, an all-girls school from which she graduated in 1994. She characterized…

The fact that one of the more genuinely brilliant engineering concepts of recent years began with a garage and a rejection letter is almost poetic. William Freeman, an electrical engineer at Polaroid at the time and a professor at MIT today, saw an advertisement in Scientific American back in 1985. Up to $10,000 was available for creative textile and apparel concepts through the Innovative Design Fund. Freeman provided a zipper with three sides. The kind that could turn a chair or tent from soft to solid like flipping a switch, but not the kind that closes a jacket. The plan…

The scene outside Harvard-Westlake’s Upper School campus in Studio City is predictably chaotic if you drive north on Coldwater Canyon Avenue on any weekday morning. Cars are parked along the narrow street, and students are moving between buildings on 22 acres nestled into the hillside. It’s the kind of controlled bustle that suggests a place that takes itself seriously without having to make an announcement. At first, the campus served as a country club. In some way, that detail seems appropriate. Despite what the name suggests, Harvard-Westlake School is not connected to Harvard University. The Harvard School for Boys, established…

Someone is staring at an increasingly difficult-to-explain number somewhere in Cambridge, inside the modest offices of Harvard Management Company. As of 2025, Harvard’s unfunded commitments to private equity funds totaled $7.9 billion. The same amount was $4.6 billion eight years ago. The difference between those two figures reveals information about timing, ambition, and what happens when the deal-making industry slows down more quickly than anyone anticipated. On the surface, Harvard Management Company’s entry into private markets wasn’t careless. The endowment was perceived as underperforming in comparison to peers like Yale and MIT when NP “Narv” Narvekar took over as CEO…

The fact that Tiger Woods, one of the most famous athletes in modern history, attended an economics lecture at Stanford in the fall of 1994 after winning three straight U.S. Junior Amateur titles is somewhat amazing. He was eighteen. At the age of two, he had already made an appearance on national television. Nevertheless, he was being called “Urkel” by his college teammates as a freshman on a golf scholarship. Notah Begay III, who would later become the first Native American to win on the PGA Tour, inspired that moniker. It’s the kind of minute, humanizing detail that gets lost…

Every time Kirk Cousins is brought up, a version of this tale is overlooked. The franchise tags, the guaranteed contracts, and the “You like that?!” moment captured on camera following a fourth-quarter comeback are all talked about. However, very few return to the place where it all began: a young man from Holland, Michigan, who was most likely headed to Toledo. When Mark Dantonio became Michigan State’s head coach in 2007, he had few options for quarterbacks. None of his main targets had signed. He then gave Kirk Cousins a call. Cousins, who had been considering Western Michigan or Toledo,…

A certain type of story works particularly well: one in which a powerful person acknowledges that they were once utterly, helplessly clueless, but does so with genuine warmth and no justification. One of those tales is that of Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. It has to do with a college cafeteria, a Hindi phrase he had no business using, and what he describes as his one day of fame on campus, all while grinning. Pichai was born and raised in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. At the age of twelve, the family’s first telephone was delivered. He came to IIT Kharagpur,…

The structure on Tenbury Wells’ edge has seen many changes over the years. Originally located on the border between Herefordshire and Worcestershire, St. Michael’s College was established in 1856 as a choir school for boys by the Reverend Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley. It was a Victorian institution with a distinct, almost rarefied purpose. As a result of the pandemic, it closed in 2020. After SIAS Education Group and Anglo Independence School acquired the property in August 2024, they began renovating it and reopening it under a different name. In September 2025, St. Michael Abbey School welcomed its first class of…

A school district that has been in operation continuously since 1900 and still requires families to submit lottery applications in order to get their kids admitted has a subtle telling quality. East Lansing Public Schools, or ELPS as the locals like to refer to it, educates about 3,700 students in eight schools in a comparatively small area of Ingham County, Michigan. It appears modest on paper. In actuality, it has a reputation that extends far beyond its boundaries. The district is located in a city that most people are primarily familiar with because it is home to Michigan State University,…