Author: Kelsey Myers

A certain type of story travels the world and, for some reason, misplaces its passport at the border with the United States. One such tale is the OMEP World Assembly resolution on the education of refugee children. Adopted at the 68th World Assembly and bearing the burden of a real humanitarian crisis—more than half of the world’s school-age refugee children are not attending school, with millions of them under the age of eight—it received significant coverage in forty countries and hardly made an appearance in domestic U.S. media. Not because it wasn’t a true story. Because there were other things…

Imagine a Tuesday morning in late May in a classroom in Wayne, New Jersey. The windows are as far open as they will go. Warm air is pushed from one side of the room to the other by a box fan that hums in the corner. As the outside temperature rises into the upper 90s, children sit at their desks in shorts and t-shirts, clearly uncomfortable as they attempt to concentrate on a lesson. The district has called it by midmorning. The school day ends early. Once more. At least a dozen districts in New Jersey sent students home early…

In New York State, a quiet civic event takes place every third Tuesday in May. Voters with strong opinions about capital reserve funds, diesel buses, and tax levies swarm gymnasiums and school lobbies. On their way to work, the majority of people probably don’t give those “Vote Here” signs a second thought. However, it’s one of the most important days of the year for the parents, educators, and administrators who watch the tallies roll in that evening. It occurred once more on May 19, 2026. Overall, the results revealed a well-known pattern: voters approved bus purchases, school boards updated their…

A seventeen-year-old is attempting to figure out how to write a thousand words that matter somewhere, be it a kitchen table in Mexico City, a dormitory in Shanghai, or a school library in Seoul. Not an essay for a college application. It’s not a history test. Something more akin to what you’d read in a policy journal—analytically supported, globally minded, and persuasive enough to withstand a fifteen-minute oral defense in front of judges from one of the most prestigious publications in the world. Every cycle, thousands of students attempt to meet the standards set by the Harvard International Review Academic…

Watching one of the most influential universities in the world battle the federal government in court, in public remarks, and in the media over the issue of who gets to control American higher education is almost cinematic. Harvard says that the White House is not the solution. Federal judges appear to have agreed, at least in part, thus far. For more than a year, the conflict has been intensifying. Citing concerns about campus culture, antisemitism, and what officials described as violations of federal civil rights law, the Trump administration withdrew approximately two billion dollars in research grants and froze federal…

It’s difficult to ignore how much pressure seems to be in the air when you stroll through Harvard Yard on any given afternoon, past the worn brick of Widener Library and the iron gates. Applications for internships, research fellowships, and excessive course loads are all on top of an academic setting where practically everyone seems to be receiving As. Not a few pupils. Not the best quarter. roughly 60% of them. One of the more candid discussions American higher education has had with itself in recent years revolves around that figure. This week, Harvard faculty members have been voting on…

The notion that a child’s entire future could depend on their ability to resist eating a marshmallow for fifteen minutes seems almost ridiculous. However, that was essentially what we told ourselves for decades. The Stanford marshmallow experiment turned out to be one of the most complicated, misinterpreted, and frequently cited studies in contemporary psychology. Sometime in the early 1970s, a researcher, a child, and a single puffy white treat were seated on a table in a small room at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School. In retrospect, Walter Mischel, a psychologist who had studied human behavior and self-control for years, created what…

Most real turning points have a moment when you can sense the change before anyone makes an official announcement. That moment in the AI world occurred on Tuesday morning when Andrej Karpathy announced his joining Anthropic in a single paragraph on X. In its first hour, the post received close to three million views. By the afternoon, the tech sector was engaged in its usual activities: analyzing, arguing, and interpreting what might or might not have been stated.At this point, Karpathy’s career is essentially a chronology of contemporary artificial intelligence. Along with Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, he co-founded OpenAI…

There’s a certain energy at Stanford Stadium on a May evening. The rows of purple light sticks that reach every corner of the stands are illuminated by the California air, which is still warm after a hot day. Fifty thousand people have been waiting in the dark for something they won’t be able to adequately explain to anyone who wasn’t present, counting down the days, some of them weeks. The third and last night of BTS’s ARIRANG World Tour stop in Stanford took place there, and it delivered in ways that even the most prepared fan probably didn’t anticipate. Day…

Imagine a teen sitting in his room in India at around two in the morning. He has no textbooks open, no structured syllabus, just a laptop screen and whatever part of the internet he happened to be using that evening. No safety net, no IIT preparation course, no coaching facility. Just a tab in the browser and a restless, hazy feeling that there must be another way. This story starts with that image, which is unglamorous and a little lonely. Like these things, the story recently went viral. A 20-year-old college dropout claimed on Reddit that he had secured a…