Author: Nelson Rosario

New York City produces a certain type of school, one in which the student-to-faculty ratio seems nearly unreal, the campus feels too large for the borough it is located in, and the name carries a subtle weight that some families recognize right away. That’s precisely what Riverdale Country School is. Located in the Bronx’s Riverdale neighborhood on more than 27 acres, it is by far one of the nation’s most prestigious independent schools. However, the more you understand about it, the more difficult that distinction gets. Frank Sutliff Hackett established the school in 1907; he called it “an American experiment…

The largest school district in the state discreetly decided it no longer needed the organization created to represent it in a meeting room somewhere in Meridian, Idaho. Avoid a dramatic walkout. No conflict in public. The Idaho School Boards Association, whose declared goal is to “empower and champion school boards to foster student success,” was bid farewell with a simple 4-1 vote. Anyone who was paying attention could see the irony. The fourth public school district in Idaho to sever ties with ISBA was West Ada School District, which had about 38,000 students in the 2025–2026 school year. Only a…

The call was received at 2:50 in the morning. On Right Way Path, there is an outside fire. That’s about as ambiguous as emergency calls get, and what Laconia Fire crews discovered upon arrival was anything but ambiguous. Already, half of a three-story abandoned building was destroyed, with flames shooting through windows and pouring from the roof as if something had deliberately caught fire. In the middle of the night, the former Laconia State School, a location with a convoluted past, was ablaze. That timing is a little unsettling. Not only was it dark, but it was unique in that…

Santa Cruz’s Harbor High School is situated so close to the Pacific that, on some mornings, the salty air permeates the parking lot before first period even starts. It’s not the type of school that frequently appears in origin stories about the music industry. Oliver Tree Nickell, however, seemed to be shaped by that specific stretch of California coastline in ways that no formal curriculum could ever hope to. He was unhurried, a little eccentric, and quietly creative. Before he was old enough to read chapter books, he began taking piano lessons. He had already developed an ear for electronic…

People who grew up close to Ontario’s wartime training airfields will always remember this sound. A low, throaty growl that appears to originate from deep within the apparatus; it is neither quiet nor polished, nor does it resemble the smooth hum of contemporary aircraft. The Harvard was that. And you begin to see why this aircraft will never be forgotten once you’ve heard it or read enough about what it meant to a generation of young men climbing into cockpits for the first time. In 1937, the North American Harvard—also referred to as the Texan, the AT-6, or just the…

Witnessing one of Silicon Valley’s most influential individuals stand in front of a group of Stanford graduates and lead with a terrible haircut story is subtly disarming. Sundar Pichai began his Stanford commencement speech this spring with a memory of filming a YouTube graduation ceremony in his backyard during COVID lockdowns, sporting a self-administered haircut he obviously still regrets, rather than with quarterly earnings or a prepared vision of the future. The beginning was strangely human. And that seemed to be the whole point. When Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, returned to his alma mater to speak to…

Most people outside of Louisiana are probably unaware of this quiet school located in Lafayette. Ovey Comeaux High School doesn’t make a big effort to promote itself. It is not required to. Every few years, someone emerges from those corridors and gains enough notoriety that the entire nation is forced to pay attention. Named for a farmer who served on the school board for 48 years, the school was founded in 1966. Take a moment to consider that: 48 years. Whatever Ovey Comeaux thought about education, he was dedicated to it for almost fifty years. A school with that kind…

Texas is not where Bo Nickal was born. Really, he didn’t even grow up there. Nickal was born in Rifle, Colorado, a small town whose name sounds more like a fever dream than a hometown. As a young child, he moved to Wyoming, where he began wrestling at the age of five or six. In the fifth grade, he moved to Rio Rancho, New Mexico. He had already lived in more places than most teenagers twice his age by the time he started high school. After that, there was another relocation—to Allen, Texas, where the true story starts. Located in…

Every morning when you stroll through Birmingham City University’s engineering corridors, you’ll notice that the labs are busy, the students are concentrated, and the equipment, some of which is already outdated, is working extra hard. In places like this, there’s a subtle pressure. Defense contractors are hiring. Demands for national security are growing. And for years, the supply of graduates with the necessary skills to fulfill those demands has just not kept up. The British government is currently attempting to close that uncomfortable and widening gap. It’s an important announcement. Grants totaling £80 million were distributed among 24 English universities…

When Katherine Arksey received the email, she wasn’t overly concerned. She was a third-year University of Nottingham criminology student who had previously seen institutional emails, which were measured, circumspect, and meant to convey information without going overboard. Then she heard the numbers, though. She then noticed it on the news. “I thought, this is a lot more serious,” she replied. She is twenty-one. She put her life on paper, her address, and her financial information in the hands of the university. “I never even thought it could be hacked into.” The university seems to be experiencing that emotion at the…