Author: Nelson Rosario

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…

Nowadays, you can see signs of stress on practically every British university campus in ways that aren’t included in press releases. departments that share a small office space. courses that subtly vanished from the prospectus for the following year. Exams are held in entire buildings that are listed for sale on real estate websites. Nobody is yelling about it as a scandal. It’s more akin to a slow leak, and no one in the government seemed to be very interested in fixing it for years. More than 40% of English universities are predicted to finish this fiscal year in deficit,…

Molly Woodworth talks about an unforgettable moment. As she watches her daughter’s teacher point to an image of a bear and a fox, she is volunteering in a kindergarten classroom in Michigan. A child has trouble pronouncing the word “bear.” The instructor leans in and asks, “Look at the picture, look at the first letter—is it a bear or a fox?” Woodworth became motionless. These were her tactics. When she was a struggling reader in the 1990s, she created the same guessing games by herself in an effort to get through the page. And here they were being taught to…