Author: Nola Jones

When most people first hear the term “IDVA,” they tend to shrug bureaucratically. Four letters with no clear meaning, the kind of acronym you might see on a hospital noticeboard or in a council pamphlet. Beneath those letters, however, is one of the hardest jobs in the social care sector in Britain, and it has quietly gained prominence over the past 20 years. IDVA stands for Independent Domestic Violence Advisor; depending on who you ask, it can also mean Advocate or Adviser. The wording changes slightly. The work doesn’t. To put it simply, an IDVA is a qualified professional who…

The word pennant has an almost unyielding quality. Even though the items it once described have largely disappeared from everyday life, it refuses to retire. If you walk into a basement rec room in Queens or a sports bar in Boston, you’ll probably see one tacked above a doorway. The colors are a little duller than the team’s current uniforms, and the felt edges curl slightly. It does a lot, but it just hangs there doing nothing. A pennant is a long, narrow, tapering flag, according to the dictionary’s dry definition. It has its roots in nautical signaling, according to…

A specific type of pause occurs when a solver encounters the clue “paltry.” You can practically picture someone hunched over a kitchen table with a pencil hovering over the morning paper and lukewarm coffee. Part of the appeal is that the word itself sounds offensive. It makes a meager, cruel promise that is hardly worth the trouble. Nevertheless, “paltry” has emerged as one of the most dependable little workhorses an editor can use when creating crossword puzzles. A pattern starts to show up when you look at the data. Over twenty major American puzzles have included the clue, and that…

A particular type of college basketball player never quite shows up all at once. Among them was Landry Shamet. When he arrived at Wichita State in the fall of 2015, the Shockers were still riding high from their rise under Gregg Marshall, a program with more swagger than most mid-majors and a fan base that had high expectations. Shamet, a four-star recruit from Kansas City’s Park Hill High School, was expected to be a member of the upcoming generation. Then his foot failed. He participated in three games, skipped the remaining ones, and vanished into the kind of quiet rookie…

Staring at a five-letter blank in a Sunday crossword puzzle with the clue simply “Rose oil.” You squint, and you get a certain kind of frustration. You take a sip of your coffee. For a moment, you wonder if the constructor is trying to test your vocabulary or your patience. It turns out that the solution predates the majority of the puzzles in which it can be found. ATTAR. Five characters. It’s a word that has subtly outlasted entire publishing trends, yet every time it appears, it still seems mysterious. The clue reappeared in the Washington Post Daily Mini Meta…

When a college baseball program spends years on the verge of success, a certain silence descends. While the Eagles continued to finish close enough to hurt, Boston College has been living in that silence for some time, watching other ACC schools cycle through regionals. Therefore, the reaction was more like an exhale than a celebration when the bracket was released on Monday afternoon and Chestnut Hill was placed as the two-seed in the Athens Regional. In a sport this harsh, three years is a long time. Although the Eagles’ 36-21 record appears neat on paper, it has more significance than…

The building isn’t the first thing you see when you drive down Seahawk Road on a weekday morning. The traffic is the problem. The flat terrain of Worcester County was traversed by a slow river of pickup trucks, school buses, and parents in SUVs, all on their way to the same destination. Situated on twenty-seven acres just outside Berlin, Maryland, a town that still has the appearance of a small American town, Stephen Decatur High School feels like an extension of that vibe—sturdy, unhurried, and a little self-satisfied. It was created in 1954 as a result of the union of…

Two girls, Nasra and Muslimo, sit at their desks at Kabasa Primary School in Dollow, a dusty town in southwest Somalia. They are eighth graders. Children from both the host community and displaced families attend the school, and most days the atmosphere in the classroom is more intense than the actual lessons. The land outside provides all the information you need to understand why so many of their classmates are absent. The drought has appeared, disappeared, and then returned. Additionally, fewer kids show up each time it comes back. A UNICEF report published in April that quantifies this gradual degradation…

Women still arrive in blue burqas at a hospital in Kabul, which is the only maternity facility of its kind in the nation, and wait for hours outside its gates. Now, some people cover their faces in silence, almost as a tiny act of defiance. Some people don’t. Because the women who used to staff the wards are gradually leaving the workforce and no new ones are coming to take their place, female doctors and nurses move between wards that are getting thinner every year. This is the gradual phase of a crisis that appears abrupt on paper. If the…

The same scene can be seen if you stroll past any neighborhood pool in the late afternoon. A parent is shouting something about kicking harder from the shallow end as a child stands at the edge, half-confident, half-anxious. The child leaps. splashes. sinks a bit. Coughing comes up. Everyone chuckles. The lesson is over. And somewhere in that brief, everyday moment, a question is subtly omitted: did the child learn to swim, or did they just learn to stay afloat for thirty seconds? There is a propensity to treat swimming and floating as the same accomplishment, particularly among hurried parents.…