Author: Nola Jones

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.…

The particular annoyance of a clue that seems simple but isn’t is familiar to anyone who has spent a Sunday morning bent over a crossword grid, pencil hovering, coffee cooling. “Small monkey” is among them. Three phrases. Deceptively easy. Nevertheless, it has plagued puzzle solvers for years, primarily because the solution is solely dependent on the number of squares you must fill. For at least 20 years, and occasionally longer, the clue has appeared in popular American crosswords. It has been logged more than twenty times by Crossword Tracker, one of those unobtrusive online resources that puzzle enthusiasts rely on.…

A recent chapter by Kate Bailey of the Cambridge Centre for Evaluation & Monitoring contains a minor, nearly unremarkable fact that should worry more people than it does. According to her, a child’s progress during their first year of school doesn’t diminish. They remain. Exams and the long, awkward years of adolescence continue to leave their mark until the age of sixteen. It’s the kind of conclusion that sounds almost too neat, but the evidence supporting it is stubborn and has been accumulating for decades. Bailey’s work in The First Year at School: An International Perspective is intriguing for reasons…

Observing a crossword clue resist you can be enjoyable. You glance away after reading it once or twice. Six letters: “Rich, naturally fermented soy sauce.” The pencil lingers. This small obstacle will seem familiar to anyone who has spent a peaceful afternoon leafing through the back pages of a newspaper. It appears to be fairly straightforward, almost generous in its description. However, the solution doesn’t always appear right away. Most of the time, TAMARI is the word the puzzle seeks. The most dependable solution for that exact phrase, according to the majority of solving databases, is six letters that naturally…

These days, the word appears in strange places. a TikTok response. A casual remark in a group chat. When choosing a restaurant, someone shrugs and types “brow.” No follow-up, no punctuation. A little flat, a little final, it sits there. If you’re over thirty, you most likely read it twice and thought your friend was referring to their eyebrows. It’s not unusual to be confused. The dictionary still defines “brow” as the forehead, the ridge above the eye, or occasionally the steep edge of a hill for the majority of recorded English. Collins enumerates six different versions. Merriam-Webster keeps everything…

The word “tinsel” has a subtle allure. The word itself has a nearly six-century history, but most people only give it a thought once a year, usually while untangling a knotted strand from last December’s box. Its Old French origin, estincele, which means sparkle, still seems appropriate. Fundamentally, the word “tinsel” refers to eye-catching light. These days, the term “tinsel” mostly describes those long, glossy strips that are draped over mantelpieces or wrapped around Christmas trees. It is described in dictionaries as thin, glittering strands of material, typically made of plastic or metal, that mimic the appearance of ice or…