Author: Nola Jones

A parent’s face lights up with a certain kind of worry when the pediatrician talks about ADHD. It’s not really panic. What a child’s behavior is like when it goes from being a mystery to being explained is more like a door quietly closing. Often, not long after that, a prescription comes next. That’s what a study led by Stanford Medicine that came out in late August 2025 in JAMA Network Open made very clear. Researchers looked at the medical records of almost 10,000 kids ages 4 and 5 who were diagnosed with ADHD in eight pediatric health networks in…

Zendaya, one of the most famous performers of her generation, went through kindergarten more than once. This is something to think about. Not because she did badly in school, but because her parents wanted her to become more sure of herself. It’s not important and is simple to skip over. But it tells you a lot about the people who paid attention and the kind of base she was built on. Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman was born in 1996 in Oakland, California. She grew up in a home where school was just something that everyone did. Her dad and mom…

It’s pretty amazing that LeBron James, whose name is now on a school of education at a university, never went to college. In 2003, he skipped all the normal steps and went straight from St. Vincent–St. Mary High School to the NBA. And yet, not many people his age have done more to make education the most important thing in their public life. LeBron didn’t have a stable childhood in Akron, Ohio. Gloria, his mother, was only sixteen years old when he was born. The family moved around the city’s rougher areas, looking for a stable place to live. From…

When you walk onto a Canadian International School campus, the noise is the first thing you notice. This is true whether the campus is in Khalifa City in Abu Dhabi or on the western edge of Singapore. Not really chaos. That sound is more like a dozen different languages talking together. The kids shout at each other in French, English, Korean, and Arabic. It’s all done without a hitch by the teachers. It seems like this is more than just an international school. In practice, it really feels international. People often don’t realize how important that difference is. A lot…

A quote from Angel Reese when she left LSU for the WNBA doesn’t get used nearly enough. “I’m leaving college with everything I ever wanted,” she replied. “A degree, a national championship, and this platform.” The degree came first for her. It’s not as important as it seems that little thing. Reese grew up in Randallstown, Maryland. It’s not the kind of place that usually ends up in books about sports mythology, but it does make people tough. Even though her basketball skills were clear from a young age, the way she and her family chose to spend their money…

Something very interesting about a scholarship program that has been around for more than 130 years stands out. A lot of business projects don’t even last ten years, let alone one hundred. Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata started the J. N. Tata Endowment in 1892. Since then, it has helped more than 5,800 Indian students go to graduate or doctoral school abroad. You can’t just read that number and move on. There were generations of scientists, lawyers, doctors, and government workers who did that. Many of them went on to change institutions in ways that no single scholarship could. A J.N. Tata…

There’s something different about Savannah Guthrie when she talks to a politician or forces a government official to give her the truth. Not only is it confidence, but it’s also a certain level of accuracy. She hears, then follows up, and she doesn’t let an answer not given go by. You can’t help but wonder if that instinct has always been there or if she learned it somewhere along the way, like in a law library or a lecture hall. As a child, Guthrie lived with her family in Melbourne, Australia, for a few years. She then moved to Tucson,…

There’s no way Jake Paul has ever been one to follow the rules. Paul was born on January 17, 1997, in Cleveland, Ohio. He grew up in the suburb of Westlake in a family where ambition seemed to be built into everything. Most kids his age were busy with AP tests and college applications at that time, but he was already building an online fan base that would make most media companies jealous. He went to Westlake High School in Ohio for his formal education. For someone who would go on to become worth an estimated $200 million, it was…

Something quietly interesting about how Chappell Roan got here stands out. No training in a conservatory. There is no music degree on the wall anywhere. Just a girl from Willard, Missouri, who learned to play the piano when she was ten years old, started putting cover songs on YouTube a few years later, and won a Grammy in 2025. There’s no easy way to describe the path she took to get there, and that’s probably the point. Roan, whose real name is Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, grew up in a small, religious town where she went to church every week and…

A common story about higher education in New York is the one about Columbia, NYU, Cornell, the prestige, and the desire to live in Manhattan. On the other hand, there is a story that affects more lives. It takes place on 64 campuses from Long Island to the North Country and graduates more than 96,000 students every year. The State University of New York is that, and most people outside of New York may not have giving it much thought. SUNY, as everyone knows it, wasn’t really started out of ambition. A bit of an embarrassment, New York was one…