Author: paige laevy

Imagine a Phoenix contact center in the spring of 2024: rows of headsets, fluorescent lights, and the distinct buzz of two dozen people conversing quietly in multiple languages at once. Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Spanish. These were bilingual customer service agents who were hired not only for their fluency in English but also for their ability to switch codes in the middle of a call when a caller’s English faltered. kind, knowledgeable, and frequently the sole person between a business and a disgruntled client. AI chatbots took the role of many of those desks by early 2025, and executives used them…

Since March 2022, the Whitechapel Station sign has been in place. It was funded by the Tower Hamlets Council. It was installed by TfL. For around three and a half years, it stood on the roundel poles above the station entrance, showing “Whitechapel” in both Bengali and English, mostly without incident. The Bangladesh High Commissioner attended the installation, which was requested by the then-Mayor of Tower Hamlets. Then, in November 2025, someone took a picture of the Bengali section alone, cutting out the English sign next to it, and uploaded it on X with the caption, “It says Whitechapel Station.”…

The first thing you notice when you walk into the open-plan offices of a fintech company in Shoreditch on a Wednesday at 11 a.m. is the sound of the various languages being spoken across the rows of standing desks. The Slack channels that are displayed on the screens are partially arranged geographically, and although English is the operating default, it is blended with accents from Lisbon, Mumbai, Warsaw, and Seoul. The head of the engineering team is speaking with Singapore over the phone. The product designer is using a shared screen to sketch something with a colleague in Berlin. This…

A pile of documents, one in English, one in Bengali, and one in Urdu, rests on a desk in a consultation room in an east London hospital. The content and structure of the forms are the same. They describe the nature of the suggested cancer treatment, the associated risks, and the terms of the patient’s signature. The majority of people who enter that room with a cancer diagnosis are already coping with a great degree of anxiety, uncertainty, and the particular confusion of navigating a healthcare system under pressure. According to research conducted by Queen Mary University of London and…

Three-year-old Eloise is studying the French word for caterpillar on a Tuesday morning in the West Village. By the time she goes to bed tonight, she will have spent around six hours in what her parents, with a straight face, refer to as a “French-immersion environment.” She is currently working through a picture book on her nanny’s lap. The nanny, a French national with a master’s degree in early childhood education from École des Hautes Études in Sciences Sociales in Paris, receives $32 per hour, perks, and an extra stipend for the three weeks she spends traveling with the family…

The duration of the AP Environmental Science exam is two hours and forty minutes, which is less than many other AP examinations, longer than a relaxing afternoon, and packed so tightly that time moves more slowly than the clock indicates. When you enter the testing room in May, you will be presented with eighty multiple-choice questions and three free-response questions that differ from one another in ways that are important for preparation. It is easy to summarize the structure. In reality, it requires a little more variety than the synopsis suggests. There are 80 questions in Section I, which takes…

Beginning in July 2018, Argosy University students received ambiguous emails from Dream Center Education Holdings advising them that campuses would be closing. The emails did not specify the dates of the closure or provide clear instructions on what to do with the credits or financial assistance already obtained. As it turned out, this was a sneak peek at how the entire collapse would be handled: suddenly, erratically, and with a degree of institutional dishonesty that finally caught the notice of the U.S. Department of Education and thirty state attorneys general. The doors were permanently closed by March 8, 2019. Every…

In May, the APUSH testing room seems to be carrying the weight of a full academic year. The standard institutional desks are set up in rows, pencils and exam booklets are provided ahead of time, and the proctor’s instructions are given in the flat monotone of someone who has given this speech numerous times. Three hours and fifteen minutes to go. There are four parts. Two pieces of writing. Well-prepared kids are already aware of this. Students who are well-prepared and have an understanding of timing—those who have practiced each segment against a real clock rather than just studying the…

Compared to the three-hour or longer marathons required for history and English examinations, the AP Macroeconomics exam is one of the shorter AP exams on the May schedule, lasting two hours and ten minutes. This relative length sometimes gives the appearance of easiness. Two hours seems doable. at fact, it’s so short that kids who don’t pace well end up at the free-response portion with less time than the questions actually call for. There is no sprawl in the exam. It compresses. To perform well in the room, one must be aware of its structure before entering. In 70 minutes,…

You will write nearly nonstop for the next three hours and fifteen minutes when you enter a testing room for the AP English Language exam. This is an honest response to the question of how lengthy the AP Language exam is: not only the length, but also the density. After a one-hour multiple-choice portion, there is a ten-minute break, followed by two hours and fifteen minutes of reading and writing three consecutive essays. You’ve spent more time in that room than a full film by the time the final essay is due, and if you’re writing by hand, your hand…