Author: paige laevy

Only the DMV creates a certain type of waiting. This is something flatter, more institutional, with the subtle scent of industrial carpet and the ambient hum of fluorescent lights that never quite flicker but seem like they might. It is not the resigned waiting of an airport gate or the anticipatory waiting of a restaurant. You accept a number. You take a seat. You watch as numbers that don’t appear to be yours are cycled on a digital display. It’s not the first time you’ve wondered if any government agency has ever thought, “We could do better,” after observing a…

A graduate student is inserting a patient into an MRI machine in a research lab at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research while a Hindi translation of a passage from Alice in Wonderland plays on headphones. The experiment’s goal is to map how the human brain processes language in dozens of different languages and determine whether speaking more than one of them alters the brain’s architecture in ways that are significant long after the last vocabulary lesson. This sounds almost whimsical. Saima Malik-Moraleda, a PhD candidate who spent her childhood dividing her year between Girona in Catalonia and Kashmir, is…

It takes a moment to realize what’s different when you walk into Hatching Dragons on a weekday morning. A plastic slide, a soft play area, and tiny hands smearing paint on paper are all present. typical chaos in the nursery. However, the toddler, who may be eighteen months old and still unsteady on her feet, reacts when a staff member crouches next to her and says something that doesn’t sound like English. Lanterns made of paper dangle from the ceiling. Noodles are on the lunch menu. Additionally, a shadow puppetry session is being prepared somewhere in the background. Depending on…

An elder speaks into a microphone somewhere in a New Zealand recording studio. The words are Māori, or te reo, a language that, during the twentieth century, dangerously approached generational silence. The recording is fed into a machine learning system developed by Te Hiku Media, a Māori-owned nonprofit that made the decision years ago that Māori people would be the ones to digitize their language, rather than a Silicon Valley company. Over 90% transcription accuracy is currently attained by the system. The voices of the elders are no longer merely recollections. Variations of that scene occur in an increasing number…

On a typical Wednesday morning in Huddersfield, Kirklees College made headlines for an unwelcome reason. Following the receipt of what West Yorkshire Police described as malicious emails, the college’s centers were put under lockdown on May 7. Parents were informed, students were confined to their classrooms, and for a few hours, the campus was filled with the kind of subdued fear that results from such circumstances. Later, on suspicion of sending malicious communications, a 20-year-old man was detained in Huddersfield. The centers reopened and classes resumed by midday after officers verified the threat was a hoax. Unsettling. and was promptly…

When most people think of a world-class university, Cranfield University doesn’t look like that. About an hour north of London, the campus is located in a sleepy Bedfordshire village with flat farmland that stretches toward the horizon and little resistance to the wind. An actual operational airfield is located on the property, which provides some insight into the activities that take place there. There aren’t a lot of undergraduates on this red-brick city campus. It is a specialized postgraduate institution that performs narrowly focused work at a level that is seldom matched by larger universities. This specificity is reflected in…

In the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, there is a section of Tracy Street where you are stopped by a particular type of building. John Marshall High School’s main building features Collegiate Gothic architecture, which is typically associated with historic universities in rural England. It features pointed arches and stone details. When it first opened in 1931, George Lindsey’s design gave it a somber appearance. It continues to do so. It’s difficult not to feel the weight of everything that building has seen when you walk by it today. Locals refer to it as Marshall. It is a part…

There are about 190 high school football games taking place at the same time on a Friday night in October someplace in North Carolina. These games take place in stadium lights along the coast, on grass fields in the Piedmont, and on mountain turf that retains the cold in a certain way as September turns into fall. The playoff brackets, the scorecards, the referees, the eligibility of every player on every roster, and the catastrophe insurance that covers the injured lineman who is carted off the field are all handled by a single organization with its headquarters located in a…

Situated on the hills above the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, the Frost Amphitheater is surrounded by the kind of California evening air that softly arrives as the sun sets. The air is warm, slightly dry, and smells of cut grass and eucalyptus. This stage, which has been used for concerts for many years, is tucked away on university property in a way that both makes performances feel ceremonial and intimate. Paul Simon performed two nights of music on that stage on June 3 and 4, 2026, which shouldn’t have been conceivable by any logical accounting. He had declared his…

When you get off the Blue Line at Chicago’s Illinois Medical District stop, you are practically instantly in the middle of one of the most densely populated areas of the city’s medical infrastructure. To the east is Rush University Medical Center. A short stroll north is Cook County Health. The $251 million Malcolm X College campus is located on West Jackson Boulevard, a structure that most drivers would mistake for a hospital rather than a college. The training center’s ambulance bay runs simulations that are so similar to the real thing that students occasionally have to remind themselves that no…