Author: paige laevy

Give your name as Nuñez when you call the automated service line of a large US bank. Not the anglicized version, but the original, with the tilde, pronounced like a native speaker from Medellín or Monterrey would. There’s a good probability it won’t be detected by the system. You might be prompted to repeat yourself. It might produce a transcript that says “Nunez,” completely removing the diacritical mark—a little omission that, in other circumstances, completely alters the meaning of the word. After that, it either stalls, cycles back to the main menu, or routes you improperly. You put it in…

A backend developer is gazing at forty lines of legacy JavaScript that she didn’t write, can’t completely read, and must explain to a product manager in a meeting at nine the next morning somewhere in an apartment in São Paulo at eleven o’clock at night. Portuguese is her native tongue. Her second language is English, which is useful but requires work when it comes to technical aspects. The syntax she reads all day is, in a sense, her third. She launches GitHub Copilot, pastes the block, writes “explain this,” and in a matter of seconds, she receives a paragraph outlining…

When you walk into the Albuquerque Bilingual Academy on a Tuesday morning, you’ll hear something that still astounds guests: a room full of second graders switching between Spanish and English mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-story—not because they’re confused, but because they’re fluent. In theory, the school’s 50/50 dual-language approach, which divides instruction equally between the two languages starting in the early grades, is not new. However, it still seems worthwhile to pay attention to when you see it genuinely work, with the kind of consistency that fills a waiting list year after year. The only state in the union with a state…

Before you get to the door of a grocery store on Southall Broadway on a weekday afternoon, you will hear three different languages. The shelves inside are filled with goods that were brought in through import networks that were established over many years, such as family contacts in Punjab, distributors in Dubai, and WhatsApp groups that run in both Urdu and English at the same time. This isn’t unofficial trade. It operates out of a shop front the size of a studio apartment and is, in its own quiet way, a sophisticated trading operation. Bilingual small businesses in London rarely…

Newspapers are stacked next to the register at a gas station in Del Rio, Texas, on a Tuesday morning, just as they have always been, next to the bottled water and lottery tickets, with a hint of neglect. However, if you look closely at the front page, you’ll notice something. There are two columns. two languages. The identical tale, repeated twice, flowing side by side like a dialogue between neighbors who were raised speaking different languages at home. Decades ago, the majority of American journalists stopped using this format. A few small dailies continue to operate in some areas of…

There is a document that most veterans know they need, but few truly comprehend, somewhere between leaving active duty and entering a college classroom for the first time. The Department of Veterans Affairs issues a document known as the Certificate of Eligibility, which is the fundamental document that initiates the GI Bill education process. More often than not, it is a digital letter. Nothing else moves without it. Nevertheless, the noise of leaving the military frequently obscures how it functions, what it contains, and what a veteran is expected to do with it afterward. The COE is more than just…

A very uncommon type of institutional self-awareness occurs when an organization considers its own identity and consciously and collectively chooses to make a joke out of it. For more than 20 years, the Rhode Island School of Design has been doing just that. Scrotie, the school’s unofficial mascot, is a seven-foot anthropomorphic penis wearing a red cape that wanders the edges of basketball courts and hockey rinks in Providence. Nowhere is that posture more obvious, literally. This detail may be the best way to describe RISD. Since its founding in 1877 as one of the nation’s first art and design…

Knowing that a number will appear on a screen—a number that required months of study, several hundred dollars, and four hours inside a quiet Prometric testing center to produce—and having no choice but to wait can cause a very particular type of anxiety. This is clear to anyone who has taken the CPA exam. There isn’t nearly enough discussion of the waiting experience, which is distinct from the study and test itself. For the Core sections (AUD, FAR, and REG), the 2026 CPA exam score release schedule follows a rolling cycle, with targeted release dates occurring approximately every two to…

There was an incident in Gainesville that should have received more attention. The Troy Trojans, a mid-major program that most casual fans couldn’t have put on a map a month ago, entered Florida’s home regional as a No. 3 seed, lost to Miami in their opening game, and then won four straight, including back-to-back victories over Florida by scores of 16-11 and 10-2. In the end, it wasn’t close. dominant. These are the kinds of performances that leave you wondering if a team just clicked at the right time or if the seeding committee was looking at the correct statistics.…

In Troy, New York, there once stood a building that is worth learning about. For a brief period in the late 1850s, Troy University—a Methodist-backed institution that opened its doors in September 1858 with considerable ambition and closed just three years later as a casualty of inflation, foreclosed mortgages, and the general chaos of pre-Civil War America—was housed in this four-story building with four Gothic spires and Byzantine architecture rising above the Hudson Valley fog. The rest of the students moved to Wesleyan in silence. Before RPI demolished it in 1969 and replaced it with a library, the structure stood…