Author: paige laevy

More than any other sport, golf seems to generate a certain type of story: the kind in which a minor, nearly undetectable detail from a person’s past unexpectedly reappears in the room twenty years later, fully grown, and inquiring. This weekend at Aronimink, Alex Smalley is living one of those stories, and oddly, he has known it was coming for a long time. His parents made jokes about it. He made a joke about it. And now, at the age of 29, he’s on the verge of something that most golfers spend their entire lives chasing, following a collegiate career…

The fact that a woman who never completed her own undergraduate degree played Elle Woods, the pink-clad Harvard Law dreamer from Legally Blonde, one of the most iconic college students in modern film history, is subtly humorous. Former Stanford freshman Reese Witherspoon was born Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon in New Orleans in 1976. She was an English literature student. She then departed, just like many aspirational young people who are drawn into a larger orbit before they are fully prepared. That part is easy to forget. In hindsight, her career path seems so seamless and cinematic that the messy middle…

When I first heard the term “AI bilingual,” I thought it was the kind of catchphrase that is produced in large quantities by government communications offices and ends up on a slide deck. Then it kept coming back. in keynote after keynote. in the briefing notes. And, more recently, in the discourse emanating from Washington, where a few policy advisors seem to have begun promoting Singapore’s strategy as something worth further investigation. In late January, Minister Josephine Teo spoke at the NTUC LearningHub Human+ Symposium about a change that seems to be happening already. She said that workers are using…

When a bilingual child describes pain in two different languages for the first time, you notice something odd before you can identify it. The expression changes. The shoulders tighten or soften. The word “hurt” itself has a distinct weight. Parents are aware of it. Sometimes pediatricians do the same. However, for years, no one had been able to confirm what many caregivers had long suspected: that language could be used for purposes other than describing pain. It may influence how one experiences pain. This suspicion has been made public by a recent University of Miami study. Researchers working with bilingual…

The tale of America’s talent shortage ceases to be a statistic and begins to feel like a slow leak somewhere between the testimony of a hospital administrator in Houston and the buzz of a half-empty engineering lab in Pittsburgh. Yes, the numbers are impressive. There are hundreds of thousands of open positions in the healthcare industry alone, factories running below capacity, and school districts pleading for math instructors who speak Arabic, Spanish, or Vietnamese. However, the more illuminating detail is more subdued. It’s the young student in an ESL classroom in Phoenix who, despite having a math score in the…

When I first noticed it, I thought I had misheard. Leaning into a corner table at a wine bar close to Bishopsgate, two men in dark suits were speaking what sounded like a code. A brown-colored tumbler was in one of their hands. The other was holding a phone, screen down, against his thigh. It took a moment for the penny to drop as the words rolled in that specific melodic manner, with long vowels and rapid consonants. Welsh. Two bankers were wrapping up what appeared to be a lengthy discussion in Cymraeg on a Tuesday in the middle of…

Anyone who has recently attended a linguistics conference can sense the tension before the coffee has even cooled. The dispute has been simmering in academic corridors for years. Speaking two languages, according to some researchers, rewires the brain in ways that improve cognitive function, postpone dementia, and subtly outperform the monolingual mind. Conversely, a smaller but noisier group continues to raise the annoying question, “Where exactly is the proof that any of this raises IQ?” You can see the division if you stroll through the linguistics department at practically any major university. The bilingual-advantage camp is typically supported by younger…

You will most likely miss it if you walk into a Year 2 classroom in Tower Hamlets on a rainy Tuesday morning. No flags are being waved by the bilingual kids. They are mouthing English words they learned six months ago, coloring in fractions, and sometimes slipping a Polish or Bengali phrase to a friend at the next table. However, when the data finally catches up to them at seven, it reveals something that educators in this area of London have long suspected. These children are moving forward in silence. According to a University of Sydney study based on the…

When you drive into Lubbock from any direction, the campus appears almost instantly out of the flat West Texas plain. With its red tile roofs and sand-colored stone, it looks much more Iberian than Panhandle. There is a subtle defiance to Texas Tech. The Spanish Renaissance arches were an obstinate architectural decision made in 1925, and they continue to feel that way today. The school was constructed to insist on being on the map, even though the map didn’t quite agree. The brochures don’t tell the whole story of how Tech got here. When a sitting governor was discovered to…

You wouldn’t notice it right away if you drove into Ringgold, Georgia on a weekday morning. There isn’t a glossy promotional video playing outside a glass entrance, nor is there a marquee or rolling banner. However, for almost thirty years, this small campus has been training deaf men and women to preach, teach, and lead churches in their native tongue—something that most Bible colleges in America never try. Harvest Deaf Bible College is a part of Harvest Deaf Ministries, a larger ministry that was founded on the straightforward notion that Christian education shouldn’t treat the deaf as an afterthought. The…