Author: paige laevy

What Duke softball has evolved into is almost unyielding. A program that didn’t even exist at the varsity level until 2017 continues to persist into late May and won’t go away. This usually doesn’t work like that. Decades are needed for programs. customs. a pipeline. Duke had none of that. Marissa Young, a former Big Ten Player of the Year, took over in July 2015, spent two years assembling a roster from the ground up, and then began winning games she had no right to. It was difficult to ignore how bizarre the timeline is as I watched this Arizona…

If you stand long enough at the base of Beaumont Tower, you can see why people who attended Michigan State University talk about the place the way they do. There’s a certain way the morning light hits the tower in early autumn, and the carillon bells start and stop with that slightly imperfect rhythm carillons always have. Loyalty, nostalgia, and a hint of defensiveness. It’s a campus that doesn’t really make an impression. It simply sprawls over 5,000 acres along the Red Cedar River, acting like a small city that neglected to request permission. The brochures don’t accurately depict how…

Driving down Iliff Avenue, the entrance’s lackluster appearance is the first thing you notice. There isn’t a grand gate, a well-kept stone sign, or a valet posing as someone who knows you. Tucked away in a residential area of Southern Denver, Harvard Gulch Golf Course appears more like a neighborhood park than a location where golf is played. Perhaps that’s the whole point. In 1982, when Denver was a different city and golf was a different game, this nine-hole par-3 course was constructed. It has endured four decades of real estate booms, trend cycles, and the gradual corporatization of almost…

Thursday, May 28, 2026 is the brief response. The longer answer is that Harvard’s graduation isn’t actually a day, as anyone who has spent time in Cambridge in late May will understand. It’s a slow tide of events that takes place over the course of a week, starting with quiet receptions and concluding with families dragging suitcases past the iron gates of the Yard, feeling a little confused, proud, and depressed. The date has been marked for months for the Class of 2026. Speaking with graduate students in Harvard Square gives me the impression that this commencement has more significance.…

One of the driest regions on Earth is the northern Chilean Atacama Desert. It receives less than one millimeter of rain annually in some areas. In a trial run a few years ago, a cookie-sheet-sized hydrogel panel placed out there overnight filled with moisture and released it as drinkable water the following day. This is the kind of landscape where everything seems to argue against the presence of water. The experiment was successful. Then the substance began to crumble. Water scientists and climate researchers are paying close attention to a new paper from Stanford and MIT that details this issue…

In the rural outskirts of Villavicencio, the capital of Meta department in Colombia’s eastern lowlands, a school is situated on a plot of land that doesn’t appear to be much from the road, somewhere past the Caracolí condominium. Then you get nearer. The sports courts appear, the green areas expand, and in the distance, kids are studying English in an environment that seems purposefully cut off from the bustle of the city. This is Stanford School, and although it shares a name with one of the most prominent universities in the world, it came to that identity on its own…

Shaquille O’Neal returned to Baton Rouge in the spring of 2000 to complete what he had begun, eight years after leaving Louisiana State University for the NBA draft and four NBA seasons with the Orlando Magic. After earning his Bachelor of General Studies with a minor in political science, he crossed a graduation stage at LSU wearing a cap and gown and told the audience that he could now go find a real job. Phil Jackson, his coach at the time, allowed him to skip a home game. People laughed at that statement about the real job. There was no…

Round Rock, Texas, is one of those places that had to develop infrastructure to keep up with its rapid growth. When the Williamson County government signed the documents creating Round Rock ISD in 1913, there were just two schools in the district. It now employs about 6,340 people, covers about 110 square miles, serves about 47,000 students across 60 campuses, and runs on a budget of almost half a billion dollars. Over the course of a century, the district changed from being a two-school rural area to one of the biggest in Texas, but the majority of the weight came…

Bryce Harper began hitting in the Bat-R-Up batting cage in Las Vegas when he was six years old. not engaging in practice. striking. In the sense that teachers who had witnessed thousands of young athletes took a step back and searched for the appropriate words to describe what they were witnessing. “The way the ball came off the bat was something I’ve never heard or seen at that age,” said Harper’s eighth-grade teacher, Buck Thomas. Almost everyone who came into contact with Harper before the rest of the world knew his name repeats that description in different ways. The noise.…

Located in the center of Acadiana, a region of south-central Louisiana known for its French Creole ancestry, cuisine, music, and unique way of life that doesn’t always translate well to the metrics used by education researchers in Massachusetts or California, is Lafayette, Louisiana. Therefore, it is noteworthy that the Lafayette Parish School System is outperforming expectations not only within Louisiana but also against school districts nationwide, according to a national academic report created by researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities. Lafayette Parish students outperform roughly 64 percent of American districts in math achievement and 61 percent in math growth, according…