Author: paige laevy

A fourteen-year-old hitchhiked to the National Theater School of Cuba in Havana in the early 2000s to attend acting training. The later biography, which includes an Academy Award nomination, a James Bond movie, and a portrayal of Marilyn Monroe that divided critics and viewers almost equally, tends to overshadow that detail—the hitching. However, the part about hitchhiking reveals something about how Ana de Armas’s education really worked: not through institutional convenience but through persistent, unglamorous effort in a city where the resources available to a teen with aspirations were limited in ways that have no real equivalent in Madrid or…

A unit within the National Library of Norway’s larger operations spends its working days cataloguing audio recordings in Oromo, acquiring books in Tigrinya, and sending Somali-language novels to prison libraries in counties that most Norwegians couldn’t quickly locate on a map. In comparison to national libraries, the Multilingual Library, or Det flerspråklige bibliotek in Norwegian, is not a large organization. Millions of volumes cannot be stored in it. It stocks books and media in 41 languages and makes them available to Norway’s most vulnerable populations—asylum seekers, immigrants, refugees, and anyone whose mother tongue is outside the scope of what a…

The South Downs National Park on the edge of your peripheral vision and the campus buildings in the valley below, a mix of 1960s concrete and more recent additions spread across land that is technically within Brighton and Hove’s city boundaries but feels much farther from the seafront than the map suggests, are what announce the University of Sussex campus from the road approaching Falmer rather than any signage. The university became the first of what became known as the “plate glass university generation” when it was granted a royal charter in August 1961. These postwar English universities were constructed…

Troy, Alabama, a small community of about 19,000 inhabitants, is located in Pike County, about 50 miles southeast of Montgomery along US Highway 231. The town and the university are so closely entwined that it is hard to distinguish between them. Troy University has a physical presence that is out of proportion to the population of the surrounding city thanks to its main campus, which is located along University Avenue and consists of a number of buildings, sports facilities, and open spaces. Founded in 1887 to train teachers in rural Alabama, the institution has been many different things to many…

On Saturday afternoon in Troy, Alabama, a team that had been chosen as one of the final programs to make it into the NCAA Tournament’s field of 64 earned a spot in the College World Series in Omaha, something no Troy baseball club had ever done before. With a 7-2 victory over Little Rock, the Trojans punched a ticket that the program had been working toward for years but had not yet achieved. Although Troy isn’t a household name in college baseball, it was the kind of moment that doesn’t make a big impression on the national discourse. However, for…

Situated on the outskirts of the Vale of White Horse, Faringdon is a market town in the kind of South Oxfordshire countryside that appears in glossy county living magazines, complete with undulating fields, historic stone structures, and a church tower that can be seen from the nearby hills. On the surface, secondary school performance doesn’t seem to be the kind of location that attracts a lot of national attention. However, Faringdon Community College, the only secondary school in the town that serves students from eleven to eighteen, offers something worth carefully examining: a comprehensive school in a rural setting that…

The San Pedro College campus on Guzman Street in Davao City is situated in an urban area that, in the Philippines, frequently denotes institutional longevity. It is established and embedded, as colleges that have been a part of a city’s fabric for decades typically seem, rather than sprawling and suburban. In retrospect, the college’s birth tale seems a little unlikely because the main building is just a short distance from the commercial center of one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. It began as a nursing program affiliated with San Pedro Hospital, the first Catholic hospital in Mindanao, founded…

Students at Van Mildert frequently cite a specific instance, usually in retrospect, as the one that resolved the issue of whether they had made the proper decision. It’s not on the first day of classes or during the official introduction. It usually occurs in October, when the leaves around the lake in the middle of the college grounds are changing, and the late afternoon light on the water does something that a prospectus shot can roughly but not quite portray. The roads that run alongside the lake, the common areas that overlook it, and the overall impression that the entire…

On May 30, 2025, in the afternoon in Auburn, Alabama, the UW–Milwaukee Panthers were acting in a way that didn’t immediately make sense. With a record of 27 wins and 31 losses, they were the fourth seed going into the NCAA Regional. They were a team that had lost more games than they had won during the regular season, and they were competing in a mid-major conference that doesn’t typically send teams to Southern regionals to defeat programs as well-known as Auburn. And yet there they were, one victory away from a Super Regional for the first time in the…

Stephenson College occupies territory it has only occupied since the late 2010s on the Elvet Hill site in Durham, where Howlands Farm formerly ran beside the River Wear and the cathedral city’s skyline is visible on a clear day. That is uncommon for a Durham college; the majority of Durham University’s seventeen colleges are connected to structures and sites that have been collected over decades or even centuries and feel inextricably linked to their identities. Between 2017 and 2019, Stephenson moved from Thornaby-on-Tees, therefore it had to establish its brand elsewhere before moving to a new location. One may argue…