Author: paige laevy

On a Tuesday afternoon in late winter, Professor Aric Halvorsen stands in front of about forty students in the lecture hall on Yale’s old campus, which smells slightly of damp wool and old radiators. He informs them, almost casually, that he believes bilingualism is having an odd effect on American political behavior. After pausing to let the sentence linger, he returns to the lectern as though he hadn’t just tossed a tiny stone into a motionless pond. His theory, which is still mostly discussed in conference panels and working papers, goes something like this: individuals who are proficient in two…

The picture of Maurice Williams sitting in his parked car outside a 7-Eleven in Hyattsville, Maryland, with a five million dollar scratch-off ticket and then calmly, almost obstinately, driving off to begin his shift behind the wheel of a school bus is almost comical. The majority would have acted in a theatrical manner. contacted all of their acquaintances. Perhaps wept. Perhaps give up right there in the parking lot. Williams simply sat there in shock before starting to work. It took place on May 5. The Maryland Lottery introduced the $5,000,000 LUXE scratch-off game in February, and Williams, 59, had…

Kai Trump is beginning to feel the full impact of the pressure that comes with having a well-known last name. The majority of her 18-year-old peers are preoccupied with roommate snoring and dorm assignments. She is concerned about whether or not strangers will allow her to peacefully swing a golf club. In August of last year, she announced her commitment to the University of Miami on Instagram, as most teenagers do. She expressed her gratitude to her parents, Vanessa and Don, her coaches, her grandfather for providing access to “great courses,” and her mother, Mormor, for believing in her. The…

A certain type of Hollywood narrative—the child star, the breakthrough role, the Oscar, the production company—is repeated so frequently that it begins to become monotonous. Numerous retellings of Reese Witherspoon’s arc have been made. However, there is a smaller chapter that seldom receives the recognition it merits between Hello Sunshine’s $900 million sale and its teenage film debut. In actuality, she attended college. She simply left. Depending on your point of view, Witherspoon’s mid-1990s enrollment at Stanford University as an English literature major is either completely predictable or subtly revealing. Growing up in Nashville, she referred to herself as “a…

One type of invention doesn’t fail as much as it arrives too early. Among them was the three-sided zipper invented by William Freeman. Freeman, who is currently a professor at MIT and was an electrical engineer at Polaroid at the time, saw an advertisement from the Innovative Design Fund in Scientific American in 1985 offering up to $10,000 for creative clothing and home goods prototypes. He submitted a sketch of an unusual zipper that was triangular in shape. The floppy assembly was snapped into a rigid tube by a slider that wrapped around the three thin wooden teeth that were…

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…