Author: paige laevy

There is a church at number 136 on Clerkenwell Road that doesn’t seem to belong in London. The facade is a twin-arched loggia and portico in the style of a Roman basilica, with a central statue of Christ surrounded by mosaics and alcoves in an architectural grammar that is completely different from the street surrounding it, which is made up of Georgian terraces, Victorian converted warehouses, and the occasional brutalist block. An Italian immigrant community that had been constructing itself in this area of EC1 for the preceding thirty years provided funding for the building, which was dedicated in April…

Students at Alpha School’s K–8 campus, located in a renovated office building south of Zilker Park in Austin, have already completed many hours of arithmetic, reading, science, and history by 1 p.m. on a typical school day. Before lunch, the AI-powered, self-paced training that Alpha refers to as “2 Hour Learning” was completed. The children spend the remainder of the day working on leadership workshops, financial literacy exercises, and passion projects with what Alpha refers to as “guides”—well-paid adults who are specifically not required to have teaching credentials and whose duties include social development, emotional support, and motivation rather than…

A bilingual crew leader is translating during a hectic harvest week in Ventura County’s strawberry fields. She does more than just this. She controls the crew’s speed, keeps an eye on the weather, tracks the boxes, and assesses the pick’s quality. However, the foreman’s morning instructions are constantly translated from English into Spanish, which is then filtered back to the two or three workers in her crew who speak Mixteco, an Oaxacan language for which there is no official interpreter at this operation and no county agency has enough staff. She works three jobs. She gets paid for one. The…

In 2024, bilingual and monolingual adults—some cognitively normal, some at high risk for Alzheimer’s, and some already in the early stages of the disease—were put in MRI machines in a neuroimaging lab at Concordia University in Montreal, and researchers used the same measurement tools to examine their brain structures. They discovered that the bilingual brains were preserving structural integrity in areas linked to memory and language processing more quickly than the monolingual brains, confirming ten years of mounting data. It had a significant impact. Adults in good health, those in the at-risk category, and those who already had the illness…

A vendor selling Italian burrata is in the center of three concurrent talks on a Saturday morning at Borough Market, between the Korean fried chicken stand, which always has an equally competitive queue, and the Brindisa chorizo booth, which always has one. One is in English and features a Chicago visitor reading a description from his phone. One in Italian with an elderly man who appears to be very relieved after arriving from Rome last week. And something that begins in French and develops into a sort of trade English, a working language created on the spot, with a woman…

For four years, a tiny German outdoor gear manufacturer has been selling its products in German on WooCommerce. According to Google Analytics, 30% of website visitors come from France, the Netherlands, and Spain. These visitors spend time on product pages before leaving without making a purchase. It has been assumed that the product is sufficiently intriguing, that the price is reasonable, and that the English product descriptions are enough for a European market. Conversely, the conversion data indicates otherwise. The situation occurs in thousands of WooCommerce stores, and Polylang for WooCommerce was designed to address this particular issue—not multilingual content…

Depending on how you interpret technology company gift-giving, Google made an announcement in the exhibition halls of the BETT conference in January 2026 in London. This is the world’s largest educational technology trade show, where vendors fill thousands of square meters of floor space with demonstrations and sales pitches aimed at school administrators. According to the business, certain Gemini AI features will be free to use in all Google Workspace for Education core editions. This means that the free Education Fundamentals tier, which operates classrooms in schools in dozens of countries, now includes technologies that instructors previously had to pay…

John Cena was getting ready for a future that had not yet taken shape on the grounds of Cushing Academy, a private boarding school located in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. The school buildings have the kind of stone-and-brick permanence that New England prep schools tend to accumulate over decades. He had come from Central Catholic High School in Lawrence, where he had worked to raise his grades in order to be admitted to a more challenging school. The portion of the John Cena education tale that is most frequently overlooked in favor of the wrestling statistics is that detail—the conscious attempt to…

On the morning of January 4, 2024, the pupils of Truman Early Childhood Education Center entered a structure that was completely different from what their parents or teachers had seen at the former Clara Street location. Built in the 1950s, the ancient school had seen two generations of Lafayette families, decades of preschoolers, and the cumulative wear of a structure that had long before reached the end of its functional life. Principal Stephanie Francis recalled hearing “ooos and ahhs” as soon as the families entered the nearly $30 million facility located in Lafayette, Louisiana, at the intersection of University Avenue…

The kids aren’t sitting at tables studying vocabulary lists on a Tuesday morning in a regular bilingual academy preschool classroom. In a corner with building blocks, a group of four-year-olds are arguing over whose turn it is. The instructor is watching the fight, but she doesn’t step in right away. The disagreement is taking place in both Spanish and English. A youngster is going through a sorting exercise near the Montessori material shelves, transferring items from one tray to another with the concentrated focus that three-year-olds occasionally exhibit and adults frequently underestimate. There is a moderate amount of noise. The…