Stories and essays, particularly related to education in the United States, that caught my attention this week.
The former pope, Benedict XVI, died last night. NPR’s obituary includes an early controversy of his papacy, when Benedict delivered a lecture on faith and reason at the University of Regensburg (where he had worked as a professor) that became a major diplomatic incident.
In Pennsylvania, a Ph.D. student in criminal justice was arrested for the murders of four University of Idaho undergraduates. Meanwhile, a history professor is suing a TikTok tarot reader for falsely accusing her of involvement.
During the pandemic—consistent with existing knowledge that young people are more likely to die by suicide during the school year—local schools’ returning to in-person instruction was associated with increased suicide rates among teenagers.
Seasonality may also account for the mixed evidence about whether teen suicides rose after the release of 13 Reasons Why in the spring of 2017.
In 2014, a policy shift at Wellesley College provided data suggesting that pass/fail grading modestly reduces undergraduates’ effort compared with traditional grading.
No, Stanford University didn’t ban the word American.
Sometime during the last decade, millennials became old. But “millennial cringe” is just as much about changes in the way Internet communities form.
The professional misogynist Andrew Tate, who apparently was arrested this week in Romania on charges of operating a sex-trafficking ring, has an international following among radicalized school-aged boys. A business survey this fall named him the top influencer among U.S. teenagers.
Zahra Joya, who dressed in boys’ clothes to attend school in Afghanistan in the 1990s, lamented the drastic denial of educational freedom under renewed Taliban rule.
When a man in suburban Buffalo broke into a school and raided the kitchen and nurse’s office, he was publicly hailed as a hero.
Blue Book Diaries 