Category: The Conversation – USA

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo, Clinical Professor of Literacy Studies, Drexel University

If you have a child in school right now, you may have heard them talk about needing a “brain break” while doing homework or studying for a test. Maybe they shake their bodies out, do some deep breathing exercises, or watch their favorite YouTube video of hamsters in a maze or a hydraulic press crushing various items.

To assist with these brain breaks, the School District of Philadelphia recently announced that an app called Rallee will be available to teachers and students in the district. The district’s version of Rallee will include a section of the app with branded activities related to the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team.

I’m a clinical professor of literacy studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and I previously worked as an elementary school teacher for 18 years. I know some families will wonder: Will this digital tool actually improve my child’s learning? And do students really need a brain break that involves more screen time?

What is Rallee?

Rallee encourages users to “turn your body into the controller for timed obstacle courses” and “stretch and breathe alongside the avatar.” While using Rallee, students might jump in place to help their avatar clear an obstacle or imitate their avatar by stretching their arms wide while taking a deep breath. These movement breaks are designed to take 1 to 5 minutes. The website says the activities help students improve learning comprehension, reduce stress and manage overwhelming emotions.

What are brain breaks?

Brain breaks are brief interruptions in instructional time during which students do cognitive or physical activities that are different from what they are doing in class. These breaks are grounded in some general principles of learning science and human physiology.

Researchers and educators know that learning requires students to absorb new information or skills and actively connect this new information to things they already know. One way the brain does this is through a process called consolidation. When a learner focuses on something other than the new information or skill, it gives the brain a chance to improve the neural connections it is making between the new information and prior knowledge. This improves long-term retention.

Scientists also know that movement increases blood flow to the brain, which enhances executive function. Executive function refers to the ability to focus on new information and then organize that information in the brain. Executive function skills also help a learner filter distraction, which is something many teachers and families see as a challenge for today’s learners.

Finally, long-standing research shows that recess, which is an extended break from learning, has a positive effect on student learning.

These established ideas support the idea of shorter “brain breaks” during lessons starting in preschool and all the way through college.

Do ‘brain breaks’ actually work?

The research that supports the idea of brain breaks is strong, but what does the research say about how effective brain break programs and practices are when applied in schools?

Many small studies show positive outcomes for specific learning measures with specific populations.

For example, a study of 35 Canadian students in grades 1 to 3 showed that classroom activity breaks improved kids’ engagement in learning tasks.

Another study involving second and third graders in the U.S. demonstrated that brain breaks using the popular website GoNoodle were associated with improved reading fluency

And a study involving 7- to 9-year-olds in Europe showed that classroom-based physical activity breaks were correlated to better math scores and an improvement in some executive function skills, such as cognitive flexibility, which is the ability to switch attention from one thing to another.

Still other studies have shown that activity breaks help adolescents and college students with general cognitive skills, such as attention and concentration.

However, when researchers combine the results of these smaller studies and do a larger statistical analysis, they find that the impact of brain breaks on learning and achievement is weaker than expected. This may be because these larger studies include other published studies that did not find that school-based brain breaks improve learning and achievement.

These meta-analyses find that there are no negative outcomes for students when they participate in these brain breaks, but the evidence does not strongly support positive outcomes either.

How will Rallee work in classrooms?

Rallee states that using their brain break app takes 1 to 5 minutes, but simply asking students to open a digital device and access an app can take twice that time, depending on the age and accessibility challenges of the students. These tools also need to be put away afterward, which takes more time. I’d estimate that a Rallee break would likely take 10 minutes in an average classroom.

Moving your body to navigate an avatar through a maze, as depicted on the Rallee website, also means a teacher may need to manage different students moving in different ways within their classroom space.

Rallee also requires students’ eyes to be focused on a screen, which research shows can have a negative impact on the very skills that brain breaks are trying to improve. Screen time is associated with concentration difficulties and a slower pace of new learning. More time on a screen and the required time to access and implement the brain breaks may prove more problematic than beneficial.

On their website, Rallee does not share any research on the use of their product in either a lab or a classroom. Rallee did not respond to my inquiry about research on its product.

Who is paying for the app?

Rallee’s rollout in Philadelphia schools is being funded by the Philadelphia Flyers for one year. The version of the app they are supporting has a special “Flyers World” set of activities built in. This partnership seems to be supported by the NHL’s Industry Growth Fund, which pays for projects aimed at increasing the team’s fan base and getting more people, particularly kids, to play hockey.

The Philadelphia School District did not respond to questions about how it chose the app or the specific source of the Flyers’ funding.

Some parents might see the Rallee subscription as a win-win, where the Flyers grow potential hockey fans and the Philadelphia School District gets a new tool it might not otherwise be able to purchase for its schools. Others might be more suspicious of the district partnering with a sports franchise to promote its team while offering unclear benefits to its learners.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo has received funding from the National Science Foundation and Drexel University.

– ref. The new brain break app for Philadelphia students raises questions about more screen time – https://theconversation.com/the-new-brain-break-app-for-philadelphia-students-raises-questions-about-more-screen-time-280246

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Peter McGraw, Professor of Marketing and Psychology, University of Colorado Boulder

When a couple marry in a church, synagogue or mosque, the ceremony does more than sanctify a union. Often, it binds two families to an institution.

For centuries, marriage and child-rearing have been among the main ways adults are integrated into congregational life. Couples who share the same faith tend to be more observant, and they often raise children within that tradition – bringing the next generation into congregational life. More marriages mean more families in pews and more children raised in the faith.

That helps explain why the rise of single adults is so unsettling for many faith communities today. In the United States, 42% of adults were not married or living with a partner in 2023, up from 38% in 2000. This shift is unlikely to change soon: A quarter of 40-year-olds have never been married, and a third of Gen Z are projected to never marry.

At the same time, the share of unmarried Americans who belong to a religious congregation has fallen well below that of married Americans. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, 68% of married adults identify as Christian, compared with about 51% of never-married adults. Twenty-four percent of married Americans are religiously unaffiliated, compared with 39% of Americans who never married.

As a behavioral economist and a business school professor, I study what I call the “solo economy”: how the rise of single adults is reshaping workplaces, taxes and consumer markets. Religious institutions are the latest domain to face the same shift. They are not simply confronting lower marriage rates. Many of them, I contend, are reckoning with the consequences of treating unmarried adults as incomplete members of the community.

Alarm across faiths

According to the Survey Center on American Life, the gap in religious membership between married and unmarried Americans has widened substantially since the 1990s.

At the time, 71% of married Americans said they belonged to a religious congregation, compared with 64% of unmarried Americans. In 2019, those numbers were 59% and 45%, respectively. Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling firm, found that just 1 in 4 single mothers attend church weekly – the lowest rate of any parent group.

Communities that have historically built their infrastructure around married families are feeling the shift most acutely: couples retreats, small groups organized by life stage, children’s programs, and leadership roles that quietly assume a spouse. The cumulative effect is less about overt exclusion than about whom the institution imagines when it pictures itself.

In an April 2021 address during a churchwide conference, M. Russell Ballard, then one of the top leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, acknowledged that more than half of adult church members were widowed, divorced or not yet married – and that some “wonder about their opportunities and place in God’s plan and in the Church.” In July 2024, the church expanded its “young single adult” category from ages 18–30 to 18–35.

In evangelical Christianity, sociologist Katie Gaddini’s research for her book “The Struggle to Stay” found that women – especially those over age 35 – often felt overlooked, excluded from leadership and valued less because they had not married.

At a women’s conference in London, one attendee captured the tension: “I’m so tired of fighting Christian church leaders to be treated equally, but I don’t want to leave the church. So, what do I do?”

In Modern Orthodox Judaism, similar patterns of exclusion have emerged. A 2022 Nishma Research survey found that singles reported the lowest sense of community connection of any group studied: 69 on a 100-point scale, compared with 81 for married members. Another 2022 report, by Brandeis University sociologist Sylvia Barack Fishman, described unmarried members feeling “ignored and invisible” in synagogue life, sometimes treated as if they were broken people waiting to be fixed.

On my podcast, sociologist Ari Engelberg, author of “Singlehood and Religion,” described how unmarried adults in Israel’s Religious Zionist community internalize their single status as a religious failing. The community treats marriage as so central to observant life that remaining single can feel like falling short.

Doubling down

Religious institutions’ responses to the rise of singles have split in two directions.

Some have reasserted marriage as the expected path to adulthood, belonging and spiritual maturity. Pope Francis, for example, repeatedly warned about declining birth rates, calling the trend a “tragedy” in a 2021 address. In a 2023 worldwide broadcast, Dallin H. Oaks, who is now the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, urged single adults to date more, marry earlier and not delay having children. And in June 2025, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution lamenting “willful childlessness” and calling for laws that “incentivize family formation.”

In qualitative research with single churchgoers, a consistent theme emerges: Marriage comes up regularly in sermons – in illustrations, examples and applications – while singleness almost never does.

That instinct is understandable. But a strategy built for a society where most adults married young is a poor fit for one where many never will.

But doubling down carries a real cost. When single adults hear, again and again, that the fullest version of faithful life is married life, many do not feel called upward. They feel pushed outward.

Adapting

Other religious communities are adapting.

In the U.K., the Single Friendly Church Network developed a guided audit to help congregations across denominations assess how welcoming they are to people who come alone. In the U.S., ministries such as Table for One have tried to move singles programming away from matchmaking and toward spiritual community. And Fishman’s 2022 report on Modern Orthodox Judaism urged synagogues to give singles leadership roles, committee seats and ritual honors, regardless of marital status — though whether those recommendations have taken hold remains an open question.

But adaptation raises its own question. Are these efforts designed to support single adults as full members of the community or to manage them toward marriage? There is a difference between welcoming singles and treating singlehood as a problem to solve.

I see several practical steps for religious institutions that want to keep unmarried adults engaged in their communities:

1. Count who is actually in the pews. Leaders may not realize how many of their members are single, divorced or widowed. The Single Friendly Church Network found that when congregations conducted demographic audits, many were surprised by the results.

2. Give singles real authority. Inclusion does not mean creating a special ministry and leaving decision-making to married people. It means leadership, voice and visibility.

3. Rethink the language of belonging. Sermons and announcements that reflexively address “families” and “couples” can make unmarried adults feel peripheral. Small linguistic changes can signal that they are not.

4. Build community rather than dating pools. The goal should not be to funnel unmarried adults toward coupledom. It should be to treat them as complete people whose spiritual lives matter now.

Religious institutions have joined employers, policymakers and consumer brands in facing the same choice: Adapt to a society with more single adults, or keep building for a world that no longer exists.

Peter McGraw does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Many churches, synagogues and mosques are built around families – and they’re struggling to respond to rising singles – https://theconversation.com/many-churches-synagogues-and-mosques-are-built-around-families-and-theyre-struggling-to-respond-to-rising-singles-278723

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Mark Bartholomew, Professor of Law, University at Buffalo

Americans spend a remarkable amount of time shopping – more than on education, volunteering or even talking on the phone. But the way they shop is shifting dramatically, as major platforms and retailers are racing to automate commercial decision-making.

Artificial intelligence agents can already search for products, recommend options and even complete purchases on a consumer’s behalf. Yet many shoppers remain uneasy about handing over control. Although many consumers report using some AI assistance, most currently say they wouldn’t want an AI agent to autonomously complete a shopping transaction, according to a recent survey from the consultancy firm Bain & Company.

As scholars studying the intersection of law and technology, we have watched AI-assisted commerce expand rapidly. Our research finds that without updated legal measures, this shift toward automated commerce could quietly erode the economic, psychological and social benefits that people receive from shopping on their own terms.

Caveat emptor

Part of shoppers’ hesitation is about privacy. Many are unwilling to share sensitive personal or financial information with AI platforms. But more profoundly, people want to feel in control of their shopping choices. When users can’t understand the reasoning behind AI-driven product recommendations, their trust and satisfaction decline.

Shoppers are also reluctant to give away their autonomy. In one study involving people booking travel plans, participants deliberately chose trip options that were misaligned with their stated preferences once they were told their choices could be predicted – a way of reasserting independence.

Other experiments confirm that the more customers perceive their shopping choices being taken away from them, the more reluctant they are to accept AI purchasing assistance.

Although the technology is expected to get better, there have been some well-publicized missteps reported in financial and tech media. The Wall Street Journal wrote about an AI-powered vending machine that lost money and stocked itself with a live fish. The tech publication Wired cataloged design flaws, like an AI agent taking a full 45 seconds to add eggs to a customer’s shopping cart.

The business case for AI shopping

Consumers have good reason to be cautious. AI agents aren’t just designed to assist; they’re designed to influence. Research shows that these systems can shape preferences, steer choices, increase spending and even reduce the likelihood that consumers return products.

And companies are hyping these capabilities. The business platform Salesforce promotes AI agents that can “effortlessly upsell,”
while payments giant Mastercard reports that its AI assistant, Shopping Muse, generates 15% to 20% higher conversion rates than traditional search – that is, pushing shoppers from browsing to completing a purchase.

For companies, the appeal is obvious. From Amazon’s Rufus app and Walmart’s customer support to AI-enabled grocery carts, companies are rapidly integrating these tools into the shopping experience.

Assistants with names like Sparky and Ralph are being promoted as the future of retail, while technologists are calling on companies to prepare their brands for the era of agentic AI shopping.

The real concern is not that these systems might fail, but that they may succeed all too well.

The human side to shopping

AI shopping agents do offer considerable benefits.

For example, they can scan numerous products in seconds, compare prices across sellers, track discounts over time, sift through thousands of product reviews, and tailor recommendations to the user’s preferences and needs. They can even read through terms of service and privacy policies, helping consumers detect unfavorable fine print.

But there’s more at stake than these considerations.

While consumers have reason to focus on privacy and control, AI shopping agents carry some overlooked emotional risks, such as squashing the joy of anticipation. Psychologists have shown that the period between choosing a purchase and receiving it generates substantial happiness – sometimes more than the product or experience itself. We daydream about the vacation we booked, the outfit we ordered, the meal we planned. Automated buying threatens to drain this anticipatory pleasure.

This anticipation connects to another value: a sense of personal and ethical authorship. Even mundane shopping decisions allow people to exercise choice and express judgment. Many consumers deliberately buy fair-trade coffee, cruelty-free cosmetics or environmentally responsible products. The brands and products we choose, from Patagonia and Harley-Davidson to a Taylor Swift tour shirt, help shape who we are.

Shopping, moreover, has a communal dimension. We browse stores with friends, chat with salespeople and shop for the people we love. These everyday interactions contribute considerably to our well-being.

The same is true of gift-giving. Choosing a gift involves anticipating another person’s preferences, investing effort in the search and recognizing that the gesture matters as much as the object itself. When this process is outsourced to an autonomous system, the gift risks becoming a delivery rather than a meaningful gesture of attention and care.

Keeping human agency alive

AI shopping agents are likely to become part of everyday life, and the regulatory conversation is beginning to catch up, albeit unevenly.

Transparency has emerged as a central concern. Past experience with recommendation engines shows that undisclosed conflicts of interest are a real risk. The European Union has proposed a disclosure framework around automated decision-making, although its implementation was recently delayed. In Congress, U.S. lawmakers are considering bills to require companies to reveal how their AI models were trained.

So far, consumers seem to want to choose their own level of engagement – a signal that shopping, for many people, is more than just the efficient satisfaction of preferences. Perhaps the least-settled, yet most crucial question is whether AI shopping tools will be designed and regulated to serve users’ interests and human flourishing – or optimized, as so many digital tools before them, primarily for corporate profit.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What we lose when artificial intelligence does our shopping – https://theconversation.com/what-we-lose-when-artificial-intelligence-does-our-shopping-280251

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Shawn Datchuk, Associate Professor of Special Education, University of Iowa

Recently, I worked with a group of elementary teachers in Iowa to select new reading textbooks and software. They wanted new materials to improve their district’s stagnant reading scores.

After several days of reviewing materials from a state-approved list, one of the teachers asked me, “Will any of these help my students learn to read?”

I said, “I think so, but I don’t know.”

The teacher looked disappointed. But my answer reflects a hard truth about what reading scholars like me understand about the best ways to teach people to read and boost their literacy. Although research suggests that elementary teachers should focus on helping students learn the sounds of speech, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension strategies, there is little evidence on how well these skills are packaged into the textbooks used in classrooms.

I am a professor of special education at the University of Iowa and the former director of the Iowa Reading Research Center.

I help schools across the country adopt new textbooks and software to improve their students’ reading and writing. Currently, I’m working with colleagues on a review of how elementary school teachers use new reading textbooks to improve their students’ literacy skills.

There is a crowded marketplace of reading textbooks and software for schools to purchase, and it is often difficult to determine which one is better than the others. As a result, schools may end up purchasing new, expensive materials that do little to improve reading skills.

Stalled reading progress

Many elementary school students, including those with reading disabilities such as dyslexia, struggle to learn to read.

On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a broad measure of reading development given to fourth grade students in every state, approximately 34% of students without disabilities and 72% of students with disabilities scored below basic levels. This means they displayed difficulty with multiple foundational reading skills and were reading below grade level.

The fact that many young students struggle to read at grade level is not a new problem. For the past 30 years, reading performance across the U.S. has remained largely unchanged.

Since 1992, the average NAEP reading score for fourth graders has varied by only a few points. In fact, NAEP scores for most students in fourth grade, the only elementary school grade measured by the NAEP, have declined since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since 2019, a total of 42 states, including California and Tennessee, have passed legislation intended to help students read better by training teachers to use evidence-based reading instruction. This means schools across the country are adopting new approaches to teach reading and using new textbooks.

For example, Louisiana in 2021 and Iowa in 2024 passed legislation that provided teachers with additional training, in addition to giving them state-approved reading textbooks that align with key areas of reading development, such as phonics and reading comprehension strategies.

As a result of these policies, reading scores are improving in some states. However, a substantial number of students across the country are still reading below grade level.

For example, Louisiana had a significant increase in fourth grade reading scores on the 2024 NAEP, rising from 55% of fourth grade students scoring basic or above in 2019 to 60% in 2024. However, 40% of fourth grade students still scored below basic, meaning they were reading below grade level.

Iowa had minimal increases in the reading proficiency of its students in 2024 statewide assessments, rising from 73% to 74% of sixth graders reading proficiently. Most elementary grades’ reading levels stayed the same from the prior year, with approximately 65% to 69% of students reading proficiently.

Despite this large number of students reading at grade level, nearly 70% of students with disabilities were reading below grade level in 2024.

To improve the scores of those still reading below grade level, new research that I and colleagues are doing is looking at the quality of reading textbooks promoted on state-approved lists.

New textbooks aren’t necessarily better

Reading textbooks play a pivotal role in how reading is taught. These textbooks have distinct daily lessons in which specific reading skills and content are taught, such as specific letter sounds or words. Textbooks not only include paper-based materials for students but also online apps and websites, as well as lesson plans for teachers.

There are a variety of textbook publishers and textbooks, and each textbook differs on what reading skills are taught and how often they are taught. For example, a recent review found textbooks differ drastically on the amount of time given for students to learn the sounds of speech. This time difference matters, as students’ reading performance suffered when too little or too much time was spent on learning the sounds of speech.

More than 36 states publish a list of approved reading textbooks, often referred to as high-quality instructional materials. States differ on which textbooks they consider to be of high quality, but they typically rely on the opinion of reading experts. Two popular nonprofit organizations that provide detailed reports on how reading experts rate textbooks include EdReports and The Reading League.

A need for more research

Despite using expert opinion to determine quality, ineffective textbooks still make it onto state-approved lists. A 2025 study by the Tennessee Reading Research Center found mixed effects for teachers who used state-approved textbooks to teach reading. In the study, students with dyslexia improved their reading on some measures, but overall their reading remained significantly lower than their peers.

Once a state promotes a reading textbook as high quality, it is likely to remain a staple in schools. Most states do not have systems in place to monitor which reading textbooks are used in schools and their potential effects on student reading performance.

Once a school adopts a textbook, it is likely in place for years. Adopting a new one is a time-consuming and expensive process. It can take several years to train staff and several hundred thousand dollars to pay for materials and training.

I think that we ultimately need scholars who research how kids learn to read to closely collaborate with schools as they use new reading textbooks, and then measure whether student reading performance improves. This will help them determine which reading textbooks improve student reading scores. The results of this research can then be shared with other schools across the U.S. that are considering new textbooks. Schools could then make informed decisions on which textbooks to purchase.

Without this kind of research, states may promote ineffective textbooks and leave schools with a confusing choice on which textbooks to use.

Shawn Datchuk consults to several curriculum companies, including Learning Without Tears, Heggerty, and Dyslexico. He receives funding from the Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.

– ref. New reading textbooks, same problem: Why children’s reading scores in the US aren’t rising – https://theconversation.com/new-reading-textbooks-same-problem-why-childrens-reading-scores-in-the-us-arent-rising-280125

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Paul M. Collins Jr., Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science, UMass Amherst

Washington is buzzing with the possibility that President Donald Trump might name one or more Supreme Court justices before the November midterm elections.

In a conversation with Fox Business TV host Maria Bartiromo on April 15, 2026, Trump discussed the potential retirement of Justice Samuel Alito, 76, the reliably conservative justice appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005.

Trump praised Alito as “a great justice” and said that he is prepared to appoint a replacement, should Alito retire.

Trump added, “In theory, it’s two – you just read the statistics – it could be two, could be three, could be one.”

Trump didn’t say who the other potential retiring justices are. Speculation from pundits is that he is referring to Justice Clarence Thomas, 77, another solid conservative vote. Thomas, appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1991, is the court’s oldest justice and longest-serving member.

In the same Fox interview, Trump pointed to former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was under intense pressure to retire during President Barack Obama’s presidency. Ginsburg opted to stay on the bench and died in September 2020.

Republicans blocked Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland in 2016 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Then, in 2020, Trump replaced Ginsburg with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, solidifying a 6-3 conservative majority.

As a scholar of the Supreme Court confirmation process, I know the timing of Trump’s comments is closely linked to November’s midterm elections.

If Democrats were to take over the Senate following the midterms, it is very unlikely they would confirm a Trump-appointed Supreme Court nominee. Instead, they would probably follow the precedent set by Republicans in 2020 and block a Trump pick.

The clock is ticking on November’s midterm elections, and Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate are improving. Assuming a current Supreme Court justice retires, here’s what has to happen for Trump and Senate Republicans to successfully confirm a successor.

The Supreme Court confirmation process

The Constitution says that the Senate provides “advice and consent” on presidential appointments to the Supreme Court. Over the course of the nation’s history, this has developed into a complex process.

Once the Senate receives a nomination from the president, it goes to the Judiciary Committee.

This is where the most public part of the confirmation process takes place: confirmation hearings. These typically last three to four days and feature a high stakes question-and-answer session with the nominee.

Prior to the hearings, senators and the nominee engage in a substantial amount of preparation.

Senators, with their staffs, do extensive background research on the nominee, which helps inform their questioning. Some of this is accomplished through the Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, to which nominees provide written answers. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s 2022 questionnaire was 149 pages long. It included questions about organizational memberships, public speeches and judicial opinions authored.

Meanwhile, the nominee makes courtesy calls to senators to build support for confirmation.

At roughly the same time, the nominee takes part in hearing preparation, known as “murder boards.” Here, the nominee’s allies play the roles of members of the Judiciary Committee, anticipating the type of tough questions the nominee will face from skeptical senators from the opposition party of the appointing president.

During Jackson’s murder boards, for instance, the focus was on expected Republican attacks that Jackson was soft on crime.

Within a few days of the end of the confirmation hearings, the Judiciary Committee votes on its recommendation to the full Senate. Then the nomination goes back to the full Senate for more discussion and a final confirmation vote. A simple majority is needed to confirm a Supreme Court nominee.

For the nine members of the court, it has taken an average of 70 days between presidential appointment and Senate confirmation, according to data from The U.S. Supreme Court Database. But this number has decreased recently, with Barrett and Jackson taking 30 and 41 days, respectively, to be confirmed.

So, as long as there is roughly a month before the November midterms, it is likely that there is enough time for the Republican Senate to confirm a Trump nominee.

Democrats have limited options

In 2017, Senate Republicans ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. It was a move to secure the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch.

This reduced the threshold for confirmation from 60 votes to 51 votes. Perhaps most importantly, it also severely limited the options available to the minority party to block a Supreme Court confirmation.

With a 53-47 Republican majority in the Senate, so long as Republicans stick together, it will be very difficult for Senate Democrats to block a Trump nominee.

There are some delay tactics available to Democrats – they can perhaps even grind the entire Senate to a halt – but they may pay a political price for these tactics. Republicans, for instance, may try to paint Democrats as obstructionist, potentially motivating a voter backlash against the Democratic Party in the midterm elections.

Nonetheless, Democrats may view this as a fight worth having, since the confirmation of another Republican-appointed justice will ensure conservative dominance on the court for decades – if not generations – to come.

Paul M. Collins Jr. does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. If Justice Alito resigns before the midterms, a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court is likely to sail through confirmation – https://theconversation.com/if-justice-alito-resigns-before-the-midterms-a-trump-nominee-to-the-supreme-court-is-likely-to-sail-through-confirmation-280887

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Richard B. (Ricky) Rood, Professor Emeritus of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, University of Michigan

Michigan and parts of Wisconsin are in the midst of a historic flooding event in spring 2026. Days of heavy rainfall on top of snow have sent lakes and rivers over their banks and threatened several dams in both states, forcing people to evacuate homes downstream. By April 20, 2026, nearly half of Michigan’s counties were under a state of emergency. In Cheboygan, Michigan, large pumps were brought in to lower pressure on a century-old dam in the city.

The region’s aging water infrastructure was never designed for the volume of water it is facing. That’s a troubling sign for the future, with flooding becoming more common as global temperatures rise.

In many areas, the damage has been exacerbated by a culture of building homes and cabins on the shores of inland lakes and along riverine lakes behind small, often privately owned dams. Many of these dams were built over 100 years ago, with some long forgotten.

I am a professor emeritus of meteorology at the University of Michigan whose work focuses on helping communities adapt to climate change. The warming climate is worsening the flood risk, and disasters like the one Michigan is experiencing are setting higher benchmarks for safety as communities plan future infrastructure.

Where is all the water coming from?

For much of Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as northern Illinois, 2026 has been the wettest March and April on record.

In March, much of that precipitation fell as snow, including in an enormous blizzard that brought 3 feet of snow to parts of Michigan. In mid-April, persistent rains began. The rain, on top of all that snow, sent floodwaters running into rivers, streets and homes. The water carries large amounts of ice that damages shores, infrastructure and homes.

The moisture for much of these storms has been funneled northward from the warm Gulf of Mexico, thanks in part to a high pressure system sitting over the southeastern U.S.

The problem of warming winters

The kind of flooding Michigan and Wisconsin are experiencing in 2026 is what forecasters expect to see more of as global temperatures rise.

Winters have been warming faster than other seasons across the U.S. In Michigan and Wisconsin, winter months used to be reliably below freezing, but that’s changing. In the Cheboygan area, near the tip of Lower Michigan, March temperatures used to be below freezing on all but a few days. By the 1991-2020 period, the region averaged 10 days above or close to the freezing point – about twice as many as the 1951-1980 period.

The air coming in from the south is also warmer than in the past. Nationally, 2026 was the warmest March on record in 132 years of record-keeping in the contiguous U.S., with an average temperature more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) higher than the 30-year average. So, in addition to snowmelt starting earlier, melting is happening faster.

Michigan’s average wintertime temperature rose by more than 4 F (2.3 C) from 1951 to 2023. Though winter 2026 in Michigan was colder than the 1991-2020 average, the Gulf of Mexico, where the moisture originated, was warmer than average, accelerating the snowmelt.

How warming leads to downpours and flooding

A few aspects of a warming climate can lead to flooding.

First, temperatures are increasing. In higher temperatures, moisture evaporates faster from the ground, plants and surface water. That moisture, once in the atmosphere, eventually falls again as precipitation. However, for each degree Celsius that temperatures increase, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more moisture, resulting in more heavy downpours.

A warmer winter also means more melting snow and more rain-on-snow events that can quickly increase the amount of runoff into rivers.

The Great Lakes region and much of the Northeast already experience more precipitation than in the past. Winters with more persistent wetness – not just snow but also rain – prime the region for floods. With continued warming in the coming decades, 2026 might be among the least disruptive in the future.

Data shows that a scenario of persistent wetness, changes in winter and seasonal runoff is part of the future for Michigan and the other states and Canadian provinces along the Great Lakes Basin, as well as New England.

Fixing dams for the future

All of this means communities across the region will have to pay closer attention to the growing risks facing their vital infrastructure – particularly dams.

Even prior to the 2026 floods, Michigan had a well-documented problem with its aging inventory of 2,600 dams. In May 2020, an intense storm system that stalled over the region brought so much rain that the Edenville and Sanford dams both failed near Midland, Michigan, forcing 10,000 people to evacuate and causing an estimated US$200 million in damage.

After that disaster, a state task force issued recommendations for fixing the state’s water control infrastructure to meet the growing risks. But a member of the task force told The Detroit News in April 2026 that little had been done to address those recommendations.

Because warming will continue for the coming decades, the 2026 flooding should be considered at the lower end of capacity for stormwater infrastructure and dams. Rather than relying on the statistics that described floods in the past, planners will have to anticipate the floods of the future.

Michigan is often touted as a climate haven because it is relatively cool and has plenty of water. The state is not, however, immune to the amped-up weather of a warming climate. Environmental security in the future requires improved and more adaptive infrastructure.

Richard B. (Ricky) Rood receives funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

– ref. Extreme rain on snow is testing aging dams across Michigan and Wisconsin – this is the future in a warming world – https://theconversation.com/extreme-rain-on-snow-is-testing-aging-dams-across-michigan-and-wisconsin-this-is-the-future-in-a-warming-world-281221

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By J.C. Bradbury, Professor of Economics, Kennesaw State University

When the Atlanta Braves opened Truist Park in 2017, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred called it a “watershed” moment.

What drew so much attention to the new Braves’ stadium in suburban Cobb County, Georgia, at the time was its construction within a mixed-use development, known as The Battery Atlanta. Truist Park anchors a live-work-play campus that includes restaurants, shops, hotels, offices and residences. The idea was to create a year-round attraction rather than build a standalone stadium that serves only as a game-day destination.

Manfred declared that this sort of mixed-used district “provides a road map for clubs to get new stadiums built.” And he’s not alone in that belief.

The Tampa Bay Rays’ new owner, Florida home-building mogul Patrick Zalupski, hopes to mimic the Braves’ approach, calling it “the gold standard of what we want to build and develop here in Tampa Bay.”

But what do mixed-use projects like The Battery mean for host communities?

As an economist – and lifelong Braves fan – who lives a few miles from the complex, I’ve had the unique opportunity to experience The Battery as a community member, as well as study it as a scholar. I’ve attended many games, visited on off-days and examined its impact on surrounding businesses, county property values, sales tax receipts and tourism. My forthcoming book, “This One Will Be Different: False Promises and Fiscal Realities of Publicly Funded Stadiums,” looks at the history and economics of public stadium projects, including my hometown Truist Park.

Tampa as a public partner

Critical to Zalupski’s proposal to build a new US$2.3 billion ballpark is a hefty contribution from taxpayers. He is asking the city of Tampa and Hillsborough County to fund at least $1 billion of the cost.

That’s more than triple the $300 million Cobb County devoted to build Truist Park in Georgia, which was funded by a combination of property, hotel and rental car taxes.

In addition to that $1 billion, the state of Florida is offering $180 million for transportation improvements and rebuilding Hillsborough College, whose land would be donated to host the new development.

Rays CEO Ken Babby insists that the immense public outlay is worth it. He described it as “a generational opportunity” for the community that “will strengthen the region by creating jobs, encouraging economic investment and supporting long-term growth.”

But 50 years of consistent research findings show that sports venues don’t generate a financial windfall for host cities. The overwhelming evidence regarding the limited economic benefits of stadiums has produced a strong consensus among economists that sports venues are not worthwhile public investments.

It may seem counterintuitive that stadium events fail to boost local economies, because fans clearly do spend vast sums of money attending games. But most of the spectators in the crowd are locals, who reallocate their spending from other area merchants, rather than generating new commercial activity.

Mixed-use to the rescue?

When the Braves and Cobb County leaders announced their stadium vision, they confidently predicted that The Battery was the key that would unlock the economic potential of the stadium. Truist Park’s complementary development was touted as a game changer that would propel its economic success.

Knowing that past stadium deals had been unprofitable for surrounding communities, the team acknowledged that a standalone venue was unlikely to pay off financially. But with The Battery, president of the Braves Development Company Mike Plant promised, “We’re going to build a city, and we’re going to create tons of jobs, tons of density and year-round tax revenues.”

Now that Truist Park is entering its 10th season, we can assess what the stadium development has meant for the local economy using historical data.

The Braves’ mixed-use development has indeed boosted the team’s bottom line. In 2025, for example, Atlanta Braves Holdings reported that the mixed-use component added $97 million in revenue – primarily from rent, parking and advertising – on top of $635 million from baseball operations.

With those numbers, it’s no wonder the Rays want to follow the Braves’ blueprint.

Unfortunately, the Battery hasn’t been a boon for taxpayers. My research shows that the relocation of the Braves did attract some new spending into Cobb County. But the gains have been far too small to cover the county’s debt service and other funding obligations, generating an annual loss of around $15 million.

And what spending may be imported into Cobb happens during the baseball season. In other words, The Battery has not been a year-round attraction.

Why didn’t Truist Park’s ancillary development strategy work?

Just as spending inside the ballpark mostly represents a reshuffling of local commerce, purchases within the surrounding district largely come at the expense of other off-campus area businesses. And though nearly $100 million in revenue from the mixed-use development may seem impressive, it’s trivial in comparison to Cobb County’s $80 billion economy.

A new gold standard or fool’s gold?

If the Braves’ mixed-use development hasn’t been able to pay off Cobb’s much smaller $300 million subsidy, it casts serious doubt on Tampa’s ballpark-village strategy to cover its billion-dollar ask of taxpayers.

The evidence shows that stadiums aren’t capable of funding themselves, even with a mixed-use component. The public funding has to come from someone, and it’s local taxpayers who ultimately pick up the tab.

I believe the Rays’ plan and similar stadium developments being discussed in Kansas City, Chicago, Denver and elsewhere should be viewed as risky bets rather than sound public investments.

Read more of our stories about Florida.

J.C Bradbury is a faculty affiliate of KSU’s Bagwell Center for the Study of Markets and Economic Opportunity, which has previously provided him with a summer research support (last received in 2022).

– ref. Sorry, Tampa Bay, mixed-use districts don’t reverse the dismal economics of sports venues – https://theconversation.com/sorry-tampa-bay-mixed-use-districts-dont-reverse-the-dismal-economics-of-sports-venues-280862

Source: The Conversation – USA – By John E. Jones III, President, Dickinson College

John Jones knows about voter suppression. Currently the president of Dickinson College, Jones – nominated in 2002 by President George W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate – served for almost two decades as a federal court judge. In that role, Jones presided over a case, filed just prior to the November 2020 presidential election, in which a conservative legal foundation sued Pennsylvania’s top election official, alleging that she had allowed 21,000 dead people to remain on the voter rolls. The group asked Jones to stop those people from voting.

Jones denied the request. “In an election where every vote matters, we will not disenfranchise potentially eligible voters based solely upon the allegations of a private foundation,” he wrote in his memorandum on the case. In this interview with The Conversation politics and legal affairs editor Naomi Schalit, Jones discusses President Donald Trump’s March 31, 2026, executive order to wrest control of mail-in voting from states and give it to the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security; how the constitutional design of U.S. voting bars such federal control; and how Trump’s order would disenfranchise voters and is now the subject of lawsuits by voting rights groups and 23 states.

Article 1, Section 4, of the Constitution says, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” When you saw the executive order by the president, what did you think?

My first thought was, this executive order is dead on arrival. It assumes two problems that really don’t exist.

States are empowered under Article 1, Section 4, of the Constitution to conduct elections and set the time, place and manner of those elections.

The president’s March order asserts that states don’t maintain active and appropriate voter rolls. That’s just not true. State after state takes that very, very seriously, and it’s a principle of federalism that states are given the responsibility for conducting elections. This includes maintaining accurate voter rolls, which, despite the noise to the contrary, states have historically done very well.

The second inaccuracy that undergirds this executive order is that there is rampant fraud in mail-in voting. There is absolutely no evidence to show that that is true.

So you have those twin rationales that are, in my view, demonstrably untrue. And as someone who believes that we need to defer to the laws and the Constitution, not to mention find accurate facts, this is deeply troubling. It’s just beyond the president’s authority to do this.

There are other problems. They are less critical but equally fatal.

President Trump said on signing the executive order that “the cheating on mail-in voting is legendary.” So the order gives the U.S. Postal Service the job of determining who may cast mail ballots, in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security. Is that one of the problems you see?

That is not what the post office is equipped to do. I could joke here that they have a hard enough time at the U.S. Postal Service getting the mail delivered. Now they’re supposed to develop a program in concert with Homeland Security so that they could work to disqualify voters because they’re not on the list that Homeland Security provides to them that supposedly contains U.S. citizens. Homeland Security is simply not equipped to do this either. This is out of their skill set as well.

What’s the upshot?

Setting aside all the legal and constitutional hurdles, if this would survive judicial scrutiny, it clearly would disenfranchise voters. We have a country that has an increasing group of citizens who really like to vote by mail – including, by the way, the president of the United States.

And now the administration is in effect saying, “We want to make it really, really difficult for you to vote by mail,” because of these contrived and, quite frankly, false premises that have to do with voter rolls and fraud in elections. There are legal challenges over this order in federal courts in D.C. and Massachusetts. The result will be a legal race to see which of those courts enjoins the policy first.

Why does anybody have to sue if this is simply not in the president’s power to make happen?

Because if they don’t sue to enjoin this, since these agencies – the Postal Service and Homeland Security – are under the executive branch, they’ll just go ahead and implement this cumbersome and impossible initiative.

Secretaries of state have pushed back against this. In a separate move by the administration, the Department of Justice has asked states to turn over their voter rolls, and many have refused to do so, standing on the principle that it’s beyond the executive to demand those. Various federal courts have backed the states so far. One of the problems with the request is a lack of confidence that the information can be kept safe by the federal government. And states work very, very hard to do that.

When I was on the federal bench and denied the injunction in the lawsuit filed by a conservative legal foundation that sought to take 20,000 plus voters off the rolls, I did so because there was no good proof that they were, in fact, deceased, which is what the suit asserted. Subsequent to the election, at the now infamous Four Seasons landscaping press conference, Rudy Giuliani was waving my decision in the air and decrying the fact that dead people voted in Pennsylvania. That was simply not true.

These types of hyperbolic claims, made up out of whole cloth, stoke fears. This recent executive order is a solution that is looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.

Why did the framers of the Constitution set up a process where states run elections and not the federal government?

Well, first of all the federal government didn’t have the apparatus to conduct elections. And states had been running elections; they knew how to do it. There was a great deal of trust in the states’ ability to run elections. And there was the core debate of federalism, as to what powers states could retain, and they didn’t want to abdicate many of those powers. There was also a debate about the potential for fraud, that if there was a single entity controlling all the elections – that is, if you centralize elections under one politically motivated executive – it’s a really fraught situation which can be abused.

The Constitution is clear, and unless amended, Article 1, Section 4, is – to use the trite phrase – what it is. The power rests with the states, absent congressional action. There is no mention of the president. None. This executive order is thus, in my view, patently unconstitutional, and I harbor little doubt that it will be found to be so.

John E. Jones III does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why Trump can’t just decree changes to voting by mail – a former federal judge explains how the president’s executive order is ‘a solution looking for a problem’ – https://theconversation.com/why-trump-cant-just-decree-changes-to-voting-by-mail-a-former-federal-judge-explains-how-the-presidents-executive-order-is-a-solution-looking-for-a-problem-280680

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Benjamin Freeman, Assistant Professor, School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology

Each spring, birds across America are in full voice. Cardinals chatter, sparrows sing and warblers warble. Birdsong lifts the human spirit – “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” after all. Yet birds are not singing to soothe our nerves after a stressful day at the office. Instead, they sing to defend their territories and attract mates.

The traditional view of birdsong focuses on the male bird: He is like a gladiator who fiercely defends his territory against rivals to ensure sufficient space and resources to feed and raise his chicks.

Female birds, on the other hand, are often thought to be quiet spectators when it comes to territorial defense. This holds true for the red-winged blackbird and many other North American birds.

But it is far from the complete picture.

Female rose-breasted grosbeaks and many other birds sing and defend territories across the globe.

The growing recognition that females often participate in territorial defense leads to a puzzle: If two is better than one, why do male-female pairs cooperate to defend territories in some species, while just the male defends home turf in other species?

To find out, we performed over 3,000 playback experiments across the Americas, playing recorded bird songs from the same species so the bird would think it was hearing an intruder.

We measured territory defense in 264 species. By studying many types of birds in many different environments, we were able to figure out some answers.

Simulating a bird intruder

Humans are well aware of their property lines and don’t take kindly to intruders. Imagine you are relaxing at home and you see your neighbors digging in your flower garden. You might rush out to tell them to stop; your prize dahlias aren’t for them to take.

For birds, these sorts of disputes happen all the time, with territory owners engaging in song battles with neighbors. The songbirds aren’t just defending their garden. They’re defending their food resources, nest locations and even their mates from rival birds, within territories that often span several acres in size.

To study how birds defend their territories, we pretended we were an intruding bird. But because we can’t sing like the average bird, we used technology.

We surreptitiously placed a speaker in a bird’s territory, hid in the bushes nearby, and then broadcast that bird species’ song. We then counted how many individuals came out from other parts of their territory to respond to the speaker. Some sang at the sound, clearly agitated. A few tried to attack the speaker itself.

At the end of a two-minute experiment, we would leave – and the rightful territory owner presumably felt proud that it had successfully repelled the invisible intruder. Then, we analyzed variables that could explain why some female birds participate in territory defense while others stay out of the fray.

Birds that hang out together defend together

Some birds stick with their mate for life, while others pair up just for one short breeding season.

Studies have found that birds in long-term relationships cooperate in many daily tasks, whether it’s foraging for meals, gathering nest materials or feeding the babies.

We found that this cooperation extends to guarding their home.

Females in species with long-term bonds that last for years, such as Carolina chickadees, often defended their territory.

However, among pine warblers and other species that form temporary pairs only during the breeding season, males typically took responsibility for defending the territory.

Some families took it one step further by including the kids.

The brown-headed nuthatch might look cute and sound like a squeaky toy, but these birds are no joke when they team up to defend their territory.

The nuthatches employ the previous seasons’ offspring as nannies – nest helpers that help take care of their babies. We often saw three or more adult nuthatches attacking the speaker to defend their territory when we conducted playback experiments on this species, meaning that the mated pair was joined by at least one helper. It seems to be a good strategy to get the whole family involved in territory defense too.

There were some exceptions to these patterns. When we simulated invasions on the territory of the blue grosbeak, a species thought to be monogamous during breeding season, in multiple instances only the female bird defended the territory.

No time to relax in the tropics

Location also matters when it comes to bird defenses.

In the rainforests of Costa Rica and the mountains of Peru, we found that males and females cooperating to defend their territory together was generally the rule.

While humans living in places with cold winters associate tropical climates with vacations, birds living near the equator are not afforded the luxury of rest. Instead, they need to stay vigilant year-round to ward off any birds looking to usurp their resource-rich habitats. The need for year-round territorial defense may mean that teaming up is the best strategy to ward off competitors.

Lots of bird personalities

You might think it would get boring observing bird behavior day after day. And, indeed, we dealt with heat and humidity, hordes of biting insects, and early morning wake-ups.

But every experiment brought a peek into the personalities of these birds. There were the pugnacious tufted titmice, which seemed as if they were eagerly awaiting an opportunity to fight, given how quickly they came in to investigate the apparent intruder, and the nonchalant American robins, which took their sweet time in responding, only briefly peering at the speaker before returning to their daily routines.

Our adorable feathered friends are not afraid to get up close and personal with anything they deem a threat, either, including any gadgets. Many times we’d see small birds such as chipping sparrows scrapping with a speaker twice its size. The birds focus on the song, and it can take birds a while before they realize the speaker is not, in fact, a rival bird.

Male birds sing and defend territories, but so do many female birds. We found that cooperative territorial defense is especially common in birds with long-term social bonds or that live close to the equator.

So, the next time you hear birds singing as you walk around your neighborhood, listen closely to what each voice is really saying – and who is doing the singing.

Benjamin Freeman receives funding from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation

Shreyas Arashanapalli does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. It’s a sing-off! Myth-busting about birds and sex when it comes to defending the nest – https://theconversation.com/its-a-sing-off-myth-busting-about-birds-and-sex-when-it-comes-to-defending-the-nest-279998

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Michael A Messner, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

High school students will soon take part in a more than 160-year-old tradition in American education: receiving yearbooks at the end of the school year.

In an era of high-speed ephemeral images and social media, some may see high school yearbooks as outdated. But high school and college students have told me that they found it meaningful to look through their yearbooks and inscribe their classmates’ books with personal messages, poems, jokes or simply their signatures.

Many graduates will tuck away their yearbooks – some to be lost forever, but others to be revisited or rediscovered years or decades later.

As a sociologist, I have studied high school yearbooks as time capsules and as a way to understand how youth culture, sports, gender and race relations have changed, or have not changed, over time. Despite their ubiquity, school yearbooks are a largely untapped source for scholarly inquiry.

But as media historian Kate Eichhorn notes, people may probe an old high school yearbook to learn more about a mass murderer or to scrutinize whether someone is fit for public office. Some reporters, for example, dug into Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavinaugh’s 1983 high school yearbook while he was going through the confirmation process in 2018. His yearbook included a reference to a female student that some boys, including a young Kavanaugh, might have dated or had a sexual relationship with.

But as Eichhorn notes, some scholars seem to dismiss yearbooks as “cringy” documents created by teenagers, or as documents focused on personal nostalgia, unworthy of examination.

An incomplete picture

Yearbooks are a limited source for accurately understanding history.

In my 2025 study of 120 years of high school yearbooks from Salinas High School in California, where I graduated from in 1970, I found nary a mention of the Great Depression or the Salinas Valley’s violent agricultural labor strikes, which Salinas High alum John Steinbeck wrote about in the 1930s.

Nor did the Salinas High School yearbooks mention the war in Vietnam, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the mass social movements that opposed them.

Some yearbooks from the 2000s showed student clubs that addressed violence, substance abuse and LGBTQ+ issues. But over the years, yearbooks have mostly skipped the pain of high school and focused instead on the pleasure.

They shine a spotlight on sports, cheering and public rituals like all-school rallies and homecoming week. Photos and text blurbs celebrate the accomplishments and humorous antics of the “popular” kids and, at times, the most academically successful students.

A nostalgic rear window

It can be reassuring to dive into nostalgic remembering. It’s common for most people to idealize the past and remember it as better than today.

A Gallup poll from 1939 found that 62% of Americans agreed that people were happier and more content a generation earlier. Since then, national polls consistently show that most people think fondly about the good old days, and usually think 30 or 40 years ago was a better time than the one they are living today.

We can see this penchant for nostalgia in the Salinas High yearbooks of the late 1970s and 1980s. Students in these yearbooks are seen enjoying 1950s-themed dances echoing popular television shows like “Happy Days” that idealized 50s culture.

In analyzing high school yearbooks of the past, I tried to not sidestep nostalgia – probably impossible to do anyway – but to consciously deploy an idea called critical nostalgia. This means acknowledging the pleasures of looking back in time, while remaining attentive to the ways that schools too often worsen, rather than challenge, inequalities among students.

A double focus

Taking on a critical nostalgia lens requires a double focus – first, looking at what high school yearbooks routinely illuminate, like football rallies and cheerleaders. It also means identifying what American writer and activist Tillie Olsen once called “unnatural silences,” like the voices, imagery and activities of marginalized students who have been left outside the frame.

Two examples from the Salinas High School yearbooks illustrate this approach.

Someone looking at Salinas editions from the early 1900s might be surprised to see girls baseball, track and field, volleyball and basketball teams engaged in interscholastic competition.

Yearbook photos show girls wearing school sports uniforms and being treated with respect.

By the early 1930s, girls sports teams disappeared from the yearbooks, absorbed into the Girls’ Athletic Association, a recently formed organization that was based on the idea that competition and vigorous exercise was unhealthy for girls.

For nearly half a century after the creation of the Girls’ Athletic Association, photos of girls playing sports were accompanied by captions that disparaged their athletic abilities.

In the mid-1970s, when competitive girls sports teams were reinstated at Salinas, the yearbooks started to give them more equitable and respectful treatment.

This history shows an uneven picture of social change, as changes in girls sports were driven by the waxing and waning of 20th-century women’s rights movements.

The spring 1941 and 1942 Salinas High School yearbooks, meanwhile, showed scores of Japanese American students – about 14% of the student body at the time – fully integrated into nearly all aspects of student life.

But by the time the yearbook was distributed in the spring of 1942, the Japanese American students had been sent with their families to the Salinas Rodeo Grounds, where they were temporarily housed in converted horse stalls.

They were later transferred for the duration of World War II to an internment camp in Poston, Arizona.

The 1943 yearbook showed zero Japanese American students, nor did the editors of the book mention how or why their classmates had disappeared from campus.

For today’s Salinas students, reading their school’s old yearbooks against the backdrop of this history can help them to explore questions about how the legacy of racial and ethnic removal and detention is echoing in their community and country today.

A starting point for understanding history

It’s not just Salinas High students who might benefit from reading their school’s past yearbooks. I have spoken with a handful of professors who are guiding their students into their university’s archive of yearbooks to explore race and gender relations in their own community.

Students discover that the size, content and organization of school yearbooks have shifted over time. But the books are a rich starting point for a group exploration of how schools create a pleasurable collective identity – for some, at least – while simultaneously shaping and celebrating students’ division and inequalities.

I am a 1970 alum of Salinas High School.

– ref. High school yearbooks focus on the fun students had, obscuring the pain people also experienced – https://theconversation.com/high-school-yearbooks-focus-on-the-fun-students-had-obscuring-the-pain-people-also-experienced-280910