Dear Ms. Szabados,

I am writing on behalf of the student council of Quillfield High School, many of whose members have come to depend on the second-floor reading room of Tamsin Road Library. Since its renovation last spring, the room has offered exactly what many of our homes cannot: silence, good lighting, and the quiet company of others who are working just as hard. It is precisely because the space has become so valuable that its current closing time of 9 p.m. has turned into a real obstacle. Students who leave evening academy classes often arrive with barely an hour left, and a recent council survey found that more than two-thirds of respondents would regularly stay until midnight if they were allowed to. We realize that later hours mean added costs for staffing and security, and our council is prepared to organize student volunteers to assist with closing duties. We would therefore ask you to consider keeping the reading room open until midnight, at least on weekdays during the four weeks before final exams.

Respectfully,
Elif Tarkanian, Student Council President

Noah had rehearsed the monologue so many times that the words seemed to move with his own breathing. Signing in at the front desk, he joked with the assistant about the flickering light above the door, and he took the last seat in the waiting room with the relaxed posture of someone who had already been cast. Then the studio door swung open, and a tall girl walked out, pressing a tissue to her eyes. "They stopped me after two lines," she murmured to no one in particular. The boy beside Noah, who had been silently mouthing his lines, began to recite them aloud in a voice so rich and controlled that the whole room fell silent. Noah looked down at his script and noticed that his fingers had left damp prints on the pages. The opening line, which he had known by heart for weeks, would not come. When his name was called, he stood up so abruptly that his chair scraped across the floor, and every head turned toward him.

Many legal rules survive for no better reason than that they have always been there. Lawyers trace a doctrine back through centuries of decisions and treat the length of its pedigree as though it were a justification in itself. Yet the fact that a rule was laid down long ago tells us only where it came from, not whether it deserves to govern us now. The situation becomes troubling when the conditions that once gave a rule its point have long since vanished and the rule persists merely by imitation of the past. History, properly used, should therefore be not an object of reverence but the first step toward a clear-eyed skepticism: by showing how a rule arose, it lets us see which of its original supports are still standing. Only then can we ask the question that really matters—what social ends the rule serves today, and at what cost. Judges and lawmakers who weigh such considerations openly, instead of sheltering behind precedent, will produce law that is both more honest and more useful.

A number that summarizes a complex reality is informative precisely because no one has been trying to move it. The average waiting time at a clinic, the share of students who pass an exam, the count of crimes reported in a district—each tells us something only as a by-product of activities aimed at other things. Its link to the condition it describes is a quiet correlation, sustained by the indifference of those whose behavior produces it. Once rewards and penalties are attached to the figure, that indifference disappears. Those being assessed have every reason to seek the cheapest route to a better reading, and the cheapest route seldom passes through the condition itself: patients are reclassified rather than seen sooner, teaching narrows to what the test can detect, and offenses are recorded under milder headings. The indicator keeps improving, but it has become a weathervane turned by hand rather than by the wind. The more forcefully such a figure is used to steer behavior, the less it can tell anyone about what it was supposed to steer.

It is tempting to explain expert performance by some general mental power. A chess master who glances at a board for five seconds and then rebuilds it almost piece by piece must, we assume, possess an unusually spacious memory. Studies of chess players, begun in the 1940s and extended in the 1970s, complicate that assumption in a revealing way. When the pieces were arranged as they might appear in an actual game, masters reproduced far more of the board than weaker players did. When the same number of pieces was scattered at random, however, the masters' advantage all but disappeared, and they recalled hardly more than beginners. Whatever the masters were drawing on, then, it was not a larger container. What they perceived was not twenty-odd separate pieces but a handful of familiar configurations, each stored through thousands of hours of play and retrieved as a single unit. Take away the meaning that makes such grouping possible, and the expert is left with the same narrow window of attention as anyone else.

It seems self-evident that a machine needing less fuel to do the same work will leave more fuel in the ground. In 1865, however, the economist William Stanley Jevons argued that this intuition confuses the economy of a single operation with the consumption of a whole society. Every gain in efficiency lowers the cost of the service that fuel provides, and a cheaper service rarely stays confined to its former uses. When improvements to the steam engine made coal a less expensive source of power, engines spread into mines, mills, and workshops that had never been able to afford them, and the total demand for coal climbed rather than fell. Jevons pointed to the ironworks of Scotland, where the coal burned for each ton of iron had been cut to less than a third of its former amount, only for the total coal burned by those ironworks to rise roughly tenfold as cheap iron found new markets. Saving at the level of the unit, in other words, can become the very mechanism by which the aggregate expands.

Imagine a fog at sea. For most passengers it is an experience of acute discomfort: the ship slows, the horn sounds at anxious intervals, and every unseen shape might be another vessel. Yet if one can set aside, even for a moment, the delay and the danger, the same fog becomes strangely beautiful—a soft veil that turns the water into milk and the world into a single pale room. What has changed is not the fog but the relation between the fog and the self: it has been set apart from our practical needs and personal concerns so that it can be contemplated rather than merely endured. Art depends on this separation, but in a delicate measure. A man who suspects his own wife of betrayal may watch Othello and see only his own marriage; the play collapses into his private anguish. Push the work too far away, on the other hand, and it seems artificial and empty, touching nothing in us at all. The ideal is to reduce the gap as much as possible without letting it vanish.

The graph above shows the percentages of teenagers by their average nightly sleep duration in 2016 and 2026. ① In 2016, teenagers who slept 7 to less than 8 hours made up the largest share, at 31 percent. ② In 2026, more than half of teenagers slept less than 7 hours a night. ③ The difference between the two years was the greatest in the "6 to less than 7 hours" group. ④ The share of teenagers who slept 8 to less than 9 hours fell from 21 percent in 2016 to 12 percent in 2026. ⑤ In both years, the "9 hours or more" group was the smallest, and its share in 2026 was 3 percentage points lower than in 2016.

Alice Ball, a chemist whose work changed the treatment of leprosy, was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1892. Her grandfather was a well-known photographer, and her father worked as a newspaper editor, photographer, and lawyer. At the University of Washington, she earned bachelor's degrees in both pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacy, and while still a student she co-authored a paper that appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. She then moved to Hawaii, where she became the first woman and the first African American to receive a master's degree from the College of Hawaii. Asked by Dr. Harry Hollmann to improve chaulmoogra oil, a traditional remedy that was hard to use, she developed a technique that turned the oil into a form that could be injected. She died in 1916 before she could publish her results, and Arthur Dean, her former advisor, continued the work without giving her proper credit. In 1922, however, Hollmann published a paper calling the technique the "Ball method," and in 2000 the University of Hawaii officially honored her achievement.

Riverside Clean-Up Kayak Day

Help us bring the Tolliver River back to life—one paddle stroke at a time!

• Date & Time: Saturday, May 15, 2027, 9 a.m. – 1 p.m.
• Meeting Point: Gorsedge Boat Launch (east parking lot)
• Who Can Join: Anyone aged 12 or older (participants under 16 must be accompanied by an adult)

Schedule

• 9:00 – 9:30: Safety briefing and basic paddling lesson
• 9:30 – 12:00: Collecting litter from the river by kayak
• 12:00 – 1:00: Sorting the collected waste, followed by a free picnic lunch

Fee: $10 per person (kayak, paddle, and life jacket provided)

Registration: Online only, by May 10 (limited to 40 participants)

Notes

• No previous kayaking experience is required.
• Please bring a change of clothes and a water bottle.
• If the river is too high after heavy rain, the event will be moved to Saturday, May 22.

Teen Radio Drama Workshop

Discover how stories come alive through sound alone!

• When: Every Saturday in July 2027 (July 3 – 31), 2 p.m. – 5 p.m.
• Where: Haverleigh Community Media Center, Studio 2
• Who: Students aged 14 to 18 (maximum of 12 participants)

What You Will Do

• Weeks 1 – 2: Writing a short script for the ear
• Weeks 3 – 4: Voice acting and creating sound effects with everyday objects
• Week 5: Recording your drama in a professional studio

Fee: $45 (all materials included; snacks are not provided)

How to Apply: Upload a one-minute recording of yourself reading any short passage to the center's website by June 20.

Notes

• No previous acting experience is necessary.
• The finished dramas will be aired on a local community radio station in August.

As Galileo recognized, size cannot be altered freely while everything else stays the same. If an animal were simply enlarged in every direction, the strength of its bones, ① which depends on their cross-sectional area, would increase only as the square of its length, whereas the weight they have to support would increase as the cube. A giant built on the proportions of an ordinary man would thus collapse under its own bulk unless its limbs ② were made disproportionately thick, as the legs of an elephant indeed are. The same reasoning applies, in reverse, to the very small. For an insect, forces acting on the surface of the body—air resistance, the pull of a film of water—matter far more than gravity ③ does. The ratio of surface to weight, which rises steadily as a body shrinks to the size of insects, ④ make a fall that would badly injure a large animal harmless to a beetle. Form, in short, is never independent of magnitude: an organism's shape is in large part a solution to the problems ⑤ that its particular size poses.

Doubt and belief differ not merely in how they feel but in what they do to us. A belief is a settled habit that guides our conduct, whereas doubt is an uneasy state from which we struggle to free ourselves. Because inquiry is set in motion by this irritation, what it seeks, at least in the first instance, is simply ① accuracy. This explains the lasting appeal of what might be called the method of tenacity. By steadily ② avoiding whatever might unsettle a cherished opinion, a person can enjoy a peace of mind that is entirely indifferent to whether the opinion happens to be correct. The method fails not because it is illogical but because it is ③ unsustainable in practice. Living among others, we cannot help discovering that equally sensible people hold contrary views, and this discovery ④ weakens our confidence. Only a method that lets our beliefs be fixed by real things, ⑤ independent of what anyone thinks about them, can produce an agreement that survives the encounter with other minds.

Every attempt to steer a new technology runs into a peculiar mismatch of timing. In its early years, a technology is still flexible: few people depend on it, its standards have not hardened, and redesigning it would cost relatively little. But this is also the period in which its social consequences are hardest to anticipate, since those consequences emerge only as millions of users adopt it in ways no designer foresaw. By the time the harms and benefits have become visible enough to justify intervention, the technology has been woven into markets, habits, and other technologies that presuppose its existence, and altering it has become slow and costly. The regulator's predicament, then, lies less in a shortage of will or authority than in the fact that . Some analysts therefore conclude that the realistic goal is not to predict effects correctly in advance but to keep technologies correctable—favoring designs that can be monitored, adjusted, and, if necessary, reversed as evidence accumulates.

No historian, however diligent, can set down everything that happened. To be perfectly and absolutely true, a history would have to record every trivial particular of every trivial transaction, and such a record could be neither written nor read. History, like portrait painting, therefore lives by omission, and the real question is not whether a historian leaves things out but what he chooses to leave out. Two painters may each produce a likeness that contains no false line, yet one portrait may capture the sitter while the other, by enlarging a minor feature and shrinking a decisive one, conveys an impression that is wholly mistaken. The same holds for narratives of the past: a writer who lacks the art of selection may, while stating nothing but facts, produce the effect of a gross falsehood, simply by placing in the foreground what belongs in the background. The fidelity of a history, then, is measured less by the accuracy of its individual statements than by .

A procedure for allocating scarce places—seats in sought-after schools, for instance—is usually judged by its outcomes, above all by how many applicants receive the option they ranked highest. This yardstick, however, quietly takes for granted the very thing it ought to be testing—that the preferences it records are the ones people actually hold—and whether they are depends on the procedure being judged. Under the mechanism Boston voted to abandon in 2005, each school first admitted those who had ranked it first, so a family that aimed high and failed often found its second choice already filled. Well-informed parents responded by placing a safer school at the top, and the reported share of first choices granted remained high even as it ceased to describe what anyone wanted. The deferred acceptance procedure adopted in its place keeps every assignment tentative until the end, so that ranking a school highly can never cost an applicant a place elsewhere. What distinguishes a well-designed mechanism, then, is less the satisfaction figures it reports than its capacity for , without which those figures cannot be trusted.

A painter or sculptor, unlike a poet, can show only a single instant of an action, and from a single point of view. It might seem to follow that the artist should seize the instant of greatest intensity—the scream or the final agony—since that is where the meaning of the event is most concentrated. Lessing argued the opposite. Because the chosen instant is fixed forever and will be looked at again and again, its worth depends on how much it permits the beholder to add to it. Once the climax is shown, the eye has nowhere further to go, and the imagination, unable to rise above what it sees, can only sink to weaker images. Seen in this light, the sculptors of the Laocoön were wise to let the priest sigh rather than cry out, for in the sigh we hear the cry, whereas to a cry nothing could be added. In an art confined to one moment, the most expressive instant is therefore not the one that displays the most but the one that .

Students preparing for an exam overwhelmingly prefer rereading their notes to testing themselves, and the preference is understandable: each pass through familiar material feels smoother than the last. ① That smoothness, however, measures how easily a text can be recognized while it lies open before us, not how readily its content can be recalled once it is gone. ② In one well-known study, students who repeatedly restudied a passage did better on a test five minutes later, but those who had practiced recalling it retained far more after a week. ③ Strikingly, the restudying group was more confident about its memory, which suggests that the very fluency that comforts learners also misleads them about what they have learned. ④ Because rereading demands little effort, students can review a whole textbook in one evening, leaving more time to rest before the exam. ⑤ The effortful act of retrieval does not merely reveal what is stored in memory but strengthens the routes by which it can be found again. A feeling of mastery, in short, is a poor guide to the methods that actually produce it.

Thorstein Veblen identified two broad ways of putting wealth in evidence before others: the visible abstention from useful work and the visible consumption of costly goods. ( ① ) For much of history the first served admirably, since in a village a man's habits were known to all his neighbors, who could testify that he never needed to labor. ( ② ) Leisure, in such a setting, advertised itself through the talk of people who had watched one another's lives for years. ( ③ ) Such observers have no way of judging a person's standing except by the goods he displays as he passes before them, and leisure, which leaves no visible trace on the street, counts for little in their eyes. ( ④ ) Consumption has accordingly gained ground on leisure as the chief instrument of reputation. ( ⑤ ) It is no accident, Veblen observed, that city dwellers devote a larger share of their income to display than country people do, even when this forces them to live closer to the edge of their means.

It seems natural to read a trait's origin from its present use: wings are for flying, so feathers, which make flight possible, must have evolved for flight. ( ① ) Such reasoning has served biologists well, for in countless cases the fit between a structure and its task is too exact to be the work of chance. ( ② ) Fossils of feathered dinosaurs that could never have flown show that feathers were present—most likely for insulation or display—before the first birds took to the air. ( ③ ) Flight, in other words, did not create feathers; it recruited structures that already existed for other reasons. ( ④ ) Biologists call such a shift in function an exaptation, and they set aside the older term "preadaptation" precisely because it implied that evolution prepares structures for roles they will play in the future. ( ⑤ ) The same pattern appears elsewhere: two of the tiny bones that carry sound in the mammalian ear were once part of the jaw. To ask what a trait does now and to ask why it first arose are, in short, two different questions.

We tend to assume that the past is known and the future unknowable, as though memory and prophecy were the only ways of reaching beyond the present. Yet much of what we confidently call the past was never witnessed by anyone. The vast ages that preceded human records were pieced together from odd-shaped stones and the bands in quarry walls—present traces treated as effects and followed back to their causes. In 1902 H. G. Wells argued that nothing in principle prevents the same habit of inquiry from being turned forward. He did not claim that we could foresee what any particular person would do; the individual future, he conceded, must remain the darkest region of all. A heap of sand illustrates his point: no one can predict where a single grain will come to rest, yet the shape of the whole heap is easily foretold. Knowledge of the future, in the same way, may be general though never individual, built up by reasoning rather than revealed.

We usually picture a word as a label attached to a thing or idea that exists independently of it, as though a language were a set of name tags for a world already sorted into categories. On this view, learning a foreign language would mean nothing more than exchanging one set of tags for another. The difficulty is that languages rarely divide experience at the same joints. English separates sheep from mutton, the animal from its meat, while French covers both with the single word mouton; the French word therefore does not (a) correspond exactly to either English one. Its meaning is not a substance it carries but a territory it occupies, and the borders of that territory are drawn by its neighbors.

Ferdinand de Saussure expressed this by saying that in language there are only differences. A term's value lies less in what it positively contains than in what it (b) excludes: it means what it means because the other terms of the system mean something else. One consequence of this is easily overlooked. When a new word enters a language, it does not simply add an item to an inventory; it (c) redraws the boundaries of the words around it, which must now share a territory they once held alone. Likewise, when a word falls out of use, its neighbors (d) expand to fill the space it has left behind. A dictionary, which lists each entry with its own definition, thus offers a (e) faithful picture of how meaning works. To know a word fully is to know the whole set of alternatives against which it is chosen.