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What is a “barndominium”? Anything you want it to be.

Posted in Economy, Property Taxes, Real Estate, The New York Times, Topics Of Interest on January 12, 2025| Leave a Comment »

After Stacee Lynn Bell’s children left for college, she and her husband found 14 acres “in the middle of nowhere” on which to build their dream barndominium. Her home, and those that she designs, focus on the connection between outdoor and indoor space. | Credit Arturo Olmos for The New York Times

By Colette Coleman | The New York Times

In the 1980s, the “barndominium” was designed with the horse owner in mind. A Connecticut developer came up with the name — a mash-up of “barn” and “condominium” — to refer to a lot and horse stall purchased together, in a subdivision where owners had a stake in a shared equestrian center.

The barndominiums of today don’t necessarily hold horses, though they’re certainly big enough. They do still promise open space, both inside and out.

Interpretations vary, but many in the housing industry define today’s barndominiums — barndos, for short — as large metal structures with high ceilings, open-plan layouts, and garages or workshop areas. “The goal would be as much square footage as you can fit on the site,” said Andy Wiker, a pre-construction project manager at Conestoga Buildings, which builds barndos throughout the Northeast. “People want to play basketball in their living room.”

The style has become so popular that barndos were featured for the first time earlier this year in a national survey of single-family home builders, in which 7 percent of the builders said they had constructed at least one in the past year.

Ms. Bell, who goes by the trademarked name, “The Barndominium Lady,” is part of a growing number of Americans choosing space over cities. | Credit Arturo Olmos for The New York Times

The pandemic drove the recent building surge. Emily Stamper, a loan officer in Kentucky with the lender Rural 1st, said that she first saw demand for barndominiums take off in 2020, when lumber was in short supply, but metal was more readily available.

And according to Stacee Lynn Bell, 60, the self-styled Barndominium Lady, more people wanted bigger homes, more distant neighbors, land to raise chickens and grow vegetables, and an environment “not as hustle-bustle.” Since 2020, Ms. Bell and her 19-person team at the Barndominium Company have designed over 1,000 bespoke barndo plans in 41 states, and she recently hired two more designers to keep up with the craze.

Ms. Bell herself lives in a barndo, about an hour north of Houston near Sam Houston National Forest.

Census data confirms a more widespread preference for country life. According to an analysis by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia, “migration out of counties with more than one million residents in 2023 remained nearly twice as high as before the pandemic, while migration into the country’s smallest metro areas and rural counties rose in 2023 from already near record levels in 2022.”

One major draw of the style is customizability. The garages — generally big enough to house tractors, ATVs, hunting and fishing gear, and cleaning stations for catches — suit a rural lifestyle, Ms. Bell said. As Ms. Stamper put it, barndominiums “give people a blank canvas to do what they want.”

The Cost of Barn-Sizing

The price is right, too — as long as you’re willing to do some of the construction yourself.

In September 2023, Simona Carr, 43, moved from Marion, Ohio, to Golden Valley, Ariz., where she and her husband had bought 10 acres for $26,000 sight unseen. The area outside Kingman, Ariz., with mostly dirt roads, is like something out of an old western movie, she said, with her closest neighbor about a mile away.

When Simona Carr proposed to her husband that they purchase 10 acres of land in rural Arizona, sight-unseen, his initial reaction was, “Honey, you’re crazy.” Eager to get out of their urban area, they made the leap. | Credit John Burcham for The New York Times

A beginner prepper, Mrs. Carr had been eager to flee the city, she said, “just to be prepared for what might take place in the future.”

For $51,000 a company built the metal exterior structure for her future 3,000-square-foot home. “I could get the big house that I wanted for such a small price,” she said. Once the home is done, Mrs. Carr estimates (optimistically) that the total cost will be $210,000.

Read more here.

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The largest immigration surge in U.S. history

Posted in Economy, Politics, Pritzker’s Rules of Order, Property Taxes, Taxes, The New York Times, Topics Of Interest on December 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »

In El Paso in 2022. | Paul Ratje for The New York Times

By David Leonhardt | The New York Times

My colleagues and I worked with government officials and outside experts in recent weeks to analyze the magnitude of the recent immigration surge in the United States. We published the results of that analysis this morning.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll give you seven highlights, with help from charts by Albert Sun, a graphics editor at The Times.

1. The immigration surge since 2021 has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing even the levels of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Total net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — will likely exceed eight million people over the past four years, government statistics suggest. That number includes both legal and illegal immigration.

Never before has annual net migration been close to two million for an extended period, according to data from the Census Bureau and the Congressional Budget Office.

2. Even after adjusting for today’s larger population, the surge is slightly larger than that during the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. This chart tells that story:

3. The share of the U.S. population born in another country has reached a record high as a result. That share hit 15.2 percent in the summer of 2023 (and continued rising over the past 18 months). The previous high of 14.8 percent occurred in 1890, and the share remained high for decades afterward.

It began to decline after the passage of a tough immigration law in 1924. That restrictive era lasted until 1965, when a new law expanded immigration. (On a recent episode of “The Daily,” Michael Barbaro and I told the story of that 1965 law and its unintended consequences.)

4. President Biden’s welcoming immigration policy has been the main reason for the recent surge. During his 2020 campaign, Biden encouraged more people to come to the U.S., and he loosened several policies after taking office.

Biden administration officials sometimes argue that outside events, such as the turmoil in Haiti, Ukraine and Venezuela, have been the main cause of the surge, and those events did play a role. But the sharp decline of migration levels since this past summer — when Biden tightened the rules — indicates that the administration’s policies were the biggest factor:

5. More than half of net migration since 2021 has been among people who entered the country illegally. Of the roughly eight million net migrants who came to the U.S. over the past four years, about five million — or 62 percent — were unauthorized, according to an estimate by Goldman Sachs.

6. The unprecedented scale of recent immigration helps explain why the issue played such a big role in the 2024 election. Polls showed that the sharp rise in immigration was unpopular with most Americans, especially among working-class voters, some of whom complained of strained social services, crowded schools and increased homelessness.

The issue appears to have been Kamala Harris’s second biggest vulnerability, after only the economy. Donald Trump made striking gains near the border in Texas, winning six counties along the Rio Grande that he lost badly only eight years ago. And Democrats who outpaced Harris and won tough congressional races — in Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, New York and elsewhere — often criticized Biden’s immigration policies.

7. The recent immigration surge has probably ended. Trump has promised to impose even tougher border rules next year than Biden recently imposed. Trump also campaigned on a plan to deport millions of immigrants who entered the country illegally.

It remains unclear how far Trump will go and whether his plan will remain popular once he begins to implement it. Either way, the pace at which immigrants enter the U.S. has already fallen significantly from the peak levels of 2022 and 2023 and may continue to fall after Trump takes office. Historically, in both the U.S. and other countries, very high levels of immigration often cause a political backlash that leads to new restrictions.

Our full story includes more details, including an explanation of why experts believe recent census numbers underestimate the size of the immigration surge.

Source

Related: “Chicago to be ground zero for mass deportations, Trump border czar tells Illinois Republicans”

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Happy Thanksgiving: Gobbling and squabbling

Posted in OP/Ed, The New York Times on November 28, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Harold Lambert/Getty Images

By Ian Prasad Philbrick | The New York Times

Things have gotten so bad, we are told, that the Thanksgiving table is now a battlefield. Advice columnists, psychologists, therapists, podcasters and philosophers counsel us how to avoid or defuse arguments about politics.

But sparring at (or about) Thanksgiving isn’t new. It is, in fact, a very old tradition — no less American than pumpkin pie. Debates were on the menu even before Congress formally declared the federal holiday in 1941.

Here, from The Times’s archive, is a sample of what we’ve been arguing about.

The New York Times

1. Thanksgiving itself. In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt moved up the traditional Thanksgiving Day by a week to stimulate holiday shopping and boost the economy. The move prompted a national debate. Retailers were pleased and plenty of Americans didn’t seem to mind. But traditionalists gnashed their teeth. “We here in Plymouth consider the day sacred,” said a local official in the birthplace of the Thanksgiving dinner.

“Who,” asked a letter to the editor published by The Times, “wants a turkey one week thinner?” Some governors proclaimed separate Thanksgivings on the original day, inviting chaos that lasted until, in 1941, Congress standardized the date for the whole country. (Roosevelt, folding, signed the change into law.)

Even some who stood to benefit from Roosevelt’s move mocked it. In early November, a shopkeeper in Kokomo, Ind., put a sign in his store window that read: “Do your shopping now. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas.”

The New York Times

2. American iconography. A Times editorial in 1987 dinged Benjamin Franklin for (apocryphally) proposing the turkey to be the fledgling country’s national symbol. “Who would thrill to a turkey clutching the arrows of war in its right talon and the olive branch of peace in its left?” The Times wrote. “The banners of the Caesars, Charlemagne and Napoleon were emblazoned with eagles.”

Soon, a reader shot back: “That the eagle was the symbol of these mischief makers was precisely why Franklin objected to it.”

3. The Middle East. A Thanksgiving debate may be indirectly responsible for the existence of Israel. Ahead of the 1947 holiday, the United Nations was debating a plan to divide Palestine, a British-administered territory, into two sovereign states — one for Jews, one for Palestinian Arabs. The proposal seemed likely to fail. Arab and Muslim-majority countries opposed it, and much of Europe and Latin America was ambivalent.

But when the U.N.’s American hosts called a Thanksgiving recess, advocates for Israel began a furious lobbying campaign. They won over Haiti, the Philippines, Liberia and France, and the partition plan passed on Saturday. “On what remote, and often irrelevant, factors historical decisions may sometimes depend,” one negotiator later marveled about the holiday’s role. (Ultimately, Arab states rejected partition, and Palestinian statehood is still debated today.)

The New York Times

4. Gender equality. In 1973, Joyce Slayton Mitchell, a 40-year-old woman from Vermont who worked for the National Organization for Women, urged women to share the burden of prepping Thanksgiving dinner with their families. One year, Mitchell let her daughter carve a turkey cooked by her husband. Her father was having none of it. “He had a fit,” she said. As The Times put it: “Poor grandfather. Instead of a proper New England Thanksgiving, he got his fill of feminism.”

5. Vietnam. In 1965, a youth group in Rye, N.Y., invited high school students to spend the holiday debating sex, underage drinking and the Vietnam War. One boy burned a symbolic draft card, and a blond girl with braces said, “I guess if you really believe the war’s wrong, maybe it’s O.K. to burn it.”

Another boy retorted: “I’d rather be dead and buried than to be that selfish. The draft-card burners ought to be thrown in jail.”

The New York Times

6. Food. The pages of The Times have filled over the years with debate-inducing pieces about whether the food even matters, what should be served, which foods are healthy, which wines to pair and how to speed up the cooking of a turkey.

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A top university bet on D.E.I. What went wrong?

Posted in 220, 300, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Elgin Community College, Harper College, OP/Ed, Politics, School Districts, The New York Times, Unions on October 16, 2024| 1 Comment »

Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan and Danielle Del Plato

By Nicholas Confessore | The New York Times

Diversity, equity and inclusion programs are under attack. A dozen states have passed new laws restricting D.E.I. in public universities. Conservatives argue that the decades-long drive to increase racial diversity in America’s universities has corrupted higher education.

After covering some of these debates for The Times, I decided that I needed to see D.E.I. programs up close. So earlier this year, I began visiting the University of Michigan, one of the country’s most prestigious public universities.

Michigan voters had banned affirmative action in 2006, leading to a plunge in minority enrollment, particularly Black students. So the university built one of the most ambitious D.E.I. programs in higher education. It hoped to attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty. Since 2016, I learned, the university has spent roughly a quarter of a billion dollars on the effort. Each of Michigan’s 51 schools, colleges, libraries and other units has its own D.E.I. plan; many have their own D.E.I. offices. By one count, the school has more D.E.I. staff members than any other large public university in the country.

The program has yielded wins — a greater proportion of Hispanic and Asian undergraduates and a more racially diverse staff. It has also struggled to achieve some central goals. The proportion of Black undergraduates, now around 5 percent, has barely changed in a decade.

Most strikingly, the university’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, Michigan has become less inclusive. In a 2022 survey, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Minority students — particularly those who are Black — were also less likely to report “feelings of being valued, belonging, personal growth and thriving.” Across the board, students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or with different politics.

These are the precise areas of engagement that D.E.I. programs have promised to improve. I wrote a story in The New York Times Magazine today about why the effort is coming up short.

Campus paranoia

At the University of Michigan. | Nic Antaya for The New York Times

One reason I wanted to report at the University of Michigan was to better understand campus conflicts around identity and speech. Last year, the school received more than twice as many formal complaints of sex or gender discrimination than it did in 2015. During roughly the same period, complaints involving race, religion or national origin have increased from a few dozen to almost 400.

Some of that change reflects a growing willingness to challenge ugly behavior that might once have been tolerated. But people at Michigan also argued to me that the school’s D.E.I. efforts had fostered a culture of grievance. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding administrative intervention.

At the law school, some students demanded that a professor be fired for referring to two students — who were both named Xu and sat next to each other in class — as “left Xu” and “right Xu.” Another class was derailed when the professor asked a white student to read aloud from a 1950s court decision containing the word “Negro.”

As at other colleges and universities nationwide, faculty and students told me, everything escalated in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. One professor, Eric Fretz, was pulled into a Title IX hearing because he invited his class to let him know when he wasn’t being sensitive enough to gender stereotypes. (A student complained that Fretz was forcing his female students to educate their own professor on how not to be sexist.)

What is D.E.I. really for?

Michigan’s recent past may be a glimpse of D.E.I.’s future. The school’s program was built to accomplish what affirmative action, forbidden in the state, could not. Last year, the Supreme Court copied Michigan and barred schools nationwide from using racial preferences in admissions, making administrators likely to reach for D.E.I. solutions.

What went wrong at Michigan? One answer is that programs like Michigan’s are confused about whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. The earliest versions were aimed at integrating Black students who began arriving on college campuses in larger numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. But in subsequent decades, as the Supreme Court whittled down the permissible scope of affirmative action programs, what began as a tool for racial justice turned into a program of educational enrichment: A core principle of D.E.I. now is that all students learn better in diverse environs.

That leaves D.E.I. programs less focused on the people they were originally conceived to help — and conflicted about what they are really trying to achieve. Schools like Michigan pay lip service to religious or political diversity, for example, but may do little to advance those goals. Along the way, they make ambitious commitments to racial diversity that prove difficult to achieve. As a result, many Black students at Michigan have grown cynical about the school’s promises and feel that D.E.I. has forgotten them. They are, a leader in the university’s Black Student Union told me, “invested in the work, but not in D.E.I. itself.”

I encourage you to read the in-depth story of what went wrong.

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Miranda Devine and The Big Guy

Posted in Chicago Tribune, Deception, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Elections, Ethics, John Kass, New York Post, News Media, OP/Ed, Perjury, Politics, Pritzker’s Rules of Order, The New York Times on October 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

By John Kass

I want you to get yourself a book. It is an important, special book written for those of you who love your country, pay your taxes and play by the rules. It has a great title, written by a fearless reporter, Miranda Devine of the New York Post:

“The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America”

It’s all about the cover-up, backed up by hard facts and on-the-record testimony about the liars who abused you, me, our nation, all of us. It has been written cleanly, clearly. So if you care about America, you’ll rush and order this great book now.

And while you’re ordering, how about I tell you a story?

A few years ago after she came out with her first book on Joe Biden’s oily corruption, “Laptop From Hell” (another great read) I was at “the paper.” And sometimes I’d hear the wailing and sighs of agony when I’d tell my editors I planned on writing a column in support of Miranda Devine of The New York Post.

You ever take children to the dentist for a tooth-pull? It sounded like that.

Their sighs, tiny screams and complaints meant I was over the target. No doubt journalistic curiosity had been squeezed out of them by the Shameless 51, the liars of the so-called “Intelligence Community” who’d been wrangled to protect the corrupt China Joe Biden and elect him president over the objections of people with common sense.

The best editors, the most respected, such as John McCormick and Bruce Dold were already gone. And my dear friend Kristen McQueary was either gone or on the way out the door. She, like Devine was a tough reporter who deserved more than she received from the Trib. One thing she’d never do–she’d never whine about a good column coming her way, one that readers would read because it had all the elements of a good story: The use of raw political power and money and sex.

But this new breed of woke editors terrified of angering the rabid left wing (I took to thinking of them as news suppressors) weren’t enthused by Miranda Devine’s great stories.

The once-great paper was repeating a pattern of self-destruction becoming woke, before it went broke.

I was about to go, too, but I didn’t know it yet then.

Miranda Devine was and is the lead columnist at the New York Post, a tabloid that understood a good story. She loves tabloids. She’s unpretentious and curious. She’s a tough, seasoned pro who came from a newspaper family. I knew of her father, the late Frank Devine when he was editor of the Chicago Sun Times.

Read more here.

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Smartphones in schools

Posted in 220, 300, Education, OP/Ed, Politics, School Districts, The New York Times, Topics Of Interest on September 7, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Confiscated phones in Orlando, Fla. | Zack Wittman for The New York Times

By David Leonhardt | The New York Times

A turning point?

Several times a year, I visit a high school or a college to talk with students about how I do my job and how they see the world. On a typical visit, I spend a few minutes in the back of the classroom while the teacher is conducting another part of that day’s lesson. These experiences have shown me what a dominant — and distracting — role smartphones and laptops play in today’s schools.

From my perch behind the students, I can see how many of them are scrolling through sports coverage, retail websites, text messages or social media, looking up occasionally to feign attention. It’s not everyone, of course. Some students remain engaged in the class. But many do not.

I would have been in the latter group if smartphones had existed decades ago; like many journalists, I do not have a naturally stellar attention span. And I’m grateful that I didn’t have ubiquitous digital temptations. I learned much more — including how to build my attention span — than I otherwise would have.

Above all, my recent classroom experiences have given me empathy for teachers. They are supposed to educate children, many of whom have still not caught up from Covid learning loss, while in a battle for attention with fantastically entertaining computers. A growing body of academic research suggests it isn’t going well.

Twister and pickleball

In Orlando. | Zack Wittman for The New York Times

But school officials and policymakers have begun to fight back. It’s probably the most significant development of the 2024-25 school year.

At least eight states, including California, Indiana and Louisiana, have restricted phone use or taken steps toward doing so. They are following the lead of Florida, which last year banned phones in K-12 classrooms. Other states, including Arizona and New York, may act soon. (My colleague Natasha Singer, who’s been covering this story, discussed these policies on an episode of “The Daily.”)

At the schools that have restricted phones, many people say they already see benefits. In a Florida school district that Natasha visited — and that went even further than the state law requires, banning phones all day — students now have more conversations at lunch and play games like Twister and pickleball. Before, children mostly looked at their phones, one principal said.

Of course, there are still some hard questions about these policies, including:

  • How do schools enforce the rules? And what is an appropriate punishment for breaking them?
  • Should schools ban phone use only during class time or for the entire school day? To put it another way, is a more social lunchtime worth the downside that parents can’t easily reach their children?
  • How can teachers incorporate technology into lessons, as the new laws generally allow, without undermining the policies’ benefits?

A mixed blessing

Even with these difficult questions, the new policies may represent the start of a broader shift. For much of the smartphone era — which began with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 — Americans treated the rapid spread of digital technology as inevitable and positive.

Now people view it as more mixed. “Smartphones have brought us a lot of benefits,” Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, told me yesterday. “But the harms are also considerable.”

Children’s mental health has deteriorated during the same years that smartphone use has grown. Loneliness has increased, and sleep hours have decreased. In surveys, both teenagers and adults express deep anxiety about their own phone use. By many measures, American society has become angrier, more polarized and less healthy during the same period that smartphones have revolutionized daily life.

Social scientists continue to debate precise cause and effect, but many policymakers, Democrats and Republicans alike, argue that the country can’t wait to act. Murthy agrees. “There’s an urgency to this,” he said. “What we need now is a great recalibration of our relationship with technology.” As encouraging examples, he cited schools’ new phone policies and the student-led Log Off movement.

If the country ultimately looked back on unfettered smartphone use as a mistake, it wouldn’t be the first time that a public health campaign took years to have an impact.

Russell Shaw, the head of Georgetown Day School, an elite private school in Washington, D.C., recently wrote an article for The Atlantic explaining why he was banning cellphones in all grades. Shaw described the ways that constant phone use had harmed social life and learning during his 14 years at the school. Yet he began the article with a historical anecdote on a different subject: When his parents attended high school in the 1960s, they received free samples of cigarettes on their cafeteria trays.

“I believe that future generations will look back with the same incredulity at our acceptance of phones in schools,” Shaw wrote.

Source

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The school tech problem

Posted in Politics, School Districts, The New York Times, TMI, Topics Of Interest on August 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »

At a high school in Orlando, Fla. | Zack Wittman for The New York Times

By Natasha Singer | The New York Times

As the new school year begins, school districts across the United States are cracking down on cellphones in classrooms. Teachers are tired of constantly pressing students to stop watching TikTok and messaging friends during class. In many schools, students have also used phones to threaten or bully their classmates.

As a result, as I note in a story today, at least eight states, including Indiana and Pennsylvania, have adopted measures this year to limit cellphones in schools.

But the phone crackdowns illustrate a larger issue. Technology rules and safeguards in schools often lag far behind student use and abuse of digital tools.

And it’s not just phones — school-issued laptops, tablets and classroom apps can also become sources of distraction and bullying. In today’s newsletter, I’ll highlight some of the tech challenges schools are facing.

Student cellphone bans

Schools have been trying to limit student phone use for decades. Maryland banned students from bringing pagers and “cellular telephones” to school in the late 1980s as illegal drug sales boomed. In the 1990s, as mobile phones gained traction, some schools barred the devices to stop the chirping from disrupting class.

Since the 2000s, though, it’s also gone the other way. As school shootings became more common, many districts began allowing mobile phones as a safety measure. And, after the rise of iPhones, some schools that had barred cellphones reversed the bans in part because some lower-income students who did not own laptops used them for schoolwork.

Now, phone bans are trending again, partly in response to public concerns over youth mental health and social media use. This year, Indiana, Louisiana and South Carolina passed laws that bar student cellphone use either during class or the entire school day. Some governors have been bullish, promising “cellphone-free” learning and decreased classroom screen time.

The bans are hardly school tech panaceas. But they can have positive effects. Some schools have reported increased student engagement and fewer incidents of phone-related fights and bullying. But there are mixed reports on whether the bans actually improve students’ academic outcomes.

A.I. abuse

The problem facing schools, though, is that technology often moves faster than policy. As districts were still wrestling with cellphones, a new threat arose: artificial intelligence. In early 2023, some prominent districts rushed to block A.I.-powered chatbots on school-issued student laptops and school Wi-Fi. Administrators feared that chatbots like ChatGPT, which can generate human-sounding book reports and other texts, could enable mass cheating.

So many schools were caught off guard last fall when male students began using other A.I. tools for a darker purpose: to create fake sexually explicit images of their female classmates. In one New Jersey high school, administrators announced over the school intercom the names of girls who had been subjected to the faked images. In a Seattle-area high school, boys shared A.I.-generated nude images of ninth-grade girls in the lunchroom. But the school did not report the incident to the authorities until a police detective, who heard about it from the girls’ parents, informed administrators they were required to do so.

A.I. cheating fears have since abated, as districts start to train both educators and students how to use chatbots as tools for teaching and learning. But so far, few schools have developed specific policies or rules around A.I. image abuse.

In Orlando, Fla. | Zack Wittman for The New York Times

Distracting classroom tech

Remote learning during the pandemic made school-issued laptops, along with school messaging and learning apps, far more common. But even apps intended to help students research topics, write essays and collaborate with peers can lead to distractions and enable bullying.

Teachers say students regularly use school-issued devices like iPads to surreptitiously take photos of their classmates, and then use the images to spread mean memes through school communication tools like Microsoft Teams. (Microsoft said schools could use controls in Teams to monitor or block student chats.) Students are also often able to bypass school internet filters and spend class time playing games or watching YouTube videos.

In many schools, students spend much of the day glued to these laptops or tablets, meaning phone bans may not ultimately reduce overall classroom screen time.

To remedy the school tech problem, critics say, lawmakers must push social media platforms, A.I. start-ups and other technology developers to install the digital equivalent of speed limits, seatbelts and airbags. Districts, they say, must also do a better job of educating teachers and students on tech harms and responsible technology use.

Essentially, some say, we should follow the model of another program that has for many decades taught young people how to handle powerful machines without harming themselves or others: It’s called drivers’ ed.

Tell your story: I’d love to hear from educators, students and parents about your experiences with school tech. If you’re interested, you can share them with me here.

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Harris takes control

Posted in Commodius Maximus, Elections, Goat Rodeo, OP/Ed, Politics, The New York Times on July 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Vice President Kamala Harris

By David Leonhardt | The New York Times

What next?

With President Biden having dropped out of the race, I’m devoting today’s newsletter to four big questions about what happens next. My colleagues and I will also give you the latest news about the campaign.

Four questions

1. Is the Democratic nomination race already over?

It may be. Vice President Kamala Harris appears to be in a commanding position.

Some top Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, favor a competition to choose a new nominee. And an open process would have some big advantages. It would test whether Harris was a stronger politician than she had been during her failed 2020 campaign. If she won the competition, she would emerge from it looking like a winner who was more than Biden’s No. 2.

But a competition obviously requires more than one competitor, and Harris was the only top-tier Democrat to declare herself a presidential candidate yesterday. Many other Democrats endorsed her in the hours after Biden’s withdrawal.

Her list of backers include both progressives and moderates in Congress, as well as Biden, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and two governors who had been considered potential presidential candidates themselves: Gavin Newsom of California and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. The party’s nominating delegates from three states — North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee — unanimously voted yesterday to endorse Harris.

Overall, the hours after Biden’s exit went about as well as Harris could have hoped.

2. What will the Harris-Trump polls say now that they’re not hypothetical?

Polling experts frequently caution against trusting hypothetical survey results. People don’t always know how they will respond to a scenario that hasn’t yet happened, such as a sitting president’s departure from a campaign.

That said, the recent hypothetical polls about a race between Harris and Donald Trump have suggested he leads her, although more narrowly than he led Biden. A CBS News poll conducted this month, for example, showed that Trump had support from 51 percent of likely voters, compared with 48 percent for Harris.

As new polls emerge in coming days, it will be worth watching whether a Harris-Trump race effectively starts as a tossup — or something else.

3. How will Trump campaign against her?

For starters, Trump will emphasize the same unpopular parts of Biden’s performance that were already the central message of Trump’s campaign, including inflation and immigration. Given that Harris helped oversee Biden’s immigration policy, that subject will continue to play a central role.

But there are some uncertainties about how Trump and his aides will campaign against a Harris-led ticket. Among the questions: Will Republicans emphasize the candidates’ obviously different racial and gender profiles, much as Trump used gender-based messages against Hillary Clinton in 2016? Or will Trump tread more carefully now that he hopes to win a meaningful share of Asian, Black and Latino voters?

It does seem likely that Trump will emphasize some of Harris’s most liberal past positions, including her support in 2020 for Medicare for All, a policy that would effectively eliminate private health insurance.

4. How will Harris campaign differently from Biden?

Harris has one huge advantage over Biden: She isn’t 81 years old. She is an energetic campaigner, with a strong history as a debater.

She has some other advantages, too. Harris is more comfortable criticizing the Republican Party’s unpopular position on abortion than Biden has been. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, points out that recent polling data suggests she is also better positioned than Biden to hold onto support from some groups that have historically supported Democrats but soured on Biden, such as younger voters and voters of color.

At the same time, Harris is starting with some disadvantages relative to Biden, Obama and other recent nominees. Nate notes that the same polling data suggests Harris is weaker than Biden among voters over 65 and white voters without a college degree.

Above all, Harris has little track record of winning the type of swing voters who decide presidential elections. She comes from California, a liberal bastion. In her only Senate campaign, which she won, no Republican even qualified for the general election. Harris beat another Democrat.

If she is the nominee, I think the biggest question is: How she will appeal to swing voters in states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin?

Many of these voters are working-class Americans dissatisfied with the country’s direction. Many do not follow politics obsessively. Most are less liberal on social issues than prominent Democratic politicians, including Harris. Many have been attracted to feisty populist and patriotic messages, from both Trump and from Democratic Senate candidates. (Harris is likely to choose a running mate with a stronger history of winning swing voters.)

Harris will no doubt devote much of her campaign to an anti-Trump message. But a message organized almost entirely around Trump seems less likely to succeed than one that also focuses on her vision of the future — including how it differs from Biden’s vision and why even voters who are often skeptical of the Democratic Party should support Harris this year.

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The new pet care

Posted in Animal Welfare, New Normal?, The New York Times, Topics Of Interest on June 23, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Claire Kirsch and her dog at home in Vassar, Mich. | Brittany Greeson for The New York Times

By Katie Thomas | The New York Times

Pets these days are just like us. They get birthday cakes, day care and rubber boots to wear in the snow. Their health care is becoming more human, too — for better and for worse.

Decades ago, animal care was relatively rudimentary. Veterinarians usually owned their own clinics, and the options to treat a sick or injured pet were limited. Today, animal hospitals are equipped with expensive magnetic resonance imaging machines, round-the-clock critical care units and teams of specialists in cancer, cardiology and neurology. For pets and the people who love them, the advances are welcome.

But as animals’ health care has changed to more closely resemble our own, it has also taken on some of the problems of the human system, including the biggest one: cost. The price of veterinary care has soared more than 60 percent over the past decade, outpacing inflation. Private equity firms have snapped up hundreds of independent clinics, in a trend reminiscent of corporate roll-ups of doctors’ offices. Veterinarians around the country told me that they worry this is changing the way that they practice, as they face growing pressure to push costly treatments and order more tests.

The changed landscape means that even as veterinarians can do more for dogs and cats than ever before, pet owners face sometimes heartbreaking decisions about whether they can afford the care. (Read more in our story on the topic.)

Changes in the industry

About one-quarter of primary care clinics and three-quarters of specialty clinics are owned by corporations, according to Brakke Consulting, which focuses on the animal health industry. Sometimes, the corporate ownership is not obvious: Many private equity firms do not change the name of the vet clinic when they take it over.

Most veterinarians are paid, at least in part, based on how much money they bring into a practice, whether that is by ordering tests, selling prescription dog food or performing procedures. One veterinarian said she quit her job after she was told her “cost per client” was too low; another said she was told she needed to see 21 animals a day, about a half-dozen more than her current workload.

Retired veterinarian David Roos and his dog, Chester. | Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times

Other veterinarians said the pressure had no influence on the care they provided. In interviews, they said they bore the brunt of pet owners’ complaints, even when they have little to do with setting prices. Veterinarians make far less money than doctors for humans, and are also often in debt from years of education. Prices have gone up partly because of the rising cost of drugs, vaccines and other supplies, as well as worker salaries in a tight labor market.

One veterinarian I interviewed, Dr. Pam Nichols of South Jordan, Utah, has seen the transformation firsthand. When she was starting out in the 1990s, she said she used to sneak dachshunds into the human hospital where her father was a radiologist to give them M.R.I. scans. If the dog needed surgery, the bill would be about $2,000. Now, she said, a similar dog might get an M.R.I. and a CT scan, and will probably be operated on by a specialist who is assisted by several nurses. The cost could reach $10,000.

Tough choices for owners

Veterinary care differs from human health care in one big way: Most pet owners pay out of their own pocket — and in full — before leaving the vet’s office. While pet insurance is available, only a small percentage of pet owners have it.

A generation ago, pet owners with a seriously ill animal may have had little choice but to opt for euthanasia if they wanted to relieve their pet’s suffering. Now, they must choose between extending the animal’s life and going into what can be debilitating debt, or letting an animal die. I spoke to some pet owners who were still paying off credit card debt years after their animals had died. And animal welfare groups said owners frequently relinquished their pets to shelters because they couldn’t afford veterinary bills.

For many people, though, the sacrifices are worth it. That was the case for Claire Kirsch, who was earning less than $10 an hour as a veterinary technician in Georgia when her own dog, Roscoe, and her horse, Gambit, each had medical emergencies, resulting in bills that totaled more than $13,000. The animals would have died if she had not opted for the additional care. She took a higher-paying job, maxed out a credit card and tapped into her husband’s retirement account to pay off the debt.

“I knew I would never be able to forgive myself if we didn’t try,” she said.

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How humans failed racehorses

Posted in Animal Welfare, OP/Ed, The New York Times, Topics Of Interest on May 5, 2024| Leave a Comment »

At Churchill Downs in Kentucky. | Jon Cherry for The New York Times

By Joe Drape | The New York Times

It was a thrilling finish: A long-shot named Mystik Dan held off a late charge by Sierra Leone and a colt from Japan named Forever Young on Saturday to win the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, America’s oldest major continuing sporting event, bringing to a close a much-needed casualty-free week of thoroughbred racing.

It was a welcome conclusion for the multibillion-dollar sport imperiled by frequent racing fatalities, reckless breeding, dodgy doping practices and the old-fashioned greed of veterinarians, trainers and owners.

Last year, 12 horses perished at Churchill Downs in the days surrounding the famous race. It only got worse. Two weeks later, a horse trained by one of the sport’s most recognized trainers died at Pimlico Race Course. At the historic Saratoga Race Course in New York a few months later, another 13 horses died while racing and training at the sport’s signature summer meet, including two that seemed poised to win their races before they broke down near the finish line on nationally televised broadcasts.

Ambulances rumbled onto the track, emergency workers erected privacy screens and, behind them, vets euthanized the horses with injections. All of it put the social acceptability of one of America’s oldest sports at risk.

The root of the problem

Ahead of the race. | Audra Melton for The New York Times

Why do racehorses die? As beautiful as a thoroughbred is in full flight, the legs that seemingly rarely touch the ground are fragile. Ankles the size of a Coke bottle and hooves the size of a crystal ashtray propel a 1,200-pound thoroughbred at speeds up to 35 miles per hour.

Over the past 12 months, my colleague Melissa Hoppert and I analyzed confidential documents and covert recordings made by law enforcement authorities to report on why so many horses, supposedly in peak physical condition, were breaking down. (Our investigation, which you can read here, also became a documentary, “The New York Times Presents: Broken Horses,” which is streaming on Hulu.)

As is so often the case, money is the root of the problem. Trainers push horses too hard, sometimes giving them illegal performance-enhancing drugs. That’s because owners know that a signature win will turn their million-dollar investment into a multimillion-dollar A.T.M. in the breeding shed. Do the math: Sierra Leone can be retired tomorrow and enter a life where he mates twice a day, to 155 mares, potentially earning $31 million annually over a breeding career that can last 10 years or more.

Even at the more modest levels of the sport, trainers sometimes rely on illegal drugs. More often, though, the problem is overuse of legal corticosteroid medications that mask pain and allow at-risk thoroughbreds to run until they perish. Among the cluster of 13 deaths at Saratoga, for example, 11 were the result of injuries to a fetlock joint, which can be weakened by injections. Three of the 11 received corticosteroid injections within 30 days of racing. Another three had been declared unsound by veterinarians before their breakdowns, though their owners and trainers still managed to get them into competition.

In short, the humans failed the horses.

Most people involved in the sport have put their horses first, and they were integral in creating the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, the federal body that now polices the sport. But if that group does not do its job, horse racing could be in trouble. It is at risk of losing its core audiences, including horse lovers, who do not want to see animals die, and gamblers, who now have many other options for betting on sports.

Along with a multibillion-dollar economy, an important part of American history and its soul would be lost.

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