About a year ago, the White House touted its One Big Beautiful Bill Act as the “biggest legislative win” of President Donald Trump’s second term.

The bill, commonly referred to as the OBBBA, which primarily combined an extension of the 2017 tax cuts and some new tax breaks with cuts to programs such as Medicaid and food stamps, is the most significant piece of legislation this administration has passed. As recently as June, a news release by Republican House Minority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota touted the bill as “the single-greatest victory for working families in history!” 

The bill figures to play a key role in this fall’s pivotal contest to control Congress. But even some Republicans say what should have been the party’s major accomplishment is looking more like a liability ahead of November’s midterms. With Democrats predicted to win a majority in the House and possibly in the Senate, voters are hearing two very different descriptions of the legislation that’s affected millions of Americans. Democrats are hammering the healthcare cuts on the campaign trail. Republicans focus on the tax relief.

Why We Wrote This

Political parties usually tout major legislative wins as reasons why voters should stick with them at election time. This year, Republicans are fielding public skepticism about President Trump’s signature bill, and Democrats are using it to craft their own message.

Even there, the GOP might be losing the messaging war, as Democrats have been highlighting that the tax cuts were larger for high-income than for low-income households. Jay Townsend, a Republican consultant who worked in four presidential campaigns but is not involved in any midterm campaigns this cycle, hears people saying that the bill’s tax cuts “‘did not help me, it helped rich people.’” 

Many of the bill’s most controversial provisions – such as work requirements for people receiving Medicaid – won’t go into effect until after the midterms. Democrats accused Republicans of delaying those changes to avoid the political fallout. 

But there are signs that some of that political fallout is already happening. A Politico survey in July found that nearly 1 in 3 Americans say the law has made their financial situation worse, and a poll from the same month by the left-leaning Navigator Research found that nearly half say it is making their costs go up. The law is estimated to reduce federal Medicaid spending over the next decade by nearly $1 trillion, and a handful of rural clinics have already shut down, citing future cuts. Democrats say those closures, alongside spiking healthcare premiums, have given their candidates a strong issue to use against Republicans on the campaign trail. 

“From what I can tell, nearly every Democratic challenger is using the [healthcare] cuts against Republican incumbents, and in most cases with significant effect,” says Geoff Garin, the president of Hart Research, a Democratic research and polling organization. “There’s very little [Republicans] can do at this point to mitigate the damage.”

Medicaid cuts sway voters

Republicans passed the bill in July 2025 without Democratic support. It extended tax cuts passed during Mr. Trump’s first term in 2017, and added temporary tax deductions for groups such as seniors and workers receiving tips. Republicans such as Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa called it a “recipe for economic success.”

On the campaign trail, many Republicans are touting the bill’s benefits – labeling Democrats as the party that rejected tax cuts. Sometimes, the candidates point to the bill; sometimes, to specific provisions within it. Rep. Darin LaHood of Illinois recently mentioned a barber who is benefiting from tax relief on tips – but he also credited the “tax bill” broadly with helping businesses across his district. 

“The Republican Party has a very clear difference for America, and that is: Always lower taxes, always American workers first,” Rep. Brian Mast of Florida told CNBC earlier this month. 

But even as Republicans paint them as would-be tax hikers, Democrats have fastened on to a different part of the bill: changes made to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The OBBBA set new work requirements for people to receive Medicaid, cut federal help for states that expanded the program, and ended eligibility for some legal immigrants. Meanwhile, SNAP enrollment dropped by 11% between July 2025 and April 2026 after the law narrowed exemptions and raised the work requirement age. 

Americans can expect to see a lot of ads about the Medicaid cuts leading up to the midterms, says Mr. Garin. 

“Medicaid? Gutted,” says a May video ad run by Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio against his opponent Eric Conroy, who is not a member of Congress but has expressed support for the OBBBA. 

Republicans are pushing back, saying the cuts are helping the nation’s fiscal position by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse,” by tightening eligibility and closing what they call loopholes in how states share costs.  

Still, the party’s messaging has downplayed the Medicaid provisions. Instead, Republicans emphasize the tax changes, which saved American taxpayers an average of just over $2,200 per filer, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. The Treasury Department says more than 53 million taxpayers claimed things like a new tips deduction and an enhanced deduction for seniors. 

But Mr. Garin says that many voters are being hit by the loss of enhanced healthcare subsidies and fear losing their health insurance altogether. Those subsidies expired at the end of 2025 and are not directly related to the OBBBA, though Republicans could have used the bill to pass an extension. Democrats shut down the government last year over the issue, but eventually agreed to reopen it without winning any concessions.

Messaging challenges

The bill has been controversial from the start. At the time of the OBBBA’s passage, it faced widespread criticism from Democrats. A July 2025 Quinnipiac poll found that 44% of Americans thought the bill would hurt rather than help them personally. 

The same month, longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove predicted on Fox News that the bill could pose problems for his party in the next round of elections.

“I think it'll have a huge impact on 2026, because, remember, as these changes, particularly the Medicaid changes, come into effect, they’re going to have, people are going to be losing their coverage,” said Mr. Rove.

Just weeks after the bill’s passage, President Trump and congressional Republicans tried to rebrand it, pivoting from the “great, big, beautiful” bill and instead calling it the “Working Families Tax Cuts Act.”   

While voters might hold more negative than positive views of the legislation, failure to extend the tax cuts could have posed its own political challenge for Republicans. Polls also show widespread confusion about what’s actually in the bill. In the July Politico poll, about 2 in 5 voters said they had heard of the law but couldn’t explain its features.

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In a separate survey by Winning the Issues, part of the GOP-aligned Winston Group, almost half of U.S. voters did not think the bill prevented a tax increase on them and their families. That was a key part of Republican messaging as they campaigned to pass the bill last year.

“We’ve seen some Republicans run ads calling this essentially a tax cut, but that’s not how people feel,” says Julie Alderman Boudreau, the director of research at left-leaning Navigator Research. “This [bill] is a huge liability ... for any Republican on the ballot in 2026.”

About a year ago, the White House touted its One Big Beautiful Bill Act as the “biggest legislative win” of President Donald Trump’s second term.

The bill, commonly referred to as the OBBBA, which primarily combined an extension of the 2017 tax cuts and some new tax breaks with cuts to programs such as Medicaid and food stamps, is the most significant piece of legislation this administration has passed. As recently as June, a news release by Republican House Minority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota touted the bill as “the single-greatest victory for working families in history!” 

The bill figures to play a key role in this fall’s pivotal contest to control Congress. But even some Republicans say what should have been the party’s major accomplishment is looking more like a liability ahead of November’s midterms. With Democrats predicted to win a majority in the House and possibly in the Senate, voters are hearing two very different descriptions of the legislation that’s affected millions of Americans. Democrats are hammering the healthcare cuts on the campaign trail. Republicans focus on the tax relief.

Why We Wrote This

Political parties usually tout major legislative wins as reasons why voters should stick with them at election time. This year, Republicans are fielding public skepticism about President Trump’s signature bill, and Democrats are using it to craft their own message.

Even there, the GOP might be losing the messaging war, as Democrats have been highlighting that the tax cuts were larger for high-income than for low-income households. Jay Townsend, a Republican consultant who worked in four presidential campaigns but is not involved in any midterm campaigns this cycle, hears people saying that the bill’s tax cuts “‘did not help me, it helped rich people.’” 

Many of the bill’s most controversial provisions – such as work requirements for people receiving Medicaid – won’t go into effect until after the midterms. Democrats accused Republicans of delaying those changes to avoid the political fallout. 

But there are signs that some of that political fallout is already happening. A Politico survey in July found that nearly 1 in 3 Americans say the law has made their financial situation worse, and a poll from the same month by the left-leaning Navigator Research found that nearly half say it is making their costs go up. The law is estimated to reduce federal Medicaid spending over the next decade by nearly $1 trillion, and a handful of rural clinics have already shut down, citing future cuts. Democrats say those closures, alongside spiking healthcare premiums, have given their candidates a strong issue to use against Republicans on the campaign trail. 

“From what I can tell, nearly every Democratic challenger is using the [healthcare] cuts against Republican incumbents, and in most cases with significant effect,” says Geoff Garin, the president of Hart Research, a Democratic research and polling organization. “There’s very little [Republicans] can do at this point to mitigate the damage.”

Medicaid cuts sway voters

Republicans passed the bill in July 2025 without Democratic support. It extended tax cuts passed during Mr. Trump’s first term in 2017, and added temporary tax deductions for groups such as seniors and workers receiving tips. Republicans such as Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa called it a “recipe for economic success.”

On the campaign trail, many Republicans are touting the bill’s benefits – labeling Democrats as the party that rejected tax cuts. Sometimes, the candidates point to the bill; sometimes, to specific provisions within it. Rep. Darin LaHood of Illinois recently mentioned a barber who is benefiting from tax relief on tips – but he also credited the “tax bill” broadly with helping businesses across his district. 

“The Republican Party has a very clear difference for America, and that is: Always lower taxes, always American workers first,” Rep. Brian Mast of Florida told CNBC earlier this month. 

But even as Republicans paint them as would-be tax hikers, Democrats have fastened on to a different part of the bill: changes made to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The OBBBA set new work requirements for people to receive Medicaid, cut federal help for states that expanded the program, and ended eligibility for some legal immigrants. Meanwhile, SNAP enrollment dropped by 11% between July 2025 and April 2026 after the law narrowed exemptions and raised the work requirement age. 

Americans can expect to see a lot of ads about the Medicaid cuts leading up to the midterms, says Mr. Garin. 

“Medicaid? Gutted,” says a May video ad run by Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio against his opponent Eric Conroy, who is not a member of Congress but has expressed support for the OBBBA. 

Republicans are pushing back, saying the cuts are helping the nation’s fiscal position by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse,” by tightening eligibility and closing what they call loopholes in how states share costs.  

Still, the party’s messaging has downplayed the Medicaid provisions. Instead, Republicans emphasize the tax changes, which saved American taxpayers an average of just over $2,200 per filer, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. The Treasury Department says more than 53 million taxpayers claimed things like a new tips deduction and an enhanced deduction for seniors. 

But Mr. Garin says that many voters are being hit by the loss of enhanced healthcare subsidies and fear losing their health insurance altogether. Those subsidies expired at the end of 2025 and are not directly related to the OBBBA, though Republicans could have used the bill to pass an extension. Democrats shut down the government last year over the issue, but eventually agreed to reopen it without winning any concessions.

Messaging challenges

The bill has been controversial from the start. At the time of the OBBBA’s passage, it faced widespread criticism from Democrats. A July 2025 Quinnipiac poll found that 44% of Americans thought the bill would hurt rather than help them personally. 

The same month, longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove predicted on Fox News that the bill could pose problems for his party in the next round of elections.

“I think it'll have a huge impact on 2026, because, remember, as these changes, particularly the Medicaid changes, come into effect, they’re going to have, people are going to be losing their coverage,” said Mr. Rove.

Just weeks after the bill’s passage, President Trump and congressional Republicans tried to rebrand it, pivoting from the “great, big, beautiful” bill and instead calling it the “Working Families Tax Cuts Act.”   

While voters might hold more negative than positive views of the legislation, failure to extend the tax cuts could have posed its own political challenge for Republicans. Polls also show widespread confusion about what’s actually in the bill. In the July Politico poll, about 2 in 5 voters said they had heard of the law but couldn’t explain its features.

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In a separate survey by Winning the Issues, part of the GOP-aligned Winston Group, almost half of U.S. voters did not think the bill prevented a tax increase on them and their families. That was a key part of Republican messaging as they campaigned to pass the bill last year.

“We’ve seen some Republicans run ads calling this essentially a tax cut, but that’s not how people feel,” says Julie Alderman Boudreau, the director of research at left-leaning Navigator Research. “This [bill] is a huge liability ... for any Republican on the ballot in 2026.”

U.S. stockpiles of some of America’s key defensive missiles have been seriously depleted – some estimates say by more than two-thirds – since the Iran war began in February. It will take years to replace them, say analysts who add that the shortage could embolden U.S. rivals, such as China and Russia.

Gen. Dan Caine, the Pentagon’s top officer, warned the White House about potential shortages of Patriot and other missiles weeks before it decided to attack the Iranian regime, news articles at the time noted.

More recently, President Donald Trump has reportedly demanded answers from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about the shortages, which are already influencing how the United States conducts war. The White House called off attacks against Iran due to concerns about troop defense given the depletion of interceptor stocks, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported.

Why We Wrote This

The military’s top officer warned the Trump administration about a possible missile shortage if it attacked Iran. Stockpiles are now depleted, and plans to rebuild them focus less on the current war than on preparing for possible future conflicts.

Publicly, however, President Trump has continued to say that the U.S. has “massive amounts” of missiles. He also threatened to prosecute “treasonous” leakers.

In response, retired Marine Corps Col. Mark Cancian, who has conducted widely cited studies tracking depleted U.S. missile stockpiles, says that his numbers came from public records, not leaks. A defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Mr. Cancian also says that he’s ready to show the work that went into his reports.

“If two analysts at a Washington think tank can come up with these numbers,” he says, “then the Chinese government – with tens of thousands of intelligence officials and way more sources of information – can come up with the same numbers.”

What is the current situation with U.S. missile stockpiles?

Patriot missiles are valuable because they are versatile from a military perspective, designed to handle relatively low-flying threats – ranging from incoming missiles to drones and aircraft – and leaving the more specialized THAAD system to defend against high-flying, faster missiles.

These Patriot stockpiles are down about 65% since the U.S. and Israel launched their war against Iran, according to the CSIS study, co-written by Mr. Cancian, and based on budget materials and publicly released information. The exact numbers are classified. But by these estimates, there are fewer than 850 Patriots left in America’s arsenal.

To defend U.S. forces stationed at bases in the Middle East from more high-flying Iranian ballistic missiles, which are harder to intercept, the U.S. has THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missiles. Since the war began, analysts estimate that supplies of those are down by anywhere from about 50% (by CSIS’ count) to some 80% (as cited in a widely circulated CNN report).

What are U.S. options for filling the shortfalls?

The U.S. is taking several major steps to boost its missile stockpiles.

It has a $58 billion, seven-year contract with Lockheed Martin to help increase Patriot missile production from roughly 620 to 2,000 a year.

Under another $35 billion contract, the defense contractor is also slated to ramp up THAAD missile production from 96 to some 400 per year over seven years.

The Pentagon said Friday that it is increasing production of ship-fired SM-3 interceptor missiles, designed to take out ballistic missiles, which “form the backbone” of naval defenses, according to a Pentagon statement.

“We are stabilizing our supply chains, expanding munitions production and putting our entire defense industrial base on a wartime footing,” said Michael Duffey, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment.

While the administration has pushed back on reports that the U.S. missile defense stockpile is low, it has used the alarm surrounding them to drive up Pentagon spending requests, some analysts note. That has prompted concerns about the growing number of no-bid contracts beneficial to big defense corporations and the political donors who run them.

Brokers representing President Trump bought millions in defense-sector shares during 2025, public records show. The following year, the government awarded Lockheed Martin the Patriot and THAAD contracts. Mr. Trump’s trades were made under a blind arrangement in which brokerage firms are prohibited from accepting direct trade requests from the president or his family.

In the meantime, President Trump said at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, last month that he was considering granting Ukraine a production license to allow it to use Patriot technology to build missile parts locally. Weeks later, however, Mr. Trump appeared to walk back the offer.

What could this mean for the wars in Iran and Ukraine?

For the U.S., the problem is less about an immediate shortage of missiles – since about one-third or half of the arsenal remains – and more about what it portends for future conflicts, analysts say.

The risk comes from U.S. adversaries, particularly China, as well as North Korea and Russia, which could view the depleted U.S. stockpiles as a window of opportunity to attack American allies at a time when the nation’s defenses are already stretched.

This is already playing out in countries like Ukraine, says Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Aware that the scarce Patriot missile is the main weapon capable of effectively and consistently intercepting Russian ballistic missiles, the Kremlin has put its own missile production into high gear to try to exploit Kyiv’s shortages. Its ballistic missile strikes on Ukraine have climbed steadily, from 61 in April to 198 in July, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

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European countries like Spain have stockpiles of interceptors that could be transferred to Ukraine with little risk, Mr. Coffey adds.

And not all munitions are in short supply. But those that are more plentiful come with trade-offs for conflicts like the current war in Iran, including shorter ranges that could require U.S. military forces to fly over enemy territory. That, Mr. Cancian warns, could result “in greater vulnerability” for American troops, “and potentially greater losses.”

Democrats seeking the party’s presidential nomination in 2028 will need to prove themselves early on in states where Black and Latino voters and union members are key supporters, under an election-year calendar approved Saturday.

The primary lineup pushes Iowa from the traditional top spot and makes South Carolina the leadoff state, voting on Jan. 22, 2028, followed by Nevada on Feb. 1. New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan, and Virginia round out the early states, throughout February, according to the plan endorsed by the Democratic National Committee at its meeting in Texas.

DNC Chairman Ken Martin said that to win the general election, “You have to be battle-tested in a way that you already have campaigned in front of and for the support of various communities throughout the country.” That is why the calendar designed by the party matters, he said in an interview.

Some potential candidates in what is expected to be a large field have visited early-voting states such as South Carolina. Party leaders have said the order give candidates the best shot at winning back the White House after Republican President Donald Trump’s second term.

“They have to show that they can go to the South and talk to Black voters and rural voters, as well as out west, talking ranching and mining issues, to a border state, to union members,” said party strategist Karen Finney, who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “Whoever survives will be battle-tested.”

Former presidential candidate Howard Dean, a onetime Vermont governor, recalled his tenure as national party chairman, when Democrats solidified Nevada and South Carolina as early states behind Iowa and New Hampshire. The latest change is even better, he said.

“These states look more like the country,” as a whole, he said, “whereas Iowa and New Hampshire don’t.”

Rita Hart, chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, said bypassing her state in the early going would sideline important voter voices and give a political edge to Republicans, who are expected to keep Iowa atop their calendar.

Nonwhite voters claim top billing

As the first-in-the-South primary, South Carolina was more decisive than Iowa and New Hampshire for nominees Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020. All three dominated among South Carolina’s large Black population, which can yield more than half the state’s Democratic primary electorate.

With Nevada and New Mexico following, that will require candidates to court more Latino voters early in the process.

Shifting from Iowa and New Hampshire does not mean little-known candidates cannot catch fire, as Pete Buttigieg did in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2020. They just will not be able to do it with an almost entirely white audience.

“If you can’t go to every part of this country and make your case, you should not be running for president,” Ms. Finney said.

The progressive vs. establishment dynamics may shift

There is disagreement over how Democrats’ split between progressives and mainstream liberals may or may not surface in the nominating calendar.

“I think our primary voters up north are probably a little different than primary voters in South Carolina,” said Boyd Brown, a former DNC member from South Carolina. “It’s not the woke ideologies that we just can’t get away from” in other places.

Nina Smith, a former Buttigieg adviser who now works closely with progressive causes, disagreed. Ms. Smith said Black South Carolinians, especially, have gravitated to more moderate candidates – twice rejecting Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in favor of Ms. Clinton and Mr. Biden.

But, she said, “Southern Black voters are more progressive than they’re given credit for” on policy but also “realists” about what is possible.

“Living through Jim Crow and other oppressive structures will force you to be take that approach,” she said.

Ms. Smith said that with South Carolina leading off and many Southern states following on Super Tuesday soon after the early lineup concludes, progressives will have to take the time to listen and then tailor their messages.

“A lot of Black voters don’t necessarily see themselves in the ideas and arguments that progressives put forward,” she said.

Unions will get a spotlight in the early-voting states

Nevada has the service industry unions because of Las Vegas; Michigan has the auto industry and associated manufacturing support industries; Virginia is home to more federal workers than any other state.

“Labor is still so important,” Mr. Dean said.

Beyond seeking the backing of organized labor, the campaigns and the party will look to unions for help in spreading Democrats’ message to voters and getting people to the polls.

More scheduling efficiency for candidates

Campaigns struggle to balance many demands such as meeting voters in person, raising money, and the logistics of travel. As a result, places such as Nevada have gotten short shrift in the past because candidates, most from the eastern part of the country, have concluded the investment of time is not worth it.

An expanded calendar offers more clustering opportunities.

A swing to the West could hit two early states – Nevada and New Mexico – and include a fundraising stop in California, full of Democratic donors. A South Carolina trip could mean fundraisers and public appearances in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh, both in North Carolina. Virginia offers proximity to donors and national TV studios in Washington; the same options are available by adding a New York City stop on the way to New Hampshire.

Bre Maxwell is a DNC member from South Carolina who said the state’s smaller size and lower media costs are a financial equalizer, allowing not only the best-funded candidates to have an impact.

“They can campaign from the top to the bottom in a day,” Ms. Maxwell said.

It’s about primaries, with a clear look to November

Of the six early states, all but South Carolina have been competitive in general elections.

That means that even before Super Tuesday, the Democratic candidates will have spent significant time and resources in states worth a combined 43 Electoral College votes. That is not insignificant on the way to the 270 needed to win.

Television ads and news coverage can spill over, as well. Markets targeting parts of South Carolina also reach portions of North Carolina and Georgia.

After all, Mr. Brown said, the point is to put a Democrat in the White House.

“This is not a social or a debate club. It is a political party,” he said.

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___

Mr. Barrow reported from Atlanta. Associated Press writer Meg Kinnard in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.

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Mr. Know-It-All: A comic about AI in schools

As a new school year begins, more than half of teens are relying on artificial intelligence to help them complete schoolwork. What do we lose when we invite AI into the classroom?

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Aug. 14, 2026, 4:00 p.m. ET

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When Maybelle Blair, seated like a queen in a wheelchair, threw a ceremonial opening pitch on a misty August night, there might have been some crying in baseball.

Ms. Blair, with her mane of white hair and fashionable wrap-around sunglasses, is a sports icon. Turning 100 this year, she starred in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League of the 1950s that inspired the hit 1992 movie “A League of Their Own.” She was a guest of honor at the inaugural weekend of the new Women’s Pro Baseball League earlier this month in Springfield, Illinois.

“I want you to know that this is the happiest moment of my life,” she told the cheering crowd at Robin Roberts Stadium. “Nothing would stop me from being here if I had to crawl. I’ve watched so many of them, as little girls, grow up, and all they wanted to do was play baseball. And guess what? They are playing it.”

Why We Wrote This

As interest and investment in women’s sports surges, a new “league of their own” steps up to the plate: the Women’s Pro Baseball League.

The Women’s Pro Baseball League (WPBL) is the fifth iteration of women’s pro baseball in the United States, the last being the short-lived Ladies Professional Baseball League, which folded in 1998. The WPBL is made up of four teams: the Boston Hunters, New York Heights, San Francisco Firebells, and Los Angeles Queens. Their season runs for eight weeks, and all games are played in Springfield and broadcast on ESPN Select. The league’s launch comes at a moment when interest in and investment across women’s professional sports in the U.S. are surging. Yet amid the celebration, pressures remain to prove that, this time, a women’s pro baseball league – without the extensive youth, collegiate, and professional development system that supports many other women’s sports – can succeed.

The WPBL didn’t come out of left field. Baseball for All, the nation’s largest girls’ baseball organization, estimates that more than 100,000 girls play youth baseball in the U.S. In Canada, the second-most represented country in WPBL, there are 30,000 girls and women registered with Baseball Canada. Japan ran its own professional league for a decade before folding in 2019, and today more than 23,000 women play baseball there on 102 teams, according to MLB.com.

If one thing was clear in the messages from the coaching staff in the days leading up to the opening pitch in Springfield, their rosters are stacked with elite athletes.

While some in the WPBL played softball in high school and college, others have been dedicated baseball players, securing spots on high school and collegiate rosters. For many players, it is their first time competing on a professional team made up entirely of women.

Five WPBL players already play professional baseball with men in the Banana Ball Championship League, made famous by the Savannah Bananas. Ayami Sato of Japan, considered the best female player in the world with pitching speeds nearing 80 mph, plays for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the Canadian Baseball League. With seven countries represented on the final WPBL rosters, dozens of players have competed in the biennial Women’s Baseball World Cup.

“It’s really mind-blowing the talent that they have,” said Keith Foulke, a former relief pitcher with the Red Sox and, for their first three games, the manager of the Boston Hunters. “When I saw them play [during spring training] down in Fort Myers, it was like, ‘Wow. These aren’t women playing baseball; these are athletes playing baseball.’... They play the game at a very high level, and they play it the correct way.”

Fans line up

Despite a drenching rain, spirits were high at Robin Roberts Stadium. Fans queued up with umbrellas and ponchos several hours before the gate opened at the sold-out debut game on Aug. 1 to ensure they got a bobblehead giveaway of Mo’ne Davis, the first girl to pitch a shutout in Little League World Series history in 2014. She now plays center field for the Los Angeles Queens.

An arc of colorful balloons framed the front gate, and the air was heavy with the smell of freshly potted flowers. Merchandise supplies – caps, sweatshirts, T-shirts, and canvas bags – quickly dwindled.

“We were No. 9 and 10 in line at 12:30 p.m. to make sure we got our bobblehead,” said Brenda Highley, a retired Navy veteran and softball player, who drove 3 1/2 hours from Lakewood, Illinois. “It’s all coming around finally, and I want to be part of it.”

The rain pushed back the original 5 p.m. start time, and spectators crowded beneath the stadium steps to stay dry. Every now and then, a cheer rippled through as players entered the stands to greet fans and sign autographs.

Liz Gilder, a left-handed pitcher from Canada for the San Francisco Firebells, folded down her 5-foot-10-inch frame to eye level with a 5-year-old in a pink sweatshirt decorated with butterflies, clutching a pen and a baseball, muted by shyness. “She just started T-ball. She’s got a good arm,” says her mother.

Let’s play ball

After the opening ceremonies, athleticism took center stage as the Los Angeles Queens and the New York Heights squared off.

The Queens rallied from a 7-2 deficit in the second inning to beat the Heights 10-8. Maggie Foxx of the Queens secured the league’s first RBI on a two-run single in the first inning. Denae Benites of the Heights lifted the crowd to its feet in the fourth inning with a slug that disappeared into the rain and darkness over the head of Ms. Davis in center field for WPBL’s first-ever home run.

“I never thought this [league] would happen. I’m 20 years old, and I thought this might happen when I was 50 and done playing,” said Ms. Foxx at the postgame press conference. “When I walked on the field, I started crying because of how much this moment meant to everyone.”

Hurdles to overcome

It remains to be seen if this fifth iteration of women’s pro baseball will finally take hold.

“I think the time is right. There is a wave of women’s pro sports, and we’re certainly riding that wave,” says Commissioner Justine Siegal, founder of Baseball for All and co-founder of the WPBL with Keith Stein, the co-owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs. She cites as momentum the league’s Instagram following, which reached 175,000 followers before the first game. It has since jumped to more than 240,000 followers.

Part of that success depends on getting the word out. Many local spectators only heard about the league the week before. Becky Brouse Davis and her husband, Brad Davis, drove two days from West Virginia to catch the first week of games. The sports information director for West Virginia University Institute of Technology was so frustrated with the lack of details about the league and players that she started an independent website, thisiswomensbaseball.com.

Even though the first game sold out on a rainy night, on the second night, a clear summer evening with cicadas chirping beneath a starry sky, the stadium was only two-thirds full.

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Longtime baseball fans and retirees Carl Bollinger and Mike Powers drove an hour down from Peoria, Illinois, after hearing about the league on talk radio. Even though the San Francisco Firebells, with No. 1 draft pick Kelsie Whitmore on the mound, defeated the Boston Hunters 11-3 with little drama, Mr. Powers says he’s glad they came.

“The word ‘inaugural’ adds something to it. Anytime you see someone chase their dreams,” he says, pausing with a catch in his throat, “that’s worth something.”

Howard University’s move to disenroll some 500 first-year students who had not met a tuition payment deadline weeks before the start of the fall semester is bringing renewed attention to colleges’ financial challenges and the decisions being taken to address them.

Universities are facing a looming drop in enrollment due to declining birth rates, along with a decline in federal funding and the loss of many full-tuition-paying foreign students who are struggling to get visas. In response, they are cutting faculty and staff, eliminating majors, and pruning electives to control costs. They’re also focusing on the income side of the equation – including, as in Howard’s case, going after students who fail to pay tuition or meet financial aid deadlines.

Howard’s interim president, Wayne Fredrick, said in a statement that the decision reflected “our responsibility to ensure that students begin their Howard experience with a documented and sustainable financial plan.” Without one, they were less likely to complete their degrees, he added. Eventually the school, based in Washington, D.C., reenrolled more than 200 of the students.

Why We Wrote This

Colleges are cutting programs and staff heading into a new school year. They are under pressure from falling enrollment, reduced federal support, and a loss of international students.

Last week, Howard offered buyout packages to 16% of its faculty and staff, potentially hundreds of employees.

The financial challenges are hitting colleges of all sizes, and at all levels of selectivity.

In April, Syracuse University offered buyouts to about 175 faculty members. The University of Texas at Arlington saw 209 faculty and staff take buyouts in May. Last month, University of Texas at Tyler offered buyouts to nearly a quarter of its workforce. Even schools with billion-dollar endowments are making adjustments: The Harvard Crimson college newspaper reported that dozens of employees had been laid off last week at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“I think we’re in a period where a decent number of schools are going to be struggling financially and for a variety of reasons,” says Phillip Levine, a nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, and an economics professor at Wellesley College. “Enrolling students and generating enough revenue to cover their bills is something that many schools need to be concerned about in the coming years.”

Building pressure

A sharp drop in birth rates in the United States means there will be fewer high school graduates entering college each year, a phenomenon dubbed the “enrollment cliff.” The applicant pool is already shrinking for some, but not all, schools and it’s creating financial instability. Some tuition-dependent small schools have closed, while other, larger schools have announced revenue declines, leading to program cuts and layoffs.

Additionally, efforts by the Trump administration to prevent international students from studying in the U.S. has wiped out a source of income – as most foreign students, unlike most Americans, generally pay full tuition. Cuts in federal funding and research have put additional strains on universities.

Mr. Levine adds that it’s too soon to gauge the impact of the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which made significant changes to financial aid. The bill capped federal loans that parents could take out for their children’s college education at $20,000 per year or $65,000 for lifetime borrowing. Previously parents were allowed to borrow the entire amount needed for their children to attend college. Likewise, loans used for graduate and professional schools, which previously had no ceiling on borrowing, were capped at $100,000 lifetime borrowing for nonprofessional programs, and $200,000 for professional programs such as dentistry, medical or law school.

Howard mentioned changes in federal student aid as one of several reasons for the employee buyout offer. At HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities), 70% of students are eligible for Pell Grants, the federal government’s need-based undergraduate financial aid.

United Negro College Fund President and CEO Michael Lomax told NPR that both students and colleges are under pressure to meet their financial obligations. “The reality is that Howard, just like everybody else, has to pay their bills, and the people who attend the institution have to pay theirs,” said Dr. Lomax, who previously served as president of Dillard University, an HBCU in New Orleans.

Tough road ahead

Experts say higher education is entering a period of turbulence unlike any it has seen before.

In addition to offering buyouts, Syracuse announced that it was cutting 93 of its academic programs, though the school said that was the result of a review of its offerings, not a cost-cutting measure.

In July, Temple University laid off about 40 staff members as it tries to address an $85 million budget deficit for the 2026-27 school year. It was the second straight year of layoffs at the school. In 2025 it eliminated 190 positions. School leaders blame steady enrollment decline and a state appropriation that has stayed the same since 2018.

The financial strains haven’t spared any schools, says Professor Levine – but that doesn’t mean the pinch will be felt equally across the board.

Highly selective and wealthy Ivy League schools will be fine, he says. So will most mid-tier, or moderately selective schools like Syracuse.

But lower-tier schools and smaller schools, he predicts, “will have difficulty surviving.”

When Howard disenrolled its students, the school’s interim president said the school could no longer afford to let payments slide until students proved that they had the scholarships or grants to cover costs, as it used to do.

“We have really allowed students to show up without paying us [and] to carry balances beyond what is appropriate,” Dr. Frederick told CNN.

That leniency affected retention. Dr. Frederick said that Howard has a four-year graduation rate of 70% and that retention has dipped primarily because of students’ inability to pay.

“Across higher education, students who enroll without a realistic plan to meet their educational expenses are significantly more likely to experience financial hardship, interrupt their studies, or leave college before earning a degree,” Dr. Frederick said. “We have a responsibility to help students persist, graduate, and thrive.”

Unlike her friends and classmates, Sloan Hull didn’t want to attend a four-year college after high school. She knew she wanted to be a chef and chose Orange Coast College, a public community college near Los Angeles, for its culinary arts associate degree.

She graduated in December, and had planned to transfer to a top U.S. culinary school, until she realized the school would not accept her transfer credits, meaning she faced four years of about $40,000 annual tuition.

The Transfer Abroad Network, a new business based in California, offered another option. It helps U.S. community college students transfer to international schools to finish bachelor’s degrees. Ms. Hull saw a more economical path to a higher degree and the opportunity to study abroad.

Why We Wrote This

U.S. community college students sometimes face obstacles to finishing degrees, including credit transfer rules and tuition costs. Some overseas schools are drawing them by offering savings, as well as the study abroad experience.

TAN’s founders, Ashley Warmington and Emma Schwartz Lara, told her about a short summer program at the Business and Hotel Management School in Lucerne, Switzerland.

There Ms. Hull cooked with chefs, met students from around the world, and decided to enroll in a fast-track, one-year bachelor’s degree program. She is scheduled to start school near the end of August.

“I really never considered going abroad just because I had no idea that my credits could transfer,” she says.

Clearing a path

TAN started in late 2025, and launched with university partners for spring semester 2026. Programs are traditional two-year and one-year bachelor’s degrees for students who have their associate degree.

TAN’s founders say the platform streamlines the transfer process and includes specific transcript information, required classes, GPA requirements, costs, and financial aid information.

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which has been tracking a cohort of students who began community college in the fall of 2018, found that fewer than one-third of those students transferred to a four-year school within six years.

The reasons vary: curriculum mismatches, as well as unclear transfer rules, prerequisites, and GPA requirements. And U.S. higher education is among the most expensive in the world. The average tuition, not including room and board, for an in-state public four-year college last year was $11,371 and $25,415 for out-of-state, according to U.S. News & World Report. Private schools averaged $44,961.

TAN identifies schools outside the U.S. that offer accredited degrees, as well as those that accept U.S. government financial aid to students. U.S. community college students get a more affordable path to finishing a bachelor’s degree and the schools they partner with gain access to part of the U.S. higher education market.

A growing network

Today, TAN has partnerships with 20 schools in 13 countries, with 11 more schools in the onboarding process. These schools are in countries including Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Greece, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, and Spain.

“Emma and I both worked in international education for so many years. We would be helping students apply to go overseas and oftentimes there would be so many barriers along the way,” says TAN’s Ms. Warmington. She and Ms. Schwartz Lara both studied abroad and later worked as recruiters for international education and study abroad programs in Australia and the United Kingdom. They said that the hiccups to transferring were due to the administrative and admissions process and not students’ fault.

“Universities were just blocked off from connecting with this broader audience of transfer students that had amazing potential,” Ms. Warmington says.

Ms. Schwartz Lara adds that TAN knows that there is huge interest in it from the community they serve, but people are unaware of the opportunities and that it’s often more affordable than going to school in the United States.

Opening a U.S. market

There are no official statistics for how many community college students transfer abroad, but experts say the number is small. Only 1% to 2% of U.S. college students study abroad between four-year and community colleges, according to

NAFSA: Association of International Educators. Additionally, only 16% of students who start at community college transfer and finish a degree.

“It’s a big, wide-open field and there are a lot of community colleges out there,” says Beth Thomas, international officer for the Americas at Abertay University in Scotland, a TAN partner.

“Not all students will have the option to financially look at going overseas, so I think this will be a game changer for the right students,” she adds.

TAN helps schools like hers raise their profile with U.S. students, so it was worth her school paying the annual fee to join the network, she says. TAN said the flat fee does not change with enrollment size, but declined to say how much it is.

Ms. Thomas says that in the past her office would go back and forth with students about the correct materials to send, but now TAN handles that. Abertay accepts U.S. financial aid and offers scholarships to international students. Community college students interest her because she doesn’t want to miss nontraditional students who may have started school late or who have families. The biggest dividend is spreading awareness about Abertay.

“A lot of community college students wouldn’t think this is an opportunity that they can take advantage of,” Ms. Thomas says. “The more that they can do to raise that awareness to say, ‘This is an option for you, you can do this, you can go overseas and here’s how you do it,’ that’s fantastic.”

Tara Zirkel, director of strategic research with education consultant firm EAB, says that TAN could appeal to community college students because the pathway is predictable and clear. She says that recent high school grads who are unsure if they want to attend a four-year school abroad could be drawn to the idea of doing community college for two years and then going to Australia or the U.K. But they need to see that what they want to happen – for example, landing a job – is achievable, Ms. Zirkel says.

An equality of opportunity

Ms. Hull’s community college in Costa Mesa, California, was the first to work with TAN.

Greg Buie is the program facilitator at the school’s Global Engagement Center. He wants community college students to have study abroad experiences and to connect with the world in a way that their peers at four-year schools do.

“We want community college students to be able to have the same access to those types of learning opportunities and experiential, personal growth opportunities, so [TAN] is filling a need that exists,” Mr. Buie adds.

The platform is free for community colleges and students to join. He thinks that more students will begin to take advantage of it. Mr. Buie says that streamlining the process makes it easier for community college administrators and could result in substantial savings for students.

“That could be the difference between someone transferring at all or stopping at the associate level,” Mr. Buie says.

By transferring her community college credits and doing the one-year culinary bachelor’s program in Switzerland, Ms. Hull will pay a little more than a quarter of what she would have had to spend over four years starting from scratch at a culinary school in New York. She secured housing in Switzerland, got financial aid, and will complete a paid six-month internship that is built into her program. She hopes to one day be a private chef and own a brunch café.

“I think that going abroad is definitely a big risk to take, and I think that everyone should experience some kind of risk like that and go abroad,” Ms. Hull says. “I think that community college students deserve the same chance as anybody else.”

Miriam Kendall has never gotten her children an iPad. She doesn’t allow screens at home, except for limited TV time. So, when her oldest daughter was handed a tablet in kindergarten, it felt to her like opening a Pandora’s box. 

“She came home and said, ‘Mommy, you have to let me watch YouTube,’” recalls the mother of three from Evanston, Illinois. Ms. Kendall, who encourages her children to play outside and not on devices, held the line on her household rule.

But when her daughter entered second grade, Ms. Kendall found something concerning when she checked the school tablet’s tracker: Her daughter had spent two hours watching Taylor Swift videos at school when she should have been learning. 

Why We Wrote This

Parent groups across the country are pressuring schools to rethink the rapid advancement of technology in the classroom, due to concerns over the impact of rising screen time on student development.

She wondered: Did the school have a clear policy on technology use? She reached out to other parents, who shared her concerns.

Today, Ms. Kendall, founder and director of parent group Screen Sense Evanston, is leading the charge in her neighborhood and with others nationwide to unplug kids from devices in classrooms. She speaks at school board meetings and lobbies for screen-time limits and a return to pencil-and-paper learning, particularly in elementary grades.

“We want there to be a really thoughtful and strategic reevaluation of the use of technology in schools,” says Ms. Kendall, who launched a petition last year to limit screen time that garnered over 1,400 signatures in her local pre-K through eighth grade district of about 6,000 students. “This is widespread. ... Parents are demanding change.”

Indeed, parents from California to Illinois to Pennsylvania are pushing back against technology they say creates distractions, negatively impacts learning, and conflicts with screen-time limits set at home. Many had heeded the advice of Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book “The Anxious Generation” to limit digital exposure, only to find themselves undermined by the place that is supposed to be most attuned to child development: the classroom.

“How in the world are you providing these highly addictive, highly distracting devices to every single student in the district?” asks Ms. Kendall, who wants to see clearer policies and more staff training. 

From a tech surge to growing caution

A decade ago, many districts across the United States raced to close the “homework gap” and “digital divide,” as educators viewed technology as essential for preparing students for a modern world. They signed multiyear contracts with technology companies and invested billions of dollars into digital tools such as iPads and Chromebooks. In 2020, the pandemic accelerated the trend as districts used federal Coronavirus Relief Fund  money to invest in technology and remote learning.

When students returned to classrooms, parents had hoped to trade tablets for textbooks as it became clear technology could not replace in-person learning. Today, many school districts have still not fully recovered from historic academic declines in student achievement due to school closures and remote learning, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

“Nobody stepped back after COVID and took a fresh look at the use case for the iPad and the school policies and said, ‘Is this the optimal way to use the tool?’” says parent Aaron Friedman of Glenview, Illinois, who launched a petition to limit devices last spring that garnered 1,000 signatures.

In spring 2020, about 45% of public schools assigned devices to individual students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. By the 2024-25 school year, that figure had nearly doubled: Around 88% of public schools had 1:1 computing programs, which provide every student with a school-issued device. 

Organizers point to growing evidence that shows excessive screen time harms children, including a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advisory issued in May linking it to poorer student well-being. 

Many of these parents helped drive the national Wait Until 8th pledge movement to delay smartphones until eighth grade, which over 155,000 families have signed. They’re also mobilizing to support school-wide cellphone bans. At least 37 states now require school districts to ban or restrict student cellphone use during class time, according to Education Week. 

At school board meetings across the U.S., parents have reported kids playing video games in class and students watching prerecorded lessons instead of learning from a teacher. Part of the solution, parents say, is to let students dig in the dirt during science class or leaf through a library book during English.

Parent Jordan Spicklemire from Morton, Illinois, runs a device-free home for her first-grade son and 2-year-old daughter. She understands that screens can play a role in learning, but she wonders: “Are they better than a human teacher?”

Ms. Spicklemire points to how some learning apps are designed to be highly addictive. She’s concerned ed tech companies are profiting from children’s education and prefers to use paper flash cards with students she tutors instead of quiz apps that often have pop-up ads. 

Internet Safety Labs, a nonprofit research group, reported in 2022 that 96% of educational apps share children’s data with third parties, often unbeknownst to students, parents, or schools.

Educators suggest the question isn’t whether technology belongs in classrooms, but how it’s used. Research shows digital tools can improve literacy and STEM comprehension when used with teacher oversight. A 2024 meta-analysis across 119 studies in the Review of Educational Research looked at ed tech’s effects on literacy in K-5 grades and found positive outcomes for reading comprehension and writing proficiency. 

But some parents want more say in how their children learn, including the right to remove their students from screen-based instruction. Parents in the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania drew national attention in June when yelling broke out at a board meeting after the district repealed a policy that had given families a choice to opt out. 

Many districts, including Lower Merion, are reexamining their policies. After facing pressure from parents and the group Schools Beyond Screens, the Los Angeles Unified School District in June approved a ban on classroom screen time for students through first grade, while gradually increasing access in higher grade levels. Meanwhile, at least 16 states have introduced or enacted legislation to limit screen time or take a closer look at ed tech policies. 

Since launching her petition in Evanston, Ms. Kendall says her district has banned YouTube and over 300 noneducational apps from school-issued devices. The district also agreed to screen-free indoor recess, she says. The Evanston-Skokie School District 65 did not respond to requests for comment. 

When Mr. Friedman brought parents’ concerns to his school board in Glenview last spring, they listened. “Our district takes this very seriously,” says Mr. Friedman, who has a third grader. “Within a matter of weeks, they came back and instituted meaningful changes,” he says, including a decision to review and clarify appropriate use policies for technology in classrooms. 

Parents agree technology, when properly supervised, can help students conduct research, take online exams, or learn multimedia skills.

College student Nadia Easley from Northbrook, Illinois, learned how to type and code in middle school at a private school, Willows Academy. But getting taught by humans is what she remembers most. She grew to love her least favorite subject, history, thanks to a teacher who made the class engaging. 

A survey of 600 U.S. teachers in May found that 85% believe students spend too much time on screens in class, according to researchers at Auburn University College of Education and Christopher Newport University. 

It’s soft skills that matter most, and those are learned face to face, with good, in-person interactions, says Kim Whitman, a parent from Overland Park, Kansas, and organizer with Distraction-Free Schools Policy Project. “Kids coming out of school need to be able to speak to people and look them in the eye.” 

Mainstream Democrats are heaving a sigh of relief.

The upset loss by Francesca Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, in the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor shows that the party’s left-wing insurgency may only go so far.

Polls heading into Tuesday’s primary showed Ms. Hong, a state assembly member, comfortably ahead of her top opponent, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. But a large chunk of voters remained undecided until late in the campaign, and negative publicity over old tweets by Ms. Hong – including one calling for the cancellation of Thanksgiving – may well have swung the race. 

Why We Wrote This

Despite a messy gubernatorial primary in which multiple candidates dropped out, polling front-runner and democratic socialist Francesca Hong was edged out by center-left candidate David Crowley.

After last week’s victory by progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan primary for U.S. Senate, establishment Democrats worried that left-wing momentum could damage the party’s prospects nationally in the Nov. 3 midterm elections. 

In Wisconsin, a battleground state in presidential races, the center-left Mr. Crowley staged an extraordinary comeback with a late surge in fundraising and the backing of outgoing Gov. Tony Evers. Just three weeks ago, Mr. Crowley had dropped out of the race, but Governor Evers encouraged him to get back in after another Democrat dropped out. He also won the support of major labor unions. 

Ms. Hong had disavowed controversial old statements, including calls to defund the police and abolish prisons, and insisted to reporters that she “loves” Thanksgiving. But the damage may already have been done. 

Mr. Crowley’s narrow victory also points to challenges in polling during primaries, when voter turnout is low and can be hard to predict, especially during the summer. In last week’s Michigan primary, Mr. El-Sayed barely won after polls showed him far ahead. 

In nearby Minnesota, progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan beat the more-centrist Rep. Angie Craig in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate on Tuesday, showing that the liberal wing of the party is hardly in retreat. 

If Mr. Crowley wins in November, he will be the state’s first Black governor. U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany easily won the Republican primary, setting up a showdown for leadership in a state that President Donald Trump won in 2024 by fewer than 30,000 votes. 

Progressive Democrats expressed frustration that their preferred candidate failed to win the Wisconsin nomination, and that Congress’s most prominent democratic socialists – Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York – did not endorse Ms. Hong. 

“We cannot build progressive power while gatekeeping our own movement through the eyes of the establishment,” the progressive group Our Revolution said in a statement late Tuesday on X. 

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Both Mr. Crowley and Ms. Hong focused on economic issues in their campaigns. But Ms. Hong’s now-deleted social media post from November 2020 denouncing Thanksgiving as “celebrating colonialism” may have been her undoing. 

And even in backing away from past statements, Ms. Hong did not completely disavow them. As a chef, she told CNN on Aug. 3, she enjoys “bringing folks around the table.” But, she added, “Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities.” 

On a bright Saturday morning in February, I stood in front of a classroom in Johannesburg and announced triumphantly to the 30 kids seated in front of me: “We’re getting pen pals!” 

Rows of blank faces stared back at me. I waited. They waited. Finally, one girl raised her hand. “Ma’am,” she began tentatively, “what is a pen pal?” 

I was born in the United States at the end of the 1980s – a time these kids earnestly refer to as “the 1900s.” That makes me part of the last generation to know the world before the internet. I am not sure who first introduced me to pen pals, but in my childhood, I had a handful. I don’t remember anything about them, only the thrill of receiving an envelope in some unknown handwriting with a return address from an exotic, faraway place scrawled in the upper left corner: Tulsa, Minneapolis, Saratoga. 

Why We Wrote This

Our Africa editor began a letter exchange for local students. She ended up with an archive of childhood.

I wanted to share that thrill with these South African students, who are part of a weekend literacy program I coordinate in a low-income neighborhood called Alexandra. So I found teachers in Mexico and the United States whose students were keen to exchange letters with them. 

Once the South African kids understood what this was all about, they were keen, too. (I am replacing their names with first initials to protect the privacy of minors.)

Dear Pen Pal, 

Hi, my name is K. and I live in South Africa. I am 12 years old but turning 13. ... I love soccer! I’m actually really good at it, so it’s basically my talent! One thing I really don’t like is bubble gum. I don’t like when people chew it aggressively. 

Dear Pen Pal, 

In my country we do many things like build robots, prank each other, and all other things. ... I don’t like cheese and my favorite food is salad. Make up, I don’t like it, sorry. And do you like running? 

Dear Pen Pal, 

People say that I am tall like a tower. I have huge eyes. 

Dear Pen Pal, 

A fun fact about me is that I am fun but at the very same time I am rude. 

The students who wrote these letters are a dazzlingly multilingual crowd, natural storytellers who can toggle between three or four languages in the same conversation. But many have barely been taught to read. A quarter of those who speak Sepedi – one of the dominant languages in Alexandra – reach third grade unable to read a single word in any language. Eighty-one percent of South African fourth graders cannot understand the content of a simple text in English, according to a Progress in International Reading Literacy study . 

The problem, needless to say, is not intelligence but lack of resources. Students who learn in overcrowded classrooms, with parents who can’t help them with homework, quickly fall behind. Reading and writing can become a joyless slog. 

Writing to someone on the other side of the world, though – that’s interesting enough to bypass the boredom. Many of the students threw themselves into drafting and redrafting their letters until they were clear and readable. The end product wasn’t always grammatically perfect, but for me, that was part of what made the letters so powerful. Here were kids on opposite sides of the world, pushing through the vulnerable act of writing in their second, third, or fourth language in order to forge a connection with each other. 

“My favourite food is pizza,” explained a 13-year-old in her opening letter. “Every time when we go to the mall with my mother, she always know that we don’t come back without a pizza.” 

As we went, I explained that letters were a kind of written conversation. To keep it going, you had to ask questions. Luckily, the kids had many. 

Do you eat meatballs? 

What kind of phone are you using?

How do you say pink in your language? 

Can you do a backflip? 

Does your place have an ocean? 

Are you magical and a dreamer? 

On the other side of the world, their correspondents fired back with queries of their own: 

Do you like to sleep? 

Where do you buy make-up in South Africa? 

How many kids are in your English class? 

Do you believe that there is life after you die? 

Does your name mean something?

If you could change something about your house, what would it be? 

In my pen pal-ing times, you dropped your letter in a mailbox. But South Africa’s postal service has a well-earned reputation for losing mail, so I opted for a 21st-century hybrid approach. The children handwrote their letters. Their teachers and I swapped photos of them, then printed them for the kids to read, misspellings and all. 

“I like so much mountain bicicle,” explained a letter writer in Mexico. “One time I went to the mountain with friends and one friend falled in a very deep hole ... and it was very difficult to get him out of there.”

The letters from Mexico arrived on graph paper, in a tight cursive that the South African students had never seen before. Much of the content was foreign, too. “What is ziplining?” someone asked me. “What is avocado toast?” 

Meanwhile, some South African children wrote that their favorite foods were pap and mogodu, not realizing that their pen pal’s mother wasn’t cooking the same dishes for dinner:  stiff cornmeal porridge and tripe stew for dinner.

But soon, the writers began to conjure their worlds for each other. 

“Alexandra is a very noisy place, overcrowded but really fun and exciting, because you get to know a lot of people,” one eighth grader in my class explained. “We really like to make our own words here, like when we want to say South Africa, we say ‘South Ahhh.’”

“I love going to the women’s march,” one student wrote. “On the 8th of march it is international day of women. Here in mexico it is not so much a celebration, it is more of a fight for women to live without violence and have the same rights as men.”

“My home is near an airport, so it gets noisy here sometimes,” explained a high school senior in the United States. “I’ve lived here most of my life, though, so I’m used to the sounds of the airplanes. Does [Alexandra] get noisy too?” 

And there were many pieces of childhood that transcended culture. 

Kids in all three countries loved learning dances from TikTok and annoying their siblings. “You’re right – KFC is delicious! affirmed one Mexican boy to his new South African friend.” 

In their letters, the children from each place wrote that  they aspired to become doctors, lawyers, and pilots. “I want to be a YouTuber and change the world,” wrote a boy in Mexico. 

Most of the exchanges fizzled quickly. Despite letters being exchanged virtually, the pace was glacial. There was spring break in one hemisphere, then winter break on the other. There were finals, field trips, cross-country meets. 

“Hello, hope you’re well,” wrote a 10-year-old girl in South Africa. “I’m fine but terrified at the same time. We are about to write our June exams and I haven’t started studying.”

Students at the private school in Mexico wrote about ski holidays in France. Students in South Africa talked about going home to the village to see their grandmothers. Questions hung in the air, unanswered. 

“I want to see how Mexico looks like and learn the languages you speak in your place,” wrote an eighth grader in my group in her final letter. “I want us to be best pen pals and see each other when we grow up. Do you have brown hair?” 

On both sides of the Atlantic, life moved on. And I was left with an international archive of childhood, in all its particularities and all its universality. There was, I could see clearly, so much more uniting the world’s children than dividing them. ■

Alessandra Seiter avoids driving. She doesn’t enjoy it, and concedes to not being very good at it. Seiter rides her bike to her job as a librarian at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and walks everywhere else.

That isn’t a risky lifestyle for Seiter to lead in Somerville. This densely populated Boston suburb has recently been on a streak: It’s gone three years without a traffic death, making it a prime example of what can go right in road safety.

“I’m not surprised to see Somerville really stand out as a traffic safety leader,” says Leah Shahum, founder and executive director of the Vision Zero Network, a national nonprofit that works to eliminate traffic deaths. “They’ve had really consistent and strong leadership in terms of really prioritizing safety over speed.”

Why We Wrote This

The United States struggles with traffic safety in comparison with the track records of other developed nations. There are some bright spots, such as the city of Somerville, Massachusetts, where use of road safety tools and community engagement has brought success.

Although traffic deaths in the United States have declined after surging during the pandemic, American streets remain hazardous. Some 36,640 people died on the road in 2025, according to government data. That’s about 100 people per day, and 12% higher than the country’s best year, 2014. The U.S. performs poorly compared with other developed nations, recording 12.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 2023. Only two other surveyed countries fared worse that year, according to the International Transport Forum.

Few places have had more success bucking those trends than Somerville. For roughly a decade, officials in this city of 81,000 people have focused on reducing car speeds, both by lowering limits and improving infrastructure. And it’s done so, proponents say, with a commitment to community engagement and working with volunteer residents to flag safety problems.

The city’s solutions are neither groundbreaking nor flashy. But they’ve worked. Last year, Somerville reported a 50% decline in car crashes causing serious injury, and crashes overall have decreased every year since 2022. Everything the city has done, transit activists say, can be replicated elsewhere.

“They are not using some magic toolbox in Somerville,” Ms. Shahum says. “They are really leaning into and committing to road safety tools that work best, and so many places could be doing that.”

Setting a vision and sticking with it

In 2017, Somerville – following in the footsteps of neighboring Boston and Cambridge – committed to “Vision Zero,” an international road safety initiative holding that smartly designed infrastructure can prevent all traffic deaths. The idea started in Sweden in 1997 and has since spread around the world. More than 70 other U.S. cities, including Savannah, Georgia; New York; and Portland, Oregon, have made a Vision Zero commitment, according to Vision Zero Network.

“We as humans do not have to accept the status quo that people lose their lives on the street,” says Brad Rawson, who has worked as Somerville’s chief transportation official for more than a decade.

Yet the city was eyeing safer streets even before Vision Zero. In 2006, a Massachusetts Highway Department report found the city had the most accident-prone intersection in the state. In 2016, Somerville lowered speed limits on most roads from 30 mph to 25 mph, taking advantage of a recently passed state law allowing lower speed limits in certain areas. Since then, the city has created more than 500 “safety zones” where the speed limit is 20 mph, according to a report by LiveableStreets.

Vision Zero, though, is about more than legal limits. Road infrastructure, proponents say, must encourage lower speeds – and accommodate human error. To that end, Somerville has made hundreds of changes to create what Mr. Rawson calls “physical traffic calming.” In 2025, Somerville installed more than 70 such upgrades.

Of those features, the speed hump has reigned supreme. Since 2019, the city has installed 139 of them. (Drivers can comfortably ride over these gradual mounds of raised road at about 15 mph – faster than they can traverse the steeper and taller speed bumps, which slow vehicles to a near halt and tend to be better suited for parking lots than roadways.)

“Speed humps work. They really work,” says Peter Furth, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University.

Data backs that up. On Laurel Street, a short residential thoroughfare, speeds fell from between 25 to 30 mph to less than 20 mph after speed humps were added. The number of vehicles hitting pedestrians has dropped citywide for years: Somerville reported 26 such collisions in 2025, compared to 40 in 2013. Fewer cyclists are being hit, too: falling from more than 60 in 2013 to 36 last year.

Other traffic-calming features included raised crosswalks, which can lower vehicle speeds and reduce the risk of someone getting hit by 45%, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Curb extensions – where curbs at intersections protrude into the street to shorten crosswalks – have also proven popular in Somerville.

Other cities have seen success using similar tools. Hoboken, New Jersey, just over the river from New York City, has gone nine years without a traffic fatality.

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To Seiter, the librarian, what sets Somerville apart is its commitment to meeting residents where they are. As chair of the Pedestrian and Transit Advisory Committee, Seiter hosts community walks around areas slated for new infrastructure so that residents can ask questions and make recommendations.

“What I see Somerville doing differently is recognizing that infrastructure is not going to be successful unless it is really meeting the needs of community members on the ground,” Seiter says.

Voices bounce off century-old farmhouse walls as actors rehearse for a theater production. Amid the gardens outside, picnic tables fill with attendees of a weeklong writing retreat. And across the grounds, students at a therapeutic school rest in the shade of a tree.

This scene among the pines and mountains of a small central Vermont town reveals how Plainfield, with a population of nearly 1,000 people, is finding a way to solve a problem vexing communities across the United States.

Just two years ago, this buzzing commons was an empty college campus.

Why We Wrote This

The closures of small colleges across the U.S. affect their towns’ economic, social, and cultural well-being. In Vermont, one community turned a shuttered campus into a different type of education destination.

Goddard College is one of nearly 2,000 federally funded higher-education institutions that have closed over the past 30 years – and one of 17 four-year private nonprofit colleges to shut their doors in 2024 alone. Small, private, rural colleges are most susceptible to closures due to a combination of declining birth rates and students increasingly choosing the labor market or urban institutions, experts say.

These numbers are only expected to grow. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education predicts that the number of high school graduates will steadily decline until 2041, reflecting a drop in births after 2007. This will likely lead to fewer traditional college applicants and more college closures. The communities these institutions call home often bear the economic, social, and cultural effects of their closures.

Plainfield is working to restore what it lost by partnering with a private investor and the state to reinvent Goddard

College as a vibrant community hub. The Creative Campus at Goddard redefines learning as something rooted in

collaboration, creativity, and continuous growth, offering one model for other struggling college towns.

“Just the act of interacting with others on challenging topics does wonders to develop remarkable people,” says Robert Kelchen, professor and head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Trying to fill a “cultural hole”

Colleges are often one of the largest employers in rural communities, Dr. Kelchen says. When they close, not only do faculty and staff lose their jobs, but the surrounding economy suffers as local businesses lose customers, which can trigger cascading job losses, prolonged economic depression, and population decline.

But college closures don’t just leave this “economic hole.” They leave “a cultural hole in the community” as well, Dr. Kelchen says.

Nathan Grawe, professor of economics at Carleton College in Minnesota, says the students, as well as the campus employees and their families, can strengthen local K-12 schools, for example.

The Creative Campus in Plainfield hopes to reimagine this cultural and intellectual life that Goddard College once brought.

After Goddard closed its doors in spring 2024, Michael Davidson, founder of New Hampshire-based property rental company Ledgeworks Inc., bought the 131-acre campus for

$3.4 million. He worked alongside town members and the select board to understand their aspirations and needs for the space and has redeveloped it for community use. The partnership now acts as an “umbrella lessee” overlooking other nonprofits that rent campus buildings, including youth support organizations, a community radio station, and a sustainable food network. Mr. Davidson and The Creative Campus board, many of whom are former Goddard faculty members, continue to create a space for people of all ages to live, convene, and learn.

In the former Goddard mail room, where students once collected letters and packages, neighbors now gather for dinner at the new restaurant. The campus rose garden has traded silence for the sounds of weddings and concerts. Colorful buildings that once housed Goddard students are now available to Vermont youth in need. The property’s manor house, once a Goddard College library and event space, now serves as a rehearsal space for the Goddard Institute of Dramatic Arts.

Barbara Vacarr, former Goddard president and now board member of The Creative Campus, and Kris Gruen, director of The Creative Campus and Haybarn Theatre Arts, say the Creative Campus repurposing works because it breaks down the historic divide between the college and its community. Rather than “turning inward” during difficult times, the campus meets genuine needs.

But the learning continues

Favor Ellis, executive director of Elevate Youth Services, a youth well-being and development nonprofit, found “kinship” through the integrated campus community.

“Proximity matters,” Ms. Ellis says. “It tells a young person, without anyone having to say it out loud, that they belong somewhere ordinary and alive, not somewhere set apart for people who need fixing.”

As the campus fills with new people and purpose, another idea has taken shape: Education doesn’t have to end when a college closes. The Creative Campus team emphasizes lifelong learning, project-based learning, and “learning by doing.”

“The hope is that learning happens in living in the community also,” Ms. Vacarr says. “That it doesn’t necessarily have to be a course that’s being offered, but there is this kind of informal learning that happens when you live in a community.”

Actors and writers swap stories, for example. Nonprofit staff on campus share advice with other organizations.

Ms. Vacarr and Mr. Gruen emphasize that while this model of repurposing is working at Goddard, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for towns that lose colleges. They believe successful campus repurposing requires collaboration, a coordinated system of state support and funding, and a private owner who understands regional needs.

“I think this is a moment where we all have to put our real collaboration and creativity into thinking and let go of our attachments to what has been, and really ask what can be now,” Ms. Vacarr says.