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What Your Taxes Are Paying For in Israel:

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What Your Taxes Are Paying For in Israel:

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This is my last article I will be reading and I wanted it to be on a topic that has affected our world most recently. That being said, I felt as if the Israel-Palestine conflict would be an effective choice for the state of our world currently. As the article claimed, this is the worst fighting in 7 years between Israel and Palestine. My interest stems from my Middle Eastern History class which I am taking this spring term. We also just recently covered the Israel-Palestine conflict and how it came to be. The things that Israel has been getting away with considering the treatment of Palestinians is mind-blowing. Israeli conduct in some areas accounts to “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution”. I believe that Palestinians have every right to fight back against the cruel regimes of Israeli rule. The US provides several billion dollars every year to Israel for military assistance which they unjustly use. I think that the Biden Administration has taken a timid approach to this situation. They have to find the courage to name an ambassador to Israel and find a way to call a cease-fire before this conflict escalates any further. If America is too slow to respond then we might find ourselves too deep in the conflict to resolve any issues.

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Since then the Middle East has been caught in a " Boomerang Syndrome," in which extremists on each side mount violent assaults, which ultimately lead to attacks against their own side as well. Hamas's past shelling undermined political moderates in Israel. And Israel's siege of Gaza destroyed a Palestinian business community that could have been a moderate counterweight to Hamas, while land grabs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem made the Palestinian leadership seem irrelevant.

It's true that force sometimes works. In my conversations in Gaza over the years, I've found that many Palestinians have complicated views. Some resent Hamas as oppressive and incompetent, and many dislike missile launches at Israel because they know they will face retaliation. Then again, they have endured economic distress, fear and funerals because of Israel, so some acknowledge a bitter satisfaction to seeing missile launches and anticipating that Israeli mothers will grieve as they do.

Israel's future security depends in part on good will in America and on some modus vivendi with Palestinians, yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has frittered both away. History suggests that Israel cannot consistently deter nonstate terrorists, but it can very effectively deter nation-states - so it should welcome a Palestinian state. Yet as extremism on each side foments extremism on the other, that possibility fades.

The Biden administration has been timid and restrained, slowing the U.N. Security Council's engagement on the issue, and it has yet to name an ambassador to Israel. But the stakes are too high for evasions, and President Biden should stand with others on the Security Council to demand a cease-fire before this escalates further.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken helpfully said "it's vital now to de-escalate." The administration should also express strong concern about the planned evictions of Palestinians that provoked the crisis. Dithering and vacillation help no one.

A basic truth of the Middle East is that anyone who predicts with any confidence what's going to happen is too dogmatic to be worth listening to. But for now it appears that the winners in the current fighting are Netanyahu, who may be able to use the upheaval to get another chance to continue as prime minister, and Hamas, which is showing itself relevant in a way that the Palestinian Authority is not.

Meanwhile, millions of Palestinians and Israelis lose, and the Boomerang Syndrome spirals on.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | Should U.S. Condition Aid to Israel on Reducing Conflict?

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Since then the Middle East has been caught in a " Boomerang Syndrome," in which extremists on each side mount violent assaults, which ultimately lead to attacks against their own side as well. Hamas's past shelling undermined political moderates in Israel.

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Everything Was Canceled in 2020. What about 2021?:

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Everything Was Canceled in 2020. What about 2021?:

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This article was a really great read and the overall tone was really hopeful. While it is true, that many significant events in the sporting world were postponed/canceled due to COVID-19, they are in fact coming back. Many of these events will return in 2021, but with modifications. The Tokyo Olympics are scheduled to begin on July 23rd, which is really exciting news for the sporting world. I can’t remember a time when the Olympics were delayed. As well, Wimbledon will begin on June 28th and they might even have a spectator capacity of 25%. To name a few others, The 125th Boston Marathon is scheduled for October 11th, The 105th Indianapolis 500 will start May 30th, and The Champions League Final will be held on May 29th. These huge sporting events are starting to help the world ease itself back into normalcy. Going to a baseball game is now becoming available to the public and I can’t wait to get my hands on some Boston Red Sox tickets this summer. Our world struggled for so long to bounce back and now our sporting world is making a comeback, and so will we. I’m really excited to be able to watch these events on TV again as it reminds me of just how much I missed them.

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From the French Open and the Tokyo Olympics to New York Pride, a look at which global events are canceled, postponed or moving ahead (with altered plans) in 2021.

The women's national soccer team for Japan leading the Olympic torch relay in March. After being postponed last year, the Olympics are scheduled to begin July 23. Credit... Pool photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon

Early last year, as international lockdowns upended daily life, they took with them, one by one, many of the major cultural and sporting events that dot the calendar each year. The N.B.A. suspended its season, the French Open was postponed for several months and the Tokyo Olympics were delayed a year. The future of the Glastonbury Festival and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival were in doubt. It was a bleak time.

Recently, as conditions in many places around the world have slowly begun to improve, and as countries have begun mass vaccination campaigns, some events and cultural staples have made plans to return, albeit with modifications. While few events, if any, have plans to go ahead free of restrictions this year, some are taking a hybrid approach. Others remain postponed or canceled.

Here's the status of some of the major events around the world.

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The Tokyo Olympics are set to start on July 23. Credit... Shuji Kajiyama/Associated Press

The Tokyo Olympics, which were delayed for a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, are scheduled to begin on July 23 with an opening ceremony. The bulk of the athletic events will begin the next day. The first round of Wimbledon begins on June 28 and will run through mid-July. Officials said they were working toward a spectator capacity of at least 25 percent.

The 125th Boston Marathon, which is usually held in April, is now scheduled for Oct. 11, and the 50th New York City Marathon is set for Nov. 7.

The 105th Indianapolis 500 will go on as planned on May 30. Officials will allow about 135,000 spectators in - 40 percent of the venue's capacity. The event was organized with state and local health officials and was approved by the Marion County Public Health Department, race officials said.

The French Open, one of the premier tennis competitions, has been postponed one week to a new start date of May 24. The decision was made in agreement with the authorities in France and the governing bodies of international tennis, said officials, who want the tournament played in front of the largest possible number of fans.

When the Premier League rivals Manchester City and Chelsea face off in the Champions League final on May 29, they'll do so in Porto, Portugal. The game had been scheduled to be played in Istanbul, but that would have ruled out attendance for most British fans, since Turkey is on a so-called red list of countries to which travel from Britain is discouraged.

Coachella was canceled in 2020, and again in 2021. Credit... Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated Press

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which typically draws big headliners like Beyoncé and is an annual pilgrimage for the more than 100,000 fans who trek to Southern California, is canceled again this year.

In January, organizers for the Glastonbury Festival said it would not take place this summer.

The Essence Festival of Culture, which usually draws more than a half million people to New Orleans over the Fourth of July weekend every year, will host a hybrid experience this year over two weekends: June 25-27 and July 2-4.

Headliners like Billie Eilish, Post Malone and ASAP Rocky will take the stage at the Governors Ball Music Festival, which is scheduled for Sept. 24-26 at Citi Field in Queens. Organizers say the event will return to its typical June dates in 2022.

Burning Man, the annual countercultural arts event that typically draws tens of thousands of people to Black Rock Desert in Nevada, has been canceled again this year because of the pandemic. It will return in 2022, organizers said.

After being canceled last year, the Austin City Limits Music Festival, the event in the capital of Texas, is scheduled to return to Zilker Park on Oct. 1-3 and Oct. 8-10.

Lady Gaga at the Met Gala in 2019. The event this year is scheduled for September. Credit... Karsten Moran for The New York Times

A delayed 2021 Met Gala, the annual benefit at the Metropolitan Museum that draws scores of celebrities and fashion-industry elites, will happen on Sept. 13. A second event is scheduled for May 2022.

NYC Pride 2021 will move forward in June with virtual and in-person events. The Pride March, which was canceled last year, will be virtual this time. ( San Francisco Pride, also in June, is planning similar adjustments, while Atlanta Pride is planning to hold an in-person event in October.)

The Lucerne Festival, which offers a range of events featuring classical orchestras, ensembles and more in Switzerland, will run from Aug. 10. In order to keep concertgoers safe, organizers said events will not have intermissions and its venue will have a limited number of available seats. Similarly, the Salzburg Festival in Austria kicks off in mid-July with modifications.

The Edinburgh International Festival, a showcase for world theater, dance and music in the Scottish city since 1947, will run Aug. 7-29. Performances will take place in temporary outdoor pavilions with covered stages and socially distanced seating.

The 145th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show will be June 12-13 in Tarrytown, N.Y., after plans to hold the show in February at its traditional site, Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, were canceled because of the pandemic.

E3, one of the video game industry's most popular conventions where developers showcase the latest news and games, will be virtual this year from June 12-15.

The New York International Auto Show, which showcases the newest and latest automobiles from dozens of brands, will run Aug. 20-29. The event last year was postponed and eventually canceled because of the pandemic.

The Cannes Film Festival in the South of France, one of the movie industry's most revered and celebrated events, has been postponed to July 6-17 from mid-May. The 2021 edition of the event, which was canceled last year, is currently scheduled to be in person.

After more than a year of no theater performances, Broadway shows will start selling tickets for full-capacity shows with some performances starting on Sept. 14. (Some West End shows will resume as early as May 17.)

After being virtual last year, New York Comic-Con will return with a physical event Oct. 7-10 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. The convention will run at reduced capacity to ensure social distancing, organizers said. This year's Comic-Con International event, which is normally held in July in San Diego, has been postponed until summer 2022. There are plans for a smaller event called Comic-Con Special Edition however, that will be held in person in November.

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Everything Was Canceled in 2020. What About 2021?

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From the French Open and the Tokyo Olympics to New York Pride, a look at which global events are canceled, postponed or moving ahead (with altered plans) in 2021. Early last year, as international lockdowns upended daily life, they took with them, one by one, many of the major cultural and sporting events that dot the calendar each year.

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The title of this article really caught my eye as I have two younger brothers whose favorite pastime when we were younger, was tattling on me. The article focused on the idea that there is a combination of the “struggle to distinguish what is minor rule-breaking situation and what is a major rule-breaking situation” as well as them “working on the development of their moral compass”. Most children can’t tell the difference between their sibling breaking a window, or their sibling using their colored pencils. To add to this, they are still learning what is right from wrong and what is acceptable to allow and what isn’t. This gave me some reason as to why my brothers told on me so much growing up. The truth is, that they were just younger and still developing their “moral compass”, so I didn’t understand that what I thought wasn’t a big deal, was a huge deal to them. I also think that children choose to tattle because they like getting praised for acknowledging wrong-doing. It also makes them seem very innocent when they run to their parents with something their sibling did. It’s because they want their parents to know that they would never do what their sibling just did to get themselves in trouble. It is a strange relationship but I thought it was really cool to get an understanding of the science behind “tattling”.

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The NYT Parenting Newsletter

There's a developmental reason behind children's obsession with rules.

Credit... Melissa Mathieson

My older daughter is obsessed with the truth. Talking to her sometimes feels like being cross-examined by the world's smallest and cutest litigator. Once I described something as "snobby" within her earshot and she hit me with a barrage of questions, "Why is it snobby? What did you mean by that? Why did you say it if you didn't really mean it?" Until she broke me and I told her exactly why I had said it (because something was very expensive and I was being judgmental and a little rude).

Because she is 8, the downside to her desire for accuracy is that she does not fully understand intention. She frequently accuses meteorologists of "lying" because the weather report is not accurate, and I gently explain to her that they're not lying, they're just ... wrong. She also loves to impose her definition of "truth" on her little sister, informing me and her father immediately when her sister falls short of her outsize expectations.

Other parents of 7- and 8-year-olds have told me about similar experiences ("Why is my daughter such a narc?" one mom asked), so I checked in with three psychologists to find out what's going on, developmentally, for kids in this age group.

It turns out children who are roughly elementary-school age are in a phase of cognitive development called the concrete operational stage, and at the same time, they are embarking on a journey of moral reasoning that will be ongoing for the rest of their lives.

The pioneering psychologist Jean Piaget observed that children who are roughly 7 to 11 are able to apply logic to concrete, or real life, situations but they struggle to apply their knowledge to hypotheticals. "Everything is very black-and-white, and they may struggle to distinguish what is a minor rule-breaking situation and what is a major rule-breaking situation," said Sally Beville Hunter, a clinical associate professor of child and family studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Alongside cognitive development, children are working on the development of their moral compass. Building on Piaget's ideas, a psychologist named Lawrence Kohlberg observed three levels of moral development: pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional. Preschoolers are mostly in the pre-conventional stage: They know what is right and wrong, but they are motivated to do "right" because of fear of punishment or desire for reward, Dr. Hunter said.

Children in elementary school are working on conventional development, which involves learning about societal rules and the emotions behind those rules. "Young kids acquire rules, but then over-generalize them - they apply those rules to everything," said Tina Malti, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, and director of the Laboratory for Social-Emotional Development and Intervention.

Dr. Malti describes the next steps of moral development as a "lifelong process" of developing empathy and weighing intention in complicated situations, which is known as post-conventional moral thinking. Even as adults, she said, we deal with ethical dilemmas, in which doing something to help one person may hurt another person, and there's no clear right answer.

So how do we set our kids straight when they keep calling the weatherman a liar? Here are some tips.

Talk it out. If your child is trying to apply a rule in situations where leniency would be more appropriate, unpack it together. For example, when my older daughter is giving her sister a hard time for not following the family rules about eating with a fork, we remind her that 4-year-olds are still learning, and that it's our job to remind her, kindly. "Ages 6 to 9 is a great window of opportunity for learning about others' needs and desires," Dr. Malti said.

"Sometimes these parents find themselves overwhelmed with their children's concerns of rules being enforced or everyone doing the 'right' thing all the time," said Stephanie F. Thompson, a research scientist at the Center for Child and Family Well-Being at the University of Washington. She said that if you have a kid like this, it's important to talk through instances when you're bending your own rules based on extenuating circumstances, or protecting someone's feelings. My daughter prizes honesty to the extent that we're still having discussions about why it's OK to keep it to yourself when you think Mom's shirt is hideous.

Mind the gap. At the same time, especially with siblings, always be mindful that you're not being harder on one kid than on the other, and that your rules are fairly applied, Dr. Hunter said. So if one child is telling you they think your rules are not being enforced on their sibling, hear them out. "Periodically examine whether you really do have a lot more harsh rules for your older child," she suggested.

Role-play. If kids are having trouble distinguishing between big transgressions and small ones, try to run through scenarios with them. Dr. Hunter gives the example of a problem at a friend's house: If a friend broke his crayon, you can let your child know that's something he can deal with on his own without running to an adult for help. If that friend is lighting things on fire, that's a situation where he definitely wants to tell a grown-up.

In moments when children are running to tell you about every little problem, Dr. Thompson recommends reminding them that they probably wouldn't like it if their friends were telling them what to do, and saying something like, "It can be risky to be a full-time hall monitor if your goal is to make and keep friends."

This, too, shall pass. Most children grow out of this phase when they've had more cognitive development and life experience. Dr. Hunter, whose children have moved past their intense moralistic phase, said, "I kind of miss it."

I see the upside to my daughter's moral outrage, too. She's been learning about smog and pollution in school, and is already nagging me to get a compost bin. I hope she retains some of that moral certitude even as she learns to see shades of gray.

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The NYT Parenting Newsletter There's a developmental reason behind children's obsession with rules. My older daughter is obsessed with the truth. Talking to her sometimes feels like being cross-examined by the world's smallest and cutest litigator. Once I described something as "snobby" within her earshot and she hit me with a barrage of questions, "Why is it snobby?

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Our 11 Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes:

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Our 11 Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes:

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This was probably my favorite article I’ve ever read in my life. To start, I’d like to say that I am probably the world’s biggest fan of chocolate chip cookies. My entire childhood is built around my grandmothers and my own mother making chocolate chip cookies for me when I did something good or when I behaved myself. When it comes to these cookies, I’ll try any type of recipe and love them all the same. I sent the link to this article to my mom and both of my grandmothers so they know what I’m expecting when I come home for the summer. In total, there were 11 recipes to try and all of them looked amazing. I’m extremely hungry writing about this right now and I really want a chocolate chip cookie. If I were trapped on an island and could only make one thing for the rest of my life, I would live and die by chocolate chip cookies. They are so simple, yet so amazingly tasty. I really wanted to include this article in my project so I could talk for a little bit about how wonderful chocolate chip cookies are. That is all.

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We've published many takes on the classic treat over the years, but these are the ones our readers return to again and again.

Alison Roman's shortbread chocolate chip cookies are a perennial favorite. Credit... Melina Hammer for The New York Times

It's a matter of great debate among chocolate chip cookie lovers: Chewy and gooey? Cakelike and tender? Crisp and crunchy? (Or maybe you're one of those people who likes to eat just the dough? We see you.) Whatever your preference, we've got a recipe you're bound to adore. Here are 11 of our readers' most-loved chocolate chip cookie recipes.

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This is what people are talking about when they refer to "The New York Times's chocolate chip cookie recipe." The cookbook author and writer David Leite adapted it from Jacques Torres to accompany a 2008 article about the science of making a perfect chocolate chip cookie. It's a tad fussy: You need bread flour and cake flour, and 36 hours to chill the dough for the best texture and flavor. But when we say the results are worth it, we mean it. (One food editor we know - ahem - baked 10 batches to give out as wedding favors.)

Impossibly tender and savory-sweet, these cookies were adapted from the chef Danielle Oron, a New Jersey native with Israeli roots who grew up drizzling her bowls of vanilla ice cream with lightly nutty tahini.

Recipe: Salted Tahini Chocolate Chip Cookies

Legend has it that Ruth Wakefield accidentally invented the chocolate chip cookie at the Toll House Inn, her popular restaurant in eastern Massachusetts. She was experimenting with making a chocolate drop cookie, but, in a rush, skipped melting the semisweet chocolate. Instead, she broke it apart with an ice pick and added it to butterscotch cookie dough. This version is very close to the original - Wakefield's called for a teaspoon of hot water and ½-teaspoon-size cookies - and it's the one you will still find on the back of every yellow bag of Nestlé chocolate chips. It never disappoints.

Recipe: Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies

This recipe from the baker and blogger Sarah Kieffer features a clever technique: banging the pan on the counter a couple of times during baking. That simple trick creates crinkly, crackly edges and a soft, gooey center.

Almond flour is the only special ingredient required to make this gluten-free version of the Jacques Torres recipe. For even more flavor, toast the almond flour in a dry skillet over medium-low heat until golden and fragrant, then let cool before using.

Recipe: Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

Erin Jeanne McDowell baked more than 50 batches of cookies in her quest to develop a worthy vegan version of the famous Jacques Torres chocolate chip cookie. She used a combination of vegan butter, flaxseed meal, cane sugar and coconut sugar for a superb cookie that will make everyone happy.

Recipe: Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

The internet went wild for these chocolate chip shortbread cookies from Alison Roman when they were first published in her 2017 cookbook, " Dining In: Highly Cookable Recipes. " They are rich, crispy, crumbly and tender all at the same time, and the dough freezes like a dream. (Hot tip: There is no egg in the dough, so eat as many raw spoonfuls as you like.)

Recipe: Salted Chocolate Chunk Shortbread Cookies

This oatmeal-chocolate chip cookie recipe was born of an urban myth about a woman lunching at the Neiman Marcus Cafe in Dallas. She enjoyed the chocolate chip cookies so much, the story goes, that she asked for the recipe. "Two-fifty," the waitress said. Just $2.50! When the credit card bill arrived, she'd been charged $250. The story was later debunked, but in 1997, Neiman Marcus developed a recipe anyway and gave it away for free. It's a special cookie, rich with grated milk chocolate, semisweet chocolate chips, ground oats and chopped nuts.

Recipe: The $250 Cookie Recipe

This easy, foolproof chocolate chip cookie recipe from Sherry Yard, the former executive pastry chef at Spago, has more than 3,000 five-star ratings. Using chopped chocolate bars instead of chips means you get a lovely smattering of small shards and large chunks distributed throughout the cookie. Serving with cold milk is a no-brainer.

Recipe: Quintessential Chocolate Chip Cookies

For domed cookies ideal for gifting, try this recipe from Ravneet Gill. Rolling the dough into balls before chilling for at least 12 hours yields uniform circles with soft, chocolaty centers.

Recipe: Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

Adapted from the cookbook "Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar" by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, this recipe is here to make use of that single, sad banana on your countertop. These dairy-free cookies are chunky and packed with rolled oats, chocolate chips and walnuts.

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Our 11 Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes

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We've published many takes on the classic treat over the years, but these are the ones our readers return to again and again. It's a matter of great debate among chocolate chip cookie lovers: Chewy and gooey? Cakelike and tender? Crisp and crunchy? (Or maybe you're one of those people who likes to eat just the dough?

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Ellen DeGeneres Is Ending Her Show After Years of Dancing and ‘Be Kind’:

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Ellen DeGeneres Is Ending Her Show After Years of Dancing and ‘Be Kind’:

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This article was especially interesting to read because of how public the fallout of Ellen DeGeneres has been in the recent months. I only know of Ellen because of just how famous she really is. Plus, my grandmother absolutely loves her show and was devastated when I told her about the news of Ellen stepping away from the show. I grew up sitting in my grandmother’s living room with her watching Ellen give away prizes and have celebrities play crazy games. But, a shadow of doubt has been cast over Ellen recently as rumors of her being extremely rude to coworkers has come out. Many had claimed they confronted “racism, fear, and intimidation” while at work. As well, some had claimed they were sexually harassed by producers of the show. 3 high-level producers were fired from the show after an investigation was conducted by Warner Bros, the production company of ‘Ellen’. In my own opinion, I do believe that Ellen might have put up her “niceness” as a ruse. But, I don’t think she should be cancelled for these complaints against her. She is far enough along in her career where she can retire and live the rest of her life and she doesn’t need internet trolls watching her every move. I do think she should be held accountable, but definitely to a certain extent.

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An enduring daytime TV hit suffered a sharp ratings decline after complaints of workplace misconduct clanged against the performer's public image.

"The Ellen DeGeneres Show" lost more than a million viewers in the 2020-21 television season. Credit... Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times

With the announcement on Wednesday that she will end her long-running talk show next year, Ellen DeGeneres is stepping away from her biggest platform in a career that started in a New Orleans comedy club, led her to more than 30 Emmys and the Presidential Medal of Freedom and included a late phase during which she adopted Be Kind as a motto and brand name for products she sold to her fans.

Her decision followed a sharp ratings decline for "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," also known as "Ellen," which is in its 18th season. Since September, it has lost more than a million viewers, a bigger drop than any of her competitors have gone through this television season.

Once at the very top of her field, Ms. DeGeneres, 63, was bringing in roughly the same number of viewers as Maury Povich and Kelly Clarkson, daytime hosts who, until recently, did not give her much competition. "Ellen" has averaged about 1.4 million viewers in the 2020-21 season, a 44 percent decline from about 2.6 million last season, according to Nielsen.

The decline seems to have affected the bottom line. Between September and February, the show brought in $127.6 million in advertising revenue, according to the research firm Kantar. That was down from $163.8 million in the same six months in the previous season, a 22 percent decline.

The slide started shortly after BuzzFeed News reported in July that several former and current staff members said they had confronted "racism, fear and intimidation" at work. Several employees also said producers had sexually harassed them. After an investigation by Warner Bros., the company that produces the show, three high-level producers were fired.

Ms. DeGeneres apologized to her staff in the summer, when the show was on hiatus. On her return to the air in September, she addressed her viewers: "I learned that things happen here that never should have happened. I take that very seriously. And I want to say I am so sorry to the people who were affected."

That episode scored the biggest ratings for "Ellen" in four years. Then viewers started tuning out.

The on-air apology was also a rare moment of seriousness on a program known for its nonstop levity. For 18 years, it has been a daily hour of light jokes, cash giveaways and gossipy chats with Hollywood A-listers. Celebrities including Beyoncé, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Lange, Madonna, John Travolta, and Barack and Michelle Obama broke out their goofiest moves as they danced with the show's star.

"Ellen" was a natural outgrowth of Ms. DeGeneres's standup act. She started out as a lighthearted comic with an absurdist streak, a rare figure whose jokes were family-friendly in the blustery, macho comedy world of the 1980s, when the noisier Sam Kinison, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay drew the crowds.

Quietly, she was a groundbreaker, even early in her career. In 1986, Ms. DeGeneres was the first female comedian making her "The Tonight Show" debut to be invited by Johnny Carson to sit by his desk, a gesture of respect. More momentously, as the star of the hit ABC sitcom "Ellen" in 1997, she announced that she was gay.

It is an all but forgotten part of her story that her decision to publicly state her sexual identity nearly ended her career. Years after her sitcom had gone dark, Ms. DeGeneres was still at a low point. Jim Paratore, an executive at Telepictures, which was part of Warner Bros., believed she had what it took to be a hit on daytime TV. Managers of local TV stations initially did not think the same.

"I was not an easy sale; they were telling me I couldn't relate to housewives," Ms. DeGeneres said in a 2012 interview with The New York Times. "Jim wouldn't accept that."

Mr. Paratore introduced her to people at stations across the country, the affiliates agreed to carry "Ellen" - and it was a hit, often drawing an audience of roughly three million.

As the show went on, its host displayed more sides of herself. After the 2010 suicide of Tyler Clementi, a gay college student who was bullied, Ms. DeGeneres adopted her catchphrase, ending each episode with the words "Be kind to one another."

Be Kind by Ellen became a mini-industry. Subscribers to Be Kind who pay $197.96 a year receive four boxes, one for each season, filled with products from socially or environmentally conscious brands. The Be Kind Box now available includes "ice globe facial massagers" from the brand Aceology, a vegan leather shoulder bag from Samara and a reusable water bottle from Fill It Forward. The products are selected by Ms. DeGeneres.

The complaints about the "Ellen" workplace seemed to contradict the host's public image, and she suddenly found herself the subject of criticism. Social-media users combed through footage of her interviews to find spicy remarks she had made to celebrity guests, as if turning up evidence that the niceness was a ruse.

She noted all this in her on-air apology, telling viewers, "Being known as the Be Kind Lady is a tricky position to be in. So let me give you some advice. If anyone is thinking of changing their title or giving yourself a nickname, do not go with the Be Kind Lady."

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Wednesday, Ms. DeGeneres denied that the workplace allegations had anything to do with her departure, saying she had long known 2022 would be the final year of her talk show.

She had indeed hinted at pulling the plug in recent years. In a 2018 interview with The Times, she suggested she was weary of always having to put on a cheerful face and said she had been prepared to leave the show until her brother, the comedian Vance DeGeneres, persuaded her to stay on, arguing that people needed a break from the volatility of the Trump years.

She signed a new contract through 2022. And she reached a separate deal with Warner Media to create shows for its streaming platform, HBO Max, among other projects. Then things got difficult.

The pandemic probably didn't help the ratings for "Ellen." The restrictions forced Ms. DeGeneres to broadcast from her home part of last year, depriving her of the interactions with an often boisterous studio audience. She has been back in her Warner Bros. studio this season but has been stuck playing to large TV screens filled with images of audience members watching from their homes.

"Although all good things must come to an end, you still have hope that the truly great things never will," Mike Darnell, the president of the Warner Bros. unscripted television division, said in a statement on Wednesday. "'The Ellen Show' started as the little program that could and became an absolute phenomenon."

He added, "It was and is an indelible piece of the television landscape, and it will be sorely missed."

Even at the start, Ms. DeGeneres was more than just affable. In her career-making debut on "The Tonight Show," in 1986, she started with a joke that seemed harmless enough at first.

Setup: "My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was 60."

Punchline: "She's 97 today and we don't know where the hell she is."

Laughter. Applause.

And then came the kicker: "I'm kidding. We know where she is. She's in prison."

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Ellen DeGeneres Is Ending Her Show After Years of Dancing and 'Be Kind'

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An enduring daytime TV hit suffered a sharp ratings decline after complaints of workplace misconduct clanged against the performer's public image.

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Where is Country Music Making Room for Women?:

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Where is Country Music Making Room for Women?:

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I’m super excited to write about this article/podcast. As an avid lover of country music, I was really excited to listen to a podcast about the genre. However, it is true, country music favors a ton of big artists and does little to offer smaller artists a platform that they can build on. That was the main focus of the podcast. It talked a lot about how the genre is mainly male dominated and how hard it is for female country singers to involve themselves in places like Nashville, TN. I do agree though, that there are far too few female country singers that I hear on the radio, or even listen to myself. The podcast offered up some female country singers to listen to and I decided to do that because it couldn’t hurt. What I found was a plethora of talent and amazing music abilities. These women in the country music industry are extremely talented and I think they deserve a better shot when it comes to what gets on the radio and the hierarchy of Nashville. For me, country music isn’t about who is singing it, it’s about how the music makes me feel. Country music mellows me out and gives me a relaxed feeling. To be honest, I found many of the female sung country songs to be more relaxing and enjoyable. To close, I will now for sure be an advocate for the success of women in the country music industry.

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For the last several years, the obstacles female performers face in country music have been widely documented and discussed, yet conditions haven't improved much. The genre favors a handful of big stars, and offers few opportunities for growth to younger ones.

That said, recently some rising singers - Gabby Barrett, Carly Pearce, Ingrid Andress, Lainey Wilson - have found success on the historically inhospitable country radio airwaves. And TikTok has provided an avenue to getting heard that elides Nashville infrastructure altogether, allowing performers like Priscilla Block a side door to a wide fan base, and then a record deal.

On this week's Popcast, a conversation about the myriad ongoing barriers faced by women in the country music business, and the ways they are manifested in the music itself.

Guests:

Marissa Moss, co-author of the Don't Rock the Inbox newsletter and author of a forthcoming book on women in country music, "Where Have All the Cowgirls Gone?"

Natalie Weiner, co-author of the Don't Rock the Inbox newsletter and writer about music for Billboard and others

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Where Is Country Music Making Room for Women?

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For the last several years, the obstacles female performers face in country music have been widely documented and discussed, yet conditions haven't improved much. The genre favors a handful of big stars, and offers few opportunities for growth to younger ones.

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I thought this article was really easy to follow and I agreed with a lot of what it had to offer. I found it really interesting that they brought up the connection between physical activity and psychological well-being. I have noticed this in myself over the years. For example, I’ve never been a morning person, and I don’t plan on becoming one. However, there have been times where I woke up early for a workout and then I am filled with energy for the rest of the day. Waking up and working out is a really strong way to start your day and the energy it gives you is really strange. I also like to drink coffee when I’m feeling tired in the morning. However, I found that exercise in the morning gives me more natural energy so I don’t have to drink coffee all the time. Even something simple, like starting my day with some push ups and sit ups give me a much needed boost for my 8:15 AM english class. I think this article would have a positive influence on a lot of people looking for inspiration to work out. If you work out, plain and simple, it will increase the likelihood of your mental health becoming stronger. So, it’s a win-win.

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Physical activity can promote a sense of purpose in life, creating a virtuous cycle that keeps you moving.

Credit... Getty Images

Our exercise habits may influence our sense of purpose in life and our sense of purpose may affect how much we exercise, according to an interesting new study of the reciprocal effects of feeling your life has meaning and being often in motion. The study, which involved more than 18,000 middle-aged and older men and women, found that those with the most stalwart sense of purpose at the start were the most likely to become active over time, and vice versa.

The findings underscore how braided the relationship between physical activity and psychological well-being can be, and how the effects often run both ways.

Science already offers plenty of evidence that being active bolsters our mental, as well as physical, health. Study after study shows that men and women who exercise are less likely than the sedentary to develop depression or anxiety. Additional research indicates that the reverse can be true, and people who feel depressed or anxious tend not to work out.

But most of these studies examined connections between exercise and negative moods. Fewer have delved into positive emotions and their links with physical activity, and fewer still have looked at the role of a strong sense of purpose and how it might influence whether we move, and the other way around.

This omission puzzled Ayse Yemiscigil, a postdoctoral research fellow with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, who studies well-being. "A sense of purpose is the feeling that you get from having goals and plans that give direction and meaning to life," she says. "It is about being engaged with life in productive ways."

This definition of purpose struck her as overlapping in resonant ways with many people's motivations for exercise, she says. "Active people often talk about how exercise gives structure and meaning to their lives," she says. "It provides goals and achievements."

In that case, she thought, physical activity plausibly could contribute to a sense of purpose and, likewise, a sense of purpose might influence how likely we are to exercise.

But there was scant evidence to support those ideas. So, for the new study, which was published in April in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine, she and her colleague Ivo Vlaev, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Warwick in England, set out to find links, if any, between moving and meaning.

They began by turning to the large and ongoing Health and Retirement Study, which gathers longitudinal data about the lives, attitudes and activities of thousands of American adults aged 50 or older. It asks them at the start about their physical health, background, daily activities and mental health, including if they agree with statements like, "I have a sense of direction and purpose in life," or "My daily activities often seem trivial and unimportant." The study's researchers then checked back after a few years to repeat the queries.

Then, Dr. Yemiscigil and Dr. Vlaev drew records for 14,159 of the participants. To enlarge and enrich their sample, they also gathered comparable data for another 4,041 men and women enrolled in a different study that asked similar questions about people's physical activities and sense of purpose.

Finally, they collated and compared the results, determining, first, how much and how vigorously people moved, and also how strong their sense of purpose seemed to be. The researchers then assessed how those disparate aspects of people's lives seemed to be related to one another over the years, and they found clear intersections. People who started off with active lives generally showed an increasing sense of purpose over the years, and those whose sense of purpose was sturdier in the beginning were the most physically active years later.

The associations were hardly outsize. Having a firm sense of purpose at one point in people's lives was linked, later, with the equivalent of taking an extra weekly walk or two. But the associations were consistent and remained statistically significant, even when the researchers controlled for people's weight, income, education, overall mental health and other factors.

"It was especially interesting to see these effects in older people," Dr. Yemiscigil says, "since many older people report a decreasing sense of purpose in their lives, and they also typically have low rates of engagement in physical activity."

This study was based, though, on people's subjective estimates of their exercise and purposefulness, which could be unreliable. The findings are also associational, meaning they show links between having a sense of purpose at one point in your life and being active later, or vice versa, so do not prove one causes the other.

But Dr. Yemiscigil believes the associations are sturdy and rational. "People often report more self-efficacy" after they take up exercise, she says, which might prompt them to feel capable of setting new goals and developing a new or augmented purpose in life. And from the other side, "when you have goals and a sense of purpose, you probably want to be healthy and live long enough to fulfill them." So, cue exercise, she says.

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Physical activity can promote a sense of purpose in life, creating a virtuous cycle that keeps you moving. Our exercise habits may influence our sense of purpose in life and our sense of purpose may affect how much we exercise, according to an interesting new study of the reciprocal effects of feeling your life has meaning and being often in motion.

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McDonald’s Will Raise Wages at Some Restaurants to Attract New Workers:

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McDonald’s Will Raise Wages at Some Restaurants to Attract New Workers:

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This was an interesting read as I was once a part of the minimum wage earning employees in the U.S. McDonald’s is said to raise their wages from $11 to $17 depending on the location of the restaurant. However, these pay increases don’t affect 95% of the nearly 14,000 restaurants in the United States. So, in theory I think it is a good idea, it just won’t affect that many people. Plus I think it would help McDonald’s with their service a lot. When those workers are getting paid minimum wage to make food, they usually are not putting in their best effort. But, raise their pay to $17 per hour and they might start putting more care into their work. My first job was at an American Eagle Outfitters, which was a clothing store. While earning minimum wage, I still tried my best to give my best effort and treat customers with respect. But, at times it was really hard for me to find a reason not to scream at an annoying customer. I wasn’t getting paid enough to deal with an estranged customer who keeps trying to return an item without a receipt. This winter, I chose to move on from American Eagle to pursue a paying job that was more in the field I wanted to pursue for my future. I was hired as an Assistant Manager at Olympia Sporting Goods which is a smaller sports retailer in Worcester County and across the US. It is similar to a Dick’s Sporting Goods, just with smaller stock. So far, I love the job and I make above minimum wage for the position I hold which is really cool. Fashion and clothing have never really been my thing, so it was nice to transition into a job that was basically made for me. To close, I think earning more than minimum wage would give a positive incentive for workers to put in their best effort while clocked in.

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Competing with fast-food chains, restaurants and other businesses for workers, McDonald's said on Thursday that it, too, will raise wages at some restaurants in an effort to attract employees.

The company said it would increase hourly wages for current employees by an average of 10 percent and that the entry-level wage for new employees would rise to $11 to $17 an hour, based on the location of the restaurant.

The pay increases do not affect the 95 percent of the nearly 14,000 restaurants in the United States that are independently owned, only the 650 company-owned restaurants.

Responding to a tight job market and echoing a move earlier this week by the burrito chain Chipotle, McDonald's said it hoped the higher pay would attract as many as 10,000 new employees in the next three months, as the busy summer season approaches and dine-in restrictions are removed at many of its restaurants.

At its company-owned restaurants, McDonald's said the average employee wage would increase to $13 an hour, with some restaurants achieving an average wage of $15 an hour later this year. All company-owned restaurants expected to be at an average salary of $15 by 2024, the company noted.

Still, that falls short of the minimum wage of $15 an hour being demanded by the Fight for $15 organization, which is backed by the Service Employees International Union. The Fight for $15 organization is spearheading a strike by McDonald's employees in several cities across the country on Wednesday ahead of the company's annual shareholder meeting.

A leader for Fight for $15 dismissed McDonald's move to bolster wages, saying it wasn't enough.

"We've showed up to work day after day in the middle of a global pandemic, risking our lives without proper P.P.E. or paid time off to keep your stores open and corporate profits flowing," Doneshia Babbitt, a McDonald's employee in St. Louis and union leader, said in a statement. "You've called us essential for over a year, but your announcement today proves that you've seen us as disposable all along."

The strikes in 15 cities on Wednesday, she said, would go on as planned.

In 2019, McDonald's announced it would no longer use its powerful lobbying arm to fight attempts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour at the federal, state and local level. In a call with Wall Street analysts in January, the McDonald's chief executive, Chris Kempczinski, said the company was doing "just fine" in the more than two dozen states that had increased minimum wages in a phased-in way.

In fact, despite having many of its dining rooms closed or with limited capacity in parts of the country for much of the pandemic, the strength of McDonald's drive-throughs helped push its profit to more than $4.7 billion in 2020. It paid its shareholders more than $3.7 billion in dividends and spent another $874 million repurchasing shares before suspending the program in early March of last year.

Mr. Kempczinski agreed to cut his base salary in half last year, but his total compensation was still more than $10.8 million.

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McDonald's will raise wages at some restaurants to attract new workers.

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Competing with fast-food chains, restaurants and other businesses for workers, McDonald's said on Thursday that it, too, will raise wages at some restaurants in an effort to attract employees. The company said it would increase hourly wages for current employees by an average of 10 percent and that the entry-level wage for new employees would rise to $11 to $17 an hour, based on the location of the restaurant.

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‘I Feel Like I’m Just Drowning’: Surviving Sophomore Year 2020:

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‘I Feel Like I’m Just Drowning’: Surviving Sophomore Year 2020:

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This article was easy to relate to for me. However, the only difference was that it was the end of my junior year that got cancelled and moved to online. As a spring athlete, this was super stressful for me considering I was trying really hard to get recruited. My junior season was crucial for recruiters watching me and deciding whether they want me or not. When I found out we weren’t having a season, I was really worried. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be recruited at all because my process hadn’t really started yet. For some of my other friends, they already had offers from schools and were cruising through the recruiting process. Many of them even committed during the quarantine period which probably gave them a sigh of relief. For me, I didn’t have that relief. Every day during the spring was school, and then just baseball. I would work out and hit, as well as work on my outfield skills. All the while filming myself so I could send it to college coaches. I got a lot of coaches to respond to my emails, but it was always the same answer. “Hey Eric, we think you have some real potential and love the video you’ve sent us, but we really want to see you play in person to decide whether you are the right fit.”. While that seems like a positive response, I knew I wasn’t going to be playing any games any time soon till at least the summer. So, hearing that from coaches was tough for me because they all wanted to see me play, but I wasn’t playing, nobody was. However, once I reached the summer, I was able to start playing again and happily found a home for the next four years at Assumption University, where I will be playing baseball on a scholarship.

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Sarah in her room in April. She and her family contracted the coronavirus, and she spent the early days of the school year taking care of everyone. Credit... Kholood Eid for The New York Times

The Great Read

A group of high school students try desperately to make it through an isolated and dire year.

Sarah in her room in April. She and her family contracted the coronavirus, and she spent the early days of the school year taking care of everyone. Credit... Kholood Eid for The New York Times

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On Aug. 11, Sarah, a cheerleader at Hickman High School in Columbia, Mo., turned 16 and passed her driving test. Triumphant, she arrived home to a Happy Birthday sign in the front yard, a treat of beignets from a Creole restaurant and the news that her 17-year-old brother did not have pinkeye, as their mother initially suspected, but Covid-19. They all did, it turned out: Sarah, who asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her privacy; her brother; their 85-year-old grandfather; and their mother, a nurse practitioner who started having trouble breathing two days after her son tested positive. Sarah had thought she would first take advantage of her license to drive herself to cheerleading practice; instead, she used it to take her mother to get a coronavirus test, when her mother realized she was already too weak to drive herself. Then, a week later, Sarah's mother - who had not been leaving the couch and was having trouble finishing her sentences - told her she needed to be driven to the hospital. Her pastor and other members of her church would be checking in, but Sarah would have to look after everyone. That meant taking care of her grandfather, who had Parkinson's disease and some dementia, and her brother, who had autism. Could she do that? Sarah, whose eyes had grown wide, quickly recovered. Yes, she told her mother. Of course she could.

As Sarah drove to the hospital, she could feel her mother stealing looks at her face, so she focused on the music coming out of the car radio. They hugged goodbye at the entrance of the hospital, and then Sarah drove home. A few days after that, while her mother was still at the hospital, Sarah realized her grandfather was acting strange and confused - after she gave him a glass of water he asked for, he yelled at her that he had wanted something else. Some relatives spoke to him on the phone and made an assessment, and then Sarah was making another hospital run, this time to drop off her grandfather.

Now it was just Sarah and her brother, who played Xbox for hours in the living room while Sarah hid out in her bedroom, leaving only to pick up the endless amounts of food that neighbors and church friends were leaving at their doorstep. Sarah couldn't exactly say why, but it got on her nerves a little, all that food. Lasagna after lasagna, spaghetti in tomato sauce, more red food than she could shove into their small refrigerator. Didn't they know this virus could kill their whole family? Was it worth risking all that to leave their home, to come right to Sarah's door just to drop off another plate of cookies? "We're good," she said whenever anybody called to check in. How was her mom doing, they wanted to know. "She's getting better," Sarah said, even though she had no idea if that was the case. If somewhere deep inside she felt true terror, she put layers of protection between it and her conscious self; the fear was like nuclear waste that was buried far beneath the earth's surface for everyone's safety.

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At 8:14 on the first day of school, MacKenzie Everett-Kennedy, an A.P. World teacher, uploaded a welcome video for the class. In the video, Everett-Kennedy, dressed in a purple Hickman High T-shirt, launched into a modified version of the school's 76-year-old fight song. "Are we it? Well, I guess yes!" she chanted with a big thumbs-up. " 'Cause we're the A.P. scholars" - raise-the-roof hands - "of H.H.S.!"

Here, telegraphed loud and clear in the first 30 seconds of class, was Everett-Kennedy's teaching brand: endearingly dorky enthusiast. Everett-Kennedy - her students called her Ms. E.K., or among themselves, just E.K. - was a vocal figure in town and had publicly advocated remote learning that year. She had rallied her fellow teachers on social media to call the governor's office to demand that schools stay closed, especially given the high virus case rates in the community.

But an organized cohort of parents in town had raised concerns about the widespread suffering among their children when school closed so abruptly in March 2020: Their children had been sad, even seemed depressed. They weren't learning. They were isolated. Months later, research would confirm what parents already knew: Many kids were struggling. During March and April 2020, the number of reimbursement claims for adolescent mental-health treatment had roughly doubled, nationally, compared with the same months in 2019.

Everett-Kennedy understood that the beginning of the pandemic had been brutal for some of her students. She had faced unusual hurdles to try to re-engage them, while also managing the needs of her own daughter, Stella, who was 7 at the time. She and her husband had a side business, Papa's Cat Cafe, which added to the stress of the pandemic as business plummeted. To juggle her two jobs and child care, she wasted hours making schedule after schedule on Excel, all of which ultimately represented her failed efforts to impose order on an unmanageable new set of challenges.

But she felt, at the start of the new school year, that surely things would be better, not just for her but also for the students. "Now we all knew what to expect," she said. Maybe her students would even feel the same way she did - eager to find some purpose, to throw themselves back into the closest thing to a routine they could find. She was sure she could effectively teach her students, could find a way to connect with them for the help they needed, even in A.P. World, a whirlwind academic tour across millenniums. Many considered the class, which was taught by two teachers, a rite-of-passage experience, maybe even the most challenging course the school offered. "But it only seems like the hardest class," Everett-Kennedy always said, "because it's your first A.P. class."

Everett-Kennedy, who is 36, graduated in 2003 from Hickman High, a school in the middle of a town in the middle of a state in the middle of the country. Its student body, a third of which qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, drew from public housing, rural parts of town and the more affluent neighborhoods where many professors from the nearby University of Missouri lived. She saw, in a lot of her students, reflections of the teenager she had once been: a kid who relied on the school to help catapult her out of poverty, to send her on her way to her own dream job, which happened to be teaching. Every year, in the first week of A.P. World, she tried to bring that point home in a presentation she gave to her students, some of whose parents were academics and some of whose parents were out of a job or employed as factory workers at the 3M plant in town.

The presentation was on a concept called periodization: the chunking of history into different periods. This year, she created an online version of the personal presentation she always gave, breaking her own life into chapters. Her voice accompanied snapshots at different phases: the Rebel Years of middle and early high school, and then the Secret Scholar years, so-called because she kicked into high gear academically without making much of it to her friends. Everett-Kennedy's parents did not have college degrees, she told the students; her mother managed a gas station. "My family was poor," she said in the voice-over that accompanied an image of her and three girlfriends beaming in purple mortarboards. "We did not have a lot of money." She knew, she said, that she needed to do well to get scholarships to attend college.

Everett-Kennedy followed up the presentation every year by assigning an essay in which students were asked to divide their own lives into periods, an exercise that always jump-started her understanding of who they were: Students often seized the opportunity to whisper their concerns into the reeds of the assignment, to someone who was still, at that point, mostly an abstraction. Sometimes the essays revealed enough distress that Everett-Kennedy felt obligated to involve a counselor, if she was worried for their safety. In less stressful years, there was at least one student who triggered that protocol, and so she was not surprised that 2020 was no exception. A student named Suzanne, who also asked that her middle name be used, had divided her life into periods when she had dreams and more recent periods when she was overwhelmed with self-doubt - when she told herself she "could never be good enough for the world's harsh standards."

Charles had to give some credit to Ms. E.K., this little woman with the long brown hair and the side part, with the Stop Genocide in Sudan T-shirt and the peppy pep talks; she had a no-nonsense way of making it clear how much she cared. He had agreed to a one on one with her because he was inclined, from the outset, to like her. It meant a lot to him when she talked openly, on that first day of class, about her family's financial hardships. His father, especially when Charles was younger, had struggled to get by. "It's not nice to see that she suffered," he said. "But it's nice to see that someone else has."

When Everett-Kennedy spoke to Charles during that meeting, she tried to assure him that they could work closely together. She even opened up about how out of control she, too, sometimes felt these days. But in the end, Charles left the Zoom meeting uninspired. It felt forced trying to connect with someone he had never met in person - someone he had never even texted with. "It's hard to believe someone that you've only met through a screen," he told me. "Like what they're even saying." If he had to pick one word to describe the meeting, it would be: awkward.

Charles was pretty sure his teacher did not pick up on how he felt during their meeting, because he was a skilled performer. At school, in person, he was used to entertaining his classmates but also impressing his teachers, showing off his smarts, his mastery of the material. During the pandemic, he moved his personal stage to his bedroom, where he'd hung LED lights and a tapestry with a design that evoked some graphic novel's envisioning of another planet. From that room, he projected the image of a young man wildly amused and amusing. Yet sometimes, as soon as a friend hung up on FaceTime, his face would seem to collapse - to close down, as if some emotional gate had abruptly slammed shut.

Before the pandemic, he would have said he was a kid who was on track for a scholarship down the road, maybe even at a college like Northwestern, where his father studied briefly before transferring out. When he became obsessed with the musical "Hamilton" in seventh grade, he went ahead and read the Federalist Papers just to see what they had to say. He starred as Macbeth in a production at school and liked it so much that he read other Shakespeare plays for fun. He never wanted to sound conceited, but in the past, he would have said that school came easily. At the same time, he sometimes found all of it overwhelming. As a Black teenager now approaching six feet, he was acutely conscious of how the expectations of his mother - a school administrator with a Ph.D. - ran up against the expectations of the rest of the world. "To keep proving these stereotypes wrong," he said, "it takes a lot out of me."

And then last spring, when the school closed its doors, he found himself alone with thoughts that had been waiting, it turned out, for just that kind of opportunity - for vast amounts of time and space. These new thoughts flooded in, leaving little room for concerns about Othello's motivation or the subjunctive in French. More and more, when he was alone in his room, there was only one voice, and that voice was telling Charles that he was doomed to fail no matter how promising his start, that he would surely follow what he perceived as his father's downward slide. His destiny was failure.

In the very first days of the school year, Charles's laptop kept crashing during Zooms, which started to feel like a metaphor for what the whole year would bring: a big mess, a disconnect, a technological headache that he was left on his own to solve. In the weeks that followed, the days loomed empty and long; the more time that voice had, the louder it grew and the harder it was to get out from under it. Because he did all his work in his bedroom, it was easy to go back to sleep after his first class, if he made it to his first class. "Then when I woke up, I could either a) get up and do what I had to do," he said, trying to capture his typical schedule, "or b) look at the time, be disappointed in myself and go back to bed." During remote learning, attendance did not factor into a student's final grade. Charles wasn't just skipping class, though - he was barely turning in any assignments. And suddenly, there he was, no longer a kid who got A's but already a kid who had blown it this early in the semester.

The voice in his head exhausted him, so Charles started sleeping more, even during the day. Sometimes the voice scared him. His heart would start pounding, and he would feel overwhelmed with a sense of impending crisis: It was all over, and there was nothing he could do about it. It was too late.

How was E.K. possibly going to get him out of the hole he was in? She had no sense of how vast it already was. Even still, in early October, he decided to linger after class, on Zoom, when she offered to help any students who were falling behind. At a minimum, he could tell his mother that he'd made an effort. He stayed, and so did Sarah, a classmate everyone liked. She did Cheer and he played J.V. football, but they didn't move in the same circles. She was really smiley - he thought of her as one of those happy-all-the-time people.

When Sarah stayed after class to attend that extra-help session with Ms. E.K. in early October, she was surprised to see that Charles was there too. Charles, she had already gleaned, was smart. He often had an answer for whatever Ms. E.K. asked; in fact, the students had quickly come to rely on him to save them all from the silences that often hung in the air in their online classes. As they talked with each other and Ms. E.K. that day, Charles and Sarah quickly found common ground and diagnosed their shared problems: lack of motivation, loneliness, a feeling of hopelessness. Charles suggested that maybe Sarah needed some help, to which Sarah said: What about you?

During that conversation, Sarah told the first of many lies that she would tell her teachers, her mother and herself over the coming months. OK, she would say, I am ready to turn over a new leaf. Now I'm really going to apply myself. But she still rarely made it to class. If her laptop died in the middle of a Zoom, she decided that was God's way of telling her she had done enough for the day. About six weeks into school, her mother, her health still shaky, her mind still foggy, looked at an interim academic assessment that landed in her email inbox and said, "What do all these N.H.I.s mean?" Sarah said, "Huh, I don't know," as if trying to decode one of the great bureaucratic mysteries of her time, when in fact she knew exactly what they stood for: not handed in. She grew accustomed to emails from teachers piling up. "Just making sure you saw. ... " "A reminder that your essay. ... " Everybody wanted something from her. Whoa, whoa, whoa. She was going to get back to them - eventually.

She had a soft spot for Ms. E.K., who showed up at class looking a little wild some days, Sarah thought, hair in that messy ponytail, tired eyes, Diet Coke always beside her. Sarah liked it - that she was letting herself be relatable. At least she always showed up; some teachers just popped into class, said, "Tough day today - no Zoom," and checked out.

To encourage Sarah to come to class, Ms. E.K. tried sending her corny encouraging Bitmojis. One featured an image of Ms. E.K. - long brown hair, side part - with a rising sun behind her. "Wake up my little bonbon!" Ms. E.K. wrote in the text. "Time to get crack-a-lackin!" Class started at 11:10; by the time Sarah woke up and saw the text, it was already noon.

Sleep always seemed to be there for her; the heaviness of home was like a blanket she could crawl under at any time. Her mother's Covid had turned into a pneumonia that dragged on for weeks. Her mother was working on breathing exercises well into October and also getting help from a speech therapist - it was as if there was cotton blocking the connection between her brain and her vocal cords. And she kept forgetting things, like where she put her keys. It drove Sarah crazy.

Her brother hadn't said much of anything about his fears when their mom was most sick, but now, out of nowhere, sometimes he said things like "I'm glad Mom did not die in the hospital, because that would have been very upsetting." Sarah had not been able to say aloud the part of all of it that was haunting her the most - which is that she felt guilty, even ashamed. That day she went to take her driver's test in August, she was exhausted and her eyes ached, which she realized only later were probably symptoms of the virus. She had even gone to Cheer practice. What if she gave someone the virus who gave someone else the virus? What if someone died because she had not even realized she was sick?

In mid-October, her mother wrote to Sarah's Cheer coach to ask how her daughter was doing. "That is a loaded question," the coach wrote. "She seems to be getting a spicy attitude. Eye-rolling, exasperated, complaining - just out of the norm for her." Sarah had probably taken her hospitalization harder than either of them realized, her mother wrote back, adding that she had never seen Sarah's grades so low before. She was failing two classes.

Sarah felt betrayed that the coach criticized her to her mother - but she also knew she had not been herself at practice. Even she was surprised to hear the things that were coming out of her mouth. That fall, when a girl on the team was crying with frustration over how hard they all were being pushed, Sarah said to a friend, loudly enough that the girl could hear, "We don't need any babies on this team." At a different point, she would have beaten herself up about speaking so harshly, or more likely, she never would have said that in the first place; now she saw it happen as if from a distance, her own feelings at a remove.

As her mother recovered, Sarah tried to keep an eye on her brother: Was he supposed to be in class instead of watching videos on YouTube? She gave her grandfather and her brother lunch, cleaned up the kitchen when her mother was obviously too tired. She could summon the energy for that, but not much else many days. Instead of logging onto class, she either dozed or watched hours of Netflix in her room. "The Vampire Diaries" was her favorite. She related to the vampires, because they could turn off their emotions - turning off their humanity, they called it.

When Sarah pictured depression, she imagined some girl in a movie, sobbing in the shower and pulling at her hair. That wasn't who she was - but slowly it started dawning on her that maybe she was depressed all the same. She kept going to Cheer, but back at home, when she was alone, she felt as if she were sinking lower and lower. When she went to a pediatrician that fall, she told him she was doing well. But that wasn't true. "If I was being honest, I need a lot of help," she told me. "Because I feel like I'm just drowning in a pool." She could see that people were trying to help. "But their hands are slipping, and I'm pulling myself down," she said, her voice breaking. "And you cannot swim. You cannot swim up."

On Nov. 9, the Columbia school board convened to debate the possibility of opening schools for in-person learning, a meeting Everett-Kennedy attended so she could personally stand at the lectern to defend teaching remotely. Yes, there were challenges, she acknowledged, but she insisted that teachers were working it out. "Students are learning!" she said, raising her arm and pointing her finger with the kind of energy she ordinarily relied on to keep students alert. "They are!"

A good number of her students seemed to be coping with the change in routine, and some were clearly thriving, including a student named Dejanai, who was turning in A paper after A paper, even though she had a lot of responsibility for a 9-year-old sister with A.D.H.D. while her mother worked at Target. Everett-Kennedy was so pleased with Dejanai's work that she sent her mother an email just to say, "She brings sunshine to my day, as cliché as that sounds." Dejanai, who spent a lot of time with her girlfriend, didn't miss in-person school at all; being in class with all those professors' kids could sometimes intimidate her into silence. Instead of meeting with Ms. E.K. in front of her desk as other students trickled in and out of the classroom, she could talk to her privately from the safety of her home. Sometimes, Dejanai's tiny dog, a Maltese that she dressed up, made an appearance, or Everett-Kennedy's daughter popped in with the family's new longhaired kitten.

But Everett-Kennedy could not deny that many more students seemed to be struggling. And she was starting to wonder if there was anything she could do about it. She had never better appreciated that school was more than just a building; it was like a community-ordained safe space, a place where her students could experiment messily in the exercises of adulthood, with stakes that felt high even as they were safely low. It was as if the students en masse created a collective force field that held them all up, kept them on track; there was power in conformity, in streaming into the building at the same hour, reaching into their backpacks at the same time for their homework. So much of the life that goes into learning had gone out of their days: the moment when she could see, from her doorway, a girl fiercely hugging her friend goodbye right before class, or a teenager giggling with adrenaline, bolting into the room and falling into his seat seconds before he would be marked tardy. She felt the loss of all the tiny moments of intensity, of limits-testing, all the emotion that a regiment of bells and schedules kept contained, if barely.

In recent years, whenever she faced disengaged students, she had been able to meet with them in person - to forge relationships that allowed her to help them succeed. But now there were so many she just couldn't reach - she barely knew who they were. She understood how self-conscious teenagers were and had given up on having them turn their cameras on every day. But that meant that since the start of the school year, she had come to know students mostly through whatever they had to say in class - for some, precious little - and the frozen, smiling images they had chosen to project, if they even posted a photo. Some days, only about half the students in the class popped in. Of the 101 students enrolled in the two A.P. sections taught by her and a co-teacher, Joe Henke, at least 10 had never turned up even once.

'They all tell me the same thing: They're struggling. They're sad. They're overwhelmed. They're hurting. They're not learning.'

Every time they started a new unit, she tried to tell the students: Now we're having a fresh start. What's done is done. Let's just move forward. She sensed that her students felt some relief when she put it that way, but as the weeks wore on, it was becoming harder to convince even herself that they were going to be able to make things right. She was shocked on Nov. 10, when a major essay was due: At least a third of her students, including many with whom she thought she had developed a solid rapport, did not turn it in. Ten days later, that was still true.

For Everett-Kennedy, school was usually what she considered "a locus of control," a near-sacred zone where she excelled; now it was taking more and more energy to fight off her own sense of failure, which was frustrating because she had never worked harder. For the first time in her career, she offered a few students her cellphone number. She had previously guarded that boundary carefully; now she was willing to give her students another way to connect.

Among the shifts wrought by the pandemic were millions of tiny personal upheavals in the lives of teenagers, including altered circles of friendships, some of which were reconfigured simply by the hours they kept. That was true for Charles and his friend Catherine, a 15-year-old he first met in seventh grade at a camp run by a megachurch in town. Charles and Catherine, who also asked to be identified by her middle name, drifted apart in ninth grade, but during the pandemic their friendship deepened. Charles has two older sisters, but with all three of them hunkered down in their bedrooms for most of the day, he often felt lonely. Unsure of when a panic attack was going to kick in, he would reach out to Catherine at 2 or 3 in the morning to keep himself from his own thoughts; she was one of the kids who, like him, was almost always up at all hours of the night, sleeping for chunks of the day. She'd grown accustomed to the role of talking him down when he needed to tell someone how bad things had gotten; some days, he confided to her, he was not sure how much more he could take.

Catherine played baritone saxophone in the wind ensemble, had been playing goalie on soccer teams since she was 7 and was, like Charles, taking a challenging roster of honors and A.P. courses. But by December, soccer was over, wind ensemble felt dumb on Zoom and her grades were slipping because she kept putting off assignments. It ate at her, especially because sophomore year was when her older brother's grades also started to drop - and then he dropped out of school his junior year. Her father, who did not graduate from college, did not put a lot of pressure on her, but she wanted to be more like her sister, who was studying education at the University of Missouri. Whenever she was behind on an assignment, she grew anxious, which she coped with by sleeping, which was easy to do because she was alone all day while her father, who was in charge of upkeep of an office park, went to work. Her parents divorced when she was in sixth grade, and since then, for reasons she generally kept to herself, her family had distanced itself from her mother.

Catherine and Charles often kept each other company late at night on FaceTime, saying little, each quietly pecking away at some assignment while taking breaks to watch TikTok videos of kids ranking their favorite anime characters or talking about their own pandemic blues. Catherine gave Charles a hard time about the onesie pajamas he rotated among, one of which gave him the look of a polar bear, all four of which had hoods; Charles made fun of her five-foot-tall stuffed bear, a gift from a rejected suitor, which she often leaned against when they spoke, as if in its embrace.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, they broke into a "Hamilton" rap battle; sometimes they talked about Ms. E.K., who had not exactly won Catherine over: She thought of Ms. E.K. as some kind of steamroller decorated with hearts and flowers, piling on work, all the while talking about how much she cared. And sometimes they talked about what Charles was going through with his father. Even when they didn't talk about their parents, they had what Charles called "a tacit understanding."

When Catherine was on FaceTime with Charles, she angled her camera to be sure he couldn't see the contents of her room: a pile of laundry as high as her bed, a collection of empty cans of Monster Energy still sticky with residue, the floor so thick with who-knew-what that if she heard a sudden crunch beneath her feet, she just kept going. She was embarrassed about all of it but could not even imagine doing something about it. Days were going by when she never even managed to get out of bed. Many nights, her father brought her dinner, opening the door and quietly leaving her food on the desk. "He knows I'm not very good at accepting help," she said. She did wonder whether he thought she was depressed or just lazy. She wasn't sure which would make her feel worse. She usually tried not to worry her father about anything, because he had enough to worry about - her older brother, helping out her older sister with tuition and rent and car payments. Catherine felt bad about adding to his burden with the things she needed - $20 a week for music lessons, money for gear like cleats and shin guards for soccer.

It was easier for Catherine to be the voice of reason with Charles than it was for her to talk openly to him about how she was feeling. "Charles sees me as tough," she said. "And therefore I don't like to be anything else besides that." But that didn't mean she did not feel just as low or as afraid. "This is just how it is," she said one day, her sentences coming out in halting phrases as she cried. "Usually I don't show emotion until something triggers me, and then I'm a complete mess. It's like - conceal, conceal, conceal, then mental breakdown, then back to being fine again."

Sometimes, that trigger was a photo that her mom might text her on a day when Catherine happened to be feeling lonely. Once, her mom texted her a picture of the two cats Catherine grew up with, a tabby and a calico that lived with her mom. She missed those cats - she loved them. "Because cats, when they see you crying, they come over to you," she said. When her mother sent her pictures of them, it was overwhelming - she felt a rush of emotions, all of them confusing. Sometimes the photos had no accompanying words, so Catherine could read anything she wanted into them: a taunt, a lure, a longing.

The last thing she wanted to do was explain to Ms. E.K. why her assignments were so late. Ms. E.K. would probably make her talk to some counselor, and nothing that counselor would say or do, she thought, would make any difference at all.

At some point midway through the first semester, Charles's mother opened the door to his room, took a good look at the detritus of weeks' worth of takeout food - a record-breaking collection of burger wrappers, the ketchup ground deep into the perfectly good rug in his room - and felt an overwhelming sense that things had clearly gone too far.

In November, when she started to realize that Charles wasn't keeping up with his schoolwork, she tried to tell herself that he wasn't failing at school; he was surviving a pandemic. She took heart in seeing him manage to get out of bed to play video games, and she felt relieved that he was at least connecting that way with some friends. Although the schools were closed, sports, for the most part, continued on. When J.V. football ended, he socialized with fellow members of the wrestling team. Even after a knee injury sidelined his season, he kept going to practice, which was perfect, as far as she was concerned: Charles could feel more like himself with his friends, but he wouldn't be smushing his face right up against another wrestler.

She tried not to think about his grades. In fact, she made a point of not looking at them. But as the months wore on, her frustrations started building. She had come out publicly in favor of remote learning - and was out there, as a school administrator, trying to push back against the movement of state legislators and parents telling her that children couldn't learn outside school. The school where she worked served many Black and Latino students, whose families, she knew, were especially vulnerable. In early March 2020, she herself had what she is now sure must have been Covid. At the time, she was having so much trouble breathing that she isolated in her bedroom and "just prayed: Lord, I can't leave my babies all alone," she said.

She wanted to protect her teachers and students at all costs. But here was Charles, her own child, who seemed miserable and unable to thrive with remote learning. He explained that he needed the threat of looking a disappointed teacher in the eye, in person. He needed to be around other kids sitting in desks and handing in their homework so that he, too, would hand in that homework - would not, in fact, be caught dead not handing in that paper. It irked her - angered her, on her worst days - that her son might have looked to the outside world like some case study in how remote learning let students down. Like so many parents she was hearing from, she was annoyed that when he was home, her child was not even leaving his room. "If you had a port-a-potty in there, I wouldn't see you for weeks," she told him.

The first week of December represented a new turning point for Everett-Kennedy, who was seeing in her students a level of darkness that left her feeling flat-out terrified for them. "I'm really scared," she told me. Parents were reaching out. Students were asking how they could access counseling - that week alone, she estimated, she was aware of 10 students in her two A.P. classes who were in crisis. "It was too much," she said later, looking back. "Too, too, too, too much." The sheer volume of their needs was troubling to take in - and to take on. It was demanding work, with a heavier emotional load than her $50,000-a-year job normally required. Every one of those crises required multiple email conversations with the parents, with the student, with the counselor, and not one of those emails could be written with anything other than the utmost care and sensitivity.

Only looking back was she able to talk about the toll that the previous months had taken on her. The pandemic was straining her marriage, which was sapping some of her usual high energy. And not long after the start of the school year, her own rhythms shifted toward the students' late hours. She started waking up just minutes before class, feeling that it was a slog simply to get to the laptop. Her daughter's lunch break for school started in the middle of one of her own classes, requiring her to step away from her students for a few stressful minutes. "You need to eat your damn lunch," she yelled at Stella more than once. She stopped wearing makeup and some days didn't even brush her teeth.

Engaging with the students who were in crisis drained her in some ways but focused her in others - even helped her channel the intensity of her emotions. "I could throw myself into supporting my students to distract me from the ways I was struggling," she said. "So in some ways, and this might sound trite, helping them helped me." She spoke openly to students and parents about the benefits of therapy, of how positive it had always been for her. But she did not tell them that she had started having a relapse of panic attacks, which left her doubled over, heaving with sobs, drained. "I did not feel I could tell them," she said, "because they needed, this year, for me to put on that brave face and just plow through."

On Dec. 3, Everett-Kennedy wrote an email to Charles after a series of exchanges in which he made it clear he was suffering. "When can we chat sometime? I am NOT OK with you sliding into this pit of despair. You are not so far behind that this can't be fixed (and quickly with some narrowed efforts!)." She offered some solutions for how they could work together and then reminded him she was there for him. "Giving up is not OK," she wrote. "I won't let you give up on your school potential and dreams. And I'm not giving up on you." Charles wrote back: "Dear Mrs. E.K., I can meet with you whenever to talk about it, and I'm sorry for not being a better student. This year has been rough, to say the least."

A few days later, she noticed that he disappeared abruptly from a Zoom class. Concerned, she turned instruction over to her co-teacher and took a break so she could text Charles. He texted back and admitted that he was having a panic attack; he was alone in the bathroom, crying. Eventually, she learned that right before class, he received a text from his father, the first in many months. Charles apologized to her for being so distressed. "I'm sorry I get in my head a lot," he wrote. She replied: "Yep. I get it." She took a deep breath and explained that she was going to have to call his mother and a school counselor to let them know she was worried about his mental state. If she didn't hear from him or his mother in the next 15 minutes, she thought, she would get in the car and drive to his house. She texted Charles to ask if he was OK. She anxiously waited for his response. "I am right now while I listen to music," he finally wrote back. "I'm so disappointed in myself that I let myself get to this point."

Around the same time she had that exchange with Charles, Everett-Kennedy checked in on another A.P. student she'd been worried about. She had heard from a teacher that the girl seemed depressed, and she knew that she had dropped an after-school club to which she had previously been fairly committed. Everett-Kennedy heard back from the student around 11:30 at night. "I'm gonna be honest - I'm not doing great, haha," the student emailed. "Thank you for your grace - I really am trying. I'm not lazy, just depressed and unmotivated, ha." She had lost her taste and smell back in November, following a bout with the virus, and it still had not come back. She hoped she wasn't oversharing, she told Everett-Kennedy, but the pandemic had been hard on her family in a few ways. Her mother, with whom she was close, had just come home from a month in rehab.

Even though it was late, Everett-Kennedy emailed her back. She had already crossed many personal lines this year. Whatever she had to give, she was, in those raw, dark weeks, ready to give, and in this particular moment, that was a piece of her own history. "Whenever you have a family member who is in the hospital and sick or has a long-term illness, everyone shows up with a casserole," she wrote, calling on helpful comments someone offered her years earlier. "But you know what? If you have a family member in rehab, ain't no one gonna show up with a casserole." She knew what that felt like from firsthand experience, she told the girl, because her own father was an alcoholic for the duration of her childhood, unable to keep a job or pay child support. She was sharing this with the student, she said, because she wanted her to know that she should feel zero shame about any of it. And that none of it defined her. "So my sharing all this is me bringing you a casserole," she told her. "You are not alone."

"I let my own flaws and mistakes take over my mind and my emotion," wrote Suzanne. Credit... Kholood Eid for The New York Times

On Jan. 9, Suzanne, the student who wrote about her loss of self-confidence in her periodization essay at the start of the school year, realized she was going to miss another deadline, one more failure alongside all the others that had been weighing heavily on her mind for months.

She had been feeling that something was wrong - really wrong - since the summer, but when the therapist her pediatrician recommended was not available, somehow her mother lost steam in finding her another.

Suzanne knew that her mother thought she was just moody, even prickly. But she wished her parents understood that it was hard to be someone other people liked when you didn't really even like yourself. She couldn't exactly explain that to them - or even share just how low she felt. It was somehow ... embarrassing. She found it easier to express herself in that essay back in September, when she wrote that she was in the Era of Chaos. "I let my own flaws and mistakes take over my mind and my emotion," she wrote, referring to her "declining mental health." Her composition triggered a meeting that Suzanne, her mother, Everett-Kennedy and Joe Henke attended on Zoom.

Suzanne did start seeing a therapist after that, although a lot of what she was asked to do really annoyed her - like drawing charts and circles with lines showing how one thought got her to another one. How was she supposed to know where the thoughts came from? They were just there: She was not good enough. Her life was a waste. All she did was bring people down. Sometimes she couldn't sleep all night, nights that rattled her. She stared up at the ceiling in the dark, with the same ideas batting her consciousness over and over. She had always grappled with intrusive thoughts about worthlessness, but it used to be that eight hours a day, her head was filled with something else - teachers talking about their weekends, going over homework assignments and showing her how to calculate the length of a hypotenuse; friends in the cafeteria complaining about their parents or listening to her complain about hers over a bad piece of lunchroom pizza. Now there were just her thoughts - they had the advantage, and she sometimes felt she could not go on coexisting with them for much longer.

On the evening of Jan. 9, Suzanne's father, a former police officer who now maintained the department's fleet of cars, took her to his office so she could finish an assignment and use the printer. Her dad was working in the garage next to the office, and she could hear his country music playing as she picked up her notebook and a black pen. If she was to keep going, she needed to justify the reasons. She made a T-chart and labeled one side pros and the other side cons. If she gave up, she wrote on the side marked pros, then her father could take the money the family was saving for her college education and buy himself the Toyota Avalon she knew he always wanted. The two went to car shows a lot, and he often talked about his fantasy of taking a road trip in a car like that. That was how she showed the people she loved how she felt - she gave them things. Another argument in favor of giving up: She would no longer have to live with the feeling that she did nothing but disappoint herself. She had to think for a moment about what to put on the other side of the chart. She wrote that she was looking forward to going to school out of state. Also - she could laugh about this much later - she had a new set of golf clubs that she had wanted for a long time.

Then she put the paper aside and wrote an email. "Hi Mrs. E.K., I feel really embarrassed emailing you about this, but I have been trying to get work done from before break, to turn in tonight," she wrote. "I'm really fighting with myself internally today. To put it simply, I'm trying to justify living today. These feelings pass eventually, but it's very difficult to get things done. I don't know how to explain these feelings and deal with them. Can I please turn in things after midnight?"

"Yes, of course you can have an extension," Ms. E.K. wrote back. "As we've said all year - you matter to us as a healthy human before academics. Also, I do need to call your folks about this tonight. It's a professional obligation that I must contact them to ensure your safety." She was letting her know, she told her, because she did not want her to feel that she was violating her trust.

Everett-Kennedy was not quite numb, but she did, at that point, take comfort in protocol. Suzanne's parents and the school counselors would take over from there.

Two days later, the school board met to vote on whether to open schools, as planned, for hybrid learning later that month. This time Everett-Kennedy did not speak; having started out so opposed to the opening of schools, she was now reconsidering.

The experience of the past months had cracked something open in her. There were some students she would not recognize if she passed them on the street, but there were also many whose stories she knew intimately - the student worrying about his parents' potential deportation, the student whose mother was murdered in a previous year, the student whose parents were navigating a painful divorce, the students who had mental-health problems that were manageable before the pandemic but had now overrun their lives. "And I've seen more tears with students than I've seen, and I've shed more tears at home than I've ever shed before," she said in a video she made for her students in December after a deluge of concerns they expressed about their workload.

It was clear at that moment on the video that she was getting emotional. "I'm getting verklempt now," she said, looking away. "I feel like I know you guys personally more than in previous years, and you're certainly being more vulnerable with us. ... You're advocating for yourself better than any other year of students." She talked about how she was trying to prepare them for that big A.P. test that was coming, regardless of how much they all hated remote learning. And she reminded them that they were all in it together. "You are not alone," she said. "Your teachers, too - we are just as stressed as you are."

Some evenings, she put her daughter in front of the TV and sat on a seat in her shower for 45 minutes, drinking a Diet Coke, without managing to muster the energy to wash her hair. By the end of the semester, she sometimes showed up for class without changing out of her pajamas, hoping the kids thought she had on a regular top.

At the school-board meeting, the high school's orchestra director, Dustin Frieda, addressed the community. He made it clear that he was no Covid denier; he understood the threat. His own grandfather, who survived Dunkirk and liberated Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp, received a Covid diagnosis just that week at age 99. "But I want to talk to you about our students," he said. "I talk to them. And they all tell me the same thing: They're struggling. They're sad. They're overwhelmed. They're hurting. They're not learning. And they've almost given up or they've already given up. Since Labor Day, I've had four different students reach out to me with thoughts of suicide and two reach out to me for help with sexual assaults that happened during the pandemic."

When schools opened on Jan. 19, Charles and his mother found that their positions had now flipped: She felt he needed to be back at the building with his classmates. But now he was reluctant to return. He had asthma; he considered himself high-risk. And he did not feel ready to see all the people whose lives had moved forward while his seemed to have ground to a halt. At the same time, he was curious - maybe it would feel right, as his mother said. Maybe he'd actually have ... fun.

Catherine was scheduled to go to school on Mondays and Tuesdays, which meant that she and Charles, who was assigned to Thursdays and Fridays, would not overlap. But she gave him the report Monday evening: how one of her best friends gave her a ride to school that day, blasting Nirvana out the window; how strange it felt to meet the teachers for the first time.

"It was funny seeing Ms. E.K.," Catherine told him. "She's way shorter than me." In A.P. World, she said, the students had to stand up and introduce themselves, but Catherine was lazy (self-conscious, really) and stayed seated. "I want to call on you, but I don't know your name," Everett-Kennedy told her. When she said her name, Everett-Kennedy's face lit up. "Oh, my gosh!" she said. Affectionately, she called her "infamous." Then Catherine stood and took a bow. Something about meeting Everett-Kennedy in person was already softening her impression of the teacher. "I think I might have given her a bit of a hard time," Catherine told Charles. "She seems like she's not trying that hard to make our lives miserable." Everett-Kennedy had also given another one of her pep talks about how this was a new start, but for the first time, Catherine felt that maybe she was right.

Three days after that, Charles walked into the school for the first time since March 2020. It hit him hard that none of his best friends were there because of how the classes were divided. Instead of feeling like a shot of his old life, school felt eerie and silent. No one was jostling or posturing in the cafeteria; kids didn't seem to want to have conversations with one another in class, because to do so you practically had to yell across a distance of six feet. He felt none of the contagious, boundless energy he used to feel in a building packed with high schoolers; students seemed as if they were still on mute. He came home that afternoon drained and exhausted, desperate to get back under the covers. The next day, he wanted to stay home, and his mother told him there was no point in fighting about whether he should go or not: Someone in his class had tested positive for the virus, and now he was in quarantine anyway.

Charles retreated back into his bedroom. He sent Ms. E.K. two texts on Feb. 9. "I'm back to in-person Thursday and excited for 'Othello,'" he wrote. "It's one of my faves." She responded with a Bitmoji of herself with her hands in the air, the word "yayayaya" repeating in the background.

That Thursday, Charles didn't make it to class. To help with his panic attacks, he was on new medication that was tiring him out, making it hard for him to start bouncing back to a routine. "I'll try to be there tomorrow, and I'm very upset that I don't get to act out the final acts of one of my favorite plays," he wrote to Ms. E.K. that afternoon when she checked in. "It's third behind Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible' and Shakespeare's 'Macbeth.'" Even back in seventh grade, he had thrilled to the harsh, bleak truths of "Macbeth," which he now saw as missives from the future to his innocent young self. His favorite line, about life: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

That month, snow forced school closings on three separate days. By then, it was as if Charles had forgotten how to be a kid who went to school. He was starting to miss Catherine, who never answered on FaceTime anymore in the middle of the night, even though they still sometimes texted and talked during the day. "I'm feeling like a McDonald's ice cream machine," he texted in late February. They each knew what that meant in their part of the world: broken.

On her first day back at school, Sarah noticed almost immediately that so many people looked different. It was not just that their faces had thinned or filled out, or that they had grown taller; it was how they dressed. Last spring, before schools closed, almost all the girls she knew had dressed daily in leggings and bright-colored, sporty tops, even Sarah. (She called it her "white phase.") But now pretty much everyone looked full-on emo or skater: girls in big, baggy pants with graphic T-shirts, a lot of flannel shirts tied around their waists. Other girls were wearing tights with holes and big chunky boots, not quite goth but not exactly neutral. It was as if over the course of the pandemic, some mysterious algorithm had fed an entire generation of teenagers a never-ending series of dark, moody TikTok videos that reflected their collective state of mind and influenced their aesthetic in the process.

Sarah had a much better sense of herself since the pandemic, she thought; she'd watched a lot of body-positivity posts on TikTok, and sometimes she felt she learned more from them than she would in a year of school. Self-acceptance - that was crucial. Normally, she hated her hair. After all that time at home, she decided to embrace it, to dress any way she wanted, to wear thrift-store clothes that were a little more quirky. Life was too short to care what other people thought.

Every conversation she had that day felt fresh - and the teachers seemed happy, like, goofy happy. But the social nature of school was also overwhelming, especially as she was trying to figure out where some of her friendships stood. A lot of people she thought were friends, she came to realize during the pandemic, were more like fake friends who stopped texting her back. And a lot of people she thought were fake friends turned out to be real friends who were going through some of the same things she was. Some of her friends would text her, when they didn't hear back after several attempts, "Are you dead?" It had taken her a long time to start opening up about how sad she was. "Girl, me too," her friends sometimes told her. She was amazed that she had been too far gone at the time to notice, and too isolated to have shared any of her own experiences sooner.

In class, Sarah was sure she could detect Ms. E.K.'s smile beneath her mask. Ms. E.K. announced that she would be holding before-school tutoring sessions, which Sarah, who finished the fall semester with a D-, never would have attended during remote learning. But in the coming weeks, she started going with some regularity; by mid-February, she knew she was going to do much better in the class the second semester than she did the first.

Her mother had recovered by then, but it still wasn't easy to put everything Sarah had been through behind her. "When I'm happy, I'm happy," she said in early March. "But when I'm sad, it's like - terribly sad. I had it last week. I'll just get like that and not do anything for two days and then - I don't know. I'm working on myself, trying to stop that."

On the days when she was home from school and supposed to be working on her own, she sometimes fell back into old habits and thought patterns. She was still angrier than she used to be and then ashamed of herself for yelling at her mother, even her brother. School was often overwhelming as she adjusted to life without solitude: so many questions, so many people talking to her, so many people shoving their opinions in her face. Her recovery would take time. "I feel like my emotions are coming back one by one," she said.

Everett-Kennedy headed into the first day of hybrid school worrying about whether it would feel safe and worrying about the worrying she knew her already-anxious students were doing in anticipation. Many of them told her they felt nervous about catching the coronavirus.

Instead, the first day was "bizarre but wonderful," she said, calling from her drive home. For the first half of class, she didn't notice all the frantic messages from remote students telling her that she had forgotten to turn on Zoom. Rather than putting phones in a lockbox, as she normally did, she let students use them to call up a presentation - everyone's relationship to technology had changed.

Part of the thrill of the day was seeing in person all these students she'd known only virtually - it was as if the characters of a novel she'd been reading for months had suddenly come to life, walked into her classroom and greeted her by name. "It all felt like some kind of big reveal," she said.

She had been so concerned about safety that she had not expected her mood to change so quickly - but within two weeks or so, she was starting to feel her usual energy again. All the pieces of her were there in the classroom now: the part that was good at her job, that was intellectually challenged, that knew how to get a laugh out of the kids with a morbid joke, that could manage to get students to early-morning tutoring, that could recognize, by name, every sophomore she taught.

She knew she would never see her students the same way - she had a better appreciation for the richness of their inner lives, the domestic dramas, the anguished choices, the responsibilities, the fears that so many of them were bearing, even in typical years, often without her knowledge. Her boundaries had grown porous this past year, at a time when desperation demanded it. "I saw their struggles," she said, "and they saw mine." But she felt that in the future, she wanted to fix some of those ruptures - to keep her own walls intact while remaining open to the complexity of the burdens her students were carrying. "I want school to be the place of normalcy and control for students," she said. "That involves me being that face for them."

She did not want to forget what they'd all been through - but, she said, she also longed for closure: "This year just has to end."

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list of additional resources at SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
Kholood Eid is a documentary photographer, filmmaker and educator based in New York who is known for her intimate portraiture. In 2020, Eid was a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Domestic Print, alongside colleagues, for the Times series "Exploited."

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'I Feel Like I'm Just Drowning': Surviving Sophomore Year 2020

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The Great Read A group of high school students try desperately to make it through an isolated and dire year. Sarah in her room in April. She and her family contracted the coronavirus, and she spent the early days of the school year taking care of everyone. Credit...

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The C.D.C confirms more cases of a rare blood clot disorder linked to the J.&J. vaccine:

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The C.D.C confirms more cases of a rare blood clot disorder linked to the J.&J. vaccine:

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To be honest, I don’t really have a lot to say about this article. I think the title of it speaks for itself. I just found it really annoying to have to read it. We are supposed to be focused on moving forward as a society and then something like this comes out. It just rains on the whole vaccine parade. I still already have my first dose and will be administered my second next week, however I got Pfizer. With almost 9 million J.&J. vaccines administered in the U.S., it causes fear towards receiving the vaccine. While the risk is extremely low, it still gives a lot of people second thoughts. I know the whole point of article titles is to grasp attention and get people to click on it. But, that is a scary title. If some people don’t read the actual article and just read the title, then there is probably little chance they will get the J.&J. vaccine. I just wish things would go well with the vaccines so we can move on.

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Federal health officials have now confirmed 28 cases, including six in men, of a rare blood clotting disorder in adults who have received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine.

Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, the deputy director of the immunization safety office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presented the new cases on Wednesday at a meeting of a panel of advisers to the C.D.C.

The figure is an increase from the 15 confirmed cases, all of which were in women, that were reported at last month's meeting.

Although officials have now identified a handful of cases in men, women - especially those between the ages of 30 and 49 - appear to remain at elevated risk. "The trend is that the reporting rates are higher in females compared to males in all age categories," Dr. Shimabukuro said at the meeting.

Patients with the rare but serious disorder develop both blood clots, often in the brain, and low levels of platelets, blood components that promote clotting. The disorder is a "rare, clinically serious and potentially life-threatening condition," Dr. Shimabukuro said.

Last month, after reports first emerged that six women who had received the vaccine had developed the disorder, federal health officials recommended pausing use of the vaccine while they investigated. They lifted the suspension 10 days later and added a warning about the potential risks to the vaccine's label, which notes that a connection between the vaccine and the condition is "plausible."

Twenty-two of the confirmed cases so far have been in women, and six have been in men. All were in adults between the ages of 18 and 59 who received the vaccine before the national pause. (There was also one additional case recorded in a 25-year-old man who participated in the clinical trial.)

Three people have died and four remain hospitalized, including one who is in intensive care. No new deaths have been documented since last month's meeting, Dr. Shimabukuro said.

The overall risk remains exceedingly low. More than 9 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have now been administered in the United States.

There have been 12.4 cases per million doses among women between the ages of 30-39 and 9.4 cases per million doses among women between 40 and 49, the two demographic groups that appear to be at highest risk. Among older women and men of all ages, there were fewer than 3 cases per million doses.

Among the 28 confirmed cases, 12 people who developed the disorder had obesity, 7 had high blood pressure, 3 had diabetes, and 3 were taking estrogen, though it is not yet clear whether any of those factors might substantially increase the risk of the disorder.

Officials will continue to monitor for cases of the clotting disorder in people who have been vaccinated, Dr. Shimabukuo said.

There have been no confirmed cases of the clotting disorder following the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, which employ a different technology, Dr. Shimabukuro said.

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C.D.C confirms more cases of rare blood clot disorder linked to J&J vaccine

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Federal health officials have now confirmed 28 cases, including six in men, of a rare blood clotting disorder in adults who have received the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine. Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, the deputy director of the immunization safety office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presented the new cases on Wednesday at a meeting of a panel of advisers to the C.D.C.

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Climate Change is Making Big Problems Bigger:

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Climate Change is Making Big Problems Bigger:

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I found this article especially interesting for me as in the fall term I took a class on climate change so I was very curious to see what kind of opinion it would have. The article kept its focus on the fact that our planet is in fact growing increasingly warmer each day and so far we have had a very late response to stop it. In my climate change class, we talked a lot about the modes of climate change and ways to effectively begin a plan to halt it. However, I wish the article included some ways that the average person can help fight climate change. Most articles I see nowadays on climate change revolve around the creation of fear in the people who read them. While in theory, yes, fear is important to get people to realize just how big of a deal climate change is. However, I think it is more important to instill fear while also instilling solutions. In the climate change class I took in the fall, I remember vividly arguing that offering solutions would be much more effective than the fear factor. I still believe that many people read these articles and decide that “there’s nothing we can do” or “we’re screwed”, and that is increasingly becoming closer to the truth. This is because people are probably deciding that they can’t do anything to fix our doomed planet. When in reality, there is still a chance to fix our mistakes. I remember my teacher pulling up a list of things that the everyday person can do to help the planet. I wish that those kinds of articles would be going up more often in places like The New York Times because a sense of hope would be nice for a change.

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New data compiled by the E.P.A. shows how global warming is making life harder for Americans in myriad ways that threaten their health, safety and homes.

The Bond Fire burning through Orange County, Calif., in December. Credit... Noah Berger/Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Wildfires are bigger, and starting earlier in the year. Heat waves are more frequent. Seas are warmer, and flooding is more common. The air is getting hotter. Even ragweed pollen season is beginning sooner.

Climate change is already happening around the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday. And in many cases, that change is speeding up.

The freshly compiled data, the federal government's most comprehensive and up-to-date information yet, shows thata warming world is making life harder for Americans, in ways that threaten their health and safety, homes and communities. And it comes as the Biden administration is trying to propel aggressive action at home and abroad to cut the pollution that is raising global temperatures.

"There is no small town, big city or rural community that is unaffected by the climate crisis," Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, said on Wednesday. "Americans are seeing and feeling the impacts up close, with increasing regularity."

The data released Wednesday came after a four-year gap. Until 2016, the E.P.A. regularly updated its climate indicators. But under President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly questioned whether the planet was warming, the data was frozen in time. It was available on the agency's website but was not kept current.

The Biden administration revived the effort this year and added some new measures, pulling information from government agencies, universities and other sources. The E.P.A. used 54 separate indicators which, taken together, paint a grim picture.

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Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, on Tuesday. "Americans are seeing and feeling the impacts up close, with increasing regularity," he said. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

It maps everything from Lyme disease, which is growing more prevalent in some states as a warming climate expands the regions where deer ticks can survive, to the growing drought in the Southwest that threatens the availability of drinking water, increases the likelihood of wildfires but also reduces the ability to generate electricity from hydropower.

The E.P.A. data can help people make sense of the shifts they're already seeing in their daily lives, according to Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University. That's especially useful because many Americans tend to view climate change as a problem affecting other people or more remote parts of the world, she said.

"Having relevant indicators is a really important way to show people that climate is already changing, and it's changing in ways that affect you," Dr. Hayhoe said. "It helps us connect climate change to our lived experience."

The new data shows that temperatures are rising, and that increase is accelerating. Since 1901, surface temperatures across the lower 48 states have increased by an average of 0.16 degrees Fahrenheit each decade; since the late 1970s, that rate has jumped to as much as half a degree per decade.

The increase has been even more pronounced in Alaska, parts of which saw average temperatures rise more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1925. And it's affecting the permafrost: At 14 of 15 sites, permafrost temperatures rose between 1978 and 2020.

Scientists say the world needs to prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels to avoid irreversible damage to the planet.

As surface temperatures have risen, heat waves have become more common. Since the 1960s, the frequency of heat waves in large U.S. cities has tripled, according to the new data, to six each year from two. And nights are becoming hotter, making it harder for plants, animals and people to cool down.

Rising temperatures are affecting ice levels as well. The new data notes that the extent of Arctic sea ice cover in 2020 was the second-smallest on record. At the same time, oceans are becoming warmer, reaching a record in 2020.

That combination of melting polar ice and rising water temperatures is causing sea levels to rise along the East Coast and Gulf Coast. In some places, the sea level relative to the land rose more than eight inches between 1960 and 2020.

As seas rise, flooding is becoming more common. The number of days when water has inundated communities along the East and Gulf Coasts has increased and the rate of that flooding is quickening, the data show. At many locations, "floods are now at least five times more common than they were in the 1950s," according to the E.P.A.

Seawater flooded a street in Key Largo, Fla., in 2019. Credit... Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Rising temperatures are also making wildfires worse. The amount of land burned each year is increasing, and the wildfire season is growing longer.

In addition to updating the metrics, the latest version of the E.P.A.'s climate indicators adds new types of data. Among them is the surface area of glaciers in Glacier National Park, Mont., which shrank by one-third between 1966 and 2015.

"These measurements are either setting records or they're well above the historical average," said Michael Kolian, an environmental scientist at the agency who presented some of the new data.

Since taking office, President Biden has made climate action a top priority across the federal government. He has returned the United States to the Paris climate accord, hosted a virtual climate summit of world leaders on Earth Day and pledged to slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least half by the end of the decade.

Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the E.P.A. could expand its data collection even further, tracking not only the physical effects of climate change but what those effects mean for disasters.

For example, she said the E.P.A. could show the number of people forced to flee their homes each year because of hurricanes in the United States, or the number of people who seek assistance rebuilding.

While Dr. Dahl applauded the Biden administration for updating and expanding its climate data, she said the work that matters is changing those trends.

"It's a bare minimum that this kind of data should be updated regularly and available to the public," Dr. Dahl said. "We have a very long, uphill road ahead of us for actually enacting policies that will make change."

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Climate Change Is Making Big Problems Bigger

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New data compiled by the E.P.A. shows how global warming is making life harder for Americans in myriad ways that threaten their health, safety and homes. WASHINGTON - Wildfires are bigger, and starting earlier in the year. Heat waves are more frequent. Seas are warmer, and flooding is more common.

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This article reminded me a lot about what we have been discussing during class. The premise of the article as I’m sure you can already tell from the title, was why has social media become so addicting to so many people. I’d like to give my own opinions on this matter. I believe that social media, to begin with, was a fantastic idea. It was a platform to connect people from all different kinds of backgrounds on a single site. It was new and exciting when it first arrived and I remember exactly when I created my instagram account. It was my very first experience with social media and I was in the 7th grade. For a while, my parents did not allow me to have any kind of social media; the main ones consisting of instagram, facebook, and snapchat. They didn’t believe that I needed these applications that early in my adolescent life, and quite frankly, they were probably right. Through my first years of social media use, I became obsessed with posting on instagram and receiving likes on my posts. I became enthralled with the number of likes I received on each post. I accounted for my self-worth, with how many likes I got on a picture of a cool baseball field I played at. As a young, 7th-8th grader, this was certainly not healthy for me. As I became older and started to mature, I started to care less about what people thought of me on social media, and I started to post less frequently. I didn’t feel the need to update everybody around me on what I was doing every second of my life. However, for some people, this addiction never mellowed out. But, I can understand and empathize with why. Social media can be a dangerous vacuum that can suck you in and keep you there for some time. Getting likes and attention makes people feel like what they are doing is cool, and important to other people. When in reality, the 4 hour painting you worked on and posted only takes a random person 0.2 seconds to double-tap their screen to like it. It creates a self-recycling numbness that is extremely addictive for some reason. To finish, I think the worst part about social media is how easy it is to be negative on its platforms. It is very easy for anybody to sit behind their computer or phone screen and say something negative about another person and have no repercussions for it. Anybody can take 5 minutes and make an anonymous instagram account to spread hate on other people’s accounts. This dark, deep, addictive hole that social media has become is a dangerous one, but I don’t see social media going anywhere anytime soon.

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Our complicated relationship with social media might be simpler than it feels. Just remember how it started.

Credit... Simoul Alva

It's a testament to the power of the biggest social platforms that many common complaints about them sound contradictory.

They're accelerators for extremism that simultaneously uphold suffocating consensus. They're wastes of attention and should play a smaller role in people's lives; however, they also need to be improved, refined and purged of bad actors, whoever you think they might be. They're advanced surveillance machines, but they also routinely serve irrelevant recommendations and ads. They're cutting-edge behavior modification tools, but they're also overtly spammy, seeking engagement through clumsy and often misleading notifications.

And for, or despite, all those reasons, people can't seem to leave them - a point bolstered by financial statements. Facebook, as a company, is doing extraordinarily well, and Twitter saw its revenue grow last quarter.

Still, within the disparate critiques of social media, there is a shared experience for many - a loss of patience with "this site," or a withering assessment of how people behave "on here." An urge to type "this hellsite" into the hellsite itself, to like that post about how much the poster hates posting. They're aware of the irony; still, they can't stop. They might even suggest it's their own fault, which it isn't, at least not entirely. They're just stuck. Maybe you are too.

What does it mean to be stuck, in platform terms? It's not the same as being trapped; you're as free to leave Instagram as you were to join it in the first place. Neither is being stuck a mere habit, or pattern of personal behavior over which you've lost some amount of conscious control.

Stuckness, instead, is a largely unforeseen consequence of the manner in which modern social networks became popular and powerful in the first place.

Social networks, even the very biggest, are virtually worthless without people - not just as customers, but as sources of value for other customers. The term of art for this phenomenon is the "network effect," a concept predating social media and the internet in general. A telephone system, for instance, gets better as more people use it, and is at its best when everyone has a number; likewise, a social network needs multiple users to function at all, but tends to become more compelling the more it connects.

Today's biggest social networks were founded by people and supported by investors for whom network effects were both a gospel and a plan: build a network, reach a critical mass, watch it grow, then accelerate, creating an insurmountable advantage over anyone else attempting to connect people in similar ways.

In 2012, in an email exchange with Facebook's then chief financial officer, revealed during a House antitrust subcommittee hearing in 2020, Mark Zuckerberg made his case for buying up smaller competitors, among them, at the time, Instagram:

There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it's difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.

It's a tidy way to understand the process that led to the popular internet of today: a bunch of companies trying to establish unassailable and maximally broad networks through the use of different "mechanics" (i.e. styles of sharing or connection or content production). It also hints at the fear that each network could fail as quickly as it succeeded if a critical mass of users had enough reason to leave - producing, basically, a death spiral.

To whatever extent Facebook was "the next Myspace," it spent much of its first decade fending off, or acquiring, anything that might credibly call itself the next Facebook, frequently altering the environment around the users it already had in the process. Later in the same 2012 email exchange, Mr. Zuckerberg characterized the strategy of buying and incorporating competitors and their "dynamics" and "mechanics" as a way to "buy time" before they could reach threatening scales.

The plan worked, or at least has not failed so far: Nothing has been able to supplant Facebook the way Facebook supplanted others, and its network has remained more or less intact. User-wise, there have been signs in financial disclosures for years that Facebook's core property is reaching some sort of plateau of activity, which could be explained in countless (again seemingly contradictory) ways: youth exodus, maturity in different markets, misinformation, conflict, boredom, politics.

Still, Facebook remains the only Facebook. And that dominance has led some users to reasonably feel stuck with the platform. The networks people signed up for in the aughts have changed beneath their feet and lasted longer than even their creators might have imagined - realizing network effects to their theoretical extremes, genuinely aspiring to connect everyone, for no more specific purpose than connection itself, which, conveniently, was thought to be worth a lot of money.

Over time, these networks became more strange, leading some users to consider, as network effect theorists had in the past, the possibility of a network that becomes worse as it continues to grow. Many longtime users of established social networks continue to have great experiences, finding new ways to appreciate familiar spaces. Late joiners enjoy the benefit of fresher connections and no baggage. Others are plainly miserable.

Stuck users are subjected to indefinite experimentation. Through their chosen networks within the larger network, users also experience subordinate forms of stuckness, pulled into intense group social dynamics rooted in hasty friend requests made years ago.

Stuckness is struggling to explain why you're still part of the network that's making you frustrated, anxious, unhappy or bored. Stuckness is a genuine question that sounds like a humiliating joke: Where else would I read tweets? Stuckness is struggling to quantify, or merely conceptualize, the cost of leaving a network into which you've invested time and attention. Stuckness is a basic sense of obligation, co-opted and turned back against you. Stuckness is the lingering, uneasy spirit of the long-passed fear of missing out.

Stuckness is also the inevitable result of a commercialized social and civic space, built only to grow. Stuckness is not quite the same as "needing to be here for work," but not entirely different, either.

An instructive way to think about this is to imagine every social network as a version of LinkedIn, the platform that helpfully elucidates the space between what we think of as social platforms (feeds) and what we imagine to be more commercial platforms (something like eBay).

LinkedIn, it is fair to say, provides a less-than-joyful experience to some of its users, demanding labor, attention and particular styles of performance, all while subjecting them to upselling, focus-grabbing notifications and an endless stream of content about recruiting, job-hunting and related subjects. Many people joined for a reason: It was a new place to find a job, or to hire people. Years later, however, they find themselves stuck. Leaving has a fuzzy but material cost, even for the happily employed, and LinkedIn's dominance has ensured that this cost remains, if not high, at least real enough to discourage leaving. Now, consider what distinguishes LinkedIn from Facebook or Instagram. Some "mechanics"? Users' intentions when signing up?

None of this is to say that the attention of the stuck isn't drawn elsewhere, to newer platforms that encourage new kinds of communication with freshly assembled networks of people. Joining and forming other networks is one of the more obvious responses to feeling stuck, even if it presages new varieties of stuckness down the line. TikTok and Discord, for example, offered mechanics and experiences that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram did not, at least in the beginning. For the already stuck, however, these networks are often complements, not replacements.

Among some tech investors, this sort of stuckness has inspired a fresh take on what happens to platforms in the long term: not a death spiral, but the slow bleeding of time and attention by more focused competitors, through which users remain present, distracted, but - crucially - available to be drawn back in (consider the rise of Facebook Groups in recent years, or the persistent growth of Facebook Marketplace). Users sticking around to talk about how much they hate sticking around is merely stuckness reproducing itself.

This sort of stuckness isn't permanent or entirely unexpected, but it is characterized by lasting longer than anyone anticipated. And though recognizing one's stuckness might not make it easier to leave a social media platform, it has other benefits.

If nothing else, it's a more genuine form of connection to our fellow user than any platform-generated mechanic can provide: a shared feeling that this - whatever it is - isn't what we signed up for.

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Our complicated relationship with social media might be simpler than it feels. Just remember how it started. It's a testament to the power of the biggest social platforms that many common complaints about them sound contradictory. They're accelerators for extremism that simultaneously uphold suffocating consensus.

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Online Schools Are Here to Stay, Even After the Pandemic

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Online Schools Are Here to Stay, Even After the Pandemic

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To start, I’d like to say that this article was very well written and very compelling, however I have my own opinions on this matter which I would like to voice. Essentially, the basis of the article was on the fact that while many schools are choosing to open their doors again for their students, there are still many people who have chosen to remain with online schooling. The article did a very good job of convincing me of the benefits to online schooling. However, my opinion on the matter still stands. I believe that as a student, and as an adolescent it is much more beneficial to attend school in person. I have reasons to back this belief up. First, I do think that online schooling was a really important challenge for our society. But, I will add that a challenge isn’t meant to become permanent. It’s something you are supposed to work through and overcome. What we are trying to get back to, is in-person learning, being back in a classroom, and interacting with your peers. Second, while I do believe in the premise of online learning, it simply does not prepare you for the outside world. The way to prepare for the crazy world that we live in starts with going to school. It’s where I learned how to read and write, and more importantly in my opinion, how to interact with other humans. It taught me about social structure and hierarchies, respect, and people skills to name a few. In-person learning is the best way to prepare us for the real world and while online learning may be tantalizing, I think it is important to stick to what has made our world so successful.

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Rory Levin, 11, with his mother, Lisa Levin, has been attending an online school in Bloomington, Minn., and plans to re-enroll this fall. Credit... Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Some families have come to prefer stand-alone virtual schools and districts are rushing to accommodate them - though questions about remote learning persist.

Rory Levin, 11, with his mother, Lisa Levin, has been attending an online school in Bloomington, Minn., and plans to re-enroll this fall. Credit... Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Rory Levin, a sixth grader in Bloomington, Minn., used to hate going to school. He has a health condition that often makes him feel apprehensive around other students. Taking special-education classes did little to ease his anxiety.

So when his district created a stand-alone digital-only program, Bloomington Online School, last year for the pandemic, Rory opted to try it. Now the 11-year-old is enjoying school for the first time, said his mother, Lisa Levin. He loves the live video classes and has made friends with other online students, she said.

In December, Bloomington Public Schools decided to keep running the online school even after the pandemic subsides. Ms. Levin plans to re-enroll Rory for this fall.

"It is such a good fit for him," she said. "We're really hoping they can continue it for the rest of his school career."

A year after the coronavirus set off a seismic disruption in public education, some of the remote programs that districts intended to be temporary are poised to outlast the pandemic. Even as students flock back to classrooms, a subset of families who have come to prefer online learning are pushing to keep it going - and school systems are rushing to accommodate them.

The districts are racing to set up full-fledged online schools even as concerns mount that remote learning has taken a substantial toll on many children's academic progress and emotional health. Parents and lawmakers, alarmed by the situation, have urged schools to reopen. Last month, Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, went so far as to say there should be no remote learning option for children in New Jersey this fall.

Even so, at least several hundred of the nation's 13,000 school districts have established virtual schools this academic year, with an eye to operating them for years to come, education researchers said. Unlike many makeshift pandemic school programs, these stand-alone virtual schools have their own teachers, who work only with remote students and use curriculums designed for online learning.

Bloomington Online School "is such a good fit for him," Ms. Levin said. Credit... Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

For exercise, Rory uses a treadmill at home. Credit... Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Demand for virtual schools has soared. Fulton County Schools in Atlanta, one of the nation's largest school systems, plans to enroll about 1,000 students in its new online school this fall. The Anchorage School District expects about 2,000 children to attend its year-old online school beginning in August. And in Minnesota, the number of state-approved online schools is on track to double this year to 80 or more, from 37 before the pandemic.

In a study by the RAND Corporation, " Remote Learning Is Here to Stay," 58 out of 288 district administrators - roughly 20 percent - said their school system had already started an online school, was planning to start one or was considering doing so as a postpandemic offering.

"This is hardly a panacea or a silver bullet for public schooling," said Heather Schwartz, a senior policy researcher at RAND who directed the study. But, she added, "there is a minority of parents, a minority of students and even a minority of teachers for whom virtual schooling is the preferred mode. "

Yet a surge of online schools comes with risks. It could normalize remote learning approaches that have had poor results for many students, education researchers said. It could also further divide a fragile national education system, especially when many Asian, Black and Latino families have been wary of sending their children back to school this year.

"My fear is that it will lead to further fracturing and fragmentation," said Jack Schneider, an assistant professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Districts said they were simply responding to demand from parents and children who want to stick with remote learning - some because of student health issues, some because of concerns about bullying or discrimination in their school, and some who just prefer the convenience of learning at home.

Districts that fail to start online schools could lose students - along with government education funding - to virtual academies run by neighboring districts, companies or nonprofits, administrators said. To pay for the new online offerings, some districts said, they are using federal coronavirus relief funds orshifting resources from other programs.

Online schools began opening in the 1990s, some run by states or districts and others by private companies or nonprofit charter management organizations. But until recently, they played a niche role in many states.

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Bags of supplies were distributed to children attending online classes during a monthly pickup outside Washburn Elementary School in Bloomington. Credit... Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Many virtual schools require children to work through online courses independently, supplemented by occasional virtual interactions with teachers. That self-directed approach has attracted self-motivated students and those with parents available to act as learning coaches. But it has not worked well for those who need more live, face-to-face teacher guidance.

"If our traditional public schools start teaching this way, it's going to be disastrous," said Gary Miron, a professor of education evaluation and researchat Western Michigan University who has studied virtual schools.

Before the pandemic, fewer than 1 percent of the nation's primary and secondary school students attended virtual schools full time, according to the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado. The majority of those students attended virtual charter schools.

Then last spring, as the coronavirus spread, districts began seeking ready-made digital curriculums. Many turned to established providers like Florida Virtual School, a 24-year-old online-only public school that offers free instruction to in-state students and franchises its courseware to hundreds of other districts.

This school year, Somerville Public Schools in Somerville, Mass., has enabled remote students to take certain classes through Florida Virtual School. Keri Rodrigues, a Somerville parent, enrolled her son Miles, a third grader, in the program in December.

Ms. Rodrigues said Miles had grown bored and felt ignored during his local school's live video classes. She thought he might be happier taking courses through the virtual school, where he could direct his own learning and she could check on his progress.

"He had a beautiful experience," said Ms. Rodrigues, who is president of the National Parents Union, a network of advocacy groups representing low-income parents and parents of color. "One day he was down the rabbit hole in social studies, and he could spend all day doing those lessons - then the next day he could take on math."

Other districts, such as Bloomington Public Schools, decided to create online schools in-house.

"Our tagline is: 'Bloomington Online School courses are taught by Bloomington teachers with Bloomington-created curriculum,'" said John Weisser, the district's executive director for technology. "It adds a layer of integrity, where often online courses are considered lesser."

Creating a program in-house "adds a layer of integrity," said John Weisser, technology director of Bloomington Public Schools. Credit... Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Some districts are also providing social opportunities for children in online schools. Students in the Anchorage School District's virtual program may participate in athletics, clubs and other in-person activities through their neighborhood schools.

Districts establishing online schools face a learning curve. Last summer, Huntsville City Schools in Alabama began marketing its new Huntsville Virtual Academy as an option for children to learn from anywhere at their own pace. But a few months into the school year, parents asked for more support and structure for children in the program, so this semester the school introduced a teacher-directed model requiring students to log in for group video classes and turn on their cameras. Nearly 6,900 of the district's students - about 30 percent - are enrolled.

Siloam Springs Virtual Academy, which was set up last fall by the Siloam Springs School District in northwest Arkansas, has also tightened its policies. Instead of accepting all interested students, it is asking them to submit applications for this fall and meet certain criteria, administrators said at a school board meeting. That includes having a good attendance record and strong parental support.

The momentum for online schools is particularly evident in Minnesota. The state's Department of Education said it was processing about 50 applications for new virtual schools, compared with two or three a year before the coronavirus.

"It was a small club before of people who really understood and were practicing online learning," said Jeff Plaman, the digital learning specialist who manages applications for new online schools at the Minnesota Department of Education. "Now it's the entire work force."

Last summer, administrators at Osseo Area Schools, near Minneapolis, created a distance-learning program for the pandemic school year. About 5,000 kindergartners through 12th graders, or nearly 25 percent of the district's students, enrolled.

Now Osseo is setting up a full-fledged online school with its own teaching staff, said Anthony Padrnos, the district's executive director of technology. Unlike some virtual schools that pack 80 or more students into live group video lessons, he said, Osseo caps its online classes at 30 to 35 students. So far, 1,000 have signed up for the fall.

Whether virtual schools can maintain high enrollments after the pandemic remains to be seen. Even self-driven students who enjoy online school said they missed their friends, not to mention in-person activities like gymnastics.

Abigail Reams, playing a math game with her brother, said she liked Bloomington Online School but looked forward to a return to in-person classes. Credit... Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

"I do like online school," said Abigail Reams, 11, a fifth grader at Bloomington Online School who anchored the school's video news broadcast this year. "But I also like in-person school. I'm really hoping that next year we can go back."

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Online Schools Are Here to Stay, Even After the Pandemic

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Some families have come to prefer stand-alone virtual schools and districts are rushing to accommodate them - though questions about remote learning persist. Rory Levin, 11, with his mother, Lisa Levin, has been attending an online school in Bloomington, Minn., and plans to re-enroll this fall. Credit...

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The PawSox Moved, but Pawtucket Has Yet to Move On:

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The PawSox Moved, but Pawtucket Has Yet to Move On:

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After reading this article, I had a bit of a bittersweet feeling. Growing up, I was always a Boston Red Sox fan. By proxy, I was also a fan of their minor league affiliate, the Pawtucket Paw Sox. I can recall many times where my grandfather and I took a trip down to Pawtucket, RI from my grandparents’ home in Newport, RI to watch the Paw Sox play. I found it so cool to go to Pawtucket to watch some of the good players play really well and then soon enough see them on TV playing for the Boston Red Sox. The Pawtucket Paw Sox will always be a part of my childhood and I’ll never forget the memories they gave me. However, I’m not a child anymore, and similar to moving on from my childhood, the Paw Sox weren’t making any money in Pawtucket and decided to move on, to Worcester, MA. Lucky for me, I have grown up 20 minutes down the road from the location of the Worcester Red Sox’s new stadium. This change in scenery for the Red Sox’s minor league team, I believe, can be a really good thing. I think there is a strong, baseball fan base in Worcester, MA. As well, the city itself is enormous so they should have no problem finding fans to fill their new stadium. In addition, for my future, I’d like to pursue a career in Sports Management and I will be attending Assumption University, which is also in Worcester, MA. The career opportunities that have been mentioned to me with the newly added Worcester Red Sox could be huge for me. The minor league team for the Boston Red Sox just 5 minutes away from my college campus where I will be studying how to get a job for the Red Sox, could potentially set me up for success. However, it still stings to take the team out of Pawtucket. I found this quote in the article to hit home the hardest:

“The story of the Pawtucket Red Sox “Paw Sox” carries the familiar moral that in the end, baseball is a business. But it is also the story of a piece of identity lost. This minor league team was as much a part of Rhode Island as quahogs, or Del’s Lemondade, or hoary stories of having once bumped into so-and-so the mobster at such-and-such a joint.”

To end, the Pawtucket Red Sox will always be a part of Rhode Island’s history, and my history. But the time for new beginnings has begun and the Worcester Red Sox look to bring with them, a bright future.

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Essay

As the Red Sox' top minor league team took the field in Massachusetts on Tuesday, a proud old stadium in Rhode Island sat empty. A symbol of a fading era.

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PAWTUCKET, R.I. - The man entrusted with the key approached a dull-gray door flecked with rust. A turn of the wrist threw the lock to reveal a ballpark in suspension, its outfield far from true-hop ready, its billboards fading, its thousands of empty seats the hard-plastic playground of pigeons.

Maybe Pawtucket should charge the birds admission, said the employee, Chris Crawley, who is the maintenance manager for the Rhode Island city of 71,000. His joke was of the coping kind.

It was a sunny and mild Tuesday, perfect for the home opener of the spanking new Worcester Red Sox in a spanking new ballpark 40 miles to the north, in Massachusetts. That is all well and good and hooray for baseball, but - for a half-century and up until very recently - the Worcester Red Sox were known as the Pawtucket Red Sox.

Their home was here: in McCoy Stadium, in Pawtucket, in Rhode Island, until a change in ownership and some shortsightedness on this side of the state border gave Worcester the opening to lure the franchise away. The team long known as the PawSox are now called the WooSox, a nickname that may never roll easily off the Rhode Island tongue, if at all.

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Chris Crawley is the maintenance manager of Pawtucket. The city is maintaining McCoy Stadium.

All of which means that on this opening day at McCoy, in an old mill city that could use a break, all that could be heard were the coos of feathered gate-crashers.

"Hearing the birds and hearing no baseball," said Crawley, who is 52. "It's a weird feeling."

The story of the Pawtucket Red Sox carries the familiar moral that in the end, baseball is a business. But it is also the story of a piece of identity lost. This minor league team was as much a part of Rhode Island as quahogs, or Del's Lemonade, or hoary stories of having once bumped into so-and-so the mobster at such-and-such a joint.

The team began as a Double-A team in 1970, playing its games here at McCoy, a Works Progress Administration project built on a swamp 80 years ago. Local lore holds that oceans of cement were needed to solidify the mushy ground, to the benefit of connected contractors.

The team moved up to the Triple-A level in 1973, where the franchise struggled to survive until a wealthy entrepreneur named Ben Mondor took over in 1977. What he didn't know about the game he made up for with his business acumen. A Pawtucket Red Sox game became an affordable family event, with reasonably priced tickets, cheap concessions and - here was his genius - free parking.

The experience came packaged with the thrill of seeing ballplayers striving to play for the major league Boston Red Sox, whose home field, Fenway Park, was an hour and one Dunkin' cup of coffee away. You might be seeing the next Yaz, the next - dare we say it - Teddy Ballgame.

Rhode Island embraced the team. It became tradition to see the Saturday night fireworks, or to return batting-practice balls for tickets, or to fish for autographs by dangling plastic milk bottles containing baseballs and pens in front of the dugouts tucked beneath the stands. But nothing is static.

Mondor died in 2010, and his widow, Madeleine, sold the team in 2015 to a group led by Larry Lucchino, then the president and chief executive of the Boston Red Sox and a baseball veteran who had overseen the building of major league stadiums in other cities. It was clear that Lucchino was impervious to McCoy's scrappy charms, and that change was coming.

"In all honesty, it was a combination of factors," the mayor of Pawtucket, Donald R. Grebien, said as he stood near the home team dugout, its green seat cushions frayed by the elements. His voice carried notes of disappointment and what-could-have-been.

The team's new owners introduced themselves to Pawtucket by saying they wanted to leave. They announced a proposal to move to a stadium that would be built, largely at taxpayer expense, in Providence - an egregious overreach, and a profound misread of the current Rhode Island mood.

The plan died a quiet death, but still. "It ripped the heart out of us," Grebien, 53, said.

A feasibility study determined that a proper renovation of McCoy would cost nearly $70 million, so Grebien worked with the team on another proposal: to build an $83 million ballpark in downtown Pawtucket, along the Blackstone River. The team would pay more than half the cost, with the state and the city covering the rest.

"They wanted new," the mayor said. "To keep them, we needed new."

After months of hearings, negotiations and obstruction by the then-speaker of the house, a reworked financing arrangement was rejected in 2018 by the team, which could barely contain itself in announcing a relocation to Worcester - to a minor league ballpark that, at $157 million, is said by the Worcester Business Journal to be the most expensive in history.

The move left Pawtucket "to figure out how to pick up the pieces," Grebien said.

The divorce between this old couple of city and team has been awkward. After the pandemic robbed the PawSox of a farewell 2020 season, the team invited fans to " Dining on the Diamond " events at which they could eat ballpark food on picnic tables planted on the field. Nice, but not the same.

And the city, now solely responsible for an aging, empty McCoy, has sued the team on the grounds that it had failed to maintain and repair the stadium properly - a charge the team rejects. The city is paying a contractor $6,500 a month to keep McCoy locked and secured.

In a few hours on this Tuesday, baseball would be played in a new ballpark 40 miles to the north, filling the coffers with money, the parking lots with cars and the fans with memories of a WooSox victory over Syracuse. Here at McCoy, the pigeons would settle in and the parking lot would continue to be used for a coronavirus testing site. And tomorrow, vaccinations will be offered, and the old PawSox gift shop will be used as an observation room.

For now, though, about the only movement in McCoy came from the two Pawtucket employees, their footsteps echoing through the concrete corridors. Crawley, the maintenance manager, grew up nearby and worked here for 10 years as a groundskeeper. Grebien, the mayor, used to come here as a boy with his father and grandfather, both Teamster truck drivers, both baseball aficionados.

They walked past the mementos that the team had chosen to neither take nor sell. A wall tribute to the longest game in professional baseball history - 33 innings - played here in 1981. A sepia-tinted photo of the future Hall of Famer Jim Rice, celebrating his 1974 win of the International League triple crown. A price list for souvenirs (PawSox pencil - $0.50; PawSox magnet - $2.50; PawSox #1 foam finger - $5.00).

The mayor had to leave. Among other things, he is now focused on a $300 million redevelopment plan for downtown that would include hundreds of residential units, assorted retail and commercial space, and an 11,000-seat soccer stadium. A better deal for the city, he said.

But the Pawtucket Red Sox? "It's part of our soul," he said.

The two men walked down the concrete stairs, sidestepping large deposits of bird droppings. They walked out the dull-gray door, the maintenance manager first, the mayor following.

"Chris, you want the top locked too?" the mayor called out.

No need, the man with the key said. The place is locked up.

Dan Barry, a domestic correspondent, is the author of "Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption and Baseball's Longest Game,'' in which the Pawtucket Red Sox, eventually, beat the Rochester Red Wings in 1981.

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The PawSox Moved, but Pawtucket Has Yet to Move On

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Essay As the Red Sox' top minor league team took the field in Massachusetts on Tuesday, a proud old stadium in Rhode Island sat empty. A symbol of a fading era. Credit... PAWTUCKET, R.I. - The man entrusted with the key approached a dull-gray door flecked with rust.