‘We feel closer to their struggles and successes’

‘College football may be the last remaining communal experience we have’

Daniel Diermeier at USA Today

College sports “undoubtedly unify a community, but they also do more: They reveal and forge character,” says Daniel Diermeier. And “excelling at sports or academics isn't an either/or choice” at schools like Vanderbilt. The university takes “pride in the fact that student-athletes live in the same residential colleges as their peers, where a roommate could be a concert pianist or a double major in economics and chemical engineering,” even as a “winning football program seemed beyond our reach.”

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‘How white-collar workers could fuel a new populist movement — on the left’

Noreena Hertz at Politico

Fear that “AI will decimate the job market is growing fast among the educated middle class,” says Noreena Hertz. It is also “threatening to impact who they will vote for.” We can “expect to see the threat of being replaced by AI increasingly become a factor propelling voters toward a new cadre of populist politicians.” But “this time it will be white-collar workers driving the charge, and many will turn not to the right but to the left.”

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‘Get cellphones out of schools’

The Boston Globe editorial board

The “prohibition of cellphones may be the most clear-cut school policy choice in the United States,” says The Boston Globe editorial board. It’s a “rare moment when data validates what many can already feel anecdotally.” With the “usual caveat that correlation is not causation, the trends are too stark to ignore,” and they “make a strong case for follow-through; schools with a cellphone ban on the books but no enforcement saw no difference in student attention.”

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‘The pending disaster of a Skydance-Warners merger’

Ben Schwartz at The Nation

The “Trump administration immediately signaled its enthusiasm for a Skydance-WBD deal,” and “it’s not hard to see why,” says Ben Schwartz. But one “entity’s controlling that many movies, in theaters and on TV, television programming, news media and sports gives instant leverage to Skydance to raise prices for consumers.” It “would also continue wreaking harm to the basic canons of newsgathering.” The “merger would bode ill for Warner Bros.’ mainstay products — film and television.”

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