Author: Errica Jensen

Like most terrible things these days, the notice came via email. The message was succinct and impersonal to Marie Myung-Ok Lee, a writer who had spent years preparing for an NEA fellowship application—carefully putting together a proposal about her Korean immigrant father’s imprisonment and suicide. For the fiscal year 2026, the NEA had discontinued its Creative Writing Fellowships program. The category had been eliminated. With a hint of bureaucracy, the email went on to say that “receiving this news can be disappointing.” The situation was probably understated. The official language of grant cycles and budget announcements tends to flatten into…

The wealthier families in San Antonio have quietly grown accustomed to a certain kind of humiliation. After completing the application, sending in the portfolio, and making a few phone calls, they wait. Not for a spot at any of the better-funded private schools in the city, like Keystone or the San Antonio Academy. In a public program, they wait for a seat. One with no tuition fees. The San Antonio Independent School District is home to one. And one that rejects far more families than it takes in, depending on the year. When the Advanced Learning Academy was founded in…

Early in the morning, before traffic picks up and the corner stores roll back their security gates, a certain kind of silence descends upon a neglected neighborhood. You see things that statistics can’t fully convey when you stand on one of Jacksonville’s more rugged blocks. Unfinished paint. A playground where the swings have been absent for many years. The way a block can simultaneously feel forgotten and strangely resilient. That’s about the world that Jacksonville’s burgeoning creative learning movement quietly entered—not with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and a barrage of local news cameras, but with the kind of slow, methodical effort…

The timing of all of this is subtly ironic. Teachers tapped desks and gave students who couldn’t sit still a warning look for decades. It was disorder to wiggle. Tapping served as a diversion. These restless children, who rocked on their chairs and clicked their pens during every lecture, may have been doing something truly beneficial, according to evidence being produced by a Stanford research team. A study conducted by Stanford’s Accelerator for Learning, which was published in late 2025, examined the effects of allowing middle school students to move freely during class while seated on “wiggle stools” rather than…

When considering what’s going on at Cornell right now, one image stands out: a biology student sitting at a lab bench, sketching rather than pipetting or calculating. Holding a watercolor. A specimen of a bird before them. The objective is to compel the eye to slow down and truly see, not to create art for a gallery wall. In a way, this is the main justification for Cornell’s increasing efforts to incorporate fine arts methods into science courses. Additionally, the argument is more serious than it first seems.The second part of Cornell’s Center for Teaching Innovation’s larger “Art of Teaching”…

Something feels instantly different when you walk into a classroom using the Center for Creative Education’s arts integration framework. Information is not being delivered by the teacher at the front. Students are moving, conversing, formulating arguments, and occasionally engaging in conflict—not over whether they are correct, but rather over the reasons behind their opinions. There’s a certain energy in the room. Not exactly chaos. more akin to controlled friction. The kind that occurs when people actively participate in something rather than just waiting for it to finish. The CCE’s approach, which combines arts integration with a methodology known as “Dialogue…

When a cherished location does something subtly unsettling, there’s a certain kind of friction. Disneyland has always been adept at creating the appearance of seamless operations, with lines disguised as experiences, crowds moving smoothly, and an overall nostalgic atmosphere that discourages people from asking too many questions. Therefore, it’s important to pay attention when someone does inquire and when that inquiry turns into a federal class-action lawsuit that seeks damages of at least $5 million. Lead plaintiff Summer Christine Duffield, a California parent who traveled to Disneyland and Disney California Adventure with her kids, filed the lawsuit in May 2026…

Kyle Busch did something that most professional athletes never do in the fall of 2025. He made his financial grievance public. It was a comprehensive lawsuit against Pacific Life Insurance, a large insurance company, claiming that he and his wife Samantha had been sold something that appeared to be financial security but turned out to be much messier. It wasn’t a contract dispute or sponsor fallout. As is typically the case, the Kyle Busch Pacific Life settlement that was reached in February 2026 was private. However, the backstory was anything but quiet. According to the lawsuit, which was filed in…

More than five years have passed since a Sikorsky S-76B helicopter took off on a foggy January morning from Santa Ana, California’s John Wayne Airport and failed to make a safe landing. There was an almost tangible silence over Los Angeles following the January 26, 2020 crash that claimed the lives of Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven other people. However, in the years since, the legal fallout from that catastrophe has been severely warped; social media has turned it into something unrecognizable, and a recent conspiracy theory that has gone viral has brought it back into the spotlight…

Finding out that your phone was using your own cellular data to send information back to Google without your consent, without warning, and apparently even when the screen was dark and all apps were closed, is a subtle form of betrayal. With a $135 million settlement on the table and a deadline of June 23, 2026, about 100 million Android users in the US are sitting on a potential payout that the majority of them are unaware of. This is precisely what a federal class-action lawsuit has been arguing for years. According to the lawsuit Joseph Taylor v. Google, Google…