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We are already seeing the first wave of "who won and who lost" sorts of stories pitting various governors' responses against each other in horse-race fashion, as if these were early polls for the 2024 presidential election.

Then reality stepped in. A surge of summer cases forced the imposition of some restrictions on Floridians, like local mask mandates imposed by mayors in some cities in South Florida.

Now DeSantis is claiming again to be a master of pandemic control, as Florida's beach-tourism-restaurant industry is said to be doing well. Never mind that the state's seven-day infection rate of 143.9 per 100,000 population places it 12th highest of the 50 states.

For example, as of March 22, over the last seven days, Florida has had the most Covid-19 cases in the country, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the 12th highest per capita case-rate, the fourth highest number of deaths, and the 17th highest death rate.

Once celebrated for his pandemic management, he is now getting poor marks on managing. He has not strutted or had roundtables of fan-doctors to sing his praise. But the fact is California's recent numbers are much better than those of Florida, coming in at about 47th in the country with a case-rate 46.8 per 100,000, according to the CDC's data, and fewer deaths as well.

Florida is ignoring the death toll and instead pushing the upbeat metrics the governor would like America to pay attention to: jobs are up! and schools are open! DeSantis stood up to the Covid-19 threat like John Wayne would have done!

Rather than wallow in reality, she chose to celebrate an active economy and the joys of hunting season (note: the South Dakota new-infection rate is climbing the charts once again and sits at 105 per 100,000 South Dakotans ).

These rate-the-governors perspectives ignore a basic fact: it is no time for trophies.

Worse, this obeisance to economic and social factors as measure of success creates a series of disturbing false equivalencies as they compare deaths against the economy.

Measuring Covid-19 management on anything other than the number of human lives lost is not only disgraceful, it will also almost certainly lead us to make all the wrong decisions once again and usher in yet another Covid-19 resurgence in the US.

Sea levels have risen eight inches since 1870, according to the new report, which projects a further rise of one to four feet by the end of the century. Waters around southeast Florida could surge up to two feet by 2060, according to a report by the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact. A study by the Florida Department of Transportation concluded that over the next 35 years, rising sea levels will increasingly flood and damage smaller local roads in the Miami area.

with most polls indicating that it’s anyone’s guess who will carry Florida

held rallies in nearby Tampa on Thursday that underlined the polar-opposite realities each candidate now inhabits:

a conservative who said he had blocked Fox News on social media for being “too mainstream,”

“felt that it would be a good learning experience, so she could learn about some history and politics firsthand.”

Does he have a locker-room mentality?

“Yeah, sure, but I’m not hiring him to be nice.”

once overshadowed by Clearwater’s beach-retirement hub — has been transformed by recent years that have brought a mix of gentrification and progressive politics.

get-out-the-vote rally in honor of Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and voting rights champion who died over the summer

One in five Black Floridians is thought to have a felony conviction and could be unable to vote because of it.

“I’m not encouraging anyone to break the law, but today is a day for some ‘good trouble,’” she added, using one of Mr. Lewis’s signature phrases from his civil rights struggles

Mr. Overcast sighed. He said that living in the same county as the Church of Scientology’s headquarters had taught him how to tolerate almost any point of view, even that of the neighbor, who he suspected had stolen the Trump sign from his lawn.Mr. Overcast said his home security system had filmed the culprit making off with it. But rather than confront the neighbor, Mr. Overcast just bought another sign.“But with this one I tied 90 pounds of fishing line on it and tied it to a tree in my yard,” he said.

Billy Overcast — “spelled like the weather,” said Mr. Overcast, pointing up, however, to a typically clear day with one hand, a “Trump 2020” flag in the other.

Clearwater

The Confederate flag also bothered him, he told his fellow Jeep enthusiasts, as did the systemic racism

decorated with red, white and blue balloons; an American flag; a Black Lives Matter flag; another flag with an L.G.B.T. rainbow he found on Amazon; and lots of Biden-Harris campaign paraphernalia.

St. Petersburg and conservative Clearwater, the vacation hub and base of the Church of Scientology.

in the swing state that crowned past presidents by small margins, much in this country is riding o

n the all-important question of who flies what flag on which Jeep.

Pinellas County, about three-quarters of which is white, includes a good number of older retirees and suburban women

favor Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee.

256,000 are registered as Democrats

252,000 as Republicans.

a swing county in a swing state

Donald J. Trump narrowly triumphed here by roughly 6,000 votes, out of about half a million cast

But postelection observers said her appeals to middle-class voters in Pinellas County didn’t resonate as well as Mr. Obama’s had.

Figuring out exactly what happened that Saturday night will take time and require generous listening to reveal important details about exactly what events took place, how law enforcement became involved and whether permitting and operational procedures were followed.

I'm convinced that the depiction of the event and the actions of law enforcement is contrary to what was initially reported. This was not a pop-up Spring Hill block party that spontaneously became massive, disruptive and violent. Instead, it involved groups gathered for a series of events (including, among others, a car show, a concert and memorial for a former Spring Hill resident who in 2008 was a victim of gun violence) that were promoted successfully enough to attract attendees from as far away as Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville.

And instead of becoming yet another incident where unarmed African Americans were shot by law enforcement officers who felt threatened based on preconceived fears and racist assumptions, there have been no reports or claims that these law enforcement officers shot, killed or inflicted life-threatening injury on any residents or visitors

law enforcement officers claim they were hit and injured that night by a sucker punch and the hurling of bottles, a bar stool and a mason jar; that they recovered one loaded Ruger 9 mm and other guns, some narcotics and $3,840 in cash; that they made seven arrests and issued five traffic citations. It remains the subject of further investigation and reporting to resolve community complaints in social media posts about undue provocation, escalation and unlawful business interruption. Videos of the incident shed some light but do not capture all aspects of a crowd this large -- the Volusia sheriff's office estimated it at 3,000 -- moving across multiple locations.

To facilitate effective community policing during this pandemic crisis, law enforcement leaders and African American leaders and residents need to further discuss and endeavor to reach consensus on four practical steps: suspending plans for any large gatherings until public health officials say they are safe; advocating for national and state leaders to put health over politics by warning about the continuing risks of asymptomatic virus transmission as the economy reopens; using social media to promote a consistent message about the danger of asymptomatic spread, especially given that the African American community is experiencing a disproportionate number of Covid-19 deaths, and ensuring that when large events are permissible organizers comply with local permitting requirements, which should be consistently enforced in ALL communities, not just in African American neighborhoods.

Ironically, on the same morning as the Spring Hill neighborhood events in question, I was part of a group of 19 racially, politically and socially diverse individuals from eight states and 11 cities gathered for a virtual "Color Line Roundtable."

participants thoughtfully discussed what values, beliefs and principles would guide their votes -- or abstentions -- in the November election. Each of us had a slightly different way of articulating those foundational beliefs, but, as one first-time participant emailed me after the discussion, it was "affirming to hear the commonality of beliefs and principles amongst a group of people who obviously also have some significant differences in opinions and positions."

upon further reflection, I have come to appreciate the value of our community's years-long series of roundtable discussions. Covid-19 restrictions and Floyd's murder might have complicated relations with law enforcement officials, but they offer yet another opportunity for us to talk candidly about the complex issues of effective community policing, racial diversity, equity and inclusion.

Meanwhile, a disconnect seems to have occurred in our daily lives in Florida. The weekly forecasts, the hourly detail have seemingly become less accurate as the weather patterns have become more erratic.

That’s because the situation has fundamentally changed. This is not so much like a proverbial frog in a hot pot as a more insidious effect, in which we come to experience the stress of hurricane season more viscerally. Perhaps all of us will be hunkering down at some point, too exhausted to do anything else, whether we want to or not.

Now, with mini-droughts punctuated by torrential downpours, we prepare for flooding, overflowing sewers, loss of electricity and erosion. So we are already adrift as a result of climate change, unmoored without realizing it, when a hurricane looms large.

Encountering, then, meteorologists’ spaghetti models of a hurricane’s possible track, with their different futures, both help us make decisions and deepen a sense of anxiety. In one reality, the roof of our house blows off, and we are exposed to the elements. In another, just a hair’s breadth different, we’re standing, relieved in the yard, sun shining, just a day later.

We miss the gentle 3 p.m. rain of prior summers because it was part of our schedule, our routine, our understanding of and comfort with the rhythms of the seasons.

Apparently, my mind could not hold more than one extreme weather event at a time. So I write this from a hotel that could experience loss of electricity, high winds and flooding when Helene arrives. But to drive further would be dangerous, so I’m hunkering down, the window for decision making closed. I wonder sometimes if I should go back to Florida at all, which may feel like betrayal but also a relief.

But Obama’s early opposition to the Iraq war gave him a political firewall that protected him throughout that primary campaign, while Romney has no such policy safe harbor to safeguard him from an intramural backlash.

Romney and Obama share a lack of natural affinity for this key group of swing voters, but it is Romney who needs to figure out some way of addressing this shortcoming if he wants to make it to the White House. It’s Romney’s misfortune that the voters’ prioritization of economic issues, his own privileged upbringing and his lack of connection with his party’s base on other core issues put him in a much more precarious position than candidate Obama ever reached.

The current economic circumstances have undoubtedly exacerbated the problem for Romney. Had Obama initially sought the presidency during a primary season dominated by concerns about the domestic economy rather than war in Iraq, his explanation that small town voters “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” might have created an opportunity for Hillary Clinton or even the populist message of John Edwards.

Of more immediate concern to Team Romney should be how their candidate can overcome his habit of economic tone-deafness before Rick Santorum steals away enough working-class and culturally conservative voters to throw the Republican primary into complete and utter turmoil.

The curious thing about Romney’s verbal missteps is how limited they are to this very specific area of public policy. He is usually quite articulate when talking about foreign affairs and national security. Despite his complicated history on social and cultural matters like health care and abortion, his explanations are usually both coherent and comprehensible, even to those who oppose his positions. It’s only when he begins talking about economic issues – his biographical strength – that he seems to get clumsy.

The second possibility would be for him to outline a series of proposals specifically targeted at the needs of working-class and poor Americans, not only to control the damage from his gaffes but also to underscore the conservative premise that a right-leaning agenda will create opportunities for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. But while that approach might help Romney in a broader philosophical conversation, it’s unlikely to offer him much protection from the attacks and ridicule that his unforced errors will continue to bring him.

The question is why Romney hasn’t embraced a third alternative – admitting the obvious and then explaining why he gets so tongue-tied when the conversation turns to money. Romney’s upbringing and religious faith suggest a sense of obligation to the less fortunate and an unspoken understanding that it isn’t appropriate to call attention to one’s financial success.It wouldn’t be that hard for him to say something like:I was taught not to brag and boast and think I’m better than other people because of the successes I’ve had, so occasionally I’m going to say things that sound awkward. It’s because I’d rather talk about what it takes to get America back to work.

As a 15-year-old, I was condemned to long-term solitary confinement in the Florida prison system, which ultimately lasted for 18 consecutive years

From age 15 to 33.

For 18 years I didn’t have a window in my room to distract myself from the intensity of my confinement

I wasn’t permitted to talk to my fellow prisoners or even to myself. I didn’t have healthy, nutritious food; I was given just enough to not die

These circumstances made me think about how I ended up in solitary confinement.

United Nations standards on the treatment of prisoners prohibits solitary confinement for more than 15 days, declaring it “cruel, inhuman or degrading.”

For this I was arrested and charged as an adult with armed robbery and attempted murder.

My court-appointed lawyer advised me to plead guilty, telling me that the maximum sentence would be 15 years. So I did. But my sentence wasn’t 15 years — it was life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

But a year and a half later, at age 15, I was put back into solitary confinement after being written up for a few minor infractions.

Florida has different levels of solitary confinement; I spent the majority of that time in one of the most restrictive

I was finally released from prison in 2016 thanks to my lawyer, Bryan Stevenson

Researchers have long concluded that solitary confinement causes post-traumatic stress disorder and impairs prisoners’ ability to adjust to society long after they leave their cell.

In the summer of 1990, shortly after finishing seventh grade, I was directed by a few older kids to commit a robbery. During the botched attempt, I shot a woman. She suffered serious injuries to her jaw and mouth but survived. It was reckless and foolish on my part, the act of a 13-year-old in crisis, and I’m simply grateful no one died.

More aggressive change is needed in state prison systems

In 2016, the Obama administration banned juvenile solitary confinement in federal prisons, and a handful of states have advanced similar reforms for both children and adults.

Yet the practice, even for minors, is still common in the United States, and efforts to end it have been spotty

Because solitary confinement is hidden from public view and the broader prison population, egregious abuses are left unchecked

I watched a corrections officer spray a blind prisoner in the face with chemicals simply because he was standing by the door of his cell as a female nurse walked by. The prisoner later told me that to justify the spraying, the officer claimed the prisoner masturbated in front of the nurse.

I also witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television

On occasion, I purposely overdosed on Tylenol so that I could spend a night in the hospital. For even one night, it was worth the pain.

Another time, I was told I’d be switching dorms, and I politely asked to remain where I was because a guard in the new area had been overly aggressive with me. In response, four or five officers handcuffed me, picked me up by my feet and shoulders, and marched with me to my new dorm — using my head to ram the four steel doors on the way there.

The punishments were wholly disproportionate to the infractions. Before I knew it, months in solitary bled into years, years into almost two decades.

As a child, I survived these conditions by conjuring up stories of what I’d do when I was finally released. My mind was the only place I found freedom from my reality

the only place I could play basketball with my brother or video games with my friends, and eat my mother’s warm cherry pie on the porch.

No child should have to use their imagination this way — to survive.

It is difficult to know the exact number of children in solitary confinement today. The Liman Center at Yale Law School estimated that 61,000 Americans (adults and children) were in solitary confinement in the fall of 2017

No matter the count, I witnessed too many people lose their minds while isolated. They’d involuntarily cross a line and simply never return to sanity. Perhaps they didn’t want to. Staying in their mind was the better, safer, more humane option.

Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, yet prisons continue to practice it.

When it comes to children, elimination is the only moral option. And if ending solitary confinement for adults isn’t politically viable, public officials should at least limit the length of confinement to 15 days or fewer, in compliance with the U.N. standards

As I try to reintegrate into society, small things often awaken painful memories from solitary. Sometimes relationships feel constraining. It’s difficult to maintain the attention span required for a rigid 9-to-5 job. At first, crossing the street and seeing cars and bikes racing toward me felt terrifying.

I will face PTSD and challenges big and small for the rest of my life because of what I was subjected to.

And some things I never will — most of all, that this country can treat human beings, especially children, as cruelly as I was treated.

Sadly, solitary confinement for juveniles is still permissible in many states. But we have the power to change that — to ensure that the harrowing injustice I suffered as a young boy never happens to another child in America.

one that has conservative groups wrestling for control over how climate science will be taught to American students. The science classroom, after all, remains the dominant venue in which those students first encounter the topic, and it greatly informs how students eventually square-up to the veracity of climate change — either as something they believe to be happening and worth responding to politically, or as a phenomenon of nature, underserving of public funds and political action.

The outcome matters: Whoever wins over the minds of this upcoming cohort of American voters will, to a large extent, shape the nation’s policies on climate change for decades to come.

“Teachers are facing pressure to not only eliminate or de-emphasize climate change science, but also to introduce non-scientific ideas in science classrooms,” the statement said.

For advocates of inserting climate change skepticism into the classroom, the notion of “teaching both sides of the debate” is a familiar refrain, and it’s one used to mask the more fundamental motive: Fostering doubt in students that the scientific community conclusively agrees climate change is occurring.

For those science teachers who remain in the classroom, a comprehensive understanding of climate science itself is not a given. One recent report found that less than half of K-12 science teachers received formal climate science training during their own college education — a comprehension void that helps explain why political ideology has been shown to be the most consistent indicator of how a teacher presents climate science to their own students.

Trying to continue with lessons on climate science despite this intensifying atmosphere of hostility has forced some teachers to become savvier — or more secretive — about how they present the information to their students. In Texas, Nina Corley is careful to keep explicit mentions of climate change out of her lessons, for fear that her skeptical administrators might try to censor the science. “The administrators in a school can have total control, because they’re your boss, you have to remember that. It’s going to be how you word it,” she said. “I’m not going to say my lesson plan is on climate change today, I’ll just talk about how we’re investigating the effects of carbon dioxide.”

Recalling one student who was hostile to her lessons on climate change, Erin Stutzman realized the more personal ramifications catalyzed by the student changing his mind. “He was tightly engrossed in the skepticism, that belief was engrained in him. And his initial resistance wasn’t to the science, really, it was that someone was challenging his parents and his friend’s parents,”

Conservative politicians have long complained that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media companies unfairly remove or demote some conservative viewpoints.

Associations of internet companies and some constitutional rights groups said that the Texas law violated the First Amendment because it allowed the state to tell private businesses what kinds of speech they could or could not distribute.

Texas countered that Facebook, Twitter and the like don’t have such First Amendment protections because they are more like old telegraphs, telephone companies and home internet providers.

A federal appeals court recently deemed unconstitutional a Florida law passed last year that similarly tried to restrict social media companies’ discretion over speech.

written by Justice Samuel Alito that said: “It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.”

These cases force us to wrestle with a fundamental question about what kind of world we want to live in: Are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube so influential in our world that the government should restrain their decisions, or are they private companies that should have the freedom to set their own rules?

What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe.

What accounts for this pattern of denial? Earlier this year, the science writer Chris Mooney published “The Republican Brain,” which was not, as you might think, a partisan screed. It was, instead, a survey of the now-extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations — and authoritarians are strongly inclined to reject any evidence contradicting their prior beliefs

it’s not symmetric. Liberals, being human, often give in to wishful thinking — but not in the same systematic, all-encompassing way.

We are, after all, living in an era when science plays a crucial economic role. How are we going to search effectively for natural resources if schools trying to teach modern geology must give equal time to claims that the world is only 6.000 years old? How are we going to stay competitive in biotechnology if biology classes avoid any material that might offend creationists?

then there’s the matter of using evidence to shape economic policy. You may have read about the recent study from the Congressional Research Service finding no empirical support for the dogma that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to higher economic growth. How did Republicans respond? By suppressing the report. On economics, as in hard science, modern conservatives don’t want to hear anything challenging their preconceptions — and they don’t want anyone else to hear about it, either.

After the protesters were ejected, Trump remarked on "the hatred, the animosity" and the division in America today, seemingly laying the blame at the feet of President Barack Obama.

The purpose of the group is to "[promote] national security and [defeat] terrorism"—two goals which are, in the group's view, intrinsically threatened by the Islamic faith. The rhetoric of their meetings doesn't suggest that the problem is radical Islam, but Islam itself.

Just hours after the attacks in Paris, a mosque in St. Petersburg, Florida received a voicemail from a man who said he planned to shoot all Muslims, including children, in the head.

Act for America has flourished

the basic doctrine of the Quran, which is a personal, moral code for Muslims—as a threat to American security. It doesn't matter that the majority of American mass shootings are committed by young, white males (and often fanatical Christians), or that gun regulations play a role in terrorism-related events. Here, the group's mission is to "educate and effect change"—meaning, the Muslims have to go.

Yerushalmi claimed that 80 percent of mosques in the United States are "strictly Sharia," which he equated to Muslims following the same dogma as Al-Qaeda terrorists.

"national security expert," where her advice tends to be "get rid of the Muslims."

By his logic, when a Muslim attends an American mosque, he is not only learning a violent doctrine but is also susceptible to be recruited by ISIS

Yerushalmi was suggesting further alienation. "Syrian immigrants, when they come here, where are they going to go to those mosques; the reservoir of support is there."

"The threat is real!" Yerushalmi concluded. "Sharia is not a peaceful, feel-good Islam."

"If my Roman Catholic church was preaching death to Muslims, Jews, everyone else, I'm sure it would be closed down with a blink of an eye," she continued. "So this is where we have to stop the growth of mosques!"

some members believe that the White House "is controlled by Muslims."

"They don't want peace and prosperity. They want to live by Sharia," said an angry old man.

President Obama delivered a speech responding to the San Bernardino shootings, calling for religious tolerance. He harshly condemned those who wish to discriminate against others based on their religion and addressed the plight of Muslim Americans who are currently enduring the ongoing Islamophobic backlash

“Over 100 likes is good, for me. And comments. You just comment to make a joke or tag someone.”

The best thing is the little notification box, which means someone liked, tagged or followed her on Instagram. She has 604 followers. There are only 25 photos on her page because she deletes most of what she posts. The ones that don’t get enough likes, don’t have good enough lighting or don’t show the coolest moments in her life must be deleted.

Sociologists, advertisers, stock market analysts – everyone wants to know what happens when the generation born glued to screens has to look up and interact with the world.

“It kind of, almost, promotes you as a good person. If someone says, ‘tbh you’re nice and pretty,’ that kind of, like, validates you in the comments. Then people can look at it and say ‘Oh, she’s nice and pretty.’ ”

School is where she thrives: She is beloved by her teachers, will soon star as young Simba in the eighth-grade performance of “The Lion King” musical, and gets straight A’s. Her school doesn’t offer a math course challenging enough for her, so she takes honors algebra online through Johns Hopkins University.

“Happy birthday posts are a pretty big deal,” she says. “It really shows who cares enough to put you on their page.”

Dave Pommerening wants to figure out how to get her to use it less. One month, she ate up 18 gigabytes of data. Most large plans max out at 10. He intervened and capped her at four GB. “I don’t want to crimp it too much,” he says. “That’s something, from my perspective, I’m going to have to figure out, how to get my arms around that.”

Some of Katherine’s very best friends have never been to her house, or she to theirs. To Dave, it seems like they rarely hang out, but he knows that to her, it seems like they’re together all the time.

He checks the phone bill to see who she’s called and how much she’s been texting, but she barely calls anyone and chats mostly through Snapchat, where her messages disappear.

Even if her dad tried snooping around her apps, the true dramas of teenage girl life are not written in the comments. Like how sometimes, Katherine’s friends will borrow her phone just to un-like all the Instagram photos of girls they don’t like. Katherine can’t go back to those girls’ pages and re-like the photos because that would be stalking, which is forbidden.

Or how last week, at the middle school dance, her friends got the phone numbers of 10 boys, but then they had to delete five of them because they were seventh-graders. And before she could add the boys on Snapchat, she realized she had to change her username because it was her childhood nickname and that was totally embarrassing.

Then, because she changed her username, her Snapchat score reverted to zero. The app awards about one point for every snap you send and receive. It’s also totally embarrassing and stressful to have a low Snapchat score. So in one day, she sent enough snaps to earn 1,000 points.

Snapchat is where flirting happens. She doesn’t know anyone who has sent a naked picture to a boy, but she knows it happens with older girls, who know they have met the right guy.

Nothing her dad could find on her phone shows that for as good as Katherine is at math, basketball and singing, she wants to get better at her phone. To be one of the girls who knows what to post, how to caption it, when to like, what to comment.

Katherine doesn’t need magazines or billboards to see computer-perfect women. They’re right on her phone, all the time, in between photos of her normal-looking friends. There’s Aisha, there’s Kendall Jenner’s butt. There’s Olivia, there’s YouTube star Jenna Marbles in lingerie.

The whole world is at her fingertips and has been for years. This, Katherine offers as a theory one day, is why she doesn’t feel like she’s 13 years old at all. She’s probably, like, 16.

“I don’t feel like a child anymore” she says. “I’m not doing anything childish. At the end of sixth grade” — when all her friends got phones and downloaded Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter — “I just stopped doing everything I normally did. Playing games at recess, playing with toys, all of it, done.”

Her scooter sat in the garage, covered in dust. Her stuffed animals were passed down to Lila. The wooden playground in the back yard stood empty. She kept her skateboard with neon yellow wheels, because riding it is still cool to her friends.

On the morning of her 14th birthday, Katherine wakes up to an alarm ringing on her phone. It’s 6:30 a.m. She rolls over and shuts it off in the dark. Her grandparents, here to celebrate the end of her first year of teenagehood, are sleeping in the guest room down the hall. She can hear the dogs shuffling across the hardwood downstairs, waiting to be fed. Propping herself up on her peace-sign-covered pillow, she opens Instagram. Later, Lila will give her a Starbucks gift card. Her dad will bring doughnuts to her class. Her grandparents will take her to the Melting Pot for dinner. But first, her friends will decide whether to post pictures of Katherine for her birthday. Whether they like her enough to put a picture of her on their page. Those pictures, if they come, will get likes and maybe tbhs. They should be posted in the morning, any minute now. She scrolls past a friend posing in a bikini on the beach. Then a picture posted by Kendall Jenner. A selfie with coffee. A basketball Vine. A selfie with a girl’s tongue out. She scrolls, she waits. For that little notification box to appear.

My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me.

The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic.

Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down.

When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are higher.

The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.

students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State.

The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value.

An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse.

Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.”

For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend.

The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life? Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education?

Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others.

At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.

being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.

The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade.

Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. GA_googleFillSlot('Rectangle_InArticle_Right'); GA_googleCreateDomIframe("google_ads_div_Rectangle_InArticle_Right_ad_container" ,"Rectangle_InArticle_Right"); Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions

Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business.

Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty.

But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual.

Yet there is a dimension of the intellectual life that lies above the passion for ideas, though so thoroughly has our culture been sanitized of it that it is hardly surprising if it was beyond the reach of even my most alert students. Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the 18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power.

It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage.

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there.

Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school

I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks. You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla.

The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance—and affect—that go with achievement

Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships.

What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude

the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.

The mating and cohabitation produced the exact same effects [as TSA],” said Bruce Cushing, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Akron who was not involved in the study. “That is really powerful.”

“We made some mistakes early on, but we learned from them,” a senior Disney executive once said to me. “How can you judge us without seeing for yourself?”

At the end of the day, what makes a Disney park unique are the people who occupy it.

In France visitors stroll along those glorious garden paths — no rushing to the rides. Disney World in Florida is a melting pot endurance test, while the original Disneyland in California relies less on tourists than on annual pass-holding locals. Tokyo visitors, once completing that initial sprint, stand politely and quietly in tidy lines; Hong Kong attendees from mainland China show little interest in personal space, even leaning on one another in the ride queues, and go gaga for simple go-in-a-circle rides that would bore most Americans.