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From Vox
The best four years of your life? -
Paige Vickers for Vox
Dropping out helped me see the lies we were sold about the college experience.
“But these will be the best four years of your life!”
It’s what people told me the first time I dropped out of college as an almost-19-year-old buckling under the pressure of needing time and space to figure out what she wanted her life to be and help her mental health, while simultaneously needing to pick a major, a city, and a career plan before she could even legally drink alcohol.
“You know this is your future?” I remember the woman in the registrar’s office informing me with the tone reserved for parents catching their kid sneaking back into the house after a night out.
Of course I know, I wanted to counter. It seemed like the only things I “knew” had to do with my future: what it should look like, the gravity of it, the numerous ways I was ruining it by just standing there. My future — the vague, all-consuming ideal we’re taught to live for — felt like a more dominant force in my life than my present. That was all changing in the drafty hallway at the small university 45 minutes from my hometown. I was dropping out.
I always imagined I’d go to college later; I was going to work in the dance industry, and higher education would come after the prime working years for my body. But when I got injured, recalibration looked like rushing into college as fast as possible to try to get my life in order, fearing that if I didn’t go then — and if I didn’t go full time — I’d never get “on track,” an ideology that permeates young adulthood that I now know to be a myth. I’d get involved; I’d make new friends. Surely I’d love college. Everyone did, right?
But what awaited me on campus was not reinvention. I was toggling back and forth between being a student and commuting 45 minutes to my off-campus job. For the first time, I encountered adults older than me who asked me why I was working so much and not focusing only on school. I was severely depressed but had no language to explain it, and subsequently felt isolated and lonelier than I ever could have imagined feeling in spaces where I was perpetually surrounded by people. By the time I strode across the campus to the registrar’s office to withdraw, it felt like an out-of-body experience, watching myself choose failure in real time.
Of course, there was a little more to it than that: I had the privilege to move home until I figured out what I was doing. I also had the job I’d been commuting to throughout my freshman year, at which I could increase my hours to full time. But in that moment when I dropped out, I felt like I had ruined my life before it had even begun.
We call college a rite of passage because it’s spun as the start of who you are as a young person. For many young adults, it’s the first time they have the opportunity to leave their hometowns. We have college rankings and “best of” lists, where you can see exactly where your education and formative experiences fall on the scale of what is perceived as impressive. You start making critical decisions about your future — taking on debt, deciding where to live, entering courses of study that supposedly outline the career path you’re going to take — which, by the way, you’re supposed to have determined before you sign for those loans.
Too many of the common talking points still exist: If you don’t go to college, you’re a slacker who didn’t make the most of their potential; if you do go, you’re also irresponsible, because whatever you decided, there’s someone waiting to tell you that you could’ve done it cheaper, or chosen a better major. A certain idea of how to attend college — pursuing a four-year degree while living at school right after you graduate high school — dominates the narrative, so much so that any other way of attending is labeled “nontraditional” by schools themselves. College is amplified as “the best four years of your life,” not to mention the mostformative. Pegging anything as the “best of your life” is a gutting amount of pressure whether you’re 18 or 60, because, deep underneath the wild freedom that’s supposed to illustrate, you’re left wondering whether the self-doubt and uncertainty and terror will linger forever.
In retrospect, the pressure to have my life figured out, sealed and signed on the dotted line for student loans by 18, still feels unrealistic and insurmountable, but familiar enough to remember the ache of thinking it was all downhill from here. But what I didn’t realize at the time is that what I felt like I was straying from was a myth, and one that so many others around me were puncturing, whether through choice, circumstance, or both. Instead, I was doing something every young person should have the opportunity to do, especially in college — building a life that felt more like me.
Among all Americans over the age of 25, college graduates are just shy of the majority. But the share of young people attending colleges is rising steadily (with the big exception of the 2020 pandemic) — from 2007 to 2017, enrollment of those under 25 increased by 11 percent. Among those who attend, leaving school is a strong possibility: A whopping 40 percent of students drop out, sometimes because of financial pressures and needing to work, or lack of support and feelings of isolation. Some decide their college circumstances aren’t for them, or their scholarship or financial aid is not renewed, and falling behind on payments prevents them from continuing. Barriers to staying enrolled in college impact low-income and first-generation students, in particular, with systemic inequality embedded in degree attainment.
Many of those who are enrolled look far different from the popular idea of a college student, known by colleges as a “traditional student.” According to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, as of 2015, 70 percent of full-time college students were working while in school. A 2018 report thoroughly debunked the myth of every college student being a recent high school graduate: Around 41 percent of college students in 2018 were 25 or older, despite many universities being slow to accommodate needs that make education more accessible to them, including child care, flexible class schedules, and more expansive financial aid and payment plans. Students who are also parents are more likely to face time and financial demands (and one in five of today’s college students are parenting a child while enrolled in classes). According to a survey of 86,000 students by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University, 56 percent reported experiencing housing insecurity in the previous year.
There’s also a persistent narrative that students pursuing post–high school education only attend residential four-year universities, leaving out the thousands of people who lay a foundation for their lives at community colleges or vocational schools, or through pursuing a trade. A subset of this myth pretends that all students have to focus on is what happens in the lecture hall for that hour and a half, as if life beyond school pauses simply because you’re a student. But college students — whatever kind of school they attend, whether they’re full time or part time, whatever their age — aren’t just students. They’re people, with complex lives and stressors and expectations even beyond what they do in classes or on campuses.
Xorah, a 16-year-old community college student pursuing her associate’s degree in early childhood education, told me that this myth of the “traditional” college student is “a part of this American dream ideal that we have about owning a house and having a specific number of kids and being married. It’s like a dream that we have in our collective mind.”
Xorah (who, like other students interviewed for this piece, is being referred to by her first name only to protect her privacy) thinks part of the reason community colleges aren’t centered in conversation around young people and school is that they have a “negative connotation” as being somehow lesser — the exact opposite of Xorah’s school, which she says offers academic and personal support as well as a diverse student body.
“In my parents’ generation, it was super important that you go to college, and that if you wanted a good job, if you wanted to be stable, you got a college degree,” she said. “I think that is kind of being questioned, because there are so many different mediums to be able to be successful. And success looks so different today, and even the idea of success is super diverse today.”
Paige Vickers for Vox
For lots of young people, college represents access and opportunity and a chance for freedom, reinvention, and discovering a “true self.” But for others, it feels midway between an identity crisis and existing in a pressure cooker. The idea that any rite of passage will contain the best of your years isn’t just inaccurate; it’s depressing. It’s not a matter of whether any one person loved college or didn’t. But it is about how an entire society has hyped up one four-year chunk of time as the best you’re ever going to be, while ignoring the realities that compose it.
When I asked Pearl, 21, whether she felt collegiate pressures had informed her identity as a young adult, she was swift to correct me, explaining that the word “inform” was too passive in regard to what college does to your identity. “College more so chokes or conforms your identity rather than informs,” she told me, describing the challenges of dealing with discrimination for marginalized students on predominantly white campuses. “People think the height of your life is your college years, which, the more I think about postgrad life, the more I think that is not true,” she said. “There are so many opportunities out there that people fail to see or look for.”
When I talked to adults in their mid- to late 20s about whether college was their best four years, most seemed skeptical to attribute who they were now solely to the experience they’d had then. Many said they regretted the money they spent on college, and there was a lot of repetition that, at the time, they didn’t realize how much that would factor into what they experienced later. Some people loved their social lives at school, whereas others pointed to incidents of harassment and assault, discrimination, or ostracization that they felt were embedded in their campus’s culture. Stuffing college into a one-size-fits-all, glorified cornerstone of young adulthood leaves out that for a lot of people, their higher education experience wasn’t just okay — it was awful.
Rebecca, who went from community college to a four-year college and is now in graduate school, likened college to a popular conception of marriage, in which your partner is supposed to be everything — the love of your life, your best friend, your therapist, your financial support, your whole world. “I think college has become the same thing,” she told me. “You’re supposed to find yourself, learn everything, get job skills, become financially independent. And it’s like, how in the world can one institution be all those things?”
There’s tremendous pressure regarding young people getting into college — America even had its own higher education scandal where celebrities scammed to get their kids into elite universities, dubbed Operation Varsity Blues, underscoring the classism, “elite” school fixation, and parental collegiate obsession that still exists. Maybe it’s because costs have skyrocketed or the college prep process feels like it starts around first grade, but by the time students actually make it to college, no wonder they are stressed out, overwhelmed, and, as one student who recently endured the admissions process phrased it to me, “soulless,” having poured so much of their energy and self-worth and time into building a future that begins at collegiate gates.
All this breathless hype “makes it feel like you have to follow a specific plan and everything has to go a certain way and it has to be done on a specific timeline, and if you can’t get it done in that timeline, something’s wrong with you,” said Jessi Gold, an assistant professor in the psychiatry department at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and a specialist in college mental health, medical education, and physician wellness. Having to decide a life plan so early, she said, doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility in your choices, given many haven’t had time to determine their own “identity and values. But you’re supposed to be choosing what you’re going to be doing forever.”
When I dropped out of college, I was sure I had decimated my future with my own uncertainty. Goodbye, I thought, to the chances to try new opportunities, or courses of study, or meeting new people. But the failure around my collegiate expectations also felt freeing: So much of my own unhappiness and anxiety and uncertainty around that time came from following a path I didn’t feel I’d picked in the first place. It didn’t match that I didn’t feel ready to move away from home. Or that I needed to work while in school and had an off-campus job I didn’t want to give up. Mostly, it didn’t feel as though it matched me being sounsure — instead of slowing down and looking at how different pieces could make a puzzle that fit my life, I panicked, worried that I was behind, and that if I didn’t go to college right then, in the “traditional way,” it meant I’d squander my opportunity to define my life. The expectations felt insurmountable.
I floundered for a while, a thing we’re never supposed to admit lest we betray we don’t know everything yet. But eventually, I found my footing. About two years after I dropped out, I discovered a bachelor’s program where I could submit portfolios of work experiences for academic credit, which saved significant money and time. I took online classes with classmates who were both younger, freshly out of high school, and older, midway through careers or during retirement — an experience I loved. Because my bachelor’s program was online, classmates weren’t confined to a specific geographic region, and hearing about how their communities or jobs shaped their perspectives was enlightening.
Sometimes I wondered if I was missing out on what college was “supposed” to be. But my experience set me up for the kind of adulthood I embraced, not just one I thought I should aspire to: Deciding to finish college a different way gave me the opportunity to have dreams beyond just getting through.
It’s worth considering that the perception of college might be shifting for students today, maybe because of cost, maybe because of the pandemic — which, in a lot of ways, shattered the “traditional college experience” myth as we know it — or maybe because they’ve chosen a different path. If time is so precious, if these years are so coveted, some young people are reconsidering how they do college and if they do it at all: It’s presented as both an aspiration and a life practicality, an opportunity you both have to earn and pay for. Students I spoke with described opting to take gap years, working full time instead, or pursuing a couple of classes at a time while they continued working as opportunities to craft a college experience that fit with their lives, rather than them working to fit it.
Colleges need to do their part, too. Instead of students working to fit their lives into the confines of a specific experience, these institutions should work to meet students where they are — particularly those who are working, parenting, or caregiving, who are first-generation or low-income students, or who are experiencing basic needs insecurity. That means acknowledging college students have lives and identities beyond school. Those aren’t “nontraditional” experiences. They are parts of people’s lives.
During my college career, I was hustling, I was achieving, but little of it was driven by curiosity or exploration, two things I thought college would provide in spades. And I was a white, privileged student with a job. First-gen students, low-income students, students of color, students who are queer, and otherwise marginalized students all face challenges that often go undiscussed, because our society still believes that as long as we get them to college, the rest figures itself out. While the talking point that gets thrown at college students often is to take chances, explore, and embrace failure, that skims over how many students fundamentally can’t afford to fail, and renders that advice a platitude out of touch with the stakes countless students are experiencing.
There are a lot of moments I remember from college. I remember the first time we were required to read aloud in class, and how my cheeks flamed red when I stumbled over words I’d never heard spoken aloud as classmates coasted through them. I remember a professor telling me I didn’t take getting a degree “seriously” because I was working while in school. I remember how I felt I was failing more often than I was doing much else, and I wish I’d known that was normal, but I also wish I’d known that failing wasn’t the end of the road. The college experience has changed.
But if I could tell my college self anything, I’d tell her to ease up on the pressure that college must be the best of you. I’d encourage her to be honest, about who she is and what she wanted and when she felt lost. And I’d tell her that so few of the things she learned that would eventually become who she is would be included in her GPA.
Rainesford Stauffer is a writer and Kentuckian. She previously wrote for Vox’s The Highlight about the death of the summer job. This essay has been adapted from her new book, An Ordinary Age, reprinted with permission from HarperCollins.
Why the 400m hurdles is one of the hardest Olympic races -
Running the 400-meter hurdles requires strategic rhythm, but it’s over so quick you just might miss it.
There are few single events that demand as much skill as the 400-meter hurdle race. It’s not as simple as just running and jumping. Olympians need to have the speed of a 200-meter dash runner, the endurance of an 800-meter runner, an understanding of rhythm, and, of course, the ability to efficiently clear a hurdle.
Various techniques can make or break a race. For one, hurdlers don’t “jump” — they sprint right over the barrier. If you hurdle too high, you’re wasting time and energy; too low and you collide with a hurdle. Even if your technique over the hurdles is perfect, you can’t win if you don’t have the speed — but starting too fast could lead to burnout later in the race.
Former Olympic hurdler and (until very recently) world record-holder Kevin Young helps us break down the rhythm of the 400-meter hurdles.
Correction: Karsten Warholm broke Kevin Young’s record at a Diamond League meet in Oslo, Norway on July 1 — not at the Olympic trials.
The case for optimism about American democracy -
Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. | Brent Stirton/Getty Images
Why Fareed Zakaria believes the American experiment is flawed but resilient.
How worried should we be about the state of democracy?
Democracy panic is its own genre of journalism at this point, and for good reasons. After the last five years, it’s impossible not to worry about the future of democracy, not just in the US but across the globe.
Is the sort of democratic decline we’re seeing in places like India and Hungary and Brazil a glimpse of our future? And if it is, are we prepared for it? I reached out to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to discuss exactly how worried we should be.
Zakaria, whose most recent book is called Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, is uniquely positioned to answer these sorts of questions. Back in 1997, he wrote a now-famous essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.” What he saw then was a form of reactionary populism sweeping across the democratic world, and virtually all of the trends he spotted have only intensified since.
We talk about how we got here, the failures of liberalism, why the Republican Party has become an existential threat to our constitutional system, and whether Democrats are capable of rising to the challenge. I also ask him for reasons to be optimistic in spite of all the disturbing signs.
You can hear our entire conversation (as always, there’s much more) in this week’s episode ofVox Conversations. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.
A lot of people are panicking over the state of democracy these days, but you were sounding the alarm back in 1997. What did you see then that so worried you?
Fareed Zakaria
To paint the picture, we’re talking about the mid-1990s. The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union has collapsed. Communism is discredited worldwide and it feels like the triumph of liberal democracy, the end of history. And what I started to notice was that, in country after country, the places that were becoming democracies often had a peculiar kind of democracy: They had elections but they weren’t free and fair, and the elected governments were then systematically undermining core liberal concepts, like minority protections, protections of free speech, rule of law, and even the separation of church and state. So I was watching a kind of oxymoron — not liberal democracy, but illiberal democracy.
Illiberal democracy sounds like an oxymoron because these two concepts have always gone together in the Western world. But I tried to explain that the democratic project, which is really about elections, is quite separate from the liberal project, which is about who governs minorities and the limitations on power and liberty.
So if you think about it, the American Constitution is actually fundamentally and deeply imbued with this liberal project, in the sense that the Bill of Rights is all about what government cannot do, even if a majority wants to do it. That spirit was very absent in countries where new elections were being held, from Belarus to Ghana to the Philippines to Russia.
Now I have to confess, I worried a little bit about illiberal democracy in the Western world back then, but I never expected to see what we have seen in these last five years which is, from Poland to Hungary to the United States, a willingness for majorities and elected leaders to rub up against core liberal concepts like an independent judiciary, like independent election commissions and processes.
Sean Illing
What’s the clearest case of an “illiberal democracy” today?
Fareed Zakaria
The most worrying one to me right now is India, because India was this miracle, a very poor country that had managed to have sustained democratic governance since 1947. There’s a two-year interregnum when Indira Gandhi, in the mid-1970s, declares emergency rule and suspends civil liberties, but other than that it had had a pretty strong democratic experience, one with real opposition parties, real alternations of power, independent judiciary, and a free press.
So for 75 years, liberal democracy felt deeply ingrained in the Indian system. And over the last five years, the Modi regime has managed to overturn many of these elements of constitutional liberalism in India. They have managed to intimidate the media in a very clever way, by getting between friends and industrialists who are cozy with the government, intimidation, the withdrawal of government advertising. There are some smaller publications that still are very spirited and very strong, and there’s one TV channel that continues to battle a lonely battle, but it has been subjected to the most extraordinary government persecution. The judiciary has been packed. The independent election commission has been packed.
The most worrying thing is that there isn’t a great deal of pushback. It turns out that if you use the language and tools of democracy to undermine democracy itself, it’s much harder to fight back than I would have suspected. So it’s not that India is the worst offender, it’s that it had succeeded admirably for so long that liberal democracy seemed rooted, and now it’s eroding, and Modi remains very popular in India.
Sean Illing
There’s a temptation to call America an illiberal democracy now, but that doesn’t seem quite right. Trump wasn’t a “popular” authoritarian using his popularity to destroy democracy. Trump was and remains deeply unpopular. But we did have a major political party that refused to check an illiberal president and that continues to use its power to push anti-democratic measures. We definitely have an illiberal system at the moment, but it’s not exactly democratic.
Fareed Zakaria
I would agree with that. The American system is much, much stronger than the Indian one, though. Let’s not forget that Trump lost. When push came to shove, every Republican official in all 50 States followed the law. Mike Pence followed the law, even though it meant he himself was going to lose his office. Now, as I said, we worry about the future, but what we are looking at here is not India. Our courts upheld the law. They dismissed all the frivolous lawsuits that the Trump campaign was putting in place. There were lots of Trump’s policies that were unconstitutional or borderline constitutional, and the court either rolled them back or trimmed them in various ways, and independent agencies like the CIA and the FBI refused to go along with Trump in many areas.
The American story is a somewhat different one. The story here is the Republican Party losing the ability to do what parties have historically done throughout Western history. The reason parties have been so central to the preservation of liberal democracy is that they channel public passions, public emotion, public anger, public joy, into programs and policies that are compatible with a liberal democratic framework. At their best, that’s what parties do. And parties act as gatekeepers. They rule out the most extreme fringes on both sides.
What has happened in America, ever since the onset of the primaries in the 1960s, is we have eviscerated the political parties and empowered all kinds of non-party actors — from the candidates themselves to the rich — through fundraising processes. And the effect of that has been that the parties have gotten hollowed out. So the political system has become one run almost entirely by small fringes that occupy the extreme wings of the party.
Sean Illing
But there’s a clear asymmetry here.
Fareed Zakaria
Yeah, this is particularly true of the Republican Party. So the party caves to Trump because they’re all worried about losing the next primary, about losing the funding that comes at those early stages, which all tends to come from the most passionate and the most committed. It’s basically the candidate, his or her Rolodex, his or her name recognition, and his or her ability to appeal to the most extreme slice of the electorate that is going to make those early decisions that make all the difference.
Sean Illing
If the parties in our system are supposed to act as buffers between popular passions and public policy, and we only have two parties, one of which has totally lost this ability, then that seems to put us on an unsustainable path.
Fareed Zakaria
It’s not sustainable. Obama put it this way, “The fever has to break and the fever will break.” I agree with half of his sentiment. I don’t know how the fever breaks in the short term, but I do believe that at the end of the day, you cannot sustain such a profoundly undemocratic attitude toward elections in a democracy.
This is not about being against liberalism. This is saying, “We will not accept the outcome of elections so we’re going to try as many ways as we can to make it difficult for people to vote. And then we’re going to reserve the right to count the votes in creative ways to try to fudge the results.” That can’t survive.
I’ll say this with due concern: It’s possible that the GOP might be able to do this once, but I think the backlash will be very strong. This is where my optimism comes in. I think that America remains a very vibrant democratic political culture. I think there would be a deep revulsion if the GOP actually overturned an election.
One nice thing about democracy is that you have space for revolt, for reaction, for opposition movements, and if you win by enough, the cheating doesn’t do enough. So that’s my hope in India, and it’s my much stronger hope in America.
Sean Illing
Does the US still strike you as a model democracy?
Fareed Zakaria
I think the American system is still pretty extraordinary. There’s still a lot to learn from it. I’m not one of these people who believes that the founding fathers were demigods who came down from Mount Olympus, briefly appeared here, gave us a perfect Constitution, and then disappeared. And that every time we confront a problem, we should ask, “What would James Madison have done?” I think there’s a kind of founder fetish sometimes, but I do think it’s an extraordinary process that delivered an extraordinary product that has been amazingly resilient.
Sean Illing
If you’re an American citizen worried about democratic decline and wanted to look around the world for a glimpse of our possible future if we don’t get this turned around, where would you suggest looking?
Fareed Zakaria
In the case of Hungary, not for very long, but Hungary’s a rich Western country. And India, as I said, is very concerning because, like the US, it has had a deep democratic culture and independent media, and the courts were very strong — and it’s all been undermined.
The puzzle in America is that we have these same structures, but one party is trying to destroy them or weaken them. And this is something James Madison never conceived of because he hated political parties. He thought political parties were terrible precisely because they would eventually adopt a “party over country” attitude. That’s why he imagined a political system with lots of different factions. (And again, this is another example of someone like Madison being wrong because he himself eventually presided over the founding of the first political party.)
Sean Illing
The big worry has always been, what does the next Trump look like? For all the damage he caused, Trump’s clownishness limited the amount of damage he could do. But what if the next wanna-be autocrat isn’t a wanna-be at all? What if the next Trump combines the ethno-nationalism with a real populist agenda?
Fareed Zakaria
Trump was so bizarre in so many ways. He was clownish and he fundamentally didn’t know how to govern and didn’t care about governing. It was all mostly tweets and announcements rather than actual policy. And he was sort of weird and mercurial and contradictory. So there were times at which he would undermine his own agenda, like the obsession with being nice to Putin while his administration was pursuing anti-Russian policies.
What you’re asking is, what if we end up with a more sophisticated, more coherent, more capable version of Trump? I don’t have the answer to that. My hope is that part of what made Trump attractive to so many people in America was his weirdness and celebrity and the fact that he was entertaining. He didn’t appear to be some dark evil proto-fascist when you listened to him because he was so unserious. My hope is that the kind of person you’re describing would not attract as many votes.
But I have to confess that I don’t know, and we’re both agreeing that the fundamental problem is that the parties have lost the ability to internally discipline and weed out this kind of threat. And this is a greater issue for the GOP, for all kinds of cultural reasons.
A lot is going to depend on what happens in the next four years: Does Trump get nominated again? If he is, and he loses in a crushing humiliating defeat, then maybe that makes the GOP realize they’ve gone down the wrong path. No idea if that can happen, but that kind of repudiation of Trump and Trumpism would be best for the country.
Sean Illing
When we last spoke, you said you were an eternal optimist about America, in part because you’re an immigrant. How much optimism is left in that tank?
Fareed Zakaria
I’m still optimistic. I still believe we’ll get through this, but I think it’s a struggle. The challenges reflected in this conversation are deep. We’re more polarized than at any point since around the Civil War. That degrades the democratic culture. We have strong illiberal forces within our society. That’s all true. It’s still an amazingly resilient country, however. There’s still a lot of dynamism and vitality. Young people particularly seem to want to live in a country that’s really a kind of universal nation, where everyone is more equally treated.
Some of this is mushy idealism and can be caricatured as “woke” platitudes, but there’s a spirit of empathy there that I admire and appreciate. So I hope that general feeling has an effect and translates politically. But this is the fight of our political lives and we’ll have to engage and make our voices heard in a way that is perhaps more important and louder and stronger than at any point since the Civil War, certainly since the civil rights movement.
Will this happen naturally? No. But there’s an inherent logic in the American experiment that can move us in the right direction if we push hard enough.
From The Hindu: Sports
Gymnastics | Olympic champ Simone Biles out of team finals with apparent injury - Biles huddled with a trainer after landing her vault. She then exited the competition floor with the team doctor
Tokyo Olympics | Swimmers Tom Dean, Lydia Jacoby spring a surprise - 17-year-old Jacoby from Alaska, the first swimmer from her State to make it to the Games, crowned herself with glory clocking 1:04.95 in the women’s 100m breaststroke
Tokyo Olympics | Vishnu Saravanan moves up to 22, Nethra slips to 33 - In the men’s 49er, the Indian pair of Varun Thakkar and K. C. Ganapathy came 18th in the first race
Krunal Pandya tests positive for COVID-19, 2nd India-Sri Lanka T20 postponed - The match will now take place on Wednesday, July 28
Ferreira, Moore create history, bag maiden surfing medals at the Games - Italo Ferreira defeated Kano Igarashi, and Carissa Moore defeated Bianca Buitendag to bag maiden surfing medals
From The Hindu: National News
‘Opposition unity will automatically happen,’ says Mamata Banerjee - After meeting PM Modi in New Delhi, the West Bengal CM also demanded a Supreme Court monitored probe into the Pegasus issue
Seven Opposition parties write to President urging him to instruct govt to discuss farmers’ issues, Pegasus in Parliament - Seven Opposition parties have written to President Ram Nath Kovind seeking his intervention to direct the government to discuss farmers’ issues and P
Extend date to accept suggestions on draft plan till August 31, says BJP - ‘VMRDA should initiate a discussion with all the stakeholders’
Kateel, Arun Singh visit Yediyurappa before meeting of legislators - Sources said that the outgoing Chief Minister is likely to propose the name of his successor at the meeting of legislators
Centre seeks extension till January 9 for framing rules on CAA, Home Ministry tells Lok Sabha - The Committees on Subordinate Legislation, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, had been requested to grant further extension of time up to January 9, 2022, to
From BBC: Europe
Vatican’s Cardinal Becciu on trial in $412m fraud case - Cardinal Becciu was once close to the Pope but was sacked after reports of financial misdeeds.
Beach handball: ‘It’s shocking to have to pay to not play in our pants’ - Tonje Lerstad tells Newsbeat about a rollercoaster week for Norway’s women’s beach handball team.
Greece seeks spear fisher who killed famous seal - Kostis, a rare Mediterranean monk seal rescued as a pup, is killed by a spear gun.
German lawyers wrangle over pensioner’s WW2 tank in basement - The 84-year-old kept the vehicle in his basement, along with an anti-aircraft gun and a torpedo.
Nikola Tesla: Sparks fly over plans to honour inventor with coin - Both Croatia and Serbia claim Nikola Tesla, pioneer of alternating current electricity, as their hero.
From Ars Technica
Intel’s foundry roadmap lays out the post-nanometer “Angstrom” era - Could the “Intel 20A” process node (that’s 20 Angstroms) rival TSMC and Samsung? - link
COVID surge in unvaccinated is pushing US to more mandates, masks, mitigation - “More mitigation is coming… and it’s coming because this pandemic is spiraling out of control yet again” - link
Spiral shark intestines work like Nikola Tesla’s water valve, study finds - Tesla’s valve let fluid flow in one direction with no back flow or moving parts. - link
VPN servers seized by Ukrainian authorities weren’t encrypted - Company says it’s in the process of overhauling its VPN offerings to better secure them. - link
One afternoon he see a kid ride past on his bike with a roll of chicken wire. The old guy asks: “Where are you heading with that chicken wire son?”
“I’m gonna catch me some chickens down at the park”.
“You don’t catch chickens with chicken wire”
The old feller shakes his head in exasperation with the ‘youth of today’. Half an hour later, the kid rides past with 3 chickens bundled up in the chicken wire.
“Well I’ll be hornswoggled”.
The next day the kid rides past with a roll of duck tape on the handlebars of his bike. The old guy asks:
“Where are you heading with that duck tape son?”
“I’m gonna catch me some ducks down at the pond”.
“You don’t catch ducks with duck tape son”
The old feller shakes his head in exasperation with the ‘youth of today’. Half an hour later, the kid rides past with 3 ducks wrapped up in the duck tape.
“Well I’ll be hornswoggled”.
The next day the kid rides past with a couple of stalks of pussy willow. The old guys says:
A boy and his date were parked on a back road some distance from town… -
A boy and his date were parked on a back road some distance from town, doing what boys and girls do on back roads some distance from town, when the girl stopped the boy.
“I really should have mentioned this earlier, but I’m actually a hooker and I charge $20 for sex.” The boy reluctantly paid her, and they did their thing.
After a cigarette, the boy just sat in the driver’s seat looking out the window. “Why aren’t we going anywhere?” asked the girl.
“Well, I should have mentioned this before, but I’m actually a taxi driver, and the fare back to town is $25.”
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Paige Vickers for Vox
