■ Those are indoor temperatures -- and there’s no number of fans that can possibly be installed to make those rooms tolerable. It’s a plain and inescapable fact that at certain temperatures, particularly indoors, people become less able to get their jobs done -- including the jobs of teaching and learning.

■ The effects of heat on productivity are making news in India, too, where the temperatures are cutting into factory productivity by as much as 10%.

■ There are scolds and puritans out there who would say that humans have created the high temperatures by burning fossil fuels and causing anthropogenic climate change, and thus humans should be punished. But not only is that wildly unfair to the schoolchildren (who made none of the choices that led to the climate change), it’s self-defeating: Things aren’t going to get better if misery is the only outcome that counts.

■ This means that we will have to act in a way that mirrors the classic admonition that “You have to spend money to make money”. In this case, in the process of trying to rectify past wrongs that resulted from burning too many fossil fuels, we will have to accept some accommodations along the way (like spending on air conditioning systems and the electricity needed to run them) on our way to mitigating or reversing the impact of past environmental wrongs. Things aren’t going to get better if we leave students to roast in classrooms where it’s too hot to learn. We can’t expect progress if we subject the next generation to environmentally prohibitive learning environments.

■ There is no reasonable doubt that domestic politics around the world are being shaped in meaningful ways by foreign interference: See, for instance, the riots taking place in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Simultaneously, international collaboration both in the shadows and in the spotlight has had big effects on politics, as well.

■ Meanwhile, this takes place against a backdrop of a general amplification of extremes without interference from abroad, charged heavily by the effects of both social media and algorithmic media siloization.

■ With the G7 meeting looming, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has openly declared, “What one can’t do at this point in a rapidly shifting world order is to rely on one set of institutions, one grouping, one country to provide the answers”. Carney is in many ways a textbook institutionalist, but he seems unapologetic about calling out what he sees as a major geopolitical realignment that moves the United States from hegemon to participant.

■ The risk is grave that Carney might be right. The time of peak global cooperation, mutuality, and barrier-lowering, largely under US leadership, may be over -- or, at the very least, put on hold for a substantial time to come. And that’s a travesty, because such a reversal in policy will hurt the United States more than most other countries, and it’s largely a self-inflicted injury.

■ Other periods of barrier-building and general retreat from international engagement have been costly, as anyone with even a modest exposure to history would know. But it takes trust and patience to lower the barriers, and while those barriers are in place, people like Carney will rationally position themselves around building substitute arrangements for the good of their own countries if it looks like no one will really stand up for the old institutions.

■ Their interaction often played out in front of the national media, and despite their many points of contention in domestic politics, they shared some important goals surrounding America’s place in the world. It left a model for behavior that gets ignored quite a lot today: Knowing that they didn’t agree, they bargained instead.

■ O’Neill wrote a fair amount in his retirement, including a short book on his general view of politics -- not of policies, but of the act of serving in office. One of his lasting recommendations was, “[A]sk your staff periodically, ‘Am I the same person you went to work for?’”

■ That’s good advice not only for public office-holders, but for private-sector leaders as well. Nothing could be more important than remaining grounded and aware of one’s own shortcomings. Lots of people drift from their original principles (even when only in charge of small projects or minor offices). The risk of this happening grows exponentially with power, as does the harm that comes from it.

■ Calvin Coolidge anticipated O’Neill’s advice in somewhat more high-minded language: “It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man. When a man begins to feel that he is the only one who can lead in this republic, he is guilty of treason to the spirit of our institutions.” But both men had it right: Anyone with great power (not just Presidents) needs great humility, too. Nobody is indispensable, and everyone is at risk of coming untethered without the help of truth-tellers. Real greatness is conditioned on having the modesty to be willingly pushed back into line.

■ Aside from some of the forgettable Chief Executives of the middle and late 1800s, more significant Presidents have also been left out. James Madison, for instance, has a namesake building housing the Library of Congress, but it only opened in 1980 (and isn’t exactly a “Presidential library” of the same hagiographic status as the brand-new Obama Presidential Center).

■ That probably wouldn’t bother Madison, though. He would almost certainly be content with recognition via a functional library building, considering his foundational influence on the Library of Congress.

■ Madison’s was a zealous advocate for knowledge, even pressing Congress to form a national university “on a scale and for objects worthy of the American nation”. Though no comprehensive university of the type was ever built, it’s interesting to consider what that might look like today. As important as bricks-and-mortar residential college life can be, a truly national university today would have to contain a very large online learning component.

■ And despite the rarity of higher education in the late 1700s, there is no better advertisement for the value of very broad access to educational opportunity than the progress of the country since Madison’s time. We live vastly richer in a material sense in large part because so many people in so many ways over so many years decided to get a little bit smarter than they were before. Compounding effects matter in human knowledge, too. America doesn’t need more places to stand in the way.

■ A worthwhile monumental program for our 250th anniversary as a country could easily include some incarnation of a national university. We don’t need vanity renaming projects or more opportunities to sit still: We need people who are eager to keep moving towards greater and greater goals.

■ 1. Don't insult your people by sharing best practices. Best practices are for suckers. Truly talented people are naturally good at everything, including things they've never seen before. It's rude to tell them ways to save time and frustration.

■ 2. Avoid doing anything you've seen anyone try elsewhere. All good ideas are your own original thoughts. If it wasn't yours first, don't bother attempting it. Ignore what peers and admirable leaders have tried.

■ 3. Under-communicate. Begrudge the process of explaining your ideas, do it as infrequently and irregularly as possible, and treat all messages as having the same level of importance. Never differentiate! There's no such thing as a "most important" thing: Your message channels should be one big Facebook-style feed of equal value.

■ 4. Avoid identifying talent. Make people fight their way to the top: Status-seeking and unchecked ambition should be rewarded.

■ 5. Have no transcendent goals. If you must have goals, keep them small and self-serving. Goals should be reserved for tedious metrics that you can use to hound volunteers. Anything bigger is just a hassle.

■ The National Assessment of Educational Progress contains a mixed bag of score-based data, including some good signs about 9-year-olds and some disappointing ones about 13-year-olds (whose reading scores are no better than those of their counterparts in 1971, despite the decades of research and experimentation since).

■ Here’s the fact that should resonate like a fire alarm in a concrete hallway: Only 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun “almost every day”. That number has collapsed since 2012, when it was twice as high. Those who “never” read for fun has surged: While it hovered generally around 10% from 1984 to 2004, it’s been triple that figure since 2020.

■ There is no way to be sufficiently alarmed about those figures: A society that doesn’t read for fun isn’t post-literate, it’s illiterate. And to those who would say we shouldn’t worry because they’re just kids: To the contrary!

■ If there’s one thing that has always been true about 13-year-olds, it is that they are invariably searching for answers about how to define themselves: What they think, what interests them, who they want to become. And those lessons aren’t found in the 50th TikTok short of a binge session. They aren’t always found in books, but they are vastly more likely to be found somewhere in the written word -- novels, poems, magazine articles, news clippings, letters, diaries, encyclopedias, and all other forms of written words.

■ Reading isn’t just for stereotypically bookish kids: It’s also for the ones who find new hobbies and want to explore, the ones who realize their own weaknesses who want to brush up, and the ones who need safe ways to explore tough questions about self-identity.

■ Scores matter, and our social failure to get any better at improving those scores for 55 years is troubling. But the collapse in plain, simple “reading for fun” ought to be cause for enormous alarm.

■ The school is closing due to a number of familiar refrains: The student population has been declining, the cost to keep a school open continues to rise, and a variety of public pressures (from local taxpayers to the state legislature) offer resistance to finding more funding. As with so many other places, the community considers the school a fixture of its identity, and closing the school is a harsh blow to that sense of place.

■ Nothing really can be done, however. Baumol’s cost disease remains basically undefeated, and tiny schools are not going to escape emotionally-charged closures without huge changes.

■ One possible change would come in the form of a massive overhaul to their funding models, which seems unlikely, considering that every tax expenditure needs a constituency and the core of the problem is the lack of a population big enough to form such a constituency.

■ The other possibility is a sea change in the cost of delivering instruction. There are few plausible scenarios here, either, but one possibility looks like a shift to outsourced instruction, delivered mainly by personalized online connections, but supervised by one or more roving tutors who could pitch in to help when and where needed.

■ If routine classroom instruction can be largely outsourced, tiny schools just might be able to afford to keep the lights on by having teachers supervise larger numbers of students while someone else delivers the classroom material. By consolidating classes (and grade levels) together, the schools might be able to reach the necessary critical mass of students to teachers in order to afford an in-person experience, perhaps with rotating assignments for additional teachers to supervise unavoidably hands-on activities like science lab sessions or gym classes.

■ It may not meet anyone’s standards for an ideal experience, but not much else is likely to work. As long as educators are expected to have four-year college degrees, their salary expectations will be moved along (to at least some degree) by the pay received by people with comparable levels of schooling. The only way to level out this “cost disease” is to find new sources of efficiency (i.e., by getting more classroom instruction per hour of teacher time by having students get most of their instruction online) or to gladly accept an ever-rising -cost to keep schools open.

■ People have an astonishing capacity to ignore or even deny the obvious when it requires them to admit unpleasant realities. (Recall that it took decades for hand-washing to catch on with doctors because it was simply too unpleasant to countenance the idea that their unclean hands might have been causing avoidable death.)

■ An unpleasant reality forced upon us by Russia’s war on Ukraine is that we have been launched directly into a complex world of warfare where the ideas of battlefields and front lines have been rendered far less important. If Ukraine -- not on anyone’s radar as a leader in warfighting technology five years ago -- can launch thousand-kilometer drone attacks deep into Russia, then “defense” needs to be rethought.

■ 1,000 kilometers is a long, long way: It’s like someone launching a drone from Washington, DC, and having it land in Chicago. Only, what landed in St. Petersburg wasn’t just a fleet of flying machines. If war can be projected over distances that great at relatively low cost by a country that has built a domestic drone industry essentially from scratch, then it’s time not to ignore the obvious but instead to get serious about realizing that a whole new era of warfare is likely afoot.

■ 37 years ago, the Chinese Communist Party used the armed forces at its disposal to violently repress pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

■ Probably the most enduring image of that multi-day incident is the Tank Man, who simply stood, groceries in hand, directly in the path of a tank as an act of fearless, spontaneous protest.

■ The “Frontline” documentary of the incident should be required viewing for all Americans. For one thing, it is a compelling depiction of the First Amendment spirit we too easily take for granted.

■ No less important, though, it is a tale about building the future we want. That begins with conceiving of a world where individual librties are universally protected and the consent of the governed is secured voluntarily. But it also includes having a serious, persistent, and extremely long-term plan for how to advance those values worldwide.

■ That doesn’t mean advancing them at gunpoint (quite the opposite; if they aren’t chosen freely and endogenously, they’re unlikely to stick). But it does mean looking at a character like the Tank Man and asking how his quest for dignified citizenship can best be supported from abroad, and how it can be secured in ways that make our own liberties safer in the world, too. If 37 years and counting is too long a wait (and it surely is), then what should we have been doing all along and what’s holding us back from acting without any further delay?

■ The phrase “survive and advance” is usually tied to sports, but it’s the right term here, as well. Strategically, we want to attack most serious illnesses (including cancer) in the same way: Prevention wherever possible, detection as early as practical, cures wherever we can find them, and therapies to slow the spread of disease for as long as possible.

■ Cures obviously remain the trophies we seek the most. But we ought to get really excited -- standing-ovation excited -- over discoveries that stretch out the time over which people with dreadful diagnoses can have a chance to benefit from the discovery of new cures.

■ It really is an amazing time to be alive, with terrifically effective vaccines coming into being and new therapies being proven all the time. We can’t let up on any frontier, though; detection still seems to lag in many more ways than it should, but we might be getting some early inklings of what could be possible with the help of data as tools like AFib detection on the Apple Watch and biometric detection via jewelry achieve mass-market acceptance.

■ Baumol’s cost disease paints a semi-gloomy picture of health-care costs that rise forever (in both absolute and relative terms), and that has long been a model backed by the hard data of real experience. If there is to be any hope of diminishing that, it will come from sustained research and progress on all fronts in the fight against the big serious diseases.

■ As Emily Bender points out, lists of links actually serve a useful purpose by providing a sort of orientation to the landscape of knowledge on a subject: Not an authoritative single “answer”, but rather an array of possible avenues. And that’s how information works: Not everything is known, and not every known thing is the product of a universal consensus. It’s often just as important to see dissent as it is to see a purportedly “right” answer.

■ For those who were exposed to early iterations of the World Wide Web, there’s a certain degree of comfort with uncertainty (there was, believe it or not, a time before everything had a website). And there is also a very sensible understanding that links make the Internet work. Not paid advertising links or SEO-juicing reciprocal links, but real, honestly-meant links to supporting or extending information on a topic.

■ Hyperlinks are the essential footnotes of the Internet. Footnotes are for serious people. Footnotes are how we show our work. Footnotes enforce accountability. You can ignore footnotes, of course. But you shouldn’t! An Internet sans hyperlinks is little more than a giant wall covered in advertising posters.

■ Both spreadsheets and social media are much lessened by their basic lack of functional footnotes. Sure, a person can insert links into a social-media thread, but especially now that social-sharing cards force themselves into those threads and interrupt the flow of writing, it’s a distraction to do so in a way that a basic hyperlink never was.

■ Things purported as “features” are not always beneficial. Whether it’s the usurpation of semi-structured information (like the ten blue links of a classic Google search result) by AI-generated outputs or the conversion of basic links into attention-hogging social-sharing cards, there’s a real battle underway not just for the answers people want, but for their very structure. Hyperlinks, the modern footnotes, are part of an unbroken tradition with a multi-century history. We jettison them at our own peril.

■ This massively misses the point of that document. The pursuit of happiness is a right, to be sure, but it is more important to be good than to be happy. Nobody cares whether Hitler was happy; he chose evil, and that overshadows everything else.

■ The reason that the pursuit of happiness deserves to be documented as a right isn’t because being happy is itself a right -- it’s because power (usually, but not always, through government) is so often used in bad ways. Some people could be made very happy indeed if they were given unfettered access to the public treasury, unlimited claims to the labor of others, or unconstrained freedom to break the law at will.

■ The moral dimension to life -- the question whether or not to be good -- is dangerous to legislate but absolutely imperative to the success of self-government under the rule of law. The law cannot be enforced at all times everywhere. The vast majority of civilization itself depends upon people choosing to be good for reasons other than the threat of punishment and sometimes in direct opposition to their own happiness.

■ Beyond the imprint of human nature, that’s something we can only gain through training and habits, from families and religious institutions, role models and social structures. It’s often easy to see who has grown up without those influences, because they appear only to ever ask “Will this make me happy?” and never “Is this a good thing to do?”.

■ If we really are in a more atomized age than ever before, then it’s going to take some work to make sure the habits of “good” get their due attention. Without them, a few people will surely take advantage of power when they can get it, and by extension, take advantage of everyone else.

■ Under the headline, “This Cal State program produces some of the country’s highest-paid grads“, the Chronicle publishes a story that hails the phenomenal success of a four-year nursing degree program at Cal State East Bay, celebrating a report saying that graduates of the program earn the highest starting salaries of any nursing program in the nation.

■ The Chronicle finds several reasons affirming the high incomes, including a strong labor union presence, regulations on nurse-to-patient ratios, and the quality of the program itself. But the story overlooks entirely the causal effects of a massive contributor to those high wages: San Francisco is an eye-wateringly expensive place to live.

■ The extraordinarily high cost of living makes just one tiny appearance in the story, when a current student is described as living with her parents and commuting to campus at a cost of $450 a month. Unfortunately, this is treated merely as a colorful anecdote rather than as an explanation.

■ It matters because one of the best pieces of advice anyone can give to a young person just starting out is, “Maximize the gap between your compensation (in all its forms) and what you have to give up to get it.” Anyone can earn a high income -- San Francisco doesn’t just have highly-paid nurses, it has some of the nation’s best-paid convenience-store clerks, too -- but if that high income evaporates in extremely high rents, time-wasting commutes, and a sky-high cost of living, then the resulting gap may be quite small.

■ Money isn’t everything; people are often compensated in psychic rewards, free time, and the gratitude of others. But it’s journalistic malpractice to lead a round of cheers for high incomes without deducing that high expenses are a main factor driving those incomes upward. Bloated self-congratulations over high incomes that overlook the inevitability of local market forces (as both a driving factor in those high incomes and a mitigating factor in how much they can be enjoyed) don’t really tell the full story.

■ What’s interesting to contemplate is how that definition could meaningfully and usefully evolve with time. Community-scale solar power, for instance, was economically infeasible not that long ago. Today, it’s not only much more affordable than ever, it might actually serve a very sensible public interest to install some forms of it as a means of achieving greater community resilience to various forms of natural and human-made disaster. As infrastructure, it could well fall under the public works umbrella.

■ Similarly, there could be other physical assets that might make economic sense at the community level that look like good candidates for “public works”, even if they’re not conventional. Improved weather forecasting and structural engineering science have made community-scale storm shelters or safe rooms into useful public assets in some places. Those certainly look like infrastructure.

■ So, potentially, do some approaches to “Housing First” strategies as a response to homelessness. In many cases, the chronically homeless take up temporary shelter in places already under the care of public works agencies (like bridges and sidewalks). It’s not unimaginable that some communities could decide to put the upkeep of shelter arrangements under a public works department.

■ As it becomes evident that we may well be closing in on a global population peak but with no letup in the continued expansion of urbanization, it makes sense not to pigeon-hole public works just to what we recognize now, but to think about what physical assets might be useful and desirable now and into the future. Good community resilience planning has never been more important, and changing economic and geopolitical circumstances ought to press us to think about what ideas and projects make sense now that may never have crossed our minds before.

■ Automating the battlefield in Ukraine has transformed expectations of how the next wars will be fought. But it hasn’t diminished the real peril to the people in the uniforms of both the aggressor (Russia) and the defender (Ukraine). Their death and injury counts are astonishing.

■ We need a holiday like Memorial Day not just to remind us of the fitting tributes we owe to those who died in war, but equally to compel us to think about alternatives to open combat. Conflicts will never go away, but how we solve them without resorting to bloodshed is a matter worth a considerable amount of energy and resources. Memorial Day acknowledges when that couldn’t be done before, but now and always we have a perpetual obligation to seek ways to keep young lives intact.

■ As a particularly notable example, the “CBS World News Roundup“ wasn’t necessary, but it was good -- a commute-length radio news broadcast that really did try to capture the world’s stories for a day. It was truly broadcasting in the public interest, and that’s the kind of thing being lost.

■ It says something unflattering about our culture that streaming coverage of sports (utterly soaked in the language of betting) can be found at all hours of the day or night, while one of the few remaining heritage radio news network gets euthanized. The periodicity of radio news -- about 5 minutes at the top of each hour -- is reassuring: It says that we don’t have to be on high alert at all times, and that we can check in for a professional opinion about what’s noteworthy once an hour. Smartphone alerts, by contrast, aren’t designed to keep us calm, but rather to keep users in a heightened state of stimulation at all times.

■ With luck, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction sometime soon. Maybe we’ll recapture the sense that it’s responsible and sanity-preserving to choose to check the news from reputable outlets only periodically, and unplug from the stimulus stream the rest of the time. But as the reputable sources with long histories fade from relevance or are closed down, it becomes harder to have confidence that something good will still be around when that time comes.

■ The fact it has gotten as far as a referendum to be conducted later this year (technically, a referendum on whether to hold a binding referendum) is a troubling sign that all is not well.

■ No state, province, or region should be run with one foot already out the door. So many things are bound up in reasonable expectations of the continuity of the law, among other things, that even contemplating an exit from national union ought to be reserved for true “Break glass in case of fire” kinds of moments.

■ On the other hand, even though threats of secession ought to be so imposisbly rare that no one would even think of them, anyone running a national-level government ought to be hounded constantly by the thought that they could, in fact, lose it all.

■ In a youth organization, absolutely nothing does more to determine the health of the group than program quality. Parents will look past all sorts of shortcomings in promotions, communications, or recruiting, if their kids are always excited about attending Sunday school, youth choir, or Cub Scouts.

■ Likewise, a government that consistently attends to the priorities of voters, no matter how dull or seemingly inconsequential, has a fighting chance at remaining in office. Resentments big enough to rile up a whole province of people, in numbers large enough to call a referendum on whether to stay, do not just emerge overnight.

■ Technology is often marveled-at because of big things it makes possible. But it’s perhaps equally exciting to see the things that don’t happen because technology was doing its work.

■ An intervention that eliminated one of every 20 deaths would be hailed as a significant breakthrough. Here, though, what matters is what didn’t happen. Intuitively, it makes sense that if fewer impaired drivers chose to drive and instead chose to take a ride-share, the net total of deaths might fall.

■ But what seems a little remarkable about the ride-share story is that it’s hardly new technology; people have been hailing cabs and splitting rides for a long time. What apps like Uber did was remove the obstacles to those requests. It’s a lesson well worth understanding: Sometimes all that’s needed is to remove the impediments to getting a job done.

■ The community value in Google Reader was that it created an organizational structure that resisted some of the drawbacks of disseminating news and information via social media as we see it today.

■ There was no algorithmic interference; users saw what they chose for themselves. There was no immediacy bias; Google Reader kept track of unread updates and let the user decide when to acknowledge them as “read”. There was no intrinsic reward for pushing out loads of volume just to achieve visibility; by organizing and labeling feeds, the user could impose their own editorial preferences instead of rewarding whoever posts most often.

■ No credible or reasonable observer can look at the way social-media algorithms, shameless clickbait, and AI slop dominate the attention economy today and think that we’re better off.

■ In the process of shutting down, Google Reader’s own outlet recommended some alternatives, but the shutdown both dismantled the meticulous cultivation many users put into organizing their feed readers and smashed the critical mass that had developed around RSS feeds. Claims of “declining usage” notwithstanding, the service still offered lots of value to influential users (like journalists, as noted by Powell).

■ Nobody can or should force private businesses to engage in unprofitable activities, but there remains something to be said for firms that provide public services without getting hung up on how much money they make. Some tasks can only be done at scale by institutions with the internal capacity to get big things done -- or, like Google, the massive customer reach to turn niche interests into sustainable products or services. From time to time, we should offer more of a public cheer for those firms that disregard the siren’s song to optimize everything and continue providing a good or service because it’s the socially good thing to do.

■ For several reasons, we ought to reconsider how much we depend upon fuel taxes to cover 91% of the Federal Highway Trust Fund. The chronic incapacity of the fuel tax to keep things adequately funded should be a chief concern, and there’s no reason to believe that the structural reasons are moving towards a correction.

■ Proposals now to cut or suspend the gas tax as a means to offset higher petroleum prices are fairly predictable moves, but they’re no less ill-advised for their predictability. The tax isn’t big enough to turn expensive gasoline into anything other than just-slightly-less-expensive gasoline. Because of how the tax is collected, only some of a cut would actually make it to consumers anyway.

■ And, crucially, cutting the tax wouldn’t do anything about the need it funds. Dismantling a user fee without replacing it with a better one only means that the funds will have to come from somewhere else -- probably a general fund taken out of income taxes -- where it will almost certainly become even less accountable and only rack up interest costs due to deficit spending practices.

■ User fees shouldn’t apply to everything, but they make enormous sense when applied to road construction, maintenance, and replacement. Suspending them should take something more than public grievance over the extremely productive second-order effects of a major tax.