Internal documents obtained by Guardian show White House meetings, scheduled calls with top Trump officials and communications with Fox News producers
Continue reading...Internal documents obtained by Guardian show White House meetings, scheduled calls with top Trump officials and communications with Fox News producers
Continue reading...Healthy women under 50 are now more at risk of the condition. What I didn’t know is that intense exercise could be to blame and the condition could cost me hundreds of dollars
If you’re in your 40s, I have a great trick for getting people to spontaneously tell you how young you are: develop shingles. Friends, acquaintances and medical professionals will rapidly inform you that the painful rash is an older person’s disease and, “You’re a bit young to get that, aren’t you?”
I say this because at the tender age of 43, I have come down with a horrible case of ocular shingles. When I first went to urgent care about a weird red spot on my nose, a swollen eye and a terrible headache, the nurse looked dubious when he told me it might be shingles. “You’re a bit young,” he said. When I then went to the ER as instructed – shingles near the eye is a medical emergency that can blind you – the ophthalmologist said the same thing. According to conventional medical wisdom, shingles is a disease you get if you’re elderly or immunocompromised.
Continue reading...Poll after poll shows the same thing. The American people know that the current economic system is rigged
The media pundits have written article after article desperately trying to understand why progressive candidates, despite being heavily outspent, keep defeating establishment Democrats in primaries around the country. Well, the answer is not complicated.
Whether it is a corrupt campaign finance system, unprecedented income and wealth inequality, a broken and wildly expensive healthcare system, the enormous threats posed by AI or an immoral and destructive foreign policy, progressives are talking about the real issues facing working families. And they are providing real solutions. Establishment Democrats are not.
Continue reading...Many of my clients expected to find fulfillment from their career, marriage and home. Instead, they feel grief
“I have the career I wanted, but at this point I just don’t care.”
“I don’t know why I’m so angry.”
Continue reading...President Trump's move to curtail military drills with South Korea has stoked anxiety in Asia, as the region's sole U.S. aircraft carrier heads to the Mideast.
Buying a home costs more than $2,000 a month more than renting in the L.A. area
Democrat Xavier Becerra pledged on Tuesday to participate in more than one debate against Steve Hilton, his GOP rival in the California governor's race.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that the Department of Justice cannot keep an official who has not been confirmed by the Senate in charge of a U.S. attorney's office simply by giving that person a different title and the full powers of the job.
California voters are more inclined to back progressives running for office than mainstream Democrats, a new poll found, though a marked generational divide separates those who favor each camp.

Всем привет! Меня зовут Алексей Малафеев, я Senior SEO‑специалист, ex‑Детский мир. Также работал в качестве лида в компании KazanExpress (нынешний Магнит Маркет).
В этой статье хочу показать несколько прикладных кейсов того, как можно упростить и автоматизировать рабочие процессы в SEO крупного e‑commerce проекта: от мониторинга технического состояния сайта и анализа трафика до работы с большими объёмами данных и сезонностью категорий.
По опыту могу сказать, что на разных проектах встречаются как похожие и повторяющиеся задачи, так и абсолютно специфические, которые возникают из‑за особенностей конкретного бизнеса, архитектуры сайта или внутренних процессов. Но чем крупнее проект, тем чаще возникает одна и та же проблема — данных становится слишком много для ручной работы.
Что делать, чтобы не работать руками
In addition to pay, striking hospital workers say patient violence is an issue. Hospital workers are seven times more likely to be injured at work due to violent acts than the general working population.
(Image credit: Teamsters J.C.43)

When Indian authorities scrubbed the biopic of activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, local villagers and activists turned its censorship into a grassroots movement.
(Image credit: Omkar Khandekar)
Klaire Rhodes was attacked by a brown bear in state park but spray helped her escape with ‘relatively minor injuries’
An Alaska marathon athlete used a repellant spray to fend off an attacking bear that officials say injured her while she ran on a popular trail recently – an encounter that she has since described as “a nightmare come to life”.
The particularly harrowing episode unfolded on 13 August, when a woman who later identified herself online as marathon winner Klaire Rhodes, 28, was running alone on the Wolverine Bowl trail in Chugach state park, officials with Alaska’s fish and game department said. A brown bear on the trail attacked and injured her, according to the agency.
Continue reading...Internal documents obtained by Guardian show White House meetings, scheduled calls with top Trump officials and communications with Fox News producers
Continue reading...
Команда разработчиков обычно подписана сразу на несколько таких сервисов: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Cursor, Midjourney. У каждого своя подписка, свой биллинг, и в итоге расходы размазываются по личным картам сотрудников, а бухгалтерия потом не может свести отчетность.
Оплата зарубежных сервисов российскими картами после 2022 года для российского бизнеса стала отдельной проблемой. Интереснее другое: у разных сервисов из списка разные модели биллинга, и универсального решения под все сразу не существует. Разбираем, чем они отличаются и что из этого следует для оплаты от компании.
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Every August, our country celebrates new beginnings. Families fill cars with bedding, desk lamps, laptops, notebooks, and high hopes. Students decorate dorm rooms and imagine the people they will become, while parents drive away with a mix of beaming pride and quiet, heavy lumps in their throats.
Every August, I go back to 2006.
Twenty years ago this fall, I helped my daughter, Reema, begin her freshman year at Virginia Tech. I remember believing she had her whole life ahead of her. Like every parent, I assumed the biggest challenges she would face would be exams, homesickness, and choosing a major.
My family could never have imagined that eight months later, she would be among the 32 people killed in her classroom on April 16, 2007, coming home in a mortuary van.
In the years since, mass violence has become a recurring nightmare in American life. Yet every August, millions of parents still make that same drive, entrusting their children to colleges and universities across the country. No parent should have to make that journey wondering whether their child will come home safely.
We have learned a great deal since 2007. We know more about recognizing warning signs, responding to mental health crises, and building stronger safety protocols on campus. We know more about what proactive prevention requires. The problem is that knowing what works and consistently doing it are two different things.
As another academic year begins, we cannot rely on prayers or goodwill to keep our students safe. While most colleges and universities spend phenomenal budgets emphasizing sports, campus events, and academics, parents need to ask the most important question: how safe is my child? We need sustained, measurable, and accountable action from lawmakers, university leaders, and citizens.
First, campus safety cannot remain reactive. Every college president and administrator will tell you that student safety is a top priority. But a pledge to safety is not enough. Colleges should be able to demonstrate, through regular and rigorous self-assessment, where their vulnerabilities are and what they are doing to address them.
Every single college and university should be using the 32 National Campus Safety Initiative, or 32NCSI. Through the VTV Family Outreach Foundation, in partnership with NASPA (Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education), we launched this campus safety tool in memory of the 32 people killed at Virginia Tech. It gives colleges a framework for assessing critical areas of campus safety and infrastructure, including threat assessment teams, emergency communications, mental health services, and physical security.
The tools exist. The question is whether we are using them consistently, and whether we are holding ourselves accountable.
Second, campus safety cannot begin when a student arrives at college. It must begin years earlier. Every elementary, middle, and high school should have access to evidence-based programs that help educators and school resource officers recognize concerns, build positive relationships, and address problems before they escalate.
One such model is Preventing Problems by Promoting Positive Practices, or P5, developed by the Virginia Tech Center for Applied Behavior Systems with support from the U.S. Department of Justice’s COPS Office, and in conjunction with VTV Family Outreach Foundation. P5 provides a comprehensive safety model and training program for K-12 school resource officers and administrators to create a safety net for students when they are in the yellow zone, prior to entering into the red zone. Simply put, it creates a culture of caring.
Finally, we need to restore national infrastructure for campus safety. The National Center for Campus Public Safety was established in 2013 to conduct research, develop best practices, and provide campus security training. Its federal support eventually lapsed after funding allocations ran out, and the federal government no longer maintains the Center as the sustained national resource it was created to provide. While archived federal documents and reports remain available through the Office of Justice Programs Virtual Library, an active national center is no longer doing the work it was created to do. This needs to change.
In 2026, there is no reason to wait for another warning sign, another missed opportunity, or another family to experience an unimaginable loss. When I watch parents drop off their freshmen this month, I do not want them to live in fear. Hope is a vital part of entering college, and every student deserves to experience the wonder of a new beginning.
But hope is not a policy. If we truly want to honor the memory of Reema and the countless others lost to mass violence, we must match our back-to-school hopes with uncompromising action.
Twenty years after I helped my daughter move into Virginia Tech, every parent should be able to drive away from a college campus believing their child has a whole life ahead of them. That belief should not be a matter of faith. It should be a matter of policy.
The general election for Wisconsin governor is now a week old. But the past seven days of debate between the race’s Republican and Democratic candidates can be paraphrased in just two lines:
“My opponent is a shill for Big Tech who wants to build data centers over Wisconinites’ farms, parks, preserves, graves — and, possibly, Lambeau Field.”
“I know you are, but what am I?”
The Republican nominee, Congressman Tom Tiffany, has been the aggressor in this argument. Tiffany has branded his Democratic rival David Crowley as “Data Center David,” spotlighting the Milwaukee County Executive’s past support for turning Wisconsin into a “data hub” for “the entire globe.” In the Republican’s telling, Crowley is a corporate stooge eager to let Wisconsin’s “lakes run dry” and its “family farms” get “paved over,” just to generate higher profits for his Silicon Valley paymasters.
• Republican Tom Tiffany has made data centers the focus of Wisconsin’s governor’s race.
• But his policies on hyper scale development aren’t much different than David Crowley’s.
• Some Wisconsin labor unions and municipalities benefit a lot from data center projects.
• Crowley and Tiffany have held off on embracing a moratorium for that reason.
Crowley has returned fire. The Democrat has insisted that every Wisconsin community should have veto power over any data center project within its territory — and that new computing campuses anywhere in the state must comply with strict regulations. Meanwhile, Crowley has argued that Tiffany is the race’s true corporate shill, noting that the member of Congress voted for tax cuts that benefit Big Tech (paid for with cuts to Medicaid and food stamps), permitting reforms that made data centers easier to build, and a ban on state and local AI regulations. “Congressman Tiffany loves data centers,” Crowley warned in a recent statement.
Meanwhile, it’s not clear how much they actually disagree on what they would do about the issue as governor.
The Wisconsin governor’s race has quickly become the most prominent flashpoint in the national war over data centers. And it’s not hard to tell which side is winning. On Tuesday, Josh Shapiro, the moderate Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, announced a suite of measures to slow and block “predatory” data center developments, after having previously led efforts to attract them.
If the public’s views on data centers are increasingly clear, the substantive issues remain unsettled. And the politics are more complicated than polling alone would indicate: Key constituencies in both the Democratic and Republican parties remain invested (literally and figuratively) in hyperscale development. Even as Tiffany and Crowley spar over who would do more to curb the data center menace, their actual policies quietly reflect these tensions.
On first glance, Crowley and Tiffany’s back-and-forth on data centers looks odd in multiple respects. For one thing, Republicans do not typically accuse Democrats of trying too hard to spur corporate investment — nor of doing too little to protect the environment. For another, Crowley and Tiffany seem to appear to largely agree about data center policy, which makes their emphasis on the issue sound a bit strange.
Upon closer inspection, however, Tiffany’s emphasis on the subject isn’t hard to understand.
Crowley just barely defeated socialist Assembly member Francesca Hong in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. And data center policy was among the key divides in that contest, according to Crowley himself: Hong championed a statewide moratorium on data centers, while Crowley merely favored imposing tight guardrails on their development.
What’s more, Crowley really did tout the potential benefits of data center development in the past. And he is closely allied with sitting Democratic Governor Tony Evers, who enacted large tax subsidies for new computing campuses in the state. Thanks in part to that largesse, Wisconsin witnessed a sudden wave of hyperscale (in other words, AI) data center development over the past two years.
Thus, by staking out a more (ostensibly) hardline, anti-data center position, Tiffany hopes to fracture the Democratic coalition — and isolate Crowley from the 76 percent of Wisconsin voters who say that the server farms’ costs outweigh their benefits.
In reality, however, the distinctions between Crowley and Tiffany’s positions on data center construction are much narrower than the latter’s attacks suggest. And to the extent that Crowley is more sympathetic to hyperscale development, this has less to do with his alleged fealty to Big Tech than his support for organized labor.
Crowley and Tiffany’s positions on data centers heavily overlap.
Neither candidate supports a statewide moratorium. Both say that local communities should have the power to veto new computing campuses; that data centers must pay the full price of their energy needs (including the costs of any new power and transmission infrastructure that their consumption necessitates); and that companies should not be allowed to enter into nondisclosure agreements with local governments that temporarily conceal negotiations over new data center developments from the public.
Likewise, as their respective attacks suggest, Crowley and Tiffany were both friendlier to the AI industry in the past, before the backlash to artificial intelligence — and the infrastructure it requires — took off. Crowley really did express a desire for Wisconsin to become a global leader in artificial intelligence. Tiffany, meanwhile, has indeed voted to cut taxes on AI companies and shield them from state and local regulations. And the Republican is aligned with an even more unabashed champion of data centers than Evers, President Donald Trump.
Further, many of the distinctions between Crowley and Tiffany’s data center platforms reflect perennial left-right divides on other issues, rather than any difference in each candidate’s degree of chumminess with Big Tech.
For example, Crowley wants to require data center projects to finance new renewable energy installations — both so that they can meet their own power needs in a sustainable way and so that Wisconsin’s broader electric grid becomes less dependent on coal.
Tiffany also recognizes that data center development could be leveraged to fund new renewable energy. But he sees this as a bug, not a feature: After all, new solar and wind farms could eat up Wisconsin’s precious farmland, which Tiffany has sworn to protect. The Republican instead prefers for new data centers to run on coal, thereby propping up that embattled industry.
All this said, Tiffany’s platform is genuinely less pro-data center than Crowley’s in one respect: The Republican has promised to end all taxpayer subsidies for data centers in Wisconsin.
Crowley’s position is comparatively nuanced. In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in July, the Democrat said, “I do not believe Wisconsin should automatically roll back all data center tax incentives, but I do believe we need a more rigorous review of whether taxpayers are receiving sufficient value for the incentives being provided.”
In response to Tiffany’s recent attacks, Crowley has embraced far more adversarial rhetoric towards the tech industry in general and the AI sector in particular. And he has called for imposing a set of requirements on new data center development so numerous and profound, it is unclear whether many companies would be interested in pursuing new projects under his leadership, subsidies or no subsidies.
Nevertheless, as of this writing, Crowley has yet to abandon his July position on tax incentives. Instead, he has countered Tiffany’s charges on that front by noting that, in supporting Donald Trump’s tax bill, his Republican opponent effectively “signed over $70 billion in tax handouts to the same companies now steamrolling over our local communities with data centers.”
This is a fair hit. But it’s also a little evasive. How high the corporate tax rate should be federally — and whether Wisconsin should offer tax breaks to data center developments — are two different questions.
And Wisconsin’s subsidies to hyperscalers are not small. Under Evers, the state exempted large data center projects from sales taxes. This means that a data center developer need not pay taxes — to either the state or localities — on construction materials, IT equipment, on-site power infrastructure, cooling systems, or electricity.
Critically, these exemptions do not sunset: Tech companies don’t just avoid sales taxes when initially building their data centers. Rather, they pay no taxes on their facilities’ electricity consumption forever, while also avoiding any levies when updating their servers or other equipment.
All this adds up. According to a report from Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the state is poised to forgo $1.5 billion in sales tax revenue during the construction of certified data center projects, and then another $369 million annually after the facilities are fully operating. This is an especially sensitive issue in Wisconsin, where voters are still upset over an effort to lure tech manufacturer Foxconn to the state in Trump’s first term, a costly gambit that failed to deliver on its promised benefits.
To be clear, the Fiscal Bureau’s projections do not mean that data centers are likely to subtract billions of dollars from Wisconsin’s state and local budgets. Even if the hyperscale facilities are exempt from sales levies they must still pay property taxes. And their owners could owe corporate taxes while their construction workers and permanent employees will pay income taxes.
Their spending also generates business — and thus, income tax obligations — for other Wisconsin enterprises, such as utilities. On net, the projects will almost certainly increase the amount of revenue available to Wisconsin state and local governments. The debate is over whether the projects could have generated even more revenue, in the absence of subsidies — or whether these developments would have gone to a different state, had Wisconsin not made their funders such a sweetheart deal.
The evidence on that question is mixed. On the one hand, tax subsidies of some kind were plausibly necessary to spur hyperscale data center investment in Wisconsin. At present, 38 states provide tax incentives to data center developers.
On the other hand, Wisconsin’s subsidies are unusually generous. States commonly spare servers and capital equipment from sales taxes, but many do not extend that exemption to electricity. And the indefinite nature of Wisconsin’s subsidies is also far from standard. In nearby Illinois, data center projects enjoy a sales tax exemption for only 20 years.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin has some structural assets that might make it appealing to tech companies, even if it offered far lower subsidies. Due to its proximity to the Great Lakes, Wisconsin boasts abundant water. And it also has relatively cool temperatures, which limit hyperscalers’ cooling costs.
Crowley has not ruled out dramatically scaling back the state’s subsidies. But unlike Tiffany, he has thus far declined to endorse abolishing those subsidies in their entirety.
At this point, you might be asking why Crowley doesn’t simply go “full populist” on data centers. Why give Tiffany any room to get to the Democratic Party’s left on this issue? Why not shore up your left flank by simply calling for a statewide moratorium — or at a minimum, for ending all data center tax breaks? After all, roughly three-quarters of Wisconsinites think the facilities are net harmful to the state.
In Tiffany’s telling, the answer to these questions is simple: Crowley is a bought-off puppet of the AI industry. But this is almost certainly wrong.
In truth, Crowley’s refusal to fully disavow data center construction likely reflects his ties to labor, not capital.
In his attack ad, Tiffany alleges that Crowley’s campaign is funded by “the people building” data centers and then flashes this image:
Tiffany’s claim is true — but in a misleadingly literal sense: The figure cited appears to be a reference to Crowley’s support from Wisconsin’s building trades unions. As of August 13, unions representing Wisconsin electricians, pipefitters, carpenters, construction workers, and other laborers had collectively contributed $412,000 to Crowley’s campaign. The Democrat has received no comparable support from corporate PACs of any kind, much less AI industry-affiliated ones.
The building trades are strongly supportive of data center construction — and for good reason. A data center serving OpenAI and Oracle in Port Washington, Wisconsin is being built through an explicit partnership with the Wisconsin Building Trades Council.
Separately, the Democrat has evinced concern for municipalities that do desire data center development, saying that Wisconsin can protect its ratepayers and environment “while also not preempting communities that have done their due diligence to allow for different types of economic development investments.”
For some Wisconsin communities, the fiscal benefits of data center development can be profound.
Consider Port Washington: In recent decades, the city’s manufacturing base shrank — and its business tax revenues declined with it. As a result, homeowners shouldered more and more of the burden of financing local government. But its new hyperscale data center promises to dramatically change its finances. According to the city’s Mayor Ted Neitzke, the project is expected to add between $1.3 and $1.8 billion in property value to a municipality whose entire existing valuation is scarcely over $1 billion.
By doubling the tax base, the data center could finance property tax cuts or public service expansions for Port Washington residents. Many of Wisconsin’s other post-industrial towns face similar challenges — and thus, could reap similar benefits from data center development. This may be why neither Crowley nor Tiffany have felt comfortable endorsing a moratorium, despite their increasingly populist rhetoric about data centers and AI.
Add it up, and you have two candidates who are balancing the interests of the data center boom’s material beneficiaries against its growing political toxicity — and giving more and more weight to the latter.
It is unclear whether data centers will remain at the forefront of governors’ race as the campaign enters its homestretch. Although hyperscale facilities are increasingly unpopular in Wisconsin, they also are not a top-tier concern for the vast majority of the state’s voters. In a July poll from Marquette Law School, only 5 percent of Wisconsin voters named “data centers” as the state’s most important issue, putting it behind inflation, “illegal immigration,” health insurance, property taxes, “jobs and the economy,” and housing affordability.
Nevertheless, the fact that Crowley and Tiffany are sparring over who dislikes data centers the most — months after both expressed positive sentiments about the facilities — shows which way the wind is blowing.
Something happens to kids when they’re about 9 years old. Before then, they’re voracious little bookworms, with most of them saying they read for fun at least five days a week. After their ninth birthday, only 35 percent still do.
Experts call this phenomenon “the decline by 9,” and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to stop it. They talk up and cherish the books that break through: the Harry Potters and the Percy Jacksons, which got so many kids to keep reading through those danger years and which sold so well through millennial and Gen Z childhoods. Publishers keep looking for new books compelling enough to keep kids away from their screens and glued to the page.
But for the past 10 years, books for kids ages 8 to 12 (known as middle grade) have been selling less and less.
“It had been happening for maybe a decade, very very slowly,” said Joanne O’Sullivan, a children’s book author and reporter for Publishers Weekly. What had been a gradual slope got dramatically worse in 2020. And in the years since the pandemic, publishers have shut down multiple middle-grade imprints, culminating in it happening twice this year.
No one in publishing is entirely sure why kids books stopped selling, but there are two major theories. One says that children are no longer reading as much as they used to, because they are worse readers than previous generations were. The age group that used to happily devour Harry Potter is now distracted by iPads and YouTube shorts, so they never developed the ability to sit down and focus on a printed page. Their reading scores, which started falling in 2014, tell the tale.
The other theory says that the kids aren’t the ones who changed — publishers are. Starting in the 2000s, middle-grade books began getting long, with the average going from 174.5 pages in 2006 to 290 in 2016. According to this narrative, publishers flooded the market with books too difficult for their target audience. Kids responded by tuning out.
Whichever theory is true, the fact remains that all those ravenous 8-year-old bookworms depend on middle-grade publishers to keep on reading after they turn 9. The publishers who sell these books have built massive businesses on their ability to supply kids with exciting, addictive stories. If they’re failing, what will kids turn to for entertainment instead?
Reading decline happens during the big transition all middle-grade readers go through: moving from short illustrated chapter books to fully fledged novels. It’s a pain point.
“They’ve been doing short chapter books; they’ve been doing those leveled readers in the classroom; and, then, all of a sudden, what’s available to them is a lot chunkier, more challenging,” O’Sullivan said. She described the transition as “abrupt,” adding, “that’s not necessarily just for kids who are struggling with reading. That’s also for kids who like reading and are capable.”
“If you have a kid who’s not a very confident reader, a long book is very intimidating,” Kelly Dickinson, a middle school librarian in Bethesda, Maryland, told Vox. “They just stall out before they can even pick one, because they look at it and they think, ‘I can’t read that.’”
The shadow of Harry Potter, with its doorstopper volumes approaching a thousand pages, looms large here. Before Harry, a standard middle-grade novel might look like The Baby-Sitters Club volume The Truth About Stacey, which clocks in around 35,000 words. In a Substack post in April, Vicky Weber, an author, literary agent, and author coach for middle-grade books, pointed out that Sorcerer’s Stone was 76,944 words long, already pushing the limits of a middle-grade reader’s attention. After the books became phenomenons, they got much longer; Order of the Phoenix was 257,045 words, which is heftier than most adult novels. As publishers raced to catch up, their books began to expand, as well.
“When something becomes really popular, other publishers try to replicate that success,” Weber told Vox. “I think one of the things we didn’t take into account is how many Harry Potter readers were adults.”
While middle-grade books really did get longer, everyone I spoke to also acknowledges that kids’ reading scores really did drop, too. Kids have lost a lot of their unstructured play time to the grind of organized sports and music lessons, which means the empty childhood hours that are such perfect reading opportunities have vanished. “That time to just sit down and read is so truncated for a lot of kids, probably a lot of the kids who would have chosen to read a 400-page book if they had the time,” O’Sullivan said.
Then, there was the trauma of Covid, which smashed right into kids’ reading habits. “There were factors like schools and libraries closing, not much time with peers, and plenty of screen time during the pandemic,” said Kristen McLean, who runs the thought leadership collective Circana Entertainment Knowledge Group. All these bad effects, McLean said, that essentially “broke the discovery chain” for middle-grade fiction, in what she describes as “a perfect storm for lower literacy.”
The good news is that kids didn’t stop reading entirely during the pandemic. A few categories spiked: illustrated books, graphic novels, and manga. Jackie De Leo, now the chief merchant and publisher at Scholastic, was a vice president at Barnes & Noble during the pandemic, and she describes seeing kids with an unquenchable thirst for manga all through 2020.
“If you sat in a store and watched the manga section, you’d see little kids at lunch; you’d see them through the day; and, then, it would move into being adults,” De Leo said. “The only real constraint was actual inventory.”
Now, O’Sullivan says she keeps hearing middle-grade publishers say, “Let’s meet them where they are.” In practice, that appears to mean they’re focusing on books like the wildly popular Dog Man, a graphic novel series featuring a hero with the head of a dog and the body of a police officer.
“Dog Man is full color — so immersive,” De Leo said. “There’s these fun parts about the physical book, too, where you actually have to flap the pages and it makes an animation reel.” More importantly, she said, the books are funny. “Kids like things that are funny, and we were giving them some pretty serious things for a while — books for adults packaged as middle-grade books.”
The new ideal middle-grade book is short, punchy, and comedic and comes with a hefty dose of graphics. “Maybe it’s comics, maybe it’s illustrated novels,” O’Sullivan said. “Maybe, instead of just running text, they’ll have a panel with some text messages in it or something, just to break up the text to make the entire experience of reading less intimidating.”
This focus on breaking up the text means that publishing isn’t going back to what middle-grade books looked like before Harry Potter: short, simple chapter books à la The Baby-Sitters Club and Encyclopedia Brown. Those series weren’t hefty or overly serious, but they were massive bestsellers on the strength of their words, not their images. (It’s also worth noting that Scholastic adapted a few of the BSC books into graphic novels in 2006 and, then, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, picked up the project again in 2021.)
I asked De Leo if she thought the industry’s shift to including more illustrations suggests that kids have lost an ability to handle pure text, even when it is short and sweet.
But De Leo said that reading graphic novels represents a “different type of literacy” from that required to read Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, not a lesser one. She said that when she reads a graphic novel, she has trouble forcing herself to look at the images, not just the words. When she sees kids focusing on the pictures with ease, she takes it as evidence of “a real visual literacy that they have that I am jealous of.”
Dickinson, the librarian, said she wishes that publishers would put out comedic fiction in more formats. “A lot of kids want funny books, and a lot of the funny books are the illustrated hybrid stuff,” she said. “There’s not enough other funny books, in my opinion.”
Experts are hopeful that publishers’ new direction will be enough to get kids reading again — and to get their parents to buy books. “This is probably the first year where I’ve heard people being optimistic and feeling excited about the new ideas that are coming,” O’Sullivan said. “People are beginning to be able to re-envision middle grade.”
The publishing shutdowns reflect the industry’s new direction. One of the three people to survive the March closure of Dial Books for Young Readers was an editor specializing in picture books and graphic novels. Macmillan is replacing the now-defunct Roaring Brook Press imprint, which also closed in March, with a new imprint specializing in nonfiction and illustrated books for kids, although it’s not yet clear what age group the new imprint will cater to.
In the meantime, kids’ reading test scores have started to rebound. In 2025, 9-year-olds’ average reading scores went up four points from 2022 — back to where they were before the pandemic.
With kids becoming stronger readers and books getting shorter, the hope is that they’ll meet in the middle.
“Kids in the middle-grade age are extremely self-centered and view everything through how it impacts them. Developmentally, that’s very normal,” Dickinson said. “But also, they’re incredibly empathetic at this age.” Reading fiction, which allows us to imagine how other people’s minds work, can be deeply impactful for this malleable age if kids can hold onto their love of reading long enough to reap the benefits.
“This is a time when reading habits and interest in reading can really die,” Dickinson said. “The hope is to help kids discover what kinds of books or what formats they like — and to show that there are ways in.”

Когда речь идет об автоматизации бизнес‑процессов, существенная часть разговора неизменно будет касаться использования офисного пакета. Есть такой интернет‑мем: гигантская конструкция, названная «финансовая система мира», тремя четвертями своего веса опирается на небольшую подпорку, названную «Excel». И пока все вокруг не заполонили рои интеллектуальных агентов, табличный редактор остается основным инструментом человека для обработки и представления структурированной информации. Вероятно, когда корабль человеческих возможностей начнет тонуть в океане данных, именно разнообразные электронные таблицы последними покинут палубу.
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Меня позвали настроить сквозную аналитику для маркетинга. Заказчик — кинодистрибьютор, работает в шести странах СНГ, десятки миллионов долларов кассы в год. Задача звучала стандартно: есть реклама фильмов в digital, есть бюджеты, нужно понимать отдачу. Соберите данные, постройте дашборд.
Обычный сценарий здесь — взять бриф и пойти делать. Я потратил три недели на интервью с руководителями направлений и разбор их рабочих файлов, прежде чем что-то строить. Выяснилось, что дашборд по маркетингу отвечал бы на вопрос про малую часть выручки, а основной денежный процесс компании — роспись, распределение сеансов по кинотеатрам, — не имеет ни одной управленческой метрики. Ни плана, ни факта относительно плана, ни замера качества. При этом через него проходит более 200 фильмов в год по более чем 150 кинотеатрам и примерно 500 залам.
Дальше — как устроен ИТ-ландшафт компании, которая делает десятки миллионов долларов кассы на Excel-файле со 150 вкладками, где именно там теряются деньги, и как я оценил размер потерь, когда сравнивать не с чем. Спойлер по методу: никакой магии, оценка построена на публичных бенчмарках производительности и честно помечена как нижняя граница.
Открыть Excel на 150 вкладок
Figure AI, Sunday Robotics, Weave Robotics и другие компании вкладывают огромные деньги в создание домашних гуманоидов, которые должны однажды превратиться в настоящих роботов-дворецких.
Но прежде чем дройд в стиле C-3PO из "Звездных войн" начнет готовить вам ужин и мыть полы, ему придется разобраться с кучей грязного белья.
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Как асинхронно отправить диагностическую информацию на удалённые сервера для дальнейшей диагностики в условиях очень ограниченной среды? Корутины C++20 без динамической памяти и исключений, а также некоторые другие вещи, о которых вы бы никогда не подумали, что они вам нужны.
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Большинство ИТ-компаний начинают готовиться к проверке после получения первого требования ФНС. На практике, если запрос пришел, то налоговая к этому моменту уже собрала информацию и сформировала свои вопросы к вам. Поэтому сегодня важно «подстелить соломку» заранее. В этой статье разбираю, как изменился подход ФНС к проверкам, какие ситуации становятся причиной дополнительных вопросов и что проверить, если компания применяет ИТ-льготы.
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Government data showed the outbreak had so far recorded 5,021 cases, including 2,378 deaths. The outbreak has infected and killed more people at a greater speed than any other outbreak in history.
(Image credit: Dieudonne Dirole)

В предыдущей статье мы разобрали четвёртое базовое понятие BABOK — Решение (Solution). Мы выяснили, что оптимальное решение — не то, которое технически совершенно, а то, что наилучшим образом закрывает сформулированную потребность в данном контексте с учётом реальных ограничений. Ключевое словосочетание здесь — «в данном контексте». Но что именно скрывается за этим словом?
Представьте: команда провела безупречный анализ заинтересованных сторон, точно сформулировала потребность, спроектировала переход и выбрала оптимальное решение. А потом выяснилось, что регулятор запретил использование облачных технологий для хранения персональных данных. Или что организационная культура компании настолько иерархична, что любое изменение без явного одобрения топ-менеджмента обречено на саботаж снизу. Или что технологический стек компании несовместим с выбранным решением, а на его замену нет ни бюджета, ни времени. Всё это — контекст.
Разберём пятое базовое понятие BABOK — Контекст (Context).
Читать далееGreens say analysis shows government failure to take bold climate action could lead to big gains for party at election
Labour could lose dozens of seats to the Green party if the government allows new drilling in the North Sea, according to internal research shared with the Guardian.
Green party analysis suggests up to 50 Labour MPs, including Andy Burnham’s key ally Louise Haigh, could lose their seats at the next election if the government fails to make urgent climate action a priority or allows new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea.
The Guardian’s climate forum 2026: On Tuesday 20 October, join Damian Carrington and our panel of experts, including Prof Andy Haines, Katie White, Asad Rehman, Shruti Suresh, Gareth Thomas and Amy Fairman, for a hopeful and solutions-focused evening. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
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Government data showed the outbreak had so far recorded 5,021 cases, including 2,378 deaths. The outbreak has infected and killed more people at a greater speed than any other outbreak in history.
(Image credit: Dieudonne Dirole)

Импортозамещение софта подошло к тупику экстенсивного роста. Бюджеты стабилизировались, первая волна пожарной миграции завершена, и на смену паническому «на чем работать завтра» приходит трезвый аудит TCO и вендор-рисков.
В этой статье мы разберем математику сетевых эффектов, парадокс теневого Telegram, почему On-Prem отечественных «вендорских комбайнов» вместо снижения рисков оборачивается инфраструктурным взрывом, и как Matrix, TOGAF 10 и SABSA помогут бизнесу вырваться из нового вендорского капкана.