It’s times like this I wish I lived in Hawaii. Or Arizona. Or American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, or on the Western lands of the Navajo nation. Those are the places under U.S. jurisdiction that do not observe the manifest folly of Daylight Saving Time, and will be leaving their clocks and watches exactly as they are when the rest of us are dialing ours an hour forward on Sunday, March 9. The switch will happen as it always does at the decidedly unhandy time of 2 a.m., when anyone with a decent circadian sense will have long since gone to bed. It will mean that the sun comes up an hour later in the morning, leaving early risers to wake up in darkness. The sun will also hang around an hour later in the evening, contributing to an unseemly 8:30 sunset in most of the continental U.S. and the absurdity of an 11:44 p.m. sunset in Alaska on the June 21 summer solstice. Advertisement The U.S. is not exactly alone in fiddling with the time twice a year—but we’re hardly in the majority either. Roughly 60% of countries follow standard time year-round, and there is a growing American constituency for joining them. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) endorses eliminating Daylight Saving Time and staying on Standard Time year round, citing the increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, atrial fibrillation, emergency room visits, and traffic accidents when the clocks spring forward. “The human biological clock is regulated by the timing of light and darkness, which then dictates sleep and wake rhythms,” the AASM wrote in a position statement in 2023. “In daily life, the timing of exposure to light is generally linked to the social clock. When the solar clock is misaligned with the social clock, desynchronization occurs between the internal circadian rhythm and the social clock…which has been associated with risks to physical and mental health and safety.” Holiday inbound tourism thrives Branded Content Holiday inbound tourism thrives By China Daily According to an AASM poll of 2,000 Americans, 63% support eliminating the seasonal time jumps—though the poll did not tease out whether they prefer Daylight Saving Time or Standard Time. Read More: Why Do I Keep Having Recurring Dreams? The American Medical Association agrees that Daylight Saving Time belongs on the cultural scrap heap. In 2022, the group called for the elimination of the spring-forward practice, writing, “Some studies suggest that the body clock does not adjust to Daylight Saving Time even after a few months.” A 2020 study in PLOS Computational Biology found that Daylight Saving Time adversely affects not just the body but the mind. When the clocks spring forward, the incidence of mood disorders, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse all rise. Studies show that adolescents and teens might be especially affected by the clock change, exhibiting attention, learning, and behavioral deficits. At school they are often sleepier and have slower reaction times.

A severe storm was moving east across the central and southern United States on Wednesday, a day after it carved a destructive path that killed three people in Mississippi and two in Nebraska, pulled down power lines and ripped roofs off buildings. One of the people who died was electrocuted by a downed power line, said Alex Breeland, the coroner for Madison County, Miss., and another was killed when a tree fell on his car. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency reported a third death and at least six injuries on Wednesday. In Nebraska, two people were killed in a crash on Tuesday after their S.U.V. struck a semi truck on Interstate 80 during the storm, according to the Nebraska State Patrol. More than 51,000 customers in Texas and more than 17,000 in Tennessee were without power on Wednesday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us, as the storm’s strong winds pummeled the region. The authorities in some parts of Texas closed schools and ordered residents to evacuate. The storm, unusually strong for March, was expected to strengthen as it moved east, bringing rain and thunderstorms to the East Coast. In parts of Minnesota 11 to 13 inches of snow fell between Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service in Minneapolis. The Minnesota State Patrol warned of slippery roads in the Twin Cities area on Wednesday. In Iowa, the State Patrol said it responded to more than 60 crashes on Tuesday and Wednesday, including one that damaged a trooper’s car, because of “the extreme weather conditions.” Areas from the Mid-Atlantic to Jacksonville, Fla., were the most at risk, with strong to severe thunderstorms expected ahead of a cold front, the Weather Service said on Wednesday. The strongest storms were expected over the eastern Carolinas and southeastern Virginia, including Norfolk and Virginia Beach. The Storm Prediction Center issued an enhanced risk for these regions, warning of severe thunderstorms that could produce damaging wind gusts and isolated tornadoes through Wednesday evening. Some shoreline areas in the Northeast are facing coastal flood advisories, according to the Weather Service. Up to six inches of rain were expected through Wednesday night in some low-lying areas along the South Shore of Long Island, the Connecticut shore and on Cape Cod.Blizzard conditions were forecast from north of Kansas City, Mo., to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan through Wednesday night. One person was injured and 24 families displaced when a tornado hit parts of Ada, Okla., on Tuesday morning, KOCO-TV of Oklahoma City reported, citing local officials. A mobile home was also destroyed, KOCO said. In Texas, a brief tornado carved a destructive path through Irving, northwest of Dallas early Tuesday, with winds estimated at up to 110 miles per hour. By Tuesday afternoon, a dust storm had caused the skies in Central Texas to turn dark orange. Local news outlets referred to it as a “haboob,” which the Weather Service describes as an extreme dust storm that can last up to three hours.

Linda McMahon’s first act as secretary of education was to instruct staff to prepare for its “final mission,” her clearest indication yet of how she will work to fulfill President Trump’s goal of shuttering the department. Ms. McMahon’s missive, sent via email shortly after she was sworn in on Monday, was just the latest thunderclap for federal workers, teachers and school administrators anticipating seismic changes to the nation’s education system. Ms. McMahon’s message broadly outlined a “disruption” to the education system that would have a “profound impact.” The changes to the status quo, she said, would be “daunting.” “This is our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service to future generations of students,” Ms. McMahon wrote. “I hope you will join me in ensuring that when our final mission is complete,” she continued, “we will all be able to say that we left American education freer, stronger and with more hope for the future.” Mr. Trump has been blunt about his desire to do away with the department entirely, including a recent remark that he hoped Ms. McMahon would effectively put herself out of a job. He told reporters last month that the Education Department was “a big con job” and that “I’d like to close it immediately.” The department is created by statute, however, and closing it would require an act of Congress. But up until Monday night, Ms. McMahon had been more nuanced in her position. At a confirmation hearing, she described to senators a bold vision for the future of education — one that pushed for more high school vocational programs, increased school options and protected families from insurmountable college debt. Ms. McMahon had watched her successful Senate confirmation vote on Monday, along with some key staff and advisers, from inside the secretary’s office at the Education Department building, just a few blocks from the Capitol. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT When the vote ended at 6:28 p.m., Ms. McMahon was sworn into office by Jacqueline Clay, the department’s chief human capital officer. By 9:29 p.m., she sent her first email to the department’s roughly 4,200 workers with the subject line, “Our Department’s Final Mission.” She used the email to explain her ambitions in stark terms. “Restoring patriotic education and classes” was among her top priorities, she wrote. The department would “restore the right role of state oversight in education,” she added. This restoration, she said, would mean significant changes for the agency’s staff, budgets and operations.“We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul — a last chance to restore the culture of liberty and excellence that made American education great,” she wrote. Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said she was worried that the Trump administration wanted to return to a time when there were fewer protections for students with disabilities and those from poor districts. “America is about progress,” Ms. Pringle said. “We know that we are still a work in progress, and my concern — and it is a real concern — is that we are going back to a time when certain students were left alone in a corner somewhere and not getting the services that they needed.” Ms. McMahon also cast the department as a failed experiment, noting that it had spent more than $1 trillion since opening its doors for the first time in 1980. But she did not describe how it would help to give more power to state and local school districts, which have spent exponentially more on education during that same time. Madi Biedermann, a department spokeswoman, said that Ms. McMahon would oversee a “historic overhaul” of the agency that was aligned with Mr. Trump’s goals. “He was very clear about what his vision for the department looked like, and Secretary McMahon was clear in the hearing that she is here to implement his agenda,” Ms. Biedermann said. Some agency officials said privately that the email seemed like an attempt to undermine morale within an agency already reeling from the administration’s aggressive overhaul. These officials, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, said they believed their new boss was delivering a not-so-subtle message to retire early or simply resign. Education workers who did not accept a resignation package offered to nearly all government employees in the first weeks of the Trump administration were offered a modest severance again on Friday, a proposal that expired on Monday. Workers who have spent 20 years at the agency and are at least 50 years old have until March 25 to apply for an early retirement package being offered. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, noted in an interview that parts of Ms. McMahon’s email seemed to contradict her testimony during the confirmation hearing. During the hearing, Ms. McMahon called for increasing vocational training in high schools to the point where new graduates have the skills to “even start a business of their own.” In her email, however, she said that “postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with work force needs.” “They are still trying to figure out what they can and can’t do, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up trying to do this by 1,000 cuts,” Ms. Weingarten said. “But if they make things worse, it’s going to be on their watch — because parents all across the country are saying they want help to protect their kids and don’t want to gut federal funding.” Ms. Weingarten spoke by phone while driving from Albany, N.Y., to New Haven, Conn., to speak at events on a “day of action” organized by the teachers’ union. She said that with less than three weeks of planning, there were roughly 2,000 rallies, marches and other local events on Tuesday aimed at urging lawmakers not to undermine public education. She also pointed to a series of public opinion surveys in the past month that had shown roughly two-thirds of Americans were against eliminating the agency. According to an NPR/PBS/Marist poll released Tuesday, 63 percent of respondents said they were opposed to closing the Education Department.

On March 9, most people in the U.S. will set their clocks forward an hour, thanks to the start of Daylight Saving Time. But if President Donald Trump acts on what he’s said about the practice, Daylight Saving Time as we know it could change. Daylight Saving Time has long been controversial—most countries don’t participate in it, and many Americans have said they want to stop changing the clocks twice a year. Trump has expressed support for ending the practice, but recent efforts to do so have stalled, and only two states—Hawaii and most of Arizona—don’t participate in Daylight Saving Time. Advertisement Here’s what Trump has said about Daylight Saving Time, and what changes could potentially be on the horizon. Read More: When Do the Clocks Move Forward in the U.S.? Your 2025 Guide to Daylight Saving Time What has Trump said so far about Daylight Saving Time? On Dec. 13, 2024, Trump posted on his social media site, Truth Social, “The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.” But more than a month into his presidency, Trump has yet to make any moves on the issue since his Truth Social post, and experts are a little unsure as to what changes could be coming. David Prerau, author of Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time and an expert on the topic, says there are three options. The first is to keep the existing system of changing the clocks twice a year; currently, most of America sets the clock forward an hour starting in March for Daylight Saving Time, and sets the clock back an hour starting in November for Standard Time. The second option is to make Daylight Saving Time permanent, and the third is to make Standard Time permanent.

Watching Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar can feel like you’ve ventured into the pit of a misinformation cesspool and are oscillating between horror, disgust, and bewilderment the entire time. The series tells the story of real-life health influencer Belle Gibson (played by Kaitlyn Dever), the Australian sensation who in 2015 confirmed that she had faked having brain cancer and that she had cured it through alternative medicine in order to achieve celebrity status. The true story is nightmarish, in part because Gibson’s practice of building a massive following based on lies that endangered everyone but herself is far from an anomaly, especially in the influencer space. Advertisement Apple Cider Vinegar frustratingly elides some of the nuances that made Gibson’s ascension possible, including her whiteness, race- and gender-based inequities in medicine that can lead patients to mistrust doctors, and a frightening disinterest in the truth amid our social media age. There’s been a widespread rise in misinformation from health and wellness influencers. And Apple Cider Vinegar is far from the first instance of people turning to other remedies to try and cure cancer. Liana Werner-Gray, who advocates for “natural health” remedies, wrote a bestselling 2014 book titled The Earth Diet, about how she overcame cancer by going on “a massive detox plan.” Fake truths like those are a particular source of concern for many medical professionals. Gail Cresci, a dietitian and researcher at Cleveland Clinic, says that people often come to her reciting whatever a health influencer has said with little regard for facts. Take, for instance, an apple cider vinegar antidote that’s portrayed in the Netflix series. While Cresci, who offers advice on product development as a member of Bragg’s Scientific Advisory Board, considers the benefits of apple cider vinegar “wonderfully diverse,” she quickly adds, “But can it cure cancer? No.” “I teach medical students, and I hear how they're even talking about things that are just on social media,” she says. “They listen to an influencer. I'm like, ‘There's no evidence for that.’” Why people are drawn to wellness influencers Apple Cider Vinegar reflects the clout health influencers have and the stark medical reality facing many patients. In one episode, a sarcoma patient named Milla (played by Alycia Debnam-Carey and partly inspired by the real-life Jessica Ainscough) dismisses her doctors’ recommendations to amputate her arm in favor of so-called cures like apple cider vinegar that she learned about from Gibson’s popular social media account. It isn’t until Milla’s illness progresses that she desperately returns to her doctor seeking his help. But by then, it’s too late. She dies at age 30. “I think a lot of patients, when you get that early diagnosis, don't feel pain,” says Cresci. “I deal with this all the time. People who have early pre-diabetes or hypertension, they don't really feel it until it gets more progressed. And then they start to feel what's going on.”

Extinction is typically for good. Once a species winks out, it survives only in memory and the fossil record. When it comes to the woolly mammoth, however, that rule has now been bent. It’s been 4,000 years since the eight-ton, 12-foot, elephant-like beast walked the Earth, but part of its DNA now operates inside several litters of four-inch, half-ounce mice created by scientists at the Dallas-based Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences. The mice don’t have their characteristic short, gray-brown coat, but rather the long, wavy, woolly hair of the mammoth and the extinct beast’s accelerated fat metabolism, which helped it survive Earth’s last ice age. Both traits are the result of sophisticated gene editing that Colossal’s scientists hope will result in the reappearance of the mammoth itself as early as 2028. “The Colossal woolly mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said company CEO Ben Lamm in a statement. "By engineering multiple cold-tolerant traits from mammoth evolutionary pathways into a living model species, we've proven our ability to recreate complex genetic combinations that took nature millions of years to create." Colossal has been working on restoring the mammoth ever since the company’s founding in 2021. The animal’s relatively recent extinction—just a few thousand years ago as opposed to the tens of millions that mark the end of the reign of the dinosaurs—and the fact that it roamed the far north, including the Arctic, means that its DNA has been preserved in multiple remains embedded in permafrost. For its de-extinction project, Colossal collected the genomes of nearly 60 of those recovered mammoths. Recreating the species from that raw biological material is relatively straightforward in principle, if exceedingly painstaking in practice. The work involves pinpointing the genes responsible for the traits that separate the mammoth from the Asian elephant—its close evolutionary relation—editing an elephant stem cell to express those traits, and introducing the stem cell into an elephant embryo. In the alternative, scientists could edit a newly conceived Asian elephant zygote directly. Either way, the next step would be to implant the resulting embryo into the womb of a modern-day female elephant. After 22 months—the typical elephant gestation period—an ice age mammoth should, at least theoretically, be born into the computer-age world. Advertisement But speedbumps abound. The business of rewriting the genome takes extensive experimentation with hundreds of embryos to ensure that the key genes are properly edited. The only way to test if they indeed are is to follow the embryos through gestation and see if a viable mammoth pops out; the nearly two years it would take for even a single experimental animal to be born, however, would make that process impractical. What’s more, Asian elephants are highly social, highly intelligent, and endangered, raising intractable ethical obstacles to experimenting on them. Enter the mouse, an animal whose genome lends itself to easy manipulation with CRISPR—a gene-editing tool developed in 2012, based on a natural process bacteria use to defend themselves in the wild. What’s more, mice need only 20 days to gestate, making for a quick turnaround from embryo to mouse pup. In the current experiment, researchers identified seven genes that code for the mammoth’s shaggy coat—identifying distinct ones that make it coarse, curly, and long. They also pinpointed one gene that guides the production of melanin—which gives the coat its distinctive gold color—and another that governs the animal’s prodigious lipid metabolism. Relying on CRISPR, they then took both the stem cell and zygote approach to rewriting the mouse’s stem cell to express those traits. The next steps involved more than a little hit and miss. Advertisement Over the course of five rounds of experiments, the Colossal scientists produced nearly 250 embryos. Fewer than half of them developed to larger, more-viable 200- to 300-cell embryos, which were then implanted in the womb of around a dozen surrogate females. Of these, 38 mouse pups were born. All of them successfully expressed the gold, woolly hair of the mammoth as well as its accelerated lipid metabolism. The Colossal scientists see the creature they’ve produced as a critical development. "The woolly mouse project doesn't bring us any closer to a mammoth, but it does validate the work we are doing on the path to a mammoth,” Lamm tells TIME. “[It] proves our end-to-end pipeline for de-extinction. We started this project in September and we had our first mice in October so that shows this works—and it works efficiently.” There’s plenty still to accomplish. A mammoth is much more than its fur and its fat, and before one can lumber into the twenty-first century, the scientists will have to engineer dozens of other genes, including those that regulate its vasculature, its cold-resistant metabolism, and the precise distribution of its fat layers around its body. They would then have to test that work in more mouse models, and only if they succeed there try the same technique on an elephant. Advertisement "The list of genes will continue to evolve,” says Lamm. “We initially had about 65 gene targets and expanded up to 85. That number could go up or down with further analysis, but that's the general ballpark for the number of genes we think we will edit for our initial mammoths.” Colossal scientists see all of this work as just a first step in developing a more widely applicable de-extinction technology. In addition to the mammoth, they would also like to bring back the dodo and the thylacine—or Tasmanian tiger. “Our three flagship species for de-extinction—mammoth, thylacine, and dodo—capture much of the diversity of the animal tree of life,” says Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer. “Success with each requires solving a different suite of technical, ethical, and ecological challenges.” Advertisement The work can’t start soon enough. The company points to studies suggesting that by 2050 up to 50% of the Earth’s species could have been wiped out, most of them lost to the planet’s rapidly changing climate. The Center for Biological Diversity puts the figure at a somewhat less alarming 35%, but in either case, the widespread dying could lead to land degradation, loss of diversity, the rise of invasive species, and food insecurity for humanity. Arresting climate change and the loss of species that will result is a critical step away from that brink, but one that policymakers and the public are embracing only slowly. Restoring the species that will vanish—or fortifying the genetic heartiness of those that are endangered to help them adapt to a changing world—is one more insurance policy against environmental decline. “We do not argue that gene editing should be used instead of traditional approaches to conservation, but that this is a ‘both and’ situation,” says Shapiro. “We should be increasing the tools at our disposal to help species survive.”

Late last fall at the Hugo Newman School in Harlem, two social studies teachers handed out pages of hip-hop lyrics to their seventh graders, and then flicked off the lights. The students appeared surprised. They had been studying ancient matriarchal societies, including Iroquois communities that had women as leaders. Now, their teachers were about to play the song “Ladies First” by Queen Latifah and Monie Love. The teachers instructed their students to highlight any lyrics that reminded them of the Iroquois women, who were known as the Haudenosaunee Clan Mothers. Although they did not know it, the middle schoolers were in the midst of their first lesson of “Black Studies as the Study of the World,” a curriculum that rolled out in September and is now available to every New York City public school. Tristan Vanderhorst, 12, took notes and bobbed to the music. “I had never seen a woman rap like that,” he said afterward. The curriculum, which spans from pre-K to 12th grade, covers early African civilizations, Black American history and the achievements and contributions of the African diaspora. The curriculum emphasizes what is known as “culturally relevant” teaching, an approach meant to help students connect their own lives with what they are learning. It has been used by dozens of schools across the city since the last school year, to little fanfare. But the Trump administration has moved aggressively in its first weeks to ban programs related to diversity and equity across government, including in schools. Local school districts have traditionally been insulated from interference from the federal government. New York’s curriculum — and similar efforts to bring discussions about race and history into schools — could test those lines, and how far the Trump administration might go to enforce its edicts. Already, many K-12 educators, including the architects of New York City’s new Black studies curriculum, appear defiant. “In New York, we are trying our best to be Trump-proof,” Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the New York City Council, said in a recent interview. “We are doing everything we can to protect the curriculum.”In his second week in office, President Trump signed an executive order to withhold funding from schools that teach that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.” The order bans what it called “discriminatory equity ideology,” which “treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.”Whether New York’s curriculum or other Black history efforts violate those terms is open to interpretation. That executive order and others like it enter an ongoing debate about how schools should handle race and ethnicity. Some states, like California, have embraced ethnic studies education, a discipline born on the left that connects the experiences of people of color throughout history. Others have sought to limit or ban it. Since 2021, more than 44 states have restricted how race is discussed in public schools. Last week, the Trump administration issued guidance to schools detailing how it might pursue its orders. Officials might examine elementary schools with programs that “shame students of a particular race or ethnicity” or that “accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy.” In its guidance, the administration also suggested it would look at schools that it argued “have sought to veil discriminatory policies with terms like ‘social-emotional learning’ or ‘culturally responsive’ teaching.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Ms. Adams, who helped allocate $27 million to develop the Black studies lessons, has called New York’s curriculum a “model of fearlessness.” The curriculum offers students an “African-centered perspective that predates slavery” and is optional for schools. But about 200 have adopted it, and in early February, nearly 2,000 students gathered at the Channel View School for Research in Rockaway, Queens, for a Black studies student fair connected with the curriculum. Melissa Aviles-Ramos, the city’s schools chancellor, said the curriculum was essential in a diverse school district. “When students connect with the material, they are more engaged, develop critical thinking skills and build a deeper sense of belonging,” she said in a statement. “I am proud to lead a school system that values inclusion and the powerful truth that our diversity is our strength.”In the curriculum’s pre-K and elementary school lessons, students contemplate their identity through name study and ancestry exercises. In middle school, they are introduced to the concept of agency while studying local Black communities. They also learn about the Black media and the Black Panthers. In high school, students explore Black liberation, slavery, disenfranchisement, policing and other hot-button political issues like reparations while reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations.”Peta-Gaye McLean, one of the seventh-grade social studies teachers who began a lesson with a hip-hop music video, said she appreciates the new material, even though she has been teaching about Black history for years. “Not only does it legitimize it, it gives the teachers a responsibility,” she said. Some of her students took personally the lesson comparing the roles of women in pre-colonial America and Africa. Tristan said his takeaways were “don’t take women for granted. Respect them highly.” His classmate, Amelia Sierra, 12, said the class taught “all these good things about women and the ladies — how helpful they were and how important they were,” she said. “So I think that shows me how important I am.” That is part of the goal. Some education experts say that making connections to students’ own lives and culture helps them master the material. One study found that students who take ethnic studies classes are more likely to graduate and go to college. “The ability to really dig into problems that kids care about is one of the things that I think sets culturally relevant pedagogy apart,” Gloria Ladson-Billings, an education scholar who coined that term in the mid-1990s, said in an interview. Not all educators agree with that approach. Ian Rowe, the founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in the Bronx that embraces the classics, urges students to “reject victimhood.” He said his school would never adopt the “Black Studies as the Study of the World” curriculum. His students, who are predominantly Black and Latino, are still exposed to Black history, Mr. Rowe said. But, he added, “We’re going at it from the human condition, a universality. So we don’t want our kids to only see themselves through the prism of race only or gender only.”Conservative and liberal educators may have more in common than they realize when it comes to teaching about Black history, said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. In both right- and left-leaning parts of the country, new standards and lessons related to African American history often emphasize teaching about the strengths of the Black community. He said that heated political rhetoric prevents both sides from appreciating some of their shared values. “Instead of trying to find common ground on antiracism or inclusive history or ways in which we can broaden the canon,” he said, partisans “have instead found it more politically beneficial to plant an extremist flag.” Alesha Smith, an English Language Arts teacher at Eagle Academy in Harlem, an all-boys school that is using the New York City curriculum, said she loved teaching about empowerment in difficult lessons about slavery, for example. “The strengths of this curriculum are in identifying the strengths of the individuals and the flaws in the system,” she said.Nevertheless, conservatives who have taken issue with ethnic studies might make similar criticisms of New York’s curriculum, which was informed by some of the issues the Trump orders condemn, like “equity.” It also does not discuss many Black conservatives. Still, in some lessons, race never comes up. Professor Sonya Douglass, who oversaw the development of the curriculum as the director of the Black Education Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, said the intention was to have students think more about “concepts like identity and empowerment, self-knowledge, culture.” In December, Ms. Smith led a lesson on how enslaved people subverted the institution of slavery. An illustration at the front of the room showed a rose climbing out of concrete, a reminder of the class’s previous discussion of Tupac Shakur’s poem that reflects on the same imagery. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Students chose from several writing prompts, including one asking how they had overcome adversity in their own lives and another about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. TriNahum Jones, 18, described how Dr. King used his platform as a minister to inspire legions of supporters. And Muhamed Toure, 17, wrote his essay about being stopped and frisked while walking home from the gym. “It kind of just showed me racism hasn’t gone away,” he said. “It has just evolved and changed throughout time.” After they put their pencils down, the class talked about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. They also spoke about quieter acts of rebellion, like learning how to read and write. “I come out of class more impressed with the resilience of my race,” TriNahum said.

When one of New York City’s most prestigious private schools hired Winston Nguyen in 2020, administrators knew about the felony conviction for fraud in his troubled past. But the second chance they offered him backfired. Nearly four years later, Mr. Nguyen, a math teacher, was arrested again, accused of preying on students. And the school, Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn, faced a roiling crisis. On Monday, Mr. Nguyen, 38, pleaded guilty to a felony and several misdemeanors after being charged with soliciting lewd images and videos from students. When he is sentenced later this month, he faces a possible seven-year prison term. Mr. Nguyen was taken into custody after the hearing and will be held temporarily at the Rikers Island jail complex. His plea marks the latest chapter in a scandal that has marred the reputation of Saint Ann’s School and the administrators who hired him. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This is the second time Mr. Nguyen has been convicted of a felony. In 2019, he pleaded guilty to grand larceny and other charges after he was accused of stealing more than $300,000 from his employers, an older couple he worked for as a home health aide. He served four months at Rikers, and about a year later was hired by Saint Ann’s, a school that charges about $60,000 per year in tuition and caters to New York’s wealthy creative class. A nattily dressed figure who arrived at class often in a suit and sometimes with a bow tie, Mr. Nguyen transformed a felony record from a liability into a résumé-builder at a school known for embracing unconventional educators. He taught a seminar called “Crime and Punishment” and quickly become a fixture at the school. It was the kind of opportunity that few felons get. In interviews with The New York Times last week, Mr. Nguyen tried to make sense of how he squandered it all, and how he plummeted from the promise of his youth — a driven high school student, he was once honored by the mayor of Houston, his hometown, and went on to attend Columbia University — to the reality of being a 38-year-old man headed to prison for the second time in six years. “I’ve hurt so many people,” he said. Mr. Nguyen declined to directly address the students he targeted — he will do so when he is sentenced, he said — but expressed remorse for the damage he caused to the school. “It was an incredibly great community to me, and I really, really regret that my actions have painted them in a horrible light,” he said. Neither the students targeted by Mr. Nguyen nor their families have spoken publicly, and prosecutors have protected their privacy through the legal process. Sitting in the courtyard outside his Harlem apartment, Mr. Nguyen vacillated between teary recognition of his transgressions and occasional intense bursts of self-analysis. He said he suffers from a mental illness, bipolar II disorder, which he said went untreated during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that he experienced sexual abuse as a child, but he did not make excuses for his behavior. “I very much take responsibility for my actions,” he said. “I made bad decisions.” In Brooklyn criminal court on Monday, Mr. Nguyen arrived 30 minutes late, wearing an untucked T-shirt, casual slacks and a parka. He carried a large red shopping bag and a large red book, The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Mr. Nguyen agreed to plead guilty to one count of using a child in a sexual performance and five separate counts, representing five children, of “knowingly acting in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than 17 years.” Daniel Newcombe, an assistant district attorney, informed the judge of the recommended punishment: seven years in prison, 10 years supervision after his release and a requirement that he register as a sex offender for 20 years. Mr. Nguyen’s sentencing will take place in two weeks. The judge, Philip V. Tisne, asked Mr. Nguyen if he understood that after the completion of this sentence, should he be convicted of a felony a third time, he would automatically be sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. “Yes, your honor,” Mr. Nguyen said. Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, said the plea agreement held Mr. Nguyen responsible for his “disturbing and predatory conduct” while sparing victims from having to testify. When the hearing ended, court officers cuffed Mr. Nguyen’s hands behind his back. He slung his head downward as his lawyer, Frank Rothman, patted his back. He was led out a side door. Outside the courtroom, Mr. Rothman was circled by reporters. “There is no defense one can proffer when you have images on your phone,” he said. “I don’t know what his first night is going to be like,” Mr. Rothman said. “I’m sure he is anxious. He is going to jail as a sex offender.” Mr. Nguyen was hired as an administrative aide at Saint Ann’s in the summer of 2020. He had alerted the administrator who interviewed him that he had been convicted of a felony, and at least one Saint Ann’s employee urged the school’s leaders not to hire him. He quickly became an indispensable member of the staff, helping to manage logistics during the pandemic as he integrated himself into the school community. The school promoted Mr. Nguyen to math teacher in the fall of 2021 but did not alert parents to his criminal record until after students discovered news stories about him on the internet. In October of 2021, Vince Tompkins, then the head of the school, sent parents an email about the new math teacher. “I can assure you that as with any teacher we hire, we are confident in Winston’s ability and fitness to educate and care for our students,” he wrote. Within a year, students at Saint Ann’s and other Brooklyn private schools — some as young as 13 — began to receive solicitations via Snapchat for lewd photos and videos. The user behind the anonymous Snapchat accounts sent one student a graphic video of a 16-year-old boy masturbating. By February 2024, Saint Ann’s had been notified by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office that it was investigating the continued targeting of its students by anonymous Snapchat accounts seeking sexual photographs and videos. School administrators did not notify parents. Days before the end of the school year, Mr. Nguyen was arrested near Saint Ann’s. He was charged in July with 11 felony counts, including using a child in a sexual performance, promoting a sexual performance by a child and disseminating indecent material to a minor. The news shocked parents and students and led to a torrent of media coverage. In December, Saint Ann’s released the findings of an investigation conducted by lawyers commissioned by the school’s board to determine how the school had come to employ a felon. The blistering report said that the school administration had “shamed” parents who expressed concern about Mr. Nguyen’s background and had suggested they were not in step with the school’s progressive values. “In some instances,” the report said, administrators “prioritized teachers including Nguyen over the concerns of students and their families about the teacher’s background or behavior.” In the months since his arrest, Mr. Nguyen mostly has been confined to his apartment. He takes part in video therapy sessions, including group sessions with other people accused of sexual offenses, and has attended occasional church services. Otherwise, he has remained isolated, reading and watching television. His sister recently visited him from Houston to help him clean out his apartment as he prepares to grow into middle age in prison. “I don’t deserve the family that I have,” Mr. Nguyen said. In recent weeks he has been culling his belongings. While packing, he came across a warm coat given to him during a cold winter by Bernard Stoll, the man he worked for and stole from before his employment at Saint Ann’s. “People have been very, incredibly good to me, and I betrayed their trust in a very deep way,” he said. He did not wish to stand trial, he said. “I am at a place where I know what I’ve done,” he said. “I think part of the reason I feel so horribly is I just don’t know any way I can make it better for the kids, or for their families or for the school. I accept this sentence because I know that I did something wrong and I want to answer for it.”

A courtroom can become a sort of time machine. The criminal trial of Paul Geer, a former music teacher, played out in federal court in Albany, N.Y., last week. But testimony and photographic evidence transported everyone back to the 1990s and early 2000s to a town 125 miles away, Hancock, and to the Family Foundation School’s secluded campus in the woods. The reform school is long closed and has settled several lawsuits by former students accusing Mr. Geer of sexual abuse over decades. But the trial brought the place back into the public spotlight. There is a photo of a large basement lined with bunks. The female students slept there, beneath Mr. Geer’s home. There is the barn, where he held practice for his young singers. Middle-age men and women sat in the witness stand and were asked the same question: “Do you see Paul Geer here today?” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT They scanned the room, resting their eyes on the stout, bald, bespectacled man hunched at the defense table. Some knew him when he was in his 20s or 30s. Now he is 57. They all pointed — him. They were asked about how he terrorized them, or worse, decades ago, when they were teenagers. In 2024, Mr. Geer was charged with six counts related to bringing three children across state lines to engage in sexual activity. The case led to a trial that began on Feb. 19. On Friday, closing arguments took place. About a dozen former students who had mostly never met before, having attended the school at different periods, watched in the gallery. The jury began deliberating soon after. Over the past week, witnesses were shown photographs of the place many have tried to forget. Their names have been redacted from public records in the case, but several have come forward in interviews and lawsuits. “This is the isolation room where I had to stay for five days,” one former student, Elizabeth Boysick, 41, testified, looking at a picture of a tiny, windowless room. “It’s very hard to look at. Nobody should be treated like this. Especially children.” The school was founded in the 1980s by Tony and Betty Argiros, a couple who had each struggled with addiction and built the place on the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step program. Parents from surrounding counties and states sent their troubled children to the small campus, billed as a “therapeutic boarding school,” in the foothills of the Catskills. Upon arrival, the children were strip-searched in front of other students, and an adult watched as they rubbed lice shampoo into their hair and genitals in a shower, according to testimony. They were assigned to a “family,” with staff members playing the role of parents. Mr. Geer, who taught at the school from the early ’90s until it closed in 2014, was the “father” of Family Six. He openly described himself to students as a sex addict who hit rock bottom while driving one day and nearly crashing as he masturbated, former students testified. “This constant, returning story,” Steve Zahoroiko, 43, a former student and, later, a marine, testified. “That was the shining moment in his life, when he turned everything around.”He forced students to admit to impure thoughts and actions in front of their new family. “Talk about whatever sex lives we supposedly had,” Mr. Zahoroiko said. Mr. Geer was repeatedly described as flying into a rage when confronting a student. “Being screamed at by him very close to my face,” Ms. Boysick testified. “Red-faced, sweating.” Other students recalled being forced to run in place all day — “trotting” — or haul buckets of rocks up and down a hill as a punishment. Prosecutors called several former students who said they were sexually abused by Mr. Geer. A 39-year-old man identified as “Victim 3” testified that he had been forced by Mr. Geer to join the choir — “I wasn’t a singer” — and that the teacher had abused him on a school trip to Toronto, in a hotel room. Prosecutors showed videos of his singing in the choir, a younger Mr. Geer energetically conducting the group. “Never thought I’d be up here on the witness stand talking about this, ever again,” the former student testified. “But he was the devil.” Mike Milia, 46, another former student, testified that Mr. Geer took him on a fishing and sightseeing trip to Maine for several days in 1994, when he was 15. His parents did not know about the trip. Prosecutors showed photographs of the smiling teenager posing before roadside signs — “Brake for Moose.” “We never put a fishing rod in the water,” Mr. Milia testified. Instead, Mr. Geer bought beer and pornographic magazines and sexually abused the teen for days, he testified. Mr. Geer’s lawyers with the federal public defenders’ office sought to soften the grim portrayal of the man and the school. A former administrator, Emmanuel “Mike” Argiros — a son of the founders — testified that he had never heard complaints about Mr. Geer abusing children, and that he had sent three of his own children to the school, in part for its excellent music program. Former students were confronted with smiling yearbook photographs of their teenage selves, paired with glowing testimonials about their time there. Mr. Zahoroiko, the former marine, chuckled on the witness stand and said the students did not write those blurbs; the school did. Defense lawyers have raised inconsistencies in the students’ versions of events over the years, in F.B.I. interviews and elsewhere. Elizabeth Ianelli, a former student and an organizer of the earliest public attacks against the school, wrote a memoir of her time there, “I See You, Survivor,” published in 2023. But she was called as a witness for the defense on Wednesday, and lawyers raised contradictions between what she had written and what she testified. Throughout, Mr. Geer watched in silence, occasionally wincing in apparent physical pain and seeming to have difficulty rising from his chair when jurors entered or left the courtroom. Lauren LaCroix, 34, flew to Albany from San Diego, where she lives with her husband and young sons, to watch the trial. She had tried to put her time at the school behind her. Now, she found comfort in meeting other former students. “There’s no explaining,” she said. “They get it right away.” Listening to accounts of abuse, she thought of a female staff member who had pulled her aside shortly after her arrival at the school. “She said, ‘I never want you alone with Paul Geer,’” Ms. LaCroix recalled. On Monday, after an afternoon and a following morning of deliberations, the jurors returned with its verdict. Guilty on the two counts involving the choir singer in Toronto. Guilty on the two counts for Mr. Milia on the road trip to Maine. But jurors were unable to reach a verdict on the counts related to Ms. Boysick — the only counts without photographs to document her time with Mr. Geer. To those in the audience, Mr. Geer appeared to tear up with emotion at the verdict. He was led away in handcuffs, to remain in jail until his sentencing in July. Ms. Boysick, who was among the first students to publicly come forward, using her name in a lawsuit, felt vindication, not loss, in the verdict, despite the outcome of the counts involving her. “I’m going to totally own those guilty verdicts,” she said. “It wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for me.” She said that moments before the verdict, Mr. Geer looked at her — “Wide-eyed, pure fear, what’s about to happen to me?” she said. It was a feeling Ms. Boysick and her old classmates in the gallery once knew well.

Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican-written bill aimed at barring transgender women and girls from school sports teams designated for female students, thwarting consideration in the Senate of the G.O.P.’s latest move to use transgender people as leverage at the dawn of President Trump’s second term. With Democrats opposed, the measure stalled on a party-line vote of 51 to 45, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and be brought up for consideration. The bill, which passed the House in January on a largely party-line vote, would prohibit federal funding from going to K-12 schools that include transgender students in women’s and girls’ athletic programs. It mirrors one of the goals of an executive order Mr. Trump signed last month titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which charged the Education Department with changing its interpretation of civil rights laws so that schools that failed to bar transgender athletes could lose federal funding. Senate Republicans argued it was essential to protecting girls from predatory men encroaching on their private spaces and seeking to gain an unfair athletic advantage on the basis of sex, even as they hinted that the measure was intended to lay a political trap for Democrats. “Democrats can stand for women or stand with a radical transgender ideology,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said on Monday. If they opposed the legislation, he said, “they’ll have to answer to the women and girls they vote to disenfranchise.” Democrats denounced the legislation as a craven effort by Republicans to wring political advantage from a small but vulnerable population of transgender children that would ultimately put at risk the girls it purported to protect. “What Republicans are doing today is inventing a problem to stir up a culture war and divide people against each other and distract people from what they’re actually doing,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii. He called the bill “totally irrelevant to 99.9 percent of all people across the country.” The measure was sponsored by Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama and a former high school girls basketball coach, who framed it as an example of how Democrats were out of touch with a mainstream point of view. On the Senate floor, G.O.P. lawmakers cited polls showing a majority of Americans, including most Democrats, believed that biological males should not be allowed to play women’s sports. Many congressional Democrats have agreed that there are real concerns about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports at the highest levels. But they have argued that athletic associations should be making those decisions, not lawmakers passing broad bills at the federal level that lump together competitive athletes and young children who simply want to participate in school activities with their friends. More than two dozen states already bar transgender athletes from participating in school sports, whether in K-12 schools or at the collegiate level. On Monday, Senate Democrats argued that the legislation was not only an attack on basic human dignity, but also a waste of time. Of more than 500,000 N.C.A.A. athletes, they noted, fewer than 10 identified as transgender. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, also noted that the bill had no enforcement mechanism and “could subject women and girls to physical inspection by an adult if someone from an opposing team accused them of being transgender.” Out of power and in the political wilderness, congressional Democrats have few levers to pull to stand in the way of the Republican governing trifecta. But the filibuster remains one of their final ways of blocking legislation that otherwise could make its way to Mr. Trump’s desk for his signature. Earlier this year, Senate Democrats also blocked a measure that would subject some doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties. They blocked a Republican bill to impose sanctions on officials affiliated with the International Criminal Court, which Republicans have wanted to rebuke for the decision of its top prosecutor to bring war crimes charges against top Israeli leaders for their military offensive against Hamas in Gaza.