While the average person would use a standard charger to top off their phone, [Tom Stanton] is no average man. Instead, he put mind to matter with an entire pendulum battery system.
Using the inductive effects of magnets on copper coils, [Tom] found the ability to power small components. With that in mind, the only path was forward with a much larger pendulum. A simple diode rectifier and capacitors allow for a smoother voltage output. The scale of the device is still too small to power anything insane, even the phone charging test is difficult. One thing the device can do is juice up the electromagnetic launcher he put together a couple years back to hurl an RC plane into the air.
The useful applications of pendulum power storage might not be found in nationwide infrastructure, but the application on this scale is certainly a fun demonstration. [Tom] has a particular fascination with similar projects where practical application comes second to novelty. For a perfect example of this, check out his work with air powered planes!
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DeWalt was second only to Makita in our rankings of major power tool brands, and the familiar black and yellow tools are common on professional job sites. The brand’s quality and reputation come at a premium price, though. The DeWalt 20V XR drill/driver is sold by Home Depot in a kit with two 4 amp-hour batteries, a charger, and a soft case for $269, although it’s on sale as of this writing for $40 off.
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If you already have a collection of DeWalt 20V Max and Max XR batteries, buying power tools from another brand might not be the best move. But if you’re building a workshop from scratch or looking to save money on a replacement for a drill that no longer works, Harbor Freight’s Hercules brand is worth a look. For example, the 20V Hercules HCB91K1 1/2-inch drill comes with a charger and 2 Ah battery for $97.99, which leaves you plenty of cash left over vs. the DeWalt to purchase additional batteries and a carrying bag.
Consumer Reports named it the cordless drill with the best battery life, and a spare Hercules 8 Ah 20V battery costs $99.99 at Harbor Freight. With the larger battery the Hercules cordless drill can drill up to 350 holes in a pine board using a 1-inch spade bit. For comparison’s sake, DeWalt says its DCD801 20V drill is capable of making as many as 175 holes in a 1.5-inch softwood board using a ⅞-inch auger bit on a fully-charged 4 Ah battery. The two tasks aren’t a direct one-to-one comparison but should give you an idea of the power of the Hercules system.
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head-to head comparison of DeWalt and Hercules 20V drills
The manufacturer’s specs and features of the two drills match up pretty well, but it’s the huge price difference that makes the Hercules a far better buy. Both drills have a metal chuck, LED lights, and two speed settings and max out at 2,000 rpm. The Hercules drill can generate up to 100 foot-pounds of torque, but DeWalt doesn’t provide raw torque numbers for its tools.
With the almost-too-good-to-be-true pricing, it’s understandable if you’re wondering if Harbor Freight’s Hercules power tools are any good. You don’t have to trust the specs alone; plenty of outlets have thoroughly tested Hercules tools like this drill. Project Farm tested 11 different drills across multiple build and performance categories including 20V models from Hercules and DeWalt. The DeWalt drill performed slightly better when all test results are considered (averaging between 4th and 5th place to the Hercules’ sixth and a fraction), but the difference isn’t nearly enough to justify the huge price difference.
Matthew Peech did a head-to-head test betwen DeWalt and Hercules drills on his Woodworking and DIY blog and found that the Hercules didn’t heat up as much as the DeWalt during prolonged use. He concluded that “While the DeWalt might still edge ahead in premium features and build, the Hercules is nothing to scoff at.” Real Tool Reviews put this Hercules drill up against similar products from Makita and DeWalt in various real-world tests and found that the Hercules HCB91K1 held its own against the two much more expensive drills.
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Methodology
There is no shortage of comparisons between DeWalt and Harbor Freight power tools. We found our own previous reporting and the detailed data from Project Farm to be useful as a starting point, then consulted side-by-side testing by other outlets and anecdotal opinions from user reviews and online forums.
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In addition, the author has used an older DeWalt DCD780 cordless drill to perform campground maintenance and tested this Hercules HCB91K1 as part of an in-store demonstration at a local Harbor Freight store. While we didn’t try these two drills side-by-side, the Hercules drill felt solid, powerful, and capable of standing toe-to-toe with any of DeWalt’s offerings. This Hercules drill also comes with a five-year limited warranty, while buyers of DeWalt’s power tools enjoy three years of similar protection.
Following last year’s trend of showcasing AI in multimillion-dollar ad spots, the 2026 Super Bowl advertisements took it a step further by leveraging AI both to create the commercials and to promote the latest AI products. Love it or hate it, the technology has become a star in its own right, alongside the latest movie trailers and snack brands.
Let’s explore the biggest moments from this year’s Big Game ads, which featured everything from robots and AI glasses to a touch of drama involving tech founders.
Svedka
Vodka brand Svedka went with what it touts as the first “primarily” AI-generated national Super Bowl spot. The 30-second ad, titled “Shake Your Bots Off,” features the company’s robot character, Fembot, and her new companion, Brobot, dancing their circuits off at a human party.
According to Svedka’s parent company, Sazerac, it took roughly four months to reconstruct the Fembot and train the AI to mimic facial expressions and body movements, The Wall Street Journal reported. However, the vodka brand noted that certain aspects were still handled by humans, such as developing the storyline.
It’s a bold move to debut AI-generated content during the Super Bowl, an event known for star-studded, high-production ads. The heavy reliance on AI is polarizing, fueling debates over whether AI will replace creative jobs.
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Boston, MA | June 23, 2026
Either way, Svedka definitely got people talking.
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Anthropic
Anthropic’s ad wasn’t just about selling its Claude chatbot; it was about throwing shade. The commercial took a jab at OpenAI’s plan to introduce ads to ChatGPT, with a tagline: “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” Rather than focus solely on Claude’s features, it poked fun at the idea of your helpful AI assistant suddenly turning into a hype man for “Step Boost Maxx” insoles, for example.
It wasn’t a standard product pitch, and it escalated into an online feud. OpenAI’s Sam Altman fired back on social media, calling the ad “clearly dishonest.” So while we didn’t get any more Kendrick vs. Drake rap beef this time around, maybe we did get our own AI, nerdy version of it.
Meta spotlighted its Oakley-branded AI glasses, designed for sports, workouts, and adventures, including extreme scenarios such as chasing down a departing plane.
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The ad showcased thrill-seekers, from skydivers to mountain bikers, using the glasses to capture epic moments. Famous faces like IShowSpeed and filmmaker Spike Lee made appearances, demonstrating capabilities like filming a basketball dunk in slow motion, posting hands-free to Instagram, and other advanced features.
The tech giant also featured its wearable AI tech in last year’s Super Bowl ad to spark consumer interest, with stars like Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth, and Kris Jenner showing off Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
Amazon
Amazon’s ad took a cheeky (and slightly unsettling) approach, starring Chris Hemsworth in a satirical “AI is out to get me” storyline. The commercial exaggerates common fears about AI, with Hemsworth humorously accusing Alexa+ of plotting against him. Scenes included Alexa+ closing the garage door on his head and shutting the pool cover while he swam, each mishap escalating in absurdity.
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Beyond the dark comedy, the ad introduced the new Alexa+, showcasing its enhanced intelligence and capabilities, ranging from managing smart home devices to planning vacations. Alexa+ had been available in early access for over a year and officially launched to all U.S. users on Wednesday.
Ring
Ring’s commercial spotlighted its “Search Party” feature, which leverages AI and a community network to reunite lost pets with their owners. The ad followed a young girl searching for her dog Milo, illustrating how users can upload a pet’s photo to the app, where AI works to identify matches and taps into nearby cameras and the broader Ring user community to help track down missing furry family members.
Ring recently announced that anyone can now use Search Party, even without owning a Ring security camera. According to the company, the feature has already helped reunite more than one lost dog with its owner every day.
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Google
Google’s ad showcased the Nano Banana Pro, its newest image-generation model. The commercial followed a mother and son as they used AI to envision and design their new home, uploading photos of bare rooms and turning them into personalized spaces with just a few prompts.
Ramp
Ramp scored big by getting Brian Baumgartner — the actor who played Kevin in “The Office” — for its Super Bowl commercial.
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In the spot, Baumgartner uses Ramp’s AI-powered spend management platform to “multiply” himself, effortlessly tackling a mountain of work. The ad highlights how Ramp’s all-in-one solution helps teams focus on the most important tasks through smart automation.
And, as a playful nod to his TV persona, Baumgartner is seen carrying a pot of chili in the ad, referencing Kevin’s legendary scene where he brings his cherished recipe for his co-workers to try, only to disastrously spill the entire pot on the floor.
Rippling
Rippling, the cloud-based workforce management platform, went all in on its first-ever Super Bowl ad. The company tapped comedian Tim Robinson in a spot about onboarding an alien monster, poking fun at HR headaches and the promise of AI automation.
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Hims & Hers
Health company Hims & Hers used its Super Bowl spot to address disparities in healthcare access. The ad cleverly references the lengths the wealthy go to for health and longevity, even appearing to poke fun at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spaceflight in 2021 and Bryan Johnson’s expensive anti-aging routines.
In recent years, the company launched an AI-powered “MedMatch” tool to deliver more personalized treatment recommendations, especially for mental health and wellness.
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Wix
Website builder Wix spotlighted its new AI-powered Wix Harmony platform, promising website creation as easy as chatting with a friend. Unveiled in January, the flagship platform combines AI-driven creation and “vibe coding” with full visual editing and customization.
Wix’s biggest competitor, Squarespace, also has a Super Bowl ad this year. Squarespace’s ad has a more cinematic approach starring Emma Stone and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
This post was initially published on February 6, 2026.
Danny Spencer took his trusty old Game Boy Color and turned it into a canvas for real-time 3D shading, transforming the simple handheld into a shockingly convincing three dimensional environment. As the teapot spins, its curves capture the light from a source you control with the D-pad, causing shadows to alter seamlessly in response to each nudge.
Pixels light up one by one with a Lambertian shader, which tells you exactly how directly light hits a surface, and Spencer solved the problem of multiplying non-integer numbers by baking surface information into normal maps and storing them in tiny three-byte chunks in the ROM. Each pixel selects a normal vector from these maps, doses it with light direction, and outputs a shade ranging from dead black to full-on white. The teapot’s spout glints in the light or falls into shade, with each frame a whole new creation from raw calculations.
The hardware will not be pleased because the Game Boy Color only runs at 8 MHz, which equates to approximately 140,000 cycles each 60 FPS frame. There is no multiply command, so Spencer had to get inventive. He had no trouble swapping multiplications for logarithms and lookup tables. Log tables convert products into sums, whereas power tables do the reverse. All values are compressed into 8-bit fractions from 1 to 1, with signs hidden away in the highest bits. Negative numbers in logarithmic space? No need to worry, he flags them independently and makes modifications on the fly.
To reduce the workload, Spencer shifted to spherical coordinates, in which vectors become angles: tilt (theta) and spin (phi), where light theta remains constant and you only adjust phi to move the light. The dot product is a simple formula: sin(Nθ)sin(Lθ)cos(Nφ – Lφ) + cos(Nθ)cos(Lθ). One subtraction later, he’s incorporating a custom cos_log table, a combination of cosine and logarithm, to speed things up. Five lookups every pixel, subtract, add, lookup, add, for a total of 960 pixels and 89% of the frame budget.
Spencer can patch the shader method in real time, swapping memory loads for hard-coded immediates. That’s an additional 8 cycles saved every subtraction, for a total of 11,520 over the frame. He skips over rows that contain no pixels at a rate of three cycles per pop. As a result, all of the frames remain consistent, even with some slight LCD ghosting to contend with.
You can examine the code for yourself in the GitHub repository, which was compiled with the RGBDS toolkit and includes Python scripts to transform Blender normal maps into ROM data. Two ROMs appear: teapot and gbspin. The releases page contains pre-compiled versions that will get you up and running. You can launch the BGB emulator or flash it onto a cart. Or, better yet, simply press some keys on Spencer’s internet emulator. [Source]
Microsoft is investigating an ongoing Exchange Online issue that mistakenly flags legitimate emails as phishing and quarantines them.
The incident began on February 5 and continues to affect Exchange Online customers, preventing them from sending or receiving emails.
“Some users’ legitimate email messages are being marked as phish and quarantined in Exchange Online,” Microsoft said in a service alert when it acknowledged the bug on Thursday.
“We’ve determined that the URLs associated with these email messages are incorrectly marked as phish and quarantined in Exchange Online due to ever-evolving criteria aimed at identifying suspicious email messages, as spam and phishing techniques have become more sophisticated in avoiding detection.”
Over the weekend, Microsoft confirmed that the issue is caused by a new URL rule that incorrectly flags some URLs as malicious and the emails as phishing attempts.
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“An updated URL rule intending to identify more sophisticated spam and phishing email messages is incorrectly quarantining legitimate email messages in Exchange Online, resulting in impact,” it added.
While Microsoft has yet to disclose how many customers are affected or which regions are impacted by this ongoing issue, it has classified it as an incident, which typically involves noticeable user impact.
Until the issue is resolved, Microsoft is working to release quarantined emails and said that affected users may begin to see previously flagged messages in their inboxes.
“We’re reviewing the release of quarantined messages for affected users and working on confirming legitimate URLs are unblocked,” it noted on Saturday. “Some users may see their previously quarantined messages successfully delivered and we’re working to confirm full remediation. We’ll provide an estimated time to resolve when one becomes available.”
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Microsoft has addressed similar issues over the last several years, resulting in emails being quarantined or incorrectly tagged as spam or malicious. For instance, in March, an Exchange Online bug caused anti-spam systems to mistakenly quarantine some users’ emails, and another one in May caused a machine learning model to incorrectly flag emails from Gmail accounts as spam.
Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.
In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.
Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.
Today’s NYT Connections puzzle has a varied mix of categories, and some of them are pretty tough to solve. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.
The Times has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.
Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.
Yellow group hint: A textile art.
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Green group hint: How you do something.
Blue group hint: `Related to books and money.
Purple group hint: You might do this with crayons.
It’s been almost five years since the PlayStation 5 launched. That means its successor, the PlayStation 6, isn’t far away, so the rumors are starting to arrive thick and fast. Read Entire Article Source link
As anyone who extrudes plastic noodles knows, the glass transition temperature of a material is a bit misleading; polymers gradually transition between a glass and a liquid across a range of temperatures, and calling any particular point in that range the glass transition temperature is a bit arbitrary. As a general rule, the shorter the glass transition range is, the weaker it is in the glassy state, and vice-versa. A surprising demonstration of this is provided by compleximers, a class of polymers recently discovered by researchers from Wageningen University, and the first organic polymers known to form strong ionic glasses (open-access article).
When a material transforms from a glass — a hard, non-ordered solid — to a liquid, it goes through various relaxation processes. Alpha relaxations are molecular rearrangements, and are the main relaxation process involved in melting. The progress of alpha relaxation can be described by the Kohlrausch-Williams-Watts equation, which can be exponential or non-exponential. The closer the formula for a given material is to being exponential, the more uniformly its molecules relax, which leads to a gradual glass transition and a strong glass. In this case, however, the ionic compleximers were highly non-exponential, but nevertheless had long transition ranges and formed strong glasses.
The compleximers themselves are based on acrylate and methacrylate backbones modified with ionic groups. To prevent water from infiltrating the structure and altering its properties, it was also modified with hydrophobic groups. The final glass was solvent-resistant and easy to process, with a glass transition range of more than 60 °C, but was still strong at room temperature. As the researchers demonstrated, it can be softened with a hot air gun and reshaped, after which it cools into a hard, non-malleable solid.
The authors note that these are the first known organic molecules to form strong glasses stabilized by ionic interactions, and it’s still not clear what uses there may be for such materials, though they hope that compleximers could be used to make more easily-repairable objects. The interesting glass-transition process of compleximers makes us wonder whether their material aging may be reversible.
Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.
Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.
If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.
The story Mike Landry told about his students, who were majority African American, sounded depressingly familiar: poor, raised on the wrong side of the tracks, ignored, forgotten. But it made the rest of their story seem even more inspiring: Through grit, hard work, and help from a hole-in-the-wall private school — T.M. Landry College Prep in tiny Breaux Bridge, Louisiana — the students landed spots at Yale, Harvard, Brown, Wellesley and other elite schools.
But it wasn’t the whole story. Several of the school’s students did make it into elite colleges. However, once they enrolled, a significant number of them struggled to maintain their academic status as they realized they had inadequate skills. All they really knew was what they’d memorized through incessant ACT prep drills at T.M. Landry.
At worst, Landry’s narrative, with its lack of nuance and reliance on old stereotypes of underserved Black children in poor areas, preyed on the very communities he purported to support — resulting in many gains for himself and his wife, Tracey, but at great personal cost to the students and their families.
In their book, “Miracle Children,” two New York Times reporters — Erica L. Green, a longtime education reporter who now covers the White House, and Katie Benner, an investigative reporter — explore the duplicity of Landry’s motives and the damage he wrought.
The book opens with Alex and Ayrton Little, two exceptionally gifted brothers out of T.M. Landry who made it into Stanford and Harvard respectively. Their story is an example of how Landry used his young charges to promote his own false narrative.
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The brothers were featured on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” where they were portrayed as academic phoenixes: “You were raised by a single mom,” DeGeneres said. “You were on the verge of being homeless for most of your lives.”
In truth, though the Littles were indeed raised by a single mother, and at times the family did struggle financially, they weren’t dirt-poor for most of their lives and their academic achievement wasn’t the result of a miraculous transformation at T.M. Landry. Rather, the brothers were high performers at a different, well-established private high school and had transferred to Landry about a year before.
Yet, Landry was able to manipulate the Littles’ success for his own ends: Social media videos of them reading their college acceptance emails generated millions of views, burnishing the Landry Prep brand and fueling a lucrative pipeline of new students and potential donors. It was a pattern Landry would repeat over and over. In fact, the Littles themselves had been lured to Landry Prep in part because of similar exuberant social media posts by previous students.
As a cautionary tale, with more states considering diverting taxpayer dollars to fund alternatives to traditional public schools, the story of T.M. Landry highlights troubling gaps in how education is measured and regulated, particularly at uncredentialed private academies and microschools.
In Louisiana, which has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the country and where parents scramble to get their children into a limited number of well performing schools, Mike and Tracey Landry were able to operate with no oversight. They demanded complete trust in their method, deliberately kept parents in the dark about the children’s progress and persistently dodged questions, even as the school’s troubles mounted and law enforcement was closing in.
Even worse, and the crux of Benner and Green’s examination, is how the students suffered. Landry coerced students to paint themselves falsely in their college applications — downtrodden, ill-used — telling them that it was the only way elite schools would find them compelling. If they refused, Landry rewrote their essays and shamed them in front of their peers. When the colleges accepted them and promoted their success, the schools seemed complicit in the lie, further damaging the students’ well-being.
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The students also carried a burden of secrets, including witnessing severe physical punishments and emotional abuse that left them traumatized. The Landrys deny that they abused children.
EdSurge spoke with Benner and Green, who first reported on T.M. Landry in 2018 and revisit many of the students’ stories in “Miracle Children.” Landry Prep alumni, as they write in their authors’ note, “believe, as do we, that they deserve to take back their stories from the Landrys and tell one that is complicated and real.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
EdSurge: One thing that struck me about this story is that there’s a lot of exploitation going on. There’s exploitation of stereotyped perceptions of Black children. There is the exploitation of expectations in education for different groups, of Black and white, poor and wealthy. And there is the exploitation of our culture’s unspoken rules about how the system works.
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Katie Benner: That exploitation of unspoken rules that you’re describing, one of the reasons why so many of these rules are unspoken is because they’re things that society doesn’t want to admit to or to face. And we’ve seen this in all sorts of other kinds of stories of exploitation and abuse where somebody takes advantage of the fact that there are rules that we live by that we don’t want to say.
You know, American society has a lot of preconceived notions about what it means to be Black in America. And Mike [Landry] was willing to exploit them, including this idea that all Black people are damaged and that it’s that damage that makes them valuable — instead of saying if there is damage done to this community, we should fix it and stop it. It’s a fetishization of that damage.
He kept parents in the dark. He didn’t like to be questioned. If parents were not getting enough information about anything… I’m just wondering why this worked for so long?
Erica L. Green: This is something that the parents, as I’m sure you can imagine, have reflected deeply on. Even when they felt uncomfortable, even when they questioned Mike’s tactics, even when they thought he was full of it, he delivered results. They had receipts. This was a transaction that they made with him.
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When the parents and families visited, when they ultimately enrolled, the ground rules were that you do not talk to your children about education. You feed them, clothe them, and I am responsible for everything else. And so for a lot of them who were uncomfortable with that, they saw this transaction that they made pay dividends on social media with videos of students getting into the most elite colleges in the country.
They saw a lot of propaganda, too, of their children solving complex math problems. And they obviously didn’t know that that was fake, but they saw to the extent that they needed to with their own eyes, what the return on investment — even the investment of deep, unfettered trust — would yield for them.
What did you learn in the course of reporting for the book that was different or surprised you since 2018?
Benner: One of the things that happened over that time frame is that the students themselves had time to process what had happened to them. I think we were both really wary of assigning meaning to another person’s experience, which is easy to do, especially if you work in a newspaper. It’s one of the things you’re asked to do — take an experience … and then to use outside voices to assign a larger meaning.
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We were able to let the students themselves process what had happened and have them explain how they see their stories and what meaning they import to it.
It’s very powerful.
The students’ stories are moving. One, Raymond, was drawn to Mike Landry because he saw firsthand many of the inequities Landry had identified when he was growing up. But Raymond is eventually neglected by Landry.
Benner: Raymond is one of the stories people find so moving in the book. I think that there are things that are sad about his story, but he talks about how much he got out of that experience, how it forced him to reflect on whether or not the dreams that Mike had told him he should have were the dreams he actually wanted.
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I think that that asks us all to wonder why we give specific kinds of dreams around going to certain kinds of colleges or having certain kinds of jobs.
I hope readers [wonder] too, [and] understand that dignity is not about a diploma and it’s not about a salary, that dignity is something else.
The case of Louisiana allowed for another exploitation. It is typically at the bottom of national test scores, though it showed some improvement in the National Report Card assessments last year. Would continuing to improve these scores keep other families from becoming prey to people like the Landrys?
Green: This is something that I really reflected on when we were writing this book and thinking about my K-12 coverage over more than a decade. So much rides on these test scores. And I’m not one of those people who think test scores don’t matter. We need to measure academic achievement in this country. But I recall when I was covering Baltimore, progress would just fluctuate every other release.
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I don’t know if we can sit here and say that Harvard or any other Ivy is looking at NAEP scores and saying, ‘well maybe the Louisiana students are getting better, maybe we should look there more.’ That’s just not how it works. That’s what we expose in the book. That’s not how it’s ever worked. The access to these institutions does not depend on NAEP scores.
And in Louisiana, a lot of the high-performing schools are private. Which is why T.M. Landry was such an anomaly — why it was so shocking that students were leaving their very high-performing private schools to go to T.M. Landry in 11th grade and 12th grade. Because they understood that no matter how much preparation they had had throughout their educational careers in public school or private school, that what T.M. Landry was offering was … one [ACT test score] number that would get them on the radar of the most elite colleges. That was their ticket in.
He claimed that he had this network of elite-school deans who could give his students an in. The ACT score was important, but it was also about who you know.
Green: The parents say it for themselves in the book. [Mike Landry] wasn’t just selling a dream for their kids, he was selling a dream to [the parents], too. He was selling access to places that growing up in Louisiana, [they seemed] to be shut out of.
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Can you talk about how the school shifted from being a sort of whole-child institution, tutoring kids from elementary school age, to one that was focused on and recruiting much older kids?
Benner: Isn’t that one of the most interesting things? You do get the sense that when they were a home school, between around 2005 and 2012, that [Mike and Tracey Landry] wanted just to tutor students and they were able to make some money off of it. And it was something that could have been a going concern in a part of the country where living expenses are lower.
But they got this taste of what it could mean both to be revered in their community and to be able to attract more students and possibly even charge higher prices when they can get a student into NYU [New York University].
That’s a very different proposition. It’s in New York City, it’s far away, it’s somewhat of a household name. And things start to change because there’s a realization that you can have more of those tangible benefits, whether it’s money or it’s renown, adoration from your community or adoration from institutions like Harvard or Yale. You start creating a different set of goals for your kids, for the students.
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And it’s much easier if you’re trying to get a pipeline, to lure that pipeline from schools that have students who are in high school and doing well, than to try to take somebody who’s 4 or 5 or 6 years old and spend the next seven years of their life training them to get into Harvard. That is hard and the outcomes are unknown. Whereas meeting somebody who in their junior year seems like they could probably get into Harvard, that’s a much easier and sure business proposition.
Did T.M. Landry have elementary-age kids at the end?
Benner: They did. And that’s one of the reasons why the school begins to unravel. One of the parents [Adam Broussard] who had a student who was in high school and doing well went to T.M. Landry, and then went to an Ivy League college. [Adam] put his really young son [Colin] in T.M. Landry as well, thinking it would produce the same result.
And this is the part of the book that I think is just really beautiful: Erica [Green] wrote this part where [Broussard] gets an email from T.M. Landry, this miracle school. And he’s looking over his kid’s work and he’s like, wait a second. This isn’t the quality that I’m expecting.
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And then he takes [Colin] to a Sylvan Learning Center and finds that he actually is not doing very well at all. So he starts to tell all these other parents.
Green: Once word spread that the younger ones were not performing, that’s when things really started to collapse. And it was so sad that it happened to Adam Broussard, in particular, because he was such a booster for the school. He handed over Colin when he was, like, 3 years old.
It seemed that Landry was selling a means of escape from Louisiana, from a certain way of life. But what was interesting is that at least a couple of students chose to return to their home towns because they wanted to help their communities.
Green: I think that’s actually one of the beautiful things about the book, one of the beautiful outcomes. Escape was very much imposed on them — not that they didn’t come to believe it. Mike was very, very clear that they needed to get out of Louisiana, they needed to go ‘up north,’ which is code for where white people and wealth are. They were not allowed to apply to HBCUs; they were not allowed to apply to in-state schools. So it was very much drilled into them that if they wanted a better life, they needed to get away from their own people.
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There were some who did want to leave Louisiana. But as they started to come home for different reasons, whether it was financial or other circumstances, they really rediscovered their love for themselves and for their communities.
Bryson, he started a business and he has a daughter and he could not be happier. Nygel, he stayed in Louisiana after wanting to go to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. Now he’s getting his master’s to become a psychologist. As he says so beautifully, he wants to become who he needed — to extinguish the gaps that the Michael Landrys of the world fill.
Jeffrey Epstein’s Apple Watch gift, an actor followed his stolen iPhone to China, and two iPhone thefts in one day in Texas, all in this week’s Apple Crime Blotter
