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.
Decodo reports 68% rise in digital squatting scams over five years
Techniques include typosquatting, combosquatting, TLD squatting, and homograph attacks, tricking users into sharing credentials or payments
WIPO logged 6,200 domain disputes in 2025, the highest ever; Decodo urges brands to register domains beyond .com for protection
Digital squatting is getting increasingly popular among scammers, ruining businesses and their reputations at an unprecedented pace.
This is according to a new report from Decodo, which said that there’s been a 68% increase in these cases in half a decade.
In a new press release shared with TechRadar Pro, Decodo said that, according to data from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), there were 6,200 domain name disputes in 2025, the highest ever in the organization’s history, and a 68% increase since 2020.
Fraudulent purchases
Digital squatting is a type of scam in which hackers register domains mimicking established brands. That can include typosquatting (registering domains that are a typo of a legitimate business, for example “Microsfot” instead of “Microsoft”), combosquatting (adding keywords to brand names, such as “microsoft-login”, or “ebay-discounts”), Top-Level Domain squatting (registering a new domain for an established brand, for example “microsoft.ai” when the company is on the .com domain), and homograph attacks (using visually similar characters, for example “rnicrosoft” instead of “microsoft”).
Cybercriminals can do all sorts of malicious things when they trick people into visiting their websites. They can get them to try and log in, stealing credentials for important services. They can even get them to “buy” something, as was the case with Decodo.
Using its old branding, Smartproxy, hackers registered fraudulent domains and tricked people into purchasing services that they never received.
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“We’ve spent years earning our customers’ trust through reliable service and ethical practices,” said Vytautas Savickas, CEO of Decodo. “Impersonators don’t just steal money. They deliver low-quality services that fall far short of what real companies provide. Every fake site makes it harder for honest businesses to earn trust and for customers to know who to rely on.”
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Decodo argues that prevention offers the most cost-effective approach to the problem, urging organizations to register domains beyond their primary .com address.
Finding your favorite workout app may require a bit of trial and error since you’ll want to see if you’re looking for a personalized experience or are comfortable with a cookie cutter plan.
Where will you be using the app? Think about where you’ll mainly be using the app. Do you work out at home, at the gym, outside or a mix of all three? If you like to run outdoors, for example, you’d likely want an app that offers location tracking. Similarly, when looking into a specific app, figure out whether its classes require you to have certain equipment on-hand, like dumbbells or a yoga mat.
Your goals: You should also think about your goals for using the app. Do you just want to get moving more often, or are there specific fitness goals (like running a certain speed or lifting a certain weight) that you want to achieve? Some apps allow you to personalize your goals or even connect with a personal trainer to help you meet them.
Budget: Lastly, know that there are workout apps for every budget — including free. Some require a monthly subscription to access, so take advantage of the free trials to determine if it’s worth the cost to you.
Sometimes you just know that you have the best ever idea for a hardware product, to the point that you’re willing to quit your job and make said product a reality. If only you can get the product and its brilliance to people, it would really brighten up their lives. This was the starry-eyed vision that [Simon Berens] started out with in January of 2025, when he set up a Kickstarter campaign for the World’s Brightest Lamp.
When your product starts shipping and you hope everything went right. (Credit: Simon Berens)
At 50,000 lumens this LED-based lamp would indeed bring the Sun into one’s home, and crowdfunding money poured in, leaving [Simon] scrambling to get the first five-hundred units manufactured. Since it was ‘just a lamp’, how hard could it possibly be? As it turns out, ‘design for manufacturing’ isn’t just a catchy phrase, but the harsh reality of where countless well-intended designs go to die.
The first scramble was to raise the lumens output from the prototype’s 39K to a slight overshot at 60K, after which a Chinese manufacturer was handed the design files. This manufacturer had to create among other things the die casting molds for the heatsinks before production could even commence. Along with the horror show of massive US import taxes suddenly appearing in April, [Simon] noticed during his visit to the Chinese factory that due to miscommunication the heatsink was completely wrong.
Months of communication and repeated trips to the factory follow after this, but then the first units ship out, only for users to start reporting issues with the control knobs ‘scraping’. This was due to an issue with tolerances not being marked in the CNC drawings. Fortunately the factory was able to rework this issue within a few days, only for users to then report issues with the internal cable length, also due to this not having been specified explicitly.
All of these issues are very common in manufacturing, and as [Simon] learned the hard way, it’s crucial to do as much planning and communication with the manufacturer and suppliers beforehand. It’s also crucial to specify every single part of the design, down to the last millimeter of length, thickness, diameter, tolerance and powder coating layers, along with colors, materials, etc. ad nauseam. It’s hard to add too many details to design files, but very easy to specify too little.
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Ultimately a lot of things did go right for [Simon], making it a successful crowdfunding campaign, but there were absolutely many things that could have saved him a lot of time, effort, lost sleep, and general stress.
Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks announced Friday that he has joined prediction market Kalshi as a shareholder, making him the first NBA player to invest directly in the company.
“The internet is full of opinions. I decided it was time to make some of my own,” said the two-time NBA MVP in a social media post. “Today, I’m joining Kalshi as a shareholder. We all on Kalshi now.”
The announcement has not gone over well on social media. On Reddit, for example, one user described it as “literally a conflict of interest,” while another described Kalshi as “cancerous” and yet another wondered, “is this even allowed.”
According to The Athletic, the NBA’s recent collective bargaining agreement allows players to advertise and take stakes of up to 1% in sports betting companies, as long as they’re not promoting league-related wagers.
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Kalshi said it will partner with Antetokounmpo on marketing and live events — and in accordance with the company’s “strict terms of service that ban insider trading and market manipulation,” he will not be allowed to trade on markets related to the NBA.
The implications of the breakthrough could ripple through multiple industries. A better understanding of how superconductivity behaves at quantum scales could accelerate the development of room-temperature superconductors, radically improving electrical grids, quantum computers, and magnetic levitation systems. Read Entire Article Source link
The Super Bowl is happening in Silicon Valley this Sunday, and the Patriots-Seahawks game at Levi’s Stadium is going to be packed with tech money. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is expected to be there. Apple’s Tim Cook, too. (He has become a Super Bowl fixture since Apple Music began sponsoring the halftime show several years ago.)
Longtime VC Venky Ganesan from Menlo Ventures gave the New York Times a quote about the whole thing, saying the Super Bowl in the Bay Area is “tech billionaires who got picked last in gym class paying $50,000 to pretend they’re friends with the guys who got picked first.” Added Ganesan, “And for the record, I, too, was picked last in gym class.”
Ganesan could likely afford a $50,000 ticket if he needed one. Menlo went all-in on Anthropic, setting up a $100 million fund with the AI company in summer 2024 to invest in other AI startups. The firm has also joined numerous funding rounds for Anthropic itself, both through its flagship fund and various special purpose vehicles. (Anthropic is reportedly expected to close a $20 billion round of funding next week at a post-money valuation of $350 billion.)
Tickets are expensive across the board, averaging almost $7,000 according to the Times (with some last-minute seats still available on StubHub for closer to $3,600, according to a quick glance at the ticket reseller site). Only a quarter go to the general public; the rest are distributed to NFL teams. Of all ticket buyers, the largest group (27%) is coming from Washington State for the Seahawks, who’ve won just one Super Bowl in franchise history compared with the Patriots’ six titles, all with Tom Brady as quarterback.
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Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, and Meta are splashing out for competing ads about whose AI is best for customers, so maybe their respective CEOs will show up, too. Other than Amazon’s Andy Jassy, who reportedly splits his time between Seattle and Santa Monica, all of them have homes within an hour or so of Sunday’s game.
This is just the third time the Bay Area has hosted the Super Bowl. The first time was in 1985 at Stanford Stadium, the original football stadium at Stanford University, where the 49ers beat the Dolphins. The second took place 10 years ago at Levi’s Stadium, when the Broncos beat the Panthers.
Josh Grenier got a powerful lesson in the benefits of revitalization when he was a high school art teacher in Edina, Minnesota. He was teaching ceramics and photography in a dull classroom in the basement. No windows. Poor ventilation.
“It was an old, underutilized, leftover space down in the bowels of the building,” Grenier says.
Worse, the dreary room seemed to reflect an unspoken, but obvious, negativity directed at the people who used it: “I think the program and the students who were involved with it were not perceived particularly well.”
Within a few short years, though, the school went through a major renovation, which included a new, stylish fine-arts wing at the front of the existing structure. Grenier and his art students moved from “the worst space to the best space” in the building, a shift that transformed how others perceived the arts program, and how the students perceived themselves and their place in the school.
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Josh Grenier. Photo courtesy of Wold.
“Facilities investments are really expressions of what a community values,” Grenier says. “I think the people who are in them feel that; I witnessed that firsthand.”
The experience so moved Grenier that he left his nine-year teaching job to become an architect. Today, he’s an educational practice leader and educational planner in the Denver office of Wold Architects & Engineers, where he works with communities across Colorado that are trying to shape their school needs for the future. Sometimes they choose to build new schools. More often, they revamp old schools that have been around for decades, but lack the space or mechanical systems to meet the demands of modern learners.
Grenier and his design peers are part of a pivotal moment in education. Shifting populations have left cities and towns with unused school buildings in zero-growth areas and too few classrooms in high-growth areas. Many schools still in use were constructed in the boom years after World War II and don’t meet today’s building codes, some dangerously so. A 2020 report by the Government Accountability Office found that more than half of the nation’s 100,000 K-12 schools need to replace heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems or plumbing to mitigate health hazards.
At the same time, the amount districts have to spend on school renovations has dropped by about $85 billion a year nationwide since 2016, according to a recent report from the American Institute of Architects. This despite research of the past 20 years showing a strong link between unhealthy school buildings and poor learning outcomes. The Harvard School of Public Health concluded in 2017 that by failing to modernize old schools “policymakers and parents may be missing one of the largest health and safety issues affecting students daily.” On the other hand, the study’s authors wrote, “properly designed, maintained and operated school buildings…have been shown to prevent cognitive deficits, optimize student and teacher performance, and create a thriving learning environment within the school.”
In Colorado, about 85 percent of the population lives in urban areas; its small plains and mountain towns struggle to keep their identities. Grenier has worked with districts of all sizes in the state, including Manzanola School District, with fewer than 200 students; the eight-school district in touristy Cañon City, southeast of Aspen; and St. Vrain Valley Schools, the state’s seventh largest district.
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Grenier spoke with EdSurge about the challenges of rebuilding old schools — and how his experience as a teacher informs every aspect of his job.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
EdSurge: When you talk about how depressing it was to work in a basement, I think many people would identify with that. There are thousands of offices and schools where only a select few have access to light.
Josh Grenier: You’re pointing to something that I was very conscious of. Spaces communicate something to us about where we sit in a hierarchy of the world and how we’re valued and perceived by others. Schools are very much that way, too.
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In that [Edina] school, we had a front that was nice and well invested in, and it had a back with dumpsters and a loading dock. The buses dropped the kids off in the back by the dumpsters. The people who owned their own cars and could drive themselves to school would park in the front, and they’d walk in the nice front door. And I remember thinking, ‘what is that saying?’ If you don’t have a car and you’re of lesser means, well, you come in the back door by the dumpster. That’s the kind of thing that if you’re not thinking about it, the buildings themselves can communicate that.
Did that orientation change when the school was renovated?
No. That project was not perfect. That was another reason why I thought that I could contribute by joining the architecture side. We were winners — the arts program. But there were others who were not. There were other parts of the building that could have been thought about more deliberately.
What’s involved in designing for modern learners?
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There’s so much variety from student to student of what they’re doing throughout the day, when things are happening, how things are unfolding. There are far more moments of independence, informal opportunities.
That’s another part I like about having been a teacher. I’m pretty good at imagining what’s going to happen, and I like doing that. You’re working on a floor plan, you’re working on a space, and you’re trying to just imagine, well, there’s that kid and there’s all those backpacks, and here he goes doing this, and there she is doing that. They’re gathering over here, and the teachers are walking from here to here, and they’re stopping here.
That’s always been something that I find a lot of pleasure in, just imagining what’s going to happen.
I had a teacher in architecture school who encouraged [us] to try to make it so that people feel they’re being embraced by this space. If you can’t find in yourself some fondness for whoever is going to be there, well, what are you doing?
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Many kids today have conditions that hadn’t been identified when these old schools were built. How do you accommodate them?
It’s not a revolutionary idea, but allowing spaces to be used in a variety of different ways helps. You don’t have to make everything dedicated to one function.
A classroom in the renovated Manzanola School features furniture that is easily moved around and separate areas for reading or other quiet tasks. Photo courtesy of Wold.
Furniture is a huge part. It is the furniture that can help make those flexible spaces work. Things that are on wheels to support different uses or subtly separate one space from another.
You see a lot of modern furniture that has a ‘fidget component’ built into it so a kid can kind of vibrate. You know, a lot of times, kids just have extra energy; they’ll stay more engaged and more present if you just let them fidget.
It’s complicated and costly to renovate a school. How does it begin? In Cañon City, for instance, you took on four schools at once.
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Mostly we just listen. People are pretty quick to talk about what’s wrong. We also try to lean into ‘what are you proud of? What are you really good at?’ We try to find a few things that they can rally around and then build a list of possible projects at each of the four schools.
One of the complexities of planning with large entities is that you’re trying to navigate lots of different individual stakeholders and everybody has their own unique point of view. You’re trying to help [them] see bigger picture things. But that’s another benefit of having been a teacher. I feel like [teachers are] pretty good at facilitating those kinds of conversations.
The featured project was the high school. Like so many of our public schools, it was built in the post-World War II era. Most schools start there. And then it’s been added onto, like, 10 times.
They become Franken-buildings…?
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[Nods] They become mazes. The circulation becomes overly complex. They’re disorganized and confused. But that school, Cañon City High School, was really proud of its CTE programs. They’re a model in the state for allowing student choices to define the educational path that each of those students is going down. And they have a lot of specialized spaces already in place. But what they were lacking was a central part to the building that reinforced and supported all these piecemeal things that had been cobbled together.
A draft concept for Cañon City High School that imagines a new commons and gathering hub. Photo courtesy of Wold.
We really focused on creating a new core to the building that felt like it reflected the pride they had in their programs.
How do emotions and nostalgia play into design? How did it work in Manzanola?
The town is around 400 people. In communities like that, the school really is the heart of the town. With those small communities, one of the first things we hear is that they’re afraid if the school goes away, the whole town will go away.
Athletics are huge, and it’s not just Friday night football. Members of the town and the outlying areas will attend athletic events even if they don’t have kids in the school system. In addition to athletics, performances are huge. [The school gym] is usually the biggest space in town. When a prominent member of the community passes away, they have the funeral in the gym. People get married in the school.
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That alone makes it fun because it’s just such a key element to that community.
[We knew] it was going to be a public-facing building off-hours because of so much of the community use. It really needed a public side and a learning side with a pretty clear boundary.
Renovation and repurposing of existing schools is happening at all levels of education. California State University, Fullerton, reimagined its campus to accommodate a changing demographic of commuter students. Oklahoma City Public Schools repurposed unused elementary schools into early learning centers. What’s next?
Our facilities are aging and our communities are aging. In a lot of the communities, the bulk of the build-out was post-World War II. We see a lot of consolidation happening.
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There was a model that was really common across the country: a school that was designed to have about 300 kids in it. When you looked at the map, they weren’t particularly far apart and everybody could just walk to their neighborhood elementary school.
Now a lot of those schools are half full. I think, yes, we’re seeing people trying to be creative about how buildings can be used. Some outright just need to be sold.
When done poorly, a district can make a big mistake and have a vacant building that’s a blight. [One city we worked with, southeast of Colorado Springs], they originally had two elementaries, a middle and a high school. And before we got there, they closed one of those elementaries. They put it up for auction and somebody from out of town bought it, I think as a tax write-off. But it just sits there to this day, abandoned, with transients moving through and building little campfires inside. The worst thing you can imagine.
So if you’re going to leave a [school] building, we are very strong advocates that you either tear it down or you have a vetted proposal for reuse. Build some criteria for what you’re willing to sell to, so that you know that it’s actually going to be used.
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As a former teacher, what specifically do you think about when designing a school? What is top of mind based on your experience in the classroom?
There are a lot of different little examples, but the one that comes to mind for me a lot is acoustics. The design of spaces, in the end, is a lot of very tangible things that are just sort of specific. And one of those is how well [a space] does or doesn’t perform acoustically. As a teacher, I remember very clearly being in some spaces that were loud, chaotic. They made engaging with the students challenging and problematic. I remember wanting to have confidential conversations and not feeling like [we] had the spaces for that.
You want to be specific and intentional about designing things that function well for people, even if they don’t know or perceive that you even did it.
You know, it’s nice to walk around the school and have it feel… quiet.
The EU could take “interim measures” against WhatsApp as it investigates AI providers’ access to the app. On Monday, the EU’s regulatory arm announced its “preliminary view” that Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, violated antitrust laws by blocking third-party AI assistants from operating on WhatsApp.
The European Commission’s is concerned that Meta’s actions will limit competitors from entering the AI assistant market. “We must protect effective competition in this vibrant field, which means we cannot allow dominant tech companies to illegally leverage their dominance to give themselves an unfair advantage,” Teresa Ribera, executive vice-president for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition said in a statement.
Ribera continued: “AI markets are developing at rapid pace, so we also need to be swift in our action. That is why we are considering quickly imposing interim measures on Meta, to preserve access for competitors to WhatsApp while the investigation is ongoing, and avoid Meta’s new policy irreparably harming competition in Europe.”
The issue arose in October when Meta announced updates to its WhatsApp Business Solution Terms. According to the European Commission, the January 15 update would “effectively” make Meta AI the only AI assistant available on WhatsApp. The regulatory agency opened an investigation into the matter on December 4.
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Today’s update stands as a warning to Meta that the European Commission initially believes the company has violated antitrust regulation. A final decision is still to come. It also gave Meta a chance to respond to the allegations — which it swiftly did.
“The facts are that there is no reason for the EU to intervene in the WhatsApp Business API,” a Meta spokesperson told Reuters. “There are many AI options and people can use them from app stores, operating systems, devices, websites, and industry partnerships.”
After launching the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 chip last year, Apple is now preparing more powerful variants featuring the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips. Recent leaks suggest the company could unveil the updated laptops soon, and a new report now points to an early March announcement.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who has a strong track record with Apple-related leaks, the new MacBooks could arrive in the first week of March. The lineup is expected to include updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, along with a new MacBook Air featuring the M5 chip.
It’s not immediately clear whether Apple will introduce the long-rumored OLED MacBook Pro as part of this refresh. Reports suggest the OLED model, which is also expected to add touch support, is likely to debut in 2026, with display production already underway.
Beyond the MacBook Pro upgrades, Gurman says Apple is also planning to launch a new low-cost MacBook in the first half of the year. The entry-level model is expected to feature a sub-13-inch display and an “iPhone-class chip.” New Mac Studio desktops are also in development and are said to arrive not long after Apple’s spring Mac refresh.
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More Apple hardware launches are on the horizon
A refreshed Studio Display, referenced in multiple leaks over the past few months, is on the way, while new Mac mini models are also on Apple’s roadmap for the year. Alongside new Macs, Apple is reportedly gearing up to launch the iPhone 17e in the coming weeks, as well as a new entry-level iPad powered by the A18 chip and a refreshed iPad Air featuring the M4 processor.
Apple has yet to make anything official. If the reported timeline holds, Apple could announce the iPhone 17e later this month, followed by refreshed iPads and the new MacBook Pro lineup in early March.
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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.
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