Courtesy of Jeana Wallace

Jeana Wallace never enjoyed reading as a child.

The books she read in school didn’t interest her and “constant deadlines made it even harder to connect with the stories,” she said. Reading was a chore, something to rush through for a test or school assignment.

So when Wallace became a mother in 2019, she didn’t read to her son at home often — about once or twice a week, “maybe not even that,” said Wallace, who lives with her family in Frankfort, Kentucky.

That changed around the time her son was three and she was working at a local adult education center where she helped develop a family literacy program. There, she learned about research on how reading to young children daily can improve school readiness, develop language and listening skills and promote social-emotional growth.

Now her family reads “three or four books every single night,” she said.

The payoff has been clear: Her son, Levi, has an impressive vocabulary for a soon-to-be six-year-old, can speak in complete sentences and most importantly “his confidence is boosting tremendously.”

“His life is going to be so much easier because he loves to read,” Wallace said. “I didn’t want him to grow up hating to read [like I did]. … I always struggled with comprehension and remembering what I read, and so it’s challenging when you don’t love doing it.”

Wallace’s initial resistance toward reading may be the new norm among parents, The 74 reports. Earlier this year, HarperCollins UK released a report showing a steep decline in the number of caregivers who read to their young children.

For many new parents, a dislike of reading stems from their own classroom experiences in the early 2000s that emphasized reading as a skill for testing. Many are also unfamiliar with the importance of reading to young children or may instead undervalue reading because of a dependence on online educational programs that have limited benefits for learning.

For children not getting the benefits of being read to at home, the opportunity gap has widened, with those young students entering school unprepared compared to those who have been read to.

“The gap really begins very, very early on. I think we underestimate how large a gap we’re already seeing in kindergarten,” said Susan Neuman, professor of childhood and literacy education at New York University, adding she recently visited a New York City kindergarten classroom and saw some children who only knew two letters compared to others who were prepared to read phrases.

A 2019 Ohio State University study found that a five-year-old child who is read to daily would be exposed to nearly 300,000 more words than one who isn’t read to regularly.

The 2025 HarperCollins survey found that less than half, around 41%, of children between the ages of zero to four were read to every day or nearly every day; a decline of nine percentage points from 2019 and 15 percentage points in 201

Matthew Hatcher // Getty Images

For this November’s election, no candidate was listed on the ballot for judge of elections in Scranton’s Ward 6, Precinct 1. So the poll worker on duty allegedly wrote her own name on the ballots.

According to the Lackawanna County district attorney, Kathie Sico, who was serving as the precinct’s judge of elections that day, decided to write herself in for the position on the ballots before handing them to voters.

Sico — who has been charged with multiple violations of election law, including felony fraud by election officials and interference with elections — “stated that she knows it looks like voter fraud, but she has had so much going on the past couple weeks with her medical condition that she didn’t even think,” a detective with the county wrote in a criminal affidavit, according to WVIA.

Outright fraud by an elected poll worker, such as Sico is accused of, is rare. But the case highlights one of many issues that have arisen from Pennsylvania’s unique system of selecting the people who run voting locations — and some argue it’s time for change.

Unlike most states, which use some variation of an appointment-based system, Pennsylvania elects its poll workers. Each polling place has at least five workers, including three who are elected: the judge of elections, a minority inspector, and a majority inspector. There are over 9,000 voting precincts in the state, meaning the state needs to elect more than 27,000 workers

Pennsylvania is the only state that still elects poll workers

Pennsylvania has been electing poll workers since 1799. And according to data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, it’s the only state in the country that still directly elects the workers who run voting precincts. The other longtime holdout, Rhode Island, did away with the practice in 2009.

Former Rhode Island state Rep. Michael Marcello, a Democrat who wrote the bill that ended those elections, told Votebeat and Spotlight PA in May that the goal was to prevent these positions from being politicized. But his co-sponsor, former Democratic state Rep. Scott Pollard, recalled a more practical reason: It was tough to find people to run for the positions, especially when they needed to fill out paperwork to appear on the ballot.

The same is true in Pennsylvania. This year, thousands of poll worker positions went without named candidates on the ballot.

“There’s something about the emotional hurdle of having to be on the ballot,” said Sean Drasher, election director for Lebanon County. “They don’t want to be seen as a politician.”

In Allegheny County, which needs nearly 4,000 judges and inspectors to staff its precincts, only 439 candidates for those offices were on the ballot this fall.

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Genaro Molina // Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

American colleges are under siege.

The Trump administration has waged a legal and rhetorical battle against the country’s elite universities. Voters have grown increasingly skeptical of higher education. Some high school students are questioning the value of a college diploma. In turn, there’s been a veritable firehose of news stories about a generational pivot away from college due to some combination of ruinous costs, close-minded campus cultures, and appealing alternatives.

It is a disorienting experience, then, to examine the cold, hard data of higher education.

College tuition has become more affordable in recent years. The economic return on a bachelor’s degree has stopped growing but remains near historic highs. After a post-pandemic dip, four-year college enrollment has almost fully recovered to near-record levels. Students are increasingly flocking to flagship public universities like UCLA and the University of Michigan.

Whatever the problems of higher education, the narrative has raced far ahead of the reality.

Much of this mistaken story stems from a simple confusion: conflating enrollment in two-year and four-year colleges. While it’s true that fewer people are in community colleges, the number of students seeking bachelor’s degrees hasn’t changed much. “It’s been roughly flat for the last 10 years,” says Joshua Goodman, an education economist at Boston University. “That’s very much not the narrative.”

Chalkbeat unpacks the disconnect between the data and the vibes.

The costs vs. benefits of college

It is often treated as a well-established fact that the price of college is soaring. That is no longer the case. For the last couple of decades, net tuition has, if anything, trended down at private and in-state public universities, according to data compiled by the College Board. Since household earnings have gone up during this period, college tuition appears to have become somewhat more affordable in recent years, not less.

“When I talk to members of the pub

Michael Buckner // Penske Media via Getty Images

In a media landscape shaped by on-demand streaming and personalised feeds, live television might seem like a fading idea. Yet year after year, award shows like the Golden Globes still dominate timelines, group chats, and entertainment headlines. They create moments that capture reaction, commentary, and conversation in real time.

That cultural pull is reflected in both viewing figures and social buzz. The Golden Globes 2025 telecast drew an estimated 10.1 million viewers across broadcast and streaming platforms, making it one of the most-watched entertainment award nights of the season.

Beyond TV screens, the ceremony generated around 40 million social media impressions on show night, with total engagement up more than 124% year over year, underlining how awards culture now lives as much online as it does on air.

A recent survey of 2,000 U.S. respondents by Mecca Bingo into awards-season habits suggests that while viewing styles have changed, engagement has not disappeared. More than 20% say they still watch major awards shows live from start to finish, treating the night as an event. Another 19% tune in live more casually, while almost 26% primarily follow awards shows through highlights and clips. The result is an experience that rarely lives on just one screen.

Mecca Bingo

What people think about the Golden Globes

When asked which words best describe the Golden Globes, the most common answers were “entertaining” (29%) and “glamorous” (28%), closely followed by “a social event” (25%). Attitudes reinforce that shift toward spectacle. 42% say they enjoy the Globes more for the fashion and social moments than the awards themselves, while 37% say the red carpet and celebrity appearances are the main reason they pay attention at all.

The red carpet, celebrity moments, unexpected wins, and speeches that instantly become memes remain central to the appeal. Rather than being seen purely as a traditional ceremony, the Golden Globes are increasingly viewed as a pop-culture moment. It is something people experience not just by watching the broadcast, but by participating in the wider conversation across platforms.

From live TV to second screens

Streaming has given viewers control, but it has also removed one thing television still does best, which is shared experience. Awards shows offer unpredictability. Viewers don’t just watch to see who wins. They watch for what might happen.

And increasingly, they don’t watch alone. The survey found that 38% use a second screen while watching awards shows, while 24% actively engage socially and 14% post or comment during the broadcast i

Por Hadas Gold, CNN

El chatbot Grok de Elon Musk limitó algunas de sus funciones de generación de imágenes a suscriptores de pago de X, días después de la indignación internacional sobre la herramienta de IA que respondió a solicitudes de usuarios “desvistiendo digitalmente” a personas, incluyendo niños.

El cambio parece haber ocurrido entre el jueves y el viernes. La cuenta de Grok en X responde a las solicitudes de imágenes de los que no son suscriptores con el mensaje: “La generación y edición de imágenes está actualmente limitada a los suscriptores pagos”, e incluye un enlace para suscribirse.

Pero la restricción se aplica solo a una de las formas en las que los usuarios de X pueden interactuar con Grok. Un botón de “editar imagen” en las imágenes subidas a X permite que cualquier usuario use Grok edite la imagen. Además, la generación de imágenes y videos aún está disponible de forma gratuita a través del sitio web y la aplicación independiente de Grok. La restricción parece aplicarse únicamente a la función en la que los usuarios etiquetan a Grok en una publicación de X con una solicitud, a la que Grok responde luego con una publicación pública en X.

CNN informó previamente que en las semanas previas a que la tendencia explotara en X, Musk había expresado frustración por las limitaciones de Grok Imagine en una reunión en xAi. Tres miembros clave del equipo de seguridad de xAI, incluyendo su jefe de seguridad de producto, también abandonaron la empresa en las semanas previas a la controversia.

Funcionarios del Reino Unido, la Unión Europea, Malasia e India han expresado su preocupación por las limitaciones de Grok y cómo esto deriva en lo que muchos consideran porno deepfake.

Un portavoz del primer ministro del Reino Unido, Keir Starmer, criticó el último movimiento de X, diciendo que “simplemente convierte una función de IA que permite la creación de imágenes ilegales en un servicio premium”, según la BBC.

En Estados Unidos, un grupo de senadores envió una carta a Apple y Google, instándoles a eliminar X y Grok de sus tiendas de aplicaciones por violar los términos de distribución de las tiendas.

Mientras la controversia sobre el desvestimiento digital alcanzaba su punto álgido en X, los líderes del sitio —incluidos Musk y el jefe de producto Nikita Bier— alardeaban de que X estaba experimentando algunas de las tasas de participación más altas de su historia.

xAI también anunció esta semana que había completado su ronda de financiamiento Serie E, superando el objetivo de US $15.000 millones y recaudando US$ 20.000 millones de inversionistas.

Un portavoz de X no respondió de inmediato a la solicitud de comentarios por parte de CNN.

The-CNN-Wire
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