by Zhang | Jun 10, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
While evidence of fish pain perception accumulates, regulatory responses vary dramatically by region. The EU requires by law that fish be spared unnecessary pain during slaughter. Norway banned carbon dioxide stunning, a particularly painful method, more than a decade ago, with 80% of their fish facilities now using less harmful stunning methods instead. The UK has scientific committees specifically focused on fish welfare at slaughter. America? Complete silence on the issue. The most frustrating part is that we already have better methods that are entirely practical.
by Zhang | Jun 9, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
In February, the Trump administration announced a plan to eliminate over 90% of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in assistance. A month later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that 83% of USAID’s programs would be cancelled, without offering a rationale for the figure change. Out of 6200 contracts appropriated by Congress in the last budget approval, Rubio said that the 1000 that remained would be transferred to the State Department. Within the first few months of the administration, programs have been suspended, reinstated, and terminated multiple times.
by Zhang | Jun 6, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
President Donald Trump began his second term in January of 2025, and has since taken multiple measures to increase deportation, the revocation of visas, and the detainment of noncitizens–regardless of status, criminal background, or legality. In light of how these measures present a threat to universities, this conversation offers an unfiltered space for the emotions, opinions, and reactions of one student on a F-1 visa, a primary demographic target of Trump’s authoritarianism and ideological control. They will be referred to as Student X for their safety. A conversation between two college friends, this interview is filled with personal anecdotes, hot takes, and the occasional banter. The interview was conducted on April 17, 2025.
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
Together, these stories reflect a hard truth: no money, no mission. As Christa Velasquez, nonprofit lecturer at the University of Chicago, puts it: “If [nonprofits] don’t have the money, they can’t do their work.” Diversifying funding is no longer optional— it’s a strategic imperative.
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
Many IFA grants are now jeopardized by President Trump’s sweeping federal freeze mandates from earlier this year. The order drafted by the Office of Management and Budget mandated freezes across trillions of dollars in federal grants. Although the initial decision was subsequently rescinded in response to a legal and public backlash, these developments upended the lending sector. For the non-profit sector working with the IFA, it meant disruptions and uncertainty across a range of climate-related projects.
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
Most would agree that public transit is not an ideal place for people to be sheltering. Sleeping on trains can be both physically harmful and dangerous. However, it is still essential that infrastructure is developed specifically with the goal of making trains safer and more comfortable to sleep on, not because this is a permanent solution but because, as Jacob Wasserman, the Research Program Manager for the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, said, “transportation has to bear the burden of failures in other social realms”.
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
Lingering delays in visa processing from the COVID-19 pandemic will only be exacerbated by the 2026 World Cup’s expanded format to 48 teams instead of 32, which will incentivize fans from a greater number of countries to travel for the competition. Unfortunately, some of these fans will be more inconvenienced by delays in the visa approval process than others. Wait times for available consular appointments can vary greatly depending on the country, but in some cases, delays are so extreme that fans may miss the competition entirely. For example, fans applying for visas in Bogotá, Colombia must wait over a year for the next available appointment, making it impossible for them to be approved by the time the World Cup starts in June 2026.
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
“Without the House, Democrats can’t do anything,” Quigley said. But even he acknowledged the broader governing failure of USAID’s gutting: “It’s not charity. It’s national security.” Indeed, foreign aid is one of America’s smartest soft-power investments. It prevents pandemics. It promotes stability. It makes the world safer — including for Americans. James Mattis, Trump’s former Defense Secretary, once said, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” Congress, apparently, forgot.
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
The announcement came in March, with the Department of Health and Human Services stating it would rescind nearly $12 billion in funds earmarked for infectious disease control, including coronavirus, measles, Candida auris, bird flu, sexually transmitted infections, and influenza. These enormous cuts include $125 million in previously awarded funds to the Illinois Department of Public Health, and an additional $324 million in future funds promised to Illinois-based health centers.
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
More than a year after a cyber breach affecting UnitedHealth Group (UHG) subsidiary Change Healthcare compromised 190 million people’s data, providers continue to feel the pain of UHG’s scale
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
But this is not all. The impact of defunding reaches far beyond individual programs. It disrupts the ability of organizations like CLS to function at even the most basic level. When I asked about the broader implications, Barrientos was clear: “Without our federal grants, we have had huge financial cuts, and so it calls into question hiring and salaries. How will we get the work done if we don’t have the budget to hire/pay attorneys?” This simple question cuts to the heart of the crisis: there can be no legal aid without lawyers. And without funding, migrant women are all the more susceptible to the predations of both abusive men and a nativist government.
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
Of course, cognitive and social-emotional skills go hand-in-hand: engaging with the real-world challenges of a project can teach resilience, and resilience allows students to tackle real-world problems. The strongest school models should reflect that truth – whether that looks like Polaris, where Crew is coupled with expeditionary learning, or HTH, where projects frequently challenge students to examine their identities and communities. Critically, this requires the funding and autonomy to experiment with new curricula, educational leaders committed to continuous improvement and iteration, and massive scaling of successful programs to reach students across the country.
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
NIH funding is the engine behind most major medical breakthroughs in the U.S. Basic biomedical discoveries—those made in university labs, funded by public dollars—form the backbone of nearly all new FDA-approved therapies. These discoveries are shared openly, reducing duplication, lowering drug costs, and accelerating innovation. This is the key difference between private funds and federal. Federal funds acknowledge that funding early career scientists and projects that may produce slower returns on investment is an essential responsibility of the federal government, which recognizes scientific progress as a public good.
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
Despite the objects of many experts, the administration, in January, issued a federal hiring freeze, preventing the hiring and onboarding of seasonal firefighters, who, last year, composed a third of all federal wildland firefighters. The administration has also attempted to eliminate the jobs of permanent Forest Service employees. In early February, the administration issued an executive order that fired (and was subsequently forced to rehire) 3,400 probationary employees, about 10% of the Forest Service’s workforce.
by Zhang | Jun 4, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
The threat of privatization facing USPS is looming and it is pertinent that those most affected understand the potential dangers these changes may bring. However, recognizing the value USPS brings to communities, particularly rural and underserved populations, empowers citizens and policymakers to push for reforms that strengthen USPS rather than dismantle it. As USPS continues to be a lifeline for millions, ensuring that essential communication and goods remain accessible regardless of location is necessary.
by Zhang | Jun 3, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
The proposed funding cut “means fewer new treatments, slower time to realizing some of the benefits of medical research, and probably, ultimately, an inability to advance innovative health care in the way that we have in the past,” Prensner said in an interview I conducted with him in April. Though Prensner hasn’t reported experiencing disruptions to ongoing clinical trials in his own lab thus far, cancer treatment plans have already been suspended for a number of patients across the country.
by Zhang | Jun 3, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
Trump cuts have dulled what was once the sharpest weapon in policymakers’ educational arsenal. Since the start of his second term, the Trump administration cut around $1 billion from the Department of Education’s funding. Despite promising to insulate NAEP from those cuts, Trump cancelled the 2015 NAEP for 17-year-olds and has since placed the former Biden-appointed commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, who oversees the NAEP, on paid leave before the completion of her term. His cuts on the Department of Education’s headcount left only three employees at the National Center for Education Statistics to run the NAEP.
by Zhang | Jun 3, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
Trust was already strained. Doctors who work long hours, handle life-or-death cases, and shoulder high legal risk are deeply familiar with the healthcare system’s shortcomings. Many felt the new policy ignored on-the-ground realities. The government had long failed to address systemic issues like burnout, low compensation in high-risk specialties, and rising litigation. Now it was pushing a policy that, to many doctors, felt more political than medical—an attempt to boost sagging approval ratings by casting reform as a battle between the administration and obstructive elite doctors. Although the government later adjusted the number to 1,509, it was too late.
by Zhang | Jun 3, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
A country that disinvests from science does so at its own peril, and targeting early-career scientists is particularly short-sighted for a country that has led the world in scientific discovery for more than eight decades precisely because of our university-centered structure. Abandoning support for future scientists will reduce the quality of the science we’re able to produce, something which is especially alarming as we continue to navigate complex, accelerating problems.
by Zhang | Jun 3, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
The good news is that we know what works to prevent medical debt. It starts with the foundational step: expand health insurance coverage. States that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act have seen dramatic reductions in medical debt. A 2021 JAMA study found that new medical debt fell by 44 percent in states that expanded Medicaid, compared to just 10 percent in states that refused to expand. Expanding Medicaid in the ten holdout states would extend insurance to millions of working poor Americans, dramatically cutting the amount of unpaid hospital bills.
by Zhang | May 5, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
In 2022, Afghanistan produced more than 80% of the world’s opium, capturing as much as 95% of the market in Europe. With a shaky start to external relations, the Taliban’s edict to outlaw opium was likely deemed an effective way of appealing to Western sentiment. But using force to outlaw the main source of livelihood for a significant percentage of the population holds potentially devastating ramifications from which the Afghan nation will struggle to recover.
by Zhang | May 2, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
American sports gamblers lost $13.26 billion in 2024, and the amount has risen every year since states began legalizing sports betting in 2018. These losses entail serious financial consequences: sports gambling is pushing people into debt and even bankruptcy. Despite this danger, quitting is difficult; many people are at risk for developing or have already developed a gambling addiction. Meanwhile, the industry continues to broaden its reach. A recent poll by the Siena College Research Institute found that 39% of Americans bet on sports, which has almost doubled from two years ago.
by Zhang | Apr 29, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
Perhaps the most dangerous phone use during school is cyberbullying, including the distribution of sexually exploitative content and videos of students physically abusing their peers in school bathrooms or locker rooms. While the implementation of classroom phone bans will not curb cases of in-person bullying, the presence of smartphones exacerbates the issue by giving sensitive content a permanent residence on the internet, complete with a global audience. Therefore, along with classrooms, teachers should enforce phone-free zones in areas like bathrooms and locker rooms, where bullying is more likely to occur.
by Zhang | Apr 18, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
The legal landscape surrounding Japan’s sex industry is a paradox. On paper, prostitution is illegal under Article 3 of the Prostitution Prevention Law. However, the law is riddled with loopholes. The regulation only bans vaginal intercourse for money, meaning other forms of paid sex work exist in a legal gray area. As a result, an entire industry of “delivery health” services, hostess clubs, and soaplands thrives by skirting legal definitions and thereby avoiding prohibition. Rather than protecting vulnerable individuals, this fragmented policy approach fosters an environment where abuse flourishes unchecked.
by Zhang | Mar 23, 2025 | Academic year 2024/2025
Why can’t Chinese delivery riders stop the hustle? How does the delivery platform hold on to its laborers? In this video, Jessie will introduce you to the challenges, vulnerabilities, and aspirations of delivery riders through their own voices.
