Log in to access your notifications and stay updated. If you’re not a member yet, Sign Up to get started! Mustafa has been writing about Blockchain and crypto since many years. He has previous trading experience and has been working in the Fintech industry since 2017. SonicX, a popular tap-to-earn game on TikTok, will airdrop its SONIC tokens to users through Solana’s Sonic SVM network. Launched in October, SonicX allows players to tap their screens to earn rewards, purchase power-ups, and refer friends. The game’s user-friendly setup requires no crypto wallet or complex transactions, attracting over 2 million players in just two months. The SONIC token snapshot is yet to be taken, meaning new users can still qualify for the January airdrop by logging in via TikTok. Sonic SVM, Solana’s layer-2 gaming network, supports over 20 projects and plans to expand its reach with partnerships like Mahjong123. This marks another milestone in TikTok’s growing presence in Web3 gaming.
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Astronomers have identified a remarkable water reservoir hidden in a corner of the cosmos, circling a quasar more than 12 billion light-years away. At that distance, the light we see today began its journey not too long after the universe itself formed. The water supply in this distant place is huge, containing the equivalent of about 140 trillion times all the water in Earth’s oceans combined. This supply is sitting near a supermassive black hole that is about 20 billion times more massive than our sun. The black hole is surrounded by a quasar named APM 08279+5255, which pumps out as much energy as a thousand trillion suns. This quasar, according to astronomers, holds the farthest and largest known reservoir of water anywhere in the universe. Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., leads one of the teams involved in the observations. “The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” said Matt Bradford. “It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.” Both Bradford’s group and a separate team of astronomers studied APM 08279+5255 and its black hole, which sits at the center and draws matter inward. As it does, it warms the surrounding gas and dust, forming an area filled with molecules that have never before been detected at such an immense distance. Quasars were first noticed more than half a century ago when telescopes revealed puzzling sources of intense brightness in distant areas of space. These objects are unlike any ordinary star. They shine brightly from the center of distant galaxies, outshining all their galaxy’s stars combined. At their heart sit supermassive black holes, millions or billions of times heavier than our sun. As gas and dust spiral in toward one of these black holes, the swirling material heats up and releases energy. This energy blasts out across all kinds of wavelengths, making quasars some of the brightest, most energetic phenomena ever seen. Observing quasars helps astronomers understand what the universe looked like long ago, since the light we see now began its journey billions of years in the past. Quasars can show how galaxies formed, how matter spread out, and how the earliest structures in the cosmos came together. They can even help map the distribution of matter between galaxies, shining light on the regions that would otherwise remain unseen. Some quasars also launch huge jets of high-speed particles that stretch across enormous distances. These jets can affect how stars form, influencing entire neighborhoods of cosmic material. Astronomers observed that water vapor is present in this quasar’s environment. It occupies a region spanning hundreds of light-years, with one light-year at around six trillion miles. Although the gas is thin by Earth standards, it is surprisingly warm and dense compared to what is typical in places like our Milky Way. The temperature hovers around minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit, and the gas is roughly 300 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere. Still, it is about five times hotter and tens to hundreds of times denser than the gas seen in normal galaxies. With its unusual conditions, this region stands out as an unexpected find. Water vapor is not just a molecule. Its presence here suggests that the quasar is bathing its environment in radiation that keeps the gas relatively warm. Astronomers also spotted other molecules, like carbon monoxide, hinting that there is an abundance of raw material that can feed the black hole as it continues to grow. They estimate that there is enough gas for the black hole to increase in size by about six times, although what actually happens next is not certain. Some of this gas may form new stars, while some might be thrown out into space instead. Either way, these measurements open a window into what conditions were like when the universe was still young. Detecting water vapor in such a distant quasar expands our knowledge of how building blocks appear across vast stretches of time and space. Water is essential for life as we know it, and its presence billions of years ago suggests that the elements needed for life have been around for a very long time. Beyond that, water plays a key role in shaping how stars and galaxies evolve. When gas clouds cool, water helps by allowing those clouds to collapse more easily, leading to star birth. By spotting it this far back, astronomers get new clues about how galaxies changed as the universe aged and matured. Bradford’s team began collecting data in 2008 with an instrument called Z-Spec at the California Institute of Technology’s Submillimeter Observatory (CSO). This 33-foot telescope sits near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. They later confirmed their findings using the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA), a set of radio dishes located high in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California. Meanwhile, another group led by Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps. In 2010, Lis’s team found hints of water in this quasar by detecting a single signature, while Bradford’s team uncovered multiple signals that revealed the massive amount of water present. To sum it all up, this discovery shows that even at a time when the universe was young, water formed and gathered in places we never would have guessed. Instead of seeing just cold, empty darkness out there, astronomers have spotted a real treasure — an enormous reservoir of water swirling around a quasar more than 12 billion light-years away. This water vapor, along with the intense radiation from the black hole at the quasar’s center, paints a picture of an environment that is far denser, warmer, and more active than ordinary parts of the cosmos. By studying this distant quasar, scientists can learn how the earliest galaxies came together and evolved. They can see how matter spread out, how black holes grew, and how even tiny molecules like water played a role in shaping the universe. Every new detail uncovered by these long-ago signals traveling through time and space helps make sense of the vast cosmic story we are all a part of. *** Other authors on the Bradford paper, “The water vapor spectrum of APM 08279+5255,” include Hien Nguyen, Jamie Bock, Jonas Zmuidzinas and Bret Naylor of JPL; Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland, College Park; Phillip Maloney, Jason Glenn and Julia Kamenetzky of the University of Colorado, Boulder; James Aguirre, Roxana Lupu and Kimberly Scott of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Hideo Matsuhara of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan; and Eric Murphy of the Carnegie Institute of Science, Pasadena.
Before we reveal my top movies of the year, let’s take a look at some of 2024’s worst offerings. Whereas I am going to do a Top 30 of my Best Of The Year, I’m only doing a Top–well, “top”, such as it is–Ten of my worst flicks of 2024. But that’s for a pretty good reason: when you look at stuff mass released commercially, 2024 wasn’t that terrible of a year! At least not what I saw; I had enough sense not to see Madame Web or Kraven The Hunter, though. (Actually, I have sworn off watching comic book based movies for fun, and I figure these two will both someday get drawn for the Stew World Order podcast, whereupon I’ll have to watch and review them then. So in the meantime, the aforementioned flicks, as well as the second Joker offering, remain a blindspot for me. Look, if I’m going to HAVE to watch them someday, why watch bad movies twice if I have other things to view?) You may have noted my usage of the phrase “mass released commercially”. That’s because I received several screeners for independent, smaller-budgeted films, and I am excusing them from this list. Two-fold be the reason: First, I don’t particularly like calling out those kinds of flicks for being bad. It feels unnecessarily cruel. These filmmakers tried their best, and while their best may not be that good, I still don’t want to knock their earnest efforts. And secondly, they would make up almost the entirety of this list, and how much fun would you have if the whole thing was stuff you’ve likely never heard of? So, no… we are keeping this to the bigger theatrical releases for the most part, even if they were hard floppers at the cinema. With that out of the way? Who’s ready to see what stunk this year? I sure am!
Legacy sequels often have a huge hill to climb to really hit strong with audiences or critics, but it’s anything but impossible. We have seen flicks like Top Gun: Maverick and Bill & Ted Face The Music be successful and entertaining despite long layoffs from their source material. Unfortunately, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice took no notes from the good legacy sequels and just went lazy in its reprisal. Gone are pretty much every single element that made the original work. There is no heart. The humor isn’t as funny. The story is not focused and direct. What we got instead are Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton sleep-walking through their roles, Jenna Ortega being a bland copy-paste of Lydia’s character from the first movie, and about seven plotlines too many, none of which are resolved in anything resembling a satisfactory manner. Really, ONLY Catherine O’Hara is even putting forth an effort in this one. And she’s good, but not good enough.
The ultimate sin of Road House’s 2024 requel is mostly its forgettability. I barely recall anything that happened in it. And what I do recall–Conor McGregor’s “acting”, horribly filmed action sequences that tried to be revolutionary, and Jake Gyllenhaal’s imbalanced characterization–is the kind of stuff I wish I hadn’t. I’m not the kind of person who is opposed to remakes (or requels or whatever) on principle. Some truly fantastic movies are remakes of older properties. It’s not impossible, or even that hard, to do a remake of a movie that matches or even surpasses the original. But boy… Road House sure did not do it. This was a lazy story with bad screenwriting and some awful acting. Even Jake himself is nowhere near the top of his game. Make no mistake: he’s the ONLY reason to watch this, and he does at least try. But his character is all over the map, and his emotions rarely fit the setting.
Ah, yes. The excerption to my “I don’t see comic book movies until I have to” philosophy. But my uncle and aunt bought extra tickets to see this, and it would have been rude to turn down their offer to see it for free and get dinner together. So while I successfully ducked Joker, Madame Web, and Kraven… I didn’t escape this graphic novel brought to life on the big screen. Here’s my first disclaimer: I’m not even a huge fan of the original The Crow. I’ve never sat through the whole thing since I was a kid. So my disdain for this flick comes from its own piss-poor efforts, not out of loyalty to what came before. I will give The Crow 2024 credit for TRYING. It has one truly great action set piece and it attempts to build a relationship between the leads that we will care about. But there’s just no tact to anything here. Nothing is created with any care. It tries to deviate from the original Crow and do its own thing, which is a solid strategy, but it never truly forges its own identity. So it just comes across for what it is: a pale imitation.
I’m not really a musician bio-pic kind of guy. They are often fine, I guess, but not the type of movie I seek out. I don’t care about the life of, say, Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan. I go to the movies because I want fantastical works of fiction brought to life. Not… someone else’s real life brought to another kind of life. But you know what’s worse than a good musician biopic? A bad one! And Back To Black is definitely a bad movie. It skips over chunks of Winehouse’s life and leaves out plenty of seemingly relevant details. It makes her years-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction a footnote, when it should have been the core of the tale. It’s just not a worthwhile movie.
For my full review, click HERE. I actually moderately enjoyed Russell Crowe’s role in the recent film The Pope’s Exorcist. It allowed him to clown around with a fun accent and ride a scooter. What more could you want? Well not this, that’s for sure. The Exorcism removes the light-hearted elements of The Pope’s Exorcist and replaces them with a more boring straight-ahead exorcising story arc that sees Crowe’s lead character get possessed while on the set of a new movie. There’s some okay family drama with his daughter and his vices, but that’s really all there is to like. Aside from that, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen done much better elsewhere.
Ah yes, with Brothers we have an action-comedy that both never makes you laugh AND has pretty uninspired action set pieces. The double-whammy! It certainly has the cast to have succeeded, but no one is doing particularly inspired work here. Josh Brolin has his charisma turned down to zero, Peter Dinklage is going through the motions, Glenn Close is just “there”, and Brendan Fraser… well, okay. Fraser is putting forth a little resistance to the drag of everything else. Mostly what this boils down to is that it’s trying to be funny, but it almost never accomplishes that mission. Nothing is worse than a comedy with no laughs.
For my full review, click HERE! Practical effects only get you so far with me. Look, I appreciate them, too. I know a lot of people do. And I, like many people, would love to see more good practical effect work in movies. But the key word there is “good”. Just doing practical effects for the sake of doing them doesn’t curry favor with me if they don’t stand up well. So you’ve got some werewolves that don’t hold up to having any real light shined on them, and a screenplay that doesn’t take nearly enough advantage of its wild premise to have a true blast with it. This could have further cemented Frank Grillo as an underground action star if they let him have some fun and really sink his teeth into the role, but… it was not to be. Not a winner!
Imagine making a movie about a HAUNTED SWIMMING POOL, and not having at least a little fun with it. Just… having “haunted swimming pool” as your entire plot and deciding that it needs to attempt to be treated super seriously. Imagine telling your actors and producers and assembled movie-making talent this. It boggles the mind. But here we are, with The Haunted Swimming Pool Movie and a storyline and direction that seems to not realize that joy exists in the world. One could have made an excellently campy picture around this absurd premise, but here we are, with… not that. With poor Wyatt Russell and the rest of the cast having to be believably scared and horrified. Of a haunted swimming pool.
I’ve heard, from multiple sources, that this movie was [somehow] a substantial upgrade on its predecessor. And now it is set up to usher in a whole nonsense cinematic universe of twisted public domain properties. Imagine what society will do in one hundred years to The Sopranos and weep for us all. This is threadbare nonsense, with nowhere near enough story to entertain its runtime. It quickly turns into repetitive kills and gore. And while kills and gore can be fun–and there are some highlights here–a movie has to have at least a LITTLE more going for it than this. But what story this even tries to tell is utter bunk that just doesn’t work out.
For my full review, click HERE! First off: I come bearing apologies to Jeremy who I know really enjoyed this picture, but it did not work for me. I did not find this movie to be funny or relevant or even particularly well-made. It stretches its plot thin at barely 90 minutes, and even that includes weird, pointless psychedelic scenes and irrelevant character flashbacks. It misuses some of the big names on its cast, and is just an overall mess of a picture. It IS admittedly weird to think this is the WORST movie I saw all year, but then again it isn’t, I guess. I just culled a bunch of those aforementioned indie flicks that came in behind it. And besides, a bad movie from a Coen Brother should count for more than a bad movie from Jabroney McIphonecamera. And it does. And this is quite bad, and not just for Ethan Coen. Don’t cry for Margaret Qualley, though. We’ll see her pop back up in the Best Of side of things…
The Internet Archive is still under attack two weeks after suffering a data breach and DDoS attacks that took the website down. How do we know? Because the hacker just responded to Mashable’s email that we went to the Internet Archive to find out more about the hack. The hacker was able to respond via Internet Archive’s Zendesk, an online service that helps companies respond to users’ support queries. Earlier this month, Internet Archive suffered multiple cyberattacks that ended up taking the entire platform, including The Wayback Machine which archives websites throughout the years, offline. While a group known as SN-Blackmeta took responsibility for the DDoS attacks, the attacker behind the data breach has remained anonymous. It’s unconfirmed whether that anonymous hacker is also behind the latest Internet Archive breach. The attacker claims that they have access to all of the more than 800,000 support tickets sent to Internet Archive since 2018. “It’s dispiriting to see that even after being made aware of the breach 2 weeks ago, IA has still not done the due diligence of rotating many of the API keys that were exposed in their gitlab secrets,” the hacker wrote on Sunday through Zendesk to our email that we sent to Internet Archive on October 10. “As demonstrated by this message, this includes a Zendesk token with perms to access 800K+ support tickets sent to [email protected] since 2018,” they continued. Chief Security Officer Chris Hickman of the cybersecurity company Keyfactor explained to Mashable why the rotating API key issue played such an important role here. “This is a security oversight as tokens that are not rotated regularly have longer lifespans, increasing the window of opportunity for attackers to steal and misuse them,” Hickman said. “If a malicious actor obtains an unrotated token, they could use it to gain unauthorized access to systems or services.” And it appears that’s what happened. In the initial attack earlier this month, the hacker shared that they had accessed emails, screen names, and encrypted passwords for 31 million Internet Archive users. However, in this most recent attack, the attacker now shared that they have more than 800,000 support tickets shared between Internet Archive users and the non-profit group. These support tickets could contain even further sensitive information as users who requested that their content be removed from the Internet Archive had to oftentimes provide identification. In an age where everyone seems to disagree about everything on the internet, there’s one thing that most people seem to agree with: The Internet Archive is an amazing tool that provides online library services at no-cost to users. Many were shocked when their site was attacked earlier this month. The Internet Archive was able to get parts of its website back up and running last week. However, it seems like significant damage has been done. “Whether you were trying to ask a general question, or requesting the removal of your site from the Wayback Machine—your data is now in the hands of some random guy. If not me, it’d be someone else,” the hacker said in its reply to Mashable’s contact. “Here’s hoping that they’ll get their shit together now.” TopicsCybersecurity
PUBLISHED : 24 Dec 2024 at 09:23 WRITER: Bloomberg Singapore forged ahead with efforts to formulate a digital-assets hub in 2024, while rival financial centre Hong Kong has struggled to gain traction. Singapore doled out 13 crypto licenses in 2024 to a range of crypto operators including top exchanges OKX and Upbit, as well as global heavyweights Anchorage, BitGo and GSR. That’s more than double the licenses awarded by the city-state the previous year. A similar licensing regime in Hong Kong has been slow to progress. Both cities are bidding to entice digital-asset firms to their shores with dedicated regimes, tokenization projects and regulatory sandboxes. Local authorities see in crypto the potential to boost the allure of their respective jurisdictions as global business hubs, but progress has been uneven. “Hong Kong’s regulatory regime for exchanges is more restrictive in a number of ways that matter — such as custody of customer assets and token listing and delisting policies,” said Angela Ang, senior policy adviser at consultancy TRM Labs. “This may have tipped the balance in Singapore’s favour.” Approvals in Hong Kong have come slower than expected and regulators had signalled their intent to authorise more exchanges by year-end. The city has now fully licensed seven platforms in total, with four of those given the green light — with some restrictions — on Wednesday. A further seven hold provisional permits. Prominent exchanges such as OKX and Bybit withdrew their applications for Hong Kong licenses. The city allows trading in only the most liquid cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether, barring investors from punting on smaller and more volatile tokens, known as altcoins. “It’s quite a high standard to meet and be profitable,” said Roger Li, co-founder of One Satoshi, a chain of stores in Hong Kong offering over-the-counter conversions between cash and crypto. Another factor for digital-asset executives mulling expansion in Asia is the influence of China, where crypto trading is banned. Hong Kong’s special administrative regime has a different risk profile compared to other countries, said David Rogers, regional chief executive at market maker B2C2 Ltd, which has applied for a license in Singapore. Singapore’s supportive digital-asset environment makes it a “safe, long-term choice” for a regional hub, Rogers said. “It is a risk-adjusted approach we’re taking here.” On the wholesale side, both cities can point to progress getting regulated financial institutions to experiment with blockchain software. The Monetary Authority of Singapore in November announced plans to support the commercialisation of asset tokenization through Project Guardian and Global Layer 1, two state-backed initiatives. Hong Kong oversaw the sale of HK$6 billion ($770 million) of digital green bonds using HSBC Holdings Plc’s tokenization platform. Hong Kong also notably rolled out spot-Bitcoin and Ether ETFs in April, but they have failed to stoke the kind of enthusiasm displayed by buyers of equivalent products in the United States. The city’s Bitcoin and Ether ETFs combined have amassed about $500 million, a fraction of the more than $120 billion held by US issuers. “Singapore’s framework encourages interaction between new entrants and established institutions,” said Ben Charoenwong, associate professor of finance at INSEAD. Hong Kong’s focus on established financial institutions “creates fewer opportunities for new entrants and limits the scope of innovation.” By subscribing, you accept the terms and conditions in our privacy policy.
The Hechinger Report Covering Innovation & Inequality in Education The Hechinger Report is a national nonprofit newsroom that reports on one topic: education. Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get stories like this delivered directly to your inbox. Consider supporting our stories and becoming a member today. This article includes references to self-harm, which some readers might find distressing. If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of self-harm, help is available at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 1-800-273-TALK(8255). More resources from the National Alliance on Mental Illness can be found at https://www.nami.org/suicide. This story was produced by Chalkbeat and reprinted with permission. Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter. Lucian O’Donnell sat curled up in the lower bunk in a friend’s house, a two-story clapboard in a neighborhood crowded with other faded homes in Southwest Detroit. Spring was sprucing up the trees lining the narrow one-way street. But on that day in March 2023, in the bedroom where Lucian was crashing, the blinds were drawn, draining the color from the pale blue walls. In the previous years, he had hustled at long shifts in two restaurants and taken night classes after dropping out of high school. He had brainstormed life goals with his “success coach” at a neighborhood nonprofit working with teens and tried to better manage the diabetic kidney disease that had claimed his mom during the pandemic. He had seen a therapist. We take you inside school districts and classrooms weekly to see how K-12 education is changing and how it can be strengthened.
Now, the 18-year-old had surrendered to the screens. He toggled between “Minecraft” on his laptop — endlessly stacking blocks on a virtual grid — and social media on his phone. He knew the algorithms steered him toward negativity and conspiracy theories. He went along anyway. The moment felt like a flashback to COVID-era isolation, except even lonelier: America had moved on from the pandemic. A resurgent Detroit was getting its swagger back, its population and median income inching up a decade after a bruising bankruptcy. But Lucian felt shut out from that sense of possibility. At one point, he told his success coach that he thought of harming himself. They made a plan: He’d get in touch immediately if these thoughts escalated. They put together a list of good reasons to be alive. That day, he glanced at the list. It was short: High school friends. Music. His goal of managing a restaurant. He sank back into stacking blocks. Youth advocates call young people like Lucian — 16- to 24-year-olds who are not in school, college, or the workforce — “opportunity youth,” focusing on untapped potential, not failure. Many are high school dropouts. As many as half earn a diploma or GED but flounder after graduation. If the 4.2 million opportunity youth in the U.S. all lived in one city, it would be the second largest in the country. They have long been “the kids everyone forgot,” as one nonprofit leader put it. But roughly a decade ago, with youth employment ravaged by the Great Recession, the Obama White House made reconnecting these young people a signature issue. Experts decried the lasting toll of even relatively brief stints of disconnection: lower incomes, but also poorer health and personal relationships. Congress passed the Workforce Opportunity and Innovation Act in 2014, tapping hundreds of millions for youth employment efforts. But the programs that sprang up were often small-scale and insular, with modest, short-lived results. After COVID emerged in early 2020, advocates worried its upheaval could turn Lucian’s generation into the most deeply disconnected yet. So they pushed to rethink reengagement programs. They argued these efforts had focused too much on quickly steering youth toward a job — any job — often low-skill, unstable work vulnerable to economic downturns. Meanwhile, trauma and mental health issues kept young people from gaining a foothold in the workforce. Related: Widen your perspective. Our free weekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in K-12 education. In Detroit, the city’s Employment Solutions Corporation, an agency reporting to the mayor’s workforce development board, enlisted six nonprofits that vowed to bring a more holistic approach to connecting with youth. It’s a crucial mission. As Detroit clamors for skilled young workers to power its growth, more than a quarter of Detroiters age 16 to 24 are not going to school or working, the country’s second-highest youth disconnection rate, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data released last month. Among the nonprofits that signed contracts worth a collective $3.4 million in federal money to tackle the issue were two groups with different backgrounds. One, Urban Neighborhood Initiatives, known as UNI, had offered programs to steer students to high school graduation and college for years. But amid the pandemic, it ramped up efforts to help teens who had dropped out of school or had graduated with no clue what to do next. A UNI success coach set out to triage Lucian’s complex needs through a turmoil-filled stretch. Another nonprofit, SER Metro Detroit, has long been the largest local player in working with disengaged youth, offering job training programs and an alternative high school. Here, GED teacher Anthony Tejada — who brought his own backstory of youth disconnection — set out to help a homeless teen named Seth get back on track. Studies have suggested the empathetic approach is showing some promise. But efforts are running up against perennial hurdles: fragmented programs, fickle funding — and the lack of opportunities in ZIP codes with long histories of disinvestment where many opportunity youth live. In a highly polarized country preoccupied with the economy, reengaging these young people and forging non-college pathways to good jobs has drawn some bipartisan agreement. After years of deadlock, a lame-duck Congress is on the verge of reauthorizing the sprawling Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, potentially beefing up funding for youth programs. But in a moment ripe with uncertainty, will Detroit and other cities around the country be able to help young people like Lucian and Seth forge a path to stability? Or will they remain the kids everyone forgot? In the spring of 2021, Lucian walked from the home where he was staying at the time to a community garden in Southwest Detroit run by Urban Neighborhood Initiatives. A group of teens wearing facemasks stood in a circle in the middle of a grassy expanse with just a few raised boxes with tomatoes. Lucian resisted the urge to turn and flee. UNI had long worked with middle and high school students in the Springwells neighborhood: a 1.3-square-mile, densely populated, and predominantly Latino area. But during the pandemic, Los HQ, the nonprofit’s hangar-like space down the street from the garden, welcomed more youth like Lucian — members of the COVID shutdown generation, who bore the brunt of the pandemic’s learning disruption and mental health toll. The nonprofit set out to help them with funding cobbled together from philanthropy, the Workplace Innovation and Opportunity Act, and federal COVID relief. It started offering short-term counseling and referrals to therapists with normally yearslong waits for new patients. It kicked off the gardening and cooking program to expose youth to culinary and green careers — and bring them back together outside. A friend told Lucian about the culinary program, and he’d come to interview for the last spot left. The teen, who’d dreamt of designing video games, had never considered working with food. But the small stipend the program offered was a big draw. Lucian had tuned out of high school during remote learning, which dragged on his entire sophomore year at Western High. He returned in 2021 when school buildings reopened, only to find he’d fallen too far behind. So he stopped going. Related: How four middle schoolers are making it through the pandemic? For most of his childhood, his single mom had been sick and rarely held on to a job or an apartment. Then, around the time COVID hit, her kidneys failed and other ailments reared up, confining her to the hospital for most of 2020. She died in early 2021. Lucian decided he wouldn’t let himself mourn her. He was on his own; he couldn’t afford to fall apart emotionally. As he approached the group in the garden, his social anxiety spiked. He had forgotten how to talk to people in person. Danielle Dillard, the program lead and a trained social worker, stepped aside to talk with Lucian, who stared at his beat-up sneakers and dribbled one-word answers. He felt he was blowing the interview. Dillard offered the last open spot to Lucian. SER Metro’s Youth Reengagement Center sits on a treeless commercial stretch in southwest Detroit, with a shuttered strip club and boarded-up adult bookstore across the street. The building was unveiled in 2023, remodeled and expanded with $4 million in state and philanthropic dollars. Earlier that year, Anthony Tejada started working with 19-year-old Seth in the center’s GED classroom. The teen — who Chalkbeat is not identifying by his full name to protect his privacy — was coming off a rough couple of years. After dropping out of high school, he faltered in night school and another reconnection program in Flint, where a staffer urged him to give finishing high school one more try at SER. He was jobless and staying with his brother. Tejada met Seth at a time when efforts to reconnect youth like him were in a new spotlight. In the years leading up to COVID, youth disconnection rates across the country had been steadily declining. Some advocates and practitioners saw it as evidence that their efforts were paying off. But experts credited a recovering economy, noting that most of the relatively few reengagement programs studied rigorously have shown modest gains — a single-digit increase in high school completion, say, or several hundred dollars more in annual earnings. And even as the overall rate improved, the disconnection rate for Native American youth such as Lucian and Black youth such as Seth remained double or even triple that for Asian American and white youth. Meanwhile, scientists had been rethinking the very definition of adolescence. The prefrontal cortex is developing well into the mid-20s, they noted, offering a make-or-break window to do the social-emotional repair many young people need to navigate the workplace — and life. Then COVID hit. The national disconnection rate rose from 10.7 percent to 12.6 percent, or about 716,200 more youth, bringing new urgency to building better reconnection programs. At SER Metro, staff embraced trauma-informed case management and got restorative practices and “healing-centered” training, rooted in the idea that trauma and disconnection feed each other in a vicious cycle. Tejada wants the young people he works with to take the lead. He lets students, who increasingly come in reading at an early elementary level, do the GED prep class at their own pace and tackle the tests in their chosen order. In late 2023, Tejada felt Seth had momentum. He’d been coming to class consistently and had passed the science exam. He’d found a social circle in the GED classroom, even dating another student, his first real relationship. It was easy for Tejada to root for Seth. In high school, Tejada — like Seth — had struggled with ADHD. Tejada graduated and went to college, but in his freshman year, crippling depression set in. He stopped going to classes and dropped out. But Tejada was a middle-class kid from the Detroit suburbs whose close-knit family rallied around him. Society is much harder on kids like Seth — poor, family scattered — when they take the same detours. As Seth geared up to take the social studies exam, Tejada told him about his years pulling shifts in his family’s Mexican restaurant. Eventually, he made his way back to college. Look at his life now, he told Seth: a home, a family, a job he loved. Stability. Tejada told Seth he didn’t need to stay in lockstep with an arbitrary timeline or a predetermined path: “A lot of us have many twists and turns along the way.” For Lucian, the two years after he turned up at UNI’s community garden were full of twists and turns. He slept on a series of couches and beds, then rented a small apartment — only to get evicted a few months later. He worked several jobs, sometimes with pay under the table, which he often spent on expensive gifts for his friends in a bid to cobble together the family he never had. Related: Communities hit hardest by the pandemic, already struggling, face a dropout cliff There was one constant: Danielle Dillard, Lucian’s UNI supervisor and “success coach.” Dillard sat him down to make a “success plan” with goals for the year and beyond. She pushed him to go back to school — a top goal on his list, but one for which he didn’t feel ready. She pushed him to see UNI’s new in-house therapist and to address health issues. After Lucian completed UNI’s culinary program in 2021, the nonprofit helped him find a job as a server’s assistant at a high-end Detroit restaurant. The shifts were long and fast-paced, but he was learning a lot. Then the restaurant closed abruptly, a pandemic casualty. He eventually found a job at Family Treat, a Springwells neighborhood fast food fixture. But it was only open in the warmer months. It was after the restaurant closed for the season that Lucian found himself isolated — and sliding downward — in that friend’s bedroom in the spring of 2023. When Family Treat reopened a month later, for a brief moment Lucian felt freed from his entrapment. He loved the bustle and camaraderie of restaurant kitchens. He just wanted a restaurant job with more stability, benefits, room to grow. For now, he picked up all the shifts he could, working up to 60 hours a week. After work, his mind descended to the same dark place it had staked out during his jobless stretch. Exhaustion made things worse. The grief over his mom’s death that he’d suppressed two years earlier reared up. By May 2023, that despondency turned to despair. On Mother’s Day, in a park not far from the cemetery where his mom was buried, Lucian slashed his wrists. Tejada’s work day was drawing to a close at the SER Metro reengagement center when a distraught Seth burst through the door. A few weeks earlier, the teen had failed the social studies GED test by just a few points. He had righted himself for a bit, turning his attention to the language arts exam. For almost a year, he had chipped away at the GED at his own pace as Tejada, his instructor, had urged. But his momentum was fizzling out. He had been wondering if it might be time to get a job — any job. What sent him pushing through the door minutes after he’d left the center was dropping his phone and cracking it while he was running to catch a bus. Suddenly, Seth found himself beset by all the complications in his life. His girlfriend, a classmate at SER, was pregnant. He was panicking that his baby would have two jobless parents slogging through a GED class. “Nothing good’s ever coming to me,” he railed as Tejada and two other staffers sought to calm him down in the lobby. “Every little good thing I get is taken away.” As Seth tried to slam his phone against the floor, Tejada enveloped him in a hug that was part comfort, part restraint. “You’ve been through worse things than breaking a phone and missing a bus,” he reminded him. Recent studies suggest that adding social-emotional support to reconnection programs can work. A 2021 report of the Opportunity Reboot model in Minnesota, which layers mentoring and social-emotional guidance onto existing reengagement programs, found it increased the odds of youth getting and keeping jobs. A study of One Summer Chicago Plus, a summer jobs program that paired minimum-wage jobs with cognitive behavioral therapy and mentorship, showed it significantly reduced teens’ involvement in violent crime — a goal that has often fueled efforts to reengage disconnected youth in that city and others. The results so far in Detroit illustrate the challenges that persist. Ericka Page, point person for youth programs at the Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation, the agency contracting with the six nonprofits running programs, said data on these programs’ outcomes shows many young people bouncing in and out of reengagement programs and from job to job. Often, these are minimum-wage, part-time, or gig jobs. The programs are connecting with youth and getting some of them employed. But sustaining their momentum over the extended time it takes to remake their lives is hard, Page said. “The biggest challenge with opportunity youth is retention,” says Ann Leen, who heads the SER Metro center. “It could be a $15 an hour job. It could be the streets calling. It could be, ‘Mom needs help.’ It could be, ‘It’s just too hard.’ We have to be louder than those other voices.” On the afternoon Seth burst into the SER lobby, the staff helped him calm down. But after that day, he started showing up less and less. By last spring, he had stopped coming. By fall, he returned, on and off. By winter, Tejada worried he was losing him again. Lucian was not alone at the park when he harmed himself on Mother’s Day 2023. A friend who was with him called an ambulance that rushed him to the emergency room. He spent a week at a psychiatric hospital. When he left, staffers from Urban Neighborhood Initiatives kicked into high gear. They set him up with an outside therapist and gave him rides to appointments. When he stopped going, they pushed him to go back. They found him a bed at a small shelter all the way across the city. Lucian was eager to get back to work. He needed the money, but he also missed the steadying rhythms of working full-time. He walked the drab commercial stretch with boarded-up storefronts near the shelter and found the few businesses left were not hiring. For occasional shifts at a fried chicken place in his old neighborhood, he sometimes commuted as much as two-and-half hours one way. Then in early 2024, a friend invited Lucian to move in with him, his mom, and his eight siblings in a house not far from Los HQ. The move back to the Springwells neighborhood was a game-changer, bringing him closer to jobs and friends. By this spring, he was on full-time grill duty at Family Treat. He had picked up more shifts at the fried chicken place. And UNI brought him on to help out with the culinary program two evenings a week and soon promoted him to program lead. At that rate, he felt, he might be able to afford to rent his own place with a friend by summer’s end. Across the country, young people like Lucian had been getting back to work, pushing post-pandemic disconnection rates down as the labor market ramped up. But some experts and advocates worry there’s a catch to that good news. Kristen Lewis, director of the think tank Measure of America, says she worries that many young people are choosing unstable jobs that can breed more disconnection in the longer run over opportunities to finish high school and get training that could actually open up a path out of poverty. The post-pandemic data has reaffirmed something experts knew before COVID: The fates of vulnerable young people like Lucian are chained to their ZIP codes and the whims of the economy. “We’ve been searching for silver bullets: Summer jobs will solve everything! Mental health care will solve everything!” she said. “But look at the deep structural problems and profound inequities some neighborhoods face. It’s the story of what’s wrong with America.” Related: Why are kids still struggling in school four years after the pandemic? Lucian, too, felt keenly the precariousness of his situation last spring. His worries came to a head when a diabetic seizure struck near the end of his shift at Family Treat one April afternoon. He had just started on an order of five footlongs in the narrow kitchen when a buzzing in his ears muffled the sizzle of the fryers and his vision faded to white. As he convulsed on the floor, his manager kneeling beside him, one thought cut through Lucian’s brain fog: He had to get back to making hot dogs. He couldn’t lose that $11.50-an-hour job — and the fragile stability he’d just started regaining. Lucian staggered up to his feet. His vision still swam, and arms stung as though jabbed by needles. But he dashed back to his work station, where the hot dogs he had set on the grill still rotated. “You still need five of these, right?” Lucian called to the young woman working the front register. This November, with Family Treat closed for the season, Lucian, now almost 20, walked into a GED prep classroom in Southwest Detroit. UNI had referred him to the program, which would pay him $200 a week and introduce him to a career in carpentry. Lucian felt it would be good insurance against the fickleness of restaurant work — and a chance to finally tackle his longtime goal of getting a high school credential. But uncertainty still plagued Lucian. He and his roommate were both unemployed, and the bills kept coming. The staff at UNI collected almost $400 for Lucian’s November rent and got him a free Thanksgiving turkey. He was quickly learning that it was tough to find a job while tied up in a carpentry and GED program for most of the day. Related: OPINION: Post-pandemic, our bored and disconnected youth need a whole lot more than high dosage tutoring Some advocates worry that the COVID-era sense of urgency around opportunity youth might be fading even as many young people like Seth and Lucian haven’t yet regained their footing. But boosting funding for re-engaging and training disconnected youth has been a key area of bipartisan consensus in the federal push to reauthorize the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which expired in 2020. Lawmakers launched a bipartisan Opportunity Youth caucus this summer. And a bipartisan agreement on the law in late December could steer more money to youth programs, including a new $65 million apprenticeship program. On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance at times appeared to speak directly to young men like Lucian and Seth, promising a return to an era of robust manufacturing and access to good jobs that don’t require college. But practitioners worry about what the incoming administration’s appetite for federal spending cuts might mean. In Detroit, the Ballmer Group, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s foundation, has been pushing the city for a big-picture vision for attacking youth disconnection. Here and nationally, the focus is shifting back to the training and credentials young people need to access high-demand jobs employers are trying to fill. It’s impossible to know where Lucian and Seth would be now if their lives had not intersected with the agencies and people helping them. But their experiences these last few years affirm that young people who become disconnected from school and work need more than jobs that pay the bills. They need social-emotional backing – and also a way to see a clear path to more stable, fulfilling lives. Their stories show that rebuilding after a stint of disconnection takes time. And programs often aren’t set up to serve young people in the long run, so the years ahead could bring more uncertainty. It’s easy, Lucian realizes, to miss the growth he’d made amid the rollercoaster of the last three years. He is taking better care of his physical and mental health. Time spent “jotting and rambling” in his journal about his long-term goals grounds him. Dillard moved to the West Coast earlier this year, but they’ve stayed in touch, catching up on Zoom. She told him she was proud of him. He told her he was anxious, but also determined. “I think a lot about the future,” Lucian said this month. “I am always thinking about when I am going to reach my goals — not if.” Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org. This article was reported with support from the Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan. The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that. Join us today.
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