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Lock Up Your Kids: The Eclipse Is Coming! Rupa Subramanya

On Monday, April 8, hundreds of schools across North America, from Texas to Ontario, are closing in order to protect pupils from sustaining lifelong injuries—from the sun.
Just after 11 a.m. local time, a complete solar eclipse will begin over the Pacific coast of Mexico. Its “path of totality”—the areas where the sun will be entirely blotted out—will pass through 13 U.S. states, before ending off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. In these regions, schools face a dilemma: Is the eclipse a learning opportunity for kids—or a threat?
“The solar eclipse offers a rare educational occasion,” Natalie Jameson, an educator in Canada’s Prince Edward Island, admitted last month. “But prioritizing safety is crucial.”
And so, classes in her district will end two hours early to ensure “students will be home safely” before the start of the eclipse.
The decision, her department added, was made “out of an abundance of caution.”
The same decision was made by Ontario’s Waterloo District, even though it initially opted to remain open for the eclipse, arguing the event would be an opportunity for “growth” and “learning.” But after the elementary teachers’ union criticized the decision, with its president arguing “it’s naive to assume students won’t look directly at the sun,” the school board announced it would cancel class after all.
Educators in America, meanwhile, are singing from the same hymn sheet. “You obviously cannot look at the sun when this is happening,” a rep for Perry Township Schools in Indianapolis told local news. Instead, she told me, the school district is “having an e-learning day due to safety reasons,” because it’s “the best way to experience the solar eclipse.”
A superintendent in upstate New York echoed these reasons when he explained why classes in the Schoharie Central School District would be canceled on Monday: “It really is out of an abundance of caution.”
Abundance of caution. You hear this phrase a lot in our era of absurd safetyism, which is reshaping modern childhood. An abundance of caution is the reason kids no longer spend time alone or play outside, depriving them of some of life’s most fulfilling experiences.
To be clear: when you look at an eclipse, your instinct to squint may not kick in—which can damage your eyes—but cases of blindness are vanishingly rare, and there are simple precautions that can be taken.
Many of the scientists I spoke to believe the eclipse should be treated as a learning opportunity for kids. Ilana Macdonald, an astrophysicist at Ontario’s Eclipse Task Force, said the event is a way “to incite wonder and amazement about the world. And yet they’re focusing more on the negatives and the dangerous aspects of it,” she said of schools that are closing.
“It feels very medieval,” she added. “It’s like there’s a dragon eating the sun, and we have to run away.”
Michael Kirk, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, agrees, calling the eclipse “a once in a lifetime experience.”
“You will tell your grandchildren about this. You will remember it for the rest of your life,” he said, noting that the next total eclipse visible in America won’t happen until 2044.
How do kids feel about spending it at home? I spoke to Lola McAdam, 13, whose Ottawa school district has opted to close on April 8 to “ensure safety” for students. Lola will be going to Zoom school instead.
“I probably would rather have been with my friends,” she told me. “It would have been cooler than being stuck at home.”
Suzanne Hancock, Lola’s mother, said she still has fond memories of the total solar eclipse in 1979, when she was 7 years old. Her school remained open, and the students made pinhole projectors together so they could safely watch the event. Suzanne wishes her daughter had a similar opportunity, telling me this could have been a communal “celebration.”
“That experience and adventure has been robbed from today’s students just like during the Covid-19 pandemic,” she concluded.
And if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that being cooped up inside, in front of a screen, harms kids a lot more in the long run.
Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free-Range Kids project—which promotes “a commonsense approach to parenting in these overprotective times”—says there are many examples of silly safetyism in schools. She notes that a high school in New Jersey was evacuated in 2021 when a student brought in an antique dinner plate, because its glaze was deemed a biohazard. And in 2012, a school in Washington didn’t allow students to apply sunscreen on a field trip because it was considered medication—and two students were badly sunburned as a result. “We have a culture that sees childhood through the lens of risk and danger,” Skenazy said.
And it’s not just schools. Up until 2011, an eight-year-old could travel unaccompanied on Amtrak—and then the minimum age was raised to 13. The reason for the change? An Amtrak spokesperson cited an “abundance of concern.”
Skenazy said she dislikes these empty words.
“An ‘abundance of caution’ turns out to be excess caution,” she said.
And if we stop kids from taking solo train rides, or bringing old plates to school, or collectively experiencing a spectacular, celestial event, Skenazy believes we are effectively giving them something much worse:
“An abundance of distrust.”
Rupa Subramanya is a reporter for The Free Press. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @rupasubramanya. And read Julia Duin’s Free Press piece about the quest to preserve America’s night sky, “Welcome to Dark Sky Country.”
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Nellie Bowles: The Triumph of the Plastic Straw Nellie Bowles

The biggest environmentalist craze of my generation started in 2011 with Vermont 9-year-old Milo Cress cooking up an arbitrary number for how many plastic straws Americans used daily. This 9-year-old figured it was so many. He says he called up straw manufacturers and calculated 500 million a day. Boom, big number, good number. The mainstream media was off to the races. That 500 million a day number was cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Suddenly the most important thing we could do for the environment—for our children!—was ban plastic straws.
States and cities passed laws against them. California banned them from restaurants outright in 2018. New York, in 2021, changed the law so the only straws on display were paper (you were allowed to ask for plastic). Official fact sheets from Ron DeSantis’s state of Florida instruct Floridians to “Skip the Straw,” citing the 500 million figure. Did anyone question the basis of this?
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It Pays to Be a Friend of Donald Trump Joe Nocera

Two dodgy Democrats had a great day on Monday—thanks to our new Republican president, Donald J. Trump.
The first, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, was granted a full pardon. Back in 2009, after he’d been charged with corruption, Blagojevich got himself booked on Trump’s show, Celebrity Apprentice. (You can see his appearance in these YouTube clips. He was fired, of course.) I don’t know if Blagojevich had a premonition that Trump might someday be in a position to help him, but it sure has turned out that way. Transforming himself from a high-profile Democratic governor to a big-time Trump supporter was the single best move he could have made.
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Stop Making Cents? Charles Lane

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he has ordered his administration to cease production of the penny. The argument for the move seems straightforward enough. It costs more than a penny to make a penny (3.7 cents, according to the U.S. Mint). Given inflation and the move to digital payments, ditching the coin is just common cents, right?
Not necessarily. Life’s about more than just making the numbers add up, and amid all the government waste, doesn’t the humble penny deserve a carve out for sentimental reasons?
Today, we debate the penny’s fate. Good riddance or gone too soon? Deputy Editor Charles Lane supports Trump’s move. Consulting Editor Jonathan Rosen opposes it. Have at it, gentleman.
Charles Lane: President Trump’s decision to end production of the penny has my total support. This mite of a coin betrayed me, quite directly and personally, over the course of 13 years.
“Save your pennies, Chuck,” a supervisor at work told me in 2002, responding to some angst I expressed about future college tuition costs. This was her way of not getting the hint that I needed a raise.
Attitudinally positive as always, I took her advice. I told my 5-year-old son that we would henceforth be keeping every one-cent coin we received as change, found on the street, or won playing dreidel until the moment he left for college.
What a father-son project! So rich in lessons about thrift, consistency, and long-term thinking! And so we collected and collected, filling first one large glass jug and then another, until July 2015, when it was time for the big reveal: We had accumulated 10,142 pennies, about 2.19 per day.
They were worth $101.42, not even enough to cover a month’s fraternity dues.
Wrapping the little suckers in paper rolls to enable deposit at a bank took me several days. Valued at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, the time wasted offset any wealth embodied in our hoard—with change left over.
So I did not need the DOGE to tell me the government lost over $179 million in fiscal year 2023 minting more than 4.5 billion one-cent pieces at a cost of three-plus cents each. I already knew that a penny is much more trouble than it’s worth.
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