In bold documentary style, Retro Report looks back at the major stories that shaped the world using fresh interviews, analysis and compelling archival footage. Produced by Retro Report for The New York Times.
In bold documentary style, Retro Report looks back at the major stories that shaped the world using fresh interviews, analysis and compelling archival footage. Produced by Retro Report for The New York Times.
Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 2021.
What story does this image inspire for you?
Use your imagination to write the opening of a short story or poem inspired by this illustration — or tell us about a memory from your own life that this image makes you think of.
Post it in the comments, then read the related article to learn more.
About Picture Prompts
• Find all our Picture Prompts in this column.
• Have an idea for a Picture Prompt? Tell us about it.
• Teachers, discover more ways to teach with our Picture Prompts and learn how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning.
Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
adjective: relating to or articulated in the throat
adjective: like the sounds of frogs and crows
noun: a consonant articulated in the back of the mouth or throat
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The word guttural has appeared in 23 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Aug. 18 in “Bully’s Alicia Bognanno Is Revealing Herself, One Rock Song at a Time” by Lindsay Zoladz:
Alicia Bognanno has a horror-movie scream — not the shriek of the beleaguered heroine so much as the guttural howl of the demon pursuing her. “I’m trying to hide from my mind,” she hollered on a track from “Feels Like,” her grungy debut album as Bully in 2015. The song’s foundation trembles in her wake.
“It actually happened because of the lyrics,” Bognanno, the 29-year-old singer, songwriter and guitarist said of her now-signature vocal style, which can instantly flip from melodic to pummeling. “I started writing stuff that was really personal and meaningful, and because of built-up aggression, some of the words just felt like they needed to be screamed.”
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A slide show including some of our most popular images published from 2016 to 2020 in “What’s Going On in This Picture?”
This week, Cream of Wheat changed its packaging. Its parent company, B&G Foods, is the latest company to re-evaluate the racial undertones of its brand after this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests renewed the focus on images that the companies had used for decades to sell their products. Which of the brands below has announced it will do the same?
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How sensitive are you to your surroundings and experiences? Would you say you’re more like an orchid that needs a very particular environment to thrive? A dandelion, which can grow practically anywhere? Or, a tulip — somewhere in between those two extremes? Why?
Sensitive children are keen observers of the world, but tend to get overstimulated. They often live intense inner lives and are highly creative, but they are wary of new situations and of people they don’t know.
They also easily intuit the moods of others and feel their pain. This empathy draws their peers and sometimes even adults to confide in sensitive children. Later in life, they often go into helping professions like health care and counseling, where their natural gifts are put to good use.
Roughly one in five children are highly sensitive, according to the research psychologist Elaine Aron, whose 1996 book “The Highly Sensitive Person” popularized the term. Dr. Aron developed a 23-question test, which is often used to help determine whether or not a child is highly sensitive.
Sensitivity is an inborn temperament, she says, that comes hard-wired and remains with highly sensitive people for their whole lives. Michael Pluess, a professor of developmental psychology at Queen Mary University of London, has found that our life experiences, particularly those early in life, also have a big impact.
“We found that about 50 percent of differences in sensitivity between people are due to genetic factors, the other half by environment, including the prenatal environment,” Dr. Pluess said.
He said people fall roughly into three groups: highly sensitive, whom he calls “orchids,” which are beautiful flowers that need very particular environments to thrive; hardy “dandelions,” which can grow virtually anywhere; and a middle group — the largest — “tulips,” which fall somewhere between the two extremes of the sensitivity scale.
“The idea is not that one is better and one is worse,” Dr. Pluess explained, “but that these are different personalities, each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses.”
He added: “It is important to communicate consistently to the child that their sensitivity isn’t a problem, that it’s a strength so that they can develop a healthy sense of what they can do well.”
In what kind of environment do you thrive? Are you able to be at ease regardless of what is happening around you? Or are you sensitive to the sounds, sights and people nearby? If you were to create your ideal atmosphere to grow and learn, what would it look like?
How do your friends, family, teachers or others in your life talk about sensitivity? In general, is it viewed as a strength or a weakness? After reading this article, how do you think about sensitivity?
Do school, parties, family gatherings or group activities tend to overwhelm you? Do you find that you are able to “intuit the moods of others and feel their pain”? And has the pandemic and staying home more offered you welcome respite to “explore, create, read and think on [your] own”? Or do you miss the energy, crowds and noise that were part of your daily routines?
Do you think that people understand you and the way you relate to the world? What is one thing that you wish people better understood about your nature? If people better understood this part of you, how do you think that would change the way they treated and interacted with you?
According to the article, research has found that being highly sensitive is not specific to one gender; boys who are perceived as more sensitive, however, are sometimes viewed as being less masculine. Is this true in your experience? What roles do gender or other identify factors play in how sensitivity is viewed by your peers, teachers, family members or society? How does this make you feel?
If Dr. Pluess’s flower metaphor doesn’t resonate with you, what is an analogy you can come up with to describe where you fall on the sensitivity scale?
Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 2021.
Featured Article: “18 Revelations From a Trove of Trump Tax Records” by David Leonhardt
On Sept. 27, The New York Times published the results of an examination of decades of personal and corporate tax records for President Trump and his businesses in the United States and abroad. The records provide a detailed history of Mr. Trump’s business career, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
What The Times’s investigative team found was an existential threat to the image he has constructed about his wealth and lifestyle. The tax documents consistently appeared to call into question the business acumen he has cited in his presidential campaign and throughout his public life.
In this lesson, you will learn what The Times’s investigative team discovered in the tax documents and what the investigation reveals about our president. In the Going Further activity, you will synthesize what you’ve learned in a visual one-pager.
Take a moment to study the graph below of income and losses from businesses that Donald J. Trump has run over the past 20 years. Then respond to the following questions:
What story does this graph tell about Mr. Trump and his finances? Write a catchy headline that captures its main idea. If your headline makes a claim, tell us what you noticed that supports your claim.
Read the article, then answer the following questions:
1. Why are President Trump’s tax returns “among the most sought-after documents in recent memory”?
2. What did The Times’s investigative team learn about Mr. Trump’s federal taxes over the past 20 years? How do Mr. Trump’s federal payments compare with other wealthy Americans and past presidents?
3. How was Mr. Trump able to receive a $72.9 million tax refund? Why is it now the subject of an Internal Revenue Service audit?
4. The article states that “the most successful part of the Trump business has been his personal brand.” What evidence supports this claim? How does Mr. Trump’s personal brand compare with the success of his high-profile businesses such as his hotels, resorts and golf courses?
5. How might have Mr. Trump’s financial situation influenced his decision to run for president in 2016, according to The Times?
6. Currently, how many loans is Mr. Trump personally responsible for? Why would a second term as president put his lenders in an “unprecedented position”?
7. Which of the revelations do you think is most significant and why?
Option 1: Share your thoughts
What is your reaction to The Times’s investigation and its findings? What picture of President Trump emerges from it? Does it change how you see Mr. Trump as a man, as a businessman or as a president?
Do you think the financial and tax revelations will affect Mr. Trump’s presidency and the remaining five weeks of the 2020 election campaign? Do you think they should factor in voters’ decisions on Nov. 3?
In “The Picture of a Broken Tax System,” The Times’s Editorial Board writes about the state of the United States tax system that allows a man like Mr. Trump, who before he became president, lived lavishly while paying little in federal income taxes:
Remove Mr. Trump’s current job from the picture, and what remains is a story that still demands attention. The portrait of a man who earned hundreds of millions of dollars, lived a life of comic excess and yet, in many years, paid nothing in federal income taxes is an indictment of the federal income tax system. It illustrates the profound inequities of the tax code and the shambolic state of enforcement.
The government has sharply reduced the share of income that it collects in taxes from the wealthiest Americans. One recent study found that the 400 wealthiest households paid 70 percent of their total income in federal, state and local taxes in 1950, 47 percent in 1980 and 23 percent in 2018. The cuts in tax rates have come mostly at the federal level.
Do you agree that the tax system is broken? Which of the Editorial Board’s recommendations to reform it, such as cracking down on rich tax cheats, restoring I.R.S. funding and modernizing collection techniques, would you support? What other changes to our tax system would you want to see?
Option 2: Synthesize
Synthesize everything you have learned by creating a one-pager. A one-pager is a way to visually share key ideas about a text using both words and images. At a minimum, your one-pager should include:
Three key takeaways about President Trump’s taxes
Two important quotations from the article
One question you still have about the president’s taxes or the U.S. system of taxation in general
Visual elements that illustrate the essential points
You can also include any other information you think is important to share.
Your one-pager can be arranged however you think makes the most sense. But if you need inspiration, you can see examples of other students’ work here or find a template to print or copy here.
About Lesson of the Day
• Find all our Lessons of the Day in this column.
• Teachers, watch our on-demand webinar to learn how to use this feature in your classroom.
Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 2021.
The SAT is taken by some two million high school students every year as part of the college application maze. But this year, just finding the opportunity to sit for the three-plus-hour exam, with its math and verbal sections and optional essay, has been its own test for many students.
Are you taking the SAT this year? Do you think it’s fair to hold the test now, when there are so many hurdles to administering it safely and to offering equal access to all communities? How important do you think tests like this are in general?
Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn more.
About Picture Prompts
• Find all our Picture Prompts in this column.
• Have an idea for a Picture Prompt? Tell us about it.
• Teachers, discover more ways to teach with our Picture Prompts and learn how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning.
Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
: a state of extreme confusion and disorder
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The word pandemonium has appeared in 52 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on June 9 in “New York City’s Kettlebell Shortage: ‘People Are Kind of Freaking Out’” by Aaron Randle:
When the coronavirus forced Americans indoors — out of offices, away from grocery stores and off public transit — gyms under went an economy-rattling shift.
Suddenly fitness enthusiasts were forced to reimagine not only where they could work out, but how. People snapped up benches, resistance bands, dumbbells and kettlebells. In New York, the demand led to a citywide shortage of workout equipment.
“People are kind of freaking out,” said Jahkeen Washington, co-owner of JTW Fit, a boutique gym in Central Harlem. “They feel like all of the hard work they’ve been putting in for so long is at risk of going to waste.”
….“It’s pandemonium,” said Ed Pryst, the chief sales officer of Gym Source, a New Jersey-based workout equipment retailer with several offices in New York. “I’ve been in the business for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”
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