Good morning! Our Spring Reading Challenge just ended and our Summer Reading Contest begins today. With these two challenges, we hope to help teenagers see that journalism is not only important, but also relevant to their own lives. — The Learning NetworkOur 17th Annual Summer Reading Contest begins!Every week for 10 weeks this summer we’re asking students, “What got your attention in The New York Times this week? Why?” To participate in Week 1, students should choose something to read, watch or listen to in The Times, and then submit a short essay or video that answers those questions by 9 a.m. Eastern on June 12. They can choose anything that was published in the print paper or on nytimes.com in 2026, including articles, photos, essays, videos, podcasts or graphics. We hope they’ll click around to find their own great pieces, but we also know that not everyone who participates has a Times subscription so, each week, we provide dozens of free links to interesting articles, features and multimedia. Recent Times reporting about schools
We challenged students to read any three pieces in The Times they wanted and tell us their takeaways.
Ahead of our 17th Annual Summer Reading Contest, we posed a mini-challenge in April in which we invited teenagers to choose any three recently published Times pieces from across sections, then tell us what they learned and what they wondered. The results delighted us, both in terms of the variety of what they read and took away from the reading, and in terms of the deep questions it made them ask. We hope you’ll read the whole collection, but here are a few. Each comment links to the article that inspired it. What is the most interesting thing you learned?Ruoyi, 14, Vienna, Va.: I liked learning about how two-thirds of dog owners think their dogs are smarter than average. It shows both how much humans love their dogs and how much we tend to overestimate them. Cameron, 16, London: There are apparently 14,000 McDonald’s in the United States?! What kind of grip does McDonald’s have on your country? Joon, 13, Norwood, N.J.: The sheer dedication, loyalty, and commitment shown by the fans of the Argentine national soccer team. Joseph, 16, Gardner, Kan.: It was crazy to me that a third of Americans cut spending for healthcare, and 11 percent of that third skipped a meal. Aidan, 16, New York City: I found it incredible how quick the Supreme Court was to abandon century-old practices in favor of making hasty, politically-charged, yet enormously consequential decisions. I’ve always regarded the Court as more-or-less impartial and as a key part of maintaining a democracy. Judah, 15, Austin, Texas: How much the world relies on oil coming from the Strait of Hormuz. Yousuf, 16, Lancaster, N.Y.: I had no idea guys were going this far just to look better. What really got me was that Clavicular started taking testosterone at 14 and was okay with possibly never being able to have kids just so he could look good. Xihan, 15, Plainview, N.Y.: Many people see Gen Z in a negative light, thus I had never known that Gen Z is making such big changes in the world. What questions did you have after reading these pieces?Eden, 15, Kenya: Doesn’t reporting on a trend unintentionally help popularize it? Jackson, 17, Greenwich, Conn.: Is an AI partner better than no partner? Is an AI partner better than a bad partner? Does having an AI partner affect relationships outside of one’s love life? Quinn, 15, Lancaster, N.Y. : How many people have avalanche rescue dogs saved over the years? Eirene, 14, Shanghai: To what extent should life-support decisions be made on science versus person-to-person connection? Fayme, 16, Houston: Is self-improvement caused more by internal, personal effort or by outside experiences and relationships. Sophia, 16, Birobidzhan, Russia: Have we reached a “civilizational ceiling” where our technological advancement has finally outpaced our psychological and moral evolution? Does a future of true progress actually require us to selectively “de-digitalize” our lives in order to remain human? Ashley, 16, Bentonville, Ark.: Are more bad things happening than good? We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to LNfeedback@nytimes.com. More next week.
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