Education

When we are facing a challenge in life, we're often encouraged to talk about it with a confidante, a family member or to seek professional counsel like a therapist. But some people find more comfort in silence.

In her new memoir, Sit, Walk, Don't Talk, Jennifer Howd takes readers into the world of silent meditation retreats, where, as you may imagine, there's scarcely any talking.

Howd says the practice of mediation is a viable option for pretty much anyone seeking an escape from our sometimes too-noisy world.

Ignorance is Strength, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Big Brother is Watching: 1984 has come to Broadway. George Orwell's dystopian novel tells the story of a man who works at the Ministry of Truth creating fake news for a totalitarian regime. The stage adaptation opens in New York on Friday.

After a recent performance of 1984, Dorit Friedman, a doctor from Great Neck, N.Y., says she was stuck by how contemporary the story feels. "Big Brother is watching us, that's for sure ..." she says. "Little did we know that that was going to be reality."

She kept getting confused, losing her place in lessons at the University of Utah, where she taught. And then, just before she turned 61, Gerda Saunders was given a diagnosis: She has early-onset microvascular dementia.

Saunders and her husband Peter are South African; they emigrated to the States back in the 1980s.

This trip is not going to end well.

That much is clear from the outset in Arabia Felix. The book — first published by Danish novelist Thorkild Hansen in 1962, later translated into English by James and Kathleen McFarlane, and now out in a new edition — flirts with the ambiguous boundaries between history, fiction and travelogue. But almost from the very beginning, it is unmistakably firm on one point: Just about every one of the bright young scholars who undertake the ambitious scientific expedition at the heart of the book is going to die.

I keep wondering how I'd feel about The Changeling if I'd started by reading the flaps, and let someone else build the box into which to pour my reading experience.

The land border crossing between Tijuana, Mexico and San Ysidro, Calif. is one of the busiest in the world. Every day 25,000 people cross the border on foot. Among the crowd are students whose families live in Tijuana. Each morning their families commute many hours to bring the children to school in the U.S.

Juan and his mom, Maria, wake up at 5:30 a.m. each day to make the trek from their home in Tijuana to Juan's high school in San Ysidro. Some mornings, crossing the border can take up to an hour and half.

It's the weekend, and that means our rollup of education news around the country — starting this week with some rollbacks.

Freeze of for-profit college regs

The U.S. Department of Education is rolling back two regulations introduced during the Obama administration and designed to protect students, especially those at for-profit colleges.

Alaska is home to about 18,000 fishermen who harvest nearly 6 billion pounds of seafood each year. Salmon dominates the catch, five species in all: chum salmon, sockeye, king, coho and pink.

For a taste of Alaska fishing life, we head out with a father-daughter fishing team as they go trolling for king salmon in the waters off Sitka, in southeast Alaska.

At Yale University's commencement ceremony last month, hundreds of graduating students and their supporters staged a labor protest. The dispute pits graduate student teachers who voted to form a union in February against a Yale administration that refuses to bargain and disputes the election's validity.

Three-course dinner chewing gum.

Fizzy lifting drinks.

Everlasting gobstoppers.

These, of course, are the creations of Willy Wonka, who himself is the creation of author Roald Dahl.