Hi! Ever wondered how life used to be before inventions like the air conditioner, socks, headphones, etc. Modern technology makes us fascinate how did the primitive man walked on this planet without it; one such fascination today is social media:

Your taps and your scroll, is all that it needs,
It preys on your mind, and we call it a feed;
No love nor compassion, hatred grows here like weeds,
They'll die for attention, it's a modern man's greed.

Mankind has always felt some regret with its greatest of inventions, one of them being social media. It has changed the very fabric of reality that we live in, to the point one can hardly tell what's real and what's not. Some food for thought, on the occasion of Social Media Day. So, don't forget to live outside your screen and now let's get started with our regular:

Today’s special:

Short-end of The Stick: The gender pay gap has eased up but not really by much!

It’s The Damn Phone: How strict are U.S. schools on banning phones and does that leave any lasting impact?

Hard On Harvard: Harvard's acceptance rate is pretty tight unless you were an early bird.

The pay gap is narrowing in America but just not in a way that feels permanent. By the third quarter of 2025, women who were working full-time earned about 81 cents for every dollar made by men, etching a pay advantage of 24% in place for the latter. In weekly terms, that financial gap showing up every single pay cycle translates to $256, with men earning $1,338 as opposed to $1,082 for women.

What’s more telling is how that gap had actually closed up just two years earlier, when women reached 85 cents per dollar in 2023. Since then, progress has been slippery to say the least and instead of a steady climb it looks more of a movement that starts and stops indefinitely.

Disparity in pay gap is dramatically contingent on the occupation itself men earn $147,225 compared to $77,270 for women in field related to securities, commodities, and financial services sales while in profession like umpires, referees, and other sports officials, women out earn men’s $34,204 by $122,760.

Parity when it comes to gender pay is backsliding, with women earning 18.6% less per hour than men, a slight widening from the previous year. If looked through the lens of category of work even there, pay differences persist to no surprise men earn more than women across all 15 major occupational groups, including high-paying fields like legal professions where gaps are the widest.

If analysed from the ground level across 170 U.S. cities, women earn about 17% less than men on average, and the gap stretches beyond 30% in some place. The flipside to this is that in only 4 cities women earn more than men with the largest reversal reaching $8,452 more per year. Also, it’s worth mentioning among younger workers aged 25–34, the margins are closer allowing them to pocket about 95 cents per dollar, but that progress hasn’t been realized across the broader workforce.

In fact, some of the progress made has less to do with pay structures and more to do with life choices. . As the average number of children per worker fell from around 2.4 to 1.8, the pay gap narrowed to 8%, in other words, fewer career interruptions have closed part of the pay divide.

America’s push to limit screentime in the classroom is reaching new heights. As of this spring, about 37 states have moved to restrict or ban phones entirely in schools. On the other spectrum, districts are opting for “bell-to-bell” bans which mandate students to keep their devices locked in magnetic pouches for the entire day.

Public systems are spending real money to make sure this materializes too: New York City schools alone allocated $29 million toward phone pouches, followed by Los Angeles committing another $5.2 million.

This push stems from a growing frustration among educators as per a Pew research survey about one in three teachers considered student cellphone distraction a “major problem,” and among teachers that number is at staggering 72%. As for the public, they are vouching for this shift with 74% of Americans now supporting classroom phone bans for middle and high schools, up from 68% just months earlier.

In one sense, the bans are working exactly as intended. A national study on school phone restrictions spearheaded by researchers from Stanford, Duke, Michigan, and Pennsylvania found that students using phones in class for personal reasons plunged from 61% to 13% after the onset of strict pouch policies were introduced. GPS tracking data also showed a roughly 30% decline in device activity during school hours by the third year of implementation.

The catch is that the academic results of the students aren’t getting any better. Researchers found that standardized test-score improvements were “consistently close to zero,” followed by little to no substantive change in attendance, attention in the classroom, or online bullying either. Albeit the situation was better for high schools with slight gains in math performance, conversely middle schools were dealing with modest declines.

Instead, the effects of this are manifesting in the behavior of students, and it's not entirely always positive. Suspension rates increased by roughly 16% within the first year after the introduction of bans as schools enforced the new rules and students adjusted. Student well-being also initially dipped before rebounding later. By the third year, however, researchers found well-being levels had climbed above baseline levels, while disciplinary rates were normalized.

For students aspiring for Harvard University, the odds of getting in are getting slimmer by the year. For the class of 2029, just over 2,003 students were admitted out of nearly 48,000 applicants for the Class of 2029, setting acceptance rates down to roughly 3–4%. That’s less than half the rate at which Harvard was admitting back in 2008, when about 9% of applicants got in.

But there’s one loophole though that applicants keep chasing: that is to apply early. In recent cycles Harvard’s Restrictive Early Action pool accepted 8–9% of applicants as opposed to just about 2.7% during Regular Decision. In other words, unlike everyone else, early applicants were landing acceptance letters at nearly triple the rate.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Harvard becomes “easy” in November. The early pool is stacked with recruited athletes, legacy candidates, and applicants whose profiles are already polished months ahead of schedule. Still, with roughly 40–44% of the incoming class effectively filled before spring decisions even arrive, late applicants are fighting over a shrinking number of seats.

What makes the frenzy remarkable is the hefty price tag. Total annual costs at Harvard now sits near $87,000, yet the university remains endeared to Gen Zs as their top “dream school,” according to The Princeton Review. Part of that all boils down to financial results and expectations roughly half of surveyed seniors from Harvard’s Class of 2025 expected to make more than $90,000 straight out of college, while about 1 in 5 anticipated salaries north of $130,000.

And despite the intimidating sticker price, Harvard’s aid machine actually minimizes the blow: 45% of students who are admitted get to attend tuition-free; much more families making under $200,000 annually are qualified for free tuition.

But of course, the path to get in remains cutthroat; aspirants are up against the daunting task of competing with applicants who have SAT scores between 1460 & 1570. Yet even that barely guarantees a chance of consideration. As Harvard’s applicant pool keeps piling up, being exceptional is starting to feel like the minimum requirement just to enter the race.

Airbnb may be the most talked-about venture, but there's one that beats them all. Can you guess which one?

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