Are the kids okay? Because something troubling is happening in American schools these days. Look, we never had exceptional test scores compared to other developed nations. We’ve been known to produce “middle of the road” type pupils—particularly underperforming in mathematics, though its science and reading scores are sometimes closer to or above the OECD average.

But now, almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, according to new, district-level test score data released Wednesday by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down last year in 83 percent of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70 percent. The declines have affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides.

“I cannot be more emphatic: This is an enormous problem that’s not getting enough attention,” Nat Malkus, a senior fellow studying education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Upshot. Education experts say there is no single reason for the declines. But the timing provides some clues.

Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990—then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops. The pandemic-era backslide in math and reading scores for students across the U.S. was not a sudden catastrophe but the continuation of a brutal, decade-long “learning recession” that began years before COVID-19’s arrival.

Some pandemic effects have lingered. Student absenteeism, for example, remains higher than pre-pandemic. According to NPR, there’s been an important wild card in the effort to improve students' reading skills: A movement among states to change their approach to teaching reading to young children by embracing the “science of reading.” As of March, the Scorecard says, most states had passed new literacy laws, including doubling down on the importance of teaching phonics.

President Donald Trump is in Beijing for his highly anticipated two-day summit with President Xi Jinping. It’s his first visit to China since 2017, during his first term. Upon greeting Trump, Xi said the two countries “should be partners, not rivals,” while Trump said the U.S. delegation looked forward to discussing “reciprocal” trade.

In their closed-door session of talks that are now underway, the two leaders are expected to discuss issues involving trade, the Iran war and Taiwan. Trump, of course, has said he’s most interested in talking trade. However, the New York Times says Xi doesn’t “need a deal” and will no doubt use the war as a power play. China has its own reasons to help end the conflict. Its economy is affected by higher energy prices. A global recession would hurt China’s exports, which are a major engine of growth. “What Xi wants most from Trump lies elsewhere—in Taiwan.”

Taiwan says it is confident that U.S. policy toward the Beijing-claimed island will not change during Trump’s meeting with Xi, but that it is preparing for “surprises.” One concern is whether Trump could agree to a subtle shift in language that is closer to Beijing’s preferred wording, changing Washington’s longtime stance from “not supporting” Taiwan independence to “opposing” it.

You know the saying, “good artists copy, great artists steal”. Well, Instagram is cribbing from competitors like Snapchat and BeReal with a new photo-sharing format they’re calling “Instants”. What is it? Ephemeral photos that you can’t edit and that you can only share with your close friends or followers that follow you back. Instants are available now as a feature in the inbox in the Instagram app and as a separate app that’s now in testing in select countries.

To access Instants from the Instagram app, go to your DM inbox and look in the bottom-right corner for an icon or a stack of photos. After you post a photo, your friends can emoji react to it and send a reply to your DMs, but after they see it, the photo disappears for them. Instants also disappear after 24 hours, and they can’t be captured in screenshots or screen recordings.

Unlike Snapchat, Instants is much more focused on capturing raw moments, like the once-viral BeReal app, and doesn’t allow any filters or retouching. And Wired points out one specific kind of raw image they fully believe adult users will be sharing with their Close Friends list through Instants: nudes. “Even though this isn’t a secure way to share your nudes, I expect Instants to be the next evolution of a Close Friends thirst trap.”