For years, educators across Iran have taken to the streets to demand fair wages, better working conditions, the release of detained teachers, the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free education for all children and to peaceful assembly and association. For years, they have faced arrests, enforced disappearances, prosecutions on national security charges, dismissals, imprisonment and solitary confinement.
We shoot things off into the ether and hope something will stick — that people will hear our calls to rise up and somehow self-organize. Or that if we point at a problem often enough, everyone will arrive at the same solutions we did. And each time something or someone does break through, it feels like luck.
The 1.5 degrees C target was originally set by a landmark, legally binding international agreement back in 2015, at the Paris meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Paris Agreement aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly and hold the planetary temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius, while pursuing efforts to limit the warming to 1.5 degrees C.
In 2025, Gen Zers visited bookstores and public libraries more than they did in 2022. About 36% of Gen Zers said they found a book through a librarian, up from 15% in 2022. We also asked about their experiences of loneliness, with 85% saying they wanted to find another place to relax outside their home. Gen Zers who didn’t visit libraries had higher loneliness scores than those who did.
Determining whether an employee is engaged boils down to a single question: Does the work matter to the person doing it? Engaged employees are invested in the outcome of their work. Disengaged ones have stopped caring.
As I’ve written before, resistance to an authoritarian regime is measured by greater unity, greater nonviolent discipline in the face of violence, greater numbers and greater ability to provoke defections.
So how are we doing? Allow me to skip around with a few thoughts.
