First Run News

The admissions process is out of whack. Just ask the heartbroken applicant, rejected by her dream school. Ask high school counselors, who complain that colleges don’t reward promising students for their creativity, determination or service to others. Even the gatekeepers at some famous institutions acknowledge, quietly, that the selection system is broken. Ask five people how to fix it, though, and they’ll give five different answers. Sure, you might think colleges put too much stock in the SAT, but your neighbor’s kid with the near-perfect score thinks it should matter a lot.

When Elle Fraser, a business operations assistant for the New Jersey Devils, came down with the flu just before Thanksgiving last year, she didn’t think about staying home from work. The hockey team had home games on Wednesday and Friday that week, and she worried that her work would never get done without her, even if she had a 103-degree fever. She toughed it out, alternating between chills and sweats, falling asleep at her desk, wiping down every surface she touched, and insisting to co-workers she was wearing mittens to handle tickets only because she was cold. On that Wednesday, Ms.

A Tesla is an electric car. Just about everybody knows that. But it is less widely known that the car was named for Nikola Tesla, an electrical engineer who was once renowned as the prototype of a genius inventor. While Tesla’s star began to fade long ago, Elon Musk has contributed to something of a Nikola Tesla revival. In the age of Edison, Westinghouse, Marconi and J. P.

What two words can inspire more fear in drivers in wintertime than “mixed precipitation”? Perhaps “black ice,” the slick patches that can form unpredictably and almost invisibly because they blend in with the asphalt. Adrianne Reilly of Wallkill, N.Y., recalled an encounter with black ice while driving on I-79 near Erie, Pa., in 1989, in an episode that left her and her husband unhurt but badly shaken. “The car did two 360-degree turns before screeching to a halt on the side of the road,” she wrote on Facebook. Her husband, David, who had been reading in the passenger seat, repeated: “‘We’re a

1,393 nuclear warheads deployed on ICBMs, submarines and heavy bombers. The US also has non-deployed and inactive warheads that, when added to the deployed warheads, raises to 4,571 the total number of warheads in the U.S.

Size matters. So says President

President Donald Trump hit back at Steve Bannon in scathing comments on Wednesday saying that when his former White House chief strategist was fired "he not only lost his job, he lost his mind". President Trump's comments, which came in the form of a written statement from the White House, were in response to Bannon's strident criticism of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort for sitting down with a group of Russians who promised damaging information against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election in excerpts from a new book by Michael Wolff, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump Wh

President Donald Trump has dissolved the presidential commission created to investigate his unproven claims that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election. The commission, which was created through an executive order of May of last year, was unceremoniously ended Wednesday by another executive order. The White House announced the dissolution in a press release, citing many states' refusal to turn over information needed for the inquiry as the impetus for disbanding the commission. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive

Lawyers on behalf of Stephen Bannon demanding he refrain from making disparaging comments against the president and his family. The letter comes after excerpts from a forthcoming book by journalist Michael Wolff were made public Wednesday, causing a stir. Trump attorney Charles J. Harder of the firm Harder Mirell & Abrams LLP, said in a statement, "This law firm represents President Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. On behalf of our clients, legal notice was issued today to Stephen K.

DATA: Twitter Daniel McLaughlin / Globe Staff © 2018 Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC