In a 2024 survey, the Canadian Teachers’ Federation found that 80 percent of teachers report struggling to cope with poor working conditions. Among the exacerbating factors are class sizes, inadequate supports for students with disabilities, and all those unpaid hours required to prepare course material. Instead of tackling these systemic issues, there have been predictable calls to shorten teacher training. But such initiatives risk sending the wrong message about the seriousness of the profession—does the government go around slashing medical training to combat the chronic shortage of doctors? If we want young people to flock back into our bachelor of education programs and build careers in our school systems, then being a teacher needs to be a good job, one that combines solid pay with reasonable expectations.

It took long enough for Parker to receive the care she needed that she stopped asking, “How can I end this pregnancy?” and started asking, “What’s going to happen if I don’t?” In the end, the most helpful medical attention she received was made accessible to her because she knew someone who knew someone else. This path through the system does not offer hope for others, as it can only be followed by disclosing your most private information to an ever-widening pool of people. “It wasn’t until I first wrote publicly about my experience that I was put in touch with the professionals who did offer solutions,” notes Parker. “Before that, my time spent as an anonymous patient in the system felt never ending. So what about everyone else, without a name to use as a passcode?”

While some politicians are celebrating the disappearance of pesky journalists, others are lamenting their absence. Activists who counted on watchdog journalism to keep an eye on elected officials are discovering they must do the job themselves. In the absence of local coverage that introduces people to different perspectives and explores solutions to thorny community problems, social cohesion suffers. Perhaps most importantly, municipalities must now work harder and spend more to keep people informed. Local governance more frequently morphs into crisis management as residents angrily protest decisions by local councils that take them by surprise. And it’s more difficult to get essential information to the public during the floods, wildfires, and other natural disasters that now occur with unnerving frequency.

A study from the University of Michigan published in 2022 did an analysis of almost 4,000 retracted papers to quantify how much attention they received over a ten-year period. The depressing result: retracted papers received more attention—in the popular press, on social media, in academic literature—than studies that are never retracted. This is concerning on many levels; as the authors of the study note, “flawed findings [spread] throughout the scientific community and the lay public.” But Timothy Caulfield, author of The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters, suspects that the content of retracted articles often seems more exciting than studies that are done rigorously. Bad science can be more extreme, and as a result, it grabs more eyeballs, especially if it plays to a cultural moment and/or feeds a controversial position that demands supportive data. Vaccines cause autism! (Wrong and retracted.) Ivermectin treats COVID-19! (Wrong and retracted.) Police shootings are not associated with anti-Black racism! (Wrong and retracted.)