A school owner urged kids to choke a classmate. Arkansas still funds it.

01 • 25 Minute Read

ProPublica

Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

This Private School Had Students Scrub Floors and Attack a Fellow Classmate. The State Still Funds It.

In April 2025, the owner of a small Arkansas private school for kids with autism and ADHD led a "group discussion" in which she hit a 13-year-old boy and urged his classmates to choke, slap, and punch him for nearly 40 minutes. Mary "Tracy" Morrison had opened The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain a year earlier, soon after Arkansas began letting families spend public money on private school tuition. The state requires little of these schools beyond fire drills, immunization records, and a flagpole with an American flag, and private schools have more than doubled since 2023. Morrison was charged, pleaded guilty, and served 30 days in jail. Yet state funding to the school resumed two days after it was paused, parent complaints about other schools often went unanswered, and a teacher involved in the attack now runs the school's education program.

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02 • 20 Minute Read

The New York Times

Claire Suddath

Inside the Outrageous Collapse of a ‘Montessori Ponzi’

A decade ago, a Montessori enthusiast named Ray Girn set out to do for preschool what Airbnb did for travel. His for-profit chain, Guidepost Montessori, grew to 150 schools serving tens of thousands of children, then lost $440 million and filed for bankruptcy in 2025. Girn raised $335 million from investors and funded expansion partly with large cash advances from landlords, opening even more schools during the pandemic to keep money flowing. Former employees, several of whom called it a "Montessori Ponzi," describe barely trained teachers, understaffed classrooms, and neglected toddlers.

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03 • 20 Minute Read

The Baffler

Daniel Kolitz

Paid Phones

Daniel Kolitz, recipient of the 2026 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for his excellent Harper’s Magazine feature “The Goon Squad”, once earned a comfortable living ghostwriting SEO-optimized corporate content watched ChatGPT wipe out half his workload within a year. To stay afloat, he turned to cash advance apps with friendly names like Albert, Cleo, Brigit, and Dave, which market themselves as financial wellness tools but function much like the strip mall payday lenders of the 2000s. Subscription and instant deposit fees pile up on loans as small as $25, users end up borrowing from several apps at once, and Albert even quietly pulled money from his account into a savings feature he never signed up for. Online, he finds thousands stuck in the same cycle, many now sending letters revoking the apps' access to their bank accounts.

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04 • 40 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Anne Applebaum

MAGA Is Making the World Safe for Corruption

Anne Applebaum, a historian who has spent decades writing about authoritarianism, makes a sweeping and unsettling argument in this Atlantic essay about what American foreign policy has become. She contends the Trump administration now uses diplomacy to serve private profit and far-right ideology rather than democracy or long-term alliances, with formal channels giving way to donors, informal envoys, and online influencers. In Brazil, the U.S. imposed tariffs and sanctions over the coup trial of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Businessmen with ties to Trump's circle are pursuing oil and development projects in Greenland, and State Department officials have met with separatists in Canada's Alberta ahead of an October referendum. Across Europe and Latin America, Washington openly backs far-right "civilizational allies," while foreign money flows into Trump family ventures.

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A school owner urged kids to choke a classmate. Arkansas still funds it.

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