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Ever since Donovan Scott was about ten years old, he’s known he wanted to go to a historically Black college or university.

He was drawn to depictions he saw of them in movies and TV shows. Plus, he said, “a lot of my family went to historically Black colleges, like my father, my grandmothers, my auntie.”

Now 18, and just through the long saga that is the college search and application process, he’s bound for an HBCU in the fall. First though, high school graduation, in just a few weeks.

“This year rushed by really fast,” said Scott, who lives in Savannah, Georgia, with his mom, dad, and three-year-old brother. “I kind of wanted to enjoy it a little bit more. And I did enjoy some parts, but it just slipped by me, like water.”

Scott’s parents started taking him to look at colleges back when he was a sophomore. HBCUs mostly, with good mechanical engineering programs and marching bands. His mom, Toni Gray, said they started talking to him about finances then, too.

“I was always big on telling him kind of like, well, ‘Hey, you go where you’re wanted,’” she said with a laugh. Meaning: to a school that gives you money.

“Big names are great. And I actually wanted a big name school for him,” she said. “But at the end of the day, just with how the economy is … we're going to go whatever leaves us with less debt. So he understood that going in.”

Money was always going to be a big part of the decision for Gray, Scott, and their family. But it became an even bigger part once Congress approved new caps on federal student loans for both parents and students.

Starting this summer, parents will now only be able to borrow up to $20,000 a year in federal Parent PLUS loans, and will have a lifetime max of $65,000 per child. The annual amount undergraduate students can borrow from the government hasn’t changed, but there is a new lifetime cap on how much they can take out for undergrad and graduate school combined: $257,000.

At many private colleges and universities, the cost of attendance can easily exceed the new federal loan caps. The only other option for students enrolling this fall will be private loans, which not everyone will qualify for, and which don’t have as many protections.

Gray talked about all of this with Scott as he was narrowing his list of schools down last fall, but encouraged him to apply everywhere anyway, and see what kind of aid and scholarships he might get. So he did.

“He got into pretty much every school he applied to,” she said. “We sat down with the numbers and did the cost. So that was the hard part.”

The U.S. hiring rate is at its lowest point since the pandemic began, many consumers are still grappling with inflation, and nearly half of Americans would struggle to cover an emergency expense.

Although we are not in a recession, 57% percent of Americans believe we’re in one, according to a December poll from the U.K. publication The Guardian.

Inflation since the COVID-19 pandemic has put pressure on the lower half of the income distribution, said Alex Hsu, an associate professor of finance at Georgia Tech. “It’s just very tough to survive,” Hsu said. Since April 2020, consumer prices have risen 29%. Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer. Those invested in the stock market are seeing their wealth rise thanks to generous market returns.

Some economists say we’re living in a K-shaped economy, a term used to describe the increasing divide between the wealthy and poor.

The National Bureau of Economic Recession, the group that officially declares whether the U.S. is in a recession, defines one as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months.” It takes into account numerous factors like gross domestic product, personal income and employment levels. The NBER is very cautious in declaring a recession, and we don’t know if we’re officially in one until months after we’re in an actual economic downturn, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

“That’s why you have economists engaging in this age-long debate: ‘Are we in recession or not a recession?’” Zandi said.

The prospect of super-hacker artificial intelligence systems, like Anthropic’s Mythos, has sent many leaders in government, finance, and the business world into a cybersecurity panic.

Mythos is Anthropic’s latest and greatest AI model the company said is too dangerous to release to the public because it’s so good at uncovering security vulnerabilities.

Anthropic has shared a preview version with a group of large companies in tech and finance to get a head start on patching the security holes that Mythos finds. OpenAI’s latest cyber model is raising similar concerns.

“It was inevitable,” said Steven Weber, a retired University of California, Berkeley, professor who led the Center for Long Term Cybersecurity.

He’s long worried about AI empowering malicious hackers, because if there’s one thing we know today’s large language models are really good at, it’s coding.

“So the idea that the models were going to discover bugs in code, it doesn't really surprise me,” Weber said.

Anthropic and OpenAI claim their new models are significantly more capable at detecting unknown bugs in the code that underlies everything from operating systems to web browsers.

These so-called “zero day exploits,” allow bad actors to access systems through back doors nobody knew were there. No patch exists to lock them.

“Zero day exploits are the nuclear weapons of the cybersecurity world,” said Weber.

And like nuclear weapons, finding zero day vulnerabilities had largely been the domain of sophisticated state-level actors. But AI is changing that.

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There are just a few truly American art forms: Jazz, abstract expressionism, stand-up comedy… but what about merchandising?

Enter Yale University’s Bicentennial Schlock Collection, which shows how businesses repurposed American iconography for lunch specials, barf bags, processed food and even condoms (“One Time for Old Glory”) to cash in on the 1976 celebration.

These tacky, patriotic products are just a sampling of the tens of thousands produced. They invite us to consider the national image Americans were ready to buy, and sell, in the aftermath of Watergate.

“We want to prompt people to think about where their ideas about patriotism come from,” Yale curator Joshua Cochran told the New York Times. “The Bicentennial was a formative moment for a lot of people, when the iconography was inescapable.”

Fifty years later, there’s a lot less merch to be found for “America250,” although one might argue the Trump administration is making its own schlock now.