Zvezdelina Stankova has taught mathematics at UC Berkeley for nearly three decades. But in 2023, while teaching introductory calculus for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, she noticed that something was quite wrong. The bottom 25 percent of students were not just struggling with the coursework, Stankova told me; 'people were in freefall.' Teaching was becoming impossible. 'With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x ' 2 = 5,' Stankova said. Mina Aganagic, a string theorist at Berkeley who has taught calculus for 20 years, noticed something similar. 'I realized that for students to follow me,' she told me, 'I had to start reviewing basic algebra stuff, like fractions.' The lack of mathematical fluency, Aganagic said, extended even to 'the meaning of equals in an equation.' Both professors said their students came to office hours and still tried hard to pass'often by trying to commit equations to memory when they could not understand them. But however hard they worked, most of the students who arrived to calculus class without knowing algebra failed....

As recently as five years ago, Spain was no one's idea of an economic success story. Southern European countries have long been notorious for lagging behind their neighbors to the north. Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain were referred to by the intentionally unflattering nickname 'PIGS' after they had to be bailed out following the 2008 financial crisis. 'Greece, but also Spain and Portugal have to understand that hard work'meaning ironfisted money-saving'comes before the siesta,' the German tabloid Bild wrote in 2010. And yet, since the coronavirus pandemic, Europe's major economies'including the United Kingdom, Germany, and France'have slumped, while Spain's has boomed. Over the past three years, Spain has accounted for one out of every three jobs created across the European Union. Disposable income has risen three times as fast as in France and eight times as fast as in Germany. Unemployment, poverty, and inequality have fallen to their lowest levels in nearly two decades. In 2024, The Economist ranked Spain as the No. 1 economy in the world. That success has helped the country's main center-left party, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, remain in power for eight years, even as incumbents across the continent have lost ground to right-wing populists....

Employees can pragmatically absorb only one or two major changes per year, yet leaders are planning three or four by 2027, according to research. Leaders who want to help their teams navigate change must pay close attention to how people are experiencing it. They can apply three strategies to help: Make dialogue with employees nonnegotiable, develop a shared change story, and sequence changes better. In 2021-2022, CareRx was handling an ambitious expansion. In a span of 20 months, the Canadian pharmacy services company tripled its business through a series of acquisitions. Each acquired company brought its own processes, systems, and cultural norms. Employees barely had time to adjust before the next change arrived. 'We were growing so fast that the organization could not keep up,' said Adrianne Sullivan-Campeau, chief employee and customer experience officer at CareRx. 'We had teams under the same roof not speaking the same language. It was an us-versus-them situation.' In late 2022, compounded by the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, turnover spiked and customer complaints piled up. At one location, Sullivan-Campeau recalled, a leader from the head office arrived to roll out yet another change, and employees turned them away. ''Leave us alone,' they said. 'We're done.''...

According to Americans, it is bad out there. Real bad. This month, the University of Michigan's index of consumer sentiment dropped to its lowest point since 1952, when the survey started. A poll of potential Republican voters found that just 43 percent rated the economy as 'excellent' or 'good' and 55 percent as 'fair' or 'poor'; for potential Democratic voters, the shares were 5 percent and 94 percent, respectively. Low-income families are nervous, and so are high-income ones. Students and retirees are dour. Rural and urban voters are dissatisfied. People are worried about the present and future. They're concerned for themselves and their neighbors. Indeed, households are feeling worse about their personal finances and the broader state of the economy than they did during the Great Inflation of the 1970s, when the cost of groceries doubled and the government was forced to ration gasoline; the Volcker shock, from 1979 to 1982, when the average interest rate on 30-year mortgages hit 18.6 percent and the country went into devastating back-to-back recessions; the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, when 200,000 firms collapsed, the unemployment rate flirted with 15 percent, and essentials such as infant formula became impossible to find; and the Great Recession, when the stock market lost half its value, the banking system teetered on the brink of implosion, and lenders foreclosed on 6 million homes....