Thank you to the 1,252 teenagers who participated in the eighth week of our 10-week Summer Reading Contest, and congratulations to Annie Ma, our winner, as well as to our many runners-up and honorable mentions.

Scroll down to take a look at the variety of topics — from the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton to climate change and a mystifying math equation — that caught the eyes of our participants this week. You can find the work of all our winners since 2017 in this column.

And please remember to always check the top of our contest announcement to find the right place to participate, any week from now until Aug. 23.

Winner

Annie Ma from California chose an article headlined “There Was No Gunfire in Times Square. But the Panic Was Still Real.” She wrote:

Last Wednesday, while waiting for my bus to depart from the Santa Cruz Metro Center, I was falling asleep to Ed Sheeran when I heard the sound I never thought I would hear. It was like a thousand cymbals had clashed at one moment. In an instant, I was huddled beneath my seat, my body reduced to a twitching sack of adrenaline and jelly. The subsequent panic, gunshots, and dread made the waiting the worst twenty minutes of my life. I eventually learned that the shots were the result of a heated argument rather than a mentally unstable domestic terrorist. Although no one was injured, the incident speaks to the severity of America’s gun problem. As Mr. Wilson explains, the population is so inundated with news of shootings that any loud sound — a vehicle backfiring, a store sign falling — can trigger widespread panic. More and more Americans are experiencing what it’s like to fear for their lives at the hands of a gun. We are actually, as Mr. Wilson puts it, living in a “new normal.” As I listened to the car radio the next morning, I wondered how it might sound if shootings became so frequent they were reported like traffic: “A shooting at the Cupertino Target has the block zoned off and slow traffic backed up into Stelling. Additionally, police investigating a shooting at the Autumn Festival has the southbound 280 exit 13 closed.” It may very well be the new normal if we don’t take action to avoid it.

Runners-Up

Vaidehi B on “How We Fact-Check in an Age of Misinformation”

Shena Han on “The Ideology of Hate and How to Fight It”