Making Connections: Among so many political and cultural divisions, how can Americans connect with each other? The community organizations honored in this year’s Renewal Awards offer some examples—as does the new podcast S-Town, a true-crime murder mystery that transforms tropes about the urban–rural divide into a deeply empathetic story. And in school, educators are seeing positive results from programs that focus on kids’ social skills and psychological health.

Snapshot

Evening Read

Rachel B. Doyle dubs Thomas Jefferson “the Father of American Cryptography”:

As a youth in the Virginia colony, Jefferson encrypted letters to a confidante about the woman he loved. While serving as the third president of the newly formed United States, he tried to institute an impossibly difficult cipher for communications about the Louisiana Purchase. He even designed an intricate mechanical system for coding text that was more than a century ahead of its time. Cryptography was no parlor game for the idle classes, but a serious business for revolutionary-era statesmen who, like today’s politicians and spies, needed to conduct their business using secure messaging. Codes and ciphers involving rearranged letters, number substitutions, and other now-quaint methods were the WhatsApp, Signal, and PGP keys of the era.

Keep reading here, as Doyle uncovers the Founding Fathers’ secret messages.

What Do You Know?

1. Out of about 33,000 species of fish, ____________ are venomous.

Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.

2. By the World Bank’s estimate, ____________ percent of the jobs now performed by humans could be automated by 2037.

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3. Recent notable rap tracks by Future, Drake, Kodak Black, and Migos make use of what’s believed to be the world’s oldest instrument: the ____________.

Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.

Urban Developments

Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Adam Sneed shares three of today’s top stories:

In the 1960s and ’70s, private cars gobbled up the world-famous streets of Paris. Now the city is fighting back on a massive scale, reclaiming road space in the name of pedestrians, cyclists, and the environment. City planners get tons of pushback when they suggest imposing a fee on drivers as a way to ease traffic congestion. Now they have an unlikely ally: Uber. You may have heard that America’s largest cities are too big and powerful. In fact, they’re not big enough.

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