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The inspiring way this Grammy and Oscar winner is working to transform education.

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XQ

Common knows a thing or two about wrestling with tough subjects.  

In his 25-plus years as a Grammy- and Oscar-winning rapper, actor, advocate, and activist, the Chicago native has gone up against racial injustice, social inequality, and poverty with his powerful words and performances.  

But recently, he has taken an active role in another tough battle: education reform.

All photos courtesy of XQ.

In 2006, he started the Common Ground Foundation, a nonprofit that, as he puts it, isn't trying to "preach" to kids, but rather inspire them to lift themselves up.

"I always believed that if we started with the youth then we would be planting the seeds for our future to blossom," says Common in his organization's mission statement. "Give the children a sense of hope, self-esteem, and love that will better the world."

Common's idea for improving education revolves around one simple concept: Education has to evolve.

"I think education has to evolve when society evolves," Common says. "It's like a constant evolution of what the youth may need and what they're attentive to ... and finding out those things and letting that curriculum be something that's progressive."

"I still think about the periodic charts in science that I can still recite," Common says, remembering a science teacher from his youth who made his students rattle off the elements of the periodic table in a rhythmic pattern. He used an engaging and youthful form of communication to teach a lesson that stuck. "His method was fun," he explains.

XQ Luminary: Common

Thanks to one very special teacher, this rapper can still recite the elements of the periodic table.

Posted by Upworthy on Thursday, December 14, 2017

Around the country, more and more schools are helping their students by engaging directly with their interests.

There's Youth On Record, an organization that helps kids catch up on missed high school credits by teaching them music production, and classrooms like Makerspace in Phoenix, where kids can build whatever they want.

If the American education system is to be improved, finding out what kids actually enjoy — and using that to teach — could be a crucial way to do it.

"We have to relate to one another," Common says. "Teachers have to know how to relate. If we can relate as educators, and teachers and school systems to the youth, they will receive it and retain it. And go out and apply it at a higher level."

Whether it's music, fashion, or building robots, there are lessons to be learned everywhere. Common believes that harnessing the power of those natural interests is the key to our future."But I'm just offering my two cents," he says.

"My Common sense. Pun intended."

Learn more at XQSuperSchool.org.

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National Geographic Documentary Films
National Geographic Documentary Films
Family

Nat Geo's 'Blink' tracks a family finding beauty while facing blindness as they travel the globe

“Let's go all in and fill their visual memory with as much beauty as we can."

via Edith Lemay/NatGeo

Mia, Leo, Colin, and Laurent Pelletier pose on top of their camper van in front of adouble rainbow while in Mongolia.

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“Blink,” a new film by National Geographic Documentary Films shows how a family with four children, three of whom are going blind, embraces life in the face of an uncertain future. It’s a testament to the resilience of the Lemay-Pelletier family but also a reminder for all of us to seize the day because all our futures are uncertain.

Edith Lemay and Sébastien Pelletier are the parents of Mia, a 13-year-old girl, and three boys: Léo, 11, Colin, 9, and Laurent, 7. Over the last six years, they’ve learned that Mia and the two youngest boys have retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetic disease in which the cells of the retina slowly die. As the disease progresses, the person develops “tunnel vision” that shrinks until very little vision remains.

The diagnosis devastated the parents. "The hardest part with the diagnosis was inaction. There's nothing they can do about it. There's no treatment,” Edith says in the film.

However, even though the parents couldn’t affect the progress of the disease, they could give their children’s senses an epic experience that would benefit them for a lifetime.

“We don’t know how fast it’s going to go, but we expect them to be completely blind by mid-life,” said the parents. Mia’s impairment advisor suggested they fill her visual memory with pictures from books. “I thought, I’m not going to show her an elephant in a book; I’m going to take her to see a real elephant,” Edith explains in the film. “And I’m going to fill her visual memory with the best, most beautiful images I can.”

The Pelletier family (from left): Mia, Sebastien, Colin, Edith Lemay, Laurent and Leo inKuujjuaq, Canada.via National Geographic/Katie Orlinsky

This realization led to an inspiring year-long journey across 24 countries, during which every family member experienced something on their bucket list. Mia swam with dolphins, Edith rode a hot-air balloon in Cappadocia, and Léo saw elephants on safari.

Colin realized his dream of sleeping on a moving train while Sébastien saw the historic site of Angkor Wat.

“We were focusing on sights,” explains Pelletier. “We were also focusing a lot on fauna and flora. We’ve seen incredible animals in Africa but also elsewhere. So we were really trying to make them see things that they wouldn’t have seen at home and have the most incredible experiences.”

Cameras followed the family for 76 days as they traveled to far-flung locales, including Namibia, Mongolia, Egypt, Laos, Nepal and Turkey. Along the way, the family made friends with local people and wildlife. In a heartbreaking scene, the boys wept as the family had to leave behind a dog named Bella he befriended in the mountains of Nepal.

But the film isn't just about the wonders of nature and family camaraderie. The family's trip becomes a “nightmare” when they are trapped in a cable car suspended hundreds of feet above the Ecuadorian forest for over 10 hours.

annapurna range, blink, nat geoLeo, Laurent, Edith, Colin, Mia, and Sebastien look out at the mountains in the Annapurna range.via MRC/Jean-Sébastien Francoeur

As expected, NatGeo’s cinematographers beautifully capture the family's journey, and in the case of “Blink,” this majestic vision is of even greater importance. In some of the film's quietest moments, we see the children taking in the world's wonders, from the vast White Desert in Egypt to a fearless butterfly in Nepal, with the full knowledge that their sight will fail one day.

Along the way, the family took as many pictures as possible to reinforce the memories they made on their adventure. “Maybe they’ll be able to look at the photographs and the pictures and they will bring back those stories, those memories, of the family together,” Edith says.

But the film is about more than travel adventures and the pain of grief; ultimately, it’s about family.

“By balancing [the parents’ grief] with a more innocent and joyous tale of childlike wonder and discovery, we felt we could go beyond a mere catalog of locations and capture something universal,” the directors Edmund Stenson and Daniel Roher, said in a statement. “Keeping our camera at kid-height and intimately close to the family, we aimed to immerse the audience in the observational realities of their daily life, as well as the subtle relationships between each of them. This is a film built on looks, gestures and tiny details—the very fabric of our relationships with one another.”

Ultimately, “Blink” is a great film to see with your loved ones because it’s a beautiful reminder to appreciate the wonders of our world, the gift of our senses and the beauty of family.

The film will open in over 150 theaters in the U.S. and Canada beginning Oct. 4 and will debut on National Geographic Channel and stream on Disney+ and Hulu later this year. Visit the “Blink” website for more information.

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Science

Ecologist 'burst into tears' seeing endangered gliders using boxes designed to save them

A third of the greater gliders' remaining habitat was destroyed in the Australian wildfires, and researchers didn't know if their high-tech box idea would work.

Mark Gillow/Flickr

Greater gliders are endangered in Australia and rely on old-growth tree hollows to make their nests.

When a team of Australian researchers started checking the high-tech boxes they'd installed to help save endangered greater gliders, they weren't sure what they were going to find. The hope was that the tree-dwelling marsupials would use them for nesting—a replacement for the tree hollows they normally nest in—but no one knew whether or not the creatures would take to them.

So when Dr. Kita Ashman, Threatened Species and Climate Adaptation Ecologist at WWF-Australia, found a glider in the second box she checked, she was thrilled.

"I just burst into tears, I was so surprised and so happy," she told ABC News Australia.

Greater gliders are nocturnal marsupials that live in old-growth forests of eastern Australia. They have large ears, fluffy fur, long tails, and they can glide up to 100 meters at a time. The species is only found in Australia.

"I grew up looking at greater gliders all throughout the Dandenong Ranges. So they have a really special place in my heart," said Dr. Ashman told ANU.

The special nesting boxes were designed and created through a partnership between Australian National University (ANU), Greening Australia and the World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia after bushfires destroyed a third of the greater gliders' remaining habitat. The tree hollows that greater gliders rely on to nest can take over 100 years to form, according to ANU, so it's not like they can just find some new trees to live in when their homes are destroyed.

Nesting boxes that are commonly used for wildlife aren't a good fit for greater gliders, as the thin walls and lack of thermal protection can result in gliders overheating. (Heat-stressed gliders will slow their eating, which can be life-threatening, according to ANU.) The high-tech boxes in this project are insulated and include a non-toxic, heat-reflective, fire-resistant coating to keep gliders safe.

"I've affectionately been calling this design the Goldilocks box because we hope it will keep greater gliders not too hot and not too cold and will help to increase the species' resilience in a changing climate," Ashman said in July 2022.

"Producing and installing high-quality nest boxes is costly," added ANU research fellow Dr. Kara Youngentob, "so this project is very important because it will help us understand if expensive interventions like nest boxes are the best use of funding in our urgent mission to save greater gliders."

It appears that their efforts are paying off.

"What we didn't know was whether these boxes worked and whether they have an impact on the glider population," Dr. Youngentob told ABC News Australia. "Much to our delight, within a few months of them going up they are already being used by gliders, so we know the individuals themselves like them and use them."

According to Youngentob, greater gliders are the largest gliding marsupial at risk of extinction. More than 200 nesting boxes have been installed in Victoria's East Gippsland and in Tallaganda National Park in New South Wales. Youngentob told ABC News Australia that this project will help researchers learn more about how many of the species are left in the wild.

The quiet, nocturnal marsupial faces threats from climate change and deforestation in addition to the wildfires that ravaged Australia in 2020. Their population has fallen by 80% in the past 20 years and the species reached endangered status in July of 2022.

"They're a treasure for this country." Dr. Youngentob told ANU. "And I think the more people know about them, the more that they will fall in love with them and want to protect them too."


This article originally appeared on 1.20.23

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Health

Woman 'spikes' all of her friends' drinks at  party to make a serious point about safety

via Shiraah Benarde (used with permission)

Shiraah Benarde spikes drinks at a party,

A new video by TikTok user Shiraah Benarde is a fun way of exposing a serious problem that countless people face when going to bars, nightclubs, or even a friend’s party. It’s a lot easier than most people think to have their drink spiked, especially when you’re not taking any precautions.

Benarde is the CEO of NightCap, which makes products that prevent people from having their drinks spiked.

In the video, Benarde has several gummy candies and Pixy Sticks at a house party. Throughout the video, she drops them into people’s drinks when they aren’t paying attention without getting caught.

“Pregames and private parties are a false sense of security. You don’t expect anything to happen, but it does,” she captioned the video.

@shiraah

With everything going on with #diddy right now, this is do important to remember. Do not let your guard down even at a private party. #diddyparty #drinkspikingprevention #spiked

Benrade’s experiment is even more eye-opening because it happens at a friend’s house, a place where most people wouldn’t assume they’d have their drink spiked. However, it often occurs in places where people feel like no one would ever tamper with their drink. In this type of situation, the person who spiked the drink could fall victim to someone they trust to take of them in a drugged state.

There are many reasons why people spike drinks, the most common being to render the victim defenseless against sexual assault or robbery. Drink-spiking has also been tied to abuse or dangerous pranks.

It can be tough to know the difference between the effects of alcohol and a doctored drink, but here are some warning signs, according to NBC News.

  • You may feel drowsy and nauseated
  • Your cheeks may feel flushed
  • You may feel like your body temperature has gone up
  • You may feel sexually aroused
  • You may feel like you've had many more drinks than you've consumed
  • You may start staggering and have an unsteady gait



Given that many people don’t tell the authorities that they’ve had their drink spiked it’s hard to know how often it happens. A 2016 study of 6,000 students at 3 American universities found that nearly 8% thought they had been slipped something in a drink at one point in their lives. Another 1% admitted that they had spiked someone’s drink.

Benarde says that she made the TikTok video to remind everyone of the dangers of having their drink spiked at a time when sexual assault is making headlines. “With everything going on with #diddy right now, this is so important to remember. Do not let your guard down even at a private party,” she writes in the video’s caption. Sean Combs, a.k.a P. Diddy, was recently accused by over 120 people of sexual assault, some of whom claim they were drugged.

Many of the 200,000-plus people who’ve seen the video thought it was a great way to show how easy it is to have your drink spiked and to encourage people to be more cautious. “This is a good video. You really don’t think it’s this easy! Especially when you trust someone. I got roofied by someone close to me who I trusted,” one commenter wrote. “Honestly, this is a fun way to teach your friends to pay attention to their drinks,” another added.

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Pop Culture

Guy who sounds remarkably like Michael Jackson gets 27 million views on first TikTok video

Holy moly that voice.

Constru-centro/Wikimedia Commons

Brandon Conway sounds remarkably like Michael Jackson when he sings.

When Michael Jackson died 13 years ago, the pop music world lost a legend. However markedly mysterious and controversial his personal life was, his contributions to music will go down in history as some of the most influential of all time.

Part of what made him such a beloved singer was the uniqueness of his voice. From the time he was a young child singing lead for The Jackson 5, his high-pitched vocals stood out. Hearing him sing live was impressive, his pitch-perfect performances always entertaining.

No one could ever really be compared to MJ, or so we thought. Out of the blue, a guy showed up on TikTok recently with a casual performance that sounds so much like the King of Pop it's blowing people away.

Brandon Conway posted his first TikTok video ever on July 24, and in less than three weeks it's been viewed more than 27 million times. It's just him standing in a parking lot snapping his fingers and singing "The Way You Make Me Feel," but when he opens his mouth, whoa.

As he keeps going, it gets even more whoa. Then he hits Jackson's signature "he he" and the whoa turns into what?!?

Take a listen:

@brandonconway11

First post on tiktok let me know what you guys think! More videos coming soon feom mj to country to rock so yall be sure to stay tuned!#fyp #singer #usherchallenge @usher @tpain #letsgo #firstvideo

Uncanny, right? If you need a reminder of how Jackson himself sounded when he sang it, here's a live performance from Auckland during his 1996 world tour.

Very impressive. You can follow Brandon Conway on TikTok to hear more from him.


This article originally appeared on 8.10.22

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Music savant Kodi Lee gives a completely new version of 'Bohemian Rhapsody' on 'AGT'

Lee gave "America's Got Talent" audiences chills with his haunting cover.

America's Got Talent/Youtube

Kodi Lee has become an "AGT" fan favorite with his next level skills

Since 2019, Kodi Lee has wowed “America’s Got Talent” audiences with his next-level musical skills. That goes for whether he’s performing touching original works or putting his own personal touch on well-known songs.

For “America’s Got Talent: Fantasy League,” the music savant was guided by his mentor Howie Mandel to cover “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen.

It’s hard to imagine a version of this fan-favorite tune you haven’t already heard before, since the song has been covered quite a few times. But once again Lee delivered something epic and completely unique.

Even though judges Mel B and Heidi Klum still prefer Lee’s original songs, all applauded his haunting and emotional piano rendition of the rock-n-roll anthem.

Simon Cowell even said “You use these words ‘Star Quality’ a lot, but you genuinely, Kodi, over the years we’ve got to know you, you’ve just got better as an artist. You’ve never given up, and the Finals just wouldn’t be the same without you in it this year.”

Other viewers applauded Lee for one-of-a-kind performance, agreeing that he did freddie Mercury proud.

One wrote, “‘You can do whatever you want to do in my music, just don't make it boring’ -Freddie. What a magical performance.”

Another added, “Kodi has an amazingly rare talent to be able to sing across different musical genres. He owns them all!!!”

Last but not least, I think this comment sums up the general consensus pretty well: "This version is unlike anything anyone has ever seen before. It’s truly a masterpiece. Kodi is an amazing gift to our world. He continues to change the world just by being himself."

Watch below. And enjoy.

This article originally appeared on 2.13.24

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Joy

We've been Airbnb hosts for 7 years. We agree—cleaning fees and check-out chores are bunk.

This is why Airbnb guests actually make the best hosts.

Photo by Taylor Heery on Unsplash

People are right to complain about being charged a cleaning fee and being asked to do chores.

In 2016, My husband and I started renting our basement apartment out as a short-term rental on Airbnb. We live in a college town and figured we'd get some guests during football game weekends and graduations. We didn't realize how many people come to our town to visit their college kids or check out the school, so we were pleasantly surprised by how regularly we were booked.

In 2019, we bought the house next door and now rent out both floors of the old house as separate units. We love being Airbnb hosts and have had a very successful run of it, with hundreds of 5-star reviews, Superhost status and lots of repeat guests.

We also don't charge a cleaning fee or make guests do check-out chores. In fact, we find both things rather loathsome.

What makes us good hosts is that we've been Airbnb guests for years. As a family of five that travels a lot, we've found far more value in Airbnbs than in hotels over the years. We love having a kitchen, living room and bedrooms and feeling like we have a "home" while traveling. We even spent a nomadic year staying at short-term rentals for a month at a time.

When you've experienced dozens of Airbnbs as a guest, you learn what guests appreciate and what they don't. You see what's annoying and unnecessary and what's to be expected in comparison to a hotel. We started taking mental notes long before we started our own rental about what we would want to do and not do if we ever had one and have implemented those things now that we do.

As guests, we know the pain of the cleaning fee, so we don't charge one.

via GIPHY

It helps that my husband has a flexible schedule and grew up helping with his parents' janitorial service, so most of the time he cleans the apartments himself. We could charge a cleaning fee for his time and labor, but even if we were paying for outside cleaners, we still wouldn't put a separate fee onto guest bookings. It makes far more sense to us to just wrap the cleaning fee into the per-night price.

From a host's perspective, the one-night stay is where the cleaning fee question hits the hardest. Whether someone stays one night or 10 nights, the cleaning cost is the same. But spreading the cost over 10 nights is a very different beast than adding it to one night, especially from a guest's perspective. On the host side, if we had to pay cleaners without passing that fee onto guests, we've barely make anything on one-night stays. But on the guest side, a $100 a night stay suddenly jumping to $150 because a cleaning fee was added is painful, and often a dealbreaker. You can see the conundrum.

The way we see it, and as other Airbnb hosts have found, wrapping cleaning costs into the base price comes out in the wash over time, as long as you have some longer-term stays mixed in with the one-nighters. And it's a much better experience for the guest not to get hit with sticker shock on the "final cost" screen, which is already eye-popping when service fees and taxes are added on.

(I will say, this may only ring true for smaller units. If you're renting a huge home, cleaning costs are going to be higher just because it takes longer to clean. But I still don't think the full cost should be passed onto guests as a separate fee.)

As for check-out chores—asking guests to do things like start laundry, sweep the floor, take out the trash, etc.—those have never made sense to us. Hosts should have enough switch-out linens that laundry doesn't have to be started prior to checking out, and none of those chores save enough time for the cleaning people to make it worth asking guests to do it. I can see taking out trash if there wasn't going to be another guest for a while, but usually you'd want to clean right away after a stay anyway just in case it does get booked last minute.

The only thing we ask guests to do is to start the dishwasher if they have dirty dishes (as a guest, I've never found that an unreasonable request), lock the door and have a safe trip home. Don't need to pull the sheets. Don't need to take out any garbage or recycling. Those things don't take that long, but that's just as much a reason not to ask guests to do it. Annoying your guests by asking them to do something extra isn't worth the tiny bit of time it might save the cleaning people.

And you know what? This approach works really well. Approximately 95% of guests leave the apartments clean and tidy anyway. In seven years, I can count on one hand how many problems we've had with guests leaving a mess. That's been a pleasant surprise, but I think part of the reason is that guest are simply reciprocating the respect and consideration we show them by not making them pay extra fees or do chores on their way out.

To be fair, it probably also helps that we aren't some big real estate tycoon buying up a bunch of apartments and turning them into short-term rentals run by impersonal management companies. People's complaints about how short-term rentals impact local housing economies are legitimate. We're more aligned with the original "sharing economy" model, renting out our home to guests who come through town. And in a small college town with a large university, there often aren't enough hotel rooms during busy weekends anyway, so it's been a bit of a win-win.

I think being right next door, having personal communication with our guests (but also leaving them their privacy), and not charging or asking anything extra of them makes them want to be respectful guests. From our perspective, both as guests and hosts, cleaning fees and check-out chores simply aren't worth it.


This article originally appeared on 4.4.24

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