Page Type: Middle

The Tony Awards are theater’s biggest night of the year. It’s the awards show that honors the best stage performers, directors, playwrights, costume designers, and anyone else who works to make live performances magical. This year, one of those magic-makers was middle school theater teacher Freddie Hendricks.

Hendricks has dedicated his life to helping middle school students learn leadership and creativity through performance. He teaches acting, movement, and storytelling at the Utopian Academy for the Arts in Ellenwood, Georgia. Some of his pupils have gone on to perform on the world’s biggest stages. 

“I’ve always had a passion for theater. I’m an actor myself, and when I got into teaching years and years and years and years ago, it became my passion,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press.

Paris Fashion Week is a time when established and rising fashion designers showcase their annual collections. Along with style giants like Dior and Chanel, something—or someone—new and exciting hit the runway this year. That someone was 10-year-old Max Alexander, the youngest-ever designer to show a collection at Paris Fashion Week. 

For his debut, Max showed 15 of his designs. His dresses are mainly made with recycled materials, including a military parachute, a vintage sari, and jewelry duster bags. Aiming to make fashion more sustainable and keep textiles out of landfills, Max looks for deadstock (leftover textiles that clothing makers don’t use) and recycled or biodegradable fabrics for his designs.

“I want to show the world how beautiful recycled and natural materials can be in fashion,” he said in an interview with Elle India.

Max has been called a dressmaking prodigy. He began sewing and designing clothes at 4 years old and holds the Guinness World Record for the youngest person to design a runway show, at age 7 years and 266 days. Now he can add showing his designs in the capital of fashion to his growing accomplishments.

Though Max has accomplished a lot at a young age, in many ways he’s living the regular life of a fourth grader. He still spends most of his days going to school, doing after-school sports, and playing with family and friends. For now, he sews and designs in the evenings or on weekends. 

“I come home and do my homework, have a bath, eat dinner, and then I can work in my studio for a little bit before bed,” he explained. “On Saturdays I either see my sewing teacher or I sew at home.”

Max hopes his collection will attract others who appreciate sustainable fashion. “I am happy I got to show the world my designs,” he said in an interview with People magazine after the show. “And maybe encourage people to think about reuse and not buying so much fast fashion.”

Click through the slideshow to check out Max’s designs!

When a devastating hurricane hit the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico in 2017, thousands of homes were destroyed and even more had no electricity to cook food. Immediately after the storm, Chef José Andrés arrived with other volunteers to cook and deliver food to anyone who needed it. Andrés’s nonprofit organization, called World Central Kitchen, provided almost four million meals to people affected by the hurricane. 

Andrés, an award-winning chef and an immigrant to the United States, is now dedicating his life to feeding people when disaster strikes. June is National Immigrant Heritage Month in the United States. It’s a time to celebrate the heritage of immigrants in America and honor their contributions. Immigrant stories like Andrés’s show how much one person can affect a country, and the world.

“My story is like the story of one more immigrant,” said Andrés in a 2020 interview with the Tufts University podcast Tell Me More. “To a degree, I believe we are all immigrants in more ways than we think.”

Andrés learned to cook as a young man in Spain before moving to the United States in 1991 with only $50 in his pocket. After working in several restaurants, he helped open some of his own in the city of Washington, D.C. These largely Spanish- and Latin-inspired eateries made him famous as a chef and earned him several top awards.

Rising sprint star Gout Gout may be on the fast track to making history. The Australian teen’s professional running career is only just getting started, but he has been turning heads for years with his bursts of acceleration on the track. Now 18 years old, Gout recently won the 200-meter title at the 2026 Australian Athletics Championships in April, running the race in 19.67 seconds.

Gout’s time is remarkable simply for being under 20 seconds, a huge accomplishment in sprinting. He is now the first Australian to break the 20-second barrier in the 200-meter race. But what has caught everyone’s eye is the significance of Gout being this speedy at 18 years old. That’s because Gout ran faster than Usain Bolt—called the fastest man on Earth—did at about the same age. 

American colonists declared their independence from Great Britain 250 years ago—but the fight wasn’t over. It took a hard-fought revolution before the United States became an independent country. What many people don’t know is that just before the American Revolution, another nation had fought and won its independence against a mighty empire. Corsica’s revolution helped inspire the spirit of independence in colonial America.

Behind many digital activities—watching TV, using the Internet for a research project, or streaming music on a smartphone—there is a vast, yet unseen network of fiber-optic cables making those activities happen at the speed of light. The person who made it all possible was Narinder Singh Kapany. 

Kapany, an Indian American physicist, is considered the “father of fiber optics.” Without him, it’s likely we would not have the world as we know it. Born in Punjab, India, Kapany completed his graduate studies at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom. It was there, in 1953, that Kapany successfully transmitted light through bent bundles of thin glass fibers.

Actor Zendaya likes to keep her private life private, so it was surprising when photos of her wedding to actor Tom Holland appeared online. The wedding looked beautiful, and Zendaya said her friends complimented her on how the photos came out. There was only one problem—the photos weren’t real. They had been generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

“Many people have been fooled by them,” Zendaya told late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. “People were like, ‘Your wedding photos are gorgeous.’ And I was like, ‘Babe, they’re AI. They’re not real.’”

It’s a common mistake. AI technology is getting better at creating photos and videos, which means we’re more likely to be fooled by them. A few online tools, like WasItAI and Content Credentials, are designed to tell users whether an image was created by AI. But they’re not always correct. 

Underneath a quiet botanic garden about an hour from London, England, there’s a fortified bank that holds a great treasure. It isn’t dazzling gold or sparkling jewels but seeds. The Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) is on a mission to safeguard billions of seeds and with them, Earth’s biodiversity.

“It’s invaluable,” the bank’s seed collections manager, Sharon Balding, told National Geographic Kids. “Our future survival depends on these seeds.” Plant biodiversity is the foundation for life on Earth. Plants are sources of food, medicines, building materials, and oxygen for the atmosphere. “Without [seeds], vital resources like food and medicines could be lost to us.”

Young people have a regular habit of helping others. A new survey found that many members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha are volunteering their time in ways that make them feel more connected to their communities. 

Polling 3,000 young people ages 12–25 in the United States, The Allstate Foundation and Gallup found that 82 percent of young people have participated in some form of service. The poll results paint an uplifting picture of the way young people are helping others and dedicating time to causes they are passionate about.

Community service is work done without payment to help other people. It can mean extracurricular activities like picking up trash in a neighborhood, volunteering for a food drive, or donating clothes. But it can also be something smaller, like helping a friend study or carrying groceries for a neighbor.

Have you ever had a fun idea for an invention but realized it isn’t that useful? Congratulations—you may have just come up with a chindogu! Chindogu, which means “strange tools” in Japanese, is the word for silly gadgets that are almost useful, like a solar-powered flashlight or a glue-stick-style butter dispenser. Why would someone want these barely helpful inventions? It turns out that chindogu are not made for necessity, but for the joy of creating something.

Japanese inventor Kenji Kawakami coined the term chindogu. Kawakami has created more than 600 of these gadgets. 

Here are just a few of Kawakami’s inventions:

• Hay fever hat: a hat with a roll of toilet paper on top so that people can quickly reach a tissue before they sneeze
• Funnel glasses for eye drops: glasses with funnels that help people aim as they apply eye drops 
• Fan chopsticks: eating utensils with a small, motorized fan attached to the end so that the person eating hot noodles can cool their food as they eat
• Umbrella shoes: dress shoes with little umbrellas on the end so that the shoes won’t get wet in the rain