August 3, 2026

Photo credit: Boston Globe / Contributor / Boston Globe via Getty Images

Since 1978, “duration of status” has governed immigrant students, allowing them to stay in the United States for as long as they maintained their status and made progress toward completing their program. If they needed more time, a university official could typically extend their program’s end date.

Come September, that will change. F-1 students will be allowed an admission period of no more than four years. Anyone who takes longer (like doctoral students) will have to pay a $420 fee and gather evidence to persuade U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that he should be allowed to finish his program.

“The administration is right that student visas require enforcement. Visa mills, fake employers, and ‘forever students’ are small but real problems,” Santiago Vidal Calvo writes. “But the old system does not produce fraud on a scale that justifies alienating immigrant students, many of whom might otherwise become some of America’s most valuable residents.”

Indeed, of the 1.58 million active records in the government’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, only about one-tenth of 1 percent of them had unusually long enrollments, a distinction that doesn’t automatically signify fraud. “The category could include lawful students who completed multiple degrees or pursued extended doctoral research,” Vidal Calvo explains.

Read more about the new rule.

On May 21, 2020, Anthony Fauci wrote: “It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable.”

That’s just one of the many jarring entries Fauci wrote in his Covid diary. These entries are significantly more revealing than his Senate hearing proved last week, since he refused to answer any questions and invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.

Senator Rand Paul accused Fauci of funding dangerous “gain of function” research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the Covid-19 virus most likely originated, eventually killing 20 million people. Paul asserted that Fauci later attempted to cover up his ties to the Wuhan lab by promoting a report that the virus had arisen naturally.

“But Fauci can be blamed for only so much,” Nicholas Wade writes. “The pandemic’s 20 million deaths rest squarely on the shoulders of the Chinese government that controlled the research in Wuhan, let it proceed in unsafe conditions, and to this day has covered up all the relevant information in its possession.”

Read more.

Many great biographies of George Washington have been written, but H. W. Brands’s new American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington stands out for its reliance on primary sources and insightful, witty commentary. “Though known as a popularizing historian, here Brands has written an unabashedly scholarly narrative, which nevertheless retains his usual readability,” Edward Short writes. “Disdaining paraphrase, he replicates the texture and tone of Washington’s eighteenth-century world by letting his subjects speak for themselves.”

Read Short’s review.