For Madeleine Elizabeth Jackman, the only thing scarier than choking as members of her family looked on was realizing that “no one sitting around me knew what to do.”
“In a whole restaurant full of people, only one customer, a registered nurse, had the proper training to save my life,” Jackman, of Newburyport, said.
That fateful moment brought Jackman, the president of her Red Cross Club at Newburyport High School, and a rising senior, into contact with state Senate Minority Leader Bruce E. Tarr.
And together, they hatched a plan that would become a bill, and, they hope, eventually, the law of the land in the Bay State.
Namely, making CPR training and training on defibrillators a high school graduation requirement. And last week, Jackman and Tarr, R-1st Essex/Middlesex, made the case for the bill before the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education.
“There’s a lack of CPR training amongst the population, and though I was lucky, it can cost lives,” Jackman told the panel during a public hearing in Gardner Auditorium at the State House last week.
“Now, here’s an even more shocking statistic: Massachusetts is one of only seven states in all of America in which CPR is not already a high school graduation requirement,” Jackman continued.
“We are a state that prides itself on providing the best access to health care in the world, and yet we are not granting the same access to our students,” she continued. “CPR itself is a straightforward yet immeasurably impactful skill that can be taught in under two hours.”
Your Monday Long Read
If you’re one of the millions of people who log onto Reddit every day, congratulations, you’re helping to keep one of the last vestiges of the delightfully weird, non-corporate, old internet alive.
But thanks to the rise of AI, the site is facing new challenges, even as its popularity explodes thanks to folks who’ve just had it with algorithm-driven social media.
Writing for NYMag’s Intelligencer, John Herrman, explains the tension.
Here’s the germane bit:
“According to Similarweb, it’s one of the largest properties online; if you take away social apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and utilities like Google and ChatGPT, its closest competition among websites is Wikipedia.
“In 2023, according to the company, Reddit had around 60 million unique visitors a day; its latest earnings report puts the number at 108 million a day, 400 million a week, and, according to conservative estimates, well over a billion different people using it every month. About those earnings reports: In 2024, Reddit went public. Its stock price popped, then climbed alongside its traffic. Revenue is way up, and after years of losses, the company eked out a slim profit in the last quarter.”
“Why now? Reddit’s co-founder and current CEO, Steven Huffman, suggests the answer is obvious. ‘When we started Reddit, it was a web page of 25 links from around the internet,’ he says. ‘Now, 20 years later, you’re stumbling into some thread where people are telling stories they’ve never told before and it drifts into life advice for someone who lives 2,000 miles away.’ He didn’t see that coming, he says, but “in hindsight, it actually makes a lot of sense.”
That’s it for today. As always, tips, comments and questions can be sent to jmicek@masslive.com. Have a good week, friends.
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