The Central Valley of California is a vast expanse of flat farmland, far from the bustling cities on the state’s coast. How surprising, then, to drive along its straight highways and suddenly see rising on concrete pillars one of America’s most ambitious infrastructure projects in decades: a bullet-train line planned to run between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The graduation speech is a dismal genre, typically a sermon about showing grit and finding your own path, leavened by dad jokes. America’s university graduating classes of 2024 are unlikely to mind. The great majority of them started college four years ago, amid peak covid. This spring, protests over the war in Gaza disrupted many campuses and led to nearly 3,000 arrests nationwide. At the hotspot of Columbia University in New York, classes went online again, triggering covid flashbacks. University leaders and police prepared this month for tense scenes at graduation ceremonies.