The Brief

For generations of U.S. schoolchildren, phrases like "shuttle run" and "sit-and-reach" likely conjure vivid memories of what was once a staple of American physical education: the Presidential Fitness Test. And thanks to a new executive order, it's slated to return to gymnasiums nationwide.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed the order reviving the test, a set of standardized exercises that schools conducted to measure students' physical fitness for over half a century until 2013, when President Barack Obama phased it out in favor of a more holistic approach. It's not yet clear which exercises will be part of the test going forward, or when it will launch.

It was traditionally conducted once or twice a year for students ages 10 to 17, and included drills like push-ups, the back-and-forth PACER running test and the infamous one-mile run.

And it was a competitive affair: Students who placed at or above the 85th percentile on all exercises were eligible for the Presidential Fitness Award, which Trump's order is also reinstating.

"From the late 1950s until 2013, graduate scholars all across our country competed against each other in the presidential fitness test, and it was a big deal," Trump said at the signing ceremony, flanked by a slew of professional athletes. "This was a wonderful tradition, and we're bringing it back."

Trump is also reestablishing the President's Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition and tasking it with developing criteria for the test. Its rollout will be administered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Kennedy's "Make America Healthy Again" report, released in May, bemoans the decline of American kids' activity and physical fitness levels, rising rates of obesity and what he calls the "childhood chronic disease crisis."

Trump's order adds another layer of urgency, saying that Americans' physical wellbeing is in decline, and is a "threat to the vitality and longevity of our country," especially on the eve of 2026 — America's 250th birthday and the year it's set to host the FIFA World Cup.

"Rates of obesity, chronic disease, inactivity, and poor nutrition are at crisis levels, particularly among our children," the order reads. "These trends weaken our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale."

Leaders made a similar argument about patriotism when the original test was introduced in the Cold War era. But the trends cited by the Trump administration have only worsened since then. So experts and educators tell NPR they are exercising caution when it comes to their hopes for a revamped version.

Joanna Faerber, a physical education teacher working with rural Louisiana schools on federal grants, says Trump's announcement drew a passionately divided response in her professional network.

"We all agree that childhood obesity and lack of physical activity and physical education in school is limited," she said. "I think measuring it is the question."

How did the test come about?

In this 1955 photo, Bonnie Prudden helps a student with sit-ups in the Kraus-Weber test — the precursor to the Presidential Fitness Test.

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Pioneering orthopedic surgeon Hans Kraus — now recognized as the "father of sports medicine" in the U.S. — worked with another doctor, Sonja Weber, in the 1940s to create the Kraus-Weber test. They designed the test to evaluate fitness through sit-ups and other exercises focused on core strength and flexibility.

In the 1950s, Kraus and his fellow fitness enthusiast Bonnie Prudden set about administering the test to thousands of schoolchildren in the U.S., Italy, Switzerland and Austria. The researchers found that 58% of American kids failed at least one element of the six-part test, compared to just 8.7% of Europeans.

"We have no wish to change the standard of living by trying to do away with the automobile and television," Kraus said, presenting their work to a White House gathering in 1955. "But we must make sure that we make up for this loss of physical activity."

Their findings — which Sports Illustrated at the time called "The Report That Shocked the President" — spurred President Dwight Eisenhower to order the creation of the President's Council on Youth Fitness in 1956. (That's the same council that Trump reestablished in this week's order.) The following year, the council piloted its own national fitness test.

President John F. Kennedy built on Eisenhower's momentum, launching a nationwide public service campaign encouraging Americans to take the 50-mile hikes once required of U.S. Marines. Kennedy was a strong advocate of physical fitness, penning an influential Sports Illustrated essay to that effect — titled "The Soft American" — as president-elect in 1960. Trump referenced the essay in his executive order, and RFK Jr. talked about it at the signing ceremony.

"He was lamenting the fact that America had prided itself on a beef jerky toughness, and that … we were falling behind Europeans, we were falling behind other nations," Kennedy said of his uncle.

The third iteration of the council under President Lyndon B. Johnson formalized the fitness test in 1966, and added the element of an award for top performers.

From there, the test became a fixture of American P.E. classes, though its components did evolve over the decades. For example, it ditched the softball throw, which came to be seen as more of a skill (for grenade-wielding soldiers) than a measure of fitness.

"I think it was instilled to try to get people back in the '60s ready to enter into the armed forces and get them fit for battle," Laura Richardson, a clinical associate professor in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Michigan, told NPR. "And then as time evolved, they said, 'We need to change this.'"

Why did the test go away?

Over the decades, the physical fitness test drew increasing criticism for its negative impact on mental health. Many students found it an exercise in humiliation in front of their peers, fueling concerns about body image from a young age.

Critics also doubted the test's effectiveness, saying its task-specific, one-size-fits-all nature was not conducive to making individual progress towards a healthier lifestyle. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data shows that the adult obesity rate rose from about 13% in 1960 to about 34% in 2008, during the rough window the test was in effect.

The Obama administration phased out the fitness test after the 2012-2013 school year, replacing it with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program. The voluntary program provides resources to schools for assessing and recognizing youth fitness, shifting its emphasis from athleticism to overall health.

Many schools do that using the FitnessGram Assessment, which was developed by the Kenneth H. Cooper Institute at Texas Tech University and evaluates criteria like aerobic capacity, flexibility, body composition and muscular strength.

While specifics about Trump's revamped Presidential Fitness Test are still scarce, the educators NPR spoke with hope it will continue to prioritize that kind of health-related fitness over specific skills.

They would like to see the test include robust resources for the teachers who will be implementing and collecting data from it. And they hope that it will enable schools to spend more time allowing and encouraging kids to be active — not just to prepare for the test, but to form lifelong habits.

"A fitness assessment is just to let you know where you are," Faerber said. "It's not the end. It's the beginning of changing."

Ricardson says it will likely take years to see whether the new test is working, because of the amount of individual and population-level data required. And, she notes, fitness is just one avenue for addressing childhood obesity, along with things like nutrition, sleep and stress.

"I think the biggest thing is that right now we have child fitness at the forefront," she adds. "And that is what we need to be focusing on: How do we help kids get to where we want them to be, less about the test and more about how we get them there."
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Micki Boden wanted a wedding cake that checked off a couple of big boxes — personalized and tasty. Instead of a traditional tiered cake, the San Fernando Valley native went with a favorite from her school days.

“My favorite cake of all time is the coffee cake that I ate through my entire K-12 education going to LAUSD public school,” Boden said.

Boden attended elementary school in Studio City and middle school in Sherman Oaks before graduating from a Reseda high school.

Boden and her husband, Matt Stollman, met in 2016 while working on the reality television show Big Brother and eventually started dating. The two got engaged in 2025.

With the groom’s family traveling from the East Coast for their wedding in October, the couple wanted to provide a uniquely L.A. experience.

Micki Boden and Matt Stollman cut into their LAUSD coffee cake wedding cake.

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“We wanted something that was gonna be fun, that was gonna be memorable for people,” Boden said.

They held their wedding at the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys, surrounded by San Fernando Valley memorabilia, and got a California favorite — an In-N-Out truck — to serve guests.

The search for a cake that fit 

But when it came to the wedding cake, the couple struggled to find something suitable. Neither Boden nor Stollman liked frosting, and traditional wedding cakes didn’t excite them.

“We explored the more traditional tiered cake setup, and it just wasn’t meshing well,” Boden said.

Boden kept returning to the coffee cake she ate throughout her years in public school. Los Angeles Unified School District had published its official recipe online, but she wasn’t confident she could bake it herself. So she reached out to the district to ask for help.

The Stollman's wedding cake, decorated by the chef at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa, sits in a pastry box.

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How LAUSD made it happen 

Thomas Cohen, a public relations representative at the district, and Manish Singh, the director of food services, arranged for a chef at Mulholland Middle School in Lake Balboa to prepare the wedding cake. The chef also shaped part of the cake into a heart just for the couple.

Singh said the district doesn’t take cake orders from the public — but made this exception.

“We were doing it just to make one of our Angelenos, an ex-LAUSD student, make her special day even more special,” Singh said.

For the bride, it was the icing on her big day.

“I think it’s all just part of being an L.A. student,” she said. “The fact that we have these amazing memories from childhood, I think it’s just so meaningful for a lot of people.”

People may have been getting high off cannabis earlier than previously thought — at least 2,800 years ago, a new study suggests.

Archaeologists who led a dig at a monumental tomb in Siberia said they turned up evidence of the earliest known use of cannabis for psychoactive purposes.

The findings point to cannabis consumption at least 300 years earlier than previously known use in neighboring China.

Ancient drug use has long intrigued scholars. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about inhabitants of Central Asia smoking cannabis around 440 B.C., and recent archaeologists have found the seeds in tombs across its highlands.

The team from Germany, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland said analysis of hair in the royal tomb where cannabis seeds turned up sheds new light on the plant’s role in ancient societies.

“It’s extremely rare that we have both preserved plant parts and human soft tissue with the active compounds in it in the same context,” said co-author Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the University of Bern.

It’s not clear whether the cannabis was consumed through inhalation or ingestion, he said.

The dig took place starting in 2017 at a large burial mound at the Tunnug 1 site in the Uyuk Valley of southern Siberia, home to one of the earliest monumental tombs showing material culture of the Scythians — ancient nomads who migrated from Central Asia to southern Russia and Ukraine.

The team, deployed “essentially out in the middle of nowhere,” lived in tents for months and faced a spring-to-autumn season that variously featured swamps, snowstorms, frosts and swarms of mosquitoes. Herds of horses ran freely across the grassy steppe.

Larger artifacts on the site include weapons in the burials, horse gear and animal-style motifs. But the team “struck gold” as it also found tiny black spots that turned out to be cannabis seeds along with preserved human hair, Caspari said.

“It’s only so often as an archaeologist that you do get to drug test a person that’s been dead for almost 3,000 years,” he said.

Radiocarbon dating on some of the more than 1,000 seeds helped establish the time of origin, and “they are not there by accident” but deposited within the tomb, suggesting that the plant material had significance in the community, he said.

Results were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Not all independent experts were convinced.

The hair analysis “is scientifically weak” and there’s not enough evidence to tell whether cannabis was used, wrote Volker Auwaerter, head of the forensic toxicology section at the University Medical Center in Freiburg, Germany, in an email.

“For a central part of the study, the article falls far short of what would have been possible,” Auwaerter said. “This matters because the hair data carry the abstract’s main claims (cannabis consumption and use for its psychoactive properties).”

Today, scholars don’t consider ancient accounts trustworthy without corroborating evidence. Because the cannabis plant has other uses — seeds are pressed for oil and fibers used for cloth — their presence alone doesn’t confirm drug use.

Auwaerter, who was not part of the study, said the data didn’t distinguish consumption from external exposure — in other words, the hair could have picked up traces of weed simply by being buried together with it. He said a lab test involving forensic toxicology expertise would have been advisable and easy to arrange.

But Elisa Guerra Doce of the University of Valladolid in Spain, who has written about use of consciousness-altering substances in European prehistory, said toxicological hair analysis was not new in archaeology and has been used to identify consumption of psychoactive substances. She was not involved in the study.

In an email, she credited the authors for showing, through their methodology, that “cannabis was not merely deposited as a funerary offering but was actually consumed by individuals associated with the burial rite.”

A California appeals court has found that “ER” and “The Pitt” have enough similarity that a lawsuit brought by the widow and estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton alleging “The Pitt” is an unauthorized reboot can move forward.

A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled unanimously on Wednesday that the trial court judge was correct to reject a motion to throw out the case from “The Pitt” production company Warner Bros. Television, which also produced “ER.” But the judges dismissed Noah Wyle — the star of both shows and a producer on “The Pitt” — as a defendant along with two other producers who worked on both series.

The lawsuit is a clash between the makers of multiple Emmy-winning TV series that were each among the most important and acclaimed shows of their eras.

Crichton, the author of “Jurassic Park” and many other novels that became hit movies and TV shows, wrote the pilot script for “ER,” the NBC show about a Chicago emergency room that redefined the medical drama genre and drew tens of millions of weekly viewers in its run from 1994 to 2009.

The lawsuit brought by Sherri Crichton was filed two years ago, before a single episode of “The Pitt” had aired. The HBO Max series that shows a real-time day in the life of a Pittsburgh emergency department has since become perhaps the most lauded series in television, winning two Emmys for best drama for its first two seasons and two best actor Emmys for Wyle.

Along with more technical legal issues, the judges had to decide whether the shows had at least the minimal similarity that would give the lawsuit enough merit to move forward. Their decision applies only to this early legal challenge and they did not rule on whether the plaintiffs had proved the “The Pitt” is derivative of “ER.”

The court agreed with the plaintiff that “both shows provide commentaries on the healthcare system; they focus specifically on the emergency room and the difficult conditions under which the medical staff operates. Both shows take place, with little exception, in the emergency room, as opposed to other medical shows which track patients as they move out of the emergency room, or indeed never enter it.”

The opinion also said that both feature “very fast pacing, and reactions to multiple overlapping crises. The fast-paced dialogue is (to a layperson) frequently incomprehensible shorthand and jargon, lending an air of immediacy and accuracy.”

Warner Bros. Television said in a statement that “WBTV continues to maintain that ‘The Pitt’ is an entirely original series and that the claims against it are without merit. Nothing in the Court of Appeal’s decision establishes otherwise, and WBTV looks forward to defending its position as the case proceeds.”

The defendants argued in legal filings that the shows have “generic similarities” that would exist in “any dramatic story” that features “overworked doctors and staff.”

The panel also unanimously dismissed as defendants Wyle, John Wells, who created “The Pitt” and worked on “ER,” and R. Scott Gemmill, a “Pitt” executive producer who also worked on both shows. The judges found there was no evidence the three men knew the provisions of the Crichton contract that the lawsuit alleges they interfered with.

Sherri Crichton’s lawsuit alleges “The Pitt” is a rebranded version of an unauthorized “ER” reboot that she had rejected.

Her husband had secured a coveted “frozen rights” provision in his contract for the series, prohibiting Warner Bros. from proceeding with any sequels, remakes, spinoffs or other productions derived from “ER” without Crichton’s consent, or his estate’s consent after his death from cancer in 2008.

After the production company could not reach an agreement with Sherri Crichton over a proposed “ER” reboot, the TV studio proceeded to develop and produce a series based on the same premise without permission, the lawsuit alleges.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday moved to dismiss its own lawsuit that sought to stop California from counting roughly 20,000 ballots it alleged went to noncitizens until their immigration status could be verified.

The request to dismiss the case comes days after Republicans’ significant losses in the midterm elections and about a week before a scheduled hearing where a special master was slated to evaluate the accuracy of the list. California officials have previously said the list is out of date and includes legitimate voters — a sentiment that the federal judge presiding over the case echoed in his blistering order denying the federal government’s request.

The case was at the forefront of President Donald Trump’s administration’s effort to assert control over state-run elections across the country, which Trump has said are rife with illegal voting without providing evidence.

The Department of Justice remains enmeshed in litigation with multiple immigrant and voting rights groups seeking to limit its use of the list of what is says are suspected noncitizens. Another controversial suit it filed in Alaska at Trump’s direction before the election to block the victory of the Democrat in that state’s Senate race was swiftly dismissed by a federal judge. The administration is appealing that ruling but has yet to file a full brief at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

California had processed roughly 9 million ballots as of early Friday, with nearly 5 million still left to be counted, according to state election officials. The motion to dismiss the lawsuit said that, by the time of the upcoming hearing, the state will have already irreparably “commingled the challenged ballots with lawful ones.”

“The relief the United States sought and needed is no longer available—rendering voluntary dismissal necessary,” the motion said.

Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, previously argued in court that the lawsuit would be irrelevant after election day, because there would be no way to sequester the ones allegedly belonging to noncitizens. The lawsuit was filed in mid-October, when ballots had been sent to all of the state’s 23 million registered voters, and after hundreds of thousands of ballots were already processed. Once a ballot is processed, it is completely anonymized.

Essayli said at the time the lawsuit was filed that his goal was to “safeguard the integrity of the election so it doesn’t have an effect on the upcoming election.”

“We want to stop the illegal voting. We don’t want to chase it later,” he said outside of court the week before the election.

California prosecutors in recent weeks have arrested over 30 noncitizens who are accused of illegally registering to vote. Some who were arrested were also accused of voting in previous elections. Elections clerks around California in the week before the election were sent subpoenas to testify before grand juries slated to convene in November. It’s not clear who is being criminally charged in those cases, but the department does not typically subpoena people whom it regards as targets of a criminal investigation to appear before a grand jury.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter appointed the special master in late October, shortly after allowing California to proceed with elections as planned. Carter, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, argued in his blistering order that separating ballots at that late stage would risk disenfranchising citizens and warned it would “wreak havoc” on the midterm elections.

The special master would have also considered whether or not California election officials did in fact have a mechanism for separating the ballots.