Wednesday, March 18th, 2026

Welcome to Friday’s edition of The Pennant. To listen to this newsletter, click the “Listen Online” link in the top right corner of this email.

March Madness is HERE! Did you know that only one Ohio team has ever claimed the NCAA championship title? The Ohio State University made history back in 1960. Will they win their second title this year?

Shocking new research reveals that the average child spends just 4–7 minutes outside per day. What's keeping our kids indoors? Keep reading to find out.

Plus, don't miss our exclusive editorial diving deep into the current state of Ohio's construction industry. It's a must-read!

The numbers are hard to ignore and harder to explain away.

An After Babel Substack contributor and culture critic, Ted Gioia compiled 30 research-backed facts about the state of childhood today, from declining test scores and reading ability to surging rates of mental illness and vanishing time spent outdoors.

Among the findings: the average child now spends just 4–7 minutes outside per day, time with friends has fallen by half in a decade, and one in three American students can't read at a basic level. Some teachers report students arriving at school unable to hold a pencil or tell time from a clock.

Gioia points to smartphones, addictive tech platforms, and passive screen consumption as key culprits — and places responsibility on adults, not kids, to reverse course.

For the full story, go here.

The Lucas County Republican Party is in open revolt, with Central Committee Chairman Tim Brentlinger calling for a special meeting to remove Executive Chairman Barbara Orange over unresolved questions about party finances, including a request for financial records that he says went unanswered for more than a year.

Orange fired back that the meeting was not properly called under the party's bylaws and Robert's Rules of Order, making it invalid, and offered her own explanation for a disputed donation return that Brentlinger cited as evidence of financial concerns.

For more on this story, go here.

Niantic revealed that the 143 million people who played Pokémon Go unknowingly spent eight years scanning the physical world, producing a dataset of more than 30 billion real-world images that the company is now using to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots.

You can get more on this story here.

Palmer-Donavin, the Grove City-based building materials company, is staying put in Central Ohio but expanding its Midwest footprint in a big way.

The company recently opened a 200,000-square-foot distribution center in Bluffton, Indiana, swapping out its older facility in Delphos, Northwest Ohio, for a major upgrade while keeping its Grove City headquarters right where it is.

The new space has 35-foot ceilings to stack product higher and move it faster, plus a four-acre outdoor storage yard, the biggest in the entire company. The extra room is a big deal for its growing Engineered Wood Products business, and the company says it is already planning future upgrades, possibly including automated material handling systems like those used at other locations.

Palmer-Donavin has been around for more than 100 years and is one of Central Ohio's largest private companies. It distributes residential building materials and fabricates doors, with operations stretching from Ohio and Indiana to Wisconsin, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia.

Ohio is sitting on a big opportunity, and we cannot blow it. Factories, power plants, roads, and data centers are being built across the state. But there is a serious problem: we do not have enough skilled workers to do the job.

The numbers tell the story. The U.S. construction industry needs to hire 349,000 new workers this year just to keep up. Ohio alone needs about 14,000 more skilled workers in 2026. Without them, projects fall behind, costs go up, and the economic growth we are counting on slows down. That is not a maybe. That is what happens.

Businesses are not sitting around waiting for the government to fix this.

Read the full Editorial here.

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