Guadalupe Alexa Marcial of St. Charles, Missouri, knew she would be the wrong age for the moment: a 16-year-old celebrating her quinceanera, a coming-of-age milestone for 15-year-old Latinas.

But she still wanted her once-in-a-lifetime party.

"It's always been my dream to have a quinceanera," she said.

She was in seventh grade when the pandemic hit in 2020. Her school shut down after spring break, and Guadalupe stayed out the entire next year, too.

As the months at home dragged on, she asked her mom if she could still have the party, despite being a year older. Her mom agreed.

Guadalupe was hardly alone: Many girls whose quince anos fell during the pandemic had to delay their celebrations.

The mother and daughter spent two years planning. They reserved a church for the Mass and a community center for the celebration, hired a makeup artist and hairstylist, rented a party bus, arranged for catering, booked a photo booth and secured a DJ, photographer and videographer.

Guadalupe traveled to Chicago to find the perfect emerald-green gown, while the rest of her court -- composed of five chambelanes, or escorts -- got outfitted with tuxes at St. Louis' first dedicated quinceanera boutique, Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.

As the population of Hispanic residents has risen in the St. Louis metro area, there's been a boom in the services available to families planning this major life event. The parties have also become more elaborate and expensive, often rivaling -- or exceeding -- the cost of many weddings. A quinceanera dress alone can cost anywhere from $500 to $2,000, and the entire party often runs from $15,000 to $30,000.

Some families share the expense of the party with several padrinos and madrinas, or godparents, each of whom sponsors a different element of the event. A close relative might pay for the catering or the cake, for instance, while a family friend might pay for the limo or photography.

Guadalupe's big day finally arrived, beginning with a Mass in Spanish and English. Shortly after noon, she and about 20 of her friends boarded their party bus and headed to St. Louis' historic Main Street for a photo shoot. Next stop: Starbucks.

"A lot of people were staring," she said. Several complimented her dress and asked if there was a wedding.

Around 4:30, she made a grand entrance at her party while mariachis serenaded her with the traditional birthday song. The musicians continued playing while 300 guests dined on chicken with mole verde, rice and beans.

After dinner, a series of traditional dances and ceremonies began. In one, the shadow of a toddler appeared against a curtain backdrop and was then replaced in turn with a 7-year-old, an 11-year-old and finally a 13-year-old, symbolizing a little girl growing up.

Guadalupe's father lives out of town and could not attend the event, so the dancing began with a mother-daughter waltz instead. The guest of honor missed her father, and the emotions of the day were getting to her.

She started to cry. Her mother's friend pulled her into the kitchen.

"Everything is going to be OK," she said. "He's going to call you tomorrow. You should enjoy your day."

After drying her tears and fixing her makeup, Guadalupe joined her escorts for their dance.

Traditional rituals followed -- her godmother placing a crown on her head and her grandmother changing her tennis shoes to glittery gold heels. She performed a dance with two younger girls, who then presented her with her last doll.

A modern trend in quinceaneras is for the honoree and her court to perform a surprise dance number. So at the end of the night, Guadalupe swapped her dress for black bootcut jeans and a green shirt, and her chambelanes ditched their tuxes for jeans, boots and sombreros. They did a mix of different Latin dances, to the delight of the guests.

The day turned out to be just as memorable as Guadalupe had imagined. And well worth waiting for.

It took a little over a year for Elon Musk to prove me dead wrong.

In April of 2022, the Twitter board accepted Musk's $44 billion offer to acquire the company. My colleague, columnist Tony Messenger, and I posted a video a few weeks later discussing what this might mean for the future of the site.

We lamented how much time we'd spent on the platform. I'd been tweeting for 15 years at that point. What started as a useful tool became a daily habit. The site attracted so many journalists because it could be used as a curated news feed and start conversations with people around the world.

And it was more than a source of news or entertainment. Twitter also became a pivotal force in movements for social justice and freedom: helping mobilize protests in Iran, fueling the Arab Spring, giving rise to the #MeToo revelations and galvanizing millions after the killings of George Floyd and Michael Brown.

It was a place to learn from and engage with others and share our own thoughts on the biggest events and debates –- all in real time.

When Musk took over, my colleague and I were concerned that he might ruin it. Messenger said he feared that the people who used social media to attack and harass others would be given free rein to do so under the new ownership.

"But ultimately, (Musk's) a businessman, and I don't think he's going to do something that destroys the platform," he said.

I agreed.

"If he forces Twitter to loosen its rules against hate speech online, then he will see people leave, and less engagement, which translates to a loss in money," I said. We decided to wait and see what happened.

So, here's what happened: Since Musk took over, hate speech and misinformation spiked, traffic plunged, advertisers fled and competitors have proliferated. Twitter still has around 300 million users on the site, but the bulk of its content is created by "power users." Among U.S. adults who use the site, 20% produce 98% of that subgroup's tweets, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center. These power users' average number of tweets per month declined by around 25% following the acquisition by Musk, the report found.

Matthew Prince, CEO of internet services company Cloudflare, posted a chart this week (on Twitter, ironically enough) showing that the platform has been on the decline since the start of this year.

The data reflect my own experiences. The comments on Twitter have gotten nastier. There is less reach and engagement for those of us who refuse to pay the subscription fee. Fewer people see what you're sharing. It's far less useful and interesting than before.

It made me think about why I was so wrong about Musk. I had bought into the meritocracy myth so prevalent in American society. We are biased toward wildly wealthy businessmen, assuming that in order to amass billions of dollars, a person must possess an exceptional level of intelligence or business savvy. Such a rare achievement must be a result of some kind of genius.

Well, this week Musk challenged his business rival Mark Zuckerberg to a literal penis-measuring contest.

The genius just leaps off the screen when you read Musk's tweets: He promotes conspiracy theories and hurls childish insults at his critics. The silver lining in Musk's destruction of Twitter through a relentless series of bad decisions has been seeing his unfiltered thoughts online. He's laid to rest the notion that massive wealth translates to great leadership or wisdom.

Listening to my words from a year ago made me realize how ingrained these assumptions are.

There's a raft of reports about the negative impact on young people who are heavy users of social media. But clearly, young people are not alone in spending too much time online. Being ensconced in an online bubble can warp anyone's thinking -- about themselves, others and the world around them.

The Musk fiasco has me appreciating the value of posting less on social media.

But I'm also among the 100 million users who joined Zuckerberg's rival site, Threads, in the first five days since it launched. Part of me hopes that it might eventually feel like the old Twitter.

On the other hand, it's another billionaire's brainchild.

The Supreme Court recently overturned affirmative action for underrepresented minorities in college admissions. Those who saw it as a win for fairness cheered.

But now there's a similar challenge that may hit closer to home, and it will be interesting to see how many of those in the fairness crowd are still on board.

Three days after the court's decision in the cases brought by Students for Fair Admissions Inc. against the University of North Carolina and Harvard College, Boston-area advocacy groups filed a complaint with the Department of Education requesting an investigation into another controversial practice. They argued that Harvard's admissions policies discriminate against Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants in favor of less-qualified white candidates who have alumni and donor connections.

Ironically, their point is supported by data that came out of the lawsuit that dismantled affirmative action. Harvard had released years of records as part of the lawsuit that ended up before the Supreme Court. Researchers found that the data revealed that legacy students were eight times more likely to be admitted, and nearly 70% were white.

A study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 43% of white students admitted to Harvard were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean's interest list -- applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard.

Of the white students admitted from those four categories, 75% of them would have been rejected if they had been treated as white students without the special considerations, the study said.

Even after the court's decision, affirmative action for mostly white and wealthy students still stands. Yet everyone knows the students did nothing to earn this advantage.

Not a single other country in the world has legacy preferences in admissions.

America's longstanding tolerance for this particular unfairness begs the question: Why have conservative groups been unwilling to challenge legacy and donor preferences along with their fight against race-based preferences?

Unearned advantages -- bestowed by chance, at birth, mostly to white students -- have been accepted for generations, but a preference for Blacks and other underrepresented minorities for a few decades has provoked years of legal challenges.

We all know that giving the richest people in America affirmative action at the expense of others who are more qualified is ethically indefensible.

In the ongoing war over fairness in the admissions game, this battle has renewed life after the court's recent decision.

An Associated Press survey of the nation's most selective colleges last year found that legacy students in the freshman class ranged from 4% to 23%. This tidbit from the AP report was even more revealing: At four schools -- Notre Dame, the University of Southern California, Cornell and Dartmouth -- legacy students outnumbered Black students.

Who could have known.

On several occasions, white parents have lamented to me how difficult it will be for their child to gain admission at an elite school or graduate program "as a white male" or "as a white girl."

It's a common refrain during college application season. The unspoken part of that grievance is that their child is being disadvantaged by nonwhite students. But even with affirmative action, the percentage of Black students at Ivy League colleges has hovered around 6% for years.

Perhaps those parents were blaming the wrong group all along.

The defenses I've heard from those who have benefited from legacy admissions are, "I was still highly qualified for admission" and "I also worked hard."

Great. Let's see how you would fare without a thumb on the scale.

I say this as a parent of a child who is a legacy student at my own alma mater: It's time to get rid of the practice. It goes against the mission of higher education.

A conservative group found Asian plaintiffs to bring the case that overturned affirmative action. As my husband and I are Asian Americans, our children may ostensibly benefit from this decision -- statistically, lower percentages of Asians with qualifying scores and grades are accepted into elite universities. But I believe our children, and all students, will be worse off for having fewer classmates from diverse perspectives and backgrounds on their campuses. That's largely been the outcome at other places that have already gotten rid of considerations of race in admissions.

There are already several elite institutions that have decided that legacy status merits no weight in its admissions: MIT, CalTech, Amherst College, Johns Hopkins University, Pomona, the University of California system and the University of Texas.

To all the remaining universities that claim to value diversity, and to the people who have been clamoring for fairness: Here's your moment to prove it.