Allan T. Demaree, a retired executive editor of Fortune magazine, gladly makes donations to Princeton University, his alma matter. His son, who also went to Princeton, points to its endowment of $15.8 billion, and will not give it a penny.

“Why give money to an institution that can seemingly live off its interest when other very deserving entities need money to function tomorrow?” asked the son, Heath Demaree, a professor at Case Western Reserve University who instead donates to Virginia Tech, where he was a graduate student. His question captures how the wealth collected by elite universities like Princeton through soaring endowments over the past decade has widened the divide between a small group of dramaticly wealthy universities and all others.

The result is that America’s already stratified system of higher education is becoming ever more so, and the gap is creating all sorts of tensions as the less wealthy colleges try to compete. Even state universities are going into fund-raising overdrive and trying to increase endowments to catch up.

The wealthiest colleges can tap their endowments to give considerable financial aid to families earning $180,000 or more. They can tempt star professors with high salaries and hard-to-get apartments. They are starting advanced new research laboratories, expanding their campuses and putting up architecturally notable buildings.

Higher education has always been stratified, but the differences were never as large as today. The last decade brought a sea change, as skilled money managers hired by the universities moved their portfolios into high-performing investments, and endowments skyrocketed.

Until recently, top public research universities could rely on enough public subsidy to hold their own, when the taxpayer money was combined with tuition and fund-raising. But that world is changing.

The University of California, Berkeley has a $3 billion endowment, but it is stretched across 34,000 students. And with state budget cuts approaching, Robert Birgeneau, its president, fears he will no longer be able to attract the best professors and students.

“It will cost less for a student from a family with an income of $180,000 to go to Harvard than for a student with a family income of $90,000 to go to Berkeley,” he said, taking into account Harvard’s recent decision to give more financial aid to families earning up to $180,000 annually.

Getting a driving license was once a universal passage into adulthood. But now a growing minority of young people ignore or actively oppose it, into their 20s and beyond. That starts to create more support for anti-car policies in cities around the world to pass anti-car laws, changing planning rules to favour pedestrians over drivers. After a century in which the car remade the rich world, the tide begins to swing the other way.

By 1997, 43% of America’s 16-year-olds had driving licenses. But the proportion has been falling for every age group under 40. Even those who have them are driving less. A similar trend is seen in Europe. One study of five European capitals found the number of driving trips made by working people was down substantially since a peak in the 1990s.

No one is entirely sure why young adults are proving resistant to owning a car. The growth of the interest is one obvious possibility—the more you can shop online, or stream films at home, the less need there is to drive into town. The rise of taxi apps like Uber has contributed as well. Driving generally is more expensive. Other reasons seem more cultural. One big motivator is worries about climate change.

The falling popularity of cars among the under-40s chimes with the mood among city planners and urbanists. In America, New York has banned cars from Central Park and some streets. In the past few years, dozens of American cities have removed rules that force developers to provide a certain amount of free parking around their buildings.

As the example in Oxfond shows, political opposition could put the brakes on the growth of anti-car policies. But in the parts of Europe where anti-car policies have been in place, they appear to have worked. Giulio notes that almost nowhere in the world that has removed a big road, or pedestrianised a shopping street, has decided to turn back. “Once people see, they generally don’t want to go back.” If that pattern holds, the 21st century might just see the car’s high-water mark.

The United Nations food agency is unable to feed most civilians in Rafah, its local director warned Friday, with most border crossings closed amid what he described as “apocalyptic (大灾难的) conditions” and the Israeli military pushing further into Gaza’s (加沙) southernmost city.

The World Food Programme (WFP) is currently serving only 27,000 people in Rafah, according to Matthew Hollingworth, the organization’s country director in Gaza. That’s a tiny proportion of the roughly one million Gazans who have been displaced from the area.

“The sounds, the smells, the everyday life are horrific and apocalyptic.” Hollingworth told journalists Friday after returning from a trip to Gaza. “People sleep to the sounds of bombing, they sleep to the sounds of drones, they sleep to the sounds of war, as now tanks roll into parts of central Rafah, which is only kilometers away.”

Rafah had previously been the central artery (干线) for aid to flow into Gaza, as the only border crossing not controlled by Israel. But since Israel seized control of the Gazan side of the Rafah crossing on May 7, aid has been blocked, with supplies piling up in Egypt and the critical path falling close to famine. “From the 7th of May to the 20th, not a single WFP truck crossed from the southern corridors of Egypt into Rafah,” he said.

Israel’s military has continued to push further into Rafah, defying international concern and anger over its operations in the city. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Friday that its troops were in central Rafah – confirming what eyewitnesses told earlier this week, when tanks were spotted there for the first time since it entered the city in May.

The IDF’s operations in Rafah have prompted a 67% drop in the amount of humanitarian aid getting through, according to the UN.

Gaza is now receiving a daily average of 58 aid trucks – down from the daily average of 176 trucks between April and May, which itself is far from the 500 trucks that used to enter Gaza each day before the war broke out in October.

Hollingworth added that the WFP’s warehouse in Rafah, which was once capable of storing 2,700 tons of food, is no longer operational.

“We do not have the supplies available to provide significant numbers of ready-to-eat ration boxes. We don’t have significant supplies of wheat flour to hand out to those families that have a stove to cook on,” Hollingworth said – but added they are providing around 400,000 hot meals to families in central Rafah.