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Unlimited PTO policies were all the rage for a while, but now they’re starting to lose their allure. Here, experts weigh in on why companies are shifting away from this once-popular benefit, what alternative solutions look like, and why other options can be more effective. Failing to Deliver Unlimited paid time off policies are losing popularity because, in practice, they often fail to deliver the flexibility and wellness benefits they promise. While they sound progressive, the reality is that many employees end up taking less time off under these policies. Without a clear benchmark for what’s considered “normal” or acceptable, employees often hesitate to use their time, fearing it might reflect poorly on their work ethic or commitment. This lack of clarity creates anxiety and inadvertently fuels a culture of overwork—exactly what unlimited PTO is meant to prevent. Another challenge is inconsistency. Some employees may feel empowered to take extended time off, while others are quietly discouraged, leading to inequities and resentment. In industries where consistent staffing is critical, the lack of structure makes planning difficult, and in some cases, managers may even override requests, further undermining the policy’s intent. Additionally, unlimited PTO can’t always be applied equally across salaried and hourly workers, potentially triggering claims of unfairness or noncompliance with local labor laws. As a result, many companies are shifting toward mandatory vacation policies, which require employees to take a minimum number of days off each year. This approach removes the ambiguity, helps normalize taking time away from work, and actively combats burnout. It’s especially effective in high-pressure environments where employees may otherwise push through exhaustion or skip vacations entirely. By institutionalizing rest, companies see improved retention, better morale, and a more energized workforce. It’s a simple yet powerful shift—one that sends a clear message: rest isn’t a perk, it’s a priority. Tyler Butler, founder, Collaboration for Good Company-Wide Reset Weeks Foster Collective Well-Being Unlimited PTO once promised freedom and flexibility, but it’s increasingly clear that for many employees, especially those from underrepresented or historically excluded backgrounds, it’s more of a mirage than a benefit. In my work as a senior HR leader in Tech and a therapist and coach for underrepresented communities, I’ve seen how this policy, when poorly implemented, can erode psychological safety, blur boundaries, and increase inequity. One major issue with unlimited PTO is that it lacks structure. Without clear norms or leadership modeling, employees may feel guilty or uncertain about taking time off. Research shows that in organizations with unlimited leave policies, people often take less time off than those with set vacation days. This perceived pressure to “prove” one’s commitment disproportionately affects women, caregivers, and marginalized employees who are already navigating imposter syndrome or subtle biases. It can make rest feel like a risk. Instead, some companies are shifting to collective rest models, structured, trust-based systems that prioritize equity and well-being. One alternative I’ve seen gaining traction in hybrid workplaces is “company-wide reset weeks” or seasonal shutdowns, where the entire organization takes time off simultaneously. These initiatives remove the ambiguity and competition of unlimited PTO and foster psychological safety by normalizing rest for everyone, not just the bold or burnout-resistant. This model supports all five elements of high-performing teams identified by Project Aristotle, Google’s Research on Effective Teams: 1. Psychological safety is boosted when everyone logs off at once, minimizing the fear of falling behind. 2. Dependability grows when teams can trust that their colleagues will take breaks and return replenished, not burned out. 3. Structure and clarity are enhanced when time off is explicitly defined and coordinated. 4. Meaning is reinforced as employees feel that their well-being is genuinely prioritized, not just promised. 5. And impact increases when people return from true rest more creative, collaborative, and focused. In today’s hybrid reality, where boundaries are already blurred, the future of time off needs to be as thoughtful and inclusive as our approach to work itself. Unlimited PTO may sound progressive, but the real innovation lies in creating policies that build trust, provide clarity, and prioritize collective wellbeing. Manuel Schlothauer, founder, HeyManuel.com ‘Life Leave’ Balances Flexibility with Clear Expectations One of the most consistent challenges I’ve heard over many years of practice is that PTO policies—despite their intended flexibility—often lack clear structure and guidance. This absence of clarity can lead to uncertainty around what’s considered acceptable, making team members hesitant to fully utilize their time off. While teams appreciate the flexibility their companies provide, they also place high value on clarity—they want to know what success looks like and how time away aligns with performance expectations. Unlimited PTO policies, in particular, tend to fall short in this regard. Though well-intentioned and often introduced to help companies elevate their total rewards, they can leave people wondering how much time is “too much,” which leads to underutilization and inconsistent experiences across teams. What’s especially challenging—and somewhat counterintuitive—is that this happens despite our clear understanding that time off is critical to our team members’ ability to do their best work. We know it supports mental health, overall wellness, creativity, and long-term performance. Yet without the right structure, even the most flexible policies can miss the mark. In response, I’ve often implemented an approach called “Life Leave” that complements traditional PTO policies (e.g., vacation). This framework offers flexibility with intention. It empowers team members to take time off in ways that are personally meaningful to them, whether for rest, volunteering, professional development, cultural observances, or family responsibilities. What makes Life Leave most effective is its balance, as it supports individual needs while reinforcing clear expectations around performance and accountability. I’ve found it particularly impactful to provide explicit guidance on how much time is available, which helps create clarity and confidence for team members, leading to more usage and engagement. At the same time, it remains flexible enough to allow people to lean in when and how it makes sense for them—and it evolves as the team’s needs evolve. Heidi Hauver, VP, Customer & People Experience, LearnExperts Structured Time Off Motivates Employees Better Unlimited PTO sounds like a great benefit on paper, but after working with several companies who were considering Unlimited PTO, I have firsthand seen why this policy does not usually work well in practice. There are several reasons, but by far, I believe the biggest reason for moving away from this policy is people’s behavior. That is, people are wired to want to know our “score,” by reacting to scarcity. For instance, when we see how many “lives” we have left on a video game, or how long a training program video runs, or how many more points until we earn a free taco, we tend to be more motivated to keep going, earn more, and utilize what we have earned. Marketing professionals know this and utilize it with “limited edition” runs of products to create demand. Unlimited PTO removes this “limited edition” mindset by removing the “scoreboard.” When people are unaware of how many days they have taken off or how many they have remaining, psychologically it makes them use less overall. Virtually every company I have experience with that has moved to unlimited time off has seen a drop in time off taken, not an increase. So if the purpose is less time, then it is working, but if the purpose is increased well-being and increased engagement, it is not working. The better solution, when you have people asking for either unlimited or simply more time, is to simply give more time. Yes, there is a balance sheet cost, but in reality, it is a very small cost compared to other benefits with a very high upside. Creative approaches like additional recognized company holidays, floating holidays so people can celebrate religious or family occasions that aren’t otherwise recognized, giving an extra day off in the month of your birthday or your company anniversary, and giving an extra week or two as an earned “sabbatical” every few years, all go far in employee appreciation without adding a large cost burden. Additionally, leading by example helps. People pay attention to what their leaders do. So when they see leaders not taking off their allotted time, they will do the same. Conversely, leaders I work with who use their time off have employees who do as well, and are healthier and more engaged as a result. Angela Heyroth, principal, Talent Centric Designs Mandatory Minimum PTO Protects Against Employee Burnout Data suggest that the popularity of these plans may be waning. Why? Job postings offering unlimited paid time off (PTO) have decreased by 50% from 2022 to 2024, according to Revelio Labs, from 3.1 per 1,000 to 1.5 per 1,000. Employee perception is also waning; companies offering unlimited paid time off (PTO) were rated 3.24% lower in work-life balance compared to those with traditional PTO policies. While unlimited PTO sounds like the ultimate perk, our research revealed that, when deciding whether to adopt this type of plan, employees generally take less time off than those with a traditional PTO plan. Research suggests that these policies are underutilized due to ambiguity surrounding acceptable usage and concerns about appearing less dedicated. We have instituted a “use-it-or-lose-it” PTO policy to encourage our team members to take their full time off to recharge and rejuvenate. Also, we award a paid week’s sabbatical every five years of service. As companies rethink traditional time-off models, flexible PTO and mandatory minimum PTO policies are emerging as more innovative alternatives to unlimited leave. Flexible PTO offers freedom with a light structure, appealing to organizations that trust employees to manage their well-being. Meanwhile, mandatory minimum PTO ensures employees take the time they need to reset, which protects against burnout and boosts long-term productivity. Increasingly, companies are realizing that spending time away from work is not enough to recharge their team. They have to design for it. Structured time-off policies backed by leadership modeling and clear expectations are proving far more effective than the “you figure it out” approach of early unlimited PTO experiments. Kristin Pardue, cofounder and CEO, Rêve Consulting Flexible Scheduling Focuses on Job Performance Goals Unlimited PTO policies are losing popularity with both employees and employers. This is largely because the “logic” of such policies is faulty. For such policies to make sense, extremely accurate KPIs are required (both lagging and leading) to assess all aspects of the employees’ jobs. In theory, any employee who is performing at or above 100% of all job responsibilities with no risk of performance slipping should be supported in taking as much time off as they desire in exchange for continued performance. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to identify highly accurate lagging and leading KPIs for every aspect or responsibility of any given job/employee. Moreover, it’s often difficult to track and report on all KPIs in a timely manner. Thus, employers and employees alike cannot be sure performance is truly where it should be in support of such policies. Consequently, Unlimited PTO policies have often caused conflict, which nobody likes. One alternative many companies are having success with is a fresh take on an old idea: Flexible Scheduling/Flexible Work. These policies often take the opposite approach, stating the job performance goals regardless of when or where the work is performed to achieve them, or how long it takes. These programs often do not distinguish between working versus nonworking hours or days of the week, or any amount of hours required—just satisfactory completion of the requirements. So, it’s just a different perspective to accomplish the same objective. Sometimes a different perspective changes everything. Joe Palmer, managing partner, Prosperity Partners Consulting, Inc. Scheduled Downtime Replaces Unlimited PTO Policy Unlimited PTO policies are fading because companies realize that offering unlimited time off doesn’t translate into employees taking enough breaks, especially high-performers focused on hitting deadlines. Instead of preventing burnout with a better work-life balance, getting rid of vacation minimums might lead to your best people leaving because they’re exhausted and feel too much pressure to take ample time. For us, it’s been much better to intentionally schedule downtime that fits in the company’s work rhythm. You have to actively plan for it by finding those natural lulls between projects or busy seasons and leaning into them. If you can’t manage full shutdowns, you can stagger these lighter periods across different departments so the business keeps running smoothly. Marketing teams can take a breather while engineering ramps up, or vice versa, for example. Unlike unlimited PTO, which puts the onus on employees who often feel they can’t step away from the work, scheduled downtime makes taking a break a normal and expected part of the job. It takes real effort to implement properly, and you need buy-in from every manager to actively champion and protect this downtime for their teams. We try to put this into practice by encouraging our team leads to actively schedule cooldown periods for their teams right after major projects wrap up or after particularly intense sprints. After our big Q1 product launch last year, the core product and engineering folks got a designated week immediately after with a lighter workload, very few meetings, and real encouragement to disconnect as much as possible before we started diving into Q2 planning. Many of our teammates tend to use vacation time then because they’re ready for a break, and work won’t pile up while they’re away. We’ve noticed less burnout reported after those crunch times, and people generally come back feeling more focused and recharged from that planned time off. Edward White, head of Growth, beehiiv Planned PTO Cycles Improve Operational Clarity It reduces operational clarity, to some degree at least. When time off isn’t formally accrued or budgeted, teams struggle with planning. They can’t accurately forecast bandwidth, coordinate coverage, or identify burnout risk if everyone is on an undefined schedule. Managers end up tracking PTO informally anyway, which then defeats the whole premise. Planned PTO cycles may hold the answer here. Instead of waiting for people to request time off, companies can preschedule rest into the calendar. This could involve two company-wide breaks a year (e.g., one week in summer, one in winter), plus a set number of flexible days. This approach works better because it removes the psychological barrier of “asking” and builds rest into the rhythm of the business. Teams recover together. No one returns to an overwhelming backlog, and clients learn to expect and respect the cadence. Adam Dayan, founder, Consumer Law Group, LLC Transparent Time-Off Calendars Enhance Team Planning There is a reason why Unlimited PTO policies aren’t as popular as they used to be. At first glance, they sound incredibly empowering—”Take all the time you need!”—but the reality often plays out very differently. What ends up happening is a lack of time-off visibility across the team. When everyone’s PTO is open-ended but not clearly communicated or tracked, people get caught off guard by surprise absences, especially during critical project phases. It’s not about “if” someone takes time off, but “when” and “how it affects the team.” That’s where things start to fall apart. What worked much better for us was moving to Transparent Time-Off Calendars that sync directly with our project management tools. Everyone can see who’s off and when, which helps with coverage and planning. But what really made the difference were the “soft limits” we introduced—like encouraging team members not to book extended time off during peak quarters or final sprint weeks unless discussed in advance. These aren’t hard rules, but they give the team a structure to work with. It reduces friction and prevents the kind of calendar chaos that was quietly undermining productivity under the Unlimited PTO model. In the end, it’s not about offering endless days off—it’s about building a culture where taking time off is respected, communicated clearly, and planned thoughtfully so that no one feels like they’re carrying the weight when others are away. Ben Kruger, CMO, Event Tickets Center View the full article

Move aside, Google Maps: Snapchat’s Snap Map has hit a major milestone with 400 million monthly active users. Launched in 2017, Snap Map began as a GPS-based feature that allowed users to see their friends’ real-time locations. Those who opted in could view a live map showing not just where their friends were, but also what was happening nearby—and share their own location as well. Since then, Snapchat has significantly expanded its map features. Last year, Snap Map introduced “Footsteps,” a tool that helps users visualize how much of the world they’ve explored. For instance, the app might report that you’ve covered 75% of your local area. The feature is reminiscent of Google Maps’s “Timeline,” which tracks visited places through Location History. “Our Map is about more than getting directions from point A to point B; it enables Snapchatters to stay connected, in real time, to their physical world,” Snapchat said, per Adweek. Snapchat also launched “Promoted Places,” allowing brands to advertise and highlight all their locations on Snap Map, making it easier for users to discover new spots. McDonald’s and Taco Bell are among the brands leveraging this feature. Currently, Snapchat is the only major social media platform with a map feature as a central part of its experience, offering real-time social discovery. That may soon change, though—Instagram has confirmed it’s developing a similar “Friend Map” feature. This will allow users to post text and video updates tied to specific locations, with friends’ updates displayed alongside one another on the map. Despite Instagram’s ambitions, it still has a long way to go to catch up. “Snap Map is one of the most used mobile maps in the world, and we’re thrilled to see our community continue to grow,” said Ceci Mourkogiannis, VP of Product at Snap, in a statement to TechCrunch. “The Snap Map is helping hundreds of millions connect with friends and their favorite places and discover what’s happening around them, making the world feel more connected every day.” View the full article

As a nearly 60-year-old brand, Hot Wheels has been a playroom staple for generations of children. But while the tiny cars and buildable track sets have managed to find their way into the playrooms of millions of children, the looping, curving track pieces have always been a bit of a challenge to actually put together. Mattel, which created the Hot Wheels brand in 1968, knows this is a pain point, especially at the younger end of their target market. Recent research found that less than a third of kids aged 3 to 6 are able to assemble Hot Wheels track sets without help. “That to us was a really big call to say that we need to approach this in a different manner,” says Roberto Stanichi, executive vice president of Hot Wheels. So, in 2022, Hot Wheels launched an unusually detailed research and development effort to improve the assembly of its playsets. The outcome is the new Hot Wheels Speed Snap Track System, which makes every section of track easier to connect together. Instead of the somewhat complicated existing system that requires a small connector piece to slide into the end of each section of track, the new system’s track pieces come together with a simple snap that’s manageable for kids as young as 3. Products will start hitting stores in early summer, and will come with adapters to connect to the existing track system. “It’s the first time we’ve done this big of an innovation in the track system in over 50 years,” says Katie Buford, vice president of product at Mattel. Building a new track For Hot Wheels, the typical pipeline to bring a new product to market takes about 18 months. When it came to the tracks, the brand spent almost three years to get this essential piece of the playsets right. Buford says consumer research helped inform the need for a different approach, and Hot Wheels designers and engineers worked their way through six prototypes, and variations of those six, before landing on the approach that was the most intuitive and the most accessible. “It comes back to the testing. Like, lots and lots of rounds of making sure that the snap is the right tolerance, and that it is the right amount of pressure for kids to be able to put together, but also the right amount for it not to come apart,” Buford says. “It’s a fine balance to strike.” Hot Wheels playsets, which come in a range from conventional racetrack loops to extravagantly looped and motorized contortions, can be a make or break for consumers, according to Stanichi. Some consumers will buy a track product and call it a day, while the more engaged Hot Wheels fan might buy many track sets over time, connecting them together in wild and YouTube-ready arrays. All Hot Wheels playsets sold over the past decade or so have included at least one connection point that allows them to link up with other sets for more creative and expansive play. But for those kids who have been unable to build the playsets on their own, the drive to get more tracks just wasn’t there. “Kids are already engaged in our brand. They are already our fans. But because of some of these usability challenges, we were not getting them to go deeper into our track system,” Stanichi says. “When the Hot Wheels track system really comes to life is when you’re expanding it.” Endlessly expandable The new system was intentionally designed to be modular, so that it could be endlessly expanded. Redesigning the tracks became a way to nudge more kids away from thinking of the playsets as a contained activity and toward thinking of them more as what Stanichi calls “a sandbox for creativity.” According to user testing, Hot Wheels’s Speed Snap Track System addresses the main problem with the existing track system, making assembly easier for a majority of the Hot Wheels 3-to-6-year-old target audience. Track setup time was also reduced by 10%. Stanichi says the product will be a success if it gets more Hot Wheels customers to go from just buying toy cars to buying playsets, and for more of those who already have playsets to double or even triple the number of sets they own. Whether a few stretches of plastic race-car track will convince kids—or, really, parents—to buy more Hot Wheels stuff remains to be seen. But according to Stanichi, the brand doesn’t actually need that much help. It’s seen seven years of revenue growth, and shows no sign of slowing down. “The last seven years have been the best performing years in the history of the brand,” Stanichi says. That makes redesigning one of the key components of the brand a possibly confusing decision. But Stanichi says the user data on the existing track’s assembly challenges was impossible to ignore. “There’s been a lot of excitement and support within Mattel overall to innovate and to break something that is not broken so we can make it better,” Stanichi says. View the full article

If you’ve ever felt like your pet knows exactly when to pull you away from the stress of your computer screen, you aren’t alone. A landmark study surveying over 30,000 pet owners in 20 different countries found that 78% of dog or cat owners report that their pets remind them to take breaks during work or tasks, with 50% of the participants saying this happens daily. The study, which was conducted by YouGov on behalf of Mars, is the largest international survey of its kind in the world. The findings resonated deeply with David Reilly, Global VP at Mars Petcare. “If my dog’s at daycare, I don’t take a break at lunch time,” he says. “But if my dogs’s not at daycare, somehow miraculously, I find the space to create up an hour to take my dog on a walk.” Knowing that his relationship with his own pet had such an impact on his mental health, David was excited by the data. “I think 46% of people globally report their mental well-being is their number-one health priority and 56% of the population of the world has a pet. So if we can help unlock this idea that the pet could be your well-being superhero . . . then there’s a real opportunity there,” he says. To do this, Mars Petcare team needed to seek further expertise. “We have a deep knowledge of pets and we actually have a deep knowledge of the bond between people and pets. But we aren’t experts in human mental health,” says Reilly. The solution was to collaborate with consumer mental health company Calm. Together, Mars and Calm collaborated on a collection of content meant to help pet lovers think about their bond with their pets as ways to improve their own well-being. Its launch marks the first pet-inspired collection featured on Calm. The content on Calm will include: A series of sleep stories inspired by the emotional connection between people and their pets. A series of guided meditations meant to help listeners reflect on the ways pets support their mental wellness. A series of breathing exercises. On Mars’s pet advice platform Kinship, Mars and Calm are launching the interactive quiz My Pet Guru, which helps pet owners learn which of six “wellbeing superpowers” their pet has based on questions about their personalities and behaviors. “Together, we’re helping more people—and their pets—experience the proven benefits of the human-animal bond through real stories, science-backed tools, and supportive content,” says Greg Justice, chief content officer at Calm. “Once the insights are rich . . . it doesn’t need to be overly clinical” says Reilly. The researchers, pet experts, and content creators, “worked together to find the sweet spot of ensuring that the content was true to what we’d heard, but also really accessible and also engaging for pet owners or other people who love pets.” Mars and Calm are also seeking touching stories from pet owners to inform the wave of pet stories from Calm. “What I’m looking forward to, honestly, is hearing the stories that people share. Pets genuinely make a really incredible impact on people’s lives,” says Reilly. View the full article

Jonathan Goldstein’s Heavyweight, where he helps people confront things from their past, is one of the most beloved podcasts of all time. In 2023 when Spotify was making huge cuts, it was one of them. But earlier this year, Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries picked it back up, and episodes will be returning soon. If you want more Heavyweight-ish stuff now, this list of podcasts will keep you satisfied. They share Heavyweight’s ethos—curiosity, empathy, a sense of humor, and beautiful audio. Wiretap Credit: Wiretap Wiretap is Jonathan Goldstein’s earlier CBC show, and it’s the spiritual ancestor of Heavyweight—weird, warm, and moving. Each episode blends scripted monologue with real-life moments and absurd sketches, all wrapped in Goldstein’s signature self-deprecating wit. It’s looser and more surreal than Heavyweight, but the emotional core is the same: people trying to make sense of themselves and each other. You'll hear stories that feel like confessions told late at night, or voicemails from someone who knows you better than you know yourself. Listening to Wiretap is like reading Jonathan’s diary—and discovering it's somehow yours, too. Proxy Credit: Proxy Yowei Shaw is trying to help people. With her beautiful show Proxy, Yowei (who refers to herself as an emotional journalist) solves niche emotional conundrums, investigated by proxy—finding people with unresolved relationships and linking them up with a stranger who can help them better understand their problems. (Recently she connected a man whose wife left him for another woman with another woman who left her husband for a woman.) Yowei comes from the massively popular podcast NPR Invisibilia, so you can trust her to deliver a good story that is tender and professionally structured. There is nothing like Proxy, making it a space for unique conversations never heard before. Selected Shorts Credit: Selected Shorts Selected Shorts is like a mixed bag for audio lovers, a magazine and time capsule all in one. Every month, executive producer and host Mitra Kaboli releases curated audio documentaries, interviews, and discussions made by and with the best people in the business. This is the stuff from the past that has inspired some of the best things you’re listening to now. There is free content on the feed (I recommend “Call Now” by Sean Cole, a hilarious piece about lawyer ads) but you need a subscription to get all the goodies. Family Ghosts Credit: Family Ghosts In episodes of Family Ghosts, host Sam Dingman starts with a personal mystery—an old family rumor, a missing person—and digs until he finds gold. It’s the mystery that snags your attention, but it's Sam’s thoughtful meditation on what it means that will keep you adding these episodes to your queue. These are stories about identity, legacy, and truth that often lack a tidy resolution, like so many of our relationships. It’s tender and comforting to hear about the complications that are happening in other people’s families. It’s why we peek into windows at night; it makes us feel less alone. This Is Love Credit: This Is Love Phoebe Judge’s This is Love has the same soulful curiosity and emotional depth that makes Heavyweight so beloved. It’s almost like Phoebe is painting a mural of the theme of love, and she is using human stories about love in all forms (friendship, romance, love for animals) to do it. Her voice is famously calm and steady, the kind that makes you want to sit still and really listen to what she has to say as she unspools stories of connection, devotion, and the unexpected ways love shows up in people’s lives. The show isn’t afraid of melancholy, but always offers a sense of awe rather than despair. Snap Judgment Credit: Snap Judgment On Snap Judgment, Glynn Washington is your emcee for a poetry slam of stories, starting out each episode with one of his own, told with such energy that you can feel it pulsing through your body. Then he hands the mic to his storyteller and you hear their story, expertly assembled with killer beats. The result? Movies for your ears. These stories—a foreign negotiator attempts to free an American journalist being held captive, someone experiences a glitch in the universe, an underwater photographer is saved by harp seals—will stick with you. Listen to just one story (I recommend starting with “The Border Hacker”) and join the huge community of Snappers who sit at the altar of storytelling master Glynn Washington, waiting for him to drop new beats. Articles of Interest Credit: Articles of Interest Like Heavyweight, Articles of Interest is a meticulously crafted show that finds profound meaning in unexpected places. Host Avery Trufelman investigates the hidden histories behind clothing and fashion with the same mix of curiosity and narrative perfection that Jonathan Goldstein brings to his show. Both shows make the small feel big, unearthing emotional depth in things most of us overlook. There’s a gentle wit and generosity in the storytelling, making you feel smarter and more connected by the end of every episode. If Heavyweight is about people trying to understand their past, Articles of Interest is about understanding the past stitched into what we wear. Beautiful / Anonymous Credit: Beautiful / Anonymous Episodes of Beautiful / Anonymous (short for Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People) take you to unexpected, human places. Every episode is a phone call to a stranger—host Chris Gethard sets his stop watch to 60 minutes and has a conversation with them, letting them take the conversation however they see fit. Chris Gethard brings a tender curiosity to every anonymous call, allowing space for the sometimes strange, sometimes funny, always heartfelt conversations that, like Heavyweight, often unlock a human mystery about someone. Chris has talked to a witch, a man whose wife is dying of cancer, a funeral director, someone who opens up about their heroin addiction, and many more. The Memory Palace Credit: The Memory Palace The Memory Palace and Heavyweight are kindred spirits, both obsessed with the weight of the past. But with The Memory Palace, the stories are quieter and a little bit more mysterious. Nate DiMeo tells true, often forgotten tales with the rhythm of a lullaby and the punch of a good short story, slipping history into your ears like a secret. Episodes don’t need resolutions or jokes to get you to feel all the feelings, but episodes will stick in your head for a while. "The House of Lowe" is an evocative story about a pioneering woman in fashion, "Below, from Above" is an account of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and "I'm Still Alive" explores the history of premature burials. Endless Thread Credit: Endless Thread Most Endless Thread stories begin with something strange found on Reddit and evolve from there into a story about people IRL. Using storytelling, interviews, and discussions, hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson find the people involved in the stories and bring their threads to life. What makes it like Heavyweight is the mixture of mysteries and personal experiences that will give you a glimpse into the lives of people around the world, both online and off. View the full article

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A group backed by tech billionaires spent years and $800 million secretly buying up over 60,000 acres of land in Solano County, California, 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The group—which calls itself California Forever and is funded by Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs, among others—planned from the start to build a brand-new city for as many as 400,000 residents. But to do that they needed voter approval to change the county’s development rules. Just before heading to the ballot this past November, California Forever yanked its initiative despite spending over $9 million on its campaign. Now it seems California Forever may have found a way to develop the property it owns without needing to win an election. The pulled ballot measure caught the attention of Bret Prebula, the city manager of Suisun City, a small city in the area. It was the “trigger,” he tells Fast Company, for coming up with the idea to expand the city’s borders and annex nearby land as a way to address the city’s finances and budget deficit. There is only a small bit of undevelopable marshland to the city’s west; to the east are the vast tracts of land owned by the tech titans. Prebula brought his idea to the Suisun City council last year, and in January it voted four to one to explore the possibility of annexing land. It was a heated meeting, with critics bringing up California Forever’s likely involvement, but the mayor of Suisun City chastised attendees multiple times that California Forever was not on the agenda. And yet, when Suisun City later sent letters out to property owners surrounding the city, California Forever was the main group that responded to indicate its interest. The map Suisun City produced of what land it’s looking at annexing is “exactly” where California Forever’s proposed city would be, says Sadie Wilson, director of planning and research at The Greenbelt Alliance, which has been leading the opposition to California Forever’s development plans. A few weeks later, Rio Vista, another small city in the area, announced it, too, would explore annexation in response to Suisun City’s announcement. The city voted to join the effort to ensure that, as City Manager Kristina Miller said at the meeting, it will have “a seat at the table so that, for lack of a better word, we are not on the menu.” Many of the councilmembers took the same stance, voicing their opposition to California Forever’s plans while saying, in the words of Councilmember Rick Dolk, the city needs to take a “defensive” position. Indeed, Rio Vista’s hand may have been forced: the land Suisun City is looking at annexing that’s owned by California Forever goes right up to the city’s west border. If it didn’t join in, the city could “feel the impacts and get none of the benefits,” Wilson says. At a meeting in mid-April, the two cities signed a memorandum of understanding to avoid being pitted against each other. Suisun City is also pursuing an agreement with California Forever that would require the group to cover all of the costs of consultants and other needs the cities will have as it explores the idea of annexation so it doesn’t have to spend its own money. That could also include an agreement that California Forever won’t put another measure on Solano County’s ballot next year as the group vowed to do after it pulled last year’s initiative. For California Forever, it seems that “annexation is the focus right now,” says Nate Huntington, resilience manager at the Greenbelt Alliance. Representatives from the group have attended meetings in both cities in which these plans were discussed. In response to a request for comment, a California Forever spokesperson says: “We look forward to working with Suisun City, Rio Vista, and Solano County to bring new industries, amazing neighborhoods, and new sources of tax revenue to the region.” The annexation process is typically lengthy, often unfolding over several years. Before either city can expand its sphere of influence to include additional territory, the city councils must first vote in favor of the proposal. They must then reach an agreement with the county on how to share property tax revenue. After that, detailed plans and analyses must be developed to outline what the expansion would involve and how the cities would provide municipal services to the new areas. The plan must then be approved by the Solano Local Agency Formation Commission, which oversees jurisdictional boundaries. The process also requires a municipal service review, an environmental review, and multiple city council votes. But opponents of California Forever’s development plan point out that the group has a track record of trying to do things differently than what is typical. “There are roadblocks, but also I think they’ve shown they’re really willing to go around the normal process,” Wilson says. “California Forever is very powerful and they have a lot of resources.” Prebula, for his part, sees it similarly, saying that it could make sense, if annexation moves forward, to see if the state legislature will pass legislation shortening the process as it did for the construction of a new NBA stadium. But the deal could be a raw one for the cities if they move forward. Although they would get upfront development fees from California Forever, a fiscal study of the group’s ballot initiative commissioned by the county last year found that, had it won and developed the city, the county would over time actually lose $103.1 million, and that was under an arrangement where all tax revenue would have flowed to the county. If the cities go forward with annexation, they’ll have to share tax revenue with each other and the county, earning even less. Prebula rebuts those findings, arguing the analysis “happened way too quickly” and was based on “archaic” ways of delivering services. Opponents of California Forever’s efforts say the annexation plan reflects the group’s belief that it can’t win at the ballot box, “especially when they got off on such a bad start and there’s so much distrust,” Huntington says. The group kept its plans secret until the New York Times revealed who was behind the land acquisition in 2023. California Forever also sued local ranchers and farmers—most of whom had refused to sell their land—alleging they violated antitrust law when they “collude[d]” by holding out for higher offers and seeking $510 million in damages. Many of those landowners were ultimately forced to settle and give up their property. Jan Sramek, former Goldman Sachs trader and CEO of California Forever, told Fast Company last August that the group would refuse to drop the case. They also say it represents an end-run around the public. “If you go the annexation route, there is no vote,” noted Duane Kromm, a former member of the Solano County Board of Supervisors who was involved in opposing California Forever’s ballot initiative. Prebula argued that county residents’ voice “can be heard without a public vote” and that his approach “brings more people into the conversation when you have a select group of people who can foster a process and a project.” That, he argued, is “what democracy is, it’s just not about a vote.” But Wilson argued that it’s a way to go around the process California Forever should have followed. “It’s saying you don’t care about the public’s vote, don’t care about the county process,” she says. “Time and again they seem to just be doing whatever they want and not respecting the people or laws or processes or communities.” View the full article

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Long before the The President administration tapped Elon Musk to cut federal costs and headcount via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), business leaders and politicians have been trying to find ways to make government leaner, less bureaucratic, and more like a well-run corporation. In 1982, Ronald Reagan asked J. Peter Grace, CEO of W.R. Grace & Co., to lead a private sector committee to root our government waste. While campaigning for the presidency in 1992, Bill Clinton promised to “radically change the way government operates—to shift from top-down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government.” The notion that federal agencies and programs can be run more like businesses has animated the Oval Office aspirations of executives such as Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz, and Doug Burgum. Public-sector playbooks for CEOs But are there lessons that executives in the private sector can learn from their public counterparts? Businesses certainly have benefitted from government; tech companies owe a debt to DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for funding the predecessor to the internet, for example. Local governments can be particularly good at empowering employees at all levels to innovate, something that can confound large corporations. Rick Wartzman and Lawrence Greenspun, when they were with the Drucker Institute, shared the story of how a single front-line employee and two-middle managers in South Bend, Indiana, streamlined the city’s application for tax-abatement to four pages from 22 and moved the process online. The mayor who challenged them to innovate? Pete Buttigieg, who went on to become U.S. Secretary of Transportation during the Biden administration. Government has produced and shaped other notable leaders, including Christina Romer, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration; and Maura Healey, the current governor of Massachusetts, whom I happened to interview last week at Think 2025, IBM’s annual event for senior business and technology leaders (Fast Company was a strategic media partner at Think). At a time when many forces are pushing government entities to be more like businesses, I asked both of them to reflect on what business can learn from government. Here’s what they had to say: Maura Healey, governor, Massachusetts: “Nobody has ever asked me that question. In many ways, government can do better by operating like a business, but in other cases that just doesn’t hold. Government is the place where things have to get done that the market isn’t going to do. As governor, I have to be attentive to the needs of seven million residents, some of whom voted for me and some of whom didn’t, many of whom have competing interests. In government you have to find a way to account for all of that. It gets messy; it gets noisy; but at the end, it helps in terms of productive policy formulation when you have that kind of stakeholder incorporation. “For purposes of creating a better world—I think in big terms—a world where there is an abundance of energy, of housing, of healthcare, of transportation, of economic opportunity and prosperity for every child, it has to come from a broader lens than sometimes might be incentivized by the bottom line.” Christina Romer, professor emerita, Graduate Division, University of California at Berkeley, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers: “Government policymaking is often chided for being slow, and it can indeed be frustratingly bureaucratic and incremental. But ‘moving fast and breaking things’ is not what Social Security recipients want when they are waiting for their checks or what the public expects when the FAA is reconfiguring flight patterns and deciding control-tower staffing. At their best, government actions are carefully researched, broadly vetted, and deliberately implemented. This approach wouldn’t work in every business setting, but it could certainly help prevent many bad decisions and unintended consequences. “Something else that impressed me during my time in government was the high quality of government workers. Far from being the lazy, overpaid bureaucrats they are often caricatured to be, I found government workers to be knowledgeable, hard-working, and committed to serving the public. Businesses would certainly benefit if they could generate that kind of loyalty and passion in their workers.” Good enough for government work Are you a business leader who has worked in government? What did you learn from your experiences in the public sector? Send your stories to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I may include insights in a future newsletter. Read and listen to more: good government The first 100 days at the SBA Gen Z really wants to work for the federal government Reclaiming the phrase “good enough for government work” The Computer Freaks podcast tells the untold story of how the internet almost didn’t happen View the full article

When you’re running a superpower, you can’t just ignore the outside worldView the full article

By 2027, nearly every new home in England might be required to include solar panels. That’s according to a story last month from The Times, which reported that U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is set to approve a mandate that will require all English homebuilders to install solar panels on the roofs of new properties starting in 2027. The move is part of two wider government plans: decarbonizing England’s grid by 2030 and building 1.5 million new homes by the end of the current parliament. Meanwhile, the U.S. is busy taking aim at clean energy while bolstering fossil fuels. Just last week, President The President announced that he planned to end the energy efficiency program Energy Star, which curtails household emissions and saves American households $40 billion in energy bills per year. It’s a stark picture of how the The President administration is walking back clean energy initiatives in the name of consumer “freedom”—at the same time that other countries are moving ahead with ambitious goals to cut emissions. England’s solar plan 2024 was a major year for solar energy around the world. According to a recent study from Solar Power Europe, global solar installations reached nearly 600 gigawatts (GW)—a 33% year-over-year increase—and accounted for 81% of all renewable energy capacity added worldwide. A report from Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie shows that, in the U.S., new solar generation capacity far surpassed any other source of electricity in 2024. In the U.K., renewables also reached a record high, totaling 45% of all energy production. Data from the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero indicates that solar capacity increased by 1.2 GW in 2024, a 7.5% increase over the course of the year. Still, experts say the rate of solar deployment will need to increase if the U.K. is to meet its 2030 decarbonization goal, which includes a target of 47 GW of added solar. Currently, two in five new builds in England are outfitted with solar panels. Based on documents reviewed by The Times, Starmer’s soon-to-be-approved building rules will require 99% of new homes to have at least some solar roof paneling beginning in 2027. The changes are expected to cost homeowners between $3,700 and $4,500. Ultimately, though, the change will likely result in savings, as the solar panels are estimated to recoup around $1,100 in energy bills every year. It’s an ambitious plan that, if enacted, would go a long way toward helping the U.K. reach its clean energy target. The U.K. takes two steps forward; the U.S. takes two steps back Since entering office, The President has repeatedly made it clear that he plans to prioritize fossil fuels over renewables, including with an executive order on his first day in office aimed at lifting restrictions on the fossil fuel industry (despite the fact that oil and gas production is at record highs in the U.S.). He has since withdrawn from international climate agreements, curtailed funds for renewable energy projects, and expressed a markedly intense disdain for wind farms. Within his order for “Unleashing American Energy,” The President listed the goal of “safeguard[ing] the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to light bulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and showerheads.” Last week, that resulted in the administration announcing plans to scrap Energy Star, a program that helps consumers identify energy-efficient home products like appliances and electronics. Since its inception, Energy Star has saved households and businesses more than $500 billion in energy costs and stopped 4 billion metric tons of emissions from entering the atmosphere. It’s a paradoxical plan that, while framed as a way to give Americans more “freedom,” actively works against The President’s promise to slash energy prices. The The President administration has also ignited uncertainty around the future of American solar power. Following the growth of the industry in 2024, solar companies in the U.S. are facing new challenges in 2025—namely, price hikes due to The President’s global trade war. Solar companies that rely on parts from China have already been hit with higher costs due to tariffs. And at the end of April, the U.S. Commerce Department announced plans to impose tariffs of up to a whopping 3,521% on some imports of solar panels from Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Cambodia, which together account for over 80% of U.S. solar module supply. Still, solar is one of the cheapest forms of energy to deploy. Back in March, multiple solar companies told Fast Company that they felt the business proposition of solar was too strong to be damaged by the new administration. Several experts have warned that solar will be key to powering American data centers and keeping the country ahead in the global AI race. It remains to be seen whether this economic argument will ultimately sway The President into reconsidering his crackdown on renewables. View the full article

There’s no question that Amazon is known for its packaging. Boxes and mailers with the ubiquitous smile logo now dot the porches of every neighborhood in the country. And with the company’s 2017 purchase of Whole Foods, it became a major player in food packaging as well, wrapping everything from produce to potato chips. Since then, the chain has expanded to 535 locations and increased its sales 40%. That means that every day, millions of people take home some food wrapped in plastic from Whole Foods—but probably rarely think about the packaging. But in a nondescript warehouse in a still-industrial part of Seattle, five scientists at Amazon’s Sustainable Materials Innovation Lab are trying to design a better package. This work is twofold. First, researchers are putting dozens of bio-based plastics through a gauntlet of tests on things like tensile strength, tear strength, and seal strength to see how they compare to their fossil-fuel-based counterparts. Second, they’re working with a handful of partners to make sure that when this packaging hits the market, there’s a recycling infrastructure already in place that can support it. “Our long-term objective is to enable simplicity and recycling of plastics in the same way that you have paper today,” says Alan Jacobsen, the director of Materials and Energy Sciences at the lab. “You don’t need to know, is it a 1, 2, 3, 4. You just throw it.” The intense focus on circularity sands in stark contrast to the overconsumption that Amazon’s business model entails—and the vast amounts of junk it distributes, particularly with the recent launch of Haul, where every item is under $20. Jacobsen, for his part, says that he knows people are going to buy products at “a range of price points. . . . We try to figure out how to enable that in the most sustainable way.” And the company says it intends to make the research and technology available beyond Amazon, which means that if it’s successful, it could lead to a fundamental change in packaging—and recycling—throughout the economy. The challenges of designing food packagingLast October, Amazon announced that it had swapped out all of its plastic fillers with paper, part of its overall commitment to reducing plastic use. Paper isn’t just more environmentally friendly than plastic, it also has much higher rates of recycling (68% compared to 6%). “When you’re at home recycling paper, you just throw it in the bin and you know it’s going to get recycled,” Jacobsen says. “Because it’s easier to recycle, it’s recycled more.” But for some applications, paper just isn’t a viable solution. That’s especially true for food packaging “because of the physical properties of the material,” says Jacobsen. “Sometimes this has to do with the tear strength or puncture strength; sometimes it has to do with the moisture barrier properties or oxygen barrier properties—just properties that it is not possible for paper to meet.” Food packaging has to keep potato chips crispy and pretzels salty and baby carrots wet; it has to be tough enough that a pile of apples don’t tear open the bag, with a seal strong enough that frozen peas don’t spill all over the floor (while still being easy to open). Food has way more demands of its packaging than something like a book, a tube of lipstick, or even a set of dishes. The default solution to this has always been plastic. But Jacobsen and his team are working on a replacement: biopolyesters. That means the plastic is biodegradable and uses biological materials, waste, or recycled content as the feedstock (or raw material used to make the plastic). But this packaging doesn’t just have to be developed, tested, and produced—Amazon also wants it to be easily recyclable, which is where things get even more complicated. Our current recycling infrastructure is finicky: It’s not good at differentiating between different types of plastic, and if it gets confused, it errs on the side of landfill. (Because if the different types of plastic get bundled together, it downgrades the entire bale, which means less money for the recycling facility.) Jacobsen and his team want to eliminate this problem entirely. They want to make biopolyesters that are a blend of feedstocks (including different types of recycled plastic) and then have recycling plants (called “materials recovery facilities,” or MRFs) be able to take it all in, easily separate it, and find a home for these streams. “But one new type of material is not going to work,” says Jacobsen. “You’re going to need a range of different materials. You often have to blend these materials together. You have to put them in different layers to meet the requirements for a particular application.” But most recycling facilities aren’t set up to deal with these kinds of mixed waste streams in a single piece of packaging. So Amazon is working with a network of other companies to help redesign the plastic recycling infrastructure to make it simple for their designs to always be made into something new. Glacier—designing robots to go through the trashMuch of the recycling infrastructure in the United States is built on MRFs. These massive warehouses take in gobs of recycling—cardboard boxes and wine bottles and take-out containers and everything in between—and sort hundreds of tons of waste each day. But in the course of that sorting, a lot of otherwise recyclable stuff can get missed or thrown out, maybe because the machines can’t tell what it is, maybe because it gets mixed in with other items. That means a lot of theoretically recyclable materials get sent to the landfill, and also that a lot of bundles of recycled plastic are too degraded with other materials to be properly reused. Glacier, a San Francisco-based company that Amazon invested in last fall, designed a robot to eliminate these pain points. It can sort through more than 30 different types of material, meaning the end bales are more accurate, and fewer items get trashed. (One company, for example, added a Glacier robot, and found that its paper bales were 17% more pure as a result.) “Our society tends to view recycling as a nice alternative to landfilling our trash,” says Rebecca Hu-Thrams, one of the cofounders. “[But] we very much see recycling as an absolutely crucial pillar of society’s necessary transition toward circular manufacturing. In other words, recycling is at its core a way to get your hands on more raw feedstocks, more materials to turn into new stuff.” Hu-Thrams referenced a customer in the Midwest that installed one of Glacier’s AI camera’s on what’s known as a “last chance line,” where all the trash leaves the facility and there’s one more shot to pick out recyclable items. This facility quickly realized that about two-thirds of its total “leakage” was coming from beverage bottles; when they identified where and why this was happening, they were able to fix the issue. “So in the span of a couple of weeks or less, they actually are now on track to rescue 15 million more of these PET bottles every single year that would’ve ended up in landfill,” says Areeb Malik, Glacier’s other cofounder. Amazon plans to install one of these robotic systems in its lab next month. The goal is that as they develop new biopolyesters that are a mix of materials, they can simultaneously be training the system to recognize them and mark them as recyclable—never getting confused and thinking they belong in the trash. “We want to make sure that once the materials are out in the market, we know that they’ll be identified in these systems right away,” says John Shane, a principal materials engineer who worked in Amazon’s lab for three years. “And we’ll be able to generate data sets here that we can share with Glacier and then they can share with their customers.” As that information is fed back to the companies, they’ll ideally be able to design packaging that’s easier to recycle (and better identified by the robot). That’s a huge priority for Amazon, which plans to share what it learns from its biopolyester development. “We don’t want to own the IP and keep it to ourselves,” says Jacobsen. “We want everybody to have access; we have no financial motivation.” EsterCycle—designing chemicals to break down the plasticsBut even if Glacier’s tech scales up and is able to identify much more theoretically recyclable plastic, the current recycling infrastructure isn’t necessarily able to transform that into new products. And that’s the problem EsterCycle is trying to solve. The Denver-based startup spun out of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory last August, after completing a successful project with Amazon on mixed recycling waste. Julia Curley was a postdoctoral researcher at NREL working on the project; she’s now EsterCycle’s founder and only full-time employee. Curley stresses that EsterCycle isn’t looking to upend traditional recycling processes—it’s developing an entirely new one. The goal is to be additive to the current system, taking what MRFs now see as contaminated, lower quality plastic and transforming it into materials that can be made into new products. Our existing system essentially collects bales of similar plastic; shreds, washes, and melts it; and then turns it into something new: It’s a mechanical process. EsterCycle, on the other hand, is working on chemical recycling. “Plastics are made of these long chains of molecules called polymers,” Curley says. “And what we’re doing is actually cutting that chain into its individual components, kind of like taking apart a large string of Legos into its individual pieces. And then they can be remade into new plastics.” (Some environmental groups criticize wide-scale chemical recycling as being a pipe dream of Big Oil, although most of the research in this area thus far solely relates to fossil-fuel-based plastic.) This will be especially relevant for compostable plastics, which are commonly used in food packaging. While this is still a small portion of overall plastic (just 1%, as of 2024), it’s projected to keep increasing—and our current infrastructure isn’t designed to recycle it. Curley says that currently, if too much of it is in a recycling bale, it will significantly lower the quality and price that a MRF can ask for it. Commercial composters, meanwhile, often don’t accept it either, because of contamination issues, or because they’re skeptical that it actually breaks down. EsterCycle is now using a lot of these compostable plastics as feedstocks to demonstrate how well its chemical process works at breaking them down and making them usable for the supply chain. As EsterCycle breaks down these kinds of plastics, the resulting “building blocks” can be sold to any kind of manufacturer. “The idea is that they can be drop-in additions to existing manufacturing, meaning the process doesn’t have to change at all,” Curley says. Novamont—designing packaging to be recycledNovamont, an Italian company, has been working on biodegradable and compostable products since its launch in 1990—and it’s exactly the kind of company that might buy those building blocks. Its Mater-Bi is used in things like shopping bags and packaging; while it was originally made out of fossil-fuel-produced polyesters, the company has been working to increase the amount of renewable content in this material. While EsterCycle isn’t yet sending its feedstock their way, the idea is that ultimately, Novamont and similar companies would be able to seamlessly incorporate those biopolyesters into their products. In the meantime, Amazon and Novamont are testing out bio-based plastic grocery bags in Amazon Fresh stores in Valencia, Spain. “That was a great application where paper was being used and it wasn’t meeting the requirements,” Jacobsen says. The grocery bags were being put in the fridge before being delivered to customers and because of the moisture, they were falling apart when people took them out. Switching to the plastic bags has “made it better for the folks that are delivering them and improved it all around.” In the U.S., Jacobsen and his team have been testing out produce bags made from biopolyesters at some Whole Foods locations and at Amazon Fresh stores in the Seattle area. There, they have QR codes where customers can give feedback on the bags. The Amazon lab collects that feedback, shares it with Novamont, and then they keep iterating on the design until it gets closer to what they want. “We learned that lettuce wilted faster [in the early bags],” says Jacobsen. “Is it the end of the world? Probably not, but to some customers, it’s not ideal.” Researchers at the lab could then take that feedback and reexamine the moisture barrier properties in the bags to see how that element could be adjusted. Once these bags have been used, the goal is that they’re fed back into the recycling stream. To that end, Novamont is also conducting trials with one of Glacier’s AI models to ensure that the bags can be properly sorted once they reach a MRF. And then, of course, the ideal is that EsterCycle would be able to chemically break down the bags to be fed back into Novamont’s production system. Designing a better recycling system—no matter who’s in the White HouseMany of these developments are still years from being widely used in the market. That would seem compounded by the fact that the The President administration appears actively hostile toward anything that benefits the environment and is cutting funding and staffing at research institutions across the country. (Just last week, 114 people were fired from NREL as part of massive cuts to the Department of Energy.) Jacobsen admitted that it’s a bit of “a wait-and-see period,” and notes that while their funding isn’t necessarily dependent on the government, they do partner with government labs “where there’s an opportunity to accelerate progress.” He hopes that will continue to be possible over the next four years. The Glacier team, meanwhile, is cautiously optimistic about what The President means for their business. “Recycling in the waste industry as a whole tends to be extremely bipartisan,” says Glacier’s Hu-Thrams. “Whether you’re thinking about recycling from a climate crisis mitigation angle, or an onshoring and workforce development and job creation angle, there’s so many reasons why advancing recycling infrastructure and recycling efficiency is a really, really good thing to do for our society.” Much of this work is also done at the state and local level, where decisions are more insulated from The President’s rhetoric and slapdash executive orders. That’s where Jacobsen hopes to make the most progress, noting that cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Denver are interested in incorporating these products into their recycling infrastructure. It can be a bit jarring to try to square the innovations coming out of Jacobson’s team—and the genuine passion that they have for a fossil-fuel-free supply chain—with Amazon’s position as the largest online seller of stuff in the U.S. But our addiction to consumption—and Amazon’s commitment to fulfilling it—means that this cycle is unlikely to end anytime soon. Ensuring that it’s not wrapped in plastic made from fossil fuels is a big deal. And if they’re successful at transforming food packaging, it has implications far beyond just what we eat. View the full article

It is hard to believe that in 2025, we are still dialing to schedule doctor appointments, get referrals, refill prescriptions, confirm office hours and addresses, and handle many other healthcare tasks. In fact, I created Zocdoc nearly 20 years ago to help patients avoid the dysfunctional phone experience and schedule appointments online. But I must confess that I have to pick up the phone sometimes, too—and I dread it. I am not alone. According to a recent survey my company conducted, most Americans say they dread calling their doctor about as much as they dread getting a shot. At best, it is an inconvenience. At worst, the phone is a barrier to care and a wildly inefficient and costly channel for providers. Given that billions of healthcare interactions occur over the phone each year, this is a calamitous liability. Relying on technology that was revolutionary in 1876 is no way to manage America’s healthcare administration. Especially because 150 years later, a new technology has emerged that will transform how healthcare operates: artificial intelligence. While AI incites a range of feelings when it comes to its clinical implications and possibilities, I am much more focused on leveraging AI to solve healthcare’s administrative challenges. Considering these burdens cost $600 billion to $1 trillion annually, AI offers a remarkable opportunity to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and deliver first-class experiences for everyone. As I see it, the effort to leverage AI to improve healthcare administration will unfold in three stages: Assistive, Autonomous, and Augmentative AI. Assistive AI: Supervised Intern In the Assistive stage, I view AI as a capable but dependent intern. It supports healthcare workers—but requires ample supervision. Take AI scribes, for example. Although the technology takes records and transcribes patient encounters, physicians must still review and revise the notes to ensure they are correct. However, because AI scribes cannot yet work autonomously, documentation burdens remain and there is not a pure efficiency gain. And they do not even begin to clear the waste and friction burdening office staff and patients. Autonomous AI: Productive Peer AI that works independently defines the Autonomous stage. Instead of an intern, think of the technology as a peer. This is where efficiency gains begin to accrue, and it is where we are now. To understand Autonomous AI’s potential, let’s return to the phone. In healthcare, the phone is bad for business. Up to 20 percent of calls go unanswered, with each missed call costing provider organizations $200 to $300 in lost revenue. Half of Americans say they’re likely to switch providers if they cannot get through to their doctor’s office. The phone is also bad for health outcomes. More than half of patients admit to delaying care when they cannot reach their doctor’s office, while a third admit to giving up on scheduling a visit entirely. Autonomous AI is perfectly suited to remove these challenges. Appointment management is high volume, with billions of calls a year. It is highly volatile, with fluctuating peak times that are hard to efficiently staff. And it is highly rote, with most scheduling tasks being simple and repetitive. This makes appointment management a prime area for AI, freeing staff to focus on more valuable, complex responsibilities. In fact, the best AI phone assistants can successfully and independently handle more than 70 percent of a practice’s inbound scheduling calls. The AI phone assistant’s ability to scale efficiency, improve the patient experience, and help practices counter macroeconomic headwinds and bolster their bottom lines is compelling. Augmentative AI: Superhuman Colleague When AI surpasses—and then scales—anything humans can do, we enter the Augmentative stage. Soon, polyglot AI phone assistants will detect and then offer to converse in a patient’s preferred language. AI models will recognize patients’ appointment preferences, from cadence of visits to time of day and day of the week. AI will even predict the likelihood of a patient attending an appointment and then create custom engagement plans to increase those odds. Augmenting AI will also excel at anticipating patients’ needs. It may contact a patient before a prescription runs out and offer to refill it with their pharmacy, or it may proactively schedule a checkup at their preferred appointment time. This might sound futuristic, but given AI’s rapid advances, this stage is fast approaching. My prediction is this is likely only 12 to 18 months away. AI or Obsolescence It is tempting to point AI toward healthcare’s moonshots, but our biggest and most immediate opportunities for transformation lie in fixing the basics. With AI, we finally have the technology to bring America’s healthcare experience out of the 1800s and into the modern age. In doing so, we can remove the friction, barriers, and waste that have disempowered patients and saddled providers for decades. Change will happen suddenly, and then all at once. Because AI improves by the minute, healthcare organizations that wait to adopt this technology lose more ground every day. In no time, they will find themselves as relevant as a rotary phone. View the full article

Charles Suppon has big plans for the Tunkhannock Area School District. At any given time, the northeastern Pennsylvania district’s chief operating officer can rattle off statistics about fields in which its schools excel: arts, AP classes and softball, as well as on-the-job training programs for future farmers, welders and more. Goats and chickens roam the high school’s courtyards, where students also tend to koi fish; in the hallways just beyond, high schoolers tinker with tractors, build furniture to sell and offer free tax services for the broader community. But Suppon speaks with vigor when he talks about the five-megawatt system he hopes to install across five solar arrays on the district’s buildings and surrounding property. The solar panels will heat the district’s pool and serve as the basis for new curricula and jobs training classes on the solar industry. For a rural district of around 2,000, Tunkhannock is punching above its weight class, he believes. “We’re a smaller school district doing big things.” Suppon’s district is in a bright red portion of Pennsylvania northwest of Scranton, narrowly outside one of the state’s more prolific natural gas regions. For him, solar is simply a pathway toward cost savings—just as natural gas, from which the district earns royalties off several leases, has been. Tunkhannock believes it could save upwards of $1 million a year by switching to solar, money that could be used for student initiatives. “It was always a financial decision,” Suppon said. “We wanted to be able to offset our energy costs, produce our own energy, and only pay distribution [fees] back to the grid.” There’s one catch: Tunkhannock’s plan to go solar is contingent upon winning more than $1 million in funding from the state’s Solar for Schools program. Currently in its inaugural year, Solar for Schools was born from a bill that faced an uphill battle in a legislature where environmental bills often die by attrition—a battle that required its creator, progressive Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler (D-Philadelphia) to reach across the aisle and help marry what are often competing interests in the state—labor, education, and climate. But that money for Tunkhannock might not come through because of the stiff competition for the limited funds. While last year’s state budget gave the Solar for Schools program $25 million to disperse to school districts, the program received applications that add up to nearly four times that amount from schools and districts large and small, rural and urban, and conservative and liberal. “I was pleased, but hardly surprised,” Fiedler said in an email to Capital & Main of the demand. The disparity between the grant program’s budget and the size of its application pool mirrors a broader reality within the state Legislature: Despite clear and growing demand for solar energy, the political will to meet it has yet to catch up. A 2022 poll of more than 1,300 Pennsylvanians conducted by Vote Solar Action, an advocacy group urging pro-solar legislation at the state level, found that 65% of Pennsylvanians support large-scale solar farm development in the state. More than 80% said they support rooftop solar, while 73% support natural gas and 52% support coal. “I [have] visited nearly every corner of the state, from Waynesburg to Bethlehem, and in every place I met folks who wanted to save money on electricity, create good local jobs, and preserve the beauty of their communities,” Fiedler said. Yet the state lags far behind most others in solar development: Pennsylvania currently ranks 49th in the nation for its growth in solar, wind, and geothermal generation over the last decade, according to the nonprofit advocacy group PennEnvironment. It has fallen behind other major fossil-fuel producing states, like Texas, the country’s second-largest solar generator in 2023; California, where solar and wind together comprise close to half the state’s energy generation; and New Mexico, which Environment America, the national organization behind PennEnvironment, ranked 4th in the U.S. for renewable energy production in 2024. Just 3% of Pennsylvanians now have solar panels on their roofs, Vote Solar Action’s poll found—though 31% said they’d be interested in installing them. The lag could be attributed, in part, to interconnection delays by the regional grid operator PJM—though many of its neighbors in the same system, like Washington D.C., New Jersey, and North Carolina, have eclipsed Pennsylvania’s solar production. Because of increased demands predicted by PJM, utility bills in Pennsylvania are slated to increase this summer. Fiedler sees solar production as an antidote to what could be an oncoming energy crisis in the state. “We must generate more electricity,” she said. “Nuclear, wind, geothermal, and gas power plants can all be part of the solution, but the fact is we need energy now, and solar is the fastest.” But solar initiatives continue to hit gridlock in the halls of state power. After making its way through the state House last summer, a bill that would have enabled community solar—a program that allows multiple residents to enroll in a shared solar array separate from their homes—died in the Republican-controlled Senate. The bill’s author, Rep. Peter Schweyer (D-Lehigh), who introduced it as a way to make solar accessible for renters, apartment dwellers and those who can’t afford solar panels by themselves, has had to reintroduce the bill and start over again this session. Gov. Josh Shapiro’s attempt to pass an updated renewables target also failed to gain traction in the Legislature last session. Where a 2004 target required 0.5% of the state’s energy generation to come from solar, the new plan would have required the state to reach a 35% target by 2035 that included solar, wind, and nuclear energy generation. He has reintroduced it as part of a broader energy package dubbed the “Lightning Plan.” In a divided legislature, the fate of both initiatives is tenuous. As renewable energy faces sweeping attacks at the federal level under the direction of President Donald The President, states are stepping up to hold the line. Whether Pennsylvania will prove itself to be a meaningful player in this fight remains an open question. “Climate change has become politicized,” said David Masur, executive director of nonprofit advocacy group PennEnvironment. “Which then potentially can create more powerful special interests who are opposed to common sense policies and have a vested self-interest in the status quo, and politicians having sort of a knee jerk reaction to oppose things [that] are probably good even for their very own constituents.” Case in point: Solar for All, a federal grant program initiated by the Biden administration that awarded Pennsylvania $156 million for residential solar installations on low-income households, was designed to save residents $192 million over the next 20 years in energy costs while averting 43 million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere, the equivalent of removing more than 9 million cars from the road for a year. These funds quickly became a negotiating chip. During deliberations over the 2024 state budget, a line was inserted into an omnibus fiscal code bill that prevented the state from accessing the funds. Though the Solar for All program was just one of several dozen federal environmental grants Pennsylvania won under Biden-era initiatives, the budget bill specifically calls out that one program. It requires legislative approval for the program’s funds to be disbursed. So, Fiedler sought out exactly that when she authored HB 362, a bill that would force the Legislature to vote on allowing the Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority, the state’s independent financing authority, to distribute funds it has already been awarded. Fiedler said the funds are already under contract with the federal government. HB 362 passed the House Energy Committee, which Fiedler chairs, in March. It now sits in the state House, home to a slim one-vote Democratic majority, as a battle to free the money falters after being confronted with a last-minute hurdle. Two days after the bill passed, Rep. Craig Williams (R-Chester County), introduced an amendment that would require the state’s utility regulator to promulgate regulations on net metering—a system that allows residential solar users to sell surplus energy back to the grid to incentivize the buildout of rooftop solar. Environmentalists fear the amendment could open the door to doing away with net metering—a major financial incentive for many residential solar owners. Reforming net metering has long been a priority of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative lobbying firm that disburses model bills to states, including those fighting renewable energy and attacking environmentalists. The group argues that paying solar owners for the energy they produce is costly for utilities—they pay them retail rates, rather than wholesale rates, and residential solar producers may end up generating enough energy to offset distribution fees they’d pay for the wires that move energy around the grid. Utilities then pass those costs onto consumers, and nonsolar users end up subsidizing their neighbors with solar panels, they argue. Williams has used similar language in opposing solar legislation; environmentalists generally disagree with this premise. Critics were quick to point out that, prior to joining the Pennsylvania House in 2020, Williams spent more than 10 years as general counsel for PECO, a Philadelphia-based utility that has come under fire from environmentalists for neglecting to increase its share of renewable energy. State lobbying and campaign finance records show the company spent more than $600,000 on lobbying in 2024, and donated $6,000 to Williams in 2024 between a failed run for attorney general and a successful campaign to keep his seat in the state House. The trade group that represents PECO and other utilities, the Edison Electric Institute, has long challenged net metering as states have grown their share of solar production. “The more people who generate energy from their homes, the less [utilities] get to build out their larger operations,” said Elowyn Corby, Mid-Atlantic regional director for Vote Solar Action. Williams’ amendment passed with support on both sides of the aisle. Environmentalists, however, consider it a poison pill—one that could weaken the state’s fledgling solar industry. “In Pennsylvania, probably the best thing we have going for solar is net metering,” said Masur, the PennEnvironment director. Minus Williams’ amendment, Fiedler’s Solar for All bill makes common sense, Corby said. “At its heart, the goal of this legislation is to make sure Pennsylvania doesn’t send federal money that belongs to our neighbors back to DC,” Fiedler said. The Solar for All program focuses specifically on serving homeowners who might otherwise be unable to afford solar panels of their own. In Pennsylvania, funds are specifically earmarked for low-income households, who are guaranteed at least 20% savings on their electricity bills. It’s unclear whether Fiedler will push forward to advance HB 362 now that it includes a threat to net metering. In the coming months, the state Legislature may also vote on initiatives that would put solar panels on municipal and emergency response buildings; warehouses and distribution centers; and townhouses governed by homeowners associations. Shapiro has proposed reupping the Solar for Schools program’s $25 million appropriation in the 2025-2026 budget, set to be finalized by June 30. Though Fiedler said she’s pleased to see the program reinstated, she said “that number is the minimum we should budget.” Jim Gregory, a former state representative and now executive director of the Conservative Energy Network-Pennsylvania, has committed himself to convincing his former colleagues of the importance of renewables in a diverse state energy portfolio. “If that money is going to be made available, we want to see it made available to low- and moderate-income families in rural Pennsylvania,” he said. Gregory said he’s watched as attitudes toward solar among conservatives in state government have shifted. “I don’t oppose anyone who wants to put solar on their rooftop or anything like that to help with utility bills,” said Rep. Kathy Rapp (R-Warren) at a recent meeting of the House Energy committee on Fiedler’s bill. Rapp has, for several sessions, introduced legislation requiring solar operators to create end-of-life plans for their arrays, which has yet to pass. Though far from an all-out embrace of solar, Rapp’s language offers a window into a softening stance on renewables. In 2019, Rapp wrote on her Facebook profile that solar and wind energy pose “serious environmental risks,” and called its supporters “radical Green New Deal proponents.” Despite past roadblocks, Fiedler remains optimistic about the fate of solar initiatives in the state. She sees the Solar for Schools program as evidence of broadening support for clean energy. “I believe there is political will for solar and all types of energy development in the state,” she said. “A lot of that success comes from the broad stakeholder coalition we built and from the support of colleagues on the other side of the aisle.” For school districts like Tunkhannock, the state’s ability to reach consensus has very real consequences. With the fate of federal solar tax credits unclear, district leaders say they are currently on the edge of their seats. The Solar for Schools grant could end up being a lifeline. “To say not getting potentially a million dollars in grant money wouldn’t affect us at all I think would be a lie,” said Suppon, the school district’s chief operating officer. This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. View the full article

Greenland’s coastline is huge: a sprawling 27,394-mile labyrinth of fjords, glaciers, and ice-choked waters, longer than Earth’s circumference. Its length and topography makes it one of the planet’s longest and most logistically hostile to patrol in peacetime. Now, with countries like Russia and the United States’s neo-imperialist plans to grab as many Arctic natural resources as possible, it is one of Europe’s frontlines. Which is why people like Jens Martin Skibsted—global partner and VP of foresight and mobility at design studio Manyone—are thinking about how to better protect a wonderland that is key for the future Denmark and the European Union. For decades, Denmark has relied on the Sirius Dog Sled Patrol (yes, soldiers using sleds and good boys), satellites, and sporadic aerial surveys to monitor this vast expanse. These methods are slow, costly, and imprecise. For example, in 2023, a tsunami in Dickson Fjord went unnoticed for a year, clearly exposing the systemic gaps in this mixed surveillance system. Skibsted and his design team originally thought drones could be a solution. Drones are efficient, they can act in swarms, and they can be fitted with cameras and sensors that can feed an artificial intelligence system to keep track of that vast ice landscape at all times. But traditional drones have problems. The big ones are long range but expensive to operate and require human crews. The small ones don’t have enough range: Their batteries run out after a short time and they need to return to a base to reload. Skibsted and his team thought that they needed a new solution—one that could fly, so they could quickly cover large patches of territory, but also one that could operate entirely on its own, landing, recharging, and taking off again. The AquaGlider, as they called their drone, is a solar-powered autonomous drone. It reimagines the USSR’s ekranoplan, a large airplane-like vehicle once feared by NATO, which the Red Army wanted to use for coastal invasions. Its origins trace back to the 1960s, when Soviet engineer Rostislav Alexeyev designed a hybrid aircraft-boat that exploited ground effect, an aerodynamic phenomenon where wings gain increased lift and reduced drag when flying within one wingspan of a flat surface. By skimming 10–30 feet above water, these mammoth craft, like the 550-ton “Caspian Sea Monster,” achieved fuel efficiency double that of airplanes, hauling military assets at 300-plus mph. Soviet GEVs were plagued by instability in rough seas, navigational hazards, and political abandonment after the USSR’s collapse. It’s ironic that a machine inspired by Soviet ingenuity could become Europe’s first line of defense in a region where Russia is rapidly militarizing (and which The President also wants to control). But Skibsted saw potential in this forgotten tech to create a new kind of vehicle. The proposed AquaGlider would fly on its own for weeks at a time, taking off and landing on water; it’s designed to recharge while floating thanks to solar panels, and avoids storms by simply sitting on the water rather than flying. The drones make the most efficient use of energy, dozens of them zipping along the huge coastline a few feet above the water to absorb information and transmit it to base, surveilling everything from illegal fishing to Russian submarine activity. Engineering perpetual motionThe AquaGlider is basically a wing that uses two propellers to speed forward, trapping air against the ocean or ice. This creates an air cushion that allows it to glide with minimal energy. This ground effect lets it travel twice as far as a conventional aircraft on the same power. During takeoff, retractable hydrofoils lift the hull above waves, reducing drag until the craft transitions to flight. If storms surge, electric thrusters enable vertical takeoff, though Skibsted told me in an email interview that this “zaps the battery” and is a last resort. Solar panels cloak its wings and underbelly, harvesting energy even in twilight—a critical feature near the Arctic Circle, where summer brings 24-hour sunlight and sometimes the sun rays go almost parallel to the ground for most of the day. Still, Greenland’s winters, with months of darkness, pose a problem. Here, the AquaGlider docks with buoys that store energy from waves and offshore wind farms. These buoys double as communication relays, transmitting data to satellites or coastal stations. Durability is baked into its graphene-coated composite hull, which resists corrosion and iceberg collisions. “It avoids obstacles like any driverless car,” Skibsted tells me, relying on Lidar and thermal sensors to navigate. For icing—a fatal flaw in Soviet designs—the drone borrows deicing systems from modern aircraft designed to work under extreme conditions, like those of Air Greenland’s he says, using heated surfaces or pneumatic boots to shed frost. The geopolitical iceberg aheadFor now, however, after all the technical work done with an unnamed drone manufacturer that was Manyone’s client, the AquaGlider remains a design on paper. “The client aborted the project because they were too busy making drones for the Ukraine war,” Skibsted says. “So, basically we own it ourselves. We don’t know what will happen, but Denmark is investing heavily in the arctic.” Indeed. Denmark knows that things may get really bad. Russia’s Arctic ambitions loom large. Its “shadow fleet” patrols the GIUK Gap (Greenland-Iceland-U.K.), mapping underwater cables and wind farms for potential sabotage. Danish intelligence warned that Russia could mobilize for regional war within five years, which now have been updated to just two if NATO appears divided, according to Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish defense minister: “Russia is likely to be more willing to use military force in a regional war against one or more European NATO countries if it perceives NATO as militarily weakened or politically divided.” In response, Denmark’s 2024–2033 defense agreement has committed $570 million to maritime upgrades, including autonomous drones, underwater sensors, and 21 new Home Guard vessels. The AquaGlider fits neatly into this strategy—a low-cost, persistent patrol akin to Ukraine’s low cost maritime drones, which have destroyed or damaged at least 26 Russian naval vessels in the Black Sea since the war began including the Red Navy’s Moskva flagship. But Denmark’s immediate investments are pragmatic: four minelaying ships and underwater drones will deploy by 2030. But there’s also a section of the budget that will be dedicated to “autonomous surveillance crafts that can monitor the coastlines,” Skibsted tells me. That’s where AquaGlider can fit. It makes sense from a design perspective. It will be up to the engineers to make it a reality, if it picks up the interest of the Danish government. View the full article

An upcoming exhibition at London’s Design Museum will let guests take a journey through Wes Anderson’s never-before-seen personal archives—from the coat worn by Gwenyth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums to the original Grand Budapest Hotel model and the actual puppets used in the stop-motion film Fantastic Mr. Fox. The exhibition, titled “Wes Anderson: The Archives,” includes more than 600 objects collected by the iconic filmmaker over the past 30 years. It opens on November 21 and runs through the following July, and advance tickets are already on sale. Aside from a smaller initial showing at la Cinémathèque française, a collaborator on the exhibition, this will be the first time that Anderson’s archives have been displayed. In fact, most of the items have rested in storage ever since the shooting of their respective films. Rushmore An extensive archive Anderson’s personal object curation began after the making of his first feature-length film, Bottle Rocket, which was released in 1996. “Anderson’s meticulous collecting of these items began when he realized that everything that had been made for Bottle Rocket was owned and then sold off by the film’s production company,” the release explains. “So, from his second feature film—Rushmore—he personally took care of every item after shooting concluded, ensuring he was the guardian of all items crafted for each movie.” The Grand Budapest Hotel Because of this concerted effort, the Design Museum now has access to items from 1998’s Rushmore all the way up to Anderson’s most recent project, the 2023 short film anthology collection The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More. The Royal Tenenbaums Some of the most recognizable pieces in the collection include props, costumes, and puppets from Anderson’s films. From The Grand Budapest Hotel, there’s the original candy-pink model of the titular hotel, standing several feet tall; the film’s Boy with Apple painting, which becomes a central character in itself; and the jaunty concierge costume worn by Ralph Fiennes’s Gustave H. From The Royal Tenenbaums, there’s the much-emultated tan fur coat worn by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Margot Tenenbaum, as well as a poster of Richie Tenenbaum that’s shown in the film. And from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, costumes from the full ensemble cast will be on display together. Isle Of Dogs Fans of Anderson’s animated stop-motion films, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs, will get an opportunity that might be the most exciting of all: coming face-to-face with the characters themselves. Fantastic Mr. Fox A glimpse of Wes Anderson’s creative mind In addition to props from the films, “Wes Anderson: The Archives” plans to offer a peek into Anderson’s work process and lesser-known details from his career. Starting with the earliest point in his artistic evolution, the museum will show a screening of Anderson’s Bottle Rocket short film, the original 13-minute version of the eventual feature-length movie starring Owen and Luke Wilson. The short serves as the very first example of Anderson’s now-iconic style, and is often cited as the launchpad for his later fame. The Royal Tenenbaums Also on view will be a series of Anderson’s annotated notebooks from the set of The Royal Tenenbaums, as well as early sketches, storyboards, and polaroids from set. In short, it’s a Wes Anderson superfan’s most far-fetched dream, all contained in one museum showing. View the full article

In April 2024, Yahoo acquired Artifact, a tool that uses AI to recommend news to readers. Yahoo folded Artifact’s—which was cofounded by Instagram cofounders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom—into its revamped news app to help surface and curate content for readers. Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to talk about the acquisition, the company’s approach to news curation, and what the future could hold for the private equity-owned company. This interview has been edited and condensed. Yahoo acquired news discovery platform Artifact last year. Now, the technology is used in Yahoo’s revamped news app. Why did you acquire the platform? Artifact had come up as a startup founded by the Instagram cofounders. It used AI and advanced algorithms to pull in really great content and also do a great job of surfacing it. When we read that they were going to shut it down, I reached out to Kevin Systrom immediately to say we should talk about acquiring it. We basically took the backbone of the Artifact app and made it the Yahoo News app. We look to acquire companies if they can fill a gap for us. We’re not in the game of acquihires. It has to be a product fit. We’re the No. 1 news publication in the U.S. in terms of total traffic. We got to that point by being an aggregator. We’re aggregating thousands of sources and then using algorithms to surface the right ones for each of our millions of users. With Artifact, how are you using AI to personalize a user’s newsfeed? We hope the end user doesn’t think about it at all. It’s just about the Yahoo News app getting smarter at delivering the right content to you at the right time. We’re very pro publisher and we are a big part of the ecosystem. We send them traffic and give them revenue as part of it. We’ve been doing that for over 20 years. That is, in some ways, pro publisher, but AI summaries come up on search and articles get summarized via bullet points. That means users may not actually read the articles, and media companies will get fewer page views. I would think about it a little bit differently. If you go back to the beginning of how Yahoo has always worked with publishers, we’re a huge part of the ecosystem in sending traffic out. It’s very important to us to keep the ecosystem very healthy, at least how it historically was. I understand your point, and certainly that’s a new factor for publishers to worry about in terms of AI companies sucking in all their data. Everything we do is with the publisher. We brought all of our publisher relationships to Artifact. Even when there’s a summary, it’s not trying to [stop people looking at] the article, it is trying to pull out the highlights of [the article]. We will also summarize a topic across publishers just for helpful understanding. But again, it all goes back to sending people down the funnel to [media] properties. But they would only go down that funnel if they want to learn more, right? I don’t know how much time you’ve spent with any of these apps, but I’d say they’re bullet points, short tidbits at the top. They’re really not summarizing the whole article. A news algorithm designed for people can contribute to their biases. Yahoo’s role is nonpartisan, but how do you think about balancing the goal of providing a customer service with preventing the information that only reinforces a reader’s beliefs? We think a lot about it. We try to be very nonpartisan. It’s a hard job. One of the signs we’re getting it right is I get nasty emails from people on both sides. Part of our job with the algorithm is to make sure readers don’t go too [far] into the rabbit hole and that [they] actually can continue to see a balance of things. At the same time, our job is to customize for them as an individual, so the algorithms take that into account. But there are a couple other things happening. We also balance [AI curation with] human curation, which is part of Yahoo being the trusted guide for all these years. Then of course, we are working with trusted publishers that we have long standing relationships with—not sharing user generated content. How does the app fit into Yahoo’s business strategy? In any given month, we are usually the No. 2 ranked property on comScore in the US multiplatform or in the top five across desktop and mobile. We’re in the top five with Gen Z, and 90% of internet users in the US touch Yahoo in any given month. So monetization of one property is not our issue. We monetize very well. Most of it’s through advertising, like with any major freemium publisher or product. A certain percentage of our users subscribe to our more premium offerings in given categories like sports or finance or email. News is just a part of that. You’ve said job No. 1 is making every one of these products and brands under Yahoo superstrong on their own within the categories in which they operate. There’ve been news reports saying you might want to spin off different products and take them public. There’ve been other reports saying you might want to take the company public as a whole. I guess I’m trying to get a sense of what you think the future is for Yahoo. I would answer that maybe two ways. It’s our job to create value and grow the business, which 30 years old. But for those who don’t know, we were spun out of Verizon by Apollo, the world’s largest private equity firm in September 2021, then I came in as CEO. Most private equity firms want returns. There are two ways to get a return. If you’re a private equity firm, you could go public or you can sell. It is also possible that your investors feel that they have a tiger by the tail and want to hold out longer. I’ve founded startups, I’ve worked at big public companies. It doesn’t matter the size of your company, the name of the game is growth either way. That’s also a sign of a healthy company. It’s a sign that you’re delivering for users. We’ll create a very valuable company, whether it’s us stand-alone going public, or it’s someone acquiring the company. That said, we definitely have inbounds all the time, especially because it is owned by private equity of people trying to pick off part of our pieces of our company. Part of the private equity game is probably to listen to everybody and understand what your options are. Every search engine tech company that puts out any kind of content or that aggregates content is partnering with LLMs like Open AI or Anthropic. Who are you partnering with? Going back to the late 2000s, Yahoo has had a longstanding relationship with Microsoft, which led to an easy relationship with Microsoft copilot. We have the second largest email platform after Gmail, it’s in the hundreds of millions of users. Even a year before Apple announced this Apple Intelligence series of products that would show up in their mail product, we announced AI in Yahoo Mail, helping you search mail, summarize it, write, edit, and more. That partnership was done with OpenAI. We also are partners with Anthropic, with Google, and others on other products that we have. We work with everybody so far and we’ll continue to do so. We’re also internally building a bunch of our own AI products. I think it’s too important to leave it purely to third parties. We have to have our own expertise there. View the full article

Hawa Hassan was only 4-years-old when fighting forced her and her family from their home in Somalia. Hassan spent the next three years in Kenya, where some of her earliest memories were of running around tents in a refugee camp with her siblings and helping her mother stock the goods store she’d opened there. When she was seven, Hassan’s mother sent her to live with family friends in Seattle. It would be another 15 years before she saw her family again. “A lot of my childhood was spent wondering about my own background and my own identity,” said Hawa, a chef and entrepreneur who now lives in New York. “For many years, I had this deep desire to find people like myself and tell that story.” Hassan’s new cookbook, Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Communities from Eight Countries Impacted by War is the fruit of that longing. To write it, Hassan spent three years travelling and interviewing dozens of chefs and entrepreneurs from Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, El Salvador, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, and Yemen—countries perhaps better known to outsiders for civil strife than rich ingredients and complex flavors. The chapters are divided by country, each one offering a brief history; lush photos of daily life; several recipes; and at least one interview with a local grower, restaurateur, or community organizer. “My number-one goal is to tell a different story about what it means to be from these places,” Hassan said. “I hope that when people pick up this book, they come for the recipes, but they stay for the stories.” In the DRC she spoke with a baker who found success delivering mikate—or doughnuts—to customers during the pandemic. A brewer from Baghdad reflects on building a new life in New York and highlights masgouf—a grilled fish with tamarind sauce—as a must-try Iraqi dish. Though many of the people she spoke with have been displaced, Hassan said she intentionally focussed on food traditions and everyday life rather than conflict. “This was much more about the idea of home rather than what the temperature of a country is, or what your politics are,” she said. Mikey Muhanna, a social entrepreneur featured in Hassan’s Lebanon chapter, said that perspective came as a relief. “I was apprehensive at the beginning,” he said. “There’s a million orientalizing books, like, let’s go to war-torn countries and talk about real people on the ground, but the more I got to speak to her, and her collaborator [photographer Riley Dengler], I realized that they were coming from a place of real curiosity.” He said Hassan’s work offers a “blueprint” for how to report on communities other than one’s own. “It’s really powerful to see somebody who has the life perspective that Hawa has tell these stories with integrity, patience, and curiosity,” he said. Hassan traces the roots of Setting a Place for Us more a decade back to a six-month stay in Norway, where her mother and siblings eventually settled. After so many years apart, Hassan said she had to learn to find her place again in her family. “That’s when I started thinking about how I know it’s not only my family that has these big stories to tell about being othered or impacted by war or by family separation,” she said. Hassan was working as a model in New York at the time, but in Norway she spent hours in the kitchen with her mother making Somali food. When she returned to the U.S. in 2015 she started to lay the groundwork for her company, Basbaas, a condiment company with offerings like tamarind date sauce and coconut cilantro chutney. In 2020, she published her debut cookbook, In Bibi’s Kitchen, which she cowrote with Julia Turshen. A collection of recipes from grandmothers in eight eastern African countries, it won the James Beard Foundation award for Best International Cookbook. “The sauce [company] has helped me to inch my way onto the American dining table, and tell a story of not just being a Somalian girl, but being an African girl,” she said. She saw In Bibi’s Kitchen as an expansion of that story—offering a glimpse of women’s daily lives in East Africa. Following the success of In Bibi’s Kitchen, she was approached by Food Network TV to host her own show. She starred in Hawa at Home, where she cooked dishes like Doro Wat and made piri piri sauce, bringing East African food to new audiences. Her new book is a more intimate exploration of her life story—one that relates to millions of displaced people around the world. “Setting a Place for Us is the next layer of who I am that I’m willing to share, which is a person who’s been impacted by civil unrest, displacement, and family separation,” Hassan said. But despite the heavy subject matter, the book is largely optimistic—a celebration of the places people have returned to after years away or that that they continue to long for from afar. “My philosophy is we have no sad stories to tell,” Hassan said. Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Communities from Eight Countries Impacted by War will be published on Tuesday, May 13, by Ten Speed Press. View the full article

Burnout is a pervasive issue that can be damaging to individuals and costly to organizations. As Fast Company has reported previously, 82% of workers feel at risk for burnout and could be costing companies an average of $21,000 per year in lost productivity. And while there’s no shortage of advice about how to prevent burnout, prevention isn’t always a level playing field. Here are some situations that may leave you more prone to burnout than others: 1. If you’re in the wrong work environment Kandi Wiens, senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the university’s master’s in medical education program, says that some people may be more at risk for burnout than others—especially those who are working in environments that aren’t compatible with their personality or temperament. Wiens, author of Burnout Immunity: How Emotional Intelligence Can Help You Build Resilience and Heal Relationships at Work, says that burnout, especially in the workplace, “ultimately comes down to a misalignment, or sometimes referred to as a mismatch, between someone’s personality or temperament and the environment that they are in.” So if you are an extrovert and were working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, that might have led to burnout, while your more introverted colleagues may have thrived. If you’re curious and open-minded and your workplace shuts down that kind of inquiry or experimentation, you may burn out faster. Clues that you might be in the wrong work environment include feeling resistance to the company’s work style or ideas. Wiens suggests people “pay attention to that resistance and check themselves.” Practice vocalizing your concerns about that resistance with someone you really trust. “What would that look like, and how can you do that in a way that is healthy for you?” she says. 2. If you’re prone to fawning Those who are constantly overextending themselves in an effort to please others in the workplace and are unable to set healthy boundaries are “fawners,” says clinical psychologist Ingrid Clayton, author of Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back. This chronic people-pleasing is a “hybrid response to trauma,” Clayton says, noting that it’s an alternative to traditional fight, flight, or freeze responses. “It’s this hyper-attunement and managing other people—appeasing other people in a hyperarousal kind of way,” she says. “But it’s also hypoarousal, where there is a disconnect from ourselves, so we don’t know we’re fawning.” In her book, Clayton cites the example of a Harvard-educated law firm partner who was suffering signs of burnout. Through working with him, she helped him realize that the external validation he was seeking, as well as his inability to set boundaries, was leading to burnout. Such extreme people-pleasing can cause us to overwork and take on too much, ultimately leading to burnout. “Our worth is tied to these external markers rather than a connection with ourselves,” Clayton explains. “So, burnout is not just about output—the exhaustion of overdoing—but our loss of autonomy, authenticity, and knowing who we are at all. This is survival mode, and we are not meant to live there 24/7. Something has to give.” 3. If you lack self-awareness and self-advocacy skills When you’re encountering challenges in the workplace, whether they’re related to the culture being out of alignment with your personality and traits, or if you’re slipping into people-pleasing behavior, advocating for yourself is an important part of burnout protection. However, Wiens says that self-awareness is essential to understanding the issues that are causing friction with your personality or temperament and then being able to address them. Once you identify the issue, you can begin to take steps to mitigate it. For example, if you’re isolated and extroverted, you can purposefully design other ways to get the interaction you need. If your creativity is being stifled, you may be able to find other outlets for it. Wiens suggests thinking of it this way: “What is it in the environment that is a mismatch or misalignment with that thing that is triggered in me, and then what can I do to either change it or change the way I think about [it]?” She notes that people who lack self-awareness and the ability to examine their feelings face a fundamental hurdle in addressing the issues that could lead to burnout. Clayton notes that if you’re unable to advocate for yourself—including asking for what you need and setting boundaries when necessary—you may be more prone to burnout. Fighting burnout The good news, Clayton says, is that boundary-setting can be practiced and “built like a muscle.” Start by asking for what you need when the stakes are low—in a restaurant order, for example—to get in the habit. “Some people can kind of laugh this off if they don’t have this experience, but it’s very real that if you don’t have an experience of speaking up or setting a boundary where it felt safe and it was successful, you have to start to build that experience,” she says. While several factors may contribute to burnout, these three issues may accelerate it. However, through awareness and practice in mitigating these factors, workers can find a measure of protection from a pervasive malady. View the full article

Artists and cultural workers are falling through the cracks of our economy at a time when their work has never been more needed in society. Their ability to exist and thrive is threatened by the cost of living and housing affordability crisis, our increasingly precarious economy, and cuts to grant funding under the new administration. Many exist in a structural grey area between independent gig workers and small business owners. Their work is often episodic, making them easily left out of safety net programs like unemployment and healthcare—this is especially true for artists from historically marginalized communities. To address these challenges, we need new systems and solutions to increase economic equity and ensure that our communities have access to creativity and culture. One such area we’ve seen a wave of interest and experimentation around the potential of in recent years is guaranteed income. What is guaranteed income? It refers to unrestricted recurring cash payments that people can use however they see fit to cover their basic needs and reach their personal and professional goals. Guaranteed income programs can be focused geographically on specific cities, on specific communities—for example young people, entrepreneurs, or parents—or a mix of both. Laura Zabel At Springboard for the Arts, we’ve been delivering one of the longest running guaranteed income programs in the country since 2021, focusing on both urban and rural artists and creative workers in Minnesota. Our 100 recipients to date include painters, sculptors, hip‑hop artists, singers, composers, teaching artists, performers, and writers who are receiving $500 a month over a five-year period. This has given us the opportunity to reflect on what we’ve learned and what insights we can offer to others thinking about doing this work. Adapt each program to the historical, cultural, and economic extractions in that community At its best and most effective, guaranteed income is a tool for justice and repair by supporting populations who have been exploited by social, cultural, and economic systems in America. These programs should be tailored to a community’s needs by considering the connection points between the economics, culture, and physical design of our cities and the impact of policy and planning harms from the past. Both cities and rural places bear the generational impact of economies based on the extraction of natural or cultural resources including redlining, land theft, the interstate highway system, and placement of industrial infrastructure, like trash burners, that has caused generations of environmental harm and adverse health impacts. The results of these policy decisions fall disproportionately on American BIPOC communities and neighborhoods, particularly Native and Black communities. Briuana Williams For our work in Saint Paul, we’ve focused our efforts in Frogtown and Rondo—two neighborhoods that are culturally vibrant, resilient, and community oriented, yet that continue to be disproportionately impacted by historical disinvestment, discrimination, and extraction. Rondo, for example, is a historically Black neighborhood whose cultural and business corridor was destroyed in the 1950s and ’60s by highway construction, causing generational economic and cultural harm that residents deal with to this day. Our rural work is focused in Otter Tail County, in West Central Minnesota. This community, like many rural areas across the U.S., is in the midst of economic transformation, including the loss of major employers, lack of affordable housing, and increase in predatory businesses like dollar stores and payday lending. Here, guaranteed income can be a tool for attracting and retaining the creative people these communities will need to imagine a different future. The focus on artists and creative workers is rooted in the idea that, like caregiving and community work, cultural work is a form of labor that communities depend on to be healthy but is not adequately valued by our current economy. Kandace Creel Falcón Use artists to help change the narrative about guaranteed income programs While the idea of guaranteed income is gaining traction across the country, there are still embedded cultural and political beliefs that limit how far economic justice policy change can go. These are often harmful tropes like: “Do people deserve it? How do they spend the money? Why don’t they just get a job?” One of the most effective ways of countering these questions is for people to experience the stories of these programs on a human level, which can transform pervasive narratives about inequality and poverty into belief systems of belonging, deservedness, and inherent self‑worth. In this way, artists—particularly those participating in guaranteed income programs and who are locally rooted in their communities—have a unique role to play in guiding and delivering a narrative shift around guaranteed income. With this in mind, we created a project within our wider guaranteed income work, collaborating with a cohort of artists on Artists Respond: People, Place, and Prosperity. In this program, artists created public projects highlighting the root causes that lead to the need for guaranteed income, and its impact on families and communities. (These projects were supported separately and outside of artists’ participation as guaranteed income recipients.) Kandace Creel Falcón Artists have designed projects that range from podcasts and coloring books, to postcards, a public installation, and a collaborative performance/dance meditation made available on YouTube, all of which use messages that are reflective of their local communities. A billboard on rural Highway 210 by artist Kandace Creel Falcón looked at guaranteed income’s connection to rural values, with the message “In Rural We Tend to the Herd” as a way to root messaging in the collective values of that community and counter individualistic narratives that attempt to malign safety net programs. Mickey Breeze Cross-sector investment and collaboration are key Our original pilot was a cross-sector partnership—designed in collaboration with the City of Saint Paul’s People’s Prosperity Pilot guaranteed income program and supported by local and national funders including the McKnight, Bush, Surdna, and Ford Foundations. We recently announced the expansion of this work, which includes extending the Saint Paul pilot and adding additional participants to the pilot in Otter Tail County, Minnesota, totaling 100 artists across both locations and committing to five years. The majority of the pilots taking place across America have been 12 to 18 months, in part because that’s the amount of time that cities were able to raise and access relief funds during the pandemic. These are a great start, but to have the kind of longevity that will allow us to make a meaningful—not just temporary—impact requires bringing more and different kinds of partners on board and moving from pilots to policy. This is an area where philanthropy has an opportunity to be a true partner by seeding longer-term pilots in more geographies and by supporting advocacy and policy work. Kashimana Research and evidence matters When it comes to expanding the reach and impact of guaranteed income, research and evidence matters. Groups like Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, led by Saint Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, are integrating learning and research from local pilots into state and federal policy recommendations. Springboard for the Arts is working with the University of Pennsylvania Center for Guaranteed Income Research to collect data through community-led participatory research in both rural and urban locations, allowing us to understand what’s working and how people are using these funds. Emergent themes from this research are compelling, with monthly income contributing to general financial stability; participants’ ability to do longer term planning toward healthcare, savings, business ownership and housing; and increasing financial security so artists can generate creative work for their community and stay in their neighborhoods. This money is going toward rent and supplies but it’s also being put to everyday expenses like fixing a car so that an artist can get to their job or buying snow boots for their children. Being able to point to these tangible impacts allows us to bring in more partners and more effectively advocate for policy. Even if it feels tedious, having a growing body of data will bolster all of our efforts for both individual programs and the movement as a whole. The experience with our pilot has shown us that guaranteed income works as a tool for supporting both an individual’s economic security and their ability to contribute to their communities in creative ways. As our economy becomes even more stratified, there is an urgent need to advocate for policy innovations, like guaranteed income, that offer more Americans the freedom to take care of their families and communities and imagine and build a better future. The article was adapted from the chapter ‘Artists as Allies in Economic Justice’ in the recently released Routledge Handbook of Urban Cultural Planning. View the full article