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How SEO teams can reclaim time and budget by streamlining labor-intensive tasks with human-guided automation. The post How To Use AI To Streamline Time-Consuming SEO Tasks appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Peloton bikes are best known for their video classes, which feature a social leaderboard, chatty instructors, and handpicked music. But from a fitness perspective, my favorite feature is “power zone” training, which works with specific classes or you can enable the power zone bar for any workout. Let me tell you why I love it, and how you can get started with it, too. What is power zone training? Cyclists measure their effort in terms of power: how much energy you transmit through the pedals in a given length of time. It’s often measured in watts. On an outdoor bike, you need a power meter to measure this; on Peloton, this measurement is built in. On Peloton, you're probably familiar with your "output," the number in the center of the display that goes up when you increase your resistance, your cadence, or both. This is the same as power. Just as heart rate can be divided into zones for training, so can power. There are seven zones in Peloton's system, with higher output numbers falling into higher zones. To know what zone you're in, you'll have to turn on your Power Zone bar in Settings, and tell the system what your "FTP" is, the number that the zones are based on. Peloton can estimate an FTP for you, but you should really take an FTP test to know for sure—more on that below. A power zone workout (or “ride,” as Peloton calls them) will tell you when to go into each zone. Unlike other Peloton classes, instructors leading power zone rides won’t tell you what resistance to use, and they may recommend a cadence, but you’re never required to hit it. So if you’re in zone 1 and the instructor tells you it's time to pedal in zone 3, you can choose to increase your resistance, your cadence, or both—whatever gets you there. To be totally clear, power zones are nothing to do with heart rate zones. We’ll talk about the difference a little bit later. Why are power zone rides special? Since power zones are calibrated to your personal abilities, you always have a scale that tells you how hard you’re working, relative to what you are capable of. I like power zone rides because I know what kind of training effect to expect from them. While the non-power zone workouts could be almost anything—a “classic rock ride” could be hard, easy, or anywhere in between—I know that a “power zone endurance” ride is going to keep me in zones 2 and 3 for most of the workout, training my stamina without making me too fatigued. On the other hand, a “power zone max” ride will have me working hard, like a HIIT workout. The difference is that I know from the power zone bar on my screen exactly when I’m hitting the ideal output for the workout that I’m doing—not too hard and not too easy. In short, other rides are great for having fun or for letting yourself be surprised. Power zone rides are for training. If you want to get faster and better on the bike, these are structured workouts that will make that happen, and give you ways to measure your improvement. What is a power zone ride like? When you want to do a power zone ride, your first job is to decide which kind. You can filter classes by “power zone” as a type, but within that you’ll see three types of classes: Power zone (PZ): With these you’ll spend most of your working time in zones 3, 4, and 5, with recoveries in zone 1 or 2 in between efforts. These tend to be pretty hard workouts, but they’re usually not too intense. Power zone max (PZM): These rides will take you into the higher zones (6 and 7) with easy recoveries, usually in zone 1. Power zone endurance (PZE): These rides almost always keep you in zones 2 and 3 the whole time. Your effort will be moderate but steady. The shortest power zone rides are usually 30 minutes (there may be a few 20-minute rides in the catalog). The 45-minute rides are probably the most popular, but there are plenty of 60-minute rides and a few 75- and 90-minute PZE rides. Credit: Peloton All power zone rides start with a warmup that is usually between 10 and 13 minutes. A typical one goes like this: A few minutes (usually one song’s worth) of pedaling in zone 1 to let your legs start to warm up. Spin-ups, where you move your legs as fast as you comfortably can, for maybe 30 seconds at a time. Your exact zone doesn’t matter here. In between the spin-ups, you’ll pedal in zone 1 to recover. After three to five spin-ups, with maybe 30 seconds or a minute in between, it will be time for the next phase. A “build” with 30 to 90 seconds in each of the zones you’ll be using in the workout. For a PZE that might be 90 seconds in zone 2 and 90 seconds in zone 3. For a PZM, you might get 30 seconds each in zones 3, 4, 5, and 6. A short recovery (usually 1 minute) of zone 1 pedaling before the main workout begins. Instructors will get creative with the details, but will always keep the structure of a zone 1 segment, a few spin-ups, and a build. During the warmup, they will usually explain the structure of the workout to come. To see the structure of the workout before you start the class, you can tap Class plan in the ride description, then View details, and you’ll be able to see the full breakdown. (Some older classes may not have this information, but anything from the past few years will always have it.) The plan will show you what zone each interval is in, and how many minutes you’ll spend there. In the example here, you’ll spend 3, 5, 7, and then 5 minutes in zone 3, with shorter recoveries in zone 2. This is pretty typical for a PZE class. Why you’ll love the power zone bar Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Peloton Anybody can take a power zone class at any time, but if you haven’t set up your power zone bar, you won’t know exactly when you’re in the right zone. (Go ahead and take the class anyway, though. During the build, the instructor will explain what each zone should feel like. You can do your first ride or two by feel.) The power zone bar is a color-coded line at the bottom of your screen underneath your output. The zones will fill in with color according to your output, so that when you’re in zone 1, you’ll just see the leftmost blue chunk lit up, and when you’re in zone 7, you’ll see the whole rainbow, with zone 7 in red to let you know that’s where you are. Power zone classes released after November of 2022 have an indicator outline around the zone you’re supposed to be in, so even if you missed the instructor calling out the zone, you’ll see on your screen what zone you should be in. When you set up your power zone bar—more on that in a sec—you’ll get the option to show it all the time, instead of just in power zone classes. I highly recommend doing this. With the power zone bar, you can use the idea of power zone training when you’re doing a scenic ride, and you can see how traditional style classes compare to your own zones. If I want to take a music ride for fun, but stick to easy training, I’ll just make sure my output stays in zone 2 or 3. With the power zone bar enabled, it’s easy to do that. How to set up your power zones on Peloton Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Peloton If you know what the term “FTP” means (hello, cyclists), you can go into your settings right now and turn on the power zone bar. It’s in your profile, under Preferences. At the bottom of the screen, find the FTP section, and tap “calculate custom value.” You can enter your FTP number there. For the rest of us, though, you’ll want to take an FTP test. Well, you might not want to, but you kind of need to, to calibrate everything properly. How to take an FTP test Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Peloton FTP stands for Functional Threshold Power, and it’s a measure of how high an output you can sustain over time. There are specific Peloton rides that are designed to measure your FTP. After you do one, you’ll get a prompt asking if you’d like to update your FTP in settings. (Say yes.) The FTP test takes 20 minutes, but I like to budget an hour. That gives you 10 to 20 minutes for a warmup, 20 minutes for the test, 5 to 15 minutes for a cooldown, and then plenty of time to lie on the floor afterward. (Pro tip: Have someone bring you a fresh, cold bottle of water when you finish.) People get nervous about the FTP, but it’s really just a benchmark of where your fitness stands at the moment. If you do it right, you’ll be exhausted at the end, but then you’ll know your FTP—which means you can take easy rides and know they will be easy, because they’ll be calibrated to you. I’ve taken a few FTP tests. Here are my tips: Schedule a time, and when the time comes, hop on the bike and do it. If you are the type of person to get nervous when a test is on your calendar for a future date, just do it now. I’m serious, turn on your bike right this second and get it over with. You can read the rest of this article when you’re done. Do an FTP warmup ride. Some are 10 minutes, some are 15. I find that longer is better; sometimes I’ll do a 10 minute warmup twice. Pick your favorite, most encouraging instructor for the warmup. After the warmup, take a quick minute for a water break if you need it, and then go right into the FTP test. It does not matter who the instructor is; you’ll barely notice them. Mute the screen and play your own music if the music matters to you. Start at a strong, steady pace, something you’re confident you could keep up for 20+ minutes. Every five minutes, ask yourself if you could kick up the intensity a notch and still be able to hang on. If you have a 20-minute PR already in the system (whether a previous FTP test or another ride), filter the leaderboard to “just me” and try to beat yourself. Anytime you feel like you can’t possibly continue, slow down a little but do not stop. Use this as your new steady pace, and get back to asking yourself every few minutes whether you could increase your output or if you need to stay where you are. Better to go out too fast, slow down, and then continue to the finish, than to quit halfway through and…then what? Do it all over again? No way. No matter your fitness level, there is some amount of power that you can log in a 20-minute test. If you don’t like the number you get, you can retest in a couple weeks. But you won’t know what number that is until the end. So don’t quit. Keep pedaling. You can absolutely do this. Whatever minute you’re in, don’t focus on how many minutes there are left. Just focus on making it through this minute. Before you know it, you’ll be in your final sprint to the finish. The ride will end, and at this point I usually snap a photo with my phone of my output on the leaderboard. When you leave the ride to do a cooldown (please do a cooldown, your body will thank you), Peloton will ask if you’d like to update your FTP. Say yes. By the way: It’s recommended to take a new FTP test every 4 to 6 weeks. Heart rate zones vs. power zonesI need to make something very clear: When you’re training with power zones, those are to be used instead of heart rate zones. Not in addition. Now, you can still wear a heart rate monitor. That’s fine. You’re just not using it to guide your workout. You’ll see the power zone bar at the bottom of your screen, and a heart rate zone indicator at the top left. Either ignore or hide the heart rate zone indicator. You can tap the little sideways arrow and it will disappear, but your heart rate data will still be logged so you can look at it later. Note the heart rate zones in the top left, and power zones at the bottom. At the moment, both are in zone 1. Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Peloton People often wonder how heart rate zones match up with power zones, but there is no consistent way to convert them. In general, heart rate zone 2 matches power zones 2-3. But your heart rate drifts upward the longer you work out, and your heart rate also takes longer to change when you shift gears. If you’re moving into power zone 5, your bike will be at zone 5 immediately. Your heart might take 30 seconds to catch up. Don’t ever worry if your heart rate zones and power zones aren’t matched, OK? You can only train with one at a time, and we’re here to train with power zones. What kind of power zone workouts should I do? When you first start, the easiest way to learn your way around power zone workouts is to do the Discover Your Power Zones program (available from the “Programs” section on your bike's screen). It will guide you through doing an FTP test at the beginning and at the end of the four-week program, and in between you’ll get a sampler of all the different power zone workout types. The instructors know they’re talking to power zone beginners, so they’ll spend plenty of time explaining how everything works and giving you tips on making the most of it. When you’re done with that program, you may want to take Build Your Power Zones to continue working in that same vein, but it’s also fine to just start taking whichever power zone classes you think you’ll enjoy. Eventually you may want to take Peak Your Power Zones, a more advanced program that is geared toward improving your FTP. (Your FTP will improve no matter which program you take, but the “Peaking” program is laser-focused on making that number go up rather than delivering a well-rounded fitness program.) Besides those three built-in programs, you can also find program suggestions online. Some popular options include a free #RedditPZ group that runs nine-week programs and a paid Power Zone Pack that runs challenges for subscribers. But if you’re on your own, you can build your own routine just by knowing what to expect from each type of power zone workout. For most people, it would work to do: 0 or 1 Power Zone Max ride(s) per week 1 or 2 Power Zone ride(s) per week Power Zone Endurance rides for the rest of your available time (or do other rides while staying in zone 2-3 on the power zone bar) So if you ride three times each week, you might do one PZ and two PZE. If you’re a monster who rides every day, you might do one PZM, two PZ’s, and four PZEs, with one or two of those PZE rides being all zone 2 (instead of following the callouts to switch between zones 2 and 3). Adjust as needed to your own fitness level, and choose the lengths of workouts that work for your schedule. When choosing your own workouts, the Power Zone Tool from homefitnessbuddy.com is incredibly useful. You can filter and sort by instructor, length of workout, and a cool metric called TSS (training stress score). The higher the TSS, the harder the workout will be to recover from. (For example, you can search for “Christine PZE” and sort by TSS, lowest first. You’ll immediately see that she has several rides that are 30 minutes long and that are entirely in zone 2—great for a recovery ride.) You can also get a preview of the zones as a visual chart, which I find easier to read than the way Peloton presents them in the class plan. Be aware that the very newest rides won’t be on this tool yet, but also that some older rides will be on there as well that may not have the power zone indicator. But fortunately all the statistics are right there in each entry, so you can choose exactly which rides you’d like to take. View the full article

Buyers ask a question. You answer it clearly. That’s the premise behind the “They Ask, You Answer” (TAYA) framework, and it holds up in AI-driven discovery. In theory, it’s simple. In practice, teams struggle to anchor their approach and get started. The result is predictable: generic questions that produce generic content. That’s a problem, especially as AI shifts search behavior from short queries to more detailed, contextual questions. The difference comes down to the questions you choose to answer. And that’s where a simple concept makes a big difference: buyer personas. The problem with generic questions Odds are, you and many of your competitors have already answered these questions somewhere, or could easily. The generic question trap happens because when marketing teams brainstorm content ideas, they often start with topics like: What is CRM software? What is marketing automation? What is warehouse management? These are reasonable questions. But they’re also questions no real buyer actually asks. Real buyers ask questions that reflect their situation and their problem. Something more like this: “What CRM should a 10-person sales team use?” “Why are leads slipping through the cracks in our marketing?” “Why is our warehouse picking speed so slow?” The difference is subtle but important. The second set of questions includes a person and a problem. That context completely changes the quality of the content. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with Why this matters more in AI-driven discovery Instead of typing short keywords, buyers ask detailed, contextual questions: “I run a 15-person marketing team, and we’re struggling to track leads properly. What should we do?” The AI explains the problem, outlines solutions, and suggests vendors. In other words, the buyer is having a consultation with an AI. If your content explains why a specific persona experiences a specific problem, you have a much better chance of shaping how that problem is understood in the first place. This puts you into the conversation and consideration set earlier, making it more likely you’ll stay in as the user refines their thinking. Consider this scenario. I’ll use myself as an example. Marcus. 50 years old. Meeting some old friends in Birmingham, UK. Looking for ideas of things to do for the day. I start by asking a somewhat broad opening question: “I’m looking for some ideas of things to do with friends in Birmingham on the weekend. I’m 50, and I have several male friends coming down to get together for a day. There will be some beers, no doubt, but we need some activities as well.” Answers then include a bunch of top-level suggestions — bars, food, and activity-type bars. One of these suggestions is for an F1 gaming arcade. I like games, but not so much cars, so this leads my follow-up to dig in a bit more: “Ah, we all like games. What about gaming arcades? What gaming arcades could you recommend?” I get a bunch of recommendations, one of which is for a pinball arcade in Digbeth (a sub-area of Birmingham). “Pinball Factory in Digbeth sounds fun. What else is there to do around there, food- and drinks-wise?” I then get a set of responses that helps me narrow the list and formulate a perfect day and evening out for a group of old friends. Being in the early part of the conversation lets you shape the dialogue and increases your chances of being part of the eventual solution. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Personas make TAYA far more precise Personas are the tools that let you think like your customers and figure out the kinds of questions they ask long before they get to what you have to offer. When you can identify a customer segment, you can dig into that persona, understand their problems and goals, and think like your target customer to generate content ideas that help them decide earlier. Now, instead of writing content for a generic avatar, write for specific people. For example, instead of “Things to do in Birmingham?” you might write, “The best day out in Birmingham for a group of 50-year-old gamers.” You’re still addressing the same underlying topic. But now the content speaks directly to a real person experiencing a real problem. That shift usually leads to much more useful content. This helps you work your way into those conversations, rather than relying on the brutal battleground of commercial queries. A simple way to uncover better questions You don’t need a complicated persona framework to make this work. In most cases, a simple three-question exercise will uncover the kinds of problems your buyers are actually trying to solve. For each persona you serve, ask: What are they responsible for? For example: Hitting sales targets. Generating marketing leads. Running warehouse operations. What problems make that responsibility difficult? Examples might include: Missed sales targets. Inefficient warehouse processes. Poor lead tracking. Slow picking speeds. What would they ask Google or an AI assistant when that problem occurs? Now the questions start to look very different. Instead of broad category topics like: “What is CRM software?” You start to see questions like: “Why are leads slipping through the cracks in our CRM?” “What CRM should a small sales team use?” “Why is our warehouse picking speed so slow?” Those questions reflect real situations experienced by real people — exactly where the best content opportunities exist. ‘They Ask, You Answer’ works better with personas Now we revisit the big five topic areas from TAYA: cost, problems, comparisons, reviews, and best-of. These topics already give us a powerful structure for content. But when they’re approached generically, they often lead to content that looks exactly like everyone else’s. So you can go from the typical, generic kinds of questions: “How much does CRM software cost?” “What problems do warehouse systems have?” “HubSpot vs. Salesforce” “Best CRM systems” “Salesforce review” To questions that are more connected to the needs of our target audience: “What does CRM cost for a 10-person sales team?” “Why do my warehouse managers struggle with picking accuracy?” “HubSpot vs. Salesforce for a small B2B marketing team” “Best CRM for growing sales teams” “Is Salesforce worth it for a mid-size sales organization?” The topic hasn’t changed, but the question now reflects the buyer’s reality. This shift produces more useful content and aligns with how people interact with AI assistants. Those questions include their role, company size, or situation: “We’re a small marketing team struggling to track leads properly. What CRM should we use?” If your content already answers these persona-driven questions, you increase the chances that your explanation becomes part of that conversation. In other words, personas don’t replace They Ask, You Answer. They make it more precise, moving you from answering generic topics to answering the exact questions buyers ask when solving a real problem. Persona-driven questions improve TAYA content for three simple reasons. They mirror how buyers actually think: People rarely search for textbook definitions. They search for solutions to problems. Personas keep the content anchored in those problems. They produce more useful content: When you know who the content is for, it naturally includes better examples, more practical advice, and clearer explanations. In other words, content that genuinely helps someone move forward. They align with how AI explains problems: AI assistants increasingly start by explaining the problem before recommending a solution. Content that clearly describes why a specific persona experiences a specific challenge fits neatly into this pattern. This increases the chances that your explanation influences the AI’s response. See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with Start with the problem, not the product One of the most common mistakes companies make with content marketing is starting with their product. But buyers rarely start their journey there. They start with a problem. Personas help keep your content anchored in the buyer’s world rather than your own product — remember, it’s about the customer, not you. And that simple shift often makes the difference between content that merely exists and content that actually influences decisions. Where you enter the conversation matters “They Ask, You Answer” remains one of the most powerful frameworks available to marketers. But the effectiveness of the framework depends entirely on the quality of the questions you answer. Personas help you turn vague topics into real problems and ask better questions. When your content speaks directly to those problems, buyers and AI systems are far more likely to trust your answers. View the full article

Last year, the CEO of the department store chain Kohl’s (NYSE: KSS) announced the closure of 27 locations in order to help shore up the company’s struggling finances. But in November, a new CEO took the helm, prompting many to wonder whether he would implement additional store closures. Now that CEO has made his plans clear. Here’s what you need to know. Kohl’s shut 27 stores in 2025 In January 2025, Kohl’s announced it was closing 27 underperforming locations in 15 states, as well as its San Bernardino E-commerce Fulfillment Center (EFC) in California. At the time, the company’s then CEO, Tom Kingsbury, said the closures were a “necessary” step “to support the health and future of our business for our customers and our teams.” The closures followed slumping comparable store sales in 2024, and by April 2025, all of the previously announced doomed locations had shut for good. But in November, Kohl’s got a new CEO, Michael Bender, the chain’s third chief executive in nearly three years. Bender’s top priority was to turn around sinking store sales and increase the company’s bottom line. That left many wondering whether even more underperforming stores would be on the chopping block this year. Now, thanks to recent comments from Bender, we know for sure. Will there be more Kohl’s store closures in 2026? On March 10, Kohl’s reported its fourth-quarter 2025 results, and on the following conference call, Bender was asked specifically whether additional store closures were planned. The good news for Kohl’s customers and employees is that the answer, for now at least, is no. In response to an analyst’s question about potential additional closures, Bender noted that the company has around 1,150 locations and that the “vast majority”—over 90% of them—are still profitable, according to a PitchBook transcript of Bender’s comments. Bender stated that the company would be looking at the “hygiene” of each store to make sure they are “positioned in the right spot,” adding that he “would not anticipate any sort of grand plan of saying we’re taking stores out or adding stores at this point.” “The focus for us is actually on optimizing what we already have, and we’ll be focused on making sure that we continue to push the store’s productivity as far as we can going forward,” he continued. He added that the company tends to assess its store footprint on an annual basis. Kohl’s stock price has struggled It was little surprise that Kohl’s decided to shutter underperforming locations in 2025. Like many big-box retailers, the chain had been struggling for years with declining sales and shifting consumer habits, as well as ever-increasing competition from online retail giants like Amazon, Temu, and Shein. Most recently, the company reported its Q4 and full-year fiscal 2025 results, and as has been the case lately, things could have been better for Kohl’s. For its most recent quarter, net sales decreased 3.9% and comparable sales decreased 2.8%. When looking back over the full fiscal 2025 period, net sales decreased 4.0% and comparable sales decreased 3.1%. If there was one bright spot, it’s that for the fourth quarter, Kohl’s posted a diluted earnings per share (EPS) of $1.07. As noted by CNBC, that was well above the EPS of 86 cents that analysts polled by FactSet were expecting. Still, it wasn’t enough to reverse the downward slope of Kohl’s stock price. As of yesterday’s closing bell, shares of Kohls Corp have declined more than 37% year-to-date. The company’s stock price closed at $12.69 yesterday. However, over the past 12 months, KSS shares are actually up over 48%, largely thanks to a November surge, a surprise earnings beat in the company’s Q3 2025, and the appointment of Bender as CEO. And yet, looking back even further reveals how dire things have become for the company’s share price. Over the past five years, Kohl’s stock has lost nearly 80% of its value. View the full article

Despite what Timothée Chalamet may think, the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s epic Tristan und Isolde is generating a lot of buzz this season. That’s thanks in no small part to director Yuval Sharon’s bold choices, which include cutting-edge video projections and an immersive set design by Es Devlin. Sharon believes it is necessary to be forward-thinking, especially since the arts are facing a hard economic reality. He also believes it’s what helped drive the production’s impressive ticket sales. “People all saw that there is something new is being attempted here that you’ve just got to see,” he tells Fast Company. “I think that is its own reward.” In an era where New York’s storied Met Opera has faced layoffs, pay cuts, postponed productions, and a controversial financial agreement with Saudi Arabia, Chalamet’s comments, while dismissive and disrespectful, may have a kernel of hard truth in them. According to reporting by the New York Times, declining ticket sales are part of the problem, down $20 million in 10 years. And live performances are not the only ticket revenue dwindling—live broadcasts of opera in movie theaters are down as well. Because of high production costs, opera cannot survive on ticket revenue alone. Companies such as the Met also rely on investment endowments. Unfortunately, the Met has also depleted its endowment by one third, dropping from $340 million in 2022 to $212 million today, the Times reports. Sharon is aware of this budget crisis but also views it as an opportunity. “The business of opera is ludicrous, and we’ll never make money . . . That’s kind of part of the deal,” he says. “But part of that also means it’s about the experimentation. And for me, that is so liberating.” “The storytelling needs to demand it” It seems only natural to push the boundaries of technology to further innovate opera. To its diehard fans, the over-400-year-old art form is not dying but progressing forward, no matter what outsider Hollywood movie stars say. Because of opera’s long history, integrating elements such as prerecorded and live video into the mix opens up a larger discussion about the role of technology in live performance. Both Sharon and Devlin believe if Wagner were alive today, he would have approved, and perhaps would have even worked in VR or cinema himself. “I think he would absolutely have wanted us to work with the most advanced means of creating magic, of transporting an audience to another time and place,” Devlin says. Sharon considers opera a “constantly evolving language, not something that is stuck in the past” but “something that’s always ever present.” He views his job as the director to help articulate its universal message to a modern audience. “I’m not changing a word, but something new has emerged from it based on who we are as 21st-century artists making it,” he says. “I just love that. It’s part of what makes me believe in the art form so much.” His interpretation of Tristan und Isolde utilizes a split-world concept. Actors dressed in contemporary clothing at a table act as a bridge or tunnel into the mythical world of the story. “The mythic still is always churning in our everyday contemporary lives in ways that maybe we are not always conscious of,” Sharon says. “Sometimes in everyday rituals of sitting at a table, we are unconsciously enacting memories from the mythic past . . . they’re with us in these ways that we don’t necessarily anticipate.” He views the opera as a kind of solemn rite, with technology being just another tool on this larger mission. “I don’t come into a project saying, ‘Well, of course I’m going to use video because I like using video.’ The storytelling needs to demand it,” he says. In the story, the overwhelming and sudden love between Tristan and Isolde causes the characters to question their reality, making video the perfect medium. Devlin’s set, designed as an end-to-end immersive system, gives Sharon’s vision an ideal playground. Not only does it act as a platform for projections, but this is the first time that a set will fill the full square of the proscenium on the Met’s main stage at Lincoln Center for the entire production. “Often when you work at the Met Opera, you will work in the bottom two-thirds of the picture in a rectangular orientation,” Devlin says. “But we are working with the full square throughout—right up to the edge of the proscenium.” Utilizing the whole space was a goal of hers since working on Verdi’s Otello in the same space in 2015. The existing architecture of the building acted as one of her inspirations. “The Met is this extraordinary selection of shapes . . . the stage sculpture feels very continuous with the sculptural architecture of the design of the interior of the building, which is incredibly beautiful,” she explains. Beyond its expansive size, the set supports the cast, who are singing a beautiful but notoriously difficult score. “We’ve designed the set in such a way that it’s a musical instrument,” Devlin says. “We’ve designed literally a series of megaphones around them.” Striking the right balance for humans Both Sharon and Devlin believe technology is a tool that needs a human element, while Devlin says she hopes the innovative use of video projections draws in fresh spectators. “If including some contemporary means of storytelling brings a new audience to the work, then that’s fantastic,” she says. However, Sharon wasn’t afraid to cut technological elements when they overwhelmed the human performers. “Before the singers come in, it’s like an art installation,” he says. “And then the singers come in and then you realize that, well, actually we need to tone it down to such a degree that the singers are still at the center.” While the opera is larger-than-life, Sharon wants to showcase intimate human moments. He couldn’t say enough good things about the cast, featuring Michael Spyres and Lise Davidsen in the title roles, which he called “the greatest cast I think that’s ever been assembled for this opera.” “A big part of my job is also supporting and being there to make sure that singers can give the very best performance they can,” he adds. “And if there’s a stumbling block in their way, I have to remove it.” In the end, Sharon firmly believes that opera is still for everyone. In fact, he literally wrote a book on it. Audiences outside of New York City can catch a filmed live performance of Tristan und Isolde on March 21 through the Met’s “Live in HD” program. After the experience, you can decide for yourself if opera is alive and well in 2026. View the full article

Sponsored Post If you asked a small business owner five years ago what kept them up at night, they might have said cash flow, finding staff, or maybe a competitor opening up across the street. Fast forward to 2026. While those worries haven’t vanished, a new set of invisible, digital, and economic threats have joined them. It’s not just about a customer slipping on a wet floor or a storm damaging the roof. Today, the risks are often buried in lines of code, hidden in employment contracts, or eroded silently by economic shifts. For many small business owners, the challenge isn’t just managing these risks, it’s knowing they exist in the first place. Here’s a look at the emerging threats shaping the small business world in 2026, and practical ways you can protect what you’ve built. 4 Emerging Risks Owners Aren’t Talking About (But Should Be) Here are four specific areas where exposure gaps are widening for small businesses. 1. The AI Gap: Liability for Algorithmic Errors and Copyright Whether you’re using generative AI tools to write marketing emails, draft code for a client’s website, or automate customer service responses, you’re relying on an algorithm to represent your business. But what happens when the AI gets it wrong? We’re seeing a rise in “AI hallucinations,” where tools state false information as fact. If your business acts on or publishes this information without first checking it, and it leads to a financial loss for a client or damages their reputation, you could be liable for negligence. Copyright issues are also a growing minefield of risk. If your AI tool inadvertently generates a logo or text that infringes on existing intellectual property, your business is typically on the hook, not the AI provider. Standard general liability policies were not built with algorithmic errors in mind, leaving many business owners exposed to what is essentially a new form of digital malpractice. 2. Inflation-Driven Underinsurance: The Real Cost of Material Increases This is perhaps the most silent threat on the list. Many business owners set their insurance coverage limits years ago and simply renew them automatically. However, the cost of nearly everything has skyrocketed. Construction materials, specialized equipment, and inventory all cost significantly more to replace in 2026 than they did in 2023. If your workshop burns down, or your inventory is stolen, your insurance payout is capped at the limit you chose. If that limit reflects 2023 prices, you might find yourself with a payout that covers only 70% or 80% of the replacement cost. This gap can be the difference between reopening your doors and closing them for good. A good way to monitor a potential coverage gap is with an annual insurance audit. Increased revenues, additional hires, or new equipment can be signs that you may need to increase or add coverage. At Simply Business, a few minutes with our online quote tool can help you see what coverage you may need. We also have licensed agents who can help you review your options on the phone. 3. The Rise of Small-Scale Cyber Extortion and Phishing There’s a dangerous misconception that cybercriminals target only massive corporations with deep pockets. In reality, hackers view small businesses as “low-hanging fruit.” They know that while a Fortune 500 company has a dedicated security operations center, a local consultant or agency might just have a standard firewall and a reused password. In 2026, the threat has evolved from simple data theft to direct extortion. Ransomware attacks are becoming more targeted and less expensive to launch. Criminals lock critical business files such as client lists, financial records, and project data and demand a ransom to release them. Additionally, social engineering and phishing techniques have become more sophisticated. Scammers are now using deepfake audio technology to impersonate vendors or executives, tricking employees into transferring funds to fraudulent accounts. These attacks are personal, fast, and often devastating to cash-strapped small operations. 4. Contractor Misclassification and the 2026 Legal Landscape Regulators are cracking down on the distinction between an “independent contractor” and an “employee.” If you’re a small business owner who sometimes uses outside help, you should be aware that governmental agencies, particularly on the state level, are increasingly scrutinizing businesses that rely heavily on freelancers to ensure they aren’t avoiding payroll taxes and benefits. If you control when, where, and how a contractor works, the federal Department of Labor or the local state equivalent may classify them as an employee, regardless of what your contract states. The risk here is retroactive. If an audit finds you have misclassified workers, you could be liable for years of back taxes, unpaid overtime, workers’ compensation premiums, and hefty penalties. How to Conduct a 2026 Risk Audit for Your Business You don’t need to hire an expensive consultant to get a handle on these risks. You can start by conducting a simple internal audit. Review Your Tech Stack: List every AI tool and software platform you use. Find out if it’s an open system that pulls data from outside sources or shares your input with other programs. Check the terms of service: Do they indemnify you against copyright claims? If not, proceed with caution. Audit Your Workforce: Look at your independent contractors. Do they have other clients? Do they set their own hours? If they look and act like employees, it might be time to formalize that relationship or restructure the engagement. You should also consider consulting with an employment attorney if you have questions. Check Your Limits: Pull up your current insurance policy. Look at your property and equipment limits. Go online and check the current market price for your essential gear. If there is a discrepancy, call your broker. Educate Your Team: Cybersecurity is a human issue, not just a tech issue. Train your staff to spot phishing attempts and verify unusual payment requests, especially those that seem to come from leadership. For more strategies on managing these shifts, resources like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s guide on risk management can provide a helpful baseline for strategy. Staying Ahead: How Simply Business Monitors Emerging Threats Navigating these risks can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re trying to run a business. The good news is that you don’t have to be an expert in cyber law or economic forecasting to stay protected. At Simply Business, we understand that a graphic designer in Austin faces different risks than a carpenter in Ohio. That’s why we use data and industry insights to understand the specific pressures that small businesses will face in 2026. We partner with leading insurers who specialize in covering small businesses. They can offer insurance products to address cyber extortion, update property values, and respond to professional liabilities in the digital age. The world changes fast. Your protection should keep up. By acknowledging these new risks and taking small, proactive steps to address them, you can ensure that your business is ready, no matter what 2026 throws your way. This article, "Small Business Risks Are Changing: What Matters Now in 2026" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Sponsored Post If you asked a small business owner five years ago what kept them up at night, they might have said cash flow, finding staff, or maybe a competitor opening up across the street. Fast forward to 2026. While those worries haven’t vanished, a new set of invisible, digital, and economic threats have joined them. It’s not just about a customer slipping on a wet floor or a storm damaging the roof. Today, the risks are often buried in lines of code, hidden in employment contracts, or eroded silently by economic shifts. For many small business owners, the challenge isn’t just managing these risks, it’s knowing they exist in the first place. Here’s a look at the emerging threats shaping the small business world in 2026, and practical ways you can protect what you’ve built. 4 Emerging Risks Owners Aren’t Talking About (But Should Be) Here are four specific areas where exposure gaps are widening for small businesses. 1. The AI Gap: Liability for Algorithmic Errors and Copyright Whether you’re using generative AI tools to write marketing emails, draft code for a client’s website, or automate customer service responses, you’re relying on an algorithm to represent your business. But what happens when the AI gets it wrong? We’re seeing a rise in “AI hallucinations,” where tools state false information as fact. If your business acts on or publishes this information without first checking it, and it leads to a financial loss for a client or damages their reputation, you could be liable for negligence. Copyright issues are also a growing minefield of risk. If your AI tool inadvertently generates a logo or text that infringes on existing intellectual property, your business is typically on the hook, not the AI provider. Standard general liability policies were not built with algorithmic errors in mind, leaving many business owners exposed to what is essentially a new form of digital malpractice. 2. Inflation-Driven Underinsurance: The Real Cost of Material Increases This is perhaps the most silent threat on the list. Many business owners set their insurance coverage limits years ago and simply renew them automatically. However, the cost of nearly everything has skyrocketed. Construction materials, specialized equipment, and inventory all cost significantly more to replace in 2026 than they did in 2023. If your workshop burns down, or your inventory is stolen, your insurance payout is capped at the limit you chose. If that limit reflects 2023 prices, you might find yourself with a payout that covers only 70% or 80% of the replacement cost. This gap can be the difference between reopening your doors and closing them for good. A good way to monitor a potential coverage gap is with an annual insurance audit. Increased revenues, additional hires, or new equipment can be signs that you may need to increase or add coverage. At Simply Business, a few minutes with our online quote tool can help you see what coverage you may need. We also have licensed agents who can help you review your options on the phone. 3. The Rise of Small-Scale Cyber Extortion and Phishing There’s a dangerous misconception that cybercriminals target only massive corporations with deep pockets. In reality, hackers view small businesses as “low-hanging fruit.” They know that while a Fortune 500 company has a dedicated security operations center, a local consultant or agency might just have a standard firewall and a reused password. In 2026, the threat has evolved from simple data theft to direct extortion. Ransomware attacks are becoming more targeted and less expensive to launch. Criminals lock critical business files such as client lists, financial records, and project data and demand a ransom to release them. Additionally, social engineering and phishing techniques have become more sophisticated. Scammers are now using deepfake audio technology to impersonate vendors or executives, tricking employees into transferring funds to fraudulent accounts. These attacks are personal, fast, and often devastating to cash-strapped small operations. 4. Contractor Misclassification and the 2026 Legal Landscape Regulators are cracking down on the distinction between an “independent contractor” and an “employee.” If you’re a small business owner who sometimes uses outside help, you should be aware that governmental agencies, particularly on the state level, are increasingly scrutinizing businesses that rely heavily on freelancers to ensure they aren’t avoiding payroll taxes and benefits. If you control when, where, and how a contractor works, the federal Department of Labor or the local state equivalent may classify them as an employee, regardless of what your contract states. The risk here is retroactive. If an audit finds you have misclassified workers, you could be liable for years of back taxes, unpaid overtime, workers’ compensation premiums, and hefty penalties. How to Conduct a 2026 Risk Audit for Your Business You don’t need to hire an expensive consultant to get a handle on these risks. You can start by conducting a simple internal audit. Review Your Tech Stack: List every AI tool and software platform you use. Find out if it’s an open system that pulls data from outside sources or shares your input with other programs. Check the terms of service: Do they indemnify you against copyright claims? If not, proceed with caution. Audit Your Workforce: Look at your independent contractors. Do they have other clients? Do they set their own hours? If they look and act like employees, it might be time to formalize that relationship or restructure the engagement. You should also consider consulting with an employment attorney if you have questions. Check Your Limits: Pull up your current insurance policy. Look at your property and equipment limits. Go online and check the current market price for your essential gear. If there is a discrepancy, call your broker. Educate Your Team: Cybersecurity is a human issue, not just a tech issue. Train your staff to spot phishing attempts and verify unusual payment requests, especially those that seem to come from leadership. For more strategies on managing these shifts, resources like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s guide on risk management can provide a helpful baseline for strategy. Staying Ahead: How Simply Business Monitors Emerging Threats Navigating these risks can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re trying to run a business. The good news is that you don’t have to be an expert in cyber law or economic forecasting to stay protected. At Simply Business, we understand that a graphic designer in Austin faces different risks than a carpenter in Ohio. That’s why we use data and industry insights to understand the specific pressures that small businesses will face in 2026. We partner with leading insurers who specialize in covering small businesses. They can offer insurance products to address cyber extortion, update property values, and respond to professional liabilities in the digital age. The world changes fast. Your protection should keep up. By acknowledging these new risks and taking small, proactive steps to address them, you can ensure that your business is ready, no matter what 2026 throws your way. This article, "Small Business Risks Are Changing: What Matters Now in 2026" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Entrepreneurship has been synonymous with sleep deprivation for decades. Treating sleep as a weakness, CEOs and founders have worn the “founder’s grind” on their faces—showing off dark circles as badges of honor, and drawing a parallel between exhaustion and commitment. Sleep became optional in the name of business success. I’ve worn that badge and know that grind all too well. In my roles as a founder and entrepreneur, I treated sleep as a luxury, and it wasn’t until I lost the ability to get a good night’s rest that I realized just how critical it was to my performance. For a long stretch of my career, I woke up every morning at exactly 2:57 a.m. My eyes would open. My mind would start running. And I wouldn’t fall back asleep until well after 4:00 a.m., if at all. At the time, I was leading a company, making high-stakes decisions, managing teams, raising capital, and parenting a young child. I told myself it was just stress. What I didn’t understand then was that the most expensive mistakes I was making as a leader weren’t strategic. They were physiological. And I realized that pushing through with little sleep isn’t a sign of grit. It’s a sign of poor resource management. Record burnout Now it’s 2026, and burnout is at a record high. Sleep is bubbling as a leadership advantage, not necessarily because it feels good, but because it makes us smarter, calmer, and more effective. The most forward-thinking founders and executives are reframing sleep, not just as “self-care” but as infrastructure for critical decision-making, creativity, emotional regulation, and long-term resilience. In the next decade, the companies that outperform won’t be led by the most exhausted leaders, but by the ones who are truly well-rested. Fatigue is more of a risk factor than a flex when running a business, and the “Hustle Culture” that founders and leaders cling to is costing companies more than it’s delivering. Chronic sleep deprivation impairs judgment, slows reaction time, and erodes emotional intelligence: three core capabilities that modern leaders cannot afford to sacrifice for the sake of productivity. A founder’s perspective is their biggest asset. In high-stakes environments—whether it’s fundraising, managing teams, or planning for the future of the business — clear judgment and sharp reaction times aren’t trade-offs; they’re everything. Today’s leaders are expected to be sharper, not necessarily tougher. And as AI absorbs more of the operational and repetitive cognitive load, it’s more important than ever to set yourself apart by processing information faster, managing multiple teams and tasks seamlessly, and navigating uncertain or crowded markets with finesse. A competitive edge Quality sleep is the best competitive edge we can have as business leaders. Now more than ever, uniquely human skills: creativity, strategic thinking, empathy, are at a premium, all of which are directly tied to sleep quality and quantity. Those qualities don’t come from staying up late to finish work; they start the night before, during a good night’s sleep. Leaders who protect their sleep are protecting their brains and their judgment. It starts at the top. Prioritizing sleep is a leadership signal to the rest of your company. When leaders model boundaries, recovery, and sustainable performance, it sets the tone for a healthier, more productive team. Sleep-positive leadership can help reduce burnout and turnover—two of the biggest concerns for employers today. Organizations are competing for top talent, and as younger generations prioritize well-being and work-life balance, sustainability is a critical leadership signal. The late-night email sends a louder message than just the words inside it. It sets an expectation of blurred boundaries between work and life. Leaders set the standard for those boundaries, protect employees’ recovery time, and treat sleep as non-negotiable. Forward-thinking companies are beginning to integrate sleep education, flexible scheduling, and performance recovery into broader talent and productivity strategies. Not because it’s trendy, but because the link between sleep, mental health, and decision-making is undeniable. Sleep isn’t just a personal habit; it’s a business strategy. In an era defined by complexity, the ability to think clearly, respond calmly, and create strategically is the ultimate advantage. And that advantage starts with a good night’s rest. As organizations navigate economic uncertainty, AI disruption, and workforce burnout, the leaders who stand out will be the ones who prioritize sleep. View the full article

Back in 2020, advertisements from Big Oil companies were focused on climate actions, like touting renewable energy investments or emphasizing sustainability pledges. But now, those companies seem to have shifted away from the climate and back toward normalizing fossil fuel dependence, a new report notes. Clean Creatives, an advocacy group that works to get PR and ad professionals to give up their fossil fuel clients, outlined the trajectory of this shift in a report that analyzed nearly 1,900 ads from BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron. Those ads span from 2020 to 2024, and show what Clean Creatives calls a transition away from greenwashing and toward “climate gaslighting.” Big Oil ads now push the narrative that oil and gas are economic necessities, the report says—crucial to address our growing energy demands. And, instead of discussing renewables like solar and wind, they now highlight technologies like carbon capture, which experts say is often used to justify more fossil fuel extraction. Big Oil says fossil fuels are “indispensable” This messaging playbook coincides with geopolitical instabilities, from the ongoing war in Ukraine to America’s escalation in Iran, that highlight how vulnerable our global fossil fuel markets actually are. Those disruptions have led to rising oil prices—prompting climate experts to note that renewable energy would have buffered our country from such volatility. Sunlight and wind, many have pointed out, don’t need to go through the Strait of Hormuz. But even as the world is noticing how detrimental it is to rely on fossil fuels, Big Oil is doubling down on framing their products as a permanent fixture of life, and “indispensable to national security,” Clean Creatives says. To that advocacy group, this messaging amounts to gaslighting. It ignores the fact that renewable energy is cheap to build and would insulate countries from such geopolitical instability. “Greenwashing has taken on a new form,” Nayantara Dutta, head of research at Clean Creatives and lead author of the report, says in a statement. “Instead of making false claims, oil majors are promoting false solutions like [carbon capture and storage] and natural gas, even though they are derived from and create long-term dependence on fossil fuels.” “While the world is phasing out fossil fuels,” she adds, “oil companies are crafting a narrative that keeps them profitable and in power.” Chevron, BP, and ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment about the report. Shell declined to comment. How messaging on fossil fuels has evolved Fossil fuel companies have a long history of misleading messaging. Big Oil knew about fossil fuels’ impact on global warming as far back as 1959, but denied that fact for decades. They spent years—and billions of dollars—on advertising and PR campaigns that downplayed climate risks and even shifted the blame to individuals, like by introducing the idea of a “carbon footprint.” Eventually, that changed. Companies began to acknowledge climate change and even positioned themselves as part of the solution. In February 2020, BP made headlines as the first such company to announce a net zero pledge. (It has since diluted its targets, even outright abandoning plans to cut its oil outputs.) Chevron, Shell, and ExxonMobil soon followed. Ads across these companies began to include images of solar farms, phrases such as “lower-carbon,” and claims that Big Oil was “advancing climate solutions” and “aligning” their businesses with the Paris climate agreement. “The latest rhetorical twist” from Big Oil This era of advertising is defined as one of “climate leadership” in the Clean Creatives report. But it didn’t last. By analyzing everything from paid advertisements (across Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, and television) to ad library archives, press releases, investor communications, and executive speeches, Clean Creatives outlines how fossil fuel messaging has changed in the years since. From 2020 to 2021, Big Oil companies positioned themselves as leaders on climate. But in 2022, they began focusing on “energy security.” In 2023, they adopted a “both, and” narrative, the report says, which said fossil fuels were essential to meet today’s energy needs, and that these companies were working on a “lower carbon” future. From 2024 to today, though, the messaging has centered around fossil fuel dependence, or what Clean Creatives calls “‘you can’t live without us’ messaging.” “The transition from greenwashing to advocacy of fossil fuel energy dominance is the latest rhetorical twist in the manipulation of the public to accept greenhouse gas emissions as just part of doing business,” Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University, says in a statement. “Meanwhile,” he adds, “the war in the Middle East shows the folly of the idea that fossil fuels provide ‘energy security.’ The case for renewable energy is only growing stronger.” View the full article

Usually, all-nighters are for college students and people worried about losing their jobs if they don’t deliver. And if there’s one thing that Ryan Coogler—writer, director, and producer of Sinners—has demonstrated over his career, it’s that he delivers. Yet on this February afternoon—a day before his blood-soaked Southern Gothic blockbuster would become the most Oscar-nominated project in cinema history—he’s sitting across from me in a knit monochrome tracksuit and thick-rimmed glasses, looking rather sleepy. “My bad, bro,” he tells me after briefly losing his train of thought in the middle of a sentence. “I just pulled an all-nighter trying to get a draft in.” The script is for an upcoming TV reboot of the hit 1990s series The X Files, which Ryan is coproducing for Disney+ through Proximity Media, the company he founded with his wife, producer Zinzi Coogler, and producer and screenwriter Sev Ohanian (no relation to Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian). I’m meeting with the three of them at a hotel suite in the Bay Area, where Ryan and Zinzi live, amid a punishing awards-season schedule. Ryan could be forgiven by his partners if a draft were a few days late, but Proximity runs on this kind of commitment. As Zinzi says as she sips her decaf coffee, the founders are basically family, and “you treat your family a little bit differently because you’re invested in a different way.” Though the three have been working together since Ryan and Ohanian’s student days at the University of Southern California’s School for Cinematic Arts, they didn’t officially found Proximity until 2018, following Ryan’s catalytic success as the writer and director of Fruitvale Station, Creed, and Black Panther. Since then, the company has grown to some 20 people who work across its film, television, audio, music, and unscripted divisions. Proximity has produced a handful of feature films (Judas and the Black Messiah, Creed III), documentaries, and television shows. Sinners, which ended up taking home four Oscars, including for best screenplay and best actor (Michael B. Jordan), is its first feature film written and directed by Ryan himself. Inspired by the imagery and iconography of the Delta blues, the movie is a meditation on Southern Black culture and the exploitative foundations of the plantation system. It’s culturally specific enough to inspire think pieces and podcast interviews. But it’s also a good old-fashioned vampire horror flick, filmed on IMAX and Panavision to maximum effect. The movie surpassed $350 million in global box office on a $90 million budget, establishing Proximity as a heavyweight. What’s more, the production company secured a head-turning deal with Warner Bros., which financed and distributed the film, reportedly giving Proximity full creative control, first-dollar gross, and rights to the intellectual property after 25 years. (The Proximity team declined to discuss the deal, saying it was never meant to be public knowledge.) The rights-reversion part of the deal became a flashpoint for other studio executives, though, some of whom speculated that such deals could mean the end of the studio system. Those fears may be overblown: Quentin Tarantino struck a similar rights-reversion deal for his 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; studios have yet to collapse. And Ryan remains one of the surest bets in town. Measured by both critical reception and box office, the 39-year-old is the most successful director across his first five films since Steven Spielberg. Ryan’s films have grossed an estimated $2.7 billion globally and hold an aggregated Metacritic score of 81.2, surpassing the first five movies of Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, and James Cameron. Proximity’s achievements come at a time when theatrical releases are under increasing threat. Summer 2025 saw the lowest box-office numbers since 1981 (adjusted for inflation and excluding the pandemic years). In the age of streaming and short-form video, getting audiences into movie theaters for something other than a franchise is no small feat. But with Sinners, Proximity found a way to create not just a film but a genuine event. The movie weaves Black history, musical history, and cinematic history into something that feels very close to an epic—one that’s entirely original, not tied to a comic book, superhero, toy line, or another film. Just as notably, Proximity engineered a release strategy that treated originality itself as the product, building anticipation across mediums. The company, which controls the content around its releases to an unusual degree, added even more energy to the film by producing a series of behind-the-scenes podcast episodes around it. Meanwhile, its in-house music division, a rarity among independent studios, came out with a hit soundtrack, cementing the film as a musical phenomenon. “It earned its success the hard way,” Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca, co-chairs and CEOs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, said in an emailed statement. “The film serves as a reminder that originality is rarely the safest path, but it can be the most rewarding.” In a moment when Hollywood is questioning what brings people out of their homes, Proximity offers a clear, quietly radical answer. Like many teenagers, Ryan and Zinzi Coogler spent their first date at a movie theater: the Regal Cinema in Oakland’s Jack London Square, where they saw Bring It On. They were 14 and dreaming of athletic superstardom—Ryan in football, Zinzi in middle-distance track. In some sense, their working relationship began almost as soon as they met. They trained together through high school to keep each other motivated. But it was movies that became the centerpiece of many future dates—and defined their lives. Zinzi attended Fresno State; Ryan went to St. Mary’s College of California, then to Sacramento State. A creative writing professor at St. Mary’s had told Ryan that he should consider screenwriting. He learned that USC was the place to be and entered the MFA program in 2008. By then, Zinzi was working as an ASL interpreter, but would visit him on campus, sitting in on film classes and serving as script supervisor, producer, and even cinematographer and camera operator on his student projects. The result was so good that one of Ryan’s professors arranged for him to meet with Forest Whitaker’s production company, citing the expert camera work. That led to Whitaker helping to produce Ryan’s first feature, 2013’s Fruitvale Station. At USC, Ryan and Zinzi got to know Ohanian, an astute and mild-mannered former Boy Scout from Glendale, California. Ohanian was already a self-taught filmmaker. In the early days of YouTube, he had written and directed a scripted series that mined his Armenian family for humor. When the videos went viral across the diaspora, he raised money from the Armenian community to shoot a feature-length film with the same characters. He screened it at community centers, churches, and schools, realizing that people show up when you give them something to care about. After USC, he gravitated toward producing, a job he sums up as “making the impossible possible.” Zinzi CooglerErik Carter The seed for Proximity came from a conversation the three had over dinner during the San Francisco Film Festival in 2018. Ryan and Zinzi were basking in the success of Black Panther, and Ohanian was in town to support the thriller Searching, which he coproduced. They floated the idea of forming a company, Ryan as creative lead, Zinzi and Ohanian as producers. In their time in Hollywood, they’d noticed there was a pattern to the nonfranchise films that performed well at the box office. “What we were finding was that every quarter, there was a movie that would beat tracking,” Ryan says, referring to the test-screening scores studios use to gauge wider interest in a film. “People would say, ‘Man, we never saw this coming.’ Get Out is a great example. Crazy Rich Asians is another.” Even Hustlers, Ryan points out, exceeded financial expectations. But Proximity’s founders believe that the success of these films should have been predictable, largely because they have multiple “hooks,” something they talk about frequently. In the case of Hustlers, there’s Jennifer Lopez, con artists and criminals, and Cardi B in a strip club. “These movies made popcorn money,” Ryan says, “but there was still something sticky there, something that challenges you or brings you closer. So we started to wonder if maybe this could be our lane.” Proximity aims to build a business on films that deliver, as Ryan says, “real, potent artistic points of view,” while also giving audiences reasons to leave their homes. For Sinners, those hooks are vampires, IMAX, and Michael B. Jordan playing twins. There’s a word heard often among Proximity’s founders, who named their company for its mission to bring audiences closer to often-overlooked subjects: eventizing. Ohanian is so committed to this idea that he once tried to create a formula for turning a movie into an event. “Disclaimer,” he warns, “I don’t even know if it’s possible to reverse engineer, but I came up with this ridiculous acronym called PUGS: propulsive, unique, genre-bending, and surprising.” Ohanian may be a better film producer than a creator of acronyms, but Sinners is evidence that he’s onto something. For Proximity’s founders, who learned to love movies alongside family, friends, and community, generating mass appeal is a matter of responsibility. “Sixteen-year-old Zinzi, Sev, and Ryan didn’t know what an art house theater was,” Zinzi recalls, “but we did know what the multiplex was. There are so many people whose entry point to this medium is through the multiplex. That’s inspired us to be broader in scope, but very specific with intention.” In the hotel room, Ryan, Zinzi, and Ohanian are reminiscing about the heyday of the movie soundtrack, listing the ones that impacted them the most: Titanic, Space Jam, Above the Rim, Waiting to Exhale, The Bodyguard. “Did I already say The Bodyguard?” Ryan says with a laugh. “Well, screw it, I’m going to say it again!” Now all around 40 years old, they remember a time when the soundtrack was a bridge between the theater experience and your life. You’d listen to your favorite TLC or Tupac track in your bedroom while you looked at the CD cover and replayed scenes from the movie in your mind. To bring that experience to modern audiences, Proximity has an in-house record label, which creates and releases soundtracks for its projects. The Sinners soundtrack, which includes songs from nearly two dozen contemporary blues, folk, and country artists, hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Blues Albums list and took home a pair of Grammys. Proximity’s Wakanda Forever soundtrack, released in 2022, peaked at a respectable No. 12 on the Billboard 200 list. (Though Ryan directed the Black Panther follow-up for Marvel Studios and Disney, Proximity handled the music.) Perhaps more impressively, it provided listeners with Rihanna’s first hit since 2017: the power ballad “Lift Me Up,” which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Both projects were overseen by Ludwig Göransson, a soft-spoken Swede who runs Proximity’s music division and who has also known Coogler since USC. A graduate of the school’s Screen Scoring program, he remains a soundtrack composer of the traditional variety. He takes his orchestral arranging and composing work seriously enough that he traveled to Mexico City and Lagos, Nigeria, to find musicians for the Wakanda Forever soundtrack. For Sinners, he and Ryan road-tripped through the Mississippi Delta to Memphis to immerse themselves in the blues and, during filming, in New Orleans, he rented a church turned studio to record the score while on set. The resulting soundtrack won two Grammys and the Oscar for best original score. But unlike a traditional composer, Göransson is also a bona fide hitmaker who has worked with the likes of Adele and Haim. He met Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino) while writing music for the TV show Community and produced three albums with the artist, as well as the viral (and seemingly forever-relevant) song “This Is America,” which netted Göransson Grammys for Record of the Year and Song of the Year. “He exists in the film-scoring space,” says Coogler, “but at any given time, he’s also trying to make a hit record with somebody.” That Proximity has a music division is notable. (Perhaps even influential: Indie hitmaker A24 launched a music division in 2025.) But for Göransson, it’s a no-brainer. “Music is at the core of our communication,” he says. “We want to make sure we have control.” With that control, Proximity can create an ecosystem of content around its IP, well beyond music. The company’s unscripted division released a limited series in 2023 about Göransson’s development of the Wakanda Forever score. And the company teases out spin-offs from nonmusical projects as well. For the Shaka King–directed Judas and the Black Messiah, which nabbed Oscars for Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Song, the company’s podcasting arm produced a show discussing the film’s dramatized version of the death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and what really happened that winter of 1969. Sev OhanianErik Carter Paola Mardo, a veteran of Sony Entertainment, has run Proximity’s audio division since 2022. In that capacity, she oversees a weekly podcast, In Proximity, that focuses on stories behind the camera, especially the artistry of everyday people. Indeed, one of the most popular episodes features a 40-minute interview with Steve Gehrke, the Hawaiian-shirt-clad script supervisor for Sinners, who talked about why he still takes notes with a pencil and pad. For a Sinners-related series, the podcast team also recorded conversations with Göransson, cultural consultant Dolly Li (who helped the filmmakers understand the role of Chinese immigrants in 1930s Mississippi), and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who discussed shooting for IMAX for the first time. At this year’s Academy Awards, Durald Arkapaw became the first woman to take home the prize for cinematography, for her work on Sinners. These interviews highlight one of the keys to Proximity’s ability to make such quality work. Ryan has “these longitudinal relationships,” says Franklin Leonard, film producer and founder of the industry platform the Black List. “He finds his people, and they continue to build together.” Durald Arkapaw had also worked on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. As had Sinners’ costume designer, Ruth Carter, and production designer, Hannah Beachler. Leonard notes, almost as an aside, that many of these collaborators are people of color, something he believes isn’t diversity for diversity’s sake. “Much of [Ryan’s] work is talked about in terms of diversity, but I think that’s a disrespect to him. Yes, he works with a Black production designer, but there’s a real meritocracy there,” he says. “They’re the best people at what they do.” In addition to the Oscar nods for Ryan’s script and direction, Sinners received nominations for casting, editing, production design, costume, cinematography, makeup and hair, sound, VFX, Original Score, and Original Song. Indeed, almost every department head on set was nominated. A year after Sinners’ release, the industry is watching to see what Proximity does with its success. “Are you going to become a major [studio] looking for financing to launch a production outfit?” wonders Sean McNulty, industry analyst and author of the newsletter The Wakeup. “Or are you going to be just the home for Ryan Coogler and some associated stuff?” Proximity, which is self-funded, seems committed to its independent approach: Sell the movie to a big distributor, make the money, sell another movie. It’s a viable plan, McNulty says. “Theatrical is still a vibrant business.” And studios are still deeply invested in it—60 million views on Netflix is worth a great deal less to a studio than 60 million tickets sold. Plus, says McNulty, there’s another reason to feel bullish on Proximity: “I have a hard time betting against Ryan Coogler.” In the next few months, Ryan will direct the pilot for Proximity’s much-anticipated X-Files reboot. Later, he’ll head into production for Disney’s Black Panther III. Other Proximity projects on deck include Southern Bastards, a Hulu series based on the graphic novel of the same name, helmed by showrunner Matt Olm­stead; a spy thriller film from Searching director Aneesh Chaganty; and “a series built on a singular comedic voice,” Ohanian says cryptically. Not every Proximity film with another director has been a clear box-office success. While the Michael B. Jordan–directed Creed III earned more than $276 million worldwide, Judas and the Black Messiah took in less than $8 million. To be fair, its real box-office power remains unknown: Judas’s release was postponed by the onset of COVID, and Warner Bros. took the unusual step of streaming it on HBO Max for about a month before its exclusive theatrical window. Proximity, however, is confident that films and shows featuring populations Hollywood has historically treated as “niche” can perform well with broader audiences, even overseas. The Ohanian-produced Searching, the first mainstream American thriller with an Asian American lead, cleared $75 million at the box office on a reported $880,000 production budget. Sinners, a film in which the only white characters are vampires or Klansmen, performed surprisingly well with white audiences and garnered a respectable $88 million in international ticket sales. McNulty believes that number could have been higher: “I think Warner Bros. undermarketed it [internationally].” If there’s one thing that ties all of Proximity’s projects together, it’s a profound respect for audiences. It goes back all the way to Coogler’s 2009 student film, Locks, for which Zinzi served as assistant director and script supervisor and Göransson composed the score. The six-minute short, set in Oakland, tracks the decision of a young man to cut his hair. That’s it. That’s the story. But in it, you can see a Proximity ethos being born while Coogler perfects the patient, observational, almost reverent eye that he used to stunning effect in Fruitvale Station, which similarly depicts a day in the life of a young Oakland man—in this case, 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who was killed by a BART police officer on New Year’s Eve 2009. Both films portray Black characters having an experience that is very much a function of race, but in a way that is instantly recognizable and emotionally relatable to nearly everyone. In a world fatigued by conflict and isolation, this simple, principled approach might be the movie industry’s best way forward—even if it requires a few sleepless nights. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. 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During the final weeks of his battle with ALS, the late actor Eric Dane teamed up with ElevenLabs to restore his voice with the use of artificial intelligence technology—creating an emotional moment for his family, friends, and nurses when they heard how authentic it was. “The final version of Eric’s voice sounded exactly like him,” Rebecca Gayheart Dane, his widow, said during a recent discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “If you are familiar with him at all, you know he had a very distinct voice and he had a distinct way of telling his stories—he was witty, acerbic, he just had a lot of personality—and this voice captured that so perfectly. It sounded so real.” ElevenLabs, the New York-based AI voice technology company that made all of that possible, now has its sights set on providing one million people with free access to voice-restoration technology. But that wasn’t part of its original mission; rather, the company launched in 2022 with a voice model that turned text into audio, making it “sound human” with emotions and intonations, explained Mati Staniszewski, the company’s cofounder and CEO. “Very organically, a lot of people started reaching out to be able to use that technology when they lost their voice,” Staniszewski explained. As those stories continued to pour in, the company opened up an impact program to provide the technology for free—such that now someone can send a voice sample on a Monday and have a sample by the end of the week. ‘HOW AI CAN BE USED FOR GOOD’ ElevenLabs has now helped restore the voices of about 7,000 people worldwide, of which 11 of their stories are documented in “11 Voices,” a documentary series it premiered at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Some of those stories capture “deeply emotional” moments, which makes the company’s work very motivating, Staniszewski said. “It just reaffirms the commitment to the mission of transforming the interactions with each other with technology, through technology, around the world.” Having seen how much happiness it brought to Dane to have his voice restored before the Grey Anatomy star’s death last month, Gayheart Dane is continuing his advocacy work by supporting the “1 Million Voices” initiative—and she’s inspired by how many people this technology could help. “It’s AI being used ethically for a great reason,” she said. “A lot of people are cautious around AI, but I think this is the best example of how AI can be used for good.” View the full article

Nearly every major policy paper, and the wannabe thought leaders that quote them, says that university enrollment and programming skills are the winning combination for the next Industrial Revolution. My analysis of 11 million professional programmers at Gild completely disagreed. This is not the Industrial Revolution. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment . . . and be honest. You are the CEO of a multinational company with 100,000 employees. Rate all of their jobs on a scale from ‘lowest’ to ‘highest’ skill. Now consider a near future in which AI and automation have disrupted the bottom 80% of those jobs by skill-level. Those 80,000 jobs are not needed anymore, and those lower-skilled employees are staring at pink slips. But just as with the Industrial Revolution, automation, in this case in the form of artificial intelligence, has created an equal number of high-skilled jobs. So you have 100,000 employees and 100,000 great jobs—or maybe even more. This is wonderful! Problem solved, right? But wait, now your company needs five times as many high-skill employees. AI hasn’t created any new lower-skill jobs because if they fall below the skills threshold then those jobs are in turn automated as well. So ask yourself these questions: will many, if any, of those lower-skilled employees be qualified to fill these new top-20% roles in your company, even with reskilling? Take a step back. Today, how easy is it to recruit for and fill those top 20% positions that already exist in your company? How would that change if you have five, ten, twenty times as many “top jobs” to fill? And what if we’re not talking about the top-20% but the top-1%? Will productivity boosts from AI lift your entire labor force into these elite roles? Do you truly believe you can retrain even a minority of your workforce to fill those new jobs? I believe that we can, but it isn’t going to be through reskilling or the gig economy. It won’t be because we’ve given everyone a university degree or taught them all to program. And in order to secure a robot-proof future for our children and our economy, we must stop pretending that it will be. Lessons from history The post-World War II economic transformation in Germany is often cited as the ultimate proof of concept for large-scale reskilling. The successful transition of naval shipyard workers into the booming automotive industry is presented as a template for our own AI-driven disruptions. A closer, more critical look at this historical case study, however, reveals a far more complex and cautionary tale. The success of this grand retooling was highly conditional and exposed a deep, underlying truth about the nature of skills. The retraining programs were overwhelmingly successful for low- to medium-skilled workers whose jobs were defined by relatively routine tasks. For them, it was a lateral transfer; the repetitive work of the factory line was analogous to the repetitive work of the shipyard. They were swapping one set of well-posed problems for another. The true story lies in the program’s surprising failure. The highly-skilled workers and, most notably, the experienced managers proved profoundly resistant to retraining. This was not a failure of intelligence or work ethic; it was a failure of adaptability. These were individuals with deep expertise in the unique, project-based constraints of building massive vessels. When placed in the high-volume, process-driven world of the automobile factory, their hardwon expertise became a form of cognitive rigidity. They lacked the metalearning skills—the fluid adaptability and comfort with uncertainty—required to navigate a fundamental shift in their professional context. The very brevity of so many six-week retraining programs reveals a systemic misunderstanding of what it truly takes to build these deeper capacities. The leaders of this transformation, often the scions of the company founders, navigated the chaotic, post-war world with relative ease. They were not just trained in a specific skill; they were raised in an environment that cultivated the very adaptability and strategic thinking the displaced managers lacked, inheriting a form of human capital that prepared them for change. But this post-war boom did not create a universally creative economy. It created a robust, high-skill service economy. This professional middle class was a vital engine of prosperity, but it was distinct from the creative class. This history shows that reskilling for even sophisticated routine work does little to address the persistent, unmet demand for the truly creative talent needed to explore the unknown. A case study I saw this exact dynamic play out in a recent collaboration with a major global financial services company. They projected 200,000 layoffs over the next 10 years due to ‘technological obsolescence’ and launched a well-funded corporate initiative to ‘upskill’ their team. The program was a catastrophic failure. Within two years, nearly all of the original one thousand employees had left the company. These elite employees saw the move for what it was: a lateral transition that required an immense amount of effort just to maintain their same professional status. They called it “treading water.” The problem wasn’t a lack of skills. The problem was a fundamental lack of adaptability. “Reskilling” may be shouted self-servingly as the future of work, but it becomes evident over time that simply reskilling people into different jobs will not improve their long-term prospects because their intellectual experiences have not fundamentally changed. Reskilling, even for the most elite and credentialed workers, is a doomed strategy if their entire career has not prepared them to explore the unknown. Adaptability and other meta-learning skills are not a “soft” layer you can bolt onto an existing skill set in a six-week course. They are foundational capacities that must be cultivated over a lifetime. But won’t automation free people to be more creative and innovative? Isn’t that what happened in the Industrial Revolution? It’s always struck me that the lazy myth of the Industrial Revolution involves a bit of a bait-and-switch in which new jobs were created and society advanced, and therefore the lives of individual people must have improved at the same pace. Only . . . those weren’t the same people, and at times it took a generation or more for those improvements to take hold. Whenever I hear the AI bait-and-switch it brings to mind a cartoon from, strangely enough, the science journal Nature. Two horses are looking down from a hilltop at a Model-T driving up the road. One horse turns to another and says, “I’m not worried—the wheel, the plow—new innovation always means more jobs for horses.” Unfortunately for our four-legged protagonist, Derek Thompson noted in The Atlantic, “After tractors rolled onto American farms in the early 20th century, the population of horses and mules began to decline steeply, falling nearly 50% by the 1930s and 90% by the 1950s.” The Gilded Age analogy The Gilded Age of the late 19th century presents a stark case study in the divergent paths of human capital. The mass migration from farm to factory is often portrayed as a simple story of industrial progress, but it was, for most, a lateral transition into a more brutal form of routine labor. The exhausting, repetitive, and soul-crushing work on the factory line offered regular pay but stripped away the autonomy and seasonal variation of agricultural life, leaving workers with little time or energy for anything beyond sleep and simple diversions. While this new industrial system was insatiable in its hunger for this kind of routine labor, it also created a new landscape of ill-posed engineering and logistical problems, opening a second, very different path for a select few. The divergence between these two paths was not a matter of luck or circumstance but of endogenous motivation. The individuals who thrived and became the era’s great innovators were not made creative by their new environment; they were spontaneous creatives who brought a pre-existing, fanatical drive to their work. They were the ones already tinkering in the barn after supper, who saw a broken wagon as an opportunity, not a chore. For them, industrialization was a necessary but not sufficient condition for success; it lowered the threshold for their creativity to flourish by freeing them from the necessities of farm labor and exposing them to more complex problems. Their defining characteristic was a willingness to make immense personal sacrifices, forgoing leisure to working endless unpaid hours, not for a specific reward but because they were intrinsically compelled to solve the problem in front of them. So can we train endogenous motivation and creativity? I’ve been proud of nearly every product that my companies have released, and my work in education most of all. We published scientific papers, gave invited talks, and presented demos around the country with the belief that we would transform teaching. But every teacher that played with our tools said the same thing: “That’s cool . . . and a little terrifying. And what the hell am I supposed to do with it?” We imagined that we were handing teachers a tool to influence the life outcomes of their students. Each of these innovative products had huge potential to help and could have genuinely been a foundation for a more creative learning experience for both teachers and students. But in every case, they (and I) simply assumed that the presence of the technology would inevitably lead to better outcomes. For all its AI sophistication, cognitive analytics never made teachers or students more creative, even when they were given the freedom to explore without negative consequences. All of these technologies, including my own, were responding to the same basic impulse: because we can imagine a world in which these technologies do good, that world is inevitable. The myth of technological empowerment Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. The idea that any technology will make people more creative simply by existing is ludicrous. The vast majority of people, educators included, are heavily entrenched in a pattern of routine labor and systems that discourage creativity. Shoving technology into their hands and saying “go” will not transform work from non-creative into creative overnight. My research has found intriguing evidence that evoking and developing creativity really is possible, but experiences at Gild and across numerous EdTech projects demonstrated a brutal truth: the idea that technology will magically empower remains pure myth. Of course people can change, but that change comes from intentional effort. It is not the inevitable result of some Econ101 supply and demand curve. In 2014 at Gild, I had this amazing dataset—122 million working professionals—and my entire mission was to use the data to predict who did the highest quality work. But I’ve never had to interview for a job my whole life. What the hell did I know about what makes a great employee? So when I was hired, I figured I would do what any scientist would do in a job like this—read the existing research. In fact, I read over 100 years worth of research about what makes a great employee. I looked for more than correlations but what actually causes people to do great work. At the same time, I was also the CEO and chief scientist at Socos Learning, where we were looking at the predictors of positive long-term life outcomes in young children. It turns out, the factors we found in children’s life outcomes were nearly identical to the predictors we found in professionals who did the best work. Perhaps It is not shocking that the qualities that make for an exceptional life also make us good at our jobs. Across the Socos data on children’s long-term life outcomes and Gild’s data on 122 million working professionals, we discovered a rich set of nearly 50 factors that might collectively be described as your ability to learn how to learn. More so than all the data we cram on a resume—your skills, your name, your zip code, even your university—it is these meta-learning factors, things like emotional intelligence, social skills and creativity, that say who you are and who you can become. Most of these factors involve experiential learning: they develop slowly over time through direct experiences. I know many leaders and venture capitalists in the Tech industry tend to believe that you’ve either got it or you don’t, but research disagrees. Take resilience, defined as an individual’s likelihood of pushing through failure to achieve success. While some of resilience’s qualities are almost certainly rooted in genetic differences between individuals, it is absolutely possible to intervene and increase (or decrease!) resilience over time. But clearly a lecture on the value of resilience won’t change anyone. Instead, a resilience intervention involves direct experience with failure. And this is where our educational system and labor market get it wrong. Is it important to know when the Treaty of Westphalia was signed or to understand how AI works? Yes, but these are only the tools. We have built our entire education system and labor market not just myopically focused on these tools, but on treating humans as though they were just tools themselves. We educate little kids and employees like they are a tool belt instead of an artist. We hire people this way. This has always been the wrong thing to do. Now we live in a world where AI is a tool that can wield itself. If we continue to build people to be tools in a world where AI is the ultimate tool, we reach a dead end. Our existing institutions do not utilize the strengths of humanity. We need to rebuild education and the future of work to focus on the artist and what they do with the tools. The future of humanity is about the artists. Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc., from Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All the Answers, Build Better People. Copyright © 2026 by Vivienne Ming. This book is available at all bookstores, online booksellers, and from the Wiley web site at www.wiley.com. View the full article

The housing market is about to step out of its prolonged slump. And, according to a new report from Realtor.com, selling conditions are about to become favorable. According to the real estate destination’s 2026 Best TIme to Sell report released today, the market is set for a major spring turn around. That’s because, in addition to warmer spring weather, mortgage rates have also been on the downslide, dropping to their lowest rate in at least three and a half years. That, coupled with the typical springtime surge, is likely to inspire more home shoppers to begin their spring time search. The best week for listing, the report says, will be the week of April 12 through the 18th. While springtime listing is usually smart, receiving an average of 16.7% more views in mid-April and selling approximately 17% faster, the report explains that this spring could be one for the books. Last year, homes that were listed during the same time spent 50 days on the market, selling 10 days faster than 2025’s average and three days faster than the 2019 (pre-pandemic) average. Listing during that window can also lead to listing prices of around 1.3% higher than the average week. According to the report, putting your house on the market in mid-April can mean listing at $5,300 more than the annual average, or $26,000 more than listing in January. Plus, home prices are more stable with roughly 18.9% fewer homes seeing price reductions. “After years of being squeezed by limited inventory and high rates, the 2026 housing market is starting to feel more approachable for those who have been sidelined,” Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, said in a press release. “This shift doesn’t just mean more options; lower rates and tempered price growth should give buyers’ some budget breathing room. For sellers, the mid-April window represents an opportunity to enter a market that feels more within reach for buyers while benefiting from a seasonal advantage in terms of pricing and competition.” The report explains that it’s important that home-sellers aren’t late to the listing game, given that by late June, competition is especially fierce. While prices are reaching peak levels in early summer, the number of listings surges by around 38.4%, meaning your home could more easily get passed over. When you list always matters, but if you live in certain parts of the country, it’s even more important this year. “The housing market remains undersupplied, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, meaning sellers of well-priced, move-in ready homes are likely to find success,” Hannah Jones, senior economic research analyst at Realtor.com, explains in the release. “However, in the South and West where inventory is more abundant, sellers face softer conditions.” Jones adds, “In those metros, optimizing timing to this early spring window is even more critical to differentiate a property from the growing competition.” View the full article

Nike and U.S. Soccer just revealed the official team jerseys for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and they’re the perfect blend of something old and something new. The U.S. men’s national team (USMNT) kits include two distinct home and away jersey designs that take visual inspiration from the American flag. The home “stripes kit” features classic rippling red and white waves; the away “stars kit” highlights subtle shining stars on a dark navy backdrop. The designs will be worn across all 27 U.S. Soccer national teams (including men’s and women’s, youth, and senior teams) in the lead-up to the 2026 World Cup, which will conclude with a final match on home soil at New York’s MetLife Stadium. Nike has served as the official apparel partner of U.S. Soccer since 1995, and the two entities signed another 10-year deal back in 2021. But this year marked a turning point in the 31-year collaboration. After athletes and fans reacted negatively to the team’s jerseys in 2022, USMNT players were much more involved in the latest design process. Their aesthetic sensibilities shine through with uniforms that balance an homage to World Cup history with a modern, undeniably cool edge. Starting from square one The design process for the 2026 team kits started all the way back in fall 2023. It was just about a year after several USMNT players held up a team photo shoot because they were so displeased with that year’s kits, which included one plain white jersey and one blue tie-dye jersey. In an interview with The Athletic this March, midfielder Tyler Adams explained that the delay stemmed from the fact that the team “didn’t feel that [the kits] represented us.” The shake-up nudged Nike and U.S. Soccer to rethink the design process from beginning to end. In past years, players’ feedback was taken into consideration, but it was typically collected through a predesign interview phase, meaning players took more of a back seat during active brainstorming and prototyping. This time around, players were consulted throughout the process, from the very earliest meetings to the final draft stage. Adams told The Athletic that by the end, he felt like the team “had more say than Nike had.” “This was the first time players got direct, in-person face time with the designers over multiple touchpoints,” says ​​Maribeth Towers, VP of consumer products at U.S. Soccer. “This was sparked by the players expressing an interest in being able to share their input into the design of the kits early in the process. Nike and U.S. Soccer came together to bring the players along the journey to ensure the kits authentically represent the identity of the team.” One jersey for the stadium, one jersey for the club During the brainstorming phase, Towers says, players expressed a “diverse array of preferences”—with a few key notes in common. First, they wanted a jersey design that was recognizable enough to easily identify fans in the stands as a source of motivation. Second, they wanted a trendier jersey that could be worn both on and off the field (some players, according to The Athletic, specifically requested a jersey that could be worn “to the club”). To hit that first criteria, the design team took its cues from a 2012 jersey known as the “Waldo.” Multiple players cited this classic red-and-white-striped version as their favorite World Cup look of all time, and it’s long reigned as a beloved design among fans, too. The jersey stood out in the stands and on the field for its retro Americana look, but also for its striking similarity to the titular character in the book series Where’s Waldo? (hence its enduring nickname). This year’s home “stripes kit” gives the Waldo a modern facelift, adding color gradients and waves to the red lines that suggest the natural movement of the flag. “When we began our conversations with athletes regarding their preferences for representation and emotional experience, one significant insight emerged: They are highly motivated by fan engagement within the stadium,” says Yazmin Rosete, a senior designer for Nike’s global football apparel. Compared to the “stripes kit,” the away “stars kit” has a more modern, edgy look that does, indeed, seem like something an off-duty player might wear straight to the bar. It’s rendered in a dark navy blue that verges on black, with accents of reflective stars that are visible only from close range. Towers told The Athletic that initial prototypes of this piece were actually too bright, and players requested that they be toned down, resulting in a more subtle final look. In sum, she tells Fast Company, the two jerseys “complement each other because they’re so different.” They’re a clever mash-up of fan service and player swag that, hopefully, will offer something for everyone. View the full article

Marcus Hoed, a Dutch immigrant who founded the New York-based shipping company DutchX in 2013, was always intrigued by the possibilities of biking—specifically cargo bikes—to fill in the same-day shipping gap in urban logistics. For the last few years, the company has billed itself as a zero-emissions shipper: a fleet of electric-powered vans that traverse roadways and bridges while cargo bikes handle the last few miles of a package’s journey. But starting last December, DutchX found a way to dramatically cut delivery times. Typically, shipping from its Brooklyn Marine Terminal sorting facility to Midtown West would take about 75 minutes, after navigating over a bridge or via a tunnel under the East River. But now, using a ferry, the firm can do the same trip in a third of the time. “We don’t need to drive a van into Manhattan, we don’t need to deal with parking challenges, and we don’t need to pay the fee for congestion pricing,” he says. Instead, goods are dropped off at Pier 70 and loaded directly onto a bike that can navigate Manhattan’s busy streets. DutchX’s ongoing trial is just one facet of a plan pushed by New York City to revolutionize everyday freight transport by revisiting the potential of the city’s vast network of waterways. The Blue Highways program seeks to modernize water-based shipping across the city—including turning the Brooklyn Marine Terminal into an all-electric marine port—and divert much of the 90% of city freight traffic that moves into and through the city by truck. It’s a stark example of coming full circle. Trade in New York City once took place on bustling piers and waterfronts that have now become the home of upscale apartment buildings and urban parks. The Blue Highways initiative believes the waterfront can once again become a key part of the transit system, ideally with clean power and with many fewer cars, vans, and trucks. The trial on Pier 79 is part of a suite of investments the city is making in creating water-based transit options for freight shipping. Piers and shipping depots have been, or will be, retrofitted for more of this water-based delivery, and ideally, future stages of the program will invest in electric charging for battery-powered boats. Currently, there are some emissions savings by eliminating idling vans and grouping together shipments on boats, but the road map includes plans to add electric boats in 2027. This concept comes at a time when cities are battling rising traffic and congestion from e-commerce deliveries, and shippers and consumers seek out lower- or zero-emission options for shipping. Hoed says that his firm—which has five hubs across the city and 272 bikes—ships a lot of smaller consumer goods, such as perfumes or fashion items, but there’s also more and more interest in zero-emission deliveries from bigger companies delivering furniture and electronics. Sections of the city packed with industrial warehouse and shipping sites, such as Hunts Point in the Bronx, have cascading impacts on the city’s traffic and pollution, says Joy Gardner, executive director of the not-for-profit Empire Clean Cities. And these overloaded roadways lead to congestion and increased diesel pollution from trucks. Transitioning this traffic to other sources, especially bikes and boats, can lessen that burden. Hunts Point, for example, welcomes more than 15,000 trucks a day, and the surrounding public school students have the city’s highest asthma rate. The city has done a good job of exploring and laying out a cleaner transition for Blue Highways, such as trialing so-called renewable diesel made from recycled fats and oils that creates 50% less emissions, and eventually expanding charging infrastructure for ports and piers. A public-private partnership overseen by the New York City Economic Development Corp. and the New York City Department of Transportation, Blue Highways announced its long-term vision in October 2025 and has identified more than two dozen sites. The program will include shipping wholesale food and beverages by barge from the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center. (A few trial runs have already been staged.) “Not every delivery in the city may be able to move by water, and it’s going to take a while to figure out some of the logistics. But it is one of many tools that I think the city can utilize to decarbonize,” Gardner says. Hoed says he’s still evaluating the impact of the Blue Highways trial. He’s certain at this point that while the boat-and-bike method delivers faster times without raising the price of shipping, he’s not yet sure if it decreases cost, or if there are ways to achieve even more efficiency with additional practice. Currently, the company makes the run once a day on weekdays, departing from Brooklyn at 10:30 a.m. on a boat that can hold the equivalent of 45 vans. Hoed says he doesn’t see a world where this pilot stops, because it’s delivering results for his company. “Congestion costs companies like ours a lot. I’m not even talking about traffic. Those hours in traffic jams cost us a lot in terms of wages.” View the full article

The former Rocket employee said she faced pressure to resign after requesting remote-work accommodations and leaves of absence to deal with health conditions. View the full article

Realtors and loan officers are wary of using artificial intelligence in place of a real estate agent, after a homeowner claimed to realize meaningful savings. View the full article

An SEO experiment shows how easily misinformation ranks in Google Search and spreads to other sites. The post SEO Test Shows It’s Trivial To Rank Misinformation On Google appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

UK is too slow to boost defence spending while underfunding areas of comparative advantage View the full article

Nvidia has unveiled DLSS 5, a new PC gaming technology that uses AI to re-render video games in real time. It’s basically a make-it-realistic filter, affecting characters, foliage, textures, and lighting. It’s but another example of how in the age of AI, the world may never be the same. And the gaming community doesn’t quite know what to think yet. While the previous versions of DLSS simply upscaled a game’s resolution using AI, this version turns a tree that looks like a 3D model into a tree that looks like a real tree. It’s a monumental change. And a bold move. Unsurprisingly, the gaming community is fiercely divided. While some embrace the leap in visual fidelity, a loud contingent of hardcore players is furious, claiming it destroys artistic intent. The latter camp claims it turns games into AI slop, the derogatory term that everyone loves to use now, whether it’s accurate or not. It used to mean poor-quality AI-generated images or video, but that meaning has been lost, turning into the 2026 version of “It’s Photoshop!” and “It’s CGI!” whining of yesteryear. The way I see it, DLSS 5 looks fantastic most of the time. The intense backlash feels like it’s half posturing, and half psychological disconnect. Our brains are used to filling in the blanks of lower-fidelity graphics. And when faced with a highly detailed reality, we experience a jarring dissonance. It reminds me of how bad it feels to hear a beloved comic book character’s voice for the first time in an animated movie, and realize it doesn’t match the one in your head. Reality bites The two big complaints I keep hearing about DLSS are that this technology averages everyone toward one single beauty standard, and that it throws an unapproved filter over an artist’s painstaking work. On YouTube, people like Luke Stephens called the technology “AI slop garbage,” complaining that a young character in Hogwarts Legacy “can look like a 45-year-old man.” Similarly, YouTuber AngryJoeShow lamented, “They turned DLSS into a TikTok filter. This is like hiring someone to lick off the flavor of a potato chip before you eat it.” Critics have also lamented a loss of creative identity across DLSS-ified games. A user on Reddit argued that characters from totally different genres “all appear as if they belong to a single title, which feels like a blatant disregard for the original artistic vision.” And industry veteran John Linneman noted that while the environmental lighting shows great potential, “the character stuff is horrendous and should have been left out.” But to me, this comment on Reddit is the one that defines the reality of it, going back to my original thesis of the brain disconnect: “The more realistic they become, the less they feel like true games.” That’s fine. It’s a valid point. Or at least as valid as my own point of view having grown up on Atari and NES: Any game past the Game Boy Advance or the DS doesn’t feel like a true game to me. Just give me 16-bit sprites. The rest of the overproduced, stiff, motion-capture 3D-modeled stuff with infinite cutscenes you kids like is just garbage to me, not real gaming! See? That criticism doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, either. The promise of AI-rendered gaming With apologies to critics, I simply do not see how DLSS 5 is bad. Every demo I’ve watched looks perfectly in-line with the original games, showing no fundamental style change—just vastly more detail and dramatically improved lighting. Both my gamer and non-gamer friends agree that the processed graphics look superior in most instances. To me, the true uncanny valley—that creepy feeling when a digital human looks almost real but not quite—is a product of robotic motion and stiff facial expressions in big-budget games, not the sheer fidelity of the rendering itself. Analyst Ryan Shrout rightly pointed out that “the early ‘it’s just a face filter’ isn’t the right take,” adding that the enhancements to shadows, water, and foliage are incredibly impressive. Another Redditor summarized the reality of the situation perfectly: “DLSS 5 isn’t replacing good rendering. It’s amplifying it.” It’s also crucial to remember that Nvidia is not forcing this on unsuspecting creators. As Bryan Catanzaro, VP of Applied Deep Learning Research at Nvidia, told me back in 2023, Nvidia works closely with game developers to further develop DLSS. And remember, DLSS 5 is optional. Existing games will not suddenly morph overnight without permission; the technology requires a specific, intentional patch from the studio to even function. Gamers will also be able to opt in or out. What we are witnessing right now is the loud birth of a new era. As Unreal Engine artist JSFILMZ observed, “It feels like we’re moving toward fully generated frames—not just upscaled ones.” I anticipate that more developers will focus more of their energies on getting much better motion and physics and gameplay, rather than investing insane resources on extremely detailed modeling and texturing. Down the line, I can see game developers just concentrating on the game dynamics, using 3D models to guide the AI rendering precisely, which will use other types of assets (like detailed images of the characters and the rest of the game elements) to create every game frame from scratch. So instead of panicking over a perceived loss of artistic purity, we need to recognize that our brains are simply adjusting to a digital reality that finally matches the physical one. And that we are moving into a new era, just like we went from 8- to 16- to 32-bit sprites to low-def 3D games and the current generation of PC and console gaming. The pixels are just changing again, and once the initial shock wears off, we’ll wonder how we ever played without this new tech. View the full article

If you’re looking to improve teamwork and creativity within your company, there are several engaging activities available nearby. From the competitive spirit of a guacamole-making contest to the adventurous thrills of zip lining, these options cater to diverse interests. You can likewise try stress-relief activities or enjoy unique experiences like indoor go-kart racing. Each option provides a memorable way to bond with colleagues. Let’s explore these opportunities in more detail. Key Takeaways Engage in a Guacamole Making Competition to foster teamwork and creativity, suitable for groups of 25 or more. Experience outdoor activities like zip lining at Geronimo Adventure Park, perfect for team bonding with groups of 6 to 40 people. Unwind at Tantrums Rage Room, where teams can relieve stress through item smashing in a fun, collaborative environment. Compete in K1 Speed Houston’s indoor go-kart racing for thrilling team-based competition designed for groups of 30 or more. Enhance communication and strategy skills with Houston Axe Throwing, offering various packages for groups of eight or more. Guac Rock: A Guacamole Making Competition If you’re looking for an engaging way to improve teamwork within your organization, consider Guac Rock, a guacamole-making competition that combines culinary creativity with collaboration. This interactive event is perfect for groups of 25 or more, making it an excellent choice for corporate retreats or offsite team-building activities in Columbus, Ohio. No master chef skills are required, so even those with basic avocado mashing abilities can participate. Team members will work together to create unique guacamole recipes, promoting communication and collaboration as they share ideas and techniques. An executive chef may assist in judging the competition, ensuring a professional touch and adding excitement to the event. Bar Fight: A Mixology Competition Following the fun and creativity of “Guac Rock,” teams can shift gears to “Bar Fight,” a mixology competition that blends trivia with drink crafting to improve teamwork and creativity. This engaging activity consists of three phases, where teams design a themed drink and presentation to impress judges. As one of the premier team building activities in Columbus, “Bar Fight” promotes collaboration in a fun pub-style atmosphere, making it ideal for team bonding. With a minimum group size of 25 participants, this competition accommodates larger teams, creating a dynamic experience that encourages interaction. Pricing varies, offering flexibility for companies looking to improve team dynamics through spirited competition. Participants won’t just develop mixology skills but will also learn to work together effectively, ensuring that everyone contributes to the final product. “Bar Fight” stands out as a unique way to combine learning, creativity, and camaraderie in the workplace. K1 Speed Houston Teambuilding Activities K1 Speed Houston offers an exciting indoor go-kart racing experience that’s perfect for team-building activities. With a team-based competition format, participants can engage in friendly rivalry during earning points based on their racing performance, which encourages collaboration and strengthens team dynamics. Located conveniently in Houston, this venue accommodates larger groups, making it an ideal choice for companies looking to improve teamwork through thrilling racing challenges. Indoor Go-Kart Racing K1 Speed Houston presents a unique opportunity for companies seeking effective team-building activities. This venue accommodates groups of 30 or more participants, allowing for an engaging experience that combines fun with valuable teamwork benefits. With high-speed electric go-karts on a professional track, you’ll enjoy a thrilling yet safe environment for friendly competition. Participants collaborate to earn points for their team, enhancing communication and cooperation among members. K1 Speed additionally tailors unique activities to suit your group’s specific needs, ensuring an unforgettable experience. Located at 14900 Northwest Fwy, Houston, TX 77040, it’s easily accessible for local businesses interested in innovative team-building options, even those planning corporate events in Columbus, Ohio. Team-Based Competition Format When participants engage in go-kart racing at K1 Speed Houston, they’re not merely racing; they’re furthermore involved in a structured team-based competition format that encourages collaboration and strategic thinking. This facility offers unique team-oriented activities, allowing larger corporate groups to compete together. With a minimum group size of 30, you can cultivate strong communication and camaraderie among team members. As your team races on the professional track in high-speed electric go-karts, they’ll work in the direction of earning points for their collective success. This competitive environment not only improves teamwork but also provides an exciting alternative to traditional team building activities Utah. Points System Collaboration Engaging in a points system collaboration during team-building activities at K1 Speed Houston can greatly improve your team’s dynamics and performance. This unique approach allows your team to earn points together as they navigate the professional track in high-speed electric go-karts. As you participate in company team building activities near me, you’ll experience an exhilarating environment that promotes friendly competition and teamwork. With groups of 30 or more, this activity becomes not just a thrilling racing experience but also an opportunity for members to strategize and improve their collaborative skills. The available group pricing options make it a cost-effective choice for companies aiming to boost teamwork through this exciting and engaging activity. Geronimo Adventure Park Team Building At Geronimo Adventure Park, you can engage in a range of outdoor activities like zip lining, axe throwing, and climbing, which are perfect for adventurous teams. With options for groups of 6 to 40 people, the park tailors experiences to meet your specific needs during nurturing teamwork and communication. A dedicated host can guide your group through these challenges, enhancing team dynamics and building trust among participants. Adventure Activities Overview Geronimo Adventure Park offers a variety of adventure activities intended to improve team dynamics through engaging outdoor experiences. You can choose from exciting options like zip lining, axe throwing, and climbing, all designed to encourage collaboration and communication among team members. The park accommodates groups of 6 to 40 people, making it suitable for small to medium-sized teams seeking unique fun group activities in Houston. A dedicated host is available to guide you through the activities, ensuring a customized experience that meets your group’s needs. Furthermore, facilitated team-building options allow your team to tackle challenges that promote trust and teamwork in a thrilling environment. Located in Spring, TX, Geronimo Adventure Park is easily accessible for companies looking to bond. Team Building Benefits Building strong teamwork is essential for any organization’s success, and participating in team-building activities at Geronimo Adventure Park can greatly improve this aspect. By engaging in activities like zip lining, axe throwing, and climbing, you’ll cultivate trust and collaboration among team members. The park tailors its team-building events in DC to meet your group’s specific needs, accommodating 6-40 participants, which is perfect for smaller teams. A dedicated host enriches the experience by guiding your team through challenges, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable event. These outdoor adventures not only break down barriers but also encourage open communication, making it easier for team members to connect on a personal level. In the end, you’ll leave the park with stronger bonds and improved teamwork. Tantrums Rage Room Tantrums Rage Room in Houston offers a distinctive team-building experience that allows participants to relieve stress through a unique activity—smashing various items in a controlled environment. This engaging venue promotes teamwork and collaboration, as participants bond over shared experiences of stress relief and fun. With each session priced at $56 per person and a minimum group size of 10, it’s perfect for corporate outings or team events. Located at 1730 Elmview Dr. A, Houston, TX 77080, Tantrums provides a safe atmosphere for teams to unwind and connect. You can customize your experience by selecting from different packages that vary in the number and type of items available for smashing, including dishes, TVs, and computers. Whether you’re organizing team building events in Orange County or seeking a unique bonding experience in Houston, the Tantrums Rage Room delivers an unforgettable opportunity for stress relief and team engagement. Houston Axe Throwing If you’re looking for an engaging way to boost team dynamics, Houston Axe Throwing provides an exciting environment where groups can participate in themed games and competitions. This venue is perfect for corporate team-building events, accommodating groups of eight or more. You can select from various packages, such as Casual, Party Pack, and Premium, which includes a dedicated expert coach for improved learning. Here’s a quick breakdown of the available packages: Package Features Ideal For Casual Basic axe throwing experience Small groups Party Pack Includes drinks and snacks Celebrations Premium Expert coaching included Professional development Axe throwing encourages communication, focus, and strategy, making it an exciting choice for team building in Columbus. Located at 1431 W 20th St Unit B, Houston, TX 77008, it’s a great spot for team bonding. Armand Bayou Nature Center Armand Bayou Nature Center serves as an ideal setting for companies seeking to improve teamwork through outdoor adventures. Located at 8500 Bay Area Blvd, Pasadena, TX 77507, it offers a variety of activities aimed at improving collaboration and communication among team members. You can engage in hiking and nature exploration as you learn about local wildlife and ecosystems, which enriches the overall experience. The center tailors its team-building activities to meet the specific needs of your group, ensuring an effective and enjoyable outing. Pricing and group sizes vary based on the selected programs, making it accessible for teams of all sizes. If you’re looking for engaging team-building activities in Salt Lake City or nearby, consider the unique opportunities at Armand Bayou Nature Center. This environment not only nurtures teamwork but also provides valuable educational experiences that your team can benefit from long after the day ends. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Typical Duration of Team-Building Activities? The typical duration of team-building activities varies, usually lasting between two to eight hours. Shorter activities, like icebreakers or workshops, often take around two to four hours, whereas full-day events may include more extensive challenges or training sessions. Some companies may opt for multi-day retreats to encourage deeper connections. In the end, the duration depends on the objectives, the number of participants, and the specific activities planned, ensuring a balance between engagement and effectiveness. Are Activities Suitable for Remote or Hybrid Teams? Yes, many activities are suitable for remote or hybrid teams. Virtual team-building exercises can include online games, collaborative projects, or discussion forums, allowing participants to engage from different locations. These activities often use video conferencing tools to facilitate interaction. Moreover, hybrid activities can combine in-person and virtual elements, ensuring everyone feels included. How Do I Choose the Right Activity for My Team? To choose the right activity for your team, start by evaluating your team’s goals and dynamics. Consider their preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. Review whether the activity promotes collaboration, communication, or problem-solving. Think about logistics like location, budget, and time constraints. Additionally, confirm the activity accommodates all team members, including any remote participants. Finally, gather feedback post-activity to measure its effectiveness and adjust future selections based on what resonates best with your team. What Is the Ideal Group Size for These Activities? The ideal group size for team-building activities typically ranges from 6 to 20 participants. Smaller groups, like 6 to 10, encourage deeper connections and easier communication. Nevertheless, larger groups, around 15 to 20, allow for diverse interactions and a wider range of skills. Consider the activity type when choosing size; some activities require collaboration, whereas others focus on individual strengths. In the end, the right size balances engagement and participation for effective outcomes. Can We Customize Activities to Fit Our Company Culture? Yes, you can definitely personalize activities to fit your company culture. Start by evaluating your team’s values and goals, then choose activities that align with those principles. For example, if collaboration is essential, opt for group challenges that require teamwork. Moreover, you can modify existing activities by incorporating company-specific themes or objectives. This customized approach not just improves engagement but reinforces your organizational identity, nurturing a stronger team bond. Conclusion To summarize, these seven team-building activities offer diverse options for companies looking to improve collaboration and creativity among employees. From the engaging Guac Rock competition to the adventurous challenges at Geronimo Adventure Park, each activity promotes teamwork in a unique way. Whether you prefer culinary contests or outdoor adventures, these experiences can help strengthen workplace relationships as they encourage a productive environment. Consider incorporating one of these activities into your team’s schedule for effective bonding and skill development. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "7 Exciting Team Building Activities for Companies Near Me" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

If you’re looking to improve teamwork and creativity within your company, there are several engaging activities available nearby. From the competitive spirit of a guacamole-making contest to the adventurous thrills of zip lining, these options cater to diverse interests. You can likewise try stress-relief activities or enjoy unique experiences like indoor go-kart racing. Each option provides a memorable way to bond with colleagues. Let’s explore these opportunities in more detail. Key Takeaways Engage in a Guacamole Making Competition to foster teamwork and creativity, suitable for groups of 25 or more. Experience outdoor activities like zip lining at Geronimo Adventure Park, perfect for team bonding with groups of 6 to 40 people. Unwind at Tantrums Rage Room, where teams can relieve stress through item smashing in a fun, collaborative environment. Compete in K1 Speed Houston’s indoor go-kart racing for thrilling team-based competition designed for groups of 30 or more. Enhance communication and strategy skills with Houston Axe Throwing, offering various packages for groups of eight or more. Guac Rock: A Guacamole Making Competition If you’re looking for an engaging way to improve teamwork within your organization, consider Guac Rock, a guacamole-making competition that combines culinary creativity with collaboration. This interactive event is perfect for groups of 25 or more, making it an excellent choice for corporate retreats or offsite team-building activities in Columbus, Ohio. No master chef skills are required, so even those with basic avocado mashing abilities can participate. Team members will work together to create unique guacamole recipes, promoting communication and collaboration as they share ideas and techniques. An executive chef may assist in judging the competition, ensuring a professional touch and adding excitement to the event. Bar Fight: A Mixology Competition Following the fun and creativity of “Guac Rock,” teams can shift gears to “Bar Fight,” a mixology competition that blends trivia with drink crafting to improve teamwork and creativity. This engaging activity consists of three phases, where teams design a themed drink and presentation to impress judges. As one of the premier team building activities in Columbus, “Bar Fight” promotes collaboration in a fun pub-style atmosphere, making it ideal for team bonding. With a minimum group size of 25 participants, this competition accommodates larger teams, creating a dynamic experience that encourages interaction. Pricing varies, offering flexibility for companies looking to improve team dynamics through spirited competition. Participants won’t just develop mixology skills but will also learn to work together effectively, ensuring that everyone contributes to the final product. “Bar Fight” stands out as a unique way to combine learning, creativity, and camaraderie in the workplace. K1 Speed Houston Teambuilding Activities K1 Speed Houston offers an exciting indoor go-kart racing experience that’s perfect for team-building activities. With a team-based competition format, participants can engage in friendly rivalry during earning points based on their racing performance, which encourages collaboration and strengthens team dynamics. Located conveniently in Houston, this venue accommodates larger groups, making it an ideal choice for companies looking to improve teamwork through thrilling racing challenges. Indoor Go-Kart Racing K1 Speed Houston presents a unique opportunity for companies seeking effective team-building activities. This venue accommodates groups of 30 or more participants, allowing for an engaging experience that combines fun with valuable teamwork benefits. With high-speed electric go-karts on a professional track, you’ll enjoy a thrilling yet safe environment for friendly competition. Participants collaborate to earn points for their team, enhancing communication and cooperation among members. K1 Speed additionally tailors unique activities to suit your group’s specific needs, ensuring an unforgettable experience. Located at 14900 Northwest Fwy, Houston, TX 77040, it’s easily accessible for local businesses interested in innovative team-building options, even those planning corporate events in Columbus, Ohio. Team-Based Competition Format When participants engage in go-kart racing at K1 Speed Houston, they’re not merely racing; they’re furthermore involved in a structured team-based competition format that encourages collaboration and strategic thinking. This facility offers unique team-oriented activities, allowing larger corporate groups to compete together. With a minimum group size of 30, you can cultivate strong communication and camaraderie among team members. As your team races on the professional track in high-speed electric go-karts, they’ll work in the direction of earning points for their collective success. This competitive environment not only improves teamwork but also provides an exciting alternative to traditional team building activities Utah. Points System Collaboration Engaging in a points system collaboration during team-building activities at K1 Speed Houston can greatly improve your team’s dynamics and performance. This unique approach allows your team to earn points together as they navigate the professional track in high-speed electric go-karts. As you participate in company team building activities near me, you’ll experience an exhilarating environment that promotes friendly competition and teamwork. With groups of 30 or more, this activity becomes not just a thrilling racing experience but also an opportunity for members to strategize and improve their collaborative skills. The available group pricing options make it a cost-effective choice for companies aiming to boost teamwork through this exciting and engaging activity. Geronimo Adventure Park Team Building At Geronimo Adventure Park, you can engage in a range of outdoor activities like zip lining, axe throwing, and climbing, which are perfect for adventurous teams. With options for groups of 6 to 40 people, the park tailors experiences to meet your specific needs during nurturing teamwork and communication. A dedicated host can guide your group through these challenges, enhancing team dynamics and building trust among participants. Adventure Activities Overview Geronimo Adventure Park offers a variety of adventure activities intended to improve team dynamics through engaging outdoor experiences. You can choose from exciting options like zip lining, axe throwing, and climbing, all designed to encourage collaboration and communication among team members. The park accommodates groups of 6 to 40 people, making it suitable for small to medium-sized teams seeking unique fun group activities in Houston. A dedicated host is available to guide you through the activities, ensuring a customized experience that meets your group’s needs. Furthermore, facilitated team-building options allow your team to tackle challenges that promote trust and teamwork in a thrilling environment. Located in Spring, TX, Geronimo Adventure Park is easily accessible for companies looking to bond. Team Building Benefits Building strong teamwork is essential for any organization’s success, and participating in team-building activities at Geronimo Adventure Park can greatly improve this aspect. By engaging in activities like zip lining, axe throwing, and climbing, you’ll cultivate trust and collaboration among team members. The park tailors its team-building events in DC to meet your group’s specific needs, accommodating 6-40 participants, which is perfect for smaller teams. A dedicated host enriches the experience by guiding your team through challenges, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable event. These outdoor adventures not only break down barriers but also encourage open communication, making it easier for team members to connect on a personal level. In the end, you’ll leave the park with stronger bonds and improved teamwork. Tantrums Rage Room Tantrums Rage Room in Houston offers a distinctive team-building experience that allows participants to relieve stress through a unique activity—smashing various items in a controlled environment. This engaging venue promotes teamwork and collaboration, as participants bond over shared experiences of stress relief and fun. With each session priced at $56 per person and a minimum group size of 10, it’s perfect for corporate outings or team events. Located at 1730 Elmview Dr. A, Houston, TX 77080, Tantrums provides a safe atmosphere for teams to unwind and connect. You can customize your experience by selecting from different packages that vary in the number and type of items available for smashing, including dishes, TVs, and computers. Whether you’re organizing team building events in Orange County or seeking a unique bonding experience in Houston, the Tantrums Rage Room delivers an unforgettable opportunity for stress relief and team engagement. Houston Axe Throwing If you’re looking for an engaging way to boost team dynamics, Houston Axe Throwing provides an exciting environment where groups can participate in themed games and competitions. This venue is perfect for corporate team-building events, accommodating groups of eight or more. You can select from various packages, such as Casual, Party Pack, and Premium, which includes a dedicated expert coach for improved learning. Here’s a quick breakdown of the available packages: Package Features Ideal For Casual Basic axe throwing experience Small groups Party Pack Includes drinks and snacks Celebrations Premium Expert coaching included Professional development Axe throwing encourages communication, focus, and strategy, making it an exciting choice for team building in Columbus. Located at 1431 W 20th St Unit B, Houston, TX 77008, it’s a great spot for team bonding. Armand Bayou Nature Center Armand Bayou Nature Center serves as an ideal setting for companies seeking to improve teamwork through outdoor adventures. Located at 8500 Bay Area Blvd, Pasadena, TX 77507, it offers a variety of activities aimed at improving collaboration and communication among team members. You can engage in hiking and nature exploration as you learn about local wildlife and ecosystems, which enriches the overall experience. The center tailors its team-building activities to meet the specific needs of your group, ensuring an effective and enjoyable outing. Pricing and group sizes vary based on the selected programs, making it accessible for teams of all sizes. If you’re looking for engaging team-building activities in Salt Lake City or nearby, consider the unique opportunities at Armand Bayou Nature Center. This environment not only nurtures teamwork but also provides valuable educational experiences that your team can benefit from long after the day ends. Frequently Asked Questions What Is the Typical Duration of Team-Building Activities? The typical duration of team-building activities varies, usually lasting between two to eight hours. Shorter activities, like icebreakers or workshops, often take around two to four hours, whereas full-day events may include more extensive challenges or training sessions. Some companies may opt for multi-day retreats to encourage deeper connections. In the end, the duration depends on the objectives, the number of participants, and the specific activities planned, ensuring a balance between engagement and effectiveness. Are Activities Suitable for Remote or Hybrid Teams? Yes, many activities are suitable for remote or hybrid teams. Virtual team-building exercises can include online games, collaborative projects, or discussion forums, allowing participants to engage from different locations. These activities often use video conferencing tools to facilitate interaction. Moreover, hybrid activities can combine in-person and virtual elements, ensuring everyone feels included. How Do I Choose the Right Activity for My Team? To choose the right activity for your team, start by evaluating your team’s goals and dynamics. Consider their preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. Review whether the activity promotes collaboration, communication, or problem-solving. Think about logistics like location, budget, and time constraints. Additionally, confirm the activity accommodates all team members, including any remote participants. Finally, gather feedback post-activity to measure its effectiveness and adjust future selections based on what resonates best with your team. What Is the Ideal Group Size for These Activities? The ideal group size for team-building activities typically ranges from 6 to 20 participants. Smaller groups, like 6 to 10, encourage deeper connections and easier communication. Nevertheless, larger groups, around 15 to 20, allow for diverse interactions and a wider range of skills. Consider the activity type when choosing size; some activities require collaboration, whereas others focus on individual strengths. In the end, the right size balances engagement and participation for effective outcomes. Can We Customize Activities to Fit Our Company Culture? Yes, you can definitely personalize activities to fit your company culture. Start by evaluating your team’s values and goals, then choose activities that align with those principles. For example, if collaboration is essential, opt for group challenges that require teamwork. Moreover, you can modify existing activities by incorporating company-specific themes or objectives. This customized approach not just improves engagement but reinforces your organizational identity, nurturing a stronger team bond. Conclusion To summarize, these seven team-building activities offer diverse options for companies looking to improve collaboration and creativity among employees. From the engaging Guac Rock competition to the adventurous challenges at Geronimo Adventure Park, each activity promotes teamwork in a unique way. Whether you prefer culinary contests or outdoor adventures, these experiences can help strengthen workplace relationships as they encourage a productive environment. Consider incorporating one of these activities into your team’s schedule for effective bonding and skill development. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "7 Exciting Team Building Activities for Companies Near Me" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Whether you’re a devoted college basketball junkie or you just pay attention for a few weeks each spring, you’ll get a lot more out of the Division I men’s tournament if you know the storylines behind the matchups. Here are some of the biggest narratives to follow from work, home, and wherever you watch the games. The year of the freshmen From February 2021 until the start of the 2025-26 college basketball season, there were exactly three 40-point games by freshmen. On January 24, 2026, three freshmen achieved that milestone on a single day. Two of them were playing against then-top-12-ranked teams, on the road. Kingston Flemings of Houston scored 42 points against Texas Tech, Keaton Wagler of Illinois scored 46 points against Purdue, and AJ Dybantsa of BYU scored 43 points against archrival Utah. All three players were selected as Associated Press All-Americans, and play for teams seeded No. 2, 3, and 6, respectively, in this year’s NCAA Tournament. Meanwhile, the national player of the year favorite, Cameron Boozer, is a freshman playing for Duke, the overall top-seeded team. Arkansas, which is a No. 4 seed after winning the SEC Tournament, is led by Darius Acuff Jr., a freshman point guard who averages 23 points per game. Kansas guard Darryn Peterson has been in and out of the lineup with injuries throughout the year, but has looked every bit the part of a potential superstar in the NBA, and will play for the No. 4-seeded Jayhawks in the tourney. Arizona, another No. 1 seed, starts three freshmen: Koa Peat, Brayden Burries, and Ivan Kharchenkov. Mikel Brown Jr. (Louisville), Nate Ament (Tennessee), Braylon Mullins (UConn), Killyan Toure (Iowa State), and Trey McKenney (Michigan) are all key players on teams with a chance to make a run. Even some of the mid-majors in the NCAA Tournament have star freshmen on their rosters. Santa Clara’s Allen Graves is getting NBA draft buzz. Hofstra’s Preston Edmead won CAA Tournament MVP thanks to a buzzer-beater and a heroic performance. Alex Wilkins of Furman also won his conference tournament MVP after making the All-Conference second team. This is the greatest freshman class in the history of college basketball, and these players are ready for their NCAA Tournament moment. Can Nebraska finally do it? The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has had a basketball team for 130 years. The school has been a member of a power conference for much of that time, first in the Big 12 (which was then known as the Big 8) and then in the Big Ten (confusing, but different conferences). Among the 79 teams in power conferences, Nebraska is the only one that has never won a game in the NCAA Tournament. The Cornhuskers have as good a shot as ever to wipe that dubious honor clean this year. They started the regular season with 20 consecutive wins and have already matched the program’s single-season win record of 26, entering the tournament at 26-6. Nebraska earned a No. 4 seed in the tournament and will take on the Troy University Trojans on Thursday, March 19, at 12:40 p.m. Eastern time. KenPom gives the Huskers a 92% chance of winning that game. Back-to-back back-to-backs Florida’s miraculous run to win the national championship last year included a hard-fought second-round win over UConn, the winner of the previous two national championships. The Gators are in position to have a chance to match that feat and win back-to-back national championships themselves for the second time in program history. Head coach Todd Golden’s team started the season just 5-4, but is 21-3 since then, winning the SEC regular season championship by three games. All of that earned Florida a second consecutive No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament and made the team a popular pick to win another title. Should Florida win the national championship, it would be the first time in the 87-year history of the tournament that a team won back-to-back championships immediately after a different team won back-to-back championships. The Gators would also join UCLA as the only two programs to win back-to-back national championships on two separate occasions. Florida won the 2006 and 2007 championships, while UCLA went back-to-back in 1964 and 1965 before winning seven in a row from 1967 to 1973. Miami has people talking Think about it: 31 wins; 0 losses. That was Miami University’s regular season. The RedHawks of Ohio became the first team to enter their conference tournament with an unblemished record since Gonzaga’s 2020-2021 season. But Gonzaga is a college basketball powerhouse. This is Miami University. Head coach Travis Steele’s team won four overtime games during the regular season, and five other games by one possession, holding on by the skin of its teeth to keep its undefeated record alive. After losing to UMass in the quarterfinals of the Mid-American Conference tournament, the RedHawks didn’t earn the automatic bid from their conference. Because they played one of the weakest schedules in the country—not for lack of trying, their at-large case was one of the most polarizing in recent memory. But the selection committee decided to put Miami in the tournament, rewarding the team for winning all of its regular-season games. Miami will take on Southern Methodist in the First Four on Wednesday, March 18, at 9:15 p.m. Eastern time in Dayton, just 32 miles from its Oxford, Ohio, campus. If the RedHawks win, they move on to play the Tennessee Volunteers in Philadelphia on Friday, March 20, at 4:25 p.m. ET. Another top-seed collision course? Last year, all four No. 1 seeds made it to the Final Four of the tournament. The top of the sport was historically good, and it remains historically good this year. On prominent analytics website KenPom.com, Duke, Michigan, and Arizona have power ratings well higher than everybody else, similar to how last year’s top four separated themselves from the pack in that metric. Most fans don’t like a tournament devoid of upsets, because the upsets are a major part of why March Madness can be so exciting. And it’s certainly true that the most compelling storylines tend to come with those Cinderella runs. Similar to last year’s tournament, this year’s may end up being light on upsets, but it’s likely to be filled with heavyweight battles between elite college basketball teams in the later rounds. Last season’s Final Four delivered two epic semifinals and a classic national championship game. This year’s action will culminate on Monday, April, 6, at 8:30 p.m. ET, in Indianapolis. 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On a hot day, most clothing traps heat. But fabric coated with nanodiamonds—tiny diamond particles—can instead release heat, helping cut energy use for air-conditioning. The diamond nanoparticles, each less than one-thousandth of the width of a human hair, have the same carbon crystal structure as larger diamonds. But since they don’t have to be perfectly formed and can be made from carbon waste such as plastic, they are relatively inexpensive to make. The structure means that they’re especially effective at moving heat. “Because carbon has exceptional thermal properties, it can absorb energy and heat quickly, and it can dispense it quickly through that system,” says Shadi Houshyar, an engineering professor at Australia’s RMIT University, whose team developed nanodiamond-coated fabric in the university’s Centre for Materials Innovation and Future Fashion. Diamonds are already used in electronics to help keep parts like computer chips cool. The researchers realized that they could use the same idea in clothing. “We decided to add nanodiamonds to textiles,” Houshyar says. “When it’s in contact with the skin, it absorbs heat quickly from the body.” Then it releases the heat. It’s particularly helpful in areas like the torso that get hottest. “It has a high capacity, so it can pull heat from the body for many hours,” she adds. While it could be used in any type of clothing, it can also be useful in protective gear for firefighters, she says. Clothing made from the fabric can lower your body temperature by around 4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 3 degrees Celsius)—enough that you don’t have to crank up the AC as much to feel comfortable in extreme heat. Curtains made from nanodiamond-coated fabric can also keep homes cooler; house paint could also potentially incorporate nanodiamonds. To add the material to fabric, the scientists use a sustainable binder that Houshyar says can securely attach the nanodiamonds for at least 50 wash cycles. The team is now also developing a way to coat yarn with a layer of the material earlier in the manufacturing process. Nanodiamonds can be made from waste carbon—including plastic waste—by exposing the carbon to extreme pressure and temperature in a reactor, rearranging the atoms into a diamond structure. By tweaking the process, it’s possible to give the material other properties, including the ability to absorb or release moisture. “There’s a possibility that this could replace PFAS,” Houshyar says. Unlike PFAS (forever chemical) coatings, which are used to make rain jackets and other clothing water-repellent, the nanodiamonds are nontoxic and environmentally safe. As climate change makes extreme heat more likely, other researchers are exploring new ways to redesign clothing to keep people cool. Engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently used calcium carbonate—low-cost chalk—to coat fabric that cooled by several degrees in tests. Others are experimenting with materials like silver nanowires and zinc oxide. Now, Houshyar’s team is looking for funding to spin the research into a startup. “Companies are already interested,” she says. The project, called DiamondCool, is a finalist in H&M’s Global Change Award for 2026, a prize that backs early-stage work to make fashion more sustainable. View the full article

Parents make “deals” with their kids everyday. Mow the lawn and get your allowance. Finish your dinner, and you’ll get some ice cream. When Corey Scholibo was eight, his mother made him an offer: if he stopped sucking his thumb, he’d earn $20. He stopped in a week, and she made good on the promise. Now 47, Scholibo has a business designed around these childhood “deals.” In January, he launched an app-based service, Dayo Deals, that enables parents to strike bargains with their teenage children—specifically to help them reduce their screen time and social media use. Together, both parties work together to establish time limits and a monetary reward. If the teen stays within the limit, they keep the money; if not, the cash vanishes. Sure, it could be considered bribery. But Scholibo argues, quite simply: cash talks. “There’s something transactional about it, and that’s kind of the point,” he says. A screen time solution Parents and teens alike agree that the overuse of smartphones is a problem. According to Pew, half of teens between 13 and 17 spend more than four hours a day on their phone. Forty-six percent report being online “almost constantly,” with six in ten teens using social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. But many are willing to ditch the screens. Nearly half of U.K. youths between 16 and 21 recently said that they support a digital curfew. Actually implementing limitations is difficult: A Pew Research study from 2024 found that four in ten teens and parents argue regularly about screen time, and while 76% of parents say managing screen time is a priority, 43% say it’s hard to do. “There’s never really been a product where people use it this much and dislike it this much,” Scholibo says of screens. “Except maybe insurance.” Scholibo, a former journalist and entrepreneur whose previous ventures include compostable tableware and a plant-based wellness line for menopause-aged women, started the app with his co-founder, Patrick Triato, when Triato grew concerned about his own kids’ screen time. Scholibo and Triato realized that America is unlikely to follow countries like Australia and Spain in banning social media use by children under 16. But the pair did notice people looking to restrict themselves, which was giving rise to a new category of products that Scholibo calls “restriction-as-a-service,” such as Bark and Brick. Scholibo describes Dayo as a “peer-to-peer payment model.” With a subscription of $9.99 a month, parents and kids set deal parameters together, then monitor progress live on a colorful dashboard that also shows monthly progress and days-in-a-row streaks. If teens keep their screen use under the allotted time, they can withdraw their reward—via Venmo or PayPal, or in gift card form from brands like Starbucks, Adidas, and Amazon. But if they go over, they watch the money travel back to their parents. “It’s like asking your kid to give you back $5 at the fair,” Scholibo says. “No one wants to do that.” The brand connection Dayo initially launched in April 2025 as a “rewards-based marketplace” for helping adults reduce their own screen time. It resembled any earned rewards program: If users stick to their self-imposed limits, they can claim discounts at close to 100 partner stores such as Yeti, North Face, Stumptown Coffee, and Portland-based Powell’s Books. That iteration of the app still exists and currently has a user base of 6,000 people; just as parents set their teens’ deals, they can set their own, with Dayo as their “sponsor.” They gradually earn discounts with partner stores; for example, they might work up to 40 “Dayo Dollars” toward a $100 Yeti cooler or Rumpl blanket. For these partner companies, it’s good PR with little risk: be involved in a mission, and simultaneously gain some new customers. Christopher Eng, founder of ergonomic furniture company Smallish, via email, calls it “a win-win. We acquire new customers at a cost similar to what we would spend on other channels, while providing the discount directly to the user.” Some brands even tie Dayo’s mission to their own. “Hammies is all about the simpler times when shorts were shorter and people got together in person to socialize,” said Grant Nestor, founder of the retro-themed apparel store. Drew Downie, co-founder of pet supply company Lay Lo, credits Dayo for encouraging “people to spend more intentional time with their dogs.” Teens can also earn these discounts, but Scholibo reports that they overwhelmingly want to cash out or get a gift card. (Dayo doesn’t have direct partnerships with these gift card partners but with Tango, a gift card aggregator.) The rewards conundrum Dayo is based on the theory of contingency management, a behavioral intervention used frequently in drug addiction therapy. It offers a tangible and immediate reward, like a voucher or cash, for a good behavior change such as abstaining from a drug. Or a screen. The notion of engaging in bribery may turn off some parents, but “one person’s bribery is another person’s positive reinforcement,” says Nicholas Kardaras, a psychologist and clinical professor at Stony Brook University who focuses on substance and behavioral addiction, and who wrote Glowkids, a 2016 book about the epidemic of screen addiction. “Money does have value, especially in our materialist culture with adolescents,” Kardaras says. “In the short term, it’ll work.” Kardaras explains that a major issue with extrinsic rewards—e.g. tangible incentives, like money—is that they tend to diminish in perceived value over time, so parents would likely have to keep upping the sum. It’s a similar idea to being in the same job year after year with the same salary; your perceived value often starts to outweigh the compensation. “I think parents need to understand it’s not the whole solution,” Kardaras says. “It’s a “starting point.” The magic number In the longer term, he says, parents would need to shift from extrinsic motivation to intrinsic—where the will to behave a certain way comes from within, fueled by a change in personal values. That might be helping kids to understand that there are more valuable things than social media likes and followers, and that excessive screen time is unhealthy. Once that happens, “social media has less of a gravitational pull.” While Scholibo respects the argument, he believes absolutely in the rewards system as a motivator. “It wasn’t like my parents sat down and tried to educate me on why I should empty the dishwasher for the good of society,” he says. He also realizes that some parents are simply strapped for cash. Dayo doesn’t have firm data yet but Scholibo has anecdotally found $100 to $200 to be “highly impactful.” To help fund the deals, Dayo is starting what it calls a “scholarship” program, initially with 15 scholarships of $50 a month for three months. Teens will apply for it, which will in turn equip Dayo with some case studies and a better understanding of the gravity of screen dependence. Eventually, Scholibo may look to recruit more brand partners to sponsor these scholarships, particularly banks, which typically want to attract young people as lifelong customers, and influential individuals. “Why couldn’t Bank of America sponsor 1,000 teens?” he says.“Why couldn’t Scott Galloway, who talks about how he wants to get young men off social media?” Galloway declined Scholibo’s initial invitation to get involved, but Scholibo has plans to reach out again. Meanwhile, Scholibo is working on growing the audience for his “reduction-as-a-service” product, defending its transactionary nature for what it is. “What I can do is get your time back,” he says, “and I can get you money for it.” View the full article