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Technical SEO “best practices” increasingly reflect CMS and plugin defaults, not individual site decisions, according to 2025 HTTP Archive analysis. The post Web Almanac Data Reveals CMS Plugins Are Setting Technical SEO Standards (Not SEOs) appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

How often do you review your PPC ad copy? Not just analyzing the performance of each asset within the ad platform, but also reviewing your ads in the context of how they appear next to competitor ads? Are you using the exact same messaging as your competitors? Does your offer stand out from theirs? Which ads are bland and generic, and which provide concrete calls to action and compelling selling points? Let’s walk through several tips for writing paid search copy that stands out in search results and converts customers for your brand. 1. Think about how assets will appear together, not just individually When you’re writing Responsive Search Ads, it’s easy to fall into the trap of simply filling in all 15 headline options and all four descriptions. However, if each headline essentially says the same thing with slightly different wording, your ad copy will appear bland and repetitive in the SERP when two or three headlines are shown together. For instance, if this example ad showed the following, it would be less helpful: “Project Management Software – Project Management Solution – Project Management” Instead, it says: “Project Management Software – Trusted by 3 Million Users” If you want to test multiple headlines with slightly different wording, pin them to the same position so the ad platform can rotate between them, but not show both at the same time. Zoho appears to be doing this by using both “Preferred by 3 Million Users” and “Trusted by 3 Million Users” as options. Dig deeper: The anatomy of compelling search ad copy 2. Don’t obsess over ad strength The visibility of the ad strength rating looms over every Google Ads account. Don’t let chasing an Excellent score consume your focus. Focus more on making sure each headline and description speaks accurately to your benefit points than on including the maximum number of each. Pinning may negatively impact ad strength, but as discussed above, it can help make your messaging cleaner. 3. Use AI as a partner, but don’t blindly outsource all your copy to AI Google and Microsoft make ad writing easy, generating text for all your ad assets with a single click. Your LLM of choice can also spin out halfway acceptable copy with the right prompt. These tools can provide a helpful starting point, but they shouldn’t be the final result you use without careful review. Don’t skip the human touch when reviewing the copy you get back. Problems can range from copy that doesn’t reflect your brand voice to flat-out inaccuracies. In industries such as finance and healthcare, where legal guidelines matter, AI-generated copy may not be compliance-friendly. Dig deeper: How to write high-performing Google Ads copy with generative AI Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. 4. Include value propositions, and back them up It’s not enough to claim that you’re the “Best Local Contractor” in your area. Think of concrete ways to reinforce superlative statements like this. For instance, “Voted Best Local Contractor by [News Outlet]” provides a tangible source for the claim. Mention awards or rankings from organizations your prospective customers are likely to recognize. Incorporating numbers, where possible, also helps bring credibility to your messaging claims. Years in business. If you’ve been around a long time, stating this positions you well against newer players in the market. Number of customers served. Number of locations for physical businesses. Number of connectors for a software product. Number of active users. Number of trips booked. Number of properties managed. One word of caution: If you include numbers that are likely to change over time, such as how many customers you serve, revisit them periodically and update them for accuracy. Ranges are fine, too, for example, “Over 500 Locations.” 5. Highlight ease of effort In today’s busy culture, saving time and hassle can be one of your biggest selling points. Think about where the product or service you’re promoting can reduce effort for your target audience. Open an account in 10 minutes. Complete your application online. Schedule a same-day appointment. Conduct your consultation remotely. Repairs done while you wait. Make sure you can back up what you promise here, and consider whether current customer reviews reflect the experience your claims describe. Dig deeper: How to assemble captivating Google Ads copy 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 6. Offer a ‘free’ hook Just like free samples at Trader Joe’s, mentions of “free” in ad copy immediately draw a user’s attention. What can you offer as a free entry point for potential customers? Free demo. Free trial. Bonus for new customers. Free college application. Free quote. Free content, such as ebooks, whitepapers, or webinars. Whether it’s a trial of a software product or a free visit to your home to assess what’s needed for pest control, this type of offer can be what convinces prospects to fill out a form and enter your sales funnel. For instance, Strayer University highlights, “Pass 3 Bachelor’s Courses, Earn 1 Tuition Free.” In an age of skyrocketing college costs, that’s an attractive reason to click and learn more. 7. Turn off automated assets If you’re not careful with your account settings, Google and Microsoft can automatically generate assets, from ad copy to sitelinks, without your review. That can create concerns for compliance and for overall messaging accuracy. Make sure you turn off this option at the account level to avoid issues with unwanted copy or unexpected links to irrelevant pages. Dig deeper: When to trust Google Ads AI and when you shouldn’t 8. Highlight pricing where it makes sense for your brand When people are comparison shopping, they usually want quick visibility into cost. Of course, providing pricing may be more or less straightforward depending on your business, and price isn’t always a primary selling point for every brand. If you’re in an industry where showing a cost is simple, including it in your ad copy can help. When your pricing is competitive, mentioning it helps you stand out. If your pricing is higher than most competitors, showing that cost may help filter out people you don’t want clicking your ads. For example, lower-priced competitors may cater to small businesses, while your company serves enterprise-level organizations that need more robust solutions. If you offer multiple price tiers or clearly defined costs for different services, consider using price assets to highlight them. For example, you might break out cost by number of users for a SaaS product. 9. Mention locations in regional campaigns If your business serves a particular region, mention locations in your ad copy to create a local connection. For example, if you just opened a new store in Buckwheat County, including “Now Open in Buckwheat County” can help appeal to users in that area. Your ad will likely stand out against national brands running generic messaging. You can set up ad groups based on regional keywords and tweak your headlines to reference those locations. Also consider using location insertion to dynamically include regions in your copy. Dig deeper: Localization in Google Ads: How to structure multi-market campaigns 10. Review and revise your ad copy Now that we’ve covered ways to improve your paid search copy, take a moment to review your current ads. Where can you better think through how assets combine? What value propositions aren’t you mentioning yet? How can you tailor your wording more directly to customers’ concerns, such as by highlighting pricing or regions? Start creating new copy variants and testing them to improve your PPC performance. Your ad doesn’t compete in isolation — it competes in the SERP Paid search success isn’t about filling every field or chasing an Excellent ad strength score. It’s about how your messaging appears next to competitors in the SERP. Review your ads in context. Look at how assets combine. Strengthen value propositions, highlight what makes you different, and test new variations. If your ad sounds like everyone else’s, it won’t stand out. Make sure it does. View the full article

Neuroscientists have found birding is actually a brain hack. A new study published in JNeurosci, the Journal of Neuroscience found birdwatching may actually alter the structure and function of your brain—what is known as neuroplasticity—effectively helping to boost cognitive abilities, especially in more seasoned bird watchers. “Our brains are very malleable,” lead researcher Erik Wing, a research associate at York University in Toronto, explained. Wait, what exactly is neuroplasticity? Neuroplasticity is basically the process or way your brain learns, creates memory, and adapts to experiences and trauma, according to Psychology Today. Research shows that while the brain changes and develops the most in childhood, it continues to do so throughout your life. Today, neuroscientists see the brain as a dynamic and flexible organ, one that can “reorganize connections” through “wiring” and “rewiring.” How bird watching helps your brain The new study of 58 adults compared the brains of 29 expert birders (ages 24 to 75), and 29 beginners around the same age. It found something interesting: The MRIs of the expert birders’ brains had more density when it came to areas governing perception and attention, than those of the novices. Again, they didn’t divide the two groups based on a person’s age—but based on their birding knowledge and expertise. Birding, which involves deep concentration and the ability to identify different birds, alters brain activity and structure in the same way becoming an expert musician or athlete does. That’s because they all require extensive brain training. So, what did the study conclude? In short, it found the process of becoming an expert birder boosted brain cognition. And while it doesn’t stop brain aging, it does suggest that it could help minimize age-related declines in the future. View the full article

One of the many constitutional duties of the president is giving a State of the Union address to Congress. Article II, Section 3 only mandates that this act happen “from time to time,” but it has become an annual event. Tuesday, February 24, will technically mark President The President’s first State of the Union address of his second term—even though he lectured Congress in 2025. That speech was labeled an “address to a joint session of Congress,” so The President could speak on his goals for his second term. Here’s everything you need to know about tonight’s SOTU address. What topics could The President speak about? Most pundits agree, the economy will be front and center. President The President even teased this himself last Wednesday, February 18, at the White House. “Watch the State of the Union. We’re going to be talking about the economy. We inherited a mess,” he stated. This could mean he will spend some time blaming his predecessor President Joe Biden for the country’s ills. Vice President JD Vance also confirmed that economics will take precedence. “You’re going to hear a lot about the importance of bringing jobs back into our country, of reshoring manufacturing, of all these great factories that are being built,” he explained in a Fox News interview. Recent polling shows the need for The President to tackle this important issue ahead of the midterm elections. According to a recent Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey, only 39% of American adults approve of his economic leadership. He loses a percentage point for immigration. Add these low numbers predate Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, which declared that some of The President’s tariffs exceeded executive powers. Either way, The President is going into the State of the Union with low poll numbers. Are Democrats boycotting the SOTU? The Democratic party is expected to display varying acts of dissent during The President’s State of the Union Address. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries plans to attend, but outlined his expectations for his fellow party members. “Either attend with silent defiance” or “not attend,” he instructed. He doesn’t want a repeat of last year’s ejection of Texas Representative Al Green. Many are taking the second option, including Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut; and representatives Greg Casar of Texas and Pramila Jayapal of Washington. These lawmakers are instead attending another event, the “People’s State of the Union,” organized by MoveOn and MeidasTouch. This will take place on the National Mall. Another counter-programming event will be held at the National Press Club: It’s is being called the “State of the Swamp.” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is scheduled to appear. Additionally, Senator Patty Murray of Washington is planning on meeting with constituents instead. Who is giving the Democratic response? After President The President has his say, the Democrats have their turn to speak. This year, they have elected Governor Abigail Spanberger of Virginia to represent their interests. She is a vocal The President critic and is not expected to hold back. Senator Alex Padilla of California will give the Democratic Spanish-language response. Who is giving the Progressive response? Democrat Representative Summer Lee of Pennsylvania will also speak. She will give the Working Families Party’s response. Since American politics is dominated by a two-party system, this progressive group allows members to be a part of another party while also closely aligning with Democrats. How to stream the SOTU live The State of the Union 2026 speech is scheduled to begin tonight (Tuesday, February 24) 9 p.m. ET. Most major networks such as NBC, CBS, and ABC will cover the speech, as will major cable networks including C-SPAN. If you have an over-the-air antenna, you can watch it for free on a broadcast network or PBS. Traditional cable subscribers are also covered. You can also find SOTU 2026 on live-TV streaming services such as Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, and FuboTV. Last but not least, you can easily live-stream the State of the Union speech for free on the YouTube channel of PBS News. We’ve embedded that video below. View the full article

Apparent network of energy companies’ vast reach revealed by FTView the full article

A cabinet of sycophants makes an already erratic US president a greater threatView the full article

Google is testing removing the dates from the articles shown in the Google Discover feed. This is a limited test, Google confirmed, to see the impact of removing the date value.View the full article

Microsoft Advertising seems to be testing a new design for the Bing shopping ads carousel. The new design fills the screen more from left to right than the old design and is just wider in general.View the full article

Shares in US chipmaker surge as deal paves way for social media giant to take a stake in the groupView the full article

San Francisco restaurant Mister Jiu’s is kicking off its 10th anniversary celebration next month with a three-part dinner series in its Chinatown kitchen. The restaurant will host 10 celebrated Chinese chefs from around the world, including Dan Hong from Sydney, Australia’s Mr Wong, and ArChan Chan from Ho Lee Fook in Hong Kong. Guests, seated in tables of four or eight, pay $285 each for 16 dishes from four chefs, all inspired by classic banquet-style dining. The even is nearly sold out, and, according to executive chef and owner Brandon Jew, an exciting creative collaboration that the restaurant couldn’t afford to produce on its own. The extravaganza is sponsored by Resy, the reservations provider used at Mister Jiu’s and one of two reservations platforms owned by American Express. The payments company acquired Resy in 2019 and competing service Tock in 2024 to help its card members access both tables and special events at top restaurants, like the dinner collabs at Mister Jiu’s. (Amex card members were able to secure bookings to the event 48 hours before everyone else.) The series is among hundreds of events that Resy will put on this year to try to coax more diners into restaurants—and more restaurants onto Resy. That platform is about to get a shot in the arm. This summer, Amex will merge Tock’s restaurant inventory with Resy’s, adding roughly 8,000 bookable venues—including 1,200 wineries, a handful of tattoo parlors, and at least one goat farm—to Resy’s app and website. The move boosts Resy’s venue count to 25,000, but will sunset the Tock brand, formally uniting two onetime startups against reservations market leader OpenTable, the incumbent provider they each hoped to disrupt. Crucially, it also bolsters Amex’s position amid increased competition: Delivery company DoorDash spent $1.2 billion to acquire reservations platform SevenRooms last year and offers diners delivery credit for booking tables, and Chase Sapphire linked up with OpenTable last spring as part of its larger Visa partnership to offer exclusive restaurant bookings. Chase also has a longstanding partnership with DoorDash, offering Sapphire holders credit. “Resy will be the singular app for the best culinary experiences used by the hospitality world’s most ambitious operators, with a membership benefit for card members,” says Pablo Rivero, CEO of Resy and Tock and SVP and head of American Express global dining. “And all of that will come together under the umbrella of a new era for the Resy ecosystem.” Behind the Resy-Tock merger The merger follows efforts by American Express to link its cards to reservations services that provide valuable access to restaurants. When the card issuer raised its Platinum card fee by $200 last September, it added a $400 annual credit for diners to use in Resy restaurants. This summer, Tock restaurants will start to become eligible for the credit, with the majority eligible by the end of 2027. Brandon Jew It was a powerful move; in the three weeks following the announcement, there was a 36% increase in Resy reservations made by users with a U.S. Platinum card linked to their account—and a five times increase in the daily average number of accounts being linked. People using the Resy credit are spending, on average, 25% more, according to Rivero. Resy wants its restaurants to notice; in January, it sent partner restaurants a Spotify Wrapped-style digest that included the value of Resy credits earned by Amex users at their business. “Look out for more of these card members in your seats in 2026,” it promised in its note to restaurants. Amex is already seeing results: In the fourth quarter of 2025, global restaurant spend by American Express card members was up 9% overall, but spending by American Express card members at Resy restaurants was up more than 20%. Both Resy and Tock launched in 2014 with new approaches to restaurant reservations. Resy challenged OpenTable’s longtime model of charging restaurants per reservation. Instead, it offered a monthly subscription to its reservations and table management software. Around the same time, Tock pioneered a new model, prepaid ticketing, with the thesis that diners should book and pay for dinner the same way they’d buy tickets to a Broadway play or a football game. Founder and CEO Nick Kokonas, a former derivatives trader, launched the tech inside Alinea, the Chicago fine dining restaurant that he cofounded. One platform, two systems Tock’s structure immediately attracted fine dining restaurants drawn to a fresh idea. Kokonas, meanwhile, seemed to relish antagonizing chief competitor OpenTable, which he accused of peddling outdated technology and a stale business model. In one memorable marketing stunt, he planned to distribute 5,000 plastic dinosaurs at an industry trade show, each branded with the URL OpenTableSaurus.com, which then led to Tock’s homepage. A cease-and-desist letter from OpenTable thwarted the plan, and Tock eventually gave them the domain. But Kokonas, refusing to accept defeat, pointed a second URL, DinosaurTable.com, at Tock’s homepage to underscore his position. (Both URLs still work.) Kokonas wanted the restaurant industry to embrace the prepaid model that eliminated nearly all of the dreaded and expensive no-shows at its restaurants. Eventually, Tock’s competitors added prepaid ticketing to their platforms, and Tock started offering free reservations. By the time American Express acquired Tock from website-building platform Squarespace for $400 million in 2024 (Squarespace paid the same amount to acquire the business in 2021), its diner-facing products—free reservations, deposits, tickets—had become standard across providers. But Tock maintained an impressive roster of high-end restaurants, which bought into the platform’s adaptable technology and the company’s reputation for serving them well, something that Tock’s restaurant customers hope won’t vanish when the brand does. “It’s so clear [Tock] was built by restaurant people that understand service,” says Anya Abrams, managing director at Blue Hill in upstate New York. Blue Hill operates the two-Michelin-starred restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns, alongside the more casual Cafeteria, which serves lunch and communal-style dinner. It uses prepaid ticketing on Tock for both. It also uses the platform to facilitate experiences like farm tours and cocktail demonstrations. Abrams says that at her request, Tock has added product features and changes that fit the company’s complex needs. Once bookings at Tock restaurants are moved to Resy, Rivero says that diners will see and be able to book the exact same tables and experiences that they would on Tock, cocktail tastings and farm visits included. Restaurants using Tock’s software to manage their venues won’t notice any tech changes on their end besides a switch to Resy’s logo. Restaurants already using Resy won’t see any changes—though if they prefer to switch to Tock’s operating system, which many say offers better tech, they can. “Tock has built an incredible product that so many restaurants have come to use and love, and we don’t want to mess with that,” Rivero says. Eventually, Rivero says, Amex will combine Resy and Tock’s restaurant-facing tech, made up of “the best of both, along with new features and integrations.” He didn’t share a timeline, but restaurants have been told to expect the change in 2027. A battle for restaurants Amid this heightened competition between platforms and credit cards, restaurants have gained more negotiating power. Over the last year or so, reports and rumors have surfaced of restaurants receiving five-, six-, or even seven-figure payments to switch between booking platforms including Resy, Tock, OpenTable, and SevenRooms. The services and their deep-pocketed owners and partners are hoping that the cash infusions, along with promises to fill dining rooms with people eager to spend, will net them the most desirable restaurants. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, Brandon Jew is happy the platforms, including Resy, see the value in restaurants like his, which work to create great experiences for diners. “Restaurants have a very natural way of being able to storytell and provide experiences, entertainment, and food and beverage that contribute to memorable events,” he says. “I think that’s what the reservation systems are interested in providing, especially for their elite users.” “It’s such a weird era,” he adds. “I feel like we’re so used to paying for their products.” For now, at least, the tables have turned. View the full article

In the past, women’s work bags were designed to assert power. Women marched into the boardroom with hyper-structured “girlboss” totes or aggressively minimalist tech clutches. But there’s a shift taking place. Many work–life bags today are softer, both visually and physically. They’re lighter. They collapse. They transition seamlessly from the office to the many other things that fill your life: The mid-day grocery run, a coffee meeting that turns into school pickup, dinner with friends straight from the office. Every year, I test dozens of bags in search of the ones that best capture how we’re actually living and working right now. It’s clear that work bags are slowly shedding their armor. Rigidity and structure have given way to something more fluid. And perhaps they say something about our identity as working women. We’re not longer looking for a bag that assert power and competence, but rather one that reflects how work is just one part of our lives. This year’s standout bags share a clear through line: They’re soft without being sloppy. Structured enough to carry a laptop securely—but relaxed enough to collapse into something chic and compact once the tech is removed. They’re built for a hybrid life. After months of testing, here are the five bags that rose to the top. Barra Tote Strathberry, $895 At first glance, the Barra Tote—made by the fast-growing Scottish startup Strathberry—looks like a classic, polished work bag. It’s made with 100% grain calf leather in a family-owned factory in Spain. The clean lines and signature gold bar detail give it a distinctly elevated feel—one that would be perfectly at home in a boardroom. But once you start carrying it, you realize it’s more versatile than it appears. The leather has structure but isn’t stiff. With my 14-inch laptop inside, the bag feels balanced and intentional—not boxy or overstuffed. There’s enough organization to keep everything upright and easy to access, but not so much that it feels over-engineered. What surprised me most is how the bag transforms when you remove the laptop. It relaxes slightly, softening into a sleek everyday tote. Add the crossbody strap and it becomes commuter-friendly, freeing up your hands for coffee, phone, or a child’s hand on a busy sidewalk. It’s the rare bag that signals professionalism without locking you into it. Forma Satchel Cuyana, $698 Cuyana has built its reputation on the idea of “fewer, better things,” and the Forma Satchel embodies that philosophy. This bag has two distinct silhouettes, an architectural hexagonal satchel that transforms thanks to hidden magnetic side panels into a spacious tote bag. With it’s rounded edges, it feels refined rather than rigid. The pebbled Italian leather—which has been environmentally certified by the Leather Working Group—feels substantial but not heavy, and the bag holds its shape beautifully when a laptop is inside. Thanks to metal feet at the base, my computer sits upright, making it easy to slide in and out during meetings. Yet once the laptop is removed, the Forma doesn’t collapse awkwardly or gape open. It simply becomes a polished everyday satchel—sleek enough for work, understated enough for weekend errands. It pairs just as well with tailored trousers as it does with denim and sneakers. It doesn’t demand attention, but it quietly pulls an outfit together. This is the bag for someone who wants versatility without visual clutter. Bella 2-in-1 Convertible Backpack Tote Vestirsi, $679 If any bag on this list fully embraces the fluidity of modern life, it’s this one. The Bella can be worn as a tote or converted into a backpack—a feature that genuinely changes how you move through your day. In tote mode, it reads polished and office-ready. In backpack mode, it becomes a practical companion for commuting, travel, or long days on your feet. The bag is made by the Australian startup Vestirsi, which makes all of its products in Italian factories. The leather, now in a chic woven design, gives the bag visual softness and texture, which helps it avoid the overly technical look of many laptop backpacks. Even with my computer inside, it doesn’t scream “tech bag.” Instead, it feels artisanal and thoughtfully designed. When worn as a backpack, the weight distribution is noticeably more comfortable, especially during longer walks. And when the laptop comes out, the bag slouches just enough to feel relaxed and lifestyle-oriented. It’s a reminder that functionality doesn’t have to sacrifice aesthetics. Medium Park Satchel MZ Wallace, $325 MZ Wallace has long mastered the art of the ultra-lightweight bag, and the Medium Park Satchel is a standout example. Before you put anything inside, it feels almost featherlight. Even with a laptop, charger, and daily essentials, it never crosses into shoulder-aching territory. The quilted nylon construction makes it durable and practical, but the shape remains feminine and refined. It’s the little details that made it feel refined: The Italian leather trim, the gold hardware, the straps that come down the front, adding visual interest. The color options this year—especially the bold apple pink—signal a shift away from the traditional black-and-brown work bag palette. Work bags don’t have to be neutral to be professional. When I remove my laptop, the Park Satchel instantly feels like a playful everyday carryall. The crossbody strap makes it easy to navigate crowded sidewalks or public transportation without feeling weighed down. It’s the most “low-maintenance” bag of the group—and that’s precisely its appeal. Jorja Puffy Tote Jorja, $625 The Puffy Tote represents perhaps the clearest aesthetic shift of all: toward softness. Made by Jorja, a startup that uses the same nylon and factories as luxury brands like Prada, the padded body feels almost cloud-like against the shoulder. It’s protective without appearing corporate, and there’s something inherently comforting about carrying it. With a laptop inside, the cushioning adds a sense of security. Without one, the bag gently slouches into a fashion-forward tote. Unlike traditional structured work bags, this one feels casual—but not careless. It works with tailored outfits and athleisure alike, making it especially well-suited for days that move between multiple settings. It doesn’t look like a laptop bag. And that’s the point. View the full article

When looking for an apartment in San Francisco today, artificial intelligence can seem inescapable; and that’s not just because every rental building seems to have an AI bot answering calls. In San Francisco, the technology’s ascendency—and the subsequent skyrocketing job growth— has helped make the apartment market one of the tightest in the nation, with the fastest growing rent in the U.S. Lisa McCarrel, Managing Partner of Move Bay Area, a relocation and rental housing service, has seen the rental market become frenzied in recent months due in part to the increase in AI and AI-adjacent jobs. With units harder to come by, she’s seen some potential tenants offer a year’s rent in cash upfront. “I just had a meeting with my team because spring time is typically when the rental market here starts to get crazy,” says McCarrel. “But it’s already crazy. I’ve been running this business for 11 years, and this is the first time I’ve had to hold a meeting to prepare staff for what will be a hyper-competitive market.” Between 2024 and 2025, job postings for AI roles in the Bay Area, many extremely high-paying, grew 72%, from roughly 57,000 to 99,000, according to an analysis by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. That influx of new, highly paid workers—who may be renting until a post-IPO windfall—has helped rents in the city of San Francisco jump 13% year-over-year, according to data from Apartment List. The market currently has a 3.5% vacancy rate, roughly half the national average (nearly even with the city’s pre-Covid 2019 vacancy rate of 3.4%). Jackie Tom, founder and broker of the agency Rentals in SF, said the market is now very busy and well past pre-pandemic pricing. A different kind of tech boom But not all tech booms are created equal. AI’s outsized impact on San Francisco differs today significantly from the impact of the 2010s tech expansion, when it felt like tech hiring had a wider impact on other economic sectors. In part, that’s because of both where AI firms are located and their workforce cultures, as well as the overall state of the economy. That same job posting analysis found non-AI jobs in the region declined 1% over the same period. “Ten years ago, you had tech workers flocking to San Francisco, but a lot of them moved to the South Bay or the Peninsula, or lived across the city and took buses to Menlo Park, Mountain View or Cupertino,” says Apartment List economist Chris Salviati, referencing the Silicon Valley HQs of Meta, Alphabet, and Apple, respectively. “Right now, the neighborhoods where AI companies are based are seeing an influx of apartment demand.” San Francisco neighborhoods such as SoMa, where Anthropic recently took over a 430,000 square-foot office, and Mission Bay, where OpenAI expanded its office footprint to encompass more than 1 million square feet, have seen skyrocketing demand for rental units, says Salviati. RentCafe data shows one-bedroom units in these neighborhoods at $4,700 and $3,800. Anna Squires Levine, president of coworking firm Industrious, said demand for their San Francisco locations has been “off the charts” due to AI. AI firms have embraced “9-9-6” culture, a concept pushing workers to grind from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. With that kind of schedule, and offices and startups clustered in a handful of neighborhoods, the new AI workforce wants to live as close as possible, ideally walking distance, to eliminate long commutes. One firm, Cluey, even gives its employees rental subsidies. That’s a sea change from the 2010s boom that reshaped San Francisco, where many workers either lived in the city, as well as Oakland, and commuted to Silicon Valley offices. In fact, whereas Oakland was seen as a battleground against gentrification during the last tech wave a decade ago, dealing with dramatic rent increases, today, its apartment market has flatlined, as a lack of demand and a surplus of new apartment supply has pushed rents down 20% compared to 2020. AI’s growth, in terms of its office leasing footprint, remains ravenous, says Colin Yasukochi, executive director of the Tech Insights Center at CBRE, a massive international real estate brokerage and services firm. Last year, nearly a third of the 10.5 million square feet of office leases were for AI companies. Yasukochi says that if you add up all the total space requirements for AI firms looking for new offices right now, it would total 3.3 million square feet. McCarrel of Move Bay Area says she’s seeing industry growth move in phases; last year, she was helping AI startup founders find places to live, and now she’s working with more of the employees they’re starting to hire. For AI firms, says Yasukochi, the most important factor is time, as they race each other to deliver the newest model or breakthrough; leases have mostly been for massive blocks of move-in ready space they can immediately occupy and get to work (typically, high-end office tenants would spend lots of time and money refurbishing their trophy offices). Keeping pressure on a crowded rental market The influx of thousands of new tech jobs doesn’t offset area job losses in other sectors, as well as the tech industry at large, says Abby Raisz, Vice President of Research at the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. But it is concentrating pressure on the high end of the rental market. The city’s long-time shortage of new housing, as well as stubbornly high interest rates pushing more high-income renters into the rental market instead of buying, has made that segment of the market especially crowded in 2026. McCarrel says that it’s a full-time job for someone seeking a place to have to continuously call leads and monitor what is and isn’t available; she doubts even an AI program made by some of these new arrivals would help someone figure out a new living arrangement. “There’s too many barriers,” she says. “You have to be very careful the way you communicate with brokers and owners; there’s a lot of competition.” Most forecasts see AI companies continuing to expand, which will bring more jobs, and increase competition among San Francisco apartment seekers. Enrico Moretti, an economist at UC Berkeley, says as firms start commercializing AI, there will be an explosion in hiring as investment in training leads to more monetization. But the contours of this boom remain uncertain; if AI tools can make workers more efficient and therefore shrink office space and headcount, the companies most impacted by this effect will be those creating the AI in the first place. “We have to throw out the ideas about the way companies grow right now,” says Raisz. “AI companies will be the best at using their tech to be efficient, and they’ll be really good about being efficient and not overhiring. Is AI a new job creator or destroyer? It’s still a question mark.” McCarrel says the market is so tough, she’ll probably be handing out copies of articles like this one to potential renters she works with; the process of finding an apartment can “be like a marathon,” so best to set expectations right away. View the full article

Ambassador ignored summons to appear at foreign ministry View the full article

U.S. Army personnel may be training for cyberwar, but their own web browsing is quietly feeding the surveillance economy. According to a recent study by the Army Cyber Institute at West Point, corporate surveillance has deeply infiltrated the U.S. Army’s unclassified IT infrastructure in the continental United States. The researchers—who declined an interview request, citing increased scrutiny of external engagements by the Department of Defense—analyzed the 1,000 most frequently requested internet resources on Army networks over a two-month period and found that 21.2% were “tracker domains.” Those domains exist solely to harvest user data and analytics. A follow-up dataset showed that while trackers made up roughly 19% of the top domains, they accounted for nearly 42% of actual web requests. Another 10.4% of the original sample consisted of standard websites embedded with tracking code. “For several years there have been concerns about the use of the open internet from military locations and by military and government personnel,” says Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey in the U.K. (who was not involved in the research). “This paper makes the alarming point that many domains commonly visited from those using military or government networks are tracking domains.” The companies operating those domains include Adobe, Microsoft, and Akamai—but also TikTok, which was ostensibly banned on federal devices due to its Chinese ownership, as well as Google China and a defunct gambling site. Those three were singled out by the authors as domains that warrant further investigation. The data hoovered up by these adtech trackers—including geolocation, email addresses, and browsing preferences—is routinely aggregated and sold by data brokers as commercially available information (CAI). From there, adversaries could potentially purchase that data and use it to identify and analyze how servicemen and women interact online. Woodward said the findings suggest lessons still haven’t been learned from past incidents involving commercial products exposing sensitive military data, such as when fitness app Strava’s public “heat map” revealed the locations and patrol routes of military bases around the world in 2018. “It sounds like simple operational security,” Woodward says, “but still many systems administrators haven’t learned that old lesson that on the internet, if you’re not a paying customer you are the product.” View the full article

Hiring well is one of a leader’s most important jobs. Having talented employees is a strong competitive advantage and allows your organization to produce results and create a productive and positive culture. It’s hard to do well, especially at senior levels where judgment and character become increasingly important, and there’s a high cost of recruiting or replacing someone. Substantive questions help assess a candidate’s skills and readiness for a job, and behavioral questions provide the opportunity to understand how they think and handle themselves. But ultimately, once you’ve established their competency, it’s time to decide whether a candidate’s character is the right fit for your team and company cultural. I asked several experienced hiring managers from different fields what “secret weapon” questions help them evaluate key intangible qualities that indicate a trustworthy team member’s character. They all have one thing in common. Though each interviewer approaches their inquiry from a different angle, they all ask questions that invite vulnerability and connection. 1. What’s a time in your life or work when someone helped you? An executive director of a nonprofit organization that works with inner-city kids swears by this question. His team needs to work together under stressful conditions, so anyone who works there needs to be able to offer and ask for help when necessary. “I go first—I share my own story of a time when I hit my limit caring for two special needs children as a single parent and finally told my friends that I was at a breaking point and needed help. This opens them up to share their own vulnerable stories, and I learn so much about them. Only once did someone tell me that they had never needed help. I didn’t hire them.” This person’s team has enviable retention in a field with high turnover. He credits hiring team players, rather than heroes. 2. Tell me about a mistake you made—what happened, how did you react, and what did you do differently after that? A CFO I spoke to says her team members need to have a high baseline of skills. However, she also knows that no one is perfect. She employs this question to assess a candidate’s willingness to take accountability, apologize (she usually asks this directly if they don’t volunteer it), and change their behavior. “I appreciate working with people who are smart but also humble, who know the value of saying ‘I’m sorry’ in an authentic way—and who know there’s always room to grow.” 3. When have you changed your mind on a difference of opinion with a colleague? A CTO I spoke to prides himself on building engineering teams with both a positive culture and a high-quality standard. He likes this question because it gives him insight into “how a candidate handles a conflict and whether they can be flexible and get out of the ‘I’m-right-you’re-wrong’ mindset to collaborate and solve problems.” Having an open mind and being willing to change your view of an issue promotes cooperation and innovation on a team, and is key to building trusting relationships. Each of these questions gets at the interdependent nature of working on a team and invites the candidate to demonstrate humility versus ego, flexibility versus rigidity, and team orientation versus self-orientation. Other hiring managers I talked to have used a different approach. One deliberately has pictures of his children, a travel photo, and a guitar displayed behind him, hoping the candidate asks him about himself, his family, or his hobbies. One exec who has interviewed hundreds of candidates scours the often-ignored “Interests” section of the résumé or picks out a project from their portfolio. “It takes a little preparation, but asking them about their experience as a competitive swimmer or their record collection, or showing interest in a piece of work that they are proud of gives me a chance to see their enthusiasm sparkle,” she says. The importance of going deeper Whatever approach you take, remember that the best questions lead to a conversation that goes beyond the surface level. As the interviewer, don’t just accept an answer and move on to the next question. Instead, dial up your curiosity to ask follow-up questions. You’ll want to probe what they learned from the experience, how it changed their relationships or perspective, and how they balanced trade-offs in a decision. Questions that ask a candidate to go a layer deeper often reveal more about their values and motives, beyond their specific behavior. Ultimately, this helps you predict how they would respond and fit in your environment. View the full article

In 2001, Antoni was working at a business that was underperforming and facing layoffs. People didn’t know who would be cut or when. You could tell by people’s behavior that anxiety was at an all-time high. Managers were “networking” in the right corridors, colleagues started to crowd meetings to look indispensable, and teams were slowing down because nobody wanted to make the wrong move. One leader chose a different tactic. Every day, at the same time, he stood in the same spot where anyone could walk up to him. He shared what he actually knew (not what he guessed), answered questions without theater, and ended with a concrete direction for “today.” People still didn’t like the situation, but the atmosphere changed. Not because he shared more information than everyone else. Because he paired transparency with clarity. That pairing is the point. Leaders talk about “being transparent” as if it’s the whole job, but it isn’t. Transparency and clarity are different muscles. Transparency builds trust, while clarity builds focus. When you confuse them, you end up paying twice in lost time and diminished credibility. The myth: more transparency automatically creates clarity Transparency in a company setting typically means more dashboards, more all-hands, and more context. It feels responsible—especially in uncertain moments—because it signals you aren’t hiding anything. But facts don’t organize themselves. People still have to decide what matters, what they need to ignore, and what to do next. When leaders don’t provide that structure, they leave teams confused, and teams will fill in the blanks with rumor and gossip. In the end, this leads to more insecurity and more internal politics. How transparency can coexist with confusion This is why “radical transparency” can coexist with mass confusion. You can be open and still leave people directionless. In some instances, transparency can even backfire. David De Cremer summarizes research showing that “complete transparency” can trigger predictable side effects: blame cultures (because you see who erred without understanding why), distrust (because being constantly monitored feels like suspicion), and even resistance and reduced creativity in highly exposed environments. In our decades of experience working with leaders and organizations, this oversharing is one of two extreme communication modes that companies can slip into. It’s worth taking a closer look at these two and their costs before we examine how leaders can avoid them. The following are two traps that many leaders often fall into (but should stop doing). 1. Transparent but unclear: the ‘information dump’ organization This is the leader who shares everything: forecasts, board slides, Slack threads, meeting notes. They hide nothing, but execution continues to drift. That’s because you highlight nothing when you share everything. People don’t know which metrics are “heads up” versus “background.” They don’t know which risks are actionable. The natural response among workers in this scenario is to hedge and wait. Worse yet, when incoming data exceeds what people can process, information overload is the inevitable result. And according to research, this overload can lead to worse decision-making, higher stress, and lower productivity. Yet productivity isn’t the only area that suffers. Ambiguity has measurable psychological and performance costs. Meta-analytic research on role ambiguity—a close cousin of organizational “unclear-ness”—finds it too is associated with worse outcomes, including strain and reduced performance. Transparent-but-unclear leaders often misread the feedback from their workers. They hear, “We’re confused,” and respond by adding more information. But in doing so, they’re trying to fix traffic jam by pouring more cars onto the road. 2. Clear but opaque: the ‘because-I-said-so’ organization The second mistake looks better on paper but is just as costly. Leaders succinctly present things, set firm deadlines, and outline who’s accountable for what. As a result, everyone knows what to do. But (and this is the critical bit) the “why” is missing. This is important. As Nancy Duarte points out in a Harvard Business Review article, when you ask people to change behavior, their first question is rarely “how.” It’s “why.” If people don’t recognize the why, they can become suspicious of a leader’s motives. What leaders should do instead So how do you know if you’re missing transparency or clarity? Start by listening to the reactions you already get. If people say, “What are we supposed to do with this?”, “Why are we doing these tasks?” or “What’s the point?” you are not being clear. If people say, “We feel out of the loop,” or “Decisions come out of nowhere,” you are not being transparent. By paying attention and listening to what they express, you don’t even need a survey to detect the gap. Your people are already telling you what your company needs to do. From there, we recommend a three-step process that we’ve seen numerous successful leaders intuitively adapt, as a way of ensuring the proper balance of transparency and clarity: Start with transparency. This is what we know, and what information we still miss. Add clarity. This is why you need to know. End with direction. These are the short-term goals we pursue, the reasons for them, and how we follow up. This is a simple yet impactful framework that brings transparency and clarity together. It eliminates unnecessary confusion and frustration, so that your people can be more productive and generate better results. And that’s exactly what Antoni’s boss in the hallway was doing. View the full article

By now, you’ve surely noticed it. Jean waistlines, sky-high not so long ago, are going lower. Low enough that you might need to think of underwear as outerwear. Across the fashion industry, experts agree that in 2026, ultra-low-rise will be a key business driver in the denim sector, with some brands saying that their low-rise styles have replaced the eternally popular high-rise as their best selling cut. “What we’re going to see in this next decade is [it’ll be] really dominated by the low-rise,” says Amy Williams, CEO of Citizens of Humanity group, which also owns the premium denim brand Agolde. “Right now, you’re sort of at that early stage where people are just now getting a feel for it.” If you pay attention to the runways or street style, you might have already picked up on this shift, as celebrities, models, and on-trend normies started trading in high-waisted jeans for pairs that sit low on the hips in the past couple of years. But the real tell is that low-rise jeans finally hit mass market. In 2025, global brands with slower–to-adopt consumers like Gap found their large customer base was finally ready for the navel-gazing silhouette. “We’ve been kind of waiting for this moment,” Noelle Rogers, senior vice president and general manager of Gap Specialty, told me last August. “We tested a few times on low-rise and it wasn’t until the last 9, 10 months that the customer was ready.” Now denim designers are pushing low-rise further. We’ll definitely see more ultra-rises coming through in 2026,” says Susie Draffan, senior denim strategist at WGSN who began tracking low-rise in 2019 when macro trends like a resurgent interest in ’90s and Y2K aesthetics put the style on her radar. Mass-market brand Lucky launched an ultra-low-rise flare style (that’s an itty-bitty, two-button, 7.25-inch rise) with Addison Rae last August, after the company first spotted her wearing the vintage version in the wild. “Fashion is going to be pushing those extremes,” Tamara Reynolds, vice president of the Denim Center of Excellence at Catalyst, the parent company of Lucky Brand. “We are really excited about low-rise still, and we’re even more excited about super low-rise.” This style was bound to happen. High-rise is a silhouette “that’s really held people’s attention for almost 15 years,” says Citizens of Humanity’s Williams. “So, as with anything in fashion, that pendulum swings backward, but when it goes back, it evolves into something new.” Part of that evolution is today’s range of equally acceptable pant silhouettes: wide-leg baggy, straight, bootcut, flare, and, dare I say, increasingly skinny. “What’s most fun about this moment is that while we’re seeing some strong micro-trends within denim—slimmer, straighter, lower-rise cuts are undoubtedly dominating the conversation—we’re still seeing brands across the market sell nearly every kind of denim shape and style,” says Alexandra Avdey, vice president of merchandising at Reformation. “In the past, there has almost always been a single must-have style. Right now, there’s something for everyone.” So pick your poison. The result is sure to be toxic (1. adj., pejorative, a negative association due to the ultra-low-rise’s inherent ties to an era that correlated beauty with thinness; or 2., adj., complimentary, origin: Britney Spears song; a nostalgic association with naughties cultural icons that brings new and interesting approaches to dress in the current context.) Ultra-low-rise is polarizing. But whether or not you want to hang, it’s going to be here for a while. Britney Spears Slow burn, hot stats Data from a cross-section of denim brands is indicating that low-rise is a big business driver. At Citizens of Humanity, its low-slung baggy represents 35% of its business. Four of its top 10 styles are low-rise, according to the company. Agolde since introduced a low-rise bootcut for Spring, which the website describes as “a true nod to the early 2000s.” Though the company doesn’t plan to release any ultra-low-rise styles, this bootcut is now the company’s lowest rise (8 inches) and sits low on the hips. The numbers are even more striking at Reformation. Sales of low-rise denim grew 500% in 2025 compared to 2024. Like Citizens, 4 of Ref’s top 10 jeans SKUs year to date are low-rise. Its top-selling denim style is its Cary low-rise slouchy wide-leg jean, which overtook its high-rise counterpart. (Hitting about an inch below the navel, Cary feels a bit more like a mid-rise.) And the style isn’t just for the youngest consumers. The company says that low-rise is performing across generations, with 38% of low-rise e-comm sales driven by Gen Z and 30% by millennials. If anything, going low has more to do with a willingness to experiment rather than age. At Lucky, whose customers are predominantly women in their twenties, low-rise sales increased 763% in August 2025 compared to the previous year, and contributed 43% to full price denim sales, compared to 8% the previous year. Gap didn’t share specific data, but following a test period that resulted in high sales volumes, the company went all in on low-rise with its long and lean launch with girl group Katseye last August. “We’ve seen a huge uptrend that is more U.S. and North American-based starting in basically like August of this year,” Citizens CEO Williams told me in late 2025, noting the upswing is all coming from either low-rise or straight leg shapes. Of course, runways are one of the best signals for what brands will launch down the road, and waistlines are jostling for share. Over the last two seasons, designer labels like Diesel (see its nearly-bumster styles) and Alexander McQueen (revival of its actual ’90s bumster styles) have shown off ultra-low-rise styles. Low and natural or high-rise styles held equal share of the denim mix at the A/W 25/26 shows, at 17.8%, with low-rise styles increasing 11.8 percentage points year over year, according to WGSN catwalks data provided to Fast Company. Katseye Cultural emergence Last fall I was scrolling through Instagram and a paparazzi photo of actress Zoë Kravitz—my personal style chimera—in baggy low-rise jeans crossed my feed. Kravitz, 37, wore them low on the hip, without a waistband or pockets so they’re flat across the pelvis. They also had an adjustable toggle closure at the ankle. The design felt new. After some recon I learned it was the $325 Still Here’s Sport jean that fashion acolytes have been ravenously scooping up. Head of Brand Eliza Rolfs told me when I visited the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, store that the connection happened organically, after Kravitz’s stylist, Danielle Goldberg, reached out and pulled some styles. Kravitz kept three pairs of the Sport, which Rolfs describes as a more classic approach to low-rise. She’s not the only fan: The brand’s Pear wash sold out in 25 minutes after its first release, which led to 10,000 people joining a waitlist. The original Sport Jean, which launched in July 2025, sold out four times within its first six months on the market. As with previous trends, many denim designers I spoke with cited street and celebrity style as their early ultra-low-rise indicators, and name-checked Bella and Gigi Hadid as two examples. The members of Katseye are always in hip-bone, thong-strap, or belly-chain-bearing pants. (Thong straps, functionally designed to hide a visible panty line, have now become lucrative new real estate for charms and bedazzling.) So are other Gen Z pop stars like Tate McCray, Addison Rae, or more recently, fellow millennial Charli XCX, 33, who wore a thong-bearing jean to promo her new movie, The Moment. In the beginning of February, stylist Andrew Mukamal dressed Margo Robbie, 35, in super-low leather pants for a look during her Wuthering Heights press tour. That’s because many current cultural icons are looking to the irreverence and confidence of early 2000s stars like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, according to Reynolds. “Really low-rise denim was a key piece in the outfitting and the entire look. That’s how the Y2K kind of revival came across and it caught like wildfire,” she says. Reformation plans to lean even more into Y2K this year, with components like exposed buttons, rivets, seaming details and low-rise boot-cut styles, for instance. Christina Aguilera “Nostalgia is a big driver,” says Draffan. Interest in that period revived a range of low-rise styles, with ’90s-inspired baggy and straight legs as well as bootcut styles from the noughties “driving the revival,” she adds. But don’t just peg ultra-low-rise’s comeback to a long-simmering cultural fixation on Xtina at the 2001 VMAs. The low-rise revival has a co-dependency with other shifting denim trends like baggy pants. “As those baggier fits got lower and lower slung, and they’re belted and they’re hanging off the hips, it gave rise to the midriff, right?” asks Reynolds. “So that’s where I feel like the rumblings from a design point of view first came.” Can design fixes mend cultural flaws? Like anything you wear, denim has direct ties to material and tech innovations as well as the broader sociocultural climate. “Back in the day when skinny jeans became a thing, it was primarily because stretch products had evolved to a point where there was so much stretch in the product that you could wear a skin tight jean all day long and be really comfortable,” says Williams. Stretch materials remained as waistlines shifted to high-rise in the early to mid-2010s (I was a Citizens of Humanity Rocket devotee), and it made for a skin-tight fit like leggings, which people also couldn’t wait to peel off and replace with sweats or actual Lululemon leggings when they got home. When the pandemic hit, so did the wide-legged pants. “It’s super comfortable and you can wear it all day long,” says Williams. “I think that’s what got people out of their sweatpants from COVID and into wide leg jeans.” The most common rise was still around 9 inches (considered high-rise), though. Williams says high-rise jeans have been telling the same fashion story for a long time, and consumers are simply ready for styling that has something fresh to say. “You can tell when you lose your attention span and the customer changes gears,” she says. “I do think there’s just an element that is absolutely cyclical.” Kate Moss When I delivered the news to friends that ultra-low-rise is back, the reaction wasn’t very different from what it’d be like to share that you got back together with a boyfriend they all secretly hated: healthy skepticism. “You have to be hot to wear low-rise,” an aggravated friend told me at a party (in this context: hot = 2000s model thin). Cynicism from those of us who’ve been through the first go-around is fair, because the ultra-low-rise revival calls back to the era we came of age in: dominated by fatphobia and capped by Kate Moss telling WWD one of her mottos is “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” And while contemporary low-rise is in reality more of a wearable mid-rise (Reformation, for instance, dropped the crotch so the wearer could adjust where it sits by sizing up or down), ultra-low-rise, which sits low on the hip bone and creates a more square rather than hourglass shape, is less universally flattering. “While they’re trending right now with Gen Z, there is obviously a huge swath of the market for whom a low-rise will just not appeal,” says Draffan, the WGSN strategist. “It’s a tricky rise to pull off, not to mention that anyone over 30 already did the low-rise at some point in their lives, and isn’t keen to go back there, especially Millennials and the mature market.” She describes mid and high-rises as more flattering with “broader consumer appeal.” The good news for the low-rise-averse is that wearable high and mid rises are still in the mix, so those with an aversion to navel exposure can keep a safe distance in the comfortable rise of their choice. “For low-rise, the cool thing about denim trends is when a silhouette does come back in style is that it lingers a little bit, rather than fast fashion, [which is] a voracious trend cycle,” says Rolfs of Still Here Sport. “Denim tends to stick for a couple of years and that has ripple effects in the rest of the garments as well.” The leg opening of denim is tapering toward straight, which in turn looks nice with a pair of loafers, which are becoming more popular too, thanks to a prep revival. “The customer’s purchasing a lot more than they have,” says Williams, who calls straight legs and loafers the new wide leg and Sambas. And it’ll keep evolving: a stovepipe skinny jean is one of WGSN’s key fashion items for 2026. Anatomy of the new low-rise Denim designers I spoke with insist the style is more inclusive this time around, and brands like Gap are showing the style on a variety of body types. The fit of Y2K-era low-rise jeans were a painted-on, tightly fitting second skin. “When it comes to today’s aesthetics, it feels much more sophisticated and cool to wear something that sits a little bit away from the body,” says Williams. “So you’ll see a low-rise iterated, in a way, that has like a bit of ease, maybe bagginess to it so it still looks refined and it has a little bit more of what you would imagine today’s model off duty to have evolved to.” Williams says the new cuts are easier to wear and have more balance proportions, allowing for a different visual anchor. “Now you’re anchoring the jean at that low hip, so the top part is the anchor rather than the legs and the booty as the anchor,” she says. “That solves the whole host of problems that we’ve all witnessed.” Designers make lots of micro adjustments to make a low-rise jean look more flattering and proportional. “You’re going from a proportion that’s hourglass-shaped to one that sits low and is a little bit more square, and you’re shrinking down all of the proportions,” McDonald says of the difference between a high-rise fit and low. To accommodate for this shift in proportions, ultra-low-rise jeans have different pocket scoops, smaller, shorter back pockets, and adjusted spacing between pockets. Whereas the waistband of many skin-tight 2000s era ultra-low-rise was a V-shape in two pieces to be ultra form-fitting, today’s typically have a slightly curved waistband for a sense of cheeky “boyishness,” says McDonald. (Lucky’s ultra-low-rise does have a V waistband.) “One of the things that’s most exciting about a low-rise jean is just how appealing your bum looks,” she says. “It creates the cutest boyish, bum shape.” The curved waistband is meant to prevent gapping, but also helps keep the pant up even though it generally sits at the widest part of the hipbone. “I see all of the women that are adopting this that were afraid of it at first and we’re like, oh, actually it’s great it looks good on them,” says Reynolds. “It’s all ages, all body types, and all attitudes, and so I’m really proud and impressed with the outcome and the adoption that’s happening across the board.” She adds, “It’s one of those things you sort of have to get out of your mind and just put it on, right? For anything new, there can be a resistance and you’re like, ‘Oh wait, I love this.’” I tested a several pairs in my usual size. One of the best was the Gap long and lean ’90s loose, which had a touch of stretch and contour waistband which didn’t, well, gap. Neither did Still Here’s Sport or Reformation’s 100% cotton low-rise Cary, although it had the most mid-rise fit in my usual size. It’s not foolproof though. Agolde’s low-rise loose epitomized the cool sort of ease you want with low-rise denim: a perfectly stiff, nonchalant straight leg silhouette, balanced with a just-low-enough waistband that had a touch of looseness at the hip—though it did gap to reveal my underwear while seated at the bar. A charm opportunity, if I’m brave. View the full article

There’s a new epidemic sweeping companies worldwide: unhappiness. According to recent research, only 51% of employees frequently feel happy at work. Being happy is not just a “nice to have” in the workplace. The same research found that happy workers are 42% more likely to feel productive or motivated, meaning that employee happiness is directly linked to business outcomes. While many organizations have introduced initiatives such as “duvet days,” mindfulness classes, and wellbeing apps, recent research from the University of Oxford has shown that these have no discernible effect on employee mental wellbeing. So, what is the answer to curing this unhappiness epidemic? It lies in your management approach. Unlocking happiness with questions As a manager, you play a crucial role in your employees’ happiness and mental well-being. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report found that those who work in companies with poor management practices are nearly 60% more likely to be stressed than those in companies with good management practices. Add to this the fact that managers have the same impact on people’s mental health as their partners, doctors, or therapists, and you can see that staff happiness, perhaps unsurprisingly, is contingent on how they’re managed. Implement effective people management, however, and the results speak for themselves. If workers feel seen and understood, and believe that their strengths, values, and contributions are noted and celebrated, engagement, trust, and retention all improve. Once an employee is empowered by their manager to know and use their strengths daily, they’re nearly six times more engaged. Businesses with highly engaged staff experience 78% less absenteeism and significantly lower turnover rates. When employees feel that managers care about their well-being, they’re 73% less likely to feel burned out and 53% less likely to be actively seeking a new job. If you’re a manager wondering how you can better motivate your team and reap these benefits for your organization, it’s time to consider a new style of management called Operational Coaching. Practitioners of this new approach learn to use an enquiry-led approach, asking purposeful questions intended to engage others’ thinking. At the heart of developing an Operational Coaching style is learning to apply the STAR model in everyday situations: ● Stop: When an employee comes to you with a problem, as their manager, you must learn to stop, take a step back, and overcome your natural inclination to step in and solve the problem for them. ● Think: This gives you the space to think about whether the situation an employee has presented offers a “coachable moment”. ● Ask: Mastering the art of asking powerful, thought-provoking questions and then actively listening to your employees allows you to ditch the “fix and solve” response and instead presents the other person with a learning opportunity to become independent, solution-driven problem solvers. ● Result: Work with the employee to secure commitment to an action from this coachable moment, that they’ll see through. You may need to ask a few more questions to agree on the appropriate follow-up, increasing the likelihood that action will be taken and providing a future opportunity to give appropriate feedback. By learning how to ask purposeful questions and actively listening to what your team members are saying, you’re supporting them on a journey of continuous performance improvement. Enabling and empowering employees to take action establishes a more equitable relationship and advances their skills, capabilities, and prospects. An important part of Operational Coaching is also offering appreciative feedback to your staff. This is crucial for motivation, which, as we’ve already established, is what’s needed to banish workplace blues, boost morale, and ensure employees feel valued. Learning to apply the STAR model also has benefits for you as a manager. Chances are, your responsibilities already mean you’re overstretched. In fact, you may be one of the 82% of people who have ended up as an “accidental” manager on top of your actual role. So learning to use an Operational Coaching style of management enables you to have “in the moment” daily coaching conversations with your employees and achieve great results, without the need for lengthy coaching-style sessions that drain your time and energy. This means you’ll likely be happier and have improved morale, too. Reframing the purpose of management The benefits of Operational Coaching in action have been clearly established. A large-scale randomised controlled trial, funded by the U.K. Government and conducted by the London School of Economics (LSE), showed statistically significant results across 62 organizations in 14 sectors. Managers who undertook the STAR Manager program went on to spend 70% more time coaching their team members in the flow of work than before adopting an Operational Coaching style of management. Intervention group organizations also recorded a sixfold improvement in employee retention, and 48% of reported successes were related to increased engagement and productivity. The robust results of the study show the benefits that await managers who learn how to adapt their management style to an enquiry-led approach. It clearly demonstrates that when managers are better trained to handle the people side of their roles, everyone feels happier and more motivated. By reframing management’s purpose and intention to enable others to develop, empower them to act, and motivate them through appropriate appreciative and developmental feedback, you can ensure your organization is a place where employees feel motivated, supported, and able to grow. And this is exactly the type of workplace we desperately need in the U.S. and around the world. View the full article

Three weeks into her new role as VP of operations, “Maria” got an 11:47 p.m. Slack from her COO: “Where are we on the Q3 supply chain numbers?” She had sent him those numbers that morning. She sent them again. By 6 a.m., Maria’s boss had changed the entire project scope based on a board conversation she didn’t know had happened. By noon, he’d cc’d the CEO on a complaint about “delays”—delays caused by his own shifting priorities. Maria didn’t push back: She absorbed the burden. She reframed his abrupt messages before forwarding them to her team. She stayed late recalculating projections to match his latest mandate. She deflected her team’s frustration with careful explanations about “strategic pivots.” The work was exhausting, and it was invisible. Her team saw a supportive leader. Her boss saw smooth execution. No one saw the toll. Many managers find themselves in this position: absorbing friction from above while protecting those below. Gallup research finds that managers account for at least 70% of changes in employee engagement, yet many of those same managers report feeling crushed by contradictory demands from their own bosses. McKinsey research confirms that the quality of the relationship with a direct manager is the single most important factor in employee satisfaction. The message is clear: The friction you absorb doesn’t just affect you. It reverberates through everyone below you. In my executive and team coaching work with senior leaders, I see this pattern repeatedly: A C-suite leader creates destructive organizational friction through a chaotic style, lack of personal accountability, and unchecked reactivity. And managers are left to absorb it. It’s an unsustainable dynamic—but one managers can counteract. Here are four strategies for navigating friction without burning out or compromising your effectiveness. 1. Name the Friction, Then Decide What’s Worth Absorbing The first step is getting honest about which type of friction you’re dealing with. Constructive friction—a boss who raises the bar, questions your logic, or forces you to confront underperformance—is uncomfortable but valuable. This is what I call healthy friction. If your boss is pushing you to eliminate inefficiency or rethink a flawed process, that’s worth leaning into, not absorbing. Destructive friction is different. It’s energy lost to misalignment, rework, and emotional labor. Stanford management professor Bob Sutton identifies several types of destructive friction: unnecessary complexity that adds steps without adding value, ambiguity when goals keep shifting, emotional volatility that forces you to manage up constantly, and micromanagement that erodes autonomy. Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers, calls leaders who create destructive friction “diminishers.” They drain capability through behaviors like jumping in with answers or involving themselves in every decision. To separate signal from noise, seek to understand whether this unnecessary interference is actually your boss managing real constraints you don’t see. A sudden pivot might reflect CEO pressure. Increased scrutiny might follow a compliance issue. Research on the hidden realities of leadership shows that senior leaders frequently operate under pressures that are invisible to their teams. Use these criteria to assess the situation: Comprehension: Have you had a candid, vulnerable conversation with your boss to understand the origin of the friction? What specific behaviors create it? Duration: Is this temporary or chronic? You can absorb friction during a crisis. You can’t sustain it indefinitely. Impact on outcomes: What is your role in creating or enabling the behavior? Does absorbing the friction improve results or just create an illusion of progress? Cost to you and your team: What does it cost in time, energy, and team morale? Are you protecting your team or just delaying the impact? If talented people are leaving, you’re not absorbing effectively. “Marcus,” chief of staff at a healthcare startup, learned this the hard way: “I spent three months resenting my CEO’s constant questions about our hiring pipeline. I thought he was micromanaging. Then I learned we were six weeks from running out of runway, and he was trying to slow spending without panicking the team. I wish I’d asked, ‘What are you seeing that I’m not?’ sooner.” 2. Create Systems That Reduce Friction Once you’ve diagnosed the friction, build systems to reduce it—systems that don’t require you to be the constant intermediary. The instinct is to work harder, absorb more, and hope conditions improve. But research consistently shows that individual effort cannot compensate for structural dysfunction. A Deloitte study finds that when productivity tools and ways of working lack clarity, they create more work rather than less. And Gallup’s engagement research shows that only 46% of employees clearly understand what is expected of them, a 10-point drop from 2020. When the system around you generates confusion, the solution is not to absorb faster. It’s to redesign the system. Four structural changes can reduce your role as the constant go-between. Establish clear decision rights. Much friction comes from unclear ownership. When roles blur, decisions stall and accountability weakens. Bain’s RAPID framework (recommend, agree, perform, input, decide) can help. When Maria finally had this conversation with her boss, they discovered he wasn’t trying to micromanage. He genuinely didn’t know she had authority to approve vendor contracts under $500K. Create predictable communication. Random check-ins create constant interruption. Your operating rhythm is a signal of how you lead—it sets the tempo for decision-making, collaboration, and accountability. One director of product management I coached solved her boss’s “just checking in” problem by instituting a Friday afternoon dashboard: three metrics, three decisions pending, three risks. “He stopped asking because he knew he’d get answers Friday,” she said. Document and share context. When priorities shift, capture the change and its rationale. A simple decision log helps everyone see how you got here and why yesterday’s plan changed. Build buffers into your processes. If your boss routinely changes direction, don’t commit your team to immovable deadlines. Build in review points. Use phased rollouts. 3. Have the Conversation Sometimes systems aren’t enough. You need to name the pattern directly. Your boss likely doesn’t see themselves as creating friction; they see themselves as ensuring quality or responding to pressure from above. Research on managing up suggests framing it as a shared problem, not an accusation. Try the following scripts: Frame it as shared: “I want to make sure I’m giving you what you need without overwhelming the team. Can we talk about how decisions are flowing right now?” Come with data: “We’ve reprioritized three times this month, which has added about 40 hours of rework. I want to understand what’s driving these changes so we can build more flexibility into the plan.” Focus on impact, not intent: “When requests come in after 9 p.m., the team feels like they need to respond immediately, which is creating burnout. Can we establish core hours for urgent communication?” Propose experiments: “What if we tried a two-week sprint where priorities stay locked unless something is genuinely on fire?” “Andrea,” a senior director at a media company, used this approach when her boss’s conflict-avoidant style created constant mixed messages. “I told him, ‘I think we both want the same thing: happy clients and a sustainable pace. Right now, we’re getting requests from three stakeholders who think they are all top priority. Can you help me understand how to sequence these?’ He didn’t love the conversation, but he did start having clearer conversations with stakeholders.” 4. Know When to Stop Absorbing, And Protect Your Own Leadership Sometimes friction stops being fuel and becomes rot. Drawing on insights from organizational psychologists like Adam Grant, you can watch for three warning signs that conflict has crossed into dysfunction: It’s chronic rather than tied to specific crises, it’s driven by ego or insecurity instead of real business concerns, and it’s starting to show up in exit interviews and the loss of your strongest people. At that point, continuing to quietly absorb the damage is not noble leadership. It’s enabling a toxic culture. You have three options: Escalate. Share what you’re experiencing with a skip-level leader or HR business partner—not as gossip, but as a risk flag. “We’ve lost three senior people in six months, and the exit interviews all mention the same concerns about unclear priorities.” Set boundaries. Let some friction flow downward or upward. If your boss demands weekend work for nonemergencies, say no. If they change priorities daily, push back: “I need three business days to reallocate resources. If it’s truly urgent, tell me what we’re deprioritizing.” Leave. If the friction is chronic, you’ve tried to address it, and nothing changes, staying may be costing more than it’s worth. Make an exit plan. “James,” former VP of Sales at a SaaS company, eventually chose to leave. “After two years, I realized this is the job. And the job was making me someone I didn’t want to be: short-tempered with my team, anxious on Sunday nights, too tired to be present at home. Leaving felt like giving up. Six months later, I can see it was the smartest thing I did.” The bigger risk, though, is what happens if you stay and don’t change course. Deloitte’s research on leadership sustainability shows that burned-out leaders transmit their stress directly to their teams, creating a cascade that damages performance at every level. You become reactive instead of strategic. You model anxiety instead of steadiness. You teach your team that success means managing up rather than delivering value. The Fallout from Friction With time, Maria also realized this. “I thought I was being a good boss by shielding my team. But I was teaching them that last-minute fire drills were normal. When one of my best people resigned, she said, ‘I just want to work somewhere that feels calmer.’ I wasn’t absorbing the friction. I was transmitting it.” So as you navigate friction from above, ask yourself regularly: What kind of leader am I becoming? What norms am I creating? What am I teaching my team about how work should feel? Being a buffer matters. But being a buffer shouldn’t require you to lose yourself in the process. View the full article

The President administration sends no senior officials to fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasionView the full article

Last year was full of talk about tariffs. Are they coming up or going down? On which products and countries? How could businesses handle all the uncertainty? But while there was a lot of discussion of these fees, paid on imported goods and raw materials, there wasn’t actually that much evidence of their price impact at stores. According to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, that’s about to change. Tariffs had a modest impact on prices in 2025 Tariffs are a tax on businesses, which means you’d expect that if tariffs go up, so do prices. But the effect of President The President’s ever-changing but always aggressive tariff policies didn’t cause the huge price hikes and widespread economic damage many feared in 2025. Economists offer several likely explanations. One is all the exceptions and carve-outs the government made after announcing the tariffs. What The President threatens and what ends up being charged are often very different. “The actual tariffs are much lower than what were announced, and that is one of the reasons why the effects have not been as big as feared,” Harvard economist Gita Gopinath told The New York Times. Another big reason is timing. The President hasn’t been shy about his love of tariffs. That means many people got ahead of the new taxes by stockpiling goods before they came into effect. “Consumers and business time very-short-run purchases to try to minimize tariffs,” according to the Budget Lab at Yale University. “This can reduce the amount of imports of higher-tariffed goods and countries for a time.” But Jassy says this tactic to keep prices down may have reached its expiration date. Amazon’s CEO warns of big pricing changes to come Jassy spoke to CNBC’s Becky Quick at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and said that so far, Amazon has seen “some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices, some of the items.” He continued: “And you see some sellers are deciding that they’re passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices, some are deciding that they’ll absorb it to drive demand, and some are doing something in between.” But the days of these modest impacts may soon be over. “I think you’re starting to see more of that impact,” he continued. Many sellers simply don’t have much of a choice but to pass on the cost of tariffs. “At a certain point—because retail is, as you know, a mid-single digit operating margin business—if people’s costs go up by 10%, there aren’t a lot of places to absorb it,” the Amazon CEO said. “You don’t have endless options.” No white knight is riding to consumers’ rescue No matter what you might hear coming out of the White House, realistically, those options do not somehow magically include getting foreign suppliers to shoulder the cost of tariffs. A new study by the Kiel Institute in Germany found that a whopping 96% of the costs of tariffs are passed on to U.S. importers and consumers. Nor can smaller businesses that are already squeezed keep shielding consumers indefinitely. When large retailers raised prices, smaller firms said, “we’re going to try to not raise prices, giving them a competitive edge,” Kyle Peacock, founder of Peacock Tariff Consulting, explained to Harvard’s Institute for Business in Global Society. But, he continued, “they can only absorb it for so long.” Jassy’s comments suggest that the breaking point for many sellers is fast approaching. The Amazon CEO is far from the only business luminary issuing such warnings. On a recent investor call, Nike cautioned tariffs could add about $1 billion in costs during its 2026 fiscal year. Mattel warned it may need to raise prices on toys, while Walmart likewise said it may be forced into “selective” price increases on imported goods. Add to these existing pressures The President’s latest threats to slap further tariffs on European countries if they fail to go along with his weird neo-colonialist demand that they hand over Greenland, and the picture looks worrying. Economists fret Amazon’s CEO is right The Peterson Institute for International Economics worries all this could spell higher—rather than lower—inflation this year. “The pass-through of tariffs to consumer prices has been modest to date, suggesting U.S. importers have been absorbing the bulk of the tariff changes. That will change in the first half of 2026,” Lazard CEO Peter Orszag and PIIE president Adam Posen predicted. “The many reasons for the lagged pass-through include businesses pricing based on when their inventories arrived (and have since run out) and concerns around being seen as raising prices too rapidly (so they are instead gradually increasing them). This won’t last,” they continued. Of course, who knows what The President might do in the end. His track record has, to put it mildly, been inconsistent and changeable. But if he doesn’t chicken out and change course, many economists clearly fear Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is right. Hard-pressed U.S. consumers are hoping life gets more affordable in 2026. They’re likely to face the opposite. —Jessica Stillman This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy. View the full article

A year ago at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance accused Europe of using “ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” to justify restricting dissent, and warned that its speech rules posed a greater threat to democracy than Russia or China. Now the The President administration is acting on that belief. Earlier this month, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed this year’s conference (in a far more conciliatory tone), the U.S. government launched Freedom.gov. For now it’s just a landing page, but it is reportedly planned as a way for Europeans to duck content bans, including restrictions on hate speech and terrorist propaganda. Officials have discussed incorporating a built-in virtual private network (VPN) function that would make users’ internet traffic appear to originate in the U.S., effectively routing around European content restrictions. The project is overseen by Sarah Rogers, under secretary for public diplomacy; Edward Coristine, a former member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is reportedly working on the site’s design. The backdrop is escalating tension over tech regulation. European and U.K. authorities have tightened enforcement on social media platforms, recently opening investigations into X and its AI chatbot Grok over alleged rule-breaking and harassment. These moves have angered The President administration officials, who see them as attempts to criminalize American companies and suppress speech. “Proponents might argue that it is merely the modern-day version of Radio Free Europe, which broadcast unfiltered news across the Iron Curtain,” says Anupam Chander, an expert on global tech regulation at Georgetown Law. That’s likely how the The President administration sees it: Officials have framed Freedom.gov as a champion of “digital freedom” and emphasized the State Department’s long-standing support for “the proliferation of privacy and censorship-circumvention technologies like VPNs.” But others see it as interference. “Democratic countries are likely to see the American portal as improper interference with domestic laws,” says Chander, who believes “countries might respond to the American ‘freedom’ portal by ordering their internet providers to block it.” Paul Bernal, a professor of information technology law at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, expects the EU would simply block the site. Under laws like the Digital Services Act, Europe can bar platforms that attempt to evade its rules. “I can’t see how the Americans are going to stop them effectively blocking access,” he says. “Web-blocking capabilities exist. We do it for child sex abuse material. We do it for copyright.” The result could become “a kind of cat-and-mouse thing where the U.S. puts something up the EU blocks, then the U.S. puts it up somewhere else, and so on.” Bernal also rejects the administration’s framing. “There is no question to anyone who knows about free speech that Donald The President’s regime are very much anti-free speech,” he says. “They’re closing down their enemies wherever they can, they’re taking over platforms like TikTok and TV stations like CBS in order to ensure they toe the line over political things.” In his view, the dispute is “fundamentally about geopolitics rather than about freedom of speech”—and about Europe trying to limit the influence of American tech companies on its politics. View the full article

Roger Sauerhaft thought he had done everything right. The 38-year-old PR consultant had been running his solo practice in New York since 2021, paying $1,189 a month for what seemed like good health insurance through his state’s individual marketplace. In late 2023, he developed a medical issue that required a specialist, and started calling doctors’ offices—only to be turned away again and again. The closest in-network specialist was an hour away in Long Island. One medical administrator was honest with him: His plan’s network was too restrictive. He needed broader coverage—but that wasn’t available to him. “When you’re a solopreneur, your health is your business,” Sauerhaft says. “When you have a problem, you need to get it fixed really quickly. That requires access.” Approximately 16.5 million Americans were self-employed as of January 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. MBO Partners’ 2025 annual survey puts the number at 72.9 million, counting not just full-time self-employed workers but also part-time and occasional independent earners. For solopreneurs and small-business owners across the U.S., individual marketplace plans are predominantly HMOs, or health maintenance organizations, which have narrow networks and require referrals to see specialists. PPOs, or preferred provider organizations with broader access, are available on marketplaces in only a handful of states or through employer-sponsored plans. Most solopreneurs across the U.S. get their insurance from Affordable Care Act marketplaces. Premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs can eat up a significant portion of their income, and many plans restrict access to care through narrow provider networks. This gap leaves many paying high prices for plans that don’t meet their needs, forcing them to choose between their health and their business—or find creative work-arounds to access better coverage. Making it work For Sauerhaft, HMOs were the only plans available on his state’s ACA marketplace, complicating his search for a nearby specialist. He looked at options from the Freelancers Union, but couldn’t find anything better and began questioning the future viability of his business. “I thought about folding the business at that point,” he says. Instead, he expedited his wedding by a few months so he could join his fiancée’s employer PPO plan. He had gone independent to chart his own path, but the system “had basically taken it away from me,” he says. Liang Zhao, 38, was able to set up her own independent PR practice in 2019, in part because she had access to health coverage through her husband’s employer. But in September 2025, her husband was laid off. Their premiums for a family of three jumped from around $700 to $3,000 per month under COBRA (the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, a federal law that ensures individuals and their families are able to maintain access to healthcare coverage during certain life events, such as job loss). “We’re literally one layoff away from an entire family losing coverage,” Zhao says. “Historically, this country has set up a system where health insurance has been distributed through employers, so the whole system benefits larger employers who are able to negotiate better rates for their employees.” Solopreneurs who can’t rely on a spouse’s coverage have to get more creative. For Bob Christie, an independent consultant based in New York who travels across the country for his work, having nationwide coverage is a priority—but the state marketplace offers plans that work only in New York, or other states in an emergency. A broker connected Christie with Iron Health Benefits Partners, a Nebraska-based company that works with independent contractors. He technically became their employee—filling out a monthly questionnaire for token pay—which gave him access to their Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska group plan with nationwide PPO coverage. His premium: $1,321 a month. Barriers to growth When it’s time to expand, health insurance can be a formidable obstacle. Alvin Carlos, 34, a financial planner in Washington, D.C., built his solo practice into a five-person firm and knew he needed to offer coverage to attract and retain talent. But when he explored group plans for his five employees across five states, a broker’s quote came to $8,010 a month—more expensive than individual coverage. His solution was to turn to a Health Reimbursement Arrangement, or HRA. Carlos reimburses employees $300 to $1,000 monthly depending on whether they’re single or have a family, covering premiums, copays, and deductibles. HRAs are a tax-advantaged benefit that gives employees flexibility to choose their own plans. He’s increased the reimbursement once in 2026 due to premium spikes. “Our health insurance system is broken,” Carlos says. “It is so expensive and it is so complicated.” Navigating the rules Sole proprietors and companies with few employees have to wade through a patchwork of state-specific rules, shifting eligibility standards, and premiums that keep going up. “They’re in a very precarious position right now,” says Jesse McDonald, a health insurance broker based in Milford, Connecticut. “U.S. healthcare costs keep escalating, so the insurance that’s covering it gradually escalates. It’s been a problem that’s been getting worse and worse.” McDonald said enhanced premium tax credits during the pandemic briefly eased the burden for many independent workers, lowering monthly premiums and expanding eligibility. But those enhanced subsidies expired at the end of 2025. Jennifer Chumbley Hogue, a Dallas-based health insurance broker, says 22% of her clients qualified for subsidies in 2025. Of those clients, about half went without coverage in 2026 after losing that support. Still, she cautions solopreneurs not to assume they’re out of options, recommending they consult brokers with extensive knowledge of their local market and rules. Fixing the access gap For Sauerhaft, the barrier isn’t cost but breadth of coverage. “Even if I had to pay $2,000 a month for a PPO, I would have done it,” he says. “It wasn’t about affordability—it was about getting access.” He believes his state’s marketplace could better serve solopreneurs if it offered more middle-ground options between restrictive HMOs and PPOs—or allowed people to pay more for greater provider choice. Sauerhaft, whose own coverage crisis nearly derailed his business, sees the pain as a catalyst for change. “The more people who get caught in this broken system, the more awareness there will be, and hopefully pressure to fix it,” he says. “I am heartened by the fact that things are already much better today than they were 20 years ago, but progress can be slow.” View the full article

At a park near Canberra, Australia, a series of small white pyramid-shaped boxes are part of a new experiment: Can “frog saunas” help bring back an endangered species? The green and golden bell frog—an iconic Australian amphibian with a call that sounds like a cross between a power tool and a quacking duck—is already extinct in the area. Like other frog species around the world, it was a victim of a deadly fungus called chytrid that has been killing amphibians for decades. But scientists are reintroducing the vibrant frog with the hope that a design intervention can help it survive. The “sauna” is a simple design, with bricks inside a plastic enclosure that heats up in the sun. The bell frog loves sitting in the heat—and conveniently the high temperatures kill the fungus. “The technology we’re using is extremely low tech,” said Simon Clulow, a conservation ecology professor at the University of Canberra leading the research. “That’s good because everything we do in science and conservation, ideally, we want to be accessible, affordable, and scalable.” A new intervention backed by years of research Clulow started thinking about the idea as a doctoral student, when he noticed that frogs in a university enclosure liked to sit in the holes inside bricks, probably because they could hide away and feel warmer. At the same time, he knew that the chytrid fungus was most dangerous when frogs got cold. “That led to this idea: Could you create essentially pockets of disease refuge by creating little hot spots in the environment?” he said. Along with other researchers, he initially tested bricks that were painted black, but they didn’t get quite warm enough, so the small plastic greenhouse was added to help keep the bricks hotter. Research has shown that this type of environment makes a difference. “We know for sure if we hold the frogs in a temperature-controlled cabinet at those sorts of temperatures for even just a couple of days, it usually leads to complete clearance [of the fungus],” Clulow said. “But even just short-term spikes clearly have beneficial effects.” The green and golden bell frog used to be common on Australia’s eastern seaboard. “It was widespread in every farm, in everyone’s ponds, and it was just one of those frogs probably nobody took much notice of because it was absolutely everywhere,” Clulow said. Universities often went out to collect the frogs for use in biology classes. Then, in the 1980s, the fungus devastated the population, along with other species of frogs. Only a few isolated pockets of the green and golden bell frogs were left on the coast. The places where the frogs survived were a little warmer in the winter, with water that was slightly more saline. That led to the second part of the intervention in the new study—tiny ponds with slightly saltier water, which research has shown also kills the fungus without harming the frogs. (The salinity is only about two or three parts per thousand, not enough to taste salty if you drank the water.) The scientists call the small saline ponds spas, and they’re set up next to the saunas. The new experiment is the largest of its kind. The research team installed 15 experimental wetlands sprawling over hundreds of square miles in Australia’s Capital Territory, with some areas acting as a control to see how well the interventions work. They’ve released around 450 frogs so far this year; the first generation was raised in captivity and given the extra boost of a vaccine against chytrid. The next generation, born in the wild, will rely on the saunas and spas to treat the fungus. The real-world test When we talked, Clulow had been up until 3 a.m. the previous night tracking the newly released frogs. They’re not hard to spot. “They have a really fantastic, obvious call, a little bit like a motorbike revving up,” he said, demonstrating the sound. The frogs have microchips so they can be tracked. So far, roughly a month after the first frogs were released, the population is thriving. The first big test for the project will be in the upcoming Australian winter (during the North American summer), and then the following winter when the new generation of frogs will need to survive. The outside temperature can dip to negative 5 degrees Celsius, or 23 degrees Fahrenheit. Inside the tiny saunas, it can stay a toasty 77 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit. The research team still needs to prove that the interventions work as well in the wild as they did in the lab, but the solution could potentially be replicated around the world. At least 90 species of frogs have gone extinct because of the fungus; hundreds of others are at risk. View the full article

Kremlin steps up curbs against messaging app and promotes a state-backed rivalView the full article