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United Wholesale Mortgage originated $32.4 billion, up 17% year-over-year and its best first quarter since 2022, helped by refinance volume of $10.6 billion. View the full article

US president says rebel group has agreed to halt its attacks on regional shippingView the full article

A WordPress bug is causing fatal errors on WooCommerce sites, resulting in widespread outages. The post WordPress WooCommerce Bug Causing Sites To Crash appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

A reader writes: I’m a new-ish manager in a small company. I have two direct reports. One is professional and a joy to work with. The other is a recent hire (he’s been here two months) who is right out of college, Jake. In our most recent weekly one-on-one, Jake told me that he is “disappointed in the role” and the work is “not as interesting as he hoped.” I can understand how someone could find much of the work tedious. There’s a significant amount of data entry in the position. But I never hid this. I was clear with every candidate I interviewed that there would be tedious tasks and screened for people who seemed able to figure out strategies for handling that tedium. I’m wondering where to go from here. Jake was not able to give me any clear idea about what he wants the role to be instead, and even if he could, I hired him for the job he’s doing now. Part of me also feels like he hasn’t given this a fair shake. He’s only been here two months! A lot of those tedious tasks will start taking up less of his time as he gets better at them so he can expand other parts of the role, and I have told him that this is what I expect. And lastly, I’m not sure how much investment I want to put into someone who has expressed such disinterest so early. He has also had a couple of attitude problems that I have been addressing (he can come across as entitled and arrogant, which is not a good look for the most junior member of our staff), but those by themselves, I felt were coachable. I answer this question over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here. The post my new employee is “disappointed” with his job appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

The Senate Banking Committee sent the nomination of Michelle Bowman to the full Senate in a party-line 13-11 vote. View the full article

China and others must think afresh as the US steps away from its role as balancer of last resortView the full article

Country has briefed diplomats and humanitarian officials on proposal to funnel supplies through little-known foundationView the full article

Improve your conversion rate. By Martin Bissett Passport to Partnership Go PRO for members-only access to more Martin Bissett. View the full article

Improve your conversion rate. By Martin Bissett Passport to Partnership Go PRO for members-only access to more Martin Bissett. View the full article

Bloc’s latest package of measures targets more than 20 businesses it accuses of helping Moscow evade restrictionsView the full article

Big Four accounting firm PwC is laying off about 1,500 employees in the United States, a company spokesperson told Reuters on Monday. The workforce reduction equates to approximately 2% of our U.S. firm, the spokesperson said. PwC employs more than 75,000 people in the United States. “This was a difficult decision, and we made it with care, thoughtfulness, and a deep awareness of its impact on our people, appreciating that historically low levels of attrition over consecutive years have made it necessary to take this step”, PwC said in a statement. Last year, Reuters had reported that PwC was considering slashing up to half its financial services auditing staff in China, as a regulatory investigation and an exodus of clients darken business prospects. PwC last month shut operations in nine Sub-Saharan African countries following a strategic review. KPMG, PwC, EY and Deloitte make up the Big Four accounting firms. In November last year, Reuters had reported that KPMG would lay off less than 4%, or about 330 people, of its audit workforce in the United States. —Jaiveer Shekhawat, Reuters View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. When I wrote about adding baking soda to ground beef for better browning and moisture retention, the readership was starkly divided—those who think this chemical reaction is pure snake oil, and those who want to know immediately how to apply this technique to hamburgers. Well, for those of you mapping out your Memorial Day weekend grill game, saddle up. This very real chemical reaction is indeed perfectly suited to improving your summer burgers. How does baking soda make meat tender? Baking soda reacts with the proteins in meats, whether ground or not, preventing them from winding up as tightly as they normally would when cooking. This is a technique that’s been around for ages in Chinese cooking, called velveting. You’ve probably seen steak, chicken, bacon, and hamburgers that haven’t been treated with baking soda shrink dramatically after cooking. The protein network starts to squeeze and clench up as it heats, expelling the meat's natural juices. When you bite into it, the meat feels rubbery and dry because the proteins are wound tight and the juices have been left behind in the pan or down in the charcoal pit. Baking soda-treated meats have looser protein networks that maintain a comparatively greater amount of natural juices. To the palate, this feels like a tender, juicy, more flavorful hamburger patty with a crispy brown exterior. Oh about that: The browning gets better too. How does baking soda improve browning?It turns out that the Maillard reaction (the attractive and flavorful browning that happens to foods when they cook at around 300°F) happens faster in a more alkaline environment. A sprinkle of baking soda is enough to increase the PH and cause more pronounced browning to occur faster, whether it's in banana waffles or with meat. This literally creates new flavors in your food, thus your burger will actually be more flavorful by incorporating a pinch of this basic pantry item. To demonstrate, I split up a pound of 93% lean ground beef and added a half teaspoon of baking soda to one half of the meat. I shaped the meat into patties and griddled up both types of burgers in a light spritz of canola oil to ensure good contact with the heat. I cooked each burger to reach 140°F to 145°F degrees for medium doneness. You can see in the picture, it’s pretty easy to tell which one was treated with baking soda. The baking soda treated burger on the right has better browning and less shrinkage occurred. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann How to make better burgers with baking sodaThis small amount of baking soda leaves no off flavors behind in your burger, and it reduces moisture loss, which keeps the shrinking to a minimum (you won’t end up with tiny burgers on huge buns). The result is tender meat, and you’ll be rewarded with a lovely brown crust. Here’s how I do it. 1. Season the ground meatI add the ground burger meat to a large bowl and season it with salt. Go ahead and add any other seasonings you like. Then dust baking soda over the surface of the meat. For every eight ounces (half-pound) of ground meat, I used a half-teaspoon of baking soda. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann 2. Mix it thoroughlyThen you need to get your hands dirty. I’m sure you could do this with a spoon but I find it much quicker to do it with my hands. I find that the seasoning gets more thoroughly distributed this way too. If you want to keep your hands clean, don some vinyl food-safe gloves. Squeeze and toss the meat in the bowl until it’s well mixed. 3. Shape the patties and cookForm the patties with your hands and have them ready on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper, or a plate for a small batch. Let them rest in the fridge while you get the pan or the grill ready. Cook as usual. I recommend testing for doneness with a meat thermometer rather than by color. With the accelerated browning of the exterior, you don’t want to remove the burger too soon. I use the Thermapen One and I love it. Try to insert the probe end at a side angle toward the center as much as possible. You want a reading for the center, not to poke through to the other side. Once done, let your burgers rest for a few minutes off the heat—which I think happens naturally as you plate them and dress them with fixin’s—and enjoy the first bite of summer grill season. View the full article

Cisco is the latest company to announce a quantum breakthrough. On Tuesday, the company said it has developed a prototype entanglement source chip that has the potential to cut the timeline for practical quantum computing by as much as a decade. The chip was developed in partnership with UC Santa Barbara and is novel in that it generates up to one million entangled photon pairs per second, and does so at room temperature, saving considerable resources. Additionally, Cisco is also announcing the opening of Cisco Quantum Labs, which will be the company’s dedicated quantum research hub in Santa Monica, California. The chip itself was developed at Cisco’s “Outshift” incubator, where Viljoy Pandey, senior vice president at Outshift by Cisco, says the company works on projects that are “slightly out of the comfort zone.” “We’re a networking company,” says Pandey. “We’re looking at quantum networking and quantum security.” “Our thesis is pretty straightforward: To make [quantum computing] practical, you need to scale it out,” he adds. “You need a network, and to have a quantum network, you need a quantum entanglement chip. That’s the first building block.” In practice, the chip will allow quantum computers to be networked together—similar to existing networks for classical computers—enabling distributed quantum computing. ‘There’s going to be a ChatGPT moment for quantum’ While other companies are focused on building quantum computers themselves, Cisco is working on the infrastructure to make quantum computing actually work—and it’s attempting to get ahead of things by developing the network and security frameworks while large-scale quantum demand is still likely years away. Moreover, while some experts have mused that quantum computing could be as far as 20 years down the road, Pandey says that Cisco’s breakthrough likely cuts that timeline by “between five and 10 years.” Building the chip took between three and four years, and now Cisco is looking at moving it into production, says Reza Nejabati, head of Quantum Research and Quantum Labs at Outshift by Cisco. “We’re working toward more commercial fabrication,” he says. “There’s a whole bunch of hardware and software technology that we’re bringing up. The quantum proof of concept is happening.” As for what’s next, Pandey says Cisco will work on software to help build out a quantum network and continue work on a quantum roadmap. “There’s going to be a ChatGPT moment for quantum,” he says. “We need to start putting the fundamental building blocks together to prepare.” View the full article

Hallucinations have always been an issue for generative AI models: The same structure that enables them to be creative and produce text and images also makes them prone to making stuff up. And the hallucination problem isn't getting better as AI models progress—in fact, it's getting worse. In a new technical report from OpenAI (via The New York Times), the company details how its latest o3 and o4-mini models hallucinate 51 percent and 79 percent, respectively, on an AI benchmark known as SimpleQA. For the earlier o1 model, the SimpleQA hallucination rate stands at 44 percent. Those are surprisingly high figures, and heading in the wrong direction. These models are known as reasoning models because they think through their answers and deliver them more slowly. Clearly, based on OpenAI's own testing, this mulling over of responses is leaving more room for mistakes and inaccuracies to be introduced. False facts are by no means limited to OpenAI and ChatGPT. For example, it didn't take me long when testing Google's AI Overview search feature to get it to make a mistake, and AI's inability to properly pull out information from the web has been well-documented. Recently, a support bot for AI coding app Cursor announced a policy change that hadn't actually been made. But you won't find many mentions of these hallucinations in the announcements AI companies make about their latest and greatest products. Together with energy use and copyright infringement, hallucinations are something that the big names in AI would rather not talk about. Anecdotally, I haven't noticed too many inaccuracies when using AI search and bots—the error rate is certainly nowhere near 79 percent, though mistakes are made. However, it looks like this is a problem that might never go away, particularly as the teams working on these AI models don't fully understand why hallucinations happen. In tests run by AI platform developer Vectera, the results are much better, though not perfect: Here, many models are showing hallucination rates of one to three percent. OpenAI's o3 model stands at 6.8 percent, with the newer (and smaller) o4-mini at 4.6 percent. That's more in line with my experience interacting with these tools, but even a very low number of hallucinations can mean a big problem—especially as we transfer more and more tasks and responsibilities to these AI systems. Finding the causes of hallucinations ChatGPT knows not to put glue on pizza, at least. Credit: Lifehacker No one really knows how to fix hallucinations, or fully identify their causes: These models aren't built to follow rules set by their programmers, but to choose their own way of working and responding. Vectara chief executive Amr Awadallah told the New York Times that AI models will "always hallucinate," and that these problems will "never go away." University of Washington professor Hannaneh Hajishirzi, who is working on ways to reverse engineer answers from AI, told the NYT that "we still don't know how these models work exactly." Just like troubleshooting a problem with your car or your PC, you need to know what's gone wrong to do something about it. According to researcher Neil Chowdhury, from AI analysis lab Transluce, the way reasoning models are built may be making the problem worse. "Our hypothesis is that the kind of reinforcement learning used for o-series models may amplify issues that are usually mitigated (but not fully erased) by standard post-training pipelines," he told TechCrunch. In OpenAI's own performance report, meanwhile, the issue of "less world knowledge" is mentioned, while it's also noted that the o3 model tends to make more claims than its predecessor—which then leads to more hallucinations. Ultimately, though, "more research is needed to understand the cause of these results," according to OpenAI. And there are plenty of people undertaking that research. For example, Oxford University academics have published a method for detecting the probability of hallucinations by measuring the variation between multiple AI outputs. However, this costs more in terms of time and processing power, and doesn't really solve the issue of hallucinations—it just tells you when they're more likely. While letting AI models check their facts on the web can help in certain situations, they're not particularly good at this either. They lack (and will never have) simple human common sense that says glue shouldn't be put on a pizza or that $410 for a Starbucks coffee is clearly a mistake. What's definite is that AI bots can't be trusted all of the time, despite their confident tone—whether they're giving you news summaries, legal advice, or interview transcripts. That's important to remember as these AI models show up more and more in our personal and work lives, and it's a good idea to limit AI to use cases where hallucinations matter less. Disclosure: Lifehacker’s parent company, Ziff Davis, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems. View the full article

From answering complex queries to generating creative content, large language models (LLMs) are designed to deliver “zero-click” results – concise, direct answers that eliminate the need for further research. This shift raises a critical question: if users no longer need to visit a website to get the information they want, what happens to web traffic? While the broader implications for the future of websites are a conversation for another day, there’s a more immediate and tactical issue worth examining – links. Specifically: What kind of links are LLMs providing, and how can brands generate traffic from them? The critical role of links in LLM outputs Links in LLM results function as citations, giving users a way to verify the information presented and explore the original source material. This is especially important for maintaining accuracy and reliability, particularly in sensitive or complex topics. For brands, these citation links are the only viable path to generating inbound traffic from LLMs. The good news: Referral traffic from LLMs is up nearly 400%. If LLMs are driving significantly more traffic, then the nature of the links they provide becomes even more important. What the data tells us: Branded vs. third-party links I analyzed hundreds of prompts and categorized the resulting links into three buckets: The brand’s official domain. Third-party domains. Third-party domains that mention the brand name. The data revealed that only 9% of links pointed to the actual branded domain. This presents a clear problem for brands – they’re being mentioned in responses, but not receiving the direct credit of a link to their own site. Dig deeper: Optimizing LLMs for B2B SEO: An overview Real-world examples: Retail and financial services Here are a couple of practical examples from the retail and financial services sectors. In the retail case, I was shopping for a raincoat for an upcoming golf trip to Bandon Dunes. The results for raincoats were decent, but only one link in Perplexity pointed to Patagonia. The rest directed me to third-party sites. The same pattern emerged with a financial services and insurance prompt. The brands mentioned were the major players you’d expect, but every link pointed to third-party lead aggregator sites – sites that typically resell traffic back to those same brands, monetizing it through arbitrage. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. Business email address Sign me up! Processing... See terms. Why LLMs prefer third-party sources From the LLM’s perspective, linking to a third-party site is a logical choice. It mirrors how people seek information in the real world. If you’re deciding which coat to buy, you don’t ask Patagonia for an unbiased opinion. LLMs appear to apply the same logic, favoring third-party sources that seem more “neutral.” This perceived neutrality is intended to provide a better user experience. However, nearly all of these third-party sites are monetizing traffic in some way, often by profiting from the brands they’re linking away from. Dig deeper: How to optimize your 2025 content strategy for AI-powered SERPs and LLMs What brands can do about it: A 3-step framework So what can brands do about it? Right now, there are three key actions to take: Step 1: Understand your results If you haven’t already, analyze how your brand appears across various LLMs and identify which links are being surfaced. You need a clear picture of the landscape before making any strategic decisions. Step 2: Audit the links Are the links coming from third-party sites? Do those sites have strong inbound link profiles or rely on user-generated content? These insights will shape how you approach Step 3. Step 3: Build a hypothesis LLMs are constantly evolving, and the inputs they rely on remain a bit opaque, so start testing. Based on the patterns you’ve observed, create control and test groups, then adjust your content and link strategies accordingly. Measure impact, revisit Step 1, and refine. Dig deeper: How to segment traffic from LLMs in GA4 Rethinking link equity in the AI era Links have long been the backbone of the web – and they now play a critical role in how LLMs are trained and how they deliver information. As these models become more deeply integrated into our daily lives, the importance of links will only grow. By understanding how links function within LLM outputs, brands can better navigate this shifting landscape and ensure they remain a credible, visible, and accessible part of the conversation. View the full article

A reader writes: In February, I changed companies and took on a manager position for the first time as the current manager was being promoted. While the exiting manager introduced me to the different people I would be supervising I was taken aback when “Benjamin” immediately assured me that despite looking like he was 21 or 22, he had worked there for years. If you had asked me to guess his age, I would have said 41 or 42. In the moment I was stunned, not sure if it was a joke, and just said I looked forward to working with him. Later the exiting manager told me that he’s been doing that for years. The first time at a lunch meeting with a potential client, Benjamin made a big deal of having his ID ready and despite the best efforts of the others would not let the conversation move on until he had thoroughly discussed how often he gets carded and how no one believes his actual age. During a presentation, he started by talking about how he was qualified despite his youthful appearance while everyone waited uncomfortably for him to finish and begin the actual presentation. The exiting manager claimed he talked with Benjamin several times, but Benjamin insisted it was necessary to inform people of his true age because everyone would assume he was younger and not treat him as an equal. Finally Benjamin threatened to complain to HR, who in turn told the manager to leave it alone. The manager said Ben’s usual work is good, so he just kept him away from in-person and Zoom meetings with people outside the team and hoped that when Ben turns 40 this year he’ll finally drop it. Since I officially took on the manager role, I’ve noticed Ben will try to bring up his supposed youthful looks at every opportunity. If someone went to their kid’s school, he insists that when he went to his nephew’s high school winter concert a few months ago he was mistaken for a student. If someone goes on vacation, he talks about how hard it is to get a rental car when everyone thinks he’s too young to be the person on the paperwork. You get the idea. He is good at what he does and always volunteers to help others, so I was willing to chalk this up as a harmless if annoying quirk. Recently, however, when Ben took a long lunch for a doctor’s appointment, I was walking by the break room and overheard his colleagues making fun of him. They were talking about how he would be in tomorrow with nothing but stories about how the doctor actually claimed he was aging backwards, how the nurses couldn’t believe his birthday, etc. in a frankly mean-spirited way. And the “jokes” and impressions of him got worse from there. I chose to eavesdrop and confirmed this isn’t a one-off conversation; Ben is the office joke. From what I heard, the consensus from the older workers was that he is competent but needs therapy, while the younger ones called him “delulu” and said he is the last person they would ask for help with anything considering how “obviously detached” from reality he is. I don’t want to have a culture of bullying, so I tried talking to a few of Ben’s colleagues privately. Their sentiments can be summed up as: we’re always nice to his face and if he stopped talking about it we would too, but his lies are so obvious and outrageous that people are going to inevitably talk. I’m not sure what to do. Do I frankly tell him how badly him professional reputation is being damaged and hope the whole team doesn’t implode? Do I pray this is a joke that has gone on too long and telling him so will get him to drop it? Do I try to stop people from talking about him? Do I ignore it and try to maintain the current status quo? Do I wait until I am more established to do something? Do I escalate it to someone? Do I find a picture of him when he was 20 and a picture of him now and tell him, “Corporate wants you to find the difference” a la The Office? What on earth. This fixation would be weird even if he did look a lot younger than he is, but it’s especially bizarre since he doesn’t (and in fact, you actually originally guessed his age to be slightly older than he actually is). Is there such a thing as age dysmorphia? If you didn’t know the history about Ben complaining to HR when the previous manager tried to address this, I’d say to definitely just talk to him. You wouldn’t need to frame it as “no one thinks you’re that young”; you could frame it as, “Talking so frequently about your age is becoming disruptive, derailing meetings, and distracting from the good work you otherwise do. None of us here are focused on age, and I expect we’ll treat everyone respectfully regardless of what age anyone guesses they are.” In other words, it’s not your job to correct whatever age dysmorphia he has going on, but it is your job to say this has become disruptive and he needs to stop making it such a focus. But since there’s already an HR history with it, you’d likely benefit from touching base with them first. Explain that it has affected Ben’s relationships with others and the way he’s perceived, and that you believe it’s a disservice to him not to let him know. Who knows, maybe you’ll find out that the previous manager addressed it differently and there’s more room for you to try the approach above. Or maybe HR will tell you to leave it alone. If you’re told to leave it alone, then I tend to agree with Ben’s colleague that people are inevitably going to talk. That said, you don’t need to accept mean-spiritedness on your team and you overhear anything like that again, you should shut it down with something along the lines of, “Regardless of what he’s doing, I want us to speak respectfully about each other.” People will still talk about it — because what he’s doing is really weird, and it’s not realistic to expect his coworkers not to be bursting to reality-check it with others — but you can at least make it clear that they need to be discreet about it / you’re going to call it out if you hear it. The post my employee keeps insisting he looks much younger than he is (but he doesn’t) appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

Google’s AI Overviews appeared in 13.14% of all U.S. desktop searches in March, up from 6.49% in January. That’s a 102% surge in just two months, according to a new analysis of more than 10 million keywords by Semrush and Datos. Why we care. Google’s introduction of AI Overviews was the biggest shift since the arrival of featured snippets a decade ago. Google is forever changed and is becoming more of an answer engine than a search engine. That’s because AI Overviews generate answers rather than pointing searchers to websites, which studies have shown is impacting traffic and CTRs for many types of websites. Triggers. AI Overviews tend to appear for low-risk, fact-based content. However, Google is slowly creeping into conversion territory, according to Semrush: 88.1% of triggered queries are informational (e.g., “what is BMR”). 8.69% are commercial queries – up from 6.28% in January. 1.43% are navigational queries – this is double from 0.74% in January. Industry trends. The top five industries where AI Overview grew since January were: Science: Up 22.3% Health: Up 20.3% People & Society: Up 18.8% Law & Government: Up 15.2% Travel: Up 14.3% On the other end, real-time information categories (e.g., News, Sports) were the least unaffected – perhaps suggesting that “Google is still wary of covering recent events with AI-generated content,” according to Semrush. For now anyway. Zero click. AI Overview queries show higher-than-average zero-click rates. However, when comparing the same keywords pre- and post-AI Overview, zero-click behavior actually declined slightly, according to Semrush. It fell to 36.2% in March from 38.1% in January. As Semrush put it: “That suggests AI Overviews do not automatically increase zero-click behavior.” The study. Semrush AI Overviews Study: What 2025 SEO Data Tells Us About Google’s Search Shift View the full article

Shares of Palantir Technologies slumped more than 13% on Tuesday, after quarterly results and a raised forecast failed to meet the high expectations of Wall Street investors, who had driven the stock price up significantly ahead of earnings. The data analytics company’s stock had gained 63% ahead of earnings this year, following a more than fourfold increase last year, fueled by AI-powered growth and government contracts. “We believe we have reached a point where respectable earnings beats and raised guidance aren’t enough to materially move the stock to the upside,” Morningstar analyst Mark Giarelli said. Palantir is set to lose more than $40 billion from its market valuation of $292.06 billion if losses hold. The Denver, Colorado-based company is a significant beneficiary of increased AI-driven demand and strong government contracts, with its AI software solutions being widely used across U.S. commercial sectors such as healthcare, energy, and automotive. Palantir’s total revenue grew 39% in the first quarter to $883.9 million, with U.S government revenue up 45% from a year earlier. Analysts had expected quarterly revenue of $862.8 million, according to data compiled by LSEG. Despite the seasonally light quarter, analysts noted strong demand for Palantir’s solutions, with its U.S. business driving results and securing the “lion’s share” of new customers in the quarter. “Despite recent uncertainty introduced from tariff announcements, Palantir continues to see underlying momentum in the business, landing a record number of $1M deals,” analysts at D.A. Davidson said. The company now expects full-year revenue to be between $3.89 billion and $3.90 billion, up from its earlier forecast of sales between $3.74 billion and $3.76 billion. At least 9 brokerages raised their price target for Palantir after earnings, bringing the PT median to $96.46. Palantir’s 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio is 202.07, compared with Snowflake’s 131, Salesforce’s 23.48 and Datadog’s 54.81. —Harshita Mary Varghese, Reuters View the full article

When then-former president Donald The President introduced a line of NFTs in December 2022, he was widely mocked for it. The digital trading cards alternately depicted The President as a muscle-bound superhero, a cowboy, and an astronaut—like some antiquated fever dream of inspirational masculinity. Coming so soon after a stinging midterm election, in which nearly as many The President-backed candidates in competitive races lost as those who won, it seemed like a desperate, cringy cash grab from a political supernova, mid-explosion. All the ridicule around The President’s stratospheric self-image, however, turned out to be a blip. Crucially, the NFTs sold out in less than 24 hours, raising an estimated $4.4 million, and like seemingly every obstacle in The President’s charmed political career, he incurred no lasting damage from the episode. Now that The President has resumed his presidency, his White House has apparently internalized this lesson. Its official X account now regularly blasts out similarly cringy portraiture, culminating over the weekend in AI-assisted images of The President as the next pope and a shredded Sith Lord from Star Wars. Government channels are reaching uncharted levels of embarrassment, having ratcheted up the 4chan factor both to emphasize The President’s world-beating dominance and communicate official policy. And they may just be getting warmed up. Ever since the inauguration in January, the White House’s X account has served up a cosmic gumbo of horn-tooting and antagonistic trolling. Reflecting the president’s relentless command of the attention economy, it often retweets various characters from the The President Cinematic Universe—JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Kristi Noem, for instance—in between provocative posts designed to reach maximum eyeballs. The account codified its house style for the latter early on with an exhibition of mirthful hostility. Viral entries in this genre included an “ASMR” video about deportations, a Valentine’s Day card about deportations, and a Studio Ghibli–style AI rendering of, well, more deportations. Last weekend, however, the account went into overdrive. Beyond the AI rendering of Pope The President, in the wake of Pope Francis’s recent death, and the May the Fourth–timed image of the president wielding a red lightsaber, there were similar posts celebrating the ostensible defunding of PBS and NPR, several posts mocking the groundswell of support for mistakenly imprisoned immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, some celebrating The President’s attacks on DEI, and a 46-hour video entitled “Lo-Fi MAGA Video to Relax/Study To,” slowly listing The President’s accomplishments next to a cartoon-The President writing from the Resolute Desk. (The use of the word “study” in that title suggests which age group this account is tweeting for.) While the tweet depicting The President as Pope Francis’s successor had the furthest reach, with 103 million views, and proved the most contentious, with Catholics responding in an uproar, the Star Wars post might be the most mortifying of the bunch. Why is The President more yoked than a Wrestlemania contestant, for instance? And why is his lightsaber incorrectly the color of the bad guys in the Star Wars universe? (Or correctly colored, as Luke Skywalker himself joked.) There’s a world of difference between Candidate The President selling worthless digital trinkets cosplaying various boyhood fantasies, and the White House tweeting such pap from the perch of the presidency. Now that these dispatches come from the communications apparatus of the U.S. government, they’re more than just embarrassing or cringe. Considering that, as some are pointing out online, all White House tweets are preserved in the Library of Congress, these goofy-cruel schoolyard taunts will now have a permanent echo in American history. Coming right on the heels of the Biden’s administration’s blissfully boring institutional tone, the The President 2 White House’s X account is giving rocket-ship-level whiplash. Social channels during Biden’s term were so comparatively tame, it was kind of a big, boundary-pushing deal in 2022 when some of Biden’s staffers and a Democratic Senator posted Dark Brandon memes, depicting Biden as a supernatural mastermind equipped with fiery eye-lasers. It was an even bigger deal when Biden himself posted the meme in a playful tweet following last year’s Super Bowl. What is happening on the official White House X account these days, however, would seem like an escalation even if it came straight after The President’s first term. Between 2017 and 2020, the president’s Twitter account was a constant source of brazen, combative, and often inflammatory posts, while the official accounts generally maintained a more traditional posture. With sanitized summaries of all the unfurling chaos, the official White House account acted as a normalizing Zamboni, cleaning up after The President’s headline-generating posts, to preserve the thin veneer of politics as usual. Now, the administration’s official communications channels are in sync with The President’s belligerent, reality-defiant brand, but with the juvenile posting sensibility of X owner Musk to boot. Any given day on X might find the White House’s account framing The President’s personal beliefs as those of the U.S. government—and woe betide those who share any opposing views. This unified front suggests a deep erosion within the U.S. government of any remaining distance between The President and Not The President. It’s a show of supremacy so clear, one couldn’t even miss it from a galaxy far, far away. It seems to be gaining a following, too. On Monday morning, Semafor released a report that the White House’s X account had garnered two billion impressions in The President’s first 100 days. For an administration that so clearly thrives on generating attention of any kind, it seems like a big win. The billions of impressions the White House’s The President-y posts keep racking up only underscores how all of this will look in posterity, though. There’s a good reason the Library of Congress has no wood engravings of a buff Abe Lincoln freeing America’s slaves with a turbo-musket—and it’s not because AI didn’t exist back then. View the full article

Maybe it's not fair to call a medical diagnosis "trendy," but more and more adults in the U.S. are seeking treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. ADHD, once regarded as a childhood disease, has made the transition to adulthood: About 15.5 million adults in the U.S. have been "officially" diagnosed with the disorder, and a growing group of others believe they have ADHD. A lot of them are wrong, but that's OK. Fed by a steady stream of online influencers and pop science, more and more people are self-diagnosing with ADHD, autism, depression, and other mental disorders. Very few of them are qualified to make these diagnoses. While it’s easy to scoff at someone self-diagnosing a complex mental illness after watching a TikTok, the rise in self-diagnosis, however flawed, points to an unmet need for mental health care. The double-edged sword of "awareness"A recent survey found that more than half of the members of Generation Z get health information from TikTok, and there are over four million videos tagged #ADHD on the platform. It's in the top 10 of health-related hashtags, and the top 100 videos on the subject have a collected view total of nearly half a billion. So ADHD awareness is high, particularly among young people, and that's a good thing. The disease is under-diagnosed and under-treated in adults in the U.S. ADHD has been linked to job loss, depression, substance abuse, and higher morbidity rates. Talking about the disorder online de-stigmatizes it, and may lead many to seek treatment they might not have previously. And treatment is effective. So it's great that more people are wondering if they have ADHD—but that awareness has a downside. A recent study of 100 of the most popular #ADHD videos (with a combined view-count of around half a billion) indicates that more than 50% of the claims made about the disorder in these videos are misleading. With each false claim in a TikTok video, the popular perception of what ADHD actually is strays further from a mental illness toward a trendy collection of quirks. Why you're (probably) wrong about your self-diagnosed ADHDYou can't tell if you have ADHD from an online quiz or from relating to someone else's video. Self-diagnosis lacks the objectivity and clinical context of a professional diagnosis, and even doctors can find it difficult to recognize ADHD. Among people who seek treatment, ADHD is usually accompanied by other psychiatric conditions like major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, and/or alcohol abuse. Medical professionals, with training and experience, often treat those co-morbidities instead of the underlying problem, so it's no surprise that average people scrolling TikTok so often get it wrong. But those mistakes still serve an important purpose. Maybe it's not ADHD, but maybe that's not the pointADHD is not sometimes forgetting appointments or zoning out in meetings occasionally. Popular ADHD videos on social media often equate common life experiences—losing your keys, hyperfixation on hobbies, blurting out thoughts—as symptoms. Those could be indicative of the disorder, or they could be just part of being human. It's a spectrum, and, as with autism, this can lead to overgeneralization and people believing normal human experiences are part of a mental illness; conversely, it can lead to neurotypical people viewing a serious mental health issue as something quirky, cute, or funny. This is not good, but it beats the alternative of having no explanation or language to talk about a mental illness. When people say, “I think I have ADHD,” they often mean something like: “I’m struggling, and maybe this is why." Whether the impulsivity and inability to focus they are experiencing fit the diagnostic criteria of ADHD or not, paying attention, noticing patterns, and taking mental health seriously are important. Maybe that's not a medical diagnosis, but it can be an important act of self-reflection. For many, putting a name to the struggle is a first step toward seeking support, even if the label isn’t exactly accurate. Why people are drawn to misleading ADHD videosIt's easy to blame social media for spreading misinformation about healthcare—it does, constantly—but people choose to get medical information from social media for understandable reasons. Many regard the way medicine is practiced as impersonal, even scary, and view doctors as untrustworthy. Social media figures, on the other hand, are charismatic, non-threatening, non-judgmental, and don't charge for their time. In a perfect world, ADHD TikTok would be a gateway to medical evaluation and treatment, but too often, it becomes the end of the line. Non-evidence-based "treatments" gain traction. Skepticism of doctors hardens into full-blown mistrust. And as research shows, frequent social media use often correlates with worse patient-provider relationships—though it's unclear which is the cause and which the effect. Social media will (probably) continue to serve as a support systemTikTok, Instagram, and Facebook aren't optimal ways to approach diagnosis or treatment, but given the current realities of the healthcare system, it may be the best many people can do. Until structural changes make mental health care more affordable and accessible, platforms like TikTok will continue to serve as makeshift support systems. Flawed as they are, they’re filling a gap the medical system has yet to close. And for now, that may be the only starting point available to millions. View the full article

Prioritizing growth to sell is a perfectly reasonable business strategy. Being acquired by a larger group at some point (like Poppi’s recent sale to PepsiCo) makes sense for many—to generate cash flow for expansion, take a shortcut to economies of scale or market penetration, or just cash in for early retirement. But not for me. Early on in my business journey at Bulletproof, we considered a buyout from a renowned global comms agency. But when they starting asking for growth projections and questioning whether we could achieve them, we walked away. We went on to smash those projections within three years—that’s when I truly started to realize we would be better off independent. Really, who would want to report to someone who doesn’t believe in your vision? Putting independence first Growing a good business is about relevance, internal culture, and excellence—qualities that risk dilution under a larger group. You can so easily lose your way and what you stand for—just look at the recent headlines around Ben and Jerry’s, with original CEO, David Stever, ousted for the political activism that was always at the heart of the original business. Also, as you relinquish control, you invariably compromise on how you pursue innovation or map the future. It’s why I’ve always put independence first. But if you don’t want to bank on acquisition in your strategy for scale, how can you nurture expansion, while retaining your independent spirit? In fact, independence and global success go together quite nicely, you just need to embrace the right mindset. Always striving for relevance Different leaders will always have different qualities, but independence, to me, is about embracing a certain restlessness. A business shouldn’t just be about creating great work, but about being at the cutting edge of culture—about being relevant. For that, you need to be constantly moving, searching, never settling. We could be a perfectly good business of 50 people in London, sticking to a clearly defined niche—very well-off but ultimately very bored. Or we can be the business that doesn’t settle, one that embraces new technology, new opportunity and innovation without having to deal with interminable layers of approval. It’s a choice you need to actively make and embrace. Embracing imperfection To do so, though, you need to allow yourself to make mistakes. In fact, being able to make mistakes, without being dragged over the coals for every misstep, is one of the biggest luxuries of independence. We’ve made many mistakes at Bulletproof. For example, we messed up when we thought we could crack New York without having people on the ground and soon learned that it wouldn’t work. From a personal point of view, I made the mistake of thinking I could do it all—run the business and be the creative head. For a long time, I didn’t accept that there were people better suited to running parts of the business. It’s a mistake I wish I’d made a lot earlier. You don’t grow a business, you grow people. So being independent is about embracing that imperfection and learning from those gaffes along the way. If you don’t, you never progress. It goes hand-in-hand with persistence. As a business founder or leader, you take things personally, so you’re protective over the business and its people. But you have to learn from mistakes and move on quickly. The right approach to scale Pursuing scale as a marker of success has its place. But progress means that you must grow for the right reasons—and without compromising quality. For us, scale is about growing talent and capabilities to complement our strengths. It’s never about scale for the sake of it. For example, we dismissed the idea of franchising our name for global expansion, even though we received a few approaches. Maintaining control over quality was far more important than spreading our name in this way. A better way to think about scale is that it’s all about the right talent. Hard work, determination, nurturing, kind individuals who attract the right work and embody your values. If you get this right, you can scale. Articulate your vision To ensure that quality, you also need conviction—and vision. People can help you with every other aspect of running a business, but the vision needs to come from the top. It needs to be both externally and internally facing. That way you will always have a road map of what you want to achieve and why, and you’ll always know how to take your team on that journey, At Bulletproof, our vision is to challenge the creative agency networks through doing the most compelling, commercially creative work on the planet. To prove there is a different way of doing things. Keep your fighting spirit But underpinning it all needs to be a fighting spirit. Things start to fall apart when you think you’ve “made it’” Don’t forget the early days, which invariably are hard. I didn’t come from a lot, for example. You should always nurture the mindset to spot the opportunities when they present themselves. Diageo is now one of our largest clients, but it all started with a $20,000 brief for a cocktail in a can. Sometimes businesses reach a certain size and only go for the million-dollar briefs—but that’s not how you grow, especially not as an independent business. You can see this fight, this alertness to opportunity, in many of the world’s most respected entrepreneurs. These leaders always look to evolve their enterprises, both into new markets and within their business practices, and their fight and drive keeps them relevant. Nike’s Phil Knight is a great example. His book Shoe Dog is a personal favorite. In it, he speaks so honestly about what they went through, and the hustle of the early days. It’s what makes running a fiercely independent business so rewarding. With it will come the growth that is truly rewarding—and the freedom to say no when a buyer comes knocking. View the full article

“Well, it took a minute,” said Spike Lee, surveying the glittering Met Gala crowd during cocktail hour through bright orange glasses that matched his New York Knicks cap. “But we’re here now, that’s the most important thing.” Lee was referring to the fact that for the very first time, the Met Gala was making a point of celebrating Black style and Black designers — something he felt was an overdue milestone, but a very welcome one. “Long overdue,” Lee repeated. “But we’re here to celebrate. And who knows what’s gonna happen because of this event? There’s gonna be reverberations around the world.” Lee was echoing an excitement that many of the approximately 400 guests — luminaries in sports, music, fashion, film, theater and more — shared as they sipped cocktails or toured the gala’s accompanying exhibit, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” The show is an exploration of Black menswear from the 18th century onward, with dandyism as a unifying theme. Another film director, Baz Luhrmann, was touring the exhibit, designed by curator Monica L. Miller, a Barnard professor who literally wrote the book on dandyism: “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. He, too, mused on the importance of this year’s theme. “Sometimes the subjects are fun, sometimes you go, that’s interesting. But this is a subject where you go, why has light not been shone on this before?” Luhrmann said. “Black sartorial power on culture is so great but how much talk has there been about it?” Thinking of a departed friend For Whoopi Goldberg, the most important person of the evening wasn’t actually there. It was her late friend, André Leon Talley, the fashion editor and personality who was so important to Black style, and with whom she’d attended previous galas. Talley, who died in 2022, is honored in the exhibit; there’s a caftan he wore, among other objects. And Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton has said he was an inspiration for the show. “I think they did him proud,” Goldberg said during cocktails. “I’m very happy to be here again, but spectacularly happy to see how they took care of him.” Asked what Talley would have thought of the show, she guessed he’d say: “I’m glad you understand.” And she added: “What better way to honor him?” Goldberg was dressed head to toe — meaning mini-top hat to spats-inspired shoes, to handbag – in Thom Browne. “He said. ‘Will you come?'” Goldberg said of Browne, whose suits, particularly, are hugely popular. “And I said, when you’re done, just put it on me, and I’m good. I feel incredible.” So what is dandyism? It was a favored topic of conversation; every guest had a slightly different way of defining what a dandy is. For director Lee, it was simple: “Doing your own thing.” For Audra McDonald, it was about “a sense of reclaiming” one’s own identity and worth. The Broadway actor, currently starring in “Gypsy,” was among the first guests examining the exhibit, along with her husband and fellow actor, Will Swenson. Over at cocktails, the Rev. Al Sharpton was describing dandyism as a form of activism: the silent kind. “It means to me that even in the midst of being in a socially limited situation, we celebrate. I refuse to submit to just having a menial job. I’m gonna dress up . I’m gonna tip my hat. It’s a sense of rebellion without having to speak it.” A crucial sense of timing Sharpton was full of praise for the Met having chosen this moment to honor Black style. “It comes at a very important time,” he said. “To make a statement of diversity at the highest cultural level — which is the Met Gala — when diversity is under attack by the highest office in the land is more than if I could do a hundred marches. This is a monumental night.” Broadway actor Alex Newell agreed. It was the performer’s third Met Gala in a row, but this one had a special meaning. “It’s nice to see us represented this way,” Newell said. “Just when it is needed the most.” A flower-filled night sky Once gala guests climb the steps outside and enter the museum’s Great Hall, they encounter each year a monumental centerpiece, usually floral. This year, it was hundreds — thousands? — of flower petals suspended from the ceiling, with lighting evoking a starry sky. The petals also hung over the Great Hall staircase, which guests ascended to greet the awaiting receiving line of gala hosts. The petals — made of fabric, truth be told – were meant to symbolize narcissus flowers, and there were also reflecting pools, nodding to the myth of Narcissus. The greeting was not only visual but musical: An orchestra, accompanied by swaying singers, played favorites like Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” and Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing,” Guests then either proceeded to view the exhibit, or head straight to cocktails in the airy Engelhard Court. Often, they seem to prefer socializing, but this year the exhibit was filled with guests. Honoring Oscar (Wilde, that is) One of the more famous dandies, historically speaking, was Oscar Wilde. And so there was symmetry in the fact that Sarah Snook — the “Succession” star — was dressed in a way Wilde would have liked. It was certainly intentional. Snook now is appearing on Broadway in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the stage adaptation of Wilde’s 1891 novel in which she plays all 26 roles. “Yes, There’s definitely an echo,” Snook said with a smile, about her striking (and aristocratic-looking) black suit. “Oscar would be happy.” Snook said she was enjoying her night off at the gala — conveniently for the many guests from Broadway, theaters are dark on Mondays. “I’m loving the celebration of beautiful things,” Snook said of her gala experience. There are always first-timers At every Met Gala, there are newbies — and they’re often rather starstruck. One of them was model Christian Latchman, 19, wearing a dramatic white ensemble that combined trousers with a long skirt. If he looked familiar, that’s because Latchman is the face in the photograph on the cover of the exhibit’s massive hardcover catalog. Asked to sum up his feelings about the evening, he said simply: “Astonishment. That’s the word for it.” Also new to the gala was actor Keith Powers, who sat on the sidelines, soaking it in. Was it all intimidating? Overwhelming? “All of the above,” he said. “It makes me anxious — and happy, and inspired.” A call to dinner, tuba included Cocktails are fun, but dinner at the Met Gala sounds even more fun — that’s where guests get an A-plus musical performance, for one thing. But music also accompanies the call to dinner. This time, it was the New York-based High and Mighty Brass Band who did the honors, snaking through cocktails with drums, trombones, a tuba and The Presidentets. Then guests headed off — slowly — to dinner, where they feasted on a menu by chef Kwame Onwuachi. Dinner began with papaya piri piri salad, and moved on to creole roasted chicken with a lemon emulsion, and cornbread with honey curry butter and barbecue greens. Dessert? That was a “cosmic brownie” with powdered sugar doughnut mousse. For more coverage of the 2025 Met Gala, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/met-gala —Jocelyn Noveck, AP National Writer View the full article

Provide clients with actionable information they can use to move their businesses forward. The Disruptors With Liz Farr Go PRO for members-only access to more Liz Farr. View the full article

Provide clients with actionable information they can use to move their businesses forward. The Disruptors With Liz Farr Go PRO for members-only access to more Liz Farr. View the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...View the full article