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Google updated its Google Merchant Center merchant listing structured data documentation to removed the EnergyConsumptionDetails properties and added an alternative solution to the certificationIdentification property. But keep in mind that the hasEnergyConsumptionDetails is backwards compatible for those who have already implemented it.View the full article

Google's Lisa Landsman interviewed Google's Google Business Profiles Verification Product Manager, Sheerna. They discussed a lot of the concerns many local SEOs and small businesses are dealing with around GBPs and also the challenges they have with managing the service.View the full article

Impact from The President trade wars set to prolong the longest economic slump in country’s postwar historyView the full article

Google Ads is rolling out a new way to view some of your reports in a tree table view. "Instead of flat tables, you now get a hierarchical layout where dimensions are stacked visually," explained Thomas Eccel who posted about this on LinkedIn.View the full article

Beijing says claims it is nearing a deal with Washington to resolve the trade war are ‘fake news’View the full article

We’ve all heard the familiar directive: “We’re going through another reorganization and will be cutting 20% of headcount, but priorities remain the same and, in fact, may expand.” Meanwhile, you’re being told to “just make it work” without offering additional resources, guidance, or support. This conversation, unfortunately, isn’t unique. It represents the silent crisis engulfing middle management across America. Middle managers—who oversee 90% of the U.S. workforce—are facing unprecedented challenges in 2025. Recent KPMG data reveals nearly one-third are actively disengaged, while 62% report unsustainable stress levels as they struggle with expanded responsibilities amid shrinking teams. At the same time, Gallup’s findings show employee dissatisfaction at 15-year highs. The economic uncertainty plaguing the U.S. has created a perfect storm for middle management burnout. Organizations are seemingly undergoing constant reorgs and scrambling to eliminate redundancies, optimize productivity and reduce resources to do more with less. Middle managers find themselves caught between the demands from top leadership to cut costs and maintain output while keeping their teams productive and motivated at the same time. “The concrete middle” Middle managers are what I call “the concrete middle”—the foundation bearing pressure from both the top echelon of organizations and the functions and teams reporting to them. They understand the real flow of work, the network connections, and who the true “magic makers” are in the organization. They’re facing tightening budgets from above while trying to maintain an engaged, high-performing workforce below. What makes this crisis particularly acute in 2025 is that the job market is reported as “healthy” but remains very tight. Employers may be in a wait-and-see mode, and struggling leaders may not see viable alternatives. This creates a dangerous apathy—what I’ve observed as “doing just enough to survive.” But here’s the concern: When the pendulum swings the other way and market conditions improve, companies will feel real pain—because employees remember. They remember which organizations honored their values during difficult times and which simply treated people as disposable resources. Break the cycle of disempowerment One of the biggest challenges middle managers face is maintaining a sense of autonomy and growing their employees’ talent and potential. How do you keep top talent feeling they can contribute meaningfully and advance their careers amid constant change and disruption? The truth is, during volatile periods, trust and empowerment often take a back seat to numbers. While financial responsibility is certainly necessary, organizations need a more nuanced approach—particularly for functions that drive growth. During these unprecedented times, I’ve coached leaders to advocate and empower themselves by harnessing this moment as a chance to reinvent and reimagine how their work is being done. Because amid the volatile and unpredictable times lies opportunity—an opportunity to change and employ new strategies, tactics, and ways of working that may not have been supported during more stable, constant, and calm periods. Middle managers, with their unique vantage point, often see possibilities that senior leadership overlooks or never considers. We need to give them the tools, trust, and ability to reimagine their work in ways that might actually achieve growth in a down period while achieving cost savings by simply doing things differently and better. This approach requires a fundamental shift in perspective—from viewing middle managers as mere implementers to recognizing them as the crucial bridge between strategy, execution, and market growth. Move from platitudes to real development Many middle managers have been told, “Nobody owns your development but you.” Translation: It’s up to you to grow yourself, learn, and improve. Traditional leadership development approaches are not meeting the needs of today’s leaders. The solution isn’t another perfunctory annual performance-review exercise—it’s creating intentional support systems that address well-being, professional growth, trust, and empowerment. Organizations must implement scenario planning into their talent management process. This means preparing leaders for all market conditions—growth, stable, uncertain, and competitive landscapes. Building this muscle prevents paralysis during challenging times and empowers managers to push for a strategic repositioning of their teams to restructure, realign, and optimize team performance. The development of top talent isn’t just about surviving difficult periods—it’s about positioning them to deliver in different ways that might not have been possible before. In times of disruption, there’s often more support and openness for working differently, adopting new tactics, approaches, and novel ways of working than during periods when business as usual comes with a playbook of what to do and how to do it. Cut the consensus culture Perhaps the most insidious barrier to middle-management effectiveness is what I call “consensus culture”—the endless cycle of meetings and layers of review and approvals that exist primarily to stroke egos rather than drive decisions and unleash innovation and potential. During my time leading organizational development initiatives, we introduced the philosophy of GEPO (Good Enough, Proceed On). This wasn’t about compromising the operational excellence of what you’re doing, but about streamlining how ideas are socialized. Do you really need three to five meetings with people at all levels to make a decision? Can you eliminate the pre-meetings prior to the decision meetings and the “I’m just being informed” meetings that clog calendars without adding value? By streamlining decision-making and trusting and empowering the people who own and support the work, organizations can reduce the time-to-decision and allow experts to take true accountability. This approach isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about restoring purpose and autonomy to the manager’s role while empowering them to do their jobs effectively with minimal bureaucracy. In the absence of this trust, we handicap our middle managers. They become dependent on groupthink and consensus-driven approaches, operating in a highly risk-averse fashion because they fear making independent decisions without extensive backup and group support. This is the opposite of innovation—and organizations simply cannot afford this handicap if they want to innovate, disrupt, and improve performance. Embrace AI as ally, not threat The AI revolution adds another layer of complexity and also an opportunity for middle managers in 2025. Too often, leaders view these technologies through a lens of fear rather than as an efficient resource that enables productivity and output. It’s a genuine fear of replacement. But I don’t believe AI will replace good managers. Instead, organizations must be transparent about AI’s business value while generating excitement about its possibilities. AI should be positioned as a complement to human talent—just like we would approach any new technology. Leaders at the top need to create engagement and excitement around AI as a strategic lever that can help streamline processes and improve decision-making. This isn’t about replacing jobs but freeing up time and attention for the work that truly matters—the strategic thinking and human connection that AI can’t replace. The path forward requires moving beyond traditional development approaches to build resilient leadership pipelines capable of sustaining organizations through continuous transformation. By elevating and empowering middle managers, companies can stabilize their operations while preparing for future challenges in an increasingly complex business environment. The companies that will thrive in this era of disruption will be those that transform their middle management from a burnout risk into an innovation advantage through empowerment, trust, autonomy, and accountability for their work. View the full article

Google is relaxing its photo guidelines for Local Service Ads. This may result in photos that were not previously allowed, may be allowed after May 22, 2025. I am not sure if these photos will automatically show up in your Local Service Ads or if you need to manually approve them after May 22nd.View the full article

On a quiet residential street lined with unassuming homes and white picket fences in Gliwice, Poland, one building is not like the rest. It’s a hulking, bright silver structure that’s covered entirely in pipes. This eye-catching building is the new headquarters for Gambit, a Polish pipe distribution company specializing in underground water systems. Designed by the architecture firm KWK Promes, the headquarters takes Gambit’s building materials aboveground, transforming pipes from a utilitarian necessity into an aesthetic material that encases the building’s entire exterior. The result is a visually striking structure that cleverly merges architecture with product advertising. Building a headquarters out of pipes While the idea to create an office entirely covered in pipes might seem like an avant-garde concept, it actually started as a cost-saving measure. “The idea to use pipes on the facade came up when the investor—the company Gambit—asked us to design an office-warehouse building that would serve as its unique showcase, but at the lowest possible cost,” says Robert Konieczny, founder of KWK Promes. “We then thought that since they deal with specialized pipes, we could use this very material—especially since they could acquire it at cost price.” The concept of using Gambit’s actual pipes was short-lived, as Konieczny’s team quickly discovered that PVC pipes meant for underground use are prone to oxidizing in the sun, tend to be quite bulky, and don’t meet Polish fire safety requirements. Still, the firm wanted to follow through on the idea of transforming Gambit’s building material into a custom cladding that would resemble “a stack of pipes.” Ultimately, they found a way to make it happen without breaking the bank. To mimic Gambit’s pipes, KWK Promes commissioned custom silver tubes from a metal fabrication company, each made from inexpensive raw aluminum sheeting—a material the company has also used for projects like an apartment complex in Katowice, Poland, and a futuristic mountain home. KWK Promes explained on the Archello platform that as an added advantage, the aluminum sheeting develops a patina over time, “taking on a matte, raw character reminiscent of concrete.” Importantly, the firm added, “the sheet is incredibly durable and virtually indestructible, making it easy to maintain. This is crucial for us because the operation of buildings generates up to 30% of CO2 emissions, so we always seek simple, low-maintenance solutions.” The final structure includes a two-story office section with sloping walls, a cube-shaped warehouse to hold the company’s inventory, and a lower workshop section. The entire exterior is fitted with piping, while rooftop skylights and glass windows allow natural light into the working spaces. Inside, concrete walls and flooring have been added to mimic the building’s eventual aging process. A multifunctional material Aesthetically, the cladding comes about as close to resembling a stack of pipes as a building could get, lending parts of the structure the disconcerting sense that it might be moments from rolling away. From certain angles, the sides of the tubing create a striped pattern, while other angles of the building take on a honeycomb pattern from the open ends of the pipes. KWK Promes also hopes that beyond its visual advantages, the pipe cladding might serve a purpose for the surrounding environment. “Initially, at the investor’s suggestion, the design included protective nets for the pipes,” Konieczny explains. “Over time, however, we decided to leave the pipes open so that, for example, birds could make their home there. In the end, we managed to convince the investor to abandon the nets—although it’s hard to say whether it was the ecological arguments or the financial ones that convinced them more, as this decision significantly reduced the implementation costs.” In an era when remote and hybrid work arrangements increasingly influence the way office interiors are designed, the Gambit headquarters is a reminder that there’s still plenty of room for innovation on an office’s exterior—even in an industry that rarely sees the light of day. View the full article

The top five servicers had a combined unpaid principal balance of more than $23 billion at the end of December 2024. View the full article

Whether current conditions favor buyers or sellers is up for debate, as economic uncertainty begins to influence consumer behavior, The Real Brokerage said. View the full article

Two industry organizations are giving Congress and FHFA reasons to make Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's pricing more advantageous rather than less attractive. View the full article

Oceans cover about 70% of the Earth’s surface, yet the ocean floor remains largely untouched by humans. But perhaps not for long. A Canadian-based firm called the Metals Co. (TMC) recently announced plans to ask the The President administration to allow it to mine the deep seabed for valuable critical metals in the Pacific Ocean. President Donald The President is reportedly considering an executive order that would speed up permitting for deep-sea mining, which has prompted outrage from other countries. While some small and exploratory deep-sea mining operations already exist, the practice has yet to happen on a large commercial scale, partly due to fears that it could cause catastrophic damage to the pristine seafloor environment and the wealth of life harbored there. But the worsening climate crisis and the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels has put deep-sea mining in the spotlight. Clean energy technologies like solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries contain critical minerals like nickel, lithium, cobalt, copper, and manganese, and concerns are growing over whether we’ll have enough of these materials to meet near-term net-zero goals. Some companies have pitched deep-sea mining as a solution. But would the risks be worth the potential rewards? Into the deep TMC’s mining process would involve collecting potato-size balls of rock, known as polymetallic nodules, that rest gently on top of the seafloor sediment and contain various critical minerals. These nodules have formed over millions of years, and they carpet vast swathes of the seabed. A large rover-like machine would be lowered from a ship down to the seafloor where it would gather the nodules and send them back up to the ship. (To give you a sense of depth, the area in the Pacific where TMC wants to mine, called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), is a deep-sea abyssal plain some 2.5 miles down and is estimated to hold 21 billion tons of nodules.) The water and sediment that comes up with the nodules would then be pumped back into the ocean. concept rendering The company says it would pay “careful attention not to harm the integrity of the deep-ocean ecosystem” during this process and plans to use a real-time monitoring program that will enable it to “adapt, pause, and change . . . operations to stay within expected ecological thresholds.” But the nodules themselves are an essential part of that ecosystem, and removing them would have consequences. Nodules are among the only hard surfaces in a vast plain of sludgy sediment, and serve as a habitat for many slow-growing and unique creatures, including sea sponges, corals, and octopuses. And the CCZ likely contains many thousands of species that have yet to be identified. Research suggests that removing the nodules “would lead to a loss of food-web integrity and a significant depreciation of faunal biodiversity.” Disturbing the ocean food web could have cascading effects, putting many fish populations at risk and threatening the livelihoods and food security of millions of people. (The The President administration did not respond to request for comment by the time of publication.) There are other concerns. The mere presence of the rover itself in an environment that has remained untouched for millennia would likely disturb its living organisms, most of which exist in the top 2 inches of sediment, explains Oliver Ashford, a marine biologist with the World Resources Institute’s Ocean Program. “The organisms there aren’t really adapted to rapidly changing currents and being thrown around and disrupted,” he says. “They’re quite delicate organisms normally. So the physical interaction with that machine might cause death.” A recent study published in the journal Nature found that life at a small deep-sea mining test site in the CCZ is still recovering four decades after the tests were conducted. The creatures that aren’t physically disturbed by the rover could be harmed by changes in temperature, light, and sound. The activity could stir up large plumes of sediment that get picked up by ocean currents and spread across hundreds of miles, smothering and starving sponges and coral and disrupting fishing activities. There’s even some concern that mining could interfere with the ocean’s natural ability to sequester carbon and produce oxygen, further harming the Earth’s climate. TMC doesn’t deny that deep-sea mining comes with environmental risks, but says “the clean energy transition will require trade-offs.” Who’s in charge around here? The U.N.’s International Seabed Authority is responsible for setting environmental and financial regulations for the nascent deep-sea mining industry, but has yet to do so even after years of deliberations. “They’re developing regulations from scratch for an industry that could potentially have a large environmental impact,” Ashford says of the ISA. “I feel like it’s a process that shouldn’t be rushed.” But the sluggish pace of this rulemaking has frustrated some mining firms, including TMC, that are tired of waiting. Technically the United States doesn’t have to wait for the ISA to give mining the go-ahead because it never ratified the UN Law of the Sea, the 1994 treaty that put the ISA in charge of seabed mining. This is why TMC has come knocking on The President’s door. The company promises “a massive and rapid injection of metals” into the U.S. if it’s allowed to mine the seabed. This is important because demand for critical minerals is expected to more than double by 2030 and triple by 2040 as clean energy technology advances. While mineral reserves are abundant on land, production tends to be concentrated in a handful of countries—in China especially—which makes the supply chain unreliable. In the U.S., for example, more than 80% of critical minerals are imported. And heightened trade tensions will further tighten supply: China recently restricted exports of seven rare earth elements in response to The President’s tariffs on Chinese goods. Lack of investment has also made it difficult to rapidly scale up mineral production. Deep-sea mining, therefore, is “a path to making real progress toward solving our supply chain problem,” TMC says in a promotional video. TMC also argues that deep-sea mining would be less harmful for the environment than terrestrial mining activities. It’s true that land mining contributes to pollution, resource depletion, and damage to biodiversity. “Mining, by its nature, is not a zero-harm activity. It poses significant risks to the environment and local communities,” writes Melissa Barbanell at the World Resources Institute. But it’s not clear that deep-sea mining would be more sustainable than land mining, and TMC admits that seabed mining is unlikely to replace land mining anytime soon. Peering into the future Some groups predict that rapid technological advances, improved recycling methods, and robust circular economies would be enough to help us use the minerals we have more efficiently, eliminating the need for deep-sea mining altogether. “Future mineral demand can be met without deep seabed mining,” declared the World Wildlife Fund in a report finding that innovations could curb demand for critical minerals by 20% to 58% by 2050. As with so many new technologies, figuring out whether deep-sea mining is a good idea or a bad one isn’t straightforward. A paper published in the journal Ocean Sustainability a few years ago tried to look at the question through an economic lens. The researchers wanted to know: Of all the key stakeholders—from mining companies to governments to humanity at large—who really benefits from deep-sea mining, and by how much? “Our conclusion was that only the commercial mining companies are likely to get some profit, and it’s not much,” says Ussif Rashid Sumaila, a professor of ocean and fisheries economics at the University of British Columbia, and lead author on the paper. The analysis found that revenues would likely be huge for deep-sea mining companies in the first few years while demand for minerals is high, but would drop off as the market is flooded and prices come down. Combine this with high operational costs and the threat of numerous expensive lawsuits, and the long-term viability of deep-sea mining looks tenuous. Some companies, like the Norwegian firm Loke Marine Minerals, have already gone bust due to funding troubles. As for another key stakeholder—nature—Sumaila’s paper concluded that the costs of managing environmental damage caused by deep-sea mining will likely be astronomical. “Look,” he says, “sometimes you just have to leave things alone.” View the full article

America cannot offer enough aid, green technology or new market access to mould the world trading systemView the full article

Michelle Eisen, a 15-year Starbucks veteran, is a barista for the coffee chain at a location in Buffalo—the first Starbucks store to unionize back in December 2021, in fact. But on a Tuesday in March, Eisen was at a Pittsburgh Starbucks, to participate in what Starbucks Workers United members have dubbed “sip-ins.” A spin on “sit-ins,” they involve union workers and allies hanging out for hours in a Starbucks store, ordering drinks under names like “Union Strong” and leaving tips for workers. In the weekend leading up to that Tuesday, union members held more than 100 sip-ins across the country. It was a message to Starbucks management: Union workers were calling attention to the fact that, more than three and a half years after organizing their first store, they still didn’t have a contract. Negotiations between the union and the company have broken down, members say. Since September, the union has presented the company with a number of suggestions around wages, benefits, and guaranteed hours, all of which are meant to be negotiations, but it says the company wouldn’t even counter those offers. The union (and the National Labor Relations Board) argue that Starbucks hasn’t been bargaining in good faith. But the Pittsburgh action was more than just a sip-in. Partway through, the workers at that store announced that they were on strike and walked out. Most of the attendees followed, forming a picket line on the sidewalk. Eisen and four others stayed in the store, refusing to leave. The sip-in had turned into an occupation. The store’s manager called a manager from a different store for help. “They would periodically come over and they were like, ‘We need you to leave’ and we’d say, ‘We’re not leaving. We don’t know what you don’t understand about this, but we will sleep in the store,’” Eisen says. The five of them, all current or former Starbucks workers, were asking that company executives, including CEO Brian Niccol, talk to them and respond to the union’s demands. The crowd outside grew louder; there were speeches and chants from people on the picket line. Eventually the store manager called the police, who gave the occupiers three warnings to exit the store. When Eisen and the others refused, they were arrested, handcuffed, and walked out the front doors. That action was a form of civil disobedience, a nonviolent tactic in which people intentionally break the law or disobey orders in order to highlight actions they say are unjust. It has long been used by activists—during the civil rights movement, the fight for women’s suffrage, and frequently by labor unions looking to improve worker conditions. For Starbucks Workers United, the decision to engage in acts of civil disobedience didn’t happen overnight. “It’s a natural evolution or escalation for where we are on the campaign,” Eisen says. “After three and a half years, still in bargaining, and . . . with an offer [from Starbucks] that is very far from sufficient given what this company can provide to its workers, we felt like we needed to take a stand.” Starbucks sit-ins spur action Starbucks Workers United has been doing various strikes since its inception in 2021, but recently, those protests and strikes have been escalating to arrests. A January sit-in at a Park Slope store was first. That was a union location that the company was permanently closing. Ahead of the closure, union members peacefully protested, and at least seven were arrested. Those arrests got a lot of media coverage, and Eisen says it pushed the company to agree, in writing, that they were willing to go to mediation—a process in which a company and a union meet with a neutral third party mediator to assist in negotiations. That agreement to use a mediator was the first progress the union has seen in weeks, Eisen says. Before that, there had been a December bargaining session at which the company proposed an economic package with no wage increases for union baristas. The union opposed that proposal, and then conducted a five-day strike across multiple cities. The day of the Pittsburgh occupation coincided with two others, at a store in Chicago and also in Seattle. (In Chicago and Pittsburgh, 16 people in total were arrested.) The timing was intentional: The next day, March 12, Starbucks was holding a shareholder meeting. “We wanted them to go into that meeting having to defend their actions when it came to how they were dealing with the union stores [and] union workers,” Eisen says. This week, we took direct action to show @Starbucks the urgency of finalizing contracts with the wages, staffing, and protections we need to thrive. We’re doing what it takes to win. And we won't stop until we do. pic.twitter.com/OQ60OOGUEO — Starbucks Workers United (@SBWorkersUnited) March 13, 2025 At that meeting, Starbucks executives were asked when the company would negotiate its first union contract. Though she didn’t give a timeline, Sara Kelly, executive vice president and chief partner officer for Starbucks, answered in part that, “When a partner elects a union to represent them, we are committed to engaging in good faith with that union and the partners who have selected that union to negotiate fair contracts.” In a response to a request for comment about these actions and the current bargaining process, a Starbucks spokesperson said the company is “focused on creating the best job in retail,” and added that the company and the union have held more than nine bargaining sessions since last April and three mediation sessions, reaching “over 30 meaningful agreements on hundreds of topics Workers United delegates told us were important to them.” They reiterated that the company is committed to good faith bargaining. Why Starbucks workers say civil disobedience makes sense Workers are willing to risk arrest to draw attention to their fight—and that fact alone should show the company how desperate its employees feel, the union says. “You’ve got people you employ who feel so strongly about the way you are mistreating them that they’re willing to put their body, their being, at risk to demand change,” Eisen says. “I just think you have to take that seriously.” The union and Starbucks have come to some tentative agreements—around issues like safety and dress code—but not on economic issues. The union says the minimal concessions from the company—no raises in the first year and a guarantee of just 1.5% in future years—amounts to less than 50 cents an hour for most baristas. The union also still wants progress around guaranteed hours and staffing; they say some workers have had their hours cut below the threshold to qualify for benefits, even as stores are understaffed. Starbucks Workers United filed an unfair labor practice against the company specifically alleging that its refusal to negotiate on economic suggestions, instead coming with a “fixed economic position,” is against the spirit of bargaining in good faith. Though Eisen was calmly walked out of the building when she was arrested, she says the sit-in was still nerve wracking: there are a lot of unknowns in terms of how the police will respond or how things may escalate. Though civil disobedience itself is nonviolent, it can provoke violent reactions from others. The union knew that if they were going to engage in actions that come with safety risks or potential arrest, they had to prepare their members. Starbucks Workers United reached out to labor activist Bill Fletcher Jr. to run workshops on civil disobedience, mostly talking about the tactic’s history and what the union should know if it wanted to carry this out. “The most important thing is that you have a critical mass of your membership that embraces this and feels the need for it,” he says, “because if you don’t, you will find yourself quickly isolated and ultimately defeated.” When some people think of civil disobedience, they might think of the civil rights movement and the Greensboro sit-ins in which young Black students protested racial segregation. To some, the plight of Starbucks workers may seem, in comparison, less serious or not deserving of such drastic action. Unionized Starbucks workers have heard criticisms of their efforts since they began. When, in April 2022, an employee mentioned unfair labor practice charges against the company to then-CEO Howard Schulz, he told her, “If you’re not happy at Starbucks, you can go work for another company.” Workers have also been criticized for being “just baristas,” implying that the title isn’t deserving of raises or worker protections. Baristas, though, have been trying to communicate just how chaotic and difficult their jobs are—and how understaffing exacerbates that. They’ve also highlighted issues with mobile ordering (asking for pauses or limitations during busy times) and their concerns about low pay. Eisen adds that it’s a pervasive American viewpoint that some jobs are just bad, and people should try not to end up there. But there’s “very little recognition,” she notes, “of the fact that these are jobs that need to be done. And they are in a lot of ways essential. Why do we look at a job and say, ‘Well, that’s not a skilled job’?” Working at Starbucks has been the most physically demanding job she’s ever done—and she’s put in years to develop her skills, get to know regular customers, and make friends with coworkers. “Why should I walk away from all that?” she says. “Why not try to make it better?” Starbucks union—and civil disobedience—sits in a bigger context Diego Franco, a union member and Starbucks worker at a Chicago store, is trying to get a better job—by making his at Starbucks better. He was one of the people arrested at the Chicago sit-in, and though he said he felt nervous ahead of the action, it helped knowing he wasn’t doing it alone. “[Civil disobedience] comes with a lot of risk, but with that risk, it shows dedication—not just to get a contract, but to the people who you work with,” he says. Starbucks workers all over the country are participating in a strong showing of solidarity today. Civil disobedience, strikes, solidarity actions, and more are happening at $SBUX locations all over the country. Hear us yet, @Starbucks? ITS TIME TO FINALIZE CONTRACTS NOW. https://t.co/e9GXWHFlFS pic.twitter.com/6hpxshl7l1 — Starbucks Workers United (@SBWorkersUnited) March 11, 2025 That camaraderie is key, Fletcher says. When speaking to the union, he emphasized the risks and hard realities of civil disobedience, how these actions require preparation—and the fact that workers need to know they’re not alone in order to get through it. The Starbucks union’s cause has reached beyond the company. It helped spur a larger revitalized labor movement that has seen record-high strike actions and led to the highest U.S. support for labor unions since 1965. Starbucks workers sit in that broad labor context—as does civil disobedience as a tactic. “People are standing on the shoulders of others,” he says. “There’s a history to this.” Since the first Starbucks store unionized in December 2021, it has been joined by more than 550 stores, encompassing more than 11,000 workers. Though labor experts have long said that penalties under current labor laws are so weak that they’re essentially toothless, the The President administration has already been even more hostile toward unions, adding to the challenges workers face. Still, Eisen is hopeful about the future of Starbucks Workers United. “I know these members and I know this campaign, and I know that for every one of us who gets exhausted and has to take a step back, there are 10 more Starbucks workers who are willing to step into their place. And so the company is fighting a losing battle,” she says. “We will keep growing [our actions] and getting bigger, until the company just has to recognize that.” View the full article

As the 2025 Major League Baseball season gets into full swing, you’d expect the league to use its marketing muscle to hype the heroics of its biggest stars. But its anime-style ad campaign takes that idea to a new level. “Heroes of the Game” mixes the on-field superpowers of players like Shohei Ohtani, Paul Skenes, Julio Rodríguez, Juan Soto, and Aaron Judge with the pop cultural artistry of anime hits like One Piece and Fullmetal Alchemist. Created with ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, the league also partnered with Passion Pictures and Echelle Studios in Japan, as well as acclaimed animation director Hiroshi Shimizu, to make the work. The first ad features a whole collection of players, with individual player spots rolling out over this month. The new work follows earlier collabs with anime series Demon Slayer and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami for the season-opening Tokyo Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs last month. Not-so odd couple It may feel like an odd coupling, but MLB chief marketing officer Uzma Rawn Dowler says the league has used anime in past social posts and fans loved it. “And our players are also die-hard anime fans,” says Rawn Dowler. “Whether it’s Julio (Rodríguez) or Fernando Tatís customizing their cleats with their favorite characters, or Jazz Chisholm wearing a One Piece chain, anime is really popular in our clubhouses and with our players. So we felt like it was a really authentic medium to tell our player stories.” The campaign lands at a time that finds baseball flying high. The league’s $12.1 billion in reported 2024 revenue was a record, breaking the previous record of $11.6 billion set in 2023. It also represents a 33% jump in the past decade. Last season’s attendance of more than 71 million fans was the highest since 2017. Television viewership was up across the board, including among the coveted 18-to-34 demographic. If you hit a baseball to Julio Rodríguez, just know you've entered a no-fly zone ❌ J-Rod anime goes CRAZY 🤯#HeroesOfTheGame pic.twitter.com/kyQq8fFppS — MLB (@MLB) April 13, 2025 Now that it’s got the attention of fans—especially younger ones—MLB is focusing on how it can harness their passion for baseball and culture in creative new ways. Back in 2023, the league partnered with Wieden+Kennedy for its “Baseball Is Something Else” campaign, which this year’s work continues. Rawn Dowler says the emphasis on specific stars has really paid off, noting, “We have young, dynamic, diverse, global players who transcend baseball, and our younger sports fans are increasingly identifying with individual players. So we want to continue to prop up the folks who are the face of our game.” The league picks which players to spotlight based on a number of factors, including sheer on-field dominance, and making sure the mix works across a variety of club markets and global audiences. It probably shouldn’t be a surprise to find the anime pedigree involved in the new campaign, considering Wieden+Kennedy’s award-winning, manga- and anime-related work for McDonald’s last year. That saw the fast-feeder flip its golden arches as a nod to the fictional spoof store WcDonald’s that had become a mainstay of many popular manga and anime TV shows, graphic novels, and video games for the past several decades. The brand went deep to collaborate with celebrated artists on limited-edition packaging, a new sauce, and a series of WcDonald’s anime shorts and manga. The next big league event is the inaugural Speedway Classic in August, when the Atlanta Braves will play the Cincinnati Reds on the infield of NASCAR’s Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tennessee. In the meantime, the league will continue its winning formula of finding creative ways to bring pop culture to baseball, and its superstars to pop culture. “It’s just a really exciting time in baseball right now,” Rawn Dowler says. “The talent level is insane. We have players achieving remarkable feats, and they’re doing it with a little bit of swagger, style, and flair, and so that has allowed us to really showcase and tell the stories of our players.” View the full article

The ever-increasing power of generative AI has divided the graphic design community. Many are embracing the tools in their workflows, while others believe they’ve stolen from culture and commoditized a craft. In any case, we all live in a strange time, when people are often presenting fully generative work as their own. Sometimes that’s innocuous. And sometimes that’s icky. But now Adobe wants to offer the public a means to distinguish the authentic from the automated. A new “created without generative AI” tag in Adobe Fresco—the company’s drawing and painting app—will let you mark work as being free from the use of generative AI tools, to certify that you created it by hand. The feature is likely to come to other pieces of the Adobe Suite, according to Eric Snowden, SVP of design at Adobe. “Fresco is one of our tools that we’re not including generative AI, and we wanted to make sure that for someone creating these amazing artworks by hand, they have the ability to say, ‘I did not use generative AI inside of Fresco,” says Snowden. “Those are our customers, too, and we want to support them. If they feel the need to be able to convince clients that they didn’t use generative AI, we want to make that as simple for them to do as possible.” The new optional disclosure comes alongside a greater wave of announcements from Adobe this week that double down on generative AI. Adobe is introducing video and vector support to its own “commercially safe” Firefly model, while also integrating popular generative AI models by third parties—including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Imagen and Veo, and Flux—into its software suite. (More partners, including Runway and Luma, will be coming down the line.) Despite Adobe’s lengthy, and even delayed approach to building its proprietary AI model, Snowden says enabling these options that Adobe has tacitly criticized is all about “customer choice.” How Adobe marks work as “created without generative AI” To certify your work as AI-free, Adobe is using its Content Credentials standard. While originally presented as a means to limit misinformation—a topic on which I was more than a little skeptical—this approach to metadata makes a lot more sense in the context of Adobe’s GenAI workflows. These credentials are basically a running receipt of where you did what to any piece of media inside of Adobe’s system. So it will list if you brought your own photo into ChatGPT to restyle it, and then exported it to Adobe Firefly to turn it into video. (Adobe is labeling any media imported into its software that out of its gaze might already be influenced by GenAI as media of unknown origin on this running receipt.) Granted, provenance is almost an oxymoron in any generative AI workflow: ChatGPT 4 was trained on 13 trillion “tokens” of data you’ll never be able to cite. But the Content Credentials standard does offer some sort of ledger of reference to clients or the public at large to how something was created. It’s something a creator can point to and explain or defend the source of their work. “I think illustration is where we’re seeing [demand] . . . but I don’t think it’s specific to only illustration,” Snowden says. Indeed, the competing platform Procreate has taken an anti-GenAI stance, but anti-AI sentiment doesn’t apply to illustrators alone. “I would imagine there are people in every creative discipline where generative AI is not something they’re interested in,” Snowden continues. “And if they feel compelled to communicate—or they’re again being asked to communicate—that they didn’t use generative AI, we should help them do that.” Claiming that any digital work is free from the influence of AI is impossible. For a human gesture to be transformed into a pixel, it’s filtered through all sorts of algorithms that help smooth and make sense of one’s input on a screen—and that’s definitely true for Adobe Fresco as well as the other apps in its suite. Long before GenAI arrived, Adobe products were steeped in the benefits of artificial intelligence and similar coded assistance. That said, Adobe is clearly reading the room, and realizing it must acknowledge that many creators find generative AI to be an assault on their viewpoint and livelihood—even while Adobe is investing more into these technologies that are simply too powerful, and in demand, to be ignored. “Everybody’s going to create in such different ways,” says Snowden. “Which is the exciting thing about working on these kinds of projects—giving people as much choice as possible.” View the full article

Welcome to the world of social media mind control. By amplifying free speech with fake speech, you can numb the brain into believing just about anything. Surrender your blissful ignorance and swallow the red pill. You’re about to discover how your thinking is being engineered by modern masters of deception. The means by which information gets drilled into our psyches has become automated. Lies are yesterday’s problem. Today’s problem is the use of bot farms to trick social media algorithms into making people believe those lies are true. A lie repeated often enough becomes truth. “We know that China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and North Korea are using bot networks to amplify narratives all over the world,” says Ran Farhi, CEO of Xpoz, a threat detection platform that uncovers coordinated attempts to spread lies and manipulate public opinion in politics and beyond. Bot farm amplification is being used to make ideas on social media seem more popular than they really are. A bot farm consists of hundreds and thousands of smartphones controlled by one computer. In data-center-like facilities, racks of phones use fake social media accounts and mobile apps to share and engage. The bot farm broadcasts coordinated likes, comments, and shares to make it seem as if a lot of people are excited or upset about something like a volatile stock, a global travesty, or celebrity gossip—even though they’re not. Meta calls it “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” It fools the social network’s algorithm into showing the post to more people because the system thinks it’s trending. Since the fake accounts pass the Turing test, they escape detection. Unlike conventional bots that rely on software and API access, bot farm amplification uses real mobile phones. Racks and racks of smartphones connected to USB hubs are set up with SIM cards, mobile proxies, IP geolocation spoofing, and device fingerprinting. That makes them far more difficult to detect than the bots of yore. “It’s very difficult to distinguish between authentic activity and inauthentic activity,” says Adam Sohn, CEO of Narravance, a social media threat intelligence firm with major social networks as clients. “It’s hard for us, and we’re one of the best at it in the world.” Disinformation, Depression-era-style Distorting public perception is hardly a new phenomenon. But in the old days, it was a highly manual process. Just months before the 1929 stock market crash, Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK’s father, got richer by manipulating the capital markets. He was part of a secret trading pool of wealthy investors who used coordinated buying and media hype to artificially pump the price of Radio Corp. of America shares to astronomical levels. After that, Kennedy and his rich friends dumped their RCA shares at a huge profit, the stock collapsed, and everyone else lost their asses. After the market crashed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Kennedy the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Today, stock market manipulators use bot farms to amplify fake posts about “hot” stocks on Reddit, Discord, and X. Bot networks target messages laced with ticker symbols and codified slang phrases like “c’mon fam,” “buy the dip,” “load up now” and “keep pushing.” The self-proclaimed finfluencers behind the schemes are making millions in profit by coordinating armies of avatars, sock puppets, and bots to hype thinly traded stocks so they can scalp a vig after the price increases. “We find so many instances where there’s no news story,” says Adam Wasserman, CFO of Narravance. “There’s no technical indicator. There are just bots posting things like ‘this stock’s going to the moon’ and ‘greatest stock, pulling out of my 401k.’ But they aren’t real people. It’s all fake.” In a world where all information is now suspect and decisions are based on sentiment, bot farm amplification has democratized market manipulation. But stock trading is only one application. Anyone can use bot farms to influence how we invest, make purchasing decisions, or vote. These are the same strategies behind propaganda efforts pioneered by Russia and the Islamic State to broadcast beheadings and sway elections. But they’ve been honed to sell stocks, incite riots, and, allegedly, even tarnish celebrity reputations. It’s the same song, just different lyrics. “People under the age of 30 don’t go to Google anymore,” says Jacki Alexander, CEO at pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. “They go to TikTok and Instagram and search for the question they want to answer. It requires zero critical thinking skills but somehow feels more authentic. You feel like you’re making your own decisions by deciding which videos to watch, but you’re actually being fed propaganda that’s been created to skew your point of view.” It’s not an easy problem to solve. And social media companies appear to be buckling to inauthenticity. After Elon Musk took over Twitter (now X), the company fired much of its anti-misinformation team and reduced the transparency of platform manipulation. Meta is phasing out third-party fact-checking. And YouTube rolled back features meant to combat misinformation. “On TikTok, you used to be able to see how many times a specific hashtag was shared or commented on,” says Alexander. “But they took those numbers down after news articles came out showing the exact same pro-Chinese propaganda videos got pushed up way more on TikTok than Instagram.” Algorithmically boosting specific content is a practice known as “heating.” If there’s no trustworthy information, what we think will likely become less important than how we feel. That’s why we’re regressing from the Age of Science—when critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning were central—back to something resembling the Edwardian era, which was driven more by emotional reasoning and deference to authority. When Twitter introduced microblogging, it was liberating. We all thought it was a knowledge amplifier. We watched it fuel a pro-democracy movement that swept across the Middle East and North Africa called the Arab Spring and stoke national outrage over racial injustice in Ferguson, Missouri, planting the seeds for Black Lives Matter. While Twitter founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey thought they were building a platform for political and social activism, their trust and safety team was getting overwhelmed with abuse. “It’s like they never really read Lord of the Flies. People who don’t study literature or history, they don’t have any idea of what could happen,” said tech journalist Kara Swisher in Breaking the Bird, a CNN documentary about Twitter. Your outrage has been cultivated Whatever gets the most likes, comments, and shares gets amplified. Emotionally charged posts that lure the most engagement get pushed up to the top of the news feed. Enrage to engage is a strategy. “Social media manipulation has become very sophisticated,” says Wendy Sachs, director-producer of October 8, a documentary about the campus protests that erupted the day after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel. “It’s paid for and funded by foreign governments looking to divide the American people.” Malicious actors engineer virality by establishing bots that leach inside communities for months, sometimes years, before they get activated. The bots are given profile pics and bios. Other tricks include staggering bot activity to occur in local time zones, using U.S. device fingerprinting techniques like setting the smartphone’s internal clock to the time zone to where an imaginary “user” supposedly lives, and setting the phone’s language to English. Using AI-driven personas with interests like cryptocurrency or dogs, bots are set to follow real Americans and cross-engage with other bots to build up perceived credibility. It’s a concept known as social graph engineering, which involves infiltrating broad interest communities that align with certain biases, such as left- or right-leaning politics. For example, the K-pop network BTS Army has been mobilized by liberals, while Formula 1 networks might lend themselves to similar manipulation from conservatives. The bots leach inside these communities and earn trust through participation before agitating from within. “Bot accounts lay dormant, and at a certain point, they wake up and start to post synchronously, which is what we’ve observed they actually do,” says Valentin Châtelet, research associate at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council. “They like the same post to increase its engagement artificially.” To set up and manage thousands of fake social media accounts, some analysts believe that bot farms are deployed with the help of cyber criminal syndicates and state sponsorship, giving them access to means that are not ordinary. Bot handlers build workflows with enough randomness to make them seem organic. They set them to randomly reshare or comment on trending posts with certain keywords or hashtags, which the algorithm then uses to personalize the bot’s home feed with similar posts. The bot can then comment on home feed posts, stay on topic, and dwell deeper inside the community. This workflow is repetitive, but the constant updates on the social media platform make the bot activity look organic. Since social media platforms update frequently, programmed bots appear spontaneous and natural. Software bots posted spam, also known as copypasta, which is a block of text that gets repeatedly copied and pasted. But the bot farmers use AI to author unique, personalized posts and comments. Integrating platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude into a visual flow-building platform like Make.com, bots can be programmed with advanced logic and conditional paths and use deep integrations leveraging large language models to sound like a 35-year-old libertarian schoolteacher from the Northwest, or a MAGA auto mechanic from the Dakotas. The speed at which AI image creation is developing dramatically outpaces the speed at which social networking algorithms are advancing. “Social media algorithms are not evolving quick enough to outperform bots and AI,” says Pratik Ratadiya, a researcher with two advanced degrees in computer science who’s worked at JPL and Apple, and who currently leads machine learning at Narravance. “So you have a bunch of accounts, influencers, and state actors who easily know how to game the system. In the game of cat and mouse, the mice are winning.” Commercial bot farms charge around a penny per action to like posts, follow accounts, leave comments, watch videos, and visit websites. Sometimes positioned as “growth marketing services” or “social media marketing panels,” commercial bot farms ply their trades on gig marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork, as well as direct to consumer through their own websites. Bot farms thrive in countries where phone numbers, electricity, and labor are cheap, and government oversight is minimal. A new book about Vietnamese bot farms by photographer Jack Latham called Beggar’s Honey offers a rare look into Hanoi’s attention sweatshops. Sentiment breeding Before free speech colluded with fake speech online, traders used fundamental analysis and technical analysis to decide what and when to buy. Today, fund managers and quants also use sentiment analysis to gauge the market’s mood and anticipate volatility. Sentiment scores are even fed into trading algorithms to automatically adjust exposure and trigger trades. Courts recently dismissed a securities fraud claim against a group of online influencers called the Goblin Gang, who made millions buying up shares of thinly traded, low-float stocks, which they promoted aggressively on Twitter, Discord, and their podcast. Once followers bought into the stock—which, in turn, pumped up the share price—the defendants dumped their shares at inflated prices without disclosing it to their flock. The court dismissed the indictment because the government failed to prove a scheme to defraud. Expressing enthusiasm, even if it is exaggerated, didn’t meet the legal threshold for securities fraud. On March 21, 2025, Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine wrote an opinion piece titled “Pump and Dumps Are Legal Now.” Chatterflow, a service from Narravance, alerts subscribers to roughly 10 stocks a day, with 2 to 4 seeing sharp, short-term moves from social media chatter. The sentiment monitoring platform cross-references unusual social media chatter against EDGAR filings, analyst reports, newswires, and other material disclosures to identify unusual spikes in chatter originating on social media. The service also weights participants driving social media conversations for engagement and authenticity. “When we dig into the online chatter behind the alerts, at least half of them are bots,” says Wasserman. “We keep records. But most of the time, after the stock price jumps, the social media accounts that instigated the frenzy get instantly deleted.” On X, residue from the deleted posts often lingers, preserved through retweets by genuine users. Due to potential legal risks from investors who profited off trades and companies whose stock prices surged, Narravance agreed to share evidence of numerous publicly traded stocks that saw big daily increases on the condition that their ticker symbols not be published. To distinguish correlation from causation, in the case of Silicon Valley Bank’s 2023 collapse, social media chatter also played a role, but that chatter was organic. Bloomberg reported that Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund was advising its portfolio companies to withdraw funds due to concerns about the bank’s solvency. Bloomberg reported that those warnings, which were made through direct communications, triggered private discussions among venture capitalists and startup founders on WhatsApp, email chains, and text grists, which spilled over onto Twitter and LinkedIn, amplifying panic and sparking the digital bank run that led to its collapse. Similarly, the GameStop rally of early 2021 is a compelling example of how retail investors, galvanized by social media channels like Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets, pumped up a stock price targeted by institutional short sellers. Their collective action led to a dramatic short squeeze, causing GameStop’s stock price to surge by approximately 1,500% over two weeks. Spawning deceptive mass influence On October 7, 2023, as Hamas launched its deadly terror attack into Israel, a coordinated disinformation campaign—powered by Russian and Iranian bot networks—flooded social media with false claims suggesting the attack was an inside job. Social media posts in Hebrew on X with messages like “There are traitors in the army” and “Don’t trust your commanders” were overwhelmed with retweets, comments, and likes from bot accounts. Russian and Iranian bot farms promote pro-Palestinian misinformation to inflame divisions in the West. Their objective is to pit liberals against conservatives. They amplify Hamas’s framing of the conflict as a civil rights issue, rather than the terrorist organization’s real agenda—which is the destruction of the state of Israel and the expansion of Shariah law and Islamic fundamentalism. The social media posts selected for coordinated amplification by Russian and Iranian actors tend to frame Palestinians exclusively as victims, promoting simplistic victim-victimizer or colonizer-Indigenous narratives—false binaries amplified not to inform but to inflame and divide democratic societies from within. Bot farm amplification can’t be undone. The same deceptive forces used bot farms to boost posts about a New York Times report that falsely blamed Israel for a bomb that hit a hospital in Gaza that reportedly killed 500 Palestinians. It was later revealed that the blast was actually caused by a rocket misfire from jihadists. The New York Times updated its headline twice. But you can’t put deceptive mass influence back in the bottle. In the case of the war in Gaza, bot farms may not be solely to blame. “The Twitter algorithm is pretty nefarious,” says Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, Gaza writer and analyst and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “I really think it optimizes for hate and division to drive engagement and revenue.” Perhaps Twitter is just more bot-farm-friendly? Xpoz collected evidence of a global bot farm amplification campaign by Russia-, Iran-, and China-backed bot farms to frame what Hamas admits in Arabic is a religious crusade to expand the Islamic state as a civil rights battle for freedom and justice against Israeli oppressors in English. In another example, Xpoz found that the same bot network amplifying antisemitic hate speech in Arabic was also being used to amplify tweets critical of Ukraine in German. In the case of the pro-Palestinian campus protests, they erupted before the Israeli death toll from the Hamas attack had even been established. How could it happen so quickly? Radical Islamic terrorists were still on the loose inside Israel. The film October 8 explores how college campuses turned against Israel less than 24 hours after the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. “We think most of what we see online is real. But most of what we see is deceptive,” said Ori Shaashua, who is chairman of Xpoz and an AI entrepreneur behind a host of other tech ventures. Shaashua’s team analyzed the ratio between bots, avatars, and humans. “It doesn’t make sense when 418 social media accounts generate 3 million views in two hours,” says Shaashua. Before the release of October 8, Sachs’s IMDb page was flooded with hundreds of 1-star ratings. “They’re obviously just haters because they haven’t even seen the film,” the producer-director said. In response, she encouraged audiences at screenings to leave reviews to counter the abuse. She got 6,300 10-star ratings, pushing her film’s unweighted average to 9.1 by the end of last month. On April 1, bots had added more than 1,000 new 1-star reviews. Three weeks later, it had 4,700 1-stars and 10,000 10-stars, dragging its IMDb rating down to just 4.3 stars. In a bot-driven world, engagement metrics are no longer a reflection of authenticity. As the automated jiggering of reviews grows more pervasive, we’ve entered an era where star ratings have little value—especially on topics where passions run high, but increasingly even where they don’t. Cloning celebrity gossip Bot farms manufacture familiarity until it feels like truth—not just in politics or capital markets, but in lifestyle and entertainment, too. On December 20, 2024, actress Blake Lively filed a lawsuit against actor-director Justin Baldoni and others, alleging harassment, intimidation, and retaliation after the A-lister reported concerns about inappropriate behavior on the set of It Ends With Us. Lively’s claim alleges that Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios (which Baldoni cofounded) retained a crisis PR firm, the Agency Group, to execute a strategy involving astroturfing and digital manipulation—orchestrated, deceptive online engagement made to look grassroots. The claim says it included using bots, coordinated Reddit and TikTok threads, and fake fan engagement to manipulate public sentiment against Lively. “I can’t connect it to Baldoni, but I can say there is evidence of synthetic activity that is not human,” said Ori Lehavi, an independent threat consultant who analyzed the Lively-Baldoni incident on Xpoz. The analysis showed that bot farm amplification activity had been coordinated against Lively. The preemptive surge in coordinated, inauthentic bot-like activity that Lehavi found came on December 20, 2024, a day before The New York Times broke the story about Lively’s allegations. On that day, bot-like activity spiked to 19,411 engagements, amplifying the reach of posts about Lively to a potential audience of 202,540,776 viewers. Bot farm amplification appears to have sparked organic activity as well. There were 2,913 human-like posts on the day of the bot surge, rising to 3,772 the following day and 4,734 the day after that—even though the bot-like activity subsided. One week later, Baldoni filed a libel lawsuit against The New York Times seeking $250 million for running a story based on “cherry-picked evidence” with “false allegations of a smear campaign.” As is common in bot farm amplification, the most active X accounts used to bash Lively have since been removed. In this case, two of the most outspoken profiles were a suspended account with the username @schuld_eth, and a deleted account called @leapordprint_princess. The legal battles around these allegations continue to unfold. It’s not just the bots that are gaming the algorithms through mass amplification. It’s also the algorithms that are gaming us. We’re being subtly manipulated by social media. We know it. But we keep on scrolling. View the full article

Substack and Patreon are vying to become creators’ primary revenue stream. For most influencers, payouts from platforms like Meta or Google aren’t enough to build a sustainable career. Rather than spending their days hawking products, many creators are turning to direct fan support, and two companies dominate that space: Patreon and Substack. Patreon’s latest move targets streamers. Its native livestreaming feature, currently in demo and set for a broad rollout this summer, could attract gamers and broadcasters alike. But Substack beat them to it, launching a similar live video tool just three months earlier. As the two platforms expand their offerings, the rivalry for creator loyalty is heating up. The market for creator livestreams Video already performs well on the platform: It’s Patreon’s second-highest-earning media category after podcasting. Many Twitch streamers rely on Patreon as a more stable source of subscription revenue, preferring it to Twitch’s unpredictable payouts. With the addition of live video, Patreon is betting that more of these streamers will shift even larger parts of their operations to its platform. “Creators can use livestreams to attract new free members, but they can also use it to encourage free members to pay to ‘upgrade to unlock’ a Live so that creators are earning the most from their fans,” writes Drew Rowny, Patreon’s VP of Product, in an email to Fast Company. “Native livestreams will also be a part of our existing ticketed events experience on Patreon. Live will become a part of our tools that already convert 700,000 free memberships to paid each month.” But Substack, which was founded four years after Patreon, already has the upperhand. The platform introduced livestreaming to top-performing creators in September, then expanded access sitewide in January. Video is now central to Substack’s strategy: 82% of its 250 highest-earning creators are using audio and video in their work. Since its inception, Substack has been a refuge for journalists leaving legacy media—and its live video feature is now drawing in television anchors as well. Don Lemon and Jim Acosta both stream on Substack—and sometimes, they stream together. As of 2025, roughly one in three live videos on the platform are cohosted with another Substack creator. Earlier this month, former MSNBC host Chris Matthews announced he’ll be streaming there, too. “The important thing about live video, community features, or any other publishing tools is that they aren’t just standalone features—they’re connected to a network that helps publishers grow both audience and revenue,” Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie writes in an email to Fast Company. “That’s what Substack does exceptionally well.” Who will win the creator subscription market? Second-stream creator revenue has been Patreon’s domain for over a decade. But Substack has recently inched its way, courting TikTok creators with big-money incentives. To some extent, the budding strategy has worked. When Hannah Neeleman, the infamous trad wife behind Ballerina Farm, wanted to venture outside of TikTok, she started a Substack newsletter. So have a good many shopping influencers, wanting to more easily insert affiliate links. Not long ago, Patreon would have been these creators’ only option. Of course, Substack doesn’t think of itself as a Patreon competitor. It wants to be known as a wider social media platform, and not just a subscription service—even if it continues to tout its five million paid subscriptions. “Substack is a destination people visit specifically to discover new voices and find creators to subscribe to,” McKenzie says. “Users willingly engage with all content forms while there, whether it’s livestreaming, reading, watching videos, or listening to podcasts. In that sense, Substack is truly a 360-degree platform, offering creators everything they need. It’s more comparable to YouTube than to Patreon.” That doesn’t mean Patreon is losing its grip. The company emphasizes that more than half of the $290 billion creator economy comes from direct-to-fan paid programs. The growth of other platforms could just be a sign of an expanding industry. “We’re seeing more and more platforms helping creators to connect directly with their fans—which is a great thing for the creator economy,” Patreon’s Rowny writes. “Creators can build tighter communities, grow their audience more, and earn more income on Patreon. We’re laser-focused on helping creators manage and grow their direct-to-fan businesses.” View the full article

When it opened in 2001, watchmaker Timex’s new headquarters building in Middlebury, Connecticut, was an architectural wonder. Its all-glass walls and open floor plan put the entire 275-person company in one big, light-filled workspace, covered by a swooping arched roof. It was a radical embrace of the ideals of openness, collaboration, and anti-hierarchical social interaction. On top of all this, the award-winning building had one additional—and unique—feature: a hole in the top that shines sunlight down on an ancient time-marking device known as a meridian line. Covering the building at the time, Fast Company noted “the building itself is a watch.” But now the building is on the verge of being demolished, decades earlier than most buildings of its generation would be threatened. A distribution center has been proposed for development on the site, and Timex, which is now majority owned by a hedge fund, is planning to move out. About the only thing standing in the way of the wrecking ball is a man named Nicholas Stuller. In 2020, the 61-year-old and his family moved to Middlebury, where he runs a financial technology startup. The town of about 8,000 people sits 25 miles outside of New Haven, and is mostly green and bucolic. It’s the kind of place where not much changes. So in 2023, many residents were surprised to learn of plans for a speculative 670,000-square-foot distribution center that a group of developers wanted to build there, not far from Interstate 84. Part of the complex, named Southford Park, would sit right on the footprint of the Timex building, known as Watch Hill. To build the distribution center, the Timex building would have to be torn down. Stuller learned the news at the same time as the rest of the community, but he was even more in the dark: Still relatively new to the town, he didn’t know Timex was located there, or about its unique headquarters. Curious, he took a detour one morning in October 2023 on the way to dropping his daughter off at grade school. Stuller and his daughter pulled up to the building and walked in the front door to take a look. They ended up going on an impromptu tour led by a group of eager company employees. “They rolled out the red carpet. An hour and 15 minutes later, I had to take my daughter to school, but they kept on talking about the building, about the company,” Stuller says. “[It’s] a magnificent building,” he adds. “It’s so unusual. I’ve been in a lot of buildings around the country and the world, and this is a really unique building. I walked out of there saying, wow, something’s got to get done. Irrespective of the distribution center, this building needs to be preserved.” So Stuller launched a nonprofit called Save Historic Middlebury with the goal of creating preservation laws in the town, which currently has none. The intent is to establish the legal framework to stop the demolition of the Timex building. For now, there’s little to prevent the building’s owners from knocking it down. Save Historic Middlebury is trying to get the building recognized as a significant historic property. “It’s the only building, we think, in the world, let alone the U.S., where the building itself is a working example of the product the company makes,” Stuller says. His group has gathered support from a range of preservation groups, including the Sierra Club of Connecticut, the Cultural Landscape Foundation, and Docomomo US. Former Timex employees are also supportive of the preservation effort. Lou Nugai worked in computer operations for Timex from 1968 until his retirement in 2012, spending time both in the company’s previous headquarters in an office park on the edge of town and in the current building from 2001 onward. “It was nice. The floor plan was open. There was good visibility. I liked it quite a bit,” he says, noting it was a particular improvement on the previous headquarters. “They were completely opposite. I wouldn’t say it was a dungeon, but it wasn’t as bright or cheerful as Watch Hill.” Last August Save Historic Middlebury made a formal application to the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office to have the building added to the National Register of Historic Places. “When we applied to put the building on the register, not surprisingly the developer who owns the building said, ‘no, we don’t want you to put it on,’” Stuller says. But because anybody can apply for a building to be included on the National Register, Stuller and his group moved forward. In December, the application was denied at the state level, ostensibly because the building is not at least 50 years old, a general guideline often used to gauge a building’s historic character. “It’s one particular person at the state level who just doesn’t like new buildings,” Stuller says. Save Historic Middlebury is amending its application and plans to reapply. (The group also briefly filed a lawsuit under the Connecticut Environmental Policy Act to stave off demolition, but withdrew the suit in December.) Timex plans to vacate the building this spring and move into another office building in nearby Shelton. “Once it’s vacant, theoretically the property developer could knock it down,” Stuller says. Timex did not respond to requests for comment. In the meantime, other groups in Middlebury have lobbied to stop the development project that would result in the Timex building’s demolition. The Middlebury Small Town Alliance has led a lawsuit against the distribution center’s developers. “It doesn’t match our community,” says Jennifer Mahr, president of the alliance. Her organization is opposed to the distribution center, but is also in favor of preserving the Timex building. “A lot of us agree that something else could be done on that property as is,” says Mahr, who was subsequently elected to the town’s governing Board of Selectmen. “It’s a perfectly fine building.” In January, the group got a favorable ruling from the local superior court judge, who decided that permits issued to the developers were in violation of the town’s wetlands and zoning regulations, effectively halting the project. But an appeal is now being prepared. Lawyers for the developer declined to comment. “I’ll be surprised if the appellate court takes the case,” Mahr says. “I do think that their appeal has run out of steam.” Even if the distribution center project falls through, Stuller and his group of volunteer preservationists are concerned that the Timex building is still in danger. He says the group plans to filed its amended National Register application directly to the National Park Service within the next month or two. They’re hoping for a positive response the second time around, but aren’t relying on protection from the top down. Stuller says the building’s fate may hinge on how much support he can gather from the local community and beyond. “Once we continue to beat this drum and get the word out,” he says, “I think there’s decent odds we can convince the people that do control the building to change their plans.” View the full article

Google's John Mueller explained how to remove a site from the search results without Search Console ownership verification The post Google: How To Remove Site From Search Without Verifying Ownership appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Reading just got a whole lot cooler. Online Ceramics, a cult East L.A. clothing brand that makes hand-dyed apparel for artists like the Grateful Dead and André 3000 and helped A24 win the movie merch game, has a new capsule collection with the biggest trade publisher in the world that celebrates the freedom to read. The “Reading Is a Right” collaboration with Penguin Random House comes against a backdrop of increasing book bans across the country. Penguin Random House is among the publishers suing states like Idaho and Florida over recent laws they say are onerous and could lead to public and school library bans on books by beloved authors like Maya Angelou, Ernest Hemingway, George R. R. Martin, and Toni Morrison. The collaboration is an attempt to fight back through merch, raising awareness, and fundraising. The collection includes Online Ceramics cream and tie-dyed T-shirts with the publisher’s penguin mascot and an opened book that says “Practice Magic: Read.” Prices range from $5 for a “Read a Banned Book” bumper sticker to $35 for “Reading Is a Right” socks. Hoodies are priced as high as $135, but 100% of Penguin Random House’s net proceeds will be donated to the nonprofit American Library Association (ALA). The gesture is welcomed. “This message is incredibly timely in this climate when censorship is rampant and federal funding for libraries has been gutted,” ALA’s president, Cindy Hohl, said in a statement. There were book challenges against 2,452 unique titles in 2024, according to ALA data, a figure far above the average 273 unique titles challenged annually over the period from 2001 to 2020. And President Donald The President signed an executive order cutting the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provides federal funding to libraries. Penguin Random House publishes more than 14,000 new works annually. It’s the parent company to subsidiaries that have published bestsellers like former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Becoming and classics from George Orwell’s 1984 to Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Online Ceramics cofounder Elijah Funk called Penguin Random House “the absolute epicenter of all things books” in a statement, and for him, teaming up for “Reading Is a Right” was a long time coming. “I’ve always wanted to partner with them, and once I found out about their work standing up for the freedom to read, I knew we needed to highlight their efforts as a positive force for good and bring more visibility to this issue,” Funk said. “There’s a reason books are usually one of the first things to be burned or banned from communities. Books are about justice, freedom, history, and imagination: some of the most powerful tools a person or community can have. And the library makes them free and accessible for every person.” With book bans on the rise, “Reading Is a Right” gives people a new way to show their love of reading on their sleeves and raise some money to support U.S. libraries in the process. View the full article

Coral reefs are vital to the health of the oceans, but in recent years they’ve been decimated by climate change, pollution, and overfishing. While this has been widely covered, a new documentary sheds light on the groundbreaking efforts to restore these fragile ecosystems, and the scientists and communities working to bring them back to life. Reef Builders showcases the work of the Sheba Hope Grows initiative, part of one of the largest coral reef restoration efforts globally, led by Mars Sustainable Solutions. Sheba, a cat food brand owned by global conglomerate Mars Inc., has been supporting reef restoration through its Hope Grows program since 2019. Threats Endangering Coral Reefs As environmental disasters intensify in a warming climate, the destruction of coral reefs can be overlooked. Oceans are key to world health as they regulate the climate and weather, provide food, and support billions of people around the globe. “Coral reefs are probably the most important ecosystem that drives the health of oceans. A quarter of all marine life is found on coral reefs, although they occupy a very small percentage of the ocean surface,” says David Smith, chief marine scientist and senior director at Mars Sustainable Solutions, a program run by Mars Global, which tackles environmental threats through science-based actions. “The other side of the story, unfortunately, is that they’re on the edge of extinction. The best science that we have today suggests that we could lose up to 95% of coral reefs in the next 20 years.” Destructive fishing practices, water pollution, and land development all contribute to reef degradation, while climate change intensifies natural threats like ocean acidification and marine heat waves, which lead to coral bleaching, according to Smith. Just this week, the International Coral Reef Initiative announced that 84% of the world’s coral reefs have been affected by the worst bleaching event ever. Work Behind the Restoration MSS has worked on coral reef restoration since 2006, investing millions in research, builds, and community engagement. It says approximately 1.3 million coral fragments and 87,000 “reef stars” (metal structures designed to support coral growth) have been installed, all using locally sourced materials. In collaboration with local communities, organizations, and stakeholders, restoration sites are carefully chosen based on both need and feasibility. Teams then deploy reef stars to create expansive, interconnected webs across degraded reef areas. This approach enables coverage of an area the size of a basketball court within days, with dozens of reef stars installed each hour. These structures help stabilize loose coral rubble and provide a solid foundation for coral to grow. After a few years, corals colonize the reef stars, eventually integrating them into the natural reef. The result is a restored habitat for fish and invertebrates, alongside the return of native coral species. “Many coral reefs around the world have got to a stage where they’re not able to recover without any assistance, and that’s where restoration comes in to aid the recovery in those systems that have lost their ability to recover naturally,” Smith says. The first Sheba Hope Grows project was launched in 2019 in Salisi’ Besar, a reef off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Within five years, the reefs had grown back. The organization now uses it as a model to show the impact reef stars can have. “That success proves that large-scale restoration is possible,” says Mindy Barry, Sheba’s global VP of marketing. “That’s what gives you hope, and that’s what ideally will inspire consumers to say this is an issue that not only matters, that I need to care about, but there are things that can be done.” The Making of Reef Builders Reef Builders follows coastal communities in Indonesia, Hawaii, Kenya, and Australia that are working to restore their disappearing coral reefs, essential for their food and livelihood. “There’s a huge science program that underpins the restoration,” Smith says. “But actually what was unique, and one of the most rewarding parts of my job, is when you have that knowledge, you’ve done that research, but then you talk to the people who are at the coral face, which is actually in the local community with harbors that depend on that reef.” This intersection of science and community was at the heart of the project featured in Reef Builders, which now spans 72 restoration sites across the world. Coral reefs form a natural belt around the planet stretching across the world’s oceans, but they’re concentrated most heavily in the Indo-Pacific. Within this belt, distinct regions emerge, each with its own unique ecological and social characteristics. The team selected sites to ensure broad representation of these different regions, focusing on areas where strong local community involvement could drive meaningful restoration. “It’s not us necessarily restoring. It’s those communities that are restoring,” Smith says. “What we can do, and what we’ve done, is demonstrate that it’s possible to restore a reef effectively, rapidly, in a way that’s accessible to local communities around the world.” While each region has its own environmental challenges, the human stories remain strikingly similar. “The emotion of the individuals, of those local members whose lives were being impacted by the loss really shines through,” Smith says. “It’s that beautiful combination between, yes, you’ve got all the white-coated science and numbers and spreadsheets but actually, ultimately, it’s people’s problems. People are there to try and find a solution for it.” Call to Action People often underestimate the crisis facing coral reefs. According to a Sheba survey conducted by Wakefield Research, 70% of people believe that coral reefs have little to no impact on their daily lives. But reefs are essential ecosystems that support a wide variety of fish species, many of which are commercially valuable and eaten by people around the world. Reefs also play a crucial role in producing a substantial amount of the oxygen humans rely on. Between 1957 and 2007, research shows that more than 50% of coral reefs vanished. But the crisis is escalating, and so is the need for action. Barry says that through the documentary Sheba aims to rally people to recognize that saving coral reefs is not a solitary mission but a collective effort. Smith echoes that goal. “Who’s going to start to make those first steps on that journey? And then who can you bring along with you?” he asks. “I hope that people feel that’s a trajectory that we can get on together.” Reef Builders is available to stream worldwide on Prime Video. Through June 29, Amazon will donate $1 for every hour of the documentary that’s streamed in the U.S.—up to $100,000—to the Kuleana Coral Restoration foundation in Hawaii. View the full article

New Jersey has a million acres filled with towering pitch pines. It’s springtime and the trees stand straight, bare and bonelike, above a carpet of winter needles that worry state fire service professionals. This week, a swath of the Pine Barrens went up in flames, a stark warning of what might be a treacherous fire season. About 11,500 acres were affected by a fire that started Tuesday morning in the Greenwood Forest Wildlife Management Area of Ocean County, New Jersey Forest Fire Service said midday Wednesday. The Garden State Parkway was shut down for miles as thick smoke wafted into neighborhoods and thousands of households and businesses were evacuated for hours and had power cuts. The New Jersey Forest Fire Service said 50% of the blaze was contained by Wednesday evening. Foresters had warned in March that New Jersey was particularly vulnerable to wildfires this year because of below-average rains, near-drought conditions—and a delay in prescribed burns by authorities that have typically helped to reduce risk. The pitch pine is considered resilient to fire. Its bark is dark and scaly and can endure the periodic wildfires that are part of the natural ecological cycle. But the pinelands, the first national reserve in the country, also thrive because of forest service prescribed burns to rid brush. This year, foresters said they cut back on springtime burns because of on-the-ground conditions: It has been just too hot and dry to start prescribed fires. The Forest Fire Service typically treats 25,000 acres in central New Jersey, across seven counties, with planned burns. So far this year, forest personnel have burned only 3,320 acres, a fraction of its work in previous years. Five years ago, 26,000 acres were burned. In 2024, 15,000 were targeted. New Jersey entered fire season, from March to May, following its third driest January since records began in 1895. State fire officials are warning that a drop in rainfall and snow have made autumn leaves and winter needles ready tinder across what is called the Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens. “Conditions have severely hampered efforts by the Forest Fire Service to conduct prescribed fire operations that are critical to preventing wildfires,” Bill Donnelly, the state’s fire warden and forest fire service chief, said in an email before Tuesday’s flames. Donnelly and his team normally conduct prescribed operations through March 15 in the southern and central regions of New Jersey, and April 1 in the north. When fire officials burn during dry conditions, there’s a higher risk of burning into what’s called the duff layer, which is the decomposed organic matter like leaves, twigs, and needles that sits atop the soil. If burned, Donnelly said, it could damage new growth and cause smoke that lingers, affecting communities and roadways for weeks. “Not sure what the rest of the year’s gonna hold for us,” Donnelly said in a press briefing last month. “If things continue the way they are, we’re going to have quite a fire season on our hands.” New Jersey, the country’s fourth-smallest state geographically, offers an example of America’s growing fire risk in the Northeast. The region is experiencing drier and wetter seasons, part of what is a changing and much less predictable cycle of drought and deluge. Evolving climate patterns are testing fire strategy from California to Connecticut as well as communities. Los Angeles suffered devastating fires in January, with billions of dollars in damages, and UCLA researchers, in an extensive survey, found residents reported emotional and financial loss for months after. Beautiful broadleaf deciduous trees that color the Northeast in the fall are tightly packed so that, in less trying times, when the leaves drop they often hold a lot of moisture, according to Erica Smithwick, a professor of geography and ecology at Penn State University. Not so in drier conditions. The leaves are parched for water as they fall and pose an increased fire risk. “If the leaves are dead and they dry out in the fall and they drop to the ground, all you need is ignition to get it all to burn,” Smithwick said. Burns are meant to clear undergrowth safely and limit wildfire. Last fall, multiple woodland fires broke out in the Northeast including Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York. In January, firefighters from a coalition of Northeast states met to discuss the increasing unpredictability of rain and drought across the region. Record-low rainfall allowed for blazes in October and November north of Boston, in Brooklyn, and in Connecticut. On New Jersey’s border with New York, fire scorched 5,000 acres of land and one volunteer firefighter died. Some experts, including Jaclyn Rhoads, executive director at Pinelands Preservation Alliance, suggest that prescribed burning should occur throughout the year. Fire personnel should be planning beyond seasons, she said, and considering month-by-month weather conditions. “We need to try to mimic the wildfires in a controlled way that allows for us to receive all the benefits without necessarily the damages,” Rhoads said. “There are plenty of examples, like in Florida, where their forest fire service burns all year round.” Smithwick at Penn State noted that Northeast forests are close to cities and infrastructure such as roads and powerlines. Maps of wildlife urban interface (WUI)—areas where wildland vegetation and man-made development intermingle and are particularly vulnerable to wildfires—show an expansion of 2 million acres per year based on data from the U.S. Fire Administration. “Even a small wildfire could have more impact in the east because of all that built infrastructure,” Smithwick said. “In fact, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the mid-Atlantic—some of the highest WUI in the country is in the east.” Caryn Shinske, senior press officer of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, said fire teams in the past month had been staffing fire towers, staging for initial response for possible fires, and readying equipment for the summer risks. —By Anna Mattson, Inside Climate News This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. View the full article

In a February 2025 Truth Social post, President Donald The President declared a “Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” So far, this “golden age” has entailed an executive order calling for the federal agency that funds local museums and libraries to be dismantled, with most grants rescinded. The The President administration has forbidden federal arts funding from going to artists who promote what the administration calls “gender ideology.” There’s been a purge of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, with The President appointing himself chair. And the administration has canceled National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Suffice it to say, many artists and arts organizations across the U.S. are worried: Will government arts funding dry up? Do these cuts signal a new war on arts and culture? How do artists make it through this period of change? As scholars who study the arts, activism and policy, we’re watching the latest developments with apprehension. But we think it’s important to point out that while the U.S. government has never been a global leader of arts funding, American artists have always been innovative, creative and scrappy during times of political turmoil. A rocky relationship with the arts For much of the country’s early history, government funding for the arts was rarely guaranteed or stable. After the Civil War, the Second Industrial Revolution facilitated massive concentrations of wealth, in what became known as the the Gilded Age. Private arts funding soared during this period, with some titans of industry, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, seeing it as their duty to build museums, theaters and libraries for the public. The heavy reliance on private funding for the arts troubled some Americans, who feared these institutions would become too exposed to the whims of the wealthy. In response, Progressive Era activists and politicians argued that it was the government’s responsibility to build arts spaces accessible to all Americans. Efforts to fund the arts expanded with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, as the country was reeling from the Great Depression. From 1935 to 1943, the Works Progress Administration provided jobs with stable wages for artists through the Federal Art Project. However, Congress famously terminated the program in response to a 1937 production of “The Revolt of the Beavers,” which conservative politicians denounced for containing overt Marxist themes. Nonetheless, over the ensuing decades, the federal government generally signaled its support for the arts. Congress established the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1965 to fund arts organizations and artists. And since 1972, the General Services Administration has commissioned public art for federal buildings and organized a registry of prospective artists. The NEA gave US$8.4 million in direct funding to artists in 1989 via fellowships and grants. This might be considered the high-water mark for unrestricted government funding for individual artists. By the 1980s, sexuality, drugs and American morality had become hot-button political issues. The arts, from music to theater, were at the center of this culture war. Pressure escalated in 1989 when conservative leaders contested two NEA-funded exhibitions featuring work by Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, which they deemed homoerotic and anti-Christian. In 1990, Congress instated a “decency clause” guiding all future NEA work. When Republicans regained control of Congress in 1994, they slashed direct funding for the arts. With direct funding to artists largely eliminated, today’s artists can indirectly receive federal government support through federal arts agency grants, which are given to arts organizations that then dole out a portion to artists. Local and state government agencies also provide small amounts of direct support for artists. The stage of democracy Artists and arts organizations have a long legacy of persistence and strategic organizing during periods of political and economic upheaval. In the pre-Revolutionary colonies, representatives of the British government banned theatrical performances to discourage revolutionary action. In response, activist playwrights organized underground parlor dramas and informal dramatic readings to keep arts-based activism alive. Activist theater continued into the antebellum period for the purposes of promoting the abolitionist cause. These dramas, often organized by women, would take place in living rooms, outside of public view. The clandestine staged readings – the most famous of which was written by one of the earliest Black American playwrights, William Wells Brown – seeded enthusiasm and solidarity for the antislavery cause. These privately staged readings took place alongside public performances and lectures. Craft the world you want Dozens of experimental schools like the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and Commonwealth College in Arkansas were founded in the 1920s and 1930s to train activists. Supporting adult learners of all ages – but specifically young adults – they initially focused on arts-based techniques for training workers in labor activism. For example, students wrote short plays based on their experiences of factory work. In their rehearsals and performances, they imagined endings in which workers triumphed over cruel bosses. Many programs were residential, rural and embraced early versions of mutual aid, where artists and activists support one another directly through pooling money and resources. Tuition was minimal and generally provided directly from labor organizations and allies, including the American Fund for Public Service. Most teachers were volunteers, and the learning communities often farmed to cover basic necessities. Although these institutions faced perpetual threats from local governments and even the FBI, these communal schools became testing grounds for social change. Some programs even became training sites for civil rights activists. Linda Goode Bryant Curate the world you need Black artists have long created spaces for community connection and career development. The Great Migration brought many Black American artists and thinkers to New York City, famously spurring the Harlem Renaissance, which lasted from the end of World War I through the 1920s. During this period, the neighborhood became a fountain of culture, with Black artists producing countless plays, books, music and other visionary works. This legacy continued at Just Above Midtown, or JAM, a gallery and arts laboratory led by Linda Goode Bryant from 1974 through 1986 on West 57th Street in Manhattan. At the time, arts organizations primarily supported artwork by white men. In response, Goode Bryant launched JAM to create a space that supported and celebrated artists of color. JAM provided arts business workshops, cultivated collaborations and launched the careers of Black artists such as David Hammons and Lorraine O’Grady. The future is now Whether or not they realize it, many artists and arts organizations today are integrating lessons from the past. In recent years, they’ve promoted the unionization of museum workers and created local mutual aid networks such as the Museum Workers Relief Fund, which was one of many groups fundraising for arts workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re building networks of financial support to share space and money with other artists and arts organizations. And they’re forming cultural land trusts, which create land cooperatives where artists can work and live with one another. What’s more, new philanthropic models are reshaping arts funding by elevating the perspectives of artists, rather than those of wealthy funders. CAST in San Francisco helps arts organizations find affordable gallery and performance spaces. The Community and Cultural Power Fund uses a trust-based philanthropy model that allows artists and community members to decide who receives future grants. The Ruth Foundation for the Arts makes artists the decision-makers in giving grants to arts organizations. While the current challenges are unprecedented – and funding threats will likely reshape arts organizations and further limit direct support for artists – we’re confident that the arts will persist with or without government support. Johanna K. Taylor is an associate professor at The Design School at Arizona State University. Mary McAvoy is an associate professor of theatre at Arizona State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

Conflict management is one of the most critical leadership skills today, yet many leaders are struggling to get it right. Companies are implementing return-to-office mandates; shifting stances on diversity, equity, and inclusion; and dealing with climate change and an uncertain economy. All of these factors put pressure on businesses and the people who work for them. Over 80% of workers report escalated tensions in the workplace, and 90% of workers say they have witnessed political clashes between coworkers. Employees are feeling uncomfortable because they are unsure how they fit into company goals, or don’t feel clear about where the company is headed. This tension leads to conflict, and it’s up to the leaders to manage the situation. When we teach conflict management, there are several classic models and approaches. Some call for weighing goal achievement versus relationship orientation, while others look to balance assertion versus cooperation. In all scenarios, there is an underlying assumption: Leaders foster the climate that determines whether employees will engage in collegial discourse. In other words, people who disagree should be comfortable advocating for their position while listening to others’ points of view. While this notion works well in theory, the practical manager knows this is not always the case. In recent years, hybrid work has made free-flowing communication opportunities and seeing things eye-to-eye more challenging, literally. While it’s widely recommended that you should not accept what you read, having a conversation to ask for more clarity is not always natural (or even possible) in a hybrid setting. So, what do you do when mixed-work modality team members are in conflict with one another, with the company, or even with you? As the leader, your job is to manage the situation. The challenge is determining how to approach conflict in a way that is both constructive and comfortable. The Remote​​ Work Factor There are many efficiencies afforded by flexible work arrangements, but a side effect of remote (and sometimes asynchronous) work is that conversations between coworkers are often limited to scheduled check-ins and meetings. Consequently, coworker interactions are relatively two-dimensional. Employees make inferences and judgments from emailed statements or Slack DMs that rarely, if ever, tell the full story of one’s perspective and context. Compounding this issue is the fact that today’s multigenerational workforce has significantly different comfort levels using different modalities for collaboration. Gen Z and millennial employees have learned communication norms that entail a heavy reliance on direct messaging and video calls versus talking things through with one another. In fact, 46% of workers report they have engaged in full arguments over chat-based applications. Meanwhile, members of all generations have varying preferences for direct communication—whether in person, via phone, or video. The shift toward remote and hybrid work has complicated communication particularly as it pertains to giving feedback. In traditional office settings, mentorship and sharing feedback often occur naturally through hallway conversations, post-meeting discussions, or informal manager check-ins. One of the drawbacks of remote work can be the elimination of these spontaneous opportunities. Without casual in-person interactions, employees must deliberately schedule feedback conversations, which can make the process feel more formal and high-stakes than a quick chat in the office. As a consequence, performance itself can become a source of conflict since remote employees are 32% less likely to receive real-time feedback, including what has been working well, and what needs to change. Navigating the Next Era of Workplace Conflict When teams realize that what they are doing is not working, conflicts will happen. Due to not having the opportunity to bring issues up until they become undeniable, conflicts may have festered and therefore may be emotionally charged. We recommend three considerations for those ready to rise to the challenge of hybrid or remote conflict management. 1. Be honest about what you’re seeing—and why it’s a problem A first crucial element to managing conflict is that leaders call out what they are seeing and then discuss observations with their team. For example, although sentiments are mixed when it comes to how politics should be brought into or left out of the workplace, there is no denying that stakeholders and stockholders alike have been impacted by various international events and executive orders. From the impact tariffs may have on a company’s ability to import materials, to the impact layoffs may have on staffing, what needs to be considered in our work today is different than it was a few weeks ago. Leaders can’t ignore what is going on around them. One of the tenets of psychologist and author Daniel Goleman’s model of emotionally intelligent leadership posits that a leader’s primary responsibility is to be in sync with their followers. In order to be able to react in a way that resonates with one’s team, leaders should know whether something may cause apprehension, excitement, or concern among their reports. In fact, if managers are oblivious to or ignore any elements of the world that concern their employees, they will cause further frustration or be dismissed themselves. One option is for leaders to start their weekly check-ins with a current events update. Share top headlines and explain how news may impact the organization in the coming week or months. If a company does change its policies due to shifts in federal or state sentiments, acknowledge these and explain how this shift will affect your team members directly or indirectly. If you don’t know how to get discussions going, it’s likely that your company’s communication department has created talking points for managers to use. In smaller companies, ask the human resources department for some guidelines on how to explain changes to employees. You should not feel alone in what you say, but you should take responsibility for bringing changes up. 2. Get to know your team If a leader doesn’t know what the team cares about in the first place, it will be impossible to connect their perceptions to conflicts that may erupt. Meanwhile, those employees who have not learned how to self-advocate may struggle finding the right time and place to raise their concerns (and voices) constructively. Leaders who bridge these two scenarios can mitigate conflicts or manage them when they arise. As mentioned earlier, resonant leaders are those in sync with their followers emotionally. They understand that an employee who is seeking international relocation may see global affairs differently than one who has a domestic promotion agenda. If your company conducts business with countries involved in tariff discussions, some company leaders may worry about how financial reporting will be adversely impacted. Knowing what is important to your team enables you to proactively manage topics that may become conflicts. Because of this, it’s important that leaders take the time to listen to their employees when they share what matters to them. Whether there is data from a formal performance review and goal-setting session, or you’ve gone to lunch with a member of your team, take inventory of what you know about each individual and what is important to them. If you are not already in the habit of doing so, use your one-on-one meetings as opportunities to bring up what you know, and ask your team members to share how they are feeling about a related element of their job or development plan they had established. If employees don’t share topics of frustration or worry, ask open-ended questions that provide the opportunity to express their concerns or identify paths they wish to explore. And, if you’re not having in-person or virtual on-on-ones, now is a very good time to start. 3. Learn to communicate proactively and address conflict remotely If you were walking down a hallway and heard someone complaining, you’d know they are unhappy. But if your interactions with your team members are limited to when they choose to turn their webcams and microphones on, you will not have the same windows of insight. Identifying potential conflicts and managing ones that have already come into focus require an adjustment of management techniques. Similar to knowing and understanding what team members may value, it’s incumbent upon a manager to know some of their direct reports’ attitudinal tells. If an employee shakes their head a little more than usual in agreement or asks the same question more than once and does not seem to apply what they learn, these may be signs that remote workers are struggling to stay focused or engaged. It has been said many times before, but when working with a remote workforce, you cannot overcommunicate. Leaders need to establish a cadence of regular meetings and also be sure to casually check in with informal conversations and temperature checks. Information that is verbally shared in a meeting should also be documented and distributed via written communiqués to avoid miscommunication or misunderstanding, which can also lead to conflict. When remote employees are simply not performing according to expectations, leaders need to manage their performance in the same way they would for in-person employees. Letting issues go or looking the other way is not an option. On the flipside, it’s important to understand that sometimes what you—the leader—are doing is the cause of the conflict. One-third of employees have indicated that their bosses are too aggressive in text messages. Therefore, to avoid greater conflicts, leaders must address the situation directly and manage just as they would if the employee worked in the office. To preempt any issues, leaders must become comfortable saying, “Hey, can you stay on the line for a minute?” Use this time after the regular meeting to acknowledge what you are seeing and ask for feedback on the initiative, the players, or the process being employed to address the work. If the opportunity to talk right after another meeting is missed, it’s okay to email or send a Slack message to an employee to ask: “Do you have time later to hop on a quick Zoom? I want to go over X topic.” It’s important to be specific about the agenda so that there isn’t cause for alarm as to the subject of the conversation. That said, we also suggest doing this when you are able to jump on a call in the not-too-distant future, as requesting a meeting may still induce anxiety. Bring People Together to Manage Conflict When workers are not in the same physical space, facilitating conflict management is not easy. While it’s easy enough to ignore what may be distressing your team or assume that everyone interprets things the same way, managers should openly address differences, ask questions, and demonstrate flexibility when conflict arises. By deliberately managing communication in a way that normalizes healthy conflict, leaders create an environment where everyone feels heard and understood. View the full article