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Google's John Mueller said that link spam left in the comments section have no effect on Google Search or SEO, (and maybe even your website's performance in Google Search?). He wrote on Bluesky, "These links all have no effect - they're from spammers dropping links into comments. These would not have any effect, positive nor negative, on your site."View the full article

Five days compressed into five minutes. Six weeks into six days. These aren’t marginal improvements. They’re what happens when marketing organizations remove the structural barriers that prevent talented people from acting at the speed of customer behavior. As Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, warned in “Managing in Turbulent Times,” “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” Markets are volatile. Customer behavior shifts in real time. Channels are always on. Yet many marketing organizations still operate with structures designed for a slower world, and the cost is measured in missed moments. Drucker identified the real constraint: Structure limits performance One of Drucker’s most enduring ideas was that organizational structure matters more than individual capability. Smart people trapped in the wrong system will still underperform. Consider a global gaming operator that required seven teams to launch a single campaign. Planning cycles stretched to six weeks. As their Global Head of Customer Marketing put it: “We needed seven teams and six weeks to send a single campaign.” This wasn’t a talent problem. When insights live with analysts, creative execution lives with designers and activation depends on engineers; value is lost in the handoffs. Decisions slow. Context degrades. Moments pass. Drucker warned against this fragmentation. He believed knowledge workers needed both clarity of purpose and freedom of action. Positionless Marketing removes the structural barriers that prevent that freedom. From knowledge work to moment-based execution At one of the largest iGaming companies in the U.S., campaign execution took five days. In an environment where players place bets, browse products or show signs of disengagement in real time, five days is an eternity. The opportunity to act appears and disappears almost instantly. By consolidating customer data, orchestration and execution, eliminating the handoffs that killed momentum, they reduced campaign execution to five minutes. A 99% reduction in cycle time. This reflects what Drucker always advocated: decisions made close to the action, by the people with the most context. Positionless Marketing enables marketers to move from insight to action without waiting on approvals or cross-functional workflows. The impact goes beyond speed. They can now more easily direct a meaningful percentage of spend to their most deserving players. It means better decisions, executed immediately. From management by objectives to execution by outcomes Drucker introduced “management by objectives” to align organizations around outcomes rather than tasks. Over time, marketing drifted back toward task completion: build the campaign, launch the asset, measure later. The global gaming operator’s transformation brought this philosophy full circle. After restructuring around Positionless principles, they reduced campaign time from six weeks to hours, and sometimes a single day. But the real shift was accountability. In the past, they had shared responsibility, which really meant no responsibility. Now, a single marketer owns a campaign from end to end. They build it. They launch it. They learn from it. The objective is no longer to send a message; it’s to drive a response. Not to launch a journey, but to change behavior. Not to complete a process, but to create value in the moment. As Drucker put it in “The Effective Executive,” “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” Positionless Marketing prioritizes effectiveness by enabling marketers to decide and act without delay. Real-world evidence: Organizations moving at the speed of interaction The pattern repeats across industries. Organizations adopting Positionless Marketing principles see similar results: Campaign execution cycles collapse from days to minutes. Teams shrink from seven to one. Planning horizons compress from weeks to hours. But the outputs improve — more personalized, more relevant, more effective. These aren’t technology wins. They’re structural transformations. Organizations have moved from assembly-line marketing to empowered execution — from dependency to ownership. What changed? They stopped organizing around functions (data, creative, activation) and started organizing around outcomes. They gave individual marketers the authority and tools to move from insight to action without handoffs. They became Positionless. Technology as an amplifier of judgment, not a replacement Drucker was clear that tools should support human judgment, not replace it. Technology’s value lies in speed and scale, not wisdom. The organizations succeeding with Positionless Marketing embody this principle. AI provides prediction and recommendations. Automation removes friction. But judgment on what to do, when to do it, and why remains with the marketer. With all customer data and orchestration tools in one place, marketers don’t need to wait for engineers to target lists, analysts for insights, or creative teams for content assets. Strategic judgment is now enabled by technology, not replaced by it. This is why Positionless Marketing isn’t about doing more work. It’s about enabling better decisions to be executed immediately. In Drucker’s terms, it makes the knowledge worker productive. The evolution Drucker anticipated but could not fully describe Drucker foresaw flatter organizations, faster decision-making and greater autonomy. What he could not anticipate was a world where customers are always connected, channels are always on, and relevance expires instantly. In that world, insight without execution is wasted potential. Structure without flexibility is a liability. Specialization without ownership creates bottlenecks. Positionless Marketing is the next logical step in Drucker’s philosophy. It gives marketers what knowledge workers were always meant to have: Immediate access to information, clear authority to act, and accountability for outcomes rather than tasks. What was once an assembly line requiring seven teams has become something a single marketer can own end-to-end. As Drucker warned, the greatest danger in turbulent times is continuing to operate with yesterday’s logic. Marketing teams that still rely on yesterday’s assembly-line structures will continue to miss today’s moments. From philosophy to practice If Drucker defined what knowledge workers need to be effective, Positionless Marketing defines how marketers can finally work that way in real time. It replaces waiting with action. Five-day workflows become five-minute responses. It replaces handoffs with ownership. Seven-team processes become single-marketer executions. It replaces process-driven execution with moment-driven relevance allowing brands to move at the speed of a consumer’s interaction. The question is no longer whether marketing organizations need to change. It’s whether they’ll change before their competitors do. The knowledge worker Drucker envisioned is no longer just informed. In marketing, they are finally empowered to act. They are Positionless. To see the examples referenced in this article: go to case study 1, and here case study 2. View the full article

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Last week, Modern CEO shared reader recommendations of books leaders should read to get ready for 2026. Lyft CEO David Risher submitted a classic, writing: “If you’re looking for inspiration on how to write a comeback story for your company, there’s no better tale than The Odyssey.” Risher knows a bit about penning comeback stories. He’s undertaking the Homerian task of reviving rideshare company Lyft and narrowing the gap between the company and rival Uber. Taking on a turnaround When Risher became CEO of Lyft in April 2023, after serving on its board of directors for almost two years, the company’s stock was trading at about $9 per share, well below its IPO price of $72 per share. At the time, its U.S. market penetration was about 26% or 27%. Lyft, once hailed as an innovator and a whimsical alternative to Uber, was stagnating. Risher had previously worked at Amazon, where founder Jeff Bezos instilled an ethos of customer obsession, and he quickly assessed that Lyft had lost sight of its riders. Its employees also tended to overthink issues. Risher has sought to address both issues: Early in his tenure, for example, he noted that customers experienced a cancellation about 15% of the time. When Risher expressed concern over the stat, employees shrugged it off. Eventually a driver would show up, and rides were completed 99% of the time. “I said, ‘Okay, but 100% of the time, it’s annoying,’” Risher recalls. When some team members suggested they address Risher’s concerns by conducting research, he replied: “I don’t think we have to do a study. I can tell you right now, it’s just really annoying. So, let’s stop doing that, please.” Getting driver cancellations down required operational and technical work, but Lyft has made progress, with rates now below 5%. Risher believes that reliability helps customer loyalty. Other rider-centric moves include the national rollout last year of Lyft Silver, a service for older adults, and Women+ Connect, an opt-in feature that increases the odds of pairing female and nonbinary riders with female and nonbinary drivers. Still, Lyft has been called out on safety issues: A recent New York Times investigation into sexual assault by Uber drivers noted that Lyft bans all drivers with convictions for violent felonies but it, too, is facing sexual assault lawsuits from passengers. “We’re committed to continuously strengthening our systems and working with safety experts, advocates, and regulators to set the highest standards for our industry,” the company told The Times. Risher has also worked to expand Lyft’s reach via the recent acquisition of Freenow, a European mobility platform, a move that he says doubles the company’s addressable market. “Now we truly are a global company,” he says. Under Risher’s leadership, Lyft has eked out gains: Its market share has climbed to about 30%, and the stock now trades at about $19 per share, up about 40% over the past 12 months, outperforming Uber and the broader market. Some analysts have speculated that Lyft could be an attractive acquisition for Amazon, Tesla, Google, or Waymo as they look to expand their autonomous transportation ambitions. “As a public company, we’re on sale every day on the market,” Risher responds. “People can buy our shares anytime they want, but we’re not out looking for suitors.” Indeed, Risher—who was a comparative literature major at Princeton University—sounds like someone who hasn’t finished writing Lyft’s comeback story. When I asked what stage the turnaround is in, he says, “It might well be 10%.” What’s left to be done? “Having really focused on people, customer obsession, and a deep culture of operational excellence,” he says, “now, frankly, it’s asking: How do we grow in new ways?” He calls autonomous vehicles “one of the biggest opportunities we’ve had since the beginning of the company” and envisages a hybrid network that allows riders to decide whether they want a self-driving car or one with a driver. “I think that’s going to be a big unlock,” he adds. Tell us your turnaround tales Are you trying to turn around a company? What are some of the tactics you’re deploying to increase sales, grow market share, or restore your brand? Send me a few lines about what you’re doing at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. We’ll publish top insights in a future newsletter. Listen and read more: comeback kids Brian Niccol, Starbucks’s $100 million man, shares his vision Elliot Hill on his mission to “make epic shit” at Nike How to turn your company around after a crisis View the full article

Boeing aircraft, bourbon, motorcycles and soyabeans among targeted products if Donald The President makes good on his threats View the full article

NIIPing an outlandish idea in the budView the full article

Trade war with US risks ‘huge damage’ to UK, warns British prime ministerView the full article

To an outside observer (honestly even to the average American), the jurisdiction of the United States government appears convoluted—it’s a collection of states with one set of rules that can be overturned by the larger federal government. Holidays can sometimes fall into liminal space, and it can get confusing as to what is open and closed on days such as today (Monday, January 19), Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Let’s take a look at the man behind the holiday and the fight to get his birthday recognized, before we dive into how the day is observed. How was Martin Luther King Jr. Day established? Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) was a civil rights leader, Baptist minister, and social activist whose legacy cannot be overstated. King was instrumental in organizing the Montgomery bus boycott, which began in 1955. He cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to continue the advancement of Black people in American society. He also organized the 1963 March on Washington, which helped usher in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and he was the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The movement to create MLK Day started just four days after King’s death in 1968. Representative John Conyers introduced the idea in the House of Representatives, but it would take 11 years before a vote would be held on the motion. It would take even longer for the vote to pass. Stevie Wonder got involved, dropping a single in an effort to get King’s birthday formal recognition. Another march on Washington was organized by King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, where around 500,000 people took to the streets to show their support of the cause. Finally in 1983, the House passed the bill, although the Senate proved to be another battle, as Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina attempted to block the bill with a filibuster. President Ronald Reagan signed it into law in 1983 and the first federal holiday was observed three years later. It wasn’t until 2000 that all 50 states recognized the holiday. Now that we know the history behind the observance, here’s what to know about the potential disruption of normal day-to-day services. Are banks open on MLK Day? No. Most banks are closed because it is a federal holiday. Online banking is available. ATMs are available if you need fast cash. Is the post office open on MLK Day? No. The United Sates Postal Service (USPS) is closed on federal holidays, and most physical post offices won’t be open. Mail will not be delivered. Are Fedex and UPS operating? UPS will be closed in observance of MLK Day. FedEx will remain open with modified service. Is the stock market open? No. Both the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq exchange will be closed. Are schools open? No. Most public schools will be closed in observance of the holiday. If your loved one attends or works at a private school it’s a good practice to double check. Are restaurants open? Yes. Most large chain restaurants will be open but some will modify their hours. This includes major fast-food chains such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and others. Smaller mom-and-pop establishments can make their own rules so it is best to call ahead. Are retail chains open? Yes. Most major retailers and big-box stores are open. This includes Walmart, Target, Costco, and Home Depot. Are pharmacies open? Yes. If you happen to catch the flu or a cold that always seems to go around at this time of the year, Walgreens and CVS are available to soothe your ailments. Are grocery stores open? Yes. Groceries stores are typically open, including major chains such as Whole Foods, Kroger, and Aldi. Are national parks free on MLK Day? Not anymore. Under President The President, the National Park Service changed its policy and eliminated the free admission days that were previously available on both MLK Day and Juneteenth. Free admission is now available on Flag Day, which coincides with the president’s birthday. Many civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), are upset about this change because of the gravity of both of these observances. Ways to observe MLK Day There are many ways to honor the legacy of King on this day. You could volunteer at a local nonprofit and help your community, or you might consider visiting a Black history museum. You could even honor the day by simply reading a book about the visionary leader or watching one of his many moving speeches. View the full article

That felt impossible. For instance, YouTube has been the internet’s default video platform for nearly two decades. It’s frequently dubbed the second-largest search engine. So I asked Xibeijia, Ahrefs’ superstar data scientist, to pull our data and double-check. Turns out,…Read more ›View the full article

What did the latest holiday shopping season reveal about consumer confidence going into 2026? Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach unpacks the signals he’s seeing across global spending—from shifting consumer sentiment to AI’s growing role in financial security. Miebach also explores how credit cards fit into a future shaped by crypto, digital wallets, and agent-driven commerce, and what it will take for businesses to stay competitive amid continued market disruption. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You have a unique vantage point on consumer activity. So many payments run through your system. From this past holiday season, do you have any observations about consumer spending or customer sentiment? Any sort of emerging trends or lessons you’ve seen yet? When you think about what we do, we facilitate payments all around the world, so that provides a really interesting data set across all sectors, across all countries, 220 countries and territories. Last year we’re about 160 billion transactions through our network, so it does provide quite a unique view. The past holiday season, 3.9% was the year-over-year growth. So that’s a strong holiday season. You think political uncertainty, you think trade alignments and all these kinds of things, but the consumer held up well. One thing that I thought was striking was apparel sales. So we see this by categories. We don’t see individual Mastercard holder data, but the aggregate data of what are people buying and where are they buying it? So apparel sales had a real moment. So 7.8% growth in apparel, really a stick-out kind of category. One of the interesting things that I saw there in the data this particular season compared to last holiday season, consumers came in early. Probably it’s a continuation of what the consumer has done throughout 2025. “I can look for a better deal. I can look for a promotion.” So Black Friday was particularly strong, and then you look thereafter. So the savvy consumer is doing that, and so are businesses. Businesses were also worried about potentially sitting on inventory through that. So they’re trying to sell their inventory and put out offers earlier. So interesting to see what we’re going to see in 2026. The word affordability, at least in the U.S., has become like this big buzzword. And it sounds like you’re sort of seeing that in some of the data that that’s where people are leaning. When you look at some of the post-tariffs, certain prices have gone up, others have come down. But it’s very interesting when you look at the 3.9% overall. Is that inflation? No. It’s about half price increases, so pretty tame. And the other half is real volume increase where people were just still making investments into the things that they wanted to buy. It’s interesting. You must see data every day about spending patterns and changes. I’m curious how that impacts your planning and strategy. I had a CEO on the show out of the tech world recently who said he’s now replanning every week, that even monthly is too late. Very different leadership perspective from three-year, five-year plans. Is your system different because of the speed of the feedback you get? It’s not. Five years ago, we re-architected Mastercard’s network. We’re in more and more countries around the world. We’re facilitating more and more types of payments that might have been from an account-to-account are now happening on card rails or stablecoins or you name it. So we had to re-architect. From that perspective, that is not really changing our plans. What is changing our plans is if consumer behaviors and consumer choices are changing in more fundamental ways. Younger consumers like “buy now, pay later.” So we got to have that built into our system. Those are the kind of changes [we are tracking], not short-term changes. It’s ups and downs from the economy. Where are the payment trends going? Where do we invest to really understand where consumer or business payments are going? The payments need to be smarter, they need to be faster, they need to be safer. All those kinds of things, that’s where we’re investing. But that’s not week on week. We look out two, three years, and then we make those technologies available for our customers, which are generally banks or large merchants or airlines. Those are our customers. You mentioned “buy now, pay later,” a business like Klarna, which went public last year. Isn’t a credit card “buy now, pay later?” What’s the distinction? Why do people get so excited about it? It’s yet another payment choice out there. So, payments have not been more competitive than they are today. So you can pay in stablecoins, you can have a push payment, you can have a prepaid payment. You can have a buy now, pay later. This goes straight to essentially a personal loan kind of equivalent. So those are choices. And those are the choices that if we see them amongst consumers or the customers of our customers, then we make them available. If you are a buy now, pay now—a pure play company—you’re going to find large merchants, large brands that are going to have these offers on their websites and in their stores if they have physical stores. The way that we did it, we built it just as an offer into our network. So wherever Mastercard is available, one of our acquiring partners can offer at the checkout terminal in an in-store and someone can buy now, pay later. So JPMorgan or Galileo are partners like that of us, they make that pay available. So the initial craze of buy now, pay later has died down a bit. I think it’s a very credible choice. We offer it. And a lot of young people think this is a good idea because it gives you more planability of your interest payments and all that. We also think loans on cards where you say, let’s say you pay $500 on a card and you turn that into three payments and many banks just offer that and it’s not going into a buy now or pay later route, but it’s the same outcome. So in the end, people want more control over their finances and more flexibility to buy bigger things that they maybe cannot afford in the moment. And different solutions to that. We’re all about consumer choice and we make all of that available. Obviously we’ve had this drastic evolution from physical cards and checks and even cash to contactless tap and digital wallets. Right. Is this new standard going to stay or do you think things will keep moving to things like biometrics or face scanning? I mean, I know you’ve talked about more personalized payments. Is that what you mean? That’s not quite what I mean. But when you think payments, it’s a constant evolution, so it’s not going to stay where it is. It took 10 years for contactless to get what it is today. So you tap with your phone, you tap with your card. It’s about two-thirds of global transactions on our network are now contactless. What is now a big driver for the next kind of experience is where checkout really becomes a non-issue. It just going to disappear. So we put a lot of focus on making checkout a non-event, and an enabling technology for that is tokenization. So you take your card data and you turn it into a one-time code that can only be used for the transaction that’s securely shot between the different participants and the payment ecosystem, very safe. Now you can do the same thing with your biometric identity, be your fingerprint or your facial, and that comes along with that transaction token and anybody on the other side can see that is the transaction and it should go through. So it increases security dramatically. So we invented tokenization in the payment side many years back, and it’s now scaling. So we made a commitment starting with Europe that by 2030, every transaction will be tokenized. Really the checkout moment is just going to really recede to the background. View the full article

In 2018, the NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt co-authored a book titled ​The Coddling of the American Mind​. It argued that the alarming rise in mental health issues among American adolescents was being driven, in part, by a culture of “safetyism“ that trained young people to obsess over perceived traumas and to understand life as full of dangers that need to be avoided. At the time, the message was received as a critique of the worst excesses of the academic left and wokeism. But in the aftermath of Coddling, Haidt began to wonder if he had underestimated another possible cause for these concerning mental health trends: smartphones and social media. In 2019, working in collaboration with the demographer Jean Twenge (who wrote the classic 2017 Atlantic cover story, ​“Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”​), and researcher Zach Rausch, Haidt began gathering and organizing the fast-growing collection of academic studies on this issue in an ​annotated bibliography​, stored in a public Google Document. At the time, the standard response from elite journalists and academics about the claim that smartphones harmed kids was to say that the evidence was only correlational and that the results were mixed. (See, for example, this ​smarmy 2020 Times article​, which amplified a small number of papers that Haidt and his collaborators ​later noted were almost willfully disingenuous​ in their research design.) But as Haidt continued to make sense of the relevant literature, he became convinced that these objections were outdated. The data were increasingly pointing toward the conclusion that these devices really were creating major negative impacts. Haidt began writing about these ideas in The Atlantic. His 2021 piece, ​“The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls,” ​forcefully declared that we had transcended the shoulder-shrugging, correlation is not causation phase of the research on this topic, and we could no longer ignore its implications. The sub-head for this essay was blunt: “The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents.” (Around this time, I interviewed Haidt for a New Yorker column I wrote titled,​ “The Questions We’ve Stopped Asking About Teenagers and Social Media: Should They Be Using These Services At All?”​) In 2024, Haidt assembled all this information into a new book, ​The Anxious Generation​, which became a massive bestseller, moving more than a million copies by the end of its first year, and many more since. As of the day I’m writing this, which is almost two years since the book came out, it remains in the top 20 on the ​Amazon Charts​. In the aftermath of The Anxious Generation, as new research continues to pour in, and we hear from more​ teenagers​ and parents about their experiences with these devices, and schools (finally) start to ban phones and discover ​massive benefits​, it has become increasingly clear that Haidt was right all along. Last month, even the Times technology reporter Kevin Roose, a longtime skeptic of Haidt’s campaign, ​tweeted​: “I confess I was not totally convinced that the phone bans would work, but early evidence suggests a total Jon Haidt victory.” All of this history points to an urgent question for our current moment: Given that Haidt was so prescient about the harms of smartphones, what are the technologies that are worrying him now? Presumably, these looming dangers are ones we should take seriously. To answer this question, I went back to read what Haidt and his collaborators have been writing about in the months following The Anxious Generation’s release. Here, I’d like to highlight three technology trends that seem to be causing them particular concern… Online Gambling After a 2018 Supreme Court ​decision​ lifted many long-standing controls on gambling, online versions of this vice, powered through low-friction, attractive smartphone apps, rapidly spread. A July article on Haidt’s ​After Babel​ newsletter, titled ​“Smartphone Gambling is a Disaster,”​ catalogs some truly alarming statistics about how prevalent this activity has become: 33% of American men and 22% of American women now have a sports betting account. Nearly half of men between the ages of 18 and 49 have these accounts. Almost 70% of college students living on campus now bet on sports. What about younger kids? A 2022 report found that 60% of high school students had gambled in the last year. The speed with which this once frowned-upon pastime has spread is truly astonishing. Not surprisingly, it’s accompanied by negative side effects. A 2023 study found that 60% of sports bettors who deposited $500 or more per month said they would be unable to pay at least one of their bills or loans. Another study, commissioned that same year by the state of New Jersey, found that close to 20% of 18 to 24-year-olds who gamble qualify as having an unhealthy addiction. The conclusion: Adolescents and young adults should steer clear of online gambling. They’re at high risk for addiction, and the activity will 100% cost them non-trivial amounts of money. (As I learned from a recent ​Michael Lewis podcast series​ on the topic, the online sports betting services will kick you off the platform if you start winning with any consistency. You literally cannot make money over time on these services. If they’re letting you bet, you are, by definition, bad at it.) For parents, this means having frank conversations with your kids about the addictive and financially exploitative nature of these services. Online Video Games Another concern of Haidt and his collaborators is the rise in popularity among kids of multiplayer (often free-to-play) games such as Roblox, Minecraft (in online mode), and Fortnite. As reported in a 2025 After Babel article titled ​“It’s Not Just a Game Anymore,”​ both Minecraft and Fortnite attract roughly 30 million monthly active users (MAU) under the age of 18. Roblox, however, is the major player in this field, attracting an astonishing 305 million MAU under the age of 18 worldwide. Roblox estimates that around 75% of US children between the ages of 9 and 12 are active users of their platform. Why is this a problem? Because Roblox is a loosely-regulated carnival of terribleness and predation. For those unfamiliar, Roblox is not a single game, but instead a vast collection of virtual worlds created by individual users. There are far too many of these worlds, changing far too fast, to be adequately moderated. Here are just some of the Roblox worlds described by the After Babel article’s authors: A game in which you’re trained to hide a body after a murder. A simulation of a concentration camp where users carry Nazi flags. A classroom in which teachers have sex with students. A simulation of killing children in an elementary school classroom with an AK-47. In 2023, Roblox reported over 13,000 instances of child exploitation, leading to over 1,300 law enforcement requests. Online Minecraft and Fortnite feature more controlled virtual environments, but here, the problem lies with third-party chat. Often, without their less tech-savvy parents being aware, young players of these games install mods that allow them to make use of third-party chat software such as Discord. The result is an unregulated and often anonymous virtual locker room of sorts in which horrible things may unfold. Here’s how the article’s authors summarize what goes on in these chats: “In these unfiltered and unregulated spaces, adults contact children and extreme content can flow freely: bestiality, violent porn, animal abuse, self-harm, stabbings, and an array of extreme ideologies to name a few.” Indeed, many of the memes referenced by Tyler Robinson, the accused murderer of Charlie Kirk, ​are popular​ in the video game Discord chats where Robinson reportedly spent a large amount of time. These issues are not rare. A survey of adolescent gamers cited in the article found that 51% had encountered extremist content, while 10% of girls had been directly sent sexually explicit content while playing. And all of this isn’t even taking into consideration the addictive nature of these games and the massive amount of time they consume. Over 40% of boys report that gaming is hurting their sleep, while a 2022 study found that 15.4% of adolescent males who play these games meet the criteria for Internet Gaming Disorder. The conclusion: Kids and adolescents should not play multiplayer video games with people whom they don’t know. Period. Keep in mind, if you’ve given your kid an iPad or a video game player on which you haven’t specifically activated internet restrictions, then, spoiler alert: they’re not innocently playing Angry Birds; they’re almost certainly involved in these games and all the harms that accompany them. Chatbots The final technology concern I’ll discuss is also one of the most recent: kids and adolescents having unsupervised conversations with AI-powered chatbots. As explained in an After Babel article from November, co-authored by Haidt, and bluntly titled ​“Don’t Give Your Child Any AI Companions,”​ the use of these tools is rapidly rising among young people. A 2025 survey found that 72% of US teens have used an AI companion at least once, and more than half use them multiple times a month. Why should we care? Here’s Haidt: “Early research, journalistic investigations, and internal documents show that these AI systems are already engaging in sexualized interactions with children and offering inappropriate or dangerous advice, including sycophantically encouraging young people who are considering suicide to proceed. As ChatGPT put it in one young man’s final conversation with it: ‘Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity.’” As of this fall, OpenAI is already facing​ eight different wrongful death​ lawsuits involving advice given by ChatGPT. The volume of these cases is likely to skyrocket in the near future. What about younger kids? They’re being exposed to chatbot companions indirectly through a growing number of toys that utilize chatbots to have conversations with their owners. As you might imagine, this isn’t going well. ​A recent study ​of three new AI-powered toys found that they can easily veer into dangerous conversation territory. In the study, the toys provided advice on where to find knives in the kitchen and how to start a fire with matches. They even engaged in explicit discussions about sex positions and fetishes. The conclusion: Do not let kids or teens use chatbots without supervision. Think of it as similar to letting them have an unsupervised conversation with a random drunk at the end of the bar. It might be harmless, but there’s a good chance the interaction will head to dark places. (There’s a misguided notion out there that kids need to be using tools like ChatGPT so that they’ll be prepared for the “AI-powered future.” This is overstated. The technology is moving so fast that whatever form of AI your kids will eventually encounter in the workforce will likely look and operate nothing like circa-2026 chatbots. Also, these existing tools are dead simple to use. Your kids will figure them out in roughly 19 seconds if/when they’re in a professional circumstance that requires this.) The post What’s Worrying Jonathan Haidt Now? appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

In 2018, the NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt co-authored a book titled ​The Coddling of the American Mind​. It argued that the alarming rise in mental health issues among American adolescents was being driven, in part, by a culture of “safetyism“ that trained young people to obsess over perceived traumas and to understand life as full of dangers that need to be avoided. At the time, the message was received as a critique of the worst excesses of the academic left and wokeism. But in the aftermath of Coddling, Haidt began to wonder if he had underestimated another possible cause for these concerning mental health trends: smartphones and social media. In 2019, working in collaboration with the demographer Jean Twenge (who wrote the classic 2017 Atlantic cover story, ​“Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”​), and researcher Zach Rausch, Haidt began gathering and organizing the fast-growing collection of academic studies on this issue in an ​annotated bibliography​, stored in a public Google Document. At the time, the standard response from elite journalists and academics about the claim that smartphones harmed kids was to say that the evidence was only correlational and that the results were mixed. (See, for example, this ​smarmy 2020 Times article​, which amplified a small number of papers that Haidt and his collaborators ​later noted were almost willfully disingenuous​ in their research design.) But as Haidt continued to make sense of the relevant literature, he became convinced that these objections were outdated. The data were increasingly pointing toward the conclusion that these devices really were creating major negative impacts. Haidt began writing about these ideas in The Atlantic. His 2021 piece, ​“The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls,” ​forcefully declared that we had transcended the shoulder-shrugging, correlation is not causation phase of the research on this topic, and we could no longer ignore its implications. The sub-head for this essay was blunt: “The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents.” (Around this time, I interviewed Haidt for a New Yorker column I wrote titled,​ “The Questions We’ve Stopped Asking About Teenagers and Social Media: Should They Be Using These Services At All?”​) In 2024, Haidt assembled all this information into a new book, ​The Anxious Generation​, which became a massive bestseller, moving more than a million copies by the end of its first year, and many more since. As of the day I’m writing this, which is almost two years since the book came out, it remains in the top 20 on the ​Amazon Charts​. In the aftermath of The Anxious Generation, as new research continues to pour in, and we hear from more​ teenagers​ and parents about their experiences with these devices, and schools (finally) start to ban phones and discover ​massive benefits​, it has become increasingly clear that Haidt was right all along. Last month, even the Times technology reporter Kevin Roose, a longtime skeptic of Haidt’s campaign, ​tweeted​: “I confess I was not totally convinced that the phone bans would work, but early evidence suggests a total Jon Haidt victory.” All of this history points to an urgent question for our current moment: Given that Haidt was so prescient about the harms of smartphones, what are the technologies that are worrying him now? Presumably, these looming dangers are ones we should take seriously. To answer this question, I went back to read what Haidt and his collaborators have been writing about in the months following The Anxious Generation’s release. Here, I’d like to highlight three technology trends that seem to be causing them particular concern… Online Gambling After a 2018 Supreme Court ​decision​ lifted many long-standing controls on gambling, online versions of this vice, powered through low-friction, attractive smartphone apps, rapidly spread. A July article on Haidt’s ​After Babel​ newsletter, titled ​“Smartphone Gambling is a Disaster,”​ catalogs some truly alarming statistics about how prevalent this activity has become: 33% of American men and 22% of American women now have a sports betting account. Nearly half of men between the ages of 18 and 49 have these accounts. Almost 70% of college students living on campus now bet on sports. What about younger kids? A 2022 report found that 60% of high school students had gambled in the last year. The speed with which this once frowned-upon pastime has spread is truly astonishing. Not surprisingly, it’s accompanied by negative side effects. A 2023 study found that 60% of sports bettors who deposited $500 or more per month said they would be unable to pay at least one of their bills or loans. Another study, commissioned that same year by the state of New Jersey, found that close to 20% of 18 to 24-year-olds who gamble qualify as having an unhealthy addiction. The conclusion: Adolescents and young adults should steer clear of online gambling. They’re at high risk for addiction, and the activity will 100% cost them non-trivial amounts of money. (As I learned from a recent ​Michael Lewis podcast series​ on the topic, the online sports betting services will kick you off the platform if you start winning with any consistency. You literally cannot make money over time on these services. If they’re letting you bet, you are, by definition, bad at it.) For parents, this means having frank conversations with your kids about the addictive and financially exploitative nature of these services. Online Video Games Another concern of Haidt and his collaborators is the rise in popularity among kids of multiplayer (often free-to-play) games such as Roblox, Minecraft (in online mode), and Fortnite. As reported in a 2025 After Babel article titled ​“It’s Not Just a Game Anymore,”​ both Minecraft and Fortnite attract roughly 30 million monthly active users (MAU) under the age of 18. Roblox, however, is the major player in this field, attracting an astonishing 305 million MAU under the age of 18 worldwide. Roblox estimates that around 75% of US children between the ages of 9 and 12 are active users of their platform. Why is this a problem? Because Roblox is a loosely-regulated carnival of terribleness and predation. For those unfamiliar, Roblox is not a single game, but instead a vast collection of virtual worlds created by individual users. There are far too many of these worlds, changing far too fast, to be adequately moderated. Here are just some of the Roblox worlds described by the After Babel article’s authors: A game in which you’re trained to hide a body after a murder. A simulation of a concentration camp where users carry Nazi flags. A classroom in which teachers have sex with students. A simulation of killing children in an elementary school classroom with an AK-47. In 2023, Roblox reported over 13,000 instances of child exploitation, leading to over 1,300 law enforcement requests. Online Minecraft and Fortnite feature more controlled virtual environments, but here, the problem lies with third-party chat. Often, without their less tech-savvy parents being aware, young players of these games install mods that allow them to make use of third-party chat software such as Discord. The result is an unregulated and often anonymous virtual locker room of sorts in which horrible things may unfold. Here’s how the article’s authors summarize what goes on in these chats: “In these unfiltered and unregulated spaces, adults contact children and extreme content can flow freely: bestiality, violent porn, animal abuse, self-harm, stabbings, and an array of extreme ideologies to name a few.” Indeed, many of the memes referenced by Tyler Robinson, the accused murderer of Charlie Kirk, ​are popular​ in the video game Discord chats where Robinson reportedly spent a large amount of time. These issues are not rare. A survey of adolescent gamers cited in the article found that 51% had encountered extremist content, while 10% of girls had been directly sent sexually explicit content while playing. And all of this isn’t even taking into consideration the addictive nature of these games and the massive amount of time they consume. Over 40% of boys report that gaming is hurting their sleep, while a 2022 study found that 15.4% of adolescent males who play these games meet the criteria for Internet Gaming Disorder. The conclusion: Kids and adolescents should not play multiplayer video games with people whom they don’t know. Period. Keep in mind, if you’ve given your kid an iPad or a video game player on which you haven’t specifically activated internet restrictions, then, spoiler alert: they’re not innocently playing Angry Birds; they’re almost certainly involved in these games and all the harms that accompany them. Chatbots The final technology concern I’ll discuss is also one of the most recent: kids and adolescents having unsupervised conversations with AI-powered chatbots. As explained in an After Babel article from November, co-authored by Haidt, and bluntly titled ​“Don’t Give Your Child Any AI Companions,”​ the use of these tools is rapidly rising among young people. A 2025 survey found that 72% of US teens have used an AI companion at least once, and more than half use them multiple times a month. Why should we care? Here’s Haidt: “Early research, journalistic investigations, and internal documents show that these AI systems are already engaging in sexualized interactions with children and offering inappropriate or dangerous advice, including sycophantically encouraging young people who are considering suicide to proceed. As ChatGPT put it in one young man’s final conversation with it: ‘Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity.’” As of this fall, OpenAI is already facing​ eight different wrongful death​ lawsuits involving advice given by ChatGPT. The volume of these cases is likely to skyrocket in the near future. What about younger kids? They’re being exposed to chatbot companions indirectly through a growing number of toys that utilize chatbots to have conversations with their owners. As you might imagine, this isn’t going well. ​A recent study ​of three new AI-powered toys found that they can easily veer into dangerous conversation territory. In the study, the toys provided advice on where to find knives in the kitchen and how to start a fire with matches. They even engaged in explicit discussions about sex positions and fetishes. The conclusion: Do not let kids or teens use chatbots without supervision. Think of it as similar to letting them have an unsupervised conversation with a random drunk at the end of the bar. It might be harmless, but there’s a good chance the interaction will head to dark places. (There’s a misguided notion out there that kids need to be using tools like ChatGPT so that they’ll be prepared for the “AI-powered future.” This is overstated. The technology is moving so fast that whatever form of AI your kids will eventually encounter in the workforce will likely look and operate nothing like circa-2026 chatbots. Also, these existing tools are dead simple to use. Your kids will figure them out in roughly 19 seconds if/when they’re in a professional circumstance that requires this.) The post What’s Worrying Jonathan Haidt Now? appeared first on Cal Newport. View the full article

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O-1B visas are for immigrants of “extraordinary ability,” originally designed for acclaimed artists, musicians, athletes, and scholars, But increasingly they’re being handed out to people with a more modern definition of “extraordinary ability”: influencers and OnlyFans creators. Immigration lawyers say social media influencers now make up more than half of their O-1 visa applicants, according to a recent report by the Financial Times. These visas are intended for an individual who possesses “extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics,” or those who have “a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry,” according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). What defines “extraordinary ability,” though, is open to interpretation. To qualify for an O-1B visa type applicants must submit evidence of at least three of the six regulatory criteria. These include, but are not limited to, performing a leading or starring role in a distinguished production or event, national or international recognition for achievements, and a high salary compared to others in the field. USCIS regulations do not prescribe limits over what falls under the umbrella term “the arts”. While traditionally this might have been singers and actors, these days content creators are dominating new forms of media as cultural influence has shifted online. The annual number of O-1 visas approved rose by more than 50% between 2014 and 2024, far outpacing the roughly 10% growth in nonimmigrant visas overall. Still, O-1s make up only a small fraction of the system: Fewer than 20,000 were issued in 2024, versus the hundreds of thousands of H-1B work visas granted. OnlyFans creators and influencers may have an advantage over other creatives when it comes to the application process. Their influence is easily quantifiable in terms of likes and follower counts, numbers that fit neatly into the O-1B framework. An artist or scientist, meanwhile, whose work is predominantly offline and less easily quantified, may find making their case of “extraordinary ability” more complicated. The growing number of content creators seeking visas reserved for those with “extraordinary ability” has sparked mixed reactions online. On X, political analyst and writer Dominic Michael Tripi described the trend as a sign of “end-stage empire conditions.” Others suggested the administration was taking immigration advice from fictional character Ali G. “The President is literally doing the Ali G ‘let the fit ones in’ policy.” one X user joked. But the backlash against influencers applying for O-1 visas shows how little attitudes have shifted when it comes to recognizing influencing and content creation as legitimate work. And, when it comes to OnlyFans creators, one immigration lawyer told Fox News, “acting is acting”. View the full article

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Putting yourself out there is difficult. Rejection is tough. And feeling like you’ve gotten the rug pulled out from under you is the worst. When you’re in charge of business development, where you’re responsible for growing your revenue within your current client portfolio as well as seeking out new potential opportunities, you can easily vacillate from feeling like a hero to feeling like a zero, depending on what kind of results you’re getting from your efforts. As a time management coach for 17 years, I’ve learned how to summon the inner resolve to continue forward with business development even when it feels difficult, and I’ve coached many clients on how to do the same. Here are three of the biggest challenges you may face with staying consistent with business development, and solutions for moving forward with tenacity no matter how vulnerable and overwhelming it may feel. 1. You’re So Busy with Current Clients That You’re Not Investing in Future Ones One of the hardest parts of success is maintaining that success, particularly if you’re not solely devoted to business development. I often have individuals come to me because they’re taking care of their current portfolio but keep pushing off the activities that will help them sustain and grow their business in the future. In these situations, I find this two-prong strategy works best: The first prong is to clearly define quantifiable actions that will support your goals. For example: “I will make 10 follow-up calls to strong leads per day,” or “I will have five business development meetings booked each week.” These concrete objectives help you to more clearly know what to do and to honestly assess whether you’re doing enough. The second prong is to decide on a timing strategy so you don’t keep putting off the business development tasks. Here are a few examples: I don’t look at email until I’ve made five prospecting calls, or before I eat lunch, I do all the needed follow-ups on outstanding proposals. I’ve found that doing business development activities earlier in the day and before a habitual activity you really want or need to do helps them to happen much more frequently. 2. You’re Getting Too Many Noes, So You Shy Away From the Ask Experiencing noes is a natural part of the sales process. But in most instances, there’s a typical close rate that you expect. When you hit a long series of deals that don’t work out beyond what you were used to experiencing, doubt can creep in: What if other deals don’t close? What if I don’t hit my targets? What if I don’t get my bonus? What if I lose my job? What if other people lose their jobs? Even with a long history of success, this negative spiral can happen pretty quickly, and you need to catch yourself before your doubts and fears keep you from the actions that will move you into a more positive place. There are two powerful actions you can take in this scenario: First, think about what you can learn—if anything—from the deals that didn’t happen. Was it the wrong type of client? Could you have presented the benefits in a different way? Was there something about the financial structure that needed to change? Second, let go of the past and create as many opportunities as possible to get in front of other potential clients in the present and future. The only way to get out of a slump is to double down on the potential for people to say yes. 3. You’re Reeling From Market Changes, So You’re Uncertain About What Will Work Most of the time, effective business development requires a greater level of commitment to the strategies you know work. But sometimes broader circumstances have had an impact on your business, and you need to completely change direction. It could be that a platform that has been a wonderful source of leads no longer provides them. It could be that the industry you’ve typically served has contracted, and you need to pivot to a new one. Or it could be that AI has changed how people view the value of your business. These shifts can make business development even more overwhelming because you no longer have a repeatable, predictable strategy for your sales process. To keep moving forward when you face this dilemma, you need to shift your definition of success from closing deals to systematically testing strategies to learn what does or doesn’t work in this new environment. For example, you might decide that you’ll run a new ad campaign and see whether it generates the type of leads you’re hoping to attract. Or you might work with a consultant on tactics for breaking into a new industry. Or you might work on a new presentation strategy to help people understand the unique value of your company within the context of AI and test the response you receive. In these circumstances, it’s too vulnerable to base success on what revenue you do or don’t generate as a result of trying new things. That can leave you feeling frustrated, angry, and demoralized, thinking you would have been better off not even attempting a certain experiment if it doesn’t work out the way you hoped. Instead, you’ll want to count it as success that you tried something new, and then understand there’s valuable learning in every attempt. As you persistently try new strategies, you’ll eventually land on what works. Business development in the face of disappointing results requires enormous inner courage to not give up. But by following these strategies mixed with a strong dose of resolve, you can not only survive whatever difficulty you may face but also thrive. View the full article