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Your newest hire just sent their third Slack message in an hour. First, they couldn’t find the email template for password resets. Then they needed the escalation criteria for database issues. Now they’re asking which Jira project handles network tickets versus hardware requests. You answer each question in under a minute, but you’re also watching your own queue grow while they wait. This is day three. They completed the standard onboarding materials. They know the tools exist. They just can’t find anything when they need it. Closing a single ticket requires knowledge from systems that don’t talk to each other, and you’ve accidentally built an operation where experience means remembering which system holds which piece of context. Here’s what you can do. What a new hire needs to close their first ticket Walk through what actually happens when someone new picks up their first unassigned ticket. A customer reports they can’t access a shared drive. Simple issue, common fix, should take fifteen minutes. Your new hire opens the ticket in Zendesk. They need to check if this customer has had drive access issues before. That history lives in Zendesk, but only if previous tickets were tagged correctly. They need to verify the customer’s permissions. That’s in Active Directory, which requires different credentials and a separate interface. They need to see if there’s a known issue with this particular drive. That information might be in Confluence if someone documented it, or in a Slack thread from two weeks ago, or nowhere at all. To apply the fix, they need to follow the procedure. Is it the version in Confluence, the PDF in SharePoint, or the runbook someone maintains in a personal Notion workspace? They’re not sure, so they ask. You point them to Confluence. They find three different documents titled “Network Drive Access Issues” with different last-modified dates and no indication which is current. They stare at the screen, cursor hovering between tabs, trying to figure out which version won’t get them in trouble. Twenty minutes in, they still haven’t touched the customer’s account. They’ve opened six different applications and sent four messages asking for clarification. The actual technical work—resetting permissions—takes three minutes once they know what to do. This is the gap between having conceptual knowledge and being able to retrieve operational context fast enough to act on it. You hired someone who knows IT service management. They don’t know your organization’s particular information sprawl. Five ways knowledge becomes inaccessible during onboarding You’ve documented the processes. You’ve recorded the walkthrough videos. Information exists. New hires just can’t get to it when a customer is waiting. So why can’t new hires find the information they need to solve problems independently? Search only works within individual tools When your new hire searches for “database escalation,” they get results from whatever system they’re currently in. The problem is they don’t know which system contains the answer, so they either search everywhere or ask someone who remembers. Context doesn’t transfer between systems A ticket escalates from Tier One to Tier Two. The ticket moves to a different queue, but the Slack conversation where someone explained the workaround doesn’t move with it. The Confluence page where this issue was documented last quarter doesn’t link to the ticket. Your new hire sees the ticket but not the context around it. Historical decisions lack breadcrumbs Six months ago, your team decided to handle VPN tickets differently for remote employees in specific regions. That decision was discussed in Slack, documented in a meeting note, and implemented as a custom field in your service management platform. Your new hire sees the custom field but has no idea why it exists or what happens if they ignore it. Updates don’t propagate A procedure changes. Someone updates the runbook in Confluence, but the link embedded in the ticketing system macro still points to the old version. The training video was recorded before the change. Your new hire follows what they find first, applies an outdated fix, and creates a problem that requires escalation. Tribal knowledge never gets written down Your experienced team members don’t search Confluence for printer issues — they message Sarah because she handled the rollout. They don’t check the asset database — they know Mark maintains a spreadsheet that’s more current. New hires don’t have that mental map yet, so they spend time searching systems that are technically complete but operationally ignored. Why connecting systems matters more than documentation The instinct is to document more thoroughly, create more detailed runbooks, record more training videos, and build a comprehensive knowledge base with proper tagging and regular reviews. This helps. Documentation quality matters. But it doesn’t solve the core retrieval problem. More documentation also means more places to search. You built the comprehensive Confluence space with proper hierarchy and tagging. You also still have the old wiki, the SharePoint site from the previous ticketing system migration, and the Google Drive folder where the team keeps templates. Each repository is well-organized within itself, but now your new hire has four organized places to search instead of one chaotic place. The retrieval problem comes down to connection, not volume or organization. When someone encounters a ticket, they need the related information to surface automatically — not because they knew where to search, but because the systems are connected enough to show context without requiring navigation. This is where synchronization comes in: ensuring that when something happens in one system, the relevant information appears in the other systems where people are actually working. A ticket gets created in your ITSM platform about a recurring application error. That ticket should automatically create a linked task in your development tracker. When the developer adds investigation notes, those notes should appear in the support ticket. When support adds customer impact details, those should flow back to development. The context moves with the work. Experienced team members are fast not because they’re more skilled at searching. They’ve internalized which system holds which context for which type of issue. They don’t think about where to look anymore. You’re asking new hires to build that same mental index while simultaneously learning the technical work. It’s two cognitive loads at once. Focus on connections that give new hires the context they need when they need it. Not instant sync for everything—that overwhelms people and creates noise. The question is: what information would prevent them from having to ask you where to find something? Time-to-competence as an integration metric The usual way to measure integration success is technical: sync reliability, data consistency, error rates. Those matter for system health, but they don’t tell you if integration is actually helping people work faster. Time-to-competence is simpler: how long before a new hire can close common tickets independently? Track it the same way you track time-to-resolution, but segment by experience level. If your experienced team members resolve password resets in an average timeframe and your new hires take significantly longer, the gap is mostly context retrieval. When you connect systems, that gap should shrink. Not because new hires suddenly know everything, but because they spend less time hunting for information. If you link support tickets to relevant documentation pages, new hires see the documentation without knowing to search for it. If you sync escalated tickets between service management and development platforms, they don’t need to ask which project board handles backend issues. Watch the gap. If integration is working, new hires should reach experienced team member performance on common issues within weeks, not months. Which connections reduce onboarding time the most Not all integrations save equal time during onboarding. You have limited bandwidth to set up connections, and you need new hires productive quickly. Start with the integrations that eliminate the most frequent questions. Ticket-to-documentation links When someone opens a ticket, show them the related knowledge base articles or runbooks. This works if you can tag tickets and documentation with matching categories. Even rough matching helps. A new hire opening a VPN ticket sees the VPN setup guide without searching. They might still need to ask questions, but they start from a documented baseline instead of zero. Bidirectional escalation paths When a ticket escalates, the receiving team should see why it was escalated and what’s already been tried. When the escalated team updates status, that should flow back to the original ticket. This prevents the “what’s the status?” questions that new hires ask constantly because they’re checking the wrong system. Clear escalation workflows make the handoff visible regardless of which system someone’s looking at. Conversation-to-ticket connection Important discussions happen in your chat platform, then someone needs to find that context later. Instead of hoping people remember to document decisions, connect the conversation to the ticket. When your new hire picks up a ticket that was discussed yesterday, they see the thread directly. They’re not asking “has anyone seen this before?” The institutional memory is attached. Status visibility across project systems A customer asks when a feature will be fixed. Your new hire needs to check the development status. If your project tracker updates sync to your ticketing system, they answer immediately. If they need to request access to the development board, find the right project, search for the relevant issue, and interpret the status, that’s fifteen minutes and probably a question to you about what “code review” means for customer communication. The pattern: connect information to the context where people need it, not just where it was created. New hires shouldn’t need to know your organizational topology to find answers. The systems should bring answers to them. How to prioritize integration work for faster onboarding Fragmented knowledge won’t be solved before your next hire starts. You’re going to get them productive despite fragmentation, then gradually reduce how much fragmentation matters. That means starting with the connections that block them most frequently, not building a perfect architecture. Watch where new hires get stuck in their first two weeks. When they ask questions, note what they were trying to do and which system didn’t have the answer. After several new hires, you’ll see patterns. The same gaps appear repeatedly. Those are your integration priorities. Connect those systems first, even if it’s a basic connection that just links related items without full sync. Track the questions your new hires ask. If you’re answering the same question for the third person in three months, that’s a system connection problem, not a training problem. “Where do I find the escalation criteria?” means your ticketing system and your documentation aren’t linked. “Which Jira project is this?” means your service desk and your development tracker aren’t connected. “What’s the status of this fix?” means updates aren’t flowing bidirectionally. Each repeated question represents time your new hire spends waiting instead of working, and time you spend answering instead of closing tickets. The experienced team member who sighs and sends another Slack message explaining where to find something—that’s your signal. That friction point is costing you hours every week across multiple people. You’ve built systems that work for people who already know the landscape. Now you need systems that work for people who don’t. That’s less about technology selection and more about making sure information can move to where someone needs it, regardless of where they’re working. When you can do that, onboarding stops being an archaeology lesson and becomes actual skill development. Your new hire closes their first solo ticket in fifteen minutes instead of forty-five, and by week two, they’re not interrupting you every hour because the context they need is already in front of them. Unito keeps your tools synchronized so when information lives in one system, it’s visible in the systems where your team actually works. Your new hires see escalation context automatically, documentation links appear with relevant tickets, and status updates flow between platforms without manual copying. That’s the difference between onboarding that takes weeks and onboarding that takes days. Ready to transform your onboardings? Meet with a Unito product expert to see how two-way integrations improve institutional knowledge. Talk with sales View the full article

A Powerball ticket purchased at a gas station outside Little Rock, Arkansas, won a $1.817 billion jackpot in Wednesday’s Christmas Eve drawing, ending the lottery game’s three-month stretch without a top-prize winner. The winning numbers were 04, 25, 31, 52 and 59, with the Powerball number being 19. The winning ticket was sold at a Murphy USA in Cabot, lottery officials in Arkansas said Thursday. No one answered the phone Thursday at the location, which was closed for Christmas. The community of roughly 27,000 people is 26 miles (42 kilometers) northeast of Little Rock. Final ticket sales pushed the jackpot higher than previous expected, making it the second-largest in U.S. history and the largest Powerball prize of 2025, according to www.powerball.com. The jackpot had a lump sum cash payment option of $834.9 million. “Congratulations to the newest Powerball jackpot winner! This is truly an extraordinary, life-changing prize,” Matt Strawn, Powerball Product Group Chair and Iowa Lottery CEO, was quoted as saying by the website. “We also want to thank all the players who joined in this jackpot streak — every ticket purchased helps support public programs and services across the country.” Lottery officials said they won’t know who won until at least Monday because winners must contact a claims center, which is closed for the holidays until then, according to Karen Reynolds, a spokesperson for the Arkansas lottery. The prize followed 46 consecutive drawings in which no one matched all six numbers. The last drawing with a jackpot winner was Sept. 6, when players in Missouri and Texas won $1.787 billion. Organizers said it is the second time the Powerball jackpot has been won by a ticket sold in Arkansas. It first happened in 2010. The last time someone won a Powerball jackpot on Christmas Eve was in 2011, Powerball said. The company added that the sweepstakes also has been won on Christmas Day four times, most recently in 2013. Powerball’s odds of 1 in 292.2 million are designed to generate big jackpots, with prizes growing as they roll over when no one wins. Lottery officials note that the odds are far better for the game’s many smaller prizes. “With the prize so high, I just bought one kind of impulsively. Why not?” Indianapolis glass artist Chris Winters said Wednesday. Tickets cost $2, and the game is offered in 45 states plus Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Associated Press videojournalist Obed Lamy in Indianapolis contributed. Olivia Diaz is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. —Olivia Diaz, Associated Press/Report for America View the full article

Improving customer service is vital for any business aiming to increase satisfaction and loyalty. By leveraging technology, like AI-powered chat systems, you can provide instant responses to customer inquiries. Furthermore, enhancing agent training with a focus on soft skills can greatly impact service quality. Exploring how these strategies can create a more effective customer experience is imperative. Let’s examine five innovative ideas that can transform your approach to customer service. Key Takeaways Implement AI-powered chatbots for instant responses, allowing agents to focus on complex inquiries and enhancing customer satisfaction. Use data analytics to identify pain points and proactively address customer needs, improving overall service quality. Foster a customer-centric culture by empowering employees to prioritize customer satisfaction and recognize exceptional service efforts. Streamline communication through integrated omnichannel platforms, ensuring a consistent brand voice and seamless customer experience. Invest in continuous training and development for agents, focusing on soft skills to enhance empathy and active listening in customer interactions. Leverage Technology to Streamline Processes As businesses aim to improve customer service, leveraging technology to streamline processes is essential for meeting consumer expectations. Implementing advanced phone systems like VoIP and IVR improves communication by enabling self-routing, which reduces call transfers and boosts response times. Online chat systems can provide instant responses to basic inquiries, aligning with the demand for rapid support. AI-powered tools analyze call transcripts in real time, giving immediate feedback that can inform customer service training topics, ensuring agents are well-prepared. Help desk software centralizes communication, allowing teams to track inquiries more effectively across multiple channels. Finally, integrating social listening software enables prompt responses to social media interactions, ensuring consistent engagement and support across all platforms. Enhance Agent Training and Development Effective agent training and development is vital for improving customer service, with studies showing that proper onboarding can boost retention rates by up to 25%. To enhance your team’s performance, consider implementing client service training ideas that focus on soft skills, like active listening and empathy. These skills can greatly improve agents’ ability to address customer needs effectively. Regular workshops and role-playing scenarios help keep agents engaged, leading to a 20% increase in customer satisfaction scores. Furthermore, investing in continuous learning opportunities reduces employee churn and increases handling time efficiency by 15%. Providing access to performance analytics and feedback tools encourages a growth mindset, empowering agents to identify areas for improvement and improve their overall service delivery. Foster a Customer-Centric Culture Building on the importance of agent training, cultivating a customer-centric culture is equally vital for enhancing overall service quality. Empower your employees to make decisions that prioritize customer satisfaction, nurturing a sense of ownership in their roles. Recognizing and rewarding exceptional customer service efforts can motivate teams to focus on delivering friendliness in customer service, which eventually improves brand loyalty. Encourage collaboration among departments to guarantee everyone is aligned in enhancing the customer experience. Regularly solicit and act on customer feedback to demonstrate your commitment to continuous improvement. Utilize Data Analytics for Continuous Improvement Utilizing data analytics allows businesses to make informed decisions that can considerably improve customer service. By analyzing trends in customer feedback, you can identify specific pain points that help a customer and target improvements effectively. This process can boost customer satisfaction rates by up to 20%. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) provides actionable insights, enabling you to measure the success of your initiatives and adjust strategies as needed. Additionally, leveraging predictive analytics helps anticipate customer needs, leading to proactive support that can reduce churn by 25%. Regularly reviewing this data cultivates a culture of continuous improvement, ensuring your business remains adaptable to evolving expectations and consistently elevates the overall customer experience. Optimize the Omnichannel Experience As customers engage with your brand across various platforms, ensuring a seamless omnichannel experience becomes crucial for maintaining their satisfaction. To achieve this, integrate communication channels like phone, email, chat, and social media. This provides a unified brand voice, which is fundamental since 64% of consumers expect real-time support on their preferred platforms. Utilizing help desk software centralizes interactions, allowing your team to manage inquiries efficiently, leading to improved satisfaction rates. Implement social listening tools to monitor feedback across channels, enabling you to adapt quickly based on real-time insights. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the 5 C’s of Customer Service? The 5 C’s of customer service are Clarity, Consistency, Communication, Compassion, and Customer-centricity. Clarity helps you define processes and policies, ensuring customers understand what to expect. Consistency keeps service levels uniform across all platforms, building trust. Effective Communication involves listening to customer needs and providing timely responses. Compassion allows you to empathize with customers, turning negative experiences into positive ones. Focusing on these principles improves customer satisfaction and loyalty effectively. What Are the Innovations in Customer Service? Innovations in customer service include AI-powered chatbots that manage routine inquiries, letting human agents tackle complex issues. Predictive analytics helps anticipate customer needs, boosting satisfaction rates by 10-15%. Omnichannel support guarantees consistent service across platforms, as 90% of customers expect seamless changes. Self-service options like knowledge bases are preferred by 81% of customers, and advanced technologies, such as virtual reality, can improve engagement and increase conversion rates by up to 30%. What Improvements Could Be Made to Customer Service? To improve customer service, consider implementing advanced technology like AI chatbots to boost response times. Set clear, measurable goals and track performance indicators to monitor progress effectively. Offering multiple communication channels, such as online chat and social media, caters to diverse customer preferences. Regular training for representatives in empathy and active listening can lead to better interactions. Finally, actively seeking and acting on customer feedback can pinpoint areas needing improvement, ensuring a better overall experience. What Are the Ways to Improve Customer Service? To improve customer service, you can adopt several strategies. Start by implementing advanced technologies, like AI tools, to provide agents with real-time insights. Establish a culture of continuous training and feedback to boost agent performance. Utilize omnichannel support for seamless communication across platforms. Regularly gather customer feedback to identify areas for improvement. Finally, set clear performance metrics to monitor progress and guarantee alignment with your customer satisfaction goals. Conclusion Incorporating these innovative strategies can greatly improve your customer service efforts. By leveraging technology, improving agent training, encouraging a customer-centric culture, utilizing data analytics, and optimizing the omnichannel experience, you can create a more efficient and satisfying interaction for customers. These approaches not just address current challenges but likewise position your business for ongoing improvement and success. Prioritizing these elements will help you meet customer expectations and drive loyalty in a competitive market. Image via Google Gemini This article, "5 Innovative Ideas for Improving Customer Service" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Improving customer service is vital for any business aiming to increase satisfaction and loyalty. By leveraging technology, like AI-powered chat systems, you can provide instant responses to customer inquiries. Furthermore, enhancing agent training with a focus on soft skills can greatly impact service quality. Exploring how these strategies can create a more effective customer experience is imperative. Let’s examine five innovative ideas that can transform your approach to customer service. Key Takeaways Implement AI-powered chatbots for instant responses, allowing agents to focus on complex inquiries and enhancing customer satisfaction. Use data analytics to identify pain points and proactively address customer needs, improving overall service quality. Foster a customer-centric culture by empowering employees to prioritize customer satisfaction and recognize exceptional service efforts. Streamline communication through integrated omnichannel platforms, ensuring a consistent brand voice and seamless customer experience. Invest in continuous training and development for agents, focusing on soft skills to enhance empathy and active listening in customer interactions. Leverage Technology to Streamline Processes As businesses aim to improve customer service, leveraging technology to streamline processes is essential for meeting consumer expectations. Implementing advanced phone systems like VoIP and IVR improves communication by enabling self-routing, which reduces call transfers and boosts response times. Online chat systems can provide instant responses to basic inquiries, aligning with the demand for rapid support. AI-powered tools analyze call transcripts in real time, giving immediate feedback that can inform customer service training topics, ensuring agents are well-prepared. Help desk software centralizes communication, allowing teams to track inquiries more effectively across multiple channels. Finally, integrating social listening software enables prompt responses to social media interactions, ensuring consistent engagement and support across all platforms. Enhance Agent Training and Development Effective agent training and development is vital for improving customer service, with studies showing that proper onboarding can boost retention rates by up to 25%. To enhance your team’s performance, consider implementing client service training ideas that focus on soft skills, like active listening and empathy. These skills can greatly improve agents’ ability to address customer needs effectively. Regular workshops and role-playing scenarios help keep agents engaged, leading to a 20% increase in customer satisfaction scores. Furthermore, investing in continuous learning opportunities reduces employee churn and increases handling time efficiency by 15%. Providing access to performance analytics and feedback tools encourages a growth mindset, empowering agents to identify areas for improvement and improve their overall service delivery. Foster a Customer-Centric Culture Building on the importance of agent training, cultivating a customer-centric culture is equally vital for enhancing overall service quality. Empower your employees to make decisions that prioritize customer satisfaction, nurturing a sense of ownership in their roles. Recognizing and rewarding exceptional customer service efforts can motivate teams to focus on delivering friendliness in customer service, which eventually improves brand loyalty. Encourage collaboration among departments to guarantee everyone is aligned in enhancing the customer experience. Regularly solicit and act on customer feedback to demonstrate your commitment to continuous improvement. Utilize Data Analytics for Continuous Improvement Utilizing data analytics allows businesses to make informed decisions that can considerably improve customer service. By analyzing trends in customer feedback, you can identify specific pain points that help a customer and target improvements effectively. This process can boost customer satisfaction rates by up to 20%. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) provides actionable insights, enabling you to measure the success of your initiatives and adjust strategies as needed. Additionally, leveraging predictive analytics helps anticipate customer needs, leading to proactive support that can reduce churn by 25%. Regularly reviewing this data cultivates a culture of continuous improvement, ensuring your business remains adaptable to evolving expectations and consistently elevates the overall customer experience. Optimize the Omnichannel Experience As customers engage with your brand across various platforms, ensuring a seamless omnichannel experience becomes crucial for maintaining their satisfaction. To achieve this, integrate communication channels like phone, email, chat, and social media. This provides a unified brand voice, which is fundamental since 64% of consumers expect real-time support on their preferred platforms. Utilizing help desk software centralizes interactions, allowing your team to manage inquiries efficiently, leading to improved satisfaction rates. Implement social listening tools to monitor feedback across channels, enabling you to adapt quickly based on real-time insights. Frequently Asked Questions What Are the 5 C’s of Customer Service? The 5 C’s of customer service are Clarity, Consistency, Communication, Compassion, and Customer-centricity. Clarity helps you define processes and policies, ensuring customers understand what to expect. Consistency keeps service levels uniform across all platforms, building trust. Effective Communication involves listening to customer needs and providing timely responses. Compassion allows you to empathize with customers, turning negative experiences into positive ones. Focusing on these principles improves customer satisfaction and loyalty effectively. What Are the Innovations in Customer Service? Innovations in customer service include AI-powered chatbots that manage routine inquiries, letting human agents tackle complex issues. Predictive analytics helps anticipate customer needs, boosting satisfaction rates by 10-15%. Omnichannel support guarantees consistent service across platforms, as 90% of customers expect seamless changes. Self-service options like knowledge bases are preferred by 81% of customers, and advanced technologies, such as virtual reality, can improve engagement and increase conversion rates by up to 30%. What Improvements Could Be Made to Customer Service? To improve customer service, consider implementing advanced technology like AI chatbots to boost response times. Set clear, measurable goals and track performance indicators to monitor progress effectively. Offering multiple communication channels, such as online chat and social media, caters to diverse customer preferences. Regular training for representatives in empathy and active listening can lead to better interactions. Finally, actively seeking and acting on customer feedback can pinpoint areas needing improvement, ensuring a better overall experience. What Are the Ways to Improve Customer Service? To improve customer service, you can adopt several strategies. Start by implementing advanced technologies, like AI tools, to provide agents with real-time insights. Establish a culture of continuous training and feedback to boost agent performance. Utilize omnichannel support for seamless communication across platforms. Regularly gather customer feedback to identify areas for improvement. Finally, set clear performance metrics to monitor progress and guarantee alignment with your customer satisfaction goals. Conclusion Incorporating these innovative strategies can greatly improve your customer service efforts. By leveraging technology, improving agent training, encouraging a customer-centric culture, utilizing data analytics, and optimizing the omnichannel experience, you can create a more efficient and satisfying interaction for customers. These approaches not just address current challenges but likewise position your business for ongoing improvement and success. Prioritizing these elements will help you meet customer expectations and drive loyalty in a competitive market. Image via Google Gemini This article, "5 Innovative Ideas for Improving Customer Service" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

This week in search, we covered an update on the Google December 2025 core update. Google Search traffic to news publishers continues to vanish, but there is Google Discover. A report shows Google has deleted a ton...View the full article

When conversions matter, these landing page builders give you the flexibility and optimization features to capture more customers. The post The 7 Best Landing Page Builders For 2026 appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Highest ever number of megadeals lifts total value of M&A by 50% in 2025View the full article

A report from The Information outlined a number of avenues OpenAI is looking at for ad formats in ChatGPT. The main one that is reportedly being thrown around at the AI company is to show sponsored content within the AI responses given by ChatGPT.View the full article

Google has been publishing these videos from advertisers on the number one Google Ads launches of the year 2025. Bug Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, was asked and she picked PMax channel performance reporting as her number one feature release for Google Ads in 2025.View the full article

Google is testing placing the search results in the center of the screen, instead of aligning it more to the left of the screen. This is an ongoing test we have seen on and off over many many years and it is still going on.View the full article

Google's John Mueller said on Reddit that when picking a site name, make sure to pick something that you can reasonably expect to rank for. In short, don't go online and complain that your site is named Best SEO blog and you don't rank in the number one position in Google Search for [best SEO blog].View the full article

Navah Hopkins, the Ads Liaison for Microsoft Advertising, made it crystal clear that exact match is prioritized even over Ad Rank. Navah Hopkins wrote on X and LinkedIn, "Exact match will get the priority if it's there, otherwise Ad Rank determines everything."View the full article

Talks expected to address the most sensitive parts of US peace plan View the full article

It’s time to reckon with the reality that nonstop doomscrolling has delivered us: a hard-to-ignore erosion of our cognitive skills. We’ve lost the ability to focus on words for long stretches of time . . . er, read books. Years of turning everything worth consuming into “content” that’s been “optimized” for attention has turned our brains into mush, shoved our mental health into free fall, and reduced our ability to pay attention to anything for more than five seconds at a time. (In fact, I clicked away from completing this sentence to check Facebook Marketplace for credenzas on sale.) While we’re still in the early days of what the long-term impact of artificial intelligence on our brains might look like, a growing contingent of folks are fighting back against the hijacking of our attention spans in favor of good old-fashioned reading. These are teenagers forgoing social media for social reality, working moms carving out time in their busy schedules to devour books, and people on #BookTok swapping tips to get into reading. In the spirit of celebrating the dying art of reading actual, honest-to-god chapter books—and not just furiously scrolling through endless Instagram slideshows and calling it a day—and before AI-written novels completely take over (this reality might already be upon us), I consulted a number of my colleagues at Fast Company to compile a list of the best books they’ve read this year in the hopes of inspiring you, too. You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue From Amy Farley, Executive Editor You Dreamed of Empires is a weird, wild, hypnotic retelling about the fateful meeting between emperor Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés in Tenochtitlan. The action takes place across a single day in 1519, but what a day: packed with family drama, palace intrigue, world history-altering misunderstandings, and lots and lots of psychedelics. But the highlight, for me, were Enrigue’s descriptions of the city of Tenochtitlan itself: its layout and architecture, the smells and food, the everyday routines of its many residents. Halfway through reading the novel, I started planning a trip to Mexico City. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid From Isa Luzarraga, Social Media Producer Nearly everyone knows the name Sally Ride. In 1983, she became the first American woman in space, setting a crucial precedent for female astronaut candidates at NASA. Still, the National Geographic documentary Sally, released earlier this year, verified what many had only surmised during the astronaut’s life, that Ride was queer. There are clear parallels between Ride’s story and the protagonist of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s most recent novel. Atmosphere follows astronomer Joan Goodwin as she becomes a member of the second NASA astronaut class to accept female candidates. The narrative alternates between two timelines: Joan’s years of training at NASA and her role as the on-ground liaison between the astronauts and command center for a mission gone wrong. Throughout her training, Joan forms a secret relationship with fellow astronaut Vanessa. Like the rest of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s body of work, this historical fiction novel is rigorously researched and highlights the author’s signature, evocative prose. It is an ode, not only to Ride and the first female astronauts, but also to the queer community as a whole. Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams From Bryan Lufkin, Senior Editor I started reading this after getting super into the This Jungian Life podcast. The three brilliant, warm and funny psychoanalysts who host it wrote this book about how to analyze dreams. (They analyze a listener’s dream at the end of every episode.) Every one of us is an iceberg, and this book gives amazing insight into the huge stuff going on with you underneath the surface! Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire From Vanessa Singh, Executive Producer This is such an insightful look into Britain’s world empire takeover, but specifically about the Caribbean-British experience and growing up in London as a Black person during the ’80s and ’90s. Written by Akala (a British rapper and activist), the book is history that is easy to digest and semi-autobiographical. I love it because it is not written by an upper-class historian who has no emotional investment in the topics discussed. It is written by a highly intelligent, working-class, mixed-race man from London. The book looks at how racism and class shape life in modern Britain, and he shows how the legacy of empire still influences policing, education, and opportunities today. Very no-nonsense. The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante From Rebecca Barker, Event Producer I can’t believe it took me until 2025 to read Elena Ferrante’s esteemed Neapolitan Novels, but, as they say, better late than never. The Story of a New Name is the second book of the series and follows the events of the New York Times’ best book of the 21st century, My Brilliant Friend, chronicling the teenage and early adulthood years of friends Lenu and Lila, who have grown up together in poverty in 1960s Naples. I consider the first book’s role as building a rich foundation for the characters and setting that drive the plot of the second—in my humble opinion, The Story of a New Name is where things get good. As the girls navigate Lila’s new marriage (which brings her wealth and stability but lacks love and respect), a growing schism between their social classes and the opportunities available to them, political turmoil, and a shared romantic interest, they are forced to reckon with the strength of their friendship and what it can survive. Ferrante paints one of the most intricate and beautiful portrayals of female friendship in literature—I can’t recommend it enough. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro From Maia McCann, Executive Digital Director The story is told by Klara, an artificial friend/AI robot for a very ill child. Klara and her human, Josie, live in a dystopian future where some children are genetically lifted or enhanced and others are left behind. The reader follows an AI as it tries to understand complex human emotions like grief and love. Potentially a little disturbing, but you wind up really rooting for the robot. This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone From Anne Latini, Art Director I was absolutely rapt reading this beautiful science-fiction fantasy while on vacation this summer. Written as a series of letters that rove forward and backward through time, the book reminds you that the tension between technology and nature has been with humanity since the beginning and will continue long after we’re gone. Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan From Jill Bernstein, Editorial Director I finally read Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach and couldn’t put it down. I loved the characters and was totally absorbed by the action and historical detail. It’s about bravery, love, and the mysterious pull of the sea. Foster by Claire Keegan From Jay Woodruff, Senior Editor Knowing my wife and I were heading to Dublin for our daughter’s wedding in October, a friend told me, “Read everything you can get your hands on by Claire Keegan.” If this exquisite Irish novella doesn’t help restore your faith in humanity, it will definitely restore your faith in first-rate, quiet, vivid storytelling. “Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing,” one kindly character tells the narrator. Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams From Sandra Riano, Photo Editor This was an eye-opening memoir about Facebook’s leap from Silicon Valley tech enterprise into global politics. Both illuminating and terrifying, it poses the question, How far will Meta go under the guise of free speech? Carless People is a cautionary tale about Big Tech’s quest for more and what we all stand to lose. View the full article

Rightwing attacks on one of the world’s most visited cities at odds with reality, says mayorView the full article

In Denmark, a grocery store chain used a black star. In Canada, it was a maple leaf. President Donald The President’s trade war inspired new country-of-origin “Made In” labels this year as shoppers outside the U.S. looked to avoid buying American-made goods and shop local instead. In the U.S., though, the “Made in USA” brand is losing its domestic appeal. Country-of-origin labeling is designed to be a stamp of authenticity and quality. Countries police their own rules to ensure products labeled “made” or “assembled” in their country really were made or assembled there and that they meet national standards. When the Copenhagen-based think tank 21st Century introduced its concept for a possible future “Made in Europe” label, its managing director said it was designed to establish trust, as in, if something was made in Europe, consumers could trust no arsenic would be in it. In the U.S. this year, though, “Made in USA” isn’t so much about trust for a growing number of consumers as it is about higher prices. And they don’t want to pay them. A Conference Board survey released in August found about half of U.S. consumers say knowing a product was made in the U.S. made them more likely to buy it again, an 18% decline since 2022. The report’s author blamed the drop on consumers appearing to associate “Made in USA” with being expensive because of high domestic production costs. U.S. consumers today face an overall average effective tariff rate of 16.8%, according to Yale’s Budget Lab. That’s the highest rate since 1935, and it comes amid wider economic discontent. Half of U.S. adults say they are spending more time than usual looking for the the lowest price for items, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. That’s up from 31% in 2021 and helps explain the rise of yuppie, designified generic brands. Value matters to consumers today. The President’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) plans to make “Made in USA” one of its top enforcement priorities in 2026, but for half of all shoppers looking for the best deal, they won’t be swayed one way or the other, no matter where a product was produced. Americans say they are generally attentive to where their products are made, an October Gallup poll found, with 76% aware of the country products were made in before purchasing them sometimes, most of the time, or always. Following years of inflation, though, the most important label for many U.S. shoppers isn’t “Made in USA.” It’s the price tag. View the full article

Vince Gilligan spent a decade ruminating about his next TV series before he had a clear vision of what it was going to be. But through all that time, the writer/director, who is best known for creating Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, knew one thing for sure: it had to be entirely different from what he’d made before. In fact, it had to be completely unlike any other show, period. “As far as a prime directive, it is always: A) how can we make this show look different than any other show on TV? That’s the most important one,” Gilligan told me during a recent call. “And B, how can we make the show look and sound and feel different from the other shows we’ve already done?” Gilligan made good on his promise to himself. The resulting show, Pluribus, really is a wholly unique take on the sci-fi genre. Massive in scope, yet intimate at its core, it’s a deep study of a character who is going through an impossibly hard situation that affects the entire planet. Before Gilligan told anyone about his idea for Pluribus, he wanted to get his idea onto paper. “I wait as long as I can, and I have as much figured out, at least with the first episode, as possible,” he says. “And in this case, I had the luxury of having a completely written first script, I think actually, possibly a completely written first two scripts.” Vince Gilligan That’s what he showed to Rhea Seehorn, who played Kim Wexler opposite Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul. Initially, Gilligan thought about a male protagonist for Pluribus but, after working with Seehorn, he decided to write the series for her. “I talked to Rhea first because I wanted to make sure Rhea would star in the show,” he says. It was only after Seehorn agreed to play Carol Sturka—the grumpy bestseller romance author who becomes the hero—that he got the production ball rolling. “I started talking to our department heads, our wonderful crew people that I’ve been working with for years,” he tells me. “And that makes it a lot easier.” Gilligan—together with series’ writer/director Gordon Smith and writer Alison Tatlock—says the show’s premise is meant to be the opposite of every “alien invasion film” you’ve seen up to this point. Having first worked as a writer on The X-Files, which embodied and invented many of the universal sci-fi tropes, Gilligan knew that Pluribus needed to serve the premise with no cracks in the story, which resulted in flipping, subverting, and ultimately destroying every single sci-fi trope wedged into our collective mind since The Twilight Zone. For Gilligan, Pluribus is the culmination of decades of work in TV. Filmed in Albuquerque (where most of the crew lives), Gilligan says the show is a direct result of working with the same reliable team he’s been with since Breaking Bad. Pluribus’ composer Dave Porter, who worked with Gilligan on his previous two series, told me that Gilligan’s directive cut across departments on Pluribus: “We wanted to plant our flag in the ground to say this is a very, very different experience.” A Post-it sketch becomes a panopticon To understand the production design, it helps to know what the series is about (my recommendation: run to watch the first episode if you haven’t yet). The series begins with an eerie but subtle alien encounter. The U.S. Army lab uses RNA code radioed from an exoplanet 600 light-years away to create a self-replicating alien retrovirus. The virus infects one person transforming her into the first node of a hive mind called The Others. Within a few weeks, all of humanity turns from a selfish, violent-prone, greedy group of individuals into a pacifist, vegetarian, and very happy collective. Immune to this alien virus, only 13 humans survive this process, called “The Joining.” Carol being one of them, is the only person in the U.S. that keeps her free will. The Others only have one mission: To turn civilization and the entire planet into a hippie bliss paradise, all while trying to find a way to “save” those last 13 humans from what they think is the angst of freewill, the pain of our daily choices, our imperfect nature. It’s not that they want to assimilate the 13 like the Borg or cordyceps; The Others believe they are doing the right thing when they liberate you from your sad pointless life. Pluribus follows Carol as she grapples with this new reality, and as she tries to find a way to revert the world back to how it was. Carol has a mission, but her mission is far from a sci-fi trope of saving the world. There are no tropes in Gilligan’s vision. In fact, the series team had to strip away the spectacle usually associated with global cataclysms. Smith and Tatlock describe this as a pursuit of “scrupulous emotional truth.” In most sci-fi, when the world changes, the characters sprint toward the explosions. In Pluribus, as it happened in Better Call Saul, they stop. “Your wife just died. Really? The world just became a hive mind, how fast do you move to get past that?” Smith asks. This refusal to rush required a specific kind of geography and to ground the infinite scope of a global hive mind, led the production team to build a very small, very specific cage for Rhea Seehorn’s character. Her home is the center of her world. That began with a crude drawing. “My favorite picture is a Post-it drawn by Vince,” production designer Denise Pizzini tells me. “He has a little cul-de-sac and he has these houses and he has the one house at the top that says ‘C’, which is Carol’s house.”​ That doodle evolved into a big civil engineering project. Rather than fighting the logistical nightmare of filming in a real neighborhood for multiple seasons, Pizzini and her team leased a plot of empty land outside Albuquerque and built Carol’s cul-de-sac from the dirt up, complete with plans and full permits and licenses. They poured concrete slabs, laid curbs, and constructed seven custom homes around a circle of asphalt, which became itself a way to communicate later in the series (warning: some minor generic spoilers ahead). A controlled gaze The physical location of the house is real, with fully working systems and finished downstairs interiors. The team also built the upstairs bedroom, office, and hallways on a controlled soundstage. They duplicated the ground floor almost exactly, allowing the camera to seamlessly look from the street into Carol’s living room, or from her kitchen window out to the hive, without a cut, effectively building the house twice. The architectural mirroring was so precise that the illusion eventually fooled its own creator. “I watched the episode last night, and there’s a shot of her in the kitchen seeing the exterior, and I thought, I couldn’t tell,” Pizzini confesses. “Is that on location or is that on the set? Which is great because I don’t remember.” For Gilligan, this wasn’t just about production convenience; it was about the gaze. Before a single wall was framed, the team pounded stakes into the empty field so Gilligan could test the camera angles. “Vince was very specific about what we wanted Carol’s view to be,” Pizzini says. “We needed from her front door and that front window, we needed to be able to see everybody else’s front door. Plus the city lights below.” They even graded each house separately to ensure the street curved precisely to vanish into a fictional neighborhood.​ The result is a set that functions like a panopticon, designed to ensure Carol is never truly alone. Pizzini designed Carol’s house as the “bastion of her humanity,” filled with the evidence of her previous life with Helen, who fails to survive the merging into the hive mind. The production team filled the space with invisible details. “Helen was [Carol’s] organizer . . . she manages all her tours,” Pizzini says. They placed Helen’s laptop on the dining room table, an orchid she bought, her sleeping mask, and her books by the bed. “Just little things like that give you an indication that they had a life together,” she says. Pizzini also designed the interior knowing that this home was a character in itself. Inside, she used arches and open sightlines because so much of the action was going to happen there and they needed to move the camera around. “She’s in a little bit of a maze because she’s kind of stuck in her house . . . or she chooses to be,” Pizzini tells me. To show the passage of time, Pizzini added an atrium. “I decided to do this so there could be actual sunlight coming in. We could see the plants kind of growing or dying because Helen’s not there taking care of things.”​ Gilligan was over the moon with the Pluribus set, he tells me, because it opened so many creative opportunities for them. They were able to design so many scenes in advance. “For episode one, when Carol’s coming home after this horrible night she’s been through, I wanted certain angles past her onto the house next door where the little kids [part of The Others] come out,” Gilligan says. Carol’s home is a brutal contrast to the spaces controlled by the hive mind. As The Others consolidate, they abandon individual homes for communal living to save electricity and water. The world becomes austere. Traffic doesn’t exist. Lawns grow wild. Commercial spaces and offices are closed. Buffalos roam golf courses. Hospitals have the bare minimum personnel (remember, since the minds merged, everyone has everyone else’s knowledge, so every person regardless of age, gender, or previous occupation, is now the best doctor, the best pilot, the best physicist, and the best anything you can imagine). Supermarkets are also empty. The production took over a real Sprouts supermarket after a year negotiating with the actual chain and weeks physically emptying the shelves. “Emptying out a supermarket . . . boy, that’s a nightmare,” Gilligan says. Sometimes you think something is going to be very complicated but turns out to be so easy. This was the contrary: They thought it was simple but it was a logistical hell, he points out. “Every step of the process, I was like, this is a nightmare,” Smith adds. Seeing the empty supermarket—and how it gets filled in a matter of hours—captures a society that has optimized itself into terrifying efficiency and silence. Subtracting humanity, adding logic So many other things required the same level of subtraction, which became the mandate—and nightmare—for the visual effects department. Rather than adding hordes of zombies, spaceships, and lasers, VFX Supervisor Ara Khanikian and his crew spent his time erasing life from each frame. “We’re subtracting a lot instead of adding,” he says. To achieve the eerie stillness of a society reduced to its most efficient expression, Khanikian’s team meticulously rotoscoped out people, cars, and movement from wide shots of Albuquerque. This forced the team to realize more consequences about the show’s premise, answering philosophical questions about a post-human world. “If there’s no concept of humans and traffic . . . are they all green or do they continue blinking? Or have we turned off the electricity to that because we don’t need it anymore?” Khanikian asks.​ Another question was how The Others move. At one point of the series, there is a massive exodus from the city. The team initially created film plates to animate cars moving in perfect synchronization, assuming a networked intelligence would drive with mathematical precision. But it looked fake. “Theoretically, if everybody’s in sync together, there shouldn’t be any traffic jams,” Khanikian explains. “We have to add a little bit of that human imperfection . . . Some people accelerate just a little bit more. Some brake a little bit later.” Gilligan’s commitment to physical reality extended everywhere. At one point, one of the unaffected humans arrives at the airport in Bilbao, Spain, on Air Force One. Initially, Pizzini tells me, they started out building just the plane’s door, the surrounding frame, some stairs and green screen. “But we knew Vince was going to want it big,” she says. Gilligan saw it and he asked to expand it. “He was like, no, we need to do a little more, a little more,” she recalls amused. “So we built a big chunk of it and we found the stairs that could go up to it. And then we . . . built little pieces of the interior, so you could go inside Air Force One and shoot out and see them coming up the stairs.” But it didn’t end there. They ended up buying the frontal 747 landing gear. And, since they filmed scenes on the runways of Bilbao’s airport, they had to match the cement and asphalt patterns of the airport. “That was a big, big set,” Pizzini recalls. Clothing becomes function Like the sets, the costumes show us a civilization that has decided to stop waste, both physical and mental. Costume designer Jennifer Bryan pitched a radical concept to Gilligan: In a hive mind, clothing no longer serves to signal status, culture, or religion. It is reduced to its leanest, meanest function. “I pitched to him that the clothes shouldn’t signify any of that,” Bryan says.“Basically just leaving clothing as a shell to cover your body, like a snail has a shell.”​ She stripped the costumes of jewelry and accessories. She only kept belts in cases where pants would literally fall down. The clothes also tell the story without having to enunciate it with dialog, one of the core strengths of Pluribus. In the early days of the assimilation, because the hive mind shares its knowledge, anyone can do anything, regardless of their attire. This leads to the visual dissonance of a TGI Friday’s waitress piloting the Airbus that flies Carol to Bilbao. The woman wears the uniform she was caught in when the virus struck, but she possesses the skill set of a veteran pilot. “When you see the uniform or the clothing not matching the occupation, you know something’s off,” Bryan says. Even the man cleaning Carol’s house in a spandex cyclist suit is a misplacement of role (fun fact: that character is played by the actual mayor of Albuquerque).​ Those were the early days of the hive mind unification. Later in the series, as society continues to optimize, people lose their individual uniform and begin to wear plainer, neutral clothing—a “shell” aesthetic will only deepen as the series progresses. As the hive mind realizes that wool requires disturbing a sheep and silk requires killing a worm, the very materials of clothing will change to reflect a society that refuses to do harm. “In the second season you’ll start to see the effects of that,” Bryan teases. She explains what we all know about modern society. “Somewhere along the line, something had to die for it, whether it’s a mulberry worm to make silk or you cut on a tree to make lumber.”​ This also opens a stark contrast among the few remaining humans. While waiting to find the science to assimilate them, The Others are obsessed with pleasing the 13 free humans by doing anything these ‘freewill’ humans ask for. While Carol largely rejects the hive’s offers of help and comfort, other survivors indulge. Mr. Diabate, one of the 13 free humans, treats the hive like a genie lamp. To dress him, Bryan looked to the Sapeurs of Brazzaville, Congo—blue-collar workers who dress in ostentatious, high-end suits. She dressed Diabate in a tuxedo made of African fabric, a visual explosion of ego in a world that has otherwise been flattened to grey. She looked at the characters and asked herself: “If you could get every single thing that you wanted, what would you go for?”​ Since Gilligan insisted on actors who were genuinely from the regions they portrayed—like Mauritius, Colombia, China, or Peru, Bryan collaborated with them on the specific mix of Western and traditional clothing unique to their cultures. The sound of the swarm The final layer of this happy apocalypse is the soundscape. Like everyone else on the production team, composer Dave Porter tells me that he got the same prime directive from Gilligan. After spending 20 years defining the sonic palette of the Breaking Bad, El Camino, and Better Call Saul universe, he realized he needed to “strip it down to the studs” for Pluribus. The series premise also defined his musical choice from the start. Instead of sci-fi synths or traditional orchestral arrangements, Porter chose the most innate human instrument: the voice. But like the traffic in Khanikian’s visual effects, he found that a controlled cacophony of a slightly off-sync choir was the perfect way to convey both the nature of The Others while introducing a disheartening, uneasy feeling. Something must be wrong. Porter tells me that he was influenced by American minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich to structure the score, using syncopation and phase-shifting to mirror the hive’s behavior—moving from soothing unison to chaotic dissonance. At times, this chaos gets into an ever-increasing crescendo that reminds me of the work of Hungarian composer György Ligeti for the Monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey. “Nobody’s singing any words, but there’s a lot of syncopation and punctuation about what they’re doing,” he says. This technique was used to perfection in a chilling scene in which Carol is trying to extract information from Zosia, the character who serves as her primary contact and chaperone with The Others. In the scene, Carol drugs Zosia with Sodium Pentothal, as she asks Zosia to give her information about what might reverse what’s happened to the world. When the hive mind realizes what’s going on, a mob appears out of nowhere to surround them. The on-set extras’ voices were blended with a choir to create an overwhelming wall of sound to stop her. Tatlock told me the story logic behind that moment. The Others were not talking in perfect synchronicity because of “network latency” but as a tactic to create a buzz to stop her. “They can pretty quietly and calmly drown her out,” Tatlock explains. It is a sonic tactic designed to “foil” Carol’s questions without aggression. The hive doesn’t need to scream; it just needs to vibrate at a frequency to drown you in sound. The ants Porter tells me that the music was designed to explore the tension between the pain of individuality and the comfort of surrender. He also avoided scoring The Others with purely menacing music. Instead, he used vocals that could shift from comforting to terrifying. “As Vince has been saying a lot in interviews about the show, they’re not all bad, right?” he says. For Gilligan, it was important that the score didn’t paint anything in black and white—there’s always multiple ways to view things. Which brings us back to the very nature of the show. Unlike most series, it doesn’t give us answers; instead it gives us all the questions we should be asking. At every plot turn, every reveal, and every character decision, you feel that any kind of dichotomy is a false one. Like Porter says, there are no binary answers in the real world. Especially when it comes to free will, our nature, and the nature of the societies we build. And that’s perhaps Pluribus’ greatest success, beyond its storytelling and cinematic virtues. Vince and his family have built a glass ant farm, removed the chaos of individuality, and forced us to watch what remains. The result is a world that feels nice, quiet, seductive, yet profoundly inhuman, which makes you appreciate your faulty humanity even more. View the full article

The bank regulator is proposing to strengthen national preemption in the wake of conflicting decisions in related court cases. View the full article

Mortgage lenders test crypto-backed mortgages as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac review digital assets in underwriting, weighing risk, non-QM loans and access for nontraditional homebuyers. View the full article

For the chronically online, 2025 was the year of “brain rot”, AI slop, and “rage bait,” a time of consuming Labubu matcha Dubai chocolate to the sound of “nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” and “six-seven,” on repeat, as a form of torture. Here, ​​we take a look back at the biggest internet-culture moments that brought us all together even as the country is more divided than ever. The TikTok ban that never happened If I told you the supposed TikTok ban was this year, would you believe me? In January, users panicked over the looming threat of the apps impending disappearance, flocking to alternatives like the Chinese-owned RedNote and making last-ditch confessions on the doomed app—only for the ban to never materialize. American woman in Pakistan American Onijah Andrew Robinson went viral in February after claiming she flew to Pakistan to marry a 19-year-old she met online, only to be rejected. Instead of returning home, she became a minor celebrity in Pakistan, holding press conferences in Karachi, demanding money, and announcing plans to “rebuild” the country, earning the moniker “American woman in Pakistan.” The lone anglerfish Usually found 6,500 feet under the sea, this black seadevil was filmed by marine researchers in Tenerife swimming toward the water’s surface. Tragically, the fish died just hours after being spotted, sparking an emotional outpouring on social media for this six-inch fish. RIP. Tesla Cybertrucks If one good thing came out of 2025, it’s the unanimous cancellation of Cybertrucks. The ostentatiously hideous vehicles became everyone’s favorite punching bag in 2025 as a result of anti-Elon Musk backlash. A group of TikTokers known as the Cybertruck Hunters roamed the streets, hunting Tesla Cybertrucks in the wild. People posted their Tesla trade-ins on TikTok accompanied by the hashtag “ByeTesla” and scored to Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” Die-hard owners eventually retreated to Facebook support groups and demanded harassment of Tesla drivers be labeled a hate crime (if so, owning one should also be considered one). Great Meme Depression The panic around the lack of memes as we entered the third month of the year began on March 10, when user @goofangel posted a video titled “TikTok Great Depression March 2025.” He says, “Nine days into March and we haven’t had a single original meme.” The Great Meme Depression soon became a meme itself, later triggering talk of The Great Meme Reset of 2026. Stay tuned for updates. OpenAI Studio-Ghibli-gate After “Images for ChatGPT” launched in March, users transformed selfies and family photos into Studio Ghibli-style “portraits.” What started as a lighthearted trend quickly took a darker turn as ethical questions and copyright issues began to surface. In a resurfaced clip from a 2016 documentary, Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of Studio Ghibli, called AI “an insult to life itself.” Some food for thought for 2026. Chicken Jockey If you took a trip to the cinema in April to watch A Minecraft Movie, based on the popular game, you would likely have been subjected to a teen-filled audience yelling “Chicken jockey!” at the top of their lungs, flashing phone lights, and launching popcorn and drinks at the screen. (To which I say: Why were you watching A Minecraft Movie in the first place?) Conclave In May, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost of the United States was declared the 267th pope, taking the name Pope Leo XIV. On social media, “diva sightings,” memes about the niche, daily process of conclave, and live updates of the Sistine Chapel’s chimney flooded FYPs. Can we do it all again next year? Velvet Sundown The mysterious indie rock band—seemingly unironically named Velvet Sundown—suddenly appeared in Spotify’s Discovery Weekly in July, quickly amassing hundreds of thousands of listeners. Their rapid rise sparked speculation that the group might be AI-generated (while they confessed they kind of are, but kind of aren’t). A true mystery for the ages. Etsy witches 2025 has been a big year for Etsy witches. From sports fans hoping to gain an advantage for their teams to anxious brides praying for perfect wedding weather, more people than ever were purchasing spells on platforms like Etsy this year to turn their luck around. Coldplay’s Kiss Cam We all remember where we were the first time we saw the clip. A Coldplay concert in Massachusetts went viral in July when an HR executive was caught on the jumbotron embracing her company’s CEO—spurring a million memes and breaking the internet in the process. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security The official X account of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security tested a new social media strategy this year, as meme lord, drawing widespread backlash on and offline. So far, they’ve got on the wrong side of Sabrina Carpenter, SZA, Olivia Rodrigo, Jess Glynne, Theo Von, and Pokémon, to name a few, for featuring their songs and audios without permission to promote deportations. “6-7” Last but not least . . . you can’t talk about 2025 without mentioning six, seeeeven. Or maybe we can, and instead pretend a bunch of grown adults don’t need to dissect a trend that is only funny, relevant, or interesting if your birth year begins with a two. Unfortunately, the two digits have become too ubiquitous to ignore, wreaking havoc in classrooms, banned at fast food chain In-N-Out, and cemented as the choice for Dictionary.com‘s word of the year. Lets hope for 2026. View the full article

When you hear the phrase “family business,” you might think of the backstabbing Roys of Succession or the dysfunctional Duttons of Yellowstone. But while TV’s family companies are entertaining, their real-life counterparts may be even more compelling. Around the world, family businesses produce about two-thirds of all economic output and employ more than half of all workers. And they can be very profitable: The world’s 500 largest family businesses generated a collective US$8.8 trillion in 2024. That’s nearly twice the gross domestic product of Germany. If you’re not steeped in family business research—and even if you are—their ubiquity might seem a little strange. After all, families can come with drama, conflict, and long memories. That might not sound like the formula for an efficient company. We are researchers who study family businesses, and we wanted to understand why there are so many of them in the first place. In our recent article published in the Journal of Management, we set out to understand this different kind of “why”—not just the purpose of family firms, but why they thrive around the world. The usual answers don’t really explain it The standard answer to “Why do family companies exist?” is straightforward: They allow owners to generate income and potentially create a legacy for future generations. A related question is: “Why do entrepreneurs even want to involve their relatives in their new ventures?” Research suggests entrepreneurs do so because family members care and can help when resources are limited. But that might not be unique to family businesses. All companies—whether run by a family or corporate executives—balance short-term profit and long-term goals. And all of them want reliable workers who are willing to pitch in. So those answers don’t explain why family companies, specifically, are so common worldwide. A different angle: Winning without fighting For our study, we considered decades of research about family firms to conclude that family businesses are uniquely skilled at keeping competitors out of their market space—often without actually competing with them. How? We think a quote from Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War captures the idea: To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. Family-owned businesses often do exactly this, which is why there are so many of them. Here’s how it works in practice. 3 key differences Research on family businesses has shown that they differ from other types of companies in three key ways: the types of goals they pursue, the governance structures they establish, and the resources they have. Together, these three characteristics explain how family businesses may use their property rights to get an edge over their competitors. The first is goals. Unlike other types of enterprises, family businesses prioritize noneconomic goals involving the reputation, legacy, and well-being of the family—both now and in the future. Of course, they still have to worry about making a profit. But their interest in family-centered goals can lead them to choose projects that may yield lower returns but still fulfill their noneconomic goals. These sorts of projects may not be attractive to other types of firms. As a result, family businesses may find themselves operating in spaces where there’s not much competition to start with. For instance, take Corticeira Amorim, a family-run Portuguese company that dominates the global market for cork stoppers and other cork products. The cork industry is a classic narrow niche: There are only a handful of serious global competitors, and Amorim is widely described as the world’s largest cork processing group, with a sizable share of global wine and Champagne corks. CEO Antonio Rios de Amorim discusses the history of his family business in this Business Insider video. The second key factor is governance. Family members who work together often know each other well, care about each other, and want the best for both the family and the firm, which may stay in the family’s possession for generations. This fact may reduce operating costs and the cost of contracting. Why? When they make decisions, they don’t always need to hire a fancy, Harvey Specter-like lawyer from the show Suits. They can decide on the next move for the company while having dinner together. This significantly reduces the costs associated with decision-making. In other words, because they rely less on formal contracts and monitoring, family businesses can operate more cheaply. Finally, family firms use resources like information and money differently. Since many established family businesses have been around for decades, relatives who work together accumulate information that’s hard to acquire and transfer, and might not even be useful elsewhere. Being a family member means not only doing business with relatives but also going through life together, acquiring a unique perspective about the family itself. As a result, family businesses have lower transaction costs than other companies. Sometimes this shows up in very concrete ways. An uncle may invest money in the business and never ask for it back. Would that happen at a nonfamily business? Probably not. This dedication makes family members a special type of human asset that’s hard to replace. Put simply, nonfamily businesses are unlikely to hire someone who cares as much about the company’s success as a deeply invested relative does. And because these relationships aren’t for sale on the open market, competitors can’t easily access them. That fact helps family businesses keep competitors at bay while essentially being themselves—which in turn explains why there are so many of them. Family businesses are so common worldwide that there are several holidays celebrating them, including International Family Business Day on November 25; U.S. National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day on March 29; and the United Nations’ Micro-, Small, and Medium-Sized Enterprises Day on June 27. This holiday season, you might consider spreading a little extra cheer with the family-run retailers in your community. Vitaliy Skorodziyevskiy is an assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Louisville. Hanqing “Chevy” Fang is an associate professor of business and information technology at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Jim Chrisman is a professor of management at Mississippi State University. View the full article

If you’re an entrepreneur, at the end of the year you’re probably excited about the prospect of time off, but also daunted by the new year’s potential and all the deadlines you should be setting. Traditional planning methods like to-do lists and calendars are no longer enough for the complexity of modern careers and lives. This year, I leaned into AI to approach planning differently. When used thoughtfully, AI becomes a partner in strategy, and a system that helps you transform aspirations into structured, executable plans. Here’s how I recommend using AI to clarify where you’re headed and offer more clarity on how to get there. Redefine the role of AI Most people use AI like a junior assistant, asking it to summarize things or spit out a process or recommendation based on relevant input shared. But what I realized is that AI can be extremely helpful as a thought partner, forcing clarity where you’re vague and exposing blind spots you’d otherwise ignore. One of the first prompts I ran this year was “If I repeat the same behaviors I had this year, where will I realistically end up in 12 months?” That question alone reframes everything. AI is excellent at pattern recognition, including your own. Before planning forward, I let AI show me the trajectory I’m already on to help me decide what needs to change. Plan like a portfolio manager We have a tendency to approach planning as if every goal deserves equal attention, but let’s face it, that’s rarely the case. This year, I asked AI to treat my time like a portfolio. I said, given my goals, which 20% are likely to produce 80% of meaningful outcomes? The result was uncomfortable to see but important to make me realize that several projects I thought were “important” turned out to be just draining my energy. For example, the AI flagged two goals as the most important: clarifying and focusing on one user problem to make sure the team was pushing in one direction, as well as building a regular feedback loop, so that we can iterate the product based on feedback as most important. Everything else on the backlog had to come second. Use AI to run premortems on your year One of the most powerful ways I use AI is by asking it to assume failure. Before finalizing major goals, I run a premortem, by providing context as if it’s already December next year and the plan failed, helping me see what went wrong. This helps me surface predictable risks, such as being overly optimistic on timelines, or trying to do too many things at once. For example, last year I ran a premortem on what looked like a “perfectly reasonable” plan of scaling my company while simultaneously launching two new agent products, expanding partnerships, and tightening our internal tooling, all within 12 months. The AI flagged that I’d assumed linear progress in a year that would almost certainly include regulatory friction, hiring delays, and long integration cycles with partners. It pointed out that running multiple launches in parallel would fragment leadership attention. This single exercise has saved me months of wasted effort by planning ahead for what can keep me stuck. Turn goals into systems Traditional planning tends to be driven by milestones like “scale by Q4.” But what if, instead of asking what do I want to achieve, you ask: What system do I need to follow to ensure I reach this milestone? This could look like a weekly publishing system with feedback, as opposed to just saying you want to write more. AI helps design these systems, and refine them over time. Let your plan evolve in real time The biggest flaw we tend to make in our annual planning is pretending the future is static. What’s changed for me this year is using AI agents to continuously adapt my plan based on new information, such as meetings added to the calendar or opportunities emerging that I didn’t anticipate. You can just sync your preferred chatbot with your calendar to help you do this. This turns planning into a living conversation, not a once-a-year ritual. AI won’t magically give you discipline, but it will expose contradictions between what you say you want and how you actually allocate time. Used well, AI becomes a mirror that reflects your priorities back at you in uncomfortably precise ways. The people who will get the most out of AI next year will be doing fewer things, more coherently, with systems that adapt as fast as life does. Using AI to help you in this process is what will make a difference between a plan that looks good on January 1 and one that works all year long. View the full article

2025 was unquestionably the year of the AI boom at work. When generative AI like ChatGPT entered the scene a few years ago, it started as a novelty. Early adapters saw its potential to change the way we work, but for most people it was a way to rewrite Keats’s poetry in pirate speak, or remix their favorite memes. But in 2025 AI rolled into offices everywhere, taking up residence as the boss who set performance goals, the on-call therapist-cum-coach, and the silent brainstorm partner. A McKinsey study found that 33% of organizations used genAI at work in 2023, and 55% used AI. This year, that leapt to 79% and 88% respectively. Here are five ways AI changed work in 2025. 1. The AI job application Not only is AI changing how we do our jobs, it’s changing how we get our jobs. AI generated résumés submitted on LinkedIn surged by 45% this year. Job candidates are also using AI to find companies to apply to and help them network. In parallel, overwhelmed by all the AI generated applications, HR departments are using AI to help them keep up. Three-fourths of hiring managers say they use AI to schedule interviews, and over 90% use AI to screen résumés. While interviewing still remains the domain of humans, about 25% of companies are using AI interviewers. Researcher Brian Jabarian even found that AI interviewers are more likely to result in increased job offers. They also improve 30-day job retention by 17% for industries that hire at a high volume, such as customer service. 2. AI as the superstar employee AI arrived on the scene as the perfect employee. It does not ask for a salary or raises, it does not care about getting promoted, and it won’t steal someone’s lunch from the break room. Instead, it can do the automatic, repetitive work that’s present in every job that eats up hours of the week offering very little intellectual satisfaction in return. In fact, even as companies waffled on how to train employees on how to use AI and what their AI policies should be, employees took matters into their own hands and figured out how to use AI to make their jobs easier. About 80% of employees at small and medium-size companies were using their own AI tools at work giving rise to BYOAI: bring your own AI. AI has also reduced the barrier to entry for founders: instead of hiring a fleet of programmers, vibe code. Instead of sinking hours into finding client contact information, get AI to suggest leads. 3. The silent copilot Not only is AI the superstar employee, it’s the perfect confidante since it won’t gossip. As such, AI also became the silent copilot who helped workers brush up on their soft skills and stress test their ideas without judgement. In an informal survey Fast Company conducted of employees using LinkedIn, workers reported using AI to organize documents, brainstorm ideas, challenge assumptions, summarize meeting notes, and prioritize tasks. Employees are even asking AI what kind of health insurance they should get. It’s not just employees: leaders are using AI to up their game. Studies show that 85% of new managers don’t receive training. AI quietly stepped in to fill the gap. James Cross, cofounder of Tenor, an AI leadership company, noted that “managers are often more receptive to AI feedback,” because “there’s no emotion attached to it.” 4. The rise of workslop AI might be the best employee but it’s also the worst employee because it knows not what it does. While AI can generate work, that doesn’t mean it understands what it’s doing. 2025 might have seen the ascendance of AI at work, but it also saw the ascendance of AI generated “workslop.” Stanford researchers found that 40% of employees reported receiving “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” Meanwhile, in July, MIT published a report that found that while companies were investing billions of dollars in AI, 95% of companies had found no return on their AI investments. Worse, OpenAI’s research found that their models can lie deliberately. AI promises to work easier, but workers may find instead of kicking back, they have a new job: sorting through piles of AI generated trash. 5. AI took all the jobs, or did it just get blamed for it? In addition to being the superstar employee, AI is also everyone’s favorite scapegoat. It’s getting blamed for replacing all the jobs for good reason. First, 2025 was a rough year for layoffs, with layoff announcements totaling over one million. Second, CEOs pinned the blame on AI. Understandably, as wave after wave of layoffs have swept through corporate America, nearly a third of employees say that they think AI will lead to fewer job opportunities. However, experts point out there’s little evidence AI is replacing workers—AI’s impact on the workforce is comparable to earlier technological disruptions such as the rise of the PC and the internet. In a rocky economy, where companies are struggling to trim back, “it makes companies look good to their shareholders, to suggest ‘we are deploying AI so well [that] we are now cutting our labor costs’,” Molly Kinder, a Brookings senior fellow, told Fast Company. View the full article

I’m on vacation. Here are some past letters that I’m making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives. 1. My ex works at my new job I recently got a new job (medical field) that I was very excited for. The thing is that even after turning down other offers, I have terrible luck — out of all the jobs, I accepted the offer that put me in the same room as my ex. The break-up wasn’t great. I got ghosted. So in retaliation, I made myself visible by texting her and sending friend requests on all social media (nothing mean, it was all about what her friendship meant to me). I know, childish on my part and pretty much got blocked on everything. I moved on. But to my surprise, there she was on my first day. I guessed that since she ghosted me, that meant that I was someone she never knew so I didn’t acknowledge her. I heard her tell my new manager that she needed to talk to her in private before she went home. If I’m unfortunately right that it may be about me, how do I proceed? How long ago was the break-up? If it was recent, your ex may be concerned that you intentionally got a job where she works in order to be around her — an extension of all those post-break-up attempt to get her attention. If that’s the case, she’s likely very freaked out right now, and you’d probably do well to have one polite conversation with her where you tell you had no idea she worked there but you’ve moved on and she doesn’t need to worry about any weirdness from you and you will treat her like any other colleague, or more distantly if she prefers. That’s probably a conversation you need to have even if the break-up was a long time ago, but it’s especially urgent and important if it was in the last year or so. And then treat her respectfully, as you would anyone else there. Don’t do that whole “well, she ghosted me so I shouldn’t even acknowledge her” — that’s a recipe for making her and others around her uncomfortable (and for convincing your new boss that this won’t work out). Be polite, keep a respectful distance, and don’t try to make any point with your behavior toward her (other than “I am a polite, respectful person who will not make things weird for you in any way”). It’s possible you might need to address this with your new manager as well, depending on what you think your ex might say about you. Normally this wouldn’t be something you’d need to raise with a manager, but if your ex is really freaked out and relaying that, you might benefit from discreetly informing your boss that the two of you dated, you didn’t know she worked there when you accepted the job, and you’ll have no problem treating her respectfully and professionally. – 2020 2. I’ve fired my new employee before I recently took a job in my same industry and city. In my new role, I’ll have a team of eight reporting to me in various capacities and functions. During the interview process, I got a brief read-out of the team and a high level talent assessment. Nothing stood out as an issue. On my first day, I met the team reporting to me. One of the people on the team is someone that worked for me before and who I terminated for cause due to performance at my previous job. What do I communicate to my new manager and/or HR about this situation? It feels weird to say nothing because ultimately, this could be a management issue — I’m sure this employee doesn’t feel great about the situation. On the other hand, I don’t want to risk harming this person’s reputation at this company if they are doing a good job so far. This person is pretty new here, too, and my impression is they are either doing a better job in this role or management has not yet identified an issue with their performance. Have you talked to the employee yet? That’s important because they are undoubtedly really uncomfortable, if not outright panicking. Ideally you’d tell them that you’re happy to be working with them again, you’ve heard good things about the work they’ve been doing (if that’s true), and while you know your last time working together didn’t go the way either of you wanted, this is a different situation and, as far you’re concerned, both of you are starting fresh. I do think you’re right that you need to mention it to your own manager or HR. It sucks because this person is entitled to a fresh start without the firing following them to a different job, but I’d be pretty concerned if I found out someone I managed didn’t share something so potentially relevant with me. It’s relevant not as a predictor of the person’s work now but because it could affect the dynamic between the two of you, and either of you could struggle not to interpret things through that old lens. I’d keep it very brief — “I managed Jane at an old job and unfortunately the fit wasn’t right and we ended up parting ways. I’m very willing to start fresh with her and I’m hopeful the role she’s in could be a great a match, but I figured you’d want to be aware of the prior work relationship.” Also, if it’s been a while since you worked together, stress that too. – 2021 3. I overheard my boyfriend pretending to be a doctor I’ve recently moved in with my boyfriend (one week prior to our city’s stay home order) and so we hear a lot of each other working these days. He’s in marketing for hospice care and talks to a lot of families and patients to get them onto his company’s service. Yesterday I overheard a call with a family where he called himself a doctor. He’s not a doctor in any way, shape, or form. I asked him about it after the call and he said that the wife (the patient) hates the idea of hospice care and the son referred to him as a doctor on earlier discussions so she thought it was just the doctor recommending home care. Am I wrong to have some serious ethical issues with that? I understand how hard end of life is, but pretending to be an MD seems a step too far. I told my boyfriend that I didn’t think that was appropriate, but he brushed it off. I don’t want to let harp on it, but it just doesn’t feel right to me. Whoa. Deliberately misleading a patient into believing you’re a doctor so they take your recommendations more seriously is fraudulent. In many (all?) states it’s illegal. And doing it to sell his company’s services to someone? That’s incredibly unethical and just … really wrong. And it’s such an attack on the dignity and agency of the woman he deceived. You are right to have serious ethical issues with this. – 2021 4. Should I try to take my old coworker’s job? I quit my job last February. A coworker was promoted to my position. She was totally unprepared and unqualified, and I have been secretly helping her ever since. She contacts me almost daily with questions and crises. Now I desperately need a job, and wonder if I should try to get my old job back. The boss is happy with Shanna, but has no clue that I am still “training” her. I have all the emails to prove it, but that would sabotage Shanna’s career. What should I do? Trying to take someone’s job from them would be a real dick move! Don’t do it. You can certainly stop helping Shanna — explain to her that you no longer have the time to keep helping and at this point she should be able to do the job on her own — but you can’t secretly try to sabotage her. At most, you could say something to your old boss like, “Shanna is still contacting me for help on a lot of things and I’m looking for work, which made me wonder if there might be space for a role for me to help with some of my old projects, or even something else.” You’d be proposing coming back, but not taking Shanna’s job to do it. – 2020 The post my ex works at my new job, I’ve fired my new employee before, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager. View the full article

The country is taking a huge bite out of the European and US market with ever-growing production of luxury foodsView the full article