ResidentialBusiness

The question came innocently enough: What do you want to be when you grow up? Lindsay’s daughter, after a brief pause, looked up and confidently replied, “I want to be a client.” The simplicity of the answer hid the complexity of what she had observed: The clients always seemed to get the very best version of her mother. In her daughter’s young mind, being a client meant holding a special place—one that commands focus, care, and an unwavering commitment. As two mothers navigating full-time legal careers, that moment was not lost on either of us. It reveals a truth that is often glossed over in the narratives about working women, especially those of us balancing professional intensity with parenting. Beneath the thin veneer of “having it all,” we know all too well the quiet sacrifices and compromises that characterize our balancing act. The spotlight may be on our professional accomplishments, but in the shadows our children wait patiently for our attention, often competing with the demands of a profession that do not easily relent. The Weight of Expectation Too often the complexities of ambition, motherhood, and professional duty are distilled into stereotypes that seek to diminish rather than dignify. It’s a familiar story—the notion that a woman with power and responsibility must inevitably be lacking elsewhere. Or that her identity as a mother or partner is somehow contrary to her professional persona. These narratives, however veiled, carry weight. But let’s say what that really means. It means that the diligence and tenacity we bring to our careers and our clients are identical to the dedication we offer to our families. It means that the long hours spent advocating for clients are juxtaposed with the quiet moments at home, where the stakes are equally high, even if measured in hugs rather than verdicts. It means that, despite the portrayal of women in leadership as one-dimensional, we are more. We are multifaceted, resilient, and deeply invested in both our professions and our roles as mothers. Living with the Tension The path of a working mother demands a constant recalibration of priorities where both career and family vie for equal attention and each carries its own form of guilt. The notion of “balance” is a fallacy. At least that’s what we’ve learned from years of trying to juggle our careers and motherhood. Instead, it’s a constant series of trade-offs and compromises leading us to understand that each day is unique. There’s no neat division between “work” and “life” anymore. Mornings usually start early, working before the rest of the house wakes up. We often work with one eye on the clock, calculating the minutes until we sprint from the office to catch a school or sport event. Or days when there’s a sick child and no available caregiver, the idea of balance seems laughable. This has forced us to rethink how we define success—not by perfection but by flexibility and resilience. It’s about being okay with the days that feel like controlled chaos and accepting that sometimes one part of life will have to be put on pause for the other. When our daughters see us in action—they don’t just witness the power, grace, and poise required of our profession; they see the weight of that responsibility and the effort and dedication it takes to give both our clients and our children the best of us. The Lessons We Teach As children we dreamed of becoming lawyers, mothers, or both, imagining these roles as ultimate markers of success and happiness. Our daughters, however, have grown up watching us navigate the realities of those choices and their dreams for us are different. If a child believes happiness comes from being in a position where others give their full attention, then maybe that’s a mirror to our own internal narratives—the idea that to be happy we must be fully attended to, in control, or on the receiving end of care. But our journey has taught us that happiness, real happiness, isn’t about being a client. It’s not about receiving—it’s about the pursuit itself, the constant striving to give our best to both our careers and our children. So while our daughters might want to be “clients” today, we hope they understand, over time, that true fulfillment comes not from being at the center of attention, but from living and thriving with the tension. View the full article

Where there is a will (to boost military capabilities), there is a wayView the full article

Donald Trump’s turn to Moscow is restoring the geography of the cold warView the full article

Trump imposed tariffs this week on the country’s three biggest trade partners—including 25% on all goods from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on Chinese imports—which will ripple across the U.S. economy. One particular area where the impacts will be felt is housing, since construction relies on metal, lumber, and machinery heavily imported from those three countries. “This will result in higher costs, intensifying already excruciating affordability issues,” says Joe Brusuelas, Chief Economist for RSM, a global consultancy. It’s too early for analysts to have exact figures on just how much housing costs will be impacted, and much of the predicted increases have already occurred, as a fearful industry priced in trade disruptions in recent months. But overall, tariffs are expected to increase prices on raw materials, extend project timelines, raise uncertainty and make building more expensive. One estimate found the measures would potentially raise material costs by a few billion dollars a year. It’ll put a dent in the construction industry, which represents 4% of the nation’s GDP. And finding domestically made substitutes will prove incredibly difficult in the short term—if not impossible, due to the substantial cost and challenge of building up manufacturing capacity or reopening shuttered factories. Nearly a third of all wood used for homes comes from Canadian forests, says Brusuelas, and those costs will be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. Commercial developments, from skyscrapers to apartment buildings to factories, will also feel the pinch due to their reliance on steel and aluminum. Even though the U.S. currently makes 80% of the steel used domestically, prices will still be impacted, according to Tom Park, national strategic supply chain vice president at Skanska. Just the threat of tariffs has pushed steel prices up 15% since January 1, and contributed to a sharp rise in material prices in February. Park predicts “single-digit” total price increases in commercial construction due to tariffs, a small figure but enough to make projects economically infeasible, or end up pushing up rent on finished apartment buildings. Projects with smaller margins, especially affordable housing developments, will be challenged to make financing work with additional material costs. The latest round of tariffs hits right where it hurts for builders. Canada produces much of the lumber used in our country’s stick-built, single-family homes, as well as roughly a quarter of the aluminum used in curtain walls and building facades. Mexico supplies much of the machinery and appliances used in apartments and offices, as well as finished goods and heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC) supplies. And China also contributes manufactured goods, especially switchgear and other electrical equipment that’s vital to larger offices, buildings, and commercial warehouses and factories. Projects in pre-construction, a phase during which designs are decided, can still make some alterations to decrease the use of steel or alter layouts to mitigate some of this increased cost. But there simply isn’t enough slack to alter the overall shift in costs, especially if these tariffs remain in place for months. Morningstar analysts predict a significant number of planned projects will be delayed or canceled. Many suppliers tried to stockpile goods after the November election, in anticipation of the tariff threat. Brusuelas said orders for industrial supply materials from overseas spiked by $22 billion between December and January. But even that anticipatory buying can only go so far. “Certain firms stocked up on materials and have clauses in their contracts for these issues,” said Nicholas Pantuliano, co-founder and chief operating officer of developers PTM Partners. “But it won’t change the fact that certain projects won’t happen, and more projects will go by the wayside. Even perceived cost increases will create palpitations throughout the industry.” And more tariffs may be on the way. President Trump has threatened an additional 25% tariff on aluminum and steel, set to come online March 12. That would mean tariffs on aluminum from Canada, for instance, would total 50%. And trying to resuscitate domestic production by opening or reopening an aluminum smelter would take years, and require both substantial electrical power and a team of trained workers. “It’s such a global market,” said Mike Putnam, head of delivery at Unispace, a global design and construction firm. “Everything is impacted by goods coming from overseas, and it’s hard to find a true domestic product. View the full article

Fila is looking to Hailey Bieber to help its struggling brand. The South Korea-based sports apparel company is today launching a 13-piece spring/summer 2025 collection made in collaboration with Bieber, who is the founder of Rhode beauty. The pieces, which include a baby tee, sweatpants, and an oversized pullover, are designed to be “wardrobe staples,” according to the company, and are now available on FILA’s website and select Urban Outfitters stores. It’s clear the Hailey Bieber x FILA Collection is geared toward athleisure rather than performance activewear based on the campaign photography, which in one photo shows Bieber spilling an iced coffee. [Photo: Fila] Fila’s North American division said last year it would downsize in the U.S., and in January it laid off 130 employees at its headquarters and warehouse in Towson, Maryland. The rise of activewear accelerated by the pandemic has been great business for athletic apparel brands like Lululemon and Alo Yoga, which catered to spendy customers with clothes for everyday wear. Fila, however, failed to make similar gains. Last year, the brand partnered with Bieber for a retro-inspired collection also designed for everyday wear. This Bieber collaboration is another push to capture share of the growing female athleisure market. The collaboration follows a marketing strategy that’s becoming more common among athletic brands looking to expand their consumer base: securing celebrity rather than performance athlete brand ambassadors. Nike took this approach most recently when it partnered with Kim Kardashian’s shapewear brand Skims on a new women’s brand called NikeSkims. (Of course, Skims also has the appeal of a $4 billion valuation.) While Fila is better known for its partnerships with athletes and tennis players, including a sponsorship announced earlier this year with New Zealand’s Lulu Sun, just like the NikeSkims deal, teaming up with Bieber gives the brand access to a celebrity who sells a lifestyle, rather than an athlete who sells performance. [Photo: Fila] “If I wouldn’t wear it, I wouldn’t put it out into the world,” Bieber says in a promotional video for the collection. Considering the popularity of tenniscore fashion last summer and fall, the Hailey Bieber x FILA Collection is well timed. The collection also includes a lightweight twill pleated skirt and oversized knit sweater meant as a modern take on a tennis classic. For Fila, the Bieber collaboration is about more than just selling clothes, it’s about defining the brand’s place in an athleisure market dominated by competitors who already cemented their place in it. By tapping a celebrity and model, the sports apparel brand could better appeal to consumers more interested in aesthetic and versatility than athletic performance. View the full article

Tariffs have caused lots of headaches for business owners around the world, especially as they’ve become a hot topic in the political landscape. Just this week, President Donald Trump enacted 25% import taxes on Mexican and Canadian goods, causing the S&P 500 to plummet. Businesses struggling with these complex tariffs may have a newfound appreciation for a tool that promises to simplify the process: Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI-powered agent platform that was launched in October 2024. Agentforce enables users to create AI agents that can analyze and make decisions based on the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-plus page document that sets tariff rates for over 20,000 imported items. Agentforce users can create an “Import Specialist Agent” that will analyze the lengthy schedule and will automatically adjust pricing or create business plans accordingly. What once took businesses months to adapt to can now be handled in minutes, according to Paul Tatum, Salesforce’s EVP of Solution Engineering. Tatum tells Fast Company that the Import Specialist Agent is one of the many ways that AI can make convoluted, labor-intensive tasks easier. “Governments around the world are overworked and outstretched,” says Tatum. “Technology has helped with that over the years, but digital labor is going to transform the level of service and capabilities of the government.” The Import Specialist Agent responds to each business’s unique data, taking into account the size of a business, what products it sells, and previous sales history. This technology is applicable across the board for small businesses, large businesses, and government employees, says Tatum. Since 2018, the schedule has been updated around 11–30 times each year. Changing policies and pricing to align with each individual schedule change can be a laborious process without the help of AI, Tatum says. And although other AI software exists that can analyze the tariff schedule, Salesforce’s may be the only one that can automatically take action that fits a business’s specific needs, says Tatum. “A lot of the AI technology focus has been around developing large language models, and you see those come out every day. They’re an important part of the puzzle,” Tatum says. “But we believe that the most impactful part of the puzzle is making agents practical, like a digital employee working alongside and augmenting your human employee.” Agentforce currently has about 3,000 paying customers who have created over 5,000 unique AI agents for different purposes—with the Import Specialist Agent being just one of the many. Customers pay $2 per conversation, but this pricing sometimes will vary based on the scale and complexity of the work being performed, according to Salesforce. The tariff schedule isn’t the only lengthy government document that Tatum wants to see Agentforce tackle. He says these capabilities can be transferred to parse through dense language surrounding social security or Medicare. Government documentation is thorough, but often impenetrable, Tatum says. “I open up the IRS website and say: ‘What in the world is going on?’” he adds. “This is where digital employees can help us. View the full article

Murray Auchincloss’s share awards drop sharply to £2.75mn, compared with £4.36mn in 2023View the full article

Europe’s backing for Kyiv faces resistance from Orbán as Trump turns US-EU relations on their head View the full article

Eva Rodriguez has earned minimum wage at a Subway franchise in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles for more than a decade. She has stocked ingredients, wiped down tables, and served thousands of meals in the strip mall shop that’s sandwiched between an optical store and a Mediterranean restaurant. Often, she worked 70-hour weeks so her family could afford the basics. “I’m not someone with a lot of money. I have to fight to eat everyday. I have to fight to have a place to live,” Rodriguez said in Spanish. Only last year did she learn that she didn’t have to labor under those conditions—a revelation that led her to accuse the franchise’s owner of violating numerous labor laws. Rodriguez claims her boss forced her to work under two names to avoid paying overtime rates, denied her sick pay, skimmed her tips, and threatened her residency status. She is seeking nearly $100,000 in back pay and punitive damages, according to a complaint she filed with the California labor commissioner against the owner, Amarjit Singh, known to workers as “Ms. Happy.” “I’ve been a victim of every kind of theft you can imagine,” said Rodriguez, who is 58 and a grandmother of seven. Singh declined repeated requests to comment, including one made in a letter hand-delivered to her restaurant. Subway did not respond to requests for comment. While wage theft is common in low-wage industries, Rodriguez’s case is “particularly egregious” due to the sheer scope of alleged violations, according to Daniel Rojas, one of the lawyers representing her. It is especially prevalent in industries with significant numbers of immigrant workers, like construction, healthcare, and food services, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. In 2023, more than 1.5 million low-wage workers in California were victims of minimum wage violations, more than double the figure of just a decade earlier, according to a report from Rutgers University. Advocates say foreign-born workers like Rodriguez may now be at higher risk of exploitation. The Trump administration is leading a crackdown on undocumented immigrants that many say is threatening immigrant communities more broadly. They say raising awareness about existing worker protections may provide the best defense against a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment and workplace abuses. Early last year, an organizer with the California Fast Food Workers Union visited the Subway where Rodriguez works and invited her to join the union, a moment she described as “a light from God that appeared on my path.” That encounter made her aware of her rights in the workplace. Formed last February, the California Fast Food Workers Union is the first statewide fast-food workers union in the country, and is focused on raising wages and improving working conditions for the more than 750,000 fast-food workers employed in the state. Although Rodriguez has the backing of the union, she hasn’t had an easy time challenging her employer. She alleges that after she delivered a letter to her managers demanding proper pay and an end to the violations, Singh retaliated by reducing her hours dramatically. Rodriguez detailed her claims in the complaint she filed in Los Angeles Superior Court against Subway, Singh, and Singh’s company, Guardashan & Happy Inc. Over the course of three years, Rodriguez claims that she was denied nearly $54,000 in wages, most of which she attributed to thousands of hours of unpaid overtime. Though Rodriguez claims the wage theft has been ongoing for most of her time working at Subway, she is only seeking to reclaim three years of lost wages because the statute of limitations on earlier alleged violations has expired. But Rodriguez finds some of the violations that she alleges occurred before then to be particularly galling. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Singh allegedly convinced Rodriguez to work more than 1,400 hours without compensation, saying the shop might otherwise close due to low traffic. During that same time, Singh’s Guardashan & Happy Inc. received more than $850,000 in paycheck protection loans, restaurant revitalization fund grants, and employee retention tax credits—all designed to keep her business open and workers paid, according to the complaint Rodriguez filed with the California labor commissioner last August. Upwards of $300,000 of Singh’s PPP loans have since been forgiven. Some of the alleged violations highlight the way in which even immigrants with legal residency are vulnerable to exploitation. After injuring her foot and back during a fall inside Subway’s freezer in 2023, Rodriguez filed a workers’ compensation claim to cover the costs of treatment. When Singh learned of the filing, Rodriguez was pressured to drop the claim, according to the complaint she filed with the California labor commissioner. Singh allegedly warned her that the federal government would investigate her, and once officials discovered she had worked under two names, her legal residency would be at risk, the complaint stated. Rodriguez eventually dropped the claim after Singh also allegedly offered to pay her $30,000 and arrange for her to have medical care. But after weeks without the promised treatment or funds, Rodriguez found a workers’ compensation lawyer and resubmitted the claim to the state. Millions of workers across the country regularly experience similar violations, amounting to tens of billions of dollars in illegally withheld wages every year, according to an Economic Policy Institute report. The average minimum wage violation in California as of 2015 amounted to about $3,400, a small fraction of Rodriguez’s claim. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank also found that the country’s 32 million foreign-born workers were especially likely to be the victims of that crime. Kent Wong, project director for Labor and Community Partnerships at the UCLA Labor Center, said foreign-born workers are particularly vulnerable to wage theft because they are often “unaware of their rights, either as workers or as immigrants.” “When workers are informed of their rights as workers, their rights as immigrants, they’re in a better position to exercise those rights. In nonunion workplaces where exploitation is rampant, they are much more vulnerable because they are unaware of their rights,” Wong said. The California Fast Food Workers Union, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union, has pushed for cities across the state to adopt mandatory know-your-rights training. In 2024, Los Angeles City councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Katy Yaroslavsky introduced a motion to direct the city attorney to draft an ordinance requiring employers to provide paid time off for fast-food workers to attend such training. The union has pushed for similar measures in Santa Clara County by launching strikes with the support of local lawmakers. (Disclosure: SEIU is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.) For more than a decade, SEIU has been seeking to organize fast-food workers into a union, securing significant victories along the way. Last year, it successfully pushed California lawmakers to establish a fast food council tasked with setting workplace standards and wages. The formation of the California Fast Food Workers Union earlier that year marked another milestone. But despite those gains, CAFFWU lacks the collective bargaining power of more traditional unions. With Trump as president, many fear working conditions for immigrant workers may become even more perilous. In early January, scores of farmworkers were detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents during immigration raids in Bakersfield, California, sending shockwaves of fear through immigrant communities. Tom Homan, Trump’s choice for “border czar,” has pledged to launch similar raids across the country and has directly criticized know-your-rights training. The Trump administration is now also seeking to expedite deportations for more than a million migrants who arrived during the Biden administration by denying them court hearings. “We are entering a very dangerous period for immigrant workers, their families, and communities. . . . Many, many millions will be negatively impacted if Trump makes good on his promise to launch the largest mass deportations in U.S. history,” Wong said. In the meantime, Rodriguez’s newfound understanding of her rights and experience of working with the California Fast Food Workers Union have emboldened her. “I’m not afraid anymore because I have a union that defends me. . . . I am not fighting to win some money, I am fighting for my rights and the rights of all other workers,” Rodriguez said. —By Jeremy Lindenfeld, Capital & Main This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. View the full article

The L.A.-based fashion brand Lisa Says Gah just teamed up with Polly Pocket for a new limited-edition collection, and it appears to be a sign that Mattel is already gunning to recapture the marketing magic of the Barbie movie. Polly Pocket Says Gah! is an assortment of cardigans, baby tees, accessories, and PVC slingback kitten heels, all rendered in a pastel palette and topped with playful details like ruffled edges and quilted stitching. Prices range from $50 to $198. It debuts today exclusively on the Lisa Says Gah website. [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] A Polly Pocket film has been in the works with MGM since 2021, but it faced a bump in the road last July when Lena Dunham, who was going to write and direct the movie, ultimately dropped out of the project. Communications on the status of the Polly Pocket film have been quiet since then—but the movie is still in the development, Mattel confirmed to Fast Company. The studio has yet to share a release date. On the design side, the collaboration merges an ongoing interest in coquette aesthetics and Y2K nostalgia. But more broadly, it’s also harbinger that Mattel’s next blockbuster marketing campaign is launching sooner than we thought. [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] Coquette core meets ’90s nostalgia The seed for Polly Pocket Says Gah! was first planted when Mattel reached out to the fashion brand with an Instagram DM. Lisa Says Gah founder Lisa Bühler felt the partnership would be a natural fit. “Growing up in the ’90s, Polly Pocket was such a core memory—playing with those tiny outfits, mixing and matching looks—it was all about creativity and self-expression,” says Bühler. “LSG has always had Polly Pocket undertones in our playful cuts, graphic tees, and vibrant energy.” [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] The limited collection represents an evolution of the coquette core trend that emerged last winter: An aesthetic that fully embraces feminine touches like bows, ribbons, and lace. For the past year or so, this look has come to encompass a cultural movement online toward accepting the trappings of “girlhood” (e.g., “girl dinner” and “girl math”) that some women say they previously felt compelled to repress. Coquette core has enjoyed a longer-than-usual trend cycle thanks to the influence of rising stars like Sabrina Carpenter, whose Brigitte Bardot-esque look highlights soft, flirty touches and light pastels. According to Pinterest, the trend is expected to continue into 2025: per the site’s Pinterest Predicts 2025 report, searches for both “ultra-feminine,” rococo-inspired looks and “doll-like” makeup are on the rise. [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] It makes sense that the Polly Pocket Says Gah! collab would incorporate nods to coquette fashion (like heart-shaped jacket pockets and tiny ribbon bows on handbags) given that Polly Pocket was created as a line of miniature doll toys for young girls. The collection adds its own spin to the trend, though, by fusing its whimsical details with recognizable ’90s Polly Pocket IP as a nod to grown-up fans—building on a current Y2K resurgence that’s popped up everywhere from the cereal aisle to music and tech. [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] Lisa Says Gah’s life-size Polly Pockets Instead of incorporating the Polly Pocket brand’s current logo, the Lisa Says Gah collection uses the brand’s original logo, which ran from 1989 to 1998. It also takes clear inspiration from the packaging of vintage Polly Pocket toys, which recently began selling for upward of $1,000 due to a burgeoning market of collectors. In fact, one of Polly Pocket Says Gah’s signature prints is made up of various Polly Pocket compacts, a must-have portable toy in the ’90s that was meant to mimic real makeup packaging but contained a whole tiny dollhouse. “This was a true collaboration,” Bühler says, noting that Mattel provided her team with ’90s Polly Pocket images and prints from its archives for inspiration. “Our goal was to bring Polly Pocket’s tiny, magical world to life in a way that feels fresh, wearable, and true to LSG and its community.” That comes through in the apparel. Each detail of the new collection seems crafted to allow ’90s babies to dress like life-size Polly Pocket dolls. [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] The first sign of a ‘Polly Pocket’ movie Long before the Barbie movie debuted in theaters on July 21, 2023, the world had already been introduced to more than 100 Barbie-based brand tie-ins, including a signature XBox console, a line of Ruggable rugs, a Hot Wheels car, and a collection at Gap. Mattel and Universal’s wide-reaching marketing effort made the Barbie brand virtually unavoidable (and forced Fast Company to issue a moratorium on any new Barbie collabs.) It was such a smash hit that it arguably changed the way that major movie studios approach adapting recognizable IP, as in the case of 2024’s Wicked, which similarly engaged in a months-long brand collab blitz. Now it looks like Mattel is gearing up for an even more drawn-out movie marketing play. Alongside the Lisa Says Gah collab, Polly Pocket has also recently debuted collaborations with The Office, Cotton On, and Funko (the latter two also use the brand’s ’90s logo.) For now, it’s unclear whether there is a Polly Pocket summer on the horizon—but if there is, we can be sure to expect plenty more collaborations to come. View the full article

In a small section of Los Angeles’s Elysian Park, which spans the amount of land a single sprinkler head can water, a native plant experiment is underway that could change city parks for the better. It’s called Test Plot. Combining native plant species, volunteer gardeners, and a not insignificant amount of weeding, the experiment is trying to find a new way for urban parks to counter ecological degradation and improve climate resilience. The project launched in 2019 and is now underway in parks across California, and the approach is showing that with the right plants and the right amount of effort, parks can be brought back into sync with the natural tendencies of their environments. [Photo: Terremoto] An experiment to spur native, fire-resistant plant growth The idea came from the landscape architecture firm Terremoto, which formerly had an office just a few blocks from Elysian Park. “We saw that it was in need of some help,” says Jenny Jones, a landscape architect at Terremoto. Sections of the roughly 600-acre park were totally overrun by non-native species that crowd out more drought-tolerant, biodiverse, and fire-resilient species. The city’s overstretched parks department had been managing these issues through annual brush clearance, but the non-natives would always grow back, along with the risks they posed. “It clears for fire, but it also mows down every single native species in its path,” Jones says. “We wanted to just challenge the regime of maintenance that we were seeing in the park.” [Photo: Terremoto] In conjunction with a longstanding community group associated with the park, Terremoto approached the city about using the firm’s landscape architecture skills to try a different approach. They asked if they could run a small experiment, planting native plants and doing some active, volunteer-based gardening. The city agreed, with the stipulation that the project be temporary. [Photo: Terremoto] A way forward for more sustainable parks So in the fall of 2019 Terremoto hooked a hose to a water bib in the park, attached a sprinkler head, and started preparing a plot of land for a new kind of park planting. After a few rounds of watering and weeding, they planted dozens of one-gallon pots of native plants. Then, through regular maintenance and weeding sessions attended by a dedicated group of volunteers and enthusiasts, they simply helped the native plants thrive and stopped the non-native plants from moving back in. “We look to ecological restoration as a guide, but it’s not strict,” says Jones. “We lie somewhere between gardening and restoration.” Within three years the native plants fully established themselves, and no longer required watering, nor much weeding. This one plot, just 30 feet in diameter, proved that the park could be restored to a more sustainable and ecologically balanced state. [Photo: Terremoto] A 30-foot circle in a 600-acre park might seem like a drop in the bucket, but the idea has caught on. Terremoto expanded its Test Plot approach to other parts of Elysian Park and other parks across L.A. There are now about 15 Test Plots, including four or five that have fully established plants. By identifying degraded landscapes within parks, engaging with local groups already connected with those parks, and then asking city officials if they could temporarily intervene by adding native plants to those parks, they’ve been able to rethink planting and maintenance approaches at a larger scale. “There’s a little bit of figuring out how to pierce the bureaucracy and how to get around the otherwise really strict rules about engaging in that kind of work in public spaces,” Jones says. But in the urban context, parks departments often have to deprioritize planting and maintenance in the face of the social issues they also experience, like vandalism, drug abuse, unhoused individuals, and compromised public safety. A volunteer project like Test Plot is a welcome intervention. “[Parks departments] simply don’t have the budget to do what it takes to actually take care of a complicated urban park that faces intense urban problems,” Jones says. [Photo: Terremoto] Test pilot’s appeal for time (and budget)-strapped cities Test Plot is an appealing concept for parks who face such both budget challenges and the relentlessness of invasive species, and many across the state of California have allowed these interventions. Beyond half a dozen parks in L.A., Test Plots are adding native plants to parks in San Francisco, Berkeley, Daly City, Puente Hills, and Catalina Island. Interest in the approach has grown so much that it’s been formally spun off into a non-profit organization by the same name. Jones says the organization has received interest from parks groups across the country, including in Minnesota and Rhode Island. They are also being hired as consultants for new park projects, including a redesign of the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens that will feature an ethnobotanical garden created by the Test Plot organization. Jones says that a central element of all these Test Plots is community involvement. Volunteers are the backbone of the effort, and their ongoing engagement with the planting and weeding that Test Plot involves becomes a kind of reinforcement for the park’s vitality. “We have people come and they form a bond with their park in a way that they didn’t before,” Jones says. “A lot of people love their parks because they take their dogs on walks, it’s where they run, it’s where they walk with their friends. But there’s a whole new layer of bonding when your hands are in the soil and you are taking care of the land yourself.” View the full article

Kendrick Lamar. Drake. Lady Gaga. The charts of music streaming services pretty much all look the same these days, with familiar names dominating the top spots—except on up-and-coming Spotify competitor Audiomack. The current No. 1 album on Audiomack belongs to Nigeria’s Seyi Vibez, whose hypnotic Afrobeats tracks have amassed around 1.8 billion plays on the platform. Vibez is one of many African and Caribbean artists who have found breakout success on the platform. Many of them consistently draw larger audiences on Audiomack than on Spotify or Apple Music, largely due to the platform’s strong presence in local markets. “We are the most-used streaming service in a large swath of Africa,” says Audiomack cofounder Brian Zisook. “We’re No. 1 on iOS and Android in Nigeria and Ghana.” The company boasts 58 billion-plus songs streamed in Nigeria alone. Half of Audiomack’s audience of 40 million monthly listeners comes from the continent. Audiomack’s rise in West Africa was initially unintentional, but it has since become a case study in the potential of emerging markets and how smaller music platforms can thrive alongside industry giants like Spotify and Apple Music. From a mixtape hub to an Afrobeats force When Zisook and Dave Macli founded Audiomack in New York in 2012, they just wanted to make it easier for local hip-hop DJs to distribute their mixtapes. At the time, many DJs relied on questionable file-sharing sites, creating a poor experience for fans. “Those websites were strewn with pop-up [ads] and malware,” Zisook recalls. “If you downloaded a mixtape, you had to worry that you were going to crash your family computer.” Audiomack grew steadily in Western markets, but never really broke through against its much bigger competitors. All that changed seemingly overnight in 2019 when West African musicians and their fans began flocking to the service en masse. “We just took off,” Zisook says. “The growth was a hockey stick.” To adapt, Macli and Zisook hired a local team in Nigeria, gaining valuable insights into their new market. “The mistake that so many in the industry made was to view Africa as a monolith,” Zisook says. “If you are in Tanzania or Liberia, nothing is going to offend you more than only being served Nigerian, Ghanaian, or South African songs.” Betting on Africa as a growth market for music streaming is savvy, believes MIDiA Research senior music industry analyst Tatiana Cirisano. “As Western markets reach saturation, most future streaming growth will come from Global South regions, of which Africa is an important part,” she argues. “It was smart for Audiomack to position itself as a key player here.” Betting on Africa’s music boom Cirisano cautions, however, that business models that work in the West may not easily translate to emerging markets. “African countries have a lower average revenue per user than countries like the U.S. and U.K.,” she says. “Even though Africa’s impact on global music culture and consumption continues to grow, its impact on global music revenue is not matching that growth.” “It’s very difficult to monetize music in Africa,” acknowledges Zisook. “You have a young audience that has limited or no disposable income, and a lack of access to credit and debit cards. They pay for things online using gift cards. So there’s no opportunity for consistent subscriptions. There’s a lot of churn. They have hard capped data plans, and they have unreliable or no Wi-Fi.” Audiomack responded to this by striking bundling deals with local cellphone carriers. The company also integrated alternative revenue streams for musicians: Fans can become direct financial supporters of their favorite artists on the platform, and in exchange get badges and bragging rights. It’s a clever way for Audiomack to differentiate itself from the competition, Cirisano contends, noting, “The traditional streaming business doesn’t monetize fandom, or depth of engagement—it monetizes pure consumption.” Thriving alongside giants like Spotify Scaling a business works for streaming giants like Spotify, which recently reported its first full year of profitability. But it has been much more challenging for second-tier services like Tidal, which reportedly laid off 100 staffers last fall. Audiomack could provide a blueprint for these smaller services to compete with, and prosper alongside the big guys. In addition to further growing its user base in Africa, Audiomack also courts expats across Western markets. “A lot of our growth in Canada, U.K., Germany, and France is diasporic,” Zisook says. “Ghanaians in Germany, Nigerians in France.” At the same time, the company is striking licensing agreements with major labels to gain access to more of their catalogs. This attracts Western listeners familiar with hip-hop while introducing them to Seyi Vibez and other Afrobeats stars. That way, Audiomack can become a complementary service for Western audiences looking to dive deeper into different music genres. “The same folks who listen to Spotify at work might use Audiomack later in the day to more actively discover music, express their fandom, and access a catalog that is not available on mainstream streaming services,” Cirisano says. View the full article

Teenage YouTube users across the world will now get automatic reminders to go to bed and take a break from their screens. YouTube announced this week it was expanding such reminders to minors across the globe, ensuring they are full-screen and toggled-on by default. The feature first debuted in the U.S. seven years ago, and went automatic for minors in 2023. So-called “bedtime” notifications have grown in popularity, buoyed in large part by YouTube and TikTok. But it’s unclear how effective the notifications are in the first place. After all, YouTube users only have to click to close out the banner; on TikTok, it’s even easier to keep swiping past the text. “It will be effective for a small proportion of people, but the onus is still on the user to turn it off,” says Jon-Patrick Allem, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at Rutgers School of Public Health. “These are all cosmetic things that may work for some people, but aren’t really going to shift user behavior.” The rise of ‘stop scrolling’ signs YouTube first introduced their overuse warnings back in 2018. At first, it was a simple opt-in “take a break” notification. By 2020, YouTube revealed that they’d sent more than three billion warnings, and added a “bedtime reminder” to their suite. This is the same year that TikTok also premiered their screentime management ads, headed by popular creators like Alan Chikin Chow and Gabe Erwin. A few years later, parents amplified concerns about their children’s social media usage. More and more data flooded the web about a teen mental health crisis, with an uptick in depression and anxiety. YouTube responded in 2023 by making their “take a break” and “bedtime” reminders more prominent on the screen, and making them mandatory for all American users under 18. TikTok debuted their own “sleep reminder” and silenced push notifications for users under 18 after 10 p.m. Now, YouTube’s changes are global. In a LinkedIn post, Pedro Pina, YouTube’s head of Europe, Middle East and Africa, wrote that the program ensures teens’ “time on the platform is well spent.” (YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.) But these reminders are still just suggestions: Rutgers’s Allem says that users see them as “recommendations for best options,” advice that they’re unlikely to take. “There is no consequence if an individual acts or doesn’t act on this prompt,” he says. “It would probably be just as easy as moving on from the post like anything else you weren’t interested in. The one second that you take determining this isn’t interesting so you keep scrolling, would that really be impactful?” What does it take for us to actually log off? Beyond some limited content moderation, these warnings are the furthest major social media companies have gone to protect teens from addiction and overuse. But, in the wake of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and 2024’s great upheaval around internet mental health, every pundit has their own ideas for further steps. The Surgeon General recommended cigarette-style warning labels; the State of New York demanded companies tamp down on their recommendation algorithms for minors. Allem rattles off a list of changes that would be more effective at stopping social media overuse. They could mandate lock-outs for minors during nighttime hours. They could force users to pay for increased hours using their apps. Or, the apps could be redesigned all together. “There’s no natural stopping point for platforms designed with infinite scroll online,” Allem says. “We could consider default settings that were programmed to limit use, rather than allowing for unlimited use.” But none of these changers are likely to happen anytime soon. “All of this can be done quite easily,” Allem says. “It isn’t done because it will tap into and reduce growth and profit.” View the full article

Union Home Mortgage claims eight of its managers and an LO transitioned to American Pacific Mortgage, breaching a number of agreements. View the full article

The first thing anyone will notice about the new electric pickup from Telo Trucks is its compact form. Snubnosed and sporty, the five-seater has a bed the size of a typical pickup but an overall footprint the size of a Mini Cooper. When it goes into production next year, it will offer a radical counterpoint to the gargantuan trucks that dominate the U.S. automobile market. Today, Telo is unveiling the first drivable preproduction model of its new truck, the MT1, and Fast Company has an exclusive look at the innovations inside the truck that make its seemingly impossible size possible. [Image: Telo]The key to the Telo truck’s interior design efficiency is its focus on what’s known in the automotive world as the H point—the location of a driver’s hip inside the vehicle—which becomes the main parameter that determines the size of a car’s interior. Telo aimed to get about the same volumetric interior space as a crew cab Toyota Tacoma, the top-selling midsize pickup in the U.S. “A lot of the special sauce as to how we get five people and a 5-foot bed into the footprint of a two-door Mini Cooper is packaging, and people are the most important part,” says Jason Marks, Telo cofounder and CEO. From left: An MT1 compared with a Tacoma; a Mini Cooper [Image: Telo]Telo’s focus on the H-point ended up shaping the entire truck, inside and outside. “We knew we had the right amount of space that people were used to having. And then what the designers did within that space was they had a lot of free reign,” says Forrest North, Telo cofounder and CFO. That led to an exterior design with a short, frunkless nose, and a truck bed that can expand inward into the truck’s cab with an innovative folding midgate. That makes it big enough to haul a sheet of 4-by-8-foot plywood, giving the truck both utility and a compact size for urban settings. [Image: Telo]The interior design of Telo’s cabin space manages to compete with other trucks by repositioning how passengers sit. The driver and passenger seats were designed with an uncommon pedestal base that puts them higher up from the base of the floor. This height, and the lack of the typical twin mounting rails that sit on the floor beneath most front seats, creates more space underneath for the feet and legs of passengers in the back seat. “The way that we built the front seats, it’s almost like they’re hovering in the air,” Marks says. “The angle of your thighs moves down, your back angle wants to be slightly more upright, and so it lets you actually occupy less horizontal room, even though you occupy more vertical room.” [Image: Telo]Ditching the frunk in favor of a larger truck bed and shorter overall vehicle length meant that these front seats are positioned very close to the front of the truck. North equates it to the experience he had driving his first car, a 1975 Volkswagen bus. “One of the great things about that is you know exactly where the front of the vehicle is. Parking and moving around in urban areas is much easier,” he says. [Image: Telo]But to carve every cubic inch of waste out of the interior, the design had to account for the necessary safety features that exist in passenger vehicles, including crash structures, crumple zones, and a firewall. Having the front seats up on a pedestal cleared room beneath them for feet to swing in and out of the vehicle, which allowed those front end safety structures to sit closer to the people inside. “That had to be designed in a very surface contoured, three-dimensional way that optimized for both how you enter and exit the vehicle and how the vehicle performs,” Marks says. “So that was a big part of how we do what we do in our vehicle.” [Image: Telo]Industrial designer Yves Behar’s company Fuseproject led the truck’s design. (Behar is also an equity partner in Telo and serves as its chief creative officer and cofounder.) He says this pedestal seating approach is rare in car design, but has opened more space within the vehicle for human-centric design. “It’s a funny feature to talk about because it’s like talking about the underside of a chair. Nobody ever sees the underside of a chair, but that’s really what this design is about,” Behar says. “It’s about designing the things people can’t see to deliver more comfort, more ergonomics, and more spaciousness in what I would say is an extremely small vehicle overall.” [Image: Telo]Other space-efficient design elements are scattered throughout the cabin, from its two compact glove boxes to a smaller-than-usual center console bin to cupholders that slide out of view when not in use to a specific place to store sunglasses. “It’s actually a lot of storage but that feels more dedicated rather than just a big bin that you put all your random stuff in,” Behar says. Because it’s an electric vehicle, the Telo truck’s battery was also a big design parameter that shaped its interior design. North, who previously built the battery for the Tesla Roadster, says making the battery as thin as possible helped create more space inside the vehicle without compromising aerodynamics and range. “You want to reduce any millimeter you can from your from your roofline,” he says. For Telo, size is everything. But in contrast to most trucks out on the market today, bigger is not better, according to Behar. “What I think pickup trucks have really embraced in the past 20-plus year is this notion of massiveness and masculinity and silly bigness,” he says. “That has essentially turned pickup trucks into dangerous and less utilitarian vehicles.” View the full article

For anyone considering buying an EV this year, there’s a looming question: Will the federal tax credits for clean vehicles still be around by the time you file your taxes in 2026? Harbinger Motors, a startup that makes electric delivery vehicles for commercial use, decided to help its customers with what it calls an “IRA Risk-Free Guarantee” (referring to the Inflation Reduction Act). If the tax credit is discontinued, the company will cover enough of the cost to make the EV the same price as the diesel equivalent. “The tax credit is impactful,” says Harbinger cofounder and CEO John Harris. “We built the company around the belief that you have to sell these vehicles at the same price as diesel vehicles for them to make sense for most customers. And when you start to throw all this uncertainty at the customer around, ‘Well, maybe the price is going to be $20,000 higher than you think it is,’ these customers don’t have the margins to gamble like that.” [Photo: Harbinger Motors] Harris believes that the odds of the credit disappearing are low—which is why the company is willing to take its own risk in offering the program. “There’s a lot of noise coming from the White House about electric vehicles,” he says. “It’s mostly focused on mandates . . . but there is no mandate in the IRA. What the IRA really looks like is massive federal support for automotive manufacturing—which last time I checked is a priority for this administration. If there was a 60-40 split in Congress, maybe the IRA would get repealed. But consider that the House margin is three seats. There are a dozen or more elected representatives just from Michigan. What you’re really talking about is, can you convince all the elected representatives from Michigan to vote out the auto industry? I just don’t think they’re going to do that.” Though the political odds may keep the incentive in place, “it’s sort of scary for a lot of customers, and so we’re prepared to just take the uncertainty out of the equation for them,” Harris says. “It’s not the customer’s responsibility to employ a government relations firm and understand all of these political dynamics.” [Photo: Harbinger Motors] Harbinger makes the chassis for delivery vehicles that are roughly the size of FedEx trucks; some preproduction vehicles are in use with its customers now, and around 1,500 are on track to be delivered later this year. One chassis has a list price of around $103,200 (in the standard way that this type of vehicle is built, another company completes the vehicle for additional money). The leading diesel competitor has a similar list price for its own chassis, but dealers usually give discounts, so the typical transaction is $90,000. To make the vehicle truly cost-competitive, Harbinger is offering a $12,900 discount that will help replace the tax credit if it disappears and bring the cost down to around $90,000. If the tax incentive stays in place, customers will make a second payment to cover that discount. But because the tax credit itself is even larger—up to $40,000—customers could ultimately get the vehicles for less than they would have paid for a diesel truck. (Operating an EV, and fueling with electricity instead of diesel, is also much cheaper.) Most commercial EVs are much more expensive up front; the price difference between an EV and a comparable diesel version is often more than the full tax credit, so manufacturers are unlikely to offer a similar program. Harbinger has competitive pricing in part because of its manufacturing process. At its factory in Orange County, California, it builds its own parts—including battery packs and motors—rather than using a complex supply chain. And instead of dealing with multiple layers of suppliers, it buys materials like copper in bulk at commodity prices. The company also has little exposure to the tariffs newly imposed on Mexico, Canada, and China because it builds its own parts. Companies that sell passenger EVs may also be unlikely to offer to cover the cost of the tax credit if it’s revoked, both because automakers are struggling with uncertainty about tariffs and because the vehicles are sold at higher volumes. In many cases, however, those cars and trucks are already close in price to the gas equivalents. View the full article

As a child, Sunita Sah says she learned to be “good.” Growing up in the U.K. in the 1980s as the daughter of Indian immigrants, she was praised for being obedient and studious at home and at school. But she also experienced racial slurs and hostile stares. Sah lived in a place that didn’t always welcome differences—and her family was different. Sah had long considered her mother to be a compliant person. Quiet and deferential, her mom was the model of goodness. But one day that changed. When Sah was 7 years old, she and her mother were accosted in an alley by teenage boys, who shouted at them to “Go back home.” They were alone, vulnerable, and outnumbered. That’s when Sah’s mother did something surprising. Rather than shrink under their threats, she stood up straight and confronted them. “You think you’re clever?” she said to the boys. “You think you’re so strong. Big, tough boys, right?” Then it was the boys’ turn to shrink. They took off, and Sah and her mother continued on. Sah would come to realize that “defiance isn’t a personality trait,” she says. “We can choose.” Sah, a physician, psychologist, and professor at Cornell University’s SC Johnson School of Business, has spent much of her career studying decision-making, including how and when we choose to defy. “Defiance is not reducible to strength or weakness, courage or cowardice. It is not solely for the brave, the strong, or the extraordinary,” she writes in her new book, Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. “We all have the capacity to be defiant.” WHY DEFIANCE IS SO DIFFICULT Defiance—the decision to act according to your own values when you’re pressured to do otherwise—may be a matter of choice, but it’s certainly not an easy one. Many people find themselves wanting to stand up for what they believe is right, but unable to access that defiance. Nearly all of us have been rewarded for compliant behavior, over and over again. We get good grades in school if we study; we get positive performance reviews at work if we support the company’s goals. Compliance is so conditioned, that for many it’s an automatic response. So when it’s time to defy and act according to our own principles, it feels unnatural. Compliance can be a good thing, but there is a dangerous side, too, Sah says. We learn quickly that we can keep earning promotions if we go along with shady business practices, or avoid retribution if we look the other way when we see a colleague being harassed. 1. WE DON’T KNOW HOW TO DEFY Even if we want to side with our own values over external pressure, we don’t always know how. If you see a colleague misleading a client, whom do you tell, and what do you say? Will it be enough to gently nudge someone to investigate the problem, or should you confront the person yourself? If we’re accustomed to complying, it’s hard to picture what defiance looks like. 2. WE WORRY ABOUT INSULTING OTHERS Another barrier is what Sah calls “insinuation anxiety,” or the fear that we may appear to insult or undermine someone if we question their decisions or behavior. Rather than speaking up, we say nothing to avoid looking insulting or insubordinate. 3. THE COST OF DEFIANCE IS SOMETIMES TOO GREAT For some, the cost of defiance is too risky. Speaking up at work can cost you your paycheck and your healthcare. We’ve seen corporate whistleblowers fired, dragged through court, and blacklisted in their industries. When the risk of defying is too great, we sometimes have to defer our defiance to another day when the costs are manageable. LEARNING HOW TO DEFY Defiance is a choice, Sah writes in her new book. Defiance is also a process. Two decades of research have shown Sah that “defiance and compliance are not binary, but rather exist on a spectrum . . . encompassing a gradation of understanding, questioning, and action.” She believes her mother had likely encountered those boys several times, perhaps defying them in small ways before putting her foot down. The difference between someone who does defy and someone who doesn’t is preparation, she explains. Surprise can force us into compliance. Defiance can be practiced in small ways. You can envision yourself in the situation and practice saying aloud what you hope you will be able to say in the moment. “The first time we speak up, we might stumble, but with repetition our voice grows more confident,” she says. Practice is good because the best time to decide whether to defy or comply is not in the heat of the moment, Sah writes. Pausing can give you time to calculate the risks of defiance and form a plan to respond. Remember: You don’t have to defy every time. If you’re caught off guard and are unable to respond as you’d like to, prepare yourself for the next opportunity. Most acts of defiance are not historic moments, nor are they necessarily memorable ones. But those small moments of defiance can help us build the muscle we need when it matters most. “The forces that lead to compliance are more complex than they might appear, but they are not insurmountable,” Sah writes. “We may not always know how to defy. But we can learn.” View the full article

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump initiated a trade war with Canada and Mexico, America’s two largest trading partners. Following through on weeks of threats, he imposed 25% tariffs on imported goods from Mexico and Canada and a lower 10% tariff on imports of Canadian energy resources. Leaders in Canada and Mexico quickly struck back. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled an immediate 25% tariff on $20.5 billion worth of goods from the United States and promised to extend the tax to another $85 billion in products in late March. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced she also planned to unveil retaliatory tariffs this coming Sunday. Trump’s tariffs, which are widely expected to raise prices for U.S. consumers, are also poised to upend the American electricity market. All U.S. power grids except for Texas’s have some level of interconnection with grids in Canada, the largest energy supplier to the U.S. Historically, the U.S. has imported roughly twice as much power from Canada as it exports there, though that ratio has started to shift in recent years as climate change-driven drought has slowed the output of hydroelectricity in provinces like Quebec and Ontario. Some 98% of America’s natural gas imports, and 93% of its electricity imports—much of that from hydroelectric dams—come from Canada. America’s reliance on Canadian power is not evenly distributed. Northern energy grids are generally more reliant on Canada’s energy resources than southern grids due to their geographic proximity to Canada. States like New York and Minnesota have also entered into energy market agreements with Canadian provinces to receive their hydroelectricity in order to meet ambitious and rapidly approaching climate change goals. From Canada’s perspective, withholding or taxing energy exports to the U.S. is an effective bargaining chip—perhaps one of the country’s most powerful. “I see energy as Canada’s queen in this game of chess,” Andrew Furey, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, said in January, when Trump had not yet followed through on his threat of Canadian tariffs. Furey’s province is one of five that supplies the U.S. with hydropower. On the evening before the tariffs took effect, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, threatened to cut off energy exports to the United States full stop “with a smile” if Trump continues to target Canada with tariffs. On Tuesday, Ford announced a 25% export tax on power Ontario ships via transmission lines to 1.5 million homes in three states—Michigan, Minnesota, and New York—and said a full export ban was still on the table. All three states affected by Ontario’s export tax have climate targets on the books that rely in some measure on hydroelectric power. Minnesota, Michigan, and New York all aim to achieve clean electricity grids by 2040. Michigan is relying in large part on its own hydroelectric facilities, but Minnesota and New York are, to varying degrees, dependent on Canada to reach their targets. Experts told Grist it’s too soon to say what Trump’s tariffs, and Ford’s retaliatory measures, mean for these states’ climate goals—and their residents. “When you’re adding unnecessary friction into the market, of course you’re going to see price increases,” said Daniel A. Zarrilli, who served as chief climate policy adviser to former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. “Tariffs are going to flow to the consumer, either directly or indirectly.” Zarrilli noted that it’s unclear what those price hikes might look like, and who—ratepayers, utilities, or some combination of actors—will shoulder them. The trade war may be felt especially acutely in New York, where developers are extending a transmission line from Quebec all the way to Queens in order to pump much-needed hydroelectric power into New York City. Once the Champlain Hudson Power Express is operational in 2026, New York City is guaranteed hydroelectric power during the summer months. It is not, however, guaranteed that reliable power during the winter. As the state has electrified its power grid, energy demand has been increasing during the cold weather months. New York power grid operators are preparing for demand during the winter to double over the next 30 years. But whether the state gets the hydropower it needs to provide reliable, renewable power during that peak demand now depends on how the trade war plays out. “The fallout could be actually catastrophic,” said Adrienne Esposito, executive director at the nonprofit Citizens Campaign for the Environment, which has helped push New York City to adopt a climate plan that mirrors the state’s. “It defies logic.” This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here. View the full article

In the second season of Severance, there’s an unexpected character: a child supervisor named Miss Huang, who matter-of-factly explains she’s a child “because of when I was born.” Miss Huang’s deadpan response is more than just a clever quip. Like so much in the Apple TV+ series, which has broken viewership records for the streaming service, I think it reveals a devastating truth about the role of work in the 21st century. As a scholar of childhood studies, I also see historical echoes: What constitutes a “child”—and whether one gets to claim childhood at all—has always depended on when and where a person is born. An age of innocence? Americans are deeply invested in the idea of childhood as a time of innocence, with kids protected by doting adults from the harsh realities of work and making ends meet. However, French historian Philippe Ariès famously argued that childhood, as many understand it today, simply did not exist in the past. Using medieval art as one resource, Ariès pointed out that children were often portrayed as miniature adults, without special attributes, such as plump features or silly behaviors, that might mark them as fundamentally different from their older counterparts. Looking at baptism records, Ariès also discovered that many parents gave siblings the same name, and he explained this phenomenon by suggesting that devastatingly high child mortality rates prevented parents from investing the sort of love and affection in their children that’s now considered a core component of parenthood. While historians have debated many of Ariès’s specific claims, his central insight remains powerful: Our modern understanding of childhood as a distinct life stage characterized by play, protection, and freedom from adult responsibilities is a relatively recent historical development. Ariès argued that children didn’t emerge as a focus of unconditional love until the 17th century. Kids at work The belief that a child deserves a life free from the stress of the workplace came along still later. After all, if Miss Huang had been born in the 19th century, few people would question her presence in the workplace. The Industrial Revolution yielded accounts of children working 16-hour days and accorded no special protection because of their tender age and emotional vulnerability. Well into the 20th century, children younger than Miss Huang routinely worked in factories, mines, and other dangerous environments. To today’s viewers of Severance, the presence of a child supervisor in the sterile, oppressive workplace of the show’s fictional Lumon Industries feels jarring precisely because it violates the deeply held belief that children are occupants of a separate sphere, their innocence shielding them from the dog-eat-dog environs of competitive workplaces. Childhood under threat As a child worker, Miss Huang might seem like an uncanny ghost of a bygone era of childhood. But I think she’s closer to a prophet: Her role as child-boss warns viewers about what a work-obsessed future holds. Today, the ideal childhood—access to play, care, and a meaningful education—is increasingly under threat. As politicians and policymakers insist that children are the future, many of them refuse to support the intensive caregiving required to transform newborns into functioning adults. As philosopher Nancy Fraser has argued, capitalism relies on someone doing that work, while assigning it little to no monetized value. Child-rearing in the 21st century exists within a troubling paradox: Mothers provide unpaid childcare for their own children, while those who professionally care for others’ children—predominantly women of color and immigrants—receive meager compensation for this essential work. In other words, economic elites and the politicians they support say they want to cultivate future workers. But they don’t want to fund the messy, inefficient, time-consuming process that raising modern children requires. The show’s name comes from a “severance” procedure that workers undergo to separate their work memories from their personal ones. It offers a darkly comic version of work-life balance, with Lumon office workers able to completely disconnect their work selves from their personalities off the clock. Each is distinct: A character’s “innie” is the person they are at the job, and their “outtie” is who they are at home. I see this as an apt metaphor for how market capitalism seeks to separate the slow, patient work required to raise children and care for other loved ones from the cold-eyed pursuit of economic efficiency. Parents are expected to work as if they don’t have children and raise children as if they don’t work. The result is a system that makes traditional notions of childhood—with its unwieldy dependencies, its inefficient play, and its demands for attention and care—increasingly untenable. Capitalism’s ideal child Plummeting global fertility rates around the world speak to this crisis in childcare, with the U.S., Europe, South Korea, and China falling well below the birth rate required to replace the existing population. Even as Elon Musk frets about women choosing not to have children, he seems eager to restrict any government aid that would provide the time or resources that raising children requires. Accessible healthcare; affordable, healthy food; and stable housing are out of the reach of many. The current administration’s quest for what it calls “government efficiency” is poised to shred safety net programs that help millions of low-income children. In the midst of this dilemma, Miss Huang offers a surreal solution to the problems children pose in 2025. She is, in many ways, capitalism’s ideal child. Already a productive worker as a tween, she requires no parent’s time, no teacher’s patience, and no community’s resources. Like other workers and executives at Lumon, she seems to have shed the inefficient entanglements of family, love, and play. In this light, Miss Huang’s clever insistence that she is a child “because of when I was born” is darkly prophetic. In a world where every moment must be productive, where caregiving is systematically devalued, and where human relationships are subordinated to market logic, Miss Huang represents a future where childhood survives only as a date on a birth certificate. All the other attributes are economically impractical. Viewers don’t yet know if she’s severed. But at least from the perspective of the other workers in the show, Miss Huang works ceaselessly and, in doing so, proves that she is no child at all. Or rather, she is the only kind of child that America’s economic system allows to thrive. Anna Mae Duane is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

Before Donald Trump took office, Memphis-based staff for the environmental advocacy group the Southern Environmental Law Center used a tool called EJScreen to measure air quality in South Memphis. The resource tracked air quality over time, allowing SELC staffers to quantify the cumulative impacts of air pollution in the neighborhood. But when the Trump administration began shutting down federal environmental websites and scrubbing the words climate change from government websites, EJScreen went dark. The disappearance of this resource is just one example of how the SELC’s work has been stymied in recent months, according to geospatial analyst Libbie Weimer. In just the first two weeks of his presidency, Trump’s administration removed dozens of web pages and datasets from the official sites of the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Council on Environmental Quality, NASA, and others. At the SELC—which specializes in legal environmental advocacy in the South—many of those pages were part of the organization’s daily efforts to track regional concerns. To address this loss, Weimer and her team have created a guide that preserves archived environmental sites. The guide, published last Friday, includes three main sections: data archives, including suggested places to search for archived raw data, metadata, and scientific papers; a web clone section, which includes links to cloned tools like EJScreen and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Environmental Justice Index; and a web archive, which guides users through the Wayback Machine to find old pages. The whole guide is underpinned by a searchable list that allows users to quickly find specific lost sites. [Screenshot: FC] “Where I work, I serve a staff of over 100 people, plus our dozens of community-based partner organizations across six states,” Weimer says. “Overnight, those people stopped having access to the information they use on a daily basis to protect the air, water, land, wildlife, and people where they live. The guide is my attempt to reconnect folks to the information and data they need.” The guide runs off a website that Weimer maintains by cross-referencing other grassroots lost-site trackers with a list of the sites that are important to her staff. Critically, Weimar notes, she’s not the only person tracking the Trump administration’s culling of federal environmental web pages: The Data Rescue Tracker, Public Environmental Data Partners, and Climate Change Transparency Project have already embarked on a similar mission. “The purpose is simple: We believe that everyone should continue to have access to public information and data,” Weimer says. “These resources belong to us and were created for the public good.” View the full article

Treasury select committee finds high-street bank tops list for number of systems failures since January 2023View the full article

Users are flocking to AI search platforms, which presents visibility, brand recognition, and brand perception challenges for brands. View the full article

Surge in demand for premium leisure will help airline group boost profits, says chief executive Ben SmithView the full article

In the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection as U.S. president, a growing chorus of voices is calling on liberals to toughen up and tone down the moral high ground. If the left wants to claw back power, they argue, it’s time to play dirty. Enter: dark woke. The term began circulating online soon after Trump was sworn in for his second term. A video of someone sprinting up to a Cybertruck and spraying its silver shell with spray paint? Dark woke. New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling the new Republican government “rapists” and, in response, telling critics to “cry more”? Dark woke. #DarkWoke is rising. pic.twitter.com/2taP6TzHo2 — Right Wing Cope (@RightWingCope) February 3, 2025 Even elected Democrats seem to be testing the waters. California Representative Robert Garcia recently claimed he’s borrowing from House member Marjorie Taylor Greene’s playbook by bringing a “dick pic”—a photo of Elon Musk—to a Department of Government Efficiency subcommittee meeting. It’s not just a terminally online trend. TikToker and self-described “Regina George liberal” Suzanne Lambert echoed the sentiment in a CBS interview, urging Democrats to “be meaner.” Her reasoning: “You fight fire with fire: I want people to feel more comfortable fighting back, and I want them to see someone fighting for them.” It’s the latest evolution of what was once known, during Trump’s first term, as the dirtbag left—a label for young progressives who ruthlessly mocked their political enemies. During the 2024 election, then-President Joe Biden’s campaign also briefly embraced the Dark Brandon meme, which reimagined the 81-year-old Democratic nominee as a cooler internet alter-ego. “I think the “dark woke” stuff had to happen eventually because the liberal side of the culture war has not been overtly cruel enough to fit into American politics,” one X user mused last month. I think the “dark woke” stuff had to happen eventually because the liberal side of the culture war has not been overtly cruel enough to fit into American politics — Liv (@Liv_Agar) February 1, 2025 However, one interpretation of “dark wokeism” essentially boils down to slurs but said in a leftist way. On X, this is framed as a backlash against the “namby-pamby language policing that no one likes” in liberal politics. “Most people think ‘dark woke’ just means using slurs/adopting inherently regressive right wing positions,” journalist Taylor Lorenz posted on X. “Most ‘dark woke’ types have just adopted conservatism but refuse to acknowledge that bc they are nominally against Trump or want to think of themselves as ‘good” ppl.” Most people think “dark woke” just means using slurs/adopting inherently regressive right wing positions. Most “dark woke” types have just adopted conservatism but refuse to acknowledge that bc they are nominally against Trump or want to think of themselves as “good” ppl — Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) February 2, 2025 This shift toward meaner, nastier politics isn’t exactly surprising. Trump’s rise—built on a strategy of saying absolutely anything, no matter how offensive or plain wrong—didn’t just win him a second term. It set the tone for global politics. For now, dark woke is more gallows humor than any kind of serious organizing force. Whether it becomes something more? That remains to be seen. View the full article

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go… 1. Was talking about a march for science too political for work? I’m hoping you can help settle a disagreement a friend and I are having about a situation that came up in my work today. I work as a physician at a large academic hospital, and my department had our monthly faculty meeting today. As part of the meeting, our department chair discussed the current state of NIH funding going to our department. We do a large amount of research and have a number of labs dependent on NIH grants that may be affected by the current administration. He told us that there is a march for science this Friday (they are being held simultaneously in cities all over the country) and suggested that anyone who is interested and able to attend should do so, but not to wear anything that would identify us as employees of this hospital or to give any comments that could be seen as being on behalf of the hospital. On a basic level, losing funding risks labs getting shut down and my colleagues losing their jobs. I would argue that most, if not all, of us work here because of the reputation of this institution and the research performed here is a big part of that. (Trust me, we get paid less than we would at many other similar hospitals because we believe in what we do). My friend thinks that this was wrong for my chair to do because it is mixing politics in a professional environment. I see this as the chair providing us with information about the situation and encouraging us to advocate on behalf of our hospital, colleagues, patients, and research. What do you think? (I’m planning to march.) I’m with you. Your chair was providing information that many of you would find relevant to your jobs, and was also providing info you might not have had otherwise (to not identify yourself as employees of the hospital or appear to be speaking on its behalf). “Don’t mix politics in a professional environment” applies when it’s something like announcing a campaign rally for a candidate or promoting a pro-choice march if your jobs had nothing to do with reproductive health care. It doesn’t apply when the issue in question is so tightly entwined with your labs’ ability to survive. 2. How are these layoffs happening so quickly? I used to work at a large NGO that receives a lot of government funding. With the recent administration change, I’ve seen many of my old colleagues, including many who work in non-government-funded positions, announce that they’ve been laid off. How can these layoffs be happening so quickly? It seems like within one week, funding that took months to secure has vanished. Is the funding truly gone? Or are these companies using this as a reason to let people go? Plus, how can it be affecting non-government-funded positions so quickly? I thought WARN notices were required before eliminating jobs. Yes, it can happen that quickly (and is). First, while a position may not be directly government-funded, it can depend on grants or other sources of funding that have government funding somewhere in the chain. Second, some funders are changing their funding priorities in response to the new administration’s actions. Third, making adjustments in one area can affect a different area; for example, an organization might realize it’s going to lose $X in funding over the next year so they’re reconfiguring staffing and budgets now in order to prioritize programs A and B, even though that will mean cutting programs C and D. The WARN Act requires most employers with 100 or more employees to provide 60 days notice if they’re laying off 50 or more people at once or to pay the equivalent amount of time in severance. If they have fewer than 100 employees or they’re not laying off 50+ people, it wouldn’t be in effect. 3. Responding to a nosy coworker My coworker is well-meaning and big-hearted but doesn’t have a lot of personal boundaries. She shares a lot about her own personal life issues such as past family drama and medical issues, also shares personal life and medical issues of her children and husband, and has even shared very personal information from coworkers. I’ve also noticed her tendency to not just overshare, but pry a bit as well. For example, I had to share the news of a recent death of a distant coworker we did some work with (relevant to our jobs) and she demanded to know who I heard it from (really not relevant). Overall, I like her but she can be really off the wall with certain comments at times. Today, I sent my team a notification letting them know I’d be stepping out for a dentist appointment for my regular, twice-a-year cleaning. After that, she sent me a private message along the lines of, “We both have more medical appointments than the rest of the team! I’m not trying to pry — you don’t have to share any details — but I’m sending thoughts and prayers and wanted to make sure you’re okay!” Not only is this a weird comment, but, frankly, I don’t! This year I had a normal annual physical, two dentist appointments, and then the occasional “thing” that might come up for anybody, like seeing an allergist this year. That’s pretty much it. We have a pretty casual work culture where we’re salaried and free to take off for appointments as long as our work is done, so I’m wondering if she’s confusing personal appointments (car appointments, etc.) for medical appointments? I don’t always give details when I step away for an appointment so she may be assuming what the term “appointment” means. I responded with a quick “Hey thanks but I’m healthy, just good about getting my checkups!” and moved on. But I would love to hear if there’s a better way to handle coworkers bringing up something like this and setting good boundaries. Do I ignore? Eyebrow raise and say, “How odd, what makes you say something like that?” (I’m not sure she’d pickup on that level of subtly.) Go nuclear and say, “Whoa, that’s way inappropriate”? We have a cordial but distant relationship on the whole, mainly on my part because of her tendency to overshare or gossip. Given that, although this was definitely crossing a serious boundary, it hasn’t been a persistent issue and I’m not sure how strong of a response something like that would require. Nah, your response was fine. It allowed you to just quickly move on rather than getting in a discussion of boundaries with her, which is a fine choice to make (unless you want to get into it with her). Sometimes the key with people like this is to just studiously not take the bait. So you also could have just ignored her message entirely (particularly since she said she wasn’t trying to pry! let’s pretend to take her at her word). 4. Should I address a rumor about my company being awful? I am a payroll specialist who processes payroll for over 1,000 electricians. Today I heard that there is a rumor going around one of our largest sites that my company lays people off after 90 days to avoid paying out any sick time (field employees can accrue and use up to 40 hours per year, but can’t use it until their 91st day of employment). This is not true! We are a leading electrical contractor in our state and, honestly, the time and resources it takes to onboard employees would hardly make it financially sensible to be laying people off willy-nilly. Not to mention getting such an unethical practice like this past the union! What I heard specifically was this: a site administrator told me “I heard someone say…,” meaning a current employee. In my experience, these things spread like wildfire among the crew(s). And the admin seemed genuinely relieved when I told her that it wasn’t true so I’m afraid people are actually believing it! Should I say something? I have a good relationship with both my manager and our director of field personnel. Should I tell them what I heard? I don’t think there’s enough here that you really need to act on it … but if you’re concerned that there’s misinformation out there, there’s nothing wrong with sharing that concern with your manager and/or the field personnel director and letting them decide if they want to address it. Just be careful to specify exactly what you heard, so it’s clear that you’re not hearing it from multiple people (which doesn’t mean multiple people don’t believe it — maybe they do — but you don’t want to overstate what you actually know). 5. Can I be told to use PTO for partial-day sick leave when I’m exempt? I’m a salaried exempt computer programmer working from home, which means sometimes I have the luxury of working a few hours beyond the weekly 40 when inspiration strikes. Yesterday, I wasn’t feeling well so I stopped working at about 10 am. My boss asked today if I was going to file for PTO or if I’d be making it up. I’ve read your post here to make sure I was right about the FLSA. It’s come up before, but I’m not sure he believed the bit about how working any part of a week means getting paid for the full week. Anyway, he’s a good supervisor and we have a friendly relationship, but how do I tell him he’s wrong about this? I asked an AI and it said my company could require that I take PTO when I’m sick, but that doesn’t seem right — so I thought I’d ask a real intelligence. The AI got it right. As an exempt worker, you need to be paid your full salary when you work any part of a week (with some narrow exceptions, like your first and last week at a job), but that’s is only about pay. It doesn’t have anything to do with docking time from your PTO balance, and your company can still require you to use PTO for time that you miss. It’s pretty common for companies to do that, particularly when you’re missing nearly an entire day of work. (I’d consider it nickel-and-diming you if they told you to use PTO for an hour here and an hour there when you’re regularly working extra hours, but in this case you missed nearly a full day of work so it’s not that outrageous.) Related: my manager is nickeling and diming me on vacation time while I’m working 27 days in a row View the full article