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Google added QR codes that you can give your customers to quickly leave you a review for your business on Google Search and Google Maps. This can be accessed in your Google Business Profiles under the reviews section.View the full article

Trump’s Ukraine and tariffs moves: global reactionView the full article

Did you know that 10% of all searches on Google from a younger audience start with Google's new circle to search feature? That is what Roma Datta Chobey, the Managing Director at Google India, said last week.View the full article

The price of used Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y vehicles depreciated more than any other cars in 2024, according to a Fast Company analysis of CarGurus data. The average price of a Model Y for sale on the platform dropped by 25.5% between January of 2024 and January 2025, and the price of the Model 3 dropped by 25%. In that same time frame, the average price of a Nissan Maxima only dropped by 5.2% and a Ford Mustang by 5%. The analysis included only used cars for model years 2015 through 2023 and only examined the 200 most commonly occurring car models on the platform, which excludes the Model S and Model X. While electric cars made up four of the top 10 fastest depreciating cars (including Jeep Wrangler 4xe and Chevrolet Bolt EV), Tesla’s steep price drops are driven by brand-specific factors. Last year, the company slashed prices to help revive lagging demand for its autos, including cutting the cost of the base Model Y to $44,630, further dragging own the resale value of aftermarket cars. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. Some of the same factors responsible for the company's hype-driven stock price—which, even after its recent downturn from its peak, still has a price-to-earnings ratio of more than 130—also accelerate the rapid depreciation of value. For example, the company's still speculative self-driving technology is only available in Model 3s released after 2017 and post-2019 Model Ys, one of a slew of changes that aligns the carmaker's products more closely with the depreciation timeline of typical consumer technology products than autos. The drop in prices doesn't seem to follow Elon Musk's heightened involvement in U.S. politics after the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump in July 2024. Even by June, the Model Y and Model 3 had still dropped by more than any other car from January, at around 17% each. View the full article

Serendipitous adventure, carefree nights with newfound friends in foreign lands, delicious foods for bargain prices, and the luxury of time to enjoy it all. Welcome to the world of long-term travel. When it comes to this kind of travel, I get a lot of emails asking for my “secret.” How do you travel so often and for so long? How did you quit your job and escape the grind? You must have a trust fund to afford all that, right? Wrong. I’ve written about how I manage to travel in the past (over and over again), but people still wonder if I am holding something back. What am I leaving out? What, they ask, is my secret to escaping the cubicle and being a nomad? Did I win the lottery? Do my parents pay for everything? There must be something that makes me so special. Well, here it is! The big secret to traveling long-term is… Nothing. Absolutely nothing! There is no special secret. Vagabonds, nomads, and long-term travelers are nothing special. We have no superpowers or secret Swiss bank accounts. We don’t have a money tree or the ability to teleport everywhere. Of course, privilege will inevitably play its part, but we’re not unique or doing anything special. This kind of travel has been done for decades, by people from all parts of the world, with a variety of backgrounds. Long-term travelers are just like you. When I first discovered long-term travel, I thought the backpackers I had met in Chiang Mai had found some secret to life I didn’t know existed. But once I got on the road myself, I saw that there was no secret. I wasn’t unique or special. Millions of people every year did this. Even people with virtually no money were making it work. I had left home thinking I was going on an exciting adventure few people go on — then I went to Khao San Road and hung out in Amsterdam during the summer. In those places, I met travelers young and old doing exactly the same thing as me — and none of them were trust fund babies. These travelers just did what they wanted — a revolutionary idea for me at the time. But now, after years of travel, I realize that it’s not so revolutionary. If people really want something, they do it. If you want a big-screen TV or a new computer, you find a way to make it happen. If you really want to eat sushi for dinner, you are going to have sushi for dinner. If you really want to travel, you will do that, too. Because, just like you find a way to pay for that TV or your new car, these travelers simply arranged their life so that they could afford to travel. The only thing these people had that I didn’t have before was the desire to do what they wanted to do, free from the expectations of society, just because they enjoyed it. They simply said, “I want to travel” and then worked to make it happen. They saved more, they took second jobs, they stayed home instead of going out to eat or drink, they found work overseas. They did whatever it took. As the saying goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way. It is that simple. People ask me about whether I worry about bills, retirement, and my future. To be honest, not really. When you travel long-term, all those things disappear. You have no bills because you have no home. You just spend what you spend from day to day (which is usually less than $50 a day). My mother told me I should start saving more for my retirement so I could…wait for it…travel more. Then she stopped herself and said, “Well, I guess you do that already, so never mind!” I’m a big believer in the idea that we shouldn’t work our lives away and that we should take short breaks to pursue our passions. Why should I spend my best years in an office, saving money for an age I may not even see, or if I do see it, might be too sick to enjoy? Yeah, we long-term travelers save a bit for a rainy day, but we don’t worry about the future. We enjoy now. Take care of your present, and your future works itself out. When I stop traveling, I’ll figure out what is next. So, when you ask travelers how they do it, they aren’t lying when they say there is no secret. We simply made a conscious decision to do it and, after that, just worked toward our goal, saving money and making plans just like what you would do for any other goal or venture in your life. That’s the secret. So, know that you know it, go start making your travel dreams come true! How to Travel the World on $75 a DayMy New York Times best-selling book to travel will teach you how to master the art of travel so that you’ll get off save money, always find deals, and have a deeper travel experience. It’s your A to Z planning guide that the BBC called the “bible for budget travelers.” Click here to learn more and start reading it today! Book Your Trip: Logistical Tips and Tricks Book Your Flight Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner. It’s my favorite search engine because it searches websites and airlines around the globe so you always know no stone is being left unturned. Book Your Accommodation You can book your hostel with Hostelworld. If you want to stay somewhere other than a hostel, use Booking.com as it consistently returns the cheapest rates for guesthouses and hotels. Don’t Forget Travel Insurance Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. It’s comprehensive protection in case anything goes wrong. I never go on a trip without it as I’ve had to use it many times in the past. My favorite companies that offer the best service and value are: SafetyWing (best for budget travelers) World Nomads (best for mid-range travelers) InsureMyTrip (for those 70 and over) Medjet (for additional evacuation coverage) Want to Travel for Free? Travel credit cards allow you to earn points that can be redeemed for free flights and accommodation — all without any extra spending. Check out my guide to picking the right card and my current favorites to get started and see the latest best deals. Need a Rental Car? Discover Cars is a budget-friendly international car rental website. No matter where you’re headed, they’ll be able to find the best — and cheapest — rental for your trip! Need Help Finding Activities for Your Trip? Get Your Guide is a huge online marketplace where you can find cool walking tours, fun excursions, skip-the-line tickets, private guides, and more. Ready to Book Your Trip? Check out my resource page for the best companies to use when you travel. I list all the ones I use when I travel. They are the best in class and you can’t go wrong using them on your trip. The post The Secret to Long Term Traveling appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site. View the full article

Starting today, if you call an Uber in Austin you can match with a self-driving Waymo vehicle. The launch in the Texas capital is part of an expanded partnership between the two tech companies. Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are already available on the Uber platform in Phoenix, and the companies plan to launch next in Atlanta. “With Waymo’s technology and Uber’s proven platform, we’re excited to introduce our customers to a future of transportation that is increasingly electric and autonomous,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. Austin riders who request an UberX, Uber Green, Uber Comfort or Uber Comfort Electric can be matched with a Waymo all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicle at no additional cost. Riders will receive a notification each time they’re matched with an autonomous vehicle and have the option to accept or switch to a non-AV ride. Customers can then rate their experience in the app like with a traditional Uber ride, but will forgo the option to tip. [Photos: Uber] Curious Uber customers can boost their chances of getting matched with a Waymo by opting in through the “Ride Preferences” section of their Uber app under Settings. The Austin launch also conveniently comes just ahead of the popular SXSW festival, which is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to the area. Uber’s self-driving expansion is part of its play to get back into the autonomous vehicles space after selling off its AV unit in December 2020. Rather than building its own tech, which is time consuming and extremely expensive, it’s chosen to partner with third-party companies. Uber said Tuesday it had 14 AV partners to date. View the full article

Fast Company is heading to Austin, Texas March 8–10 for its 12th annual Fast Company Grill during South by Southwest. Hosted at the Cedar Door Patio Bar & Grill in downtown Austin, attendees can expect three days packed with engaging programming, networking opportunities, activations and raffles, delicious food and drinks, live musical performances, and exclusive parties. As usual, we’re bringing you a dynamic roster of speakers, including: Paul Feig, Founder, FeigCo; and Director and Producer, Another Simple Favor Carey Mulligan, Executive Producer, Actress, The Ballad of Wallis Island Tarana Burke, Author, Activist, Founder of the “Me Too” Movement Carla Vernón, CEO, The Honest Company Joon Choi, President, Weverse Daryl Lee, Global CEO, McCann Matthew Prince, Cofounder and CEO, Cloudflare Julie Haddon, Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer, National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) Andy Dunn, Founder and CEO, Pie Ev Williams, Cofounder, Mozi James Kuczynski, Senior Creative Director, Duolingo Fara Howard, CMO, GoDaddy Those speakers will lend their insights to a number of pressing topics including: How Business Leaders Are Navigating the Trump Administration Reconnect with Connection: Building Better Communities IRL The Business of Belonging: Tapping Into the Power of Fandom Inside the Fight for Your Digital Freedom Redefining the Next Generation’s Relationship to Tech The Pivot Playbook: How These CEOs Turned Their Companies Around Built to Boom: Secrets of Fast-Growing Companies Fair Play: Making Women’s Sports a Lasting Powerhouse More than a Moment: The Future of the Me Too Movement And it wouldn’t be the Fast Company Grill without live musical performances. Taking the stage this year will be Paravi, who was featured on the Grammy-nominated soundtrack of Elvis; and up-and-coming talent (and part-time rodeo cowboy) Garrett Talamantes. If you’re not yet a Fast Company Premium subscriber, now would be a great time to join! We have special offerings at the Fast Company Grill for our premium subscribers, including an exclusive after-party at Tecovas. The Western apparel brand is hosting a night of live music from country artist David Miner, signature drinks, a special discount on Tecovas items, and customized iron branding—including a Fast Company logo! Spots are limited, so be sure to register today. For a full lineup of speakers, sessions, and activities, visit our events page. A special thanks to Fast Company Grill’s presenting sponsor Canva, as well as our other sponsors Audible, Texas A&M University, Lumen, Williams, Purdue University, Huge, National Cryptocurrency Association, Novo Nordisk, PMI, Violife, Whalar Group, and Wise. View the full article

White House decision to halt military aid means Kyiv’s armoury will be depleted in ‘two to three months’View the full article

Remember the days when ‘likes’ were the gold star metric on Instagram? Now, you’re spoiled for choice when it comes to the sheer volume of data available to help you measure the performance of your content. Impressions, views, comments, shares… It’s exciting — if a little overwhelming. Instagram analytics can be a goldmine of insights for you as a creator or small business owner. These numbers can shape your Instagram strategy, helping you pinpoint exactly what kind of content will boost your reach and help grow your audience. But how do you get these insights? How do you spot patterns, connect the dots, and use your performance numbers to inform your strategy? And — best question yet — are there handy tools that can do the work for you? In this article, I’ll take you through the most important Instagram analytics and share tool recommendations that can consolidate those goldmine insights for you. At a glance: The best Instagram analytics tools Tool name Best for Price starts at Instagram native insights Using free Instagram analytics tools Free Buffer Combining analytics tools with social media management Free plan available, paid plans begin at $6/month SocialBlade Getting basic analytics $3.99/month Mintor Instagram agencies $9/month Social Status Analyzing various kinds of campaigns using one tool $9/month Reportei Automated reporting $29/month Keyhole Combining social listening and social media analytics Not publicly available Which Instagram metrics should you care about?There are plenty of numbers in Instagram analytics tools. Should you be monitoring all of them? You can, but it’s not essential. Prioritize tracking a few key metrics that help you determine whether or not you’re achieving your social media goals. For most creators, and some brands, reaching as many people as possible is likely your primary goal. If that’s the case, Instagram head Adam Mosseri recommends keeping an eye on average watch time, like rate, and send rate. (embed post) But there is more nuance involved here if your social media strategy is concerned with more than eyeballs. For example, Instagram coach, Elise Darma, shared she pays attention to the metrics that have a direct impact on her business, including: How many people are moving from her content into meaningful conversations in DMsThe quality of comments and engagement on her postsHow many non-followers are discovering her contentHere’s a table to help you understand the key Instagram metrics and when you should prioritize tracking them. Metric What this metric signifies Prioritize tracking and improving this metric when Post-specific engagement metrics How many views, likes, comments, and shares your single Instagram post has When you want to grow your personal brand on Instagram and increase your followers Overall engagement metrics How many people you engaged over a period — divided by content type and type of interaction (like vs. saves vs. shares) When you want to understand which content type reaches the most new people and which gets the most engagement (and whether or not they overlap) Accounts reached How many followers and non-followers you have reached via your Instagram content When you want to increase your Instagram reach and build an audience on the platform Audience demographics Where your Instagram followers live, their gender, and age When you want to ensure you’re reaching your target audience on Instagram Accounts reached bifurcated via content types Which kinds of posts (Posts, Stories, Reels) helped you reach followers vs. non-followers When you want to determine your most successful content type to reach new people in your target audience Follower growth How many people have followed and unfollowed you over a specific duration When you want to evaluate how your followers are increasing or decreasing over time Most active times When your audience is online When you want to find the best time to post on Instagram for you Profile visits How many people visited your profile in a specific timeline When you want to increase brand awareness External link taps How many times someone clicked a link in your bio When you want to measure website visitors via Instagram These Instagram metrics are readily available in the app itself. All Instagram analytics tools have these insights and then some. Should you monitor Instagram analytics only for your hit posts? Or only for the posts that performed below average? Elise recommends monitoring every single post: “Here's the thing about metrics — every post is data, even the ones that seem to "flop." Instead of getting caught up in day-to-day numbers, use each post as an experiment. What's working? What's not? Then use those insights to refine your strategy.” How to view your Instagram analytics in the appAll core Instagram analytics are available in the app. You must have a business or creator account on Instagram to view your insights. There are two ways to view your Instagram analytics on the app: 1. View a single Instagram post’s insight 2. View your Instagram account’s performance as a whole To view a single post or reel’s highlight, click on ‘View insights’ attached at the bottom of every post. You’ll find likes, shares, comments, and saves for that post. You can also see how many accounts you’ve reached with a single post, where those accounts came from (home, explore, profile, etc.), and how many were new accounts. To view your Instagram account insights as a whole, follow these steps: 1. Go to your Instagram profile 2. Click on the three horizontal lines at the top right to go to ‘Setting and activity’ 3. Tap on ‘Insights’ to view Instagram insights Inside the analytics tab, you can find your Instagram’s key metrics in one of three categories: Views: To see your profile activity, audience demographics, top-performing posts, and ratio of followers vs. non-followers. Interactions: To see how many Instagram accounts you’ve engaged and the number of likes, saves, replies, and shares on your posts and Instagram Stories. Total followers: To see how your follower growth has fluctuated in a specific period (but no more than 90 days) and follower demographics. If you have an Instagram business account, you can also view insights for Instagram and Facebook side-by-side on the Meta Business Suite. Source: FacebookThe insights in Meta Business Suite are more comprehensive than Instagram’s app. You can add your competitors and do a thorough competitive analysis of your page vs. theirs, see all the content you’ve posted and how it performed, and get a detailed audience analysis. But still, viewing Instagram analytics natively over using an analytics tool has many disadvantages: You have to connect the dots: You have to slice and dice the data yourself to determine key Instagram insights like best times to post, ideal posting frequency, and best types of posts. You only get the surface-level analytics and have to do the math for the rest yourself.You can’t brand the reports you create from Instagram insights or Meta Business Suite. Most Instagram analytics tools allow you to create white-labeled reports in a few clicks and handpick the metrics you want to display.You can’t view Instagram insights beyond 90 days. This means you can’t evaluate year-long campaigns as a social media manager. Or if you're a creator experimenting with new kinds of posts every three months, you can't compare your experiments against each other.These cons become even sharper as your social media marketing strategy evolves. For example, if you’re pursuing influencer marketing on Instagram, you can’t manually evaluate a creator’s profile on how their paid posts perform, audience demographics, overall reach, etc. You’ll either need to ask for each Instagram influencer’s media kit (exhausting) or add Instagram analytics tools to help you get these insights. The gist of it: Use Instagram’s native capabilities when you need a free Instagram analytics tool. But as soon as you get some budget to work with, you’re probably going to be better off with one of the tools below. The 6 best Instagram analytics tools in 2025What should you look for in an Instagram analytics software? Evaluate your needs first. Do you need a strong reporting tool to create Instagram analytics reports? Social media managers might have an extra requirement for this feature, while creators can do without it. Are you a social media marketing agency? You might need a strong Instagram analytics dashboard to get your clients’ current metrics in a jiffy. Solo marketer working with a tight budget? You need flexible Instagram analytics tools that also double as a social media management platform. Creator building a personal brand? Look for more affordable Instagram analytics tools. Your reporting needs and budget should determine which Instagram analytics tool is right for you. I’ve tried to include at least one Instagram analytics software for every use case. 1. BufferBest Instagram analytics tool for those who need a social media management platformFree trial: Free plan available with few analytics Price: Starts at $6/month Buffer is the best Instagram analytics tool for people who need a one-stop shop for all the work that goes into social media. It’s a social media management platform, so not only does it give you detailed analytics about your Instagram account, but also helps you: Store content ideasRespond to commentsSchedule social media postsUse AI to refine social media captions…and a host of other things.I personally use Buffer to manage my social media efforts, and my favorite thing is how easy it is to use. There’s no ‘learning curve’ — you can just get right to work! In terms of Instagram analytics, you get a comprehensive analytics dashboard that won’t just show you the numbers. It will give you specific, personal recommendations based on your content performance: best time to post, type of post, and posting frequency. It does all the math, and then some. You can also create beautiful and customized reports and white-label them (really handy if you’re a social media manager presenting to a client, or a creator pitching a brand partnership) The best part? These social media analytics are available for most of the platforms Buffer supports, not just Instagram! There’s no better way to analyze your social media marketing strategy or creator presence as a whole. Try Buffer for free2. SocialBladeBest Instagram analytics tool for getting basic analyticsSource: SocialBladeFree trial: Analyze one Instagram profile for free every day Price: Starts at $3.99/month SocialBlade is one of the best Instagram analytics apps if you want something free and basic. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles — it only tells you follower fluctuation, average likes and comments, and engagement rate. It’s not an ideal software for someone looking for valuable insights to inform their Instagram marketing strategy. But it might be the right choice for social media managers handling influencer marketing campaigns, and to monitor an influencer’s follower growth. It’s worth remembering that Social Blade primarily only shows follower growth. It doesn’t have charts or numbers for how an Instagram profile’s engagement rate has gone up and down. What is particularly helpful, though, is that Social Blade has 30-day data on follower growth or decline — helping you pinpoint which post(s) exactly helped gain or lose followers. 3. MintorBest Instagram analytics tool for Instagram agenciesSource: MintorFree trial: 14 days Price: Starts at $9/month Mintor is a social media analytics tool that contains insights for Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, Threads, and LinkedIn. It’s a great analytics software for agencies managing multiple Instagram accounts. You can add multiple Instagram profiles in a single dashboard and switch between them easily to find the data you need. Mintor also stores insights on your Instagram Stories for longer than two weeks (unlike native Instagram insights). The Instagram analytics data isn’t anything out of the ordinary. You can find all these insights on your app directly, too, but Mintor collates them for you in a single analytics dashboard. It also tracks mentions of your account and benchmarks your analytics against similar accounts. You can also get a breakdown of your ad analytics and compare it to your organic performance if you’re running ads on Instagram. 4. Social StatusBest Instagram analytics tool for analyzing various kinds of campaignsSource: Social StatusFree trial: Free plan available but it only has Instagram profile analytics Price: Starts at $9/month Social Status is an excellent Instagram analytics tool for a small business doing Instagram marketing, influencer discovery, and running ads. It provides these insights for all major social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook Pages, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok. It’s one of the affordable Instagram analytics tools for social media managers who have various types of campaigns running. It has influencer analytics for influencer marketing, ad analytics if you’re running Meta ads, and competitor analysis to benchmark your performance. All of this is in addition to the detailed Instagram analytics it already has. If you don’t want to use other Instagram analytics tools to track and monitor each campaign, Social Status is perfect. The free version has only the Instagram profile analyzer, which will give you insights into your Instagram posts, follower growth, and Instagram audience. 5. ReporteiBest Instagram analytics tool for automated reportingSource: ReporteiFree trial: 3 days Price: $29/month Reportei is a perfect reporting tool for creating customized and automated Instagram analytics reports. Social media managers have to do a lot to create customized reports and present their social media efforts in a distilled PPT. With Reportei, the work becomes a tad easier. It specializes as a reporting tool and is AI-powered — you can chat with the AI to derive detailed insights from your raw numbers. There are various ready-to-use templates available in the tool as well. The “timeline” feature is one of the most unique — you can record campaign milestones in a story format with dates and events. This can help you present a more accurate picture of your Instagram analytics. 6. KeyholeBest Instagram analytics tool for social listeningSource: KeyholeFree trial: Not available Price: Demo required Keyhole doubles as a social media analytics tool and a social listening tool. It has all the traditional insights: Instagram Story analyticsHistorical data on performanceInstagram audience demographic dataDetailed metrics on Instagram hashtags…and moreTracking key metrics like the one above will help you prove the impact of your Instagram presence to stakeholders. But the best part of Keyhole is it doubles as an excellent social listening tool. You can spot trends, monitor competitors, and stay connected to what people are talking about in your industry. If your social media strategy’s focus is deep in social listening, Keyhole is the perfect tool. How to use your Instagram analyticsInstagram analytics tools are great, but they can’t tell you what you should do with the raw data. Deeper insights are always contextual — so you have to find how Instagram analytics inform your strategy. If you’ve started out by setting goals, monitor how closely you achieved your objectives. Which metrics did you achieve easily? Which KPI did you struggle to hit? Once you’ve done this, zoom out and look at the performance data more broadly. What went unexpectedly? Maybe your Instagram audience analytics show a bigger market than you had anticipated. Perhaps the Instagram algorithm changed and your analytics shifted with it. Track engagement metrics to understand which types of Instagram posts did well. Spot patterns in what did well and why. Dissecting your social media analytics will not only help you create more well-informed Instagram analytics reports, but also help you move your overall social strategy in the right direction. View the full article

US vice-president says deal is unlikely to be secured by ‘some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years’View the full article

When it comes to airports, travelers tend to fall into two camps. There are the anxious types who show up four hours early, with plenty of time to leisurely peruse duty-free and enjoy the airport lounge. And then there are those who breeze into the airport with 45 minutes to spare, hoping for the best. But a viral trend on TikTok, dubbed “airport theory,” would put even that latter group’s nerves to the test. The theory suggests arriving at the airport just 15 minutes before your flight to clear security. The concept has taken off online, racking up 400 million views. Unsurprisingly, it’s already led to plenty of missed flights. “It is currently 9:24, and my flight started boarding four minutes ago,” said TikTok user, Lexi Smith, in a video testing the theory at LAX airport. “We’re in security right now; let’s see how fast we can get through this.” She claims to get through security in five minutes, despite getting randomly selected for additional screening. After transferring to her gate via bus, she informs viewers that she made it to the gate 15 minutes later, as the flight was “just now boarding.” “So. We made it; airport theory is true,” she declared, adding, “Yes, I was the first one to walk on the plane. Make that make sense.” Another TikTok creator tested the theory at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest in the world based on foot traffic. “If airport theory works here, I think it will work anywhere,” said Michael DiCostanzo in a clip with more than 3.6 million views. Breezing through security in just over seven minutes, DiCostanzo arrived at his gate in under 15 minutes from start to finish, calling it “a huge win for airport theory.” However, as one commenter pointed out, “So you had precheck, didn’t check a bag and were at the nearest terminal? Now let’s do it when it’s not all the optimal situations.” Not every traveler has been so lucky. In one clip with 17.4 million views, TikTok user Jenny Kurtz filmed herself sipping on an iced coffee, seemingly not in a rush to get to her gate. “For those of you thinking about testing out the airport theory, don’t do it,” she warns in the caption of her 14-second video, showing the closed gate sign. “Missed my flight.” Thanks to the “airport theory” trend, Google searches for “I missed my flight” have surged by 645% in the past month alone, according to experts at travel site Netflights. It’s clear many travelers are confused about just how early they should arrive at the airport. In fact, the question racks up an average of 63,870 online searches every month. For the record, most airlines still recommend arriving at least two hours before a domestic flight and three hours before an international one. View the full article

Economists’ proposal for up to €800bn of funding under review as part of coalition talksView the full article

Discussions come as investors bet that Paris-based company could replace Elon Musk’s Starlink in Ukraine View the full article

When Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement in 2017, major companies—including tech giants Apple, Amazon, and Google—were quick to criticize the move. Elon Musk stepped down from his role on the president’s advisory committees in response. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the decision was “bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and it puts our children’s future at risk.” What happened this year was very different: Trump ordered the U.S. to leave the Paris Agreement, again, on his first day in office. Zuckerberg, who was getting ready to co-host an inaugural ball for the president, didn’t comment on the news. (In an unrelated Facebook post that came shortly after Trump’s announcement about the Paris Agreement, Zuckerberg said he was “Optimistic and celebrating.”) Jeff Bezos, who previously criticized Trump and poured $10 billion into climate nonprofits, has now cozied up to the president. Other tech CEOs sat in support at the inauguration and donated millions to Trump’s inaugural committee. It’s one example of the business world’s reluctance to take any public stand against the current president. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” Trump said at a press conference in December when he talked about meeting with tech leaders. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.” Whether out of a fear of retribution and/or a belief that their companies could benefit directly from Trump, most business leaders are staying quiet. That’s true both for specific policy, like the Paris Agreement, and as the new administration veers toward authoritarianism. The muted response—not to mention the fact that some executives are embracing Trump and voluntarily ditching programs like diversity, equity, and inclusion—isn’t dissimilar to what happened when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. “The parallels of corporate conformity and subservience are quite strong,” says Peter Hayes, a professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University and the author of a new book, Profits & Persecution, about how companies responded to and collaborated with the Nazi party. When Hitler came to power in 1933, few took him seriously. As with Trump, people tended to underestimate the threat he posed. “A lot of people thought Hitler was a blowhard,” Hayes says. “He never had been to university. He’d never held a government position. He’d never had a real job in his life, aside from running messages behind enemy lines in World War I. They just didn’t take him seriously. And the antisemitism, only the worst people took that seriously—the people who believed in it took it totally seriously. Everybody else tended to sort of say, ‘Well, you know, if it comes, it’ll stop short of the kind of people I know.’” At the time, business leaders liked some aspects of the Nazi platform, including its willingness to dismantle labor unions. Those who objected to Hitler’s antisemitism thought that it could be moderated. (In the culture of the time, many Germans were antisemitic themselves—and had especially objectionable views about Jewish immigrants who had recently moved from Eastern Europe—but didn’t think that their Jewish colleagues should lose their jobs or, later, their lives.) But businesses quickly became participants in the “de-Jewification” (“Entjudung”) of their corporate boards. Some of that was driven by fear, after seeing examples of what the Nazis were willing to do. In one case, the new government arrested the editors of a newspaper in Munich and appointed Nazi replacements who fired Jewish employees. The Nazis intimidated Bosch’s CEO by arresting one of his friends. A cigarette magnate was threatened with the takeover of his property and a trial on corruption charges if he didn’t do what the government wanted. “They always were willing to use force, but they treated it as a last resort towards the corporate world,” Hayes says. “Because you can intimidate ordinary middle-class or upper-class people pretty easily. And they did. People conform.” After seeing what was happening to others, some companies started to practice “anticipatory compliance,” including Deutsche Bank, which fired Jewish members of its board before it was forced to. (In the long term, it didn’t help: Two of the bank’s directors were executed later in the war because they’d criticized Hitler.) As Hitler’s regime progressed, the corporate compliance became more horrific: seizing Jewish-owned businesses and property, using forced Jewish labor, and providing, in the case of a chemical company called IG Farben, the poison gas used to kill millions of people in concentration camps. Some companies fully embraced Nazi propaganda; others were just afraid to resist. Now, as corporate leaders fail to stand up for things they’ve advocated for in the past, such as climate action, what happened in Germany “is kind of a road map for what we’re experiencing,” Hayes says. The country is at a pivotal moment. The White House is seizing power in unprecedented ways, such as freezing funding that was already appropriated by Congress. Trump broke the law to fire inspectors general at federal agencies. Under Elon Musk, who was never elected to any office, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has started slashing jobs and funding at federal agencies, from the National Institutes of Health to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (The job cuts include accidentally firing workers responsible for nuclear security and researching the bird flu outbreak.) Musk and other Republicans have threatened judges with impeachment for blocking DOGE work that the judges say is illegal. When Musk sat in at a recent Cabinet meeting, Trump threatened to throw out anyone who objected to Musk. The White House is starting to control which journalists can be part of the press pool covering the president, something that used to happen through an independent committee. The list goes on. Hayes argues that American business leaders have caved to Trump even without the same type of intimidation that happened in Germany. But there has been some pressure: Trump threatened to jail Zuckerberg if he “interfered” with the 2024 election, for example, and then credited his own threats with forcing Zuckerberg to make changes to Meta, including ditching fact-checkers. Some of the pressure on CEOs, along with politicians and other public figures, now comes in other forms, including the fact that Trump can easily incite his online followers to violence. “We have on record Republican senators who’ve said to their Democratic colleagues, ‘I can’t speak up because I’m afraid for my family,’” Hayes says, adding that corporate leaders may also be afraid to talk because they’re worried about losing their jobs. “This is the normal form of human self-protection that dictatorial and authoritarian forces totally exploit.” Hayes points out other parallels to Nazi Germany. Hitler, like Trump, didn’t worry about long-term impacts to the economy. Hitler wanted Germany to be self-sufficient, and pushed for companies to make gasoline from coal, even though it was far more expensive than importing fuel from other countries. Similarly, Trump is trying to prop up fossil fuel companies in the U.S. at a time when the rest of the world is moving to electric vehicles—and EVs ultimately make more economic sense. “We’re giving up the future to serve the fossil fuel industry in the short term, and to try to make us an island in the world,” Hayes says. “It’s not going to work. The bill will come due. And as it starts to come due, everything that Trump has ever done indicates that he will blame someone else. And that’s when this government will become truly dangerous.” In Germany, Hayes says, the first year of Hitler’s rule was the critical moment that businesses could have made different choices. In theory, it’s not too late for companies—along with the rest of society—to become more vocal now. Hayes, however, doesn’t believe that salvation is likely to come from the corporate sector, warning, “Don’t expect them to stand up to this.” View the full article

Microsoft employees stream down a hallway by the dozen, smartphones and paper coffee cups in hand, many clad in heavy coats on this frigid February morning. The setting is idyllic—Lake Washington is in full view through floor-to-ceiling windows—but they stride purposefully. As they do, they pass a digital sign with a tersely worded call to action: All squads ship Competing/differentiating Growing work every sprint to double Successful Sessions ABS (Always Be Shipping) Despite the profusion of Microsofties on the premises, this isn’t Microsoft’s sprawling Redmond campus. Instead, these staffers have taken over a Hyatt hotel in Renton, another Seattle suburb. They work for a division known as Microsoft AI—MAI for short—and have traveled from corporate outposts as distant as the U.K., Switzerland, China, and India to attend a team off site. Mustafa Suleyman, MAI’s CEO, instituted these conclaves upon arriving at Microsoft just under a year ago—part of an unorthodox mass hiring in which the software behemoth absorbed most of the staff from Inflection AI, the startup Suleyman cofounded in 2022. The gatherings take place roughly once every seven weeks, and part of their purpose is unblinking self-assessment. Ahead of the meeting, around 80 squads of 6 to 15 people apiece have rated themselves on their success in hitting recent deadlines on a scale of red, amber, or green. The results aren’t great—but Suleyman sees that as progress in itself. “It’s taken a few cycles to get people to be basically honest in terms of their scoring,” he tells me shortly after presiding over the event’s keynote presentation. “And this time, there was lots of red—like almost 45% red. I think that was a really, really good moment; and we sort of stood up and owned it. I was very proud of the team.” Though being CEO of something called “Microsoft AI” sounds like a job of nearly unlimited purview, Suleyman does have a more specific remit. He’s charged with using AI to transform the company’s consumer properties, including the free Copilot chatbot app available on the web and in versions for Windows, Mac, iPhone, and Android. The progress MAI measures in squad-size chunks all levels up to a much higher goal: building an AI companion that not only answers questions accurately but performs tasks based on a deep understanding of your needs. And not just an anodyne chatbot, but a warm and relatable persona you’ll enjoy spending time with. In its present form, Copilot has barely begun to hint at this wildly ambitious vision. But as Microsoft pushes forward, “You’ll start to see Copilot become a platform that enables a personalized AI companion for you,” promises Suleyman. “It’ll have its own name, have its own visual representation, have its own personality, and really be your sidekick. What we are building is your second brain, your aide, your consigliere, your reliable chief of staff in your pocket.” It’s lofty talk, but Suleyman—whose round, wire-frame glasses help give him the presence of a particularly glib owl—has a knack for explaining AI in a compelling fashion. His cautionary 2023 book on the subject, The Coming Wave, was a New York Times Best Seller; his 2024 TED talk, “What is an AI Anyway?” has been viewed 2.7 million times. More importantly, his bona fides include cofounding not just Inflection, but before that DeepMind in 2010. The London-based company made computing history when it created software that taught itself to play the famously complex Chinese board game, Go, better than any human. Then it developed an algorithm for predicting how proteins fold themselves, a transformative tool for drug discovery. Both of those landmark feats reached fruition after Google acquired DeepMind in 2014; Suleyman left DeepMind in 2019 and exited Google altogether in 2022, shortly before founding Inflecton. In 2023, Google merged the company with another AI arm, Google Brain, to form Google DeepMind, with Suleyman’s fellow cofounder Demis Hassabis as CEO. The combined operation is responsible for the Gemini large language model now used in many Google products, putting Suleyman in direct competition with his former colleagues. (Suleyman says he remains friendly with Hassabis, but argues that competition fuels creativity, noting that in February, he recruited the engineers responsible for one of Google’s best-received uses of AI: its uncanny “Audio Overview” synthetic podcasts.) In terms of raw users, Copilot has some catching up to do. According to data from intelligence company Similarweb, the consumer version—which is distinct from the one that’s part of the Microsoft 365 productivity suite—had a desktop and mobile web audience of just 15.6 million in January. That was far behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT (246 million), Chinese upstart DeepSeek (79.97 million), and Gemini (47.3 million), though ahead of Perplexity (10.6 million) and Anthropic’s Claude (8.2 million). This data doesn’t include people who use Microsoft’s free Copilot app, but market intelligence firm Sensor Tower says that ChatGPT currently has 30 times the monthly active users of consumer Copilot. Microsoft is not wholly dependent on Copilot to reach consumers. Bing, another part of Suleyman’s portfolio, may only have 4% of the search market to Google’s 90%, according to StatCounter, but with an audience of 174 million people in January, it’s larger than any AI bot except ChatGPT, per Similarweb. His group also oversees Microsoft’s Edge web browser, which comes bundled with Windows and could become a potent AI delivery system of its own. And over time, Suleyman’s AI companion vision might give Copilot more market traction by clearly differentiating it from ChatGPT. (The two products share many technical underpinnings thanks to the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership.) Still, the relative tininess of Copilot’s current user base shows that the vision of Microsoft’s signature consumer-AI effort has yet to transform into the kind of mass attention the company cares about. “For Copilot to be truly useful for you long term, it needs to not only be able to ingest all your long-form documents and your email and your calendar and your context, but it needs to not forget what you’ve talked about a couple of sessions ago. And we are getting really good at that now.” [Photo: Carlton Canary for Fast Company] Then again, it’s not like anyone else has truly figured out consumer AI. The industry’s often-clumsy stabs at it—such as Google’s gaffe-ridden AI Overviews and short-lived Meta bots personified by the likes of Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton—can feel like answers to questions nobody asked. “Every single company is trying to understand what the market wants at this point,” says Divya Kumar, Microsoft‘s general manager of search and AI marketing. “We’ve barely scratched the surface.” But Suleyman can’t depend on Microsoft’s rivals flailing forever; if MAI doesn’t create the first true AI consigliere, somebody else surely will. Hence, the intensity he brings to managing and motivating his team, a job he describes as “building the cultural flywheel that then builds the product.” That goal was apparent in a February email to his staff—written shortly after DeepSeek’s stunningly efficient LLM shocked the AI industry—in which Suleyman predicted more surprises ahead and called for a great hunkering down. “What MAI needs from everyone this year is extreme focus,” he wrote. “The competition will be unlike anything we’ve seen. This is for real. This is the time to do the best work of your lives.” The son of an English nurse mother and Syrian cab-driver father, Suleyman landed on AI as his life’s work not because he was in love with the technology for its own sake, but because he saw its potential to make the world a better place. At 19, he dropped out of the University of Oxford, where he studied philosophy and theology, to help start a telephone counseling service for Muslim youth. He then served as a human rights policy officer for London Mayor Ken Livingston and cofounded a consultancy dedicated to driving societal change on a global scale. Suleyman was only 25 when he and two friends, who had the training in computer science he lacked (Hassabis and Shane Legg), started DeepMind in 2010. The company was a bet on their conviction that evermore-powerful supercomputers would lead to an epoch-shifting moment when AI would surpass human cognitive ability across an array of disciplines. Legg called that phenomenon Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. Early on, their faith that AI‘s future would be extraordinary was so contrarian, Suleyman says, that “we never really talked openly about our ambition to build AGI—that was always something that we whispered in hushed tones to each other and among a very small group.” Eventually, though, the entire field adopted AGI as a concept—and a goal. DeepMind indeed made historic progress, putting Suleyman at the heart of the AI revolution just as it was taking off. But in a major career setback, he left DeepMind in 2019—reportedly not by choice but precipitated by complaints from employees that he had a bullying management style. In a 2022 podcast, he accepted the criticism—”I really screwed up”—and said that he’d since worked with an executive coach to become a better boss. By the end of his DeepMind tenure, Suleyman says, he was itching to get AI out of the lab and into the real world. Rather than leave Google altogether, he spent another two years at the company as VP of AI product management and AI policy. Among his responsibilities was working with the Google Brain team, which had developed an LLM called LaMDA. At the time, ChatGPT didn’t exist; even OpenAI‘s GPT LLM hadn’t proven itself capable of powering radically new AI experiences. LaMDA “was at GPT-3 level performance, at least a year earlier than GPT-3,” Suleyman remembers. Leveraging it into new Google features would have been a bold, attention-grabbing move. But it also would have been risky and required sign-off from many internal stakeholders. Suleyman struggled to rally support. “That was really on me,” he says. “I was the one trying to get this out the door—persuade the lawyers, persuade the policy people, persuade Google Search. And for some reason, there was just a series of mental blockers in the company.” Concluding that this effort had reached a standstill, Suleyman departed Google in January 2022. Officially, he was joining venture capital firm Greylock as a partner. Barely more than a month later, however, he returned to AI with the launch of Inflection. Suleyman and his cofounders, DeepMind principal research scientist Karén Simonyan—now MAI’s chief scientist—and LinkedIn cofounder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman quickly lined up $225 million in funding. Suleyman didn’t spell out the startup’s exact plans beyond acknowledging they involved making it easier for humans to communicate with computers: “It feels like we’re on the cusp of being able to generate language to pretty much human-level performance,” he told CNBC. What that meant became clearer in May 2023, when Inflection introduced Pi, its chatbot. Short for “personal intelligence” and available on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as the web and as an iPhone app, Pi was a rough draft of Suleyman’s notion of an AI companion—optimized for engaging conversation rather than purely informational utility. “I chatted about philosophy with it for what turned out to be 2 hours,” wrote an impressed Reddit user. “I kept waiting for it to ‘break’ and say stupid random stuff like [ChatGPT does] but it kept going coherently.” As Pi was establishing itself, Suleyman found himself in an ongoing dialog with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about their companies’ respective futures. Microsoft had invested in Inflection and was providing the startup with cloud services, so it was only natural they’d talk. But by the winter of 2023—a period when Sam Altman’s brief ouster at OpenAI highlighted how vulnerable Microsoft had left itself by tethering its AI vision to an outside partner—Nadella was proposing scenarios involving Suleyman joining Microsoft in some capacity. Suleyman was willing to listen. Microsoft already had a deep technological platform, a large consumer footprint it knew how to monetize through advertising, and the ability to shovel its formidable resources to high-priority initiatives—assets Inflection couldn’t match on its own. Furthermore, Suleyman’s confidence in Inflection’s initial business plan, which involved building high-cost computing clusters to train its own in-house LLM, Inflection-1, had been shaken by new developments such as Meta’s open-sourcing of its Llama AI model, which made a world-class LLM available to any company that wanted to use it. “I just did not predict that a public company would make the crown jewels available to everybody,” he says, calling the realization of how that might impact the competitive landscape “painful.” Nadella, too, had reason to reassess Microsoft’s AI strategy, particularly on the consumer front. For all the benefits the company had reaped from its investment in OpenAI, the tantalizing sense that it might help Bing bite into Google’s dominance in sudden and dramatic fashion hadn’t panned out. Nor had Copilot become ChatGPT’s peer in traffic and name recognition, despite being based on some of the same underlying GPT technology. “As of right now, it feels to me as an outside observer that they haven’t gotten nearly the leverage that they would’ve wanted on the consumer side,” says tech investor and writer M.G. Siegler. Microsoft product manager for model personality Rachel Taylor: “The way that you show up for Gen Z versus my mom, who’s just turned 70, has differences in style and delivery, and it should feel different as time goes on.“ [Photo: Carlton Canary for Fast Company] Suleyman is quick to underline that he could have continued pursuing his AI vision at Inflection, which had raised a total of more than $1.5 billion from investors. On top of that, in November 2023 he met for eight hours with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who “made an enormous offer to raise a gigantic round at a huge price.” But over a January 2024 lunch at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Suleyman says, Nadella made an irresistible offer: “Come and drive Microsoft through the next decade.” ”One of the most compelling pieces of what he said to me was, ‘We completely missed mobile,’” referring to Microsoft’s Windows Phone being thrashed by Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, Suleyman remembers. “‘If we completely miss AI in the way that we missed mobile, it’ll be existential for the future of the company.’” Suleyman says it was a wrenching decision: “We were 70 people. The product was growing like wildfire. We had an amazing roster of investors.” But a couple of months after Davos, a deal was announced. Acquiring Inflection would likely have raised antitrust concerns. Instead, Microsoft simply hired Suleyman, Simonyan, and most of the team they’d assembled. (LinkedIn currently lists 59 ex-Inflection staffers now at Microsoft.) Microsoft won’t say how much it spent on this gambit; reports put the price tag at $650 million—or maybe more—to license AI models, pay off investors, and compensate Suleyman and other new employees. Along with existing Microsoft employees and additional ones Suleyman would recruit, the Inflection alums are part of MAI—“a Russian doll of new teams,” he says. The company also declines to provide a current head count, but last November, Wired’s Steven Levy quoted Suleyman saying “about 14,000 people” reported up into his team. (Inflection still exists, under new management—Suleyman no longer has an ownership stake—and has pivoted from building an AI companion to selling technology to enterprise customers.) Microsoft general manager of search and AI marketing Divya Kumar: “One of the aspects of Mustafa that I really appreciate is his consumer ethos. Everything he thinks about, whether that is product engineering or marketing, he thinks about from the lens of the customer.” [Photo: Carlton Canary for Fast Company] Suleyman’s unsatisfying experience trying to commercialize Google’s LaMDA did leave him wary of big-company bureaucracy. “The most important thing was figuring out how, culturally, we kept some distance from some of the old patterns in Microsoft that we were worried would slow us down,” he says. “This was something Satya and I talked about a lot. He was adamant that we would have all the necessary freedoms to operate and we wouldn’t be impeded in any way.” The evidence that Nadella was good to his word includes the fact that Suleyman divided his team into small squads of employees who tackle their work in six- or seven-week cycles, an approach he brought with him from Inflection. MAI controls its own tech stack and is responsible for its own recruiting. Despite being part of the ultimate Microsoft shop, it even does some of its collaborating over Slack (“I would say we mostly use Teams,” Suleyman emphasizes when I ask). Nearly a year into his new job, Suleyman remains keen to shield MAI from certain Microsoftian tendencies. In a November email to staffers, he dutifully praised Microsoft’s consensus-driven culture—but stated that MAI’s objective should be “respectful disagreement, followed up by a complete commitment to the outcome.” That bias toward speedy decisiveness is tempered by the self-awareness Suleyman has carefully fostered since getting into trouble at DeepMind. In the lead-up to one team meeting, for instance, he asked his direct reports for examples of recent moves he’d made that proved problematic so that he could share them more broadly. Suleyman still doesn’t hesitate to describe himself as “relentless.” But he adds that he’s now “much more practical and more realistic. In some ways, I’m actually a lot more patient and balanced as well.” That’s not far from how MAI staffers describe him: “He’s a kind and empathetic person who still manages to have a tremendous level of urgency,” says Kya Sainsbury-Carter, corporate VP of Microsoft Advertising, a direct report, and an 18-year veteran of the company. Back at Microsoft AI’s off-site meeting, a standing-room-only crowd has assembled for a workshop on understanding Generation Z. The presentation includes TikTok videos in which young people rhapsodize about ChatGPT and excerpts from interviews with high schoolers talking about their busy lives. In an empathy-building exercise, participants discuss what they learned from this exposure to the next generation and how it might be applied to improving Copilot. Such anthropological inquiry is serious stuff at Microsoft, which turns 50 this year and is intent on forging a relationship with consumers who weren’t around for the glory days of the PC. Gen Z “demands more than real innovation and crisp aesthetics; they want authenticity, social responsibility, and seamless digital experiences,” wrote Suleyman in a January email to MAI staffers. “We need to create experiences that truly resonate with these users.” Copilot design director and Inflection AI alum Matt Pistachio: ”We still move quickly as a startup. We still meet together like we used to do. We still have the same vision. We’re just doing it at scale.“ [Photo: Carlton Canary for Fast Company] Of course, at the scale to which Microsoft is accustomed—and hopes Copilot will reach—even delighting an entire generation of consumers wouldn’t be enough. The company must consider the needs and desires of individual customers spanning a wide swath of humanity, a test that some on its Windows team have likened to ordering pizza for 1.5 billion people. Indeed, Copilot design director Matt Pistachio—one of the Inflection employees who joined Suleyman at MAI—gets most animated when telling me how AI can empower his mother, a Lebanese technophobe. “She can talk in Arabic,” he explains. “She can talk in her broken English. She can just say what she wants and she has access to computing.” As another Inflection alum, MAI’s product manager for model personality Rachel Taylor, puts it, “Your AI should feel different than mine.” So how can Microsoft even begin to attack the problem of creating an AI companion that teeming masses of people might find indispensable—but each in a slightly different way? Suleyman divvies the necessary elements into three buckets that he’s been talking about since the days of Inflection’s Pi: IQ, AQ, and EQ. IQ covers a companion’s raw skill at working with facts—“to answer any question accurately, superfast, be grounded in the real world, [and] provide evidence and citations,” he says. AQ references the power to take action on behalf of a user—or, using one of the tech industry’s favorite current buzzwords, to be agentic. And EQ is about the companion’s emotional intelligence—its ability to “make you feel empowered and make you feel supported and make you feel smarter and more capable.” Building out these elements could keep Suleyman’s team busy for years. “A lot of breakthroughs need to happen to be able to get to the vision that he’s got in his mind,” says S. Somasegar, Madrona Venture Group managing director (and, previously, a 27-year Microsoft veteran). But some ingredients are falling into place, at least as first drafts. Starting in October, MAI began rolling out the meatiest changes to Copilot since Suleyman’s arrival. Thanks to voice mode, you can talk to the AI rather than type, and it’ll talk back. A feature called Think Deeper, based on OpenAI’s “reasoning” o1 model, takes 30 seconds to generate its answers, but is optimized to deliver richer, more sophisticated explanations and advice than the stock model. Copilot Vision lets you carry on spoken conversations with the AI about web pages, say, so it can help suss out pertinent details in an Airbnb listing you’re skimming while planning a vacation. A key focus is memory: Copilot knowing you better the more you use it rather than every session being a Groundhog Day-like new start. In February, Microsoft quietly shipped an update that lets it weave topics and ideas from past sessions into new ones: “You have a sense that there’s a compounding value,” says Suleyman. Microsoft is also working on giving its AI companion enough social grace to master group chats, tailoring its responses to the interests and attitudes of each human in a session. The challenge of making all this work is not just technological. Any AI companion worth its salt will certainly need a world-class LLM under the hood. But the MAI employees at the Hyatt off-site include “educators, therapists, linguists, comedy writers, advertisers, designers,” Suleyman tells me. Instead of building on the tech industry’s past 20 years of consumer experiences—products such as Facebook and YouTube that aggregated massive amounts of user-generated content, with its rough edges often part of the appeal—he is aiming to tap AI to help attain a level of polish that software has rarely had. “We now have this new raw material to make beautiful experiences with, which is much closer to the raw material of Hollywood or game design,” he says. “We, as humans, love the feeling that arises when you listen to a beautiful piece of music or watch an epic movie or see a director of photography wash color over a scene.” Once again, Suleyman’s rarified description of his aims is running ahead of anything MAI has actually shipped. But some of his aspiration to engage on an emotional level was visible in a blobby, smiling onscreen animated character I glimpsed at MAI’s off-site meeting—an early, unannounced manifestation of what Copilot would look like if you could see it as well as chat with it. The character’s cartoony vibe also happens to scratch an itch Microsoft has had since at least 1992. That’s when the company became smitten with research by Stanford professors Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, which showed that people attribute human qualities to computers and other forms of media. Taking their conclusions as an argument for making software interfaces more anthropomorphic, Microsoft released a quirky Windows add-on called Microsoft Bob. After that flopped, the company doubled down with Office 97’s Office Assistants, including that iconic pest Clippy. In the 1990s, Microsoft tried to add a dash of anthropomorphic companionship to software with Microsoft Bob (seen here) and Office Assistants such as Clippy. They went on to be among the company’s most famous failures. When it turned out Office users didn’t actually want productivity aid from cartoon characters, Microsoft deemphasized Clippy and company—and eventually removed them altogether. More recently, it has good-naturedly embraced the talking paper clip as a totem of failure. If consumers really do find an animated version of Copilot to be irresistible, Clippy can feel free to have a long-delayed last laugh. But applying AI to a synthetic persona also brings risks that were unimaginable in Clippy’s day. Much of the air went out of Microsoft’s triumphant reveal of the first version of its consumer Copilot in February 2023 when it turned out to be a slightly terrifying loose cannon, most famously telling New York Times writer Kevin Roose that it loved him and he should leave his wife. (The company moved swiftly to tamp down its new chatbot’s wild side.) More recently, and far more alarmingly, Google-backed Character AI has been sued by the mother of a teenager whose suicide, she claims, reflected his unhealthy emotional attachment to the startup’s bots. In another suit, families say their children’s conversations with Character AI bots went in dark directions involving self-harm, violence toward others, and sexualized content. Microsoft is hardly blithe about AI companions’ potential to go awry. ”We’re setting the standard for these things existing,” says Taylor. “And so we have to be totally sure that we’re comfortable with them existing in the world.” Her colleague Pistachio adds that the company is building its AI to calmly steer sessions in a responsible direction: “It’ll be like, ‘Okay, I think we’ve gone a bit too far—I don’t think we should be joshing around this much.‘“ Suleyman, whose book The Coming Wave takes AI’s perils at least as seriously as its promise, told me repeatedly that keeping it safe is not just vital but the whole point of his career. “The goal of the next 50 years,” he declares, “has to be to make sure that this technology remains subservient to humanity.” Yet that hasn’t led him away from high-stakes applications of the technology. Former DeepMinders are involved in a new MAI healthcare group, whose mandate he paints in only the broadest strokes for now: “Four billion or so people don’t have access to high-quality medical or health advice on a daily basis—I think it’s just an amazing opportunity.” Ultimately, Suleyman says, his mission “is to make sure that [AI] genuinely does always remain something that makes our lives healthier and happier. The goal of civilization, in my opinion, is to relieve people of the obligation and pressure to solve shelter, food, community, work, well-being.” Even now, as he builds a business at a titan of capitalism that’s older than he is, he’s still the 25-year-old enthralled by AI’s potential to do good. View the full article

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you carefully laid out all the context for your manager, only to have them cut you off? Or maybe you’ve found you’re eager to dive into the tactical details of a project while they keep steering the conversation back to vision. These moments can leave you frustrated and confused. You’re doing what seems logical, yet somehow it’s not landing. The good news is that these disconnects usually aren’t about your competency or the quality of your ideas— they’re about different styles. Studies have found that two primary dimensions shape how people communicate and approach their interactions at work. The first is dominance, which refers to the degree a person attempts to control situations or the thoughts and actions of others, and the second is sociability, which measures how readily someone expresses emo­tions and prioritizes relationships and emotional connection with others. The intersection of these two dimensions leads to four dif­ferent styles, which I call the 4Cs. The Commander Commanders can be so quick to take action that they may steamroll you or others. They care more about what needs to be done than how everyone feels about it. This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re uncaring (although they sometimes neglect their team’s need for emotional support), but they show their commitment to others by setting clear, ambitious targets rather than through praise or acknowledgment. Don’t take it personally if a Commander: Nitpicks your work. When Commanders challenge your ideas, it’s more about stress-testing them to avoid mistakes and make them stronger rather than dissatisfaction with you or your performance. Acknowledge their input without getting defensive and refute with solid data: “I see what you mean about the message lacking urgency. We approached it that way because our feedback survey showed . . . ” Skips pleasantries and small talk. Commanders see time as a valuable resource not to be wasted, so respect their desire for efficiency with phrases like, “I know you’re busy, so let’s get right to it” or, “I’ll dive straight in—here are the key points I’d like to cover.” And don’t be offended when they send you two-word email replies without asking how your weekend was. Overlooks your opinion. Commanders appreciate assertiveness, so have a point of view and present it clearly. Start your pitch with something like, “I believe . . . ,” “My recommendation is . . . ,” “From my perspective, it seems that . . . ,” or “Here are my initial thoughts.” The Cheerleader Cheerleaders are expressive and tend to be energetic, optimistic, and enthusiastic. Like Commanders, Cheerleaders value moving fast and aiming high, but they love building relationships and playing connector. Their focus on team spirit makes for an environment that’s positive and fun, but some might find their high-energy, group-oriented style overwhelming and you might not always get the nitty-gritty feedback or specific direction you want. Don’t take it personally if a Cheerleader: Cancels meetings at the last minute. Take the lead to reschedule, or you’ll be forgotten as they chase the next shiny object. Try this: “I understand your schedule is tight, but we’re running out of time to plan for X. So I’ll grab 20 minutes on your calendar to connect about that tomorrow unless you let me know otherwise.” Changes priorities frequently. Their flightiness can be frustrating, but when the Cheerleader thinks of yet another new idea or veers off topic, gently steer them back: “That’s fascinating. I’ll make a note so we don’t lose sight of this and can revisit it at a better time.” Be clear about what’s achievable, tying it back to team capacity and timelines: “To meet our deadlines and keep the quality of work you’re used to, we should stay focused on X.” Gives you vague feedback and direction. Cheerleaders prefer to inspire and motivate rather than provide step-by-step instructions. When given vague feedback, drill deeper: “Can you share what success looks like for this project?” Provide options since Cheerleaders sometimes struggle to come up with specifics on their own: “Here are a few ideas I’ve come up with. Which one do you feel fits best?” The Caretaker Caretakers are patient peacekeepers who listen carefully and make sure everyone feels seen and heard. While they’re high on sociability like the Cheerleader, Caretakers are more subdued and nurturing. They want you to feel safe voic­ing your thoughts and struggles. But at the same time, their indecisiveness can be a drag, particularly in fast-paced or high-stakes environ­ments where quick action and risk-taking are crucial. Don’t take it personally if a Caretaker: Constantly checks in. Caretakers sometimes “helicopter” manage or, worse, make you feel like you have to reassure them instead of the other way around. Gently make it clear you can handle tasks on your own without them hovering: “I’ve got this under control, but I’ll definitely let you know if I need any help.” Hoards work and stretch projects. Your boss may believe taking on the burden of extra work safeguards you from stress—or they’re convinced that they’re best suited to handle tasks. To overcome their control issues, propose a gradual transition (“Let’s start with me handling part of [project], and we can go from there”) or suggest working together initially (“How about we tag-team on [project] at first? That way, you can see my approach and make sure it’s on track”). Drops news on you at the eleventh hour. In a misdirected effort to keep things calm and stable, your boss may hold back important information, so regularly ask for insight on potential shifts: “Are there any developments we should be aware of? It would help us plan and adjust accordingly” or “Knowing about changes ahead of time helps me prepare, so any heads-up would be helpful.” The Controller Controllers excel through their meticulous attention to detail, reli­ance on data, and a preference for working behind the scenes to ensure everything runs like clockwork. They tend to be serious and reserved leaders who worry less about social con­nections and more about optimizing existing standards, rules, and processes. This can be a dream for those who love clear instructions, but Controllers can also come off as rigid and restrictive, especially when quick pivots or innovative leaps are needed to stay ahead. Don’t take it personally if a Controller: Rejects your ideas without consideration. Controllers are wary of new ideas because they see them as risks that could lead to mistakes. So frame ideas as enhancements to existing processes, not as net new changes: “[Idea] builds on our current system . . .” or “We can take what we’re already doing and make it even better by . . .” Requires multiple approvals or reviews. It’s not that they don’t trust you; rather, they believe that having multiple sets of eyes means standards will be met. Before starting work ask, “What are the key criteria you’re looking for in this project? I want to make sure I meet your expectations from the outset.” Suggest a quick pre-mortem session to catch any issues early: “Can we check in before I finalize this? I want to address any concerns you might have.” Expects you to be an expert in everything. If your boss overloads you with dense information or complex documentation, turn it back around and ask for guidance on what’s most critical: “I appreciate all the details. What would you say are the key points I should prioritize to make sure we’re compliant?” You might not always like or agree with your boss’s approach—that’s normal—but if there comes a point where their actions become disruptive to you or others, it’s not enough to say, “Oh, that’s just how they are!” Ultimately, per­sonal style doesn’t give anyone a pass to be a jerk. The key is to stay flexible and observant, adjusting your strate­gies as you learn more about your boss’s preferences and behaviors. Because even if your relationships are strong, they can always be better. Adapted from the book Managing Up: How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge by Melody Wilding. Copyright © 2025 by Melody Wilding. Published in the United States and Canada by Crown Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. View the full article

Popular industry expert finds home at Ingenius, ICE, Black Knight and Freddie Mac alums move to new companies and Visio Lending appoints board member as CEO. View the full article

For filmmakers with a fondness for certain fonts, using them frequently enough in their work can turn typography into a sort of signature. See the typeface in a film, and you know exactly who the director is. Wes Anderson has an obsession with Futura, while John Carpenter set his film credits in Albertus, a formal serif. Papyrus is now synonymous with James Cameron’s Avatar franchise, and more than 40 of Woody Allen’s films use Windsor. For director Sean Baker, whose comedy-drama Anora won the 2025 Oscar for Best Picture and netted him the Academy Award for Best Director, his font of choice is the tall, narrow, decorative Aguafina Script. Created by type designers Alejandro Paul and Angel Koziupa of the Argentinean type foundry Sudtipos, Aguafina Script is described as “semi-formal and eye-catching” with characters that “flow into each other,” perfect for product packaging, glossy magazines, and book covers. Turns out it also works well for movie posters and title sequences, as Baker has proven for more than a decade now with his various projects. [Images: IMDB] Baker told the streaming platform Mubi last year that he first selected Aguafina Script for the title sequence of 2015’s Tangerine, about a transgender sex worker (a film that was shot entirely on iPhones), because he was looking for something that was “stylistically interesting” and because it subverted the grittiness of the subject matter. “It is saying that there is an elegance to this production in the way we’re presenting the subject matter,” he said. After realizing the font could serve the same purpose for 2017’s The Florida Project (about a girl and her single mother who live in a motel near Disney World), he said, “If I continue this it could eventually become something that people connect with—and connect with my films [the way Carpenter’s and Allen’s fonts did with theirs].” “Now when you see those fonts, you think of those filmmakers and their films,” said Baker, who utilized Aguafina Script through to the movie posters too. “I like to have consistency between my advertising material and the actual credits.” By weaving it into the visual identity of his films, including a recently minted Oscar winner, Baker has made Aguafina Script his own, and shown how type can be used to challenge viewers’ preconceived notions. View the full article

The U.S. Forest Service, already struggling with understaffing, fired about 3,400 workers last month—roughly 10% of its workforce—amid the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal government. Now, with Forest Service chief Randy Moore set to retire this week, the agency will be led by a former timber industry lobbyist. In a letter posted to the agency’s website, Moore called the cuts “incredibly difficult” and urged remaining staff to “rise to the occasion.” But current and former Forest Service employees warn that mass firings threaten public access to federal lands and increase wildfire danger for tens of millions. They also fear the Trump administration is moving toward auctioning off public lands to corporations interested in resource extraction. Federal workers and their unions are pushing back—with some success. A federal judge last week ordered the government to cancel its directive to lay off employees at six agencies. However, the ruling did not extend to the Forest Service, leaving some workers unclear as to its implications. Workers are also speaking up in hopes that their advocacy can reverse the administration’s course and protect the public lands they say are at risk. Tom Carvajal’s work duties as a lead river ranger in the Boise National Forest ranged from checking parking passes to guiding archaeologists on weeklong missions into the rugged Idaho wilderness. He said it was “the greatest job in the world,” but it came to an end in mid-February when he was fired alongside thousands of other Forest Service employees. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to find something I’m as passionate about,” Carvajal said. As upset as he was to lose his job, Carvajal was more concerned about what would happen to the public lands he had dedicated years of his life to preserving. “When you look at the other executive orders . . . our public lands are f**ked,” Carvajal said. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed the Unleashing American Energy executive order that called for reversing environmental protections on federal lands—about 28% of the country—in the name of resource extraction. Carvajal fears that move could lay the groundwork for reducing the size of public lands by auctioning off once-protected areas to private development. It would not be the first time. During his first term, Trump eliminated environmental protections from more public land than any president in U.S. history. In 2017, he reduced Utah’s Grand-Staircase Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments by a combined 2 million acres after companies including Energy Fuels Resources (USA) Inc. lobbied his administration for access to the area’s uranium, coal, and oil deposits. In 2020, Trump stripped protections from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, allowing logging and road development on hundreds of square miles of old-growth forest. The Biden administration later reversed both decisions, but Trump’s team is again looking to reduce the size of Utah’s national monuments and allow logging in Alaska’s protected temperate rainforests. Trump also moved to roll back regulations that required federal agencies to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandates environmental review for actions like land permitting. Doug Burgum, Trump’s secretary of the Interior, has also directed his department to “encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters,” even though the country is already producing more crude oil than ever before. Following Moore’s resignation, the Forest Service will be headed by Tom Schultz, the former vice president of resources and government affairs at Idaho Forest Group, one of the largest private lumber producers in the country. Capital & Main reached out to the Trump administration for comment but received no response. His “Unleashing American Energy” order characterized environmental protections of public lands as “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations,” which impeded their development and stood in the way of making “reliable and affordable electricity” available to U.S. citizens. Unlike the National Park Service, whose primary mission is the preservation of natural and cultural resources, the Forest Service balances conservation with other purposes like timber production and resource extraction. Forest Service employees fear that the balance will tilt too far in favor of industry and that vast tracts of public lands could be lost. “I think we’re going to lose our federal government land. I think in the next four years, the Forest Service just won’t be around anymore,” said Taze Henderson, a Forest Service employee in Washington state’s Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest until he was fired this month. Henderson’s job was to prepare the forest for private logging operations while prioritizing forest health and fire prevention. His efforts often drew legal challenges from local environmental groups, which, he said, complicated the timber harvesting process. Now he warns that the private contractors who could replace him will do far more damage to the forest. Raymond Beaupre worked as part of the Okanogan-Wenatchee’s wilderness trail staff before getting fired. Profit-driven timber harvesters will be more “bloodthirsty,” potentially endangering the ecosystem, according to Beaupre. “It’s like letting the fox into the hen house,” he said. Beaupre warned that a downsized Forest Service would also limit recreational opportunities, as many trails require consistent upkeep to stay accessible. Without regular maintenance, fallen logs, and erosion ultimately lead to trail loss. Even before the firings, staffing and funding shortages had already led to trail loss. “Our district used to have 1,200 miles of trails. Now we fight as hard as we can to maintain 450 of those miles,” Beaupre said. Forest Service employees who were spared in the recent firings say the changes have already hurt the agency. “I didn’t know morale could get any worse and then it did,” said Madi Kraus, a wildland firefighter and union steward for the National Federation of Federal Employees in Colorado. “We feel like we’re in a relationship with an abusive partner. We never know what’s going to come next.” Many of those dismissed were responsible for managing firefighting logistics—a loss that could affect the agency’s ability to protect communities, Kraus said. In fact, many employees whose main job wasn’t firefighting, but who were qualified to fight fires when needed, were terminated. Among them was Carvajal, who started his career as a wildland firefighter and continued to assist on crews after changing positions. Last summer, he logged more than 300 overtime hours fighting wildfires just north of Boise. With wildfire risks rising as more people move into fire-prone areas and climate change leads to more extreme weather, the need for a strong firefighting force has never been greater. But the Trump administration’s actions are eroding that capacity, said Riva Duncan, a former forest fire chief in Oregon’s Umpqua National Forest. “Even if the firings stopped right now, we know it’s still going to be bad,” Duncan said. “It means the existing workforce has way more exposure to risk. . . . They’re not going to be able to suppress as many fires.” Workers have staged protests across the country, including inside national parks, and unions have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, claiming that the mass firings violate federal law. There are signs the pressure is working. Several Forest Service employees who were fired this month have since been rehired. Even though U.S. District Judge William Alsup’s order Thursday to rescind the directive firing probationary employees didn’t extend to the Forest Service, Alsup said he was “going to count on the government to do the right thing” by applying his ruling more broadly. Carvajal, meanwhile, is dedicating his time to speaking up about the potentially devastating impacts of deep cuts to the Forest Service and the loss of public lands. “If we lose those lands to any other kind of development, that’s really where the problem is going to last,” Carvajal said. “That can be avoided if people know that this is your land.” —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

When Netflix was finally ready to bring back its massive international hit TV series Squid Game for Season 2 after a three-year hiatus, it had a unique marketing challenge: remind people why they fell in love with a Korean action drama that revolves around a murderous contest. Approximately 39 months had passed since the debut of Squid Game took the world by storm with its coordinated green tracksuits, Pink Guards, and twisted takes on children’s games. The first season exploded to the surprise of everyone, becoming a global pop culture sensation. Back in 2021, Netflix marketing outside Asia was largely reactive to what audiences were excited about. This time, there were years of anticipation. Marian Lee, chief marketing officer at Netflix, says there was an excitement internally to re-create that phenomenon, but also a ton of pressure on her teams. “Convincing people to come back to watch the second season is an entirely different proposition than being surprised and having some fun with it.” [Photo: Netflix] What came next was a worldwide full-court press of entertainment marketing. Pink Guards were deployed at events, activations, and press appearances around the planet. The Season 2 campaign kicked off at the Paris Olympics. Pink Guards popped up at Sydney Harbor and Bondi Beach, the canals of Venice, Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river, Saudi Arabia’s AlUla, and Beco do Batman in São Paulo. Fans played Red Light, Green Light live under the Pink Guards’ watchful eyes in Los Angeles, Jakarta, and Warsaw. As of February 14, Season 2 had 14.25 billion owned social impressions, eclipsing Netflix’s biggest Instagram and TikTok posts ever. As a result, Squid Game Season 2 captured the most premiere-week views of any Netflix show in history. It spent eight consecutive weeks in the Netflix Global Top 10, amassing 185.2 million views in that time, and quickly became the streamer’s third-most-popular show of all time, after Wednesday and Squid Game Season 1. The marketing strategy behind the show’s second season is a case study in how to match and elevate fan-generated hype—and it offers a window into how Netflix operates as a global brand marketing organization. Jakarta [Photo: Netflix] Found in translation Squid Game is first and foremost a Korean show. That was the mantra, and that was the foundation from which Lee and Netflix approached the marketing of the show. “We have teams in 40 markets around the world, and it would be very American for us to say, ‘Okay, well, now that it’s the biggest show, we’re going to have our largest marketing and publicity teams in L.A. run the campaign,’” Lee says. “It was very important for me that the Korea team retained the strategy for how global teams were going to execute against it.” This was a major shift for the streamer’s most popular properties like Stranger Things, Wednesday, and Bridgerton, which are exported from the U.S. marketing organization to the rest of the world. Lee created a global task force to connect major markets with the Korean team. There were translators in every meeting, even though everyone spoke English, to make sure any cultural nuances weren’t overlooked. São Paulo [Photo: Netflix] Lee spent the better part of two years cultivating and setting up the relationships between the Korean team and other major markets, in order for the rollout of Season 2—and now the forthcoming Season 3—to be as strong as possible. The coordination wasn’t to make sure everyone followed the same playbook, but for the Korean team to really set the creative strategy and then the other marketing teams to take that and figure out the best way to express it in their markets. “Creative strategies and creative platforms is the starting point, where everything emanates from, but where you can deviate across markets is in partnerships, or media placements and things like that,” Lee says. “So it was really important for us to spend a lot of time arguing and debating about that creative start point.” One debate was around the theme of choice in the second season, represented by a voting system that allowed players to choose to stay or leave after each game. The Korean marketing team felt that was the center point—that moral choice. Yet it wasn’t resonating with the other teams. “It’s important that when you’re dealing with different cultures and different languages, you have to find a creative start point that is literally so simple that any agency can run with it,” Lee explains. London [Photo: Netflix] This translated into the idea of choosing to participate being a major part in all the live experiences across markets. Runners in tracksuits raced up the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Brazilian fans competed in Squid Game-themed competitions. The brand threw a Squid Game-themed rave in London. “The nice thing about Netflix is that you can have a center creative strategy, but every market is going to have different flavors of how they activate with fans,” Lee says. Paris [Photo: Netflix] Playing the brand game When Season 1 of Squid Game dropped in 2021, there were no international brand partners or collaborations. And yet Vans slip-on sneakers sales increased almost 8,000%. Duolingo saw a 40% increase in Korean language learners. For Season 2, with plenty of lead time, Netflix lined up a laundry list of brand partners, including Puma for those green tracksuits, Call of Duty, Kia, limited-edition Crocs, Duolingo, and more. But just like the creative strategy, Lee says local markets were in charge of what brand collabs would work best for their audiences. “This is a global show, so you really could have global partners, but we also asked all the teams, ‘Who are important partners in your market?’” says Lee. The result was a mix of brands that wouldn’t normally be attached to a single property. In food alone, it was McDonald’s in Australia, Burger King in France, Domino’s in the U.S., and Carl’s Jr. in Mexico. KFC Spain sold more than 400,000 units from its exclusive Squid Game menu and brought in more than $4 million in sales during its four-week run—its most successful activation ever. “We just said, ‘Okay, what really matters for your market? Make sure you’re doing the most creative and the most fun way to engage with your fans.’ And I think that really worked,” Lee says. Netflix announced last month that Season 3 will launch in June, about six months after Season 2. Lee says this allows both the streamer and brand partners to better bridge that relatively short gap. “That short window is amazing for riding high off of Season 2 straight into Season 3 without wasting media dollars. We can just keep activating and engaging fans now through creative social,” Lee explains. Beyond that, the brand will keep momentum going with live experiences in Australia, New York City, and Seoul, as well as a video game on its platform. Warsaw [Photo: Netflix] Fans lead the way The biggest insight that helped Netflix’s Squid Game marketing strategy is one Lee says has already helped other shows and properties. Lee’s teams work to find the parts of a show fans gravitate to most, then create content, experiences, brand partnerships, and more around that. “Focus on the fans and really start organically, that is always the recipe for success for Netflix,” she says. For Squid Game Season 2, it was iconography like the tracksuits and Pink Guards, combined with the desire to participate in some (nonlethal!) version of the games. “The start point for Wednesday will be different than a comedy with Amy Schumer,” Lee says. “But I really think that the fans tell you what they want to see more of.” View the full article

SEO really has changed: SERPs are drowning in AI-generated content. Google’s algorithms seem biased towards big brands like Reddit. AI Overviews are siphoning clicks away from creators. Google is losing its monopoly on knowledge management as more people turn to…Read more ›View the full article

Meta’s Messenger has a new logo set in Facebook blue. The instant messaging app dropped the multicolor gradient used in its previous logo for a solid blue that matches the shade used by Meta’s flagship app. Some small, subtle refinements were also made to the lightning-bolt shape inside the Messenger logo’s word-bubble mark. Secondary versions of the logo appear in black or white. “We often refine our designs to enhance the look and feel of our products,” a Meta spokesperson tells Fast Company. “In this spirit, you’ll find that we’ve updated the Messenger color palette.” Online, some suggested the change was made because of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s comment that his company needed more “masculine energy,” or his hopes to get back to the feeling of “OG Facebook.” Regardless, the color change just so happens to be a delayed reflection of the app’s diminished cross-platform communications capabilities. [Images: Meta] Messenger was originally known as Facebook Chat, but Facebook spun its instant messaging services into a stand-alone app in 2014. The light-to-dark-blue gradient of the Messenger logo when it launched matched the gradient of Facebook’s logo at the time. In 2020, Messenger rebranded to the multicolor gradient that it used up until last month. The Messenger app’s colorful gradient went from blue to purple to orange and pink, colors that seemed to suggest a bridge from Facebook to Instagram; for a time, Messenger did allow users to chat across both platforms. That integration came as some speculated that Meta’s portfolio of apps were more tightly integrating to avoid being broken up. But by 2023, Meta killed Messenger’s cross-platform instant messaging capabilities. That change came just as Meta was arguing that certain European antitrust rules didn’t apply to Messenger because it was a Facebook feature instead of a stand-alone messaging app. Though Meta eventually did announce last year it would acquiesce to the EU’s Digital Markets Act and open up Messenger as well as its other messaging app, WhatsApp, to third-party chats for users in the European Union, the new Messenger logo suggests the company is still set on linking Messenger to Facebook. “Messenger is a messaging app from Facebook,” Messenger’s brand guide says. That connection is now made crystal clear with color. View the full article

A new consensus is growing within the scientific community about climate change: The goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050, as set out in the Paris Agreement, is probably out of reach. We’ve already experienced the first full calendar year beyond this threshold, with last year’s global average temperature being 1.6 C higher than that of the preindustrial era. And while a single year at this level isn’t enough to confirm without a doubt that the Paris goal is a goner, several recent scientific papers have come to the same unsettling conclusion that a new era of warming has already begun. How hot will things get within our lifetimes? The answer will be determined largely by how quickly we can wean ourselves off fossil fuels, and with greenhouse gas emissions still rising—and to new highs—this remains uncertain. But researchers can make an educated guess. Right now they say we’re on track for about 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century. That means that on average, the world will be about 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in 2100 than it was at the turn of the 20th century, or about 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is today. That may not sound like much, but a 5-degree rise will affect almost every aspect of human life, in ways both large and small. What will life be like in this much warmer world? Answering this question with any certainty is difficult, because so much depends on how the earth’s many complex and interconnected systems respond. But climate scientists agree a warmer future is a more dangerous one. “I like to think of good analogies,” says Luke Jackson, an assistant professor of physical geography at Durham University in the U.K. “So, if you imagine that scoring a goal represents an extreme event, then the larger the goal, the more likely you are to score. We’re widening the goal posts.” But if we want to try to get more specific, there are projections that are backed by science. These are some of the changes that are most likely, and their potential trickle-down effects. Endless summer In the Northern Hemisphere, summer will take up a larger chunk of the year by 2100, extending from about 95 days to 140 days. Summer-like temperatures will appear much earlier, cutting springtime short, and linger well into the fall. Winter will become warmer, too, though there’s some debate over whether extreme winter storms will actually become more common as the climate changes. In many places, the warmer seasons will be unbearable, with oppressive heat waves that last for weeks on end. Thanks to the urban heat island effect, cities will be especially hot. San Antonio, for example, could see six heat waves per year, with temperatures lingering around 95 degrees, sometimes for up to a month at a time. Farther north, New York City will get eight heat waves per year, some lasting as long as two weeks. For context, in the early 2000s New York averaged less than one heat wave annually. Air-conditioning will be a literal life-saver, and the number of people with air-conditioning will increase dramatically. (Paradoxically, all these new air conditioners are likely to contribute even more greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere.) Still, heat-related deaths will continue to rise to 20,000 annually in the U.S., and that’s a conservative estimate. At 5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, the share of the world’s population living in areas outside the “human climate niche” (the temperature range at which human life can thrive) would grow from 9% to 40%. Low- and middle-income countries would be disproportionately affected. In India, the most populated country in the world, some 600 million people will feel unprecedented heat outside this niche. Other hard-hit countries will include Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Sudan, and Niger. The Arctic is predicted to be “practically ice-free” during summertime. This will accelerate warming even more, and also threaten the homes, livelihoods, and cultures of millions of people in Arctic regions, to say nothing of the wildlife and ecosystems. Fires and Disease By 2100, the number of extreme fires could increase 50% globally. The boreal forests of Canada, Alaska, and Russia will be especially vulnerable. Events like the 2023 Canadian wildfires, which burned more than 37 million acres and sent plumes of smoke billowing across the U.S., will become more common. At the same time, we’ll likely get better at forecasting and tracking wildfires, and, out of pure necessity, more cities will have clean air shelters with filtration systems where people can be protected from wildfire smoke. There will likely be a rise in mosquito-borne illnesses like dengue, Zika, West Nile, and yellow fever, as more warmth will mean more days during which viruses can spread. The “peak transmission period” for West Nile currently lasts about three months per year in Miami, but would likely increase to about five months. Across much of the Global South, temperatures will become too hot for malaria to spread, but conditions for this disease would become more favorable in other parts of the world, including Europe, North America, and Central Asia. According to the World Resources Institute, “As occasional reports arise of locally acquired malaria in Europe and the U.S., there is increasing concern that malaria could creep into places that haven’t seen it in living memory.” Sinking cities In a scenario of 5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, the ice sheets and glaciers will continue to melt, and the sea water will warm and expand. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in this scenario sea levels could rise about 2 feet on average across the globe by 2100. This “will put at risk decades of human development progress in densely populated coastal zones which are home to one in seven people in the world,” says Pedro Conceição, director of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report Office. The effect will be more extreme in areas that already have higher-than-average sea levels, such as the U.S. East Coast, Japan, and the west coast of South America. New York City, for example, could see water levels rise more than 3 feet by the end of the century. High-tide flooding will become a regular nuisance in many places, with water seeping into city streets and shop fronts every day for a few hours before receding, making it increasingly difficult to live or do business near the waterfront. Flooding from extreme storms like hurricanes will also become more frequent. “Roughly speaking, the vast majority of global coastlines are going to experience a present-day 100-year event every year,” Jackson says. “Today’s extreme event becomes tomorrow’s normal event.” For many low-lying island nations, the challenge of higher seas and more intense tropical storms will be existential. The U.N. projects that the Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Netherlands, Saint Martin, Seychelles, Turks and Caicos, and Tuvalu will see at least 5% of their territories permanently inundated by the end of the century. Most of the populations of these regions live within a few miles of the shoreline, putting them in grave danger. At the same time that sea levels are rising, coastal megacities that sit on river deltas—like New Orleans, Houston, and Shanghai—will sink as more water is pumped out of the ground for things like drinking and irrigation, causing the sediment to compact. “This is a massive concern for our global megacities,” Jackson asserts. “There’s a real sting in the tail with that one, because these are places which are some of the most densely populated locations on Earth. In many locations, there are inadequate coastal protections to deal with it, and the length of time it would take to build coastal defenses in order to accommodate for this problem is, frankly, not achievable.” Indonesia is already experiencing this, and has planned to relocate its capital city of Jakarta entirely rather than try to keep the water at bay. Other populations may eventually follow. After all, “retreat is a form of adaptation,” Jackson says. Sea levels will continue to rise for centuries, according to the IPCC, “and will remain elevated for thousands of years.” Food shortages Flooding, heat stress, and changing weather patterns will make it harder to grow crops and raise livestock. One estimate suggests up to 30% of the world’s food production could be at risk by 2100 if temperatures rise by 6.6 degrees Fahrenheit. At 5 degrees, the percentage may be slightly lower, but still devastating for millions of people. According to the World Bank, “about 80% of the global population most at risk from crop failures and hunger from climate change are in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.” The threat of malnutrition will stalk these populations. In other regions, like the U.S. and Europe, problems with food will be annoying at first and grow over time, says Kai Kornhuber, a research scientist studying future climate risks at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, and an adjunct assistant professor at the Columbia Climate School. “It starts with these small nuisances, like your favorite vegetable is not available anymore for a week or so because there was a huge flood or a heat wave or wildfire in Spain, for instance,” he says. “These things are already happening, right?” Gradually, lower yields for staple crops like corn, rice, and wheat could become the norm. One analysis projects that as early as 2030, Iowa could see corn production plummet 25% due to climate change, Minnesota’s soybean yield could drop as much as 19%, and wheat production in Kansas could fall 9%. Without adaptation, those numbers will continue to rise through 2100, threatening farmers’ livelihoods, as well as food supply chains and nutrition in the U.S. “It’s not only crops and livestock that are affected,” says Gerald Nelson, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s College of Agriculture, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences. “The agricultural workers who plant, till, and harvest much of the food we need will also suffer due to heat exposure, reducing their ability to undertake work in the field.” Soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and the collapse of ecosystems due to climate change will leave plants more vulnerable to disease and further exacerbate the risk of crop failure. Food prices around the world will rise. In fact, this is already happening: In 2023, extreme weather was the main driver of food price volatility. Researchers say that between now and 2035, global food prices could rise by up to 3% every year because of climate change. Mass migration and increased conflict It’s difficult to know what human migration patterns will look like in the years to come, but many people will have little choice but to move out of rural areas or across borders to find work, food, and a viable human habitat. These mass migrations are likely to trigger conflict and confusion. Attempts to enter the U.S. through the southern border will rise as populations in the “dry corridor” in Central America face food insecurity. Even the idea of where a country’s borders lie could be thrown into question. “The borders of your country are defined, at least along their coasts, by the position of high tide,” Jackson explains. “If your coastline moves inland [due to sea level rise] your economic zone is going to move too.” This is all very bleak, I know. And it’s only scratching the surface. But the enduring good news is that we can still change the future. Indeed, we already have. Just 10 years ago, scientists were forecasting a global temperature rise of 3.6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century—or 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Since then, new government policies, and the meteoric rise of renewable energy, seem to have made a dent. Still, there is much more to be done. “The world will not end like a computer game by the end of the century,” Kornhuber says. “It’s going to continue afterwards, and temperatures and extreme weather will continue to get worse until we’ve managed to phase out fossil fuels.” View the full article

Make UK chief calls for support for small businesses as Europe faces pressure from US to shoulder security costView the full article

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency faces a legal challenge after approving a controversial plan to include radioactive waste in a road project late last year. The Center for Biological Diversity filed the challenge last month in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals under the Clean Air Act. The advocacy group says the federal agency has prohibited the use of phosphogypsum, a radioactive, carcinogenic, and toxic waste generated by the fertilizer industry, in road construction since 1992, citing an “unacceptable level of risk to public health.” The legal challenge is centered on a road project proposed at the New Wales facility of Mosaic Fertilizer, a subsidiary of the Mosaic Co., some 40 miles east of Tampa. The EPA approved the project in December 2024, noting the authorization applied only to the single project and included conditions meant to ensure the project would remain within the scope of the application. But Ragan Whitlock, Florida staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, feared the project could lead to more roadways built with the toxic waste. “Part of what makes this process so alarming, it’s not just a one-off science experiment,” he said. “It’s being billed as the intermediate step between laboratory testing and full-scale implementation of the idea. So our concern is that whatever methodology is used for this project will be used for national approval down the road.” Phosphogypsum contains radium, which as it decays forms radon gas. Both radium and radon are radioactive and can cause cancer. Normally, phosphogypsum is disposed of in engineered piles called stacks to limit public exposure to emissions of radon. The stacks can be expanded as they reach capacity or closed, which involves draining and capping. More than 1 billion tons of the waste is stored in stacks in Florida, with the fertilizer industry adding some 40 million tons every year, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. Mosaic aims to construct a test road near its Florida stack with four sections, each made with varying mixtures of phosphogypsum. The waste would be used in the road base, which would be paved over with asphalt. University of Florida researchers would be involved in the study. Most of the comments the EPA received in response to the proposal opposed the use of phosphogypsum in road construction in general and criticized the current methods for managing the waste, but the federal agency said these comments were outside the scope of its review. The agency declined to comment on pending litigation. “The review found that Mosaic’s risk assessment is technically acceptable, and that the potential radiological risks from the proposed project meet the regulatory requirements,” the EPA stated in the Federal Register dated December 23, 2024. “The project is at least as protective of public health as maintaining the phosphogypsum in a stack.” Mosaic has faced scrutiny in the past after a pond at its Piney Point site leaked and threatened to collapse in 2021, forcing the release of 215 million gallons of contaminated water into Tampa Bay. Mosaic did not respond to a request for comment on the new litigation. —By Amy Green, Inside Climate News This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News. It is republished with permission. Sign up for its newsletter here. View the full article