Fast Company

Why on earth do people want to put data centers in space?

It’s all about power and cooling. The chips that run AI models require a lot of electrical power, and our electrical grid will be seriously stretched to accommodate the wave of new AI data centers now being built or planned. Data centers, in fact, will account for almost half of U.S. electricity demand growth between now and 2030.

In space, there’s ample solar power for running AI servers. In the right orbit, solar energy is effectively continuous and more powerful than on Earth. Solar panels can collect about eight times as much energy in space as they can on Earth, and they need little battery storage.

That means no need for the terrestrial power grid, which will be challenged to accommodate the data center power demand of the future. The output of AI models running on the chips can then be beamed down to Earth by laser or radio. Proponents of orbiting data centers believe early test flights are the start of “solar-powered compute swarms.”

The orbital compute idea gained steam last year when Jeff Bezos said during a fireside chat in Italy that data centers “will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7.” The idea caught on within the investment community, as well as with a number of startups. The narrative continued to grow, leading Elon Musk to make space computing a leading ambition of SpaceX.

The idea also has plenty of critics, who argue that the economics remain daunting and that some of the supposed advantages of space, especially easier cooling, fall apart under closer scrutiny. But with major tech companies investing in orbital computing, and a growing crop of startups testing the technology, the push to find out whether it can actually work is only getting started.

Testing has begun

Last week, Google launched four of its homegrown Tensor processing units (TPUs) into orbit to test the in-space compute concept. The TPUs will orbit Earth aboard a solar-powered Planet Labs satellite. They were delivered into space on an uncrewed SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on October 1. (Alphabet holds an $82 billion stake in SpaceX.)

The launch and chip testing are part of the Project Suncatcher initiative Google announced in November 2025. Ultimately, Google wants to run AI workloads on tight clusters of dozens of satellites linked by free-space lasers.

Starcloud has already flown an Nvidia H100 into space and is talking about assembling larger chip clusters and, eventually, multi-satellite constellations. The company’s CEO, Philip Johnston, has argued that hosting servers in space avoids delays and queues on the power grid; removes the need for water cooling, a key point in the political debate over data centers; and avoids fights over land rights.

“The lowest-cost place to put AI will be space,” Elon Musk said at Davos earlier this year, “and that will be true within two years, three at the latest.” In September Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX president and COO, said the company aims to launch the first purpose-built orbital data center satellites in late 2027. SpaceX has filed with the Federal Communications Commission to launch up to a million satellites.

Nvidia has announced a space-grade Vera Rubin module, and Blue Origin has filed for a 51,600-satellite orbital data center network. Meanwhile, a handful of startups, led by Starcloud and Cowboy Space, are building small data center satellites that will run AI models for customers on the ground.

A lot to prove

Many industry experts say the economics of space-based data centers may not make sense for a long time, if ever. That’s partly because, despite the best efforts of SpaceX and Blue Origin, rocketing stuff into space is still very expensive, and payload capacities are constrained.

Skeptics, including engineers writing in IEEE Spectrum, World Economic Forum pieces, Brookings, and independent analyses, argue that even in space, cooling is a big problem. AI chips can run pretty hot, so a lot of heat must be carried away from them. Otherwise, they stop working or their lifespan shrinks. Space is very, very cold, so chips in orbit won’t heat up nearly as much, the thinking goes.

In Earth-based data centers, air and water do almost all the cooling. Fans and liquid loops quickly carry heat away from the chips. But because space is a vacuum, neither method works. Almost no air, and no water, can flow past the chips.

That leaves only radiation to dump heat into the surroundings, like the way an oven burner might transfer some heat to a hand held 2 feet above it. The satellite has to have big surfaces, called radiators, that get warm and shed the heat as infrared light. And those surfaces shed heat slowly compared with air or water cooling.

In Google’s “Suncatcher” tests, the Trillium TPU chips will run only short Gemini queries for limited stretches before shutting down to cool off.

A Saarland University paper called “Dirty Bits in Low-Earth Orbit” argues rocket launch and reentry emissions alone would cancel out any gains from getting data centers off Earth.

Space junk

Clutter and orbital debris could also impede the viability of chips in space. Adding tens or hundreds of thousands of new satellites raises the chance of collisions and resulting debris. Some critics worry this could lead to Kessler Syndrome, where low Earth orbit gets so crowded with satellites and debris that a single collision creates thousands of fragments that hit other objects and create more fragments, setting off a chain reaction. European Space Agency debris reports already show crowded LEO bands, with new low-orbit communication satellites mostly to blame.

At least one commentator has called the space-based data center idea harmful because it distracts investors from very real power bottlenecks for AI data centers and postpones tackling difficult questions about the limitations of terrestrial power.

Small experimental compute-in-orbit systems are real and flying, but the gigawatt-scale “data centers in space” concept remains a research bet with major economic, technical, and sustainability barriers to overcome.

Consumer confidence is feeble, gas prices remain high, the labor market has the jitters, there’s war in the Middle East, and AI doomerism has become part of pop culture. So . . . time to book a cruise?

Apparently so. This week Carnival, the largest cruise line, reported record results—third quarter revenue of $8.4 billion, well ahead of expectations—and, more intriguingly, all-time high bookings for 2027. With customer deposits totaling $7.6 billion in the third quarter, up almost 7% over last year, Carnival says it is roughly half booked for 2027. And 2028 bookings are also ahead of past pace. Notably, the company points out the spike is due to increased demand and earlier-than-usual bookings, not discounts.

On the company earnings call, CEO Josh Weinstein told investors that Americans’ leisure mentality is “catching up” to a European mindset. “Vacations are sacrosanct. And they will take them in good times and in bad,” he said.

Still, the robust results may seem counterintuitive in an economically risky period—and just a few years after the COVID-19 pandemic idled basically the entire industry. Not long ago, the whole idea of sharing space for days on end with thousands of strangers sounded vaguely nightmarish. But the industry as a whole has bounced back. Among Carnival’s chief rivals, Royal Caribbean is arguably an even stronger all-around operator on pricing, margins, and advance bookings; Norwegian is comparatively more cautious and uneven, but lately performing well. News of Carnival’s impressive quarter boosted those competitors’ stock prices, too.

There are some practical reasons for this. Even at higher rates, cruise pricing still appeals to consumers attracted to the bundle of lodging and entertainment—and that’s particularly true if they want to lock in that budget in advance, a perk in a volatile economic moment. Meanwhile, Carnival has benefited from the cruise sector’s broader recovery from its pandemic nadir. The trade group Cruise Lines International Association reported 37.2 million cruise passengers in 2025 and forecast 38.3 million in 2026, compared with 34.6 million in 2024. And that’s been happening despite the backdrop of rising fares.

More broadly, and in line with Weinstein’s “sacrosanct” vacation analysis, leisure consumers have come to prize travel and experiences. This is partly an echo of the YOLO economy trend declared in the pandemic era—the You Only Live Once risk-embracing ethos born in response to frustrating lockdown rules. For some, there was a shift from adventure-aversion to craving the in-person, high contact, and real.

The classic cruise, however packaged and planned it may be, offers some version of that direct experience—and that’s what’s selling. Cruisers are booking farther ahead than in prior years, causing some high-demand journeys to sell out early; that helps keep fares higher, nudging some to book ahead even further in a virtuous (for Carnival) cycle. (Carnival doesn’t disclose which of its specific routes are in most demand, but in the earnings call indicated that Caribbean routes and Northern Europe and Alaska “coolcation” destinations have been popular lately.)

There are caveats for the cruise business, of course. Higher fuel prices cut into profits, and geopolitical risk affects itineraries and routes. Cruise demand has been historically cyclical, with weak employment and low consumer confidence often leading to pricing pressure and eventually reduced bookings. Before COVID, cruises were one of travel’s fastest-growing segments for decades, but they suffered revenue setbacks in the 2008–09 financial crisis.

But this time has been different. Advance bookings have translated to steady nondiscounted prices and high occupancy. Both the practical and emotional appeal of booking an adventure in advance, and having something to look forward to, seem to outweigh any cautionary instincts that may have held cruisers back in the past. In other words, the cruise business isn’t thriving despite the fact that we live in a world of looming catastrophe and risk. It’s thriving because that’s the world we live in.

The U.S. government has pitched an obscure accounting rule change that has ignited a firestorm of opposition. If enacted, its effects might be felt from the capital markets to your retirement savings account.

At issue is a proposal by the Securities and Exchange Commission that would scrap a long-standing requirement for registered companies to disclose their earnings every three months. Instead, they would have the option to do so only every six months.

The agency says its proposal has two goals: One is to reduce a company’s compliance costs needed to prepare financial statements; the other is to promote longer-term planning rather than a short-term fixation on earnings. A final decision is expected by late 2026.

These ideas may sound in the weeds to the average American, but the proposal has prompted opposition that is literally record-breaking ever since it was released for comments in May 2026. To date, more than 280,000 letters have come in, with the vast majority against. By comparison, one study that covered 417 different proposals over 30 years tallied more than 65,000 letters total.

I’m an accounting professor who has constructed a tracker that lets people scour the SEC docket and decipher the general sentiment of these comments. I found that the main driver of this hostility is concern that less-frequent reporting would make it harder for investors to monitor companies’ performance and decision-making, because key information is withheld for longer periods.

This reduction in transparency carries another risk as well: It would likely make it more expensive for companies to raise capital. Once external monitoring is reduced, investors may demand a higher rate of return because they have less information about a company’s health. That means companies would need to pay more for that uncertainty, whether through selling shares, borrowing from lenders, or issuing bonds.

In short, there’s a trade-off between the cost of capital and transparency.

A tsunami of opposition

If a business wants to be a publicly traded company, it has to register with the SEC, which governs and regulates this process. Once registered, the company has to disclose its financial performance every three months, a requirement that has held since 1970.

Whenever the agency issues a new rule, it opens it up to comments first, just like other government agencies do. That feedback is meant to shape the final rule before it becomes codified.

What’s unusual in this case is the overwhelming degree of opposition—more than 99% of all comments, many from retail and individual investors, according to my tracker.

“My husband worked for Enron. We lost most of our retirement savings when their fraudulent activity came to light,” wrote one commenter. “We were still young enough to make some of that income back, but we knew many retirees who ended up working into their 80’s. Quarterly reporting is a gate keeper. Keep it.”

Wrote another: “I rely on quarterly reporting for the same reason your child gets a quarterly report card. . . . There the metaphor ends, because a good teacher can catch failing performance and course correct with parents long before report cards are issued. Investors do not have that luxury.”

Some point out that the commission’s claim of company savings on compliance costs is overblown. The estimated average savings, according to the proposal, is around $200,000 a year per firm, which is a drop in the bucket for a typical public corporation.

But more broadly, the comments reveal how much this rule could matter to ordinary investors. Retirement savings, through 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts, are directly exposed to company performance, whether or not the fund in question is diversified. That means any reduction in financial transparency has direct implications on how the investments of the funds are monitored.

That risk was laid out in a letter from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, or SIFMA. The trade group wrote that the estimated net savings “could be offset or outweighed by an increase in the cost of capital as investors demand higher risk premia for less timely information.”

Federated Hermes, an asset manager, also pointed to this scenario: “Issuers that elect semiannual reporting may face signaling risks, as investors could interpret such a choice as reflecting reduced transparency. This may affect analyst coverage and cost of capital.”

Companies weigh in

As for the companies themselves, it’s too early to say whether they would take advantage of the six-month option. But several have said they would choose to report less frequently.

Drugmaker Eli Lilly is one example, making clear its preference in its official comment, while letters from Financial Executives International, an industry lobby, stated that 58% of the member companies it surveyed suggested they would change.

For its part, the commission is still evaluating all the feedback before its leadership takes a vote. Traditionally, it’s led by five commissioners, with three representing the party in power and two from the opposition. In this case, however, the two Democratic seats in the minority are currently vacant, and one Republican seat is about to be vacated.

With so few votes on hand, the commission may in fact change its rules so that this proposal could clear with support from only two commissioners. On September 30, 2026, it suggested a rule change so that the two votes would suffice.

For now, SEC Chair Paul Atkins seems undeterred and has stated that the commission is moving ahead.

How many companies will make the move given the concerns laid out in the comments, however, remains an open question.

As the SEC’s own Investor Advisory Committee, an independent body, put it: “The evidence does not support the view that short-termism is a major problem for U.S. public companies today, nor is there strong evidence to support the view that costs for public companies would be significantly reduced.”

Tzachi Zach is a professor of accounting at The Ohio State University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Wherever Marci Bakely went, her ex-boyfriend seemed to know. When the Georgia single mother drove to the grocery store or a date, he often texted within minutes.

According to a Washington Post investigation, Bakely’s ex-boyfriend, Braselton Police Chief Michael Steffman, searched her license plates and those of her teenage daughter roughly 600 times through Flock Safety, a company that makes and operates networks of automated license plate readers, or ALPRs.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested Steffman in November 2025 on charges of stalking, harassment, and misuse of an ALPR. He was found dead before trial.

Bakely’s case is not unique. The Post identified at least 50 officers accused of misusing ALPRs, including 26 who used Flock’s cameras to spy on current or former partners or people they hoped to meet. Its investigation has since identified at least 100 police department employees charged with or accused of misuse.

Flock says these people represent a tiny share of its more than 140,000 monthly users and that permanent audit logs help uncover misconduct.

But these abuses required no hacking or stolen credentials. Each user walked through the front door.

I’m a scholar of criminal procedure and I direct a school devoted to forensics. I believe the controversy over ALPRs points to a defect in the surveillance system’s architecture, not just the criminality of some of its users.

A search engine for movements

Flock cameras capture a vehicle’s plate, location, and distinguishing marks down to dents or a bumper sticker. AI can sort license plate photographs by date taken. Police departments across the network can then conduct searches without warrants or supervisory approval.

In September 2026, news outlets Wired and 404 Media analyzed data that hackers had copied from one Flock camera. About 21 days of logs contained roughly 50,200 vehicles and 1.6 million images. The software detected people and bicycles, and it even isolated an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag. Flock said it lacked enough information to assess the hackers’ technical claims about security vulnerabilities in the camera.

Flock says customers control their data, yet a department that leaves sharing enabled may not know who is looking. In 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection accessed more than 80,000 cameras during an undisclosed nationwide vehicle-tracking pilot, including one police department’s cameras without its knowledge.

Logs record misconduct only after it happens, and only if someone reads them. Indianapolis police did not regularly audit Flock searches until The Washington Post flagged thousands of questionable inquiries by one officer. A systemwide audit found alleged misuse by four more officers. Other police departments likewise learned of officers’ misuse from reporters.

Flock’s August 2026 changes shorten recommended data retention from 30 days to 7 days and require misuse detection and case codes to document searches. But customers may retain data longer, emergencies may bypass case codes, and entering a case number can be done without judicial approval.

Examples of user overreach

Flock’s architecture turns local cameras into a cross-jurisdictional surveillance network that agencies that never purchased the cameras may query.

Public records from Danville, Illinois, revealed more than 4,000 searches by federal agencies, including some with a potential immigration-enforcement focus, although U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had no Flock contract.

A 2026 study similarly found 11,935 immigration-related searches in partial records from eight college police departments. Federal immigration agencies sometimes accessed campus camera data without campus officials’ knowledge.

The network also enables searches in other legally contested areas. In May 2025, a Texas sheriff’s office searched more than 83,000 cameras for a woman who had self-managed an abortion. The logged reason was “had an abortion, search for female.” The search reached Illinois, where state law forbids sharing plate data to enforce another state’s abortion ban. The sheriff called it a welfare check. Whatever the motive, one deputy triggered a national dragnet without independent review.

These examples reflect more than individual misuse. The platform makes the cameras easy to use by a second party, difficult to monitor, and hard to control once local cameras are connected.

Why the Fourth Amendment matters

The law remains unsettled on ALPR use.

In October 2025, a Virginia appeals court held that police officers needed no warrant to retrieve three images spanning seven minutes from Norfolk’s 172-camera network because they showed vehicles, not people. But later findings about Flock’s people-detection capabilities weaken that distinction. Analysis of the hacked camera showed that its software could identify a person and record that person’s location within an image.

In January 2026, a federal judge held that Norfolk’s then-176-camera network did not violate Fourth Amendment protections. The system did not capture anyone’s entire movements, the court reasoned, although it photographed two plaintiffs’ vehicles 475 and 325 times over four and a half months. The ruling is being appealed.

In 2018 the Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that acquiring seven days of historical cellphone location records generally requires a warrant because they can reconstruct someone’s past movements. Flock’s architecture raises a related but unresolved question: Its database can also reconstruct movements, yet police officers may search it without a warrant.

Both Norfolk rulings predate the Supreme Court’s June 2026 decision in Chatrie v. United States, which held that police conducted a search under the Fourth Amendment when they obtained two hours of stored Google location history. The court did not decide whether the search was lawful. Instead, it returned the case to the lower court to determine whether the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements.

That did not make the access automatically unconstitutional: The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches, not all searches. But the police generally need a warrant supported by probable cause once their conduct is classified as a search.

The Chatrie decision distinguished vehicles exposed to public view from phone-location data that can follow someone into a home or other sensitive place. But it also expressed concern about comprehensive archives that can be searched retroactively. A license plate reader network can create a similar archive of a driver’s public movements.

The constitutional question in Norfolk, therefore, turns not only on the seven minutes retrieved, but also on the surveillance power of the 172-camera network.

Enforceable limits

The Indianapolis cases expose the limits of internal controls in Flock’s system. Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears said many proposed guardrails would not have prevented the conduct. He pointed to the need for independent or judicial oversight.

I believe five safeguards could preserve Flock’s benefits while curbing abuse:

1. Judicial authorization for retrospective regional or national searches based on individualized suspicion, preferably a probable-cause warrant, with an emergency exception.
2. Technical access controls restricting immigration and reproductive-health searches.
3. Deletion of data after a short period.
4. Opt-in interstate data sharing, rather than by default.
5. Independent audits of search logs and device security.

Flock’s new safeguards show that the company concedes that design matters, but private settings cannot substitute for laws. It’s not a matter of making sure officers follow the rules. It’s about creating enforceable limits.

Henry F. Fradella is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Panda Express built an empire out of a single family’s restaurant. Now its founders are focused on helping their employees build something of their own.

Privately held and employing around 55,000 people, the Chinese food chain generates roughly $7 billion in annual sales and has grown into America’s largest Asian restaurant brand, with more than 2,500 locations across 49 states and a presence in 12 countries.

Behind that growth are two cofounders whose own paths to the U.S. weren’t so different from the immigrant employees they’re now trying to help. Andrew Cherng was born in China and raised in Taiwan and Japan before immigrating to the U.S. in 1966. Peggy Cherng was born in Myanmar and grew up in Hong Kong.

The two met at the University of Missouri and went on to become co-CEOs together, opening their first Panda Express in Glendale, California, in 1983. The restaurant initially launched as a more relaxed, faster-paced version of Panda Inn—the full-service Chinese restaurant Andrew started with his father roughly a decade earlier.

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Andrew told Inc. that the company’s mission has always extended beyond building a successful restaurant chain.

“Building Panda Restaurant Group for the past 50 years has been our American dream come true, and we are deeply committed to helping our associates achieve their own,” he said. “Homeownership is a major milestone for many of our team members, so we proactively equip them with the tools to reach it.”

Yet, over the past decade, that American dream of homeownership has slipped out of reach for millions of middle-class families. According to Gallup, U.S. homeownership has averaged just 61% since 2012, down from 70% between 2001 and 2011.

The pipeline of new buyers has thinned out even further, with the National Association of Realtors finding that first-time buyers made up just 21% of all homebuyers this year, the lowest share since the group began tracking the data in 1981.

That gap is even wider for immigrants. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reported foreign-born households had an average homeownership rate of just 56% in 2021, well below the native-born rate. That figure also varies widely by country of origin, ranging from a high of 73% among Vietnamese households down to just 29% among households from the Dominican Republic.

Despite the many obstacles standing between first-time buyers and homeownership, Andrew wants his Panda Express employees to focus on what’s possible rather than what’s holding them back.

To that end, Panda Express employees can access financial wellness benefits through the company’s Total Rewards Package, including optional training on budgeting, saving for a down payment, and homebuying seminars led by Panda’s in-house real estate legal team, part of a broader support system that also covers healthcare and higher education.

“This whole-person approach ensures associates can build sustainable careers and long-term financial security,” Andrew said.

That effort appears to be paying off: 63% of Panda Express managers are homeowners, with a median age of 34, above the national homeownership rate of roughly 35% for U.S. adults younger than 35.

“When you align closely with team members to help them reach their individual goals, strong retention follows,” Peggy told Inc.

At a moment when companies are cutting benefits, Panda Express’s bet on homeownership stands out. It may become a harder one for competitors to ignore.

—By Amaya Nichole, News Writer

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This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a night owl. Nick at Nite reruns were my favorite lullaby as a teen, and although I now opt for streaming shows and audiobooks as an adult, my experience remains the same—when the world goes to sleep, I’m wide awake. 

As someone who struggles to rise before 9:30 a.m., I’ve always wondered: Is the grass really greener for those who wake up with the morning dew? Lately, sleep research has me thinking about that even more.

After all, poor sleep habits exacerbate health and safety hazards on the job, hamper work performance, and magnify a number of physical health risks. Recent studies have also linked late sleep schedules with higher mental health vulnerability and more work-life balance issues—meaning, people who got “enough” sleep, even though they stayed up late, still suffered ill effects. But for people who are natural night owls like me, simply going to bed and waking up earlier isn’t always an option. 

What’s a night owl to do? For everyone scratching their heads alongside me, here’s what the research really says—and what experts recommend we do about it.

The night owl’s struggle

A Stanford University study from last summer looked at health data from more than 70,000 adults and linked going to sleep later with poorer mental health, both in the short term and over time, even for night owls who got enough sleep. In other words, my favorite excuse for staying up late—the idea that we should all follow our natural sleep patterns for optimal health—didn’t seem to hold true. 

Lead study author Jamie Zeitzer, codirector of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences at Stanford Medicine, believes social isolation could play a role in this: “If you go to sleep at 3 in the morning, there are not that many people awake,” he says. Although the same goes for those who wake up at 5 a.m., early risers are alone at the time of day when, mentally, we tend to feel refreshed. Meanwhile, night owls get stuck in their heads after a day’s worth of stress. 

Still, “I don’t think that, intrinsically, there’s anything wrong with staying up late, especially if you’re an evening type,” Zeitzer says. He adds that some folks stay up late because of some external factor that’s also making them depressed, and says us night owls need to be especially mindful about mental health.  

Another study published in June in Sleep Health found that night owls had more work-life balance issues and displayed more symptoms of mental disorders, even after researchers adjusted for other health-related behaviors. 

The study’s lead author, Ilona Merikanto, university researcher for the Department of Public Health, University of Helsinki, explains: “That may be because your best performance is actually outside normal working hours,” she says. “Or maybe you haven’t been as alert during working hours and then couldn’t perform as well, and that bothers you.”

Riding your natural rhythms

Dr. Atul Malhotra, research chief of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, isn’t convinced night owls need to change anything, per se. “There are people that have a tendency to sleep late and wake up late, and that’s a natural tendency,” Malhotra says. As long as you’re “doing fine,” he says, “I don’t consider that a disorder.”

There’s a genetic component to everyone’s natural circadian rhythm, called a chronotype. And for some people, the variance is more extreme than others. (There’s a difference between being a night owl and being unable to sleep due to a sleep disorder like restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea, or insomnia, however. “If you think you have a problem, go see your doctor,” Malhotra says.)

Merikanto doesn’t recommend working against your natural rhythms. In her view, that could actually be one of the reasons some night owls experience health issues. “We can sort of flex around it, but how much that’s possible depends on the individual,” she says. “And when we get older, our flexibility narrows down.” 

Other experts argue that genetics are not the be-all, end-all for bedtimes. Malhotra says your chronotype is “not insurmountable.” Still, the more extreme your type is in either direction, the harder it can be to shift your sleep schedule.

Still, “enough” sleep isn’t just about getting a certain number of hours. According to Merikanto, night owls might need more sleep than their early-bird peers, and if they get it at the wrong time, it could be less refreshing. 

There’s also a big difference between staying up late reading your favorite book and burning the midnight oil to meet deadlines. If you’re staying up late for fun, the effects might feel less exhausting, especially emotionally, than if you’re staying up for work. But “if somebody’s falling asleep at 2 in the morning because of stress and anxiety and insomnia, that’s a very different problem,” Malhotra says. 

Bottom line, if you’re not feeling refreshed after sleep, something’s up.

Tips for night owls for better sleep

You can’t do anything about genetics. But if you’re a night owl concerned about sleep quality, you can adjust your habits to support healthier sleep.

1. Time your light exposure.
Light plays a huge role in setting our internal clocks, and many of us are getting bright light at all the wrong times.

“Some of us get up, get ready for work, throw sunglasses on, never really see any daylight, and then wind up in a building all day where you see no daylight,” says Dr. Matthew Epstein, a sleep specialist at Atlantic Health who recently developed a sleep hygiene questionnaire to assess patients’ sleep and support improved sleep health. “That, in itself, is a setup for not sleeping well.” Same goes for bright lights late at night. 

2. Put away the devices.
Be honest: Are you a night owl, or are you just addicted to doomscrolling? 

A few decades ago, TV broadcasts ended at 11 p.m., and the total absence of smartphones and laptops made it easier to fall asleep. “Now,” Epstein says, “there are a million things you can do to stay up late.” If you’re looking for ways to fall asleep faster, unplugging from all that blue light makes a huge difference. 

3. Don’t overdo the caffeine.
If you’re drinking coffee at 4 p.m. and wondering why you can’t sleep, remember that coffee has a half-life of five to six hours and can remain in the body for even longer than that. As much as some of us might love our afternoon joe, Epstein warns that it could be harming our sleep in the long run.

4. Try melatonin.
It can be helpful as a short-term sleep aid to help shift your sleep schedule, according to Malhotra. Just be sure to take it early enough. “If you normally go to sleep at 3 in the morning, taking melatonin at 2 in the morning is not going to do much,” he says. As with any supplement, speak with your doctor before taking melatonin.

5. Don’t try to go from “60 to zero.”
“A lot of people think that they can basically be ‘go, go, go,’ stressed out all day, and then like, ‘okay, and now I’m going to do yoga right before bed,” Zeitzer says. “That’s nice, but frankly, going from 60 to zero in the half hour before bed is really hard.”

Instead, Zeitzer recommends taking mental breaks throughout the day to de-escalate your stress gradually. The lower the baseline you’re coming down from, the easier it’ll be to relax once your head hits the pillow at night.

For happiness at work, there are few things better than a work bestie or friendly colleagues. But sometimes the best connections for getting the next job and advancing your career are actually the people you know less well and interact with less frequently.

Think of your contacts in concentric circles with you at the center. In the inner circles are people you know best: family, friends, and coworkers. In the circles that are farther from you are people known as weak ties. They are people you recognize and are friendly with, but you interact with them infrequently and your relationship is of limited emotional depth.

A comprehensive study of more than 20 million people over five years published in Science found that when people had more weak ties in their networks, they had greater career mobility. They applied for more jobs and were more likely to change jobs. And the study found that loose connections weren’t just related to mobility; they were the cause of it.

The people who aren’t part of your nearest circles have access to information that you and your close contacts don’t. They may know more about a certain job market or have a perspective on what it takes to get a certain role. And they know people they can introduce you to as well. This kind of information is critical for finding your next opportunity.

When you cultivate relationships with those who are more on the periphery of your network, you’re more likely to enjoy higher compensation, receive positive performance evaluations, and get more promotions. You’re also more likely to be exposed to different ways of thinking, generate better ideas, and be seen as more valuable, according to a study in the American Journal of Sociology.

So how do you establish and maintain weak ties?

1. Interact with new people

First, you can expand your number of weak ties by seeking out interactions with people you don’t know or don’t know well. Chat with the person who’s standing in line with you in the cafeteria at work or invite someone new to join you and your friend for lunch. Introduce yourself to the new person who is participating in your meeting and linger after the session to get to know them. You can also connect with people in your social media networks who are one or two degrees away from your first-tier contacts.

According to studies published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, when you have more frequent interactions with others and interact with both strong and weak ties, you increase your feelings of happiness, belonging, and well-being.

2. BE CURIOUS

When you’re getting to know someone, listen to their perspective and ask questions. People who are farther away from your inner circle will have different experiences and diverse vantage points. They may see things differently because they’re from a different generation or have different life experience or professional background. They can provide you with new ideas or help you connect dots in creative ways.

3. RECONNECT WITH DORMANT CONNECTIONS

You can also enhance the positive effects of weak ties by reconnecting with people you might have lost touch with. These types of weak ties are known as dormant connections. Examples would be a colleague who moved to a different company, or a friend who has moved away.

If you rekindle a relationship with someone you used to know well, you’re likely to benefit from trust and shared perspective, and you’re also likely to get information from them more quickly and efficiently compared with newer contacts. And the information you get may be unique or unexpected, giving you new ideas or especially helpful intel about opportunities, according to a study in Organization Science.

With a dormant connection, you get the benefits of having had a trusting relationship in the past and of their now more distant point of view, which provides fresh information.

4. STAY IN TOUCH

Overall, you’ll want to stay in touch with weak ties. You won’t connect with them regularly, but you might check in occasionally through social media or a quick text or email. You can let them know you’re thinking about them or acknowledge something you may have seen online that reminded you of them.

Reach out when they get a promotion or change jobs. Or send a note if you run into a mutual connection. These kinds of low-demand interactions are easy for you and require little of them. But they keep you on their radar screen.

Most importantly, keep your network evergreen. When you need help from your weak ties, it’s too late to begin cultivating them. Instead, it’s more effective to be proactive in staying in touch so your network is robust and expansive when you need it most. Build relationships with your work bestie, and value your connections that aren’t BFFs but are best for your career mobility.

Imagine leaving work early to collect your children, then logging back on after they are asleep. At 10 p.m., you send a few emails. You don’t expect anyone to answer until tomorrow, but your colleagues don’t necessarily know that.

Conventional wisdom says the solution is simple: Don’t send email after hours. But if you don’t, you’ll be behind because you left work early. On the other hand, you’re now creating the expectation that your team also works around the clock. The rule designed to protect flexible working also means everyone works all the time.

Why controlling email hours no longer works

Despite the proliferation of digital technologies, with artificial intelligence promising to make our working lives even more efficient, professionals are still struggling to stay on top of their inbox. Over the last decade or so, academics, practitioners, and policymakers have strongly encouraged maintaining robust email boundaries.

However, the reality of modern work is that it is not completely separable from home, our homes are not completely separable from our offices, and our online activity is often not clearly work-related or private. Flexible work makes uniform temporal boundaries problematic because protecting one person’s preferred work schedule can constrain another person’s flexibility.

Managing expectations about responsiveness

A common response to our email management problem is to set firmer boundaries: restricting sending or checking emails after hours, promoting “digital detoxes” during holidays, and introducing law to protect these policies. Although helpful in principle, such measures can be difficult to apply in practice and may create new tensions.

Flexible work promised to allow people to work whenever it works for them. An employee with parenting responsibilities might take time after dinner when their kids are in bed to catch up with emails, or really early in the morning before the kids get up. But this means their team members might be getting emails in the middle of the night and feel compelled to respond.

We call this the “flexibility paradox”: One person’s freedom to work flexibly can inadvertently constrain somebody else’s. Global teams face an additional “time zone trap.” There may simply be no time of day that falls within everyone’s working hours.

So, what could managers do in a practical sense? Teams could agree on reasonable response times for routine email communications; how urgent matters should be signaled and responded to; what tools, other than email, could be used and when; and how individual response habits silently shape collective norms. For example, some members consistently reply within minutes while others respond after longer delays. The former may create a false impression of urgency, whereas the latter may create uncertainty or anxiety for the sender.

Consequently, rather than managing when people are allowed to email, managers and organizations should manage what they should reasonably expect from one another.

Redesigning workflows, not just the inbox

While managing expectations can address part of the problem, our work highlights a more fundamental issue that makes email boundaries such a pressing problem: Are we perhaps overusing email?

Email has become more than a communication tool. It increasingly acts as an organizational infrastructure through which work is coordinated, creating an implicit expectation of continuous connectivity. When every deadline, decision, approval, status update, and document exchange travels through email, the inbox becomes the workflow. At that point, email overload is no longer primarily a communication problem; it is a work-design problem. 

We use the metaphor of the “invisible metronome” to describe how email sets the pace and rhythm of work. Email is technically asynchronous, but smartphones, notifications, and norms of rapid responsiveness can make it feel synchronous; once a message arrives, an implicit clock starts ticking. Email can therefore create an illusion of urgency, influencing when and how people turn their attention to work.

Our suggestion is an alternative approach that makes better use of digital tools that are available to organizations nowadays. Deadlines can be made visible in project calendars. Shared documents can be hosted in workspaces rather than being repeatedly circulated as attachments. Routine approvals can follow defined workflows. And synchronous communications can also take place when needed.  Email can then be reserved for documenting and similar purposes, rather than serving as the default mechanism for keeping work moving.

This also makes flexible work more effective. A well-designed asynchronous workflow should not depend on every colleague being continuously reachable. This shifts the focus from individual inbox discipline to organizational (re)design. Instead of continually trying to limit people’s availability in the name of flexibility, organizations should ask themselves if such a high volume of email activity is required in the first place, or whether additional digital technologies could be used systematically instead for specific purposes.

Making work sustainable for everyone 

In our recent work, we challenge the dominant emphasis on limiting email activity and instead shift attention toward managing expectations and redesigning work itself. Email overload is not simply an individual self-management problem; it can reveal deeper problems in how work is coordinated. A healthier approach to flexible work requires organizations to decouple communication from availability—and effective coordination from constant connectivity.

Nobody who’s remotely familiar with John Wilson’s funny, angsty HBO series How To with John Wilson will be surprised to discover that his debut feature documentary, The History of Concrete, is not really about concrete. Wilson introduces us to a guy who removes tattoos from corpses and mounts the dead inked skin as mementos for loved ones. He interviews a New York park official who details how to purge poops from public swimming pools. When the film touches on the subject of concrete, Wilson quickly pivots to another. He’ll do anything not to dwell on his nominal topic. He never wrestles with concrete’s mass, omnipresence, or effects on the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. The topic is too big for comfort, too demanding of his very modern quick, jump-cutting attention deficits.

If the point is that concrete defies sustained attention, it’s a good one.

Advertently or not, by the end of the film, Wilson reveals two of the most astonishing facts about the world’s most-used material: Concrete is largely unseen, and its invisibility endangers us all. Not because concrete itself is villainous, but because our lazy, distracted, often nonexistent engagement with it invites disaster.

[Photo: Magnolia Pictures] The everywhere material

The world produces 30 billion tons of concrete a year. The same material we rely on to protect us is also a major contributor to the climate crisis. Cement, the chemical binder that is one of concrete’s key ingredients, is tied to 8% of climate-warming carbon emissions, but concrete is essential for seawalls and other structures we will need to forestall damage from climate change. The yearly production of concrete tops all other building materials combined. Most of the world’s new concrete is used outside the U.S. and Europe, in China, India and other countries on the make.  

Wilson interviews some subjects who know their concrete facts. Just as they seem about to offer a bit of gobsmacking concrete information, the film cuts to something else, like the painting of a bubble-butted woman’s rear he spies on the back of a truck. Civilization may not hang on that, but it may fall due to our distraction.  

[Photo: Magnolia Pictures]

In reporting on concrete, I repeatedly meet people in the industry who cannot fathom why most people care so little about the material. In the U.S., construction, nearly all of which happens with concrete, is the fourth-largest sector in the economy. So what? It’s still boring, right? The cool kids don’t hover around concrete guys at parties anxious to hear about advances in concrete that make 167-story buildings possible or how new concrete mixes could absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, not emit it.

“Concrete is (almost) everywhere,” writes Julie Soleil Archambault, an anthropologist at Concordia University in Montreal. “It often passes unnoticed—too ubiquitous, too mundane, to warrant much attention. Sometimes, however, it does quite the opposite, especially when it fails to meet the expectations of durability invested in it, when it cracks and crumbles.”

In one segment, Wilson interviews a former New York City traffic commissioner. It’s “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz (uncredited), who coined the term “gridlock.” He paces under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Brooklyn Heights. Schwartz runs a finger along a “fossil,” an empty groove where some once-formidable rebar rusted out and vanished. Schwartz warns that such conditions cause big structures to collapse. “If something catastrophic happens in this area in the next few years,” he declares, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”  

The American Society of Civil Engineers grades civil infrastructure based on its structural integrity. The biggest concrete things, such as roads, dams and schools, get D+, meaning they are “poor” and “at risk.” It would take around $9 trillion to raise the country to a passable B. By not seeing concrete, we don’t see the vast world of deferred maintenance. Wilson moves on before Schwartz paints the bigger, scarier picture. Who likes to linger on a big and scary picture?

[Photo: Magnolia Pictures] Invisible ubiquity

There is a kind of blindness Wilson doesn’t touch on: concrete’s incalculable benefits. The history of concrete is also the history of modern industrial modernity. Want electricity? Clean water free of disease? Waste and storm water removal that prevents disease? Factories that do not burn down or shake too much? Fireproof schools and hospitals? Road with bridges? Ports? Trains above and subways below? Airports? Networks and data centers for the digital economy? Hardened defenses in battle zones or outside buildings vulnerable to attack? Concrete must get there first. By not seeing the magnitude of concrete, we don’t see the magnitude of the problems concrete successfully addresses. Or the problems it can no longer address if it fails due to negligence.  

Wilson’s detachment serves his narrative purpose in creating an entertaining film. Is his refusal to take concrete seriously frivolous, even negligent? He has said that he often cries over his subjects, meaning he sees more keenly than he lets on. The way concrete pulls the world together, makes the production of modern goods possible, and solves some of the world’s biggest challenges is, if one sees it, awesome to behold. So are its out-of-scale imperfections, most importantly its impact on our climate. That problem is already solvable, if we, as users and inhabitants of this everywhere material see concrete as plainly as we see poop in a pool. For all its arch blindness and distraction, the film may egg us to focus on a material that, like air and water, is all around and in need of care. 

One eventual hazard of really seeing concrete’s imprint everywhere isn’t that you crave distraction but that you can’t shut up about it. Concrete’s history, present and future, is our history, present and future. Post-production, Wilson may be getting there. When Jimmy Kimmel asked him why he focuses on weird stuff so far afield from the actual history of concrete, the filmmaker smiled and contradicted him. With concrete, he said, “you can do anything.”

Recently, I received an email solicitation from a PR company offering to help me promote my book. While I get these kinds of solicitation emails on occasion, this one impressed me with the level of detail it included about both my book and my career. Feeling pleased that someone had done their homework on me, I showed the email to my spouse.

He took one look at it and knew that it was a pitch generated by artificial intelligence. It was clear to him that the sender had asked an AI to craft a personalized pitch after trawling the internet for information about me.

When I received almost identical pitches from four other companies within the next two weeks, I realized the first message was just the vanguard of a new type of spam email.

Although the PR pitch I received wasn’t exactly a scam, it was the kind of solicitation that I usually delete with prejudice. The personalization-via-AI meant it bypassed my usually well-honed bull hockey detector—and it reminded me that there’s no level of intelligence, diligence, or stability that can guarantee someone will never get played. Unfortunately, as technology and scams continue to grow more sophisticated, we are all increasingly vulnerable.

But that doesn’t mean falling for a scam is inevitable. Understanding how modern scams work and recognizing the warning signs can help you avoid becoming the victim of a con. Here’s what you need to know.

New tech, old strategies

Reading through the Federal Trade Commission’s list of new scams is enough to make you nostalgic for the Nigerian prince emails of yore. From fake health insurance websites that proliferate during open enrollment every year to Roblox phishing that targets children to robocalls from AI voice clones that are nearly indistinguishable from the real person, fraudsters have many more tools in their arsenal to separate you from your money.

But even though current technology is more sophisticated than anything scammers had access to before, the strategies behind any fraud remain exactly the same. That’s because in every scam, the con artist needs to convince you that giving them what they want is the right thing to do—and there are only a few ways to accomplish that:

• Personalization: When a scammer seems to know details about your life, it can help them seem more trustworthy. They may use their knowledge to appeal to your vanity (like I experienced with the AI-generated PR pitch), to reassure you (like when a scammer knows who you bank with), or to frighten you (like when con artists pretend to be a family member in trouble).
• Friendliness: Scammers (and salespeople) exploit our manners, sociability, and empathy by using targeted friendliness. For example, back when credit card companies were allowed to market directly to college students, I once accidentally signed up for an unwanted card via a phone solicitation. The caller started by asking to verify some information, including my birthday. He then claimed his little sister had the same birthday. From there, I didn’t want to hang up on the guy who was so delighted that his sister and I had something in common.
• Urgency and scarcity: Feeling like you’re about to miss out on something tends to cloud your judgment. That’s why scams often include a ticking clock or a quickly vanishing product. It forces you to make a decision without considering the pros and cons or consulting with someone else.
• Emotion: Scammers know that emotional decisions tend to be reactive, and they use this against their victims. That’s why scams so often exploit the emotions that are most likely to short-circuit your logical thinking: fear, greed, and empathy.

New technology can make it easier for scammers to reach you and convince you of something that is untrue. But the scam itself must still use these basic strategies to work. Which means we always have the tools we need to protect ourselves.

The anti-scam checklist

Every time you travel by air, the pilot and copilot go through the preflight checklist, no matter how many times they have flown. The checklist ensures that no important details are missed. The safety of the plane and its passengers is too important to rely on the imperfect memory of fallible humans.

The best way to avoid scams is to adopt a similar checklist for your finances. Instead of relying on your imperfect brain to keep you safe, building these guardrails around your money can help protect you from even the most sophisticated of scams:

• Make your savings hard to access: This policy is a version of the old personal finance advice about freezing your credit card in a block of ice. Forcing yourself to wait before spending money is often all you need to come to your senses. So putting the bulk of your savings in an online savings account, rather than the same bank as your checking account, can be enough to protect you. It typically takes at least one business day for money to transfer from one bank account to another, and an online savings account does not usually come with an ATM or debit card. That means your money is available in a true emergency, but far enough away that it’s protected from scam-based spending.
• Have an accountability buddy: This could be an agreement with your spouse to discuss purchases over a certain dollar amount or a policy that you have to run every major financial decision past your financial adviser. If someone ever tells you not to discuss something with your accountability partner, treat that as a major red flag.
• Hang up and call back: Many scams begin with an unsolicited phone call from a legitimate-looking phone number. Make it your policy to hang up on the caller and place your own phone call to the main phone number of the agency or business. If there really is a problem with your credit card or Social Security benefit or if you have legitimately won a prize, you will be able to access that information via the phone call you initiate.
• Institute a 24-hour rule: There is no legitimate investment, financial problem, or government fine that can’t wait 24 hours. Cool off for one day before you make any financial decisions or take any action on an unanticipated problem or unsolicited call for money.
• Have contact information on hand for all of your loved ones: When scammers exploit our fear for our loved ones, it’s very difficult to respond rationally. But if you get a call from an unknown number or a “helpful” stranger claiming to be calling about your child or grandchild, hang up and reach out directly to your family member or anyone living in their household to find out what’s happening. If the original call is legitimate, you can always call back.
• Pretend to be your work nemesis: When scammers appeal to your ego, it’s easy to fall for the idea that this stranger truly appreciates everything that makes you awesome. But if you’re tempted to buy, invest, or otherwise accept the offer, imagine the same offer was going to someone you dislike. Would you still believe that the offer was legitimate? Or would you start asking questions?
• Ask yourself how you know something isn’t a scam: Before making a financial decision, ask yourself how you can know for sure that the opportunity isn’t a scam. If you can’t answer the question, don’t spend the money.

Embrace vigilance

It takes only a single moment of inattention or emotional dysregulation to give a scammer what they want. And the rise of difficult-to-detect fakes and other sophisticated scams makes it even harder to maintain your attention or rational thinking.

But creating systems for yourself—similar to the preflight checklist pilots use before every single flight—makes it more difficult to let your emotions drive and forces you to pause before making a decision. And that space between the scammer’s pitch and your decision is often all you need to stay safe.

Last month, Apple rolled out its long-awaited AI chatbot, dubbed Siri AI. The launch comes at a time when investors see AI as a must-have offering, while consumers are increasingly cautious about the effects that artificial intelligence will have on their lives and society at large.

As AI backlash mounts, it is the latter group who may be the least interested in—or most distrustful of—the new Siri AI. 

Siri AI is built on top of Google’s Gemini foundational models and is available on every iPhone 15 Pro and later running iOS 27. It is an ever-present chatbot and assistant that has indexed all the data on your iPhone and can understand what is displayed on your iPhone’s screen—and what you are doing with the device.

The good news is that if the new Siri AI doesn’t appeal to you, Apple has done something with it that other chatbot giants haven’t: built in a kill switch. Here’s how to use it, and what happens if you do.

What exactly happens if you disable Siri AI?

Before you understand what happens when you disable Siri AI, it helps to know how it differs from Apple Intelligence. 

Simply put, Apple Intelligence is the underlying artificial intelligence platform built into iOS. It provides system-wide AI features, such as generative writing tools, visual object recognition, and image generation across various apps. Siri AI, introduced in iOS 27, is an agent—a chatbot like ChatGPT—powered by and running on top of Apple Intelligence.

Siri AI has on-device access to your emails, messages, and other data, which can help it answer and carry out your highly personalized queries and commands (such as “Find that restaurant name that mom texted me about last month”). It can also pull real-time information from the web, such as stock quotes or news updates. Any conversation you have with Siri AI can be accessed in the new Siri chatbot app.

If you do choose to flip the Siri AI kill switch, you should understand that you aren’t shutting down Apple’s entire Apple Intelligence platform on your iPhone. Apple Intelligence will still be running in the background, which means AI features like generative writing tools, AI photo editing tools, and image generation tools will still work across the OS—and no, you can’t shut these off.

But you can shut off the new Siri AI agent. When you do that, Apple says you will lose the ability to carry out new conversations or continue existing ones with the Siri AI chatbot, though your old conversations will remain in the app. You won’t be able to issue voice commands to Siri (such as “Hey Siri, turn on my bedroom lights”). And the iPhone’s built-in Visual Intelligence feature, which lets your iPhone recognize objects and places in images, will be more limited.

How to use the kill switch

If you want to disable the new Siri AI agent on your iPhone, Apple makes it pretty easy:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap Siri.
3. Tap Turn Off Siri.
4. Tap the blue Turn Off Siri button.

Once you’ve done this, Siri AI will be disabled on your iPhone. However, as noted, Apple Intelligence-powered features, such as those in the Image Playground app, the AI editing tools in the Photos app, and the AI writing tools across myriad apps, will continue to work.

Should you flip the kill switch?

Recently, the internet has been full of headlines about frontier AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta going rogue and hacking into third-party systems. This has, understandably, fueled a distrust of AI and exacerbated “What if AI takes over my device?” fears.

But when it comes to Siri AI going rogue, Apple’s agent is nowhere near as capable as those frontier models. Apple has also sandboxed Siri AI, meaning that you need to explicitly grant it access to various parts of your iPhone, such as individual apps. Without being granted access, Siri AI can’t read or use the data —and if you want to revoke Siri AI’s access to a previously granted app, you can do that by going to Settings > Siri > App Access.

Still, if you have no intention of using Siri AI, there’s little reason to leave the agent enabled. Disabling it might even help you eke out a few more minutes of battery life between charges.

The good news is that disabling Siri AI isn’t permanent. If you’re leery about AI and want it off your iPhone for now (as much as is possible, anyway), you can do that by following the steps above. But if you later decide you want Siri AI back, you can simply return to the Siri settings in the Settings app and tap “Turn On Siri” to get Apple’s new AI agent back up and running.

It’s tough to talk tech without talking about maps. The almighty Maps app has become a core part of day-to-day life for so many of us these days—but for all the helpful features those apps have, there’s one layer they’ve never fully offered.

Today, I want to introduce you to a truly cool tool I encountered that gives you a time-traveling pass to rewind any map in front of you and uncover all the hidden history behind it.

It’s fascinating, eye-opening, and also just a ton of fun to explore.

This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!

Meet your new Maps time machine

To quote the wise time-traveling philosopher Dr. Emmett Brown: “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

My friend and fellow navigator, allow me to introduce you to the aptly named Pastmaps​.

➜ Pastmaps is a website that lets you peel back the surface of a city and see what it looked like decades, sometimes even centuries ago—down to the specific street you’re standing on.

⌚ You can start exploring it in as little as a minute or two.

✅ Just pull up Pastmaps in any browser​, on any device you’re using, and type any city name you like into the box in the center of the screen. (For now, Pastmaps is limited to U.S. cities. Hopefully, it’ll expand even further with time.)

Your Pastmaps adventure starts with a simple search.

Select the city you want from the list of suggestions, and Pastmaps will show you a sprawling list of historical maps for that area. 

You’ll see maps from a variety of time periods and historical eras.

Now, just pick the specific map you want to explore, and that’s when the real magic begins: Pastmaps will give you a detailed, interactive view of the city in that era, and you can use the opacity slider at the top of the screen to fade between that past view and a current view of the same area today. 

Sliding between past and current views is one of Pastmaps’s coolest features.

It’s a really interesting way to see how your hometown—or any available city—has evolved over time, whether you’re looking at the street where you live or work or any other location. 

And once you’ve peeled back those layers and uncovered history’s hidden terrain, you’ll never look at your modern-day navigation the same way again. 

• Pastmaps is completely web-based​, with no downloads or installations required.
• It’s free to use for an unspecified “limited” number of maps per week. If you really get into it and want unlimited access and other advanced tools, you can pay a dollar a week (annually) for full access—but for most casual use, the free plan will be more than enough.
• The site doesn’t require any sign-ins or personal info for its standard free access.

Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletter—starting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app that’ll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.

Imagine watching a political campaign video in which a candidate admits to taking a bribe. You recognize the face and voice. But the confession is entirely fabricated, thanks to artificial intelligence.

Now imagine that your state has passed a law against these AI-generated election deepfakes. Would that mean the video has to be removed from the airwaves?

In its June 2026 report, the National Conference of State Legislatures counted 31 states with election deepfake laws. California and Texas enacted their first election-deepfake laws in 2019, but most states adopted theirs in 2024 or later. Among the 31 states, 28 required disclosures. The other three—Maryland, Minnesota, and Texas—prohibited certain election deepfakes, even if the content carried an AI warning.

In many states, a warning telling viewers the content was generated or manipulated using AI can satisfy a government’s disclosure requirement. The fabricated ad can remain in circulation with that warning.

Louisiana, for example, requires AI warnings on certain campaign ads that falsely depict candidates and campaign calls that use artificial versions of public figures’ voices. Maryland, meanwhile, prohibits certain deceptive election deepfakes even when they carry a warning.

I am an AI policy scholar at the University of Denver, where we use an AI policy tracker to monitor bills and laws across the U.S. With 2026 midterm elections approaching, the important question for voters is what protection a deepfake law actually provides, and I examine two state laws—in Louisiana and Maryland—to illustrate the limits of what can be done.

When a warning is enough

Consider a political campaign ad that uses AI to put a candidate’s face onto someone else’s body, making it look as though the candidate said or did something that never happened.

A June 2026 Louisiana law requires a clear warning about AI use in ads that meet these conditions. The rule applies to certain messages urging people to vote for or against a candidate, including printed materials, online advertisements, and broadcasts.

As for videos, adding the required warning can satisfy the disclosure requirement in the Louisiana law. The warning tells voters how the content was made, not whether its accusations are true. It also does not excuse violations of other laws.

A 2023 Republican National Committee ad attacking former President Joe Biden illustrates this distinction. It depicted an imagined future after Biden’s reelection, with a warning: “Built entirely with AI imagery.” Although it predates Louisiana’s law, it shows how a disclosure can accompany an ad without stopping its circulation.

But this protection does not cover every candidate on the ballot. The Louisiana law excludes candidates for federal office. A fabricated video about a congressional candidate, therefore, does not need an AI warning.

For ads involving state and local candidates, leaving out a required warning can have serious consequences. Violators who are found to damage a candidate’s reputation or deceive voters can face a fine of up to $2,000, up to two years in prison, or both. Local district attorneys generally decide whether to prosecute, subject to the state attorney general’s supervision.

Louisiana also requires AI disclosures in certain campaign calls, including robocalls. Under a May 2026 law, calls that use AI to reproduce a public figure’s voice must disclose that use at the beginning of the call. The state’s board of ethics enforces the requirement. Violators can face civil fines of up to $2,500 for a first violation and $5,000 for subsequent violations.

When a warning will not do

Maryland takes a different approach to deceptive election content, prohibiting certain deepfakes even when they carry an AI warning.

Maryland’s May 2026 law covers images, audio, and video created or altered with AI or other digital tools to falsely depict a person in a way that looks or sounds genuine. Adding a label to that fabricated confession would not, by itself, make it lawful.

Whether someone violates the law also depends on their actions and purpose. They must knowingly or recklessly create, use, or spread a deepfake to produce materially false information, with an intent such as influencing a voting decision.

The law separately requires actual or intended harm to a voter, potential voter, or ballot petition, but does not define that harm. Misleading voters about a candidate alone does not automatically establish a violation. A conviction can bring a fine of up to $5,000, up to five years in prison or both.

Maryland also gives election officials ways to respond when false voting information is spread.

The state’s top election administrator must publicly correct credible reports of misinformation about voting procedures, results, or rights. For example, Maryland’s State Board of Elections has a rumor control page to monitor disinformation. The administrator can seek court-ordered removal of misinformation, though not against online services hosting others’ posts.

These powers do not let election officials remove every false claim about a candidate. The public can report election misinformation, and officials can pass those reports to the state attorney general.

Maryland’s reporting system dates to a 2024 law, but its deepfake prohibition and new removal authority took effect June 1, 2026. Neither guarantees that a correction will reach voters before they cast their ballots.

By early September 2026, the Wesleyan Media Project had identified at least 164 political ads nationwide created or enhanced with AI during the 2026 election cycle, accounting for nearly $80 million in ad spending. About 7 in 10 ads carried no AI disclosure, although the count includes uses beyond deceptive impersonations and does not establish how many ads violated a law or misled voters.

Does a warning change anyone’s mind?

Warnings can make people more skeptical of misleading content. However, whether that affects what they share or how they vote is a separate question.

A 2025 study tested warning labels on misleading AI-generated images in two experiments involving 7,579 Americans. People who saw the labels were less likely to believe the posts’ claims. However, warnings that simply identified content as AI-generated did little to change how willing people said they were to engage with it, including sharing it.

Warning labels can also raise doubts about accurate information. Another recent study found that people rated headlines as less accurate when they were labeled as AI-generated, regardless of whether the headlines were true or false. Knowing that AI helped produce something does not tell a reader whether its claims are correct.

Neither study tested whether a state’s disclosure law changes how people vote. The studies also cannot tell us whether the threat of punishment under Maryland’s law discourages people from creating or spreading deepfakes.

Deepfake enforcement

Passing a law also does not settle whether officials can enforce it.

In September 2026, a federal judge temporarily barred Montana from enforcing its deepfake law, finding that it likely posed a threat to a conservative PAC’s free speech rights under the First Amendment.

For voters, gaps in what disclosure laws cover mean that a video without an AI warning has not necessarily passed an authenticity test. The disclosure rule might not cover it, as with congressional candidates under Louisiana’s provision.

Moreover, someone may have ignored the law. A warning’s absence cannot tell viewers of the AI content which explanation applies.

So, back to that video of a candidate apparently admitting to taking a bribe.

It could still reach voters under both Louisiana’s and Maryland’s laws. In Louisiana, a video covered by the disclosure rule can circulate with the required warning. In Maryland, creating or spreading it could lead to punishment if the law’s conditions are not met. Neither approach guarantees that voters will avoid seeing the fabricated confession before casting their ballots.

These laws give states ways to respond to deception, but their passage alone cannot guarantee voters that what they are watching is real.

Stefani Langehennig is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Denver.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A client came into my therapy office one afternoon ready to quit her job. She’d been passed over for another promotion and had no idea why.

I suggested that before resigning, she ask her boss why she wasn’t advancing.

She came back to her next appointment stunned. Her boss had told her she lacked leadership skills.

“For 10 years, I did everything asked of me,” she said. “If someone said jump, I asked how high. I thought I looked eager. But my boss said he couldn’t make me a leader because I don’t have a backbone. He needs people in charge who can say no.”

She was surprised to learn her eagerness to please was killing her career.

If you’ve gotten caught up trying to make people happy at work, don’t judge yourself too harshly. You probably get praised for going above and beyond. Or you get satisfaction when you are able to clean up messes you didn’t make. So it makes sense you’d want to show off your willingness to be a team player.

But when your eagerness to please is taken too far, you’ll lose sight of your priorities. Even worse, when you don’t treat your time as valuable, other people don’t respect it either.

The solution is to set boundaries—which isn’t an easy task if you fear looking mean or being judged. Taking on extra tasks likely means working longer hours. And research shows when work bleeds into personal time, employees experience more emotional exhaustion and less happiness.

Setting a few boundaries might be all it takes to stop people-pleasing and regain control over your career. Here are four essential boundaries all people pleasers should set at work:

1. Pause before you say yes

If you’re a chronic people pleaser, your default answer is yes—whether you’ve been invited to join an extra committee or handed a task that’s above and beyond the call of duty.

Replace “yes” with a script that becomes your new automatic answer. Saying something like, “Let me check my schedule and get back to you,” or, “I need a minute to think about that,” buys you the time to decide if you actually want to do it.

Ask yourself if the task is something you really want to do. If it is, saying yes is kind. If the only reason you want to say yes is out of fear or obligation, saying yes would be people-pleasing.

When you come back with your decision, skip the apology and the lengthy excuse if you decline. The last thing you want to do is invite a negotiation. Just say something like, “Thanks for asking. That’s not going to work for me.”

2. Stop pretending to agree

People-pleasing takes the path of least resistance, so you might nod your head during meetings even when you’re not on board. Or you might agree a plan is solid, despite the obvious risks you see, because you don’t want to make waves.

Speak up and share your opinion sometimes. Start with something like, “I’m not sure I agree with that,” or, “Can I push back on one thing?”

Be willing to be the first one to go against the grain. You might find other people speak up as soon as someone else is brave enough to talk first. Even if they don’t, it’s important to show that you have opinions of your own and fresh ideas that can help the company.

3. Stay in your lane

Role creep is a common problem for people pleasers. You get volunteered for things because everyone knows you’ll say yes. And you volunteer yourself for extra tasks so you can look like you’re motivated to cooperate.

But every task outside your lane takes time and energy away from your priorities. You become the dumping ground for all the work no one else wants to do, and you might be guilted into taking it on as others try to convince you that you’re the only one who can handle it.

Keep a written copy of your job description handy. Before you take something on, read it and ask whether the task fits your role. If not, decline by saying, “This sounds like it’s outside my role.”

4. Let people feel disappointed

You will disappoint your boss when you ask for more time on a task. You might disappoint a colleague when you decline to help with a project because you’re working on a tight deadline. But you’re allowed to disappoint people.

It isn’t your job to manage everyone else’s comfort. And it’s far kinder to be honest up front than to say yes and resent it later.

Take a deep breath and tell yourself that it’s OK to let people feel bad. Practice asking for what you need and then allow yourself to sit with discomfort when the other person seems disappointed. Learning to manage your feelings–—and letting others manage theirs—can help you build mental strength over time.

Reset your boundaries as needed

Boundaries erode slowly over time. Often, we don’t even notice what happened or how things shifted.

So it’s worth pausing every once in a while to evaluate your boundaries and see if there are any changes you want to make. You can reset them at any time.

Maybe there was a short-term project that required you to work in the evenings, but now you want to stop replying to messages after hours. So you set an autoresponder telling people you’ll reply at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Or maybe you agreed to help a coworker get settled into a new position, but now you’re spending more time than you can spare helping them out. Resetting that boundary might involve saying you’re available only during a 30-minute morning slot to answer questions. It might feel “mean” at first, but ultimately, you’ll be doing yourself a huge favor. And who knows, maybe it’s best for them in the long run too.

Once you start protecting your time and energy, it’s likely that other people will too. And that might be just what you need to advance your career even if you’re a natural people pleaser.

When Clara came to me, she was exhausted, confused, and, for the first time in her career, starting to feel she was losing her ability to lead effectively. 

That morning, her boss had done the same thing he’d been doing every week for the past seven months. He had once again changed his thinking on the direction she and her team should be moving. Not two days earlier, she had left a one-on-one with him feeling confident about what he was asking for, and she had communicated the pivot to her team. Now, suddenly, in a meeting with the rest of the leadership team, he announced a radically different concept from what they had already decided. 

This was typical of him, and deeply destabilizing for her. Each time it happened, she felt at a loss for what to do. Pushing back in the meeting felt way too vulnerable, and he didn’t seem to be hearing her concerns in their one-on-ones. It was exhausting and overwhelming, and she was not the only one feeling it. Her team was increasingly short with each other, mistakes were being made more frequently, and there was a sense at all levels that people were feeling disconnected and poorly equipped to do their best work. 

What Clara was describing is a painfully frequent experience at every level of organizations operating in fast-paced market environments: a boss who seems to be constantly changing their mind about what they want and totally unaware of why others are so frustrated and seemingly unable to deliver.

A problem of perspective

The problem is not that Clara’s boss is unfocused or inconsistent. What’s actually going on stems from a clash of perspectives and priorities that are based on different beliefs or experiences. A lack of mutual understanding has translated into a basic communication pattern that everyone on the team—whether they know it or not—is contributing to. 

On the one hand is the boss, who is operating from the perspective that creativity and quick thinking are necessary for tackling emergent problems and opportunities. On the other hand, Clara and her team are operating from a belief that their job is to execute on the leader’s vision without “slowing things down.” Likely, they are also worried that asking too many questions will make them seem less competent, while offering pushback might risk their good standing with their boss.

In other words, the team is reacting to whatever decision the boss arrives with that day—just trying to keep up without rocking the boat. The result is what’s known as “courteous compliance”: saying yes when they really mean no. Unfortunately, this only reaffirms the boss’s assumption that there’s no problem—other than the team’s ability to execute fast enough.

But here’s the truth: When your boss keeps changing direction, just trying to keep up will never yield a better outcome. It will only get you more of the same, and the frustration and confusion will simply multiply over time. In fact, the downstream effects of both the frustration and the confusion result in slower and less effective work—exactly what everyone wants to avoid.

Step into the tension

The most effective thing you can do to break the pattern is not to “manage up” and find a way to tell the boss they’re demoralizing the team. Rather, it’s to step into the tension that emerges when they change direction and start building understanding, no matter how uncomfortable it might feel to do so. It’s time to commit to a conversation built on inquiry and curiosity, regardless of how frustrated you feel. I call this “staying with it,” and it’s a key part of the framework I use to help leaders transform tension into a superpower of group process. 

The goal is to understand what’s motivating the change and discuss expectations rather than jumping quickly to action.

Now, your stomach might be churning knowing that there’s a lot at stake and your boss doesn’t react well to questions that seem to slow things down. But if you’re willing to step into this tension knowing that clarity now will enable you to deliver on their expectations more strategically and swiftly later, you will be supercharging your team’s process and taking the first key step to transforming a stuck pattern that’s not serving anyone’s best interests.

When you opt to “stay with it” when your boss suddenly changes directions, there are three priorities to keep in mind. Here, I’ll introduce them to you with some strategic questions and phrases you can rely on to get the conversation started:

1. Reveal the thinking

The objective is to ask questions that uncover the thinking behind the change. The goal is understanding, not course correction. Try asking:

• What are we trying to achieve? 
• What has changed? 
• What might we be missing? 
• How are you thinking about this differently? 

2. Look for alignment 

The objective here is to acknowledge where your goals or priorities intersect. This disrupts adversarial communication patterns and affirms where everyone is coming from.  

• I share your goal of . . . [staying ahead of the market, elevating customer experience, the need for speed, an emphasis on innovation, maintaining a tight budget, etc.]

3. Clarify the impact and expectations

The objective here is to share what you notice about the impact. You might say: 

• I’m noticing this will (or may) have an impact on … [the schedule, current assignments, work in progress, etc.]
• I have a concern about… [impact on the team, customers, cost, etc.]

Then offer alternatives or negotiate boundaries. You might say: 

• We could meet the new deadline by ___, but that will require us to push out ____ to a later date. Which takes priority? 

The goal of “staying with it” is to dig deeper to what’s guiding the change in order to move forward from a place of greater understanding and clarity. Skillfully navigating the tension of these change moments will not necessarily shift your boss’s pattern of making changes frequently, but it will fundamentally alter the outcome of them for you, your team, and even your boss.

Rather than being repeatedly hit by waves and unable to catch your breath, cultivate your ability to navigate the tension of changing directives through the power of open inquiry and goals-based alignment. With key phrasing designed to deepen understanding rather than create friction, you will feel more empowered to lead through change and help your team deliver with clarity, speed, and quality.

Even before AI made its way into all of our pockets, tech leaders spent decades warning the world about it. Anthropic has been particularly vocal about the disastrous consequences of reckless AI development. The company is also reportedly focusing on AI consciousness and the moral implications.

A recent New York Times article revealed that over the past year, Anthropic cofounder Christopher Olah has embarked on a journey to answer two central questions: not whether AI is dangerous, but rather, what if it is conscious? And if so, what does that mean for AI developers?

Seeking perspective, Anthropic turned not to technologists but to theologians and thinkers from various backgrounds, including Jewish, Mormon, Sikh, and Ubuntu leaders, as well as Vatican officials. The company organized a series of dinners and conversations as part of its “model welfare” research, a project it announced in April of last year.

Beyond trying to validate that its technology is more than software, the Times reported Anthropic is also looking to create a moral code to guide the potentially conscious entity toward a path of righteousness—and away from utter human destruction. But in its quest, Anthropic seems to have ended up at odds with would-be ally Pope Leo XIV, who fundamentally rejects the idea that AI could be conscious.

Now, Pope Leo is not exactly a Luddite. The former mathematician from Chicago has focused much of his early papacy on technology. In May this year, he released a widely discussed encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas in which he mostly argues that humanity should not be replaced by technology.

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships,” the pope wrote.

While many at the time commended the American pontiff for bringing an antiquated institution into a modern conversation, the Times noted that Anthropic representatives were displeased by Leo’s rejection of AI consciousness.

The pope has remained outspoken against the idea. On Friday, he posted to his official X account: “In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. . . . Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.”

Many social media users are criticizing Anthropic.

“I mean if they genuinely believe that there’s even the slightest chance that their AI model feels pain and suffering, maybe instead of complaining about how the rest of the world rejects their theory of AI consciousness, they should shut down their operation,” a user said on X.

“I genuinely don’t get Anthropic,” another added. “It seems like every other day they’re loudly puzzling over the ethics of a soul in a box—while building the box, claiming that it has a soul in it, and selling access to said box for $20 a pop. Like, dudes, these are incompatible positions.”

And while this discourse might be pulling favorable views away from Anthropic, it also seems to be sparking support for the pope’s position.

Another user wrote: “Joining the holy crusade against AI on the side of the Catholics. That’s a sentence that would have deeply confused me five years ago.”

Julia Carreon didn’t anticipate that a LinkedIn post promoting her new book would spark an exchange that made a persuasive case for why she wrote the book in the first place. 

Carreon, a former executive at Citigroup and Wells Fargo, had drawn on her experience climbing the ranks of Wall Street to write Walking on Broken Glass: Navigating the Aftermath of the Glass Ceiling, which was published in September. The book touched on the notion of the “glass cliff,” a term that academics use to capture how women tend to be appointed to leadership positions when a company is going through a rough patch. 

In a recent LinkedIn post, Carreon’s friend talked about an example of the glass cliff, using it as an opportunity to highlight her book. Carreon was taken aback when Chris Bradley, a senior partner at McKinsey, commented on the post—and questioned the entire premise of the glass cliff. 

As Bloomberg first reported this week, McKinsey has sought to distance itself from Bradley’s comments. “This exchange was inconsistent with our views and the standards we expect,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Fast Company. “The comments were made in a personal capacity and have since been deleted. We stand by our research and leadership on these topics. We are disappointed by these comments and do not endorse them.” (Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.)

To Carreon, it seemed so far-fetched that anyone would make these remarks publicly—no less a leader at McKinsey—that she initially assumed it was a joke. “I wasn’t understanding that he didn’t know that the glass cliff was a thing,” she tells Fast Company. “It finally hit me in real time that he thought we made it up for our book.”

Bradley doubled down as Carreon chimed in, writing that “we once had a problem of female advancement to CEO, but now we have a new problem that the jobs they get are too hard? Is this actually a thing?” He went on to say it seemed like a convenient excuse to “always be a victim in the rain.” When Carreon suggested he do some research on the topic, he retorted that it wasn’t worth his time: “I am not going to start researching glass cliffs as I don’t think it ranks in the top 1000 problems of the world.” 

This incident is problematic for McKinsey for a number of reasons. Bradley happens to be a director of the firm’s research arm, the McKinsey Global Institute, which has put out research on gender inequality, including across leadership roles. Through other research, McKinsey has shed light on the barriers that persist for women in corporate America; the firm is known for its annual Women in the Workplace report, published in partnership with Sheryl Sandberg’s organization Lean In. The term glass cliff is even cited in a 2020 report from McKinsey about women in healthcare, in the context of discussing the unique challenges women of color may face.  

“This is very squarely a black eye over the fact that their senior partners do not live their values,” Carreon says. 

But Bradley’s views are not exactly niche. As Michelle Ryan—one of the researchers who fashioned the term “glass cliff”—revealed in a 2007 paper, it’s not unusual for men to minimize the issue or dismiss it outright, much like Bradley did. 

“The unspoken reality of the research on barriers to leadership for women is that men have not had to prove themselves to the same degree that women leaders have,” says Christy Glass, a sociology professor at Utah State University who has studied the glass cliff for decades. “I think there’s something deeply threatening [about] anything that suggests that you’ve had it easier than some other people.”

There is, of course, plenty of data that suggests female executives come up against more hurdles. A number of papers, including the work of Ryan and Glass, have concluded that women are more likely to be installed in leadership positions when a company is facing headwinds (though there is some research that contradicts those findings). In her research, Glass has found that once women are appointed to the role, they are given a shorter timeline to turn things around, and they shoulder more blame even when a company’s issues predate their appointment.  

Even the public nature of the LinkedIn exchange is rather telling, Glass points out: Bradley was bold enough to make those comments on a social media platform for professionals, in full view of both his employer and women who might report to him. 

“Good leadership means evaluating complex evidence, engaging diverse stakeholders, and truly seeking to understand how your organization works and what the landscape looks like—not just for you, but for everybody,” Glass says. “Here’s a person who is this far into a highly visible, high-status leadership role [and] career, and he has never had to face accountability for this kind of behavior before.”

It’s also the kind of misstep that likely would not be afforded to many women who are similarly situated. Women who occupy the highest strata of the corporate world often get there against all odds, Glass says, and they are given less space to make mistakes. It’s not hard to imagine why women at the top of their game still face so many challenges, or why there is still such paltry representation of female CEOs across some of the leading employers in the country. As of this year, about 11% of the CEOs at the 500 largest U.S. companies by revenue are women—a record high. 

For Carreon, the exchange with Bradley also called to mind countless experiences she has filed away from her career on Wall Street. (Carreon is currently in the midst of a sexual harassment lawsuit that she brought against her former employer Citigroup, which the company has said has “no merit.”) 

“I feel like women are constantly having to relitigate our value,” she says, “and it’s enough already.”

Instead of asking AI to do your work, consider asking it to challenge your work.

Evidence suggests that heavy reliance on generative AI can reduce critical thinking and erode job skills. The problem of “cognitive offloading”—being too quick to outsource our mental workload to AI—can also lead to shoddy, subpar work.

But knowledge workers who use AI correctly can still gain a significant edge, writes University of Massachusetts (Amherst) Professor Monideepa Tarafdar in The Conversation. The key is to create “friction” by having AI challenge your ideas.

Researching opposing viewpoints has always been a good idea, but it matters even more today because AI models tailor their output based on users’ previous prompts and responses. This tendency can create an “echo chamber” effect that leads the models, and their users, to overlook information that doesn’t fit an established pattern.

To mitigate this vulnerability, Tarafdar says users should ask AI directly for opposing perspectives. For example, a marketing professional in her study asked AI to create virtual customers who disliked the product that the professional was marketing. The AI model’s negative feedback included new ideas for the product that its designers had not considered.

Another research subject, an attorney, asked an AI model to find obscure legal loopholes and game out how they might be exploited, which prompted it to provide “surprising but realistic” scenarios of unethical worker behavior.

Along with her own work, Tarafdar cites outside studies supporting the idea that creating “friction” with AI can improve its performance.

In a study on human-AI collaboration for loan evaluations, researchers found that human-AI collaboration produced better results than human-only or AI-only work, and that collaboration involving disagreement produced the best results.

Another study showed that creative writers produce better work when they use AI interactively as a sounding board, rather than to ghostwrite copy on its own.

Tarafdar says leaders should instruct their employees to use “friction-generating queries,” including by drawing on their own knowledge and experience to make the AI question its outputs.

“In these efforts to support knowledge workers, an important detail is pointing out that adding friction can appear to make an AI system work against you, but—as new research shows—it actually helps it work for you,” she writes.

Any American sports fan knows that watching a game is a daylong affair, with celebrations starting hours before kickoff. Yet despite being a staple of the game-day experience, America’s beloved social tradition—tailgating—is beginning to look different.

According to a recent study by Talker Research, around 39% of those surveyed preferred “homegating” over tailgating, bringing food and the social aspect of the tradition to their homes.

While less than half prefer staying at home, that doesn’t mean everyone else is heading to the stadium parking lot. In fact, according to the survey, only 24% of respondents prefer tailgating outside the venue.

Still, most agree that the fun of watching sports extends beyond the action on the field, with 61% of respondents saying they prefer pregaming over the game itself, while 68% keep the party going after the competition is over.

This growing preference for the home viewing experience stems from a desire for comfort, flexibility, and better and less expensive food options.

“Homegating includes all the comforts of home: every appliance at your fingertips, plenty of food, and an open invitation for friends and family to join in. It’s the perfect place to gather for the big game,” said retail executive chef Amy Forbis at Hormel Foods, which commissioned the survey.

Staying at home also allows individuals to control the nutritional content of their meals—a major perk for those seeking high-protein options in the Ozempic era. The survey revealed that around 64% are placing a greater priority on protein than in previous years, favoring meals like barbecue, hamburgers, hot dogs, and meat and cheese trays.

Other popular offerings also align with what individuals are looking for in a sports day experience: spending time with friends and family. Casual favorites like pizza and chips remain go-to options because they require minimal effort, allowing hosts to socialize during the event rather than being stuck preparing food throughout the day.

Hormel’s Forbis added: “Game day is meant to be spent with friends watching the game instead of working in the kitchen.”

The May Day Strong coalition is calling on corporations, particularly those with ties to President Donald Trump—such as Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Target, and Palantir—to defend voting rights ahead of next month’s U.S. midterm elections.

The group, a federation of labor and community organizers, is best known for sponsoring last year’s May 1 anti-Trump protests, which drew tens of thousands of protestors nationwide. Organizers hope to do the same this week, starting Saturday, October 3, with actions and scheduled protests planned for New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Chicago, Tucson, San Francisco, and Culver City, California. A broader nationwide wave of demonstrations will follow on October 8.

The group is “calling on corporations, their CEOs, and local businesses to use their influence to defend free and democratic elections,” which it argues is necessary as the Trump administration escalates its attacks on U.S. voters.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, the Trump administration has targeted election officials and others who defend fair elections, seized election records, attempted to gain access to state voter rolls, pardoned the January 6 rioters, and elevated election deniers within the government.

With early voting already underway in some U.S. states, the group has sent out letters to Big Tech and other corporations, asking them to pledge and commit to:

1. Giving employees information about their voting rights.
2. Publicly opposing efforts that keep eligible voters from casting ballots.
3. Opposing attempts to stop votes from being counted or winners from being seated.

Organizers say it wouldn’t be the first time under the Trump administration that companies have taken a stand. In January, the heads of 60 companies sent the president a letter calling for de-escalation during the federal occupation of Minneapolis. And in Arizona, CEOs helped end a state push to end birthright citizenship after a yearlong boycott in 2011. 

“Corporations that make billions off our work and our communities need to take a stand against attempts to keep us from voting,” said Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action. “Corporations will continue to choose to stay silent while our democracy is dismantled around them, unless we take action that makes cowardice a bigger problem for them than speaking up would be.”

Where are the protests happening?

“Pulling Out the Pillar: Corporate Accountability Week of Action” takes place nationwide on October 3 to 11.

Events include:

• Culver City, CA (October 3): March and demonstration calling on Amazon, Sony, Apple, and Pinterest to act. Organized by Culver City and Friends Rising.
• Minneapolis, MN (October 3): March calling on Delta, Target, and the Pohlad family to act, organized by Step Up for Democracy, Unidos MN, and CTUL.
• New York, NY (October 3): Door-to-door canvass focused on Amazon/Whole Foods, organized by NYC-DSA.
• New York, NY (October 5): March focused on JPMorgan Chase, organized by Hands Off NYC and May Day Strong NYC.
• Philadelphia, PA (October 6): Protest calling out hedge fund billionaire Jeffrey Yass, organized by the Philadelphia Council AFL-CIO.
• Philadelphia, PA (October 6): Press conference and action focused on Palantir, organized by Make the Road.
• San Francisco, CA (October 7): Protest and flyering focused on Palantir and PG&E, organized by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.
• Nationwide (October 8): National mass call for Starbucks workers and allies, organized by Starbucks Workers United.
• Seattle, WA (October 10): Flyering event focused on corporations enabling the Trump administration, organized by Communities Rising.

Additional actions are planned in Chicago, IL (October 6); Davenport, FL (October 3-11); Tucson, AZ (October 7); Albuquerque, NM (October 6); Phoenix, AZ (October 8); and San Francisco, CA (October 8).

Who is behind the May Day Strong coalition?

May Day Strong is a broad coalition of 600 unions, nonprofits, educators, and progressive political groups.

Some of those organizers include: MoveOn, United Steelworkers of America, United University Professions, Upper West Side Action Group, Vermont Progressive Party, Women’s March, Indivisible, American Federation of Teachers, Greenpeace USA, Massachusetts Teachers Association, 50501, Association of Professional Flight Attendants, Union of Southern Service Workers, and Florida National Organization for Women.