The company is billing the tool as a way for non-designers to mock up visuals, and a way for designers to quickly test out a range of initial prototypes. It’s powered by Claude’s most recent new model, Opus 4.7, which is trained to handle difficult coding prompts and complex, long-running tasks. Claude Design is available starting today to Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise Subscribers. 

Anthropic joins a growing number of companies developing their own AI-based design tools, including Figma, Canva, Adobe Express, and Google’s Stitch. As each of these companies expands its AI capabilities, the segmentation between their capabilities is becoming less and less pronounced: Canva is an AI company with design tools, Figma is a UX company running on AI, and, now, Claude is a powerful chatbot with a design and UX assistant. 

How Claude Design works

Claude Design functions like an ultra-intelligent middle man between designers and product engineers. 

To use the tool, users start with a text prompt, as well as supplementary materials they want to use for reference, like a codebase, images, or documents. For example, a user might type, “Prototype a serene mobile meditation app. It should have calming typography, subtle nature-inspired colors, and a clean layout.”

From there, Claude Design will produce a first draft. The tool’s UX is designed to make editing intuitive: an inline comment box facilitates specific tweaks, like, in this case, adding a dark mode toggle; custom sliders automatically spawn for small adjustments, such as color and type size; and users can also make direct edits on the draft themselves. It’s clearly designed to feel iterative and collaborative; like bouncing ideas off of a very fast colleague. This same workflow applies whether a user is making an app, a webpage, a powerpoint, or a social media post.

Bigger teams can bring Claude Design into the loop on their company’s needs by uploading a codebase and design files. Claude will then digest that information and create a design system that uses the appropriate colors, typography, and components automatically. Once a design is complete, it can be shared as an internal URL within an organization, saved as a folder, or exported to Canva, PDF, PPTX, or standalone HTML files. 

Claude Design offers a one-stop shop for design consultation on app prototypes, web UX, and marketing assets, and it feels like an encapsulation of where the industry is headed. In the AI design space, the biggest players aren’t specializing—they’re becoming jacks of all trades.

As press looked on and cameras rolled, Sharon Simmons, sporting a “DoorDash Grandma” T-shirt and handing a couple of McDonald’s bags to Trump, praised the policy for saving her thousands of dollars on taxes, which she says she’s using to help pay for her husband’s Stage 3 cancer treatment. “It has helped my family out immensely,” she said.

But it wasn’t a slam dunk. In fact, Simmon’s appearance turned into an absolute disaster, as the PR stunt devolved into an argument over whether Simmons, the 58-year-old grandmother (of 10) in question, was actually a MAGA shill. That debate, as neatly chronicled by Fast Company’s Joe Berkowitz, drew attention to the forced nature of the stunt, and helped thoroughly undermine the episode’s effectiveness for the policy or the brand.

But the squabble over whether Simmons is fully legit or some kind of ringer has obscured a deeper point: Either way, she’s a dreadful symbol for the DoorDash brand and for the state of the economy in general.

At an age when a worker should command comfortable earning power and be counting down to retirement, Simmons is grinding for tips at a no-benefits gig job to cover healthcare costs. Frankly, she’s lucky the rise of driverless vehicles—long a goal of the rideshare and delivery sectors—hasn’t yet taken even this not-so-reassuring option away. (Yet.) This sounds more like a cautionary tale than a heartwarming policy success. When you think about your golden years, does your vision involve hustling to cover your spouse’s vital medical care?

Admittedly, the cozy and carefree retirement dream of security and dignity after decades of work has never been universally realized. Yet it remains culturally potent—even as many workers today (including many comfortably in the middle class) expect they’ll need to keep finding ways to earn money well past traditional retirement age. 

If DoorDash Grandma was intended to function as an anecdote polished up for political optics, the real message seems different. What’s authentic is that there are countless older Americans in similar positions, navigating a patchwork of Social Security, savings, and supplemental income streams that increasingly include gig work. (In Simmons’s case, there’s reportedly a GoFundMe as well.)

Businesses that rely on tip-dependent labor are naturally in favor of no tax on tips, because it benefits their workforce without the business sacrificing a dime or making any particular effort. And there’s nothing unusual about that; it’s just capitalism. Gig-economy companies have spent years positioning themselves as a source of opportunity: flexible work, entrepreneurial autonomy, a platform that empowers individuals to earn on their own terms. DoorDash Grandma seems like a variation on this standard gig-economy pitch: the scrappy side-hustler, the student paying tuition, the creative professional bridging income gaps.

But in reality, a 58-year-old grandmother delivering food to a rich guy (Trump apparently tipped her $100) to offset healthcare costs is not exactly an aspirational image. To the contrary, it’s vaguely alarming. The dominant implication isn’t flexibility—it’s necessity. 

That’s why the episode highlights a brand-narrative problem for the entire gig economy, and, by extension, for policymakers eager to highlight its positive impacts. The gig economy has always occupied an ambiguous space between innovation and erosion, expanding access to income in innovative ways while redefining (and often reducing) the protections and stability associated with traditional employment.

And on a policy level, no tax on tips is hardly a replacement for, say, comprehensive healthcare benefits. Trump’s healthcare policies and proposals are projected to reduce enrollment in the marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act by 750,000 to 2 million people in 2026. And some experts believe broader Medicaid/ACA cuts will strip coverage from millions more over time. The administration has promised to fix all this, but any specific plan, or concepts thereof, has yet to materialize (and lately seems to be deprioritized in favor of spending on defense and deportation efforts).

Which is part of what makes DoorDash Grandma, genuine or not, so complicated. Her story is compelling and memorable—but it’s also just kind of a bummer. Here is an older American, engaged, contributing, not sidelined. But beneath that is a nagging question: Why does she need to? As a symbol, she’s basically a question mark. And neither business nor institutions seem entirely equipped to provide a comforting answer.

Perhaps, in the end, this is a simple case of brand-narrative tension. A (true) story of flexibility, empowerment, and opportunity is contradicted or at least complicated by another (true) story of difficult lived experience. Most of the time, those tensions remain abstract. Occasionally, they crystallize in a single image or anecdote that’s too vivid to ignore. Maybe this is one of those times. And maybe actually contending with those tensions would not be such a bad thing.

The 1.2-kilometer-long bridge, about three quarters of a mile, connects an island called Laajasalo to the city center. It opens to cyclists and pedestrians on April 18 and will soon also include trams. No cars can cross it; drivers have to take a longer route over an older bridge. On one edge of the island, a former industrial site is now filled with apartment buildings, and the population is quickly expanding across the whole island.

“We’re looking at quite large new numbers of residents that will be in this part of town,” says Hanna Harris, the city’s chief design officer. “And the decision was made that we need to connect those parts of town across the water to downtown, but that we need to do it in a way that won’t increase congestion.”

Called the Kruunuvuorensilta, or crown bridge, it’s part of the city’s broader work to decrease car use, including large investments in new rail lines and bike infrastructure. On the bridge, designers focused on the experience for people on foot or bike rather than those on the tram, who will only spend a couple of minutes crossing. “If people feel it’s too difficult or long a walk or cycle ride, then they won’t use it,” says Tom Osborne, director of UK-based Knight Architects, which partnered on the design with WSP Finland.

The bridge curves slightly, which helps it seem less long to someone walking across. “A lot of times if you’re in a very long crossing and a very straight alignment, you get this vanishing point which can be quite intimidating and it feels like you’re never getting towards the end,” Osborne says. “But if you have a gentle curve, you can see your destination, which tends to make you feel safer and that you’re making better progress towards it.”

The bike path connects to the bigger bike network at each end of the bridge, and it’s separated so cyclists can ride quickly without the risk of crashing into pedestrians. Halfway across, the bridge widens and there are benches where people can rest and take in the view. In the winter, a snowplow will clear the paths so people can keep riding and walking. (Two tram lines will also begin running either late this year or in 2027.) Because Helsinki is built on an archipelago, the path connects to a few other small islands before reaching the main train station.

In the new development, residents are opting not to buy cars. “The density of that development is much greater because there’s no parking or fewer parking spaces required for each flat,” says Osborne. “And everyone’s buying bicycles, rather than buying cars, because that’s the mode that the bridge facilitates.” While the bridge was under construction, the city ran a ferry so that people weren’t tempted to start driving.

The new bridge “makes biking and public transport a lot more attractive options on trips between Laajasalo and the inner city of Helsinki,” says Niko Setälä, the city’s team manager for the project. Transportation is now the city’s largest source of emissions. Though leadership is encouraging the switch to electric cars, it’s critical to make biking, walking, and transit as appealing as possible, he says.

Right now, if someone wants to drive from the island to an office downtown, it’s a longer route. “You can still drive, but [the design is] trying to make people act in their own self interest,” Osborne says. “So if it’s cheaper and faster to cycle, then people will.”

Like millions of others around the country, if you’ve ever considered taking one of these drugs, you probably went online to learn more about where you can get them and how much they cost.

Online searches for GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy have risen dramatically since 2022. Advertisements like Williams’s Super Bowl commercial both reflect and help drive that growing demand.

More and more advertisements for weight-loss medications are appearing in people’s daily lives. These ads can be appealing, intrusive, confusing, or even misleading, and have sparked widespread concerns about inappropriate use and adverse events. But the high cost of GLP-1 medications, combined with the lack of adequate coverage by insurance plans, has helped fuel a booming online market for cheaper alternatives.

As health services researchers studying prescription medication safety, we are highly concerned about the risks of online advertisements selling alternative versions of GLP-1 weight-loss medications.

Serena Williams’s Super Bowl ad promoted GLP-1 drugs for weight loss.

Not all GLP-1 medications are the same

As of April 2026, the most popular GLP-1 medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration include semaglutide, sold under the brand names Wegovy, Ozempic, and Rybelsus; tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro or Zepbound; and orforglipron, sold as Foundayo.

These brand-name medications have undergone rigorous clinical trials and extensive FDA evaluation, including review of clinical data, manufacturing processes, and facility inspections, to ensure safety, quality and effectiveness.

Many of the GLP-1 drugs advertised on the internet are not the FDA-approved medications but rather “compounded” GLP-1 products made in compounding pharmacies. They contain the same active ingredient—semaglutide, tirzepatide or orforglipron—but add minor but clinically important modifications such as using a different salt form, adding different inactive ingredients and varying drug concentrations or dosages. In addition, they may be produced and stored under inconsistent quality standards.

Compounding pharmacies are intended to create personalized versions of FDA-approved medications to meet unique patient needs that cannot be met through the mass-produced brand-name medications. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the modifications being made to GLP-1 medications sold by compounding pharmacies meet those criteria. Instead, companies are using compounding pharmacies to bypass the FDA-approved manufacturers and generate profit.

In February 2026, the FDA released a report alerting patients and providers about the risks of compounded GLP-1 medications.

The report notes the presence of counterfeit Ozempic, the use of non-FDA-approved ingredients such as retatrutide or cagrilintide, and products bypassing regulations by being labeled as “not for human consumption.”

As of July 2024—the most recently issued report—the FDA had received more than 1,000 reports of adverse events related to compounded semaglutide and compounded tirzepatide. These include gastrointestinal effects like nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain, as well as fainting, headache, migraine, dehydration, acute pancreatitis, and gallstones. These effects occur because drug concentrations in compounded medications can vary significantly, leading to serious dosing errors.

The Better Business Bureau is seeing a rash of “subscription traps” for GLP-1 drugs.

Steps to safely obtain GLP-1 medications online

First, if you or someone you know is considering GLP-1 medications for weight management, it’s important to know that leading medical organizations have specific recommendations for the use of these drugs. For instance, the American Diabetes Association only recommends the use of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss for those with a body mass index, or BMI, of at least 30, or among those with a BMI of 27 or greater if they have at least one other condition such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, or high cholesterol. People with a BMI below 27 need further clinical evaluation to determine if a GLP-1 medication is appropriate for them.

If you and your doctor determine that it is appropriate to seek GLP-1 medications for weight management, it’s important to avoid compounded versions of GLP-1 drugs unless your healthcare provider specifically recommends them.

But identifying which GLP-1 medications are compounded can be challenging. It’s important to carefully examine how the medication is labeled on the website.

Websites selling compounded versions of GLP-1 drugs are not allowed to use the FDA-approved brand names of products like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound.

If a product description includes spelling errors or terms such as “compounded,” “generic version,” or “same active ingredient as [brand name],” it often indicates that the product is a compounded formulation. When in doubt, try contacting the online retailer and ask if the product is a compounded drug.

If you decide to obtain GLP-1 medications online, it’s important to choose reliable and transparent sources. The manufacturers of several FDA-approved GLP-1 medications provide official online platforms such as Novocare and LillyDirect.

These allow people to get medication information and transparent pricing and to get the drugs delivered to them at home or to pick them up at a pharmacy. When possible, using these official sources can reduce the risk of encountering misleading advertisements or unverified products.

Red flags

Online retailers that offer GLP-1 drugs without requiring a prescription or medical evaluation are illegal and unsafe. Advertising the ease of getting a prescription or only requiring an online form to obtain a prescription is a red flag. As a rule of thumb, patients should always begin their treatment by consulting with their local primary care provider who can evaluate their complete medical history.

It is also important to verify whether the pharmacy associated with the website is properly licensed and compliant with regulatory standards, since many online sellers rely on compounding pharmacies that are based outside the U.S. or are not appropriately licensed. Therefore, patients should check whether the pharmacy that will ship their medication has a physical address and a telephone number based in the U.S.

Patients should verify whether the pharmacy is registered on the official FDA database of approved compounded pharmacies and licensed as per the board of pharmacy of the state where the pharmacy is physically located.

Using pharmacies that are not registered or licensed is highly unsafe and can result in serious adverse effects. If the online retailer does not clearly disclose which pharmacy they are using, you should contact the retailer to confirm this information.

Finally, even after you receive your medications, you will need to carefully review the product and its label. This can help determine whether the medication being offered corresponds to an FDA-approved product or a compounded formulation. Products that arrive without proper packaging, labeling, or an expiration date, or have a foreign language on the packaging, may be unsafe or unverified products.

Sujith Ramachandran is an associate professor of pharmacy administration at the University of Mississippi.

Liang-Yuan (Claire) Lin is a PhD Candidate in Pharmacy Administration at the University of Mississippi.

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

At many refugee camps around the world, play can, understandably, become an afterthought as humanitarian organizations focus on delivering essentials like housing and food. But studies show that play is critical for helping kids develop executive motor function and relational skills. It’s also a key therapeutic tool for children who have experienced trauma. These insights inspired Playrise, a U.K.-based charity designing play structures for children living in disaster-relief sites around the world.

Alexander Meininger, the founder and director of Playrise, says the concept for the nonprofit came about in early 2024. As he watched his own two young kids learning through play, he was simultaneously keeping up with an influx of news about conflict and war in various global locations, including Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and Eritrea. During this time, he became increasingly concerned about how children displaced by violence would be impacted by the lack of access to play structures. 

“Play is important generally for every child to develop, but especially for kids who are in these really extreme circumstances, it helps them to regain some sense of normality, overcome some trauma, escape the horrors that they’ve been through,” Meininger says. “It is really beyond the physical and mental development for every child: For them, play has a really big role in terms of healing.”

Alongside the London architecture firm OMMX, which specializes in what it calls “socially responsible architecture,” Meininger has spent the past two years working on a prototype for a flat-packed play structure that can be easily shipped and built on-site. The first Playrise structure—set to be shipped to the Aysaita camp at the end of April—is endlessly reconfigurable, safe for climbing, and designed to be adaptable to any environment.

The goal is to eventually make play universally accessible to the nearly 50 million kids who are currently displaced from their homes due to violence and conflict.

Play as a tool for healing

Before the Playrise team began the design process in earnest, they consulted with several different refugee communities around the world in order to understand their unique challenges, natural environments, and how the kids themselves actually wanted to play.

To gather those insights, OMMX cofounder and director Hikaru Nissanke, Meininger, and a team of project members spent June and July of 2025 conducting workshops. They traveled to Cairo, where many Palestinian children have fled from the Israel-Hamas war; six different villages in south Egypt, which is home to a group of refugees from Sudan; and the Aysaita Refugee Camp. 

Nissanke brought along a kit of fabric pieces, fashioned by a tailor near his London office, to set up makeshift playgrounds at each site. In the U.K., he explains, his team typically engages kids through structured activities, like coloring, playing with tools, or working with stickers. In the workshops, they focused instead on movements like dancing, jumping, and singing—intuititive staples of play that the kids could guide themselves, rather than requiring excessive explanation or instruction through a translator.

“We wanted something very direct, authentic, and in the moment,” Nissanke says. “We didn’t want to just assume one way of thinking, like, This is how we do it in the U.K., therefore this is the way we’ll do it in Ethiopia. We wanted to learn from them as much as possible rather than teaching.”

With free rein, the children’s creativity flourished. They transformed fabric into parachutes, slides, monkey bars, and hammocks—features that informed Playrise’s design. “A big takeaway is that they did love everything,” Nissanke says. “That was a really huge challenge.” 

At each of the three sites, it was clear that the kids didn’t want just one unchanging structure; they wanted to be able to climb, create forts, build stages, and play based on their imaginations. At the same time, the workshops highlighted how different the architectural conditions of refugee camps are: In Aysaita, the available space was a vast, arid desert made of sandy terrain and exposed to the sun, whereas in Cairo, the available area was a cramped courtyard within a walled enclosure. 

Playrise would need to create a system that could be mass-produced, flat-packed, built on-site, and constantly reconfigured based on both the kids’ ideas and the constraints of the natural terrain.

The best solution “was to give them a tool kit so that they could then build their own forms of play for whatever they need at that moment in time,” Nissanke says. Flexibility also helped the kit become more culturally responsive, a takeaway the design team learned from workshops in Ethiopia.

“The parents said that they really would see benefit to their children building and maintaining a play structure because it is a directly transferable skill to looking after their homes, which are incredibly fragile and precarious,” Nissanke adds.

A modular playground designed like Lego

In the early phases of the design process, Meininger and Nissanke thought of Playrise’s modular system like a set of giant Legos: Each part had to be flexible enough to be used in an infinite number of ways, but strong enough to hold up to years of play.

First, they selected wood to serve as the main building block of the system. While in Ethiopia and Egypt, the team noticed multiple metal playgrounds that had been abandoned because a single break in the structure would make it unsafe, and because the material would reach scorching temperatures in the desert heat. Wood, in contrast, could offer durability and stay relatively cool under direct sunlight. 

The next phase of the design process, and the most challenging, was finding a way to secure wood joinery. “It’s a bit of a compromise, because if you want it to go together as easily as possible, the easiest thing is stuff that just clicks together like Lego—but that wouldn’t be sturdy enough,” Meininger says. Instead, he and Nissanke designed a custom bolt that could be screwed and unscrewed with simple, easy-to-use tools.

Through a collaboration with a U.K. organization called the Play Inspector, which consults on play structures to make sure that they reach a high safety standard, Meininger and Nissanke learned that any small hole on a playground could trap fingers. So along each beam of wood they drilled a series of 26-millimeter-wide holes (about 1 inch, which is large enough to be safe for kids’ hands) and created a fitting consisting of a pipe, bolts, and washers that allow these beams to be joined together in almost any configuration. 

Once the beams were complete, the final step was developing a series of supplemental parts—the Lego accessories of Playrise. To shield kids from the blazing sun, Nissanke designed colorful fabric “sails” that can be tied down between the beams to create pockets of shade. They also double as a canvas kids can paint. Additional parts in the kit include climbable handholds, swings, and rope nets. 

“I worked on this for the whole year, and I’ve seen a thousand pictures and drawings, but when you see it in reality it really looks like a giant toy,” Meininger says. “You look at it, and it looks a bit like Lego, and you think, Wow, this is really joyful.”

Playrise’s next steps

Right now, Playrise is preparing to ship its first modular playground to Aysaita by the end of April; playgrounds in Cairo and the south of Egypt will follow.

Meininger and Nissanke plan to use learnings from these locations to inform future updates to the design. They’re already expanding the accessories to include more accessible options at ground level for kids who may be unable to climb, like drums and sensory toys. They want to eventually stock a complete kit on their website that can bring the benefits of play to the sites where it’s needed the most. 

“Everything kids do is play,” Meininger says. “That’s how they experience the world. That’s how they learn. That’s how they grow and develop. Sophia Apdi, a child psychologist who sat with us on a roundtable recently, expressed it really nicely. She said, ‘Play is the language of children.’”

On wheat paste posters and short-form video posted to social media, Madonna teased her forthcoming album, out July 3, and its first song, “I Feel So Free,” in words. “Madonna Confessions II” is written on the album cover in Helvetica, a workhorse sans-serif font that’s one of the most popular fonts in the world because its minimalist form looks simple and perpetually modern.

Typography was used throughout Madonna’s announcement to spell out “Confessions II,” “COADF 2,” and other promotional copy in all-caps, sans-serif typefaces, and some of the text is vertically stretched or outlined. The singer isn’t using a single font for this album launch; she’s using a whole font book. In an Instagram Stories video, text flashes and repeats vertically on screen, along with a strobe warning. It’s loud, fast, and eye-catching. A new, provocative M logo for the album shows the singer’s legs in high-heeled silver boots making the shape of the letter out from behind a speaker.

For a sequel to Madonna’s beloved 2005 dance-pop album, Madonna reunited with producer Stuart Price who recorded, co-produced, and co-wrote the original Confessions on a Dance Floor. The snippet for the first track Madonna teased sounds squarely within the dance pop universe that the first album introduced. For the album’s graphic design, though, Madonna turned to a new creative partner that’s taking a type-first approach.

Special Offer, Inc., had previously worked with artists like Haim and Miley Cyrus, but it was its art direction for 2024’s brat that put it on the map. Charli’s breakthrough album, known for its neon green color scheme and out-of-focus Arial Narrow font, won the Best Recording Package at the 2025 Grammys.

After its launch, brat-style typography appeared just about everywhere: as murals, in an unofficial album cover generator, on merch (both official and unofficial), and on deluxe edition of the album. The brand also extended to flashing typography for Charli’s Sweat Tour with Troye Sivan and the video titles for her “360” and “Guess” music videos. Special Offer, Inc., which is credited for art direction for Madonna’s new album, did not respond to a request for comment.

Madonna once promoted her music through platforms like MTV, but today it’s short-form video where music gets traction, and the strobing, type-first approach Special Offer, Inc., is taking works well on smartphones where short, bold, visually arresting text stops you mid-scroll.

“The typography for an artist like Madonna is interesting,” says designer Nolan Strals, who’s made album artwork for artists including Titus Andronicus, Beach House, and John Legend and the Roots. “She’s always been played in clubs, but this feels like a bid at relevancy for a new generation… It’s typography not aimed to get the attention of her old fans, but to feel relevant to people who get their culture from TikTok.”

The typography used for the original Confessions album included a Madonna logo that turned the O into a disco ball. The handwritten album title, track listing, and liner notes recalled the look of disco-era album art lettering from artists like Michael Jackson and Grace Jones. Photographer Steven Klein shot the artwork that showed Madonna in red hair, a pink leotard, and sparkling heels, and designer Giovanni Biano did the art direction and graphic design. The color scheme for the album, which spun off hits like the ABBA-sampling “Hung Up” and “Sorry,” was pink and purple while the lighting was dark and moody.

A bright pink, red, and purple color scheme for the new album packs a Bratty, high-contrast visual punch, but echoes the colors of the original album art. Then there’s the photography for Confessions II, which this time around is more high fashion with a magazine-quality editorial look showing Madonna with fabric over her head wearing a floral pattern top and fishnet stockings. Her shoes this time aren’t sparkly, they’re all black.

Using Helvetica on the album cover is a simple but smart play, because while the font is widely used, such as across New York City’s subway system and in logos like Target and Jeep, it also appears across art and fashion. Special Offer, Inc., has used the closely related font Arial in its work for Charli and Addison Rae, and before his death, Virgil Abloh used Helvetica to write words out on his designs.

More than 20 years after the original album’s debut, the COADF visual identity has grown an extended universe that appeared on tour, a subsequent live CD-DVD, and an anniversary edition of the album. For the sequel, Madonna’s designers are building on what came before. The look of the new album is elevated, like Confessions on a Dance Floor all grown up.

Crowded shelves

Sensing that growth potential, new sports and hydration brands are crowding store shelves. Mike Del Pozzo, president of U.S. beverages at PepsiCo, said 150 new brands have entered the space in the last few years.

“That puts a lot of risk on the category and pressure from a credibility perspective,” Del Pozzo said. “Some that are coming in are building on the science that we created. And we’re like, ‘Well, geez, we should be doing that. We should be talking more overtly about the science and the business and why we believe we’re future-forward.”

Del Pozzo said Gatorade will now clearly label products that it says can hydrate better or faster than water. A new drink, Gatorade Longer Lasting, which will go on sale next year, blends glycerin and electrolytes to help the body stay hydrated for longer than water alone.

PepsiCo’s approach with Gatorade echoes moves made by some of its rivals. Powerade, a sports drink owned by Coca-Cola Co., received brighter, clearer packaging in 2023 that promoted an increase in electrolytes. Last fall, Powerade began selling Power Water, a zero-sugar, electrolyte-enhanced drink aimed at non-athletes.

Liquid I.V., which was founded as a sports drink mix in 2012, was acquired by Unilever in 2020 and has remade itself into a wellness and hydration brand. LMNT also had non-athletes in mind last fall when it introduced a smaller, 12-ounce version of its sparkling electrolyte drink.

Sean Harapko, a beverage sector leader with Ernst & Young Americas, said consumers have so many beverage choices that companies must clearly define their products and explain why people should choose one over another. Americans are trying to live healthier lives, he said, but they’re collecting information from many different sources and defining for themselves what that looks like.

Gatorade’s origins

Gatorade was born in 1965, when the football coach at the University of Florida asked Dr. Robert Cade, a physician and professor at the school, why his players were losing so much weight during games but not urinating. Cade realized the players were sweating out electrolytes – another word for minerals like sodium, potassium and magnesium – and upsetting the body’s chemical balance.

Cade came up with Gatorade, a drink containing salt to replace electrolytes, sugar to improve energy and lemon juice for flavor. Quaker Oats acquired Gatorade’s parent company in 1983 and established the Gatorade Sports Science Institute two years later. PepsiCo became Gatorade’s owner when it bought Quaker Oats in 2000.

Del Pozzo said Gatorade will continue to meet athletes’ needs. Gatorade Thirst Quencher, for example, has 48 grams of sugar and 18% of the recommended daily amount of carbohydrates, which athletes need to maintain energy. But Del Pozzo notes that Gatorade Lower Sugar, which went on sale last month and has 75% less sugar, is one of the company’s biggest sellers in recent history.

Del Pozzo said lower-sugar versions aimed at non-athletes, as well as the removal of artificial colors from Gatorade’s lineup, is bringing customers into the brand.

“I think there were people that said, ‘I didn’t exercise or I’m not out in the heat or I am not sweating.’ The reality is, everybody is sweating and dehydrated from the moment they wake up and many just don’t know it,” he said.

But Travis Masterson, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Health and Human Development, said the average non-athlete gets the sodium they need from their diet. Athletes sometimes need a reminder to drink, he said, because their bodies are under stress. But for average people, the thirst signal is a good indicator.

“Gatorade 100% has a place, but is it going to be necessary for everybody? Do you need to hydrate faster or longer?” he said. “The average person doesn’t need all the extra stuff.”

—Dee-Ann Durbin, AP Business Writer

Now, Canva is amongst the leading spenders on compute from platforms like ChatGPT, it’s building its own models and acquiring its own AI companies, and it’s launching even more AI design features as part of its Canva AI 2.0 release that it’s announcing today.

But the headline marks a deeper, philosophical shift within Canva: From being “a design platform with AI tools” to becoming an “AI platform with design tools.”

Connecting with Canva’s CEO, Mel Perkins, I asked about the motivation behind this repositioning. In this age of AI, much of the industry has been discussing what you could call either a flattening or a war between the roles of designers, product managers, and engineers. Was Canva responding to this trend? 

In response, Perkins pulls up an old idea from 2011 called Canvas Chef, which looks a lot like the Google Search page but with wood paneling and some kitchen kitsch. 

“From the very early stages, we always believed that you could just be able to type in whatever you want and kind of get kickstarted straight away,” she says. “Obviously, it has been a very long journey to get to this point in time, but really, that is actually what we’re launching today.”

Canva AI 2.0 looks like Perkins’s 15-year-old vision, and also the Canva you already know. The real difference now is that Canva’s existing AI tab—which is pretty much a search bar—has been supercharged with more capabilities.

A big upgrade is around connecting services. You can now link Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, Zoom, and Notion—plus it’ll crawl for an answer on the web, or even search your old Canva projects—allowing Canva to bring in relevant information that I imagine will be particularly valuable to marketers. 

Whereas you used to be able to create a somewhat generic deck from a prompt, now you can infuse that deck with data that’s lurking in your emails or spreadsheets. Other upgrades allow you to do a lot more when AI-editing that deck. Formerly, it was a one-shot, generate-the-whole-thing-for-me ask. Now, you can actually edit individual slides with AI prompts instead of starting over. Similar capabilities exist for brand templates. Before, if you didn’t start a project with your brand standards, you couldn’t always update them retroactively. Now, AI will transform any design you throw at it to be more on-brand.

And of course, Canva will develop interactive projects, too, which publish straight to the web.

“When we launched Canva, the huge innovation was we went from pixel editing, where you had to very deeply know the tools, to object editing, where you could just lay things out,” says Perkins. “And now with Canva AI 2.0 we’re actually moving into concept editing, where you can put in a concept it can then assemble it for you on the fly.” 

That said, Canva isn’t removing any of the physical tools people are used to. For this big update and grand repositioning, Canva’s vibe is largely unchanged. The more radical updates live under the hood, developed by Canva’s 100+ person AI research team.

Multi-agents made invisible

Behind the scenes, Canva provides this upgraded AI toolset by offering AI agents to its users—but those users never actually see them. I’m told that Canva’s own AI layer sits between its app and the external AI services it queries, juggling a complicated, multi-agent workflow that the Valley’s top coders are addicted to, without ever asking the user to think about more than one AI question at once. Perkins says this is what allows complicated tasks, that might need to remove the background of an image and generate copy and apply brand standards at the same time.

As the capabilities stack up, I wonder if Canva’s subscription prices can offer people the amount of AI processing they’ll need to take advantage of the service. Canva is ahead of this issue, as it’s introducing a special AI Pass that, for $100/mo, offers Pro users 40x more AI and Business users 20x more AI.

Despite Canva’s aggressive incorporation of AI, I still can’t help but wonder if it’s being experimental enough, as AI feels poised to melt the boundaries of media as we know them. Canva is excellent at reducing the friction around creating things, but it’s not all that deep for experimentation or exploration. And it’s not challenging the status quo of the prompt.

CJ Jones, head of GenAI design at Canva, says the company is rolling out the AI features that its users are asking for. And the fact is that, today, a lot of their users aren’t graphic design professionals who are artists with a mouse. Instead, most people are using AI to remove backgrounds in images and translate text to English (as many users are not native English speakers).

Even still, Jones insists that Canva is thinking more experimentally in the larger term, taking a patient, car company approach to redesigning its own software over time.

“Part of our product development process is looking at two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, and what we’ll do from there is [consider] this might be a really wild idea that completely redesigns Canva,” says Jones. “But we have to keep in mind our base right now…How easy is it to move them from where we are today to that? And so what we’ll do is look at the core of that vision, and how we want to bring that [to the product].” 

Canva AI 2.0 launches today in a preview to Pro and Business customers.

The Trump Store sells a whole skincare line plus branded golf gear, robes, blankets, glassware, and more. There’s the classic red “Make America Great Again” hats for $47, an $80 Trump Home jasmine room spray and diffuser set, and Trump-branded coffee pods that sell for $18 for a 12-pack.

All told, there are 1,492 total items for sale at the Trump Store that together cost $91,145.12, according to a new review of Trump’s branded merchandising business by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the presidency, and it’s a growing revenue stream for Trump.

“We’ve never seen any president profit off of something like the Trump Store, or indeed, any of the numerous businesses that Trump has continued to profit from while serving as president,” CREW communications director Meghan Faulkner tells Fast Company. She says the merch along with things like Mar-a-Lago memberships or Trump’s cryptocurrency “normalizes the idea that the presidency is for sale.”

“The merch store is just the most obvious physical representation of how Trump has essentially put his office up for sale,” Faulkner says.

CREW found that this storefront, which Trump launched in 2017 during the first year of his first term, brought in about $8.8 million in 2024, the latest year of Trump’s financial records, which is more than double how much it made the year before. Of the shop’s currently available products, 662 of them were launched since he took office for a final term last year.

Congress could and should pass a law requiring presidents and vice presidents to divest from assets that could pose a conflict of interest within 30 days of taking office, Faulkner says, and there should be clear enforcement mechanisms to hold them accountable if they don’t divest.

The Trump Store isn’t the same thing as Trump’s since-shuttered online campaign store where he once hawked MAGA hats to fundraise for his presidential campaigns. It’s his company’s own storefront, which isn’t beholden to the same Federal Election Commission rules, like annual limits or a prohibition against any foreign purchases. This revenue also goes straight to him rather than being split up among other groups that his joint fundraising campaign revenue was once divided between.

The growth of Trump’s merchandising business comes amid a broader shift in his overall merchandising strategy. Though Trump continued his campaign shop for a time after taking office for a second term last year, introducing new products like a prop “Gulf of America” executive order, lately the focus has been on releasing new products on his company’s shop instead, like new “Trump 250”-branded items to profit off the anniversary of the U.S. founding this year. Meanwhile the campaign’s online shop is no longer accessible from Trump’s campaign website.

Before entering politics, Trump licensed his name to branded buildings and products like water and a board game, and his hotel and golf course business necessitated things like branded toiletries and robes that he still sells today.

But it’s unusual for a U.S. president to sell branded gear in office like Trump does. Jimmy Carter’s family put its peanut farm in a blind trust after he took office, and they didn’t start a peanut butter brand or sell peanut tchotchkes to supporters. And while some presidential libraries do have gift shops, those come after a president leaves office, and are nowhere near as robust as Trump’s efforts.

Trump’s merch isn’t just lifestyle stuff, it’s explicitly political too. He sells at least 99 items that reference his presidency, including a $55 Space Force hat and a $50 “Gulf of America – Yet Another Trump Development” hat. The shop also sells merch promoting an unconstitutional third term, like “Four More Years!” and “Trump 2028” hats and a shirt that says “Trump 2028 (Rewrite The Rules).”

Trump’s already rewriting the rules of how presidents profit of their office. By merchandising his presidency, he’s monetized political fandom into a personal revenue stream for himself.

If that sounds like the background plot of a boring space movie, it’s because it is science fiction.

The TL;DR: here is that Musk’s blueprint is fundamentally broken, according to experts in physics, aerospace engineering, and chip design. It ignores basic thermodynamics and the logistical impossibility of extraterrestrial manufacturing. Even if the talented SpaceX engineers perform multiple miracles to make their CEO’s plan work, the real timeline spans decades, not years, as Musk has proposed. 

This sci-fi narrative masks a vulnerable core business that, despite being the current leader by a wide margin, could lose its launch monopoly to cheaper Chinese rockets and face a fatal technological disadvantage in the upcoming space cellular war. 

Sound familiar? 

Yes, SpaceX 1.0 could quickly become Tesla 2.0.

And yet Musk—who, remember, has a long history of delays in his enterprises—boldly claims that SpaceX can build the required lunar infrastructure for his million-satellite plan in less than a decade, and that his orbital AI computing idea can reach cost parity with terrestrial AI farms in just two to three years.

According to the experts I’ve spoken to, this timeline is unlikely to play out. And if you’re planning to spend your money on Musk’s latest pipe dream, you should pay attention to what the experts are saying.

Those pesky physics

Down on Earth, when a computer processor gets hot, a fan blows ambient air across it (it can be liquid-cooled, but that radiator also needs to radiate out the heat through air). The air absorbs the thermal energy and carries it away through a fluid motion called convection. 

In space, it’s a different story. Space is a vacuum, so there’s no air to carry the heat away. Electronics must shed their thermal energy by glowing, radiating it away as infrared light.

“Refrigeration in space is more challenging than on Earth because standard systems rely on gravity to manage liquids and gases,” Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb tells me in an email interview. He says that without gravity pinning it to the bottom of the server, “the oil used to lubricate traditional compressors can clog the system.” Furthermore, Loeb points out, “heat cannot rise away from components through natural convection.” 

Damien Dumestier is an engineer who analyzed orbital data centers for the ASCEND project, which examined the feasibility of launching orbital servers. He agrees with Loeb and adds that new technologies will need to be developed to make it happen.

“In space you need to refrigerate IT hardware. The main difference is that on Earth you have the ambient air, which is roughly around 20 degrees Celsius,” Dumestier tells me in an email interview. In space you have minus 270°C temperatures, but heat must radiate out of components due to the lack of air, which is a very inefficient way to keep things cool.

“You cannot use convection or airflow to collect the thermal power from the dissipative elements,” Dumestier says. “Therefore the only way to dissipate the thermal power outside of the data center is to use radiative elements.”

Ryan McClelland, a research engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, puts the real issue in one clean sentence: “Cooling things in space is well understood. It is the scale required that is mind-boggling.” Indeed. It’s not that cooling things in space is impossible. It’s the scale of what Musk is proposing that makes it extremely hard. 

Right now, a standard modern telecom satellite generates roughly 20 kilowatts of heat, which is low enough that the flat metal body of the spacecraft itself can act as a passive radiator, or a surface that slowly bleeds heat into the cold of space. That is a solved aerospace problem.

But Musk wants to build a 100-gigawatt network with 1 million satellites. Simple division dictates that each individual spacecraft must continuously process 100 kilowatts of power (100,000,000 kilowatts divided by 1,000,000 satellites). That is an entirely different thermal beast, as astrophysicist and science communicator Scott Manley points out. 

Manley says that at 100 kilowatts per ship, a satellite’s natural surface area is nowhere near large enough to shed the heat. SpaceX will be forced to equip each satellite with massive, fragile, deployable radiators that unfold into space. Furthermore, the heat doesn’t magically jump from the melting silicon processors to those external wings; it must be physically carried there. This requires pumping tons of pressurized cooling fluid every minute through a complex labyrinth of narrow pipes. When you multiply that zero-gravity plumbing nightmare by 1 million satellites, the sheer mechanical absurdity of Musk’s data center becomes impossible to hide.

“Basically, all the energy collected (either by direct illumination and heating, or via the solar panels) must be radiated,” European Southern Observatory astronomer Olivier Hainaut says. “And yes, the radiation is not efficient, so large radiators are needed. That said, looking at the current version of their satellites, their radiators are significantly smaller than their solar panels. Still, they will be large.” 

Dumestier calculates that the ratio of power generation to heat dissipation is roughly 4.5 to 1. To cool 100 gigawatts of computing power, SpaceX will need an astronomically massive physical footprint of radiators.

A silicon Dyson sphere

Then there’s the issue of feeding those AI processors. SpaceX will use solar panels to power them, but generating the power envisioned by Musk is a mathematical nightmare. Loeb tells me that capturing 100 gigawatts of solar flux requires an effective panel area of 1.07 billion square feet. Even if you chop that massive array into a million separate satellites, each unit requires a 32.8-foot solar panel. 

“A linear alignment of just 10 components stretches across roughly the full height of the Artemis II Space Launch System rocket,” Loeb explains.

He compares the sheer scale of this million-server constellation to a “miniature version of a Dyson sphere,” referring to the theoretical megastructure first proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960 that entirely encompasses a star to capture its power. In a 2023 paper, Loeb suggests that as stars evolve, they might break these Dyson spheres apart, turning them into “thin interstellar objects which are pushed around by radiation pressure.”

You can’t just bolt a standard off-the-shelf server into this environment. A top expert in the chip industry who requested anonymity tells me that “cooling and solar energy production will require a huge footprint.” He stresses that the industry must invent entirely new hardware, noting, “We need to reimagine how chips are designed for space (heterogeneous compute, integrated Peltier coolers, integrated photonic chips) etc.”

A Peltier cooler acts like a microscopic electronic refrigerator glued directly to the silicon to force heat out, while photonic chips use beams of light instead of electrical currents to transmit data, eliminating much of the heat entirely. While basic photonic integrated circuits are just now reaching commercial mass production for Earth-based data centers, fully integrating microscopic Peltier cooling directly into the silicon die remains largely confined to experimental research. Mass-manufacturing these exotic processors, let alone engineering hundreds of millions of them to survive the radioactive vacuum of space, pushes this timeline decades into the future.

Hainaut speculates that SpaceX may already be working on solving the chip problem, since the rocket company and Tesla recently announced Terafab, a joint $25 billion chip factory in Texas. Nobody outside the company knows exactly what’s being built there, and this chip company may actually be for the Starlink mobile plans.

But even if they manage to solve this problem and come up with amazing new hardware, the timeline alone keeps ruining the investment pitch. “I still think we can have small-scale data centers (with specific objectives) in space within 10 years for sure. . . . We cannot underestimate Musk,” the chip expert says. The key phrase here is small-scale. 

The Kessler lottery and lunar latency

The problems with this plan don’t end with hardware. Placing a million massive structures into low Earth orbit—just 250 to 370 miles above our heads—invites a planetary disaster. Loeb warns that this density would “pose a serious risk for collisions, where the debris would catastrophically trigger a cascade chain reaction” known as the Kessler effect.

Debris from crowded orbits is already wreaking havoc. In late 2025, the return of three Chinese astronauts aboard the Shenzhou-20 was delayed because orbital debris struck their spacecraft, causing cracks in a window. In a 2023 report the Federal Aviation Administration issued a stark warning that falling space debris could cause human casualties by 2035. 

Dumestier notes that 100 megawatts is completely unmanageable in low Earth orbit, which is why Europe’s ASCEND study proposed a far safer alternative: deploying just 1,000 satellites—each producing 1 megawatt—at a much higher altitude of 870 miles (for comparison, low Earth orbit is 250 to 260 miles)—to avoid the Kessler effect. But that comes short on the 100-gigawatt promise Musk is making by a factor of 100.

Furthermore, to avoid the crushing cost of launching all this heavy hardware from Earth, Musk’s master plan is to build a factory on the moon and use an electromagnetic mass driver to hurl the servers into orbit.

“Building a suitable factory on the moon will probably take many decades,” Loeb tells me. “The use of an electromagnetic catapult to launch satellites is an unproven technology. The entire project sounds more like a speculative science fantasy than a believable technological project.”

Musk wants to have a lunar factory up and running in just a decade, which is a wildly ambitious timeline, but Hainaut tells me that we shouldn’t underestimate SpaceX engineers. “They are good, and they control the whole stack,” he says, reminding me of the early days of Starlink, when astronomers complained about brightness in January and SpaceX launched modified spacecraft in March. “That kind of turnaround time is completely unheard of in the space industry,” Hainaut points out. “I suspect they can (eventually) do it,” though it will be “later than they claim.” 

Under pressure

Let’s assume that SpaceX engineers manage to pull everything off in two or three decades. Cool. There’s another big elephant in the room: money. As Dumestier points out, that’s the real problem. How can they pull it off, even with that massive valuation, soon enough to actually make money and survive? Even if SpaceX manages to magically conquer these unprecedented engineering challenges, the timeline would span decades.

Musk is mainly going to use the massive influx of capital from the IPO to bankroll his decades-long science fiction dreams of lunar factories and mass drivers. But the company still needs to generate lots of money to keep going. Right now, SpaceX is running on two massive cash engines that Musk is desperately trying to leverage into his $1.75 trillion IPO: its workhorse Falcon 9 commercial rocket and Starlink’s 9 million subscribers. Without the commercial launches and continuous, dramatic Starlink growth, the card castle starts to fall apart.

And it just so happens that those two SpaceX revenue engines are under heavy fire.

Each Falcon 9 rocket launch prints money for the company, with a staggering operating profit margin as high as 77%. But state-backed Chinese aerospace companies are already aggressively undercutting Musk’s prices, with plans to sink them even more by building enormous factories to produce thousands of rockets.

You don’t even have to wait a year or two for that. As of March 2026, a commercial firm established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS Space, successfully launched its Kinetica-2 rocket at a cost of roughly $1,970 per pound. For context, SpaceX’s most recent Falcon 9 launch prices charge customers roughly $3,100 per pound. Now, keep in mind CAS’s price tag is for a ride in an expendable rocket. They are testing reusable technology this year and, according to the company, they’re aiming to halve the cost when that happens.

Domestically, the monopoly is also breaking, with rivals like Rocket Lab and Blue Origin bringing their own cheaper, reusable rockets to market to steal SpaceX’s lucrative commercial and government launch contracts.

Adding to the financial pressure that may crush Musk’s plan is Starlink, which he wants to turn into a global phone provider. Currently the source of up to 80% of SpaceX’s gross revenue, the division may lose the space cellular wars to multiple competitors, like Amazon Leo, multiple constellations from Chinese companies, and a small Texas-based company called AST SpaceMobile, which is backed by telecom giants like AT&T. 

While SpaceX plans an environmentally reckless, brute-force constellation of 34,000 disposable Starlink V3 satellites—operating on weak, high-frequency signals that bounce off buildings and require users to buy an entirely new phone equipped with a proprietary SpaceX modem chip—AST has vastly superior technology that will allegedly allow it to cover the world with just 90 massive unfolding satellites. The latter also owns key “gold spectrum,” the low-band radio waves that penetrate walls and connect directly to the standard 5G smartphones already in consumers’ pockets.

To further complicate SpaceX’s immediate future, its Starlink V3 is so heavy that the Falcon 9 cannot launch it in economically viable numbers. The entire broadband business model hinges on Starship, a super-heavy rocket that remains in the testing phase. Even Musk admitted that because the Falcon 9 lacks the volume for next-generation satellites, SpaceX faces a “genuine risk of bankruptcy” without Starship.

Of course, SpaceX may be able to fend off competitors and solve all the huge engineering problems ahead. After all, SpaceX succeeded in making reusable rockets happen at the 11th hour, just when Musk thought the company was about to go under.

Still, with all the external forces aligning against the company and a sci-fi plan that may require decades to come to fruition, it’s hard to imagine investors getting any significant profits for an extremely long time. The current situation feels all too familiar to me. It’s as if we’re watching SpaceX walk the exact same path as Tesla: an industry that Musk started, scaled to incredible heights, only to fall, wrecked by his own hubris and the unstoppable rise of better technology, better design, and the overpowering Chinese supply chain and manufacturing muscle.

Musk’s astronomical valuation relies on investors looking at the moon, a tall tale seemingly designed to obscure his company’s breaking points right here on Earth.

The most recent mainline games in the series, Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet, sold 10 million copies in their first three days, while the accompanying Pokémon Trading Card Game printed 10.2 million new cards between 2024 and 2025. The franchise now features 1,025 Pokémon across its more than a hundred video game titles under the Pokémon umbrella, including the mobile gaming phenomenon Pokémon Go, which ranks among the highest-grossing mobile games ever. Pokémon has even gotten the Hollywood blockbuster treatment, thanks to 2019’s Detective Pikachu.

But the pull of its earliest iteration remains an appealing and accessible way into the franchise for nostalgic and new fans alike. That’s why it served as the inspiration for an officially licensed limited-time collection from Target. The collection, unveiled Wednesday, is the only U.S. retailer collaboration with Pokémon for the brand’s 30th anniversary, and it launches in May.

The collection could help bring fans into stores as the retailer looks to improve its sales, which were down 1.7% year over year in 2025 on a net basis, and down 2.6% on a comparable-store basis.

The Pokémon x Target collection features more than 100 unique pieces of merchandise, from apparel and home goods to tech accessories and bags. From the collection’s conception, Target has focused its efforts on satisfying the franchise’s most devoted fans—from one of its own vice presidents of marketing to superstar singer Joe Jonas, who’s the face of the collection.

A time machine to the ’90s

Even with more than 100 items, Target’s Pokémon collection barely scratches the surface of the franchise’s universe. Distilling 30 years into one collection was the challenge faced by Gigi Guerra, a vice president of marketing at Target, who brought her perspective as a die-hard fan to the process.

To pare down the Pokédex, Target chose to lean into the occasion and return to where it all began, basing all of its new products on Pokémon from the original Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue.

“If you took a time machine back to 1996, what would be there?” Guerra says she and her team asked themselves. “And it was the Kanto region. It was the original 151.”

The products and their accompanying campaign lean into the era’s aesthetic, too. The red, blue, and yellow color scheme that defined the first Pokémon generation is all over the collection, along with holographic packaging details reminiscent of holofoil Pokémon cards.

That ’90s nostalgia extends to the other brands that Target got involved with the collab, many of which immediately evoke the aesthetics of the era. There’s a Trapper Keeper binder designed to hold Pokémon cards, a Caboodle tackle box tailor-made for other Pokémon merchandise, and a Starter jacket representing the Kanto region. “That’s going to be an instant collector’s item,” Guerra says of the jacket, noting easter eggs like Pokémon symbols on the inside of the pocket.

Pokémon x Target will release in two drops, with the first in-store on May 2 and online on May 3. The rest of the collection will release in June. Guerra says she hopes the collection connects with Pokémon fans, no matter how or when they got into the franchise.

“Pokémon connects people from all over,” she says. “No matter where you started Pokémon or how old you are, everyone knows and loves that first-gen nostalgia.”

And though the collection can appeal to new fans, it’s especially made to satisfy longtime fandom fanatics—and was made with their input.

For fans, by fans

On paper, Target and Pokémon make the perfect collaborators. Target says that 1 in 18 of its shoppers buy Pokémon in some capacity. But marketing a collection to a specific fandom, even one as massive as Pokémon, is a tightrope walk: If a brand’s investment in the community feels surface-level, it can quickly be written off as pandering and be decried by the very audience it’s trying to reach.

“The problem with that is fandom, by its very nature, isn’t just a number,” creator economy analyst and anime expert Ben Woods says. “It has its own nuances. It has its own in-jokes. It has its own key figureheads and celebrated characters.”

From the outset of this effort, Target worked to avoid this pitfall by letting genuine Pokémon fans steer the collection. It didn’t have to look far to find them.

Guerra herself is the biggest fan in her family, even though she got into the world by picking up Pokémon Go to connect with her kids. She even attends annual Pokémon conventions in cosplay, including dressing as her favorite Pokémon, the fairy-type Eeveelution Sylveon.

The rest of the team, around 20 Target employees who offered input, came together like a game of telephone at HQ. “Everyone knew of someone that was a Pokémon fan,” Guerra says. “It was almost like we had this internal sounding board and filter for everything in how we’re picking products, picking colors, picking Pokémon.”

That insider perspective led to countless “if you know, you know” details throughout the collection, she says, from blind-box water bottles featuring beloved water-type Pokémon to puzzles with 151 pieces.

That fandom is also reflected in how Guerra is marketing the collection. Poster boy Joe Jonas is a lifelong fan of the franchise who’s known for his unboxing livestreams of Pokémon cards (he has a tattoo of mythical Pokémon Mew, No. 150 of the original 151). “He’s been a fan since he was a kid, so for him, it was like a real full-circle moment,” Guerra says, teasing forthcoming Pokémon content from the pop star.

The collection’s campaign also features superfans, with Pokémon influencers including Sydeon, PhillyBeatzU, Stephosaurawr, and Aspen modeling products like Butterfree-shaped hair clips, Magikarp tank tops, and kickballs patterned like Pokéballs.

“To be able to do a Pokémon collaboration—I’ve worked at Target for more than a decade,” Guerra says. “I’ve been waiting for this day for years.”

If the final product works like the demo, the new Firefly AI Assistant will change the fundamental way people interact with design software, giving the keys of the walled professional creative castle to anyone willing to pay the money, write in plain English, and move sliders that appear contextually to finely tune aspects of their creations whenever it is needed. Instead of forcing newcomers to memorize a labyrinth of menus, nested palettes, and pop-up windows, the assistant lets them achieve complex results just by asking. 

At the same time, the new assistant is the first stepping stone into a new type of automation for professionals. It gives veterans a fast track to bypass the tedious grunt work they already know how to do. “We have the full spectrum covered from people coming new to our franchise and they don’t know the full power of Photoshop and they want to achieve some amazing edits they can also tap into it and just talk to the assistant,” Adobe vice president of AI and innovation Alexandru Costin told me in an interview. “On the other side of the spectrum, the creative professionals that fully understand our tools can actually take those assets and continue editing them in our tools.”

This tool evolved from Project Moonlight, which Adobe teased at last year’s MAX conference and tested in a private beta. The core idea came directly from working professionals who were looking for a modern upgrade to Photoshop Actions, a decades-old feature that allows users to record and replay mouse clicks. Actions only works for fixed, repeatable chores, like adjusting a thousand images’ hue and saturation using fixed values. But users wanted a smarter type of automation agent that could adapt to what the agent sees in each image, video, or illustration. Adobe decided to create something that goes beyond basic editing, changing things on media according to the context and content of the image or the video itself, even creating new images, mockups and final candidates for art.  

The new, smart ‘Photoshop Actions’

“At Adobe MAX actually I was meeting a large group of professionals to ask them about agentic,” Costin tells me, using the industry term for an AI that actively executes multi-step tasks across different software on your behalf. “They said ‘look I would love you guys to give me a button like Photoshop actions where I can record in an agent what I’m doing and then have the agent be able to replay that for me so I can basically decide… that this automation is doing the things my way.'”

While the new Firefly AI Assistant still has two limitations that will not make it a direct Actions replacement—more on this later—it certainly has the potential to become a huge time saver for any professional willing to work with a crew of AI bots.

To make that kind of automation happen, Adobe built what it calls Creative Skills. The AI learns how a specific creator likes to work over time, picking up on their favorite tools and visual style, and can apply that knowledge to handle your files. “You can actually describe your particular taste or approach as a creative professional and then be able to ‘replay’ that using the Firefly AI system, so you save time and you can automate some portion of your work so you have more time for creativity,” Costin says.

The current beta provides a standard set of default skills to start, though making those skills fully editable and shareable is coming in a subsequent version (one of the limitations that set it apart from Photoshop Actions, which are fully shareable).

Instead of relying on rigid templates, the system acts like an autonomous digital art director. It actively evaluates the raw materials on your canvas to figure out the right context before making a move, rather than just executing blind commands based on file metadata. The software doesn’t just hijack your cursor either; it checks in with you constantly to clarify what you actually want to achieve, ensuring you remain the driver of the final artwork.

This integration goes beyond Adobe’s own engines, extending the platform to leading third-party AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude. It also hooks into review platforms like Frame.io. If a client leaves notes on a project, the agent can digest that feedback and execute the revisions on its own, selecting whatever software handles the job best.

The path for multi-model, adaptive interfaces

The assistant also introduces Precision Flow, replacing the tedious chore of painting pixel-perfect masks with semantic editing. Instead of dealing with raw pixels, the AI recognizes the actual physical objects inside the frame—knowing a coffee cup is a cup and the beans next to it are beans. “Precision flow gives you the opportunity to use generative AI to edit an asset not on the pixel level but on the semantic side,” Costin says. “Like in this case it knows that this is a photo of some coffee with coffee beans so it creates these dynamic semantic sliders that enable you then to change your image semantically without having to re-prompt.”

This semantic ability automatically generates new control panels for granular control. In the case of the coffee cup with the coffee beans splashing over the liquid coffee, users will see a panel with sliders like “Coffee beans” and “Splash” that users can move to precisely increase or decrease the amount of beans or coffee splash. This is the right step for future apps. Natural language is great for a starting point, but language is interpretable by nature, leading to imprecision and misunderstandings. There is no imprecision in a slider that can increase the amount of coffee beans in the image, interactively, in real time.

Because the assistant is hooked directly into the guts of the Creative Cloud, standard tools like hue and saturation get passed directly into the host application. The result isn’t a dead image file; it generates a native PSD document, Adobe’s standard file format that stacks individual edits on separate, adjustable layers.

“This is actually a Photoshop control where once you do these edits behind the scenes we can actually create the PSD and that PSD is loaded in Photoshop,” Costin says. “Using an actual Photoshop feature you will have that full adjustment layer applied in Photoshop.”

However, the current beta still hits a hard wall when it comes to those advanced semantic edits. While any regular control panel—like HUE & Saturation—will generate an editable layer in Photoshop, when you use Precision Flow to modify objects in the assistant, those specific changes do not yet cross over into Photoshop as live, manipulable sliders. “We haven’t yet integrated precision flow into Photoshop. You can imagine this is coming to Photoshop too, but I don’t think we’re announcing it yet,” Costin says. “Right now if you do these edits the image that will be passed to Photoshop will be a raster image.” 

That means the semantic tweaks arrive as a flattened, uneditable layer of pixels. For absolute beginners, this technical hurdle won’t matter much as long as the final image looks good. For the high-end professionals that Adobe is trying to court, I suspect it will be more like a temporary inconvenience. It would be really nice to have it, but I can work without it.

It’s clear that the Firefly AI Assistant may be a massive leap forward in making software work for the user rather than the other way around, where you direct an AI to do what you want, with the AI learning your work style, and only surfacing precise controls when needed. 

So how does the federal government use that hard-earned cash? There’s a website breaks it down for you, Spotify Wrapped-style. 

Tax Wrapped is the latest digital project from Riley Walz, the technologist responsible for viral websites including Find My Parking Cops, a tool to track San Francisco’s parking authorities; Looksmapping, a map that ranks restaurants based on the “hotness” of their patrons; and, most recently, the JSuite, a series of tools designed to help users navigate the Epstein files.

Walz’s projects almost always combine a trendy, eye-catching format with an underlying thread of social commentary, and Tax Wrapped is no different. It remixes the Wrapped format—which is so popular that it’s become ubiquitous across brands such as Uber Eats, YouTube, Snapchat, and even LinkedIn—with a genuine lesson in financial literacy.

How to use Tax Wrapped

When users open Tax Wrapped, they’re greeted with a welcome screen that’s clearly taking a page out of 2025’s Spotify Wrapped design—this time rendered in red, white, and blue rather than a mix of neons.

The tool requires a few details to calibrate: the user’s total taxable income, filing status, number of dependents, and work status. From there, it makes an educated calculation on how much the user owed in taxes in 2025, which can be manually edited to the exact sum if needed. 

Walz broke down your contribution to the federal goverment’s annual spending using a few different touchpoints, according to the website’s methodology section. He derived the government’s top-line spending totals from the U.S. Treasury’s monthly treasury statement, which Walz writes is “the standard source for deficit math and official category totals.”

For more granular budgetary breakdowns, he pulled data from USAspending’s File A accounts-balance data, which helped him split larger categories, like income security, into smaller subcategories, like Social Security and housing assistance. 

The data appears in both bar chart and pie chart form to help users digest it visually. By hovering over a given category, users can read a short description of what each subheading means and how it’s calculated. 

An American who made $50,000 in 2025, for example, can see that they contributed $95 to natural resources, $2,124 to health, and $1,391 to the military (just $123 of which went to medical care for veterans). They can also dive deeper into how the federal government used taxes to pay off national debt—which, as the tool explains, has been racking up since 2001 and currently sits at more than $39 trillion. “The catch?” it reads. “Just like credit cards, the national debt has interest payments the government needs to pay.”

The aforementioned worker will have contributed $1,403 to interest payments on the national debt in 2025. “Not roads. Not schools. Not defense,” Tax Wrapped reads. “Just interest. Interest doesn’t buy anything. It’s the price of having spent money we didn’t have.”

Tax Wrapped may not necessarily be an uplifting tool, but it’s an eye-opening exercise in understanding how the American tax system works—and in internalizing that our tax money isn’t simply floating into the void.

“Federal spending is usually described in ways that feel abstract,” the site reads. “Everything is huge, everything is rounded, and the scale is hard to feel. This project makes those numbers personal.”

Until now, Great Value’s packaging has been designed to telegraph low prices: Walmart estimates that these products save the average family more than 35% annually compared to national brand equivalents. Its white background, blocky letters, and straightforward blue logo were meant to signal a no-frills brand with products that are good for your wallet.

But in focus groups, Walmart customers expressed that while they appreciate how much money they save, they’re not necessarily proud to have the products out when company comes over. “They want to be proud to buy Great Value,” says Scott Morris, SVP of private brands, food, consumables, and manufacturing at Walmart U.S. “They want to be proud to have it in their home, to share it with their friends and family.”

Walmart has heard its customers. Today, the biggest retailer in America announces a comprehensive redesign of Great Value, the first full refresh of the brand in more than a decade. It’s a big task, involving the overhaul of nearly 10,000 food and consumable items across more than 100 categories, that will take place over the next 18 months.

The rise of the “shoppy shop” dupe

The timing of the rebrand is apt. Inflation has pushed grocery prices up across the board over the past few years, and consumers who might once have defaulted to Whole Foods or a specialty grocer started filling their carts at Walmart, often for the first time.

On the company’s February earnings call, Walmart CFO John David Rainey noted that shoppers earning more than $100,000 a year were among the biggest contributors to growth in the quarter—due to those broad economic headwinds, and to the big-box retailer’s strategic response: a deliberate effort to attract those higher-income shoppers over the past five years.

Walmart’s Great Value rebrand is part of a broader effort among retailers to make their private labels as compelling to customers as the premium national brands that sit on their shelves. Given how crowded the consumer packaged goods industry is, upscale direct-to-consumer food startups like Brightland, Fishwife, Fly by Jing, and Ghia have historically broken through online with highly branded packaging. Those brands soon landed in small, curated, upscale boutiques (so-called shoppy shops) before securing deals with big retailers like Whole Foods, Target, and, yes, Walmart.

This has influenced how the larger retailers like Walmart have designed the branding and packaging of their private-label brands, by presenting them as an affordable alternative with the same quality and shelf appeal. In 2019 Target launched Good and Gather, a food brand that stands out for its approachable, color-on-color premium branding. And discount grocery chain Aldi modernized its own private-label food products last fall.

Meanwhile, Walmart has been quietly reshaping its private-label portfolio for years. It launched a premium food line called Bettergoods in 2024 that focuses on global flavors and better ingredients, with the kind of colorful, illustration-forward branding familiar to modern consumers who might also buy upscale DTC products.

In terms of product quality improvements, last fall Walmart committed to removing synthetic dyes from all of its private-label food brands by January 2027. It’s also growing its fresh food business under the Marketside and Freshness Guaranteed labels.

The efforts appear to be paying off by driving sales among higher-income shoppers. A 2025 survey conducted by A&M Consumer and Retail Group revealed that higher-income shoppers are increasingly choosing private-label products at least in part because they look just as chic as national brands.

Great Value doesn’t have to “look cheap”

The redesign is a deliberate move to close the consumer sentiment gap between Great Value products and their look by making the packaging cleaner and more elevated, according to David Hartman, VP of creative design at Walmart.

The results follow years of consumer testing, such as at a mock store at Walmart’s Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters, walking through shelf sets to understand how designs read in context. Customer feedback—from call centers, online ratings, and third-party testing—was collected continuously. “The feedback is always on,” Morris says. “We’re able to aggregate it in a manner that helps us drive action.”

Great Value scored well on quality, efficacy, and price, but low on packaging. “We wanted to bring the external expression of the brand up to par to what the customer experiences when they buy the brand,” Hartman says. That called for an aesthetic solution that appropriately communicated the products’ high quality.

Walmart’s internal creative team partnered with their creative design agency JKR on this redesign, including redrawing the Great Value logo from scratch in a bespoke typeface. It’s larger and more prominent on the packaging, and it comes in a deeper, richer shade of blue than the old version, giving the brand more gravitas. But it’s still within the blue color palette that Walmart is known for.

The team tightened up the typography, with careful attention paid to details that most shoppers will never consciously register: Hartman mentions the angle of the two E’s in “Great Value,” which creates a subtle linking shape, like the hint of a smile.

But the team was also interested in making sure the packaging communicated important information clearly. Nutrition information is now consistently placed in the upper right corner across all food items, with a color-coded tab system—yellow for key facts—making it easier for shoppers to quickly parse what they’re grabbing, whether they’re in the aisle or scrolling through the app.

“We believe great design should be accessible to everyone,” Hartman says. “At our scale, that means creating something that works clearly and intuitively across thousands of individual items so customers can find what matters, faster.”

Morris argues that Walmart has spent decades developing its reputation for offering consumers the lowest prices on the market, so it no longer needs to use the packaging to communicate that these products are inexpensive.

“We don’t need to make things look cheap to be inexpensive,” Morris says. After all, a product conveys value when it has a sense of being worth your money, and that happens when a brand communicates great quality—at the right price.

The president, the judge wrote, was the “steward” of the residence, not its “owner.” In response, the Justice Department filed an emergency motion, asking that construction be allowed to resume due to security risks caused by the project being in a state of limbo.

Presidents of the United States, unlike other world leaders, have not typically sought to impress their own architectural tastes on national monuments.

In this regard, Trump is the exception. His approach to remaking federal architecture has mirrored his approach to university funding and immigration enforcement: move fast and break things.

But Trump’s imposition of his aesthetic preferences doesn’t just threaten to erase chapters in the story of the nation’s federal architecture. It also risks undoing the legacies of presidential wives, influential designers, and the egalitarian ideals that many of these buildings embody.

Gaudy grandeur

Since his second term began in January 2025, Trump has paved over the storied White House Rose Garden—established by first lady Ellen Wilson in 1913 and redesigned by renowned horticulturalist Bunny Mellon in 1962—complaining that ladies’ high-heeled shoes sank into the ground. The art deco bathroom off the Lincoln Bedroom now reflects Trump’s penchant for polished marble. And gold-colored decorative elements have been affixed to the simple woodwork throughout the White House, with some of the ornamentation brought from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate.

Most notably, the East Wing, which housed the offices of the first lady and her staff, was flattened in fall 2025 to make way for a grand ballroom projected to cost some $400 million. The building, if completed as planned, will dwarf the historic White House.

The ballroom also reflects Trump’s taste for grandiosity and opulence—the same aesthetic that’s reflected in the 250-foot “Independence Arch” that Trump has proposed for the National Mall.

Trump has repeatedly complained that public buildings in Washington, D.C., lack grandeur. He was even quoted by Golf magazine in 2017 as having described the White House as a “real dump,” although he later denied it.

Yet many of the structures he has demolished or has sought to revise embody, in their form and decoration, certain republican ideals, such as government by the people, civic virtue, and opposition to concentrated power.

Buildings that embody egalitarianism

Trump has added accents to the White House to mimic the imposing homes of British and European monarchs. But the residence’s original “republican simplicity”—a concept attributed to Thomas Jefferson— ctually had a purpose: It signaled the egalitarian outlook of the founders.

In 1792, when Jefferson was George Washington’s secretary of state, he anonymously entered the competition to design a new presidential home. His submission, which didn’t end up winning, was inspired by Renaissance architecture like Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotonda. Completed around 1570 in northern Italy, the Villa Rotonda features symmetrical facades and harmonious proportions that have been equated with Renaissance humanism and rationalism.

Elsewhere, Jefferson advocated for modeling the young nation’s government architecture on the classical tradition, due to its associations with ancient Greek and Roman democracy. This often meant using classical design principles like restraint, order and geometric harmony, and adapting them by either simplifying the elements or using locally available materials instead of the expensive marble and other stones favored by the ancients.

A repudiation of “republican simplicity”

In August 2025, Trump signed an executive order, Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again, directing that this same classical style inform the design of all future federal buildings.

Yet Trump’s own vision for the White House design doesn’t align with this directive. For one, the sheer enormity of the proposed ballroom transgresses the foundational belief in classical restraint.

The columns that will support the ballroom’s south colonnade have Corinthian capitals, the most ornate type of decorative top for a column. In contrast, Ionic capitals, which are more restrained, currently grace the columns at the entrance of the White House. One of Trump’s appointees, however, wants to swap these out in favor of Corinthian capitals.

And the temple-style portico on the east facade of the planned ballroom is awkwardly shifted to the far north end, rather than being centered as the classical tradition would dictate.

Glossing over history

This is not to say that classical principles have never run up against contemporary design trends.

In 1888, architect Alfred B. Mullett completed the State, War, and Navy Building, now known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Mullet had been inspired by Boston’s Old City Hall, which had been completed in 1865 and was itself inspired by the government architecture of the French Second Empire.

Trump has said that he finds the Eisenhower building’s gray granite facade dreary, and that he’d like to paint it white. Yet the material itself is a crucial element, tying the structure to the “Boston Granite Style.”

If the office building is painted white—in a process that would degrade the granite—a visual key to understanding its architectural and political history would be lost.

Architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock argued how forward-looking the building was for its time, and showed how it mirrored the first skyscrapers erected in New York City: Richard Morris Hunt’s Tribune Building and the Western Union Building designed by Hunt’s pupil George B. Post.

For these reasons, preservationists have sued Trump to try to prevent these alterations.

Design that’s bottom up, not top down

I think it’s also important to note that in the original design and construction of many of the buildings Trump disparages, women played outsize roles.

As I note in my 2025 book, Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism, which I coauthored with Mary Anne Hunting, the contributions of women in architecture and design have often been overlooked.

The Trump administration’s projects in and around Washington will only further obscure the women who shaped the federal buildings and landscapes of the capital.

While the Rose Garden reflected the efforts of Bunny Mellon and Jacqueline Kennedy, the East Wing came under the watchful eye of Edith Roosevelt, the wife of President Theodore Roosevelt. Edith worked hand-in-hand with famed classicist architect Charles Follen McKim on its redesign as the primary entrance, in 1902. And had it not been for the public fundraising efforts of Jacqueline Kennedy, the capital may never have had a performing arts venue of national significance, the Kennedy Center for the Arts. In early 2026, the Trump administration announced that the center would close for two years to undergo an estimated $200 million renovation.

While all buildings are living organisms that are frequently adapted to changing functional requirements, they are also the repositories of national memory.

In 1961, a young Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, as a U.S. senator from New York, would later go on to advocate for historic preservation, penned “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture” on behalf of an ad hoc government committee on office space.

“The development of an official style must be avoided,” he wrote. “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa.”

As Judge Leon made clear in his ballroom ruling, no government officials—not even presidents—“own” federal architecture. The American people do. And it’s up to their representatives in Congress to decide whether to destroy or renovate it, bearing in mind that it’s an inextricable part of the country’s history.

This article was written with the collaboration of Mary Anne Hunting, PhD, an independent scholar in New York City.

Kevin D. Murphy is a professor and chair of history of art at Vanderbilt University.

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

On April 13, the company announced that the “next generation” of its Delta One suites, which are made for long-haul international and domestic flights, will debut in early 2027 on new Airbus A350-1000 aircraft. The updated design will include a flat bed that’s been expanded by more than 3 inches, a custom cushion to act like an in-air mattress, and a new cubbyhole to store shoes. 

Delta’s announcement comes just weeks after United Airlines (the second-largest airline by revenue, behind only Delta) officially debuted its new Polaris Studio, an ultra-luxe seating option that’s 25% larger than its previous top-tier seat. 

Both of these moves are part of a broader focus on premiumization in the airline industry, aimed to attract and retain high-income fliers. As the sector’s biggest players double down on the most luxe in-flight experience possible, the race to design the most comfortable lie-back seat is officially on.

Inside the airline industry’s ultra-premium seats race

For the past several years, Delta has been on a mission to, as CEO Ed Bastian put it to Fast Company in 2024, “distinguish around service and having a premium brand.” 

So far, that effort is paying off: After the company began rolling out a more premium, redesigned cabin across its fleet in 2025, its total premium ticket revenue (which includes Delta First, Delta One, Delta Premium Select, and Delta Comfort) was $22.1 billion, a 7% year-over-year increase, according to a press release. And in 2026, despite increased jet fuel prices due to the U.S.-Israel war in Iran, Delta hit a record March quarter revenue of $14.2 billion. The achievement was driven in large part by premium ticket revenue, which has almost overtaken the company’s main cabin revenue for the first time ever. The airline also recently raised its checked bag fees.

In an April interview with Fortune, Bastian explained: “Delta is not a low-cost airline. We can’t win by trying to provide the cheapest. We have to be able to win by providing the best.”

Delta isn’t the only airline living by that philosophy. Recently, experts have posited that we’re squarely in the midst of a K-shaped economy—basically, an economic recovery model in which higher-income individuals rise while lower-income consumers fall behind.

And, as Fast Company has written before, that trend is becoming increasingly glaring in the airline industry. At the same time that carriers are piling on heaps of added fees for lower-income fliers, they’re dedicating even more effort to making their “premium” seating more attractive to high-income customers.  

One way to do that is with new amenities such as luxury lounges and in-flight treats (both of which Delta has already invested in). Another is to double down on ultimate seat comfort—and several airlines have already made strides in that arena.

In 2021, JetBlue Airways debuted new business-class seats designed by a mattress startup. United’s new Polaris Studio (available in ultra-limited quantities of eight to a plane) comes with expanded legroom, the largest touchscreen on any U.S. airline, and complimentary caviar. This month, United also announced a new economy seat class, called Relax Row, that lets passengers lie back on a set of three seats with added bedding (for an extra cost). Now, Delta is catching up with its new Delta One suite design.

Caviar is nice, but comfort is king

Over the past few months, Delta has enticed customers to Delta One with a series of new airport lounges featuring steak tartare, shower suites, and buffets, as well as in-flight perks like amenity bags and bedding designed by Missoni. All of those bells and whistles certainly can’t hurt—but the new Delta One suite design demonstrates that, at the end of the day, what passengers really want is a comfortable seat.

“Customers are clear that comfort is their number one priority when flying Delta One—97% say Delta’s flat bed is the reason for choosing the cabin,” Mauricio Parise, Delta’s vice president of brand experience, said in a press release. “This led us to a new design that, when combined with our current mattress pad and luxury bedding from Missoni, makes for an incomparable sleep at 30,000 feet.”

The new suites deliver on what is probably the most oft-cited pain point for fliers: leg and knee room. The lie-flat seat, designed in collaboration with the company Thompson Aero Seating, has been expanded by more than 3 inches, bringing its total length to more than 6 1/2 feet.

According to Michael Steinfeld, Delta’s senior manager of onboard product, this modification was made specifically to help accommodate side sleepers, which Delta’s research found make up most of the population. To accommodate this added room, Delta’s design team opted to arrange the suites in a reverse herringbone configuration, which maximizes the Airbus A350-1000’s wide floor plan.

On top of the existing mattress pad and sheets, Delta designed a custom pillow-top cushion to make the seat feel more like an actual bed. “As we reviewed customer insights and pressure-mapping data from our existing Delta One seat cushions, we had an idea to design a plush top layer which can make the suite feel more like a bed, especially at the hips, where most business-class seats have a small gap between the back and bottom cushions,” Steinfeld says. Delta tested multiple prototypes of the design to ensure that the cushion would move and stretch with the seat during the flight.

The spokesperson says the two-year design process involved a year of creating concept sketches and holding workshops, more than 40 development tests to validate the design, and multiple tests with employees to make sure that operational tasks like replacing components and programming seat controls ran smoothly. For a final test, Steinfeld’s team slept overnight in the seats before approving the design.

As airlines battle it out for premium supremacy, the winner may not be which carrier can offer the most perks, but the one that can most accurately replicate passengers’ bedrooms for the skies.

The day’s forecast called for high winds, but around midday in downtown Manhattan, it felt like a perfect spring day. The sun shone high in the sky last Tuesday as people gathered on the sidewalk around the corner from City Hall. Municipal employees mingled about, chatting excitedly. The cause for celebration wasn’t the weather—but a sleek, modernist-looking shed on the sidewalk where there had once stood a vacant newsstand.

The structure may not have looked like much, but it had been years in the making. Since 2021, Los Deliveristas Unidos—a union of app-based delivery workers—have been campaigning for the city to build outdoor structures where they can safely rest on the job, charge their e-bike batteries, and escape the elements. The crowd had gathered for the opening of the first “deliverista hub,” which had been a long-discussed idea, until recently—when Mayor Zohran Mamdani decided to expedite the building process following years of permitting delays and red tape.

By the time several delivery workers dressed in jeans, tactical-looking jackets, and bike helmets showed up, the atmosphere was buzzing with excitement.

“This is what the public realm is made for,” New York City Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura said from behind a podium, standing next to the hub with its clear glass windows and tall metallic columns. “This is what it means for our city to serve the people who keep it running.” 

In New York City, more than 80,000 men and women board their vehicle of choice every day and shepherd everything from burrito bowls to groceries to many people’s front doors. Many of these deliveristas travel on two wheels: opting for e-bikes, scooters, and mopeds over cars. That means this workforce is more vulnerable to extreme weather events like heat waves and flash flooding—which are becoming more frequent and more severe due to climate change.

The idea for deliverista hubs sits at the intersection of workers rights and climate justice. If the city opens more of these facilities throughout the five boroughs, they will offer respite through all kinds of inclement weather, as well as provide a space for workers to talk to one another. Soon, the Lower Manhattan hub will also be staffed five days a week by a member of the Worker’s Justice Project, the worker center that helps organize Los Deliveristas Unidos. Delivery workers who are interested in learning more about joining the union can stop by the hub as a starting point.

At the grand opening, representatives from the New York City Parks Departments, the delivery workers union, Worker’s Justice Project, and the Department of Transportation were present and gave speeches. New York Senator Chuck Schumer—who secured $1 million in federal funding for this hub—as well as New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and City Council Member Shaun Abreu also spoke.

Throughout the ceremony, a fine mist fell over the attendees. But it hardly dampened the mood of the ceremony, with the crowd frequently breaking out into cheers.

Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project, proudly claimed this week’s opening as a victory for the working class. By pushing this project through, she said, deliveristas are “redefining what’s possible” in cities like New York City, where “public spaces have historically been built for cars, for the wealthy, and for the privileged.”

Gustavo Ajche, the co-founder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, said he got the idea of repurposing city infrastructure to create places of rest for delivery workers during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We were really isolated,” Ajche told Grist, speaking in Spanish, “with nowhere to go. During the pandemic, everything was closed and things got very complicated—I saw my colleagues [working outside] struggling to find places to shelter from cold, rain, and wind.” But he noticed that there were pieces of urban infrastructure throughout the city that had sat abandoned for years—like vacant newsstands—that could easily help them escape the elements.

Still, the road from that moment to last week’s opening ceremony was anything but straightforward. Ajche lamented that New York City’s previous mayoral administration, led by Eric Adams, took its time when it came to approving permits required to construct the city’s first deliverista hub.

Under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, said Ajche, things have gone differently; the New York Times reported that the mayor pushed to open the hub within his first 100 days in office.

After years of delays, the physical construction of the deliverista hub only took about a month, said Ajche. Asked directly about the lengthy timeline by a reporter after speeches ended, Parks Commissioner Shimamura said, “Unfortunately, I can’t really speak [to that], I’ve only been the commissioner for the last eight weeks.”

Ajche acknowledged that just having one hub isn’t sufficient to provide for the tens of thousands of delivery workers who stream through the city every day. Both he and Shimamura demurred when asked about the possibility of opening more hubs throughout the five boroughs. It’ll depend on financing, they said. But establishing partnerships with other city agencies is also part of the challenge; Shimamura noted that not every viable spot for a deliverista hub is owned by the Parks Department.

While it’s formally open, the hub itself sat largely empty—no charging stations, no HVAC system. Those will come later, according to a representative from the Worker’s Justice Project. The mist that was still falling on the attendees, it turns out, wasn’t rain—just a drizzle from window-washers working on a building across the street. Nevertheless, some of the deliveristas posed for photos beside the shed. Standing with Guallpa, who had been handed a bouquet of flowers, the group sang out chants of “Deliverista! Power!” as many flashed grins for the cameras and lifted fists to the sky.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/labor/new-york-city-unveils-its-first-rest-stop-for-delivery-workers/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Starting Tuesday, Geneva hosts the annual Watches and Wonders fair, a premiere gathering in an industry eager for a rebound after two years of market contraction, hopefully including sales in oil-rich Gulf Arab countries.

The U.S. and Israeli war against Iran that began Feb. 28, however, has had a sweeping impact on the global economy, driving up energy prices, stalling shipments of fertilizer, and disrupting air travel, among other things.

High-end watches have not been spared. Soaring prices for precious metals like gold and silver, and U.S. President Donald Trump‘s tariffs launched a year ago — while down from peak levels — already affected the market.

Now, renewed inflation pressures and doubts about consumer confidence are injecting new uncertainty into the market that generates tens of billions of dollars in revenue each year.

“The war in the Middle East will have certainly a huge impact for the Swiss exports because it represents 10% of the total Swiss watch exports, so it’s quite substantial,” said Oliver Müller, founder of Swiss consultancy LuxeConsult.

“Some markets in the Middle East are totally halted,” he said. In the United Arab Emirates, for example, “60% of business is done with tourists. You can imagine that nothing is going on currently.”

A ‘cloud’ over Watches and Wonders show

The show is an elite gathering that showcases innovations, drums up deals and hosts some 65 exhibiting brands from around the world: That’s just a sliver of an industry that counts some 450 watchmakers in Switzerland alone. About 60,000 visitors are expected to attend.

“We have very few cancellations. We had to adapt some travels, but we are expecting a record edition in terms of numbers of visitors,” said Mathieu Humair, the CEO of Watches and Wonders.

Celebrities were in the mix. Tennis star Jannik Sinner and actor Patrick Dempsey were on hand for the opening Tuesday.

Morgan Stanley, in the 9th Annual Swiss Watcher report put together with LuxeConsult, said in February that Swiss watch exports declined 1.7% last year in value terms — a year when Switzerland’s franc was relatively strong compared with the U.S. dollar and the euro.

It was a second straight year of market contraction, the report said.

“When you look back at a year ago, the sort of theme was: The tariffs and the uncertainty,” said industry analyst Ming Liu. “Unfortunately, we aren’t anywhere closer to certainty, probably even less with what’s happening in the Middle East.”

Similar to the luxury goods sector as a whole, the biggest brands have been gaining market share. Four of Switzerland’s 450-odd watch brands — Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe, and Omega — make up over half the total Swiss retail market share, the report said.

And the upper-end segment has been growing: hand-crafted watches priced at more than 50,000 francs (more than $63,000) apiece made up 37% of the total value of Swiss watch exports last year — up from 33.5% in 2024, it said.

Switzerland still stands out in the luxury watch business

The Morgan Stanley report said Swiss-made watches represent about 96% percent of the global luxury watch market, or those that retail for at least 2,000 francs each (more than $2,200).

Japan’s Grand Seiko is the “most credible non-Swiss challenger” and India’s Titan is making a run at the top tier, the report said.

The Swiss are coming off a turbulent year. Trump imposed exceptionally high U.S. tariffs on goods from Switzerland last year, hitting a peak of 39% — the highest faced by any developed Western country.

A delegation of Swiss business executives traveled to the White House and offered Trump gifts, including a Rolex clock, in November. The following month a deal was announced that sharply lowered U.S. tariffs on Swiss products.

—Jamey Kaeten, Associated Press

AP video journalist Mustakim Hasnath contributed to this report.

Developed by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo in the 1980s, the ELM explains how people process persuasive information differently depending on their motivation and ability to think critically. “Elaboration” refers to the mental effort invested when considering a message. The model describes two routes that effort can take.

The central route involves careful evaluation based on logic, evidence, and argument. The peripheral route relies on superficial cues — the attractiveness of the person talking, the length of the message, the right endorsements. Central route processing tends to produce more durable, resistant attitude change. Peripheral route processing tends to produce quicker, more temporary shifts. We all use both of these decision routes all the time.

The key factors are motivation and ability. When a topic feels personally relevant and you have the time and knowledge to engage with it, you’re more likely to take the central route. When you’re pressed for time, emotionally overwhelmed, or the topic just doesn’t feel urgent, the peripheral route takes over. 

Choosing a mobile phone

• Central route: Researching specifications, reading reviews, comparing features against your actual needs.
• Peripheral route: Everyone in your circle uses this brand.

Choosing a movie on Netflix

• Central route: Reading reviews, watching trailers, considering the director or genre, with extra calculations if you’re watching with kids or a partner.
• Peripheral route: That thumbnail is a winner.

Choosing a political candidate

• Central route: Investigating policy positions, watching long-form discussions, reading their work, researching their financial backers and lobbyist connections.
• Peripheral route: This one has the correct party letter beside their name.

Choosing a street design

• Central route: Analyzing surrounding land use, comparing traffic safety outcomes, studying how similar designs performed elsewhere.
• Peripheral route: This one has bike lanes.

Two earlier figures cast a long shadow over how we think about persuasion.

Walter Lippmann, the father of modern journalism wrote in the early 20th century that people are limited in their ability to engage with complex public issues. The sheer scale and complexity of modern society means most people rely on mental shortcuts (stereotypes, prior assumptions, secondhand impressions) to form opinions. Lippmann set the stage for…

Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and the father of modern public relations, who took a harder-edged view. He argued that people are driven primarily by unconscious desires and emotions rather than reason, and that experts needed to manage public opinion. He openly acknowledged that public relations could be used for good or ill, depending on the values of whoever was wielding it. He mostly assumed those people would be his clients.

Where Lippmann and Bernays tended to treat people as fixed in their cognitive tendencies, the ELM recognizes that the same person can engage deeply or superficially depending on context. Where Bernays saw persuasion as a one-way transmission from expert to audience, the ELM frames it as a dynamic interaction shaped by source, message, and audience together.

What this means for urbanism

The goal of community engagement isn’t always the same. Sometimes you’re trying to educate an audience. Sometimes you’re asking them to choose between two design options. Sometimes you’re trying to build lasting support for a long-term policy shift. 

The ELM central route will produce more lasting and consistent attitude change, but it requires an audience that’s motivated and equipped to engage. That means translating complex subject matter into digestible talking points, connecting new information to things people already care about, and being able to meet people at varying levels of knowledge. You’re the dot-connector. The burden of accessibility is on you, not them.

The peripheral route gets faster results, but they’re more fragile. Credibility signals, visual design, trusted messengers, and social proof all matter, especially with audiences who don’t have the background or bandwidth to evaluate technical arguments on their merits. 

Both routes require storytelling. For the central route, storytelling makes information memorable, like vivid mental images, emotional resonance, and concrete examples that anchor abstract arguments. For the peripheral route, storytelling builds presence and credibility with people who are making fast judgments about whether to trust you at all.

Our instinct is to judge anyone who relies on mental shortcuts. But it’s human nature and we all do it. The ELM isn’t a critique of how people think, it’s a candid description of it. Once you accept that, you can start communicating with people instead of talking past people.