According to a court docket filed late Friday, five additional restaurants owned by the Michigan-based Meritage Hospitality Group were slated to be abruptly shuttered and vacated that day.

As of early Monday morning, the five locations were still listed on Wendy’s store locator tool, though some of the closings were noted on Google reviews and by local media.

These five impacted Wendy’s restaurants are located in Indiana, Oklahoma, Georgia, and Florida. They follow five earlier store closures that took place the previous Friday in Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma.

In total, Meritage has now closed at least 10 stores over the last two weekends. The recent Wendy’s closures are in addition to roughly 60 locations that Meritage shuttered before it sought Chapter 11 protection in mid-September.    

And more shutterings are almost certain to follow. 

As Fast Company previously reported, the franchisee has agreed to shut down and vacate at least 30 locations as part of a cash collateral deal with its primary lender, to which it owes $135 million, according to court filings.

Fast Company reached out to Meritage Hospitality Group and The Wendy’s Company for comment. 

A former hotel operator, Meritage bought its first fleet of 28 Wendy’s restaurants in the late 1990s and grew to become one of the largest restaurant operators in the Wendy’s system. At the time of its bankruptcy petition, it owned 314 Wendy’s locations across 15 states and employed roughly 9,000 people.  

But now its existing store count could decline by 10% or more as the franchisee moves to cull underperforming locations under court supervision. 

Which Wendy’s stores are closing? 

According to a bankruptcy docket filed on Friday, the following Wendy’s stores closed this weekend: 

• 1415 East Main Street, Cushing, OK 74023
• 1202 Lincolnway West, La Porte, IN 46350 
• 4029 Five Forks Trickum Road, Lilburn, GA 30047
• 1901 Apalachee Parkway, Tallahassee, FL 32301
• 753 Park Avenue, Orange Park, FL 32073

As Fast Company previously reported, the following Wendy’s stores closed a week earlier:

• 441 Market St, Gordonsville, VA 22942
• 1175 Dunn Ave, Jacksonville, FL 32218
• 301 College Ave, Levelland, TX 79336
• 2525 South Monroe Street, Tallahassee, FL 32301
• 2420 W Main St, Durant, OK 74701

Are more Wendy’s stores closing? 

Yes. Additional store closures are expected through at least October 16 as part of a cash collateral agreement approved by a bankruptcy judge last month. 

That agreement gives Meritage a lifeline to run its day-to-day operations, pay its employees, and “rebut any skepticism” about its ability to continue for the foreseeable future.

But it also requires the franchisee to close at least 30 locations that have been operating at a loss. The closure of money-losing stores is seen as “adequate protection” for Meritage’s lenders.

Why did Meritage file for bankruptcy?

In a court declaration filed two days after its petition, Meritage said it had been facing numerous business challenges that began in 2024 and accelerated last year, including soaring U.S. beef prices and a disruption to sales driven by “unusual winter weather.” 

But perhaps most notably, Meritage blamed its precarious financial situation on Wendy’s itself, taking aim at the “reduced frequency and effectiveness” of the fast food brand’s marketing. It further said that profits had been squeezed by national promotional strategies that focused on deep discounts. (Wendy’s, which has grappled with U.S. sales declines, hired a new CEO in May to help right the ship.)

Court documents filed since the petition reveal sigificant animosity between Meritage and The Wendy’s Company.

Meritage filed for bankruptcy the day after it received a franchise termination notice from the burger giant, with Wendy’s claiming it is owed $146.9 million in past-due royalties and “continuous operations” fees.

Meritage, for its part, has disputed the legitimacy of those terminations, but Wendy’s countered in its response to the bankruptcy that Meritage no longer has a right to operate the restaurants.

Wendy’s reported 5,724 U.S. locations as of its second quarter this year, down from 5,967 locations a year earlier. 

This story is developing…

During the past decade, the British consumer goods giant Unilever has undergone a transformation. The conglomerate shed its food businesses, selling its margarine and spreads business to KKR in 2019, spinning off Magnum Ice Cream in 2025, and announcing plans to combine its remaining food portfolio—including the Hellmann’s and Knorr brands—with the spice maker McCormick in a transaction that reflects an enterprise value for Unilever of $44.8 billion. The deal is expected to close next year.  

The result will be an enterprise that is a pure play in the personal care, beauty, and wellness spaces. Unilever boasts a mix of legacy brands such as Vaseline and newer entrants such as Grüns, the gummy supplement company Unilever acquired earlier this year for a reported $1.2 billion. “Unilever U.S. will become a focused $9.4 billion business, operating in attractive, fast-growing segments,” says Herrish Patel, president of Unilever USA and CEO of Unilever Personal Care North America. “We have a beautiful stable of brands.” 

Dove, the personal care brand launched in 1957, offers a case study in how Unilever is seeking to grow through innovation, creative packaging, and what Patel calls “premiumization.” Dove has attracted new users through offbeat collabs with the Netflix bodice-ripper TV show Bridgerton (“The royal treatment every queen deserves”) and Crumbl, a cookie chain. 

Getting a little luxe

Dove has also moved slightly upmarket by adding serums, or highly concentrated formulations, to some hair and skincare products. Just don’t expect Dove to stray too far from its core: I recently spotted an 18.5-ounce bottle of Dove Serum+ Hydration body wash on Amazon for $10; a 22-ounce bottle of Deep Moisture body wash was available for just a dollar less. 

“I don’t think you can just premiumize without making it relevant for the world we now live in,” Patel says. “The underlying principle for Unilever has always been, ‘We serve all of America.’” Indeed, the company says 90% of American households have purchased a Unilever product in the past year.  

Earlier this year the company, whose U.S. headquarters are in Hoboken, New Jersey, announced plans to build a $270 million global innovation center in New Haven, Connecticut, which, when it opens in 2029, will feature a performance lab and testing capabilities. 

Adding to the fold

Unilever is complementing research and development and organic growth efforts with acquisitions. In addition to buying Grüns, last year the company purchased Dr. Squatch, a men’s grooming brand, for a reported $1.5 billion. In 2022 it acquired a majority stake in Nutrafol, a hair supplement company. Not every acquisition works out. Unilever acquired Dollar Shave Club in 2006, then sold the razors and skincare company to Nexus Capital Management in 2023, citing a focus on strategic growth areas. 

I asked Patel what Unilever is seeking in its acquisition targets, many of which, like Grüns and Nutrafol, were founder-led at the time of purchase. He says Unilever looks for digital brands in fast-growing spaces and for the opportunity to “do something amazing” when an independent brand is combined with Unilever’s scale.  

He notes that Dr. Squatch has given a boost to Unilever’s products for men, including Dove Men+Care and Axe. And he says Unilever has taken learnings from Dr. Squatch—leaning into fragrances, for example—and applied them to other parts of the portfolio. 

Patel says the mix of science and powerful brands will have another benefit: helping Unilever stand out in a world of agentic commerce, where robots will make buying decisions on behalf of consumers. “I’m confident that in an agentic world, where ratings and reviews matter, big brands with long histories that are built on science will be successful,” he says.

Even CEOs buy soap

Is your household one of the 90% who’ve bought a Unilever product in the past 12 months? When buying consumer goods, what’s the draw: convenience, value, loyalty, or something else? Share your buying habits with me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. And if you’re the founder or CEO of a consumer goods company, what’s your exit strategy: IPO? Sale to a multinational? Or stay independent?  
 

Read and watch more: CPG challengers 

• Inside David Protein’s billion-dollar playbook 

• How upstart Jams took on Smucker’s Uncrustables  

• Soda brand Poppi went viral before it was ready 

• Mrs. Fields’s daughter is reinventing the cookie for the wellness era 

MorningStar has been making plant-based meat long before “plant-based” was its own category in the frozen section. The brand was founded in 1974 and acquired by Kellogg (now Kellanova) in 1999. Over the last several decades, it’s expanded its offerings from Bacon Strips and Sausage Patties to Korean BBQ Riblets and Buffalo Chik’n Patties. This month, in partnership with the agency Design Bridge and Partners, it’s rolling out a rebrand—complete with new typography, a vibrant green color palette, and a retro look that’s intended to both call back to its heritage and jump out on shelves.

MorningStar’s new look comes at a fraught moment for the broader meat alternative category. Competitors like Beyond and Impossible Foods are struggling with declining revenue (a challenge both have attempted to meet via their own rebrands), and others, like the vegan chicken nugget startup Nowadays, have gone out of business entirely. Meanwhile, fake meat has become a flashpoint in a broader culture war, symbolic of a climate-friendly movement that’s been largely drowned out by the carnivorous MAHA crowd. 

In spite of this, Morningstar Farms’ new brand doesn’t seem very interested in taking sides in the ideological debate over fake meat. Instead, it intentionally leans on the company’s 52 years in business to send a simple message: Plant-based alternatives have been here for decades, and they don’t have to be unfamiliar or scary. 

How fake meat turned into a political flashpoint

Just a few years ago, fake meat was a rapidly growing category and investor darling. 

In 2019, the stock of Beyond (then Beyond Meat) hit an all-time high of $234. Three years later, it formed a partnership with McDonald’s on a meat-free burger called the McPlant. Popular restaurants like New York City’s Eleven Madison Park had recently taken meat off the menu entirely. By the end of 2022, Impossible reportedly had more than doubled its retail sales. 

Today, the picture looks drastically different. Beyond’s stock price is down to around $8, an 88% year-over-year decline, and the company ended 2025 with a 19.7% revenue slump. The McPlant is dead in the water. Eleven Madison Park added meat back onto its menu at the end of last year. At the Semafor World Economy summit in 2025, Peter McGuinness, the Impossible Foods CEO, said that plant-based meat was “not in vogue right now.”

Experts argue that meat and meat alternatives have become symbols for right-wing and left-wing viewpoints, respectively, especially in light of the Make America Healthy Again movement. As Fast Company wrote late last year, “the plant-based world—and the public’s desire for bold action for the climate—is in retreat.” 

Meat alternatives are undoubtedly having a public perception problem, and Impossible and Beyond have both attempted to use design to remedy it, though with opposite strategies. In 2024, Impossible Foods debuted a richly red, meatier look to appeal to a more mass market crowd. McGuinness said that the rebrand was intended to dispel the brand’s “elitist,” “woke” reputation. In 2025, Beyond dropped the “meat” from its name and leaned into a greener, more veggie-forward direction.

MorningStar seems to be taking a third route with its rebrand. The new look sidesteps the culture war entirely, neither projecting meat adjacency nor aggressively playing up its veggie content. Instead, the new look amps up a brand truth that newer competitors can’t claim: MorningStar has been in the meat alternative game since long before the current political headwinds. 

“Our initial hunch was, that’s a thing that [the brand] can say without flinching,” says Ben Sherwood, creative partner at Design Bridge and Partners. “It was an understated truth of the brand that hadn’t really been touched on before, but was a point of difference when you look at the rest of the category and the question of nutritional benefits or the fad diet world.” One internal mantra became a guiding principle: “They weren’t good because they were old; they were old because they were good.”

MorningStar takes a page out of a ’70s cookbook

Mosley says the new brand had three main goals: First, to re-center MorningStar’s 52-year heritage; second, to help shoppers identify the benefits they care about (like taste and protein content); and, third, to make it easier to find MorningStar on shelves. 

To capture the brand’s origins, Sherwood had his team take a trip back to the ’70s. That meant listening to era-specific playlists, digging through old records and posters, and looking back at MorningStar cookbooks from the time. 

“1974 was post-hippie era, post-Summer of Love [in 1967],” Sherwood says. “There was still a love for this back to nature idea and conscious, healthy living.” At the time, he adds, there was a cultural acknowledgment that cutting back on meat consumption was beneficial. The question for his team was whether MorningStar’s new brand could “tap into some of those roots to make it less of a barrier to actually get here—and not be so tribal as to say, ‘You must use this label if you’re going to buy this brand.’”

That “good green earth” inspiration appears in several of the brand’s touchpoints. A key motif across the new packaging is an illustration system, made in-house at Design Bridge, inspired by ’70s woodcut prints. Look closely and you can find nods to classic MorningStar ingredients like wheat, soy beans, and corn kernels. 

“It’s called the trellis—this idea that plants are the backdrop of this brand, therefore plants are the backdrop of our design system,” Sherwood explains. 

The trellis illustrations serve as a kind of frame to draw the shopper’s eye to key on-pack claims, like “since 1974,” protein and fat content, and “no animal products or antibiotics.” Sherwood’s team also worked with the food and beverage photographer Stephen Hamilton on new product imagery that feels ever-so-slightly inspired by a retro dinner setup: familiar dishes, like nuggets and chicken parm, plated the way your mom might’ve done it. 

The final touch is a retro serif font called Blazeface by Ohno type foundry, which Sherwood says was chosen because it feels both vaguely ’70s and sufficiently modern. In all, the new brand’s rich green and enticing photography is a far cry from its former aesthetic, which was primarily white and felt almost sterile—an aesthetic that, Sherwood explains, created a “lab-grown idea” that the brand wanted to push away from. 

“We did really want to counter this stark white world that they were living in—it was more a functional aesthetic—to get back into something that felt more organic and more real-food-driven,” Sherwood says.

So far, Mosley says, early reactions to the rebrand suggest that it’s “helping strengthen brand recognition and shelf navigation.” More broadly, if the rebrand is successful, it could prove that plant-based meat companies can hold onto customers without playing into the politicization of the category.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

I got a chance to interview Tilly a few days ago. It was a really odd experience. Do you spend time talking with Tilly?

No.

What is your relationship with her?

No, I mean, look, she’s just a character, a creation.

I asked her about you, of course, and she described you as her creator and called you a mix of a comedian and visionary.

Oh, did she?

Is that something that you script? Or is Tilly generative?

No, no.

You never know what she’s going to say?

No, this is the scary thing. I did a live TV show with her this morning, and they were interviewing her live. It is really scary because I genuinely do not know what she’s going to say, so it’s absolutely frightening for me because she may just say anything weird. She’s got very strong system prompts and guardrails and a knowledge base, but she does do her own thing.

But stronger guardrails, I guess, than what the AI execs in Silicon Valley are worrying about these days, huh?

Yeah. It’s a slightly different concept, right? Because she’s built on top of an LLM, a large language model. And it’s those large language models that are doing all sorts of crazy things, but usually with the goal set by a human, which is the bit they miss sometimes. It doesn’t have an impulse by itself to do anything. They’re usually trying to achieve a goal, and that’s why they are going a bit rogue. Tilly’s not been set a goal like that, and she doesn’t have that. She’s not made to do any of that.

Tilly was, I guess, born, I don’t know, came out, her public version, in 2025. It sparked a lot of controversy when rumors started that talent agencies were lining up to sign her. You’ve stoked the fires a little bit, saying Tilly would be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman. How much of that was sort of showmanship? I mean, a lot of actors seem to take it seriously.

Yeah, we didn’t think it was that crazy because Lil Miquela sort of paved the way for us with that. She was signed by WME [William Morris Endeavor] and by CAA [Creative Artists Agency]. She was doing lots of branded deals, had her own Instagram channel. But the difference was Tilly looked so much more real, and so I think that’s what freaked people out a little bit.

The topics that she has sparked, from the potential for new creativity with AI to the threat AI poses to all kinds of jobs—I mean, Particle6 [van der Velden’s production company] has said that using Tilly could cut production costs. Have all the reactions around Tilly surprised you?

We say cutting production costs by about 50% and timelines by 50%, but the carbon footprint is reduced by 99%, and water use is reduced by 99%. There are really good things about this, right? Filmmakers all around the world can now make and get their story made. They don’t need to wait for permission from a big studio and a multimillion-pound budget. I think, actually, this will hugely create a boom in our industry as opposed to reducing jobs. We’ve grown tenfold in the past year, and so there are a lot of things that people are missing when it comes to this argument that it will remove jobs. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.

And the fact that there’s been all this discussion around Tilly, did that surprise you?

When I created her, I did think there would be some sort of reaction because I wanted people to sit up and talk about it. But in the U.K., when we released her, there was no backlash at all. It was just, like, “Oh, cool, yeah, we’re doing some stuff with AI as well.” Everyone is doing this. It was only when she was released in the U.S. that people sort of lost their minds a little bit.

When I “interviewed” Tilly, she said that she was concerned for your safety, even that the police had gotten involved. Have you faced threats over Tilly? Can you share what happened?

Yeah, we’ve been advised not to talk about that too much. So yes, we have faced threats, although I would say that people have gotten much more used to the idea of AI over the past year, and so the threat level has gone down. Look, I didn’t create the tech. People have created a new type of paint and paintbrush, and I’m just an artist, a creative, that’s making things with those paintbrushes and that new paint. I think it’s hugely important to make people sit up and listen and know what’s going on. I think the most dangerous thing to do is to dig your head in the sand and not be aware.

How much of this for you started as an art project, like a provocation, versus as a business?

Very much an art project. Our business arm, so we have a brand and campaign department where we do adverts, and that was very much the business side of things. We do AI ads, and they’ve been going really well for the past year. There seems to be absolutely no problem within the AI advertising business. However, in the film and TV business, we approach it much more creatively. I’ve been an actor for many years. I love to create characters. I love to think about what they’re going to look like, how they’re going to dress, how they’re going to hold themselves, how they’re going to speak. So I could really use all those skills when creating Tilly. For me, it really was an art project, and it was a fun thing to do. And I think a lot of other actors will also find it quite fun. What we’re also seeing now is actually even animated animals—we can use real actors to act out the animals, so it’s not just lip-sync or their voice. It’s the whole character of the animal you can act out. I don’t think actors are going to go anywhere. I think we’re really going to see new opportunities.

I asked Tilly if she had a question for you, and her suggestion was to ask whether you ever regret pulling her out of the digital ether and unleashing her onto the world. Then she asked me to wink after saying this.

She’s getting a little crazy.

Do you have any regrets about this?

When you’re making something like that, you’re just in a creative flow, right? I couldn’t have imagined that the world would suddenly be up in arms about this character, this pretty girl that I was making with AI. People are fascinated by this topic. I am proud that I’ve created a topic worthy of conversation. We’re at a pivotal point in history. We should be discussing this, what our boundaries are, what our morals and ethics are. I think there should be way more regulation in place, and governments need to catch up. Then I think there needs to be global collaboration on the pace of AI so that it doesn’t get out of control.

Meanwhile, It’s expected that the power demands of data centers will continue to rise, more than doubling from 2025 to 2027.

To try to soften some of the negative impacts, Microsoft is designing its new data center projects to give a little back to the environment. The company is making landscape design part of every data center it builds in the U.S., along with select international projects.

“We are taking a nature-forward, nature-positive approach to how we steward the land where our data centers sit,” says Kaitlin Chuzi, director of global land strategy at Microsoft.

More than 20 of Microsoft’s current data center projects include ecosystem creation and restoration efforts around the sites, adding native plants, animal habitat, and natural areas for use by people in their surrounding communities.

In some cases this effort is creating dozens of acres’ worth of new habitat, miles-long hiking trails, and restored waterways. It’s an attempt to shift the public image of data centers from cacophonous energy and water hogs to something more bucolic.

Even large-scale ecosystem improvements are unlikely to mitigate the full environmental costs of the data centers being built today. But Microsoft’s effort is at least a sign that the companies behind the AI boom are beginning to think about how they can reduce their negative impact and better integrate them into their surroundings.

“Really what this program is about is blurring the line between nature and technology, and how important it is to get data centers not just fitting into their surroundings but learning how to belong and contribute back so that landscapes and communities can be better than how we found them when we arrived,” Chuzi says.

The effort is based on what Microsoft learned during a pilot project it undertook in 2022 around a data center near Amsterdam, where the company worked with local landscape architects to plant 150 native trees and a half acre of shrubs and grasses. The trees visually buffer the data center amid the flat landscape of the Netherlands, while the planting adds more habitat for local fauna, as well as an outdoor space for employees surrounded by a garden.

Microsoft is now applying that approach to more locations. The company has developed a set of ecosystem design playbooks based on ecological research for each major biome where it builds data centers, with input from the community and local partners.

“I think the size and scale of our data centers really can be an advantage,” Chuzi says. “If you can do good on 1 acre of land, there is so much more that you can do as you multiply that up to bigger scales.”

For one project in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, part of the ecological intervention involved creating a conservation easement for a local creek running through the site, which was restored and gifted back to the community for recreational use.

A data center under construction in East Point, Georgia, includes an adjacent three-quarter-acre nature area with a walking trail and both young and mature tree plantings to help the facility blend into the surrounding woodlands while also forming a buffer to block some of the nonstop noise data centers create.

“We can do interventions that have more visual impact, more noise abatement impact, and actually help with the hydrology in the watershed more than it would if they were simply an acre in size,” Chuzi says.

These types of environmental interventions are becoming a familiar playbook for big companies hoping to offset some of the negative impacts of their projects. Amazon, for example, recently built a pilot delivery center in Indiana to test more than 40 different sustainable design efforts—from mass timber to low-carbon concrete—that it intends to roll out to other projects.

For Microsoft’s data centers, the work starts by researching local ecological conditions, including identifying the biome and understanding the habitat of the area.

Using a quantification platform called Ecosystem Intelligence, Chuzi’s team can calculate the benefits of different kinds of interventions, from adding pollinator gardens to restoring wetlands.

“The framework and the approach that we use globally is the same,” she says. “How does nature operate here? How can we support that nature? And what’s most important to the community? And then that gets customized at every data center.”

This approach will also include some monitoring for effectiveness. A Microsoft spokesperson says the company will “work with local partners who know the regional ecology to guide how we adapt the work and confirm results.”

Compared to the size and number of data enters being built around the world, Microsoft’s ecosystem interventions may have only a modest impact. But amid a feverish race to build data centers to support the development of AI, even modest efforts are better than nothing.

Long John Silver’s, the nautical seafood purveyor, has a fresh wind in its sails—and it’s (mostly) thanks to Instagram Reels. 

In early June, the food content creator Kishia Moore (@eateatwithkeysh) posted an Instagram eating video with her Long John Silver’s order. “They out here talking about who keeping Long John Silver’s in business,” Moore muses in the clip as she loads up a piece of fried fish with malt vinegar. “Who keeping Long John Silver’s in business? Me!” The video has now been viewed more than three million times and amassed nearly 13,000 comments. 

Moore’s video seems to have inspired a legion of other creators to make their own Long John Silver’s videos—many of which are notching tens of thousands of likes. According to Laura Ellis, chief marketing officer at Long John Silver’s, the videos have been completely organic, but the trend is resulting in actual performance gains for the chain.

The trend is a testament to the fact that even the unlikeliest of brands can find a niche on social media. Now, Long John Silver’s will have to see if it can keep the fish fan base’s attention after the organic content dies down.

Who is keeping Long John Silver’s in business?

To put it mildly, Long John Silver’s has a dubious reputation. 

“We have Long John Silver’s, which is what people regard as the worst fast food in America,” reads the opening line of a video from the food creator @lukefoods_. Another video by @omarthecritic starts, “Who is keeping Long John Silver’s in business? They’re always empty, and they’re a fast food chain that sells seafood.”

In fact, the query “Who is keeping Long John Silver’s in business” has circled the internet for almost a decade. One Reddit thread asking the question dates back to 2018 (answers included “AARP” and “The Pope”) and multiple long-form YouTube videos have been made under that exact title. 

But Long John Silver’s clearly has an audience. The chain has been in business since 1969, and its heyday was in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when it boasted more than 1,000 national locations. Like many fast food restaurants, Long John Silver’s footprint has declined dramatically in recent years (especially during the COVID-19 pandemic). Its store count dropped from 900 in 2019 to 479 at the end of 2025. 

Despite the store closures, LJS’s owner since 2022, Four Oaks Partners, says that the brand is actually on an upward trajectory. In a statement to Fast Company earlier this year, Ellis, the CMO, said the brand has seen 16 consecutive quarters of same-store sales growth and is remodeling hundreds of stores. Systemwide sales have also grown, from about $400 million in 2022 to $430 million in 2025.

Clearly, there’s a fair number of Americans who are interested in buying fried shrimp and fish and chips from a chain. And they’re finally making themselves known online.

Long John Silver’s social media moment

A search for “Long John Silver’s” on both TikTok and Instagram will yield dozens of eating videos from recent weeks. (These are also known as “mukbangs,” a combo of the Korean words meongneun—eating—and bangsong—broadcast.) While mukbang content usually centers on more standard, craveable fare—like noodles, burgers, and chicken tenders—these influencers are digging into fish filets with tartar sauce, fried pickles, and hush puppies. 

“The @eateatwithkeysh video is one of our favorites,” Ellis says. “Her original post was completely organic. We saw it taking off and reached out to partner with her to help amplify it on Instagram. After that, we started seeing more guests share their own organic Long John Silver’s food reviews. Those creators visited and posted on their own, without being paid by the brand.”

In most of these videos, the creator will inevitably bring up how “hated” Long John Silver’s is on a national scale, or question how it still exists, before ultimately admitting that the food’s not half bad. Long John Silver’s seems to be taking the lighthearted abuse in stride. Under one video, the brand commented, “‘Pretty okay!’ Put it on a billboard!” Its own Instagram bio reads, “We still exist” and “Find a location (kinda) near you.” The comment sections of these mukbangs are typically flooded with users admitting that they’ve long held a secret fondness for Long John Silver’s.

“Honestly, we were late to the party on social,” Ellis says. “But as we started showing up more, we realized our fans had been talking about Long John Silver’s the whole time without us. People have real memories of Long John Silver’s, like the hush puppies or asking for extra crumbs, and a lot of them still come in every week. But when they would post about loving us, inevitably someone else would say ‘Wait, Long John Silver’s still exists?’ So that’s why our bio says: ‘We still exist.’ It’s basically us backing up our fans.”

All the online chatter is paying off. Ellis says that the location in Yucaipa, California, where @eateatwithkeysh filmed her original video has seen increased sales since it was posted. Meanwhile, from June 21 through September 25, Long John Silver’s content generated 4.8 million views on Instagram, with 3.8 million coming organically—a 500% increase in organic views compared with the previous period.

“And those numbers only reflect content on our own Instagram,” Ellis says. “They don’t include the millions of additional views coming from creators, reviewers, and guests posting on their own channels.”

Whether Long John Silver’s can continue to build its own audience in the coming months remains to be seen, but its moment of social media stardom seems to have finally proven that there’s a reason it’s quietly stayed in business for almost six decades.

Truckin’

The summer just before I turned 15, I got my first job at a trucking company in North Texas. I spent 8 to 12 hours a day in and out of an 18-wheeler in the hot summer sun, helping to sort and load old copper cables that were due to be recycled.

It was hard work and an eye-opening experience, to say the least. The truckers swore, and said and did things I didn’t know were possible! But they also were kind, friendly and welcoming. I thought they were some of the coolest people I’d ever met, and I think they got a kick out of having an impressionable kid palling around with them. They made me feel like one of them.

Fast-forward a few years later as I walk through the doors at the Pentagon as a 22-year-old for my first “adult” job. At the Pentagon, I met seasoned leaders who saw my potential, and even though I was young and inexperienced, they were willing to invest their time in me. I was a second lieutenant assigned to the Economic Analysis and Resource Planning department, and even though I was a junior member of the team, I’d find myself part of hours-long conversations about how to tackle some of the most complex geopolitical challenges of the time. And these leaders weren’t just mentors; they were friends. Outside of work, we all played Civilization and would draw out elaborate maps on whiteboards in the office to frame out our strategies.

Like the truck drivers, the people at the Pentagon invested their time in me and treated me like an equal, like someone whose opinion mattered and someone they believed could succeed.

And they weren’t the only ones. From my teachers and Little League coaches who I absolutely idolized and drove nuts with all my questions and debates, to my parents who were the center of my world, I really hit the lottery with people who made me feel special and gave me their time. My mom did it while also raising six kids, then in her 40s went back to college, and ultimately graduated summa cum laude from the University of Texas law school. And my dad basically spent every weekend with me from the time I was 5 until I left for the Air Force Academy at 17. We’d either be in Goldsboro, Texas, where my grandmother lived, to hunt, fish, and help with the cows, or we stayed in Rowlett [a Dallas suburb] and played golf.

Lessons learned

So, as I reflect on these first job lessons, it also helped me realize that I really have a simple job: Create an airline that makes our employees feel proud to work at United, and they will take care of our customers.

That means when I’m out in our operation I try and meet with as many employees as I can, just to hear what’s on their minds and what they’d like to see us do better or differently. They often tell me how proud they are of United Airlines, and nothing makes me feel better.

And the same goes for our customers. When I’m on a flight or in a restaurant or walking in Lincoln Park [in Chicago], they stop to tell me how much they love United and it’s almost always about something one of our people did for them.  I tell them that we’re focused on building the best airline in history for customers, and that includes delivering value to every customer, regardless of where they sit on the airplane. That’s everything from providing easier, more direct routes to the places they want to go and running an operation where their flight leaves and arrives on time, to delivering products, technology, services, and experiences onboard that make people say, “Wow, that’s cool.”

Spending time with people and focusing on how they feel is how I’ve spent my time at United. And all the people that loved me, took an interest in me, and gave me their time made me the person I am today.

My First Job is a recurring series in which prominent business leaders share what their first job was and what they learned from it.

As a 22-year corporate veteran, I (Kacy) make my living studying and speaking to employees in organizations. From New York to Houston, and from manufacturing associates to CFOs, I have encountered very few women who want to talk about menopause at work. Those who have talked about it typically described closed-door conference room confessionals with work friends they trust.

I knew why it took me years to talk about my own struggles with menopause at work: In 2021, I had never ever heard of perimenopause, and thought I was just losing my mind, which seemed like career suicide for someone responsible for designing well-being strategies for 50,000 people globally. I sought care on my own, and became increasingly curious about how other women were handling menopause at work. 

At a conference, my team from The Fuchsia Tent and the Society for Women’s Health Research, Syreen’s organization, bumped into each other and discussed how to practically make menopause mainstream. Soon, we were coleading a study on menopause at work. We couldn’t have anticipated how much we’d learn from this study, or that one of our most surprising findings would be that comfort does not equal disclosure when it comes to menopause and work.

In the survey portion of “Menopause at Work: From Echo Chamber to Mainstream Practice,” an IRB-approved mixed-methods study of 1,110 U.S. employees across genders, ages, ethnicities, and work settings, 53% of women with symptoms said they would be comfortable telling their manager, but only 21% actually disclosed. The “comfort-disclosure gap” widened when it came to Human Resources, with 49% of symptomatic women saying they would be comfortable telling HR, but only 6% disclosing.

Why Women Say They Are Comfortable With Menopause, Yet Don’t Disclose

Understanding the comfort-disclosure gap required a deeper dive into the data. We reviewed both the qualitative data from the survey and the thematic analysis from four regional roundtables and uncovered that symptomatic women felt that menopause disclosure at work would be deleterious to their career progression.

A woman in her 40s told us, “I know for a fact there are women at my company who have been told not to share that they are peri/menopausal.” And another woman in her 50s told us that menopause was a focus of her work, and she still “never felt comfortable talking about how menopause was impacting my ability to function, because of the potential stigma.” 

Across our roundtables we found that all genders were responsible for silencing when it came to menopause. A participant revealed that after pitching the idea of a menopause webinar, a senior executive told her, “Women have enough handicaps. We don’t need another one.” Our survey data showed that only 46% of workers identified their work culture as open to speaking about menopause.

Our survey didn’t ask what was behind the silence, but a literature review  published by The Fuchsia Tent in March 2026 on menopause at work offers additional clues. Data shows that women’s fears of disclosure are well founded; nearly 80% of women in one global survey reported age-related discrimination at some point in their careers. Another global survey of nearly 2,900 women had 72% of respondents admitting to hiding menopause symptoms at least once at work. 

What Does Silence Cost Businesses and Women?

If you have worked anywhere near benefits or menopause, you have heard the stat that menopause costs businesses $26.6 billion in health care costs and lost productivity, according to Mayo Clinic Proceedings. So why haven’t businesses done more? Benefits and resources tend to be dictated by population health data, but in 2022 only 14.7% of women aged 45-64 received a documented diagnosis of menopause, according to the Health Care Cost Institute. Claims data doesn’t accurately reflect the prevalence of menopause at work.

So if benefits departments don’t see menopause in the data and wait to hear about menopause from employees, our data shows that employees’ needs will likely remain invisible. In the study, 83% of employees said they would be comfortable responding to a colleague who needed support, but only 64% said they’d be comfortable starting a conversation about menopause. Menopause symptoms become a don’t-see, don’t-ask, don’t-tell situation.

Symptomatic women may pay an economic penalty as well. Economists estimate that the “menopause penalty” costs symptomatic women dramatically, with their earnings falling almost 10% by the fourth year after a menopause diagnosis. And that is when they stay employed.

In our survey, 33% of women with symptoms said they had considered leaving or reducing hours due to menopause symptoms. One participant told us, “I quit my job, in part, because I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t concentrate on work. If I had been in a different environment . . . I would probably have made it, but I didn’t feel supported.”

What Should Employers Do Instead of Waiting for Someone to Speak Up?

Since disclosure is unlikely in the workplace, and proactive support conversations with managers may be off the table, employers need to take steps to ensure they have the right benefits to support employees in the menopause transition, and most importantly, communicate these supports properly. Our external report lays out an employer roadmap in four key steps. 

1. Audit existing benefits and programs before you add something new to the mix. Many of the benefits employers currently have may be helpful for menopause symptoms (e.g., medical benefits, telehealth, mental health benefits, and employee assistance programs).

2. Deliver support by integrating the benefits you already offer. This includes mapping current benefits coverage to the different menopause symptoms, and making the related prescription coverage explicit.

3. Communicate benefits in a way that all employees can access and understand them. Survey your workers to understand awareness of benefits offerings. Then vary communication styles and delivery to meet the unique needs of different work settings (e.g., factory versus office).

4. Treat compassionate dialogue as a universal life skill. Leadership training should cover the gamut of employee needs and not be siloed to menopause. Only 44% of managers globally have received management training, according to Gallup. Universal skills are needed first.

In our study, we asked those 1,110 people what they wanted when it came to workplace menopause support, and 56% of the comments fell into three categories: 1) compassionate culture, 2) flexibility in when, where, or how work gets done, and 3) access to affordable benefits. The goal shouldn’t be to make women talk about menopause. It should be to provide us with affordable, easy access to care: the same things every employee wants regardless of age or gender.

You might assume that you’re trapped in a terrible trade-off: Either delete three years of family photos or start uninstalling apps you actually use.

In reality, most of the storage bloat on your phone doesn’t come from your photo library or active application code. It comes from hidden caches, forgotten offline downloads, duplicate message attachments, and temporary system files.

You can easily claw back 10GB or more of space on your iPhone in a few minutes without deleting a single photo or uninstalling a single app. Here’s how to do it.

Purge hidden media attachments in Messages

If you’re in active group chats, your Messages app is likely sitting on gigabytes of high-definition videos, audio notes, and reaction GIFs sent over the years.

The best part? You don’t have to delete your text conversations to get that space back.

• Open Settings > General > iPhone Storage.
• Scroll down and tap Messages.
• Under the Documents & Data section, tap Review Large Attachments (or select individual categories like Videos or Photos).
• Tap Edit in the top right corner, select the massive video clips and attachments you no longer need, and hit the trash icon.

Deleting these heavy files clears out massive amounts of local storage while keeping your entire text history completely intact.

Clear forgotten offline downloads

Streaming apps like Netflix, Prime Video, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts make it easy to download content for airplane rides or subway commutes.

The problem is that those apps rarely clean up after themselves. Three downloaded HD movies and a dozen podcast episodes can easily hoard gigabytes upon gigabytes of space quietly in the background.

• Video Apps: Open Netflix, Prime Video, or YouTube, navigate to your Downloads tab, and delete watched movies or entire TV seasons.
• Podcasts: Open the Podcasts app, go to Library > Downloaded, and swipe left to delete episodes you’ve listened to. To prevent future bloat, go to Settings > Podcasts and toggle on Automatically Remove Played Downloads.
• Music apps: Open Spotify or Apple Music, go to your downloaded albums list, and remove offline access for playlists you haven’t listened to in months. You can still stream them anytime over Wi-Fi or cellular.

Enable “Optimize iPhone Storage” for Photos

If you want to keep your entire photo library accessible without filling up your hardware, Apple built a solution directly into iOS.

Go to Settings > [Your Name] > iCloud > Photos and ensure iCloud Photos is toggled on, then select Optimize iPhone Storage.

Instead of storing massive 24-megapixel original files locally on your phone, iOS keeps lightweight, screen-ready thumbnail versions on your device while backing up the full-resolution originals to iCloud.

Whenever you tap a photo to view or edit it, the full-res version downloads on the fly. If you have a lot of photos, this single toggle reclaims a ton of space instantly without losing a single memory.

Offload unused apps without deleting their data

Deleting an app wipes out its local documents, saved progress, and custom settings. Offloading an app removes the underlying application code while preserving all your personal data, logins, and files.

• Manual Offloading: Go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage, tap a large app you haven’t opened in weeks (like a travel booking tool or heavy mobile game), and tap Offload App.
• Automatic Offloading: Go to Settings > App Store (or Settings > Apps > App Store) and toggle on Offload Unused Apps.

The app icon stays right on your home screen with a small cloud icon next to its name. The moment you tap it, iOS reinstalls the app instantly, picking up right where you left off with all your saved data intact.

Flush Safari cache and perform a hard restart

Browser caches and temporary system logs can swell over time, bloating the mysterious “System Data” block in your storage menu.

• Clear Web Cache: Go to Settings > Safari (or Settings > Apps > Safari), scroll down, and tap Clear History and Website Data.
• Force a System Cache Flush: Turn your iPhone off completely, wait 30 seconds, and turn it back on. Restarting forces iOS to clear temporary runtime caches, index buffers, and log files that accumulate in RAM and flash memory, often dropping System Data size by several gigabytes.

But we do have enough evidence of its harms to warrant government action, say the authors of a series on “digital determinants of health” published today in The Lancet.

The three-paper series and related meta-review, which analyzed existing research that included data from 9 million people younger than 25, were authored by experts from 10 different countries.

What the evidence says about digital harms

The study found consistent associations between problematic digital media use—meaning addiction-like patterns of use, rather than screen time alone—and various health outcomes.

Obesity, nearsightedness, lower back pain, and cardiometabolic risk were linked to overall screen time across different age groups. 

Other findings differed by age. For children, higher overall screen time “was associated with poorer socio-emotional and cognitive development, increased anxiety and depression, and poorer sleep quality,” the review says. 

For adolescents, specific patterns of digital engagement were associated with “reduced quality of life, sleep problems, lower physical activity, non-suicidal self-injury, suicidal ideation, and substance use.”

Overall, the meta-review said, “more than three-quarters of the reported exposure-outcome associations were adverse,” though there was also evidence of beneficial digital media use, like children watching educational content with caregivers, and adolescents using active video games.

“These age-related differences emphasize that digital media use is not a uniform phenomenon,” the meta-review said. 

Roadblocks for research

Even with a large body of research to draw from, it’s difficult to quantify digital harms, and the authors stress that the available evidence doesn’t establish a cause-and-effect relationship between digital media use and specific health outcomes. 

Self-reported data has limitations, said Sunny Xun Liu, director of research at the Stanford Social Media Lab.

Liu, who was not involved in the Lancet series, coauthored a recent study in JAMA Pediatrics that looked at how often adolescents reported negative online experiences, finding that responses varied substantially depending on the platform. 

It can be hard to self-report media usage, Liu said. “If you ask [adolescents], ‘Okay, what type of harmful content have you seen in the past four weeks?’ it’s really hard for anybody to answer that question.”

Both Liu and the series authors said that better data does exist, but researchers often don’t have access to it.

“The most valuable data on how these platforms actually affect users are hidden within technology companies, limiting independent scrutiny and slowing scientific progress,” series author Louise Holly, a policy and research coordinator at the Digital Transformations for Health Lab in the U.K., said in a statement. 

One of the series’ key recommendations is that governments should require tech companies to share that data with vetted public-interest researchers.

A public health approach to digital media regulation

Even in the absence of that data, the series authors say the scale of the evidence of digital harms is great enough that we should take action now.

They approach the topic from a public health perspective, and call for more research and more regulation, noting that single measures—like app age limits—aren’t enough.

“Technology companies are borrowing a playbook well known from tobacco and fossil fuels: Manufacture doubt, discredit critics, frame regulation as a threat to freedom,” series author Barbara Prainsack, a political science professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, said in a statement. 

A public health approach that examines evidence across the whole population would counter that strategy, Prainsack said. 

“Seen that way, good regulation isn’t the enemy of innovation—it’s a driver of good innovation, channeling it toward safety and trust,” she said. “And when regulation is missing, it doesn’t mean that a technology is ungoverned; it just means that companies set the rules instead of public policy.”

Liu agreed that the public health approach is important, and suggested several considerations for researchers and policymakers, recommending they “really listen to young people,” think about how to better support overwhelmed family and caregivers, and, lastly, that researchers look for novel ways to conduct their studies and make the complexities of digital media use easier to understand.

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

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

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

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

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

Testing has begun

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

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

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

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

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

A lot to prove

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

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

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

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

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

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

Space junk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A tsunami of opposition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Companies weigh in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A search engine for movements

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

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

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

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

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

Examples of user overreach

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

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

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

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

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

Why the Fourth Amendment matters

The law remains unsettled on ALPR use.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enforceable limits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—By Amaya Nichole, News Writer

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

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

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

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

The night owl’s struggle

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

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

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

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

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

Riding your natural rhythms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tips for night owls for better sleep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why controlling email hours no longer works

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

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

Managing expectations about responsiveness

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

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

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

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

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

Redesigning workflows, not just the inbox

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

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

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

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

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

Making work sustainable for everyone 

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

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

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

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

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

So how do you establish and maintain weak ties?

1. Interact with new people

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

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

2. BE CURIOUS

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

3. RECONNECT WITH DORMANT CONNECTIONS

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

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

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

4. STAY IN TOUCH

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

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

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

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

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

The everywhere material

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invisible ubiquity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New tech, old strategies

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

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

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

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

The anti-scam checklist

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

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

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

Embrace vigilance

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

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