“Are you going to be the president’s human sock puppet?” asked Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana.

On one level, the question reflects President Donald Trump’s intense pressure on the central bank to cut rates, with current Chair Jerome Powell often the target of his ire. But it also points to Warsh’s own inconsistency on inflation.

Earlier in his career, he was a “hawk,” pushing for interest rate hikes to curb inflation and opposing the novel crisis management authorities that the Fed took on after the 2008 financial meltdown. Now, Warsh supports the interest rate cuts that Trump has exhorted as a way to juice growth.

Warsh has also come under fire for his deep ties to the financial sector, where he once worked. Lawmakers such as Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have cited the potential conflict of interest posed by his undisclosed assets, even though in theory they’ll be divested as part of Warsh’s arrangements with the government’s ethics watchdogs if he becomes chair.

As scholars who study central banks and the politics of finance, we understand why concerns about Warsh’s credibility have persisted. But perhaps counterintuitively, we also believe that once he’s confirmed, his finance background could reinforce his prior hawkish leanings, leading to more independence from Trump on inflation and interest rates.

Is past prologue?

If confirmed as chair, as expected, Warsh and his colleagues on the Fed’s policy-setting committee would wield enormous power. Not only does the central bank set the benchmark rate that determines short-term lending, but the Fed also oversees a US$6.7 trillion balance sheet, mostly in government bonds, that partially affects longer-term borrowing costs. Guided by its mandate to control inflation, the Fed’s decisions impact everything from grocery prices to mortgage rates.

Along with Warsh’s prior stints in government and on the Fed’s policymaking board as a governor, he worked for the investment firm Morgan Stanley and the hedge fund Duquesne Capital. In those positions, Warsh advanced his career in an industry that has long preferred hawkish Fed policies, even at the cost of job growth: Wall Street is generally “conservative” in that it favors lower inflation and higher interest rates on grounds that those policies can support bigger bank profits and higher prices for bank shares, while reducing the risks brought by disinflation policies.

While serving as a Fed governor in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Warsh’s comments reflected this outlook. He talked extensively about inflation being a “choice”—that is, the result of poor policy decisions, rather than broader structural forces.

He also questioned the Fed’s massive bond purchases, which were meant to stimulate the economy and reduce high unemployment by pushing long-term borrowing rates lower. The Fed revived those bond buys during the pandemic recession, while waiting too long, in the eyes of many economists, to hike rates once inflation began rising in 2021.

More recently, Warsh has focused his criticism on the central bank’s “bloated” balance sheet as well as its inflation record. Those legacies, along with the stimulative government spending under President Joe Biden, prompted Warsh to warn in February 2022 that “extraordinary excesses in monetary and fiscal policy caused the inflation dragon to resurface after 40 years of dormancy.”

Which Warsh will show up?

Given that long record, many Fed watchers looked at his turnaround in the second Trump administration with some skepticism. When he was a finalist for the nomination to chair the central bank in summer 2025, he told CNBC that the Fed’s hesitancy to cut rates—which was already drawing Trump’s wrath—was “quite a mark against them.”

“The specter of the miss they made on inflation, it has stuck with them,” he added. “So one of the reasons why the president . . . is right to be pushing the Fed publicly is we need regime change in the conduct of policy.”

Warsh’s rhetorical shift has led many to ask whether he can reconcile his responsibilities with political pressure. But the worsening inflation outlook for both the U.S. and world, driven by spiking oil prices, may force his hand regardless.

The spike in oil prices from the Iran war, in particular, has economists raising their inflation forecasts for the U.S. At his last Fed meeting as chair, Powell indicated that the central bank could be a long way off from lowering rates given inflation concerns. The Bank of England and the European Central Banks are also bracing for possible rate hikes if inflation doesn’t ease.

Trump ramp ups the pressure

For his part, Trump has used unprecedented means to bend the Fed since returning to office.

Those tactics include trying to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook and threatening to fire Powell—who just announced he will stay on as a governor on the Fed’s board after his chairmanship ends. Those kinds of pressure tactics—which effectively seek to restaff the Fed’s leadership with more members favoring interest rate cuts—are more often seen in countries like Turkey or Argentina.

So why do we believe that Warsh won’t be the “human sock puppet” some fear?

In our view, it’s his background in finance that leads us to think he’ll be able to resist political pressure once on the job. After all, when Powell was appointed by Trump during his first term, he had also worked in that sector—and he has demonstrated independence from both Trump and Biden.

This is not just a theory. Political scientist Chris Adolph has identified a pattern in which Wall Street is the “shadow principal” of the central bankers who shuffle in and out of the financial sector. Similarly, economist Adam Posen has described finance as the interest group with the most prominent lobbying role over monetary policy.

In practical terms, this means that Warsh has long been steeped in ideas about inflation that have traditionally held sway over the financial sector, and he may well be more open about these preferences once confirmed. Moreover, he’s likely to return to finance once his term at the Fed ends. Together, we believe these factors may give Warsh the intrinsic motivation and enough incentives to resist overt political pressure from the president.

Of course, being too beholden to Wall Street is also a risk, as pointed out by Warren and others. The Fed is meant to support Wall Street in times of crisis—and even more so since the 2010 Dodd-Frank reform. However, the Dodd-Frank Act also asked the Fed to monitor risks to the entire financial system by supervising and regulating financial institutions. That requirement requires the Fed to prevent crises, not just bail out Wall Street when a crisis hits.

As it happens, the Fed today is quietly but surely moving to water down the rules put in place after 2008—a deregulatory shift that Warsh strongly supports.

Fed independence from government, as a matter of law and of norms, is deeply important for the health of the U.S. economy. And Warsh’s rhetorical shifts on monetary policy raise serious questions about its fate under his chairmanship. Senators have been right to push him as a nominee on this matter. However, the Fed also faces pressure from the finance industry, often pulling policy in the opposite direction. As such, we believe that Warsh’s professional history in finance may bolster his autonomy from Trump on rates once he’s confirmed.

Cristina Bodea is a professor of political science at Michigan State University and Andrew Kerner is an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University.

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

It was created by Iris van Herpen in collaboration with the Tokyo-London design studio A.A.Murakami. Assembled from 15,000 hand-formed glass bubbles, it took 2,550 hours to construct, and contained hidden microprocessors that released real bubbles into the air as Gu moved.

It was also a glimpse into the show that opens at the Brooklyn Museum on May 16: Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, the North American debut of a retrospective that has already traveled from Paris to Brisbane, Australia, then Singapore and the Netherlands.

The 2016 original of that bubble dress will be in the show. “It represents the air that’s inside of our bodies,” says Matthew Yokobosky, the Brooklyn Museum’s senior curator of fashion and material culture. “Over 90% of our bodies are made up of air.”

Over two decades, van Herpen has built a body of work that treats science as a creative collaborator. She has made couture inspired by the air in our lungs, the architecture of a stingray’s skeleton, the magnetic fields of the Large Hadron Collider. She has worked with architects, paleontologists, and biologists, and used everything from iron filings to magnets to bioluminescent algae as raw materials. In doing so, she has quietly redefined what it means for fashion to be art.

The Brooklyn Museum has been making that argument for nearly a century. Its 1934 Story of Silk exhibition is often cited as the beginning of fashion’s museum era; it has since staged retrospectives of work by Madame Grès, Schiaparelli, Jean Paul Gaultier, Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Virgil Abloh, and Thierry Mugler. Sculpting the Senses extends the lineage.

Water in all its forms

The bubble dress is a launchpad for the exhibit. “The show starts about different inspirations from the different forms of water, liquid, frozen, gaseous, and how all those different states have been equally informative for her as a design inspiration,” Yokobosky explains.

It is paired with a piece by the Japanese art collective Mé, a work that Yokobosky says “looks as if they had taken a slice of the ocean and put it into the gallery.”

Van Herpen, who grew up in the Dutch village of Wamel, has returned again and again to water in all its states. That preoccupation goes back to the work that put her on the map. Her 2010 Crystallization collection, built around limestone deposits, ice crystals, and the choreography of a splash, contained the first 3D-printed garment ever shown on a fashion runway.

The skeletal, ivory-colored top made in collaboration with British architect Daniel Widrig, is on display in Brooklyn. Depending on the angle, the piece looks like a fossilized vertebra or a Dutch ruff from the 17th century. Materialise, the Belgian 3D-printing firm that helped fabricate it, had until then been making architectural models.

Bones, fossils, and a baby dinosaur

Since the natural history specimens in the Paris version of van Herpen’s show couldn’t travel, Yokobosky struck up a new partnership with the American Museum of Natural History. The Brooklyn show now includes an 80-million-year-old ichthyosaur skeleton and a baby dinosaur, displayed in dialogue with van Herpen’s bone-inspired couture. A gown built around the architecture of bird skeletons sits near the dinosaur fossils—a nod to the fact that birds are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs.

“When you look at Iris’s gown, you don’t necessarily see bones immediately, but as you look more closely, you realize that there are all those articulations of bone,” Yokobosky says.

Biomimicry runs deep in van Herpen’s work. Her atelier doesn’t replicate a fish scale; it studies how a fish scale is structured, then translates that structure into a new material. Lucid (2016) borrowed from the orb webs of argiope spiders. Sympoiesis and Sensory Seas took their cues from coral systems.

The designer’s work has a sustainability dimension too. Van Herpen has experimented with garments made from recycled plastic ocean waste, 3D-printed cocoa beans, and, last year, created a “living” dress in collaboration with biodesigner Chris Bellamy that was seeded with 125 million bioluminescent algae.

In an industry that produces somewhere between 92 million and 100 million tons of textile waste every year, the gesture suggests that garments don’t have to come from petrochemicals. They can come from a lab, or a forest, or—occasionally—a tide pool.

The slowest fashion

The most quietly radical section of the show may be the one with no garment at all. For the Brooklyn exhibit, van Herpen created a new video installation that takes the small, often invisible gestures of her atelier—the placement of a hand, the catch of a needle, the slow accumulation of a single embroidered surface—and projects them, unedited and in real time, onto 25-foot-high screens inside the museum’s 70-foot rotunda.

“She really wanted people to understand the slow process that goes into making couture . . . what emerges from this long, meditative process,” Yokobosky says.

Fashion in 2026 is dominated by AI-generated lookbooks, Shein-style ultrafast cycles, and the increasingly seamless integration of agentic commerce into the shopping experience. In contrast, van Herpen does not even do ready-to-wear; she focuses entirely on couture. She still makes everything by hand, in collaboration with a rotating cast of scientists and artists, and she still sells the pieces. She just doesn’t make very many of them.

“She is very devoted to the craft of couture and to experimenting and helping us understand what is possible in the future of fashion,” Yokobosky says.

The Brooklyn show closes in a space the museum is calling Cosmic Bloom: a darkened room full of mannequins suspended from the ceiling at strange angles, wearing some of van Herpen’s most surreal and saturated gowns. It is also a clear statement of what the entire exhibition is arguing—that the body, in van Herpen’s hands, isn’t a hanger for product. It is a small piece of the universe, and clothing is one of the languages we use to describe it.

Sculpting the Senses runs through December 6.

But it’s taken more than a daring founding team to get us to this point. This is all due to our engineers, sales, and support staff, who share a desire to grow and achieve exceptional results.

As a team, we believe a business is only as strong as its weakest link. Poor components can cause bottlenecks and compromise performance. To maintain our strong network, we’re meticulous about hiring, no matter the role. And these three questions help us identify exceptional talent to maintain our growth.

Why did you leave your first real job?

People leave jobs for many reasons. Some become frustrated with a lack of learning, and others prefer fast growth over steady progress. Some want more compensation. Others find it difficult to retain interest in a project.

None of those reasons is inherently bad. What matters, and what you need to find out, is whether a candidate’s needs and approach align with your company and the role.

After all, turnover is expensive. The average cost of replacing an employee has jumped to over $45,000 in the past year, up from $37,000, according to the most recent express employment professionals-Harris Poll survey. And that doesn’t account for the lost momentum and slowed progress during search, training, and onboarding. To avoid unnecessary costs to your finances and productivity, you need to glean what energizes and frustrates a person, as well as the kind of environment they need to thrive, before you hire them.

A mixed role might suit somebody who struggles with monotony and enjoys wearing multiple hats, while a highly structured role would work better for a candidate who thrives on routine. The best candidate on paper isn’t necessarily the best fit, and the wrong or right answer will always depend on the role.

What do you know about our company?

Many applicants use a ‘spray and pray’ approach—they send off hundreds of low-effort applications, recycling the same resume and cover letter. These candidates aren’t interested in working for you. They want a job, an improved salary, or a better title. They’re not interested in learning and growing within the company. They’re also likely to bolt as soon as they spot an opportunity for quick progress, even if it harms their long-term growth.

I don’t choose employees who apply for every role and take whatever comes their way. It can be difficult to spot them from an application alone, but the level of research (or lack of) they’ve done before the interview can be incredibly telling.

Asking the right questions is another clear indication of a committed candidate. While most ask about our flexible working policies or whether I enjoy working at the company, exceptional candidates are curious about operations, challenges, and opportunities to grow. Here are examples of some questions that some high-performing candidates have asked me during the interview process:

• “How can I succeed beyond just hitting revenue targets?”
• “Will I be mentored in my role, and can I expect feedback?”
• “Are junior staff given a chance to offer input and ideas?”
• “Do you hire from within, and what roles have previous team members moved into?”
• “Is the position stable, and are you likely to cut numbers in the near future?”

We’re looking for candidates who have done their research, want a clear picture of the environment they’re joining, and are planning how they will grow within the company before they’ve even received an offer.

What do you think about using technology at work?

We don’t expect every hire to be a tech wizard, but they need to have a positive attitude towards innovation and change. In the modern workplace – where collaboration, communication, and problem-solving rely heavily on technology – it’s nearly impossible to thrive without it. It’s helping everyone to work smarter, and the best candidates recognize that.

Truly exceptional candidates don’t answer this question by talking about the tools they were required to use in their previous role. They share stories of experimenting with new solutions to save time. And they tell you about the exciting developments in your space that they could use to improve results. Not because the company demands it, but because they see the value it could offer. 

In my experience, these employees are highly adaptable, brush off hardship, and get on with the job. These are useful qualities to have on your team during times of rapid change. Companies that encourage experimentation and grant autonomy to their teams to try new things are 60% more likely to be innovation leaders. And as history shows, innovative companies have better odds of survival. Much more so than a team that insists on sticking to ‘the way they know’.

The best interview questions reveal who you’re really hiring

For me, interviews shouldn’t focus on a candidate’s qualifications. That’s what their resume and references are for. Instead, it’s about finding out how they think, what motivates them, and whether they suit your team. Skills are something you can teach, However curiosity, drive, and resilience are all attributes is much more difficult to train.

But handing over a picture book seems especially unhelpful for the class of 2026. While every generation of young graduates seems to face a unique set of woes in their early adulthood, this year’s new grads are coming up against some particularly turbulent times.

AI is gobbling up the entry-level jobs that new graduates need to get their foot in the door. Adding insult to injury, commencement speakers are encouraging grads to embrace their new AI overlords.

But wait, there’s more!

Inflation is up 3.8% (the highest it’s been in three years), and the unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 was 5.6% as of December 2025, outstripping the national average. What’s more disheartening is that of those employed twentysomething college grads, 40% were working in jobs that didn’t require a college degree.

Honestly, it’s understandable why parents might reach for Dr. Seuss to help counsel a newly minted graduate in times like these. (And possibly grabbing a fresh copy of Goodnight Moon to ease their own parental insomnia.)

No matter how worrisome the economic news may be, however, there are practical gifts you can offer to your new grad that will help launch both their career and their personal financial success. Consider giving these gifts to the graduate in your life.

Teach them soft skills

When I was 14 years old, a new classmate introduced herself with a handshake, and immediately critiqued the “limp fish” grip I offered in return.

My new friend was the daughter of a minister, which meant she shook hands with dozens of parishioners every Sunday and knew a thing or two about greeting people that had never once occurred to me. It’s been more than 30 years, and I still use her advice on handshakes, introductions, and humor on a daily basis.

Like my teenage self, the graduate in your life probably doesn’t know all the soft skills that are considered base-level knowledge in the business world. These might include things like:

• Networking: Learning how to network can be a difficult skill to master, especially if no one tells you that it’s often considered rude to ask a contact for a job directly.
• Email etiquette: You can save the grad in your life a great deal of heartache by teaching them to wait to type the recipient’s email address in the “To” line until after composing the email to their satisfaction.
• Interviewing: Practice interviews can help your graduate build up muscle memory for this nerve-wracking experience so they can feel more comfortable when they’re in a real interview situation.
• Sussing out workplace culture: Every workplace has a different kind of culture. You can help your graduate figure out a workplace’s culture during the interview process. For example, in every academic office I have ever known, the atmosphere among the support staff (especially among the office’s administrative assistants) is the best barometer for understanding the culture of the organization as a whole.

Imparting this kind of wisdom to your new graduate can help them stand out among other job candidates and will help them fit in better when they land their first job.

An easy budgeting program

For many new graduates, walking across the stage marks the transition from childhood to adulthood—at least in the financial realm. Instead of being part of their parents’ budget, a new graduate is likely to be 100% responsible for their own financial decisions. (Well, until they get a flat tire and need to make an emergency withdrawal from the Bank of Mom and Dad).

Depending on the young adult, this can be a difficult adjustment. You can help make the shift a little easier by setting your graduate up with a budgeting program of their choice.

There are a number of apps and online programs available that are designed to help make money management simpler and more intuitive. If you already use one, consider walking your graduate through the program you prefer. If not, take an afternoon with your grad to look at several options to find one that works for them.

While many budgeting apps are free, some charge a monthly or annual fee. If your graduate is interested in one of the paid apps, you might offer to pay for it as long as they continue to use it. It will be an investment that saves both of you money in the long run.

Open a Roth IRA account

Setting money aside for a retirement 40-plus years in the future is probably the last thing on your graduate’s mind, but that’s partly what makes this is such an impactful gift. The earlier you contribute money to a Roth IRA, the more time you give it to let compounding interest do its incredible magic.

A brand-new adult is also in an excellent position for a Roth IRA for another reason: Roth accounts are funded with after-tax dollars.

Instead of deducting contributions to these accounts from your income, you contribute money you’ve already paid taxes on into your Roth accounts. The money grows tax-free, and you can withdraw it tax-free in retirement.

Here’s why this is so great for young’uns: A new graduate’s tax burden is probably the lowest one they will ever have. Making Roth IRA contributions now, while the new graduate is at a low tax bracket, means paying very little in taxes on the invested money.

As of 2026, a young adult can contribute up to $7,500 annually into a Roth IRA, provided they have earned at least that much. (Also, these yearly contribution limits encompass all IRAs you may own. If your graduate has a traditional IRA and a Roth IRA, they can’t send $7,500 to each one.)

Helping your child open a Roth IRA account and setting up some contributions, even if they’re not able to maximize them, will give them a gift that keeps on giving decades down the line.

Launching your graduate

New graduates and their families may be understandably alarmed about their financial and career prospects, considering the nonstop coverage of everything good going up in smoke just as they finish their education. This is the same story financial media has been peddling during graduation season for decades—although that doesn’t erase the potential turbulence facing this year’s crop of graduates.

However, offering newly graduated students some practical gifts can help prepare them for a tough launch. These gifts include teaching your graduate the soft skills they need to know to navigate the workplace, setting them up with a budgeting app, and helping them open and fund a Roth IRA.

Each of these actions will do so much more to encourage, support, and guide your graduate than any tangible gift, even a picture book by a beloved author.

During the pandemic housing boom, housing demand surged rapidly amid ultralow interest rates, stimulus, and the remote work boom. Federal Reserve researchers estimate “new construction would have had to increase by roughly 300% to absorb the pandemic-era surge in demand.”

Unlike housing demand, housing stock isn’t as elastic and can’t quickly ramp up. As a result, the heightened demand drained the market of active inventory and caused home prices to overheat, with U.S. home prices in June 2022 sitting at a staggering 43.2% above March 2020 levels.

The run-up was even greater in some metro markets, including Naples, Florida (+73%); Austin, Texas (+73%); Punta Gorda, Florida (+71%); Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Florida (+70%); and North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota, Florida (+69%).

Not long after mortgage rates spiked in 2022, the pandemic housing boom fizzled out. Since June 2022, the nationally aggregated housing market has been going through a period of recalibration—with U.S. home prices in March 2026 up just 2.2% above June 2022 levels, while weekly U.S. worker earnings during that same window jumped 14.7%.

However, some markets’ so-called recalibration window has gone further, and they’ve passed through a home price correction.

Among the nation’s 300 largest metro-area housing markets, these 15 markets have home prices this spring at least 10% below their local 2022 peak, according to ResiClub’s analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index:

1. Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown, TX → -27.8% 
2. Punta Gorda, FL → -25.4% 
3. Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL → -18.9% 
4. North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton, FL → -17.5% 
5. New Orleans-Metairie, LA → -13.8% 
6. Houma-Thibodaux, LA → -13.2% 
7. Boulder, CO → -11.8% 
8. Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ → -11.6% 
9. Naples-Marco Island, FL → -11.5% 
10. Lake Charles, LA → -11.4% 
11. San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX → -11.2% 
12. San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA → -11.0% 
13. Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, CO → -10.6% 
14. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX → -10.1% 
15. Boise City, ID → -10.1%

Note: Just because a market is still down from its 2022 peak doesn’t guarantee that home prices are still falling there. At the latest reading, home prices are up year over year in metro New Orleans (+2.1%), and pockets of San Francisco are seeing notable pricing action this spring.

Many of the softest housing markets, where home prices are down the most from their 2022 peak, are located in Southern and Mountain West regions. Many of those areas were home to many of the nation’s top pandemic boomtowns, which experienced significant home price growth during the pandemic housing boom, which stretched housing prices beyond local income levels.

Once pandemic-fueled domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates spiked, markets like Punta Gorda, Florida, and Austin, Texas, faced challenges, as they had to rely on local incomes to sustain frothy home prices. The housing market softening in these areas was further accelerated by the abundance of new home supply in the pipeline across the Sunbelt.

When and where needed, builders are often willing to reduce prices or make other affordability adjustments to maintain sales. These adjustments in the new construction market also create a cooling effect on the resale market, as some buyers who might have opted for an existing home shift their focus to new homes where deals are available.

In contrast, many Northeast and Midwest markets were less reliant on pandemic domestic migration and have less new home construction in progress. With lower exposure to that migration pullback demand shock—and fewer homebuilders offering large incentives—active inventory in these Midwest and Northeast regions has remained relatively tight.

As ResiClub has previously covered, there’s a moderate statistical correlation (R² = 0.30) between Moody’s Q2 2022 valuation score and the change in home prices from their 2022 peak through March 2026. If the San Francisco metro area—the largest outlier—is excluded, that correlation strengthens slightly (R² = 0.39).

Among the 412 metro areas that Moody’s Analytics tracks, Punta Gorda has seen the biggest drawdown in “overvaluation” since the pandemic housing boom fizzled out in Q2 2022. It’s followed by New Orleans, Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Austin, and North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota.  

In theory, as froth recedes and “overvaluation” comes down, so does downside risk. And that dynamic may already be quietly reshaping the risk profile in pockets of the Texas and Florida housing markets, where home prices have fallen and “overvaluation” has declined considerably since Q2 2022.

The program was called HyperCard​, from Apple, and it let you create interactive presentations with multiple choice buttons and branching pathways. We quickly started using it to craft crude choose-your-own adventure games when the teacher wasn’t looking.

HyperCard could have become something bigger if Apple hadn’t abandoned it, which is a whole other story​. The point of this article, though, is to let you know about a spiritual successor that enables all kinds of modern uses despite its old-school aesthetic—on whatever kind of device you’re using.

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

Interactive documents, retro-style

To bring back the glory of HyperCard on modern devices, check out ​Decker​.

➜ Decker is a desktop app for creating interactive documents, presentations, and games.

⌚ It takes five or 10 minutes to learn the basics well enough to start putting a presentation together.

💸 And it’s available for free or under a pay-what-you-can model​. You can also try a web-based version without installing anything.

✅ Let’s start with the download first:

• Head to the official Decker download page​, then scroll down and click the “Download Now” button.
• You’ll see a few payment options if you want to support the developer, or you can click “No thanks, just take me to the downloads” instead.
• Then choose either the “mac” or “win” version to download (or, again: If you’re using a phone or another type of device, head over to the web version​ instead).
  • In Windows, you can extract the ZIP file to any folder you like and run the decker.exe file, as it’s a portable app with no need to install anything.
  • For the Mac version, extract the ZIP file and move the Decker.app file to your Applications folder.

☝️ Decker is safe to use, gets regular updates, and has an active community of users​—but because the app isn’t notarized, it runs afoul of the Windows and Mac safety filters. In Windows, hit “Run Anyway” when prompted. For the Mac version, head to System Settings > Privacy & Security, then select “Open Anyway” next to the message about Decker being blocked. You’ll only have to do this once.

🖌️ With all that out of the way, you can start making things. While the app has a “Guided Tour” that demonstrates its main features, I suggest doing the following:

• Head to File > New Deck and hit “Discard” for a clean slate.
• Under the “Tool” tab, select “Widgets.”
• Under the “Widgets” tab, select “New Button.”
• Double-click the button, and write something in the Text field, like “Next Page.”
• Click the “Action…” button, select “Next,” then hit “OK.”
• Head to File > New Card.
• Under the Widgets tab, create a new button again, set the Text to something like “Previous Page,” then hit the “Action…” button and select “Previous.”
• Head to Tool > Interact, so the buttons become clickable.

Now, you should have two pages, each with a button for flipping back and forth between them. This is the essence of Decker: creating documents with interactive buttons for jumping around to different pages.

💡 From there, you can try some different things to dress up your pages:

• In the Tool tab, use the various drawing tools such as Line, Pencil, and Box.
• Make another button, but this time set it to “Invisible” and draw your own custom button art around it.
• Try adding some other types of objects from the Widgets menu, such as text fields, sliders, and canvases to draw on.

Decker also includes its own scripting language called “Lil,” which can add even more layers of interactivity to your documents. For instance, you can have a button that adds to a counter, which then loads another card when the counter exceeds a certain level. It’s even possible to create entire games in Decker this way​.

If you want to dive deeper into Decker’s capabilities, I suggest loading some of the files in the “Examples” folder or on the Decker website​. Like any other Decker document, you can edit these examples to see how they work.

Once you’ve finished making a document, head to File > Save As to export it. The default file format is .deck, but you can also change the extension to .html, which lets you load the document in any web browser. Yes, that means you can make any document public by uploading the .html file to your personal website, if you have one.

Much like the original HyperCard, it’s surprising how much you can do with this little program. Who knows? You might even end up ​building the next Myst​.

• Decker is available for Windows and Mac​, and you can try it online​, too.
• The app is free to download with an optional donation.
• Decker is open-source software, does not require an internet connection, and does not collect any user data.

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

But some of those data owners, also known as content creators or IP holders, are now fighting back. They are doing this by using tools known as “tarpits.” Their aim? To poison the chatbot’s underlying LLM and thus degrade the quality of its outputs, potentially causing end-user flight. Here’s what you need to know.

What is AI poisoning?

AI poisoning is the process of corrupting an AI chatbot’s underlying large language model so that the chatbot gives incorrect, misleading, or utterly bonkers outputs. This corruption is achieved by tricking the LLM into assimilating incorrect data during its training, which often involves scraping every possible website and image it can find.

There are many ways an LLM can be poisoned, depending on the capabilities of the LLM that the poisoner wants to disrupt. 

For example, if someone wanted to poison an image generator LLM, they could use a technique known as “Nightshading,” which involves using a piece of software called Nightshade to add an invisible layer to an image. This layer contains pixels invisible to the human eye but visible to LLM scrapers. These pixels then make the artwork look to the AI as if it’s in a different style than it actually is (say, abstract rather than realistic), which prevents the LLM from mimicking the artist’s actual style.

Of course, the majority of chatbots deal with text, not images, rendering poisoning tools like Nightshade useless against unauthorized AI scraping of articles and blogs. But in the last several years, a new type of AI poisoning tools has been making the rounds that aim to trick LLMs into training on useless data. These tools are known as tarpits.

What are AI tarpits?

AI tarpits are a specific type of AI poisoning tool designed to trick the crawlers that LLMs use into ingesting useless data. Since the LLM then uses this junk data to generate its text outputs, those outputs will be incorrect, which degrades the quality of the AI’s responses and, ultimately, could discourage users from using the chatbot.

There are numerous tarpit traps that content creators and IP holders can add to their websites, including Nepenthes, Iocaine, and Quixotic. When an LLM crawler visits a website with the tarpit embedded in its code, the crawler will be redirected to assimilate automatically generated, useless text that is either riddled with incorrect information (e.g., Steve Jobs founded Microsoft in 1834) or completely nonsensical information (e.g., the color of water is pepperoni). 

Further, these pages of poisoned text will have links linking out to additional pages of poisoned text, none of which have exit links. Thus, much like a physical tarpit causes an animal in real life to get stuck, an AI tarpit traps the LLM crawler into an endless assimilation of incorrect data, unable to exit the trap.

How can the average user protect their data from AI companies?

Content creators and IP holders use tarpits to waste AI companies’ valuable resources and prevent LLMs from assimilating a website’s data without consent.

But even if you aren’t a content creator or IP holder, you should be aware that AI companies are using your data to train their models, too. Every prompt you type into an AI chatbot or conversation you have with it is assimilated into that LLM’s corpus for further analysis with the goal of making the chatbot’s LLM even more robust.

The good news is that you don’t have to resort to specialized tools like tarpits to protect your data from chatbots. Instead, you can explicitly instruct chatbots not to train on your data, use chatbots through proxies to obscure your identity, or use everyday software tools to redact your sensitive data before you upload any documents to a chatbot for analysis.

David is the author of The New York Times bestsellers Range and The Sports Gene. He has worked as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and an investigative reporter for ProPublica.

What’s the big idea?

Using deliberate constraints and simplification strategies helps you focus better, be more productive, and make more creative decisions.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by David himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

1. Make all your current commitments visible.

At one genomics lab, the staff took the time to write each of their current projects on Post-it notes (one project per Post-it) and put them up on a wall. They immediately noticed that they had way too many things in progress at once. The lab team saw the importance of picking priorities to focus on.

Making all your commitments visible is a useful exercise. This can be done for personal matters, professional tasks, or both. When taking account of everything, ask yourself, “If I had to cut one of these things out in the next 90 days, which would it be?” That doesn’t mean you have to kill it forever, but maybe you put it on hold because constraints can help clarify your priorities. That’s what this exercise is about. Most people or teams who do this realize that they’re overcommitted and that a lot of medium-priority tasks are competing with top-priority tasks.

Humans are bad at taking things away. So think of this exercise as a subtraction audit. We have a bias called subtractive neglect bias, meaning we overlook solutions that involve taking things away. Do this regularly to actively reduce obligations rather than only accumulating more.

2. Batch your email.

Psychologist Gloria Mark has spent two decades observing people at work to understand what they do all day. In one of her more recent studies, she found that people in offices check email about 77 different times a day. That’s the average. And that leads to lower productivity and higher stress. New evidence suggests that this kind of frequent toggling might even affect immune function, but we do know it affects stress, because switching tasks frequently causes the quality and pace of work to drop. Less gets done, and it’s not done as well.

Dr. Mark likes to describe the brain as a whiteboard: When doing a task, you’re writing on the whiteboard, and when you switch, you erase, but it leaves a residue that interferes a little bit with the next thing. By toggling back and forth all day, you’re building up that residue and shrinking cognitive bandwidth for each successive task. This isn’t to say you can’t answer your email, but consider dividing it into one, two, or three batches a day. What you don’t want to be doing is switching back and forth all day long. In fact, if you can batch your work in general, that can be helpful for boosting productivity and lowering stress.

“Less gets done, and it’s not done as well.”

If monotasking sounds difficult, maybe start your day with 30 minutes of non-toggling work during which you focus exclusively on your most important task. You can gradually work up to longer and longer blocks of time before opening that inbox. Ideally, you can eventually block all your work so that the different types of things you do in a day are done within their own monotask blocks of time. This will increase your productivity and make you feel less stressed at the end of the day.

3. Block the familiar solution.

This might be the single greatest creativity prompt. When you block the solution that you’re used to choosing, it forces you to think in new ways. Psychologists sometimes call this a preclude constraint, where you’re precluding whatever the familiar path is to force doing something else.

As the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has said, you may think that your brain is made for thinking, but it’s actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible. Thinking is energetically costly, so your brain wants to do the thing that’s easy. When faced with a problem or a task, your brain will reach for what cognitive psychologists call the path of least resistance, which means something that’s convenient or habitual.

But if you want to be creative, you want to block that default. Sometimes it’s blocked by necessity, and that’s why we have the adage that necessity is the mother of invention. When the easy option is not a choice, you’re forced to do something inventive. But if you’re just trying to be more creative, think about whatever you’re doing and block it.

Let me give you a sense of how I applied this in some of my own work. When working on this book, I would start new chapters by writing down the first thing that popped into my mind. But then I would say, “Cross that out. I can’t use this as my beginning. I have to find something else.” It was annoying and inconvenient, but it forced me to think hard about what is really the best place to start the chapter, not just the first thing that came to mind.

“When the easy option is not a choice, you’re forced to do something inventive.”

Whatever your creative task is, don’t jump to the familiar solution. Maybe, at work, consider saying, “If we couldn’t recommend the usual thing at our next client meeting, what would we do instead?” Even if you end up choosing the familiar solution after all, it can be worth exploring the results of this generative, creative prompt before deciding.

4. Start with the box.

This is a tip that comes from Tony Fadell. He’s publicly known as the “pod father” because he was the lead designer of the iPod, and then he went on to cofound the smart thermostat company, Nest. The main advice that he gives entrepreneurs is to start by writing the press release before embarking on the project. In fact, at Nest, he had the team prototype the literal box before they had the product. He said, “This will force us to prioritize the things that we’re trying to communicate to the end user. It will force us to clarify what those things are and decide what the priorities are.”

Similarly, he suggests that entrepreneurs write a single-page press release as if their project were done. Answer: What do I want this to look like? What problem is it solving? What do I hope people say about it when it’s done? That gives a bounding box for the project. Suddenly, you have guide rails to work within. It doesn’t mean you can’t change them, but if you do, you are aware that you are making thoughtful trade-offs. This can keep a project contained and channeled.

I tried this for myself, even just for a few personal projects. I found it a useful exercise that forces you to think about why you’re doing what you’re doing, define your theory of what you’re doing, what you hope it looks like, and what the priorities are. Some people think of it as working backward. These kinds of constraints can be annoying because, as Fadell says, setting boundaries early on slows you down, but they are powerful because they force you to think ahead.

I took a cue from Fadell because my previous books had really sprawled, so this time around, I made a full structural outline of the book on a single page. I tried to foil my own system by writing as small as possible, but this exercise forced me to ruthlessly prioritize. As a result, this was the first time I hadn’t written 50% over the length I was allotted for a book. Even though writing this outline slowed me down initially, it drew boundaries that allowed me to write very fast once it came time to execute. I turned the book in early, which is unheard of for me.

5. Set “satisficing” rules and stick with them.

Satisficing is a term coined by Herbert Simon, who was a Nobel laureate in economics and one of the founders of AI and cognitive psychology. Satisficing is a combination of satisfy and suffice. What Simon found was that humans cannot optimize their decisions in the way that classical economic theory would have us do because we have limited bandwidth to evaluate different options and predict the future. So, we must satisfy ourselves by selecting good-enough options.

Simon suggested that we should proactively set good-enough rules for our decisions, and once those are surpassed, we go with the option and don’t look back. Maybe whatever decision you make or purchase you make or whatever it is goes way beyond the good enough limits, but once you pass them, you go with it. If you’re making a purchase, you establish what you need the item to do, and once you find that option, you take it and move on.

The opposite of satisficing is what’s called maximizing. That’s where you’re really trying to evaluate every option and make the best decision. This is like when you’ve found something you’d like to watch on Netflix, but because there might be something better, you keep searching. Dating apps are an obvious example: You find someone you like, but choose to swipe some more anyway, because who knows what’s around the next corner?

“Maximizers are less satisfied with their decisions.”

Psychology research shows that it’s almost always bad to be a maximizer. Maximizers are less satisfied with their decisions. They’re less satisfied with their lives. They’re much more prone to regret. They prefer reversible decisions, even when they end up happier with irreversible decisions. Just the option to always keep their options open is something that draws them into a certain level of unhappiness.

We can all do with a little more satisficing in this world, where it has never been easier to compare every decision and aspect of life to an almost infinite number of other people and other options. It’s important for our well-being to think about and set good-enough rules.

Simon himself wore the same brand of socks. He always owned one beret at a time and only bought a new one when the one he had got worn out. He told his daughter that a person only needs three pairs of clothing: one on one’s body, one in the closet ready to wear, and one in the wash. He ate the same breakfast every day. He lived in the same house for 46 years. He famously wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.” You’d almost accuse him of having low standards if he hadn’t won the highest possible awards in psychology, computing, and economics.

Simon recognized that by satisficing, you deliberately save cognitive bandwidth for other areas where it really matters.

This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.

Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea app.

“Out of curiosity, I asked AI to prepare the address. I was amazed at how quick and easy it was generated,” Bastian told the graduating class of more than 5,000 students.

“But I also noticed the lack of soul nor warmth it conveyed,” he said. “It was not my personal voice, and it did not express my genuine appreciation for the opportunity to impart my insights to thousands of you. You want to hear from me, not some algorithm of me.

“So, don’t worry,” he told the crowd. “I threw it away, and took pencil to paper.”

New grads are facing a turbulent job market that has been completely reshaped by AI, so Bastian’s measured words about the technology likely felt like a breath of fresh air. The CEO was met with a round of applause—a change of pace from the booing some commencement speakers have been subjected to in the last few weeks. 

For example, at the University of Central Florida last Friday, humanities department commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Development Co., was booed after touting AI as the “next industrial revolution.”

Bastian joined Delta in 1998 as its vice president of finance and climbed through the ranks until he became the company’s CEO in 2016. Under his tenure, Delta has grown to surpass a market capitalization of $46 billion.

Through his career, he told grads that he’s been faced with making some tough decisions (perhaps such as recently cutting snacks and drinks from hundreds of daily flights).

“Doing the right thing comes at a cost,” he told the students. “But I always prefer to think of it as an investment, a smart investment.”

“I’ve had many important decisions to make over the course of my career, and I must admit, taking a shortcut or pushing the easy button can sometimes be quite tempting,” Bastian added. “But they never yield an enduring result or an effective solution.”

Bastian didn’t promote AI tools or make promises of an “AI revolution.” Instead, he told the members of the graduating class that their most important asset is a “good name.” 

“It’s your brand,” he said. “It’s what you stand for. And there’s only one person that can take that away from you. That person is you.”

“The pandemic tested our assumption that we have to be in person in order to be productive,” Dropbox chief people officer Melanie Rosenwasser told The Associated Press. 

After adopting a remote work policy during the pandemic, Dropbox has remained steadfast to its “virtual-first” model—even as its peers pushed workers back to their desks. The San Francisco-based cloud storage and file share company allows its workforce of around 2,100 employees to work from anywhere in the world.

“It’s especially important to us to maintain this posture as so many other companies across many, many industries are mandating return to office,” Rosenwasser told the AP. 

Most of the decision-making at Dropbox happens asynchronously or over writing. The company has “core collaboration hours,” which are four-hour blocks for meetings that overlap based on time zone. “We focus on something that we call the three D’s: discuss, debate, or decide,” Rosenwasser said. “If none of those things are on the table, then a meeting is not required.”

Outside of that, employees are able to coordinate their workdays according to their preferences. This “virtual-first” model helps the company retain global talent. 

“We are explicitly not hybrid,” Rosenwasser said. “We think this is the worst of all worlds, where employees suffer through long commutes only to sit on Zoom because most of our colleagues are distributed. We really believed in this creation of an even playing field.”

According to analytics firm Gallup, 26% of U.S. companies operate completely remotely. Another 52% of companies have hybrid models, and 22% are fully on-site. The data shows that 6 in 10 employees with remote-capable jobs want a hybrid work arrangement, while one-third prefer fully remote work. While 76% enjoyed the improved work-life balance that comes with remote work, 55% said spending time with people and building relationships is an important benefit of working on-site.

To cultivate community, Dropbox gives new hires an onboarding buddy, and teams host various events through the month.

Some other challenges the company faces due to its remote work model include burnout and setting boundaries. “When you’re working from home, your personal and professional life blur. And that’s why we wanted to intentionally put into place nonlinear workdays, which are very much based on personal preferences,” Rosenwasser said.

In addition, remote workers often struggle with being sedentary. Dropbox launched a program called “Meet & Move,” which sounds exactly like what the title suggests: taking meetings while moving around, either by walking outside or at home.

According to Glassdoor, 69% of Dropbox employees would recommend working at the company to a friend. In a work climate where Dropbox’s “virtual-first” model is getting harder to come by, the company may have a recruiting advantage for employees who don’t want to spend their nine-to-five behind an office desk.

The Western drama, which began humbly in 2018, has since grown into one of television’s most valuable franchises. A Bloomberg story from last year estimated that it generated nearly $3 billion in sales and $700 million in profit.

Today, the sequel series Dutton Ranch premieres on both the Paramount Network and Paramount+. Beth and Rip are ready to make a new start in Texas. But just how did they wind up there? Here’s everything you need to know before tuning in.

How did Yellowstone end?

Taylor Sheridan and John Linson co-created Yellowstone, which ran for five seasons beginning in 2018. It follows the Dutton family and their quest to save their land from the many forces and figures who want to develop it.

In the end, after the death of patriarch John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner), his children cannot afford the inheritance tax on the ranch. Kayce, his youngest son, finds a tax loophole and sells the land to Chief Rainwater and the Broken Rock Reservation. As part of the sale, Kayce keeps 5,000 acres called East Camp for his immediate family.

Beth, John’s only daughter, avenges his death by killing her brother Jamie with some help from her husband, Rip. She holds Jamie responsible for the death of her father, even though it was his girlfriend who initiated the hit on John. Rip disposes of the body in no-man’s-land in Wyoming. When the cops show up, Beth claims self-defense and gets away with murder.

Investigators believe Jamie is still at large, thanks to some crime scene contamination by Beth and Rip. They go on to purchase a ranch near Dillon, Montana.

To find out how they wind up in Texas, you are going to have to watch Dutton Ranch.

What Yellowstone cast members are returning for Dutton Ranch?

Cole Hauser and Kelly Reilly will reprise their roles as Rip and Beth, respectively. No one else could fill those boots. Carter, their unofficially adopted son, will again be played by Finn Little.

What new cast members are joining Dutton Ranch?

Beulah Jackson, played by Annette Bening, is the matriarch of a longtime Texas ranching family who isn’t afraid of giving Beth a hard time. One of her family members, Oreana, played by Natalie Alyn Lind, befriends Carter.

Another Academy Award nominee joining the cast is Ed Harris as Everett McKinney, an experienced veterinarian and veteran.

Jai Courtney, J. R. Villarreal, Juan Pablo Raba, and Hart Denton round out the ensemble.

Wait, isn’t there already a Yellowstone spin-off airing right now?

Yes. Marshals, starring Luke Grimes as Kayce Dutton, premiered on CBS on March 1. Eleven of the 13 episodes are currently available to stream on the Paramount+ streaming service. The final two episodes will air on May 17 and May 24 at 8 p.m.

Perhaps because of its network television placement, this series is more of a procedural drama than its original source material.

How to tune in to Dutton Ranch

The first two episodes of Dutton Ranch will air on the Paramount Network beginning at 8 p.m. tonight. The season contains nine episodes in total, which will be released weekly after the premiere. The series will also be available to stream on Paramount+.

The official X account for the Sony Xperia smartphone shared examples from its new “AI Camera Assistant” tool, which offers lens, exposure, and color suggestions for users.

While it’s a decent idea in theory, the images shared by the post revealed otherwise.

The X post included a series of before-and-after examples, with the tool appearing to create a comedically overexposed effect.

In one of the images, a picture of a person in a field is turned from one with depth and contrast into an overly bright photograph.

Another before-and-after combo featured a close-up of a sandwich, with the “after” version reducing the contrast to the point that the image appears to be without depth.

But while someone clearly thought the images were good enough to post online, the X post quickly backfired, turning its comment section into a flurry of criticisms and mockery, with many posting their own satirical before-and-afters.

“If this is intelligence, I’d prefer my phone dumb,” a user said on X. Another added: “This is one way to completely destroy photography.”

Is the backlash the point?

On Reddit, the announcement has also gained traction. “I first thought this was a joke,” one user said. “Who sat there at Sony and thought that these pics would be great promo material?!”

The bad quality of the images has led several users to be skeptical of the post’s intention, with some wondering if the obvious flaws might have been shared for rage-bait, a practice becoming increasingly common among brands online.

Carlos Pei, CEO of the consumer tech company Nothing, was among those who seemed suspicious. “This must be engagement farming?” Pei said on X.

Another user added: “That’s exactly what it is. Look at how many people are talking about Sony because of this. Right when they release a new flagship camera and phone. They make some of the best cameras on the planet. They know what a good photo looks like and doesn’t look like.”

Fast Company reached out to Sony for comment.

The images have indeed gained much attention, with the original post garnering over 11 million views and over 3,000 comments. A little over a day later, the company returned to social media to share a clarification on the post as a response to the backlash.

“Following the post about AI Camera Assistant, we’d like to explain the feature in more detail. It doesn’t edit photos after shooting—it suggests 4 settings in different creative directions based on the scene and subject. You can choose any option or use your own settings,” the post says.

Still, with replies continuing to plague Sony’s comment section as of Friday, the consensus seems to be that the mockery will continue. “[Too] late,” one commenter wrote. “The meme train can’t be stopped.”

The report, out Thursday, says while there is “still substantial uncertainty about El Niño’s peak strength” this hurricane season—and it’s too early to tell—the summer outlook does seem ripe for the possibility of creating “very strong” conditions later, as “the strongest El Niño events in the historical record are characterized by significant ocean-atmosphere coupling through the summer.”

In addition, NOAA says 2026 is already shaping up to be among the warmest on record, with last month ranking as the fourth-warmest April since global records began in 1850.

What is El Niño?

El Niño is a complex weather pattern that refers to the warming of the ocean surface, or above-average sea surface temperatures, in the Pacific Ocean.

Winds that normally blow from west to east weaken, and in some cases they blow east, disrupting normal weather and creating more extreme meteorological events, per the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). As the winds “take warm water from South America towards Asia,” that’s replaced by cold water that rises, known as “upwelling,” according to NOAA.

The impact can be global, not only intensifying storms and flooding, particularly in the Southeast and Gulf Coast, but also creating wildfires and drought. The 2015 Super El Niño caused a significant Caribbean drought.

El Niño episodes typically last nine to 12 months and occur, on average, every two to seven years.

The term El Niño, which means “little boy” in Spanish, was first coined by a South American fisherman who noticed unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean in the 1600s, according to NOAA.

One approach to addressing this challenge has emerged in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a region with deep institutional knowledge and over a century of experience in energy operations. Rose Rock Bridge, a nonprofit based in Tulsa, is a pilot deployment studio that offers a new approach to removing barriers, acting as a bridge between corporations and startups.

The nonprofit’s accelerator program differs from traditional models in its design to fast-track pilot deployments, validate technology, connect early-stage startups with corporate energy partners, and provide non-dilutive funding opportunities to accelerate commercialization.

Launched in late 2022 as an initiative of Tulsa Innovation Labs, Rose Rock Bridge brings a new perspective: the fastest and most efficient way to commercialize energy technology is to build it alongside the companies that will use it. 

Here’s what sets the program apart.

A DEMAND-FIRST FRAMEWORK

The process begins with energy companies’ needs. Working closely with corporate innovation teams to evaluate demand rather than supply, Rose Rock Bridge works with corporate partners to identify high-priority technology solutions.

Tapping into a network of more than 40 universities, Fortune 500 companies, and leading industry partners like Devon Energy, H&P, ONEOK, and Williams, Rose Rock Bridge identifies pain points in the energy ecosystem and sources emerging solutions. The goal is not simply to find exciting ideas, but technologies companies can realistically deploy in the near term to solve identified challenges with a real business case.

This year’s focus areas reflect some of the most pressing operational challenges facing the industry today:

• Operational agility and integration
• Reservoir and production enhancements
• Fluid systems
• Robotics

DE-RISK AND DEPLOY TECHNOLOGIES

Selected startups participate in a six-week accelerator focused on commercialization, working directly with industry partners through one-on-one advisory clinics and hands-on workshops designed to refine their technology and prepare it for pilot deployment.

This close collaboration allows startups to assess pilot feasibility early while building relationships. At the same time, energy companies gain a direct line to emerging technologies that could transform their operations and provide a path to business innovations at the leading edge of global trends.

The result is a win-win: startups accelerate their path to market, while corporations reduce the risk of adopting new technology.

At the end of the accelerator, participating companies showcase their solutions to Rose Rock Bridge’s corporate partners. Four startups receive $100,000 each in non-dilutive funding, along with a year of additional support focused on pilot deployment and commercialization. Startups receive additional support refining their go-to-market strategies, securing follow-on investment, and building visibility through marketing and partnership opportunities.

THE IMPACT

In just a few years, Rose Rock Bridge has incubated 33 startups, supported 16 active or in-development pilot projects, and invested more than $2 million in early-stage companies. Together, those companies now represent a combined portfolio valuation exceeding $55 million.

Behind the program is a powerful coalition of energy leaders whose combined market capitalization exceeds $140 billion. Their involvement provides both the resources and the real-world testing ground necessary to bring breakthrough technologies to life.

As the energy industry continues to evolve, programs that can connect innovation directly with deployment will play an increasingly important role. Rose Rock Bridge is proving that innovation moves faster when startups and industry collaborate early.

Jennifer Hankins is the managing director of Tulsa Innovation Labs.

The cars are from robotaxi company Waymo, which has been operating in Atlanta since June of 2025. The company has a fleet of about 100 cars in the city—and when they’re not being called to provide rides, some of those Waymos have mysteriously decided to spend their free time circling a few residential streets.

One of the neighborhood’s residents explained the situation to local news channel WSB-TV, saying that she and her neighbors first started seeing Waymos in the area around two months ago, with larger groups of the cars coming en masse in the past couple weeks.

“It’s almost every cul-de-sac around our area, so I think it’s a real problem,” the resident said. “I think yesterday morning we had 50 cars that came through between 6 and 7.”

Residents have even tried using a small plastic “child-at-play” cutout to block the road and keep the Waymos out, only to create a massive traffic jam of driverless vehicles in the process. “We had, at one point, eight Waymos that were stuck, trying to figure out how to turn around,” the resident said.

The increased traffic is annoying (and more than a little creepy), but beyond any inconveniences, residents are worried that the vehicles could pose a danger to children in the area.

“We have families. We have small kids. We have animals and pets. We’ve got kids getting on the bus in the morning. And it just doesn’t feel safe to have that traffic,” the resident said. “We just would like to see them stay on main traffic roads. I don’t think there’s any reason to be on small residential cul-de-sacs if they’re not picking up somebody.”

Waymo weighs in

When news of the Waymos’ favorite hangout spot made it to social media, users quickly had a field day poking fun at the absurdity of the situation and theorizing the potential causes behind it.

Some users joked that the cars were developing their own culture. “Oh, so it’s wrong for cars to invent religion??” one user asked. 

“God forbid a robot have a hobby,” quipped another.

Others thought the cars’ bizarre patterns were a sign of something more sinister. “They just surveilling the city. No doubt about it,” one user theorized. 

“This is such a perfect allegory for what AI is doing to society,” pointed out another.

Though Waymo itself has yet to chime in on the discourse on social media, a Waymo spokesperson said that the company has “already addressed this routing behavior” in a statement to Fast Company.

“At Waymo, we are committed to being good neighbors. We take community feedback seriously,” the statement reads. “With over 500,000 weekly trips across the country, our service is proven to significantly reduce traffic injuries and improve road safety. We value our relationship with Atlanta residents and remain focused on providing a seamless, respectful, and safe experience for riders and residents alike.”

Where should cars spend their downtime?

The Waymos’ habit of circling cul-de-sacs may have been a glitch in their programming, but it raises a question regardless: When they’re not driving passengers around Atlanta, where are the Waymos supposed to be?

The company does have parking depots for its vehicles where they’re cleaned and serviced, but Waymos are also programmed to seek out street parking when they’re in between rides.

In a statement to The Verge last August, Waymo’s director of product management, Vishay Nihalani, said the company’s vehicles “will find appropriate parking spots to wait for short periods between trips, either in Waymo’s parking facilities or on-street parking locations.”

“When Waymo vehicles are idle and don’t have charging or maintenance needs, they choose between parking in nearby spots or driving to areas of high demand,” Nihalani explained. “This allows us to best match ride-hailing demand and vehicle supply, while conserving energy and reducing traffic congestion.”

But a quiet residential area in northwest Atlanta doesn’t sound like an “area of high demand”—so for now, what drew the Waymos there in the first place remains a mystery.

Zcash (ZEC) has become something of a darling of crypto markets lately, with the token up more than 1,200% over the past year. As of Friday morning, it was trading at around $530.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is down more than 21% over the past year, and Ethereum is down around 12%. Zcash has also gained more widespread adoption—Robinhood, for example, recently added it to its platform.

What’s behind the rise of Zcash?

It’s difficult to point to one specific factor for the recent rise in popularity. Zcash did see its initial large-scale push during the fall of 2025, even though it had been on the market since 2016.

Zcash’s value was more or less stagnant until September of last year, when it increased from roughly $50 and peaked at around $700 in November. It’s experienced volatility since then, but as of mid-May, has breached the $600 mark again.

That strong price action has likely attracted many traders, but Zcash’s main draw is that it’s a privacy-focused coin that was developed by researchers at MIT and Johns Hopkins University.

Like many other so-called altcoins, it’s also derived from Bitcoin, but Zcash utilizes “zero-knowledge proofs,” incorporating more encryption and protection for users.

Generally, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin detail transactions and coin usage on public ledgers—the blockchain.

But Zcash goes a bit further, shielding wallet addresses, making it more difficult to discern who or what is behind a given transaction. In other words, Zcash transactions are less transparent than Bitcoin’s, and that may be of interest to some crypto users.

The new cool kid on the blockchain?

Given its privacy-focused roots, Zcash may be benefiting from renewed concerns about surveillance and data harvesting efforts from both large tech companies (looking to suck up anything and everything to train AI models) or the federal government.

Add in more points of access (such as its availability on platforms like Robinhood), and more traders or investors can now get their hands on it—adding liquidity to the market.

Other analysts point to the “institutionalization” of Bitcoin as a factor. 

“Bitcoin is no longer rebellious. The vibes aren’t really cypherpunk anymore. Bitcoin is no longer for escaping government debasement, rather it’s for improving the sharpe ratio of boomers retirement portfolios,” writes David Hoffman, cofounder of crypto-focused media platform Bankless.

“Zcash has been on the frontier of applied cryptography, and Zcash culture has been privacy-first since inception,” he adds. “Today Zcash essentially has a monopoly on privacy.”

Matt Hougan, CIO at Bitwise, concurs. “As suitcoiners drag bitcoin into the mainstream, it makes space for things like ZEC. I suspect this narrative grows over time,” he recently wrote on X.

Adidas, which has supplied World Cup soccer balls since 1970, introduces a new match ball for every tournament, and with that comes fresh aerodynamic calculations for players. How will it fly through the air, weave and dip?

For the past 20 years, my engineering colleagues in Japan and England and I have put the new balls through their paces, investigating soccer ball aerodynamics. Our work begins by putting balls in wind tunnels to measure drag, side and lift forces. We use the measurements from these tests in trajectory simulations that tell us how the ball will behave in a real-game setting.

Putting the 2026 World Cup ball through the wind tunnel test.

That may all sound a little academic, and we do produce an academic paper on our findings. But what our data indicates could mean the difference between a goal or a miss for strikers, a save or a blunder for goalkeepers, and jubilation or heartache for fans.

At the World Cup, the ball is the most important piece of equipment in the biggest tournament of the world’s most popular sport.

This year’s ball, the Trionda, is especially interesting. When FIFA and Adidas unveiled it in fall 2025, the first thing many people noticed was the color and the paneling.

The ball’s red, blue and green graphics correspond to the three host countries, with maple leaf, star and eagle motifs representing Canada, the United States and Mexico. And for the first time in men’s World Cup history, matches will be played with a four-panel ball.

But with so few panels, has Adidas made the ball too smooth? That is the trap engineers fell into with the Jabulani ball used at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa that became notorious for sudden dips and swerves, which made goalkeepers’ lives far trickier.

You do not want the World Cup ball to feel like the start of a science experiment once it is in the air. And if it behaves strangely, players and goalkeepers notice immediately.

The evolution of soccer balls

World Cup balls have come a long way over the decades. If you go back to 1930, the ball looked very different. The first World Cup final used two different leather balls: Argentina’s Tiento in the first half and Uruguay’s T-Model in the second. Both were hand-sewn, multipaneled balls, inflated through a bladder opening that had to be tied off and tucked back beneath the laces. In damp conditions, the leather absorbed water, making the ball heavier and less predictable in play.

By 1994—when the United States last hosted the men’s tournament—the official ball, Adidas’ Questra, had evolved into a foam-based design. The modern World Cup ball is no longer just stitched leather. It is an engineered aerodynamic surface.

Trionda pushes that evolution further. It has only four panels, the fewest in men’s World Cup history, which have been thermally bonded—melded together using heat and adhesive.

Fewer panels might suggest less total seam length and therefore a smoother ball. And smoothness matters because the thin boundary layer of air clinging to the ball determines where the flow separates, how large a wake forms, and how much drag the ball experiences.

The Trionda has intentionally deep seams, three pronounced grooves on each panel and fine surface texturing.

But will these textures and grooves do the trick? To find that out, my colleagues and I measured the ball’s seam geometry and overall aerodynamic behavior. We compared it with Trionda’s four predecessors: 2022’s Al Rihla, 2018’s Telstar 18, the Brazuca used in 2014 and the Jabulani in 2010.

What the measurements show

In our wind tunnel tests at the University of Tsukuba, we measured something called the drag coefficient, which is a way of describing how much air resistance a ball experiences as it moves.

Using this data, we gained insights into how the airflow changes around the ball after it is kicked. The tests helped identify the drag crisis, the speed range in which changes in the boundary layer and flow separation produce a sharp change in drag, which can alter the ball’s acceleration, trajectory and range.

We found that the Trionda is effectively rougher than those predecessors.

Trionda reaches its drag crisis at a lower speed, at about 27 mph (43 kph). That is below the roughly 31-40 mph (50-65 kph) range for Al Rihla, Telstar 18 and Brazuca, and far below Jabulani’s roughly 49-60 mph (79-97 kph) range, depending on orientation.

Why does all that matter? Because a ball can feel ordinary off the boot and still behave differently in flight. When the drag crisis occurs in the middle of game-relevant speeds, small changes in launch speed, orientation or spin can shift the ball from one aerodynamic regime to another.

That was Jabulani’s problem. Once kicked with little spin, it had a tendency to slow down too much as it passed through its critical-speed range.

Trionda does not look like that kind of ball. It has a more steady and consistent drag coefficient in the range of speeds associated with corner kicks and free kicks.

But there is a trade-off. Our measurements also showed that once Trionda enters the higher-speed, turbulent-flow regime, its drag coefficients are somewhat larger than those of Brazuca, Telstar 18 and Al Rihla.

In plain language, that suggests a hard-hit long ball may lose a little range.

In our simulations, the difference is not huge. But it is large enough that players may notice long kicks coming up a few meters short.

It is also important to note that we tested a nonspinning ball. As such, our results do not provide a prediction of every pass, clearance or free kick fans will see this summer. Balls in flight often spin due to off-center kicks. That, along with altitude, humidity, temperature and air pressure all influence how a ball flies through the air once kicked.

The big test yet to come

Fewer panels and more texturing aren’t the only differences with the new ball.

Trionda also carries technology that has little to do with its flight and a great deal to do with officiating. Like Al Rihla, Trionda includes “connected-ball technology” that lets computers know when the ball is kicked, helping with offside decisions.

But the architecture has changed. In 2022, the measurement unit was suspended at the center of the ball. With Trionda, it sits in a specially created layer inside one panel, with counterbalancing weights in the other three panels. The chip sends data to the video assistant referee, or VAR, system and the tournament’s semi-automated offside system.

That tweak will help referees, but will the new ball in general help or hinder players?

The evidence from our tests suggests that the ball won’t be behaving in a way that leads to baffling and erratic flight.

But the more intriguing possibilities are subtler and outside the scope of our tests. Will the grooves on Trionda help players generate more backspin on the ball, generating more lift and possibly offsetting Trionda’s somewhat larger high-speed drag coefficient?

That is why I keep studying World Cup balls both in the lab and through their behavior in play. Every four years, a new design offers a fresh way to watch physics enter the game, not in theory, but in the movement of an object in which every player on the soccer field must place their trust.

John Eric Goff is a visiting assistant professor of physics at the University of Puget Sound.

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

I freelanced alongside my 9–5 for two full years before going solo full-time. That runway gave me time to figure out my offer and ideal clients, build a portfolio, and develop the confidence that I could make it work. As a result, the transition didn’t feel like a free fall. 

If you’re thinking about solopreneurship, a side hustle might be a smart way to get started.

The 9–5 is your (temporary) safety net

A side hustle while you’re still employed gives you something incredibly valuable: the ability to experiment without risking your livelihood. 

You can determine what services you plan to offer and validate whether there’s demand. You can pitch potential clients, test different pricing, and figure out what “sticks”—all while a steady paycheck covers your bills.

You’re also building proof that you can do the work. Future clients want to see what you’ve already done, not what you plan to do. A portfolio and a few client testimonials go a long way when you’re ready to announce that you’re open for business full-time. 

The tough part is juggling both. I had a lot of late nights and weekends when I took on freelance work alongside my 9–5 job. But I knew it wasn’t forever, so it was worth the period of overlap. 

Know your number before you leap

Before you quit, you need to know how much you need to earn—and have some evidence that you can get there. 

Start by calculating the minimum you need to cover your business expenses, taxes, and your cost of living. This is your baseline, and it’s more useful than a salary comparison because it accounts for the realities of self-employment: quarterly tax payments, software subscriptions, and the fact that you’re now paying for things your employer used to cover.

The day I went solo full-time, I knew what I needed to earn. I didn’t need to replace my 9–5 salary right away (though that was certainly the goal). I also knew how much more work and how many more clients I needed to get from side-hustle status to running-a-business mode. 

A side hustle with a paycheck is also the easiest time to build an emergency fund. Set aside your side hustle earnings while your 9–5 covers your day-to-day expenses. By doing this, you can afford to earn less when you initially go full-time as a solopreneur, because you can draw from your savings.

Build your operational foundation

Side-hustle time is when you set up the systems that will run your business. Contracts. Invoicing. A basic website. Pricing. All of these things are easier to figure out when your income doesn’t depend on getting it right the first time.

You’ll also start learning how to manage client relationships on a much smaller scale—like communication and setting expectations around project scope. When you make the switch, you’re able to scale up much more easily.

The jump gets smaller

Starting a side hustle shrinks the gap between employed and self-employed. By the time you leave your 9–5, you’ve already started your business.

Not everyone has the luxury of a gradual transition. Sometimes, a layoff or life circumstances force the issue. But if you have the option, use it.

With over 60% of Harvard students getting A’s in the mid-2025 academic year, faculty are currently weighing a proposal that would cap that to no more than 20% of the class, plus four students. (A more detailed breakdown: 66% of undergraduates earned A’s, and 84% earned an A or A-minus in the 2024–25 academic year.)

“The Student Handbook recognizes an A grade as one reserved for work of ‘extraordinary distinction.’ We recommend returning to this definition,” the February 2026 proposal reads. “While any changes to grading policies may raise concerns about fostering a competitive culture, we believe that these recommendations take critical steps toward the College’s goal to re-center academics, restoring confidence in the College’s grading system, and better aligning incentives with pedagogical goals.”

Just for context, less than half of the Ivy’s student body earned an A back in 2006. Also, as the administration clamped down on grade inflation during the fall 2025 semester, the number fell to 53%.

“It’s kind of nutty,” Steven Levitsky, a Latin American studies professor at Harvard, told Inside Higher Ed. “We’ve completely erased the distinction between an A and A-minus,” he said, adding that the proposal is the “least bad solution.”

Faculty are voting on the measure this week, with results due next Wednesday, May 20. It’s unclear whether it will pass, as students—already dealing with a weak job market and skyrocketing tuition costs (now surpassing $80,000)—are said to be furious, with some 85% opposing the cap, per the Harvard Crimson.

Grade inflation isn’t anything new

Of course, grade inflation at Harvard, and other U.S. colleges, isn’t anything new. It can be traced back to the Vietnam War, when professors used it to protect students from being drafted.

More recently, from 1990–2020, grade point averages (GPAs) at four-year colleges increased more than 16%, according to a post by the U.S. Department of Education. It cited students’ “consumer demand” for higher grades, and the rating of professors, in driving the trend.

“It’s true that grades always seem to be rising [at Harvard] . . . and has become extreme in recent years,” says a 2025 report about grading trends at Harvard from Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh. “A slow rise in the early 2010s, continuous with longstanding trends, followed by a more rapid rise in the late 2010s, then an additional spike during the year of remote instruction and a flattening out after that.”

As students await a decision, one thing to note: Recent attempts at Princeton University and Wellesley College to rein in runaway grade inflation failed, Bloomberg reported.