Last year, travel group AAA estimated about 80 million Americans traveled over the Thanksgiving holidays. It was the busiest Thanksgiving ever at airports across the country, and some reports are saying those records could be shattered this year.
A lot of that traveling will be done by young adults making their way home from school or new cities to see family and reconnect with old friends. That last part is the crux of Facebooks first brand campaign in four years.
In a new ad called Home For The Holidays, we see people making their way back home and various get-togethers being organized on Facebook. Created by agency Droga5 and set to Bob Dylan and Johnny Cashs Girl From the North Country, the spot expertly conjures the comfort and emotional security that only the warm embrace of old friends and familiar surroundings can provide.
The goal here is to reintroduce Facebook to a new generation of users and remind people what made Facebook magic in the first place, according to the campaign press release. Its just the start of the brands efforts in the coming months to reach younger audiences, including upcoming partnerships with Sports Illustrated and 10 American universities tied to college sports.
Facebooks Global Marketing Director Briana de Veer says that one in four young adults (ages 1829) in the U.S. and Canada use Facebook Marketplace. Hundreds of thousands of young adults in the U.S. and Canada create Facebook Dating profiles every month, and young adult matches are up 10% year over year. We see young adults using Facebook to help them navigate life stages, says de Veer. They move into their first apartment and turn to Marketplace to help furnish it on a tight budget, or using Facebook Dating to find love or joining Facebook Groups to meet people in a new city, for example.
Sounds great. Except compared to Facebooks reality in culture, the new ad is as much a fantasy as hooking up with your high school crush on that next trip home. This may be Facebooks first brand campaign in four years, but its picked up exactly where it left off in serving up an image of a brand that neither reflects nor defends who it actually is in the real world. Because in the real-life version of this spot, these old friends would likely be in the bar screaming at each other over political hot takes, healthcare facts, and anti-immigrant tirades.
Look, we all know advertising is about aspiration. For brands, it’s about projecting the roles they want to play in our lives. For us, it’s about seeing an image we might want to identify with. But marketers need to balance between that manufactured ideal and the reality of how they exist in the world. There’s aspiration and then there’s delusion, and it’s a brand’s job to know the difference.
The bad stuff
It’s hard to ignore the obvious dichotomy between Facebook’s ads and its real-life decisions. In January, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a gaggle of changes to the companys content moderation, including cutting its fact-checking program, which was originally established to fight the spread of misinformation across its social media apps. Its time to get back to our roots around free expression, Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the changes. He also acknowledged there would be more bad stuff on the platforms as a result of the decision.
The reality is that this is a trade-off, he said. It means that were going to catch less bad stuff, but well also reduce the number of innocent peoples posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
Nicole Gill, founder and executive director of the digital watchdog organization Accountable Tech, told The New York Times that this was reopening the floodgates to the exact same surge of hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories that caused Jan. 6and that continue to spur real-world violence.
A former Meta employee told Platformer, I really think this is a precursor for genocide [] Weve seen it happen. Real peoples lives are actually going to be endangered. Amnesty International said these changes posed a grave threat to vulnerable communities globally and drastically increased the risk that the company will yet again contribute to mass violence and gross human rights abusesjust like it did in Myanmar in 2017.
That’s not all, though. As Meta plows full steam ahead on building AI superintelligence, it’s leaving a path of unconsidered consequences in its wake. In August, Reuters reported that an internal Meta memo revealed that the companys rules for AI chatbots had permitted sensual chats with children.
Not quite the warm n fuzzy vibes the brand is going for.
I asked de Veer about how the company thinks about balancing the parts of the brand they want to reflect back into the world with a campaign like this, and the obvious challenges that remain. We continue to invest in keeping people safe on our platforms and removing harmful content that goes against our policies, she says. That is critical foundational work that makes it possible for people to see and experience the core value of the brand, which is the focus of this campaign.
Back to the Future
Back at the end of 2020, I called Facebook the Worst Brand of the Year, based on the Grand Canyonsize gap between the company it was projecting itself to be, and the one defined by its actual, real-world actions. Back then, I called Facebook out for how it portrayed itself as a warm and fuzzy marketplace of ideas while knowingly facilitating the spread of health misinformation and political falsehoods.
Sound familiar?
In 2021, the last time Facebook launched a brand campaign, that ol familiar feeling was back again. This time it was a spot calle The Tiger & The Buffalo, which somehow hoped that dropping some friends inside a 1908 Henri Rousseau painting would distract us from revelations in The Wall Street Journals Facebook Files, the testimony of whistleblower Frances Haugen, and a study on how climate change denial was spreading unchecked on Facebook.
The more things change, the more they stay exactly the same at Facebook, it seems. I actually feel bad for ad agency Droga5, which has crafted some truly impressive ads for the brand over the years, including two of the very best to come out of COVID”Never Lost” and “Survive” about a beloved NYC restaurant called Coogan’s.
Not only is the Facebook algorithm still fine-tuned to feed you the angriest, most controversial content it can, its also pulling back on the efforts to combat disinformation and vitriol that are known to incite violence. With its new campaign, it’s offering yet another distraction from its problematic role in culture.
The strategy here is to remind people why Facebook ever mattered in the first place. It’s to harken back to the halcyon days between 2006 and 2010, when it was actually a tool to primarily connect with people. Two decades later, Facebook is all that and a whole lot moreplus, you know, rage-baiting. Instead of living in the past, the brand needs to celebrate its best while also actively working to solve its worst. It’s definitely not a chair.
Perhaps the closest the brand has come to doing just that was in an ad called Here Together. It acknowledged what Zuckerberg recently called the bad stuff, and defined its role in regulating it, saying from now on, Facebook will do more to keep you safe and protect your privacy, so we can all get back to what made Facebook great in the first place.
That was in 2018, when all the people in Home For The Holidays were still in high school. Its time this brand grew up, too.
The latest generation of artificial intelligence models is sharper and smoother, producing polished text with fewer errors and hallucinations. As a philosophy professor, I have a growing fear: When a polished essay no longer shows that a student did the thinking, the grade above it becomes hollowand so does the diploma.
The problem doesnt stop in the classroom. In fields such as law, medicine, and journalism, trust depends on knowing that human judgment guided the work. A patient, for instance, expects a doctors prescription to reflect an experts thought and training.
AI products can now be used to support peoples decisions. But even when AIs role in doing that type of work is small, you cant be sure whether the professional drove the process or merely wrote a few prompts to do the job. What dissolves in this situation is accountabilitythe sense that institutions and individuals can answer for what they certify. And this comes at a time when public trust in civic institutions is already fraying.
I see education as the proving ground for a new challenge: learning to work with AI while preserving the integrity and visibility of human thinking. Crack the problem here, and a blueprint could emerge for other fields where trust depends on knowing that decisions still come from people. In my own classes, were testing an authorship protocol to ensure student writing stays connected to their thinking, even with AI in the loop.
When learning breaks down
The core exchange between teacher and student is under strain. A recent MIT study found that students using large language models to help with essays felt less ownership of their work and did worse on key writingrelated measures.
Students still want to learn, but many feel defeated. They may ask: Why think through it myself when AI can just tell me? Teachers worry their feedback no longer lands. As one Columbia University sophomore told The New Yorker after turning in her AI-assisted essay: If they dont like it, it wasnt me who wrote it, you know?
Universities are scrambling. Some instructors are trying to make assignments AI-proof, switching to personal reflections or requiring students to include their prompts and process. Over the past two years, Ive tried versions of these in my own classes, even asking students to invent new formats. But AI can mimic almost any task or style.
Understandably, others now call for a return to what are being dubbed medieval standards: in-class test-taking with blue books and oral exams. Yet those mostly reward speed under pressure, not reflection. And if students use AI outside class for assignments, teachers will simply lower the bar for quality, much as they did when smartphones and social media began to erode sustained reading and attention.
Many institutions resort to sweeping bans or hand the problem to ed-tech firms, whose detectors log every keystroke and replay drafts like movies. Teachers sift through forensic timelines; students feel surveilled. Too useful to ban, AI slips underground like contraband.
The challenge isnt that AI makes strong arguments available; books and peers do that, too. Whats different is that AI seeps into the environment, constantly whispering suggestions into the students ear. Whether the student merely echoes these or works them into their own reasoning is crucial, but teachers cannot assess that after the fact. A strong paper may hide dependence, while a weak one may reflect real struggle.
Meanwhile, other signatures of a students reasoningawkward phrasings that improve over the course of a paper, the quality of citations, general fluency of the writingare obscured by AI as well.
Restoring the link between process and product
Though many would happily skip the effort of thinking for themselves, its what makes learning durable and prepares students to become responsible professionals and leaders. Even if handing control to AI were desirable, it cant be held accountable, and its makers dont want that role. The only option as I see it is to protect the link between a students reasoning and the work that builds it.
Imagine a classroom platform where teachers set the rules for each assignment, choosing how AI can be used. A philosophy essay might run in AI-free modestudents write in a window that disables copy-paste and external AI calls but still lets them save drafts. A coding project might allow AI assistance but pause before submission to ask the student brief questions about how their code works. When the work is sent to the teacher, the system issues a secure receipta digital tag, like a sealed exam envelopeconfirming that it was produced under those specified conditions.
This isnt detection: no algorithm scanning for AI markers. And it isnt surveillance: no keystroke logging or draft spying. The assignments AI terms are built into the submission process. Work that doesnt meet those conditions simply wont go through, like when a platform rejects an unsupported file type.
In my lab at Temple University, were piloting this approach by using the authorship protocol Ive developed. In the main authorship check mode, an AI assistant poses brief, conversational questions that draw students back into their thinking: Could you restate your main point more clearly? or Is there a better example that shows the same idea? Their short, in-the-moment responses and edits allow the system to measure how well their reasoning and final draft align.
The prompts adapt in real time to each students writing, with the intent of making the cost of cheating higher than the effort of thinking. The goal isnt to grade or replace teachers but to reconnect the work sudents turn in with the reasoning that produced it. For teachers, this restores confidence that their feedback lands on a students actual reasoning. For students, it builds metacognitive awareness, helping them see when theyre genuinely thinking and when theyre merely offloading.
I believe teachers and researchers should be able to design their own authorship checks, each issuing a secure tag that certifies the work passed through their chosen process, one that institutions can then decide to trust and adopt.
How humans and intelligent machines interact
There are related efforts underway outside education. In publishing, certification efforts already experiment with human-written stamps. Yet without reliable verification, such labels collapse into marketing claims. What needs to be verified isnt keystrokes but how people engage with their work.
That shifts the question to cognitive authorship: not whether or how much AI was used, but how its integration affects ownership and reflection. As one doctor recently observed, learning how to deploy AI in the medical field will require a science of its own. The same holds for any field that depends on human judgment.
I see this protocol acting as an interaction layer with verification tags that travel with the work wherever it goes, like email moving between providers. It would complement technical standards for verifying digital identity and content provenance that already exist. The key difference is that existing protocols certify the artifact, not the human judgment behind it.
Without giving professions control over how AI is used and ensuring the place of human judgment in AI-assisted work, AI technology risks dissolving the trust on which professions and civic institutions depend. AI is not just a tool; it is a cognitive environment reshaping how we think. To inhabit this environment on our own terms, we must build open systems that keep human judgment at the center.
Eli Alshanetsky is an assistant professor of philosophy at Temple University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
For years, Donald Trumps distinctive, large, and bold signature has captured the publics attention. Not only did it recently come to light that his signature appeared in a book that Jeffrey Epstein received for his 50th birthday, but it fits neatly alongside Trumps long history of brash self-adulation. I love my signature, I really do, he said in a September 30, 2025, speech to military leaders. Everyone loves my signature.
His signature also happens to be of particular interest to me, given my decades-long fascination with, and occasional academic research on, the connection between signature size and personal attributes.
A long-time social psychologist who has studied Americas elite, I made an unintentional empirical discovery as an undergraduate more than 50 years ago. The link that I found thenand that numerous studies have since echoedis that signature size is related to status and ones sense of self.
Signature size and self-esteem
Back in 1967, during my senior year of college, I was a work-study student in Wesleyan Universitys psychology library. My task, four nights a week, was to check out books and to reshelve books that had been returned.
When students or faculty took books out, they were asked to sign their names on an orange, unlined card found in each book.
At some point, I noticed a pattern: When faculty signed the books out, they used a lot of space to sign their names. When students checked them out, they used very little space, leaving a lot of space for future readers.
So I decided to study my observation systematically.
I gathered at least 10 signatures for each faculty member and comparison samples of student signatures with the same number of letters in their names. After measuring by multiplying the height versus the width of the amount of space used, I found that eight of the nine faculty members used significantly more space to sign their names.
In order to test for age as well as status, I did another study in which I compared the signatures of blue-collar workers such as custodians and groundskeepers who worked at the school with a sample of professors and a sample of studentsagain matched for the number of letters, this time on blank 3-by-5-inch cards. The blue-collar workers used more space than the students but less than the faculty. I concluded that age was at play, but so was status.
When I told psychologist Karl Scheibe, my favorite teacher, about my findings, he said I could measure the signatures in his books, which he had been signing for more than a decade since his freshman year in college.
As can be seen in the graph, his book signatures mostly got bigger. They took a major leap in size from his junior year to his senior year, dipped a bit when he entered graduate school, and then increased in size as he completed his PhD and joined the Wesleyan faculty.
I did a few more studies, and published a few articles, concluding that signature size was related to self-esteem and a measure of what I termed status awareness. I found that the pattern held in a number of different environments, including in Iranwhere people write from right to left.
The narcissism connection
Although my subsequent research included a book about the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, it never crossed my mind to look at the signatures of these CEOs.
However, it did cross the minds of some researchers 40 years later. In May 2013, I received a call from the editor of the Harvard Business Review because of the work I had done on signature size. The publication planned to run an interview with Nick Seybert, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Maryland, about the potential link between signature size and narcissism in CEOs.
While Seybert told me his research had not found direct evidence for a positive relationship between the two, the possibility of the connection he inferred nonetheless intrigued me.
So I decided to test this using a sample of my students. I asked them to sign a blank 3-by-5 card as if they were writing a check, and then I gave them a widely used 16-item narcissism scale.
Lo and behold, Seybert was right to deduce a link: There was a significant positive correlation between signature size and narcissism. Although my sample size was small, the link subsequently led Seybert to test two different samples of his students. And he found the same significant, positive correlation.
Others soon began to use signature size to assess narcissism in CEOs. By 2020, growing interest in the topic saw the Journal of Management publish an article that included signature size as one of five ways to measure narcissism in CEOs.
A growing field
Now, almost six years later, researchers have used signature size to explore narcissism in CEOs and other senior corporate positions such as chief financial officers. The link has been found not only in the U.S. but in countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Uruguay, Iran, South Africa, and China.
In addition, some researchers have studied the effect of larger versus smaller signatures on the viewers. For example, in a recent article in the Journal of Philanthropy, Canadian researchers reported on three studies that systematically varied the signature size of someone soliciting funds in order to see whether it affected the size of donations. It did. In one of their studies, they found that increasing the size of the senders signature generated more than twice as much revenue.
The surprising resurgence of research using signature size to assess narcissism leads me to a few conclusions.
For one, signature size as a measure of certain aspects of personality has turned out to be much more robust than I imagined as an observant undergraduate working in a college library back in 1967.
Indeed, signature size is not only an indicator of status and self-esteem, as I once concluded. It is also, as recent studies suggest, an indicator of narcissistic tendenciesthe kind that many argue are exhibited by Trumps big, bold signature.
Where this research is taken next is anyones guess, least of all for the person who noticed something intriguing about signature size so many years ago.
Richie Zweigenhaft is an emeritus professor of psychology at Guilford College.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
In the C-suite, relationships can make or break your effectiveness, and too often, weve been taught that you must choose to be either a friend or a colleague, but never both. The fear is understandable. Too much closeness, and you risk favoritism. Too much distance erodes trust, but our research and experience as leadership advisers point to a different reality: genuine, trust-based relationships are not a liability; theyre a leadership advantage. The real risk isnt choosing one or the other; its failing to integrate both.
Morags Ally Mindset Profile data reveals a telling truth: 67% of respondents say their success has been undermined by their peer relationships or senior management. Thats not just interpersonal friction; its a strategic liability that can hinder collaboration, undermine leadership, and restrict career potential.
Why This Matters Now
The return to in-person work has reshuffled team dynamics. Some leaders are navigating hybrid work with colleagues they barely know outside a video frame. Others are relearning how to have hallway conversations and reading the social cues that once felt second nature. Layer onto this the loneliness crisis highlighted by the U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on Social Connection and initiatives like the United States Chamber of Connection, and it is clear leaders arent just managing business outcomes; theyre managing connection deficits.
And the upside of getting this right is significant. Gallup research has found that employees who have a best friend at work are more engaged, more productive, and more likely to stay with the organization. In the C-suite, where stakes are high and turnover costs are enormous, those benefits multiply.
Conventional wisdom says closeness creates bias, while distance fosters objectivity. The truth? Both extremes have costs: too close, and candor suffers; too distant, and trust evaporates. We need a third way: relationships that blend trust and empathy with clarity and accountability. This is the foundation of co-creation over competition. Its about shifting from a scarcity mindset (if you win, I lose) to an abundance mindset (were better when we win together).
The Cost of Competitive Isolation
When leaders treat relationships purely as transactional, collaboration suffers. In Morags work, shes seen executives default to turf protection rather than shared problem-solvingespecially under pressure. This competitive isolation creates silos, hinders decision-making, and erodes trust.
And heres the complication: as we move up through our careers, especially when we stay in the same organization, yesterdays peer and friend can become tomorrows boss or colleague. We cant avoid both roles, which means we have to recalibrate the relationship by making the implicit explicit. How can we maintain friendships while achieving results? Thats the relationship work of being better together.
I have seen it, too. In my work advising a biotech executive team, the CFO and COO were caught in a cycle of one-upmanship during board prep. By intentionally shifting toward a both/and approachsharing early drafts, co-owning presentations, and agreeing on mutual success metricsthey moved from guarded competition to open collaboration. The result? Faster decision-making, a united front with the board, and a ripple effect of trust across the leadership team.
Here are some of the practical benefits of Both/And relationships in the C-suite:
Better decisions, faster. When trust is high, peers are more likely to challenge assumptions without fear of backlash, leading to richer discussions and better outcomes.
Resilience that endures. Friendships provide emotional ballast during crises, reducing burnout and supporting sustained performance, especially under pressure.
Collaboration without the drag. Mutual understanding shortens the runway for complex, cross-functional projects.
Fairness with Boundaries. Friendship doesnt mean favoritism. It means respecting each others roles, decisions, and accountability.
Five practices for both/and leadership relationships
So how do leaders intentionally build relationships that are both personally enriching and professionally effective? Here are five practices that can turn potential rivalries into powerful alliances:
1. Show you care about the human
Show curiosity for the human being behind the role. When leaders demonstrate care beyond the scorecard, they build the trust that makes it easier for peers to speak up, share concerns early, and collaborate without second-guessing motives.
2. Share early, share often
Fast, unfiltered sharing of both good and bad news invites peers into the problem-solving process sooner. This means that opportunities are amplified, risks are identified and contained earlier, and no one is blindsided in the boardroom.
3. Hold each other to high(er) standards
Strong professional friendships can withstand tough feedback. This means candor is a safeguard, not a threatleaders are more likely to challenge assumptions, sharpen thinking, and avoid costly missteps.
4. Create space for micro-moments
In hybrid and high-pressure environments, trust grows in small, everyday exchangesa check-in before the agenda, a walk between meetings, a quick call to connect. These moments are the give-and-take that makes leadership work and build the trust that makes macro-decisions possible.
5. Model openness at the top
Admitting mistakes and asking for help gives others permission to do the same. This means resilience spreads, teams stick together under pressure, and the organization avoids the corrosive isolation that can occur when leadership is absent.
Its hard to make friends as adults, and even harder in the high-pressure world of executive leadership. But thats precisely why it matters. The loneliness crisis isnt just a personal well-being issue; its a business performance issue. As leaders, we can either cling to outdated binaries or we can lead in a way that blends humanity with high performance. Choosing both doesnt weaken your leadership; it strengthens it.
This weekend, tennis star Novak Djokovic is serving snackers something a little different: a new sorghum-based, corn-free popcorn brand called Cob, which will compete in the same aisle as SkinnyPop and Orville Redenbachers. The popcorns launch coincides with the announcement of a $5 million seed round for the startup thats led by Djokovic.
Popcorn has become a particularly alluring category for celebrities over the past few years. New entrants have included Khloud Protein Popcorn backed by reality TV star Khloé Kardashian; singer Luke Bryans Boldly Grown Popcorn; and Robs BackStage Popcorn, cofounded by the pop rock band the Jonas Brothers.
Why popcorn?
What they are nibbling on is a growing market thats welcoming to new brands that promote bolder flavors, avoid canola oil and artificial butter flavors and colors, and include claims of higher protein or low-carb formulations. The U.S. popcorn market grew by 31% to $3.5 billion over a five-year period through 2024, according to market researcher Mintel, and is forecasted to be valued at $3.84 billion by 2029.
I wanted to join the brand as cofounder, as well as lead the seed round, to give other investors confidence in our vision, says Djokovic in an emailed statement.
[Photo: Cob]
Cob is a gluten-free snack thats made from the grain sorghum, which is naturally rich in fiber, iron, and plant-based protein. The brand was originally conceptualized and created by entrepreneur Jessica Davidoff, who was inspired to explore snacking alternatives that could be served to her son, who suffers from an allergy to corn. My eyes were open to just how vast corn was in the American food system, Davidoff tells Fast Company.
That led her to visit a local grocery store in New York that promoted international ingredients and start testing snacks that could be made in the kitchen that were similar to popcorn, but without the key base ingredient. Davidoff felt that sorghum delivered the best taste from all the alternatives she tested. It offers this new option for people who really like popcorn but want to take the nutrition component up a notch, she says.
Cob will be sold direct-to-consumer through online channels including the brands website, at a price of $59.99 for a 24-pack of 1-ounce single-serve snack packs. The initial launch features four flavors, including Mediterranean herb, and olive oil and pink salt. Davidoff says the brand intends to launch more sorghum-based products in the future. Djokovic will serve as an adviser on ingredients, formulations, and product line extensions, as well as support marketing and future brand collaborations.
A growing trend
Healthier popcorn brands began to emerge as a force in the category after SkinnyPop launched in 2010. The brands pitch was that it featured only three ingredients: popcorn, sunflower oil, and salt. This streamlined ingredient list resonated with snackers, and sales quickly soared. The brands parent company, Amplify, was later acquired by candymaker Hershey for $1.6 billion in 2017.
Since then, newer popcorn brands have promoted their use of coconut, olive, and avocado oils and have avoided artificially added butters, which are most associated with the microwavable brands. For people who really like to snack, popcorn is only 30 calories per cup, says New York-based dietitian Samantha Cassetty, noting that the calorie count is less than whats found in most other crunchy snacks.
Brands like Cob have also promoted their alignment with GLP-1, one of the buzziest new trends in food as consumers increasingly embrace GLP-1 weight-loss medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. Cob says that sorghum is a resistant starch, meaning it can naturally boost a bodys GLP-1 to make a snacker feel fuller for longer. All of the CPG [consumer packaged goods] companies are looking for ways to target that consumer who is snacking less, Cassetty says.
Kardashians Khloud voraciously promotes the nutritional claim of 7 grams of protein per serving thats from a blend of milk protein isolate. The popcorn brand was created to tap into three big trends: Protein snacks are growing three times faster than the market, protein is the most trending ingredient among millennial and Gen Z consumers, and popcorn is the fastest-growing salty snack category, according to Khloud CEO Jeff Rubenstein.
[Photo: Khloud]
For years, protein-packed foods tended to come in the form of bars and shakes, frequently promoted to gym-obsessed men, Rubenstein says. We can do this more femininely, he says, noting the brand features more vibrant packaging that includes soft pink and blue. We can attract a different audience to protein.
The brand debuted in April with a 60-day retail exclusive at Target, and by January will be sold in more than 25,000 retail stores including Kroger and Walmart. Rubenstein says Khloud has an authentic founder story with Kardashian: She had an entire closet in her house that was dedicated to just snacks. She made Khloud a functional snack that is fashionable.
Djokovic was drawn to the popcorn category because while he prefers home-cooked meals with simple ingredients, the pro athlete travels a lot with a very hectic schedule. At Cob, were creating packaged foods with the same ingredients and recipes wed use in our own kitchens to allow people to eat well even when theyre away from their kitchens, he says.
Celebrities have craved snacks as an investment opportunity because similar to the beauty category, they can sell high volumes and drive more steady, repeatable purchasing patterns than apparel or jewelry. Snacks can also geneate gross profit margins of 40% for manufacturers, according to Alex Kushnir, a real and consumer partner at consultancy Baringa, who notes, It happens to be one of the more profitable categories in food.
If you blinked this week, you mightve missed a few major moves.
Netflix decided its time for a stock split, Amazon trimmed thousands of jobs, and Walmart is already dropping Black Friday prices before the Halloween candy wrappers are even off. Meanwhile, housing trends, climate shocks, and AI budgets kept reshaping the conversation about whats next for growth.
Heres a look at what mattered most this week, and why these stories could shape the months ahead.
Mortgage-free America hits a new high
A record 40.3% of owner-occupied homes are owned free and clear, up from 39.8% last year. Aging baby boomers and longer lifespans concentrate equity among older owners, and 64% of homeowners 65 and up have no mortgage. Lower-priced markets and older populations skew higher on mortgage-free rates, while places like Washington, D.C., and parts of the Mountain West skew lower. Expect more equity-tapping products to grow as retirees look for cash flow without selling.
Palantir stock split chatter grows, but no commitment yet
Investor chatter was growing this week that Palantir Technologies could potentially announce its first-ever stock split ahead of next weeks earnings report. Analysts say investors are eager for a cheaper entry point after the stocks 150% surge this year. Despite the speculation, the Denver-based software firm hasnt indicated any plans to split its shares. With Palantir trading at a lofty price-to-earnings ratio of about 630, some analysts warn its valuation may already be stretched.
Amazon trims 14,000 corporate roles to move faster with AI
Amazon announced plans this week to cut around 14,000 corporate positions within the company, focusing on shifting resources to bigger bets, including AI. The brand’s fulfillment staff remains intact ahead of peak season, which underscores an operating reset rather than a logistics pullback. Management suggested more hiring in specific areas in 2026, even as other layers come out. Investors want to see operating leverage and customer impact show up in results.
Black Friday is arriving early, thanks to Walmart and Best Buy
Both retailers unveiled staggered Black Friday and Cyber Monday calendars, with early DoorBOOsters and member-first windows. Pulling demand into late October and mid-November helps manage inventory and protect share in a slower-holiday-growth year. Expect heavy under-20-dollar deals and up-to-60%-off headlines to nudge cautious shoppers. Competitors now have to match earlier drops, tighter member perks, and quick delivery.
Netflix is doing a 10-for-1 stock split
Netflix will split shares by a ratio of 10-for-1 in mid-November, which lowers the share price per unit without changing market capitalization. The move improves access for employees through stock programs and can pull in more retail participation. Splits can also make options trading more granular for investors. Keep an eye on whether a broader holder base supports momentum or adds volatility.
Chipotles stock slump flags a demand soft spot
Chipotle met expectations, then cut its full-year outlook for the third straight time, which sparked a sharp stock sell-off this week. Fewer visits from households under $100,000 in income and from younger diners are pressuring comparable-store sales. Management still plans hundreds of new openings, including select international markets.
Exact change, please, as pennies slow to circulate
Kroger checkout signs asking for exact change reignited penny shortage questions this week. Minting has paused, and a lot of pennies are sitting in jars and drawers, which slows circulation. Retailers and banks may round cash transactions to the nearest five cents for a bit, while digital payments are unaffected. Retiring the penny would require Congress, so policy debate will continue.
Starbucks confirms 520 U.S. closures in Q4
Starbucks reported 627 closures globally in the quarter, including 520 in the United States, which tops many outside estimates. The moves support a Back to Starbucks turnaround that focuses on service, simpler routines, and warmer in-store experiences. Management points to stabilizing comps as proof that the reset is working. Investors are weighing near-term disruption against cleaner long-term growth.
Hurricane Melissa turns climate risk into a balance sheet story
Super-warm waters helped Hurricane Melissa rapidly intensify into one of the strongest Caribbean landfalls on record. Early analyses tie higher odds and added severity to climate change, with monetary damages modeled in the tens of billions. That hits insurers, tourism, supply chains, and public infrastructure, which feeds back into local GDP. Expect more pressure on resilience spending and location strategy in 2026 plans.
Meta posts record revenue, then raises the AI bill
Meta delivered record revenue this week but took a large non-cash tax charge that hit net income and EPS optics. Management lifted expense and CapEx guidance, and signaled even higher spend in 2026 to meet AI compute needs. The bet is that better recommendations and ad performance will eventually outrun rising costs. The open question is timing, and how quickly monetization converts into durable margin.
Lots of research shows that doing mental exercises can ward off dementia and the effects of aging, but can it actually make you better at your job? While its hard to imagine the late musical theater virtuoso Stephen Sondheim needing any kind of extra creative stimuli, he in fact had a well-known love of stimulating puzzles and games.
And he didnt just play them. The Tony-winning composer behind Broadway hits such as Sweeney Todd, Company, and a heartwarming ditty about presidential assassins also cultivated a side hustle as a designer of cryptic crossword puzzles and a frequent host of game nights and scavenger hunts.
Barry Joseph, a game researcher and designer and an adjunct professor at New York University, happened to notice a few years ago that no one had documented Sondheims niche passion in a comprehensive way. So he decided to do it himself.
His new book, Matching Minds With Sondheim (Bloomsbury, October 2025), draws from eight decades of Sondheims brain-teasing ventures. It includes a mix of rare and rarely seen game designs, archival research, and interviews with Sondheim contemporaries who played along.
[Image: Bloomsbury]
Fast Company recently caught up with Joseph to discuss the book, what inspired it, and what he hopes readers will gain from trying to match minds with a musical legend. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You have a background as a game designer and game researcher. How did you get interested in writing about Stephen Sondheim?
Sondheim passed away in November of 2021. That means March, 22, 2022, was his first birthday after he passed away. And my birthday is two days later. For a present, my wife got me three Sondheim-related books . . . recognizing that I and many other Sondheim fans were still in mourning for having lost our musical hero.
One was an academic book that was a review of all Sondheim shows, but from the perspective of postmodernism. That book left me thinking how interesting it was to look at Sondheim through one lens. What other lenses might there be?
Then I read Stephen Sondheim’s biography from the late 90s by Meryle Secrest, which barely talked about him having anything to do with puzzles and games. Its mentioned here and there, but in the index in the back of the book, there’s nothing for games and nothing for puzzleswhich tells you a lot about how seriously the topic was addressed.
And the third book was James Lapines Putting It Togetherthe oral history of Sunday in the Park With George. Lapine had met Stephen Sondheim right after Sondheim had his critical disaster Merrily We Roll Along. For those who don’t know, it was a show that lasted under two weeks and was completely decimated by the critics, putting Sondheim in a very unpleasant state of mindso much so that when he met Mr. Lapine, he was talking about leaving the world of musical theater.
Lapine asked him what he was going to do next, and he said, Maybe I’ll go into video game design. That’s not what happened! They ended up working together to do Sunday in the Park With George. Sondheim kept doing musical theater. The rest is history, and they never mentioned it again in the book.
Me, as a young person who grew up in the late ’70s, early ’80s, playing my Intellivision, my Atari, my Apple II Plus computer, I read that and wondered about Stephen Sondheim designing video games instead . . .
I remember Intellivision being the middle stepchild of video game consoles. Not too many people had Intellivision.
I was one of those people. I always liked things being outside the box. . . . In any case, I read that, and that blew my mind. I thought, “What is Sondheim doing talking about games?” And I said, “Is there something here? Is there a topic here? What is the lens on Stephen Sondheim from a game perspective?”
Ludology is the study of games. And so I thought, “Can one look at Stephen Sondheim from a ludological lens?” And at the time, I didn’t know if there’d be much of anything. But after just a few weeks of some quick Google searches, what I found was that there were a lot of fascinating, enticing tidbits.
He was the founding puzzle editor of New York magazine in 1968. He created a cryptic crossword puzzle once a week. His only Hollywood-produced movie, The Last of Sheila, a murder mystery, involves all sorts of devious puzzles and games.
And I kept coming across these other mentions of people talking about going to his house for game nights. And there was an interview in Games magazine in 1983. There’s a bunch of his little tidbits here and there. And then the rest of it I found irresistible.
So you find all these breadcrumbs, publicly known facts here and there, and realize there’s no larger body of work that has compiled all this?
I learned enough to know that there was something there, and that it wasn’t waiting for someone just to write about. Because if it was, it would’ve been written.
Did you find a moment or many moments where his love of creating these puzzles informed his creative work in a really specific way?
The last chapter in the book is an analysis of all of his shows, looking at it from a playful language. Where are puzzles and games in the shows? Where are they in the structure of the shows, and where do they show up in the process of creating the shows?
And once you start taking this lens at his theatrical work, you see it everywhere. The end of Sunday in the Park With George is a moment where this painting that we’ve been watching constructed on the stage suddenly comes into focus. And it’s one that we know the audience has some prior knowledge ofthey expect to see a certain something. Suddenly, it all happens in that moment when all the pieces all click together.
It’s those moments that Sondheim often talked about, where you’re forming order out of chaos. And that’s essentially a jigsaw puzzle being constructed.
And I’m now thinking about Merrily We Roll Along, which you mentioned earlier. Its told backwards. That feels like it’s its own puzzle.
Think about it from the audience’s perspective, right? When you are watching something in which he effect happens before the cause, you have to hold it in your mind. And when youre looking, its like a Wheres Waldo? What’s going to be the thing that caused that thing to happen? And then when you see it, it connects together. Sondheim didn’t write the book of Merrily, but I always wondered if that somehow influenced it.
And so we see it throughout the shows, in the structures of the shows, in the way that games and puzzles are used, and sometimes in the process of how they developed.
What if a reader wants to pick up your bookwho is not necessarily super into puzzles or a hardcore puzzle doer? You have the puzzles in the book. Would the casual puzzle person find these kinds of puzzles challenging?
Let me answer your question in a roundabout way. . . . When I talk about all of his games and puzzles, I talk about three particular values. The first is the principle of generosity. The second is the principle of playfulness. And the third is the principle of mentorship.
Generosity means that I am here to help you have an engaging time. I’m here to make you feel good about yourselfnot just feel good about how smart I am. And so it means creating opportunities to help people along the way. Helping along the way connects with the mentorship, which is building the scaffolding to help people solve the puzzles. And playfulness is just making it all fun.
You mentioned that your wife bought you three Sondheim books, so you must have been a fan before you started writing this. When did you discover your love of Broadway?
Im laughing because I am in my room . . . and in my closet is a collection of Playbills that go back to the mid-1980s. I cant even count how many are here. I grew up on Long Island. My mom loved musical theater, and it was a thing we often did as a family.
I learned very early on that I loved what it meant to be in an audience for a musical. I loved the magic that was created on the stage. And more importantly, I loved the emotions that it brought out in me.
When I first learned about Roth IRAs and Roth 401(k) plansthe tax-advantaged retirement plans that are funded with a taxpayers after-tax incomeI remember thinking that it must be nice to have enough income that you could afford to contribute money to your retirement without an immediate tax break.
But even though you fund Roth accounts with after-tax dollars, making them more expensive on the contribution side, they are ultimately a savvy way to save money in the long run. Unfortunately, if you dont know what these accounts are or how they work, you will miss out on all of their benefits.
Heres everything you need to know to make the most of Roth retirement accounts in your financial plan.
History of the Roth
In 1997, Congress introduced a new non-deductible IRA via the Taxpayer Relief Act. Named for Delaware Senator William V. Roth (and not, as I originally believed, for Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth), these accounts were designed to give you a tax break in retirement, rather than when you make contributions.
Although Roth accounts were originally restricted to IRAs, Roth 401(k) plans became available through workplace retirement accounts as of January 1, 2006. As of 2023, 93% of workplace retirement plans offered a Roth 401(k) option, according to the Plan Sponsor Council of Americas annual poll published in December 2024.
Roth account rules and limits
There are some important rules surrounding these accountsthe kind of rules that can put you on the IRSs naughty list. Specifically, there are specific income and contribution limits for Roth IRA and Roth 401(k) plans that you must not exceed. These limits can and do change from year to year. The current 2025 limits are listed in the table below.
Roth IRARoth 401(k)Maximum income$150,000 for single filers; $236,000 for married couples filing jointlyNo income limitAnnual contribution limit$7,000 for those under 50; $8,000 for anyone 50+$23,500 for those under 50; $31,000 for anyone 50+; $34,750 for anyone aged 6063
One thing to remember is that these yearly contribution limits encompass all IRAs or 401(k)s you may own. For instance, if you have a traditional IRA and a Roth IRA, you cant send $7,000 to each one. (Not without waking Spike, the IRS enforcement officer who sleeps in the sub-basement). You will have to split your contributions between your traditional and Roth IRA so that your total contribution does not exceed $7,000.
This is the same for your traditional versus Roth 401(k) contributions. Altogether, they cannot exceed the annual contribution limit set by the IRS.
What the Roth has to offer
Introducing the Roth retirement account can feel a little like when your friend busts out a board game with 178 pages of instructions while insisting its a little slow to get started, but its so worth it!
However, despite the seeming complexity of Roth accounts, there are three main benefits to these retirement vehicles:
Like traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans, your Roth contributions grow tax-free.
Unlike traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans, any Roth withdrawals you make in retirement are 100% tax-free, provided you wait to take these distributions until after reaching age 59 or after having held the account for at least five years, whichever comes last. You will pay the IRS a 10% penalty if you take an early withdrawalbut you wont owe taxes.
Also unlike traditional IRAs and 401(k) plans, there are no required minimum distributions once you reach age 73. You can keep your money in a Roth account forever if you want and take distributions of any amount at any time, as long as youre older than 59 and have held the account for at least five years.
In other words, with a Roth account, for the low price of paying current income taxes, you get tax-free growth, tax-free withdrawals, and no required minimum distributions.
Ripping off the tax Band-Aid
Another way to look at a Roth account is to think of it as a way of paying taxes on your terms. Many young professionals are earning much less now than they will later in their careerand possibly less than they will be living on in retirement. Funding a Roth retirement plan now, while you are in a lower tax bracket, will save money later, once you have started earning a much higher income.
Additionally, by putting posttax dollars aside in a Roth account today, it gives you a tax-free cushion for emergencies in retirement. Many retirees have a carefully planned tax strategy in retirement, which could be upended if they need to access a large chunk of their taxable retirement savings. Pulling $25,000 from a traditional IRA or 401(k) for a health problem or other emergency could throw a wrench in your tax plan for the year. But you can grab that money from your Roth account with no tax consequences.
It may hurt to fund a Roth account with posttax dollars, but the benefits can outweigh the momentary pain.
Enjoy what you have wrought in your Roth
As the brainchild of Senator William V. Roth, tax-advantaged Roth accounts are unlike most traditional defined contribution plans and individual retirement accounts.
Instead of deducting your contributions to these accounts from your income, you contribute money youve already paid taxes on into your Roth accounts. The money grows tax free and you can withdraw it tax-free in retirement, provided you wait until you are at least 59 or have held the account for at least five years. You also dont have to take required minimum distributions from these accounts, meaning you can leave the money there forever, if you choose.
There are income and contribution limits to these accounts, which can and do change from year to year. And you should be aware that annual IRA and 401(k) contribution limits encompass all accounts you may own, including traditional and Roth versions, meaning you will have to split up your contributions among your acounts so you dont go over the limit among the various accounts.
Roth accounts offer a flexible way to give yourself a tax-free source of funds in retirement. Thats a helpful gift to provide for your future self.
When we talk about phones and location sharing, were typically talking about limiting how much info overly aggressive apps can access.
But theres another side to location sharingand thats actively opting to share your location with specific people (not companies!) for your own personal purposes.
Whether its being able to keep tabs on kids, confirm the safety of parents or other loved ones, or simply know where a partner is at any given moment (with their permission, of course), your existing phone can turn into a powerful peace-of-mind provider and real-world life enhancer.
The key is having the right software to make that happen in a way thats both helpful andjust as importantalso protective of your privacy. And thats precisely where todays Cool Tools discovery comes into play.
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!
Location sharing, with a side of privacy
For most folks, deliberate person-to-person location sharing tends to revolve around a few primary paths:
Google Maps (or the other Google apps associated with it, on Android)
Apple Maps (or the Apple Find My app, on iOS)
Or Life360, a slightly pricey third-party service that people seem to have a bit of a love-hate relationship with
All of these services have their strengths. But they also come with their own limitations as well as concerns around cost, privacy, and data protection.
Thats why I was so intrigued to come across a new cross-platform location sharing service called Paralino. It attempts to address all of those asterisks with an offering thats all about giving you an exceptional all-around experiencewith privacy and security at the core.
Specifically, Paralino promises:
Complete end-to-end data encryption, so only you and the specific people you choose to share with ever see where you go
No tracking, no profiling, and no ads of any sort
Intricate control over exactly what info you share with anyone
And the option to share and receive not only on-demand location info but also proactive alerts (with everyones permission) whenever someone in your group arrives at or exits specific places
Paralino offers both on-demand location sharing and proactive location alerts.
Youll need roughly two to three minutes to set it up and try it out.
First, download the Paralino app. Its available for both Android and iOS, so you can put it on any phone you (or anyone else you know) might be using.
Then:
Open er up and follow the prompts to create an account and sign in.
You can opt to skip the sign-in and use the service only as a guest, if you want, but doing so makes it impossible to move your setup to another device in the futureso creating an account is really the most advisable way to go.
When the app prompts you to pick a plan, tap the x in the upper-left corner of the screen to skip over that and stick with the services standard free level for now.
The free level limits you to a single group for sharing, with one other person and up to two alert-generating places. If you end up really liking the service or wanting more than what the free tier provides, you can always look into Paralinos premium planswhich range from 40 bucks a year to $70 in the U.S., depending on the specificslater down the road. But you certainly dont have to pay and can get quite a bit out of the apps free level.
Once you reach the apps main screen, look for the prompts to enable all the pertinent permissions.
The app will ask to be able to send you notifications, so it can actually give you the updates you want, and to be able to see your location all the timeeven when you arent actively looking at it. It obviously needs that ability to be able to do what it does, and again, its core promise is that it always keeps everything encrypted and never saves any personal data.
From there, all thats left is to connect to someone else and start sharing. And then, you can always see exactly where that person isand vice-versaas well as get any alerts you both opt into about each others locations.
Once you’re connected to someone, you can always see their location on a simple map in the Paralino app.
Its essentially a more fully featured and privacy-minded ersion of what Google and Apple offerand a much more privacy-respecting, focused, and affordable version of what Life360 provides.
And thats exactly the kind of standard-challenging, small-scale competitor I love to see show up in arenas dominated by big players.
Ive been using Paralino with my wife for several days now, and so far, its seemed both easy and effectiveand true to its promises around privacy and quality. The effect on my battery life has been minimal with the services default settings, too, though it seems the app would update our locations more frequently (with the tradeoff of using more battery power) if we switched from the Balanced updating frequency to the more aggressive Best Performance path.
My only real gripe is that the interface for creating an alert-generating placea specific location where you get notifications when someone arrives and/or leavesis kinda funky, with no apparent search function and instead only a clunky way to find a place by zooming around on a giant world map. Thats awkward.
But that one relatively minor quirk aside, Paralino is shaping up to be a solid service and a welcome alternative to the typical options in this area. If you use any sort of location sharing already or think doing so might be beneficial for you, its well worth your while to try.
Paralino is available for both Android and iOS. The company is also working on a fully open source version of its apps for the future
The service is free, at its base level, with optional upgrades that lift limitations and unlock extra features. (If you do end up pursuing one of those plans at any point, youll absolutely want to look at the annual subscription optionswhich are much better values than their monthly equivalents.)
And, again, this app is all about using strong encryption and avoiding so much as even seeing any manner of personal infolet alone sharing your data with anyone you dont explicitly approve.
Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
Nick Foster is not a fan of how Silicon Valley imagines the future. As a designer and writer who has spent his career at places like Google, Nokia, and Sony, hes had a front-row seat to the tech worlds relentless obsession with turning science fiction into science fact. The problem, he argues, is that the source material was never meant to be a manual for reality.
The primary function of science fiction is to explore ideas and to entertain. It shouldnt be considered a brief, Foster tells me. He worries when he hears people in meetings say, We should make the thing from Minority Report. To him, its a lazy shortcutan idea taken from a cinematic universe built for drama, not for pragmatic, human-centered utility.
Theyre sort of misreading the function of that art form, he says. Theyre just trying to make something happen because theyre excited by it, not necessarily because its better or more pragmatic or more useful.
Foster, the author of Could Should Might Dont: How We Think About the Future, has a more than a few thoughts on what does make for good futurism.
What Im trying to do…is not create a method or a framework. Weve got enough of those, he explains.
Instead, he offers a simple yet powerful vocabulary to dissect the ways we approach the future, arguing that humans tend to fall into one of four modes of thinking, often without realizing it. To break free of the Silicon Valley narrative, he says, requires changing the way we think about the future of technology.
Four modes of futurism
Foster’s first mode of futurism is Could futurism. This is the one we know best. Its the futurism of opportunity, of amazing gadgets, humanoid robots, and breathtaking architecture. Its the world of flashy tech demos, driven by a modernist belief in endless progress. Its weakness, however, is that it has been absolutely co-opted by science fiction, creating dazzling but ultimately alienating visions that feel disconnected from our lives and the messy path to get there.
[Cover Image: MacMillan]
Then comes Should futurism. This is the future as a fixed destination. Its the world of master plans, and of religions and laws that point us toward a desired state. Its also the world of corporate strategists and their algorithmic projectionsthe confident dotted lines on charts that declare whats coming. The obvious flaw, Foster says, is its brittleness. The world is way more volatile than we think it is, he warns. All of our algorithmic projections and our dotted lines on charts are just stories. And often were way off.
As a reaction, Might futurism offers the opposite: a future of infinite scenarios. This is the domain of strategic foresight consultants, born from Cold War-era wargaming at the RAND Corporation. Its a pluralistic view that maps out every possibility within a futures cone. But it has a fatal flaw. Our imagination about future scenarios is actually based on the past, Foster notes. This is why companies like Blockbuster could run countless scenarios and still never imagine a future where they werent dominantuntil it happened.
Finally, there is Dont futurism, a mode that is gaining momentum in our anxious times. This is the future as a terrifying place to be avoided, the focus of protest movements campaigning against climate catastrophe, authoritarianism, or runaway AI. It is the future as a warning. While essential, its challenge is that it often protests from the outside and struggles to offer integrated, actionable paths forward. Its quite difficult to deliver a dont in a helpful way, Foster says, noting it can become strident and divisive.
The China contrast
The Wests default mode of futurism, Foster argues, is an unbalanced mix of these mindsets. But the tech industry, in particular, is overwhelmingly biased toward could futurism, driven by the commercial need to generate excitement and create market trends. Silicon Valley is blinded by sci-fi dreams, and its attitude towards the future gets worsened by Wall Street demand for growth.
This stands in stark contrast to China’s approach, a country that understands future planning in a way the West cannot. Beijing just concluded the Chinese Communist Partys fourth plenary session in October, during which they outlined a 2026-2030 five-year plan, the next-to-last chapter in their decades-long overarching plan to become a leading superpower by 2035.
Foster points out that while Western democracies are trapped in short cycles”its the midterms and then its the quarterly results and then its the next election”Chinas autocratic system allows it to plan on a generational scale. In a sort of autocratic dictatorship where you sort of have a dynastic leadership, you can start to think at 10, 15, 20, 30 generational scales, he observes.
While acknowledging the immense human and societal cost, Foster identifies Chinas strategy as a powerful, real-world example of should futurism. The government establishes a clear destination for the country and then commits all its resources to reaching it. This gives them a stability that the West lacks.
Quoting William Gibson, Foster notes you need a solid place to stand to imagine the future. China dont seem to have that problem, he tells me. Theyre very comfortable with where they want to be. And they seem to be working very hard to get there.
In our conversation, Foster didn’t offer a way for the West to achieve what China is already doing. In his book, his proposed solution to fixing our vision of the future is a cultural and intellectual one, aimed at leaders within organizations, especially in technology. He believes the crucial shift is for leaders to start communicating in a more balanced way, using all four modes of his framework.
He wants to see leaders who can discuss opportunity (the could), articulate a clear mission (the should), admit uncertainty (the might), and acknowledge fears and risks (the don’t). There’s no magic tricks or shortcuts. Fostering a more responsible, rigorous, and honest conversation about the future is the necessary first step toward makin better long-term decisions, regardless of the political system.
To me, it seems like an impossible shift. If Western societies rarely look beyond the next quarter in the political, enterprise, and financial world; if a large number of people are living paycheck to paycheck; if even most of the entertainment and design is ephemeral and single use, how can we be balanced or really think about the future beyond what’s going to happen in the next few months?
Could we have an honest future, please?
Foster argues that the power of his approach is not in choosing one of these modes, but in learning to think with all of them simultaneously. He believes we need the optimism of could, the direction of should, the preparedness of might, and the caution of dont.
Foster champions a concept he calls The Future Mundane. Its an antidote to the escapist fantasies of could futurism, which has been a cancer for both our future and present. Foster argues we should be grounding our visions in the messy, complex, and often boring reality of everyday life.
Even the most transformative technologies, from GPS to AI, eventually become normalized and part of the mundane fabric of our lives. Hes less interested in the initial wow moment of a new technology and more in what happens next. I want to try and figure out what it all means, what it actually leads to and how it changes how somebody might walk the dog or go and buy milk or go on vacation, he tells me.
This focus on the ordinary, he argues, grounds conversations about the future in a way that is not only more honest but ultimately more productive. In his book, Foster says that the value of this “Future Mundane” approach is that it forces creators to look past the initial “inspirational sugar rush” of a new idea and confront the messy, real-world consequences of its existence. By thinking about how a technology will actually integrate into the boring parts of daily lifehow it will be used, misused, repaired, and eventually become obsoletewe can build more responsible and realistic products.
It grounds the conversation in a way that helps us “ride out that hysteria” of the initial hype cycle and “figure out what it all means.” Thinking about the future isnt about predicting what will happen in 2030; its an act of “pure human responsibility to our species” to consider the long-term effects of what we are building today.
Foster says that companies tend to get trapped in the emotional extremes of the technology’s hype cycle. When a new technology like AI emerges, companies and their leaders tend to react in one of two “hysterical and a little unbalanced” ways. They either get swept up in the breathless optimism of could futurism (“Wow, it can do all these things”), or they become paralyzed by the fear and anxiety of don’t futurism.
Foster writes that the “incessant pressure to find clients, balance the books, chase sales… and deliver results utterly dominates day-to-day affairs,” pushes any serious futurism work to the fringes where it is often seen as a “vanity” exercise rather than an integral part of the strategy. This polarization and short-term focus prevents companies from having the kind of rigorous, multifaceted conversation that leads to sustainable innovation.
He doesn’t point to any company that does this right, however. My personal impression, from what I read and see every day as a journalist, is that there are not a lot of companies that think within the framework that Foster proposes. This is especially true in our current AI craze, where leading companies push the narrative that they are about honesty, responsibility, balance, and ethics.
In reality, for the vast majority of companies, those are bullet points in a Powerpoint slide. Smoke and mirrors. All talk and no walk while they all are focused on the could, gunning to become the next unicorn, the next Wall Street darling.
Perhaps I’m a cynic, but Foster believes that this may be an opportunity for those companies who actually want to practice a balanced, honest look at designing the future. For him, that is the path for lasting success: The company that delivers that kind of story, I think will be the company that succeeds because it addresses all of the key motivators we have about the future.
