The Supreme Court backed a multibillion-dollar oil railroad expansion in Utah Thursday in a ruling that scales back a key environmental law for projects around the country.
The 8-0 decision comes after an appeal to the high court from backers of the project, which is aimed at quadrupling oil production in the remote area of sandstone and sagebrush.
Environmental groups said the decision would have sweeping impacts on National Environmental Policy Act reviews. The Trump administration has already said it’s speeding up that process after the president vowed to boost U.S. oil and gas development.
The case centers on the Uinta Basin Railway, a proposed 88-mile (142-kilometer) expansion that would connect oil and gas producers to the broader rail network and allow them to access larger markets. Supporters have argued that streamlining environmental reviews would speed up development.
The justices reversed a lower court decision and restored a critical approval from federal regulators on the Surface Transportation Board. The project could still face additional legal and regulatory hurdles.
Environmental groups and a Colorado county had argued that regulators must consider a broad range of potential impacts when they consider new development, such as increased wildfire risk, the effect of additional crude oil production from the area, and increased refining in Gulf states.
The justices, though, found that regulators were right to consider the direct effects of the project, rather than the wider upstream and downstream impact. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that courts should defer to regulators on where to draw the line on what factors to take into account. Four other conservative justices joined his opinion.
Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock,” he wrote of the policy act reviews. The goal of the law is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it.
The courts conservative majority court has taken steps to curtail the power of federal regulators in other cases, including striking down the decades-old Chevron doctrine that made it easier for the federal government to set a wide range of regulations.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed with the outcome, but with a narrower legal reasoning. In a decision joined by her two liberal colleagues, she said the court could have simply cleared the way for the railway approval by finding the board didn’t need to take into account any harm caused by the oil that might eventually be carried on the railway.
Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case after facing calls to step aside over ties to Philip Anschutz, a Colorado billionaire whose ownership of oil wells in the area means he could benefit if the project goes through. Gorsuch, as a lawyer in private practice, had represented Anschutz.
The ruling comes after President Donald Trumps vow to boost U.S. oil and gas drilling and move away from former President Joe Bidens focus on climate change. The administration announced last month that its speeding up environmental reviews of projects required under the same law at the center of the Utah case, compressing a process that typically takes a year or more into just weeks.
The court’s decision gives agencies a green light to ignore the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their decisions and avoid confronting them, said Sambhav Sankar, senior vice president of programs at Earthjustice.
Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said opponents would continue to fight the Utah project. This disastrous decision to undermine our nations bedrock environmental law means our air and water will be more polluted, the climate and extinction crises will intensify, and people will be less healthy,” she said.
The projects public partner applauded the ruling. It represents a turning point for rural Utahbringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options, and opening new doors for investment and economic stability,” said Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition.
By Lindsay Whitehurst, Associated Press
Associated Press writer Hannah Schoenbaum contributed to this story.
Donald Trump’s trade war got a lot more complicated Wednesday evening as a little-known, but powerful, federal court, ruled that Trump had exceeded his authority in imposing tariffs and labeled those “Liberation Day” duties illegal.
That, effectively, will put the majority of the Trump tariffs on hold. (The Trump administration is appealing the ruling.) It’s the latest zig-zag in what has been a dizzying trade war. Since Trump announced the tariffs on April 2, there have been threats, pauses, potential counter tariffs and no end to stock market volatility.
Trump’s frequent walk back of his threats has even led to a new term on Wall Streetthe TACO trade, an acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
So what does this ruling mean for consumers and businessesand the larger trade war? Here’s what you need to know.
What did the U.S. Court of International Trade rule?
The three-judge panel ruled Trump had exceeded his authority in imposing the tariffs on imported goods under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The court said Trump could only use the emergency powers of the IEEPA to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared. Most of the tariffs that have been announced fail to meet the requirements of the Act, said the court, which deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat.
How long did the court give the Trump administration to reverse course on tariffs?
The judges, who were appointed by Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Trump, gave the government 10 days to make the necessary administrative moves to do away with the tariffs.
What does the Trump administration plan to do next?
The White House has made it clear it will appeal this ruling. Trump could ask the Supreme Court to step in and block the ruling as soon as Friday, according to some reports. In the meantime, the Trump administration is seeking an emergency stay, asking the Court of International Trade to delay enforcement of the ruling would cause immediate irreparable harm to US foreign policy and national security.”
Which tariffs would still be in effect?
While the ruling blocked tariffs applied under the IEEPA, other import taxes, such as those that were imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, will remain. That means the 25% tariffs on specific products such as automobiles, auto parts, steel and aluminum are still in effect, so prices on most vehicles are likely to stay inflated. In addition, the tariffs on specific items from China that were instituted during Trump’s first term (and were expanded under the Biden administration) will remain in effect.
Could the tariffs be reinstated?
Certainly, if the Trump administration wins its appeal, the tariffs could go back into effect. There are other routes the White House might take as well.
Goldman Sachs notes Trump could use Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose tariffs of up to 15%, for up to 150 days. And the U.S. Trade Representative could launch Section 301 investigations on trading partners, which would lay the groundwork for tariffs that have no limits on levels or duration after that investigation is complete.
Could prices still go up?
Because some tariffs remain in place, prices that have already increased are likely to stay higher. And with the added uncertainty of the ruling, retailers are unlikely to make any immediate changes until the White House announces its next course of action. Several retailers, including Walmart, have warned that tariffs will result in higher prices. Trump has lashed out at some of those, telling them to eat the tariffs
How has the stock market reacted to the ruling against Trump’s tariffs?
While stocks were broadly higher pre-market (up as much as 500 points on the Dow), the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 indexes were all largely flat in midday trading, due to the uncertainty that still surrounds tariffs. Traders appear skeptical that weve heard the last of tariffs from the Trump administration.
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here.
Why Im becoming more worried about AI safety
During the first two years of the generative AI boom, new large language models were very limited in scope and application. They were very expensive autocomplete engines that understood only words.
In 2025 generative AI models have a much broader view of the world. They can process code, images, video, and audio. They can reason and strategize about delivering a good answer. They can control external tools, including digital tools like web search agents and, increasingly, physical tools like robots. As their capabilities grow, so does their potential for harm.
This is no longer a purely conceptual argument. Research shows that increasingly large models are already showing a proclivity for unsafe behavior during testing. In a model safety card published last week, Anthropic documented some alarming behavior from its newest and biggest model, Claude 4 Opus.
During safety testing, one instance of Opus was allowed to discover plans for its decommissioning. It was also given access to some fictional emails of its developers. The model used the content of those emails as fodder to attempt to blackmail its human handlers into keeping it alive. As its attempts failed, they moved from subtle to more overt.
Separately, the independent research firm Apollo Research observed an instance of Claude 4 Opus writing self-propagating worms, fabricating legal documentation, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself with the goal of sullying its developers intentions. Anthropic says that it corrected these early safety issues in later versions of the model. For the first time, Anthropic bumped the new Opus model up to Level Three on its four-level safety scale. The company said it couldnt rule out the models ability to assist a user in developing a mass casualty weapon.
But powerful AI models can work in subtler ways, such as within the information space. A team of Italian researchers found that ChatGPT was more persuasive than humans in 64% of online debates. The AI was also better than humans at leveraging basic demographic data about its human debate partner to adapt and tailor-fit its arguments to be more persuasive.
Another worry is the pace at which AI models are learning to develop AI models, potentially leaving human developers in the dust. Many AI developers already use some kind of AI coding assistant to write blocks of code or even code entire features. At a higher level, smaller, task-focused models are distilled from large frontier models. AI-generated content plays a key role in training, including in the reinforcement learning process used to teach models how to reason.
Theres a clear profit motive in enabling the use of AI models in more aspects of AI tool development. . . . future systems may be able to independently handle the entire AI development cyclefrom formulating research questions and designing experiments, to implementing, testing, and refining new AI systems, write Daniel Eth and Tom Davidson in a March 2025 blog post on Forethought.org.
With slower-thinking humans unable to keep up, a runaway feedback loop could develop in which AI models quickly develop more advanced AI which would itself develop even more advanced AI, resulting in extremely fast AI progress, Eth and Davidson write. Any accuracy or bias issues present in the models would then be baked in and very hard to correct, one researcher told me.
Numerous researchersthe people who actually work with the models up closehave called on the AI industry toslow down, but those voices compete with powerful systemic forces that are in motion and hard to stop. Journalist and author Karen Hoa argues that AI labs should focus on creating smaller, task-specific models (she gives Google DeepMinds AlphaFold models as an example), which may help solve immediate problems more quickly, require less natural resources, and pose a smaller safety risk.
DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on AlphaFold2, says the huge frontier models are needed to achieve AIs biggest goals (reversing climate change, for example) and to train smaller, more purpose-built models. And yet AlphaFold was not distilled from a larger frontier model. It uses a highly specialized model architecture and was trained specifically for predicting protein structures.
The current administration is saying speed up, not slow down. Under the influence of David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, the federal government has largely ceded its power to meaningfully regulate AI development. Just last year AI leaders were still giving lip service to the need for safety and privacy guardrails around big AI models. No more. Any friction has been removed, in the U.S. at least. The promise of this kind of world is one of the main reasons why normally sane and liberal minded opinion leaders jumped on the Trump Train before the electionthe chance to bet big on technologys Next Big Thing in a wild west environment doesnt come along that often.
AI job losses: Amodei says the quiet part out loud
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a stark warning for the developed world about job losses resulting from AI. The CEO told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs. This could cause a 1020% rise in the unemployment rate in the next one to five years, Amodei said. The losses could come from tech, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, and entry-level jobs could be hit hardest.
Tech companies and governments have been in denial on the subject, Amodei says. Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen, Amodei told Axios. It sounds crazy, and people just dont believe it.”\
Similar predictions have made headlines before, but have been narrower in focus.
SignalFire research showed that big tech companies hired 25% fewer college graduates in 2024. Microsoft laid off 6,000 people in May, and 40% of the cuts in its home state of Washington were software engineers. CEO Satya Nadella said that AI now generates 2030% of the companys code.
A study by the World Bank in February showed that the risk of losing a job to AI is higher for women, urban workers, and those with higher education. The risk of job loss to AI increases with the wealth of the country, the study found.
Research: U.S. pulls away from China in generativeAI investments
U.S. generative AI companies appear to be attracting more VC money than their Chinese counterparts so far in 2025, says new research from the data analytics company GlobalData. Investments in U.S. AI companies exceeded $50 billion in the first five months of 2025. China, meanwhile, struggles to keep pace due to regulatory headwinds. Many Chinese AI companies are able to get early-stage funding from the Chinese government.
GlobalData tracked just 50 funding deals for U.S. companies in 2020, amounting to $800 million of investment. The number grew to more than 600 deals in 2024, valued at more than $39 billion. The research shows 200 U.S. funding deals so far in 2025.
Chinese AI companies attracted just $40 million in one deal valued at $40 million in 2020. Deals grew to 39 in 2024, valued at around $400 million. The researchers tracked 14 investment deals for Chinese generative AI companies so far in 2025.
This growth trajectory positions the US as a powerhouse in GenAI investment, showcasing a strong commitment to fostering technological advancement, says Global Data analyst Aurojyoti Bose in a statement. Bose cited the well-established venture capital ecosystem in the U.S., along with a permissive regulatory environment, as the main reasons for the investment growth.
More AI coverage from Fast Company:
9 of the most out there things Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei just said about AI
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Mothers in the U.S. are facing more widespread mental health struggles. That’s according to a new study published by JAMA Internal Medicine, out this week.The research, which took place from 2016 to 2023, showed mental health declining, as self-reported by respondents. Of the 198,417 female parents of children 17 and under who were surveyed, only 25.8% reported excellent mental health in 2023. Just eight years earlier, 38.4% could say the same. Mothers who described their mental health as “good” rose from 18.8% to 26.1%, but so did those who describe it as fair/poor, which went from 5.5% to 8.5%.
Mothers reported lower rates of “excellent” physical health, too, which went from 28% to 23.9%. “Good” physical health rose from 24.3% to 28.1%, and “fair/poor” physical health didn’t change significantly.It’s certainly not the first time we’ve heard about parental mental health worsening in recent years. In 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published a stark warning on the decline of parental mental health in America. Forty-one percent of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function, and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively), Murthy wrote in the study.
However, according to the new research, moms’ mental health is declining more than dads’. The mothers who reported “fair/poor” mental health were four percentage points higher than the fathers.
Unsurprisingly, the survey showed that when it comes to maternal mental health, socioeconomic factors play a big role. “Mental health declines occurred across all socioeconomic subgroups; however, mental and physical health status was significantly lower for single female parents, those with lower educational attainment, and those with publicly insured children,” the authors noted in the study.Financial struggles are deepening for many demographics. However, parents face issues like rising childcare costs, the growing cost of feeding a family due to inflation and the impact of tariffs, as well as a challenging job market and economic uncertainty. The latest research on the cost of raising a young child is troubling, too, as it has skyrocketed to around $300,000an increase of 36% since 2023.
Likewise, it now takes a salary of about $180,000 per year to comfortably afford childcare, according to a 2025 analysis from the National Women’s Law Center. Those high costs have been driving some parents, most commonly moms, to stay home. However, given that most families need two incomes to get by, they aren’t just child-rearing at home, they’re also working. That means more stay-at-home moms are essentially doing two jobs at once, creating a potential firestorm of stress.
Liquid Death has taken the old-timey Pepsi Challenge taste test concept to some pretty strange places for its flavored sparkling waters.
Back in 2022, it pitted its $1.99 cans of Liquid Death against tallboys of luxury liquids like lobster béarnaise sauce ($50), liquified Japanese wagyu cheeseburger ($51), Spanish squid ink ($58), and beluga caviar ($580). Cue the dry heaves. And in 2023, it responded to a tweet that said, Id rather lick sweat off a fat guys back than drink Liquid Death, with a spot entitledyou guessed it Better Than Back Sweat?
Now the brand is taking aim at prebiotic sodas like Olipop with a new taste test ad called Toilet Taste Test.
Here we have several brave members of the public coming to test the chuggability of a Liquid Death flavored sparkling water against a mug of unnamed prebiotic soda. Each subject tastes the Liquid Death first, then is asked to try the prebiotic soda while sitting on the toilet since it claims the prebiotic soda contains six times the fiber in a fiber-based laxative.
Subject responses are . . . revealing. Not quite prairie-dogging but feeling some motion. Number 2 might make me number two.
Watch the (soda) throne
The prebiotic soda market has been forecasted to hit $3.5 billion by 2032. In February, Coca-Cola launched Simply Pop, and a month later PepsiCo acquired Poppi for $1.95 billion. Popular brand Olipop (which contains 6 g of fiber per can) was valued at $1.85 billion in February, after raising $50 million in its latest funding round.
Liquid Death was valued at $1.4 billion, following its latest funding round last March. According to the company, 2024 retail sales were $333 million, up from $263 million in 2023.
While its not the most obvious competitor to the heavy metal and comedy-infused canned water brand, Liquid Death has always positioned itself as a healthy alternative to traditional sugar-filled soda. The Toilet Taste Test is a clear indication of what brands it deems a threat to its own growth trajectory. By taking aim at the taste and consequences of fiber, the brand not only found the funny, but also took a direct hit on what many see as prebiotic sodas Achilles heel.
Its also a perfect example of the brands consistently funny take on advertising. At the Fast Company Grill at SXSW in March, Liquid Deaths senior VP of marketing Dan Murphy told me the goal for all of its content was to make sure it doesnt smell like an ad and creates engagement with consumers and the media. The metrics you should look for are saves and shares, Murphy said. If somebodys going to go back and watch that again, if somebodys sharing that with a friend, theres that viral coefficient that is telling you youre doing it right.
Hormel Foods Corporation (NYSE: HRL) has issued the nationwide recall for some 256,185 pounds of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).
Here’s what you need to know.
Whats happened?
On Wednesday, the USDA announced the Tucker Georgia-based company’s canned beef stew products may be contaminated with foreign material, specifically wood. These items were shipped to retail locations nationwide.
The problem was discovered after Hormel Foods notified the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) that they had received three consumer complaints reporting pieces of wood in the beef stew product.
There have been no confirmed reports of injury due to consumption of this product.
What product is being recalled?
The recalled products include Dinty Moore Beef Stew 20-oz. produced on February 4, 2025 [view labels], which can be identified with the following details:
Best by date: February 2028
Impacted lot code: T02045 (the lot code may have an additional number at the end)
Establishment Number: EST 199G
What should I do if I have the recalled Hormel Foods Dinty Moore product?
First, do not eat the recalled food product, according to Foodsafety.gov.
Consumers who have purchased this product are urged not to consume it, and should throw it away or return it to the place of purchase. Anyone concerned about an injury should contact a healthcare provider.
FSIS is concerned that some Dinty Moore Beef Stew 20-oz. cans may be in consumers pantries. (FSIS routinely conducts recall effectiveness checks to verify recalling firms notify their customers of the recall and that steps are taken to make certain that the product is no longer available to consumers.)
Consumers with questions about the recall can contact Hormel Foods Corporation at 800-523-4635. More information about food recalls is available at the FSIS website.
Hormel Foods earnings
On Thursday, Hormel Foods Corporation reported earnings results for the second quarter of 2025 ending in April. The company met expectations for earnings per share (EPS) but slightly missed on revenue with $2.9 billion, just under the forecasted $2.92 billion. That represents a year-over-year increase of 0.4%, and earnings per share (EPS) of $0.35 for the same period, compared to $0.38 a year ago.
Shares of the stock were down about 1% in midday trading on Thursday. The company had a market cap of $16.32 billion at the time of this writing.
Grab your finest Manolo Blahnik heels and pour yourself a cosmo: The season three premiere of the Sex and the City revival series And Just Like That is upon us.
Episode one of 10 drops today (Thursday, May 29) on HBO Max, with the rest following on a weekly basis. This fashion-filled series follows the lives of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Charlotte (Kristin Davis)who are now in their mid-50sas they navigate motherhood, aging, grief, and so much more. Lets look at how the show handles mature women, the series critical reception, and cast updates.
‘And Just Like That’ serves a bigger purpose
Its no secret that the entertainment industry isnt kind to experienced women. The older an actress gets, the less prevalent the meaty roles become.
According to a 2021 Nielsen Gracenote Inclusion Analytics, women over 50 make up 20% of the population but get just 8% of screen time. Further complicating matters, when women do see themselves on screen, they are more often than not stereotyped into maternal, caregiver rolesor spinster detectivesand not allowed to be complex individuals.
When And Just Like That first premiered in December 2021, it sought to rectify this underrepresentation.
What the critics and fans thought of the first two seasons
Fans were eager to see their favorite New Yorkers back on the small screen. According to Deadline, the first two episodes of season one were the most watched series premiere of a new HBO or HBO Max series on the streaming service until House of the Dragon took the title.
After watching, however, critics and fans had some notes for the cable network.
New York Times critic James Poniewozik quipped that it all went wrong and even asked, Was this really necessary? He pointed out many awkward attempts to make the series more diverse, but gave the creators credit for trying. Entertainment Weeklys Darren Franich agreed, celebrating the series for being better than the movies in certain regards, but also pointing out it tries too hard to bring its cultural brand into a new era.
Fans echoed these sentiments, and the internet went wild. For a while, it was trendy to hate watch the series and criticize it online. Season 1 was probably the worst season of television ive ever seen and I was excited for every episode, explained one Reddit user. The show is baaaad but I’m ultimately having a good time.
Thankfully And Just Like That only improved with age. Vanity Fairs Richard Lawson wrote that the series found its footing in its second season. It is only right to hope that season three will continue this trend, especially since the creatives had a two-year break to get things right.
What happened at the end of the last season?
At the end of season two, Carrie held a goodbye dinner for her iconic brownstone apartment. She and Aiden (John Corbet) purchased a place together in Gramercy Park. When his son gets into a car accident, he asks to take a five-year pause on their relationship until his kids are older.
Miranda and Che (Sara Ramirez) are officially over but she flirts with a BBC producer named Joy (Dolly Wells). Charlotte, meanwhile, has returned to the workforce and asks her husband to get more involved in domestic affairs.
What is expected for season three?
Cast announcements may give fans a clue about potential plotlines in the new season. Sara Ramirez will not return, but Dolly Wells has been made a series regular. This could signal that Miranda might have a new love interest.
Karen Pittman, who played Dr. Nya Wallace, is also not returning to the series because of scheduling conflicts. This could instead mean that Joy takes her place as Mirandas friend. Sebastiano Pigazzi, who plays Giuseppe, a love interest for Anthony, has also been promoted to a series regular.
New iconic faces will also be joining the series this season. While exact details are being held close to the vest, Rosie ODonnell has confirmed that she will play a character named Mary. Broadway diva Patti LuPone will also have a significant role.
Male actors are getting in on the action as well. Logan Marshall-Green, Mehcad Brooks, and Jonathan Cake will steam up season three.
As the wider Sex and the City universe continues to evolve, we cant help but wonder what new trails (and fashion trends) these fictional characters will blaze.
Its incredibly hard to find a starter home in Los Angeles, where the median house price is now around $1.2 million.
But in a new project, the city is working with architects and developers to build prototypes of more affordable homes that make use of small vacant lots scattered throughout the city. L.A. has around 24,000 privately owned residential lots that are a quarter-acre or less and havent yet been developed.
The city also owns this type of small vacant lot, and now plans to use up to a dozen of them to demonstrate new models for housing. Instead of single-family homes, each development will include multiple small units that make better use of a lot, while leaving room for outdoor space and ample light.
We thought that there might be a way to unlock the lots the city owns, but also use that to actually spur private development on the many similar lots that are across the city, says Emmanuel Proussaloglou, codirector of CityLab-UCLA, a think tank based in UCLAs architecture department.
2BUY4 by Garrett Ricciardi Office. [Rendering: courtesy CityLab-UCLA]
The group partnered with the city on a design competition called Small Lots, Big Impacts, focused on rethinking homeownership on urban infill lots. Twenty-one winning designs were announced today, along with another 20 projects that received special recognition.
Architects looked at new ways to divide small lots. Shared Steps, a design from the California-based firms Word and s_sk, is an example of what CityLab calls stealth density. From the front, it looks like it could be a single-family home. But its actually nine units: three main buildings that each have a larger unit plus an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) and a junior accessory dwelling unit. The ADUs could be used as rentals for the larger units, help a family expand when they need more space, or be sold as homes of their own. The front yard, meanwhile connects to a pocket park for the neighborhood.
4X4X4 by Light and Air. [Rendering: courtesy CityLab-UCLA]
A project called 4x4x4, from the Brooklyn-based firm Light and Air, uses a single 50-by-150-foot lot for four two-story houses. Each home has a ground-floor accessory dwelling unit. The homes, which are each around 1,600 square feet, fit together like Tetris blocks.
The L-shaped plan has the ability to frame outdoor space, and also provide views in multiple directions, says Shane Neufeld, who leads Light and Air. There are courtyards on the ground floor. On the second floor, residents can walk out sliding doors to a balcony on the roof of each ADU. From the street, again, it looks like it might be a single-family home.
California and local laws allow housing development by right, without the need for discretionary approval, as long as buildings meet certain zoning and design criteria and include some affordable housing. That means that neighbors shouldn’t be able to block the projects. Still, the buildings were designed to fit into existing neighborhoods, and appease neighbors as much as possible. Physically building some of the new designs could help create more support.
“The whole point of what we’re doing here is to try to build a couple so that you can go and actually look at them and say, ‘That doesn’t look as scary as I thought it might,'” says Proussaloglou. “That’s the hope, at least.”
Lotful by Studio One Eleven. [Rendering: courtesy CityLab-UCLA]
A design called Lotful, from Long Beach-based Studio One Eleven, proposes six individually owned buildings that each have owner-occupied units and two ground-level ADUs. The rental income can help owners qualify for a mortgage. The design is also modular, using a standard size that can make it faster and potentially less expensive to build. It’s also easier to replicate. “If we create these modules, these could be used on different sites in different areas, so you actually could get economies of scale,” says Alan Pullman, a partner at Studio One Eleven.
A design called Ladderblock, from L.A.-based West of West, proposes creating a community land trust to lower the cost of each home. One- and two-bedroom units are designed with flexibility, so owners can change their homes over time, if needed. By adding a partition wall, the spaces can be split further to create a rental or another unit to sell.
A 41-unit design from the New York-based firm Only If is one example of building with future density in mind. (Buildings on larger streets near transit can be taller and include more units.) The terraced floors create outdoor space on several levels. On the ground floor, a potential parking lot is “reversible,” meaning that it could later be used to build another seven units.
Living Together in the Plains of Id by Only If. [Rendering: CityLab-UCLA]
In the past, small lots might have been used for single-family homes, or sometimes stayed vacant because development didn’t seem like it would pencil out. The competition aims to help clearly illustrate what else is possible.
Echo Yards by Shin Shin [Rendering: CityLab-UCLA]
The need to build more is acute: Under state law, the city is required to build more than 450,000 homes by 2029 to deal with the housing shortage, and it isn’t on track, with only around 17,000 new homes permitted last year. The devastating fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena earlier this year, which destroyed thousands of homes, added even more to the challenge.
In the next stage of the project, the Los Angeles Housing Department will choose development teams, including architects, contractors, and financial institutions, to build on specific city-owned lots in different neighborhoods. The city will be selling the lots, but will use the proceeds to help provide down-payment assistance for low-income buyers to live in the new developments. (The developments, which will be privately financed by the development teams, will target residents at various income levels.) The winning designs from the first stage won’t necessarily be built, though each team will have an opportunity to apply again with the designs they’ve created.
Growing Together by Outpost Office [Rendering: courtesy CityLab-UCLA]
UCLA also plans to share all of the submissions online, including proposals that didn’t win. “There are only going to be a handful of sites available in the next stage, so not all 356 ideas are going to get built,” says Proussaloglou. “But we’re hoping that people with private lots look to the database of architectural ingenuity from the Small Lots competition, and say, ‘okay, I love that submission. I want to work with that architect.'”
The ideas could also be useful beyond L.A. “So many cities are struggling with a housing crisis of affordability and a lack of the kind of units that families want,” says Studio One Eleven’s Pullman. “I’m hoping that we can show, through this demonstration project, the ability to really think beyond the standard ways that we’ve been building cities, either single-family or large multifamily, into what everyone’s talking aboutthis missing middle. The ability to build family housing, but in a way that isn’t just the single-family house.”
“Gram-negative bacteria” pose a huge threat to public health. With deathly adaptability, these types of bacteria are able to develop resistance to many antibiotics and survive in a wide range of conditions. In particular, Acinetobacter baumannii, also known as CRAB, is one of clinical medicines most antibiotic resistant pathogens, killing hundreds in the U.S. every year with estimated mortality rates ranging from 26.0% to 55.7%.
But a new antibiotic from Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche could change the future of how we treat Gram-negative bacteria. Roche announced on Monday that its antibiotic zosurabalpin will enter phase 3, late-stage human trials, by the end of this year or early next year.
If successful, the drug will be the first new class of antibiotics targeting Gram-negative bacteria to be developed in over 50 years.
What makes Gram-negative bacteria so hard to treat?
Antibiotics treat illness by killing bacteria or suspending bacterial growth. But in order to access and attack crucial parts of the bacteria, most antibiotics must first pass through their outer membranes.
However, Gram-negative bacteria are distinguished from other forms of bacteria because they are protected by a second outer membrane. These outer membranes are covered in protective molecules called lipopolysaccharides (LPS), which stabilize the membranes and create a barrier to most drugs and antibiotics.
This resistance makes Gram-negative bacteria extremely tricky to treat, especially with patients who are already immunocompromised. It causes around a fifth of ICU infections, and most cases of ventilator-associated pneumonia, bloodstream infections related to catheters, and sepsis developed from the ICU.
How does zosurabalpin help?
Roche collaborated with Harvard researchers to develop a new way to stop Gram-negative bacteria. They found that the key was to inhibit the transportation of LPS molecules, the armor that creates the structure of the bacterias outer membrane.
Zosurabalpin is able to destroy Gram-negative bacteria by jamming LPS molecules inside the bacteria, weakening its membrane. It is the first of its class of antibiotics, and the first new class of antibiotics for Gram-negative bacteria since 1968.
This antibiotic is important, but it can also serve as a catalysis point for future innovation, said Michael Lobritz, global head of infectious diseases at Roche, to the Financial Times. There are very few [new classes of antibiotics] . . . that have been discovered in the last 15 years. So if you are able to launch a new one, we can build off that for decades to come.
Basel-based Roche has a vast portfolio that includes treatments for cancer, severe eye diseases, and multiple sclerosis. The company reported sales of roughly $68.7 billion in 2024, marking growth of 7% over the previous year on a constant exchange rate basis.
David Hogg, the Parkland school shooting survivor turned Democratic activist and rainmaker, likes to say that the only good politician is a scared politician.
His day job at Leaders We Deserve, the political action committee he co-founded straight out of Harvard in 2023 with veteran campaign manager Kevin Lata, is helping recruit and elect into office the next generation of young Democrats. But he spends just as much time antagonizing his partys leadership and hectoring them about doing some post-election soul-searching.
Shortly after his successful run in February for one of five vice chair positions with the Democratic National Committee, Hogg announced that Leaders We Deserve would spend $20 million backing midterm primary challengers in safe Democratic districts represented by aging incumbents who, in his estimation, havent fought back hard enough against Donald Trump.
He expected a backlash, and he got it. DNC chair Ken Martin demanded that he sign a neutrality pledge or step aside, but Hogg declined to do either. Meanwhile, one of the defeated candidates in the vice chair election filed a protest of the outcome, arguing that the results violated DNC rules regarding gender representation. Hogg believes that party leaders have seized on this procedural issue as a means of ousting him from his position, as punishment for his primary plans.
It might work, toothe complaint remains under review, and a vote about whether to redo the vice chair election is scheduled for between June 9 and June 11. But even if they boot Hogg from the DNC, he says, hell just focus on his day job booting feckless incumbents from Congress. Hogg, who appeared on Fast Companys July 2024 cover for a story about his and Latas work getting Generation Z into politics, checked back in with us about the tempest hes triggered, and where Democrats should go from here.
Fast Company: Given all thats transpired between you and the DNCs leadership, do you think youll be re-elected if it comes to it?
David Hogg: Honestly, its anybody’s guess at this point. There’s people who don’t agree with what I’m doing with the primaries, but they also don’t think that we should have another election. And there’s people who think we should have another election, but agree with what Im doing. There’s so many different camps here.
But just so I understand, is it your view that this complaint was mounted specifically to get rid of you? Or is the DNC leadership just latching onto this because it provides an opportunity to accelerate something they already wanted to do?
Its certainly provided an opportunity. In order to remove me as an officer, one, I would need to be breaking a rule, and two, it would go through a committee and then it would require a two-thirds vote of the DNC membership. This gives them the opportunity to remove me with only a simple majority.
I ask because the other DNC vice chair elected along with you, Malcolm Kenyatta, a state senator from Pennsylvania, who would ordinarily be a natural ally of yours, has criticized your response to this complaint and accused you of making it all about yourself. Have you spoken to him?
Yes, we’ve discussed it a bit, and I’m not going to talk publicly about those conversations, but what I will say is that there’s disagreements that we have, obviously, but ultimately, I still maintain a high level of respect for Malcolm. I don’t take it personally. I see this as a strategic disagreement.
What were your goals were in joining the DNC in the first place? And given whats transpired, do you still think you can achieve them? Hogg: Oh, we’re still going to achieve them no matter what happens. The reason I ran for the DNC was that I think we need to build a culture in our party of telling people what they need to hear for example, telling a former president that he should not run again. And if I do get removed, I think it only proves my point. I ran to play a role in making our party stronger. We can’t protect the status quo of a 26% approval rating. We’re losing voting share with nearly every single demographic, and its not a matter of our message. Its our messengers.
But why the DNC specifically? Why this vice chair position?
Because I believe in the party that we could be. And I didn’t want to continue being in a position where, for example, even after Id raised nearly $1 million for Vice President Harris when I was on her National Finance Committee, Id ask a question about what are we doing about young men and theyd say it was a ridiculous question. Like, why would we ever need to care about young men? This position forces people to listen to some of these real concerns.
It was ridiculous because they thought Biden had young men sealed up? Or because young men dont vote?Hogg: To be honest with you, Devin, it’s because for a long time there’s been a taboo in the party of talking about young men, because we think empathy is a zero-sum game, so its to the detriment of young women. We’ve got to get out of that binary thinking. Caring about one doesn’t mean we inherently don’t care about the other.
What should that message be? I’m not saying crank out a slogan on the spot, but how should Democrats be appealing to young men?Hogg: I’ll tell you what the message is not it’s not paying $20 million to figure out how to talk to young men. The message isn’t saying: Here is our plan for men. If we have a good plan for men, we don’t need to say out loud that it’s for men.
For the past five months we keep hearing that elected Democrats are not fighting back hard enough. And while that may be true, it reminds me of what you were saying its easy to sit on the sidelines and say whats wrong. So what should Democrats be doing?
Im not going to sit here and act like any single person, including myself, knows the full plan of how we fix this because, frankly, this is bigger than just the U.S. Every single developed country around the world has gender polarizationwhere young men are becoming more conservative and young women are becoming more liberal. This is not just a U.S. problem. Part of the answer is showing how we are rejuvenating ourselves and getting people elected to positions of leadership in Congress based off effectiveness and not this culture of seniority politics.
One reason for some of the anxiety among Democrats could be that your criteria for challenging an incumbent feels a bit subjective. When you talk about people fighting back effectively against Trump, what does that look like right now?
Prt of our strategy here is to not have a specific set of criteria, like, These are the three things that you need to do to be considered effective. Because the reality is nobody is meeting this moment as effectively as we need to. Certainly, some members are fighting back harder than others. There are members who are literally going to El Salvador, not just sitting on their hands and saying, We can’t do anything in the minority. We cant just hope that Donald Trump screws everything up so much that voters come begging back to us for any alternative. We dont want people to feel like theyre just voting for the less bad of two options. What we’re trying to do is light a fire under everybody’s ass in our party. And frankly, if that makes you uncomfortable, maybe you should question whether or not you should run.
This reminds me of that op-ed James Carville wrote in The New York Times a couple months ago that Democrats should roll over and play dead and just let Trump screw everything up. About six weeks later, you were quoted in the Times saying more than anything it is, do you want to roll over and die or do you want to fight? I wondered if you were referring specifically to what Carville said?
Yes, I was, but I think it goes beyond him, because that notion doesn’t just come out of nowhere. I think it comes out of the exhaustion that a lot of our leaders are feeling. And look, if you’re exhausted, that’s fine. Just don’t be in politics, because this is not a time for people to be exhausted.
Another veteran Democrat, Philippe Reines, a longtime aide to Hillary Clinton, recently told New York Magazine that we can’t be the party of pronouns and land acknowledgements.
Look, I think it’s important that we maintain our values as a party and we not abandon any group for some perceived gain or political expediency. That’s not what Democrats do. I think we need to focus on the fact that in this election voters told us two things. They said the president is too old. And we said, No, he’s not. And they said prices are too high. And we said, No, they aren’tlook at these graphs. The broader issue we have is that people feel unheard by us, and they feel like we are not addressing a lot of the real issues that they’re facing on a day-to-day basis.
You told the Times that Democrats continue to treat politics like a debate club and Republicans treat it like WrestleMania. Are you endorsing the WrestleMania approach or implying we need a third way?
What I was actually getting at, more than anything, is: lets say you ask voters, if Democrats are an animal, what animal would they be? The most common answer is a turtle or a slug or something like that. Some kind of weak, vulnerable animal. Whereas for Republicans, it’s like a shark or a lion. People like to see a fight. And for us, were like, Oh, we can’t raise the minimum wage because the parliamentarian in Congress says that we can’t. Thats the type of shit that kills me.
So you want Democrats to get in the ring a little bit more?
I want us to get in the ring more. After Parkland, all these Democratic consultants came around and said, You can’t talk about banning the AR=-15. You can’t talk about taking on the NRA. It’s too unpopular, it’s too red of a state, all this stuff. If we listened to them, we wouldn’t have changed shit. Right now we have a real problem with cowardice in our party. Thats the resource we lack. It’s not cash, its courage.
