A GoFundMe page is raising thousands to support a worker at the Ford Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan, after he openly criticized President Trumpto his face.
The worker, identified in media reports as TJ Sabula, heckled Trump while he was visiting the plant on January 13. In a video obtained by TMZ, Sabula can be heard calling the president a “pedophile protector.” In response, the president can be seen mouthing an expletive and telling Sabula “you’re fired” before flipping him off.
Ford reportedly didnt hesitate to act, with the automotive giant immediately suspending Sabula, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Fast Company reached out to Ford for comment.
Predictably, and almost just as fast, a GoFundMe page was launched in support of Sabula.
“TJ is a father of two young children, husband, and is a proud United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 600 line worker,” the page reads. “Funds donated will support TJ and his family to cover expenses during this time of uncertainty.”
At present, the fundraising page, which has only been live for about 11 hours, has raised more than $90,000.
Given that GoFundMe and other crowdfunding platforms are increasingly relied upon to help people going through financial challengessometimes spurred by political eventsit’s not the first time the site has made headlines recently.
Less than a week ago, after 37-year-old Renee Good was shot by an ICE agent in her neighborhood, a fundraiser was launched to support her family. The page has amassed over $1.5 million.
Additionally, a page for Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Good, was also created. That page has raised $700,000 at present, including a $10,000 donation from billionaire Bill Ackman.
Fast Company has reached out to GoFundMe to ask if it has verified the campaign for Sabula.
Engine troubles
Sabula’s suspension is not terribly surprising. While Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley and the president have had a complicated relationship at times, Farley has also expressed optimism about Trump’s second term.
He joined President Trump in December when he announced a proposal to slash Biden-era fuel economy standards. Ford also donated $1 million in cash and a fleet of vehicles to the president’s January 2025 inauguration.
Following his suspension, Sabula told The Washington Post that he has “no regrets whatsoever” about heckling the president. He added that Trump was only standing about 60 feet away and heard him “very, very, very clearly.”
If you’d like to do a thorough review of your portfolio and plan, here are the key steps to take. I recommend doing them over a series of sessions, not all at once.
Step 1: Gather your documentation
This could be your current investment statements, plus Social Security and pension. Pro tip: Set up a My Social Security account to get an overview of your benefits and earnings history.
Step 2: Ask and answer: How am I doing?
To find out if you’re on track to reach your financial goals, review your current portfolio balance, combined with your savings rate. Tally your contributions across all accounts. A decent baseline savings rate is 15%, but higher-income folks will want to aim for 20% or more.Also factor in other goals you’d like to achieve, such as college funding or a home down payment. Are they realistic? Make sure you’re not giving short shrift to retirement.If you’re retired or about to be, the key gauge of the viability of your total plan is your withdrawal rateyour planned portfolio withdrawals divided by your total portfolio balance. The 4% guideline is a good starting point, but aim for less if you can.
Step 3: Check up on your long-term asset allocation
Does your total portfolio’s mix of stocks, bonds, and cash match your targets? High-quality target-date series such as those from Vanguard and BlackRock’s LifePath Index Series can help benchmark asset allocation. My model portfolios can also help.A portfolio that tilts mostly or even entirely toward stocks makes sense for younger investors.If your portfolio is notably equity-heavy and you’re within 10 years of retirement, shifting to bonds and cash is more urgent. Just mind the tax consequences when you rebalance.
Step 4: Assess liquid reserves
Holding some cash is crucial to ensure you don’t have to tap your investments or resort to credit cards in a financial crunch.For retired people, I recommend holding six months to two years worth of portfolio withdrawals in cash investments.For those still working, holding three to six months’ worth of living expenses in cash is a good starting point.
Step 5: Assess suballocations, sector positioning, and holdings
Your broad asset-class exposure largely determines how your portfolio behaves. But your positioning within each asset class also deserves a look. Market strength has recently broadened, but growth stocks and funds that own them have outpaced value by a wide margin over the past decade.Finally, check up on your sector positioning, allocation to foreign stocks, and actual holdings.
Step 6: Identify opportunities to streamline
Why have scores of accounts and holdings if a more compact portfolio could do the job just as well?If you’ve changed jobs, you may have multiple 401(k)s and rollover IRAs. Consider consolidating into a single IRA. If you have several small cash accounts, you may be losing out on a (slightly) higher yield.Could you reduce the number of holdings in your portfolios? Index funds and ETFs provide pure asset-class exposure and a lot of diversification in a single package. I also like target-date funds for smaller accounts to provide diversification without any maintenance obligations.
Step 7: Manage for tax efficiency
At this point, if you think changes are in order, be sure to take tax and transaction costs into account. Focus any selling in your tax-sheltered accounts, where you won’t incur tax costs and you can usually avoid transaction costs, too. Within your taxable accounts, review the tax implications and/or get tax advice before executing trades.Also review whether you’re managing your portfolio with an eye toward tax efficiency. Are you making contributions to your tax-sheltered vehicles? Are your taxable accounts as tax-efficient as possible? For a lot of people, this is as simple as holding equity ETFs and/or municipal bonds and bond funds for their taxable accounts. Finally, think about tax-efficient withdrawal sequencing.
Step 8: Troubleshoot other risk factors
Uninsured long-term-care risk is a significant factor for those who are neither well off nor eligible for Medicaid. Develop a plan in case you have sizable long-term-care outlays later in life.Another common risk factor is providing help to loved ones. In this case, it’s often helpful to talk to a financial advisor and/or estate planner to figure out how you can help without jeopardizing your financial future.
This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance.Christine Benz is director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.Related Links
5 Smart Ways to Diversify Your Portfolio for 2026https://www.morningstar.com/portfolios/5-smart-ways-diversify-your-portfolio-2026
8 Reasons You Might Need to Tweak Your Portfoliohttps://www.morningstar.com/portfolios/8-reasons-you-might-need-tweak-your-portfolio
An Investing Guide for Every Life Stagehttps://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/an-investing-guide-every-life-stage
Christine Benz of Morningstar
Heinzs newest product isnt a ketchup, or a mayo, or some Frankenstein combination of the two. Its a boxand its solving a problem thats plagued lovers of french fries for decades.
The patent-pending Heinz Dipper, unveiled on January 13, is an innovation the company is describing as a first-of-its-kind fry box. At first glance, it looks like a classic french fry box that youd get at any run-of-the-mill fast-food joint, but a closer examination reveals a pullout compartment (shaped like Heinzs keystone logo) that can hold two packets of whatever condiment you prefer.
The Heinz Dipper is debuting at more than 33 restaurant and sports stadium partners around the world in 2026 as a test for potential broad distribution in the future.
[Image: Heinz]
We dont know why the fry box wasnt always designed this way, Heinzs website reads. We just know you cant have fries without Heinz. So, we fixed it.
Over the past few years, Heinz has become known for its stable of, frankly, strange product developments, including Buffaranch (a mixture of Buffalo and ranch sauce), a burger dipping device, and squeezable turkey gravy. Of these clever, often out-of-the-box concepts, the Heinz Dipper feels the most like a product that could become a genuine mainstay in fast-food joints everywhere because it solves a truly universal design flaw.
[Photo: Heinz]
A fry box built for the modern snacker
According to a new ad from Heinz posted to YouTube, the design of the fry box hasnt changed since 1950. Indeed, the design mightve been perfectly serviceable back when a majority of people dined in. Now that takeout and delivery are vastly more popular, though, the form isnt exactly optimized for eating in the car or in front of the TV after a long night out.
Whether balancing sauce packets on car dashboards or squeezing ketchup directly onto individual fries, fans have long struggled to enjoy their favorite pairing away from the table, a Heinz press release reads, noting that 70% of ketchup-and-fry lovers admit to having spilled ketchup when dipping on-the-go, and 80% say theyve considered skipping condiments altogether due to a lack of dip-friendly packaging options.
For Heinz, a patented fry box is a clever way to expand its physical presence into the kinds of establishments where sauce is kinglike fast-food restaurants and stadiumswhich it currently achieves by serving as a supplier of branded sauces and sauce dispensers.
And unlike some of Heinzs other head-scratching innovations (lets be honest, who really needed Barbie ketchup?) the Heinz Dipper has one key hallmark of good design: It raises the question, How has no one thought of this before?
A proposed billionaires’ tax in California has ignited a political uproar in Silicon Valley, with tech titans threatening to leave the state while Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom maneuvers to defeat a levy that he fears will lead to an exodus of wealth.A technology mecca, California has more billionaires than any other state a few hundred, by some estimates. Nearly half its personal income tax revenue, a financial backbone in the nearly $350 billion budget, comes from the top 1% of earners.A large health care union is attempting to place a proposal before voters in November that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of billionaires including stocks, art, businesses, collectibles and intellectual property to backfill federal funding cuts to health services for lower-income people that were signed by President Donald Trump last year.In a state with a vast gap between rich and poor, the plan has resulted in a tangle of competing interests at a time when both Democrats and Republicans are struggling to respond to economic anxiety driven by rising costs ahead of this year’s midterm elections.An online war of words has tech leaders pondering a hollowing out of Silicon Valley, and millions of dollars are flowing to political committees engaged in the fight. That includes $3 million from billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, to a committee tied to a business group opposing the tax.However it’s not clear if the proposal will make the ballot, with more than 870,000 petition signatures required for it to qualify.
Threatened exodus
Although the tax would affect only a minuscule slice of California’s roughly 39 million residents, it would siphon money from an immense pool of wealth. If would apply retroactively to billionaires living in the state as of Jan. 1.At least 25 billionaires listed among Forbes magazine’s 2025 rankings of the world’s 500 wealthiest people either lived in California or had some significant ties to the state, based on a review by The Associated Press. But determining whether they were full-time residents or just frequent visitors could turn into a matter of dispute, since many of them own property elsewhere.“You are really playing with fire with this one,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of the publicly traded Silicon Valley company Box. He fears that the proposed tax would drive entrepreneurs to look elsewhere to run their companies and launch startups.Even liberal-leaning tech pioneers would “find it absurd just on pure economic and structural grounds, even if they might agree that the cause itself is very worthy,” said Levie, who is not a billionaire.
Governor worries about a competitive disadvantage
Newsom has long opposed state-level wealth taxes, believing such levies would be disadvantageous for the world’s fourth-largest economy. At a time when California is strapped for cash and he is considering a 2028 presidential run, he is trying to block the proposal before it reaches the ballot.Analysts say an exodus of billionaires could mean a loss of hundreds of millions of tax dollars.“It’s one of the reasons why Newsom’s path to the Democratic nomination is not going to be an easy one,” Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney said. “He’s already facing a (budget) deficit the size of which is uncertain and in the years to come, a billionaires tax that could backfire badly.”
Democrats divided on the issue
The proposal has created a deep rift between Newsom and prominent members of his party’s progressive wing, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who endorsed it and said it should be a template for other states.“Our nation will not thrive when so few have so much while so many have so little,” Sanders said on the social platform X.Another supporter, and a potential 2028 Newsom rival, is Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who mocked billionaires for threatening to flee over a tax intended to provide health care for lower-income people.The measure’s lead proponent, the Service Employees International Union, sees the threat of an exodus as exaggerated.The tax is a “workable response to a crisis created by Congress,” Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, said in a statement. She added that it would “keep emergency rooms open, hospitals staffed and health care systems functioning.”The California Business Roundtable, meanwhile, is leading an effort to defeat the measure, saying it would “undermine our economy, decimate the state budget, drive investment out of the state and ultimately make everyday life more expensive for working families.”
A business climate known for heavy regulation and steep costs
Fleeing California because of its high cost of living and reputation for stringent regulations started to gather momentum well before the proposed wealth tax began circulating last year.Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man with a $724 billion fortune, bought a home in Texas and moved his electric automaker Tesla to Austin several years ago.The financial threat posed by the proposed tax apparently is pushing even more of Silicon Valley’s renowned pioneers to curtail their exposure to California and its liberal policies, including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who moved to the state during the mid-1990s for graduate study at Stanford University.Page and Brin stepped away from their executive roles years ago but remain the largest shareholders in Google parent company Alphabet, with stakes that account for most of their combined fortunes of $530 billion, according to Forbes.But both men have begun moving more of their assets to Florida, according to multiple reports. Google, which has been based in Mountain View for the past quarter century, did not respond to an AP inquiry about their recent moves.
Associated Press writer Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California, contributed.
Michael R. Blood and Michael Liedtke, Associated Press
In a parking lot in Detroit next to the Henry Ford Museum, three streetlights now double as EV chargers.
The site is one of the first installations of the Voltpost Air, a device that taps into existing infrastructure to quickly add charging capability at the side of the road or in parking lots.
The approach is simpler than adding stand-alone EV chargers: Installation takes just a few hours. We don’t have to do costly utility upgrades to the grid in order to this, says Jeff Prosserman, cofounder and CEO of Voltpost. We’re just finding pockets where power already exists and then making it work.
[Photo: Voltpost]
Thats possible partly because the chargers are Level 2, meaning they charge more slowly than others and don’t need large amounts of power. Slower charging is still useful for the target customersapartment dwellers or others who don’t have a garage where they can easily charge at home, but who may park in the same spot next to streetlights during the day for hours at a time.
Installing conventional EV chargers often involves much more work. You would rip up the sidewalk, you rip up the street, and then you’d lay down new wire, and basically that would be a very large expense to repair effectively, Prosserman says.
Instead of digging up the road to install new conduit, Voltpost checks to see whether those conduits have spare capacity under electrical code. Then they open up existing access points and pull a single bundled power cable through. If power is overhead, the cable can drop down the pole from above.
[Photo: Voltpost]
The chargers are mounted about 10 feet above the ground. (In the case of the new installation in Detroit, each streetlight has two charging connectors; in other cases there might be one per pole.) Drivers access the charger with an app or by tapping a credit card, and then push a button to extend the charging cable up to 25 feet to their car. Once charging is complete, the cable automatically recoils inside, protecting the hardware from vandalism or rough weather.
The company partnered with AT&T to add connectivity to the devices for remote diagnostics, firmware updates, and performance monitoring so drivers know that the charger is working before they arrive. AT&T is also exploring the possible use of the same poles and conduit for telecom gear like 5G or fiber alongside the chargers, stacking infrastructure to cut costs for both.
[Photo: Voltpost]
Voltpost now has hundreds of new chargers in its pipeline, including many more in Michigan, where the state’s Office of Future Mobility and Electrification and DTE’s Emerging Tech Fund are helping fund the rollout. More funding is likely to come from the federal government, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to roll it back. Trump froze funds for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) charger program a year ago, but courts blocked the move. The money goes first to high-speed chargers, but states that have built out a network of those chargers can also use the money to install Level 2 chargers like Voltpost’s.
Around 820,000 new Level 2 EV chargers will be needed by 2030, according to an estimate from the International Council on Clean Transportation. (That many are needed even without the federal EV incentives that were cut last year.) Retrofitting streetlights could be one of the fastest ways to fill that gap.
On the surface, Apples announcement on Tuesday of a subscription service called Apple Creator Studio does not demand a whole lot of explanation or analysis. The Mac/iPad/iPhone offering, which bundles the Final Cut Pro video editor, Logic Pro audio editor, Pixelmator Pro image editor, and other apps for making and manipulating media for $13 a month or $129 a year, is exactly the sort of thing youd expect the company to get around to introducing.
After all, its strategy of expanding the portion of its revenue that comes from services has already resulted in offerings such as Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, and Apple News+. It would have been weird if Apple hadnt pushed its creativity apps in a service-y directiona process that began a couple of years ago when the first iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro carried subscription pricing.
But Creator Studio, which arrives in the App Store on January 28, also ties together several other ongoing plot lines relating to Apples business. Its very existence helps answer questions about how the company sees AI as a creative tool. The company has the opportunity to address others as it builds out the product in the coming years. I spoke with Apples VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Bob Borchers, and senior director of Worldwide Product Marketing Brent Chiu-Watson, about the new servicestarting with the fundamental question of what sort of people they envision using it.
Creator Studio subscribers will be able to generate images using OpenAIs models inside apps such as Keynote. [Photo: Apple]
Apples history in creativity software is long: For example, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro both date to the previous century. Yet at times, it hasnt been entirely clear whether the company saw the customer base for such tools as consisting literally of professionals, prosumers whod outgrown products such as iMovie and GarageBand, or some combination thereof. Even now, Creator Studio does not add up to a full-blooded rival to Adobes Creative Cloud, which offers many more apps in various editions at much higher prices, up to $70 a month for the full shebang.
Still, Borchers offered me a reasonably crisp definition of Creator Studios intended audience: creators who, increasingly, do a little bit of everything. A musician isn’t just songwriting, he told me. They’re producing the tracks, they’re creating album artwork, they’re editing music videos, they’re designing merch. They’re doing all of those things, and they’re inherently working across some of those traditional boundaries.
With that in mind, Apple is spreading useful functionality between Creator Studios apps in ways that share the wealth and reduce the learning curve. For example, Pixelmator Proa much-loved indie app whose developer Apple acquired last yearalready had AI-infused features that can intelligently auto-crop images and scale them up without losing detail. Now, Creator Studio subscribers will find the same tools in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. Similarly, Logic Pros Beat Detection feature, which uses AI to visualize an audio tracks tempo, will be available in Final Cut Pro as well, where it will help creators edit video to stay in sync with what audiences hear.
Beat Detection, which visualizes beats and bars, is available in Final Cut Pro as well as Logic Pro. [Photo: Apple]
The more features that show up in multiple apps, the more Creator Studio should feel like a coherent suite with a unified personality. That sort of consistency, we think, is really, really valuable, and we’re going to find more connection points over time, says Chiu-Watson.
Its no shock that the new features Creator Studio is launching with are largely about AI-based assistance. Some run on-device and use Apples own technology, including visual and audio search options that can find media such as a track with funky upbeat drum. Others draw on OpenAI cloud-based models, like image-generation options that go beyond Apple Intelligences Image Playgrounds, as well as Keynote’s newfound ability to turn text outlines into presentations and write speaker notes for slides. (Googles Gemini LLM plays no role in Creator Studio, though given the new Apple-Google AI partnership announced on Monday, its tough to imagine that will stay true forever.)
Creator Studios Mac apps inclde MainStage, a sort of industrial-strength counterpart to GarageBand. [Photo: Apple]
Applewhich is still an underdog in AI but has learned to be sensitive about suggesting that its trying to automate deeply human tasksis taking pains to emphasize that its not trying to turn content creation over to algorithms. Nor is it (or OpenAI) training models on the media people produce in Creator Studio.
The key thing is, we’re doing this with the philosophy that AI should amplify one’s ideas and not replace any piece of human artistry or creativity, says Chiu-Watson. We’re just trying to make someone more efficient as they explore their process.
As someone whos used an iPad as my primary work computer for almost 15 years, I am heartened by the fact that Creator Studio represents the iPad debut of Pixelmator Pro. The app supports drawing with pressure-sensitive art materials via the Pencil stylus, and is particularly welcome given that Adobes iPad version of Photoshop remains a dim echo of the desktop version. (Pixelmators sister app Photomatora rough counterpart to Apples Lightroom, and an essential part of my own iPad toolkitis not part of the new suite, and remains available via standalone subscription.)
For years, the iPad Pros powerful hardware has felt like its sprinted well ahead of most of the apps it runs. Creator Studio wont change that overnight. But it does give Apple new incentive to beef up its own iPad softwarea boon in itself and, with any luck, a good example for other developers. Our guiding principle here is we wanted to put the most powerful tools in the hands of our creative community wherever they are, says Borchers.
The new iPad version of Pixelmator Pro offers Pencil support and drawing tools that go beyond garden-variety image editing. [Photo: Apple]
The price of progress
It must be acknowledged that the shift in business model reflected in Creator Studios bundling of apps for a monthly or yearly feerather than a one-time priceis not going to be universally hailed. Just ask Adobe, whose Creative Cloud has managed to disaffect a meaningful percentage of creative types who want nothing to do with subscription plans. (Some of those users have gravitated to apps from Affinity, whose new owner Canva recently crammed photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout into one free product.)
To be fair, Apple has gone to some length to allay such concerns, at least for the moment. All Mac apps in Creator Studio will remain available as one-time purchases in the App Store. The company is also grandfathering in users who had standalone subscriptions to the iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro and prefer to keep them, though some content may be exclusive to the Creator Studio versions. Until now, the only version of Pixelmator available for the iPad has been a basic, non-Pro edition; Apple says it wont get any more updates, but will remain functional.
Apple fans with long memories may remember the long-ago days when Apple packaged Keynote, Numbers, and Pages into a $79 Microsoft Office alternative called iWork. More recently, its shipped them gratis on every new device. Only paying customers will get the new AI features that turn these appsand the Freeform whiteboarding toolinto sort of honorary members of the Creator Studio portfolio. But Chiu-Watson told me that the free versions arent turning into dead ends or demoware. Indeed, theyll continue to get upgrades of their own. Some premium features and premium content are only for subscribers, but that’s just a choice, he says. You can opt in, [but] theres no necessity to do so.
In the end, Creator Studio, like any software experience, will speak for itself, in large part through how it evolves over time. Having assembled its disparate elements and given them an initial round of updates, Apple has the opportunity to keep the momentum going through ongoing improvements that make the price feel like money well invested. As Chiu-Watson puts it, We hope people pay attention, because it’s one thing what we say. Its another how we exemplify it.
One thing has become reliable over the past year of worldwide uncertainty: the price of gold and silver has continued to rise.
The precious metals reached record highs again in the early hours of Wednesday. Silver hit over $91 per ounce, more than a 26% increase year-to-date and a 201% increase over the last 12 months. Silver had reached more than $90 for the first time on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, gold rose this morning to more than $4,637 an ounceup more than 7% in 2026 and over 73% for the past year.
Why do gold and silver continue to rise?
Gold hit a record $4,600 an ounce on Monday after news broke that federal prosecutors are investigating Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
Officially, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia is looking into $2.5 billion spent to renovate the Federal Reserve headquarters. However, President Trump has made his disdain for Powell well known, with the latter refusing Trumps demands to slash interest rates.
In a video statement, Powell pointed to the current administrations pattern of going after anyone who dares to disagree with it.
No onecertainly not the chair of the Federal Reserveis above the law, said Powell. But this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administrations threats and ongoing pressure.
This development occurred as tumultuous news around the worldnotably, Irans mass executions of protestershas pushed investors toward safe havens like gold and silver.
As for silver, the increase could also be attributed to Chinas recent restrictions on exporting the metal, limiting access to it in the U.S. A January 2025 report from the U.S. Geological Survey stated that China is one of the largest silver producers in the world.
For as long as people have been using AI to churn out text, other people have been coming up with tells that something was written by AI. Sometimes its punctuation that comes under suspicion. (The em dash is generally considered the shadiest.) Other times its words that robot writers seem to love and overuse.
But what if the biggest giveaway that a text was written by AI isnt a word, phrase, or punctuation mark, but a particular sentence structure instead?
Why is it so hard to make AI writing sound human?
The idea that certain rhythms of sentences might be a sign of AI writing first came to my attention through my work as a professional word nerd. Recently, I a potential new client contacted me about helping to polish up some of their writing. As an editor, thats not unusual. But like several recent inquiries, this assignment came with an AI-age twist.
The client had conducted a good amount of research for a work project and then asked a popular LLM to synthesize the findings. Afterward, they checked it for factual errors and removed anything that seemed an obvious red flag for AI writing. But the text still just didnt sound human. Could I fix it?
I agreed that despite the clients considerable efforts, something still sounded off about the text. I also concurred it wasnt immediately easy to spot what it was. All the commonly cited tells of AI writing had been removed. There wasnt an em dash or a delves in sight. Still, it felt like it came from a bot, not a human. The problem was clearly deeper than word choice.
I faced this dilemma from the perspective of a communications pro. But there are plenty of others scratching their heads over the same issue. These are the entrepreneurs, marketers, and others who want to use AI to speed up their workflows but dont want to annoy others with robotic off-note emails and reports. The group also includes writer Sam Kriss.
AI tells are more than weird words and punctuation
In a fascinating article in The New York TImes Magazine, Kriss delves into the stylistic tics that are certain, frequently infuriating, tells of AI writing. Unlike more quantitatively focused recent studies, he doesnt focus on easy-to-measure features like the frequency of certain words or punctuation marks. Instead, he investigates the larger patterns in AI writing that contribute to its uncanny and often deeply annoying feel.
AI, for instance, lacks any direct experience of the physical world. As a result, AI writing tends to be full of imprecise abstractions. There are a lot of mixed metaphors. Bots also overuse the rule of three. (Lists of descriptors or examples are generally more satisfying for the reader in groups of three.) Phrases that are common in one country or context are reproduced in others where they sound foreign.
If youre either a language lover despairing about the current flood of AI slop or a practically minded professional looking to use AI without irritating human readers, the article is definitely worth a read. But one of Krisss observations in particular set alarm bells ringing in my mind.
‘Its not X. Its Y’
Im driven to the point of fury by any sentence following the pattern Its not X, its Y, even though this totally normal construction appears in such generally well-received bodies of literature as the Bible and Shakespeare, he writes.
Kriss goes on to cite instances of this Its not X, its Y sentence construction in everything from politicians tweets to pizza ads. Appearances in great literature notwithstanding, the recent flood of examples has transformed this phrasing into a sure-fire way to know youre reading something written by a machine.
Hmm, I thought, reopening my clients document. Sure enough, when I reread my new clients oddly mechanical writing, I saw that particular sentence construction in nearly every paragraph.
One AI tell thats easy to scrub
Getting rid of all the giveaways that a particular text is written by AI is difficult. It might just take you longer to do a thorough scrub job than to just actually put in the intitial effort to write the thing yourself. (Which is, as a side note, what I often tell clients looking for this sort of editorial work.) Plus, writing is good for your brain.
In other instances of more mechanistic writing, keeping AI style might not matter. Who cares about the literary merits of the executive summary of a data analysis if the numbers and the takeaways are correct? If thats the case, dont sweat the odd, Its not X. Its Y.
But if youre producing ad copy, a presentation, or persuasive content and you want the reader to feel like a human actually wrote it, Krisss article is a helpful reminder. Sure, certain words or language ticks might be more common in AI writing. But the overall problem is usually deeper.
If you really want to try to make AI language passably human, you need to worry not just about word choice and eliminating hallucinations. You need to look more deeply at the way the sentences are constructed.
And you definitely want to avoid Its not x. Its y. As a bot might put it, this sentence structure isnt just a cliché. Its now a dead giveaway that AI wrote the text.
The first major retail bankruptcy of 2026 has arrived.
Today, Saks Global Enterprises, owner of Saks Fifth Avenue and other luxury retail brands, has filed to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The news shows that not even companies aimed at high-end consumers are immune to economic downturns. Heres what you need to know.
What’s happened?
On Wednesday, January 14, Saks Global announced that it is seeking Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas.
At the same time, the luxury retail brand announced that it has also secured $1.75 billion in financing commitments. Much of this money will be used by Saks Global to finance its turnaround efforts through the bankruptcy process.
In addition to announcing Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Saks Global also announced the appointment of a new chief executive, Geoffroy van Raemdonck, who will take over the role immediately from the companys outgoing CEO, Richard Baker.
Why is Saks Global filing for bankruptcy?
The companys brands are dealing with the same problems that many other retailers are facinghigher tariffs, inflation, online competition, and consumers who are cutting back on discretionary spending.
A key problem for Saks Global over the past year has been an inability to pay its debts.
As noted by Reuters, Saks Globals bankruptcy filings show the company has assets and liabilities of between $1 billion and $10 billion.
Its debt burden increased after Saks’s previous parent company, Hudson’s Bay, acquired competitor Neiman Marcus for around $2.7 billion in 2024.
That acquisition led to the formation of a new holding company, Saks Global, which is now filing for bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy filings show that Saks Global owes significant sums of money to some of fashions largest brands, including around $136 million to Chanel, $60 million to Gucci owner Kering, and $26 million to luxury goods giant LVMH.
Saks Globals most well-known brand is the iconic luxury department store chain Saks Fifth Avenue, which was originally founded in 1867. However, the company also owns a number of other retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Off 5TH, Last Call, Horchow, and, as of 2024, Neiman Marcus.
What has Saks said about the bankruptcy filing?
In a statement, CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck said that the bankruptcy process is a defining moment for Saks Global, and the path ahead presents a meaningful opportunity to strengthen the foundation of our business and position it for the future.
Are Saks and Neiman Marcus stores still open?
Right now, Saks says that all of the companys storesincluding Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks off 5TH, Last Call, and Horchowwill remain open.
Stores and e-commerce experiences across Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks OFF 5TH, Last Call, and Horchow are open and serving customers, the company noted.
Could Saks close stores?
Thats entirely possible. Saks Global noted that it was evaluating its operational footprint to invest resources where it has the greatest long-term potential.
Operational footprint is a term retailers use to refer to their physical stores. It isnt uncommon for companies that are reorganizing themselves through Chapter 11 bankruptcy to close underperforming stores, so they have more financial resources to allocate to the more profitable ones.
Will Saks go out of business?
Right now, there is nothing to suggest that Saks Global or Saks Fifth Avenue will go out of business. The Chapter 11 bankruptcy process is being conducted so the company can get its financial house in order and continue running.
However, what Saks Global may look like after it emerges from Chapter 11 remains unclear. As noted by CNBC, its possible the company could choose to close numerous stores, or even sell off entire planssay, choosing to get rid of Neiman Marcus, whose acquisition left it with so much debt.
Another possibility would be for the retailer to close all its physical locations and continue sales online only.
But nothing will be known for sure until Saks Global completes the Chapter 11 process. The process is expected to conclude later this year.
When the FIFA World Cup 2026 arrives in the United States this June, it will signal more than soccer’s return to its fastest-growing commercial market. The tournament will span three countriesthe United States, Mexico, and Canadafor the first time, becoming the largest World Cup ever staged. The scale, however, is also forcing a technological reset.
As modern global sporting events grow in scale, expectations have evolved alongside them. Audiences now look for more immersive broadcasts and real-time data, broadcasters face rising reliability demands, and governing bodies continue to push for greater transparency and precision. Together, these pressures are starting to expose the limits of traditional IT systems in elite sports such as soccer, particularly around latency, and paving the way for AI-driven, real-time intelligence embedded directly into competition, operations, and fan engagement.
As the official technology partner of the World Cup 2026, Lenovo is treating the tournament as a systems-level deployment, placing AI at the operational core of the worlds largest sporting event. The company is treating the event not as a showcase, but as a real-world test of AI beyond cloud-first architectures, where failure carries immediate consequences. Rather, its betting that global scale, matched with deep local execution, delivers an advantage in such a complex environment.
Lenovo chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang says the World Cup exemplifies how AI can operate in complex, large-scale environments. These are live events with real pressure and real audiences, he says. The value of such partnerships goes beyond short-term visibility. They help us understand how AI performs under demanding conditions, and that insight feeds directly into how we design and improve our technology.
Yang also notes that, while Lenovo uses global sports partnerships to highlight its broader AI strategy, its technology is playing a major role in improving the sport itself. This year, you will see referees using AI support, players benefiting from AI insights, and organizers using AI to improve operations, he says. The company asserts that this year’s World Cup will be the most AI-driven global sporting event in history.
An AI-Driven Sporting Event
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026 in Las Vegas last week, Lenovo detailed how it will supply the digital backbone of the World Cup 2026from core infrastructure to advanced AI systems that will shape all 104 matches.
Alongside FIFA president Gianni Infantino, the company unveiled a broad suite of AI-driven technologies for the tournament, including Football AI Pro; AI-enabled 3D player avatars integrated into semi-automated offside technology; an Intelligent Command Center using real-time AI summaries to manage tournament operations across three countries; AI-stabilized Referee View body-camera footage for broadcasts; smart wayfinding and venue digital twins; and resilient infrastructure supporting video review of refereeing decisions and broadcast systems.
Lenovo CTO Tolga Kurtoglu said that Lenovo had already deployed early versions of several upcoming technologies at the FIFA Club World Cup, using the tournament as a proving ground ahead of the much larger event this summer. That allowed us to learn, iterate, and improve before deploying at World Cup scale, he says.
Football AI Pro, codeveloped with FIFA, is an enterprise-grade AI knowledge system built with Lenovos AI Factory. The platform orchestrates multiple AI agents to analyze millions of data points and more than 2,000 football-specific metrics in real time, turning raw match data into actionable intelligence when decisions matter most. Analysts can spot patterns instantly through synchronized video, data overlays, and 3D visualizations. Coaches can simulate tactical changes in real time against specific opponents, and players will receive personalized match analysis.
The idea is to deliver value across the entire football ecosystem, not just one group, Kurtoglu explained. If you look at other industries, like aircraft engines, analytics completely changed the business modelfrom selling engines to selling engine hours. The same principle applies here. With enough data and processing, you can help fundamentally change how decisions are made on the pitch.
Elevating Human Judgment
One of the most visible changes fans will notice in this years World Cup is AI-enabled digital player avatars in broadcasts and officiating tools. Using computer vision and generative AI, Lenovo and FIFA are producing precise 3D representations of players, modeled on their actual physical dimensions. These avatars will appear in semi-automated offside replays, offering clearer, more contextual visuals for fans in stadiums and at home.
According to Johannes Holzmüller, director of innovation at FIFA, the goal of the partnership is not to automate decision-making but to elevate it. AI, he said, must support human judgment while making its reasoning visible and accountableespecially in a sport where trust is everything.
At the Club World Cup last year in the U.S., we tested a system we call advanced semi-automated offside. The key idea is that the moment the system has a high confidence that all the data is correct, that information is immediately sent to the assistant referee, he says. With this advanced semi-automated offside system, we are setting a new benchmark. [It] will shape expectations for accuracy and fairness in tournaments to come.
Referee View is also returningthis time enhanced. Body-worn referee cameras, stabilized using AI, will provide broadcast-ready footage from the officials point of view. FIFA expects the feature to give billions of fans unprecedented perspectives on the games most critical moments.
Holzmüller explained that creating precise player avatars before the start of the tournament gives the system additional context, allowing it to determine offside situations with much higher confidence. When the system reaches that level of certainty, it can send direct guidance to assistant referees, reducing the need to delay decisions. Under current rules, delayed flags often mean play continues longer than necessary, increasing the risk of collisions and injuries before the ball goes out of play. By improving both confidence and speed, the technology helps avoid those situations and reduces unnecessary risk on the pitch.
AI Could Reshape Sport Strategies
Lenovo helped us create an end-to-end process, starting from scanning the playerswhich takes only one secondthrough to having a digital asset platform where this information can be used across different use cases, says Holzmüller. Our thought behind integrating new technologies is to make the game fairer, clearer, and safer for everyone involved.
Kurtoglu believes that deeper integration of AI and data could reshape how teams approach tactics, decision-making, and tournament planning ahead of the World Cup. Strategies could change. It comes down to how you translate data into insights. The more data you have, the more analytics and AI you can apply, and eventually that will change tactics, analysis and even commentary, he says. That is why this is such an exciting moment for sports and technology.
If Lenovos bet holds, the worlds biggest sporting events will raise the bar for how AI and analytics operate far beyond the stadium.
