If theres one thing that digital platforms really dont want, its you giving login details to people outside of your household.
The past few years have seen Netflix, Disney, and HBO Maxto name a fewcrack down on password sharing with anyone who doesnt live under your roof.
Now, Amazon has joined them.
The Seattle e-commerce giant is ending its Prime Invitee program as of October 1 and is offering up the Amazon Family plan in its place.
What’s the difference between Prime Invitee and Amazon Family?
The former allowed Prime subscribers to share their free shipping benefits with a select number of individuals outside their abode.
By contrast, the Amazon Family plan is restricted to people living in your household. It will allow you to add one other adult who shares your address and four children.
The plan also includes four teen accounts, but those accounts must have been created before April 7 which is when Amazon discontinued its teen program.
These individuals can access benefits including free delivery on Prime eligible items, Prime Video (with ads), Amazon Music (ad-free on shuffle mode), and other content like audio books and games.
Like its fellow tech companies, Amazon is angling for a boost in subscriptions. The announcement comes just as Reuters reported Amazons Prime signups failed to meet last years numbers or current targets ahead of Julys Prime Day event. Amazon told Reuters that its membership numbers continue to grow, but didnt provide figures.
Fast Company has reached out to Amazon for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
Last August, a federal judge issued a historic ruling against search giant Google: The company engaged in monopolistic behavior when it offered payment to be the default search engine on tech platforms owned by other companies.
Months later, the historic antitrust verdict led the Department of Justice (DOJ) to seek numerous possible remedies against Google, including limiting the companys ability to enter into paid search deal agreements and selling off its Chrome browser.
But yesterday, the federal judge overseeing the case issued his remedies, which manyincluding those on Wall Streetsee as a win for Google, as the company has been allowed to escape the harshest consequences.
As a result, shares in Google and Apple are up in premarket trading on Wednesday. Here’s what you need to know:
Whats happened?
Yesterday, the U.S. district judge presiding over the DOJ’s long-running antitrust case against Google issued remedies that the company would be liable for. And many industry watchers and legal experts say Google got off much better than it could have.
After the same judge, Amit Mehta, ruled last August that Google engaged in monopolistic behavior in several aspects of its search business, the U.S. Department of Justice proposed several possible remedies, including:
Selling off its Chrome web browser
Selling off its Android operating system
Barring Google from entering into preferred search agreements with third parties
If Google were forced to sell off Chrome and Android, it would lose control over the software that billions of people across the globe use to interact with the internet, the companys services, and its search tools.
This impact would also greatly harm Google’s search business, and any new owner of Android and Chrome likely wouldnt keep Google as the default search engine of the software.
Barring Google from entering preferred search agreements would have also greatly affected the companys advertising revenues, as that DOJ provision would have forbidden Google from paying third parties, such as Apple, to make Google the default search engine on other companies devices.
That remedial provision would have also significantly hurt the revenues of Samsung and Apple, with which Google has preferred search deals. The company reportedly pays Apple a staggering $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on the iPhone.
DOJ ‘overreached’
Yet none of these DOJ-proposed remedies will be levied against Google, Mehta revealed yesterday.
Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment, the decision stated, as noted by CNBC.
It went on to say that the DOJ overreached in seeking forced divestiture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints.
At the same time, Google didnt get off scot-free.
Judge Mehta said that while the company can continue to make payments to preload its products on third-party devices and services, it is not allowed to enter into exclusive contracts that bar those third parties from offering other search options.
This means Google can continue to pay Apple billions to have its search featured on the iPhone.
Announcing this decision, the filing stated (via CNN), Cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantialin some cases, cripplingdownstream harms to distribution partners, related markets, and consumers, which counsels against a broad payment ban.
The judgment also requires Google to share search data with rivals.
How have Google, Apple, and the DOJ reacted?
Despite walking away relatively unscathed, Google has taken issue with the remedies that the judge did levy against it in a statement published to its blog.
Now the Court has imposed limits on how we distribute Google services, and will require us to share Search data with rivals, the statement read. We have concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy, and were reviewing the decision closely. The Court did recognize that divesting Chrome and Android would have gone beyond the cases focus on search distribution, and would have harmed consumers and our partners.
The Department of Justice framed the ruling as a win, despite the agency not seeing its major proposed remedies adopted by the court.
In the statement on the ruling, the DOJ said that the courts ruling recognizes the need for remedies that will pry open the market for general search services, which has been frozen in place for over a decade.
The agency also said that the ruling recognizes the need to prevent Google from using the same anticompetitive tactics for its [generative artificial intelligence] products as it used to monopolize the search market, and the remedies will reach GenAI technologies and companies.
Apple has not issued a public response to the ruling, though in late 2024, the company filed a motion to support Google in the antitrust casea request Mehta ultimately denied. Fast Company reached out to Apple for comment.
How has Google stock reacted?
Its not hard to guess how the stock price for Googles parent company, Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG), reacted after the company avoided the harshest proposed consequences of the antitrust verdict.
GOOG shares are currently trading up above 5.6% in premarket trading as of this writing. Currently, GOOGs stock price is $224 per sharea high for the year.
Before Alphabets share price jump after the ruling, GOOG shares were already up more than 11% for the year as of yesterdays close. Over the past 12 months, GOOG shares have risen more than 28% as of yesterdays close.
How has Apple stock reacted?
While Alphabet shares are seeing the most benefit from yesterdays ruling this morning, Apple stock (Nasdaq: AAPL) is also benefiting.
As of the time of this writing, in premarket trading, AAPL shares are currently up over 4% to $239. Thats the highest price they have seen since March, before they got pummeled by Trumps tariff orders.
Before this mornings 4% jump, AAPL shares were down more than 8% for the year so far, as of market close yesterday. Over the past 12 months, AAPL shares were up a paltry 0.3% as of yesterdays close.
One of the most powerful buttons on your phone is also one of the easiest to ignore.
Im referring to the humble “Share” button, a mainstay of both iOS and Android that unlocks all kinds of useful features. Beyond just sharing links and photos with other people, the Share button serves as a hub for all kinds of helpful shortcuts.
Even so, the Share button often feels undervalued, with some apps even hiding it out of sight. I know this because when I first wrote this column for my Advisorator newsletter subscribers, I got a bunch of emails from folks who never realized how useful the Share button can be. Lets take a few minutes, then, to appreciate everything it can do and optimize it for maximum efficiency.
Share button basics
Spot the Share buttons in Plexamp, Ivory, and Amazon [Screenshot: Jared Newman]
No matter which app youre using, think of the Share button as a way to send data elsewhere. Just tap the button, and youll get a menu of other apps (or even people) to share with.
Finding the Share button isnt always so simple, though. In some apps, the button appears as a box with an arrow pointing outwards, while in others it may resemble a set of dots with interconnected lines. You might also just see the word Share instead.
Certain apps even hide the full Share menu out of sight. In Instagram, for instance, you must hit the paper airplane icon at the bottom of a post, then hit the “Share via” button. Bluesky does something similar, making you hit a secondary “Share via” button after tapping the Share icon in a post.
Just know that if an app has shareable infowhether its a link, a photo, or a filetheres likely a Share button hiding somewhere.
Know what to share
Share menus on Android (left) and iPhone (right) [Screenshot: Jared Newman]
The Share buttons most basic use is sending photos or links to friends. From your photo gallery, for instance, hitting the Share button underneath an image lets you share it through other apps such as Messages or Facebook.
But beyond that, the Share button serves as a hub for all kinds of time-saving shortcuts. Some of my favorite examples:
Saving links from a web browser to a bookmarking app such as Raindrop, or to a read-it-later app such as Instapaper
Using the Contacts app on iOS or Android to pass along someones contact info in a text message
Sending an emailed PDF file to Notability for annotation
Copying shareable playlist links from music apps such as Spotify
Sending a file directly from email to a cloud storage service such as Dropbox or OneDrive
Using the iOS Files app or Googles Android Files app to send multiple files as email attachments
The possibilities are only limited by the apps youve installed on your phone, so try experimenting with the Share button in different apps to see what you can do.
Android users: Note that the full list of options may not appear when you first hit the Share button. Depending on your device, you may have to scroll through the list and hit More to see all of your apps.
Pin your favorites
Pinning favorite apps on Samsung, Google Pixel, and iPhone [Screenshot: Jared Newman]
Once youve found some favorite apps to use with the Share menu, you can pin them to the beginning of the menu for faster access.
On iOS: Scroll to the end of the horizontal icon list, hit the More button, then hit Edit. Hit the + button next to any app to add it to your favorites, then use the button to reorder them.
On Android: If necessary, hit the More button until you see a full list of icons. Depending on the phone, you can either long-press an icon to pin it, or (on Samsung phones, for instance) hit the pencil icon and drag your favorites to the top.
Hide suggested contacts (iPhone only)
By default, the iOS share sheet includes a row of people to share with at the very top. If youre bothered by these suggestionsas I amyou can hide specific contacts or remove this section altogether.
Hide a contact: Long-press their pofile picture, then hit Suggest Less.
Hide all contacts: Head to Settings > Siri & Search (or Apple Intelligence & Siri), then look under Suggestions from Apple, and disable Show when Sharing.
Discover extra actions
Extra actions in the Share menuincluding a print function. [Screenshot: Jared Newman]
The Share menu isnt just a way to send data to other apps. It can also provide useful actions within the app youre already using. For example:
In Safari for iOS, the Share button is where youll find important browser features such as Find in Page and Add Bookmark.
Both iOS and Android let you print documents from the Share menu. Just look for the Print button when sharing from your web browser or apps like Google Docs.
Hitting Share in Chrome for Android lets you take a full-page screenshot.
Hitting Share in iOS Photos brings up options to turn an image into a wallpaper or Apple Watch face, or assign it to a contact.
On iOS, you can expand the Share menu even further with Shortcuts. For instance, installing CmlCmlCml adds an option to the Share menu on Amazons app to check an items price history, while this Shortcut takes the current web page and reads it aloud. Explore the Gallery section of the Shortcuts app for more ideas.
Note that on iOS, these additional actions can be reordered as well. Just scroll to the bottom of the list and hit Edit Actions, and you can pin your favorites to the top.
Faced with so many options, its tempting to just tune out the Share button entirely. But if you take some time to explore its intricacies, you might wonder how you ever got by without it.
This story first appeared in Jared’s Advisorator newsletter. Sign up to get more advice every Tuesday.
This fantasy football season, Aaron VanSledright is letting his bot call the shots.
Ahead of the NFL season, the Chicago-based cloud engineer built a custom AI draft agent that pulls real-time data from ESPN and FantasyPros, factoring in last-minute intel like injuries and roster cuts.
Using his background in coding and cloud computing, VanSledright spun up the agent in just a week with Anthropics Claude large language models. He also tapped Amazon Web Services tools, including the new Strands SDK, which helps developers launch agents with just a few lines of code.
“Let’s see how well the AI performs against other humans, because nobody else in my league is doing this,” he tells Fast Company.
In this Premium story, subscribers will learn:
How players are using AI to improve player selection and create balanced rosters
The off-the-shelf AI products that anyone can play with
Why even early adopters are leaving room for human decisions
VanSledright customized the bot for the quirks of his two-quarterback league (where each team must start two QBs) by designing a weighting system that values positions differently depending on how the draft unfolds: Stockpile skill players first, grab quarterbacks next, and then fill out the rest. The bot will stay active all season, offering weekly lineup projections. He hopes it will ease the pressureand the visceral angstof making his own picks.
Admittedly terrible at fantasy football, VanSledright wanted to see what would happen if he stripped the human emotion out of this season. Could AI outperform his own mind, gut, and memory?
“[League-mates] are going to show up with their emotion-based picks, maybe some facts based on projections and everything,” VanSledright says. “But it’s kind of all who you feel week to week.”
Hes not alone. As generative AI becomes more accessible, fantasy players are experimenting with DIY tools to optimize their teamsfrom chatbots that suggest sleepers to scouts that analyze rivals drafting habits.
Whether these experiments produce game-winning Hail Marys or just new scapegoats when the season goes south, one thing is clear: Fantasy football players are increasingly willing to let machines take on decisions long dominated by human bias.
“Like a scout sitting next to you”
Chatter about AI in fantasy football is picking up. Mentions of the topic across X, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Reddit jumped 728% year over year, according to the software firm Sprinklr. (Still, with only 14,000 posts in 2025, the conversation remains relatively niche.)
Ryan Laughlin, a longtime fantasy football fan, is taking a different approach: using AI to track and predict his competition. Combining his own machine learning model with historical data from Yahoos API and OpenAIs LLMs, Laughlinwho works in commerce payments at JPMorgan Chase while pursuing a computer science masters degree part-timeset out to analyze how his league-mates have drafted in past seasons.
The result is a draft scout that generates AI summaries of league players tendencies, showing who delays drafting quarterbacks and who prioritizes running backs. As Laughlin explains it: People often forget each managers style year to year. His tool is designed to feel like a scout sitting next to you, trying to help you win your fantasy week.
To test the concept, Laughlin spent a few hundred dollars on Reddit ads targeting fantasy football subreddits, inviting others to try it and share feedback.
“I’ve gotten actually pretty strong feedback from people who say it resonates with them,” Laughlin says. “Like they read their own profile and say it’s actually kind of true and kind of weirdly accurate. They don’t have objections to it, but people aren’t incentivized to share it because if you share with your league, you’re giving away the competitive advantage.”
AI in fantasy football isnt entirely new. Back in 2015, IBM Watson rolled out tools that crunched data from Twitter activity, coaching stats, football articles, and more. Today, IBM is in its ninth year of a partnership with ESPN. Its Watsonx platform now powers features like an “AI Weekly Preview” and data-driven categories suggesting which players to add, drop, or trade.
But now those tools are reaching scale. Roughly 13 million fantasy players use IBM features (up from 12 million last year), according to Kameryn Stanhouse, IBMs vice president of sports and entertainment partnerships. Behind the recommendations: 36 billion data points, from player stats and team performance to news coverage, media sentiment, and injury reports.
There are the typical stats that you’re getting that everyone has access to, Stanhouse says. But also the ability to use that unstructured data and be able to scan the web and understand what reporters are saying. If players are getting a lot of positive media sentiment there, we’re attributing value to those as opposed to others.”
“People treat AI as an Oracle”
Startups are also pushing into fantasy sports from other industries. Sourcetable, originally built for stock traders and hedge funds, now offers its AI-driven spreadsheet platform with features tailored to fantasy football. By pulling data from ESPN, Sleeper, and Yahoo, the tool enables deeper modeling and real-time insights. Founder and CEO Eoin McMillan sees potential to expand into other sports, though he acknowledges some trade-offs.
Maybe Im just nostalgic, but I do think we lose some excitement from the game as we move increasingly toward stats management, McMillan says. On the other hand, Brady and Belichick were clearly early at being disciplined on this game-manager-mode trend, and the results showed.
Others are building tools to rethink how lineups come together in real time. Phoenix-based data scientist Ben Jensen, for example, created a draft optimizer to help assemble a balanced roster during live draftssomething traditional player projections rarely address. His tool accounts for roster constraints, models hypothetical picks from rival managers, and reflects his personal preferences with tags ranging from strongly like to strongly dislike. It also simulates whether to take or wait on certain players.
Jensen notes that he used AI mainly for coding, not for decision-makin. That distinction, he says, prevents blind trust in a system with its own risks. Too often people treat AI as an oracle instead, and then get frustrated when it isnt a magic bullet, he says. To whatever extent I inform my strategies with AI, I still am accountable for the outcome.
Theres no other phone Id rather be using right now than Samsungs Galaxy Z Fold7and thats a problem.
Ive been a foldable phone appreciator for a while now, and a couple of years ago, I caved and bought a Galaxy Z Fold5 for my own personal use. The phone was far from perfect, but I loved being able to conjure a small tablet from my pocket to watch videos, read e-books, and multitask.
Two years later, it is really hard going back to that phoneor to any non-foldable phone, for that matter. Using the Fold7 on loan from Samsung has emphasized just how compromised those earlier efforts were, and it makes those prior shortcomings a lot harder to overlook.
Its a normal-size phone now
Unlike a lot of other reviewers, I never hated the narrow outer screen on Samsungs previous foldables. Compared with other large smartphones, that screen was easier to use one-handed, and I grew accustomed to only using it on the go.
[Photo: Jared Newman]
But yes, it is nicer having a foldable phone whose outer screen works in any scenario. The Fold7s 6.5-inch outer screen is about 8 millimeters narrower across than an iPhone 16 Pro Max, so the ease of using it one-handed isnt entirely gone. But unfolding it when Im on the couch or at the kitchen counter doesnt feel as much like a necessity.
The bigger deal, though, is the extent to which the Fold7 feels like a regular phone now. When folded shut, its 3.2 millimeters thinner than last years Fold6, and only about 0.7 millimeters thicker than an iPhone 16 Pro Max. Its also 12 grams lighter than Apples largest phone, and they just dont feel all that different anymore. You could even put a case on the Fold7 without adding insufferable levels of bulk.
The only other foldable phones that have reached this territory are ones you cant buy in the United States, like Honors Magic V5 and Oppos Find N5.
The inner screen isnt as weird
Samsung isnt making a big deal about crease improvements in the Galaxy Z Foldmaybe because it doesnt want to draw attention to the crease to begin withbut its far less pronounced now. Youll still see it and feel it under your fingers, but the indent is gentler and blends in better when the screen is on.
[Photo: Jared Newman]
Theres also one other major improvement that wont show up on a spec sheet: Compared with my Fold5, the inner screen of the Fold7 has less of a gap between the built-in screen protector and the bezels around the display. That gap is a dust magnet on the older phone, and it can quickly get kind of gross in there. That hasnt been a problem with the Fold7.
Multitasking is better
Like earlier versions, the Fold7 can run two apps side by side or in floating windows. This is especially handy for watching live TV while doing other things, like dealing with emails or browsing the web.
[Photo: Jared Newman]
But on the Fold7, Samsung added a new mode thats more about quickly switching between a pair of full-size apps. If you open the apps in split screen, then drag the divider almost to the edge of the screen, youll see a narrow glimpse of the other app, and you can tap on it to switch over. Its a lot easier than using clunky swipe gestures, and it feels sort of like having two apps open, side by side, on a much larger screen.
Its still a compromise
None of these improvements means that the Galaxy Z Fold7 is just as good as a regular phone in every way. Foldable phones have inherent size and cost constraints that continue to require compromise.
The main one, still, is camera quality. Yes, Samsung improved the Fold7s rear camera with a 200-megapixel wide-angle lens and larger image sensor, matching the S25 Ultra, but the ultrawide and telephoto lenses lack the same parity. (Limited optical zoom is the thing I miss most compared with other flagships.) Even with the main lens, the Fold7 struggles with motion in low lightI got a bunch of bad photos last weekend at an escape room with my familythough this may be more of a Samsung problem than a foldable one.
The Fold7s fingerprint reader also remains under the power button on the side of the phone. I dont see this as a major downgrade from under-display fingerprint readers, but it does take some getting used to. (Like other Samsung phones, the Fold7 offers face recognition as an unlock option, but its less secure than the iPhone and Pixel phone versions, with the possibility of being fooled by an image of your face.)
Then there are the little missing things, like S Pen support, dust-proofing, and Qi2 magnetic accessories. While Google added the latter two features to its forthcoming Pixel 10 Pro Fold, it made the phone thicker and heavier than last years model to accommodate them.
Phone makers will inevitably whittle away at these things. Honors Magic V5, for instance, works with a stylus despite being slightly thinner than the Fld7and its use of silicon carbon batteries shows how device makers could fit more tech in less space.
[Photo: Jared Newman]
And yes, the Fold7 costs $2,000, which is $100 more than last years Fold6. Subsidies from the major U.S. carriers can knock that price in half, but thats still asking a lot when theyre offering subsidized iPhone 16s and Galaxy S25s at no cost.
What Samsung wont tell you, though, is that the value of these phones drops like rocks on the secondhand market. The Fold7 only launched a month ago, yet its already selling for more than $600 under the list price in mint condition on sites like Swappa.
Thats probably the road Ill end up traveling when I send the Fold7 back to Samsung and find my two-year-old Fold5 unbearable by comparison.
A quarter-century ago, David Saylor shepherded the epic Harry Potter fantasy series onto U.S. bookshelves. As creative director of childrens publisher Scholastic, he helped design and execute the American editions of the first three novels in the late 1990s.
But when the manuscript for J.K. Rowlings fourth book landed on his desk, Saylor sat up straight: It was huge. Bigger, more complex and narratively intricate than virtually any storybook ever aimed at children.
I had to really think, he said in a recent interview. How are we going to typeset this book? How are we going to print a million copies? How are we going to get enough paper?
Bound and shipped, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire clocked in at a formidable 734 pages2.5 pounds. It was, of course, another in a series of massive hits that collectively spent a decade atop The New York Times Bestseller List, ensnaring both children and adults, including most of Saylors friends.
He jokes that until the advent of Potter, mostly no one cared that I worked in children’s books. As excitement for the series grew, friends would ask him when the newest installment was due . . . and what happens next?
Suddenly my job became important, he said.
But the book and its six co-volumes now serve another purpose: Theyre an eloquent proof point in an ongoing conversation in the publishing world: Are kids still reading books?
By the time Potter arrived, Saylor had lived through waves of predictions about the next extinction-level event to doom his industry. First it was TV, then video games. Before that it was radio and comic books, once derisively called the ten-cent plague.
I’m only slightly jaded by these reports, said Saylor, 65, only because people are always predicting that kids are going to stop reading, and that the end of publishing is near.
This time, it feels different.
Even as childrens publishing explodes with new talent and excitement from fans online, new distractions and diversions are precipitously driving down the share of young people who read for fun. Its a long-simmering problem that even the optimist Saylor acknowledges his industry must confront.
The reading class
Over the course of two generations, from 1984 to 2023, the proportion of 13-year-olds who said they never or hardly ever read for fun on their own time has nearly quadrupled, from just 8% to 31%.
During that time, the percentage of middle-schoolers who read for fun almost every day has fallen by double digits, according to surveys conducted for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test widely known as the nations report card: In 1984, 35% of middle school kids read for fun almost every day. By 2023, it was just 14%.
The phenomenon is part of a larger shift away from reading, research suggests: A new study from the University of Florida and University College London found that daily reading for pleasure has dropped more than 40% among adults over the last two decades, a sustained, steady decline of about 3% per year.
[Image: Courtesy The 74]
Findings like these have sparked fears that, after more than a century of steadily expanding literacy, reading is devolving into an act relegated to a small group of elites, a reading class that enjoys books while the rest of us see them as, in the words of scholar Wendy Griswold, an increasingly arcane hobby.
Its a strange and thorny problem that in some sense seems contradictory: If you followed around a young person for a day, youd likely see that she is reading constantly, but often in tiny fragments. In addition to school assignments, shes taking in a ton of atomized content: alerts, text messages, memes and social media posts. All those bits add up for sureone study found that the typical American reads the equivalent of a slim novel every daybut it isnt the same as sitting down to read a book.
For young people, thats having downstream effects, with NAEP reading scores slumping even before the pandemic and college professors increasingly reporting that students are uncomfortable tackling long reading assignments, let alone complete books.
Adam Kotsko, an assistant professor who teaches in the Great Books School, a discussion-based classics program at North Central College in Naperville, Ill., recently reported that his students are intimidated by any reading longer than 10 pages. They seemingly emerge from readings of as little as 20 pages, he said, with no real understanding.
Adam Kotsko [Photo: Courtesy Adam Kotsko]
That has put pressure on professors to design courses with feer readings: I got to a point where I was cutting to the bone so much that there wasn’t even enough to discuss in some class sessions, he said in an interview. It seems like the habits of sustained reading are not being taught in the first place, in some cases, and they’re just being replaced with nothing.
While COVID lockdowns took a toll on reading, the problem predates the pandemic. Many observers point to several possible culprits, including schools fraught approaches to reading instruction and two decades of test-driven K-12 school pedagogies, which often de-emphasize fiction in favor of short non-fiction passages.
This has all taken place amid the dawn of smartphonesthe iPhone turned 18 in Juneand the rapid, unregulated rise of social media. So Kotsko and his colleagues are careful not to place the blame on students shoulders, but on a schooling and media ecosystem they cant control.
We are not complaining about our students, he wrote recently. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.
Continuous partial attention
Gabriel Baez, 15, said phones are a big distraction at his South Florida charter school. As soon as teachers give students even a moment of downtime, the phones come out. Several teachers have begun requiring students to stash them in special pouches during class. No distractionsthat’s the only thing that I think helped a lot of us.
A sophomore, Baez said hes excited to read the science fiction thriller Ready Player Onea novel about, of all things, video games. He loved the 2018 Steven Spielberg movie, but said most days hes overscheduled and barely able to find a minute to open a book.
Gabriel Baez [Photo: Courtesy Gabriel Baez]
Hes in class from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., then does homework until 5 p.m. Dinner is at 6 p.m., then he studies a bit more. From 7 to 8 p.m. its soccer training, then bed so he can wake up early and do it all again. I really don’t have time unless I decide to substitute something.
For many young people, school is what gets in the way of books.
Julia Goggin, 15, grew up reading books and loving them. She consumed the first few Harry Potter books unassisted in second grade and finished the series by fourth grade. She read a lot in middle school.
In high school? Not so much.
Like Baez, shes heavily scheduled, running cross country in the fall and track and field in the winter. Shes in her schools theater group, which means after-school rehearsals. Then homework. All of it leaves little time for reading anything aside from school assignments.
If a school is too overbearing about forcing kids to read a lot, it makes them not want to read for fun because it’s not fun anymore, she said. Because school isn’t fun.
A junior at a private high school in Wilmington, N.C., Goggin enjoys reading, but said her two younger brothers, eighth- and ninth-graders, dont. They never got into reading the same way I did when they were little. Since then, I guess, they’ve just played video games instead. That’s, like, all they do all day.
Over the years, she has noticed a change in herself: As a kid, she read for relaxation. But now all I want to do is scroll on TikTok, which is really bad, she said with a laugh. Now I have to be more conscious: Instead of going on my phone, I have to make the decision to read, which is different than before. When I was younger, it was just a default.
To be sure, young people in the U.S. are reading wordslots of words. Perhaps more than ever.
In her most recent book, the literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf noted that research from as far back as 2009 found that the average American reads what amounts to 34 gigabytes of information, or about 100,500 words, dailyfrom newspapers, magazines, books, games, messages and social media posts. For a bit of perspective, To Kill a Mockingbird, the Harper Lee classic, clocks in at about 100,000 words.
While all that grazing certainly adds up, Wolf said, its rarely continuous, sustained, or concentrated. Rather, those 34 gigabytes represent one spasmodic burst of activity after another.
She said the fact that young people are reading all those words should comfort no one. It means nothing. The inabilityor the unwillingnessto go deeper is whats more important. I think we have, really, a demise of deep reading, which for me is synonymous with critical thinking and empathy and the beauty of the reading act.
While the 20th century saw literacy rates in the U.S. climb steadily, technological developments such as movies, radio, TV and the Internet shifted modern culture away from reading and writing and toward visual and oral communication. One unintended result: at least two generations of young people who see books and reading as optional.
In the meantime, 65% of 8-to-12-year-olds now have an iPhone or other smartphone, according to a 2024 survey by the market research group YPulseand 92% of 8-to-12-year-olds are on social media, where theyre inundated with memes and short-form videos.
Carl Hendrick [Photo: Courtesy Carl Hendrick]
Carl Hendrick, a Dublin-born professor at Academica University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam and co-author of the 2024 book How Learning Happens, accuses this generations parents of all but abdicating their responsibilities.
He likens smartphones cognitive disruptions to the health effects of cigarettes, recalling that he grew up in Ireland at a time when smoking was ubiquitous. You could smoke on busesyou could smoke on airplanes. You could smoke anywhere. We look back on that now with horror. And I think the same thing will be true of phones. Well go, How did we allow 11-year-olds to go onto social media?
Hendrick, who has emerged internationally as a leading advocate for improving classroom instruction via better understanding of learning science, said digital distractions are taking a toll, hijacking kids ability to engage their working memory on difficult texts and problems. That kind of laser-like focus, he said, is rapidly disappearing from our lives due to the weaponized distraction of social media. It’s at an extraordinary level of sophistication to try and grab your attention, he said.
In a recent Substack newsletter, he laid down the gauntlet: Solitude, slowness and sustained attention are no longer default states but acts of resistance. And as those conditions erode, so too does the possibility of the moral work that deep reading once quietly performed.
While social media sites are the latest offenders, the phenomenon is hardly new. In 1998, the sociologist and computer researcher Linda Stone coined the term continuous partial attention to capture the ways in which the first digital television networks allowed users to connect and be connected 24/7. She described a kind of early FOMO, or fear of missing out. But it also generated an artificial sense of constant crisis, a dopamine-generated high alert thats hard to extinguish.
By contrast, Hendrick said, giving oneself over to reading deeply, whether its literature, philosophy or any complex text, offers something more: a rehearsal for real life, and for the patience we need to deal with one another. It is a rehearsal in understanding before judging, listening before reacting, he wrote recently. This is not merely a virtue. It is a survival skill for a pluralistic, tolerant society.
Ironically, one of the big drivers of the discredited whole language movement was to foster a love of books and reading. But what educators missed at the time was that not teaching all kids to read proficiently at a young age meant reading became more and more laborious as they got older, since they couldnt handle more complex texts, said Holly Lane, director of the University of Florida Literacy Institute.
Nobody likes doing something that they’re not good at, she said. They may love the idea of reading, but they don’t like the act of reading.
That, to many observers, is the original sin of the reading problem: the nations uneven commitment to teaching reading in ways we now know are more effective, such as explicit phonics instruction, which systematically teaches students the relationships between letters and sounds. Other, less effective methods, such as whole language instruction, emphasize immersion in texts rather than attention to isolated skills.
Like many educators who are pushing schools to embrace scientific approaches to literacy, Lane is hopeful about improvements in states like Mississippi and Louisiana. But she worries that progress at the elementary school level will be wasted if educators cant help students at the secondary level develop the stamina to read longer, more difficult texts. Without that, she said, they wont develop into readers. When they leave high school, even if they can read, they don’t.
Others worry that the rush to teach phonics without attention to solid background knowledge will continue to yield disappointing results. Phonics instruction is trendy to care about right now, said Boston Universitys Elena Forzani, but its being enacted in pretty superficial ways that ignore student motivation. We’re teaching kids to read in a content and motivational vacuum, said Forzani, who directs the universitys Literacy Education and Reading Education programs.
In order to be able to read deeply, she said, students need many opportunities to enjoy, analyze, discuss and write about a text and the issues or problems it presents. But when she visits classrooms, she sees students reading short, disconnected popcorn passages with new topics every day, sometimes multiple times a day.
While more and more kids are getting the explicit phonics instruction they need at an early age, the vast majority are learning to read in a very isolated fashionthe focus is on the skills. And kids don’t care about that. Theyre humans, like the rest of us. You only want to learn a new skill if it’s going to do something for you.
Very good readersand voracious readers
When he visits schools to sign books, the Japanese-American writer and illustrator Kazu Kibuishi sees this in action. His popular nine-volume Amulet series of graphic adventure novels about siblings who must find their kidnapped mother, finds a rapt audience of dedicated fans.
I don’t really buy that kids are not reading anymore, because I see the opposite of that all the time, he said in an interview. I find kids to be very good readersand voracious readers.
But state-of-the-art digital entertainment has conditioned them to want more from their media. Their minds are encoded to get information as fast as possible, he said. They have to turn that off when they go to school.
An action-packed page from Kazu Kibuishis Amulet graphic novel series. [Image: Courtesy Scholastic Graphix]
Kibuishis publisher, Scholastic, has gone all in on graphic novelsSaylor, the creative director, even established an imprint dedicated to the gnre. Teachers and librarians regularly tell him that kids read them voraciously and repeatedly, until they fall apart.
Kibuishi said he creates comics that provide high-quality, dense information on every page, with fast-moving, high-stakes plotlines, rich illustrations and heightened emotions from his characters. His inspirations are the classic Marvel comics from the 1950s through the 1980s. Big ideas were baked into small spaces, he said.
Creators like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby put a tremendous amount of life experience into the slim stories, which he compares to little sponge dinosaurs that expand exponentially in water.
A self-described average student, Kabuishi found his calling in storytelling after reading Ernest Hemingways The Old Man and the Sea in high school. I read it pretty much in one sitting, he said. And when I was done with the book, I was transformed.
The words felt like pictures, and the book was so short, he said. It was the first time reading didnt feel like homework. I felt like I was on a fishing boat. I felt like I had just experienced the rise and fall of this fisherman’s journey with this fish. And it was so poetic. The little book felt so much bigger than any other book than I’d been asked to read in class.
The struggle to find such magic books is real, said Kelsey Clodfelter, a veteran English teacher at a Chicago public high school. She teaches students whose skills are often years behind where they should be by 10th or 11th grade.
When reading is hard for you, when it is literally difficult for you to decode words at the age of 16 or 17, reading is a very painful experience, she said. It’s also really embarrassing.
Kelsey Clodfelter [Image: Courtesy Kelsey Clodfelter]
Clodfelter, 35, who has a large TikTok following as “Mrs. C,” said Common Core reforms of the past decade essentially replaced book-length readings with short non-fiction texts designed to prepare students for the kind of reading theyll do in the real world. While it didnt prohibit longer reading assignments, it may have made it harder for many teachers to assign appropriate books.
And COVID, she said, really did a number on us in terms of the transactional nature of school, sending students the clear message that grades mattered more than learning, that standards in general were lowerand that nearly any effort was satisfactory.
The upshot, she said, is that shes working harder all the time to get kids through reading assignments: She often swaps classic texts for contemporary memoirs, such as I’m Glad My Mom Died by actress Jeanette McCurdy. She invites students to read silently in class for 20-minute stretches. She creates book groups, and even sits with them and reads passages aloud.
Students still won’t read the book, she said.
Nobody can learn this much
These days, even the most elite students are rebelling against reading.
Daniel Willingham, a longtime University of Virginia professor, said he has noticed lately that his studentssome of the most successful that the system producesnot only complain about long readings but about being asked to learn as much as I ask them to learn.
Like Clodfelter, Willingham believes the pandemic scaled back expectations that have yet to be restored.
Each year since 1985, he has taught an introduction to cognitive psychology course that has changed little in 40 years. Students read about a chapter a week, averaging 30 pages or so. A careful reading, he said, would require about four hours of work.
This is the first year since the pandemic [that] I’ve been hearing from students, This is an unreasonable expectation. Nobody can learn this much.
A leading authority on cognitive science in the classroom, Willingham suggests to his students that they consider different study strategies. Long an advocate for the importance of broad background knowledge in reading instruction, Willingham said hes actually cheered and optimistic that more educators are realizing the importance of a rich curriculum.
But he worries about the time young people spend onlinerecent research suggests that they now spend most of their waking hours in front of screens, he said.
That may be the biggest irony embedded in this dilemma: The Internet has seemingly decimated young peoples desire to read books, offering them endless distractions and opportunities to do somethinganythingelse.
But dig a little deeper and youll find it is also doing a lot of heavy lifting, making it easier than ever for young people to find great books and connect to likeminded people who want desperately to talk about them.
Daphne LaPlante, 25, a video editor in Austin, Texas, posts videos to TikTok, Instagram and elsewhere proclaiming her love of books. She got her start on the app in 2021, in her final year of college.
Daphne LaPlante [Photo: Courtesy Daphne LaPlante]
Scrolling on the popular video app, she realized that other young people were also hungry for conversations about books. One of her favorites, the fantasy novel Six of Crows, was being made into a TV show, she recalled and I had nobody to talk to about it. So she turned on her phones camera and hit record. Soon her videos began detailing what shed read eac month, and before long she was recommending books. After a while, publishers took note and started sending her advance copies of new titles.
LaPlante now has more than 40,000 followers on TikTok and over 30,000 on Instagram, and jokes that she has become a micro-influencer in the corner of the social media site known as BookTok. Born during the pandemic, it has become so influential that it has both crowned new hits and turned a few backlist books into best-sellers. One industry analysis suggests that BookTok has changed behaviors: In 2021, the year it started gaining momentum, book sales rose in the U.S. by 9%, to 825.7 million copies, the most since the research company NPD BookScan began tracking sales data in 2004.
I think a big part of getting people into reading is community, she said.
For the past year-and-a-half, LaPlante and a friend have also recorded a podcast called Rereading the Revolution, about their love for 2010s-era young-adult dystopian fiction, epitomized by The Hunger Games and similar titles. There are a lot of people, like me, who read those and were obsessed with them as a kid, she said.
I don’t want to eat the f***ing salad
If hed had a mobile phone 25 years ago, Hendrick, the Irish educator, might well have been on BookTok, forcefully recommending his favorite literature, history and philosophy books. He recalled getting lost as a young man in The Great Gatsby, reading it cover-to-cover in two days. He has since read and taught it many times, but wonders: If he was 16 now, what incentive would he have to read such a book, given all the social forces in teens lives? With so much easily attained dopamine via social media, video games, movies and elsewhere, why would anyone go through the effort?
He thinks about what books must look like to his six-year-old daughter. She can read, he volunteered. She’s really clever, but she just doesn’t want to because everything else is so . After considering it for a second, he finally said, She’s in McDonald’s and I’m telling her to eat the salad, and she’s going, I don’t want to eat the f***ing salad. There’s all these chicken nuggets. Why would I do that?
To bring back reading, he said, schools may very well have to do more than just improve instruction and reading stamina and find a few tasty books. Theyll have to get mobile phones out of classrooms, he saidactually, buying a phone for a 10-year-old should be outlawed, he said. Many states and schools, to their credit, are getting the message and banning phones for much of the school day. But they may also have to consider a back-to-basics approach that treats reading as an indicator of public health.
With cars, we mandated seat belts, he said. We mandated speed limits. It may be the case that we need to say, ‘Kids have just got to read for an hour in silence on their own. That’s just itin the same way you’ve got to eat certain vegetables.
In 20 years, Hendrick predicted, well likely discover that reading and, more broadly, deep cognitive focus, offer the same kinds of benefits as exercising or a balanced diet. We’ll look back on this decade, he said, with its easily attained dopamine, its endless mental chicken nuggets and distractions, and realize, We were weaponizing mental health problems.
A quarter-century ago, Hendrick recalled, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the novelist Norman Mailer was unequivocal when asked about their significance. He said, It’s going to take us 10 years to figure this out. Call in the novelists. His thing was, we need to get the writers in to make sense of this.
People, in other words, need books. No matter how advanced our digital media have become, nothing can replace the depth of understanding they afford.
For me, when I read Shakespeare or The Sound and the Fury or [James] Joyce, I was finding out what it meant to be alive, said Hendrick. My struggles were the struggles of other people. And I was learning about ethics and morality. Where are we going to end up without that?
This article was also published at The74Million.org, a nonprofit education news site.
The C-suite executive’s dilemma has never been clearer: there is an analysis gap between recognizing that creativity is an essential skill versus designing space and time for individuals and teams to to build a creative capacity.
While 2023 research from Visier demonstrated that 83% of workers admit to “productivity theater”performing busy work that creates the appearance of output without meaningful resultsthat same year, the World Economic Forum declared creativity to be the second most critical skill for our workforce by 2027. The collision of these realities signals a fundamental shift that smart organizations can no longer ignore. We’re entering what I call the “Imagination Era,” and the companies that thrive will be those bold enough to redesign work around human flourishing rather than industrial-age metrics.
The Hidden Costs of Our Productivity Obsession
The numbers tell a stark story. With 71% of knowledge workers experiencing burnout and job stress (according to the Anatomy of Work Index) costing U.S. industries over $300 billion annually in absenteeism and turnover (American Institute of Stress), our current productivity models aren’t just failingthey’re actively destroying value. While executives worry about quarterly targets, they’re hemorrhaging their most valuable asset: the creative capacity of their people.
The irony is profound. At the very moment when artificial intelligence can handle routine tasks, freeing humans to do what we do bestimagine, connect, and innovatemost organizations are doubling down on mechanical approaches that treat people like sophisticated machines. This isn’t just shortsighted; it’s economically destructive.
From Extraction to Cultivation: A New Operating System
I propose a radical reframe: Instead of asking “How can we be more productive?” what if teams ask “What might we cultivate this year?” This shift from a mechanical, extractive mindset to one that embraces complexity and ambiguity isn’t philosophical luxuryit’s strategic necessity.
The difference is profound. Productivity thinking operates in linear equations: 1+1=2. Cultivation thinking embraces “both-and” complexity, leaving room for the kind of metamorphosis that creates breakthrough innovation. According to 2024 research from Thrive My Way, when trained groups engage in creative problem-solving sessions, they generate 350% more ideas that are 415% more original than traditional approaches.
The New Scorecard: New KPIs for the Imagination Era
We can develop new key performance indicators organized around “Minimum Viable Experiences” rather than traditional output metrics. These aren’t soft measuresthey’re strategic investments in the capabilities that will drive future competitiveness:
Human-Centered Metrics include measuring employee connection to meaningful work, minutes per week dedicated to deep reflection, and value creation through idea generation rather than widget production. Teams can track experimentation through small-scale prototypes and measure both organizational and community-impact audacious ideas.
Well-being and Rest Metrics recognize that innovation requires renewal. Forward-thinking companies could measure sabbaticals taken and their impact on team creativity, time spent in nature per week, and the productivity boost following movement breaks. Tracking stress reduction through wellness assessments and creating dedicated time for play, measuring new connections generated through structured “recess” time, are practical and novel concepts.
Innovation and Learning Metrics focus on interdisciplinary learning opportunities, innovation sprints, and curiosity-driven projects not tied to immediate business needs. What if you tracked the number of walking meetings, recognizing that physical movement often unlocks mental breakthroughs?
Organizations ready to make this transition can start with my three-pronged approach: First, conduct a “Cultivation Audit” to identify productivity metrics that may be limiting innovation while developing measures for long-term human development. Second, implement “Seasonal Planning” that aligns organizational rhythms with natural cycles of activity, reflection, and renewal. Third, launch a “Space Design Revolution” that creates environments supporting both individual cultivation and collective creativity.
The Competitive Advantage of Creativity
The business case is simple: in an age where AI handles routine tasks, the uniquely human capacities cultivated through intentional movement, thought, and rest become the primary drivers of creativity and organizational value. Companies embracing this approach will foster breakthrough innovation through activated default mode networks, reduce costly burnout and turnover, develop essential creativity skills, create sustainable growth patterns, and build stronger collaborative communities.
The goal isn’t abandoning productivity measures but expanding our understanding of meaningful work and impact. Organizations that make this shift will define the Imagination Era. The question isn’t whether this transformation will happen, but whether your organization will lead it or be left behind by those brave enough to cultivate human potential in service of extraordinary results.
In the summer of 2009, the NFL was bracing for war. The owners had walked away from a collective bargaining deal they had signed just two years earlier, demanding pay cuts, slashed pensions, and two extra games for free. They had stockpiled a $4 billion lockout fund and were ready to shut the game down for a year if that is what it took.
On the other side stood a union reeling from the sudden death of its legendary leader, Gene Upshaw. Into that void stepped an outsidera trial lawyer from Washington, D.C., named DeMaurice Smithwhom ESPN called the man with the toughest job in sports. The players had less than $300 million, a string of failed strikes behind them, and the very real prospect of being steamrolled. On top of everything, the players desperately needed to end the owners’ unilateral right under the old deal to add as many games to the regular season as they wished.
[Photo: Penguin Random House]
But this time, the fight would not be linear. The new leader pushed his players to battle on every frontpublic opinion, Congress, and most of all, in the one place owners thought they couldnt be touched: their money. Out of that fight came one of the most unlikely weapons in sports labor historyan insurance policy against a lockout.
It was the first, and only, of its kind. And if the players could pull it off, it might just prevent them from being at the mercy of thirty-one billionaires who saw an opportunity for the greatest power and money grab in the history of professional sports.Excerpted from Smith’s book, “Turf Wars: The Fight for the Soul of America’s Game,” this is the story of how how that deal went down.
AN ACE IN THE HOLE
With negotiations tabled, I did what I do when Im overwhelmed: I escape, and I drink.
An old law partner buddy, David Barrett, and I went to Palm Springs, California, and pounded cocktails.
Owners had been openly bragging about their $4 billion rainy-day fundenough to survive a months-long pausefor years, even before the dust had settled following the Great Recession. Banks werent in a position to lend so much money, and after meeting so many owners, I couldnt imagine that some of those overgrown man-babies had the discipline to save roughly $130 million apiece.
Would the TV networks give it to them? Dave asked. The league has leverage, he continued, because of how much the networks want the broadcast rights.
The day after Dave and I hit the bars, I authorized the hiring of a former network executive to advise us on television contracts. I lobbed what felt like a stupid question to the former executive: Could there be a clause in a broadcast rights contract that would pay owners even if games werent played?
Every contract, this executive explained, includes language about make goods. Say you run a doughnut shop and advertise it on Google. If, for instance, Alphabets servers get hacked and all of its sites go dark, this is the clause that requires Google to make good on the agreement and publish the ad later.
Using similar logic, networks could agree to a deal in which they paid a certain amount of money in the event that games werent played, in exchange for a discount on future payments.
If our theory was correct, it was as if the league had taken out an insurance policy from the networks. If they had, it would have been for less moneya potential violation of the leagues obligations to players under the collective bargaining agreement.
All of this got me thinking that it sure would be amazing if there were such a thing as lockout insurance. It was a disaster wed known was coming, and it wasnt as if we were causing the lockout. In fact, our players were trying like hell to avoid missing work, so the risk wasnt even ours to transfer. Still, I wondered, could there be such an insurance policy? It was a question worth asking.
I got permission to pursue this as a potential nuclear option in our arsenal. Its ultimate value wasnt the payout. It was the leverage it would create. Because if the policy did pay out, our side could withstand a work stoppage for far longer than the owners believed. Their $4 billion had to cover keeping stadiums and team facilities online, administrative staffs paid, and front-end costs guaranteed. Factoring in players salaries, this amount suggested they were prepared to miss half the 2011 season as they waited on players to cave.
But if we sprang this insurance policy on owners at the right time, I explained, owners would realize their eight-game strategy was doomed. The insurance payout was $850 million, set to be distributed after two missed regular-season games. It was enough for players to sit out the entire year, and while it might not pay for their full salary, bonuses, and benefits, it was enough to pay each player $200,000 per weekenough that players wouldnt beg me to sign whatever proposal the league put forth.
Now, here was the tricky part: The premium would cost $47 million. Players murmured, knowing the union had only $200 million in its coffers. It was a huge gamble. I believed that the insurance payout would be enough to protect our men and give them financial security for an entire missed season. For now, we had to keep it quiet. Secrecy was our most important component. We had an ace in the hole, and I had known for months who I wanted to deal the cards
‘Maybe its time we all put our guns away’
My phone rang. It was Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots.
He asked I was up for one more meeting.
Look, he said, this isnt a time to be hiding stuff. If you guys have more resources, we need to be transparent with each other.
Lets just say I took steps to protect our players, I said. Nobody is going to crumble early.
In my legal career, I had worked for men like these. Gone against them. Theyre not the type to congratulate you on a successful gambit and just accept defeat with a warm handshake. These guys are used to winning, and on the rare occasions they dont win, their response is to change the rules and punish the opposing side for making them sweat.
As we waited outside the meeting room, I mostly felt dread. My brain had produced three possible scenarios, two of them bad. Owners could storm out or call our bluff, effectively a challenge to see who broke first. Players are taught to feel comfort in certainty, so either of those possibilities would break us. The third was that Kraft realized that a civil war was good for no one, that the NFLs business model was impervious to inflation, elections, and geopolitical conflict, invincible to almost everything except greed.
The door finally opened, and we were invited into an initial meeting with just a few participats. On our side, NFL Players Association President Kevin Mawae picked Domonique Foxworth, Jeff Saturday, and me. I made eye contact with everyone in the holding room, more than fifty guys, and tried to convey confidence and conceal my anxiety. Theres no such thing as a fearless leader, and if there were, I cant imagine following them. Any conflict requires self-awareness and the acknowledgment that all of your planning, strategizing, and overthinking could fail. Against some of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world, I was well aware of the odds.
We returned to the conference room door, and I lowered the handle. There sat NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, the Coboys’ owner Jerry Jones, and Kraft at a round table. To me, every group is a jury, and I try to read their shoulders and eyes. Richardson was fuming; Jones calmer than ice water. We took our seats, and Kraft began the meeting.
In the same tone of voice I used for closing arguments in a murder trial, I told everyone about the insurance policy and its details. I paused, allowing the information to sink in. Nobody said a word.
Im sure you thought there would be a resolution by week four, I said, because players would collapse. But were content to sit out the entire season.
Im not sure Ive ever seen a hatred in someones eyes like that of Jerry Richardson. Roger turned bright red, the vein in his neck pulsing. Kraft remained silent. Jerry Jones seemed to realize that, in a single sentence, we had destabilized years of planning and maneuvering by the league.
So lets just wait a minute, he said. Maybe its time that we all put our guns away.
Kraft and Richardson looked at him.
We can just sliiiide em back into the holster, Jones continued.
The moment of truth
In a negotiation, this is whats called the deal pointthe moment of truth. Jones recognized it before anyone else, acknowledging that owners were cornered. There would be no player collapse, and thered be no eight- or ten-game season.
Why havent I been told about this? Roger said. De, you have to understand that Ive set up some things to protect the owners. Things I havent even told them about.
Thats when I knew. It was checkmate.
Ah, Puddin, I remember thinking. I got you, didnt I?
Kraft took a long breath and said that wed given the league some things to discuss. He looked at me and issued the faintest smile, an acknowledgment, finally, that I might actually be worthy of respect.From the book TURF WARS by DeMaurice Smith 2025 by DeMaurice Smith. Published on August 5, 2025, by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The executive order President Trump recently issued that calls for classical architecture to be the preferred style for all federal buildings and U.S. courthouses bears the imposing character and signature of the former real estate developer. But the order itself is the product of the single-minded persistence of one man: Justin Shubow.
Shubow, who runs a small Washington, D.C., nonprofit advocacy group known as the National Civic Art Society, has been waiting for this moment for years. Since joining the NCAS in 2011, Shubow has been telling anyone who will listen that the architecture of American democracy has been subverted for the past 75 years by an elite architectural aesthetic that flies in the face of public preference.
Modernist architecture, Shubow argues, has become the de facto standard for new federal buildings, despite the fact that the Founding Fathers established a tradition of using classical architecture in federal buildings.
“The core buildings of government in the United States are classical,” he says during a video call in early August, pointing to the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and the Supreme Court, among others. “I think it is inarguable that classical architecture is the architecture Americans most associate with our democracy.”
Shubows efforts started to pay off in 2020, when President Trump issued an executive order in December of that year, calling for classical and loosely-defined “traditional” architecture to be the default style of federal buildings in Washington, D.C. By that time, Trump had already lost the November election, and while the order rankled many in the architecture community, they didnt have to worry for long. President Joe Biden revoked the order just two months later.
The new executive order, which Shubow helped draft, calls for essentially the same things as the first one. And because it’s been issued on the early side of Trump’s second term, it could end up affecting the designs of at least some federal courthouses and office buildings in the government’s near-term development pipeline.
As it did during Trump’s first term, the American Institute of Architects has come out in opposition to the executive order. “This directive would replace thoughtful design processes with rigid requirements that will limit architectural choice,” the AIA said in a statement urging the administration to rescind the order. “Each era of America’s architectural legacy has honored the past while addressing contemporary needs through diverse design solutions. Restricting federal architecture options to styles from antiquity ignores this natural evolution and limits our freedom to create buildings that truly serve modern communities.”
Shubow has finally gotten what he wants. But some worry it may come at the cost of limiting architectural expression at the highest levels. Rather than cementing classical buildings as the architecture of democracy, it could end up forever aligning the style as yet another signifier of Trump’s divisive MAGA movement.
What the NCAS wants from the executive order
The National Civic Art Society was founded in 2002 as a nonpartisan organization made up of architects, urban planners, historians, philosophers, democracy advocates, and critics. It was meant to beat the drum for classical architecture, a historicist style of architecture with roots in ancient times, succinctly characterized by lots of columns and pediments.
In addition to ancient Greek structures and the widespread architectural influence of the Roman Empire, many of the most well-known examples of classical architecture are prominent government and court buildings scattered across the U.S., with a heavy concentration in the nation’s capital.
This old style of building is one that many people, especially in the U.S., recognize as a representation of the government and the system of democracy. Deepening that recognition has been the work of the NCAS for nearly a quarter-century.
In many ways, NCASs battle is already won. There is no real shortage of classical architecture in the world, whether ancient examples or modern forms in present-day democracies. But it is inarguably an older style of architecture in a field that often prides itself on pushing new ideas and forms, with practitioners who see their work as a mix of art and science.
For many architects, innovative design does not involve buildings that look like they were designed thousands of years ago. Accordingly, the designers who have sought out commissions for federal buildings in recent decades have proposed buildings that largely lean away from the touchstones of classical architecture.
In recent years, this trend has become the focal point of the NCAS. Shubow has said the predominant federal architecture trend of the mid-20th century onward has been generic boxes and, to a lesser extent, the steel and glass cages that came to exemplify corporate America and international business.
“There’s no doubt that modernism is hegemonic within architecture schools and within the profession,” Shubow says. This hegemony has infiltrated the federal government since the 1950s, he argues, exemplified most prominently by the Design Excellence Program, a 1960s-era policy from the federal government’s General Services Administration that set standards for federal buildings.
One section of that policy frameworkthe Guiding Principles for Federal Architecturesays that the development of an official federal architecture style must be avoided and for architects to create their own concepts of what a government building looks like. “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa,” the policy reads. The new executive order reverses that flow.
Shubow says this policy was targeted because it opened the floodgates for modernist designs to take hold in the federal architecture portfolio. Offending examples, according to Shubow, include the brutalist-style J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building (1975) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development headquarters (1968) in Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Federal Building (2007), designed by Morphosis.
These buildings and many other modern federal buildings feature heavily in the lectures, speeches, and presentations that Shubow has been delivering during his time as president of the NCAS. He often reers to the FBI building as the ministry of fear and the San Francisco Federal Building as an alien spacecraft that’s going to kill you with laser beams.”
He calls his presentation a very persuasive slideshow juxtaposing modernist designs with iconic classical buildings like the U.S. Capitol building, the U.S. Supreme Court building, and the White House, as well as historic examples of classicism dating back to Roman times.
Shubows slideshows single out brutalist and deconstructivist modern federal buildings as being oppressive, alien, and dehumanizing. One thing people have to remember about these brutalist buildings is not just that they have ugly architecture. Many of them are bad urbanism. These super blocks cut off parts of the city from each other, Shubow says.
Beyond its recent turn as a flashpoint between conservatives and progressives, brutalism has been a divisive architectural style for decades. It emerged in the mid-20th century as structural engineering techniques enabled economical concrete-based buildings to grow bigger and taller.
Postwar architects latched onto the flexibility and expressiveness of designing with poured concrete, leading to what some have called “a golden age” of modernist design. Compared to steel or stone, the lower cost of building with concrete made it a popular material choice for fiscally responsible government buildings in the mid- and late 20th century.
Though some of the resulting brutalist buildings are well loved and even awarded, the style’s use of raw concrete exteriors and imposing forms is often criticized as being cold, sterile, and (at least in postwar America) “Soviet.”
Shubow’s presentations are not subtle in the way they demonize the modernist approach. It’s fundamentally the photos of the buildings that make the argument, he says.
That’s how Shubow and the NCAS got Trump, during his first term, to make classical architecture a part of the presidential agenda, even if only as a parting shot.
What Trump wants from the executive order
The real estate developer-turned-president would seem to be a natural ally for a building-centric group like NCAS. But Trump’s real estate venturesfrom branded luxury towers and gold-themed casinos to a Manhattan hotel project that saw a classically inspired building renovated and covered in a glass facadeshow more of a preference for the modern design the NCAS opposes.
Nevertheless, the NCAS managed to get a meeting in the West Wing of the White House with four or five members of the president’s Domestic Policy Council in 2019. Shubow presented his slideshow and made his case. I explained what had gone wrong with federal architecture and why we needed to do something to reform it, Shubow says. It was from that meeting that the idea of an executive order was hatched.
Shubow says his organization would have been happy to have the same meeting with any of the other presidential administrations over the past 24 years. We’re like any advocacy organization that has policy ideas and brings them to the White House to be implemented, Shubow says. We have promoted our ideas, and they have been accepted.
Shubow and the NCAS helped draft what would become Trump’s December 2020 executive order titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.
The timing of the first executive order during Trump’s lame duck period following his losing reelection bid in 2020 suggests that his interest in the subject was more concerned with stirring up controversy than pursuing policy. One source, speaking on background, says White House insiders saw the heated response to the executive order as proof of its worth.
The White House press office did not respond to multiple interview requests.
In his second term, Trump has embraced buildings as cultural flashpoints. The White House recently focused on the renovation of the classical-style Federal Reserve headquarters as a pretense to have Fed Chair Jerome Powell fired before his term ends. Trump also followed through on a campaign platform to move the FBI headquarters out of the brutalist Hoover building.
Hes also spearheaded several major changes to the White House, including the paving of the Rose Garden and the recently announced plan to build a 90,000-square-foot neoclassical ballroom. This second executive order on a preferred federal architectural style is a continuation of this trend, and appears primed to sow division.
Shubow calls it a straightforward display of populism. I don’t think that a new executive order like the one President Trump previously issued should be controversial to normal people, he says. Sure, architectural elites are going to oppose it.
A childhood hatred
The NCAS got an unexpectedly ideal leader when Shubow joined the group. He says he’s been very sensitive to the built environment for his entire life. I remember hating a brutalist public library, even as a child, he says. Located in his hometown of Towson, Maryland, the 1974 building is a concrete complex made up of bold geometric forms. For Shubow, it was an affront.
Yet, Shubow is neither a designer nor an architect. He earned a master’s degree in philosophy in 2004 from the University of Michigan, where he was exposed to the English philosopher Roger Scruton, who was known, among other things, for his focus on conservatism and a harsh stance against modernist architecture.
Shubow later got a law degree from Yale and moved to Washington, D.C. Before relocating, he says he learned about NCAS after chatting about classical architecture with a fellow guest at a wedding. Since becoming the group’s president in 2011, he’s taken on the full-time role of arguing for classical architecture and against modernist architecture.
He says not being a designer is one of the strengths he brings to NCAS, comparing his outsider’s view to that of Jane Jacobs, whose work challenged the status quo of city planning in the 1950s. She demonstrated that an entire profession can essentially be mistaken, Shubow says. I was never brainwashed into the ideology of modernism. Given my training in philosophy, I think I’m quite god at recognizing bogus arguments. And there is a lot of B.S. underlying architectural theory today.
Shubow’s approach can be aggressive, especially for an organization whose focus is the seemingly urbane realm of aesthetics and culture. For the NCAS, the approach seems to be working. Since becoming president of the NCAS, the organization has seen its annual budget and contributions steadily increase, with a sharp jump in both contributions and in Shubow’s compensation in 2022 and 2023, the most recent year for which IRS filings are available.
Shubow declined to offer details on contributors to the organization. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the group is not required to disclose its contributors, but many similar organizations typically rely heavily on support from their own boards. One NCAS board member since 2019 is the billionaire Thomas Klingenstein, who gave more than $10 million to the Trump campaign during the 2024 election. Wherever the money is coming from, the group’s leadership sees it paying off.
Justin has been successful because he knows the issues and he’s tenacious, says Marion Smith, an NCAS board member who served as the group’s chairman from 2012 to 2022. He tells Fast Company via email that during his tenure, he defended Shubow from two separate coup attempts that sought to remove him from the organization’s leadership. Some people criticized him, but my response always was: Yes, he’s a bulldog. But he’s our bulldog.
The dilemma of political convenience
Though Shubow has now succeeded twice in elevating the mission of the NCAS to the level of presidential intervention, there are some who worry that linking the cause of classical architecture so closely to Trump is a mistake. The style already carries what many would call an unfair association with conservatism. Having it be part of Trump’s platform was enough for at least one NCAS member to revoke his support for the organization.
Steven Semes practiced classical architecture for more than 30 years and is now a professor at the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture. He’s in agreement with Shubow that the federal government has, for too long, been closed off to classical architecture. He was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the NCAS. Until Trump came along, he says. For someone who loves classical architecture and also happens to be a political liberalas I am and as many of my colleagues areit really does pose a dilemma.
Semes says he urged the organization to be cautious about the risks of making classical architecture an extension of Trump’s divisive presidency and tarnishing its merits. I’m angry that people will see the Trump embrace of classical architecture and they will say, ‘See, we told you that classical architecture is fascistic, and this proves it, he says. As some of us pointed out in the first Trump administration, when the first executive order came out, you very well may set back the movement for classical architecture. This could have a very negative impact on what we’ve worked for for decades.
Putting aside his own politics, Semes says that it should be clear that Trump’s focus on classical architecture is hardly genuine. He says the Trump administration is simply using its executive orders to stoke a culture war, pitting his own followers against establishment elites.
Shubow doesn’t dispute some of the impetus. I think [Trump] saw this as a winning issue. That this is an issue about ordinary people versus a kind of elite, and that elite being the architectural profession, he says.
Architectural styles, though, are almost totally beside the point. If you want to know what the MAGA movement thinks of classical architecture, you can see how they treated the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, Semes says about the violent storming of the historic landmark building in 2021. Obviously, what it meant to them was, it’s the headquarters of everything they hated. But when I look at the U.S. Capitol, I have an opposite opinion.
Policy and legacy
Shubow is not fazed by the dilemma of pursuing the mission of the NCAS through political convenience. It has been a goal of my organization to bring this issue to national attention, he says. Two executive orders, a presidential memorandum on classical architecture issued on the first day of Trump’s second term, plus Shubow’s appointment to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 2018 to 2021 equate to a certain degree of validation.
The NCAS was once close to achieving a more substantial version of its goals than the revocable proclamation of an executive order. In 2023, the group successfully convinced then-Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) to sponsor the Beautifying Federal Civic Architecture Act, followed by a version introduced in the Senate by then-Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. Both bills floundered, but Shubow is hopeful for binding legislation this time around. (Banks now represents Indiana in the Senate, and Rubio is the secretary of state. Banks’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
Policy change could be coming soon, affecting new federal buildings in the pipeline and those to be built in the future. The day after Trumps second federal architecture executive order, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) announced hed be introducing a bill in the House to return our federal buildings to classical/traditional architecture that reflects the spirit of democracy and self-government.
The new architecture executive order may not live past this current presidential administration, or it could get translated into legislation with a more viable path to approval. Either way, it could end up influencing at least some of the federal building portfolio in the years ahead, which includes a handful of federal courthouses and annex buildings in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Hartford, Connecticut.
According to Shubow, just a few new buildings could be enough to show that the last 75 years of modernist design have been a mistake. If we get beautiful, inspiring new federal courthouses and office buildings and contrast them to what had been built previously, he says, I think people will see that the president was right.
When I was in college, I couldnt close the front door to my dorm room. The wooden door swelled in the August heat. Multiple maintenance requests were made, and yet, weeks later, the problem remained unresolved.
I went door to door to every room and found out how long people were waiting to have their urgent maintenance requests resolved. As it turns out, there was a process problem. I bypassed the usual channels and went with my list straight to the head of campus residences. After all, the process clearly wasnt working for anyone.
You might be wondering, what does this have to do with the C-suite? The truth is, this experience mirrors what is happening in nearly every organization. Those at the top are often not aware of whats going on below. Its not that they dont care. They just have people who shield them from the truth.
You see, the higher a leader rises, the less likely they are to hear honest feedback or unfiltered reality. Thats because asking the right questions and staying grounded in whats happening is a skill in itself. When leaders dont do it, it costs the organization. A leader might be making poor decisions due to inaccurate or incomplete data. Incomplete truths can lead to low psychological safety and trust, which we know can lead to disastrous outcomes. The leader might be missing out on cultural blind spots that lead to ethical or reputational failures. An organization that doesnt allow dissent will see a stall in innovation, which can lead to extinction.
As a social scientist who coaches, speaks on, and writes about success and high achievers, including in my recent book, Ive helped many leaders learn how to increase their awareness and navigate what is happening on the front lines.
There are several reasons why people guard senior leaders from the truth. Most arent malicious, but are based on self-preservation. Here are some of the most common reasons and ideas on how to act when you suspect this might be brewing:
1) Fear of consequences
Employees self-censor to avoid appearing negative. Dont shoot the messenger” of bad news is a valid concern. Employees feel that if they share bad news, they risk being sidelined or worse, fired.
At Ford, when Alan Mulally took over as CEO, he asked his leadership team to color-code project updates. Week after week, they were all green, until one brave executive finally submitted a red status, indicating things werent going well, and that he needed help. Instead of punishing him, Mulally applauded him and made him a shining example for the entire company. Mulallys red-yellow-green system made honesty a leadership requirement, not a risk.As a leader, you need to show your employees that you value and prioritize hearing the truth. Reward those who surface problems rather than those who maintain appearances. Make it clear that you cant help or redirect resources if you dont know the problem (and its extent).
Now, there is a systematic way to do this so that you dont sound like a whiner. The presenter should share the goal, the current status, and what theyve tried so far. This shows that the presenter has done everything in their power and is looking for alternative solutions or ideas they might not have considered.
Encourage upward feedback through surveys, town halls, or anonymous portals. Have regular communication where you say phrases like I hear there is a major problem with X. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. Here is our corrective course of action. This shows that your request to hear concerns, as painful as they may be, isnt performative. You want to be able to do something to remedy the situation, but first, you must know it exists.
2) Desire to please
Everyone wants to be in the good graces of leadership. People often think that telling them what they want to hear will do just that. They end up sugarcoating updates to match what they think the leader wants to hear. They talk about their accomplishments and improvements while avoiding the areas of concern.
3) Organizational distance
Multiple layers insulate leaders from day-to-day reality. When theyre confined to their offices and circles of influence, they dont often know whats happening on the front lines. Organizational etiquette means that people often report to their direct manager, not the head of the organization (although Gen Z seems to be breaking this mold).If people dont see you and know you, they cant approach you. Jared Lamb, a school principal, turned his office into a conference room and repurposed an AV cart as his desk, which allowed him to roll through the school and be around the students and teachers throughout the workday. This way, he was able to see everyone in action, and offer a helping hand exactly in the moment where they needed him, whether it was a teacher needing a bathroom break or helping with a child who needed extra attention.
No, going fully mobile may not be conducive for everyone. You can, however, make the time to lead while walking around. Asking pivotal questions such as What are you working on? Whats your most pressing deadline? Where are you getting resistance? Did you find a solution to that problem you were facing? What have you tried? Where do you need help? This will actively and authentically show that you care. Youll also be on the front lines, so you can see when people are celebrating or supporting a colleague, which is something that leaders should be aware of.
4) Time scarcity
As leaders become busier (and have fuller calendars), they rely on filtered summaries and dashboards. The problem is that those give glossed-over versions of reality.
The critical question to ask here is Why? Why did that happen this way? Why didnt it happen before? Why is it taking so long? Instead of only having updates at meetings, use the time to understand the why behind the dashboard results.
The most effective leaders arent just visionaries. Theyre truth-seekers. Surround yourself with those you can trust to tell you the truth and mentors who can help you seek it. Include people outside the chain of command and organization for diverse, candid input. You cant lead well if you dont know whats real. Remember, staying grounded isnt a passive state. Its a form of discipline that you need to practice.
