Need a little help ordering your next lunch? Starting Friday, fast-casual dining chain Just Salad will roll out a new mobile ordering feature it calls Salad AI, which relies on OpenAIs GPT-4o model to generate text and personalize recommendations that match a customers culinary preferences. Salad AI allows customers to select their dietary restrictions, nutrient priorities, and desired flavor recommendations and within 15 seconds, the AI-powered tool will generate four order ideas.
Its a really powerful tool to navigate hundreds of thousands of potential combinations, says Nick Kenner, founder and CEO at Just Salad, in an interview with Fast Company. We felt super confident that the customer wants help.
Salad AI will be available at all of Just Salads nearly 100 restaurant locations throughout the Northeast, Florida, and the metro Chicago area. The technology will also be added to the web version on desktop computers a little later this year.
The inspiration for Salad AI came about a year ago when Kenner was discussing a personal desire to eat more vegan food, which also incorporated a lot of protein. I said it would be great if AI could tell me what to get on the Just Salad menu, recalls Kenner. And I brought that to our CTO [Matt Silverman] and he said, We can make that happen.
The first of three prompt screens asks customers to select on preferences including vegan, avoid gluten, or minimize carbon footprint. Then, nutrient needs like high protein, low calorie, and low sugar are offered. The final step asks about cravings like sweetness, spice, and savory. In a demonstration, Fast Company opted for a vegan, high fiber, spicy salad bowl and the top recommendation was a spicy vegan fiesta that included kale, almonds, sweet potatoes, corn, and a cilantro lime vinaigrette.
[Photo: Just Salad]
Menu discovery, especially in high SKU restaurant categories like salads, is quite relevant for this [technology], says Mark Abraham, a managing director at Boston Consulting Group who has helped advise restaurant clients deliver more personalized customer experiences.
Abraham says that a large chunk of investments in generative and predictive AI in the restaurant sector tend to focus on the employee and back-office operations. These use cases can make scheduling, hiring, and communication easier for employees, helpful for the industry as it faces a persistent labor shortage. AI can also help chains forecast future demand trends and to manage their inventory.
But the last piece, which isnt as far along, are the customer-facing use cases. Already, predictive AI is being used to help make accurate, personalized recommendations for add-on items in mobile apps popularized by chains like Starbucks and McDonalds. We have seen up to an 8% lift in sales for customers who are getting those personalized offers, says Abraham of the power of predictive AI and machine learning.
Inflation and the pressure on menu prices has led to a dip in demand, with overall spending at restaurants dropping 1.2% between December 2023 and 2024 according to trade group the National Restaurant Association. One way restaurants are looking to become more efficient is through automation, adding more self-checkout kiosks and incorporating robotics to churn out more orders at chains like Sweetgreen.
What it does not replace is human connection, creativity, and innovation, says Fred LeFranc, founder and CEO at restaurant consulting firm Results Thru Strategy.
A few major restaurant chains have honed in on the use of AI-powered voice assistants to take orders from customers at the drive-thru. Wendys in 2023 partnered with Google Cloud to launch FreshAI, tested first in Ohio and since expanded to a few dozen additional locations. But a similar effort at McDonalds, which worked with IBM, led to consumer backlash online because the AI-powered tool was getting orders wrong. McDonalds pulled the plug on the experiment last summer.
Just Salad says it too explored AI in the drive-thru, but wasnt sold on the consumer experience. For now, it is sticking with humans processing those orders, though the chain will continue to evaluate those technologies as they evolve.
Salad AI, Kenner says, also comes with a lot of freedom that allows customers to have the final say on their order. Even after the tool recommends a few customized salads, diners can make modifications before they buy.
Its not intrusive, it is an optional step, says Kenner. It is like a professional assisting you in how to navigate our menu and find what you want.
Ive never been a big fan of winter. These postholiday months have always seemed like a seasonal waiting room, a dark stretch of time to be endured until nature ushers me into spring. But not this year. Ive come to understand that if I want January and February to be good to me, I need to be good to them.
Recasting my typical winter state of mind to establish a new seasonal holiday, I blended the words boredom and doldrums into a different expression for a different experience: Doordom.
Treating this new holiday as I do my traditional favorites means discovering seasonally relevant ways to decorate and celebrate. The garland greens and colored lights of December have given way to streams of silver foil swags, aglow with white lights, lanterns with forest motifs, and flickering flame birch log candles, all on battery timers so my loft remains twinkly despite the darkness outside my city windows.
My winter programming
My TV queue is filled with cozy British mysteriesthe episodic equivalent of having a fireplaceand Nordic Noir. If you are going to sink into winter, here is your inspiration.
Tuning into the YouTube channel Street Style Stockholm, I drink coffee and watch people wearing well-designed winter coats and bold accessories walk along a posh shopping avenue. Where I once interpreted the Swedish proverb, There is no such thing as bad weather; there is only bad clothing, to mean choosing seasonal pieces that prepare us for the outdoors, I now believe it isnt just about temperature. It is also about the way our winter clothing makes us feel. Although my wardrobe core might still be in the dark shades (what I call the urban bruise palette), I did buy new colorful outerwear to present a more cheerful self to the world.
It’s working!
Much of my other seasonal behavior is highly ritualized: It isnt summer until I make Frogmore Stew, the Low Country shrimp boil used to mark my friend Rolands birthday. Fall starts the day I reawaken my cast iron Dutch ovens and get to braising again. and it cant possibly be Christmas without my annual box of tamales sent by a generous Texan.
To observe Doordom in this same small but meaningful way, I am tinkering with recipes to find that one perfect seasonal defining meal: Right now, it looks like Moroccan tagine is the dish du jour.
Dry January? No thanks
I know there are folks who also ritualize this time of the year for other purposes, like cleansing toxins or dry January. I understand the impulse, but seasonal challenges are not for me. Sustaining wintery mental health means putting fewer demands on myself: I dont want to make this time of the year any harder than nature already does.
Instead, my Doordom holiday honors little everyday luxuries: I like to join neighbors in our local pub and lick whipped cream off an Irish coffee while we watch the snow come down and spend cold afternoons at my favorite trattoria with a bowl of Bolognese and a good book.
Decluttering is another popular mainstream winter ritual, and I am using that same seasonal practice to clean up the mess in my mind. After writing down all my random concerns and distractionssome personal, many politicalI put the paper in a ziplock bag and place it in my refrigerators freezer compartment. I will thaw my worries out later, keep whats still fresh and discard whats expired.
In the meantime, with enough mental white space to make room for ideas, I am still experimenting with other comforting practices to mark my new holiday season, learning what I want to look forward to next winter. So, welcome to Doordom, my way of celebrating the bleakestyet potentially the besttime of the year.
Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture.
TikTok is fighting for its life in the U.S. over concerns about its parent companys relationship to the government of China. But TikTok has also just enjoyed one of the best branding weeks ever, as its potential demise has been treated as a national emergency.
That sounds like hyperbole, but as youve no doubt heard, the president of the United States has literally intervened to pluck the popular video platform from its deathbedfor now, at least. Protecting this vital component of the internets attention-suck and dubious-trend infrastructure might not seem like a top government, or even societal, priority. But in the days leading up to a possible TikTok ban, Americans dependence on this virality machine went massively viral.
Content creators and influencers said goodbye and posted teary videos. Fans shared serious and jokey goodbyes of their own. Brands and ad agencies lamented the loss; as one marketer moaned, Theres no substitute. The platforms wide-ranging cultural impacts were enumerated in the past tense. The New York Times asserted that TikTok had changed the way we cook, and publishers warned of an impending vacuum for bookselling. The frantic search for a replacement made an unlikely hit of a Mandarin-language app called RedNote. Rivals YouTube and Instagram angled to capitalize on the platforms demise. Even Kevin OLearythe Shark Tank guymanaged to drum up attention for claiming he might buy TikTok. Concerns about espionage were waved away with sarcastic Goodbye to my Chinese spy memes.
More than a collective obituary, the outpouring amounted to an endless series of advance eulogies in honor of an entity that we, apparently, could never truly replace. It was, in short, a PR bonanza for TikTok.
This has been quite a turnabout. While clearly popular, with 170 million users, TikTok owner ByteDance has long been painted by detractors as a potential tool of the Chinese government, for collecting data on or even influencing its audience. During his first term as president, Donald Trump called for banning TikTok unless it found a U.S. buyer. The Biden administration later voiced similar concerns, and backed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, passed by Congress with wide bipartisan support. The upshot was that ByteDance had to find a buyer by January 19, or it would become illegal for key service providers including Apple, Google, and Oracle to distribute or support the app, effectively killing it in the U.S. The platform fought this all the way to the Supreme Court, which unanimously upheld the act, seeming to seal TikToks fate.
But as the pro-TikTok outcry swelled, the political appetite for actually shutting it down seemed to wobble, and the company took full advantage. Two days before the shutdown deadline, it blamed the Biden White House for failing to offer clarity and assurance to TikTok service providers to buy more time to find a solution, declaring that unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called this a stunt, insisting there was no reason for action before the second Trump administration took office: TikTok and other companies should take up any concerns with them. That night, TikTok video feeds stopped working, replaced with a pop-up message blaming a law banning the app but adding: President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok.
And indeed the next morning, Trumpwho, let’s not forget, had set the whole TikTok ban idea in motion in 2020promised to stall the new laws enforcement to work out a deal. The platform was operating again within hours. (Apple and Google have yet to make it available again in their app stores, however.) According to Similarweb, by the end of the day, it hit a record 106.8 million active daily users, well above its pre-ban average.
The legality of this maneuver is murky at best, and the Wall Street Journal has called it an illegal amnesty. Nevertheless, its safe to say that the narrative around TikTok has changed decisively. Trump now professes a warm spot in my heart for the platform, which he says helped him win over younger voters. And in a somewhat surprising and oddly timed chain of events, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew met with Trump last month at Mar-a-Lago, later received an invitation to his inauguration, and was seated front and center next to America’s Big Tech CEOs.
Still, the details of whatever Trump has in mind beyond the 75-day extension are vague, and the app could die again; foreign policy hawks are complaining about placating China, and some TikTok creators may not want to be part of a platform too-associated with Trump. In what sounds like a negotiating feint, the president is now suggesting the United States government itself should own like half of TikTok, which he says could be worth hundreds of billions, but would have no value without its U.S. audience. (Again, the legality of such an arrangement is questionable.)
Meanwhile, the TikTok faithful have been rewarded for their vocal support, the TikTok Shop sales barely missed a step, and hardly anybody seems worried about the app as an espionage toolleast of all Trump, who dismissed the importance of a geopolitical rival spying on young kids watching crazy videos. Rumors of potential buyers include MrBeast and Elon Musk.
And within a day or two of its resurrection, TikTok had spawned a fresh health trend that involves pouring castor oil in your navel. Yup, back to normal.
Imagine this for a pitch: a Broadway musical about the making of a fake Broadway musical based on a real TV show about the making of a fake Broadway musical.
If that made you dizzy, you might not have what it takes to work alongside Drew Hodges and Callie Goff, the creative team that was tasked with creating the ad campaign for Smash, a new musical comedy based on a short-lived NBC series from more than a decade ago.
The musical is set to begin preview performances in March at Broadways Imperial Theatre. Like the series, it pokes fun at the backstage intrigue and inflated egos that drive the madcap world of New York theater, all while charting the wayward creation of a fictional musical about Marilyn Monroe. Chaos, drama, and plenty of hijinks ensue in anticipation of one unforgettable moment, the kind that Hodges says is uniquely Broadway: a pulsating, blissful, adrenaline-filled opening night.
Thats the moment he sought to recreate for the campaign.
Its a really specific American piece of iconography, Hodges tells Fast Company. Youre a hit, and people drink too much, and they jump on top of a table and read a review. When youre in the middle of an opening night like that, its kind of funny because its this classic idea of what a Broadway opening night isbut it actually still happens.
Hodges should know. He has worked in the business for well over three decades, helping to create the visual identity for musical hits from Rent to Avenue Q to Hamilton. He founded New Yorks SpotCo advertising agency in the 1990s and now works as an independent creative and designer. For Smash, he collaborated with Goff, SpotCos managing director and chief creative officer, along with noted portrait photographer Jason Bell.
“We wanted it to be real”
The team captured the impromptu emotional purity of an opening night with an elaborate red-carpet photoshoot that included the entire cast, members of the Broadway press, and plenty of easter eggs for theater lovers.
The result is a splashy campaign thats as meta as the musical itself, one you can stare at for hours and still find something new. Look closely beyond the red-carpet barricades and you’ll spot theater-industry stalwarts such as NY1s Frank DiLella, Broadway.coms Paul Wontorek, SiriusXM’s Julie James, and Tony-recognized theater publicist Irene Gandy, along with theater-press newcomers, including teen journalist Joel Crump.
Hodges calls it a Broadway Wheres Waldo? or maybe a Sergeant Peppers thing. And its not an overly Photoshopped composite. Everyone in the photo is actually there in real time.
We wanted it to be real, he says. Thats the fun of working on Broadway. You get to have these pinch-me moments. We wanted to bring everyone else into that.
The shoot took place at Pier59 Studios on Manhattans West Side and made use of a curved, high-definition screen that stretched some 70 feet wide, projecting the Imperials exterior. A 3D title treatment was added once the image was set. (Hodges says his original plan to shoot in front of an actual venue proved logistically impossible given that most Broadway theaters are filled with audiences and people running the shows.) Outfits had to be built specifically for the photoshoot because costumes for the final production werent finished yet.
Goff, who has worked at SpotCo since the beginning of her career, admitted to feeling some trepidation early in the process for Smash when it came time to enlist real-life industry types for the shoot.
We werent sure what was going to happen when we started reaching out to them, Goff says. The exciting moment was when we started getting positive responses. For me, that was the moment when I was like, Oh, this could come together. The community is rallying behind this.'”
Plenty of Broadway shows wink and nod at their target audiences with theater references and inside jokes about the business and fandom of Broadway. What makes Smash different is that it is overtly about the business of making theater, an insider comedy for an industry where proximity is everything.
Only time will tell if that premise will work for or against the show when it opens this spring, although putting prominent members of the theater press in your actual campaign is not a bad way to hedge against negative reviews.
If it stumbles, it won’t be for lack of talent: Smash features a score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman; direction by Susan Stroman; and it counts Robert Greenblatt, Neil Meron, and Steven Spielberg as producers. The NBC series was created by playwright Theresa Rebeck.
For Hodges and Goff, the goal was simply to create something entirely new. If Smash doesnt look like other Broadway campaigns that came before it, well at least it made you lookprobably more than once.
I mean, you could just make a mask logo and call it a day, but Im a more-is-more kind of person, Hodges says.
Correction: Julie James’s affiliation is SiriusXM, not Broadway.com as an earlier version of this story stated.
I’ve been searching for the words to describe my feelings towards the current state of adtech. Terms like “stale,” “stagnant,” and “boring” are among the pejoratives that come to mind. But, if I had to be even more descriptive, I’d have to say that adtech is like a grocery storeand not in a good way.
Just like a grocery store will sell multiple versions of the same product, adtech too is a cacophony of competing firms each effectively doing the same thing. Break down adtech into its constituent taskslike A/B testing, attribution, analytics, or whateverand you’ll find dozens, if not hundreds of companies all touting the merits of their products.
Don’t get me wrong. Some of these companies might actually have good products, or they’re competitive on price. But are they innovative? Are they doing anything wildly new, or tackling an existing problem in an imaginative and helpful way? The answer is, almost always, no.
Adtech’s Getting Old
To be clear, this isn’t inherently a bad thing. Innovation for the sake of innovation is a recipe for products with no market fit, or with no obvious utility. We see this every time there’s a hype cycle. When crypto was at its most ludicrous towards the late 2010s, there were no shortage of companies that reimagined existing technologies, but on the blockchain. We’re seeing it again with generative AI.
Going back to the supermarket analogy, we’re at a point where adtech products are a bit like common household staples. Realistically, there’s only room for a few brands of tomato soup. And there’s no line of VCs desperate to back the next disruptive player in the tomato soup industry.
It’s here where I start to get worried. When there are no more frontiers to march towards, no more boundaries to cross, you end up with consolidation among existing players. I believe we’re in the early stages of this process, as demonstrated by the near-total collapse of VC investment into adtech startups over the past decade.
In 2015, investors ploughed almost $5 billion into the sector, according to Crunchbase Data, spread across nearly 400 rounds. In the first eight months of 2024, that lofty figure had shrunk to a mere $360 million. The lion’s share of that cash went to existing companies, rather than those in the seed stage.
Consolidation (and its sibling, saturation) is, obviously, a factor in this malaise. Adtech is a (relatively) mature industry, and over the past couple of decades, a handful of players have emerged as the dominant forces in their specific niche. These companies are now multi-billion dollar entities, and it’s hard to imagine a successful challenger emerging at this late stage.
For an investor, the prospect of a rival to, say, Hubspot or Salesforce, that exists to steal the percentage of customers that are unhappy with their service, and aren’t too locked-in to move, isn’t an enticing proposition. And that’s without mentioning the other factors that have likely complicated matterslike the E.U.’s stringent privacy regulations, the dominance of Google and Facebook in digital advertising, and the general post-pandemic slump in VC spending.
A Mirror of Tech
I’ve started to realize that what I’ve described isn’t unique to adtech. In the 2000s and 2010s, Silicon Valley set out to build the digital world. Now, it’s largely been built, and the companies that executed best during that period are now leaders in their segments.
Most product categories exist. There’s very rarely anything new. Even generative AI, arguably the most “new” thing we’ve seen in recent years, feels somewhat tired. Most commercial implementations are effectively papering on a new technology onto an old ideaand often with questionable, or negligible, outcomes.
But as the tech industry writ large treads ever-stagnant water, it’s worth remembering thatat least, when it comes to marketingwe have other options. Stagnancy is a choice, and it’s one that I hope we avoid.
The biggest problem with adtech is that it was more “tech” than “ad.” Advertising is, by its very nature, a fundamentally human pursuit. Every successful marketing campaign throughout history has been centered on creative content that spoke to someone, either through imagery, writing, or music. To be successful, you need to think about your audience. You need to understand them, and to think carefully about what things will resonate with them.
Tech is, far too often, not particularly human. And that’s especially true for adtech. Think of all the websites that are literally bursting with adtech productsanalytics, ad networks, and so onthat fundamentally degrade the user experience. These products answer one question (“how do we do this one particular task faster, or smarter, or with full automation?”), but leave one unanswered: how will people respond to this?
The fact that so many people are “opting out” of advertising, either through ad-blockers or by paying for ad-free subscriptions, because they perceive digital advertising as hostile and intrusive should be cause for alarm within the adtech industry. At a very least, it should provoke some soul-searching. Something which, I’m sad to say, hasn’t happened.
Worse, the dominance of the “tech” in “adtech” is actively clouding the judgement of marketers. Far too many marketers are glued to dashboards, obsessing over the numbers generated by their chosen analytics platform. We trust that these platforms are accurate, even though there’s no such thing as “perfect attribution.” Or, rather, not without being able to read the audience’s mind.
And so, we’ve forgotten the human aspect of marketing. It’s time to go back to basics.
Putting Creative First
I’ve been critical of the adtech industry throughout this piece, and not without cause. That said, I do think it’s worth acknowledging that there are some tools that are very good. Everything has its place, and in moderation.
The problem is that I don’t see the adtech industry solving the problems of marketers, now or into the future. It’s an industry that’s hit a brick wall, and has no new ideas. Worse, I think that our collective enthralment with adtech has blinded us to the capabilities and limitations of these products, and the fact that, as marketers, our audiences are people.
To be clear, this isn’t a kind of adtech luddite manifesto, arguing for a return to a 1990’s way of doing business. For better or for worse, advertising is a digital industry now, and there’s no going back.
Rather, it’s a plea for marketers to accept that the tech products they usewhether directly or indiectlyare no substitute for human creativity, and an understanding of the audience. While the adtech industry has made some things better, we need to acknowledge that there’s nothing new around the corner. There’s no new game-changing product category that will make our jobs easier, or our campaigns more successful.
We need to start relying on ourselves more. To understand that every conversion starts with a great piece of creative, and work back from there.
This week in branding news, a 10-year-old meme appeared as the face of a new federal department, Tumblr launched a TikTok-esque feature, and Crocs made some clogs inspired by the Beatles. Heres what you need to know.Various iterations of doge.gov from the week of January 20, 2025 [Screenshots: doge.gov]DOGEs WIP logoThe news: Directly after taking office on Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to rebrand the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE (sigh). The new department, set to be headed by billionaire Elon Musk, has been pitched as an outside advisory group that would recommend government reforms and find $500 billion in annual spending to cutbut its looking more and more like the USDS with a new, meme-ified name. Now DOGE seems to be having trouble deciding on a logo that wont turn it into a laughing stock.Big picture: DOGEs name is a nod to a meme thats more than a decade past its prime, which featured a photo of a Shiba Inu with a misspelled caption. The meme is also the face of the joke-turned-real-cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which Musk has financially supported.When the doge.gov website debuted on Monday, it displayed an AI-generated Doge meme as its official logoa reference to the deluge of AI slop that hit the web after Musk initially announced the project. Shortly afterward, that first logo was replaced with a more classic version of the meme. And, as of this writing, the website has no logo at all.Why it matters: Its unclear exactly why the Doge logos were taken down. What is clear is that elevating a concept that started with a meme into an actual federal department is merely an escalation of the new Trump administrations rejection of convention in favor of all things absurd and, often, troubling. [Screenshot: Tumblr]Tumblr tries to go TikTokThe news: Ten years after it first teased the concept of Tumblr TVa tab dedicated to discovering new GIFs (how very 2015)Tumblr has finally launched the feature as a kind of TikTok wannabe. Big picture: Tumblr TV (which, in its modern form, also supports video content) comes during a moment when plenty of TikTok users are searching for potential alternatives amid the apps uncertain fate. Lemon8 and RedNote have both seen a massive spike in users; meanwhile, some former TikTok users are buying phones with the app pre-downloaded on eBay, as its no longer available on the App Store.According to TechCrunch, Tumblr was also a destination for TikTok dupe seekers: A spokesperson reported that the platform saw a roughly 35% increase in iOS app installs and a 70% increase in new users joining Communities, a feature that allows users to join various groups focused on specific interests.Why it matters: Tumblr TV might serve as a TikTok alternative if you were, say, stuck on a desert island with only one app downloaded to your phone, but as of right now, its just not cutting it. The interface is still quite GIF-focused, the video quality is subpar, and the default grid setting means that vertical swiping isnt as smooth. In 2015, this might have blown our minds, but in 2025, it feels more like a blast from the past. [Photo: Crocs]A new Crocs collabThe news: A new Crocs collaboration might just take the cake for the wackiest shoes the brand has ever released. Big picture: The new two-clog Crocs collection is a tribute to the Beatless 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine. One pair features the classic Croc silhouette decked out in the flattened, psychedelic aesthetic that defined the film. The other pair is designed to look like a literal yellow submarine, complete with portholes (through which each member of the iconic band peeps up at the wearer), tiny propellers, and a raised tower on top of the vessel. The shoes will be available online on January 28.Why it matters: Crocs continues to demonstrate its innovative dominance with a strategy that purposefully defies expectation. One moment, the brand is making serious moves for the climate by going bio-based and recycling old clogs into new clogs; the next, its entertaining silly collabs with McDonalds and making clogs for dogsall while launching the occasional high-fashion silhouette, like the popular Salehe Bembury Crocs and punkabilly-inspired leather Crocs. Its the brand that keeps us on our toes, literally.
Americans are struggling to afford a place to live. Homes cost more than five times the average salarycompared with just three times the average salary in the 1960s. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted rental prices have risen by 64%, far outpacing inflation. Meanwhile, new housing starts continue to fall, including a more than 20% drop in multi-family construction in November 2024 alone. The simple fact is that were not building enough affordable housinghomes at prices families can really afford.
And if the housing market is straining the finances of many families now, just imagine what the market will look like as surging ranks of Gen Z buyers enter the market. Countless dedicated teachers, nurses, and carpenters are already unable to live in the communities where they work; how much farther are they supposed to commute?
Housing insecurity in the U.S. is obviously a long-developing and complex problem, and theres no magic policy wand we can wave to eliminate it. But as a starting point, three major contributing factors can be addressed right now to ease the pressure on home prices. If were serious about affordable housing, its time to have serious conversations about these three priorities.
Let Gen Z help ease the skilled trades labor shortage
Housing affordability is often discussed as a matter of supply and demand: All we need to do is build more houses. But what if the houses were building are still too expensive for many buyers? After all, developers have to cover their costs. And those costs are currently being inflated by a significant labor shortage in the skilled tradesa problem of our own making.
For years, parents and career counselors have been telling young people that a college degree is essential for a successful life, and theyve been listening. This meant that as builders, electricians, and masons retired, there just werent enough millennial and Gen X aspirants to take their place. In fact, 95% of skilled trade professionals on the Thumbtack platform report their top concern for the future is the ability to find workers to hire. But now we have an opportunity to reverse that trend.
A recent survey from my company found that a full two-thirds of Gen Z generationincluding 78% of those with a college degreeexpress a growing interest in skilled trades professions, fueled in part by social media content. More than half of Gen Z are now considering a skilled trade career, up 12% over the past year alone, including 72% of those with a college degree.
Unfortunately, this appetite to learn trade-related skills is not matched by the opportunities available. Only 41% of Gen Z had access to trade programs in schoolthough 83% of those who did take shop class called it their favorite subject. Thats why comprehensive policy to address this issue has to include expanding the talent pipeline for Gen Z skilled tradespeople. Beyond restoring shop class, we need to build training, mentoring, and apprenticeship programs that prepare young people to enter the field ready to do quality work from day one.
Loosen restrictions on housing development
Exclusionary, single-unit zoning policies are the definition of NIMBY: This part of town is for families with quarter-acre lotslet other families find somewhere else to live. As the population grows, that somewhere else is getting further and further away from established communities and their infrastructure, while the prices of existing homes spiral. In fact, young adults who grew up in these spacious suburban spreads can rarely afford them by the time they enter the market.
Nobody is saying we should outlaw picket-fence bungalows and ranch homes, but if theres land and capital available nearby to build affordable multi-unit housing, why should local governments impose barriers? States across the U.S. are already moving in this direction, from Oregon and California to North Carolina and Connecticut. And some cities are also stepping in to build affordable housing.
For that matter, why are towns and counties even allowed to determine what people are allowed to build on their land? Restrictions on industrial uses are understandable, but when it comes to residential housing, the market should decide what goes whereand the market is calling for affordable apartments and townhouses wherever theres room to build them.
Take highways out of the equation
The housing shortage is most acute in our urban centers, where young people want to live and companies want to hire. Theres only so much we can do with infill developmentthough we should be doing all we can there, too. The greater opportunity is to help people access these places more easily while living further outwithout soul-crushing gridlock.
A century ago, the first wave of suburbanization was enabled by the rise of widespread car ownership and a massive investment in roads to carry them. As commute times grow and daily drives slow to a crawl, we need to shift focus to transit-oriented development (TOD) policies. In many cases, that infrastructure already exists in the form of light rail. To make those investments work harder for homebuyers, we should rezone areas near transit stations for higher residential density, complemented with expanded park-and-ride lots and development incentives for affordable housing.
The Federal Transit Administration offers grants under a TOD pilot program to support community efforts to improve access to public transportation. In 2024, applications with a significant affordable housing component were eligible for up to 100% federal support. That kind of vision and commitmenton the part of both regulators and the communities participating in the programwill be essential to solve this crisis.
Housing is one of the most fundamental human needsand America is falling short of ensuring that our families can achieve it. By taking practical steps to lower construction costs, make more land available for multi-unit development, an expand the inventory of transit-friendly homes, we can ease the pressure on home prices and help more Americans afford a secure foundation for their families.
When it comes out later this year, the most creative new set of Lego bricks won’t be available in stores or from any traditional retailer. The only place you’ll be able to find it is in a classroom.
Lego Education Science is a new science-focused Lego set and educational tool from the venerable toymaker, with its signature bricks playing the literal building blocks of hands-on science experiments and lessons. Designed for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, Lego Education Science is an attempt to engage children in science through building with Lego bricks, along with guided lessons exploring dozens of scientific concepts.
Scheduled for release this summer, the kits are the latest product from Lego Education, a school-focused arm of the company that has been producing educational playsets for 45 years. Its kits are used in public schools across the country, including those in New York City’s Department of Education, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and Chicago Public Schools.
[Photo: Lego]
Lego Education Science is the company’s first attempt at creating a standalone teaching tool. Sets of the past have been more supplemental to existing curriculaan extra learning aide for after-school programs or as part of a science or robotics club. Not every kid gets to go to an after-school program or an enrichment club. For us, that started to feel like a very, very big opportunity to make even more impact, and certainly to reach a much more diverse group of kids, says Andrew Sliwinski, Lego Education VP and head of product experience.
[Photo: Lego]
Lego Education’s Science kits include more than 120 differentiated lessons across three grade ranges that can be explored using just the material in the box. Building with Lego is a central part of each lesson, but it’s also a gateway for making sometimes difficult scientific concepts easierand more funto grasp.
What we’re trying to do is figure out a way where we can make science engaging, creative, and collaborative, but oh yeah, make that fit in a 45-minute lesson in a classroom with a teacher that doesn’t have a background in science, says Sliwinski. It’s quite the design brief to make that work.
[Photo: Lego]
Each lesson involves building something with Lego pieces, then using what was built to explore a specific scientific concept or phenomenon, from momentum to structural stability to biomorphology. The kits are designed to be used in groups of four students, with an online component that teachers use to guide a lesson plan, which typically starts with a playful scenario or storyline and often features a familiar Lego minifigure.
One lesson about earthquakes, intended for students ranging from third through fifth grades, is called Lemonade Shake, and involves a Lego character with a lemonade stand. The students put the lemonade stand on a shake table and connect it to a small motor included in the kit. When the motor is turned on, the lemonade glasses tumbles to the ground. The students then attempt to design and build their own lemonade stand that could better withstand the seismic force of another earthquake.
Ruthie Chen Ousley is Lego Education’s head of product for the science category, and a former elementary school teacher, and she says the familiarity of building with Lego helps students open up to scientific lessons that some might otherwise balk at. What we find is that it’s really the combination of the different design choices that we’ve made that unlocks this level of engagement, from the storyline in the beginning that invites everybody in to think about this character and the immediate connection to the minifigure character that children have, to the array of Lego building elements and materials that they’re able to play with, Ousley says.
[Photo: Lego]
Sliwinski says developing Lego Education Science took more than five years. Lessons are aligned with Next Generation Science Standards, the state and national standards used to normalize science curricula. In creating the tool, Lego Education integrated feedback from more than 150 teachers, and had hands-on testing by more than 3,000 students, which proved invaluable in the design process. You have to cater for a really wide rnge developmentally, Sliwinski says. What a five-year-old can do and what a 14-year-old can do are different, even down to physical hand and finger strength. So we had to think about all of those details.
The designers also had to contend with the reality that most kids already think of Lego as a toy. Sliwinski says it was important that the Lego Education Science kits weren’t just perceived to be toysor worse, to be seen as toys trying to hide the fact that they are schoolwork. We should never make chocolate-covered broccoli. The worst thing that we can do, I think, is try to take an educational idea, wrap it in a candy shell and try to get the kid to swallow it, Sliwinski says. What we really have to do is think about why should a kid be excited about this, why should a child think that this is interesting to them.
The goal of the kits, Sliwinski says, is to make science more approachable to young children, and to see themselves when they hear the word scientist. That’s not about just making science fun, he says. That’s about making science relevant more than anything else.
Passenger rail service in the United States is woefully lacking compared to other countries, particularly long-distance service that connects far-reaching cities. Amtrak currently operates 15 long-distance routes, which range from 750 to 2,500 miles. But they stretch over just 39 states and the District of Columbia, and a map of those routes reveals that large swaths of the country dont have any rail options.A new map, as part of a recent Federal Railroad Administration study, shows what the country could look like if 15 additional long-distance routes were added. With those rail lines, previously stranded regions of the country are suddenly connected with bright lines representing passenger rail. They would make the countrys rail network considerably fuller and would bring rail service to all of the lower 48 states.The existing Amtrak Passenger rail network. [Image: FRA]These 15 potential new Amtrak routes would add more than 23,000 rail miles to the system, serve more than 60 new metropolitan areas, and provide rail access to 39 million people that currently dont have it. The revealed preferred route options. [Image: FRA]The FRA study on the potential expansion of long-distance rail was delivered to Congress this week. As part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Congress directed the FRA, which oversees Amtrak, to conduct a study that evaluated the potential of restoring routes, adding new ones, and increasing existing service.The FRA has been working on the report for the past two years, conducting meetings in 21 cities across the country, from Boston to Boise to Dallas. The agency received more than 50,000 comments, from stakeholders like state transportation departments and Indian Tribes, as well as members of the public. Thats a sign, the FRA says, of the overwhelming support for long-distance services or passenger rail in general. In their comments, people across the country shared how they would use the new route options to do everything from visit family to see national parks to connect to job opportunities. Less than 10% of riders on Amtraks current long-distance routes ride from end-to-end, the study notes, but what these routes do is connect people to all the urban and rural places in between. Amtraks current Crescent route, for example, connects New York to New Orleansbut includes stops at more than 30 stations in between, from Trenton, New Jersey, to Greensboro, North Carolina, to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The studys findings underscore the growing interest in train travel thats been sweeping the U.S. in recent years. Amtrak itself saw record ridership in 2024, with new routes quickly surpassing expectations. Other rail companies have come into the fold, too, like Brightline, with its plans to develop high-speed rail options. [Images: FRA]But the potential new Amtrak routes are far from a sure thing. The options that the study outlines are conceptual, the FRA says, and more work is needed to refine the projects and determine their costs and funding sources, plus whatever else it would take to actually implement them. Some of the routes have existed previously, but were closed because of a lack of funding. Restoring them would surely be a funding challenge again. Currently, the study reads, there is no sustained financial support or program to construct or operate the selected preferred route options.Some of that funding could come from an FRA program, or from states and private stakeholders working with Amtrak. Its also not clear what this Congress, or the new administration, will think of the report. Though President Donald Trump, while on the campaign trail, lamented the fact that the U.S. didnt have bullet trains, experts say his presidency could reduce financial support for transit projects overall.
Retro tech is having an undeniable moment. Weve seen the revival of the Game Boy and chunky keyboards. Courtesy of Sega, even the pager was recently made cool again. Now we can add the iPod to the list of vintage gadgets that Americas youth yearn to experience firsthand.
The L.A.-based design collective Drought is tapping into that desire with the iMirror, a behemoth 5-foot-tall replica of the iconic iPod Nano with a mirror instead of a screen (as the name suggests). The iMirror comes in six colors, retails for $375, and will drop online today at 3 p.m. ET in a limited run of just 200. Anyone who actually wants to get their hands on the device-turned-design object will need to act fast: According to Drought founder Jake Olshan, the iMirrors first drop back in August instantly went viral, with all 200 mirrors selling out in the first minute.
[Photo: Drought]
Olshans fascination with all things retro is evident in Droughts previous drops, which have included a burning CD candle in collaboration with Napster, a giant paper clip inspired by Microsoft Offices mascot, Clippy, and a belt with a buckle fashioned to look like Internet Explorers early-aughts logo. It was only a matter of time before the iPod, which debuted in 2001, joined the ranks of aesthetic tech items from a bygone era. We shouldve known this was coming when Urban Outfitters started peddling the devices to Gen Alpha for $349 back in 2023.
[Image: Drought]
According to Olshan, who was born in 1997, the concept for the iMirror came from his own nostalgia for the tech (he owned the Classic, Shuffle, and Nano models back when iPods were hot). Picking a model for the mirror largely came down to the screen size, which was largest on the Nano.
Beyond that, there were so many iconic elements of this iPod Nano and its campaignthe colors, the ads, the song choices for the ads, Olshan says. Also, thinking a couple years to decades down the line, I felt these would look best surviving the test of time as actual home decor and art pieces as well. In 20 years, he adds, younger people will probably have no idea what the iPod was, but theyll be able to find out about them through these. I think its a cool way of paying homage to it.
[Photo: Drought]
The iMirror comes with a stainless steel power button and frosted-glass text accents on the mirror, including the phrase Find Yourself above a song progress bar and a small battery icon in the top right. The iPod buttons up arrow has been replaced with the word Drought.
I see this drop appealing to two main audiences: those who grew up with these items and feel a strong connection to them, as well as younger people who may not have experienced them firsthand but are drawn to their nostalgic appeal, Olshan says. On one hand, one group is holding on to whats familiar, while the other is eager to be a part of it and experience that nostalgia.
