The sky is about to get a lot clearer.
NASAs latest infrared space telescope, SPHERExshort for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorerwill assemble the worlds most complete sky survey to better explain how the universe evolved.
The $488 million mission will observe far-off galaxies and gather data on more than 550 million galaxies and stars, measure the collective glow of the universe, and search for water and organic molecules in the interstellar gas and dust clouds where stars and new planets form.
The 1107-lb., 8.5 x 10.5-foot spacecraft is slated to launch March 2 at 10:09 pm (ET) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. (Catch the launch on NASA+ and other platforms.) From low-Earth orbit, it will produce 102 maps in 102 infrared wavelengths every six months over two years, creating a 3D map of the entire night sky that glimpses back in time at various points in the universe’s history to fractions of a second after the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago. Onboard spectroscopy instruments will help determine the distances between objects and their chemical compositions, including water and other key ingredients for life.
SPHEREx Prepared for Thermal Vacuum Testing [Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/BAE Systems]
Mapping how matter dispersed over time will help scientists better understand the physics of inflationthe instantaneous expansion of the universe after the Big Bang and the reigning theory that best accounts for the universes uniform, weblike structure and flat geometry. Scientists hypothesize the universe exploded in a split-second, from smaller than an atom to many trillions of times in size, producing ripples in the temperature and density of the expanding matter to form the first galaxies.
SPHEREx is trying to get at the origins of the universewhat happened in those very few first instances after the Big Bang, says SPHEREx instrument scientist Phil Korngut. If we can produce a map of what the universe looks like today and understand that structure, we can tie it back to those original moments just after the Big Bang.
[Photo: BAE Systems/Benjamin Fry]
SPHEREx’s approach to observing the history and evolution of galaxies differs from space observatories that pinpoint objects. To account for galaxies existing beyond the detection threshold, it will study a signal called the extragalactic background light. Instead of identifying individual objects, SPHEREx will measure the total integrated light emission that comes from going back through cosmic time by overlaying maps of all of its scans. If the findings highlight areas of interest, scientists can turn to the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes to zoom in for more precise observations.
To prevent spacecraft heat from obscuring the faint light from cosmic sources, its telescope and instruments must operate in extreme cold, nearing380 degrees Fahrenheit. To achieve this, SPHEREx relies on a passive cooling system, meaning no electricity or coolants, that uses three cone-shaped photon shields and a mirrored structure beneath them to block the heat of Earth and the Sun and direct it into space.
Searching for life
In scouting for water and ice, the observatory will focus on collections of gas and dust called molecular clouds. Every molecule absorbs light at different wavelengths, like a spectral fingerprint. Measuring how much the light changes across the wavelengths indicates the amount of each molecule present.
It’s likely the water in Earth’s oceans originated in a molecular cloud, says SPHEREx science data center lead Rachel Akeson. While other space telescopes have found reservoirs of water in hundreds of locations, SPHEREx will give us more than nine million targets. Knowing the water content around the galaxy is a clue to how many locations could potentially host life.
More philosophically, finding those ingredients for life connects the questions of how `did the universe evolve? and `how did we get here? to `where can life exist? and `are we alone in that universe? says Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of NASAs Astrophysics Division.
Solar wind study
The SpaceX rocket will also carry another two-year mission, the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH), to study the solar wind and how it affects Earth. Its four small satellites will focus on the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, and how it moves through the solar system and bombards Earth’s magnetic field, creating beautiful auroras but endangering satellites and spacecraft. The missions four suitcase-size satellites will use polarizing filters that piece together a 3D view of the corona capture data that helps determine the solar wind speed and direction.
That helps us better understand and predict the space weather tha affects us on Earth, says PUNCH mission scientist Nicholeen Viall. This`thing that we’ve thought of as being big, empty space between the sun and the Earth, now we’re gonna understand exactly what’s within it.
PUNCH will combine its data with observations from other NASA solar missions, including Coronal Diagnostic Experiment (CODEX), which views the inner corona from the International Space Station; Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE), which launches in March to investigate the relationship between magnetic field fluctuations and auroras; and Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), which launches later this year to study solar wind particle acceleration through the solar system and its interaction with the interstellar environment.
A long journey
SPHEREx spent years in development before its greenlight in 2019. NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed the mission, enlisting BAE Systems to build the telescope and spacecraft bus, and finalizing it as the Los Angeles’s January wildfires threatened its campus. Scientists from 13 institutions in the U.S., South Korea, and Taiwan will analyze the resulting data, which CalTechs Infrared Processing & Analysis Center will process and house, and the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive will make publicly available.
[Image: JPL]
I am so unbelievably excited to get my hands on those first images from SPHEREx, says Korngut. I’ve been working on this mission since 2012 as a young postdoc and the journey it’s taken from conceptual designs to here on the launcher is just so amazing.
Adds Viall, All the PowerPoints are now worth it.
Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture.
Costco chair Hamilton Tony James caused a bit of a stir this week when, in an interview, he mentioned a retail category thats done surprisingly well for the big-box chain: luxury goods. “Rolex watches, Dom Pérignon, 10-carat diamonds, James offered as examples of high-end products and brands that have fit into a discount-club model more typically associated with buying staples in bulk. Affluent people, he explained, love a good deal.
Courting that group may be particularly timely right nowand not just for Costco. According to a recent report from research firm Moodys Analytics, the top 10% of U.S. earners (with household incomes of $250,000 and up) now account for almost 50% of all spending; 30 years ago, they accounted for 36%. Moodys calculates that spending by this top group contributes about one-third to U.S. gross domestic product.
While that reflects a serious squeeze further down the income ladder, where the price of eggs and other basics remain high, it also suggests that the comparatively well-off not only have money to spend, but theyre spending it. As of September, the affluent had increased their spending 12% over the prior year, while working-class and middle-class households had spent less.
Thats having a clear effect on such sectors as travel, where the affluent have always been part of the mix but are now even more important. Delta recently reported that premium ticket sales are up 8%, much more than main-cabin sales. Bank of America found the most affluent 5% of its customers spent over 10% more on luxury goods than a year ago. Theyre going to Paris and loading up their suitcases with luxury bags and shoes and clothes, BofA Institute senior economist David Tinsley told the Wall Street Journal.
For discounters and dollar stores targeting lower-income consumers, this has meant more competition for fewer dollars spent. (Dollar stores have struggled, and the discount chain Big Lots has filed for bankruptcy.) Addressing that challenge by courting the wealthy isnt an easy move, but Costco isnt alone in trying. Walmart CFO John David Rainey told Fox Business that the retail giant has expanded its selection of high-end Apple products, Bose headphones, and other items sought after by more-affluent customers,” as part of a stab at upleveling the Walmart brand.
Of course, it may not be easy for most bargain-oriented brands to swiftly pivot, but Costco does seem to have more of a track record of pushing a more upscale-friendly element to its image. James noted that Costco has long counted affluent shoppers among its members36% of them have incomes of $125,000 and higher, according to consumer-data firm Numerator. A Coresight analysis from a couple years ago found that Costco customers have higher average incomes than those who shop at rival Sams Club, and thats reflected in its brand and product variety.
Costcos reputation for serving that somewhat higher-income demographic makes the chain more attractive to brands that target those shoppers as well, Morningstar analyst Zain Akbari told CNBC. And of course it doesnt hurt that the chain has famously been selling gold and platinum bars. (Its also worth noting that Costcos business is doing well in general, not just with high-end customersand its reputation seems to have benefited from its reaffirmed commitment to DEI as a sound business practice.)
Weve always known we could move anything in volume if the quality was good and the price was great, Costco’s James said, and that includes higher-end items that might seem like a stretch for a price-focused warehouse chain. In fact, he argued, its a natural part of the Costco brand: Both the company and its fans like to talk about the treasure hunt-feel of finding something unexpected thats not necessarily cheap, but a bargain.
Were not interested in selling just anything at a low price, James added. If someone wants to buy a $500 TV for $250 at Costco, we want to sell them a $1,000 TV for $500 instead. Were always trying to find better items to sell to members, giving them a great deal. Were by no means a dollar store.
It (almost) goes without saying that from a macro perspective, the massive wealth and spending-power imbalance underlying Moodys analysis points to potential problems that shifts in retail strategy wont solve: Consumer debt in delinquency is rising, and the whole economy is vulnerable if splurging by the affluent were to plummet. So while retailers will likely continue to chase after wealthier customers, the majority of consumers are left to treasure hunt for reasonably priced eggs.
In 2021, Eugene Kashuk was looking for a new venture. The Ukrainian entrepreneur realized in the wake of the pandemic that there was a large gap in education. Students were lagging behind, particularly in math.
Kashuk started Brighterly, a platform that connects math teachers from all across the globe with students in the United States for private tutoring. Brighterly offers private lessons for $20 per 45-minute lessonmuch cheaper than the average rate of about $40 per hour in the United States.
In part, Brighterly is able to keep costs down because it uses AI to generate lessons so teachers are able to use their time to focus on their student instead of coming up with problem sets and exams.
Fast Company chatted with Kashuk about Brighterlys growth story and the role of AI in education.
How does Brighterly work?
Brighterly founder and CEO Eugene Kashuk [Photo: Brighterly]
We are a marketplace that connects teachers with students, but we’re not an ordinary marketplace where there’s no control over quality levels or standardization. We have a pretty sophisticated way of hiring and managing teachers and only accept 3% of applicants. We look for teaching skills and soft skills: 90% of our teachers have prior teaching experience.
We also have our own custom methodology and curriculum designed by a team of in-house experts, and then we use AI to generate content.
On the other side, we’ve got a platform that connects teachers, parents, and kids and allows for lessons to happen. Lessons themselves are fun, interactive, and gamified, and it all revolves around the school curriculum. Its a high-impact education where we are able to gain academic results as fast as possible.
You mentioned using AI to create lessons. How do you make sure its not hallucinating or creating misinformation?
We are human driven in terms of the content that we create. There are some processes that you can automate using AI. For example, you need to explain fractions to a kid. The best way to do it is to find a circular object such as a pizza you split into pieces. You can use AI to generate images. You can use AI to generate ideas on what kind of circular object will work the best here and will be engaging and fun for the kids.
We dont ask AI to tell us what to teach. As we see it, you can only use AI to create content that is aligned with what you teach.
What do you see as the role of AI in education?
When I think of AI technologies replacing human educators, I’m more afraid than excited. Ill caveat and say the technology evolves so fast that you never know what it will look like in a few years.
At this point, I don’t see any potential that AI tutors might replace real human educators. In order for education to work, teachers need to form an emotional bond with their students. Not everything can be covered by logic and algorithms; you need to have that human input to understand what the child really needs.
Were not at a moment where AI can really replace human interaction in education. However, we have great capabilities to generate content or to generate language to help create lessons and personalized assessments, which can be very useful for educators.
So youre saying AI can lighten the load for teachers so they can focus on nourishing the emotional bond with students.
And so teachers can also focus on decision-making. You need a human teacher to understand how well a student is doing and assess what they need next. For example, maybe a student seems to grasp a topic but the teacher can sense that they’d benefit from some more repetition. I don’t see at this point how AI can pick up on moments like this.
Is there anything else youd like to add?
The education gap isnt just in maththeres also a reading problem. We get daily requests for more reading lessons, so well be launching a reading course as well. There was a COVID relief program that allocated resources to cover those gaps, but its unclear if itll be funded in the future.
In the meantime, the knowledge gap is growing. Currently, we only cover elementary and middle school, but well also be launching a high school product to help with that gap. Children are the future and right now existing solutions for the knowledge gap arent working. We need more.
But what is death? I am sitting down with Katrina Crawford and we are here to talk about the White Lotus Season 3 opening credits. Together with Mark Bashore, Crawford runs the creative studio Plains of Yonder, which has crafted the White Lotus main titles for every season so far. But that question about death wasn’t posed by me. It was posed by her. And it challenges us to reflect on the meaning of death, and the many ways to die.
Since White Lotus season 3 premiered on February 16, the internet has been abuzz with theories and criticisms around who died and what the opening sequence means. In response, HBO has said: You’ll get it soon enough. So while we wait, we decided to call up Crawford and Bashore so we can dissect one of the most iconic main titles in modern history. The biggest takeaway? Some things can have more than one meaning.
[Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder]
Easter eggs or red herrings?
Plains of Yonder has made over a dozen main titles for shows like The Decameron and The Lord of the Rings TV show, Rings of Power. But Crawford says that this title, for White Lotus Season 3, is by far the longest they’ve ever spent developing.
While some showrunners don’t consider the main title until the end, Crawford says that Mike White gave the team a whole 10 months to craft the sequence. When they started, Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who wrote the music for previous seasons’ openers, was still composing the new soundtrack. The crew wasn’t even shooting yet. All they had was the script. White Lotus Season 3 has eight episodes. They got the script for the first seven episodes. We know a lot, Crawford tells me. But they don’t know who dies.
[Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder]
Crawford combed through those scrips and crafted meticulous profiles for every character, where she tried to understand who these characters areor who she thinks they are. Once the profiles were complete, she assigned dozens of images to them. Sometimes, she paired a character with an animal (a stoned monkey for the North Carolina mom played by Parker Posy). Sometimes, she crafted a scenario around them (Jason Isaacs’s Timothy Ratliff character appears coiled up in a tree with knives for branches.) These images might intimate a character’s fate or personality, but of course, some interpretations are more literal than others. Maybe someone is presenting one way, but something else is truth, she says.
[Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder]
Animal instincts
As with every season, animals carried much of the symbolism. Weve always found that using animals are a better metaphor than people, says Bashore. Season 1 was obsessed with monkeys; Season 2 introduced humping goats; Season 3 goes all in on mythological creatures that are half-human, half-beast. (Crawford spent a month poring over Thai mythology books.)
The intro opens with a circus of animals, and the first humans to be portrayed are human faces attached to bird bodies. A bit later into the sequence, Lek Patravadi’s Sritala Hollinger character (the hotel owner) appears by a pond, holding a creature that is half human, half birdperhaps a clue about her mysteriously absent husband.
Most of these metaphors are predictably obscure. Amy Lou Wood (who plays Chelsea) appears in the middle of an incriminating scene depicting a leopard that has bitten off a deer’s head with two foxes bearing witness. Which animal is she? Meanwhile, Natasha Rothwell, who plays Belinda from Season 1, is portrayed next to a stork staring down at its reflection in the water, while a crocodile is lying in lurk. Will it snap her up in its jaws?
[Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder]
Fiction or reality?
That the team spent ten months developing the title isn’t so surprising considering the complexity of these characters. But there is one more character in the story, and that is Thailand.
Like with the first two seasons, the location plays a key role in the story. To build that sense of place, the team spent ten days filming at three Royal temples in Thailand. We shot the daylights out of it, says Bashore, noting that they took over 1,000 photos of patterns, colors, outfits, and of course, those iconic Thai rooflines. We looked for quick visual cues, patterns that feel iconically Thailand.
[Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder]
Getting permits to film was no small feat considering the sacred nature of the temples. The team had to coordinate access with HBO, and other logistical challenges meant that the title took longer to make. But could the delay signal something else? Some shows, like Game of Thrones, have created main titles that change from week to week. Was the White Lotus Season 3 main title so challenging to make because the team had to tweak it as the season progresses? Crawford gives a cheeky shrug that neither confirms nor denies it: We can’t talk about anything you haven’t seen.
What we can talk about is what Crawford calls the Temple of White Lotus. Indeed, the temples help anchor the show in Thailand, but the real star of the show is the White Lotus resort, which may have been filmed at the Four Seasons Resort Koh Samui, but remains a fictional place. To emphasize the otherworldly setting, the team broke down the photographs they took into little squares and shuffled them to create new images out of themlike a patchwork that looks and feels real, but ultimately isn’t. We’re not trying to say this is a real place, says Bashore. It’s just a vibe we’re soaking in.
[Photo: Courtesy Plains of Yonder]
This vibe ultimately blossoms in the seven worlds the team created for the title sequence. The story begins in the jungle, then unfolds in a village, a temple, a pond (in which we see Sam Nivola’s body afloat), a gloomier forest with ominous snakes coiled around trees, an epic battle scene, and the grand finaledisaster at seawhere a throng of men gets swallowed by giant fish.
Could this mass killing scene signify more than one death in the show? Crawford’s response? You know it already: But what is death?
For more than two decades, users have turned to search engines like Google, typed in a query, and received a familiar list of 10 blue linksthe gateway to the wider web. Ranking high on that list, through search engine optimization (SEO), has become a $200 billion business.
But in the past two years, search has changed. Companies are now synthesizing and summarizing results into AI-generated answers that eliminate the need to click through to websites. While this may be convenient for users (setting aside concerns over hallucinations and accuracy) its bad for businesses that rely on search traffic.
One such business, educational tech firm Chegg, has sued Google in federal district court, alleging that AI-generated summaries of its content have siphoned traffic from its site and harmed its revenue. Chegg reported a 24% year-on-year revenue decline in Q4 2024, which it partly attributes to Googles AI-driven search changes.
In the lawsuit, the company alleges that Google is reaping the financial benefits of Cheggs content without having to spend a dime. A Google spokesperson responded that the company will defend itself in court, emphasizing that Google sends billions of clicks to websites daily and arguing that AI overviews have diversifiednot reducedtraffic distribution.
Its going to be interesting to see what comes out of it, because we’ve seen content creators anecdotally complaining on Reddit or elsewhere for months now that they are afraid of losing traffic, says Aleksandra Urman, a researcher at the University of Zurich specializing in search engines.
Within the SEO industry, anxiety over artificial intelligence overviews has been mounting. Cheggs legal arguments closely align with the ethical concerns the SEO and publishing communities have been raising for years, says Lily Ray, a New York-based SEO expert. While Google has long displayed answers and information directly in search results, AI overviews take this a step further by extracting content from external sites and rewording it in a way that positions Google more as a publisher than a search engine.
Ray points to Googles lack of transparency, particularly around whether users actually click on citations in AI-generated responses. The lack of visibility into whether users actually click on citations within AI overviews leaves publishers guessing about the true impact on their organic traffic, she says.
Urman adds that past research on Googles featured snippetswhich surfaced excerpts from websitesshowed a drop in traffic for affected sites. The claim seems plausible, she says, but we don’t really have the evidence to say how the appearance of AI overviews really affects user behavior.
Not all companies are feeling the squeeze, however. Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah said on an earnings call that AI overviews had little effect on its web traffic. AIs presence remains limited, he said. AI overviews are present in just 12% of our top queries.
It remains to be seen whether Chegg is an outlier or a bellwether. Ray, for her part, believes its lawsuit could be a pivotal moment in the fight over AI and SEO. This case will be fascinating to watch, she says. Its outcome could have massive implications for millions of sites beyond just Chegg.
Theres a new website that tracks how much of Project 2025, the 922-page conservative playbook, has already come to fruition under President Donald Trump’s administration. It shows that, in less than two months, more than a third of the right-wing agendas objectives have been fulfilled.
The site, called Project 2025 Tracker, is broken down into bite-sized sections based on the goals laid out in document. Project 2025 was written by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation and several members of Trumps first administration, and although the President distanced himself from the document on the campaign trail, hes since said he agrees with many parts of it. His administration has already proved itself to be at least partially aligned with the projects policy goals.
While other major media outlets have compiled list-style round-ups of President Trumps executive orders thus far, the tracker takes a more visual, big-picture approach to understanding how closely Trumps second term is mapping onto a far-right blueprintincluding a Project 2025 progress bar.
[Image: Project 2025 Tracker]
Breaking down Project 2025
The Project 2025 Tracker is the result of an unplanned collaboration between two Reddit users. It started with Adrienne Cobb, an archaeologist by trade who, outside of work, runs a political and legal news subreddit with 183,000 members called r/Keep_Track. Last month, Cobb decided to make a spreadsheet tracking the Trump administrations progress on Project 2025 initiatives, which quickly gained traction on her subreddit.
Project 2025 is one of the biggest threats to democracy, to the common good, that weve faced, Cobb says. It is important that Americans understand what it is and how it may impact their lives. But most people dont have time to read a 900-page document. So, I set out to read it myself and extract the objectives to make it easier for everyone to digest.
To build the spreadsheet, Cobb sifted through every chapter of Project 2025, each of which addresses a specific federal agency and recommends how a president can reform it in accordance with the Heritage Foundations vision, she says.
For every agency section, Cobb identified a series of objectives, which shes defined as any moment when the author of a chapter explicitly calls for an action to be taken. This is to avoid any subjective reading between the lines, Cobb says. That includes everything from a suggestion that the Center of Disease Control should immediately end its collection of data on gender identity to a directive to reverse the Department of Defenses policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military (both of which have since been carried out).
The spreadsheet only transformed into a website when fellow Reddit user u/mollynaquafina stumbled across it during their daily spin through the site.
I was scrolling through Reddit, like I do most mornings, and I came across a post from /u/rusticgorilla in the /r/keep_track subreddit, u/mollynaquafina says. They posted about the Project 2025 spreadsheet tracker they started. I checked it out and was impressed with the level of detailwith references to specific page numbers and news articles for each objective.
As someone with a background in cybersecurity, u/mollynaquafina says, seeing the information compiled in a spreadsheet helped to connect the dots in my brain. Still, they add, others might process information in a visual way. To make the information more transparent, they offered to turn the spreadsheet into a more digestible website.
‘The sheer amount of news each day is staggering’
The first priority of the Project 2025 Tracker, u/mollynaquafina explains, is to highlight just how much progress has already been made in the agendas objectives. To that end, the websites top section is a bright blue overall progress bar coupled with a live countdown of time remaining in Trumps second term. Currently, with 1,423 days left to go, overall Project 2025 progress has already reached 36%.
Trumps second term has been much more chaotic than his first, which I didnt think was possible, Cobb says. The sheer amount of news each day is staggering. I believe that is the goal, though: to move fast, to overwhelm, to stun. By the time the people have a chance to organize against a particular action, the administration has alredy moved on to the next objective.
As users dig deeper into the site, they can also filter Project 2025 progress by agency, subject (like DEIA or energy), and status. Any objective that has already been carried out is highlighted with a green completed bubble and accompanied with links to both a citation in the Project 2025 document and an accompanying news item. U/mollynaquafina has also added a chart and timeline feature to help users take in the holistic picture.
I was very intentional about using factual and neutral language where possible, U/mollynaquafina says. My goal is for people who support the Project 2025 objectives to clearly read about them and ask themselves, Is this what I signed up for?
To keep up with the constant influx of news, Cobb uses what she calls a low-tech process of combing through social media, news articles, and federal websites before manually organizing stories by topic in a word-processing document. From there, she compares her notes against the spreadsheet to determine if any news events match up with Project 2025 objectives.
The tracker is pulling in around 50,000 to 100,000 visitors each day, with about 10% of traffic originating outside the U.S. Going forward, u/mollynaquafina plans to translate the site into several other languages based on demand.
The community has been very supportive of our effort to track Project 2025 but has also expressed a lot of fear about where the country is headed, Cobb says. I think that is totally justified and normal. My hope is that helping people understand Project 2025 will remove some of that powerlessness, remove the fear of the unknown, and spur more collective action to stop its progress.
Unless youre at the very top of the food chain in your organization, you report to someone. And that manager is important for your career success. They will evaluate your performance, give you feedback and mentoring, greenlight ideas, and provide support elsewhere in the organization for things youre doing.
Because of all the roles that a supervisor plays for you, it can be stressful when a new person steps in, or you get promoted and start reporting to someone new.
There are several ways you can make this transition easier and lay the groundwork for a fruitful relationship with your new boss:
Be mindful of the firehose
When your supervisor is replaced with someone else, that person is stepping into a new role. Whenever you take on something new, there is a lot that comes at you those first few weeks. You need to get to know your team, your new responsibilities, your new peer groups. All of that happens while work needs to continue.
Thats the reason the information dump you face when you first start a role is often referred to as drinking from the firehose.
If your new boss is drinking from that hose, then you want to provide them with information slowly. Invite them to let you know when you can have a chance to meet and talk, recognizing that it may take them a week or more to get settled in before theyre ready to have an in-depth conversation.
As your supervisor gets settled, you can expand the amount of information you provide. Giving them that information when theyre ready to receive it will greatly increase the likelihood it gets read at all.
Provide an introduction
You do want to introduce yourself in stages. Start with a quick, one-paragraph introduction to share who you are, how long you’ve been with the organization, and your role on the team. If there are one or two critical things that your supervisor needs to call on you for, then highlight those as well.
After that, you can add more information about your broader responsibilities. Highlight projects that youre working on that may need your supervisors input or attention. You might consider creating a cheat sheet for your new boss that lists the things youre working on, your best contact information, and your key strengths and weaknesses. That way, your supervisor knows when to call on you and the kinds of projects where it might be helpful to include you.
After the initial rush, you can add details about projects that dont need immediate attention and other projects you have been involved in so that your supervisor can recognize the contributions you’ve made.
Talk about expectations
Your previous supervisor not only knew what you had done but also had a sense of your career trajectory, interests, and goals. Hopefully this person was also actively engaged in helping you grow and providing opportunities for you to move forward with your career goals.
Your new boss doesnt know any of these things about you. If you have expectations for how you want to be treated and what you would like your supervisor to do to help you succeed in your role and advance, you need to talk about those expectations.
It’s also helpful for you to discuss any weaknesses that you would like help to address. It is common to want to start your interactions with your supervisor by focusing on your strengths. And you should do that. But you might also be tempted to hide your weaknesses. Instead, it can be useful to be up front with those aspects of your work that you are still developing. It can ensure that you get help when you need it and that you’re considered for professional development opportunities.
Ask for what you need
Consistent with highlighting your weaknesses, you should generally ask your new boss for what you need from them. If you like to get feedback in the middle of projects, ask for it. If you need more information about the strategy behind a project or plan, ask.
Nobody is a mind reader. And the less well someone knows you, the less able they are to anticipate what you need from them. Rather than hoping your new boss will give you everything you need, youll have to ask for it. Usually, a supervisor will be glad to have some guidance about how youd like to engage with them. Asking for what you need is the best way to get the relationship with your new supervisor off to a good start.
Humanity has sequenced the genome and built artificial intelligence, and yet it’s still shockingly hard to find the right foundation shade.
I’ve spent hours at Sephora searching for a shade that doesn’t make my skin look ashy or unnatural. Then, when I finally do find a match, my skin gets darker after a day in the sun, and the color no longer works. I’m not alone in my frustration. Last year, makeup brands sold $8.4 billion of foundation around the world, but you can still find social media brimming with people complaining about how hard it is to find the right shade.
A new brand, Boldhue, wants to solve this problem forever. The company has created a machine that scans your face in three places, then instantly dispenses a customized foundation shade. Using a system similar to Keurig pods, the machine comes with five color cartridges that mix to create the right color; once they run out, you order more.
Boldhue Co-Founder and CEO Rachel Wilson and Artistic Director Sir John [Photo: Boldhue]
The product could revolutionize the way that everyday consumers do their makeup at homeand also make it far easier for professional makeup artists to create the right shade for their clients. Fueled by $3.37 million in venture funding from Mark Cuban’s Lucas Venture Group, BoldHue believes it can bring this technology to all kinds of other cosmetic products.
The Quest To Find Your Shade
Karin Layton, BoldHue’s co-founder and CTO, was an aerospace engineer who worked at Raytheon. Five years ago, she realized that her high-end foundation didn’t accurately match her skin. As a hobby, Layton dabbled in painting and had a fascination with color theory. So she began tinkering with building a machine that would produce a person’s exact skin shade.
During the pandemic, after Layton decided to turn her idea into real company, she brought her childhood friend and serial entrepreneur, Rachel Wilson, as her business partner. I really resonated with the pain points she was trying to solve because I am half Argentinian, says Wilson, who is now CEO. And while I present as white, I have undertones that make it complicated for me to find the right shade. I always look like a pumpkin or a ghost when I wear foundation.
[Photo: Boldhue]
Women of color, in particular, have trouble finding the right shade. For years, the makeup industry focused on creating products for caucasian women, leaving Black and brown women to come up with their own solutions.
This only began to change a decade ago. In 2015, I wrote about a chemist at L’Oreal, Balanda Atis, went on a personal quest to develop a darker foundation that wouldn’t make her skin look too red or black. L’Oreal eventually commercialized the product she created and promoted Atis to become the head of the Women of Color lab, which focuses on creating products for women of color. Danessa Myricks, a self-taught makeup artist, spent years mixing her own foundation using dark pigments she found at costume makeup stores and mixed them with drugstore foundations. In 2015, she launched her own beauty brand, Danessa Myricks Beauty, and four years ago, Sephora began to carry it.
[Photo: Boldhue]
Today, there are more options for women of color, but many women still struggle to find the right shade. BoldHue believes the solution lies in technology. Color matching technology already exists, but it is not particularly convenient for consumers. Lancome has a machine that color matches, but it’s only available in certain stores. Sephora has ColorIQ, which scans your face and matches you to different brands. But part of the problem is that your skin tone isn’t static; it is constantly changing based on how much sun exposure you have, especially if you are have a lot of melanin. If you order a shade online, your complexion may have changed by the time you receive it seven days later, says Wilson.
Color-Matching At Home
Wilson and Layton believe that having an affordable, at-home solution to color matching could be game-changing. The machine comes with a wand. When you want to create a new foundation shade, you scan your skin on your forehead, your cheek, and your neck. Then the machine instantly dispenses about a week’s worth of that shade into a little container.
The machine can store that shade for you to use in the future. But having the machine in your house means that you can easily re-scan your face after a day at the beach to get a more accurate shade. If there are multiple people in a household (or say, a sorority house) who wear foundation, they can each scan their faces to produce the perfect shade.
And it could transform the work of makeup artists who typically mix their own shades for their clients throughout the day. They’re lugging around pounds of products to set and are forced to play chemist all day long, says Wilson. If we can shade match for them in one minute, they can focus on the artistry part of their job,and they’re wildly excited about that. It also means they can book more clients in a day, because they have more time.
While on the surface, BoldHue’s technology seems to disrupt to the foundation industry, Wilson believes it could actually empower other makeup brands. Each makeup brand has its own formula that influences the creaminess and coverage of their foundations. BoldHue could create a brand’s formula in the machine, but have the added benefit of highly specific color matches. BoldHue is already in talks to partner with brands to create customized foundations for them, much the way that Keurig partners with brands like Peet’s and Illy to create pods for the coffee machines.
But ultimately, the possibilities go beyond foundation. With this technology BoldHue could create other color cosmetics, from concealer to lipstick to eyeshadow. We think of ourselves as a technology company with a beauty deliverable, Wilson says.
For years, the creator economy has become increasingly accepted as the future of media. These days, makeup tutorials on TikTok could have the same impact for a brand as a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, and a progressive Twitch streamer can reach a comparable, if not bigger audience, as MSNBC.
But like digital media before it, the creator economy now faces a multifaceted conundrum that could determine its long term fate: shifting priorities from Meta and X, the potential TikTok ban (which, thanks to an executive order from the Trump administration, has at least a stay of execution), industry consolidation, and AI-enabled content overload. Taken together, these issues could spell the end of the influencer and creator economy as it exists in its current form, according to nearly a dozen industry experts interviewed by Fast Company.
The appeal of influencers has historically laid with their supposed authenticity. They’re pushing products they believe in or sharing news commentary from an unfiltered perspective, which resonated with consumers. Increasingly, there is a sentiment that this authenticity is fading. And that could spell big long-term changes.
AI: Friend of Foe?
AI tools have made it easier for influencers to break into the marketplace like using ChatGPT to write articles, or Adobes text to image maker to make pictures, and Canvas AI video generator to make clips. By doing so, these products have made it easier to get content out in the world without developing the skills needed to make higher quality programming. That low barrier to entryand the general proliferation of AI-fueled content across the webalso means it can be difficult for creators to stand out. At the same time, the ubiquity of AI has for many consumers inserted a skepticism around authenticity.
Amazon Web Services researchers believe 57% of online content is already made by AI programs or translated via AI programs. Yet, per a recent Deloitte study, seven out of 10 consumers reportedly think generative AI is ruining the user experience.
Thats already having an impact on how consumers interact with creators and influencers.
Forty-five percent of 13 to 22 year olds say that influencers dont have as much sway as they used to, according to a YPulse study. Meanwhile, a survey by EnTribe found 51% of consumers scrolled right past an influencer post that appeared in their feed.
In terms of actually using AI as the way to generate ideas to create content, I think were just going to get a lot of quantity and not quality, says Ivy Yang, founder of Wavelet Strategy, a New York-based communications consultancy.
Sure enough, brands have started to catch on to consumer sentiment. A plethora of brands have asked their ad agencies to not use AI in their strategies. Dove notably said it would not use AI-generated content at all.
Are Brand Partnerships Really Helping?
A staggering 61% of 13 to 39-year-olds believe the more ads influencers do, the less they trust them, according to a YPulse survey.
As soon as the audience starts to feel like this person isnt authentic or interesting, they just jump to another person who is seen as more authentic and interesting, says James Nord, founder and CEO of the influencer marketing company Fohr.
That authenticity problem is already impacting brands who rely on influencers to push their products. An EnTribe study found that 42% of people who purchased something recommended by influencers regretted that decision which is fueling a credibility crisis.
“Inauthenticity can trigger swift backlash, and evolving regulations add complexity. As digital trends shift rapidly, sustainable success demands agility and foresight,” says Lizi Sprague, a cofounder of Songue PR.
Brands are progressively spending less on social media marketing all together. A survey of 292 CMOs showed a 23% decline in 2023 and another 11% decline in 2024. Brands are finding more success with more niche nano-influencers but that means spreading a wider net and dishing out smaller payouts.
Misinformation Crisis
Influencers played an outsize role in the 2024 presidential election. Both candidates relied heavily on podcast appearances, but ultimately President Donald Trumps strategy was to tap into the so-called “manosphere,” which ultimately led to his success by helping him court the Gen Z male vote by double-digit margins.
Now, concerns about the surge in misinformation on platforms like X and TikTok are starting to drive news consumers away. Indeed, a 2023 Gartner survey suggests that influencers being on equal footing with established press may be a short-lived phenomenon. The study found that more than half of consumers plan to pull away from social media as soon as this year, citing the spread of misinformation as one of the top reasonsa big concern with a president now in office known for lying on a regular basis. And per a 2024 study from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 62% of creaors admittedly do not verify information before spreading it online.
Talking to students about their interactions with social media platforms [. . . ] they kind of feel bad about how much time to spend with these platforms, says Jacob Nelson, a journalism professor at the University of Utah.
Nelson, who has written about shifts in social media audiences for Harvards Nieman Lab, says this is the first time his students arent optimistic about the future of social media and are in fact pulling away. No one among the audience seems all that thrilled with the amount of time that they are investing, he tells Fast Company.
Will the Creator Economy Survive?
As a cautionary tale, the creator economy ought to look at the digital media sector.
In the early 2010s, publishers like Vice and Vox seemed almost invincible. But they were ultimately dependent on the whim of tech giants for their own successparticularly Facebook (which was behind the infamous “pivot to video” trend) and Google. Eventually these Silicon Valley power players shifted their strategyand proved disastrous for publishers who relied on them.
Websites like BuzzFeed, Gawker, and Mic suddenly faced a massive shift in their own manifest destiny (i.e., a cascade of layoffs and consolidations) often under the control of private equity. Ultimately, these changes left many outlets as husks of their former selves. In 2012 the digital media industry seemed unstoppable; in 2018 alone, it laid off over 15,000 workers, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
The platforms frankly are always going to be optimizing for their own business interests, says Sterling Proffer, former head of growth for Vice Media.
Fast forward to today: X, Linkedin, and Meta platforms have all shifted key parts of their business model several times in the last couple years and TikTok is still on the chopping block. Thats why those who dont have the skills to scale their creator offerings outside of one specific platform may not surviveat least if they want to make creating content a full-time job.I think that the folks who have been building on that are coming to recognize this element that theyre building on rented land, and there is a need for content creators who can diversify their offerings across platforms and even in real life, Brett Dashevsky, founder of Creator Economy NYC and the head of Content Creators at Kickstarter, tells Fast Company.Creators who have a specific skill or insightsay, a chef sharing unique culinary knowledgewill stand the test of time. They can upscale their projects to include in-person events like cooking classes, exclusive dinners, cookbooks, and meal kits. But for those who rose to fame thanks just to brand deals and dance videos, the future may not look so sunny after all.
NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is most well known for the National Weather Service, providing forecasting that underpins local meteorological reports and major sites like AccuWeather. But the data that NOAA collects is also crucial for private-sector industries, from airlines to insurance.
The Trump administration is threatening this agency, and began slashing jobs there on Thursday. That means those other industries are also at risk. When it comes to insurance, climate change already causes billions of dollars in losses globally. Here in the U.S. people who live in areas especially prone to climate risks are seeing their rates skyrocket, or theyre seeing insurance carriers withdraw coverage in high-risk states. Without NOAA data, these trends could worsen, and leave even more Americans with higher insurance premiumsor without coverage at all.
Financial services, including home insurance providers, consistently rely on [NOAA] to comprehend the influence of climate and weather on the economy and to facilitate transactions, says Manogna Vangari, an insurance analyst at GlobalData. Specifically, insurance providers get data from NOAAs National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), which recently revealed that in 2024, the U.S. experienced 27 individual weather and climate disasters causing at least $1 billion in damages each. In total, 2024 saw more than $192 billion in disaster costs, and more than 560 direct or indirect fatalities.
NCEI data helps insurers assess risks, and determine premiums. Insurers use this data to develop their catastrophe models, which estimate the economic losses from extreme weather events like hurricanes and floods; that then underpins premiums, underwriting, claims, and more. Insurers also look at data sets on storm report categories by state, as well as databases on specific disaster types such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis.
Losing that data, Vangari says, would complicate the way home insurance companies price climate-related risks. It also would hinder their ability to accurately model out the risk of extreme weather events, like wildfires and hurricanes, “and to price climate risk with greater precision. Without knowing those climate risks, insurance companies themselves risk more financial losses. To make up for that uncertainty, they’ll need to raise premiums even more, or they might just choose to pull out of particularly risky areas. The cost of losing that accurate, reliable data would then fall on consumers.
Insurance companies also use NOAA retrospective analysis of weather effects to verify claimslike how bad a hailstorm really was, says Rick Spinrad, who served as NOAA administrator from 2021 until January of this year. The insurance industry, as well as the reinsurance industry (which provides insurance for other insurance companies) has had an informal partnership with NOAA for 20 years. Spinrad formalized that partnership with a 2024 memorandum of understanding with the Reinsurance Association of America, an agreement meant to improve risk communication. NOAA has also worked with the insurance industry through its Industry Proving Ground, an initiative to test tailored services for the private sector, and to make sure the agency provides the best data for businesses to be most effective.
Because NOAA is a government service funded by taxpayers, its data is free. That means everyone has access to crucial weather forecasts. Project 2025, the conservative playbook that the Trump administration is following, advocates privatizing this service. But experts have said that even private weather companies wouldnt want that, because then theyd have to bear the cost of collecting the data that the government currently provides.
If, instead, this data were accessible only to those who could afford it, that would particularly impact homeowners in vulnerable communities, Vangari says. Insurers might be hesitant to pay a fee and rely on some other alternative source without access to reliable data, she adds. This would lead to a disproportionate increase in insurance premiums. Additionally, insurers may refuse to provide coverage in high-risk areas.
That doesn’t just impact people who may lose their homes and need to rebuild. Broadly, the stakes of losing this data are serious: In places that are susceptible to climate impacts like tornadoes or floods or tsunamis along the coast, timely access to weather data can be a matter of life and death. Not having the data doesn’t stop climate impacts from happening, multiple experts have notedit just makes us less prepared.
Some private companies are starting to invest in their own weather satellites. But completely replicating NOAAs instrumental fleet and weather coveragewhich includes operating 18 satellites, launching weather balloons from nearly 100 locations twice every day, and deploying more than 1,300 buoyswould require an enormous amount of money.
What NOAA is able to provide for free, Vangari says, is a public good. . . . Its services offer safety and security universally, not merely to those who can afford them.
