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It’s not really possible to cleanly pin down the setting of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Written by Michael Chabon and published in 2000, the story takes place in Brooklyn, in Prague, on the battlefields of World War II, on the top of the Empire State Building, and in the imaginary universe of a superhero comic book. The breadth of locationsphysical and metaphysicalmake for a rollicking read. But when New York’s Met Opera decided to stage an opera version of the book, that globe-crossing, reality-bending narrative presented some very tangible challenges. “It’s a big sweeping novel, so it requires an enormous canvas and a lot of locations,” says Bartlett Sher, director of the opera version of the book, which has just opened the Met’s 20252026 season. “We started workshopping it a couple of years ago, and I realized I can’t do this in the normal way.” [Photo: Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera] To make those leaps in the real time span of a live opera performance, Sher and his team had to take a novel and highly complex approach to its production design. The Met tapped 59, a multidisciplinary stage and experience design studio, to design the sets, lighting, and, crucially, video elements that reveal a narrative that takes place on multiple continents and within the pages of comic books. [Photo: Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera] The story follows two Jewish cousins at the outset of World War II who create a comic book hero whose stories are intended to urge Americans to join the fight against the Nazis. Their comic becomes a hit, but their lives are thrown into chaos as the war unfolds, taking the audience from New York to Prague to the minds of comic book creators. Part of the experiential design agency Journey, 59 developed a production design approach that embraced the story’s location hopping. “The worlds start to be really musically distinct and really visually distinct, and then everything starts to collide together throughout the course of the piece,” says Jenny Melville, principal design director at 59. “It was quite clear early on that particularly the comic book world was going to have a major visual component to the whole design.” [Photo: Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera] Melville has worked on operas and stage plays around the world, and 59 has developed video elements for productions like the Broadway version of the Netflix series Stranger Things and the Met Opera’s 2024 staging of Aida. Melville says that as more and more performances integrate video elements, production designers have to strike a careful balance. “Video design in opera is very much supportive material, an augmentation to the scenic design,” Melville says. “But it’s really critical to never overshadow the live performance on stage.” [Photo: Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera] For The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay opera, video took on an outsized role, especially for scenes involving the creation of the comic book and stories from within its pages. “There are these moments where, really unusually for an opera, the singers stop singing and the video moments take over,” Melville says. That’s partially a function of the narrative, which revolves around the creation of a superhero comic. The impracticality of having the audience watch actors imagining superheroes and drawing comics on stage led to the integration of vivid animated sequences projected on the set. [Photo: Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera] The opera’s modernist score, by composer Mason Bates, also creates moments for the video elements to come into the foreground. The music juggles between the somberness of Europe in World War II, the jazziness of New York City in the 1930s, and a comic book world represented by electronic music. “Because there are these electronic music sections, it’s a really clear divide when we’re a supporting act, which is actually like 90% of the time,” Melville says. [Photo: Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera] The abundance of video elements in the opera presents its own set of technical challenges, especially when it comes to making sure the video synchs up with the musicians in the band pit and the singers on stage. “The timing changes every night, because of course the conductor and the orchestra and all the singers have to just do what feels right in the moment,” says Melville. “We’ve had to break all of our cue structures down into very, very specific time sequences.” [Photo: Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera] “We worked very cleverly and carefully to make it work,” says Sher. “And that was fun, but it wasn’t easy.” The hard work on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay opera may pay dividends later on. Sher and 59 are already working together on another production, a musical version of the film La La Land, that is going to rely on a similar level of video integration. “Everything we’ve absorbed on this experience is only going to help redouble our efforts when it comes to that experience,” he says.
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Artificial intelligence is infiltrating every corner of professional sports, from scouting and injury prevention to scheduling. Now, it looks like golf has its most sophisticated AI adoption yet, and it’s happening in the bag of Bryson DeChambeau, the sport’s most notorious tinkerer. “We’re building an AI golf coach,” DeChambeau says. “Essentially, it will be a golf coach that, based on data, will be able to tell you exactly what you’re doing, how to practice, and how to improve your game. We can take a golf swing, compile the information, upload it, and within a minute, it will give me what’s different from my gold standard set of swings.” The setup is deceptively simple: a smartphone on a tripod gathering data via video, paired with Google’s Gemini AI to interpret said data. Combined, they create a swing coach so intuitive that DeChambeau uses it even moments before teeing off in a tournament. The mental game is something I’ve always struggled with, he says. But whenever I become a little more confident and comfortable with my feel, my mental game goes extremely positive. And this assistant has helped me become a lot more confident with my golf swing. AI + AI = Coach DeChambeau’s coaching system starts with SportsBox, an AI-powered 3D biomechanical analysis app that analyzes over 30 key points on the body, club, and ball per golf swing. It measures everything from rotational range of motion to kinematic sequencingthe precise order in which different body parts accelerate and decelerate through the swing. This data is then processed by Gemini AI to turn those measurements into actionable coaching insights. Think of SportsBox as the measuring tool, Gemini as the AI coach agent, and Google Cloud as the platform hosting it all. The system starts by building and maintaining a database of DeChambeaus optimal swings from recent years to create his gold standard set. So, when he hits a poor shot, the AI immediately measures that shot against his gold standard set and ranks the factors most likely contributing to the miss. “We can take a golf swing, then upload it, and within a minute, it will give me what’s different from my gold standard set of swings,” he says. It will give me a rundown list of the top [deviations] that are correlating to whatevers causing me to miss. According to Granville Valentine, managing director of AI go-to-market at Google Cloud, its Gemini’s multimodal capabilities that bring the SportsBox data to life, creating the interactive coaching agent. “Gemini is very differentiated on multimodalitythe ability to ingest the combination of video, audio, text, and voice, and even livestreaming some of those capabilities into the model, he says. The combination of really deep video understanding plus core reasoning comes out in differentiated coaching guidance.” The devil’s in the details The granular nature of DeChambeau’s AI coaching reveals just how sophisticated modern sports analytics has become. The system uses Z-scoresstatistical measurements showing how many standard deviations a movement is from the mean of a data setto identify exactly where problems occur. Previously, DeChambeau would capture swing data but wait hours or days for analysis. With this technology, he gets feedback within a minute, allowing for real-time adjustments before a round. We were going through [the data] by hand in an Excel spreadsheet, he says. It was a manual process, very difficult. So youre talking about months and months of trying to study the golf swing, now done in minutes. The data is also surprisingly precise. Let’s say it’s a radial deviation at P6, DeChambeau says. That’s too much, meaning I’ve got too much wrist hinge, which makes the club come more outside in. So it’s very specific. For us non-DeChambeaus who got lost at radial deviation and checked out at P6, thats where Gemini comes to the rescue. The AI’s ability to adapt its communication style allows users to train it to explain complex biomechanical concepts in terms appropriate for any skill level. Like other large language models, you can ask it questions, such as what specific terms mean, and as your understanding grows, it will adapt to give you more granular, technical data, meeting each golfer where he or she is at. Old dog, new tricks When he began using this technology earlier this year, DeChambeau found one of his fundamental beliefs about his swing challenged. For years, he says, he thought he needed to stay more centered over the ballmore on top of itwhen hitting his driver. The AI consistently told him otherwise, saying he was too on top of the ball. It told me to keep swaying my chest just a bit back on the backstroke to get my center mass more behind the golf ball so I can allow the club to release through the impact more, he says. So that just blew my mind at how precise this assistant is. It was kind of a kick-in-the-butt moment of, wait, you gotta start trusting this thing. Eventually, he realized the AI’s objectivity as its strength. Its unbiased, he says. It doesnt tell you what it thinks you should do. Its literally based on what you do when youre doing your best, and keeps you in check with that. Democratizing elite-level instruction The rapid evolution of AI coaching technology suggests we’re witnessing the early stages of a broader transformation in sports training. Valentine points to each new release of Gemini, which shows consistent step-function improvements in spatial awareness and reasoning capabilities. “With each subsequent release, breakthroughs are happening,” he says, comparing Geminis current moment to the early days of Waymo self-driving cars, which needed time to become trustworthy enough for widespread adoption. That level of trustthat level of breakthrough in the model itselfis now kicking over to a place where humans have the confidence to rely on this as a coach relative to a human coach. Still, Valentine says, the ultimate goal is not to replace human coaches, but to democratize access to elite-level instruction. I don’t think the objective is to get rid of coaches, he says. I think its to deliver access to those folks who don’t have access to coaches. There are lots of folks in the world who would probably be very well served to have access to coaching, it just hasnt been available to them.” At the PGA Tour level, DeChambeau believes there are further use cases for the tool, and that widespread adoption is inevitable once other players experience the results hes seen. When these [other golfers] see what the capabilities are, they’ll immediately latch onto it, hesays. Because it’s not about some theoretical idea. It’s about what works best for them as an individual. I cant wait for a day when its a full-on coach, club fitter, you name it. Were just at the beginning.
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Following the Trump administrations cuts to foreign aid, two-thirds of Mercy Corps U.S.-funded programs have been rescinded. CEO Tjada DOyen McKenna shares how shes leading her team amid immense pressurescrambling to find new ways to help those in need, even as she resorts to layoffs to keep the business afloat. McKenna reveals what shes hearing from her team of aid workers on the ground in Gaza, and why she isnt running away from burnout but embracing it. Like many business leaders experiencing political or economic volatility right now, McKenna is faced with a complex conundrum: fight, flight, or freeze. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. U.S. government funding accounted for half of your funding, right? Exactly. About two thirds of your programs were rescinded. I mean, it’s like an existential crisis, a true existential crisis for the organization. So what did you do? I mean, you faced a slew of urgent decisions. They were urgent decisions, and I have to say it was very clumsy, right? Usually when you work with the government, there are definitions for every single thing, so very specific definition for stop or very specific definition for freeze. And in this case, the guidance wasn’t there. When they said we had to stop doing everything, our first concern was safety for people. If I have people in a remote area of a country or in charge of delivering food to a school feeding program next day, that community didn’t understand that we weren’t showing up the next day, and they certainly didn’t understand it was because the U.S. government told us not to, but we had to go to work. Once it was clear what was going to be cut or what wasn’t going to be cut, we had to go about shutting down those programs across 40 different countries, lots of different labor laws to that. We consolidated some of our regions, we closed some country offices. We just got to work to say, “If the funding wasn’t there for that program, we’ll shut it down in the most responsible way possible and we’ll keep moving and then address what we have to do with the U.S. government to see what we can preserve, make sure our other funders are okay, and still be prepared in case if another hurricane or earthquake had hit during that period, we still had to be prepared to respond.” I mean, the irony is your organization is all about responding to crisis when it emerges and now the crisis becomes you. And in some ways in some of these communities you’re sort of creating the crisis because they’ve become used to having you there. Yes, yes, yes. And I worried a lot about staff safety, particularly in remote places where we were a source of survival for people where we provided access to food, and that continued to plague me. We’d hear reports from colleagues of government officials trying to stop their country director to make sure everyone got paid before they left. And my staff in Sudan, almost all of them are displaced from their homes themselves. So they’re working for us in temporary shelters, still going through the same problems that everyone else is going through. And so this was a weird situation where our organization was the one that had to be the emergency patient, but we also knew . . . You almost felt guilty for feeling bad because people have it so much worse than you do. There were a lot of weird mental gymnastics that were happening for all of us. We’re now months in, past that initial shock. How much do you look at 2025 today as an inflection point, sort of a new normal for USAID orgs like Mercy Corps? Are you kind of holding your breath in a way in hopes that, “A next administration maybe will reinstate things?” No, we know nothing’s going back to the way it was, but we don’t know exactly what that looks like going forward. The other thing that was surreal is there was this demonization of aid or demonization of aid agencies. A lot of misinformation about the work we were doing and how we were doing it. And then theres the third and fourth effect. So in a lot of places, we rely on UN airplanes to get in and out of certain areas, and so a lot of UN organizations we’re also facing the same U.S. cuts that we were. So we are still digging out of the aftermath. We know the world is fundamentally changed, and right now we are trying to embrace that and move into the future while also knowing the future’s still quite uncertain. I have to ask you about Gaza. There are all the reports about famine in Gaza where you’ve had teams on the ground. Your Mideast director was on this show in October of 2023 soon after Hamas’s October 7th attack as the initial Israeli military action was underway. Are your teams still active on the ground there now? What are they seeing and what might our listeners be missing in the news reports that they’re getting? We have about 35 staff that are still on the ground living and working in Gaza. We’ve had about 1,300 trucks stuck at a border that have not been able to get in. We’ve had some food in those trucks expire in that time period. And even without those trucks, our teams on the ground we’re working with water desalination plants and supplying clean water to people. It’s so dire right now. Our own team members are hungry. They are worried about where their next meal is coming from. We have a staff member that is able to go in and out, and she talks about the weight loss that she’s seen in her colleagues. About a million people are under evacuation orders in Gaza City. A lot of them, this is the fourth, fifth time they’ve moved. And what’s different lately, which really concerns us, is that sense of hope is really eroded. I think people feel like they’ve been just left. This is as tough as it’s ever been, and our own staff are fighting for their own survival. We talk about the lack of food, but 95% of households there just don’t have enough water. And so someone said, “A choice you’re making every day is, do I wash my hands? Do I drink a glass of water? Do I bathe the kids? The little water I have, what do I do with it?” And we just can’t imagine. It’s just been horrific and to feel so powerless, especially when we know there are trucks waiting across the border that could get in. There are people like us that are really eager to do the work, like my staff who are looking for food themselves, who want to get out and do things, and we just know it’s political will that’s stopping that. I spoke to another humanitarian aid leader recently off the record, who shared that starting years ago, they chose not to provide services in Gaza because they were worried and believed that Hama would inevitably infiltrate their efforts. And obviously this is what the Israeli government or military at least is kind of saying, did you have worries about that? Does that matter when you’re trying to just feed people? Gaza has always been one of the most difficult places in the world to work. I mean, we all are under U.S. anti-terrorism laws. Our staff are vetted. We check the names, we check the lists because the risk of having a staff member be a part of Hamas is too great to bear. We have not seen mass aid diversion from Hamas. That just has not been our experience, and most of our colleagues have not experienced that either. So that has been talked about as a threat. You do see looting, you do see hungry people, crowds of hungry people swarming to every truck and you see children and people throwing themselves in front of trucks. The way to address people stealing aid or making food valuable is to flood the zone with food, and then it’s not as valuable. I think more importantly, there have been anonymous Israeli defense forces in COGAT, which is the border authority officials saying that they’ve seen no mass aid diversion. U.S. government reports, internal former USAID audit reports said they have no evidence of mass diversion of aid. So we work in difficult environments and we all take vetting very seriously, but we know how to do this. We know how to work in these environments.
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