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When a gunman began firing inside an academic building on the Brown University campus, students didn’t wait for official alerts warning of trouble. They got information almost instantly, in bits and bursts through phones vibrating in pockets, messages from strangers, rumors that felt urgent because they might keep someone alive. On Dec. 13 as the attack at the Ivy League institution played out during finals week, students took to Sidechat, an anonymous, campus-specific message board used widely at U.S. colleges, for fast-flowing information in real time. An Associated Press analysis of nearly 8,000 posts from the 36 hours after the shooting shows how social media has become central to how students navigate campus emergencies. Fifteen minutes before the university’s first alert of an active shooter, students were already documenting the chaos. Their posts raw, fragmented, and sometimes panicked formed a digital time capsule of how a college campus experienced a mass shooting. As students sheltered in place, they posted while hiding under library tables, crouching in classrooms, and hallways. Some comments even came from wounded students, like one posting a selfie from a hospital bed with the simple caption: #finalsweek. Others asked urgent questions: Was there a lockdown? Where was the shooter? Was it safe to move? It would be days before authorities identified the suspect and found him dead in New Hampshire of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, later linking him to the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. Here’s a look at how the shooting unfolded. Stream of collective consciousness Described by Harvard Magazine as the Colleges stream of collective consciousness, Sidechat allows anyone with a verified university email to post to a campus feed. On most days, the Brown feed is filled with complaints about dining hall food, jokes about professors, and stress about exams fleeting posts running the gamut of student life. On the Saturday afternoon just before the shooting, a student posted about how they wished they could play Minecraft for 60 hours straight. Then, the posts abruptly shifted. Crowds began pouring out of Browns Barus and Holley building, and someone posted at 4:06 p.m.: Why are people running away from B&H? Others quickly followed. EVERYONE TAKE COVER, one wrote. STAY AWAY FROM THAYER STREET NEAR MACMILLAN 2 PEOPLE JUST GOT SHOT IM BEING DEAD SERIOUS, another user wrote at 4:10 p.m. Dozens of frantic messages followed as students tried to fill the information gap themselves. so r we on lockdown or what, one student asked. By the time the university alert was sent at 4:21 p.m., the shooter was no longer on campus a fact Brown officials did not yet know. Where would we be without Sidechat? one student wrote. A university spokesperson said Brown’s alert reached 20,000 people minutes after the school’s public safety officials were notified shots had been fired. Officials deliberately didnt use sirens to avoid sending people rushing to seek shelter into harms way, said the spokesperson, Brian E. Clark, who added Brown commissioned two external reviews of the response with the aim of enhancing public safety and security. Long hours of hiding Long after the sun had set, students sheltered in dark dorm rooms and study halls. Blinds were closed. Doors were barricaded with dressers, beds, and mini fridges. Door is locked windows are locked Ive balanced a metal pipe thing on the handle so if anyone even tries the handle from the outside itll make a loud noise, one student wrote. Students reacted to every sound footsteps in hallways, distant sirens, helicopters overhead. When alerts came, the vibrations and ringtones were jarring. Some feared that names of the dead would be released and that they would recognize someone they knew. Law enforcement moved through campus buildings, clearing them floor by floor. A student who fled Barus and Holley asked whether anyone could text his parents to let them know he had made it out safely. Others said they had left phones behind in classrooms when they fled, unable to reach frantic loved ones. Ironically, those closest to the shooting often had the least information. Many American students expressed emotions hovering between numbness and heartbreak. Just got a text from a friend I havent spoken to in nearly three years, one student wrote. Our last messages? Me checking in on her after the shooting at Michigan State. Multiple students replied, saying theyd had similar experiences. International students posted about parents unable to sleep on the other side of the world. I just want a hug from my mom, one student wrote. Anxiety sets in As the hours dragged on, students struggled with basic needs. Some described urinating in trash cans or empty laundry detergent bottles because they were too afraid to leave their rooms. Others spoke of drinking to cope. I was on the street when it happened & suddenly I felt so scared, one student wrote. I ran and didnt calm down for a while. I feel numb, tired, & about to throw up. Another wrote: Im locked inside! Havent eaten anything today! Im so scared i dont even know if I get out of this alive or dead. Some students posted into the early morning, more than 10 hours into the lockdown, saying they couldnt sleep. Sidechat also documented acts of kindness, including a student going door to door with macaroni and cheese cups in a dark dorm. Information, and its limits Students repeatedly asked the same questions news? sources? and challenged one another to verify what they saw before reposting it. Frankly Id rather hear misinformation than people not report stuff theyve heard, one student wrote. Others pushed back, sharing a Google Doc that would grow to 28 pages where students could find the most updated, verified information. Some posted police scanner transcriptions or warned against relying on artificial intelligence summaries of the developing situation. Professors who rarely post on the app joined the feed, urging caution and offering reassurance. If youre talking about the active situation please add a source!!! one student wrote. But reliable information, students noted, often arrived with a delay. Within about 30 minutes of the shooting, posts incorrectly claimed the shooter had been caught. Reports of more gunshots later proven false continued into the night and the next day, fueling fear and frustration. Asked one studen, what are police doing RIGHT NOW? Replies came quickly. They are trying their best, one person responded. Be grateful, another added. They are putting their lives in danger at this moment for us to be safe. A campus changed Students awoke Sunday to a campus they no longer recognized. It had snowed overnight the first snowfall of the academic year. In post after post, students called the sight unsettling. What was usually a celebration felt instead like confirmation something had irrevocably shifted. It truly hurt seeing the flakes fall this morning, beautiful and tragic, one student wrote. Even as the lockdown lifted, many said they were unsure what to do where they could go, whether dining halls were open, whether it was safe to move. What do I do rn? one student posted. Im losing my mind. Students walked through fresh snow in a daze, heading to blood donation centers. Others noticed flowers being placed at the campus gates and outside Barus and Holley. Many mourned not only the two students killed, but the innocence they felt had been stripped from their campus. Will never see the first snow of the season and not think about those two, one student wrote. With the lockdown ended, students returned to their dorms as Sidechat continued to fill with grief and reflection. Many said Brown no longer felt the same. Snow will always be bloody for me, one person posted. Leah Willingham, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
The dreaded performance review draws the ire of employees and managers alike. Workers fret that reviews fail to capture the full scope of their work, or that they are an unfair assessment of their performance. For managers, reviews can be a time-consuming nuisance and involve the challenging task of delivering tough feedback. But a new study from Cornell University finds that the structure of the performance review can have a huge impact on how workers feel about them. Over the last decade, a number of companies have revamped their performance reviews, seemingly to address the long-standing pain points. The likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have moved away from numerical ratings, while tech companies like Microsoft eliminated stack rankings (reviews that essentially rank employees against their colleagues) and Adobe eliminated reviews altogether. (More recently, however, tech giants like Google and Meta have actually pushed for more stringent evaluations of employees and, in turn, lower ratings.) The Cornell researchers examined how the shift away from numerical reviews has influenced employee sentiment. Emily Zitek, a professor of organizational behavior, and her coauthors analyzed how employees feel about performance reviews that emphasize narrative or qualitative feedback over numerical rankings. The team looked at three different performance review formats: those that exclusively used either numerical ratings or narrative feedback, and those that employed a mix of both. What the researchers found overall was that employees believed performance reviews were, in fact, more fair when they did not have numbers attached and were purely narrative-driven. Even if they’re given kind of average numbers versus wording that says they were very average, it feels more fair if they just see the words and not the numbers, Zitek says. So we thought that was very interesting. We were originally expecting the combined feedback to still be viewed positively, but people didn’t like the numbers within that either. Employees were also more likely to want to improve their performance if they received narrative feedbackand, more notably, if they felt their review was fair. Obviously, one of the goals is improvement, Zitek says. [If youre] just giving people numbers, they don’t know as much about what they need to do to perform better. But there was an exception: If their reviews were very positive, then people perceived them as fair, regardless of format. People love knowing if they’re at the top, Zitek says. More average ratings, on the other hand, seem to betray an employees self-perceptionwhich is why a more middling review feels more palatable if there is no number attached. Psychology research has shown a lot of people think they are above average, or that they’re doing better than they are, Zitek adds. When they get narrative-only feedback, they’re able to maintain that view because there’s no explicit information showing that they didn’t do well. Thats one of the reasons Zitek and her coauthors argue there is still a place for numerical ratings, in spite of the studys findings: If one of the goals of performance reviews is to determine raises and bonuses, then including numbers-based feedback can be importantand arguably more fair. If employees are deluding themselves that they’re performing really well, sometimes it helps to have the number, she says. Sometimes you want employees to realistically know where they stand. And yes, theyre going to be mad about it; they’re not going to think it’s fair. But that could be important. The reality is that many companies still rely on numerical ratings to make decisions about compensationand if they stop using those metrics in reviews, they may still utilize a ranking system without informing employees. If the company is going to want some kind of number anyway, it seems worse to not tell the employee that number, Zitek says. And that’s what some companies are doingthey have shadow rankings behind the scenes. They don’t tell them to the employees, and then employees are like, Wait, why did I get a smaller bonus than this other person? Regardless of format, one of the most frequent critiques of performance reviews is that they are vulnerable to bias. Even if reviews are standardized across a company, your performance rating can be impacted by a number of variables and often hinges on how your manager or team approaches reviews. A narrative component can help address this issuebut that still depends on how managers are trained and whether they understand the value of proffering real feedback. To ensure managers actually commit to the review process, Zitek says, its important for employers to emphasize the purpose of providing thoughtful feedback. People are more willing to do things if they know why they’re doing it, she says. So it could just be making an effort to convince the managers [that] this isn’t just another box to check. Its also crucial that managers are trained on how to give constructive performance feedback, she addssomething that many employers fail to do effectivelyand that they offer it at a more regular cadence so employees are not surprised when their review rolls around. Feedback can be uncomfortable to give sometimes, Zitek says. But it’s more uncomfortable later if they don’t get promoted and don’t understand whyand they could have been performing better the entire time if they were given that feedback.
Category:
E-Commerce
Fast-casual salad chain Salad and Go is closing more stores and exiting Texas and Oklahoma completely. The eatery will close a total of 32 stores, 25 in Texas and seven in Oklahoma, by January 11. The closures will impact around 600 employees. The company will also close its Dallas headquarters and relocate to Phoenix. Salad and Go operates as a drive-through and grab-and-go business, known for affordable salads, wraps, and other healthy menu items. The fast-casual chain was founded in 2013 in Gilbert, Arizona. Salad and Go began rapid expansion efforts in 2022. However, the salad chain has recently been reducing its retail footprint, closing 41 of its stores in September 2025. Salad and Go will focus its efforts in its home state of Arizona Until recently, the salad chain served customers in four states: Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Texas. Moving forward, it will only operate restaurants in Arizona and Nevada. After assessing our business, we made the decision to exit our Texas and Oklahoma markets and refocus on strengthening our core operations in Arizona and Nevada, CEO Mike Tattersfield told Fast Company in an email. “By consolidating our operations at our Phoenix area headquarters, we can focus on what matters most: food quality, menu innovation, guest experience and building for long-term growth.” “Were grateful to our team members in Texas and Oklahoma for the care they brought every day, and we deeply appreciate the communities that welcomed Salad and Go,” Tattersfield said. Tattersfield, who is the former president and CEO of Krispy Kreme, joined Salad and Go in April 2025. Tattersfield also told the Phoenix Business Journal that the closures are the result of the economic burden of a flawed expansion plan and a large central kitchen in Dallas: We were so focused on expanding out in Texas and other areas and we neglected Arizona,” he told the journal.
Category:
E-Commerce
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