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The other night, I heard cabinets opening in the kitchen and the shuffling of bags and containers. My husband was looking for snacks with our 9-year-old. After, he got him ready for bed, read him a book, and ordered us dinner. Then he sat down at his laptop and worked until 9 p.m. As I unloaded the dishwasher, I realized two things. First: My husband was killing it. Second: The second shift isnt womens work anymore. Its everyones burnout. The second shift, rewritten In 1989, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild introduced the second shift to describe what happened when women got home from their paid job to an unpaid one: making dinner, folding laundry, shuttling kids to sports. Thirty-plus years ago, that division was clear. Today, its more like murky. Couples expect both parents to be career-driven and active parents These days, most dual-income households assume both partners will be ambitious at work and hands-on at home. In fact, fathers are spending more time on childcare than ever before. According to Pew Research, theyve doubled their involvement since the 1960s. Parenting is the most gender-equal its ever been. The problem is, most couples I talk to feel fried. Nobodys workload has gotten lighter. Its just doubled. Moms may still do the mental load, but dads are tired, too. The mental load. Its where the second shift truly lives. And despite how equitable weve become at dividing up chores, most households still put that boss level parenting role on mom. Who needs to be reminded about soccer practice? Who picks out which days they have guitar lessons and tutoring? Who keeps track of when new sneakers are needed? Hint: Whoever has the mental load. While mothers are traditionally expected to drive carpools, recent research shows that men are experiencing more work-family conflict than previous generations. Theyre still expected to be hands-on dads who never miss a soccer game. But theyre also expected to be nothing but present at work, too. Society told dads they could be more involved. But workplace culture didnt give them the space to do it. Thats why dads everywhere are loading up on after-hours email. Remote work came with the illusion of flexibility, then drove us all insane. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/Girl-Li.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/souter.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Girl, Listen: A Guide to What Really Matters\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Ericka dives into the heat of modern motherhood, challenging the notion that personal identity must be sacrificed at the altar of parenting.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/erickasouter.substack.com\/subscribe","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91457710,"imageMobileId":91457711,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Remote work erased the finish line When COVID sent millions of people into remote and hybrid work situations, we thought flexible schedules would solve all our problems. They kind of did. But they also left us with a handful of issues we hadnt realized we needed to solve. Without a commute, theres no transition from work to home life. Theres no off-ramp. Which means work eats into bedtimes, and work follows us home and sometimes to bed. When employees left the office for good, having it all became doing it all at once. And thats when burnout started rearing its head (again). Parents wanted equality at home. Too many people wanted equality at home without discussing what equality at work would look like. We wanted to share the childcare AND be successful professionals. What we ended up with was equally divided childcare we were both responsible for and work that still demands were on 24/7. Kids still need to eat, bathe, and be nurtured. Work still treats you like you have unlimited bandwidth. So, we both started doing two jobs. And then we crashed. Gen Z is already drawing the line The second shift stopped being a womens issue and became a systemic issue. Millennial parents are burnt out. Generation Z isnt following suit. Earlier this year, CNBC reported that Gen Z employees were the happiest in the workplace. But theyre happy for one key reason: They know exactly what they wont tolerate at work. Want flexibility? Sure. Mental health resources? Of course. Clear boundaries around your personal life? Absolutely. Theyre not buying into hustle culture as identity. Theyve grown up seeing their parents work on reports during family vacations and answer client emails during soccer games. They dont think thats the version of success they want. They see it as depleting and it has made them draw a hard line in the sand when it comes to work. Which is why Gen Z will say no to policies like flexible schedules that actually require your schedule to be flexible for their business. At 9 p.m. Companies like to brag about how they offer flexible schedules. Then they email their employees at 9 p.m. Expecting them to reply. And employees are calling BS. If you want to keep employees, especially parents youll have to offer actual flexibility. That means built-in boundaries. Actual hours you expect your employees to be offline. Actual limits on how many meetings they can attend in a day. And leaders that lead by example when it comes to quitting time. Because if they dont get that flexibility from you high-performing employees will re-impose boundaries on themselves. Or theyll leave. Actually, theyre already leaving. Parents arent just burning out at work. Theyre quitting their jobs because of it. If we dont change how we approach the second shift at work, were going to have a retention crisis. Businesses are seeing masses of Millennials and Gen Xers leave because theyre burnt out juggling homework and Slack messages. But Generation Z employees arent willing to accept that trade-off. And if businesses dont start changing how they treat parents and caregivers who need to switch gears at the end of the day, theyre going to lose an entire generation of employees. Being a human who wants to recover from work is once again a must-have. And ambitious employees are about to show businesses just how valuable that flexibility is. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/Girl-Li.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/souter.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Girl, Listen: A Guide to What Really Matters\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Ericka dives into the heat of modern motherhood, challenging the notion that personal identity must be sacrificed at the altar of parenting.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/erickasouter.substack.com\/subscribe","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff,"buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91457710,"imageMobileId":91457711,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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E-Commerce
Benson Lu’s life revolves around Pokémon.The 26-year-old has played the mobile game Pokémon Go every day for a decade, watches the animated show every week, goes to the local card shop in his Los Angeles suburb to play the brand’s trading card game every week, and has a whopping collection of cards worth more than $70,000.“I don’t remember when was the last day I did not think about Pokémon at all,” he said.In the 30 years since Pokémon debuted in Japan with the 1996 release of Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green for Nintendo Game Boy, the franchise has taken over the globe with its animated shows, mobile games and highly coveted trading cards. Its popularity continues with fans young and old.Pokémon offers a masterclass in character design, which has helped make it so enduring, said Heather Cole, teaching assistant professor of game design and interactive media at West Virginia University.“I think the longevity of it has to do with the characters and world-building it does with the characters,” she said. A valuable commodity It’s not just cuteness that has people clamoring for merchandise, particularly trading cards. Today, some are so coveted that social media star Logan Paul sold one for a record $16.5 million. In Southern California, the fervor around Pokémon cards has led to strings of break-ins in recent months at trading card stores that have amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars of losses and even some collectors robbed at gunpoint.Adam Corn, owner of card business Overdose Gaming Inc, said he was able to buy a house last year from his Pokémon cards.“Pokémon almost always appreciates in value over time,” Corn said. “So it’s just a really good place to put your money in my opinion, better than a a lot of other assets.”Companies like Beckett Grading Services and Professional Sports Authenticator authenticate and grade the quality of Pokémon cards on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being pristine mint condition and fetching the highest prices. Paul bought the PSA Grade 10 Pikachu Illustrator card a few months prior for $5.3 million and wore the card on a chain around his neck in videos. It features a Pikachu holding a pen and feather sweeper.Last Tuesday, thieves stole more than $80,000 of Pokémon cards from Do-We Collectibles in Anaheimthe second time the store has been targeted. Other stores around Los Angeles and in New York have been hit by Pokémon thieves too.Duy Pham, owner of the Anaheim store, said the financial incentive of trading cards for robbers and scalpers means “the hobby will never be the same.”“It’s rougher for collectors and players,” Pham said. “It’s hard for us to get anything.”Collectors can either pay retail price for a standard pack of randomized Pokémon cards, around $5 for 10 cards, or buy the specific card they want secondhand for higher prices. But much like gambling, opening packs doesn’t always pan out to profitAiden Zeng spent $1,000 on packs of cards that were only valued at $60 on the resale market, he said.Zeng, 17, said his fandom began in elementary school, when he obsessed over character guidebooks. He eventually began trying to collect every single type of card available for his favorite, Black Kyurem.“I memorized every single Pokémon’s specific move set, what region they come from, some of the lore behind it,” Zeng said. Resurgence of popularity Even beyond dedicated collectors, Zeng said he has seen a resurgence of popularity for Pokémon at his high school in Toronto, where some students decorate their phone cases with cards featuring special artwork or a holographic sheen.Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri has said he enjoyed catching insects and other small critters in the fields and forests outside the Tokyo suburb where he lived as a child. Those creatures inspired him to make the colorful, fantastical Pokémon of which there are thousands of species today.While his hobby is lucrative, Lu said the draw for him is still nostalgia for the characters he grew up with and the community he has formed around Pokémon. He prefers not to sell his single cards because he worries he will never be able to find them again.Lu recently spent an entire Saturday walking around the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, looking for Pokémon on his augmented reality phone game at an event attended by thousands.“I’ve liked Pokémon ever since I was a kid,” he said. “And I still like it the same amount.” Jaimie Ding and Liam Mcewan, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
A public showdown between the Trump administration and Anthropic is hitting an impasse as military officials demand the artificial intelligence company bend its ethical policies by Friday or risk damaging its business.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei drew a sharp red line 24 hours before the deadline, declaring his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s final demand to allow unrestricted use of its technology.Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, can afford to lose a defense contract. But the ultimatum this week from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posed broader risks at the peak of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer science research lab in San Francisco to one of the world’s most valuable startups.If Amodei doesn’t budge, military officials have warned they will not just pull Anthropic’s contract but also “deem them a supply chain risk,” a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries that could derail the company’s critical partnerships with other businesses.And if Amodei were to cave, he could lose trust in the booming AI industry, particularly from top talent drawn to the company for its promises of responsibly building better-than-human AI that, without safeguards, could pose catastrophic risks.Anthropic said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that Claude won’t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. But after months of private talks exploded into public debate, it said in a Thursday statement that new contract language “framed as compromise was paired with legalese that would allow those safeguards to be disregarded at will.”That was after Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s top spokesman, posted on social media that “we will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions” and added the company has “until 5:01 p.m. ET on Friday to decide” if it would meet the demands or face consequences.Emil Michael, the defense undersecretary for research and engineering, later lashed out at Amodei, alleging on X that he “has a God-complex” and “wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk.”That message hasn’t resonated in much of Silicon Valley, where a growing number of tech workers from Anthropic’s top rivals, OpenAI and Google, voiced support for Amodei’s stand late Thursday in an open letter.OpenAI and Google, along with Elon Musk’s xAI, also have contracts to supply their AI models to the military.“The Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get them to agree to what Anthropic has refused,” the open letter says. “They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in.”Also raising concerns about the Pentagon’s approach were Republican and Democratic lawmakers and a former leader of the Defense Department’s AI initiatives.“Painting a bullseye on Anthropic garners spicy headlines, but everyone loses in the end,” wrote retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan in a social media post.Shanahan faced a different wave of tech worker opposition during the first Trump administration when he led Maven, a project to use AI technology to analyze drone footage and target weapons. So many Google employees protested its participation in Project Maven at the time that the tech giant declined to renew the contract and then pledged not to use AI in weaponry.“Since I was square in the middle of Project Maven & Google, it’s reasonable to assume I would take the Pentagon’s side here,” Shanahan wrote Thursday on social media. “Yet I’m sympathetic to Anthropic’s position. More so than I was to Google’s in 2018.”He said Claude is already being widely used across the government, including in classified settings, and Anthropic’s red lines are “reasonable.” He said the AI large language models that power chatbots like Claude are also “not ready for prime time in national security settings,” particularly not for fully autonomous weapons.“They’re not trying to play cute here,” he wrote.Parnell asserted Thursday that the Pentagon wants to ” use Anthropic’s model for all lawful purposes” and said opening up use of the technology would prevent the company from “jeopardizing critical military operations,” though neither he nor other officials have detailed how they want to use the technology.The military “has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement,” Parnell wrote.When Hegseth and Amodei met Tuesday, military officials warned that they could designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, cancel its contract or invoke a Cold War-era law called the Defense Production Act to give the military more sweeping authority to use its products, even if the company doesn’t approve.Amodei said Thursday that “those latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.” He said he hopes the Pentagon will reconsider given Claude’s value to the military, but, if not, Anthropic “will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider.”-AP reporter Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report. Matt O’Brien, AP Technology Writer
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