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Place names are more than just labels on a map. They influence how people learn about the world around them and perceive their place in it. Names can send messages and suggest what is and isnt valued in society. And the way that they are changed over time can signal cultural shifts. The United States is in the midst of a place-renaming moment. From the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, to the return of Forts Bragg and Benning and the newly re-renamed Mount McKinley in Alaskas Denali National Park, we are witnessing a consequential shift in the politics of place naming. This sudden rewriting of the nations mapdone to restore American greatness, according to President Donald Trumps executive order that made some of them officialis part of a name game that recognizes place names as powerful brands and political tools. In our research on place naming, we explore how this name game is used to assert control over shared symbols and embed subtle and not-so-subtle messages in the landscape. As geography teachers and researchers, we also recognize the educational and emotional impact the name game can have on the public. Place names can have psychological effects Renaming a place is always an act of power. People in power have long used place naming to claim control over the identity of the place, bolster their reputations, retaliate against opponents, and achieve political goals. These moves can have strong psychological effects, particularly when the name evokes something threatening. Changing a place name can fundamentally shift how people view, relate to, or feel that they belong within that place. In Shenandoah County, Virginia, students at two schools originally named for Confederate generals have been on an emotional roller coaster of name changes in recent years. The schools were renamed Mountain View and Honey Run in 2020 amid the national uproar over the murder of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. Four years later, the local school board reinstated the original Confederate names after conservatives took control of the board. Last night in a 5 to 1 vote, the Shenandoah County, Virginia school board decided to reverse an earlier decision to rename three schools that honor Confederate leaders. Stonewall Jackson HS opened just a couple years after Brown v. Board of Ed. #CivilWarMemory www.cnn.com/2024/05/09/u…[image or embed]— Kevin M. Levin (@civilwarmemory.bsky.social) May 10, 2024 at 2:52 AM One Black eighth grader at Mountain View High Schoolnow re-renamed Stonewall Jackson High Schooltestified at a board meeting about how the planned change would affect her: I would have to represent a man that fought for my ancestors to be slaves. If this board decides to restore the names, I would not feel like I was valued and respected, she said. The board still approved the change, 51. Even outside of schools, place names operate as a hidden curriculum. They provide narratives to the public about how the community or nation sees itselfas well as whose histories and perspectives it considers important or worthy of public attention. Place names affect how people perceive, experience, and emotionally connect to their surroundings in both conscious and subconscious ways. Psychologists, sociologists, and geographers have explored how this sense of place manifests itself into the psyche, creating either attachment or aversion to place, whether its a school, mountain, or park. A tale of two forts Renaming places can rally a leaders supporters through rebranding. Trumps orders to restore the names Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, both originally named for Confederate generals, illustrate this effect. The names were changed to Fort Liberty and Fort Moore in 2023 after Congress passed a law banning the use of Confederate names for federal installations. Veterans and other guests posed in 2023 next to a newly unveiled sign for Fort Moore, named for Lt. Gen. Harold Hal Moore, who served in Vietnam, and his wife, Julia Moore. In 2025, President Donald Trump reverted the name back to Fort Benning. [Photo: Cheney Orr/AFP/Getty Images] Trump made a campaign promise to his followers to bring back the name of Fort Bragg if reelected. To get around the federal ban, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth identified two unrelated decorated Army veterans with the same last namesBragg and Benningbut without any Confederate connections, to honor instead. Call it a sleight of hand or a stroke of genius if youd like, this tactic allowed the Department of Defense to revive politically charged names without violating the law. The restoration of the names Bragg and Benning may feel like a symbolic homecoming for those who resisted the original name change or have emotional ties to the names through their memories of living and serving on the base, rather than a connection to the specific namesakes. However, the names are still reminders of the military bases original association with defenders of slavery. The place-renaming game A wave of place-name changes during the Obama and Biden administrations focused on removing offensive or derogatory place names and recognizing Indigenous names. For example, Clingmans Dome, the highest peak in the Great Smoky Mountains, was renamed to Kuwohi in September 2024, shifting the name from a Confederate general to a Cherokee word meaning the mulberry place. Under the Trump administration, however, place-name changes are being advanced explicitly to push back against reform efforts, part of a broader assault on what Trump calls woke culture. The view from a lookout tower on Kuwohi, formerly known as Clingmans Dome, in the Great Smoky Mountains. [Photo: National Park Service] President Barack Obama changed Alaskas Mount McKinley to Denali in 2015 to acknowledge Indigenous heritage and a long-standing name for the mountain. Officials in Alaska had requested the name change to Denali years earlier and supported the name change in 2015. Trump, on his first day in office in January 2025, moved to rename Denali back to Mount McKinley, over the opposition of Republican politicians in Alaska. The state Legislature passed a resolution a few days later asking Trump to reconsider. Georgia Rep. Earl Buddy Carter made a recent legislative proposal to rename Greenland as Red, White, and Blueland in support of Trumps expansionist desire to purchase the island, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark. Danish officials and Greenlanders saw Carters absurd proposal as insulting and damaging to diplomatic relations. It is not the first time that place renaming has been used as a form of symbolic insult in international relations. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America might have initially seemed improbable, but it is already reflected in common navigation apps. Google Maps displays the name Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico in March 2025. [Image: Google INEGI] A better way to choose place names When leaders rename a place in an abrupt, unilateral fashionoften for ideological reasonsthey risk alienating communities that deeply connect with those names as a form of memory, identity, and place attachment. A better alternative, in our view, would be to make renaming shared landscapes participatory, with opportunities for meaningful public involvement in the renaming process. This approach does not avoid name changes, but it suggests the changes should respond to the social and psychological needs of communities and the evolving cultural identity of placesand not simply be used to score political points. Instead, encouraging public participationsuch as through landscape impact assessments and critical audits tat take the needs of affected communities seriouslycan cultivate a sense of shared ownership in the decision that may give those names more staying power. The latest place renamings are already affecting the classroom experience. Students are not just memorizing new place labels, but they are also being asked to reevaluate the meaning of those places and their own relationship with the nation and the world. As history has shown around the world, one of the major downsides of leaders imposing name changes is that the names can be easily replaced as soon as the next regime takes power. The result can be a never-ending name game. Seth T. Kannarr is a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Tennessee. Derek H. Alderman is a chancellor’s professor of geography at the University of Tennessee. Jordan Brasher is a visiting assistant professor of geography at Macalester College. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. AI pioneer Illia Polosukhin offers a blockchain-flavored open-source enablement platform Illia Polosukhin, who coinvented the Transformer architecture at Google in 2017, is now launching a new company called Near AI. The company will offer services through a blockchain-powered platform that functions as a secure marketplace for open-source AI models and agents. Polosukhin is a strong advocate for transparent, open-source AI models, which he believes are the best way to promote responsible adoption in an equitable and safe manner. Hes deeply concerned about individuals data privacy and the data sovereignty of companies and countries in a world where just a few tech giants control the largest AI models and the vast amounts of data they collect. His vision is to empower many developers to build powerful models openly, while giving users more control over their data. The challenge, however, is that developers of open-source (or open-weight) models typically offer their work for free. This means they incur development costs without generating revenueand must also worry about potential liability if someone later uses their models to cause harm. According to Polosukhin, some open-source developers are reluctant to host their models on Hugging Face due to the risk of weight leaks. Hosting models on their own server clusters shifts the burden of governance and complianceespecially regarding user dataentirely onto them. On the Near platform, which Polosukhin and his team have been developing since mid-2024, that burden is eliminated. For developers its a very effective way for them to ship their models and agents because they dont need to deal with all the GDPR compliance themselves for user data, Polosukhin says. We build a very simple hosting platform that does all that and they also get distribution. He likens the Near platform to an app storebut for open-source models and agents. The platform leverages blockchain technology to create a decentralized network of usersincluding enterprises, independent developers, and researchersaround the world, Polosukhin explains. Each user must have the appropriate hardware configuration to join the network. Once connected, they can run encrypted versions of models locally and pay a fee per token to the models creator. User registration and payment coordination are handled on the blockchain. Users benefit by gaining access to models from verified developers on a trusted platformone where neither Near nor the model creators can see the user data running through the models. For enterprises in regulated industries, this could be more appealing than sending sensitive data to a frontier model provider like OpenAI or Google, where privacy and security are less transparent. Between 2018 and 2022, the Near Foundation raised $650 million to build the Near protocol and platform. Now, Near AIthe newly formed companywill offer specialized services for developers and users on top of that platform. Dont be surprised if Near AI raises a new funding round in the near future. With new Google and DeepSeek models, AI parity seems very real Remember when OpenAIs Sam Altman said that other frontier model developers shouldnt bother trying to catch up to OpenAI? What a difference a year makes. For a long time, OpenAIs models enjoyed a comfortable performance lead over the competitionbut thats changed. Google, which had been slow to accelerate development of generative models that might someday exceed human intelligence, yesterday released a new reasoning model called Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental that outperforms OpenAIs best across several well-known benchmark tests. Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental now leads in the math and science benchmarks Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A (GPQA) and the 2025 American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME). It also achieves a state-of-the-art score of 18.8% on Humanitys Last Exam, a notoriously difficult test set designed to capture the human frontier of knowledge and reasoning. Google DeepMind leader Demis Hassabis says on X that Gemini 2.5 reasons through its thoughts before responding, effectively mimicking how humans process thoughts. It approaches a problem gradually, refines potential solutions, and chooses the best one, he says. The models standout features include native multimodalityit processes images, video, audio, and code as tokensand the ability to hold vast amounts of information (up to a million tokens) in memory while reasoning through problems and selecting the best answer. The plot thickens. The Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has just released a new open-source model called DeepSeek-V3-0324, which improves on the earlier V3 model in reasoning, math, science, and coding. Anyone can download the model from Hugging Face and start developing their own models and apps with it. Developers cant do the same with OpenAIs and Googles top models, which do not reveal their code, training data, or model weights. A year ago, most industry observers believed China was years behind U.S. AI companies in model performance; now, the gap is said to be just a few months. The takeaway is that state-of-the-art frontier models arent as precious or untouchable as they once were. Thats why OpenAI, Google, and others are racing to get consumers hooked on their chatbots, agents, and other applications as quickly as possible. Their main value is no longer in powering enterprise systems at premium prices via APIsits in getting as many consumer users as possible into subscription plans, as AI becomes a bigger part of everyday work and life. Anthropic and Databricks team up to service enterprises in regulated industries Databricks and Anthropic are joining forces in a five-year partnership that will integrate Anthropic’s Claude AI models directly into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. As a result, Databricks more than 10,000 enterprise customers will be able to send their proprietary data through the most advanced Anthropic models within the AWS, Azure, or Google clouds. Many of Databricks customers are enterprises in regulated industries such as finance and healthcare, so being able to run advanced AI models on the same platform as their data storage is a major advantage. Databricks notes that its tools allow enterprises to create AI agents that not only understand their organizational data but can also reason about it using Anthropics Claude models. They are the leading AI model out there and so getting that in front of our customers is really what all this is about, says Databricks VP of generative AI Naveen Rao. We want to give our customers the best AI capabilities to unlock the value of their data. Databricks customers will have access to Anthropic by default within the Databricks cloud, eliminating the often-protracted process of adding a new vendor. Te Anthropic fees will simply appear on their Databricks bill. Rao says the two companies will first focus on helping existing Databricks customers get the most out of the Anthropic models. They may then shift focus to attracting new enterprise clients with the combined strengths of Databricks data security and governance and Anthropics state-of-the-art intelligence and safety controls. We meet customers all the time who have clarity on their model story but are looking for something in terms of their long-term data story, and Im sure the opposite or the compliment is true on the Databricks side, says Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger. Youre often meeting a customer on some portion of their journey, and being able to help them fast-forward through some discovery on the other parts helps you show up well. More AI coverage from Fast Company: The living globe that can help drones fly without GPS This watchdog is tracking how AI firms are quietly backing off their safety pledges Otters new AI agents are built to boost sales and streamline meetings Will AI-generated anime reshape storytellingor replace it? 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In 1983, six businessmen got together and opened the first Hooters restaurant in Clearwater, Florida. Hooters of America LLC quickly became a restaurant chain success story. With its scantily clad servers and signature breaded wings, the chain sells sex appeal in addition to foodor as one of the companys mottos puts it: You can sell the sizzle, but you have to deliver the steak. It inspired a niche restaurant genre called breastaurants, with eateries such as the Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery and Twin Peaks replicating Hooters busty business model. A decade ago, business was booming for breastaurant chains, with these companies experiencing record sales growth. Today its a different story. Declining sales, rising costs and a large debt burden of approximately US$300 million have threatened Hooters long-term outlook. In summer 2024, the chain closed over 40 of its restaurants across the U.S. In February 2025, Bloomberg reported that the company was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. Hooters isnt necessarily going away for good. But its certainly looking like there will be fewer opportunities for women to work as Hooters Girlsand for customers to ogle at them. As a psychologist, I was originally interested in studying servers at breastaurants because I could sense an interesting dynamic at play. On the one hand, it can feel good to be complimented for your looks. On the other hand, I also wondered whether constantly being critiqued might eventually wear these servers down. So my research team and I decided to study what it was like to work in places like Hooters. In a series of studies, heres what we found. Concocting a male fantasyland More so than most restaurants, managers at breastaurants like Hooters seek to strictly regulate how their employees look and act. For one of our studies, we interviewed 11 women who worked in breastaurants. Several of them said that they were told to be camera ready at all times. One described being given a booklet with exacting standards outlining her expected appearance, down to nails, hair, makeup, brushing your teeth, wearing deodorant. She had to promise to stay the same weight and height, wear makeup every shift, and not change her hairstyle. Beyond a carefully constructed physical appearance, the servers relayed that they were also expected to be confident, cheerful, charming, outgoing, and emotionally steeled. They were instructed to make male customers feel special, to be their personal cheerleaders, as one interviewee put it, and to never challenge them. Suffice it say, these demands can be unrealisticand many of the servers we interviewed described becoming emotionally drained and eventually souring on the role. The girls are a dime a dozen It probably wont come as a surprise that Hooters servers often encounter lewd remarks, sexual advances, and other forms of sexual harassment from customers. But because their managers often tolerate this behavior from customers, it created the added burden of what psychologists call double-bindssituations where contradictory messages make it impossible to respond properly. For example, say a regular customer whos a generous tipper decides to proposition a server. Now shes in a predicament. Shes been instructed to make customers feel special. And hes already left a big tip, in addition to being a regular. But she also feels creeped out, and his advances make her feel worthless. Should she push back? You might assume that managers, aware that their scantily clad employees would be more likely to face harassment, would try to set boundaries and throw out customers who treated servers poorly. But we found that waitresses at breastaurants have less support from both management and their coworkers than servers at other restaurants. Unfortunately, the girls are a dime a dozen, and thats how theyre treated, a former server and corporate trainer at a breastaurant explained. The lack of coworker support might also come as a surprise. Rather than standing in solidarity, the servers tended to compete for favoritism, better shifts and raises from their bosses. Gossiping, name-calling, and scapegoating were commonplace. The psychological toll My research team also wanted to learn more about the specific emotional and psychological costs of working in these types of environments. Psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Robert have found that mental health problems that disproportionately affect women often coincide with sexual objectification. So we werent surprised to find that servers working in sexually objectifying restaurant environments, such as Hooters and Twin Peaks, reported more symptoms of depression, anxiety, and disordered eating than those working in other restaurants. In addition, they wanted to be thinner, were more likely to monitor their weight and appearance, and were more dissatisfied with their bodies. Hooters didnt reply to a request for comment on this story. Why are women drawn to the job? Given our findings, you might wonder why any women would choose to work in places like Hooters in the first place. The women we interviewed said that they sought work in breastaurants to make more money and have more flexibility. A number of servers in one of our studies noted that they could make more money this way than waitressing at a regular restaurant or in other real jobs. For example, one of the servers we interviewed used to work at a more run-of-the-mill restaurant. It was OK, I made OK money, she told us. But working at Hooters . . . Ive walked out with hundreds of dollars in one shift. All the women we interviewed were in college or were mothers. So they enjoyed the high degree of flexibility in their work schedule that breastaurants provided. Finally, several of them had previously experienced objectification while growing up, or theyd participated in activities centered on physical appearance, such as beauty pageants and cheerleading. This likely contributed to their decision to work at a Hooters or one of its competitors: Theyd been objectified as adolescents, and so they found themselves drawn to these kinds of setting as adults. Even so, our research suggests that the financial rewards and flexibility of working in breastaurants probably arent worth the potential psychological costs. Dawn Szymanski is a professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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