When Mike Kelly set up his first few Airbnbs in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 2023, he figured it would be a successful move. It was meant to be an investment project for him and his daughter to work on together. But as more people moved away from bustling and expensive urban centers and landed in the Midwest, their hopes were quickly shattered.

The Fort Wayne housing market boomed. High demand for homes, coupled with the city's low housing stock, has kept costs relatively high — a Redfin analysis of housing data found home prices were up 9.2% in October compared with last year. The hot housing market has translated into higher property taxes, which is throwing off the short-term-rental business model. "The houses we purchased to turn into Airbnbs have been assessed so much higher than what we put into them that we almost can't afford to keep them," Kelly said. "The return on equity wouldn't be as high."

Owners of short-term rentals across the country have faced a similar reality, sharing stories of declining revenues over the past few years as the market was flooded with new rentals. AirDNA, an analytics firm that tracks the short-term-rental market, found that revenue per rental decreased by nearly 2% in 2022 and by more than 8% in 2023 due to an overabundance of units available for rent. AirDNA forecast that revenues would move back into the green in 2024 as the market corrected. But as short-term-rental owners felt signs of an "Airbnbust," some realized they needed to pivot.

On one end of the market, however, it's a different picture. While overall demand for short-term rentals rose just 1.8% in 2023, according to AirDNA's data, demand for stays priced at $1,000 or more increased by nearly 8%. For stays over $1,500, demand jumped 12.5%. In fact, demand for rentals costing over $1,000 a night has increased by 73% since 2019. While cheaper rentals are slowing down, luxury, niche, and themed stays are filling their place. Wealthy vacationers are increasingly going after luxe properties such as a secluded Malibu beach mansion or a modern cabin beset by pristine woods — like something off Cabin Porn. Meanwhile, Airbnb alternatives are jumping into the market to cater to the growing demand. A lust for luxury is propelling the short-term-rental market to new heights.

Over the past few years, more travelers have pushed back against the Airbnb model, complaining of outrageous cleaning fees, extensive cleanup requirements, and outright scams. As a result, some travelers have opted to stay in good old-fashioned hotels thanks to their consistent service.

These complaints, however, tend to focus on rentals on the low end of the market — the $200-a-night stay you might book to visit a family member or get out of town for a weekend. The luxury end of the rental market fills a different role. These spots boast plenty of hotellike amenities — such as contactless check-in, high-speed internet, bathroom toiletries, and coffee makers. Because of the high price point, luxury rentals also tend to standardize their cleaning services. Unlike a hotel room, though, a house or apartment comes with a lot more room to host guests, plus amenities such as a kitchen or private pool. When split between multiple guests for a night or weekend, some of the eye-popping price tags end up being surprisingly affordable.

Among high-income travelers, who made up an increasingly large share of vacationers this year, hotels are on the way out. Deloitte's 2024 summer-travel report found a 17-point drop in people who earn over $200,000 opting to stay at full-service hotels compared with the summer before. While middle-income travelers moved toward budget accommodations like bed and breakfasts and RV rentals, high earners shifted toward private-home rentals.

One brand capitalizing on the growing demand is Wander. Launched in 2022, Wander owns all of its 200 properties, each beautifully designed with stunning landscaping. Its founder and CEO, John Andrew Entwistle, had the idea of making a vacation rental feel like a luxury hospitality brand after a disastrous ordeal renting a cabin in Colorado. "The whole experience felt broken, the type of thing all of us has had at a vacation rental one time or another: The place didn't look like the photos. The beds were uncomfortable. The list goes on and on," he said.

He wanted a rental home with heart and soul, where the building was designed around the landscape and high-speed internet flowed across the house. Wander rentals are often in remote spots to give guests a sense of privacy and quiet. The cleaning service is standardized so guests don't have to worry about cleaning up after themselves, and customers can check in on their own through their smartphones. Every unit, which costs an average of $900 a night, also features sleek workstations for digital nomads.

Other travel brands have found similar success in the luxury market. There's Mint House, a cross between a hotel and short-term rental that has 12 properties across 10 major US cities. Visitor experiences are personalized — for instance, guests can request that the refrigerator be stocked with their favorite groceries before they arrive — and there's 24/7 customer care. The apartments, which can be studios or have multiple bedrooms, are priced similarly to hotels and feature bespoke furniture and decor, along with all the necessities of modern accommodations. To explain the brand's success, Christian Lee, the CEO of Mint House, pointed to the company's ability to provide consistent experiences. "Unlike other short-term listings that lack security and guest care and often require a guest to perform chores at checkout, all of our properties are professionally managed to ensure the utmost safety, security, and cleanliness," he said.

The luxuriousness only goes up from there. Rental Escapes, a full-service luxury-villa-rental company founded in 2012, offers over 5,000 villas in more than 70 destinations worldwide. They start at $500 a night — though most go for tens of thousands. Amase Stays, a collection of $10 million rental estates founded this year, creates bespoke experiences for its top-of-the-line properties, with dedicated concierges who can arrange everything from private chefs and spa services to customized excursions.

Chris Lema, a business coach and product strategist, is a Wander superfan. "These are places that are architecturally beautiful, and the land that they sit on feels like a national park," he said. He likes that the company provides attainable luxury — he's stayed in 13 different Wander locations and hopes to "collect them all," he said. He has even started planning trips around Wander rentals.

"I thought this is where Airbnb was going to go with its business model," he said. "If you go to Airbnb's website now, they have these different categories like 'amazing views' or 'lakefront.' But none of these rentals push forward on the issue of experience. There's the Luxe category — but it's not the same thing."

In Airbnb's Luxe category, homes might cost anywhere between $200 and hundreds of thousands of dollars a night. When the category launched in 2019, an Airbnb press release said the homes would have to pass a slate of design and experience criteria, including higher standards for cleanliness and amenities like towels and toiletries. Unlike at other Airbnb properties, a company representative has to walk through Luxe properties to verify them. Despite that, Lema hasn't been impressed.

"They seem to rank Luxe based on the niceness of the residence," Lema said, "but that isn't really the point of what that kind of experience should be."

An Airbnb spokesperson said, "We're proud to be the only travel platform that offers stays for nearly any desired travel experience." They added: "We're also proud of the growth of our Luxe category supply and look forward to expanding the offering."

So far, Wander's model is working out. It launched with only three locations, and two years later, it has 200 houses and an average occupancy rate of 80%, Entwistle said. By the beginning of 2025, Entwistle hopes to launch locations in Mexico and Canada.

Back in Fort Wayne, Kelly ended up pivoting his Airbnb business to cater to this demand for luxury. "We focus on four-bedroom-plus homes where groups can gather for weddings or reunions," he said. Houses with pools and hot tubs are especially desirable, he's found. Kelly has also amassed a thriving collection of themed Airbnbs. He designed one house to look like the childhood home of the fictional character Fawn Liebowitz from the cult classic film "Animal House." He's working on another rental themed around Indiana University sports teams.

"At the end of the day, the 'luxury' houses are more affordable than staying in multiple hotel rooms," he said. Plus, offering something unique, like a theme, helps homes stand out from the crowd. With the new focus, Kelly's Airbnbs are rarely empty, he said.

Part of the shifting demand stems from people viewing luxury rentals as a destination unto themselves — if the place you're staying is cool enough, you don't need to get out much. Others are drawn to them as a means to get away from the hubbub. "In today's globalized world, travel destinations have become more and more homogenous and tourist-burdened," Spencer Bailey, the editor of the new book "Design: The Leading Hotels of the World," said. "People are seeking out distinctive experiences away from the crowds and searching for a certain sense of intimacy, craft, and care." It's not just about top-rate service, intricate design, or even a Michelin-starred restaurant. "It's about being in nature, engaging in local culture, and creating discrete, felt experiences that encourage quietness and slowness, not an Instagram moment," Bailey says.

A private rental is often more secluded, meaning travelers can prioritize spending more time alone with their loved ones. "Travelers are increasingly wising up to the fact that time — and where, how, and with whom you spend it — is the greatest luxury," he said. Michelle Steinhardt, the founder of the luxury travel blog The Trav Nav, wrote about her recent stay at a secluded beachfront property rental in Punta Mita, Mexico: "Even though we were only a few minutes from the local town, our party felt like everyone else was miles away."

Increasingly, getting away from home isn't enough. We also want to get away from other people. For those who can afford it — or have enough friends — luxury-travel companies are more than happy to accommodate.

Michelle Mastro covers lifestyle, travel, architecture, and culture.

Puffs of smoke rose above a meadow in northeastern Washington as a small test fire danced in the grass a few feet away from me. Pleased by its slow, controlled behavior, my crew members and I, as part of a training program led by the nonprofit organization The Nature Conservancy and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, began to light the rest of the field on fire. The scene had all the trappings of a wildfire — water hoses, fire engines, people in flame-resistant outfits. But we weren't there to fight it; we were there to light it.

It might sound counterintuitive, but prescribed fires, or intentionally lit fires, help lessen fire's destruction. Natural flames sparked by lightning and intentional blazes lit by Indigenous peoples have historically helped clean up excess vegetation that now serves as fuel for the wildfires that regularly threaten people's homes and lives across the West and, increasingly, across the country.

For millennia, lighting fires was common practice in America. But in the mid-to-late 1800s, the US outlawed Indigenous burning practices and started suppressing wildfires, resulting in a massive buildup of flammable brush and trees. That combined with the dry, hot conditions caused by the climate crisis has left much of the country at a dangerously high risk of devastating wildfires. The top 10 most destructive years by acreage burned have all occurred since 2004.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, federal land managers reevaluated their approach to fire and did the first prescribed burns in national parks. We're still making up for lost time: Scientists and land managers say millions more acres of prescribed burns are necessary to keep the country from burning out of control.

But the scale of the task doesn't match that of the labor force, whose focus is often extinguishing fires, not starting them. Responding to the increase in natural disasters has left America with few resources to actually keep them from happening. As Mark Charlton, a prescribed-fire specialist with The Nature Conservancy, told me, "We need more people, and we need more time."

This fall, I outfitted myself in fire-resistant clothing and boots, donned a hard hat, and joined a training program called TREX to better understand how prescribed burns work. TREX hosts collaborative burns to provide training opportunities in the field for people from different employers and backgrounds. The hope is that more people will earn the qualifications they need to lead and participate in burns for the agencies they work for back home.

The program's emphasis on learning, coupled with the support of the University of Idaho's Artists-in-Fire Residency (which helped pay my way), is why I, a journalist with no fire jobs on my résumé, could join a prescribed-fire module of about two dozen more experienced participants. I had to pass a fitness test — speed walking three miles with a 45-pound backpack in under 45 minutes — take 40 hours' worth of online coursework, and complete field-operations training to participate as a crew member. While hundreds of people have participated in TREX burns across the country since the program's inception in 2008, the dramatic growth of wildfires is outpacing the number of people being trained to reduce their impact.

The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of forests and grasslands across the country, burning an average of about 1.4 million acres, roughly the size of Delaware, each year with prescribed burns. It burned a record 2 million acres in fiscal 2023. But it's still not enough preparation, considering wildfires have burned over 10 million acres in recent years and people continue building and living in wildfire-prone areas. "It's a huge workload we have, and we know it," said Adam Mendonca, a deputy director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service who oversees the agency's prescribed-fire program. The agency plans to chip away at the problem with the roughly 11,300 wildland firefighters it employs each year who squeeze the work in during the offseason, when there are fewer fires to fight.

But relying on wildland firefighters can be problematic. "We only have those resources for a short time," said Charlton, who served as the incident commander on the Washington burns I joined this fall. "After a long fire season, people are exhausted. It's hard to get people to commit." Plus, wildfires are increasingly overlapping with the ideal windows to do prescribed burns — often the spring and the fall, when conditions are cooler and wetter, making fires easier to tame.

That was especially true this year: Multiple large fires burned across the West into October. These late-season wildfires, coupled with two hurricanes that firefighters helped respond to, strained federal resources. That month, the nation's fire-preparedness level increased to a 5 — the highest level — indicating the country's emergency crews were at their maximum capacity and would've struggled to respond to new incidents.

In response to the elevated preparedness level, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group urged "extreme caution" in executing new prescribed fires, saying backup firefighters or equipment might not be available. "We get to the point where we're competing for resources," said Kyle Lapham, the certified-burner-program manager for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and the burn boss on the Washington burns.

There's also a qualification shortage. Prescribed burns require a well-rounded group with a variety of expertise and positions — including a burn boss, who runs the show and must have years of training. Charlton estimated that hundreds more qualified burn bosses are necessary to tackle nationwide prescribed-burn goals.

Just as concerning is an interest shortage. The Forest Service has struggled to hire for and maintain its federal firefighting force in recent years, in large part because of poor pay (federal firefighter base pay was raised to $15 an hour in 2022) and other labor disputes over job classifications, pay raises, staffing, and more. The agency is also expecting budget cuts next year and has already said it won't be able to hire its usual seasonal workforce as a result.

Legislation inching its way through Congress could help, though its fate under a new administration is unclear. The National Prescribed Fire Act of 2024 would direct hundreds of millions of dollars to the Forest Service and the US Department of the Interior for prescribed burns, including investment in training a skilled workforce — but it hasn't progressed past a Senate subcommittee hearing in June.

Without a boost in funding, the agency will continue relying heavily on partnerships with nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy and the National Forest Foundation to staff prescribed burns. The Forest Service also recently expanded its Prescribed Fire Training Center to host educational opportunities out West. Critically, though, time is of the essence.

During my TREX training in October, about 20 foresters and firefighters from as far south as Texas and as far north as British Columbia worked beside me. Our group included employees of the Washington Department of Natural Resources and two citizens of the nearby Spokane Tribe of Indians, who have a robust prescribed-fire program of their own.

Over two weeks I got a front-row seat to how much planning (sometimes years) and time a single prescribed burn takes. We conducted several burns in the mountains north of Spokane on the property of a receptive landowner who'd hosted TREX in previous years. He provided the training ground and, in exchange, got work done on his property. This isn't a common scenario — burning on private land can be more complicated, and so more burns happen on state or federal property.

When I arrived, the burn's incident-management team had already put together a burn plan detailing our objectives — reducing wildfire risk to the landowner's house, thinning small tree saplings, knocking down invasive weeds, opening up more wildlife habitat — and the exact weather conditions, like wind speed, relative humidity, and temperature, we needed to safely burn. Prescribed burns on federal lands also go through an environmental review.

At the site, we scouted contained areas we would burn, called units, with trainees making additional plans for how to ignite and control fires. Keeping a fire in its intended location, called "holding," meant lots of prep work, like digging shallow trenches to box the fire in. During the burn, teams monitored smoke and occasionally sprayed the larger trees we wanted to preserve with water when flames threatened their canopies; others poured fuel on the ground, igniting bushes, grass, and smaller trees to slowly build the fire.

Managing the fire didn't end when we finished burning the 30 or so acres. In some cases, it can involve days of monitoring and cleanup. To make sure the fire was out, my crew and I combed through areas we'd burned the day before for smoke or heat. If we discovered something still smoking, we'd churn up the ground with a shovel or pickax, douse the hot spot with water, and repeat. Just when we thought we were done, we'd find another spot we'd missed.

I went to bed those nights dreaming of little puffs of smoke and woke up with small flakes of ash embedded behind my ears. The work was rewarding and exhausting — I left with a deeper appreciation for the workers who do it for a living.

While every prescribed burn is different, it's always a careful equation. Everything needs to line up: supportive communities, the right weather, and, of course, the workers necessary to plan, burn, and extinguish. Only then can you light the match.

Kylie Mohr is a Montana-based freelance journalist and correspondent for the magazine High Country News.

In 2019, Leoncio Alonso González de Gregorio y Álvarez de Toledo, the 22nd Duke of Medina Sidonia, stormed into his late mother's palace on the Andalusian coast of Spain.

In a video he posted on YouTube marking the occasion, the Duke, tall and silver-haired, strides triumphantly through the Ambassador Room — a grand hall nearly 33 yards long, lined with oil paintings by the likes of Velázquez's master, Francisco Pacheco. In happier times, the room had been used for receiving dignitaries who visited the Duke's mother, Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo. Celebrated as the "Red Duchess," Luisa Isabel was a socialist-minded, fascism-battling aristocrat beloved by ordinary Spaniards. But now, 11 years after she had cut Leonicio and his siblings out of their inheritance, the Duke had arrived at the palace to lay claim to a national treasure he considered his by birthright.

"At last, I'm at home after many decades away," Leoncio proclaims in the video.

The treasure, known as the Archive of Medina-Sidonia, was housed in the palace's attic. A collection of 6 million documents, it spans nearly a millennium of Spanish imperial history. Within its pages lie the secrets of the kings, dukes, and explorers of medieval Spain. Luisa Isabel, who had spent the last two decades of her life cataloging the archive, believed it proved that Arab Andalusians, not Christopher Columbus, had discovered America. Perhaps the most important privately held archive in Europe, it is valued at over $60 million, though historians who have studied it consider it priceless.

Luisa Isabel, who'd been imprisoned under the regime of dictator Francisco Franco, believed the archive should pass to the people. "I have inherited this legacy, which is legally mine," she once declared. "But morally, it belongs to everyone." In her will, Luisa Isabel left only 743,000 euros to Leoncio and his siblings, Pilar and Gabriel. The bulk of the estate — including the archives — would be controlled by Liliane Dahlmann, Luisa Isabel's lover and longtime secretary, whom the Duchess had married on her deathbed.

What ensued was a bitter legal battle that would shatter the family, captivate Spanish society, and throw the fate of the archive into doubt. Leoncio's homecoming video was a declaration of war. Flouting a court ruling that barred him and his siblings from living in the palace, he had decided to move back into his ancestral home — even though it was legally occupied by Liliane, his mother's widow. "There's a lot of tension," says Gabriel, the black sheep of the family. "They barely talk to one another, enter and leave through separate doors, and rarely bump into one another." To drive home his disputed claim, Leoncio made a point of interrupting weekly palace tours. "Welcome to my house!" he would greet groups of startled tourists. "Here, they only manipulate the truth."

Liliane, ensconced upstairs with the archive she had been charged with safeguarding, kept her silence. At times it must have seemed that the family's inheritance, passed down through the generations and now entrusted to her care, was cursed. "Sometimes you don't choose your destiny, it chooses you," she once said. "Personally, these past few years have been exceedingly difficult — the stuff of nightmares."

The family appeared to start off happily enough. In 1955, only 18 years old and already pregnant with Leoncio, Luisa Isabel married José Leoncio González de Gregorio, a nobleman from Soria. Photographs from the time show the new Duchess smiling in a black ankle-length dress, her long hair framing her tiny face and her lips brightened with lipstick. Standing beside her, José Leoncio appears tall, athletic, and handsome.

In reality, Luisa Isabel and José Leoncio couldn't have made a more ill-suited couple. Her ancestors had commanded Spanish armadas, served as prime minister, and owned vast swathes of southern Spain. Her parents had fled the country during the Spanish Civil War. Her new husband, by contrast, was a die-hard conservative who supported Franco's dictatorship. Luisa Isabel loved the night life. José Leoncio, a man of the countryside, disliked high society nearly as much as the radical ideals that would soon claim his wife.

During their brief union, the couple had three children in quick succession: Leoncio in 1956, Pilar in 1957, and Gabriel in 1958. But the Duchess never seemed to take to the role of mother. After giving birth to Gabriel, family lore has it that she handed him to the nurses and declared she had fulfilled her role as a woman. The moment also marked the end of her marriage. Within the year, she had separated from José Leoncio and began to spend long stretches in Paris, where she mingled with Simone de Beauvoir and other leading intellectuals. Her children remained behind in Madrid, where they were left in the care of Luisa Isabel's grandmother. "She rarely came to visit," Gabriel recalls.

One day, when Gabriel was 6 or 7, his mother appeared at the door. Gone were her elegant dresses and long hair. Wafer thin, Luisa Isabel now sported men's trousers and short-cropped hair. There were rumors she was sleeping with women. "Someone in the household said she was our mother," Gabriel recalls. "But for us, she looked like the boy who worked at the local grocery." Leoncio was distraught. "You're not my mother!" he cried.

The change in Luisa Isabel ran deeper than fashion. In 1964, the Duchess led a protest march of fishermen in Sanlúcar. Her noble pedigree gave her a measure of protection to speak out against Franco. "This privileged aristocrat had a rebellious spirit," as one newspaper put it. Her reputation was further cemented in 1967, when she stood up for a group of protesters whose homes had been rendered radioactive after an American nuclear bomber crashed over the small fishing village of Palomares. The protesters, she told soldiers dispatched by the regime, "are here only for justice, and they are here with me." She then led the group to a bar at the village's main square for a round of cold beers.

Arrested and thrown in prison for a year, the Duchess kept up the fight from her miserable, rat-infested cell. She wrote letters and articles denouncing the conditions in Spanish prisons. A novel she authored about suffering farm workers called "The Strike," which she had managed to smuggle into France, prompted the government to threaten her with a 10-year sentence for slander. In April 1970, a few months after her release, the Duchess escaped to France disguised as a man. "I remember putting the hat and the mustache on her," recalls Julia Franco, a longtime family employee.

During her exile, José Leoncio seized on her political dissidence to secure custody of the children. "The role of being a mother slipped away from her," Pilar recalls. According to Gabriel, he and his siblings were at their father's mercy. "He was determined to redirect our lives, banning the staff from passing her calls or letters on to us," he says. The children, by birth, were nobility. But their lives felt anything but noble.

"The Red Duchess Returns" blared a headline in El Pais, a national newspaper, in 1976. Franco had died, paving the way for Spain's first open elections in four decades and the safe return of Spanish dissidents. Luisa Isabel moved into the palace at Sanlúcar, where she held court each evening surrounded by famous actors, foreign journalists, and celebrated academics. No longer closeted about her sexuality, she came across like a Spanish version of Sid Vicious. "She was punky, with short, spiky hair and worn-out clothing," recalls Miguel "El Capi" Arenas, who lived with the Duchess in the early 1980s.

By day, Luisa Isabel devoted herself to organizing the archives. Often rising at 6 in the morning, she would sequester herself in the attic among stacks of dusty documents, chain-smoking cigarettes — two packs a day — and barely eating. She spent years cataloging the papers in jaundiced folders, tying them up with string and developing a knack for deciphering their Gothic cursive handwriting, with all its loops and ligatures. Establishing herself as an amateur historian, she published a dozen books, including "It Wasn't Us," her reappraisal of Columbus published on the 500th anniversary of his arrival in America. Historians came to admire her patience and diligence. "She did a magnificent job with very few resources," says Juan Luis Albentosa, chief archivist of the Franciscan Library in Murcia. "She had no state support back then, nor any formal training."

The Duchess had first encountered the papers in the late 1950s in a storage tunnel at her family home in Madrid and transported them to the palace in Sanlúcar in the back of a lorry. While it wasn't unusual for noble families to maintain private archives, this one encompassed the unwritten history of Spain itself. The archive contained not only the records of various aristocratic families, but also receipts signed by the painter Diego Velázquez, primary sources about the Spanish Armada, and municipal records from Palos de la Frontera, the village from which Columbus set sail in 1492.

The Duchess both embraced and defied her status as an aristocrat. She believed the Archive of Medina-Sidonia belonged to the public — but only after she was no longer alive to claim it. "She was a traditionalist," her nephew, Alfonso Maura, tells me. "How could she spend all those years working on the family archives and not be?" Andres Martinez, a historian and friend of the Duchess, casts her contradictory nature in more poetic terms. "You can't jump out of your own shadow," he says.

As Luisa Isabel devoted her days to the archive and her nights to her soirees, her children saw her only occasionally. To the Duchess, they were reminders of their father — and of the world of entitlement she had devoted her life to rejecting. In 1977, a year after her return to Spain, she wrote to the director general of the Spanish National Heritage Board to request that the palace and its contents, including the archives, be registered as protected public goods, to "prevent losing what belongs to everyone."

"My family's wealth isn't important, and my children don't seem interested in preserving our artistic heritage, although they enjoy it," she wrote. By the following year, the request had been granted. The most important and valuable asset of Medina-Sidonia's ancestral heritage was now under the protection of the state.

In Gabriel's view, "the moment that marked our disunion" occurred in 1982 — the day Leoncio married his first wife, a Catalonian aristocrat named María Montserrat Viñamata y Martorell. It was at the wedding that Liliane Dahlmann, one of the bridesmaids, entered Luisa Isabel's life.

The Duchess noticed Liliane immediately. Tall and blonde and 20 years Luisa Isabel's junior, Liliane had moved from Germany to Barcelona as a girl. "I'll make her mine," the Duchess told her friend Capi Arenas during the reception. Julia Franco, who was also in attendance, recalls that the Duchess and Liliane "couldn't take their eyes off each other."

Before long, Liliane had moved into the palace, where she served as Luisa Isabel's secretary. The relationship mellowed the Duchess. Gone were the wild parties and the bohemian friends crashing at the palace for months on end; Luisa Isabel became quieter and more dedicated to the archives. "They were always together," her friend Andres Martinez recalls. "I couldn't get the Duchess alone, ever." Luisa Isabel's children were also suspicious. "Liliane was always in my mother's ear, trying to make us look bad," Pillar says.

The children also began to fight among themselves. As the eldest, Leoncio had a role in deciding which family titles went to whom. Gabriel claims they had an understanding that he would be named Duke of Montalto and Aragon, and that Leoncio had changed his mind.

"I'm inclined to stop the progressive scattering of our family titles," Leoncio wrote in a letter to his brother, rationalizing the decision. Since the family could no longer claim economic or political power, he said, "moral and historical integrity is all we have left."

Pilar was next. In 1993, King Juan Carlos I had named her Duchess of Fernandina. Now, Leoncio maintained that the title should have gone to his son. He launched a battle in the Spanish courts, stripping his sister of her noble name and privileges.

Leoncio also squabbled with his mother over the estate of her grandmother, who had left the children an inheritance "worth millions of euros," according to Gabriel. But as the estate's administrator, the Duchess had spent much of the money. In a letter to his mother, Leoncio protested this "robbery," complaining that he had received no financial help after his marriage and the birth of his son. He barely mentioned Pilar and Gabriel. The Duchess, in a scathing reply, denounced Leoncio as "weaker" than she had "ever imagined."

Gabriel had considered himself and Leoncio thick as thieves; they had lived together during their university days in Madrid and always looked after each other. Now, he felt that Leoncio was only looking out for himself. Pilar agreed. "My older brother tried to keep everything for himself and push us out," she says.

Gabriel and Pilar took the nuclear option. In 1989, they successfully sued their mother over the misspent money. In retaliation, the Duchess banned them from the palace.

Over the ensuing years, the Duchess sold off various tracts of land and other assets, reinvesting the money in the palace, and took steps to ensure that none of the children would have any power over the archives. In 1990, she transferred ownership of the palace and the archives to a new organization she founded, the Casa Medina Sidonia Foundation. And in 2005, she amended the foundation's statutes to ensure that, upon her death, Liliane would take over as president.

Three years later, on the night the Duchess died — March 7, 2008 — mourners filled the Salon of Columns, a vast room in the palace crafted by American artisans provided to the family by the 16th-century conquistador Hernán Cortés. Gabriel arrived at around 10 o'clock at night. At age 50, he and his mother hadn't spoken in 20 years. Leoncio and Pilar were already there. The greetings between them were civil but not warm.

There were whispers about how the Duchess had carried out one final snub of her children. Just 11 hours before her death, she had married Liliane in a civil ceremony. Details of the wedding were hush-hush, but it granted Liliane legal control of the palace — and the archives.

Gabriel had arrived at the palace with a somewhat macabre mission in mind. He'd brought a camera with him, and he planned to capture an image of his mother's corpse, just as he'd done when his father had died a month earlier. He wasn't sure where this impulse came from. Perhaps, after years of animosity and neglect, he wanted proof his parents were really gone for good.

Stepping away from the mourners, Gabriel entered the room where the Duchess lay in a casket. She was "deteriorated, stiff," he recalls. He felt no despair, no sense of grief. He took the camera from his pocket and held it over her body. As he did, others in the room protested. Gabriel took the picture anyway. "He had the right to take a photo of her," says his friend Íñigo Ramírez de Haro, an author and playwright who accompanied Gabriel that night. "He was her son, after all."

Alerted to what was happening, Leoncio suddenly appeared and began chasing his brother around the room. "He asked me to delete the photo," Gabriel recalls. It was a regression to youth, two middle-aged men sparring like adolescents in their mother's grand house. It was also a sign of the quarrels to come.

At first, the siblings worked in concert to challenge their mother's will. In court, they cited a provision of Spanish law mandating that a person's descendants have a right to two-thirds of an estate, regardless of the deceased's wishes. "I'm not surprised by any of this," Gabriel told a reporter at the time. "My mother made it clear that she was going to fuck us."

The court agreed. By transferring the vast majority of her wealth — the palace and its contents, including the archives — to the foundation, the Duchess had exceeded the portion of her estate she was legally allowed to bequeath to non-heirs. The foundation was ordered to pay 27 million euros to the children as compensation. There was only one problem: The foundation had nowhere near that much money, and, as a national heritage site, none of it could be sold.

To further complicate matters, Leoncio wasn't satisfied with the ruling. He was after something more than money. As duke, he believed he should be responsible for the palace, the archives, and the family legacy. "Leoncio Alonso wasn't happy with this solution because it meant giving up his family's property, and he didn't want to be remembered as the first Duke of Medina Sidonia to allow this," Eduardo Ferreiro, Leoncio's lawyer, said at the time.

Leoncio appealed the ruling and won. But the victory proved pyrrhic. The higher court ruled that he and his siblings would become part owners of the palace and its treasures — though without any power over its administration, any right to distribute its contents, or any privilege to reside there. Liliane, the court added, could continue to live in the palace. The siblings were effectively owners of everything, and of nothing.

Infuriated, Leoncio decided to defy the court's ruling and take matters into his own hands. He moved into the palace, effectively becoming housemates with his mother's widow. "Cohabitation is uncomfortable," he told a reporter. "However, the house is big."

Things got messy, fast. A newspaper reported that Montserrat Viñamata, Leoncio's first wife, had become romantically involved with Liliane, whom she had known since their university days in Barcelona. Viñamata denied the rumor: "Whoever has insinuated this has done me a lot of damage," she told a local newspaper.

In 2023, Leoncio ratcheted up the dispute. He accused Liliane of taking money from his mother's estate. Liliane denied the charge, arguing that Leoncio was smearing her name in an effort to remove her as president of the foundation so he could take over in her place. Both of them declined requests to speak with me.

Earlier this year, a judge found Liliane guilty of misappropriating funds. She was sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to repay 280,000 euros. Her appeal is due to be heard by Spain's supreme court.

On a hot morning last summer, I sit down with Gabriel at a busy café terrace in Madrid. Dressed in navy blue shorts and a white polo shirt, collar up, he looks every inch the aristocrat. Slim, with wavy gray hair, he's the kind of well-read man who sprinkles his conversations with quotes from the French economist Thomas Piketty. He also takes after his mother. It's as if his obsession with her betrayal has so boiled within him that it now emanates from his very physicality. He has her rosy cheeks, her birdish eyes, her same stubborn drive.

Gabriel, divorced and childless, seems caught in a perpetual struggle to find his place in the world. He has a habit of talking in circles, though he always returns to the topic of how his family has been torn apart. "I've been at cafés with him," says a close family member, "and suddenly he'll just start talking to someone he barely knows about his quarrels with his mother."

His mother, he tells me, "never wanted to have any relationship with us. Above all, she saw us as a threat to the free disposal of her wealth." He claims he wants to mediate between his siblings and Liliane. "I see the foundation as running like a business," he says. "What interests me is that it's run well, not who runs it." But even those closest to him have trouble discerning his true intentions. "Gabriel's views on all this change — depending on how he wakes up in the morning," says his good friend and lawyer, Javier Timmermans.

Pilar, for her part, sees the family drama as integral to both brothers' emotional makeup. Gabriel "seems to be searching for headlines rather than solutions," she says, while Leoncio is "just interested in defending his claims" as the first-born son.

Pilar, a writer and a socialite, inherited her mother's flair for culture: One paper called her "possibly the most elegant woman in Spanish high society." If her brothers remain bent on getting justice, she's more interested in closure. "All that sensationalism doesn't matter," she says. "That might be fine for making a soap opera if they want, but solving the archives issue doesn't have to depend on that."

Pilar is the first to admit that she has good reason to seek a settlement. She has inherited her father's residence in central Spain, the González de Gregorio Palace, and she has taken to referring to it as her vampire because it sucks up all her money. "I would be lying if I said I didn't want to resolve this situation because I need to," she says.

Unfortunately for Pilar and her brothers, their father's estate is proving every bit as thorny as their mother's. A half-sister whom their father never recognized has come forward to demand a share of his estate, using the same provision of Spanish inheritance law that they themselves deployed against the foundation. In October, a court ordered Pilar and her brothers to pay the half-sister a sum of more than $1 million. Gabriel now fears they might be forced to auction off the rights to the archive to private bidders — a desperate measure to cover their spiraling debts. If that were to happen, the children would finally be separated from the archive, just as the Duchess had wanted.

A few months after meeting with Gabriel, I travel to Sanlúcar de Barrameda to see the Archive of Medina Sidonia for myself.

Walking through a labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets in the city center, I pass rows of simple white houses. Some of the facades are crumbling like stale bread; others are as pristine as a Hollywood smile. The whitewashed palace looms above the city, just as the family's thousand-year legacy has loomed over the children for their entire lives.

Past the sprawling Ambassador's Room where the Duke had filmed his triumphant return, I climb a flight of stairs to the attic. The Investigator's Room smells sweet and woody. A faint chill hangs in the air, and bright sunlight casts shadows across the high shelves lined with books. There I find Liliane, quietly tapping away on her laptop.

In an email to me, Liliane had accepted my request to visit the archive, but said she wouldn't comment on any legal matters, citing past experiences when she felt her words had been twisted. Her position on the archive, echoing that of the late Duchess, is that it belongs in public hands. "They are the only ones who, today, can guarantee its maintenance and preservation, as required in a technological world," she wrote, adding that "knowledge of the past is indispensable for moving forward in all aspects of human life."

True to her word, Liliane sits at the table beside me in silence while I study the archive. After several hours, she abruptly leaves without uttering a word.

I'm handed an accountant's ledger, which indexes the documents in the archive, the descriptions scribbled in the margins in the Duchess's spidery handwriting. I ask for a diary of the Almadraba — the famous local fishing season held every May for the past 3,000 years. The diary dates back to 1550, comprising a nearly indecipherable tabulation of the number of fish caught, and the money made in each village.

Sitting with the nearly 500-year-old document in the dim light of the library, I'm reminded that only a tiny part of the collection has been digitized. The history it contains is almost entirely physical. A fire, or a robbery, could cause the documents to disappear forever.

The most viable resolution is for either the state or a major cultural institution to step in and buy the estate from the siblings, turning it into a state-owned asset and ensuring the proper management and preservation of the archives. But that would cost a lot of money — and thanks to the Duchess, the government already has a role in the foundation's administration, providing resources and guidance. And so the feud rages on, with the children clinging to the legacy their mother never wanted them to have. Leoncio and Liliane continue to live in separate wings of the palace, each imprisoned by the limbo to which Spanish law, and their intertwined fate, have condemned them. Gabriel remains consumed by his vendetta against their mother, and Pilar remains locked in battle with the rest of the family. The Duchess, with her relentless dedication to the archive and her disregard for her own children, left them with an acrimonious and bitter future. They had succeeded at gaining part ownership of her estate. But what they'd won seems more like a share in her disdain.

Matthew Bremner is a writer based in Spain.

The 1988 buddy-comedy action flick "Midnight Run" had an unexpected impact on the restaurant industry. While the romp about a bounty hunter transporting an accountant across the country didn't make a box-office splash, one line stuck around.

"A restaurant is a very tricky investment," the accountant, played by Charles Grodin, tells the bounty hunter, played by Robert DeNiro. DeNiro's character dreams of opening a coffee shop with his big score, but the accountant shuts him down: "More than half of them go under within the six months."

The idea that restaurants are a bad investment predates the film, but the quote lodged in people's minds. Over the past 20 years as a cook, restaurant critic, and food writer, I've heard Grodin's risk assessment quoted repeatedly, almost verbatim. But if restaurants really are a lousy investment, then why would private-equity firms be dumping billions into the sector? Data from PitchBook found that private-equity investments into fast-casual restaurants grew from $7.7 million in 2013 to $231 million in 2023 — a nearly 3,000% increase.

In 2024 alone, Blackstone purchased 1,400 Tropical Smoothie Cafes and a majority stake in Jersey Mike's — deals that gave the chains multi-billion-dollar valuations. Sycamore Partners also bought 250 Playa Bowls locations. Before its IPO in 2023, the Mediterranean eatery Cava raised nearly $750 million from private investors. Meanwhile, SoftBank Vision Fund has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into restaurant tech over the past decade.

All that cash has led to a boom in places like Chipotle, Shake Shake, and Sweetgreen. Between 2009 and 2018, the number of fast-casual restaurants in America doubled, while sales have nearly tripled. Meanwhile, the amount of money Americans spend eating out has jumped by nearly 60% since 2009. That doesn't exactly sound like a lousy investment.

The trouble is that private equity has a knack for destroying businesses. Red Lobster declared bankruptcy earlier this year after 10 years under private-equity management, Toys "R" Us famously shut down following a private-equity takeover, and even hospitals have struggled after private equity got involved. The cash infusion to wannabe chains and franchises has also made it harder for independently funded restaurants to compete for customers, real estate, and staff. When the gravy train stops, fast-casual restaurants are going to be in trouble.

To understand why private equity is pouring money into restaurants, we have to start with the appeal of the fast-casual model. In some ways, it's the golden mean of restaurants. You can charge twice as much for a meal at a fast-casual spot as you can at a fast-food joint. In Manhattan, a Burger King cheeseburger costs $3.40, whereas a Shake Shack burger will run you $7.79. But when you look at the overhead costs, there isn't much difference. Both restaurants staff a similar number of people and rely on similar ingredients. Chipotle may offer a burrito, a bowl, a quesadilla, and a salad, but it's all more or less the same ingredients: beans, corn, salsa, cheese, and basic proteins. The limited menu enables both fast-food and fast-casual restaurants to be efficient, keep costs down, and avoid losses from food waste and labor. And since fast-casual spots appear to be the nicer restaurants — with gourmet ingredients like brioche buns, healthy-sounding options, and claims of sustainable sourcing — they can charge more. If price and speed aren't priorities, many people would prefer to grab lunch at a Chipotle than at a Taco Bell.

The model also has an edge over sit-down restaurants, which have struggled in recent years. "Casual dining proper is not doing so well," Alex M. Susskind, a professor of food and beverage management at Cornell University, says. "Fast casual has provided consumers with a better meal experience that's equal to, or in some instances better than, a casual-dining restaurant, with less of a time and financial commitment."

The food is just as good, but the service is much faster. He says that's helped make the model a better investment than a place like Applebee's. Thanks in part to those higher profit margins, one restaurant analyst said it takes 18 months for a Chipotle to pay back buildout costs, compared to five years for a Cheesecake Factory.

"PE is investing money in the fast-casual market because the economics of a fast-casual concept is much better than any other type of restaurant concept," says Chris Macksey, the CEO of Prix Fixe Accounting, which specializes in hospitality. "Profit margins are anywhere from 10% to 15% as opposed to a full-service restaurant, which is 5% to 8%. Fast casual is just a far more scalable concept."

Scalability is really the brass ring. Investors in fast-casuals aren't buying restaurants; they're buying the potential growth of restaurant brands. Susskind says the boom reminds him of the late 1990s when casual-dining brands like Applebee's, TGI Fridays, and Olive Garden were taking off. He sees the recent shutdown of some of those chains — such as TGI Fridays, Red Lobster, and Smokey Bones — as a market correction for their overexpansion.

"That's what's making the investments in these businesses attractive. Because a lot of the weaker players have been weeded out," Susskind says about fast-casual restaurants. The frenzy has also been encouraged by the successful IPOs of companies like Sweetgreen in 2021 and Cava in 2023. Seeing Cava's stock grow by nearly 250% since its IPO has left investors searching for similar success.

While Sweetgreens and Dave's Hot Chickens are popping up across the country, independent restaurateurs are often left scrambling — not even for a piece of the pie, but for the crumbs.

Tracy Goh is the chef and owner of Damaran Sara, a two-year-old Malaysian restaurant in San Francisco, home of some of the most expensive commercial real estate in America. She's experienced landlords' preferences for fast-casual chains over small businesses like hers. "Especially for me, because it's my first restaurant. I don't have data to convince them that I can stay on a lease as long as they are likely to," Goh says. "They have a preference for the franchises or the big names."

A landlord's job is to generate money from their property. Their business isn't about enriching their community; it's about finding the most reliable tenants who can pay the most rent. In the restaurant real-estate space, that often means fast-food and fast-casual brands backed by major investment firms.

"If you're Chipotle or Shake Shack, you may decide to take a lease above market. You can afford it because you're privately funded," says Talia Berman, a partner at the hospitality advisory firm Friend of Chef and an expert in New York's restaurant real-estate market. "You beat out the competition because you don't care how much money you make in that space because it wasn't meant to be profitable based on the unit economics. It's part of a larger strategy."

That strategy is all about growth, she says. The primary goal of investment-backed restaurants is to expand quickly. "They're typically barreling toward an exit. So they're looking to get purchased by Nabisco or Darden or Levy or one of these huge restaurant conglomerates. And they need to show distribution — that they're operating in many states and that they have high top line," Berman says, referring to high sales volume.

A location that can gross $2 or $3 million in a year can demonstrate to a potential buyer that the eatery is successful — even if a high rent lowers the average unit profit margin. "They're thinking short term. It's a private equity mentality," says Berman.

Investment-backed restaurants also have a timing advantage over smaller shops. When a developer begins work on a new building that might lease space to a restaurant — a strip mall, food hall, or multipurpose apartment complex for instance — it's usually working on a multiyear timeline. Moshe Batalion, the vice president of national leasing for RioCan, one of Canada's largest real-estate-investment trusts, told me the firm starts thinking about who to lease to before it even breaks ground on a new property. Leases might be signed years before the space is even ready for move-in. Independent restaurateurs typically can't plan for a restaurant that won't open for two to three years.

"For independent operators, the real disadvantage is access of capital," Susskind says. "If they have access to a decent level of capital, they can grow, open more units." For chains, that's easy to do. But, he adds, "if I'm an independent, I don't know where I'm going to get $500,000 to ink a deal and build a restaurant."

When small-time restaurants get left out of the real-estate market, diners are left with a food scene that increasingly looks and tastes the same.

Thomas Crosby, the CEO of Pal's Sudden Service, a Tennessee-based chain of 31 burger shops, is all too familiar with the downsides of private equity. It's why he has eschewed outside investment. Millions of private-equity dollars might help triple the number of Pal's locations in five years — but could the chain continue to train and retest staff to remember that the perfect french fry is 3.7 inches long?

"As soon as you start taking investments or go public, you confuse your mission," Crosby says. "It becomes, what metrics can I do to wow stockholders instead of wow customers? And I think that's how so many companies get sideways. It's kind of like cars: You drive down the interstate, and you cannot hardly tell one brand from another. It becomes so homogenous." He adds: "That's what happens in the restaurant industry."

Chasing the success of another restaurant chain means everyone just tries to copy everyone else. "To please the stockholders or investors, they've got to be all things to all people," he says. By maintaining control over his operations, Crosby says, "We don't owe people money. We don't lease land. We have zero debt."

Since the early 2000s, private-equity firms started taking on a bigger role in the companies they'd invested in; these firms didn't just expect returns down the line, they began telling companies how to achieve those goals. This was good for innovation and safety, but bad for job creation and wages, with "sizable reductions in earnings per worker in the first two years post buyout," professors from Harvard and the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business wrote in a 2014 research paper.

In the long run, private equity often leaves companies worse off. In 2019, researchers found that public companies that are bought out by private-equity firms are 10 times as likely to go bankrupt as those that aren't — a finding that complicates the argument that companies like Toys "R" Us closed simply because of market forces. Similar to the casual-dining boom before it, Susskind, the Cornell professor, believes that the investment boom in the fast-casual sector will eventually lead to a bust.

Already, the graveyard of private-equity-backed restaurants is growing. BurgerFi, which has 93 locations and 51 pizza subsidiaries, primarily in Florida, received $80 million in investments just a few years ago. But despite last year's plan to update the chain's stores, menus, and technology, the investment has largely transformed into debt. The company defaulted on $51 million in credit obligations this year, and in September, it filed for bankruptcy.

Between 2015 and 2019, Mod Pizza received a total of $334 million in private-equity investments, which enabled the brand to grow to 512 locations across Western states, with over 12,000 employees. In 2019, the firm boasted of being "the fastest-growing restaurant chain in the United States for the past four years," with a plan to hit 1,000 locations in five years. The rapid expansion outpaced realistic sales growth, and earlier this year, the company closed over 40 locations.

Similarly, Rubio's Fresh Mexican Grill, founded in 1983 in California, was acquired by Mill Road Capital in 2010 for $91 million. The new ownership updated the name (to Rubio's Coastal Grill), the interior design, and the menu. Renovations at each location cost about $200,000. The chain ended up declaring bankruptcy twice: once in 2020 and again earlier this year. Though the company attributed the first filing to pandemic lockdowns, it was already struggling to maintain its growth and stay in the green prior to 2020. When it closed more restaurants earlier this year, some employees found they were unable to cash their final paychecks.

Even some of the most visible success stories of investment-based growth haven't borne fruit. Sweetgreen, "the Starbucks of salad" that was heavily backed by venture capital before its IPO, grew from one location in 2007 to 227 this year, with plans to open another 30 a year — though the company still hasn't seen a profitable year. The chain lost over $26 million last year.

At some point, the market taps out and there isn't room for more growth. Americans are already spending 42% more money on dining out than they are on groceries.

Berman says that the high volatility creates opportunities. For one, when a cash-rich restaurant bails on a retail location, it becomes available as a turnkey space, complete with HVAC, grease traps, and floor drains. Berman's company recently made a deal for a popular food brand to build out a research kitchen. It's designed to be an experiment, but they signed a 10-year lease. "Believe me, this place is not going to be around in three years, I promise you," she says. That leaves the door open for other entrepreneurs to take over.

In other words, don't get too attached to the Sweetgreen down the street. It may take longer than six months for private-equity-backed restaurants to go under, but there's a good chance your new fave won't be around in a few years.

Corey Mintz is a food reporter focusing on the intersection between food, economics, and labor. He is also the author of "The Next Supper: The End Of Restaurants As We Knew Them, And What Comes After."

It used to be that when a killer emerged in America, we found out who the man was before we began to enshroud him in myth. But with Luigi Mangione, the lead suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, that process was reversed. The internet assumed it already knew everything about Thompson's killer before a suspect had even been identified, let alone arrested.

Within hours of the shooting, social media was churning out a mythologized version of the masked man. In his anonymity, he became an instant folk hero, portrayed as a crusader for universal healthcare, a martyr willing to risk it all to send a message to America's insurance giants with "the first shots fired in a class war." A Reddit forum offered up dozens of laudatory nicknames to crystalize his mythology: the Readjuster, the Denier, the People's Debt Collector, Modern-Day Robin Hood. "I actually feel safer with him at large," one tweet a day after the shooting said; it received 172,000 likes. A surveillance image of the suspect moved some to comment that he was "too hot to convict" and prompted comparisons to Jake Gyllenhaal and Timothée Chalamet. In New York City, a "CEO-shooter look-alike competition" was held in Washington Square Park. Surely, the internet assumed, the suspect shared left-wing ideas about the cruelties of privatized healthcare.

Then the man himself appeared — and he didn't fit into any of the neat categories that had already been created to describe him. On X, he followed the liberal columnist Ezra Klein and the conservative podcaster Joe Rogan. He respected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and retweeted a video of Peter Thiel maligning "woke"-ism. He took issue with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He played the cartoon video game "Among Us," posted shirtless thirst traps, quoted Charli XCX on Instagram, and had the Goodreads account of an angsty, heterodox-curious teenage boy: self-help, bro-y nonfiction, Ayn Rand, "The Lorax," and "Infinite Jest." Yes, he seemed to admire the Unabomber. But mostly, this guy — a former prep-school valedictorian with an Ivy League education and a spate of tech jobs — was exceedingly centrist and boring. A normie's normie. He wasn't an obvious lefty, but he wasn't steeped in the right-wing manosphere either. His posted beliefs don't fit neatly into any preestablished bucket. In his 261-word manifesto, which surfaced online, he downplayed his own qualifications to critique the system. "I do not pretend," he wrote, "to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument."

That didn't stop the denizens of social media from pretending to be the most qualified people to lay out exactly who Mangione is. He's "fundamentally anti-capitalist" and "just another leftist nut job." Or he's "a vaguely right-wing ivy league tech bro." Or he was invented by the CIA, or maybe Mossad, as a "psyop." The reality of Mangione — his messy, sometimes contradictory impulses — allowed everyone to cherry-pick the aspects of his personality that confirmed their original suspicions. In the attention economy, patience is a vice.

The rush to romanticize killers is nothing new. A quarter century ago, we cast the Columbine shooters as undone by unfettered access either to guns or to the satanic influences of Marilyn Manson and Rammstein. A decade ago, we debated the glamorization of the Boston Marathon bomber, gussied up like a rock star on the cover of Rolling Stone. But social media has sped up the assumption cycle to the point where we put the killer into a category before police have found the killer. Perhaps there's a "great rewiring" of our brains that has diminished our capacity to understand each other, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests in "The Anxious Generation" — a book Mangione had retweeted a glowing review of.

Mythmaking is easier, of course, when it's unencumbered by reality. The less we know about a killer, the more room there is to turn him into something he's not. From what we have learned so far, Mangione is a troubled Gen Zer who won the privilege lottery at birth and ascribed to a mishmash of interests and beliefs. We will surely learn more about him in the coming days, weeks, and months. But now that we know who he is, it will be hard, if not impossible, to let go of our initial assumptions. Instead, we'll selectively focus on the details that fit tidily into the myths we've already created. In the digital-age version of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," the legend was already printed by the time the facts came along.

Scott Nover is a freelance writer in Washington, DC. He is a contributing writer at Slate and was previously a staff writer at Quartz and Adweek covering media and technology.

When Russ Schmidt was about 12, he was helping out on his family's farm in rural Kansas when his father looked at him and said, "You're not worth anything if you're not working."

Those words fixed themselves in Schmidt's brain. Decades later — at age 66 — they still have a hold on him.

"I was, I am, a really good employee," he says. Through his two careers in San Francisco, first as an administrator and then as a nurse for 20-odd years, he often did more than what his job required. "I see something that needs to be done, I do it," he says. He rarely took time off, so before he could officially retire in February 2023, he had to use the four months of vacation time he had accrued.

The change of pace of retirement was rough. His life became a cycle of alternating between bed and couch, eating and watching Netflix. He told himself he needed rest and recuperation — "but at some point," he says, "I realized this is settling into depression." After six months, Schmidt found a job working at a sexual-health clinic for two days a week.

When we think of retirement, we often think of endless leisure and zero responsibility. You might imagine yourself relaxing poolside with a book, strolling through a golf course, or binge-watching TV shows. In fact, many retirees live like this. The 2023 American Time Use Survey found that adults between 65 and 74 spent, on average, almost seven hours a day on leisure and sports, with four of those hours spent watching TV. Adults 25 to 54, on the other hand, averaged about four hours of leisure time and about two hours watching TV.

Spending your twilight years lying around might sound ideal — after all, everyone deserves a chance to relax after decades of working. But research suggests a life of pure leisure doesn't make you happier or healthier. About a third of American adults have said they struggled in transitioning to a life without work, and sedentary lifestyles are associated with earlier death. People are living about 15 years longer than they did a hundred years ago, which means we have many more years to spend in retirement. While there's much hand-wringing over how to save up enough money to enjoy those work-free years, much less discussed is how we should spend those years. More and more research is finding that both physical and social activity are crucial for well-being in old age — they keep people happier and living longer.

But that's not what most people are doing. Americans are doing retirement all wrong.

The concept of retirement as we know it came from German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who in 1889 designed a social insurance program compelling the government to care for people who couldn't work because of age or disability. When Social Security was established in the US in 1935, the retirement age was set at 65, though the average life expectancy was about 60 years. The norm was for people to work until they could not work anymore. Today the average life expectancy is about 77, and the age you can start receiving full Social Security benefits is either 66 or 67, depending on when you were born. We're working longer and living longer.

That has created two problems: People need to figure out how to pay for a longer retirement and how to spend their time. Anqi Chen, a senior research economist at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, says people are addressing both by simply working longer. Researchers, she says, have seen more people claim Social Security while they're still earning an income — something that used to be typical only of retirees. Of Americans 65 and older, nearly 11 million, or about 19%, are employed, and that number is projected to rise to nearly 15 million by 2032. Twenty years ago, just under 5 million Americans over 65 were employed.

Schmidt straddles these scenarios. Before retirement, he changed jobs too often to properly build up a pension — something he didn't realize until it was too late. Now finances are tight. "In that sense, retirement has been a letdown and a struggle," he says. He and his husband, who hasn't yet retired, have watched their savings dip even as Schmidt contributes through his part-time work.

Dee Cascio, a counselor and retirement coach in Sterling, Virginia, says the growing urge to work in retirement points to a larger issue: Work fulfills a lot of needs that people don't know how to get elsewhere, including relationships, learning, identity, direction, stability, and a sense of order. The structure that work provides is hard to move away from, says Cascio, who is 78 and still practicing. "People think that this transition is a piece of cake, and it's not," she says. "It can feel like jumping off a cliff."

In an online survey conducted early this year by Mass Mutual, a majority of retirees said they'd become less stressed and more relaxed upon retirement, but as many as a third reported that they'd become unhappier. Research from the Health and Retirement Study from the University of Michigan suggests that some of the negative effects people can experience in retirement are tied to lifestyle changes such as being less active and social in the absence of work.

For some, the solution is to never give up work. Schmidt feels that even if there had been no need for him to make money after retiring, he still would've sought out a part-time job. With it, "I don't feel useless," he says. "I do work that feels like I'm really giving something to the community."

But returning to your old line of work is hardly the only way to stay emotionally and intellectually fulfilled in retirement.

The idea that our personal worth is determined by how hard we work and how much money we make is deeply embedded in US work culture. This "Protestant work ethic" puts the responsibility of attaining a good quality of life and well-being on the worker — if you don't have the time or resources for leisure, it's because you haven't earned it. Or as Schmidt's father put it, "You're not worth anything if you're not working." This pernicious way of thinking prevents people from seeing purpose or value in life that doesn't involve working for a paycheck.

Meanwhile, more and more research suggests that a sense of purpose is a vital factor for health and happiness, especially in older age. "Higher purpose in life is associated with reduced risk of heart attacks and strokes," says Eric Kim, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. For adults older than 50, it's also associated with better grip strength and faster walking speed, better overall health, healthier habits, less loneliness, and a lower risk of depression.

So what does purpose outside a career look like? Paul Draper thinks he's figured it out.

In August 2023, six months before he was set to retire from his job as an enterprise-software product manager, Draper, now 68, made a plan. He liked his job and felt satisfied leaving it behind, but he recognized he still had a lot of energy and wanted to learn new things and meet new people. He was already involved in volunteering — doing prison ministry and working with soup kitchens — but more than that, "I was interested in doing things that I didn't know anything about," he says.

Draper's first thought was to work at a hardware store. He was somewhat handy but wanted to learn more about home repair. So he did. He got a part-time job at his local big-box hardware store handling doors, windows, and staircases. "That was great," he says, "because all of a sudden I had to learn a lot" to be able to answer customers' questions and solve their problems.

The job was never meant to be a forever thing. After 10 months, it began to feel more monotonous and less like a learning opportunity, so Draper decided to move on. He plans to replicate that experience and pursue other areas of work he's fascinated by. "There's a company in my area that builds continuous transmissions for bicycles and e-bikes," he says. "I just want to intern there." His dream role, however, is to lead city tours on Segways.

Since Draper isn't worried about needing an income, he can focus on learning. "There are a million fun things to do, but 99% of them are unsustainable to do as a career," he says. He views retirement as his opportunity to experiment with that 99% without worrying about achievement, a career, and the general hustle. Plus, he says it's been fairly easy to find these gigs. "I have found that there's a lot of employers that love retirees," he says. "One, because they're good with people. Two, because they're very reliable for the time that they have them, and they're calm, and they work well with other employees."

Cascio has found that when helping clients bring purpose back into their lives in retirement, it can help to think about the "six arenas of life": work, relationships, leisure, personal growth, finances, and health. A lot of people have drawn their sense of purpose or identity from work, and they might want to continue doing so through jobs or volunteering in retirement, she says. But any of these arenas can be a source of purpose. "If you haven't attended to your health and that's something you want to improve in retirement, that can become a purpose," she says.

Some activities can provide purpose in several of those areas. Draper's various odd jobs mean that he's more physically active than he would be if he stayed at home, and he's constantly meeting new people. "I've heard of people's circles closing up, but I'm finding I interact with more people, and on a regular basis," he says. Both greater social interaction and increased physical activity are associated with happier and healthier aging.

Kim says retirees who aren't exercising, socializing, or pursuing a sense of purpose may have self-limiting beliefs and pessimistic views of aging. "I've met people who will say, 'I'm X years old, and people who are this age don't really exercise anymore,'" regardless of whether their bodies are capable, he says. Sometimes older adults have to first overcome the idea that because they are older they are limited. A well-known 2002 study — and much follow-up research — found that people with more positive views of aging lived longer than those with more negative views. Kim says it can be tough to surmount those limiting beliefs, especially in a society where aging is seen as something to be avoided. In reality, there's no expiration date for finding new sources of fulfillment.

Of course, some people are perfectly happy with a leisure-filled retirement. "If you're only golfing and watching TV and you don't feel like there's anything missing in your life, you're completely happy, then I wouldn't go and say there is a psychological reason why you need to go and volunteer for a cause you care about," says Yochai Shavit, the director of research at the Stanford Center on Longevity. If you live a life of leisure but are still bored, or if you're ignoring a sense of discontentment, that's when the trouble starts. "The risk I see is that people brush aside those feelings," he says.

There's no "one size fits all" formula to retirement, but experts like Shavit hope that more people approach retirement with the understanding that they still have the ability — and often the time — to find meaning and fulfillment. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that "boredom is a 'natural' part of retirement and having aches, both internally and physically, is just a part of growing old," Shavit says. They're not, and they don't have to be.

Hannah Seo is a Korean-Canadian journalist based in Brooklyn, New York, who writes about health, climate, and social science.

YYou've just been added to a meeting. It's late afternoon, late in the week, and someone is presenting a deck. Geez, here we go. The presenter reads words that you can also read from a bulleted list on a lightly decorated page projected before you. Next slide. Because you've seen hundreds of PowerPoint presentations since your sixth-grade science-fair days, you instinctively know this one's going to take the full hour. Eyes glaze over, yawns are stifled. Next slide. The presenter attempts to play an embedded video, but the audio doesn't work. "You get the idea" though. Next slide.

Nearly four decades after the launch of PowerPoint, the slide deck remains one of the most dominant forces shaping how we think — and don't think — about our work. From startup pitches to Pentagon procurement timetables, from quarterly board meetings to annual harassment trainings, billions of presentations are given each year in a single rigid, information-squishing format, on PowerPoint or its imitators Keynote, Google Slides, or now Figma Slides. Humanity continues to cram compelling and vital information into single-idea slides, strip these ideas of context, and read them aloud among a flurry of GIFs, charts, and animated wipes and swipes. Rarely does the deck — which by design dictates a one-sided style of conversation — elicit robust questions from or conversation with the audience. We are constantly pitching our bosses, their bosses, investors, and each other via a one-size rhetorical tool that doesn't really fit all.

But some are finally thinking outside the deck. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and military top brass have been bad-mouthing and even banning slide presentations from meetings, instead favoring memos or even old-fashioned, visual-aid-free, raw-dogged discussion. Rippling, which makes HR and payroll software, has done the impossible: complete a funding round (a $45 million Series A) without a deck. Several startups, including one from Edward Norton — yes, the actor — have launched alternatives to the deck. It appears that even three Academy Award nominations cannot spare one's life from the stultifying ubiquity of decks, and Norton and his two cofounders at Zeck are on a mission to vanquish it.

Is the deck in jeopardy? Are we at last approaching a day when "this meeting could have been an email" lives alongside "this meeting could have gone without a deck"? Next slide.

For most of the 20th century, workplace meetings were typically small and informal discussions with a few colleagues. By the 1980s, the computer revolution was generating loads more information for every business to digest and act on. This meant more and bigger meetings across departments, which meant more presentations, which usually meant slide projectors. But those presentations were clunky, finicky, and laborious to make.

Then, in the mid-'80s, an ailing software startup called Forethought developed a first-of-its-kind graphics program in which computer users could string together a series of slides. Originally called Presenter, it was released in April 1987, as PowerPoint. Microsoft immediately saw its world-changing potential, buying Forethought just four months later for $14 million. For one thousandth of the nearly $14 billion the company has invested in OpenAI, Microsoft acquired a program that remains arguably more consequential to how businesses operate. By 1993, Microsoft was raking in $100 million from PowerPoint sales a year; by 2003, $1 billion. Microsoft estimated that 30 million PowerPoint presentations were being made every day.

Decks have no shortage of zealots, including my former boss. When I worked at BarkBox, Nick Cogan, a vice president of creative, always had us making decks — not just for big retail pitches but for every little task. Product planning, style guide, whatever it was, we'd make a deck. I maybe want him to apologize for all the deck wrangling, but he laughs and doesn't give an inch defending them, which, as a former animator, he loves for their storytelling capabilities. "'Look at this, not us' can be essential when presenting," he says. He describes the perfect presentation as both a "useful crutch" and a "little kids' storybook," where he can walk the great and mighty decision-makers through storytime instead of business time.

Christina Farr, a healthtech director and investor who wrote a book about storytelling in business, agrees, arguing that the deck actually draws its power from its ubiquity. Because people are used to both writing and receiving decks, "people know what the story should sound like," and the expected rhythms and beats of a PowerPoint presentation "are already baked in." But it's not just an emotional expectation, she says — it's also a formal one: "If you're raising money, in 2024, you have to have a deck. Everybody expects you to do it."

True, but there's also been no shortage of deck denigrators. In 2003, the media theorist Edward Tufte published "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," which remains one of the most deliciously damning indictments of a software program ever written. Over several thousand words, Tufte flambés PowerPoint, and "slideware" in general, for "making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleagues' time." Though PowerPoint was developed and even celebrated as a "cure for the presentation jitters," Tufte maligns it as overly oriented toward the presenter, leaving little room for the listener to chime in or even actively listen. Tufte even goes so far as to blame PowerPoint's "poverty of content" and its "foreshortening of evidence and thought" for the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

The jeremiad had many admirers, including Jeff Bezos. Inspired by Tufte, the Amazon CEO in June 2004 banned PowerPoint from executive meetings. The book "Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon" describes Bezos as finding slide decks "frustrating, inefficient, error-prone," with a stiff format that "made it difficult to evaluate actual progress." In its place the company developed what's become known as the Amazon Six-Pager: a detailed memo outlining — in narrative prose, not bullet points — the conversations and business problems that have surfaced the need for a meeting. In a deck, information takes a back seat to form and format; the memo, in contrast, forces the presenter to embody a Joan Didion axiom: "I don't know what I think until I write it down." Attendees read the six-pager before the meeting, so everyone can enter the meeting informed and be held accountable for the decisions made out of the discussion.

"I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Steve Jobs once opined, adding that "people who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint." Even Steve Ballmer, who sits atop literal millions and owns the Los Angeles Clippers in part because of PowerPoint money, maligned decks while he was CEO of Microsoft. "I don't think it's efficient," he said in 2011, adding, "Most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: 'I've got the following four questions. Please don't present the deck.'" Over the years, many members of the US military have cast aspersions toward what they call "death by PowerPoint."

"The incentive structures for a slide deck are all bad," says Aviv Gilboa, the president of Skylight, a consumer tech company known for its digital picture frames and calendars. To Gilboa, who worked at Amazon for four years, decks aren't just boring, they're antithetical to many ways we think and work. The format of a single slide is inherently low-information: When you're pitching, you're persuading, and so you can fit only one idea per slide, often forcing you to leave some good ideas behind.

Gilboa says decks also help presenters feel good without forcing them to engage with their decisions. Decks help reinforce this perception of assurance, what Gilboa calls "the smoke and mirrors of how we got to this choice." As I sat at BarkBox making decks every which way for every little business problem, I felt like a purveyor of both smoke and mirrors, no matter what my boss said about storytelling.

Many of our workplace problems have evident solutions made possible by software — for example, Google Docs, a miracle program that replaced back-and-forth documents and version control with fluid, collaborative workflow. But like many in the PowerPoint mines, I'm not sure what alternative could possibly replace slides at scale.

Zeck was born in 2022 out of its cofounders' rage at decks, especially in board meetings. "At our prior companies, the shortest deck we ever sent was 134 pages," Zeck's cofounder Robert Wolfe tells me, adding that "there was nothing more stressful" about preparing for those meetings. He says that at CrowdRise, the company he ran with his brother Jeffrey and Edward Norton, they'd stop all other work for 100 hours before every board meeting in order to write and build the quarterly decks they hated enough to found Zeck. In a nod to Norton, Wolfe integrated a "Fight Club" reference into the origin story on Zeck's website: "The meeting I just sat through was like the scene in Fight Club where you punch yourself in the face over and over."

To Wolfe, the deck model "literally creates antagonism" — everyone becomes an editor with a red pen, the deck presenting endless entry points for criticism. In the military or an everyday office, grunts and junior designers hate working on PowerPoints, tweaking pixels and making rounds of edits that drive everyone crazy, because in PowerPoint you're often not working on the idea, but only on the presentation of the idea.

Zeck proposes that the solution to the deck is a collaborative website. A Zeck site feels a bit like a Notion site but with tweaks that work well for the boardroom — it gives everyone edit access, is encrypted, can be personalized, and offers links so that your chief financial officer or finance team can access full reports and charts and important information. It is a revelation to not have that information simplified in a slide in a meeting where everyone has to sit through everything. And in Zeck's pitch I find a great clarity equaled so far only by Tufte himself: When we remove the awful slide deck, once again "the meeting can be a meeting." So far, Zeck counts among its clients Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, furniture maker Floyd, and the rocket startup Phantom Space Corporation.

While Zeck is unlikely to supplant PowerPoint any time soon, Wolfe thinks people are finally rebelling against the idea "that you only have Office and all the tools that go with it, or a Google Drive and all the tools that go with it." He makes a brazen prediction: "I would be shocked if in 18 months or five years people are still using flat slides for meetings that should be collaborative."

We aren't yet letting go of decks in business, but we've let them hop the fence into our wider culture, both celebrating and undermining their repressive formality and ubiquity. The post-irony generations are throwing "PowerPoint parties," and some singles, sick of dating apps, are using PowerPoint to make their cases as mates. A 2021 episode of the Bravo reality show "Summer House" featured a subplot built around a romantic gesture delivered via PowerPoint. For some, slides may be a love language. There are even famous decks now, like this 300-pager in which a hedge-fund excoriated Olive Garden's business practices, or, my favorite, Jennifer Egan's PowerPoint chapter from her 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "A Visit from the Goon Squad."

Egan tells me she got a crash course in the program from her business-world sister, who "thinks in PowerPoint." The formal experiment of a PowerPoint chapter was exciting, though the "cold, corporate vibe" was perhaps incompatible with real, genuine emotion and the stuff contained in great novels. She suggests this tension gives the finished chapter — "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," the 12-year-old protagonist Alison Blake's account of her autistic brother's favorite pauses in classic rock songs interspersed with descriptions of their mom and dad coming and going, fighting and reflecting — its power. The chapter delivers earnest emotion without being schlocky, and is brave and hilarious without being corny. Egan says she isn't typically this type of writer, but the PowerPoint format gave her the ability to tell "this very sweet story in a cold holder."

Perhaps the PowerPoint parties and Egan have it right and we should let PowerPoint do what it does best: tell stories. For Egan, a deck arguably won a Pulitzer. For NASA, a deck arguably killed astronauts. In the big middle between those outcomes, we're still deciding whether a story is always what's necessary — and what to do about decks.

Matt Alston's writing has appeared in Wired, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Believer. He trained as a civil engineer, and now works as a copywriter in tech. He lives in Maine with his wife and daughter.

Once upon a time, corporate bosses, associates, and interns alike would set aside their different titles and gather each December for drinks, dancing, and conversation. There would be gourmet dinners, chocolate fountains, DJs, and even live bands. For some, it was a night of merriment and splendor; for others, of awkward small talk, followed by deep regret.

Then the holiday party became endangered. In the wake of #MeToo in 2017, more professionals began rethinking the wisdom of a boozed-up night with their colleagues. The pandemic and remote work delivered a near death blow. In a 2020 survey of about 200 HR representatives by the executive-outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a mere 23% said they opted for seasonal celebrations, nearly three-quarters of which would be held virtually.

But as the return to offices continues, companies are slowly reinstituting holiday parties. Last year, nearly 65% of companies surveyed by Challenger, Gray, & Christmas said they planned to host in-person holiday parties, within sight of the 80% reported in 2016, before the advent of #MeToo. If plans pan out, this year could have before-times levels of corporate holiday cheer.

The return of the office holiday party could be a happier development than many jaded workers are likely inclined to presume. With two-thirds of the American white-collar workforce working remotely either some or all of the time, according to a USA Today survey conducted earlier this year, face time with colleagues and superiors is no longer a default feature of the 9-to-5. That might not be a big deal for everyone, but early-career workers stand to pay the steepest professional price for missing out on the kinds of networking and mentorship opportunities that are likelier to happen organically in a shared physical space. All the while, workers across the board are feeling increasingly lonely, overextended, and disengaged. They need something — anything — to celebrate.

In a work environment punctuated by uncertainty and isolation, it might be premature to let one's inner Scrooge have the final word on the tradition.

From Fezziwig's ball in "A Christmas Carol" to the power-suited backdrop of the 1988 Christmas Eve action thriller "Die Hard," the workplace holiday party has been a fixture of the cultural imagination for generations. But in the mid-20th century, the event garnered its enduring reputation for sloppiness and day-after regret. A 1948 Life magazine photo spread from a Christmas party thrown in the office of a Manhattan insurance brokerage depicts, among other modern-day HR violations, a pantless male executive dancing arm in arm with a young female stenographer and a pair of colleagues leaning in for a smooch beneath a bundle of mistletoe.

Somewhere along the way, festivities evolved from low-key gatherings held at the office to lavish affairs that might include gourmet meals, hired entertainment, and even international travel and accommodation on the boss' dime. The pandemic notwithstanding, the economic pendulum has largely dictated its tilt toward excess or restraint.

As a Toronto-area DJ during the halcyon days of the late-'90s dot-com bubble, Baruch Labunski had a front-row seat to corporate-party splendor. "I went to many and saw a lot of crazy things," he said. He described being flown to DJ holiday parties in far-flung global destinations such as Bora Bora, Palawan, and Ibiza — and, on top of that, getting paid $50,000 to $100,000 per event. (When I asked how many holiday parties he booked in a typical season, he said only "many.") By the time the dot-com bubble burst and the demand for his services cooled, Labunski had tired himself out of the DJ booth and pivoted to a career in marketing.

Economic recovery in the mid-2000s spurred a holiday-party renaissance, only to be dashed once again in the 2008 recession. A few years later, Wall Street firms were reportedly back to enjoying hush-hush holiday festivities reminiscent of their heydays. The free-money firehose of the ZIRP era was in full force, and excess was back in style.

Danielle Kane, who was a reporter for a niche New York City financial-services publication between 2015 and 2017, said that one year her company flew the entire staff of 50 to 75 people to Berlin. "Hotels and flights were paid for, there was an experiential dinner at the Berlin TV Tower, and then they paid for everyone to get into a fancy club afterwards," she said. "It was a late night, and I've never experienced a company holiday party like it since."

For all their fun, these often cringe-inducing affairs earned a bad rap — one that may come to bite younger workers.

Despite some companies' largesse, the general workforce's enthusiasm for holiday parties has long been mixed. In a 2017 survey of American workers by Randstad, 90% of respondents said they'd rather receive bonuses or extra vacation days than attend a company holiday party. "The ideal situation," Constance Noonan Hadley, an organizational psychologist, told me, "is to offer activities that foster employee social health (such as a holiday party) without asking them to sacrifice their financial health (such as a bonus) or their mental health (such as time off)."

Companies squander the opportunity to make holiday gatherings meaningful in all sorts of small but critical ways. Hadley said the Christmas-specific focus of many company holiday parties could be alienating to workers who follow non-Christian religious traditions. Parties are often held at inconvenient times and places — too late on a weeknight for parents, in a location that has expensive parking or is hard to access. Holiday parties at big firms can also be loud, hot, and crowded, which makes it difficult to have meaningful conversations or meet new people.

Well-planned company holiday parties, on the other hand, can be a boon to employees' overall work experience and even strengthen company culture. A study of workers at several German companies in 2019 concluded that parties could encourage social bonding, especially when employees' feedback steered the planning. The study suggests, for example, that icebreaker activities that get people from different parts of the organization talking help build camaraderie, despite the eye rolls they may initially provoke. Over time, that can contribute to a happier and more cohesive work environment.

For early-career workers, the benefits can be more pronounced. Rick Hermanns, the president and CEO of HireQuest, a global staffing company, said social events could help make up for the "intangible aspects of career growth and camaraderie between colleagues" that younger workers may miss out on when they're partly or fully remote. In a 2023 Adobe poll of more than 1,000 Gen Z workers at midsize and large US companies, 83% of respondents said a workplace mentor was crucial for their career, but only 52% said they had one. While holiday parties aren't the be-all and end-all of workplace networking, they provide a critical opening to build and fortify connections.

"When I look back at my early career in banking in Los Angeles, I appreciated the time I had to walk into a senior executive's office or grab a beer after work with colleagues," Hermanns said. "Those are the intangibles you can't quantify yet ultimately impact your career growth." Simply put, face time matters.

It makes sense that Gen Z and millennial workers would be more enthusiastic about workplace holiday get-togethers than their Gen X and baby-boomer counterparts. "Company leaders need to help Gen Z — as well as millennials, whose workplace experience was hugely disrupted by COVID — to build strong interpersonal workplace relationships," Hubert Palan, the CEO of the product-management company Productboard, told Business Insider last year.

Given that much of the global workforce feels lonely on the job, it's not just the youngest workers who need a social boost. A new study Hadley coauthored evaluating workplace loneliness and remedies found that the loneliest people at work were those who were offered the fewest social opportunities by their employer. "In fact, the number of social offerings provided was one of our most predictive variables in terms of whether someone was socially connected at work or not," she told me. Hadley also found that while fully remote work did seem to increase the risk of loneliness, it was less significant of a variable than whether a person was introverted or worked for an organization that held regular social activities for staffers.

The German study suggests that a holiday party can serve as the ritual capstone for these more routine coworker events, making year-end hobnobbing just a little extra special. While the ideal party activities will depend on an organization's culture, a few basic considerations — such as hosting the event somewhere besides the boring old office — go a long way. Elements of fun help too, whether they take the form of a themed photo booth, a creative dining experience, or, yes, a DJ.

A dash of festive foresight can make the difference between the raunchy affairs of yesteryear and a few hours of meaningful, PG-rated bonding between coworkers. "A nice holiday event gives people a break in their wallets and signals that the leaders value personal connections and socializing," Hadley said.

For a company's youngest workers, the benefits may last a professional lifetime.

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

On Wednesday, moments after the news broke that Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, had been fatally shot in Midtown Manhattan, social media unleashed a barrage of caustic commentary about his death. In lieu of condolences, Americans from all walks of life shared barbed jokes, grim memes, and personal anecdotes about their own experiences with giant insurers like UnitedHealthcare.

On Facebook, UnitedHealthcare's statement about the murder of its chief executive elicited 46,000 reactions — 41,000 of which employed the laughing emoji. The company quickly turned off comments on the post, but hundreds of users shared it with arch commentary.

"The amount of laugh reacts on the original post speaks volumes lol," one user wrote.

"My thoughts & prayers were out of network," wrote another.

While the motive behind Thompson's murder remains unknown, the internet treated it as an occasion for ghoulish schadenfreude. America's health insurance system is so broken and cruel, people openly declared, that the death of one of its most powerful executives merited nothing but scorn and derision. "He was CEO when he was shot," read one tweet that received more than 120,000 likes. "Preexisting condition. Claim denied."

"The UnitedHealthcare CEO might be the most celebrated death on this app since Henry Kissinger," wrote another user on X.

Given the nature of social media, where the most provocative and emotion-laden commentary is engineered to rise to the top, it's not surprising that platforms from TikTok to Reddit would be filled with hateful invective. What's striking, however, is how the backlash revealed the depth of the bitterness toward health insurers. In the face of a man being gunned down in the street, people didn't keep their feelings toward insurers in check; rather, they seized on it as a moment to vent their rage. Everyone from right-wing influencers to tenured Ivy League professors responded to Thompson's killing by posting about what they saw as the injustices of America's health insurers. Even on LinkedIn, one of the internet's last bastions of civility and professionalism, hundreds of business executives, HR leaders, and tech managers shared deeply personal stories about how they and their loved ones had suffered at the hands of a healthcare bureaucracy that often delays and denies reasonable claims.

In one exchange, a hospital executive acknowledged that many Americans are fed up with health insurers. "As healthcare security professionals, we know that many see healthcare as a target for their anger," he wrote. "Family members who have lost a loved one may feel as though a physician, healthcare facility, or insurer is responsible for that loss."

Jill Christensen, a former vice president at Western Union, responded to the post by forcefully rejecting its wording. "In many instances, it's not feel, it's ARE responsible for that loss," she wrote. "I was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and UHC denied every claim. While today's event is tragic, it does not come as a surprise to the millions of people — like myself — who pay their OOP costs and premiums, only to be turned away at their greatest time of need."

The joking language of the internet has become a standard way for Americans to process tragic events, whether the September 11, 2001, attacks or the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump. But Thompson's murder sparked something different: an unparalleled public reckoning with one of the country's largest and most profitable industries. "When you shoot one man in the street it's murder," wrote one user on X. "When you kill thousands of people in hospitals by taking away their ability to get treatment you're an entrepreneur."

To some observers, the outpouring of ire also appeared to have an immediate effect on the industry itself. One day after Thompson's murder, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announced that it was rescinding a controversial plan to limit coverage for anesthesia. "When patients become financially responsible because a health plan cuts how much they pay providers, that's what breeds all this anger," Marianne Udow-Phillips, a former Blue Cross executive, told Axios. An Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield spokesperson told Business Insider, "It never was and never will be the policy of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to not pay for medically necessary anesthesia services. The proposed update to the policy was only designed to clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines."

The storm of invective surrounding Thompson's killing will soon subside, as online malice always does. But it's also possible that the CEO's death will mark an inflection point in the debate over America's privatized system of health insurance. On X, one user drew a direct line between the callousness of the internet's response to Thompon's murder and an industry that makes it hard for many Americans to receive the medical treatment they need.

"All jokes aside," the user tweeted, "it's really fucked up to see so many people on here celebrating murder. No one here is the judge of who deserves to live or die. That's the job of the AI algorithm the insurance company designed to maximise profits on your health."

Scott Nover is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. He is a contributing writer at Slate and was previously a staff writer at Quartz and Adweek covering media and technology.

The first Yeti coolers arrived in America in the spring of 2008. They had spent weeks at sea, traveling from a factory in the Philippines to a leased warehouse in the hills south of Austin, Texas. Molded from a single piece of plastic, the coolers were porcelain white, with two black latches that gave them the rugged, field-ready look of an old Willys Jeep.

The 65-quart model of the cooler, the Yeti Tundra, was three times sturdier than lesser brands, and retailed for around $300. If you put a block of ice in one on a Monday, the payload would still be cold that Friday. Stout enough to withstand the prying jaws of a grizzly bear, the Tundra also looked right at home in your backyard on game day, a couple dozen Lone Star beers up to their necks in slush. It was perhaps the greatest ice box in the history of humankind.

Demand for the Tundra quickly exceeded expectations. Before long, a shipping container's worth of the coolers was arriving from the Philippines every week.

Two years had passed since Roy and Ryan Seiders (pronounced SEE-ders) launched Yeti out of their father's backyard, just a few miles down the road from the warehouse. Roy, 31 and fresh out of business school, was the company's pioneer with a passion for product development. Ryan, three years older, was the outdoorsman of the family. Scruffy and charming, he made the rounds at hunting and fishing shows, and lent Yeti its backwoods authenticity.

But the Seiders brothers didn't create the Tundra alone. They borrowed design tricks and styling from the best coolers on the market. And they brought it all together with the help of a collaborator who seldom makes an appearance in the company's legend — Ivan Royal Brown, a gifted Australian designer who produced the Yetis at his Outback Five Star factory in the Philippines. During those early months of 2008, Roy and Ivan spoke daily, working out the kinks in the new cooler and fine-tuning its manufacture on the fly.

One day that September, Roy emailed Ivan a question. When he didn't receive an immediate response, he grew concerned. "It wasn't like him," Roy recalls. He eventually managed to get in touch with Ivan's new wife, Gloria, who broke the shocking news: Ivan had been murdered, she said, shot four times while driving home from the factory.

Roy put down the phone and felt sick to his stomach. Not only had he lost his friend and mentor, but the future of his new company was now in jeopardy. "We didn't have a whole lot of confidence that we could move forward without him," he recalls.

As the brothers grappled with the fallout from the tragedy, things grew even more dire. Ivan had died without a will, and it wasn't clear who was in charge at the factory, putting the entire production line in jeopardy. Six months after Yeti's launch, it looked as though the cooler would vanish from store shelves just as suddenly as it had arrived.

Today, Yeti is worth $3.5 billion. This is the untold chapter of one of the great success stories in American business, and how it was very nearly stopped in its tracks.

Cold things don't stay cold for long in the Texas Hill Country. Summer here begins in April, when porch thermometers hit the 90s. For the next six months, you could fry a tortilla on your dashboard and dip it in the hot queso in your cup holder. If you're out working in that heat, all you can think about is your next ice-cold drink.

At the Seiders' home in Driftwood, 20 miles southwest of Austin, Roger — the family's 79-year-old patriarch — keeps a refrigerator out back stocked with cold drinks for the UPS drivers when they stop by with a delivery. "They can have anything they want, except for beer," Roger tells me one afternoon as we rock in a swinging chair, watching a parched driver make his way to the fridge. That's Texas hospitality for you. It's something Roger always tried to instill in his four kids, including Ryan and Roy.

The brothers were Texans before the state of Texas existed. Eight generations later, their name still means something to old-timers. "When they decide to build something, it's top shelf, the best you can get," says Jay McBride, who runs the fishing department at McBride's Guns, an Austin institution since 1960.

Back in 1977, when Roger was working as a high school shop instructor, his search for a flexible epoxy finish that wouldn't crack on his fishing rods led him to start his own business. Today, Flex Coat sells up to $1 million of product each year. "I never dreamed it would be so big," he says.

Just like their old man, Ryan and Roy loved to brainstorm ways to improve the products they depended upon. After Ryan graduated from Texas A&M in 1996 with a degree in wildlife management, he started a specialty fishing rod company, Waterloo Rods, in Roger's backyard shop. The 10-foot Launcher could fling a line over 100 yards, while the Scrape Rod was tough enough for fishing in thick grass. Fishing celebrities like Flip Pallot, host of "The Walker's Cay Chronicles" on ESPN, would phone Ryan up for gear advice and invite him out turkey hunting.

After Roy completed his degree in management information systems at Texas Tech, he, too, returned to the Austin area determined to follow in his father's footsteps. "I had this passion for wanting to do something on my own like my dad," he tells me. "I knew I wanted to start my own business." He loved being out on his boat, and he became preoccupied with designing a cooler that could double as a casting platform — one durable enough to withstand his adrenaline-charged style of fishing.

The best coolers on the market came from Australia, where packing up the Land Rover and "going bush" was a national pastime. While American coolers were typically manufactured by injecting melted plastic into a static mold, high-end Australian coolers — "eskies" in Aussi slang — deployed a technique called rotational molding, which produced stronger coolers with more complex designs and fewer material flaws.

The closest approximation to an eskie you could find in American stores was the Icey-Tek. Roy tracked down the man who was importing them from Thailand and suggested they team up. But he wound up being more impressed with the cooler than with his new business partner. So he decided to partner with Ryan and strike his own import deal with the producers of Icey-Tek. Ryan invested $130,000, and the brothers shared an email address and a single desk. To brand their cooler, they looked for a name that would evoke a harsh terrain — and that would look good on a hat or a T-shirt.

Yeti, they would call it — as in the Himalayan ice monster. "We may not have found the Yeti," they wrote on their website, "but we make a really great ice-chest."

And it was a great ice chest. But it was a far cry from perfect. The original Yeti, which the brothers called the Roughneck, was boxy and utilitarian. The sharp corners were no fun to bang a knee on. Some of the coolers had a puzzling red stain on the bottom.

That's when Ivan Brown entered the picture.

In 2006, the Seiders brothers traveled to Thailand to see the production of their coolers up close. The disappointing results suddenly made sense. Production was sloppy and haphazard. Workers at the factory were plopping fresh coolers onto the red dirt floor, which explained the stains.

As the brothers tried to figure out how to fix the problem, the name they kept coming back to was Ivan, an Aussie designer whose work was a cut above everyone else they knew. From his factory in the Philippines, he could manufacture a cooler or a kayak or a truck camper shell at a fraction of what it would cost in America. So Roy and Ryan set up a meeting and hopped on a flight from Bangkok to Manilla. Within hours they were in a car with Ivan, driving south toward his factory in Angeles City.

After the factory tour in Thailand, Ivan's production line was a welcome sight. Cement floors meant no more red stains. Like the Roughneck, Ivan's Downunder coolers were constructed from a single piece of plastic, for strength. But they also had rounded-off corners and other thoughtful features, such as rubber feet to prevent them from sliding on a boat deck and a removable basket to keep food from getting wet.

What's more, Roy and Ryan recognized a kindred spirit. Ivan was the kind of guy who enjoyed being outdoors, and he wanted to make stuff that worked, stuff you could pass on to your kids. And, like Yeti, his was a family business.

Ivan had been in his 50s when he decamped for the Philippines, seeking a new start. Back in Australia, he had launched a business manufacturing auto accessories, including fiberglass tops for trucks. "He was a risk-taker," recalls his first wife, Suzanne Handley. His self-confidence only grew when he obtained a patent for a flip-up sunroof he had created, which would go on to receive a prestigious Australian design award.

The problem was, Ivan had a habit of living beyond his means. He had a thing for flashy watches and nice restaurants. "The more you earn, the more you need," he liked to tell his eldest daughter, Clare. He ran up so many debts that tax collectors and creditors spent years pursuing him in Queensland courts. "He was a terrific designer, but hopeless in business," says Malcolm, Ivan's younger brother.

Like Roy and Ryan, Ivan and Malcolm were tight. Malcolm, who made a small fortune in trucking, supported Ivan through the lean times. The two brothers bought homes facing each other at a marina on the outskirts of Brisbane. "I could look into his kitchen," Malcolm says.

Amid his financial troubles, Ivan's marriage to Suzanne disintegrated, and the separation left a wedge between him and his daughters. The Philippines, which had a thriving Australian expat community and generous tax benefits for foreign entrepreneurs, offered a chance to start over.

But it was also a dangerous place to do business. The murder rate was four times greater than in Australia, and it was said that a killer could be hired for as little as $500. Filipino police and prosecutors tended to favor the well-connected, and many expats opted to live in gated communities under 24-hour security.

Ivan convinced Malcolm to join him. Divorced and bored with life in Queensland, Malcolm jumped at the chance for an adventure — and, perhaps, to make another fortune. In 1999, the brothers signed the papers establishing Outback Five Star. The company's articles of incorporation listed Ivan as president and Malcolm as vice president. Each received an equal share in the venture, splitting 99.2% of the stock.

Malcolm signed the lease on Outback's factory, a long metal building with a peaked roof. It was located at the Clark Freeport, a former US military base in Angeles City that had been transformed into a tax-free zone.

But the company struggled to survive. From 2004 to 2006, according to financial records, it lost nearly $150,000. "Every dollar Ivan earned, he spent two," Malcolm recalls. "It got so tight that we were making cello cases to survive." Since Ivan was essentially bankrupt, Malcolm had to tap his personal funds to cover payroll and buy equipment.

By the time the two brothers from Texas showed up on Outback's factory floor, the two brothers from Australia were barely scraping by.

On that initial visit, the straight-laced Seiders brothers weren't exactly taken with Angeles City. As much as Roy enjoyed Ivan's company, he was grateful Ryan was with him. "I was not about to go to the Philippines by myself," he recalls. Angeles City was the Wild East, the vice capital of the Philippines, a dizzying wonderland where you always had to be looking over your shoulder.

Malcolm could see how uncomfortable Roy and Ryan were one humid evening when Ivan took them out to the Tom Cat, a seedy nightclub Malcolm owned on a neon-lit street known as "Blow Row." Like many expat hangouts, the Tom Cat swarmed with bikini-clad girls and white-haired men. Foreigners looking for sex would pay $20 to escort girls to a more intimate setting, where further transactions might ensue.

Malcolm isn't shy about admitting that profits from the sex trade helped keep Outback afloat. He insists that the girls at his bars were of age and there of their own free will, but stories of sex trafficking are common in the Philippines. "Everybody portrays it as a sleazy business," Malcolm says. "But I looked at it as the matchmaking business."

According to Malcolm and other family members, it was under such circumstances that Ivan met his future wife, Gloria. In October 1998, Malcolm was celebrating his 48th birthday at the Firehouse, a bar in Manila's red-light district. Gloria, then a single mother, was there that night. Ivan bought Gloria a drink and, by Malcolm's telling, took her to Swagman's, an Australian-themed hotel nearby, where they spent the night.

To those who witnessed their courtship, there was no doubt that Ivan was enamored of Gloria. "She was the only girl I ever saw him with," says Bryan Hammer, an American businessman who assisted Ivan and Malcolm in establishing Outback. But Hammer wondered if the feeling was mutual. "She was mean to him, even in public."

As Ivan and Gloria's relationship developed, she became increasingly entwined in his business. Under Philippine law, the role of corporate secretary at a foreign company must be filled by a Filipino. By the time Roy and Ryan Seiders showed up, Gloria had taken on that role at Outback, giving her the power to review and sign off on the company's financial records. Her influence expanded further when Ivan decided to buy a home. Since foreigners couldn't buy property, it would need to be in Gloria's name. So Ivan asked Malcolm to temporarily transfer his half of the company to Gloria, effectively padding her assets so she could qualify for a mortgage.

The details of what happened next are murky. Over the next six months, a confusing game of musical chairs ensued. In addition to Gloria's recently acquired shares, three members of her family — her daughter, her future son-in-law, and her half-sister — were awarded positions as dummy shareholders in the company. In the process, Gloria went from owning less than 1% of Outback's stock to controlling a majority of the company.

In 2008, in the midst of all the stock reshuffling, Ivan and Gloria surprised their friends when an ordinary party was revealed to be their nuptials. After nine years together, they were at last husband and wife.

But a few weeks after the wedding, Outback's fortunes took another turn. Ivan evidently hadn't known about the stock transfers until his accountant brought them to his attention — and he wasn't happy about it. On May 2, 2008, he wrote the Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission: "This is to inform you that GLORIA F. BROWN has resigned as Corporate Secretary." Malcolm reclaimed his shares in the company and his title as vice president. The remaining dummy shares were transferred to three members of Malcolm's extended family. Gloria was left with nothing in her own name, apart from her joint assets through marriage.

In late 2007, a few months before Ivan and Gloria's wedding, the Seiders brothers had returned to Angeles City, where they spent 10 days at Outback's headquarters. As monsoon rains pounded on the factory roof, Ivan and Roy hustled back and forth between the office and the production floor where the workers would fabricate prototypes out of Bondo putty and fiberglass. "These guys are artists," Roy says. "It was a ton of fun."

Ivan showed them how he had improved the design of his Downunder cooler. He had bulked up the foam insulation, given it a leak-proof drain plug, integrated the hinge to make it more robust, and added a freezer-style gasket for a better seal. Roy and Ryan incorporated those same ideas into the Tundra. They also borrowed the contours from Ivan's line of fiberglass coolers and extended the hinge to stretch the full length of the back of the cooler. "For whatever reason, I just liked that look," Roy says.

Some of the old Icey-Tek features, including the rope handles and tie-down slots on the base of the cooler, also made it into the new design. "That was a big deal," Roy says. "Being able to strap your cooler down and still open and close the lid." All the tinkering reminded him of the projects he had worked on in his father's workshop, but on a much larger scale. "After four years being in the cooler business, I had all these ideas built up in my head about what makes a perfect cooler," Roy recalls. "I saw this opportunity to build a cooler from the ground up."

The collaboration also worked out well for Ivan. By the time the Tundras started popping out of their molds in April 2008, he was on the path to financial success. Outback, which employed some 150 workers, soon hit $1.5 million in sales, with another half million in assets. "He was turning a corner and starting to make money," Malcolm says.

On the afternoon of September 23, 2008, Ivan left work and climbed into his forest green Toyota Land Cruiser. The sky was hazy and rain droplets flecked against the windshield as Ivan crossed the two-lane Friendship Bridge and neared his turn-off to his home. Suddenly, a Honda motorbike zipped up along his left side, as if to pass. There were two men on the bike, their faces hidden by helmets.

The rider in back raised a 45-caliber handgun and fired at least four shots through the window of Ivan's Land Cruiser. The car veered off the road and rear-ended another motorcycle, sending its driver tumbling onto the ground, before slamming into the wall of the Serra Monte Lodge, an establishment that rents rooms by the hour. Ivan slumped in his seat. Blood pooled in his mouth and soaked into the fabric of his plaid shirt.

Malcolm, who lived in the same gated community as Ivan and Gloria, was at home when a friend called to say that a green Land Cruiser had been in an accident on the main road. Malcolm rushed over to his brother's house, but no one answered the door. He was getting ready to drive to the scene of the accident when Gloria appeared. Ivan had already been taken to the mortuary, she told him. Together, they drove off to see Ivan's body.

The next morning, Malcolm got to the factory at around seven. As vice president, he felt he had to assume the reins at Outback. He told the employees to go home until Ivan's affairs were sorted, and left.

But within the hour, Gloria arrived and announced that she was in charge. She countermanded Malcolm's decision: The factory, she said, would stay open. "I asked Gloria what gave her the right to say this," Malcolm said in a statement prepared for legal filings. Gloria responded that she was now the president and major shareholder.

That afternoon, after meeting with his lawyer, Malcolm returned to the factory with his son and placed a padlock on the factory's gate. But the next time they came back, the lock had been cut. An armed guard pointed a gun at Malcolm and his son and ordered them to leave.

As Gloria and Malcolm battled for control of the company, production ground to a halt. Outback's accounts were frozen, and employees could not be paid.

Gloria appealed to the bank to grant her full access to the company's funds. "My husband, Ivan Brown, had long speculated on his fate (he was brutally murdered by still unknown assailants)," she wrote. "He indeed made sure that the corporation's papers are in order and that I can easily take charge of its operations. Unfortunately, greed and opportunity prevailed over the mind of Mr. Malcolm Brown and his cohorts." (Gloria and Outback did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Eight thousand miles away in Texas, the Seiders brothers had begun a frantic search for alternative suppliers, hopping on planes and visiting other factories. Their business had just gotten off the ground, and suddenly its entire future was at risk. But given their relationship with Ivan, they were still hoping they could stick with Outback.

"If the factory cannot supply soon, Yeti will lose US market share and it will be almost impossible to recover," they emailed Malcolm. "If this fight continues it will inevitably get tied up in Philippine courts for many more weeks if not months and therefore everybody loses. Could you help us by temporarily allowing the factory to resume production while resolving ownership?"

Malcolm was incensed. "Ivan was murdered for greed," he replied. "I will continue to fight for what he would have wanted me to do… You guys are more than welcome to find alternative suppliers for your market if you wish to do so."

"We too have a strong feeling for finding justice for Ivan," the brothers wrote back. "But also, continuing the successful manufacturing business that he has started."

From the start, police considered Ivan's killing a textbook murder-for-hire. But without a murder weapon or any forensic evidence, they had little to go on. The most promising lead came after Malcolm offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

A cigarette vendor came forward, claiming to have seen the trigger man before he put his helmet on. According to police, when the vendor was shown a book of criminals known as the "Rogue's Gallery," he picked out a Maoist guerrilla named Alvin Salas, suspected to be a member of a "gun-for-hire" gang. That October, the Northern Philippine Times reported that police had filed murder charges against Salas — and Gloria.

"We have circumstantial evidence against somebody whom we suspect to be the mastermind," announced Pierre Bucsit, the local police chief. "The capture of the suspected gunman will complete our investigation toward arresting the author of the crime."

But the case quickly fell apart. When a police investigator named Romeo Amarillo had first showed up at the factory, he found Gloria to be defensive and uncooperative. But any link to her was purely circumstantial. Prosecutors ultimately dismissed the charges against Gloria due to insufficient evidence. Until the police found Salas, whose connection to the crime was limited to the single eyewitness, they had nothing else to go on. That hope vanished in October 2014, when Salas was killed in a police shootout.

Whoever murdered Ivan, it's clear who benefited the most from his death. Ivan didn't have a will, which under Philippine law meant his estate would likely be shared by Gloria and his two daughters from his first marriage. In a court filing, Gloria wrote that Ivan's shares were being "settled among his heirs." But Ivan's daughter Clare told me that neither she nor her sister received anything from their father's estate. "I got nothing," she says.

Gloria also moved quickly to take control of Ivan's company. A week after he was killed, she submitted a document to the securities commission claiming that an unscheduled meeting of Outback's officers and shareholders had taken place in mid-August, a little over a month before Ivan's murder. Malcolm, who was still listed as a board member, was not notified of the meeting. According to the document, Ivan had given himself control of 80.8% of Outback's stock, and Gloria now owned 18%. That left Malcolm with just 2,000 shares — a fraction of a percent of the company. The new board, composed largely of Gloria's relatives, unanimously named her as president, and her daughter as vice president.

Malcolm filed a complaint against Gloria with the prosecutor's office, claiming she had forged the document. Nathaniel Colobong, Ivan's longtime accountant, is listed in the papers as the company's external auditor. But he tells me that he was unaware of Ivan making any of the stock transfers Gloria claims he made. In fact, he told investigators that Gloria had "started to get angry with her husband" after she had been stripped of her shares earlier that year. But Colobong was unwilling to testify. "I was also afraid for my life," he says.

Regulators accepted Gloria's version of events, and the lead prosecutor in the forgery case ultimately declined to bring the charges against her. The relevant documents, he tells me, were destroyed during a typhoon. According to Outback's subsequent filings, Gloria now controls 99.6% of the company's stock.

For the first year after Ivan's death, Malcolm remained in the Philippines, protected around the clock by armed guards. Eventually he gave up the fight and returned to Australia. His biggest mistake, he tells me, was putting his faith in the Philippine justice system. "You and I come from countries where you get justice," he says. "If I had to do it over again, I would have had her shot. I'd do the same thing to her that she did to my brother."

After Ivan's murder, some of Outback's clients sided with Malcolm and refused to do business with the company. "We decided not to place any further orders due to the rumors and uncertainty of dealing with Gloria," recalls Terry Tate, a former buyer for Ray's Outdoors, who had visited both Ivan and Gloria in the Philippines.

But the Seiders brothers continued to contract with Outback. Whatever they felt about Ivan's murder, they were focused on doing what it took to keep their company alive. To get the Outback's employees back to work, the brothers even prepaid Gloria for their orders. Soon, brand new Yeti Tundras were once again being unloaded in Texas. "Never for a second did we think Gloria was involved in Ivan's death," Roy tells me.

Other business decisions they made may have been born of crisis, but proved equally shrewd. To make the most of their dwindling inventory, Roy and Ryan bumped up the price on their coolers. Remarkably, none of their buyers balked. Roy came up with a pricing strategy he called "10x" — as in, charging 10 times what their competitors were asking. Like Balenciaga sneakers and Sub-Zero fridges, the eye-popping prices of Yeti's products wound up making them more — not less — desirable.

The brothers also found a US-based supplier to ensure that their supply chain could never be held hostage again. "As tragic as Ivan's death was, all of a sudden we are a much stronger company," Roy explained on a hunting podcast.

The success of the Tundra, along with Yeti's viral marketing, helped turn the company into a kind of redneck Patagonia. Yeti Coolers went public in October 2018, and Roy and Ryan earned hundreds of millions of dollars after selling most of their shares.

Yeti's success has been good for Outback. The year that Ivan was murdered, according to the company's financial statement, it had $1.9 million in sales. Ten years later, thanks in large part to Yeti, its sales were $9 million.

At Yeti's headquarters, a conference room is named for Ivan Brown, to honor his contribution to the company. Every few years, Gloria or her representatives from Outback travel to Texas to meet with Yeti's management. But, in the past, when Gloria has invited the Seiderses to return to the Philippines for a visit, they've politely declined. "They make their employees go," their father Roger tells me. "But they don't go."

Brendan Borrell is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.

As Donald Trump returns to the White House promising to obliterate business as usual in Washington, the city's lobbyists are preparing for a seismic shift in how — and where — they do business.

"Florida is becoming the power nexus for the country," Bill Helmich, a lobbyist and close Trump ally, tells Business Insider. "It's where decisions will get made."

It's a sentiment echoed by Evan Power, a lobbyist who's serving as chair of the Florida GOP. "Florida is now the epicenter of Trumplandia," Power says.

A dozen leading lobbyists, some of whom spoke with BI on the condition of anonymity, say that having a significant presence in Florida is now an essential part of doing business in Washington. First and foremost, that means hiring lobbyists in the state to work the hallways and links at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump and his inner circle have been charting the transition and making Cabinet picks. A presence at the resort — along with the golf courses Trump owns in West Palm Beach, Doral, and Jupiter — is now seen as a major currency in the lobbying game.

Never before, lobbyists say, has the geographic center of power shifted so dramatically with the arrival of a new administration. In many respects, they say, Palm Beach is going to be the new K Street — the headquarters of the political-influence industry — particularly since Trump no longer owns a luxury hotel blocks from the White House.

What's more, the consensus among lobbyists is that anyone who hopes to influence Trump this time around will have to dispense with traditional lobbying conventions. "We can't do this the same old way," says one prominent lobbyist with ties to Trump. "Trump is such a wild card, and that gives him a lot of leverage. Cookie-cutter lobbying efforts probably won't work like they used to."

For Washington lobbyists, that means changing the way they talk about the world to appeal to the hardcore MAGA loyalists who have succeeded at commanding Trump's attention and dominating his inner circle. "This is not Trump 2.0," says Justin Sayfie, a partner at Ballard Partners, a powerhouse lobbying firm with deep Florida roots and an office down the road from Mar-a-Lago. "It's more like Trump 5.0. This is the most anti-Washington president we've elected since maybe Andrew Jackson."

When it comes to lobbying, the big winner of Trump's first term was Ballard Partners. The firm's success offers some lessons for lobbying firms itching to capitalize on their ties to Trump and his inner circle and establish a beachhead in Florida.

Before Trump's unexpected victory in 2016, Ballard Partners had no presence in Washington to speak of. But its founder, Brian Ballard, had been part of Trump's inner sanctum — first as a top fundraiser in Florida, then as part of the president-elect's transition team. By leveraging his access to Trump, Ballard Partners was able to compete with the old white-shoe lobbying firms that have been the industry's dominant players for decades.

In 2017, the first year of Trump's term, Ballard added dozens of major clients, including Google, Amazon, Uber, American Airlines, Honda, the tobacco giant Reynolds American, the private-prison firm Geo Group, and the American Health Care Association. By 2020, Ballard ranked as the nation's seventh-largest federal lobbying firm in terms of income — an astounding feat for an office that was only 3 years old. Ballard's lobbying business in Florida, meanwhile, regularly ranks among the state's top-earning firms, making it ideally positioned to once again be the go-to lobbying shop for corporations and special interests eager to cozy up to Trump and his MAGA allies in Congress.

Corporate clients need lobbyists who appreciate that Trump is "disrupting the status quo in Washington," Sayfie, the Ballard lobbyist, says. "This creates a sense of both possibility — and great worry and anxiety to navigate."

Any presidential transition poses significant challenges for corporations. Business thrives on stability; it's hard to make plans in the middle of all the uncertainty that comes from shifting political philosophies, legislative goals, and regulatory ambitions. But lobbying insiders say Trump's presidential transition has brought a new level of unpredictability — one that also represents a golden opportunity, for those able to capitalize on it.

"Trump has a mandate from the American people and is using it," says B. Jeffrey Brooks, a partner at Adams and Reese, a law firm with more than 300 attorneys and lobbyists across the country. "It hasn't been this exciting on Capitol Hill since 1994, when Republicans had their Contract with America."

Through his appointments and his campaign promises, lobbyists say, Trump has clearly signaled his desire to remake Washington in Florida's regulation-slashing, "woke"-fighting image — and do so from the comforts of his "Winter White House," now a political redoubt for all seasons. Already, many of the top slots in Trump's administration are going to Floridians who have stuck by him through his many legal and political troubles. Among them are two former Ballard lobbyists: Susie Wiles, whom Trump has tapped to serve as his White House chief of staff, and Pam Bondi, his choice for attorney general.

"Trump's team has distinct, new views that are not old Washington," says Colin Roskey, a principal at the FHP Strategies lobbying firm who served as a deputy assistant secretary of health and human services during the first Trump administration.

Some major companies, lobbyists say, have been caught off guard by the rapid pace of Trump's transition moves. "They're freaking out a little bit," says Dave Wenhold, a partner at Miller/Wenhold Capitol Strategies, which provides clients with lobbying and strategic planning. "Things are going to be coming at them fast and furiously, more than before, and this is where the lobbying community can really show its value."

There's also a new way corporations can seek to influence Trump —without disclosing their influence. Unlike his predecessors, Trump is allowing donors — including foreign nationals — to finance his transition in secret, through unlimited private contributions. Those who bankroll his staff and travel before he takes office, lobbyists say, stand to build connections and curry favor with the once and future commander in chief. "People appreciate people who invested in them," says Power, the chair of the Florida GOP.

Taken together, Trump's singular take-no-prisoners style has lobbyists excited about the possibilities for influence. Scott Mason, a senior policy advisor at the lobbying firm of Holland & Knight who served as the director of congressional relations for Trump's presidential campaign and transition team in 2016, is blunt about the prospects of Trump 2.0: "It'll be a great year for the lobbying world," he says.

Having a good lobbyist, in fact, may be more important than ever. Whatever companies think of Trump and his policies, they now face the prospect of a president who speaks openly about pursuing retribution for what he perceives as slights. On the campaign trail, Trump threatened John Deere with tariffs, called for the prosecution of Google, and tanked Meta's stock price by denouncing Facebook as "an enemy of the people." In an environment of fear and uncertainty, lobbyists expect their business to boom — likely surpassing the record $4.2 billion clients spent last year on federal lobbying.

"You have to recognize how Washington affects your business," Mason says. "If you're not at the table, you're on the menu."

Dave Levinthal is an investigative journalist based in Washington D.C. He was a reporter and editor at Business Insider until 2022.

Three years ago, when Mark Goff and Phillip Engel had their first viewing of Château Avensac in the south of France, only one thing prevented the California couple from putting in an offer: Was it old enough?

The gate tower, supporting walls, and stone bridge at the estate's entrance date back to the original medieval castle built in 1320. But the main building — a 48-room château with sweeping views of the Gers, the rural, foie-gras-producing region of southwest France — was rebuilt in the 1820s. "The idea of the royals and the nobles, to us, is a very romantic idea," Goff says. "That's why we love 'Bridgerton.'"

In the end, they decided there was "just enough 14th-century château stuff going on" to fulfill their fantasies and make it their new home. The place was certainly big enough to host weddings and artist retreats, a business the couple was counting on to help pay for the extensive renovations that would be required. By the fall of 2021, Château Avensac was theirs for $1.2 million.

That's when reality set in.

The château had exposed electrical wiring, "nonexistent" plumbing, and stone walls that retained moisture. Everywhere they looked, there was something in need of work. So far, they've spent $500,000 updating the château's electricity, heat, and plumbing, fortifying the foundations, and replacing the roof. They've budgeted for $500,000 more. "Everyone said, 'You have to assume everything is going to be double what you expect.' And they were kind of right," Engel says. "We didn't really listen to that part."

All across France, there's a glut of châteaus for sale. While the average asking price is $2 million, smaller châteaus can go for a couple hundred thousand. A few, like the palatial mansion nicknamed the "Little Versailles of the Pyrenees," are even being given away. But there's a reason they're on the market: The properties are huge money pits.

Real estate agents say buyers should expect to set aside as much as 1.5% of the purchase price for annual maintenance, and significantly more if the château requires extensive renovations. And if the place is classified as a historic monument, as some 15,000 are, add to the process a small mountain of French bureaucracy. Plans require approval by the French minister of culture, and work must be done by designated specialists. In all of France, there are just 31 architects accredited to run these projects. What's more, the places tend to be woefully outdated and incredibly isolated.

"It's true, you can buy a château in France for nothing," says Adrian Leeds, an American real estate agent who's been in France for 30 years. "There's a reason for that: because nobody wants them!"

That is, the French don't want them. Americans very much do. "There was a razzia" — a plundering raid — "right after the pandemic," says Gonzague Le Nail, a French real-estate agent who specializes in châteaus. Most of the interest used to come from foreign buyers in the market for a second home, but now, Le Nail says, it's from families looking to relocate to the French countryside and use the château as their primary residence. Half the châteaus around Paris are foreign-owned, and inquiries from Americans are up across France.

The day they signed the deed of sale, Goff and Engel invited over all 74 residents of the town of Avensac and served them Champagne, impressing their new neighbors with the decidedly un-aristocratic sensibility they brought to their aristocratic new digs. A few months later, they hosted a "spooky Halloween" party. "They're very open, very nice, and very low-key," says Mayor Michel Tarrible, who's been a recipient of the couple's homemade cookies.

This was not Goff and Engel's first time taking on an extreme fixer-upper. In 2009, they bought a place in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, that took a decade to renovate. They did much of the work themselves, much of it at night and on weekends. Goff documented the process on his blog. (Goff is a graphic designer, while Engel works in tech.) They ultimately sold the house for twice what they had put in.

Around 2020, Goff happened upon a #chateaulife vlog on YouTube, where a family was documenting the highs and lows of buying and renovating a château. He couldn't believe how cheap the properties were going for, and he pitched Engel on the idea of moving abroad.

"In California you can flip houses and make a lot of money," Goff says. "I knew going into this that it's not going to be like that. You do it because you want to live this kind of rustic, ruined lifestyle in the south of France."

Another chatelain, Abigail Carter, describes a similar trajectory: She had some experience transforming old, dilapidated homes when, as she puts it, she became "obsessed" with buying a château in France.

Originally from Canada, Carter and her husband lived in a succession of fixer-uppers in London, Massachusetts, and New Jersey as they moved around for work and grew their family. After her husband died in the September 11, 2001, attacks — he was visiting a trade show at the World Trade Center that day — Carter relocated to Seattle with their two kids. By 2021 she was living in a converted firehouse she'd renovated and wondering what was next for her.

She found her answer bingeing #chateaulife vlogs on YouTube. "For less than half of what you would pay here for a house, you can get an entire château," she recalls thinking. "I decided not buying a château in France was going to be more detrimental to my health than buying one."

Carter made two visits to France before finding a property she felt she could handle on her own. Château de Borie, a 12-bedroom château near Agen, had been vacant for four years. "It was almost like 'The Grinch Who Stole Christmas' with all the wires hanging," Carter recalls. But the place had good bones. Carter closed on the place in 2022, paying $610,000 and budgeting another $200,000 for furnishings and renovations.

Panic kicked in almost immediately. "My God," she remembers thinking. "What am I doing? Why am I doing this?"

Last year, an enormous cliff above Carter's property split open and rained rubble down on her property. It will likely take tens of thousands of euros to remove the debris and secure what remains of the cliff. "The cliff has been there for 300 years and it's been fine," she says. "Of course, I've owned it for a year and a half and this thing comes down on me."

But the experience has also been thrilling. "I'm bringing this house up in terms of its elegance again," she says. "French style doesn't change. It's very understated and very elegant."

Recently, a young family from Paris inherited a nearby château and began coming down for weekends. Carter says it's slowly dawning on them what it will cost to maintain it.

"They love it, but it's crumbling — literally crumbling," Carter says.

For many French sellers, what strikes Americans as romantic has come to feel like a curse. Château de l'Espinay, a 15-room manor in Brittany, has been in the family of Williams Henrys d'Aubigny for 250 years. His father, on his deathbed, made him promise never to sell. But at 79, he's overwhelmed by the time and money the property requires. He has no children of his own, and none of his younger relatives have any interest in moving to northwestern France to take over the place.

Henrys d'Aubigny, like many French owners who feel weighed down by history, is desperate to sell. But he's also prone to overvaluing what that history is worth. It's been five years since he listed the château for $2.7 million, and he still doesn't have a buyer. He estimates it needs $100,000 worth of renovations, though his real-estate agent says it's more like $1 million. There's mold, and only one functioning bathroom. The place is so expensive to heat that Henrys d'Aubigny sleeps in a guest cottage during the winter.

"He's very, very attached to his château," his agent says. "It's all he talks about. He thinks you can't put a price on culture."

For years, Henrys d'Aubigny has been holding out for a buyer who will love the place as much as he does. But then a couple from Ohio bought a château up the road; he came to admire their commitment and tasteful renovation. He now says his preferred buyer is "an American who's got a lot of money."

Most of the Americans who take on a château aren't looking for a European life of leisure. Their goal is to start a business. Carter, who just hosted her first retreat at Château de Borie, eventually hopes to generate $60,000 a year by marketing the romance of rural France to Americans and Canadians. She plans to host creative retreats for painters and writers, and "healing" retreats for widows. On her website, she sells château-themed T-shirts and art prints, and she has amassed 48,000 subscribers on her Chateau Chronicles channel on YouTube. In a recent video, she toured the grounds of her château and wondered aloud how this was all "somehow mine."

At Château Avensac, things have turned out to be even more difficult than Goff and Engel bargained for. Two years ago, Goff woke up from spinal surgery paralyzed from the chest down. The condition is temporary, but regaining the use of his legs has been a slow and difficult process, requiring five or six days a week of physical therapy. A wheelchair isn't the best way to move around a 48-room château, but Goff is making do.

Goff and Engel say they're on track to soft-launch their events business in 2025. They've also started selling château swag on their website, and they've set up a Patreon account so their fans can support the work they're doing to reclaim a part of France's history and culture.

"I live in a château," Engel reminds himself when he's feeling overwhelmed. "Yes, it's a crumbling château. But it's still a château. And there's something very romantic about that."

When "Sex and the City" debuted in 1998, the series captured public fascination for more reasons than what its title might imply. It wasn't just that the show's central foursome were women having lots of sex; they were women over 30 having lots of sex, and they were single. A "mid-30ish crowd of bed-hopping, hedonistic female night crawlers," a Los Angeles Times critic pointedly wrote. Their singlehood painted a picture of a titillating, and even threatening, new woman.

Through the '90s and '00s, American women "pioneered an entirely new kind of adulthood, one that was not kicked off by marriage, but by years and, in many cases, whole lives, lived on their own outside matrimony," the journalist Rebecca Traister wrote in her 2016 book, "All the Single Ladies." Now, unmarried women are no longer part of an edgy cultural vanguard — they're the official status quo. As of 2021, a record 52% of American women were either unmarried or separated, according to a report by Wells Fargo Economics. Single women also have single men outnumbered: A Census Bureau analysis of 2019 data found that for every 90 unmarried men in the US, there were 100 unmarried women.

While some women feel cornered into being single, citing a lackluster dating pool or the demoralizing experience of trawling apps, a growing share, call them Samantha Nation, are happy being on their own. In a 2019 survey from the Pew Research Center, only 38% of single women reported looking for dates or a relationship, compared with 61% of single men.

The rise of happily unmarried women has steadily shifted standards for what American adulthood looks like. But it hasn't come without a fuss from people who hold to a specific vision of the family. When JD Vance, now the vice president-elect, drew ire this summer over a years-old remark about "childless cat ladies," he doubled down on his insinuation that single women were symptomatic of Democrats' "anti-family and anti-kid" platforms; they were opting into a lifestyle that was fueling the erosion of the nuclear family, making them deviant by association. But research suggests it's misguided to pin the trend on shifting social mores. Women's newfound freedom to choose — not just whom they marry, but whether they marry at all — is due less to a cultural shift and more to a shifting economy. As men drop out of the workforce, American women have hit a new milestone: In August, the share of prime-age (25 to 54) women in the labor force hit a record high of 78.4%. Meanwhile, the median age of American women's first marriage has crept steadily upward, from 20.8 in 1970 to 28.3 in 2023.

The shift toward the single life has been a great development for women; for men, though, things aren't as peachy.

The way people feel about women's relationship patterns has a lot to do with a false cultural memory of what was normal in the past. The Rockwellian poster family of mid-20th-century Americana, with its happily married husband and stay-at-home wife raising 2.5 children in the picket-fenced suburbs, sank its hooks so deeply into the American imagination that it's easy to forget it was a historical fluke. In the immediate aftermaths of World War I and World War II, the nation saw momentary spikes in the proportion of single-income, male-breadwinner US households. The booms were over nearly as soon as they began. By 1970, 40% of the nation's married women, and more than half of its unmarried women, had jobs outside the home, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Even before 1970, it was far from unusual to see American women working for a living. The economist Claudia Goldin, who won a 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize for her work unpacking gender differences in the labor market, has noted that the gender gap in US labor-force participation steadily shrunk between 1890 and 1990. As more and more women were working for pay, deindustrialization in the '80s and '90s drove scores of men out of the labor market, shrinking the pool of those who could support a family.

Jess Carbino, a relationships researcher who formerly worked as a sociologist for Tinder and Bumble, told me that many people ascribed to a model of the family popularized by the economist Gary Becker in the early '80s, which said that single people were looking for partners whose market strengths complemented their own. By applying economic theory to the prevailing cultural ideas of the time, he concluded that because men were good at earning money and women were good at having babies and raising them, it's only logical that the two should join forces in the household.

The problem with that arrangement (besides its blatant sexism) is that men today are losing their economic footing.

"We're seeing men's labor-force participation rates really plummet, since the 1990s especially," said Elizabeth Crofoot, a senior economist and principal researcher at the labor-market-analytics firm Lightcast. "That gives women greater impetus to actually work on their careers and put in more time and effort to make themselves financially stable and not have to rely on someone else."

Of course, women's relative workforce gains have not translated into equal earning power; on average, US women still earn $0.84 per every $1 earned by men, according to the Census Bureau. However, a 2021 Pew survey found women were outpacing men in educational attainment. And a Pew analysis of government data found that in 2019, women began outnumbering men in the college-educated labor force. There's evidence that these shifts are fueling the move away from marriage. In a 2023 survey from the American Enterprise Institute's Survey Center on American Life, almost three-quarters of single, college-educated women cited "not being able to find someone who meets their expectations" as a reason they were romantically unattached. Only 54% of single women with no college degree said the same.

Against this backdrop, it makes sense why a growing share of Americans are single simply because they enjoy being single. Carmindy Bowyer is one of them.

"I'm very independent," Bowyer, a makeup artist and beauty entrepreneur in New York City, said. "I don't want to live with somebody. I don't want to have children. People out there don't realize that they have a choice."

Bowyer, who is 53, didn't always feel this way. While she always knew she would never have children, she caved to social pressure to marry in her 30s. Even her parents — who were happily married for over 50 years — questioned whether she was cut out for married life. "We were walking down the aisle, and my dad was like, 'You can always get divorced.' And I was like, 'Thanks,'" she recalled. "Sure enough, marriage didn't work out for me. And I was happy about it." Bowyer said she realized that she felt truer to herself when she was making day-to-day decisions about how to live her life entirely on her own terms. She just needed to give herself permission to do it.

For other women, the dating market has become a major turnoff. "Single women that I work with can feel very compromised by the whole process of trying to find a partner," said Stephanie Manes, a licensed psychotherapist who works with individuals and couples in New York City. "It can mean being treated in ways that are totally at odds with how these women see themselves — as smart, self-sufficient, empowered grown-ups. It can require them to lower their standards in pretty fundamental ways and force them to suffer through some really bad behavior."

Cultural attitudes have been slow to catch up to the not-so-new normal of singlehood. Traister's book quotes a passage from 1997 in which the writer Katie Roiphe, then 28, described her cohort of unmarried 20-something professionals as evidence of Americans' widespread failure to achieve adulthood on schedule. And being single today still generates some social stigma. A 2020 analysis published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that prejudice toward singles was viewed as more acceptable than prejudice toward other groups.

For women, however, the societal sense that they should be married has slowly but surely waned. In Pew's 2019 survey, just 35% of single women said they felt pressure from society to be in a relationship — a slightly larger share of single men said they felt the same.

Singledom also appears far more beneficial for women than men on average: Numerous studies have found that single women tend to be happier and healthier and live longer than married ones, while unmarried men have been found to experience markedly higher rates of depression, addiction, and loneliness than those with spouses. "If you are a man, you should probably get married; if you are a woman, don't bother," the author and behavioral scientist Paul Dolan quipped in a 2019 interview.

There are many hypotheses on why single men fare so much worse. Theories put forward by economists such as Richard Reeves and Nicholas Eberstadt suggest that male gender roles have been slow to catch up to labor-market realities, perhaps at the expense of many men's ability to thrive in the soft-skills-based 21st-century knowledge economy. Others theorize that men's loneliness starts in childhood and stems from societal pressure to keep their feelings hidden. While there are likely many factors at play, a common thread lies in the asocial and infantilizing mores of a patriarchal society that, in some crucial respects, may harm men even more than women.

Women, meanwhile, are finding joy and purpose in discovering new ways of living outside the nuclear-family norm. Platonic coparenting and cohousing arrangements between friends and the return of the multigenerational family home are just two recent examples of the changing face of the American household.

"In my book, I make the case that people who are single at heart are happy and flourishing because they are single, not in spite of it," Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist and the author of the 2023 book "Single at Heart," said. She has said that even within the past decade, there has been traction in what some call "a singles positivity movement." Now 71 (and still single), DePaulo said that current attitudes toward single professionals, in particular, are a far cry from her experience as a single 30-something woman in the workplace.

"Single people are still stereotyped, for sure, but now there is a greater awareness that some single people choose to be single and are happily single," she said.

Bowyer believes that social media plays a significant role in moving the needle. When she recently posted on TikTok about enjoying being single and child-free, the video attracted more than 4 million views and a flurry of positive feedback. It's a radical departure from the cultural feedback she and her Gen X peers received as young adults.

"We're so much more open and compassionate now — a more elevated society in some ways," Bowyer said. "You can find your tribe and be inspired by people that came before you."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.