Frances Tiafoe might be among the top-ranked American tennis pros, but he admittedly gets a little starstruck just like anybody else.
During a recent interview on "The Pivot" podcast, the 2024 U.S. Open semifinalist spoke about his breakout success and the recognition that came with that, including the attention from other celebrities and athletes.
"I’ve said it in real time, whoever I’m with, like, ‘Yo, I’m out here taking shots with Taylor Swift," Tiafoe said, adding that he is admittedly a "Beyoncé guy."
"But at the moment I’m like, man, like, this is crazy, she’s the biggest star out here."
Tiafoe, 26, said the turning point in his career was when he defeated legendary tennis pro Rafael Nadal in the fourth round of the 2022 U.S. Open. The win would advance him to the quarterfinals, making him the youngest American man at 24 to reach the quarters since Andy Roddick did so in 2006.
However, shots with Swift is only the tip of the iceberg.
"Trav and Mahomes, they’re like ‘Yo, we gotta have you in [Kansas City]. Them saying that is wild to me and then they rolled out the red carpet for me," he continued. "It’s crazy because playing tennis and being able to reach that many people and people want to meet me and hang out and actually do stuff, those are the things of why you do what you do."
Despite enjoying the company of celebrities, Tiafoe also relishes in his relatability to fans.
"A lot of people can see themselves in you… I’m just a regular dude, man. I’m just a dude from Maryland that just loves tennis."
Tiafoe did not go into details about when the hangouts with Swift, Kelce and Patrick Mahomes took place, but the Kansas City Chiefs duo were spotted at the 2024 U.S. Open for the men’s singles final between American Taylor Fritz and Jannik Sinner.
The state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter on Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral included every living former president as well as various dignitaries from around the world.
Also notable were some VIPs not in attendance.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney was not seen at the funeral inside Washington, D.C.'s National Cathedral. The 83-year-old, who has had health issues, was the only living vice president who did not make the trip as former Vice Presidents Al Gore, Joe Biden, Mike Pence and Dan Quayle were in attendance.
Also missing from the ceremony was former first lady Michelle Obama, who was not seated alongside her husband, former President Barack Obama.
"Mrs. Obama sends her thoughts and prayers to the Carter family, and everyone who loved and learned from the remarkable former President," Crystal Carson, a spokesperson for Michelle Obama, told Politico.
The outlet reported that Michelle Obama, who would have sat next to Trump at the funeral, had a scheduling conflict and is in Hawaii.
Former first lady Hillary Clinton was in attendance alongside her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Also spotted at the funeral were former first ladies Karen Pence, Laura Bush and Melania Trump, who sat alongside their husbands. First lady Jill Biden was seated alongside President Biden.
All five living men who once occupied the White House — the so-called presidents’ club — President Biden and former presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and President-elect Trump came together for the first time since the 2018 funeral of former President George H.W. Bush.
Other notable attendees included Vice President-elect JD Vance, Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Dave McCormick, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, first son Hunter Biden and Ted Mondale, the son of late Vice President Walter Mondale.
Following the funeral, Carter's remains will be flown to Georgia by the U.S. Air Force aboard Special Air Mission 39 for a private ceremony in his hometown of Plains.
Carter, the 39th president, died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100 after he was admitted to hospice care in 2023.
Fox News Digital's Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
In 2020, after walking by refrigerated trailers full of the bodies of people who died during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic one too many times, my fiancé and I decided that it would maybe be a good idea to get out of New York City for a while. Together with our dog, we spent months driving across the country and eventually made it to Los Angeles, where we intended to stay for two weeks. We arrived just in time for the worst COVID spike since the one we had just experienced in New York. It turned out we couldn’t and didn’t want to leave. Our two week stay has become five years.
While debating whether we were going to move to Los Angeles full time, my partner and I joked that we had to choose between the “fire coast” and the “water coast.” New York City had been getting pummeled by a series of tropical storms and downpours, and vast swaths of California were fighting some of the most devastating wildfires it had ever seen. We settled on the fire coast, mostly to try something new.
We have been very lucky, and very privileged. Our apartment is in Venice Beach, which is probably not going to burn down. This time, we will not lose our lives, our things, our memories. We had the money and the ability to evacuate from Los Angeles on Wednesday morning after it became clear to us that we should not stay. What is happening is a massive tragedy for the city of Los Angeles, the families who have lost their homes, businesses and schools.
I am writing this to try to understand my place in a truly horrifying event, and to try to understand how we are all supposed to process the ongoing slow- and fast-moving climate change-fueled disasters that we have all experienced, are experiencing, and will definitely experience in the future. My group chats and Instagram stories are full of my friends saying that they are fine, followed by stories and messages explaining that actually, they are not fine. Stories that start with “we’re safe, thank you for asking” have almost uniformly been followed with “circumstances have changed, we have evacuated Los Angeles.” Almost all of my friends in the city have now left their homes to go somewhere safer; some people I know have lost their homes.
I knew when I moved to Los Angeles that we would to some extent experience fires and earthquakes. I live in a “tsunami hazard zone.” I also know that there is no place that is safe from climate change and climate-fueled disaster, as we saw last year when parts of North Carolina that were considered to be “safer” from climate change were devastated by Hurricane Helene.
We are living in The Cool Zone, and, while I love my life, am very lucky, and have been less directly affected by COVID, political violence, war, and natural disasters than many people, I am starting to understand that maybe this is all taking a toll. Firefighters and people who have lost their homes are experiencing true hell. What I am experiencing is something more like the constant mundanity of dystopia that surrounds the direct horror but is decidedly also bad.
I knew it would be windy earlier this week because I check the surf forecast every day on an app called Surfline, which has cameras and weather monitoring up and down nearly every coast in the world. The Santa Ana winds—a powerful wind phenomenon I learned about only after moving to California—would be offshore, meaning they would blow from the land out to sea. This is somewhat rare in Los Angeles and also makes for very good, barreling waves. I was excited.
I had a busy day Tuesday and learned about the fire because the Surfline cameras near the fire were down. In fact, you can see what it looked like as the fires overtook the camera at Sunset Point here:
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The camera livestream was replaced with a note saying “this camera is offline due to infrastructure issues caused by local wildfires.” The surf forecast did not mention anything about a fire.
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I walked out to the beach and could see the mountains on fire, the smoke plumes blowing both out to sea and right over me. The ocean was indeed firing—meaning the waves were good—and lots of people were surfing. A few people were milling around the beach taking photos and videos of the fire like I was. By the time the sun started setting, there were huge crowds of people watching the fire. It was around this time that I realized I was having trouble breathing, my eyes were watering, and my throat was scratchy. My family locked ourselves into our bedroom with an air purifier running. Last week, we realized that we desperately needed to replace the filter, but we did not. A friend told us the air was better near them, so we went to their house for dinner.
While we were having dinner, the size of the fire doubled, and a second one broke out. Our phones blared emergency alerts. We downloaded Watch Duty, which is a nonprofit wildfire monitoring app. Most of the wildfire-monitoring cameras in the Pacific Palisades had been knocked offline; the ones in Santa Monica pointing towards the Palisades showed a raging fire.
Every few minutes the app sent us push notifications that the fire was rapidly expanding, that firefighters were overwhelmed, that evacuation orders had expanded and were beginning to creep toward our neighborhood. I opened Instagram and learned that Malibu’s Reel Inn, one of our favorite restaurants, had burned to the ground.
Apple Intelligence began summarizing all of the notifications I was getting from my various apps. “Multiple wildfires in Los Angeles, causing destruction and injuries,” from the neighborhood watch app Citizen, which I have only because of an article I did about the last time there was a fire in Pacific Palisades. Apple Intelligence’s summary of a group chat I’m in: “Saddened by situation; Instagram shared.” From a friend: "Wants to chat about existential questions." A summary from the LA Times: “Over 1,000 structures burned in LA Count wildfires; firefighter were overwhelmed.” From Nextdoor: “Restaurants destroyed.”
Earlier on Tuesday, I texted my mom “yes we are fine, it is very far away from us. It is many miles from us. We have an air purifier. It’s fine.” I began to tell people who asked that the problem for us was "just" the oppressive smoke, and the fact that we could not breathe. By the time we were going to bed, it became increasingly clear that it was not necessarily fine, and that it might be best if we left. I opened Bluesky and saw an image of a Cybertruck sitting in front of a burnt out mansion. A few posts later, I saw the same image but a Parental Advisory sticker had been photoshopped onto it. I clicked over to X and saw that people were spamming AI generated images of the fire.
We began wondering if we should drive toward cleaner air. We went home and tried to sleep. I woke up every hour because I was having trouble breathing. As the sun was supposed to be rising in the morning, it became clear that it was being hidden by thick clouds of smoke.
Within minutes of waking up, we knew that we should leave. That we would be leaving. I opened Airbnb and booked something. We do not have a “Go Bag,” but we did have time to pack. I aimlessly wandered around my apartment throwing things into bags and boxes, packing things that I did not need and leaving things that I should have brought. In the closet, I pushed aside our boxes of COVID tests to get to our box of N-95 masks. I packed a whole microphone rig because I need to record a podcast Friday.
I emailed the 404 Media customers who bought merch and told them it would be delayed because I had to leave my home and cannot mail them. I canceled meetings and calls with sources who I wanted to talk to.
Our next-door neighbor texted us, saying that she would actually be able to make it to a meeting next week with our landlord with a shared beef we’re having with them. Originally she thought she would have to work during the time the meeting was scheduled. She works at a school in the Palisades. Her school burned down. So had her sister’s house. I saw my neighbor right before we left. I told her I would be back on Friday. I had a flashback to my last day in the VICE office in March 2020, when they sent us home for COVID. I told everyone I would see them in a week or two. Some of those people I never saw again.
Image: Jason Koebler
A friend texted me to tell me that the place we had been on a beautiful hike a few weeks ago was on fire: “sad and glad we went,” he said. A friend in Richmond, Virginia texted to ask if I was OK. I told him yes but that it was very scary. I asked him how he was doing. He responded, “We had a bad ice storm this week and that caused a power outage at water treatment that then caused server crashes and electrical equipment to get flooded. The whole city has been without water since Monday.” He told me he was supposed to come to Los Angeles for work this weekend. He was canceling his flight.
A group chat asked me if I was OK. I told them that I did not want to be dramatic but that we were having a hard time but were ultimately safe. I explained some of what we had been doing and why. The chat responded saying that “it’s insane how you start this by saying it sounds more dramatic than it is, only to then describe multiple horrors. I am mostly just glad you are safe.”
We got in the car. We started driving. I watched a driverless Waymo navigate streets in which the traffic lights were out because the power was out. My fiancé took two work meetings on the road, tethered to her phone, our dog sitting on her lap. We stopped at a fast food drive through.
Once we were out of Los Angeles, I stopped at a Best Buy to get an air purifier. On my phone, I searched the reviews for the one they had on sale. I picked one out. The employee tried to sell me an extended warranty plan. I said no thank you, got back in the car, and kept driving away from the fire. I do not know when we will be able to go back.
Knowledge Graphs have long been a cornerstone of organizing structured information, yet their potential in Web3 has remained largely untapped. That changes today with The Graph’s launch of Geo Genesis, a groundbreaking application designed to make Knowledge Graphs accessible and […]
I moved to the US 12 years ago, but I still miss my life in New Zealand.
Dragonite_East/Getty Images
When I moved from New Zealand to the US, I didn't realize how much it would actually cost me.
It's been hard for me to be away from family and to build a community in a new place.
When I visit my home country, I often experience reverse culture shock.
I moved from New Zealand to California more than 12 years ago after I met and married an American.
Even though I've been in the US for a long time now, I still experience some of the same challenges I did when I first moved here. Plus, I never stopped feeling the pull of home and the family I left behind in New Zealand.
However, visiting home doesn't always bring the same comfort it once did, as it can be hard to readjust to a culture I haven't lived with for over a decade.
Sometimes, it feels like I have my heart in two countries, but I don't completely belong to either.
Here are some of the biggest challenges I've faced as an expat.
Figuring out how to navigate unfamiliar cultural norms has been difficult
When I first moved here, I discovered the US tends to have a much more cutthroat, competitive culture where people can be overlooked or dismissed if they're not prepared to speak loudly and clearly about their accomplishments.
Back in New Zealand, however, I was used to — and raised in — a culture that encourages people to act humble.
As Kiwis, we don't tend to talk up our accomplishments and we try to give credit to others (even if it rightly belongs to us) for fear of being seen as braggarts. Those who are seen as being "too big for their boots" are deliberately knocked down a peg — a phenomenon so popular in Australia and New Zealand that locals have a term for it: "tall poppy syndrome."
Though they may be small, these sorts of cultural differences can feel like a minefield to navigate and have made some social interactions a source of stress for me for many years.
Being far from family has been tough for me, both financially and emotionally
When I can afford to visit New Zealand, my daughter loves spending time with her cousins and uncle.
Katie Joll
Although my husband is American, we live far from any family — his nearest relatives are four hours away.
It's been tough to raise our daughter without access to a village of family members.
I especially miss having a community at my 10-year-old daughter's soccer games, where I'm often surrounded by many multigenerational families cheering on their kids. I can't help but feel sad that she doesn't get to experience having a ready-made fan club on the sidelines because her family is so far away.
I wish my daughter had more family cheering her on during her soccer games.
Katie Joll
I'd love to visit our family overseas more often, but it's just not possible when flights between San Francisco and Auckland typically cost over $1,000 — even when booking months in advance.
We can only afford to visit New Zealand every two years or so, and I worry how the distance will impact my daughter's relationships with family over time.
My daughter has cousins in New Zealand and Australia ranging in age from 4 to 16. She's often asked me if we can move closer to them, and I feel bad we can't visit more often.
It's also tough for my family overseas to visit the US, in part due to the exchange rate. The New Zealand dollar is worth about 60 cents here, so a USD$1,000 plane ticket would cost them about NZD$1,790. My brother and sister-in-law even cut a planned trip to the US short because of how expensive it was for them.
These travel costs have also made it tough to navigate family emergencies over the past few years — especially when I got a call that my dad was in the ICU after a nasty fall last year.
Any flights home within the next two weeks would've cost well over $2,500 — way over my budget. Instead, I had to get updates from family over the phone and cheer him on from home as he recovered.
I don't feel completely at home in New Zealand anymore, either
Most of my family still lives in New Zealand, but time and distance naturally create a disconnect with everyday life in my home country.
I look forward to my visits back home, but over the past few years, I've experienced reverse culture shock, a phenomenon that can cause expats to feel like tourists in their country of birth.
It can manifest in relatively simple things, such as not understanding local pop-culture references or feeling removed from the everyday issues that concern my fellow Kiwis. Unfortunately, this has meant my old home can feel strikingly unfamiliar, and there's sometimes a disconnect when I visit.
I can cheer on the All Blacks rugby team, hunt down Kiwi-inspired meat pies, and enjoy the company of fellow expats. However, both my home country and my family are inevitably changing and growing — so I don't always feel a sense of belonging in either the US or New Zealand.
Still, I've done my best to adapt to a new culture and accept a new sense of "normal" about people, places, and routines. Despite the challenges, I feel like I'm in a good place in California, and the relationships I've slowly been building with those around me make life worthwhile.
My experience as an expat hasn't felt easy — but at the end of the day, I'm happy I took a chance on myself and followed my heart.
If you're brushing up on your interview skills right about now, BI spoke with several current and former recruiters for the traits they say always make a good first impression.
Here are the green flags they like to see in job candidates:
Demonstrating accountability
"Self-reflection, accountability, and confidence in themselves and their work," are green flags to Lauren Monroe, who leads the creative practice group at Aquent, a staffing agency for creative, marketing, and design roles.
A personalized touch also helps. Monroe recalls one candidate who "studied the job description and prepared success stories and examples for every responsibility" to share in the interview. As the cherry on top, the candidate "created a fun animation using the company's logo and added it to their email signature" in their thank-you note.
A clear pitch
Tessa White, a former head HR chief, is the CEO of The Job Doctor and author of "The Unspoken Truths for Career Success."
"When a candidate comes in and is clear on how they can help the company, and why they are a fit, it's refreshing," she says. "I often tell people, if you don't know what your value proposition is, I guarantee you the company won't know."
Mentoring others
Kyle Samuels, who leads executive search agency Creative Talent Endeavors after 20 years in senior-level executive recruiting, looks for candidates with "a history of coaching and mentoring others" because this shows they "want the organization as a whole to operate at a high level."
Enthusiasm for the job
Amri Celeste, a recruitment manager and interview coach, watches for applicants who show passion and enthusiasm for the job.
"When a candidate is particularly enthusiastic or excited about a role, the hiring manager will often be enthusiastic and excited about the candidate," she says. "It's one of the most common pieces of positive feedback I receive from managers about candidates."
Having prepared "clear examples of any achievements and duties mentioned on a résumé" ticks off another box on the candidate checklist, she adds.
Asking thoughtful questions
Marissa Morrison, VP of people at ZipRecruiter, says well-thought-out questions reflect "interest, enthusiasm, and a deeper understanding of the position."
"For example, asking about how they'd be expected to use AI or a certain new technology in the role in a job interview can be a way to demonstrate that you're up to date with current trends and willing to embrace new technologies to creatively solve problems, drive value, and support your work," she says.
An upbeat attitude
"Having a positive attitude, showing enthusiasm for the role, and being engaged during your interview can help set you apart from the competition," Amy Garefis, chief people officer at ZipRecruiter. "In my experience, it is often the tiebreaker for me between candidates with similar skills or professional experience."
Google cofounder Larry Page made an appearance at a Y Combinator meeting in December.
He spoke to a group from the Fall 2024 class of startups.
He talked about the origins of Google and listened to founders talk about their startups.
Google cofounder Larry Page made a rare public appearance during a Y Combinator event for startups held in San Francisco, California in December, Business Insider has learned.
Page showed up at an "office hour" for a group of the Fall 2024 class of startups during the final days of the event, where he listened to founders talk about their business ideas, according to a person who attended. Y Combinator spokesperson Lulu Meservey confirmed Page's attendance at the event.
Y Combinator is a startup incubator that holds seasonal classes — known as "batches" — where budding startup founders can network and get advice from Silicon Valley luminaries.
Page was brought along to the event by Y Combinator group partner Paul Buchheit, the attendee said, adding that Page also shared some anecdotes about the early days of Google. The person asked to remain anonymous because they had not been permitted to speak to the media about the event.
A public sighting of Page is extremely rare these days.
He and cofounder Sergey Brin stepped away from their executive roles at Alphabet in 2019, giving the pair time to pursue other business interests such as flying cars and disaster relief. The pair continue to sit on the Alphabet board and hold shares of a special voting stock that gives them ultimate control of the company.
While Brin has returned to work on AI projects at Google, Page has remained more distant. He continues to financially support Pivotal, a startup working on electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles, or eVTOLs.
Got more insight to share? You can reach the reporter Hugh Langley via the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-628-228-1836) or email ([email protected]).
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