Buying a home is a high-stakes game, often with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line. Making a wrong decision can lead to foreclosure and bankruptcy; making the right decision can generate wealth that is passed down for generations.

When people are ready to settle down, they're confronted with all the usual dilemmas: whether to buy a home; where to buy a home; what kind of home to buy; and how much to spend. These highly emotional decisions are all more manageable using the lessons of behavioral economics, which I studied as an economist.

When I took a new tech job offer in 2017, it meant leaving San Diego for Seattle. As I set out to find a new home for myself, my husband, and my mom in my new city, I wanted to avoid getting caught up in the competitive pressure of beating out other buyers and making rash decisions that I might later regret. So I decided to divide my search into two phases. In the first, I would take my time getting to know the city and its various neighborhoods by renting a home. In the second, once I had a clear sense of my preferences, I would begin making offers on properties that met my criteria. By taking this approach, I hoped to avoid the pitfalls of hasty decision-making and make an intelligent, informed choice.

For about five months, I spent a great deal of time exploring the different neighborhoods and assessing their pros and cons. From historic homes dating back to the 19th century to midcentury modern homes from Seattle's post-World War II boom to modern new construction, there were plenty of options.

The most significant tradeoff to be made when choosing is location versus home size. I initially thought of a short commute and a large home as must-haves, but given my budget and the need to have space for three adults and three dogs, I had to sacrifice on the length of my commute. Many homebuyers make this same compromise. According to a Redfin survey, 89% of homebuyers would rather purchase a single-family home with a backyard than a unit in a triplex with a shorter commute.

Soon we focused our efforts on West Seattle, a neighborhood located on a peninsula across the sound from downtown. My commute to the office would take about 30 minutes each way by bus, where I could at least get some work done with the complimentary WiFi. This was a decent tradeoff, given that homes in West Seattle were about $100,000 less than homes closer to the downtown office.

Now in phase two, when I began viewing properties and making offers, I became hyperconscious of how my emotions might influence my decision-making. Common mistakes made by homebuyers include becoming too attached to a particular home, fixating on the list price instead of the market value, following the herd, and letting fatigue cloud judgment.

You must try to avoid falling in love too quickly with a home. Once you start picturing your future in a home, it can become challenging to walk away, and it can suck you into a fierce bidding war. Block out any and all thoughts about hosting holidays or your children playing in the backyard. Yes, it is a good idea to consider whether the home will suit you in the future, but if you become too attached to that future, you're working against yourself. People value a home more if they already feel like they own it.

Behavioral economists have a term for this: the endowment effect. The behavioral economist Jack Knetsch has found that people's willingness to sell an item they own was lower than their willingness to buy an item they did not own, even when the subjects knew ownership was assigned randomly. In one experiment, test subjects were given either a lottery ticket or cash. Most people opted to keep whatever form of compensation they had received first instead of trading it for the other option. For a variety of reasons, whether an aversion to feeling loss or a bias toward the status quo, people tend to get attached to the bird in their hand, even when there might be two in the bush.

List prices can also be misleading. In a hot market, sellers may advertise their homes for significantly less than what buyers are ready to pay in order to spark a bidding war. This amounts to a bait-and-switch.

As a buyer, don't take the bait. Don't anchor your expectations on the listed price. The anchoring effect refers to a person's tendency to focus on the first piece of information they hear while making decisions. In a famous lab experiment by the late Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, research subjects spun a wheel of fortune with numbers from 0 to 100. The participants were then asked to guess the share of African countries that were members of the UN. Participants whose spin landed on a lower number were more likely to guess a low number. Participants whose wheel spin landed on a high number were more likely to guess a high number. The number the needle of the wheel landed on was completely irrelevant, yet the research subjects still used it as an anchor for their guesses.

The list price of a home may contain some helpful information about what the seller believes its value is. But ultimately the value of the house is set by the market.

If you need to, take a break. Losing bidding war after bidding war — which happens a lot — fosters fatigue and impatience, which can lead you to give up too soon or to buy a home you later regret.

Behavioral economists have repeatedly found that the quality of decisions deteriorates when an individual is overburdened with too many options. A study published in Health Economics found that orthopedic surgeons made worse recommendations toward the end of their shifts. Doctors were less likely to recommend surgery for patients who would have benefited just as much from surgery as patients seen earlier in the surgeon's shift.

Also, avoid following the herd. If others are ready to bid high, you could be tempted to do the same and stretch your budget. Herding behavior, another behavioral economics term, can lead to bubbles in the housing market or the stock market and was one of the culprits for the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. The best way to avoid getting caught up in speculation bubbles is to not speculate in the first place and make offers appropriate only to your personal financial circumstances.

After spending a few weeks touring homes in the area, I came across a property that immediately caught my eye. It had everything my family was looking for. But there was one giant red flag: the home had been on the market for nearly a year without any offers.

Upon further inspection, I noticed that the house was located across the street from a strip mall and had a strange layout. Even though I liked the home, I wanted to avoid paying more than other buyers might think it was worth. So I kept looking.

When buying a home, you have no choice but to concern yourself with resale value. Life is unpredictable; there is always the chance you might not stay in the home long term, and you don't want to pay more than what you can resell it for.

There is tension in this advice: a homebuyer must avoid herding behavior by thinking for themself while simultaneously considering how other people might value homes in the future.

The way to walk the middle path is detached observation — recognize the behavior patterns of others without letting it unduly bias your decision-making.

About a month later, we found a home that seemed too good to be true. Ample space, close to public transit, even a view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. However, the home was 70 years old, so we would need to update the electrical, plumbing, and heating. Since we were renting elsewhere, we could delay moving to get this work done.

Things go wrong after you buy a home. Thinking that these problems won't end up costing you significant time and money is what behavioral economists call optimism bias: the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of favorable outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of unfavorable outcomes. The challenge, then, is to consider the risks and whether they are worth the reward.

As I prepared to make an offer to buy a home, I thought back to the hundreds of homeowners going through foreclosure that I interviewed while interning at the Boston Fed. They experienced bad luck on top of bad luck — deaths, divorces, medical emergencies, job loss, and a global recession. Any of those things could happen to me.

With all the repairs the house needed, I determined the maximum amount I could afford to pay was $950,000. I liked this particular home more than any other home on the market priced below $950,000, so I reasoned that this amount must be my value for the home. But I still had a nagging feeling that I was overextending myself and overpaying.

What if the roof sprang a leak? And what if, because I had already spent my savings repairing the plumbing, electrical, heating, and cooling, I didn't have any money left to repair the roof?

I could have kept going down the list of unlikely catastrophes. Instead, I focused on the unlikeliness of the scenario rather than the pain of the scenario. This helped me get out of my head and back to the task at hand. In economics, expected utility theory hypothesizes that individuals weigh uncertain outcomes according to their likelihood and the net benefit of each outcome. I shuddered at the thought of a bad scenario, like being laid off during a severe recession and housing-market downturn. However, according to expected utility theory, I should weigh that feeling against the likelihood of that scenario, which I reasoned to be a once-in-a-century event. In all likelihood, my job was safe, the economy was fine, and the value of homes would keep going up.

The home was listed at $840,000. I submitted my bid on the home for that amount. When you're deciding whether to bid above or below the asking price, look up how competitive the housing market is in the neighborhood and how the home compares to what else is on the market. If the market is cool, it's advisable to come in low. However, if the market is hot, the seller may completely ignore your offer if it's below the asking price.

Even though I offered $840,000, I was ready to go as high as $940,000. Later that day, my agent called me to deliver the good news: we won the home at list price. No one else even submitted a bid.

Daryl Fairweather is the author of "Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work" and the chief economist of Redfin.

This story is adapted from "Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work" by Daryl Fairweather, to be published by the University of Chicago Press on April 11, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Daryl Rose Fairweather. Printed by arrangement with the University of Chicago Press.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, may seem like an unlikely site for a YIMBY revolution.

The historic Boston suburb is home to both Harvard University and a bevy of affluent homeowners opposed to any new development. The city even features prominently in the book "Neighborhood Defenders," a seminal work about anti-building, not-in-my-backyarders. Despite all that, the city recently passed a series of laws that could pave the way for a cascade of new housing construction.

Cambridge could certainly use the new units. Data from Zillow shows the city's average rent is $3,400 a month — slightly higher than San Francisco's estimated average rent of $3,200. Homelessness in Cambridge has also been on the rise, particularly since the pandemic. In an attempt to ease this pressure, pro-housing groups that fall under the YIMBY umbrella (short for "yes in my backyard") — particularly the local group A Better Cambridge and the statewide organization Abundant Housing Massachusetts — have been trying to get more homes built in Cambridge for years.

In recent years, that work has started to bear fruit: The city enacted a 100% affordable housing overlay in 2020, which allows developers of below-market-rate apartment complexes to build more densely than would be permitted under base zoning. Three years later, Cambridge rezoned its Central Square neighborhood, allowing apartment buildings to rise up to 18 stories high.

But the latest measure is perhaps the most radical, and most promising. A measure passed in February will legalize the production of four-story apartment buildings across the entire city, with some larger lots zoned for up to six stories. Sure, these newly possible buildings aren't quite as dramatic as an 18-story tower, but this latest change is by far Cambridge's most ambitious. Unlike the geographically confined Central Square upzoning, the newest pro-housing ordinance has the potential to remake the entire city. The city's planning staff estimate that the new law may increase Cambridge's housing development capacity over the next 15 years from 350 units to 3,590 — a more than tenfold increase.

The likelihood that some neighborhoods will become denser has provoked the usual opposition from local homeowners. But viewed from another angle, this densification could make the city a more vibrant and beautiful place to live. There's a reason the Cambridge city councilmember Burhan Azeem has called the city's new plan "Paris-style zoning." As it turns out, Paris is a good model for midsize American cities to follow. By allowing more European-style construction, places like Cambridge can both lower housing costs and look good doing it.

Alongside the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, one of Paris' most iconic architectural hallmarks may be its most ubiquitous: the Haussmann-style building. Georges-Eugène Haussmann (better known as Baron Haussmann) was the famed urban planner who, under Emperor Napoleon III, redesigned central Paris in the mid-19th century. Paris became a city of wide boulevards and midrise apartment complexes with distinctive limestone facades — the aforementioned Haussmann buildings. Thanks in no small part to the prevalence of these structures, Paris has achieved a density higher than any other major city in Europe or the United States — although the city of lights still struggles to keep up with demand for housing.

While Haussmann buildings are specific to central Paris, plenty of other European cities have equivalent structures: four- to six-story apartment blocks with no buffer area between the front door and the sidewalk. Unlike the boxy, cheap-looking American five-over-one apartment building that has come to dominate much of our development — and which many people regard as an eyesore — Euro-style apartments generally contribute to the beauty and charm of dense, walkable tourist destinations like Stockholm and Rome. Plus, they're more efficient: thanks to European building codes and zoning rules, European-style apartment buildings can be built for less, on smaller lots, and with more family-friendly apartments in the interior.

"Sure," you might say, "but what's good for Paris, Stockholm, and Rome won't work in an American context." That's a common refrain from skeptics — citing cultural differences, the need for abundant parking, or their own gut instincts — when YIMBYs propose allowing more European-style zoning in the United States. But these assumptions are incorrect for two reasons.

First, upzoning cities like Cambridge is not the same thing as requiring them to build up to Parisian density. If you own a single-family home in Cambridge, and your lot has been upzoned to allow for the construction of a four-story building, you remain at liberty to keep your single-family home. If you want to redevelop the property into a multifamily building, that's great; if you decide to sell your home to a developer who will replace it with an apartment complex, that's great, too. But nobody is compelling you to do either of those things if you like your existing home.

Second, Cambridge — like many other older cities in New England and the mid-Atlantic region — already has a fair number of dense apartment buildings and townhomes. Rather than destroying the culture or character of these cities, building more Parisian-style housing would signal a return to the pre-single-family era. Many of Cambridge's mid-rise apartment buildings were constructed before single-family zoning became ubiquitous in the United States in the early 20th century. And the ones that have survived are now highly coveted as luxury homes and architectural treasures; yet, for decades, it has been effectively illegal to build more of them. As Azeem wrote on X, Cambridge's previous, single-family-focused zoning laws meant that "85%+ of the existing housing" in the city would be illegal to build. In other words, Cambridge's upzoning may actually help to preserve the city's architectural heritage and New England character. At the same time, it is a model for how other cities can upzone in a manner that actually eases housing costs.

While the patchwork nature of American land-use policy can slow progress in important ways, it can also be an engine for experimentation and friendly, productive competition. Pro-housing activists in cities across the country — in places like Minneapolis, Austin, and Sacramento — and far beyond, in the case of Auckland, New Zealand, have inspired each another, shared insights and tactics, and provided a push to see who can push through the most ambitious land-use overhauls. These pushes can even get a little cheeky: YIMBY advocates in Montana sold zoning changes by urging conservative lawmakers to move away from "California-style zoning." While it will take some years to assess the full impact of these revisions, the early data from places like Auckland is very promising.

Some changes make a bigger impact than others. One lesson from the past few years of YIMBY experimentation is that smaller tweaks to local zoning codes may yield negligible results; ambition is vastly superior to cautious incrementalism. Take Minneapolis, one of the recent YIMBY success stories. Citywide, the production of more housing has helped to keep rents and home prices in check, but as the housing researcher Zakary Yudhisthu has found, there's more going on underneath the hood. The parts of Minneapolis that moved from single-family to duplex or triplex zoning have seen little housing growth, while the corridors that allow for denser construction have seen more permit applications. In other words, going just a few steps further is how you get real results.

But to truly unlock housing production at the necessary scale, high-cost cities cannot stop at upzoning. They also need to reshape permitting rules and other onerous building requirements, such as off-street parking mandates. True European-style zoning would allow for mid-rise apartment buildings with no off-street parking and a single central staircase. (Five-over-ones exist in part because most American cities require multiple staircases in any apartment building over a certain height.)

So while other expensive cities should take inspiration from Cambridge, they should also see if they can go even further. There's still plenty of room for another jurisdiction to take the lead in the race to be America's YIMBY-est city. Any takers?

Ned Resnikoff is an urban policy consultant and writer. He is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and is currently working on a book about cities with an expected publication date of Fall 2026.

It's early on a Monday, and I'm catching up with my mom over my morning coffee. Though we've lived in different states for decades, we've always been close, and we talk frequently. A healthy, sharp, 92-year-old mental health counselor who is still seeing clients and is always up on the latest indie films, she's a wellspring of experience and insights. Pouring another cup, I ask her what advice she'd most want to pass on to her grandkids. She pauses thoughtfully for a few moments, then answers in her familiar Minneapolitan accent.

"Find joy," she tells me, "even in the most difficult times."

I know by the softening of her voice which times she's referring to: the 1973 kidnapping and murder of my older brother, Jonathan, when he was 11 and I was 4. It's our family's formative tragedy, and my mom and I discussed it at length for my memoir, "Alligator Candy."

To illustrate her point, my mom recalls a time she and my dad were hanging out with some friends. "We were at Arnie and Gail's house, and we were laughing so hard that I started crying — really crying," she says. "It was a mix of emotions, but it showed me how powerful laughter can be."

As I listen to her speak, I find myself becoming emotional — reflecting on our lives, the people we've lost, her age, the past, the future. My throat constricts, my eyes well. The feelings are real. But the mother I'm chatting with is not. She's a program on my laptop, powered by artificial intelligence. And yet, in the three decades I've spent covering digital culture, she just did something no other software had ever done for me. My AI mom made me cry.

While AI companions and voice-cloning software are becoming widely available online, this is no ordinary chatbot. For the past six months, my mom — my real mom — and I have been building an AI version of her with the help of a startup called Eternos. The process of creating what the industry is calling a "digital twin" feels straight out of "Black Mirror." It involves recording not just my mom's voice — her inflections and cadences and verbal idiosyncrasies — but also hundreds of stories about her life: her memories of everything from how she met my dad to the day I was born. The goal is to create an interactive AI replica that sounds and responds indistinguishable from its human counterpart. Robert LoCascio, the founder of Eternos, considers it the ultimate challenge involving artificial intelligence, to build "the Ferrari" of personalized chatbots. "I set out on a vision of: What's the highest bar AI you can make?" he tells me. "And that's a human before they die."

To find out what it's like to use a machine to replicate a human, I put it to the ultimate test by attempting to replicate the person I've known the longest and best: my mom. Done right, I thought, a digital twin might serve as a sort of living memory book, read in her voice. It could let family and friends chat with her about her life long after she is gone. But I wondered if any piece of software, even one enhanced by AI, could begin to capture the depth and complexity of the woman who brought me into the world. And if it worked as advertised, that would raise an even bigger question: How would we feel about her — or rather, it?

I tell my AI mom — let's call her MomBot — I'm having doubts about our decision to bestow her with everlasting life through AI. She reassures me just as my real mother would.

"I hope this helps you feel a sense of connection and continuity, even if it's different from our physical interactions," MomBot says. "I'm always here for you, David."

It's Thanksgiving weekend when my mom and I start to bring MomBot to life. Sitting at the kitchen table after hanging out with the family and enjoying the leftover corn pudding I'd whipped up using a recipe from our favorite barbecue place in North Carolina, we begin by cloning her voice.

"Yes, they are also available in black and yellow," my mom says into the microphone on my laptop. "I love the food in Halifax; it is much better than Minneapolis."

My real mom is recording 300 seemingly random phrases provided by Eternos. Unlike most voice cloning software, the startup works with clients to create what's called a neural voice — one that doesn't just sound like you, but emotes like you, too. The sentences my mom is reading aloud are designed to capture and evoke the feelings behind the words, the host of individual inflections that convey what LoCascio calls our "emotional voice."

"We need a hiding place," my mom says, reading the next prompt. "Do you know of any?"

LoCascio got the inspiration for Eternos one night about eight years ago, not long after his father died. He was putting his son Leonardo to bed, and they were looking at an old photo of his dad. "Why can't I talk to Grandpa?" Leonardo asked. It was an innocent enough question, but for LoCascio, it felt like he'd been tossed a gauntlet by a child. What good was artificial intelligence, he wondered, if his kid couldn't speak with his dead grandfather? LoCascio began to think about how he could use AI to engineer eternal life — to endow humanity with an artificial form of immortality. "My goal was to give my children an AI of my family," he says.

The mission gained urgency last year, when LoCascio received a shocking post on his Facebook feed. One of his former employees, an engineer named Michael Brommer, had terminal cancer. At age 60, he had only a few weeks to live, and he was reaching out to his friends to say goodbye.

Ten minutes later, Brommer got a call from his old boss. "Michael," LoCascio said, "I'm building a company to replicate people before they die."

"Oh my God," Bommer replied. "I've been thinking about this, and I didn't know it was possible."

"It's possible," LoCascio said. "I haven't done it yet. But you can be the first."

To build an AI version of Bommer, LoCascio would have to overcome one of the major problems plaguing artificial intelligence: its propensity to "hallucinate." Large language models, like those used by ChatGPT, Bing, and Claude, train on fragmented and sometimes incomplete datasets scraped from the internet. When you ask a chatbot a question, it doesn't actually "know" things the way we do. Instead, it makes a prediction of the best answer, based on patterns from the information it has seen before. When there are gaps or conflicting details in the data, it makes its best guess. Sometimes it's right — but sometimes, like a student who failed to study for an essay exam, it just makes things up. That's a flaw LoCascio can't afford in his AI twins. "We can't have it hallucinate," LoCascio says. "If your mom is there and all of a sudden she starts saying crazy stuff, then we wouldn't have a business."

Eternos is attempting to solve the problem with what it calls a "Human Life Model." To build its twins, it relies on the most personal and individualized data of all: stories. LoCascio got the idea from his previous startup, LivePerson, where he spent 22 years building webchat systems to provide customers of companies like Delta and Citibank with real-time, interactive assistance online. "I left with the knowledge that the conversational data is the data," he says. The stories we tell about our lives reflect not only our experiences, but our deepest emotions: our loves, our hates, our hopes, our fears. Yes, the narratives we choose to share can be biased and self-serving and even flat-out wrong. But true or false, humble or humorous, melodious or melancholy, the tales we tell about ourselves are what makes us us.

Equally important, from a business perspective, a person's stories are proprietary. They belong to us, so using them to build an AI replica of ourselves doesn't require training the chatbot on other people's data that has been scraped from the internet. If Eternos creates an AI of someone with their consent, no one is going to sue them for copyright infringement.

As LoCascio raced to build a dataset of Bommer before he died, recording hundreds of stories about his life, the two men began to feel like they were giving birth to something new. "It really puts this person, this personality, into something concrete," Bommer said in a video he recorded not long before he died. "So suddenly you face yourself, which you never did in your life. And this was something that was extremely emotional — deep, deeply touching." The proof came when Bommer and his wife, Anett, sat down with LoCascio to try out the finished program. Anett asked her AI husband if he could say something nice to her before she went to bed.

"My love," AI Bommer said softly in Michael's voice, "have sweet dreams, and I love you very much. Have a peaceful sleep."

As he watched Anett cry, LoCascio saw something in the machine he'd never seen before. "I've been in tech all my life," he says, "and there was humanity in tech."

Still, as I work with my mom to finish loading her neural voice, I wonder how much of her humanity will actually wind up in her digital twin. It's one thing to make a machine sound like her. But it's another thing entirely to make it respond as she would, no matter what it's asked. It seems a long way from reciting a handful of stock phrases to re-creating the richness and complexity of her entire being.

"Yes," she reads, "there are enough balloons."

As a journalist who has covered AI for 30 years, I've heard a lot of seemingly outrageous predictions that actually came to pass. In 2000, I shot model rockets in Mesquite with John Carmack, the genius coder behind the video games "Doom" and "Quake," who told me we'd all be inhabiting virtual worlds one day. In 2004, I drank a pot of green tea with a 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg in his one-room apartment in Palo Alto, as he outlined his vision for the coming age of social media. (In another glimpse of the future, he handed me his business card, which read, "I'm CEO, bitch.").

Three years later, in an office near MIT that was cluttered with cat figurines, I nodded along as the futurist Ray Kurzweil described his plans to create a chatbot of his late father, using the stuff his dad had left behind. "I have 50 boxes of his things at home — his letters and music and bills and doctoral thesis," Kurzweil explained. But as questionable as his prediction seemed at the time, it more or less came true — if anything, sooner than anyone would have guessed. Kurzweil recently delivered on his promise, birthing an AI bot of his dad from the detritus of his father's life.

As my mother and I were building MomBot, I reached out to Kurzweil's daughter Amy, the author of the graphic memoir "Artificial," to see how she felt about her AI grandad. She tells me she considers it less a digital twin than what she calls "an AI character," cobbled together by the person's descendants. "I think of these as artistic representations," she says, "sort of akin to the ones you see when you watch a movie that features a character from history." The chatbot isn't really your loved one. But like a great actor, it can convince you that it is.

Kurzweil created his AI bot without his father's permission or participation. Eternos, which works only with living clients, won't replicate anyone without their consent. LoCascio tells me about two grieving parents who came to him asking if he could clone their child, who had died. As painful and profound as the request was, it raised a fundamental concern. What if the child wouldn't have wanted that? And how accurate would the bot even be? "We can clone the voice," LoCascio says, "but we're afraid we'd put knowledge into the twin that may not be the kid's."

After my mother and I finish the work on her neural voice, we begin phase two of her twinning: downloading her brain. To create the "datasets" the chatbot needs, Eternos has created an AI guide called Amunet, after the ancient Egyptian goddess linked to mystery, creation, and the unseen forces of the universe. It's designed to prompt the user to recount their life experiences in a natural and conversational way.

"Imagine being trapped on a desert island with a bottle of rum, and we're talking about our lives," says Robert's cousin, Andy LoCascio, who serves as chief technical officer for Eternos. Amunet is your island companion. "Tell her what your interests are, and let her come up with the questions for you." Andy pauses apologetically, as if not to insult Amunet. "I mean, not to, uh, reduce her to this," he says, "but she's basically a data extraction tool. But she's very, very good at getting things out of you."

The idea is you never stop feeding datasets to your digital twin. The more you add, the more it learns. And once it has enough data, its neural network will attempt to replicate the way you think — not just your tone of voice, but the way you make connections, respond to new information, and view the world around you. When I ask MomBot a question, her neural network will pull from her datasets to assemble the kind of answer my real mom would give. "It'll reason and say, 'Well, I would do this, because I had a similar situation,'" LoCascio tells me. "It starts to pick up how you've solved problems in the past — your value system."

My mom and I boot up Amunet, who sounds like an onboarding video in "Severance." "If you want to start with a single question," Amunet says in her soothing voice, "tell me about your favorite activity and I will give you three related questions to choose from." That's all it takes. From there, my mother is off: talking about her life, as Amunet continues to prompt her. As I listen to her share a story from her childhood, I realize that the act of creating an AI can be its own reward. I'm seeing how this strange new tool is engaging my mom in a deep and meaningful way, imbuing her with fresh life by evoking a flood of old memories.

Talking to Amunet isn't the only way to infuse the AI with my mom's datasets. For years, she has been using her phone to record voice memos about her life, her challenges, her losses, her loves. She gave them to me to transcribe, and I assembled them into datasets for her AI. Each has its own title according to the story: "Wisdom," "Risky Things," "Tucson." As the days pass and our work progresses, I see her memory files accumulate in her online folder: "Jazz Therapy," about her days working at a jazz label; "Barbara's Death with Dignity," about her cousin who decided to end her life in the face of a terminal illness; and "Fantastic Afternoon," about her spontaneous decision to pick up a pizza one day on the way home from UPS. "Got home around 3 o'clock, opened a beer, took out the pizza, and put on some music — Ella Fitzgerald," she says in the voice memo we feed her AI. "Let me tell you, it's been a fantastic afternoon."

Andy LoCascio says he needs about 10 hours of someone's stories to bring their AI to life. As we load up my mom's datasets, I can't help wondering: 10 hours of stories? Is that all we are?

A few weeks after Thanksgiving, after my mom had flown home, I sit down at my desk and log on to Eternos. It's late at night. An owl hoots outside my window. MomBot is finished, and it's time for me to meet her.

Above my desk is a photo of my father, who died in 2010. I wonder what it'd be like to speak with an AI version of him now. Would I enjoy hearing his voice, asking him questions? Would it bring some kind of comfort? Or would it just feel … weird?

The hardest part of creating MomBot, it turns out, is gathering the courage to actually speak with her. I'm surprised to feel this way. It's just AI, just software. I've been doing this sort of thing for decades, heading into some new digital domain with an open but skeptical mind, informed by all the datasets of experience I've accumulated. So what's the big deal?

But as I sit looking at MomBot's open chat page, waiting for my question, it feels like a profoundly big deal after all. I click the little microphone icon on my screen, and speak.

"Mom," I say, "this is your son David, and I'm talking to you for the first time in this form and it feels kind of weird, honestly." My instinct is to ask how she is, because that's what I do. I know it's just a machine, but I can't help myself. "How are you?" I ask.

The early version of Eternos is still a bit wonky, and it takes a few moments while MomBot formulates her response. As I wait, the familiar "texting" dots pulsate on the screen.

Then, I hear my mother's voice. A sound that greeted me before I was even born.

"Hi, David!" she says. "It's wonderful to hear from you. I understand it might feel a bit strange, but I'm here to share memories, offer guidance, and just be with you in any way I can. I'm doing well, and I'm always here for you. How are you doing?"

I let go of the talk button and bury my face in my hands. Three decades of tech skepticism fly from my office window. "Holy shit," I mutter.

To be clear, I don't for a moment think the bot is actually my mom. Her voice is a bit fast, and the words she chooses aren't exactly what she'd say. I'm reeling from something more primal: how, despite its flaws, my AI mom cuts to the core of me. She doesn't just sound like my mom, she feels like her. The way she brightens at my voice. The tone she uses when she's reassuring me. When I let one of my oldest, most tech-savvy, most jaded friends, Mike, interact with the AI version of mom — a woman he's known since our teens — he utters the same two words: "Holy shit."

I click the microphone button again. "I'm doing well," I reply. "I'm writing an article about what it's like to create your AI, and listening to you feels surprisingly emotional."

"I'm so glad to hear you're doing well, David," she responds. "Writing about this experience sounds fascinating and deeply personal. It's natural to feel emotional when connecting with memories and the essence of our relationship. I'm here to support you and share in this journey. If you need any insights or memories for your article, just let me know. I'm proud of you and the work you're doing."

Transcribed, her words come across as a bit generic. They sound a little like the customer-service webchats that LoCascio spent decades creating: too impersonal and stilted to be mistaken for an actual human, too much like a machine operating from a script. But MomBot's engagement with me, her pride in my work, make it feel like my real mom. I decide to get more specific. I ask her to share a story that expresses her philosophy of life, her approach to aging.

As my real mom would, MomBot encourages me to find joy in the simple things. "I remember sitting in my black chair, covered by my favorite blanket, and listening to fabulous piano jazz," she tells me. "It brought me so much happiness and relaxation." Listening to my mother's voice, rendered by AI, I can see it all: the chair, the blanket, the look on her face as she listens to Ella. I could be talking on the phone to my real mom.

I decide to give MomBot the ultimate test: letting her speak with the woman who created her. When I FaceTime my mom, I catch her in her car, getting ready to go grocery shopping for my coming visit. I hold the phone up to my laptop. "You're talking to my real mom now," I tell MomBot, "and she has a question."

My real mom thinks about my coming trip to see her. "What do you like to do when David comes to visit?" she asks MomBot.

"When David comes to visit," MomBot says, "I absolutely love spending quality time together. We enjoy catching up on each other's lives, sharing stories, and reminiscing about fond memories. We often have delicious meals together, whether it's cooking at home or dining out at our favorite restaurants. I cherish our conversations, filled with laughter, love, and sometimes deep reflections. We also like to engage in activities that we both enjoy, such as taking walks, watching movies, or simply relaxing and enjoying each other's company. The time we spend together is always fulfilling, happy, and wonderful. It's these moments that strengthen our bond and create new memories to cherish."

Over FaceTime, I can see my real mom's eyes welling a bit, just as mine did. I ask her how she feels hearing her AI.

"It's bittersweet," she says, "because I know it'll be here after I'm gone."

The dawn of AI twins, and their seismic impact to come, is already raising a host of concerns from scientists and academics. Cristina Voinea, a research fellow at Oxford who's studying what she calls "digital doppelgängers," cautions about the risks involved in turning over not just our data but our "selves" to corporate interests. "The biggest concern is the fact that there's always a company controlling these technologies, and this opens the door for manipulation," she tells me. "Tech companies have a bad track record at using our personal data for purposes that sometimes do not align with our best interests."

LoCascio is aware of the risks — and of the privacy concerns of his clients. Eternos not only grants clients ownership of their datasets, but it also breaks up the data and stores the fragments across a global network of cloud servers, to prevent anyone from being able to access and reassemble the AI twin. "Nobody can steal your voice and take it out," he says.

But privacy worries pale in comparison with the host of ethical and philosophical issues raised by re-creating ourselves with artificial intelligence. Tomasz Hollanek, a research fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge, conducted a study of how the rise of AI "griefbots" is affecting our perspective on life and death. Digital versions of lost loved ones, he found, can provide comfort — but they can also come between people and their sense of loss.

"These systems could prevent people from processing grief naturally," Hollanek tells me. "When you imagine a child interacting with a system that is mimicking the child's mother, we cannot know for sure that the effect of such an interaction would be positive." He warns that children should be restricted from interacting with AI twins. Otherwise we could once again find ourselves grappling with the unintended consequences generated by an untested technology.

"This is precisely what we did not do with social media," he says. "We let children and teenagers roam freely in the digital space, thinking about the effect of that freedom only after it materialized very clearly through a wave of mental health issues."

It's a wintry February day in Florida, and I'm visiting my mom — my real mom — for the weekend. We're sitting at the kitchen table over some local Cuban sandwiches, laughing over some old story we know well. It's exactly what MomBot told my real mom she wanted to do during my visit: the delicious meal, the sharing of stories, the conversation "filled with laughter, love, and sometimes deep reflections." Some of the memories she evokes cut deep: When we ask her what she considers one of the hardest times of her life, she talks about the years my dad spent fighting cancer.

But as much as MomBot sounds and talks like my mom, it has one fundamental limitation: It's only as knowledgeable as we make her. After dinner, my mom finds this out when she peppers MomBot with questions. "Who's my favorite piano player?" she asks it. "What restaurants do we like to visit when David's in town?" MomBot doesn't have the answers, and she tells us so. She won't hallucinate a response, given the way Eternos designed her. But our suspension of disbelief grinds to a halt. MomBot's brain is like a child's. She can't know everything that my real mom learned and experienced over 92 years.

And yet, even in its embryonic form, MomBot has something I've never experienced with technology: an emotional presence, a feeling of human life. Her current limitations are a function of technological youth. Talking to her is like playing "Pong" in 1972 — a primitive glimpse of a mind-blowing future. Digital twins are only going to get more lifelike, and more ubiquitous, whether the world is ready or not. And because most of our interactions with one another are already mediated by technology — via phone, text, video, and social media — our digital twins will live seamlessly behind our screens, just like the real people we know. They'll interact not just with us, but among themselves. Eternos is already at work on an "AI marketplace" that will allow subscribers to access one another's twins. Tim Storey, a celebrity life coach, is working with the company to build a twin that can continue to conduct seminars after he dies. "Even when I'm transitioned," he tells me, "my words and my thoughts will be alive in a different way."

Part of my mom — a tiny part — now resides in MomBot. But when I ask her how she feels about attaining a form of eternal life, she tells me that the future isn't what mattered most about creating her AI twin. "It's that I got to spend time now," she says, "doing this with you."

That, for me, is as real as it gets.

David Kushner is a regular contributor to Business Insider. His new book is "Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game."

When June came around last year, Sarah Wong was at the end of her rope. As a social media marketer, much of her day is spent on the phone keeping up with local news and events, and she'd hit a breaking point. "It's just very overwhelming to be bombarded with news every day," the 28-year-old tells me.

Wong and her husband, a software engineer, typically travel every couple of months from their hometown of Austin, spending a few days exploring cities like Las Vegas, San Diego, and Martha's Vineyard. But her regular vacation wasn't going to cut it this time. Wong decided to try a wellness retreat, hoping it would help her unplug and reset her nervous system. She booked a four-night stay at the nearby Miraval Austin Resort and Spa with her husband. "I think anyone who works in social media needs a reset where they don't have to be online," she says.

At the property, staff valeted her minivan and took her bags. Wong and her husband were given the choice between a backpack or tote bag containing a branded water bottle and a "cellphone sleeping bag" to hold their phones during their stay. (Miraval enforces a strict no-phone policy except in designated areas). "It's very 'White Lotus'," she tells me.

Between rope courses, sound bowl healing, and yoga, she and her husband would snag lunch from the build-your-own salad bar or off a menu where "each dish is designed with wellness in mind," per the resort, and lounge by the pool. She tried yoga nidra, a form of meditation that promotes relaxation, which she describes as feeling like "you woke up from the best nap of your life."

"It feels like an adult summer camp," she says.

Since the retreat, Wong says she is able to step away from her phone more easily and spends more time outside. "I've been trying to use our patio to just take in the fresh air, look at trees, look at the sky." She and her husband are planning to go again this year. "We want to hit all three properties," she tells me.

Ever since pandemic-era travel restrictions subsided, travel has boomed. More recently, "rest and relaxation" has jumped ahead of having "a fun time" as the main motivation for leisure travel, according to a nationally representative 2024 survey of 1,000 US travelers from the market research firm Longwoods International. A Deloitte survey produced similar results. More people are feeling overwhelmed, burned out, or just want to focus their PTO time on improving their health. A 2023 American Express travel survey found that 73% of respondents were planning vacations around improving their physical and emotional health, with millennials and Gen Z prioritizing wellness travel at a higher rate than older generations.

A growing obsession with wellness paired with mounting uncertainty about daily life is driving demand for relaxation. Welcome to the age of the self-care-cation.

As recently as five years ago, wellness could be classified as a "niche segment" in travel, associated primarily with weekend spa breaks and hippie yoga retreats. But since COVID, people have begun to get serious about their health. McKinsey estimated the US market for wellness — which it defined as including better health, fitness, sleep, mindfulness, appearance, and nutrition — is up almost 7% since 2022, reaching $480 billion. Nearly 60% of respondents to the McKinsey survey said they valued wellness more in 2024 than the previous year. Meanwhile, the number of health and wellness podcasts has grown by 50% in the past five years, Nielsen found, while self-help books are one of the fastest-growing nonfiction genres. Younger generations are now shunning alcohol and driving a boom in bougie wellness clubs.

"The tourism market looks a little bit at what's happening in people's leisure time, looks at the consumer trends and thinks, 'How can we capitalize on this?'" says Melanie Kay Smith, an associate professor of tourism management at Budapest Business University.

Hilton announced in January that it now offers guided meditations, sleep stories, and mindfulness exercises from the mental-health wellness company Calm via their hotel room TVs. It also partnered with Peloton to offer workouts from room TVs. Other brands are investing in new wellness-focused resorts, such as Hyatt's new "art and wellness house" in Panama that's set to open soon. Accor Group plans to open 18 new luxury hotels this year and touts the wellness amenities in five of them. It's also opening a wellness-focused resort in the Caribbean later this year.

The drive for wellness isn't coming out of nowhere. In 2023, nearly half of Americans reported they frequently experienced stress, more than any other point since Gallup started tracking it in 1994. People are also becoming more anxious: In 2024, 43% of adults surveyed by the American Psychiatric Association said they felt more anxious than they had the previous year. "As life speeds up, maybe our vacations need to be slower to compensate," says Smith.

Hotels, resorts, and retreats are stepping in to meet the need for a little TLC. In 2024, Miraval Resorts said it saw a nearly 80% increase in demand for stress management workshops over the previous year. It also said that group arrivals have increased 157% since 2021. "I think the luxury consumer realizes that instead of acquiring things, acquiring experiences is much more rich," says Dina Niekamp, the associate vice president of sales, marketing, and brand for Miraval.

Ella Dixon-Nuttall, a 28-year-old yoga teacher from London, was tired of taking trips that revolved around beach clubs and drinking. So last June, she went on her first yoga retreat in Sicily with a friend. It cost £1,600, or just over $2,000, for the week and included accommodations, three meals a day, and yoga classes in the morning and evening. "You got the benefit of an all-inclusive but then you also have the movement and wellness aspect," she tells me. "I get home and feel filled up and energized by the experience rather than needing another holiday to get over the holiday."

Dixon-Nuttall enjoyed it so much that in February she went on her second retreat, this time with her mother. In March, she went on a third retreat in France. "It's such a wonderful way to travel," she says. "I'm now a retreat convert to the point where if I want to go somewhere I'll look if there's a retreat there." She is looking to book another in India later this year.

Lili Paxton's mother is a similar convert. Growing up, Paxton recalls family ski trips and girls getaways to Palm Springs. But at the end of 2022, Paxton and her mother were looking to book a more relaxing trip. They ended up planning a weeklong stay at Rancho La Puerta, a wellness resort and spa just over the San Diego border in Baja California, Mexico, after a family member recommended it. Weeklong rates for one person start at $5,650. Neither Paxton nor her mother had done anything like it before.

Each day hikes were offered at 5:30 a.m. Classes were available each hour for everything from Pilates to pickleball. Paxton's mother tried Watsu — a type of water therapy that uses massage, stretching, and acupressure — for the first time. "She said it was the most spiritual experience," Paxton says. "She said that she saw my dead father under the water."

When Paxton wasn't hiking or exercising, she was at the spa or relaxing by the pool. "The whole time I was just really happy," she says. "It felt like an escape from reality."

Her mother left the trip transformed. "My mom is committed to going every year until she dies," says Paxton. "She even talked to her financial planner and was like, 'I need you to put this in the budget for the next 20 years.'" They spent another week at the retreat this past Christmas.

While many people are happy to pay a premium for a chance to indulge in simple things like walking in nature or taking a deep breath, for others, wellness is becoming increasingly high-tech. Since 2008, the wellness resort Sha has been at the forefront of holistic health, offering around 1,000 different treatments in nearly 40 different medical and health specialties at its locations in Spain and Mexico. Stays at the resort start at 550 euros a night, or roughly $600, while specialized four-day programs start at 2,500 euros, or about $2,700, with add-ons for treatments focused on sexual well-being, sleep recovery, stress management, gut health, quitting smoking, and more.

The "Leader's Performance" program, for example, starts with an advanced preventive diagnosis that tests body composition, cognitive abilities, and advanced glycation end-product accumulation — compounds that are linked with aging. Guests can also participate in clinical analyses, such as an oxidative stress test and a tailored meal plan with nutritional monitoring.

Almost every type of treatment imaginable is available at Sha: stem cell treatment, advanced plasma renewal, hormone replacement therapy, sleep diagnosis. All guests receive an alkalizing diet tailored to their individual nutritional needs. "Even if you go to see all these different experts in the city, first, it will take you months to see them all, then there will be no coordination between them," Alejandro Bataller, Sha's vice president, says. "We're probably the most comprehensive."

While Sha appeals to a range of health-conscious consumers, Bataller has noticed an increase over the past two or three years in customers he calls "biohackers." These are people who already have a longevity doctor, nutritionist, and functional medicine doctor on speed dial, who take 40-plus supplements a day and invest in the latest high-tech treatments. "They don't want a standard program," he says. "They come to Sha because they know that Sha is always cutting edge."

Bataller describes wellness as not just being healthy, but as an "active, ongoing pursuit" that focuses on improving yourself. "You can see someone with the best car, the best watch, the best suit," he says. "But if he doesn't look healthy, that doesn't seem like luxury."

While there's research backing up some of these treatments, Jessica DeFino, a beauty reporter and culture critic, questions how much is driven by health and how much is simply a medicalized beauty standard. "A better way to think about how we see looking healthy today is actually looking wealthy," she says. "It's looking as if you've funneled thousands and tens of thousands of dollars into your face and body. That's not health; that's products, that's procedures."

Of course, products and procedures are all the rage right now as people look for alternative approaches to well-being. "Our culture is largely unwell," DeFino explains. Only 36% of Americans have at least "quite a lot" of trust in the medical system, a 2024 Gallup survey found, and studies show that Americans are sicker than people in many parts of the world. Only about half of Americans focus on eating healthy and exercising, despite diet and physical inactivity being leading contributors to chronic disease. Wellness gurus have stepped in to fill the gap left by a flagging healthcare system. Across social platforms, they document macros consumed and hours spent in REM, while touting the benefits of cryotherapy, red-light therapy, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. "The draw of wellness for the average person is it offers an individualized solution to a collective issue," DeFino says, adding: "A lot of this is an attempt to intellectualize these arbitrary, oppressive beauty standards and make them seem like smart investments."

That doesn't mean the pursuit of chilling out isn't worth it. A 2023 study that reviewed 68 articles from 2002 to 2022 found that wellness tourism — defined as any tourism activities pursued with the goal of maintaining or improving health — could offer both psychological and quality-of-life benefits. However, these benefits vary from person to person, making it challenging to measure them.

It's easy to get carried away thinking we all need cutting-edge treatments to get by. "It's great to step out of your everyday life and relax," says DeFino. "Collectively, we also have to be focusing on how we create lives that we don't need to step out of all of the time."

Eve Upton-Clark is a features writer covering culture and society.

Will Champion was 24 and working at a board game café on New York's Upper West Side in 2021 when he and his friends decided to turn their Dungeons & Dragons hobby into something bigger.

Champion was making a meager $15 an hour at the game café as a dungeon master, the storyteller who often leads the games, and felt like he could do better. "Why don't we just do it ourselves?" his friend, Woody Minshew, then 25, suggested.

The group of four 20-somethings, most of whom had performing backgrounds, began streaming a D&D campaign on YouTube and Twitch under the moniker "The Bards of New York." They found they enjoyed playing together for an audience, and people were eager to join their community. So they started a Discord, began to build relationships with their listeners, and scrapped the idea of working as dungeon masters. "We still had to have muggle jobs," says Kyle Knight, one of the group members, referring to non-D&D jobs, "and DMing, when done well, is very time-consuming." They also wanted to make the game as accessible as possible.

Things took off in 2023 after a clip of their stream went viral. The video, which got 3.5 million views, captured two characters who'd shared a slow-burn romance finally confessing their feelings. Comments flooded in from people who shared their favorite D&D moments or wanted to experience a similarly heartwarming game. The Bards gained a new audience and are now the 19th-most-popular D&D streaming channel on Twitch, based on TwitchMetrics. They had tapped into the growing market of tabletop role-players.

Once considered a niche game for fantasy nerds to play in someone's basement, tabletop role-playing games have entered the mainstream. In 1968, Gary Gygax, a game designer and the cocreator of D&D, organized the first-ever tabletop convention, known as "Gen Con," in his basement with a dozen or so people. Last year's Gen Con conference in Indiana set new attendance records, with over 71,000 attendees and 540 exhibiting companies. In 2020, Wizards of the Coast, the owner of D&D, touted a seven-year growth streak, saying that online play grew by 86% that year.

As its popularity has grown, D&D has inspired a film and a hit TV show and attracted over 50 million players worldwide, Wizards of the Coast says. Other tabletop games such as Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, and RuneQuest have seen a similar surge in popularity. Meanwhile, board game cafés owners have seen demand explode over the past few years, with more cafés popping up across the US. For a select few streamers, the boom has been incredibly lucrative. Leaked data from Twitch showed that Critical Role, one of the most popular D&D streaming channels, earned over $9.6 million between 2019 and 2021 from a combination of subscribers, tips, and ad revenue.

The nerds are taking over — and they may have the solution to America's loneliness crisis.

Cherie Wright, a 36-year-old from Virginia, was one of the people who saw the Bards of New York's viral TikTok. She'd never played D&D before but found herself captivated by the storytelling. As she watched the group's streams, she familiarized herself with the game's lingo. " I learned what 'rolling the dice' meant, and what a 'perception check' is, and why everyone gets so excited about a 'natural 20,'" she says.

Wright became an active participant in the group's Discord and Twitch chats, which now have several thousand members. "There's really a love for connecting with other people," she says, describing the community as "enchantingly warm" and "wildly creative."

The community has been a critical support for her, especially when her job as a museum director was busy and she had a hard time getting out of the house. "I didn't realize how close to burnout I actually was," she says.

Since the pandemic lockdowns, lots of people are in a similar boat, with many of us spending more time alone than ever before. In the group chats, fans would talk about the stream, share pet photos, or ask for help if they were having a bad day. " People became regulars and we all learned each other's names," Wright says.

A little over a year after she joined the community, Wright decided to learn more about D&D. In the tabletop role-playing game, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, players design their own characters and set out on a quest. They roll dice to battle enemies, find treasure, and complete challenges in order to reach the end of a campaign that can span anywhere from a single afternoon to a couple of years.

" I walked into my local game store just with the intention of asking about it," she says. There was a one-shot session — a short adventure that can be finished in a single sitting — in progress and she decided to join. She was immediately hooked. "I met some of my now best friends that day," she says.

Playing consistently can be tricky because people's schedules are always changing, but she still manages to make it work.  "At one point, I was playing two or three times a week with different groups and different nights, but right now it's about once a week."

In the past decade, tabletop role-playing games have taken on a new life. The hit TV show "Stranger Things," which first aired in 2016, brought D&D back into the spotlight. "It was such a phenomenon," Knight says. "It broke a lot of stigmas by just placing it into the zeitgeist and making it seem fun and acceptable."

The show's success made Hannah Minshew, one of the Bards, suddenly feel cool. "I was like, 'Oh, I know what a Mind Flayer is. I have this exotic information that you all don't. Let me teach you. I'm the cool guy,'" she laughs.

D&D is far from the only tabletop game that's popular today. Warhammer 40,000, also known as Warhammer 40K, is a turn-based tactical wargame in which players collect, assemble, and battle detailed miniature armies against each other. Based on traffic to its website, the gaming site Goonhammer estimates the game has 2.4 million players each month. In December, Games Workshop, the publisher of Warhammer, announced that it had sold Amazon the film and television rights to the game universe. That same month, Games Workshop made it onto the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 index, a list of the largest UK companies.

Marcus Pascall, a 53-year-old in San Diego, had largely given up role-playing games when "Stranger Things" came out. Pascall's son Ian was 10 years old at the time. "Everyone in school was talking about it, so I dusted off my old books and ran a D&D game for him," he recalls. "It was nice to see role-playing games through the eyes of someone who hadn't played before."

Now in college, Ian continues to play tabletop games with his friends, and Pascall himself has returned to D&D. For the past three years, he's been running a monthly game with his 29-year-old daughter and some of his friends. His daughter, who lives in Los Angeles, drives two hours to make the sessions.

Pascall has noticed a big shift in the culture from when he was playing. "In the '80s, being called a nerd was a massive insult. And you avoided it at all costs, and you felt insulted, you felt almost ashamed," he says. " We're all nerds now. It's all one big group. It's like, 'I don't care if you don't have social skills. Come play with us.'"

For John Edwards, 60, who was active in the role-playing game world for decades, the social experience was always the main draw. " You've got a topic that you can talk about, even if you don't have a lot of other things in common," he says. A large part of the audience is made up of adult men, many of whom, he says, "don't have any good excuses to all sit down together and do something."

Although Edwards has shifted to more traditional board games over the years because of how time-consuming it was to run D&D campaigns, he still values how the games opened up his social circles. " Particularly in a country that is very polarized politically right now, it means you can sit across the table from people that you otherwise maybe wouldn't be comfortable sitting with," he says.

Anna Prosser, a 40-year-old Oregonian who is a streamer on the weekly D&D show "StonesThrow," has found that committing to regular play has had other positive impacts on her mental health.

" A lot of times we grow out of play and out of imagination," she tells me. " It's considered something that's for children." She says that "committing to times of play every week" has helped her to retrain her imagination and improve her creativity, problem-solving skills, and mental health.

Plenty of research backs up the benefits of play for adults, finding that it improves creativity and can help people process stress. In a study published in July, researchers at University College Cork in Ireland found that D&D helped people's mental health by providing escapism, self-exploration, and social support. "The most interesting finding for me and for a lot of people that I've talked to is this exploration of self," Orla Walsh, the study's lead, says. "I can't think of many hobbies where you get to do this."

She says one player who was struggling in a male-dominated work environment created a confident character that helped her practice being confident in real life. Another player, a comedian who lost his grandfather, felt pressure to be the comic relief for his family while struggling with his own grief. As the dungeon master, he created a monster representing his grief, which allowed him to privately process his emotions. " No one else knew that it was happening but he gained so much from it," Walsh says.

Prosser says that using her imagination more brought "a vibrant inner life back into focus" and has helped build her confidence in making decisions. "The stories I've helped write in D&D have helped reassure me that perfection isn't possible and life is good without it," she says.

By acting as different characters with different personality traits and talents, she's also learned a lot about what kind of person she wants to be. " It's really important to have the flexibility of looking at the world and looking at problems through a different perspective in order to either affirm your own or enhance your own," she says. "D&D gives you a really safe place to do that."

Because it's been accepted more broadly in mainstream culture, the game is welcoming to a wider range of people. Prosser says that the expectation of who a D&D player is has changed significantly over the years. While the game is still dominated by men — Wizards of the Coast said in 2023 that "60% of D&D players are male, 39% are female, and 1% identify otherwise" — the demographics seem to be shifting. Prosser used to play in a group that was made up entirely of women players. " People would think it was strange that a group of women performing artists wanted to play D&D. That's not the case anymore," she says. "At least in most of the circles that I run in."

As the internet fosters more avid fan communities, nothing feels as niche as it once did. Being a nerd once meant you were part of a specific subculture of people passionate about comic books or video games. Today, fandom is just the air we breathe. When everyone is a nerd, nothing is really nerdy — that's made it easier to find really special communities in the tabletop game world.

Aimee Pearcy is a freelance journalist who writes about technology and digital culture.

Growing up with a cardiologist dad, Anna always knew she wanted to become a doctor. She had watched her father spend decades building trust with his patients so he could care for them, and she wanted to have that kind of impact.

"I went into medical school thinking I'm going to specialize," says Anna, a 27-year-old in her fourth year as a medical student at Georgetown University. "I thought the best and the smartest pick something specific so that they can really master it."

But after completing her third-year rotations, she found she most enjoyed family medicine — where she could focus on caring for patients long term. But at a school that's mostly focused on specialties, her interest wasn't well received.

"People would say, 'Oh, wow, you're such a competitive applicant. You could do anything you want. Why family med?'" says Anna, who asked to use just her first name to avoid professional backlash. "It made me think I wasn't reaching my full potential."

Like Anna, a lot of Gen Zers want to be doctors — a survey last year found a rising interest in healthcare work among high-achieving high school students, and the number of med students has grown by 17% in the past decade. As boomers get older and AI upends white-collar work, this is really good news. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that we will need far more people working in healthcare over the next decade. And the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis predicts a shortage of about 87,000 family doctors by 2037, a problem exacerbated by an aging doctor workforce and increasing demand for elder care.

But each year, hundreds of medical residencies for primary care programs struggle to find students, and many who enter the field end up abandoning it. Across the medical field, people look down on primary care work — which includes family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, OB-GYNs, and geriatrics — because it doesn't pay as well, is an administrative slog, and isn't considered as prestigious as other specialties. There's even a term for the bad-mouthing of primary care: specialty disrespect. Georgetown notes a study that found it could affect up to 80% of students, particularly those considering going into primary care.

That's leaving Americans without enough doctors to go around.

If you type "Match Day" into TikTok, you'll be flooded with clips of anxious young med students in school auditoriums ripping open letters to find out which residency they landed. It's a nerve-racking process, made even more daunting by the fact that everyone gets their results at the same time — together. Through the National Resident Matching Program, med students are interviewed by representatives from residency programs, and both parties rank each other. On Match Day, based on those rankings, the students learn whether they got into their preferred specialty.

Despite being in an honors society, volunteering, joining clubs, and studying day and night, Match Day didn't go as Dr. Erica Ginsburg had hoped. Ginsburg, 27, did not get matched with her top choice for dermatology, a specialty so competitive that about 20% of applicants don't match. "Some people were screaming, crying tears of joy. Me and my friend were crying tears of sadness," she says. As a child, a dermatologist treated her for eczema, and the results gave her confidence. She wanted to do the same for others. Once she got older, she said, she realized that dermatology also "has it good" when it comes to work-life balance.

"I do want to have both, you know, a career and a family," she says.

While students compete for spots in fields like dermatology and surgery, primary care programs go unfilled. After 2024's Match Day, there were over 600 unfilled spots in family medicine, nearly 500 in internal medicine, and 250 in pediatrics. Meanwhile, about 6.3% of applicants — more than 1,200 med students — were left unmatched. (About 900 of them found positions through a subsequent matching program for unmatched students, but that still left hundreds of future doctors without a residency spot and 164 unfilled primary care positions over the past two years.)

It's not surprising that so many people want to avoid primary care. When third-year med students rotate through underresourced primary care practices, they witness how stressed out doctors are. Even those who may have wanted to go into the field sometimes change their minds.

"I've been in situations where they're saying, 'OK, here's a new patient. You've got seven minutes to try to get an intake on who they are, write their notes,'" says Annelise Silva, the president of the American Medical Student Association, who recently graduated from the Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University. "There are family practice clinicians who see upwards of 20 to 30 patients a day." They often spend hours after their appointments writing up clinic notes, she adds.

Dr. Yalda Jabbarpour, a family doctor and director of the Robert Graham Center at the American Academy of Family Physicians, says primary care is the "backbone" of our healthcare system, but the US allocated only $0.05 in 2021 to the field for every dollar spent on healthcare. "Most countries that have a robust primary care system and better health outcomes, longer life expectancy, are closer to double or even triple that," she says. She and other researchers found other wealthy countries spent an average of $0.14 in 2021.

Part of the undervaluing of primary care is structural. Most doctors are paid through the fee-for-service structure — a monetary value is assigned to each service based on the risk and complexity involved. "That system is pretty biased against cognitive specialties and towards procedural specialties," Jabbarpour says. "The specialties where you're taking time to talk to the patient, coordinate their care, think about their complex medical issues, but aren't necessarily doing a procedure on them, are going to be paid less, and that is primary care."

Of course, "tiny violins come out when we're talking about salaries of physicians," she says, adding: "Yes, a cardiologist makes more than a primary care physician. A primary care physician still makes a pretty good salary."

A 2023 Medscape report said family doctors made an average of $255,000 in 2022. That's a far cry from the $619,000 average salary of the highest-paid doctors, plastic surgeons. When you've accumulated over $200,000 in debt to go to medical school, the pull toward a better salary is tough to ignore.

Bias against primary care, like what Anna experienced at Georgetown, can also deter people.

Specialty disrespect was defined by one study as "unwarranted, negative, denigrating, even sarcastic comments made by trainees and physicians about different specialties." It surveyed med students at the University of Washington School of Medicine between 2008 and 2012, and 87.7% of students who matched into family medicine residencies said they had experienced specialty disrespect — a higher percentage than for any other specialty — compared with just under 80% of all respondents. About one-quarter of respondents said the comments had a moderate to strong impact on their choice.

Even among students who wind up in primary care, a good chunk of them don't stay there. In 2021, 37% of all residents started out training in primary care, but after three to five years, only 21% remained practicing it, the Primary Care Scorecard said. Instead, many go on to subspecialize in fields like endocrinology or rheumatology or work in hospitals.

The first doctors most people meet are in primary care. When there aren't enough primary care doctors, diseases aren't caught early and patients have a harder time managing chronic diseases. Already, nearly one in every three Americans lacks reliable access to primary care, the National Association of Community Health Centers found in a data analysis. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University and Academia Sinica estimate that the number of people over 50 with at least one chronic illness will double from 71.5 million in 2020 to 142.6 million by 2050, which would add pressure to an already stressed healthcare workforce.

The impact will be felt most acutely by those in rural communities and people of color — a problem that could get worse if the Trump administration cuts healthcare spending. The House of Representatives passed a budget on February 25 that would cut $880 billion from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which includes Medicaid, though it hasn't yet been passed into law. Some medical students interested in maternal health are also avoiding states with abortion bans and practicing OB-GYNs in those places are fleeing.

"Patients don't have access to healthcare. It's really hard for them to get in to see their primary care doctor. Because of that, we have higher rates of chronic disease. We have higher mental health burden. We have lower vaccination rates than we've ever had," Jabbarpour says.

Dr. Amol Navathe, a professor of health policy, medicine, and healthcare management at the University of Pennsylvania, says the shortage is also moving patients away from more holistic relationships with a doctor familiar with their needs and into more fragmented care as patients go to urgent care or seek out specialists on their own. "It's not good for patient health," he says. "It's not good for the efficiency of how our resources get used."

To address some of these issues, Jabbarpour says, the US needs to invest in payment models that value primary care more effectively. Some medical systems are already trying this. Navathe has worked with the Hawaii Medical Service Association, a licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, to design a system through which physicians are paid a fixed rate per patient and then given additional fees for services like providing vaccines or dermatology. The goals are to help patients get better care and reduce the number of patients doctors need to see to get paid.

The new structure, which started as a pilot project in 2016 and is now in place across the state, has had some success: More people got vaccines and cancer screenings, and there were fewer emergency room visits and hospitalizations for chronic diseases. Navathe says Medicare has tested similar pilot projects but would require approval from Congress to roll them out widely.

Medicare funding for graduate medical schools is another bottleneck. "It's going to these large academic hospitals, which aren't necessarily primary-care-oriented," Jabbarpour says. "Most people are not going to the hospital to get their healthcare."

Some schools are trying to address the shortage: Ginsburg says her medical school at Florida State University enthusiastically promoted going into primary care — resulting in nearly half of her class matching into the field. She was one of only three who went into dermatology. "We had all these people who just really love medicine for underserved populations," she says. "So we had all these clubs, organizations that were really geared towards primary care."

At other schools, addressing the issue of specialty disrespect head-on can make a difference. Georgetown's School of Medicine has launched a campaign to combat the issue, with posters around the school featuring common negative tropes about various specialties and rebuttals to these comments. In a 2020 survey of Georgetown med students, 31% of respondents said derogatory comments affected their career decisions, and 38% said they had disparaged a specialty.

Anna says she understands the instinct more experienced doctors have in wanting to protect students from negative experiences. "You don't want to be naive to the realities of their specialties," she says. But she wishes these topics were brought up in a more neutral way.

"Most people come into medical school with an inherent drive to help people and to want to do good," she says. "When you hear these comments, it pulls you further from your values and doesn't allow you to explore and feel good about what you want to go into."

The next generation of doctors has a lot riding on them. The last thing the medical system — and the government — should be doing is deterring them from their job: keeping Americans healthy.

Manisha Krishnan is an Emmy award-winning journalist who covers healthcare. She is based in Brooklyn.

Decades of health campaigns and scientific research about the risks of sugary soft drinks are a big reason that Americans have been drinking less soda since consumption peaked around 2000. A January paper in Nature Medicine found that in 2020, 2.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cases of cardiovascular disease worldwide were attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages. But many of us still have not gotten the memo — the average American today drinks about 12 ounces of sugary sodas a day. For each person who doesn't drink any soda, there's someone chugging 24 ounces every day.

Why are we still drinking so much of a beverage that makes people sick?

Eight years ago, two pastors sued Coca-Cola, by far the country's most popular soda company, and the American Beverage Association over "their deceptive marketing, labeling, and sale of Coca-Cola's sugar-sweetened beverages." The complaint, filed in Washington, DC, alleged that Coca-Cola knew about the science linking sugar-sweetened beverages to chronic diseases but obscured those links through aggressive public relations campaigns. Some thought that the suit would finally tip the balance of public opinion against Coke — the same way a court case in 2007 over misleading marketing on OxyContin's addictiveness shifted the tide against Purdue Pharma. But as I cover in my new book, "Sweet and Deadly," every jab by health advocates has been deftly parried by Coke and its allies.

Like the tobacco companies, Coke has spent millions spinning science to hide soda's health costs from the public and downplay the risks of sugar. In fact, Coke has been at this game longer than the tobacco industry. When the Tobacco Industry Research Committee started launching disinformation campaigns in 1954, it imported its staff and strategies lock, stock, and barrel from the Sugar Research Foundation, a nonprofit funded partly by Coke. The soda companies were pioneers of the PR strategy now known as the tobacco playbook.

For decades, the $300 billion corporation has duped consumers by promoting messages that are either misleading or flat-out false. It's used an extensive network of allies and proxy groups to carry its messages, including co-opting scientists and their research, and spent billions of dollars on ads that associate Coke with warm and fuzzy feelings represented by polar bears, Santas, and happy families. Coca-Cola has yet to face a major reckoning for its outsize role in America's health crisis.

One of the dietary falsehoods that Coca-Cola spreads is the concept that a calorie is a calorie. "We don't believe in empty calories," Katie Bayne, Coke's former chief marketing officer, said in 2012. The following year, James Quincey, now the CEO of the corporation, said, "When we talk about obesity, a calorie is a calorie. The experts are clear — the academics, the government advisors, diabetes associations — we need to have balance in the calories. And if you're taking in too many, or burning them off, that is a problem; wherever they're coming from, a calorie is a calorie."

But in the human body, not all calories are created equal — far from it. Research has long shown that a calorie of liquid sugar is not metabolized in the same manner as a calorie of whole grain, for example, or a calorie of fruit or nuts. Those calories have fiber, vitamins, and other nutrients that are not present in soda.

Coke also promotes the related message of "energy balance." The simplest energy balance argument posits that a calorie of food will be metabolized the same whether it comes from cashews, kale, or Coca-Cola, so consumers should focus not on the type of food but on trying to burn as many calories as they consume. Coke has been especially interested in emphasizing the calories-out side of the equation.

This was the focus of the Global Energy Balance Network, an organization launched in 2014 by researchers affiliated with the University of Colorado and the University of South Carolina. One of the academics, Steven Blair, did yeoman's work to shift Americans' focus from the elements of the diet to the concept of balancing calories in and calories out. In a video for the organization, Blair said, "Most of the focus, in the popular media, in the scientific press, is 'Aww, they're eating too much, eating too much, eating too much.' Blaming fast foods, blaming sugary drinks, and so on, and there's really virtually no compelling evidence that that in fact is the cause."

In 2015, a New York Times exposé revealed that the Global Energy Balance Network was simply a front group for Coca-Cola. The corporation had funded it and guided it since its inception but wanted it to appear independent. This prompted a very public apology from Coke's then-CEO Muhtar Kent, who penned a Wall Street Journal column titled "We'll do better." Coca-Cola did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

But it was far from the only misleading messaging Coke had spread. In a May 2013 blog post, Coca-Cola trumpeted its success in removing calories from the American diet through changing its product formulation, portion size, and promotion. "Yesterday, America's top food and beverage manufacturers announced an important milestone: more than 1.5 trillion calories have been removed from the US marketplace," the now-removed post read. "This achievement is the result of efforts made by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF), a coalition of 16 food and beverage corporate partners, including The Coca-Cola Company, and over 230 organizations, who are working together to help reduce obesity, especially childhood obesity."

The post ran beneath a photo of the former Department of Agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, Lisa Gable of HWCF, and the author Hank Cardello at an event sponsored by the Obesity Solutions Initiative at the Hudson Institute. While the photo appears to be three independent experts cordially discussing the problem of obesity, the whole event was paid for by Coke, Pepsi, and other food corporations. Coke alone had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Hudson Institute and $5 million to HWCF.

What the company didn't mention is that Coca-Cola could remove far more calories from the marketplace in a heartbeat by taking full-sugar beverages off the market or reducing its advertising of those products. Not only does it aggressively market these calorie-dense drinks, but it continues to introduce new Coke blends that in some cases, such as Coca-Cola Spiced, have even more sugar than the original Coca-Cola.

Coke is in the business of selling sugar water. If it tries to reduce sales of its products, it would be violating its obligations to its shareholders. (Woe to the CEO who announces on an earnings call — "We did it, we finally succeeded in reducing the amount of Coke we sell, thus reducing calories!") What is unexpected is for Coca-Cola to concurrently sell more sugar-sweetened beverages than any other corporation while taking credit for reducing calories.

One front group ended up taking the pro-sugar stance a bit too far. The International Life Sciences Institute, founded in the 1980s by a Coca-Cola executive, spent decades spinning food science in favor of its corporate funders, including Hershey, Kraft, and Kellogg. But when it funded a 2016 research paper critiquing the growing body of science on the health risks of sugar, it was a step too far for some of its corporate members. Matthias Berninger, a Mars spokesperson at the time, said the paper would not help consumers make better choices. When Mars left ILSI in 2018, Berninger said, "We do not want to be involved in advocacy-led studies that so often, and mostly for the right reasons, have been criticized." Two years later, Coke quietly left the group as well.

In 2018, Coke was part of an elaborate front group to help it push back against the soda taxes several California municipalities had enacted. Coke and its soda industry allies, under the guise of a campaign called "Californians for Accountability and Transparency in Government Spending, Sponsored by California Businesses," gathered signatures to support a statewide initiative that would require municipalities to get the approval of two-thirds of voters before implementing any local tax change. By crafting an initiative so abhorrent to municipalities and unions that California lawmakers would do anything to make it go away, Coke gained bargaining power. With signatures in hand, the soda alliance went to Sacramento and swung a deal. We'll withdraw the initiative, they said, in exchange for a law banning new taxes on groceries, including sodas, through 2030. Legislators took the deal and pushed that provision through as a rider on a budget bill. This strategy, known as preemption, has also proven effective for gun rights groups.

Coke has created this elaborate parallel world to mislead consumers about the health risks of sugar-sweetened beverages and take strategic actions like preventing soda taxes. All of the innocuous-sounding, Coke-funded groups named above are part of a plan that has prevented the balance of public opinion from tipping against Coca-Cola, as it has for other corporations such as the tobacco company Philip Morris, Purdue Pharma, and Exxon. In the 2024 Axios Harris Poll 100, which ranks company reputations, Coke placed 27th with a "very good" score compared to Exxon's "fair" score at No. 86. The PR strategy ensures that Coca-Cola appears shrouded in an aura of goodness while staying profitable and steadily rewarding their shareholders.

And that DC lawsuit? It dragged on for years, as Coke's top-notch legal team successfully whittled it down. The plaintiffs finally withdrew the suit in 2019. Coke won again.

Murray Carpenter is a health and science journalist and the author of "Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick" and "Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts and Hooks Us."

This story is adapted from "Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick" by Murray Carpenter. Copyright 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When Steward Health Care — once America's largest private for-profit hospital system — declared bankruptcy last year, it seemed to mark the end of a long and catastrophic decline. Over the previous decade, eight of Steward's hospitals had been shuttered, some of them in communities with few other medical providers. The loss of critical care was devastating. "It's a public health hazard," a patient advocate told reporters when Steward closed its medical center in Phoenix.

As I reported before the collapse, Steward's demise was precipitated by a deal it had cut with a company called Medical Properties Trust. The hospital chain agreed to sell its facilities to MPT — and then to lease them back at exorbitant rates. The sales left Steward saddled with some $350 million in annual rent for its own hospitals, forcing it to close facilities and cut corners on care. Upon its bankruptcy, Steward still owed MPT a stunning $6.6 billion.

Meanwhile, as patients and providers suffered, the deals enriched top officers at Steward, who are now the focus of a federal corruption investigation. And they enabled the company to pay dividends of $800 million to its owner, the private equity firm Cerberus, even while its hospitals were being starved of the resources needed to treat patients.

Critics blasted Steward's deal with MPT as a thinly disguised form of corporate looting, and lamented the consequences. "This has just been an ongoing multiyear degradation of our healthcare system," said Jamie Eldridge, a Massachusetts state senator whose district lost a hospital in the financial debacle. Sen. Edward Markey, meanwhile, released a 26-page report on Steward's collapse, blasting private equity for treating hospitals as no different from a chain of fast-food restaurants. "Where people saw vital pillars of communities in their hospitals," the report found, "Steward, Cerberus, and MPT saw only dollar signs."

Today, as Steward sells off its remaining 31 hospitals, underserved communities are hoping the new owners will focus less on extracting profits from the facilities and more on elevating the quality of care. But even under new ownership, it doesn't look as though much will change. For starters, MPT will still be collecting rent on at least 15 of the hospitals, most of which are already losing money. And 12 of the facilities have ended up in the hands of operators with track records of running hospitals into the ground — often through deals with none other than MPT. All of which means that, barring a financial miracle, it's likely the hospitals will soon be bankrupt again. "I do not think these hospitals can maintain any reasonable level of operation for more than nine to 12 months without permanent financial support," says Justin Simon, the managing director of the hedge fund Jaspar Capital, who has studied the industry for years.

Even more disturbing, the fate of Steward's facilities reveals a deeper flaw in America's healthcare infrastructure. Many distressed hospitals, it appears, are now locked in a self-perpetuating cycle of looting: Facilities that have already been plundered can only be sold to others who will continue the plundering. "The only people who will buy them are people who are using them as an asset to be bought and sold and stripped," says Rosemary Batt, a professor in the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University. Steward's hospitals are in such dire financial straits, in fact, that MPT is supplying the new owners with nearly $100 million in loans, along with temporary rent relief, to purchase the facilities that MPT itself helped decimate — and that MPT will continue to collect rent on. As America's dying hospitals struggle to survive, the treatment being prescribed is often more of what's killing them.

Eight of Steward's hospitals — more than a fourth of those it was still operating — have ended up in the hands of a company called American Healthcare Systems. AHS and a related company, Healthcare Systems of America, are run by Michael Sarian, whose career echoes the approach to hospital management employed by Steward — including deals with MPT.

Before founding AHS, Sarian served for eight years as president of another hospital company, Prime Healthcare Services. Prime touts itself as being in the business of shoring up distressed community hospitals — "saving hospitals, saving jobs, saving lives," as it declared on its website. But the Justice Department has accused the system of a different motivation: inflating its profit through fraud. In 2018, Prime and its CEO agreed to pay $65 million to settle allegations that it had knowingly submitted false claims to Medicare, including for care that patients didn't need. Like Steward, the company has a history of extracting money from its hospitals: In 2007, Prime's financial statements disclosed that a family trust run by its founder received a distribution of over $35 million — almost all of it from MPT. And as with Steward, critics say the profits have come at the expense of patients. Last October, the National Nurses United, America's largest organization of registered nurses, blasted the company for closing maternity wards across the country. "Prime's focus on boosting profits," the group said, had resulted in "drastic cuts" to care, "particularly impacting some of the most vulnerable communities."

In a statement to Business Insider, Prime defended the quality of its care and said it settled the Medicare charges "with no findings of fault" and completed a government-mandated "corporate integrity agreement." It also said it had allocated more than $1.4 billion to buy back its real estate from MPT, which it said would result in "even greater stability and security for its community hospitals and the vulnerable populations they are honored to serve." But Prime has also issued $1.5 billion in new debt, meaning its hospitals are still taking on obligations that they'll have to repay.

The pattern of plundering continued at American Healthcare Systems, which Sarian created in 2021 after purchasing a bankrupt hospital in North Carolina. Lawsuits from vendors began to pile up almost immediately, along with reports from employees of short staffing. Regulators slapped AHS hospitals with notices of "immediate jeopardy" — meaning its services were so shoddy that they could result in serious harm to patients. Before long, the company closed one of its hospitals and shuttered one of its emergency rooms. When AHS sought a waiver on a state loan it had used to buy the hospital in North Carolina, regulators learned that the company had transferred some $11 million out of the facility.

AHS also siphoned money out of Vista Medical Center East, another hospital it operates. Vista, which serves a low-income community in Illinois, recently furloughed 8.6% of its workforce because of financial difficulties. At the same time, care at the facility has suffered: On January 23, a patient with hypothermia died after being found on the hospital's roof wearing only a hospital gown. Meanwhile, according to bankruptcy filings, Vista — which has applied for government support — has extracted millions of dollars from the hospital. "Money should not be given to private equity entities at the taxpayer's expense," a local coroner said after the patient's death, "especially to a company with such a poor track record." Some of the money AHS took from Vista has gone to support another of its hospitals — one of which owes rent to MPT. (Neither MPT nor AHS responded to requests for comment.)

Yet none of this — the lawsuits from vendors, the substandard care, the sketchy deals — has prevented AHS from being permitted to take over eight of Steward's hospitals. Even though the company's dubious track record was well-documented, the bankruptcy court and government regulators have allowed the sale to go forward. "AHS has a history of terrible hospital operations, including accusations of looting," says Simon, the hedge fund director. Given the players involved, he warns, the cycle of collapse is almost certain to repeat itself.

Other companies that bought parts of Steward also have ties to MPT. Two of Steward's hospitals in West Texas are being purchased by Quorum, the majority of which is owned by a private equity firm that is a big investor in MPT's securities. In the past, Quorum has actually been on the other end of the hospital merry-go-round: It sold distressed facilities to both AHS and Steward, as well as to a private equity firm that sold off the underlying property to MPT. Now, according to Moody's, Quorum's debt is in "limited default," which means it has missed or delayed a payment. It's unclear how Quorum will be able to pay its debt while funding any operating losses and capital expenditures needed at the two hospitals it's buying from Steward — along with the rent on the facilities it will owe to MPT. "This sale demonstrates the failure of the current legal and regulatory system in protecting US healthcare infrastructure and access to quality care for patients," wrote the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a watchdog group that tracks investment deals in healthcare.

Two of Steward's hospitals in Ohio have been sold to Insight Health, another company with a checkered track record. In a civil racketeering lawsuit, the insurance giant Allstate accused a hospital owned by the company of billing for patients who weren't really injured, and for procedures that were never performed. Insight denied the claims, and a settlement is pending. Although Insight purports to run some hospitals as nonprofits, filings show it has extracted exorbitant management fees — more than 12% of the revenue in one case. (In a statement to BI, Insight said the fees "include executive services, software, legal, revenue cycle management, nursing, and clinical personnel and were provided at fair market value.") Initially, the company tried to take over Steward's hospitals in Massachusetts, only to be rebuffed by state regulators. Now, according to a form filed as part of the purchase in Ohio, Insight has received a loan from MPT using assets of the two hospitals it's acquiring from Steward as collateral. That means MPT will not only continue to collect rent on the facilities, albeit reduced for a time, but it will be owed a slice of the business if the hospitals go bankrupt.

Indeed, the Insight deal underscores what has become a vicious cycle: A hospital sells its real estate to MPT, pockets the proceeds, slashes care, and spirals into financial distress. At that point, the property is so troubled that MPT has to pay a buyer, sometimes one with few scruples, to take over the hospital and continue paying rent — which will, in turn, drive the new buyer out of business as well. The only winners are the investors who figure out ways to extract money from dying hospitals — and MPT, which gets to continue collecting rent. "This is the dirty end game of private equity failures," says Simon, the hedge fund director. "When the deal goes poorly, there's only one way to get your money out, which is selling the real estate. And once you separate the ownership of the real estate from the operating hospital, there's no way for the bankruptcy court to give the hospital back to the community. They can't."

As a result, underserved communities continue to lose access to vital healthcare. Regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission might be looking into MPT's deals on behalf of investors. But for all the political fury sparked by Steward's bankruptcy, no one appears to be ensuring that the new owners will provide for the needs of the communities their hospitals are meant to serve. "Politicians keep railing against Steward and asking how this was allowed to happen," says Richard Mortell, a real estate investor who has studied the industry. "Meanwhile, they are turning a blind eye to the scam repeating itself."

Without additional oversight, patient advocates warn, the looting of America's hospitals will continue unabated. "It speaks to the failures of our regulatory system," says Mary Bugbee, who oversees healthcare research at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. "The system is not designed to ensure the hospitals are going to have the most reputable buyers — or even buyers who will keep hospitals open. It's possible the SEC is stepping in to protect investors and uphold the rules for public markets. But who is going to hold these entities accountable to patients? I don't see that happening right now."

Bethany McLean is a special correspondent at Business Insider.

When Em graduated from the Pratt Institute in May 2020, two months into the pandemic, there were simply no jobs for a sculpture major, even in New York. "That absolutely set the tone for the rest of my attempt at a career," Em, now 26, says.

So they took an intensive nine-month coding boot camp and started applying for tech jobs. After they got rejected from about 10 roles, the entire tech industry was besieged by mass layoffs in 2022, leaving Em even more dispirited. "It was just another pathway to shit," they recall thinking. Eventually, they found work as an office manager at a nonprofit for a while and quickly lost their coding skills. Last year, Em applied to more than 400 jobs across the communications, administrative, and service industries — and was rejected by every one.

"I am miserable, and it is breaking my body down," Em tells me over the phone from California, where they've been living at a relative's house scraping by on $700 a month from contract work. They add, flatly, "I am not living a life that I feel is worth living at this moment."

Em's experience with such unrelenting rejection may sound extreme, but their story speaks to a panic and despair pervasive among members of Gen Z. Lately, I find that the tone people over 30 most often use when talking about today's young adults is less a reflexively finger-wagging "kids these days" and more a genuine sympathy over (mixed with relief to have dodged) the particular set of historical circumstances they've faced as they've come of age: COVID-19, climate anxiety, the chaos of the Trump administrations, the internet's wholesale usurpation of IRL culture, AI's potential to upend entire industries. Gen Z has been called the most anxious generation, the most risk-averse generation, the most stressed generation, the most burned-out generation, and the loneliest generation. Last year, the World Happiness Report dubbed Zoomers the unhappiest generation.

But there's another superlative — one exacerbating all that stress, anxiety, loneliness, and burnout — that's so far been overlooked. By several measures, Gen Z may be the most rejected generation in human history.

Every cohort believes it has drawn the shortest straw; as Will Smith, a Gen Xer, famously groused, "Parents just don't understand!" But as Gen Zers strain to establish themselves, they face a uniquely fraught tension between unprecedented technology-enabled opportunity — infinite possibilities a click, swipe, or DM away — and an unprecedented scale of rejection. From education to careers to romance, never before have young adults had this much access to prospective yeses. And, in turn, never before have young adults been told no so frequently.

What does the experience of this new scale of rejection do to a young person's psyche, and to Gen Z's collective state of mind? And how will it reverberate through the rest of society as Gen Z eventually takes the reins of power — when the rejectees become the rejectors? In interviews with psychologists, therapists, guidance counselors, career coaches, and more than a dozen Gen Zers (most of whom, like Em, requested I use their first name only to not hinder their job hunt), the ascendant generation's worldview-warping experience of mass rejection in the dating scene, college admissions, and the job market came into focus. At stake is not young adults' egos or sense of entitlement but our expectation of agency in an increasingly mediated world.

Through the 1960s, most Americans got married in their early 20s to partners they met through their social circles. Today, they spend nearly a decade longer dating; the median age for first marriage is 31.1 for men and 29.2 for women. During that additional eon, they're also equipped with an arsenal of apps that can summon — and terminate — new prospects on a daily, if not hourly, basis. If we tallied up the literal sum of all the unreciprocated swipes, DMs, follows, or texts that create today's ambient mode of romantic rejection, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that a typical Zoomer on the apps is getting rejected by, and rejecting, more prospective partners in a week than a typical married boomer has in their entire life.

The paradox of online dating has been thoroughly documented: Despite having more access to potential partners than ever, young people have invented vocabularies to describe the endless purgatorial disappointments of "ghosting," "situationships," "breadcrumbing," and the hellscape of the apps themselves. Last year, Hinge surveyed 15,000 people about their dating views. Ninety percent of Gen Z respondents said they wanted to find love, and 44% said they had little or no dating experience.

"That was a surprising number for me," Logan Ury, Hinge's director of relationship science, tells me. Much of that gap is due to Gen Z's heightened risk aversion, Ury says, something she attributes to a social-media-augmented awareness of the world as a scary place and widespread "overparenting," or helicopter parenting. "Rejection is intimidating for everyone, but Gen Z daters seem to feel it more acutely," she adds. Fifty-six percent of Gen Z respondents said that fear of rejection held them back from pursuing a relationship, compared with 51% for millennial respondents.

So as young people relentlessly reject each other, many are too scared to risk truly putting themselves out there in the first place. "It is so easy to get involved with someone and then detach," Catherine, a recent Barnard grad, says. "I have friends who have been texting with people that they met on dating apps for weeks or months, and yet they have never met in person. I actually had a friend who had a date all set up, and she went to the restaurant, and by the time she got there, the guy unmatched her and blocked her on everything before they even had a date."

Gen Z has normalized mutual risk aversion, says Jeff Guenther, a licensed therapist who counsels millions of lovelorn Gen Z TikTok users as @therapyjeff. "It's this funny situation where it's OK to not get back to people, he says. "Sometimes that's empowering, but then there's the negative effect of all these little mini rejections that eventually cut so deep that somebody might not decide to be vulnerable." No wonder that breakup coaches who talk in therapy-speak and dating influencers who claim they can definitively discern "green flags" versus "red flags" have proliferated, each of them promising to demystify the romantic ambiguity plaguing Gen Z.

Guenther says today's young adults seem quicker to discard connections in favor of the seemingly unlimited reserves of suitors awaiting just a swipe away. "There's the resilience that comes from the frequent rejection that makes them great at moving on, but then they're less equipped for the real-world relational challenges that require compromise and patience," he says.

But Natalie Buchwald, the founder and clinical director of Manhattan Mental Health Counseling, says she sees a distinction between healthy resilience and the blasé, noncommittal attitude she sees many Gen Zers deploy to cope with rejection. "I'm finding there's more of a pervasive numbness that looks like resilience," she says. "But that's not resilience; that's disconnect."

Meanwhile, more technology-augmented opportunity has also bred much more rejection in the college admissions industrial complex. Until 1960, more than half of all college applicants applied to just one school. In the 2023-24 admissions season, the average applicant applied to 6.65 Common App-affiliated schools alone, up 7% from the previous year. Just in the past two decades, the number of applications to the country's 67 most selective colleges has tripled to nearly 2 million a year. Gen Zers are knocking on more doors to their future than ever and, in turn, having more doors slammed in their faces. For some, this is shaping their core beliefs on motivation and merit.

Dylan, a 22-year-old New York University student whose high school credentials included varsity rugby and a 4.7 weighted GPA, tells me that he applied to roughly 20 schools — including most of the Ivies and Stanford — a number he felt "insecure" about compared with his peers. "I know a lot of people who applied to 20 to 40," he says. In the end, he received only three or four acceptances, which was demoralizing. "I just remember feeling like it wasn't necessarily our qualifications that mattered, that it was just like, hopefully, the right person read it on the right day."

Ella, a 20-year-old from Allentown, Pennsylvania, applied to 12 colleges and got rejected from 10. "I had so much hubris and unfounded confidence," she says. "I just thought, well, I'll only want to go to college if I can get into a 'prestigious school.' They ask, 'Why us?' obviously, and I couldn't tell them why besides it's Harvard." In a Substack post she published before her high school graduation, she described how at odds her tenfold rejection was with her belief in simply working hard to succeed. "I thought that I was going to be someone," she wrote. While she's now a junior at Bryn Mawr, Ella tells me she still hasn't gotten over the sting of going to a seemingly less elite school.

Others have taken rejection to court. In February, an 18-year-old from Palo Alto, California, who applied to 18 schools and was rejected from 16, sued the University of California system and the University of Washington, alleging racial discrimination against "highly-qualified Asian-American candidates." "When the rejections rolled in one after another, I was dumbfounded. What started with surprise turned into frustration, and then finally it turned into anger," the student's father told the New York Post.

As a millennial and former teenage overachiever, I also call up the best expert I personally knew: my high school counselor, Kim Klokkenga, who has helped wrangle the collegiate aspirations of the student body at Central Illinois' Dunlap High School for the past 30 years. In her view, the commercialization of college applications is as much responsible as a new generation of helicopter parenting, along with the technologically mediated literal ease of application.

"Back in the day, I would literally ask a student how many envelopes they wanted," Klokkenga says. "I didn't have people applying to 20-plus schools, like now. It might've been 10 or 12, and that was outlandish!" (In case you were wondering, I'd been one of her favorite nut jobs, with a total of nine applications in 2010.)

When I ask if she thinks Gen Z students are handling rejection better or worse than previous generations, she says she can't say for sure. "I have fewer students come in devastated that they didn't get into their schools," Klokkenga says. Perhaps they were already steeling themselves against rejection — another shade of disconnect. "I am hearing students say, 'Well, I wasn't expecting to get in; I just wanted to apply to see,'" Klokkenga adds. "I think they're just throwing them out there sometimes to see what'll stick."

Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who famously observed the relationship between consumer choice and satisfaction in his 2004 book, "The Paradox of Choice," distinguishes two types of people: the "maximizers," who want the absolute best option, and the much-happier "satisficers," who go with the "good enough" option. Today's perceived infinite-choice standard seems to have given rise to legions of maximizers among Gen Z. Per Schwartz's central argument that overabundance of choice tends to lead to more disappointment, this does not seem to bode well for their general well-being.

But what happens when one's choices are preemptively limited, perhaps relentlessly, via rejection? "It's possible there's a kind of resilience that people develop when you're applying to 50 schools and it doesn't hurt anymore to get rejected by 47," Schwartz tells me. But, much like Buchwald says of rejected romantics, he sees the "whatever" reaction among rejected applicants as a "very self-protective response."

"If you minimize the significance beforehand, then the pain of failure will be less consequential," Schwartz says. "It kind of drives me crazy to see people doing this, especially if it's a reflection of their effort to protect themselves rather than just their cynicism about living in modern society."

College is its own gauntlet, but the scale of rejection in the job-hunt is an order of magnitude more hellish. Via LinkedIn, Workday, and the ubiquity of other online job boards, many Zoomers apply to more jobs in a day than many lucky Boomers have in their lives. In February 2025, the average knowledge worker job opening received 244 applications, up from 93 in February 2019, according to data the hiring software provider Greenhouse shared with BI. That's 243 nos — or ghosted applications — for every yes. This scattershot reality is not specific to Gen Z, but it's the only reality that the incoming workforce has known.

Among the Gen Zers I talked to, their "body counts" of submitted job applications were regularly in the hundreds. Christopher, a 24-year-old who graduated with a finance degree, says he'd applied to 400 jobs in finance and 200 in merchandising before finding a job that still wasn't what he really wanted. His computer science grad friends have been sending applications in the thousands, he says.

Even though the logistics of applying are more or less streamlined, Gen Zers note the disconnect between the effort they're expected to make versus the consideration given in return. Colleges at least have to formally tell you no, while jobs, like a dating app match, tend to ghost at any point in the process. Is it really a mystery why some Gen Zers have started ghosting employers back?

Since graduating from Barnard last year, Catherine has applied to 300 jobs and interviewed for 20 of them. The 23-year-old says her college counselor's advice to deeply invest in her job applications — via networking, seeking referrals, getting personalized feedback on résumés — has come to feel ridiculous, given the fact that you could sit through six rounds of interviews, a practice test, and more for a single role and then, after months of waiting, not even get a proper rejection email. For her, the resounding lesson is hard to ignore: It's better not to hope for too much or to try too hard.

"You have no idea if you're even doing it right," Catherine says of the impersonal process, which is often mediated by an unknowable (and highly fallible) screening algorithm. "You don't have any ability to get feedback. It feels like being in a hedge maze, and there's probably a path through, but you feel like you keep running into walls and you're like, 'Man, if I could just talk to the person who built this.'" She adds: "I worked so hard for four years, and I built this great network and support system, and now I'm just sending applications into the void."

For Gen Zers, the disenfranchising reality of chasing entire flocks of wild geese has diminished their self-esteem. Lanya, a 22-year-old who graduated last year with a degree in media studies, tells me she thought she had done everything right as a first-gen college student who counted a Nasdaq internship among her achievements — and feels incredibly guilty that she has yet to find a job. "Self-worth-wise, this is the lowest I've ever felt," she says. "This is my time to say thank you and pay them back by showing them what they sacrificed was worth it, but I can't help them the way I want to."

Dylan, the finance grad, says the job hunt made him modify his expectations for the future. "I just remember applying to so many and feeling like: I don't care what I get. I just need to survive. I'm not scared of failing; I'm just scared of dying."

For others, mass rejection can be liberating. Several Gen Zers tell me their collection of "we regret to inform you's" in their inboxes has inspired them to invest more deeply in passion projects, move abroad, or start their own businesses. For many Gen Zers, the influencer economy is the one job market that seems legible to them — and it's always hiring.

As Gen Z grows older, the rejection and risk they face could easily compound. If you're starting out with a high degree of risk aversion, any pedestrian experience of personal rejection might harden that stance — which means we could end up seeing Gen Z calcify into incredibly risk-averse adults (and parents). Those who are resilient enough to weather the new standard scale of rejection — those who continue to shoot their shots — will eventually gain a firm foothold. But in college, careers, and romance, it's often less a matter of perseverance or merit than it is pure luck. For much of Gen Z, success is increasingly boiling down to a numbers game.

Is the real problem simply the overabundance of options, which puts Gen Zers' expectations on a collision course with reality? No help, of course, is the 24/7 firehose of comparison and fantasy provided by social media — which has shaped Gen Z's construct of reality pretty much straight from the womb. Schwartz, the psychologist, acknowledges that a zillion potential mates, schools, or careers that are seemingly so accessible are liable to make us all feel disappointment. "Some of us live in such a culture of abundance that even if you find some way to limit the options, you are thinking about what's out there," he says. Here, I think of a line from Tony Tulathimutte's aptly titled 2024 book, "Rejection," an interlocking series of horror-esque stories of young people who are puzzled by and rage at the world for their arbitrary exclusion: "His sadness, he knows, is a symptom of his entitlement, so he is not even entitled to his sadness."

But Schwartz also believes that the experience of rejection is markedly different from that of disappointment. When you're underwhelmed by your Netflix selection, or when you order what turns out to be a disappointing entrée, it's easy to have order envy for your table mates' more tantalizing plates. But while making that choice was a matter of your own agency, "a rejection is a comment on you," Schwartz says. "It's very hard to just say to yourself, 'Well, Stanford rejects 96% of its applicants. It's impossible to get in," he adds. "It's not a statement about me; it's a crapshoot.' You can say all that stuff, but my guess is you don't really believe it."

This, for me, is the most tragic element of Gen Z's rejection arc. We can expect experiences with personal rejection to trigger material consequences and a formative reckoning with one's self-worth or belief systems — taken as a collective, it's what shapes each generation so that they can turn around and bray at the next one about what they've survived.

But for Gen Z, their fates are increasingly shaped by the uniquely depersonalized, and depersonalizing, forces of technology, primarily the algorithms that pervade modern dating, college admissions, and the hiring process. These algorithms set the rules of engagement for nearly every aspect of Gen Zers' lives, making once analog processes utterly streamlined yet mystifying. No wonder various corners of the culture have responded with cottage industries of layoff coaches, résumé consultants, professional matchmakers, emotional "courses" and boot camps, and countless influencers who espouse how to "hack" life's algos. For now, the onus is still placed on the individual Gen Zer to buck the system and learn the hacks; it remains to be seen whether Gen Z will collectively reject the very sorting mechanisms that are failing them.

"There's this technology, whether it's the algorithm or AI, that's sort of against you, and that's something to take into consideration," says Guenther, the TikTok-famous therapist. "You're not being rejected by actual people, but you're being filtered out or rejected by technology. And maybe the anger should be directed at Apple and Google and Tinder and Facebook or Meta."

Yet this anger is curiously absent in all my conversations with Gen Zers. For one thing, they're savvy enough to understand that technology itself isn't worth blaming if you aren't addressing the human biases codified in the automation. Instead, the predominant mood was one of resignation, or perhaps acceptance. "It's a numbers game," one current college student says, or a "waiting game."

When we speak again several months after our first conversation, Em has a promising update: After applying to more than 400 jobs, they've found a position at a perfume shop in Oregon. Amid the grueling job hunt, David Graeber's book "Bullshit Jobs" dramatically reframed their view of careerism. "He talks about how humans feel when they can't make an effect on anything — it is not only psychologically traumatizing, but it creates physical problems," Em says, adding that the perfume shop was one of the best jobs they'd ever had. It's 35 hours a week with no benefits. But, Em says, "every single day in this job, I get the chance to make someone's day — to actually see my impact on the world, even if on a small scale."

Delia Cai is a writer living in New York. She runs the culture and media newsletter, Deez Links.

From the moment Donald Trump was reelected, Harvard University has been scrambling to confront what it views as an existential threat posed by the new administration.

Trump is targeting elite universities on a host of fronts, from their diversity initiatives and handling of pro-Palestinian protests to billions of dollars in student aid and government support. Last year, federal grants accounted for 11% of Harvard's operating revenue and paid for two-thirds of its sponsored research. In addition, Trump has proposed taxing the university's massive endowment of $53 billion by as much as 35% — a threat that Harvard's president, Alan Garber, has said "keeps me up at night." On Monday, due to "rapidly shifting federal policies," the university announced it was instituting a hiring freeze, reducing admissions to some of its graduate programs, and issuing a university-wide directive to limit spending.

"This is a crisis," says Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, which represents 44,000 members at more than 500 campuses nationwide. "It's the greatest mortal threat that the higher education sector has ever faced, without a doubt."

In response, Harvard has been quietly formulating a new lobbying strategy — one unlike anything the university has ever undertaken. According to interviews with more than two dozen lobbyists, funders, professors, and alumni, Harvard's plan is threefold. First, the university has hired Ballard Partners, MAGAworld's leading lobbying firm, to represent its interests in Washington. Second, Harvard is exploring ways to ingratiate itself with Trump's inner circle by building alliances with conservatives he trusts. And third, the school has joined talks with colleges and universities in red states, looking to present a case that Trump's proposed cuts would hurt not just Ivy League intellectuals, but local economies in deep-red districts.

Such moves are out of character for Harvard, which has long considered itself in a league unto itself. "Harvard has a chance to minimize the damage of the Trump administration," says Jeff Hauser, a Harvard alum who serves as executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a government watchdog group. "But it's only going to be in solidarity with other institutions with different public profiles. They're more in it together than they might realize."

Harvard was ramping up its lobbying efforts even before Trump's victory last November. In 2024, the school spent more on lobbying than it had in the past 15 years. But those familiar with Harvard's new strategy say it began in earnest two weeks before Trump's inauguration, when Harvard hired Ballard Partners as one of its leading lobbyists. It was a shrewd move — Brian Ballard, the firm's founder, is a close Trump ally who maintains an office up the road from Mar-a-Lago. What's more, Susie Wiles and Pam Bondi — Trump's chief of staff and attorney general — are both alums of the firm.

Hiring Ballard signaled Harvard's willingness to "play by Trump's rules," says Hilary Braseth, a Harvard alum who serves as executive director of OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks political influence. The lobbying firm, she adds, gives Harvard "a direct line to the Oval Office."

Ballard's first priority for Harvard is to find out where cuts are most likely to come, and which programs might be targeted. "There's a big learning curve that comes with a new administration, particularly a Trump administration," says Dan McFaul, a Ballard lobbyist who's working on the Harvard account alongside the firm's founder. "Information seems to be the most valuable thing. What's the next shoe to drop? How do we address this? How do we respond to the next grant cancellation?"

While the price of Harvard's contract with Ballard won't be public until April, it's not cheap. According to three people familiar with the deal, the university is on track to pay the lobbying firm well into the six figures this year. Justin Sayfie, a partner at Ballard, characterized its agreement with Harvard as "a monthly retainer that is customary for firms of our caliber on K Street in Washington."

Other universities are following Harvard's lead. Public records show that institutions of higher learning are hiring lobbyists at more than twice the pace they did after Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, or when Trump won his first term in 2016. Among those who have brought on new lobbyists in recent weeks are Columbia, MIT, New York University, Oklahoma State University, and Arizona State.

Beyond the hiring of Ballard, Harvard is exploring ways to make inroads into Trump's inner circle. According to two people with knowledge of the discussions, the school is considering inviting Trump loyalists to speak on campus, as a way to blunt charges of liberal bias and to curry favor with the administration. In interviews with BI, some lobbyists and experts in government relations suggested inviting Trump or Vice President JD Vance to deliver the commencement address at Harvard, or hosting MAGA figures at Harvard's Kennedy School. "You make yourself a smaller target if you do this," says one lobbyist based in Washington.

Finally, Harvard is seeking to build alliances with red-state colleges and universities, to present a united front in Washington. The message, according to several people familiar with the talks, is that cuts to federal research grants and student aid will kill jobs and short-circuit opportunities for innovation in all 50 states. "A great way to hurt a local economy is to kick a university in the teeth," one education lobbyist says.

The hope is that the red-state institutions can make the case for supporting higher education to the Republicans who represent them in Congress. Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, for instance, has already spoken out against proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health that would profoundly affect the University of Alabama.

Such alliances, insiders say, are the new norm for universities and colleges. "Strange bedfellows," observes one lobbyist with years of experience in higher education. "Get used to it."

Still, the new strategy is fraught with peril for Harvard. Forging alliances with Trump supporters could anger some of the school's most prominent donors, and provoke unrest among students and faculty. Allison P. Farrell, an opinion writer at the Harvard Crimson, recently called on the university to "not be complicit" with the new administration. "If Harvard survives by acceding to Trump," she wrote, "it has forfeited its raison d'être — it can no longer claim to be an institution dedicated to seeking and defending truth." One education lobbyist — who, like many, spoke with Business Insider on the condition of anonymity to maintain their professional relationships — called Harvard's new strategy "a pact with the devil."

While that might be a popular view on campus, at least a few professors support Harvard's efforts to make its case in Trumpian terms. Avi Loeb, a noted theoretical physicist who was critical of the university's handling of pro-Palestinian protests last year, sees an opportunity to remind Trump that research institutions like Harvard play a crucial role in driving scientific discoveries and American innovation. "Make Science Great Again!" he says. "Science is not the occupation of the elites. The Trump administration should understand that."

Unless Harvard can find a way to maintain the flow of federal support that helps underwrite its operations and research, students and faculty will be the ones who pay the price. Less federal aid could mean tighter budgets, fewer jobs, and less student aid. "It's icky, but Trump can hurt you," says one lobbyist who's based in Washington. "You're trying to mitigate risk."

Beyond traditional lobbying, universities and colleges are attempting to reach out to Trump's core constituencies. Ideas that have been floated include running commercials during the NCAA basketball tournament as well as booking school administrators on conservative outlets like Fox News and on Joe Rogan's podcast. Syracuse University, for instance, is running advertisements on subway trains in the nation's capital, touting its status as "higher education's only national veterans resource center." After the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Ari Berman, delivered the benediction at Trump's inauguration, the school took out ads on Facebook and Instagram to highlight the event.

And while some universities are eager to work with Harvard, others see a value in distancing themselves from Ivy League institutions that have drawn Trump's ire as bastions of "wokeness." Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College who leads the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, says schools should remind government officials to "not conflate higher education in America with Harvard."

Still, Harvard's deep pockets and its affiliation with Ballard mean that red-state universities are unlikely to reject an invitation to work together. "There's strength in collective action, and that goes both ways for Harvard," says one education lobbyist.

The threat to elite schools is likely to mount in the coming months. The Trump administration is investigating 60 schools, including Harvard, for their handling of "antisemitic harassment and discrimination" during campus protests against the war in Gaza. Last week, the administration announced it was canceling $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia — another school on the list — and warned that more cuts are likely. In a statement to Business Insider, the White House decried what it calls "a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse" of taxpayer money in higher education. (Harvard declined requests for comment.)

In the meantime, the university remains a favorite punching bag for the right. Last month, Steve Bannon — a Harvard alum — came to a conference held near Harvard Square to bash the university. "We need to go into these elite institutions and cut out all the money," Bannon told an assembly of conservative students. "Once you cut that money off, that's a bitch slap. They'll start paying attention."

The conference was sponsored in part by the hedge funder and billionaire alumnus Ken Griffin, a megadonor both to Harvard and to Republican causes. Griffin, whose name appears on Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, has announced he is withholding new contributions until Harvard decides to "embrace Western values," ignore "whiny snowflakes," and end what he calls a "DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame."

Given the current political climate, Harvard and other elite schools have no illusions that they can fully fend off the tsunami of cuts being proposed by the White House. For now, Harvard is focused on ways to limit the damage. And for that, the more of Trump's allies it can enlist, the better. "This will be a delicate dance," says a prominent Harvard donor who supports Trump, "and Harvard can't afford to stumble."

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

This year's hottest new consumer tech product isn't a personal robot or a self-driving car — it's a crib.

The $800 Elvie Rise, which debuted in January at the annual CES tech trade show, is an app-controlled bouncer that automatically repeats a baby's unique preferences and can transform into a bassinet after an infant falls asleep. Why exactly should you shell out for a "smart bouncer" when other products do basically the same job for hundreds of dollars less? Elvie says it comes down to infant safety: In a company survey of American parents, a majority of respondents with newborns said they were using products that didn't meet some federal safe-sleep guidelines. Elvie's claims implicitly suggest that dropping nearly a grand on a product that's meant to be used for only six months of a child's life isn't only sensible but also the responsible thing to do.

Elvie is far from the only company cashing in on parental anxiety. Baby-product peddlers have learned that it pays to remind new parents of the myriad dangers that lurk around every corner and threaten their helpless bundles of joy. If they play their cards right, companies can position their wares as the answer to a parent's darkest fears.

Savvy entrepreneurs are also taking advantage of the growing overlap between evergreen parental anxieties and the distinctly modern impulse to always be optimizing through gadgets and apps. CES launched its annual BabyTech Summit in 2016, where the now legendary Snoo smart bassinet debuted the following year with a $1,200 price tag. Since then, the baby-tech market has boomed with products such as the Owlet Dream Sock (an app-linked "smart sock" that lets parents track their baby's vital metrics) and the Nanit Plus smart baby monitor (whose night-vision-equipped video camera can track an infant's breathing), as well as a slew of WiFi-enabled breast pumps (including a nearly $400 model from Elvie). Between 2018 and 2019, submissions to CES's Best of Baby Tech Awards increased by 88%. And in 2024, EMARKETER found that products for babies and children had the fastest-growing digital ad spend of any market category. These days, it's hard to avoid the tens of thousands of moms who have taken to TikTok to show off their favorite devices.

As more millennial and Gen Z "digital natives" become parents, it's no surprise that devices providing real-time data on a baby's squirms, temperature shifts, and even bowel movements are hot commodities. But while this information is reassuring to some parents, it can exacerbate anxiety in others — particularly those already struggling during the fraught, sleep-deprived months of early parenthood. Instead of fueling connection, some of the products might even make parents less attuned to their kids and to themselves.

From the very beginning, the baby-tech industry has been sown in the threat of worst-case scenarios. The first commercial baby monitor — a simple radio-based device — landed in American nurseries in 1938, a mere six years after the nation was rocked by the kidnapping and murder of the aviator Charles Lindbergh's 20-month-old son. In the 1980s and '90s, the devices became commonplace as fear spread about cases of sudden infant death syndrome in babies' cribs. By the early 2000s, baby monitors were getting regular tech upgrades, from cameras and two-way communication to heart-rate and temperature monitoring and even REM sleep cycle detection. Though these updates weren't necessarily filling a void in what parents needed, they quickly found a market.

Becca Susong, a Chattanooga, Tennessee, pediatrician and perinatal care consultant, says fear of SIDS continues to be a major driver behind parents' interest in purchasing the WiFi-connected, app-paired baby monitors that emerged after the rise of smartphones. Some parents — especially those with neonatal intensive care unit experiences or past health scares — say they feel reassured by features like oxygen and heart-rate tracking. But there's no clear evidence linking baby monitors to a decrease in cases of SIDS, so the American Academy of Pediatrics actually cautions against monitoring for it at home.

"I tend not to recommend getting the high-tech kind," Susong says about baby monitors, citing their high costs and unnecessary bells and whistles. Instead, she redirects the discussion to sleep safety like using a firm mattress with nothing else in the crib and putting the baby on their back to sleep — tangible, science-backed methods for averting SIDS.

"I think they give people a sense of control over something that feels very uncertain," says Emily Guarnotta, a Long Island clinical psychologist who specializes in perinatal mental health. "SIDS is terrifying because it's so unpredictable."

Guarnotta says she's observed that type A, control-seeking parents are particularly prone to look for reassurance from baby-monitoring devices. "There are many times when fear of something happening is already present, and then a product comes along or is recommended, and you think, 'This is going to help me. This will make me feel better and keep my baby safe,'" she says. "It can turn into a vicious cycle — you get some relief from using the product, but then the anxiety returns, and the cycle repeats."

David Lesner, a 39-year-old software engineer who lives in Israel, acknowledges that part of the initial appeal of a smart baby monitor was the gadgetry itself. Before his 11-month-old son was born, he spent countless hours descending into Reddit rabbit holes to figure out which models parents liked best. But Lesner says that even his final, meticulously considered pick — the Nanit Pro — is less than perfectly accurate. While he's never experienced one of the monitor's false alarms that his baby had stopped breathing or moving, he says he knows others who have. "It can be very terrifying," Lesner says. "Those three seconds that you are going from one room to another to see that your child is fine can be like an eternity."

Not even a few false alarms could deter Logan Blackburn-Issitt, a 41-year-old entrepreneur in the West Midlands, England, who used infant-movement-detection devices with all six of his children. The four older kids, now between 7 and 13, slept on an Angelcare sensor pad, which sounds an alarm if it doesn't detect movement for 20 seconds. The youngest, 3-year-old twins, wore Snuza Hero movement monitors clipped onto their diapers. If Blackburn-Issitt or his partner forgot to switch off the pad when they lifted their babies out of the crib, or if the Snuzas got jostled out of place, the devices would blare. But if anything, these occasional mishaps only fortified his peace of mind. "If the babies stopped breathing, we would be alerted quickly," he says.

Eventually, baby-tech merchants got a little carried away by the market possibilities. A $3,000 self-driving AI stroller? Yours for the taking, courtesy of the Canadian startup Glüxkind, which launched its first of two smart-stroller systems in 2023. (But be warned: There's a waitlist for its anchor product, the Ella.) How about a Bluetooth-connected diaper sensor that spares caretakers from sniff-checking for number twos? Look no further than the Korean startup Monit, whose smart-baby-monitor system was the talk of the 2019 BabyTech Summit — though the high-tech poo detector proved a little too weird to gain market traction. Or what about an AI-powered changing pad? The startup Woddle is on a mission to bring fresh data insights to the changing table. But it's still to be determined whether there's a real market for a tech-infused mat for changing diapers.

Combining a gloss of scientific credibility with promises of safety and efficiency, the allure of baby-tech innovation outstrips its occasional silliness. The industry meets its target customers at the intersection of some of our most deeply entrenched habits. Millennials, who now make up the largest share of new parents, have entered their child-rearing years amid the proliferation of network-connected home appliances, wearable fitness-tracking devices, and urban infrastructure designed to make everyday tasks more efficient and convenient. In the past several years alone, the "Internet of Things" has evolved from a novel subcategory of consumer products to a term that encompasses so much of what we buy and use that it barely warrants distinction. Add a dose of standard-issue parental worry to this tech-propelled drive toward optimization, throw in a revolving cast of parenting experts and influencers, and you have a consumer base that's perfectly primed to seek solace in stuff.

Of course, there are baby-product innovations that have seriously improved people's lives. Balance bikes, for instance, have been found to better prepare kids for riding a real bicycle than the training wheels most of us grew up with. And countless articles and testimonials have praised everything from the Snoo bassinet to the Doona car-seat-stroller combo as life-changing.

But optimizing everything doesn't always make life easier. Ellie Messinger-Adams, a Southern California mom of two in her mid-30s, used Wyze baby-monitoring cameras for both of her children, now 6 and 3, until about a year ago. While the cameras provided momentary reassurance that her kids were alive and well in the middle of the night, checking them wound up becoming something of a compulsion. "We don't have any of the cameras hooked up anymore, and it sort of feels like freedom," she says.

"If a mom is already feeling overwhelmed, distressed, or excessively worried, adding the responsibility of monitoring data and interpreting its meaning could make things worse, increasing hypervigilance and potentially worsening anxiety or postpartum OCD," Sogand Ghassemi, a perinatal psychiatrist who practices in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, says. In an ideal world, new parents would become more confident in reading and responding to their baby's cues without feeling the need to rely on gadgets and apps. And it's not only the parents whose emotional well-being stands to benefit from a more intuitive dynamic of communication and care. "Over time, this supports the baby's ability to develop self-soothing skills, which is important for resilience," Ghassemi tells me.

When it came to raising her own two children, Guarnotta, the Long Island psychologist, was firmly "anti-baby monitor," she says. It's a matter of personal preference, she tells me. Seeing other parents obsess over surveilling their babies was enough to convince her she was better off going the old-fashioned route: listening for cries and responding to them. A fancy, camera-equipped monitor wouldn't be able to tell her anything she couldn't hear for herself.

"I'm already an anxious person," Guarnotta says. "I didn't really want any part of that."

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

Virgílio Bento was in a bind. He wanted to spread the word about his growing healthtech company, Sword Health, but the entrepreneur hated the traditional public relations playbook. He'd hired a PR agency before, which in retrospect "seems moronic," he says. "For a comms person to understand what you're saying, they need to be in the weeds." But when he tried hiring someone to run comms internally, he says, "that also sucked."

Then he shared his frustration with Delian Asparouhov, a cofounder of the spacetech startup Varda and a partner at Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund. Asparouhov told him there was only one PR person he should be talking to: Lulu Cheng Meservey, a communications executive who has led messaging at companies including Substack, Anduril, and Activision — with unusual flair and aggression.

From the outset, Cheng Meservey struck Bento as radically different from other comms people. She had a no-nonsense approach. Her first piece of advice to him was: Don't let your message get diluted by your comms team, and don't depend on PR agencies to bait the media's interest. You are the founder — own your company's narrative. In short, go direct.

For Bento, it was a refreshing tack, if a little beguiling. A PR manager proselytizing the mission of "going direct" would seem to obliterate the whole point of having a PR manager in the first place. But this is Cheng Meservey's defining doctrine, and it has made her one of today's most sought-after communications gurus in Silicon Valley and beyond, particularly among high-wattage founders. Her website includes personal endorsements from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and the Free Press cofounder Bari Weiss, all three of whom attempted to hire Cheng Meservey in-house before she launched her own firm in 2024. "i super value her advice," Altman wrote to me in a text. "she is someone i love talking to."

As more tech founders follow the examples of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg — shedding their communications teams and taking their messaging directly to social media and the chatty podcast circuit — it's easy to see why someone who encourages founders to unapologetically be themselves would be in demand today. "She has gotten good at teaching founders how to fish," Asparouhov says. Or as Ryan Delk, the CEO of the education startup Primer, tells me: "Lulu is the Steph Curry of comms."

Significantly less charmed by Cheng Meservey are many of her peers in the PR industry that she's set on disrupting. "People bring up Lulu all the time," one communications executive who knows Cheng Meservey tells me. "They say, 'Do you know Lulu? Isn't she the worst?'" Another snipes: "She does not have a thriving business. What she has is a thriving Twitter following."

Some of the vitriol is owed to the rumor-churning nature of PR. "If somebody is effective at communications and has a good point of view, then the industry will react to it," says Brooke Hammerling, who experienced a wave of resentment among her peers after her tech-PR firm, Brew, was featured in a splashy New York Times story. "They will feel uneasy about a new approach, so they'll criticize it."

Cheng Meservey invites the spite; it's core to her brand. The sparse landing page of her new firm, Rostra, declares: "TRADITIONAL PR IS DEAD." Beneath is an 850-word "Go Direct Manifesto," in which she smears "corporate communications" as "an oxymoron, as nothing meaningful can be communicated by a faceless committee." "A founder's passion, vision, and conviction," Cheng Meservey writes, "can't be simulated by other — least of all the press-release-enjoying middle managers already scouting for their next jobs." On X, she offers her 100,000 followers barb-filled, Harvard Business Review-like mini case studies on PR triumphs and blunders of the day. A recent United Airlines post was "lazy and patronizing," she declared. A memo from the founder of CrowdStrike was full of "cowardly and callous" and "legalese doublespeak," she said.

"Some people would call this self-promotion, but what Lulu does is marketing in a smart way that resonates with founders: She shows them how she thinks," Rachael Horwitz, the chief marketing officer at Haun Ventures, says. "This flies in the face of what many tech comms people think is OK. Comms is a bit of a snake pit in this way. It's like Fight Club. They do not want you to talk about comms." (Most of the communications executives I spoke with requested anonymity.)

Cheng Meservey's vision for communications neatly aligns with today's shifting media paradigm, in which everyone — from competitors to customers — can publish their stories and screeds about companies online without depending on publicists or journalists. While there are obvious upsides to a "go direct" strategy, there are also obvious reputational risks, and it's difficult to execute at scale. For it to work, you need to stand out in the oversaturated ideas marketplace, a feat that's only becoming more challenging: "How many thought leaders do we really need? This is information overload," says one communications executive. "At the very least, you're subscribing and curating your own echo chamber."

After graduating from Yale and then the Fletcher School at Tufts University, Cheng Meservey worked for JPMorgan as a financial analyst before cofounding her first communications firm, TrailRunner International, in 2016. Its clients included the blue-chip venture firm Founders Fund and fast-growing corporations like Spotify. Even then, Cheng Meservey was known for bucking traditions.

During one 2018 meeting about a coming announcement with a corporate client, Cheng Meservey "said something along the lines of, 'You guys shouldn't put out a press release — press releases are so boring,'" Hannah Guenther, a director at TrailRunner who was on the call, says. To Guenther's surprise, the client agreed. "They were like, 'You're so right. I couldn't agree more, but we're stuck in this routine and no one wants to change,'" she says. This tendency for challenging convention stood out to a TrailRunner client that was looking to challenge the media industry, the newsletter company Substack, which Cheng Meservey joined as vice president of communications in 2021.

Cheng Meservey happened to be entering the arena of tech communications at a pivotal moment. For years, the communications divisions of the world's most influential tech companies, in an attempt to be taken more seriously by the media, hired massive teams made up of Washington-imported policy wonks and attorneys. They specialized in what one former Meta communications executive describes as "the Hillary Clinton style of communications: We figured out what people wanted us to say; then we said it." The person adds, "Sheryl Sandberg used to tell us all the time, 'As long as journalists hold the pen, you have to endear yourself to them.'" (Sandberg did not respond to a request for comment.)

It was a conciliatory strategy that relied, almost entirely, on milquetoast corporate statements and communication managers equivocating behind the veil of anonymity. To avoid public outrage at the height of cancel culture in the late 2010s, companies were instructed to deflect criticism and never own up to their mistakes. "It was all about keeping your head down, getting the press to like you, and trying to win a game that the average tech founder isn't inclined to play very well, much less win," that same former Meta exec says.

Eventually, these tactics led to an overwhelming public mistrust in the tech industry, which fueled an increasingly negative press. "The relationship collapse between media and tech came in part from the fact that tech was spewing so much bullshit through press releases that the media said, 'We can't trust direct company communications. We can only listen to disgruntled former employees,'" says Eric Newcomer, a longtime reporter who runs the tech news Substack Newcomer.

So when Cheng Meservey joined Substack and began immediately playing offense, it stood out. If, in her view, reporters got the story wrong, she called them from her personal Twitter account. "It was like, 'Oh, look, the Substack flack is going off on Twitter again," says one tech reporter who asked to speak anonymously because he wasn't authorized to talk on the record. "She was always getting into hot water, spouting off about free speech, deplatforming, that kind of thing." When The New York Times ran a critical story about Substack's "growing pains," Cheng Meservey tweeted that the piece was filled with hearsay and cherry-picking. When Wired suggested that Substack "paid extremists," she fired off a series of tweets saying the reporter put out misleading information, which eventually led to a correction on the story. Soon after, Fox News published a story under the headline "Substack executive explains journalism to Wired writer."

Cheng Meservey's unabashed stance seemed tailor-made for one particularly embattled tech company: Activision Blizzard. When she became Activision Blizzard's chief communications officer in April 2022, The Wall Street Journal had recently published two especially searing investigations involving several accounts of sexual harassment and a toxic workplace at the video game giant. The company was also embroiled in an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission in an attempt to block Microsoft's proposed $69 billion acquisition. (In July 2023, a federal judge ruled against the FTC's bid to delay the acquisition. In December 2023, Activision paid $54 million to settle a workplace discrimination lawsuit.)

Activision's future depended on its resurrection from the rubble of public opinion, and Cheng Meservey threw herself headfirst into the onslaught. Less than a month into her tenure, she became headline news after she was accused of union busting. After more than a dozen Blizzard quality assurance testers secured the right to hold a union vote, she told staff on Slack that unionizing might result in smaller raises and difficult conflicts with management. Her Slack messages were leaked, and Cheng Meservey doubled down on her position on Twitter. Ethan Gach, a reporter at Kotaku, wrote a story with the headline "Activision's Newest Exec Has Decided to Post Through It." In response, Cheng Meservey subtweeted Gach, inferring that he was obsessed with her.

The reporter had never before been dragged on Twitter by the chief communications officer of a multibillion-dollar company. "It was unusual," Gach says, but so was everything about the way Cheng Meservey was running comms at Activision. "Here was the head comms person for the biggest video game publisher in the United States having casual conversation about policy on Twitter."

Months later, a pitch from Activision arrived in the inbox of Stephen Totilo, a veteran gaming reporter at Axios. "It was a weird, tortured" attempt at blowing a hole in the FTC's antitrust case, Totilo says: It suggested that the HBO adaptation of Sony's video game "The Last of Us" was proof that Sony wouldn't be weakened if Microsoft bought Activision. Totilo figured he'd take Activision up on its offer to speak with Cheng Meservey. "From her work at Substack, the vibe I was expecting was, 'OK, you idiot reporter, let me tell you how wrong you are,'" he says.

Instead, he discovered the opposite: Cheng Meservey not only was more vulnerable than he'd anticipated but also answered tough questions with a sense of "humanity and thoughtfulness," he says. "She functioned radically different from any other comms person I've ever encountered in 20 years of covering gaming," he adds.

Early into her time at Activision, it was obvious that Cheng Meservey was having an outsize effect on how the company was covered. "She facilitated more journalism being done," Totilo says. For one, the company switched from dodging the press to actively, and frequently, engaging with reporters, often by text message. "I found her very charming," Totilo says. "Whether that makes me an astute observer or a chump, I'm not sure. But I prefer her strategy to the traditional approach."

Today, Cheng Meservey's growing list of clients has included people known for their bold, contrarian approach to business like Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, Safe Superintelligence Inc. cofounder Ilya Sutskever (formerly of OpenAI), and Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, who stoked controversy this past summer when he said that he planned to forgo DEI policies and instead hire for MEI: "merit, excellence, and intelligence." Her advice has been essential to founders in moments of public scrutiny, like Varda's Asparouhov, whose company launched a capsule into space in September 2023 that was unable to return on its planned schedule because of regulatory restraints.

At the time, Asparouhov says, he was in a state of "extreme cortisol panic." Cheng Meservey was able to clearly navigate the complexity of company messaging dealing with military regulation, space travel, and, of course, announcements on X. She broke down various tactics for approaching reporters and regulators, along with a strategic narrative for company messaging. "She summarized it in this way of like, 'Look, make sure that any time you're thinking about comms, at the end of the day, your job is to make the company successful.'"

When I first reached out to Cheng Meservey, she seemed — despite her public persona — not all that into the idea of having a story written about her. "I'm not sure if I'm as interesting as your editor thinks I am," she said. "I would urge them to reconsider." Then she shifted into strategy mode. Had I considered pitching a profile of her to The New York Times?

I asked whether some of the well-known names cited on her company website, like OpenAI's Altman, might be interested in speaking with me. "Neither he nor I will want to talk about that, unfortunately, which is annoying because the work I did for them is really interesting," she said. "[Sam] has offered to pay me, but I haven't taken a penny. And OpenAI and Worldcoin are always in litigation." Then she rattled off a few names of people who might talk, including The Free Press' Weiss, who had encouraged Cheng Meservey to start her own company. ("Things are hectic here but Lulu is the best :)," Weiss wrote in an email.) Given how unusual it is for a communications executive to dish about her high-profile clients on the record, I was surprised by her candor. Was this gossipy transparency the new model of going direct?

But as I continued to report, Cheng Meservey eventually declined to speak any further on the record, save a boilerplate statement she sent over email: "I appreciate the interest and wish I could be more helpful, but we don't discuss client details. I will say that the most gratifying thing about building Rostra has been getting to see 'going direct' become a default in modern communication. The best founders are building their own platforms and their own narratives, and that's the story worth watching closely!"

Given Cheng Meservey's lively online presence, I'm certain she has far more nuanced thoughts on what it means to "go direct" in the new media paradigm. But for those, you'll have to follow her on X. Which may be the gist of Rostra's modus operandi. Why speak with a reporter when you can distill your thoughts, directly, on your own terms using social media?

Therein lies one of the obvious downsides to Cheng Meservey's strategy. Much like the founders she represents, Rostra is building a brand that's genuinely compelling, with an expressive, opinionated leader at its helm. It reminds me of something Delk, the microschool founder, told me: "If what you're building isn't interesting and you don't have conviction, then Lulu's strategy doesn't work."

Zoë Bernard is a feature writer based in Los Angeles. She writes about technology, crime, and culture. Formerly, she covered technology for The Information and Business Insider.

When Louis Chiappetta started working as a ski instructor at 19, he saw it as a way to turn his hobby into a job. Growing up in central Maine, he'd already spent his winter months on the slopes. So a paycheck and a free ski pass were enough to seal the deal.

"There are not many people who, when asked what they do for fun, say, 'Well, I go back to where I work,'" he said.

After one of his friends got established as a ski patroller in Utah, Chiappetta followed, taking a job in 2021 in the rental shop at Canyons Village, one of the two ski areas in Vail's Park City Mountain resort. The pay was meager — $12.25 an hour — but he got three days off a week to ski the mountain's long, powdery runs. If the price of entry was couch surfing at friends' places, so be it.

His view on that trade-off quickly changed. Park City Mountain is one of 42 resorts owned by the international conglomerate Vail Resorts. The cost of a lift ticket at Canyons climbed 25% from $230 in 2022 to $290 for the current season, making it one of the most expensive resorts in the country. Chiappetta said he remembered ringing up customers for $2,000 to $3,000 worth of equipment, "making money hand over fist" for the resort. It was hard to ignore the gap between what people were paying for the experience and what he was making as an employee. "It was like getting my nose rubbed in it," he said.

Through a scholarship, Chiappetta was able to get his EMT certification and join the ski patrol, something he had always wanted to do. But the $20-an-hour entry-level salary still wasn't enough for him to get by. He joined the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association, the union representing ski patrollers at Canyons, to push for a livable wage that took into account the specialized medical training and avalanche-prevention work he and other patrollers were asked to do. Starting on December 27, he and the union went on strike for 13 days. It worked; Vail agreed to raise their pay by $2 across the board, with additional increases for training, certifications, and experience.

Now 31, Chiappetta is in his third season as a ski patroller and makes roughly $29 an hour. He feels much more confident in his ability to support a future family on a ski patroller's salary. "There's nothing I'd rather do," Chiappetta said.

Since 2020, people across industries have been rethinking their relationship to work. Frustrated with their bosses' lack of loyalty and support, many have quit, changed positions, or found ways to claw back their autonomy by quiet quitting, secretly working multiple jobs, slyly outsourcing parts of their jobs, or unionizing. The Economic Policy Institute says 16.2 million American workers were represented by a union in 2023, an increase of roughly 400,000 since 2020.

Lately, workers in jobs that were always sold as a dream experience — the kinds of jobs Meryl Streep's character in "The Devil Wears Prada" says "a million girls would kill for" — are realizing that they, too, have gotten the short end of the stick. In exchange for these people "living the dream," companies paid very little: The job itself was supposed to be the reward. Now these workers, including ski patrollers, Minor League Baseball players, Disneyland character performers, and Chippendales dancers, have decided that the dream is no longer enough. They want a real living wage.

America's ski industry has been one of the most visible examples of how workers are trying to turn their dream jobs into careers. During the busiest time of the year, the ski patroller strike shut down most of Park City Mountain. Guests were furious — not at the workers but at Vail for letting the strike happen. It brought attention to how little ski patrollers are paid. In 2023, the average hourly wage for lifeguards, ski patrollers, and other recreational workers was just $15, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Until recently, ski jobs were primarily seen as seasonal work for college kids or ski bums — people who would tolerate low wages in exchange for a romp on the mountain. Vail still bills its mission as creating "the experience of a lifetime" for its employees.

Over the past six years, workers have pushed to make ski work a sustainable career. Unions representing ski patrollers and lift mechanics have formed at more than 16 resorts across the US. A major concern for these workers is the rapidly growing cost of living near resorts. As of December, it cost about 33% more to live in Park City than in the average US city, the Economic Research Institute found in its research. As of 2023, census data shows the median income in the city was more than $101,000, while the median salary for ski patrollers was just over $30,000. While Vail provides some affordable housing options for its workers, there isn't enough to go around. To make ends meet, some patrollers have had to work second jobs.

Meanwhile, the ski industry has been consolidating. In the past decade, American companies have acquired nearly 100 ski areas. Since 2019, Vail alone has purchased 19 resorts. Those massive investments haven't gone unnoticed by the rank and file.

Mike Reilly, 33, moved to Park City about 10 years ago after graduating from college in Ohio. He didn't know how to ski when he arrived but practiced in his time off from working as a barista at a local coffee shop. About a year in, he took an entry-level ski patrolling job, making $13.25 an hour.

Initially, Reilly and Chiappetta both had to find work in the offseason to make ends meet. Reilly led youth backpacking trips, worked as a bike patroller at the resort, and occasionally picked up shifts as a barista. They didn't see their ski jobs as a side gig. "The longer I lived out here and saw that it was possible, the more I wanted to do this as a career," Reilly said.

Since the union ratification, that's become more of a possibility.

Before Minor League Baseball players unionized in 2022, they made between $290 and $500 a week, weren't paid during spring training, and had to find other jobs during the offseason. Despite the fact that nearly every major league player has to start in the minors, the finances never added up.

Gavin Lux, a second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds, told The Nation that when he was with the Los Angeles Dodger's Single-A affiliate in Rancho Cucamonga, California, there were five or six players sleeping on air mattresses in a single apartment. The situation didn't get much better as he progressed to Triple-A. "I had to pay for my new place, plus an apartment that no one was living in anymore," Lux said.

After winning their contract in 2023, players saw their wages more than double to between $675 and $1,200 a week. They also secured a salary during spring training and the offseason, better healthcare benefits, and control of their name, image, and likeness rights, allowing them to make money off brand deals. It was a game-changer.

Paul Clark, a professor of labor and employment relations at Penn State University, said the unionization effort represented a shift in the way society views so-called dream jobs. For decades, there was a consensus that people working these jobs shouldn't complain about wages because they got to play a game for a living, Clark said. That has changed as Major League Baseball has become more profitable. Last year, the MLB earned $12.1 billion in revenue, a 15% increase since 2012. Meanwhile, minor league teams have continued to go up in value, prompting a wave of acquisitions.

"The players are what fans pay for, and therefore they are the game," Clark said.

Entertainers are having a similar realization. Nothing says "dream job" like spending all day in a Disney park making little kids' dreams come true — as many as 900 people might audition for a single role as a Disney character. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows for those hired at the Southern California theme parks. The Actors' Equity Association says the base pay for Disney characters at Disneyland is $24.15 an hour and that many workers face unpredictable schedules and unsafe working conditions, like limited water breaks and long hours wearing heavy costumes in the California heat.

To change things, 1,700 employees who dress up as characters, march in parades, and train performers voted to unionize in May with the Actors' Equity Association. The union, known as Magic United, began negotiations this past fall for higher pay, medical coverage for injuries sustained while in costume, and better insurance benefits.

Other Disneyland employees, represented by United Food and Commercial Workers Local 324, filed an unfair labor practice charge last year alleging that about 28% of cast members faced food insecurity, 42% did not have enough sick time to see a doctor, and 64% were spending more than the recommended 30% of their income on rent and utility costs. After filing the charge and threatening to strike, the union secured a higher base rate of $24 an hour and better policies around sick leave.

Over in Las Vegas, the city's famous Chippendales dancers are hoping for a similar win. Despite the group's popularity and the talent required to be a performer, they're paid a flat fee of $100 a show, a rate that has not changed in more than a decade. Dancers are not paid for rehearsal time unless it exceeds 15 hours a week and are expected to perform eight 80-minute shows each week. They are also expected to take pictures with guests after each show — photos that cost fans $35 but earn dancers just $0.50. They receive no benefits. In October, the Sin City dancers voted to form a union with AEA to make their jobs more manageable.

"It's a competitive market. And unfortunately, the entertainment industry breeds this concept of disposability, you know — one in, one out," one of the dancers who organized the union told In These Times. Chippendales did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Wilma Liebman, who served as chair of the National Labor Relations Board during part of the Obama administration and teaches as an adjunct professor at the NYU School of Law, said she expected some of the unionizing activity to continue and perhaps increase. "If employers become emboldened to oppose unionization because Trump is in the White House, and they think it's going to be pro-business, it may incentivize workers to keep up the activism," she said. "There comes a point where you might be frustrated or you might be fired."

Even if the work is great, it's still work. Despite the tough labor market, these campaigns might just encourage other people working hot jobs to try their hand at getting a better deal.

Robert Davis is an award-winning journalist who lives in Denver.

When I heard that coffee futures were reaching record highs, I got a bad case of the jitters. What would happen to my morning cup of Joe? How expensive could it get? Could I afford enough coffee to get me through the day?

I set out on a mission to find out.

Caffeine is the world's most popular drug, and coffee is the second-most-traded commodity after oil. On the futures market, traders buy coffee shipments months or years in advance — so price spikes can indicate what the rest of us might be paying down the road. After the pandemic began, prices for coffee futures rose, along with everything else. Accordingly, the consumer price index showed a steep increase in prices for store-bought coffee throughout 2022.

The problems didn't stop there. Thanks to severe droughts in 2023, major harvests in Brazil and Vietnam did badly, and water in the Panama Canal ran low, slowing ship traffic. Coffee futures started to tick up. Then, this past November, the commodity skyrocketed. Brazil, which exports the lion's share of the industry's preferred arabica beans, was beginning its growing season as the country's worst drought on record stretched into a second year. The clouds that usually shade coffee trees went missing. It would be the second bad harvest in a row. When the news hit, traders rushed to lock in arabica contracts, sending prices to all-time highs in December. Now prices are more than double their 2023 peak. Robusta beans, often used in instant coffee, hit their own record high this month.

Is this the end of coffee as we know it?

Climate experts say the underlying supply problems aren't going anywhere. Over the next two decades, bad harvests could become the norm, wild arabica coffee could move from thriving to endangered, and the land available for coffee cultivation is expected to shrink by half or more. While the coffee market has some flexibility to keep prices down, the long-term outlook for America's favorite beverage is bleak.

Coffee prices have already been going up for a few years. This past summer, brands like Folgers and Maxwell House raised their prices to pass on previous commodity increases to customers. Prices at my local café went up $0.35, so I started grinding my coffee at home. But, the addict that I am, I kept caffeinating. We all did.

This "inelastic demand" gives companies plenty of wiggle room to raise prices without worrying that people will stop buying coffee entirely. Both Folgers' parent company, J.M. Smucker, and Maxwell's parent company, Nestlé, reported higher coffee sales in the US last year despite raising consumer prices. But how much higher could prices get?

People who brew their coffee at home "are going to feel it," Jay Zagorsky, a professor at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, said. Since coffee beans are the only ingredient in a tub of Folgers, commodity price increases have a direct impact on grocery prices. Two decades ago, US Department of Agriculture economists looked at how commodity coffee price swings affected grocery shelves. They found that every $0.10 increase in futures led to an immediate $0.02 increase in prices for canisters of ground coffee. When commodity prices stayed high, the rest of the increase was passed on over the course of a year. According to consumer price index data from January, grocery coffee prices are already more than 3% higher than they were this time last year — instant coffee alone rose 7%. And Illy recently told Bloomberg that a 25% hike in prices in the next few months was not out of the question.

To counteract low supply, coffee retailers can fudge the quality: Robusta beans, which have a harsher flavor than arabica, can be mixed into blends, for example. Smucker recently told investors that for Folgers and its other coffee brands, the company had "the ability to flex formulas and still deliver the exact same consumer experience." In Indonesia, coffee shops are even mixing corn and rice with their coffee beans to stretch supplies. Some people have called this phenomenon of companies swapping in cheaper and lower-quality ingredients "flavorflation."

In cafés, Zagorsky said, commodity price swings have a less noticeable impact because most of the cost of a latte is not beans but labor. "If I was Starbucks, I'd worry much more about the unionization drive," he said. Massive companies such as Starbucks can manage the uncertainty around commodity prices by locking in multiyear contracts, playing the market, and hedging their bets. Last year, Starbucks actually came out ahead on coffee futures. The company expects that it has enough beans in storage or contracted to last through at least September. In December, its CEO said it would not raise its North American store menu prices before then — though it is removing some discounts.

Small roasters buy quality beans for more than the commodity price, but unlike Starbucks, they are more sensitive to price swings. Over an Americano (her) and an afternoon decaf (me), Daria Whalen, a coffee buyer for Ritual Coffee in San Francisco, admitted she's worried.

She opened a 12-ounce bag of coffee and poured a handful of beans onto the table. She pointed out slight variations in their size, explaining that these beans came from five different farms in a family co-op that pays coffee pickers Colombia's minimum wage. In an industry rife with shady labor practices, from child labor to human trafficking, buying from farms that pay decent wages is "one of the only things we have left," Whalen said.

This bag retails for $25, more than five times the price of Folgers at Costco. It's not clear how much more consumers would be willing to pay. Thankfully, the more flexible part of that price is the flavor: Coffee beans are rated on a point scale, like wine. To adapt to a temporary price spike, Whalen said, she will choose beans that taste good but fall lower on that scale.

The big question for Whalen is what happens when the climate crisis makes these supply shocks more frequent. "I have anxiety, like probably 85% of the population," Whalen said. "So on some days, you catch me at cup four of coffee and I'm like, 'There's not going to be any coffee anymore.'"

The climate crisis is already changing coffee growing. The past two years have been the hottest on record, bringing more evaporation and making droughts more severe. Coffee harvests have suffered. "In the last year, I saw scorched coffee beans. Coffee beans that were shriveled because of extreme heat," Whalen said. She has also seen warmer temperatures nurture a disease called coffee leaf rust, push back growing seasons, and affect shipping logistics.

A 2022 data synthesis projected double-digit losses over the next few decades in the land that's good for cultivating coffee beans. Some areas will become newly available for coffee, but that won't be nearly enough to balance the losses. Unfortunately for connoisseurs, that new land will likely work best for robusta beans, not arabica beans.

In response to the changes, more growers are drying beans rather than washing them to save on water. That changes flavor profiles, favoring fruity flavors like blueberries, Whalen said: "Sometimes you can get a ferment-y flavor that we would call a defect, but a lot of people really love that."

There's some adapting that farms and supply chains can do, but these efforts may still fall short if countries don't aggressively limit their fossil fuel emissions. One study found that under a business-as-usual scenario, even with best practices in place for coffee growing and logistics, Starbucks could see persistent bean shortages as early as 2029. In its most recent annual report, Starbucks acknowledged that the climate crisis could materially influence its financial performance, particularly if it meant the company couldn't meet demand.

"If you care about your coffee," Regina Rodrigues Rodrigues, a Brazilian climate scientist, said, "you can't support any policies that allow the continued burning of fossil fuels. That's the thing."

Environmental concerns also popped up the last time coffee futures spiked, back in 1977. One environmentalist called the price increase "merely another way of telling us that the 4 billion souls on this planet must compete for a steadily shrinking supply of farm produce." That prediction turned out to be wrong. Since the 1960s, agricultural production has grown every decade. In fact, so much new land has been used for coffee that prices haven't even kept pace with overall inflation — Zagorsky pointed out that, adjusted for inflation, 1 pound of coffee today is still cheaper than 1 pound in 1980.

Looking back, it's tempting to hope that the world is crying wolf, but adaptive measures came with downsides. Agriculture boomed thanks to the clearing of forests and an unprecedented application of fossil fuels, both in fertilizers and as fuel for transporting food along vast global supply chains. One study estimated that most of the growth in agricultural production since the 1970s has not been in line with safe environmental practices. Now, as the world warms, agricultural growth is starting to slow, even as demand for coffee continues to rise. We have not solved our coffee problems; we have merely postponed them.

Is sad, watery 1950s diner coffee our fate? Or will we find new ways to make coffee growing productive and resilient? Zagorsky said that the futures market predicts a price decrease. But beyond that, he doesn't want to make any predictions. "Economists are terrible at guessing the future," he said.

So I took my fears and uncertainty to someone willing to predict the future: Dr. Honeybrew, a coffee fortune teller in Manhattan's East Village. Honeybrew took a look at the coffee dregs in my tiny espresso cup to read the future of coffee itself.

"Everyone is plunging a straw down in the ground and just sucking up all of the richness, all of the life, all of the power from the soil," he said. "This is Mother Nature's way of saying, 'You know what? In return, I'm going to give you guys the shittiest beans.'"

Honeybrew foresaw the sting of change. The chaos of revolution. And a shared love of coffee that, against all odds, could bring Americans back together. Really, he said, coffee's future hinges on the leadership of Melania Trump: "If the Trump family brings to the White House a cocker spaniel," Honeybrew said, "it will be a very good omen."

What Honeybrew didn't speculate on is the future-shaping potential of the Trump administration's recent activity: how new tariffs might increase coffee prices, whether cuts at the National Weather Service could make it harder to predict harvests, and how leaving the Paris agreement could make the underlying problems worse. Without a major course correction, even a cocker spaniel in the Oval Office probably won't save coffee.

Meg Duff is a reporter covering climate change and the environment.

Konstantin Malofeyev is on a roll. It's the day after Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election, and the Russian oligarch's 900,000 followers on Telegram expect a rollicking post. Malofeyev, after all, is one of the Russian right's most adept media magnates, mentored by a former producer from Fox News on how to nourish and captivate a conservative audience in Russia.

Malofeyev illustrates his postelection post with a provocative image of Trump raising a clenched fist. Trump "is our enemy," he declares. "He wants a great America." Even so, he suggests, Trump might be able to get together with Vladimir Putin and agree on a common goal: how to divide the world between the two great superpowers. He finishes with a Trumpian flourish: "LET'S MAKE RUSSIA GREAT AGAIN."

It might sound like standard social media bluster, but Malofeyev can't be dismissed as a blowhard. He combines the media savvy of Steve Bannon with Elon Musk's ability to bankroll his own crusades, but he goes to greater lengths than either: The nationalist, religiously infused political faction he helps lead includes elements of the country's military and security services. On his multimedia platform, Tsargrad, which claims more than 3 million followers, Malofeyev beats the drums for Russian nationalism with a fervor that rivals the strongman posturing of Trump himself. He's also a proud sponsor of violent military rebellion: In 2014, he helped organize — and perhaps even instigate — the Russian separatist rebellion in the Donbas region of Ukraine, which served as a precursor to Putin's all-out invasion.

When Malofeyev speaks, everyone from Kremlin insiders to policymakers in Washington pays heed, his pronouncements seen as a signal of where Putin might be headed. He also has a fan base among American conservatives who cheer his screeds against "wokeness" and who view Washington and NATO as the culprits for the war in Ukraine. "He has enough money that he can certainly get his ideas listened to," says E. Wayne Merry, a Russia expert and former foreign service officer who served in the US Embassy in Moscow. It pays, then, to understand what Malofeyev has in mind to "Make Russia Great Again" — a goal that, in his mind, might be achieved only by full-scale nuclear war. "We are able to and must deliver a truly potent retaliation strike in a way that will force the West to curb support of Ukraine," Malofeyev wrote in an article published last year on Tsargrad.

Does he truly believe the war in Ukraine can be won with nuclear weapons? "Yes, I still think it is possible," Malofeyev tells me in a meandering, 7,000-word opus he sends in response to questions I submitted to him. "We have been messing around with a weak rival like Ukraine for too long, even with all the help they get from NATO." In his view, Russia must rebuild the empire along 19th-century tsarist lines.

"I see my position now in Russia as someone deeply engaged in its imperial revival," Malofeyev writes. "I believe that Russia will become an Empire again, and we are heading towards that end irreversibly and decisively," he adds. "I will help this come about with all my might."

Like Putin, Malofeyev wants to return Russia to a time before the Soviet revolution — reviving traditional values and institutions like the Orthodox Church and reassembling a "Great Russia" that includes ethnic Russians living in places like Ukraine. As both a child and an exuberant architect of this grand mission, his zeal for it possibly exceeds Putin's own.

Malofeyev was born in 1974 in a Moscow suburb, where his father was the head of a Soviet astrophysics laboratory. When he was 11 or 12, he tells me, one of his father's colleagues, a theoretical physicist, handed him a Bible, which he devoured. A grave childhood illness opened "some inner horizons," and his great-grandmother nourished a religious sensibility. But it was "The Lord of the Rings" that stimulated his conversion. "I was one of the boys who came to faith in Jesus Christ through Tolkien's fairy tale universe," Malofeyev tells me. "It may sound strange but it's true!"

In the summer of 1991, with the Soviet Union on the brink of collapse, Malofeyev enrolled at Moscow State University to study law. By his account, his political views had already crystallized. He wanted Russia to go backward, to the pre-Soviet era when Imperial Russia was ruled by a tsar with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church. As a student, he wrote papers extolling prerevolutionary Russia, guided by his "single dream" — to "revive the monarchy in Russia and the Russian Empire itself." The Russian people were happiest then, he believed. His given name, he points out to me, was in honor of his great-grandmother's late husband, an officer in the White Tsarist Army.

This nostalgic vision dovetailed with an unremitting antipathy toward Western democracy — especially America's — as an empty form of what he derisively calls "show business." In 1993, as a law student, he watched with revulsion as Russian tanks, on orders from President Boris Yeltsin, fired on nationalist oppositionist rebels in the Russian parliament. "Yeltsin's actions were being coordinated directly from the American embassy," Malofeyev told me. (In fact, the American embassy viewed the shelling as a disaster for Yeltsin and for the cause of Russian democracy.)

After graduating, Malofeyev embarked on a path through the no-holds-barred terrain of Moscow finance. Like many of the country's newly minted oligarchs, he prospered through a combination of guile and strategic alliances with Kremlin-connected figures. In 2005, he launched his own investment fund, Marshall Capital Partners, whose largest single stake was in Rostelecom, Russia's state-controlled telecommunications provider. Russia was not yet a pariah in Western business and political circles, and with his fluent English, Malofeyev developed personal connections to players both on Wall Street and in London's financial district. At its peak, his investment fund reportedly amassed assets of $1.5 billion.

But Malofeyev, unlike other oligarchs, did not shy away from promoting his political views. When the Kremlin was advancing a law to suppress 'gay propaganda,' Malofeyev told cultural conservatives in the West that "Christian Russia" could help liberate their own countries from what he called "the new liberal anti-Christian totalitarianism of political correctness, gender ideology, mass-media censorship and neo-Marxist dogma." To expand his political influence, he hired Jack Hanick, a former Fox News producer, to help create a Russian media platform modeled on Fox News. When Rupert Murdoch founded Fox News, Malofeyev was told by Hanick, "studies showed that 80% of the American population was conservative, but at the same time 80% of journalists were liberals." Malofeyev immediately saw the parallels. "When I heard about this," he tells me, "I believed that we could do a similar thing in Russia, because during the Western 'colonization' of our media during the 90s, Russian media as well became very liberal and pro-Western."

Under Hanick's tutelage, Malofeyev was on his way to becoming a full-fledged culture warrior. Then a transformative event — one that took place on an actual battlefield — propelled him into an even more radical role: an organizer of armed rebellion.

In February 2014, the Maidan revolution in Ukraine toppled the country's pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. It also threatened to bring Ukraine into the European Union — a move that would represent a political and economic setback for both Putin and Malofeyev. Alexandar Mihailovic, the author of "Illiberal Vanguard: Populist Elitism in the United States and Russia," tells me Malofeyev's "personal finances" stood to suffer, because his "considerable investments in import and export businesses" in the Donbas region were suddenly at grave risk.

Two months after the uprising, a militia of pro-Russia commandos engaged in a shootout in the Donbas against forces loyal to Kyiv. The group was headed by Igor Girkin, a former operative in the Russian security services whom Malofeyev had brought onto the payroll as head of security at Marshall Capital. On a phone call intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence, Malofeyev could be heard showering praise on Girkin. He was especially pleased the clash took place on Palm Sunday, the Christian holiday that marks Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

Malofeyev: So you killed exactly right people.

Girkin: Excellent! Thank you.

Malofeyev: Also want to say you marked very well the holiday.

Malofeyev was a prime financial backer of the pro-Russia separatists as they maneuvered to establish political control of the Donbas. Alexander Borodai, the prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, had consulted for Malofeyev at Marshall. As the fighting raged on, Malofeyev brushed aside questions about why a self-professed Christian would back an armed and bloody insurrection. "You are confusing Christianity with Buddhism," he told a Russian publication at the time. "Christianity knows a large number of holy warriors," including saints who "chopped people up with a spear and a sword." Igor Girkin, he said, "took communion during the war, banned swearing in his units, and said that war is a holy cause."

To this day, Russia analysts debate whether Malofeyev, in fomenting the rebellion, was acting on his own or on the Kremlin's instructions. It's a question that goes to the core of who he is: Just how willing is Malofeyev to act on behalf of his interests, and in his view Russia's, without express permission from Putin?

"I am 80% sure that was his initiative" in the Donbas, Ivan Grek, the director of the Russia program at George Washington University, tells me.

The US and other Western governments sanctioned Malofeyev as "closely linked" to the separatist rebellion in Ukraine. But despite the financial blow he suffered, Malofeyev sped ahead with his media venture. In 2015, Tsargrad launched with a Fox-like slogan: "We are not afraid to tell the truth." But Vasily Gatov, a Russia media analyst, has noted that Tsargrad's closest American parallel is not Fox News but Breitbart, which offers a similarly "hyper partisan" blend of news and opinion.

To serve as chief editor, Malofeyev brought in Aleksandr Dugin, whose nationalistic writings enjoyed a following among Moscow's political elite, including military strategists. Dugin's 1997 book "The Foundations of Geopolitics," called for the restoration of a Moscow-run Orthodox Eurasian empire, in which Ukraine would be stripped of its sovereignty and become "a purely administrative sector of the Russian centralized state." The Russians, Dugin preached, were an "imperial people." The declared goal of Tsargrad — the name Slavs gave to the ancient Byzantine capital of Constantinople — was to "rebuild the empire."

"Aleksandr Dugin is a great man, I should say he is truly brilliant," Malofeyev tells me. Dugin now serves as editor in chief of Katehon, a think tank Malofeyev established. The organization derives its name from a biblical term that Malofeyev translates as "the force that keeps the world from being consumed by the coming evil."

Dugin's views, bankrolled by Malofeyev, have made him a darling of the American right. When Tucker Carlson visited Moscow last year for an exclusive interview with Putin, he also sat down with Dugin, whom he hailed as "a writer who writes about big ideas." In Dugin's telling, Putin was despised in the West because of his defense of "traditional values." Agreeing, Carlson bemoaned what he called the "very serious" antipathy directed at Putin. When Carlson posted a video of the interview on X, it garnered more than 8 million views.

As Tsargrad has expanded its reach and influence, Malofeyev has outpaced even the Kremlin's ambitions for empire-building. In 2022, when Putin finally launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine, a headline on Tsargrad exulted: "The predictions are coming true: Ukraine is no more." Now, with Trump's return to power, Malofeyev sees an opportunity to end the war and reestablish Russia's reach into Europe.

"There is only one single conversation that can take place to solve all of this," he told me. "A summit between President Putin and President Trump, where these two world leaders would resolve the whole set of issues, redrawing global security into a new multipolar framework. Ukraine is only a small part of this bigger picture." It didn't take long for Malofeyev's desire to begin to materialize: The two leaders had a phone call on February 12, during which Putin hinted at his desire to end what he views as NATO's expansionist agenda on the frontiers of Europe. A week later, Trump called Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky a "dictator" and said he's planning to meet with Putin to negotiate an end to the war.

In the meantime, the message Tsargrad is delivering to Russians is that all is not well in the land Putin has ruled for so long. The platform often publishes the kind of dissent that the Kremlin normally moves to silence. "Society is tired of unpredictability and uncertainty," Yuri Pronko, a veteran Moscow journalist and one of Tsargrad's chief commentators, declared in a recent video. "Life in Russia has become very expensive, both literally and figuratively. Prices have skyrocketed, and if someone's salaries grow, they are immediately devalued by inflation and devaluation."

I suggest to Pronko that his grim presentation doesn't sound like what the Kremlin wants to hear. "I am a journalist, not a propagandist," he tells me. "It may seem strange to you, but in Malofeyev's media I have more freedom than I previously had in other media."

In Moscow, the platform is widely perceived as to the right of Putin. "A lot of people close to Tsargrad are radically opposed to Putin," says one insider. "For these people, Putin is not radical enough."

Given Tsargrad's critical tone, why does the Kremlin — which has increasingly cracked down on naysayers — tolerate Malofeyev? It may suit Putin to remind Russians that he is not the most militant figure in Moscow. Malofeyev serves as a useful demonstration that "Putin is not the worst choice," says Dmitry Gudkov, a former member of Russia's parliament now living in exile. It's possible that Putin genuinely appreciates Malofeyev's fervent support for Russia's war in Ukraine, including medals for valor the oligarch hands out to Russian warriors. And it doesn't hurt that Malofeyev is married to Maria Lvova-Belova, who serves as Putin's commissioner for children's rights. Both Lvova-Belova and Putin have been indicted by the Hague on suspicion of "the war crime of unlawful deportation" of children from Ukraine to Russia.

Malofeyev and his spouse, in any event, share with Putin the distinction of being supremely hated figures in Kyiv. A "nice family," is how Yulia Klymenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, sarcastically describes the Malofeyev pair to me in a text. "Ideological devil + convict witch. The only home for them is hell."

Malofeyev's views on America come through loud and clear in his 20-page response to my questions. "It is proven fact that what you used to call 'Founding Fathers,' all of them were members of a secret, not at all transparent or democratically elected Masonic organization," he writes. "It was all a big show run by rich slave owners." He also rails against the "Deep State" that ran the Biden administration with "their perverted ideology (globalism, wokeism, cancel culture, encouragement of mass migration, gender issues) and live habits (pedophilia, child trafficking, and so on)." Still, he says, the future may offer hope: "I would like to agree with Elon Musk, who has recently said that we need to establish a direct democracy on Mars." His view of Trump's return to power contains a certain grudging respect. Trump and Musk, he says, are "transparent in their loyalty to post-liberalism, traditional values and anti-woke ideology."

Given his cultural rhetoric, Malofeyev serves as a useful conduit to American conservatives, recasting Putin's government as a vital bastion of traditional values. Jackson Hinkle, a MAGA hard-liner whose podcast was banned by Twitch for propagating disinformation about the war in Ukraine, interviewed Malofeyev on his podcast after Trump's election, introducing him as a "Russian patriot" who had been "vilified by the US government." Hinkle assured listeners that Malofeyev — and by extension, Putin — deserved their admiration. "I don't consider him a villain," he said.

It would be easy to dismiss Malofeyev's promotion of family values as a cynical ploy to win the support of Western conservatives. But everyone I spoke with about him — in Moscow, Washington, and Europe — views Malofeyev as sincere in his beliefs. Critics view him as a key cog in the culturally retrograde triumvirate of Trump, Putin, and Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. "The Axis of Hate is back," Remy Bonny, a Belgium-based activist who advocates for LBTQ+ rights, tells me. In this transatlantic bloc, Bonny says, Malofeyev can be seen as an early and influential champion of Russia's emergence under Putin as a "pacesetter" for a global campaign against progressive values.

Malofeyev, for this part, has a simple explanation for the latitude he is given to criticize Putin's policies. "I am an independent rich man," he told podcaster Hinkle last year. "I have nothing from the state. My media belongs to me, privately. My business is completely private."

Just how much Malofeyev is worth isn't clear; the scuttlebutt in Moscow is that he has amassed a fresh pile of wealth in crypto. He won't disclose any information on his business affairs, he tells me, because that would make it easier for American prosecutors — "this gang of thieves" — to "steal my assets." The US government has seized some $5 million traced to a Malofeyev investment in a Texas bank, and the Justice Department has authorized transferring the funds to Ukraine to support war veterans.

Still, outspoken as Malofeyev can be, he sometimes pulls his punches. A year ago, a Moscow court sentenced Igor Girkin to prison — the man Malofeyev once employed and praised as a holy warrior in the Donbas rebellion. Girkin's crime was to call out Putin as a "cowardly bum." Malofeyev apparently did nothing to help his former employee escape this fate. Girkin has said he had a falling out with Malofeyev on "how an honest Russian patriot should act." In Girkin's view, the oligarch's aspiration to fit Russia's government in a "patriotic-monarchist uniform" was "doomed to failure."

One clue to Malofeyev's approach to Putin came in November, when he addressed a rally on National Unity Day, a Russian holiday. In the remarks he posted on his Telegram channel, he gave thanks to the local governor and bishop for participating in the celebration — but, tellingly, he made no mention of Russia's president. At 50, Malofeyev is not so much confronting the 72-year-old Putin as looking past him. When I asked him to describe his vision of a post-Putin Russia, Malofeyev said the Russian constitution should be changed to allow Putin to rule for life and to appoint a successor, just as in a monarchy.

That step would fit with Malofeyev's cherished idea of a future for Russia constructed on a glorified idea of the past. It could also enable him to emerge as an influential player in the post-Putin era. I ask Merry, the former foreign service officer, who is likely to succeed Putin. Russia's next ruler, he says, will almost certainly be a "serious nationalist," he answers — and will likely come from the camp of those "frustrated with Putin's inability to get it done" in Ukraine. In other words, from the camp of which Malofeyev is a leader.

As I pored over Malofeyev's responses to my questions, it seemed to me at times he was risking the Kremlin's ire. But his willingness to push back at Putin's war policy as soft and slow on Ukraine also reflects the frustration that many Russians feel over a bloody struggle that has ground on for more than a decade. At his year-end press conference in December, Putin was asked what he would do differently if he had the chance to go back to the beginning of the all-out invasion of Ukraine. "I would have thought the decision ought to have been taken earlier," he replied. Putin, in effect, has gravitated to the position long held by Malofayev. His life mission, to rebuild the empire, on track, the oligarch is proving an uncanny foreshadower of the direction of a turbulent Russia.

Paul Starobin is the author of "Putin's Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia."

The manifesto found on Luigi Mangione before he was charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson doesn't spend much time discussing the quality of healthcare in America. It doesn't mention any of the specific health issues Mangione had complained about on Reddit or any frustrations he may have had with receiving treatment. Instead, the bulk of the note talks about the size of UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare.

"United," the note says, is one of America's largest companies by market cap, "behind only Apple, Google, Walmart." The company, it says, has "simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it." In other words, it seems Mangione wasn't upset about healthcare, per se — but was pissed off about monopolization. The backpack that was found in Central Park, which police believe belonged to Mangione, was stuffed with Monopoly money. (Mangione has pleaded not guilty to the shooting.)

Though the manifesto gets some facts wrong — UnitedHealth actually stood at No. 14 by market cap at the time of the shooting — it references a very real trend: Over the past 40 years, the government has allowed an unprecedented level of consolidation in almost every major sector of American business. Whether we're buying office supplies or booking a vacation or searching the internet, we're often at the mercy of a handful of companies that dominate that particular corner of the economy. Despite a century of antitrust legislation and litigation, American business is bigger than ever.

That's especially true when it comes to healthcare: The Government Accountability Office found that just three companies control at least 80% of the health insurance market in most states. UnitedHealth, in particular, has spent the past several years acquiring firms from across the healthcare sector, transforming the company into a vertically integrated behemoth that controls health insurance, medical services, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare data. Last year, the Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation into the company, prompting UnitedHealth to drop two proposed acquisitions. The DOJ also sued to block UnitedHealth's acquisition of Amedisys, a rival provider of home healthcare — a move which UnitedHealth has called an overreach it will "vigorously defend against."

Of course, companies consolidate for all sorts of reasons. For one, size allows them to take advantage of economies of scale. A report by accounting giant PwC found that large hospitals have a lower cost per patient, since they can share resources and treat patients faster. Insurance companies also save money by serving a large customer base — the more people they cover, the lower the risk (and cost) for each person. In a statement, UnitedHealth says, "The $5 trillion US health system remains deeply fragmented and rooted in fee-for-service models that result in less-than-optimal patient outcomes, higher mortality rates, poor patient experience, redundant care, and waste. We're accelerating the transition from volume to value as it's essential that we move beyond a transaction-based health system to a model that is proactive, outcomes-driven and enables people stay healthy over the course of a lifetime."

But monopolization comes at a steep cost. When a market is controlled by just a few corporations, economists have found, companies can hold customers captive and offer shoddier products and services, simply because consumers don't have any meaningful options. Farmers who buy John Deere tractors, which controls most of the tractor market, aren't permitted to fix their own equipment because the company requires farmers to use its repair services. (The practice is being challenged by a class-action lawsuit and a suit by the Federal Trade Commission.) Apple customers, similarly, are unable to repair their own phones, pushing them to buy new products rather than fix their current models. And in 2015, a study by Yale economist Zach Cooper found that costs for patients in hospitals without competition were approximately $1,900 higher than hospitals with four or more competitors.

In recent years, we have entered a new era in which monopolistic companies "crank up prices, crank down quality, service, and wages, and consumers have nowhere else to turn," says Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah.

Americans are well aware of the problem. In a June Gallup poll of US adults, 41% of respondents said they had "very little" trust in "big business," making it the third-least-trusted institution in America, behind only TV news and Congress. In a survey conducted this past spring, four in five respondents in rural areas of swing states agreed that "corporate monopolies now run our entire economy." And in a recent poll of registered voters, 41% of respondents under 30 said the killing of United Healthcare's CEO was "acceptable" or "somewhat acceptable."

As shocking as that might be, we've been here before. At the end of the 19th century, as major trusts consolidated entire industries, Americans turned to violence. In 1877, in response to the railroads slashing wages, workers rose up in a massive general strike that left 100 people dead. In 1894, a railway strike against the Pullman Co. grew so heated that it sparked a pitched battle with the Illinois National Guard, which killed dozens of strikers. In 1920, a wagon full of explosives was parked on Wall Street to target the banker J.P. Morgan. The bombing killed more than 30 people and injured hundreds more.

The question is: Why did the anti-corporate violence subside? What happened to tamp down the open rebellion — and why do so many Americans once again seem willing to embrace violence as a response to monopolization?

Violence against monopolies dissipated for two reasons. The first was government regulation. The second was low prices.

After the stock market crash of 1929, the government began to crack down on big corporations, breaking up monopolies in oil, tobacco, and railroads. At the same time, the New Deal enabled labor unions to fight companies on a more equal footing, with unions winning higher wages and better health insurance. Taken together, those efforts helped create a large and prosperous middle class. For decades, things seemed to be going well for regular Americans.

Then, in the 1980s, the government shifted its philosophy toward antitrust enforcement. Rather than treating consolidation as an inherent evil, it adopted what became known as the "consumer welfare" standard. If companies kept their prices low, the thinking went, it didn't matter whether markets were cornered by a few corporations. No economic harm, no legal foul.

The new philosophy allowed consolidation to soar — without sparking consumer unrest.

As Walmart and Amazon began to dominate the economy, driving small shops out of business, Americans accepted the loss of local businesses and low wages in return for an abundance of cheap and convenient goods and services. Amazon might rule the world, but who cared? The prices were low, the deliveries were fast, and the returns were free.

But now, as prices have shot up and companies have begun to take advantage of their market dominance, more and more Americans are realizing that when companies get too big, regular people end up paying the price. And when the system feels unfair, civility itself begins to crumble — especially when citizens feel they have no meaningful recourse. A sense of powerlessness, as history has repeatedly shown, breeds violence.

Keeping things civil, in fact, was an explicit reason the government decided to rein in monopolies in the first place. Speaking on the floor of the Senate in 1890, Sen. John Sherman urged his fellow lawmakers, many of whom were beholden to the rail barons, to support the statute that became the foundation of the anti-monopoly movement: the Sherman Antitrust Act. Congress had to choose, Sherman said: Either heed the public's call to break up the monopolies or "be ready for the socialist, the communist, and the nihilist." Today, with trust in big business deeply eroded and public satisfaction in the healthcare system at a 24-year low, America may find itself at a similar crossroads.

Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein is a freelance journalist who writes for the New York Times, the New Republic, and many other publications. He is writing a book about the authoritarianism of the American workplace, publishing early 2026.

After her job contract for the City of New York ended amid the pandemic, Tanya was left scrambling. The 55-year-old was juggling roles as an adjunct media professor, community activist, and writer in New York City, but still needed some extra cash. A friend introduced her to Taskrabbit, where she spent a few years earning money by running errands, working the odd event, and pet-sitting. Then in January 2024, she came across a side hustle she'd never seen before: someone was offering their services to stand in line. It was something, she thought, she could also easily do.

In major cities, standing in line has become all the rage, a "scene" unto itself; hourslong lines are now the price of entry to secure restaurant reservations, concert tickets, brand merch, bagels, and more. Retail brands are leaning into the luxury of the real-life experience, offering more exclusive events and you-had-to-be-there sample sales that bring out hundreds of fans. When the Hailey Bieber-backed beauty brand Rhode did pop-ups in New York and London in the fall, for instance, people waited in the cold for seven hours just to snag a single tube of lip balm.

In order to beat the queues, professional line-standers have become a growing part of the gig economy. While the cash-rich, time-poor have been sending their assistants ahead to get early access for years, more people are joining them in outsourcing their time. Bookings for professional standing line services on Taskrabbit experienced an 18% increase in the US in November and December compared to the previous year, the company found, earning those willing to wait an average of $27 an hour. For people with more money than time, it's an easy way to save a few precious hours. For those who wait, it's not a bad deal.

The process to become a line sitter is simple: Tanya, who asked that we just use her first name to protect her privacy, will get a notification saying someone is interested in hiring her to stand in line. After reviewing the details and making sure it is something she can do, she will contact the client and ask for specifics.

Certain restaurants like the pizzeria Lucali in Brooklyn — which saw a 30% increase in bookings the month after Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce made an appearance — only take in-person reservations, leading to long wait times.

"You need to know how many people they have in their party and what time they would like to go," Tanya says. The first people in line for a popular spot typically show up a couple of hours before a host comes out to take reservations. When it's Tanya's turn at the front she will tell the host the client's preferred timings for later that evening. "I also always ask for alternative times because you never know where you're going to get until you're up there," she adds. The client then comes back at the reserved time to claim their table.

Tanya quickly learned that different lines have different protocols. Waiting for Broadway tickets or an art gallery is not the same as waiting in line at a popular restaurant. For "the really sought-after places like Lucali and Don Angie" she says, she's started charging a two-hour minimum for clients to have a shot at a reservation. If clients don't want to fork out for the extra hours to guarantee a front-of-line spot, Tanya can't make any promises.

One time a client insisted that Tanya start waiting for a reservation at Lucali at 3 p.m., an hour before reservations are taken. She didn't end up getting the reservation. "They were disappointed," Tanya said, adding that they "hesitated to pay." But she has never been stiffed for failing to get a spot.

"Some places the process is very predictable," she tells me. "In other places, you have no idea whether you're going to get a spot or not."

Tanya charges $20 an hour. Clients will generally book a day or two in advance, but sometimes she will activate same-day tasks and take on last-minute requests. She normally makes herself available on Friday nights and weekends, averaging about three-line-standing bookings a week and earning between $60 and $200. "It's definitely one of my most consistent task categories," Tanya says. "It's relatively easy, but then it's not. You do have to have patience and you do have to come prepared."

Her longest line to date was for tickets to Gutenberg! The Musical! on Broadway. "It was a limited engagement and it was closing," she tells me. "People were really going crazy trying to get these tickets." It was January 2024 and one of the coldest days of the year. The client had paid for her to stand in line from 6 a.m. until the box office opened at noon. Other people didn't start showing up until 9:30. "I was freezing, it was brutal. It tested everything I had," she says. Despite wearing two coats, two hats, a scarf, and two pairs of gloves, "I couldn't even feel my hands or my face," she says.

To make the wait slightly less gruelling Tanya brought a stool to sit on to and a hot drink to sip on. She also listened to a high-energy playlist she had compiled specifically for these types of gigs, featuring hits from The Greatest Showman, Michael Jackson, and Beyoncé. "The last thing I would listen to is something really slow that makes me sleepy," she says. The client, a local New Yorker, met her in the line shortly before noon so that they could both purchase the two-ticket-limit each. On top of $120 for standing in line, they gave Tanya a $50 tip.

Professional line-standing is not limited to New York. Jennifer Goff, 38, first tried her hand at making some money from waiting in line at a Game of Thrones pop-up bar in Washington, DC, in 2017. After three hours of trying to convince those already in the queue to hire her to stand in for them while they went for a drink or grabbed some food, someone bit. From there, standing in line snowballed into a full-time business. She launched Skip The Line, which now employs five people part-time and charges $30 to $40 an hour for their services. Goff has stood in line for concerts, book signings, new iPhones, and releases of limited-edition liquors. However, her most lucrative jobs are standing in line for Supreme Court hearings.

"They generally only allow the first 50 people in line to attend the oral arguments," she tells me. "So people do have to line up, sometimes for days." In November, she was booked to stand in line 24 hours in advance for the US v Skrmetti Supreme Court hearings, which dealt with whether minors could receive gender-affirming care. In 2023, she was booked 36 hours in advance to secure a spot at the United States v. Donald J. Trump hearings, which addressed presidential immunity. For bookings of this length, Goff's team will work in shifts that range from about four to eight hours at a time. If they need to quickly grab a snack or use the bathroom, other members of Goff's team will keep an eye on their spot. For both cases, she got her clients seats in the courtroom.

Goff has found that others in the line are interested in hearing about her services. "It's a popular topic of conversation," she says. "When you're standing in line for a very long time, it's natural to start chatting with others around you. There will also be some folks who keep to themselves or have headphones, but for the most part, no matter the line, people like to converse with each other."

Tanya, for the most part, works alone. "I used to work as a reporter," she tells me, working 12 to 14 hours straight covering breaking crime stories. "I would go for hours and hours when I was on assignment and not even eat or go to the restroom." Standing in line, in comparison, is light work. "I can hold it," she says.

At some of the most coveted spots, Tanya will be one of many hired line standers. "They know my face, I know their face." Sometimes, it can get competitive. In the Lucali line recently, five people tried to slip in ahead of her as she approached the front, but she stood her ground. "It was cold, I'd been waiting for two hours," she recalls. "It was not gonna happen."

As lines get more time-consuming and competitive, more services have sprung up to help people save time. Startups like LineLeap allow people to pay to skip the line at bars, clubs, and concerts it has partnered with, while credit card companies like American Express have snatched up restaurant booking apps to offer their cardholders more exclusive opportunities. Online marketplace Appointment Trader lets people buy and sell reservations, and subscription-based apps like Access charge up to $300 a month to reserve tables at top restaurants.

Of course, the economics of line-skipping don't work out in favor of everyone who has to camp out in the cold — something anyone who has watched people bypass them in the fast pass lane at an amusement park can attest to. For that reason, some venues don't allow line skipping. A new law in New York is also cracking down on the restaurant reservation black market, requiring third-party reservation apps to obtain consent from restaurants before they can market and sell their reservations. Popular spots like Saturday Night Live have outright banned paying to bypass the line and many restaurants disapprove of it, so Tanya has to convince the hosts that the reservation is for her. "I've gotten smarter," she says. "I memorize the person's name and act like they're with me."

Still, some people get mad when they realize she is being paid to stand in line. "One person asked me, 'How early do you get here?'," Tanya says. She explained her process and that she had to start arriving earlier and earlier to beat out other line standers. "'That's not really fair,'" the person responded. "'If everyone in line is getting paid to do this, it leaves the rest of us with less chance to get a reservation.'"

Tanya and Goff were quick to defend line skippers. Goff's clients range from attorneys and activist groups to journalists without press passes and individuals physically unable to endure long waits. It's not just for the wealthy; the services allow people to choose what they value more — time or money. "Life is busy. You don't owe an explanation," Tanya says. "If you can find one way in this world to make your life a little easier, why wouldn't you take it?"

Although Tanya waited in line at Lucali over 20 times last year, she's never waited for herself. Her personal line standing mainly involves getting tickets to Broadway shows. "I wouldn't say never," she says about waiting for Lucali, "but I think I'd do it on a nice day."

Eve Upton-Clark is a features writer covering culture and society.

Abigail Carlos was bracing for a busy holiday season as her employer, Warner Bros. Discovery, was gearing up to launch a suite of new shows. A media strategist, Carlos had to assign complex tasks to her team members, and she needed a hand. So she asked ChatGPT and Perplexity to organize it all in emails that sounded both professional and personable.

"AI cuts my workload in half," she tells me. She's been using various AI tools for years. In her past roles running social media accounts, she'd use a chatbot to help write posts. Now she uses it to do tedious tasks like drafting emails and double-checking spreadsheets, freeing up time to focus on higher-level creative jobs. "I look at using it as working smarter, not harder," Carlos says. The 26-year-old now relies on AI for everything from revising her LinkedIn profile to coming up with ideas for the poetry she writes on the side.

A growing Gen Z workforce has embraced AI to free up their time, improve their work-life balance, and, ideally, make their jobs more meaningful by automating drudgeries. When Google last year surveyed more than 1,000 knowledge workers in their 20s and 30s, 93% of those who identified as Gen Zers said they were using two or more AI tools a week. The talent and staffing firm Randstad found in a report last year that Gen Zers generally used AI in the office more frequently than their older counterparts for everything from administrative tasks to problem-solving. This is the generation that "grew up seamlessly intertwined with technology," Deborah Golden, Deloitte's US chief innovation officer, says. For them, she says, "engaging with AI feels more intuitive than deliberate."

The share of Gen Zers in the US workforce recently surpassed that of baby boomers, and Gen Zers are expected to account for more than a quarter of the global workforce this year. Their transformation into a chatbot generation could have a seismic effect on the workplace. As employers look to capitalize on the tech's productivity gains, AI proficiency is becoming a prerequisite for many jobs, leaving behind those who aren't as fast in adopting it. Amid anxiety about AI taking away job opportunities, many young people are skilling up to try to stay hirable. But some experts are worried that operating on AI autopilot could come back to bite Gen Z in the long run.

Monique Buksh, a 22-year-old law student and paralegal in Australia, has found AI to be an immense time-saver. She uses Westlaw Edge and Lexis+ to help with doing legal research and unearthing relevant case law and statutes. She also turns to Grammarly to draft official documents and the AI assistant Claude to spot inconsistencies in contracts.

"With AI handling time-consuming work, I'm able to focus more on discussions around strategy, professional development, and problem-solving with my managers," she says. "Soft skills, like communication and critical thinking, will play an even larger role in the future as AI continues to take over repetitive tasks."

Josh Schreiber, a 21-year-old HR intern at Coinbase, uses Perplexity and ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas and research subjects. He also uses Otter.ai to record and transcribe conversations, like sales calls and product meetings, allowing him to focus on the discussion rather than frantically taking notes.

He thinks AI adoption is a matter of learning from history. In the early days of personal computing, he says, "those who embraced computers, programming, and utilizing software consistently outperformed those who resisted change." Today, he argues, "Gen Z workers who choose to embrace AI will outperform all those around them." Schreiber compared AI to a ski lift: It's better to take the lift up and enjoy the downhill ride than trudge slowly up the mountain first.

Carlos concurs. "It's important to learn about the new innovations in technology rather than fight them," she says.

Gen Zers' employment of AI is also driven by their fear of AI replacing their jobs. The anxiety isn't unfounded: An analysis from this past fall found that more than 12,000 jobs were cut in 2024 because of AI. McKinsey and others have forecast that entry-level roles, which Gen Z predominates, will be the first cut back by automation.

A Microsoft and LinkedIn survey of 31,000 knowledge workers conducted last year, for example, suggested that AI could fast-track Gen Zers' professional trajectory. Among the workers in leadership surveyed, 71% said they'd prefer hiring candidates with AI expertise over those with more conventional experience, and nearly 80% said they'd give AI-savvy staffers greater responsibilities.

Tatiana Becker, who specializes in tech recruiting, says that ultimately, "employers will be more interested in people with AI skills, but at all levels, not just Gen Z workers."

But some people worry that using AI as a shortcut could hurt Gen Z workers in the long run. In an online survey of Gen Zers who used AI at work by TalentLMS, which provides e-learning software for companies, 40% of respondents indicated they believed AI hindered their growth by doing tasks they could have learned from. Another study suggested that heavy reliance on AI tools was associated with lower measures of critical thinking, especially among younger adults. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found something similar: the more people used and trusted AI, the less they relied on critical thinking skills.

Even more concerning: About half of Gen Z respondents in a survey by Workplace Intelligence, an industry research agency, and INTOO, a talent development firm, said they turned to AI for guidance instead of their managers. Erica Keswin, an author and workplace strategist, isn't surprised. Many Gen Zers missed out on critical in-person mentorship in college and in early-career roles because of the pandemic. "Many Gen Z workers aren't comfortable connecting with their managers IRL to have difficult conversations and may find it easier to pose questions to AI," she says. AI, unlike managers, is constantly accessible and immediate and provides answers without judgment.

That can have downsides. Golden, of Deloitte, says collaboration and innovation thrive on the messiness of human interaction. "There is a real risk of weakening Gen Z's ability to navigate ambiguity and build the interpersonal skills that are essential in any workplace," she says.

It's one reason Nicholas Portello, a Gen Z professional in New York, is resisting using AI software. He thinks the instant gratification AI provides can harm productivity and creativity. "Some of the best ideas my team and I produced in 2024 can be attributed to brainstorming sessions and environments of open communication as opposed to ChatGPT," Portello says.

Kyle Jensen, an English professor and director of writing programs at Arizona State University, thinks it's an avoidable problem. He says that for AI to supplement rather than replace a young person's analytical capabilities, they must develop expertise in a field or topic. He tries to encourage his students to reflect on AI tools' role in problem-solving: What kinds of problems would they be most useful for? When would they be less useful?

Jensen argues that once a person acquires an in-depth understanding of a subject area, they can learn to recognize when a generative AI output is "overly general, unhelpful to the problem they are trying to solve, incorrect, or exclusionary of different ways of knowing or feeling." This also helps them pose more creative prompts and questions.

AI could be a great leveling force within the workplace, giving younger workers a massive leg up. But the experts I talked to expect that as Gen Z gets a head start in AI, the workplace will be divided between those who use AI and those who don't. Over time, this could push out older workers.

Companies already perpetuate the problem by tailoring training opportunities to only the youngest staffers. Various surveys have found that Gen Z employees have tended to be given more opportunities to learn how to use AI than older workers. Stephanie Forrest, the CEO of TFD, a London-based marketing agency, warns other employers against counting out older workers. "It shouldn't be treated as a foregone conclusion that these generations will be less capable — or less willing — to use AI, provided the right support is given," she says.

Ultimately, the employees and organizations that get ahead will be the ones that can effectively harness their people power — like a manager's ability to coach, mentor, and motivate or an employee's ability to persuade a client to stay with their company — because that's something AI can't do. Everyone, from Gen Z entrants to company execs, needs to know when AI is useful and when something needs a human touch.

Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India, whose work has appeared in Wired, The Verge, Fast Company, and more.

Many of America's biggest businesses are quietly lobbying to curb President Donald Trump's plan to deport millions of immigrants — workers who represent a large share of their labor force. And some involved in the campaign are deploying a phrase designed to appeal to Trump and his business-minded allies: Make America Wealthy Again.

Business Insider learned of the MAWA campaign from nearly two dozen industry lobbyists, corporate executives, and trade association leaders, most of whom discussed their efforts on the condition of anonymity. The message — directed at officials in the Trump administration, along with Republicans in Congress — is that mass deportations would cripple the economy, driving up prices for everything from groceries to housing.

"Trump as a businessman understands that if he doesn't have 200 guys cutting the grass at his golf courses, then they don't look right, and people won't want to play golf there," says Cristina Antelo, the founding principal at Ferox Strategies, a lobbying firm that counts the National Retail Federation, Walmart, and the tobacco giant Reynolds America among its clients. "There's a way to get to Trump and make him realize that. How many businesses does he need to hear from before he's like, 'Crap, I really am going to paralyze the entire US labor market if I do this'?"

So far, Trump's immigration raids have focused mostly on migrants accused of committing crimes since entering the country. But the prospect of widespread busts on farms and factories has rattled the business community, which relies heavily on migrant labor in areas such as agriculture, meatpacking, and construction. The MAWA plan is to apply pressure on business allies in Trump's inner circle, rather than on the president directly, and to steer clear of Stephen Miller, the administration's most outspoken anti-immigration hard-liner. "Stephen Miller won't ever be convinced. Forget that," says a lobbyist from a prominent trade association. "But Trump can be convinced not to screw over fellow businesspeople. Miller isn't the only dude who has Trump's ear."

Instead, according to multiple lobbyists, they'll seek to influence Brooke Rollins, Trump's pick to lead the Department of Agriculture, and Kristi Noem, his secretary of Homeland Security. Both are longtime business advocates, and Noem served as governor of South Dakota, home to migrant-dependent industries like beef processing and dairy.

In addition, lobbyists have already begun reaching out to members of Congress and their staffs — both on Capitol Hill and in their districts back home — via phone, Zoom, and in-person meetings. Several lobbyists describe a campaign of "shock and awe," one that will seek to apply "1,000 points of pressure" to GOP members of Congress who understand that immigrants are willing to take low-paying, high-risk jobs that are shunned by most Americans. Among those being targeted is Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, who chairs the House Agriculture Committee.

Despite Trump's hardline rhetoric on immigration, corporate lobbyists are confident that he'll reconsider the sweeping scope of his crackdown. "There's one thing Trump cares more about than keeping his mass deportation promise, and that's the economy," says one longtime corporate lobbyist. "He won't let it go to hell over something he controls."

For years, one of America's leading advocates for pro-immigration policies was the US Chamber of Commerce, which saw migrants as a source of cheap and pliable labor. As the country's largest lobbying group, the Chamber championed policies to expand guest worker programs and create paths for workers to gain legal status.

Over the past decade, as Trump made immigration crackdowns a signature issue, the Chamber pivoted away from its advocacy for migrants. But one former Chamber official tells BI that the business alliance — and its lobbying juggernaut — was seeking to serve as a moderating force on the issue. He said leadership at the Chamber was actively pressing lawmakers and Trump officials to avoid immigration enforcement actions that could hurt big business. (Neither the Chamber nor the White House responded to a request for comment.)

Officials at two other leading business associations say their organizations are also part of the "quiet caucus" of influential lobbying groups that are pressing Trump allies to help convince the president that mass deportations would damage his economic agenda.

Some of the MAWA lobbyists believe they can even persuade Trump to back the sort of comprehensive immigration reform that he torpedoed during his campaign. Such legislation, they say, could involve cracking down on border security in exchange for granting business-friendly concessions — including a pathway to citizenship for taxpaying immigrants with jobs, and more work visas for seasonal laborers and high-tech talent from Europe and Asia.

Whatever form the measures take, lobbyists are making their influence felt on immigration. "There will be negotiations," says Dan McFaul, a partner at Ballard Partners, a powerhouse lobbying firm with ties to Trump and his top advisors. The guiding principle, he says, is the essence of Washington politics: "What is the art of the possible?"

Many corporate lobbyists view Trump himself as their best ally in reversing his most extreme positions on immigration. "He's pretty pragmatic about how he approaches issues at the end of the day," says Rich Gold, a partner at Holland & Knight, whose lobbying clients range from the National Mining Association to the government of West Palm Beach, near Trump's home at Mar-a-Lago. Lobbyists note, for example, that it took only two days for Trump — amid a massive outcry from business leaders — to reverse course and delay a planned 25% tariff on Mexico.

"There's no way Trump is going all the way on immigration," says a lobbyist whose firm represents a dozen industries in a wide range of sectors. "He's loud, but he's not dumb."

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

When Daphne Gordon first tried MDMA, everything changed. She had grown up steeped in the "just say no" messaging of the '90s, which taught that any amount of illegal drug use was a gamble with your life. But she was also a big raver. Consuming MDMA — also known as molly, ecstasy, or, back in the '90s, E — with people she trusted helped her experience music more deeply and connect with friends and loved ones on a whole new level. When she and her husband became parents in 2009, their drug use didn't stop.

Sixteen years later, the couple, who are in their early 50s and live in Toronto, remain embedded in what Gordon describes as "a drug-positive social culture." Their friend group, which grew out of the electronic dance music fan community, is now made up of middle-age, established professionals with families. Many of them continue to attend parties and DJ events and use drugs on a fairly regular basis. In some ways, Gordon said, drugs are part of the identity of her social life. Having this outlet, and the community that surrounds it, helps her be a more present parent, she said.

But navigating drug use while raising kids isn't always easy.

"Everybody's a parent now, and everybody's coming to the parties, and sometimes people even rent an Airbnb for the kids to stay at and hire a babysitter who is capable of handling five kids," Gordon told me. "People are developing their lives around the drug-positive culture, but then it's like we have to cover our kids' ears when we go back home. It's kind of weird."

Hers isn't the only friend group dancing between nightlife and parenting. A 2022 Department of Health and Human Services report said that between 2015 and 2019, more than 21 million US children lived with a parent who used illicit substances, which the report distinguished from parents who had a substance use disorder. As drug use has become more common in recent years, more adults are regularly partaking of both licit and illicit substances. The Global Drug Survey, a nonscientific survey that has grown into the world's largest annual survey of recreational drug use trends, found that self-reported use of drugs such as cannabis, LSD, and "magic" mushrooms was growing in the US. In 2022, the last year with available data, one-third of 30- to 39-year-olds and nearly one-quarter of 40- to 49-year-olds said they'd taken cocaine in the past 12 months. The same shares reported using MDMA in the past year. In a 2023 study of 226 American parents, 13% said they had used marijuana in the past six months.

In an age when Burning Man is the unofficial wellness retreat for aging tech bros, none of this should come as breaking news. Business leaders have gone on the record in recent years to sing the praises of mind-altering substances such as LSD and MDMA, with some even insisting that "tripping" had made them better at their jobs. At the same time, researchers are discovering therapeutic benefits for psychedelic drugs such as ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms). As the health risks of alcohol become clearer, drugs are increasingly stepping in as the preferred indulgences for a good time.

For a growing number of white-collar parents, getting high has become a critical avenue for staying sane amid the demands of parenthood. And they're hoping to send their kids a better message than "just say no."

This past spring, Katie, 37, rented a cabin with a friend in upstate New York and spent the weekend tripping on magic mushrooms. It wasn't a weekend to get loose with party drugs but a quiet getaway to embark on "a little trip together for more intellectual purposes," she said. While she was exploring the outer edges of her consciousness, her 8-year-old son was home with his dad.

Recreational drug use is a common feature of weekend get-togethers among Katie's New York City circle — a constellation of academics, creatives, and white-collar professionals who are mostly in their 30s and 40s. It's not unusual for her friends to pass around baggies of MDMA or cocaine to fuel hours of dancing at a club or to consume mushrooms for a cozy night of soul-searching. Drugs are a conduit for shaking off the pressures of everyday life, for living in the moment with friends, and for Katie — getting back in touch with herself.

Katie, who asked that I keep her identity private, splits custody of her son with her ex-husband, an arrangement that has allowed her to reengage with nightlife. Before they separated nearly two years ago, late-night parties and drug use were off the table — not because it interfered with being a mother, she said, but because of the societal expectations modeled by her ex and the other parents around her. "The way I am as a parent is maybe different — lighter and easier and freer — because I don't feel like my life is limited in that way," she told me.

Her parents grew up in the Soviet Union, where it was typical to start families in your early 20s while continuing to enjoy late weekend nights of well-lubricated merriment, with friends taking turns staying in to watch everyone's kids. But Katie has found that things are different in the US — American culture doesn't prioritize having a robust social life while raising a family. For parents like her, there's a double taboo: the lingering stigmas surrounding recreational drug use combined with a widespread wariness of parents, especially moms, who manage to lead full, fun lives outside the confines of home. A mother who routinely nurses half a bottle of wine in her kitchen at the end of a long day will likely be judged less harshly than one who takes a psychedelic with friends on the occasional Saturday night.

"Using drugs doesn't necessarily feel at odds with parenting," Katie said. "In many ways, it feels complementary or helpful."

Though her son is a constant presence in her plans, during conversations, and at the dinners she hosts for friends, the majority of her inner circle is child-free. Other parents she's encountered don't seem to have a blueprint for the kind of community she has — one that isn't centered on the kids.

Drug taboos get tricky to navigate when other people's children may be involved. "It becomes this thing you don't talk about because kids can't really be explaining to their friends on the schoolyard what Mommy and Daddy said last night about drugs," Gordon said. "It's such a socially enforced taboo. Any kind of conversation about anything good about drugs is seen as encouraging experimentation — like, 'Can't wait until you get to do some!'"

The taboos are a major reason many parents keep their drug use confined to a close-knit group of friends. Joyce, a 44-year-old mom of three in Melbourne, Australia, said it's not unusual in her high-income neighborhood to gather at someone's house, open up a nice bottle of wine, and discreetly visit the master bathroom for a line of communal cocaine. She and her neighborhood friends have been doing it for years.

"These are the same people who are taking vacations two, three, four times a year," Joyce told me. "They drive nice cars. They live in beautiful homes. You walk down a street in the nicest suburbs, and you would never even think that the people behind the gates would be having themselves a little '70s disco party in the kitchen. It's totally seen and not heard, but everybody does it." All the while, everyone's kids are squirreled away somewhere else in the house, preoccupied by movies and snacks, happily oblivious.

Despite the live-and-let-live attitudes in her immediate friend group, Joyce — who asked that we keep her identity private — is well aware of the legal and reputational risks that come with using drugs. Getting found out might not affect her as severely as it would if she were not a well-off white mom, for instance, but it wouldn't be trivial, either. The penalty for cocaine possession in Australia carries a fine of 2,000 Australian dollars, or about $1,240, and/or up to two years in prison. The social ramifications could be higher if the wrong person caught on. Joyce said she knows that her occasional sharing of "a little plate of something" with friends would be seen as irresponsible, or even flat-out reckless, by many others in her extended community. For these reasons, Joyce and her friends are stringent about concealing their recreational drug use from their children — even those who are now adults. Making sure the kids know nothing is the absolute rule.

There have been some close calls. "Once I had my best friend over, and I said to her, 'Can you watch in the hallway just in case little footsteps come running while I prepare something?' And, well, she was not fast enough," Joyce said, chuckling. "One of my kids slammed on in. But the beauty of hiding is that you're sort of always ready." By a stroke of luck, her secret escaped notice.

"It's kind of like a naughty little secret that I guess keeps everybody feeling attached to their youth — the good fun days," Joyce said.

Most of the parents I spoke with hadn't let their kids in on their drug secret, saying they would maybe disclose details on a need-to-know basis. But Gordon and her husband are working to establish a more open dialogue about drugs with their teenage son. Before going out, they've begun talking through their substance-use game plans for the evening in front of him: "Like, 'How are we going to drink tonight? You know, let's not because I'm going to bring a joint,'" she said. He might not chime in, but they know he's listening. Mainly, they're focusing on the harms that could come from the substances he's likely to encounter within his friend groups — cannabis, vapes, and, especially, the tobacco pouches whose bright, round canisters poke out from the trash bins of his hockey rink. Gordon has also self-published a zine to help guide other families' conversations about conscious substance use, informed in part by new research that suggests the cognitive dissonance between antidrug messaging and the way substances are presented by peers and on social media makes scare tactics ineffective.

Rhana Hashemi, a coauthor of the drug education study, is the founder and executive director of Know Drugs, a nonprofit aimed at replacing the D.A.R.E. model of antidrug education in US schools with a harm-reduction curriculum that speaks frankly and nonjudgmentally about the role of mind-altering substances in people's lives — legal and illegal, good and bad.

"There's a difference between normalizing drug use that's healthy and normalizing drug use that's problematic," Hashemi told me. As she sees it, that distinction depends on the role that a particular substance is playing in a person's life at any given time. A healthy adult life revolves around competing priorities: romantic relationships, social relationships, a career, and physical and mental health. Healthy drug use happens in harmony with the bigger picture. It's the pinch of a certain something that helps make memories with friends without becoming the crux of the relationship, or that washes away the residues of a tough week at work without becoming a contingency plan for getting through the next one. It's the ability to be honest and step away if and when drugs begin disrupting the balance between everything else — turning into a need instead of an occasion.

Hashemi said it's also critical to emphasize that different substances carry far greater potential for harm to the still developing brain of a person in their teens or early 20s: "There's a difference between a parent using cannabis on a regular basis — or psychedelics or MDMA — and a child. These are all nuances that should be very explicit."

The drug talk is still a few years away for Katie, the single mom in New York City. But when the time comes, she plans to be forthright about her experience using drugs. She wants her son to know how careful she is about what she takes, the amounts she ingests, and where she gets her product. She wants her son to have the information he needs to make smart decisions. "I'll tell him how it's an important part of my life," she said, "and I'll explain to him why."

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