Mascots are currently enjoying a renaissance. From McDonalds Grimace to the WNBAs Ellie the Elephant and Pop-Tarts Pop-Tart guy, companies everywhere are leaning on characters to represent their brand values and attract eyes on social media. Now the Trump administration is joining in with its own mascot. Its a literal lump of coal.
The coal mascotnamed Coalieappears to be a new character designed to represent the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Coalie officially debuted on January 22, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted him (it?) on his X account.
In the post, which has now been viewed more than 37,000 times, Burgum shared an obviously AI-generated illustration of himself kneeling next to a grinning, bug-eyed piece of coal that’s decked out in a yellow coal miners helmet, vest, and boots. The caption, in part, read “Mine, Baby, Mine!”
[Image: USDOI]
A deeper exploration of OSMREs website shows that Coalie appears to be a genuine effort on the agencys part to explain its goals. And while it may not have been OSMREs intention, a poorly designed lump of coal is actually the perfect metaphor to represent the Trump administrations desperate attempt to revive the coal industry.
The perfect mascot for Trumps energy agenda
Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has been on a mission to prop up coal, despite both environmental and economic data pointing to a dwindling future for fossil fuels.
Coals dominance has been declining for years, and for good reason: Burning coal is linked to air pollution that can cause asthma, brain damage, heart problems, and more. Its one of the worst offenders for greenhouse gas pollution, with environmental experts estimating that the world needs to completely phase out coal power by 2040 in order to meet the goals set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Further, multiple studies have found that coal is among the more expensive technologies for utilities today, making it significantly less competitive than renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and natural gas.
Nevertheless, last April Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at reviving the coal industry, at the same time that his administration suspended a decades-old program to detect lung disease in coal miners. In September, the Department of Energy announced plans to spend more than half a billion dollars to prop up coal.
[Image: OSMRE]
Now enter Coalie: the mascot tasked with the gargantuan challenge of making Trumps coal bailout seem palatable. In a new post to OSMREs website titled 10 Things to Know About How OSMRE Supports Americas Energy Legacy and Communities, Coalie is pictured smiling and waving in multiple hastily assembled graphics.
Hes serving as the cheerful mouthpiece for several dubious claims, including that OSMRE works with Indigenous peoples by consulting with tribal leadership through a government-to-government process (see the federal governments long-standing history of extracting resources on Native lands and ignoring tribal opposition), and that OSMRE evaluates the potential environmental impact of federal actions and practices responsible stewardship of public lands and resources (there is no environmentally responsible way to harvest coal).
In short, Coalie has been handed an impossible job. Ironically, if any mascot could succinctly su up the Trump administrations asinine insistence on a fossil fuel comeback, it would be a shoddily slapped together illustration of a lump of coal.
If youre an old-school writer like me, usually the words alone are all you need. But once in a while, you need something extra.
Im referring to all the special symbols that dont appear on your keyboard. Maybe you need to mark something as copyrighted with a , or you want to rave about the 8 order of fish and chips on your recent trip to London. Perhaps youre a mathematician whos working with . Y qué pasa si necesitas escribir una pregunta en espaol?
Instead of having to dig deep into your virtual keyboards corners or memorize ASCII character codes, theres a free website you can use to copy these symbols and more directly to your clipboard for easy anywhere-pastingno matter what kind of device youve got in front of you.
This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!
Your special character cheat sheet
To look up all those extra symbols that arent on your keyboard, just head to Symbol.wtf.
Symbol.wtf is a single-page website with a searchable list of special characters.
It takes just a few seconds to find whatever symbol you need.
Clicking a symbol copies it to your clipboard so you can paste it into any text fieldwith no sign-ups, ads, or usage limits.
Symbol.wtf offers 195 commonly used characters, including punctuation, currency, accent letters, arrows, musical symbols, and even playing card suits.
Symbol.wtf makes it swift and simple to find any symbol.
The whole list is easy enough to scroll through, but theres also a search bar and a list of filtering options at the top. The hardest part of using it is remembering the Symbol.wtf URL, but I just think to myself What the f was that symbol site again? and that usually jogs my memory well enough.
What about emoji?
The characters you find on Symbol.wtf are not emoji, which are defined separately under the Unicode standard. If youre typing on a phone, your keyboard almost certainly has an emoji button for looking up these symbols.
What if youre not on your phone, though? You could bring up your computers emoji picker by pressing Win + . (on Windows), Fn/ + E (on a Mac), or Search + Shift + Space (on a Chromebook).
But if that fails for whatever reason, you could just head to Unicode.party. Much like Symbol.wtf, its a searchable list of symbolswhich you can click to copy to your clipboard. Theres a skin tone selector at the top, and the search results are pretty much instantaneous.
Unicode Party puts every emoji imaginable at your fingertips in an easily searchable list.
Just dont let any young folks know youre looking up your emoji this way, because you know how theyll respond.
Symbol.wtf and Unicode.party both work in any web browser.
Theyre free to use with no ads or usage limits.
No sign-up is required, and neither site does any tracking of your usage.
Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
Spammers and malicious actors inundate us with a steady stream of text messagesoften purporting to be from legitimate institutions or companies. Stanching this flow isn’t easy. Just as the unwanted emails we receive often tell us that we can simply unsubscribe via the unsubscribe link, these text messages explain that we can opt out of future communication simply by replying STOP. But thats not always a safe way to deal with these unsolicited texts. Here’s whyand what you should do instead.
The problem with replying STOP to unsolicited text messages
Weve all had it happen. We get a text message pitching us a product or asking for a political donation. At the end of the message, we are politely informed that we can opt out of future text communications either by replying STOP directly to the message itself, or texting STOP to another number they list.
That may be tempting. It ostensibly offers a quick solution to a legitimate annoyance. But it’s not always a good idea. Thats because replying to a spammy or malicious text in any way informs the sender that the phone number they used has a real person on the other end who is receiving their messages. Once they get this confirmation, a spammer is likely to send you more messages, not fewer.
Thankfully, todays smartphones have powerful features built into them that can help you deal with nuisance texts like this, without needing to rely on the goodwill of the sender to remove you from their blast list.
Heres what to do instead
It should be noted that sometimes it is safe to reply STOP or otherwise follow the instructions in a text message to instruct the sender to cease future communications. If the text message is from a legitimate institution, such as your doctors office, bank, school, or even political groups, they will often honor opt-out STOP requests.
But if the text is from a spammer, replying STOP is pretty much futile. Instead, your best course of action to ensure that you never hear from the sender again is to simply block the number they are texting you from.
The way you do this varies slightly depending on whether you have an iPhone or an Android phone. But heres how to block a spam text message sender on both.
How to block a text message sender on iPhone
The default text message app on iPhone is called Messages. Whenever a spam text message lands in your app, heres what to do:
Do not reply to it.
Instead, tap the senders phone number or name at the top of the text message thread.
On the next screen, tap Block Contact.
Tap Block Contact from the pop-up that appears.
If youre getting too many spam text messages from multiple senders, iOS 26 users also have the option to enable a feature called Screen Unknown Senders, which filters all texts from unknown senders into their own inbox, segregating the messages from the ones you want to receive.
How to block a text message sender on Android
Google makes it really easy to block text message senders on Android as well. You can do this through the default messaging app on Android phones, called Messages. Heres how:
Do not reply to it.
Open the Messages app.
Find the thread from the sender you want to block, then tap and hold it.
From the pop-up menu that appears, tap Block.
Depending on what flavor of Android you are using, you may also need to confirm the block by tapping OK.
Be careful who you give your phone number to
Youll probably never be able to know for certain how a spammer got your phone number. Maybe they obtained it illegally, scraped it from the web, nabbed it from a data breach, or even bought it legally from a data broker.
Many of these things are outside of your control. But you can make your phone number harder to obtain by giving it out more sparingly, especially to questionable websites.
Meanwhile, when you get those spam text messages, think twice before replying STOP. Simply blocking the number is often a faster way to end the annoyanceand to protect your number from being flagged as belonging to a real person.
Apples iOS 26 has been available for nearly six months now, but its still one of the companys least well-received software updates for the iPhone.
Primarily, people have criticized the new Liquid Glass user interface design, which Apple now lets you tone down. But iOS 26 also changed the way many apps function on the iPhone, disrupting a users muscle memory and expectations, leading to many to pine for the way the iPhone functioned on iOS 18.
Yet while you cant revert to iOS 18 once youve upgraded to iOS 26, you can make some simple tweaks that will make your iOS 26 iPhone function as it did before. Heres how.
1. Give Safari the layout it used to have, before iOS 26
After Liquid Glass, one of the most frequent complaints Ive heard about iOS 26 relates to the Safari app. In iOS 26, Apple changed Safari’s default interface, giving it a new compact design that hides important buttons, including bookmarks and tabs.
In iOS 26, you now have to tap a new three-dots button next to the new compact URL bar to reveal the buttons that let you access your bookmarks, tabs, and other functions. This change both disrupts muscle memory and requires you to tap more just to access the browser’s basic features.
Thankfully, you can ditch the new iOS 26 Safari layout and revert to the layout Safari had in iOS 18 by doing the following:
Open the Settings app.
Tap Apps.
Tap Safari.
Under the Tabs section, tap Bottom.
Doing this again places the important bookmarks and tabs buttons directly on a toolbar at the bottom of Safari.
2. Switch back to the classic Phone interface
In iOS 26, Apple also changed the layout of the Phone app, giving it a new unified interface that both merges the Favorites and Recents toolbar buttons into a single Calls button and jettisons the Voicemail button entirely. While this change declutters the Phone interface, it also means you have to tap more just to access basic featureslike your voicemails.
Thankfully, as with Safari above, you can revert the Phone app to its old interface:
Open the Phone app.
Tap the three-bar button in the top right corner.
In the pop-up menu, tap the Classic interface button.
Your Phone app will now have the same layout it had in iOS 18.
3. Stop Music from auto-mixing your songs
iOS 26 not only changed the layout of some of the iPhones most popular apps, but it also changed the way you hear your music in the Music app. In iOS 26, the Music app cross-mixes your songs by default, melding the end of one with the beginning of the next using AI.
Needless to say, this annoys the heck out of many music aficionados, who like to hear the entire song as the artist envisioned. But thankfully, you can disable this AI slopification of your songs by doing the following:
Open the Settings app.
Tap Apps.
Tap Music.
Under the Audio header, tap Song Transitions.
On the Song Transitions screen, toggle the Song Transitions button to off.
Your music will now play as it did in iOS 18.
4. Disable background wallpapers in Messages
iOS 26 brought some helpful new features to the Messages app, including polls and the ability to live translate messages not in your native language. But Messages in iOS 26 also added the ability to change a chats background. And while this in itself isn’t bad, the user doesnt have total control over the look of their background by default. The person they are chatting with can change it for everyone in the conversation.
When this happens, its a distracting pain for all those who like to see blue bubbles against a clean, white background. The good thing is that you can disable background wallpapers by doing the following, which will make Messages look as it did in iOS 18:
Open the Settings app.
Tap Apps.
Tap Messages.
Tap the Conversation Backgrounds switch to toggle the feature off.
Even if the friend youre texting with changes their background, all youll see is the glorious white background you were used to in iOS 18.
5. Get PDFs to open where youre used to
In iOS 26, Apple brought the Previews app from the Mac to iPhone. Previews is Apples PDF reader, and its presence on the iPhone isnt a bad thing. But the default way iOS 26 handles PDFs now is to open them in Previews, not the Files app (the iPhone’s file manager where documents are stored), which complicates things.
In iOS 18, tapping on a PDF in Files would open it where you expected: inside the Files app. But in iOS 26, tapping on a PDF in the Files app kicks you out of Files and launches the Previews app, where the PDF opens. This is a pain, especially if you just wanted to quickly browse all the PDFs you have in the Files app.
Luckily, you can stop this from happening by deleting the Previews app from your iPhone:
Tap and hold on the Previews app icon.
From the pop-up menu, tap Remove app.
Tap Delete App.
Tap Delete.
Now, when you tap on a PDF in Files, it will open in the Files appjust like it did in iOS 18.
Over the past couple of days, TikTok has been flooded with owl impressionsalbeit ones in which the birds sound like various celebrities, have regional accents, or find themselves in hyper-specific situations.
Its a trend better seen with your own eyes than explained.
My impression of an owl if the owl was Jennifer Coolidge is one such viral example. If Trump were an owl, impersonated another. An owl but its Keira Knightley, another posted. Or an owl but its Bella Swan, said yet another.
The hashtag #owlimpression currently has 13,000 videos of TikTokers hoo-hoo-ing in various likenesses. There are also definitive rankings of the best impressions thus far.
Other celebrities who have received the owl treatment include Shakira, Alan Rickman, Barack Obama, and Hugh Jackman. Even Jonas Brothers members Joe and Nick Jonas have joined in to playfully troll one another.
Accent-based owl impressions are a big part of the trend, too, with creators demonstrating what owls would sound like if they were from China and Texas or Scotland and Australia. Some are even as specific as an Italian American owl from New York or an owl from the Bronx.
The trend has since snowballed into a bit of a competition for the chronically online over just how niche the impressions can get, building on the internet’s shared cultural language. Here, the distinctive voices of Jennifer Coolidge and Keira Knightley, as well as Hugh Jackman in his role as Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, are internet references as much as they are real people.
Alongside cultural references such as RuPauls Drag Race and Love Island, there are the broader impressions of owls in everyday scenarios: an “owl as a jealous girlfriend or an “owl who only hangs out with the guys. Theres an impression of an owl if it was a dad getting up and an owl that trips over a cobblestone that sticks out a little bit too much.
While undeniably silly, this trend offers a welcome reprieve from the brain rot and AI slop that have come to dominate much of the internets shared spaces in recent months. Perhaps that explains why a trend so genius in its simplicity has caught on with such gusto across the social media platform.
Sure, ChatGPTs image generator could certainly morph a celebrity into owl form, complete with sound effects. Or unleash deepfakes of SpongeBob SquarePants characters on the internet.
With little hesitation, though, the human brain can conjure up what Jennifer Coolidge might sound like as an owl. AI could never come up with an impression like this of an owl that was on the Titanic.
Is there an easy way to tell when someone is really listening to what you say? New research just uncovered one unexpected sign: They may blink less. Thats the finding of a study by researchers at Concordia University in Montreal.
Most research on blinking has focused on vision, the researchers explain. But they thought blinking might also provide clues to whats going on in peoples brains. For example, do we blink less when we are concentrating hard on listening to someone or something?
To find out, the researchers recruited 49 adults and provided them with special glasses that tracked every blink. Then they played recordings of 20 sentences for the subjects with some interfering background noise. They varied the volume of the sentences. The lower the volume, the harder it was to hear over the background sounds, and the more subjects had to concentrate. As participants listened extra hard to make out those quieter sentences, their blinking slowed down.
We dont just blink randomly.
We dont just blink randomly. In fact, we blink systematically less when salient information is presented, Pénélope Coupal, an honors student in Concordias Laboratory for Hearing and Cognition and the lead author on the research, said in a statement from Concordia.
The researchers also wondered whether a change in visual conditions, such as lighting, would affect how often people blinked. So they repeated the experiment, but this time, they also randomly varied the lighting between dark, medium, and bright. They found the same pattern as in the first experiment. Changes in lighting made no difference. People blinked less when their brains were working harder.Should you assume that if youre speaking to someone, and theyre blinking frequently, they arent really listening to you? Not necessarily. The researchers noted that there is a wide range in peoples normal baseline blink rate, with some naturally blinking as often as 70 times per minute, and others only blinking 10 times per minute. But within those variations, the trend held. However much people naturally blink, their blinking slows when they are listening closely.
As a leader, you need to know when people are listening carefully to what you have to say, and when their attention has wandered away. That may tell you that whatever youre saying is something they already know, or something they dont find useful. If youre a smart communicator, you already know to watch other peoples body language closely. It can help you tell whether what youre saying is resonating, or whether you should move on to something else. This new research on blinking gives you one more tool to help you figure that out.
Minda Zetlin
This article originally appeared on Fast Company‘s sister publication, Inc.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
Below, J. Eric Oliver shares five key insights from his new book, How To Know Your Self: The Art & Science of Discovering Who You Really Are.
Eric has been teaching at the University of Chicago for 20 years as a professor of political science. He has published six books and numerous scholarly articles on topics ranging from the obesity epidemic to the sources of conspiratorial thinking in American politics. He is also the host of the Knowing podcast.
Whats the big idea?
We suffer because we mistake the fluid process of being for a fixed identity. Flourishing begins when we learn to bring into alignment and balance the forces that shape the self.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Eric himselfin the Next Big Idea App.
1. You are not a noun. You are a verb.
For most of my life, I thought of myself as a fixed entity: This is me. These are my traits. This is who I am. I assumed I was essentially that same person who loved sugary cereal at age 8, fried chicken at 12, and tequila at 21, and who still loves those things now, even if my stomach disagrees. But this is an illusion. Neuroscience, physics, and Buddhism all agree: There is nothing fixed about usnot even close.
Instead, we are processes. We are an ever-shifting swirl of molecules, emotions, passing thoughts, and the lingering echo of every person weve ever loved, disliked, or wanted to impress. The self is a process. More specifically, your self is all the ways the energies that animate you as a living being negotiate with reality.
Unfortunately, like most negotiations in my life, I accepted the contract without reading the fine print. And so, much of myself is caught up in painful and unproductive feeling states. But the good news is that once you see yourself as a verb, not a noun, everything changes. You realize you are not stuck, even if your mind insists you are. Instead, you are continually unfolding and can be redirected in more positive ways. We are not broken things, but misaligned processes.
2. Our purpose in life is balance.
When people ask about my purpose, I usually mumble something about being a better parent, writing a good book, or trying to make the world a better place. But the reality is that none of these activities really defines my life. They are disguises of what my lifes true purpose is: Optimizing this self.
This notion is not as shallow or narcissistic as it first sounds. It starts with a key fact: At our core, we are living energy systems. Everything that we know as ourselvesour identities, thoughts, emotions, and so onare ways this living energy system within keeps going. The self is what keeps the flame of life alight, preferably without burning the house down in the process.
This means balancing two basic imperatives of the self:
Order: all the structures that organize our lives, from our cells to habits to calendars.
Vitality: the energy that animates uswhat compels us to sing and dance or eat that second slice of cake.
This is where balance becomes vital. A self with too much order is stifled and diminished, but a self with too much vitality is wasteful and incoherent.
The secret to living well is finding the right balance between Order and Vitality at all layers of your being. Your moods, thoughts, and good or bad days all emerge from this balancing act. To optimize your life, you need to see and fix the things that throw you out of alignment.
3. Thoughts do not define you.
I used to believe that my thoughts were everything. Every anxious rumination. Every petty judgment. Every catastrophic prediction about the futureall hard truths.
But this was a delusion. Thoughts are more like mental weather that rolls in and rolls out. Your thoughts are not you. They are mental emissionsquick guesses that your brain makes to keep you eating better or stop you from walking into traffic.
When you step back and watch your thoughts without always believing them, you gain a bit of freedom.
Once I realized this, life became a lot lighter. I learned to ask myself, Is this thought helping anything? And a lot of the time, the answer was no. Sure, I might still wake up at 3 a.m., but Im no longer convinced that the world was ending because I hadnt replied to an email.
When you step back and watch your thoughts without always believing them, you gain a bit of freedom. A little spaciousness. A moment of, Oh, look. Theres my anxiety talking again. How cute. Its surprisingly life-changing.
4. We are social beingsdown to our cells.
Inside each of your cells live many tiny creatures called mitochondria. Technically, they are not the same species as you. They moved into our cells a billion years ago and never left. They also reveal a profound truth: We are not a singular person, but a collection of living beings.
Our very essence is a social phenomenon. We live because of cooperation. We flourish because of connection. Our selves are not built in isolation. They grow in language, in culture, in relationships, and especially in the messy ones that involve stressful holidays, unmet expectations, or the occasional handwritten apology.
I used to think I could solve myself privately, through solitary contemplation and discipline. Now I know better. The way I really grow as a person is through my relationships with others. Its where I find my sticking points, meaning the places where my self-processes are misaligned.
As a social being, love is not optional.
If you want to thrive, you must do it in community, whatever that means for you. As a social being, love is not optional. Friendship is not optional. Intimacy is not optional. Even conflict, when done kindly, can be a tool for growth.
This is humbling, but also oddly comforting. We dont have to figure everything out alone. In fact, we shouldnt even try to. Balance is something we figure out together.
5. Living well means recognizing your imbalances, and letting them go.
Most of us secretly believe in a moment of transcendence:
If I get the perfect job
If the kitchen remodel ever finishes
If my partner would just load the dishwasher correctly
then I will be calm, wise, and fulfilled. But transcendence doesnt work like that. Living well is both simpler and more difficult than we usually believe.
First, you have to see your imbalancesthe places where you are rigid, afraid, lonely, or exhausted. Recognizing them can be difficult because your mind will keep insisting that these reactions are essential to your survival. But most of the time, they are not. They are merely habits that we keep around even if they arent serving us well. Once we can ee our thoughts and feelings this way, they no longer dominate us.
But then comes the harder part: letting them go. Not by force, but by curiosity, courage, and care.
Three things help:
Tend to your basics.
Sleep, relationships, food, and meaningful work are all essential. You cant build a thriving self on a collapsing foundation. To find your optimal balance, you first need to locate the right footing. This means taking care of your bodys basic needs.
Direct your attention.
Wherever your attention goes, your experience follows. We need to find ways to control our minds better. Meditation, journaling, and yoga are useful tools for doing this. They all reveal our mental machinery and help cultivate mindfulness.
Engage your emotions with gentleness.
Our emotions arent verdicts. Theyre signals. If we treat them as teachers instead of emergencies, they lose their power to dominate us. When you can sit with your feelings and muster some calm detachment, a radical change happens. What emerges is not a flawless, transcendent self, but a softer, wiser relationship with the person you already are.
Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Companies have never had more tools to measure engagement, yet employees have never reported feeling more disconnected.
Its one of the defining paradoxes of modern work: Engagement scores are the obsession of many organizations, yet loneliness, turnover, and team friction are rising. People are completing their tasks but not always experiencing the relationships that make work sustainable, creative, or truly human. Engagement measures motivation, whereas connectedness assesses whether people can work effectively together over time.
Many researchers and thinkers have named the forces shaping the future of work. Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, highlights how todays workforce arrives with higher baseline anxiety and weaker social muscles, shaped by smartphone-centered adolescence and a decline in face-to-face interaction. Sociologist Allison Pugh, in The Last Human Job, argues that the only irreplaceable work humans will do in the future is relational, involving empathy, attunement, and presence, the distinctively human capacities that AI cannot replicate.
Given all this, why are organizations still leaning so heavily on engagement surveys, tools that were built decades ago for a radically different world of work? Because engagement has historically been a useful signal. However, in todays context, it is insufficient. Engagement indicates whether people are motivated, whereas connectedness indicates whether people can thrive.
When Engagement Worked and Why It No Longer Does
Theres a reason engagement became the gold standard of workplace metrics. According to Kevin Kruse, a serial entrepreneur and best-selling author, engagement reflects the emotional commitment employees feel toward their organizationthe psychological spark behind discretionary effort. Engaged employees often deliver higher productivity, better customer service, and stronger alignment with the company’s purpose. For years, engagement surveys have helped leaders understand motivation at scale. In the industrial, colocated workplaces for which they were designed, engagement was a reasonable proxy for performance.
But motivation is no longer the primary bottleneck. The bottleneck is relational capacity: peoples ability to work together, navigate conflict, build trust, and collaborate across distance and difference. Today, an employee can be engaged with their tasks while feeling profoundly disconnected from their team. They can care about the mission yet feel invisible in meetings. They can exceed goals while having no one at work they can confide in.
High engagement can sit atop fragile relational foundations. In hybrid and distributed work, it often does. Engagement indicates whether people are enthusiastic, while connectedness indicates whether an organization is healthy.
Why Engagement No Longer Matches the Moment
The central challenge facing leaders is not effort, its isolation. The U.S. Surgeon Generals 2023 Advisory called loneliness a public health epidemic, noting that the workplace is one of the primary places where adults seek connection. Hybrid work has weakened casual social ties, while digital communication has reduced emotional nuance. Younger workers, raised in online ecosystems, often arrive less practiced in conflict resolution, spontaneous dialogue, and relational risk-taking, all core ingredients of high-functioning teams. Employees may be engaged but unable to speak candidly, trust teammates, navigate differences, ask for help, or integrate into a cohesive whole.
As Moe, a workplace culture expert and bestselling author, often says: People thrive when they feel seen, not just surveyed. Engagement surveys werent designed to measure visibility, they were designed to measure satisfaction, and satisfaction does not predict resilience.
What Connectedness Actually Measures
Connectedness is not a vibe, it is a measurable set of relational conditions that determine whether people can do complex, interdependent work together. We define connectedness as The degree to which people feel seen, supported, trusted, and in meaningful relationships with the humans they rely on to do their work.
Connectedness captures dimensions that engagement simply doesnt:
1. Relational Trust. Do people believe their colleagues have their backs? Trust is a well-established predictor of team performance and psychological bravery.
2. Belonging. A sense of belonging reduces turnover risk, buffers stress, and improves collaboration. Deloitte reports that 79% of employees surveyed said fostering belonging was important to organizational success, and 93% agreed belonging drives organizational performance.
3. Psychological Bravery. Can employees disagree productively? Tell the truth? Take interpersonal risks? Bravery is what fuels innovation and healthy conflict.
4. Purpose and Meaning. Clarity of purpose is not a strategic artifact, it is relational glue. It helps employees understand not only what they do but also why they matter.
5. Network Strength and Collaboration Flow. This reflects how well people work together across teams, not just how they feel about the organization in the abstract.
6. Feeling Seen. Employees do not require perfection, but they do require recognition of their humanity: their story, their needs, their contributions.
Allison Pughs research underscores this point: These relational dimensions are the very aspects of work that machines cannot automate. The irreplaceable human contribution, she writes, is connection itself.
Connectedness Predicts Performance Better Than Engagement Does
Why is connectedness more predictive than engagement? Research across organizational psychology, sociology, and network science consistently shows that connected teams:
Innovate more easily
Recover from setbacks faster
Handle conflict with less damage
Execute complex work with fewer delays
Experience lower burnout and turnover
Googles Project Aristotle famously found that psychological safetya relational variablewas the top predictor of team effectiveness, beating out individual talent and skill mix. In hybrid and in-person work, it is the strength of relationships, not individual sentiment scores, that determines the speed of collaboration, cross-functional problem-solving, and execution resilience. Engagement fuels effort while connectedness fuels performance.
How Leader Can Start Measuring Connectedness Today
This is where leaders typically ask: Okay, but how do we measure something as intangible as connectedness? Heres a practical playbook from our combined work:
1. Quarterly Connection Pulses. Short, frequent surveys with questions such as: Do you feel connected to the people you work closely with? Do you have someone at work you can be real with? Does cross-team collaboration feel trusting and safe?
2. Relationship Network Mapping. Organizational network analysis, a method of mapping networks in organizations, can identify bottlenecks, isolated individuals, and overloaded super-connectors.
3. Leader Relational Credibility Index. A relational 360: Do people feel seen, supported, safe, challenged, and understood by their leaders?
4. Collaboration Friction Score. Identify where function-to-function trust is breaking down, even when engagement is high.
5. Belonging Gaps. Identify individuals who are enthusiastic but invisible, the group most vulnerable to burnout and turnover.
6. Monthly Meet-Ups. Replace or refine annual performance reviews with regular, meaningful two-way dialogue between the people leader and the employee.
These tools shift leaders from watching scores to watching stories, the lived relational realities within their teams. To build connected organizations, leaders must shift from driving engagement to designing relational ecosystems and from motivating individuals to strengthening networks.
In Tonys work designing relational leadership experiences, we call this creating Campfires of Connection: intentional spaces where people can speak bravely, listen deeply, and reconnect with the purpose behind their work. In Moes research, this is the Heart Habit of leadership: showing up with curiosity, presence, and attunement so people feel truly seen. In a world where isolation is rising and trust is fraying, connectedness is a strategic capability, and its time leaders start measuring what matters most.
Since the Trump administration deployed 2,000 immigration officers to Minneapolis a few weeks ago, childcare workers have been on high alert. Immigration officers have shown up at childcare centers across Minnesota, leaving many childcare workers scared to show up for work. Childcare providers, who have long faced funding challenges and staffing shortages, are now being forced to figure out how to protect their workers while continuing to provide an essential service to families.
Today, many of these centersat least 50 providers, according to the childcare coalition Kids Count on Ushave shut their doors to participate in an economic blackout across the state that is being called the Day of Truth and Freedom. The collective action is intended to protest ICEs presence in the state, by halting all economic activity for the day.
For childcare workers, there is a lot on the line: A viral YouTube video that made the rounds in December put a target on their backs, alleging that Somali-run daycares were committing fraud and misusing public funding. The video has since been debunked, but the damage was done: The Trump administration issued a freeze on $10 billion in federal funding for childcare and social services in Minnesota, along with four other states. (A federal judge has temporarily blocked the freeze for the time being, and the states in question have brought a lawsuit against the Trump administration.)
From the beginning, childcare and the ICE operation were very closely tied, says Meredith Loomis Quinlan, the director of childcare at advocacy group Community Change. There’s threats of these frozen funds, and at the same time their colleagues are getting targeted by ICE. These childcare providers have really stood togetherand the childcare movement of parents and providers are a really core [part] of what’s happening right now in Minnesota.
Many of them feel it is essential that they fight back against both ICE and the looming threat of a funding freeze. Thats why Kayley Spencer and Megan Schmitz, directors at a childcare center in northern Michigan, decided to close their daycare for the day.
We have connections all around the state, [and] other providers and families are experiencing this very real heaviness around being scared to go to school, being scared to go to work, and being scared to leave their houses, Schmitz says. We needed to show solidarity, and that we won’t stand for our neighbors and families and other providers being targeted in that way.
While their staff has not been directly targeted thus far, they have fielded questions about how the center would navigate any encounters with ICE and introduced protocols accordingly. That is something as a childcare provider that I never thought I’d have to come across, Schmitz says. What if they do show up now? So having those protocols in place was really important for us, to make our staff feel secure in coming to work.
This day of action is also intended to call attention to the federal funding freeze, which could leave many childcare providers struggling to keep their doors open. We’re operating on razor thin margins, Spencer says, noting that their center has six families who rely on childcare assistance from the state. If you lose those six familieseven oneyou’re at risk of permanent closure.
Access to childcare allows countless parents to stay in the workforce, and closing for the day is not a decision that providers take lightly. Spencer and Schmitz were candid about why they felt it was important to participate and why collection action was critical at this moment.
Were very transparent with our families about how this is not just an isolated incident, Schmitz says. We are in the collapse of childcare if we do nothingand we’re already at severe risk of that every single day, and this is just another way to not give childcare [providers] the funding and the resources that they so badly deserve and need.
Spencer and Schmitz say they had the support and understanding of many families they serveand a number of them who are small business owners closed shop for the day in solidarity, as well. [As] providers, our only goal is to provide safe spaces for these childrenand now they’re being targeted, and it’s not okay, Schmitz says. This is such a small way of us showing support, but we knew we had to do it.
These actions have also extended beyond Minnesota, as childcare workers around the country are finding ways to show their support. Community Change works with grassroots organizations in many states that are hosting events or taking other actionsfrom protesting ICE facilities to closing their centers in solidarityto draw attention to what is happening in Minnesota. Meanwhile, childcare providers and advocates in Minnesota are continuing to put pressure on Republican lawmakers to preserve the federal funding that is so crucial for centers to keep serving families.
People might feel hopeless or afraid right now, but there are so many ways to show up for our neighbors and for each other, Loomis Quinlan says. So we’re just trying to encourage more people to join our movement.
For the first time in Dr Peppers 140-year history, the brand is the second-most-popular soda in America. And now, it has a shiny new jingle to match.
In late December, TikTok creator Romeo Bingham, 25, posted a little ditty she had made up for Dr Pepper. Dr Pepper, baby. Its good and nice. Doo. Doo. Doo, the tune went. In her caption, she tagged the company and noted: Please get back to me with a proposition. We can make thousands together.
The original post has garnered almost 54 million views, 6.4 million likes, and almost 500,000 bookmarks at the time of this writing. One month later, Binghams dreams were realized. Dr Pepper licensed the song and folded it into an NCAA football commercial.
TikTok creators capitalizing on viral moments is not unusual. Influencers have long been tagging brands in content in the hopes of landing freebies or a lucrative brand deal, as the booming influencer-marketing industry becomes ever-more saturated.
Here, the success of Binghams overt brand baiting may signal a subtle shift in power dynamics as creators compete for brands’ attention and marketing budgets.
Once the jingle became viral, Binghams comments section was inundated with requests from national brands. Me next bb i beg, wrote Dennys Diner. Yea imma need one of these theme songs right now, added Buffalo Wild Wings. GET HER ON THE PHONE NOW!! Popeyes chimed in. Not to be pick me, but US NEXT, commented Welchs Fruit Snacks. Bingham has since gone on to make jingles for Hyundai and Vita Coca, fully realizing the new American dream of overnight viral success.
Brands showing up in the comments sections on TikTok and Instagram, whether the post is about them or not, isnt new. The top comments on a trending TikTok video often garner hundreds of thousands of likes, gaining brands the type of attention they could only dream of on their own channels.
But overnight, a new batch of POV: Trying to make a jingle so I can quit my job type videos have been cropping up across social media platforms. Some of the most popular of these jingle videos show brands actually replying to the creators in their comments sectionspossibly as a shoot-for-the-moon attempt to replicate Dr Pepper’s hype.
With these public auditions in pursuit of 10 seconds of fame, brands might appear like the real winners, receiving massive amounts of unpaid creative laborsometimes even full commercialscomplete with engagement metrics and audience-testing in real time.
If brands reward the noisiest creators with paid partnerships, this could lead to creators shilling spec work ads as a new content pillar, Dayna Castillo, founder of the digital culture newsletter Silence, Brand!, told Fast Company. And yet, brand baiting is normalizing unpaid promotional labor from creators, and long term, this practice risks burning out both audiences, brands, and creators.
As she noted in a recent Substack post: We no longer skip the ads. We consume the ads our peers made in hopes The Capitalism will notice.
The warp speed with which the internet moves means that trying to re-create anothers recipe for viral success is unlikely to ever deliver the same results. As the saying goes: Lightning never strikes twice.
Instead, all thats left to gain is further muddying the shared waters of the internet with subpar unpaid spon-con. (Binghams jingle was at least catchy!)
