As Super Bowl Sunday approaches, the battle off the field for advertisers to win over 120 million-plus viewers will be just as heated as the rivalry between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks.Dozens of advertisers are pulling out all the stops for Super Bowl 60, airing Sunday on NBC. They’re hoping that audiences tuning in will remember their brand names as they stuff their ads with celebrities ranging from Kendall Jenner (Fanatics Sportsbook) to George Clooney (Grubhub), tried-and-true ad icons like the Budweiser Clydesdales, and nostalgia for well-known movie properties such as “Jurassic Park” (Comcast Xfinity).Each year Super Bowl ads offer a snapshot of the American mood as well as which industries are flush with cash that particular year: from the “Dot-Com Bowl” of 2000 to the “Crypto Bowl” of 2022.This year’s trends include health and telehealth companies advertising weight loss drugs and medical tests, tech companies showing off their latest gadgets and apps and advertisers showcasing AI in their ads.Villanova University marketing professor Charles Taylor said because of the heavy headlines in the news lately from the immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota to conflicts abroad he expects a advertisers to stick to a light and silly tone.“Because of the Super Bowl’s status as a pop culture event with a fun party atmosphere, the vast majority of brands will avoid any dark or divisive tone and instead allow consumers to escape from thinking about these troubled times,” he said.
Record-breaking prices
Advertisers flock to the Super Bowl each year because so many people watch the big game. In 2025, a record 127.7 million U.S. viewers watched the game across television and streaming platforms.Demand is higher than ever, since live sporting events are one of the few remaining places in the fractured media landscape where advertisers can reach a large audience. NBC sold out of ad space in September.Space sold for an average of $8 million per 30-second unit, but a handful of spots sold for $10 million-plus, a record, said Peter Lazarus, executive vice president, sports & Olympics, advertising and partnerships for NBCUniversal. He said he was calling February, with the Super Bowl, Olympics and the NBA All-Star Game, “legendary February.”Lazarus said 40% of advertisers bought across all of NBC’s major sports properties, and 70% of Super Bowl advertisers bought the Olympics as well.
Celebrities galore
Featuring celebrities is a tried-and-true way advertisers can get goodwill from viewers. This year, Fanatics Sportsbook enlists Kendall Jenner to talk about the “Kardashian Kurse,” in which bad things happen to basketball players she dates.George Clooney appears in a Grubhub add to promote a deal that the delivery app offers to “Eat the Fees” on orders of $50 or more.Several ads feature more than one celebrity or sports star. Michelob Ultra shows Kurt Russell training actor Lewis Pullman, as Olympic snowboarder Chloe Kim and hockey player T.J. Oshie watch on a ski slope.Xfinity reunites Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum in a tongue-and-cheek reimagining of “Jurassic Park” that shows an Xfinity tech bringing power back to the island so nothing goes awry.And Uber Eats enlists Matthew McConaughey for the second year in a row to convince celebrities this year it is Bradley Cooper and Parker Posey that football is a conspiracy to make people hungry so they order food.
AI takes the stage
For the second year in a row, AI is making waves in Super Bowl ads.Oakley Meta touts their AI-enabled glasses in two action-packed spots showing Spike Lee, Marshawn Lynch and others using the glasses to film video and answer questions.Wix Harmony debuted an ad that features its web design software that uses AI tools. Wix is also airing an add for Base44, an AI app builder. And OpenAI will advertise during the game with a yet-to-be revealed ad.Svedka Vodka enlisted Silverside AI, an AI studio, to help create their ad, which features their robot mascot FemBot along with a male counterpart, BroBot. They took that approach because of Svedka’s positioning as the “vodka of the future,” said Sara Saunders, chief marketing officer at Sazerac, which bought the Svedka brand in 2025.“We reimagined the robot via AI,” Saunders said. “It took us many, many months to rebuild her, to give her functionality, to give her that human spirit that we wanted to show up on behalf of the brand.”
Health and telehealth
Health and telehealth providers are everywhere during Super Bowl 60. Two pharma companies are advertising tests: Novartis touts a blood test to screen for prostate cancer with the tagline “Relax your tight end,” featuring football tight ends relaxing. Boehringer Ingelheim’s ad stars Octavia Spencer and Sofia Vergara, who encourage people to screen for kidney disease.Liquid I.V., which makes an electrolyte drink mix, has teased an ad about staying hydrated.Telehealth firm Ro is using Serena Williams in their ad for GLP-1 weigh loss drugs. Novo Nordisk, which makes Wegovy and Ozempic, has teased that it will have a spot as well.Hims & Hers another company that offers GLP-1 weight loss drugs has an ad that says the company gives people better access to health care that usually only rich people get.“You could call this the GLP-1 Super Bowl,” said Tim Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University. “Often you don’t see a lot from pharmaceutical companies on the Super Bowl, but this year we’re going to see quite a few showing up.”
Tried-and-true themes
Some advertisers are sticking to the tried and true. Budweiser’s heartwarming ad shows a Clydesdale foal growing up with a bald eagle to the tune of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” The ad celebrates Budweiser’s 150th anniversary.And Pepsi tries to reignite the Cola wars with their ad showing polar bears Coca-Cola’s famous mascots picking Pepsi Zero Sugar over Coke Zero in a blind taste test. The ad ends with the bears being caught on a “kiss cam.”
Surprises
While the majority of Super Bowl advertisers release their ad early to try to capitalize on buzz, some hold back until game day to reveal their ad.Pepsi-owned soft drink Poppi teased that pop star Charli XCX and actress Rachel Sennott will star in their ad.Ben Affleck is back in an ad for Dunkin’ Donuts. A teaser spot showed him with ’90s sitcom legends Jennifer Aniston and Matt LeBlanc of “Friends” and Jason Alexander from “Seinfeld.”And there are fewer car advertisers this year, but Cdillac is hinting that it will show off its new Formula 1 car in an ad.
Mae Anderson, AP Business Writer
Olive Garden parent company Darden Restaurants has announced that it will shut down its Bahama Breeze restaurant chain for good. But in an unusual move, some current Bahama Breeze locations will live on as a different brand, while the remaining stores will close.
Heres what you need to know.
Whats happened?
On Tuesday, Darden Restaurants revealed the fate of one of its restaurant chains. The restaurant group, which is based in Orlando, Florida, owns LongHorn Steakhouse, Olive Garden, and Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and others. In a news release, it announced the closure and conversion of all of its Bahama Breeze restaurants.
That Darden is jettisoning Bahama Breeze is no surprise. Last May, the company closed 15 Bahama Breeze locations and, in June, it announced that the brands 28 remaining locations were no longer a strategic priority for the company.
At the time, CEO Ricardo Cadenas said the company would be considering strategic alternatives for Bahama Breeze, including a potential sale of the brand or converting restaurants to other Darden brands.
Jump forward to yesterday, and Darden did indeed confirm the final fate of Bahama Breeze.
A buyer for Bahama Breeze never materialized, so instead, the company has revealed that it will simply shut down the brand. Yet not all 28 locations are actually closing. Instead, half will shutter their doors for good, while the other half will continue running until they can be converted into locations of other restaurant chains Darden owns.
These Bahama Breeze locations will close
The following 14 Bahama Breeze locations will be closing for good. According to Darden, the closures should be completed by April 5. Those permanently closing locations include stores in nine states:
Delaware
500 Center Blvd., Newark
Georgia
3590 Breckenridge Blvd., Duluth
Florida
12395 SW 88th St., Miami
10205 Rivercoast Drive, Jacksonville
1251 West Osceola Pkwy., Kissimmee
11000 Pines Blvd., Pembroke Pines
1540 Rinehart Road, Sanford
Michigan
19600 Haggerty Road, Livonia
New Jersey
2000 Route 38, Cherry Hill
North Carolina
3309 Wake Forest Drive, Raleigh
Pennsylvania
320 Goddard Blvd., King of Prussia
6100 Robinson Center Drive, Pittsburgh
Virginia
2714 Potomac Mills Circle, Woodbridge
Washington
15700 Southcenter Pkwy., Tukwila
These Bahama Breeze locations will be converted
As for the remaining 14 Bahama Breeze locations, they will be converted into other Darden-owned restaurants. Darden did not disclose which brands the stores will transition into.
The company believes the conversion locations are great sites that will benefit several of the brands in its portfolio, Darden said in a statement.
The 14 transitioning Bahama Breeze locations are expected to continue operating until their temporary closures are needed for the conversion. Those converting locations include stores in five states:
Florida
499 E. Altamonte Drive, Altamonte Springs
805 Brandon Town Center Drive, Brandon
14701 S. Tamiami Trail, Ft. Myers
8160 Irlo Bronson Memorial Hwy., Kissimmee
25830 Sierra Center Blvd., Lutz
5620 W. Oak Ridge Road, Orlando
8849 International Drive, Orlando
8735 Vineland Ave., Orlando
1200 N. Alafaya Drive, Orlando
3045 N. Rocky Point Drive East, Tampa
Georgia
755 Earnest W. Barrett Pkwy NW, Kennesaw
North Carolina
570 Cross Creek Mall, Fayetteville
South Carolina
7811 Rivers Ave., Charleston
Virginia
4554 Virginia Beach Blvd., Virginia Beach
How is Darden Restaurants stock reacting?
It seems investors have taken the news of Bahama Breezes demise in stride, most likely because Darden had previously announced that it was seeking to divest itself of the chain.
Yesterday, shares of Darden Restaurants (NYSE: DRI) closed up about 2.2% to $205.49. As of this writing, in premarket trading, DRI shares are down slightly by about 0.4%.
So far this year, the companys stock price has risen more than 11%. That is nearly triple the return of the broader New York Stock Exchange during the same period. However, shares are currently down from their all-time high of around $228 in June of last year.
Darden’s brands, like many restaurant chains, are facing tough times as inflationary pressures increase costs and make diners more choosy about where they spend their discretionary dollars.
Darden is far from the only company closing restaurants in 2026.
In January alone, Fat Brands disclosed that it would close a number of restaurants (including some Smokey Bones, Johnny Rockets, and Yalla Mediterranean locations) as it seeks Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Meanwhile, Noodles & Company said it would close between 30 and 35 locations, and Salad and Go announced it would close more than 32 locations.
TV host, producer, author, and United Nations Development Program Goodwill Ambassador Padma Lakshmi has some candid advice for business leaders when it comes to speaking out, showing courage, and staying true to themselves, particularly amid the Trump administrations violent immigration crackdown. A passionate voice at the intersection of food, culture, and identity, Lakshmi shares how shes shaking up food media with her new series Americas Culinary Cup, and offers a refreshingly human take on modern work life.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
Your work, the book, your Hulu show Taste the Nation, youre drawing on multicultural experience, immigrant experience. With all the stuff that’s going on right now with crackdowns on immigration, how do you feel about that? How does that impact what you’re trying to do?
I feel horrible. I feel horrible about all of it. It’s unconscionable, it’s unethical, it’s immoral. It’s antithetical to what this country has not only been about, but what makes it so unique and singular on the world stage. I mean, there are more migration today on Earth than there has been in the history of humankind, but America in particular is shaped and evolved into the superpower it is because of immigration, specifically because of immigration. Because we are able to attract talent from around the world and with the promise of, you can make your life here peacefully, and in turn, in exchange, make America better through whatever skill you bring, however you contribute to the economy, to the educational system, to the medical system, or whatever.
And I think it is very shortsighted of this administration. I mean, it’s racist. Of course it’s racist. Let’s just call a spade a spade, but it’s also from pragmatic view, really stupid because first of all, all you have to do is open your social media to see this farmer who voted for Trump crying about carrots in his field that cannot be harvested because all of the people are scared and have run away and not come to work. We can thank Trump for that. He can thank Trump for losing his family farm, and if anyone else wants to pick that vegetable or fruit under those conditions for that money, they would have, but they don’t.
When I talk to and ask business leaders about this kind of question, there’s a lot of wariness about being as clear about the way they feel as you are being here. They’re worried about poking the administration. They’re worried about alienating customers, potential audiences.
I understand.
Do you worry about that?
I know that I turn some people who don’t think like me off. I know that I cannot credibly be anyone but who I am, and I think that me leaning into who I am has made me sleep better at night, but also has brought me a modicum of success that I feel I’ve earned. And so yes, of course I’m afraid of losing business, but I’m more afraid of losing my soul.
Your new show is on CBS. You’ve talked about what great partners they’ve been. CBS itself has been a little bit of a lightning rod with the Paramount and Warner Bros. deal and what’s happening at Stephen Colbert’s show or 60 Minutes. Have you felt any of that?
To be honest, I have not because I’m not in the news department. I personally think food is very political, but the show we are making is not at all political.
You’re also a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador. The environment around the U.N. has become more fraught also with this administration. Is what you hear when you go to other countries as an ambassador about America, is that changing?
I mean, it’s been changing for 10 years. It’s not just changing now. I remember having a book tour in India, early 2017, and I felt like I was Trump’s press secretary. People kept saying, “What is going on?” And so all I could say was, “I’m so sorry.” I kept apologizing and saying, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t vote for him. On behalf of all Americans, we are sorry,” and those such innocent times. But that was happening even 10 years ago, and I think it’s a shame because we have squandered a lot of the goodwill that America had in spite of its very questionable foreign policy for decades and decades.
We still had a lot of goodwill because we were that beacon on the hill. We were that shining light that said, “Listen, we don’t care where you’re from. As long as your values align with American values, i.e., the Declaration of Independence, i.e., the Bill of Rights, i.e., the Constitution, you too have a fair shot in this country.” And that is a beautiful sentiment, that the only club there is is what your efforts bring to the table or what your assets or resources, however you want to say it. That is a wonderful thing and very unique and something that I think every American can feel proud of, but it’s going to take decades to repair a lot of the damage that has been done and it’s too late. It’s too late to go back to how it was.
That peoples’ trust in what we say we are as Americans doesn’t
No, not that, because I think people are intelligent enough to make the distinction between one man and his administration in office and the average American citizen. I mean it’s too late for, no matter what they do, what this administration does with ICE or border patrol or any of the other ways they’re trying to impede the natural progression of what this country looks like, they want a white America. They do. They want only European descendants to be in this country, and it’s too late.
It’s too late. Who’s going to program your computers? Who’s going to be your cardiac surgeon? And also the thing that is terrible, and I want to get away from this for a second, it’s not only about what you can contribute to this country, okay? A person’s worth should not only be based on their skills or resources. There’s nothing that is more valuable between my child and that child in the Congo and Gaza, in Brazil. My child’s blood is just as red as theirs. When we see each other that way, that will be a turning point, but this administration does not hold that belief at all.
You integrate all of this into your work though, too, right?
I’m lucky. I’m very fortunate, and I know this, to be able to make a living out of what naturally interests me. I didn’t get into food professionally until I was in my late twenties or almost 30, and so I was a literature and theater major. I was an actress, and then I made this change. Most of us spend most of our life at work, and so you’ve got to believe in what you’re doing because work is hard regardless. Even when you do, there are very difficult days and that’s why they call it work. So I think the more ou can find a way to spend your time doing things guided by your principles, the happier one will be.
My producers were talking about the videos that you post with your daughter and how genuine your connection is to your community. A lot of the listeners of the show, they’re business people who are trying to come across as being authentic in their communications internally, social media, otherwise. Do you have a suggestion about how you do that?
It was hard. For so long, especially when I was still an actor, I tried so hard to figure out and be what any one person who could give me the job wanted me to be. I mean, it’s inherent when you’re an actor, I guess. But I have now realized that there’s a difference between trying to be authentic and just being authentic. One is conscious of an observer, of an audience. The other is not conscious of the self being observed. So obviously my videos are edited. They’re also edited to protect my child and certain privacy issues in my home. But I am like, I am on those videos whether the camera is on or off, which is different, obviously. That’s a different version of me than you see on my television shows or in my op-eds for The Times or The Washington Post.
How can corporate leaders be more authentic? The only piece of advice I have for them, especially when they’re doing media, whether it’s just an internal video or it’s something public facing, try to do it without the camera on or try to do it when you don’t know the camera’s on and someone on your staff that you trust, try not to be aware of being watched.
I was a latchkey kid.
Most afternoons, I came home to an empty house, let myself in with my own key, and figured it outhomework and snacks. There was inherent trust from my parents that Id figure it out, and everything would be alright.
You learned fast. If you got stuck, you improvised. If you were scared, you got practical. If you needed help, you decided whether it was worth bothering anyone. And if you were the oldestif you were parentifiedyou were given responsibilities without guidance, expected to just know.
Thirty years later, Im watching middle managers experience the exact same thing.
We hand them keys instead of house rules, responsibilities instead of resources, and expectations instead of authoritythen act surprised when theyre exhausted, disengaged, or quietly looking for a way out.
Harvard Business Review recently reported that middle managers feel less psychologically safe than their bosses and their teams. That should stop us in our tracks, because middle managers are the layer we rely on to translate strategy into realityand reality into feedback that leaders can actually use.
Middle managers arent failing. Theyre experiencing organizational latchkey syndrome: Theyre isolated, underresourced, expected to figure it out, and blamed when things break.
The anatomy of organizational latchkey syndrome
Middle management strain isnt mysterious. Its structural. And it tends to show up in three predictable conditions.
1) Responsibility without resources
Many middle managers are promoted because they were excellent individual contributorsnot because anyone developed their leadership capacity. They inherit people management and culture the way latchkey kids inherited independence: abruptly, without training, with a quiet expectation that theyll rise to it.
And the scope keeps expanding. A Gusto analysis (reported by Axios) shows managers span of control has roughly doubled in recent years, from about three direct reports in 2019 to nearly six by 2024. Thats more emotional labormore check-ins, more conflict, more coaching, more criseswithout more time. (You can read the underlying Gusto write-up here.)
2) Accountability without authority
This one is the quiet killer.
Many middle managers are told they have autonomy, but what they actually have is responsibility for outcomes without control over inputs.
Theyre accountable for performance, but key decisions get overridden. Theyre asked to drive engagement, but cant influence the policies that drain morale. So they manage the gap between what people need and what the organization is willing to support.
That gap becomes a daily exercise in emotional labor: translating strategy into reality, making contradictions sound coherent, and absorbing frustration without passing it up.
Its not autonomy. Its abandonment with a title.
Heres what that looks like in real life: A manager is expected to improve engagement scores but cant approve a raise, adjust workloads, or backfill an open role. Theyre told to retain top talent, but the promotion path is unclear and compensation decisions live two levels above them. So they become the messenger for decisions they didnt makeand the buffer for frustration they cant solve.
3) Connection without cover
Heres the question I rarely hear anyone ask: Who can middle managers actually be safe with?
They cant be fully candid with their boss because theyre expected to look like they have it together. They cant fully exhale with their team because theyre expected to provide steadiness. And they cant always be honest with peers when everyone is competing for scarce resources and recognition.
So they do what latchkey kids do: They hold it alone.
They become the ones sitting at the lunch table keeping everyone else companywhile they eat by themselves.
The psychological safety paradox
Organizations are asking middle managers to create psychological safety for their teams while failing to create it for them. Thats not just unfair. Its strategically shortsighted.
Psychological safety is permission to raise problems, admit uncertainty, ask for help, and tell the truth without punishment or humiliation. Middle managers are often the only group expected to do that up and down while being safe in neither direction.
If speaking up makes them look incompetent, theyll stop speaking up. If flagging risk is political, theyll manage optics instead of reality. If vulnerability gets weaponized, theyll teach their teams to keep their heads downnot by instruction, but by example.
This is how a culture becomes emotionally unsafe while still talking about emotional intelligence, and why leadership pipelines start to break.
Why your current solutions arent working
Many companies respond to middle manager strain with quick fixes: a wellness app, encouragement to set boundaries, training on psychological safety, a reminder to use the employee assistance program.
Those supports can help. But they can also become a way to avoid the real conversation: You cant self-care your way out of a structurally unsafe role.
You cant keep demanding emotional intelligence while designing work that forces managers to stay in constant survival mode.
In my work, I call this a W.E.L.L gap: We ask leaders to model well-being, emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and sustainable self-careinside systems that undermine all four.
What needs to change
This isnt primarily a training problem. Its a design problem. Heres what actually helps.
For senior leaders
Model the behaviors you want repeated. Invite candor before you demand it. Reward early risk-flagging instead of punishing the messenger.
Make priorities real. Decide what matters mostand what will wait.
Clarify decision rights. If managers are responsible for outcomes, they need authority over inputs. If they dont have that authority, stop pretending they doand stop evaluating them as if they did.
Protect their capacity. If you flatten layers, expand scope, and speed up change, you cant also expect deep coaching, high connection, and flawless execution. Something has to give. Choose intentionally.
For HR and People Ops
Prepare people before promotion. Dont wait until after the promotion to teach coaching, feedback, conflict navigation, and psychological safety. The accidental manager pipeline is a predictable culture leak.
Create manager-safe spaces. Peer cohorts, confidential coaching, facilitated circlesplaces wheremanagers can say, I dont know without it becoming a ping on their performance review.
Build respected paths for non-managers. If leadership is the only path to status, youll keep promoting people who dont want the joband burning out the ones who do.
Measure psychological safety by layer, not as an org average. If middle managers are the lowest-scoring group, you have a structural bottleneck. Treat it like one.
Stop leaving your leaders home alone
Latchkey kids often grow into capable adults. They become resourceful, responsible, self-directed. They also learn how to carry too much without asking for support.
If your middle managers are struggling, its not because theyre weak. Its because the organization is asking them to be the stable center of a system that wont stabilize itself.
This is how execution quietly breaks: Priorities blur, feedback stops traveling upward, burnout rises, and the leadership pipeline thins right when you need it most.
Survival shouldnt be the standard for your culture.
Its time to stop leaving your middle managers home alone.
On a recent stroll by my local Allbirds store in Harvard Square, I had to do a double take. In the window, the brand was advertising its new Varsity collection: a 70s-inspired sneaker line with a rubber sole and a feminine color palette that weaves together pink, olive green, mustard, and brick red. It’s an unmistakably fashionable shoe that wouldn’t look out of place at New Balance and Saucony, or even Valentino and Celine.
Allbirds, which launched in 2014, isn’t known for chasing trends. It has always led with sustainability, starting with the “wool runner” that quickly became a cult sneaker in tech circles. Over the years, it hasn’t strayed far from this original aesthetic. It’s made high-tops, performance running shoes, and slip-ons with a quiet, minimal design so the focus would remain on the materials.
[Photo: Allbirds]
Allbirds has never marketed itself to sneaker heads, but a decade later, the sneaker landscape looks very different. Sustainability is no longer a differentiator; it’s table stakes. Meanwhile, fashion has swung decisively toward vintage silhouettes, expressive color, and sneakers that feel as considered as the rest of ones outfit. Against that backdrop, Allbirds began to feel staticand customers, it seems, noticed.
[Photo: Allbirds]
Since going public in 2021, the companys stock has fallen roughly 80%, leaving it with a market capitalization of approximately $32 million as of early 2026. In 2024, Allbirds reported $190 million in revenue, down from $254 million the year before. More recent financial reports show continued revenue declines and ongoing losses. In January, the company announced it would close all 20 of its full-price U.S. stores by the end of this month as part of a broader effort to cut costs. (Two outlet stores, in California and Massachusetts, will remain open.)
The stakes are high. A brand that once felt like a category disruptor is now in reset mode. Inside Allbirds, the design team isnt just chasing financial survivalits chasing relevance. The companys comeback strategy hinges on a clear pivot: leaning harder into fashion, targeting women more intentionally, and expanding its aesthetic without abandoning its commitment to sustainability.
[Photo: Allbirds]
Moving Beyond the Wool Runner
The Varsity collection is the clearest expression yet of the brands attempt to broaden its visual language without losing its identity. “The question we’ve been wrestling with is how to stay true to what Allbirds is while pushing into new spaces and becoming more relevant to more people,” says Erin Sander, who joined Allbirds a year ago as VP of product and merchandising after a decade at Sorel.
Over the past five years, vintage sneakers have dominated fashion, as heritage brands like New Balance, Adidas, and Saucony dug into their archives to revive styles from the 70s and 80s. Varsity draws from that same retro runner traditionbut filters it through the restraint, comfort obsession, and materials philosophy of Allbirds.
[Photo: Allbirds]
Compared with competitors chunky soles, Varsitys rubber outsole is slim and pared back. The silhouette is streamlined rather than bulky. Inside, the shoe is lined with wool, a familiar touch for longtime Allbirds customers.
Where the shoe really distinguishes itself, though, is in its materiality. Most sneakers rely on conventional cotton, leather, and petroleum-based plastics. Varsity, by contrast, is built entirely from more sustainable alternatives. The upper is made from a blend of organic cotton and hemp, a carbon-negative crop. The leather accents come from recycled leather scraps. And the sole is made from a sugarcane-derived plastic.
[Photo: Allbirds]
Developing Varsity has given Allbirds a new design playbook: Take popular, in-demand sneaker styles and retrofit them with lower-impact materials.
That same approach is now extending into more elevated footwear. The company has identified demand for leather sneakers that can plausibly replace dress shoesand has gone searching for a material that looks and feels like leather without carrying the same environmental cost.
That search led Allbirds to Modern Meadow, whose suede-like material Innovera is made from plant proteins, biopolymers, and recycled rubber. Its being used in footwear for the first time in the newly launched Allbirds Terralux collection, which includes skater, runner, and vintage-inspired silhouettes.
Terralux [Photo: Allbirds]
Speaking to Women
The Varsity collection also reflects a deeper strategic shift. Allbirds is now explicitly designing and marketing with women in mind. While the brand has always had female customers, it has often been perceived as male-coded, partly because it first took off among the male-dominated Silicon Valley set.
Elaine Welteroth [Photo: Allbirds]
When CMO Kelly Olmstead joined Allbirds after two decades at Adidas, she found that this perception doesn’t align with the data. The customer base actually skews slightly female, and this discovery helped her crystalize a new direction. Women control north of 80% of the purchase decisions in a household, Olmstead says. Women need to be top of mind when were thinking about what we make, how we make it, and what she wants.
Justine Lupe [Photo: Allbirds]
Color has become a key tool in that repositioning. After years of neutrals and subdued tones, the brand is embracing richer, more feminine palettesdusty reds, earthy blues, warm yellowsthat feel expressive without turning the shoe into a statement piece. Footwear is an accessory, especially for her, Sander says.
The brands recent marketing reinforces that message by spotlighting women. Its spring campaign features actress Justine Lupe (of Nobody Wants This), editor and TV host Elaine Welteroth, celebrity makeup artist Nikki DeRoest, and entrepreneur Grace Cheng. Olmstead says they embody the Allbirds customer: women juggling careers, families, and social lives, who want footwear that looks polished but works all day long.
Grace Cheng [Photo: Allbirds]
For Olmstead, this push to expand the brands aesthetic and audience feels like a natural next step. Coming from Adidas, a 75-year-old heritage brand, she sees Allbirds as just emerging from startup modeand entering a more demanding phase of its life.
Ten years in, it kind of feels like were coming through our teenage years, Olmstead. Now its about growing up.
Los Angeles Lakers guard Bronny James quietly debuted a new logo for his signature shoe during last week’s game against the Cleveland Cavaliers: a lowercase b (for Bronny) that features a 9 (for his jersey number) inside the letterform.
The logo appeared on a bright pink pair of James’s father’s shoe, the LeBron Witness IX, but there was another logo on the shoe that was notable: a backwards Nike Swoosh.
Since debuting in 1971, the Nike Swoosh has become one of the most iconic brand logos of all time. Still, Nike designers have occasionally had some fun with it by breaking brand guidelines and flipping the logo around. Though there’s no formal rule for who gets the backwards swoosh, throughout Nike history, the flipped logo has shown up on shoes worn by some of the strongest-willed players across sports and culture.
[Photo: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images]
The history of Nike’s backwards swoosh
The backwards Swoosh appeared first in 1994 on the Nike Air Darwin, the big, chunky, boot-like sneaker worn by Dennis Rodman, and the mark later reappeared on Rodman’s Nike Air Ndestrukt. The backwards logo made sense for an eccentric player like Rodman, who was known for his hairstyles and tattoos as much as for his skills on the court.
Dennis Rodman, ca. 1995. [Photo: Focus on Sport/Getty Images]
Rodman set the pattern for when Nike pulls out the backwards logo. It also appeared on the 1994 Nike Air Flare worn by tennis player Andre Agassi, another athlete at the top of his game who was recognized widely for his style and attitude.
In the 2010s, the backwards logo appeared on the shoes of other superstars and made appearances in youth-oriented crossover collaborations. The backwards Swoosh appeared on James’s dad shoe, the 2012 Nike LeBron X, as well as on the Nike Kobe AD NXT in 2017, one year after Kobe Bryant retired. On Giannis Antetokounmpo’s 2019 Nike Freak shoes, the backwards Swoosh was iridescent and memorably set on the midsole to make them look like they’re from the future. The backwards logo on the PG 2, a 2018 collaboration with Playstation, was bright neon colors.
Travis Scott has popularized the backwards Nike logo since 2019, when the Travis Scott x Air Jordan 1 became the first in a string of Nike shoes from the rapper to use the backwards mark. Though Rodman complained that Scott “copied” him, the pair made up in 2024 when Rodman appeared in an ad for a velvet brown color way of Scott’s Air Jordan 1 Low OG, which, yes, had a backwards logo.
Other global brands with a simple, well-known logos like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola have found creative ways to deconstruct or reinvent their logos by crushing them or turning them upside down, and Nike turned its Swoosh on the side in 2024 on women’s soccer jerseys to celebrate the growing popularity of the game.
For such a valuable brand asset like the Swoosh, tweaking it signals a break from conventions. By debuting his signature Nike logo alongside the backwards mark, James joins a storied design tradition.
Heat pumps can reduce carbon emissions associated with heating buildings, and many states have set aggressive targets to increase their use in the coming decades. But while heat pumps are often cheaper choices for new buildings, getting homeowners to install them in existing homes isnt so easy.
Current energy prices, including the rising cost of electricity, mean that homeowners may experience higher heating bills by replacing their current heating systems with heat pumpsat least in some regions of the country.
Heat pumps, which use electricity to move heat from the outside in, are used in only 14% of U.S. households. They are common primarily in warm southern states such as Florida where winter heating needs are relatively low. In the Northeast, where winters are colder and longer, only about 5% of households use a heat pump.
In our new study, my coauthor Dan Schrag and I examined how heat pump adoption would change annual heating bills for the average-size household in each county across the U.S. We wanted to understand where heat pumps may already be cost-effective and where other factors may be preventing households from making the switch.
Wide variation in home heating
Across the U.S., people heat their homes with a range of fuels, mainly because of differences in climate, pricing, and infrastructure. In colder regionsnorthern states and states across the Rocky Mountainsmost people use natural gas or propane to provide reliable winter heating. In California, most households also use natural gas for heating.
In warmer, southern states, including Florida and Texas, where electricity prices are cheaper, most households use electricity for heatingeither in electric furnaces, baseboard resistance heating, or to run heat pumps. In the Pacific Northwest, where electricity prices are low due to abundant hydropower, electricity is also a dominant heating fuel.
The type of community also affects homes fuel choices. Homes in cities are more likely to use natural gas relative to rural areas, where natural gas distribution networks are not as well developed. In rural areas, homes are more likely to use heating oil and propane, which can be stored on property in tanks. Oil is also more commonly used in the Northeast, where properties are olderparticularly in New England, where a third of households still rely on oil for heating.
Why heat pumps?
Instead of generating heat by burning fuels such as natural gas that directly emit carbon, heat pumps use electricity to move heat from one place to another. Air-source heat pumps extract the heat of outside air, and ground-source heat pumps, sometimes called geothermal heat pumps, extract heat stored in the ground.
Heat pump efficiency depends on the local climate: A heat pump operated in Florida will provide more heat per unit of electricity used than one in colder northern states such as Minnesota or Massachusetts.
But they are highly efficient: An air-source heat pump can reduce household heating energy use by roughly 30% to 50% relative to existing fossil-based systems and up to 75% relative to inefficient electric systems such as baseboard heaters.
Heat pumps can also reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, although that depends on how their electricity is generatedwhether from fossil fuels or cleaner energy, such as wind and solar.
Heat pumps can lower heating bills
We found that for households currently using oil, propane, or non-heat pump forms of electric heatingsuch as electric furnaces or baseboard resistive heatersinstalling a heat pump would reduce heating bills across all parts of the country.
The amount a household can save on energy costs with a heat pump depends on region and heating type, averaging between $200 and $500 a year for the average-size household currently using propane or oil.
However, savings can be significantly greater: We found the greatest opportunity for savings in households using inefficient forms of electric heating in northern regions. High electricity prices in the Northeast, for example, mean that heat pumps can save consumers up to $3,000 a year over what they would pay to heat with an electric furnace or to use baseboard heating.
A challenge in converting homes using natural gas
Unfortunately for the households that use natural gas in colder, northern regionsmaking up around half of the countrys annual heating needsinstalling a heat pump could raise their annual heating bills. Our analysis shows that bills could increase by as much as $1,200 per year in northern regions, where electricity costs are as much as five times greater than natural gas per kilowatt-hour.
Even households that install ground-source heat pumps, the most efficient type of heat pump, would still see bill increases in regions with the highest electricity prices relative to natural gas.
Installation costs
In parts of the country where households would see their energy costs drop after installing a heat pump, the savings would eventually offset the up-front costs. But those costs can be significant and discourage people from buying.
On average, it costs $17,000 to install an air-source heat pump and typically at least $30,000 to install a ground-source heat pump.
Some homes may also need upgrades to their electrical systems, which can increase the total installation price even more, by tens of thousands of dollars in some cases, if costly service upgrades are required.
In places where air conditioning is typical, homes may be able to offset some costs by using heat pumps to replace their air conditioning units as well as their heating systems. For instance, a new program in California aims to encourage homeowners who are installing central air conditioning or replacing broken AC systems to get energy-efficient heat pumps that provide both heating and cooling.
Rising costs of electricity
A main finding of our analysis was that the cost of electricity is key to encouraging people to install heat pumps.
Electricity prices have risen sharply across the U.S. in recent years, driven by factors such as extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and increasing demand for electric power. New data center demand has added further pressure and raised questions about who bears these costs.
Heat pump installations will also increase electricity demand on the grid: The full electrification of home heating across the country would increase peak electricity demand by about 70%. But heat pumpswhen used in concert with other technologies such as hot-water storagecan provide opportunities for grid balancing and be paired with discounted or time-of-use rate structures to reduce overall operating costs. In some states, regulators have ordered utilities to discount electricity costs for homes that use heat pumps.
But ultimately, encouraging households to embrace heat pumps and broader economy-wide electrification, including electric vehicles, will require more than just technological fixes and a lot more electricityit will require lower power prices.
Roxana Shafiee is an environmental fellow at the Center for the Environment at Harvard Universitys Harvard Kennedy School.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
As someone who has tried almost every workout class on the planet, there is nothing like SoulCycle, said TikTok creator Matt Trav in a video posted in early January. The average human being cannot understand what blowing out the candle during the soulful song can do to the human psyche.
@mattatrav1 SoulCycle Renaissance 2026 you heard it here first original sound – Matt Trav
Nearly 40,000 people who liked the video seem to agree. Absolutely nothing can beat NYC SoulCycle circa 2016, one commenter wrote. Literally like going to church, another added.
Across social media platforms, that renaissance is already underway. Devotees have been sharing nostalgia-laced photos from years past, unearthing old merchandise, and swapping stories in comment sections. Some have been documenting their first-time experiences, while longtime riders welcome newcomers with open arms.
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Come with me to soulcycle as someone who was severely addicted . . . after a 6 year hiatus, one TikTok user wrote, adding, Soul cycle is back btw.
Once at the center of the fitness zeitgeist in New York City, the 45-minute workout class was branded a cult during its 2010s heyday. Its clientele included a number of A-list celebrities, and its instructors became bona fide stars, building obsessive fan bases who followed them across the country for a chance to snag a front-row bike in one of their classes.
At SoulCycle, we very quickly became the club you cant get into, and that has a lot of appeal to a lot of people, cofounder Ruth Zukerman said on the Wharton Business Daily podcast in 2019.
The same exclusive culture that fueled its rise also helped drive its fall. How SoulCycle lost its soul, a 2020 Vox headline read. The next year, a New York Times article reported allegations of sexual harassment, racism, and fat-shaming by members of SoulCycles elite ring of master instructors. In 2022, the chain shuttered about 25% of its locations, a ripple effect from the COVID-19 pandemic.
A decade after its peak, SoulCycle is back, and its return reflects the cultural moment.
The revival coincides with a broader 2016 nostalgia takeover on social media. Alongside a renewed fascination with so-called millennial optimism, hyper-filtered, grainy throwback images have flooded feeds as millennials and older Gen Zers reminisce about the music, fashion, and even workouts of a decade ago. It was the era of Snapchat filters, skinny jeans, and SoulCycle.
@tumblr goodbye 2025 hello 2016 #2016 #2016vibes #2016core #2016makeup #aesthetic Let me love you –
High-intensity workouts have since fallen out of favor, replaced by reformer Pilates and hot girl walks. But as saunas and ice baths become the new social clubs, and wellness-focused Gen Zers trade alcohol-fueled nights out for early morning workouts, its no surprise that a candlelit class set to blasting music and bound by a cultlike sense of community is being embraced by a new generation.
As one TikTok user suggested: Out of all the things to bring back from 2016, I vote to bring back SoulCycle.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy this week launched a new advisory council that could reshape American transportation in President Donald Trump’s aesthetic preferences.
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s newly created Beautifying Transportation Infrastructure Council held its inaugural meeting February 2, and quickly outlined plans to make a highly influential mark on the look and design of U.S. transportation infrastructure. The council could impact an array of initiatives including interstate highways, bridges, transit hubs, and airports, and has been established to provide recommendations on the policies, designs, and funding priorities of the DOT.
Though the council was created to serve an advisory role with no decision-making or funding authority, it currently has two major agenda items that could form the basis of a widespread makeover of American transportation infrastructure.
The first is the oversight of a national conceptual design competition that is seeking innovative thinking around transportation infrastructure design. The second is the creation of a design guidebook that would set new aesthetic recommendations for the design and renovation of federally controlled transportation projects. Its tentative title: “Beauty and Transportation.”
On the surface, these efforts seem open to a variety of design approaches, however the October announcement of the council states that the advisory effort will “align” directly with the aesthetic preferences laid out in Trump’s August 2025 executive order “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again.” That order defines the traditional and classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome as the basis of a preferred architectural style for federal buildings.
This aesthetic preference is likely to influence whatever comes out of the Beautifying Transportation Infrastructure Council. Its chair is Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society, the Washington, D.C., nonprofit that champions classical architecture and which helped write Trump’s executive order to make traditional architecture the preferred style for federal buildings.
“That order called for new federal buildings to be beautiful, uplifting, and admired by the common person. It reoriented architecture away from modernism toward the classical and traditional design that is so appreciated and often preferred by ordinary people,” Shubow said during his opening remarks at the council meeting. “This council, I believe, should not recommend that any particular style be mandated, but it should make clear that classical and traditional design are legitimate options.”
Council guidelines
The council has set additional guidelines to govern its work. Shubow noted that the Transportation Department has drafted five preliminary principles to help shape the council’s advice and the creation of its design guidebook. These include ideals that “transportation infrastructure should be designed to uplift and inspire the human spirit and lend prestige to the nation,” and that it “should foster a sense of place and inspire national and community pride in a way that builds upon the past.”
The council’s members include architects, landscape architects, state transportation officials, engineers, and construction specialists. None were overtly dogmatic about design preferences, at least during this initial meeting.
Shubow has cited projects like San Franciscos Golden Gate Bridge and Cincinnati’s Union Terminal as exemplars of the kinds of designs the council might encourage. But council members also spent time talking about a wider range of aesthetic approaches to transportation design, including the importance of artistic lighting under bridges and the use of regionally appropriate wildflowers along highways.
One member, Bryan Jones, mid-Atlantic division president of the engineering and construction firm HNTB, pointed to one of his firm’s recent projects, the swooping Sixth Street Viaduct in Los Angeles, a decidedly modern structure.
Official and unofficial timelines
Timelines for the design competition and guidebook have not been set. The council will have its next public meeting in the summer, and will meet in private subcommittees in the meantime.
As Trump engages in a range of rebuilding and construction efforts in Washington, D.C., the work of the council may already be starting, if unofficially.
Duffy was on hand to kick off the council’s inaugural session, but had to leave early to go to the White House. He had another meeting with Trump to discuss the potential redesign of Dulles International Airport, “a beautiful project that he wants to look at,” to “revamp in a great way,” Duffy said.
AI isnt eliminating human work. Its redistributing human judgment, away from routine tasks and into the narrow zones where ambiguity is high, mistakes are costly, and trust actually matters.
This shift helps explain a growing disconnect in the AI conversation. On one hand, models are improving at breathtaking speed. On the other, many ambitious AI deployments stall, scale more slowly than expected, or quietly revert to hybrid workflows.
The issue isnt capability. Its trust.
The trust gap most AI strategies overlook
AI adoption doesnt hinge on whether a system can do a task. It hinges on whether humans are willing to rely on its output without checking it. That gap between performance and reliance, the trust gap, is what ultimately determines where AI replaces work, where it augments it, and where humans remain indispensable.
Two factors shape that gap more than anything else: ambiguity and stakes.
Ambiguity refers to how much interpretation, context, or judgment a task requires. Stakes refer to what happens if the system gets it wrong: financially, legally, reputationally, or ethically.
When ambiguity is low and stakes are low, automation thrives. When both are high, humans must stay firmly in the loop. Most real-world work lives somewhere in between and thats where the future of labor is being renegotiated.
A simple way to see where AI fits
Think of work along two axes: how ambiguous it is, and how costly errors are.
Low ambiguity, low stakes tasks, basic classification, simple tagging, routine routing, are rapidly becoming fully automated. This is where AI quietly replaces human labor, often without much controversy.
Low ambiguity but high stakes tasks, such as compliance checks or identity verification, are typically automated but closely monitored. Humans verify, audit, and intervene when something looks off.
High ambiguity, low stakes work: creative labeling, sentiment analysis, exploratory research, which tends to use AI as an assistant, with light human oversight.
But the most important quadrant is high ambiguity and high stakes. These are the tasks where trust is hardest to earn: fraud edge cases, safety-critical moderation, medical or financial interpretation, and the data decisions that shape how AI models behave in the real world.
Here, humans arent disappearing. Theyre becoming more targeted, more specialized, and more on demand.
When the human edge actually disappears
Interactive voice response systems refine the rule. The stakes were not low, IVR is literally the companys voice to its customers. But ambiguity was. Once synthetic voices became good enough, quality was easy to judge, variance was low, and the trust gap collapsed. That alone was sufficient for AI to take over.
When trust keeps humans in the loop
Translation followed a different trajectory. Translation is inherently ambiguous, as there are multiple ways to translate a sentence. As a result, machine translation rapidly absorbed casual, low-risk content such as TikTok videos. However, in high-stakes contexts, such as legal contracts, medical instructions, financial reporting, and global brand messaging, trust is never fully transferred to the machine.
For these tasks, professional translators are still required to augment the AI’s initial output. Since AI now performs the bulk of the work, full-time translators have become rare. Instead, they increasingly operate within expert networks, deployed just-in-time to fine-tune and verify the process, thereby closing the trust gap.
The same shift is now playing out in how data is prepared and validated for AI systems themselves. Early AI training relied on massive, full-time human labeling operations. Today, models increasingly handle routine evaluation. Human expertise is reserved for the most sensitive decisions, the ones that shape how AI behaves under pressure.
What this means for the future of work
The popular narrative frames AI as a replacement technology: machines versus humans. The reality inside organizations looks very different.
AI is becoming the default for scale. Humans are becoming the exception handlers, the source of judgment when context is unclear, consequences are severe, or trust is on the line.
This doesnt mean fewer humans overall. It means different human roles: less repetitive labor, more judgment deployed just in time. More experts working across many systems, fewer people locked into single, narrowly defined tasks.
The organizations that succeed with AI wont be the ones that automate the most. Theyll be the ones that understand where not to automate, and that design workflows capable of pulling human judgment in at exactly the right moment, at exactly the right level.
The future of work isnt humans versus machines. Its AI at scale, plus human judgment delivered through expert networks, not permanent roles. Translation and model validation show the pattern; white-collar work is next.
And that, quietly, is what companies are discovering now.
