Hiroshi Fujiwara is perhaps the most dramatically lit person Ive ever interviewed on Zoom.
Joining me at his preferred time (midnight) from Tokyo, the man known as the godfather of streetwearwho launched his own label at 26, was among the first hip-hop DJs in Japan, wrote a regular column for Popeye, and now runs his own consultancy, Fragmenthas met with me to discuss his latest collaborations with Nike.
But when I dig in, asking about the hidden details lurking in his shoes? He admits, I don’t really want to talk about it, without an ounce of rudeness. Sometimes, if you see a movie and you don’t really get the ending, you have to guess what [the creators] think. I like that kind of situation.
In a world of overt and overstated sneaker collabs, Fujiwara prefers to operate with a soft touch. The semiotics of streetwear like much of fashion are born from winks and nodsan if you know you know mentality. His three new pieces for Nike celebrate that. At the same time, Fujiwara insists he isnt only trying to build enigmas that people can investigate it forever. When he visits Nike, he still designs the shoes hed like to wear.
[Photo: Nike]
I always like black shoes!
His three new shoes start with his take on Nikes new Air Liquid Max (April 1, $225)an organic expansion of its Air Max technology, where the air bubbles almost seem to melt or morph underfoot like the toes of a tree frog. He didnt touch the materiality or the silhouette. And youll need to squint to notice the light white text like Fragment Concept Testing on the side. But he turned the swoosh chrome, and filled the three printed layers of pigment on top of the shoe with various flavors of black. I imagine that in person it almost shimmers like snakeskin (which wouldn’t be the first or even second time Fujiwara used animal textures on a sneaker).
I always like black shoes! Fujiwara says. I like colorful shoes also, but I wanted to have the black one for myself. Especially that shoe. I always like those air bag shoes. Many [designers] want to do the Jordan 1, Air Force One, or Dunk. No one really want to touch the newest things. I always do that.
For the Mind 001 (March 18, $95)Nikes brain-calming slide shoe, which uses little nubs in the bottom to activate a sense of mindfulnessFujiwara also wanted to go with black. But for the nubs, he chose blue. Black and military blue are the trademark colors of Fragment.
[Photo: Nike]
Small details are really, really important. I see some comments, people say, Oh, its only changing color; Its only little things, Fujiwara says. But the little things are really important, especially for the shoe. Like even 1 millimeter really makes it different.
Indeed, the Mind 001 reads completely differently in blackready to outfit an ensemble of broody technical garments beloved by corners of the fashion scenein a way that the Mind 001s original infrared and orange colorway did not.
Yet black and blue seem like the worst colors to use to stand out: an almost stubborn choice on Fujiwaras part to squint through their universality to see his fingerprint. Is there more to them? When I asked about his exact approach to blue at Fragment, he did share more on its origins.
The first Air Jordan I had in the 80sthe original Air Jordan 1that was black and blue, Fujiwara says. And I always like black and blue. The shoe left such an imprint on his mind that he adopted Nikes colorways for himself, which he occasionally, circuitously, reapplies to the brand.
[Photo: Nike]
An excuse to look closer
Fujiwaras collaborations with Nike trace back to the 90sat one point, he even teamed up with Nike design god Tinker Hatfield and CEO Mark Parker on a special line called HTM (Hiroshi, Tinker, Mark). Hes always seen his role as translating Nikes performance approach to a more fashion-forward audience. Fujiwara himself flagged his use of croc leather on an Air Force 1 as being the sort of polarizing choice even Nikes designers didnt get at the time (about 20 years later, it seems like a downright common treatment to realize a luxe sneaker).
When I started working for Nike with a collaboration in the late 90s, there were many rules. You couldnt touch a swoosh. And at first, it was difficult. But then I got used to it, and I kind of started enjoying it, Fujiwara says. Nike already had their own creative design, so I don’t want to mess around too much. . . . I talk to the designers, I like to respect what they do.
That mentality carries across Fujiwara’s collaborations and projects. He keeps his design simple. He keeps his staff simple. He keeps his business simple. Fragment is a creative team of three, which ensures he doesnt have the overhead and payroll of managing his own brand.
But Ill admit that I appreciate it when Fujiwara takes a firmer touch with Nikes silhouettes, as he demonstrated with his Nike Mind 002 (March 18, $140).
He requested a new upper made of Flyknit, while breaking free of black and blue by introducing a second color scheme in particle gray. A closer look reveals more nuance. The top of the shoe is fuzzyalmost reading like fleece. All of that softness is caged by a one-pull performance lace system, managed with Fragments own tooling that can lock down the shoe like a bolo tie.
While the silhouette itself stays the same, Fujiwara introduced a new sock liner that raises the heel of the shoe, giving it more forward momentum than what we see in the Mind 002 (a silhouette that Ive thought looks stuck in place, given that its outsole and upper peak in the center like a triangle). Sneaker critics have been gushing about Fujiwaras approach to the Mind 002, and his most overt statement is what fans appear to want. But ultimately, Fujiwara asks that you keep looking closer.
When I was really young, the information I had was just pictures in magazines. Like, pictures of my favorite people. Id want to see, what do they have in the closet? Or what do they have on posters? Those kinds of small details, he says. But many people [dont get there now] because they have so much information already.
For some time now, reporting around Apples folding phone has coalesced around two beliefs: the device is set to drop this fall, and it will have a significantly less visible display crease than previous folding devices.
That sounds like a typically Apple feature to prioritize, and it could well explain why the company is late to the category. Folding phones are cool, but the creases in their inner screens are undeniable imperfections. Whether its capacity with music players, user interface with smartphones, or the overall form factor with tablets, Apple tends to avoid making products with clear compromises in their defining elements.
But is it even possible to make a crease-free folding phone? There are huge engineering challenges to making a phone with a glass display that bends back and forth and flattens seamlessly, much less one that stays that way over time.
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Well, a new phone announced today might well have upstaged Apple. Oppo, one of Chinas biggest phone brands, has revealed details of how its Find N6 is addressing the crease; a full launch will follow next week.
Close to zero crease
I thought last years Find N5 was the best foldable phone on the market, at least if you could get your hands on itOppo only sold it in China and South East Asia. At launch it was the thinnest smartphone available anywhere, and Oppo made some bold claims about its almost invisible crease. That was broadly true unless you turned the screen off or tried to use the phone outside; you could also still physically feel the crease in the middle of the panel.
This time Oppo is marketing the Find N6 as having a Zero-Feel Crease. Ive been using this phone for a week, and I would still say zero is an exaggerationbut only a slight one.
The N6s screen is a big improvement on the N5s, which was already well ahead of competitors. The crease is very difficult to see unless youre really looking for it, and its also hard to feel in actual use. Its clearly there if you press deeply against the screen and run your finger across it, but this is the first time Ive felt like it was truly unobtrusive and unlikely to ever bother me in a real-world situation.
Oppo isnt necessarily reinventing the technical wheel here. The company says it achieved the new crease by refining its existing design, including by widening the waterdrop-style hinge by 11% to avoid acute stress on the display.
Oppo is also using liquid 3D printing with photopolymer droplets to smooth out individual imperfections in every manufactured hinge. According to the company, the industry standard for height variance in folding hinges is 0.2mm, but this technique has reduced it to just 0.05mm in the Find N6less than the width of a human hair.
Exceptionally flat
While its impossible to test these claims right now, its also worth noting that Oppo says the Find N6 will remain in its pristine, flat state for significantly longer than other foldables. The company says it should stay exceptionally flat through 600,000 folds, while the phone has been certified by TÜV Rheinland to remain functional for more than a million.
The results are impressive, but Apple is unlikely to take the same technical approach. Oppo has been iterating on its folding phone design for a long timethe first Find N came out in late 2021 after more than three years of developmentwhereas Apple is coming in fresh.
Well-connected analyst Ming-chi Kuo has suggested that the folding iPhone will make use of a new type of metal plate to distribute bending stress across the panel and thereby reduce the impact of the crease. The solution is said to have been developed by Samsung Display, which itself showed off a demonstration Advanced Crease-less panel at CES 2026 in January.
The Apple response
Apple rarely takes off-the-shelf solutions, however, and if theres one thing Id expect from its design team, it would be to relish the opportunity to come up with a mechanically novel kind of hinge. It would be surprising if there wasnt something unique to the new iPhone that Apple could tout in its marketing, even if it does substantially rely on technology from a partner like Samsung Display.
What matters, though, is that Apples desired outcome has more or less already been achieved by someone else. With the Oppo Find N6, the crease is no longer a serious drawback to usability or aesthetics. That means that whatever Apple was planning to compete with before, theres now a new benchmark to judge the first folding iPhone by when it eventually gets announced.
On one hand, this is good news for Apple fans: the prospect of a truly crease-free iPhone seems more plausible than ever before. On the other, it might be bad news for Applethis new iPhone could be less differentiated than the company might have hoped for. Oppo has left some room for improvement with the Find N6s screen, but not a whole lot.
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In the months following Elon Musks $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022, my experience with the platform (and perhaps yours too) got quickly, dramatically worse. My algorithmic timeline, better known as the For you tab, devolved into a broken fire hydrant of tweets from blue-checked engagement farmers, shameless meme thieves, clout-chasing Republican politicians, and pseudonymous YouTubers posting weird, uncanny rage-bait. For a brief period, X even made For you the default setting, nudging users toward this slurry of boosted content and away from a simple chronological feed of posts from the accounts they chose to follow.
As a result of these changes, anytime I opened the app and neglected to select the chronological feed, I was not really experiencing Twitter as Id previously experienced it, or wanted to experience it; I was using a new and different version of Twitter that a reactionary billionaire thought I ought to see instead. Eventually, I stopped using the site, which Musk rebranded as X, because I perceived the platform (whatever the name) as feeding me a steady diet of right-wing slop, and I did not want to upset my stomach any further.
Today the site’s basic mechanics remain weighted toward feeds that incorporate some form of algorithmic input. The For you tab still appears to over-index on Musk’s posts and perspectives. The Following tab defaults to ranking posts by their popularity, which can make it very challenging to try and follow breaking news stories on the app. Finally, a dropdown menu allows users to adjust the Following tab to display more recent posts first, which, of the available options, most closely approximates the Classic Twitter experience.
A recently published study from a team of researchers in Europe attempts to measure the degree to which Xs algorithm is poisoning the brains of those who continue to use it. The study, which took place in 2023, randomly assigned around 5,000 X users to view either their algorithmic or chronological feeds over a seven-week period, and then measured the effects on users political attitudes and online behavior.
For anyone who does not have a vested interest in the financial success of X, the findings are pretty grim. The researchers found that the For you tab shifted users political opinions toward more conservative positions on certain issuesfor example, the then-ongoing criminal investigations into President Donald Trump, and Russias invasion of Ukraine. They found that the algorithmic feed increased user engagement, promoted conservative-coded political content, and demoted posts from traditional news sources, which appeared in users algorithmic feeds 58.1% less often than they did in users chronological feeds.
Finally, and maybe most troublingly, the researchers found that these effects were asymmetricthat although turning the algorithm on changed users views, turning it off did not move views in the other direction. After the study, the chronological feeds of participants the study exposed to the algorithm contained 60% more posts from conservative accounts and 28% more posts from conservative political activists, relative to the chronological feeds of study participants who did not use the algorithmic feed. The researchers attribute these results to the types of accounts that users encountered in the For you tab and eventually chose to follow, thus adding those accounts to their chronological feeds, too.
In other words, once the X algorithm moves you to the right, you probably stay there. And if you use the X algorithm long enough, even on those occasions when you decide to peruse the Following tab, you will probably see more conservative-coded content than you would have if you had never checked out the For you tab in the first place.
The researchers noted that the algorithms persuasive effects were stronger among self-identified Republicans and independents than among Democrats, whose views the researchers describe as largely unaffected by the experiment. But even if Xs design choices are not turning unwitting liberals into brainwashed MAGA dead-enders overnight, the implications for democracy remain, to say the least, troubling.
A 2024 Pew survey found that among social media platforms, X had the greatest proportion of users (59%) who said they used it to keep up with politics. Another Pew survey from the same year found that about two-thirds of X users utilized the platform to follow the news, and that half said they got news from X regularly. Again, X stood out from its competitorsTikTok, Facebook, and Instagramas the only platform for which a majority of users listed keeping up with news as a reason they used the site.
Against this backdrop, the results of the study suggest that the segments of Xs user base that are more open to conservative ideas are also likely to be in the market for political content when they doomscroll. Similarly, depending on which tab they decide to browse, X users looking for news might be less likely to encounter news reported by actual journalists, and more likely to encounter mendacious agitprop designed to make them angry at Democrats, afraid of immigrants, and/or sympathetic to Donald Trump.
Part of the reason influential conservatives so loudly profess their trust in X these days is that right-wing echo chambers make them feel comfortable: Xs algorithm amplifies content that soothes their egos, affirms their priors, and inexorably pushes them further to the right.
Around the time that Musk was taking over at Twitter, he said he wanted to build a maximally trusted and broadly inclusive platform on which a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner. In the time-honored fashion of conservative culture warriors masquerading as principled champions of free speech, he also said that the platform must be politically neutral, which, he noted, would entail upsetting the far right and the far left equally.
The reality was simpler and much more grotesque: Musk, who dove headlong into Republican politics shortly thereafter and remains the platforms most-followed trafficker in conspiracy theories embraced by white supremacists, wanted the platform to both reflect and promote his worldview. The study helps quantify the success of this effort: Over the past four years, Musk has transformed X into a disinformation-ridden radicalization machine that occasionally spits out AI-generated nonconsensual pornography, too. If those are things you want from your social media experience, X is serving your interests more capably than ever. If theyre not, X is doing its best to change your mind every time you give it a chance.
The town halls didn’t work. The twelve month wellness program didn’t work. The pricey motivational speaker definitely didn’t work. Your team looks busy, but is still very, very stuck.
What looks like apathy is almost never laziness. What looks like resistance is rarely defiance. What youre actually seeing is a nervous system in threat mode because change fatigue is fear fatigue. The fact is, the human brain just isnt wired to fully distinguish between a physical threat and an organizational one. According to Gallups 2025 State of the Global Workplace report, half of employees in the U.S. and Canada reported significant daily stress, which is higher than all other global regions surveyed.
Thats not a motivation problem. Thats a nervous system crisis happening at scale.
Our amygdala, the brains fear center, doesnt have the ability to differentiate between the danger of a rampaging rhinoceros and a reorg. It sees experiences as either safe or deadly. Once in threat mode, attention narrows, the prefrontal cortex (the brains center of creative solutions and collaboration) shuts down, and self protection protocols are engaged.
The pattern
Heres the pattern I see in nearly every organization navigating significant change:
1. A trigger hits. This could be anything from new leadership, a reorg, constantly shifting priorities, or an AI rollout.
2. The nervous system activates a fear response: freeze, fawn, fight, or avoid. To a fear aroused brain, it feels safer to outwardly resist change (fight), conserve energy and wait things out (freeze), tell you what you want to hear, but refuse to execute change (fawn), or just flee altogether with quiet or outright quitting.
3. The person finds short-term relief by disengaging, delaying, or deflecting and they stop performing at their peak.
4. Over time, that protective behavior hardens into an identity story: Why bother? Nothing I do matters here anyway.
During times of intense uncertainty, this is a completely normal response for the human brain, but it doesnt have to hinder success; teams just need better tools to navigate periods of rapid change. Here are a few of my favorite neurohacks that have proven especially impactful with enterprise technology teams in my workshops, helping them decrease fear (aka stress) in seconds, not weeks.
Pinch the Valley
Using the thumb and forefinger of your right hand, pinch the meaty area of your left hand where your other thumb and forefinger meet. Then massage for thirty seconds. This activates the vagus nerve, downshifting the stress response almost immediately. The best part? Nobody in the room knows youre doing it. Simple, but powerful.
The Near & The Far
Hold a pen or your finger about six inches from your face and focus on it. Slowly move it out to arm’s length, keeping your eyes locked on it as your focus shifts. Then bring it back in until it touches your nose. Repeat two or three times. When your visual system shifts between near and far focus, it signals your nervous system to downregulate, and I use this one constantly before every keynote.
Bravery Bites
This one surprises people: your brain stops feeling fear while youre eating. This provides powerful, albeit temporary, relief and works best with very crunchy things. My favorites are ice, corn nuts, and frozen blueberries. Essentially, your amygdala understands that if your environment is safe enough for you to eat, its safe enough to return to a sense of calm.
Sour Jolt
When a fear spiral has fully taken hold, or you find yourself thinking in never-ending worry loops, pop something intensely sour into your mouth. This can be a lemon or a sour candy (bonus points if you can combine the sour and chewy from Bravery Bites). That sudden, intense taste is such an unexpected signal that your brain has to redirect attention away from the internal thought spiral and toward the sensation in your mouth. Keep a few sour candies in a mug you actually enjoy looking at on your desk, clearly visible, so it can double as a gentle reminder that you have tools at the ready when a fear spiral hits.
The most expensive mistake a leader can make right now isn’t a bad hire or a missed quarter. It’s looking at a team in threat mode and calling it a performance problem. Your people aren’t broken. Their brains are doing exactly what brains are supposed to do when the environment feels unsafe: protect. When you reduce threat and increase agency, you don’t just get compliance, you get creativity, speed, and ownership back, with the biggest shifts happening when leaders stop trying to motivate people past their fear and start helping them move through it.
Our biology wont change. But how you lead through it can.
For years, companies have been told to prepare for the future by chasing youth, digital fluency, and technical skills. They have been urged to bet on high potentials and to focus on the next generation. At the same time, they have spent years overlooking one of the most strategic talent pools already available to them: women over 50.
This blind spot now looks increasingly dangerous. The future of work is arriving amid inflation, oil crises, wars, and all sorts of geopolitical tensions, economic anxiety, demographic aging, climate disruption, and the destabilizing effects of AI. In such a world, organizations need people who can handle ambiguity, navigate transitions, sustain relationships, and make sound judgments under pressure.
That is one of the reasons women over 50 matter so much. They are among the most underused sources of resilience, intelligence, and practical capability in the labor market. If companies are serious about survivingand growingin an age of volatility, here are nine reasons why they need to stop overlooking them.
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1. Demography is on their side
The first reason is demographic reality. In aging societies, women over 50 are an expanding part of the population and, increasingly, of the available workforce. Women live longer than men, often work longer than previous generations, and represent a growing share of experienced talent. Yet they remain underrepresented in hiring pipelines, in leadership tracks, and in strategic workforce planning. Companies speak often about talent shortages while ignoring one of the biggest reservoirs of talent in plain sight.
2. They are veterans of career transitions
Women over 50 are often veterans of career transition. Long before everyone started talking about the end of linear careers, a majority of women were already living that reality. Their working lives have frequently included interruptions, pivots, reinventions, periods of part-time work, freelance activity, caregiving, and reentry into employment. What traditional employers have too often interpreted as instability is, in fact, a deep familiarity with change. In a world where careers are less and less predictable, those who have already navigated multiple transitions have a head start.
3. They know how to learn
This leads to a third advantage: They know how to learn. In the age of AI, the most valuable workers are not simply those who possess knowledge, but those who can update themselves continuously. Women over 50 who have had to change sectors or rebuild confidence after setbacks often develop a powerful capacity to learn, unlearn, and relearn. They are used to adapting. They are used to having to prove themselves again. They are often much more agile than employers assume, precisely because life has not allowed them the luxury of rigidity.
4. They bring judgment in an automated world
A fourth reason is judgment. AI is very good at generating text, summarizing information, and automating routine cognitive tasks. But organizations do not thrive on information alone. They thrive on discernment: the ability to read a situation, understand context, weigh trade-offs, and anticipate consequences. These are not purely technical skills. They are human ones, and they tend to deepen with experience. Women over 50 often bring a kind of seasoned judgment that becomes especially valuable when the environment is uncertain. They are more likely to have seen management fashions come and go, to recognize false urgency, and to distinguish between real innovation and empty hype.
5. They bring emotional intelligence to organizations
As work becomes more digital, more hybrid, and more fragmented, organizations depend even more on people who can create trust, resolve tension, and keep teams functioning. Women over 50 often bring strong interpersonal skills forged not only through formal work experience but through years of invisible labor: coordinating, listening, mediating, caring, anticipating needs, and managing relationships. These capacities are still routinely undervalued because they are associated with femininity and because they are difficult to quantify. Yet they are central to organizational performance. In chaotic times, the people who can keep human systems working are indispensable.
6. They strengthen intergenerational workplaces
Many companies now employ several generations at once, but few know how to turn age diversity into an advantage. Too often, the focus remains fixated on attracting younger workers, as though experience were a burden rather than an asset. Women over 50 can play a crucial role here. They can mentor younger colleagues without reproducing rigid hierarchies. They can transmit knowledge, stabilize teams, and provide historical perspective. They can also help bridge cultural and professional differences between generations. In organizations where everyone is encouraged to learn from one another, this is a strategic asset.
7. They are often deeply motivated to contribute
Contrary to cliché, many women over 50 are not winding down. Quite the opposite. Midlife often brings a sharper understanding of ones strengths, limits, and aspirations. Many women at this stage are more interested in meaningful contribution than corporate theater. They know what they care about, what they are good at, and what nonsense they no longer wish to tolerate. This often makes them highly effective. They may be less ready to play status games, but they are frequently deeply motivated by usefulness, autonomy, and impact. In a period when so many organizations are struggling with disengagement, that matters.
8. They are agile in times of crisis
With an oil shock, economic turbulence, and geopolitical instability loomingor already unfolding depending on where you sitcompanies need people who know how to operate when the script no longer works. Women over 50 have often spent years adapting to scarcity, uncertainty, and institutional dysfunctionwhether at work, at home, or both. They know how to do more wth less. They know how to reprioritize, improvise, and keep going when systems fail. They are often pragmatic rather than ideological, flexible rather than brittle. In an economy shaped by repeated shocks, that kind of agility could be a growth strategy. Companies looking for new sources of resilience and invention should start betting on those who have already learned how to survive upheaval.
9. They help companies understand the society they serve
Finally, women over 50 help organizations understand the world they actually operate in. Consumers are aging. The workforce is aging. Families are changing. Needs around health, finance, care, mobility, and everyday life are increasingly shaped by midlife and older adults, especially women. And yet these women remain strikingly absent from leadership teams, innovation departments, media representation, and product design. This makes companies less intelligent. It narrows their imagination and weakens their ability to serve real markets. Hiring women over 50 is therefore a way to become more lucid about society itself.
These are some of the reasons why they are (and should be) the future of work. The conditions of the coming economy favor the kinds of strengths they have too often been forced to develop in silence.
Sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin captured this idea beautifully in her essay The Space Crone. Asked to imagine whom humanity should send to represent itself to extraterrestrials, she proposed not a president or a great scientist, but an old womanbecause she alone has lived through the full arc of the human condition. She has known youth, change, loss, reinvention, and resilience.
In many ways, the same logic applies to the workplace (albeit with older women rather than old women). In an economy defined by disruption and transformation, the people who have already navigated the most change may be the ones best equipped to face what comes next. Women over 50 are guides to our future.
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Rental housing construction is slowing down in the United States. The cost of common construction materials is a big reason why.
According to a new report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, construction material costs have skyrocketed in recent years, adding to a wide range of conditions that are slowing the production of rental housing.
The report, “America’s Rental Housing 2026,” finds that there was a 42% increase in the overall material costs of multifamily residential construction over the five-year period from 2020 to 2025, covering essential building materials like gypsum board, ready-mix concrete, and lumber. It’s a huge jump in costs compared with the previous five-year period from 2014 to 2019, which saw construction material costs rise just 7% overall.
[Image: courtesy JCHS/Harvard University]
“The cost rose a lot following the pandemic. And some of that was supply chain issues that really increased the costs, and then they didn’t quite come back down. And now tariffs are also impacting some products,” says Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies and the lead author of the report.
These costs are part of the reason the amount of new rental housing stock is shrinking. According to the report, 416,000 multifamily units were started in 2025, down from a 30-year record high of 547,000 starts in 2022. Year over year, fourth-quarter starts of new professionally managed apartments dropped 36% in 2025.
The raw materials of housing construction heavily influence the overall cost of housing production, and the past five years have seen material costs spike. Five major categories of building materialsgypsum, plastic construction products, lumber and wood, ready-mix concrete, and brick and structural clay tilehave experienced cost increases of between 26% and 47%.
The high material costs have contributed to the slowdown in overall rental housing production, but they’re only part of the picture. Airgood-Obrycki notes that there’s been a labor supply shortage in the construction industry over the same five years, and labor costs in the industry have increased by 24%. High inflation is affecting what people in the housing market can afford, and high interest rates are limiting what developers can afford to build.
“There are lots of things happening at the same time,” Airgood-Obrycki says. “The long-standing issues of the high cost of land and issues with delays in development and with a complicated permitting process in some places are also adding time and cost to projects for developers.”
Most of the impacts from construction material costs are a direct and long-lingering result of the pandemic, according to the report, but current affairsfrom tariffs to oil price shocks from the Iran warare also having an effect on the overall cost of building.
“The tariffs, of course, are adding more on top of that and preventing prices from coming back down in any real way,” Airgood-Obrycki says.
For potential renters, that likely means less housing to choose from and potentially higher rents in the long term.
New York Citys famed Fifth Avenue is best known for its sparkling, fantastical holiday windows. Now, luxury brands are transforming an often overlooked, sometimes maligned part of city architecturescaffoldinginto artful branding displays.
Located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, Prada has unveiled new scaffolding on its building, currently undergoing renovation, that covers its facade in rippling layers of semitransparent Prada-green scrim paper. The result is a beautifully nuanced design solution that turns what’s typically a functional safety requirement into a moiré urban dreamscape that becomes a visual extension of Prada’s brand.
Prada isnt the first to reimagine scaffolding as a branding opportunity. Most recently, Louis Vuitton transformed its Fifth Avenue flagship store, just a few blocks north of Prada, into a sort of construction trompe loeil by making the scaffolding that wrapped its store appear to be a gargantuan set of stacked Louis Vuitton luggage.
[Prada store on Fifth Avenue in NYC. Photo: courtesy Prada]
A reevaluation of what scaffolding could be is happening on a broader scale, too: The City of New York also recently approved six new sophisticated scaffolding designsfeaturing lights, angled roofing, and clear materialsto make these temporary safety platforms, required by law when a building is undergoing construction, look less like MacGyvered dark green caves and seem more fluid, in keeping with their architectural surroundings.
Prada worked with its longtime spatial design partner, the agency 2×4, to design the buildings covering, and it had to build full-scale mock-ups in both Milan and New York to test the impact of light, shadow, and movement, says Michael Rock, founding partner and executive creative director at 2×4. We treated scaffolding as a medium in its own right, not a backdrop.
While it uses standard commercial pipe scaffolding as the underlying structural skeleton, the deft layers of material, signature color applications, and contrast they draw signal the Prada brand and its interest in dualities, according to the company.
[The Prada Store covered in artful scaffolding. Photo: courtesy Prada]
The mesh is made of two layers of scrim papera reinforced, durable woven fiber materialprinted with a pattern that references typical New York construction fencing, but in Prada green. The scale of the pattern is different on each of the layers and had to be precisely aligned to create a moiré effect that shifts with light, weather, and viewing angle. At first, it looks like single-surface standard construction material. Someone with an eye for detail will notice a delicate optical effect.
Scaffolding is designed for speed, safety, and building codenot beauty, Rock says. The challenge was working within that strict system while transforming it into something intentional and architectural.
Color also plays a significant part in maintaining the buildings brand recognizability on street level. The team painted the pipe scaffolding, sidewalk bridge, and columns in Prada green, and applied green variations to the mesh layers so that the rear layer is a deeper, more muted shade and the outer mesh is brighter, which emphasizes the moiré effect, according to the company.
The facade operates at both macro and micro scales, and much of that nuance only reveals itself in person, Rock says. At a finer level, the two mesh layers are not identical: The front scrim is more transparent, while the rear layer is denser. From a distance, the facade reads as monolithic. As you walk along the street, the multiple moiré patterns begin to shift, revealing the layered structure. That spatial effect is difficult to capture in photographsit comes alive through movement.
[Photo: courtesy Prada]
Integrated linear LED fixtures also illuminate at night to cast a soft glow on the sidewalk and heighten the transparency of the mesh, revealing how the lights line up with the scaffoldings structural grid and adding another layer of depth to the concept.
But Pradas reinventionalong with Louis Vuitton’sof what used to be a design afterthought also shows how branding in retail spaces is evolving. Every possible consumer touchpoint, no matter how seemingly mundane, is a branding opportunity or a missed chancea moment to drive brand recognition, invoke surprise, and make ephemera into a memorable experience.
Presence is essential, Rock says. Brands need to announce themselves, even more so when their facades are lost behind protective layers f scaffolding. Typically, the answer is a kind of billboard wrapper. In our case, rather than hiding construction and maintenance, we leverage them as an opportunity to express Pradas unique aesthetic heritage. Through color, pattern, and moiré, the scaffold becomes an extension of the brand language rather than a screen. We see this as a branding of and in the structure of the city.
Every morning, people fasten their watch, slip on a bracelet, and head out the door without thinking much about what they might encounter along the way. The air they breathe, the dust on their hands, and the surfaces they touch all feel ordinary. Yet many chemical exposures happen quietly, without smell, taste, or warning.
What if something as simple as a silicone band around your wrist could help track those invisible exposures?
Environmental monitoring has traditionally relied on snapshots of exposure from a water sample collected on a single day, a blood sample drawn at one point in time, or soil tested from a specific location. But exposure unfolds gradually as people move through different environments and come into contact with air, dust, and surfaces throughout the day.
New noninvasive monitoring tools aim to capture that longer-term picture.
As synthetic chemicals such as forever chemicals, known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), become more widespread in everyday environments, scientists are increasingly focused on understanding how exposure to these substances occurs in daily life.
PFAS are called forever chemicals because they take a very long time to degrade in the environment.
Traditional monitoring misses everyday reality
Traditional monitoring methods are essential for identifying contamination, but they capture exposure as a moment rather than something that unfolds over time.
In studies involving people, measuring exposure often requires invasive procedures such as blood draws, which can be expensive, logistically challenging, and, for some participants, uncomfortable enough to discourage involvement.
Early in my environmental chemistry research, I noticed something that didnt quite add up. People living in the same agricultural community, or animals sharing the same landscape, often showed very different chemical profiles even when environmental measurements looked similar. The surroundings hadnt changed much; daily behavior had.
Movement through different spaces, time spent indoors or outdoors, contact with treated surfaces, and interactions with consumer products all shape exposure in ways a single sample cant fully capture. That realization raised a larger question: If exposure unfolds gradually, how can scientists measure it using tools designed for specific moments? Answering that question requires a shift away from isolated measurements and toward approaches that reflect lived experience.
What noninvasive tools change
That question led me to work with passive, noninvasive monitoring tools, including silicone wristbands. Rather than actively collecting samples, these tools absorb chemicals from the surrounding environment over time, similar to how skin or fur interacts with air, dust, and surfaces.
Silicone wristbands work because they are made of a silicone polymer called polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS, that can absorb many organic chemicals from the surrounding environment. As the band is worn, compounds from air, dust, and surfaces gradually diffuse into the silicone over time.
The material acts somewhat like a sponge, passively collecting traces of chemicals the wearer encounters during daily activities. After the wristband is worn for several days or weeks, researchers can extract those compounds in the laboratory and analyze them to better understand patterns of exposure.
Silicone wristbands are one example of a broader group of passive, noninvasive monitoring tools designed to observe how chemicals accumulate over time. Other approaches, including passive air samplers placed in homes or small wearable devices, follow similar principles by absorbing compounds from the surrounding environment.
Researchers have used noninvasive tools in community studies to track exposure without medical procedures, lowering barriers to participation and reducing the burden on volunteers. For example, scientists have applied these approaches to study exposure among adolescent girls in agricultural communities, firefighters, and occupants in office buildings.
Researchers have also adapted similar ideas for animal and wildlife studies. Instead of drawing blood, scientists may use wearable tags, collars, or passive samplers placed in an animals environment, such as nesting areas or habitats, to understand how chemicals accumulate over time. These approaches can offer insight into exposure across different ecosystems while minimizing stress on animals.
Like any method, passive monitoring has limitations. Some chemicals are more difficult to capture than others, and environmental conditions such as temperature, sunlight, or airflow can influence how efficiently samplers absorb pollutants. Wearable devices also reflect exposure over a specific period, meaning they cannot provide a complete lifetime record.
These approaches do not replace traditional monitoring. Instead, they add context, showing how exposure accumulates across time and space rather than appearing suddenly at a single sampling point.
Why this matters now
In the United States, PFAS contamination has become a growing public concern, from drinking water advisories to product restrictions and cleanup efforts. Federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, have highlighted the persistence of these chemicals and their widespread presence in the environment.
Much of the public conversation focuses on where PFAS are found in water systems, soils, or consumer products. Understanding exposure, however, also requires attention to ow people and ecosystems encounter these chemicals in everyday settings.
Noninvasive monitoring tools may help fill that gap. They offer ways to better understand cumulative exposure, identify overlooked pathways, and inform environmental health and conservation decisions. For wildlife, these methods may allow researchers to detect emerging risks earlier without adding pressure to species already facing habitat loss and climate stress.
Although these approaches are becoming more common in environmental health research, they are still emerging compared with traditional sampling methods. Costs, the need for standardized protocols, and differences in how various chemicals interact with passive materials can slow wider adoption. As researchers continue refining these tools, they can complement rather than replace established monitoring strategies.
Yaw Edu Essandoh is a PhD student in public and environmental affairs at Indiana University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Earlier this week, social media was wowed by images from the streets of Chinese cities showing senior citizens lining up to have OpenClaw, the always-on AI assistant, installed on their laptops, desktops, and other devices. Areas like Shenzhen and Wuxi offered subsidies to try to scale up adoption of the tool and capitalize on its capabilities. An enormous proportion of all OpenClaw instances installed worldwide, as tracked by public dashboards, emanate from China.
China is adopting tech at an absolute breakneck pace. A ridiculous amount of people turned up into a public event in Shenzhen today to install the OpenClaw.Some devs who work at Chinese big tech companies threw a free public event right outside the Tencent Building in pic.twitter.com/2t4y2ancyz— Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) March 8, 2026
But just as quickly as China adopted OpenClaw, it now appears to be shunning it. The countrys internet emergency response center has issued an official warning about the risks the technology poses. The central government has sent out diktats to government agencies and state-owned enterprises, warning them against installing OpenClaw on their systems. The private sector has also responded. The same pop-up providers of installation services are now offering to uninstall unwanted OpenClaw instances for a fee.
Its almost a notice from the Department of Stating the Bleeding Obvious, says Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey in England. Everyone has been saying ‘dont be so silly as to give agentic AI access to any valuable data. Yet Woodward points out that Chinas response is more than thatthey appear to recognize that AI adoption has been so rapid that it presents a prime target for supply chain attacks. Attackers were bound to produce malicious add-ons and plug-ins, he says.
China cant seem to make up its mind about what to make of OpenClaw, says Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute covering China and its tech development. Beijing is simultaneously banning OpenClaw on government networks while local governments in Shenzhen and Wuxi are subsidizing companies that build on top of it, he says. That points to a dual focus, Fedasiuk reckons.
The Chinese government aims to capture the economic upside of agentic AI while keeping it out of the party-state’s own bloodstream, Fedasiuk says. However, how long that balance can hold is debatable, not least because of the way every private-sector actor is trying to adopt agentic AI, he adds.
Banning agents in 2026 is like trying to ban spreadsheets in 1985, or Google Sheets in 2013, he says. The productivity gains are enormous, and the opportunity cost of abstaining from the use of agents will eventually become untenable.
Still, Fedasiuk points out that Chinas OpenClaw ban seems eminently sensible. Governments should be alarmed by the cybersecurity implications of AI agents, he says. Social norms around the technology are progressing such that many hackers will soon no longer need to crack the encryption that guards valuable files or digital services, but merely gaslight a piece of software that has already been given access to them. The problem is that its out of step with current thinking about AI.
Nevertheless, it appears that China has decided that widespread use of OpenClaw could cause safety headaches in the months to come. Prompt injections and plug-in poisoning are still the thorn in a chatbots side, and it isnt surprising China is flagging it, when you consider that every layer of the AI stack has a commercial incentive to push the tools far and wide, says Jake Moore, a cybersecurity expert at ESET. There are also the same structural risks with agentic AI tools that are granted high-level system permissions before anyone has properly stress-tested what an attacker can do with them.
Moore says the on-and-off relationship with OpenClaw reflects how different the pace of development is between the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence and those trying to roll it out responsibly. AI is clearly built to be fast and invasive, but it is outpacing security standards and reviews, he explains.
For Fedasiuk, that dysfunction between the speed of development and the speed of security patching is evident in how Chinas Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission announced its change in policy. [It] has watched agents proliferate across government networks and moved to restrict their use within days or weeks, he says. Usually the commission would study the issue as a policy problem, issue a white paper or road map, and then come to a conclusion on which it acted.
The fact that it didnt suggests preexisting anxiety within the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] about what autonomous AI means for information securityand possibly a more sophisticated understanding of where the technology is headed than many Western observers give them credit for, Fedasiuk says.
I think the strongest indicator of how normal using AI has become is the language we use as shorthand for it. It’s now extremely common for someone to say they asked “chat” for some piece of information. We all know what they mean.
But if you needed data on how popular AI portals are now, OpenAI provided it recently when the company revealed that ChatGPT has 900 million users, up from 800 million in the fall. Even if Gemini, Copilot, and Claude weren’t also rising (they are), that would be enough for the medianot to mention brands and marketing/PR agenciesto really understand how fast AI is growing as a discovery channel. Whether or not it’s a source of traffic doesn’t matter; it’s a meaningful layer between publishers and audiences.
That’s obviously the reason there’s been so much interest in the infant field of GEO (generative engine optimization) lately, and why I’ve written about it more than once in the past few months. But the focus on how to get AI search engines to notice and reference content doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some kind of reckoning with how the content got there in the first place, and whatif anyvalue exchange that should trigger.
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Surveys, such as this one done by OnMessage last fall, consistently show the public believes content providers should be compensated when their content is scraped by AI engines. The AI industry tends to have a different view, often suggesting that “publicly available” data (i.e., stuff on the internet) is fair game. It’s more nuanced than that, of course, but the central issue is one of leverage: The AI companies have it, and publishers by and large don’t.
The push for a better bargain
A new industry coalition is looking to rebalance those scales. In late February, a group of U.K. media companiesincluding the BBC, the Financial Times, and The Guardianannounced they were forming SPUR, which stands for Standards for Publisher Usage Rights. In an open letter, the leaders of those companies articulated the group’s purpose: “to establish shared technical standards and responsible licensing frameworks that ensure AI developers can access high quality, reliable journalism in legitimate, responsible and convenient ways.”
In other words, SPUR is meant to help lead the publishing industry toward a better bargain between AI companies and the media. Currently, publishers have a hodgepodge of solutions: You could pursue a licensing deal with one of the big AI companies, an option available only to publishers above a certain size. You could sue the AI companies, an expensive proposition. Or you could try to defend your content through a combination of paywalls, bot-blocking protocols, and nascent technologies aimed at getting AI crawlers to pay for access.
The spirit of SPUR is that there’s power in numbers. Although it’s beginning with a handful of U.K. publishers, the group is actively working to recruit media worldwide into the coalition. By taking collective action, which the news media is traditionally allergic to, the coalition stands a better chance of establishing some kind of framework for how AI services will pay for access to content.
It stands an even better chance with allies. Last year, Cloudflare stepped into this fight, advocating on the side of publishers. And it brought to the battlefield technical clout: A significant portion of internet traffic goes through Cloudflare’s network, so it has an outsize say in what the rules are, and which ones get enforced. As part of its push against unauthorized AI scraping, it introduced Pay Per Crawl, a new way to charge bots for access to content.
Couldflare’s solution is actually one of several on the market, and although SPUR doesn’t intend to play favorites, Pay Per Crawl is exactly the kind of technical barrier the group was created to encourage. The fact is, unauthorized AI crawling is rampant. TollBit, which publishes quarterly reports about bot activity, recently highlighted the problem of third parties leveraging virtual, “headless” browsers (essentially bots accessing sites as if they were humans and then scraping them) on an industrial scale to crawl vast amounts of datathe equivalent of a fishing trawler.
For the longest time, the only technical weapon digital publishers had was the robots exclusion protocol (robots.txt), but it’s an honor system that can easily be ignored or bypassed. The main focus of SPUR, sources tell me, is to help publishers build more defenses. By making it more difficult and cost-prohibitive for AI crawlers to access content, it will encourage the people who operate them to make deals.
Then come the agents
The biggest wild card here is agents. AI services access content largely for three purposes: for training data, for search crawling, and in response to user requests. It’s the last category that is proving very contentious and the impetus behind a war of words between Perplexity and Cloudflare last summer. User agents have traditionally been given a pass from blocking since they effectively act as human proxies, not mass-scraping tools. Importantly, though, they don’t behav as humans (for example, they don’t look at ads), so many sites (and especially publishers) believe they should be entitled to block them.
Some believe this aspect of AI crawling should be regulated, and certainly it’s part of the ongoing lawsuits between the media and the AI industry. But those approaches drag on; SPUR is acting now. You can picture this quickly leading to an arms race, and when the players were individual publishers versus the AI industry, that’s very asymmetric warfare. But a large, worldwide industry coalition, backed by technical allies like Cloudflare, might actually have a chance to push back.
So now the hard work begins of herding the cats of the media industry. And the clock is ticking: User behavior is shifting rapidly, and asking “chat” what’s happening in the world means more agents are replacing human traffic to news websites. SPUR may give publishers a chance to shape that system, but it is taking form with or without them. Once those rules harden, changing them will be much harder.
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