AI is forcing every leader into a choice they cant dodge: do you believe your people are fundamentally creative and motivated, or lazy and in need of control?
Most leaders wont want to answer that honestly, but their AI strategy already has. The AI mandates. AI-blamed layoffs. So-called AI-enabled bossware. The truth is in the tools: many leaders prefer synthetic employees they can control, and will treat human beings much the same way until they can be replaced.
Sound hyperbolic? Just look at recent headlines. Klarnas CEO famously bragged about AI replacing his staff after the company fired or lost 22% of its workforce a year earlier (this blew up in his face, of course). Duolingo effectively announced a hiring freeze with the introduction of AI. Elijah Clark, a CEO who advises other CEOs on AI, quipped to Gizmodo, AI doesnt go on strike. It doesnt ask for a pay raise as he expressed excitement about laying off employees in favor of AI. A 2024 review found that more than two-thirds, 68 percent, of U.S. workers report experiencing at least one form of electronic monitoring on the job. There are actual billboards running that say, Stop hiring humans, while a new survey found that 37% of employers would prefer hiring a robot or AI over a recent college graduate.
It isnt just that AI is replacing workers (it is), its that AI is reinforcing our dimmest view of workers in the process.
Generation X
Douglas McGregor was a social psychologist and MIT Sloan professor who, in 1960, argued that leaders dont just manage from goals and objectives; they manage from hidden assumptions about human nature. He called one cluster of assumptions Theory X: the belief that people dislike work, avoid responsibility, and need tight control and incentives to perform. The contrasting Theory Y assumed that, given the right conditions, people will seek responsibility, exercise self-direction, and bring far more creativity and judgment than most organizations ever tap. When leaders push AI in ways that amplify surveillance, shrink autonomy, or quietly replace judgment with automation, they arent just modernizing, theyre hard-coding Theory X into the operating system of work.
Heres the thing about Theory X/Y: McGregor wasnt arguing which was right, whether employees were fundamentally lazy or capable, but that managerial beliefs become self-fulfilling. How you think about your employees determines how theyll act. Bossware, productivity scoring, keystroke tracking, sentiment analysis of employee chats, all of it sends the same signal: we assume you wont do the right thing unless were watching. These tools teach people that initiative is risky, creativity is irrelevant, and trust is conditional. And once those assumptions are embedded in tools, dashboards, and performance reviews, they stop being a management preference and start being the default culture.
It doesnt matter that not every CEO or leader sees employees this way, enough vocal Theory X proponents will shape the narrative for everyone else. Ultimately, the more that human beings are placed in head-to-head competition with AI, the more that the workforce will respond with fear, mistrust, loafing, and even cheating.
Y Not
A Theory Y AI tool starts from the premise that people want to do good work when the system around them makes that possible. Unfortunately, the market isnt offering a lot of Theory Y AI right now. We need more tools here, more competition, more billboards blaring an alternative worldview.
Imagine a tool, for example, that spots duplicated efforts early. Or one that learns from and simplifies decision-making and governance over time. That helps teams compare options, highlights trade-offs, and develops their strategic thinking muscles. That could create shared situational awareness by showing how changes in one team affect others in real time. Instead of secret dashboards used to police performance, Y-style tools could give workers ownership of their data and use it for growth, not punishment. They could make invisible contributions visiblementorship, relationship-building, problem-preventionso the whole texture of teamwork gets its due. In short, they could expand autonomy with guardrails, rather than constrict it with algorithms.
Asking the Wrong Question
The real question isnt how much productivity we can squeeze out by replacing people with AI or treating them like imperfect machines. Its how much potential weve never tapped because the modern workplace was built on bureaucracy, compliance, and risk-avoidance. For decades, weve constrained the very things that make humans extraordinarycreativity, judgment, curiosity, connection, the spark that happens when people riff on each others ideas. Those capacities have never been fully measured, let alone optimized, because most organizations designed them out of daily work.
AI could help us reverse that. Not by automating humans out, but by clearing away the sludge that has buried human capability for a century: redundant approvals, performative documentation, meetings that exist because the calendar said so, processes created for a world that no longer exists. The opportunity isnt a marginal gain from policing employees harderits the exponential upside from finally unleashing the talent you hired in the first place. The leaders who will win the next decade arent the ones who solely bet on synthetic workers, but the ones who use AI to build the first truly human organizationsplaces where people can think, make, collaborate, and surprise you again.
Over the past several years, the art of the rebrand has increasingly become a spectacle sport. From cultural institutions like the Philadelphia Art Museum, which reportedly fired its CEO over a poorly received rebrand this year, to the furniture brand La-Z-Boy, which was widely praised for its modern revamp, the internets attention economy has meant that almost no notable rebrand is safe from social media’s deluge of hot takes.
In 2025, that was more true than ever. Brands that rolled out a new look this year were scrutinized for everything from their font and color choices to the potential ideological implications of their visual pivots. In September, after the design firm Pentagram received major flack for its official branding of the city of Austin, partner DJ Stout told Fast Company, Its because of social media. Back when I first started about 40 years ago, nobody even knew what an identity system was.
To close out the year, Fast Company asked seven design experts to choose one rebrand thatfor better or worsewill be remembered as the most influential of 2025, shaping both design and discourse in the months ahead. Heres what they told us:
Cracker Barrels woke rebrand
In a testament to the major impact of Cracker Barrels rebrand, two of the seven designers we contacted identified the brand as their top pick.
News of Cracker Barrels rebrand initially emerged in mid-October, when the company unveiled a new color palette, typography, and plans to revamp its restaurant interiors. But what really stood out to fans was the brands new logo, which removed the former rendering of an older man leaning on a barrel, known as Uncle Herschel or the Old Timer, in place of a more modernized look.
[Images: Cracker Barrel]
In the hope of presenting a more contemporary image to the world and attracting younger and more affluent customers, they eroded the brand’s identity and character (literally: goodbye Uncle Herschel), says Matt Boffey, chief strategy officer at Design Bridge and Partners in the UK and Europe.
Online, right-wing commentators framed the swap as a radical, woke move, with everyone from conservative activist Robby Starbuck to President Trump himself weighing in with increasingly negative takes. The backlash was so severe that Cracker Barrel lost nearly $100 million in market value in the following days (though it later rebounded). It publicly walked back the rebrand, reinstating Uncle Herschel and assuring customers that it would no longer move forward with restaurant renovations.
[Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images]
According to Stout of Pentagram, the unwanted attention around Cracker Barrels rebrand actually had ripple effects for the reception of his teams City of Austin identity, which was unveiled around the same time and similarly became the target of criticism for what he calls the logo mob.
To be fair, I think the Cracker Barrel identity rebrand was nicely done and a much needed evolution, Stout says. The effort was unfairly judged by merely comparing the before and after versions of a single element (the logo) of the comprehensive identity system, which is the typical online parlor game of rebrand criticism these days. The complete identity system is smart and exactly what I would have donewhich is why I may need to think seriously about retiring.
Stout adds that, in his opinion, the worst part of the whole fiasco was the fact that Cracker Barrel chose to revert to their dated, out-of-touch identity.
That spineless decision by the parent company didnt acknowledge the months of thoughtful deliberation and work that went into the development of their new identity systemand it threw their design partner under the bus, Stout says. This knee-jerk reaction and the online mob mentality it has stoked is a concerning trend and detrimental to my industry moving forward.
Walmart takes a trip into the archives
Undoubtedly the largest company to rebrand this year was Walmart. The brand got its first update in two decades, courtesy of the design firm Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR), which gave it a subtle facelift that amplifies its blue and yellow color palette and sprinkles in some callbacks to the companys 60s and 70s archives.
[Image: Walmart]
My favorite part is how that custom typeface is put to work, says Delta Murphy, an associate partner at Pentagrams Austin outpost. It nods to their past while still giving them room to grow, and that kind of balance is incredibly hard to pull off. Im not sure Id call it a trend as much as a principle of design I appreciate, but I get excited when rebrands tie into meaningful heritage and push into modernity, especially through typography.
[Image: Walmart]
Murphy adds that the Walmart rebrand actually hit a similar note as Cracker Barrels new identitythe difference being that Cracker Barrel got tangled up in politics and internet outrage, which stalled the roll-out before it could ever get off the ground.
If I had one wish for the future of graphic design and branding, Id wish for more curious conversation and a lot less cynicism, she says.
Cash App is not your moms banking app
One undersung branding hero of 2025 is Cash App, according to Kimia Fariborz, senior designer at the global creative agency Further.
[Image: Cash App]
In March, Cash App introduced a new set of brand guidelines that brought playful motion elements and expressive graphics to the brand, making it feel more like an artsy, design-centric brand than a baking app. These broadened guidelines, Fariborz says, helped pave the way for Cash App to roll out new features throughout the year that represent how the modern customer is actually banking, like through bitcoin payment options and an AI assistant named Moneybot.
[Image: Cash App]
What I appreciated most is that Cash App embraces its reality instead of posturing as a traditional bank, Fariborz says. It recognizes the unconventional ways people use it and builds a tone that reflects that world. That honesty gives the brand permission to be vibrant and layered in a category that often defaults to seriousness.
Grammarly gets a new name
Nearly two decades after its founding in 2009, Grammarly traded its brand name in October in favor of Superhuman, the name of a younger, less well-known AI company that it recently acquired. The swap came alongside a massive brand overhaul designed to signal Grammarlys shift into a new era focusing on agentic AI.
[Image: Superhuman]
David Placek, CEO and cofounder of the firm Lexicon Branding, believes the change is bound to pay off. He notes that weve seen other companies reverting back to a component of their old name or debuting a new iterationlike MSNBC to MS NOW and Gannett to USA Todaybut Superhuman’s naming shift was by far the boldest.
[Image: Superhuman]
I expect this to be influential because Grammarly is extremely widely used today, but their name has always held them back a bit, Placek says. I think its a great call to action for companies to reflect on whether their brand name is stunting their growth and if so, to rebrand.
Apple TV loses the +
If Superhuman represents a major brand name swap done right, then Apple TV+s new identity as Apple TV, which was revealed in October, is an example of a small identity tweak that actually makes sense.
[Images: Apple]
When streaming first emerged as a new way to consume content, the Plus symbol became a ubiquitous way to let consumers know what kind of service a brand was offering. Today, though, streamers like Disney+ and Apple TV+ are recognizable without the extra punctuation tacked onso, Apple made the decision to simplify things by taking it out altogether. A month later, the company also unveiled a new Apple TV branding system created using practical effects.
[Image: Apple]
Matt Sia, executive creative director at the design firm Pearlfisher, says the update will have an impact on branding moving forward because it demonstrates a future-facing truth: when categories become cluttered, clarity becomes the differentiator.
Instead of proliferating sub-brands and product names, adding bells, whistles (or ‘+’s), Apple pulled everything into one coherent idea, Sia says. He believes that consolidation will spark a wave of simplification across the industry, as others begin to question how they can reduce noise in their own positioning.
Apple crafted an identity that feels more visceral and immediate. It doesn’t rely solely on software animation to convey emotion, but ensuring the logo, typography, and graphic system hold expressive power on their own, Sia says. Filming in an entirely practical way without relying on CGI sends a message that human touch and crafting experiences, using process and materials, still hold value.
Gap gets its groove back
This year, one iconic American company didnt rebrand in the traditional sense, but it did manage to completely turn its brand perception around: Gap, the apparel purveyor that, mere months ago, may have seemed like an outdated relic, but is now the fashion darling of Gen Zers everywhere.
Gap x Sandy Liang [Photos: Gap]
Gaps brand resurgence into the cultural lexicon this year wasnt a story of refreshing identity but one of reclaiming ethos, says Alexa DePasquale, head of strategy at the design agency CBX. The brand focused less on overhauling aesthetics and more on doing things in the world that doubled down on the core equities that once made it so iconic: essential silhouettes, American optimism, and visual language engrained in memory.
Stand-out moves from Gap this year include aligning with Zac Posen, partnering with designer Sandy Liang, and bringing back the y2k jean through a collaboration with the pop group Katseye. All of these moves have resurrected the brand from the back of your childhood closet to the front of the cultural zeitgeist.
Brands are recognizing that distinctiveness matters far more than novelty, and Gaps confident return to what only it can do proves why it is a staple, DePasquale says. Im loving the clarity that comes from the brands conviction to buck trends. More legacy brands will realize the power that comes from moving forward without abandoning the DNA that once made them inevitable.
Every year the world gets a little more digitaland every year we still find surprise, delight, and meaning in the physical and the material. Like books or movies, the objects we obsessed over tell a story about the year gone by. So to continue a tradition that goes back several years now, heres my look at the objects that tell the story of 2025: the joys, the absurdities, and the difficult-to-explain.
[Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]
1. Gold Oval Office Decor
To call the second Trump administration a new gilded age is less a critique than a straightforward descriptor. Most notably, the president has transformed the look of the Oval Office into a barrage of gold, from gilded statues and vases to accent pieces that Internet sleuths said were actually just painted decor from Home Depot. (Trump denied this.) While mocked as tacky by many observers, the look is of a piece with a continuing embrace of brazen material opulence, from a $1 million gold card visa and a massive new ballroom where the East Wing used to be, to accepting a $400 jet from the Qatari government and a newly invented peace prize from FIFA that involved a trophyan oddly gruesome object according to The New Yorker, but a shiny one, too.
[Photo: Walmart]
2. The Wirkin Bag
Walmart doesnt usually find itself in the same conversation as luxury brands. But the discount behemoths $78 bag that echoed the design of the Herms iconic $10,000-and-up Birkin was dubbed the Wirkin on social media. It quickly became a sensationand an emblem of dupe culture, in which lower prices handily trump authenticity. That may threaten the value of some high-end brands, but actual Birkins remain coveted: The original, made for actress Jane Birkin, sold at auction for $10.9 million this year.
[Photo: Starbucks]
3. Starbucks Bearista Tumblers
Starbucks attempted turnaround journey included rough patches like closing hundreds of locations and laying off employees. But the coffee giant proved it can still generate excitementmaybe more excitement than it wanted. Customers lined up at 3 a.m. to score limited-run, bear-shaped glass tumblers for $30 a pop, and sometimes getting into scuffles when there werent enough. But the Bearista cups promptly became a meme, even inspiring good-natured copycat tributes from the likes of Aldi and Walmart. Recently, Starbucks has brought the object back (on a limited basis of course) as a prize for members of its rewards program.
[Photo: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA/B. Quint]
4. Vera C. Rubin Observatory Telescope
In a year when science seemed under assault, the worlds largest telescope debuted with jaw-dropping views of space, including millions of galaxies and thousands of never-before-seen asteroids in our solar system. Decades in the works, the observatory is at the summit of a Chilean mountain, its telescope equipped with the biggest space camera ever built, with an unprecedented three-billion pixel sensor array. The result, from the start, has been stunning images.
[Photo: Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images]
5. Inflatable Frog Costumes
Video of Seth Todd, a protester outside an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon, being chemical-sprayed by law enforcement went viral, one assumes, largely because he was wearing an inflatable frog costume. The absurdity was, after all, the point. The outfits success at making heavy-handed tactics look both bullying and clueless is why inflatable costumessharks, chickens, etc.became a popular form of protest-wear. Its an example of tactical frivolity as a form of resistance that defangs accusations of violent opposition. As one observer put it: Its hard to be violent in a frog suit.
[Photo: P&G]
6. Wicked x Swiffer
If you were looking to exemplify dubious movie-product collabs, you would have a hard time dreaming up something to top the special edition pink Wicked Swiffer. The hit Wicked movies, building on the acclaimed Broadway musical, have spawned scores of products and brand collabs, as is standard practice for blockbuster IP. But theres something the Swiffer sweeping its way into the spotlight of a witchy story thats irresistibly ridiculouspicture a witch zooming away on a sponge mop instead of a broom.
[Photo: Oasis Official Store]
7. Oasis Bucket Hat
In 2025, one locus of 1990s appreciation was the lucrative reunion tour of Millennial-favorite Britpop throwback rockers Oasis, making bucket hats one of the years Vogue-approved accessories. The floppy Gilligan-style bucket hat was part of the Gallagher brothers style, and apparently still is: Singer Liam clarified from the stage, its a bucket hat, to anyone mistaking his headgear for a beanie. You’re just in a sea of bucket hats, one concertgoer who paid $42 for an Oasis-branded hat told The Wall Street Journal, calling the effect hilarious.
[Photo: L.A.B. Golf]
8. L.A.B. Putter
Golf is not a sport known for sudden change or progressive innovation. All the more remarkable that one of 2025s most significant golf moments involved a weird-looking club J.J. Spaun used to sink a 64-foot putt that clinched the U.S. Open. Lie Angle Balance putters are designed to minimize torque, positioning the shaft directly into the instruments center of gravity, behind the head. This ends up looking like some sort of exotic barbecue tool, but their use has grown steadily on the tour and off, and this year was a breakthrough. Sales of the putter, starting at $400, are expected to triple, and a private euity fund backed by LVMH reportedly bought a majority stake in L.A.B. for $200 million.
[Photo: Microsoft]
9. AI data centers
While tech pundits seem to think a desirable AI wearable is imminent (and no, the Friend ragebait ads for a product that scarcely exists dont count), the most significant manifestation of AI mania are the data centers the technology requires. Microsofts Fairwater AI data center in Wisconsin has three main buildings totaling about 1.2 million square feet, its data storage systems five football fields long. Metas Louisiana AI campus, announced in 2025, involves over 4 million square feet of buildings, an industrial district of server halls, power yards, and cooling infrastructure. OpenAIs Stargate similarly immense data center in Abilene, Texas, in progress, may ultimately require 1.2 gigawatts of power.
[Photo: PepsiCo]
10. Dust-Free Cheetos and Doritos
With skepticism of processed foods becoming a rare point of bipartisan agreement, PepsiCo is among those adding more natural, health-conscious offerings to its lineup. The most startling experiment: versions of Cheetos and Doritos without their signature orange colorsand that weird, messy, but nonetheless iconic, dust. The new line, dubbed Simply NKD, isnt actually any healthier, it just doesnt scream industrial foodstuff anymore. Its a start?
[Image: Oleksandr Pokusai/Adobe Stock]
11. The Button
After years of swiping, tapping, and pinching, physical controls have started to show signs of a comeback. The touchscreen era has been particularly evident in auto designand so is the recent pushback. The data shows us physical buttons are better, Mercedes-Benzs chief software officer declared this year in the course of unveiling a more button-centric design strategy. Hyundai and Volkswagen are making similar moves toward bringing back buttons and knobs. The industry wont likely swipe left on touch screens altogether, but its acknowledging the attraction of physical controlsat least until the robocars take over.
[Photo: cathup/Adobe Stock]
12. Labubu
Those toothy, furry creatures hanging from everyone’s handbag werent a fever dream. The Labubu is very real, and the biggest collectible craze in recent memory. Created by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung and sold by Chinese toy company Pop Mart in mystery “blind boxes,” the willfully ugly plush dolls became status symbols after K-pop star Lisa from BLACKPINK was spotted with one late last year. By 2025, celebrities from Rihanna to Kim Kardashian were clipping Labubus to their designer bags, turning the $22 accessory into a very lucrative fad. Pop Mart reported $1.9 billion in revenue for the first half of 2025up over 200%with Labubu accounting for a third of sales; an oversized version of the creature even joined the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade. One theory of the Labubus appeal: the blind boxsales strategy as an antidote to an overly algorithmic world. As one marketing professor put it: Its fun, its uncertain, and its social. At least until the next trend comes along.
You can now read every article that has ever appeared in The New Yorkerfrom as early as February 1925with the click of a button.
For the publications centennial anniversary, its editorial team has spent months painstakingly scanning, digitizing, and organizing every single issue it’s ever published, or more than half a million individual pages. Each issue is artfully arranged in a chronological display under a purpose-built archive section of the website; but the content has also been incorporated into The New Yorkers search algorithm so that readers can come across it organically.
As the future of magazine journalism remains uncertain, a look back through this carefully archived material demonstrates the importance of preserving print media for the future.
Digitizing a century-old archive
The process of digitizing The New Yorkers full catalog actually started back in 2005. That year, explains Nicholas Henriquez, the publications director of editorial infrastructure, Random House published The Complete New Yorker, a book that came with DVD-ROMs (now retro tech) containing scanned pages from all the pre-digital issues. Then, in early 2024, Henriquezs team started to convert those scans into digital text.
To start, this meant consulting with The New Yorker library, where the magazines physical archives are stored, to re-scan several hundreds of pages that required another pass for a number of reasonsincluding damage, a poor initial scan, or a corrupted file. Some of the older issues, from the first five years or so, were basically untouched, Henriquez says. I had to use a letter opener to open the pages to scan some of them.
After the team had a complete collection of files, they then began the painstaking process of formatting and styling them for the web. There were the predictable challenges of making old magazine articles work online. Each needed a workable headline, description, and image. Bylines in particular were tricky, Henriquez says, as many early writers would use pseudonyms or humorous one-off pen namesor, in some cases, fail to sign their name at all.
Thats part of the value of having, as The New Yorker does, a team of technologists who are part of the editorial staff: We can build these databases and apps and scripts, and we can also look at something in that database like Ogden de Sade and know, okay, thats Ogden Nash, and its funny, and we should figure out a nice way to keep that joke online, Henriquez says. There were many instances where our technological approach was informed by this deep understanding of the magazines history and its cultural context.
Unearthing a treasure trove of early journalism
Over the course of this process, Henriquez unearthed stories that he never could have expected. He came across a short, unsigned book review from 1935 of a memoir by a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, and says he had to triple-check that we didnt have bad data somewhere, because that review was published in March of 1935, just two years after Hitler became chancellor. I didnt realize those stories were out there that early, much less being translated into English and published in America.
On a lighter note, he also found a piece about going to the Newark airport at the dawn of commercial aviation in 1933, and a 1947 article thats one of the first examples of TV criticism ever published by The New Yorker. Along the way, he says, he rediscovered what makes magazine writing special.
In a newspaper, most stories have the same framing: This happened, Henriquez explains. “But a magazine article can do something different: It can be told in a different tense or in a different wayThis could happen, This happened to this person.
Examples of this distinct genre of analysis include a 1969 article, a few months before the moon landing, that lays out how it will happen, step-by-step; or a pre-Sputnik piece about American scientists trying to launch the first satellite; or a 1961 feature on the rollout of desegregation, as witnessed by author Katharine T. Kinkead and a group of Black college students driving around Durham, North Carolina.
Henriquez says: These kinds of things, I think, make magazine journalism essential and unique.
More than 20% of Americans will be diagnosed with mental illness in their lifetimes. They will, that is, experience conditions that influence the way they think, feel, and actand that may initially seem incompatible with the demands of work.
Our new research suggests that what people living with chronic mental illnesses need most to succeed at work is for their managers to be flexible and trust them.
This includes the freedom to adjust their schedules and workloads to make their jobs more compatible with their efforts to manage and treat their symptoms. For that to happen, managers need to trust that these workers are committed to their jobs and their employers.
Were management professors who reviewed hundreds of blog and Reddit posts and conducted in-depth interviews with 59 people. And those are the most significant findings from our peer-reviewed study, published in the October 2025 issue of the Academy of Management Journal.
Scouring Reddit posts and conducting interviews
We gathered our data from three sources: anonymous blog posts from 171 people, Reddit posts from 781 people, and in-depth interviews with 59 workers employed in a variety of jobs across multiple industries.
All these people worked while dealing with chronic mental illness, such as major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and bipolar disorder. The blog posts were maintained by a nonprofit concerned with the experiences of individuals living with mental illness. We focused on posts tagged work.
To identify relevant data on Reddit, we searched using a combination of the word work with several terms associated with mental illness. Additionally, we restricted our data collection to unsolicited narratives published prior to mid-March 2020 to avoid overlap with the employment changes that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because this data was gathered from the internet, we couldnt obtain details about participants gender, age, profession, or education.
We also recruited people to interview through social media postings, advertising in a public universitys alumni listserv, and contacting an organization that focuses on mens mental health. We also made requests of those wed already interviewed to see whether they had recommendations for other people to possibly interview.
The interviews took place in 2020 and 2021.
Speaking with people from all walks of working life
About 37% of the people we interviewed identified as women, and their average age was 41.5 years. Approximately 80% of them identified as Caucasian, 3.5% Black, 3.5% Hispanic, and less than 2% identified as either Indian, Korean American, mixed race, or Middle Eastern and North African. About 3.5% chose not to answer.
They held a variety of jobs, including lawyer, professor, touring musician, consultant, teacher, real estate manager, chief technology officer, salesperson, restaurant server, travel agency manager, graphic designer, tester for manufacturing plant, chemical engineer, and bus driver. Several worked in tech fields.
When the employees who we studied were trusted and given flexibility, they became better able to do their jobs while also attending to their well-being.
Employees who had lived with their condition for years used what we call personalized disengagement and engagement strategies to manage their symptoms. That refers to the fact that people with mental illness respond best to different coping strategies depending on their own preferences and symptoms, instead of using generic techniques they learned from self-help resources or peers.
Examples of personalized disengagement strategies ranged from leaving workspaces to meditate to taking a walk to finding a quiet space to cry.
Engagement strategies included immersing more deeply into work and having conversations with co-workers. These coping strategies will sound familiar to most people, including those without any chronic mental health conditions. But workplaces dont always give employees, regardless of their disability status, the flexibility and self-determination necessary to enact their strategies. In fact, a recent survey by Mind Share Partners found that nearly half of employees didnt even feel like they could disconnect from their jobs after working hours or while on vacation.
Many employees also told us that they benefited from trust and flexibility in the period after they were diagnosed, when they needed to explore different therapies and treatment techniques.
When managers allow for flexibility, trust workers to do what they need to do to address their symptoms, and convey their compassion, employees with chronic mental illness are more likely to keep their jobs and get their work done.
Affecting most employers
Mental illnesses became more prevalent in the aftermath of COVID-19, especially among adolescents and young adults.
So, if youre an employer, chances are that our research is relevant to your workforce.
Depression, a common mental illness, had an estimated cost of US$1 trillion annually in lost productivity in 2019, the World Health Organization has estimated.
People with anxiety and mood disorders, including bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder, may periodically have symptoms that interfere with their ability to do their jobs.
And while doing those jobs, they risk being stigmatized by co-workers who may know little about mental illness or be judgmental about people with those chronic conditions. That adds further stress beyond what others would experience at work.
Employee assistance programs could be falling short
In response, many employers offer benefits to help employees cope with mental and emotional problems, such as employee assistance programs, mental-wellness app subscriptions, and stigma-reduction efforts.
These one-size-fits-all initiatives can help improve functioning for those with occasional or short-term emotional problems, and they can help improve leaders ability to respond to employees distress, which s crucial.
But as a whole, they are not enough to solve the problem.
Employee assistance programs, which nearly all big companies offer, have not proved systematically helpful to workers in achieving their goals. One study found that they reduced employees absences but did not reduce their work-related distress.
Another study even found that workers who used these programs became more inclined to leave their jobs.
Not missing out on peak performers
Contrary to stereotypes, people with chronic anxiety and depression, such as those we studied, are generally as capable of success in the workplace as anyone else in the right context.
Extremely high performers, such as the late actor Carrie Fisher and the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, are two such examples of people with a mental illness who were top achievers in their field.
If you were a manager, wouldnt you want people of this caliber working for you? If so, then its important to create the right conditions, which many employers fail to do despite their best efforts.
Needing more mental health support
Companies will face increasing pressure to support those with mental illness and other mental health challenges.
Monsters 2024 State of the Graduate Report found that Gen Z employees (people born between 1996 and 2010 and are currently in their teens and 20s) are increasingly prioritizing support for mental health at work, with 92% of 18- to 24-year-olds surveyed wanting a job where they are comfortable discussing their mental health at work.
This trend suggests that employers wishing to attract top entry-level talent will need to effectively support mental health, highlighting the importance of continuing to research this issue.
Sherry Thatcher is a Regal Distinguished Professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Tennessee.
Emily Rosado-Solomon is an assistant professor of management at Babson College.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Mad Max mode may sound like something out of a video game, but it is a real-life setting for cars currently plying Americas streets. And it poses genuine danger.
In an homage to the main character from George Millers dystopian 1979 film and its sequels, originally portrayed by current Trump supporter Mel Gibson, Tesla created Mad Max mode as an option for vehicles equipped with its Full-Self Driving (FSD) system. The Mad Max icon is a mustachioed smiley face wearing a cowboy hat, bearing less of a resemblance to the films titular vigilante than to Tesla CEO Elon Musks brother, Kimbal. (Warner Bros., which released the films, has not filed suit.)
Despite its name, FSD does not enable the car to drive itself. Rather, it is an advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS), capable of changing lanes, making turns, and adjusting speed as long as a human driver remains alert and ready to take over. Other automakers, such as Ford and GM, also offer ADAS systems.
Mad Max mode is starkly different from other FSD settings like Sloth and Chill. Teslas using it will roll through stop signs and blast past other vehicles on the road. One driver posted a YouTube video showing his Mad Max-enabled Tesla hitting 82 mph while whizzing by a 65 mph speed limit sign. A social media user wryly suggested that Mad Max should just immediately write you a ticket when you turn it on.
Tesla made Mad Max mode available briefly in 2018 and then reintroduced it in October. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration quickly announced a safety investigation; the agency declined to give an update on its status.
Musks company is not the only one programming its vehicles to treat traffic laws as suggestions rather than requirements.
Waymos robotaxis (which, unlike ADAS such as Tesla FSD, do not require anyone in the front seat) have been spotted in San Francisco blocking bike lanes and edging into crosswalks where children are walking. In a recent Wall Street Journal story titled Waymos Self-Driving Cars Are Suddenly Behaving Like New York Cabbies, a Waymo senior director of product management confirmed that the company has programmed its cars to be more aggressive. He said that recent adjustments are making its robotaxis confidently assertive.
Welcome to our brave new computer-powered future, where companies will determine which road rules are obeyed and which are ignored. We might not like what they decide.
Mad Max, unleashed
Traffic laws occupy a curious niche in the U.S., where most drivers break them regularly and without consequences.
There is this built-in acknowledgment that going 5 miles per hour over the limit is okay, says Reilly Brennan, a partner at Trucks Venture Capital, a transportation-focused investment firm. In other parts of our life, that wouldnt be acceptable, like going 5% over in accounting or when a doctor performs some kind of task.
Indeed, many otherwise law-abiding drivers occasionally change lanes without using a turn signal or double park while grabbing coffee, knowing that these behaviors are technically illegal, but believing they are unlikely to result in a crash or fine.
Driving more than 25 mph over the speed limit is a different story. Most people avoid doing so unless, say, rushing a child to the hospital, given the risk of getting into a crash or receiving a pricey ticket.
But unlike humans, robotaxis and ADAS can violate traffic laws regardless of situational context. Youve taken away the agency of the person to decide whether its reasonable to break the law at that time, says Phil Koopman, professor emeritus of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, who has studied autonomous driving extensively.
Furthermore, companies like Tesla and Waymo may be shielded from the consequences of both minor and major traffic violations. The driver of a Tesla running FSD, for instance, is expected to remain alert and ready to take over, and the company claims that the drivernot Teslais liable for mishaps or collisions.
You have a company deciding to break the law, but the driver is being held responsible and suffering the consequences, Koopman says. Last August, a Florida jury rejected Teslas attempts to pin crash responsibility on drivers alone, awarding $243 million to the family of a person struck and killed by a Tesla runing Autopilot, the companys less advanced ADAS. Tesla is appealing.
Producers of fully autonomous software shoulder more responsibility for their vehicles actions than car companies offering ADAS. Still, accountability isnt a given for them, either. State law in California and Georgia currently does not allow police to ticket vehicles without a driver, though California will close that loophole next year. (A Waymo spokesperson said the company supported Californias change).
Everyones a road warrior now
Without liability for traffic law violations, companies may program their vehicles to take more risks. Tesla likely launched Mad Max mode to appeal to the companys hardcore customers, says author and podcaster Edward Niedermeyer, who has written a book about the companys history and is currently writing a follow-up.
Tesla has a baseline incentive to release all kinds of weird, quirky, unique software updates that cost them almost nothing and fuel their online fan base, he says. Mad Max mode is an example of that, and it happens to also reflect the companys casual attitude toward public safety.
Waymos robotaxis do not behave nearly as aggressively as Teslas running Mad Max. But the company faces an incentive to turn its assertiveness dial up a bit, if only to match the expectations of its paying passengers, who have become accustomed to violating traffic laws when they themselves sit behind the wheel. Driving like your grandmotheras writer Malcolm Gladwell described his Waymo passenger experience in 2021isnt exactly a juicy marketing line.
Consumers think that these systems should drive the way they drive, Brennan says.
Some circumstances clearly call for rule-breaking, such as moving across a double yellow line to navigate around a moving van that is being unloaded. What weve learned through more than a hundred million real-world miles is that appropriate assertiveness is crucial for safety and traffic flow, says a Waymo spokesperson.
But other situations are trickier, such as dropping someone off in a crosswalk or bike lane when no parking spot is available. These behaviors may be common practice among human drivers, but they can endanger other road users and certainly inconvenience them. Last year, Waymo received 589 tickets for illegal parking in San Francisco.
But the public may have limited patience for computer-powered cars that bend traffic rules or cause collisions. Researchers have found that people are more tolerant of risk in activities they can control (like driving) than those they cannot (like robotaxis). Case in point: A recent outcry erupted in San Francisco after Waymo vehicles ran over a cat and dog. Of course, countless American pets are killed by human drivers, including the estimated 100,000 dogs who die annually after being placed in truck beds.
These tensions will not dissipate anytime soon, given how furiously makers of ADAS and autonomous vehicles are working to win over customers. Brennan envisions a future where riders might choose from varying levels of robotaxi assertiveness. Right now, there is just one Waymo setting, he says. But in a few years, there may be three or four settings, and one of them is almost exactly like the way that you want to drive.
For that to happen, humans will have to grow accustomed to self-driven cars zooming past speed limits and playing chicken with pedestrians in crosswalks. Companies are designing their autonomous systems to reflect how humans drive, for better and for worse.
Nostalgia has been one of the dominant themes of 2025, from AI-generated scenes of the good ol days to the resurgence of analog hobbies.
Retro, a friends-only photo journal, recently launched a new feature which taps into this mindset, turning your camera roll into a personal time machine.
The Rewind feature, launched this week, resurfaces camera roll memories from this time last year. These are private to you unless you choose to share with others.
People are taking more photos than ever but theyre actually doing less with them. Its almost as if those photos go into the ether, Nathan Sharp, cofounder and CEO of Retro, tells Fast Company.
We built Retro to change that. Our mission is to bring friends closer and help you appreciate the important moments in life. The Rewind feature does that by surfacing forgotten photos and making it easy to share memories with the people who matter most, Sharp adds.
On the app, Rewind can be launched from the end of the row of shared photos, or from the middle tab in the bottom navigation bar on the app. Users have the option to share or send the photos to a friend, or hide those theyd rather not see. Theres also a dice icon, which takes users to a random memory when tapped.
The idea of dusting off old photo albums is nothing new. Facebooks On This Day feature performs a similar function, while Apple Photos has been known to make emotional slideshows of ephemera in its camera roll or surprise you with long-forgotten photos of an ex.
Its not the solo nostalgia you get from apps built to store or manage photos. Its also not the same as social platforms that prioritize links and news over friends content, says Sharp. That’s the difference: we’re building for genuine connection with real friends, not algorithms, likes, or audience growth.
Sharp, who previously spent over six years at Meta, founded the photo-sharing startup with Ryan Olson, Retros CTO, in 2022. Now with roughly a million users, Retro just hit #1 in photo apps in 12 countries, is the #1 overall app in six countries (including Germany, Austria, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland) above Instagram and ChatGPT, and is climbing fast in the U.S. It was also selected as a finalist for Apples 2025 Cultural Impact Award.
The apps main function is sharing unfiltered photos of whats happening during your week with a private group of friends, or in shared albums. No public likes, algorithm-induced doomscrolling, or pressure to curate an aesthetic photo dump.
A wider pushback against performativity and, in turn, surveillance culture, has internet users turning to online spaces and apps that exist beyond influencer culture, social clout and e-commerce. Here, the internet is restored to its original purpose: facilitating moments of authentic connection both ad-free and slop-free.
Gen Z is actively looking for an alternative to algorithmic feeds dominated by influencers and brands, says Sharp. We see social moving toward digital sanctuaries where connection is easy and authentic, not performative. That’s what we’re building.
Thomas Kuhn was a philosopher whose groundbreaking 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is credited with bringing the term paradigm shift to pop culture. Kuhn described how scientific communities stick to established paradigms, even as evidence of their limitations mounted. Widely accepted paradigms for understanding and interpreting knowledge dont crumble under the weight of mere data. Instead, they tend to persist until a crisis emergeswhen anomalies become so disruptive that a shift to a new paradigm is unavoidable.
Zoning was established in the early 20th century as a way to protect homeowners from unwanted industrial developments nearby. It was pitched as a way to separate heavy industry from residential areas, which made practical sense at a time when factories polluted neighborhoods. Early industrial cities were notorious for their noise, filth, sickness, and all-around misery.
The wealthy had options, so theyd put some distance between themselves and factory life. You can imagine that the elite would want to guarantee never having to deal with the industrial riffraff. Zoning would give such guarantees. You can also imagine that social workers and other empaths would want to guarantee the poor and middle class had the same separation from the dirty parts of a city as the elites had. Zoning would give such guarantees.
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But zoning wasnt used merely as a tool to separate heavy industry from residential zones. Local power brokers segregated all the land usesseparating single-family homes from apartments, office buildings from retail, residential from retail, and so on. The regulatory framework became so normalized in America that its hard for people to imagine life without it: Without zoning, my neighbor might build a strip club and a paper mill.
Unintended consequences
Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all of their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the communitys willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary, at considerable cost.
As Kuhn wouldve predicted, the normal science of zoning has produced a number of anomalies that increasingly contradict zonings purported benefits.
Housing Expense and Shortage: By restricting a variety of housing sizes and types, zoning codes limit the supply of housing, driving up prices and making places unaffordable for many residents.
Environmental Degradation: Zoning encourages urban sprawl by pushing residential development outward into zones that are only practically reachable by car. Zoning codes create low-density, car-centric development, at great expense to our natural environment.
Social Segregation: Zoning is a devilish segregation tool. Throughout pre-zoning history, cities had opportunities for people from all walks of life, social standing, and economic standing.
Economic Stagnation and Opportunity Costs: By prohibiting a mixture of land uses in a neighborhood, zoning limits economic activity, making it difficult for small businesses to thrive in residential neighborhoods or for residents to access amenities without a car.
Car Dependency: Neighborhood pharmacies are outlawed, so you drive to CVS just to get a birthday card. Neighborhood restaurants are outlawed, so you drive your kids to Chick-fil-A. Neighborhood salons are outlawed, so you drive to get your nails done.
A resilient paradigm
Changing a paradigm isnt just about accepting new facts, its about challenging an entire worldview, and thats something humans are generally reluctant to do. And in spite of all its harms, the zoning paradigm remains resilient among the experts because:
Planning departments are organized around zoning administration.
Professional credentialing still lionizes zoning codes.
University programs train students to use zoning for the greater good.
Thousands of attorneys specialize in zoning law.
Lobbying pressure remains intense from industries that benefit from strict land-use policies.
There are powerful incentives to preserve the system, even among professionals who privately acknowledge its failures. Kuhn observed that paradigms persist not because they work well, but because entire careers, departments, and professional identities are built upon them. Challenging zoning means threatening not just an idea, but the livelihoods and expertise of countless people.
Much like a fundamentalist belief system, zoning has developed a language of justification that makes it difficult to challenge. Clever defenses like preserving neighborhood character or protecting property values are invoked to defend restrictive zoning policies, even when these policies have been proven to harm the vast majority of people. Zoning defenders use language not to inform, but to deflect and manipulate.
A tipping point
Kuhn would say a paradigm shift requires a moment of crisis, a point at which the old framework can no longer explain or accommodate the reality of a situation. I think were getting there with zoning, because the accumulating anomalies are becoming too severe to ignore.
Scientific revolutions reshaped how we understand the world. A zoning revolution has the potential to transform our small towns, big cities, and sprawling suburbs in positive ways we have yet to fully imagine. We have 100 years of evidence that zoning has brought more harm than good.
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The flap of a butterflys wings in South America can famously lead to a tornado in the Caribbean. The so-called butterfly effector sensitive dependence on initial conditions, as it is more technically knownis of profound relevance for organizations seeking to deploy AI solutions. As systems become more and more interconnected by AI capabilities that sit across and reach into an increasing number of critical functions, the risk of cascade failureslocalized glitches that ripple outward into organization-wide disruptionsgrows substantially.
It is natural to focus AI risk management efforts on individual systems where distinct risks are easy to identify. A senior executive might ask how much the company stands to lose if the predictive model makes inaccurate predictions. How exposed could we be if the chatbot gives out information it shouldnt? What will happen if the new automated system runs into an edge case it cant handle? These are all important questions. But focusing on these kinds of issues exclusively can provide a false sense of safety. The most dangerous AI failures are not the ones that remain confined to one particular area. They are the ones that spread.
How Cascade Failures Work
While many AI systems currently operate as isolated nodes, it is only when these become joined up across organizations that artificial intelligence will fully deliver on its promise. Networks of AI agents that communicate across departments; automated ordering systems that link customer service chatbots to logistics hubs, or even to the factory floor; executive decision-support models that draw information from every corner of the organizationthese are the kinds of AI implementations that will deliver transformative value. But they are also the kinds of systems that create the biggest risks.
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Consider how quickly problems can multiply: Corrupted data at a single collection point can poison the outputs of every analytical tool downstream. A security flaw in one model becomes a doorway into every system it touches. And when several AI applications compete for the same computing resources, a spike in demand can choke performance across the boardoften at the worst possible moment.
When AI is siloed, failures are contained. When AI is interconnected, failures can propagate in ways that are difficult to predict and even harder to stop.
The 2010 Flash Crash in the U.S. stock markets showed how algorithms can interact in unexpected ways, causing problems on a scale that can be hard to imagine. On the morning of May 6th, more than a trillion dollars was wiped off the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in a matter of minutes as automated systems triggered a spiral of sell-offs. Despite several years of investigation, the exact cause of the crash is still unknown.
What the Flash Crash revealed is that when autonomous systems interact, their combined behavior can diverge dramatically from what any single system was programmed to do. None of the algorithms were designed to crash the market and none of them would have done so if they were operating independently. But the interactions between themeach responding to signals created by othersproduced an unexpected result at the systemic level that was divorced from the goals of any one part of that system.
This is the nature of cascade risk. The danger lies not in any individual AI system failing, but in the unpredictable ways that interconnected systems can amplify and spread failures across organizational boundaries.
The Hidden Connections
Several characteristics make AI systems particularly susceptible to cascading failures.
Shared data dependencies create hidden connections between seemingly independent systems. Two AI applications might appear to be completely separate, but if they rely on the same underlying data sources, a corruption or error in that data may affect both simultaneously. And a simultaneous failure may have consequences that are more severe than the sum of the individual failures. These kinds of dependencies and their possible outcomes often go unmapped until a failure forces the organization to take notice.
Shared infrastructure creates similar vulnerabilities. Multiple AI systems running on common cloud resources or the same on-site computational infrastructure can all be affected by a single point of failure. During high-demand periods, competition between systems for resources can degrade performance across the board in ways that are difficult to predict or diagnose.
Feedback loops between AI systems can amplify small errors into large disruptions. When one systems output feeds into another systems input, and the second systems output then influences the first system, the potential for runaway effects increases. What begins as a minor anomaly can be magnified through successive iterations until it produces significant failures.
Integration with critical operations also raises the stakes dramatically. When AI becomes embedded in systems that organizations depend onsupply chains, financial operations, customer service, manufacturingcascade failures dont just create technical problems. They disrupt the core functions that keep the business running.
The Organizational Blind Spot
Perhaps the greatest challenge in managing cascade risk is organizational rather than technical. The systems that interact to create cascade failures often span different departments, different teams, and different areas of expertise. No single person or group has visibility into all the connections and dependencies.
This means that cascade risk management requires cross-functional coordination that cuts against traditional organizational structures. It requires mapping dependencies that cross departmental boundaries. It requires testing failure scenarios that involve multiple systems simultaneously. And it requires governance structures that can make decisions about acceptable risk levels across the organization as a whole, not just within individual units.
Organizations that treat AI implementation as a series of independent projectseach managed by its own team, each evaluated on its own meritswill inevitably create the conditions for cascading failures. The connections between systems will emerge organically, without deliberate design or oversight. And when failures occur, they will propagate through pathways that no one fully understood.
The alternative is to treat the entire AI ecosystem as an interconnected whole from the beginning. This means thinking about how systems will interact before they are built. It means maintining visibility into dependencies as systems evolve. And it means accepting that the reliability of any individual system is less important than the resilience of the system of systems.
Four Ways to Protect Your Organization from AI Cascade Failures
1. Map your AI dependencies before they map themselves. Most organizations discover their system interdependencies only after a failure reveals them. Dont wait. Conduct a systematic audit of how your AI systems connectwhat data they share, what infrastructure they rely on, what outputs feed into other systems inputs. Create a visual map of these dependencies and update it as your AI ecosystem evolves. The goal isnt to eliminate connections (interconnection is often where value comes from) but to understand them well enough to anticipate how failures might propagate.
2. Design circuit breakers into your architecture. Financial markets use automatic trading halts to prevent cascading crashes. Your AI systems need equivalent mechanisms. Build monitoring systems that can detect unusual patternssudden spikes in error rates, unexpected resource consumption, anomalous outputsand automatically pause operations before small problems become large ones. These circuit breakers buy time for human operators to assess situations and intervene. The cost of brief pauses is far less than the cost of cascading failures.
3. Test failure scenarios across system boundaries. Traditional testing evaluates whether individual systems work correctly. Cascade risk requires testing how systems fail together. Run exercises that simulate failures in one system and trace the effects through connected systems. What happens to your customer service AI when your data pipeline delivers corrupted information? How does your inventory system respond when your demand forecasting model produces anomalous predictions? These cross-boundary tests reveal vulnerabilities that single-system testing will never find.
4. Establish cross-functional AI governance. Cascade risks emerge from the gaps between organizational silos. Managing them requires governance structures that span those silosa cross-functional team with visibility into AI implementations across departments and the authority to make decisions about system interactions, acceptable risk levels, and required safeguards. This team should own the dependency map, oversee cross-boundary testing, and ensure that new AI implementations are evaluated not just for their individual merits but for how they affect the broader ecosystem.
The butterflys wings are already flapping. The organizations that thrive will be those that see the tornado comingnot by monitoring any single system, but by understanding how all their systems connect.
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Inbox pinging. Deadlines stacking. Morale slipping. One choice could change everything. These 11 books unpack the decisionsand strategiesthat distinguish great leaders.
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The Devil Emails at Midnight: What Good Leaders Can Learn From Bad Bosses
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The silver lining that comes from working for several bad bosses? You can learn what not to do as a leader. From every bad boss comes a valuable lesson about how to manage teams and contribute to a companys success. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Mita Mallick, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
Headamentals: How Leaders Can Crack Negative Self-Talk
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Leaders arent failing because they dont have a strategy or skill. They are stuck because of their internal battlestheir self-talknot because of the challenges happening with customers or in the market. Headamentals is about directing that inner voice so that it becomes a competitive advantage and helps you build great teams. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by co-authors Suzy Burke, Ryan Berman, and Rhett Power, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
By Rutger Bregman
What if everything weve been told about having a successful career is wrong? Rutger Bregman thinks most of us are wasting our working lives and argues we should stop trying to get rich and start trying to solve the worlds problems instead. Listen to our Next Big Idea podcast episode interviewing author Rutger Bregman, or view on Amazon.
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This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
