I was strolling up the hill in Greater Boston to a French cooking class. The rich aroma of melting butter and fresh herbs greeted us as it wafted through the chilly fall air. My friend Sylvie and I were eager to learn the art of soufflé-making.
The French instructors asked for everyones background. When Sylvie said she was from France, they pressed her to be specific: Which part of France? When they learned she hailed from Strasbourg, the Parisiennes exchanged disapproving glances. Sylvie eyed their silent, snooty disdain.
It got worse. When Sylvie started asking about techniques, we received curt responses and pronounced sighs. We left feeling as deflated as a collapsed soufflé.
The French instructors may have mastered the art of French cooking but failed miserably in practicing humility toward Sylvie. They could have done so by celebrating Sylvies hometown as a region with its own culinary specialties. In snubbing Sylvie, the instructors missed an opportunity to demonstrate the rich diversity of soufflés across geographies and to toast the diversity of participants in the cooking class.
Humility is based on a common theme: Train your focus on others, not on yourself.
The importance of managing your ego
Early in my Silicon Valley career, I had the good fortune to work for Bart, a humble leader who left his ego at the door. Bart regularly sought out employees at all levels for their input on new products and improving the company. He collaborated with individuals and other stakeholders, so they could see what made sense for the business. He asked customers crucial questions and listened carefully to their answers.
Bart never threw his weight around. Instead, he was a role model for how to be in a position of power while ensuring each employee felt heard, included, and invited to showcase their influence. Humility requires you to check your ego and ensure that you dont let it dictate your actions.
Seek and embrace feedback
Later in my career while running my diagnostic equipment business, we hired a head of research and development. This professional came with an impressive pedigreehis PhD and postdoctoral research were from some of the top schools in the world.
With his vast knowledge, accomplishments, and experience he easily could have asserted himself. You know, that arrogant person who knows best, never admits hes wrong, and isnt open to suggestions. Weve all met that individual.
But our new head of R&D was actively soliciting feedback on products from collaborators, customers, and salespeople across the globe with less education. In the end, he was able to integrate input from a broad mix of stakeholders into our products. He always showed his gratitude for ideas people gave him and considered many of them for possible future use.
Listen more than you speak
William is a strength and conditioning coach friend of mine who trains professional and amateur athletes. He says that one of the most common phrases he hears from his clients is You really understand me. He believes that this is because he allows his clients to do most of the talking. They feel heard and understood, he says, because he signals hes listening intently.
According to him, the following practices are key to being a good listener:
Practice active listening without planning your response. If you predict what the other person is about to say, your response could miss the mark. Respond only after the person youre speaking with is done talking.
Show genuine interest in others’ perspectives. Our natural tendency is to blurt out what we think. Resist the urge. Instead, draw the other person out through thoughtful questions.
Dont interrupt or dominate conversations. This is arguably the hardest to do because we want to be heard. Keep your lips together when you feel compelled to interject. Learn to sense when to yield the conversation to another person. You dont want the reputation of being that person who doesnt know when to stop talking.
Ask thoughtful follow-up questions. Think through your follow-up question before you ask it. If youve been listening carefully, a question will come to mind with little effort.
Dont underestimate the impact of curiosity
Theres a concept called epistemic humility, which refers to a trait where you seek to learn on a deep level while actively acknowledging how much you dont know.
Approach each interaction with curiosity, an open mind, and an assumption youll learn something new. Ask thoughtful questions about others experiences, perspectives, and expertise. Then listen and show your genuine interest in their responses. Let them know what you just learned. By consistently being curious, you demonstrate youre not above learning from others.
Juan, a successful entrepreneur in the healthy beverage space, approaches life and grows his business with intellectual humility. Hes a deeply curious professional who seeks feedback and perspectives from customers, employees, advisers, and investors.
Juans ongoing openness to learning led him to adapt faster to market changes in his beverage category: He quickly identifies shifting customer preferences as well as competitive threats, then rapidly tweaks his product offerings to keep competitors at bay. He has the humility to realize he doesnt have all the answers and embraces listening to key voices that help make his business even more successful.
A final reflection
Being humble makes us more approachable and respected. With humility, we value others perspectives. The French soufflé instructors lost their class participants respect because far from practicing humility, they served up snobbery along with their lessons on creating the perfect soufflé.
Humility isn’t about diminishing oneself. It’s about having a balanced perspective about yourself while showing genuine respect and appreciation for others. And if youre open to the journey, the growth and self-awareness will enrich your life and the lives of those around you.
Its easy to get swept up in headlines predicting the end of the design industry as we know it. Its true: AI tools can now generate in seconds what once took days for teams of designers. So its no longer a question of whether these tools will be usedbut how, why, and by whom. If design as we know it is being automated, what remains? And what becomes more valuable?
In the 1930s, cultural critic Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproductionphotography, film, the printing presswas transforming not just how art was made, but how it was perceived. His concern wasnt just about losing originality or craft; it was about losing aurathe sense of presence that comes from a works connection to time, place, and purpose. When something can be reproduced endlessly, that connection starts to dissolve. And in the post-internet world, its all but collapsedcontext has become slippery, distributed, and flattened. The role of creative direction, then, is to restore that lost dimensionalityto place things, to anchor them in context.
The craft of execution is no longer a differentiator. For surface-level visuals, speed and quantity now rule. But this shift reveals something deeper: When production is automated, the designers role becomes less about making and more about meaning.
Ive felt this shift firsthand. At the outset of my career, I spent hoursdaysin Photoshop extending backgrounds, removing objects, and meticulously cutting out product images for e-commerce sites. It was repetitive, yesbut also meditative. There was a quiet satisfaction in working with images by hand, pixel by pixel. That kind of technical work is now (thankfully) almost entirely automated. Although I miss blocking off an afternoon to push pixels, the ability to delegate those tasks means I no longer need to dedicate time to erasing shadowsI spend that time deciding what the image should say in the first place.
Not all design disciplines are equally affected by AI. Those who work with material, scale, and spacebook designers, muralists, sign painters, mosaicistscontinue to operate through tacit knowledge and touch. Their work still resists automation because its rooted in place and presenceit has aura. But even in brand design, something similar holds true: The more a designers value is bound to personal taste, knowledge of context, and aesthetic judgment, the more durable it becomes.
Its tempting to hold onto the idea of the designer as auteur, untouched by context. But that belief overlooks how meaning is actually made: not by the author alone, but in conversation with culture, with tools, with audience. Mistaking authorship for authority leads to stagnation. If you’re a designer today, your ability to thrive depends on shifting your creative identity from executor to editor, and from technician to translator. The cost of not adapting isnt just irrelevance. Its being indistinguishable from the tools themselves. As Chris Braden, my former CCO at Public Address, has said: In nature, things that don’t move are dead.
Virgil Abloh, Pyrex Vision Rugby Flannel (2012). Abloh bought Ralph Lauren shirts from outlet stores, screen-printed PYREX 23 across the back, and sold them at a premium, reframing authorship through minimal intervention. [Image: Pyrex Vision]
Which is why creative direction matters more now than ever. If designers are no longer the makers, they must become the orchestrators. This isnt without precedent. Rick Rubin doesnt read music or play instruments. Virgil Abloh was more interested in recontextualizing than inventing. Their value lies not in original execution but in framing, curation, and translation. The same is true now for brand designers. Creative direction is about synthesizing abstract ideas into aesthetic systemsshaping meaning through how things feel, not just how they look.
This opens up a new kind of opportunity for ideas to come from more rigorous placescritical theory, art history, cultural analysiswithout being stripped of their richness. AI can absolutely help translate complex ideas into accessible ones. But its the designer who chooses which ideas to bring forward, how to apply them, and why they matter in a given moment. Thats not just a function of intelligenceits a function of intuition, authorship, and taste.
Taste isnt just personal preference. Its an evolving, often unstable frameworkshaped by experience, exposure, and the cultural momentthat informs how we make aesthetic judgments. Its not fixed, nor is it singular. What feels resonant in one context may fall flat in another. Taste is less about knowing whats right and more about understanding whats relevantwhat aligns, what disrupts, what works now. In a world of infinite possibilities, taste becomes less of a crown and more of a compass.
Top to bottom: Thorlo by High Tide NYC (2023), Artworld by Mouthwash Studio (2020), Ilford by an unknown designer (1997). Theyre nearly identical, yet each feels novel within its own context. [Image: courtesy of the author]
Its no longer enough to know whats trending from scrolling your various feeds. As Abloh understood, when originality becomes obsolete, novelty comes from recombination, from juxtaposition: from having a point of view. If your value lies in how you seeand how you help others seethats not just algorithm-resistant. Its literally irreplaceable.
AI is a toolbut like all technologies, its not neutral. It reflects the choices of its makers and transforms every system it touches. It influences markets, media, and belief. It expands whats possible while quietly reshaping how meaning is made. And its impact on creative work is especially complex. Its a medium, a system, a collaborator. It can generate, iterate, and surprise. But it cant decide what mattes. It cant assign meaning. It cant make a choice. AI responds to input. Creative direction is that input.
This shift raises real questions for the future of design education and hiring. What does a portfolio look like when visuals are no longer enough? Increasingly, it might look less like a finished book and more like a screenplay: a series of prompts, iterations, references, and decisions that show how a designer directed a process, not just executed an outcome. The goal isnt to hide the machine but to show how its been used with intention.
Were moving into an era where synthesis and judgmentnot just executionare the creative differentiators. AI will continue to evolve, and yesit will replace certain tasks and even entire roles. But it wont replace curiosity. It wont replace intuition. And it wont replace the ability to decide what matters.
Take a look at your to-do list. Does it seem never-ending? The thing about task lists is that they are filled with specific things you need to accomplish. Combine that with an ever-expanding inbox, and you have a recipe for busy work days.
While you may get many things done, you may not feel like they are adding up to a more significant contribution to the mission of your workplace or your own big-picture goals. To ensure that the specific things youre doing lead to important outcomes, you need some time in your schedule to reflect on the big-picture goals you have and their relationship to the actions youre taking day-to-day.
Here are a few things you can do to clear the mental space to make sure your days are not just busy, but productive.
The value of unstructured time
Ensuring that your daily activities lead up to something more substantial will not happen by magic. Instead, you need to regularly save some time that is not devoted to the particular tasks that are already on your task list.
There are several purposes for this time. You want to reflect on whether the things that take up most of your time are related to the most important goals both for you and the organization. Chances are, there are many things you have to do each day that do not contribute significantly to that mission.
Identify some of the activities that soak up your time that are not that productive. Are they necessary? Are there things youre doing that you can put further down the list of priorities? Do you need to talk to your supervisor about some of the things that clutter your calendar?
Are there things you should be doing to make your contribution that are not happening? You also want to have a list of activities youre not doing that you need to be doing. Youll need to figure out how to add more of those into your daily and weekly schedule.
Finding a space to make space
One problem with trying to take a big-picture view of things is that you are likely to be surrounded by reminders to take care of the next task. You probably have documents on your desk and your computer desktop that need to be completed. You have an email inbox with a constant drip of new messages crying out to be answered. You have DMs from team members asking for information.
That can make it difficult to disconnect enough to create the mindset you need to think about strategic issues. It can be helpful to use physical distance from your most pressing tasks to think strategically.
Consider taking a walk or going to a conference room at your workplace that has a whiteboard. The distance has two benefits: First, it separates you from the specific reminders of the tasks at hand; second, psychology research suggests that physical distance can actually help you think more abstractly about your work. When you think more abstractly, youre better able to ignore the specific tasks and focus on the primary accomplishments youd like to achieve as well as the general barriers that may stand in the way of success.
Drawing your big-picture goals
When talking about strategic goals, we often use phrases like achieving a vision or seeing the future. Yet we also tend to lay out our goals in written documents. Sometimes, it can be helpful to take the language of envisioning more literally.
Sketches and diagrams may be helpful for changing the way you think about your desired contribution. So many of our workplace tools involve writing (like email, instant messages, and meeting agendas) that we get locked into needing the right words to describe what we want to bring about.
Grab a big sheet of paper or use a whiteboard. Leave the words behind at first and just sketch out processes, concepts, or prototypes. Dont worry if you dont think youre good at capturing likenesses. The power of sketches and diagrams comes from being able to use space as an element of your thinking to engage the massive amount of brain real estate devoted to vision more deeply.
Anthropic, Menlo Ventures, and other AI industry players are betting $50 million on a company called Goodfire, which aims to understand how AI models think and steer them toward better, safer answers.
Even as AI becomes more embedded in business systems and personal lives, researchers still lack a clear understanding of how AI models generate their output. So far, the go-to method for improving AI behavior has focused on shaping training data and refining prompting methods, rather than addressing the models internal thought processes. Goodfire is tackling the latterand showing real promise.
The company boasts a kind of dream team of mechanistic interpretability pioneers. Cofounder Tom McGrath helped create the interpretability team at DeepMind. Cofounder Lee Sharkey pioneered the use of sparse autoencoders in language models. Nick Cammarata started the interpretability team at OpenAI alongside Chris Olah, who later cofounded Anthropic. Collectively, these researchers have delivered some of the fields biggest breakthroughs.
Goodfire founder and CEO Eric Ho, who left a successful AI app company in 2022 to focus on interpretability, tells Fast Company that the new funding will be used to expand the research team and enhance its Ember interpretability platform. In addition to its core research efforts, Goodfire also generates revenue by deploying field teams to help client organizations understand and control the outputs of their AI models.
Goodfire is developing the knowledge and tools needed to perform brain surgery on AI models. Its researchers have found ways to isolate modules within neural networks to reveal the AIs thoughts. Using a technique they call neural programming, they can intervene and redirect a models cognition toward higher-quality, more aligned outputs. We envision a future where you can bring a little bit of the engineering back to neural networks, Ho says.
The company has also been collaborating with other AI labs to solve interpretability challenges. For example, Goodfire has helped the Arc Institute interpret the inner workings of its Evo 2 DNA foundation model, which analyzes nucleotide sequences and predicts what comes next. By understanding how the model makes its predictions, researchers have uncovered unique biological conceptspotentially valuable for new scientific discoveries.
Anthropic, too, may benefit from Goodfires insights. “Our investment in Goodfire reflects our belief that mechanistic interpretability is among the best bets to help us transform black-box neural networks into understandable, steerable systemsa critical foundation for the responsible development of powerful AI,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement.
According to Ho, Goodfire has also been fielding requests from Fortune 500 companies that want to better understand how the large language models they use for business are thinkingand how to change faulty reasoning into sound decision-making. He notes that many within businesses still see AI models as another kind of software, something that can be reprogrammed when it produces incorrect outputs. But AI works differently: It generates responses based on probabilities and a degree of randomness. Improving those outputs requires intervention within the models cognitive processes, steering them in more productive directions.
This kind of intervention is still a new and imprecise science. It remains crude and at a high level and not precise, Ho says. Still, Goodfire offers an initial tool kit that gives enterprises a level of control more familiar from traditional deterministic software.
As companies increasingly rely on AI for decisions that affect real lives, Ho believes the ability to understand and redirect AI models will become essential. For instance, if a developer equips a model with ethical or safety guardrails, an organization should be able to locate the layer or parameter in the neural network where the model chose to bypass the rulesor tried to appear compliant while it wasnt. This would mean turning the AI black box into a glass box, with tools to reach inside and make necessary adjustments.
Ho is optimistic that interpretability research can rise to the challenge. This is a solvable, tractable, technical problem, but it’s going to take our smartest researchers and engineers to solve the really hard problem of understanding and aligning models to human goals and morals.
As AI systems begin to surpass human intelligence, concerns are growing about their alignment with human values and interests. A major part of the challenge lies in simply understanding whats happening inside AI models, which often think in alien, opaque ways. Whether the big AI labs are investing enough in interpretability remains an open questionone with serious implications for our readiness for an AI-driven future. Thats why its encouraging to see major industry players putting real funding behind an interpretability research lab. Lightspeed Venture Partners, B Capital, Work-Bench, Wing, and South Park Commons also participated in the funding round. Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das will join Goodfires board of directors.
While most of the tech world now rushes ahead with the development and application of generative AI models, concerns about the inscrutable nature of the models often get brushed aside as afterthoughts. But that wasnt always the case. Google hesitated to put generative models into production because it feared being sued over unexpected and unexplainable model outputs.
In some industries, however, such concerns remain very relevant, Das points out. There are extremely sensitive use cases in law, finance, and so on, where trying to deploy AI models as we know them today is just not feasible because you’re relying on a black box to make decisions that you don’t understand why it’s making those decisions, Das says. A good part of [Goodfires] mission is just to be able to do that.
For decades, huge swaths of Brazils Cerrado ecosystem have been used to support the global demand for burgers. Forests and grasslands were replaced by pastures along with farms growing soy to feed cattle. But a major restoration project is now underway on an area nearly twice as large as Manhattan.
If you fly over one part of southwestern Brazil, youll see a patchwork of dozens of square plots where a local university is studying different methods of helping native plants regrow on former cattle pastures. On more than 25,000 acres, along rivers and the edge of remaining pieces of forest, new vegetation has been growing quickly over the past two years. Wildlife cameras track the native species that are returning, from puma to an endangered species of rabbit.
The environmental group Conservation International is working on the project with an unlikely set of partners: a forestry company and the tech giant Apple.
[Photo: TIG]
Why Apple is investing in forests
The project is one piece of Apples climate strategy. When we look at the global climate science, its clear that we have to cut emissions as quickly as possible, but we also have to end deforestation and rapidly scale up carbon removal in order to stay within 1.5 degrees [of global temperature rise], says Chris Busch, director of environmental initiatives at Apple.
The companys first priority is reducing its own emissions. Through tactics like using recycled rare earth elements in iPhones and helping suppliers shift to renewable energy at factories, it has already cut its emissions by 60% compared to 2015. By 2030, its aiming to hit 75%. But for the remaining 25%, Busch says, We just don’t have a clear line of sight to how to avoid those emissions at scale today within our value chain. So that is where nature comes in to play a role for us.
There are several ways to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, including nascent technology like direct air capture. But Apple knew that in order to reach its short-term goals for 2030, it would need to lean on natures ability to capture carbon because no other approach was ready to scale up quickly enough.
At the same time, the company recognized that there werent enough nature-based carbon credits available to buyand restoration and preservation projects often struggle to prove that they actually have as much benefit as they claim. In 2021, Apple committed $200 million to the Restore Fund, a new fund established with Conservational International and Goldman Sachs, to help carbon removal grow more quickly and to focus on creating quality projects. (In 2023, it pledged an additional $200 million for a second fund within the program.) One of the first investments, in 2022, was Project Alpha in Brazil. Restoration and planting started in 2023. It’s the first step in a larger effort that will eventually restore 741,000 acres of degraded land across Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile.
A biodiversity hot spot
The Cerrado ecosystem, which originally sprawled over more than a million square miles in Brazil with a mix of dense forests, grasslands, and wetlands, is a biodiversity hot spot. Many of its 1,600-plus species of animals, and 10,000 species of plants, can’t be found anywhere else. It’s also quickly disappearing.
“It’s faced a rate of loss that’s fairly extreme,” says Will Turner, senior vice president at Conservation International’s Center for Natural Climate Solutions. “Well over half of the native Cerrado vegetation has been destroyed, predominantly due to agriculture.”
The restoration project is focusing on an area that was converted for grazing in the 1990s, and bought the land from cattle farmers. As grasslands were replaced by pasture, they were planted with invasive grasses to feed cattle. The grass chokes off the growth of native plants. Because it’s spread so much, the non-native grass makes restoration expensive and challenging. That’s why the project took a new approach: Instead of focusing solely on restoration, it’s happening in combination with carefully managed forestry.
[Photo: TIG]
Why an environmental group wanted to partner with a forestry company
BTG Pactual Timberland Investment Group (TIG), the forestry partner on the project, is planting tree farms on half of the former grazing land, and managing restoration on the other half.
In some ways, the solution seems counterintuitive: The tree farms will grow eucalyptus, a non-native species from Australia. In other parts of Brazil, environmental groups have derided eucalyptus plantations, arguing that they’re destructive. But the trees can thrive in degraded soil where other species struggle to grow. They also grow quickly, taking up large amounts of CO2. Since deforestation reduces rainfall, planting new trees can also help with the hydrological cycle. And as global demand for wood continues to grow, the new plantationswhich are FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certifiedcan potentially help avoid deforestation of native trees in places like the Amazon rainforest.
Some critics argue that eucalyptus overuses groundwater, but Conservation International says that’s often caused by poor management. If a eucalyptus plantation is managed well, the nonprofit says, recent research suggests it will use the same amount of water as a native forest. (The forestry company is also screening out locations that have insufficient water availability and monitoring water security for others in the area.)
When TIG bought grazig land from farmers, it carefully tracked where the cattle were moved, making sure that the process didn’t lead to new land being cleared elsewhere. (The company agreed to this, along with other sustainability critera, as part of the project.) Then, with guidance from Conservation International, it began “assisted natural regeneration,” taking steps to help native vegetation regrow. In some areas, it’s also planting seeds or seedlings. Having the forestry company on the site also means that its crew can protect the restored areas from encroachment from other farmers or fight wildfires if needed.
The forestry company will earn carbon credits both as its trees capture CO2 and as native vegetation is being restored. Apple also has a stake in the project. “What we’re aiming to do is generate a financial return as an investor in those projects, but also a carbon return,” says Busch. “Part of the return that we get on that investment is carbon credits.”
Third-party auditors will monitor the project before the carbon credits are issued. Apple is also helping with some of the monitoring technology, including testing ways to use the iPhone’s lidar scanner to measure the diameter of trees.
Without the forestry part of the project in place, Conservation International says it’s unlikely that any restoration would have happened in the area at all. Including forestry makes the restoration financially viable. And it helped it happen at a large scale: The project will increase the restoration across the entire Cerrado region by 50%.
“At the end of the day, what we think is really important is figuring out how to get to scale in terms of restoration and carbon sequestration quickly,” says Apple’s Busch. “That needs to be funded somehow. The conservation side of the operation is truly [financially] sustainable because it can be funded by the business side.”
These days, when you head to a shop to buy clothes, most brands package your purchases in a recyclable paper bag, which looks more eco-friendly than plastic.
But behind the scenesin back rooms that most customers never seeevery single clothing retailer has enormous piles of flimsy plastic bags (sometimes called poly bags). These bags keep clothes clean as they travel across the complex global supply chain before arriving at the store. We need to keep clothes in good condition as they move from factories to shipping containers to trucks, says Candan Erenguc, chief operations officer at Anthropologie.
[Photo: WM/Anthropologie]
Most local recycling facilities don’t have the equipment to recycle poly bags, which are more complicated to break down than more solid plastics like water bottles. So most retailers simply send them in the regular waste stream where they will end up in a landfill. Since plastic does not biodegrade, these bags will break down into tiny fragments of microplastic that will end up in our waterways and food.
Anthropologie has been on a mission to find a way to recycle the poly bags it collects across its 215 retail stores. Over the past 18 months, it has partnered with Waste Management (WM), the largest recycling company in the United States, to develop a solution. Now, store associates collect these bags and send them to special facilities that are equipped to recycle them into other plastic products, extending their life.
Anthropologie has already recycled more than 60,000 tons of poly bags, which have been transformed into pellets that will be used to create other plastic items, including trash bags. It has been a very seamless process, and we want to make sure other retailers know they can do it as well, says Erenguc.
That said, things like trash bags cannot be further recycled, so they will eventually end up in a landfill. So it is still incumbent on brands to find ways to reduce the amount of plastic they consume and discard.
For decades, flimsy plastic bags have been a challenge for municipal recycling facilities that collect household waste. If you accidentally put them in your curbside recycling bin, they can clog up the recycling equipment, shutting the system down. As a result, people have been encouraged to simply dispose of these bags in the regular waste stream, where they will be landfilled or incinerated.
However, recycling technology is quickly improving, according to Tara Hemmer, chief sustainability officer at WM. For one thing, WM is now investing in robotics and computer vision technology that can better catch plastic bags that end up in the waste stream and separate them from the rest of the trash, so they don’t cause a major disturbance.
And perhaps more impressively, there are now several industrial recycling facilities across the U.S. that are specifically designed to recycle poly bags. Some of these plants are owned by WM. But there are also independent recyclers that partner with WM. We work with our customers to make sure they can direct their waste to the right facility in our third-party network, says Hemmer.
[Photo: WM]
Erenguc wanted to find a way to collect poly bags and ship them to these locations. However, as a major retailer, this presented a logistical challenge. It was also important for the process to be easy for employees to understand and follow. Each of Anthropologie’s 215 stores is staffed with dozens of employees who must be trained on best practices when it comes to waste disposal. Moreover, it was unclear where the nearest recycling facility would be for each store.
We didn’t want to be transporting poly bags back and forth across the country, because that isn’t good for the environment either, Erenguc says.
But this is where WM could help. Anthropologie brought in members of the WM team to study the situation and come up with a solution that would be easy for retail employees to adopt. WM identified the address of the closest recycling facility for each store. Retail associates now collect plastic bags and when they have achieved a certain volume, they ship them out to a designated facility. The recycling plants turn poly bags into pellets that can than be used to create other products.
It’s such a streamlined solution, Erenguc says. It was so easy to execute, but we’ve already managed to divert 60,000 pounds of plastic from landfills.
[Photo: WM]
Hemmer says that many retailers are eager to divert waste from landfill. While there’s been a narrative that companies have abandoned their sustainability goals, that hasn’t been her experience. We’ve found that companies still have goals and are marching towards them, she says. And consumerproduct companies are trying to increase the amount of recycled content that goes into their products.
Hemmer says that recycling technology is improving every year. WM is currently working to make it possible to recycle plastic bags in residential areas, beginning with a plant in Chicago that will reach about 3,500 households.
But often the obstacle to bringing about change at scale isn’t technologicalit’s logistical. People, as well as companies, are more likely to adopt new processes if they’re simple. Part of our job is to help troubleshoot, says Hemmer. But diverting waste from landfill is actually a lot easier than you’d imagine.
Elon Musk’s foray into government has proven disastrous for his business life.
Since taking up work for President Donald Trumps’ so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk’s electric car company Tesla has seen sales slide and has become a target for protests. Now some believe that damage could be terminal and that Musk poses a risk to companies outside of his own.
The Reputation Risk Index looks at reputational threats facing companies and organizations. It recently found that being associated with Musk posed the second biggest threat to companies, between the harmful or deceptive use of artificial intelligence and backtracking on DEI. The index, which is based on a survey with 117 public affairs leaders and former heads of state, found it’s not just being associated with Musk that’s risky, but being singled out and publicly criticized by him.
In an aerial view, brand-new Tesla cars and Cybertrucks sit parked in a lot at a Tesla dealership on April 02, 2025, in Corte Madera, California. [Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]
With his controversial omnipresence in the media landscape, 28% of the council identified this association as a top reputational risk, highlighting Musks impact on businesses that extend well past his own, Global Risk Advisory Council chair Isabel Casillas Guzman said in the report.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives predicted in a note Sunday that even if Musk were to quit DOGE and get back to his car company there will be permanent brand damage.” And if Musk stays in government, brand damage could grow for Tesla, calling it a code red situation for the company.
Musk “needs to leave the government, take a major step back on DOGE, and get back to being CEO of Tesla full-time,” Ives wrote.
Musk’s hard turn to DOGE has shown that mixing business with politics can backfire, especially for a public CEO of a company that relies on customers who in large part don’t share his views. If Musk wasn’t planning on leaving his post as a special government employee after the 130-day limit comes up, he might find a more persuasive business reason that it’s time to get back to his day job.
As a particularly cold winter sputters to an end, Pennsylvanias Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps residents pay their heating bills, closed on Fridayseveral weeks earlier than expected.
Funding for LIHEAP has dried up because federal workers who administer the program were recently laid off by the Trump administration, said Elizabeth Marx, the executive director at the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project, a legal advocacy group that assists people struggling to pay their utility costs. About $19 million has yet to be sent to the state.
The state Public Utility Commission sent a letter to Congess this week about the shortfall and called the fund a lifeline for Pennsylvanias most vulnerable households.
Marx said the delay in federal funds couldnt happen at a worse time.
April is known as the start of termination season, she said, when her organization sees an uptick in the number of households whose electricity or gas is turned off. State regulations prohibit winter disconnections before April 1.
Every year we have a spike in calls to our emergency hotline because, all at the same time, people are receiving termination notices, Marx said. This is a time when the demand for LIHEAP increases dramatically.
LIHEAP is among dozens of aid programs caught short by mass firings in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Part of broad budget cuts by the Trump administration, the entire staff that allocates funds for LIHEAP was eliminated two weeks ago. HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Administered largely by states, LIHEAP distributes more than $4 billion a year to 6.2 million low-income households nationwide to help with heating and cooling costs. Last year, LIHEAP provided assistance to 346,000 Pennsylvanians, including 55,000 people who were in danger of having their heating cut.
About $400 million in LIHEAP funding has yet to be sent to the states. In 2025, Pennsylvania had so far received $71 million by early April.
Marx said that no one has explained the delay. The funding hasnt yet been cut. We just havent gotten it, Marx said. We have no idea when the remaining amount of funds are going to come to Pennsylvania.
Sanya Carley, the faculty director at the University of Pennsylvanias Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, said the gutting of the staff is behind the funding interruption. With the layoffs at HHS, that means that nobody is there to allocate the remainder during the more extreme, excessive heat months, she said.
LIHEAP is one of our cornerstone social assistance programs, said Juanita Constible, a senior advocate for environmental health at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It can mean the difference between a family being able to afford to stay in their home or not, or to feed themselves or not, she said.
Even if funds were sent this week, the program wouldn’t be able to reopen immediately. You cant just turn a program like that on a dime, Marx said. The delay could also mean bad news this summer and beyond.
Without help from LIHEAP to pay debts to utility companies that accumulated over the winter, thousands of households could lose power, leaving them with limited access to electricity this summer. The pause in payments will likely drive up demand for aid in the fall, advocates said. LIHEAP also covers maintenance and repair to home furnaces.
Utility disconnections can lead to other losses for families scrambling to make ends meet. (Think of a refrigerator full of spoiled groceries.) They can spur evictions and, in some cases, cause children to be removed from homes deemed unsafe. And as Pennsylvania and the rest of the country face increasingly hot summers because of climate change, air-conditioning is no longer a convenience but a life-saving necessity. Prolonged heat exposure exacerbates chronic conditions including asthma, diabetes, and hypertension and can endanger pregnant women, children, and the elderly.
LIHEAP was among the programs seen as most critical for helping families in Philadelphia at a climate justice event hosted by Drexel University last week.
The federal government is disinvesting in data to understand health disparities, data to understand climate risk, funding for energy solutions. The LIHEAP program is now at risk, said Mathy Stanislaus, the executive director of Drexels Environmental Collaboratory.
Now more than ever, we really need to figure out how we can link up community-based leadership and priorities for state and local solutions, Stanislaus said.
The event brought together four community groups, called the Philadelphia Climate Justice Collective, to present recommendations for a just climate transition plan for the city. Finding solutions for neighborhoods with an atypically high heat index were part of the collectives report.
The governments disinvestment and dismantling casts a long shadow, Stanislaus said in an interview, referring to the fallout from federal cuts led by DOGE, Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency.
For example, the North Philadelphia-based nonprofit Esperanza lost a $500,000 grant for Hunting Park that would have covered the cost of weatherizing homes and planting trees. Hunting Park is a neighborhood where summer temperatures routinely register 10 to 15 degrees higher than wealthier and greener areas of the city.
Despite the funding cuts, the collectives leadership said they will continue working to help Philadelphias most underserved residents.
The federal government is completely erasing the history of environmental justice. The EPA administrator issued a memo two weeks ago that says were not going to consider the burdens of communities of color and low-income neighborhoods, Stanislaus said. We need to push back.
One of the participating organizations, the Overbrook Environmental Education Center, lost a promised $700,000 federal grant. Were disappointed, but were not devastated, said Jerome Shabazz, its executive director.
Are we going to rely on these folks to define for us what our dignity should look like, who we should protect and who we should love and who we should give consideration to? How are we going to have an attitude where the most vulnerable amongst us are not the people we want to serve? he asked. Thats not acceptable. If were talking about climate and environmental justice, then we must be just.
More than 70% of LIHEAP recipients come from households with at least one senior citizen, person with disabilities, or child under the age of 6.
Constible, of the NRDC, said if LIHEAP disappeared there would be a lot more evictions.
Wed see a lot more potential deaths or serious physical harm. I think ed see a lot more families trying to make a decision between heating and eating, or stalling medical care that they need, she said.
Marx said the disruption to LIHEAP funding is occurring as more people are losing access to consistent electricity, water, and gas service. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, last year one in four Pennsylvania households said they had trouble paying their energy bills. Even before this winter, LIHEAP funding had fallen since the 2021-2022 fiscal year, when Pennsylvania received more than $480 million. This year, the state was allocated around $200 million.
Now, experts say the situation is dire. People will die, Carley said. People will die this summer if they cannot cool their homes and they cannot pay their bills.
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
The steeple of Boston’s Old North Church has a historic claim to fame. In 1775, Paul Revere arranged for lanterns to be displayed as a signal to colonists that communicated British troop movements, and the route of an impending invasion: one lantern if by land, two if by sea. Now, 250 years later, the church is once again a messenger for a dire moment in American history.
April 18 marked 250 years since Revere’s ride the night before the Battles of Lexington and Concord outside Boston that set off the Revolutionary War. To mark the occasion, a Boston art collective called Silence Dogood (its name a tip of the hat to one of Benjamin Franklins pseudonyms) used the occasion to project far less veiled messages in vintage-style typefaces onto the Old North Churchs steeple.
[Photo: Aram Boghosian/courtesy Silence Dogood]
The Revolution Started Here and It Never Left, Let the Warning Ride Forth Once More: Tyranny Is at Our Door, and One if by Land, Two if by D.C. were digs at President Donald Trump and statements of identity about Boston as the birthplace of the American Revolution.
[Photo: Mike Ritter/courtesy Silence Dogood]
Two-hundred fifty years later, tyranny has returned, the group said in a statement. Let Boston once more be the beacon in the country’s hour of darkness and relight the rallying signal to protect our liberty.
Silence Dogood started last month with a projection at the Old State House responding to border czar Tom Homan’s comments about bringing hell to the city. The visual protests have grown in a very organic way since, an organizer tells Fast Company. The group is finding ways to both react to events as they unfold in real time and mark the anniversary of the Revolutionary War with messages about the Trump administration’s abuses of power.
Projections were a staple of protest against Trump in his first term; activists and artists projected critical messages onto Trump’s hotels in cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Silence Dogood has taken that concept and adopted it for Boston, and for the nation’s semiquincentennial, with thoughtful font and location choices. That the White House touted Trump a king only bolsters the group’s message.
[Photo: Aram Boghosian/courtesy Silence Dogood]
The projections were written in a handful of fonts, including some the group has customized. One was chosen as an homage to colonial-era pamphlets like Thomas Paine’s 1776 Common Sense, which gives their projections a sense of historic context, paired with a more blocky font used in all-caps.
As a medium, projection allows the collective to make large statements directly on the places where history happened, and messages can be quickly designed and executed. Since launching, they’ve projected onto the facades of other historic buildings, including Faneuil Hall and Old South Meeting House. The group uses a Reon solar-powered mobile electric generator, 1,600-lumen Epson projectors, and a computer using the projection mapping software MadMapper.
By bringing their projections to historic sites and using fonts and anniversaries to tie history to the modern day, Silence Dogood has tapped into a potent medium that brings timely messages to timeless locations with only the power of type and light.
Popular language learning app Duolingo is giving its bite-size lesson treatment to one of the oldest games in the world: chess.Duolingos chess course will take users, who can range from complete novices to those with a solid understanding of how to play, through its gamified exercises to become better game players. The focus is mostly on attracting new players, including those who have felt chess is too difficult to learn or otherwise inaccessible.For the most part, a lot of chess products out there are usually built by an advanced user for more advanced-use casessomeone who already is familiar with chess and is kind of trying to elevate their abilities even further, Edwin Bodge, Duolingo senior product manager, tells Fast Company. So we are more targeting beginners and think that were addressing a part of the market that hasnt previously been addressed.[Animation: Duolingo]Users can learn how each piece moves, spot tactical patterns, and build a strategy. They can then apply those lessons in mini matches, which are just a few minutes long, to full games against its character Oscar. The bot will track how many matches the user has won and lost and can scale up or down the difficulty based on past performance.This is a game thats been played for so long, and essentially Duolingo is now carrying the torch of [getting] more people interested in this game that has been around for so long and put our unique spin on it, Bodge said.[Image: Duolingo]Chess is the companys first new subject since it branched beyond languages and introduced math and music classes in 2022 and 2023, respectively. The company launched in 2012 and has amassed more than 37 million daily active users as it brought language learning to the iPhone age and leaned heavily into attracting a young user base.The company said that chess is the fastest course its developed to date thanks to advancements in AI. The product team pitched CEO Luis von Ahn on the course in late August and its first engineer started on the job in November.Duolingo is testing chess with a limited number of learners starting Tuesday. Itll roll out to all learners on iOS in English in the coming weeks, it said, with plans to eventually extend to additional operating systems and other languages in the coming months.
