Nothing is certain, they say, but death and taxes. But a new idea from Meta could add social media to that list.
The tech giant was granted a patent in December that would allow it to simulate a user via artificial intelligence when he or she is absent from the social network for extended periods, including, “for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased.”
The patent covers a bot that could simulate your activity across Metas products, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threadsmaking posts, leaving comments, and interacting with other users. It could even, potentially, communicate directly with people via chats or video calls, the patent reads.
Andrew Bosworth, Metas chief technology officer, is listed as the primary inventor, and the patent was first filed in November 2023. A Meta spokesperson tells Fast Company the company has “no plans to move forward with this example.”
Withdrawing from a social media platform can affect “the user experience of several users,” the patent reads. “The impact on the users is much more severe and permanent if that user is deceased and can never return to the social networking platform.”
Creepy? Sure seems it. Unprecedented? Not as much as you might think.
In 2021, Microsoft obtained a patent for a chatbot that would let you talk with dead people, both loved ones and celebrities. Like Meta, Microsoft said it had no plans to use the technologyand Tim OBrien, Microsofts general manager of AI programs at the time, said in a social media post he agreed it was “disturbing.” Meanwhile, startups like Eternos and HereAfter AI let people create a “digital twin” that can engage with loved ones after they have passed away.
Meta first publicly discussed the concept of a chatbot for the dead about two-and-a-half years ago, when founder Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman (in the Metaverse, of course), said, If someone has lost a loved one and is grieving, there may be ways in which being able to interact or relive certain memories could be helpful. Zuckerberg did note, however, that the technology could become “unhealthy.”
Metas take on a postmortem chatbot would analyze user-specific data, including posts, voice messages, chats, comments, and likes, to build a sense of who the person was. It would amalgamate that data into a digital persona designed to mimic the users activity.
The bot would identify that any responses were not actually generated by the user, the patent says, but rather were the result of a simulation.
Now, there are some hurdles Meta doesnt mention in the patent. What people say in a direct message to a close friend or loved one isnt necessarily meant for wider consumption. Picture, for instance, one spouse venting to the other about how frustrated they were with their child after some “terrible twos” or teenage incidentonly for that child to later be told by the bot how much they annoyed their now-dead loved one.
After all, AI has yet to grasp social niceties, or when silence or a white lie is better than the truth.
Presently, when someone dies, Meta offers several options for survivors. The page can be permanently removed (assuming you have the necessary paperwork, such as a death certificate), or it can be turned into a memorial, where people can read past posts and leave messages of their own.
As unpleasant as the topic is, Meta has good reason to think about death. One study predicts that by 2050, the number of dead users on Facebook will outnumber the living. By 2100, there could be more than 4.9 billion dead profiles on the platform.
Variant, a generative design tool that promises endless UI exploration, recently introduced a feature most creative people and designers have used for decades: the eyedropper. In Variant, the tool picks vibes: It lets you click on one AI-generated interface and inject its aesthetic DNAtypography, spatial relationships, and color palettesinto another. After so much hype around vibecoding and its text-based imprecision, seeing a familiar, direct manipulation tool applied to generative AI feels great.
The new AI modality takes a nice step to close the gap between the impenetrable ways of large language model black boxes and the tools designers actually use with their eyes and hands. Adopting a universally understood tool to control AI in any way other than words is exactly the kind of innovation the sector needs now.
Its just too bad that Variant itself is the vessel for it. The tools underlying AI engine suffers from a distinct lack of differentiation. Everything it makes looks flat and same-y, so the new style absorb-and-drop tool is not really that useful. Yes, the transformed UI changes, but the results already looked very similar anyway (except for the color palettes).
That said, the implementation is cute. When you click on a previously generated UI, the eyedropper animates the design as it is sucking its soul. You then move the eyedropper, click on another generated UI, and the new style spills over it, rearranging it to match the source. Its a satisfying bit of UI theater, an illusion broken by the fact that you have to wait a little to see the results, as the AI works it all out.
The problem is the little variance in Variant. You cant eyedrop a bitmap image or a Figma project and tell the AI, make this new app UI look like this. Currently, Variants eyedropper feels like trying to paint in Photoshop when your palette only contains five shades of beige.
A for effort
Thats too bad, considering the eyedropper is one of the most resilient and powerful metaphors in computing history. The concept dates back to SuperPaint in 1973, which introduced the ability to sample hue values from a digital canvas. While MacPaint popularized digital painting tools in 1984, it was Adobe Photoshop 1.0 in 1990 that locked the eyedropper icon as the standard for color sampling.
Then, in 1996, Adobe Illustrator 6.0 evolved the tool into a style thief. It allowed designers to absorb entire sets of attributesstroke weights, fill patterns, and effectsand inject them into other objects. Now Variant is effectively trying to take this to its UI design arsenal. The difference is that Adobes tools offered precision. You knew exactly what you were getting. With Variant, you are making a visual suggestion to a probabilistic engine and hoping for the best.
But it is a good change that highlights why we need more tools like this eyedropper and fewer text prompts. Unlike the latest generation of multi-modal video generative AIs, the lack of precision in vibecoding tools is unnerving to me. It reminds me of an exercise I did in communication design class, back in college: A professor made us play a game where one student built a shape with Tangram pieces and had to verbally describe to a partner how to reproduce it with another Tangram set. It was impossible to match it.
We are humans, orders of magnitude better semantic engines than any AI, and even we fail at describing visuals with words. We need interfaces that allow for direct, exact manipulation, not just crossing fingers and hoping for the best. Variants eyedropper shows us the way. Generative AI tool makers, more of this, please. Stop forcing designers to talk to the machine, and let us show what we want.
We made a tool that lets you absorb the vibe of anything you point it at and apply it to your designsIt's absurd and it just worksStyle Dropper, now available in @variantui pic.twitter.com/B3eXDntYtw— Ben South (@bnj) February 10, 2026
The new year has so far not been kind to the share price of Big Tech stocks, particularly the so-called Magnificent 7. These seven companiesAlphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Teslaare Americas tech crown jewels.
Combined, they have their hands in the hottest areas of tech, including artificial intelligence, mobile computing, chipmaking, and transportation. Yet all of these tech companies have seen their share prices decline since the beginning of the year. Here are some possible reasons why.
The Magnificent 7 is seeing red in 2026
As of this writing, there isnt a single Magnificent 7 stock in the green for 2026. Their year-to-date returns are as follows:
Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG): down 3.3%
Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN): down 13.5%
Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL): down 4.8%
Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) down 2.7%
Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT): down 17.4 %
Nvidia Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA): down 1.6%
Tesla, Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA): down 8.2%
While all seven companies have their own strengths (Amazon, e-commerce; Nvidia, AI chips; Apple, smartphones, etc.), they share one thread: they are traded on the already tech-heavy Nasdaq.
And given the massive market caps of these companies, all seven have an outsized impact on the Nasdaq as a whole. Keeping that in mind, its little surprise that the NASDAQ Composite itself is down over 3% year to date as well.
The question is why? Here are two of the most likely reasons.
AI capex spend is immense
In the business world, capex refers to a companys capital expenditurehow much money a business spends on building out assets in order to grow its business, and thus its finances.
Capex is why the phrase you have to spend money to make money exists. But while it has been normal for decades for tech giants to spend billions in capex per year, lately capital expenditures are explodingreaching highs never seen before.
The Motley Fool estimated that in 2025, the Magnificent 7 spent about $400 billion on AI-related capex. In 2026, that number is set to grow by around 70% to reach $680 billion. That is a staggering sum of money on a technology that no tech company has found a way to make a profit from yet.
What many investors have begun to increasingly worry about is that if the ever-present threat of an AI bubble does materialize, the Magnificent 7 companies, particularly those that have had massive capital expenditures on the technology, like Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, might not ever see a return on that investment.
Economic and global uncertainty abounds
Outside the immediate fears of overzealous AI capex and an AI bubble, the Magnificent 7 are also vulnerable to broader economic and geopolitical uncertainties.
President Trumps penchant for announcing tariffs out of the blue has harmed relations with Americas closest economic allies and trading partnersand caused massive uncertainty for businesses. These tariffs have also raised the costs of goods for American consumers. When prices rise, and incomes dont, people tend to cut back on spending, which slows the economy.
And when the economy slowsor people worry it willinvestors tend to sell off riskier investments, or investments where theyve already made a good return, to protect their profits. While shares of Magnificent 7 companies have delivered massive returns over the last decade, they are also highly volatile. And this volatility, when combined with broader market uncertainty, generally causes investor apprehension, leading to further selloffs.
Of course, theres no guarantee where Mag 7 stocks go from here. If AI bulls are right and we are on the cusp of unprecedented AI prosperity, its reasonable to assume that the fall in Mag 7 stocks at the start of 2026 has so far just been a temporary anomaly, and AI-related stocks like those in the Mag 7 will be seeing plenty of green in the years ahead.
However, if the AI bubble does indeed burst and takes the broader economy down with it, 2026 year-to-date declines in Mag 7 stock prices so far could seem relatively minor compared to what is yet to come.
When it comes to EVs, a bigger battery isnt always better.
Ford Motor Company is making that bet as part of its effort to manufacture a new suite of more affordable electric vehiclesbeginning with a $30,000-starting-price mid-size electric truck set to launch in 2027.
To get more out of a smaller battery, Ford has had to reimagine every step of its manufacturing process. It has scrapped the typical assembly line process in favor of what the automaker calls its Ford Universal EV Platform, and simplified every part of its EV, from the miles of wiring inside the electric system to the number of parts that make up its frame.
And its had to rethink the battery itself, to make it both more efficient and less expensive to produce. Ford credits many of those innovations to the team from Auto Motive Power, an EV charging startup Ford acquired back in 2023.
[Photo: Ford]
Ford Bounties to increase efficiency
Batteries are a massive challenge to designing affordable, efficient EVs. The battery makes up at least 25% of an EVs total weight and around 40% of its total cost.
In recent years, EV batteries have kept getting bigger. A bigger battery can add miles to an EVs range, but that also means adding more weight, which makes an EV less efficient, and potentially more difficult to handle. It also means more production costs, which could make that EV more expensive.
To make more affordable EVs, then, Ford has rethought every part of its EV in service of that battery.
Every engineer, whether working on the vehicles aerodynamics or its interior ergonomics, uses metrics that Ford calls bounties to weigh design tradeoffs in terms of how they affect the vehicles range and battery costs.
Alan Clarke [Photo: Ford]
That has led to a system-level optimization that the team has done to turn over every rock to find dollars of cost and watts of efficiency, says Alan Clarke, executive director of Fords Advanced EV Development department.
Ford removed 4,000 feet of wiring from its Universal EV Platform, for example, shaving off 22 pounds compared to the wiring used in Fords first-gen electric SUV. While the Ford Maverick has 146 structural parts in its frame, Fords forthcoming midsized EV will have just two parts, thanks to a lighter and simpler “unicasting” process.
[Photo: Ford]
A more efficient battery
Besides the design tradeoffs it made, Ford also redesigned its battery to make it both smaller and more efficient. That can translate to a better range and charging experience for customers, too.
The pipe of electrons coming out of the wall is always the same for every customer, Clarke says. But how many miles that translates into is directly defined by efficiency of the power electronics and efficiency of the vehicle.
[Photo: Ford]
In its forthcoming midsized EV, Ford will use lithium-iron-phosphate, or LFP, batteries. With no nickel or cobalt, these batterieswhich are common in Chinese EVsuse less expensive chemical ingredients than lithium ion and other battery types.
How efficient an EV battery is depends largely on its software, and thats where the team from Auto Motive Power comes in.
An EV battery pack is composed of multiple cells, and “the performance of that battery pack is limited by your worst cell,” Clarke explains. Battery cells are sensitive to temperature, voltage, and other conditions around them.
“You want to buy [an EV] from whatever company understands their batteries the best, thermally manages them the best from a software standpoint, can measure where they are and balance them and charge them at the rates that don’t deteriorate them,” he adds.
The E-box is a single module that controls power distribution, battery management, and provides AC power back to your home during an outage. [Photo: Ford]
Algorithms can monitor a batterys voltage, temperature, and regenerative braking in order to maximize the vehicles energy use.
Software controls how an EV takes energy out of its battery and puts it into the vehicle’s drive unit. And it also allows the automaker to optimize a battery in real time, responding to the drivers behaviors and real-world data to reduce battery degradation and protect its lifespan.
Each customer has different ways of utilizing batteries, explains Anil Paryani, formerly the CEO of Auto Motive Power and now an executive director of engineering at Ford.
In Arizona, they might have different heat challenges . . . so we have user-optimized controls to minimize those trade offs, he says.
Sometimes customers just have different charging behaviors. For example, Paryani says that his mom lives in a condo, and so she almost exclusively uses fast chargers, which can negatively impact an EVs battery life.
What do we have to do to avoid [battery] deterioration? he says. We are addressing that with our software.
Ford is making its battery cells at its BlueOval Battery Park in Michigan.
Akshaya Srinivasan leads vehicle efficiency and performance for the Universal EV Platform team, helping develop bounties. [Photo: Ford]
Staying a startup inside Ford
Auto Motive Power was founded in 2017, and was previously a supplier to Ford before it was acquired by the automaker in 2023.
At the time, the team was still operating as a very scrappy startup, Paryani says. Becoming part of a $56 billion automaker could have drastically changed that, but they were able to maintain that startup energy.
Executives decided to keep the team walled off, Paryani says, so that we can take design risks that I don’t think traditional auto companies would ever think of taking.
[Photo: Ford]
Big companies like Ford can often get caught up in analysis paralysis, Clarke admits, while startups are known for failing fast. Paryani and his team held on to that ethos, while taking advantage of Fords resources, like access to its EV development center.
[Through] all of the different things that Anil’s team have tried, we’ve learned so much about different materials, interaction between different devices, that we wouldn’t have, Clarke says. “Or in order to learn it, we probably would have spent two years building models and realizing it wasn’t a good idea.”
Paryanis team, instead, tried out multiple ideas quickly through prototypes. This work is crucial to developing better EVs, which are ultimately still an early technology.
“Internal combustion engine vehicles have had 120 years of maturation, of engineering work, of optimization, of innovation, that have gone into them,” Clarke says.
EVs, by contrast, are in “inning oneor maybe inning two.”
Anderson Cooper, who has reported for CBS’ “60 Minutes” for the past two decades in addition to hosting a weeknight news program on CNN, said Monday that he’s leaving the CBS broadcast to spend more time with his family.His decision comes at a time of turmoil at “60 Minutes.” Cooper appeared on the show Sunday night, introducing a brief piece on filmmaker Ken Burns. It’s not likely to be his last time on the show; he’s expected to finish the current broadcast season, which ends in May.“Being a correspondent at ’60 Minutes’ has been one of the great honors of my career,” Cooper said in a statement. “I got to tell amazing stories, and work with some of the best producers, editors and camera crew in the business. For nearly 20 years, I’ve been able to balance my jobs and CNN and CBS, but I have little kids now and I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while they still want to spend time with me.”Cooper’s exit from what remains the most prestigious show in television news is sure to raise questions about whether it had anything to do with the leadership of Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News since last fall. Cooper’s spokesperson said Monday he had no additional comment.He has contributed stories to “60 Minutes” since the 2006-2007 television season in a unique job-sharing arrangement with CNN. His prime-time cable news show, “Anderson Cooper 360,” has aired since 2003.In a statement, CBS News praised Cooper for his two decades of work.“We’re grateful to him for dedicating so much of his life to this broadcast, and understand the importance of spending more time with family,” CBS said. “’60 Minutes’ will be here if he ever wants to return.”His exit comes at a time of unease at the Sunday night newsmagazine known for its ticking stopwatch. At Weiss’ direction, the show in December held off at the last minute showing a report from correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi about the Trump administration’s immigration policy. She said a greater effort was needed to get an interview with administration officials, while Alfonsi complained privately that the decision was political in nature. The story aired a month later with additional administration comments, but no on-camera interviews.President Donald Trump sued “60 Minutes” for how it handled an interview with his 2024 election opponent, Kamala Harris. Much to the consternation of many at the broadcast, CBS’s parent company Paramount Global settled with Trump out-of-court.Cooper’s exit from CBS was first reported by the online news site Breaker.
David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.
David Bauder, AP Media Writer
Today marks the start of the Year of the Fire Horse, which in Chinese tradition is all about action, boldness, and taking on new challenges.
And what better way to celebrate a year that should be full of red hot, blazing energy than with a hand-crafted cowboy hat from Stetson?
The color? Red, of course.
The company, started by John Batterson Stetson in 1865, invented the cowboy hat. Today, it’s still known for embracing the spirit of the West with its quality hats, boots, and outerwear.
And to mark the year of intensity, which hasn’t happened in 60 years, the brand is partnering with Gold House to turn an iconic cultural itemthe cowboy hatinto a modern-day crown fit for 2026.
A good year to celebrate and support Asian-Pacific founders
The partnership is all for a good cause, too. The one-of-a-kind hat, handcrafted in Texas, will be auctioned off (specific details about the auction are forthcoming), with all funds going directly to the Gold House Foundation in order to further the nonprofit’s work in supporting Asian-Pacific culture and entrepreneurs.
Celebrating while redefining our most storied beliefs, symbols, and rituals is core to Gold House,” Bing Chen, CEO of Gold House, said in a statement shared with Fast Company. We are honored to partner with Stetsonan originatorto re-honor who created and who gets to wear the United States most pronounced crownthe cowboy hatfor the Year of the Fire Horse.
Given that this year is also America’s 250th birthday, celebrating Asian-Pacific culture makes sense. While history often fails to mention it, America’s pivotal Transcontinental Railroad was primarily built by Chinese laborers. Its construction inevitably led to the Gold Rush of the late 1840s and early 1850s that kick-started America’s economic boom.
The Stetson-Gold House hat is mostly bright red, but it features a gold horse and gold trim meant to honor those contributions.
While cowboy culture and fashion will forever be relevant in America, this partnership is a timely reminder that it’s also ever-important to revisit our country’s true history, especially the pieces and people who are far too often left out of history books. Hats off to that.
For the past decadeand really, for its entire 84-year historythe laundry detergent brand Tide has been trying to simplify the process of doing of laundry. From its original all-in-one powder to 1980s-era liquid soap to the 2012 introduction of the packet-based Tide Pod, the brand and its parent company Procter and Gamble have regularly reformulated the core product to accommodate the seemingly simple but highly diverse act of washing one’s clothes.
“There are 55 unique steps we’ve identified in the laundry process,” says Marchoe Northern, president of North America fabric care at Procter and Gamble. “Our job is to continue to think about ways to solve today’s modern need challenges.”
[Image: P&G]
That’s why Tide has spent the last 10 years creating a new kind of detergent product in the form of a fabric-like tile called Tide evo. Developed to streamline the way people add detergent to their laundry load, Tide’s new tile format requires little more than dropping a pre-dosed tile or two into a washing machine.
The Tide tile is a new form factor, but not just for novelty’s sake. The tile was developed by a team of 15 PhD-level chemists and engineers to eliminate the need for any fillers or non-cleaning ingredients. Unlike typical powder or sheet detergents that rely on fillers and liquid soaps that are dissolved in water, Tide evo is a 100% concentration of cleaning ingredients like surfactants, enzymes, alkalinity builders, and polymers.
Detergent designed for four senses
It took the company a decade to figure out how to do this, using a proprietary approach to spin these cleaning ingredients into fibers that can be woven together. Each Tide evo tile is made up of more than 15 miles of these fibers, which gradually dissolve when added to water. In contrast to other detergents that have plastic packaging and weights that increase shipping-related emissions, Tide evo is lightweight and comes in a fully recyclable box.
The tile is safe to touch, and in more than two years of market research Tide conducted among consumers in Colorado Spings, Colorado, the company found that people wanted to do more than just touch them. “Typically, people pick up a tile, they kind of flex it to see if it’ll break or crumble, and then they put it up to their nose to smell it,” says Northern.
[Image: P&G]
Leaning into consumers’ sensorial inclination, Northern explains that the company designed the tile itself to be a visually appealing diamond, and engineered its recyclable paperboard box to make an audible click when it’s closed. “This actually engages four of your five senses,” she says.
The fifth sense, taste, is one Tide definitely does not want to engage. In 2018, the brand had a major PR catastrophe on its hands when people on the internet created the “Tide Pod challenge,” daring each other to eat the candy-colored detergent pods. This proved incredibly dangerous. Many people were hospitalized, and there have been incidences where the ingestion of detergent pods has led to death.
The Tide evo is comparably visually simple, with its diamond shape, a monotone color, and a pliable, fabric-like feel. A sample box sent by the company pops open to reveal two neat rows of eight tiles, with no other adornment or packaging. Picking up a tile, it feels like a dense sponge. It is as unappetizing as a fuzzy piece of felt.
Chemically, though, the tile mimics the innovative function of the Tide Pod, which separated its stain removal, whitening, and brightening capabilities into the capsule’s multicolored chambers, allowing them to be deployed at different times during the wash cycle. Tide evo does this through its six layers, which are made up of woven fibers of surfactants, and embedded with cleaning ingredients formulated to perform different tasks, from breaking down stains to whitening to removing odors.
“This is really first-of-its-kind technology,” says Jennifer Ahoni, Tide’s scientific communications director and principal scientist.
On a recent video call, Ahoni offered a science class demonstration of the tile in action. She placed a single layer of the Tide tile on top of a beaker and began slightly soaking it with a stream of water from a squeeze bottle. Within a few seconds, the tile began to dissolve, eventually opening up a hole in the center and leaving a pool of soapy water below.
In another beaker, she fully dissolved a single layer of a tile into water with a few twirls of a tweezer before dropping in a small piece of polyester-cotton fiber that had been soaked with bright orange chili oil. Almost immediately small globs of the orange oil can be seen lifting out of the fabric and rising up to the surface of the soapy water like the inside of a lava lamp. “What you’re seeing here is that concentration. When you’re taking out the extras, the fillers, the water, and just focusing on the cleaning technologies, you can get this instant activation which translates to instant clean,” she says.
Getting to this point has required a large but undisclosed investment. Procter and Gamble has filed 50 different patents related to the product, from the tile itself to the manufacturing process required to produce it. None of the company’s existing facilities were capable of producing the tiles as they’ve been developed, so an entirely new plant had to be built in Alexandria, Louisiana.
But Northern says the time and expense will all be worth i. “We have high degrees of confidence because it’s arguably our most tested product before launch,” she says. Internal projections forecast annual sales to reach up to $500 million.
Tide evo will officially be hitting stores across the U.S. in April.
The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, a protege of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades after the revered leader’s assassination, died Tuesday. He was 84.As a young organizer in Chicago, Jackson was called to meet with King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis shortly before King was killed and he publicly positioned himself thereafter as King’s successor.Jackson led a lifetime of crusades in the United States and abroad, advocating for the poor and underrepresented on issues from voting rights and job opportunities to education and health care. He scored diplomatic victories with world leaders, and through his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he channeled cries for Black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms, pressuring executives to make America a more open and equitable society.And when he declared, “I am Somebody,” in a poem he often repeated, he sought to reach people of all colors. “I may be poor, but I am Somebody; I may be young; but I am Somebody; I may be on welfare, but I am Somebody,” Jackson intoned.It was a message he took literally and personally, having risen from obscurity in the segregated South to become America’s best-known civil rights activist since King.Santita Jackson confirmed that her father died at home in Chicago, surrounded by family.“Our father was a servant leadernot only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement posted online. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”Fellow civil rights activist the Reverend Al Sharpton said his mentor “was not simply a civil rights leader; he was a movement unto himself.”“He taught me that protest must have purpose, that faith must have feet, and that justice is not seasonal, it is daily work,” Sharpton wrote in a statement, adding that Jackson taught “trying is as important as triumph. That you do not wait for the dream to come true; you work to make it real.”Despite profound health challenges in his final years including a rare neurological disorder that affected his ability to move and speak, Jackson continued protesting against racial injustice into the era of Black Lives Matter. In 2024, he appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and at a City Council meeting to show support for a resolution backing a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.“Even if we win,” he told marchers in Minneapolis before the officer whose knee kept George Floyd from breathing was convicted of murder, “it’s relief, not victory. They’re still killing our people. Stop the violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.”
Calls to action, delivered in a memorable voice
Jackson’s voice, infused with the stirring cadences and powerful insistence of the Black church, demanded attention. On the campaign trail and elsewhere, he used rhyming and slogans such as: “Hope not dope” and “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it,” to deliver his messages.Jackson had his share of critics, both within and outside of the Black community. Some considered him a grandstander, too eager to seek out the spotlight. Looking back on his life and legacy, Jackson told the Associated Press in 2011 that he felt blessed to be able to continue the service of other leaders before him and to lay a foundation for those to come.“A part of our life’s work was to tear down walls and build bridges, and in a half century of work, we’ve basically torn down walls,” Jackson said. “Sometimes when you tear down walls, you’re scarred by falling debris, but your mission is to open up holes so others behind you can run through.”In his final months, as he received 24-hour care, he lost his ability to speak, communicating with family and visitors by holding their hands and squeezing.“I get very emotional knowing that these speeches belong to the ages now,” his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., told the AP in October.
A student athlete drawn to the Civil Rights Movement
Jesse Louis Jackson was born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of high school student Helen Burns and Noah Louis Robinson, a married man who lived next door. Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother.Jackson was a star quarterback on the football team at Sterling High School in Greenville, and accepted a football scholarship from the University of Illinois. But after he reportedly was told Black people couldn’t play quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he became the first-string quarterback, an honor student in sociology and economics, and student body president.Arriving on the historically Black campus in 1960 just months after students there launched sit-ins at a whites-only diner, Jackson immersed himself in the blossoming Civil Rights Movement.By 1965, he joined the voting rights march King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. King dispatched him to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to pressure companies to hire Black workers.Jackson called his time with King “a phenomenal four years of work.”Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was slain at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson’s account of the assassination was that King died in his arms.With his flair for the dramatic, Jackson wore a turtleneck he said was soaked with King’s blood for two days, including at a King memorial service held by the Chicago City Council, where he said: “I come here with a heavy heart because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr. King’s head.”However, several King aides, including speechwriter Alfred Duckett, questioned whether Jackson could have gotten King’s blood on his clothing. There are no images of Jackson in pictures taken shortly after the assassination.In 1971, Jackson broke with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to form Operation PUSH, originally named People United to Save Humanity. The organization based on Chicago’s South Side declared a sweeping mission, from diversifying workforces to registering voters in communities of color nationwide. Using lawsuits and threats of boycotts, Jackson pressured top corporations to spend millions and publicly commit to diversifying their workforces.The constant campaigns often left his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, the college sweetheart he married in 1963, taking the lead in raising their five children: Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson Jr., and two future members of Congress, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Luther Jackson and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who resigned in 2012 but is seeking reelection in the 2026 midterms.The elder Jackson, who was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and earned his Master of Divinity in 2000, also acknowledged fathering a child, Ashley Jackson, with one of his employees at Rainbow/USH, Karen L. Stanford. He said he understood what it means to be born out of wedlock and supported her emotionally and financially.
Presidential aspirations fall short but help ‘keep hope alive’
Despite once telling a Black audience he would not run for president “because white people are incapable of appreciating me,” Jackson ran twice and did better than any Black politician had before President Barack Obama, winning 13 primaries and caucuses for the Democratic nomination in 1988, four years after his first failed attempt.His successes left supporters chanting another Jackson slogan, “Keep Hope Alive.”“I was able to run for the presidency twice and redefine what was possible; it raised the lid for women and other people of color,” he told the AP. “Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”U.S. Rep. John Lewis said during a 1988 C-SPAN interview that Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination “opened some doors that some minority person will be able to walk through and become president.”Jackson also pushed for cultural change, joining calls by NAACP members and other movement leaders in the late 1980s to identify Black people in the United States as African Americans.“To be called African Americans has cultural integrityit puts us in our proper historical context,” Jackson said at the time. “Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some base, some historical cultural base. African Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.”Jackson’s words sometimes got him in trouble.In 1984, he apologized for what he thought were private comments to a reporter, calling New York City “Hymietown,” a derogatory reference to its large Jewish population. And in 2008, he made headlines when he complained that Obama was “talking down to Black people” in comments captured by a microphone he didn’t know was on during a break in a television taping.Still, when Jackson joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Obama that election night, he had tears streaming down his face.“I wish for a moment that Dr. King or (slain civil rights leader) Medgar Evers . . . could’ve just been there for 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labor,” he told the AP years later. “I became overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.”
Exerting influence on events at home and abroad
Jackson also had influence abroad, meeting world leaders and scoring diplomatic victories, including the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman from Syria in 1984, as well as the 1990 release of more than 700 foreign women and children held after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In 1999, he won the freedom of three Americans imprisoned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.“Citizens have the right to do something or do nothing,” Jackson said, before heading to Syria. “We choose to do something.”In 2021, Jackson joined the parents of Ahmaud Arbery inside the Georgia courtroom where three white men were convicted of killing the young Black jogger. In 2022, he hand-delivered a letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago, calling for federal charges against former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke in the 2014 killing of Black teenager Laquan McDonald.Jackson, who stepped down as president of Rainbow/PUSH in July 2023, disclosed in 2017 that he had sought treatment for Parkinson’s, but he continued to make public appearances even as the disease made it more difficult for listeners to understand him. Earlier this year doctors confirmed a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a life-threatening neurological disorder. He was admitted to a hospital in November.During the coronavirus pandemic, he and his wife survived being hospitalized with COVID-19. Jackson was vaccinated early, urging Black people in particular to get protected, given their higher risks for bad outcomes.“It’s America’s unfinished businesswe’re free, but not equal,” Jackson told the AP. “There’s a reality check that has been brought by the coronavirus, that exposes the weakness and the opportunity.”
Former Associated Press writer Karen Hawkins, who left The Associated Press in 2012, contributed to this report. Associated Press writers Amy Forliti in Minneapolis and Aaron Morrison in New York contributed.
Sophia Tareen, Associated Press
This should come as a shock to very few people, but Krispy Kreme doughnuts, which typically needs very little reason to give away its doughnuts, is giving away free doughnuts today.
This time, the free doughnut giveaway is in honor of Fat Tuesday 2026. But theres a catch. Heres what you need to know.
What is Fat Tuesday?
Today (Tuesday, February 17) is Fat Tuesday, otherwise known as Mardi Gras. The holiday always falls on the final Tuesday before the Christian holy day of Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of the Lent observance period.
Traditionally, Christians refrain from eating certain foods during Lent, particularly rich and fatty ones.
As a result, the Tuesday before the Lenten fasting period began has historically been a day when followers binged on sweet and fatty foodstheir last chance to do so for over a month. This Tuesday thus became known as Fat Tuesday.
Why is Krispy Kreme giving away doughnuts on Fat Tuesday?
The ubiquitous doughnut chain never seems to miss an opportunity to give away free doughnuts.
While this practice may appear anathema to a profitable business model, Krispy Kreme knows that giving away a few doughnuts will likely spur customers to spend more in-store than the chain is losing by giving away carefully formulated dough that costs it just a few cents each.
After all, who can eat just one glazed doughnuts and not want to wash it down with a cup of (high-margin) coffee?
What is Krispy Kreme giving away on Fat Tuesday 2026?
Participating Krispy Kreme doughnuts locations will be giving away a free original glazed doughnut to those who go to their shops today.
However, theres a catch.
How can I get my free doughnut on Fat Tuesday?
In order to get the free doughnut, youll need to wear beads, the traditional accessory that people adorn themselves with during Mardi Gras celebrations.
As Krispy Kreme notes on its website, Bring your celebration spirit, and your shiniest beads, to a Krispy Kreme shop near you for a FREE Original Glazed doughnut per guest.
The offer is available to those who physically enter a participating Krispy Kreme store or use its drive-through. Unfortunately, the offer isnt available for online orders. A disclaimer on Krispy Kreme’s website also notes that the offer is valid for today only and “while supplies last.”
Hospital intensive care units are notoriously noisy, with medical equipment emitting alarms, beeps, and other alerts designed to grab the attention of overextended healthcare workers.
That constant barrage can lead to what experts call alarm fatigue, causing stress and exhaustion for doctors and nurses who must distinguish between routine signals and those indicating a patient is in urgent distress. Patients, too, often struggle to rest amid the cacophony, even though sleep is critical to recovery.
To Ophir Ronen, a serial tech entrepreneur who sold his IT alert-handling startup Event Enrichment HQ to PagerDuty, the problem sounded familiar. Ronen first encountered the ICU alarm issue while volunteering in search and rescue, and he realized that although alarm fatigue has been widely discussed in scientific literature, no one had yet developed a comprehensive solution.
I thought to myself, wow, we certainly experienced the problem of alarm fatigue in operations and enterprise ITI wonder if its the same pattern, he says.
[Image: CalmWave]
Betting the problem might have a similar fix, Ronen founded CalmWave in 2022, with early backing from the Allen Institute for AIs incubator program. The startup aims to help hospitals silence unnecessary alarms, prioritize those that truly demand action, and build datasets that make it easier for computers to tell the difference.
Like other complex IT operations, Ronen found that critical information in hospitals is siloed across at least two systems: electronic medical records (EMR), which track diagnoses and treatments, and networks of sensors and monitoring systems that log vital signs and trigger alarms. Those monitoring data points typically never make it into EMR systems, which arent designed to handle that volume of information, Ronen says. CalmWaves technology integrates both streams.
[Image: CalmWave]
The system presents staff with a unified view of patient vital signs alongside treatment timelines, such as medication administration, reducing the need to toggle between records to assess a patients status. Drawing on its accumulated data, CalmWave can also recommend how to adjust alarm thresholds for specific patients, backed by clinical evidence explaining its reasoning. That might mean widening acceptable ranges to reduce unnecessary noise or tightening thresholds to catch problems earlier, according to Ronen.
We don’t just reduce alarms, he says. We restructure which alarms fire when and why, giving the nurses the clinical evidence of why this makes sense.
[Image: CalmWave]
While the system is based on machine learning, its not powered by large-language models or other similarly inscrutable generative AI tools, Ronen emphasizes. Thats helped win acceptance from even skeptical medical professionals, and the technology is currently deployed in 14 hospitals. The company has also raised money from a number of investors, including in a follow-on round announced last June that brought in $4.4 million from Third Prime, Bonfire Ventures, Catalyst by Wellstar, and Silver Circle.
An early pilot study with Wellstar Health System found CalmWaves system could lead to a 58% reduction in non-actionable alarmsreducing clinician interruptions and cutting by approximately 10 hours the time the average patient is exposed to alarms.
On Tuesday, the company announced a new feature called Recovery State, designed to help hospitals identify patterns suggesting a patient may be ready for transfer or discharge from the ICU. Like its alarm-configuration tools, Recovery State draws on data from monitoring systems and EMRs, matching patient profiles to recovery patterns while leaving final decisions to clinicians.
CalmWave hopes to roll out the feature this year. Ideally, Ronen says, it will help move patients out of stressful ICUsand potentially out of the hospitalsooner, freeing up resources and reducing costs. More broadly, he argues, it offers hospitals a way to measure when patients are improving, not just when they are deteriorating.
Healthcare has always known how to detect when things go wrong, he says. What it’s never had is an objective, continuous way to confirm when things are going right.
