Dearest gentle reader, Netflix humble requests your presence on your couch this today Thursday, January 29, 2026 to binge part one of the fourth season of its hit series Bridgerton. It is up to you whether or not to don your finest gowns, tiaras, and petticoats or simply leave that to the actors gracing your screens. While Lady Whistledowns identity is now common knowledge, society still has its eyes and judgement on you. So here are some facts you should know going into this next chapter so you are not the laughing stock of the season. Dont say we didnt try to help.
What is the basic premise of Bridgerton?
Netflixs Bridgerton is based on a series of romance novels by Julia Quinn. There are eight novels in the main series, each focusing on a Bridgerton sibling and a classic romance trope such as enemies to lovers. Additionally, since the popularity of the series epilogues, novellas, and one prequel book has expanded the literary world of the franchise.The plot centers on the individual Bridgerton family members quest for love in Regency Era London. The young adults and children are guided by their loving mother Violet who does her best despite missing her late husband who was killed by a bee sting before his children were of marrying age.
Who is the creative force behind Bridgerton?
Shonda Rhimes [Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Netflix]
It is wild to think that Bridgerton came about because in 2017 creator Shonda Rhimes was sick on vacation. While she wasnt feeling well, she ran out of things to read and picked up Quinns first novel in the series, The Duke and I, which by chance was left in her room. After devouring it, she went out fever and all to the local bookstore to buy the rest of the books in the series. A seed for an idea was planted.That same year, Rhimes left ABC, her previous creative home, and signed a very lucrative four year overall deal with Netflix. Industry insiders estimated this deal was worth around$100 million dollars. With her newfound creative freedom outside the world of traditional network television, Rhimes teamed up with Netflix to tackle a genre that was looked down upon, romance.
Why was Bridgerton such a surprise hit?
Bridgerton was a gamble for both Rhimes and Netflix. Historically, traditional cable channels tended to stay in their land and do one genre well. For example HBO and Showtime focused on dark, gritty offerings that wouldnt make it past the censors of network televisions. Netflix has offerings for all, including women.
Rhimes unabashedly embraced the Regency era and the pursuit of love and marriage. She also put her own unique fingerprints on it by creating an ethnically diverse world. One way she accomplished this was through the character of Queen Charlotte who did not appear in the original book series but was a real historical figure. While historians will continue to debate her ethnicity, in the show she is a Black woman. Her character’s popularity inspired Quinn to pair up with Rhimes to write the prequel novel. This representation in a genre that doesnt typically see diversity helped create even more fans.
Golda Rosheuvel (left) as Queen Charlotte, Adjoa Andoh as Lady Danbury. [Photo: Liam Daniel/Netflix]
Bridgertons first season debuted on Christmas day 2020. Eighty-two million homes tuned in (including partial viewers) so clearly men got into the action as well. This massive number was even bigger than Netflix projected and made Bridgerton Netflixs biggest series at the time. While the global pandemic certainly helped initially, the momentum for this series did not die down.
Season 3s numbers continued to impress. This installment achieved 45.1M views opening weekend alone. Season 4 is primed to build on this momentum.
Who does Bridgerton season 4 focus on?
Season 4 is a Bridgerton twist on the Cinderella story. This time it is Benedict Bridgertons turn to find love. (Actor Luke Thompson is up to the challenge.)Benedict is the second oldest son which means he has a little more freedom than his older brother Anthony. He has used this freedom to pursue the arts and explore his sexuality, briefly considering a throuple in season 3.While his personality is bohemian, Violet fears he is a bit lost and needs to settle down. It is believed his sister Eloise (played by Claudia Jessie) will also be heavily featured in the season both because of their close relationship and the need to set up her future season.Last season also saw his sister Francesca married to John Stirling, the Earl of Kilmartin. Readers know some plot points also need to happen here for her season to be able to unfold.
What new actors are joining the cast in season 4?
Since Bridgerton is about a family, the core cast stays mainly the same with the focus shifting to whomevers love story is front and center for the season. Although sometimes this means fan favorites such as Simone Ashley (Kate Sharma) are not seen on screen. She is just one of the actors not listed on Netflixs official Season 4 cast announcement.Others not present are Jessica Madsen (Cressida Cowper), Bessie Carter (Prudence Featherington), James Phoon (Harry Dankwoth) or Harriet Cains (Philippa Featherington). Never fear the supporting cast does have additions to make up for these absences.Yerin Ha will don a mask for her turn as Benedict’s love interest Sophie Baek. The couple first meet at a masquerade ball that was teased in season 3.
L to R: Michelle Mao as Rosamund Li, Katie Leung as Lady Araminta Gao, and Isabella Wei as Posy Li. [Photo: Liam Daniel/Netflix]
The role of Lady Araminta Gun, aka the wicked stepmother, will be tackled by Katie Leung. Audiences might remember her from her role as Cho Chang in the Harry Potter movies.Rounding out the supporting cast are the stepsisters Michelle Mao as Rosamund Li and Isabella Wei as Posy Li.Fans can also expect to see familiar faces such as Jonathan Bailey, Nicola Coughlan, and Luke Newton.
What are the release dates for season 4?
Netflix is following a similar release schedule to season 3. The first four episodes will drop on Thursday, January 29, 2026 at 3 a.m. ET. The concluding four episodes of the season will debut on February 26, 2026.
As Italy prepares for the 2026 Winter Olympics, a crucial part of the prep is the manufacturing of artificial snow; the Olympics organizing committee plans to make 2.4 million cubic meters of the stuff.
The practice has become more and more common as climate change leads to warmer temperatures and less reliable snow packs. But as climate change worsens, artificial snow wont even be enough to help certain countries host the Winter Games.
By mid-century, the number of countries that could potentially host the Winter Olympic Games could be cut nearly in half, according to a recent study from the University of Waterloo.
Currently, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) says there are 93 potential host locations that have the winter sports infrastructure needed to host the games. That includes arenas for events like hockey and ice skating and areas for snow sports outside of a big city.
If countries continue with their current climate policies, though, that number drops to 52 locations that would remain climate-reliable for the Winter Olympics by 2050, according to the study, which was published in the journal Current Issues in Tourism.
For the Paralympics, which occur in March after the Olympics in February, the situation is even more dire: By 2050, there are only 22 potential host locations.
The Olympics need snowmaking
Those remaining locations would still require artificial snowmaking, a process that needs cold and dry air. In some places, its becoming too warm to even make snow or to maintain that snowpack.
Those are the [locations] that drop off our list of climate-reliable, says Daniel Scott, the study’s lead author and a professor in the Faculty of Environment at Waterloo.
This happened during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics: An El Nino brought record high temperatures along with rain to the area before the games, which meant officials couldnt make snow. Instead, they had to bring in snow via trucks and helicopters from higher elevations.
If the snow, real or artificial, melts and turns into slush, that becomes a safety issue for athletesand generally hinders their athletic performance.
Without snowmaking, the study found, the number of potential hosts for the Winter Olympics plummets to just four by the 2050s.
Those are Niseko, Japan; Terskol, Russia; and Val dIsre and Courchevel in France.
Is snowmaking sustainable?
To not use snowmaking makes about as much sense as moving hockey and figure skating back outside, the way it was in the 1930s, Scott says.
The question, then, is how to make snowmaking as sustainable as possible, just like how officials work to make their refrigerated arenas as sustainable as possible.
Snowmaking can require a lot of both energy and waterbut just how environmentally harmful it is depends on the specific location.
The power grid in France, for example, is nearly completely free of fossil fuels, so a higher electricity demand for snowmaking there wouldnt directly lead to more emissions.
In Utah, though, under 20% of electricity comes from renewable energy. That means making snow in Salt Lake City would come with a carbon footprint.
Making the Winter Olympics earlier
Along with looking at climate-reliable locations, the Waterloo study explored some adaptation strategies to make the Winter Games more resilient against rising temperatures.
Combining the Olympics and Paralympics so both occur in February, when colder temperatures are more likely, would be too difficult because of the size and complexity.
But the researchers found that if the games each shifted to be a few weeks earlier, the number of climate-reliable host locations for the Paralympics increases to 38. That would mean the Paralympics begin in the last week of February.
Cortina dAmpezzo, the Italian Alps town that will host certain events for the upcoming 2026 Olympics, has already seen the effects of climate change. February temperatures there are 6.4 degrees F warmer than in 1956, the first year Cortina hosted the Winter Games.
The IOC plans locations years in advance, meaning it relies on this kind of modeling data to make hosting decisions. The committee is already planning who will host the 2038 games, and after that are the 2040 Olympics, already close to that mid-century mark that eliminates a bunch of possible locales.
Its only going to become increasingly important for the IOC to pay attention to climate science. The past three years have been the hottest on record, and 2024 was the first year to surpass 1.5 degrees of human-caused warming.
If that kind of acceleration were to continue, it would be more and more important for [the IOC] to take note of, Scott says.
The more qualified you are today, the harder it is to get hired. This is not a guess. Its a documented, scientific reality.
A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that when job candidates were perceived as high-capability, highly experienced, highly credentialed, or simply more advanced than what a role required, they were less likely to be hired than lower-capability applicants, even when all other factors were equal.
The researchers behind this study discovered something most hiring managers would never admit: candidates who appear too good for a job are viewed with suspicion. Not because of any specific flaw, but because of what they might do.
They might leave too soon. They might expect too much compensation. They might act superior. They might disrupt the hierarchy. Or, they might just get bored and leave. So, employers hedge. They take the path of least resistance. They pass on the most capable candidates, not because they doubt their skills, but because they fear the candidates motives.
Increasingly, the overqualified label is used to avoid confronting deeper forms of bias against age, against education, or against those who they think may not fit into a companys hierarchy. These concerns are more emotional than rational, rooted in fear, insecurity, and a desire for safety, calm, and steadiness.
If youve been in the job market for a while and you have a long résumé, seniority, and lots of education behind you, youve felt this firsthand. Youve applied to roles that match your background perfectly and heard nothing. Its not in your head. The system is flagging you as a problem. Fortunately, this bias can be overcome.
Rewriting the story
The same study showed that high-capability candidates can get hired if they know how to rewrite the story that employers are telling themselves. The researchers found that when highly capable applicants took three specific actions, the hiring bias against them disappeared. Not reduced, eliminated. These specific actions include: 1) High commitment to the company and role, 2) Organizational alignment (culture and values), and 3) Hunger for the job at hand, not just any job.
Overall, the biggest fear hiring managers have about high-capability candidates is that theyre secretly holding out for something better. Of course, many are. They apply broadly. They keep doors open. They mention that theyre entertaining other opportunities during interviews. And thats exactly what sinks them. Like their search for the right culture fit, employers these days arent just hiring for skills, theyre hiring commitment. If they believe youll accept another offer or back out after an offer is extended, they wont take the risk. Period.
The study mentioned previously found that even the most qualified candidates were viewed more positively and were more likely to be hired when they showed high levels of commitment to both the company and the position. Not generic interest. Not professional courtesy. Real, observable, targeted commitment.
What to do
So how do you show that? You do it three ways: preparation, positioning, and language.
All three work together to shift the employers perception of you from flight risk to first choice.
Hiring managers can tell when a candidate has done their homework, and for experienced professionals, preparation matters even more. You cant rely on your résumé to do the convincing. You have to show them that you didnt just apply because the job matched a few keywords; you applied because you chose their company for a specific reason.
Many overqualified candidates unintentionally undermine their own commitment by saying things like, I already have a lot of experience in this area. Or plainly, Ive done this before. Or self-centeredly, This is a good fit for my background.
None of those statements signals loyalty. They signal neutrality at best. They say, I can do this job, not I want this job.
Lead with what’s next
To keep from accidentally positioning yourself as someone whos just applying to collect a paycheck, you need to stop leading with what youve done and start leading with what you want to do next. That next thing? Make it clear that its this role.
Theyre not asking to evaluate your ambitions. Theyre asking to evaluate your loyalty. What they want to hear is simple: I see myself here. Doing what the company needs. Evolving with the team. Staying, contributing, and growing.
They want language that says, This is not a temporary stop. This is where I plan to stay. Long-term commitment is what builds trust. Its what gets you hired in a system that assumes people like yousomeone experienced, overqualified, and resourcefulwill walk away the minute something shinier comes along.
The current hiring systems are built to minimize perceived risk. And right now, highly capable and credentialed job candidates look risky. Not because of what theyve done, but because of what employers assume theyll do next. If this sounds like you and you want to change it, you have to make new assumptions easier to believe. This isnt about playing small. Its about showing commitment, not ambivalence. Collaboration, not superiority. Focus, not distraction.
Removing the risk label requires you to own your experience and your intentions, at the same time.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani faced his first snowstorm as mayor over the weekend wearing a trio of jackets that had his new job title embroidered on the chest and sleeve. One was custom with a message written on the inside collar and typography on the front pulled from New York’s past.
Contrary to what you might assume, being elected mayor of New York doesn’t automatically get you access to a wardrobe of customized city agency jackets with “Mayor” embroidered on the outside hanging in the closet for you at Gracie Mansion. Those have to be given or made.
[Photo: Adam Gray/Bloomberg/Getty Images]
Two of the jackets he wore were given to him: a green fleece from the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY), and a black windbreaker from the New York City Emergency Management Department (NYCEM). A third, black, custom Carhartt jacket was personalized at the Brooklyn embroidery shop Arena Embroidery.
[Photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office]
The custom jacket features “The City of New York” written out in long-limbed serifs originally found on old municipal stationery letterhead from the 1980s and ’90s. The wordmark appears in white on the front right chest. Written inside of the collar, hidden from view of the cameras, is the phrase “No Problem Too Big, No Task Too Small.”
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The typographic style of the “The City of New York” mark is vintage, but it’s also back in vogue. Noah Neary, a senior adviser to Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, designed the mark, and the style can be seen on items like “New York or Nowhere” brand totes, or even on an “Eric Adams Raised My Rent” shirt from Mamdani’s mayoral campaign.
For elected officials, these officially embroidered jackets have become the unofficial uniform at public events when Mother Nature strikes. Surveying fire damage last year in California, for example, President Donald Trump wore a windbreaker with the presidential seal on the front and California Gov. Gavin Newsom wore a quarter-zip with a bear, referencing the state flag. For Mamdani, his jackets signaled common cause with the city’s workers during a deadly storm.
Political natural disaster wardrobe choices can easily veer into cosplay, like Republican lawmakers who dress like they’re going to a war zone when they’re just going to Texas. And simply wearing the right clothes to an event is not foolproof. What people remember about Trump’s visit to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 wasn’t his jacket, but the image of him tossing paper towels and the delay of billions of dollars worth of aid.
[Photo: Kara McCurdy/Mayoral Photography Office]
Dressing more casually, though, does serve as an important form of visual communication when storms, fires, earthquakes, or other threats arise. You don’t show up to a disaster zone in a suit and tie. For Mamdani, his jackets showed solidarity with a city, its workers, and its citizens during his first snowstorm in office with a custom nod to city history.
Have you ever had the experience of rereading a sentence multiple times only to realize you still dont understand it? As taught to scores of incoming college freshmen, when you realize youre spinning your wheels, its time to change your approach.
This process, becoming aware of something not working and then changing what youre doing, is the essence of metacognition, or thinking about thinking.
Its your brain monitoring its own thinking, recognizing a problem, and controlling or adjusting your approach. In fact, metacognition is fundamental to human intelligence and, until recently, has been understudied in artificial intelligence systems.
My colleagues Charles Courchaine, Hefei Qiu, Joshua Iacoboni, and I are working to change that. Weve developed a mathematical framework designed to allow generative AI systems, specifically large language models like ChatGPT or Claude, to monitor and regulate their own internal cognitive processes. In some sense, you can think of it as giving generative AI an inner monologue, a way to assess its own confidence, detect confusion, and decide when to think harder about a problem.
Why machines need self-awareness
Todays generative AI systems are remarkably capable but fundamentally unaware. They generate responses without genuinely knowing how confident or confused their response might be, whether it contains conflicting information, or whether a problem deserves extra attention. This limitation becomes critical when generative AIs inability to recognize its own uncertainty can have serious consequences, particularly in high-stakes applications such as medical diagnosis, financial advice, and autonomous vehicle decision-making.
For example, consider a medical generative AI system analyzing symptoms. It might confidently suggest a diagnosis without any mechanism to recognize situations where it might be more appropriate to pause and reflect, like These symptoms contradict each other or This is unusual, I should think more carefully.
Developing such a capacity would require metacognition, which involves both the ability to monitor ones own reasoning through self-awareness and to control the response through self-regulation.
Inspired by neurobiology, our framework aims to give generative AI a semblance of these capabilities by using what we call a metacognitive state vector, which is essentially a quantified measure of the generative AIs internal cognitive state across five dimensions.
5 dimensions of machine self-awareness
One way to think about these five dimensions is to imagine giving a generative AI system five different sensors for its own thinking.
Emotional awareness, to help it track emotionally charged content, which might be important for preventing harmful outputs.
Correctness evaluation, which measures how confident the large language model is about the validity of its response.
Experience matching, where it checks whether the situation resembles something it has previously encountered.
Conflict detection, so it can identify contradictory information requiring resolution.
Problem importance, to help it assess stakes and urgency to prioritize resources.
We quantify each of these concepts within an overall mathematical framework to create the metacognitive state vector and use it to control ensembles of large language models. In essence, the metacognitive state vector converts a large language models qualitative self-assessments into quantitative signals that it can use to control its responses.
For example, when a large language models confidence in a response drops below a certain threshold, or the conflicts in the response exceed some acceptable levels, it might shift from fast, intuitive processing to slow, deliberative reasoning. This is analogous to what psychologists call System 1 and System 2 thinking in humans
Conducting an orchestra
Imagine a large language model ensemble as an orchestra where each musician an individual large language model comes in at certain times based on the cues received from the conductor. The metacognitive state vector acts as the conductors awareness, constantly monitoring whether the orchestra is in harmony, whether someone is out of tune, or whether a particularly difficult passage requires extra attention.
When performing a familiar, well-rehearsed piece, like a simple folk melody, the orchestra easily plays in quick, efficient unison with minimal coordination needed. This is the System 1 mode. Each musician knows their part, the harmonies are straightforward, and the ensemble operates almost automatically.
But when the orchestra encounters a complex jazz composition with conflicting time signatures, dissonant harmonies, or sections requiring improvisation, the musicians need greater coordination. The conductor directs the musicians to shift roles: Some become section leaders, others provide rhythmic anchoring, and soloists emerge for specific passages.
This is the kind of system were hoping to create in a computational context by implementing our framework, orchestrating ensembles of large language models. The metacognitive state vector informs a control system that acts as the conductor, telling it to switch modes to System 2. It can then tell each large language model to assume different rolesfor example, critic or expertand coordinate their complex interactions based on the metacognitive assessment of the situation.
Impact and transparency
The implications extend far beyond making generative AI slightly smarter. In health care, a metacognitive generative AI system could recognize when symptoms dont match typical patterns and escalate the problem to human experts rather than risking misdiagnosis. In education, it could adapt teaching strategies when it detects student confusion. In content moderation, it could identify nuanced situations requiring human judgment rather than applying rigid rules.
Perhaps most importantly, our framework makes generative AI decision-making more transparent.Instead of a black box that simply produces answers, we get systems that can explain their confidence levels, identify their uncertainties, and show why they chose particular reasoning strategies.
This interpretability and explainability is crucial for building trust in AI systems, especially in regulated industries or safety-critical applications.
The road ahead
Our framework does not give machines consciousness or true self-awareness in the human sense. Instead, our hope is to provide a computational architecture for allocating resources and improving responses that also serves as a first step toward more sophisticated approaches for full artificial metacognition.
The next phase in our work involves validating the framework with extensive testing, measuring how metacognitive monitoring improves performance across diverse tasks, and extending the framework to start reasoning about reasoning, or metareasoning. Were particularly interested in scenarios where recognizing uncertainty is crucial, such as in medical diagnoses, legal reasoning, and generating scientific hypotheses.
Our ultimate vision is generative AI systems that dont just process information but understand their cognitive limitations and strengths. This means systems that know when to be confident and when to be cautious, when to think fast and when to slow down, and when theyre qualified to answer and when they should defer to others.
Ricky J. Sethi is a professor of computer science at Fitchburg State University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
In December 2025, the Department of Transportation (DOT) put out a call for design concepts for new terminals and concourses at Washington Dulles International Airport. The DOT claimed Dulles had fallen into disrepair and was “no longer an airport suitable and grand enough for the capital of the United States of America.”
The agency said it was looking for proposals to either replace the airport’s existing main terminal and satellite concourses or build upon them. It also noted Trump’s executive order calling for classical architecture in federal building projects.
Mobile lounges on the tarmac at Dulles International Airport [Photo: carterdayne/Getty Images]
A number of firms submitted proposals, including Ferrovial, Phoenix Infrastructure Group, and Alvarez & Marshal Infrastructure and Capital Projects. The submission from Bermello Ajamil & Partners and Zaha Hadid Architects included architectural renderings with a prominent feature that appears to be custom designed for a president who is fond of putting his name on things.
[Rendering: Ajamil & Partners/Zaha Hadid Architects, via USDOT]
The firms’ proposed terminal design would boast a “grand arch” made of a transparent facade and lettering that reads “Donald J. Trump Terminal.” In some renderings, the name is written out in Trajan, a serif font used by the Trump Organization. In one Reddit thread, commenters criticized the move as “shameless” and brought up Zaha Hadid’s work for authoritarian regimes.
[Rendering: Ajamil & Partners/Zaha Hadid Architects, via USDOT]
Renderings show the Trump terminal superimposed over the airport’s iconic existing terminal, completed in 1962 with a swooping concave roof and large window sides designed by architect Eero Saarinen. A departures hall in the proposed new building builds on Saarinen’s use of openness and natural light with a continuous skylight over a long-span roof.
[Rendering: Ajamil & Partners/Zaha Hadid Architects, via USDOT]
Bermello Ajamil & Partners has designed terminals for airports in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Past projects by Zaha Hadid Architects include Western Sydney International Airport in Australia, Bishoftu International Airport in Ethiopia, and Beijing Daxing International Airport in China. Zaha Hadid Architects did not respond to a request for comment.
As governor of South Dakota, one of the least populated states in the U.S., Kristi Noem still made an outsize name for herself nationally using public service announcement campaigns designed to capture attention. The topics of her PSAs have changed dramatically since then.
Before assuming her current Cabinet post as secretary of Homeland Security, the former state lawmaker and member of the U.S. House of Representatives served as South Dakotas governor from 2019 to 2025. In her first year as governor, the state ran a widely mocked anti-drug campaign called “Meth. We’re On It,” followed by “Freedom Works Here,” a workforce recruitment campaign in which she was featured prominently.
Once elevated to DHS secretary, Noem continued to utilize public funds for commercials promoting her particular brand of political communication, including a 2025 campaign in service of President Trump and his border and immigration policies.
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The nearly $1.4 million “Meth. We’re On It.” campaign ran on TV, billboards, and online (via the now defunct website onmeth.com), and it caught plenty of grief for its ambiguous tagline. Noem defended it at the time, writing on social media, “Hey Twitter, the whole point of this ad campaign is to raise awarenes. So I think thats working.”
“Meth. We’re On It.” was made to combat a real problem in the state, as South Dakota ninth graders tried meth at twice the national average, according to the creative brief for the campaign. Ultimately, it saw some success. By 2020, 1,072 people had clicked the find treatment link on the campaign’s website, 184 people called or texted the campaign’s help line, and 44 were referred to treatment. “Meth. We’re On It.” would become a finalist in the public health category for the Shorty Awards, a social media and digital advertising industry awards ceremony.
In spots for Freedom Works Here,” a South Dakota workforce recruitment campaign that aired nationally in 2023 and 2024, Noem dressed as a law enforcement officer, welder, and dentist as a play on the fact that there werent enough people to fill the state’s job openings, so she was doing them herself. As of July 2023, more than 3,500 people had applied to the program, Noem’s office said at the time. Yet the campaign was criticized as self-serving by some Republican state lawmakers.
At DHS, Noem was the face of the biggest political ad of 2025. The agency spent upwards of $50 million of taxpayer funds to air the spot, in which Noem both thanked Trump “for securing our border, deporting criminal illegal immigrants, and putting America first” and called directly for people in the U.S. illegally to leave. Though DHS denied it was a political ad, it sure looked and sounded like one, with B-roll pulled straight from the tropes of Republican attack ads about border security, like shots evoking crime, drugs, trafficking, and chaos at the border.
Through her political career, Noem has appeared in PSAs for vaccines and storm preparedness, though they didn’t receive the same multimillion-dollar budgets as her more controversial ads. She also starred in a video during last year’s government shutdown intended to be shown at airport security checkpoints that blamed Democrats for related closures and service slowdowns (although many airports did not air it).
There is growing bipartisan pressure for Noem to step down or be removed from her DHS post following the fatal shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration and border protection officers. Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina have called for her to resign, and House Democrats have threatened to begin impeachment proceedings against her if Trump doesn’t fire her.
Noem built a national profile in part by using her public office as a platform, but from her time in Sioux City to her days in Trumps administration, that platform became less civic and more brazenly partisan.
The anti-drug campaign Noem once defended caused eyerolls and snickers, but at least it was also the catalyst for more than a few calls to a hotline set up to help people facing addiction. Contrast that to 2025s “The Law,” in which she made herself the face of an immigration and border enforcement agenda that’s growing increasingly unpopular with the American public.
Noem’s recent PSA appearances indicate the value the Trump administration places on government as showbiz, and that for Noem, public office is theater.
For designers of the built environment, it’s necessary to take a long view. Years or even decades can go into the design and construction of a single project, and the best built projects can stand for centuries.
But the business of designing buildings is also subject to the upheavals and uncertainty of any given moment, including this very tumultuous one. Looking ahead to the (relatively) short-term future of the next year, Fast Company asked architects from some of the top firms working in the U.S. and around the world to predict the biggest forces shaping the industry this year, and the potential bright spots they might see.
Here’s the question we put to a panel of designers and leaders in architecture:
What challenges do you see architects tasked with solving in 2026, and what are potential new opportunity areas?
Collaboration is key
Affordable housing and supporting community resources are in crisisprojects that deliver proximity to public transportation, social infrastructure, and offer cultural resources such as restaurants and entertainment will be in high demand. Understanding the role a building plays within a broader community is a vital part of the design process that is often lacking. Collaboration needs to extend beyond cities and design teams to integrate community needs.
This year will bring many of the same challenges we have already seen: more pressure to deliver projects faster while maintaining the quality of the work, understanding what a high-performance building actually means, and streamlining public agency approvals. The latter is an area where AI would be a valuable tool to support innovation and efficiency. There is also a growing opportunity for greater partnership and collaboration with academia and architectural practice. It is important that there is heightened collaboration between the two, particularly because the skill sets of architects are expanding [to include] different job descriptions and needs.Nick Leahy, co-CEO and executive director, Perkins Eastman
Resilience is a given
2026 is the year when designing for resilience becomes a given. Innovation will be as much about systems as function, form, and aesthetics. We will think more about embodied carbon, and derive ways to deliver low-carbon buildings without cost premiums. Clients will no longer accept “green is more expensive.”
Opportunities: Reuse and reinventionthe second life of a building or district. Conversion of outmoded office buildings to residential and hotels where practical and possible, particularly with older, charming office stock in places where people want to live. Meanwhile, new office buildings will be A++ “luxury,” designed with new forms of amenities centered on wellness and socialization. In the suburbs, malls can become places where mixed-used districts arise, transformed into incubator or civic spaces, designed around health and wellness.
Parking lots can be filled with characterful streets and special 24/7 precincts. Workforce housing will also be a big opportunity that fills the gap between luxury and market rate, while data and energy projects will be relevant and exciting for architects not for their novelty but rather for the spatial intelligence and thoughtful planning required in their successful realization.Trent Tesch, principal, KPF
Sustainable design is harder than ever
One of the most significant challenges facing the U.S. building market in 2026 will be maintaining momentum for sustainable and regenerative design solutions amid economic and policy headwinds. The U.S. construction market has always been driven by a first-cost first mentality, while sustainable design has held its promise of return on investment in the long life cycle of buildings.
The hurdle has always been there, but now the bar is even higher with changes to the Energy Star program, the cutting of federal grants for clean energy, reductions to climate resilience programs, and more. So, architects and designers must move beyond purely ROI and well-being conversations to demonstrate how sustainability mitigates risk, ensures compliance, and drives long-term financial resilience.David Polzin, executive director of design, CannonDesign
Economic headwinds
At PAU we are continuing to incorporate artificial intelligence in aspects of our workflow, but only to augmentnever to replaceour teams talent and judgment. In 2026, architects will probably continue to face economic headwinds. The strong pace of firm consolidation through mergers and acquisitions continues, leaving the question of whether someday it will largely be a discipline split between boutique practices and behemoth corporations.Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder, PAU
More than just buildings
In 2026 climate volatility, housing inequity, infrastructural breakdown, and economic uncertainty will no longer be background conditions but active forces shaping every decision an architect makes. We will be asked to do more than deliver buildings; we will be expected to repair trust in systemspolitical and economicthat have too often failed communities and the environment.
We must navigate these higher expectations, delivering projects with tangible social, environmental, and economic benefits while grappling with tighter timelines and fewer resources. The central challenge will be remaining responsible to both environmental and civic ideals within delivery models that are not designed to reward either.Claire Weisz, founding principal, WXY architecture + urban design
Better decisions, earlier
Architects are working in a moment where pressure is coming from all sides; climate risks are intensifying, housing affordability remains unresolved, and the industry is still constrained by limited labor and capacity. At the same time, clients increasingly expect early, data-backed answers that show how a design will meet sustainability goals and deliver on long-term building performance outcomes.
The challenge is no longer just designing well but navigating increasing complexity and trade-offs without slowing projects down. This is driving the need to remove fragmentation of information across teams and project phases. The defining challenge that architects and designers will need to solve for in 2026 is making confident, defensible decisions early, when they have the biggest impact on [how] a projects environmental, cost, schedule, and performance outcomes are determined.Amy Bunszel, EVP of architecture, engineering, and construction solutions, Autodesk
They lie. Repeatedly. Shamelessly. They lie even when the truth would be easier. They lie when the lie can easily be debunked. They lie to dominate, confuse, and assert control. They treat contradiction as an attack and disagreement as betrayal. These are defining traits of narcissistic leadership.
Strangely enough, in politics and in organizations alike, we keep rewarding narcissistic leaders by giving them more power. We promote them, fund them, vote for them, excuse them, and normalize their behavior, even when there are unmistakable warning signs that should stop us from doing so.
It is obvious that narcissists seek power. The big (and more burning) question is: Why do we keep giving it to them?
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We choose narcissists when were anxious
Narcissism is often confused with confidence, ambition, or charisma. In reality, pathological narcissism is defined by grandiosity, a constant need for admiration, low empathy, intolerance of criticism, and a tendency to instrumentalize others.
At high doses, narcissism is deeply corrosive. Highly narcissistic leaders take greater risks, manipulate more freely, break rules more readily, and do not learn from failure. They externalize blame, rewrite history, and prefer loyal sycophants over competent professionals.
As organizational psychologist Adam Grant has argued, we are rarely naive about narcissistic leaders. Most of the time, we recognize them quickly. They boast. They monopolize attention. They perform outrage. They lie openly and repeatedly. We see itand we still choose them.
One of the main reasons is that chaos makes us crave certainty. In moments of crisiseconomic instability, war, technological disruption, climate anxietywe mistake loud confidence for competence. Nuance feels weak. Complexity feels unbearable. Fear narrows our tolerance for ambiguity. It makes us vulnerable to leaders who promise control, simplicity, and absolute answersno matter how fictional those answers may be.
Seen through this lens, Donald Trump is not really an anomaly. He is a symptom. His constant lying, grandiosity, and contempt for institutions are extreme, but the underlying dynamic is familiar. The same behaviorson a smaller scaleare rewarded every day in companies, startups, media organizations, and public institutions around the world.
7 Things We Must Change If We Want Fewer Narcissistic Leaders
If narcissistic leaders keep rising, it is because our systems keep selecting and protecting them. Changing outcomes requires changing the rules of the game. Here are seven shifts that matter.
1. Stop confusing visibility with value
Narcissistic leaders thrive on attention. They dominate meetings, interrupt others, and flood the space with what appears to be certainty. In too many environments, visibility is mistaken for contribution. To counter this, organizations must actively redesign how influence is expressedby limiting airtime and prioritizing written input, for example. Value should be measured by clarity created, not noise produced. Treating visibility as value creates a moral hazard: Those least constrained by doubt gain disproportionate influence.
2. Make lying costly
Narcissists lie because it works. Lies are tolerated, minimized, or reframed as communication style. This tolerance is fatal. False statements must be corrected publicly and promptly. Repeated dishonesty should carry clear reputational and career consequences. Treating truth as optional corrodes institutions fast. The longer a lie goes unchallenged, the more it signals that reality is negotiableand that power, not truth, sets the terms.
3. Evaluate leaders on collective outcomes
Narcissistic leaders often look impressive on individual metrics while quietly hollowing out their teams. Measuring leadership without accounting for turnover, burnout, disengagement, and loss of trust is profoundly wrong. Collective intelligence, psychological safety, and learning capacity must be treated as core performance indicatorsnot soft, secondary concerns. If results are achieved at the expense of trust, retention, and learning, they represent short-term extraction rather than sustainable performance.
4. Stop rewarding the will to power
Aggressively wanting power is not proof of leadership potential. In fact, narcissistic personalities are statistically more likely to self-nominate, campaign for authority, and pursue promotion relentlessly. Systems that equate ambition with suitability all but guarantee poor outcomes. Leadership selection should deliberately include capable individuals who do not seek power for its own sakeand should treat excessive self-promotion as a risk signal.
5. Institutionalize dissent
Narcissistic leaders fear contradiction and punish it, directly or indirectly. That is why dissent cannot rely on individual bravery alone. Organizations must structurally protect disagreement through formal devils advocate roles, strong whistleblower protections, and explicit rewards for surfacing bad news early. A leader who cannot tolerate dissent is fundamentally dangerous. Disagreement should be seen as a contribution to intelligence.
6. Redefine charisma
Charisma is too often equated with dominance, theatrical confidence, and verbal force. But sustainable leadership can look different: calm authority, restraint, curiosity, and the ability to change ones mind in light of new evidence. As long as we glamorize the worst kind of strong personalities, narcissistic leaders will continue to thrive. Our dominant definition of charisma is also deeply gendered. Traits coded as charismaticassertiveness, verbal dominance, emotional detachment, physical presencemap closely onto traditionally masculine norms, while behaviors more often associated with women (like listening) are systematically undervalued.
7. Address the root cause: Fear
Narcissistic leaders rise fastest in anxious systems. When people feel unsafeeconomically, socially, psychologicallythey outsource certainty to those who project it most loudly. Reducing precarity, increasing fairness, and building real psychological safety are not just mral imperatives. They are structural defenses against narcissistic leadership.
Narcissistic leaders do not seize power alone. They are enabledby our fears, our metrics, our myths about leadership, and our reluctance to confront uncomfortable truths. If we want different leaders, we must become different selectors. The problem is not that narcissists exist. Its that we keep mistaking them for leaders.
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Two years ago, the last pay phones were disconnected in Rochester, New York. But a group of volunteers has started bringing a handful of phones backand making them free to use.
Called the GoodPhone Project, the effort is aimed at people who still dont have reliable access to a mobile phone, including those experiencing homelessness. As pay phones have disappeared, alternatives have been hard to come by.
A lot of community centers, and especially the Monroe County libraries, were being inundated with people asking to use their front desk phones, says Eric Kunsman, one of the volunteers behind the project.
[Photo: Eric T. Kunsman/GoodPhone]
Theres a clear need: The handful of phones that the GoodPhone Project has installed each get hundreds of uses per month. Around 20% of the calls go to social services. (Calls have a 20-minute limit unless theyre made to social service organizations, since that often involves a long wait on hold.)
The upcycled phones use voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology and allow users to set up their own voicemail extensions, so its possible to use the number when they apply for a job.
Kunsman, a photographer who teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology, spent years photographing pay phones in the area as they were slowly taken away. He soon realized that despite seeming like relics, the phones were still in use. He partnered with colleagues Rebekah Walker, a digital librarian, and researcher Janelle Duda-Banwar to map out the phones locations. The last phones to survive were in the poorest areas.
[Photo: Eric T. Kunsman/GoodPhone]
When the Frontier phone company removed the last phones, the group decided to do something. They found a Los Angeles-based company that still installs pay phones, called Littlejohn Communications, and converted old phones to add VoIP and make it clear that theyre free to use. Six have been installed so far, all in neighborhoods that had the most need. One of the phones is solar-powered, since its in a location that didnt have access to electricity.
The project is relatively inexpensive. An old pay phone costs around $350. (Kunsman tried to acquire Frontiers old phones in Rochester before they were scrapped, but didnt succeed.) The digital device to convert it costs $50, and operations cost around $40 per month. Kunsman has also received some donations of equipment, and says he currently has around 200 old pay phones sitting in front of his photography studio.
[Photo: Eric T. Kunsman/GoodPhone]
He hopes that the city or county can take over the project as a public service and expand it. Im a photographer, Kunsman says. If Im still doing this in five years, we failed in some way.
Previously there were around 1,400 pay phones in Rochester. Roughly 20 years ago, there were 2 million nationally; by 2016, that number had dropped to 100,000. At that point, the Federal Communications Commission stopped tracking the number that were left.
Kunsman wants to make a guide for other communities that want to replicate the process. Since December, he says hes heard from groups in seven other cities that recognized a similar need. “If a photographer, a social sciences librarian, and others can do this, it’s actually a lot easier than it seems,” he says. “You just need to have the time.”
