Why Airlines Are Always Going Bankrupt

How aviation companies (fail to) make a profit

It might not be the most important story in the world right now, as our species takes its first halting steps into a brave new world of technological power whose contours are still to us mysterious and weighted with fearful portent, but lately I’ve been spending a good bit of time reading about the death of Spirit Airlines. Spirit, for those lucky enough to have never flown on one of its planes—I have a few memories of terrible Spirit flights from New York to Miami in my teenage years—is, or rather was, one of the ten or so largest airlines in the United States, and, after its more popular rival Southwest, the most prominent of the budget airlines. (JetBlue is somewhat larger, but can’t be considered a “true” budget airline.) And, for the last few years, Spirit had been hurtling toward insolvency.

Spirit had last turned a profit in 2019; things turned disastrously bad with the COVID pandemic in 2020—as was the case for every other airline—but whereas larger flyers generally recovered, things went from bad to worse for Spirit. Corporate leadership pursued a merger with JetBlue, but this was blocked by a federal judge. And so in November 2024, Spirit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; then it filed again, less than a year later, in August 2025. But these filings did little to save Spirit. There was talk of liquidating the company. The Trump administration raised the prospect of a capital injection that would leave the federal government with a 90 percent stake in the airline (the first time in American history that the federal government has owned a passenger airline outright), but the talks collapsed, and so in early May 2026 Spirit announced that it was shutting down for good.

The collapse of Spirit was unique in that in its death throes it managed to solicit a bailout offer from the U.S. government; but it was not unique among its fellow airlines in going broke. Airlines are a bad business: a really, really bad business. The International Air Transport Association, the trade body of the global airline industry, has documented for years that airlines as a sector destroy investor value in the aggregate. The IATA’s 2026 outlook, looking forward to a quite strong year—this was before the Iran war broke out and oil prices surged—projected an average return on invested capital of 6.8 percent, against a weighted average cost of capital of 8.2 percent. As the IATA’s report said, “the airline industry collectively does not generate earnings that cover its cost of capital.” This has been the case for a long time. From its deregulation in 1978 to the end of 2025, the airline industry has cumulatively lost money: its net profit over those 47 years sits at negative $37 billion.

Given these grim economics, you won’t be surprised to hear that airlines have a bad habit of going insolvent. This includes many of the most famous names in the history of aviation. Pan Am, long the unofficial flag carrier of the United States, ceased operations in 1991; Eastern Air Lines liquidated the same year; TWA, the carrier of Howard Hughes, was absorbed into American Airlines after a third bankruptcy filing in 2001; Braniff died in 1982. And those are only the most famous names; countless aviation startups have come and gone. (Have you ever heard of Trump Shuttle?) Even airlines with the backing of a national government go bankrupt all the time: Alitalia, Italy’s flag carrier, reported only a single year of profit since its founding in 1946 and was saved countless times by the Italian government before ultimately ceasing operations in 2021. Even those airlines that survive for long periods of time are perpetually in financial distress. Between 1978 and 2005, more than 160 airlines filed for bankruptcy; virtually every major U.S. carrier other than Southwest has been to bankruptcy court at least once. In September 2005, every one of the four largest American airlines—United, Delta, Northwest, and US Airways—was operating simultaneously under Chapter 11 protection.

This is very strange. There’s not really a conventional economic explanation for an industry whose long-term equilibrium is losing money: an industry that, on a purely economic level, should not exist. Warren Buffett once called the airline industry a “bottomless pit” for investor capital. “Indeed,” he wrote, “if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.”

So why is the airline business so remarkably bad?

One answer is that airlines are particularly vulnerable to shocks. There are so many potential risks with air travel that practically anything going wrong will have some effect. The September 11th attacks, for example, had a huge effect on air travel; so did the surging oil prices of the 2000s, the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting recession, the 2020 pandemic, and now the volatility in oil prices surrounding the Iran war. Whenever a major shock occurs you tend to see a huge wave of airline bankruptcies.

But airlines obviously aren’t the only type of business in the world that’s vulnerable to shocks. Hotels, for instance, are heavily exposed to recessions, terrorism, and pandemics; their costs are heavily front-loaded into the property, just as an airline’s costs are loaded into the plane; and yet the hotel industry doesn’t go through synchronized waves of bankruptcy each time a shock hits. Shocks might explain why airlines tip over the edge into restructuring or liquidation; but they don’t really explain why they’re so vulnerable in the first place, or why the airline sector—uniquely among all major industries—is unable to generate profit in the aggregate.

And we don’t see the same structural unprofitability in any of the other companies of the aviation ecosystem: engine and avionics manufacturers, for example, do totally fine; so do the service suppliers that sell into airlines.

Maybe, then, the answer is that airlines specifically are just poorly managed. This was the dominant view in the 2000s and 2010s: legacy full-service carriers were chronic money-losers; budget airlines, like Southwest and Ryanair, were much more profitable; and so in the future air travel would bifurcate into budget aviation for the masses and Emirates-style luxury travel for the few. But the budget airlines don’t look so good anymore. Spirit was a flagship budget airline and has now been liquidated; JetBlue and Frontier, two budget or semi-budget competitors, are also at risk of bankruptcy; even Southwest, the most durable and iconic of the low-cost carriers, has been unable to make a profit since the pandemic and is now fending off an activist challenge from the hedge fund Elliott Management. So the budget strategy clearly wasn’t a solution to the airline industry’s problems.

So explanations that cite shocks or bad management either explain too much or too little. If it’s just vulnerability to shocks, why don’t other industries have such huge bankruptcy waves? And if it’s bad management, why has no airline in the long history of aviation figured out a replicable solution to running the business profitably?

I’d like to suggest that the problem with the airline industry is much deeper than people seem to think. Losing money in the aggregate is a feature, not a bug, of a competitive airline industry. The airline sector, for reasons that go into the essential nature of the industry, cannot reach a profitable competitive equilibrium. This is not because airlines are vulnerable to shocks or because they’re poorly managed. The airline industry itself can either be profitable, or it can be competitive: but it can’t really be both.

To understand why, we have to learn a little bit about game theory.

by David Oks, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Mike Kelley from “Life Cycles” series
[ed. Interesting thesis. I'd never have imagined the industry as being systemically unprofitable given ticket prices and all the add-on charges. Or, at least wildly profitable during certain periods to compensate for the occasional downdrafts.]

Ronnie Earl & The Broadcasters

[ed. From Just For Today (full album). Bonus: Song for a Sun:]

Banter

I run into a lot of people who don’t seem to understand what banter is. In my experience, it has exactly two ingredients:

• You call someone out for a transgression that is, in fact, a transgression—something where they are in fact cringe, have in fact lost some points.

• You do so in a context and in a manner where it’s clear that this doesn’t matter, overall—that they are safe, and still “in.” That the loss is small and absorbable and forgettable.

That’s it.

If you (metaphorically or literally) fart while everyone is eating, and nobody mentions it, this can be a certain kind of anxiety-inducing. It’s not clear whether the faux pas was noticed, and by whom; it’s not clear whether it’s being left unmentioned because it’s a really big deal, actually; it’s not clear whether maybe people are going to talk about it later, behind your back, or whether the loss of status is so great that actually this is the last time you’ll be invited, or whether they think that you are so fragile and thin-skinned that they don’t dare to just … acknowledge plain reality.

But if you fart, and everybody groans and calls you the Field-Marshal of Flatulence, and there’s good-natured laughter, and then the conversation moves on to the next target…

What’s happened is that a cap has been put, on how bad it could possibly be. That the group feels safe acknowledging plain reality. They feel like it’s fine. They’re showing, viscerally, that it’s fine. They’re defusing the potential of social land mines by loudly stomping around, laughing and unafraid. They’re not so concerned over the loss of a few points that they’re making A Big Deal Out Of It.

This can go south, in a number of ways. It’s not always easy to distinguish loving banter from contempt; they sort of necessarily use the same words and the same channels.

And if you yourself are not secure in your position within the group—if you’re either genuinely afraid that you don’t have very many points, or if you just kind of happen to be eternally socially anxious, such that you feel threatened by the pointing-out—this can cause you to react loudly to the attempted gentle slug-on-the-shoulder, in a way that demonstrates back to the group that it’s not safe to josh you, actually, and that whole thing can start a spiral away from a starting point that was actually safe (if only you’d known).

But overall, friendships that have had a few fights and then recovered feel more secure than friendships that have only ever been Good Vibes Only. People who’ve made a couple of mistakes and come out of it fine are less terrified of misstepping than people who’ve never gotten anything wrong, in a given context, and don’t know what will happen if they do. One feels less scared of small downturns in the market if one has been investing for a while, and seen the squiggles go up and down, and trusts that they mostly go up in the end.

Banter is your friends’ expression of the sentiment “We see you. We actually see you. We see your flaws, your foibles. We accept you, warts and all. We’re not going to only conspicuously be accepting of your carefully curated best face.” [...]

Banter is your friends telling you “look, yeah, you lost some points, but whatever, you had 9567 and now you have 9548, big deal, nobody cares.”

And that’s a lot more safety-inducing, for most people, than “Whoa, whoa, whoa—you just lost 19 points!? Jesus, you’d better get your shit together, you can’t afford to do that very many times.”...

And it’s a lot more safety-inducing, for most people, than [embarrassing moment] → [radio silence]. Radio silence could mean anything.

by Duncan Sabien, Homo Sabiens |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

Jan Lauschmann, Bent Tree, 1934

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Ukai Uchiyama (1907-1983), Spring Onion and Taro

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[ed. Juilliard School of Fine Arms.]

Japanese House

Shooting and Crying

The focus of a recent conversation on the New York Times’s “The Opinions” podcast with Jia Tolentino and Hasan Piker, hosted by Nadja Spiegelman, was whether stealing from large corporations is justified and/or constitutes a meaningful form of protest or political action. Most of the controversy that ensued had to do with the fact that while Tolentino denied the latter (“Any successful direct action in history has to be ostentatious, has to make itself known, it’s ideally collective”), she affirmed the former, and not so sheepishly admitted to stealing from Whole Foods herself. Commentators expressed outrage at her glib affirmation of petty crime. What caught my attention however was something different altogether. It wasn’t a matter of questionable conduct, or a specious form of moral reasoning, per se. What struck me was a peculiar understanding of what it means to be moral at all.

Spiegelman ended the conversation by asking, “What’s one thing that you think should be OK but currently isn’t OK?” Piker answered briefly, “I.P. theft. Stealing movies, things like that.” But Tolentino struggled to answer the question directly:

One thing that should be legal that isn’t—it’s interesting, because I have to regularly explain this stuff to a small child, and have so thoroughly explained to her that some things are against the rules, but they’re OK, depending on who you are. And some things are not against the rules, but they’re not OK. There are so many perfectly legal things I do regularly that I find mildly immoral. Like getting iced coffee in a plastic cup. I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action. I have taken so many planes for so many pleasure reasons; I have acted in so many selfish ways that are not only legal, but they’re sanctioned and they’re unbelievably valorized, culturally. So, maybe things like blowing up a pipeline, let’s say that. (Emphasis mine.)

Spiegelman found this particularly relatable. “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society,” she agreed. “I’m constantly acting in ways that don’t align with my belief system. And constantly having to justify that, like ordering in food when it’s raining out … my comfort is more important than someone bringing me food through the rain. And it doesn’t feel good. But it is part of living—I mean, no one’s making me do that, but it is part of the way in which we live in our society.”

On the standard view of what it means to act in the light of moral knowledge—to act while possessing a capacity to tell right from wrong—when one confronts a moral injunction, say, “don’t do X,” one faces a choice between two courses of action: refrain from Xing or figure out why “don’t do X” is only apparently a moral injunction. Show, to yourself if not also to others, why it is, in general, or under these circumstances, okay to do X.

Both paths can be difficult. Not Xing may come at great personal cost, or one might really love Xing. And figuring out why it is actually okay to do X could be tricky because it might just not be okay to do X, at all; or the argument to the effect that Xing is fine, actually, might be elusive, requiring a lot of serious thinking; or these arguments may be such as to put one in conflict with oneself—with other beliefs one espouses and ways one conducts oneself—or with others, on whose companionship, or approval, or readership, one depends. In other words, the incentives to find ways to both do X and distance oneself from doing X, at one and the same time, are plentiful and powerful.

Jia Tolentino has always been particularly interested in such dilemmas. In her best-selling 2019 essay collection Trick Mirror, she wrote probingly about the difficulty of abstaining from Amazon, Ballet Barre, Sephora, expensive haircuts and salad chains. In 2026, she adds to these moral torments iced coffee in plastic cups and flying for pleasure. By her own admission, all of these temptations might be just the tip of the iceberg.

Tolentino’s curious confessions—“I do so many immoral things every day!” she jauntily reassured Spiegelman—put me in mind of an expression in Hebrew that is meant to capture a way of responding to the powerful incentives to do X and distance oneself from doing X at one and the same time: yorim ve bochim, “shooting and crying.”

Shooting and crying is a term of derision directed at the attitude that IDF soldiers and Israelis more generally have been known to take toward the violence they routinely employ. While it was first and mostly subsequently used to mock a certain kind of post-factum lament—soldiers complaining after the Six Day war, or the first Lebanon war, or the second Lebanon war, or the Gaza war, about the military’s conduct, the implicit idea is that the crying and the shooting might as well be contemporaneous. This is because, while in individual cases those accused of shooting and crying might have been expressing genuine moral contrition—indeed some of those blithely accused of shooting and crying have gone on to dedicate their lives to justice and reform—collectively, a certain kind of crying enables rather than curbs moral disaster. This is the kind of crying that is calibrated to express regret not for what one has done and should not have done so much as for what one, regrettably, had to do. In this way, the avowed hatred of violence absolves the personal and national conscience (cf. “I find that to be a profoundly selfish, immoral, collectively destructive action”) and thereby clears a path for its infinite repetition (cf. “I do so many immoral things every day”). At the same time, the professed “moral injury” to self turns the perpetrator into a victim (cf. “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society”). The problem with shooting and crying is that all too often you are not really crying for anyone but yourself.

Far be it from me to propose that a slippery slope leads from Ballet Barre to what Tolentino would be very happy to call a genocide. At the same time, Tolentino’s own moral trajectory does suggest, minimally, that one is liable to gain a certain facility with the move. Do it enough and shooting and crying starts to come easy.

by Anastasia Berg, The Point |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I love this term - shooting and crying. It applies to so many bad decisions and behaviors (especially former and present wars). After the fact contrition where before the fact certainty once ruled. If only we had known then what we know now. No. You were told then and refused to listen.] 

AI Jobs For the Future

[ed. If we have one.]

The jump from working with a chatbot to having an agent that actually helps automate a process requires a real amount of work. 

Most companies will need to have dedicated people that are responsible for bringing automation to their teams, instead of leaving this up to every individual employee. Partly because the work is more technical than we imagine today, and partly because it’s just hard to do this as a side project. 

The job spec is to map out new workflows with agents, implement new systems to deploy agents, make sure the agent has all the right (up to date) context to work with, wiring up internal systems to connect to the agents, creating evals for the agents, figuring out where the human is in the loop, managing the system when there are new upgrades, helping with the change management of the existing business process, and so on. 

These jobs may come from IT or engineering, or live directly in the business function itself. They’ll be called different things depending on the company, and in some sense it’s the future of software engineering that you’ll see a huge growth of in non-tech companies. Most companies will have to be hiring for this now or in the future, and it’s another example of the kind of new jobs that will be created in AI.

by Aaron Levie, X |  Read more:

[ed. Once these processes are up and running it's hard to see why they would need continual human maintenance.]

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[ed. Courtesy Palantir surveillance systems. See also: What does Palantir Actually Do? (Wired).]

What Makes Art Great?

Shakespeare is excellent, whereas AI writing is — at least, for now — dull. AIs can now write much of our code, review legal contracts, and perform various impressive feats; they have achieved gold-medal-level scores at the IMO. But, as of this writing, I am not aware of a truly interesting AI-written poem or even essay. Why?

This breaks down into two questions:

1. What makes texts good?

2. Why is it difficult for AI to do that?

This essay will focus on question 1, and is thus mostly about aesthetics.

1. Surprise

One of the things that so offends us about AI ‘slop’ images is a sense that the details don’t matter. The cup is green, but it may as well have been blue. In good human works, every detail feels carefully chosen. Arbitrarily changing a color in a Hopper painting would make it worse.

You can put this in terms of compression. A cliche illustration of, say, a vase of flowers can just be described as “imagine a New Yorker cartoon of a vase of flowers“. But a really good painting of a vase of flowers can only be captured by seeing the painting itself: nothing else will substitute. Great artworks are hard to compress (i.e. have high information content); slop is easy to compress. When you type a few short sentences into an AI image generator and it makes you an image for your blog post, you are likely generating slop because you are injecting relatively little information yourself. 

Another word for ‘high information’ is ‘surprising’. Thus:

1. Great art is not predictable or obvious, it is surprising.

One can explain this using the predictive processing model of the brain. As we are scanning a text, our brain is constructing the meaning and predicting the next several words. Where there is no surprise — where something is perfectly predictable, or fits some pattern that we know — our brain registers only dullness. When our expectations are violated in a way that’s satisfying to resolve, we get pleasure and novelty. [...]

Compare the famous passage from Macbeth, where both of the bolded words are famously surprising:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Hence, too, the story of the writing professor who would give his students a copy of the below stanza from Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings with many words blanked out, and ask them to guess those words, and claimed that nobody had ever gotten ‘hothouse’ or ‘uniquely’:

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose…

The value of surprise is more obvious in visual art. In his four-volume work The Nature of Order, the architect Christopher Alexander gives this example from a Fra Angelico painting:

Alexander asks us to cover up the black stripe on the priest’s robes and the door, and imagine we were the painter:

Imagine some moment before the black of the door and priest’s robe had been painted, but when everything else is more or less already there...You can see what I mean by putting your hand over the picture, so as not to see the black parts. Do you see that the picture loses much of its haunting character...can you see how immensely surprising it is?
— Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 4, p. 133

The surprise principle operates in other ways, too. We barely see everyday objects because we are so used to them (low novel information again), but great art can make you see these objects afresh, the way a child might. This too is a kind of surprise, sometimes called defamiliarization. This is a favorite technique of Tolstoy’s, who often takes a normal action that we are all familiar with, and describes it the way an alien might. Thus he describes a person being whipped as “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor...“ and so on, deconstructing the action without ever using the word ‘whipping’. This makes you feel the action much more viscerally than if he had just used the word to summarize it.

These are all familiar points to lovers of art. But the surprise principle operates at even deeper levels, below even our conscious perception. [...]

My main argument in this section has been that surprisingness, or strangeness, operates at many different levels in the art we value: word choice (or color choice), grammar, sentence, plot, form, and so on. This strangeness is essential for the effect of great art, because we like to make sense of things, and if we make sense of things too easily they are not interesting to us; great works of art are therefore necessarily somewhat difficult to grasp the meaning of, their meanings are multiple and constantly shifting, and they require a pleasant kind of effort to make sense of.

To go back to AI, all of this gives us some sense of why LLMs aren’t great writers by default. At the word level, they tend to pick relatively ‘obvious’ choices. Thus, I ask the model currently considered the best AI writer: “write a descriptive paragraph about a day in the park“ and it starts with: “A warm afternoon unfolds in the park, where sunlight filters through the canopy of old oak trees and dapples the ground in shifting patterns of gold and green“. Note that this is the most cliche possible detail to have picked, and the word ‘dapples’ is the most common word to use in this context; in short, the whole thing is unsurprising.

And yet: you cannot fix this problem simply by asking the AI to be more surprising. Why?

2. Echoes

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms…
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles

The most surprising sequence of numbers is a random one, but a random sequence of numbers is not great art. You need more than just surprise. The details of great artworks relate to each other somehow. They are chosen in such a way that they cohere with each other at multiple levels.

Great works are full of patterns. They are as intricately patterned as Persian rugs or Norwegian stave churches. [...]

2. Great art contains multiple overlapping layers of echoes.

This is often harder to spot in verbal artifacts, but it is this feature that I think distinguishes really good works of art from merely ‘ok’ ones.

Most of us are familiar with the surface level ways of doing this: rhyme, for example, knits together different lines of a poem in a semantically irrelevant way that nevertheless makes it feel like part of a unifying whole. Same with assonance and other such effects most of us are familiar with from English class. It is echoes, for example, that make so many verses from the King James Bible so pleasing and beautiful to listen to:

“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” (Isaiah 60:1)

Note the echoing vowel sounds throughout in ‘arise’, ‘shine’, ‘light’, and ‘thy’. Rhyme and assonance are verbal echoes.

In music, the most famous example perhaps is Beethoven’s Fifth, with its famous “ba-ba-ba-BUM“ theme; the short-short-short-long statement in the beginning then echoes through that movement in thousands of ways, sometimes stretched, sometimes slowed down, so that the whole movement feels like an organic thing that has grown from that single seed.

Good art layers these, one on top of another, to build up artifacts of stunning complexity. These are the text equivalents of Gothic cathedrals. Each layer alludes to other layers, too, adding more and more constraints, until you get an artifact where changing any one word does violence to the whole.

To see this density in action, let’s look at Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15. Click through the layers to see how a single fourteen-line poem simultaneously participates in half a dozen independent systems of meaning — sonic, structural, thematic, and more.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 15 

When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheerèd and checked even by the selfsame sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory:
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night:
And, all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I ingraft you new.

(The interactive version of this essay lets you click through a few layers of the poem and see the below analysis.) [...]

Echoes are sewn through sophisticated literary works in more subtle ways, too.

Thus Nabokov, in his Lectures on Literature, points out that Anna Karenina is filled with trains and railway images even apart from the fact that the main plot points occur at railway stations; Kafka’s Metamorphosis is filled with occurrences of the number three. Lots of movies and books use Christian symbolism this way — crosses, doves, and so on. Macbeth is full of birds (ravens, crows, bats, owls, the Thane of *Caw*dor...).

Sometimes these symbols are significant, as in the Christian symbolism; and sometimes they are insignificant, as in the number three; but either way, the density of these symbols strewn throughout a work give it an additional coherence that would be lacking if you wrote down things at random. It gives it the same type of coherence that you see when you look at a beautiful tree, or a grassy field: things feel right. This feeling of rightness is achieved through these echoes.

by Nabeel S. Qureshi, Substack | Read more:
Image: Fra Angelico

Vermeer, View of Delft (1660)
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A Life Hack for the Ultra-Wealthy Is Going Mainstream

Here is the promise of a house manager. Hire one, and soon someone else could be doing your laundry, washing your dishes, prepping your meals, and completing those Amazon returns you’ve been meaning to make. They could reorganize the utensil drawer, notice if your kid is outgrowing their shoes and order more, take your car to the repair shop, and be at home to meet the plumber. If your child needs food for a class party, a house manager could make the dish and drop it off; if that child also has a pet lizard, a house manager could buy the crickets to feed it.

House managers are not a nanny or a house cleaner. They’re a “chief of staff for the home,” a “personal assistant for Mom,” and “a clone of myself,” according to the more than a dozen people I spoke with who have either hired one or work as one. They are, in effect, what might have once been called a housekeeper—a person who helps oversee a household’s basic functioning. Middle- and upper-class families used to more commonly employ this kind of position (the title “house manager” dates back to at least the 1830s), but it has become rare enough that a couple of people I spoke with thought they may have come up with the term.

Whatever you call the job, the ultra-wealthy have maintained some version of this role in their homes for years, but more and more companies are cropping up to serve Americans with salaries in the lower six figures—a cohort that is nowhere near having a private jet but might already use a house cleaner or have a regular handyman.

Some will argue that shouldering the burden of household work is a necessary part of adulthood. But for many on the high side of the country’s wealth divide, time is at enough of a premium that buying it back feels worth the money. Kelly Hubbell, who in 2023 founded Sage Haus, a company that helps people find house managers, told me that many of her clients are dual-income households where tasks pile up beyond what two adults can handle; a house manager steps in as a third. Several women described their house manager to me as “my wife.” One company offering the service is even called “Rent A Wife—Oregon.” (Its founder, Brianna Ruelas Zuniga, knows what the name sounds like; she still likes it, she told me.)

Many house-managing businesses started around the country at about the same time. In 2022, Amy Root was running a home-organization business in central Connecticut—clearing out people’s garages and adding shelving to their closets—but she realized that even if she got the right home systems in place, “the laundry still needed to get done,” she told me. People needed “help with their regular to-dos but also the aspiration checklist,” such as finally hanging that one painting they bought a year ago, she said. In 2023, she pivoted to running a house-managing business, Personal Assistant for Mom, and now leads a team of five (soon to be seven) part-time house managers.

The crew includes retirees and empty nesters, as well as a woman training to be a doula and an artist who needed an extra gig. Rates for house managers generally are $25 to $50 an hour; some agencies take a cut. (Sage Haus charges clients a finder’s fee; house managers are paid directly.) Today’s version of the job is very much part of the gig economy, and like many gig workers, the managers are usually responsible for their own health insurance. Some of the house managers I spoke with work full-time for one family, but many are cobbling together part-time gigs with multiple families while also working as a nanny or cleaner.

When Root tells people what a house manager does, most of the time, their response is “Someone will do that for me?” A time-saving purchase like that just doesn’t occur to a lot of people, Ashley Whillans, a Harvard Business School professor who studies such spending, told me... “I’m buying back joy and time where I can right now,” Barbara Mighdoll, a mother of two and a business owner who now has a house manager for 15 hours a week, told me. Each time her house manager does a chore, she said, “that is a tab that is now closed in my brain.” When she’s with her family, she no longer has ticker tape running through her head about the laundry she needs to put away. The house manager already took care of it.

A purchase like that really can buy happiness, according to Whillans’s research. She and her colleagues have found that when people outsource bothersome chores and reinvest that time in something they actually care about, they report being more satisfied with their life. (Anyone who hates doing the dishes will not be surprised by this.) In one study, she and her co-authors found that couples who take that freed-up time and spend it on each other say that it improved their relationship. So far, Whillans has yet to see a point at which couples who off-load their to-dos stop getting happier. Some tentative evidence, she said, suggests that when given money for time-saving purchases, lower-income people report more benefits than their wealthier counterparts. But where someone in the so-called upper-middle class might consider $30 an hour a bargain, being able to buy back time is still a luxury.

by Nancy Walecki, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: The Atlantic
[ed. As I've gotten older, I've sometimes imagined what I really need is a personal secretary. Not a care-taker or health aide or some other limited form of assistance, but someone who's overseeing all the tasks in my frantic, highly complex, and multi-dimensional life (ha!). Actually, the thought evolved mostly after reading Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, then listening to an interview with Joni Mitchell where she casually mentions in passing her secretary's duties, including among other things, taking care of her scheduling, providing companionship, grocery shopping, driving, bill paying, and almost everything else. I thought wow, now that's it. That's what I need!]

How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom

Amy Warren's “mom siren” went off when her seventh-grader in Wichita, Kan., seemed to know too much about Fortnite, a battling-and-shooting videogame he is barred from playing.

When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal.

His feed was rife with inappropriate content. Videos glorifying gun culture, asking about silencers on Nerf guns, “head shots” where children realistically portray being killed, a video with sexually explicit jokes about neighbors sleeping together.

YouTube had served up “shorts”—video after video that it algorithmically determined that he might like.

“It made me cry,” Warren said. “All of a sudden it’s this kind of gun slop, by no fault of his own. ” She later ran for school board and won in November, eager to galvanize change.

American public schools are awash in YouTube. According to more than 45 families, school administrators, clinicians and educators across the country interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, schools’ overreliance on the Google-owned platform for educational content has created a gateway for students to get sucked into an infinite scroll of videos on school-issued devices.

YouTube during snack time, dismissal and indoor recess. YouTube to teach drawing to first-graders. YouTube to read a book to class. YouTube under the covers at night, watching hamster videos on school-issued Chromebooks. A survey touted by YouTube executives shows that 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles...

The concern about YouTube arrives during a crisis in education. American math and reading scores have slid to their lowest point in decades. Many educators, families and learning scientists say they can no longer blame pandemic learning loss; the decline has coincided with a dramatic increase in school screen time, turbocharged by the embrace of 1:1 devices by more than 88% of public schools, according to government survey data. YouTube and Meta recently lost a landmark social-media addiction trial, with a jury finding the companies negligent for operating products that harmed children. YouTube said it’s appealing the ruling.

Chromebooks—primed for Google software and YouTube—have about 60% of the K-12 mobile device market, according to Futuresource Consulting. Apple iPads are also a popular school device. YouTube is a top-viewed website on school devices, sometimes accounting for half of student traffic, according to administrators and web-filtering companies.

YouTube says school administrators control what students watch at school, and it supports districts deciding what’s best for their children. “Our tools allow administrators to block the platform entirely or restrict access to teacher-assigned videos only, with no ads, recommendations, or browsing,” said YouTube spokesperson José Castañeda. But some districts and teachers said Google’s tools and content filters haven’t met their needs for a variety of reasons.

In some school districts, including Wichita, efforts to block all or part of the platform proved futile. Students found workarounds: logging out of their district accounts, sharing YouTube links in Google Slides and Docs and other backdoors in, parents, teachers and students say. Google says it’s fixed the Slides and Docs bug.

When Warren asked about blocking YouTube altogether from student devices last spring, she heard back that teachers depended on it for parts of lesson plans.

Wichita Public Schools is “working to restrict open YouTube browsing,” a spokeswoman said, after learning over time that the platform’s own “restricted” content-filtering mode “isn’t sufficient for the way algorithms and short-form content have evolved.”

In Ben Warren’s science class, nearly all educational content has been on the iPad: instead of live science experiments, the teacher showed a YouTube video. “Everything is a simulated experience,” the now-eighth grader says. “I would rather use paper and pencil. It’s easier to focus.”

When Google brought Chromebooks into classrooms early last decade, they were heralded as a boon for bringing low-income students online. School districts adopted the devices and with them, Google’s suite of workplace software. Chromebooks quickly became used for everything from gamified math practice to standardized tests.

To Google, the K-to-12 market and Chromebooks were a critical entry point for building lifelong brand loyalty, according to internal documents released during the social media trials. The company trained its eyes on children under 13 as the world’s fastest-growing internet audience. YouTube sought to close the 80 million-hours-per-day viewing gap between school days and weekends, according to a 2016 document entitled “YouTube edu opportunities”: “Increasing usage in schools M-F could decrease this gap!”

A Google user experience team two years later detailed ills affecting viewer well-being, based on external research. Among them: addictive gaming content was being sought out by “inappropriately-aged children,” children were entering therapy after watching sexually graphic content, and overexposure to videos “decreased attention spans.”

By 2019, the company was aware “the YouTube experience in K-12 schools is broken” due to ads and inappropriate content. A restricted mode used to police content was under-resourced and “trivially easy for students to bypass,” internal exchanges said.

An effort that year to regulate YouTube on children’s privacy grounds by the Federal Trade Commission was halfhearted due in part to its importance in education, ending in “absolute regulatory failure,” said Erie Meyer, former chief technologist at the FTC.

The pandemic enmeshed YouTube deeper into schools. Chromebook shipments exploded, driven by schools spending federal Covid aid on the devices. 

by Shalini Ramachandran, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Colin E. Braley for WSJ

[ed. See also: Classroom Cope (The Point) - AI as another teaching tool:]

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"As for outcomes: it is one thing to say that in-class practice is the best we can do in the age of AI; it is quite another to credit AI with “reviving” writing. There is nothing, nothing, to celebrate about teachers and students being forced to resort to degraded forms of learning, practice and assessment. We might as well credit a basketball hoop in the prison yard with reviving organized sports. It’s a good thing that the inmates are given a chance to exercise. It is better than nothing."

Ned Rozell, Anchorage Daily News
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Rosalía’s LUX Listening Party in Barcelona Changes the Paradigm for Live Event Curation (Hypebot).

***

Rosalía hosted a semi-secret listening party with about 900 guests for her newly released, and highly acclaimed, album L U X at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), in Barcelona.

But this was unlike any listening event we’ve seen before.

The Spanish singer and pop sensation dressed in white, stood and sat and laid down silently and nearly motionless throughout the full hour-long event. There was no rapturous introduction, and when the last notes of the album’s final track rang out, Rosalía simply walked offstage to the sounds of her applause, without uttering a word.

She existed like a living sculpture for an extended moment in time, as her courageously orchestrated and sound-designed album draped her and her audience in sound.

Backline: What Happens Before Doors Open

When fans walk into a venue, they see the lights, the merch lines, the dark stage, and eventually the band walking onstage. What they don’t see is the world that made that moment possible.

That world is backline.

Backline is the instruments and equipment artists use on stage — drum kits, guitars, bass rigs, keyboards, amps, stands, pedals, thrones, cables, and all the details in between. It’s also the people who source it, prep it, transport it, set it up, troubleshoot it, and pack it down after the encore.

If everything goes perfectly, nobody notices us. That usually means we did our job right.

It Starts Long Before Show Day

Most backline orders begin when a promoter is booking talent for a show. Somewhere in that process, an artist’s backline rider gets sent over. That rider is the gear wish list: exact drum sizes, amp models, keyboard stands, strings, sticks, drum heads, and sometimes highly specific requests that only make sense if you’ve spent years on the road.

Our goal is simple: fill the rider exactly as requested.

Sometimes the artist team tells us, “This is our full touring rider — since it’s a fly date, we can simplify a few things.” Other times, every detail matters.

Promoters are naturally budget-conscious, but they also know artists don’t want to walk onstage and see low-grade gear. While the promoter may be the client on paper, the artist is the one trusting us in real time. That’s why cutting corners is never a smart move.

The Perfect Fly Date Doesn’t Exist

The best fly-date riders are realistic, clear, and tailored to the show. Those are gold. They help everyone win. Then there are festivals. Multiple bands, tight changeovers, shared drum kits, shared amps, shared keyboards, limited stage space, and no chance every artist gets their exact dream setup.

That’s where backline becomes equal parts logistics and diplomacy. We want every artist to have a smooth day, even when five bands are sharing the same stage gear.

The Real Work Happens at the Warehouse

People assume the hard part is show day. Sometimes it is. But one of the most important parts of a rental happens when the gear comes back. Returns mean inspection, testing, cleaning, recoiling cables, wiping cases, checking hardware, and making sure everything is ready to go again.

Road cases protect gear, but attention to detail keeps gear exceptional. Clients notice when cymbals shine, drums look fresh, and guitars feel dialed in.

Then comes prep for the next show.

Depending on the schedule, we may be packing days ahead—or hours ahead during busy season. Drum heads get installed and tuned. Guitars and basses get fresh strings. Spare cables get packed. Cases get labeled. Trucks get loaded.

Then it’s wheels up.

Arrival: Controlled Chaos

We usually aim to arrive before the artist. Ideally, security knows we’re coming, stagehands are ready, and we have a clear path to the stage.

Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it’s a muddy festival field where road cases are bouncing through grass and dirt on the way to the stage. Show business keeps things interesting.

Once we hit the stage, our techs move fast. We check the stage plot with audio and lighting, uncase gear, position amps, build drum kits, and make sure everything is where it needs to be.

If we haven’t met the production manager yet, we’ll often reference recent show photos or videos to get placement close before the artist arrives. A standard band setup can usually be show-ready in 90 minutes to two hours — assuming the day behaves itself.

Then the Artist Walks In

This is where the human side matters.

An artist arriving at a venue is stepping into the first moments of their workday. New room, new stage, new energy, rented gear, and a schedule that’s already tight.

We introduce ourselves casually: we’re the backline team, we’re here to help, and we’ve got you covered.

by Neil Rosenbaum, Hypebot | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: In the New Era of Touring, Artists Are Planting in One City. For Weeks. (Hypebot).]

Extra Special Effects

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I Mean, Why Shouldn’t We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about smoking. All the time. It started sometime after we kidnapped the president of Venezuela but before we watched Alex Pretti get shot and killed by Customs and Border Protection agents. Or maybe it was between their detaining young Liam Ramos in his bunny hat and their releasing that tranche of Epstein files and nothing happening. I definitely felt it a couple of weeks ago as I headed inside a fancy dinner party the same day our president had, via social media, threatened to wipe out all of Iranian civilization if the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t open by 8 p.m. The invitation was for 6:30 p.m.

Anyway, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it started. But with each passing day of this absolutely deranged year, my desire to contemplate how to make sense of it all while puffing on a cigarette grows.

Like many ideas of middling wisdom, this one was fed to me by the algorithm. A woman named Stephanie Wittels Wachs was suddenly on my Instagram scroll, reminiscing, longingly, about smoking in the ’90s. Obviously, she clarified, she wasn’t going to smoke; she was just thinking about it. Because smoking kills you. And if she died, she figured, who would take care of her kids? Very solid point, I thought. Then I remembered: I don’t have any kids.

I certainly remember smoking in the ’90s — it was divine. Before we stood around staring down at our phones, we used to stand around staring at each other. Talking and talking while we blew smoke in one another’s faces.

In those early years, I was a student at an artsy Brooklyn high school in Midwood. We were “teens” in chronology only — we worked jobs, we went clubbing, we rode the subway at all hours of the night. And generally, in varying degrees, we smoked. The serious smokers were committed. You’d find them out in the school courtyard no matter the weather. Often, they were the benevolent suppliers to those of us who merely flirted with the idea of being serious smokers. Happy, if you joined them outside “for a smoke,” to trade a stick of nicotine for some interesting gossip you might have heard. Sometimes, we even smoked with our teachers. Usually, they were from the English department.

The irony of my current jonesing for a cigarette is that I was, in those days, a dabbler at best. Mainly seduced by the smell of a clove cigarette, usually found in the hands of somebody from Park Slope. But I loved the culture of the whole thing: the intimacy of someone getting close to light you up. The matches, the Zippos. The way, over the course of five minutes, small talk could fall into something like deep conversation.

There was a reason I never crossed the Rubicon into “big smoker” territory though, one I’ve been contemplating a lot in the wake of my craving: I had big dreams then. I yearned deeply to get out of Brooklyn. To get into some kind of a college and become some sort of interesting adult. It was all very vague. But the future was the thing I was really invested in. And I knew enough to know that required focus. And discipline. And that commitment to “being a smoker” seemed to take up a lot of time. All those trips outside. All those minutes, burning into ash, that I felt I probably should be spending doing something that might help with my undefined tomorrow.

In my 20s, the smoking got sexy. Dive bars and chic lounges, where we’d now have cocktails and ash into ashtrays and steal matchbooks with which to help one another light future cigarettes. Since nobody seemed to care that smoking was bad for us, our paternalistic mayor, Michael Bloomberg, decided he needed to care for us. Public indoor smoking was banned, and, inadvertently, we were armed with a new way to flirt. There was nothing better than breaking off from a crowd of friends with an invitation outside to share a cigarette. I realize now the excitement wasn’t in the cigarette. It was in the possibility that it raised. Would this be a brief excursion to the sidewalk? Or might it end the next morning, in a bed you didn’t really know, sharing smoke-tinged kisses?

Smoking, in this phase of life, went hand in hand with chaos. The kind that is welcome when you are trying to create from your young adult existence something like a life. Every potential mistake was also a potential opportunity. Because maybe you woke up and never saw the person next to you again. Or maybe you fell in love and married them and ended up having kids and getting a few promotions at work and being a big success.

Either way, since I was just a casual smoker, I hardly noticed that one by one, everyone decided that the mayor was right. Smoking was, obviously, very bad for you. We had jobs we needed to turn into careers. Futures ahead of us that we needed to be optimally prepared for. We no longer had chaos; we had lives. Cleanses became cool; the in-crowd suddenly put a premium on personal purification. Cigarettes became signifiers of calamity, the perfect pairing with a broken iPhone screen. Our bodies weren’t just temples, we seemed to realize. They were functioning machines that could run like well-oiled engines. We had many decades to look forward to! And that required discipline and order: eating well and exercising and sleeping more and drinking less. And, quite obviously, not smoking.

By my mid-30s, who could believe anybody ever used to stand outside in the cold like that? What were we thinking? I’d often wonder. We now had better things to do with our time. And our hands. Like work. And check our phones. And go to spin classes and get brunch and check our phones. Or unwind from a long week of work with a yoga class. And then check our phones. Or pull out our laptop and do some work. And then check our phones. Or get together with the friends we barely got to see and then sit around and take out our phones.

Because we were not just working. We were working toward something. Charging toward a tomorrow when every girl could also be a boss if she worked hard enough. The narrow space found between working or mindlessly wandering the internet researching diets that would maximize our lifespans or shopping for serums and masks to make us look rejuvenated and vital. Preparing ourselves for the promised land of success. Readying ourselves to be perpetually “booked and busy.”

Recently, a friend my age was visiting me. She was helping me shop for clothes for my upcoming book tour. Rushing from one appointment to the next, when she suddenly stopped and pulled out a cigarette. “Do you mind?” she asked. Of course I didn’t. Instead, I salivated. Dying to ask for one, but remaining a good girl. Committed to my health. Committed to my future!

“When did you start smoking again?” I asked as I wrapped my arm in hers. We walked and talked, and she told me of a trip to Italy and questioning, at almost 50, how much damage a few cigarettes a week could really do to her. Her kids were basically teenagers; how much longer did she really need to stay perfectly healthy for? She meant this nihilistically and practically. We got to our next destination and just stood together while she finished her ciggy. It felt utterly luxurious. Slowing down and taking the time to take a drag.

So, yeah, part of this smoking thing is a yearning for the past. Not in an effort to recapture my youth, but to recapture an approach to time and life. I can’t personally slow down technology or fix media or the demands of capitalism or any of the other existential things that have crept into our lives, slowly and insidiously, and worn us down and numbed us in the name of productivity. But maybe what I can do is stop what I’m doing, ask somebody to come outside, and take five minutes to slow down with me while I engage in the very dangerous act of holding a flaming stick to my face. This could be my rebellion. Is it really any worse for us than the numbing digital go-go-go it feels we’ve all been engaged in?

And, truth be told, unlike in my high-school days, I’m no longer certain that the future I’ve been preserving myself for is all that promising. Sure, I can eat as clean as I want, but does it matter when there are forever chemicals in the soil? If we’re walking into dinner parties wondering if the third course will include nuclear war, is there really a point in sacrificing a quick thrill in the now?

Which is, perhaps, the biggest part of it all. If smoking loves chaos, then perhaps it is the perfect new-old bad habit for our moment. A moment that is surely being ruled by Eris, the goddess of chaos, upsetter of norms and apple carts. She is meant to be a foil for the western need to find order in everything. She insists that the only truth is chaos. Our lives may have all been in perfect order, but does it matter if the world in which we live in is burning out of control? And if it doesn’t matter, then, I suppose, why not just smoke?

by Xochitl Gonzalez, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Getty
[ed. Do you really want to live that long anyway? With all the indignities that an advanced age inflicts? It ain't pretty. See also: The Most Important Charts in the World (Zvi):]

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