via:
Sunday, May 3, 2026
***
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).]
That world is backline.
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
Saturday, May 2, 2026
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):]
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.
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):]
An AI Company You Can Wear Wthout Socks
Say what you will about AllBirds’ corporate tailspin: You gotta respect the sheer chutzpah of the sneakers-to-AI pivot.
On Wednesday, two weeks after selling off all its assets in an ignominious fire sale, the faded apparel darling announced it would abandon all environmental and sartorial pretenses and start renting out computing power, instead. Just five years ago, AllBirds was valued at $4 billion and beloved by the likes of both Barack Obama and the sorts of tech bros who still vote Democrat. Now, it plans to rent out specialized chips it does not currently possess, and may in fact be unable to obtain, in an industry where it has no preexisting relationships, expertise or other claim to fame.
This is, I would argue, the type of brazen, self-deluded “pivot” that could only be accomplished by a white man: a rich white man with woolen sneakers on his feet and dreams of corporate reinvention in his head. Imagine, imagine, what you or I might achieve with that level of unearned confidence! Tomorrow, Links could become a fashion Substack despite my irreparably basic, midwestern taste. (I recently bought Allbirds for Jason and still think they’re … fine, actually.)
But that metaphor doesn’t go far enough, does it? Because in it, I — a newsletter-writer — would still be writing a newsletter. And AllBirds, a maker of sneakers, will make sneakers no longer. So in order for this hypothetical to hold, I’d need to spontaneously declare myself an astronaut or a Supreme Court justice or an emergency physician … and someone, someones, would have to believe it. Because as of this writing, AllBirds’ stock price is still up 351% from before the so-called “pivot.”
I’ll say this for America, at least: It’s still a place where — with enough money, a couple buzzwords and a public listing — you can (pretend to) be anything. Or so a little NewBirdie told me.
NewBird AI expects to use initial capital from the Facility to acquire high-performance GPU assets, which will be deployed to serve customers requiring dedicated access to AI compute capacity. NewBird AI’s long-term vision is to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider. Over time, the Company intends to grow its neocloud platform by expanding its compute and service offerings, deepening partnerships with operators and customers, and evaluating strategic M&A opportunities."
This is, I would argue, the type of brazen, self-deluded “pivot” that could only be accomplished by a white man: a rich white man with woolen sneakers on his feet and dreams of corporate reinvention in his head. Imagine, imagine, what you or I might achieve with that level of unearned confidence! Tomorrow, Links could become a fashion Substack despite my irreparably basic, midwestern taste. (I recently bought Allbirds for Jason and still think they’re … fine, actually.)
But that metaphor doesn’t go far enough, does it? Because in it, I — a newsletter-writer — would still be writing a newsletter. And AllBirds, a maker of sneakers, will make sneakers no longer. So in order for this hypothetical to hold, I’d need to spontaneously declare myself an astronaut or a Supreme Court justice or an emergency physician … and someone, someones, would have to believe it. Because as of this writing, AllBirds’ stock price is still up 351% from before the so-called “pivot.”
I’ll say this for America, at least: It’s still a place where — with enough money, a couple buzzwords and a public listing — you can (pretend to) be anything. Or so a little NewBirdie told me.
by Caitlin Dewey, Links I Would Gchat | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Too funny. I love my Allbirds but this has to be a joke, right? Right?]
***
"Following its prior announcement that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell the Allbirds brand and footwear assets to American Exchange Group, which intends to continue to build on Allbirds’ legacy and deliver compelling products to Allbirds’ customers (the “Asset Sale”), Allbirds, Inc. (Nasdaq: BIRD) (the "Company") today announced the execution of a definitive agreement with an institutional investor for a $50 million convertible financing facility (the “Facility”). The Facility, which is expected to close during the second quarter of 2026, will enable the Company to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure, with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider. In connection with this pivot, the Company anticipates changing its name to “NewBird AI.” [...]NewBird AI expects to use initial capital from the Facility to acquire high-performance GPU assets, which will be deployed to serve customers requiring dedicated access to AI compute capacity. NewBird AI’s long-term vision is to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider. Over time, the Company intends to grow its neocloud platform by expanding its compute and service offerings, deepening partnerships with operators and customers, and evaluating strategic M&A opportunities."
Want to Be Friends With a Bravolebrity?
That’ll be $5,000.
The wealthy have always been able to buy access to celebrities (consider the many pop stars who appeared on My Super Sweet 16), but Fan Social seeks to standardize what were formerly backdoor negotiations with an individual’s management. The idea was born in 2024 when a fan called in to “Jeff Lewis Live,” a two-hour SiriusXM show hosted by the former star of Bravo’s Flipping Out, asking if she could take Lewis to dinner, to which he joked that she could — for $10,000. The dinner never happened, but other fans took him seriously: Soon Lewis was receiving multiple $10,000 dinner invitations over DM, which he accepted. Months later, Lewis started Fan Social along with Southern Hospitality showrunner Michael Beck and Charleston-based software and product designer Shannon Barnes. Fan Social launched with ten celebrities, mostly Lewis’s friends from the Bravoverse. Within a year, the site had hundreds of bookings; the roster now sits at around 50 and includes comedians, actors, and influencers. The founders are currently expanding Fan Social’s talent pool of athletes, who are often based in smaller cities and have local appeal; they’re also hoping to land Andy Cohen, who Lewis expects could charge up to $20,000 per dinner. Barnes describes the pitch as “Uber for celebrities,” a side hustle they can squeeze into their schedules whenever they want. “It’s such an easy way for somebody to make money for one hour of conversation — usually about themselves, which they’re happy to do,” says Beck.
Like most Fan Social clients, Parrott had heard about the company on “Jeff Lewis Live,” which she listens to “religiously.” (Until now, the platform has done no traditional marketing or press, relying on celebrities to promote their own pages.) Along with her family, she owns three subcontracting companies and was using the trip to L.A. to “capitalize on alone time.” “Here’s the thing,” she tells me, a stack of gold designer bracelets dangling on her wrist, as we wait at the bar for Farahan and Javid to arrive. “You can spend $500 on a Cameo that you watch one time and post. This is more expensive, sure, but it’s the memory of it. That for me is what’s so cool: the memory.” [...]
The day after Parrott’s meetup, Amy Powers, a 54-year-old from Tennessee, arrives at the SiriusXM offices in Hollywood for her “Jeff Lewis Live” studio visit — a Fan Social experience where, for $5,000, a client can listen in on the prep meeting and taping of Lewis’s show. Powers is a Fan Social power user, a tiny blonde OG Housewives fan with a southern drawl who owns a construction company with the husband she’s in the process of divorcing. ChumpCon, the convention for fans of “Jeff Lewis Live” held last year in Las Vegas, was “the best weekend ever,” she says. Last night, she had a Fan Social dinner at the West Hollywood restaurant Craig’s with Doug Budin ($2,000) and Jamison Scala ($1,500), who both work on “Jeff Lewis Live.” “Any time I’m in town, the first thing I do is call Shannon, like, ‘Where are my boys? Can they do something? Can they have lunch? Can we have dinner?’ ” she says. [...]
Not all “Jeff Lewis Live” listeners support Fan Social; posts on Lewis’s sub-Reddit have criticized him as being “desperate” and “grifting off his fans” for his $4,000 drinks and $7,500 dinner offerings. Lewis waves this off. “My guess is most of those people, if they had the opportunity to do what I’m doing, I’m pretty sure they’d be doing it. Why wouldn’t you?” he says. “You wanna go to a thousand-dollar dinner and have an amazing evening and then sometimes get a gift on top of it and be paid for it? It’s crazy.” Last year, Lewis did 33 Fan Socials and made well into the six figures on the platform (Fan Social takes a commission of around 20 to 25 percent). “I get to go to all my favorite restaurants for free,” he says; he’ll usually suggest Craig’s, the Polo Lounge, Boa, Cecconi’s, or Steak 48.
by Rebecca Jennings, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Michelle Groskopf
[ed. Sad. They'd have to pay me.]
Friday, May 1, 2026
via:
[ed. Don't know why more people don't take this approach. Stand on a street corner, meet some people (who are interested, or just curious), have a few chats... all in a low stakes environment. Maybe meet someone like the gal above.]
[ed. Don't know why more people don't take this approach. Stand on a street corner, meet some people (who are interested, or just curious), have a few chats... all in a low stakes environment. Maybe meet someone like the gal above.]
Thursday, April 30, 2026
More Than Half of All Polymarket “Long Shot” Bets on Military Action Pay Off
More than half of “long-shot” bets on military action made on Polymarket are successful, according to a new report that suggests prediction markets could pose a bigger threat than previously recognized to the security of sensitive information.
Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets—defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 percent or less—on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 percent in markets on military and defense actions.
That compares with a win rate of 25 percent across all politics-focused markets and just 14 percent for all markets on the platform as a whole.
The research is likely to add to growing concerns among regulators and lawmakers about insiders placing bets on the timing and success of military actions, amid fears that this could reveal classified information in advance.
The report, which analyzed more than 400,000 prediction markets settled on Polymarket between January 2021 and March 2026, comes as US prosecutors last week charged a soldier involved in planning the January raid to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro with placing Polymarket wagers on the mission that netted more than $400,000. [...]
Growing scrutiny has created a business opportunity for a wave of start-ups selling tools to help users profit by copying suspected “insiders.”
“The platforms are creating new rules to try to root them out and make it clear they don’t allow that activity. That to me [ . . . ] proves there is some informed flow in these markets worth following,” said Matt Saincome, chief executive of financial data provider Unusual Whales, which sells a $20-a-month “unusual predictions” tool to monitor suspicious bets on Polymarket.
Another start-up, Polywhaler, promises to help traders “monitor large bets in real-time” for $4.99 a month.
Polymarket has itself published a list of the 10 most-copied wallets in a blog post, including recommendations for traders on strategies to follow and pitfalls to avoid when copy-trading.
by Stephanie Stacey, Chris Cook, and Jill R Shah, Financial Times, Ars Technica | Read more:
Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets—defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 percent or less—on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 percent in markets on military and defense actions.
That compares with a win rate of 25 percent across all politics-focused markets and just 14 percent for all markets on the platform as a whole.
The research is likely to add to growing concerns among regulators and lawmakers about insiders placing bets on the timing and success of military actions, amid fears that this could reveal classified information in advance.
The report, which analyzed more than 400,000 prediction markets settled on Polymarket between January 2021 and March 2026, comes as US prosecutors last week charged a soldier involved in planning the January raid to seize Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro with placing Polymarket wagers on the mission that netted more than $400,000. [...]
Growing scrutiny has created a business opportunity for a wave of start-ups selling tools to help users profit by copying suspected “insiders.”
“The platforms are creating new rules to try to root them out and make it clear they don’t allow that activity. That to me [ . . . ] proves there is some informed flow in these markets worth following,” said Matt Saincome, chief executive of financial data provider Unusual Whales, which sells a $20-a-month “unusual predictions” tool to monitor suspicious bets on Polymarket.
Another start-up, Polywhaler, promises to help traders “monitor large bets in real-time” for $4.99 a month.
Polymarket has itself published a list of the 10 most-copied wallets in a blog post, including recommendations for traders on strategies to follow and pitfalls to avoid when copy-trading.
by Stephanie Stacey, Chris Cook, and Jill R Shah, Financial Times, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Financial Times
[ed. Seems pretty clear prediction markets have some serious problems with insider betting, methods/terms of resolution, and maybe legal culpability.]
The Case of Missing American Mushrooms
Why the U.S. is missing a million pounds of mushrooms a week.
I am a grocery-list-captured male shopper. If something is not on the grocery list, it most likely does not go into the shopping cart. There is one item, though, for which I make an exception. Whether it is on the list or not, I always get a pack of mushrooms because I love them. I love mushrooms in my soup, in my burgers, on my toast, or just sauteed with garlic1.
Given the short shelf life of mushrooms and their fragility, I had always assumed that most of the mushrooms I buy must be coming from some nearby place in California.
I recently learned that Canada’s mushroom production has been growing over the last 20 years, and much of it is exported to the United States, while production in the United States has declined. Differences in policy toward migrant workers between the United States and Canada, and differences in investments in new technology may explain the divergence in mushroom production between the two countries.
But before we get into the details, it is important to understand where and how mushrooms are grown, harvested, and shipped.
I am a grocery-list-captured male shopper. If something is not on the grocery list, it most likely does not go into the shopping cart. There is one item, though, for which I make an exception. Whether it is on the list or not, I always get a pack of mushrooms because I love them. I love mushrooms in my soup, in my burgers, on my toast, or just sauteed with garlic1.
Given the short shelf life of mushrooms and their fragility, I had always assumed that most of the mushrooms I buy must be coming from some nearby place in California.
I recently learned that Canada’s mushroom production has been growing over the last 20 years, and much of it is exported to the United States, while production in the United States has declined. Differences in policy toward migrant workers between the United States and Canada, and differences in investments in new technology may explain the divergence in mushroom production between the two countries.
But before we get into the details, it is important to understand where and how mushrooms are grown, harvested, and shipped.
US mushroom production
You would be surprised to learn that almost 69% of the US mushroom production occurs in the borough of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. It is a small town of about 6000 people, but mushroom-growing facilities around town produce almost 451 million pounds of mushrooms annually (2024). 451 million pounds of mushrooms would occupy about 45 American football fields or 35 soccer fields. The dollar value of mushroom production in the US is roughly $ 1 billion per year.
China is the undisputed leader in mushroom production. China accounts for 93% of the world’s global mushroom production.
The history of mushroom farming in Kennett Square dates back to 1885, when a grower obtained mushroom spores from Europe and began growing mushrooms. This concentration of mushroom farming in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, is due to historical immigration patterns, primarily of Italians in the 1950s or 1960s, easy availability of horse manure for the mushroom substrate, an easy access to the Philadelphia and New York markets.
Growers use an old system called “Pennsylvania doubles” to grow mushrooms. Specialized, two-story cinderblock buildings with wooden shelves and intensive manual picking characterize the system. The system is designed with the assumption of cheap labor.
The growing houses provide a strictly controlled environment for growing white button, cremini, and portobello mushrooms on stacked beds, producing approximately 400 to 500 million pounds of mushrooms annually. Growers can manage the temperature, humidity, and airflow to create optimal conditions for mushroom mycelium to grow and fruit.
The houses are equipped with vertical wooden or aluminum shelves, which maximize growing space. The shelves house pasteurized compost (often made from hay, straw, poultry litter, and cocoa shells) used to grow mushrooms year-round.
As you can see in the video below, the conditions inside the mushroom-growing facilities are hot, humid, and stinky! The process of harvesting mushrooms is fairly manual, unless the grower has invested in a robotic harvesting system from companies like 4AG Robotics. Most US production facilities lack an automation design.
Mushroom shelf life dictates the supply chain
Mushrooms are a type of fungus. If you have the right spawn available and can control the environment economically, you can grow mushrooms year-round. Mushrooms have a short shelf life. Mushrooms are 92% water. A mushroom starts losing water as soon as it is harvested. Anyone who has seen a fresh mushroom that has begun to dehydrate knows how unappetizing it can look.
The dominant mushroom variety grown in both the U.S. and Canada is called the Agaricus. Your most common mushroom variety in your grocery store, the white and brown button mushrooms, cremini, baby bellas, and portobello, all belong to the Agaricus family. The Agaricus family accounts for more than 90% of mushroom production and sales in North America. Shiitake (my favorite or oyster mushrooms) do not belong to the Agaricus family.
Canada and the United States grow mushrooms year-round in climate-controlled, indoor warehouses. Readers of this newsletter are aware of my massive skepticism about the economic viability of vertical farming, but mushrooms provide a counterexample in which vertical farming actually works. The main difference is that mushrooms are fungi and do not need sunlight for photosynthesis.
Due to supply chain constraints and the limited shelf life of mushrooms post-harvest, most fresh mushroom consumption occurs within a few days of production. For example, mushroom production from Pennsylvania mostly stays within a few days of transit.
Most mushroom production facilities in Canada are located in British Columbia and Ontario, close to the US border, and deliver their products to the northern United States within 36-48 hours of harvest. Production geography relative to population is the structural constraint that neither shelf-life extension nor improved cold chains can fully overcome.
The shelf life of mushrooms is the hard constraint. Fresh button mushrooms have a 7-10 day usable shelf life under an optimal cold chain, beginning at harvest. Mushrooms are a high-respiration-rate product. They consume oxygen, produce CO2, and generate moisture. Every degree of temperature above the ideal range of 34-38 degrees F doubles the respiration rate and halves the effective shelf life. Continuity in temperature from the moment of harvest to when the customer picks it up is a critical supply chain variable.
Mushrooms are fragile and bruise under their own weight. Vibration and pressure can cause bruising in transit. Each bruise initiates a localized decay, which accelerates from the point. It limits the number of handoffs or transfer events, since each event is a risk. Mushrooms can lose quality if they dehydrate or become too heavy, and they require an ideal relative humidity of 90-95%.
The same MAP technology used for packaged salads is also used for mushrooms and can extend their shelf life, though it cannot do much for the product’s fragility or the minimum handling requirements.
So, why is US production dropping while production in Canada is rising, even though 99.6% of Canada’s exports go to the US? A big part of the answer to this question lies in how the United States and Canada provide support to migrant workers who come over to pick mushrooms.
by Rhishi Pethe, SFTW | Read more:
Images:Rhishi Pethe; YouTube: Alan Rockefeller, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
You would be surprised to learn that almost 69% of the US mushroom production occurs in the borough of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. It is a small town of about 6000 people, but mushroom-growing facilities around town produce almost 451 million pounds of mushrooms annually (2024). 451 million pounds of mushrooms would occupy about 45 American football fields or 35 soccer fields. The dollar value of mushroom production in the US is roughly $ 1 billion per year.
China is the undisputed leader in mushroom production. China accounts for 93% of the world’s global mushroom production.
The history of mushroom farming in Kennett Square dates back to 1885, when a grower obtained mushroom spores from Europe and began growing mushrooms. This concentration of mushroom farming in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, is due to historical immigration patterns, primarily of Italians in the 1950s or 1960s, easy availability of horse manure for the mushroom substrate, an easy access to the Philadelphia and New York markets.
Growers use an old system called “Pennsylvania doubles” to grow mushrooms. Specialized, two-story cinderblock buildings with wooden shelves and intensive manual picking characterize the system. The system is designed with the assumption of cheap labor.
The growing houses provide a strictly controlled environment for growing white button, cremini, and portobello mushrooms on stacked beds, producing approximately 400 to 500 million pounds of mushrooms annually. Growers can manage the temperature, humidity, and airflow to create optimal conditions for mushroom mycelium to grow and fruit.
The houses are equipped with vertical wooden or aluminum shelves, which maximize growing space. The shelves house pasteurized compost (often made from hay, straw, poultry litter, and cocoa shells) used to grow mushrooms year-round.
As you can see in the video below, the conditions inside the mushroom-growing facilities are hot, humid, and stinky! The process of harvesting mushrooms is fairly manual, unless the grower has invested in a robotic harvesting system from companies like 4AG Robotics. Most US production facilities lack an automation design.
Mushroom shelf life dictates the supply chain
Mushrooms are a type of fungus. If you have the right spawn available and can control the environment economically, you can grow mushrooms year-round. Mushrooms have a short shelf life. Mushrooms are 92% water. A mushroom starts losing water as soon as it is harvested. Anyone who has seen a fresh mushroom that has begun to dehydrate knows how unappetizing it can look.
The dominant mushroom variety grown in both the U.S. and Canada is called the Agaricus. Your most common mushroom variety in your grocery store, the white and brown button mushrooms, cremini, baby bellas, and portobello, all belong to the Agaricus family. The Agaricus family accounts for more than 90% of mushroom production and sales in North America. Shiitake (my favorite or oyster mushrooms) do not belong to the Agaricus family.
Canada and the United States grow mushrooms year-round in climate-controlled, indoor warehouses. Readers of this newsletter are aware of my massive skepticism about the economic viability of vertical farming, but mushrooms provide a counterexample in which vertical farming actually works. The main difference is that mushrooms are fungi and do not need sunlight for photosynthesis.
Due to supply chain constraints and the limited shelf life of mushrooms post-harvest, most fresh mushroom consumption occurs within a few days of production. For example, mushroom production from Pennsylvania mostly stays within a few days of transit.
Most mushroom production facilities in Canada are located in British Columbia and Ontario, close to the US border, and deliver their products to the northern United States within 36-48 hours of harvest. Production geography relative to population is the structural constraint that neither shelf-life extension nor improved cold chains can fully overcome.
The shelf life of mushrooms is the hard constraint. Fresh button mushrooms have a 7-10 day usable shelf life under an optimal cold chain, beginning at harvest. Mushrooms are a high-respiration-rate product. They consume oxygen, produce CO2, and generate moisture. Every degree of temperature above the ideal range of 34-38 degrees F doubles the respiration rate and halves the effective shelf life. Continuity in temperature from the moment of harvest to when the customer picks it up is a critical supply chain variable.
Mushrooms are fragile and bruise under their own weight. Vibration and pressure can cause bruising in transit. Each bruise initiates a localized decay, which accelerates from the point. It limits the number of handoffs or transfer events, since each event is a risk. Mushrooms can lose quality if they dehydrate or become too heavy, and they require an ideal relative humidity of 90-95%.
The same MAP technology used for packaged salads is also used for mushrooms and can extend their shelf life, though it cannot do much for the product’s fragility or the minimum handling requirements.
So, why is US production dropping while production in Canada is rising, even though 99.6% of Canada’s exports go to the US? A big part of the answer to this question lies in how the United States and Canada provide support to migrant workers who come over to pick mushrooms.
by Rhishi Pethe, SFTW | Read more:
Images:Rhishi Pethe; YouTube: Alan Rockefeller, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
LIV R.I.P.
LIV Golf will soon be gone. Its collateral damage will linger.
LIV Golf is on life support. The circuit that promised to disrupt the sport by liberating players and democratizing power is losing support from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund. Its architect, PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan, has stepped down. A recent event was postponed, the league citing heat and a soccer scheduling conflict. LIV insists the project continues, scaled down from its Golf But Louder origins, with a restructured board of directors hoping to find new investment to keep it running come 2027. The rest of the evidence is harder to soften. No funding, no captain, no fanbase to absorb the financial and reputational weight the league is now dragging, its marquee star Bryson DeChambeau openly entertaining a return to the tour he sued.
Should LIV's attempt at survival fail, it leaves behind a landscape permanently altered—Fissures that will take years to close, loyalties that calcified under pressure, and a generation of fans that watched the sport they love hold itself hostage. It is tempting to declare winners. This is understandable and mostly wrong. Let's be precise about what happened, because there is a specific kind of silence that follows a standoff that neither side truly won, with the participants left wondering what, exactly, they were fighting for.
LIV Golf was not, at its core, a golf league. It was a geopolitical instrument. Saudi Arabia spent an estimated $5 million to $8 billion on the venture because soft-power exercises work. PIF understood, correctly, that associating the kingdom's brand with the game was worth more than any conventional PR campaign could deliver. The players who signed were not naive about this. Some convinced themselves the cause was separable from the source. Others simply didn't care. Both positions were defensible in their own way, and both were, ultimately, wrong.
The LIV product was mediocre, although that was besides the point. What made LIV genuinely, existentially dangerous was its bottomlessness, and the greed that bottomlessness unleashed. There is no conventional competitive response to an opponent who has decided that losses are acceptable. The PGA Tour spent a century building a system of merit. LIV walked in and wrote checks that made that system feel like a prank. When Dustin Johnson signed, when Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm signed, each name felt like another stone pulled from a wall that had seemed permanent.
The tour suspended the defectors, asked its remaining membership to fight for the league, then reversed course and announced a framework deal before the deal existed. It was the behavior of an institution that had never gamed out the scenario it was now living through. Jay Monahan was right to fight. He was wrong to pretend, for as long as he did, that the fight was about the integrity of the sport rather than the preservation of the tour. The PGA Tour outlasted its opponent in part because a foreign government decided to redirect its attention elsewhere. That is not the same as winning. The tour had strategy and endurance. It also had luck, and the difference between strategy and luck is the kind of thing institutions are tempted to revise in their own favor afterward.
The professional golf landscape after LIV looks like a neighborhood after a flood—structurally intact in most places, yet waterlines on the walls everywhere you look. The players who stayed, who watched colleagues leave, who made the calculation that their careers and their principles required them to remain, who played through the uncertainty of a tour that was simultaneously suing a competitor and negotiating with it, were never celebrated for staying. Loyalty tends not to be. You are left with the satisfaction of having made a decision you can live with, and you get to watch the tour eventually extend an olive branch to the men who burned it. [...]
The most lasting damage may be the hardest to quantify, which is the goodwill of the audience. Golf as a participation sport was growing before LIV, lifted by a pandemic-era surge that had introduced millions of new players to the game and returned millions of lapsed ones to it. Rounds played hit a 40-year high. Equipment sales broke records. Junior participation climbed. The sport had momentum it had not felt in a generation, and the timing was rare, a confluence of cultural availability and demographic interest that the industry had spent decades trying to manufacture. It then spent the next five years asking that audience to care about a labor dispute between multi-millionaires and a sovereign wealth fund.
The casual fan, always the most important and most fragile constituency in any sport, is not an idealist. That fan understands athletics are not synonymous with saints. However, that fan requires the sport to be primarily about sport. LIV made that impossible. Every tournament existed inside a larger conversation about money and loyalty and the kingdom's human-rights record, a conversation most fans had neither the appetite nor the obligation to follow. The hardcore audience stayed. The hardcore audience always stays. But the viewer who had started watching after 2020, who was learning the rhythms of the season, who had not yet decided whether this was a sport that belonged in the rotation alongside the NFL and the NBA—that viewer was handed an exit ramp, week after week, for five years. Some took it. The industry will be measuring the cost of that for a long time.
The damage was particularly harmful because it was cumulative, a slow tax on attention paid in storylines nobody asked for. Golf exhausted its fans quietly. That is, in certain ways, harder to recover from. The current effort to frame Yasir's departure, PIF's pullout, and the postponement of the New Orleans event as "strategic decisions" is part of the same pattern. What this moment does offer is clarity. For five years, golf operated under an atmospheric pressure of uncertainty. Would the deal happen, would more players leave, would the framework collapse, would the Saudis walk away? That pressure is lifting. The air is cleaner. You can see farther. [...]
There is a version of this story that ends on the triumphalist note. Golf survived! The sport is resilient! That version is incomplete. What LIV revealed, underneath the politics and the money and the posturing, was a question the sport had long avoided asking itself directly: What is professional golf actually for? Is it a meritocracy or only in name? Is it a global sport, or a primarily American entity with global marketing? Are its players independent contractors or franchise assets? Does the history of the game belong to the tour that administers it, or to the game itself? These are not new questions. LIV pulled them into the light and refused to let anyone look away.
The soul of golf has never belonged to a tour or a sovereign wealth fund or a television contract. It belongs to the men and women who play the game, watch it, argue about it. Who make any of this matter in the first place. They were sidelined, asked to spectate a fight they did not start. The game has outlasted wars and scandals and its own periodic conviction that it was dying. Not gracefully, not cleanly, but through a stubborn refusal to be finished. For five years the sport lived that refusal out loud, without much dignity. Survival means little without an accounting of what it cost.
[ed. See also: LIV Golf members have reached out to PGA Tour about return, but terms and pathways will be more restrictive (GD).]
LIV Golf was not, at its core, a golf league. It was a geopolitical instrument. Saudi Arabia spent an estimated $5 million to $8 billion on the venture because soft-power exercises work. PIF understood, correctly, that associating the kingdom's brand with the game was worth more than any conventional PR campaign could deliver. The players who signed were not naive about this. Some convinced themselves the cause was separable from the source. Others simply didn't care. Both positions were defensible in their own way, and both were, ultimately, wrong.
The LIV product was mediocre, although that was besides the point. What made LIV genuinely, existentially dangerous was its bottomlessness, and the greed that bottomlessness unleashed. There is no conventional competitive response to an opponent who has decided that losses are acceptable. The PGA Tour spent a century building a system of merit. LIV walked in and wrote checks that made that system feel like a prank. When Dustin Johnson signed, when Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm signed, each name felt like another stone pulled from a wall that had seemed permanent.
The tour suspended the defectors, asked its remaining membership to fight for the league, then reversed course and announced a framework deal before the deal existed. It was the behavior of an institution that had never gamed out the scenario it was now living through. Jay Monahan was right to fight. He was wrong to pretend, for as long as he did, that the fight was about the integrity of the sport rather than the preservation of the tour. The PGA Tour outlasted its opponent in part because a foreign government decided to redirect its attention elsewhere. That is not the same as winning. The tour had strategy and endurance. It also had luck, and the difference between strategy and luck is the kind of thing institutions are tempted to revise in their own favor afterward.
The professional golf landscape after LIV looks like a neighborhood after a flood—structurally intact in most places, yet waterlines on the walls everywhere you look. The players who stayed, who watched colleagues leave, who made the calculation that their careers and their principles required them to remain, who played through the uncertainty of a tour that was simultaneously suing a competitor and negotiating with it, were never celebrated for staying. Loyalty tends not to be. You are left with the satisfaction of having made a decision you can live with, and you get to watch the tour eventually extend an olive branch to the men who burned it. [...]
The most lasting damage may be the hardest to quantify, which is the goodwill of the audience. Golf as a participation sport was growing before LIV, lifted by a pandemic-era surge that had introduced millions of new players to the game and returned millions of lapsed ones to it. Rounds played hit a 40-year high. Equipment sales broke records. Junior participation climbed. The sport had momentum it had not felt in a generation, and the timing was rare, a confluence of cultural availability and demographic interest that the industry had spent decades trying to manufacture. It then spent the next five years asking that audience to care about a labor dispute between multi-millionaires and a sovereign wealth fund.
The casual fan, always the most important and most fragile constituency in any sport, is not an idealist. That fan understands athletics are not synonymous with saints. However, that fan requires the sport to be primarily about sport. LIV made that impossible. Every tournament existed inside a larger conversation about money and loyalty and the kingdom's human-rights record, a conversation most fans had neither the appetite nor the obligation to follow. The hardcore audience stayed. The hardcore audience always stays. But the viewer who had started watching after 2020, who was learning the rhythms of the season, who had not yet decided whether this was a sport that belonged in the rotation alongside the NFL and the NBA—that viewer was handed an exit ramp, week after week, for five years. Some took it. The industry will be measuring the cost of that for a long time.
The damage was particularly harmful because it was cumulative, a slow tax on attention paid in storylines nobody asked for. Golf exhausted its fans quietly. That is, in certain ways, harder to recover from. The current effort to frame Yasir's departure, PIF's pullout, and the postponement of the New Orleans event as "strategic decisions" is part of the same pattern. What this moment does offer is clarity. For five years, golf operated under an atmospheric pressure of uncertainty. Would the deal happen, would more players leave, would the framework collapse, would the Saudis walk away? That pressure is lifting. The air is cleaner. You can see farther. [...]
There is a version of this story that ends on the triumphalist note. Golf survived! The sport is resilient! That version is incomplete. What LIV revealed, underneath the politics and the money and the posturing, was a question the sport had long avoided asking itself directly: What is professional golf actually for? Is it a meritocracy or only in name? Is it a global sport, or a primarily American entity with global marketing? Are its players independent contractors or franchise assets? Does the history of the game belong to the tour that administers it, or to the game itself? These are not new questions. LIV pulled them into the light and refused to let anyone look away.
The soul of golf has never belonged to a tour or a sovereign wealth fund or a television contract. It belongs to the men and women who play the game, watch it, argue about it. Who make any of this matter in the first place. They were sidelined, asked to spectate a fight they did not start. The game has outlasted wars and scandals and its own periodic conviction that it was dying. Not gracefully, not cleanly, but through a stubborn refusal to be finished. For five years the sport lived that refusal out loud, without much dignity. Survival means little without an accounting of what it cost.
by Joel Beall, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Icon Sportwire
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Why Do the Top Sushi Restaurants Leave Us So Bored, and So Broke?
Hiss, hiss, hiss. Up and down the marble counter, the sushi chefs are brandishing their weapons. The first time it’s a thrill, the blue gush of the hand torch, the whoosh like an F-16 fighter jet taking flight. The fifth time it’s a tic. Piece after piece of fish goes under the flame, until the flavor is more smoke than sea, until everything tastes the same.
In a 1963 column about new Japanese restaurants in Manhattan, the New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne wrote that sushi “may seem a trifle too ‘far out’ for many American palates.” Then came the California roll, popularized by Ichiro Mashita in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the flocking of Hollywood stars and studio heads to sushi bars like Osho, conveniently located next to the 20th Century Fox lot.
By 1987, Charlie Sheen, playing a whippersnapper stockbroker in the movie “Wall Street,” was churning out rice balls eight at a time from a home nigiri-making machine in his penthouse.
That nigiri-maker might have been an omen for what was to come: the co-opting of sushi by finance bros, favoring optimization and spectacle over craft, in an eerie Benihana-fication of the American sushi-ya.
I am not arguing for sushi as some serene, transcendent ritual. Sushi as we know it started out as working-class food sold in the streets of 19th-century Edo (today Tokyo). Some of the best sushi I’ve had was in strip malls in Los Angeles, at unadorned counters where the chef set down piece after piece with sometimes little more than a grunt, and we were out in half an hour. (Shout-out to Sushi Ike, for those who know.)
Now the hand torches flare and, at the most expensive restaurants, there’s a banker’s roll of supplements to pad out your meal and push the already astonishing prices even higher — up to $1,200 per person, pre-tax and pre-liquor, for the “chef’s reserve” omakase at Masa on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
At Sushi Nakazawa in the West Village, you might have your choice of A5 Wagyu, truffles (a Japanese food writer I consulted expressed concern that the scent would be “distracting”), a tweezering of gold leaf over caviar and a pairing of Krug Champagne and kinki (thornyhead), a rare and opulently fatty fish sometimes called the Wagyu of the sea.
More insidiously, an odd note of appeasement has crept in. A recent omakase meal at a Lower Manhattan counter was almost all crowd-pleasers. First, three kinds of salmon — a fish not even used for sushi until the 1980s, when Norway, eager to offload an oversupply, lobbied to create a new market in Japan (which may in turn have expanded the audience for sushi in the United States, with the lure of a more familiar and straightforwardly buttery fish). Then delicate sweet snappers, luscious jacks and tuna close to liquefying in its own fat.
With each bite I had the nagging sense I was being spoon-fed, like a finicky child who couldn’t possibly know what’s really good or keep an open mind. There was nothing funky or chewy that might demand a pause to wonder: What am I eating?
In the past decade and a half, omakase, in which the guest cedes power and the chef decides what you eat, has become the dominant form of sushi in major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. This stems in part from the popularity of the 2011 documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a paean to the monastic virtuosity of the sushi master Jiro Ono, plying his craft in a basement nook off a subway station in Tokyo.
In classic omakase, a chef has leeway to improvise in the moment, modulate, maybe even figure out what kind of person you are. These days in New York, the experience is more often one-size-fits-all: a fixed series of courses — essentially, a tasting menu — ranging from a dozen to 20 or more, with accommodations only for allergies or a particularly querulous diner, and often not even then. At the highest-end spots, everyone sits down at the same time and is fed in the same order, as if at the most elegant of mess halls.
There was a time when omakase was something you asked for, a way of saying, I’m curious and open, willing to try anything. You voluntarily set aside the menu and gave yourself up to fate. It was part of a code you learned, along with picking up pieces by hand and not dipping them into soy sauce unless instructed to do so, and then only the very tip of the fish, never the rice.
In my early years of eating sushi, I didn’t expect to love an omakase meal from beginning to end. Inevitably there were pieces I found slightly less delightful: giant clam, profoundly rubbery, or the oilier fishes that smacked of murky parts of the sea. Nevertheless I ate them, hoping I would learn something — about fish, sushi as a craft, the corners of the chef’s mind. [...]
Every omakase has an arc — as a year has seasons, marking our passage through time — and this is certainly not the only way to eat sushi. I’ve had fine meals ferried by conveyor belt in Tokyo, and nights I would’ve been content with a fistful of negitoro rolls.
But when you ask for omakase, you relinquish choice and your own desires. You put your trust in the stranger across the counter, and say, tell me a story.
Sometimes the story is personal. Naomichi Yasuda, the founding chef of Sushi Yasuda, near Grand Central Terminal (who has since returned to Japan), once told me that he was trained to be an “eel man,” and then served me only eel, sea and freshwater, in every treatment and form, including the flash-fried spine.
At the now-shuttered Jewel Bako in the East Village, I was handed a shot glass full of squirming baby eels, boneless, to be drunk straight; the likewise shuttered Kura, a few blocks over, presented a saucer of shiokara, fermented squid viscera, while the chef laughed and laughed. [...]
No such surprises await at most of today’s sushi-yas. Instead, you are assured that you will get what you pay for: pliant and unchallenging fish, occasional pyrotechnics and status-symbol frills on demand. Which is to say, what you think you want, or the world wants you to want. Nod to the chef; fiddle with your phone. Whatever comes will probably be delicious. It will also be boring.
by Ligaya Mishan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ellen Silverman for The New York Times[ed. Any place blow-torching sushi should be avoided.]
By 1987, Charlie Sheen, playing a whippersnapper stockbroker in the movie “Wall Street,” was churning out rice balls eight at a time from a home nigiri-making machine in his penthouse.
That nigiri-maker might have been an omen for what was to come: the co-opting of sushi by finance bros, favoring optimization and spectacle over craft, in an eerie Benihana-fication of the American sushi-ya.
I am not arguing for sushi as some serene, transcendent ritual. Sushi as we know it started out as working-class food sold in the streets of 19th-century Edo (today Tokyo). Some of the best sushi I’ve had was in strip malls in Los Angeles, at unadorned counters where the chef set down piece after piece with sometimes little more than a grunt, and we were out in half an hour. (Shout-out to Sushi Ike, for those who know.)
Now the hand torches flare and, at the most expensive restaurants, there’s a banker’s roll of supplements to pad out your meal and push the already astonishing prices even higher — up to $1,200 per person, pre-tax and pre-liquor, for the “chef’s reserve” omakase at Masa on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
At Sushi Nakazawa in the West Village, you might have your choice of A5 Wagyu, truffles (a Japanese food writer I consulted expressed concern that the scent would be “distracting”), a tweezering of gold leaf over caviar and a pairing of Krug Champagne and kinki (thornyhead), a rare and opulently fatty fish sometimes called the Wagyu of the sea.
More insidiously, an odd note of appeasement has crept in. A recent omakase meal at a Lower Manhattan counter was almost all crowd-pleasers. First, three kinds of salmon — a fish not even used for sushi until the 1980s, when Norway, eager to offload an oversupply, lobbied to create a new market in Japan (which may in turn have expanded the audience for sushi in the United States, with the lure of a more familiar and straightforwardly buttery fish). Then delicate sweet snappers, luscious jacks and tuna close to liquefying in its own fat.
With each bite I had the nagging sense I was being spoon-fed, like a finicky child who couldn’t possibly know what’s really good or keep an open mind. There was nothing funky or chewy that might demand a pause to wonder: What am I eating?
In the past decade and a half, omakase, in which the guest cedes power and the chef decides what you eat, has become the dominant form of sushi in major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. This stems in part from the popularity of the 2011 documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a paean to the monastic virtuosity of the sushi master Jiro Ono, plying his craft in a basement nook off a subway station in Tokyo.
In classic omakase, a chef has leeway to improvise in the moment, modulate, maybe even figure out what kind of person you are. These days in New York, the experience is more often one-size-fits-all: a fixed series of courses — essentially, a tasting menu — ranging from a dozen to 20 or more, with accommodations only for allergies or a particularly querulous diner, and often not even then. At the highest-end spots, everyone sits down at the same time and is fed in the same order, as if at the most elegant of mess halls.
There was a time when omakase was something you asked for, a way of saying, I’m curious and open, willing to try anything. You voluntarily set aside the menu and gave yourself up to fate. It was part of a code you learned, along with picking up pieces by hand and not dipping them into soy sauce unless instructed to do so, and then only the very tip of the fish, never the rice.
In my early years of eating sushi, I didn’t expect to love an omakase meal from beginning to end. Inevitably there were pieces I found slightly less delightful: giant clam, profoundly rubbery, or the oilier fishes that smacked of murky parts of the sea. Nevertheless I ate them, hoping I would learn something — about fish, sushi as a craft, the corners of the chef’s mind. [...]
Every omakase has an arc — as a year has seasons, marking our passage through time — and this is certainly not the only way to eat sushi. I’ve had fine meals ferried by conveyor belt in Tokyo, and nights I would’ve been content with a fistful of negitoro rolls.
But when you ask for omakase, you relinquish choice and your own desires. You put your trust in the stranger across the counter, and say, tell me a story.
Sometimes the story is personal. Naomichi Yasuda, the founding chef of Sushi Yasuda, near Grand Central Terminal (who has since returned to Japan), once told me that he was trained to be an “eel man,” and then served me only eel, sea and freshwater, in every treatment and form, including the flash-fried spine.
At the now-shuttered Jewel Bako in the East Village, I was handed a shot glass full of squirming baby eels, boneless, to be drunk straight; the likewise shuttered Kura, a few blocks over, presented a saucer of shiokara, fermented squid viscera, while the chef laughed and laughed. [...]
No such surprises await at most of today’s sushi-yas. Instead, you are assured that you will get what you pay for: pliant and unchallenging fish, occasional pyrotechnics and status-symbol frills on demand. Which is to say, what you think you want, or the world wants you to want. Nod to the chef; fiddle with your phone. Whatever comes will probably be delicious. It will also be boring.
by Ligaya Mishan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ellen Silverman for The New York Times
Wind Developers Paid to Quit (With a Catch)
As the Iran war pushes up energy prices, the Trump administration is paying offshore wind developers to walk away from projects and invest instead in fossil fuel infrastructure.
The US Department of the Interior (DoI) announced on Monday two "historic" agreements under which the firms behind the Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind projects will voluntarily terminate their offshore wind leases.
In return, the DoI will reimburse the companies with taxpayers' cash, to the tune of $765 million in the case of Bluepoint Wind, and $120 million for Golden State Wind.
There is a catch, of course: the leaseholders must first invest a comparable amount in qualifying US conventional energy projects (i.e., oil, gas, or liquefied natural gas infrastructure) before they can recover the money tied to their offshore wind leases.
This isn't the first such development: last month, the DoI reached a similar deal with French energy biz TotalEnergies to reimburse the company approximately $1 billion to give up its wind farm leases in Carolina Long Bay and the New York Bight area, suggesting that this may be an ongoing strategy.
It appears that paying developers to surrender offshore wind leases has become a fallback strategy after President Trump's executive order halting new federal approvals for wind projects ran into legal challenges from a coalition of state attorneys general and was later struck down in federal court.
In a remarkable coincidence, both sets of developers have decided not to pursue any new offshore wind developments in the US.
Washington's justification for these actions is that it is all part of President Trump's "Energy Dominance Agenda" to "leverage the nation's natural resources" to benefit American citizens and help lower everyday energy costs.
"President Trump is focused on providing affordable and reliable energy to American citizens," claimed Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a prepared remark.
"The companies that bid for these offshore wind leases were basically sold a product in 2022 that was only viable when propped up by massive taxpayer subsidies. Now that hardworking Americans are no longer footing the bill for expensive, unreliable, intermittent energy projects, companies are once again investing in affordable, reliable, secure energy infrastructure," he added.
The President's well-known aversion to renewable energy is said to date back at least to his failed legal attempt to stop a wind farm project from being built within sight of his golf course in Scotland over a decade ago.
Looking at the figures, fossil fuel producers are estimated to receive about $34.8 billion a year in federal support through tax breaks, royalty policies, and other subsidies, even though oil and gas have enjoyed public backing for decades and hardly qualify as an emerging industry.
Meanwhile Meta this week signed an agreement with Overview Energy to beam a gigawatt of solar power down from orbit, just as soon as they can lob the arrays into orbit. But, just like SMRs, that won't happen until at least 2030.
Power constraints have become such a limiting factor that major model builders like AWS, Google, and xAI are now talking about building orbital datacenters. However, the economics of such a deployment remain dubious to say the least.
The US Department of the Interior (DoI) announced on Monday two "historic" agreements under which the firms behind the Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind projects will voluntarily terminate their offshore wind leases.
There is a catch, of course: the leaseholders must first invest a comparable amount in qualifying US conventional energy projects (i.e., oil, gas, or liquefied natural gas infrastructure) before they can recover the money tied to their offshore wind leases.
This isn't the first such development: last month, the DoI reached a similar deal with French energy biz TotalEnergies to reimburse the company approximately $1 billion to give up its wind farm leases in Carolina Long Bay and the New York Bight area, suggesting that this may be an ongoing strategy.
It appears that paying developers to surrender offshore wind leases has become a fallback strategy after President Trump's executive order halting new federal approvals for wind projects ran into legal challenges from a coalition of state attorneys general and was later struck down in federal court.
In a remarkable coincidence, both sets of developers have decided not to pursue any new offshore wind developments in the US.
Washington's justification for these actions is that it is all part of President Trump's "Energy Dominance Agenda" to "leverage the nation's natural resources" to benefit American citizens and help lower everyday energy costs.
"President Trump is focused on providing affordable and reliable energy to American citizens," claimed Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a prepared remark.
"The companies that bid for these offshore wind leases were basically sold a product in 2022 that was only viable when propped up by massive taxpayer subsidies. Now that hardworking Americans are no longer footing the bill for expensive, unreliable, intermittent energy projects, companies are once again investing in affordable, reliable, secure energy infrastructure," he added.
The President's well-known aversion to renewable energy is said to date back at least to his failed legal attempt to stop a wind farm project from being built within sight of his golf course in Scotland over a decade ago.
Looking at the figures, fossil fuel producers are estimated to receive about $34.8 billion a year in federal support through tax breaks, royalty policies, and other subsidies, even though oil and gas have enjoyed public backing for decades and hardly qualify as an emerging industry.
by Dan Robinson, The Register | Read more:
Image: AI
[ed. Your taxpayer dollars at work. See also: Core Scientific accelerates crypto-to-AI pivot, converts Bitcoin mine to gigawatt-scale token farm (Register):]***
Over the past year, all of the major hyperscalers have embraced some kind of non-traditional energy storage or generation tech, some more exotic than others. Google, Oracle, AWS, and others are all betting on small modular reactors (SMRs), tiny nuclear power plants, that can be deployed on site to fuel their AI ambitions. Meanwhile Meta this week signed an agreement with Overview Energy to beam a gigawatt of solar power down from orbit, just as soon as they can lob the arrays into orbit. But, just like SMRs, that won't happen until at least 2030.
Power constraints have become such a limiting factor that major model builders like AWS, Google, and xAI are now talking about building orbital datacenters. However, the economics of such a deployment remain dubious to say the least.
Drone Strikes on Data Centers Spook Big Tech, Halting Middle East Projects
A data center developer has paused all Middle East project investments after one of its facilities was damaged by an Iranian missile or drone attack. The decision comes as the Iran war is forcing Silicon Valley investors and tech companies to rethink a trillion-dollar plan to build more AI and cloud data centers in Gulf countries.
The damaged data center is owned by Pure Data Centre Group, a London-based company that is operating or developing more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “No one’s going to run into a burning building, so to speak,” Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek told CNBC. “No one’s going to put in new additional capital at scale to do anything until everything settles down.”
Data center developers are already eating the costs of uninsurable war damage from the conflict, which began with a US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28. Iran primarily responded by attacking shipping to shut down the Strait of Hormuz trade corridor along with striking US military bases and energy infrastructure across the Gulf region.
Iran also directly struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates, while a near-miss from an Iranian one-way attack drone damaged a third AWS data center in Bahrain. The Iranian attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and also triggered fire suppression systems that caused water damage, AWS reported through its service dashboard on March 1.
That led to widespread disruptions in cloud services for AWS customers like banks, payment platforms, the Dubai-based ride-hailing app Careem, and the data cloud provider Snowflake.
Crucially for Amazon’s bottom line, the company chose to waive customer charges in its Middle East cloud region for the entire month of March 2026, as reported by The Register. That decision cost Amazon an estimated $150 million—not including the damaged data centers—because existing civil law frameworks put the financial burden on data center operators to absorb costs and refund clients in the event of military conflicts, according to Tech Policy Press. [...]
Big Tech in the crosshairs
It has been clear for a while that tech companies cannot pretend to be mere bystanders in the ongoing conflict. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps directly threatened retaliation against US companies that it identified as having Israeli links and supporting military tech applications after an Iranian bank’s data center was hit by a US or Israeli strike on March 11. The Iranian military organization released a list of “Iran’s new targets” that included offices and data centers operated by Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, and it reiterated a similar threat against tech companies on March 31 in retaliation for Israeli and US military strikes that resulted in the assassination of Iranian leaders.
The Revolutionary Guard attempted to make good on that threat by attacking an Oracle data center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on April 2, according to Data Center Dynamics. Although the Dubai Media Office initially dismissed the claim, it later confirmed that shrapnel had fallen on the facade of the Oracle facility after a “successful aerial interception” by local air defense systems. [...]
Silicon Valley investors and Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates may also need to rethink plans for making the Middle East into a hub for AI data centers alongside the United States and China, Rest of World reported. US tech companies have each announced plans for data center developments worth billions of dollars, while certain Gulf countries have each pledged hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in AI chips and data centers.
[ed. It should be obvious that ALL data centers everywhere are sitting ducks for terrorist attacks. Unless owners are ready to pay for military-grade defense systems, this will be an ongoing threat.]
The damaged data center is owned by Pure Data Centre Group, a London-based company that is operating or developing more than 1 gigawatt of data center capacity across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. “No one’s going to run into a burning building, so to speak,” Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek told CNBC. “No one’s going to put in new additional capital at scale to do anything until everything settles down.”
Iran also directly struck two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates, while a near-miss from an Iranian one-way attack drone damaged a third AWS data center in Bahrain. The Iranian attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and also triggered fire suppression systems that caused water damage, AWS reported through its service dashboard on March 1.
That led to widespread disruptions in cloud services for AWS customers like banks, payment platforms, the Dubai-based ride-hailing app Careem, and the data cloud provider Snowflake.
Crucially for Amazon’s bottom line, the company chose to waive customer charges in its Middle East cloud region for the entire month of March 2026, as reported by The Register. That decision cost Amazon an estimated $150 million—not including the damaged data centers—because existing civil law frameworks put the financial burden on data center operators to absorb costs and refund clients in the event of military conflicts, according to Tech Policy Press. [...]
Big Tech in the crosshairs
It has been clear for a while that tech companies cannot pretend to be mere bystanders in the ongoing conflict. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps directly threatened retaliation against US companies that it identified as having Israeli links and supporting military tech applications after an Iranian bank’s data center was hit by a US or Israeli strike on March 11. The Iranian military organization released a list of “Iran’s new targets” that included offices and data centers operated by Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle, and it reiterated a similar threat against tech companies on March 31 in retaliation for Israeli and US military strikes that resulted in the assassination of Iranian leaders.
The Revolutionary Guard attempted to make good on that threat by attacking an Oracle data center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on April 2, according to Data Center Dynamics. Although the Dubai Media Office initially dismissed the claim, it later confirmed that shrapnel had fallen on the facade of the Oracle facility after a “successful aerial interception” by local air defense systems. [...]
Silicon Valley investors and Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates may also need to rethink plans for making the Middle East into a hub for AI data centers alongside the United States and China, Rest of World reported. US tech companies have each announced plans for data center developments worth billions of dollars, while certain Gulf countries have each pledged hundreds of billions of dollars for investment in AI chips and data centers.
by Jeremy Hsu, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Giuseppe CACACE/AFP via Getty Images[ed. It should be obvious that ALL data centers everywhere are sitting ducks for terrorist attacks. Unless owners are ready to pay for military-grade defense systems, this will be an ongoing threat.]
Six Things Apple Achieved Under Tim Cook’s Management
Apple CEO Tim Cook announced this week that he’s stepping down from his position in September and handing the reins to John Ternus, currently the company’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering and a 25-year employee. [...]
Quiet hardware successes: Apple Watch, headphones, and more
The Tim Cook era can’t lay claim to any single hardware announcement as important or far-reaching as the iPhone, the iPod, or even the iPad. Apple has definitely introduced good—even great—hardware in the last 15 years, though.
The main difference is that Apple products introduced during the Jobs era tended to belong at or near the center of your digital life. The Macintosh popularized the graphical user interface. The iPod was a constant musical companion on commutes, during workouts or study sessions, or when plugged into someone’s speaker at a party. The iPhone, obviously, became the most important personal computing device since the personal computer. And the iPad, as conceived by Jobs, was clearly intended to be a new kind of primary computing device (it was only under Cook that the iPad settled into its current in-betweener rut, computer-like but not computer-like enough to supplant the Mac’s mouse-and-pointer usage model).
Hardware introduced during Cook’s tenure, on the other hand, tended to be at its best when it extended or sat atop those Jobs-era products in some way. The AirPods and the wider universe of Beats headphones are the archetypal example—wireless headphones with just enough proprietary Apple technology in them that they’re much easier and more pleasant to use with other Apple products than typical Bluetooth headphones.
Similarly, the Apple Watch is a convenient way to tap into a tiny subset of your iPhone’s communication capabilities (plus fitness tracking). The HomePod is a speaker version of AirPods. I don’t know a kid with an iPad who doesn’t also have an Apple Pencil for doodling and sketching. Apple never released a TV set, but the Apple TV is the streaming box that makes the TV I already have feel the most like a TV and the least like a billboard. Apple never released a car, but it did introduce CarPlay, a useful add-on that is a prerequisite for me when I’m in the market for a car.
None of these products changed the face of their industries the way the iPod, iPhone, or iPad did, but they’ve all become ubiquitous, succeeding on the strength of Apple’s other products and services. That’s the kind of thing Cook’s Apple was good at inventing—reasons to stick around in Apple’s ecosystem once you’d already been drawn in.
Apple, the cloud services company
Apple still makes the majority of its money from hardware, but especially in recent years, the steadiest growth has come from Apple’s services—things like iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV (the service, not the box), and software subscriptions like the new Creator Studio bundle.
The iCloud branding was introduced at the tail end of Jobs’ tenure, but its growth (and the growth of most Apple services and subscriptions) all happened on Cook’s watch. In 2011, Cook’s first year as CEO, Apple brought in a then-record $102.5 billion in annual revenue; in 2025, the Services division alone pulled down more than $109 billion in revenue. Not bad for a collection of features that rose from the ashes of the failed MobileMe service (and .Mac and iTools before it).
I don’t think the rise and increasing importance of the Services division has been entirely good for Apple or its users. The need to convert customers into subscribers and to upsell current subscribers to higher service tiers means that Apple’s users are now subject to some of the same kinds of notifications and reminders that so richly annoy PC users in Windows 11. [...]
A penchant for iteration
While it lacked somewhat in world-changing, all-new products, Cook’s Apple was also very good at relentlessly iterating on and improving Apple’s core products.
I’ve been covering Apple for various outlets throughout Cook’s tenure as CEO, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how Apple has changed in the 15 years since he formally took over from an ailing Steve Jobs in the summer of 2011. Under Cook, the company has become less surprising but massively financially successful; some of Apple’s newer products have flopped or underperformed, but far more have become and stayed excellent thanks to years of competent iteration.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of everything Cook has done as CEO, but it’s my attempt at a big-picture, high-level summary and a snapshot of where Apple is now, to serve as a comparison point once Ternus kicks off his tenure.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of everything Cook has done as CEO, but it’s my attempt at a big-picture, high-level summary and a snapshot of where Apple is now, to serve as a comparison point once Ternus kicks off his tenure.
Quiet hardware successes: Apple Watch, headphones, and more
The Tim Cook era can’t lay claim to any single hardware announcement as important or far-reaching as the iPhone, the iPod, or even the iPad. Apple has definitely introduced good—even great—hardware in the last 15 years, though.
The main difference is that Apple products introduced during the Jobs era tended to belong at or near the center of your digital life. The Macintosh popularized the graphical user interface. The iPod was a constant musical companion on commutes, during workouts or study sessions, or when plugged into someone’s speaker at a party. The iPhone, obviously, became the most important personal computing device since the personal computer. And the iPad, as conceived by Jobs, was clearly intended to be a new kind of primary computing device (it was only under Cook that the iPad settled into its current in-betweener rut, computer-like but not computer-like enough to supplant the Mac’s mouse-and-pointer usage model).
Hardware introduced during Cook’s tenure, on the other hand, tended to be at its best when it extended or sat atop those Jobs-era products in some way. The AirPods and the wider universe of Beats headphones are the archetypal example—wireless headphones with just enough proprietary Apple technology in them that they’re much easier and more pleasant to use with other Apple products than typical Bluetooth headphones.
Similarly, the Apple Watch is a convenient way to tap into a tiny subset of your iPhone’s communication capabilities (plus fitness tracking). The HomePod is a speaker version of AirPods. I don’t know a kid with an iPad who doesn’t also have an Apple Pencil for doodling and sketching. Apple never released a TV set, but the Apple TV is the streaming box that makes the TV I already have feel the most like a TV and the least like a billboard. Apple never released a car, but it did introduce CarPlay, a useful add-on that is a prerequisite for me when I’m in the market for a car.
None of these products changed the face of their industries the way the iPod, iPhone, or iPad did, but they’ve all become ubiquitous, succeeding on the strength of Apple’s other products and services. That’s the kind of thing Cook’s Apple was good at inventing—reasons to stick around in Apple’s ecosystem once you’d already been drawn in.
Apple, the cloud services company
Apple still makes the majority of its money from hardware, but especially in recent years, the steadiest growth has come from Apple’s services—things like iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV (the service, not the box), and software subscriptions like the new Creator Studio bundle.
The iCloud branding was introduced at the tail end of Jobs’ tenure, but its growth (and the growth of most Apple services and subscriptions) all happened on Cook’s watch. In 2011, Cook’s first year as CEO, Apple brought in a then-record $102.5 billion in annual revenue; in 2025, the Services division alone pulled down more than $109 billion in revenue. Not bad for a collection of features that rose from the ashes of the failed MobileMe service (and .Mac and iTools before it).
I don’t think the rise and increasing importance of the Services division has been entirely good for Apple or its users. The need to convert customers into subscribers and to upsell current subscribers to higher service tiers means that Apple’s users are now subject to some of the same kinds of notifications and reminders that so richly annoy PC users in Windows 11. [...]
A penchant for iteration
While it lacked somewhat in world-changing, all-new products, Cook’s Apple was also very good at relentlessly iterating on and improving Apple’s core products.
by Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica | Read more:
Images: Apple
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