Everyone is talking about AI, whether they want to or not. Every day, it feels like there’s a news story about how the tech is improving/ruining our lives, and many conversations about artificial intelligence either come from a place of deep fear or heightened optimism.
As someone who works in entertainment, I’ve been wondering if these reactions reflect the actual state of the technology that’s out there. Well, as I learned during this year’s AI on the Lot, the world’s biggest conference focused on AI in media, the disconnect is significant — and the means to bridge the gap from fear to understanding, and potentially acceptance, are lacking.
The event, which drew roughly 2,500 attendees throughout its three-day run, took place near (and partially on) the backlot of Amazon MGM Studios in Culver City, California. I was there for one day, but that was enough time for me to experience the product hype and techno-optimism firsthand. (The persistent worries about human replacement and environmental damage were rarely mentioned.)
One thing you should know about me: I’m a card-carrying member of the performers’ union SAG-AFTRA and, just a few years ago, I joined the strike that raised red flags about the non-consensual use of generative AI in entertainment. Now, here I was — an AI skeptic, an actor, a CNET journalist — entering the belly of the beast.
Recent films like Hell Grind, which made waves at Cannes, and Dream of Violets, which sparked controversy for being the first full-length AI-made movie to be featured at Tribeca, show the direction movie-making may be heading: quicker, cheaper productions with fewer humans involved.
I wanted to change my mind about the state of the entertainment industry and AI’s potential to improve Hollywood’s overall operations. By day’s end, I left feeling even more conflicted.
Albert Cheng, the head of AI Studios at Amazon, delivered the opening keynote on the day I attended. During the hour, he informed the crowd that his team’s approach to AI is “humans first.”
“We truly believe that at every part of the creative process, humans must be an active participant and decision maker in that process,” he told the crowd, while standing in front of Amazon MGM Studios’ Volume Wall — an AI production tool used to transform a soundstage into any location imaginable.
“Whether it would be a writer or a director or an actor,” he continued, “it’s really important to have humans involved in driving that process with AI as tools to empower, enable, and accelerate everything that we do. And with that combination we’ll get better creative product, we’ll get more creative product, we’ll get more voices.”
An hour later, Amazon greenlit three new animated series, all created with AI; that afternoon, Jorge R. Gutierrez (The Book of Life, Maya and the Three), the creator of Punky Duck — one of the titles announced — scrapped the project entirely due to peer criticism and online backlash.
A day later, screenwriter Paul Schrader, best known for writing the Martin Scorsese-directed movies Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ, took that same Volume Wall stage to counter Cheng’s words by dismissing the need for human actors altogether.
“We, as carbon-based fools, will spend our money empathizing and caring about silicon-based creations, and then they’ll want the next one,” he said during one part of his speech. “We know where that actor lives, and he works for nothing, and he works 24 hours a day.”
Schrader also took aim at background actors — a legitimate job that can help performers make a living and qualify for union-offered health insurance (I’m speaking from experience) — who he described as utterly expendable: “Why are we paying extras $180 a day when they look so plastic anyway? We have to clothe them, we have to feed them, and we have to deal with their complaints when it gets too hot. Why don’t we just make them?”
Two keynote speeches, two completely different AI perspectives. On one end of the spectrum, you have the human-driven message that AI is controllable and should be viewed as any other production tool — not a death knell for humanity and creativity as we know it.
On the other? Throw all that out the window and let AI take the wheel.
This is where we are with AI and Hollywood, though. On one side, there are people, such as Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino, who look down on the use of this technology in entertainment.
The other side of the AI in filmmaking debate has people, including Roger Avary, Tarantino’s former writing partner, using AI to make movies — just as Darren Aronofsky has been doing with his AI-made series on the American Revolutionary War. Martin Scorsese has hopped on the AI bandwagon, as well, investing in an AI company that helps make storyboards.
The 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude quakes toppled dozens of buildings, killed at least 32 people, and injured at least 700 others, the authorities said. A frantic rescue effort was underway.
Here’s the latest.
Huge, twinned earthquakes struck Venezuela on Wednesday, toppling many buildings and killing at least 32 people and injuring 700 others in a disaster that added to the country’s already severe political and economic turmoil.
One of the quakes was the strongest to hit Venezuela in more than a century, and the full scale of the damage was not immediately clear early Thursday morning. President Delcy Rodríguez announced the initial toll of deaths and injuries on television but noted that it did not include the worst-hit state of La Guaira, where dozens of buildings had collapsed.
Residents describe terror and confusion as quake struck
Residents in Venezuela’s capital and nearby cities described scenes of terror and confusion as buildings collapsed, windows rattled, and homes lost power when two major earthquakes struck the country on Wednesday evening.
“I’ve never felt something so strong,” María Barco, 24, said from the city of San Felipe, near the earthquake’s epicenter, describing a strong shake that seemed to last 60 to 90 seconds. Her daughter screamed, she said. The back part of her house fell in, she said, leaving the family unable to get back in, and they were without internet or electricity.
The earthquakes hit in the evening of a holiday celebrating an 1821 battle that eventually led to Venezuela’s independence from Spain. Schools were closed, and when the quakes struck, many Venezuelans were at home because they did not go to work on Wednesday.
Internet connectivity dropped significantly in Venezuela after the earthquakes, according to network data from the monitoring group NetBlocks. Connectivity appeared to drop from over 90 percent to around 65 percent, the data showed.
Venezuela’s neighbors offer rescue teams and humanitarian assistance.
The United States and several Latin American countries said they would send humanitarian aid and rescue personnel to Venezuela, after two major earthquakes struck west of Caracas on Wednesday night, killing at least 32 and injuring hundreds more.
“I have instructed all agencies of our government to get ready to move quickly. We will be there for our new and great friends,” President Trump wrote in a social media post on Wednesday night.
American Airlines, which operates two daily flights between Miami and Caracas, said that it has suspended its operations at Simón Bolívar International Airport. The Venezuelan authorities closed the airport, which serves the capital, after it suffered heavy damage during the earthquakes.
Venezuela’s health system has struggled with resource constraints for years, making rescue efforts more challenging, said Dan Hovey, vice president of emergency response at Direct Relief, a California-based humanitarian organization that provides aid to Venezuela. Road closures, power outages, and communication disruptions also create logistical hurdles for delivering aid, he said.
The government of Curaçao said people on the Caribbean island nation also felt tremors from the earthquakes in Venezuela. There were no immediate reports of any serious damage there. Curaçao lies around 40 miles off the Venezuelan coast and is about 110 miles north of the quake epicenters.
It’s early Thursday morning here in Caracas, and parts of the city —particularly in the west — have no power. Subway and train services here and in the nearby state of Miranda are also suspended. As I traveled through some of the capital’s western and central areas earlier, I saw neighborhoods with no lights on and streets flooded by burst water pipes.
Rodríguez said that hotels and shelters were available for those who lost their homes or whose homes were damaged by the earthquakes.
In her televised address, Delcy Rodríguez urged the public to report missing people or damage to their homes through a government platform that is typically used to track utility outages. Separately, Venezuelans have reported hundreds of missing people on a non-official website. Others are sharing details about the missing on social media groups.
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The 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude quakes toppled dozens of buildings
The latest interstellar visitor to be discovered in our solar system was born somewhere in the universe that was nothing like our home and, according to a new study, a time long before the solar system even formed—in the infancy of the cosmos.
Spotted in 2025, 3I/ATLAS is the third interstellar comet that astronomers have identified flying through our solar system, after 1I/ʻOumuamua and 2I/Borisov. Since then, researchers have used the space-based James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the ground-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to study the gas spouting out from 3I/ATLAS as the sun’s heat has burned up its icy insides. Chemical isotopes contained in the gas reveal details of the comet’s murky history—and a new study published in Nature (after it was posted online as a preprint in March) helps further color in that origin story.
Using carbon isotopes in the comet to estimate its age, the authors believe it may be even more ancient than earlier estimates had suggested—as old as 12 billion years. That’s far older than our own solar system, which is 4.5 billion years old, and just less than two billion years younger than the universe itself.
The study also shows that 3I/ATLAS came from a much colder region of its own solar system than any of the comets we see in our own. The comet contains far more heavy hydrogen—in the form of an isotope called deuterium, which has one neutron and one proton—than any local space rock, a quality that tends to point to colder environs. The finding jibes with other recent research, and astronomers are increasingly speculating that our solar system might be the oddball—and that the comets we’ve been studying for centuries have been unlike most in the universe.
It’s thanks to cutting-edge telescopes like ALMA and JWST that we’ve spotted these first three interstellar objects. And with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile now beginning a decade-long sky survey, more such discoveries are likely to follow, says Cyrielle Opitom, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a co-author of the new study. “We hope they will be as exciting as 3I/ATLAS,” she says. These vagrant rocks could soon tell us far more about what lies at the universe’s outer reaches—and perhaps how weird we really are.
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Image of the interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope on July 21, 2025. NASA/ESA/David Jewitt
At its June meeting, the Federal Reserve voted to pause interest rates in the 3.50% to 3.75% range yet again. This latest in a series of pauses has left savers in limbo.
With inflation topping 4% and most savings accounts barely keeping pace, where is the best place to stash the cash you don’t need right now?
If you don’t want it to lose value amid rising inflation but you also don’t want to risk exposing it to the market by investing it, a certificate of deposit (CD) account is one of your best options.
But how do you choose the right term length? That really comes down to what the Federal Reserve’s next move is. While a 5-year CD was your best bet in the past, with fed rates still above average while inflation was ticking downward, the uncertainty in today’s economy makes those longer-term CDs less attractive.
With the outlook for both inflation and future Fed rate moves uncertain, your best bet right now is a short-term CD so you can lock in today’s rate while still having flexibility to shift your cash somewhere else depending on where the market goes.
Why a short-term CD is your best after the Fed meeting
Like high-yield savings accounts, CD rates generally move in the same direction as Federal Reserve policy. The difference is that a CD locks in a fixed rate for the entire term, while savings account rates can rise or fall at any time.
With many short and long-term CDs offering around 4% right now, locking in those above-average rates for as long as possible was a great idea when inflation was trending downward. But now that inflation is back above 4% and only a few savings accounts are beating it, a short-term CD, with a term of, say, six or so months, might be a better bet.
This allows you to lock in higher rates for a few months while you wait to see what happens with inflation and what kind of signals the Federal Reserve puts out about where interest rates might land by the end of the year.
If the Federal Reserve raises rates in response to stubbornly high inflation, you’ll have the opportunity to lock in those new, higher rates after the term is up. If inflation, instead, starts falling again, you can move your cash after those few months to a longer-term CD to lock in these rates for longer.
With that in mind, use the tool below to find the top CD rates available today:
Economic signs to watch to anticipate the future of interest rates
After stashing your cash in a short-term CD, you can keep an eye on the economy in the next few months while you wait for it to mature. That way, when it does mature, you’ll have a good idea of where to move your cash next to maximize your yields.
Watch for clues as to how Kevin Warsh will change the Fed. Warsh has historically been a proponent of keeping rates higher rather than risking inflation. But some analysts speculate that he might be more likely to give in to pressure from President Donald Trump to cut rates. Keep tabs on what he says in upcoming meetings to get a sense of which way he might lean in the future.
Keep up with the monthly CPI reports. The consumer price index, released every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, not only gives you a broad picture of how your own costs are changing, but it’s an important measure of inflation tracked by the Federal Reserve. If inflation keeps going up, the Fed is likely to either keep rates paused or hike them further. If inflation slows, rate cuts might be in the future.
Check the latest jobs reports. In addition to inflation, the Federal Reserve also closely watches employment data, including unemployment rates and wage levels, when setting its monetary policy.
Track the 10-year Treasury yield. Especially for longer-term savings accounts, such as your CD, rates can be influenced by yields on multiyear Treasury bonds. This is also an important economic indicator to watch if you might be buying a house soon, as the 10-year Treasury yield also influences mortgage rates.
Even if you don’t want to track economic indicators that closely for the rest of the year, you can stash your cash in a short-term CD now and set a reminder to check in on what’s going on in the market in the weeks before it matures.
From there, you can decide whether to move your cash into another short-term CD or lock in rates for longer by opting for a multiyear CD.
Hmmmm … The current administration, with its court Jester!
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My father was fond of the Spanish expression “en los pequeños detalles se ve la persona” — the person is revealed in the small details. Last week, at the summit of the Group of 7 leaders in France, two details revealed two people in two starkly different lights.
The first — who else? — is Donald Trump, the world’s most powerful man yet possibly the world’s smallest. Speaking to a journalist, the president claimed that Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, with whom he was once friendly but has since fallen out, “begged me to take a picture with her. She wanted a picture with me so badly,” before adding, “I wouldn’t have done it, but I felt sorry for her!”
Meloni’s response came swiftly. Trump’s statement, she said, was “totally invented.”
“I don’t know why the president of the United States behaves this way toward his own allies,” she said in a video posted to social media. “After all, this is not the first time it has happened. I can only say that it’s upsetting that he doesn’t have the same resolve toward the enemies of the West, toward the enemies of the United States, toward leadership to which he instead proves much more indulgent.”
“There is one thing he should remember,” she concluded. “I never beg — and neither does Italy.”
No prizes here for guessing who’s telling the truth — or who, despite their very considerable difference in physical size, is the bigger and braver person. But there’s also a lesson in this relatively trivial but telling episode that it behooves Americans to learn on the eve of our semiquincentennial: If you love America, now is the time to cringe for it.
Cringing is not simply a physical reflex stemming from embarrassment or disgust. It also involves a mix of compassion and empathy. You cringe when someone’s child flubs their lines in a school play. You cringe for a spouse trying to calm an abrasively drunk partner at a dinner party. You cringe whenever you feel implicated, if only as a human being, whenever someone humiliates those near them, even when they’re the last to know it. It’s how I felt for Jill Biden the night of her husband’s debate debacle.
To exist as a sentient American in the age of Trump is to live in a perpetual cringe — morally, aesthetically, intellectually, politically. If the administration were a play or film script, it would be neither farce nor tragedy but instead a kind of absurdist travesty, “Waiting for Godot” meets “Pulp Fiction” meets “Dumb and Dumber.”
However much we may disdain him, the president has the rest of us on the hook, as the face and voice of a country that ought to know better. Trump’s angry visage draped between the exterior columns of the Department of Justice? That’s us. His gilded, meretricious redecoration of the White House? That’s us. His repeatedly avowed admiration for Vladimir Putin? That’s us. His laughable claim about having achieved regime change in Tehran? That’s us. His Mafia-like threats against NATO allies? That’s us. His indescribably vain (and pathetically fruitless) effort to affix his name to the Kennedy Center? That’s us. His venal family profiting off his presidency in ways both transparent and tacky? That’s us.
The same goes for his insult of Meloni, which may be far from the worst of his sins but is also the most emblematic for being at once so utterly unnecessary as well as dementedly self-defeating. That’s us. The same country that freed its slaves, welcomed immigrants, invented airplanes, liberated concentration camps, landed men on the moon, and challenged the Soviet Union to tear down this wall now bids to be the global equivalent of the expensively dressed man soiling his pants at a cocktail party.
For 10 years, I’ve watched my former political party work overtime not to cringe; to pretend that the Vesuvius of verbal infamies erupting daily from Trump’s mouth is either unimportant, or hilarious, or calculating and shrewd. Republicans turned their tolerance for the president’s mental goo into a shot-drinking contest — the more you drank, the manlier you were supposed to be. John McCain and Mitt Romney refused to play, to their everlasting credit; other Republicans, less admirably, did so only after Trump had ended their political futures.
But for 10 years, too, I’ve also watched the president’s opponents fail to appreciate the necessity of cringing — by understanding their role in Trump’s rise. The Democrats and their media enablers, who, until June of 2024, insisted Joe Biden was fit for a second term (surely knowing, somewhere in the dim recesses of their minds, that this could only help Trump) are complicit. So are the progressives who, on one cultural issue after another, shoved the Democratic Party so far to the left that it became the very caricature of what MAGA-world said it was.
Here, then, is our American challenge: Let’s not be afraid to cringe. Ronald Reagan predicted, correctly, that the Soviet Union would end up on the ash heap of history; now it’s our turn to risk winding up on the ash heap of idiocy.
So let’s not look away from the parts we played in bringing America to this moment. Let’s remember who we once were, because it’s what we may yet be again — if only we feel the sting of our present shame.
The decision of whether to have children is a deeply personal one—so personal that it may be influenced by the attachment style someone develops in their own childhood. Attachment styles are psychological frameworks that form in the first years of life based on the quality of interactions with primary caregivers; research suggests that they influence how we relate to friends, parents, and partners throughout life.
Broadly speaking, psychologists recognize four different attachment styles: secure attachment, anxious/preoccupied attachment, avoidant/dismissive attachment, and disorganized/fearful attachment. According to attachment theory, securely attached people’s needs were reliably met by caregivers, and as a result, they have confidence in their closest relationships. The other three categories are types of insecure attachment: people with these attachment styles tend to have difficulties with trust and intimacy as a result of their early needs being rejected or inconsistently met.
A study published in April in the International Journal of Psychology found that people who have fearful or preoccupied attachment styles tend to want and to have slightly more children than those with secure attachment styles. The findings, while not definitive, suggest that people with these insecure attachments could be compensating for their attachment by having more children.
According to co-author T. Joel Wade, a professor of psychology at Bucknell University, these findings make intuitive sense because insecurely attached people tend to struggle to form lasting bonds with others. “They might think, ‘Even if my partner leaves me, I’m not going to be alone because I’ll have a relationship with a child.’”
This interpretation is “theoretically sensible,” says Lisa Welling, a professor of psychology at Oakland University, who was not involved in the research. “Fearfully attached individuals may be having children in part to feel more secure in their relationships or to forge stronger bonds through their children,” she says.
Wade and his colleagues used a research firm to administer an online survey to 15,120 participants equally divided across Japan, Canada and the U.S. The survey included measures that identified the participants’ attachment styles, as well as questions about how many children they desired and how many children they already had.
Across the full sample, those with insecure attachments reported wanting slightly larger families than those with secure ones, and insecure attachment was likewise modestly associated with having more children. This finding specifically held true for people with fearful and preoccupied attachment styles, two subtypes of insecure attachment associated with a craving for intimacy but, respectively, a deep fear of it or a fear of rejection and abandonment. When pooled, these effects were small but significant; when broken out by individual countries, however, the associations grew weaker. Still, “the sample size is very large, so statistically significant findings can emerge even when the practical effects are small,” Welling says.
Conversely, having a secure attachment style was linked with having fewer children. The trend was only seen in populations in the U.S. and Canada; in Japan, the researchers found no relationship between secure attachment and number of children. Wade suspects that social norms might explain these differences, with couples in Japan possibly feeling more pressure to have children than those in more individualistic Western countries such as the U.S. and Canada. “Culture can be a moderating factor,” Wade says.
Welling notes that the study was based on a one-time online survey and that the findings need to be replicated with future research—but overall, she says, the authors provide “a solid foundation for what I hope will be a growing area of investigation.”
An outbreak of tornadoes killed at least two people and left a path of destruction in Illinois and Indiana on Sunday after a tornado earlier in the day killed a person in Kansas.
Nearly three dozen tornado reports were logged by the Storm Prediction Center in Illinois and Indiana, as supercell thunderstorms roared across the region.
In Illinois, Sunday’s tornadoes piled onto what had already been a record-active year for them in the state. The 149 tornadoes recorded as of June 17 broke the state’s previous record high for a year of 142 set in 2024, Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford said.
Sunday’s tornadoes were part of a more widespread outburst of severe thunderstorms with damaging winds across the Midwest and Plains that knocked out power to tens of thousands. A continuous path of wind damage from southwest Kansas into Oklahoma was caused by a long-lived and powerful thunderstorm cluster called a derecho, a preliminary report from the National Weather Service said.
And the threat isn’t over on Monday. Tornado chances are low, but the overall storm threat will shift east to cover many more people across the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast.
Deadly tornadoes hit Illinois, Kansas
At least two people were killed Sunday in rural Jefferson County, Illinois, around 90 miles southeast of St. Louis, according to county Sheriff Jeff Bullard.
Both victims died in separate mobile homes that were destroyed about two to three miles apart, Bullard said. A third home was completely leveled and five other people were taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, Bullard said.
The storms damaged at least 20 homes in the county, Deputy Emergency Management Coordinator Keith Hertenstein said. Trees and power lines were knocked down, leaving some residents without electricity.
Earlier Sunday, one person was also found dead in Sedgwick County, Kansas, after a manufactured home was blown off its foundation by an EF2 tornado, the county said in a statement and the National Weather Service later confirmed.
Tornadoes also tore through southern Indiana. Around 30 homes were damaged in Gibson County, Sheriff Bruce Vanoven told CNN. Some were completely destroyed, including the house and barn at a farmstead that lost everything, he said.
The nearly 100-year-old Blythe Chapel in Owensville, Indiana, was also destroyed.
Several buildings in Gibson County, including a 96-year-old chapel, were destroyed after powerful storms swept through the area Sunday night. Gibson County Sheriff’s Office
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While Gibson County’s tornado siren system was activated, some sirens in Owensville and Princeton did not sound due to old age. Those are being replaced with new sirens, and the system is being updated so that it can be activated directly by the National Weather Service, according to Vanoven.
None of the areas where sirens malfunctioned had tornado damage, he said.
The storm tore through a retirement community in neighboring Warrick County, Sheriff Mike Wilder told CNN. Two roofs collapsed at the Park Place Apartments in the town of Newburgh, trapping a woman who had to be rescued by emergency officials, Wilder said. The woman and two others suffered minor injuries but refused treatment at the scene.
Also in Newburgh, a woman visiting her parents at a different apartment complex witnessed debris “flying everywhere” and watched from her car as a tornado ripped through a parking lot and pool.
“It was like, boom … 200 yards from my vehicle, as I sat there with my car in reverse, ready to pull off,” Ka’Lisha Puckett told CNN. She said firefighters knocked on her parents’ door at Bell Pointe Apartments to prepare them to evacuate because of damage to their roof.
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Tornado spotted in Illinois as severe storms sweep through the Midwest
When the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full-time and have banned remote and hybrid work.
Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity, or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.
Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full-time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.
Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers, and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Since we couldn’t directly measure the size of their egos, we measured factors that many previous studies have identified as reliable proxies for narcissism: the sizes of their pay packages, their signatures, and their photos in their company reports. (No, the chief executives probably aren’t directly overseeing the page layout, but their underlings have to figure out what will and won’t please the boss.) Commanding outsize compensation and projecting an outsize image sends a message right out of Ron Burgundy’s playbook: I’m kind of a big deal. We found that the higher chief executives scored on this index, the more likely they were to seek power and status by becoming chairmen of their own companies and joining the boards of other companies. These were the chief executives who made the most negative statements about remote and hybrid work during the first two years of the pandemic.
The connection between narcissistic personality traits and wanting people in the office full-time is not coincidental — it’s causal. In one experiment, we got leaders to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the success of Steve Jobs as Apple’s chief executive and Larry Ellison as Oracle’s. After participating in that exercise, leaders were more likely to oppose remote work.
None of this is to say that individual leaders who reject remote work are necessarily egomaniacs. Many factors influence workplace policies around flexibility. But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a drug — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.
When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control. Leaders can’t intimidate by hovering over cubicle desks and slamming doors. They can’t establish their dominance by summoning people to a conference room and pounding their fists on the table. They can’t even make direct eye contact to stare people down.
Remote work also prevents leaders from basking in the glow of employee reverence. Instead of standing out in the corner office, leaders are lost in a sea of equal squares on a screen. Instead of rapt attention, they’re met online with boredom, fatigue, and interruptions from partners, children, and pets. Instead of being showered with immediate gratification, they get glitchy facial expressions and delayed replies. Sycophantic reassurances from employees just don’t have the same effect if they’re on Slack.
Self-centered leaders often respond to these threats by tightening their grip. They declare that people are shirking from home instead of working from home. They threaten to fire people who aren’t on-site five days a week.
Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay, and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.
There are limits to the benefit of flexible office policies. Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning, and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week. They can use a day or two at home to focus on individual deep work and reserve the rest of the week for communication and collective problem-solving. It’s well documented that too much togetherness breeds groupthink (not to mention germs). When we spend some time apart, we actually generate more innovative ideas and make smarter decisions.
Hybrid work does have its own challenges for leaders. It’s not fun to try to inspire through a recorded video message or lead a brainstorming session on a digital whiteboard. But to maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly flexible world, it’s time for leaders to put their egos aside and master the art of managing from afar. Evidence supports a few basic guidelines.
One: Coordination counts. Teams need anchor days when everyone shows up — especially to welcome newcomers and mentor junior people. At Microsoft, new hires who spent at least a couple of days a month with their manager and their teams were more satisfied with their early experiences, which in turn meant they were more likely to stay over the next year and a half.
Two: Intensity beats frequency. The software company Atlassian has found that spending a few days with your team at a well-designed quarterly team gathering does more for connection and belonging than daily schleps to the office.
Three: Hybrid work is not one-size-fits-all. Different jobs require different amounts of time in person. So do different people; for example, flexibility proves particularly important in attracting and retaining women. And you need to gather together more if your staff operates like a basketball team passing the ball back and forth, rather than a gymnastics team whose members do their own individual events. (This explains why fully remote teams struggle to patent new technologies, but the people who examine patent applications are more productive when they can work from anywhere they like.)
Four: Most people care more about when they work than where. If they can choose the hours, they’re more willing to let leaders pick the place.
Organizational policies shouldn’t be vanity projects. The responsibility of leaders is not to mold the world to their needs. It’s to adapt themselves to the world’s needs, even if it means learning to live without the thrill of a live audience.
Hmmmm … More of the Trump Administration’s wasted dollars!
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The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was intended to reopen as a patriotic showpiece of Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C., beautification plan, with the bottom of the pool freshly coated in what he called “American flag blue” and the feature ready for the country’s 250th anniversary. The project, which began in April, cost an estimated $14.7 million, according to a contract summary from the Department of the Interior.
In early June water began to flow back into the pool. Soon after the blue gave way to green, as algae spread across the shallow basin, and crews began trying to knock it back with hydrogen peroxide and other treatments. Efforts are ongoing.
The green pool quickly became an online spectacle, and scientists began weighing in on what the color could reveal about the water. Scientific American spoke with one of them—Ashley Bair, a senior research developer at Usalco, which makes coagulants and other water-treatment chemicals. Bair got her Ph.D. studying cyanobacteria. In the conversation, she explained what might be happening in the Reflecting Pool and what can be done about it.
When you first saw images of the Reflecting Pool turned green, what did you think?
Honestly, my pool turns green all the time, so it didn’t shock me. We could have predicted it, but there’s no guarantee that it was going to happen.
Why would algae bloom in a place like the Reflecting Pool?
The algae are either eukaryotic algae, such as green algae, or cyanobacteria, which are bacterial algae, or a combination of the two. But no matter what they are, they need nutrients to grow. So they need light for photosynthesis, nutrients, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and some warmth for there to be any biochemical activity that allows them to happen. At this time of year, though, there’s plenty of light, and there’s plenty of heat.
How much of the bloom would you pin on the heat?
I know people are associating the painting of the bottom of the pool as causing more heat in the water. And maybe it increased the temperature slightly, but there’s plenty of heat in Washington, D.C., right now to fuel an algal bloom. So I do not believe that that was a major factor in this bloom.
In fact, back in 2012, when the pool was refilled, the same thing happened, and it hadn’t been painted at the time, right? So really what’s fueling this, the only thing that’s going to be limiting an algal bloom this time of year, are nutrients.
Limiting nutrients for algae, whether they’re cyanobacteria or green algae, are going to be phosphate and nitrogen. If [the algae are] cyanobacteria, they’re more likely to be limited by phosphates because a lot of them are capable of fixing atmospheric nitrogen.
I do know that the water, if it is filled from the Tidal Basin, is treated somewhat, with filtration and ozone for disinfection. But that’s not going to remove phosphate. Typically, for that, you’re going to need to coagulate your water, which will remove organics and phosphates.
If phosphates are basically alga food, why would the water in the Reflecting Pool have phosphates in it?
From what I understand, [the National Park Service] converted the pool to fill from the Tidal Basin back in 2009. And I believe they did that so that they wouldn’t have to go to the expense of using the city water supply, especially when you’re completely refilling that pool at 6.5 million gallons. The Tidal Basin fills from the Potomac River, so it’s natural water and can contain some runoff contaminants.
There can be high levels of phosphate from [pollution] point sources or from agricultural runoff, which is a big issue.
f phosphate is helping fuel the bloom, how would operators remove it from the water?
I would have recommended that they do some sort of coagulation treatment to remove the phosphate.
Coagulants are metal-based chemicals, either aluminum coagulants or iron coagulants. And what these do is form complexes with organics and phosphates. And [the coagulant] takes these dissolved organics and phosphates and precipitates them [so they fall to the bottom of the pool]. And then you can either vacuum it out or, if you were treating it prior to it going into the pool…, just let [the water without phosphates] go over a weir, and the sludge stays at the bottom.
Why might hydrogen peroxide fail to get rid of the algae?
They didn’t use enough of it. The Reflecting Pool is stagnant. It’s reflecting, so you want it to be very still. It’s designed that way. Peroxide doesn’t have time to diffuse into the middle before it’s done. So they only poured it around the edges…. They should have covered it evenly.
Peroxide is actually a very effective algicide. There are peroxide-based products that are used as algicides. Now, typically, when they’re labeled as an algicide, they’re going to be a stabilized form because peroxide doesn’t last very long. It breaks down really easily. Fortunately, it breaks down into oxygen and water, which [are nontoxic, and that’s] why it’s so great. I call it the nuclear option. If you really want to just kill your bloom, you use it, but it’s not going to last.
The other issue is: once you use it, you’re lysing those cells. So you’re breaking down the cells, which means phosphates are released back into the water. So now you have dissolved phosphates coming from the breakdown of these algal cells that you’ve killed with algicide. So you’re going to fuel “bloomageddon.” Typically, when you use a peroxide-based algicide, if you don’t follow up with either a phosphate-removal treatment or a copper treatment as a static algicide, you’re going to have a rebound growth. And I would expect that within a week or two, more likely a week.
Could a bloom in the Reflecting Pool be more than just a cosmetic problem for America’s 250th?
I’ve seen pictures with surface scums coming from [the Reflecting Pool] that are typically indicative of cyanobacteria, [which] have the potential to produce cyanotoxins, which have the potential to be fatal if ingested. It’s important that we understand that this is a serious thing. It’s not just something to laugh about.
There was just a lot of misinformation going around. I just wanted to share my thoughts on “Hey, this is what I think is happening.” It’s kind of a cool thing, and I’d like to see this dealt with because, you know, there is potential for this bloom to have cyanobacteria in it.
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National Park Service employees work to clean up algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool following the completion of recent renovations on June 14, 2026 in Washington, DC. Tasos Katopodis / Stringer / Getty Images
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