Please give us the elevator pitch of your business. I am Corry Banks, founder and operator of Modbap Modular, a Black-owned boutique manufacturer of electronic musical equipment based in Southern California. We’re dedicated to crafting innovative and performance-focused instruments tailored to the unique approaches of DJs and beatmakers. By combining modular synthesis with beat-making styles like boom bap, Modbap Modular aims to expand the boundaries of beat-making composition and empower musicians to experiment with their craft. We take pride in making our instruments accessible, as they are available in over 40 electronic music stores worldwide, including locations in North America, Europe, and Asia.
When did it launch and what is your role/title? Modbap was launched in the fall of 2020, specifically on 10/10/2020. By the time it hit the market, I had been working on my initial product for about a year. The beginning of the pandemic delayed the launch by a few months, but we pushed through. My official and on-paper role is President of Modbap Modular. I’ve come to realize that I am a product designer, and it is one of the most gratifying things that I’ve ever done.
What inspired you to create this business? Well, I am a beatmaker. I make boombap beats. I spent some years blogging about it and all the related topics like music equipment. I also have a background in IT and a degree in electronics. Somehow, all these things converged to sort of push me in the direction of creating something that I wanted but didn’t seem to exist in the marketplace. I realized that I was uniquely positioned to fill a void for the types of products that I design and that I aspire to design.
My “aha moment” was truly a “Wait, THAT’S it!!” kind of experience. I was preparing for a live beat set featuring my original compositions. As I took stock of all the gear I needed for my performance, I realized it was overwhelming—far too much stuff! I found myself wishing that a particular device could fit into my Eurorack performance case instead. So, I decided to share my thoughts on Instagram, posting a photo of that device with the caption, “Someone needs to make something like this in Eurorack format.” Just like that, I deleted the post, grabbed my sketchbook, and got to work.
Please tell us one “holy @#$!” moment on your business journey. That moment and the most memorable day for me was the launch day of my first product. I was hosting a weekly beatmakers podcast called BeatPPL Podcast. I announced on my social media that I had exciting news about the launch of the first Modbap product. I’d made the product available for preorder, and the plan was to go live, share the announcement, and showcase the production-ready final prototype of the product. The launch exceeded my expectations, and by the end of the weekend, I found myself needing to revise my initial purchase order with the manufacturer three or four times to meet the demand. It was an exhilarating moment, but I also had to pause and ask myself, “Am I really ready for this?” I was confident that the product was solid and ready to succeed, but I suddenly found myself confronted with the responsibility of running a company and making a genuine effort to make it work. Ultimately, I felt prepared for the challenge, and it has been a continuous and rewarding learning experience.
At a press conference last week at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., agency leadership announced that lingering hardware issues have forced NASA to push back Artemis II—a four-person crewed flight in an Orion spacecraft around the moon and back to Earth—from September 2025 to April 2026.
Most observers had already considered a 2025 launch unlikely. That Orion craft’s ride into space—NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket—isn’t fully assembled at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That places it behind the pace set by its predecessor, the uncrewed Artemis I mission. Artemis I launched in November 2022, after its SLS had been fully assembled about a year in advance.
“The safety of our astronauts is always first in our decisions; it is our North Star,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson in a press conference at the agency’s headquarters. “We do not fly until we are ready. We do not fly until we are confident that we have made the flight as safe as possible for the humans onboard. We need to do this next test flight, and we need to do it right—and that’s how the Artemis campaign proceeds.”
That said, agency officials are also thinking bigger about the program’s planned missions.
As originally conceived, Artemis II was a 2020s version of the 1968 mission Apollo 8, a no-frills journey around the moon and back to Earth to prove out NASA’s ability to send people safely to and from the lunar vicinity. But now that development of SpaceX’s Starship rocket is progressing rapidly, NASA officials are considering increasing the scope of Artemis II. Starship is intended to land NASA astronauts on the moon’s surface during the subsequent Artemis III mission, making the private rocket a crucial pillar of the public space agency’s ambitious plans for crewed lunar return.
NASA is now exploring the possibility of launching a Starship in parallel with Artemis II, with an eye toward possibly rehearsing the sorts of maneuvers that will need to be performed between Starship and Orion during Artemis III, which would be the first crewed moon landing attempt since 1972.
“We always want to look for ways to exploit new technology [and] new capabilities that, even five years ago, seemed like they were a bit out of reach,” said Reid Wiseman, Artemis II’s commander, at last week’s press conference. “You’re going to ask an astronaut to do more on their mission? Bring it on.”
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The damaged heat shield of NASA’s Orion crew spacecraft, as seen after the Artemis I lunar test flight. The scorching temperatures of atmospheric reentry eroded the heat shield more than expected, contributing to delays for the Artemis program. NASA
The first time I thought about leaving the US was in mid-2020. I was frustrated with how the pandemic was handled and was looking for a reason to leave the country.
I was born in New York and grew up around the East Coast. I attended college in North Carolina, where I studied math and economics, but dropped out in my third year in 2017.
Around the time, I became interested in Silicon Valley — it felt like a meritocratic place where people could take their own path. After leaving college, I worked as a baseball analyst and traveled between Seattle and San Francisco.
When the pandemic hit, I dropped plans to move to San Francisco. I thought the city was declining, and I preferred my lifestyle in Seattle. I was working for a startup with two Indian cofounders. When they
decided to pursue the business full time, they faced visa challenges and had to move back to India. So, in 2021, I tagged along to visit India for the first time, traveling to Mumbai and Bengaluru.
On that trip, I met my wife, an American teacher in India. I also stumbled upon the idea for what would eventually become Commenda — the company I cofounded.
I came up with the idea for my company in India
I was talking to local founders in Mumbai who faced challenges registering or expanding their businesses in other countries. There are hundreds of multilateral trade agreements between countries and thousands of bilateral trade agreements, and no tool for businesses to navigate them.
There are 8,760 hours every year, and the average person will spend about 1,992 of them at work, or more than a fifth of their lives. Your relationship with your job is usually defined by your relationship with your coworkers and your boss—especially your boss, who has a lot of control over your day-to-day experience at your job, and thus a lot of control over one-fifth of your life (or more). A toxic boss can make life a misery.
When your boss is openly campaigning to get rid of you, it’s bad enough—but at least you know what’s happening. Sometimes a boss doesn’t want to come out and fire you, so they decide to manage you out instead. “Managing out,” sometimes called “quiet firing,” is a technique wherein your boss makes your job so intolerable you voluntarily quit, saving them the trouble of justifying your termination. It can make you miserable, but you can at least take steps to protect yourself. Here’s what you can do if you’re being managed out of your job.
The Signs
The first step in defending yourself from being managed out of your job is to recognize the signs that it’s happening. While these might seem obvious in a list (or in retrospect), in reality, they can often happen subtly, over a period of time. Here’s what to look for:
Negative dynamic. You don’t have to be besties with your boss, but in a normal, functioning work environment there’s at least a superficial sense of camaraderie. If your boss becomes unexpectedly (and inexplicably) cold and hostile toward you, it might indicate that you’ve become a problem they’d very much like to go away all by itself.
Reduction of responsibility. If you’re being given less to do, not being invited to meetings, and left off of email chains and Slack chats, your first reaction might be to enjoy the extra time and reduced stress. But this is often the result of a manager hoping you’ll take the hint and go away. Check in with your co-workers: If they’re just as busy as ever, or busier, that’s a clear sign you’ve been cut out.
Lack of reward. If you haven’t received a raise or promotion—or even a compliment—in some time, it could be a sign that your manager has checked out on your career and is just hoping you move on to a new role somewhere else.
Micromanaging. A manager who suddenly scrutinizes everything you do and comes up with regular lists of complaints and errors made might be making it clear that you’re not wanted. Good managers will usually try to help an employee address mistakes or missing skills instead of simply making them feel incompetent—if there’s no support, only constant disdain, they might be sending you a message.
Impossible tasks. Your manager hasn’t said anything negative, but they’ve given you performance goals or tasks that no one could possibly meet? They might be hoping you give up and move on.
f you see one or more of these signs, you might be in the midst of a campaign to manage you out. Here’s what you need to do.
Investigate
Your first step is to try to determine what’s changed—why your boss is suddenly eager for you to go away. The most efficient way to accomplish this is to set up a meeting with your boss, framed either as a formal performance review or a more informal check-in. While your boss probably won’t outright admit they want you to quit, you might be able to at least figure out why you’re suddenly unwanted.
This is crucial because some reasons for being managed out can be addressed. If budgets have shrunk, and your boss is trying to cut heads without having to fire someone, you might offer to take on extra duties, or find a way to transfer to a different project or department—and they might even help you do so, since it would solve their problem. If there’s a performance-related reason for the animosity that hasn’t made it into your reviews, that might also be addressable, and if your boss doesn’t think you’re capable, you might be able to change the tone of the conversation by having a plan to upskill. And it’s always possible that the quiet firing is due to some kind of misunderstanding that has led to a personal animosity, and the air could be cleared.
If there’s no clear answer and the only thing your conversation confirms is that your boss would be happy to see less of you, there’s value in that certainty, at least.
Modern humans have lived on Earth for more than 300,000 years, but we’re still discovering tons about this massive breathing rock we call home. From its deep 4.5-billion-year history to its current mysteries, here are six mind-blowing things we’ve learned about Earth in 2024.
Life-Giving Catastrophes
The news begins with an event that occurred 3.26 billion years ago, when a massive asteroid—some 50 to 200 times larger than the one that drove the nonavian dinosaurs extinct—slammed into the young Earth. This “S2 impact” devastated the planet and its early, simple life, new research shows. But it also triggered key changes that would allow organisms to eventually thrive, in particular by sending crucial nutrients into the ocean. Despite the apocalyptic nature of the impact, then, the bacteria that managed to survive might have ultimately become better off than they were before the collision.
Ancient Seafloor Found Suspended below Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is massive and hides some impressive secrets. One we learned about this year is a slab of seafloor dating back some 250 million years, shortly before the emergence of the earliest known dinosaurs. Researchers discovered the slab trapped some 410 to 660 kilometers below Earth’s surface. The ancient rock is slowly descending within a strange blob of Earth’s outer core that protrudes into the planet’s rocky mantle.
“Dark Oxygen” from the Seafloor
A favorite genre of scientific discovery is the one that begins with data so strange that researchers think something is wrong with their instruments. That’s what happened to a team studying oxygen levels on the seafloor in a region of the Pacific Ocean called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. “I literally told my students, ‘Throw the sensors in the bin. They just do not work,’” said Andrew Sweetman, who studies seafloor ecology and biogeochemistry at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, in an interview with ScientificAmerican. It turns out the sensors were fine, and they alerted researchers to a strange process by which metallic deposits on the seabed produce mysterious “dark oxygen.”
What Caused This “Unidentified Seismic Object”?
In September 2023 earthquake sensors around the world reported a strange, monotonous hum unlike any seismic signal ever before detected—and it lasted for nine days. Scientists classified the source of the hum as an “unidentified seismic object” and then set to work trying to identify it. Just this year they determined that the signal was caused by a massive landslide in Greenland’s Dickson Fjord. The landslide triggered a tsunami, followed by a seiche, or a wave that sloshed back and forth within the confined fjord for more than a week.
Earthquakes Forge Gold Nuggets
Large gold nuggets found in Earth’s crust puzzled geochemists, who understood how dissolved gold seeping into cracks in the mineral quartz could create small deposits but not how larger ones could come to be. New research, however, suggests that earthquakes might do the job via a phenomenon called the piezoelectric effect—by which certain materials can produce an electric charge when exposed to mechanical stress. Quartz is piezoelectric, so scientists tested whether forces similar to seismic waves could generate enough charge to make gold nanoparticles start to build up. Preliminary results suggest this effect is enough.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told the bureau workforce Wednesday that he plans to resign at the end of President Joe Biden’s term in January, an announcement that came a week and a half after President-elect Donald Trump said he would nominate loyalist Kash Patel for the job.
Wray said at a town hall meeting that he would be stepping down “after weeks of careful thought,” three years short of the completion of a 10-year term marked by high-profile and politically charged investigations, including that led to two separate indictments of Trump last year.
Wray’s intended resignation is not unexpected considering that Trump had settled on Patel to be director and had repeatedly aired his ire at Wray, including in a television interview broadcast Sunday. By stepping down rather than waiting to be fired, Wray is trying to avert a collision with the new Trump administration that he said would have further entangled the FBI “deeper into the fray.”
“My goal is to keep the focus on our mission — the indispensable work you’re doing on behalf of the American people every day,” Wray told agency employees. “In my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.”
Wray was put in the job by Trump and began the 10-year term — a length meant to insulate the agency from the political influence of changing administrations — in 2017, after Trump fired then-FBI Director James Comey amid an investigation into ties between Russia and the Republican president’s campaign.
Trump had telegraphed his anger with Wray on multiple occasions. Trump said in the recent interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “I can’t say I’m thrilled with him. He invaded my home,” a reference to the FBI search of his Florida property, Mar-a-Lago, two years ago for classified documents from Trump’s first term as president.
But the soft-spoken director rarely seemed to go out of his way to publicly confront the White House.
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FBI Wray FILE – FBI Director Christopher Wray speaks during a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill, March 11, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File) ASSOCIATED PRESS
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In 2023, Anna-Marie Ortiz worked remotely for a fintech startup, where she earned $60,000 a year.
She liked the job well enough, but wasn’t sure what her future at the company would look like. “I realized I can’t wait around for other people’s dreams, and that’s when I decided to go all in on mine,” she tells CNBC Make It.
That July, Ortiz used the last of her $2,000 in savings to start a cleaning company on the side. By November, she took the business, Cool Aunt Cleaners, full-time.
Although she’s only able to pay herself around $29,000 this year — a significant pay cut from her last position — she’s happy with her choice to strike out on her own.
“I love being my own boss,” she says. “It allows me the flexibility to make my own decisions and create a work environment that reflects my values.”
Becoming an entrepreneur in her 20s
Cool Aunt Cleaners isn’t Ortiz’s first experience with entrepreneurship.
After working at a series of tech startups in her early 20s, she opened a plant store in Wichita, Kansas, in 2020. Although the store closed in early 2021, it taught her about managing inventory, customer service, and budgeting — key lessons she later applied to launching Cool Aunt Cleaners.
Ortiz decided to start a cleaning business instead of another retail store because of the low startup costs and solid return on investment, she says. Low overhead gave her the flexibility to start solo and gradually expand, hiring employees as demand increased.
She also liked that cleaning is a “tried and true” service that’s been “around forever,” giving her hope that the business would offer stability for her future.
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Anna-Marie Ortiz in her home. Matt Wolcott | CNBC Make It
Sycophant was once a rare word, reserved for high-brow literature and nonfiction. However, in these politically tumultuous times, the word has regained popularity. “I said to the President this morning, I can’t afford to be a sycophant to you,” Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived White House Communications Director, said in a July CNN interview. It was an interesting word choice, not because of its elegance or complexity, but due to its origins.
Merriam-Webster defines sycophant as “a servile self-seeking flatterer”. In layman’s terms, a sycophant is a brownnoser, a flunky, or a suck-up. Even if you haven’t adopted the word into your everyday vocabulary, you’ve most certainly used one of its synonyms before.
Sykophant∆í ÔøΩs, the ancient Greek spelling of the word, was derived from the words sykon ( “fig”) and phanein ( “to reveal”). Thus, the literal translation would be “fig revealer”. But how did fig revealers become brownnosers? The association is not as improbable as it seems. In those times, Greek farmers were forced to pay a hefty tax on figs they sold at public markets. Some farmers hid their figs to avoid paying the tax. However, some citizens would squeal, leading to financial punishment for the farmers and putting the fig revealers in good standing with local authorities. To the farmers, the fig revealers were just suck-ups to the police and not truly interested in doing the right thing.
Over time, sycophants developed an even stronger bond with the government. They became overly litigious private citizens who were hired to prosecute fig smugglers and writers, despite having no law experience or personal stake in the cases. Their primary objective was profit and staying in the good graces of government officials. Thus, they quickly earned a bad reputation throughout Greece. Statutes of limitation were introduced to reduce their power in the courts. And Greek playwright Aristophanes satirized sycophants in much of his work including The Birds and The Acharnians.
In the 1530s, the Latin word sycophanta was adopted. It was defined as “Informer, talebearer, and slanderer” then.
Today, sycophant doesn’t carry as much weight as it did in ancient Greek times, but its meaning is still potent, combining the definitions from both its Greek and Latin origins. And quite often, it’s used in relation to politics on both a national and local scale.
“Steven Mnuchin may be the greatest sycophant in Cabinet history,” American economist Larry Summers tweeted, after Mnuchin objected to NFL protests during the National Anthem. Though some politicians have used the word with a tinge of humor. “I don’t think I’ve been accused of being a Mike Bloomberg sycophant,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo joked, as he praised the former NYC mayor during a September Cornell Tech meeting. Sycophants are even present in office politics. An Economic Times article argued against being the “Chief Sycophant” when trying to impress a new boss in the workplace.
Though sycophant is most certainly applicable to other industries and situations beyond politics, it hasn’t escaped its political beginnings. And judging by the context of its modern use, it’s a trend that will continue.
Narcissists are one of the most challenging personalities to be around. Unfortunately, some of the most common narcissistic traits — grandiosity, superiority, entitlement, and a lack of empathy — have been on the rise in recent years.
Even worse, these traits often go unnoticed or are ignored, particularly from people who don’t know about narcissism or have other vulnerabilities such as low self-esteem.
As a psychologist who studies extreme self-involvement, I’ve found that narcissism is a maladaptive personality type that can impact the mental health and functioning of those who come into contact with it — especially when money is involved.
Narcissists seek power over others to feel better about themselves, and money is a tool they use to manipulate and control.
Many of us might think that we know what a narcissist looks like. There are plenty of tell-tale signs, like self-importance, a lack of empathy, a demanding personality, and an excessive need for admiration.
But when we’re in the early stages of a relationship – be it romantic, familial, or platonic – with a narcissist, their traits can often be more covert and nearly impossible to detect.
Sudden changes in a person’s demeanor often make us wonder if we did something wrong to lose their affection, or if we’re just being overly sensitive about their behavior.
This is particularly true for emotionally intelligent and empathetic people who are typically more self-aware and attuned to the feelings of others, and therefore sadly become magnets for those with narcissistic tendencies.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Spencer Schneier
James' World 2 