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Teamsters workers at the Airgas plant in Valley View, Ohio, are on strike as of June 25th. After voting 13 to 5 in favor of forming a union a little more than a year ago, the location’s 23 workers still don’t have a contract. Large corporations, like Airgas, are known to stall negotiations with newly formed unions for as long as financially possible. What is surprising is the Valley View location is not negotiating the first contract between Airgas and Teamsters, and another Airgas facility less than ten miles away got their contract months ago. However, another Ohio Airgas location just a few miles from the Valley View plant already negotiated their union contract months ago.

Joe Most says that he was initially skeptical when his coworker approached him about asking the Teamsters to help their small plant unionize. At a previous job, Most was a member of a UAW union, and he was disappointed by the lack of support his plant received. “Because we were only 150 [workers at that location], they [UAW] practically ignored us because we were so small.” Most recalls that when they approached UAW about supporting them during a strike, the union’s leaders declined to do so, claiming that the plant’s small size made it “not worth it.” (Most also notes that his experience with UAW was more than 20 years ago, and suggests that their practices may have changed since then.)

In contrast, the Teamsters have agreed to support the far smaller Valley View Airgas location, despite having a staff less than one sixth the size of Most’s previous job where the union was UAW. Most said he’s been “shocked” by the level of support they’ve received. When the plant was initially fighting for the contract, Juan Campos, the Vice President of the Teamsters, came to the Valley View plant to personally oversee the negotiations. “When they told me the vice president was coming in from Chicago, I thought, ‘I mean, he’s going to ‘big-time’ us, right? There’s no way he’s going to talk to these peons,’ you know?” laughs Most. “But no, he went to each person, shook their hand, asked them, ‘Do you have any questions?’ and gave them his card.”

What’s more, when it became clear during the contract negotiations that the Airgas representatives were refusing to match the Oakwood plant’s contract, it was Campos himself who walked out of negotiations and declared that the tiny plant of 23 workers would strike with the full support of the Teamsters. That is what working class solidarity looks like.

In late 2023, while taking a break at a conference in Baltimore, I shared a New York Times chart, based on detailed census records, with a colleague from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data showed a sharp rise, since 2020, in Americans reporting serious difficulty remembering, concentrating or making decisions, which are among the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Moments earlier, my colleague had presented a graph with a nearly identical curve – this one tracking the steep increase in adult stimulant prescriptions since 2020. By 2023, CDC data had confirmed that a record 7.8 per cent of American adults reported an ADHD diagnosis. Google searches for ‘ADHD’ surged, and TikTok videos tagged #ADHD had racked up more than 20 billion views. At the very most, we could be experiencing an adult ADHD epidemic in the United States. At the very least, ADHD was now suddenly very fashionable to the public. Yet, a third explanation is also possible – for better or worse, the ADHD diagnostic category might be becoming more inclusive.

Midway through Benedict Nguyễn’s propulsive trans volleyball novel, Hot Girls with Balls, Six, one of the book’s two heroines, struggles with mounting nerves as she prepares to play an important match. She is less worried about the actual gameplay than she is about the performance of her public persona, which she knows will be screencapped, shared and dissected by fans and haters alike: “For what sports arena was not also a theatre?”

Six and Green are the larger-than-life protagonists of Nguyễn’s dizzying satire. The two are both “very hot” Asian American trans women who play in a fictional men’s global volleyball league; they work tirelessly, not just in their volleyball training sessions, but also to curate and maintain their social media star status. Six and Green, who are also very publicly dating each other, are as canny and self-aware as they are hot—they know that their athletic careers depend just as much on their ability to bring in brand deals by amassing more and more followers, as on their prowess on the volleyball court. Hot Girls with Balls brims with charisma, envy, sabotage and taut, taut muscles. You don’t have to be a sports fan to be utterly compelled by Nguyễn’s vision—and to become just as obsessed with Six and Green as their fictional followers are.

Nguyễn’s knack for recreating the chaotic, hate-it-but-can’t-look-away nature of online discourse makes this, her debut novel, a text in perpetual motion. She is an athlete herself—a dancer and self-professed gym buff—and writes as deftly about the stresses, training regimens and team choreography of competitive sports as she does about the micro-details of being trans in the public eye. Hot Girls with Balls is an expertly structured text, its central narrative arc intercut and propelled by scrolls of livestream and forum comments from Six’s and Green’s supporters and enemies. Reading it is a dizzying experience, as overwhelming as scrolling through a constantly updating online comment section, while straining to follow the various polarized arguments that are being thrown around. Six and Green have taken the sports world by storm, showing volleyball fans that the game “wasn’t just balls but endless unspoken feeling filtering back and forth across the net.” Nguyễn crafts a text that mimics this emotional back-and-forth—the novel darts between the perspectives of our two star players as they train for a major tournament; curate their online personas; publicly manage their romantic relationship; navigate brand deals, media appearances, blatant transphobia, obsessive adulation and the pitfalls of solidarity and visibility discourse.

When I first call Ros Hemmings, I expect her to be surprised. A widow in her 60s living in rural North Wales, she has never received a call from an investigative journalist in London. But instead she tells me: “Oh no, I have a very good idea why you are ringing.” She has been waiting for this call for years.

Hemmings rightly suspected that I wanted to ask her about a woman she knows as Sally Walker. Millions of people around the world know Sally by a different name: Raynor Winn. She is the author and protagonist of one of the most successful British non-fiction books in recent years. The Salt Path traces Raynor and her husband Moth’s 630-mile journey along the sea-swept South West Coast Path.

A heartbreaking “true” story of two people in their early 50s forced out of their rural home in Wales and weighed down by a sudden diagnosis of Moth’s terminal illness, The Salt Path went straight to the top of the bestseller charts, selling more than 2m copies worldwide since its publication in 2018.

Winn has since written two sequels and has a lucrative publishing deal with Penguin to produce at least one more. Five weeks ago The Salt Path reached new audiences when it was released in the UK as a film, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, and Winn is a co-producer.

Standing proudly on the red carpet outside the Lighthouse Cinema in Newquay, Raynor, 60, told TV cameras at the film’s UK premiere that the experience was “almost unbelievable”. In that moment, she and Moth seemed like the ultimate examples of British grit and perseverance.

Back in Wales, Hemmings saw a very different picture. Because she knew something about Winn that almost everyone – her publishers, her agents, the film producers – had missed. She knew that Raynor Winn wasn’t her real name and that several aspects of her story were untrue. She also believed she was a thief.

With a population of about 3 million people, Toronto is not only the biggest city in Canada, but also the fastest-growing urban centre in North America.

Its downtown core is a hub of activity but venture just a couple of kilometres northeast and you’ll find yourself in the Don Valley Brick Works, a former quarry that over the course of three decades has been transformed into a wetland. Fringed by houses and high rises, the marshlands and the valley that surrounds them are home to ducks, foxes, beavers and even the occasional deer.

The urban oasis is one of several spread across Toronto, which was recently recognized by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) as a model for other cities aiming to restore their natural spaces.

Max will debut Sinners in the U.S. on Friday, July 4, when viewers will be able to watch it two ways: by 1) streaming the exact theatrically released version, and 2) choosing Sinners in Black American Sign Language (BASL). It’s the first time a streaming service has interpreted a film into BASL, Warner Bros. says.

BASL is “a distinct dialect of American Sign Language (ASL) with its own dynamic history and unique grammar, signing space, rhythm, facial expressions and cultural nuances,” reads an announcement released Monday. Max says the release of Sinners in BASL marks “a major step forward in accessibility, representation and visibility in streaming.

“For the first time, the Black Deaf community will have streaming access to a more immersive experience in their language,” the press release continues. The written announcement also encourages Max subscribers who sign in ASL but are unfamiliar with BASL to “follow along with this interpretation.”

Sinners with BASL is interpreted by Nakia Smith, “an influential voice in the Black Deaf community, who delivers a powerful interpretation with cultural depth and linguistic richness that aligns with the film’s themes and historical timeline,” Max said. Smith performs the BASL as directed by Rosa Lee Timm.

[...]there's another story to be told here — and it's older and, if possible, even sadder. Microsoft has simply never been any good at running game studios.

The waste — of time, money, and human potential — is incalculable. And it's a sadly familiar story. In 2006, Microsoft acquired the legendary British developer Lionhead, only to close it ten years later after forcing the studio to chase fads it was ill-suited to, like motion control and live-service games. Rare, acquired for a then-record-breaking $375 million in 2002, has seemed to skirt close to a similar fate several times as it searched for a place within the Xbox family that made sense and played to its strengths. Pirate game Sea of Thieves has kept the developer afloat in recent years, but how much longer can that last?

Microsoft's original sin in this arena was its handling of Bungie. The studio was an inspired early acquisition that almost single-handedly made Xbox's reputation among gamers with its Halo series. But Microsoft responded to this success by stifling Bungie's creativity with a forced march of sequel production that ultimately drove the studio away: It bought itself out in 2007. The Halo brand never recovered from the loss, and the mismanagement of the caretaker studio founded to take it over, 343 Industries (now Halo Studios), was arguably even worse. It was never allowed to develop its own identity, and saddled with tasks — including maintaining its own game engine, and turning Halo into an ill-defined forever game — that were clearly beyond its capabilities.

The truth is that much of Microsoft's decision-making as a publisher seems to come from a place of insecurity. Burned by its experiences with Bungie, Lionhead, and Rare, the company began a partial retreat from first-party development under previous Xbox boss Don Mattrick. When the resulting weakness of its slate of games became all too apparent, Mattrick's successor Phil Spencer began a massive overcorrection, buying studios left, right, and center.

If the goal of the spending spree was to turn Xbox into a first-party powerhouse with system-selling exclusives to rival Nintendo and Sony, Microsoft has failed — or, arguably, overshot the mark. The acquisitions of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard brought it properties like Call of Duty, Warcraft, and The Elder Scrolls that were too big to make exclusive. Combined with a strategic shift away from consoles and toward PC, subscriptions, and cloud gaming, Microsoft has become something quite different: the biggest game publisher the world has ever seen, bigger than any platform. In that context, nurturing vanity projects like Everwild or resuscitating old IP like Perfect Dark simply isn't a priority.

In the aftermath of the Eaton Fire that destroyed over 6,000 homes in Los Angeles’s Altadena area in January, another kind of potential crisis is unfolding. In a town once built by working families and craftsmen, the new face of development doesn’t carry a hammer or a blueprint—it carries a spreadsheet.

In the wake of natural disasters, families often face immense pressure to sell—whether from rising insurance costs, the emotional and logistical burden of rebuilding, or uncertain timelines for recovery. Into this vulnerable window steps a wave of acquisitions, often quiet and fast moving, led by companies with opaque ownership structures that capitalize on disrupted communities before they’ve had a real chance to regroup. In Altadena specifically, since the fire, nearly 150 damaged properties have been sold in this close-knit foothill community just northeast of Los Angeles, known for its mix of cottages, midcentury bungalows, and multigenerational households.

After combing through public records and deed filings, I discovered that of those post-fire home sales, at least 50 percent were purchased by corporate entities. This on its own isn’t inherently alarming, as individuals can purchase property through LLCs to limit legal exposure. But it is a rate that far exceeds the national average, where corporate buyers account for roughly 23 percent of single-family home sales. Even more striking, 42 percent of those sales are now held by just six companies, each of which has acquired four or more homes. While this sample size is limited, the concentration of ownership points to a pattern of land consolidation that warrants attention—particularly in a community still recovering from disaster. The paper trail leads to a small group of repeat buyers.

Let’s break down who they are. (None of the representatives associated with these companies responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.)

In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.

The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,” he wrote in the Duke Law Journal.

The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they’d pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn’t happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it.

Some of the sludge we submit to is unavoidable—the simple consequence of living in a big, digitized world. But some of it is by design. ProPublica showed in 2023 how Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would endure the process of appeal. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was “incorrect.”) Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota’s motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. (The now-diminished bureau canceled the order in May.) As one Harvard Business Review article put it, “Some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers.”

Sludge can also reduce participation in government programs. According to Stephanie Thum, an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology who researches and writes about bureaucracy, agencies may use this fact to their advantage. “If you bury a fee waiver or publish a website in legalese rather than plain language, research shows people might stay away,” Thum told me. “If you’re a leader, you might use that knowledge to get rid of administrative friction—or put it in place.”

Fee waivers, rejected claims—sludge pales compared with other global crises, of course. But that might just be its cruelest trick. There was a time when systemic dysfunction felt bold and italicized, and so did our response: We were mad as hell and we weren’t going to take it anymore! Now something more insidious and mundane is at work. The system chips away as much as it crushes, all while reassuring us that that’s just how things go.

The result: We’re exhausted as hell and we’re probably going to keep taking it.

Australians using search engines while logged in to accounts from the likes of Google and Microsoft will have their age checked by the end of 2025, under a new online safety code co-developed by technology companies and registered by the eSafety Commissioner.

Search engines operating in Australia will need to implement age assurance technologies for logged-in users in "no later than six months”, under new rules published on Monday.

While only logged-in users will be required to have their age checked, many Australians typically surf the web while logged into accounts from Google, which dominates Australia’s search market and also runs Gmail and YouTube; and Microsoft, which runs the Bing search engine and email platform Outlook.

If a search engine’s age assurance systems believe a signed-in user is “likely to be an Australian child” under the age of 18, they will need to set safety tools such as “safe search” functions at their highest setting by default to filter out pornography and high impact violence, including in advertising.

Currently, Australians must be at least 13 years of age to manage their own Google or Microsoft account.