That’s what the Austrian graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister did with two shoes he designed for Ekn, a German footwear brand, that are on view at his exhibition Finally, Something Good at the Paris gallery Gaîté Lyrique through April 2027.

Sagmeister says the exhibition is meant to look at the world over the long term rather than through daily news. Each shoe uses data to tell a story: one about renewable energy, and the other about homelessness. The key to understanding what the shoes say is written in the footbed.

The Bring It On, a multicolored sneaker about renewable electricity, uses data from the Energy Institute’s 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy to inform the relative sizes of color panels on its sides, with each leather panel representing a different energy source. Yellow, the largest color, represents hydropower, followed by black for wind, pink for solar, and red for all other renewables.

“Wonderfully, the shoe is already out of date,” Sagmeister tells Fast Company. “In the 2025 figures, published this summer, solar passed wind for the first time, so today the pink panel should be slightly bigger than the black one.”

His other shoe, Like a Complete Unknown, is a boot that uses circles to represent the relative homeless populations of six countries. The area of each circular appliqué corresponds to the number of people who are living in the streets and public spaces per 100,000 inhabitants, according to OECD data. The biggest circles are for the U.S., at 76, and Germany, at 46, followed by the U.K. (16), France (8), Mexico (5), and Japan (2).

“Countries count differently, so the numbers are not perfect, but Mexico, a much poorer country, reports a fifteenth of the American rate, and a gap that size is not only a counting difference,” he says. Sagmeister volunteered for the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy and service organization, and says what stayed with him from that experience was why some countries handle the same problem so much better than others.

The shoes are available for purchase on Ekn’s website. Both retail for more than $300, of which 10% goes either to the climate innovation think tank Future Cleantech Architects or the Coalition for the Homeless in New York, respectively. Sagmeister sees the inherent awkwardness between homelessness data and a boot costing 350 Euros, and says a donation “doesn’t make that go away.” He hopes people will take away that neither the data behind renewable energy nor homelessness is fate.

“When the number of people sleeping in the street runs from two to 76 per 100,000 across six countries,” he says, that shows “it’s about decisions, and decisions can be made differently.”

Capital makeover extends well beyond the fairways

Trump, a golf aficionado who plays often, had already announced plans to makeover the links as part of his broader push to renovate and refurbish places around Washington, including the White House and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Many of his projects, including plans for a huge ballroom at the White House, the installation of his own name on the Kennedy Center and construction of a massive arch, have been challenged in courts.

The 106-year-old park and course has been the subject of many emergency hearings as the president has sought to renovate it. While it has been open to Washingtonians of all income levels, opponents of Trump’s plans to turn it into a high-end course have argued it will alter the character of the space and make it less affordable to people.

Trump in his post echoed arguments he has made to justify his plans to remake the Kennedy Center, arguing it is in such dangerous condition that it needs to close.

“The current Course is old, broken, dilapidated, and of no further use or effect. It is in very poor condition, with falling, dangerous, and disease infested trees and, importantly, a collapsing and hazardous seawall,” Trump wrote.

Debris from the demolition of the White House East Wing to make way for his ballroom project has also been dumped on the grounds. The National Park Service has said the debris tested positive for lead, chromium and other toxic metals.

Trump also sought to justify the National Park Service’s removal of hundreds of trees that the judge paused, writing in his announcement that when the golf course was originally built, “it was famous for no trees, with views of Washington, D.C., for all to see, but now, it is completely overgrown, dysfunctional, and unsafe.”

Legal case returns to court and the administration seeks to remove the judge

Trump’s post outlining a clear plan for construction complicates a federal court hearing scheduled for Monday in a lawsuit filed by the DC Preservation League and two golfers opposing the construction.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes has ordered key members of the Republican administration to testify on the recent tree-cutting and whether those actions are tied to the president’s plans for the historical public links.

The administration on Friday asked for Reyes to be replaced on the case, questioning her impartiality and citing what it called “egregious” behavior from the bench in response to an emergency hearing Oct. 12. Her frustration boiled over in a three-hour hearing when she lambasted the government’s attorney for the lack of notification she and the plaintiffs received before the trees were chopped down.

At the upcoming hearing, the judge is expected to address the request that she step aside. Meanwhile, over the weekend the plaintiffs asked that she grant them a more long-standing preliminary injunction in the case and/or a stay.

Associated Press writer Gary Fields contributed to this report.

—Michelle L. Price, Associated Press

Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design, In Service: MTA Photographs by Christopher Payne is the agency’s first systemwide photography exhibition capturing a behind-the-scenes look into the machines of NYC’s transit system.

Presented in 52 light boxes, the large photographs are displayed across five locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn: Grand Central Madison, Grand Central Dining Concourse, 42 St-Bryant Park, Bowling Green, and Atlantic Av-Barclays Ctr.

A resident of Inwood, Payne was captivated by the 207th Street Overhaul Shop, a nearby 43-acre complex where subway cars go to be repaired. Built from the late 1920s through the early 1930s, the shop services the R62 trains—the stainless steel orange-seated cars that ride the numbered lines. He became fixated on entering 207th Street and other overhaul shops around the city to see the cars stripped of their elements.

The documenting of these spaces began as a personal project, before becoming the basis for a story for The New York Times. Eventually, it led him to work with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to get unprecedented access to shops across the city as well as the other factories around the country that help build New York’s transit cars.

The exhibition features images like a partially assembled car at a subway train factory in Nebraska, a moment of friendship between workers in a bus factory in Minnesota, and simpler photographs from a locomotive factory in California for the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) and MetroNorth.

“I loved sort of being an ambassador of New York City and being able to say to the people making these vehicles that we use every day, you know ‘I ride that every morning’ and ‘that’s where I sit’,” Payne tells Fast Company.

Payne’s work often takes him behind the scenes of factories and restricted areas. These places are filled with large equipment and create a visual chaos that translates to interesting photographs. He describe his approach as finding the “aha, that’s how they did it” moment.

The resulting photographs are carefully composed vignettes. They’re not candid, but rather “styled, not staged,” as Payne puts it.

He often walks into rooms, trying to capture the large size of the machines, looking for shorter factory workers who might make the scale more pronounced. Other times, the photographs are meant to capture the human moments among the great machines. In one case he spotted a man wearing a bright tie-dye shirt, standing out against other workers.

“There was a young woman working with him and she piped in saying, ‘Oh, I made that shirt for him,'” Payne recalls. “All of a sudden I had this great shot. Without them, it would have just been this empty bus, but with them, it was like these two people who have this relationship and it all sort of fit.”

The photographs at each subway stop tell a different sliver of these machines’ story. At Grand Central Dining Concourse, the photographs illustrate the humans in the system’s infrastructure, displaying portraits of workers at overhauls and factories. At Grand Central Madison, the images showcase scale, with images from the MTA’s five operating agencies. At Bryant Park, the photos focus on everyday components of the system; at Bowling Green, the images capture the stages of a bus from manufacturing to maintenance. And at Barclays Center, the photographs follow the lifecycle of a Kawasaki R211 car, made in Nebraska and maintained in Yonkers.

But within those different stories, the installations aim to capture a system at a “peak moment of elegance,” to honor the workers’ craft, Payne says.

“If you think about someone who works in a factory, no one really cares what they do most of the time. When I show up, to me, they’re the most important people in the world,” he says. “If I don’t honor them, then I’m not doing my job.”

While warehouse stores offering food and household items in bulk will always have a draw among consumers looking for volume discounts, the grocery store of 2035 could look different from today’s, with tinier packaging on its shelves, according to a new report. Unlike stealth shrinkflation, which packs less product into the same sized package for the same price, the new era of smaller portions is part of the selling point.

Traditional packaging strategies for consumer packaged goods (CPG) prioritize things like upselling, pantry loading, and increased consumption, but those strategies are becoming less relevant, warns the report, from the consumer intelligence company NielsenIQ. Instead, manufacturers, retailers, and designers must rethink their packaging formats to meet the needs of multiple shifting consumer trends at once.

Household sizes keep going down, living costs keep going up, and the growing adoption of GLP-1s means more consumers are buying less. In other words, packaging design for high consumption and big families with deep, full pantries is packaging design for a world that no longer exists. Instead, companies need to think smaller.

“If the American household is shrinking, the way it shops is shrinking right along with it,” the report says.

Already, CPG giants like PepsiCo have begun testing smaller units. Mike Del Pozzo, president of the company’s U.S. beverages division, said in June the company was introducing mini cans at a low price point and considering “new price points and pack sizes” for other beverages too. And last year Campbell’s rolled out 2.5-ounce single packs of Goldfish that retail for less than $2. The report says smaller packaging sizes are showing up especially across soft drinks, ready-to-eat cereal, and salty snacks, but building in other categories too.

Average household size has fallen from 2.6 people in 2000 to 2.5 people today due to factors like economic pressure and delayed family formation, the report says. And 21% of households now have at least one GLP-1 user. At the same time, food-at-home prices have risen 2.7% year over year as of June.

That means things like smaller packs, trial sizes, mini cans, and portioned servings are appealing to a new generation of shoppers. The unit price might be higher than buying in bulk, but smaller sizing lowers the cost at checkout for inflation-pressed consumers.

“Value traditionally sits at the intersection of unit price and product attributes that are important to the shopper,” the report says. “Smaller packages can create value in a different way by lowering the upfront cost, improving storage of the items, reducing the risk of waste, and better matching the amount a shopper needs based on what they know they will fully consume.”

The family Costco run is giving way to a new way of grocery shopping that’s about buying fewer things at once. The report notes that fill-in shopping makes up most grocery trips, and changing consumer habits mean those quick trips could over time come with even smaller portion sizes.

Meteomatics, a Swiss weather technology company, thinks we can get better weather data. It recently introduced Strato, a multicopter drone made to study Earth’s atmosphere. It is designed to reach higher altitudes of the troposphere—the part of the atmosphere where weather happens—than weather balloons, at a fraction of the price. And once its mission is complete, it returns to its launch site ready to go back up again.

A weather instrument you can fly over and over, wherever and whenever you need it, could change how we watch the sky and predict the weather.

Data on demand

According to Meteomatics, no drone before Strato could profile the atmosphere all the way from the ground into the stratosphere on demand.

As Strato climbs, it reads temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind at every altitude, building a sort of core sample of the air above us. Meteorologists call that a vertical profile. Until now, only a radiosonde, the instrument package that hangs from weather balloons, could collect that data.

Using a radiosonde has its flaws. Weather balloons need roughly 40 minutes just to rise to 12 kilometers, or about 39,000 feet. Additionally, 90% of weather balloons never return to the people who launched them, their radiosondes lost forever, essentially becoming pollution. Some new balloon models incorporate GPS and controlled descent that allow for recovery of the sensor packages, but scientists still have to drive for miles to pick them up. Plus, they must be refitted to fly again, which takes time. They’re impossible to operate continuously.

Strato solves these problems. The drone rises to 34,000 feet in about 25 minutes, Meteomatics CEO Martin Fengler told me, finishing a full atmospheric profile in about half the time a weather balloon would. Plus, Strato always returns to its operators’ exact location, ready to ascend again and again. 

More reliable forecasts

Strato’s speed and its continuous-launch ability are the keys to get more data about the jet stream—the atmospheric highway that weather systems travel across—in a timely manner.

“If the data isn’t located correctly relative to the jet stream, the forecast won’t be reliable either,” Fengler said when he announced Strato.

Jet streams—there are several, in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres—are rivers of wind racing around the planet near the top of the troposphere. (The stratosphere starts right above this.) Up there, a sudden twist in the wind or a jump in temperature can push an airliner off its route, keep a rocket on the pad, and ruin your picnic in the park—or worse, as extreme weather events have shown.

And we know the least about what happens up there. Meteomatics says government observation networks don’t reliably cover jet streams’ highest altitudes. This is because balloons typically launch on a fixed timetable from their fixed bases. Nobody deploys an extra one out of the blue because a weather system is coming through. So airlines, military pilots, and launch teams often make key decisions with data that’s stale or was gathered elsewhere.

Strato’s readings feed Meteomatics’ own high-resolution forecast models—along with data from the company’s older, lower-flying “meteodrone” called Tropo—to provide much more accurate atmospheric readings.

Excuse me, coming through

As promising as the tech sounds, there could be potential problems with Strato’s approach.

At 34,000 feet, Strato shares the sky with airliners at cruising altitude. I asked Fengler how they keep Strato out of the way of a jet full of passengers. According to him, there are no automatic, worldwide handshake protocols with air traffic control for drones, so Strato follows whatever rules each country sets.

There are some safety stopgaps, Fengler says. Strato can carry a transponder, a radio beacon that puts it on controllers’ radar like any other aircraft, and the drone’s operators could issue warnings that tell pilots ahead of time to steer clear of an area. They could also coordinate with local air traffic control. 

Since the mix of requirements varies with each country, launch site, and airspace, Fenglar notes that Meteomatics helps its customers handle the regulators. In other words, filing lots of paperwork.

The atmosphere itself poses another hurdle. Flying that high is a nightmare for a drone. More than 6 miles up, the air is so thin that propellers barely have anything to grab onto. And if you change the shape of the blades to account for the lack of air density, then they’ll guzzle battery near the ground, where the air is thick, shortening the flight time and making it impractical for weather operations.

Fengler tells me that Meteomatics’ engineering team had to test multiple combinations of propellers and motors to find the sweet spot. First, they used a flight simulation to predict how each design variation would behave as the air thinned. The most promising of those went into a vacuum chamber that mimicked high-altitude air, and into a wind tunnel that hit them with brutal gusts.

The survivors in the tests, Fengler says, keep the drone climbing in thin air without draining it down low, and still have power to spare when the wind fights back.

Another showstopper that they had to overcome? The weather itself. But Strato’s design, Fengler says, takes this into account. It can withstand sustained winds of up to 80 mph and its body is shaped to slice through the air. “An automatic wind mode swings its nose into the headwind like a weather vane,” he says. Rain doesn’t bother it either. It’s waterproof. Finally, if ice starts to form, Strato heats its own propellers to melt it. The operator, Fengler adds, monitors altitude, wind, temperature, and icing alerts live for the entire flight.

The fine print

Ice is not the only enemy. At high altitude, cold air is really the worst adversary of drones’ batteries. Strato runs on lithium-ion cells 0.83 by 2.76 inches in size. They are capable of charging anywhere from 32 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, delivering power to the drone at minus 40 degrees.

This doesn’t mean that the batteries won’t suffer. Fengler can’t yet say how many charges a pack survives before it starts to fade but he claims that Strato’s cells have beaten earlier generations in his team’s cycle-life tests. He tells me that Strato drains them in such a peculiar way that Meteomatics wants more data before publishing a number.

The sensors can also be tricky. Balloons float up slowly with the wind, which gives their instruments time to settle as temperature and conditions change. Strato goes up at almost double the speed of the old balloons.

According to the company, the drone goes quickly through temperature inversions, layers where the air gets warmer as you climb instead of colder, and through wind shear, the sudden shifts in wind speed or direction from one altitude to the next. If the sensor reacts too late, there could be bad readings due to a phenomenon called “dynamic heating.”

Fengler claims his company’s sensors are built for the fastest possible response and sits out of reach of the rotors’ turbulence. Dynamic heating, he insists, is “not measurable in our testing.” 

Better and faster?

Whether Strato lives up to its promise of faster, better weather data and predictions is yet to be seen. It’s a great proposition, however, especially if you factor in the operation costs. By Meteomatics’ own estimate, ground stations spend $150,000 to $200,000 a year on weather balloons that fly once and disappear. A drone that comes home could be an easy sell, if the price is right.

Fengler wouldn’t say how much Strato costs—“it depends on how each system is configured,” he told me—but it will definitely be much cheaper in the long run. At least that’s true for traditional disposable weather balloons, which still dominate roughly 80% to 90% of high-altitude survey operations.

“Ten years ago, a drone that effectively flew into the stratosphere to collect weather data was a pipe dream,” Fengler says. “We’ve made it a reality.”

If the company’s claims hold up, the weather balloon can finally retire after nearly a century of one-way trips.

Take Chris Olave, the New Orleans Saints wide receiver. He wears a Guardian Cap, a padded cover on his helmet for added protection against head trauma. The trade-off is that it makes him look like he just nabbed a mushroom power-up in Super Mario. Olave, who suffered four concussions in his first three NFL seasons, has made peace with that. “Shoot, I got kids now,” he said after the Saints’ season opener. “I want to live a regular life after I’m done with football. I love my kids to death. So, I don’t really care how it looks no more.”

The NFL has spent the past decade trying to bring its concussion numbers down, with mixed results. In-game concussions fell 15% to 129 in the 2024 regular season, then jumped 30% to 168 last year. Much of that increase came on kickoffs, where a new format designed to bring back more returns sent concussions on the play from 8 in 2024 to 35 in 2025.

Since 2022, when the league made it mandatory in practice, the Guardian Cap has been the NFL’s most noticeable safety measure. It has been optional in games since 2024, and after a design refresh this offseason, it’s showing up on game days more than ever.

Foam, fabric, and a lot of jokes

The cap is made by Guardian Sports, a Georgia company run by Lee and Erin Hanson, a husband and wife whose materials business developed custom polyurethane for products like rocket boosters and golf ball covers. It’s a lightweight foam shell that straps over any standard helmet. It’s designed to compress and slide on impact, absorbing force before the blow reaches the helmet’s hard shell underneath.

The Guardian Cap comes in two main versions. NFL players and select college players wear the NXT, which weighs about 12 ounces. Youth, high school, and most college players wear the XT, a lighter version that weighs about half a pound and sells for up to $89.99. More than 500,000 athletes across all levels wear one. The company also makes versions for hockey and lacrosse helmets.

The NFL allowed the cap in practice in 2020, then required it in practice for linemen, tight ends, and linebackers in 2022. By 2024, everyone but quarterbacks, kickers, and punters was required to wear a Guardian Cap in contact practices, and players could choose to wear it in games.

Players hated the look from the start. J.J. Watt, an All-Pro pass rusher, said it made him feel like a bobblehead. Jason Kelce mocked it by showing up to Philadelphia Eagles camp with bubble wrap around his cap. Jordyn Brooks, a Miami Dolphins linebacker, called them “UFO caps.” The 2024 game-day look wasn’t any better—a fabric sleeve printed with the team logo, stretched over the foam’s ridges like a shower cap on a carton of eggs.

This season, the cap finally got a makeover.

A glow-up, not an upgrade

The Guardian Cap NXT 2.0 is what happens when the safety department finally gets a creative director. Approved by the NFL for 2026, it’s the same 12-ounce pad, with the same materials and, per Guardian Sports, the same performance. The difference is on the outside. The original’s lumpy, egg-carton ridges made it hard to print a logo on, so the 2.0 has a smooth surface that replaces the fabric sleeve and takes stick-on team decals directly.

In other words, the change is purely cosmetic.

The cap is also racing against the helmets underneath it. Since the NFL and the players’ union began ranking helmets by lab performance, manufacturers have rolled out flexible shells, layered foams, and position-specific designs, with extra forehead padding for linemen and extra rear padding for quarterbacks.

The science is mostly physics. A concussion happens when the brain “accelerates, decelerates, and rotates” inside the skull, and no helmet can stop that, says Dr. John Leddy, president of the International Concussion Society. Padding can only stretch out the moment of impact, so the head speeds up and twists less violently. That’s what new helmet designs, and the cap, are graded on.

Helmet models also age fast. For the 2025 season, the NFL banned seven helmets that had been rated top-tier as recently as 2022, and 10 models tested well enough to be “Guardian Cap Optional,” meaning players who wear one can skip the cap in practice. By season’s end, more than 98% of players wore top-performing helmets.

The data beneath the padding

According to a 2026 study, at least one in four former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain condition known as CTE that is associated with repeated head impacts. Concussions alone don’t explain it. A 2023 study of 631 former football players’ brains found that the total force of every hit, not the number of concussions, best predicted the disease. “It’s the largest study of CTE pathology ever, and concussions were basically noise,” the lead author, Daniel Daneshvar of Harvard Medical School, told The New York Times. So the question isn’t whether the cap softens a blow. It’s whether softening every blow by a few percent adds up to anything.

In NFL-funded lab tests, the NXT cut impact severity by about 9%. The league says that climbs to about 20% when both players wear one. It also reported a 52% drop in concussions during 2022 training camps among the positions required to wear the cap (linemen, tight ends, and linebackers) compared with prior years. Commissioner Roger Goodell has repeatedly said the cap cut concussions in half.

A peer-reviewed study coauthored by the NFL’s chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills, and published in 2025, adds an asterisk. Practice concussions at cap-required positions fell by between 54% and 62%. But when researchers looked only at concussions caused by hits to the helmet shell, the part the cap actually covers, they found no statistically significant link between the cap and fewer concussions.

Independent researchers have found smaller, mixed effects. Virginia Tech’s helmet lab, whose star ratings have guided helmet buyers since 2011, found the NXT reduced linear acceleration 8% and rotational acceleration 14%, which it estimated would lower concussion risk by about a third in the lab. The youth XT cut them by just 3% and 5%. A University of Wisconsin study of 2,610 high school players found no meaningful difference in concussion rates between players who wore the youth cap in practice and those who didn’t.

Guardian Sports, for its part, sells the cap on reducing impact, not preventing concussions. Though its marketing still cites the NFL’s 54% to 62% figure, its disclaimer says no headgear can eliminate concussion risk, and that lab impact tests shouldn’t be used to draw conclusions about concussions at all.

A cap with an expiration date?

Olave, the wide receiver, is now a Guardian Sports brand partner. He isn’t waiting for the science, and wearing the cap hasn’t hurt his performance. Through five games, he’s second in the league in receiving yards and tied for second in receptions. He has more company on game days, too. About 20 players wore a Guardian Cap in games in 2024, roughly two dozen did in 2025, and more than 35 wore one in this year’s preseason alone.

But much of the league is already looking past the Guardian Cap. Last season, 56% of returning players chose cap-optional helmets. Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president for health and safety, told Yahoo Sports he sees the cap as “transitional.” Steve Rowson, a professor of biomedical engineering at Virginia Tech and director of the helmet lab, told the outlet he wonders whether add-ons will have a market in 5 to 10 years.

In Super Mario, the mushroom power-up helps you survive an extra hit. For now, Olave and a few dozen others are still hoping the Guardian Cap does the same.

The team unveiled its new font, Rocastle, at a pop-up exhibition this month at the Design Museum, in London. It’s named for the beloved late Arsenal player David Rocastle (1967–2001), also known as Rocky, and was created by David Rudnick, founder of the research and design studio terrain, with Léa Bruneau.

Rudnick—an Arsenal fan who says “I would only ever have worked with one club” —is also the architect behind the club’s new, bespoke font book developed over the past four years. For Rocastle, he sought an aesthetic that felt distinctly English and custom-tailored to the team.

The font has to do “a lot of very difficult contradictory things,” Rudnick tells Fast Company. “It had to be sufficiently distinctive and bold and proud as a set of letterforms that it functioned as a kind of glorious pinnacle of the identity, but it also had to be simple, legible, modern, and applicable enough to function in the way that a modern typeface would.”

The letterform is unmistakably black letter, but a mix of elements like an inline weight and swashes that recall the shape and flow of pennants in the wind, make it feel modern and English. “You create the sense of something that feels more chivalric or knightly,” Rudnick says.

Arsenal began updating its typography in 2022, and Rudnick designed three fonts licensed exclusively to the team around three pillars: team, community, and culture. Rocastle represents “culture,” or “where football intersects with fashion, art, music, and more,” according to a curator statement from the exhibition. It’s a font that would work in a fashion drop or, say, on the walls of a pop-up design museum show; contemporary but heritage.

The team assembled hundreds of pieces of Arsenal memorabilia and type specimen during the research phase of the four-year project. The Rocastle font—along with a blackletter “A” mark that’s now one of the club’s three primary logos alongside its crest and cannon—is inspired by the lettering in the club’s retro VCC crest (Victoria Concordia Crescit, victory grows through harmony).

Rudnick’s first font for the club in 2022 was Northbank, a bold, thick sans-serif font. It appears in all caps in player names, words in animations like “Goal” and “Believe” that show up on stadium video screens, and “We Are the Arsenal” signage at the club’s training facility. The designer built it using letterforms from signage on the club’s old Highbury Stadium. Northbank represents the “team” pillar, and a superbold version of it was designed “so that any other club that wants to go into a shouting match with us can’t win,” Rudnick says.

The second font, Chapman, released in 2023, is a humanist sans-serif font that’s used in sentence case and designed for the club’s “community” pillar. It’s meant for “the days, weeks, months outside of the game where you’re anticipating the match, you’re reading the program,” Rudnick says.

Rocastle, meanwhile, communicates the club’s “deep past and far future,” Rudnick says. For Arsenal, competition extends to graphic design.

“There will be people whose great grandparents went to Arsenal, people whose ancestors that were never alive in their lifetime who love the club,” he continues. “This is us declaring boldly to other institutions, even other companies, we outlive you and we will outlast you.”

Some online commenters have criticized the font’s legibility, a common concern when historic typographic elements are adapted for modern use. But this isn’t a font made for dense text or heavy use; it’s an accent the club can pull out for special moments and creative collaborations.

“It gives us the freedom to take the club forward creatively while staying true to who we are,” Arsenal’s creative studio lead, Johnnie Campbell, said of Rocastle in a statement.

Arsenal’s multifont strategy shows a team that’s being thoughtful about the way typography can speak to fans. With Rocastle, they’re thinking far beyond just game day.

Specifically, a clip from the Meta founder’s appearance on a podcast called The Cheeky Pint—which involves talking tech over a beer with host (and Stripe cofounder) John Collison—caught his notably unenthusiastic facial expression in response to the Irish stout. He looks, as one observer put it, as if he has just “accidentally swallowed the little paper cup of fluoride at the dentist’s office.”

Funny. But what’s the big deal? Zuckerberg isn’t the first to discover that Guinness isn’t for everybody. Why did the Guinness Wince morph into a viral roasting?

Probably because, you know, he’s Mark Zuckerberg. Surreally rich and powerful, he’s a figure who remains effectively cloistered and out of reach from most of the routine frictions of everyday life. Like his billionaire peers, he inhabits spaces he controls (mansions, yachts, private jets) or where his appearance is carefully choreographed (congressional hearings, product unveils, whatever this is), while other people literally make movies speculating about various phases of his career. Seeing a master of the corporate universe do something as human as wince at an unfamiliar brew is just . . . weird.

And in a way, these rare incidents function as a litmus test for authenticity, maybe even normality. The last similarly high-profile example was the promo clip of McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski gingerly biting into the chain’s then-new Big Arch burger. Again, the internet noticed, and judged Kempczinski a man who did not eat fast food. Burger King and Wendy’s noticed, too, offering videos of their top executives taking ravenous burger bites, converting the physical act of consumption into a brand-reputation performance.

These moments don’t always read like the actions of confused aliens. Elon Musk has, not surprisingly, made his mark in this genre with fully characteristic displays of excess, knocking back three beers in his own appearance on The Cheeky Pint, and infamously puffed a blunt on Joe Rogan’s podcast. NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang has turned his public food moments into signals of accessibility and cultural curiosity: He’s been recorded eating Beijing street noodles and Korean fried chicken, and handing out red bean buns in Tokyo. There’s a site devoted to his food forays.

But for most billionaires, such scrutiny is more of an adjustment. Politicians, for whom performing normality is part of the electoral process, learn the tricks of public consumption early: hoisting a beer with salt-of-the-earth gusto, while avoiding gaffes such as eating pizza with a fork, or having anything to do with a county fair corn dog. CEOs, in contrast, are not required to rub elbows with the hoi polloi.

And that is exactly why these occasional awkward appearances are so funny and fascinating to the rest of us. We don’t have much sense of the Zuck life, but at least we all eat and drink, and know what that’s supposed to look like, regardless of income status. Weird variations—particularly involving familiar brands (or even a CEO’s own brand) are not just amusingly suspicious but almost reassuring. 

In retrospect, The Cheeky Pint gimmick of serving beers seems like a deliberately humanizing move. In the wake of the Zuckerberg commotion, another show, European Technology Network, has posted a ranking that purports to document which Cheeky Pint guests drank the most. (Musk is winning.)

“That’s just my face,” Zuckerberg joked in response to the episode—and in fairness he apparently drank two beers on the show. The incident comes at an interesting time in the arc of the Meta chief’s public image. He recently granted an interview to The New York Times’ chief fashion critic to talk about the role of aesthetics and style in his company’s next chapter, and how that relates to his own evolving taste (which has included a “bro-next-door” makeover, combined with mixed-martial-arts and strength training).

In other words, he’s hard at work trying to control how he’s perceived. And most of the time, the rest of us can only look on and wonder. Incidents like the Guinness Wince have a kind of leveling function: They give us the rare chance to peek through all that image management and distance, and pass judgment. On such matters, however silly, we’re the ones in control.

That’s the number of Starship launches per year SpaceX has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to allow. It’s almost 40% more than all the orbital launch attempts worldwide in 2025—a record year with 329. The scientists who study what rockets and satellites leave behind in the sky think the whole world should be paying attention.

Leonard Schulz, a researcher at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, who studies the metals that burned-up spacecraft leave behind, believes the entire planet needs to weigh in on this sudden increase in launches and the massive deployment of satellites that will come with it. “I think this problem should be addressed internationally: limits to the use of space need to be quickly established and adhered to by everyone; we only have one atmosphere,” he said in an email.

SpaceX’s request works out to nearly two launches every weekday. Every single year, Starship alone would fly more than three times the 135 missions NASA’s space shuttles flew in three decades. That’s a lot of rocket engines roaring over a coastline full of people and wildlife. And those satellites Starship will carry by the thousands? They will seed the upper atmosphere with metals whose effects nobody fully understands. And before that, they will crowd low Earth orbit, the band of space a few hundred miles up where most satellites circle the planet, and raise the odds of collisions.

License to kill

The FAA licenses every commercial launch in the U.S. Before it lets SpaceX fly this often, it has to produce an environmental impact statement, a detailed study of what the plan would do to its surroundings (the FAA published a notice on Wednesday, announcing an environmental review of the plan). This one will cover an entire program of operations rather than a single project, and SpaceX’s request comes in two phases.

In the first, Starbase, the company’s launch site next to the city of Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico, would go from 25 to 100 launches a year, plus 200 landings, which could take place at any hour from Monday to Friday. The second phase would arrive “within several years,” according to the FAA, and raise the ceiling to 456 launches and 912 landings. (Starship goes up with its two stages in one piece; the stages come back down separately.) Launches would stop on weekends, but not at night. For its analysis, the agency assumes that half of all launches and landings would happen between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.

Not every flight would come home. Starship’s booster could also make a gentle splashdown in the Gulf or be deliberately blown up in flight, and the spacecraft could splash down at sea or be discarded there.

The review will look at how all that noise and traffic affects the air, wetlands, groundwater, the coastline, and wildlife around Boca Chica, Texas, among other things. What happens to the global atmosphere and to orbit falls outside it. The U.S. will make this call alone, even though the Outer Space Treaty, which it signed in 1967, says that the exploration and use of space belong to all of humanity and that no nation can claim it as its own.

Final countdown

If Musk pulls this off, putting anything in space would get a lot cheaper, from internet satellites to the crewed moon missions NASA has hired the company to fly. That’s great! It will enable Musk, and other companies that want to do the same thing in Europe or China, to deploy tens of thousands of Starlink-like satellites, for better or for worse.

For now, though, this plan is another insane Musk pipe dream. Today, SpaceX is allowed to launch Starship 25 times a year from Texas, but the rocket has flown only three times in 2026 and has never managed more than five flights in a single year. The company has also yet to prove that the vehicle can be fully reused, let alone turned around in a matter of days. So far, Starship has cost more than $15 billion and has taken four years longer than Musk predicted (he said it would reach orbit in 2022).

But we will get there. This 456-launch license request, combined with the partially successful orbital Starship launch on September 28, shows that Musk’s endgame may be getting closer to reality faster than we thought.

Musk isn’t slowing down. He claims that within a decade, Starship will fly more than once an hour. His plans go beyond Texas, too. The FAA is reviewing a proposal for up to 76 Starship launches a year from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and in August, SpaceX announced it would spend as much as $100 billion on a giant launch complex in Louisiana.

From airplanes to orbit

Going from three flights a year to hundreds would bring problems that no multibillion-dollar investment can solve, starting with commercial aviation. Starship’s seventh and eighth test flights blew apart in 2025, scattering debris over the Caribbean while airliners flew nearby.

After the first explosion, 21 planes seemed to swerve abruptly to leave or steer clear of an emergency no-fly zone, ProPublica found. This year, the FAA warned that launches can “significantly reduce safety” for planes, and before Starship’s ninth flight it nearly doubled the stretch of sky it closes to traffic during each launch. With hundreds of missions a year, those closures would become a constant headache for airlines.

The second major issue is orbit. One of the main reasons Starship exists is to put more Starlink satellites into space, faster. The constellation already has more than 10,000 working satellites, two-thirds of everything operating around Earth, and SpaceX has asked to expand its second-generation broadband fleet alone to nearly 30,000.

Only Starship can economically carry the next-generation Starlinks. Each of these V3 satellites weighs about 4,400 pounds, roughly three and a half times as much as the current model, and SpaceX expects Starship to deploy up to 60 per flight (a Falcon 9 rocket carries up to 29 of today’s smaller satellites). On top of that, in January it asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch up to a million satellites for a separate system that would work as data centers in orbit.

Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who logs every launch in his newsletter Jonathan’s Space Report, told me in an interview last year that “if you have 10 times as many satellites, you have 100 times as many close misses.”

The numbers bear it out. In the 12 months ended May 31, Starlink satellites performed more than 355,000 maneuvers to dodge space junk and other satellites, according to SpaceX’s latest semiannual report to federal regulators. That’s more than triple the 2024 total, while the fleet itself grew by about two-thirds, from about 6,000 satellites in 2024 to more than 10,000 now. The dodging grows faster than the constellation because every new satellite can cross paths with every satellite already up there, its own siblings included, inside the same altitude bands, or shells. “Double the satellites in a shell and you roughly quadruple the number of pairs that need to be watched,” Tommaso Sgobba, director of the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety, told Space.com.

And not every dead satellite comes down on command. “Even with a 99% success rate for de-orbiting, a 1% failure rate on a 30,000-satellite constellation means you’re adding 300 dead, multihundred-kilogram satellites to orbit every five years,” McDowell added. Each one could be the first domino, because “once you have the first collision, the debris from that is now threatening all the other satellites.” Meanwhile, China has filed paperwork for constellations of its own totaling more than 200,000 satellites.

Scientists call that chain reaction Kessler syndrome. In the worst-case scenario, it would turn low Earth orbit into an unnavigable cloud of shrapnel.

Not everything that comes down burns up completely, either. In a 2023 report to Congress, the FAA warned that if Starlink debris survives reentry, the growth of these constellations could mean one person injured or killed every two years by 2035. SpaceX disputes that conclusion.

Poison in the sky

Perhaps the least understood problem is what happens to the satellites that do burn up. According to the study by Schulz and his team at the Technical University of Braunschweig, rockets and satellites burning up overhead already add the equivalent of 16% of the metal that arrives naturally with meteoroids, the bits of space rock that turn into shooting stars when they hit the air. In 2015, human activity was the main source of 18 elements in the upper atmosphere. By 2024, it was the main source of 24.

In theory, a fully reusable Starship wouldn’t add much metal to the atmosphere—although its exhaust will have an effect we have yet to measure. Its cargo is another matter, Schulz points out. Remember, thousands of satellites will keep coming down and vaporizing, only to be replaced by new ones that will burn up in turn. That’s why Musk needs a crazy number of Starship launches.

“If these launch rates would become reality, a much increased amount of metal injection well surpassing our extreme Scenario 2, can be expected,” Schulz wrote, referring to the most pessimistic future his team modeled. The number of elements where human activity outweighs meteoroids would then “rise above 30 (that is a lot!),” he added.

Copper from wiring and titanium from structures are among the metals already reaching the upper atmosphere, and both can speed up chemical reactions. Researchers fear three effects: These metals could eat away at the ozone layer the way CFCs, the chemicals once used in spray cans and refrigerators, did. They could change how clouds form. And they could heat or cool the atmosphere in unpredictable ways.

Nobody has yet studied, for example, how titanium affects ozone. Schulz tells me that research from recent years shows “a considerable risk of strong changes in our atmosphere,” such as ozone loss or more clouds at high altitude. The size of those effects hasn’t been measured yet, but he doesn’t think we should wait for the numbers, “because in the meantime, the atmosphere is used as a giant testing ground.”

Boca Chica can be very ‘grande’

Which brings us back to the FAA and its license. The agency will count decibels in Boca Chica and check on its wetlands. That’s great. The stratosphere and orbit stay off the books. “It shouldn’t be just the U.S. that decides that. It should be decided by all of the countries in the world, because they’re all affected whether they’re space powers or not,” McDowell told me. Schulz agrees. He credits reusable rockets, an area where SpaceX leads the industry, as one way to reduce the harm to the atmosphere, “but there are limits to the use of space,” he wrote.

The FAA license is a decision that will affect the sky over every country. It shouldn’t be settled by a review that stops at the Texas coastline.

The Roadster showed off its ability to do absolutely useless stuff that no car has ever done before. It raced upside down, clinging to a giant inverted ramp like a Hot Wheels car. It jumped over a Model 3, a Model Y, a Cybertruck, a Tesla Semi, and a Cybercab. The Roadster Fast & Furious’d its way through a stunt course, flipping in midair and floating down on air thrusters to land back on solid ground, momentarily hiding the car in a puff of gas.

What it didn’t do was give us a price or a date anyone should believe. Musk’s latest toy is the most literal case of vaporware in tech history: a product you can’t buy, propelled by actual vapor.

Consider what was promised in 2017, when Musk surprised everyone at the Semi truck event with a red Roadster that looked nothing like this new one. Tesla said it would do 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, go 620 miles on a charge, seat four in a 2+2 layout, cost $200,000, and reach customers in 2020. Fans put down $50,000 to get in line, or $250,000 to claim one of the 1,000 Founders Series cars.

Nine years later, the Roadster’s range claim is “over 300 miles,” not even half the original figure. The back seats are gone. There’s no price at all. And the delivery date has become “2028, actually,” as Musk put it on stage, according to the EV publication Electrek. The deposit for this new car is still $50,000.

Wedge issue

On the design front, the Roadster looks like the unholy son of a Model Y and a Cybertruck. One that dreams of becoming a Lamborghini when it grows up but is just too ugly to ever pull it off.

The Roadster has gone from the rounded, almost sensual shape of the 2017 prototype to a white, angular wedge with scissor doors. Tesla pitches it as an aerospace look, with nods to the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane and the F-35 fighter jet that are nowhere to be seen for anyone with eyes. Musk called it “better than any James Bond car.” Better, no. But he’s right that it looks like one. Its front instantly reminded me of Roger Moore’s Lotus Esprit submarine car from the 1978 film The Spy Who Loved Me.

The problem is that every element feels borrowed. The Autopian’s David Tracy, who likes it, made a list of the cars it resembles: the Lamborghini Murciélago and Countach, the Ferrari Testarossa, the Lotus Esprit, the Lancia Stratos Zero, the Vector W8. “It’s all a familiar wedge-y design and nothing groundbreaking,” he writes. Road & Track places it somewhere between the Cybertruck and the wedge supercars of the 1980s.

I look at it in profile and I see a Model Y’s tall cabin trying to squeeze into a Lamborghini Countach costume, with the faceted Cybertruck surfaces and the Cybercab hubcaps on the stunt car giving away the family tree. The great wedges by Lamborghini’s designer Marcello Gandini were low, tense, and outrageous. But they made sense. Next to the Vector W8, Tracy notes, the Tesla “looks rather tall and upright.” The 1980s posters on our bedroom walls had proportions. This thing doesn’t.

Not everyone agrees. MotorTrend’s Edward Loh, the most enthusiastic of the big car magazine critics, finds it “fresh and futuristic looking” and calls the cabin “straight-outta-Tron awesome.”

Rocket man

The Roadster comes in three versions, according to Tesla. The Performance model seats two and uses fans that suck the car onto the road for grip, which is what allowed it to cling to the ramp upside down. Tesla claims it does 0 to 60 in under 1.6 seconds. The Thrust version adds rear cold-gas thrusters, basically nozzles that blast compressed air backward like a giant can of keyboard duster, to get under 0.9 seconds. And the Rocket version, which is invite-only, seats one person and carries thrusters all around its body. Tesla bills it as having a “full flight system.” It’s also, in Tesla’s own words, “not approved for public road use.”

Think about that for a second. The headline trick of a car called Roadster can’t legally go on a road. When someone in the crowd asked Musk if it would be street legal, he answered, “Yeah, yeah. Depends on your street.” Wired talked to Scott Miller, an airline pilot who lectures on aviation at San Jose State University, who reminded everyone that the Federal Aviation Administration “has jurisdiction over any machine that leaves the surface of the earth.”

The air has to live somewhere, too. Tesla says it stuffed “every usable void in the car” with high-pressure tanks wrapped in carbon fiber. But as TechCrunch’s Sean O’Kane notes, that kind of tank has been behind several SpaceX rocket explosions. And all these tricks make the car worse to live with. “I, for one, use my trunk a lot more than I would use the ability to do a standing flip in a car,” writes Jalopnik’s Amber DaSilva.

Even Musk doesn’t pretend this is anywhere near sensible. “Now, I should say that this is not necessarily a safety-optimized car. But it takes the fun meter to 11 out of 10,” he said on stage. Back in January he said that, “if safety is your number one goal, do not buy the Roadster.” Tesla, he added, would “aspire not to kill anyone in this car.”

Smoke and mirrors

And that’s basically the summary of it all. It feels like the Roadster was never really about the car. It’s about the show. Last year, Musk promised Joe Rogan it had “a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever.” And indeed, it was memorable. But a show only goes so far.

In 2019, the Cybertruck’s “armor glass” shattered on stage, Musk swore, and the internet went wild for a $39,900 truck due in late 2021. It arrived two years late, its price starting more than 50% higher, and became a flop. In 2024, the “We, Robot” event promised a sub-$30,000 Cybercab. This January, Musk admitted its production would be “agonizingly slow” this year.

As for the Roadster, it has slipped so often that Musk picked April Fools’ Day 2026 for the reveal because, as he put it, “I could say I was just kidding.” Then he missed that date too, followed by late April, early summer, August, and October 1. The final two-week slip was blamed on the weather.

The internet is not buying it either, even when it loved the show. On Reddit’s r/cars, the top comment, with more than 2,000 upvotes, reads: “The new Roadster goes into production in 2028. I’ll see you all in 2035 at the next press conference where they announce this car again.”

And here we are now. New jumping Roadster, same Tesla problems to hide behind those nozzles’ exhaust. Tesla deliveries fell about 2% year over year in the third quarter, the shares had lost 21% of their value this year by the start of October. (The company reports its quarterly earnings on October 21.)

The whole night felt like a commercial for a possible Tesla-SpaceX merger, as Electrek’s Fred Lambert wrote. Musk himself admitted he’s “not sure it moves the needle massively from a revenue standpoint.”

On that, I believe him.

But few sagas have captivated audiences quite as intensely as that of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. The wide-eyed CEO promised a world of needleless blood tests, yet delivered little more than a persona consisting of Steve Jobs-inspired outfits and an unnaturally deep voice.

She is now back in the spotlight. A highly anticipated Nathan Fielder documentary revisiting Holmes’s case hits theaters on Oct. 16, teasing an uncensored look at her inner world. Just ahead of the film’s release, a new website is aspiring to do the same, giving users a glimpse at the very space where the fraud happened: Holmes’s desk.

Titled Theranos.World, the website transports users into Holmes’s glass-enclosed office within the Theranos headquarters. It simulates a view from behind her modern white desk, complete with motivational corporate posters like “a healthier world is within reach” and Theranos’s circular logo adorning the walls.

The project’s essence is similar to Jmail, which made thousands of Epstein emails available to read in a more user-friendly format. Theranos.World offers some of the same. But for the site’s designer, the software engineer Bo Lau, building an interactive platform is more about the love of the game: showcasing how technologies like AI can help anyone create highly detailed interactive worlds that would’ve taken months or years to build by hand.

The desk is crammed with objects from Holmes’s tenure as a founder. There’s a MacBook Air and an iPhone, an Edison machine (the device that was supposed to test blood), a stack of books including The Odyssey and Moby Dick, and branded company swag.

Lau, who currently leads developer relations at AI document processing platform Extend, began the project with a social media post.

“Would anyone be down if i hosted a private screening of the nathan fielder elizabeth holmes documentary in nyc,” she wrote on X. The post received almost 20,000 views, which led her to wonder if she could turn the idea into a work-related endeavor in order to expense it.

As the post gained more and more engagement, a member of the growth team at Extend encouraged her to make the idea a reality.

“He slacked me and said, ‘You should totally actually do this,'” she tells Fast Company. She queried, “Do you think they’ll give me money to actually rent out a theater?” to which he replied with a simple “Of course.”

With thousands of applicants, Lau managed to secure two venues in San Francisco and New York, screening the documentary a day before its release to the public.

But she knew she could somehow connect the event to Extend beyond just the tech world’s interest in Holmes’ story. She came up with the idea of recreating Holmes’s office with interactive elements developed using her AI company’s technology.

Struggling to find many original photos of Holmes’s actual office, Lau relied on screengrabs from Hulu’s The Dropout, a show about the Theranos case, to inform the virtual office’s design.

“It’s a Hulu show so I assumed they tried to make it as accurate as possible, so then I was just gonna take inspiration from that since it’s readily available,” she explains.

She then listened to podcasts and articles to understand how Holmes behaved in the office. Think of the scenes in The Dropout where she chugged down green juices and danced around to rap music. These small elements made their way to Lau’s rendition of her desk—there’s a green juice users can click on to “sip” and a playlist with music from that time.

The result is a remarkably detailed interactive experience. Users can snoop through her laptop and read her email, unlock her iPhone and scroll through her messages with Sunny Balwani, her partner and Theranos COO. The Holmes-inspired playlist was curated by Lau, featuring songs from the show’s soundtrack along with rap songs from the mid 2000s, which Holmes notably enjoyed.

To build the site, which took just three days, Lau used Exempt AI agents to download all the Theranos documents that are publicly available. This step alone took hours because of the sheer amount of data, Lau says.

Then she used Instinct (an AI agent you can text) to find images of Holmes’s offices and popular songs of the time. Once all the materials were gathered, she used Cursor and OpenAI’s latest frontier model GPT-6 Astra set to the highest effort available to generate the designs and deploy the website.

“I just used the most expensive model because like I have, like, a work-paid account, so I’m like might as well make it more efficient,” Lau says.

Beyond being a fun creative exercise for Lau—who has in the past built other satirical websites, like one that provided feedback for Hinge profiles—the deep dive into Holmes’s universe also shone a light on some of the more toxic aspects of the tech world.

“VCs really idolize like super-young founders and that puts a lot of pressure on young people,” she says. “I think when she started Theranos, she was like nineteen. Like her frontal lobe was like very far from being developed.”

The brand’s core product, the $100 Tin Can phone (so named for its chunky, playful form factor) is a Wi Fi-enabled, screen-free landline complete with a spiral cord and a dial tone. Since its debut in April 2025, the phone has sold out seven production batches—equal to hundreds of thousands of units. 

Now, just over a year later, Tin Can is introducing its first nonphone products: Twirly Cord Charms, which let kids accessorize their own gadget and retail at $20 for a pack of five; and the Contact Keeper, a $40 new-school spin on the Rolodex. As part of the launch, the brand is also releasing a new version of its core product with entirely translucent hardware, called the Technicaller Clear.

For Tin Can’s founder and CEO, Chet Kittleson, this product expansion is part of a much bigger aspiration: getting the Tin Can into the homes of every elementary and middle schooler in the nation.

Tin Can takes off

The idea for Tin Can struck Kittleson after his young daughter, Emma, lamented the fact that she had to go through her parents to make any plans with friends. At the time, Kittleson told Fast Company, “I was like, ‘Man, when we were kids, our first social network was the landline.’” In a moment when countless companies were targeting adults’ desires to cut down on screen time with products like dumbphones and app blockers, Kittleson zeroed in on the less popular but equally relevant niche of screen-free tech for kids. So far, the concept is enjoying massive success.  

As Tin Can has expanded its inventory with each consecutive batch, consumer interest has more than kept up. For most of the company’s history, customers waited between two and three months to receive their phone, by virtue of limited stock and high demand. Now, Kittleson says, after investing heavily in its supply chain, manufacturing, and operations, Tin Can has brought its standard shipping timeline down to around three business days for the first time since its launch.

The Tin Can’s primary marketing lever is word of mouth, by virtue of the fact that its free tier allows calling only to other Tin Can phones (and 911). And now that word has spread through classrooms across the nation, Kittleson says, Tin Can has a substantial user network that’s making the phones their own. 

Designing a Rolodex in 2026

Both the Contact Keeper and the Twirly Cord Charms evolved from the same conceptual ethos: designing products around how kids are already using their Tin Cans, rather than trying to influence their behavior. 

“One of the things we saw early on was people were doing all sorts of crazy, fun, innovative things at a very small scale for their community of friends to help their kids remember numbers and store them,” Kittleson says. “We saw everything from people buying old, big, clunky Rolodexes to a secondary marketplace popping up of people selling Tin Can phone books on Etsy.”

So the Tin Can team decided to meet users where they are, and design an official product to help kids remember their friends and family members’ numbers. As a starting point, Kittleson recalls, the in-house design team looked at a broad collection of antiques and old Rolodexes to understand the design context. From there, the aim was to create a modern product that could stand on its own.

“With a Tin Can, an adult is like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a landline,’ whereas a kid is like, ‘That’s a Tin Can, what the heck is a landline?’” Kittleson says. “It’s uniquely distinct to our brand. We wanted the Contact Keeper to have the same feel.”

Functionally, the Contact Keeper works like an old-fashioned Rolodex. Inside, it contains 20 cards where kids can write names and numbers, each of which can be removed and traded among friends. As for design, it’s custom built to fit in the Tin Can family. It’s a satisfyingly chunky rectangle that’s just a bit bigger than the phone itself, and each card is held in place with a slot featuring one of the brand’s vibrant colors. When the clear plastic top is lowered, all of the cards automatically flip back into place. The design looks at once like a modern piece of decor and something you might have found on your grandma’s counter in 1999.

Tin Can’s next move

Like the Contact Keeper, the Twirly Cord Charms evolved from a trend that the Tin Can team noticed among users. 

The charms are dangly little designs, similar to a Croc Jibbitz, that come in themed packs including Mostly Sportsballs (think soccer balls and hockey sticks), Mostly Nonsense (think balloon animals and flowers), and Mostly Fish (exactly what you’d imagine). Each comes with a Lego hand-esque clip that allows them to snap onto the cord of the Tin Can or onto one of three keychain adapters that come with the set. 

Kittleson says the charms were inspired by videos his team found of kids decorating their Tin Cans at home, often using bedazzling kits and other accessories to give their device a unique flair. 

“We were trying to think of a really cool way for them to make the Tin Can feel like it was really owned by them,” Kittleson says. “One of the words we use a lot as a company is ‘agency.’ Even for a young kid, we want them to feel like the Tin Can is theirs—it’s not a thing they have to ask about.”

Unlike the vast majority of toys on the market, Tin Can phones are refreshingly gender neutral in both their design and marketing, and the Twirly Cord Charms follow suit. Kittleson says the categories were chosen specifically to appeal to as many kids as possible while avoiding gendered stereotypes. The results include everything from tennis rackets to a shrimp wearing headphones and a pair of googly eyes. 

As Tin Can expands, Kittleson says that user behavior will continue to serve as a north star for updates and new product offerings. If demand keeps up, he believes that the brand could become a nationwide household staple.

“I feel pretty convinced that over the next decade, everyone in elementary school and probably middle school will have something like a Tin Can,” Kittleson says. “The product has such a clear product-market fit, and it’s such a good solution for this demographic, that I don’t see a world where that’s not the case.” 

The Trump administration launched SI.gov on Tuesday, a narrative microsite that promotes the administration’s AI policies and initiatives. The old AI.gov, which formerly linked to the administration’s AI action plan and executive orders now, redirects to the new site.

As a work of marketing, the website is slick and graphically compelling. The overarching message is that the U.S. is a superintelligence leader. But the overall site design is otherwise sugarcoating a major issue Trump isn’t polling well on.

The site welcomes visitors with an interactive element that depicts the letters “SI” at the top of the page. The letters, each made up of a grid of dots, respond to your cursor or tap, and rearrange into the words “Super Intelligence” spelled out in full, capturing users’ attention with an engaging effect that’s visible in other background illustrations as users scroll down page.

“Whoever builds the largest SI ecosystem will set the global standards and reap the economic and security rewards,” the site says under a header that reads “Why it matters.” “Under President Trump, the nation aims to usher in a new golden age of innovation, human flourishing and technological achievement for the American people.”

The site highlights the administration’s priorities by focusing on Trump’s AI executive orders, the federal permitting of data centers, and the launch last year of the Genesis Mission, a public-private partnership through the Department of Energy to “double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade” using AI technology.

Further down the page, there’s a link to more information about initiatives such as Melania Trump’s First Lady Seal of SI Readiness for schools to develop guidelines around AI usage in the classroom, and her challenge for students to develop a project using AI to solve problems.

The microsite has an oversized footer which showcases an SI.gov word mark in the administration’s font, Instrument Serif, although the letterforms are made up of a tight grid of dots to call back to the animations throughout the page. The word mark also has an animated red, white, and blue gradient that shifts from left to right. An eagle from the presidential seal takes the place of the typical dot found in a URL.

Unlike many of the administration’s past microsites, including the AI chatbot America.gov, this page doesn’t indicate it was designed by National Design Studio. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration launched AI.gov during Trump’s first term. It was redesigned twice when then-President Joe Biden was in office. Under both presidents, the site has been used to promote the government’s AI work and priorities.

Trump’s new SI.gov rebrand, however, also tries to make his preferred term, “SI,” a part of the zeitgeist. So far, it’s not going well. YouGov polling found 53% prefer the term “artificial intelligence” compared with just 9% for “superintelligence.” And while Elon Musk renamed his company from Space XAI to SpaceXSI to follow Trump’s lead, others like OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, aren’t planning to change names. (Even though Trump has called anyone who doesn’t buy his SI rebrand an “enemy.”)

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week found about 57% of registered voters believe the Trump administration has not taken AI risks seriously enough or at all, and the new site seems to prove them right.

At a time when a majority of Americans don’t want a data center built near them, SI.gov promotes data center construction as a positive. And although the biggest school district in the country, the New York City public schools, just banned AI for students up through 8th grade, SI.gov promotes AI challenges for students. Most Americans don’t trust Trump’s handling of AI or AI in general, but the site’s messaging indicates everything’s going great.

And that gap, as showcased on the rebranded website, indicates an administration out of step with public opinion. Though perhaps that should be expected from a website that uses an acronym most Americans don’t.

The startup, Perennial Polymers, extracts the natural polymers in leaves—lignin and cellulose—to make plastic that can easily break down. It’s an approach that can ultimately be less expensive than making other bioplastics, the company says.

“I spent the last 12 years or so in the biomaterial space, and got to see from the inside how challenging it is, largely due to the economics,” says Nathan Noyes, founder of Perennial Polymers. “Two of the main reasons for that seemed to be that we were always relying on food-grade agricultural feedstock when moving away from petrochemicals, and the route to turn that into a plastic relied on fermentation, which is quite expensive.”

Urban leaves, he realized, didn’t require any agricultural land to grow, and there was already infrastructure in place to collect them. The startup, which works in a lab in Delaware, was inspired by previous academic research about the potential to use leaves to make new materials (like this study of maple leaves). After launching this summer, Perennial developed its own new material with a process designed to easily scale up, and filed provisional patents.

The startup’s formulation includes not only lignin and cellulose, but minerals from leaves to strengthen the bioplastic. Production is designed to be low cost, both because of the cheap feedstock and because it doesn’t require the expensive step of fermentation. The plastic can be used in existing industrial equipment to make products.

One potential application is on farms, where huge plastic sheets are commonly used to reduce weeds and erosion. This plastic “mulch” helps increase farm yields, but also creates microplastic waste in farm soil. The plastic films currently in use can’t be recycled, and often are burned. A similar film made from Perennial’s material could safely break down in the field. “In very early testing in thin films, it looks like our material degrades in contact with soil over about two to three months,” says Noyes. That’s similar to the way leaves biodegrade in their natural state.

The material could also be used in packaging such as plastic mailers for products that have to be protected from the weather, or other uses where plastic serves a useful purpose, but can’t easily be recycled today, Noyes says.

Large cities like New York collect thousands of tons of leaves each fall. Leaves are often composted, but EPA data suggests that nearly a third end up in landfills, where they can’t easily break down. Perennial wants to tap into existing urban leaf collection systems to make its products, and although the company just launched a few months ago, a municipal partnership is already in the works. Other natural materials, including waste from the forestry industry, could also potentially be used to make the plastic.

The startup is scaling up to begin testing its material with customers, and aims to commercialize the bioplastic in 2027.

Instead of a cheeseburger and apple slices, fans could choose the Saja Boys Breakfast Meal, with a spicy McMuffin, hash browns, and soda, or the Huntr/X Meal, with McNuggets, Ramyeon McShaker Fries, and purple Demon Sauce. Their selection corresponded to a vote in McDonald’s “Battle for the Fans.” The prize inside was a pack of collectible photocards and a QR code that would later unlock an exclusive video revealing the winner. (Huntr/X, thankfully.)

Analysts estimated that KPop Demon Hunters Meals could bring in $100 million in their first few days. Some fans, though, were confused. “No KPDH Happy Meal toys???” one asked online. But McDonald’s had put it right there in the announcement: These were “dueling adult meals”—a promotion for grownups. (Honestly, the spicy McMuffin or the QR code should’ve been the tell.)

In the nearly 50 years since the burger giant debuted its first Happy Meals (circus wagon-themed boxes featuring McDoodler stencils, McWrist wallets, and McDonaldland character erasers), the kids’-meal offering has expanded through fast food and beyond, with the prizes inside going from physical trinkets to augmented reality portals and hologram cards. Along the way, the value proposition has evolved too. Gen Alpha is ordering more kids’ meals than ever, but according to the market research firm Circana, they’re increasingly taking their business from drive-through burger chains to chicken chains like Chick-fil-A and restaurants with more adventurous menus, like Chipotle.

Meanwhile, adults, squeezed by increasing prices and squeezing their own stomachs with GLP-1s, have started ordering a lot of kids’ meals for themselves. Call it a role reversal. If it was a movie tie-in, it would obviously have to be Freaky Friday.

Surprise inside

Why would McDonald’s build an adult meal around KPop Demon Hunters—essentially Gen Alpha’s Frozen—instead of making it a Happy Meal? The answer is that the kids’ meal has morphed into a value hack, a light meal, a nostalgia trip, and a collector’s drop, none of which mean much to an actual kid.

The kids’ meal emerged in the ’70s, after fast-food marketers discovered that children drove a surprising share of sales. Yolanda Fernández de Cofiño, a McDonald’s franchisee who had just opened the first location in Guatemala, noticed in 1974 that children were not finishing their food, and created a special “Menú Ronald” for them that drew crowds. McDonald’s had a U.S. version in regional tests three years later. Wendy’s and Burger King followed, packaging kid portions and toys into decorated boxes.

Back then, kids rarely expected new toys unless it was Christmas or a birthday, says Gary Cross, a Penn State historian of consumer culture whose books include Kids’ Stuff and The Cute and the Cool. Free kids’-meal prizes turned getting one into an any-day event. Soon the prizes were tied to popular movie franchises and toy brands, a strategy “to sell two products at once and use one product to advertise the other,” he says.

The toys began as disposable trinkets meant to keep kids busy. Even McDonald’s had underestimated their potential, betting that cartoons and puzzles on box flaps would sell the meal. “Once they realized it was the prize kids were after, they course-corrected fast,” says Jonathan Alexandratos, a toy scholar and author of Free With Every Kids’ Meal, a book about how toys became a fixture of the meal. What customers really buy with a kids’ meal, Alexandratos argues, is “access to a trend and FOMO satiation,” which means chains can never stop reinventing the prize: “All you can do is evolve as your consumers do.”

In the ’80s, Wendy’s more than quadrupled its kids’-meal toy budget after seeing a survey about how many parents—83%—said their kids help decide where the family eats. “We give them puzzles, games and toys,” the then-spokesperson, Denny Lynch, remarked. “And oh, by the way, you also have a good hamburger, fries, and a drink.” By 1988, the strategy was so widely adopted that a Wall Street analyst complained to Newsweek: “The food business has become: If you can’t lure them in with your food, lure them in with a stuffed animal.”

Then McDonald’s struck gold. In 1997, it launched its now-famous Teenie Beanie Babies promotion, stocking Happy Meals with 100 million of the stuffed animals from Ty Inc. Restaurants ran out nationwide, as the media breathlessly tracked the rush (“Feeding Frenzy Depletes Teenie Beanies Stock”), and Teenie Beanies became a recurring Happy Meal promotion.

Almost by accident, McDonald’s evolved into the world’s largest toy distributor. By the 2000s, fast-food chains were handing out so many—1.6 billion toys in 2006 alone, by the Federal Trade Commission’s count—that a secondary market had spring up. Enthusiasts started to gather in hotel ballrooms, price guides like Kiddie Meal Collectibles in hand, to buy, sell, and trade a whole new genre of pop-culture memorabilia: miniature, limited-edition, possibly grease-flecked Barbies, Hot Wheels cars, Looney Tunes figurines, Trollz dolls, Lego sets, and, of course, Beanie Babies.

This golden era lasted until 2007, when kids’ meal orders began a four-year slide. The Great Recession froze spending just as parents and politicians were blaming fast food for childhood obesity. New York City forced chains to post calorie counts. San Francisco enacted a “Happy Meal ban” barring restaurants from giving away toys with meals that failed nutrition standards. In response, chains rushed out apple slices and nonsoda drink options, such as low-fat milk. But other problems were arising that healthier sides couldn’t solve: American children now wanted “tech-y toys,” as one analyst called them. “Kids’ meal toys are not where the action is.”

Adult toy collectors weren’t disenchanted, though, and those menu changes rolled out to win parents’ approval had, incidentally, made the food more appealing to grownups. McDonald’s seemed to sense the shift first. For the Happy Meal’s 40th birthday in 2019, it resurrected 15 throwback toys, some three decades old, and explained they could make guests of any age “feel like a kid again.”

Three years later, the brand dropped the pretense altogether and released its first adult Happy Meal. McDonald’s didn’t officially call it that, though the company came pretty dang close. “We’re taking one of the most nostalgic McDonald’s experiences and literally repackaging it in a new way that’s hyper-relevant for our adult fans,” said Tariq Hassan, then McDonald’s USA’s chief marketing officer. Designed with the streetwear brand Cactus Plant Flea Market, the boxes came with a regular Big Mac or McNuggets and a collectible figurine of a McDonald’s character like Grimace or the Hamburglar, each sporting CPFM’s signature four eyes. The meals set a single-week digital-order record, the company said, and McDonald’s has repeated the formula every year since, in collaborations ranging from ones with the New York designer Kerwin Frost to the Minecraft movie and, most recently, KPop Demon Hunters.

McDonald’s didn’t respond to an invitation to discuss its current kids’-meal marketing philosophy. Neither did Burger King or Wendy’s. Chick-fil-A, which links its kids meals to a mix of high and low tech—both board games and original animated series—declined to talk on the record.

Meanwhile, McDonald’s has tried marketing kids’ toys to older collectors, too. When it released Hello Kitty Happy Meal toys in 2024, its global brand strategy lead, Guillaume Huin, promoted them on X by saying: “In your Happy Meal today. Probably on eBay for $500 in a week.”

Kids move on

Kids’ tastes are changing. So are their priorities

In 2019, Ella and Caitlin McEwan, sisters from Southampton, England, who were then 9 and 7, called on Burger King and McDonald’s to eliminate their plastic kids’-meal toys. “They’re useless, we don’t want them, and they’re really bad for the environment, so let’s stop them,” Ella said in her cutting assessment to Britain’s ITV network. They were able to get more than half a million people to sign their petition.

Responding to the McEwans, Burger King and McDonald’s pledged to (largely) eliminate plastic toys by 2025 and introduce more alternatives like books and board games. McDonald’s announced that by the end of 2024 it had cut the use of virgin fossil fuel-based plastic in toys by 80%. Burger King, for its part, has made changes such as offering paper-based toys, in partnership with Animal Planet. Hard-molded toys have endured anyway: This year alone, Burger King’s King Jr. Meals came with mini Nerf blasters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles spinning tops. Happy Meals included 70 varieties of plastic Disney toys. Both, somehow, offered SpongeBob figures.

But kids’ taste buds are definitely becoming more daring. For a February Razorfish survey mapping how “today’s tweens are transforming what families eat,” 58% of Gen Alpha members claimed they have more adventurous palates than their parents did at their age, and an impressive percentage of parents—70%—said they agree. A Wall Street Journal story in January, “Parents Are Going Broke From Their Kids’ Sushi Obsession,” drew attention for reporting that “raw fish has replaced pizza as a birthday party staple.” The trend was “prompting plenty of regret,” it noted, quoting one mother who said her children consume omakase meals “like savages.”

Yet 41% of fast-food chains with a kids’ menu still offer the decades-old classics: some version of a burger, chicken pieces, a hot dog, grilled cheese, or mac and cheese, according to MenuData, which tracks more than 100 million menu items at more than 300,000 restaurants. Just four fast-food brands tracked by the company include globally inspired dishes like rice bowls, teriyaki, or gyro plates on their kids’ menus, says Menu Data’s CEO, Sunny Khamkar. He tells me families looking for something more creative have better luck at fast-casual and sit-down restaurants: “Kids today are eating sushi, bulgogi [Korean barbecue], and falafel, but mostly not at the drive-thru.”

An April report from the food data company Tastewise and the marketing agency Esrock, which surveyed 70,000 diners and pulled data from 579 chains, reached a similar conclusion: Fast-food kids’ menus are short on variety. “Those three or four staples that were in every kid’s meal when I grew up, they’re still out there,” says Esrock’s CEO, Kevin Wilson. “Go to McDonald’s today and their kids’ meal is not much different. Well, except on the health side—the fry box is literally the size of two of your fingers.”

Kids aren’t cutting back on kids’ meals. In fact, Circana, the market research firm, says their orders went up by another 10% this year. They’re just ordering fewer of them from the burger chains that have long dominated the category. Since 2022, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s saw their share of kids’ meal purchases fall by nearly 10 percentage points, while restaurants that aren’t the classic burger or chicken joints gained the most share.

A bad economy is rough on both restaurants and families. Families with children have cut restaurant visits more than any other group this year, according to Circana. That’s a problem for fast food, since it relies so heavily on visits driven by kids. Overall restaurant traffic is down slightly this year, with growth concentrated in concepts that sell novelty and excitement: Chili’s and its retro-maximalist redesign, the wave of indie drive-through coffee players like Dutch Bros, 7 Brew, and Scooter’s Coffee, and newly arrived Chinese chains that already dethroned McDonald’s and Starbucks globally by selling cheap treats.

Investors have punished fast-food companies like McDonald’s (its stock price is down 24% this year), Domino’s (down 27%), and Yum Brands (down 8%), and rewarded casual-dining chains that can give families a value-focused night out: Chili’s owner Brinker is up 53%, Darden 8%, Bloomin’ Brands 17%, and The Cheesecake Factory 100%. Kids at Chili’s get eight entrée choices and coloring games, and parents get to have a margarita and hang out for an hour. Consumers have reversed course from last year, says Cristin O’Hara, head of Bank of America’s restaurant group, and now feel they might as well “spend a little more to get better quality and a different experience.”

Adults move in

As much as the kids’ vote counts, a growing number of adults have found their own reasons to order a kids’ meal, from tighter budgets to smaller appetites. In a May article about the trend, Ad Age called kids’ meals a “restaurant value hack” for customers “more concerned about their car payments than the free toy inside.”

Circana has found that adults from 18 to 34 are the fastest-growing segment of kids’ meal customers, with their orders up 51% since 2022 and 15% in the past year. David Portalatin, Circana’s top food and restaurant analyst, ties the phenomenon to diets, food prices, and Americans now eating at irregular times, perhaps due to hybrid or work-from-home schedules; 37% of restaurant consumers say they’re ordering smaller portions.

When Portalatin rattled off the eating times consumers now observe beyond three square meals a day, the list sounded like it was invented by Hobbits: “brunch,” “morning snack,” “afternoon occasions,” “late-night occasions,” “something light,” “something small.” At odd times, a kids’ meal seems more fitting than an adult double bacon cheeseburger. As Portalatin explains, “A lot of consumers tell us, ‘I had a light, healthy meal.’ We’ll ask, ‘What did you have?’ They’ll say, ‘Well, it was still a cheeseburger and fries, but it was the kid-meal bundle.’”

The Tastewise-Esrock survey arrived at a bolder conclusion, that “GLP-1s are changing how adults eat in 2026,” and predicts: “This isn’t a fad. It’s the future of food.”

Whatever the cause, the trend is easy to spot on social media, where adults routinely share kids’-meal hacks, like ordering two kids’ meals for the price of one adult meal.

Esrock’s Wilson says his daughter’s Gen Z boyfriend swears by the double-kids’-meal hack. He also recently polled followers on LinkedIn, and was surprised to see half of them admit to ordering a kids’ meal for themselves over the past year. Some people have even mentioned their love for the healthy sides that sprang out of the 2000s nutrition crackdown: “They’ll say, ‘I have a better beverage—I can get apple juice, I can get milk. I have a better side—I can get broccoli, I can get carrots.’”

For research (“research”?), Wilson subjected himself to a “kids’-meal challenge,” eating his way through 30 straight days of fast food. “I had three or four per sitting,” he admits. “So really I had 90 to 120 different meals.” He says that a couple of restaurants refused to let a middle-aged man order a kids’ meal, though one did relent after staff learned it was for social media. “It’s become a very low barrier,” Wilson says. “You just order what you order.”

But why does a 20-something eating a desk lunch or a 50-year-old on Ozempic want a meal in a box designed for children? Grownup life has evolved, too: Milestones like finding a stable career, settling down, and buying a home are arriving later for adults, and restaurant brands are betting that a moment of comfort in a cardboard box is good business.

“We have more mental stress and challenges today,” Wilson says. “And the beauty of the kids’ meal for some people is that it’s a mental break. The graphics and the silly toy and the little thing of fries allow them to destress and be a kid for a couple of minutes.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved bemotrizinol—sometimes called BEMT—in June. The first sunscreens containing it are now hitting U.S. store shelves, including formulas from Neutrogena and other manufacturers.

Dermatologists say the chemical fills an important market gap by offering broad protection, like the most well-established sunscreen ingredients, but without their cosmetic downsides, including white streaking.

BEMT has decades of safety data behind it, including studies showing it has minimal absorption into the skin. That’s been a concern with some older sun-blocking chemicals.

“It’s not a brand-new ingredient that you’re going to be the first person to try,” said Dr. Jennifer Stein, a dermatologist at NYU Langone Health.

Here’s what to know.

New ingredient offers broad protection without streaks

To be effective, sunscreens must protect against both forms of ultraviolet light that can damage the skin—UVB rays, which cause most sunburn, and UVA rays that pose the greatest risk of skin cancer and wrinkles.

Sunscreens that block both forms are labeled “broad spectrum protection.” Those that don’t must carry an FDA warning label.

BEMT is the first chemical-based sunscreen in the U.S. that offers this dual protection. Previously, manufacturers had to mix multiple ingredients to protect against both UVA and UVB light.

“This ingredient provides a solution for what is currently a big gap with respect to providing strong UVA protection,” said David Andrews, chief science officer of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit that advocates for higher sunscreen standards.

A different class of sunscreens, using minerals such as zinc oxide and titanium dioxide, has long been shown to offer strong protection against both forms of ultraviolet light. These mineral-based formulas work by physically blocking harmful rays from the skin.

But some people—particularly those with darker complexions—tend to avoid them because they cause white streaking and discoloration. In other cases, people don’t like their texture or consistency.

“Those are good sunscreens,” Stein said. “But for people who aren’t so inclined to use them—maybe they don’t like how it feels on their skin—this is a nice option.”

There’s less skin penetration with the new formula

The fact that chemical-based sunscreens are absorbed into the skin means they have to be carefully studied to make sure they aren’t building up in the body at unsafe levels.

Last month, the FDA revoked approval of an older chemical ingredient, oxybenzone, after determining it was “absorbed through the skin to a greater extent than previously understood.”

That’s not a problem with BEMT.

“It’s a molecule that’s too big to really penetrate through the skin and get absorbed into the bloodstream,” Stein said. “The older chemical sunscreens had small molecules.”

As part of its safety review, the FDA reviewed studies of BEMT in more than 500 patients conducted by Dutch manufacturer DSM Nutritional Products. Levels of the chemical absorbed into the skin were nearly undetectable, the studies found.

Agency reviewers said research in people who used the sunscreen daily for up to three weeks showed that BEMT “did not cause irritation” or allergic reactions. As a result, the FDA designated the ingredient as “generally recognized as safe and effective,” alongside the older mineral ingredients zinc oxide and titanium dioxide.

More than a dozen other ingredients are currently used in U.S. sunscreens, but the FDA has said they will require additional evidence to support their safety and effectiveness. The FDA review is part of an ongoing effort to overhaul U.S. sunscreen ingredients that kicked off in 2019.

More evidence is needed about the impact on coral reefs

Scientists have shown that some sunscreen ingredients can trigger bleaching and damage coral reefs. That’s led to bans on two chemical ingredients—oxybenzone, the ingredient recently targeted by the FDA, and octinoxate—in Hawaii and parts of Florida. It’s estimated about 25% of the sunscreen people apply to their skin washes off while swimming or wading in the ocean.

The U.S. government doesn’t classify the environmental impact of sunscreens, and marketing claims like “reef safe” or “reef friendly” have no standard definition or requirements. The European Union’s environmental agency has found “limited evidence of environmental toxicity” with BEMT, but longer-term research is needed.

Mineral ingredients like zinc oxide are generally considered safer for the environment, although some experts recommend staying away from so-called nano formulations. Those products are made with tiny particles that are more likely to be inhaled or absorbed by marine organisms.

Older chemicals were often unstable

Experts say BEMT has one other key advantage, in that it doesn’t quickly break down in the sun. That’s been a particular issue for avobenzone, the only other chemical-based ingredient that filters UVA light.

“Avobenzone has been known to be particularly unstable on its own, and a lot of work and reformulation efforts have gone into trying to find ways to stabilize it,” Andrews said. “BEMT is significantly more stable.”

As with all sunscreens, dermatologists say it’s important to reapply every few hours—more frequently if you’re swimming or sweating a lot.

Also, people shouldn’t rely on sunscreen alone when spending time outside, Stein said. Taking breaks in the shade and wearing a hat and sun-protective clothing are all important protections.

“Sunscreen is just one part of an overall sun-protection plan,” Stein said. “Clothing is even better.”

___

The Associated Press’ health and science coverage receives financial support from the AP Fund for Journalism and private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

—By Matthew Perrone, AP health writer

The US has a patchwork of rules regarding rides

In the U.S., roller coasters and other rides at major amusement parks such as Six Flags are not regulated by the federal government. That responsibility falls to states.

Some say this has led to an inconsistent patchwork of rules where some states have strict regulations and others have little to no oversight.

U.S. Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts has repeatedly introduced legislation to close what he calls a “loophole” in federal law that allows U.S. safety officials to regulate mobile rides but prevents the Consumer Product Safety Commission from overseeing stationary rides like those at major amusement parks.

Brian Avery, a University of Florida professor and amusement ride safety expert, agrees that more federal regulations are needed.

“Who’s watching those in these organizations to ensure that they are adequately trained, that they are compliant, that they are monitoring these rides to the level in which the standards have established?” Avery said.

Georgia’s Office of Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner, which oversees annual ride inspections in the state, is “conducting an in‑depth and comprehensive review” of what happened Monday at Six Flags, said Garrison Bennett, a spokesperson.

Amusement park industry has set its own safety standards

Amusement park operators worldwide generally adhere to what are known as ASTM standards set by industry experts, which cover everything from ride design and construction to how much acceleration and force each rider is allowed to experience.

The industry has multiple layers of inspection, said Dennis Speigel, a theme park consultant and past president of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, a trade group. Park operators are under pressure from insurance carriers that could face a hefty payout if something goes wrong.

“With the checks and balances that are put in place, theme parks are really one of the safest places to be on the planet,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday.

The trade group said the chance of being seriously injured on a U.S. amusement park ride is 1 in 15.5 million rides taken.

Martin Lewinson, a roller coaster expert and a professor at Farmingdale State College, said it was difficult to imagine there being a mechanical malfunction on a roller coaster such as Goliath because of its design.

The ride features a pull-down lap restraint, called a “clamshell,” that works with a ratchet mechanism that makes clicking sounds as you press it down over your hips. These have multiple disks to ensure redundancy if one fails, Lewinson said.

“They’re dependable. They’re not so technically advanced that theme parks have difficulty with operations,” Lewinson said.

The operator then has a safety system that displays a green “go” light for every seat on the train before it can be dispatched. The train should theoretically not be allowed to proceed unless all restraints are locked, Lewinson said.

But few things are 100% safe.

In 2022, a 14-year-old Missouri boy fell to his death from an Orlando amusement park ride when the harness didn’t lock properly due to his size. In 2013, a 52-year-old Dallas woman was killed when she slipped out of her seat on the Texas Giant ride at Six Flags Over Texas. Six Flags has since added redesigned restraint-bar pads, seat belts and a coaster seat at the ride’s entrance so guests can check before they get on whether they fit safely into the cars.

Nick Mendenhall, who has been on the Goliath more than a dozen times in recent weeks, said he saw Six Flags staff check the restraints each time he rode it.

“There are two employees, one on either side of the train, and with their hands they push down and they make sure it locks every time. I’ve never seen them not do it,” Mendenhall said.

States handle oversight in different ways

In California, the state Department of Industrial Relations approves new rides and rides that have been modified. State officials either directly inspect them and how they are being operated each year or rely on an annual inspection by the owner, according to the department’s website.

Florida’s largest theme parks, on the other hand, are exempt from state safety inspections, unlike smaller venues and fairs. Instead, the largest theme parks like Walt Disney World and Universal conduct their own inspections and have their own protocols, but they must report to the state any injury or death. Texas, similarly, relies on inspections carried out by private inspectors hired by park operators or their insurance companies.

Arizona, where Six Flags Hurricane Harbor Phoenix is located, does not have a state-level agency that regulates amusement park rides or conducts safety inspections at all. The law requires an annual private inspection, with enforcement largely by local government.

—Jaimie Ding, Dylan Lovan and Sudhin Thanawala, Associated Press

The suitcases are available on Away Reclaimed, a new site where the luggage brand sells its own products that cannot be sold as new. Its inventory comes from customer returns, which Away accepts within 100 days of purchase, as well as from “safety stock,” the last handful of units Away removes from its website so it never accidentally sells the same suitcase to two shoppers.

And there’s more. The site also sells Away’s backpacks, totes, and duffles. Later this month, the company plans to add an “Employee Archive,” which will include luggage that staffers have gently tested, along with one-of-a-kind production samples.

Because it no longer has to waste perfectly usable inventory, the company can be more sustainable. The platform also provides a new revenue stream.

Jessica Schinazi, Away’s CEO, says Reclaimed could effectively introduce the brand to new consumers who are looking for products that are slightly more affordable, perhaps turning them into loyal customers down the road.

A sustainability problem

Before Reclaimed, much of Away’s returned merchandise didn’t have an obvious place to go. That’s a problem across retail, where returns are among the biggest sources of waste. U.S retailers expected 15.8% of their annual sales would be returned in 2025, or $849.9 billion worth of merchandise, according to a study by the National Retail Federation and the return platform Happy Returns.

Brands generally treat wasted returns as a cost of doing business. Many returned products never make it back onto shelves. Some items are liquidated to off-price retailers like T.J. Maxx; others are donated. A lot ends up in landfills: 9.6 billion pounds annually, according to the reverse logistics company Optoro.

But today, shoppers are much more comfortable acquiring things that aren’t brand-new. For instance, 59% of consumers shopped secondhand apparel in 2025, up 7% in three years, according to ThredUp’s most recent report. Schinazi says Away’s own customers have been asking for a resale option for years.

But resale is complicated—it takes a reverse logistics system to collect old products, inspect them, and list them online. That’s why Away is starting with its own returned and unsold inventory. To build Reclaimed, the company partnered with Trove, which powers the resale programs for many brands, including Carhartt, Cotopaxi, and Eileen Fisher.

Away opened a dedicated reverse logistics warehouse, where every product is inspected, cleaned, refurbished, and graded on a three-point scale from “excellent,” meaning it’s essentially new, to “good,” which means there’s some noticeable wear. Away replaces wheels, trolley handles, linings, or anything else that affects the functionality of the suitcase.

“If the item is not performing the way that it should be, we will not sell it through Reclaimed at all,” Schinazi says. “If there’s a sticky zipper, we will never sell a product like that.”

Customers have been snapping these bags up. Away soft-launched Reclaimed in August with no marketing and sold 80% of its initial inventory within the first two weeks. The company says return rates on Reclaimed purchases have been low, and some customers have already come back to buy a second piece.

“It’s an interesting testament to how important those kind of programs are for the American consumer today,” Schinazi says, pointing both to interest in sustainability and to shoppers who are watching their wallets.

For now, the biggest thing holding Reclaimed back is supply. Since inventory largely comes from returns, Away cannot control how many pieces come in.

“We’re learning as we go in these early months,” Schinazi says, noting that the company is exploring a buyback program that would take back suitcases customers have owned for years.

For now, though, it’s running a test through its “Trade In, Trade Up” event this month. Customers can bring in a wheeled suitcase from any brand in any condition to a participating Away store October 16 through 18 and October 23 through 25 (by appointment) and receive $100 toward a new suitcase from Away’s newly redesigned Series 3 line. The company will use the event to learn how trade-in programs might eventually feed into Reclaimed.

Selling discounted versions of its own products could, in theory, cannibalize Away’s full-price sales. But Schinazi isn’t particularly worried. She believes Reclaimed will be an entry point, especially for younger shoppers who aren’t willing to spend full price on a carry-on.

“We know that Away Reclaimed might be their first purchase,” she says. “But we’re going to be able to have them experience our bags.” As they travel more, she hopes they will buy new pieces for themselves, their family, or as gifts.

Gomi, a sustainable U.K. design studio, put out a call for old Barbie dolls for its Childhood Memories Collection, a new collaboration with the Mattel-owned brand to give old plastic dolls a second life as tech products.

The collection includes $371 speakers, $95 power banks, $61 wireless chargers, and $45 tracker tags that are compatible with Apple devices and have a built-in alarm. Each is made from recycled plastic that comes in a one-of-one design, a marbled pattern of melted-down Barbie dolls, accessories, and other recovered plastics that make for a bright, playful palette of swirled pink, purple, turquoise, and Barbie blonde yellow. The batteries for the speakers and power banks are also recycled, using lithium from damaged and retired e-bike batteries.

Gomi was founded in 2017 with the goal of creating sustainable technology products. It focuses on flexible plastic waste, which isn’t recycled in much of the U.K. The company created its first product, a speaker, in 2023, and each one is made from the equivalent of about 44 plastic bags. The swirl effect on the products is created after plastic is melted at the lowest possible temperature. Once molten, color layers are stacked, twisted by hand, and cut.

Working with different waste streams is a challenge because plastics vary in quality and shrink rates. To allow for these inconsistencies, Gomi uses a textured mold to ensure every piece looks and feels desirable.

Gomi made speakers out of Barbies after the 2023 movie came out. Cofounder Tom Meades tells Fast Company that months later, he got in touch with Mattel, which was “keen to partner on a collaboration.” The official collab brings major brand recognition to Gomi’s product line, not to mention a more playful color palette than some of its others products. There’s also a deep emotional attachment.

“I’m not sure anyone has ever made electronics from recycled materials that have so much sentimentality attached to them,” Meades says.

Toy manufacturers have increasingly offered consumers a way to return toys after they’ve outlived their use. For example, Hasbro’s toy recycling program launched in 2018, and Lego’s Replay program began cleaning and repackaging old Legos in 2019 to be reused and donated to educators and community groups.

Mattel launched its own PlayBack program in 2021 to accept old Barbie, Hot Wheels, and Fisher-Price toys, which it recycles and repurposes into new items like playground equipment.

Gomi shows there’s still a commercial life for old Barbie dolls and accessories. By giving a childhood memory a new life and form, the studio turns nostalgia into something functional.

The company first launched its resale platform, Worn Wear, nine years ago, making it a pioneer in the brand-owned secondhand clothing space. The platform lets customers send back used clothing in exchange for a gift card; the clothing is then cleaned, repaired, and sold at a deep discount to someone else.

But until now, you had to open a different website to actually buy refurbished Patagonia clothing. Now it’s in the same place, and you can add new and used clothing to the same shopping cart.

The shift is a way to “bring resale to the center of our brand and the forefront of our customer experience,” says Sam Brown, Patagonia’s head of resale, noting that in the past, many customers haven’t been aware that Worn Wear exists.

Resale has become ubiquitous across fashion brands, but it typically happens separately from new sales. Patagonia’s integration is the next step in making secondhand shopping the new norm.

The brand’s website includes a used section that customers can browse. If you look up a new item, you’ll see links to buy a used version when it’s available. (Previously, new-product pages linked to the separate Worn Wear site.)

Bringing everything to the main site also helps give the resale platform a sense of more legitimacy. “There’s still a gap of customers who are willing to buy used or trade in,” Brown says. “And I think we can close that gap by helping to normalize the shopping experience.”

The project took four years to fully build. “Putting used [products] on a typical main e-comm platform is definitely fitting a round peg into a square hole,” Brown notes. “Nothing about this has been easy.”

First, since it’s not common for brands to sell new and used products in the same place, the company’s UX design team had to find ways to make the differentiation clear for consumers, such as different colored backgrounds for used products.

The team also had to deal with new complexity. Rather than selling a particular new sweater, for example, suddenly it had to work with multiple sweaters with different levels of wear, sometimes in colors that are no longer in production.

“We were figuring out how to come up with a solution where we can manage single-SKU logistics on the back end in the warehouse, and then present something to customers where they’re not choosing across 10 different individual items,” Brown says. “That’s a really hard technical hurdle, and something we’ll probably have to iterate on.”

The company now has to manage tens of thousands of products from its 20-year history, with a constantly changing assortment based on what customers decide to sell back, rather than a single season’s worth of styles and colors.

Making it easier to buy used products means more competition with sales of the brand’s new products. But that’s the point, Brown says: The company wants to sell more used items so it can reduce the environmental impact that went into making them in the first place.

Right now, it’s also still relatively limited in scale, because the company can sell only the items that customers happen to send back; this year, the brand has sold nearly 160,000 used items.

Patagonia sees room to do more. “We have our work cut out for us in that so much apparel ends up in a landfill or it sits in people’s closets,” Brown says. “There’s definitely more utility we can get out of the stuff we’re making. It’s just a matter of building the infrastructure and the awareness of these programs.”