Hello again, and thanks for reading Fast Companys Plugged In.
When you think about it, training AI to use the web might be the single most impactful way to expand its power. So much of what we do todayfrom buying products of all kinds to managing every aspect of our personal datawe do online. If a piece of software could handle that work at least as well as a human, it could be a far more essential assistant than any existing AI tool.
Web savvy is key to the tech industrys current yen to make AI more agenticthat is, capable of performing multistep processes on our behalf with some degree of autonomy. A flurry of recent news reflects this trend. On July 9, for example, Perplexity launched Comet, a web browser with a built-in AI agent, available mostly to users of the companys $200/month plan. A week later, OpenAI began rolling out a new ChatGPT agent called . . . Agent. Microsoft is adding a Copilot mode to its Edge browser that it says will soon be able to perform tasks such as making reservations; Opera is previewing Opera Neon, its own browser with built-in agentic AI.
Ive been playing with OpenAIs Agent, which showed up in my ChatGPT Plus account earlier this week. The companys blog post on the feature raises expectations by describing it as already a powerful tool for handling complex tasks. So far, however, my experiences with it have not provided any moments of awe and wonder.
Instead, Ive been left wondering if the era of offloading all kinds of web work to an LLM is further off than I thought. Tech companies have already trained AI to do some astonishing things, such as achieve gold-medal-level performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad. But Agent often came off like a clueless internet newbie banging its head against a medium conspiring to foil it.
In its own odd way, watching Agent at work is fascinating. When you give it a promptas with AI of all types, the more detail you provide, the betterit opens a web browser on a remote OpenAI computer. Then it displays the web pages its accessing right inside your chat and explains every step its taking in absurd detail, down to which buttons it chooses to click. Its like peering into the features brain, and underscores the infinite number of tiny, almost subconscious decisions we make when using the web.
[Screenshot: Harry McCracken/ChatGPT]
More often than not, though, Agents responses to my requests werent worth the wait. It took 13 minutes to rummage through Google Flights for San Francisco-New York flight options, and the list it gave me was missing the itinerary I probably would have chosen. When I asked it to compile a list of the necessary ingredients to bake authentic German lebkuchen, it combined ones from two different recipes without any apparent logic. I fed it the description for a job opening here at Fast Company and asked it to find candidates; it suggested some, but with out-of-date information on their current employers.
After a certain point, I wondered whether the projects I was throwing Agents way were poor tests of its talents. So I tried several tasks ChatGPT suggests when you initiate an Agent session. Many of them, it whiffed. Agent could not log into my Wall Street Journal account to prepare a report on the sites coverage of rare earth materials, or verify my phone number to schedule an Uber pickup. While adding banana cream pie ingredients to an Instacart order, it plugged in a random delivery address and didnt seem to offer any way for me to correct it. A summary of Axioss recent articles on AI worked better, except it didnt include anything from the past two weeks. (Agent was often confused about the current date, informing me at various points that it was July 15 or July 16 when it was actually July 30.)
Because Agent discloses what its doing so thoroughly, its possible to hazard some guesses about why the results arent better. First of all, it was frequently bogged down by what it concluded were errors on its part or website malfunctionsIt seems the previous click didnt work as expectedthough it wasnt always clear whether anything had in fact gone wrong.
Secondly, the internet as we know it is designed for the convenience of humans, not to facilitate AI agents. Indeed, many sites (including, ahem, FastCompany.com) block automated browsing of the sort Agent performs.
In my experience, this blocking was a persistent obstacle to Agent, which kept encountering Are you human? tests. Unfazed, it tried increasingly ambitious work-arounds, such as translating a Fast Company story that had been translated into Spanish back into English. But that turned theoretically simple projects into slogs, almost always with diminishing returns.
Lastly, theres the question of privacy and security. Agent is designed to let you type login information for your accounts into its remote browser, though it didnt always work for me. Many folks might be disinclined to even try it, given that it involves handing your passwords over and trusting OpenAI to use them responsibly.
In the interest of researching this newsletter, I signed into my Gmail account and asked Agent to compile a few reports on the messages therein. Correctly identifying it as a sensitive situation, Agent insisted I monitor its work and paused it whenever I tabbed awaynegating any time I might have saved by not performing the job myself.
Access to the users personal data is essential to Agent realizing even a fraction of its potential, since the better it knows us, the moe sophisticated its help can get. For example, I try to book an aisle seat when flying alone but grab myself a middle seat if my wife is along for the flighta habit a truly clever AI might be able to divine from my travel history without me explicitly stating it. But OpenAI hasnt yet given the feature anything resembling an uncanny ability to understand such needs and desires.
For now, Agent often turned out to be a slower way to achieve a goal than existing web tools that are mature and predictable. I was heartened when I asked Agent to find the lowest price on a particular Casio music keyboard: It found it on eBay and added it to my shopping cart. Except that a Google search returned the same eBay listing as its first link. And clicking the Add to cart button oneself does not exactly amount to heavy lifting.
The thing is, we already have tools designed to give software, such as an agent, efficient access to other software. Theyre called APIs, and instead of expecting an app to puzzle its way through browsing the web, typing into forms, and clicking forms, they let it transmit requests and retrieve results as streams of raw data. APIs only support processes that the host software has chosen to make available rather than the theoretically open-ended capabilities of an agent. But they do it quickly, easily, and without requiring the user’s attention.
Agent does support an existing API-based ChatGPT feature called Connectors, but this, too, was flaky in my experiments. When I issued a Gmail-related request, it didnt point out that there was a Gmail connector but I hadnt installed it. Instead, it had me log into my account and supervise its browsing. Another time, I tried a task involving OneDrive and Agent suggested, fuzzily, that there might be a relevant connector. (There is.)
Im not discounting the possibility that Agent, or someone elses agentic web-browsing AI, will get radically better in manifestly obvious ways. Some degree of improvement is inevitable. Yet the tool, in its current state, is another reminder of how far the industrys lofty proclamations have raced ahead of actual progress.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Metas Mark Zuckerberg, and others have lately said that their goal is superintelligenceAI thats better than humans at everything. Using a web browser hardly ranks among the worlds most intellectually taxing activities. But until AI masters it, superintelligence will be a talking point, not a reality.
Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
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Imagine if Congress had a clear-eyed guide to the technological upheavals shaping our lives. A team of in-house experts who could have flagged the risks of generative AI before ChatGPT went public, raised alarms about deepfakes before they flooded social media, and assessed the vulnerabilities in U.S. infrastructure before ransomware shut down pipelines.
For a time, Congress had exactly that, in the form of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). But lawmakers shuttered it 30 years ago, and were still feeling its absence today.
Created in 1972, the Office of Technology Assessment gave Congress something it almost never has: a reliable way to understand the science and technologies reshaping the world. The offices reports didnt tell lawmakers what to do. Instead, they laid out the risks and the benefits (so cleanly that members on opposite sides of an issue could wave the same report to make their case). The OTA was overseen by a 12member board, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, with equal representation from the House and the Senate. In just over two decades, it produced over 750 studies, on everything from Alzheimers to automation.
It was an impartial repository of interdisciplinary experts who would proactively assist Congress in understanding emerging technology, says University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo, and to do so at a time early enough in its life cycle that it had not become full of special interests that had not grown around it, like barnacles.
But not everyone was pleased with OTAs body of work. In 1980, Washington Times reporter Donald Lambro published Fat City: How Washington Wastes Your Taxes, arguing that the agency often focused on issues championed by Senator Ted Kennedy and other liberals. In his view, OTAs studies were duplicative, frequently shoddy, not altogether objective, and often ignored. (Lambros criticisms were, ironically enough, arguably quite partisan: True, OTA sometimes revisited issues already studied by other agencies, but a 1977 Government Accountability Office (GAO) review noted that OTA’s output made “significant contributions in areas of concern to Congress.”)
That sentiment carried into the Reagan era. OTAs sharply critical assessments of President Ronald Reagans Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Pitched at the height of the Cold War as a revolutionary system of space and groundbased weapons capable of intercepting Soviet missiles in flight, SDI struck supporters as a technological moonshot. OTAs assessment was a splash of cold water: the office warned that the programs staggering cost and ambitious scope offered little assurance it could actually shield the nation from a Soviet attack.
Those findings triggered intense political backlash, including from the Heritage Foundation, which in 1984 accused OTA of letting politics override objectivity, claiming that at least one division had prioritized discrediting SDI over providing balanced analysis. The report also argued that flaws in the study and the release of sensitive information were unlikely to be the result of simple mistakes or misunderstanding, concluding: The evidence that some OTA staffers oppose the Administrations Strategic Defense Initiative seems clear and compelling. (Several subsequent independent reviews echoed OTAs assessment of SDI.)
The controversy continued when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms used the SDI dispute to condemn the agency outright. OTA has been obsessed with proving that President Reagans strategic defense initiative is both wrongheaded and dangerous, Helms said in 1988.
The political pressure only intensified as the partisan tides shifted. During the 1994 midterm elections, Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich vowed that if Republicans took control of Congress, the Office of Technology Assessment would be on the chopping block. Once his party indeed did sweep into power, Gingrich (now ascended into the role of House Speaker) made good on that promise: In 1995, with a staff of about 140 and an annual budget of roughly $21 million (a rounding error in terms of congressional budgets, Calo says), OTA was quickly defunded, effectively shuttering the office.
The move drew swift criticism even from within Gingrichs own party. New York congressman Amo Houghton, for example, lamented, We are cutting off one of the most important arms of Congress when we cut off unbiased knowledge about science and technology.
Shuttering OTA solved a partisan problem in 1995, but it left Congress flying blind on science and technology, a gap it has never truly closed.
There have been a number of attempts to resurrect OTA, but none have succeeded. House Democrats have floated funding proposals, including a 20192020 effort to allocate $6million to restart the office but these measures died in the Senate. In the meantime, Congress has tried to fill the OTA-sized hole with alternatives like the Government Accountability Offices Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) unit. But while this setup offers some basic technical support, critics argue it lacks OTAs mission-driven focus and deep multidisciplinary expertise, and thus produces far fewer insights than its bureaucratic forebear. They do not have anything like the capacity that the OTA had, says the University of Washington’s Calo.
The stakes of that void are becoming increasingly clear. Take, as an example, large language models: An office like OTA could have assessed the risks, outlined guardrails, and prepared Congress before the tools reached the public. Without that kind of early guidance, lawmakers are left reacting after the fact, often leaning on industry lobbyists or outside experts.
In the absence of OTA, theres, regrettably, been quite a bit of soft capture by the tech sector, says Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former Justice Department scienceand technology advisor. And its easy to make the oh, you silly Congress, if only you understood the technology, you’d realize the error of your ways type argument when Congress lacks the technology expertise to respond.”
Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and lecturer at Harvard University, argues that the most damning consequence wasnt just the loss of OTA itselfit was what the closure signaled about Congress. It was an early example of ideology trying to shut down facts, he says. And what were left with, he argues, is a tech policy landscape that is shaped largely by lobbyists. Which is not good, he adds, because it comes with an agenda.
Even the worlds most bumbling detective could probably figure out why there havent been any comedy blockbusters lately. Amid all the rampaging dinosaurs, broods of superheroes, and live-action Disney characters who technically are not alive, no major comedies whatsoever have graced big screens this summer. (Or last summer.) Thats about to change, though.
The Naked Gun reboot careens into theaters this weekend, with Liam Neeson filling in as the films leading man for Leslie Nielsen as shambolic police detective Frank Drebin (this isnt a 007 situationNeesons Drebin is Nielsens son).
A spoof franchise thats lain dormant for three decades might not quite sound like a recipe for box office gold (even if it has been a recipe for romance). But Paramount reportedly has a lot of faith in the project, opening it wide against family friendly animated flick The Bad Guys 2. Helmed by Akiva Schaffer, part of the Lonely Island trio with Andy Samberg, The Naked Gun has already won over critics, with reviews hailing it as the funniest movie in years. If it hits hard, it wont just reignite the series, but potentially restore executives faith in theatrically released comedieswhich makes it kind of scary to contemplate what will happen if it flops.
When a comedy connects with a packed theater crowd, the energy is electric. Synchronized belly laughs come tumbling out at every turn, seemingly summoned by the rhythm and sheer force of roiling collective joy. Its a visceral, physiological experience, akin to audiences gasping and screaming together at a horror movie. But unlike horror movies, pure comedies rarely make it to the big screen anymoreat least not without modifiers like family-, action-, or indie-.
Where have all the comedy blockbusters gone?
[Image: Paramount Pictures]
When comedy was more common
In 2005, Batman Begins kicked off Christopher Nolans Dark Knight trilogy. It was a massive hit, propelling Christian Bale to stardom and helping usher in the modern era of superhero movies. What now seems lost to history about the films success, however, is that it was slightly exceeded by the Vince Vaughn goof-fest Wedding Crashers, which earned $209 million to Batman Beginss $206 million at the domestic box officeon roughly a quarter of the budget.
Wedding Crashers was an unusually big comedy 20 years ago, but not that unusual. It was one of 28 from the genre to reach the top 100 highest-grossers that yeara list that, in domestic box office returns, includes Will Smiths Hitch ($179 million), the Ben Stiller versus Robert De Niro sequel Meet the Fockers ($146 million), and The 40-Year-Old Virgin ($109 million), which kicked off Judd Apatows reign as something of a raunch-comedy auteur. The following year had even more comedies in the top 100, including Borat ($128 million) and Will Ferrells Talladega Nights ($148 million).
Typically cheaper to make than special-effects-driven blockbusters, comedies remained a wildly profitable part of the box office throughout the early 2010s. As established stars like Vaughn and Adam Sandler began shedding some of their box office potency, new comedic heroes like Zach Galifianakis (The Hangover, $277 million) and Melissa McCarthy (The Heat, $159 million) emerged, right on schedule, to pick up the slack.
By the back half of the decade, though, there seemed to be nothing but slack.
[Photo: Frank Masi/ 2025 Paramount Pictures]
The case of the vanishing chuckles
Sandler saw the writing on the wall fairly early. In 2014the same year that Blended, his reunion with Wedding Singer costar Drew Barrymore, grossed a relatively paltry $46 millionSandler signed his first deal with Netflix to make comedies that live exclusively on the streaming platform. It was an ominous, accurate indicator that original streaming content was coming to eat the box offices lunchand comedies appeared to be first on the menu.
The revolution rolled in gradually. In 2015, Apatow had his last big hit to date with Trainwreck, which made $110 million and anointed Amy Schumer as the next major comedy movie star. Tiffany Haddish snatched that title two years later, as the breakout of Girls Trip ($115 million), but neither star managed to sustain their momentum, with returns quickly diminishing. Meanwhile, the ceiling for big-screen comedies collapsed, as well-regarded hits like 2018s Game Night and Blockers topped out between $60 million and $70 million. (Crazy Rich Asians made a crazy rich $174 million that summer, but its more of a romantic comedy/drama than a pure comedy.)
Buoyed by the dominance of superhero fare like Avengers: Endgame ($858 million domestic), 2019 became the biggest box office year on record, but comedy had comparatively meager returnscementing the conventional wisdom that the genre was no longer profitable. It coincided with the arrival of fresh streamers like Apple TV+ and Peacock, hungry for exclusive content, and COVID-19 keeping millions of moviegoers out of theaters for years.
As far as theatrical releases go, comedy is now mostly relegated to an element that filmmakers inject into other genres. Thor: Love and Thunder ($343 million), is now a comedy. M3GAN ($95 million), with its made-to-be-memed robot dance, is a comedy. Barbie ($636 million) with its money-printing IP and the black swan event-iness of opening against Oppenheimer, is a comedy. As for pure comedies from legendary stars of the genre like Eddie Murphy, though, one need only scroll through Netflix and Prime Video, where movies like You People and Coming 2 America exclusively reside.
Big-screen comedies, it would seem, are cooked. But maybe they dont have to be.
Whats riding on The Naked Gun hitting
The problem facing theatrical comedies now is one of expectations. As the potential for staggering worldwide grosses grew over the past two decades, studios became interested in top global performers and little elseand comedy tends not to translate well. Everything in theaters now seems to either be a $500 million juggernaut or a $20 million A24 movie made for pocket change. Whatever happened to midbudget movies and mid-level expectations?
One of the last hyped comedies to hit theaters, the 2023 Jennifer Lawrence vehicle No Hard Feelings, was considered a flop because it only made $50 million domestically on a $45 million budget. This years One of Them Days, however, starring Keke Palmer and SZA, took in the same total on a third of the budget, and is considered a modest hit. (A sequel is already in the works.) If audiences will turn out enough to make that comedy profitable, it stands to reason theres a lot of untapped potential left in the genre.
With a reported $42 million budget, The Naked Gun will have to shoot a little higher to be considered a hit. If it manages to clear that magic $100 mark, though, something a pure comedy hasnt done in ages, it could remind the decision-makers that filmgoers love to laugh. It could lay the groundwork for a big marketing push for Aziz Ansaris filmmaking debut, Good Fortune, starring Seth Rogen, which is slated for this fall. (I dont buy into this theory that theatrical comedies are not a thing, Ansari has said about his hopes for the film.) It might not take more than one or two major hit comedies before the genre is deemed theatrically viable again.
If The Naked Gun flops, however, comedy stands to be further relegated to the world of streaming, where the stakes are low and so, too often, is the level of effort.
Theres nothing funny about that.
YouTubers dedicate their lives to building a following in hopes of creating and sustaining a livelihood. For top creators, the rewards are immense: MrBeast, the worlds biggest YouTuber, is estimated to be worth $1 billion.
Its no surprise, then, that YouTube channels are valuable assets, often bought and sold for significant sums. A new study published in the Cornell University archive arXiv reveals that 1 in every 400 YouTube channels has changed hands on third-party platforms, frequently undergoing complete transformations in the process.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University analyzed Fameswapa kind of eBay for social media profilescataloging 4,641 YouTube channels with a combined 823 million subscribers listed for sale between October 2024 and March 2025. They then tracked which of those channels sold, confirming more than $1 million in transactions during that six-month period.
It was really remarkable, says Alejandro Cuevas, the papers lead author.
A YouTube spokesperson said that selling accounts violates the platforms Terms of Service, and the company will take action if such activity is detected. “If we detect that bad actors are creating channels with the intent to scam, mislead, spam, or defraud other users, we terminate those channels, the spokesperson tells Fast Company.
Given the high prices paid, new owners are eager to see a return on their investment. About one in four of the tracked channelsrepresenting a combined 220 million followerswere completely overhauled within 30 days, with changes to their handle, title, and description that erased any connection to the original identity.
The researchers found that these revamped channels continued to gain subscribers over the following 12 weeks, suggesting most viewers didnt notice the switch. However, many new owners werent focused on producing quality content: 37% of repurposed channels later promoted material flagged by YouTube as potentially harmfulespecially political disinformation, crypto schemes, and gambling ads.
A follow-up analysis by the same researchers of 1.4 million randomly selected channels from analytics platform Social Blade revealed that around 0.25% showed similar patterns of transformation.
The growing trade in YouTube channels reflects broader shifts in how we consume content, says Manoel Horta Ribeiro, a coauthor on the study. Part of the reason why this is so prevalent right now is because systematically, in these platforms, weve seen a decrease in the agency over what we consume, he says. Knowing that a channel already has an audience and a veneer of credibility makes it easier to push new content into users feeds.
The shortform content paradigm facilitates this a lot, because in the past, you would search for channels directly, maybe by name, or be more aware of that, says Cuevas. This just makes it more fertile ground for these type of thing.
If you sit on the terraced steps at the newly-rebuilt Wagner Park on the Manhattan waterfront, looking out at the Statue of Liberty, you probably wont know that theres an 18-foot-tall flood wall hidden under your feet.
The small park, which just opened after an 18-month renovation, is one piece of a larger, $1.7 billion system of flood protection being installed in New York City.
Most of the park now sits around 10 feet higher than it did in the past, with the hidden wall high enough to hold back water in a storm surge. Under the central lawn, a 63,000-gallon stormwater cistern holds rain in heavy storms, then recycles the water to irrigate the park. On the other side of the wall, near the Hudson River, rain flows through gardens and into an infiltration system that releases it slowly to help avoid floods.
[Photo: Battery Park City Authority]
You can engineer these solutions with large floodwalls everywhere, says Raju Mann, president and CEO of Battery Park City Authority, the public benefit corporation that manages urban planning in the area. But here, we took a more careful approach. How do we have a great open space that also has flood protection in itnot how do we just build a flood protection project?
[Image: BPCA]
From the beginning, the design team knew that they wanted to avoid exposing the floodwall as much as possible. In a few spots in the park, tunnels underground meant that it wasnt possible to go down to the bedrock, and the wall is exposed. But most of it is completely hidden. In other parts of the park, flood gates integrated into pathways can pop up in an emergency, but otherwise arent noticeable.
[Photo: Battery Park City Authority]
Its a beautiful waterfront, says Gonzalo Cruz, vice president and principal for landscape architecture and urban design at AECOM, the engineering firm that worked on the design. We want people to feel very connected to its experience and how to navigate the park, he says. “Back in the day, when mechanisms for flood protection were put into place, they were erected without any consideration for how people use these spaces. Were rethinking the way we think about open space and how we design around infrastructure.
The redesigned park feels larger than it previously did, Mann says, with more outdoor rooms and space for concerts and other performances. It will also have a new energy-efficient pavilion with community space where nonprofits can have classes, and a rooftop terrace.
Gardens through the park are designed with native plants. The paving materials were chosen to help reduce the urban heat island effect. The solar-powered lighting in the park is DarkSky compliant to reduce the impact of light pollution on wildlife.
[Photo: Battery Park City Authority]
The plan for the transformation started more than a decade ago, after Hurricane Sandy devastated lower Manhattan. The storm surge reached 13 feet at Battery Park, at the southern tip of the island. Streets and subway tunnels were flooded. The power went out for days. Some offices closed for weeks. A hospital had to evacuate patients. Two residents drowned in a basement apartment in the East Village.
Wagner Park sits next to the Battery, but at a higher elevation. It avoided flooding during Sandy. But its in the 100-year flood plain.
The city recognized that major storms are becoming more likely because of climate changeboth storm surges and heavy rain. And it knew that the park needed to be better protected. The new design is based on flood levels that are possible in the 2050s as the sea level rises.
[Photo: Battery Park City Authority]
The floodwall will connect to other projects to the north and south. Collectively, the new infrastructure will help make it less likely that the surrounding neighborhoods flood. Thats especially important now, Mann says, as the federal government is pulling back from climate action.
As we’re getting less serious as a country about managing our greenhouse gas emission, then we need to get more serious about how we actually adapt to a change in climate, he says. I think it’s going to put more and more pressure on places to think about how do we actually grapple with the reality that increasingly looks like. And with some optimism, meaning, can we actually design better places? I think that this project, and other projects getting delivered now, provides some optimism that climate change adaptation doesn’t need to be just taking your medicine. It can actually be better space.
For the first time since its founding in 1943, Ikea is making it possible to shop for a piece of its furniture in a store other than its own.
Historically, Ikea has run a solely direct-to-consumer business model, selling its wares exclusively through its iconic big blue box stores and via its website. Now, though, the company is breaking that mold through a new partnership with Best Buy.
Beginning in fall 2025, small Ikea kiosks will begin popping up in Best Buy stores in Florida and Texas, combining Ikeas signature room-specific furnishings with Best Buys range of home appliances.
The move represents another step in Ikeas yearslong plan to diversify and expand its retail footprint. In 2025, that looks like finding new ways to appear in physical storefronts without the investment required for a typical 300,000-square-foot Ikea behemoth.
[Image: Ikea]
A one-stop shop for your dream kitchen
According to the company, Ikeas cross-brand retail experience will launch in 10 stores throughout Florida and Texas. Each will feature 1,000-square-foot Ikea storefronts that showcase inspirational kitchen and laundry room settings, including embedded Best Buy appliances such as refrigerators, dishwashers, microwaves and washers and dryers.
Both Ikea representatives and Best Buy employees will be available to help customers plan their spaces and order the items on display. The Ikea display items will not be warehoused at the Best Buy sites, but customers can place orders through the Ikea representatives for shipping and in-home delivery.
In a press release, Ikea shared that the goal of the collaboration is to create a one-stop destination for customers to design their dream kitchen, storage area, or laundry space.
The Ikea growth strategy in the U.S. is to create a more accessible, easy, and convenient shopping experience for many people, says Rob Olson, chief operating officer for Ikea U.S. Physical expansion takes time, and by partnering with Best Buy, we can enter markets sooner, introducing new customer meeting points at a faster pace. It also allows us to penetrate existing markets in a much deeper way, as we can open shop-in-shops focused on how consumers like to shop, [putting] Ikea closer to where they live in the process.
Ikea’s retail experiments
Since 2018, Ikea has experimented with a series of small-format stores that deliver a pared-down version of the brands physical retail experience. These plan-and-order points with pickup typically include a small storefront with a few popular Ikea items and a team of staffers dedicated to helping customers plan and order furnishings for big design projects. According to Olson, Ikea had opened 10 such locations by the end of fiscal year 2024, and its already cut the ribbon on six additional locations in 2025; more will debut before the end of the year.
In an interview with RetailSpaces last year, Olson referred to these new-format stores as an avenue for the brand to literally get closer to its consumers, considering that Ikea’s large locations often require fans to travel out of their way to browse in-person. By opening shops-in-a-shop through Best Buy, it looks like Ikea is pursuing another opportunity to show up where its customers already are.
On July 25, the company behind the app Tea Dating Advice admitted it had been hit with a major data breachwhich sounds like a disaster for an app trying to make a name for itself as a safe digital space for women to privately discuss, or red-flag, potential dates. And indeed, an app many had never heard of abruptly became a hot topic, not only criticized for the breach but also questioned over whether its whole Yelp for men approach was a good idea in the first place.
On the other hand, a week later the app is still hovering near the top of app download chartsin the third slot on Apples App Store as of July 31. Good idea or not, Tea has in some sense never been more popular than it is now, in the immediate aftermath of a brand catastrophe.
Notoriety attracting attention is hardly new, and pretty much every social media app has contended with a hack or breach or other bad publicity. One memorable example: Snapchat, whose brand promise is wrapped up in privacy, saw thousands of users accounts hacked and private photos leaked in an early-2010s incident dubbed the Snappeningand active users on iOS actually rose. Snap was still relatively young at the time, and the high-profile incident no doubt alerted people to the existence of a clever new communication tool.
It may not be strictly true that all publicity is good publicity, but theres been some research exploring the idea. A 2011 study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business found that in some cases negative publicity can increase sales when a product or company is relatively unknown, simply because it stimulates product awareness.
As a comparison point, the researchers documented how previously obscure books hit with high-profile negative reviews actually enjoyed better sales. The effect with brands can be similar, one of the researchers explained: This suggests that whereas the negative impression fades over time, increased awareness may remain, which can actually boost the chances that a product will be purchased.
THE RIGHT PROBLEM
This may apply to Tea, because up until a week ago it wasnt particularly well known. The news of the breach disaster didnt undercut a highly popular brandit introduced a brand to a much bigger audience. And some of that audience was (and is) looking for solutions to exactly the problems Tea is trying to address. That doesnt mean Tea will get it right in the long run, but whatever you make of Teas approach, there seems to be real demand for a dating-safety tool of some kind.
Tea launched in 2023 as a kind of app version of private Are we dating the same guy? groups on Facebook and elsewhere online, where women share information to vet potential dates. The ostensible motive is to root out abusive men, cheaters, and other red flags. More than a few men have found this practice unfair and invasive, even libelous. Some are enraged. Naturally that stark divide applied to Tea, which had been the subject of online chatter and social media pro-and-con buzz in the days leading up to the breach, posting on its Instagram account that it had 900,000 names on its waiting list.
The controversy (and enraged male backlash) seems to have fueled the breach, which was strikingly malicious in form. Tens of thousands of leaked Tea user images and even IDs shared on forums like 4chan were used by various bad actors to publicly mock, harass, or otherwise attack Tea users. The site 404 Media, which broke the news, reported that a second breach involved thousands of direct messages within the app, including intensely personal and sensitive information. A class-action suit has already been filed against Tea Dating Advice.
The basic idea of providing women with a tool for communicating about problematic potential dates sounds straightforward enoughparticularly given that many women feel dating sites arent necessarily a safe way to meet men. But the potential pitfalls are just as obvious: False accusations are easy and potentially quite damaging, and theres little sense of due process or accountability. Some critics argue that the approach fosters an incurious, and even potentially combative, dating dynamic, and that the whole concept of anonymously rating other people in secret is just a bad idea.
That said, responding to women who are trying to steer clear of abusive men by launching corrosive personal attacks on them isnt a very persuasive rejoinder. In fact, if you need an explanation for the continuing demand for tools to avoid being harassed by toxic men, look no further than this breach. Tea may not prove capable of solving these problems, but for the momentpartly because of the breachno other brand is better known for trying.
A new 3D-printed model takes advantage of the design of the Nintendo Switch 2’s snap-on magnetic controllers by turning the video game console into a french fry holder.The GamiFries rig has magnetic connectors that allow the Switch 2’s controllers and screen to snap on in two modes, handheld and controller.It’s built to hold a medium-size order of fries, with a circular carve-out thats perfectly positioned to show the McDonald’s golden arches logo. An anonymous user with no other post history uploaded the model as a free download with fair-use promotional images in McDonald’s red and yellow.[Image: user7R135/MakerWorld]“We’re fans of 3D-printed models and how we can use them to bring ideas to life, especially for small-scale fabrication,” the creator behind the model told Fast Company in an email. “You can have an idea and suddenly it becomes a product. Then you have to hope that people find it funny or useful.”The Switch 2 has inspired a host of 3D-printed accessories on sites like MakerWorld since Nintendo released the console in June. The Switch 2 sold 1.6 million units in the U.S. in one month, making it the fastest-selling gaming hardware in U.S. history, and it’s become the fastest-selling Nintendo console of all time globally. [Image: user7R135/MakerWorld]GamiFries joins gaming chopsticks holders, a Pizza Hut video game pizza warmer, and Nintendo Switch soda cups as the latest innovation in gaming-snack accessories, a novelty category well suited for fast food like french fries. It’s also especially well suited for streamers.A 2023 U.K. report by the entertainment wiki hosting site Fandom found “gamers are 50% more likely than the average person to value taste over nutrition,” while gamers’ top snack purchases trend toward salty (41%) over sweet (33%).Seems like gamers might just be natural spokespeople for fast-food and snack brands that want to get their products in front of consumers.
After two decades as an industrial designer working on products like augmented reality glasses Lauryn Morris was ready for a change.
I was really becoming jaded with the status quo of the linear economy, she says. Most products still take a one-way journey from raw materials to a landfill. Sustainabilityincluding what happens at a products end of lifeis usually an afterthought.
Morris had seen the impact of climate change firsthand, when a wildfire in 2020 burned through a property that she and her husband own near Los Angeles. And she wanted to rethink her role as a designer.
I wanted to not be part of the problem anymore, she says. I wanted to counter all of the waste that I was a part of over the last 20 years, and then show other people in the hardware world how we could challenge it and think differently.
Lauryn Morris
In 2023, she took a sabbatical to explore what she wanted to work on next. She took time to rechargeworking with her hands and spending time outsidewhile reading as much as she could about climate solutions. She went through the Climatebase fellowship, a 12-week accelerator program that helps professionals pivot to careers focused on climate.
She could have taken several different paths. But she ended up taking inspiration from her own life: She loves driving vintage cars, and she wanted to find a way to help convert more existing cars on the road to EVs.
Right now, EV conversions are typically custom projects. Morris had looked into converting her own car, a gas-guzzling 1975 Datsun, to electric.
I started calling shops in Southern California and found two-year-long wait lists and really high price tags, she says. Auto shops do long, complicated, bespoke conversions and full restorations. Alternatively, there are companies that sell DIY kits for consumers to convert some models, like VW Beetles. But those hobbyist projects can also take months or years in a garage.
[Photo: Dan Coronado/courtesy Nice]
Its never really been interesting to me to do small projects, Morris says. Thats where the industry has been with gas-to-electric conversion. I wanted to take my experience working in mass production and apply principles of scale to reuse. How can we remanufacture things at scale?
She saw the opportunity to make the idea of EV conversions mainstream. “I think that designers and product strategists are the missing key to make circularity more desirable and more normal for the way that we all consume products,” she says. While it’s not realistic to convert every car on the road to electric, Morris argues that conversions can make a “significant dent” in the adoption of EVs.
She launched a startup called Nice (a reference to what people would say when they pulled up next to her vintage Datsun at traffic lights in L.A.: Nice car.) In 2024, the startup joined the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator to pilot the idea, starting with a 1987 Suzuki Samurai. The car is a cult favorite. Its really unique looking compared to modern vehicles, Morris says. Its a cute little boxy SUV. And its not rare. The idea is finding identical vehicles to convert in batches.
[Photo: Dan Coronado/courtesy Nice]
The company’s process involves doing R&D oncefiguring out where a battery and electric motor can fit, and the exact configuration neededand then repeating the process, making it both faster and more affordable. As the company moves forward, it will focus on cars that are newer and even more plentiful on the road, making it easier to scale.
Currently the team is working on the first challenge: building the infrastructure to easily source used parts from retired Teslas or other electric cars. Our pilots with Suzuki Samurais proved the demand. People loved them,” Morris says. “I cant tell you how many people have reached out to have their Samurais converted. But the real bottleneck wasnt interest. It was infrastructure.
When Nice converted its first two Samurais using the same process and parts, the cars performed differently because the second-life batteries they were using were different. “We found that the information we were able to get from the suppliers who were selling those second-life parts was very minimal,” Morris says. “There’s not a lot of transparency.”
[Photo: Sarah Lyon/courtesy Nice]
If you buy a used battery from a Tesla Model S, for example, you won’t know what year it was made or how it was used, from the climate it was driven in to how it was charged. More detailed diagnostics are possible but aren’t commonly used by resellers. So Morris is building a platform that can reclaim parts and certify their performance.
Beyond cars, the second-life batteries can be used for energy storage. Some used EV batteries have enough life left to be a good fit for use in another car, while others are too drained but could still be used for years to store energy.
[Photo: Sarah Lyon/courtesy Nice]
“We’re seeing these two massive trends converge,” Morris says. “Hundreds of thousands of EVs are starting to age out of their warranty. The first wave of EVs is now retiring, and so there’s just this big wave of end-of-life EVs. Then we’re also seeing this exponential growth and demand for energy storage.”
While others, like Redwood Materials, are beginning to use second-life batteries for large data centers, Nice plans to serve the thousands of commercial and industrial applications that need the same batteries but can’t easily source them.
For most customers today, sourcing parts is still a game of guesswork and finger-crossing,” Morris says. “Thats the gap Im focused on closing as a founder: building the connective layer between salvage supply and second-life demand, and ensuring these assets are accessible, safe, and reliable far beyond EV conversions.
The challenge, she says, is not so different than other projects she’s worked on in the past. “I just find it so fun and invigorating and energizing to learn about something really complex,” she says. “I didn’t get into augmented reality or head-worn computing knowing everything there is to know about computer vision and display technology, but you learn it along the way. It’s the same principle, where you study and understand the subject matter and think about what the goals are, what the value propositions are.”
But Morris is more focused now on the bigger picture. “I realized that my role going forward in my career needs to be less about designing a new beautiful object and more about designing a system and looking at the value chain across all of these objects that we need in our lives,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with these products being in our lives. But the people responsible for making themindustrial designers, engineersare uniquely positioned to advocate for challenging that status quo of linear thinking.”
When President Donald Trump announced in early 2025 that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement for the second time, it triggered fears that the move would undermine global efforts to slow climate change and diminish Americas global influence.
A big question hung in the air: Who would step into the leadership vacuum?
I study the dynamics of global environmental politics, including through the United Nations climate negotiations. While its still too early to fully assess the long-term impact of the U.S.s political shift when it comes to global cooperation on climate change, there are signs that a new set of leaders is rising to the occasion.
World responds to another U.S. withdrawal
The U.S. first committed to the Paris Agreement in a joint announcement by President Barack Obama and Chinas Xi Jinping in 2015. At the time, the U.S. agreed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025 and pledged financial support to help developing countries adapt to climate risks and embrace renewable energy.
Some people praised the U.S. engagement, while others criticized the original commitment as too weak. Since then, the U.S. has cut emissions by 17.2% below 2005 levelsmissing the goal, in part because its efforts have been stymied along the way.
Just two years after the landmark Paris Agreement, Trump stood in the Rose Garden in 2017 and announced he was withdrawing the U.S. from the treaty, citing concerns that jobs would be lost, that meeting the goals would be an economic burden, and that it wouldnt be fair because China, the worlds largest emitter today, wasnt projected to start reducing its emissions for several years.
Scientists and some politicians and business leaders were quick to criticize the decision, calling it shortsighted and reckless. Some feared that the Paris Agreement, signed by almost every country, would fall apart.
But it did not.
In the United States, businesses such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Tesla made their own pledges to meet the Paris Agreement goals.
Hawaii passed legislation to become the first state to align with the agreement. A coalition of U.S. cities and states banded together to form the United States Climate Alliance to keep working to slow climate change.
Globally, leaders from Italy, Germany, and France rebutted Trumps assertion that the Paris Agreement could be renegotiated. Others from Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand doubled down on their own support of the global climate accord. In 2020, President Joe Biden brought the U.S. back into the agreement.
Now, with Trump pulling the U.S. out againand taking steps to eliminate U.S. climate policies, boost fossil fuels, and slow the growth of clean energy at homeother countries are stepping up.
On July 24, 2025, China and the European Union issued a joint statement vowing to strengthen their climate targets and meet them. They alluded to the U.S., referring to the fluid and turbulent international situation today in saying that the major economies . . . must step up efforts to address climate change.
In some respects, this is a strength of the Paris Agreementit is a legally nonbinding agreement based on what each country decides to commit to. Its flexibility keeps it alive, as the withdrawal of a single member does not trigger immediate sanctions, nor does it render the actions of others obsolete.
The agreement survived the first U.S. withdrawal, and so far, all signs point to it surviving the second one.
Whos filling the leadership vacuum
From what Ive seen in international climate meetings and my teams research, it appears that most countries are moving forward.
One bloc emerging as a powerful voice in negotiations is the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries, a group of low- and middle-income nations that includes China, India, Bolivia, and Venezuela. Driven by economic development concerns, these countries are pressuring the developed world to meet its commitments to both cut emissions and provide financial aid to poorer countries.
China, motivated by economic and political factors, seems to be happily filling the climate power vacuum created by the U.S. exit.
In 2017, China voiced disappointment over the first U.S. withdrawal. It maintained its climate commitments and pledged to contribute more in climate finance to other developing countries than the U.S. had committed to $3.1 billion compared with $3 billion.
This time around, China is using leadership on climate change in ways that fit its broader strategy of gaining influence and economic power by supporting economic growth and cooperation in developing countries. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has scaled up renewable energy exports and development in other countries, such as investing in solar power in Egypt and wind energy development in Ethiopia.
While China is still the worlds largest coal consumer, it has aggressively pursued investments in renewable energy at home, including solar, wind, and electrification. In 2024, about half the renewable energy capacity built worldwide was in China.
While it missed the deadline to submit its climate pledge due this year, China has a goal of peaking its emissions before 2030 and then dropping to net-zero emissions by 2060. It is continuing major investments in renewable energy, both for its own use and for export. The U.S. government, in contrast, is cutting its support for wind and solar power. China also just expanded its carbon market to encourage emissions cuts in the cement, steel, and aluminum sectors.
The British government has also ratcheted up its climate commitments as it seeks to become a clean energy superpower. In 2025, it pledged to cut emissions 77% by 2035 compared with 1990 levels. Its new pledge is also more transparent and specific than in the past, with details on how specific sectors, such as power, transportation, construction, and agriculture, will cut emissions. And it contains stronger commitments to provide funding to help developing countries grow more sustainably.
In terms of corporate leadership, while many American businesses are being quieter about their efforts in order to avoid sparking the ire of the Trump administration, most appear to be continuing on a green pathdespite the lack of federal support and diminished rules.
i and Statistas Americas Climate Leader List includes about 500 large companies that have reduced their carbon intensity (carbon emissions divided by revenue) by 3% from the previous year. The data shows that the list is growing, up from about 400 in 2023.
What to watch at the 2025 climate talks
The Paris Agreement isnt going anywhere. Given the agreements design, with each country voluntarily setting its own goals, the U.S. never had the power to drive it into obsolescence.
The question is whether developed and developing country leaders alike can navigate two pressing needseconomic growth and ecological sustainabilitywithout compromising their leadership on climate change.
This years U.N. climate conference in Brazil, COP30, will show how countries intend to move forward and, importantly, who will lead the way.
Shannon Gibson is a professor of environmental studies, political science, and international relations at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
Research assistant Emerson Damiano, a recent graduate in environmental studies at the University of Southern California, contributed to this article.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
