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Start spreading the news: Theater’s biggest night is happening this evening (Sunday, June 8, 2025) in the Big Apple. The 78th Tony Awards will showcase this seasons best theatrical moments, from revivals to new works, from 8 to 11 p.m. ET. Let’s catch up on all the drama and how to stream the event live as the curtain rises at Radio City Music Hall. Who is nominated? Three musicals are tied for most Tony nominations this year. Buena Vista Social Club is inspired by real life events and tells the story of the four musicians in Havana, Cuba, who continue to play music despite a turbulent political climate. The Korean musical Maybe Happy Ending tells the futuristic story of two lonely abandoned helper bots who manage to find connection despite isolation. TikTok sound-bite sensation Death Becomes Her is based on the 1992 Robert Zemeckis movie of the same name. Meanwhile, two plays boast seven nominations each. Kimberly Belflowers play John Proctor Is the Villain takes a fresh look at Arthur Millers classic play The Crucible and the historic Salem witch trials. Jez Butterworths The Hills of California centers on the estranged Webb sisters who reunite to care for their aging mother and are forced to face past family secrets and traumas. Cole Escolas comedy Oh, Mary!, a farcical portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln, boasts five nominations. On the musical revival sides of things, it is a tight race between Sunset Blvd and Gypsy. Many critics believe the winner of Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical category is between Nicole Scherzinger and Audra McDonald. You can see the full list of nominees here. Who is hosting? Movie Elphaba herself Cynthia Erivo will host the festivities this year. She has her very own Tony for her work as Celie in the 2016 revival of The Color Purple. Fans are eager to see the conclusion of Wicked later this year, so maybe this will tide them over. Brian Stokes Mitchells smooth voice will help keep things moving as he is serving as the offstage announcer. Who is presenting? Many theater greats will help present awards. These include Aaron Tveit, Adam Lambert, Allison Janney, Ariana DeBose, Danielle Brooks, Kelli OHara, Kristin Chenoweth, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Lea Michele, Lea Salonga, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Sara Bareilles, and Sarah Paulson to name a few. Who is performing? Its tradition (cue Fiddler on the Roof ) for nominated musicals and revivals to perform at the ceremony. This means that beyond the ones already mentioned, you can expect performances from Dead Outlaw, Operation Mincemeat: A New Musical, Floyd Collins, Gypsy, Pirates! The Penzance Musical, Sunset Blvd, Just In Time, and Real Women Have Curves. Beyond the present, Broadway loves to celebrate its past successes. Its almost as if history has its eyes on the industry. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., Christopher Jackson, Jonathan Groff, Ariana DeBose, Daveed Diggs, Phillipa Soo, and many other original cast members will reunite to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hamiltons Broadway debut at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. This special performance is not to be missed. What special Tony Award moments can audiences expect? Two new special awards have already been announced. The musicians in the band of Buena Vista Social Club will receive special awards as will the technical effects of Stranger Things: The First Shadow. Harvey Fierstein will be presented the 2025 Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. His impressive resume includes work as an actor and writer on projects ranging from La Cage aux Folles to Newsies. The 2025 Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award will be presented to Celia Keenan-Bolger for her offstage advocacy work. She has championed many important causes, such as hunger, same-sex-marriage rights, and arts education. She also works as an end-of-life doula, helping the late Broadway star Gavin Creel transition peacefully at the end of his life. How can I watch or stream the 2025 Tony Awards? Traditional cable subscribers can catch every kick ball change on the CBS broadcast network beginning at 8 p.m. If you have an over-the-air antenna, you can also watch it for free without cable. If streaming is more your style, the ceremony is also available on Paramount+, which also allows you to stream it on a computer or via its mobile apps. Several other live-TV streaming services also carry CBS, such as: YouTube TV Hulu + Live TV DirecTV Stream Just make sure to double check regional availability. If you just cant get enough Broadway action, tune into Pluto TV early for the pre-show The Tony Awards: Act One, hosted by Darren Criss and Renée Elise Goldsberry, which begins at 6:40-8:00 p.m. ET.
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Retirement planning is typically framed around full-time employment. 401(k)s or pension plans are attractive benefits for people in the corporate world. Those people can open their monthly statements and watch their retirement accounts grow steadily over time. But for the 16.8 million people in the U.S. who are self-employed (myself included), retirement planning looks different. Over the past two years, 1.4 million people have turned to self-employment. Whether thats due to layoffs, voluntary quitting, or other reasons, the number is steadily increasingand there arent a lot of resources available for people trying to figure out retirement planning on their own. While retirement is not something self-employed people can ignore, the whole concept of ending work on a certain date and drawing money from your retirement accounts may not be what some people have in mind. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}} The traditional retirement model doesnt apply If youre self-employed, you know a lot of factors can make retirement savings tricky. Your income is irregular, you forego a 401(k) plans employer match, and the process to make contributions might be more manual. When I first became self-employed a few years ago, retirement was something I started thinking about in the first year. However, I also spent more than 15 years working in the banking industry, so it was no surprise that finances were on my mind. I had to research a solo 401(k), figure out how to open the account, and start making contributions when I could. But as Ive watched my little self-employed 401(k) grow over the years, Ive also wondered: Am I even working toward the same retirement goal I had when I was working a corporate job? Or have my financial needs in retirement changed? Redefining a retirement lifestyle Ive known many people in my life who have literally counted the days until retirement. They couldnt wait to stop working. By contrast, many self-employed people love their workespecially creatives. Its an integral part of their identities. Im a freelance writer, so does retirement mean I . . . stop writing? Its hard to imagine. Retirement feels like a fuzzy concept. As self-employed people look into the future, retirement might look less like a full stop and more like a slow down or akin to selective work. It may include passion projects, consulting, or mentoringbut not giving up work altogether. With this in mind, the retirement calculation is different. Rather than assuming you have zero income during retirement, you instead consider that youd have less income. Planning for an undefined ending You wont have an office retirement party. No one will give you an engraved watch or clock celebrating your years of service with a company. (But, by all means, get yourself a gift!) Without a particular end date in mind, think instead of how you might step backand at what age? Its important to intentionally plan what you want your next chapters to look like. Retirement for the self-employed requires more self-direction, but you also get to define your own path. You already did that once, when you started your own business. You can do that again as you plan for retirement. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"salmon","redirectUrl":""}}
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If you dont get the job, you have nothing to lose by asking for feedback.
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Whether youre streaming a show, paying bills online or sending an email, each of these actions relies on computer programs that run behind the scenes. The process of writing computer programs is known as coding. Until recently, most computer code was written, at least originally, by human beings. But with the advent of generative artificial intelligence, that has begun to change. Just as you can ask ChatGPT to spin up a recipe for a favorite dish or write a sonnet in the style of Lord Byron, now you can ask generative AI tools to write computer code for you. Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder who previously led AI efforts at Tesla, recently termed this vibe coding. For complete beginners or nontechnical dreamers, writing code based on vibesfeelings rather than explicitly defined informationcould feel like a superpower. You dont need to master programming languages or complex data structures. A simple natural language prompt will do the trick. How it works Vibe coding leans on standard patterns of technical language, which AI systems use to piece together original code from their training data. Any beginner can use an AI assistant such as GitHub Copilot or Cursor Chat, put in a few prompts, and let the system get to work. Heres an example: Create a lively and interactive visual experience that reacts to music, user interaction, or real-time data. Your animation should include smooth transitions and colorful and lively visuals with an engaging flow in the experience. The animation should feel organic and responsive to the music, user interaction, or live data and facilitate an experience that is immersive and captivating. Complete this project using JavaScript or React, and allow for easy customization to set the mood for other experiences. But AI tools do this without any real grasp of specific rules, edge cases, or security requirements for the software in question. This is a far cry from the processes behind developing production-grade software, which must balance trade-offs between product requirements, speed, scalability, sustainability, and security. Skilled engineers write and review the code, run tests, and establish safety barriers before going live. But while the lack of a structured process saves time and lowers the skills required to code, there are trade-offs. With vibe coding, most of these stress-testing practices go out the window, leaving systems vulnerable to malicious attacks and leaks of personal data. And theres no easy fix: If you dont understand everyor anyline of code that your AI agent writes, you cant repair the code when it breaks. Or worse, as some experts have pointed out, you wont notice when its silently failing. The AI itself is not equipped to carry out this analysis either. It recognizes what working code usually looks like, but it cannot necessarily diagnose or fix deeper problems that the code might cause or exacerbate. Why it matters Vibe coding could be just a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon that will fizzle before long, but it may also find deeper applications with seasoned programmers. The practice could help skilled software engineers and developers more quickly turn an idea into a viable prototype. It could also enable novice programmers or even amateur coders to experience the power of AI, perhaps motivating them to pursue the discipline more deeply. Vibe coding also may signal a shift that could make natural language a more viable tool for developing some computer programs. If so, it would echo early website editing systems known as WYSIWYG editors that promised designers what you see is what you get, or drag-and-drop website builders that made it easy for anyone with basic computer skills to launch a blog. For now, I dont believe that vibe coding will replace experienced software engineers, developers, or computer scientists. The discipline and the art are much more nuanced than what AI can handle, and the risks of passing off vibe code as legitimate software are too great. But as AI models improve and become more adept at incorporating context and accounting for risk, practices like vibe coding might cause the boundary between AI and human programmer to blur further. Chetan Jaiswal is an associate professor of computer science at Quinnipiac University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Adam Kucharski is a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and an award-winning science writer. His book, The Rules of Contagion, was a Book of the Year in The Times, Guardian, and Financial Times. A mathematician by training, his work on global outbreaks has included Ebola, Zika, and COVID. He has advised multiple governments and health agencies. His writing has appeared in Wired, Observer, and Financial Times, among other outlets, and he has contributed to several documentaries, including BBC’s Horizon. Whats the big idea? In all arenas of life, there is an endless hunt to find certainty and establish proof. We dont always have the luxury of being sure, and many situations demand decisions be made even when there is insufficient evidence to choose confidently. Every fieldfrom mathematics and tech to law and medicinehas its own methods for proving truth, and what to do when it is out of reach. Professionally and personally, it is important to understand what constitutes proof and how to proceed when facts falter. Below, Adam shares five key insights from his new book, Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. Listen to the audio versionread by Adam himselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. It is dangerous to assume something is self-evident. In the first draft of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers wrote that we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal. But shortly before it was finalized, Benjamin Franklin crossed out the words sacred and undeniable, because they implied divine authority. Instead, he replaced them with the famous line, We hold these truths to be self-evident. The term self-evident was borrowed from mathematicsspecifically from Greek geometry. The idea was that there could be a universal truth about equality on which a society could be built. This idea of self-evident, universal truths had shaped mathematics for millennia. But the assumption ended up causing a lot of problems, both in politics and mathematics. In the 19th century, mathematicians started to notice that certain theorems that had been declared intuitively obvious didnt hold up when we considered things that were infinitely large or infinitely small. It seemed self-evident didnt always mean well-evidenced. Meanwhile, in the U.S., supporters of slavery were denying what Abraham Lincoln called the national axioms of equality. In the 1850s, Lincoln (himself a keen amateur mathematician) increasingly came to think of equality as a proposition rather than a self-evident truth. It was something that would need to be proven together as a country. Similarly, mathematicians during this period would move away from assumptions that things were obvious and instead work to find sturdier ground. 2. In practice, proof means balancing too much belief and too much skepticism. If we want to get closer to the truth, there are two errors we must avoid: we dont want to believe things that are false, and we dont want to discount things that are true. Its a challenge that comes up throughout life. But where should we set the bar for evidence? If were overly skeptical and set it too high, well ignore valid claims. But if we set the bar too low, well end up accepting many things that arent true. In the 1760s, the English legal scholar William Blackstone argued that we should work particularly hard to avoid wrongful convictions. As he put it: It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. Benjamin Franklin would later be even more cautious. He suggested that it is better 100 guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer. We dont want to believe things that are false, and we dont want to discount things that are true. But not all societies have agreed with this balance. Some communist regimes in the 20th century declared it better to kill a hundred innocent people than let one truly guilty person walk free. Science and medicine have also developed their own traditions around setting the bar for evidence. Clinical trials are typically designed in a way that penalizes a false positive four times more than a false negative. In other words, we dont want to say a treatment doesnt work when it does, but we really dont want to conclude it works when it doesnt. This ability to converge on a shared reality, even if occasionally flawed, is fundamental for science and medicine. Its also an essential component of democracy and justice. Rather than embracing or shunning everything we see, we must find ways to balance the risk that comes with trusting something to be true. 3. Life is full of weak evidence problems. Science is dedicated to generating results that we can have high confidence in. But often in life, we must make choices without the luxury of extremely strong evidence. We cant, as some early statisticians did, simply remain on the fence if were not confident either way. Whether were sitting on a jury or in a boardroom, we face situations where a decision must be made regardless. This is known as the weak evidence problem. For example, it might be very unlikely that a death is just a coincidence. But it also might be very unlikely that a certain person is a murderer. Legal cases are often decided on the basis that weak evidence in favor of the prosecution is more convincing than weak evidence for the defendant. Unfortunately, it can be easy to misinterpret weak evidence. A prominent example is the prosecutors fallacy. This is a situation where people assume that if its very unlikely a particular set of events occurred purely by coincidence, that must mean the defendant is very unlikely to be innocent. But to work out the probability of innocence, we cant just focus on the chances of a coincidence. What really matters is whether a guilty explanation is more likely than an innocent one. To navigate lawand lifewe must often choose between unlikely explanations, rather than waiting for certainty. 4. Predictions are easier than taking action. If we spot a pattern in data, it can help us make predictions. If ice cream sales increase next month, its reasonable to predict that heatstroke cases will too. These kinds of patterns can be useful if we want to make predictions, but theyre less useful if we want to intervene in some way. The correlation in the data doesnt mean that ice cream causes heatstroke, and crucially, it doesnt tell us how to prevent further illness. Often in life, prediction isnt what we really care about. In science, many problems are framed as prediction tasks because, fundamentally, its easier than untangling cause and effect. In the field of social psychology, researchers use data to try to predict relationship outcomes. In the world of justice, courts use algorithms to predict whether someone will reoffend. But often in life, prediction isnt what we really care about. Whether were talking about relationships or crimes, we dont just want to know what i likely to happenwe want to know why it happened and what we can do about it. In short, we need to get at the causes of what were seeing, rather than settling for predictions. 5. Technology is changing our concept of proof. In 1976, two mathematicians announced the first-ever computer-aided proof. Their discovery meant that, for the first time in history, the mathematical community had to accept a major theorem that they could not verify by hand. However, not everyone initially believed the proof. Maybe the computer had made an error somewhere? Suddenly, mathematicians no longer had total intellectual control; they had to trust a machine. But then something curious happened. While older researchers had been skeptical, younger mathematicians took the opposite view. Why would they trust hundreds of pages of handwritten and hand-checked calculations? Surely a computer would be more accurate, right? Technology is challenging how we view science and proof. In 2024, we saw the AI algorithm AlphaFold make a Nobel Prize-winning discovery in biology. AlphaFold can predict protein structures and their interactions in a way that humans would never have been able to. But these predictions dont necessarily come with traditional biological understanding. Among many scientists, Ive noticed a sense of loss when it comes to AI. For people trained in theory and explanation, crunching possibilities with a machine doesnt feel like familiar science. It may even feel like cheating or a placeholder for a better, neater solution that weve yet to find. And yet, there is also an acceptance that this is a valuable new route to knowledge, and the fresh ideas and discoveries it can bring. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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