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On Thursday, the China Film Association (CFA) announced that it would moderately reduce the number of American films imported in response to the ongoing tariff war. The wrong move by the U.S. government to abuse tariffs on China will inevitably further reduce the domestic audiences favorability towards American films, the statement read. We will follow the market rules, respect the audiences choice, and moderately reduce the number of American films imported. The move came a day after President Trump announced a 90-day tariff pause for several countries, while raising levies on Chinese imports to 125%. The tariff hike from Trump came in response to Chinas move to impose an 84% tariff on U.S. goods. Earlier in the week, reports from China indicated that officials were considering limiting or even banning Hollywood films, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Speculation intensified when two prominent Chinese figuresone a state media editor and the other the son of a former party chiefoutlined potential countermeasures to Trumps tariffs, including restrictions on imported American films. Under current trade agreements, China had pledged to release 34 foreign films annually under revenue-sharing terms, granting overseas studios 25% of ticket sales. China is the worlds second-largest film market. We have always adhered to a high level of opening up to the outside world and will introduce more excellent films from the world to meet market demand, the statement continued. Once a crucial revenue source for Hollywood, China has now become an afterthought as geopolitical tensions rise. Chinese audiences, increasingly favoring domestic productions, have grown disenchanted with U.S. films. This shift was reflected by Ne Zha 2, released in January, which outperformed all American films to become the highest-grossing movie in a single market.
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E-Commerce
Thomas Shedd, who directs the General Services Administrations vaunted tech group, Technology Transformation Services (TTS), has just announced that a new round of firings has begun at TTS, insiders tells Fast Company. Shedd made the announcement during a midday Thursday conference call with TTS employees, according to two TTS insiders. He is requiring existing TTS staff to reapply for their jobsroles that are likely to come with new descriptions and potentially lower pay grades. Under the leadership of Shedd and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) higher-ups, TTS has seen its work slow to a directionless crawl. And for DOGE, which has been shaped by Elon Musk, that may be a feature, not a bug. One TTS source tells Fast Company that the group had 691 employees at the beginning of February and Shedd’s goal is to cut that workforce by half. No immediate timeline was given for the downsizing, but the TTS source says at least 120 people appear to be getting laid off, based on a rough head count during the phone call with Shedd. A follow-up email sent by Shedd to TTS personnel on Thursday that was shared with Fast Company said the group is “moving to smaller and flexible teams to provide support to government-wide shared services and partner agencies.” TTS has long been responsible for building and maintaining key government websites and systems that enable U.S. citizens to access services ranging from veterans benefits to tax payments. DOGE has already dismantled two of the federal governments key tech brain truststhe U.S. Digital Service and 18F (the latter of which is housed within TTS)and now appears to be stripping TTS itself of its resources and purpose. Neither DOGE nor TTS immediately responded to Fast Company‘s request for comment. Adding to the turmoil, Shedd doesnt have much time to lead TTS. The former Tesla employee recently took over as CIO of the Department of Labor. Sources within TTS say that since assuming that role, Shedd has become far less visible and less responsive on email and Slack. And when Shedd is present, he appears to be taking orders from his DOGE superiors rather than setting his own agenda, according to a second source inside TTS who spoke on condition of anonymity. Creating choke points When Shedd was named director of TTS, he expressed excitement about working with some of the brightest tech talent in government. But his decisions so far seem designed to minimize the groups impact. One tactic: insisting that only he and a small circle of others control basic resources and operations. They want to centralize control over everything, says the first TTS source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, then make it impossible for people to actually do their job because everything has to go through one choke point. Shedd has continually pushed for administrative access to TTS websites and third-party tools, while limiting access for TTS staffers. For example, TTS now has just 35 Adobe seat licenses to support its website workforcing project teams to compete for access, with Shedd deciding who gets priority. The Adobe license cuts are part of a broader DOGE cost-cutting initiative within the General Services Administration that has left thousands of agency workers without access to essential tools. DOGE leadership is now pushing for Sheddalong with the groups communications leadto become the sole administrators of TTSs social media accounts. That would prevent the staffers actually building the technology from sharing updates about their work online. Yet with much of his time now spent at Labor, Shedd has little bandwidth to write social posts himself. The centralization of power within TTS has disrupted normal workflows and stripped staff of their autonomy. They have disrupted decision making, leading to inefficient, lengthy, and unclear decision making processes, leading to lots of waiting, especially in areas where people used to know how and were able to actually make things happen, says the second TTS source Firings and morale In the first round of layoffs announced on March 1st, DOGE cut 90 employeesincluding the entire 18F group. But Shedd told staff during an all-hands meeting that DOGE intends to eliminate 50% of the groups personnel. General morale is terrible, the first TTS source says. Those of us who stuck it out are trying to pick up the pieces but they . . . just cut, cut, cut, and don’t care about the mission. So far, DOGE is moving largely unopposed in its quest to downsize the federal government and redirect remaining resources toward Trump administration priorities, such as eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Within TTS, some feel frustrated that others in governmentincluding members of Congressand the broader public remain in denial about the real harm DOGE is inflicting. All of these special government employees don’t have background checks or swear an oath or anything, says the first TTS source. People keep saying silent coup and think oh it’s just hype in Trump’s world where everything is bluster and bullshit. But it literally is happening and the collusion allowing it to happen across the branches of government is astounding.
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E-Commerce
Olivia Walch is an investigator in the Department of Neurology at the University of Michigan and CEO of a tech start-up called Arcascope. Her research has been featured on CNN, NPR, and in The Atlantic, among other outlets. Beyond sleep research, she coedited Political Geometry, a book on the mathematics of gerrymandering, and published comics with The Nib and Silver Sprocket. She is also the cartoonist of Imogen Quest, a webcomic that won her the Americas Next Great Cartoonist prize from the Washington Post. Whats the big idea? If you are dancing and cant catch the beat, you are not dancing well. In this way, if your sleep doesnt follow a regular pattern that matches your biological beat, then you are not sleeping well. To find the beat your body is wired to cycle through and not just step along with it but groove with that beat, its important to develop an intuition about how your circadian rhythms work to shape overall health. Below, Olivia shares five key insights from her new book, Sleep Groove: Why Your Bodys Clock Is So Messed Up and What To Do About It. Listen to the audio versionread by Olivia herselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Sleep is like your heartbeat; rhythm is central to health. Even if both beat 60 times a minute, you wouldnt say an arrhythmic heartbeat was as healthy as a regular one. Yet, we do this all the time when it comes to sleep. We think that as long as we get eight hours a night on averageeven if one night you go to bed at 8 p.m. and the next you stay up until 2 a.m.the rhythm doesnt matter. Except it totally does. A recent study found sleep regularity (how much your sleep schedule on one day resembles your sleep on the next day) to be a better predictor of mortality than sleep duration. Every day, a new study comes out linking sleep irregularity to hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, you name it. Sleep regularity correlates with all these things because it correlates with circadian health. Specifically, when you have regular sleep, the signals you send to your bodys circadian clock are very rhythmic. When you give your clock rhythmic inputs, then it is more confident about when daytime is and when nighttime is, and it does a better job scheduling things that happen during the day, at night, and at all the times in between. One of those things is making you feel sleepy at bedtime, but other things include metabolism, DNA repair, and immune response. In general, you do better when your body does those things confidently at the right times versus muddling through them at all hours because of mixed signals. 2. Circadian rhythms are like being on a swing. The same input can give you wildly different outputs depending on when its delivered. When I say being on a swing, I mean a classic playground-style swing. In this analogy, that rhythm (swinging back and forth) is a stand-in for your circadian rhythms. The input, when youre on a swing, is a push in the forward, outgoing direction. Biologically, that push in the outward direction can be anything that affects your clocks sense of time. The biggest influence on your bodys sense of time is light exposure, but meal timing and exercise can also affect what time your body thinks it is. Lets go with light exposure since its the primary signal your clock pays attention to. Getting light exposure when your body expects it, during the day, is like a push in the forward direction when youre heading forward. It helps reinforce your rhythm; it helps you get to a higher amplitude swing. But that same forward push when youre on the backswing actively messes up your rhythm. You dont want someone to give you a forward shove when youre swinging backward. Similarly, when youre entering your biological night, you dont want a burst of light exposureyou want to continue in the dark. Just like how a forward push is good at some times, that burst of light exposure is critical for health only when you get it during your biological day. When youre entering your biological night, you dont want a burst of light exposure. This is both a simple pointif I get light during the middle of the night, it will confuse my brain and throw off my rhythmsand a hard one to internalize. Were not primed to understand how the same thing can go from good to bad to good again as time passes. We dont think of anything being more rhythmic as making us healthier. I chose the title Sleep Groove because groovealong with getting in the swing of thingsis a concept that explicitly ties rhythmicity to positive outcomes. I think our way of understanding health writ large will change once we begin to think of not just sleep but all aspects of health, in terms of how much theyre grooving. 3. Circadian rhythms are like walking. Circadian rhythms are robust, stretchy, able to entrain, and can be more or less in a groove. Lets say I gave you a yellow shoe and a black shoe, and I told you to walk on a sidewalk with alternating yellow tiles and black tiles, with your yellow shoe hitting yellow tiles and black shoe hitting black tiles. If the tiles were well sized for your legs (not too long, not too short), youd be able to adapt your stride to match this yellow-on-yellow, black-on-black pattern. This process of adapting your rhythms (your gait) to match the environment (the sidewalk) is something circadian scientists call entrainment. Youre able to stretch or shrink your walking pattern to match the size of the tiles, which is what I mean by stretchy. If I randomly put a puddle on the sidewalk that you had to step around, you could do that, throwing off your walking pattern temporarily, and then falling back into the pattern once you were around the puddlewhich is what I mean by robust. Your bodys clock is the same. For circadian rhythms, its not the color of tile your body is adapting to but the light exposure you get. Your natural day lengthhow often your circadian rhythms would repeat if you were cut off from all signals, like light and food timingis probably a little longer than 24 hours, but your circadian clock adapts to match the lighting patterns in your environment the same way you can adapt how long your stride is on a sidewalk. Or at least it tries to. Imagine I take that original sidewalk and change it so youve got a yellow tile, followed by a black tile, and then a shorter grayish tile that looks halfway between yellow and black. Step with the yellow foot on the yellow tile and the black foot on the black tile, I tell you, except now its kind of hard to do. You can still manage it, but youre not taking strides of an even size with a consistent tempo. Youve gone from walking in an easy, effortless groove to stepping. When we give our brains ambiguous day/night signals, our circadian clocks struggle to keep a rhythm going. Its one of the reasons why Daylight Savings Time, which moves the light later in the day, is so disruptive to sleep and health. 4. Your sleep system is like a watercooler. Listen, you might be saying, this is all very well and good, but my problem is that I wake up in the middle of the night and cant fall back aslep. What do multi-day patterns of light and dark have to do with me waking up on Tuesday at 3:40 a.m.? Youve probably been to a barbecue before, gone up to a watercooler to fill your glass, and noticed, as youre pouring, that the levels getting low. If it drops too low and falls below the level of the tap, your flow of water is going to stop. So, you tilt the watercooler toward you to keep the flow going and get a nice, long, uninterrupted pour. Your circadian clock tilts your system in favor of sleep during your biological night, allowing you to sleep longer than you would without the tilt. This is exactly what your circadian clock does during your biological night. Think of your sleep system as governed by two things: how hungry for sleep you are (how full your cooler is) and how much your circadian clock is promoting sleep (how tilted your watercooler is). Sleeping is when you drain the watercooler, and if your water level (sleep hunger) falls below the level of the tap, you wake up. Your circadian clock tilts your system in favor of sleep during your biological night, allowing you to sleep longer than you would without the tilt. It also tilts away from sleep at some times. If youve ever tried to scoot your bedtime up a few hours and been unable to do it, it could be because your circadian clock is tilting your sleep watercooler away from you, making it so that even though youre pretty full of water (sleep hunger), the level is below the tap and you cant fall asleep. If you wake up in the middle of the night and cant fall asleep again, here are three reasons why that might happen: You might have gone to sleep earlier than your clock expected. The tilt is still coming; its just late. If you stay in the dark and wait for it to hit, you might be able to fall back asleep. You might have gone to sleep later than your clock expected. The tilt could have come and gone already. In this case, it could be tough to fall back asleep, even if you try to wait. Try going to bed earlier the next day. Maybe you tilted at the right time, but it wasnt a big enough tilt. It was a shallow, barely-there tilt. That can happen to older people or those who have lower amplitude rhythms. The theoretical way to boost amplitude is to get really bright light during the day and the darkest dark at night, at the same time every day. If you think you might not have enough of a circadian tilt to your sleep at night, send your brain clear, unambiguous day/night signals for at least two weeks and see what happens to your sleep. 5. Circadian rhythms are like an audio recording slowed way, way down. We dont understand how much of our health is rhythmic because the rhythms happen on a timescale too slow for us to really notice. But rhythms are fundamental to how our bodies work, even if we dont always consciously register them. Lets bring it back to the heartbeat analogy. If you were performing chest compressions on someone in cardiac arrest, you wouldnt do one push, sit back, and decide youve done everything you could. We intuitively understand that rescuing a heartbeat means giving it a clear rhythm of inputs to lock onto. The same goes for your sleep. To rescue a grooveless sleep rhythm, theres no one-time hack. You need to fundamentally change how you think about light, activity, and food to center rhythmicity. If you give your body enough time to find the beat, youll notice differences not only in how you sleep but also how you feel. To listen to the audio version read by author Olivia Walch, download the Next Big Idea App today: This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
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