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Maybe you first bonded over shared workplace frustrations. You gradually started finding each other every lunch break and synchronizing trips to the coffee machine. Eventually they become a confidant for venting about your real life outside of work. They become your work spouse. And if you find yourself strolling the greeting card aisle sometime today, you may even feel compelled to get this person in your life a trinket for celebrating the most romantic day of the year. Turns out, there are options available. For my work wife on Valentines day, one option reads from Card Factory. Ive finally found someone just as inappropriate as me! A card to show appreciation for your work spouse on Valentines Day might seem like a sweet gesture. But if you have an actual spouse or partner waiting at home. . .they might think differently. Im sorry, one TikTok creator posted after spotting the card in the wild, but the argument that would ensue if my partner came home from work with one of these cards from his colleague on Valentines day. “Im already mad thinking about it,” one user commented. The video quickly racked up almost 700,000 views and hundreds of comments. Another quipped: I didn’t know card factory even sold divorce papers. A third wrote: “the person who designed them cards just LIVES to stir up drama, i just know it.” While honoring a colleague on Valentines Day might be taking things a little far if youre otherwise spoken for, the idea of a work wife or work husband has been a feature of American offices for decades. Its also been much-parodied online, with the overly flirtatious colleague stereotype a trigger for many. Im not even married but Im already planning an argument with my husband, one comment under a viral skit read. I punched my phone by reflex, another added. The boundaries of the work spouse relationship can get blurry. Its by nature more intimate from other workplace relationships, but it must remain strictly platonic. Some scholars have argued that the connection actually sits somewhere between friendship and romance. Having lunch with my work wife, one TikTok creator posted. Hoping my wife wife doesnt find out. Of course, having close friendships at work is no bad thing. In fact, its good for both productivity and performance. According to a new study from KPMG, employees said that having workplace friendships increases their motivation to go above and beyond their job description. More than half (57%) would even take a salary 10% below market rate if it meant being able to have close friends at work. But labeling someone other than your spouse your wife or husband, however innocently, can easily spiral into conflict, especially given the close proximity that working together necessitates. A 2023 Newsweek poll found that 45% of adults in the U.S. dont think its appropriate to have a work spouse. Only 21% deemed it okay. Having a work spouse is one thing. But getting them a Valentines Day card if you have an actual spouse at home? That might be a one-way ticket to the doghouse.
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E-Commerce
News that the Washington Post had laid off hundreds of workers and scrapped several sections of the storied paper altogether stunned the journalism community last week. The Post cut roughly one-third of its staff, reduced local coverage, and completely destroyed its sports and international departments. The paper is owned by Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder, who has a staggering net worth of approximately $250 billion, bought the Post for $250 million in 2013. The newspaper has consistently lost more money than it has made since the 2020 election, yet has long been considered a stalwart of American dailies. But last week, The Posts editor-in-chief Matt Murray told employees the layoffs were part of a strategic reset meant to attract more customers. Though he acknowledged the cuts were painful, the overall messaging seemed to be that they were necessary. Of course, not everyone agrees. Martin Baron, who served as the outlets executive editor until 2021, told The Guardian, This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the worlds greatest news organizations. But one question has persistently risen out of the fog of disappointment and disillusionment: if Jeff Bezos understood that owning such a vital newspaper was a “sacred trust,” why is he no longer willing to keep it running at a loss for a tiny percentage of his net worth? Yes, the financial optics for the Post arent the most promising: the New York Times reported in 2022 that the papers online ad revenue fell to $70 million that year, a 15% drop from 2021. Last year the number of print subscriptions fell to below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years. The Post hoped to gain 5 million digital subscribers by 2025; in late 2024, the outlet reported having approximately 2.5 million digital subscribers. And the Post lost $177 million in 2023 and 2024 combined, per the New Yorker. Trebor Scholz, a scholar-activist and Associate Professor for Culture & Media at The New School in New York who has authored several books on labor and economics, hinted that it might just be that Bezos simply doesnt find the Post useful anymore. Bezos is a businessman first and foremost, and if the paper isnt making money, cuts have to be made. I think financially, [the Post] is not a great consideration for him, right? Scholz says. He also pointed out that Bezos may have lost interest in the newspaper after owning it for several years and called to mind Elon Musks decision to purchase X, then Twitter, in 2022. Musk intended to own the social media platform as a means to control discourse and swing the political atmosphere in a particular direction, Scholz says. That plan appears to have worked, he added, as X, which was considered an online gathering space for politically engaged people of all persuasions during Twitters heyday, is now fairly useless for social movements and has really turned into this sort of toxic right-wing space. (The platform has spent considerable time and money battling a surge in bots and misinformation since Musks takeover.) The Post isnt the only newspaper thats been taken over by a seemingly benevolent billionaire, Christina Bellantoni, director of USCs Annenberg Center and former Los Angeles Times editor told Fast Company by phone. Patrick Soon-Shiong swooped in to save the Los Angeles Times in 2018, when he paid $500 million for the paper, a transaction that was initially celebrated by the media. But Soon-Shiongs decision to order the paper to cancel its endorsement of Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election pushed most of its editorial staff out, and the outlet began to lose money. He fired 20% of the papers staff in the same year, and in late 2025 Soon-Shiong announced plans to take the paper public. Soon-Shiong didnt buy the paper just to come in and fire people, Bellantoni said. I think he really did believe in himself and the ability to save it, to turn it around and make it this thing he’d be very proud of and also make money on, she added. That’s not what happened, and I think people are really angry about him but also because they’re mad they put him on a pedestal. Both newspapers benefitted from the surge in public interest in reading the news that marked the first Trump administration; both ended up gutted by their owners after later declining to endorse a political candidate in 2024 (on top of that, both owners have been criticized for their professional and personal ties to the Trump administration). That decision caused a lot of damage for the Post and the Times, Bellantoni also said. Subscribers departed both in large numbers despite the pleas of journalists to stick with them. But things can also work out: in 2013 John Henry (who founded his own investment firm and is the owner of several sports teams, including the Boston Red Sox and Pittsburgh Penguins), paid $70 million for the Boston Globe. Though print subscriptions to the paper have dropped, digital subscriptions are over 250,000. The intersection of morality and business isnt one-size-fits-all, which makes questions of Bezos own internal philosophy toward the Post and the value of the free press difficult to discern. After all, he could have just shut the paper down, Bellantoni noted, but he didnt. Obviously, he knows how important the Post is that’s why he bought it, she said. And I think he does know its value and in the end, you know, if he wanted to kill it, he could do that too. The Post is still doing great journalism every day, and there are a lot of people there who really care about their work, Bellantoni concluded. And so the question is: whats next? To that end, Bezos has praised the newspapers essential journalistic mission and said he will continue to focus on the data that tells us what is valuable and where to focus. Though conversations about data over the enormous benefits the public can reap from a fully-staffed, storied news outlet such as the Post raise the hackles of some (as former Post Opinions writer Molly Roberts put it, Democracy dies in The Data), business owners have been data-driven for years. The Post is and will continue to produce great work, Bellantoni said, and in the end, there will always be that institutional love for the Washington Post because it has been there forever, and it has had such an important place in society, whether it is struggling inancially or not. The tale of what happened after Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post may be a cautionary tale to billionaires everywhere who invest in the news in the future. This is not a recipe for lining your pockets with money anymore. Its a hard, expensive industry to finance.
Category:
E-Commerce
Somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, archaeologists in Heerlen, Netherlands, came across an odd-looking smooth white stone. They knew the territory was once the Roman settlement of Coriovallum, but had never seen anything like it and had no idea what it was for. For the better part of the next 100 years, the stone sat in a storage unit at the Thermenmuseum (Thermal Bath Museum), a mystery taunting researchers. Then, six years ago, archaeologist Walter Crist spotted it while wandering the museum. Crist specializes in ancient board games and recognized it as one, though not a game he had ever seen before. That sparked his curiosity. Now, with the help of artificial intelligence, Crist thinks he has figured it outand even knows how to play. The stone isnt much to look at. Its an 8-inch piece of white Jurassic limestone. Lines etched into it form an oblong, diamond-like shape within a rectangle. But in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Antiquity, Crist and his team discuss what happened when they programmed two AI agents from the AI-driven play system Ludii to try to solve it. Playing Ludus Coriovalli The researchers had the AI play the game against itself thousands of times, testing more than 100 different sets of rules drawn from other known European games, both modern and ancient. They compared the AIs moves with patterns of wear on the board, tracking which gameplay styles most closely matched the grooves on the stone. The board, it appeared, was used for a blocking gamea type of board game in which the goal is to prevent your opponent from moving. (Think of modern titles like Go or Blokus.) Blocking games were rare in ancient Europe and, before this, had only been dated to the Middle Ages. This discovery suggests they were played several centuries earlier. In the end, the AI and the team identified nine sets of rules consistent with the boards wear. Crist and his team named the game Ludus Coriovalli, the game from Coriovallum. “By combining AI simulation with use-wear analysis to identify and model traces of game play, it is possible to not only identify potential game boards, but also to rebuild playable rulesets that may provide indications regarding the ways that people played games in the past,” the paper reads. So what were the rules? Here’s what researchers determined. One player controls four dogs. The other controls two hares. The dogs start on the four leftmost points; the hares start on the inner two points on the rightmost side. Players take turns moving a piece to an adjacent empty spot on the board. The dogs attempt to block the hares, while the hares try to remain unblocked for as long as possible. If the hares are blocked, players swap roles and play again. The player who lasts the longest as the hares wins. Got it? Good. Because this isnt just a theoretical reconstruction. Its a game you can actually play online now. Crist and his team uploaded a simulation of Ludus Coriovalli to Ludii, and its available to anyone who wants to give it a try. So why study the games that ancient civilizations played? Beyond simple curiosity, Crist notes, they offer a clearer picture of everyday life in the pastand a connection to history that isnt just dry numbers or broken pot shards. “The ability to identify play and games in archaeology strengthens the understanding of our ludic heritage, and makes ancient life more accessible to people in the present, as the act of playing a board game is fundamentally the same today as it was in past millennia,” he writes in the paper.
Category:
E-Commerce
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