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The apocalypse will start having vermouths and tapas, a friend told me yesterday. Just a day before, the electricity shut down for all of Spain and Portugal, trapping thousands in subways, trains, and elevators for hours, forcing people to walk miles back to their homes, putting hospitals on backup power, and turning off traffic lights, phones, and credit card readers. It shut down everything. Officials are still calculating the economic costs, but it will be in the billions. As this was happening, I still saw the people drinking in bar terraces too, as I was walking up the street to pick up my son early from school. They were joking and making fun. Others were rushing around in a panic like me, some with their kids, some alone. Lines dozens of people long were waiting for buses that came and passed by, overloaded. After everything passed, many celebrated online how refreshing it was to be living without social media or phones. An analog world felt so nice to those who were ignorant about the ultimate consequences of a total blackout for hours or days. Nobody knew that, if this lasted for more than 24 hours, many people would start dying in hospitals and panic would ensue. In 48, we will be out of water or any food supply chains. And, in 72 hours without electricity, civilization as we knew it would be on the brink. Without electricity, we go back to the Stone Age. Especially in high density urban centers, Dr. Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, assistant professor of computing in University of California, Irvine, told me in a conversation about a potential global blackout years ago. I cant even imagine what would happen in an event of this scale. Luckily, that didn’t happen, but it felt like the beginning of the end to me. When the national blackout started at 12:23, on April 28, 2025, I was at home writing, as usual. I noticed that my internet was off at the same time as everyone else in the country. I shrugged. The building power is down. Probably they are doing some work again outside, I told myself. I took a break, had the last cup of coffee still warm in my french press. I noticed my phones data was off. An hour later, the internet didnt come back and my cell connection still wasnt working. Weird. I went outside and saw people rushing. Some were out of their offices, talking. The doorman didnt know what was going on and mumbled something about the damn government. Thinking it was just my neighborhood, I decided to go to a café by my sons school. Thats when I passed by the first traffic light. It, too, was off. At that point I suddenly got extremely worried. A police helicopter zoomed by at low altitude. This is how the world ends, I told myself. Spectators roam the grounds of the Mutua Madrid Open tennis tournament after a power outage forced the cancellation of play on April 28, 2025. [Photo: Oscar J. Barroso/Europa Press/Getty Images] Where are all the zombies? I wasnt expecting zombies. Okay, maybe for a split second (The Last of Us Season 2 is intense). A couple years ago, I wrote and directed a short documentary on how a major solar stormsomething called a Carrington Eventcould take down the entire civilization. The phenomenon made telegraph poles burn down back in 1859 but, today, when everything depends on electricity, experts told me that it would probably cripple our entire civilization. Not for 12 hours. Not for a day. But, for decades, according to the Pentagon and the National Academy of Sciences. John Kappenman, an American engineer with decades of experience in the North American electrical industry, painted a dire picture: “Yes, there would clearly be public health disasters, public service disasters, disasters in the food distribution chain, disasters in the pharmaceutical industry, collapse of hospitals and ERs, payment systems. . . . Everything will fall once you suffer an impact on the most important of all infrastructure, the power grid,” he said. I spoke with scientists from NASA. Everyone told me the same thing. And everyone insisted that we urgently needed to set up better early warning systems and reconfigure power networks throughout the world to make them more independent from each other. We needed to install surge suppression systems capable of absorbing the energy overload from such a solar event, and stockpile industrial transformers, which right now take about two years to make and deliver (most of them, from China, of course!). Its not a question about whether we are going to suffer one of these events or not. Its a question about when it is going to happen, Holly Gilbertthe former director of the heliophysical science division of the NASA Goddard research center who now heads the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research of the United Statestold me back then. [Photo: Alejandro Martinez Velez/Europa Press/Getty Images] A surreal experience So you have to excuse my contained panic when I started to assume the worsteven as, within minutes, the lack of transformers on fire proved I was just paranoid. I could still hear the ambulance, police, and firefighter sirens howling, and I saw the cars starting to pile up in long traffic jams. But drivers and pedestrian alike were incredibly polite and chill. My mind, still searching for a culprit, jumped from solar interference to the war in Ukraine and Putin. Could this be a cyberattack? I got to the café and asked the owner, Francesco, if he knew anything. My father sent me a message from Italy. I got it in a brief moment of signal, he said (I guessed and confirmed later that some people had connections that were coming and going because their cell provider had towers with backup power units). He said that Spain, Portugal, and the south of Spain are down. It had to be an ttack. Well, that, or some monumental incompetence with the power lines. [Photo: Matias Chiofalo/Europa Press/Getty Images] I decided to get my son from school right away. He was startled by the situation and he asked if the Russians could nuke Madrid. I told him no. I told myself yes. I knew a major cyberattack taking communications and power down would be the opening notes of a full war. I walked with him back home, easing his fears and making it all a game. We noticed hundreds of people walking alongside us. People out of their offices. People with kids. Many were carrying big water bottles and supermarket bags. “Don’t forget to fill your bath tubs,” I told a couple. They laughed nervously, thinking I was joking. I wasn’t. Others were carrying suitcases. Are they leaving I kept asking myself. Scenes from the documentary kept coming to my mind. The first people start leaving the city hours after the hit, the voice over was narrating in my head. I knew that fridgesat homes, restaurants, and supermarketswere off. With no credit card readerssince there was no cell coverage for the most partshops were shutting down. Some bars were open (it’s Spain!) but only cash payments were possible. TV and routers went off at homes. Some had solar panels and batteries, so they could still access the internet, while many were in their cars parked in the street listening to the radio, the only source of information. The government had no idea what was happening. The President only appeared to say that he didnt know anything five hours after the shutdown. This would have been unthinkable in any other serious European country. The national power grid company said electricity may be on in six hours but, for most of Spain, it didnt come after much later. As we were walking home, I noticed people searching for cell bars. Some of them were texting. I raised my phone trying to find a connection, like a diviner in search of water. My phone showed 5G and two bars. The internet worked for a few seconds and a torrent of messages poured in. Friends. Work. Family. Then I managed to call my brother for a few seconds. The 5G turned to 4G, then 3G then E. Then nothing. I got bits of info from other people and realized how everything I’d learned researching the documentary was becoming a reality. Hospitals were on emergency power. Surgeries got cancelled. I knew that, after 12 hours, we may start seeing generators running out of fuel. Without energy, people on respirators could start dying in the first 24 hours. People who needed dialysis or other electric devices to survive would die in a few days. Blood banks and some drugs would quickly start going bad, too. I learned that some buildings in Barcelona lost water pressure. Without electricity, their pumps couldn’t get water to the higher floors. I already had filled bath tubs and bottles with water. Just in case. After 24 hours, I knew things could get really bad. Logistics would stop. Major distribution centers would stop working. Cities would become rat traps. The water supply be cut off for most part in every city. The admirable civic attitude of the first hours would get replaced by desperation and panic. Supermarkets would be emptied. Elderly people in need of oxygen and care would be at risk. In 72 hours, the experts told me, civilization as we know it would just end. [Photo: courtesty of the author] The weird feeling of seeing the world standing still My brain was racing but I put it all aside. I knew this was an extreme case. I learned that the rest of the world was fine. Europe was okay. We were okay. I went back out with my son because I didnt have a cell signal at home. We went to the park. When we arrived, I saw all the families. At this time, nobody would be at the park on a typical weekday. But, without anything to do, there were parents and their kids, just hanging out, and commenting on what was going on. I overheard that all radios were sold out at Chinese bazaars and shops. No batteries either. And supermarkets were already out of water. [Photo: courtesty of the author] But people seemed weirdly calm. It was almost picturesque. My son and I returned home after playing some soccer. We had dinner (luckily, we have a garden and a small grill, so I fired some wood and we had a feast of chorizos and blood sausage before they went bad in the fridge). We watched some Andor on my laptop. He brushed his teeth and went to bed using the light of my iPhone. [Photo: courtesty of the author] It was just a little ifferent than normal. He told me “I love you” and “goodnight.” And I went back to wait. It wasnt until 11:30 p.m. when my neighborhood got the power back. It was a relief, but we still don’t entirely know what happened. We know that it wasn’t an extreme solar weather event, like some rumors from Portugal suggested. That would have fried everything electrical, worldwide. We also know that the European Union and the electrical companies said it wasn’t a cyberattack. The Spanish national power grid company said that 15 gigawatts coming from solar panels disappeared, a sign of what appears to be a terrible design of the power network and the lack of batteries that sustain Spain’s electric network, 71% of which comes from renewable energy. It seems that, for years, the current Spanish government has failed to architect its network to match the amount of solar and wind power we are producing. It’s a dreadful error that will now cost the country billions of dollars. But it was over. Alone in my room at night, brushing my teeth with my battery-powered toothbrush looking at the torrent of news and messages in my revived phone, I couldnt think of anything else but how mundane everything seemed at that point and, at the same time, how close we all came from dodging the bullet that may one day end modern life as we know it. We got really lucky. Because nobody was ready for this. Not the companies, not the government, not the peoplethe latter of whom were so civil and nice and, luckily, so naive about how everything could have unfolded. I figured out that the world wouldnt begin its final days with zombies invading out of nowhere. No, I thought, the zombies this evening are all of us still caught in a stupor. They are the thousands of people spending the night in frozen trains, waiting to be rescued by the military. The people sleeping in their homes after getting drunk with friends or alone. The wandering humans walking miles to their homes. Or this single dad having grilled chorizo with his kid, playing with him, putting him to sleep, and then impatiently waiting for lights and the internet to come back alive, staring blank at a bathtub full of water, planning how we could escape a city of seven million people and head to Cádiz in case things went truly wrong next time.
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E-Commerce
Chances are youve had a bad boss at some point in your career. Research shows that up to 65% of employees would take a new boss over a pay raise, and roughly half of people who quit their jobs cite their manager as the main reason for leaving. Bad bosses are not just annoyances; theyre productivity drains, engagement killers, and mental health hazards. They create toxic cultures, stifle growth, and often drive the best people out while promoting dysfunction. So why do we keep ending up with them? Companies have long tried to solve the “bad boss” problem. They spend billions on leadership development programs, executive coaching, and increasingly, AI-powered feedback tools promising to “upgrade” managers. These efforts are not entirely futilesome leaders do improvebut the overall return on investment remains disappointing. Gallup data still shows that the majority of managers are ill-equipped to lead. Why? Because leadership, like character, is hard to changeand even harder to scale. But maybe weve been asking the wrong question all along. Instead of trying to fix bad bosses after the fact, why dont we focus on choosing better ones from the start? Just as we put considerable thought into selecting a romantic partnerconsidering compatibility, values, and long-term potentialwe should approach choosing a boss with similar care. After all, your boss will profoundly influence your well-being, career trajectory, and daily experience. Mistakes can happen, but they are often avoidable if we learn to recognize the right signals. Here are three evidence-based principles for picking the closest thing to a perfect boss, or lets just say a decent, good, beneficial boss . . . Forget charismaembrace boring competence Charisma is the dating-app profile picture of leadership: seductive, memorable, and often misleading. It dazzles in job interviews, town halls, and all-hands meetings. But over time, the same charm can morph into attention-seeking, volatility, and narcissism. Many of the most inept and destructive bosses Ive encountered (and studied) had an abundance of confidence and not nearly enough competence. They were high on style, low on substanceand their teams suffered for it. So how can you spot them? Watch for grandiosity (I transformed the whole department), name-dropping, and overconfidence in interviews. They often talk more about themselves than the team. They may even be entertaininguntil you’re the one cleaning up the mess after their impulsive decisions. Now contrast this with the “boring but effective” boss. Theyre calm, measured, and often underwhelming in first impressions. They may not blow you away in the interview, but they show deep knowledge of their domain. They talk about collective achievements, not personal triumphs. They ask questions, take notes, and actually listen. Competent bosses focus on execution, alignment, and people developmentnot just self-promotion. They might not get all the credit, but they usually deserve it. If charisma is what you want on day one, competence is what youll thank yourself for choosing on day 100. Find someone who will make you better The best bosses act more like coaches than commanders. They dont just assign tasksthey challenge, stretch, and support their people. As leadership expert and scholar Herminia Ibarra put it, modern leadership is less about giving answers and more about asking the right questions, enabling others to learn, and creating a space for people to grow. If your prospective boss cant describe how they develop their team, its a red flag. Here are a few questions you can ask in interviews or informal chats to gauge their orientation toward people development: Can you tell me about someone on your team whos grown significantly under your leadership? How do you help people identify and build on their strengths? What does success look like for someone in this role six months from now? Great bosses will answer with specific stories, not generic platitudes. Theyll talk about feedback, mentorship, stretch assignments, and talent reviews. Mediocre ones will deflect or talk mainly about output and control. A boss whos committed to your growth is worth their weight in stock options. Prioritize personality over raw talent We often assume that because someone is highly talented, they must be great to work for. But talent may have gotten them the jobnot kept them good at it. Their personality, however, will determine your everyday experience. Thats why personality should matter more to you than their résumé. What traits should you look for? Empathy, emotional intelligence (EQ), integrity, curiosity, humility, and self-awareness. These are the foundations of psychological safety, trust, and good judgmentall of which drive high-performing teams. Fortunately, you can assess many of these in a conversation: Empathy: Do they ask about your interests, listen actively, and respond to your cues? Integrity: Do they credit others, admit mistakes, and avoid overpromising? Curiosity: Do they ask insightful questions, or pretend to already know everything? Humility: Do they share what theyre still learning or areas theyre working on? Self-awareness: Do they acknowledge past feedback or their leadership style, do they know how they are seen by others? A talented boss may impress you in a presentation. A great personality will make every meeting more humanand every tough moment more bearable. In the end, personality is the key to predicting your boss in the future: we are what we repeatedly do, and if you can work out what makes your boss tick, you will be better at dealing with them in the future, even if you have to make an effort to adjust. The perfect boss may not existbut the right boss for you does. Choosing wisely can mean the difference between dreading Mondays and loving what you do. So dont just focus on salary, benefits, or brand names. Consider the person who will shape your day-to-day experience and your long-term growth. Remember: charisma fades, competence compounds. Find a boss who builds others, not just their own reputation. And never underestimate thepower of empathy, integrity, and humilitytheyre not soft skills, theyre superpowers. After all, your boss may not be your spouse, but youll probably spend more waking hours with them than almost anyone else. Choose accordingly. A boss isnt just a job titleits a lifestyle choice. Pick the wrong one, and youll spend your best years decoding passive-aggressive emails and starring in a workplace reality show where the villain wins every episodeand you’re the unpaid emotional labor.
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E-Commerce
Getting dressed for work in the morning can be complicated. Gone are the days of the office dress code. While most of us are happy that our bosses no longer dictate that we wear collared shirts, heels, or shift dresses to work, this means the burden of figuring out what is appropriate now lies squarely on our shoulders. As corporate culture has become increasingly more relaxed, with denim often replacing trousers, finding the right balance between formal and casual can be tricky. If you show up to work in a three-piece suit, you might look like you don’t understand your company’s values. But if you wear your favorite baggy jeans, you might come off as unserious. And looking out of place can have negative consequences on your career. Citizens of Humanity, a denim label, and Argent, a workwear brand, are deeply familiar with this sartorial confusion. Both brands regularly field questions about how to put together an outfit that will allow someone to look polished but also creative and unpretentious. “This is not a trivial issue,” says Sali Christeson, Argent’s founder and CEO. “Our goal is to make sure that women show up to work feeling confident, so they can do good work.” The brands have joined forces to create a Citizens of Humanity x Argent collection of garments called “Good Work” that epitomizes the modern work wardrobe. Thanks to Citizens of Humanity’s expertise, it is full of denim pieces that are elevated and elegant, telegraphing professionalism. But taken as a whole, the capsule is meant to be versatile, helping the wearer transition from formal moments to casual ones, since work today often requires moving between diverse environments. “With these pieces, we’re trying to give women a formula for getting dressed for the many different parts of their work life, which could mean going from a board meeting to a creative brainstorm in a single day,” says Amy Williams, Citizens of Humanity’s CEO. The pieces in this collection offer a useful blueprint for how to style denim for the office today. [Photo: Argent x Citizens of Humanity] Consider The Cut and Color Jeans have become an office staple, but the key to finding the appropriate pair for a given occasion depends on the cut and rinse. If you’re anxious about appearing too casual, one good solution is to find jeans that are cut like traditional suiting trousers. For this collection, Citizens of Humanity developed a pair called the Beverly Trouser made from non-stretch denim that has an elegant drape and a wide leg silhouette. It comes in two shadesvery dark blue and whitethat also give them a more formal look, since they are reminiscent of traditional suiting. [Photo: Argent x Citizens of Humanity] But there are moments when you might deliberately want to look more relaxed. In Williams’s case, this might be when she’s working with her designers or creative teams, who tend to dress more casually. So Citizens of Humanity has included the Ayla jeans in this collection. These are baggier than the Beverly, with a roomy leg that can be cuffed to give them more structure or left to pool a little to give them a more laid-back look. To give the outfit a more polished look, Williams says you might wear them with, say, a button-down shirt or a waistcoat. (The Good Work capsule includes a black one.) [Photo: Argent x Citizens of Humanity] Consider Denim Dresses and Skirts One way to bring denim into office wear is to go beyond the jean altogether, and consider other kinds of garments. The Citizens of Humanity x Argent capsule includes the Farrow Denim Dress, which has a structured fit that accentuates the waist and buttons that go down the entire front. Another material, such as crepe, might make the outfit look more prim, but denim fabrication offers versatility. You could wear the dress with a blazer to the office, and wear it on its own for a more casual lunch or dinner. The Gwynn denim skirt is similarly versatile. It comes in a dark wash and reaches the calf, a length that is work appropriate. But it also has a stylish slit in the front, that also makes it easier to walk around in. The skirt can be easily dressed up or down. With a button-down, you could wear this to meet with a client; with a tank top, you could wear it on a casual Friday. [Photo: Argent x Citizens of Humanity] What About Denim Jackets and Shirts? If you’ve been used to wearing blazers to the office, but find that they’re increasingly feeling too formal, a good swap could be a denim jacket. For the Citizens of Humanity x Argent collection, the two brands developed the Abra Work Jacket, a silhouette that is in vogue. It comes in a dark indigo rinse, which is reminiscent of a traditional navy blazer. But the denim material and the contrast stitching makes it undeniably inspired by heavy-duty workwear. The jacket front also has staggered patch pockets, which transform it into a statement piece. And if you feel like your traditional Oxford button-down shirt makes you look too dressy, you might consider replacing it with a denim shirt. The Harris shirt in this collection is oversize, with a high low hemline. Williams points out that there are many ways to wear this piece. You can layer it over a tank top. You can pair it with trousers. Or, if you want to stand out, you could wear it with jeans to create a full denim look. [Photo: Argent x Citizens of Humanity] What if I want to be more dressy, but not too formal? The Citizens of Humanity x Argent capsule is designed to have an outfit for every occasion, including more formal ones. Here’s where Argent’s expertise comes in. For this collection, Argent reimagined one of its suits, comprised of its Chelsea blazer and Park trousers, in a denim blue linen. Both the material and the color give the suit a more breezy feel that allows you to blend seamlessly into relaxed or formal scenarios. Another way to dress up without looking overly starchy is to swap a blazer for a waistcoat. Argent designed a linen twill waistcoat in black that you can pair with matching black trousers or shorts. It comes with a matching blazer that can elevate the look, so you can wear the entire three-piece suit to a talk or a board meeting, then remove the blazer for date night.
Category:
E-Commerce
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