Construction input prices rose 0.2% in May, according to a new Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Producer Price Index data. Last month, nonresidential construction input prices reduced by 0.1%. Overall construction input prices are 1.3% higher than levels from a year ago, and nonresidential construction prices are 1.6% higher. Prices decreased in two of three major energy categories in April. Natural gas prices fell 18.7%, unprocessed energy materials were down 3.5%, and crude petroleum prices increased by 1.3%. Chart credit: Associated Builders and Contractors“Construction materials prices continued to increase at a faster-than-ideal pace in May,” said ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu. “While input prices are up just 1.3% over the past year, that modest escalation is entirely due to price decreases during the second half of 2024. Costs have increased rapidly since the start of this year, with input prices rising at a 6% annualize...

While we’ve had plenty of superhero games come out over the past decade and a half (and I’m always down for more), most have either been open-world adventures or fighting games. I’m as excited as anyone for the upcoming Marvel Tōkon and Invincible VS, but I’m also ready for a little something different. That’s where Dispatch from AdHoc Studio comes in. Dispatch is a game made for people who enjoy watching a rerun of The Office as a palate cleanser after the bloody battles of Invincible. So, me. You’re cast as Robert Robertson, the former superhero known as Mecha Man. He has to step away from frontline superheroics as the mech suit he relied on was destroyed in battle. Needing a job, he starts work at a dispatch center for superheroes, and the demo takes you through a small, 30-minute chunk of his first day. You’ll notice Dispatch’s crude humor early on. The first thing you can do in Dispatch is give a colleague a “bro fist” at a urinal, and the juvenile jokes don’t stop there. Middle school boys are going to love it, though I’d be lying if I said a few of the jokes didn’t get chuckles from me. Another of Robertson’s co-workers, who also used to be a superhero until his powers caused him to rapidly age, introduces Robertson’s team of misfit heroes, though that term should be used loosely. He notes they’re a “motley crew of dangerous fuck-ups” as Robertson examines their files, each with a mugshot and rapsheet. Robertson isn’t in charge of the Avengers — he’s leading a D-List Suicide Squad. The cast, however, is full of A-listers: Laura Bailey, Matthew Mercer, Aaron Paul, and Jeffrey Wright are among those lending their voices to Dispatch. Much like The Boys, Dispatch plays with the idea of the corporatization of superheroes (though without the satire of and parallels to modern-day politics). These heroes aren’t a lone Spider-Man swinging through Manhattan on patrol — they’re employees waiting for an assignment. Gameplay consists of matching the right (or perhaps “good enough”) hero to the job. Some assignments I saw in the demo included breaking up a robbery, catching a 12-year-old thief, and grabbing a kid’s balloon from a tree while also making sure the kid didn’t cry. Seeing as how one of your misfits is a literal bat man and another looks like a tiefling, you have to choose wisely. The real draw of Dispatch for me isn’t the point-and-click assignment gameplay, but rather the choice-based dialogue. It’s developed by AdHoc Studio, which was formed in 2018 by former developers who had worked on Telltale titles like The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead, and Tales from the Borderlands, and you can easily see the throughline from those titles to Dispatch. At various points, you have a limited time to select Robertson’s dialogue, and occasionally a pop-up saying a character “will remember that” appears. How much Robertson’s choices actually have consequences or influence his relationships with others remains to be seen, though I have no doubt those choices will be fun to make. After its reveal at The Game Awards six months ago, Dispatch will be coming to Windows PC and unspecified consoles sometime this year. You can check out its demo now on Steam.

We may earn a commission from links on this page.Like shopping on Amazon itself, Prime Video can sometimes feel like a jumble sale: a proliferation of TV and movies from every era, none of it terribly well-curated. There’s a lot to sort through, and the choices can be a little overwhelming. Presentation issues aside, there are some real gems to be found, as long as you’re willing to dig a bit—the streamer offers more than a few impressive exclusives, though they sometimes get lost amid the noise. Here are 20 of the best TV series Prime Video has to offer, including both ongoing and concluded shows.Overcompensating (2025 – ) Comedian Benito Skinner plays himself, sort of, in this buzzy comedy that sees a former high school jock facing his freshman year in college, desperately trying to convince himself and everyone else that he's as straight as they come (relatable, except for the jock part). Much of the show's appeal is in its deft blending of tones: It's a frequently raunchy college comedy, but it's simultaneously a sweet coming-of-age story about accepting yourself without worrying about what everyone else thinks. The impressive cast includes Adam DiMarco (The White Lotus) and Rish Shah (Ms. Marvel) You can stream Overcompensating here. Étoile (2025 –, renewed for season two) Amy Sherman-Palladino and David Palladino (Gilmore Girls, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) are back on TV and back in the dance world (following Bunheads) with this series about two world-renowned ballet companies (one in NYC and one in Paris) that decide to spice things up by swapping their most talented dancers. Each company is on the brink of financial disaster, and so Jack McMillan (Luke Kirby), director of the Metropolitan Ballet, and Geneviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg), director of of Le Ballet National, come up with the plan, and recruit an eccentric billionaire (Simon Callow) to pay for it. Much of the comedy comes from the mismatched natures of their swapped dancers, and there's a tangible love of ballet that keeps things light, despite the fancy title. You can stream Étoile here.Fallout (2024 – , renewed for second and third seasons) A shockingly effective video game adaptation, Fallout does post-apocalyptic TV with a lot more color and vibrancy than can typically be ascribed to the genre (in the world of Fallout, the aesthetic of the 1950s hung on for a lot longer than it did in ours). The setup is a little complicated, but not belabored in the show itself: It's 2296 on an Earth devastated two centuries earlier by a nuclear war between the United States and China, exacerbated by conflicts between capitalists and so-called communists. Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) emerges from the underground Vault where she's lived her whole life protected from the presumed ravages of the world above, hoping to find her missing father, who was kidnapped by raiders. The aboveground wasteland is dominated by various factions, each of which considers the others dangerous cults, and believes that they alone know mankind's way forward. It's also overrun by Ghouls, Gulpers, and other wild radiation monsters. Through all of this, Lucy remains just about the only human with any belief in humanity, or any desire to make things better. You can stream Fallout here.Deadloch (2023 –, renewed for a second season) Both an excellent crime procedural and an effective satire of the genre, this Australian import does about as well as setting up its central mystery as Broadchurch and its many (many) imitators. Kate Box stars as Dulcie Collins, fastidious senior sergeant of the police force in the fictional town of the title. When a body turns up dead on the beach, Dulcie is joined by Madeleine Sami's Eddie Redcliffe, a crude and generally obnoxious detective brought in to help solve the case. Unraveling the web of secrets and mysteries in the tiny Tasmanian town is appropriately addictive, with the added bonus of cop thriller tropes getting mercilessly mocked all the way. You can stream Deadlock here.The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022 – , third season coming) All the talk around The Rings of Power in the lead-up to the series had to do with the cost of the planned five seasons expected to be somewhere in the billion dollar range. At that price point, it’s tempting to expect a debacle—but the resulting series is actually quite good, blending epic conflict with more grounded characters in a manner that evokes both Tolkien, and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. Set thousands of years before those tales, the series follows an ensemble cast lead by Morfydd Clark as Elven outcast Galadriel and, at the other end of the spectrum, Markella Kavenagh as Nori, a Harfoot (the people we’ll much later know as Hobbits) with a yearning for adventure who finds herself caught up in the larger struggles of a world about to see the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the fall of the idyllic island kingdom of Númenor, and the the last alliance of Elves and humans. You can stream The Rings of Power here.Reacher (2022 – , fourth season coming) Getting high marks for his portrayal of the Lee Childs’ character (from both book and TV fans) is Alan Ritchson (Titans), playing Reacher with an appropriately commanding physical presence. The first season finds the former U.S. Army military policeman visiting the rural town of Margrave, Georgia...where he’s quickly arrested for murder. His attempts to clear his name find him caught up in a complex conspiracy involving the town’s very corrupt police force, as well as shady local businessmen and politicians. Subsequent seasons find our ripped drifter reconnecting with members of his old army special-investigations unit, including Frances Neagley (Maria Stan), who's getting her own spin-off. You can stream Reacher here. The Bondsman (2025, one season) It's tempting not to include The Bondsman among Prime's best, given that it's representative of an increasingly obnoxious trend: shows that get cancelled before they ever really got a chance. This Kevin Bacon-led action horror thriller did well with critics and on the streaming charts, and it's had a consistent spot among Prime's top ten streaming shows, but it got the pink slip anyway. Nevertheless, what we did get is a lot of fun: Bacon plays Hub Halloran, a bounty hunter who dies on the job only to discover that he's been resurrected by the literal devil, for whom he now works. It comes to a moderately satisfying conclusion, despite the cancellation. You can stream The Bondsman here. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022 – , third season coming) All the talk around The Rings of Power in the lead-up to the series had to do with the cost of the planned five seasons expected to be somewhere in the billion dollar range. At that price point, it’s tempting to expect a debacle—but the resulting series is actually quite good, blending epic conflict with more grounded characters in a manner that evokes both Tolkien, and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. Set thousands of years before those tales, the series follows an ensemble cast lead by Morfydd Clark as Elven outcast Galadriel and, at the other end of the spectrum, Markella Kavenagh as Nori, a Harfoot (the people we’ll much later know as Hobbits) with a yearning for adventure who finds herself caught up in the larger struggles of a world about to see the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the fall of the idyllic island kingdom of Númenor, and the the last alliance of Elves and humans. You can stream The Rings of Power here.The Expanse (2015 – 2022, six seasons) A pick-up from the SyFy channel after that network all but got out of the original series business, The Expanse started good and only got better with each succeeding season. Starring Steven Strait, Shohreh Aghdashloo, and Dominique Tipper among a sizable ensemble, the show takes place in a near-ish future in which we’ve spread out into the solar system, while largely taking all of the usual political bullshit and conflicts with us. A salvage crew comes upon an alien microorganism with the potential to upend pretty much everything, if humanity can stop fighting over scraps long enough to make it matter. The show brings a sense of gritty realism to TV sci-fi, without entirely sacrificing optimism—or, at least, the idea that well-intentioned individuals can make a difference. You can stream The Expanse here. Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024 – , renewed for a second season) One-upping the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie movie on which it's based, Mr. & Mrs. Smith stars Donald Glover and Maya Erskine as a couple of spies tasked to pose as a married couple while coordinating (and sometimes competing against one another) on missions. Smartly, each episode takes on a standalone mission in a different location, while complicating the relationship between the two and gradually upping the stakes until the season finale, which sees them pitted against each other. The show is returning for season two, though it's unclear if Glover and Erskine will be returning, or if we'll be getting a new Mr. & Mrs. You can stream Mr. & Mrs. Smith here. Good Omens (2019– , conclusion coming) Michael Sheen and David Tennant are delightful as, respectively, the hopelessly naive angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, wandering the Earth for millennia and determined not to let the perpetual conflict between their two sides get in the way of their mismatched friendship. In the show’s world, from the 1990 novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, heaven and hell are are less representative of good and evil than hidebound bureaucracies, more interested in scoring points on each other than in doing anything useful for anyone down here. It’s got a sly, quirky, sometimes goofy sense of humor, even while it asks some big questions about who should get to decide what’s right and what’s wrong. Following some depressingly gross revelations about writer and showrunner Gaiman, it was announced that he'd be off the production and the third season would be reduced to a movie-length conclusion, date tbd. You can stream Good Omens here. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017 – 2023, five seasons) Mrs. Maisel was one of Prime’s first and buzziest original series, a comedy-drama from Amy Sherman-Palladino (Gilmore Girls) about the title’s Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), a New York housewife of the late 1950s who discovers a talent for stand-up comedy. Inspired by the real-life careers of comedians like Totie Fields and Joan Rivers, the show is both warm and funny, with great performances and dialogue; it also achieves something rare in being a show about comedy that’s actually funny. You can stream Mrs. Maisel here. The Boys (2019 – , fifth and final season coming) There’s a lot of superhero stuff out there, no question, but, as there was no series quite like the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic book on which this show is based, there’s nothing else quite like The Boys. The very dark satire imagines a world in which superheroes are big with the public, but whose powers don’t make them any better than the average jerk. When his girlfriend is gruesomely killed by a superhero who couldn’t really care less (collateral damage, ya know), Wee Hughie (Jack Quaid) is recruited by the title agency. Led by Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), the Boys watch over the world’s superpowered individuals, putting them down when necessary and possible. A concluding fifth season is on the way, as is a second season of the live-action spin-off (Gen V). An animated miniseries (Diabolical) came out in 2022. The Man in the High Castle (2015–2019, four seasons) From a novel by Philip K. Dick (whose work has been the basis for Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, among many others), The Man in the High Castle takes place in an alternate history in which the Axis powers won World War II, and in which the United States is split down the middle; Japan governing the west and Germany the east. The title’s man in the high castle offers an alternate view, though, one in which the Allies actually won, with the potential to rally opposition to the Axis rulers. As the show progresses through its four seasons, the parallels to our increasingly authoritarian-friendly world, making it one of the more relevant shows of recent years. You can stream The Man in the High Castle here. The Wheel of Time (2021 – 2025, three seasons) An effective bit of fantasy storytelling, The Wheel of Time sees five people taken from a secluded village by Moiraine Damodred (Rosamund Pike), a powerful magic user who believes that one of them is the reborn Dragon: a being who will either heal the world, or destroy it entirely. The show has an epic sweep while smartly focusing on the very unworldly villagers, experiencing much of this at the same time as the audience. This is another mixed recommendation in that, while the show itself is quite good, it has just been cancelled following a third season that saw it really getting into its groove. The show goes through the fourth and fifth books of Robert Jordan's fantasy series, so, I suppose, you can always jump into the novels to finish the story. You can stream Wheel of Time here. The Devil’s Hour (2022 – , renewed for a third season) Jessica Raine (Call the Midwife) joins Peter Capaldi (The Thick of It, Doctor Who) for a slightly convoluted but haunting series that throws in just about every horror trope that you can think of while still managing to ground things in the two lead performances. Raine plays a social worker whose life is coming apart on almost every level: She’s caring for her aging mother, her marriage is ending, her son is withdrawn, and she wakes up at 3:33 am every morning exactly. She’s as convincing in the role as Capaldi is absolutely terrifying as a criminal linked to at least one killing who knows a lot more than he makes clear. You can stream The Devil's Hour here. Batman: Caped Crusader (2024 – , second season coming) I know, there's a lot of Batman out there. But this one's got real style, harkening back to Batman: The Animated Series from the 1990s (no surprise, given that Bruce Timm developed this one too). With a 1940s-esque setting, the show dodges some of the more outlandish superhero tropes to instead focus on a Gotham City rife with crime, corrupt cops, and gang warfare. There's just enough serialization across the first season to keep things addictive. You can stream Caped Crusader here. Secret Level (2024 – , renewed for a second season) This is pretty fun: an anthology of animated shorts from various creative teams that tell stories set within the worlds of various (15 so far) video games, including Unreal, Warhammer, Sifu, Mega Man, and Honor of Kings. It's hard to find consistent threads given the variety of source material, but that's kinda the point: There's a little something for everyone, and most shorts don't demand any extensive knowledge of game lore—though, naturally, they're a bit more fun for the initiated. The voice cast includes the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, his son Patrick Schwarzenegger, Keanu Reeves, Gabriel Luna, Ariana Greenblatt, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. You can stream Secret Level here. Cross (2024 – , renewed for a second season) James Patterson's Alex Cross novels have been adapted three times before, all with mixed results: Morgan Freeman played the character twice, and Tyler Perry took on the role in 2012. Here, the forensic psychologist/police detective of a few dozen novels is played by Aldis Hodge (Leverage, One Night in Miami...), and it feels like he's finally nailed it. There are plenty of cop-drama tropes at work here, but the series is fast-paced and intense, and Hodge is instantly compelling in the iconic lead role. You can stream Cross here. Fleabag (2016–2019, two seasons) Fleabag isn’t a Prime original per se, nor even a co-production, but Amazon is the show’s American distributor and still brands it as such, so we’re going to count it. There’s no quick synopsis here, but stars Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the title character (only ever known as Fleabag) in the comedy drama about a free-spirited, but also deeply angry single woman in living in London. Waller-Bridge won separate Emmys as the star, creator, and writer of the series (all in the same year), and co-stars Sian Clifford, Olivia Coleman, Fiona Shaw, and Kristin Scott Thomas all received well-deserved nominations. You can stream Fleabag here.

There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don’t know where they came from.Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception.I don’t know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word “Machiavellian” means. It’s someone who’s cunning and shrewd and manipulative. Or as one famous philosopher called him, “the teacher of evil.”But is this fair to Machiavelli, or has he been misunderstood? And if he has been, what are we missing in his work?Erica Benner is a political philosopher and the author of numerous books about Machiavelli including my favorite, Be Like the Fox, which offers a different interpretation of Machiavelli’s most famous work, The Prince.For centuries, The Prince has been popularly viewed as a how-to manual for tyrants. But Benner disagrees. She says it’s actually a veiled, almost satirical critique of authoritarian power. And she argues that Machiavelli is more timely than you might imagine. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts.In another of his seminal works, Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli is also distinctly not authoritarian. In fact, he espouses a deep belief in republicanism (the lowercase-r kind, which affirms representative government).I invited Benner onto The Gray Area to talk about what Machiavelli was up to and why he’s very much a philosopher for our times. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The popular view of Machiavelli is that he wanted to draw this neat line between morality and politics and that he celebrated ruthless pragmatism. What’s incomplete or wrong about that view?What is true is that he often criticizes the hyper-Christian morality that puts moral judgments into the hands of priests and popes and some abstract kind of God that he may or may not believe in, but in any case doesn’t think is something we can access as humans. If we want to think about morality both on a personal level and in politics, we’ve got to go back to basics. What is the behavior of human beings? What is human nature? What are the drives that propel human beings to do the stuff that we call good or bad? He wants to say that we should see human beings not as fundamentally good or evil. We shouldn’t think that human beings can ever be angels, and we shouldn’t see them as devils when they behave badly.But the basic point is if you want to develop a human morality, you study yourself, you study other humans, you don’t put yourself above other humans because you’re one, too. And then you ask, What kind of politics is going to make such people coexist?I take it you think his most famous book, The Prince, is not well understood?I used to have to teach Machiavelli and I would just say, It’s a handbook for tyrants. But he wrote the Discourses, which is a very, very republican book. So that’s the first thing that sets people off and makes you think, How could he have switched so quickly from writing The Prince to being a super-republican writing the Discourses? So that’s a warning sign. When I started seeing some of the earliest readers of Machiavelli and the earliest comments you get from republican authors, they all see Machiavelli as an ally and they say it. They say he’s a moral writer. Rousseau says, “He has only had superficial and corrupt readers until now.” If you ever pick up The Prince and you read the first four chapters, and most people don’t read them that carefully because they’re kind of boring, the exciting ones are the ones in the middle about morality and immorality and then you come to chapter five, which is about freedom.And up to chapter four, it sounds like a pretty cruel, cold analysis of what you should do. Then you get to chapter five and it’s like, Wow! It’s about how republics fight back, and the whole tone changes. Suddenly republics are fighting back and the prince has to be on his toes because he’s probably not going to survive the wrath of these fiery republics that do not give up.So who is he talking to in the book? Is he counseling future princes or warning future citizens?It’s complicated. You have to remember that he was kicked out of his job and had a big family to support. He had a lot of kids. And he loved his job and was passionate about the republic. He was tortured. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. He’s absolutely gutted that Florence’s republican experiment has failed and he can’t speak freely. So what does a guy with a history of writing dramas and satire do to make himself feel better? It’s taking the piss out of the people who have made you and a lot of your friends very miserable, in a low-key way because you can’t be too brutally satirical about it. But I think he’s really writing to expose the ways of tyrants.Would you say that Machiavelli has something like an ideology or is he just a clear-eyed pragmatist?He’s a republican. And again, this is something that, if you just read The Prince, you’re not going to get. But if you read the Discourses, which was written around the same time as The Prince, it’s very, very similar in almost every way except that it praises republics and criticizes tyrants very openly. Whereas The Prince never once uses the words “tyrant” or “tyranny.” So if there’s a guiding political view, whether you call it “ideology” or not, it’s republicanism. And that’s an ideology of shared power. It’s all the people in a city, all the male people in this case. Machiavelli was quite egalitarian. He clearly wanted as broad of a section of the male population to be citizens as possible. He says very clearly, The key to stabilizing your power is to change the constitution and to give everyone their share. Everyone has to have their share. You might want to speak a little bit more for yourself and the rich guys, but in the end, everyone’s got to have a share.Should we treat Machiavelli like a democratic theorist? Do you think of him as someone who would defend what we call democracy today?If you think the main principle of democracy is that power should be shared equally, which is how I understand democracy, then yes. He’d totally agree with that. What kind of institutions would he say a democracy has to have? He’s pretty clear in the Discourses. He says you don’t want a long-term executive. You need to always check power. I realize we exist in a very different world than Machiavelli, but is he a useful guide to understanding contemporary politics, particularly American politics?This is a really Machiavellian moment. If you read The Prince and look not just for those provocative quotes but for the criticisms, and sometimes they’re very subtle, you start to see that he’s exposing a lot of the stuff that we’re seeing today. Chapter nine of The Prince is where he talks about how you can rise to be the ruler of a republic and how much resistance you might face, and he says that people might be quite passive at first and not do very much. But at some point, when they see you start to attack the courts and the magistrates, that’s when you’re going to clash. And he says, That’s when you as a leader — and he’s playing like he’s on the leader’s side — that’s when you’ve got to decide if you’re going to get really, really tough, or are you going to have to find other ways to soften things up a bit?What would he make of Trump?He would put Trump in two categories. He’s got different classifications of princes. He’s got the prince of fortune, somebody who relies on wealth and money and big impressions to get ahead. He would say that Trump has a lot of those qualities, but he’d also call him this word “astutia” — astuteness, which doesn’t really translate in English because we think of that as a good quality, but he means calculating shrewdness. Somebody whose great talent is being able to shrewdly manipulate and find little holes where he can exploit people’s weaknesses and dissatisfactions.This is what he thought the Medici were good at. And his analysis of that is that it can cover you for a long time. People will see the good appearances and hope that you can deliver, but in the long run, people who do that don’t know how to build a solid state. That’s what he would say on a domestic front. I think there’s an unsophisticated way to look at Trump as Machiavellian. There are these lines in The Prince about knowing how to deploy cruelty and knowing when to be ruthless. But to your deeper point, I don’t think Machiavelli ever endorses cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and with Trump — and this is my personal opinion — cruelty is often the point, and that’s not really Machiavellian.Exactly. I wouldn’t say Trump is Machiavellian. Quite honestly, since the beginning of the Trump administration, I’ve often felt like he’s getting advice from people who haven’t really read Machiavelli or put Machiavelli into ChatGPT and got all the wrong pointers, because the ones that they’re picking out are just so crude. But they sound Machiavellian. You’re absolutely right, though. Machiavelli is very, very clear in The Prince that cruelty is not going to get you anywhere in the long term. You’re going to get pure hate. So if you think it’s ever instrumentally useful to be super cruel, think again.This obviously isn’t an endorsement of Trump, but I will say that something I hear often from people is that the system is so broken that we need someone to smash it up in order to save it. We need political dynamite. I bring that up because Machiavelli says repeatedly that politics requires flexibility and maybe even a little practical ruthlessness in order to preserve the republic. Do you think he would say that there’s real danger in clinging to procedural purity if you reach a point where the system seems to have failed?This is a great question. And again, this is one he does address in the Discourses quite a lot. He talks about how the Romans, when their republic started slipping, had “great men” coming up and saying, “I’ll save you,” and there were a lot before Julius Caesar finally “saved” them and then it all went to hell. And Machiavelli says that there are procedures that have to sometimes be wiped out — you have to reform institutions and add new ones. The Romans added new ones, they subtracted some, they changed the terms. He was very, very keen on shortening the terms of various excessively long offices. He also wanted to create emergency institutions where, if you really faced an emergency, that institution gives somebody more power to take executive action to solve the problem. But that institution, the dictatorship as it was called in Rome, it wasn’t as though a random person could come along and do whatever he wanted. The idea was that this dictator would have special executive powers, but he is under strict oversight, very strict oversight, by the Senate and the plebians, so that if he takes one wrong step, there would be serious punishment. So he was very adamant about punishing leaders who took these responsibilities and then abused them.Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.See More:

This article contains spoilers for Big Mouth season 8. It’s become increasingly rare for a streaming series to end on its own terms, especially when that series has run for eight seasons and revolves around the uncontrollable hormonal impulses of a bunch of teenagers.  Big Mouth made waves upon its premiere back in 2017, yet it’s grown into one of Netflix’s longest-running shows and a program that’s experienced as many changes as its adolescent protagonists. The series is comfortable indulging in its cruder and more mature impulses, whether that’s relentless Hormone Monsters or anthropomorphic genitals. That being said, there’s an undeniable heart to Big Mouth and it’s an animated comedy that actually strives to educate and enlighten, as wild as that may seem, as it preaches inclusivity and a truly modern world of sex, relationships, and identity.  As Big Mouth reaches its splashy big finish with its eighth season, the comedy’s co-creators — Andrew Goldberg, Jennifer Flackett, and Mark Levin — open up on their animated project’s farewell year. Goldberg, Flackett, and Levin get candid on Big Mouth’s latest changes as its characters acclimate to high school, the highs and lows of pornography, and their trepidation over sticking the landing. Also: the one storyline that was almost turned into its own interactive episode! DEN OF GEEK: It’s been so much fun to see this series evolve since its beginning. Is it satisfying to get the rare luxury of bringing many of these characters’ stories to fruition across eight seasons as they all find their respective cliques and learn a little more about themselves? MARK LEVIN: I mean, it is a rare treat to be able to tell a story that long and to be able to really explore these characters in depth over so much time. To have anyone’s puberty last eight years is pretty cool.  JENNIFER FLACKETT: But also to age the characters and to have animation that changes was not something that [we anticipated]. Andrew often talks about the fact, because he’s from Family Guy. He never thought that the character models would change and we hadn’t really talked about that. Then when we realized that the show’s all about changes, that was really interesting to us.  ML: Also, to have the runway to be able to know that we were going to close out the show, and to be very thoughtful and intentional in our approach to that, was great. We went on a retreat with the writers in advance of season eight to just talk about everything and wrestling with this big idea. Ultimately, the big question was, “How do you end a story about characters who are just beginning their story – their lives,” you know? That’s the conclusion of the future being the thing they have to wrestle with most–the unknown of the future.  I’m glad you touched on that too, because I do think there are always really high expectations that surround any series finale and I think you guys handled this one very gracefully. Was this always kind of the ending that you had envisioned for the show? Did it change over time? ANDREW GOLDBERG: No, we don’t have plans. We even like to figure out each season with our staff as we go. I mean, it would be great if we had a plan from the very beginning, but we did not, and like Mark said, we really came into season eight with this dilemma of “how do you tell the end of a story about kids who are just starting out?” I remember when we were first talking about what the final episode would be, Gil Ozeri, who wrote it, kind of looked at us and was like, “Well, you guys, it’s your show. What do you think? What is the show about?” And I was like, “I don’t know.” Mark thought that the most salient thing that we’ve learned over the years is that the show is about this idea that you’re not alone. That was sort of our guiding principle for the final episode, too. This idea that the future is scary and unknown, but you’re not alone. You have your friends to go into it with.  Were there any other series finales that you looked to for inspiration? I felt the tiniest bit of Moonlighting in terms of the characters’ universe kind of being dismantled around them. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! AG: Not really. I wanted to do that Andrew was masturbating and right before he comes, it cuts to black, and we don’t know if he comes or not or if he gets shot by the guy in the diner. Nobody else got on board with that. JF: I will say, like when you were just talking about it – to me Cheers and Mary Tyler Moore–  AG: Cheers was a great finale.  JF: Those were two great finales that were funny and were emotional. That has always been our guiding light with Big Mouth. We didn’t really realize when we first started how important the emotionality was going to be. That these were kids with big feelings and everything mattered so much. So I think just that idea–we knew we wanted the end to be emotional, but it was also emotional for us! When we had our final table read and all those kids walked off, everyone was crying. So, I think that also a big part of it, too – being funny, emotional, and that we really wanted to do well by these characters. We wanted to feel like the future was pretty bright for them. AG: Sometimes with finales, shows try to reinvent the wheel. They’ll make the finale its whole own thing. As a fan, I always like a finale that’s just like a really good episode of the show. That was also one of our goals and one of the reasons why we went back to the middle school for the finale because that was the heart of the show. Big Mouth is obviously very silly, but it pushes some really important messages, too. It’s filled with encouraging examples of representation as well. Which storyline or piece of character development are you the most proud of bringing to life here? JF: I just think we all learned so much about human sexuality and human development making this show. I can really say I learned a lot and I feel like we really created something where the things that we learned–we really wanted to tell people about things like female pleasure. I did not think that was a story that I was going to do. Like, I knew there’d be periods. I knew there’d be masturbation, right? But beyond that–going into asexuality and all these things that really came from real students that we spoke to who said, “I don’t feel represented.” That was really interesting and we didn’t really know about that. I think that always interested us in all these different ways. Consent is something – both in the first and the last season – that we really talk about in a specific kind of way. Those were things we learned as the world changed. The world changed so much while we were making the show, so we had to really keep abreast of everything.  And Holly Hunter is Compassion. I really will say that Holly Hunter’s Compassion was a real thrill for all of us.  AG: I agree that the learning experience of making this show has been incredible and the breadth of who we’ve learned from. We had this moment in season one where we did “Girls Are Horny Too,” where we realized–we had read Peggy Orenstein’s book, Girls & Sex, and she had come to the writers’ room to talk to us. One of the things that she writes about is that in sex ed, we teach boys about their boners and ejaculation and girls about menstruation. We don’t teach–we don’t imply to girls as we’re teaching about sex–that they’re supposed to experience pleasure, too. We realized, “Oh my God, our first episode is literally about a boy masturbating and in the second episode a girl gets her period. We did the very thing that we’re not supposed to do. So we course-corrected with the fifth episode of the first season, “Girls Are Horny Too.”  Then, like Jen said, the idea for having an asexual kid was totally born out of how we speak to teenagers every year with their sex ed teacher, Shafia Zaloum, who’s a great sex ed teacher in the Bay Area. That storyline came directly from one of her students being like, “Hey, I’m asexual, and I’d really love to see a character like me on TV.” We were like, “Absolutely.” He actually read scripts for us and gave us his thoughts. It was a really great collaboration. So, we’ve had this amazing experience where we’re learning from experts, but also from teenagers; from kids. The pornography episode from this season is really strong, but it’s also exciting that you’re able to do an episode that helps normalize pornography, break it down, but also explore the more toxic behavior it can reinforce, too. Did this feel like significant subject matter to explore? JF: Well, that’s always how we like to explore any topic: like we’re having a conversation. The first one was about the head push and if it’s okay or if it’s not okay. We were like, “Oh, that’s got to go in the show.” Our kids need to basically be having the same conversation that we’re having. That’s often a way that leads us, but it was actually my daughter who was talking about guys and their relationship with porn. She was like, “It’s really kind of ruined them and it’s such a bummer.” So when we were coming into this last season, I thought that we should explore that. We had done porn in the very first season, but it didn’t get to the heart of the problem.  AG: It was more of an addiction story.  JF: It was more of an addiction story. It wasn’t really a porn story. We really realized–and this was another thing we talked to a lot of people about–just about how porn was becoming sex education and how unfortunate that is and what do we do about it. How do you masturbate again when you’ve gotten used to porn? All those things. It’s not just one thing. It turned out it was a lot of things, all of which play out over three episodes. You really get the chance to realize what’s going on and how it can actually affect your life in all these different ways. AG: We had this really cool experience where–as we were figuring out that story, we always, every season, meet with a group of teenagers via Zoom and really pick their brains and ask them questions. This time, for the first time ever, we split them up between boys and girls because we wanted to hear what the boys had to say and what the girls had to say. It was amazing just the disconnect that seemed to occur where – at least for the groups of kids that we talked to – the boys were kind of like, “We get it. Porn isn’t real. It doesn’t actually affect the way we behave.” While the girls were like, “No.” They did not feel the same way. JF: It was shocking, but true! All that was just so  interesting.  Absolutely, and then to have your characters at an age where they can emulate that behavior, too. I always love when the show will do a bit of a concept episode that does something structurally different, like the penultimate entry that has the whole grab bag of odds and ends formula. I think that’s such a smart way to touch on a bunch of stuff that couldn’t organically be covered in the series. ML: When you’re heading to the end of an experience like this, you realize there’s so much left to say and so much you still want to say. In this case, we reached out through social media to the fans and said, “Hey, what are the things you wish we talked about?” That’s really true, we really did do that.  So, are those real questions, then, from real fans?  ML: Yeah, those topics, they’re all real.  JF: And when we say that there was a ton about queefing, that’s also actually true. We had thousands of responses. We had this vaginismus story and one of the guys on the staff was like, “I don’t like the vaginismus story…” But a lot of people were asking about it so clearly there is interest there! So I wanted to find a way to do that. ML: It all really came from that experience of serving the fans. And we love form-breaker episodes. We love form-breakers, but this was a great one. It was an opportunity, in a grab bag kind of way, to race through all these things that we never got a chance to talk about. These probably would have been episodes or storylines, but maybe they’re even better for the fact that they don’t last for an entire episode. “What’s it like to go to the gynecologist?” That doesn’t need to be a whole episode. These ideas can be their own mini-movies, like the Looney Tunes one. Well, I was going to say exactly that. You dress each one up in a different style, whether it’s The Twilight Zone or the whole Looney Tunes aesthetic. Was this episode more of a challenge to bring together? AG: Yeah, I think that’s always the fun with the form-breakers. I think it’s fun for the fans. It’s fun for us, too, on a creative level. Last year we did the international episode, where we did a show in different languages. We did that Christmas episode with all the different kinds of animation. It’s always so much fun for us, but this one in particular was great because I do think our fans are so invested. They feel so much ownership over the show and we’re happy to share that with them. It was exciting to see all their questions that Maury explores in that episode.  You mentioned before that you don’t like to plan things out, but this season brings closure to the Ponytail Killer after so long, which is super funny to me. I can see this being an idea that just kept getting pushed back during previous seasons, but had you planned to do more with this tangent over the years? Did you know that this was the killer’s identity from the start? JF: And it was! We had tried to do something with the Ponytail Killer a couple of other times, but it just didn’t feel right. This felt good though and we were finally able to pay that one off. ML: At one point, we were talking about doing an interactive “Choose-Your-Own Adventure” episode like Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch.” There was a minute where everything was going to be interactive! We flirted with the idea of doing a “Choose-Your-Own Adventure” episode where you solve the Ponytail Killer’s murders. We went down that road, but we realized just how much work it would take–it would have been like a whole season’s worth of work just to make all the multiple threads. So we were happy to at least bring closure to it inside this season.  AG: My favorite part of that is when Lola is like, “What? Who cares?” There are Reddit threads out there that have guessed it! There are people that will be very satisfied with this season. JF: One of my favorite Reddit threads is about, “Does Cyrus wear the radish bra?” Eight seasons is a lot of time to spend with these characters, but would you ever want to return to them and this universe, perhaps when they’re adults with kids of their own? Is there a possibility that you might do something like periodic Big Mouth specials in the future or some further extension of the series? ML: Yeah, I mean, we love these kids. We really want to see what happens to them. It’s fun to just let them go off into the void and imagine what would happen, but I’m sure that over time, we’ll miss them and want to revisit them again. Whether it’s the college years or some other thing, you know?  JF: It’s funny, because what happens is before you know exactly when your show is going to end, you’re like, “It’s so hard to find these stories…” But then when you know that you’re going to end, we suddenly had more stories to tell because we moved them to high school. It was ironic, but also kind of lovely, because you always want to leave people wanting more. That’s a great feeling and it’s nice to not feel like we’ve completely exhausted everything. It’s very bittersweet. We’ve had an amazing run here and we were at Netflix at just the right time. I’m not sure if Big Mouth could have existed at any other time. It seems like Big Mouth got to tell its full story, but that this might not have necessarily been the case with Human Resources. Can you talk a little on where else that show had gone if it lasted longer? Were there any ideas for future Human Resources stories that were incorporated into this final season as a way of providing closure? JF: We loved Human Resources. I mean, we just thought that was a great, great show, and such a wonderful universe.  ML: They’re infinite things that could be done there! And you know, there is an episode this season that visits Human Resources again. We really wanted to go back to Human Resources, whether it was in that episode where we had the Keke Palmer and Aidy Bryant characters come back. Rosie Perez’s character, too. The whole cast! We wanted to weave them all into this season to make sure that they were acknowledged as such an important part of the universe. We were fortunate to get to explore all of that in the same show, but just through a flipped perspective. We were seeing it all from the monsters’ point of view, but now we’re back to the kids. But we absolutely loved, loved Human Resources.  Big Mouth has ended, but your new animated series, Mating Season, has been announced. Can you talk at all on how this idea came together, what this show was born out of, and if it will have a similar vibe to Big Mouth or be a different type of animal? ML: The vibe will be similar in some ways, in that, it’s very honest and it deals, frankly, with things that we all deal with. In Big Mouth, it was puberty and that temporary change, but Mating Season is looking kind of into your twenties – your late twenties – when you’re trying to find a mate. You find your person, or hook up, or, you know – have sex, get married, all those things that we struggled with then. JF: What we always found in Big Mouth, when we were trying to depict sex, was that it was better when it had a metaphor behind it. But we realized that you really don’t want to see humans having sex. However, with animals, it’s a lot funnier.  ML: You’re not going to see anything you don’t see in the zoo, or in the forest, or in your backyard. I’m looking forward to it. I appreciated the Animorphs reference this season, so if you can make one of the characters an Animorph–just have one be an animal that is actually a human in disguise. I think that’s a fun approach. ML: That is a good idea. We’re putting it on the list. JF: We’re putting it on the list. Beautiful. That’s all I ask. All eight seasons of Big Mouth are now streaming on Netflix

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Meet Cathy Tie, Bride of “China’s Frankenstein” Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback and to repair his reputation after a three-year incarceration for illegally creating the world’s first gene-edited children. One area of visible success on his come-back trail has been his X.com account. Over the past few years, his account has evolved from sharing mundane images of his daily life to spreading outrageous, antagonistic messages. This has left observers unsure what to take seriously.Last month, in reply to MIT Technology Review’s questions about who was responsible for the account’s transformation into a font of clever memes, He emailed us back: “It’s thanks to Cathy Tie.”Tie is no stranger to the public spotlight. A former Thiel fellow, she is a partner in a project which promised to create glow-in-the-dark pets. Over the past several weeks, though, the Canadian entrepreneur has started to get more and more attention as the new wife to He Jiankui. Read the full story. —Caiwei Chen & Antonio Regalado Anthropic’s new hybrid AI model can work on tasks autonomously for hours at a time Anthropic has announced two new AI models that it claims represent a major step toward making AI agents truly useful. AI agents trained on Claude Opus 4, the company’s most powerful model to date, raise the bar for what such systems are capable of by tackling difficult tasks over extended periods of time and responding more usefully to user instructions, the company says. They’ve achieved some impressive results: Opus 4 created a guide for the video game Pokémon Red while playing it for more than 24 hours straight. The company’s previously most powerful model was capable of playing for just 45 minutes. Read the full story. —Rhiannon Williams The FDA plans to limit access to covid vaccines. Here’s why that’s not all bad. This week, two new leaders at the US Food and Drug Administration announced plans to limit access to covid vaccines, arguing that there is not much evidence to support the value of annual shots in healthy people. New vaccines will be made available only to the people who are most vulnerable—namely, those over 65 and others with conditions that make them more susceptible to severe disease. The plans have been met with fear and anger in some quarters. But they weren’t all that shocking to me. In the UK, where I live, covid boosters have been offered only to vulnerable groups for a while now. And the immunologists I spoke to agree: The plans make sense. Read the full story. —Jessica Hamzelou This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Thousands of Americans are facing extreme weather But help from the federal government may never arrive. (Slate $)+ States struck by tornadoes and floods are begging the Trump administration for aid. (Scientific American $)2 Spain’s grid operator has accused power plants of not doing their job It claims they failed to control the system’s voltage shortly before the blackout. (FT $)+ Did solar power cause Spain’s blackout? (MIT Technology Review)3 Google is facing a DoJ probe over its AI chatbot deal It will probe whether Google’s deal with Character.AI gives it an unfair advantage. (Bloomberg $)+ It may not lead to enforcement action, though. (Reuters) 4 DOGE isn’t bad news for everyone These smaller US government IT contractors say it’s good for business—for now. (WSJ $)+ It appears that DOGE used a Meta AI model to review staff emails, not Grok. (Wired $)+ Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex. (MIT Technology Review)5 Google’s new shopping tool adds breasts to minorsTry it On distorts uploaded photos to clothing models’ proportions, even when they’re children. (The Atlantic $)+ It feels like this could have easily been avoided. (Axios)+ An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots. (MIT Technology Review)6 Apple is reportedly planning a smart glasses product launchBy the end of next year. (Bloomberg $) + It’s playing catchup with Meta and Google, among others. (Engadget)+ What’s next for smart glasses. (MIT Technology Review) 7 What it’s like to live in Elon Musk’s corner of TexasComplete with an ugly bust and furious locals. (The Guardian) + West Lake Hills residents are pushing back against his giant fences. (Architectural Digest $)8 Our solar system may contain a hidden ninth planetA possible dwarf planet has been spotted orbiting beyond Neptune. (New Scientist $) 9 Wikipedia does swag now How else will you let everyone know you love the open web? (Fast Company $)10 One of the last good apps is shutting down Mozilla is closing Pocket, its article-saving app, and the internet is worse for it. (404 Media)+ Parent company Mozilla said the way people use the web has changed. (The Verge)Quote of the day “This is like the Mount Everest of corruption.” —Senator Jeff Merkley protests outside Donald Trump’s exclusive dinner for the highest-paying customers of his personal cryptocurrency, the New York Times reports. One more thing The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility. What happened?On April 3, 2010, Steve Jobs debuted the iPad. What for most people was basically a more convenient form factor was something far more consequential for non-speakers: a life-­changing revolution in access to a portable, powerful communication device for just a few hundred dollars. But a piece of hardware, however impressively designed and engineered, is only as valuable as what a person can do with it. After the iPad’s release, the flood of new, easy-to-use augmentative and alternative communication apps that users were in desperate need of never came.Today, there are only around half a dozen apps, each retailing for $200 to $300, that ask users to select from menus of crudely drawn icons to produce text and synthesized speech. It’s a depressingly slow pace of development for such an essential human function. Read the full story.—Julie Kim We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet 'em at me.) + Dive into the physics behind the delicate frills of Tête de Moine cheese shavings.+ Our capacity to feel moved by music is at least partly inherited, apparently.+ Kermit the frog has delivered a moving commencement address at the University of Maryland.+ It’s a question as old as time: are clowns sexy? 🤡

Getty Images 2025-05-22T09:05:02Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Kate Collins has worked on an all-female nonprofit team since starting a new job in 2024. In the past, she's worked in male-dominated media workplaces with rigid, then lenient, boundaries. Collins says that an all-female team brings both a supportive culture and blurred work-life lines. When I walked into work last year on my birthday, there was an envelope with my name written in cursive on my desk. I was less than three months into a new job and hadn't announced my birthday. Being an introvert, a slight discomfort rose as I opened the envelope.The discomfort dissipated as I read the personalized messages written by my colleagues. I was grateful for the simple gesture; this was the first time I received a birthday card at work. A few months later, I returned from my honeymoon to find another thoughtful card and a wedding-decorated desk.My colleagues' acknowledgment of these milestones is proof that after a midlife pivot, I've landed somewhere good. The all-female leadership and team where I work prioritize the organization's mission by fostering a kind, encouraging atmosphere for clients and employees.While I see the perks, I've also experienced some downsides to an all-female workplace.I started my career in offices with boundariesI entered the workforce during an era when professionalism stressed a clear delineation between work and personal lives. In the offices of the media companies where I worked as a photojournalist and reporter, employees refrained from divulging details of their outside lives. I welcomed these boundaries.By the mid-2010s, successive rounds of layoffs in my industry resulted in a less diverse workplace. Management became mostly men who I remember using sports analogies, mansplaining, and all-caps emails — controlling tactics that diminished my sense of worth.A decade later, bias issues forced the last media company I worked for to adopt policies stressing safe, inclusive workplaces. The personal became political, and the movement to normalize almost everything took hold. Before long, a workplace culture emerged where revealing intimate personal information was commonplace.Yet there still wasn't a shift away from the male-dominated culture. Many of my female colleagues who survived layoffs exited the industry. Before long, I was planning my own exit strategy. It was difficult to separate myself from a profession I once loved For a few years, I worked on reinventing myself by expanding my skill set through classes and freelance work. I was eventually offered an environmental communications position. While the job didn't last, it launched me into the nonprofit sector.I live in a region with many nonprofits. The local nonprofits I'm most familiar with are primarily led and staffed by smart women passionate about helping others. This isn't surprising, as studies concerning the differences in personality traits have found that women are more nurturing, tender-minded, and altruistic more often and to a greater extent than men — traits necessary to do lower-paid, sometimes emotionally taxing work.When I started nonprofit work, I felt acknowledged and supportedI started my current communications manager position in early 2024. Since transitioning to nonprofit work, I've experienced how an all-female team can promote a kinder, more collaborative workplace. Have an idea for something not in your job title? Share it. Need help with a project? There are always offers to assist, even for projects requiring time outside normal schedules.There's also the celebration of achievements. Our leader frequently shares our team and individual accomplishments publicly. She gifted us with bright yellow smiley face bells to ring when we complete a difficult project. After years without recognition of my professional achievements, it feels good to have my contributions acknowledged.The professional respect ingrained in our office culture extends beyond job tasks. If we come in late or leave early for an appointment or emergency, we can do so without advance approval. Leadership even encourages us to take personal days when we're feeling stressed.This kind, empathic leadership style trickles down. Recently one of my coworkers was out for a few days with the flu. Knowing she lives alone, we reached out with "get well soon" texts and offered to pick up her prescription and deliver it to her home.There are also challengesWhile working in an all-female office has been a positive change, certain aspects can be trying. There's inherent pressure to participate in optional group activities such as weekly team lunches and afternoon walks, which can be stressful for someone who cherishes alone time like me.Recently, a mandatory retreat escalated into a cold plunge. Voiced statements about not liking cold water were countered with emails about "team building." Days before, a colleague said that she couldn't partake due to a medical issue.In the end, a few of us watched the cold plunge through the window of a warm house. I was already nervous about an overnight cabin retreat. I wasn't fond of the planned kayaking and swimming, but I also didn't want to hurt the feelings of my colleagues planning it.The blurring of lines between work and play can also result in unexpected workplace tension. When a new colleague joined our team recently, she misinterpreted the relaxed atmosphere as "any topic goes." While I appreciate an informal office, some of the topics she discussed made me uncomfortable. I eventually spoke up about my new colleague's crudeness, and the issue was addressed.I question whether the easing of professional manners has veered too far off-trackI wonder if a single-sex environment contributes to this. I wonder if my colleague would've acted differently around male colleagues and if a male would've been terminated for similar behavior around female coworkers.I'm not looking to leave my job. If I ever return to a workplace with both men and women, I'll bring what I'm learning about collaboration, kindness, and celebrating achievements with me.Kate Collins is a writer and nonprofit communications professional. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, stepson, and two foster dogs.

When we look at the relationship between 73-year-old legendary football coach Bill Belichick and his girlfriend and business partner, 24-year-old Jordon Hudson, it’s hard to know exactly what we’re seeing. Two grown-ups in love forging a dynamic business partnership? Elder abuse, as some have wildly speculated? Or is it, as the vitriolic comments in Hudson’s social media posts would have it, good old-fashioned gold digging? Gold digging is a misogynistic and retro term, but this scandal is a retro one. It’s a bizarre, slightly off-putting mystery that fits remarkably well into our current age of newly regressive gender politics.Hudson and Belichick, the six-time Super Bowl-winning former NFL coach, met on a flight in 2021 and went public with their relationship last December. While their nearly 50-year age gap has raised eyebrows amid observers, the scandal has only grown as Hudson has taken on an increasingly central role in Belichick’s professional world. It’s a bizarre, slightly off-putting mystery that fits remarkably well into our current age of newly regressive gender politics.Belichick requested Hudson be cc’ed on all publicity and media emails about him at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is now a college football coach. In public records, she’s listed as the manager of several companies that appear to be tied to Belichick. Insider accounts say she essentially cast herself in a Dunkin Donuts commercial in which Belichick appeared, and that she blocked a docuseries about Belichick’s career. But speculation around the relationship reached a fever pitch when Hudson interrupted during Belichick’s interview on CBS Sunday Morning in April. “How did you guys meet?” host Tony Dokoupil asked Belichick, referring to Hudson. “We’re not talking about this,” Hudson cut in tersely from off-camera. “Jordon was a constant presence during our interview,” Dokoupil informs viewers in voiceover, in a moment that launched a thousand TikTok reaction videos. In the midst of this controversy, the couple has been manufacturing social media content about their relationship that isn’t alarming so much as it is lightly uncanny, especially given Belichick’s famously gruff public persona. On Hudson’s Instagram account, she has posted beachside pictures of herself balancing athletically on Belichick’s outstretched legs, and of Belichick, dressed as a fisherman, reeling in a mermaid-tailed Hudson from the surf. (“Ouucchhhh!!!” goes the caption on that one.)A few have defended the relationship between Belichick and Hudson. Sports media personality Colin Cowherd has said that Hudson’s choice to hop into Belichick’s interview was normal for PR directors, if “kind of a cringy thing.” Right-wing sports outlet The Outkick has rallied to Hudson’s side on the grounds that she triggers the libs, saying, “If Jordon wants to spend her weekends at Bill’s house on Nantucket, soaking up the sun and enjoying Cisco Brewery on Bill’s dime, I say GO FOR IT.” But the most common reaction to the spectacle of Hudson and Belichick’s relationship is the one outlined by sports media personality Katie Nolan on a podcast in February: This is weird and seems like it has sinister undertones.“We’re already going, ‘You’re how much younger than him?’ And then you show up in a commercial. And then you hear that she’s in charge in his career.” Nolan said. “It seems like you could be taking advantage of the guy. And he’s obviously taking advantage of the girl.” Notably, it doesn’t appear to be much of a head-scratcher why a powerful septuagenarian would choose to be with a recent college graduate and pageant contestant. But the nefarious reason implied about why Hudson wants to be with Belichick is the one people are misogynistically and freely throwing around: gold digger.The resurgence of the gold digger I don’t know anything about Hudson and Belichick’s private relationship, and most likely, neither do you. I don’t want to make any claims about who is using whom or what their private life is like. But as a feminist pop culture critic, I am interested to see the term “gold digger” swim back up from the collective unconsciousness again, ready and willing to go to work. There’s something almost old-fashioned about it. The last time “gold digger” was thrown around in pop culture so much was when teenager Courtney Stodden skyrocketed to fame in 2011 after they got married at age 16 to 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchison. Stodden would later describe their marriage as one characterized by grooming and sexual assault. Before that, the great pop culture gold digger was Anna Nicole Smith, the model turned paparazzi obsession who married oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II in 1994. Since Smith’s untimely death in 2007, she’s found a place in the pantheon of wronged women of the 1990s, someone we came to believe over the last decade was publicly mistreated — in part by her tarring as a gold digger. “It’s a bit provincial to look down one’s nose at a woman wanting something from a man and give a pass to a man who arguably would have never given her a second glance had she not been a beautiful, blonde Playboy Playmate,” essayist and sex work activist Laura LeMoon argued in 2023, writing about Smith in Salon. “Rather than singling out and condemning Anna Nicole Smith, we should be pointing our fingers at the inequities and systemic failures that put people like me and Smith in positions where obtaining money and resources from men, directly or indirectly, is our best option for survival.”“Gold digger” is a euphemism that allows us as a culture to talk around those systemic failures. It’s a way to deride women when they take seriously the idea that their financial well-being should depend on their relationships with men. So it’s odd to see the term becoming so popular during a moment when popular culture has become rather infatuated with the idea that life is most pleasant, simple, and straightforward when women’s finances do depend on romantic relationships with men.TikTok is full of tradwives explaining how their lives became better once they got out of the 9-to-5 grind to make cereal from scratch for their children and let their husbands do the breadwinning. (That the most successful of the tradwife influencers are actually the primary breadwinners in their homes is an irony the influencers themselves seldom discuss.) Or there are the stay-at-home girlfriends cooing over how taking care of their boyfriends without even the financial safety net of a marriage contract has been their ticket to the soft life. The gold digger is the tradwife as seen through a funhouse mirror: a woman living off her ability to attract a man, only here done crassly.Meanwhile, some of President Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters are arguing that his tariffs will force women out of the workforce and make them once again financially dependent on men, either through marriage or through sex work, life paths these men treat as equivalent. Trump’s appeal to the dream of a lost American manufacturing economy is a nostalgic one. It’s an appealing fantasy to some of his more incel-adjacent fans: that under this economy, the sexes will revert to an older, allegedly more natural economic relationship, one in which women trade their sexuality and childrearing capabilities to men in exchange for financial security. The gold digger is the tradwife as seen through a funhouse mirror: a woman living off her ability to attract a man, only here done crassly, without the show of love to soften the crude edges of the transaction. The gold digger is simply a figure we can blame for how uncomfortable this dynamic makes us feel, without having to think through just what is so uncomfortable about it. So if we’re angry at Jordon Hudson, it’s worth asking the question: Are we angry with her, or with the fact that powerful people want to make gold digging one of a woman’s most viable career paths again?See More:

Construction input prices fell 0.1% in April, according to a new Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Producer Price Index data. Last month, nonresidential construction input prices increased by 0.2%. Overall construction input prices are 0.1% higher than levels from a year ago, and nonresidential construction prices are 0.2% higher. Prices decreased in all three energy categories in April. Natural gas prices fell 7.1%, unprocessed energy materials were down 5.0%, and crude petroleum prices dipped by 4.9%. Chart credit: Associated Builders and Contractors“Construction input prices declined in April, but that was largely due to falling energy prices,” said ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu. “Materials directly affected by tariffs saw sharp price increases for the month. Steel mill product prices, for instance, rose 5.9%, while copper wire and cable prices increased 5.0%.” Chart credit: Associated Builders and Contractors“While recent d...