While much of Hollywood was consumed by the streaming wars, Issa Rae was studying a different mode of entertainment thousands of miles away: microdramas.No stranger to creating a successful online series, the Emmy-nominated actor and producer became intrigued by China’s booming market for the short, mobile-first soap operas, seeing its potential to build audiences and intellectual property.In May, Rae’s Hoorae Media released the thriller “Screen Time,” one of the first major studio-quality microdrama projects developed by an established Hollywood production company. The TikTok-backed series drew nearly 75 million views during its first week.Rae believes the format offers advantages traditional media…
Author: Staff Writer
For a workplace redesign, it’s hard to imagine a project that would need to serve as many types of stakeholders as the new Creative Artists Agency (CAA) office opening in Nashville this July. As one of the world’s leading sports and entertainment agencies, CAA caters to a wide range of outsized personalities, from NBA legends to touring musicians to college football coaches to YouTubers. But it’s also regularly bringing in new, young, unsigned talent, and often their parents or family members. And, of course, this new office in Nashville is also a 9-to-5 workplace for 160 employees, from the hotshot…
When Carley Fortune started writing her debut novel Every Summer After, she had one goal: to create something for herself. Frustrated by corporate pressures, the then-executive editor of Refinery29 Canada returned to the lake where she grew up. Everything that followed—five best-selling books published in five years, two projects in development at Netflix, a television adaptation charting in the top 10 on Amazon Prime Video, and the mania surrounding her romances set in idyllic nooks of Canada—she never anticipated. Every Summer After, a coming-of-age romance set in Barry’s Bay—the corner of Ontario where Fortune spent her adolescence—was published in 2022 and…
I’m a technologist with a software studio. AI is in nearly everything my agency builds and most of how we work. But when our Anthropic bill recently skyrocketed, I was happy about it. The price we pay for AI is a lie. The longer the lie continues, the more dangerous AI is to the future of human expertise and human teams. The sooner businesses start paying up, the better. THE PRICE IS FICTION Let’s start with the math. In 2025, OpenAI booked around $13 billion in revenue and posted a roughly $21 billion operating loss, spending close to $1.60 for…
As companies work to build more inclusive, high-performing workplaces, one major workforce issue is still hiding in plain sight: menopause. Around 1 billion women globally are currently in perimenopause, menopause, or postmenopause, equating to roughly 12% of the world’s population. In the U.S., nearly 50 million women in the workforce are aged 35 and over, which is the demographic most likely to experience menopause-related symptoms. And yet, even though menopause affects half the world’s population, workplace support remains inconsistent, misunderstood, or absent altogether. Why menopause has become a business issue The conversation around menopause has finally started catching up with…
On June 25, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo launched Raise Us, an initiative to confront what she calls America’s missing piece: a people strategy to match its technology strategy. Raimondo explains how she built a $500 million war chest, secured bipartisan backing, and signed up launch partners from Bank of America to Anthropic before the ink was dry. The problem of AI displacement is a serious one, and Raimondo’s solution is nothing short of a collective reinvention of how America trains, transitions, and values its workers. The window, she warns, is narrower than most people think. This is…
Below, Josh Tyrangiel shares five key insights from his new book, AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter. Tyrangiel spent the last few years covering artificial intelligence, first at The Washington Post and now at The Atlantic. Before that, he ran Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Media, and made news and documentaries for HBO and Netflix. What’s the big idea? AI’s greatest impact is coming not from flashy promises but from practical tools that help people solve real problems. Ignore the hype, focus on the evidence, and see AI as a powerful assistant that can enhance human capabilities when…
“I Love Gay People” I once had a coworker I’m going to call Maggie. And Maggie loved gay people. I know that, because she explicitly told me when she learned I was gay, probably six months into working together. Up to that point, Maggie and I had collaborated on a few projects, but were in different departments and didn’t socialize outside of work. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were gay!” she exclaimed, before sharing how much she loved going to drag shows, shopping, and watching Bravo with “her gays.” She then demanded to know my favorite Real…
China has now openly declared that it believes it has the legal right to pursue people beyond its own borders under its new Ethnic Unity Law, which takes effect on July 1. Beijing insists the law is “legitimate, lawful, necessary, and feasible,” and argues that every nation has the right to suppress separatism. The legislation extends legal liability to individuals and organizations outside China accused of undermining what Beijing defines as “ethnic unity” or promoting separatism. This is no longer simply domestic legislation. It is a declaration that China intends to extend its legal reach far beyond its own borders.…
Right now, I have 628 unread emails in my work inbox. That’s in addition to seven unread Signal messages, a few unopened Telegrams, dozens of texts coming in (both personal and professional), and a whole separate Google work suite to contend with for another professional project, with an impossible number of comments appearing daily within the documents therein. Let’s not forget the various other apps required for work—Asana, Slack, Gusto—not to mention the two-factor authenticators needed to log into them. Together, the cacophony of buzzes and pings these apps elicit constitutes a very normal way of working in 2026. In…