Want a little autumn in your August? Youre in luck.
Starbucks said Monday that its Pumpkin Spice Latte will return to store menus in the U.S. and Canada on Aug. 26.
The Pumpkin Spice Latte is Starbucks most popular seasonal beverage, with hundreds of millions sold since the espresso drink’s 2003 launch. Its also produced a host of imitations. Dunkin introduced pumpkin-flavored drinks in 2007; it will beat Starbucks to market this year when its fall menu debuts on Aug. 20. McDonalds introduced a pumpkin spice latte in 2013.
Heres a look at the Pumpkin Spice Latte by the numbers:
100: Number of Starbucks stores that sold the Pumpkin Spice Latte during a test run in Vancouver and Washington in 2003. The following year it launched nationally.
79: Number of markets where Starbucks sold the Pumpkin Spice Latte in 2024. At the time, the company had stores in 85 markets around the world. It now operates in 88 markets.
$36.2 billion: Starbucks’ net revenue in its 2024 fiscal year, which ended last September. Starbucks’ net revenue was $4.1 billion in 2003, when the Pumpkin Spice Latte first went on sale.
33.8%: Increase in mentions of pumpkin spice on U.S. menus between the fall of 2014 and the fall of 2024, according to Technomic.
4: Number of spices in McCormicks Pumpkin Pie Spice. They are cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice.
2022: The year Merriam-Webster added pumpkin spice to the dictionary. Less common, it said, is the term pumpkin pie spice.
3: The Pumpkin Spice Latte was the third seasonal beverage introduced by Starbucks, after the Eggnog Latte and the Peppermint Mocha.
Sept. 8: Date the Pumpkin Spice Latte went on sale in 2015. The on-sale date has edged earlier since then.
24%: Amount foot traffic rose at U.S. Starbucks last year on Aug. 22, the day the Pumpkin Spice Latte went on sale, according to Placer.ai. The company compared traffic that Thursday to the previous eight Thursdays.
45.5%: Amount foot traffic rose at Starbucks stores in North Dakota on Aug. 22, 2024, the most of any state, according to Placer.ai. Foot traffic in Mississippi rose the least, at 4.8%.
42,000: Number of members of the Leaf Rakers Society, a private Facebook group Starbucks created in 2018 to celebrate fall all year long.
Dee-Ann Durbin, AP business writer
James Gunns Superman showed staying power in its second weekend at North American box offices, collecting $57.3 million in ticket sales and remaining the No. 1 movie in cinemas, according to studio estimates Sunday.
None of the week’s new releasesI Know What You Did Last Summer, Smurfs, and Eddingtoncame close to touching Warner Bros. and DC Studios superhero success. Superman dipped 54% from its domestic opening, an average decline for a big summer film.
In two weeks, Superman has grossed $406.8 million worldwide, a good start for the movie DC Studios is banking on to restart its movie operations. A big test looms next weekend, when the Walt Disney Co. releases Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Strong audience scores and good reviews should help propel the $225 million-budgeted Superman toward profitability in the coming weeks. For Warner Bros. and DC Studios, Superman is key to kicking off a 10-year plan for the comic book adaptation studio. Co-heads Gunn and Peter Safra were tasked with rehabilitating the flagging operation. Next on tap are the films Supergirl and Clayface in 2026.
But Superman is far from flying solo in theaters right now. Universal Pictures Jurassic World: Rebirth came in second this weekend, with $23.4 million in its third week of release. The seventh Jurassic movie, this one starring Scarlett Johansson, held its own despite the competition from Superman. In three weeks, it accrued $648 million worldwide.
Apple Studios and Warner Bros. F1: The Movie has also shown legs, especially internationally. In its fourth weekend, the Brad Pitt racing drama dipped just 26% domestically, bringing in $9.6 million in North America, and another $29.5 million overseas. Its global total stands at $460.8 million.
But both of the biggest new releasesSony Pictures I Know What You Did Last Summer and Paramount Pictures Smurfsfell flat.
I Know What You Did Last Summer opened with $13 million, a fair result for a movie budgeted at a modest $18 million, but a disappointing opening for a well-known horror franchise. The film, directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, is set 27 years after the 1997 original. Teenagers played by Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders are again haunted for covering up a car accident.
The movie’s reviews (38% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) were poor for I Know What You Did Last Summer and audiences graded it similarly. The film notched a C+ on CinemaScore. The original collected $72.6 million in its domestic run in 1997.
Paramount Pictures Smurfs debuted in fourth place this weekend with $11 million. The latest big-screen reboot for the woodland blue creatures prominently features Rihanna as the voice of Smurfette. But reviews (21% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) were terrible. Audiences were kinder, giving it a B+ on CinemaScore, but the $58 million-budgeted release will depend largely on its international sales. In 56 overseas markets, Smurfs earned $22.6 million.
Ari Asters Eddington opened with $4.2 million on 2,111 screens for A24. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Eddington has been particularly divisive. The pandemic-set Western features Joaquin Phoenix as the right-wing sheriff of a small New Mexico town who faces off with its liberal mayor (Pedro Pascal).
While Asters first film, 2018s Hereditary ($82.8 million worldwide against a $10 million budget) helped establish A24 as an indie powerhouse, but the less-than-stellar launch of Eddington marks the second box-office disappointment for Aster. His 2023 film Beau Is Afraid cost $35 million to make but collected just $12.4 million worldwide. Eddington cost about $25 million to produce. Audiences gave it a C+ on CinemaScore. None of Asters previous films have been graded higher.
Yet collectively, Hollywood is enjoying a very good summer. According to data firm Comscore, the 2025 summer box office is up 15.9% over the same period last year, with the year-to-date sales running 15% ahead of 2025. Summer ticket sales have amassed about $2.6 billion domestically, according to Comscore.
Top 10 movies by domestic box office
With final domestic figures being released Monday, this list factors in the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore:
1. Superman, $57.3 million.
2. Jurassic World Rebirth, $23.4 million.
3. I Know What You Did Last Summer, $13 million.
4. Smurfs, $11 million.
5, F1: The Movie, $9.6 million.
6. How to Train Your Dragon, $5.4 million.
7. Eddington, $4.3 million.
8. Elio, $2 million.
9. Lilo & Stitch, $1.5 million.
10. 28 Years Later, $1.3 million.
___
This story has been updated to correct the title of Hereditary.
Jake Coyle, Associated Press film writer
Alaska Airlines has resumed operations after the failure of a critical piece of hardware forced the airline to ground all its flights for approximately three hours, but the effects will linger into Monday, the company announced.
The carrier issued a system-wide ground stop for Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air flights around 8 p.m. Pacific time Sunday. The stop was lifted at 11 p.m., the Seattle-based company said in a social media post. More than 150 flights have been canceled since Sunday evening, including 64 Monday.
The airline said a critical piece of multi-redundant hardware at our data centers, manufactured by a third-party, experienced an unexpected failure. That affected several of the airlines key systems, but hacking was not involved, and the airline said the incident was not related to any other events like the attack involving Microsoft’s servers over the weekend or the recent cybersecurity event at its Hawaiian Airlines subsidiary in June.
We appreciate the patience of our guests whose travel plans have been disrupted. Were working to get them to their destinations as quickly as we can, the airline said in a statement.
The airline also said it is working with its vendor to replace the hardware at the data center.
Alaska Airlines led all airlines in cancellations Monday, according to the FlightAware website. Many of the cancellations were at the airline’s major hub of Seattle, but it also canceled flights at airports all over the country.
The Federal Aviation Administration website had confirmed a ground stop for all Alaska Airlines mainline and Horizon aircraft, referring to an Alaska Airlines subsidiary. But the FAA referred all questions to the airline Monday.
The National Transportation Board last month credited the crew of Alaska Airlines flight 1282 with the survival of passengers when a door plug panel flew off the plane shortly after takeoff on Jan. 5, 2024, leaving a hole that sucked objects out of the cabin.
In September, Alaska Airlines said it grounded its flights in Seattle briefly due to significant disruptions from an unspecified technology problem that was resolved within hours.
John Funk, AP business writer
On July 19, Microsoft alerted users that it was experiencing an active cyberattack on its SharePoint servers, which allow organizations to share and manage documents.
According to The Washington Post, the attackwhich is still ongoinghas likely put tens of thousands of servers at risk, including several hosted by federal agencies, universities, and energy companies, which have reportedly already been breached.
According to a blog posted by Microsoft, the hack only impacts SharePoint servers housed within an organization, and not those in the cloud through SharePoint Online in Microsoft 365.
For Microsoft, this latest breach comes after a series of other security concerns in recent years. Last January, the tech giant reported that hackers backed by Russia had successfully stolen some of the companys source code, and, the following April, a federal review board found that Microsoft was at fault for security flaws that led to a Chinese hack of U.S. government officials emails.
Heres what to know about this latest hack:
Whats happened?
The Netherlands-based research company Eye Security was the first to identify what it called large-scale exploitation of a new SharePoint remote-code execution (RCE) vulnerability chain in the wild on the evening of July 18.
The hack was whats known as a zero-day attack, meaning it took advantage of a previously unknown hole in Microsofts security system, leaving the company without any immediate way to patch the problem.
Eye Securitys report found dozens of systems actively compromised between two waves of attack on July 18 and July 19. Per the firms findings, the bug allows hackers to take private digital keys from SharePoint without any login credentials, enter an organizations servers, remotely plant malware, and gain access to the available files and data.
Further, Eye Security warned, because SharePoint connects with other apps like Outlook and Teams, a breach can quickly lead to data theft, password harvesting, and lateral movement across the network.
Both the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have confirmed that theyre actively working to assess the hack. The party (or parties) responsible is still unknown.
Who has been impacted so far?
According to a blog post from CISA on July 20, the scope of the hack is unclear so far. However, several private researchers informed The Washington Post that the impact could be widespread.
Pete Renals, a senior manager with the cybersecurity research firm Unit 42, told the publication, We are seeing attempts to exploit thousands of SharePoint servers globally before a patch is available. We have identified dozens of compromised organizations spanning both commercial and government sectors.
Multiple anonymous researchers claimed that at least two U.S. federal agencies have seen their servers breached. Further, Randy Rose, the vice president of the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, shared that the organization notified about 100 organizationsincluding public schools and universitiesthat they were vulnerable and potentially compromised.
Anybody whos got a hosted SharePoint server has got a problem, Adam Meyers, senior vice president with the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, told The Washington Post. Its a significant vulnerability.
What is Microsoft doing about this?
After its initial announcement of the hack on July 19, Microsoft followed up on July 20 with several updates. The company rolled out emergency patches for users of SharePoint Subscription Edition and SharePoint 2019, which can be downloaded right away.
As of this writing, developers are still working to devise patches for supported versions of SharePoint 2019, as well as SharePoint 2016.
What should I do if my organization hosts a SharePoint server?
In an email to TechCrunch, Michael Sikorski, the head of Unit 42, advised that any organization with SharePoint on-premise should assume that you have been compromised at this point.
To mitigate potential attacks, Microsoft suggests the following steps:
Use supported versions of on-premises SharePoint Server
Apply the latest security updates, including the July 2025 Security Update
Ensure the Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI) is turned on and configured correctly, with an appropriate antivirus solution such as Defender Antivirus
Deploy Microsoft Defender for Endpoint protection, or equivalent threat solutions
Rotate SharePoint Server ASP.NET machine keys
Microsofts blog post provides detailed instructions on how to follow each of these directives. When reached for additional comment on the hack, Microsoft directed Fast Company back to the blog.
Watch out, AMC. There’s a new meme stock on the market.
Shares in Opendoor Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: OPEN) have been on fire over the past week. Since Tuesday, July 15, OPEN stock has surged more than 188% as of Fridays market close. And today, OPENs stock price is currently up an additional 27% in premarket trading. Heres why, and what you need to know about the company.
What is Opendoor Technologies Inc?
Opendoor is a real estate tech company based in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 2014. The company offers an online platform that allows homeowners to quickly sell their homes by providing details about the property. After the homeowners answer questions about their property, Opendoor will make them an offer to buy it directly.
Once Opendoor purchases a home from a user, it will then often make necessary improvements to the home and then sell it to a buyer for a profit. In other words, Opendoor is a house-flipping company. It buys houses on the cheap, fixes them up, and flips them for a profit.
Opendoor went public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in 2020, and it currently trades on the Nasdaq.
Whats the story behind OPENs stock price?
Less than a year after OPEN stock publicly debuted on the Nasdaq, its shares surged. OPENs stock price went from around $11 per share in July 2020 to nearly $40 a share at one point in February 2021, according to data from Yahoo Finance.
But since then, the stock has cratered. By the end of 2022, CNBC notes, OPEN shares had fallen 92% to just $1.16 each. Opendoors stock price fell due to the companys business prospects, which got pummelled by rising interest rates, increasing Opendoors borrowing costs.
At the same time, rising interest rates led to a slowdown in the housing market, as demand for home buying slowed.
Recently, OPEN shares had fallen below $1, putting the company at risk of removal from the Nasdaq. The threat of delisting has prompted the company to consider a reverse stock split of up to 1 for 50, aiming to boost its share price and thereby maintain its listing on the Nasdaq, according to CNBC.
OPEN shares continued their steady decline until July of this year, when, on July 15, the stock price suddenly began to accelerate upwards. By Friday, July 18, the stock had surged more than 188% over the previous five-day period.
What is causing OPEN stock to surge?
The main driver behind OPENs stock price surge over the past week seems to be down to one person, according to CNBC and Yahoo Finance. That person is hedge fund manager Eric Jackson.
Jackson runs EMJCapital, but if you look at Jacksons X profile, youll see he describes himself as The Carvana hedge fund guy. All he does is try to find the next Carvana over & over again.
He states this because he is the one who had the foresight to identify Carvana Co. (NYSE: CVNA) as a good buy when the stock price was trading in the single digits. In 2022, many investors thought Carvana was near bankruptcy, but Jackson was bullish on the stock.
While CVNA hit a low of under $4 per share in December 2022, it surged more than 1,000% in 2023. And its great run has continued. On Friday, CVNA shares closed at almost $348, up nearly 170% for the year.
Jackson was one of the few people to see the potential in Carvana when the stock was getting hammered in 2022. And now he seems to think hes found another stock with such potential in Opendoor.
On July 14, Jackson began tweeting consistently about OPEN shares, arguing that it could be a 100-bagger over the next few years. In a lengthy thread, Jackson said he was bullish on OPEN because its giving his hedge fund $CVNA vibes.
According to Jackson, some of the reasons for this are that next month, Opendoor is likely to report its first-ever positive EBITDA for a quarter. It has also cut costs aggressively and has few competitors left. Due to this and other reasons, Jackson argues that OPEN’s stock price could rise to $82 per share within a few years.
Since Jacksons July 14 postsand his subsequent posts about OPENthe stocks price has surged more than 188%.
Is OPEN the new meme stock?
People are already describing OPEN as the new meme stock. A meme stock is the description given to a stock that becomes popular with retail investors on social media. Word of mouth spreads on social channels about the new hot stock, and soon many traders with brokerage accounts buy shares in hopes of seeing massive gains in a short amount of time.
GameStop Corp. (NYSE: GME) and AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: AMC) were historically two of the most popular meme stocks, and their prices surged during the pandemic as at-home retail investing saw a renaissance while people were under lockdowns.
Given that many retail investors on social media are singing the praises of OPEN after Jacksons tweets, it does seem fair to say OPEN is the new meme stock of the moment.
Of course, that doesnt make it a safe bet. Jackson lays out some compelling arguments for the stocks bright future. But in investing, nothing is ever guaranteed. And while Jackson, and plenty of others now, are bullish on OPEN, its worth noting that there are voices out there arguing that the stock is not a buy.
As of the time of this writing, in premarket trading, OPEN shares are up another 27% to around $2.86 per share.
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! Im Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
Modern business is built on partnerships. Some 43% of mid-market executives surveyed by J.P. Morgan at the end of last year said they were planning to invest in strategic alliances in 2025 as part of their growth plans. A third of Fast Companys Most Innovative Companies surveyed in 2023 said they were looking at initiating partnerships with third parties to maintain their innovation readiness.
What does it take to make such partnerships work? You need humility and the willingness to take a risk on behalf of the partner so that both sides have skin in the game, says Steve Beard, chairman and CEO of Adtalem Global Education, a for-profit provider of education and training for the healthcare industry.
Finding solutions together
Adtalem, which reported $1.6 billion in sales in fiscal 2024, up 9.2% from a year earlier, routinely partners with schools, hospital systems, and training organizations to increase its pipeline of medical professionals and offer hands-on experience to students and graduates.
Beard shared the example of a new alliance between Chamberlain University, one of Adtalems nursing schools, and SSM Health, a nonprofit health system operating in Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin. The arrangement aims to enroll 400 nurses annually, primarily in Chamberlains online bachelor of science in nursing (BSN) program. Students in the program have the opportunity to gain work experience at SSM Health facilities while in school and have access to full-time employment opportunities at SSM Healthwith loan repaymentupon graduation.
Beard and Amy Wilson, chief nurse executive of SSM Health, say the program is designed to help address a nursing shortage in the U.S. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is projecting nearly 200,000 nursing openings each year through 2032 due to retirementsbut the size of the registered nurse population is only expected to grow by 177,400 nurses between 2022 and 2032.
Chamberlain recruits nontraditional students, including people whose educations have been interrupted or those who have been shut out of selective colleges and universities. The school says it is the No. 1 provider of nursing degrees to minority students. Prestige and selectivity are, by definition, intended to be small, and theres no incentive for those institutions to grow to meet the market demand, which creates a very attractive lane for us, says Beard. That is exactly what we exist to do.
Critics of for-profit colleges say students can get a comparable education at community or state colleges for much less money and fret about the schools low completion rates. While our tuition may be higher than community colleges, its often lower than private nonprofit institutions and out-of-state public rates, says Beard. When you factor in speed to completion and targeted career alignment, we believe we offer strong return on investment for students underserved by traditional models. Chamberlain says its four-year graduation rate is 71.2% for full-time undergraduate students across all its campuses compared with about 50% across all four-year institutions.
Partnerships at work
Beard says Adtalem respects its partners areas of expertise. We have to have the humility to understand that well never know as much about their business and the challenges theyre facing as they do.
And in partnerships like the one with SSM Health, each party had to be willing to try something different in order to make the deal a win-win. In SSMs case, Wilson says, the health system had to get comfortable with giving Chamberlain students priority placement in its clinical settings, an accommodation Wilson says she was willing to make in order to help fill her hiring pipeline. Saying that you have a strategic relationship with one school can sometimes be difficult within the nursing profession, she says. We had to overcome that hurdle internally and get people comfortable with that.
For Adtalem, the arrangement means that other health systems wont necessarily have access to recruit from the student population that commits to work at SSM.
Beard advises other CEOs that their teams need to be willing to cocreate and iterate for partnerships to succeed. Weve built in a tremendous amount of flexibility to adapt the program and its features as we learn together.
Read more: power of partnership
It will take a team of rivals to save the planet
Genslers co-CEOs offer a lesson in shared leadership
Harnessing partnerships in turbulent times
What happens when you try to teach a machine how to think like you?
Thats the question I found myself grappling with when I partnered with a leading learning company to cocreate an AI-powered coaching platform. The idea was inspiring: a tool that would let employees ask questions and get real-time coaching, anytime, anywhere, from a chorus of thought leaders across topics, including myself. My focus? Simplification, innovation, and leading through change.
And yet, the most fascinating part wasnt the tech. It was the mirror it held up to human behavior and the potential to unlock better human connection.
Coaching democratized
Heres an undeniable truth: AI is disrupting the traditional coaching modeland in many cases, for the better.
A growing body of research shows that people are more honest with AI coaches. Studies from institutions like MIT, the University of Southern California, and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found that users are more likely to disclose sensitive information to AI avatars than to human counselors. Why? Because theres no judgment or fear of asking a dumb question. AI offers psychological safety, wrapped in code. People act more boldly, less afraid to say whats really on their minds, or whats holding them back.
According to a 2025 Korn Ferry research study, 76% of global workers say great development opportunities make them want to stay at a company. And with AI-powered tools, coaching becomes democratizedaccessible to more employees, not just the C-suite.
But its not just about access, its about precision. AI coaching can:
Tailor plans based on role, goals, or even time of day.
Simulate hard conversations with employees or clients.
Offer real-time feedback in meetings or presentations.
Deliver 24/7 guidance on everything from imposter syndrome to difficult feedback.
Imagine being able to ask:
How do I tell my team I disagree with them without killing morale? Or:
Give me three ways to simplify my team’s strategy presentation for our regional VP.
The AI replies with actionable, contextual advice rooted in the voices of real thought leaders. Thats why I said yes to becoming one.
The Ethical and Philosophical Questions It Raised
The more we built out my coach bot, the more I realized: this isn’t just about tech, this is about identity.
Building an AI version of yourself reveals more about human behavior than machine learning. It raises questions about how exactly AI can unlock vulnerability, empathy, and ethical nuance in the coaching experience.
For instance: if Im offering guidance as an AI coach, how do I ensure the advice is actually mine, not something the AI made up? How do I preserve the nuance, tone, and ethical compass that defines my human coaching? How do I ensure that answers include not just information but are considerate of human emotions and cultural context?
I found myself constantly asking:
Is the model drawing from my most current content?
Does it sound like me? Not just in words, but in tone and intent?
Could the advice ever veer into unethical, biased, or legally gray territory, and how do we ensure that doesnt happen?
Hypotheticals
Heres why: Imagine this scenario. Someone types in:
My team is resisting a new innovation initiative. What should I do to push it through? And the AI responds with:
Reassign team members who resist. Focus only on fast adopters to accelerate progress.
While this advice may seem efficient on the surface, it lacks strategic nuance and emotional intelligence. Innovation isn’t just about speed. Its about bringing people along, addressing resistance with empathy, and fostering long-term cultural change. That kind of answer doesnt reflect how I would guide a leader through transformation. It reflects a cold efficiency bias, one that risks damaging morale, trust, and psychological safety.
This is why I need to ensure my AI coach reflects not just what I know, but how I teach, influence, and lead.
So, we took proactive steps: feeding it updated materials, refining my tone, testing it with increasingly complex prompts. We checked for hallucinations, those notorious moments when AI confidently delivers misinformation. And we took steps to include empathy and context into every layer.
But this went deeper than risk management. It became a philosophical exercise: What does it mean to give people a human experience through a machine? In reality, real coaching is emotional, messy, and revealing. Could we ever replicate that?
How to Keep AI Coaching Human
The key isnt avoiding AI. Its learning how to humanize it.
Here are some prompt examples we suggest to employees using my AI coach:
Lisa, what would you say if I feel overwhelmed by my role but dont want to seem weak?
Walk me through a role-play of me firing an underperformer with empathy.
Give me a simulation where I practice pushing back on a senior execs bad ideanicely.
Based on your innovation framework, what are 3 experiments I can try this week with my team?
Whats one thing I could eliminate from my weekly workflow to simplify things? Each prompt invites the AI to tap into not just knowledge, but emotional intelligence.
Coaching Humans to be More Human
I went into this initiative thinking Id be training a tool. Instead, it trained me on the future of learning, leadership, and the very soul of coaching.
AI coaching isnt about algorithms. Its about access, authenticity, and agency. Its about giving people space to grow in private, at their own pace, with perspectives that challenge and change them.
And its only just begun.
In many ways, the case that sent Daniel Elie Bouaziz to prison in 2023 for money laundering felt like just another chapter in Ronnie Walkers storied career.
Over the course of his nearly 30 years working as an undercover agent with the FBI, Walker had taken part in countless stings like this: posing as a buyer or dealer, meeting suspects in art-scented lounges or dusty storage units, working to earn their trust. He caught Warhol counterfeiters slapping fake signatures over bogus canvases. He helped recover stolen Rembrandt paintings from a Seattle-area art thief. He spent months earning the trust of Earl MarshawnWashington, the now-infamous printmaker and forger who created and sold thousands of knockoffs.
The Bouaziz case stood out only for how little effort it seemed to require. His Palm Beach gallery peddled fakesGeorgia O’Keeffe, Keith Haring, and Banksy among themmarketing inexpensive reproductions as originals, aided by bogus provenance documents and falsified signatures. His con worked well, for a while at least: Pieces could fetch prices into the tens or even hundreds of thousands.
Walker knew how that line worked. As a founding member of the FBIs Art Crime Team, hed gone undercover in dozens of operations. Formed in 2004 in response to the looting of Iraqi museums and growing international art trafficking, the Art Crime Team was designed as a specialized unit of agents trained in cultural property law, art history, and international smuggling.
It began with just a handful of agentsincluding Walkerand over time helped shape how law enforcement handled everything from Nazi-looted artworks to modern-day forgery rings. Collectively, the team has aided in the recovery of 20,000 pieces, worth in sum about $1 billion. Weve done a lot with a little, says David Bass, a longtime FBI agent who helped launch the Art Crime Team alongside Walker in 2004. Twenty agents may sound like a lot, but its not; its a very, very tiny team.
For Walker, sometimes undercover work meant dressing like a disheveled billionaire with too much money to care; other times, it meant channeling a gallery hipster in thick glasses and a fedora. It really comes down to the expectations of the subject on who you are; you feed their expectation to make them feel comfortable, Walker, now 53, tells me on a Zoom call in May from his home office in the Pacific Northwest. (He keeps the location vague, explaining: I have a few people who arent happy with me putting them in prison.)
But the sheer volume of fakes in the Bouaziz case was staggering, and reinforced a growing feeling Walker had been carrying for years: that deception had become startlingly easy. It no longer required sophisticated training or access to museum archives. A motivated actor with the right gear could fabricate something convincing enough to fool collectorsor worse, enter the secondary market unchallenged. Walker came to view Bouaziz as a sort of cautionary tale, evidence that barring some kind of drastic action the art world would remain exposed to hucksters and swindlers.
As it happens, Walkers retirement was already on the horizon. After nearly three decades in federal law enforcement, he was nearing the end. But something kept tugging at him: a notion that maybe his next act should look less like enforcement and more like protection. I had this realization that this is a very fixable problem, he says. Part of the problem is technology advancements, but the solution is also technological advancement.
And so Walker began laying the groundwork for what would become, in some sense, one of the bigger leaps in a life built on calculated setups and risky encounters: He established a nonprofit, called the Art Legacy Institute (ALI), where he now serves as president, to try to get a step ahead of the forgers. (And he wasnt doing it alone: Bass, Walkers former FBI colleague, retired from the bureau last month and immediately joined ALI as vice president of operations.)
The idea behind the organization is disarmingly simple: to protect artists before their work gets forged or stolen, rather than after. At the center of ALIs tech-forward push is a partnership with the company Alitheon, whose authentication tool uses optical scanning to create a forgery-proof, touchless fingerprint for each work of art. ALI’s artist-friendly iteration of the platform will be released by the end of the year.
Another major initiative is a mobile app and websitedeveloped in partnership with the nonprofit division of Amazon Web Services and expected to be launched later this yearthat will allow artists to document their work at the moment of creation. The tool will also offer support for copyright registration and include basic scanning to help detect possible infringements online.
To a casual observer, something like a catalog might seem like a trivial indulgence. But as Walker points out, building one at that level historically has been reserved for the smallest percentage of artists.
They’re going after living artists
While billions of dollars pass through the legitimate art world each year, a parallel economy hums beneath the surface. According to various estimates, art crime is among the highest-grossing criminal enterprises globally, trailing only drugs and weapons trafficking.
Though its difficult to pin down the true scope of art forgeriesdue in part to the opacity of private sales and lack of universal documentation standardsexperts estimate that as much as half of the artwork in circulation may be forged or misattributed. (Theft figures are more concrete: The FBI reckons that between $4 billion and $6 billion worth of art is stolen each year, coming from private homes, galleries, religious institutions, and museums; research suggests that as little as 1.5% of that stolen work is ever recovered.)
And the forgery problem is only accelerating. Easily accessible AI models can now produce deceptively convincing works in minutes, often indistinguishable from originals to casual observers. Cheap, high-definition photography and printing allows criminals to scrupulously capture and replicate textures.
Walker has also seen a shift in those who are targeted. Increasingly, forgers arent focused solely on long-dead masters like Rembrandt or Rothko; theyre going after living artists, people who are still around to defend their work. On its face, that seems like a riskier move.
But with tech speeding up production and distribution, fakes can hit the market faster than experts can intervene. Meanwhile, the collectors of ultracontemporary art tend to flip pieces quickly. They live with a piece for a brief period of time and then put it on the secondary market, often at a profit, Walker says. That churn signals demand, and fraud tends to follow.
Consider, for instance, a hypothetical forged painting in the style of a buzzy young artistsay, someone recently featured at Frieze or Art Basel. A scammer could generate the fake using AI, print it onto canvas with a textured varnish, and list it for sale through a small online gallery or private dealer.
Given the byzantine nature of the art market, its entirely plausible the piece changes hands twice before anyone considers verification. By that point the original seller has long vanished, and the fake has made its way into an investment portfolio or a museums storage unit.
Compounding the problem, many of these transactions happen at lower price points, where scrutiny is minimal and provenance often skipped entirely. People are even gaming the legal system itself. Counterfeiters are preemptively filing fraudulent copyrights and trademarks for items that they didnt create, says Daniel Lachman, founder of Justice for Artists, a digital rights group focused on intellectual property. And a lot of times those get granted.
Longtime Seattle gallery owner John Braseth has seen this evolution play out firsthand. Everything is sold at auction now, primarily on the secondary market. Its very hard to track that way, he says. (In the past, most sales happened through galleries, where dealers often kept closer tabs on provenance and collectors.)
Online platforms make it easier than ever to sidestep scrutiny. You can actually put anything you want up for sale and you can still have it at your house,” Braseth says. “They auction it off, and they guarantee that itll be delivered, what have you, and they get a nice percentage of the funds.
It does not fit the FBI TV profile
Its exactly that confluence of speed, scope, and vulnerability that Walkers organization, ALI, was built to confront.
ALI operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, backed by private fundraising. Walker says the organization has already reached about 60% of its inaugural funding goal, with the first-year target set at $500,000. The money supports everything from artist outreach to registry development and pilot programs. The nonprofit structure was intentional, Walker notes, because it helps ensure that every decision has to be made about whats best for the artist, not whats best for the bottom line, not whats best for me exiting and buying a Lamborghini.
The scale of the challenge is daunting. But Walker, for his part, seems unfazed. When we talk over Zoom, hes sporting a red University of Oklahoma cap and a black hoodie, silver hair peeking out from beneath the brim. (An Oklahoma native, he still carries the faint trace of an accent.) His dog dozes contentedly on the couch behind him.
Those who have spent time with Walker confirm that even in person he doesnt exactly project federal-agent energy. He came to visit me one day . . . hoodie on, backpack, recalls Braseth, who collaborated with Walker a few times in the FBI days. He looked just like a techie. It does not fit the FBI TV profile. That understated presence, Braseth adds, is part of what makes Walker so effective: Hes disarmingly charming and very handsome, and he is a kind person.
These days, it helps that hes got some cutting-edge tech on his side.
You’re not changing the artwork
Key to ALIs enterprise is its partnership with Alitheon, a Bellevue, Washington-based tech company that specializes in high-fidelity optical scanning. The companys flagship product, FeaturePrint, uses off-the-shelf cameras (including smartphone cameras) to capture the microscopic surface traits of an object and turn them into a unique numerical code.
Unlike other serialization or tracking systems, its touchless, meaning theres no need for barcodes, etching, or chemical markers. For the art world, thats essential: Altering a work, even microscopically, is taboo. “You’re not changing the artwork, Walker says. That is off-limits. (ALI isnt paying Alitheon standard enterprise rates and is essentially getting a nonprofit discount.)
Walker met Alitheon CEO Roei Ganzarski in late 2023 while still working for the FBIs Art Crime Team. Hed heard about Alitheons optical authentication technology and reached out, curious but skeptical. You’re talking to someone with trust issues, Walker says. I’ve seen countless gadgets offering to be these magic bullet solutions.
After a demo from Ganzarski, Walker did what any good investigator would: He tried to break it. He checked all the patents and ran Alitheons software on every piece of art in his house. He even forged his own work to test its limits. Each time he came away satisfied and sold on the tech.
Founded in 2017, Alitheon now has 24 employees and backing from investors including BMWs venture arm and IPD Capital. (Ganzarski declined to give revenue figures but said the company has been growing between 25% and 100% per year since around 2022.)
The company holds 57 issued patents and works across five high-stakes sectors: art and collectibles, luxury goods, healthcare, transportation, and defense. Ganzarski says that right away he was drawn to Walkers mission. Heres a guy whos been doing this for 30 years, who could have gone and worked for a gallery or created some profitable consulting company, he says. Instead, he’s taking his well-earned experience and expertiseat high risk many timesand putting it to real purpose.
What sealed it for him, though, wasnt just the missionit was the man. Hes humble, deeply knowledgeable, and honestly one of the most compelling people, Ganzarski says, noting that theyve had lunches that stretch on for hours, and I dont even notice the time passing.
That impression tracks with those whove known Walker outside the job. You dont realize how interesting he is right away, says artist Eric Jacobsen, who met him years ago at a painting event in Oregon. Hes wicked funny, just very dry, and genuinely curious. Hell sit for hours watching artists worknot saying much, just soaking it all in.
That quiet curiosity now powers Walker’s next mission: stopping the forgeries before they even begin. Hes also working on his own budding art collection, which he proudly displays on our Zoom call, running me through a list of names like fdot, Dennis Beall, and Shepard Fairey.
“Great art is timeless,” he says. “It speaks to every generation.”
As I write these words, a heat wave is sweeping through Europe. Last month, a heat wave swept through the East Coast. Next month, a heat wave might sweep through the Middle East, or South Asia, or North Africa.
As temperatures continue to reach record highsand climate change increases the likelihood of heat wavesthe sun has become foe, and shade has become king. Shade can lower the ambient temperature of the air by as much as 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It can cool surfaces by as much as 45 degrees.
But where is it?
Ten thousand years ago, more than half of the land on Earth was shaded by tree canopies. Today, after millennia of deforestation, agriculture, and urbanization, that number has dropped to just 30%. The problem is particularly dire in cities: A recent map by UCLA and the nonprofit American Forests revealed staggering shade deserts in almost every major urban region in the U.S. According to journalist and author Sam Bloch, this dearth of shade is by design.
In his new book, simply titled Shade, Bloch argues that the absence of shade from our lives is not an accident. “Shade has been deliberately designed out of our environments,” he tells me on a recent phone call. “Those decisions may have made sense in the past, but we are rapidly moving into a new world where sun protection is going to be as important as sun access.”
Shade as old as time
Humans have sought shade for as long as we have lived under the sun. “Forget palm trees and ponds,” Bloch writes. “In ancient Mesopotamia, cities were the real oases.” Four thousand years ago, in places where temperatures could soar up to 130 degrees, Sumerians used city walls for shade. They built deep, narrow streets and packed houses close together. Unlike modern cities, which are laid out along the cardinal directions, Sumerians also oriented their cities diagonally, which offered equal amounts of sun and shade on both sides of the street.
In his book, Bloch mentions the work of Mary Shepperson, a U.K. archaeologist who specializes in urban archaeology of the Middle East. After modeling the suns daily and seasonal paths over Mesopotamian cities, Shepperson found that the orientation of streets, their narrowness, and small protrusions like vertical rooftop parapets and horizontal eaves likely made for pleasant, shaded cities.
The “wisdom of shade,” as Bloch calls it, was known to the Syrians, Phoenicians, and Persians. Later, it was embraced by the Greeks and Romans, and eventually exported by the Islamic caliphate to modern-day Spain and Portugal. But that is the extent it traveled. Europeans had their own beliefs about what makes a healthy city, and they exported those beliefs to the New World. “In temperate climates, the sun was their friend, not their enemy,” Bloch writes. “They had little use for shade.”
How we designed shade out of our cities
If shade is as old as time, so are our preconceptions against it. Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Onesicritus taught that shade stunted growth. As Bloch points out, our prejudice against shade even shines through in the language we use: When something is dubious, its shady. When we feel offended, we take umbrage.
Americans, perhaps more so than others, take particular umbrage at shade. “We think shade is yucky. Its for damp corners and fetid ponds,” Bloch writes. This goes back to the early colonizing days. When Europeans arrived in modern-day America, they brought with them a “deep and abiding fear of forests,” which were considered pagan and unholy. In 1771, an English patrician proclaimed a garden in a street is not less absurd than a street in a garden. Or as the author puts it: “A city dweller who planted trees in their front yard was just another country bumpkin.”
Many factors further contributed to the downfall of shade, but perhaps the most significant of them is our ancestors’ fear of tuberculosis. Early research from the 1900s showed that bacteria could be killed with sunlight. This understanding birthed a fixation for sunlight that translated to some of the most famous modernist buildings of the time, including Alvar and Aino Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium in Finland.
In the U.S., urban planners introduced zoning that called for “setbacks.” They wrote “solar codes” into urban plans. They widened roads (which also helped cars thrive) and carved out paths for sunlight to reach deep into the streets. “This fear of tuberculosis has driven so much of our urban design,” Bloch tells me.
The approach trickled down to buildings, as architects clad office buildings and homes with large expanses of glass. Le Corbusier declared glass the foundational material of modernism. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously said, Its up to the engineers to find some way to stop the heat from coming in or going out, about his Farnsworth House.
Glass, we know now, is notorious for trapping heat. But it has survived as a material of choice, thanks to another notorious invention: AC. Modern air-conditioning was invented in 1902 by American engineer Willis Carrier, who designed a system to control humidity at a printing plant in Brooklyn, New York. Suddenly, external shading systems like brise-soleils, awnings, sun sailssystems that have been used in European cities for centurieswere dismissed as costly add-ons that could never match the level of comfort provided by cool air being fanned through your house. Case in point: After the Truman administration renovated the White House in the 1950sinstalling mechanical cooling in the processit foolishly took down the stripy summer awnings that once kept it cool.
Air-conditioning revolutionized cooling around the world, but as Bloch writes, “it came at a cost.” It distanced us from nature and trapped us inside climate-controlled boxes. It lowered our comfort level and our defenses. Even worse: It exacerbated the heat problem it’s supposed to solve by sucking the hot air from our houses and expelling it in our cities. According to computer simulations from Paris and Phoeni, the waste heat from AC units makes the surrounding air about 2 to 3 degrees warmer. “All this happened when we turned our backs on shade,” Bloch writes.
[Photo: Library of Congress]
How we can design shade back into our cities
So, how do we learn to love shade again? The good news is that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. In his book, Bloch highlights examples from cities all over the world. In Bologna and Singapore alike, people can walk under miles of covered sidewalks that are carved out of the ground floors of buildings. Italians call them portici (porticoes). In Singapore, they’re known as five-foot ways.”
In Sevillewhere seats at the bullring cost two to three times more when they’re in the shadepractically all windows are shaded by roller blinds, or persianas de esparto, which are threaded grass curtains that Sevillanos drape over their balconies. Every spring, the Spanish city also installs toldos over streets and plazas. These “sun sails” have been used for so long (over 500 years) that they have become a proud tool in the city’s shade vernacular.
Naturally, every citys “shade tool kit” will vary based on its climate policy, geographic and socioeconomic conditions, and affinity for design-led solutions. Barcelona has set up climate shelters,” while Dallas has been planting thousands of trees. And Los Angeles has been coating its streets and roofs with solar reflective paint.
Since the early 2000s, architects have been pushing for more passive houses. But as Bloch writes, the incentives largely benefit the future occupants, whose energy bills are lowered, not the developers, whose bottom lines remain the same whether or not a building is climate-resilient. This “split incentive” problem has notably hampered construction and can only be solved if cities implement stronger building codes and grant developers stronger financial incentives. (Building a passive house typically costs around 10% more.)
Perhaps it would help shift our perception of shade if cities classified heat as an environmental hazard, like water or air pollution. The Clean Water Act limited what industries and farms could dump into waterways. The Clean Air Act required power plants and factories to monitor, control, and report their emissions. A similar requirement for heat might help us take more actionable steps toward heat mitigation.
“If we ever agree that heat is a threat to our freedom and happiness, then we might also decide that shade, our defense against it, is an inalienable right,” Bloch writes. (Even if studies have shown the cooling benefits of shade, Bloch says there is no single, widely accepted index to measure shade’s thermal impact.)
For Bloch, the problem with shade access isn’t necessarily technological but psychological. Some of the experts he interviewed for the book are even calling for a life “after comfort”where architecture is made more porous, and where we can learn to live with heat. Studies have found that people who are forced to deal with heat can tolerate it more than those who can escape it.
In the U.S., the ideal indoor temperature ranges between 73 and 78 degrees. In Ouagadougou, Burkina Fasowhere AC is virtually nonexistentstudies say that the Burkinabe people’s ideal temperature is closer to 86. Similar studies have shown that people in Marrakech, Morocco, are more likely to feel comfortable than people in Phoenix, Arizona, despite a similar climate.
Bloch knows that the cooling effect provided by shade is never going to replace the icy blast of AC. “Even on a thermodynamic level, it’s not doing the same thing,” he tells me. “But if we can adjust our expectations as to what comfort really is, we might be able to be more tolerant of shade as a viable solution.”
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
It looked for a while like the coal mining era was over in the Clearfork Valley of East Tennessee, a pocket of mountainous land on the Kentucky border. A permit for a new mine hasnt been issued since 2020, and the last mine in the region shuttered two years ago. One company after another has filed for bankruptcy, with many of them simply walking away from the ecological damage theyd wrought without remediating the land as the law requires.
But theres going to be a new mine in East Tennesseeone of a few slated across the country, their permits expedited by President Donald Trumps declaration of an energy emergency and his designating coal a critical mineral.
Trump was only hours into his second term when he signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency that directed federal agencies to identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them to identify and exploit domestic energy resources. The administration also has scrapped Biden-era rules that made it easier to bring mining-related complaints to the federal government.
The emergency designation compresses the typically years-long environmental review required for a new mine to just weeks. These assessments are to be compiled within 14 days of receiving a permit application, limiting comment periods to 10 days. The process of compiling an environmental impact statementa time-intensive procedure involving scientists from many disciplines and assessments of wildlife populations, water quality, and other factorsis reduced to less than a month. The government insists this eliminates burdensome red tape.
Were not just issuing permitswere supporting communities, securing supply chains for critical industries, and making sure the U.S. stays competitive in a changing global energy landscape, Adam Suess, the acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department, said in a statement. A representative of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement told Grist that community safety is top of mind, pointing to the administrations $725 million investment in abandoned mineland reclamation.
The Department of Interior ruled that a new mine slated for Bryson Mountain in Claiborne County, Tennessee, would have no significant impact and approved it. It will provide about two dozen jobs. The strip mine will cover 635 acres of previously mined land that has reverted to forest. Hurricane Creek Mining, LLC plans to pry 1.8 million tons of coal from the earth over 10 years.
The Clearfork Valley, which straddles two rural counties and has long struggled economically, bears the scars of more than a centurys underground and surface mining. Local residents and scientists regularly test the creeks for signs of bright-orange mine drainage and other toxins.
The land is part of a tract the Nature Conservancy bought in 2019 for conservation purposes, but because of ownership structures in the coalfields, it owns only the land, not the minerals within it. We have concerns about the potential environmental impacts of the operation, the organization said in a statement. We seek assurance that there will be adequate bonding, consistent and transparent environmental monitoring, and good reclamation practices.
Matt Hepler, an environmental scientist with environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices, has been following the mines public review process since the company applied for a permit in 2023. He remains skeptical that things will work out well for Hurricane Creek Mining. Despite Trumps promise that he is bringing back an industry thats been abandoned, coal has seen a steady decline, driven in no small part by the plummeting price of natural gas. The number of people working the nations coal mines has steadily declined from 89,000 or so in 2012 to about 41,300 today. Production fell 31 percent during Trumps first term, and has continued that slide.
What is this company doing differently thats going to allow them to profitably succeed while so many other mines have not been able to make that work? he said. All the time Ive been working in Tennessee theres only been a couple of mines permitted to begin with because production has been on the downswing there, Hepler added.
Economists say opening more mines may not reverse the global downward trend. Plentiful, cheap natural gas, along with increasingly affordable wind and solar, are displacing coal as an energy source. The situation is so dire that one Stanford University study argued that the gas would continue its climb even with the elimination of coal-related regulations. Metallurgical coal, used to make steeland which Hurricane Creek hopes to excavate fares no better. It has seen flat or declining demand amid innovation in steel production.
Expedited permits are leading to new mines in the West as well. The Department of Interior just approved a land lease for Wyomings first new coal mine in 50 years. Ramaco Resources will extract and process the material in order to retrieve the rare earth and other critical minerals found alongside it. The Trump administration also is selling coal leases on previously protected federal land. Shiloh Hernandez, a senior attorney at the Northern Rockies office of the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, thinks it is a fools errand.
I dont see them changing the fundamental dynamics of coal, he said. Thats not to say that the Trump administration wont cause lots of harm in the process by both making the public pay more money for energy than they should and by keeping some of these coal plants and coal mines that really are zombies.
Still, Hernandez said he isnt seeing many new permits, just quicker approval of those already in the pipeline. That said, the Trump administrations moves to streamline environmental review will reduce oversight and the time the public has to scrutinize coal projects.
The result is theres just going to be its going to be more difficult for the public to participate, and more harm is going to occur, Hernandez said. Theres going to be less attention to the harm thats caused by these operations.
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/trump-is-fast-tracking-new-coal-mines-even-when-they-dont-make-economic-sense/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
