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Email: Its one of the more evil of the necessary evils. We all spend a significant chunk of our days wading through messages, to the point that it can feel like a never-ending task. Save us, artificial intelligence! The good news: AI is revolutionizing how we interact with our email. And the best part? Many AI email tools offer free tiers that are actually useful. If you’re looking to supercharge your Gmail experience, reclaim your time, and take a bit of work out of your workflow, look no further. Compose AI: Effortless email drafting Ah, the dreaded blank email draft. Thanks to AI, its days are fortunately numbered. The Compose AI extension integrates directly into your Gmail compose window and offers intelligent suggestions as you type. Simply provide a few keywords or a brief description of what you want to say, and watch the AI craft a well-written draft for you. Theres also a super handy one-click email-reply feature, which suggests quick replies based on the context of messages you receive. The free version offers 1,500 AI-generated words per month, while premium plans unlock additional generations and access to more advanced writing styles. Paid plans start around $10 per month. InboxPurge: Cut the clutter An overflowing inbox can be a needless source of stress, but AI-powered extensions are stepping in to help you regain control. InboxPurge offers a free plan focused on helping you declutter your Gmail. It uses AI to identify and categorize emails and allows you to quickly unsubscribe from identified newsletters and delete or archive entire categories of messages. InboxPurge offers 20 free cleanup actions each month, while premium plans start at $4 per month and unlock more advanced automation features. Theres also a onetime $5 plan that unlocks all features for a weekperfect for periodic binge-decluttering sessions. Mailmeteor: Enhance email productivity Mailmeteor is primarily a mail-merge tool, with a free plan that offers features for boosting your email productivity and organization. Use it to send follow-up emails at the perfect time, even if you’re not online. With the free plan, you can run three campaigns concurrently and send 50 personalized emails each day to multiple recipients. Paid plans start at $5 per month and unlock higher sending limits for mail merge, more detailed tracking features, the ability to personalize emails with more variables, and integrations with other tools. Concisely: Summarize emails automatically Don’t have time to read every lengthy email in detail? Neither does anybody else. Thats why AI-powered summarization tools are such lifesavers. The free Concisely extension can quickly analyze long emails and provide you with a brief overview of the key points, boiled down to a single sentence. Its especially useful for newsletters, reports, or lengthy discussions where you only need the core information. The extension is free at the moment, with no paid plans available. Grammarly: Watch your tone AI-powered tone analysis extensions can help you communicate more effectively. Grammarly has a free version that analyzes the tone of your messages to let you know how you might sound to the person on the other end. There are lso built-in grammar-checking features, of course, which help you come across more clearly and professionally to your recipients. The free version of Grammarly offers grammar, spelling, and punctuation checks, as well as basic tone detection, plus some limited AI text generation. Paid plans start at $12 per month and unlock more advanced tone suggestions, clarity-focused rewrites, vocabulary enhancement suggestions, and plagiarism detection.
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In the UK, it is currently Dying Matters Awareness Week. Griefand the impact of death and lossis something that nearly all of us will experience at some point in our working lives. Despite this, many workplaces are not equipped to have these tricky conversations and are unsure how to best support their staff with their mental well-being while grieving. At This Can Happen, we conducted an in-depth, two-stage research project into how workplaces are supporting employees with griefthe Grief In The Workplace Reportand the findings are eye-opening. We found that 87% of respondents with lived experience felt grief had impacted their mental well-being, yet 46% felt that they did not have enough time to grieve and 51% did not feel supported by their organization. This is a critical issue for managers and leaders in the workplace that is impacting not only employee mental well-being, but also the ability for staff to perform at work. In fact, 76% said since returning to work they had not received any communications from managers or leadership in relation to their grief, and 76% also said they felt their loss had affected their performance in their immediate return to work. So, how can employers help? Here are five ways. 1. Break the taboo in speaking about grief and bereavement These conversations should be led from the top-down to tackle stigma and build psychological safety in the workplace. This is the responsibility of both leadership and line managers. For example, if members of leadership have lived experience of grief and loss, consider how personal storytelling from these individuals could have a transformative impact on staff likelihood to share their own challenges. This could take the form of an internal blog, a panel discussion, or even an update in a company meeting. Line managers can then pick up on this note and continue these conversations in catch-ups with line reports, encouraging open and honest conversation about mental well-being to build trust, so that employees know that they can immediately go to their manager when they need support. 2. Put the right support in place Providing the right resourcesand ensuring that staff know where to find themis crucial. Our research shows that this is currently an area in which businesses are struggling, with 37% of respondents unsure about what resources were currently available to support them with grief. Make sure that you have a comprehensive Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) in place, which is a confidential service that supports staffand sometimes their family memberswith their health, including counseling, referrals, and expert advice. Consider creating worksheets with tips and advice about living through bereavement, along with helpful links that employees might want to explore for further reading or conversations. Finally, ensure that line managers are fully trained in having these conversations in the workplace, and understanding what resources your organization has in place, so that they can signpost staff correctly and efficiently. 3. Be open, empathetic, and human in your approach This might sound like an obvious one, but its not; so many leaders and managers approach grief and bereavement from a policy-led perspective, or avoid the conversation altogether because they are afraid of saying what could be perceived as the “wrong thing.” Some 64% of respondents in our research had not heard their managers talking openly about bereavement. Take the time to understand what employees are thinking and feeling in terms of their grief, and what they need right nowkeeping in mind that grief is not one linear path forward, but rather a journey thats filled with peaks and troughs over time. This can be heightened around key moments such as anniversaries and birthdays. Keep the lines of communication open to understand what employees need at any given moment, and how you as an employer can really make a tangible impact in the support you offer. 4. Give employees experiencing grief both space and flexibility at work Make sure employees who have uttered a loss know that you as an employer or line manager are there for them to speak to if they need it, but also give them the time and space to process their grief as needed. As much as you can within your workplace and industry, offer flexible working arrangements to bereaved staff. The thought of going into the office following a bereavement can sometimes be an overwhelming prospect; try to understand the impacts of grief in the short-, medium- and long-term, and understand where staff might benefit from flexible working arrangements. 5. Consider how you can provide ongoing support For example, if resources allow, consider meeting with a psychologist to explain how to set up bereavement support, and ensure that this is baked into the heart of an organization, rather than sitting solely in a policy. From here, speak to staff and understand if theres anything further that they would like to set up from a grassroots perspective. A lot of powerful work that we have seen in this space has been created and run organically by employeeslunch-and-learn sessions on lived experience with grief or quarterly drop-in “grief cafés,” for instance. These are all thought-starters on how best to support employees experiencing grief. The most important thing that you can do as a leader or manager is to be kind, empathetic and understanding to the challenges that these team members are facing, and listen with an open ear around how best to support them. Youll soon see the benefits of this, not just on employee mental well-being, but in terms of presenteeism and productivity as well.
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Getting an email in the mid-90s was kind of an eventsomewhere between hearing an unexpected knock at the door and walking into your own surprise party. The white-hot novelty of electronic mail is preserved in amber by a ridiculous 1994 film: reverse sexual-harassment thriller Disclosure. It opens with a little girl perusing what was once known as a family computer before casually shouting, Daaaad, you got an email! Her announcement is as much for the benefit of 1994 viewers as it is for Michael Douglass character, an executive in the Seattle tech scene, letting them know theyre witnessing their imminent future. [Photo: MGM] At that point, the majority of Americans had never seen an email. According to a contemporary Pew Research poll, 42% had never even heard of the internet. Still, the early 90s thrummed with the propulsive drum line of digital revolution. The internet had existed in more esoteric forms for ages, but now America Online had terraformed it for normies, and Netscapes landmark IPO in 1995 began fueling the frenzy of the dot-com boom. Things changed fast, and The Net and Hackers dragged online culture center stage. Released as summer bookends, The Net stars Sandra Bullock as a tech worker whose identity is stolen, while Hackers, featuring Angelina Jolie in her first major role, follows a squad of elite high school coders as they get caught up in a corporate conspiracy. Looking back now on the flag-planting internet movies of 1995, its incredible how well they predicted the possibilities and horrors on the horizon. Fast Company talked to the filmmakers behind both about all thats changed in the 30 years since. [Photo: Sony Pictures] Neither 90s movie was a blockbuster, exactly. The Net proved a modest success, earning $110 million worldwide and spawning a short-lived TV adaptation a few years later, while Hackers flopped, making back less than half of its reported $20 million budget. Both gained long tails of notoriety and cult-classic status, however, in part for having depicted the internet on-screen at the precise moment most filmgoers were discovering it at home. The concept of connectivity had, of course, graced movie theaters before. Matthew Broderick plays a crafty teen who tweaks his high school computer system from home in both 1983s WarGames and again three years later in Ferris Buellers Day Off. A ragtag team of techies spends the entire run time of 1992s hacking romp, Sneakers, spelunking in a shadow realm of digital information. As technology rapidly evolved, though, and 90s news anchors began talking about chat rooms and using terms like cyberspace, it had to evolve in pop culture as well. [Photo: TriStar Pictures] Several studio releases from 1995 were lumped together as internet movies, with critics cross-referencing them in reviews. Among them were Virtuosity, in which Russell Crowe plays a computer-generated killer, and Johnny Mnemonic, which is mostly remembered as the cyberpunk action flick Keanu Reeves made before The Matrix. Both are set in the speculative sci-fi future1999 for Virtuosity, 2021 for Johnny Mnemonicwhile paranoid thriller The Net and teen comedy Hackers are dialed into reality on the ground and online. At that point, no one had yet to really make a movie that was anywhere in that world, says Jeff Kleeman, the executive producer who oversaw the development of Hackers. Part of the reason I was excited about it was I felt like, for some reason, nobody is doing this. And I just thought, somebody ultimately is going to do this and I hope it’s me.” “It was slow, and then very fast” Before making Hackers, Kleeman didnt quite understand all the hype about the internet. He could easily grasp its significance for global businesses and governments, but on a personal level, he hadnt found many use cases. Still, he had absolute faith in the allure of a project about computer-savvy teenagers making digital mayhem. As he learned from Secret Service agents while researching the movie, teenagers at the time understood the internet better than anybody. Kleeman shepherded Hackers practically from its inception. It started when a friend, an artist named Rafael Moreau, confided that hed lately been tagging along with an elite hacking crew known as the Legion of Doom, and he was thinking of writing a movie based on them. Kleeman was skeptical (film executives generally do not want to field pitches from novice writer pals), but he agreed to take a look at the screenplay, should one ever materialize. He was blown away by what Moreau eventually delivered. The first draft of Hackers had a technical authenticity absorbed from its primary sources, and it pulsed with kinetic energy. Equally impressive, the dialogue read like it came from actual human teenagers. Kleeman first attempted to put the film into production at Francis Ford Copolas American Zoetrope before succeeding years later at United Artists. Meanwhile, the film that would come to be called The Net originally had very little to do with going online. It started instead as a project about résumé-tampering. Producer Irwin Winkler had read a buzzy spec script called The Game, which David Fincher would go on to direct, and wanted to meet its writers. The project he had in mind for them centered on a woman who hires a hacker to fake her résumé so she can land a job at a major advertising firm, only to end up with the hacker becoming obsessed with her. (Fatal Attraction with some glimmerings of high-tech in the background is how one of The Nets writers, Mike Ferris, describes it.) The in-demand duo took on the gig, executives approved their outline, and they churned out a draft. Nobody involved with the project was impressed by what they turned in, including the scribes themselves. By the time they embarked on the next draft, though, writer John Brancato had read a book on the topic of identity theft, and it sparked some ideas. It was a book about the possibility of a digital shadow and how the world could fuck with it, Brancato says. And that seemed like an interesting thing. The writing pair seized on a scene that took place near the end of their first draftwhen the hacker starts erasing the protagonists credit history and banking dataand decided to make it the engine of the movie. The story would now focus on a computer expert whose entire life is being expunged online, forcing her to figure out why and reclaim her identity. The executives were thrilled. Their résumé-tampering project had morphed into a movie steeped in the technology that was defining the era in real time. During production is when more of the hype about the internet really started rolling out, Brancato says. The awareness of it was slow, and then very fast. The most infamous delivery order in film history While Disclosure trumpeted the glorious future of normalized email the previous year, Hackers and The Net showed 90s viewers what else might be possible online. During an early scene in Hackers, Jonny Lee Millers character, Dade Murphy, digitally breaks into a TV station, preempting a right-wing talk show to put on an episode of The Outer Limits. Through a 2025 lens, it seems bizarre that hed even think to do such a thing. Anyone wanting to watch The Outer Limits, or any TV show ever, can now easily do so with minimal keystrokes. To the average viewer in the 90s, however, what Murphy does is essentially sorcery. The Net has some similarly dated 90s tech-flexing. Its opening moments follow systems analyst Angela Bennett, played by Bullock, as she goes about a flurry of online activity. Viewers watch her talk to some pals in a chat room (ooh!), purchase plane tickets right from her computer (ahh!), and in perhaps the most infamous food delivery in film history, order pizza online. Although it was considered state-of-the-art in a pre-Dominos Pizza Tracker era, this scene quickly curdles into kitsch. I’m sure any kid watching now would be like, Why are we looking at that? Ferris says of the moment. Other aspects of the films tech turned out to be more prescient. Bullocks character works on her laptop at the beach, prefiguring the remote-work eraeven if she does wonder aloud, Where can I hook up my modem? (Wi-Fi would not be invented for another three years.) Dial-up internet took 30 seconds to connect in 1995, but Bullocks character logs on at a speed much closer to present-day broadband internet. The quickness was meant to spare viewers from the full-length screeching sound of modems meeting up, according to Brancato, but some viewers still complained about the lack of realism. One thing thats aged well about both movies is what isnt in them: virtual reality. At the time, hype around VR ran parallel to internet evangelism in the mid-90s. Both technologies appeared on the verge of becoming equally ubiquitous in the American future. Hollywood had already called its shot, making VR central to the plot of several sci-fi films, including 1992s The Lawnmower Man, 1994s Brainscan, and 1995s Strange Days and Virtuosity. The worst offender may have been the more down-to-earth Disclosure, which somehow went all in on the idea of office workers donning VR headsets to find files within their computers. To their credit, The Net avoids VR entirely while only the try-hard villain in Hackers, played by Fisher Stevens, is briefly glimpsed wearing those gogglesand hes meant to look like a huge dork while doing so. Our whole lives are on the computer Beyond showcasing some technological possibilities newly on offer, the early internet movies of the 90s also flicked at the broader societal shifts they representedfor better and worse. Our whole lives are on the computer, Bullocks character says at one point in The Net. It might as well have been the tagline for the film. Although its since become self-evident, nascent online dwellers of the 90s may not have understood just how much sensitive data about them was floating around in the ether, let alone the fluid nature of that data and the real-world consequences attached to changing it. Bullocks character spends a large chunk of the movie trying to convince various authority figures shes actually systems analyst Angela Bennett, even though all online records now indicate shes hardened criminal Ruth Marx. This real-world editing is a far cry from Ferris Bueller changing the number of school absences hes incurred in a semester. It might be considered almost tame by todays standards, though, since it affects only one person. The Net seems to anticipate a catastrophic problem that has only metastasized over the past decade: the degradation of objective truth. In 2025, between AI deepfakes and other forms of digital disinformation, its now harder than ever to distinguish whats real from what isnt. That’s what was so scary about the entire thing, even back then, Brancato says. The more you consign reality to this machine, the more manipulable it is. Hackers, however, demonstrated the bright side of manipulating reality on- and offline. Although the film never addresses their sexuality explicitly, Matthew Lillards character, who goes by Cereal (as in Cereal Killer), and Renoly Santiagos character, who answers to Phreak, are bth stylized with a queer-coded, gender-fluid aesthetic. Lillards looklong, braided pigtails, eye makeup, and tight crop topswas especially audacious for a male high school student in a mainstream movie from 1995. As Kleeman confirms, these style choices are meant to underline the liberating quality of the internet; the way it thrust its users into a choose-your-own-adventure mode of identity. For the first time that I know of, in the history of humanity, if you were a high school kid, you could actually have a second life online, he says. And what you did with that identity in terms of gender, in terms of attitude or personality, was completely up for grabs. As for the paranoia around data privacy radiating off both 90s films, it now seems nearly as quaint as ordering pizza from Pizza.net. I would’ve been up in arms 10 or 15 years ago about Amazon or Apple listening through our devices, Ferris says. And now everyone’s just like, Well, yeah, sure they do. I mean, what are you gonna do? Throw away your phone? Throw away your computer?’ I’m not as outraged about that stuff as I feel like I should be. The escape you cant escape As much as the earliest internet movies seemed to peer into the future, the iPhones emergence is what rendered them hopelessly stuck in the past. Hackers and The Net present computers as rabbit holes, transporting users into a weird, wild online wonderland. Everything changed once a tiny, high-speed computer was suddenly within arms reach at all waking hours. The internet ceased being a mysterious place people sometimes visited, and instead became an omnipresent layer on top of the real world, no entry required. As much as Hackers made the internet feel dynamicdepicting it as a vivid cityscape of circuitry, with skyscraper-like database towersit was still a world that needed to be approached from a static location. Like all early internet movies, Hackers and The Net now suffer from the fact that a lot of their action features a person seated at a computer, typing really hard. Once most people had smartphones, filmmakers started to simply overlay a user interface on-screen. Characters could now move around physically as their online activity moved the plot forward. Of course, the invention of the iPhone may have hurt all movies, not just the retro internet ones from the 90s. Once most modern movie characters had instant access to all information in recorded history, it became too easy for them to solve juicy cinematic problems. They now either have to lose Wi-Fi access somehow, or go back in time. Perhaps the reason directors like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson seem to make only period pieces these days is so they can create movies devoid of the ever-present internet. While going online was once a tantalizing escape from reality, a lot of people now seem to fantasize instead about escaping from the internet. In that sense, The Net did accurately predict the future. It ends with Sandra Bullock literally going outside and touching grass.
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