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Bright and early on a recent Saturday morning, a line snaked around the block in Boston’s trendy Seaport District. People were patiently waiting to get their hands on PopUp Bagelssoft, steaming hot bagels designed to be torn and dipped directly into tubs of cream cheese or butter. PopUp Bagels wants to help Americans reimagine our relationship with this beloved breakfast food, and it’s well on its way to doing so. Today, it announces an ambitious expansion from its 13 stores on the East Coast to a fleet of 300 stores from coast to coast with a focus on hubs like Atlanta; Nashville; and Orlando, Florida. “We’re bringing our stores to places where people don’t necessarily think of themselves as ‘bagel people’,” says Adam Goldberg, PopUp Bagels’ founder. “We’re introducing bagels into their routines.” [Photo: Courtesy of PopUp Bagels] The company began as a pandemic hobby for Goldberg, a flood mitigation expert from Connecticut. In lockdown, Goldberg started baking. After trying his hand at sourdough bread, he moved on to bagels. With much tinkering, he developed a recipe for a bagel that had a softer, lighter texture than the dense bagels you find in New York. The bagels were so delicious friends and neighbors wanted to buy them by the dozen. Two years later, Goldberg began opening pop-up shops around New York City that attracted large crowds. To many people, PopUp Bagels offers a fun new take on bagels. Most bagel shops bake their goods in the morning, then toast them for customers. But PopUp Bagels are meant to be served fresh from the oven. They’re satisfying to rip apart, with a crisp exterior that provides contrast with the soft interior. At the Seaport District, people were scattered at picnic tables and benches, dipping their bagels directly into different flavored schmears. They can also be eaten cold in a more traditional way, by slicing them and slathering them with cream cheese and lox. Goldberg points out that the New York bagel has evolved over the years to become what it is. His bagels are actually reminiscent of those in New York shops from decades ago. “I’ve had so many New Yorkers tell me these bagels remind them of their childhood,” he says. “Back then, people lined up for hot bagels straight out of the oven, when they were at their peak performance.” Part of the reason bagels stopped being served this way is that it is logistically challenging to serve them hot at scale. Each store needs to predict demand, then bake them at steady rate that keeps pace with the line. PopUp has turned this process into an art with the help of Tory Bartlett, whom Goldberg appointed as CEO last November. Bartlett, who previously saw the expansion of Moe’s Southwest Grill to 600 locations, is familiar with scaling food businesses. [Photo: Courtesy of PopUp Bagels] Bartlett says that PopUp Bagels has streamlined its operations by exclusively selling bagels and coffee; it doesn’t make sandwiches. It also sells bagels in bundles of three, six, or a dozen, rather than one at a time. (Prices vary from $13 to $15 for a three pack and a schmear, depending on the market.) This allows them to better predict demand and generate revenue. “The unit economics of a business needs to be competitive as you scale,” says Bartlett. “It’s hard to make money by selling one or two bagels at $3 a pop. But selling a three pack protects the transaction.” Another reason the shops are profitable is that they don’t require a very large footprint. They just need a couple of ovens and a counter. Employees focus on quickly packing bags of bagels and schmears for customers. “We don’t need a lot of workers,” Bartlett says. “It’s a very streamlined operation.” [Photo: Courtesy of PopUp Bagels] The efficiency of the business convinced Bartlett that it was possible to quickly scale PopUp. In 2023, the company received an infusion of $8 million Series A funding, and last year, it took a Series B round, both of which were led by Stripes, a growth equity firm. They then began the process of franchising PopUp. Bartlett says they were extremely judicious about their partners. They’re only working with 15 franchisees, who will each run dozens of shops. “Thousands of people reached out to work with us, but we were extremely selective about whom we partnered with,” says Bartlett. “We picked people who are very passionate about this business.” To keep the taste of the bagels consistent, PopUp will make the dough and disseminate regionally. This will allow the franchisees to focus on the operations of delivering hot bagels quickly. If the other locations are any guide, there are likely to be long lines at all of these new stores, as people experience the novelty of the PopUp experience. But can the company keep up this level of inteest? Goldberg has high hopes. “Conveniently, we’ve landed on a product that has been a staple for many people throughout their entire lives,” he says. “The fact that we’re making something that people love anyway gives us a head start.
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E-Commerce
An intense dream can leave you in sweats and existential wonder. But just moments later, it evaporates from your mind to never be experienced again.The fleeting nature of dreams is why many keep a dream journal by their bedside to jot down the story before it disappears. The design studio Modem imagined another, more modern recording device. Called the Dream Recorder, its something like a bedside clock radio that uses AI to log your dreams and play them back to you.[Photo: Courtesy of Dream Recorder]When you wake up in the morning, you pick up the recorder and dictate what you remember of your dream. That ensuing transcript is sent to an AI video generator in the cloud, which creates a short video of it. Whats important to Modem is the ritual, done without an app or phone, is performed with an object dedicated to youa sort of generated visual diary of dreams.The thing that happens in your head isn’t going to be magically recreated by this video generator, says project contributor Mark Hinch. But it will hopefully capture the essence of the perhaps bizarre, weird, fragmented ideas of what happened in your head in the story.The dreams themselves are rendered through an intentionally ethereal aesthetic, at a low fi 240-by-240-pixel resolution thats meant to mirror the way we remember a dream, but also sidestep too much literality when things naturally dont match up. For instance, it blurs faces so that you never see someone who doesnt match up with what you remember. And rather than saving every dream you ever have forever, the Dream Recorder has been designed to flush its memory much like you doholding onto dreams for a week at most before overwriting them with whatever you dream up next.[Photo: Courtesy of Dream Recorder]Instead of selling the device, Modem shares the code on Github, along with all the items you need to buy to build it, ranging from a Raspberry Pi processor to USB microphones and capacitive touch sensors, via Amazon links. The body can be printed via an online service like Shapeways, and it all connects together without soldering. (Dreams cost between about a penny and 14 cents apiece, depending on the AI service you connect to render them.)But the Dream Recorder is admittedly less interesting as another product with features to be scrutinized than it is as a greater idea, and model of experimentation thats been lacking in the race toward AGI or building the next unicorn. With so much of the AI conversation focused on companions, productivity tools, or generative whatever, its easy to block out the more transcendental possibilities like being able to literally speak to whales. Modem cut through the productization of AI with a new dose of wonder. The Dream Recorder is fascinating not just for what it literally does, but as a rare, tangible beacon for a future that feels just within our grasp. (Dream recording inherently seems feasible within our electrical brain patterns and new AI capabilitiesso much so that Samsung filed a patent around a UI to control your dreams.) And much like a good sci-fi novel, it offers us an anchor to discuss and debate what it all means until a world of inventors actually leads us there.We hope to inspire the new generation coming of age in the age of intelligence . . . showing them that there’s a more mindful alternative to the very distracted world, says Bas van de Poel, cofounder of Modem. Perhaps using the engines of wisdom and mindfulness, and combining them with the logic of computer science, will be sort of like the ultimate dream, he says.
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E-Commerce
There have been five 1 in 1,000-year floods” this summer alone in the continental U.S. Heavy rains have poured over Texas, North Carolina, New Mexico, Illinois, and Florida over the past months causing streets to flood, homes to suffer irreparable damage, and people to lose their lives, loved ones, and pets. The death toll alone in Texas is at 135 as of July 25, as search efforts begin to end with only three more persons still missingthe result of over three weeks of searching. The 0.1% chance of these floods occurring makes their recent frequency alarming. This, coupled with other recent flash floods across major East Coast states like New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey and projected flash floods in central and southwestern U.S., makes for increasingly unsettling future forecasts. But are these weather patterns actually out of the normor are these floods becoming more common? How rare are 1,000-year floods? The phrase “1 in 1,000-year floods” comes from the fact that statistically, floods of that intensity and destruction are likely to happen once every 1,000 years (or a 0.1% likelihood). In 2024, there were 35 1,000-year floods across the U.S. and more than triple that number of 100-year floods, which have a statistical probability of happening 1% of the time. As far as I’m aware, if we tracked 1 in 1,000-year flood events over time, you wouldnt necessarily see a discernible increase in the number of events per year, says Allie Mazurek, a climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center. However, on a more general scale, we are expecting to see more extreme precipitation events in a warmer climate. An interactive map from the Colorado Climate Centerwhich is updated in near real-timetracks high precipitation events across the country. It combines past research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Atlas 14, a precipitation frequency data interface, to track high-precipitation events from 2002 to today in every state but Washington and Oregon (their data has yet to be updated on NOAA’s precipitation server). The data sets visually depict the number of 1,000-year heavy precipitation rates from 2002 to 2024. Each year follows similar patterns and frequency. But that doesnt mean rainfall and subsequent flooding isnt intensifying. Mazurek says there are two factors at play for these natural disasters: the frequency in which rain falls, and the intensityhow much it rains in a short amount of time. According to independent climate research group Climate Central, 88% of 144 locations across all nine climate regions in the U.S. have experienced a 15% increase in hourly rainfall intensity since 1970. Nearly two-thirds of those locations experienced at least a 10% increase in the same period. Mazurek says these trends come down to one primary effect of climate changehumidity. Rising temperatures create wet air Essentially, when you have warmer temperatures, that allows more water to exist in the vapor phase, and therefore, you get more water up in the atmosphere, Mazurek said. Then when you get a thunderstorm, there is more water available to it when it starts to precipitate and make rainfall. If youre adding more water to the atmosphere, you’ll get more rainfall as a result. Climate Central says that for every single Fahrenheit degree of Earth warming, the air holds 4% more moisture. Give that the Earths temperature has risen by roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the preindustrial era, there’s simply often more water available to create intense rainfall. So while the statistical probability of these floods occurring won’t change, their severity could get worse Mitigation and adaptation Flash floods arent expected to subside anytime soon this summer, with Accuweather meteorologists warning that additional flooding events can be expected due to this summers continued trend of high precipitation predictions. I think there’s definitely more work that all of us together could work on for extreme rainfall and flood events from meteorologists to emergency managers, Mazurek said. We all obviously have more work to do communicating those kinds of events and keeping people safe. I think that is still a very active area of research. However, with recent Trump administration changes to climate policy, emergency weather cuts at NOAA, and the dismantling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), these efforts may become more and more difficult, even as climate-driven natural disasters increase. “We expect kind of both sides of the extremes to get more extreme, Mazurek said. Heavy precipitation, extreme rains, flooding events, as well as drought. They each work off their own feedback.”
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E-Commerce
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