The post Detroit Evening Report: Two Detroit museums request support for millage appeared first on WDET 101.9 FM.

The post Detroit Evening Report: Anti-Muslim demonstration at Dearborn city council meeting, Mayor Hammoud’s response appeared first on WDET 101.9 FM.

The Peacock Room that left Detroit 100 years ago lives on today in Rachel Lutz’s boutique.

When looking for a name for her business,  Lutz referenced Detroit art collector Charles Lang Freer, who first brought the Peacock Room to Detroit as a part of his art collection.

Now the shop has evolved, making a name for itself with careful curation, styling expertise and intimate knowledge of the stories behind the pieces sold. The New York Times recently included The Peacock Room in a list of 25 favorite stores across the country.

Rachel Lutz joins the show to talk about Detroit history, what’s behind the success of her store and what lays ahead. 

The origins of The Peacock Room

In 1876 and 1877, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room was completed by artist James McNeill Whistler. 

It was originally a dining room in the London home of Frederick Richards Leyland, a wealthy shipowner from Liverpool, England. The room was to house Leyland’s priceless Chinese blue-and-white porcelain.

But while Leyland was away, the room became a fresh canvas. Whistler covered the ceiling with imitation gold leaf and peacock feathers, gilded the shelving, and painted peacocks across the shutters. 

Leyland became infuriated and the two men feuded over the work and the bill for the rest of their lives. It remained intact in Leyland’s home until his death in 1892.

Enter Charles Lang Freer, a Detroit railroad-car manufacturer and later a student of art. He was an avid collector of Asian and Middle Eastern art works and bought The Peacock Room in its entirety. Freer had it shipped to his home on East Ferry Avenue in 1904. It remained in Detroit until 1919. 

Related: Detroit’s cultural exports go beyond cars and techno—it’s the blueprint for free public museums

 

The room currently is on display in its entirety in the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art.

Detroit’s new Peacock Room

Rachel Lutz’ retail store The Peacock Room pays homage to Charles Lang Freer’s vision of collecting and the room Detroit lost. Located in The Park Shelton and Fisher buildings, since 2011, Lutz has curated her spaces like galleries. 

This fall, The Peacock Room Antiques Studio opens in the Park Shelton, which will be an event-driven destination for collecting, education and community.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and stream on-demand.

Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Support the podcasts you love.

One-of-a-kind podcasts from WDET bring you engaging conversations, news you need to know and stories you love to hear. Keep the conversations coming. Please make a gift today.

Give now »

More stories from The Metro

The Metro: After anti-Muslim protest, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud on belonging in America 

Sam Corey

Read More »

CONTAINER on The Metro: Chef Godwin’s Yum Village

Tia Graham

Read More »

The Metro: He came to WDET as an intern. He leaves as its news director

Robyn Vincent

Read More »

The post The Metro: A room that left Detroit 100 years ago lives on through Rachel Lutz’s Peacock Room appeared first on WDET 101.9 FM.

The post Detroit Evening Report: Survey finds that Michigan farmworkers fear ICE raids, deportation appeared first on WDET 101.9 FM.

BasBlue, an organization of women and non-binary individuals, celebrated a five year anniversary by focusing on their Future Founders and Future Leaders program.

According to the Detroit Regional Chambers, women were behind over 13% growth in business ownership from 2018 to 2023. BasBlue hopes to build on that foundation.

Ellen Gilchrist is the Chief Executive Officer of BasBlue. Gilchrist says finding solutions to problems begins with self determination. “When you find your passion, it pushes you forward,” Gilchrist says.

Fatoumata Sacko is an entrepreneur of Katii Café, a Malian inspired tea cart. Sacko is also a BasBlue Future Leaders member. She says networking with peers and learning from mentors motivated her to push forward with her business.

They join The Metro to discuss how the business ideas and professional networks of people should be nourished from an early age to increase odds of success.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and stream on-demand. Never miss an episode – subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts.

 

Support the podcasts you love.

One-of-a-kind podcasts from WDET bring you engaging conversations, news you need to know and stories you love to hear. Keep the conversations coming. Please make a gift today.

Give now »

More stories from The Metro

The Metro: What Abdul El-Sayed learned from being outspent 11-1

Robyn Vincent

Read More »

The Metro: A room that left Detroit 100 years ago lives on through Rachel Lutz’s Peacock Room

Tia Graham

Read More »

The Metro: Life on Detroit’s canals — and the fix that could end it

Robyn Vincent

Read More »

The post The Metro: BasBlue encourages women to pursue entrepreneurship in Detroit appeared first on WDET 101.9 FM.

For the first time, truckers running between Detroit and Windsor have a choice of bridges — and the two crossings are competing for that business.

A semi pays about half as much to cross the new Gordie Howe Bridge as it does the Ambassador: roughly $35, versus $75.

But that’s a toll — what you pay to drive across. It has nothing to do with what is in the truck, and what is in the truck is about to get expensive. 

On Aug. 19, an additional 50% tariff is set to hit a long list of Canadian goods, among them wine, dairy, cement and hockey sticks. In other words, a business might save $40 getting a load across the river, then pay thousands more for the load itself.

So who actually comes out ahead here?

Mark Lee runs The Lee Group, where he has advised small businesses in this region for nearly 20 years. He joins host Robyn Vincent to talk tolls, tariffs, Delray, and whether Canadian visitors are coming back.

Hear the full conversation using the media player above.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand. Never miss an episode — subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or NPR, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have thoughts? Email the show at metro@wdet.org

Support the podcasts you love.

One-of-a-kind podcasts from WDET bring you engaging conversations, news you need to know and stories you love to hear. Keep the conversations coming. Please make a gift today.

Give now »

More stories from The Metro

The Metro: A room that left Detroit 100 years ago lives on through Rachel Lutz’s Peacock Room

Tia Graham

Read More »

The Metro: Life on Detroit’s canals — and the fix that could end it

Robyn Vincent

Read More »

The Metro: What Republican candidates need to do to win Michigan

Sam Corey

Read More »

The post The Metro: The Gordie Howe Bridge is cheaper to cross. The cargo is about to cost more appeared first on WDET 101.9 FM.

The post Detroit Evening Report: Detroit invests in Homeless to Housed initiative appeared first on WDET 101.9 FM.

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST and PAUL WISEMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some two dozen states challenged President Donald Trump’s new global tariffs on Thursday, filing a lawsuit over import taxes he imposed after a stinging loss at the Supreme Court.

The Democratic attorneys general and governors in the lawsuit argue that Trump is overstepping his power with planned 15% tariffs on much of the world.

Trump has said the tariffs are essential to reduce America’s longstanding trade deficits. He imposed duties under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 after the Supreme Court struck down tariffs he imposed last year under an emergency powers law.

Section 122, which has never been invoked, allows the president to impose tariffs of up to 15%. They are limited to five months unless extended by Congress.

The lawsuit is led by attorneys general from Oregon, Arizona, California and New York.

“The focus right now should be on paying people back, not doubling down on illegal tariffs,” said Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield. The suit comes a day after a judge ruled t hat companies who paid tariffs under Trump’s old framework should get refunds.

The new suit argues that Trump can’t pivot to Section 122 because it was intended to be used only in specific, limited circumstances — not for sweeping import taxes. It also contends the tariffs will drive up costs for states, businesses and consumers.

Many of those states also successfully sued over Trump’s tariffs imposed under a different law: the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

Four days after the Supreme Court struck down his sweeping IEEPA tariffs Feb. 20, Trump invoked Section 122 to slap 10% tariffs on foreign goods. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant told CNBC on Wednesday that the administration would raise the levies to the 15% limit this week.

The Democratic states and other critics say the president can’t use Section 122 as a replacement for the defunct tariffs to combat the trade deficit.

The Section 122 provision is aimed at what it calls “fundamental international payments problems.’’ At issue is whether that wording covers trade deficits, the gap between what the U.S. sells other countries and what it buys from them.

Section 122 arose from the financial crises that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s when the U.S. dollar was tied to gold. Other countries were dumping dollars in exchange for gold at a set rate, risking a collapse of the U.S. currency and chaos in financial markets. But the dollar is no longer linked to gold, so critics say Section 122 is obsolete.

Awkwardly for Trump, his own Justice Department argued in a court filing last year that the president needed to invoke the emergency powers act because Section 122 did “not have any obvious application’’ in fighting trade deficits, which it called “conceptually distinct’’ from balance-of-payment issues.

Still, some legal analysts say the Trump administration has a stronger case this time.

“The legal reality is that courts will likely provide President Trump substantially more deference regarding Section 122 than they did to his previous tariffs under IEEPA,’’ Peter Harrell, visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Institute of International Economic Law, wrote in a commentary Wednesday.

The specialized Court of International Trade in New York, which will hear the states’ lawsuit, wrote last year in its own decision striking down the emergency-powers tariffs that Trump didn’t need them because Section 122 was available to combat trade deficits.

Trump does have other legal authorities he can use to impose tariffs, and some have already survived court tests. Duties that Trump imposed on Chinese imports during his first term under Section 301 of the same 1974 trade act are still in place.

Also joining the lawsuit are the attorneys general of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

By SUMAN NAISHADHAM and JOSEPH WILSON

MADRID (AP) — Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez again criticized the U.S. and Israel’s military actions in Iran, standing firm on Wednesday against trade threats from Washington and warning that the war in the Middle East risked “playing Russian roulette” with millions of lives.

“We are not going to be complicit in something that is bad for the world and is also contrary to our values ​​and interests, just out of fear of reprisals from someone,” Sánchez said in a televised address.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to end U.S. trade with Spain because of Spain’s refusal to allow the U.S. to use joint military bases in the country in its attacks on Iran.

Sánchez has called the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran an “unjustifiable” and “dangerous” military intervention.

It’s not clear how Trump would cut off trade with Spain, which is a member of the European Union. The EU negotiates trade on behalf of all its 27 member states.

On Wednesday, Sánchez expressed concern that the attacks on Iran could lead to another costly military quagmire in the Middle East, similar to the past American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“In short, the position of the government of Spain can be summarized in four words,” Sánchez said. “No to the war.”

The EU said Wednesday it would protect its interests and work to stabilize its trade relationship with the U.S, with which it struck a trade deal last year after months of economic uncertainty over Trump’s tariff blitz.

“We stand in full solidarity with all member states and all its citizens and, through our common trade policy, stand ready to act if necessary to safeguard EU interests,” said European Commission spokesperson Olof Gill.

After Spain denied U.S. use of its bases, Trump on Tuesday said “we could use their base if we want,” referencing the Rota and Morón installations in southern Spain that the U.S. and Spain share, but which remain under Spanish command. “We could just fly in and use it,” Trump said. “Nobody’s going to tell us not to use it, but we don’t have to.”

Tuesday’s threats from Washington were just the latest instance of the U.S. president wielding the threat of tariffs or trade embargoes as punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court last month struck down Trump’s far-reaching global tariffs, saying emergency powers do not allow the president to unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs.

However, Trump maintains that the court allows him to instead impose full-scale embargoes on other nations of his choosing.

Spain has not had any direct contact with the U.S. since Trump’s criticisms, Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo said Wednesday.

“I want to send a message of calm,” Cuerpo told Spanish radio station Cadena Ser. “Beyond those comments (by Trump), there have not been any more moves (by the U.S.).”

Spain’s main business groups expressed concerns over the U.S. trade threat, calling the U.S. a “key partner from an economic and political standpoint.”

“We trust that our trade relations will ultimately not be affected in any way,” the Spanish business chambers CEOE, CEPYME and ATA said Tuesday.

Last year, Spain’s central bank issued a report that concluded Europe’s fourth-largest economy was relatively cushioned compared to the EU average when it came to exposure to tariffs by Trump.

Spain’s exports and imports with the U.S. accounted for 4.4% of GDP, the Bank of Spain said, while trade with the U.S. for the EU as a whole was 10.1%.

Exports of Spanish goods to the U.S. accounted for 1% of Spain’s GDP, or $18.6 billion, making it Spain’s sixth largest export market for goods, the bank concluded. The Southern European nation’s main exports to the U.S. include pharmaceutical products, olive oil refined gas and electrical transformers, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

Spain’s position on the Iran conflict is the latest flare-up in its relationship with the Trump administration.

Spain was an outspoken critic of Israel’s war in Gaza and attracted Trump’s ire last year when it backed out of NATO’s pledge to increase defense spending by members to 5% of GDP. At the time, Spain said it could meet its estimated defense needs by spending less — just 2.1% of its GDP — a move that Trump roundly criticized and also threatened with tariffs in response.

Wilson reported from Barcelona. Associated Press journalist Sam McNeil in Brussels contributed to this report.

By Darius Tahir, Lauren Sausser, KFF Health News

It’s the rare policy question that unites Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and the Democratic-led Maryland government against President Donald Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California: How should health insurers use AI?

Regulating artificial intelligence, especially its use by health insurers, is becoming a politically divisive topic, and it’s scrambling traditional partisan lines.

Boosters, led by Trump, are not only pushing its integration into government, as in Medicare’s experiment using AI in prior authorization, but also trying to stop others from building curbs and guardrails. A December executive order seeks to preempt most state efforts to govern AI, describing “a race with adversaries for supremacy” in a new “technological revolution.”

“To win, United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation,” Trump’s order said. “But excessive State regulation thwarts this imperative.”

Across the nation, states are in revolt. At least four — Arizona, Maryland, Nebraska, and Texas — enacted legislation last year reining in the use of AI in health insurance. Two others, Illinois and California, enacted bills the year before.

Legislators in Rhode Island plan to try again this year after a bill requiring regulators to collect data on technology use failed to clear both chambers last year. A bill in North Carolina requiring insurers not to use AI as the sole basis of a coverage decision attracted significant interest from Republican legislators last year.

DeSantis, a former GOP presidential candidate, has rolled out an “AI Bill of Rights,” whose provisions include restrictions on its use in processing insurance claims and a requirement allowing a state regulatory body to inspect algorithms.

“We have a responsibility to ensure that new technologies develop in ways that are moral and ethical, in ways that reinforce our American values, not in ways that erode them,” DeSantis said during his State of the State address in January.

Ripe for Regulation

Polling shows Americans are skeptical of AI. A December poll from Fox News found 63% of voters describe themselves as “very” or “extremely” concerned about artificial intelligence, including majorities across the political spectrum. Nearly two-thirds of Democrats and just over 3 in 5 Republicans said they had qualms about AI.

Health insurers’ tactics to hold down costs also trouble the public; a January poll from KFF found widespread discontent over issues like prior authorization. (KFF is a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.) Reporting from ProPublica and other news outlets in recent years has highlighted the use of algorithms to rapidly deny insurance claims or prior authorization requests, apparently with little review by a doctor.

Last month, the House Ways and Means Committee hauled in executives from Cigna, UnitedHealth Group, and other major health insurers to address concerns about affordability. When pressed, the executives either denied or avoided talking about using the most advanced technology to reject authorization requests or toss out claims.

AI is “never used for a denial,” Cigna CEO David Cordani told lawmakers. Like others in the health insurance industry, the company is being sued for its methods of denying claims, as spotlighted by ProPublica. Cigna spokesperson Justine Sessions said the company’s claims-denial process “is not powered by AI.”

Indeed, companies are at pains to frame AI as a loyal servant. Optum, part of health giant UnitedHealth Group, announced Feb. 4 that it was rolling out tech-powered prior authorization, with plenty of mentions of speedier approvals.

“We’re transforming the prior authorization process to address the friction it causes,” John Kontor, a senior vice president at Optum, said in a press release.

Still, Alex Bores, a computer scientist and New York Assembly member prominent in the state’s legislative debate over AI, which culminated in a comprehensive bill governing the technology, said AI is a natural field to regulate.

“So many people already find the answers that they’re getting from their insurance companies to be inscrutable,” said Bores, a Democrat who is running for Congress. “Adding in a layer that cannot by its nature explain itself doesn’t seem like it’ll be helpful there.”

At least some people in medicine — doctors, for example — are cheering legislators and regulators on. The American Medical Association “supports state regulations seeking greater accountability and transparency from commercial health insurers that use AI and machine learning tools to review prior authorization requests,” said John Whyte, the organization’s CEO.

Whyte said insurers already use AI and “doctors still face delayed patient care, opaque insurer decisions, inconsistent authorization rules, and crushing administrative work.”

Insurers Push Back

With legislation approved or pending in at least nine states, it’s unclear how much of an effect the state laws will have, said University of Minnesota law professor Daniel Schwarcz. States can’t regulate “self-insured” plans, which are used by many employers; only the federal government has that power.

But there are deeper issues, Schwarcz said: Most of the state legislation he’s seen would require a human to sign off on any decision proposed by AI but doesn’t specify what that means.

The laws don’t offer a clear framework for understanding how much review is enough, and over time humans tend to become a little lazy and simply sign off on any suggestions by a computer, he said.

Still, insurers view the spate of bills as a problem. “Broadly speaking, regulatory burden is real,” said Dan Jones, senior vice president for federal affairs at the Alliance of Community Health Plans, a trade group for some nonprofit health insurers. If insurers spend more time working through a patchwork of state and federal laws, he continued, that means “less time that can be spent and invested into what we’re intended to be doing, which is focusing on making sure that patients are getting the right access to care.”

Linda Ujifusa, a Democratic state senator in Rhode Island, said insurers came out last year against the bill she sponsored to restrict AI use in coverage denials. It passed in one chamber, though not the other.

“There’s tremendous opposition” to anything that regulates tactics such as prior authorization, she said, and “tremendous opposition” to identifying intermediaries such as private insurers or pharmacy benefit managers “as a problem.”

In a letter criticizing the bill, AHIP, an insurer trade group, advocated for “balanced policies that promote innovation while protecting patients.”

“Health plans recognize that AI has the potential to drive better health care outcomes — enhancing patient experience, closing gaps in care, accelerating innovation, and reducing administrative burden and costs to improve the focus on patient care,” Chris Bond, an AHIP spokesperson, told KFF Health News. And, he continued, they need a “consistent, national approach anchored in a comprehensive federal AI policy framework.”

Seeking Balance

In California, Newsom has signed some laws regulating AI, including one requiring health insurers to ensure their algorithms are fairly and equitably applied. But the Democratic governor has vetoed others with a broader approach, such as a bill including more mandates about how the technology must work and requirements to disclose its use to regulators, clinicians, and patients upon request.

Chris Micheli, a Sacramento-based lobbyist, said the governor likely wants to ensure the state budget — consistently powered by outsize stock market gains, especially from tech companies — stays flush. That necessitates balance.

Newsom is trying to “ensure that financial spigot continues, and at the same time ensure that there are some protections for California consumers,” he said. He added insurers believe they’re subject to a welter of regulations already.

The Trump administration seems persuaded. The president’s recent executive order proposed to sue and restrict certain federal funding for any state that enacts what it characterized as “excessive” state regulation — with some exceptions, including for policies that protect children.

That order is possibly unconstitutional, said Carmel Shachar, a health policy scholar at Harvard Law School. The source of preemption authority is generally Congress, she said, and federal lawmakers twice took up, but ultimately declined to pass, a provision barring states from regulating AI.

“Based on our previous understanding of federalism and the balance of powers between Congress and the executive, a challenge here would be very likely to succeed,” Shachar said.

Some lawmakers view Trump’s order skeptically at best, noting the administration has been removing guardrails, and preventing others from erecting them, to an extreme degree.

“There isn’t really a question of, should it be federal or should it be state right now?” Bores said. “The question is, should it be state or not at all?”

©2026 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Matthew Nix had driven past the brewery in Sauganash for years, but — not much of a weekday drinker — had never stopped in.

When he finally decided to meet friends at the taproom on a recent Saturday to play some cards, he found bartenders dancing on countertops, dogs wearing sweaters and the last of the beer draining from the tap. It was the farewell party for Alarmist Brewing.

“This is my first time here, first and obviously last,” said Nix, 36, a high school teacher living in the Edgewater neighborhood, about the closure.

In Illinois and across the country, breweries have been struggling as consumers seek healthier drinking habits or have a wider range of options, such as THC-infused drinks, as business costs continue to rise. Many have closed their doors, while others have redefined its meaning as a social space that offers beverage variety and events.

In Chicago alone, a handful of breweries have closed or consolidated in recent years, including Metropolitan Brewing, Revolution Brewing Brewpub and Lo Rez Brewing and Taproom. 

The number of U.S breweries closing outpaced those that opened for the second year in a row in 2025 for a net loss of 179 last year, according to preliminary 2025 data from Brewers Association, a trade group for small American brewers.

It stands in stark contrast from a decade ago — a golden age — for craft brewers when the number of breweries opening was about 10 times higher than those closing, according to Matt Gacioch, staff economist at Brewers Association.

One industry challenge is that Americans are now drinking less. A 2025 Gallup poll showed that only 54% of U.S. adults said they consume alcohol — the lowest percentage in 90 years. 

Figures are even lower among young adults with only 50% reporting that they drink alcohol. These numbers fall in line with healthier drinking trends like “sober curious” and “Dry January,” which seek mindful and moderate drinking.

On top of drinking less, consumers are also seeking wider beverage options from nonalcoholic drinks to hard seltzers, which adds pressure for traditional craft breweries specializing in beer.

Sports and music arena United Center is expected to start selling THC-infused drinks Señorita and Rythm at its stands this month — apparently the largest U.S. arena to do so. 

“Bringing Señorita and Rythm to the United Center reflects a simple truth: Consumers want nonalcoholic options, and leading venues are responding,” Ben Kovler, Rythm, Inc. chairman and interim CEO, said in a statement last month.

Other music venues that sell cannabis-derived drinks are the Salt Shed, Riviera, Ramova Theatre and Thalia Hall, taking up coveted beverage shelf space.

“There’s just so much more competition in terms of consumer attention and physical retail space,” Gacioch said. “There’s this whole world of other options.” 

Rising business expenses and the cost of goods like aluminum have also contributed to the strain, particularly after the pandemic.

“You have the increased cost of just about everything,” said Andrew Heritage, chief economist at the Beer Institute, noting the increase in operating costs, rent and labor. 

Some Chicago breweries were unable to recover, with Lo Rez Brewing in the Pilsen neighborhood closing its doors in 2023 in what cofounder Dave Dahl called a “pandemic casualty.” Another staple in the craft industry, Metropolitan Brewing, one of Chicago’s oldest, closed in 2023 after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Most recently, award-winning Alarmist Brewing closed on Feb. 1 after years of struggling with falling business after the pandemic.

“The bottom line is we’re just not selling,” said Alarmist owner Gary Gulley. “It just never recovered since COVID.”

Illinois lost over 30 breweries in two years after 2020, falling to 218 total breweries, according to data from the Beer Institute. By 2024, the number of Illinois breweries rebounded to 251.

Some breweries have adapted to create third spaces, a place to mingle and play trivia with friends — and pups.

“I like a place where you can bring your dog, you can bring a book,” Nix said, likening these breweries to social spaces where you can play card games. 

One brewery that has been bolstering events and activities is Maplewood Brewery and Distillery in the Logan Square neighborhood. The decade-old brewery holds events like its upcoming Pulaski Day Party to celebrate its Pulaski pilsner, trivia nights and beer festivals to cultivate brand loyalty.

“We have our core brand that we make, but we’re always coming out with something new and fun … that’s helped us out,” said Paul Megalis, co-owner and CFO of Maplewood Brewery.

Their expansive beverage options include ready-to-drink rum punch cocktails, in-house coffee liqueurs for espresso martini lovers and seasonal beer concoctions. 

“We’ve essentially been a beverage company since Day 1, and so we’ve always had a diversified portfolio. I mean, we just hustle,” Megalis said.

They plan to open a second location in Glen Ellyn slated for this spring.

Despite the changing tides in the craft beer business, experts believe craft breweries are evolving not disappearing.

“Craft beer industry is nothing if not creative,” Gacioch said.

By BARBARA ORTUTAY and KAITLYN HUAMANI, AP Technology Writers

Social media addiction has been compared to casinos, opioids and cigarettes.

While there’s some debate among experts about the line between overuse and addiction, and whether social media can cause the latter, there is no doubt that many people feel like they can’t escape the pull of Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and other platforms.

The companies that designed your favorite apps have an incentive to keep you glued to them so they can serve up ads that make them billions of dollars in revenue. Resisting the pull of the endless scroll, the dopamine hits from short-form videos and the ego boost and validation that come from likes and positive interactions, can seem like an unfair fight. For some people, “rage-bait,” gloomy news and arguing with internet strangers also have an irresistible draw.

Much of the concern around social media addiction has focused on children. But adults are also susceptible to using social media so much that it starts affecting their day-to-day lives.

Recognizing signs of compulsive use

Dr. Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist and the medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, defines addiction as “the continued compulsive use of a substance or behavior despite harm to self or others.”

During her testimony at a landmark social media harms trial in Los Angeles, Lembke said that what makes social media platforms so addictive is the “24/7, really limitless, frictionless access” people have to them.

Some researchers question whether addiction is the appropriate term to describe heavy use of social media, arguing that a person must be experiencing identifiable symptoms. These include strong, sometimes uncontrollable urges and withdrawal to qualify as addiction.

Social media addiction is not recognized as an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the standard reference psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners use to assess and treat patients. That’s partly because there is no widespread consensus on what constitutes social media addiction and whether underlying mental health issues contribute to problematic use.

But just because there is no official agreement on the issue doesn’t mean excessive social media use can’t be harmful, some experts say.

“For me, the biggest signpost is how does the person feel about the ‘amount,’ and how viewing it makes them feel,” said Dr. Laurel Williams, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Baylor College of Medicine. “If what they discover is they view it so much that they are missing out on other things they may enjoy or things that they need to attend to, this is problematic use. Additionally, if you leave feeling overwhelmed, drained, sad, anxious, angry regularly, this use is not good for you.”

In other words, is your use of social media affecting other parts of your life? Are you putting off chores, work, hobbies or time with friends and family? Have you tried to cut back your time but realized you were unable to? Do you feel bad about your social media use?

Ofir Turel, a professor of information systems management at the University of Melbourne who has studied social media use for years, said there was “no agreement” over the term social media addiction, and he doesn’t “expect agreement soon.”

“It’s obvious that we have an issue,” Turel said. “You don’t have to call it an addiction, but there is an issue and we need, as a society, to start thinking about it.”

Noninvasive tips to reduce social media use

Before setting limits on scrolling, it’s helpful to understand how social media feeds and advertising work to draw in users, Williams said.

“Think of social media as a company trying to get you to stay with them and buy something — have the mindset that this is information that I don’t need to act on and may not be true,” she added. “Get alternate sources of information. Always understand the more you see something, anyone can start to believe it is true.”

Ian A. Anderson, a postdoctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology, suggests making small, meaningful changes to stop you from opening your social media app of choice. Moving the app’s place on your phone or turning off notifications are “light touch interventions,” but more involved options, like not bringing your phone into the bedroom or other places where you tend to use it, could also help, Anderson said.

Tech tools can also help to cut back on tech overuse. Both iPhones and Android devices have onboard controls to help regulate screen time.

Apple’s Screen Time controls are found in the iPhone’s settings menu. Users can set overall Downtime, which shuts off all phone activity during a set period of their choice.

The controls also let users put a blanket restriction on certain categories of apps, such as social, games or entertainment or zero in on a specific app, by limiting the time that can be spent on it.

The downside is that the limits aren’t hard to get around. It’s more of a nudge than a red line that you can’t cross. If you try to open an app with a limit, you’ll get a screen menu offering one more minute, a reminder after 15 minutes, or to completely ignore it.

If a light touch doesn’t work

If a light touch isn’t working, more drastic steps might be necessary. Some users swear by turning their phones to gray-scale to make it less appealing to dopamine-seeking brains. On iPhones, adjust the color filter in your settings. For Android, turn on Bedtime Mode or tweak the color correction setting. Downgrading to a simpler phone, such as an old-school flip phone, could also help curb social media compulsions.

Some startups, figuring that people might prefer a tangible barrier, offer hardware solutions that introduce physical friction between you and an app. Unpluq, for instance, is a yellow tag that you have to hold up to your phone in order to access blocked apps. Brick and Blok are two different products that work along the same lines — they’re squarish pieces of plastic that you have to tap or scan with your phone to unlock an app.

If that’s not enough of an obstacle, you could stash away your phone entirely. There are various phone lockboxes and cases available, some of them designed so parents can lock up their teenagers’ phones when they’re supposed to be sleeping, but there’s no rule that says only teenagers can use them.

Yondr, which makes portable phone locking pouches used at concerts or in schools, also sells a home phone box.

Seeking outside help

If all else fails, it may be a good idea to look for deeper reasons for feeling addicted to social media. Maybe it’s a symptom of underlying problems like anxiety, stress, loneliness, depression or low self-esteem. If you think that’s the case, it could be worth exploring therapy that is becoming more widely available.

“For people struggling to stay away — see if you can get a friend group to collaborate with you on it. Make it a group effort. Just don’t post about it! The more spaces become phone free, the more we may see a lessened desire to be ‘on,’” Williams said.

By Andrew Van DamThe Washington Post

Around Y2K, the mighty American private sector hit a momentous milestone. For the first time on record, frontline managers – supervisors, team leads, foremen, forewomen, etc. – outnumbered back-office managers.

That seemed significant, especially for the working-class folks for whom these noncommissioned-officer-style positions provided a rare path to the upper reaches of the career ladder. As quickly as the milestone was crossed, the trend reversed, according to our analysis of about 37 million responses to the census and American Community Survey from 1950 to 2024.

Once ascendant, supervisory jobs crop up all over our lists of the hardest-hit jobs of Americans’ working lives, even as white-collar management soars to new highs. What happened?

Having been burned by data-collection changes before, our first instinct was to take a long, hard look at how the Census Bureau classifies jobs. Or, more accurately, to spend 15 seconds emailing an extraordinarily talented economist and hoping they’ve already done the work for us.

We were in luck. Utrecht University economist Anna Salomons responded within an hour, even though the hour in question was already a wee one in the Netherlands. For her blockbuster 2024 analysis, Salomons and her collaborators collected and analyzed detailed Census Bureau job descriptions from 1930 to 2018 to figure out how our economy had evolved, mutated and automated.

She first mentioned that the change in occupational definitions around the 2000 Census was “notoriously large” and, like us, wondered if that might cause some of the shift we saw in the numbers.

But two factors argue against that thesis. First, as Salomons suggested, we’re using a system from our friends at IPUMS that carefully adjusts for all those changes in the raw census definitions.

Second, the changes come gradually after the inflection point – if a census definition change was the culprit, you’d expect a sudden swerve. But what if, Salomons suggested, those changes in definition took place outside of the friendly confines of the Census Bureau?

Specifically, she suggested we look at title inflation, which immediately blew the case wide open. Or at least blew it ajar.

It seems quite possible that, over the past few decades, jobs that were once called some variation on “supervisor” were now called some variation on “manager.”

A fancier title (and no change in pay) may, at least temporarily, fool a worker who’d been angling for a raise or promotion. But could it really fool the almighty Census Bureau?

We fear the answer must be “probably.” The American Community Survey’s superpower – that it hears directly from about 2 million U.S. households each year – is also, in this case, its Achilles’ heel. Because it must rely on what those households say.

The census crew does its utmost to elicit clean answers, but even the most carefully designed questions would struggle to distinguish a manager from a “manager.”

The survey asks not just for your occupation but also for your most important work activities or duties. That detail, plus answers to other questions throughout the survey, such as education level, give the clerks at the National Processing Center – and the government robot that handles the easiest cases – as much information as possible when they’re determining which job a respondent really performed.

But not everybody fills out those activities. And not every manager-in-name-only will provide enough information to reclassify them as a supervisor or even as an individual contributor. So, a certain percentage of inflated titles will slip through.

But that would mean census surveys still reflect a real trend toward title inflation. And why are titles inflating? Based on a lifetime of observation, we’d guess some of corporate America’s brightest minds have noticed that a title upgrade allows you to give a worker a “promotion” without a change in responsibility – or in pay.

Particularly crafty economists may even have found a way to measure one narrow instance of this. Salomons points to an analysis forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies. In it, economists analyzed about 450,000 online job postings with salaries near the cutoff that makes you eligible for management under the Fair Labor Standards Act. (The postings came from 2010 to 2018, when the cutoff was $455 a week. It currently sits at $684.)

The authors – Lauren Cohen at Harvard University, and Umit Gurun and Bugra Ozel at the University of Texas at Dallas – found that jobs paying just above the legal cutoff are about five times more likely to have managerial titles than are similar jobs with pay just below it.

Why? Well, even a dubious title such as calling a barber a “grooming manager” or a front-desk clerk a “director of first impressions” could provide cover for employers looking to claim that person is exempt from overtime pay. The economists estimate such spurious classifications save employers about 13.5 percent on the pay of each “manager.”

To be sure, as Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told us, the definition for overtime-exempt employees says nothing about titles – it’s purely about job function. Faux-promoting a worker to “manager” shouldn’t change anything. But in reality, she said, bosses often use these titles as a smoke screen.

“Titles can still matter a lot in practice,” Ozel said. “A ‘manager’ label can shape expectations about whether overtime is available and can muddy the record for anyone trying to assess the role from the outside. … Job duties are hard to observe and document without access to internal records and day-to-day work.”

But this dynamic, while suggestive, applies only to a narrow slice of the workforce. In any given year, less than a tenth of the workforce earned enough to put them within fudging distance (20 percent) of the cutoff.

What else might drive this title inflation?

Our best clue came in a call from Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University management expert who longtime readers may recognize is also a remote-work data impresario.

Bloom pointed out the rise of managers coincides with what he calls the overeducation of the American workforce. College graduates once made up a tiny, elite minority. Now, America’s colleges churn out so many that they outnumber the share of young people who never made it past high school.

As a result, Bloom said, there aren’t enough highfalutin’ positions for all those brand-new baccalaureates. Of course, employers would still love to attract these talented young grads to their unfilled lower-falutin’ positions. But to do so, they’d need to get creative.

“How do you get a college graduate to do a job that’s honestly probably better suited to a noncollege graduate?” Bloom asked. “You just shove the word ‘president’ into the title!”

When we took Bloom’s hint and charted the rise in managers by education, the fallout of his observation became clear. The increase in managers with a bachelor’s degree or higher drowns out any other trend. If we explain that segment, we explain the whole thing.

We started by looking at where all those college-educated managers worked.

As we should have guessed, they’re in the industries with the most-educated workers overall. In almost every major industry, as more educated workers roll in, the number of educated managers rises at the same rate.

Let’s look at an appropriate example: the industry of higher education. In that business, a four-year degree (or something fancier) gave you almost a 5 percent chance of being in management in 2000. By 2024, the share of educated workers in that sector had more than doubled, but your chances of being a manager conditional on having a college degree didn’t really change.

Many industries – banking, real estate, hospitals – follow this pattern. The exception? Computer services, which added more jobs than all but a handful of (mostly low-wage) industries over this time period, also saw your odds of becoming a manager double.

That matches what we heard from Ben Hanowell, an anthropologist who now helps direct ADP Research, the research arm of the outfit that probably processes your paycheck each month. The company’s endless piles of proprietary payrolls allow Hanowell to produce metrics that us mere civilians can’t match.

In his analysis, Hanowell found that U.S. teams got slightly smaller after the pandemic – an average manager went from 7.4 direct reports to about 7.3. But over that time, tech firms have gone from 6.5 workers per manager to about 5.3, with much of the drop coming after the pandemic.

So, while there are some situations where individuals became more likely to be managers, the much more common story is: People with college degrees had the same odds of becoming a manager as they always did, so as we got more people with college degrees, we got more managers.

But are these Potemkin promotions, or do they signal a change in the economy?

It hinges on whether the new boss, the “manager,” is truly the same as the old boss, the “supervisor.” We don’t have enough data right now to compare their actual duties, but we can at least look at their pay.

And sure enough, when we compare managers to similarly paid supervisors since the turn of the millennium, a clean pattern pops out. At every step of pay scale, managers rose, and supervisors fell in roughly equal quantities (after accounting for workforce growth over that time). To us, that looks a lot like replacement.

To be sure, they may not all be simple swaps in which a firm hires a college graduate to be a glorified supervisor with a cool title. We could also be seeing centralization. Perhaps work that once fell to supervisors – say, scheduling or coaching – now shifts to a central, college-educated staff of trainers and human resources professionals.

Around the edges, we expect those trends have been exacerbated by the decline of small businesses, since a megacorp in search of efficiency will centralize more functions. Similarly, the rise of outsourcing and perhaps gig work means jobs that were once done by small teams with supervisors inside the company are now handled by huge outside contractors.

And of course the increasing reliance on gig workers and outsourced workers that such a model implies might also help explain why tech’s managers now seem to manage so few employees – many of the folks they’re managing are now working outside the company.

But experts like Shierholz confirmed our hunch that the dominant force seemed to be the simplest: Job titles are getting a college-friendly makeover even if the jobs themselves don’t change much. Cory Stahle, senior economist at Indeed, agreed this seemed plausible based on his impressions from the online job site’s vast archives of job postings.

“We’re seeing a lot of jobs that have manager in them, but they are doing these more direct manager or direct supervising type of jobs,” Stahle said. “They are managers who are more directly involved in the day-to-day operations rather than a higher-up.”

By CATHY BUSSEWITZ, Wellness Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Barbara Goldberg brings a stack of newspapers to the office every day. The CEO of a Florida public relations firm scours stories for developments relevant to her clients while relishing holding the pages in her hand. “I want to touch it, feel it, turn the page and see the photos,” Goldberg said.

Generation Z employees at O’Connell & Goldberg don’t get her devotion to newsprint when so much information is available online and constantly updated, she said. They came of age with smartphones in hand. And they spot trends on TikTok or Instagram that baby boomers like Goldberg might miss, she said.

The staff’s disparate media consumption habits become clear at a weekly Monday staff meeting. It was originally intended to discuss how the news of the day might impact the firm’s clients, Goldberg said. But instead of news stories, the conversation often turns to the latest slang, digital tools and memes.

The first time it happened, she listened without judgment, and thought, “Shoot, this is actually really insightful. I need to know the trending audio and I need to know these influencers.” Of her younger colleagues, she said, “they know the cultural conversation that I wasn’t thinking about.”

With at least five generations participating in the U.S. workforce, co-workers can at times feel like they speak different languages. The ways people born decades apart approach tasks may create misunderstandings. But some workplaces are turning the natural divides between age groups into a competitive advantage through reverse mentoring programs that recognize the strengths each generation brings to work and uses them to build mutual skills and respect.

Unlike traditional mentorships that involve an older person sharing wisdom with a younger colleague, reverse mentoring affords less experienced staff members the opportunity to teach seasoned colleagues about new trends and technologies.

“The generational differences, to me, are something to leverage. It’s like a superpower,” Goldberg said. “It’s where the magic happens.”

Here are some ways to make the most of a multigenerational workplace.

Mentoring up

Beauty product company Estée Lauder began a reverse mentoring program globally a decade ago when its managers realized consumers were rapidly getting beauty tips from social media influencers instead of department stores, said Peri Izzo, an executive director who oversaw the initiative.

The voluntary program now has roughly 1,200 participants. The mentors are millennials, born 1981 to 1986, and Gen Zers, born starting in 1997. They’re paired with mentees who are part of the U.S. baby boom of 1946 to 1964, and members of Generation X, born 1965 to 1980, according to the generational definitions of the Pew Research Center.

At the start of a new mentoring relationship, participants do icebreaker activities like a Gen Z vocabulary quiz. The young mentors take phrases they use with friends in group chats and quiz older colleagues about what they mean, said Izzo, who at age 33 qualifies as a young millennial. For example, if a Gen Zer says something is “living rent-free in your head,” it refers to someone or something that constantly occupies your thoughts.

“Most of the mentees knew what it was, but then one mentee’s reaction was, ‘Oh I get it, my son lives rent-free in my house,’ and everyone thought it was so funny because they were like, ‘You really don’t understand the context that it’s being used on TikTok and amongst millennial and Gen Z,’” Izzo said.

Madison Reynolds, 26, a product manager on the technology team at Estée Lauder, is a Gen Zer and serves as a reverse mentor in the program. She and her contemporaries teach their older colleagues phrases such as “You ate it up,” which means you did a good job. When her manager tries out Gen Z phrases, Reynolds offers feedback, saying, “No, that’s not right,” or “You got it.”

Give and take

When 81-year-old hotelier Bruce Haines brought in athletes from Lehigh University’s wrestling team to participate in a mentorship program at the Historic Hotel Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, he taught them about entrepreneurship by having the students shadow managers in various departments. He also gained valuable marketing insights from the students, which he hadn’t anticipated.

“It’s been energizing for me. It’s almost reinvigorating,” Haines, the hotel’s managing partner, said. “We tended to be Facebook-focused. We’re a luxury destination hotel, so we tend to be an older crowd that we’re reaching. They enhanced our marketing by alerting us that we need to be on Instagram and YouTube and get out there and reach the younger people.”

The students also suggested offering prepackaged pints of ice cream to the hotel’s in-house parlor because their contemporaries didn’t want to wait around for cones. “We were really missing out, and it’s truly increased our ice cream sales and our profitability,” Haines said.

Old-fashioned people skills

Carson Celio, 26, is an account supervisor at the PR firm Goldberg leads. She’s part of the cohort that advises the CEO about what’s trending on TikTok and what’s over with. She says Goldberg has taught her how to successfully work a room and spark conversations that feel natural and organic.

Celio was a sophomore in college when COVID-19 hit, which pushed most of her classes online, including a public speaking course. “We have spent so much time online and conducting meetings over Zoom or Teams.” As a result, in-person networking can feel overwhelming to her generation, she said. “Learning the value of actually being face to face with people and building those connections — Barbara has helped me a lot with that.”

A text or a tome

At Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians, a medical group that employs 2,400 doctors in eastern Massachusetts, Dr. Alexa B. Kimball adapts her communication style to a range of age groups. Some mature clinicians send very long emails, which can be unproductive.

“When you have an email conversation that’s in its 15th response, that tells you you should pick up the phone,” Kimball, the group’s CEO, said. On the other extreme, some of the youngest trainees communicate with six-word texts, she said.

A reverse mentoring program that teachers doctors about different communication styles helped when the practice launched a new medical records system that required 14 hours of training. Following the training, Kimball paired workers with more tech-savvy colleagues, who tended to be younger, to provide support.

Phased retirement

Robert Poole, 62, is the only person at health care technology company Abbott who manages the laser used to create nearly microscopic components of a cardiovascular device. Since he’s approaching retirement, Abbott hired Shahad Almahania, 33, an equipment engineer, to work alongside him and absorb some of his decades of knowledge.

“The equipment is all custom, so it takes a long time to learn how to run it and keep it running,” Poole said.

Poole, who began working in the 1980s, said he also learns from Almahania. When Abbott removed landline telephones five years ago, he migrated to group chats like Slack, asking her for help deciphering the meaning of emojis.

“When you strip away all the generational stereotypes, … every age group, every person, is looking for some of the same things,” said Leena Rinne, vice president at online learning platform Skillsoft. “They want supportive leadership. They want the opportunity to grow and to contribute in their workplace. They want respect and clarity.”

Share your stories and questions about workplace wellness at cbussewitz@ap.org. Follow AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well

WINTER HAVEN – Final preparations are being made inside and outside Galacticoaster, Florida’s newest roller coaster, which is set to open at Legoland Florida theme park this month.

Space-themed Lego models — rotating ride vehicles that are customized by passengers and a next-generation animatronic named Biff Dipper — are prominent parts of the indoor coaster.

Near the entrance is a brick-by-brick and way-bigger-than-life model of Lego set 918, a spaceship introduced in 1979.

It’s “a classic ship, but it’s got some extra flourishes that you only really find in the Legoland park,” says Rosie Brailsford, senior project director for Merlin Magic Making, the creative arm of Merlin Entertainments.

About four years ago, Brailsford was instructed to work with Lego Group to develop an attraction that would work on a global platform, she says.

“They have a line, kind of from the ’70s and various different iterations of that, which is what you will find in Lego Galaxy,” she says. “So, it’s kind of a merge of past and present and opportunity for future iterations as well.”

Brailsford guided the Orlando Sentinel on an exclusive walk-through — no riding yet — of the attraction, which opens to the public Feb. 27.

What’s outside

The new coaster is on the site of the Flying School ride that was closed in August 2023. The exterior queue looks down at the park’s Driving School attraction. There are two entrances, including one from Legoland’s water park.

The spaceship is surrounded by Lego characters, including photo opportunities. The Alien Tourist figure — outfitted in a floral shirt, red shorts, aqua hat and big old-school camera — takes snaps of a green and antennaed alien family. A Duplo play area dubbed Tot Spot and designed for the youngest visitors, includes a Lego Shuttle. (A shade structure is being added.) Nearby are large Lego space flowers and a robot dog.

Early on, potential riders meet Capt. Olivia on screen.

“She’s welcoming you to the Lego Galaxy, telling you about a little snippet of the mission that you’re going to go on,” Brailsford says.

New Super Bowl ad launches Universal Orlando campaign

A large screen televises a 10-minute loop of details about what’s coming up.

“There are little moments of backstory here, so that if you are milling around in the land, you’ve already started to absorb in your subconscious what’s going on,” Brailsford says.

What’s going on? In the Galacticoaster universe, they are bracing for “the asteroid of probable destruction.”

What’s inside

The front lobby features a large blocky version of the Lego Galaxy logo, which is a bit interplanetary and a bit NASA meatball. Below it are actual assembled Lego models on display, some of which are vintage and difficult to find, Brailsford says.

A series of halls and customized posters lead to a big Briefing Room with animatronic Biff Dipper, the chief engineer. He’s about 4 feet tall and standing on an elevated platform. His arms, legs and head move, and his face is animated below the visor of his space helmet. He greets future riders — there can be as many as 80 people in the room — and explains the goal. It’s us versus the asteroid.

“Most of our minifigures in our Legoland are static, smooth minifigures. … Biff is essentially next generation of how we want to do that on a show basis,” Brailsford says. They partnered with Engineered Arts of Cornwall, United Kingdom, to create this figure, which sports 45 facial animations, Legoland says.

Merlin is “working really closely with Lego to make sure all of that motion that they do is true to how a minifigure would move, and we’re not just making them do random things,” she says.

Disney board taps Josh D’Amaro to succeed retiring CEO Bob Iger

Other on-screen characters give ride instructions and advance the storyline of how to deal with that asteroid. Plans A and B (one involving a giant net) were flops, and they need help with Plan C. It involves “separator swarms.”

The room includes interesting visuals such as a blueprint for vehicle options and a sign that reads “Interested in time travel? Meet here last Monday, 2 p.m.”

From here, Biff sends riders into a room where ride vehicle options are selected. Riders pick design features for wings, tail, nose and such. The choices range from practical to fanciful — add-ons such as hamburger wings and disco balls. The console allows 15 seconds for each selection, and then the total look is uploaded onto an RFID-enabled bracelet. There are more than 600 possible combinations.

The idea, we’re told, is to make the spacecraft “so awesome that it grabs the separators’ attention like nothing else.” Also, don’t let them catch you.

Next stop: the Galacticoaster loading bay.

The ride stuff

Passengers navigate a moving sidewalk to the in-real-life vehicles, which seat four passengers across and have lap bars that lower from overhead.

The ride moves into an airlock space, and there “you’ll see yourself in your awesome creation,” Brailsford says. You’ll linger for about 10 seconds, “then you will launch, up to 40 miles an hour, off on your adventure,” she says.

“And you have your kind of save-the-day moment on the ride.”

The Sentinel walk-through did not include a ride-through. Brailsford said the experience is smooth and the launch makes it punchy, probably more intense than the Dragon coaster, its Legoland Florida sister attraction. The height requirement is 36 inches for riders accompanied by an adult. Unaccompanied visitors must be at least 48 inches tall.

“It’s not like terrifying or anything, but being indoors, we do feel like they’ll get a little bit more of that thrill factor as well,” she says. “Because it’s dark, you don’t necessarily quite know where you’re going.”

The spinning is programmed, she said. “It’s not like a free spinning.”

Legoland’s website says to expect “Special effects, synchronized lighting and surprise appearances from classic Lego Space characters.”

Ride time is about 1 minute and 30 seconds, and, per theme park tradition, the exit is through the gift shop (official name: Orbital Outpost).

Another Galacticoaster is under construction that’s set to open March 6 at Legoland California, and, in theory, there could be more. There are also Legoland theme parks in New York, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Malaysia, Dubai, Japan, South Korea and China.

“We have, like, a base story and land concept that we can adjust and tweak if we were to roll a version of it out,” Brailsford says. “It might not necessarily be this ride. It might be a different ride with another story from the world.”

Email me at dbevil@orlandosentinel.com. BlueSky: @themeparksdb. Threads account: @dbevil. X account: @themeparks. Subscribe to the Theme Park Rangers newsletter at orlandosentinel.com/newsletters.

When Kate Brouner decided to put her six-bedroom, three-bath 3,590-square-foot Howell house on the market, she called the previous owner: Novi-based Realtor Jenn Anderson.

Anderson lived in the home for 11 years before selling to Brouner.

“We call it ‘our house’ and we wanted to make sure to find the right buyer,” Anderson said.

Winter tends to be a slower time for agents but it allows real-estate agents to size up last year’s marketplace and forecast the year ahead. But houses are still being bought and sold.

Steve Stockton has a national and local perspective of the housing market. He’s a board member for RealComp, Michigan’s largest multiple-listing service; the North Oakland County Board of Realtors; and the National Real Estate Review Board.

“This is the longest time period we’ve had growth: 29 months in a row of increased value nationally,” he said. “I don’t remember a month since COVID where we haven’t gone up month over month.”

Regionally, sales rose month-over-month in the Northeast and South, were unchanged in the West, and declined in the Midwest. Demand in Michigan remains steady, Stockton said.

Nationally, home sales rose in December, up by a half percent from November, according to the National Association of Realtors. But compared to December 2024, sales were down by 1%.

The typical homebuyer is 60 years old and the median age for a new-home buyer is at an all-time high: 40, up from 33 in 2021 and 29 in 1991.

“The hardest issue is finding starter homes that younger people can buy. To finally hit 40 as the average first-time buyer’s age is just crazy,” he said.

Market shift

Stockton said the current market is transitioning from one that favored sellers to a balanced market favoring neither buyers nor sellers, aided in part by lower interest rates.

As of late Thursday, a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage loan was around 6.2% and the 15-year rate was around 5.6%. Few expect interest to drop below 6% this year, despite pressure on the Federal Bank by the Trump administration, he said.

Karen Kage, Realcomp’s CEO and a real estate agent for more than 40 years, said buyers are finding 10% more homes for sale in southeast Michigan this year compared to last year while Oakland County has 15% more.

Oakland County’s hottest markets include Novi, Northville and South Lyon, where builders are busy. Existing homes are selling in Milford, Highland and White Lake townships, Stockton said.

Areas like Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills remain popular and lakeside homes are always in high demand.

Home prices

Southeast Michigan’s median price for existing homes was $270,000 in December, up 5.9% over December 2024. Oakland County’s median home price increased by less than 1%, to $360,000..

“The buyers have a little more to chase,” Stockton said, noting that less than five years ago, buyers were skipping home inspections and warranties to compete with a slew of other buyers.

These days, he said, softer markets in Nevada, Arizona, Idaho and Florida are inspiring older homeowners who are weighing getting a good price for their Michigan home and taking advantage of better prices in what Stockon called “the sunshine states.”

In southeast Michigan, the number of homes on the market represent about three to four months of inventory, up from 2015, when the inventory was a scant six weeks. A truly balanced market requires a five-to-seven-month supply of homes, Stockton said.

More homes for sale means sellers are now waiting on home inspection results, offering home warranties again and bargaining on prices more than in recent years.

But in some areas, buyers are writing love letters about the home they want to persuade a seller to pick their offer.

What’s selling

A refreshed kitchen remains a selling point, as does a newer roof.

“The homes selling quickly now are updated and sharp,” Stockton said. “If you have a house that’s a little tired and dated, it’s going to sit on the market for a while.”

But a motivated seller like Brouner will adjust the home price to attract buyers.

Brouner, a healthcare analyst and mother of five, wanted a new home after her divorce was finalized but didn’t have the time for significant updates.

Anderson said it’s important for sellers to be realistic about their home’s value and the marketplace. Brouner had been watching the real estate market for 18 months before deciding to list her home. She and Anderson agreed to list the house for $449,900.

Less than a week after the listing went online, offers poured in.

“I was pretty confident my house would sell but Jenn really helped me make the most money possible,” she said. “Selling is not as scary as everyone thinks. Find the right agent and they will guide you.”

Brouner will start shopping for a new home with Anderson soon. She hopes to find a house with more land, room for her family and a price under $400,000 and she’s being pragmatic about her options.

“I don’t mind buying a fixer upper,” she said.

The 2026 outlook

“I hate making predictions,” Kage said. “Everything could change tomorrow … Who could have predicted some of the things we’ve been through in the last 40 years?”

She prefers to watch monthly home-sales figures and said two months of numbers gives a short-term peek into the future. The final months of winter can suggest how a season will progress. The second-quarter market is a better indicator, she said.

The solid sellers’ market pressed buyers into bidding wars, which Kage said raised prices to a point that challenges younger buyers.

She believes more sellers are confident of getting a good price for their home and being able to find an affordable next home,” she said.

A rise in the number of homes available has increased the average time on the market by two days, to 43 days, which has alarmed sellers and it shouldn’t because buyers who have more choices are more confident in their offers, Kage said.

Kage encourages buyers and sellers to work with a licensed real estate agent. They can help sellers find the optimum price for marketing a home and typically learn about new listings before they are published.

“People say, ‘Oh, I’ll just check Zillow’ but where do you think Zillow gets the information? They get it from us,” she said.

By Ariana Perez-Castells, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Job hunters beware: some of the hard-earned skills listed on your resume are going unnoticed by potential employers.

Workers’ profiles on job posting websites often feature general abilities, like leadership, communication, teamwork, and problem-solving, a recent report from the Wharton School says. But they’re not highlighting the “specialized, execution-oriented skills,” employers are seeking. That’s created a “skills mismatch economy.”

“People are not representing their skills in a way that’s necessarily resonating with the skills that employers want,” said Eric Bradlow, the vice dean of artificial intelligence and analytics at the Wharton School, who co-authored the report.

Meanwhile, AI has been speeding the shift from a “role-based labor market to a skills-based economy,” the report outlines, making it all the more poignant to know what skills employers actually want.

Bradlow, says generative AI has been “a positively destructive bomb on roles and titles,” by making workers able to carry out tasks that they didn’t know how to do in the past. So “having a specific job title is becoming less relevant.”

The Wharton School worked in partnership with Accenture, a professional services firm, to analyze millions of job postings and worker profiles for the report. The study used data from Lightcast, a labor market data provider, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bradlow spoke with The Inquirer about their findings.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What are some skills included on resumes that don’t make much difference to employers, because everyone seems to have them?

A: Do we think it’s important to communicate? Well, yeah, of course, it is. Do we think it’s important to have leadership skills and manage teams well? Yeah, of course. Last time I checked, those were really important parts of the job — but everybody puts that down. We’re not saying in the report that those skills aren’t important. What we’re saying is there’s an over supply of people stating those skills, as opposed to companies saying these skills are what’s going to get you the job.

Companies are realizing that depth of skill is what’s going to be really important.

Q: Do people lack the specialized skills employers are looking for? Or are they just failing to highlight them on their resumes?

A: That’s something, trust me, I wish I could answer.

If we had people’s transcript data, or if we knew what courses someone had taken, then we could try to get an understanding of what skills people actually have.

I think two things are going to happen, based on this Wharton-Accenture Skills Index gap report. Number one is, you will see a migration where people [will say] “I need to acquire those skills, if I don’t have them, if I want a job.” Second, you’ll see [organizations] — whether it’s an academic institution or a for-profit institution — saying “wait a second, here, we need more people with this skill. We’ll create a certification program.”

Q: You found that some skills are actually tied to higher-paying jobs. Was that surprising?

A: I’m not sure I had hypotheses about which skills would be paid higher or lower.

I think maybe the part that surprised me a little bit was that there wasn’t massive swings and variation like “if you have this skill, your salary doubles.” That’s not what we found in the data.

Q: What advice would you give someone crafting their resume?

A: One is talk about the specific skills you have. Every resume I read says “I’m an effective communicator, experienced leader.” That’s fine, but that’s not what’s going to stick out and become differentiated, because everyone’s going to say that. To the degree that you have specific expertise and depth or skills, those are the kinds of things to put on the resume.

The second thing I would say is that … we should be in the skills acquisition business, be a lifelong learner. Skills will always be valued. Jobs in a particular workflow can go away. People with skills will be hired.

Take, for instance, a customer support agent in a customer satisfaction group. If you’re someone with exceptional problem solving skills, you’re hearing your customer, and you’re able to tie it to some remedy, that skill is not going to go away even if the job you’re currently in happens to go away.

Q: What skills are needed more or needed less because of the adoption of AI recently?

A: I don’t view it as AI replacing humans. I view AI as that decision-support tool you should use for every decision. If I were an employer today, I wouldn’t even consider hiring someone that didn’t recognize the power of artificial intelligence as a decision-support aid. I don’t know what business decision — pricing decision, product launch decision, product design decision, possibly even hiring decision — [for which] I wouldn’t use artificial intelligence as a decision support tool.

I would also say, equally, I’m very concerned about the agentic use of AI — in some sense totally handing over high stakes decisions.

Q: From where you stand, is AI coming for people’s jobs, as we often hear, or is it coming for their skills? What’s the difference?

A: Go through the history of mankind.

The train engine came. So you mean we don’t need as many horses? Electricity came. You mean we don’t need as much coal? Green energy came, and so now we don’t need as much nuclear fusion?

Doesn’t technology always come and translate one set of jobs to another set of jobs? It’s not AI is coming for your job. What companies are realizing about AI is there are certain roles and functions that AI can do extraordinarily well, with high accuracy, and in some cases better than humans can do. These tend to be functions, by the way, that many humans don’t like doing anyway.

I don’t see AI coming for your job any more so than any set of technology. This is an extraordinarily disruptive technology, but we’ve lived through periods of extraordinarily disruptive technology.

©2026 The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. Visit at inquirer.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By GARY FIELDS, JOSH FUNK and ED WHITE, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — An air traffic controller felt a “little overwhelmed” by numerous aircraft around Reagan airport just minutes before an American Airlines jet collided midair last year with an Army Black Hawk helicopter, killing 67 people, an investigator said Tuesday at a National Transportation Safety Board hearing to determine the biggest factors in the crash.

During the hearing’s early stages, some themes emerged: The jet’s pilot had no warning about the helicopter, and airspace was crowded the night of Jan. 29, 2025.

“It will not be an easy day,” NTSB board member Todd Inman said in his opening remarks. “There is no singular person to blame for this. These were systemic issues across multiple organizations.”

Everyone aboard the jet, flying from Wichita, Kansas, and the helicopter died when the two aircraft collided and plummeted into the icy Potomac River. It was the deadliest plane crash on U.S. soil since 2001.

The Federal Aviation Administration made several changes after the crash to ensure helicopters and planes no longer share the same airspace around the nation’s capital, and last week made those changes permanent. The NTSB will recommend additional action, and families of the victims have said they hope that leads to meaningful change.

NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said she couldn’t believe the FAA didn’t realize the helicopter route in use during the crash didn’t provide adequate separation from planes landing on Reagan’s secondary runway.

“We know over time concerns were raised repeatedly, went unheard, squashed — however you want to put it — stuck in red tape and bureaucracy of a very large organization,” Homendy said. “Repeated recommendations over the years.”

NTSB investigator Katherine Wilson said an air traffic controller felt a “little overwhelmed” when traffic volume increased to 10 aircraft about 10 to 15 minutes before the collision, but then “felt the volume was manageable when one or two helicopters left the airspace.”

Yet about 90 seconds before the collision, Wilson said, “traffic volume increased to a maximum of 12 aircraft consisting of seven airplanes and five helicopters. Radio communication showed that the local controller was shifting its focus between airborne, ground and transiting aircraft.”

The workload “reduced his situational awareness,” Wilson said.

NTSB investigators showed a video animation to demonstrate how difficult it would have been for the pilots in both aircraft to spot the other amid the lights of Washington. The animation also showed how the windshields of both aircraft and the helicopter crew’s night vision goggles restricted views.

Some people were escorted from the room, including two in tears, as an animation of the flights began. Several entered the auditorium wearing black shirts bearing the names of crash victims.

“I hope that we see a clear path through the recommendations they offer to ensure that this never happens again,” Rachel Feres, who lost her cousin Peter Livingston and his wife and two young daughters in the crash, said ahead of the hearing. “That nobody else has to wake up to hear that an entire branch of their family tree is gone, or their wife is gone or the child is gone. That’s what I hope coming out of this. I hope we have clarity and urgency.”

Whether that happens depends on how Congress, the Army and the Trump administration respond after the hearing. Victims’ families say they will keep the pressure on officials to act.

Young Alydia and Everly Livingston were among 28 members of the figure skating community who died in the crash. Many of them had been in Wichita for a national skating competition and development camp.

The NTSB has already spelled out many key factors that contributed to the crash and detailed what happened that night. That includes a poorly designed helicopter route past Reagan airport, the fact that the Black Hawk was flying 78 feet (23.7 meters) higher than it should have been, the warnings that the FAA ignored in the years beforehand, and the Army’s move to turn off a key system that would have broadcast the helicopter’s location more clearly.

Several other high-profile crashes and close calls followed the D.C. collision, alarming the flying public. But NTSB statistics show that the total number of crashes last year was the lowest since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, with 1,405 nationwide.

Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska, and White reported from Detroit. AP Airlines writer Rio Yamat contributed from Las Vegas.

By CATHY BUSSEWITZ

NEW YORK (AP) — Beth Brown was assigned to a major project at work when hardship struck. First, her 6-month-old daughter fell ill with COVID-19. A few days later, her mother passed away.

Brown, director of health and well-being at a company that provides employee mental health programs and absence management services, sent a note to the senior ComPsych director who was her partner on the project, explaining she would have to miss work to care for her daughter and to make funeral arrangements. “The guilt that I felt for knowing I was going to leave her dry on my end,” she recalled.

Instead of calling to go over remaining tasks, the director reached out to ask whether Brown was OK and to tell her not to worry about the project. “In the grand scheme of things, this is not important,” Brown recalled her colleague saying. “It’ll be here when you get back. I’ll be there when you’re back.” Hearing the kind words, Brown “felt like there was a brick taken off my chest.”

The importance of treating others with kindness is one of the first lessons most parents and guardians try to teach children. But the skill sometimes falls by the wayside in work settings that encourage competition and where adults face deadlines and pressure. Financial worries and fears of layoffs also can stifle generous impulses.

Perhaps that’s why acts of kindness on the job often are so memorable for those on the receiving end. Molly MacDermot, director of special initiatives at Girls Write Now, a nonprofit mentorship and writing program, feels lucky to have a boss who was kind to her when MacDermot’s father died eight years ago and her mother passed away six months ago.

As technology accelerates the pace of many types of work, “it’s really important to feel human, to be allowed to be human, which is getting the grace to just deal with the bumps in life,” MacDermot said.

Kindness can also mean sharing hard truths in a productive way, going out of the way to welcome a new coworker or bending the rules for the sake of love.

Here are some examples of kindness in action and ideas for spreading goodwill at work.

Create safe spaces

Treating others with warmth and consideration may be especially meaningful at a time of heightened political divisions that has many people feeling like they have to choose sides, said Anna Malaika Tubbs, a sociologist and author of “The Three Mothers” and “Erased.”

“Especially in a workplace, where you can level the playing field and really make sure people know, ‘Hey, you’re welcome here and you’re seen here,’ that can really make a difference at a time when on a national level people feel really divided from each other,” Tubbs added.

One way to encourage empathy at work is to create an environment where people get to know each other, Tubbs said. Organizing staff retreats where family members are welcome, bringing in guest speakers, starting book clubs and scheduling fun offsite activities like going to an escape room are ways to generate shared experiences and facilitate healthy dialogues, she said.

The goal isn’t “to erase political difference or erase being able to disagree with each other” but to promote a cultural shift by encouraging behavior and actions different from the ones that often get rewarded at work, Tubbs said.

“Let’s not show up to meetings thinking that we have to compete and show who’s going to be the loudest and who’s going to be the most dominant,” she said. “What would look differently if we were collaborating with each other? If we were more focused on community?”

Creating a supportive culture within an organization requires daily attention, said Maya Nussbaum, the founder of Girls Write Now and MacDermot’s boss. She starts meetings with “heart warmers,” a time for staff members to share their thoughts on topics as simple as a favorite candle. She also encourages actively listening to different perspectives.

“Productivity is better when people feel that they’re valued and they’re listened to and they matter,” Nussbaum said. “They’re going to work harder and they are going to care, and they’re going to channel their passion as opposed to feeling dismissed.”

Provide real feedback

Compassion can mean sharing hard truths in a tactful way. For example, it’s challenging to let people know they aren’t meeting performance expectations, but “sometimes kindness is getting out of your comfort zone and telling someone the truth so they can shine,” said Chantel Cohen, founder and CEO of Atlanta-based CWC Coaching and Therapy, a counseling and life coaching practice in Atlanta.

When providing feedback as a manager, give specific examples to illustrate the behaviors that need improvement, she said. “Kindness isn’t a conflict-free workplace. Kindness is a workplace where repair is possible or improvement is possible,” Cohen said.

However, remember to acknowledge successes. Karla Cen recalls a former boss who she says criticized her several times a day. She learned a lot, but felt unrelenting pressure.

A manager at the retirement community in Florida where Cen works now brought her a potted plant on her first day after driving four hours to meet her. Another manager provides encouraging feedback daily.

“Having her pass by and say, ‘You did that really well today,’ it just really uplifts the mood of the whole department and makes us ready to come in for the next challenges,” Cen said.

Give back time

Before scheduling a meeting, consider whether the goals can be accomplished another way. For example, a manager can tell a working group, here’s what’s on the agenda, take time to think about it and send your ideas in writing, Cohen suggested.

“Sometimes, the gift of time is such a kindness,” she said. “Maybe you can’t give your team time off right now, but what you could do a couple times a quarter is just say, ‘Hey we’re going to skip tomorrow’s meeting and here are the things I want you all to think about. Submit this in writing so that you can have the time for yourselves.’”

Keeping meetings structured and focused also frees up time, Nussbaum said.

Reconsider rules

Meher Murshed began dating a colleague, Anupa Kurian-Murshed, more than two decades ago when they both worked at Gulf News in Dubai. The couple wanted to marry, but the newspaper prohibited spouses from working in the same department. They feared one of them would have to quit if they wed.

So they appealed to their editor-in-chief, who raised the issue with the managing director. The top managers decided the couple could keep their jobs and get married as long as one of them didn’t report to the other.

“It changed our lives. Life could have been very different,” Meher Murshed said.

Share your stories and questions about workplace wellness at cbussewitz@ap.org. Follow AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well