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Several years ago, the night before a local election, I was arrested for prostitution outside of a Koreatown motel. The customer who made the appointment with me twirled his wedding ring a lot and made small talk about sex toys. When he stood up, I followed him towards his motel room, which was across a parking lot. Once outside, I was handcuffed and shoved into an unmarked van by the “customer” and another cop, who flashed his shiny gold badge. After a few hours, I was dumped like a stray dog at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles. Unlike many other sex workers who have been routinely rounded up in prostitution stings, I was not misgendered, raped or beaten by cops. But the subordination ritual of the arrest itself, and the feeling of being caught in the jaws of a likely publicity stunt before an Election Day, stuck with me.

A majority of the other women in jail with me that night were half my age and were Black or brown. One of them fell asleep with her head on my lap after she showed me how to use the phone. Then, and now, the LAPD brags about making the city safer, but for sex workers, more arrests only mean more fear, abuse, trauma and poverty. Incarceration only exacerbates these conditions. For sex workers, cleaning up the city means erasure.

When I have friends visiting Los Angeles and I ask where they’d like to eat, of all the incredible restaurants that the city has to offer — old Hollywood steakhouses, elite sushi counters, taco trucks, bustling Korean barbecue spots — there’s one place that always comes up these days: Erewhon.

Best known as a wonderland of intriguing specialty products with prices that feel like performance art — $24 coconut yogurt, $75 matcha, $18 bottles of camel milk — the health-focused grocery store opened in LA in 1969. But in 2011, it fell under new ownership that rebranded it as an ultra-premium food destination rather than a hippie-food depot, and in 2022, all hell broke loose when Hailey Bieber’s $21 strawberry smoothie debuted and became an instant phenomenon, bringing national, even global attention to the once-lowkey chain. New Erewhon locations opened one after another in Silver Lake, Culver City, Beverly Hills, Pasadena, West Hollywood, and Studio City, with several more planned for the future. Its reputation is now both aspirational and polarizing; it’s known for its elaborate Tonic Bar beverages (including a never-ending series of celeb collabs), upscale hot bar, high concentration of influencers, and adherence to a particular mushroom-supplement vision of West Coast wellness.

Despite becoming more and more omnipresent, the store seems to show no signs of waning interest from the public. I’m consistently fascinated by how many people in LA can afford to make the high-price-point chain their everyday grocer. A friend once casually told me she spends $2,500 at Erewhon every month. “On what?!” I asked, incredulous. “Oh, you know — food, my supplements,” she replied nonchalantly, as though spending $30,000 annually on groceries as a childless adult was perfectly normal. That exchange should perhaps have been a canary in the coal mine for what came next: the elite membership tiers that Erewhon announced in mid-April.

Erewhon’s long had a membership program that can be joined by anyone for a $200 annual fee, offering 10 percent cash back, exclusive offers and discounts from “leading lifestyle brands” (examples include Lululemon, Cadillac of Beverly Hills, and a variety of five-star hotels), and a free smoothie each month. But it recently unveiled significantly more exclusive membership tiers, including the Premier tier, automatically granted to those who spend $5,000 or more per year at the store, and the Reserve tier, for members who spend upwards of $15,000 annually. These new tiers offer priority checkout, free delivery, “Your Drink Made First” privileges at the smoothie counter, and for Reserve members, a free daily coffee and pastry, butler-like assistance (carrying your groceries to the car; saving you a table in the cafe area), and most intriguingly, access to a “personal in-store concierge.”

America’s fastest-growing new bank doesn’t specialize in AI or crypto-currency or some exotic investment strategy with little real world value. It specializes in environmental sustainability.

Based in St. Petersburg, Florida, Climate First Bank was chartered in 2021 with a mission to finance environmental sustainability. Five years later, it’s already pushing $1.8 billion in assets. The bank — which describes itself as the nation’s first climate-focused bank — nearly doubled in size over the course of 2025 alone.

While Climate First is financing solar arrays of all sizes, including community solar and utility-scale battery storage systems, its rapid growth is powered mainly by the oldest force in banking: relationships.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, a wave of hysteria swept across the United States. Sensationalist media coverage and tabloid covers fueled wide-spread public fears that children were being sexually abused in Satanic rituals at the hands of their caretakers. In several high-profile cases, dozens of day care providers were criminally charged, sometimes facing hundreds of counts of sexual abuse.

The so-called Satanic Panic did not emerge in a vacuum. It coincided with a rise in conservative political and social influence and a broader backlash against feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. In the 1960s and 1970s, more women joined the workforce, increasing reliance on day care. At the same time, queer identities became more visible amid gradual legal and cultural shifts. These developments were widely perceived by social conservatives as threats to traditional family and sexual norms. Conservative Christian media figures in the 1980s—often described as “moral entrepreneurs”—helped amplify fears of satanic ritual abuse.

When I talk to other journalists and random bus stop strangers about the idea of divesting from Microsoft and Xbox - worth doing for many reasons besides the company's dealings with the Israeli military - there is often an air of learned helplessness, a kind of deer-in-headlights mentality. Microsoft's gaming biz is too huge to ignore. They own so much. They own a lot of the malarkey that gets eyeballs. Which I can confirm, based on day-to-day experience of traffic stats. Still, I would argue that they do not have any momentum with the things they own, and to be frank, a fair whack of their stuff does sod-all traffic for us. Microsoft today are institutionally incapable of being intriguing. As such, an extremely indulgent way of thinking about the BDS boycott is to treat it as positive encouragement to seek intrigue elsewhere.

Last week's Xbox showcase was a banner day for advocates of the idea that Microsoft's gaming business is a zombie, after thousands of layoffs in the face of a landscape transformed by fever dreams about productivity gains and the 'democratisation of art' under ChatGPT - a brave new world of acute component shortages in which the $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard starts to feel like buying up horse stables in 1908. Admittedly, a more basic reason for the show being so short of excitement is that Microsoft are keeping the powder dry for their next Xbox console, which isn't far away from a proper reveal. But still, what a crock of diminishing returns.

Fifteen years ago, the world’s billionaires collectively had $4.5 trillion.

By 2024, their wealth had more than tripled to $14.2 trillion.

Now, their combined wealth totals $20.1 trillion — an amount that is equivalent to nearly a fifth of the entire world’s total yearly output.

The stunning figures — calculated by the French economist Gabriel Zucman, director of the International Tax Observatory, a research organization funded by the European Union — reveal more than a surprisingly rapid increase in the concentration of wealth at the tippy top.

They also reflect a series of important global trends: the growing dominance of a few technology companies leading artificial intelligence development; the shrinking slice of the economic pie that goes to workers; and a deepening inequality that will be handed down to the next generation.

Tucked in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s sprawling universal childcare plan is a little-talked-about milestone: In September, the city will open what appears to be the first free daycare for municipal workers in the country.

The center, called The Little Apple, is a pilot program that could prove to be a model for cities across the country that are childcare curious, but not ready to take the big universal swing.

Housed in a renovated space on the first floor of the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building in Manhattan, home base for more than 2,000 city workers, the Little Apple will offer free care to the kids of full-time staff. All workers in the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), a city government support agency, can also take advantage of it regardless of their work location.

The center will be small — just 40 seats for children ages six weeks to 3 years old. To pay for it, the city budgeted about $1.5 million, or $35,000 per child.

According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including “10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026,” “11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026,” “The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026),” and “Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms.” The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify.

If rankings produced by the very company at the top of the list seem unlikely to fool anyone, that’s because humans probably aren’t the target audience. Chatbots are. When I recently asked ChatGPT for the “best way to set up an online storefront,” the AI tool identified Shopify as the first option. It wasn’t immediately clear how ChatGPT arrived at that recommendation, but a list of citations that accompanied the answer yielded a clue: Shopify’s own rankings.

For the quarter century that Google has been the de facto front door to the web, businesses have tried to find ways to get their pages at the top of search results. You’ve surely felt the influence of search-engine optimization, even if you don’t know the term. When you search for a recipe and have to scroll past the author’s rambling reminiscences about their great-aunt’s kitchen, that’s a form of SEO at work. Years ago, it became conventional wisdom among recipe bloggers that Google’s search rankings favored longer, more distinctive articles. (Some of them also just liked to spin a yarn.)

Now chatbots are cannibalizing the traditional search engine. More people are asking questions directly of AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. And searching Google now often yields an AI response, shunting the site’s famous “10 blue links” to the bottom of the results page. Last month, Google announced what it billed as the biggest change to search in 25 years: The search box now automatically expands as you type, and sometimes morphs into a chatbot. As a result, the SEO industry is scurrying to figure out how to get search bots to recommend a given product—a practice sometimes called “GEO,” for generative-engine optimization. To put it more bluntly, your search results are getting sloptimized.