Doug Field is fourth senior member of the iPhone maker’s car team to leave since February
Last modified on Wed 8 Sep 2021 07.20 EDT
Apple has lost the executive in charge of its below-the-radar car project to Ford, dealing a further blow to the iPhone maker’s automotive ambitions.
Doug Field, Apple’s vice-president of special projects, had also worked on Tesla’s Model 3 vehicle under Elon Musk. Field, who rejoined Apple in 2018 after a previous stint at the business, is the fourth senior member of the company’s car team to leave since February.

He will become Ford’s chief advanced technology and embedded systems officer with immediate effect, a critical post as the auto industry moves to adopt vehicles powered by electricity and guided by computers. This year Ford signed a six-year deal with Google that includes using Android software in the Michigan carmaker’s vehicles.
“I’m thrilled to be joining Ford as it embraces a transition to a new, complex and fascinating period in the auto industry,” Field said. “It will be a privilege to help Ford deliver a new generation of experiences built on the shift to electrification, software and digital experiences, and autonomy.”
Field will also oversee the integration of Ford products with other pieces of technology, such as a smartphone or watch.
Apple has been working on its own car project – known as Project Titan – since 2014 but few details have emerged of the venture, with executive appointments and departures largely used as a proxy for its progress. However, in 2015 the Guardian revealed that Apple was working on a self-driving vehicle and was scouting secure locations in the San Francisco Bay Area for testing.
Responding to Field’s departure, Apple said: “We’re grateful for the contributions Doug has made to Apple and we wish him all the best in this next chapter.”
The latest upheaval at Apple’s car project comes as the firm based in Cupertino, California, prepares to unveil its latest iPhone and Apple Watch on Tuesday 14 September at 10am Pacific time, or 6pm in the UK.
According to the website MacRumors, the iPhone 13 lineup will bear similarities to its immediate predecessor, with four phones in sizes that include 5.4in, 6.1in, and 6.7in. Two phones will be at the higher-end “pro” range, with the other two at a lower, comparatively more affordable price range. The most notable improvements in the iPhone 13 are expected to be the camera lens and battery capacity.

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The United States has about 100,000 public chargers, far fewer than Europe and China. It needs 10 times as many, auto experts say, to complete the switch from combustion engine vehicles.
Over the past year, the electric vehicle charging industry has been swept up in a Wall Street gold rush because of growing optimism about electric cars and trucks.Credit…Kelsey McClellan for The New York Times
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By Niraj Chokshi, Matthew Goldstein and Erin Woo
In President Biden’s vision of a green future, half of all new cars sold in 2030 will be electric. But something really basic is standing in the way of that plan: enough outlets to plug in all those cars and trucks.
The country has tens of thousands of public charging stations — the electric car equivalent of gas pumps — with about 110,000 chargers. But energy and auto experts say that number needs to be at least five to 10 times as big to achieve the president’s goal. Building that many will cost tens of billions of dollars, far more than the $7.5 billion that lawmakers have set aside in the infrastructure bill.
Private investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into building chargers, but the business suffers from a chicken-and-egg problem: Sales of electric cars are not growing fast enough to make charging profitable. It could be years before most charging companies break even, let alone mint big profits like Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
Fast chargers — ones that can fill up an electric car battery in 20 to 40 minutes — cost tens of thousands of dollars but are typically used less than humdrum gas pumps. Yet the auto and energy industries need to build them to reassure people that they won’t be stranded in an electric car with no plug in sight.
“E.V. charging infrastructure is the single biggest barrier to E.V. adoption,” said Asad Hussain, a senior analyst at PitchBook, a research firm. “You talk to anyone who’s on the fence about buying an E.V. and the No. 1 concern that comes to mind is range anxiety.”
The European Union, which is further along in electrifying cars, had nearly 200,000 public charging points last year. China, where electric cars are even more common than in Europe, had more than 800,000 in 2020.
European and Chinese officials have offered better incentives and imposed tougher regulations in part because they want to win a global race to build the cars and trucks of the future. U.S. policies, including the infrastructure bill, have been more modest because most Republicans and some Democrats oppose the regulation and spending needed to quickly ditch fossil fuels.
Soon, even $7.5 billion won’t be enough to lay the groundwork for the electric age, Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, a consulting and research firm based in Washington, said about the proposed federal spending on charging stations.
“Is it sufficient? No,” he said. “But it gets things going.”
Most drivers today plug in their electric cars at home, and only occasionally use public charging stations. But those stations will be crucial, especially to those who live in apartments and people who drive long distances.
For years, start-ups, automakers and other companies have been slowly building chargers, mainly in California and other coastal states where most electric cars are sold. These businesses use different strategies to make money, and auto experts say it is not clear which will succeed. The company with the most stations, ChargePoint, sells chargers to individuals, workplaces, stores, condo and apartment buildings, and businesses with fleets of electric vehicles. It collects subscription fees for software that manages the chargers. Tesla offers charging mainly to get people to buy its cars. And others make money by selling electricity to drivers.
Once the poor cousin to the hip business of making sleek electric cars, the charging industry has been swept up in its own gold rush. Venture capital firms poured nearly $1 billion into charging companies last year, more than the five previous years combined, according to PitchBook. So far in 2021, venture capital investments are up to more than $550 million.
On Wall Street, publicly traded special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have struck deals to buy eight charging companies out of 26 deals involving electric vehicle and related businesses, according to Dealogic, a research firm. The deals typically include an infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars from big investors like BlackRock.
“It’s early, and folks are trying to wrap their heads around what does the potential look like,” said Gabe Daoud Jr., a managing director and analyst at Cowen, an investment bank.
These businesses could benefit from the infrastructure bill, but it is not clear how the Biden administration would distribute money for charging stations.
Another unanswered question is who will be the Exxon Mobil of the electric car age. It might well be automakers.
Tesla, which makes about two-thirds of the electric cars sold in the United States, has built thousands of chargers, which it made free for early customers. The company could open its network to vehicles made by other automakers by the end of the year, its chief executive, Elon Musk, said in July.
Volkswagen also owns a charging network, Electrify America, which is already available to all makes of cars. In Europe, Volkswagen, BMW, Ford Motor, Daimler and other automakers jointly own a charging company called Ionity. Drivers pay fees to charge in both cases, but some automakers offer free charging for a few years to entice car buyers.
Energy giants like BP and Royal Dutch Shell have gotten into the business, too, by buying charging companies in Europe and the United States.
And 14 electric utilities from Maine to Texas have formed the Electric Highway Coalition to build stations at intervals of 100 miles or less. Utilities elsewhere are also building chargers, as are cities like Los Angeles and New York.
They are all competing in a tiny market: Less than 4 percent of new car sales and less than 1 percent of vehicles on U.S. roads are electric.
Charging companies claim they can succeed even if it takes years for electric vehicles to take over. Some businesses like ChargePoint have been around for more than a decade, while others raising money don’t have much of a track record.
The chief executive of ChargePoint, Pasquale Romano, says his company avoids some costs by using contract manufacturers to build equipment and selling stations to employers who own electric vehicle fleets, retailers and others, who also buy software and maintenance subscriptions.
​​“Everyone thinks this can go fast, and it can’t,” Mr. Romano said. “You have to get in and start pedaling to help shape what it looks like.”
Volta, a smaller charging company, places chargers near the entrances of retailers like Whole Foods Market and Walgreens. The chargers show ads, generating revenue, and the stations pay for themselves within a few years, said the company’s president and a co-founder, Chris Wendel. “It’s a sponsored service brought to you by brands that care about what you’re doing.”
But some companies have stumbled. In December, TPG Pace Beneficial Finance, a SPAC backed partly by TPG, the private equity firm, announced that it would buy EVBox, an Amsterdam-based maker of charging equipment, valuing the company at $1.4 billion.
In January, Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” said EVBox was his favorite charging company because it is an established player in Europe. Shares of TPG Pace Beneficial climbed to $31 in February, from around $10.
But this month, the companies delayed the merger’s closing because EVBox has not yet released its audited financial statements for 2020. TPG Pace said in a regulatory filing that there was “significant uncertainty” about the deal’s completion, and its shares have fallen back to about $10.
A spokeswoman for EVBox declined to comment.
Mr. Cramer no longer stands by the EVBox pick. “I suppose we put too much faith in the financials as presented to investors at the time,” he said in an email.
Since the start of 2020, 16 proposed SPAC mergers have been canceled or withdrawn. And investors and regulators have raised questions about the optimistic claims made by executives and promoters of SPACs.
Yet investors continue to pour money into charging. One charging company, EVgo, completed a SPAC deal and started trading in July. Trading in Volta started last month. Several other deals have been announced in recent months, including for Tritium, which makes fast chargers; Wallbox, which sells charging equipment, software and related services; and Allego, which operates a large charging network in Europe.
Some investors think that charging cars might not be the best approach.
Last month, Ample, which aims to build stations where drained E.V. batteries are replaced with charged ones, raised $160 million. Raed Masri, founder of Transform VC, an investor in Ample, said battery swapping would be better for people without a place to plug in their cars because it is much faster.
“They need a quick energy delivery system, and only swapping provides that,” Mr. Masri said.
Other investors are making lots of bets. Energy Impact Partners, a private equity firm based in New York, has invested in several charging networks, a repair app for charging stations and an app that optimizes charging.
Cassie Bowe, a principal at the firm, said that with electric vehicle sales growing fast, it was urgent to build a network to support them. “There’s no more time,” she said. “We need this infrastructure fast.”
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(Sucker Punch Productions; Sony; PS4, PS5)
This expansion of last year’s hit offers a wider range of missions and side quests to its samurai warfare
Last modified on Sun 5 Sep 2021 06.39 EDT
The Japanese island of Tsushima was, until last year’s Ghost of Tsushima, part of an obscure archipelago that few could pinpoint on a map. So much has the video game raised the island’s profile, through the story of how its 13th-century inhabitants resisted the invading Mongols, that the island’s mayor has made its developers permanent ambassadors of tourism for Tsushima. Now, an update, The Director’s Cut, may do the same for an even smaller neighbouring island in the Tsushima strait, Iki, where this expansive, newly released chapter takes place.
Having all but driven the Mongols from Tsushima, our hero, Jin, arrives on Iki with a similar aim. Iki’s residents, however, are less accepting; decades earlier, the samurai’s father invaded the island and subjugated its citizens. Memories remain brightly painful, and the islanders’ hostility is tempered only by virtue of a common enemy.

Last year’s epic was exquisitely rendered but repetitive and somewhat limited in its range of interactive possibility. And despite the tasteful rendering of the world – all whispering reeds and cherry blossom sunsets – you played as a sort of samurai Rambo, single-bladedly repelling the invader army. Here, you’re an important cog in a more complex, multifaceted drama. While the island is geographically small, it is rich and densely packed with missions and distractions: archery ranges to master, animal sanctuaries to establish and ancient riddles to solve.
The update makes elegant use of the PlayStation 5’s controller’s quasi-magical properties. Tilt the controller to guide a note along a musical stave and play a mournful lament on the flute. Wearing the appropriate outfit, haptic buzzes will guide you toward hidden valuables, the force of the pulse quickening the closer you are to the treasure. Despite the intermittent violence, this is a beautiful world to explore, lovingly crafted and compellingly framed.

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Microsoft delayed its office return indefinitely, it said in a blog post on Thursday. The company had pushed the full reopening of its U.S. offices to no earlier than Oct. 4., but revised those plans because of the threat of the Delta variant of the coronavirus. “It’s a stark reminder that this is the new normal,” wrote Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for modern work. “Our ability to come together will ebb and flow.” The company has said it will require proof of vaccination for all employees, vendors and guests to enter its offices.
UPS said on Thursday that it planned to hire more than 100,000 employees to help manage the annual influx of packages during the holiday season, from October through January. The company said that many individuals who apply will receive an offer within 30 minutes and that, in the past, about a third of those hired during the holiday season received a permanent position with the company.
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The ambitious new look at SpaceX’s first all-civilian flight, the streaming platform’s first real-time docuseries, takes reality television to space
Last modified on Tue 7 Sep 2021 12.47 EDT
The rise of commercial space travel is here, and for the vast majority who cannot afford its millions-plus price tag, streaming platforms are here to capture it. Starting this week, Netflix will air the first two installments of Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space, its first docuseries to cover an event – SpaceX’s launch of its first all-civilian crew on a three-day trip circling Earth – in “near real time”. Subsequent episodes will document the four astronauts’ preparation for the 15 September launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Episodes three and four will air just two days prior; a feature-length finale film of the mission itself will air in late September.

The series, directed by veteran sports documentarian Jason Hehir, best known for The Last Dance, promises to take audiences behind the scenes of the Inspiration4 mission, from the astronaut selection to the training and eventual takeoff. Netflix, as well as the passengers and SpaceX figures introduced in the first two episodes, are billing the trip as a paradigm shift in space exploration: an aperture in commercial space travel, a small but significant advancement toward the proliferation of rocket transportation, and a new frontier for reality television.
“Inspiration4 is just a really small step along that journey toward a Jetsons world where everyone’s going to jump in their spacecraft and journey in the worlds beyond ours,” Jared Isaacman, the 38-year-old billionaire chief executive of Shift4 Payments and longtime flight enthusiast who will be the mission’s commander, told the Guardian. “I don’t think it’s just going to be a few people for a long time,” he added, comparing space travel now, executed by private companies such as Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic with exorbitant price tags, to the early days of experimental aviation. “This is starting with a few, for sure, but this going to open up to the many.”
Until then, commercial space travel remains an ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive club predominantly spurred by the mega-rich, with live streams for everyone else. In July, Blue Origin livestreamed its launch of Jeff Bezos on a 11-minute suborbital space journey on its YouTube channel and on Amazon Prime; Virgin Galactic also streamed founder Richard Branson’s 59-minute space flight on YouTube, and recruited a popular science TikTok star for a future trip. It’s a given, as the environmentally questionable business of space tourism continues to expand, that reality TV will ride along – in April, Nasa signed a Space Act Agreement with the production company “Space Hero” to “[facilitate] initial cooperation and information sharing” for a competition show that would send the winner on an expensive trip to the International Space Station as early as 2023.
There’s a gameshow undercurrent to Countdown, the Netflix series, whose first two episodes predominantly serve to introduce viewers to the civilian astronauts, selected by a Willy Wonka-like arbitrary process tied to four core mission values.
Besides Isaacman (“Leadership”), who declined to specify the amount paid to participate in the mission (but did say proceeds raised for the pediatric cancer specialists at St Jude’s children’s research hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, would exceed the cost of the mission), the group includes Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old pediatric cancer survivor and physician assistant at St Jude’s, which nominated her to symbolize the value of “Hope”; Sian Proctor, 51, of Phoenix, Arizona, a geology professor who won a spot on Inspiration4 through a competition assessing entrepreneurial spirit and the ability to go semi-viral (“Prosperity”); and Chris Sembrowski, 42, a data engineer and air force veteran from Everett, Washington, selected off a list of donors to St Jude’s as part of Inspiration4’s Superbowl campaign (“Generosity”).
All are new to astrodynamics, ordinary figures unused to cameras and spotlight. It’s a far cry from Hehir’s mission on The Last Dance, in which his team endeavored to “de-iconize” a celebrity as ubiquitous and iconic as Michael Jordan. Though Countdown will build, in real time, the iconography of Inspiration4, Hehir assures that the project is not acting as gauzy PR for the company – “I didn’t see it as our role to aggrandize SpaceX,” he told the Guardian. “I thought it was necessary to outline what their mission is, why are we doing this – because one of the first questions is always that it’s another billionaire going to space, what’s the point? The point is ambition, seeing what else is out there, and the point in a charitable sense is raising $200m for St Jude’s.”
This is the most common criticism levied at SpaceX, and private space travel in general, one Hehir floats midway through the first episode – why send, or care about, billionaires going to space when there’s an abundance of earthbound issues that need addressing, most pressingly the climate emergency. Asked his response to such backlash, Isaacman echoed his answer in the first episode of the series: “We absolutely believe in balance here,” he said. “It’s been right from the start, from the creation of Inspiration4, that we’ve said: ‘we have to address some of the problems of today to earn the right to make progress for tomorrow,’” pointing to the fundraising effort for St Jude’s.
SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, appears in the first episode for brief overviews on the mission of Inspiration4 (civilian orbital space flight) and the company at large (colonization of Mars). It was “necessary to have [Musk] in it,” Hehir said, “because he is the face of that company and I felt that we owe it to our viewers for him to do two things. One, to articulate what the company’s mission is, and then two, to address the criticism that is so pervasive these days, of billionaires going into space and the privilege of wealth.” (Musk’s answer to the billionaire-critique is that “99%-plus of our economy should be dedicated to solving problems on Earth” but a multi-planet, space-bearing civilization is an “exciting, inspiring future”.)
“I had no interest in mythologizing that company or making it out that they’re saviors of the world,” Hehir said. “But I do think it’s important if you’re going to understand the ambition of the mission, to understand the ambition of the company itself.”
If all goes according to plan, the final episode, turned around on a snap days-long production timeline, will capture the Inspiration4’s crew successful return to Earth. The first two episodes find each weighing the inherent risk of space travel; Proctor, in particular, remembers watching the Challenger disaster when a shuttle exploded on live television in 1986, killing all seven crew on board (captured on camera: the shock and grief of Grace and Edward Corrigan, whose daughter Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher from New Hampshire, was to be the first American civilian in space).
“I understand what calculated risk is and what the reward is,” she told the Guardian, “and the reward of human space flight far exceeds the risk.”
Proctor, who was born in Guam, where her father worked for Nasa at an Apollo tracking station, will be only the fourth black American woman ever to travel to space (to date, only about 600 people have made the journey). Bubbling with a Ms Frizzle-esque enthusiasm for space exploration, Proctor is using to her spot aboard Inspiration4 to highlight black women’s long-overlooked role in American space travel. “We’re opening up the door for people who normally would have thought of being an astronaut or going to space, giving them the insight into how we’re doing it, and how times are changing,” she said of participating in the first all-civilian space flight.
“Old space was exclusive and you had to be the best of the best, you had to fit certain criteria. This is new space that’s emerging, that enables us to open up who gets to go and participate and write the narrative of human space flight,” she added, mapping out what she called a “Jedi” space — Just, Equitable, Diverse and Inclusive.
It remains to be seen if that narrative of a more democratic space will come to pass – and if Inspiration4 will push past skepticism of ultra-expensive, privately funded space flight. Regardless, the mission, and the messaging attached to it, will be televised, bringing the vast frontier to your personal screen.
Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space starts 7 September on Netflix

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The bill would rein in production quotas at warehouses that critics say are excessive and force workers to forgo bathroom breaks.
By Noam Scheiber
Among the pandemic’s biggest economic winners is Amazon, which nearly doubled its annual profit last year to $21 billion and is on pace to far exceed that total this year.
The profits flowed from the millions of Americans who value the convenience of quick home delivery, but critics complain that the arrangement comes at a large cost to workers, whom they say the company pushes to physical extremes.
That labor model could begin to change under a California bill that would require warehouse employers like Amazon to disclose productivity quotas for workers, whose progress they often track using algorithms.
“The supervisory function is being taken over by computers,” said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the bill’s author. “But they’re not taking into account the human factor.”
The bill, which the Assembly passed in May and the State Senate is expected to vote on this week, would prohibit any quota that prevents workers from taking state-mandated breaks or using the bathroom when needed, or that keeps employers from complying with health and safety laws.
The legislation has drawn intense opposition from business groups, which argue that it would lead to an explosion of costly litigation and that it punishes a whole industry for the perceived excesses of a single employer.
“They’re going after one company, but at the same time they’re pulling everyone else in the supply chain under this umbrella,” said Rachel Michelin, the president of the California Retailers Association, on whose board Amazon sits.
California plays an outsize role in the e-commerce and distribution industry, both because of its huge economy and status as a tech hub and because it is home to the ports through which much of Amazon’s imported inventory arrives. The Inland Empire region, east of Los Angeles, has one of the highest concentrations of Amazon fulfillment centers in the country.
Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokeswoman, declined to comment on the bill but said in a statement that “performance targets are determined based on actual employee performance over a period of time” and that they take into account the employee’s experience as well as health and safety considerations.
“Terminations for performance issues are rare — less than 1 percent,” Ms. Nantel added.
The company faces growing scrutiny of its treatment of workers, including an expected ruling from a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board that it unlawfully interfered in a union vote at an Alabama warehouse. The finding could prompt a new election there, though Amazon has said it would appeal to preserve the original vote, in which it prevailed.
In June, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters passed a resolution committing the union to provide “all resources necessary” to organize Amazon workers, partly by pressuring the company through political channels. Teamsters officials have taken part in successful efforts to deny Amazon a tax abatement in Indiana and approval for a facility in Colorado and are backers of the California legislation.
Both sides appear to regard the fight over Amazon’s quotas as having high stakes. “We know that the future of work is falling into this algorithm, A.I. kind of aspect,” said Ms. Gonzalez, the bill’s author. “If we don’t intervene now, other companies will be the next stage.”
Ms. Michelin, the retail association president, emphasized that the data was “proprietary information” and said the bill’s proponents “want that data because it helps unionize distribution centers.”
A report by the Strategic Organizing Center, a group backed by four labor unions, shows that Amazon’s serious-injury rate nationally was almost double that of the rest of the warehousing industry in 2020 and more than twice that of warehouses at Walmart, a top competitor.
Asked about the findings, Ms. Nantel, the Amazon spokeswoman, did not directly address them but said that the company recently entered into a partnership with a nonprofit safety advocacy group to develop ways of preventing musculoskeletal injuries. She also said that Amazon had invested over $300 million this year in safety measures, like redesigning workstations.
Amazon employees have frequently complained that supervisors push them to work at speeds that wear them down physically.
“There were a lot of grandmothers,” one worker said in a study underwritten by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, another backer of the California bill. Managers would “come to these older women, and say, ‘Hey, I need you to speed up,’ and then you could see in her face she almost wants to cry. She’s like, ‘This is the fastest my body can literally go.’”
Yesenia Barrera, a former Amazon worker in California, said that managers told her she needed to pull 200 items an hour from a conveyor belt, unbox them and scan them. She said she was usually able to reach this target only by minimizing her bathroom use.
“That would be me ignoring using restroom-type things to be able to make it,” Ms. Barrera said in an interview for this article. “When the bell would ring for a break, I felt like I had to do a few more items before I took off.”
Edward Flores, faculty director of the Community and Labor Center at the University of California, Merced, says repetitive strain injuries have been a particular problem in the warehousing industry as companies have automated their operations.
“You’re responding to the speed at which a machine is moving,” said Dr. Flores, who has studied injuries in the industry. “The greater reliance on robotics, the higher incidence of repetitive motions and thus repetitive injuries.” Amazon has been a leader in adopting warehouse robotics.
Ms. Gonzalez said that when she met with Amazon officials after introducing a similar bill last year, they denied using quotas, saying that they relied instead on goals and that workers were not punished for failing to meet them.
During a meeting a few days before the Assembly passed this year’s bill, she said, Amazon officials acknowledged that they could do more to promote the health and safety of their workers but did not offer specific proposals beyond coaching employees on how to be more productive.
At one point during the more recent meeting, Ms. Gonzalez recalled, an Amazon official raised concerns that some employees would abuse more generous allotments of time for using the bathroom before another official weighed in to de-emphasize the point.
“Someone else tried to walk it back,” she said. “It’s often said quietly. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it.”
The bill’s path has always appeared rockier in the State Senate, where amendments have weakened it. The bill no longer directs the state’s occupational safety and health agency to develop a rule preventing warehouse injuries that result from overwork or other physical stress.
Instead, it gives the state labor commissioner’s office access to data about quotas and injuries so it can step up enforcement. Workers would also be able to sue employers to eliminate overly strict quotas.
Ms. Gonzalez said she felt confident about the Senate vote, which must come by the close of the legislative session on Friday, but business groups are still working hard to derail it.
Ms. Michelin, the retailer group president, said that the Senate committees’ changes had made the bill more palatable and that her members might support a measure that gave more resources to regulators to enforce health and safety rules. But she said they had serious concerns about the way the bill empowers workers to sue their employers.
As long as that provision remains in the bill, she said, “we will never support it.”
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The 18-year-old behind the viral Twitter account @CraigWeekend has offered people a routine reminder to take a load off.
By Kellen Browning and Becca Foley
In a scene from “Saturday Night Live,” the English actor Daniel Craig stares into the camera and flops his arms halfheartedly, as if he meant to raise them above his head but got tired halfway.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Weeknd,” he says, announcing the episode’s musical guest: the Canadian pop star Abel Tesfaye. The studio audience begins to cheer.
These four seconds of footage, notable if only for Mr. Craig’s ambiguous tone (was he exasperated? dubious? expectant? neutral?), were surely forgotten by most viewers after the episode was broadcast on March 7, 2020. But not by Miles Riehle.
Watching Mr. Craig on “S.N.L.,” he was amused by what he saw as a double entendre. “It sounds like he’s welcoming in the weekend, as in Saturday or Sunday,” said Mr. Riehle, 18. “I was like, ‘Man, that’s really funny.’”
Following in the footsteps of Twitter accounts that tweet only on specific dates — think “Mean Girls” and Oct. 3 — Mr. Riehle claimed the handle @CraigWeekend and started tweeting the clip every Friday afternoon.
When the account took off months later, in November, “I was excited to have so many people following something that I was doing,” Mr. Riehle said. Soon, interview requests started rolling in.
The extra attention, while thrilling, was also daunting, he said, “because now I have to make sure I keep all these people entertained.”
That said, he seems to be sustaining the interest of his more than 450,000 followers, who Friday after Friday await his announcement that the workweek has come to an end. Some people message him when they feel he has not delivered his proclamation early enough.
Mr. Riehle thinks the account’s appeal can be chalked up to its positive and predictable messages during a period marked by fear and uncertainty.
“Given how much stress there was going on in the world, for a lot of people it was extra potent, being able to embrace the weekend and get excited for it,” he said. Fans of the account, he said, have developed “a community of good vibes.”
“It always seems like people are nice to each other in the replies and the comments and the quote-tweets,” Mr. Riehle said. “I think that’s sort of rare on the internet.”
He usually posts between 3:45 p.m. and 4:20 p.m. Pacific time, but never on the hour. “I kind of want to keep people on their toes,” he said.
Indeed, that his followers know something is coming — but not exactly when — could be key to keeping them engaged, said John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University.
The predictability “is very reassuring to people, especially during a pandemic when people have little else to do on a Friday and everything else in life seems so unpredictable,” Dr. Suler said. “But then, he does mix in a bit of unpredictable reinforcement by posting at different times of the night.”
Josh Varela, a fellow at Lead for America, a local government leadership program for recent college graduates, from Ventura, Calif., has notifications turned on for the account so he and his roommate know it’s time to put aside their responsibilities for the week.
“Whenever @CraigWeekend tweets, we see it as the time we’ll crack open a beer and hang out,” Mr. Varela, 23, said.
Derek Milton, a 34-year-old film director from Los Angeles, said that “any anxieties, any worries, any hardships that have accumulated over the past five days are relieved by a four-second clip.” He and his friends love the video so much that they recorded a parody version of their own while on the set of a photo shoot with none other than the Weeknd.
Mr. Craig was not available to comment on the “S.N.L.” clip, but the Weeknd appears to be in on the joke. In May, he tweeted, “ladies and gentlemen, the …”
It wasn’t hard for Mr. Riehle to fill in the blank.
“I consider that to be a call-out tweet to me personally,” he said. “I think he likes it.”
Mr. Riehle starts college this fall at the University of California, Davis, where he plans to study environmental policy and planning. He intends to keep running the account while in school.
“I don’t know when it will end or if it will end,” he said. “Obviously if it gets to a point to where it’s harming my relationship with the internet, then I might get rid of it, but I have no plans right now to ever stop doing it.”
For all the relief his account gives the weekday 9-to-5 crowd, Mr. Riehle knows that, for some workers, the tweet could also be a dispiriting reminder of impending duties. He himself works as an ambassador for Orange County’s public transit service — on the weekend.
“It is kind of ironic,” he said.
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As companies embrace hybrid working arrangements, the reshaping of roles can make jobs more fulfilling and rewarding
Last modified on Thu 12 Aug 2021 05.37 EDT
As offices slowly reopen, much of the discussion about the “new normal” centres around the rise of the hybrid workplace. A recent Microsoft/Edelman Data & Intelligence survey found that 73% of employees wanted flexible remote work options to stay, while 66% of leaders said they were redesigning office space for hybrid work.
Flexible and hybrid working combines the freedom of remote work with the benefits of the office. Handled well, the transition to hybrid working can also be an opportunity to reimagine roles in a way that makes them more fulfilling and rewarding. But structuring a successful hybrid workplace is surprisingly complicated and goes much further than just saying: “You can do three days a week at home.”

“Based on the work we’ve been doing, we think there are about 10 different factors that control an organisation’s ability to allow people to split their roles between the office and home,” says Ian Gooden, CEO of the HR consultancy Chiumento. “To take a simple example, if you’re a hairdresser, you nearly always have to be wherever the customer is. This obviously limits your ability to work from home, although you can visit the customer in their home – or even cut hair in your garage.”
According to a recent McKinsey study, more than half of jobs have little or little or no opportunity for remote working. However, more than 20% of the workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as they could if working from an office. Done collectively, this could translate into three to four times as many people working from home compared with pre-pandemic levels.
Gooden says that when considering whether jobs can be partly done at home, companies need to look at issues ranging from the need for special equipment and face-to-face meetings to technology and security. A job requiring high levels of security clearance may not be suitable for home working, even if in all other respects, it’s ideal.
However, it’s also a mistake to treat jobs as monolithic. This gets really interesting when you start “unbundling” jobs into individual tasks in order to make them more flexible and rewarding.
At its simplest, this may just involve looking at when people need to be in the office (for meetings, ideas sessions and appraisals) and when they don’t (research or writing reports). From there, a more nuanced set of complexities must be considered. How do one person’s needs fit in with the team’s needs and how do factors such as trust and managerial preference feed into this? It is a matrix that will differ significantly from one organisation to the next.
Lewis Barker, senior manager, EMEA, workplace and real estate at ServiceNow, says he’s seeing his company’s offices become more centred around “hospitality” – whether it’s for client meetings or team meetings. “We now view our own office space as much more about collaboration and innovative thinking as well as for tasks in areas where technology doesn’t yet allow effective home working.” It is, he explains, becoming a case of staff going into the office because there is a reason to be there, rather than going in by default.
Key to making this new arrangement work, he adds, is using the company’s workflow software to connect people in a way that facilitates communication and resolution of any conflicts that might arise. Then there’s the issue of how best to spread office-based tasks throughout the entire week despite many people’s preference for working from home on Mondays and Fridays. “We’re already seeing what we call ‘midweek mountains’ and we’re looking at data to see how people might resolve that.” He adds: “You might also receive notifications when people on your team come in – that’s very easy to do.”
If you can unbundle roles into their constituent tasks, you can also put many of the tasks into a kind of team pool – allowing managers to reapportion tasks in a way that lets people work more as they wish. This can lead to more fulfilling and empowering work. Again, it can be quite complex and so workflow software, data analytics and AI can help. Many jobs have elements – mainly menial, repetitive tasks – that lend themselves to automation. So unbundling roles into their constituent tasks might give you three buckets – work you need to be in the office for, work better done at home and tasks that can easily be offloaded to a machine. By automating the latter, employees have more time to focus on the former.
Another way technology can help redefine roles is by giving employees new tools that allow them to be more autonomous. For instance, low-code platforms are giving more and more teams the ability to create applications that solve their own unique problems as they see fit. Low-code solutions like ServiceNow’s Creator Workflows offer pre-built templates and tools that enable users to customise their own systems and apps. Low-code platforms can be a more empowering – and, ultimately, more effective – alternative to adopting standardised solutions dispensed by the IT department.
The use of empowering technology and the unbundling of roles are likely to have significant upsides for companies as well as for their staff – from lower real estate costs to the ability to access more talent. Gooden notes that being able to offer flexible working will make employers more attractive and expand the pool of good candidates. “If you need to hire a lawyer but they can work anywhere in the UK most of the time, you’re likely to get more applications.”
The pandemic cracked open the foundation of the traditional workplace – a foundation largely put in place before we had the technologies to work from anywhere. So, for those ready to reinvent the way work is done, whether you’re an individual or the CEO of a multinational, now is the time to ask – because the appetite for change will not last.
“Right now, everyone is seeing ways to do things differently,” says Barker. “There’s a real willingness to ask: ‘Why don’t we try something new?’”
The way we work is changing. Find out more at servicenow.com/uk

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