Brandon Zech and Jessica Fuentes discuss their most anticipated Texas exhibitions opening in the spring season, including solo shows by Mary Ellen Carroll at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston and Rashid Johnson at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and a group show of digital art at the Blanton Art Museum in Austin.
Mary Ellen Carroll, “No. 9 (My Death is Pending…Because.) Night of Destruction with Fireworks Demolition Derby” (production still), 2017. Photo: Michele Asselin
“Mary Ellen Carroll: How To Talk Dirty and Influence People is the first exhibition to survey the work of acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Mary Ellen Carroll. The exhibition focuses on a selection of key projects spanning more than four decades, several of which remain ongoing and include new works realized in collaboration with CAMH. The exhibition charts the import and impact of Carroll’s engagement with questions of agency and identity, as well as the artist’s exploration of some of the most urgent issues of our time, including environmental sustainability, social justice, immigration, and urban legislation.
Carroll’s approach to art-making is collaborative and research-based, often involving years of planning, coordination, and community engagement. As the exhibition title’s allusion to famed comedian and rabble-rouser Lenny Bruce suggests, Carroll is equally a trickster, scamp, and intermediary, applying a wryly humorous (though no less critical) approach to addressing society’s most pressing issues.”
“The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, the artist’s largest exhibition to date and his first major museum survey in more than a decade. Johnson, one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation, is known for his diverse practice, which spans painting, sculpture, film, and installation — all of which are included in this exhibition.
For nearly three decades, Rashid Johnson has cultivated a multidisciplinary approach to artmaking while drawing upon art history, philosophy, literature, and music as conceptual frameworks. Over this time, Johnson has developed a distinct visual language that engages with central themes and questions that reflect on his story and contemporary life in general, such as race, masculinity, empathy for others, self-care, family, sobriety, and his own, and each of our inner emotional lives. The exhibition’s title, A Poem for Deep Thinkers, takes its name from a poem by Amiri Baraka, an American poet, writer, teacher, and political activist whose work is a frequent source of inspiration for Johnson. Tracing Johnson’s trajectory from his early experiments in photography and video to his recent materially complex paintings and assemblages, this presentation brings together nearly 90 works spanning pivotal phases of the artist’s career.”
“In Run the Code, contemporary artists harness algorithms and generative AI models to create powerful, thought-provoking works that explore nature, art history, internet culture, and human behavior. Showcasing highlights from the Thoma Foundation’s Digital and Media Art Collection, this immersive exhibition transforms digital information into sensory works of art. Included are some of the most important digital and generative artists working today: Refik Anadol, Daniel Canogar, Jenny Holzer, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, teamLab, Siebren Versteeg, Leo Villareal, and Marina Zurkow, among others.
Some create interactive systems that respond to your movement, touch, or presence — inviting you to become part of the artwork. Others design custom software that generates ever-evolving images right before your eyes. Digital landscapes reflect on our relationship with the natural world, while other works remix historical paintings and cultural archives through machine processes. Together, these artworks demonstrate that algorithms can be more than technical tools — they can also serve as a creative medium.”
“The Nasher Sculpture Center announces Rauschenberg Sculpture, a presentation of highlights from the 3D practice of Robert Rauschenberg — an artist whose experimental and innovative approach to art making has affected virtually every aspect of contemporary art. The exhibition, organized by Senior Curator Dr. Catherine Craft, is being held during the celebration of the centennial of his birth.
Rauschenberg Sculpture will highlight numerous themes the artist pursued across a wide range of materials throughout his career, including his use of found materials, his interest in the relation between art and science, the multivalent role of movement and performance in relation to his work, and references to other cultures and artistic traditions, past and present. Central to Rauschenberg’s sculpture was his use of discarded objects, from scrap metal and tires to rags and cardboard boxes, accompanied by his insistence that such items were as legitimate as any traditional artistic material.”
Norwood Viviano, “Recasting Houston,” 2019, kiln-cast glass, 14 x 14 x 13 inches. Photo by Tim Thayer/RM Hensleigh
Clutch City Craft Houston Center for Contemporary Craft February 28 – August 08, 2026
From the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft:
“Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC) is pleased to present Clutch City Craft, a major group exhibition examining the craft traditions and material cultures that have shaped Houston into one of the nation’s most formidable centers of making. Spanning both the front and main galleries at HCCC, the show will feature a wide spectrum of making practices, from the artists behind century-old mosaic street signs to cowboy boot makers and fiber artists who design space suits and preserve the woven interiors of NASA mission control.
HCCC Curator and Exhibition Director Sarah Darro notes, ‘Drawing its title from the city’s emblematic nickname — earned during the Houston Rockets’ back-to-back NBA championship wins in 1994 and 1995 — this exhibition uses Clutch City as both a cultural ethos and curatorial framework to examine how skilled craftsmanship underpins Houston’s industrial, social, and aesthetic identities.’”
In brief: In today’s post we discuss the likelihood of Saturday being fine to get out and about in Houston, and whether that is likely to change on Sunday. We also have some thoughts for people driving north on I-45 and west on I-10 this weekend.
Big picture on the winter storm
Not much has changed overnight with the forecast for this weekend. A strong Arctic front will arrive in the region on Friday or Friday night, but it still appears that coldest air behind this front will only gradually spill into the Houston region. Therefore, if you’re planning to remain in the Houston metro area (i.e. from The Woodlands to Galveston, and Katy to Baytown) you should be able to go about your activities as normal throughout the daytime Saturday. I think roadway conditions will also be fine on Saturday evening, prior to 9 pm at least, but we’ll have to see.
This is the forecast for various types of precipitation this weekend across Texas: Rain, freezing rain, snow, and sleet (ice pellets). Please note this is for illustration purposes only, it is not yet a high confidence forecast. (Weather Bell)
Sunday is now the greater concern as this is when the colder air will arrive in Houston. The question, as we’ve been talking about for a few days now, is the timing of the colder air’s arrival and the end of widespread, light showers. I think there’s a decent chance that showers and freezing temperatures overlap on Sunday morning, in which case roads become icy and dangerous to drive on. Whether this occurs on bridges and overpasses only, or a majority of roads remains to be seen. But you should be prepared for disruptions, especially along and north of Interstate 10.
Our coldest temperatures will descend into the region on Sunday night into Monday morning, when there will be a hard freeze across the region. Whether roads remain icy during this period will depend on the amount of precipitation, afternoon temperatures on Sunday, sunshine later on Sunday, and a host of other factors I just cannot predict. But there is the distinct possibility of ice on roads through Monday morning. We’ll see.
What if I need to drive north on I-45?
There must be a lot of cheer competitions in the Dallas area this weekend because I have received an extraordinary number of questions about participants. I wish you all well, if the competitions proceed. My sense is that travel north all the way to Dallas should be fine on Friday and Friday afternoon. At some point on Friday night, maybe sunset, maybe 9 pm, maybe midnight, rain will start to transition to sleet or freezing rain in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. After that temperatures will remain below freezing through at least Monday morning, and perhaps all the way to Tuesday. Roads in the region up there will likely range from hazardous to borderline impassable for the weekend.
Yeah, things are going to be a mess in Dallas this weekend. (National Weather Service)
What if I need to drive west on I-10?
You have a little more time if you’re headed west. Driving along I-10 should be fine on Saturday, and likely into Saturday evening. But again, at some point Saturday evening or Saturday night there will likely be a transition to freezing rain that will last into Sunday morning. I would imagine that driving back from Austin or San Antonio will be fine on Monday afternoon.
What if I live north of Houston, in the Piney Woods or College Station?
For locations on the northern fringes of the Houston metro area, basically along and north of Highway 105, you can expect freezing temperatures to remain in place from Saturday afternoon through at least Monday, and possibly into Tuesday morning. This means any freezing rain or ice that accumulates on Saturday and Sunday will likely remain in place for awhile. I expect travel around these areas to be very difficult starting on Saturday and you should prepare to hunker down for a couple of days.
Thursday
It won’t feel like winter today. Thanks in part to warm, humid air and yesterday’s rains we are seeing fairly widespread fog this morning. After this clears we will see partly sunny skies this afternoon, and a warm day with temperatures in the lower 70s. Winds will be light, generally from the east. There is a very slight chance of showers near the coast. Lows tonight will only drop to about 60 degrees. It’s a good day for winter storm preparations.
Friday
This will be another fairly warm and humid day, to start. Expect highs to reach the upper 60s. We may see some very light showers during the daytime, ahead of the front, which should arrive on Friday afternoon or evening. As noted above the initial push of cooler and drier air into Houston will not be the main event. Lows on Friday night will likely drop into the upper 40s or lower 50s, with additional light showers.
Saturday
This will be a rainy and cold day. Expect widespread showers. Overall, I expect most areas to pick up about one inch of rain, give or take. The majority of this will fall as cold rain in Houston, rather than freezing precipitation. Highs on Saturday will likely top out in the 50s before a surge of colder air arrives later on Saturday and into Saturday night. We continue to think it should be OK to move around the Houston area on Saturday, with temperatures remaining above freezing. That could begin to change Saturday night, but perhaps not until after midnight for most locations.
Low temperature forecast for Monday morning. (Weather Bell)
Sunday and Monday
This will be the coldest period. I don’t feel particularly comfortable predicting highs on Sunday because they will be influenced by a number of factors, including clearing skies on Sunday afternoon, the influence of ice on the ground north of the Houston metro area (northerly winds chilled by this ice are not well modeled), and other factors. Generally, I think there is a decent chance that Houston’s highs reach above freezing for a couple of hours on Sunday, and if this happens in conjunction with clearing skies we could see most roads dry out. That’s the glass half full scenario. It is also possible that light rains linger into Sunday afternoon, temperatures remain at about the freezing level, and ice persists on roads through Monday morning. It’s going to be a close call in Houston. Anyway, we are highly confident in a cold night on Sunday into Monday (see image above), with lows in the hard freeze range necessitating the protection of pipes, plants, and pets. Temperatures on Monday should push at least into the upper 30s, and in conjunction with clearing skies this should end the threat of ice on roads. Lows on Monday night will be very cold again, although perhaps a couple of degrees warmer than Sunday night.
Next week
We should get into the 50s or perhaps lower 60s for a few days next week, but there is the potential for another front by Friday or so that could return freeze chances into Houston. We’ll see.
Our next update will be posted by around 3 pm CT today.
President Trump announced Wednesday that a framework for a future Greenland deal had been reached. The Onion assesses the veracity of Trump’s statements regarding Greenland.
Claim: Greenland needs protection from Russia and China.
Partially true: Greenland needs protection from Russia, China, and the United States.
Claim: America will use military force to acquire Greenland if necessary.
False: Military force will be used even if it’s unnecessary.
Claim: Buying Greenland would benefit national and global security.
False: Sometimes it’s fun to just buy stuff.
Claim: The fearsome, 400-foot ice kaiju that protects Greenland from invaders can easily be felled with conventional weaponry.
False: Sure, if you completely forget about its ability to rapidly regenerate damaged cells.
Claim: Greenland contains large swaths of unspoiled resources.
Partially true: Not for long!
Claim: Greenlanders would welcome American influence.
False: Though they probably wouldn’t say no to a Cheesecake Factory.
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND – Following his poorly-received and rambling address at the World Economic Forum, U.S. President Donald Trump angrily demanded that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney personally give him the standing ovation he earned for his speech yesterday. “That foreign lady gave me her Nobel Prize last week, which means I won a Nobel Peace […]
The Social Security Administration made two Hatch Act violation referrals last month after a Department of Government Efficiency employee signed an agreement to share SSA data with a political advocacy group, according to a new court filing.
That advocacy organization isn’t named in the document, but its “stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.”
Last March, the advocacy group contacted two DOGE associates at SSA “with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired,” the court filing says.
One of the DOGE employees — neither of whom are identified in the court filing, which is dated Jan. 16 — signed a “voter data agreement” with the group on March 24, 2025, potentially to use SSA data to match against voter rolls.
It’s not clear if that advocacy group ever got the data, the court papers note, saying “SSA has not yet seen evidence that SSA data were shared with the advocacy group.”
The DOGE employee-signed agreement wasn’t approved through the agency’s typical data exchange procedures. SSA only learned about it during an unrelated review last fall. It made two referrals to the Office of Special Counsel in December for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which limits certain political activities of federal employees.
The revelation is tucked within a Justice Department “correction” to testimony from SSA officials during ongoing legal battles over DOGE access to SSA data. The court filing is signed by longtime DOJ employee Elizabeth Shapiro, deputy director in the agency’s Civil Division.
The White House and SSA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. An OSC spokesperson said that they could “neither confirm nor deny” the complaint and directed Nextgov/FCW to SSA.
The Trump administration is already ramping up the use of SSA data to comb through voter rolls using a searchable, national citizenship database as it pushes states to share their voter rolls with the Justice Department. That’s caused alarm among experts, who say that the effort could lead to eligible voters being disenfranchised.
True the Vote, which has repeatedly made false claims about voter fraud in elections, publicly asked DOGE to audit voter rolls last March, as Democracy Docket has reported.
Shapiro also wrote that the former operational head of DOGE — Elon Musk associate Steve Davis — was emailed an encrypted, password-protected file of SSA data in early March of last year.
The SSA DOGE team copied Davis on an email to the Department of Homeland Security with this file — the contents of which SSA still doesn’t exactly understand, since it hasn’t been able to access it. A Labor Department DOGE associate was also copied on the email.
SSA doesn’t know if Davis or the Labor employee had the file’s password or accessed the file, which SSA believes contains personal information on 1,000 people, including their names and addresses.
The agency still maintains that DOGE didn’t have access to SSA systems of record, but Shapiro wrote that SSA believes the encrypted attachment was “derived from SSA systems of record.”
Two DOGE associates were also granted access to sensitive data after a court issued a temporary restraining order last March blocking DOGE’s access to SSA data, according to the new court document, although Shapiro writes that “it is unknown at this time whether any [personally identifiable information] was accessed.”
The Supreme Court overruled the block on DOGE access to data in June, although the case is ongoing back down in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The new court papers also list additional databases that SSA DOGE employees had access to last spring, including a system containing SSA employee records, and say that DOGE employees were using links to share data through third-party server Cloudflare.
The agency hadn’t approved Cloudflare for data storage, and “when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols.” As with other revelations in the court document, SSA didn’t know about this until more recent reviews.
SSA also doesn’t know what data was shared to the third-party server or if it's still there.
That is one of the most concerning parts of the court documents, Kathleen Romig, director of social security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Nextgov/FCW.
“Nearly a year after DOGE staff shared sensitive data with a group hoping to overturn election results, SSA acknowledges that they still don’t know what data they shared or whether it is still on an insecure server,” she said.
The revelations follow other allegations about data sharing from SSA’s former chief data officer Chuck Borges, who resigned after filing a whistleblower complaint last summer alleging that DOGE employees created a live copy of sensitive SSA data on a vulnerable cloud server.
That cloud environment lacked security controls like independent tracking of who has access to the data, which included personal information for each person issued a Social Security number, like names, birthdays and more. Its creation “potentially violated multiple federal statutes,” Borges alleged.
“The federal government has conceded that many of Mr. Borges’ allegations are accurate," Debra Katz, one of Borges' attorneys, said in a statement.
SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano has since toldconcerned lawmakers that SSA hasn’t shared or leaked any of its Numident database, its master record of all assigned Social Security numbers, in any unauthorized fashion.
That may be true, but the latest court documents show that SSA doesn’t know exactly what data has and hasn’t shared, said Romig.
Borges also alleged in his whistleblower complaint that DOGE associates “circumvented” court orders prohibiting them from accessing SSA data last spring.
While that temporary restraining order was still in effect, one SSA executive, Greg Pearre, refused to give DOGE access to an SSA database that they wanted to share with the DHS, Borges wrote in a complaint filed against SSA with the Office of Special Counsel in November, alleging that he was retaliated against for his whistleblowing.
“A DOGE affiliate responded by having Mr. Pearre physically removed from the SSA’s premises,” that complaint reads.
Government Executive reporter Sean Newhouse contributed to this story.
Editor's note: This article has been updated to include a comment from one of Chuck Borges' attorneys.
The latest crash came two days after Spain's worst railway disaster since 2013 that left many Spaniards in disbelief. The death toll in that crash, in southern Spain, rose to 43.
“By making any Member Content available through the Site or Services, you hereby grant to Academia.edu a worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, transferable license to exercise any and all rights under copyright, in any medium… including the generation and hosting of Output and the use of AI to generate adaptations and other derivative works of Member Content.” — Excerpt from the social platform Academia.edu’s terms of service.
- - -
Our AI has turned your book chapter about the ecology of the Southern Appalachian mountains into a five-minute podcast.
- - -
Our AI has turned your article about seahorse reproduction into a webcomic.
- - -
Our AI has turned your book chapter on pleromatic forms in gnostic cosmogony into a cute cat video.
- - -
Our AI has turned your dissertation on novel applications for multi-qubit nanoscale sensing into a catchy K-pop song.
- - -
Our AI has turned your article about Proust’s multiple ontologies of the self into a thirty-minute meal with only six ingredients.
- - -
Our AI has turned your thesis about oxygen evolution electrocatalysis into rage bait preloaded with one hundred racist and transphobic comments.
- - -
Our AI has turned your article about convex-constrained nonlinear functions into one simple trick to lose belly fat.
- - -
Our AI has turned your conference poster about nanofluid flow and thermal transfer into a fake endorsement by Selena Gomez.
- - -
Our AI has turned your article about post-IPO stocks and convertible bond prices into a hip-hop musical.
- - -
Our AI has turned your essay about mid-twentieth-century Brazilian sugar exports into an NIL deal for your university’s second-string quarterback.
- - -
Our AI has turned your white paper about the application of fiber optic sensors in tunnel construction into an unboxing video of your white paper… in a tunnel.
- - -
Our AI has turned your conference presentation about Sigenauk’s War of Independence into a makeup tutorial.
- - -
Our AI has turned your article on new treatments for dysentery in underserved rural communities into a romantasy novel.
- - -
Our AI has turned your article about a new species of salamander into a prestige drama starring Giancarlo Esposito.
- - -
Our AI has coated your critical review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology in Dubai chocolate.
- - -
Our AI has converted your law review article about AI and copyright infringement into a pop-up ad for Academia.edu.
CHICAGO—Calling attention to the startling lack of tied-up cherry stems in the average diet, health experts from the American Medical Association warned Tuesday that Americans were not sensually eating enough fruit. “While it’s recommended that adults erotically suck on at least two pieces of fruit daily, many people are falling far short of that,” said Dr. Logan Toledano, emphasizing how essential it is for overall health and well-being to sumptuously lick a strawberry in a slow, circular motion before taking a big, wet bite. “Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen a marked decline in the amount of peach juice dripping down cleavage. While some might prefer to run their tongue up and down a melting ice cream cone or eat sushi off a bare stomach, there’s simply no replacement for moaning with tantalizing pleasure while eating grapes.” Toledano added that Americans could easily introduce more succulent fruit into their diet by deep-throating a banana.
LOS ANGELES—Leaning forward in his seat as a number of questions raced through his mind, Dwayne Johnson was reportedly intrigued Monday after learning there was a special trophy for good actors. “Huh, interesting—and you said they give them out every year?” asked Johnson, who frowned as he racked his brain in an attempt to recall if any of the orange blimps, WWE belts, or other assorted awards on display in his study had been given to him by the “academy” his dinner companions had mentioned. “So the statue is a man, but do you have to be a man to earn one? No? I see, I see. Well, how good of an actor do you have to be? Really good, or just good-good? Is there a certain movie you need to be in?” At press time, reports confirmed the veteran pro wrestler was even more confused after being told that sometimes an actor didn’t even need to be good to receive one.
On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic's Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called "Humanizer," the simple prompt plugin feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as chatbot giveaways. Chen published the plugin on GitHub, where it has picked up over 1,600 stars as of Monday.
"It's really handy that Wikipedia went and collated a detailed list of 'signs of AI writing,'" Chen wrote on X. "So much so that you can just tell your LLM to... not do that."
The source material is a guide from WikiProject AI Cleanup, a group of Wikipedia editors who have been hunting AI-generated articles since late 2023. French Wikipedia editor Ilyas Lebleu founded the project. The volunteers have tagged over 500 articles for review and, in August 2025, published a formal list of the patterns they kept seeing.
Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers.
Elizabeth Shapiro, a top Justice Department official, said SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from using their official positions for political purposes.
1. Coworker keeps suggesting I should babysit his kids
I work in an office environment, somewhat casual, but we have absolutely no involvement with anything children-related. So I have no idea why a manager here seems to think that I would be interested in babysitting for him in the office or outside of work. For reference, I’m a mid-20s woman in a mostly male office.
The manager in question, Fergus, is above me in the hierarchy but not my boss (I report to two people above him). I’ve known for a while that he has two young children, and the nature of our jobs is either long hours, an odd schedule, or both. He has often made reference to his unhappiness with not being able to see his kids as often.
Back when we were peers, he made the occasional comment about getting me to babysit for him, despite the fact I’ve never met his children, have no desire to meet or babysit his children, and we made the exact same pay rate. Since he’s been promoted to his current job, I have seen him less due to schedule mismatches but every few weeks I still hear an occasional somewhat passive-aggressive comment about him bringing his children in and leaving them with me or me watching his kids after work. I haven’t heard ever he make a similar request to any of the other people in my job or to the other woman of similar age in the office.
How should I handle this? It’s not super frequent but it is grating when he does mention it. I do get along with my bosses, but I am not sure it is worthwhile to bring up to them. I could speak to Fergus about it but am not comfortable with the idea of engaging with him directly. And I’m not sure if it’s even worth it to bring up since it’s not an everyday occurrence.
It’s because you’re one of the few women, and he assumes all women are interested in and available for child care.
The next time he says something about having you watch his kids, say this in response: “I know you’re joking, but I’m not available to babysit and would rather you stop joking about it.” If you want to — or if the initial request to stop doesn’t work — feel free to also say, “It’s uncomfortable being one of the few women here and being the one to get babysitting comments. I’m sure you don’t mean it that way, but I’m asking you to stop.”
If he ever does bring his kids in and try to leave them with you, be ready to say on the spot (before he can get away), “I’m not able to watch them, don’t leave them here.”
2. My shifts are annoyingly short
I work in a call center and it’s casual work. But it’s casual in a really annoying way.
I get three- and four-hour shifts, every day. That means three hours of commuting for three hours work, on a bad day. People are leaving just because it’s not worth it. Why not give me seven hours work one day, then a day off?
When I mentioned this in a meeting, management just said “there’s an algorithm” and “the business needs you at some times and not others.” But when I finish my three-hour shift, I find myself leaving just as the guy next to me starts his four-hour shift. So there’s clearly seven hours of work to be done, right?
Another manager in that meeting said, “Hey, this job is not for everyone” as if it was submarine captain or battlefield medic. But it’s mostly helping elderly people change their passwords.
Do you think the company is deliberately giving us crumbs of work to keep us hanging on? I speculate sometimes that if they gave us whole days off, we would find it easier to apply for other jobs.
I don’t think they’re scheduling you that way to keep you from applying for other jobs (since you could do that during your half-days off — or at least you could if you didn’t have such a long commute). But I do think they’re scheduling you that way for other reasons that aren’t good — like that they want to avoid you being eligible for health insurance or other benefits, or keeping each person’s hours below a certain threshold means they don’t have to pay into specific state programs (or offer paid sick leave, in some states), or so forth.
Have you ever asked how it advantages the company to schedule people like this? Or explicitly asked for longer shifts? This company doesn’t sound particularly forthcoming so nothing useful may result from that, but both are worth asking.
3. Should I say I’m willing to take a salary below the advertised range?
This is my first time job-hunting since it became a requirement in many places to post the pay rates with job listings. Many places still have a spot for expected salary on their applications, though. With jobs that I’m confident I’m qualified for, I have no problem naming a figure in that range, but what about the ones that are a stretch? Some I would be happy to take even $10,000 below the lower end of the range, but is that helping my application to offer that or should I stick with the range? For reference, I’m being laid off from a nonprofit for financial reasons, and it’s mostly for profit jobs that I’m feeling this way about.
You should stick with the range they listed. Saying that you’ll take less than their range will look like you’re naively undervaluing your own skills, or aren’t qualified for the level the job is at, or didn’t pay enough attention to the ad. They’ve told you what the job is worth to them; assume they mean it and assess where you should fall in that range accordingly.
Also, the fact that you’re moving from nonprofit to for-profit is almost certainly playing a role here; you need to assess the value of the work you’d be doing within the market you’d be doing it in. The question isn’t, “How little pay would you accept in a vacuum?” It’s, “Knowing what you know about the market rate for this work within this industry and this geographic area, what salary will seem fair and worthwhile to you?” (And believe me, you would not be happy two years from now to realize that you’re making $10,000 less than coworkers doing the exact same work as you just because you used nonprofit salary scales to negotiate originally.)
4. Using family caregiving leave immediately before vacation
Last month, with the holidays approaching, I was planning to work remotely from my parents’ house Monday and Tuesday of one week while visiting them (this is allowed under company policy — up to six remote weeks a year from anywhere in the continental U.S.) and then take off the rest of the year for holidays. However, my mother is seriously ill and dying of cancer so I took off that Monday and Tuesday to care for her (this is also allowed under company policy and comes out of a different balance than vacation, which is why I could do that but not take vacation these two days.)
However, I am wondering about whether it is appropriate to use the two back-to-back — caregiving leave immediately prior to a vacation (and potentially immediately after depending on where we are in January). Is it appropriate under these particular circumstances, or is it bad optics since it seems like I’m extending my vacation? And if not, what should I do?
You are fine. People cobble together all sorts of arrangements during the holidays, but you’d be fine even if it hadn’t been the holidays. It’s not suspicious for care-giving to fall right before or after a vacation; in fact, it can make a lot of logical sense in situations like yours. The only way this would raise eyebrows in a reasonable company would be if you were someone who had a track record of unreliability and/or using your time off in ways that seemed obviously outside the spirit or letter of the law (like if you were someone who always seemed to need sick days to extend vacations you otherwise wouldn’t have had accrued time to take, or so forth). Assuming you are a reasonably conscientious person without a track record of shady PTO use, no one is likely to think twice about this.
I’m sorry about your mom!
5. Should I let someone launch a gas-flame-heated hot air balloon from our parking lot?
The company where I work is on the outskirts of town and has a large gravel parking lot and an empty lawn and forest behind that. If I am the only person in the building and someone knocks on the door and asks to launch a gas-flame-heated hot air balloon from our parking lot, should I let them? This is completely hypothetical, of course.
Absolutely you should.
The real answer is that no, you’re probably not authorized to take on that legal liability (and potential safety risk?) for your company and so you’d need to either say no or consult with whoever is. Whoever is will be delighted to get this question.
I’m off for the holiday, so here’s an older post from the archives. This was originally published in 2021.
A reader writes:
My fiancé, “Ted,” has worked for 10 years on a small, very close-knit team, all of whom seem to get along exceptionally well. All the team members and spouses/partners socialize outside of work together as well, and we consider them all to be close friends. We thought they felt the same.
A few months ago, on the way to a work event, Ted and his coworker/best friend “Bob” were involved in a serious car accident and were rushed to the ER. Everyone waited anxiously for hours as they both underwent surgery. Thankfully, they both recovered.
When Ted returned to work, a team member, “Sally,” told him she had a confession to make. She said that while they had been in surgery, she prayed that if God had to let one of them die, she hoped it would be him. (WTF?!?)
Ted was shocked and asked why. He said she gushed on and on about what a “saint” Bob is. (Her examples were that Bob gives her great advice on her struggling marriage and has loaned her money when she was in a tight spot.) She finished by saying, “No disrespect to you, but Bob is in a class by himself. You have to admit you can’t measure up to that” and walked away.
Ted was truly devastated to learn that she felt this way, but he tried to attribute it to the stress of the situation and did his best to put it behind him. He never told anyone else on the team what she said and tried to continue on at work as if nothing had happened, but his relationship with Sally hasn’t recovered. He is still deeply wounded by her comments.
Although Ted appears to be a confident person, underneath he is fairly insecure. He truly thought Sally was a good friend. So in addition to causing him a lot of pain, this has also rattled his confidence. Now he’s wondering if all his team members secretly feel the way she does. Ted and Sally have always seemed to have a warm, cordial relationship and he can’t understand why she would say such a hurtful thing. Ted is now constantly measuring himself against Bob and questioning why he isn’t as “good.”
I suggested that perhaps Sally has a crush on Bob or feels closer to him for reasons that have nothing to do with Ted. But he is convinced that thinks she sees him as a “second tier” man and worries that others do too.
Our wedding is coming up soon and the venue strictly limits the number of guests. When it was time to send out invitations, Ted invited the rest of the team and their spouses but did not invite Sally and her husband. I expressed my concern that this would cause more problems, but he replied that since we could only have a limited numbers of guests, he’d prefer to spend our special day with another pair of close friends who “genuinely love and appreciate” us rather than a woman with whom his relationship is now severely strained.
Two weeks ago, I got a call from another team member, “Alice,” asking me if I had forgotten to send an invitation to Sally. I explained that because the venue is small, we simply couldn’t invite everyone.
Alice then told Ted that if we didn’t invite Sally, she and the other women on the team wouldn’t attend either. Ted told her that since the invitations have already gone out, there is no way to add Sally and her husband now unless we “uninvited” two other guests, which we can not do.
Now all the women on the team, including Sally, are freezing Ted out. They refuse to speak to him except when forced to, which is really starting to adversely impact the collaborative work the team does and hampering Ted’s ability to do his job. The men on the team have sided with Ted, saying they feel we have the right to invite (or not invite) whomever we want to our own wedding. This has caused an even further rift in the team.
Everyone is questioning Ted about why we didn’t invite Sally, but he doesn’t feel it’s his place to explain why he doesn’t want her to attend and just keeps repeating that the decision was due to the venue size limitations.
The manager of the team works at another site, and because the team has previously worked so well together, has historically been fairly hands-off, and is oblivious to what is happening now. But if the work continues to suffer, she’s going to notice and ask what’s going on.
What, if anything, should Ted do? Should he preemptively go to the manger to give her a heads/up, or will that make it even worse to be seen as “tattling”? Is there anything he can do to “fix” this on the team, before it erodes their work product even more?
I did weaken and called the venue, who grudgingly said they would be willing to accommodate one more couple. Should we break down and invite Sally to the wedding for the sake of harmony at work?
What a mess.
I completely understand why you wouldn’t want Sally at your wedding! She prayed your fiancé would die. Maybe not exactly … but pretty close to it. And then for some reason, she felt the need to tell him. Why?! She should have kept it to herself; there was no need to inform Ted and if she hadn’t, presumably life at work would have just gone on as before. So Sally sounds like a bit of a nut.
However.
I’m not a fan of pressuring people into wedding invitations, but you also can’t exclude one person from a tight-knit group and expect that not to send a message and cause drama. You’ve got to either invite the whole group, or invite fewer of them so you’re not leaving out just one person, or leave out the one person and accept that it’s going to be A Thing. You and Ted chose the latter option but are hoping it won’t cause drama, and that’s not realistic.
It’s especially not going to happen when no one knows why Ted is upset with Sally. From what they can see, they had a close, tight-knit group of work friends and now Ted has randomly and hurtfully decided to exclude one person for no reason.
I get that he’s trying to blame it on the venue size, but that doesn’t really work when you’ve excluded one person from a “tier” of wedding guests. It wouldn’t work if he had excluded one uncle or one niece, and it doesn’t work when you exclude one of a very close team of colleagues. People are going to read something into it and be hurt.
The drama that it’s causing is pretty excessive — coworkers freezing him out and refusing to speak to him except when forced, to the point that it’s affecting their work, is a weirdly intense reaction (as well as inappropriate and unprofessional). That’s likely a sign that the boundaries on this team were messed up before any of this happened, and that’s why the wedding invitations are functioning as a bomb rather than more like an exploding soda can.
And again, in theory you should be able to invite whoever you want to your wedding and exclude anyone you don’t want there. And you can! You just can’t do it without consequence, and that’s what you’re seeing now.
As for what to do, if Ted wants to stick to his decision, he’s probably better off just being matter-of-fact about why: “Normally we would have loved to have the whole group, but when Bob and I were in the hospital Sally told me she prayed for me to die if one of us had to. So we’re not asking her to celebrate our wedding with us.” Then at least people would have context. It will probably cause a different kind of drama, but if Ted can stay matter-of-fact about it (“it is what it is and we can still work together fine, but it didn’t make sense to ask her to be at the wedding”) it’s probably a better option than the drama of No One Knows Why Ted Did Such an Unkind Thing.
Frankly, it might also be an opportunity to clear the air with Sally. It sounds like she might have no idea why Ted didn’t invite her. He could sit down with her and say, “I’m sorry this has gotten so out-of-hand. I should have spoken to you earlier. I was really hurt by what you said to me after Bob’s and my accident. I’d thought we were close friends, and I haven’t been able to get past you telling me that you prayed I’d die if one of us had to. It’s why we didn’t ask you to be at our wedding, but I’m realizing that I should have talked with you about it earlier.”
It’s possible that conversation could move things to a much better place. Maybe Sally didn’t realize how her remark came across and maybe she’ll be mortified in hindsight. Maybe it’ll turn out she was addled by painkillers when they talked and this is the latest in her long and embarrassing list of discoveries of things she said that day. Maybe they’ll have the sort of conversation that will make Ted happy to extend a wedding invitation to her. Who knows. But looking at where things stand now, not talking to her about it seems like the worse option. And just giving in and inviting her without having that conversation first doesn’t seem likely to fix things at this point.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]
September 2025 was an unusually bad month for runway overruns in the US. On the night of September 24th, an Embraer 145 with 53 people on board landed long at the Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport in Virginia, overshooting the end of the runway. Just weeks earlier, on September 3rd, TWO similar incidents occurred on the SAME DAY, one a Gulfstream at Chicago Executive Airport and another a Bombardier at Boca Raton. In all three cases, the surface at the very end of the runway crushed under the weight of the planes’ tires. You look at the photos, and it looks like a mess, but these systems worked exactly as they were intended, preventing fatalities and serious injuries in all three cases.
We’ve all seen a runway before. At first glance, there’s not much to it: a strip of concrete or tarmac planted on the landscape with some extra markings and lights. It basically looks like a short section of highway. But if you look under the surface, there is a tremendous amount of engineering that makes these facilities entirely unique from anything else we build. I want to peel back the layers and show you what really goes into building a runway. I’m Grady, and this is Practical Engineering.
A fully loaded semi truck usually weighs on the order of 80,000 pounds (or 36 metric tonnes) and, depending on what state you’re in, legally maxes out at 60 to 80 miles per hour. Our highways are carefully engineered for vehicles in that weight and speed regime. Compare that to modern heavy jets that can weigh more than 500 tonnes or a million pounds, with takeoff and landing speeds around 180 miles per hour. Just like highways, the design decisions for runways - from length, to width, to shape, to materials and beyond - all have major implications on public safety. There is a long list of crashes and incidents that could have been avoided by better designs, and actually, a lot of the reasons we do things the way we do is because of lessons learned through previous tragedies. Maybe better than any other industry, the aviation world strives for continuous improvement through the understanding of past failures, and you can see evidence of that just about everywhere you look, including resources like SKYbrary.
The thing is, building a runway is an extremely costly endeavor. There’s practically no limit to the amount of money you can spend making one incrementally safer. So there’s always a balancing act between cost and capability. One of the most fundamental decisions that affects both sides is length. A longer runway can accommodate larger aircraft, but it can dramatically increase costs by requiring more land and more infrastructure. It can even affect the siting decisions, pushing an airport farther outside a city. It’s a pretty important choice. So important that FAA has a 40-page guidance document on length alone. Based on what you want to accomplish - whether it’s basic general aviation at a municipal field, air cargo, medevac, or serving as a backup to the Space Shuttle program - you first have to pick a critical aircraft: the one that requires the longest runway. But it’s more complicated than that, since takeoff and landing performance depends on a lot of factors. High temperatures and elevation reduce the density of the air, requiring more speed for the same amount of lift, which results in longer takeoff distances and landing rollouts. Slopes affect both takeoff and landing as well. Uphill takeoffs are harder because the engines have to fight gravity; downhill landings require stronger braking. The FAA says that for each percent of downhill slope, landing distance is increased by 10%. Manufacturers of aircraft can tell you the runway requirements for a specific make and model, or FAA has developed curves that can help you take these factors into account to decide a runway length.
When you’re driving on the highway, direction isn’t that important. Obviously, you have to get to where you’re going, but other than that, there aren’t many engineering requirements that change with the direction of the roadway. With runways, that’s not true. Whether taking off or landing, airplanes work best when facing directly into the wind. And in fact, they might not be able to land or take off at all under certain crosswind conditions. So the direction of a runway is a consequential decision. Prevailing winds vary a lot by location. In fact, one of my favorite types of diagrams, the wind rose, is specifically designed to show this at a glance. And if you look at enough wind roses, you’ll notice that, in some places, there’s not a prevailing wind direction at all. That’s why most large airports have perpendicular runways. Again, this is aircraft-dependent. Every airplane has its own crosswind limits. FAA generally expects runway orientation to provide about 95% wind coverage for the airport’s design aircraft, so in places without a strong prevailing wind direction, it takes a second runway to meet that target.
Length and direction are easy to notice, but there’s more to the geometry of a runway. In 2019, a Miami Air International Boeing 737 touched down in Jacksonville during heavy rain. The aircraft skidded off the runway and came to a stop in the St Johns River. 21 people were injured, but thankfully, nobody was killed. When the NTSB investigated the accident, one of the main contributors was that the runway was ungrooved. The water on the surface couldn’t squeeze out fast enough, instead building pressure in the contact patch between the tire and runway. It’s hydroplaning: the tires ride on the water instead of the ground, wiping out friction and directional control.
Just like in a car, planes need friction to stop. Larger jets have the benefit of aerobraking, using devices that reverse the thrust of the engines, but regular-old wheel brakes still do most of the work. And just like for cars, water makes that much more challenging, so there are a lot of engineering decisions that go into maintaining good friction on the runway surface. Like highways, most runways have a gentle crown at the centerline that drops off to the sides. This cross-slope helps shed rain and stops water from pooling on the surface. Larger airports install grooves in the runway surface that give water an escape path from beneath the tires, reducing the chance of hydroplaning in bad weather. And this isn’t just a one-time decision. Airports use friction-measurement equipment to monitor operational conditions. If the surface gets too polished from use or built-up rubber from the countless touchdowns, they have to clean the surface or even retexture with shot blasting to roughen it up.
Runways are a bit unusual because, when you think about it, they really have two very different jobs. Taking off and landing are pretty similar; one is essentially the reverse of the other. But in some ways, they’re entirely different. And so they drive the requirements for runway engineering in different ways. For example, it may feel like landing is the most dynamic moment in a flight, but it’s actually takeoff that usually governs runway length and strength. That’s mostly because of weight. A big part of the weight of a fully loaded airliner is fuel. An Airbus A380, the largest of commercial jets, has a max gross takeoff weight of over 550 metric tonnes. For a long-haul flight, nearly half of that weight can be in fuel. When an airplane touches down, even though the moment the wheels hit may feel impactful, the plane is much lighter. In fact, landings are so much less damaging to pavement than takeoffs that they usually don’t even count in load cycle tracking for the engineering design. It’s all about takeoffs, and to support those enormous loads, airport runways have some of the most heavily engineered pavement systems in the world.
This is something that you’ll almost never be able to see, but the amount of consideration and engineering below the surface is incredible. The FAA even has its own engineering software package, complete with a wonderful government acronym: the FAA Rigid and Flexible Iterative Elastic Layered Design or FAARFIELD. Just like highways, you basically have two choices for runway pavement materials. Rigid pavements generally use concrete. Flexible pavements use hot-mix asphalt. Their behavior and performance are pretty different, so the engineering is different too. Asphalt has a small but significant measure of give to it, which causes the effective width of aircraft tires to spread out in a cone underneath the surface into the deeper layers. This contrasts with rigid pavement, where a tire's effective width is its actual width.
Asphalt is a cheaper material, so it's used in the vast majority of paved airfields in the US. Concrete is stronger and stiffer, so most large-scale commercial airports use rigid surfaces. The tradeoff usually comes with volume. A rigid pavement has a longer design life, so the additional cost is offset by reduced maintenance and a longer interval before replacement. But in both cases, there’s a lot under the surface. It’s basically a layer cake of materials that all serve different functions.
Everything sits on the subgrade, which is the natural soil at the site. The quality of the subgrade really decides everything else. The soil strength, its potential for shrinkage and swelling, the depth of the frost line, and the depth of the water table will drive the design. If it’s really soft and mushy, the subgrade can be amended with sand, lime, cement, or geosynthetic materials.
Some pavements put a drainage layer on top of the subgrade. This is a permeable material, like gravel, that lets water get out of the system so it doesn’t soak the soils below, which might lead to softening and weakening over time. A runway is one place you don’t want a pothole.
Above that, many pavement systems (especially flexible ones) use a subbase. This is a layer of course material (sometimes even crushed up bits of an OLD runway). Practically, the sub-base adds thickness cheaply. Stress from wheel loads drops quickly with depth, so a layer of material that doesn’t have tight engineering specifications can accomplish the depth without driving up the cost too much. Plus, the subbase serves as a working platform so you’re not mucking up the subgrade with heavy equipment during construction.
Then comes the base course. This is the structural workhorse of a pavement system. It’s usually a mixture of high-quality crushed and uncrushed aggregates, specifically designed to lock together when compacted into a high-strength support. The goal is to distribute the point forces of wheel loads into the layers below. Lower stress mean less movement, which results in less cracking of the surface layer and a smoother ride over time.
On top of all that is the surface course that provides the friction and texture. Concrete pavements distribute forces, so they don’t require quite as much engineering underneath. For asphalt, friction is essentially its only purpose. The layers below do the heavy lifting. And if the surface course degrades, you can often mill it and overlay it with new material without having to rebuild the entire system below.
Separating the pavement into all these layers is about finding the right balance between performance, cost, and constructability. You could just build a 10-foot-thick layer of concrete and be done with it, but eventually those costs flow to the airline tickets, and no one would be happy to pay for that!
Since runways are essentially a connection to the sky, there are some quirks in their engineering to account for that too. One is the use of displaced thresholds. Sometimes, surrounding obstacles don’t allow for a gentle glide slope to the end of a runway. You don’t want airplanes diving steeply into a landing, so instead, we displace the touchdown point farther down the runway, while still allowing takeoffs to use the full length. Takeoff lengths are usually longer than landing lengths anyway, so this is a compromise worth making to take the best advantage of the surrounding airspace.
You can only displace a threshold so much, though. Sometimes design choices and sacrifices are made to accommodate unavoidable restrictions caused by nearby terrain or buildings. Airports have to exist in the broader context of developed areas. So, airport designers and managers have to ensure that imaginary zones called “obstruction surfaces” are free of buildings, trees, towers, and anything else you don’t want to get hit by a plane. These imaginary surfaces extend farther than you might think into the air space, providing safe approach and departure paths with comfortable margins of safety. Airports don’t usually have land-use authority, though, so keeping the airspace free from obstructions is a collaborative, and occasionally contentious, process between regulators, cities, landowners, and developers.
There are also areas of pavement at the ends of runways that aren’t intended to have planes on them at all. For example, larger runways include blast pads. This is one of my favorite elements of runway engineering. The powerful wakes produced by jet engines pick up grit and scour away the land behind them. If this is just loose soil or grass, the endless parade of planes will eventually dig a huge hole at the back of the runway! I’ve spent a lot of time working with concrete structures meant to curb erosion from flowing water, but there just aren’t that many pieces of infrastructure that are purpose-built to mitigate aerodynamic erosion. Blast pads can’t carry the weight of a jetliner, so they’re painted with yellow chevrons to tell pilots ‘stay off!’
Even when a runway is long enough to accommodate the air traffic it sees on a regular basis, accidents happen, and sometimes airplanes overshoot the end of the runway on takeoff or landing. Runways are required to have a certain amount of space beyond the pavement on all sides, called runway safety areas or RSAs. Like the clear zones along highways, RSAs provide an airplane with room to safely come to a stop without obstacles. There are some instances where space is tight, though. Urban infrastructure, a body of water, or other stuff can get in the way, making it less feasible to maintain so much open space around a runway. Luckily, there’s another option: Engineered Materials Arresting Systems, or EMAS.
These systems are manufactured from crushable material like lightweight concrete or foamed glass. In an emergency situation, they can dissipate a plane’s kinetic energy, quickly slowing it down so it doesn’t crash into whatever lies beyond. EMAS saved the day in all three major overrun incidents in September 2025. You can see just how effective it is in this footage from the September incident in Boca Raton. It’s like a much more sophisticated and carefully engineered runaway truck ramp for airplanes.
There’s so much more going on in the engineering and design of runways than I can possibly cover in one video. I’ve tried to focus on the hidden stuff: construction techniques and requirements that you don’t really notice when you’re a passenger looking through the window and may not even be familiar with as a pilot. I really love knowing how much goes into that stuff that most of us never have to think about. It makes me feel safer as a passenger. It’s a reminder that smooth and boring is usually the goal, and it takes a lot of work to keep it that way.
TORONTO – Citing an exhaustive battery of treatment, dermatologist Dr. Barbara Sanders has officially terminated all care of your profoundly and irredeemably stupid face. When Dr. Sanders first saw your face, she tried traditional methods of gentle cleansers, dietary changes, and doxycycline. As time went on, she tried more experimental methods, while her medical support […]
ALT
