Hi! Weekends are upon us, and with weekends coming also comes shopping. Fashion has come a long way from being exclusive to royalties to having designer diaper bags for babies, and it doesn't stop there:
High heels, originating in the 10th century were actually worn by Persian men to assist when riding horses. It wasn't until the 16th century, where European nobility fancied the heels and both men and women wore them as status symbol.
A beachwear staple, the bikini was created in 1946 by French designer Louis Réard; the controversy at the time wasn't just for the design but also the name, as it was named after the Bikini Atoll, where atomic bomb tests were conducted.
Quite some bombing facts, especially fitting for the occasion of World Fashion Revolution Day. So, don't forget to buy that cloth that has been sitting in your wish list since the Great Depression. And let's get started with our regular!
Today’s special:
Not New News: America's faith in mainstream news media is at an all time low.
Retirement Dreams vs Reality : Are American retirees really enjoying their lives?
Allbirds Aren’t Flocking Together: Allbirds has been hit with a single loss stone…
Mass Media, Amassed Distrust
For much of the decade, the news followed a familiar script that carried something close to institutional authority. The setting also more or less stayed the same: news arrived via anchors, in the form of papers on doorsteps, and millions of Americans assumed the information in front of them was broadly reliable. Today, that premise no longer holds, and that broad consensus around the media has since unraveled.
According to Gallup, just 28% of Americans say they trust the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly”. That's the lowest level recorded since the polling firm began tracking the question more than five decades ago. The decline becomes even clearer in historical context: trust once reached 72% in 1976, meaning the share of Americans expressing confidence in the press has effectively been cut in half over the past generation.
Within the mainstream media people are carefully choosing who they believe, and that hasn’t been kind to outlets equally. Americans place their highest confidence in The Weather Channel at 49%, which peaks far ahead of the rest, while international broadcasters like the BBC (26%) and PBS (25%) also relatively retain reputation.
An Unfaithful Belief
Confidence in national media has faded, but it hasn’t disappeared entirely, it’s splintering across the nation. Americans are surrounded by more information than ever, yet increasingly uncertain about who to believe.
56% of Americans, according to Pew Research, say they trust information from national news organizations at least somewhat, down 11 percentage points since March 2025. It’s worth noting that figure is almost identical to the 50% who say they trust information from social media platforms, blurring the once-clear boundary between professional journalism and algorithm-driven feeds. The shift is increasingly personality-led too; for instance, podcasters like Joe Rogan reach about 22% of Americans with news or commentary in a single week, and the platform landscape itself has been reshaped by Elon Musk, whose takeover of X accelerated the transition of politically engaged audiences onto social feeds.
It’s safe to surmise that national outlets are struggling to maintain credibility, but community ties maintain a credible foothold with 70% of Americans still endowing their confidence in local journalism for trusted information. The challenge for mainstream journalism, then, is not simply producing information in an era overflowing with it. It’s rebuilding the credibility that once made audiences believe it.
All Stones No Birds
As a minimalist sneaker with a maximalist valuation once embodied Silicon Valley optimism, Allbirds has ended up as one of its latest cautionary tales. It started its debut as a sustainability-first disruptor. Sure enough, the brand rode investor hype to a valuation of $4.1 billion only to agree to sell its assets for just $39 million as of today. To say it’s just a decline would be an understatement; it's a near-total collapse in perceived value.
Even at IPO, the company preempted that it would continue to incur losses, a prediction that held true as it never posted a single profitable year as a public company. By 2025, sales sank to $152.5 million, nearly half of its peak, speaking volumes on how demand has simmered down.
Furthermore, All Bird’s quarterly gross profit has been doing down the drain. After hitting a frothy peak of $49 million in 2021, it had slid to about $18 million by late 2025, a steep 63% decline. To aggravate things further intermittent rebounds have done little to offset the broader downward drift.
Down To The Last Feather
The deeper problem wasn’t just the decline of demand; it was the aggressive approach in which Allbirds tried to outrun it. In an effort to scale, the company expanded its retail footprint and at its highest realized 60 stores rapidly, only to succumb into a dramatic pullback as performance lagged. As of 2026, all full-price U.S. stores had been shut, leaving only a few outlets behind just keeping them from being obsolete.
Operationally, the company isn’t doing too well either; its endeavor of expansion has turned into contraction with store count dropping from 60 to 23 within a year. Meanwhile, the market didn’t wait around. Shares cascaded quickly, with the stock down 59% over the past year alone, and at one point, things got so bad that the company’s market cap fell to $21 million, a margin below its eventual sale price.
With all bets down, Allbirds announced a complete revamp, by pivoting themselves from a sustainable shoe company to Artificial Intelligence and will work under the name NewBird AI. As per the announcement, “The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service.” This master stroke has allowed the company to skyrocket its market cap to $148 million all the way from a measly $21 million.
Life Beyond The Sunset
Retirement has long been pitched as the long exhale after a lifetime of work, the moment when the alarm clock stops ringing and instead of deadlines the calendar is finally filled with things from a bucket list. But if you ask many retirees, in reality that practice is quite convoluted, although it's not necessarily worse.
As per a survey by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, retirement is actually improving life for many Americans. About 44% of retirees say their enjoyment of life has improved since leaving the workforce, while 41% report higher levels of happiness. In fact, nearly 89% describe themselves as generally happy, and upbeat figures are very good for a stage of life often framed around decline.
However, on closer look, the disconnect between what retirees imagined and what they actually do begins to show. Retirement does harken back to lost time and 59% are using it for family and friends time, slightly more than the 56% who merely dreamed of it. But elsewhere, reality is falling short, while 65% hoped for a life of travel, only 44% are actually doing it. Hobbies, at least, are holding steady, with 39% both aspiring to and actively pursuing them.
Can’t Win Everything
Behind the relaxed mornings and long lunches sits a quieter financial reality. Leaving the workforce hasn’t always entailed a comfortable life; for 33% of retirees it has led to a decline in their health, and 28% say their financial situation has gone down the drain. Even so, 66% of most households seem to be holding up well with their standard of living remaining the same.
Financial security remains a pertinent concern, and that’s apparent when the median retiree household earns roughly $63,000 a year, and about $4,622 a month is spent on living costs. and for more than half of retirees, social security does the heavy lifting as their primary income source.
But retirement itself is quietly changing and retracting away from its traditional model which deigns that people should walk away from work at an old age, a benchmark set by the Social Security Act, 1935. But that old script of working until 65, collecting a pension, is no longer the default. Employment among Americans 65 and older has risen 117% over the past two decades, because retirees are now working part-time, or pursuing passion projects.
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