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Who founded GAIL’s Bakery? The story of Gail Mejia and her sourdough empire

Julie Steinbeck
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Who founded GAIL’s Bakery? The story of Gail Mejia and her sourdough empire

GAIL’s Bakery has become a fixture on Britain’s high streets, but the woman behind its name has a remarkable history in sustainable food, including helping pioneer a farmers market in Dubai. And we were among the first to ever interview her. 

Before GAIL’s Bakery became one of Britain’s most recognizable bakery chains, there was a woman named Yael (Gail) Mejia, a food entrepreneur who believed good bread should be made by skilled bakers using excellent ingredients.

Gail Mejia from Baker and Spice
Gail Mejia from Baker and Spice and Gails. breabrewadShe is of mixed heritage, born to an English father and an Israeli mother.

Today, GAIL’s has grown to more than 175 bakeries across the United Kingdom, and its owners are exploring expansion into Europe and the United States. But who founded GAIL’s Bakery, who owns it today, and what happened to Gail herself?

Green Prophet has a special connection to this story. In 2010, our writer Tafline Laylin interviewed Gail Mejia about local farming, artisan bread and her efforts to bring fresher, more sustainable food to Dubai.

(As a side note, when we were in Boston we noticed a cafe with a Yiddish name for father. Tatte Bakery & Café is </span a popular gourmet bakery and cafe chain founded in Boston, Massachusetts, by Tzurit Or, an Israeli immigrant.) What’s with Israelis and bakeries that people love? Go to Tel Aviv and visit some. Here is our article on Avigail’s bread in Jaffa.

Who is Gail Mejia, the founder of GAIL’s Bakery?

Gail Mejia’s story began long before the first GAIL’s opened in London’s Hampstead neighborhood in 2005. Gail was born in London then her her family moved to Israel when she was six months old, and she grew up in Tel Aviv before returning to London in her early twenties. In 1990, she established a bread distribution business in London, purchasing artisan bread from independent bakers and supplying restaurants and other customers. By 1993, she was baking bread herself through a business called The Bread Factory, which would become an important supplier to London’s restaurant industry.

Mejia also established Baker & Spice in London in 1995, combining artisan baking with fresh, carefully prepared food. Her work helped introduce London customers to a different approach to everyday bread, one based on skilled craftsmanship rather than industrial production.

In 2003, entrepreneur Tom Molnar joined the bakery business. Together, Mejia and Molnar opened the first GAIL’s neighborhood bakery on Hampstead High Street in 2005. The idea was to bring the kind of naturally fermented sourdough previously supplied to prestigious restaurants directly to ordinary customers.

The concept worked. GAIL’s became synonymous with sourdough bread, pastries, coffee and neighborhood café culture.

Gail Mejia helped pioneer local food in Dubai

 

GAIL's sourdough bread
GAIL’s sourdough bread

 

One of the lesser-known chapters of Mejia’s career unfolded in the Middle East. In 2009, she was involved in bringing Baker & Spice to Dubai, where she worked to connect the restaurant with local growers rather than relying entirely on imported ingredients.

At the time, sourcing fresh, locally grown food in the United Arab Emirates was far from straightforward. Much of the country’s food supply depended on imports. Mejia helped build relationships with UAE farmers and contributed to the development of a farmers market connected to Baker & Spice.

In her 2010 Green Prophet interview, she explained her approach to sourcing:

“The most important definition to me is Local not Organic.”

Her comments reflected an interest in the origins of food, the farmers producing it and the environmental consequences of long-distance transportation. Long before locally sourced ingredients became an expected feature of upscale restaurant menus, Mejia was advocating for shorter supply chains and closer relationships between chefs and growers.

What happened to Gail Mejia?

Mejia left the GAIL’s business in 2010. The following year, investment firm Risk Capital Partners backed Tom Molnar in a buyout, helping the bakery chain enter another phase of expansion. Mejia subsequently remained largely outside the public spotlight associated with the growing brand.

In November 2024, Air Mail published a rare profile of the bakery founder, interviewing and photographing her at her home in Alvaiázere, Portugal. While the business continues to use her name, she is no longer part of its leadership. Tom Molnar remains chief executive, overseeing the expansion of the bakery chain she helped establish.

Currently Gail’s bakeries are being attacked in London for its association with a Jewish woman who is Israeli. 

Attacks on Gail's for its Israeli connection
Attacks on Gail’s for its Israeli connection

Attacks on Gail's for its Israeli connection

Who owns GAIL’s Bakery today?

GAIL’s Bakery is not owned by Gail Mejia. The chain operates within a privately held bakery group that also includes The Bread Factory. In September 2021, Bain Capital Credit and EBITDA Investments, associated with hospitality investment firm McWin, acquired a controlling interest in the wider bakery business in a deal valued at more than £200 million.

Today, ownership is shared among investors and members of the executive team, including Bain Capital, McWin and hospitality entrepreneur Luke Johnson. According to GAIL’s own website, no single individual or business holds a majority stake on its own. The bakery has grown dramatically since the 2021 investment, expanding from approximately 70 locations to more than 175 across Britain.

GAIL’s Bakery is preparing to go international

In June 2026, GAIL’s appointed Harry Goss as managing director of international operations, with responsibility for exploring expansion opportunities in Europe and the United States. The appointment represents a potential new chapter for a company that began as a small artisan bread supplier in London.

Its growth also raises questions about how the principles of traditional baking can survive the demands of a large international business. GAIL’s says it continues to prioritize long fermentation, carefully sourced ingredients and relationships with farmers and millers.

The company has also been experimenting with heritage grains, reducing food waste and reusing building materials in its stores. Its Moonshot Bakery project in Hampstead, opened in 2025, explored how reused furniture and fittings could reduce the environmental impact of retail refurbishment. Surplus food is also distributed through charity partnerships and sold at discounted prices through Too Good To Go.

These initiatives are meaningful, although the environmental impact of a growing bakery chain ultimately depends on its wider sourcing, transportation, energy use and waste.

For more on the woman behind the brand, read Green Prophet’s original 2010 interview with Gail Mejia about artisan baking and local food in Dubai.

The ancient factory that never sat idle: what Tel Shiqmona can teach modern architects

Karin Kloosterman
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The ancient factory that never sat idle: what Tel Shiqmona can teach modern architects

Modern economies have become extraordinarily good at building spaces for one thing. A factory makes one product, an office is occupied from nine to five. A school empties for the summer, and a music venue or stadium may sit largely unused between events. Warehouses, wedding halls, parking lots and conference centers can consume enormous amounts of land, energy and building materials while remaining idle for significant parts of the day or year. I always dream about ways to use cities and spaces maximally that I fantasize about a 3-shift town that operates 24 hours, but with us humans occupying spaces in shifts so the best places never go idle. Think about it: some animals only come to life at night – an interesting visit to the zoo!

People in the ancient Mediterranean could not always afford that luxury. New archaeological research from Tel Shiqmona, an Iron Age industrial settlement on Israel’s Carmel coast, offers a surprisingly modern lesson in how to make better use of buildings. Researchers from the University of Haifa have found that workspaces at the famous purple-dye production site used for holy garments were not devoted to one fixed activity. The same valuable pieces of real estate appear to have been repurposed as the seasons changed.

At different times, people were pressing olives, keeping animals, working with textiles and producing purple dye. In other words, this 2,700-year-old factory had something resembling a flexible-use business plan.

Murex blue techelet snail
A murex shell which makes techelet

Tel Shiqmona was a small fortified industrial site operating on the Mediterranean coast during the ninth and eighth centuries BCE under the control of the Kingdom of Israel. It is regarded as the largest purple-dye production center known from the Iron Age Mediterranean.

The site contains the world’s largest concentration of finds associated with ancient purple production: more than 170 objects, most stained with the dye itself. Archaeologists have uncovered remnants of dozens of ceramic vats used to produce and apply the dye, some capable of holding approximately 350 liters.

Purple was an extraordinary commodity. The famous dye was made from Mediterranean murex sea snails and became associated with royalty and elites. Tel Shiqmona was clearly an important specialized industrial center. But specialization did not mean that its buildings had to sit empty whenever purple dye was not being made.

techelet blue ritual fringe threads
Techelet threads

The new study focuses on roughly 790 to 740 BCE, during the reign of Jeroboam II and the peak of industrial activity at the site. By combining conventional excavation with microscopic analysis of sediments, researchers were able to see activities that left almost nothing obvious behind.

Related: King David’s purple recreated

One room contained a stone used for crushing olives and soil preserving impressions of olives. Yet microscopic animal dung and trampling showed that the same space had also served as an animal pen. Two loom weights found in place suggest textile work.

Nearby were crushed murex shells, olive pits, an olive-press weight and pieces of purple-stained dyeing vats.

The researchers propose a seasonal rhythm: olive pressing during autumn, animals housed there in winter and textile-related work taking place in spring. Purple dye manufacture was incorporated into the cycle as well, although its precise season cannot yet be established.

Even the transition between uses appears to have been deliberate. Layers of dung were sealed with ash, which researchers believe was used to help disinfect the space, reduce odors and control pests before another activity began.

Why build four rooms when one will do?

“When archaeologists find an olive press, the natural tendency is to say, ‘Olive oil was produced here.’ However, the olive harvest lasts for only a relatively short period at the end of autumn. Therefore, in order to understand how space was used, we need to ask what was done there during the rest of the year,” says excavation director Dr. Golan Shalvi.

That question could just as easily be put to a modern architect. What does an office do at night? What happens to a school after 4 PM? Why does a community construct a separate room for every occasional activity? The Shiqmona discovery fits a much wider tradition of vernacular architecture in which ordinary people made buildings respond to daily and seasonal life rather than assigning every room a permanent purpose.

Traditional Mediterranean courtyard houses are a good example. Research into vernacular architecture in Cyprus has documented semi-open spaces used for cooking, washing, weaving, drying crops, agricultural work, dining and social gatherings. Their function changed with weather, time of day and agricultural season. The architecture itself provided shade, ventilation, sunlight and working space rather than requiring separate mechanically conditioned buildings for every activity.

Research into ancient Greek courtyard houses has similarly shown how occupants could use different parts of a house as patterns of sunlight and shade shifted during the day and across the year. This wasn’t primitive architecture. It was adaptable architecture.

What today’s cities forgot

Tel Shiqmona, on the Mediterranean coast at the foot of Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel.
Tel Shiqmona, on the Mediterranean coast at the foot of Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel.

Industrialization made enormous specialization possible. And sometimes specialization is essential: nobody wants a hospital operating theatre doubling as an olive press in November. But we may have carried the principle too far.

A building represents concrete, steel, glass, land, energy and money before anyone switches on a light. The more hours that building can perform a useful function, the more value can potentially be extracted from those resources. We’ve some good use of movie theaters where owners rent the venues out for talks and seminars during the day. We could use more of that thinking.

The principle is increasingly resurfacing in modern ideas such as adaptive reuse, mixed-use development, shared workspaces and buildings designed with movable partitions rather than permanently fixed interiors. At Shiqmona, the innovation wasn’t an impressive machine, it was common sense.

Prof. David Friesem of the University of Haifa describes the finding as evidence that “improving efficiency and maximizing the use of resources and space was clearly a feature of ancient societies, no less than it is of our own.”

techeleFor architects trying to build a lower-carbon world, that may be one of the oldest design briefs worth rediscovering: before constructing another building, make sure the one you already have has finished working.

The world’s tallest wind farm could turn into double decker turbines

Karin Kloosterman
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The world’s tallest wind farm could turn into double decker turbines

Germany has just pushed wind power into skyscraper territory. Not exactly Burj style, but close. A new wind turbine in Schipkau, in the eastern German region of Lusatia, has reached a total height of 365 meters, or about 1,198 feet, making it the tallest wind turbine in the world.

For perspective, that puts the turbine almost level with the roof of New York’s Empire State Building, which stands 1,250 feet to the roof. It is taller than the Eiffel Tower, which is about 330 meters including its antenna.

The extraordinary turbine was developed by Dresden-based engineering company GICON as a pilot project idea commissioned by Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, SPRIND. Its hub sits 300 meters above the ground. GICON says the idea is simple: go higher to reach stronger and more consistent winds.

Why build a wind turbine this tall?

wind farms should put their first one to slow
German offshore wind

Wind generally becomes stronger and less turbulent as you move farther above the ground, away from trees, buildings and terrain. That matters enormously because the amount of energy available in wind increases roughly with the cube of wind speed. A relatively modest increase in wind speed can therefore produce a much larger increase in available energy.

GICON says that a commercial version of its high-altitude tower could produce roughly twice the annual electricity of a conventional turbine using the same rotor diameter. That figure remains a developer projection to be demonstrated by the pilot plant, which is scheduled for commissioning soon, in November this year.

The concept could also create what GICON describes as “two-storey” wind farms: very tall turbines harvesting higher-altitude wind while conventional turbines work the air below them. If it works, more power could potentially be extracted from an existing wind-energy area without simply spreading turbines across more land.

What does 1,200-foot wind power mean for birds and bats?

renewable energy software for solar and wind turbines
Renewable energy software for solar and wind turbines can predict when bats and birds will be flying overhead

Taller does not automatically mean more dangerous to wildlife, but it changes which part of the atmosphere is occupied by the rotating blades. Research suggests the effect is highly species-dependent. A study of 811 turbines in Ontario found that fatalities increased with turbine height for several bat species and for purple martins and tree swallows, while mortality actually decreased for some other bat species. Other research has shown that high-flying bats can enter the rotor zone while many lower-flying species spend much less time there.

That makes pre-construction wildlife surveys especially important as turbines move into previously unused layers of airspace. Operational measures can help too. Researchers have found that temporarily stopping turbines during low-wind nights when bats are particularly active can dramatically reduce collision risks with relatively small losses of electricity.

A 365-meter structure is also a serious aviation obstacle. Germany’s air-navigation authority, DFS, reviews tall structures and can require height restrictions, daytime markings, warning lights or even reject projects where aviation risks cannot be adequately managed. Structures above 100 meters are placed on aviation charts for low-flying aircraft such as rescue helicopters and small personal aircraft and private jets.

GICON tower reached final height end of September 2026
GICON tower reached final height end of September 2026

For residents, aviation lights have historically been one of the most irritating parts of living near wind farms. There is also the whooosh of the blades. Germany now requires most turbines to use demand-controlled night lighting: instead of blinking red through the entire night, the warning lights activate when aircraft approach.

Height also makes turbines visible from much farther away, increasing their landscape impact, an annoyance if you are living in nature and want to enjoy it. Noise, however, is not simply proportional to tower height. German wind projects above 50 meters require environmental approval and must comply with national noise limits. Shadow flicker, which must be irritating if you had a wind turbine blocking the sun into your room, and visual impact also remain as planning considerations.

Do wind turbines even need three blades?

The industry’s familiar three-blade silhouette may not be sacred either. In recent news, engineers at companies like Envision Energy have been revisiting two-bladed turbines, particularly for very large offshore machines. Properly designed two-bladed rotors can achieve aerodynamic performance close to equivalent three-bladed machines while removing an entire giant blade, cutting weight and materials.

Research on large turbine designs has found only a small aerodynamic efficiency penalty in some configurations, although two-bladed turbines face additional vibration, loading, rotational-speed and noise challenges. In other words, the future wind farm may look rather different from the one we know today: taller towers, perhaps fewer blades, and turbines operating in several layers of the atmosphere.

Germany’s giant energy experiment

The turbine also arrives at an extraordinary moment for Germany’s energy policy. Germany has decided to discontinue nuclear energy and its final three reactors — Emsland, Isar 2 and Neckarwestheim 2 — were shut permanently on April 15, 2023, completing a phase-out whose political roots stretched back decades.

There is now unmistakable regret in parts of German politics. Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this year that he regretted the decision, while also calling the shutdown effectively irreversible as dismantling proceeds. His government has meanwhile stopped opposing nuclear power receiving equal treatment with other low-carbon technologies at the European level.

But Germany’s renewables buildout has continued. Renewables supplied about 59 percent of domestically generated electricity in the first half of 2026, with wind the country’s largest single electricity source. The geopolitical argument for producing energy at home has also become harder to ignore. It might have made sense back in 2023, but with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forcing Germany to rapidly abandon its dependence on Russian pipeline gas and construct LNG import terminals, Germany has a problem.

Related:The Houthis have taken mocha – what that means for your coffee

Today Norway is Germany’s largest gas supplier, while most LNG landed directly at German terminals comes from the United States. Conflict involving Iran has disrupted energy markets around the Strait of Hormuz, while Houthi attacks and instability around the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb have demonstrated how quickly shipping lanes can become strategic energy vulnerabilities.

Germany itself does not depend heavily on Persian Gulf LNG, but it still feels global price shocks. A 1,200-foot wind turbine isn’t just an engineering stunt. It represents something Germany increasingly values almost as much as carbon reduction: energy that doesn’t have to pass through a pipeline, a tanker route, the Strait of Hormuz or anybody else’s war.

Is resin safe? The hidden chemical risks behind epoxy crafts and handmade products

Karin Kloosterman
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Is resin safe? The hidden chemical risks behind epoxy crafts and handmade products

Resin jewelry glows like amber. Epoxy river tables resemble frozen water, while clear casting resin suspends wedding flowers, shells and photographs in seemingly permanent glass. Across Etsy, Instagram, TikTok and craft fairs, makers are selling resin everything: there are earrings, coasters, serving trays, tumblers, keychains, lamps, bookmarks, countertops, flooring and charcuterie boards. But “resin” is a surprisingly gentle word for what is essentially polymer chemistry.

I have been making pottery for years and am aware of the hazards of silica dust, mixing glazes and making sure the right chemistry ends up on the cup you drink from. Otherwise people can get sick. Now that I am being bombarded with clips and ads from people selling resin products, I have to wonder? With all this concern of plastics, plastic in bottles, plastic in retainers, plastics in our water and in our air, why do we have a blindspot for this new resin trend? Resin is a plastic made at home without supervision.

Natural tree resin
Natural tree resin

Natural resins do exist. There was a time in my life when me and the kids would go out for walks and collect it from different trees we’d find in the city. There is pine resin, frankincense resin (which may help as a medicine against Covid) and tree sap-derived materials which have been used by humans for thousands of years. The epoxy resin, casting resin, UV resin and polymer resin used in most modern crafts, are synthetic materials that cure into plastics. Technically, calling them resin is correct. But the word also has a distinctly more natural and artisanal ring than “thermosetting plastic.”

This distinction matters because the home resin boom has effectively turned a branch of industrial chemistry into a craft hobby.

Epoxy resin isn’t glue and glitter

Resin crafts may look harmless and artisanal, but epoxy and UV resins are synthetic plastics made with reactive chemicals that require careful handling, ventilation and proper curing.
Resin crafts may look harmless and artisanal, but epoxy and UV resins are synthetic plastics made with reactive chemicals that require careful handling, ventilation and proper curing.

Making an epoxy product generally involves combining reactive chemicals, a resin and a hardener, and allowing them to chemically cross-link. UV resin uses light-reactive chemistry to accomplish a similar transformation.

Before they are completely cured, these materials can be potent skin irritants and sensitizers. The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration warns that uncured epoxy resins represent a significant dermal exposure hazard and can cause irritation, rashes, dermatitis and sensitization. OSHA outlines the occupational hazards associated with epoxy resin systems here.

Sensitization is particularly troublesome. A person can work with a chemical repeatedly without obvious problems and then develop an immune response that makes subsequent exposures trigger dermatitis. A 2023 Danish study followed 825 epoxy-exposed factory workers and found approximately twice the risk of dermatitis compared with non-exposed blue-collar workers. This study is available through PubMed.

Factories overseen in the United States, Canada or Europe, at least have the possibility of local exhaust ventilation, protective equipment, worker training, controlled formulations and standardized curing procedures. A resin artist working at a kitchen table probably has none of this. That isn’t hypothetical.

Resin charcuterie boards may look natural and handmade, but the epoxy sections are synthetic plastic and must be properly formulated and fully cured for food-contact use.
Resin charcuterie boards may look natural and handmade, but the epoxy sections are synthetic plastic and must be properly formulated and fully cured for food-contact use.

A 2026 study titled Monitoring Emerging Risks for Consumers: DIY Projects Using Epoxy Resins in YouTube Videos examined roughly 200 popular DIY resin videos. Researchers found common projects included resin jewelry, decorative objects, lamps, epoxy tabletops, kitchen countertops and resin floors. In 41 percent of the videos, people handling epoxy weren’t wearing gloves. The researchers described DIY epoxy use as an emerging consumer-health risk. Read the study on PubMed.

Related: we don’t like jewelrly made from bugs and butterflies 

The main DIY applications for epoxy resins were making small decorative objects, jewelry, lamps, tabletops, kitchen countertops and floors. “In 41% of the videos,” the researchers write,”no gloves were worn during the handling of epoxy resins. The analysis of content on YouTube shows that the application of epoxy resins by consumers in the DIY sector may present an emerging risk for consumers’ health.”

Another 2026 paper investigated three people who developed eczema after making jewelry with products sold as “epoxy UV resin.” Chemical analysis found that the products contained sensitizing methacrylates; researchers concluded that some products labeled epoxy UV resin were exposing hobbyists to hidden acrylate chemistry. The study is available here.

But what about the person buying the coaster or table?

A resin table combines wood with poured epoxy resin, creating a glossy, glass-like surface from a synthetic plastic polymer.
A resin table combines wood with poured epoxy resin, creating a glossy, glass-like surface from a synthetic plastic polymer.

This is where the distinction between uncured resin and properly cured resin becomes important. A completely cured epoxy object is much less reactive than the chemicals used to manufacture it. There is no evidence that simply owning a properly formulated and fully cured resin ornament or coaster is inherently dangerous. The unanswered question is whether a consumer can tell that a handmade product was formulated and cured correctly and that the end-user or into the future will know if it is food safe.

Some potters I’d work with in Canada would put holes in their bowls if the glaze used contained hazardous to health materials. We aren’t seeing any of that in the world of resin, and I hazard to guess in pottery as well.

Incorrect resin-to-hardener ratios, inadequate UV exposure, low curing temperatures or insufficient curing time can leave residual chemicals in a polymer. This becomes particularly relevant with resin cups, tumblers, serving boards, cheese boards, charcuterie boards, countertops and other food-contact epoxy products.

One food-contact study found that the degree of cross-linking in epoxy changed dramatically depending on curing conditions. Better cross-linking substantially reduced migration of epoxy-related compounds into food simulants.

That does not mean every homemade resin serving board is poisoning dinner. It means “food safe when cured” depends on the resin formulation and on actually curing it according to specification. Even US FDA food-contact authorizations for epoxy materials can be remarkably specific, defining particular formulations, uses, temperatures and conditions rather than declaring epoxy universally food safe. The FDA lists an example of those conditions here.

The resin economy therefore presents an unusual consumer problem. We increasingly buy chemical products from individual makers without seeing a safety data sheet, batch record, curing temperature or quality-control test. No one is demanding this data from the makers and it might be time for a concerned citizen to start a project where maker goods made from resin and pottery is undergoing random checks for safety and compliance.

 

Finding the Right Surfboard Is Less About Looks Than You Think, a Guide With Nate Panza

Bhok Thompson
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Finding the Right Surfboard Is Less About Looks Than You Think, a Guide With Nate Panza

Walk into any surf shop and the options can be overwhelming. Racks of boards in every length, shape, and color, each promising to transform your surfing. It is tempting to pick the one that looks the coolest or matches what the best surfer at your local break rides. That approach usually leads to frustration. Nate Panza has been surfing since he was young and competed as a kid, and one lesson that tends to come with that kind of experience is simple. The right board is the one that fits the surfer and the waves, not the one that looks best on the rack.

Choosing well starts with understanding a few basic concepts. Panza’s years in the water make these concepts second nature, but they are worth learning for anyone.

The Four Measurements That Matter

Surfboards are usually described by length, width, thickness, and volume.

Length is the most obvious. Longer boards generally paddle faster, catch waves earlier, and feel more stable. Shorter boards are usually easier to turn but require more skill to catch waves.

Width affects stability. A wider board feels more stable when paddling and standing, while a narrower board can be easier to put on its rail for sharper turns.

Thickness affects how much the board floats and how it feels underfoot. Thicker boards float more but can feel less responsive.

Volume, measured in liters, pulls these dimensions together into a single number that describes how much the board floats. It has become one of the most useful measurements for matching a board to a surfer, since two boards of the same length can have very different volumes. Experienced surfers like Panza often think in liters as much as in feet and inches.

Why Volume Matters So Much

Volume determines how easily a board paddles and catches waves. More volume makes paddling easier, which means more waves and more practice. For beginners, that is almost always the priority. It is a principle that holds true whether someone is a beginner or has surfed as long as Panza has.

The right amount of volume depends on a surfer’s weight, fitness, skill level, and the waves they ride. Many shapers and surf shops use guidelines that relate a surfer’s weight to a recommended volume range, adjusted for ability. These are starting points rather than rules, and it is worth asking an experienced shaper or shop for help.

A common mistake is choosing a board with too little volume too early. It may look like a performance board, but if a surfer cannot catch waves on it, progress slows dramatically.

The Main Types of Boards

Surfboards fall into several broad families, each suited to different surfers and conditions.

Longboards are typically nine feet or longer. They paddle easily, catch waves early, and offer a smooth, stable ride. They are excellent for small waves and for learning, and they have their own rich style of surfing built around graceful turns and walking the board.

Funboards and midlengths fall between longboards and shortboards. They offer a balance of paddle power and maneuverability, which makes them a popular choice for surfers moving beyond the beginner stage.

Fish boards are shorter and wider, often with a distinctive split tail. They generate speed easily in small to medium waves and are known for being fun and forgiving.

Shortboards are the high-performance option most associated with competitive surfing. They are designed for sharp turns and critical maneuvers in good waves, but they require strong paddling and solid technique. For someone like Panza who came up through contests, the shortboard is often the board that defined those early years.

Soft-top boards, sometimes called foam boards, have a soft deck and are especially common for beginners. They are forgiving, stable, and safer in crowded learning environments.

Choosing the right surfboard means balancing volume, length, rocker, rails and fin setup with your skill level and the waves you ride. Photo by Dylan Patterson on Unsplash.Choosing the right surfboard means balancing volume, length, rocker, rails and fin setup with your skill level and the waves you ride. Photo by Dylan Patterson on Unsplash.

Rocker, Rails, and Tails

Beyond basic dimensions, a few design features shape how a board performs.

Rocker is the curve of the board from nose to tail. More rocker makes a board easier to turn in steep waves but slower in flat sections. Less rocker helps with speed and paddling.

Rails are the edges of the board. Softer, rounder rails tend to feel forgiving and smooth. Harder, sharper rails can provide more bite and precision in turns.

Tail shape influences how a board releases from turns and holds in the wave. Squash tails, round tails, pin tails, and swallow tails each offer slightly different characteristics.

Fins Make a Difference

Fin setups affect how a board feels. Single fins provide a smooth, flowing ride often associated with longboards and classic styles. Thrusters, with three fins, are the standard for most modern shortboards and offer a balance of control and drive. Quad setups, with four fins, can add speed and hold, while twin fins are known for a loose, fast feel.

Many modern boards use removable fin systems, which allow surfers to experiment with different setups for different conditions. Experimenting like this is part of how surfers like Panza fine-tune a board for a specific trip or swell.

Match the Board to the Waves

A board that works perfectly in small, soft waves may struggle in powerful surf, and the reverse is also true. Many surfers eventually build a small collection, often called a quiver, with different boards for different conditions. For a surfer like Panza, who travels to explore new breaks, a small quiver makes it easier to adapt.

For traveling surfers, this becomes especially important. Panza surfs as a way to explore new places, and a surfer heading to a destination like Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, one of his favorite spots, will want to consider the typical wave size and power there before deciding which boards to bring.

Buying Tips

For beginners, renting or borrowing different boards before buying can be a smart move. It provides a feel for what works without a large upfront cost. Used boards can also be a good value, as long as they are checked for dings, cracks, or water damage.

When buying new, talking with a knowledgeable shop or shaper is invaluable. Be honest about your skill level, fitness, and the waves you usually surf. A good shaper would rather sell you the right board than the flashiest one. That kind of honest conversation is how surfers like Panza end up with boards that work for them.

Choose for the Surfer You Are Now

The best board is not the one you hope to ride someday. It is the one that helps you catch more waves, have more fun, and improve right now. As skills grow, boards can change too. Panza’s shift from competing to exploring is a reminder that what a surfer needs from a board can change over a lifetime.

Surfing rewards patience. Choosing equipment that fits your current level is one of the simplest ways to make every session more productive and more enjoyable, whether you are just starting out or, like Panza, have been in the water for most of your life.

PETA will pay meat workers $10,000 to blow the whistle. Is that a good thing?

Karin Kloosterman
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PETA will pay meat workers $10,000 to blow the whistle. Is that a good thing?

PETA is putting a $10,000 bounty on information from inside the American meat industry — and the offer raises an interesting question: when does paying people to expose wrongdoing become good public policy, and when does the money itself begin to complicate the truth?

Nicole Perreira from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, better known as PETA, sent Green Prophet details of the campaign this week, describing a nationwide effort to find meat-industry employees with firsthand knowledge of meat being repackaged, relabeled or otherwise misrepresented. This isn’t simply $10,000 for taking a disturbing photograph at work.

According to PETA, the reward is for credible information that ultimately leads to enforcement action by state or federal authorities against a meat company for misrepresenting its products. PETA is taking the campaign directly into American meat-producing regions including Harrisonburg, Virginia; Sioux City and Sioux Center, Iowa; Decatur, Alabama; and parts of California.

It is a fascinating proposition. On one hand, $10,000 is a powerful incentive for someone standing inside a slaughterhouse, packing plant or processing facility who knows something the public doesn’t. I started thinking if I had ever worked at a meat-packing house…

On the other, once you put a cash prize on incriminating evidence, it is reasonable to ask whether you have also created an incentive to go looking for wrongdoing — or to interpret ambiguous practices in the most damaging possible way.

Why PETA is offering the money

PETA in Egypt. Like Greenpeace, they have local networks around the world
PETA in Egypt. Like Greenpeace, they have local networks around the world

The immediate background is Farmer Focus, the Virginia chicken brand operated by Shenandoah Valley Organic. Green Prophet reported on the company earlier this year after PETA presented allegations involving its animal-welfare claims, wastewater practices and meat sourcing. Farmer Focus has marketed its chicken around ideas including traceability and animal welfare.

PETA says documents showed Shenandoah Valley Organic purchased more than 50,000 pounds of chicken from George’s Inc., a much larger conventional poultry producer. A whistleblower subsequently alleged that this chicken was repackaged and sold as Farmer Focus product.

PETA has taken the allegations to the Federal Trade Commission. That is significant, but it is also important to distinguish an allegation and regulatory complaint from a final regulatory finding that fraud occurred. PETA argues that the case suggests the problem could extend beyond one company.

For consumers, this matters because people willingly pay more for meat carrying words such as “humane,” “organic,” “animal welfare certified,” “pasture raised” or “traceable.” Those words don’t merely describe chicken. They create economic value in the hearts and minds of people. 

If an ordinary industrial product can simply be put inside premium packaging, then the consumer isn’t merely being misled about chickens. The market for supposedly higher-welfare food stops functioning.

But should whistleblowers be paid?

At first glance, paying someone to report misconduct can sound ethically dubious. If someone witnesses fraud or animal cruelty, shouldn’t they report it because it is wrong, rather than because somebody has put $10,000 on the table? The real world is considerably messier. Think about who is working at a slaughterhouse. 

A slaughterhouse employee may depend on the company for rent, health insurance and the food on their own family’s table. Reporting an employer can destroy workplace relationships and, despite legal protections that may apply in some circumstances, whistleblowers can face enormous personal and professional consequences.

Money can therefore compensate for risk rather than simply purchase a story. PETA did not invent this principle. The United States has long used financial rewards to encourage whistleblowers in areas ranging from government-contract fraud to securities violations of insider trading. Research into these programs has found that financial incentives can significantly increase reporting.

One peer-reviewed analysis of whistleblower reward systems notes that although critics often fear a flood of fabricated allegations, false reporting has not proved to be a major problem in several established American programs. The researchers argue that successful systems depend on verification, meaningful standards of proof and consequences for deliberately fabricated evidence. And what happens if employees set up a situation and frame their employees “for evidence”. It gets murky.

Related: the fall of Rodney McMullen

Other research has similarly found that monetary rewards increase people’s willingness to report misconduct. So the idea isn’t as radical as it sounds. Still, there is an important difference between a government whistleblower program which borders on communist-era practices, and an activist organization offering money to generate evidence against an industry it openly opposes.

PETA is not a neutral meat-industry regulator. Its stated position is that animals should not be eaten at all. That doesn’t mean evidence supplied to PETA is false. It does mean journalists, regulators and consumers should distinguish carefully between evidence, allegations, and PETA’s interpretation of that evidence.

Imagine a disgruntled employee with an old score to settle. Or an employee who sees something troubling without understanding the regulatory context. Or someone who captures the most shocking ten seconds of a complicated industrial process while leaving out what happened immediately before and afterward.

Those possibilities are precisely why PETA’s requirement that information result in government enforcement is important. The organization isn’t saying that an accusation alone earns $10,000. An outside authority still has to act.

There is another uncomfortable reality. Industrial animal agriculture mostly happens behind closed doors. Consumers standing at a refrigerated supermarket case cannot see how a chicken lived, how it died, where it was processed or whether the animal inside the package really corresponds to the pastoral language printed outside it.

Certification systems and regulators are supposed to bridge that information gap and sometimes insiders do it instead.

Insiders have produced important evidence not only in animal agriculture but in chemical companies (remember the farmer who took on Monsanto and lost?), pharmaceutical companies, banks, governments and practically every other industry in which the people on the inside know things the people on the outside cannot see. 

If an employee can document fraud or mislabeling, if regulators independently examine the evidence, and if enforcement follows, the fact that the original whistleblower was paid does not make the underlying wrongdoing disappear. But the existence of a reward should also make journalists and regulators more careful, not less, about corroborating what they are shown.

 

Chickpea Orzo Stuffed Tomatoes

Zara Nur
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Chickpea Orzo Stuffed Tomatoes

Chickpea orzo stuffed tomatoes for the fall harvest

As summer has come to a close and Fall/Stav/סתיב tolls the harvest in advance of Sukkot, I have picked most of the tomatoes on my plants either to be eaten immediately, set to ripen, or used after a short time I found myself wondering what to do with the handful of fully ripe and fancifully-ribbed tomatoes needing to be used.

A bounty of tomatoes
A bounty of tomatoes

Looking at what I already had in the pantry, I decided to make stuffed tomatoes with some of the unique single-ingredient chickpea orzo from Barilla. I’ve previously written about their embrace of wheat-alternative pasta and pastas enhanced with legume ingredients, yet this diamantine orzo is one of their best creations even to my gluten-loving preferences.

Stuffed tomatoes with orzo, by the author
Stuffed tomatoes with orzo, by the author

This recipe would work just as well with ptitim, which is often known as Israeli couscous that’s was often called Ben-Gurion rice. Ptitim (פתיתים) means ‘flakes’ and was created by the Osem food company in 1953, due to rationing during Israel’s austerity policy during the economic hardship of 1949 to 1959; originally it looked the same as orzo and that shape is still made by Osem and other companies like Tami, sometimes called Israeli rice or ptitim orez/אורז yet also still call orez Ben-Gurion/בן-גוריון.

Gluten-free ptitim orez is also made by Eshbal Functional Food’s Barili Free Living line of gluten-free products. Other ptitim shapes are stars/kochavim/כוכבים, rings/tabaot/טבעות, and hearts/levavot/לבבות.

Orzo with mushrooms. This latest version is with chickpeas and tomatoes
Orzo with mushrooms. This latest version is with chickpeas and tomatoes

Sometimes the common round couscous shape that’s larger than typical couscous is also known as pearl couscous and resembles pearled barley. Orzo and orez both mean rice, rice being the shape both ptitim and orzo originally were modeled after; the chickpea orzo still recalls this reference to rice in its form, albeit in a distinct and innovatively enjoyable form.

All of these options might work, yet this chickpea orzo also has a great mouthfeel in addition to being high protein, a good balance of soluble and insoluble dietary fiber, vegan, and kosher-certified.

Ingredients:

Filling:
½ cup dry Barilla chickpea orzo
½ cup frozen peas and cubed carrots blend

Tomatoes:
10 smallish (3″ to 4″ / 7cm to 10cm) stuffing tomatoes such as the smaller of the fruits of those I harvested from my Homs No. 11, Costoluto Genovese, or Rosso Sicilian varieties

Seasoning:
2 tbsp chopped fresh chives
3 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp tahini
3 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp chopped fresh mint
3 pinches kosher salt

Topping:
2 small onions, I used red onions though sweet onions would be excellent as well

Instructions:

This recipe is a teensy bit involved yet actually very easy. As I only have one working burner on the stove, I have the ongoing opportunity to improvise a bit. Thus lacking more than that single burner I opted to boil the orzo on the stovetop while broiling the onion in the stove as well subsequently broiling the peas and carrots; more on that later, for now mix up the seasoning and prep the tomatoes.

To make the seasoning, I combined the seasoning ingredients in a mason jar and shook; you can reuse most jars to do this or stir the ingredients in a measuring cup. I started with this step and then set it aside to be combined with the stuffing. It should look creamy and relatively uniform aside from the chives and mint, it will not separate while sitting.

To prep the tomatoes, cut the tops off and scoop the seeds and any excess flesh out besides some of the outermost rib for support, I used the tip of a butter knife to carefully scoop after using a serrated knife to remove the top. You can save the seeds from this and grow more tomatoes if that sounds like a good time to you or even donate the seeds to your local seed library, though if you use more than one variety you may end up with a delightfully diverse mix of seeds that should be labeled as such.

Since I also decided to top the stuffed tomatoes with crispy onions, I somewhat lazily made these by thin-slicing the onion and broiling it carefully with some olive oil in several nonstick bread pans. There are better ways to do this, as my friend Adva taught me. You can choose to do this more properly and you’ll likely have better onions for it compared to mine that turned out a bit overly crispy, yet this works well enough.

After making the onions, removing them from the oven, combining them in one of the bread pans, and covering that pan with tinfoil to set aside until topping the tomatoes, I briefly broiled the peas and carrots in the leftover oil from the onions.

Once the peas and carrots had a nice bit of color while still relatively firm, I combined the chickpea orzo with peas and carrots, then mixing in the seasoning. After making sure the stuffing mixture was well-mixed, I used a spoon to carefully transfer the stuffing to each tomato. Once each tomato had been stuffed and the stuffing in them patted down (not too hard, you don’t want to burst the tomatoes) to both level the tops and ensure full stuffing, taking a bit of onion to top each completes your tomatoes.

Feel free to add olives, garlic, or other ingredients to the seasoning. This recipe is by default vegan and easily kosher, yet could be made with the addition of cheese as a topping if so desired. I hope you enjoy this recipe!

Drinking Mercury: How Art Makes Invisible Pollution Visible

Karin Kloosterman
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Drinking Mercury: How Art Makes Invisible Pollution Visible

Art can sometimes explain an environmental problem better than a thousand scientific reports. That is the idea behind Drinking Mercury, a new exhibition opening in La Paz, Bolivia, where artists are confronting mercury pollution caused by illegal and artisanal gold mining around the reservoirs that supply drinking water to more than a million people.

The exhibition, curated by Naira Corzon Cortez and presented through apexart, runs from October 17 through November 13, 2026 at Casa Passiflora in La Paz. It brings together work by Viviana Mamani Cori, Nayra Corzon, Wara Vargas Lara and Mariel Terán across photography, sound, video and installation.

The underlying story is not abstract. Gold mining has expanded around the Hampaturi, Milluni and Incachaca reservoirs, while mercury used in gold extraction is entering the watershed. Mining has also reached the slopes of Illimani, the sacred Andean mountain overlooking La Paz.

Water moves and mercury moves. Pollution does not respect the neat boundaries we draw between a mine, a river, a kitchen tap and a human body. And this is where art can become a particularly powerful form of environmental activism.

One of the earliest environmental-art stories I wrote, long before Green Prophet became what it is today, was about New Mexico photographer Laurie Tümer. I wrote about her Glowing Evidence series for Grist and later TreeHugger.

Laurie Tumer
Laurie Tumer

Tümer had suffered a serious pesticide poisoning after her home was sprayed. She later became interested in the research of environmental scientist Richard Fenske, who used fluorescent tracer dyes and ultraviolet light to demonstrate how pesticides could migrate onto agricultural workers’ bodies even when they wore protective equipment.

Tümer borrowed the technique artistically. She put fluorescent tracers on shoes, surfaces and objects and photographed their movement under UV light. Suddenly an invisible environmental threat became visible.

The photographs were beautiful, almost celestial. But once you understood what the glowing patterns represented, they became disturbing. That is what environmental art can do exceptionally well. Science can tell us that contamination exists at a certain concentration. Art can help us understand what it means for a substance to move from soil to water, from water to hands, from hands into homes and eventually into bodies.

Drinking Mercury works in a similar territory.

Wara Vargas Lara’s All Rivers Flow into the Sea documents mining and gold extraction in the Bolivian Amazon and around Milluni, emphasizing a simple ecological reality: water systems are connected. Viviana Mamani Cori’s video Permissible Limits questions how contamination is represented publicly. Nayra Corzon transforms environmental laws and books into damaged landscapes overtaken by moss and biological material, while Mariel Terán’s Earth Hands uses Andean instruments, sound and earth to examine what remains alive in landscapes being excavated.

The exhibition does not simply illustrate pollution. It turns an invisible environmental threat into something people can experience.

And perhaps that is one of art’s most useful environmental functions: not frightening people for the sake of fear, but giving shape to something that otherwise remains unseen. Once contamination can be seen, heard or imagined moving through a landscape, it becomes much harder to pretend it stops somewhere upstream.

Was the Flydubai cockpit emergency an attempted terror attack — or a pilot in crisis?

Karin Kloosterman
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Was the Flydubai cockpit emergency an attempted terror attack — or a pilot in crisis?

What happened inside the cockpit of flydubai Flight FZ1073 on Wednesday morning is still under investigation, but the story has become considerably more disturbing since the first reports of a “fight between pilots.”

The Boeing 737 MAX 8 had taken off from Dubai for Tel Aviv on September 30 with more than 150 passengers aboard. Ynet, an Israeli outlet, reported 174 passengers, including 27 children. The flight departed Dubai at about 7:05 a.m. and was expected at Ben Gurion Airport around 9:30. Then the aircraft began behaving strangely.

According to flight-tracking data and Israeli reports, the crew first transmitted squawk code 7700, the international code for a general emergency. It then transmitted 7500 — the code used to discreetly signal unlawful interference or a hijacking — before returning to 7700.

The plane turned away from Israel and rapidly lost altitude. Reuters reported that it descended roughly 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds before ultimately landing safely at Tabuk in northwestern Saudi Arabia. Israeli fighter aircraft were scrambled, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz convened an urgent security consultation as Israeli authorities tried to establish whether they were confronting a hijacking.

All the passengers survived. So what happened aboard the plane? At first, the explanation seemed almost absurdly mundane considering the response: the two pilots had apparently become involved in a physical fight and one stabbed the other with a pen knife.

But by midday Wednesday, Israeli reporting was pointing to a much darker possibility that the captain of the plane, suspected as having a Russian or Ukrainian and Omani nationality, may have been trying to crash the plane as a form of terror. Ynet reported that senior figures in the Israeli aviation industry had not ruled out a security incident and were examining the possibility that one pilot had tried to cause the aircraft to crash and that the second pilot, reportedly with assistance from passengers, a couple who were plain clothed pilots, prevented him from doing so.

Either way, this story is terrifying. Local news in Israel are reporting that investigators believe it was a terror attack. There are also reports in Israeli media, not yet confirmed by Saudi, Emirati or flydubai authorities, that the copilot was Omani, the captain may have also been Emirati, and that the copilot attacked or stabbed the captain before allegedly trying to crash the plane.

So many details cannot be confirmed. Witness accounts seen on X, describe screaming from the cockpit and a man with a knife forcing one of the pilots down; evidence of blood was also reportedly seen by the Israelis who busted into the cockpit to subdue the attacking captain of the plain. But crucial details, including who wielded the weapon and precisely what took place inside the cockpit, remain under investigation and may be held secret until after the passengers return home.

Flydubai itself has so far described an “incident” aboard the aircraft and confirmed that its passengers were safe. Saudi authorities, where the Israelis landed, have been questioning the crew. Israel and Saudi Arabia have no formal peace agreement or established relations and neither are allowed in most circumstances to travel to the other’s nation. Israeli Muslims for instance, need to pay a hefty sum to get a temporary Jordanian passport into to travel to Mecca on an annual Hajj pilgrimage.

“We were attacked on this plane. They tried to murder the pilot,” an Israeli witness says, recounting the horror on board.

That leaves two very different scenarios on the table: an attempted act of terrorism against an aircraft carrying a large number of Israelis, or an extreme personal or psychiatric crisis involving a pilot. Both situations are intensely frightening.

A pilot deliberately bringing down an aircraft is extraordinarily rare, but there are precedents. The best known is Germanwings Flight 9525. On March 24, 2015, copilot Andreas Lubitz waited until the captain left the cockpit, locked the reinforced door and deliberately commanded the Airbus A320 into a descent toward the French Alps. All 150 people aboard were killed.

French investigators later established that Lubitz had a history of severe depression and was experiencing symptoms consistent with a serious psychiatric episode before the crash. The BEA concluded that he intentionally altered the autopilot and prevented anyone from re-entering the cockpit.

Two years earlier, LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 crashed in Namibia, killing all 33 people aboard. Investigators concluded that the captain, left alone in the cockpit after the first officer went to the lavatory, deliberately changed the Embraer 190’s altitude setting from 38,000 feet to a height below the surrounding terrain. The first officer could be heard trying to get back inside as the aircraft descended.

Then there is the remarkable case of Richard Russell. Russell was not a pilot at all. He was a Horizon Air ground-service employee at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport who, on August 10, 2018, gained access to an empty Bombardier Q400, moved it into position and simply took off.

For more than an hour he flew over Puget Sound while military F-15s followed the aircraft and air-traffic controllers tried to persuade him to land. Russell ultimately crashed on Ketron Island and died alone. Federal investigators concluded that he acted alone. The episode is particularly unsettling because it demonstrated that the human security problem in aviation is not limited to trained pilots: a trusted employee with aircraft access can become an insider threat.

Research into aircraft-assisted suicide has found no single psychological profile that explains these events. Documented factors have included depression and other psychiatric illness, relationship breakdown, legal or financial crises, occupational conflict, substance abuse and acute negative life events. A systematic review of aviation murder-suicides stresses that suicide and homicide-suicide are also not the same phenomenon and should not simply be lumped together as “pilot suicide.”

And the phenomenon is exceptionally rare. One review of thousands of fatal American aviation accidents calculated aircraft-assisted pilot suicide at roughly one third of one percent. Yet, this is important when considering the flydubai incident. A mental-health crisis is possible, but “mental health” should not become a convenient explanation before investigators know what actually happened.

If investigators are considering terrorism, they will need to establish things such as whether the Tel Aviv destination and Israeli passengers were deliberately targeted; whether there was prior planning; whether the suspect expressed ideological motives; whether communications or digital evidence point toward radicalization; and whether the alleged attempt to crash the aircraft was intended as a political act rather than an act of personal violence or suicide.

If evidence eventually shows that a crew member tried to destroy an Israel-bound passenger jet because the people aboard were Israeli or Jewish, the terrorism designation would follow from that intent, not from the man’s passport.

The distinction matters particularly in the Gulf, where flydubai’s Tel Aviv route is itself a product of the extraordinary changes in regional aviation following the Abraham Accords. Reuters notes that flights between the UAE and Israel routinely use Saudi and Jordanian airspace, routes that would have been politically difficult to imagine only a few years earlier. I have flown on FlyDubai and found it to be a convenient and fast way to travel to Thailand. Will I wonder before booking my next flight on this carrier? One-hundred percent. If mental illness or terrorists are an “inside job” we need to start holding airlines accountable for the people they entrust with others’ lives.

Commercial aviation has become astonishingly safe partly because almost every mechanical failure imaginable has been anticipated, documented and engineered around. Germanwings led regulators to reconsider medical confidentiality, psychiatric screening and the risks created when a single pilot is left alone behind an impenetrable security door. Researchers since then have also warned that pilots may conceal psychological difficulties if asking for help threatens their medical certificate and career. Better safety may therefore require not simply tougher psychological screening, but systems in which pilots can seek treatment early without automatically losing their livelihoods.

There is an environmental dimension to this story, although it should not overshadow what happened aboard FZ1073.

Green Prophet has followed the recent opening of shorter aviation corridors through the Gulf because direct routes mean less fuel burned, lower emissions and fewer unnecessary hours in the air. Regional cooperation can make aviation both more efficient and less carbon intensive. But those efficiencies depend on something more fundamental: trust. What happens when Israelis land in Saudi Arabia?

Reports on the ground show that do to a supersonic dive the plane lost part of its rudder.

FlyDubai rudder blown off by supersonic dive
FlyDubai rudder blown off by supersonic dive

For the moment, that successful landing is the one fact that is not disputed. What happens next will be on the tip of everyone’s tongues as we commemorate 911 and the harm caused by murderous, savage people who work in the west to destroy it from within.

Breaking: a second flight from Dubai has been diverted to return to Dubai. According to reports on X, flydubai flight (FZ1081) from Dubai to Tel Aviv has been diverted and has announced that it is returning to Dubai. The reason is currently unknown.

Two People, One Dataset, and a Disagreement Nobody Can Settle

Bhok Thompson
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Two People, One Dataset, and a Disagreement Nobody Can Settle

The sustainability lead says the site’s emissions fell 11% year on year. The plant engineer says she does not believe the number. They are both looking at the same dashboard.

This argument is happening in a lot of buildings right now and it is more interesting than it sounds, because neither person is being difficult. The sustainability lead has a figure produced by a system that ingests meter data, production volumes, fuel receipts and grid emissions factors, and resolves all of it into a monthly intensity number. The engineer knows three things about the plant that she cannot see anywhere in that pipeline: two of the flow meters were out of calibration for most of the second quarter, the site ran an unusual product mix in August, and the grid factor the system uses is a national average when the site sits on a regional interconnect that is measurably dirtier.

She might be wrong. The 11% might be real. But she cannot find out, and neither can he, because the system produces the answer without producing the workings.

Nobody built this badly on purpose

It is worth being clear that the platform is doing something genuinely difficult and doing it reasonably well. Manual carbon accounting at a multi-site operation is a spreadsheet nightmare that burns weeks of skilled time and is itself full of errors nobody catches.

The models replaced that. What they did not replace was the part of the old process where a human being had to look at each input and decide whether to trust it. That step used to be slow, visible and annoying. Now it happens invisibly, or not at all, and the output looks the same either way.

The question that surfaces it

Ask anyone showing you a sustainability figure this: if a regulator asked where this number came from, how long would it take you to answer?

The answers cluster. Some people say a few days, which usually means the evidence exists in pieces and somebody would have to assemble it. Some say they are not sure, which is honest. A few say immediately, and when you look, they turn out to have built something deliberate: a record written at the moment each figure was produced, naming the inputs, their vintage, the model version and the person who signed it off.

That third group is small and they did not get there by buying better software.

Why the deadline changes the stakes

Voluntary reporting forgives a lot. If a number is soft, you refine it next year and nobody is harmed. Regulatory reporting does not work that way, and the calendar has moved.

Under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, disclosures carry assurance requirements, which is a plain way of saying an external party will ask the engineer’s question and will not accept the dashboard as an answer. The International Sustainability Standards Board’s IFRS S2 pushes in the same direction. Add jurisdictional AI rules on top: Texas’s Responsible AI Governance Act took effect with the state Attorney General’s complaint portal opening 1 September 2026, and the complaint route means the first external review of a model may arrive unannounced from someone who feels harmed by its output.

The 11% figure becomes a liability at the moment it becomes a disclosure.

The engineer’s three objections are all the same objection

Look again at what she said. Meters out of calibration is a provenance problem. Unusual product mix is a question about whether the model was applied inside the conditions it was built for. National grid factor where a regional one applies is the same thing again in a different coat.

Every one of them is answerable with a record rather than a better model. Which sensors, calibrated when. Which model version, which inputs, what vintage. Whether the operating conditions that month sat inside the envelope the thing was designed for, and a flag when they did not. Who accepted the output and whether anyone disagreed.

Those are the pillars of a published framework for AI decision governance, written for energy operators, and they line up with what NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework names as accountable and transparent, explainable and interpretable characteristics of a trustworthy system, and they exist because the same argument has been playing out in oil and gas for several years with larger numbers attached. The transition side of the industry is arriving at it later and with less patience.

What is genuinely unresolved

Here is where I will stop pretending this is tidy.

Recording all of this creates a defensible file and it also creates a record of every soft number you ever published. Organisations know this, which is part of why the governance layer keeps losing to the reporting deadline. A vague number is safer in the short run than a well-documented uncertain one, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not sat in the meeting.

I do not think that tension resolves cleanly. What I think is that it resolves in one direction the moment assurance becomes mandatory, because at that point the vague number stops being safe and the documented uncertainty becomes the only defensible position. Organisations that start building the record now will publish some uncomfortable footnotes. Organisations that wait will publish numbers they cannot stand behind.

If you are the engineer in this story

The useful move is not to escalate the argument. It is to ask for one specific thing: the provenance record behind a single figure, for a single month, in writing. Not the methodology document, which describes what the system does in general. The record of what it actually did that month.

If it exists, your objection gets answered and you were wrong, which is a good outcome. If it does not exist, you have surfaced the real problem without having to win an argument about the meters.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has run this exercise on a live sustainability pipeline, because I have heard the first version of this argument perhaps a dozen times and I have yet to hear a clean account of how it ended. My suspicion is that most of them are still going.

Arabia Suburbia was adapted from the American blueprint for suburban living

Karin Kloosterman
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Arabia Suburbia was adapted from the American blueprint for suburban living

Walk through almost any Saudi city today and one form dominates residential streets: the detached villa, sitting on its own plot, separated from its neighbors, usually surrounded by a wall and reached by car. It feels thoroughly Saudi. But much of the architectural DNA of the modern Saudi house comes from American suburbia.

In January 1954, Saudi Arabia’s Aramco magazine Al-Qafilah published an article documenting the work of its Urban Development Department and the company’s expanding Home Ownership Program. Aramco is the national oil company of Saudi Arabia, and they had launched the program in 1951, offering Saudi employees financial help, including interest-free loans, to build or buy houses. The Saudi government, a monarchy, assisted workers in obtaining land from crown grants.

Employees could discuss their requirements with company staff, choose from prepared house plans, request changes or submit their own designs. Contractors then competed to build the houses.

Aramco-built “Western-style residences” show how detached villas and planned neighborhoods became part of Saudi urban life.
Aramco-built “Western-style residences” show how detached villas and planned neighborhoods became part of Saudi urban life.

It sounds like a straightforward employee benefit. Architecturally, however, something much bigger was happening. Researchers Abdulaziz Alshabib and Sam Ridgway argue that Aramco’s housing developments, followed by the Saudi government’s Al-Malaz project in Riyadh, helped begin a dramatic displacement of Saudi vernacular architecture after the arrival of oil.

Saudi homes had traditionally developed around climate, family and privacy. Many were inward-facing, organized around courtyards, attached to neighboring buildings and designed to create shade and protect domestic life from the street. But the new model based on the American dream was different.

Aramco required houses financed through its program to satisfy company building standards. Research on the period has found that those standards were substantially imported from American suburban codes. Saudi applicants were also required to produce professional drawings at a time when there were few Saudi architects able to prepare them, increasing their reliance on Aramco’s American architects and engineers. The same rings true today where mega projects contracted by Neom are drawn up by firms in England or America.

One of the people translating Saudi homeowners’ wishes into buildings was T. Coleman, a Californian contractor working with Aramco. His sketches were developed by a Sudanese draftsman, while Donald M. Bammes served as Aramco’s head architect in the early years of the scheme.

As demand grew, individually designed houses increasingly gave way to standard plans.

In 1951, eleven houses were commissioned from five local contractors. In 1952, contractor Abdallah bin Darwish Fakroo received an order for 300, using concrete-block machinery and modern construction methods. The result was not simply a new house. It was a new way of organizing Saudi life: detached villas on individual lots, regular road systems and residential districts that increasingly resembled suburbs. The inner courtyards that offered cool afternoons disappeared.

Dhahran, 1949: Rows of standardized Aramco housing laid out in the desert, an early example of American-style suburban planning in Saudi Arabia.
Dhahran, 1949: Rows of standardized Aramco housing laid out in the desert, an early example of American-style suburban planning in Saudi Arabia.

Aramco itself was remarkably explicit about the comparison. Writing about West al-Khobar in 1961, an Aramco publication called the development “Arabia Suburbia.” It described concrete and stucco homes built through company loans on land supplied through royal grants.

The model spread far beyond Aramco employees. Architectural research argues that the villa introduced through the Home Ownership Program became the dominant Saudi house type, reinforced later through planning and building regulations. Saudi families did not simply accept the imported model unchanged. Residents raised perimeter walls for privacy, altered spaces and adapted homes to local family structures and customs. The Saudi villa in the end became a hybrid: an American suburban framework modified for Saudi life.

There is an interesting Canadian link for me here.  In nineteenth-century Ontario, governments also used crown land, housing and settlement rules to manufacture communities. Under systems culminating in Ontario’s Free Grant and Homestead Act of 1868, settlers could obtain Crown land, but ownership depended on actually settling it: building a dwelling, clearing land and cultivating a farm.

My own house in Ontario was built from a blueprint, a reminder that what later looks like organic vernacular architecture can sometimes begin as somebody’s standardized plan. That is what makes these early Aramco houses so interesting.

We tend to look at contemporary Saudi cities and assume their architecture developed naturally from Saudi culture. Yet one of the Kingdom’s most familiar residential forms emerged from an encounter between Saudi families, oil wealth, government land policy, American building codes and the postwar dream of suburbia.

America’s role in Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth

Daniel E. Garvey Photographs, CP DG, Arizona State University LibraryHis Royal Highness and Secretary of Agriculture Anderson get hearty laughs out of the performance of a rooster at the Governmental Experimental Farm at Beltsville.
Daniel E. Garvey Photographs, CP DG, Arizona State University Library
His Royal Highness and Secretary of Agriculture Anderson get hearty laughs out of the performance of a rooster at the Governmental Experimental Farm at Beltsville.

Saudi Arabia was not created by America. King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud had already unified the Kingdom in 1932 after three decades of conquest and political consolidation. But the physical Saudi Arabia that emerged afterward was profoundly shaped by an American presence.

Less than a year after the Kingdom was founded, Ibn Saud granted Standard Oil of California the concession that eventually became Aramco. American geologists found commercial oil in 1938, and with oil came roads, company towns, concrete construction, engineering standards and a new idea of domestic life.

The detached Saudi villa that now appears almost indigenous to the Gulf was therefore born during an extraordinary moment when a newly unified Arabian monarchy encountered American oil capitalism and postwar suburbia. 

The relationship between Saudi Arabia and American resources has since come full circle in other ways. In Arizona, Saudi dairy company Almarai, through its subsidiary Fondomonte, acquired farmland to grow water-intensive alfalfa for export back to the Kingdom, pumping groundwater from an already arid region.

As Green Prophet reported in 2023, the uncomfortable part of the story was not simply that a Saudi company wanted American water, but that American laws and land deals made such extraction possible in the first place. Saudi Arabia was exploiting a system the United States itself had created, just as, decades earlier, American oil companies had exported their own ideas about housing, infrastructure and suburbia to the newly formed Saudi state.

 

 

Leen Kawas and the Work of Carrying Promising Medicines Forward

Bhok Thompson
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Leen Kawas and the Work of Carrying Promising Medicines Forward

Chronic hepatitis D is better studied than treated. The virus occurs only in people already living with hepatitis B, and it can accelerate progression to cirrhosis, liver failure, and liver cancer. Treatment options remain limited, leaving a meaningful gap between the seriousness of the disease and the therapies available to the people living with it.

That gap is where EIT Pharma is positioning itself: not as a company built around discovering every molecule from scratch, but as one designed to identify promising programs that were left unfinished, secure the rights, and do the clinical, regulatory, and operational work required to move them toward patients. Its lead program, lonafarnib, is an illustration of that strategy.

EIT Pharma bought two programs in 2024 and launched operations early 2025.

Carrying Promising Programs Forward

Lonafarnib was initially developed by Eiger BioPharmaceuticals, which advanced the compound through the pivotal D-LIVR Phase 3 program in chronic hepatitis D before the late-stage asset changed hands. EIT Pharma subsequently secured rights to the program and resumed development.

That sequence is more common in biotechnology than the industry’s discovery-first mythology implies. A drug program may lose momentum for reasons that have little to do with the underlying science: an overextended balance sheet, a shift in corporate priorities, a need to concentrate resources on another therapeutic area, or the difficulty of financing the last stages of development.

For an operator willing to take on complexity, those circumstances can create an opportunity. The opportunity is not merely to acquire a molecule at a discount. It is to recognize when a completed body of clinical work, a defined unmet need, and an executable path forward can together create a credible route to a medicine.

EIT has achieved a meaningful milestone this summer with the filing of its first NDA. The FDA accepted the company’s New Drug Application for lonafarnib in chronic hepatitis D. The compound is an oral farnesyltransferase inhibitor, and in this disease it interferes with the prenylation-dependent assembly that new viral particles require. It already holds Breakthrough Therapy, Fast Track, and Orphan Drug designations. It is not approved for chronic hepatitis D.

The filing of a New Drug Application (NDA) with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration represents a significant and encouraging milestone for any biotechnology company. Although an NDA submission neither assures regulatory approval nor independently confirms a drug’s efficacy or safety profile, it demonstrates the team’s ability to execute a complex clinical, regulatory, manufacturing, and operational process. The Lonafarnib NDA filing is therefore an important step toward potentially bringing the first oral therapy for chronic hepatitis D to patients with this serious disease.

A CEO for the Last Mile

EIT Pharma commenced operations in January 2025 with Leen Kawas as chief executive. Her career is particularly relevant to companies that must do more than generate early scientific enthusiasm. It reflects the later stages of company-building: raising capital, advancing clinical programs, organizing expert teams, building operating infrastructure, and managing the transition from development-stage science toward patient access.

She co-founded Propel Bio Partners with Richard Kayne in 2022 and remains its managing general partner. She sits on the boards of Inherent Biosciences and Persephone Biosciences. Her training is in pharmacology, with a Ph.D. from Washington State University and a pharmacy degree from the University of Jordan. Before Propel, she ran a biopharmaceutical company focused on neurodegenerative diseases, advanced multiple late-stage clinical programs there, and led it through a September 2020 initial public offering that raised more than $400 million. More than a decade of biotechnology leadership sits behind the current role.

Jeffrey Glenn, who co-founded EIT Pharma and holds the Joseph D. Grant Professorship and a professorship of medicine and microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, said the fit between Leen Kawas and the job comes down to operating history. “Her experience building a company from the ground up and carrying it through the full arc of drug development makes her the ideal person to advance EIT Pharma’s mission to deliver life-changing therapies to people impacted by significant unmet medical needs,” he said.

Whether the review ends in approval is not knowable now, and the people closest to it have avoided guessing. A narrower claim already holds. A finished, expensive body of clinical work that had stopped moving got picked up and carried to the point of a regulatory decision by people who knew how that last stretch works.

Leen Kawas has put the stakes in plainer terms. “The people living with chronic hepatitis D have far too few treatment options and no patient should be left behind,” she said when Propel Bio Partners reviewed the company’s progress in August.

The Clinical Need

Chronic hepatitis D is an especially compelling setting for an asset-development strategy because it is both serious and underserved. It affects people who already have hepatitis B and may progress rapidly to severe liver disease.

The D-LIVR study, involving more than 400 participants, is described by EIT as the largest chronic hepatitis D trial conducted to date. It evaluated lonafarnib-based regimens over 48 weeks, including lonafarnib boosted with ritonavir, with and without peginterferon alfa.

The potential importance of an oral component extends beyond pharmacology. In chronic illnesses, how a therapy is administered can shape whether it reaches patients in the first place. Practical treatment options can influence care delivery, long-term adherence, specialist capacity, and access for patients who do not live near major academic liver centers.

None of that resolves the scientific or regulatory questions around any investigational program. It does explain why companies may see strategic value in advancing clinically mature assets in diseases where the treatment shelf is still sparse.

A Repeatable Strategy

EIT’s strategy matters most if it can be repeated. Its pipeline also includes Lambda, an investigational treatment for severe acute viral respiratory infections, suggesting that the company sees lonafarnib not as an isolated transaction but as the first expression of a broader approach.

The premise is simple: identify programs with meaningful evidence and a credible patient need; acquire them when their prior sponsors cannot or will not continue; then apply the capital, execution, and development discipline needed to carry them forward.

For patients living with severe, under-served diseases, that distinction can be consequential. A program that stalls inside one company may still have a path to become a treatment in another. EIT Pharma’s bet is that finishing those programs—carefully, rigorously, and with patient access in view—is not merely an operational exercise. It is a way to create value by delivering therapies to people who have been waiting too long.

The Financial Impact of Meta Glasses on Europe’s Eyewear Market

Bhok Thompson
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The Financial Impact of Meta Glasses on Europe’s Eyewear Market

Smart glasses are changing the economics of eyewear by turning conventional frames into higher-priced technology products. What used to be mainly a sale built around frame design, lenses, prescription needs and brand preference is now also a sale built around cameras, audio, AI features, app support and connected-device setup.

Ray-Ban, Oakley and Sunglass Hut show how this shift is playing out. Ray-Ban has helped move smart glasses toward mainstream buyers. Oakley is extending the category into performance eyewear. Sunglass Hut is showing how retailers may need to reorganize the shopping experience around AI glasses as a distinct product category.

Smart Glasses Are Raising the Value of an Eyewear Sale

Ray Ban AI glasses
Ray Ban AI glasses

The clearest financial story is sales value. EssilorLuxottica said more than two million Ray-Ban Meta glasses had been sold by February 2025, less than 18 months after the product’s September 2023 launch. The company was also preparing production capacity of 10 million smart-glasses units per year by the end of 2026, according to Reuters reporting on its smart-glasses plans.

That momentum accelerated in 2025. EssilorLuxottica later reported more than seven million AI-glasses units sold during the full year, including both Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta. This is not a pure Ray-Ban figure, but it shows how quickly smart eyewear moved from a niche experiment to a meaningful product category.

Europe is central to that story. Counterpoint Research data reported by Communications Today indicated that Western Europe accounted for 30% of global smart-glasses shipments in the second half of 2025, while the global average selling price of AI smart glasses rose to about $360. That is well above basic audio glasses and helps explain why eyewear companies and retailers are paying close attention to the category.

The higher price is not only about the frame. Smart glasses add components and capabilities that ordinary eyewear does not have: cameras, microphones, speakers, batteries, processors, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, companion apps and AI functions. These features allow brands to position smart glasses closer to consumer electronics while still selling them through familiar optical and fashion channels.

For retailers, that creates an opportunity to increase average transaction value. But it also changes what the sale requires.

Ray-Ban: Bringing Smart Glasses to Mainstream Buyers

Ray-Ban’s advantage is familiarity. Earlier smart-glasses products often struggled because they looked too much like devices and not enough like eyewear. Ray-Ban Meta reduced that visual barrier by putting smart functionality into frames consumers already recognized.

The sales growth of Meta glasses suggests that consumers are more open to wearable technology when it comes in a familiar eyewear design. Instead of asking buyers to adopt a strange-looking device, Ray-Ban gives them a product that still feels close to ordinary glasses or sunglasses.

That matters financially because mainstream acceptance expands the addressable market. The product is not limited to technology enthusiasts. It can appeal to travelers, creators, commuters, parents, students, professionals and existing Ray-Ban customers who already understand the brand’s style language.

Product education is also part of the sale. Smart glasses are harder to explain than standard frames, so tools such as AI simulators, guided product pages and in-store demonstrations can help consumers understand what the glasses actually do before buying. Better education can reduce expectation gaps, especially around camera quality, AI capabilities, battery life, audio, privacy settings and app requirements.

This is important because expectation-based returns can be expensive. Ray-Ban has not disclosed an official return rate for Ray-Ban Meta. Its support material says returns are rare, but it does not provide a percentage. So the safest financial conclusion is not that returns have been solved. It is that clearer education may help reduce avoidable dissatisfaction.

Oakley: Opening a Performance-Eyewear Segment

Oakley brings a different financial opportunity. While Ray-Ban Meta helped make smart glasses more familiar to lifestyle buyers, Oakley gives the category a way into sport and performance eyewear. That opens the door to runners, cyclists, outdoor athletes and other active consumers who may be interested in hands-free audio and capture while they are moving.

With Oakley recording glasses, the priorities are a little different. Frame stability, lens coverage, durability and comfort can matter more when the glasses are being used during a run, ride or other outdoor activity. For a lifestyle buyer, everyday design and social use may come first. For someone buying with sport in mind, how the glasses feel and hold up during movement is likely to matter more.

This segmentation can raise the financial ceiling of the category. Smart glasses do not have to remain one general product. They can become lifestyle eyewear, performance eyewear, prescription eyewear and creator eyewear, each with different price points and buying motivations.

Market research cited in the brief indicates that Oakley Meta HSTN and Vanguard represented more than 30% of Meta’s smart-glasses shipments in Q4 2025. Because this figure comes from third-party market analysis rather than direct company disclosure, it should be treated as an estimate. Still, it supports the idea that sport-focused smart glasses quickly became commercially relevant.

Fit is especially important for Oakley. Performance eyewear buyers are more sensitive to whether a frame sits securely, works with movement and feels right on the face. Virtual try-on can help buyers assess appearance and approximate fit before purchase. That may reduce uncertainty, but it should not be overstated. Oakley has not published a specific return-rate reduction for Meta glasses, so the responsible claim is that virtual try-on may reduce buying friction, not that it has proven a specific drop in returns.

Sunglass Hut: Changing the Retail Experience

Sunglass Hut shows how smart glasses are changing retail structure. Instead of treating Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta as isolated brand products, retailers are beginning to organize them into dedicated AI-glasses sections.

The dedicated Sunglass Hut Meta section shows how established retailers are beginning to organize smart glasses as a distinct category. That matters because category creation shapes consumer behavior. A shopper who sees “AI glasses” as its own area may begin comparing smart eyewear across brands, models, features and prices, rather than thinking of it as only a Ray-Ban or Oakley variation.

This can help increase discovery and support higher-value sales. Sunglass Hut also has the advantage of an established optical and fashion retail footprint. Smart glasses can be introduced through a familiar eyewear retailer instead of only through electronics stores.

But selling smart glasses is more demanding than selling standard sunglasses. Staff may need to explain pairing, app compatibility, camera features, audio quality, privacy settings, battery charging, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cloud-based processing. Customers may also need live demonstrations before they understand the product’s value.

That changes cost structure. A higher ticket price may improve revenue per sale, but it also requires more staff training, longer sales conversations, technical troubleshooting, warranty handling and return management. EssilorLuxottica’s Leonardo learning ecosystem is relevant here because large-scale employee education becomes more important when retail staff must sell products that sit between eyewear and consumer electronics.

What Will Determine Long-Term Profitability?

The Avantguard sunglasses

The long-term profitability of Meta glasses in Europe will depend on more than unit sales. Strong sales show demand, but retailers and manufacturers still need to manage cost, support and repeat use.

Several figures will matter over time:

  • Gross margins on smart eyewear
  • Manufacturing and component costs
  • Staff training costs
  • Warranty and repair expenses
  • Return rates and return reasons
  • Repeat usage after purchase
  • Consumer demand for future upgrades

No official return rate has been disclosed for Ray-Ban Meta or Oakley Meta. That is an important limitation. Ray-Ban and Oakley support materials may say returns are rare, but without disclosed percentages, market observers cannot accurately calculate the return burden.

Virtual try-ons and product simulators may help reduce uncertainty. They can show shoppers how a frame may look, explain features before purchase and help customers make more informed decisions. However, their exact effect on Ray-Ban Meta or Oakley Meta returns has not been publicly measured.

There is also a sustainability and lifecycle question. Smart glasses include batteries, chips, cameras and speakers, which makes them more complicated than traditional eyewear. For a Europe-facing market, that matters because connected accessories create repair, recycling and e-waste considerations. As Green Prophet has often covered in its wider sustainable fashion and design reporting, product value increasingly depends on durability, responsible materials and how long items remain useful.

This is especially relevant because the global e-waste problem continues to grow. The Global E-waste Monitor reported 62 million tonnes of e-waste generated in 2022, with only a minority formally collected and recycled. If smart glasses scale into tens of millions of units, product lifespan and end-of-life handling will become part of the financial picture.

Conclusion

Meta glasses are reshaping Europe’s eyewear market in three clear ways. First, they are raising the value of an eyewear sale by adding cameras, audio, AI and connected-device features to familiar frames. Second, they are opening new customer segments, with Ray-Ban reaching mainstream lifestyle buyers and Oakley extending the category into performance eyewear. Third, they are forcing retailers such as Sunglass Hut to build a more demanding sales model around demonstrations, education, support and returns.

The sales data shows strong demand. More than two million Ray-Ban Meta units had been sold by early 2025, and EssilorLuxottica’s broader AI-glasses portfolio passed seven million units in 2025. Western Europe’s 30% shipment share in H2 2025 also shows that the region is a major part of the category’s growth.

But long-term success will depend on profitability, not only popularity. The winners will be the brands and retailers that can maintain demand, protect margins, manage support costs, reduce expectation-based returns and keep consumers using smart glasses long after the first purchase.

Why Pest Control Has to Be Local: Mira Home on How Climate and Geography Change Pest Pressure Across America

Bhok Thompson
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Why Pest Control Has to Be Local: Mira Home on How Climate and Geography Change Pest Pressure Across America

“Local” gets used as a marketing word so often in home services that it has started to lose its meaning. For pest control specifically, though, the word describes something operational, not just a positioning choice. Mira Home, a residential pest control company that now serves 14 markets across eight states, treats the local/national tension as a genuine operating question rather than a slogan: a single treatment plan copied across every market will underperform in at least some of them, because climate, moisture, building patterns and local species change what a technician is actually up against.

A dry climate concentrates the pressure

Utah is the clearest example of why this matters. The state’s high-desert climate produces large swings between daytime and night-time temperatures, along with irrigated lawns and landscaping that create small, reliable pockets of moisture in an otherwise dry environment. Mira Home’s own guidance for its Utah service area describes the resulting pattern directly: “In a dry climate, pests follow the water.” Ants, spiders and wasps concentrate wherever a sprinkler system, garden bed or shaded patio keeps conditions slightly more hospitable than the surrounding landscape, and mice work the edges of those same irrigated lots as outdoor food sources dry up heading into fall. A technician working a Utah route learns to read a yard’s irrigation pattern almost as closely as the house itself, because that’s usually where the pest pressure is concentrated.

A humid climate spreads it out

pictures of a cockroach

A humid Southeastern market presents a nearly opposite set of conditions. Instead of moisture being scarce and concentrated, it’s abundant almost everywhere, which spreads pest pressure across a wider range of entry points rather than funneling it toward a handful of obvious hot spots. The University of Georgia Extension’s household pest management guidance calls excess moisture the single most important condition behind pest infestations in a home, and its list of common sources, grade and drainage, crawlspace ventilation, roof and plumbing leaks, misdirected sprinklers, clogged gutters, spans the entire structure rather than one concentrated area. Where a Utah technician might focus tightly on irrigation zones, a technician in Georgia or Florida is more likely to be managing pressure along the entire perimeter of a property, since there is rarely a single dry stretch that concentrates activity the way there is in an arid market.

What changes during the actual visit

That contrast changes what actually happens during a service visit, not just the marketing language around it. Inspection priorities shift: a technician in a dry climate checks irrigation lines, garden beds and any standing water first, while a technician in a humid climate spends more time on foundation vents, crawl spaces and anywhere moisture collects after rain. Timing shifts too. Pest activity in an arid market often tracks closely with irrigation schedules and the sharp day-to-night temperature swing, while humid-climate activity tends to stay elevated across a longer stretch of the year. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s integrated pest management guidance reflects this same logic at a national level, describing identification, monitoring and prevention as steps that need to happen before a control method is chosen rather than after, precisely because the right method depends on what is actually happening at a given property in a given climate. A blanket treatment schedule applied regardless of geography skips that step and, more often than not, either overtreats a low-pressure area or undertreats a high-pressure one.

The practical guidance homeowners get from a technician tends to reflect these same regional differences, even when the underlying advice sounds similar on the surface. In a dry, irrigation-dependent market, a homeowner is more likely to hear about adjusting sprinkler timers, moving mulch away from the foundation, and checking where a garden bed sits relative to the house, since those are the features most likely to be drawing pests toward the structure. In a humid market, the advice tends to shift toward gutters, downspouts, crawl space vents and anywhere water pools after a storm, because the moisture problem is diffuse rather than tied to a single irrigation source. Neither list is more correct than the other. They reflect two different climates producing two different sets of vulnerabilities, and a technician who gives the same five tips in both markets is, in effect, guessing which one happens to apply.

Consistency on the surface, judgment underneath

A New York rat on the Upper East Side
A New York rat on the Upper East Side

None of this means Mira Home, or any company operating in multiple states, has to reinvent its standards market by market. Its basic service commitments, inside-and-out coverage, local technicians and re-service between scheduled visits, stay consistent regardless of where a customer lives. What changes is the judgment applied underneath that consistent structure: which entry points get priority, how often a property needs monitoring, and which pests are actually likely to be a problem at a given time of year in a given climate. A company that tries to run an identical treatment script in Utah and Georgia is optimizing for administrative simplicity, not for results, and homeowners in either market would likely notice the gap eventually.

The business lesson underneath the weather

The broader business lesson extends past pest control. Any home services company scaling into new geographies runs into the same fork: standardize everything for consistency and efficiency, or preserve enough local judgment that the service still fits the place it’s being delivered. Pest control makes the trade-off unusually visible, because the wrong choice shows up quickly in the form of a callback. But the underlying principle applies just as much to landscaping, HVAC or any other service where the physical environment, not just the customer, is a major input into what “good service” actually requires. Scale and local execution are not opposites. They just require a company to decide, market by market, what has to stay uniform and what genuinely needs to adapt.

For homeowners evaluating a pest control provider, that distinction is a reasonable thing to ask about directly. A company that can explain why its approach in one region differs from its approach in another, and why, is usually applying real judgment rather than running the same script everywhere and hoping the geography doesn’t matter. A company that answers every question the same way regardless of where the customer lives is worth a second look. Climate and geography turn out to be close to the whole job in pest control, not an incidental detail.

Brad Pitt walked the red carpet with rescue dogs. Why isn’t rescue just the default?

Karin Kloosterman
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Brad Pitt walked the red carpet with rescue dogs. Why isn’t rescue just the default?

Who buys purebred dogs anymore? I know people do, and there are breeders, bloodlines, dog shows and people who know exactly what shape a German shepherd’s hips should be. But as someone who lives with two spectacular rescue dogs, the whole idea of buying a dog for its pedigree increasingly feels ridiculous when there are so many puppies and dogs already here, waiting for someone to love them.

Sometimes even the expression “rescue dog” seems redundant. Shouldn’t that simply be a dog? That was what I thought when I saw Brad Pitt on the red carpet for the world premiere of his new film, Heart of the Beast, in Franklin, Tennessee. Four adoptable dogs from Wags and Walks joined Pitt at the September 16 premiere. The organization, which operates adoption centers in Nashville and Los Angeles, has placed thousands of dogs in homes and focuses on animals that can be harder to place, including bully breeds, nursing mothers and dogs with medical needs.

The film itself is about a Special Forces officer, played by Pitt, stranded in the Alaskan wilderness with his combat dog Odin after a plane crash. Odin is played by Uber, a highly trained German shepherd from a military and law-enforcement breeding line.

There are obviously cases where dogs are bred for very specific working characteristics, but most of us are not looking for an elite military dog. We are looking for the animal who sleeps at the end of the bed, follows us into the kitchen, watches us leave the house and somehow knows exactly when we are sad.

My two dogs are gorgeous rescues from Ramallah in the West Bank.

boy with big puppy
My rescue dogs with my son

They came to us through Diana Babish in Bethlehem, a remarkable woman who has effectively created an emergency-response network for animals. People call her when they find abandoned puppies, injured dogs, abused animals or dogs that are simply in danger, and she somehow works out what to do next. She finds veterinarians, foster homes, transportation and eventually, when everything goes right, permanent homes.

diana babish with puppy
Diana Babish and her rescues

Green Prophet has written about Diana before and about her work through the Animal Environment Association, rescuing dogs, cats and other animals throughout the West Bank while trying to build a permanent no-kill shelter. Her work has also brought her into some very ugly situations.

In 2022, the mayor of Hebron announced that the municipality would pay 20 shekels, roughly seven dollars at the time, for every dead stray dog brought to local authorities. It was an extraordinary idea: putting a cash bounty on the bodies of unwanted dogs because the municipality had failed to develop a humane system for dealing with its stray population.

The result was predictable. Dogs were killed, disturbing photographs circulated, and animal welfare activists protested. Diana challenged what was happening until the municipality eventually backed away from the bounty.

The underlying problem was real. There were too many stray dogs, people were frightened of packs, and municipalities did not have adequate systems for sterilization, sheltering or adoption. But killing dogs because humans failed to control their reproduction is not a particularly sophisticated solution.

Turkey has wrestled with the same problem on a far larger scale. In 2024, the country passed legislation requiring municipalities to remove millions of stray dogs from the streets and place them in shelters, with euthanasia permitted under certain circumstances. Animal welfare groups warned that there simply was not enough shelter capacity and that the policy could lead to mass killing.

There is still an enormous amount of work to be done in the Middle East when it comes to protecting animals, including sterilization programs, shelters, veterinary care, education and changing the basic assumption that an unwanted dog is disposable.

That is why something as apparently trivial as a Hollywood red carpet can matter. Four rescue dogs standing beside Brad Pitt will not solve the stray-dog crisis, but culture changes partly through the images we normalize.

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