التصنيف: غير مصنف

Ultimately, we spent just over $120 for drinks, an appetizer, entrees, and desserts for a group of five. It would have been around $132 without the 10% discount the server gave us due to my daughter’s issues with her entrée.

At around $25 per person, the meal felt like a pretty good value, especially given the variety of food we received for the price.

My son and his girlfriend, who were already big fans of the chain, would absolutely return to BJ’s for more pizza, burgers, and Pizookies.

My husband and I, however, are undecided. We may return for a quick snack at the bar or to share a Pizookie dessert, but I’m not sure we’d take the entire family there again for dinner, especially given my daughter’s disappointment with the experience.

There are other chains we’ve all enjoyed, plus we usually prefer to support smaller mom-and-pop restaurants when we dine out.

Still, that Pizookie was really delicious, and I’ve definitely caught myself daydreaming about going back for one since.

BJ’s Restaurant and Brew House did not respond to a request for comment.

The week before my husband and I were supposed to become empty nesters, piles of laundry, bedding, suitcases, pink sparkly boots, Oregon Ducks hats, and shirts crowded the living room of our small cottage.

Some of the piles belonged to our daughter, on her way to a university residence hall. Some belonged to my 50-year-old brother Mark, who has Down syndrome, and asked in August if he could move in with us.

We were very close growing up

My brother was born without any health issues, a robust, blond-haired baby, in 1975. “He’ll never be able to walk or talk,” doctors told my parents and suggested he should be institutionalized.

Instead, my mother brought him home, enrolled him in pediatric physical therapy, and treated him just as she treated me. We camped, hiked, baked cookies, and did arts and crafts. Mark and I became friends and allies, particularly after our parents’ bitter divorce.

When Mom died seven years ago, he moved to a group home, but I felt he could do better living with me. My family discussed the pros and cons of inviting him to move in with us, just as we would if one of my husband’s siblings wanted to become our housemate. In the end, we welcomed him with delight.

He wants to work and feel useful

I’m a former job coach for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I know how few employers take a chance on hiring someone with a condition they don’t understand. My brother wants to work, to feel of use in the world, and I’m eager to help with the job search, but it’s going to take some time. In the meantime, he needs to stay busy.

In September, I dropped my daughter off at her residence hall and turned Entertainment Director and chauffeur again. I reached out to our local Parks and Rec, the YMCA, arts organizations, and a dance studio. I registered him for daily classes so that he could make friends and integrate into the community.

Our community has responded in beautiful ways. Now, when Mark walks into the YMCA, trainers and fellow bodybuilders greet him by name. He’s got friends at the rec center. Yes, there are challenges. I bring my laptop with me everywhere so I can grab an hour of work in the car, at the dance studio, or in the YMCA lobby. Mark needs help showering and walking up stairs, and he’d prefer my husband and me to lounge on the couch with him, watching movies instead of working. But he’s a loved and valued member of our family.

It took one long, exhausting month to deal with the laundry piles and activity planning, as well as help decorate a dorm room with pink flamingos and fluffy pink rugs, and our spare room with Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson posters.

Mark looks forward to using a door-to-door shuttle for people with disabilities and to getting a job.

Melissa Hart is the author, most recently, of Down Syndrome Out Loud: 20+ Stories of Disability & Determination. She lives in Oregon.

When I was younger, I experienced almost every type of schooling: homeschool, private, and public. By the time I reached middle school and convinced my parents to send me back to the public school system, I spent a lot of my time resenting my parents’ decisions because I felt like an outsider in that foreign space — it was as though my peers were speaking in an entirely different language, and, as a result, I struggled socially. But becoming both a parent and a public school teacher shifted my perspective.

I switched schools 10 times

We moved around a lot because my father was a “church planter,” which meant that I switched schools 10 times. Not only that, my parents often switched between different schooling methods, from public to homeschooling to private, and then back again to public, depending on what was happening in our lives and what they felt best suited our current situation. Finances were consistently tight, so we didn’t always live in areas where my parents felt comfortable sending us to public school.

During elementary school, I often resisted being homeschooled or attending a private evangelical Christian school, so the summer before seventh grade, I begged my parents to let me return to public school. They agreed, but that transition was also difficult. I felt like a fish out of water, completely naive and innocent in terms of pop culture and developmental knowledge. In other words, no matter which form of schooling I endured, there were real challenges: physical, mental, and emotional. No single method or school emerged as a clear winner.

Now that I’m a parent, I look back and think about how my mom and dad — who became parents at 17 and 19 — did the best they could, given their tenuous life circumstances. They really tried to give us a good life, and, for the most part, they did.

I became a teacher to pay it forward

After graduating from college, I attended graduate school to become a secondary English teacher — mostly because I wanted to pay it forward as a thank-you to all the amazing teachers and mentors I’d had along the way. It was through my decadelong classroom experience that I learned, firsthand, how every child — and every family — is different.

I worked tirelessly in Title I schools, doing my best to provide each student with the highest quality education possible. I taught students with a wide range of cognitive, physical, emotional, and language abilities. I customized learning plans and communicated with parents, faculty, and staff to ensure student needs were being met. Most of the time, my team and I were successful in our endeavors.

However, there were times when a student needed additional support, and we weren’t able to meet their needs to the caregivers’ satisfaction. We had hard conversations with their guardians, and what we found was that if there was an alternative option on the table that felt better suited for the child, they’d transfer them to a different school.

I remember feeling heartbroken on those rare occasions — like I’d let both the caregiver and the child down. But, in the end, I learned to trust what the guardian thought was best, and, now, as a parent, I understand this. I want what’s best for my children, too, and I’m in a fortunate place where I’m able to be somewhat selective about my children’s schooling.

My experiences affected how I look at school as a parent

Through my life experience, I’ve come to see that no single educational path is perfect, and each family makes it Besta choices they can with the options available — not always the ideal. Today, I have my kids in both public and private Montessori schools — my 5-year-old daughter attends a nearby public Montessori school, while my 3-year-old daughter took her older sister’s place at a private Montessori school this past fall.

My husband and I plan for our youngest to remain there until kindergarten, and then we will revisit and decide which educational pathway we feel will best suit her needs. Our children are currently thriving, and we’ve chosen to place both of them in Montessori schools because we believe in the goal as defined by Maria Montessori: “the development of the complete human being, oriented to the environment, and adapted to his/her time, place, and culture.”

It’s a solution that works for our family at the moment, but may change in the future. I’m fully aware and accepting of this truth. Parenting, like education, isn’t a straightforward path — it’s a journey full of detours, hard left turns, and, very rarely, cruise control.

The French rapper Orelsan recently released a new album called La fuite en avantand it closes with a song featuring former Daft Punk member Thomas Bangalter. Listen to “Yoroï” below.

Bangalter is credited as a co-producer and co-writer of “Yoroï,” and he also played bass on the track. A representative for Bangalter told Pitchfork, “Orelsan and Thomas have been friends for some time, and Orelsan invited Thomas to make music together on one song for his latest album.”

Since the end of Daft Punk, in 2021, Bangalter has released numerous projects, including Mythologies, Chiropteraand a soundtrack EP for Yes! He also recently joined Fred Again.. and others for a DJ set in Paris.

Check out the column “Long Live Daft Punk’s Music Videos.”

Photo: Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images

Earlier in January, Netflix announced it is hiking prices for 58 million users in the United States by between 13 percent and 18 percent. (The platform hasn’t raised prices since 2017, when it upped the cheapest plan by a dollar and the premium plan by two.) On Wednesday, Hulu announced it is dropping the cost of its most basic plan — read: the one with ads — from $7.99 to $5.99 per month.

In addition to the 25 percent decrease, Hulu also announced it’s keeping its ad-free plan price the same, at $11.99. Which is still cheaper, mind you, than the $13 Netflix is ​​going to charge users soon. Hulu’s Live TV plan, the basic subscription with over 60 broadcast and cable channels, is getting a 13 percent price hike. Instead of $39.99, it’ll now cost $44.99. This makes Hulu’s Live TV option no longer the most cost-efficient cord-cut offering from a streaming service; instead putting it about on par, or priced above, offerings from to YouTube ($40) and DirectTV (starts at $40).

The Hulu cost changes mean you now have two things to consider when deciding if you’re going to choose just one streaming service: What it’ll cost you and also which Fyre Festival documentary you want to be able to stream?

iRobot CEO Colin Angle with a Roomba.
Photo: iRobot/iRobot

In 1990, fresh out of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, Colin Angle co-founded iRobot, a company best known for that friendly little robot vacuum the Roomba. In the early years, Roomba was unprofitable, and the majority of iRobot’s profits actually came in from military and defense contracts. That changed over time, and in 2016 iRobot divested itself of its military and defense work to focus on robots for the home. Angle talked to Intelligencer about how he made the decision to divest from military projects, the difficulty in finding a new home for the defense division, and how his decision to focus completely on the Roomba means there’s now a robot vacuum that can empty itself.

iRobot was founded in 1990. The product that we’re most known for, the Roomba, came along 12 years after our founding. We knew if we could create a vacuuming robot it would be good, mostly because people kept asking for one. I’d introduce myself: “I’m Colin, I’m the CEO for iRobot.” And people would literally say, “Good to meet you, Colin. When are you gonna build that Rosie the Robot that will clean my floors?”

The challenge was, we didn’t know how to get there at any price point the average person could afford. It was a long journey that involved taking things from everywhere. The original algorithm used by Roomba to make sure it got every part of your room clean was taken from mine-hunting algorithms we had developed for the military. We built robot toys and patented them with Hasbro to learn how to build cheaper electromechanical devices.

At the same time, we started working with the military. One early project we did was building an underwater walking robot that could detect mines in the surf zone. They were our crab robots, so we called them Sebastian and Ursula — although I’m not sure Ursula’s a crab.

In 2002, we both launched the Roomba and sent our robots to Afghanistan. The military robots were instantly profitable. They brought in something like $160 million in revenue and funded the company quite effectively. Roomba didn’t make any money for a few years, because we had so much to learn on how to manufacture, distribute, and support them. During this time, 100 percent of our profitability was coming from our business in defense with the government.

We went public in 2005, and the Roomba and military bots made for interesting bedfellows. We’d always get the question, “Why are you doing both?” And we’d say, “Well, because they’re both robots and the synergies between the kinds of robots we build for consumers and the robots that we build for defense are very real.”

But by 2014 we were starting to face real questions about how valid that was. Over the years, that supplementary military budget went away, so the revenue from the military went from $160 million down to $55 million. Competition in the defense business on the robot side was increasing. The cost of our robots was going to need to come down, the capabilities of the robots would need to continue to improve, and the next steps were getting expensive.

We were also seeing similar things with the Roomba, where competition was increasing. We wanted to make Roombas that could really navigate a room, and that required more dollars to be invested. Everything was getting more expensive and harder.

We even had issues around the branding of the company. What colors should the company use? Because they have to both be appealing to an average civilian and to someone in the military, with military aims in mind, and those are pretty different consumers.

The fact was we were increasingly two companies under the same roof, and we were continuously making decisions where we had to prioritize one of these business units over the other.

But in 2014, we recognized that these were two very different businesses, and we were headed in a direction where we were going to have to choose. We couldn’t have had a great business if we invested in both home electronics and defense.

It’s important to point out how culturally important the defense business had been for our company. One of the things that really drove us was the impact that our robots have had in the world. We used defense technology to explore the Great Pyramid in Giza. We sent a PackBot to map radiation levels after the Fukushima disaster. With the Deepwater Horizon oil well disaster, we sent defense underwater robots to identify these giant subsurface pools of oil that were going to create a long-term ecological disaster. And, of course, during the Gulf War, we saved thousands of lives using the robots to defuse bombs and render IEDs safe. The idea that we could go out and have a real positive, chest-thumping impact on the world by deploying our technology, that was pretty central to why people felt good about being at iRobot.

On a rational basis, it was obvious that one of these things had to go, and the growth prospects were on the Roomba rocket ship, while the defense business was contracting. And on the emotional side, oddly, how much I cared about the defense side of our business drove me to realize that keeping it was killing it.

We’d have these discussions, and then I would go home and really think about what I really wanted to happen. Which is a question I often ask myself when faced with a decision. Our defense side had done so much good in the world, so what I really wanted was for it to survive. So we hired a bank and we spent a year looking for the right place for it, and we just didn’t find it.

The next time around, there was that ex-iRobot guy, Sean Bielat, who had worked on the defense side and then went to a private equity firm. He ended up convincing that private equity firm that iRobot should spin out our defense business and relaunch it. That made all kinds of sense. It meant that our defense side would be a startup again, and the new CEO would be a super well-respected ex-iRobot guy.

The devil was in the details, and it took about six or eight months to work everything out. Finally, Sean and Tom Frost — who was the internal leader of the defense business unit at the time — and I jointly announced the deal. That was very emotional, because that was the moment that there was really no going back. I think Tom and Sean realized what it meant to me. Their very sincere message to me was, “We will take good care of your baby.” They would make this new business not just about maximizing profit, but about maximizing the positive impact on the world.

The end game of the divestment coincided with this all-consuming proxy battle with an activist investor. He wanted iRobot to divest from defense, but he really didn’t want to hear from us that we were doing that. Some of the romance was stripped out of the experience by fighting this fight against a guy who wanted to replace our board and leadership, just so he could force the company to do something it was already about to do. That honestly was one of the most trying times. I’m trying to do the right thing by this company, and someone’s trying to come in and gut me.

It meant broadening my horizons around what is this thing that is iRobot. It’s a public company. It has shareholders that haven’t dedicated their entire lives to the business, nor do they have to, but they have every right to expect to be heard because they took money out of their pocket to be part owners of the company. That is what being a public company is about. I needed to be okay with that and figure out how to embrace that. I had to accept that this journey to build the company that I’ve been on for my entire adult life — there is no divine right for me to lead it.

I think I was rewarded for doing the right thing. Endeavor Robotics, which is what our defense business became, is thriving today. And investors in iRobot looked at the maturity of the leadership, its ability to make difficult decisions, and the overall good management during our proxy battle, and we ultimately won.

For us, being able to focus on the home market meant that in 2017, consumer growth quadrupled. We just launched the i7+. You can get a Roomba now and bring it to your home, and it will operate a year without you touching it, because it can empty itself — you don’t even have to pick it up. If you’re in the kitchen and make a mess, you can say, “Okay, Google, clean the kitchen.” And the robot actually now knows what the kitchen is because of the advancement in navigation technology. We’re still very far away from fulfilling the potential that robots have, but we just completely changed vacuuming, and that’s pretty cool.

If a company is like your kid, selling defense was like sending your kid off to college. Knowing that the people carrying the founding vision forward would do something great. That moment when Sean and Tom said, “We got this. We understand why it matters so much,” I knew letting go was the right thing to do.

If you look back at iRobot’s trajectory, and say, “Gee, what would you do differently if you had to do it over?” I think you could come up with a long list of things that’ve gotten us to a better place faster. At the same time, I say, “If I could travel back in time and do it over, I wouldn’t want to.” Because one of my most powerful assets was that I had complete ignorance about the size of the challenges that we were facing. I’m happy I was youthful and ignorant.

Photo: Courtesy of Moncler

Moncler’s labyrinth, built in an old Shanghai shipyard near the Huangpu River, had no dark corners, monsters, or Minotaurs like in the ancient Greek myth of yore. Rather, its winding roads were filled with neon blinking lights, its nooks were populated with food stands serving miniature steamed buns and coconuts with straws, and instead of Theseus, Rihanna was our hero. In Moncler’s so-called City of Genius, there is only revelry to be had, and from my vantage point, the brand’s 8,000 or so guests that populated this man-made 320,000-square-foot town for a night did just that.

Moncler’s event, which closed out Shanghai Fashion Week, was a behemoth that transcended the typical constraints and likely budget of a standard fashion event. Since 2018, the brand’s CEO, Remo Ruffini, has invited designers to collaborate with Moncler through its Genius program, hosting Richard Quinn, Pierpaolo Piccioli, Liya Kebede, and Simone Rocha in the past. Last year, Ruffini opened the program up to creatives beyond the fashion industry, which is how, at this Shanghai showcase, a powerhouse group of ten guest designers came together: Edward Enninful, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Donald Glover, Lulu Li, Nigo, Palm Angels, A$AP Rocky, Willow Smith, and guest appearances from Rick Owens and Lucie and Luke Meier, co-creative directors at Jil Sander.