👋 Good morning. Parades = fun. Planetary parades = out-of-this-world fun. So get ready to cheer on Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune on Feb. 28 when the six planets will appear to align in the sky. While most of the planets will be visible to the naked eye, starry-eyed viewers will need binoculars or a telescope to peep Uranus or Neptune. Finally, a parade where one tall guy in front of you can’t ruin the view.
STARTING UP
This startup is the missing piece for a niche hobby
❌ The problem: Warhammer miniatures are notoriously complex and players struggle to find what they need on traditional marketplaces with poorly described, counterfeit, and misidentified pieces.
💡 The pitch: Miniswap is building a marketplace specifically for Warhammer collectors. Using AI-assisted tools, the company’s founders created a comprehensive catalog of 20k+ miniatures — which they describe as the most complete taxonomy of tabletop wargaming minis ever made — allowing sellers to match listings to Miniswap’s catalog and buyers to filter by detailed attributes.
🚀 The outlook: With the global tabletop games market estimated at $20B in 2025, and Warhammer alone projected to reach $3B by 2030, the company plans to expand into other lucrative hobby categories.
NEWS FLASH
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Athletes aren’t the only ones who train for the Olympics. Much of the action is caught by drones, each worth $150k, and piloted by experts who use only a joystick to capture every twist and turn. Yiannis Exarchos, CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services, told The Wall Street Journal that some pilots are even former Olympians themselves.
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A welcome change: San Jose, California, says its bus routes are now 20% faster thanks to an AI transit signal priority (TSP) system it began implementing in 2023. The system, developed by software company Lyt, manipulates stop lights to move buses more efficiently, resulting in reduced delays and shorter wait times.
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Haven’t you people ever heard of closing the Waymo door? If not, Waymo and DoorDash have been working on a pilot through which DoorDashers can get paid to close doors left open by Waymo passengers. One Dasher told Reddit he received such an offer for $11.25.
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Love is in the AI: EVA AI held a Valentine’s-themed pop-up cafe at a Manhattan wine bar where humans could enjoy dates with AI companions, who appeared on either customers' own or provided phones. Wired’s Brittany Spanos found most attendees were other journalists or content creators, though one teen said he improves his communication skills by chatting with one of Eva’s AI characters.
INCOME INSPO
How to go professionally viral
To earn those hearts and thumbs on the humdrum-est of news feeds, it helps to know what’s already won.
See the 50 viral LinkedIn posts we compiled to inspire more attention-grabbing content that cuts through the fluff.
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Scroll stoppers: Insights on real posts with 1k+ likes
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Content strategies: 6 proven post types (including hot takes, personal stories, and corporate jokes)
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Tips and takeaways: Summaries of what you should steal
Each section breakdown covers stats, success factors, and lessons worth sending to your friends.
THE BIG IDEA
Are reverse recruiters the only professionals thriving in this job market?
Sometimes, you gotta spend money to make money. The truth behind that expression is debatable, except among today’s jobseekers, for many of whom it's become an established reality.
In their search for employment, desperate workforce hopefuls — white-collar ones, in particular — have given way to a relatively new breed of workers: reverse recruiters, per The Wall Street Journal.
Traditionally, recruiters are hired by companies to find candidates to fill open positions; by contrast, reverse recruiters are hired by jobseekers to help them find employment.
Why is this happening?
Because the current job market is an absolute shitshow pretty bleak.
- In late 2025, the unemployed outnumbered open roles for the first time since the pandemic, and the average job search now takes nearly six months, per federal data.
Adding to the mess are factors like ghost jobs, which waste applicants’ time and efforts, and AI tools, which have made it easier to mass-apply to jobs but more difficult to stand out.
So how much do they cost?
Reverse recruitment agencies, which typically apply on behalf of jobseekers, can charge upwards of $1k and may even take a cut of their clients’ first paychecks if they’re successfully matched.
- Refer uses “Lia,” its AI agent, to set up ~20 introductions a day between applicants from top colleges and the ~2k companies in its network. Few result in employment, but the company told WSJ new candidate signups have grown from ~10 a day to ~50 since August. The cost of one successful matchup: ~20% of the new hire’s first month’s paycheck.
- Boutique firm Reverse Recruiting Agency’s service boasts a 2- to 2.5-month average placement time and includes resume building, career coaching, LinkedIn posting, and up to 100 application submissions a week. Its client pool is smaller but its success rates are higher, having successfully matched 20 of 44 past clients. The charge: $1.5k a month, plus 10% of their first-year salary (minus the first month’s fee).
For those able to, or simply depleted enough, dropping a couple thousand for a steady paycheck isn’t the worst trade-off against the prospect of sustained unemployment and the treachery of job hunting.
So, you gotta have money to make money?
To the disadvantage of jobseekers who can’t afford the professional assistance, reverse recruiting does stand to make that increasingly the case.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Americans have a lot of stuff: The country has 2.1B square feet of self-storage units — enough to cover 34k football fields. Here’s why the business boom is starting to backfire.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Hotels listed on Bring Back Doors, an online campaign against the disappearance of fully closable, opaque bathroom doors in hotel rooms, per The Wall Street Journal. Increasingly, they’ve been replaced by sliding barn doors, curtains, and other solutions that simply aren’t as good at containing the sounds, smells, and sights of answering nature’s call.
Hotel operators pursued these alternative barriers in compliance with The Americans With Disabilities Act but have iterated on the designs to save money on space, repairs, and energy at the cost of guests’ privacy, WSJ reports, with one big unintended consequence: As one TikToker quipped, they’re “designed to either move your relationship forward or end it.”
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1913, the Armory Show opened in NYC, marking the first large exhibition of modern art in the US. It featured ~1.3k paintings, sculptures, and other works from 300+ European and American artists.
👀 That’s cool: An optical illusion.
📰 Newsletter: Take a break from doomscrolling with Stretch Break, InHerSight’s wellness newsletter filled with cozy reads.
🧠 Game: Got a lot of time to kill? Try this game where you have to slowly match 45 items into 45 groups.
🐱 Aww: Not quite tough enough.
SHOWER THOUGHT
If radio was invented today it would be controlled by four companies and locked behind a paywall. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Applying myself" Friedman.
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