👋 Good morning. Did you end up wrestling with your seatmate for the armrest on that last long-haul flight? There’s good news for your sanity and your lower back: United Airlines is rolling out a new seat offering starting in 2027 across 200+ airplanes to let you sprawl out. The “Relax Row” is a set of three economy seats that can be converted into a couch with a mattress pad, blanket, and extra pillows. While it certainly helps with that mid-flight charley horse, it likely won’t stop the child behind you from kicking the back of your seat.
NEWS FLASH
🚁 Eyes in the sky: Brinc, a startup that sells drones to police and public agencies, unveiled a public safety drone designed to one day replace police helicopters. The drone, called Guardian, can fly at speeds of up to 60 mph and stay in the air for 62 minutes. It’s equipped with thermal imaging and 4K cameras, a spotlight and loudspeaker, and built-in Starlink connectivity. Its landing station can autonomously swap its batteries and store emergency supplies like defibrillators, flotation devices, and Narcan.
💼 Reading between the resume lines: Aetheon, a startup building a “skills operating system,” wants to help workers translate real-world experience into verified, measurable skills. The platform pulls from 100+ occupational sources and maps them to 300+ skills, generating worker profiles to cut through the noise of AI-generated resumes. The company is starting with pilots focused on veteran and higher-ed candidates, as well as helping employers vet stronger candidates.
🤖 Bots vs. bus stops: Twice now, a delivery bot has crashed through a glass bus stop like the Kool-Aid Man. Both incidents occurred in a single week in Chicago, the first involving a Serve Robotics bot, the second a Coco Robotics bot. Luckily, no one was injured. Both companies called the event rare and are investigating, but many Chicagoans already considered the bots wheeled nuisances — even before their attacks on public transit infrastructure.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
-
A good time to be wearing a Patagonia vest: Wall Street bonuses hit a record $49.2B in 2025, with average annual bonuses growing 6% to $246.9k.
-
Pricier postage: The US Postal Service will add its first-ever 8% fuel surcharge — through mid-January, for now — on packages to offset soaring energy costs.
-
Keeping it real: Wikipedia has banned AI-generated articles, only allowing editors to use the tech for basic copyedits and translation.
-
On second thought: OpenAI has indefinitely paused the release of its erotic chatbot following pushback from investors and employees and difficulty training models to avoid illegal content.
MUST-OPEN EMAILS
Make folks open your email
We love getting punny, but there’s no need to reinvent recipes for subject lines and preview texts.
Keep it simple, smarties. Seize 50 classic subject line formulas to strengthen your sends with data-backed winners.
You won’t be impressed with the words. Only the results.
THE BIG IDEA
Happy hour has gotten weird
For decades, after-work drinking has been a longstanding workplace custom. But times have changed, as have employees and the way they socialize — and if getting a little tipsy around your boss ever seemed like risky business, just wait till you hear about what’s replaced the traditional happy hour…
The newest corporate bonding activities involve needles, sledgehammers, and colleagues getting physical.
While that makes these work-sanctioned activities sound way less appropriate than they are, it's all still true.
Mixing business with pleasure, rage, and everything else
With fewer people imbibing these days, many companies are swapping traditional happy hours for a range of unique team-building activities that meet employees where they’re at.
For stressed-out workers looking to blow off steam (a lot of us — shout out low worker morale and “hardcore” work cultures), that might mean smashing shit to bits, per Business Insider.
- At The Ragery, an NYC rage room, where corporate bookings jumped more than 2x between January 2025 and 2026, workers can collaboratively destroy rooms set up to look like offices.
- Corporate events now dominate business at Bury the Hatchet, a national ax-throwing chain, where teams might pin a photo of loathed work software to a target and chuck an ax at it repeatedly to decompress before reconvening for a meeting.
Other, less-violent physical activities are also helping wellness-focused coworkers connect and unwind in more mindful ways.
- Fitness studios like Barry’s and F45 have reported upticks in corporate bookings, while bathhouses have become breeding grounds for cold-plunge productivity-talk, steamy investor meetings, and half-naked networking. (Hard pass.)
Another trend that’s crept its way into the workplace?
- Looksmaxxing, which is taking the form of corporate botox parties, particularly in image-driven industries like PR and real estate — because nothing brings a team together like a bunch of smooth foreheads.
Nudity, lethal weapons, and medical procedures?
The modern happy hour is taking place in settings somehow less professional than a pub, and might even sound a bit like HR-complaint fodder.
But for office workers whose days are often sedentary and computer-bound — especially younger experience-driven, wellness-oriented ones — these offbeat activities provide healthier and more engaging ways to connect and destress offline compared to downing beers in a bar.
(Though, understandably, some of them might be less inclusive.)
Just hope that not getting botox isn’t what makes you a bad culture fit when applying to your next job.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Tune in: The wild tale of how one guy went from selling ACs to becoming the all-inclusive resort king of Jamaica.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Years that Arthur Porter has worked at Ford Motor Co.’s Chicago Stamping Plant, making him the longest-tenured of the company’s 169k global employees, per WGN9. By contrast, the typical employee today stays at a job for ~4 years.
A lot has changed since Porter was hired in 1961, back in the manual days and long before robots joined the workforce. The key to his long career: being good at adapting. The 87-year-old, who started his career as a welding operator, now oversees the factory’s autonomous guided vehicles.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 1884, Alexander Graham Bell made the first long-distance phone call from Boston to his assistant in NYC.
🖼️ How to: hang a picture.
📰 Newsletter: The Donut delivers smart, unbiased news that won’t dampen your morning.
📕 That’s interesting: An excerpt from author Brian Raftery’s Hannibal Lecter: A Life on how 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs made an unlikely antihero out of its cannibal villain.
🦏 Aww: Snow day.
SHOWER THOUGHT
It is highly likely that you never pressed the 8 button on a microwave. SOURCE
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "Sticking with the discount Pinot Grigio" Friedman.
Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.
Working on something big?
We've got a whole library of business-building resources for you.
Subscribe to our other newsletters
Grow your business: Starter Story | Stay up-to-date on AI: Mindstream
Expert insights: Marketing Against the Grain | Sell better: The Science of Scaling