Latest news with #Relationship
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's Relationship Is Entering a New Era
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's Relationship Is Entering a New Era originally appeared on Parade. It has been a crazy year for both Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Swift wrapped up her year-and-a-half-long Eras Tour a little more than six months ago, while Kelce finished the 2024-2025 NFL season in February after he and the Kansas City Chiefs lost the Super Bowl against the Philadelphia Eagles. The couple wanted to remain low profile after the Super Bowl. The two went on a trip to Park City, Utah, in early March, then to New York City, where they were spotted enjoying a lowkey dinner at Del Frisco's Grille on March 14. Then on Mother's Day, Swift and Kelce were spotted enjoying a Mother's Day brunch at Talula's Garden in Philadelphia with Kelce's brother, Jason, and his wife, Kylie Kelce, and their mother, Donna Kelce. When Swift announced in late May that she had earned the rights back to the master recordings of her first six albums from Scooter Braun, the public and fans noticed that the couple had been out and about more often. For instance, a week after the news was released, the two were spotted attending Kelce's cousin's wedding in Nashville on June 6, then a few days later, they attended Game 4 of the NHL Stanley Cup Finals between the Florida Panthers and the Edmonton Oilers on June 12. Just last week, Swift attended the welcome gala and the benefit concert for Tight End University, which is an exclusive three-day event in Nashville hosted by Kelce, San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle and sports analyst Greg Olsen, where NFL tight ends gather and practice before the start of the official season in Tuesday, a source told PEOPLE that the couple has been enjoying some rare downtime, which has allowed their bond to deepen. This feels like the first time the couple has been able to slow down after a whirlwind of concerts and football games between the two. "It's been a turning point for their relationship in a lot of ways," a source told PEOPLE exclusively. "They're incredibly happy and in sync. There's a calmness and ease to their relationship right now that's been really grounding for Taylor and Travis." The downtime comes at a great time for the "Style" singer personally. When the 35-year-old singer regained control of her masters, it was a move that took years and was very important and emotional for her. "She's proud, relieved, and finally feels like a chapter has closed in the best possible way," the source said. They also mentioned that Kelce was quietly backing her up behind the scenes. "Having Travis by her side for that milestone made it even more special. He was honored to support her and he wouldn't have wanted it any other way." The source also mentioned that the couple has been splitting their time between New York City, Nashville and going on a few getaways and vacations to just enjoy "each other's company without all the usual chaos." "The past two seasons were a whirlwind between performing across multiple countries, long flights and trying to squeeze in alone time together wherever possible. It wasn't easy but they made it work," the source said. "This kind of downtime is rare for both of them, and it's really allowed their bond to deepen." Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's Relationship Is Entering a New Era first appeared on Parade on Jul 1, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 1, 2025, where it first appeared. Solve the daily Crossword
New Statesman
6 days ago
- Health
- New Statesman
Schools need more sex education, not less
Illustration by Chris Rogers / Getty Images The grand total of my sex education when I was at school in the Noughties went like this: in Year 6, the girls and boys were split up, and the girls were made to watch a graphic birth video; in Year 8, we carried 'flour babies' around school for a week; in Year 9, we received a self-defence lesson in which the male instructor told us not to wear our hair in a ponytail because an attacker could grab it; and in Year 10, the school nurse demonstrated how to use a condom while we all giggled hysterically. It was entirely focused on the mechanics of sex and the risks it posed to our life outcomes and health. There was no discussion of consent, no suggestion that sex could or should be pleasurable. And there was no mention of the internet and the ways it was already shaping our early, faltering romances. My peers and I learned far more about sex outside the classroom – from playground gossip, chat rooms, TV and porn – than we ever did within it. And yet this is the sort of sex education the last government wanted to return to. In May last year, the then education secretary, Gillian Keegan, published draft revised guidance for Relationship, Sex and Health Education (RSHE), which proposed age limits on what children could be taught. Children, it said, would not be informed about puberty before Year 4 (when they are aged eight to nine), sex before Year 5 (nine to ten), sexual harassment or pornography before Year 7 (11-12) or STIs before Year 9 (aged 13-14). There are basic biological problems with this chronology: girls could start their periods before learning what it is (one in four girls already reports that this is the case); pupils could be offered the HPV vaccine before learning what an STI is. But setting all this aside, it is deluded to believe that children are not exposed to everything Keegan wished to protect them from, and much more, beyond the school gates. So, the new RSHE guidance, released by Bridget Phillipson's Department for Education on 15 July, is a welcome relief. While it incorporates some sensible Tory proposals, such as teaching children about the prevalence of deepfakes, age restrictions have been removed. There is greater emphasis on tackling misogyny and incel culture, which Phillipson described, in the aftermath of the Netflix drama Adolescence, as 'a defining issue of our time'. To the previously planned content on stalking, revenge porn and upskirting, Labour added financial sexual exploitation, strangulation, and 'personal safety in public spaces, recognising that sexual harassment and abuse are never the fault of the victim'. Schools will have the flexibility to teach in late primary about sexual imagery online 'where this is an issue in their school'. Keegan's ban on sex education for children aged nine and under received much media attention at the time, thanks largely to the efforts of Miriam Cates, then the Tory MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge, who coordinated a letter to Rishi Sunak raising concerns about the appropriateness of RSHE content. Cates, who lost her seat last July, has since said the subject should be 'scrapped' altogether. Children, she told the Commons, employing some bad-faith hyperbole, were being taught 'graphic lessons on oral sex, how to choke your partner safely and 72 genders'. (This last was a reference to news reports about a school on the Isle of Man, which is not part of England and therefore falls outside the Department for Education's remit.) It may indeed seem inappropriate to teach children about strangulation during sex. We instinctively feel that they should not have to know about such things – not yet, not ever. And yet it is necessary that they do. No one wants to have to prepare a small child for the possibility that another child or an adult might try to touch their genitals, but they should know that such an act would be wrong and that they should report it. If a child brings to their teacher a question about, say, a pornographic video that has been shared with them, that teacher should be allowed to sensitively discuss with them what they have seen. Children must be prepared for the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This is the world as it is: one in ten children has seen pornography by the age of nine, according to the Children's Commissioner, Rachel de Souza. The same research found that nearly half of 18- to 21-year-olds have experienced a violent sex act. More than a third of girls at mixed-sex schools have experienced sexual harassment at school, and, according to the teacher survey app Teacher Tapp, one in eight secondary-school teachers say a student in their school sexually assaulted another pupil in the last autumn term. Pornographic deepfakes are a growing problem; in June 2024 a girls' school alerted authorities that deepfake images and videos depicting its pupils were circulating a nearby boys' school. Despite the UK's overall falling birthrate, pregnancy rates among the under-20s are rising; so too is the prevalence of STIs. 'All children,' as Baroness Strange put it in a debate in the Lords on sex education in 2000, 'have a right to their childhood and their innocence.' Yet it is not schools that threaten their innocence, but technology, which moves at such a pace legislation cannot keep up. Children should be given every opportunity to bring to a trusted adult – whether a teacher or a parent – what they hear and see in the dark corners of the playground or the internet. The alternative is not that they are protected from inappropriate content, but that they are left to process and navigate it alone. [See also: Kemi Badenoch isn't working] Related
Atlantic
29-06-2025
- Automotive
- Atlantic
The Real Reason You're Still on Hold
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. In hindsight I'll say: I always thought going crazy would be more exciting—roaming the street in a bathrobe, shouting at fruit. Instead I spent a weary season of my life saying representative. Speaking words and numbers to robots. Speaking them again more clearly, waiting, getting disconnected, finally reaching a person but the wrong person, repeating my story, would I mind one more brief hold. May my children never see the emails I sent, or the unhinged delirium with which I pressed 1 for agent. I was tempted to bury the whole cretinous ordeal, except that I'd looked behind the curtain and vowed to document what I'd seen. It all began last July, here in San Francisco. I'd been driving to my brother's house, going about 40 mph, when my family's newish Ford Escape simply froze: The steering wheel locked, and the power brakes died. I could neither steer the car nor stop it. I jabbed at the 'Power' button while trying to jerk the wheel free—no luck. Glancing ahead, I saw that the road curved to the left a few hundred yards up. I was going to sail off Bayshore Boulevard and over an embankment. I reached for the door handle. What followed instead was pure anticlimactic luck: Ten feet before the curve in the road, the car drifted to a stop. Vibrating with relief, I clicked on the hazards and my story began. That afternoon, with the distracted confidence of a man covered by warranty, I had the car towed to our mechanic. (I first tried driving one more time—cautiously—lest the malfunction was a fluke. Within 10 minutes, it happened again.) 'We can see from the computer codes that there was a problem,' the guy told me a few days later. 'But we can't identify the problem.' Then he asked if I'd like to come pick up the car. 'Won't it just happen again?' I asked. 'Might,' he said. 'Might not.' I said that sounded like a subpar approach to driving and asked if he might try again to find the problem. 'Look'— annoyed sigh —'we're not going to just go searching all over the vehicle for it.' This was in fact a perfect description of what I thought he should do, but there was no persuading him. I took the car to a different mechanic. A third mechanic took a look. When everyone told me the same thing, it started looking like time to replace the car, per the warranty. I called the Ford Customer Relationship Center. Pinging my way through the phone tree, I was eventually connected with someone named Pamela—my case agent. She absorbed my tale, gave me her extension, and said she'd call back the next day. Days passed with no calls, nor would she answer mine. I tried to find someone else at Ford and got transferred back to Pamela's line. By chance—it was all always chance—I finally got connected to someone with substantive information: Unless our vehicle's malfunction could be replicated and thus identified, the warranty wouldn't apply. 'But nobody can replicate the malfunction,' I said. 'I understand your frustration.' Over the days ahead, and then weeks, and then more weeks, I got pulled into a corner of modern existence that you are, of course, familiar with. You know it from dealing with your own car company, or insurance company, or health-care network, or internet provider, or utility provider, or streaming service, or passport office, or DMV, or, or, or. My calls began getting lost, or transferred laterally to someone who needed the story of a previous repair all over again. In time, I could predict the emotional contours of every conversation: the burst of scripted empathy, the endless routing, the promise of finally reaching a manager who— CLICK. Once, I was told that Ford had been emailing me updates; it turned out they'd somehow conjured up an email address for me that bore no relationship to my real one. Weirdly, many of the customer-service and dealership workers I spoke with seemed to forget the whole premise and suggested I resume driving the car. 'Would you put your kids in it?' I'd ask. They were aghast. Not if the steering freezes up! As consuming as this experience was, I rarely talked about it. It was too banal and tedious to inflict on family or friends. I didn't even like thinking about it myself. When the time came to plunge into the next round of calls or emails, I'd slip into a self-protective fugue state and silently power through. Then, one night at a party, a friend mentioned something about a battle with an airline. Immediately she attempted to change the subject. 'It's boring,' she said. 'Disregard.' On the contrary, I told her, I needed to hear every detail. Tentatively at first, she told me about a family trip to Sweden that had been scuttled by COVID. What followed was a protracted war involving denied airline refunds, unusable vouchers, expired vouchers, and more. Other guests from the party began drifting over. One recounted a recent Verizon nightmare. Another had endured Kafkaesque tech support from Sonos. The stories kept coming: gym-quitting labyrinths, Airbnb hijinks, illogical conversations with the permitting office, confounding interactions with the IRS. People spoke of not just the money lost but the hours, the sanity, the basic sense that sense can prevail. Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years. I decided to de-fugue and start paying attention. Was the impenetrability of these contact centers actually deliberate? (Buying a new product or service sure is seamless.) Why do we so often feel like everything's broken? And why does it feel more and more like this brokenness is breaking us? Turns out there's a word for it. In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called 'sludge'—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives. The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. 'People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,' he wrote in the Duke Law Journal. The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they'd pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn't happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it. Some of the sludge we submit to is unavoidable—the simple consequence of living in a big, digitized world. But some of it is by design. ProPublica showed in 2023 how Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would endure the process of appeal. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was 'incorrect.') Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota's motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. (The now-diminished bureau canceled the order in May.) As one Harvard Business Review article put it, 'Some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers.' Sludge can also reduce participation in government programs. According to Stephanie Thum, an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology who researches and writes about bureaucracy, agencies may use this fact to their advantage. 'If you bury a fee waiver or publish a website in legalese rather than plain language, research shows people might stay away,' Thum told me. 'If you're a leader, you might use that knowledge to get rid of administrative friction—or put it in place.' Fee waivers, rejected claims—sludge pales compared with other global crises, of course. But that might just be its cruelest trick. There was a time when systemic dysfunction felt bold and italicized, and so did our response: We were mad as hell and we weren't going to take it anymore! Now something more insidious and mundane is at work. The system chips away as much as it crushes, all while reassuring us that that's just how things go. The result: We're exhausted as hell and we're probably going to keep taking it. Call Pamela. Call the mechanic. Call the other mechanic. Call that lemon-law lawyer. My exhausted efforts, to the extent I understood them, revolved around getting my car either fixed or replaced and getting the various nodes in the Ford universe to talk with one another. In the middle of work, or dinner, or a kid's soccer game, I'd peel off to answer a random call, because every now and then it was that one precious update from Ford, informing me that there was no news. The hope, with all of this, was to burrow my way far enough into the circuitry to locate someone with the authority and inclination to help. Sometimes I got drips of information—the existence of a buyback department at Ford, for instance. Mostly I got nowhere. The longer this dragged on, the more the matrix seemed to glitch. The dealership where I'd bought the car had no record of the salesman who'd sold it to me. Ford's internal database, at one point, claimed that I had already picked up the car I was still trying to get them to fix. A mechanic told me, 'It's not that we couldn't fix it. It's that we never found the problem, so we were unable to fix it.' Another mechanic, apparently as delighted by our conversations as I was, grew petulant. 'Driving is a luxury,' he told me without explanation. Initiating these conversations in the first place: also a luxury, I was learning. For this we have the automatic call distributor to thank. The invention of this device in the mid–20th century allowed for the industrialization of customer service. In lieu of direct contact, calls could be funneled automatically to the next available agent, who would handle each one quickly and methodically. Contact centers became an industry of their own and, with the rise of offshoring in the '90s, lurched into a new level of productivity—at least from a corporate perspective. Sure, wait times lengthened, pleasantries grew stilted, and sometimes the new accents were hard to understand. But inefficiency had been conquered, or outsourced to the customer, anyway. Researching this shift led me to Amas Tenumah. As a college student in Oklahoma, Tenumah had come up with a million-dollar invention: a tool that would translate those agent voices into text, and then convert that text into a digital voice. 'So you'd end up with this robotic conversation,' he told me, 'which one could argue may even be worse. I didn't know what the hell I was doing.' The million dollars didn't materialize, but connections did. Needing work, he took a telemarketing job at a company called TCIM Services. Rather than transform contact centers, he strapped on a headset and joined one. The obsession with efficiency in his new field astonished him. Going to the bathroom required a code. Breaks were regulated to the minute. Outwardly he worked in an office, but by any measure it was a factory floor. Overly long 'handle time'? He'd get dinged. Too few calls answered? He'd get dinged. Too many escalations to a supervisor? Ding. Ostensibly the goal of customer service is to serve customers. Often enough, its true purpose is to defeat them. In the two decades after he took that first job, Tenumah rose from agent to manager, ultimately running enormous contact centers around the world. His work took him from Colombia to the Philippines in an endless search for cheap and malleable labor. In 2021, he published a slim book titled Waiting for Service: An Insider's Account of Why Customer Service Is Broken + Tips to Avoid Bad Service. Between calls to Ford and various mechanics, I'd begun reading it, and listening to the podcast that Tenumah co-hosts. He has a funny, straight-shooting manner that somehow lets him dish about his industry while continuing to work in it. When we first spoke, I mentioned that someone at Ford had told me that my case had been closed at my request; I had to go through the whole process of reopening it. Was I imagining things, I asked, or was my lack of progress deliberate? Tenumah laughed. 'Yes, sludge is often intentional,' he said. 'Of course. The goal is to put as much friction between you and whatever the expensive thing is. So the frontline person is given as limited information and authority as possible. And it's punitive if they connect you to someone who could actually help.' Helpfulness aside, I mentioned that I frequently felt like I was talking with someone alarmingly indifferent to my plight. 'That's called good training,' Tenumah said. 'What you're hearing is a human successfully smoothed into a corporate algorithm, conditioned to prioritize policy over people. If you leave humans in their natural state, they start to care about people and listen to nuance, and are less likely to follow the policy.' For some people, that humanity gets trained out of them. For others, the threat of punishment suppresses it. To keep bosses happy, Tenumah explained, agents develop tricks. If your average handle time is creeping up, hanging up on someone can bring it back down. If you've escalated too many times that day, you might 'accidentally' transfer a caller back into the queue. Choices higher up the chain also add helpful friction, Tenumah said: Not hiring enough agents leads to longer wait times, which in turn weeds out a percentage of callers. Choosing cheaper telecom carriers leads to poor connection with offshore contact centers; many of the calls disconnect on their own. 'No one says, 'Let's do bad service,'' Tenumah told me. 'Instead they talk about things like credit percentages'—the number of refunds, rebates, or payouts extended to customers. 'My boss would say, 'We spent a million dollars in credits last month. That needs to come down to 750.' That number becomes an edict, makes its way down to the agents answering the phones. You just start thinking about what levers you have.' 'Does anyone tell them to pull those levers?' I asked. 'The brilliance of the system is that they don't have to say it out loud,' Tenumah said. 'It's built into the incentive structure.' That structure, he said, can be traced to a shift in how companies operate. There was a time when the happiness of existing customers was a sacred metric. CEOs saw the long arc of loyalty as essential to a company's success. That arc has snapped. Everyone still claims to value customer service, but as the average CEO tenure has shortened, executives have become more focused on delivering quick returns to shareholders and investors. This means prioritizing growth over the satisfaction of customers already on board. Customers are part of the problem too, Tenumah added. 'We've gotten collectively worse at punishing companies we do business with,' he said. He pointed to a deeply unpopular airline whose most dissatisfied customers return only slightly less often than their most satisfied customers. 'We as customers have gotten lazy. I joke that all the people who hate shopping at Walmart are usually complaining from inside Walmart.' In other words, he said, companies feel emboldened to treat us however they want. 'It's like an abusive relationship. All it takes is a 20 percent–off coupon and you'll come back.' As in any dysfunctional relationship, a glimmer of promise arrived just when I was giving up hope. As mysteriously as she'd vanished, Pamela came back one day, and non-updates began to trickle in: My case was still under review; my patience was appreciated. All of this was starting to remind me of something I'd read. The Simple Sabotage Field Manual was created in 1944 by the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the CIA. The document was intended to spark a wave of nonviolent citizen resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe. 'Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions,' advised one passage. 'Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.' I'd encountered the manual in the past, and had thought of it as a quirky old curio. Now I saw it anew, as an up-to-the-minute handbook for corporate America. The 'purposeful stupidity' once meant to sabotage enemy regimes has been repurposed to frustrate us —weaponized inefficiency in the name of profit. (I later discovered that Slate 's Rebecca Onion had had this same revelation a full decade ago. Nevertheless the sabotage persists.) As I waited for news from Ford, I searched for more contact-center agents willing to talk. Rebecca Harris has fielded calls—mainly for telephone-, internet-, and TV-service companies—since 2007. She calls the work 'traumatic.' 'I'd want to do everything I can to help the person on the other end,' she told me. 'But I had to pretend that I can't, because they don't want me to escalate the call.' Many customers called because they were feeling pinched by their bill. For a lot of them, a rebate was available. But between the callers and that rebate, the company had installed an expanse of sludge. 'They would outright tell you in training you're not allowed to give them a rebate offer unless they ask you about it with specific words,' she said. 'If they say they're paying too much money, you couldn't mention the rebate. Or if the customer was asking about a higher rebate but you knew there was a lower one, they trained us to redirect them to that one.' Harris told me she'd think about her parents in times like this, and would treat her callers the way she'd want them treated. That didn't go over well with her managers. 'They'd call me in constantly to retrain me,' she said. 'I wasn't meeting the numbers they were asking me to meet, so they weren't meeting their numbers.' Supervisors didn't tell Harris to deceive or thwart customers. But having them get frustrated and give up was the best way to meet those numbers. Sometimes she'd intentionally drop a call or feign technical trouble: ''I'm sorry, the call … I can't … I'm having a hard time hearing y—.' It was sad. Or sometimes we'd drag out the call enough that they'd get agitated, or say things that got them agitated, and they'd hang up.' Even if an agent wanted to treat callers more humanely, much of the friction was structural, a longtime contact-center worker named Amayea Maat told me. For one, the different corners of a business were seldom connected, which forced callers to re-explain their problem over and over: more incentive to give up. 'And often they make the IVR'—interactive voice response, the automated phone systems we curse at—'really difficult to get through, so you get frustrated and go online.' She described working with one government agency that programmed its IVR to simply hang up on people who'd been on hold for a certain amount of time. There's a moment in Ford's hold music—an endless loop of demented hotel-lobby cheer—when the composition seems to speed up. By my 8,000th listen I was sure of it: The tempo rose infinitesimally in this one brief spot. Like the fly painted on men's-room urinals, this imperfection was clearly engineered to focus my attention—and, in so doing, to distract me from the larger absurdity at hand. Which is to say, my sanity had begun to fray. When I set out to document the inner workings of sludge, I had in mind the dull architecture of delays and deferrals. But I had started to notice my own inner workings. The aggravation was adding up, and so was the fatigue. Arguing was exhausting. Being transferred to argue with a different person was exhausting. The illogic was exhausting. Individually, the calls and emails were blandly substance-free. But together they spoke clearly: You are powerless. I began to wonder: Was the accretion of these exhaustions complicit in the broader hopelessness we seem to be feeling these days? Were these hassles and frictions not just costing us but warping us with a kind of administrative-spiritual defeatism? Signs of that warping seem to be appearing more and more, as when a Utah man who says he was denied a refund for his apparently defective Subaru crashed the car through the dealership's door. But most of us wearily combat sludge through the proper channels, however hopeless it seems. A Nebraska man spent two years trying to change the apparently computer-generated name given to his daughter, Unakite Thirteen Hotel, after a bureaucratic error involving her birth certificate. She also hadn't received a Social Security number—without which she couldn't receive Medicaid and other services. In his 2021 follow-up to Nudge, Sludge, Sunstein notes that this constellation of frictions 'makes people feel that their time does not matter. In extreme cases, it makes people feel that their lives do not matter.' I asked Sunstein about this depletion. 'Suppose that people spend hours on the phone, waiting for help from the Social Security Administration, or seeking to get a license or a permit to do something,' he replied. 'They might start to despair, not only because of all that wasted time but because they are being treated as if they just don't count.' For Pamela Herd, a social-policy professor at the University of Michigan, sludge became personal when she began navigating services for her daughter, who has a disability. 'It's one thing when I get frustrated at the DMV,' she told me. 'It's another thing when you're in a position where your kid's life might be on the line, or your kid's access to health insurance, or your access to food.' In 2018, Herd published Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means, with her husband, Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Michigan. The book examines how bureaucratic quicksand—complex paperwork, confusing procedures—actively stymies policy and access to government services. Rather than mere inefficiencies, the authors argue, a number of these obstacles are deliberate policy tools that discourage participation in programs such as Medicaid, keep people from voting, and limit access to social welfare. Marginalized communities are hit disproportionately. Throughout my ordeal, it was always clear that I was among the fortunate sludgees. I had the time and flexibility to fight in the first place—to wait on hold, to write follow-up emails. Most people would've just agreed to start driving the damn car again. Fuck it. One of sludge's most insidious effects is our ever-diminishing trust in institutions, Herd told me. Once that skepticism sets in, it's not hard for someone like Elon Musk to gut the government under the guise of efficiency. She was on speakerphone as she told me this, driving through the Southwest on vacation with Moynihan. As it happened, something had flown up and hit their windshield just before our conversation, and they were surely headed for a protracted discussion between their rental-car company and their insurance company—a little sludge of their own. Exasperated as we all are, said Tenumah, the customer-service expert, things are going to get much worse when customer service is fully managed by AI. And, as Moynihan observed, DOGE has already taken our frustration with government inefficiency and perverted it into drastic cuts that also will only further complicate our lives. But in some corners of academia and government, pushback to sludge is mounting. Regulations like the FTC's 'Click to Cancel' rule seek to eliminate barriers to canceling subscriptions and memberships. And the International Sludge Academy, a new initiative from both the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the government of New South Wales, has promoted the adoption of 'sludge audits' around the world. The business research firm Gartner predicts that 'the right to talk to a human' will be EU law by 2028. In the meantime, I've developed my own way of responding. Years before my Ford ordeal, I'd already begun to understand that sludge was doing something to us. It first registered when I noticed a new vein of excuse in the RSVP sphere: 'Sorry, love to, but I need to figure out our passport application tonight.' 'Sorry, researching new insurance plans.' The domestic tasks weren't new; the novelty was all the ways we were drowning in the basic administration of our own lives. I didn't have a solution. But I had an idea for addressing it. I fired off an email to some friends, and on a Tuesday night, a tradition began. 'Admin Night' isn't a party. It isn't laborious taking-care-of-business. It's both! At the appointed hour, friends come over with beer and a folder of disputed charges, expiring miles, summer-camp paperwork. Five minutes of chitchat, half an hour of quiet admin, rinse, repeat. At the end of each gathering, everyone names a minor bureaucratic victory and the group lets out a supportive cheer. Admin Night rules. In an era of fraying social ties, it claws back a sliver of hang time. Part of the appeal is simply being able to socialize while plowing through the to-do list—a 21st-century efficiency fetish if ever there was one. But just as satisfying is having this species of modern enervation brought into the light. Learning of sludge's existence, Thum, the bureaucracy researcher, told me, is the first step in fighting it, and in pushing back against the despair it provokes. Among sludge's mysteries is how it can suddenly clear. With no explanation, Pamela called one day to tell me that Ford had decided to buy back my car. She put me in touch with the Reacquired Vehicles Headquarters. From there I was connected to a 'repurchase coordinator,' then I was told to wait for another process in 'Quality,' and after some haggling over the price they agreed to buy the car back. To Ford's credit, they gave me a fair offer. But I would've accepted a turkey sandwich at that point. What happens to the car next? I asked. I was told that if returned vehicles could be repaired, they could be resold with disclosures. But was Ford obligated to fix the defect before selling it? No one could give me a clear answer. I pondered options for warning potential buyers. Could I post something to Yelp and hope it somehow got noticed? Hide a note inside the car somewhere? Publish the Vehicle Identification Number—1FMCU0KZ0NUA29474—in a national magazine? Before I could decide on a solution, I got the call. One hundred eight days after this whole thing began, I borrowed a friend's car and drove to the San Jose dealership where my Escape had been waiting all this time. When I arrived, a man named Dennis greeted me and we walked to the lot where the car was sitting. I grabbed everything out of the center console, and then we walked back inside. 'What's going to happen to it?' I asked. 'Are they going to resell it?' Dennis didn't know, or didn't seem inclined to discuss. (A Ford communications director named Mike Levine later told The Atlantic that the company does not resell any repurchased vehicles that can't be fully repaired. Given the confusion I witnessed, I still wonder how they confirm that a car is fully repaired.) I signed some papers, and it was over. The car that wasn't safe to drive, the process that seemed designed not to work—the whole experience ended not with a bang but with a cashier's check and a wordless handshake. When I originally alerted Ford about this article, a spokesperson named Maria told me that my case was not typical and that she was sorry about it. Regarding all the back-and-forth, she said, 'that was not seamless.' Levine told The Atlantic that Ford does not 'encourage or measure 'sludge,'' and that 'there was zero intent to add 'sludge'' to my interactions with Ford. He said that the teams I spoke with had needed time to see whether they could replicate the problem with my car, though to my mind that suggests a more concerted effort than what I perceived. Pamela emailed an apology, too, adding that, given 'the experience you had with your vehicle, I do want to extend an offer for a maintenance plan for your vehicle should you decide to purchase a Ford again, as a complimentary gift for your patience with the brand, as I understand this process took a long time.' We did purchase another vehicle, but it wasn't a Ford. Lately I've taken to noticing small victories in the war against sludge. That Nebraska dad with the daughter named Unakite Thirteen Hotel? I'm happy to report she was at last given a Social Security number in February, and was on her way to finally, officially, becoming Caroline. Still, I couldn't help thinking of all the time her dad lost in that soul-sucking battle. 'It's been very, very taxing,' he said in an interview. I understood his frustration.
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
PEAK ROCK CAPITAL AFFILIATE SELLS AMTECH SOFTWARE TO VISTA EQUITY PARTNERS
Amtech more than tripled its annual recurring revenue and more than doubled its team during Peak Rock's ownership AUSTIN, Texas, June 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- An affiliate of Peak Rock Capital ("Peak Rock"), a leading middle-market private equity firm, announced today it has signed a definitive agreement for the sale of Amtech Software ("Amtech" or the "Company") to Vista Equity Partners. Amtech is a leading provider of industrial software to the global packaging industry. The Company provides an end-to-end suite of products including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. The Company's comprehensive platform provides digital connectivity across these product suites with functionalities spanning the entire value chain from order to cash. Since acquiring Amtech from its founder, Peak Rock has supported the Company's strategic growth and operational initiatives. This included converting the Company to a recurring subscription revenue model, launching new products, executing a strategic acquisition, and expanding in multiple geographies and end markets. The Company also invested heavily in additional corporate infrastructure, including new information technology systems and enhanced operational capabilities. During its partnership with Peak Rock, Amtech more than tripled its annual recurring revenue (ARR) and more than doubled its headcount. Preston Thomas, Managing Director of Peak Rock, said, "We are extremely proud of the success Amtech has achieved under Peak Rock's ownership. Since partnering with Amtech's founder, Cosmo DeNicola, we have helped support the Company with strategic and operational resources to achieve transformational growth, convert to a highly recurring subscription revenue model, and significantly increase its product differentiation through investments in research and development." Chuck Schneider, Chief Executive Officer of Amtech, added, "Peak Rock's partnership has been critical to Amtech's impressive growth through significant investments in the Company's team, technology and capabilities. We look forward to continuing to support our customers with our leading software solutions." "Amtech combines deep industry expertise with strong customer relationships and a clear perspective on the future of packaging technology," said Jake Hodgman, Managing Director at Vista Equity Partners. "We share their commitment to modernizing operations for manufacturers and are thrilled to support them in this next chapter of growth." Anthony DiSimone, Chief Executive Officer of Peak Rock, said, "This transaction is another great example of Peak Rock's software investing strategy and the breadth of our portfolio featuring market leading technology businesses. Peak Rock has expertise in providing resources and strategic partnership to support the rapid growth of family and founder-owned businesses. We look forward to partnering with additional software businesses that can benefit from our capabilities to achieve transformational outcomes." Houlihan Lokey and Macquarie acted as financial advisors and Kirkland & Ellis LLP acted as the legal advisor to the Company on the transaction. ABOUT AMTECH SOFTWARE Founded in 1981, Amtech Software is a leading provider of industrial software to the global packaging industry. The Company's fully-integrated product suite of modules and enterprise solutions provides a compelling value proposition to the full spectrum of manufacturers. Amtech is headquartered in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. For more information visit ABOUT PEAK ROCK CAPITAL Peak Rock Capital is a leading middle-market private investment firm that makes equity and debt investments in companies in North America and Europe. Peak Rock's equity investment platform focuses on opportunities where it can support senior management to drive rapid growth and performance improvement, with expertise in corporate carve-outs and partnering with families and founders seeking first-time institutional capital. Peak Rock's credit platform invests across capital structures, with a broad mandate to provide flexible, tailored capital solutions to middle-market and growth-oriented businesses. Peak Rock's real estate platform makes equity and debt investments in small to mid-sized real estate assets in attractive, growing geographies. For further information about Peak Rock Capital, please visit ABOUT VISTA EQUITY PARTNERS Vista is a global technology investor that specializes in enterprise software. Vista's private market strategies seek to deliver differentiated returns through a proprietary and systematic approach to value creation developed and refined over the course of 25 years and 600+ transactions. Today, Vista manages a diversified portfolio of software companies that provide mission-critical solutions to millions of customers around the world. As of December 31, 2024, Vista had more than $100 billion in assets under management. Further information is available at Follow Vista on LinkedIn, @Vista Equity Partners, and on X, @Vista_Equity. Media Contact:Daniel YungerKekst View original content: SOURCE Peak Rock Capital Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Business Wire
29-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Acumatica to be Acquired by Vista Equity Partners
BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Acumatica, a leading provider of cloud ERP solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Vista Equity Partners ('Vista'), a global investment firm focused exclusively on enterprise software, data and technology-enabled businesses. "With Vista's support and track record of growing software companies, we believe we're positioned to accelerate product development, deepen partner engagement and extend our impact." Acumatica's cloud-native Enterprise Resource Planning ('ERP') platform enables a range of mid-market organizations to digitally manage and automate mission-critical processes from core financial management to payroll and Customer Relationship Management ('CRM') in a single, unified system. Built on an open, flexible architecture, the platform delivers AI-driven real-time visibility across the business, enabling users to make faster and more strategic business decisions. Acumatica offers industry-specific functionality tailored to complex sectors, including manufacturing, distribution, construction, retail and professional services. 'Our partnership with Vista not only marks a significant milestone in Acumatica's history but also is a strong endorsement of the real-world value we deliver to the market and our customers,' said John Case, CEO of Acumatica. 'Vista's investment can help power our AI-first product strategy and further strengthen our thriving Community of partners, developers and customers, working together to find better ways to work and redefine business management software for everyone. With Vista's support and track record of growing software companies, we believe we're positioned to accelerate product development, deepen partner engagement and extend our impact.' 'Acumatica is an ascendant, cloud-native ERP platform that has become a leading provider of mission-critical tools that enable small and mid-sized businesses to run more efficiently and effectively,' said Monti Saroya, co-head of Vista's Flagship Fund and senior managing director. 'With its industry-leading, strong partner ecosystem and growing presence in markets embracing cloud-based business technology, we believe Acumatica is well-positioned to lead the shift toward modern, integrated ERP solutions.' 'Acumatica has established a strong market position with differentiated, flexible and industry-specific ERP solutions as well as a uniquely dedicated channel of value-added resellers,' said John Stalder, managing director at Vista. 'We're excited to partner with Acumatica and its outstanding community of partners to drive continued growth and product innovation and to deliver even greater value to customers worldwide.' Vista will acquire Acumatica from EQT, which will no longer be an investor in the company. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Moelis & Company served as financial advisor to Acumatica. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP acted as legal counsel to Acumatica, and Greenberg Traurig LLP served as legal counsel to Vista. About Acumatica Acumatica Cloud ERP is a comprehensive business management solution that was born in the cloud and built for more connected, collaborative ways of working. Designed explicitly to enable small and mid-market companies to thrive in today's digital economy, Acumatica's flexible solution, customer-friendly business practices and industry-specific functionality help growing businesses adapt to fast-moving markets and take control of their future. For more information, visit or follow us on LinkedIn. About Vista Equity Partners Vista is a global technology investor that specializes in enterprise software. Vista's private market strategies seek to deliver differentiated returns through a proprietary and systematic approach to value creation developed and refined over the course of 25 years and 600+ transactions. Today, Vista manages a diversified portfolio of software companies that provide mission-critical solutions to millions of customers around the world. As of December 31, 2024, Vista had more than $100 billion in assets under management. Further information is available at Follow Vista on LinkedIn, @ Vista Equity Partners, and on X, @ Vista_Equity.
