Day: November 1, 2025

‘That broke my heart’: Witness describes pulling children from crash that injured 10 in Orlando

• My mom and I had lived 1500 miles apart for 35 years when we decided to try living together again.
• We thought it would be easy, but didn’t realize how different we’d become.
• Being together after so long only highlighted how our paths had diverged.

When my mom was 76 and I was 52, my mom decided it was time to free herself from the rigors and responsibilities of homeownership. So, she decided to leave her close-knit Florida neighborhood and travel north to live with me in upstate New York.

We had lived 1500 miles apart for 35 years and naively assumed that because we had always gotten along well when I was young and when she visited, it would be all tea parties and good times. We were clueless about how different we had become.

I was happy and excited to have my mom so near me again, dreaming of the fun times we would have. It was wonderful to catch up on the details of each other’s lives and spend time together reminiscing and making plans. But as the weeks passed, we started to realize that we were very different people from when we last lived together, when she was 41 and I was 17.

We expected living together would be easy, but quickly discovered our differences

I am a vegetarian. My mom is not. There were some tense moments when my mom was trying to savor time in the kitchen cooking, with me close by, imagining Salmonella and E. coli coating the surfaces. Mom tried not to be annoyed with me ruining her enjoyable time, saying, “Don’t contaminate the faucet!” and hovering around with a bleach spray at the ready. She gave me her infamous eye roll. I made her fun times in the kitchen a lot less fun.

When I tried to offer advice that I thought would help make my mom’s life easier, I only ended up irritating her. She didn’t want to be told what to do. I thought I was being a caring daughter, but my mom didn’t want or need to be mothered. She had taken care of herself for the past 60 years and was still razor sharp with the same anti-authority streak she’d always had. She’s a grandma with outlaw energy.

I am a night owl and rarely go to sleep before 1 am. My mom’s days often start at 4 am because she goes to bed early. I needed to be mindful to be quiet when I was at my most energetic, while my mom felt she needed to close herself in her room in the morning so as not to wake me up. When I rolled out of bed at 8 am, my mom could hardly believe what a lazy day-waster she had raised!

My mom lived in her Florida neighborhood for decades and knew everyone. She thrives on being with her friends and having places to be. She’s outgoing and makes friends easily wherever she goes. She and her neighbors looked out for each other; she took care of them and their animals, and loved hearing the kids playing and the music of people going about their lives.

I live like a recluse most of the time. My home is in the woods and I can’t even see my neighbors’ houses. I bought my house precisely for the abundance of trees and the lack of people. I can take my dogs out in the morning with my hair standing on end in my pajama pants with the life-size chihuahua faces, and not have to feign a good morning and a smile before I’ve had my coffee. I love hearing the birds singing, distant roosters crowing, frogs croaking, and the utter lack of human sound.

Our differences surprised us

We were surprised how different we’d grown over the years. We had both lived as the only adults in our homes for many years before we lived together, used to directing our own shows. We had no idea we’d grown so different as I transitioned from a daughter to an independent, responsible woman, while she evolved from my mother into a wilder and freer spirit as she aged.

Living together as adults changed our relationship. We lost our unrealistic reverie. I used to think my mom and I had unending positive thoughts of each other.

I thought I was the child who got along best with her, and that living with me was her perfect landing place. It was hard on my child’s heart in my middle-aged chest to realize that was not our reality. I assumed her unending approval, and was crushed when I felt I had disappointed her. She was anticipating my youthful sunniness and got greyer skies.

We don’t live together anymore. We’re better at being mother and daughter with wider boundaries than we thought we needed. We feel close in a different way now. More as adult friends, without expectations. We text our joys and troubles, cheer and support each other. We’re still learning to marvel at our inherited sameness while respecting how the differences of our individual lived experiences have shaped us. We’re practicing getting better at that lifelong dance.

• Brooks Running CEO Dan Sheridan went from teaching high school to leading a billion-dollar fitness brand.
• Sheridan said he strives to maintain his focus on the human side of the brand.
• He spent over 27 years at Brooks and said mistakes happened when they lost focus on the customer.

Brooks Running CEO Dan Sheridan sits at the helm of a billion-dollar global fitness brand that has over 1,400 employees. His path to the C-suite wasn’t conventional, however.

Sheridan told Business Insider that he grew up in a household of teachers, and when it came time to choose a career, he decided to enter the family business, teaching high school-level physical education, history, and English.

Sheridan said he realized in his 20s that teaching wasn’t his passion, and had a friend working at Brooks Running, which at the time had 52 employees. Sheridan, who picked up running in college, was hired in a field sales and marketing job at the shoe brand, a position now referred to as a “guru.”

He’s been with the company ever since, having worked in nearly every role aside from shoe design during his 27-plus years with the company.

“It’s really a strange thing, the CEO title,” Sheridan said. “Because I think of myself as one of the teammates on Brooks — because I grew up here.”

The CEO said the company is on track to hit $1.6 billion in global sales by the end of this year, after surpassing a billion dollars in global revenue in 2024.

As Sheridan worked his way up to the top role, here’s what he said he learned:

The brand’s biggest mistake

Sheridan said the moments where Brooks strayed its focus away from the customer are the times that the brand made mistakes.

“We’ve made not just flesh wound errors, but significant errors,” Sheridan said.

The CEO said when the pandemic hit, Brooks had a call with his boss, Berkshire Hathaway’s Greg Abel, who reminded him where the company needs to keep its attention.

“He said, ‘We’re going to play the long game here. Just listen to your customer,'” Sheridan said.

Tariffs are one area where that focus has been applied. Sheridan said the shoe brand is bracing for a 100% tariff increase in its imports and has had to make considerations about how it’s going to make up for the cost.

The CEO said the company has decided on price increases of 2% to 3% on its products, which he said “feels very rational and competitive,” considering the tariff rate.

“We don’t want to punish the consumers and dampen demand,” Sheridan said.

Focusing on the human element

As the company navigates tariff uncertainty and grapples with the promise of AI, Sheridan has made an effort not to get bogged down by the noise and maintain his focus on the humans that the brand is ultimately serving.

“Running may be the most human act in sports,” Sheridan said.

While the company plans to leverage AI internally in areas such as workforce productivity and product research and development, Sheridan says they are taking a careful approach to implementing the technology.

“We’re going to be very thoughtful on how we plug in AI and how it impacts our organization,” Sheridan said.

Sheridan strives to remain similarly grounded in his interactions with employees. He said that when the office added plaques with titles to doorposts, Sheridan opted to keep a Post-it note outside his office that simply says “Dan.” The CEO said he doesn’t want his interactions to change because of his title, which he gained about a year and a half ago.

“When people laugh at my jokes, or they return a phone call, they’re returning the title phone call,” Sheridan said. “And for me, this is a relationship business, and so I’m working really hard at staying authentic to my journey at Brooks.”

Sheridan said he’s become “good friends” with some of the customers he’s met throughout his tenure. Managing his ego and flattening power dynamics within the company is something Sheridan said he works “really hard” to achieve, he said.

• Private jet companies are competing for clients who have it all with extravagant perks.
• It’s some of the most lavish marketing on the planet, from luxury trips to swanky suites at sporting events.
• Here’s a look inside the exclusive world of private aviation — and the benefits that come with it.

On a Thursday afternoon this spring, a few dozen well-heeled travelers descended via helicopter to the Rosewood San Miguel de Allende, a five-star hotel in central Mexico. Rooms at the hotel typically cost four figures a night.

Over the course of the weekend, the group went horseback riding and tequila tasting; on the final night, they enjoyed a private fireworks display.

All of it was complimentary — except the flights, which cost anywhere from $7,000 to $23,000 an hour for clients of Flexjet, a fractional ownership company that is sort of like a (very expensive and very fancy) timeshare for private aviation.

The trip, Flexjet’s Chairman Club event, is one of the perks you get for dropping at least six figures a year on a jet program. Other destinations have included Anguilla and Lake Como.

Flexjet and other private jet operators are touting wine tastings at vineyards not typically open to the public, suites at a Formula 1 Grand Prix and the Super Bowl, facials at 40,000 feet, and menus created by top chefs like Nobu Matsuhisa. Think of it as some of the most luxurious marketing on the planet.

Over the past five years, the number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals has ballooned more than 70% to 510,810, according to wealth intelligence firm Altrata. Last year, that group spent nearly $30 billion on private jets and yachts.

That influx of capital, a new class of customers who ditched commercial airlines during the pandemic, and membership models — such as NetJets, Flexjet, and VistaJet — that make private aviation more accessible mean more people are flying private than ever before. From June to August, fractional jet usage increased 70% over the same period in 2019, according to data from Aviation Week.

To attract those customers, jet operators are spending more than ever on lavish benefits — a tough sell, given that most potential clients can afford anything they’d want.

“We give them something they never want to get rid of,” Matteo Atti, the CMO of VistaJet’s parent company, Vista Global, told Business Insider of the membership perks.

Basically, once you get used to watching the Yankees from the Legends Suite or your dog gets used to drinking water with natural flower essences while at altitude — one of the many benefits of the VistaPet program — it can be hard to go back.

And in the competitive world of private jet operators, what one company does, another must one-up.

“It’s like the gladiators going after each other,” Doug Gollan, the founder of Private Jet Card Comparison, told Business Insider.

Old school marketing tactics, on steroids

The No. 1 reason people fly private is simple: To get from point A to point B. A recent survey of more than 500 private jet users conducted by Private Jet Card Comparison, a guide and advisory service, found that more than 67% of users said door-to-door time saving was the reason they flew private.

But the extras have always been part of the fun.

Twenty-five years ago, jet companies offered access to Billy Joel concerts or the Super Bowl, Gollan said. Now, much like with premium credit cards, those benefits are bigger and better than ever.

It all comes down to two pretty simple marketing goals: acquisition and retention.

Typical marketing, whether a billboard or a targeted ad on Instagram, is unlikely to persuade someone to drop hundreds of thousands of dollars, let alone millions. Almost all private jet customers come through word-of-mouth, and when an existing client brings a friend to NetJet’s VIP Art Basel experience in Miami or on a trip to Bordeaux to visit vineyards with VistaJet, that’s an instant connection.

As Gollan said, “Birds of a feather flock together.”

Then there’s the retention element.

“This is belonging to a club,” Michael Silvestro, a co-CEO of Flexjet, told Business Insider, adding that event-based experiences have been particularly successful. “You expect a certain level of amenities and service.”

The bells and whistles can help keep a customer’s eye from wandering, especially when a competitor is laying down the sales pitch thick. They can also be a spoonful of sugar to help with the undeniable medicine of flying. Even on a private jet, there can be air traffic delays or mechanical issues.

Tickets to the Masters or a stay at a luxury resort “takes the edge off when something goes wrong,” Gollan said.

A change in frequent flyers

If youth is wasted on the young and perks are wasted on the rich, then the new private jet customer gets the best of all worlds.

Over the last decade, the average age of those who fly private has decreased.

“It’s not just for people who have made it, it’s for people who are making it,” Atti said.

And people who are making it prioritize experiences, whether it’s access to the Royal Ascot with Flexjet or pampering during a flight.

In general, younger generations are fueling a surge in the luxury experience sector. Last year, it was the fastest-growing of all luxury segments, according to a report by Bain, with a 5% uptick in spending. Luxury products, on the other hand, saw a 2% decrease in spending.

“They value the journey more than the thing,” Silvestro said of Flexjet’s younger customers.

A group of 40-somethings going on a trip won’t meet at the destination; they will get the party started on the tarmac, where a private car will take them directly to the plane, and the flight crew will greet them with Champagne and caviar. On the way home, the wellness-obsessed generation will eat a nutritionist-approved beet carpaccio, breathe in designer aromatherapy, and sit in ergonomically optimized chairs.

To be sure, some distinguish between extravagance and excess.

“People don’t want to pay through the nose to get that added perk,” said Tony Theis, VP at private aviation consultancy Central Business Jets. “For some people, traveling is just, I just need to get from A to Z.”

Ask any executive at one of these private jet companies, and they’d say that someone in it for the utilitarianism isn’t their target customer — but they also know that at the end of the day, a box at Wimbledon or special access to the Mayo Clinic can only go so far.

“You are spending hundreds of thousands, millions to join,” Gollan said. “No dinner with a chef makes sense if you join the wrong program.”

Taylor Rains contributed reporting.

For those driving to and from shuttle lots and rental car facilities, the diverging diamond interchange shifts the direction of traffic on Jackson Gap Street.

I started fantasizing about moving to New York when I visited the city at the age of 16. I fell in love with the buzz, the jagged skyline, and the passion that seemed to fill every New Yorker I met.

In my teenage fantasies, I daydreamed about walking through Central Park, frequenting Broadway shows, and eating bagels whenever I wanted. So, when I was accepted into a publishing graduate program at New York University at the age of 22, I was overwhelmed with a sense of exhilaration. It felt like everything I wanted for my career was falling into place.

When it was finally time to make my move from Atlanta to New York in 2017, I did everything I could to prepare. I painstakingly packed cardboard boxes to the brim with books and keepsakes, and I arranged for an Ikea bed to be delivered to my new StuyTown apartment on the exact day I arrived. I convinced my family to fly with me the two hours to the Big Apple so they could help me drag about five suitcases full of my entire world to my new home.

I couldn’t wait to start my new life. Still, when I walked into my apartment for the first time, giddily greeting my roommate — a friend from college who was also attending NYU — and taking in our new home, there was a quiet, anxious voice that started in a whisper but had grown louder now that I was settling in: What if I wasn’t cut out for New York? Could I afford life in New York City? How would I get around without a car? What if I didn’t make any friends? Could I even get a job after school? What if I couldn’t figure out the subway?

To my 22-year-old self’s relief, I discovered I was cut out for New York. I found I didn’t miss driving at all as I wandered through NYC, learned not to buy a haircut from a stranger on the street, and made friends. After I graduated from NYU, I became a reporter at Business Insider. I even met my husband on a wintry night in Manhattan, and we’re now the proud parents of our 3-year-old rescue dog, Rory. After more than eight years, New York is my home.

I’ve built a life that is, in some ways, exactly like the one I had dreamed of — but it hasn’t always been easy. In fact, that first year in New York was particularly challenging. I locked myself out of my apartment more times than I care to admit, held back tears the first time my paper grocery bag ripped open on the sidewalk, and smiled stiffly through awkward social interactions until I found friends I could really be myself around.

Relocating is daunting, no matter how much you want it.

In 2024, Business Insider connected with three people about to take the same leap of faith I did all those years ago. Althea McBride, Hayley Perry-Sanchez, and Erin Grindstaff were all set to relocate for several reasons: to pursue the dream of homeownership, achieve financial stability, or support their partners’ careers. They offered Business Insider a front-row seat to their transition, and we followed them over the course of 12 months to detail the highs and lows of relocating in a new series called “Reinventing home.”

Our monthly conversations with each of them highlighted that moving can be as stressful and unsettling as it is fulfilling and exciting. It’s part of the reason people are staying put.

James Gregory, a history professor at the University of Washington, told Business Insider in 2024 that people are moving less often. With increased job opportunities closer to home and the rise of remote work, people no longer have to relocate to find their American dream.

Still, an August Business Insider survey showed that although people are moving less, it’s still on people’s minds, primarily with the hope of reaping financial benefits. We asked readers to share whether they had moved or considered moving within the past year, and if they had, why moving appealed to them. Over 1,500 people, including young professionals, busy parents, and retirees, participated in the online survey.

While some respondents had recently landed new jobs, others were unemployed or felt stuck in their careers. They hoped to move somewhere new to find better job opportunities, a lower cost of living, a more tight-knit community, or a place that could help them stretch their retirement savings as far as possible.

Regardless of their phase of life, moving seemed to be the key to unlocking the promise of prosperity for respondents in the survey. While relocating can be a dream come true for many, our conversations with McBride, Perry-Sanchez, and Grindstaff made clear that the reality of a move is often more complex than the daydream.

At times over the year, the three raved about the financial freedom their new home gave them or happily shared details about their new favorite spot in town. Other times, they felt lost as they tried to find their footing in a place that didn’t quite fit them yet.

Their stories, which you can read below, offer a glimpse at what it truly takes to reinvent home.

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• Grokipedia is Elon Musk’s alternative to Wikipedia, focusing on less “woke” content.
• A lot of the non-political entries are just direct copies of Wikipedia.
• But in certain cases, Grokipedia improved the Wikipedia page — padding out information and sources.

I’ll admit I’m fairly skeptical of the results of xAI’s new Grokipedia and its mission to be an anti-woke version of Wikipedia.

And yet, after testing it out a little bit, I was surprised to find that, in certain cases, it seems better than Wikipedia.

Of course, its entries for hot-button things like “Elon Musk” or “gender” are exactly what you’d expect for its “unbiased” mission. It hurts my head to think about this too much, so I won’t linger on this.

But most pages are not hotbeds of “wokism,” so they end up almost word-for-word identical to Wikipedia. (Grokipedia is able to essentially copy from Wikipedia because Wikipedia allows itself to be scraped by AI bots). So far, Grokipedia has about 800,000 pages, whereas Wikipedia’s English-language version has over 7 million.

xAI did not respond to a request for comment on how Grokipedia pages were chosen.

For example, one of the first things I compared was the entries for the 2008 animated movie “Bolt”, where a superhero dog is voiced by John Travolta. (I had happened to look at the Wikipedia page for it while my kid was watching the movie recently.) As you can probably imagine, this isn’t a particularly political entry.

Like most movie entries, Grokipedia’s has a plot summary, some production details, a cast list, and an overview of the critical reception. (I asked ChatGPT to compare the two articles to see which had more “bias,” and in a case of AI-on-AI crime, ChatGPT accused Grok of having a pro-corporate bias by taking only Disney execs’ word on some of the elements of production. Ha!)

Where Elon Musk might be onto something with Grokipedia

After browsing around Grokipedia for a while, I came across some things that seemed particularly promising.

The types of pages where Grokipedia seemed to beat Wikipedia were the unloved, scraggly entries on Wikipedia. You know the kind — where it truly seems like a bunch of people added in a single sentence once a year for the last 15 years. Where the writing lacks cohesion, tiny details are given equal prominence alongside big facts, and the result is generally a mess.

Here’s an example of one of these. I had recently looked up the Wikipedia entry for the Dana Hall School, a fancy girls’ private school near Boston where the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner attended. The entry isn’t short, but it’s disorganized, with a lengthy “history” section that reads like a list of disjointed bullet points.

Meanwhile, the Grokipedia version felt much more thorough and organized into sections about its history, academics, facilities, admissions, and impact. This is one of those things where there is lots of solid information about it existing out there on the internet — more than has been added so far to the Wikipedia page by real humans — and an AI can crawl the web to find these sources and turn it into text. (Note: I did not fact-check Grokipedia’s entry, and it’s totally possible it got all sorts of stuff wrong!)

I will note that there are some unusual aspects to the entry, however. There’s a whole section that talks about the arguments for and against single-sex education and a discussion of the school’s racial diversity that has more than a whiff of an anti-DEI agenda. My head hurts again, so let’s set that aside for now.

AI might be of some help to Wikipedia

What I can see is a version where AI is able to flesh out certain types of articles and improve them with additional information from reliable sources. In my poking around, I found a few other cases like this: entries for small towns, which are often sparse on Wikipedia, are filled out more robustly on Grokipedia.

One interesting example: By clicking “Random article” on Wikipedia and searching for corresponding Grokipedia entries, I found a curious case where the two entries differ slightly.

For the case of Baroness Marie Vetsera, a woman involved in a minor 18th-century royal scandal, Wikipedia had a substantial entry. But Grokipedia’s was even longer, and formatted quite differently — and frankly, I thought it told a better narrative of the baroness’s untimely demise. But it also had some bad quirks. For example, Grokipedia used a citation for a Facebook page about royal history that seemed to be viral clickbait written by AI.

Obviously, Grokipedia is not perfect — far, far from it. But it’s an interesting idea of how AI could help to improve Wikipedia itself. It could smooth out stilted writing or pad out pages that need improving.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikimedia, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, recently appeared on NPR’s Open to Debate show, where he said that he’s not opposed to AI helping out. He gives an example of an editor looking at a page that needs improvement and asking AI to identify additional relevant facts in the sources already on the page. Then the editor could verify those and add them himself. Seems reasonable!

I’m not planning on switching to Grokipedia for factual information anytime soon, and I don’t recommend you do, either.

In a way, the best outcome would be for Wikipedia to observe what does or doesn’t work on Grokipedia as a sort of sandbox, and take lessons from it.