I am working on a story about underemployment in America ahead of the midterm elections. With heightened prices it is harder for people to get by. With slower job growth and a low-hire, low-fire environment, finding new work is increasingly difficult. If you are underemployed and would like to talk about your experience, please reach out.

Yesterday, Bumble agreed to be taken private in a $1.3 billion deal.  This is significant because this is as much a cultural story as it is a business one.  It tells us something about the business of looking for love. Bumble went public in 2021 with a valuation of roughly $14 billion. Now, after years of declining paying users and revenue, it’s getting a reset under new ownership. This is fascinating and, frankly, a big deal that goes beyond your typical business news headline. The dating app’s decline began as soon as public markets became widely involved. Match Group, which owns apps like Hinge and Tinder (and dozens of others), became the standard way of meeting a partner. Before Match Group bought the biggest apps, the model for app-based dating was sustainable. One user in, one user out. There’s no shortage of people moving to a new city and trying to meet someone, or someone looking to get back out there after a breakup or something similar. It’s not as if the market of people looking for love would disappear. However, sustainability is not growth, and going public obligates a company to pursue growth. Growth often means acquiring customers and retaining them for as long as possible. That means retaining current customers while acquiring new ones. In turn, this changed how people think about courtship, relationships and their own behavior within them, overwhelmingly for the worse. Because of Match Group’s hold on the industry, Bumble needed to follow suit to compete.  Together, these companies changed how we look at one another and turned one of the most vulnerable parts of the human experience—looking for love—into a business. The market’s inherent need for growth diminished the utility of the actual product. That utility is rooted in our innate desire to feel wanted, loved and desired. Consumers caught on, leading to endless social media posts about how dating sucks and think pieces explaining why. This led to countless surveys about dating app burnout and much of the discourse surrounding it, especially post-COVID, rather than a discussion of how dating apps themselves changed the experience and the way we think about each other. Bumble going private may be an acknowledgment that it’s time for a course correction. It doesn’t automatically solve the problem, and private owners still want to make money (they are private equity, after all, and they’re known for stripping things apart). But it could give Bumble an opportunity to focus on making a product people actually want to use, rather than one they feel stuck using. My questions on this will be: Can a company built around helping people find love succeed without needing them to keep looking for it? Will competitors follow suit? And if they do, is the damage they’ve done to the cultural discourse something that can be reversed?

The final inflation report before the midterm elections was released this morning. No surprises, here, gas prices jumped by 9.1 percent as tensions between the US and Iran as well as Russia and Ukraine weigh on global energy markets. That is only on a month-over-month basis. Annually it's much bigger at 34.2 percent. This is a big deal ahead of the midterm elections which is only weeks away and a hefty majority of Americans blame the President for heightened gas prices. Well anyways, here are the details for Al Jazeera: aljazeera.com/economy/2026/1…

I’m not sure how this qualifies as an exclusive. The mayor’s public schedule is circulated to the press daily, and this event was never included in that guidance.