Latest news with #Lore
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Marc Lore, A-Rod Expected to Take Over Timberwolves Soon, New Arena Plans Coming…
Times are changing for the Minnesota Timberwolves. Fresh off their second-straight Western Conference Finals appearance, the team is headed in a new direction. Glen Taylor, who has owned the franchise since 1994 when he saved it from relocation to New Orleans, will finally transfer majority power to Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez. Taylor accepted his fate following arbitration hearings earlier this spring. Lore and A-Rod, who have been chomping at the bit to get going — will soon be putting their first official orders of business in motion. Timeline set for Minnesota Timberwolves ownership change Credit: Bruce Kluckhohn-Imagn Images Now that the legal battle for ownership of the Minnesota Timberwolves has been put in the rearview mirror, the last hurdle needing to be overcome is the NBA owners vote, of which Lore needs 2/3 majority to seal this deal. Advertisement Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the new ownership group is expected to be approved easily. And we also know when it will take place. According to a recent report from The Athletic's Jon Krawczynski, the NBA Board of Governors vote for Timberwolves majority ownership will take place in less than a month, 'toward the end of June'. 'Sometime toward the end of June, team sources familiar with the process told The Athletic, the league is expected to hold a final vote to approve Lore and Rodriguez as the new majority owners of the Timberwolves and Lynx.' Jon Krawczynski – The Athletic The exact date has not been made known, but the end of June coincides with some important dates on the league calendar. The NBA Draft is scheduled for June 25th. Minnesota holds the 17th and 31st overall selections. Just a few days later, June 30th, free agency opens. It would behoove the Minnesota Timberwolves to have their new owners assume full power prior to those events taking place. The vote to make the ownership change permanent should go as planned, but until it's cemented in reality both Rodriguez and Lore must wait. Related: Timberwolves Expected to Chase Kevin Durant Again… and He's Interested This offseason is a significant one for the Timberwolves. President Tim Connelly could look to go elsewhere, and the roster changes are expected to be significant. Julius Randle, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, and Naz Reid are all key players that Minnesota must decide on how they fit into future plans. Advertisement Anthony Edwards and his running mates came up short losing 4-1 in the Western Conference Finals for the second year in a row. Finding a blueprint to get beyond that point, and over the hump, will require looks at the roster and coaching staff. New arena plans underway for Timberwolves It's not just the roster configuration that new owners Rodriguez and Lore are concerned with. Minnesota's home arena, Target Center, is 35 years old and it needs more than just a facelift. In fact, the plan is to find a new home digs, something that the new owners have made clear will be a priority right away. 'They plan to be much more aggressive with their investment on the business side of the operations, including formulating plans for a new arena, team sources told The Athletic. The partners have openly stated their firm commitment to keeping the team in Minnesota, and team sources reiterated that is the long-term vision for a team that is booming in popularity locally, thanks to their playoff runs the last two seasons.' Jon Krawcyznski – The Athletic Multiple different sites and ideas have been floated regarding a new arena. It is something that the franchise must capitalize on while excitement is currently at an all-time high. How the building is funded, where, and what designs look like will all be of significant importance to fans. Advertisement Related: Kendrick Perkins Apologizes to Anthony Edwards Building over the offseason is always a goal for every franchise across the NBA. With such a monumental change at the top of the organization, this one figures to be the most significant in franchise history. If Lore and Rodriguez can usher in a summer of excitement, and parlay that into a season of success, fans will be waiting in droves to enter the new building whenever its doors open. Related Headlines
The Guardian
a day ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Online brothels, sex robots, simulated rape: AI is ushering in a new age of violence against women
Society is sleepwalking into a nightmare. The rate of global investment in AI is rocketing, as companies and countries invest in what has been described as a new arms race. The Californian company Nvidia, which dominates the market in the chips needed for AI, has become the most valuable in the world. The trend has been dubbed an 'AI frenzy', with the components described by analysts as the 'new gold or oil'. Everyone is getting in on the act, and politicians are desperate to stake their countries' claim as global leaders in AI development. Safeguards, equitable access and sustainability are falling by the wayside: when countries gathered for the Paris AI summit in February 2025 and produced an international agreement pledging an 'open', 'inclusive' and 'ethical' approach to AI, the US and the UK refused to sign it. It is worth asking who is benefiting from this headlong rush, and at whose expense. One developer, who only goes by the name Lore in their communications with the media, described the open-source release of the large language model (LLM) Llama as creating a 'gold rush-type of scenario'. He used Llama to build Chub AI, a website where users can chat with AI bots and roleplay violent and illegal acts. For as little as $5 a month, users can access a 'brothel' staffed by girls below the age of 15, described on the site as a 'world without feminism'. Or they can 'chat' with a range of characters, including Olivia, a 13-year-old girl with pigtails wearing a hospital gown, or Reiko, 'your clumsy older sister' who is described as 'constantly having sexual accidents with her younger brother'. This million-dollar money generator is just one of thousands of applications of this new technology that are re-embedding misogyny deep into the foundations of our future. On other sites men can create, share and weaponise fake intimate images to terrorise women and girls. Sex robots are being developed at breakneck speed. Already, you can buy a self-warming, self-lubricating or 'sucking' model: some manufacturers have dreamed up a 'frigid' setting that would allow their users to simulate rape. Millions of men are already using AI 'companions' – virtual girlfriends, available and subservient 24/7, whose breast size and personality they can customise and manipulate. Meanwhile, generative AI, which has exploded in popularity, has been proven to regurgitate and amplify misogyny and racism. This becomes significantly more of a concern when you realise just how much online content will soon be created by this new tool. Women are at risk of being dragged back to the dark ages by precisely the same technology that promises to catapult men into a shiny new future. This has all happened before. Very recently, in fact. Cast your mind back to the early days of social media. It started out the same way: a new idea harnessed by privileged white men, its origins in the patriarchal objectification of women. (Mark Zuckerberg started out with a website called FaceMash, which allowed users to rank the attractiveness of female Harvard students … a concept he now says had nothing to do with the origins of Facebook.) Women, particularly women of colour, raised their voices in concern: some of the earliest objections to FaceMash came from Harvard's Fuerza Latina and Association of Harvard Black Women societies. They were ignored, Facebook was born and the rest is history. Social media was rolled out at great speed. Back then, Zuckerberg's famous catchphrase was 'Move fast and break things'. The things that got broken were societal cohesion, democracy and the mental health, in particular, of girls. By the time people started pointing out that online abuse was endemic to social platforms, those platforms were too well established and profitable for their owners to be prepared to make sweeping changes. Politicians seemed too enamoured with the powerful tech lobby to be prepared to stand up to them. The results have been devastating. Young women have taken their own lives after experiencing sexualised cyberbullying. An alarming number of female parliamentarians have stepped down from office after experiencing intolerable levels of online abuse. Millions of women have been subject to rape and death threats, doxing, online stalking and racist and misogynistic abuse. We failed to prevent this crisis when we didn't heed the warning calls in the early days of social media. We now risk squandering a similar opportunity. Without urgent action, we will be doomed to repeat the same mistakes with AI, only this time on a far larger scale. 'One of the reasons many of us do have concerns about the rollout of AI is because over the past 40 years as a society we've basically given up on actually regulating technology,' Peter Wang, co-founder of data science platform Anaconda, recently told the Guardian. 'Social media was our first encounter with dumb AI and we utterly failed that encounter.' If women and marginalised communities have already learned from their frequent mistreatment on social media to self-censor, to disguise their real names and to mute their voices, these coping mechanisms and restrictive norms will follow them when they step into new technological environments. Nearly nine in ten women polled in a 2020 Economist study said they restricted their online activity in some way as a result of cyber-harassment, hacking, online stalking and doxing. This helps to explain the disparity between men's and women's use of AI; 71% of men aged 18 to 24 say they use AI weekly, while only 59% of women in the same age range do so. So long as men remain the main users of AI, the technology will be designed to cater to their preferences. The answer isn't to reject new technology, or ignore the enormous potential of AI. Instead, we should ensure regulations and safeguards are implemented when AI is designed, before products are rolled out to the public, in much the same way that they are within other industries. 'I thought people should be aware,' said Leyla R Bravo, then president of Fuerza Latina, when she tried to raise the alarm at Harvard over the nascent FaceMash website back in 2003. This time, might someone listen? It isn't too late for political leaders to stand up to big tech. The harms of this technology aren't rooted in a future dystopia where robots take over the world. AI is already devastating the lives of women and girls, right now. If people realised this, they might desire to do things differently. Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and author of The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
Hypebeast
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
Hypebeast Community Center: Lore
Give me your elevator pitch. Lore is a luxury brand centered around an alternate world. With each collection, you get a glimpse into this world through the lens of a specific region and occupation. From an apparel and accessories perspective, Lore is imagined as otherworldly workwear. Lore feeds its archive and uses a combination of tools to generate its visual language through tangible and digital means. These tools include analog tailoring for garment construction, creative writing that defines the world and its inhabitants, and both real and rendered imagery crafted through photography, digital painting, and photo editing. Who is wearing Lore? These are handmade luxury pieces. The wearer should range from people who care about style and fashion to people who care about Lore and the story behind it. The collections are made up of both menswear and womenswear. There is a practical nature to our apparel and accessories — we want to create garments that people covet but feel comfortable in. What is Lore's main message? Lore is about a play between fantasy, functionality, beauty, and world-building. It is about creating transformative pieces that can take people into this world, whether they do so with a single garment or an entire Lore look. We intend to create styles that don't require you to fully understand this world in order to feel its influence. 'We created Lore because we wanted to magnify the fashion world's sense of fantasy.' When did you launch Lore? In March 2025, we soft-launched with an event at WSA during NYFW. The event featured our first capsule paired with an immersive experience showcasing the region for which the capsule was named, 'Undergate: The Silver Plains.' Where are people wearing Lore? Capsules are currently non-seasonal, but hint at a standard RTW range, and our capsule wardrobing is designed to be cumulative. Even with all of the narrative behind each look, the idea is peculiarly achieved through fictionally functional elements, but without inhibiting fit, comfort, or modernity. Why was Lore created? We created Lore because we wanted to magnify the fashion world's sense of fantasy. We felt there was this emotional aspect to it as well, something we felt but couldn't find in the luxury market. It's this sensation where you want to participate in Lore and collect it for nostalgic purposes that you can't quite explain. And then it's our job to make the pieces easy to covet and exciting to a range of people who care about the stories we aim to tell. What was the spark that catalyzed the creation of Lore? Early on in my footwear design career, I started incorporating fantastical elements into my designs. I realized that functional solutions in footwear plateaued at a much lower level than the stories of that function. There was so much fun to be had in the gap between a practical brief and having a design scream about the problem you were solving. So, I would tell the stories of these solutions with my design. They were exaggerations that were born from functional elements. This idea of using utility as a design brief to explore and play is at the center of Lore, and it quickly became apparent that I would need to expand my canvas into apparel and expand my resources into a team focused on this pursuit. When did fashion design become a passion for you, and on top of that, an intended career path? Storytelling has always sat at the center of creation for me. From a young age, I was fascinated by fantasy and a desire to craft my own characters, creatures, and worlds through drawing and writing. As I grew up, I found that the path of an illustrator felt too disconnected from my life, so I moved into product design in college, which I found too disconnected from fantasy. Fashion entered my life through my friends and peers at school, and it felt like the perfect medium; it was both otherworldly and connected to my world. By my final year of school, it was clear I had found my path, and it has led me to Lore. 'Things feel intuitive at the moment, and we are embracing that in our infancy.' How would you define Lore's style in your own words? It's difficult to quantify Lore's exact style; things feel intuitive at the moment, and we are embracing that in our infancy. The aesthetics follow the idea of fictional functionalism, where utility serves as the source for decorative storytelling devices that create new aesthetic forms. The technical aspects of each piece are executed in a way that feels analog, a sort of soft tech that focuses on tailoring techniques. There are elements inspired by jewelry, such as the custom buttons (exclusive to each capsule) and areas that integrate chains into the garments. But at its base, each garment intends to warp the proportions of the body into that specific look's most hyperbolic form. Customers can put on the bomber jacket from the Metal Former look and feel the bulk around their shoulders, vents that flare out along the arms, and a protective apron structure in the front. They get to step into this armor-like clothing and experience a sense of roleplay while wearing contemporary luxury fashion products, and it's a powerful feeling. What do you think makes Lore stand out in today's sea of emerging fashion brands? Part of what sets us apart is that we are building this world with its own geography, climate, economy, history, and politics. We are creating a playground of inspiration for ourselves to explore, but it's really more about what this allows us to do. I am excited to see how far we can go without participating in the current cycle of trends and aesthetics. The factors that let us sit next to other luxury brands will simply be our quality, materials, and the relevance of our silhouettes. The goal of each garment is to evoke a precious feeling from the piece itself. We are putting so much development into every line, every gusset, corner and pocket. Right now, each capsule is only a handful of looks. We ascribe to a 'less is more' mindset without being visually minimal. 'Apparel has a different set of rules that I am still learning, but I intend to break them as quickly as I learn them.' The slowness of historical garments inspires me, but for us, it's being applied to a beautiful technical bomber with graphic shank buttons set with gems. We rendered these from nothing, and 3D-printed them a dozen times to get them right. I'm inspired by our complex patternmaking and construction that can evoke that historical quality, but in a totally new and innovative visual language. In the new collection, we have these large external darts on the trousers that are used for wiping metal off the Metal Fuser's fingers. Nobody is going to know where that idea came from, nobody is going to wipe their fingers on them. But they can love the end result. I appreciate the fearlessness that footwear manufacturing has in its development of detail and difficult execution, which has allowed me to push my designs to their limits throughout my career. Apparel has a different set of rules that I am still learning, but I intend to break them as quickly as I learn them. Lore is already building a strong visual identity. What role do campaigns—and the visual narratives you create around your clothing—play in the brand? Campaigns and visual assets are the portal into this world. To me, they can feel more important than the product itself. In fashion, imagery is your pitch. If your image looks a certain way, the brand will sell to specific stores and sit alongside neighboring labels on the rack. Instead, we are so focused on creating primary, secondary, and tertiary imagery that can continue to feed the Lore database and introduce this world to our audience. We're so focused on creating and answering our own prompts to better explain this place. I want the campaigns and visual narratives to really take people to Lore and immerse them in the lifestyle of each collection. I have found so much inspiration and joy exploring portals like this throughout my life. It can be easy to forget that when any of us started creating as kids, it was essentially magic. I want to capture that feeling and share it with others. What style codes or eras do you draw inspiration from? There are several layers to what we currently look at and intend to look at for future collections. The subject for each collection is an occupation, so workwear and uniform attire inform some of our more initial and structural codes. We take a lot of inspiration from historical design periods. They feel so disconnected from our world, and ornamentation is a large part of the aesthetics of Lore. I really enjoy the playfulness of the Y2K era I grew up in. There is something that feels very 'dress-up' about it that I find fun. There is a sense of that in all of our inspirations, and it is an easy association to fantasy. In many cases, fantasy attire is camp or gaudy. We aim to prove that fantasy can also be rich and impressive and that it can assimilate into daily life without looking costume-y or out of place. What was the biggest challenge you faced when building Lore? There is so much we want to do; it is difficult to feed our clientele at a pace that makes sense. It can be challenging to find the line between what needs to be quantified and what should be left for future exploration. We are constantly sifting through ideas, making sure we pull out the ones that are attainable at the right time. It's a good problem to have. There is a never-ending element to it that I love. It will never be enough. We have created something daunting but also something that is extremely energizing. What's next for Lore? Our first capsule, released in March 2025, titled 'Undergate: The Silver Plains,' explored the metal workers in the region of Undergate. In September 2025, during NYFW, we will present our second capsule, which is inspired by metal workers from another part of the world. We will begin sales for our first capsule in September, with several pieces available to purchase in the coming months.
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Los Angeles Times
A new Black-owned bookstore inspiring a community
Looking for your next good read? There's a new Black-owned bookstore in town hoping you'll swing by. Lore is an independent bookstore and community space in Leimert Park that centers Black design and art, but features everything from children's book to candles. Yesterday they celebrate their grand opening. Here's what the people behind the store had to say about what the it means.
Business Insider
21-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Marc Lore's Wonder just eliminated one of the most annoying parts of food delivery
Food delivery customers often find a list of fees on their receipt when they order dinner in. Wonder, the food hall startup helmed by entrepreneurMarc Lore, has a solution: Eliminate delivery fees altogether. On Monday, Wonder eliminated its $1.99 fee on delivery orders, Courtney Lawrie, Wonder's senior vice president and general manager in charge of Wonder's restaurants and delivery experience, told Business Insider. The company also waived its 12% service fee for orders placed through Wonder+, its $7.99-a-month subscription service. Delivery fees have become common for many delivery services such as DoorDash and Uber. DoorDash, for example, says that its delivery fee covers "costs associated with getting your order directly to you." The fees can also provoke frustration from customers when they see their delivery order's price rise as they select the delivery option. "People are tired of paying fees across all of these marketplaces," Lawrie told BI. Wonder operates its own food halls as well as its own delivery service, making it more vertically integrated than most of its competitors, which deliver food from an array of restaurants. The startup also acquired delivery service Grubhub earlier this year. All that means that Wonder doesn't have to deal with middlemen when it needs to get food to customers' doorsteps, Lawrie said. "We're uniquely positioned to be able to provide that savings to customers," Lawrie said. Wonder has just under 50 food halls at the moment. Customers can have their food delivered, or, for a 5% discount, they can stop by one of the food halls to pick up their order themselves. Wonder's food halls serve dishes created by chefs including Bobby Flay and Marcus Samuelsson. At Wonder's New York City locations, menu items range from a fried chicken sandwich with a side and a drink for around $12 to a 16-ounce ribeye for $37. Its locations span city centers as well as more sparsely populated suburbs. Wonder sees an opportunity to grow its business among suburban diners by giving them the range of choices in Wonder's food halls, Lawrie said. "They might not have access to the variety that we can provide," she said. Many consumers are cutting back their spending, including on eating at restaurants, due to worries about a potential recession. Even so, demand for food delivery — both restaurant orders and grocery hauls — remains steady, companies like DoorDash and Instacart have said in recent earnings reports.
