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I was excited to see what the city had to offer since my friends and family had hyped it up.
I loved exploring Bryant Park, but I wish I never visited Times Square.
New York is one of the most iconic cities in the world, and even though I travel 100 days out of the year, I’d never been until recently.
I finally took my first trip to the Big Apple in November. As my plane landed, my headphones blared Taylor Swift‘s « Welcome to New York, » and I couldn’t have been more excited to see what was in store for me.
In the end, my four-day trip surprised me — in both good and bad ways.
A man from Northern Ireland looks set to spend Christmas in the UAE following his arrest.
Craig Ballentine was arrested after posting a negative Google review about his former employer in Dubai, the BBC reported.
Ballentine’s family said the situation was « a living nightmare. »
A man from Northern Ireland who was arrested after posting a negative review about his former employer in Dubai looks set to spend Christmas in the United Arab Emirates after he was given a February court date, the BBC reported.
Craig Ballentine, a Northern Ireland holidaymaker, was arrested in Abu Dhabi airport in October over a negative Google post about his former workplace — a dog grooming salon, the report said.
Ballentine’s case reportedly traces back to a roughly six-month stint he spent working at the salon in 2023.
He is said to have needed time off due to illness and presented his employer with medical certificates as proof of his condition.
But the employer registered him as « absconded » with UAE authorities after he missed work, and he was hit with a travel ban, per the BBC.
After managing to get the ban lifted, Ballentine returned to Northern Ireland, where he wrote a Google review detailing the issues with his former employer.
He was arrested after returning to the UAE for a holiday and faced charges of slander.
Ballentine, who said he had paid a fine and that he was given a one month social media ban, had hoped to get his travel ban lifted and return to Northern Ireland ahead of Christmas.
But he told the BBC that while on the way to a police station to get the ban lifted, he was told authorities wanted to appeal his case and had set a court date for February.
« While I was in the middle of the transit going there, I got the email that the court was not happy and they wanted to appeal again, » he said. « I called friends and family and couldn’t stop crying, because you’re holding on to those emotions, you’re just trying to focus on ‘let’s get out of here.' »
A GoFundMe set up by Ballentine’s family has raised nearly $2,500 to help with his legal fees.
« What started out as a holiday to catch up with friends for Craig has turned out to be a living nightmare, » the family says on the page.
« At present legal fees are crippling and any money raised will go to help clearing these costs, » they added.
Ballentine has also appealed to politicians to support his case with the help of Radha Stirling, a representative from the campaign group « Detained in Dubai. »
« The amount of support Craig has is quite incredible, » Stirling said. « Charging someone for an online review is something everyone can imagine happening to them. We’ve received an influx of worried tourists contacting us to check their police status in Dubai and it’s certainly a good idea. »
After years of being a lawyer, I suddenly became burned out and lonely.
I decided to quit my job, leave London, and move to a small town in the UK.
At first, the change was difficult, but now I know I’m in the right place.
I never understood the concept of burnout at work. For me, the key to success in the rat race was simple: If you’re hungry enough, you will endure; you can’t possibly get tired of doing your job if you are tough enough.
Well, that was the case until I burned out.
Twelve years of studying law and working as an attorney in Mexico, the US, and the UK had taken their toll. After years of working in London in a fast-paced environment at a law firm, I reached my limit and broke down.
When I reached rock bottom, I decided to make a drastic change and move out of London.
I quit to prioritize mental health over money and glory
One day, I woke up feeling lonely, exhausted, anxious, and lost — with my life solely defined by my career.
I knew it was time to do something about it, so I left my high-power law firm. The hardest part of quitting wasn’t the uncertainty of what the future held but saying goodbye to a high-paying job — especially in a city like London, where the cost of living is high. But at a certain point, money wasn’t enough to keep me there.
I started therapy and a rigorous exercise regimen. I needed to make myself stronger and healthier. It wasn’t easy, but in the end, those things empowered me and gave me the clarity I needed to end the toxic relationship I had with my job and finally have a fresh start somewhere else.
I had to leave the big city
Staying in London was never an option; it was too expensive to sustain myself financially and too chaotic to clear my head and find peace. I needed nature to reconnect with myself.
After some research, I discovered the perfect place: Eastbourne. It’s a small seaside town connected to London by direct train, next to a couple of hiking trails, with more sun than the rest of the UK, and with enough coffee shops to keep me caffeinated.
I moved as soon as I could. The first weeks were rough as I learned the main difference between a big city and a small town: Life is slow— in every possible way. At first, I was desperate and annoyed, but after a couple of days, I understood there was no need to do things quickly. Things are better enjoyed when you take the time to acknowledge them.
One of the best things about small-town life is the sense of community. Everyone in Eastbourne knows each other and welcomes you as if you were family. Inspired by this sense of community, I decided to immerse myself fully. I joined the local rowing club and a volunteer group.
On the professional side of things, I struck a balance between my work and personal life. I took the necessary number of deals and clients to earn a living and also have a moment for myself every day. The balance is what keeps me happy and healthy.
I’m happy for the time being
I know that nothing is permanent, so I’m not sure how long I’ll last in this small resort town.
I just know that I have never felt better physically, mentally, and spiritually. I found peace and also some time to embrace my artistic side. I don’t miss the old days at all.
But this tranquil existence in Eastbourne may not endure indefinitely. I reckon that at some point, I will need to take more action in my daily life, but for the time being, it has been the best decision I’ve ever made.
Welcome back to our Sunday edition, a roundup of some of our top stories. Bummed about your Spotify Wrapped? Maybe this explanation from a former Spotify engineer about what was different this year will help.
On the agenda today:
But first: Keeping track of DOGE.
If this was forwarded to you, sign up here. Download Insider’s app here.
DOGE today, gone tomorrow
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are promising to make sweeping changes through the Department of Government Efficiency.
Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images; Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images; iStock; Natalie Ammari/BI
With a little more than a month until Inauguration Day, one of the most fascinating parts of the new administration isn’t being led by President-elect Donald Trump.
The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has arguably garnered more attention than Trump’s plans for tax cuts, tariffs, and immigration.
Co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have targeted $2 trillion in budget cuts by July 4, 2026, but concrete details on how it plans to get there remain a bit of a mystery.
To get a better sense of what DOGE might ultimately do, we mapped out all the areas Musk and Ramaswamy have hinted at making cuts. What is clear is there’s no shortage of ideas on where the government is wasting money, according to the duo.
However, tweeting that you’ll « delete » an entire agency is one thing. Executing that plan is another thing entirely.
That’s not to say there’s no value in the endeavor. A Pimco economist highlighted DOGE as one of the key ways Trump can reduce the risk from America’s soaring debt.
This gets to a wider point: DOGE’s goal of cutting government spending comes at a crucial time for the global economy.
Government debt across the globe has spiraled out of control and the current trajectory represents « the most serious threat to macroeconomic and financial stability, » according to a senior economist at the Bank for International Settlements.
Inside the life of Luigi Mangione
Photo by Altoona Police Department via Getty Images; BI
Before he became a suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangione came from a prominent Baltimore family and received an education at elite schools. Friends described him as whip-smart, kind, and unassuming. A former classmate told BI, « I would set my sister or friend up with him. »
For years, however, Mangione suffered from debilitating back pain, which he detailed in dozens of Reddit posts, that « put my life on hold in my 20s. » The experience appears to represent a significant — and excruciating — engagement with the American healthcare system.
Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images; iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
Gordon Singer, the son of Elliott Management founder Paul Singer and the head of its London office, is now the only one of the firm’s 14 partners based abroad. He has less autonomy over the office and fewer big-hitting portfolio managers reporting to him.
Yet within the firm, the younger Singer has more power than ever. Thanks to a recent reorg, his voice is now one of the most influential inside it.
A recent study from Kruze Consulting found the average salary for the CEO of a seed-stage startup in the US is $132,000 a year — which is down from $142,000 in last year’s study. The average founder is also likely to be making less than other people on the leadership team.
The consultancy, which analyzed 450 VC-backed startups’ payroll records, also says employee compensation accounts for around 75% of the total operating costs for its startup clients.
Both Oracle and xAI love to flex the size of their GPU clusters. Back in the day, it used to be a lot simpler to figure this out. But it’s getting harder to tell who is actually right, no matter how much CEOs love to brag.
Plus, size isn’t the only important factor. Power efficiency is a vital indicator in AI computing since energy is an enormous operational expense in AI.
« In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies. »
— Cruise founder Kyle Vogt on X following GM’s announcement that it would stop funding Cruise and fold it into the company’s other driver-assistance efforts.
Traveling for Christmas became an expensive obligation instead of a joyful celebration for my husband and I.
When our first child was born, we decided to put an end to the hectic travel and stay home for the holidays.
Setting boundaries allowed us to create new traditions and enjoy a peaceful holiday.
Traveling in December is the worst. When I was a teenager, it’s basically what ruined Christmas for me. After all, it’s hard to get excited for the holidays when you spend your entire break from school bouncing back and forth between multiple households and celebrations, some at the homes of extended step-family you hardly even know. But this was life as a kid of divorced parents in the 90s.
Even once I was a real adult, my husband and I felt obligated to continue the pattern of bouncing from family to family during the holiday season. We didn’t even have a Christmas tree since we’d never spent a Christmas at our own home. For us, Christmas became an expensive obligation instead of a joyful celebration.
Then we became parents
For our first child’s first Christmas in 2006, no plan felt right. From where we lived, it was a 10-hour drive to my family, and a 4-hour flight to my husband’s. Traveling with an eight-month-old didn’t seem fun, but we’d also have to pick which set of grandparents would get to experience our daughter’s first Christmas morning. The guilt and anxiety of my teenage and young adult years bubbled up and took over; instead of thinking about which age-appropriate toy would catch my baby girl’s fleeting interests on Christmas morning, all I could think about was how much I hated it all. When I imagined telling my daughter sometime in the future about her first Christmas, I cringed. Did I really want to pass down my tradition of hating Christmas?
So, instead of mapping routes and checking flights, instead of asking any of our parents who else was coming in for Christmas and if they’d have room for us, instead of making lists of all the things our baby required that we’d have to pack in order to travel anywhere, I made a decision: we were staying home.
And so it came to pass that my first baby’s first Christmas was my first peaceful Christmas in a very long time.
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Setting this boundary was a gift to myself
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was giving myself a gift: I was learning to set boundaries. As a young parent, it’s hard to know what advice to follow or ignore, especially with so many voices vying for attention and so many issues that need attending to. But by staying home and ending the cycle of chaotic Christmases, my husband and I set a boundary that let our families know we were our own family now. We could create our own traditions and have our own ideas of what was important to us.
Our decision to set boundaries was a gift that keeps on giving. I can see now that by establishing a precedent of not traveling for Christmas, we gave our children a dependable and safe place to land during their breaks from school. We gave them the gift of waking up in their own beds on Christmas mornings, even if « morning » is a little later than it used to be now that they are teenagers.
We now see our families when it’s more convenient for us
It was difficult to break the news to our parents that first Christmas, but once we made the decision to not travel for a holiday that is stressful in the best of circumstances, we knew it was the right choice for us. Ultimately that boundary set a precedent that we would visit our families when we could make the most of our time together. One tradition we’ve started is driving to see my family just after the school year is over. It’s been great because the weather is still mild so we can spend time outside, and we have the flexibility to stay longer or take a detour on our road trip if we want to.
What’s also great is that my children don’t hate Christmas like I did. It’s possible their attitudes rubbed off on me a little. After all, I am the one who has purchased matching Christmas pajamas for us for the last few years. For me, that truly is a Christmas miracle.
Israel invoked a WWII precedent in trying to justify its pre-emptive strikes in Syria.
During WWII, the Royal Navy attacked the fleet of its former ally to keep it from Nazi control.
Both operations were borne in atmospheres of fear and crisis.
When Israel sank six Syrian warships at the port of Latakia this week amid larger attacks on the military remnants of the ousted Assad regime, Israel’s leader invoked a precedent from World War II.
« This is similar to what the British Air Force did when it bombed the fleet of the Vichy regime, which was cooperating with the Nazis, so that it would not fall into the Nazis’ hands, » Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Though Netanyahu’s history was faulty — it was the Royal Navy rather than the RAF that struck the French fleet — his analogy was revealing. The attack on the port of Mers-el-Kebir on July 3, 1940, has gone down as either a courageous decision that saved Britain — or a treacherous and needless backstab of an ally.
At the least, it is one of Britain’s most controversial decisions of the Second World War. Like Israel today, the British acted amid an atmosphere of crisis, haste and uncertainty. The Israeli goal is to keep the now-deposed Syrian government’s huge arsenal — which includes chemical weapons and ballistic missiles — from falling into the hands of rebel groups, which are dominated by Islamic militants. For Britain, the goal was to keep Adolf Hitler’s hands off the French fleet, the fourth-largest navy in the world in 1940.
In that chaotic summer of 1940, the situation looked grim. The German blitzkrieg had just conquered France and Western Europe, while the cream of the British Army had barely been evacuated — minus their equipment — from Dunkirk. If the Germans could launch an amphibious assault across the English Channel, the British Army was in no condition to repel them.
However, Operation Sealion — the Nazi German plan to invade Britain — had its own problems. The Kriegsmarine — the German Navy — was a fraction of the size of the Royal Navy, and thus too small to escort vulnerable troop transports. But Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill had to contemplate a situation he had never expected: a combined German-French battlefleet.
Technically, France had only agreed to an armistice — a permanent cease-fire — with Germany rather than surrender. France would be divided between German-occupied northern zone, and a nominally independent rump state of Vichy comprising southern France and the colonies of the French Empire. Vichy France would be allowed a meager army, and the French Navy would be confined to its home ports.
The British didn’t trust French promises that its ships would be scuttled if the Germans tried to seize them. Why had France signed a separate peace with Germany after earlier pledging not to? Why didn’t the French government choose to go into exile, and continue the war from its North African colonies as the British urged? London was well aware that the right-wing Vichy government — under Field Marshal Philippe Pétain, hero of the First World War — had more affection for the Third Reich than it did for Britain. With Germany master of Europe, Pétain sneered that Britain would soon « have its neck wrung like a chicken. »
The Royal Navy struck French warships at Mers-el-Kebir in French Algeria on July 3, 1940.
Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
After Vichy rebuffed pleas to send the fleet to British ports, Churchill and his ministers decided the risk was too great. In late June 1940, the Royal Navy received orders for Operation Catapult. A task force — including the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and three battleships and battlecruisers — would be dispatched to the French naval base at Mers-el-Kebir, near the Algerian port of Oran. A powerful French squadron of four battleships and six destroyers were docked there, including the new battleships Dunkerque and Strasbourg.
The French were to be given six hours to respond to an ultimatum: sail their ships to British ports and fight the Germans, sail them to French Caribbean ports and sit out the war, demilitarize their ships at Mers-el-Kebir, or scuttle their vessels. When the local French commander tried to delay while summoning reinforcements, the British opened fire.
The ensuing battle was not the Royal Navy’s most glorious. Caught in every admiral’s nightmare — unprepared ships anchored in port — the French were simply smothered by British gunfire. The battleship Bretagne and two destroyers were sunk, two other battleships damaged, and 1,297 French sailors perished. The British suffered two dead.
This was no repeat of the Battle of Trafalgar, when the Royal Navy smashed a Franco-Spanish fleet off Spain in 1805. Most ships at Mers-el-Kebir were damaged rather than sunk, and the French fleet quickly relocated its scattered vessels to the heavily defended French port at Toulon (where they were scuttled in November 1942 when German troops occupied Vichy). Though Vichy didn’t declare war on Britain — and only retaliated with a few minor attacks on British bases — it confirmed old French prejudices about British treachery and « perfidious Albion. »
Britain’s attack on Mers-el-Kebir was political as much as military. In the summer of 1940, many people — including some in the United States — believed that the British would be conquered or compelled to make peace with a victorious Germany. Churchill argued that Britain had to show its resolve to keep on fighting, not least if it hoped to persuade America to send tanks, ships and war materials via a Lend-Lease deal. Attacking a former ally may have been a demonstration of British resolve.
Israel’s situation does not resemble that of Britain in 1940. Syria has never been an ally of Israel. The two nations have had an armistice since 1949, punctuated by multiple wars and clashes over the years. Britain acted out of a sense of weakness, while Israel is confident enough of its strength to hit targets in Syria.
Yet by citing Mers-el-Kebir as a precedent, Netanyahu proved a golden rule of international relations that applied in 1940 and still applies today: Nations always act in their own interests. Faced with a choice between respecting a former ally and defending Britain from invasion, Churchill chose the latter. Netanyahu didn’t hesitate to do the same.
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
My husband and I had been together for almost 14 years when he came out to me.
We tried to stay together at first before deciding to divorce.
It was painful, but we both love each other’s new partners and spend time together frequently.
My husband told me he had something he wanted to tell me after dinner.
« Why can’t you just tell me now? » I asked.
« Because I just want to wait, » he said.
I had a bad feeling.
« So what is it? » I asked the minute the table was cleared.
« Here’s the thing, » he said, and then he let a few beats pass without talking. I could tell he was nervous. « I need for you to know that I have never been exclusively heterosexual. » He paused. « I need to be able to explore that part of me more. »
« What do you mean? » I asked. I was filled with anxiety. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
It was 1990, and my husband and I were in our mid-30s. We had been together for almost 14 years. I thought we had a great marriage. We talked and laughed and traveled, and shared a love of music and books and food and nature. He was a great dad to our daughters, who were 2 and 5 at the time. He satisfied me intellectually, emotionally, and physically. I never had a reason to question his sexuality.
« I’m sorry I never had the courage to tell you this before, » he said.
He told me he felt he had no choice but to keep his desires hidden, growing up in the machismo world of Miami’s Little Havana in the 60s. He thought he was gay until he was 23 — until he met me. He had never had unsafe sex, he assured me, but he also had not been faithful.
I was surprised I wasn’t mad at him. I know my rage would have been infernal had he told me had slept with other women. But this felt different. This felt like a dark secret he had carried with shame for over 20 years. I just felt sad for him — and for me.
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We tried to stay together at first
At first, we weren’t sure we would have to split up. We still loved each other and enjoyed spending time together, including in bed. I joined a support group for straight people married to gay or bisexual spouses. It turned out I was not alone.
I sought out academic journals and read everything I could related to bisexual people and marriage. I wanted to know our prognosis. Not good. Studies showed that the couples who tended to make it were those who knew the full picture when they first got together. We weren’t in that category.
I wondered what an open marriage would feel like. I viewed myself as an open-minded person, but I had a hunch my husband’s nonmonogamy would be too painful for me. Could I handle him going on vacation without me? Not coming home at night? I was doubtful. We decided to play it by ear. We’d see how things progressed and then reassess.
But really, nothing progressed. We worked, we took care of the kids, and we continued to live as we had before, he told me, as though nothing had changed. But everything had changed.
Almost exactly one year later, it became clear that clinging to the status quo would not work. I knew I had two choices, and both were excruciating: stay with my husband knowing I would always have to share him, or end my marriage and be alone. If I left, my new world might be bleak and lonely, but at least it would hold the possibility of some future joy. At 35, I was still young. I wanted to find a relationship where I would feel like enough. I didn’t want to compete with someone else. I wanted to be the only one.
We both came to this realization simultaneously. We sat together on the couch one dismal night. We didn’t even have to say anything. I realized I could not flourish in this union, and he realized he could not live his life fully with me by his side. We held each other and cried.
Our separation was slow
I remember the last week we lived together before he moved out. There should be a name for this strange period. A Divorceymoon, maybe. A time when instead of starting to build your life together, you must begin to take it apart. Separating the books, photos, and posters was the easy part. Far harder was cutting up the fabric of our shared life. Soon, I would stop seeing him when he came home from work. Soon, I would wake up alone in the morning. Soon, the marriage would be over.
The first few weeks of starting a life apart were more painful than I expected. The house was so quiet when the kids were with him, and I was always happy when they came back. I felt like I had not understood true loneliness until then. To have a full family one day, and the next day, to be alone.
The separation continued at a gradual pace. We still spent time together as a family, going out to eat or to the playground with the kids. We went camping on the Cape. Once, we even traveled to Spain together. And then, a few months later, he met someone. Soon we were spending less time with each other, and I missed him terribly. But then, a few months after that, I met someone too. We had now become two separate families.
We’ve incorporated our new big loves into our big family
Years passed, and relationships came and went for both of us. We rarely met each other’s love interests. They rarely joined us at our shared meals. They didn’t feel like part of the joint family we still had together.
But then my ex met his big love. And two years later, so did I.
I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that I liked my ex’s new boyfriend and that he liked mine — and that the two boyfriends liked each other. We all seemed to have the same sense of humor and spent a lot of time laughing, and often had dinner at each other’s houses. Usually, I’m not a big fan of socializing with other couples. It often feels unbalanced because I rarely like both spouses. But this didn’t feel like that. This felt like family.
It’s now been more than 20 years that the four of us have been hanging out together, sometimes every week; sometimes more. Recently our gatherings have gotten much larger. I’ve picked up a stepdaughter along the way, so now we are often joined by our three daughters, three of their spouses, and three little grandkids. Last year I had to buy a bigger table and four sets of benches.
These days, the grandkids hold center stage at the table. Once the food is cleared, we’ll play a round of Junior Mad Libs which will make everyone shriek with laughter. Then later, my husband and my ex will pull out their guitars and everyone will join in for a raucous round of Wheels on the Bus. Though there’s not a specific name for what we are to each other, the way there are for relationships like « daughter-in-law » or « uncle, » the term « family » still fits — perhaps even better than it did before.
Buy-now-pay-later provider Affirm says it’s committed to being a remote-first company.
However, one challenge of remote work is finding ways to get company culture to thrive.
COO Michael Linford told BI about one approach he’s using to get teams to work more effectively.
Back during the COVID-19 pandemic, buy-now-pay-later provider Affirm decided to commit fully to being a remote-first company.
« We debate it all the time, » chief operating officer Michael Linford told Business Insider. The company had « not looked back, » he said, and it « would be very difficult for us to go back on that. »
« We think it benefits us and our employees, » he said. « We recruit from deeper pools of talent. We get more productivity from our team. »
However, Linford said one persistent challenge is finding ways to get company culture to not only survive but thrive.
In particular, the COO pointed to the importance of building what Affirm founder and CEO Max Levchin dubbed a « high-performance culture, » which in true fintech fashion has been rendered into a key metric that is tracked each quarter.
In a recent blog post, Levchin defined the term as « a culture of individuals doing productive work for the company in the most efficient way possible and helping others do the same, while generally having a good time. »
The puzzle, Levchin said, is how do companies actually accomplish this — and what should they avoid doing.
A high-performance culture is never final, Linford told BI. « That is a function of sustained focus, » he said.
Right now, one approach Linford said he’s focused on is less about maximizing day-to-day work experiences and more about creating additional opportunities to connect in person, especially in cities like Austin, Texas, where he and about 40 other employees live.
« We just take a couple of days a quarter and get a WeWork, and folks can come together, » he said. « The point isn’t that these folks are working together. They’re not. They literally have no work overlap. »
« The point wasn’t that. It was to be Affirmers together in a room, » he added. « That’s where culture gets reinforced. »
Bringing together people from across the company — like an Android engineer, a recruiter, an HR team member, and the COO — underscores a value expressed by Levchin that Affirm is made up of individuals working together.
At the same time, such cross-functional coworking likely helps the company avoid the pitfall of an « us vs them » dynamic that Levchin says is prohibited at Affirm.
« Max felt compelled, I think, to write that because we do want to not let culture just get created, » Linford said. « We want to make sure we’re influencing what it is the team is feeling, thinking, et cetera, and leave our mark on it. »
Like Affirm, Spotify is another major company that has committed to not calling staff back to the office. While Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Google have all ordered staff back to the office for either a hybrid or fully in-person setup, Spotify has said it will continue to have physical offices and a « core week » where teams are encouraged to meet up in person.
The music-streaming platform said the flexible policy led to a decrease in attrition rates, increased workplace diversity, and hiring times that were six days faster.
However, Spotify’s chief human resources officer, Katarina Berg, said in an October interview that it is « harder » to collaborate virtually.
« But does that mean that we will start forcing people to come into the office as soon as there is a trend for it? No, » Berg said.
In 2019, Leoncio Alonso González de Gregorio y Álvarez de Toledo, the 22nd Duke of Medina Sidonia, stormed into his late mother’s palace on the Andalusian coast of Spain.
In a video he posted on YouTube marking the occasion, the Duke, tall and silver-haired, strides triumphantly through the Ambassador Room — a grand hall nearly 33 yards long, lined with oil paintings by the likes of Velázquez’s master, Francisco Pacheco. In happier times, the room had been used for receiving dignitaries who visited the Duke’s mother, Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo. Celebrated as the « Red Duchess, » Luisa Isabel was a socialist-minded, fascism-battling aristocrat beloved by ordinary Spaniards. But now, 11 years after she had cut Leonicio and his siblings out of their inheritance, the Duke had arrived at the palace to lay claim to a national treasure he considered his by birthright.
« At last, I’m at home after many decades away, » Leoncio proclaims in the video.
The treasure, known as the Archive of Medina-Sidonia, was housed in the palace’s attic. A collection of 6 million documents, it spans nearly a millennium of Spanish imperial history. Within its pages lie the secrets of the kings, dukes, and explorers of medieval Spain. Luisa Isabel, who had spent the last two decades of her life cataloging the archive, believed it proved that Arab Andalusians, not Christopher Columbus, had discovered America. Perhaps the most important privately held archive in Europe, it is valued at over $60 million, though historians who have studied it consider it priceless.
Luisa Isabel, who’d been imprisoned under the regime of dictator Francisco Franco, believed the archive should pass to the people. « I have inherited this legacy, which is legally mine, » she once declared. « But morally, it belongs to everyone. » In her will, Luisa Isabel left only 743,000 euros to Leoncio and his siblings, Pilar and Gabriel. The bulk of the estate — including the archives — would be controlled by Liliane Dahlmann, Luisa Isabel’s lover and longtime secretary, whom the Duchess had married on her deathbed.
The fight over the priceless archive — one of Europe’s most important private collections — has been « the stuff of nightmares. »
What ensued was a bitter legal battle that would shatter the family, captivate Spanish society, and throw the fate of the archive into doubt. Leoncio’s homecoming video was a declaration of war. Flouting a court ruling that barred him and his siblings from living in the palace, he had decided to move back into his ancestral home — even though it was legally occupied by Liliane, his mother’s widow. « There’s a lot of tension, » says Gabriel, the black sheep of the family. « They barely talk to one another, enter and leave through separate doors, and rarely bump into one another. » To drive home his disputed claim, Leoncio made a point of interrupting weekly palace tours. « Welcome to my house! » he would greet groups of startled tourists. « Here, they only manipulate the truth. »
Liliane, ensconced upstairs with the archive she had been charged with safeguarding, kept her silence. At times it must have seemed that the family’s inheritance, passed down through the generations and now entrusted to her care, was cursed. « Sometimes you don’t choose your destiny, it chooses you, » she once said. « Personally, these past few years have been exceedingly difficult — the stuff of nightmares. »
The family appeared to start off happily enough. In 1955, only 18 years old and already pregnant with Leoncio, Luisa Isabel married José Leoncio González de Gregorio, a nobleman from Soria. Photographs from the time show the new Duchess smiling in a black ankle-length dress, her long hair framing her tiny face and her lips brightened with lipstick. Standing beside her, José Leoncio appears tall, athletic, and handsome.
In reality, Luisa Isabel and José Leoncio couldn’t have made a more ill-suited couple. Her ancestors had commanded Spanish armadas, served as prime minister, and owned vast swathes of southern Spain. Her parents had fled the country during the Spanish Civil War. Her new husband, by contrast, was a die-hard conservative who supported Franco’s dictatorship. Luisa Isabel loved the night life. José Leoncio, a man of the countryside, disliked high society nearly as much as the radical ideals that would soon claim his wife.
During their brief union, the couple had three children in quick succession: Leoncio in 1956, Pilar in 1957, and Gabriel in 1958. But the Duchess never seemed to take to the role of mother. After giving birth to Gabriel, family lore has it that she handed him to the nurses and declared she had fulfilled her role as a woman. The moment also marked the end of her marriage. Within the year, she had separated from José Leoncio and began to spend long stretches in Paris, where she mingled with Simone de Beauvoir and other leading intellectuals. Her children remained behind in Madrid, where they were left in the care of Luisa Isabel’s grandmother. « She rarely came to visit, » Gabriel recalls.
One day, when Gabriel was 6 or 7, his mother appeared at the door. Gone were her elegant dresses and long hair. Wafer thin, Luisa Isabel now sported men’s trousers and short-cropped hair. There were rumors she was sleeping with women. « Someone in the household said she was our mother, » Gabriel recalls. « But for us, she looked like the boy who worked at the local grocery. » Leoncio was distraught. « You’re not my mother! » he cried.
The change in Luisa Isabel ran deeper than fashion. In 1964, the Duchess led a protest march of fishermen in Sanlúcar. Her noble pedigree gave her a measure of protection to speak out against Franco. « This privileged aristocrat had a rebellious spirit, » as one newspaper put it. Her reputation was further cemented in 1967, when she stood up for a group of protesters whose homes had been rendered radioactive after an American nuclear bomber crashed over the small fishing village of Palomares. The protesters, she told soldiers dispatched by the regime, « are here only for justice, and they are here with me. » She then led the group to a bar at the village’s main square for a round of cold beers.
Despite her noble pedigree, the Duchess was imprisoned for speaking out against Franco.
Nate Sweitzer for BI
Arrested and thrown in prison for a year, the Duchess kept up the fight from her miserable, rat-infested cell. She wrote letters and articles denouncing the conditions in Spanish prisons. A novel she authored about suffering farm workers called « The Strike, » which she had managed to smuggle into France, prompted the government to threaten her with a 10-year sentencefor slander. In April 1970, a few months after her release, the Duchess escaped to France disguised as a man. « I remember putting the hat and the mustache on her, » recalls Julia Franco, a longtime family employee.
During her exile, José Leoncio seized on her political dissidence to secure custody of the children. « The role of being a mother slipped away from her, » Pilar recalls. According to Gabriel, he and his siblings were at their father’s mercy. « He was determined to redirect our lives, banning the staff from passing her calls or letters on to us, » he says. The children, by birth, were nobility. But their lives felt anything but noble.
« The Red Duchess Returns » blared a headline in El Pais, a national newspaper, in 1976. Franco had died, paving the way for Spain’s first open elections in four decades and the safe return of Spanish dissidents. Luisa Isabel moved into the palace at Sanlúcar, where she held court each evening surrounded by famous actors, foreign journalists, and celebrated academics. No longer closeted about her sexuality, she came across like a Spanish version of Sid Vicious. « She was punky, with short, spiky hair and worn-out clothing, » recalls Miguel « El Capi » Arenas, who lived with the Duchess in the early 1980s.
By day, Luisa Isabel devoted herself to organizing the archives. Often rising at 6 in the morning, she would sequester herself in the attic among stacks of dusty documents, chain-smoking cigarettes — two packs a day — and barely eating. She spent years cataloging the papers in jaundiced folders, tying them up with string and developing a knack for deciphering their Gothic cursive handwriting, with all its loops and ligatures. Establishing herself as an amateur historian, she published a dozen books, including « It Wasn’t Us, » her reappraisal of Columbus published on the 500th anniversary of his arrival in America. Historians came to admire her patience and diligence. « She did a magnificent job with very few resources, » says Juan Luis Albentosa, chief archivist of the Franciscan Library in Murcia. « She had no state support back then, nor any formal training. »
The Duchess had first encountered the papers in the late 1950s in a storage tunnel at her family home in Madrid and transported them to the palace in Sanlúcar in the back of a lorry. While it wasn’t unusual for noble families to maintain private archives, this one encompassed the unwritten history of Spain itself. The archive contained not only the records of various aristocratic families, but also receipts signed by the painter Diego Velázquez, primary sources about the Spanish Armada, and municipal records from Palos de la Frontera, the village from which Columbus set sail in 1492.
“I couldn’t get the Duchess alone, ever, » says her daughter, Pilar. « Liliane was always in her ear, trying to make us look bad.”
The Duchess both embraced and defied her status as an aristocrat. She believed the Archive of Medina-Sidonia belonged to the public — but only after she was no longer alive to claim it. « She was a traditionalist, » her nephew, Alfonso Maura, tells me. « How could she spend all those years working on the family archives and not be? » Andres Martinez, a historian and friend of the Duchess, casts her contradictory nature in more poetic terms. « You can’t jump out of your own shadow, » he says.
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As Luisa Isabel devoted her days to the archive and her nights to her soirees, her children saw her only occasionally. To the Duchess, they were reminders of their father — and of the world of entitlement she had devoted her life to rejecting. In 1977, a year after her return to Spain, she wrote to the director general of the Spanish National Heritage Board to request that the palace and its contents, including the archives, be registered as protected public goods, to « prevent losing what belongs to everyone. »
« My family’s wealth isn’t important, and my children don’t seem interested in preserving our artistic heritage, although they enjoy it, » she wrote. By the following year, the request had been granted. The most important and valuable asset of Medina-Sidonia’s ancestral heritage was now under the protection of the state.
In Gabriel’s view, « the moment that marked our disunion » occurred in 1982 — the day Leoncio married his first wife, a Catalonian aristocrat named María Montserrat Viñamata y Martorell. It was at the wedding that Liliane Dahlmann, one of the bridesmaids, entered Luisa Isabel’s life.
The Duchess noticed Liliane immediately. Tall and blonde and 20 years Luisa Isabel’s junior, Liliane had moved from Germany to Barcelona as a girl. « I’ll make her mine, » the Duchess told her friend Capi Arenas during the reception. Julia Franco, who was also in attendance, recalls that the Duchess and Liliane « couldn’t take their eyes off each other. »
Before long, Liliane had moved into the palace, where she served as Luisa Isabel’s secretary. The relationship mellowed the Duchess. Gone were the wild parties and the bohemian friends crashing at the palace for months on end; Luisa Isabel became quieter and more dedicated to the archives. « They were always together, » her friend Andres Martinez recalls. « I couldn’t get the Duchess alone, ever. » Luisa Isabel’s children were also suspicious. « Liliane was always in my mother’s ear, trying to make us look bad, » Pillar says.
“I’ve been at cafés with Gabriel, » one friend observed. « And suddenly he’ll just start talking to someone he barely knows about his quarrels with his mother.”
The children also began to fight among themselves. As the eldest, Leoncio had a role in deciding which family titles went to whom. Gabriel claims they had an understanding that he would be named Duke of Montalto and Aragon, and that Leoncio had changed his mind.
« I’m inclined to stop the progressive scattering of our family titles, » Leoncio wrote in a letter to his brother, rationalizing the decision. Since the family could no longer claim economic or political power, he said, « moral and historical integrity is all we have left. »
Pilar was next. In 1993, King Juan Carlos I had named her Duchess of Fernandina. Now, Leoncio maintained that the title should have gone to his son. He launched a battle in the Spanish courts, stripping his sister of her noble name and privileges.
Leoncio also squabbled with his mother over the estate of her grandmother, who had left the children an inheritance « worth millions of euros, » according to Gabriel. But as the estate’s administrator, the Duchess had spent much of the money. In a letter to his mother, Leoncio protested this « robbery, » complaining that he had received no financial help after his marriage and the birth of his son. He barely mentioned Pilar and Gabriel. The Duchess, in a scathing reply, denounced Leoncio as « weaker » than she had « ever imagined. »
Gabriel had considered himself and Leoncio thick as thieves; they had lived together during their university days in Madrid and always looked after each other. Now, he felt that Leoncio was only looking out for himself. Pilar agreed. « My older brother tried to keep everything for himself and push us out, » she says.
Gabriel and Pilar took the nuclear option. In 1989, they successfully sued their mother over the misspent money. In retaliation, the Duchess banned them from the palace.
Over the ensuing years, the Duchess sold off various tracts of land and other assets, reinvesting the money in the palace, and took steps to ensure that none of the children would have any power over the archives.In 1990, she transferred ownership of the palace and the archives to a new organization she founded, the Casa Medina Sidonia Foundation. And in 2005, she amended the foundation’s statutes to ensure that, upon her death, Liliane would take over as president.
Three years later, on the night the Duchess died — March 7, 2008 — mourners filled the Salon of Columns, a vast room in the palace crafted by American artisans provided to the family by the 16th-century conquistador Hernán Cortés. Gabriel arrived at around 10 o’clock at night. At age 50, he and his mother hadn’t spoken in 20 years. Leoncio and Pilar were already there. The greetings between them were civil but not warm.
There were whispers about how the Duchess had carried out one final snub of her children. Just 11 hours before her death, she had married Liliane in a civil ceremony. Details of the wedding were hush-hush, but it granted Liliane legal control of the palace — and the archives.
Gabriel had arrived at the palacewith a somewhat macabre mission in mind. He’d brought a camera with him, and he planned to capture an image of his mother’s corpse, just as he’d done when his father had died a month earlier. He wasn’t sure where this impulse came from. Perhaps, after years of animosity and neglect, he wanted proof his parents were really gone for good.
Stepping away from the mourners, Gabriel entered the room where the Duchess lay in a casket. She was « deteriorated, stiff, » he recalls. He felt no despair, no sense of grief. He took the camera from his pocket and held it over her body. As he did, others in the room protested. Gabriel took the picture anyway. « He had the right to take a photo of her, » says his friend Íñigo Ramírez de Haro, an author and playwright who accompanied Gabriel that night. « He was her son, after all. »
The night the Duchess died, her sons devolved into a fight over a photograph Gabriel took of her body.
Nate Sweitzer for BI
Alerted to what was happening, Leoncio suddenly appeared and began chasing his brother around the room. « He asked me to delete the photo, » Gabriel recalls. It was a regression to youth, two middle-aged men sparring like adolescents in their mother’s grand house. It was also a sign of the quarrels to come.
At first, the siblings worked in concert to challenge their mother’s will. In court, they cited a provision of Spanish law mandating that a person’s descendants have a right to two-thirds of an estate, regardless of the deceased’s wishes. « I’m not surprised by any of this, » Gabriel told a reporter at the time. « My mother made it clear that she was going to fuck us. »
The court agreed. By transferring the vast majority of her wealth — the palace and its contents, including the archives — to the foundation, the Duchess had exceeded the portion of her estate she was legally allowed to bequeath to non-heirs. The foundation was ordered to pay 27 million euros to the children as compensation. There was only one problem: The foundation had nowhere near that much money, and, as a national heritage site, none of it could be sold.
To further complicate matters, Leoncio wasn’t satisfied with the ruling. He was after something more than money. As duke, he believed he should be responsible for the palace, the archives, and the family legacy. « Leoncio Alonso wasn’t happy with this solution because it meant giving up his family’s property, and he didn’t want to be remembered as the first Duke of Medina Sidonia to allow this, » Eduardo Ferreiro, Leoncio’s lawyer, said at the time.
Leoncio appealed the ruling and won. But the victory proved pyrrhic. The higher court ruled that he and his siblings would become part owners of the palace and its treasures — though without any power over its administration, any right to distribute its contents, or any privilege to reside there. Liliane, the court added, could continue to live in the palace. The siblings were effectively owners of everything, and of nothing.
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Infuriated, Leoncio decided to defy the court’s ruling and take matters into his own hands. He moved into the palace, effectively becoming housemates with his mother’s widow. « Cohabitation is uncomfortable, » he told a reporter. « However, the house is big. »
Things got messy, fast. A newspaper reported that Montserrat Viñamata, Leoncio’s first wife, had become romantically involved with Liliane, whom she had known since their university days in Barcelona. Viñamata denied the rumor: « Whoever has insinuated this has done me a lot of damage, » she told a local newspaper.
In 2023, Leoncio ratcheted up the dispute. He accused Liliane of taking money from his mother’s estate. Liliane denied the charge, arguing that Leoncio was smearing her name in an effort to remove her as president of the foundation so he could take over in her place. Both of them declined requests to speak with me.
Earlier this year, a judge found Liliane guilty of misappropriating funds. She was sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to repay 280,000 euros. Her appeal is due to be heard by Spain’s supreme court.
On a hot morning last summer, I sit down with Gabriel at a busy café terrace in Madrid. Dressed in navy blue shorts and a white polo shirt, collar up, he looks every inch the aristocrat. Slim, with wavy gray hair, he’s the kind of well-read man who sprinkles his conversations with quotes from the French economist Thomas Piketty. He also takes after his mother. It’s as if his obsession with her betrayal has so boiled within him that it now emanates from his very physicality. He has her rosy cheeks, her birdish eyes, her same stubborn drive.
Gabriel, divorced and childless, seems caught in a perpetual struggle to find his place in the world. He has a habit of talking in circles, though he always returns to the topic of how his family has been torn apart. « I’ve been at cafés with him, » says a close family member, « and suddenly he’ll just start talking to someone he barely knows about his quarrels with his mother. »
His mother, he tells me, « never wanted to have any relationship with us. Above all, she saw us as a threat to the free disposal of her wealth. » He claims he wants to mediate between his siblings and Liliane. « I see the foundation as running like a business, » he says. « What interests me is that it’s run well, not who runs it. » But even those closest to him have trouble discerning his true intentions. « Gabriel’s views on all this change — depending on how he wakes up in the morning, » says his good friend and lawyer, Javier Timmermans.
Pilar, for her part, sees the family drama as integral to both brothers’ emotional makeup. Gabriel « seems to be searching for headlines rather than solutions, » she says, while Leoncio is « just interested in defending his claims » as the first-born son.
As Liliane and Leoncio battle for control of the archives, they continue to share the palace. « There’s a lot of tension, » observes Gabriel. « They barely talk to one another. »
Nate Sweitzer for BI
Pilar, a writer and a socialite, inherited her mother’s flair for culture: One paper called her « possibly the most elegant woman in Spanish high society. » If her brothers remain bent on getting justice, she’s more interested in closure. « All that sensationalism doesn’t matter, » she says. « That might be fine for making a soap opera if they want, but solving the archives issue doesn’t have to depend on that. »
Pilar is the first to admit that she has good reason to seek a settlement. She has inherited her father’s residence in central Spain, the González de Gregorio Palace, and she has taken to referring to it as her vampire because it sucks up all her money. « I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to resolve this situation because I need to, » she says.
Unfortunately for Pilar and her brothers, their father’s estate is proving every bit as thorny as their mother’s. A half-sister whom their father never recognized has come forward to demand a share of his estate, using the same provision of Spanish inheritance law that they themselves deployed against the foundation. In October, a court ordered Pilar and her brothers to pay the half-sister a sum of more than $1 million. Gabriel now fears they might be forced to auction off the rights to the archive to private bidders — a desperate measure to cover their spiraling debts. If that were to happen, the children would finally be separated from the archive, just as the Duchess had wanted.
A few months after meeting with Gabriel, I travel to Sanlúcar de Barrameda to see the Archive of Medina Sidonia for myself.
Walking through a labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets in the city center, I pass rows of simple white houses. Some of the facades are crumbling like stale bread; others are as pristine as a Hollywood smile. The whitewashed palace looms above the city, just as the family’s thousand-year legacy has loomed over the children for their entire lives.
Past the sprawling Ambassador’s Room where the Duke had filmed his triumphant return, I climb a flight of stairs to the attic. The Investigator’s Room smells sweet and woody. A faint chill hangs in the air, and bright sunlight casts shadows across the high shelves lined with books. There I find Liliane, quietly tapping away on her laptop.
In an email to me, Liliane had accepted my request to visit the archive, but said she wouldn’t comment on any legal matters, citing past experiences when she felt her words had been twisted. Her position on the archive, echoing that of the late Duchess, is that it belongs in public hands. « They are the only ones who, today, can guarantee its maintenance and preservation, as required in a technological world, » she wrote, adding that « knowledge of the past is indispensable for moving forward in all aspects of human life. »
True to her word, Liliane sits at the table beside me in silence while I study the archive. Afterseveral hours, she abruptly leaves without uttering a word.
I’m handed an accountant’s ledger, which indexes the documents in the archive, the descriptions scribbled in the margins in the Duchess’s spidery handwriting. I ask for a diary of the Almadraba — the famous local fishing season held every May for the past 3,000 years. The diary dates back to 1550, comprising a nearly indecipherable tabulation of the number of fish caught, and the money made in each village.
Sitting with the nearly 500-year-old document in the dim light of the library, I’m reminded that only a tiny part of the collection has been digitized. The history it contains is almost entirely physical. A fire, or a robbery, could cause the documents to disappear forever.
The most viable resolution is for either the state or a major cultural institution to step in and buy the estate from the siblings, turning it into a state-owned asset and ensuring the proper management and preservation of the archives. But that would cost a lot of money — and thanks to the Duchess, the government already has a role in the foundation’s administration, providing resources and guidance. And so the feud rages on, with the children clinging to the legacy their mother never wanted them to have. Leoncio and Liliane continue to live in separate wings of the palace, each imprisoned by the limbo to which Spanish law, and their intertwined fate, have condemned them. Gabriel remains consumed by his vendetta against their mother, and Pilar remains locked in battle with the rest of the family. The Duchess, with her relentless dedication to the archive and her disregard for her own children, left them with an acrimonious and bitter future. They had succeeded at gaining part ownership of her estate. But what they’d won seems more like a share in her disdain.
In an interview published Thursday on « The Weekly Show with John Stewart, » Cuban said he believes the fast-advancing technology will not impact jobs that require workers to think.
« So if your job is answering the question, ‘yes or no,’ all the time — AI is going to have an impact, » he said. « If your job requires you to think — AI won’t have much of an impact. »
Cuban, the CEO of Cost Plus Drugs, an online prescription service, said workers must supervise AI and ensure that the data the models are being trained on and the resulting output are correct.
« It takes intellectual capacity. So somebody who understands what the goal is, somebody who’s been doing this for years, has got to be able to input feedback on everything that the models collect and are trained on, » he said. « You don’t just assume the model knows everything. You want somebody to check — to grade their responses — and make corrections. »
AI’s recent advancement has raised existential questions on the future of work.
The World Economic Forum reported in 2023 that employers expected 44% of workers’ skills to be « disrupted » within five years, requiring a massive effort on worker retraining.
A McKinsey study, however, found that AI won’t decimate white-collar roles such as those in legal or finance. Instead, AI can potentially enhance those jobs in the long term by automating about 30% of overall hours worked in the US.
Cuban told Business Insider in an email that AI’s impact on any company’s workforce numbers will be on a case-by-case basis.
« Every company is different, » he said. « But the biggest determinant is how well the company can implement AI. »
