• Bruce Springsteen met Patti Scialfa at a New Jersey rock club, the Stone Pony, in the ’80s.
• Scialfa joined Springsteen’s E Street Band in 1984, and the two got married in 1991.
• Here’s what we know about their relationship.

The new Bruce Springsteen biopic, “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” portrays The Boss as a tortured genius and unreliable lover — and while that may have been true in the early ’80s, the real-life Springsteen has been happily married for over three decades.

Springsteen and his wife, Patti Scialfa, both grew up in New Jersey. The pair first spoke on the phone when he was 21 and she was 17, according to Springsteen’s 2016 autobiography, “Born to Run.” She answered a newspaper ad seeking background singers for Springsteen’s band, but he told her there was too much traveling involved for a high schooler.

After a few more chance meetings over the years, in 1984, Springsteen saw Scialfa perform at the Stone Pony, a now-famous rock club in Asbury Park, New Jersey. She sang the Exciters’ hit “Tell Him,” and Springsteen said he “fell in love” with her voice.

“We found ourselves standing in a buzzing crowd at the back bar as I introduced myself to her,” he wrote, “and the rest was a long, winding semi-courtship.”

Scialfa joined Springsteen’s E Street Band in 1984

After hearing her sing, Springsteen and Scialfa continued to meet up semi-regularly at the Stone Pony “for a cocktail and a dance,” he wrote.

While preparing for the “Born in the USA” tour, Springsteen invited Scialfa to join his live ensemble as a backing vocalist, guitarist, and keyboardist.

Scialfa made her onstage debut with the E Street Band on June 29, 1984, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The tour’s namesake album, which quickly became a smash hit and was eventually certified diamond, had been released just a few weeks earlier.

“Through Patti’s addition, I wanted to accomplish two things. One, I wanted to improve our musicality,” Springsteen wrote in his autobiography. “I wanted dependable, well-sung harmony vocals.”

“Two, I wanted my band to reflect my evolving audience, an audience that was becoming increasingly grown-up and whose lives were about men and women,” he added.

Scialfa remains an active member of the E Street Band to this day.

Springsteen met his first wife, Julianne Phillips, that same year

Springsteen and Phillips were reportedly introduced by their agents in October 1984. He was 35, and she was 24. “We hit it off and began seeing each other regularly,” Springsteen wrote.

Springsteen and Phillips had a whirlwind romance and married in 1985, in Phillips’ hometown of Lake Oswego, Oregon.

At the time, Phillips was a working model and aspiring actor, mostly appearing in music videos and made-for-TV movies.

Despite what Springsteen called a “press feeding frenzy,” the couple kept the details of their relationship relatively private. In his autobiography, Springsteen said he was plagued with fear that he couldn’t make it past two or three years with a partner, since he’d never done it before.

“Following our wedding I was struck by a series of severe anxiety attacks,” he wrote. “I was scared, but I did not want to scare the wits out of my young bride. It was the wrong way to handle it and created a psychological distance at just the moment I was trying to let someone into my life.”

Springsteen and Scialfa fell in love while he was still married to Phillips

Springsteen’s bond with Scialfa grew stronger during the 1988 “Tunnel of Love Express” tour, performing songs he wrote about his ambivalent and fearful experience as a husband.

“Patti was a musician, was close to my age, had seen me on the road in all of my many guises and viewed me with a knowing eye,” Springsteen wrote in “Born to Run.” “She knew I was no white knight (perhaps a dark gray knight at best), and I never felt the need to pretend around her. Julie had never asked me to either; I just did.”

Their friendship turned into a romance when his wife was away filming on location, leaving him alone in New Jersey. He and Scialfa met up, as Springsteen said, “under my ostensible excuse of working on our ‘duets.'”

“There came a moment when I looked at Patti and saw something different, something new, something I’d missed and hadn’t experienced before,” he wrote. “In my life, Patti is a singularity. So, it started. At first, I told myself it was just ‘a thing.’ It wasn’t. It was the thing.”

Springsteen said he broke the news to Phillips as soon as he came to grips with the depth of his feelings for Scialfa, and they quietly separated. He added that he regretted how he handled their split.

“I placed her in a terribly difficult position for a young girl and I failed her as a husband and partner,” he wrote of Phillips.

Phillips filed for divorce in August 1988, citing irreconcilable differences.

Springsteen and Scialfa have been married since 1991 and share three children

Springsteen and Scialfa moved in together after finishing the “Tunnel of Love” tour in August 1988, eventually settling in California. At first, Springsteen struggled with avoidant habits and wrote that Scialfa was “patient… to a point.”

The couple fought often, and eventually, Scialfa “threw down the gauntlet and laid it out. Stay or go.”

Though he was tempted to retreat to solitude, Springsteen said he couldn’t bear to “throw away the best thing, the best woman, I’d ever known.”

“I stayed,” he wrote. “It was the sanest decision of my life.”

Springsteen and Scialfa welcomed their first child, Evan James, in 1990. They got married the following year at their estate in Beverly Hills.

Their only daughter, Jessica Rae, was born in December 1991. She would go on to become a professional equestrian, winning a silver medal in the team jumping competition at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in 2021.

The couple welcomed their youngest child, Samuel Ryan, in January 1994. He works as a firefighter in New Jersey.

In 2022, Springsteen and Scialfa became first-time grandparents when Samuel welcomed a daughter with his partner.

Springsteen has also credited Scialfa with teaching him to be a more present parent, instead of prioritizing work.

“We created a life and a love fit for a couple of emotional outlaws,” Springsteen wrote of his wife. “That similarity bound and binds us very close.”

• As more employees return to the office, some are being met with limited space — and bedbugs.
• While open floorplans are now in style, people used to sit in small cubicles.
• Offices used to have typing pools with dozens of typewriters. In 2025, we all have laptops.

Thanks to the popularity of shows like “Mad Men” and “Masters of Sex,” people love to see what offices have looked like over the past century … often through dense clouds of cigarette smoke.

Before email, Teams calls, and Slack, messengers wearing roller skates passed notes between office workers, while laptops were preceded by typewriters, calculators, and stacks of paper.

And while some office complexes for major firms today — think Nvidia’s futuristic office in Santa Clara or Apple’s Cupertino headquarters — feature vast atriums filled with trees or outdoor amenities like swimming pools and volleyball courts, some 20th-century office workers were lucky if they got a window.

These vintage photos of offices reveal how far companies have come in regard to technology, interior design, and even safety.

See what your office might have looked like decades ago.

One glaring difference between offices now and in 1940? Cigarettes were everywhere.

When Gallup polled US adults in 1944, 41% said they smoked — compare that to around 11% of US adults who smoked in 2022, per the CDC.

As such, in the mid-20th century, smoking was common everywhere, from grocery stores to homes to workplaces.

Technically, there are still some states where it’s legal to smoke inside an office — the only federal bans on smoking are on planes or in federal buildings.

However, you’d be hard-pressed to find an office building that allows people to light up at their desks.

Pipes were common sights as well. Today, offices have designated places outside for smoking.

The popularity of the traditional tobacco pipe has been steadily decreasing since the ’90s, though they’re making a comeback with hipsters, The Times of London reported in 2024.

Before every desk had a computer, there was more space to spread materials out.

This image of a design office in 1935 is a far cry from the tech-heavy workplaces of 2025.

An open-plan office used to look a little different.

Now, an open-floor office typically has giant tables with multiple stations at it, not individual desks.

Before electronic stock tickers made it possible to see the stock market in real time, employees printed out the news on ticker tape to distribute.

The last ticker tape machine was released in 1960 — they were first invented by Thomas Edison in the late 1800s.

Ticker tape has two legacies that live on in 2018. First, the stock prices running along the bottom of your TV screen are still called stock tickers. And second, ticker tape was given a second life when New Yorkers discovered that ticker tape made great confetti.

Ticker-tape parades still happen, but shredded paper is used instead.

It was a lot harder to transcribe calls back then.

This secretary appears to be writing down a conversation she’s having with someone on the phone, which she is listening to using a proto-speakerphone device.

Today, there are apps that can record a phone conversation, and headphones mean you don’t need to broadcast the conversation to everyone around you.

That telephone amplifier is also obsolete — most phones now have built-in speakerphones.

As technology advanced, every desk became equipped with its own typewriter.

The typewriter was invented in 1867 but didn’t become popular until a couple of decades later, during the Industrial Revolution. It became people’s job to record facts and figures, and the typewriter was the easiest way to do that.

They stayed popular for over 100 years.

Bookkeepers used a combination of computers, typewriters, and calculators.

If you take a closer look, you might notice that all these bookkeepers are women, a trend that’s still prevalent.

In 2022, 86.7% of bookkeepers were women, according to Data USA, which cited US Census Bureau data, so maybe not everything has changed.

When typewriters became obsolete, offices implemented computers and cubicles, which gave people a little privacy.

Cubicles first entered our lives in 1968, when they were invented by Robert Propst, who wanted to improve upon the typical open bullpen office. He thought cubicles would increase productivity and give workers privacy.

At first, cubicles flopped. But when companies realized that using cubicles would increase the number of people that could be crammed into a space, they really took off. The ’80s and ’90s were a booming time for cubicles.

Now, many offices have abandoned them in favor of the original open office space — just take a look at the offices of Shopify, DropBox, or even Business Insider.

However, there has been a more recent push to bring cubicles back.

Before email and Slack, some offices communicated via messengers who were given roller skates to speed up the process.

Probably due to violating dozens of workplace safety protocols, and the advent of computers, roller skating in the office is a thing of the past.

This office had a designated “tea lady” who would walk around providing refreshments.

Some offices still offer amazing perks.

Now, everything is digital and located in the cloud. But for years, all important records had to have physical copies.

This machine handled 80 individual record cards a minute — now, data can be uploaded to the cloud in seconds.

Phone booths seem so old-fashioned today.

These transparent ones still look cool, to be clear.

So do typewriters.

Maybe they’ll come back, though. As Business Insider’s Hannah Towey pointed out in 2021, physical media objects like records, typewriters, and film cameras were all in high demand.

Note the ashtray, rotary phone, and old-fashioned radio — it’s a far cry from what your typical desk looks like now.

It’s impossible to overstate just how different our workspaces used to be just 30 years ago.

It makes you wonder: How different will they be 10, 15, or 30 years from now?

• Year-over-year inflation rose to 3.0% in September from 2.9%, just below the forecast.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t published other key data releases during the government shutdown.
• The Federal Reserve’s next rate decision, informed by data like inflation, is next week.

The year-over-year inflation rate heated up to 3.0% in September, back to where it stood in January.

Economists expected last month’s rate to be 3.1% after an uptick to 2.9% in August.

Core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, also increased 3% over the year in September. It was also expected to be 3.1%, which would have matched rates in July and August.

Core CPI increased 0.2% over the month between August and September, short of the 0.3% forecast that would have matched July and August’s rates.

CPI increased 0.3% over the month between August and September, below the 0.4% forecast and the previous rate.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics was supposed to publish September’s consumer price index report on October 15, but the release was delayed when the government shut down on October 1. The shutdown, which is now the second-longest in US history, has affected the compensation and employment of many federal workers and some agencies’ operations.

“The delayed September CPI print showed slight stubbornness, primarily driven by goods inflation, with services inflation indicating signs of moderating,” Ryan Weldon, investment director and portfolio manager at IFM Investors, said.

BLS said the price of gas was the biggest factor in the monthly rise. That rose 4.1% over the month, way above the previous 1.9% increase. However, the gas index fell 0.5% over the year.

The food index rose 3.1% year over year. It rose 0.2% over the month, less than the previous 0.5% increase. Beef and veal prices rose 1.2% over the month but 14.7% over the year, the largest year-over-year rise since March 2022.

The BLS’s jobs report wasn’t published earlier this month due to the shutdown and hasn’t been rescheduled. The Fed is meeting on October 28 and October 29 to discuss rates, and given the lack of official data, they may use private data releases and previous jobs reports to understand how the labor market has been performing.

“In our view, the Fed is increasingly focused on supporting the labor market, especially as inflation risks appear transitory and tariff-driven,” a note from global financial services company Raymond James before the latest CPI report said.

Large companies and small businesses have been figuring out whether to increase prices, reduce head count, and make other business changes due to tariffs and economic uncertainty.

While the full picture of the job market remains murky, today’s CPI report at least gives Fed members some insight into prices. The Social Security Administration will also be able to use the fresh inflation figures to calculate and announce the annual cost-of-living adjustment for benefits.

The Fed cut rates for the first time this year in September, providing some relief to Americans’ wallets, and is expected to make another rate cut. CME FedWatch showed an overwhelming probability of a 25-basis-point cut next week and a slim chance that the range will be held steady.

With inflation ticking up less than expected and a soft job market, the Fed will likely cut rates again.

“This will be framed as an insurance cut, with hopes that by December the shutdown is over and the Fed has a clearer read on jobs,” Olu Sonola, the head of US economic research at Fitch Ratings, said.

Median inflation expectations for one year ahead increased for the third straight time in a New York Fed survey, rising from 3.2% in August to 3.4% in September.

• AI, AI, AI.
• Fried chicken, fried chicken, fried chicken.
• Which one matters more to you?

While the tech and finance world continues to debate whether we’re in an AI bubble, one thing is for sure: People love AI!

For proof, like no further than Apple’s App Store, where OpenAI’s ChatGPT app and its Sora video spinoff are atop the “free app” rankings, and …

Whoops? So maybe we love AI, but we love fried chicken more?

Answer: We love — or are at least interested in — both things. But the reason Dave’s Hot Chicken is currently at the top of App Store rankings — above Sora and ChatGPT — is really simple: This week, the fast food chain, which counted Drake as an early investor, gave away free sandwiches to anyone who used the app to order the sandwiches.

Cue lots of downloads, lots of press coverage, and funny scenes like this.

I’m not personally a big Dave’s fan. But at least one of my kids loves it, so I’ve been spending a lot of money on the hot chicken chain. I’m not saying that’s the reason the company was sold in a deal that valued it at $1 billion earlier this year. But it didn’t hurt?

But this is not a story about my discretionary spending. It’s really a story about how Apple’s App Store rankings work. Because while it’s reasonable to think that the rankings are measuring sheer popularity, that’s not the case: They are generally measuring recent velocity of downloads. (Apple doesn’t disclose its formula publicly, but developers have been making informed guesses about this for some time.)

So a hot new app that’s getting a flurry of downloads will rocket to the top — but that doesn’t mean it’s going to stay there.

If you see a top app stay at the top of the app rankings over an extended period of time — like ChatGPT has — then you’re likely seeing an app that has a lot of new downloads and a lot of overall downloads. That is a truly popular app.

But it also means you should exercise caution when a buzzy new app comes out and rockets to the top of the charts, as Sora has done in recent weeks.

Maybe that indicates that lots of people are using Sora all the time. But it could also mean that a lot of people are hearing about Sora — which is still technically limited to users who have invites — and are checking it out.

Whether they’re sticking around is another matter, and we won’t know about that for a while.

• Francis Ford Coppola is auctioning luxury watches from his personal collection.
• Coppola invested over $100 million in “Megalopolis,” which underperformed at the box office and left him broke.
• “I need to get some money to keep the ship afloat,” Coppola told The New York Times.

After selling two of his vineyards to help finance his passion project “Megalopolis,” director Francis Ford Coppola is auctioning off some of his personal possessions to make ends meet.

The legendary filmmaker behind “The Godfather” movies and “Apocalypse Now” took a major gamble when he invested over $100 million of his own money to self-finance his latest movie, “Megalopolis.” But with the movie only generating just over $14 million worldwide since it opened in theaters last September, he’s looking for cash to recoup his losses.

The answer? Auctioning seven of his luxury watches, including one Coppola designed himself that retails at $1 million, according to The New York Times.

“I need to get some money to keep the ship afloat,” Coppola, 86, told the Times. The auction will be done through Phillips, an auction site that specializes in watches, on December 6.

The most exclusive watch Coppola is selling is one he designed himself in collaboration with F.P. Journe, a Swiss watch company. Instead of conventional clock hands, the center features a glove hand. The fingers disappear and reappear in various configurations depending on the hour. It retails for $1 million.

The other watches include two Patek Phillipes, a Blancpain Minute Repeater, an IWC Chronograph, a different F.P. Journe, and a Breguet Classique. All range in estimated prices from $3,000 to $240,000.

Another path to recouping some of his money is licensing “Megalopolis” to streaming platforms, but Coppola has been reluctant to take that option, believing his epic sci-fi tale set in a futuristic New York City needs to be seen in theaters.

“Many of my films earn out over time,” Coppola told the paper, citing another gamble he took decades ago when he self-financed most of “Apocalypse Now.” That movie, now considered a classic, has gone on to sell millions of tickets, Coppola said.

The difference is, along with movie tickets, “Apocalypse Now” also generated revenue for Coppola through sales of physical copies in different viewing formats, from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray. Those avenues are either extinct or significantly less profitable today, so they likely won’t play a major role in helping “Megalopolis” get in the black.

Since the release of “Megalopolis,” Coppola has told various publications he is broke despite being in preproduction on his next movie, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel, “The Glimpses of the Moon.”

“I don’t have any money because I invested all the money that I borrowed to make ‘Megalopolis,'” he said on the podcast “Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin” in March. “It’s basically gone. I think it will come back over 15-20 years.”

A rep for Coppola did not respond to requests for comment.

• Director Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” debuted in select theaters this month.
• Del Toro said he wanted Victor Frankenstein’s “arrogance” to mirror tech bros.
• He also told NPR’s “Fresh Air” that he’d “rather die” than use AI.

Although “Frankenstein” is a fictional Gothic novel, director Guillermo del Toro took some real-world inspiration from Silicon Valley for his version.

During an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” podcast, del Toro said he wanted the film’s titular character — Victor Frankenstein — to mirror tech bros. Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” published in 1818, tells the story of a scientist who assembles a creature from corpses and brings it to life.

“I did want to have the arrogance of Victor be similar in some ways to the tech bros,” del Toro said. “He’s kind of blind, creating something without considering the consequences, you know? And I think we have to take a pause and consider where we’re going.”

The tech industry has gone all in on AI, which has rapidly advanced over the last several years. Startups like OpenAI helped make the tech more accessible with models like ChatGPT, forcing legacy companies like Google and Microsoft to play catch-up. In April, UN Trade and Development estimated that the AI market will hit $4.8 trillion by 2033.

Despite the tech industry’s excitement about AI, some critics have expressed concern over its impact on employment, the environment, human connection, and privacy, among other things. Some people, including Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, have said the technology needs clear safety guardrails as it’s scaled.

During the interview, del Toro railed against AI. He said he’s not interested in incorporating the tech into his work.

“AI, particularly generative AI, I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested,” del Toro said. “I’m 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak. I really don’t. The other day, somebody wrote me an email, ‘What is your stance on AI?’ And my answer was very short. I said, ‘I’d rather die.'”

A representative for del Toro told Business Insider that he had no further comment.

“Frankenstein” debuted in select theatres on October 17. The film will make its Netflix premiere on November 7.