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• When I first met my partner’s mom, we couldn’t communicate because we didn’t share a language.
• I realized she was learning about me through my food preferences and remembering every detail.
• Even when words fail us, food has become our shared language.

When my boyfriend’s mother and I met a few years ago, I was nervous. Not because I didn’t think we’d like each other, but because we couldn’t communicate. I’m American, and she’s Italian. I didn’t know how we’d be able to make a good impression on each other without speaking.

While I’ve been learning Italian (and she’s picked up some English), she has another language she communicates in: food.

While many people cook for the ones they love, she also pays attention to my preferences, which makes me feel seen and cared for. She’s not just saying “I’m taking care of you,” to me, she’s also saying “I’m interested in who you are.”

My relationship with food was different growing up

Growing up, I hated onions. Every time my mom made pasta, she’d add lots of onions to the jarred tomato sauce. I recall asking her if, just once, she could add the onions in after I had served myself, but there on my dinner plate, was always onions.

This continued when I was older. I always felt like she didn’t know the types of food I liked or ate. For example, I only started liking mushrooms a few years ago, but when I’d visit her, she told me I loved mushrooms. One year, on my birthday, she brought out a chocolate cake and told everyone it was my favorite. It’s not, I like carrot cake.

My boyfriend’s mom started paying attention

My boyfriend’s mom started asking if I liked the dishes she cooked. She wanted to know which ones I enjoyed, what was too spicy, and what flavors I liked best. Looking back, I can tell that she was gathering data and taking notes in her head.

Now, when her son and I come to visit, she has the fridge stocked with foods we both like. She has planted dill and cilantro in her garden (even though she doesn’t eat them). She knows I like my food saltier. She keeps a bottle of balsamic vinegar under the sink even though nobody else uses it, and she keeps my preferred spices and teas in her cupboard for when I visit. If my boyfriend and I miss a holiday with her, she puts some of our favorite foods in the freezer for when we return.

She noticed we had become vegetarians before we told anyone

It all clicked last year when she told my partner and me that she had noticed we had stopped eating meat, and so for an upcoming event, she had requested vegetarian options for us. We hadn’t told anyone about our lifestyle change, but she knew. She had been paying attention.

By contrast, when I became a vegetarian for the first time in my early 20s, I faced a lot of pushback from my parents. My mom stocked the fridge with lots of beef and offered to cook me chicken. When I became a vegetarian a year ago at 31, it was easier because I had more support this time around.

Of course, my boyfriend’s mom has tried her hand at making vegetarian versions of classic Italian dishes, and she keeps the freezer stocked full of beans for when she cooks meat for others at the table.

Food became our shared language

I’d like to think I’m special, but I know my partner’s mother has a mental notebook of what everyone in the family likes to eat (and the rest of my boyfriend’s family shares the same talent).

She saves cookies for people, she knows who likes lemon on their food and who doesn’t, and what each of us will want on our pizza. In the four years I’ve known my boyfriend’s mom, I’ve learned enough Italian to communicate: to thank her, to tell her I’m happy around her, to learn how to bake with her, and to ask her what food she likes.

When words aren’t enough (and when my attempt at Italian sounds very broken), we can eat together.

• I use AI regularly for work, parenting, and everyday problem-solving.
• My children are learning to question AI’s answers rather than accept them blindly.
• I believe AI can encourage curiosity and resilience when used intentionally.

It is the bottom of the third inning, and I am on my phone.

My boys play travel baseball, and I have spent about 4,000 hours on the bleachers watching nothing happen for long stretches. I have also, during those hours, written code for my AI startup, rehearsed answers for an investor interview, pressure-tested a crisis comms plan, and argued with Claude about the infield fly rule.

My kids see me do this.

I could easily be the cautionary tale about modeled behavior. Mom on her phone, missing the game, checked out behind a screen, later surprised by her kids’ device addiction. But AI is a welcome guest in my household, and here’s what I think my three young boys are learning from it.

AI is not social media

My husband Pete is a product leader. Whip smart and chronically online in the way that tech people are. Before AI, he scrolled incessantly — X, Instagram, Slack, group chats — struggling to quiet his overactive mind with passive digital consumption. Since he started using AI, he’s given up social media entirely.

Pete now spends his free time talking with Claude, interrogating ideas, using them to build things, and working through business problems that used to just rattle around in his head. Our kids don’t see us doomscrolling anymore; they see us thinking out loud.

The tool reflects the person using it

My eldest son, Dash (13), has a Claude subscription and has started building complex games on Roblox. AI acts as his math tutor when 7th-grade geometry gets too much for his parents.

He says Claude is really good at helping him with school work, but he is also aware that kids can use it to cheat on assignments and tests. He already understands something many adults don’t: AI reflects the judgment of the person using it.

Dash is also skeptical in ways adults often aren’t. He complains that AI search results are frequently wrong, having once tried to look up the specs for an e-bike model and being confidently lied to. He rolls his eyes at what he calls “obviously fake” AI-generated videos because the spelling in the captions is wrong, people appear to be levitating, or poorly lip-syncing.

“I haven’t been fooled yet,” he told me proudly.

We only fear what we don’t understand

I work in tech PR, so I’m familiar with how quickly world-ending narratives form around new technology, and how rarely they capture what something feels like in practice. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still fearful of what will happen to my kids’ future jobs, and their ability to think critically or problem-solve as adults. But in our house, we engage intentionally with AI to better understand it (and, as a consequence, fear it less), and replace lower-quality attention with higher-quality attention.

It also just makes life run better, which is its own kind of demystification. Before a family trip, we used to spend hours down TripAdvisor rabbit holes, half-reading travel blogs written by people trying to sell us luggage. Now we listen to a history podcast in the rental car and ask Claude for the top five things to know about wherever we’re going.

Driving into Alberobello last summer (my 72-year-old dad in the back seat alongside the boys), we already knew we were walking into a UNESCO village of 1,500-year-old trulli — stone huts built without mortar so peasants could dismantle them fast when tax collectors came. Sure, we could have Googled that, but pulling up Claude and asking questions on the fly turned sightseeing into a conversation. Even my dad, who’d never touched AI before the trip, became a power user.

I don’t know if any of this makes us an atypical family. As with most parenting decisions, it’s probably too early to say whether I’ve miscalculated and will end up as the aforementioned cautionary tale.

I do know when the top of the fourth inning is, and that my son is stepping into the batter’s box, and that’s when I put down the phone.

• A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter.
• Sign up for the weekly BI Tech Memo newsletter here.

AI coding agents are increasingly being trusted to work without human oversight.

New data from Cursor shows the share of AI-generated code changes reaching production without a separate manual review step has jumped in the past six months.

This suggests developers are becoming more comfortable letting AI handle larger chunks of the software-development process on its own.

While Cursor doesn’t directly measure the quality of fully autonomous code, it says AI-generated code is surviving at higher rates than before, a sign that developers are finding the output increasingly reliable.

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

• Our family’s friendship with an Argentine au pair deepened during the 2022 World Cup.
• Argentina’s championship run became a shared tradition and lasting connection.
• Years later, that friendship inspired a trip to Argentina and continues across continents.

When an au pair from Argentina joined my family in 2022, I expected convenient childcare and a cordial friendship.

I did not expect to wake up at 4 in the morning to watch her country play in the World Cup. After all, my family had never even watched an entire soccer game together.

But by the end of the tournament, we were painting our faces blue and white, putting photos of Kylian Mbappe in the freezer, and watching the games on cellphones in the grocery store.

Without warning, we had become Argentina fanatics.

We watched Argentina win the 2022 World Cup

The night before the semifinals, my husband, daughters, and I decided to display our team spirit. We cut triangles from printer paper at the kitchen table. Then we filled each pennant with drawings of sky-blue stripes, golden suns, and attempts at soccer balls and threaded the whole thing onto a length of light blue yarn.

The next morning, we hung the bunting above the television, ensuring it would be one of the first things our au pair, Yulca, would see when she woke up.

A few days later, with Argentina heading for the final, Yulca carefully packed the bunting as we traveled for early family Christmas celebrations. We draped it along my parents’ fireplace mantle, hoping Santa might grant an early wish.

We watched on the edges of our seats through every minute of regular play, every minute of extra time, and every kick of the penalty shootout. When Gonzalo Montiel scored the final penalty, Argentina had won one of the most dramatic matches of all time.

Yulca collapsed into tears. Video calls poured in from relatives celebrating in the streets back home. My dad, who had patiently sat through every minute of the match, was finally free to change the channel.

Amid the chaos, I opened my phone and ordered a last-minute Christmas gift: an official Argentina championship jersey. The $120 price tag was far beyond anything I’d buy for myself, but I knew we’d just experienced a moment worth commemorating with stripes, embroidery, and the all-important third star.

Our au pair taught us about her culture

Over the next nine months, Yulca showed me how to fold empanadas and taught us the many rules of drinking mate. She wore the jersey all the time, a symbol of both her Argentine pride and the close relationship she’d developed with our family.

When Yulca returned to Argentina in 2023, something strange happened: the girl who sobbed when her brother called from the streets of their hometown was homesick for the United States. We exchanged messages and voice notes almost daily, bridging the distance even when we couldn’t visit each other. Unfortunately, air travel to Argentina is wildly expensive.

But in 2025, a flash sale on tickets to Buenos Aires showed up on Instagram one day when I was feeling financially reckless. A dream trip that had always felt too expensive was suddenly within reach. The tickets even included extra luggage, which was perfect for hauling a large suitcase of Yulca’s items across the equator.

Before I knew it, my daughters and I were boarding a plane.

We flew to Argentina to visit our au pair

When we arrived in Yulca’s small hometown in northern Argentina, the first order of business was to unpack the oversize suitcase. Before the trip, I’d searched the nooks and crannies of my house to find everything she wasn’t able to fit in her suitcase when she’d returned home.

I’d packed a special item right on top: the homemade World Cup bunting. The memories of watching the World Cup together flooded back as we hung it over her bedroom window, 5,000 miles away from where we last cheered for Argentina together.

But my daughters and I needed our own reminders of that World Cup. So, we made our way to downtown Posadas to purchase Messi jerseys.

Now, Yulca wears her American-purchased jersey in a small town in Argentina, and I’m wearing my knockoff in North Carolina. After washing mine just a couple of times, the decals are visibly cracked, and the backing of the embroidered logo doesn’t lie flat.

But every time I wear this $12 jersey that cost nearly $7,000 in travel to get, I smile as I say to myself: there’s nothing more Argentine than a fake jersey from Paraguay.

As we get ready to cheer for la Albiceleste from two different hemispheres, the third stars on our jerseys represent a long-awaited victory for Argentina.

For us, the stars are a physical reminder of the monthlong soccer tournament that cemented a friendship strong enough to span 5,000 miles.

• Country music star Brad Paisley is protesting a proposed data center near the Nashville Zoo.
• Paisley called it a “monstrosity” and urged local leaders to block its construction.
• The Nashville Zoo’s petition to stop the data center development has almost 530,000 signatures.

A proposed data center near the Nashville Zoo is drawing pushback from local community members, including 14-time Country Music Award winner Brad Paisley.

Paisley called the proposed data center — backed by DC Blox, a digital infrastructure company — a “monstrosity” in an Instagram video on Friday. He compared the development, which he said was unfolding without the permission of residents, to AI stealing intellectual property from musicians.

“It’s without the blessing of those who are going to be affected by it,” Paisley said. “Look, Nashville, we have to fight this. We have to set a precedent, because if we can win this and we can stop that from happening where we don’t want it, it’s a precedent that will help other communities.”

He added, “I’m calling on our elected leaders to find a solution to this that’s going to benefit everybody.” Paisley criticized the data center in a separate video earlier this month, calling it an “absolute nightmare scenario.”

In a statement, DC Blox said it was aware of Paisley’s “social media commentary.” It said the data center, which would have an eventual capacity of about 50 megawatts, is not intended to power AI. Data centers have been around for decades, hosting data for things like websites and social media. Large AI data centers, meanwhile, typically have capacities in the hundreds of megawatts or more.

“We want to clarify that the data center is designed to function as a digital connectivity hub and not as a large AI factory,” the company said in its statement. “Designed to meet Middle Tennessee’s surging digital demands, the data center is part of the essential infrastructure that supports and enables the entire community, from residents to local businesses.”

DC Blox said such data centers actually help artists like Paisley.

“In fact, it is this digital infrastructure that enables artists like Mr. Paisley to distribute and stream their music globally, engage with fans on social media, and utilize video platforms to share their voices,” the company said. “All these daily digital services rely on data centers and internet connectivity, as is being proposed for Nashville, and without them, the music industry would not be what it is today.”

A growing number of Americans are resisting large-scale data centers, which are essential to powering AI. Tech companies want to build more facilities to support rapidly advancing AI systems, but are struggling to convince Americans to support construction in their communities. Many critics are concerned that the sprawling developments could worsen water resources, air quality, noise levels, and local wildlife.

While the Nashville data center is smaller than many of the country’s larger AI-focused facilities, its proximity to the Nashville Zoo has raised concerns about its potential impact on the animals and the surrounding environment.

A permit filed with Nashville’s Department of Codes and Building Safety in May said the nearly 70,000-square-foot single-story building would sit less than three miles from the zoo.

In response, the zoo urged community members to sign a petition to stop the data center earlier this month. As of Saturday, the petition has gained almost 530,000 signatures.

“How are we to know this new data center will not lead to irreversible damage to the animals we exist to protect?” the zoo wrote in its petition. “We cannot afford to find out years from now how this facility has negatively impacted our 1.4 million visitors, our local community, or the 3,000 animals entrusting us with their care.”

A spokesperson for the zoo told Business Insider that it’s exploring whether to take legal action.

“As we move forward, we have taken the next step in our fight against the proposed data center. Our Land Use Attorney has filed a zoning appeal with the city,” the spokesperson said. “The goal of this appeal is to overturn the permits that DC BLOX has filed and that have been approved. Additionally, we are working with an environmental rights lawyer to assess any legal actions we can take in regards to the protected species on our property and the proposed data center’s property.”

Some local politicians are also fighting back. Council Member Rollin Horton has proposed legislation that would cap the size of data center construction and where they are built. Council Member Courtney Johnston has proposed a temporary data center moratorium in Nashville and Davidson County.

“Like so many municipalities, Nashville was caught flat-footed, not having ‘data center’ defined in our code for purposes of regulating that land use and protecting our sensitive areas like the zoo, schools, parks, and neighborhoods,” Johnston told Business Insider. “We are working hard to rectify that with a current text amendment going through the legislative process.”

In addition to the moratorium, Johnston said she is challenging the zoning administrators’ land use determination alongside the Nashville Zoo’s counsel.

“The Southern Environmental Law Group is also closely watching this development as it relates to the Endangered Species Act,” Johnston said. “As a community and a government and as the elected representative of the zoo and this area of Nashville, I am, and we are, doing everything we can to stop this project from being built out next to our zoo.”

• The last time I applied for a job was more than 20 years ago.
• My résumé needed a major update, which led me to go through old paper files.
• After a lot of work, I applied and landed a job.

Recently, I paid off my student loans ahead of schedule. Along with the joy of saying goodbye to 10 more years of payments, I unexpectedly felt open to doing something completely different.

I stepped away from my marketing career in 2023 to focus on something I was more passionate about, writing. I will continue to write, but I’ve realized that I crave more regular interaction with people in my day-to-day life.

I spotted a listing at a local high school for advanced placement (AP) test proctors — a job I hadn’t known existed. That’s how I found myself applying for a job for the first time in 20 years.

I had forgotten a lot

The last job I completed a traditional application for was in corporate America in 2004. Since then, my jobs have come through networking and recruiters, some of which didn’t even require a formal application.

Applying for a job in 2026 was a new experience. It started similarly with an online application requesting work experience, education, and references. The difference this time around was me, my priorities, and 20 years of work experience.

My résumé needed a major update

I was surprised to realize that I hadn’t updated my résumé since 2014. One of the biggest challenges was finding the dates I needed to include. When did I start grad school? Did I start that job in April? How old are those references? It was hard to know these things for sure.

Thank goodness for LinkedIn. I had kept that updated with my writing work, the marketing role I left in 2023, and many of the dates I hadn’t thought about in years.

As for the earlier part of my career, well, that took some digging. I found a few hard copies of outdated résumés from the early 2000s; one even had my maiden name on it. They were a good starting point, though, and a trip down memory lane.

These were crafted before AI, electronic résumé readers, and writing résumés tailored to job descriptions. They aren’t riddled with corporate speak and data. There are no budgets or sales figures to prove what I had achieved. They are, of course, one page.

The process was involved

Once dates and work experience were located and entered, I could move on. Now it was time for step two, verifying what I said in my application.

For starters, every job working with kids seems to be done through a system that requests the employer’s name, phone number, email, and a contact name. That’s a lot of information that I can admit I didn’t readily have at hand.

This even included my stint as a preschool teacher in high school, a children’s hospital in college, and volunteering at my kids’ schools this year.

Just thinking about the preschool I worked at in 1996 was an experience, let alone finding a phone number and remembering my manager’s name.

Next was fingerprinting. A process that the employer made super easy. It’s all electronic, no black ink involved.

I landed a job

My application was submitted successfully. Soon after,k I was hired, trained, and proctored multiple tests.

Being a proctor, I was in a high school, engaging with staff in a new way, not as a parent or volunteer, but as an employee. I was with students in a role of authority instead of feeding them dinner, and that felt like a good fit.

By day two of proctoring, I realized how much I loved being in the school and helping the students and staff.

Since then, I’ve obtained my substitute teaching license and completed another application with a local school district. It went much faster this time!