The NBA is back following contentious labor negotiations, the NFL has caught up from its own labor strife with a playoff race in full, Tewbotastic effect, and Women’s Professional Soccer could be going nonprofit: It’s an interesting time in sports business. What better way to keep the conversation going than add one of the country’s most famous sports franchises to the list of GOOD Company Project finalists?
The Green Bay Packers are one of the NFL’s most storied teams, with legendary players and coaches like Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr, and Brett Favre. The team has been to five Super Bowls, winning four—including the first ever played and the most recent contest last year. The current team is undefeated and on pace to contend for the title once again. Like many NFL teams, the Packers maintain an extensive philanthropic effort, donating $2.5 million to nonprofit organizations last year, establishing a foundation dedicated to community development, and participating in the league’s anti-child-obesity campaign. The team was recognized as the best sports franchise in the country by ESPN the Magazine this year. What makes the Packers unique, however, is that they are community-owned and managed, the only team in the NFL that is literally owned by the fans. That allows them to do things other teams can’t, like banning advertising from inside the stadium and keeping ticket prices low. The Packers’ latest stock offering, to fund stadium renovations, began this month and could provide a model for other community organizations in need of funding.
Professional sports isn’t necessarily the first place you look for social responsibility, but the mass appeal of leagues like the NFL and NBA make them ideal platforms to promote social impact, from individual athletes taking stands to an example like the Packers’ franchise that shows that non-traditional business practices can compete—in a very literal way—with their profit-focused counterparts.
For too many, access to clean drinking water is incredibly difficult. According to the World Health Organization, over two billion people live in water-stressed areas due to pollution, climate change, or population growth. However, engineering experts in Texas have developed a possible solution: just put on a jacket.
The engineers and researchers gathered at the University of Texas at Austin developed a prototype jacket that can pull drinking water out of thin air. The jacket could help anyone frequently in areas where drinkable water is scarce. This could be used recreationally by campers, hikers, and runners—but it could also save lives. Emergency responders, soldiers, and agricultural workers could also collect water for themselves and others simply by wearing it.
The technology behind the jacket is similar to the materials used in netting for water harvesting of air and fog. This time, however, the idea is to collect water while also being mobile.
“Water harvesting from air is usually imagined as a stationary device such as a box, a panel or a large sorbent bed,” said Guihua Yu, chair professor of the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute. “Here, we wanted to rethink the form of the technology. If the fabric itself can collect water from air, it opens a new direction for personal and portable water access.”
How does this jacket collect water?
The textile used to create the jacket was derived from a device the same team created. That device was a specially engineered hydrogel fabric made from biomass-derived materials. This hydrogel fabric takes moisture from the air and then releases it as water via condensation when it’s heated by sunlight. The water can easily be collected.
The jacket’s textile collects moisture from the air and funnels it into detachable harvesting units. The units can be placed into a foldable collector piece where they are heated to produce water. The material and system doesn’t just absorb water like other materials. Instead, it actively converts vapor into water while functioning as a piece of protective clothing.
The jacket is able to produce between 400 to 900 milliliters of drinkable water daily. This is a vast improvement upon other similar inventions that yielded less water and were significantly bulkier to wear. The jacket’s material could collect and produce more water over time and testing, depending on the humidity of the terrain.
Aside from creating clothing out of the material, the researchers hope to make backpacks, tents, emergency shelters, and other outdoor gear from it. The hope is that this could create more clean water access for disaster response units and everyday people living in water-stressed areas alike.
How much hydration do you need in the heat?
Until water-collecting jackets are commercially available, it’s important to have drinkable water nearby at all times, especially during the summer. When out in the heat, the Center for Disease Control recommends having a drink of water before working outdoors. Then drink a cup of water every 15 to 20 minutes. This can help keep your body cool and hydrated to prevent heat stroke. That said, stay alert and stay indoors if there is a heat warning in your area.
Photo credit: Yasin Akgul/AFP via Getty Images – Children look at developed film in a darkroom during an analog photography workshop held in southeastern Turkey on June 14, 2026.
Film photography is experiencing a resurrection, summoned by unlikely conjurers: Gen Z.
It wasn’t too long ago that analog photography – which uses photographic film and chemical processing – was declaredall but dead, relegated to the province of niche hobbyists and professional artists.
Digital cameras had taken over nearly all areas of photographic production. Film industry titans like Polaroidand Kodak had shrunk dramatically from their heyday, becoming shells of their former selves. Darkrooms, where students learned how to manually develop and print film, shutteredat high schools and college campuses across the country, replaced by digital labs. For most people, the spirit of analog photography was mainly channeled through Instagram filters.
In 2025, 35% of the 42 million active film camera users worldwide were reported to be between the ages of 18 and 30. The year prior, online searches for analog photography saw a 41% rise.
Disposable camera sales have been steadily increasing since 2023. The photography journal PetaPixel went a step further and announced 2024 as “film’s best year in decades,” as major brands have introduced new cameras in response to renewed demand and revived classic models. More than 30% of respondents to a 2024 Ilford Photo survey on film photography were in the 25-34 age group.
As I’ve witnessed more and more of my undergraduate art and design students embrace analog photography, I’m not seeing this as a trend rooted in a nostalgic yearning for the past. Instead, I’m seeing it as young people rejecting algorithms, breaking free from the alienation of social media and reacting to childhoods spent on Zoom and TikTok – a deliberate move to redefine the future of art, social connection and engagement with the world.
Pining for a ‘third place’
In my work as a historian of photography and lecturer at the University of Southern California, I’ll often ask my students about how they take photos – whether they’re using digital cameras their smartphones or analog devices.
This year, for the first time, some of my students discussed images they’d printed and the physical photography albums they’d put together of their friends and family. They talked about how they’d also been sending postcards, writing letters and tacking photographs to their bedroom walls.
New York Knicks forward OG Anunoby snaps a photo with a disposable film camera during the team’s victory rally on June 18, 2026, after winning the NBA Finals. Craig T. Fruchtman/Getty Images
This was a rhetorical move by social media companies, likely designed to help people feel as though they were in a familiar terrain of social connection. Yet the underlying business model of these platforms depended more on maximizing engagement and advertising revenue than on nurturing authentic relationships.
Everyone knows what happened next: The more connected young people became online, the more isolated and detached they started to feel. The COVID-19 lockdown pushed social life online even further, and researchers are only now starting to see how the combination of increased screen time and isolation negatively affected adolescents’ mental health. By 2023, 51% of American teenagers reported they spend at least four hours a day on social media.
I see the attraction of analog photography as a response to life lived through screens, a pathway toward community engagement and the desire for what sociologists call “a third place.”
Coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place,” third places are meant as a space separate from home and work. They offer a reprieve for the in-between, generating the conditions needed for creative cross-pollination. They might include a local cafe, a neighborhood writing group, a weekly Magic: The Gathering game or a college fraternity – any space that allows for social interaction and personal growth.
These spaces also combat loneliness. They get people out of their heads and into a community. Oldenburg also referred to them as “havens of sociability,” places or gatherings where people can arrive alone to join others, and the atmosphere is “democratic and festive.”
Analog communities IRL
In April 2026, the inaugural AnalogCon took place in Los Angeles. Organized by the Los Angeles Center of Photography, where I serve as executive director and chief curator, it was a festival for all things analog photography. It didn’t just serve as a third place for photography enthusiasts; it also showed how analog photography – as a practice, ritual and community – is flourishing.
Vendors, industry leaders, artists and teachers participated in the two-day event, which included exhibitions, panels, demonstrations and guided photography tours around Little Tokyo. The excitement and thirst for similar events was palpable.
Photography now joins a broader trend of a generational preoccupation with physical cultural objects and media. Although music streaming represents 82% of revenues generated in the music industry, vinyl records sales have been rising for over a decade, crossing the US$1 billion threshold in the U.S. in 2025.
But beyond that, record stores and video rental shops have become third places in their own right. There’s a big difference between selecting a film to stream from your bed and getting out of the house, going to a store and talking about movies with a clerk and fellow film enthusiasts.
Think about the sound a tape cassette makes when you open and close it, or the vibrant graphics on the covers of DVDs or VHS tapes. Think about rewinding or making a mixtape for your recent crush. These are objects of belonging that signal specific cultural moments, rituals and aesthetics, and many young people today are starting to experience them for the first time.
Now, think about gently inserting a roll of film into a camera. Think about choosing an angle carefully when snapping a photo, because the number of frames is limited and you want to make them count. Think about the thrill of discovery when the pictures finally emerge as objects on paper.
To me, these are more than fleeting trends. They signal a push against a digital culture that is designed to cultivate envy and reward outrage, insults and humiliation.
Instead, armed with rolls of film, more and more Gen Zers appear to be opting out of their algorithmic feeds in favor of experiencing life in ways that feel more deliberate, personal and tangible.
Photo credit: Heather Diehl/Getty Images – A stretch of Route 66 in Albuquerque, N.M., pictured on June 7, 2026. Towns and cities located along the highway are gearing up to celebrate the iconic road’s centennial.
Working in concert, the American Association of State Highway Officials and the Bureau of Public Roads adopted a uniform highway numbering system and corresponding map on November 11, 1926. The numbering system and map replaced the confusing patchwork of highways and trails, like the Lincoln Highway or the Old Trails Road, with an official network of numbered highways sanctioned by federal and state highway authorities.
Since then, a small group of these highways have attained the status of cultural icon. There’s Route 1, which snakes all the way from Maine to Florida. Route 101 is celebrated for its majestic views of the Pacific Ocean, while Route 6 was immortalized in “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac’s classic novel.
The most famous, though, is arguably Route 66, nicknamed the “Main Street of America” and the “Mother Road.”
Yet as the towns that dot the highway prepare to celebrate its centennial, I’ve found myself wondering what it is, exactly, that’s being celebrated.
As a historian of Route 66, I’ve written about how there are really two versions of this 2,448-mile (3,940-kilometer) stretch of pavement.
There’s the actual highway, which reflected the 20th-century expansion of the nation’s infrastructure. Then there’s the mythic highway – a cultural icon imbued with nostalgia for a specific, 20th-century idea of romance, adventure, freedom and the American West.
There was almost no 66
As state highway commissioners in the 1920s wrangled over the specifics of the nation’s new highway system, they prized highway numbers that ended in zero, since they indicated a cross-country route. The thinking went that these routes would get the most traffic and, with it, the most business.
Oklahoma State Highway Commissioner Cyrus Avery had been a big booster for a Chicago-to-Los Angeles road in order to juice highway traffic through the Midwest. He suggested calling it Route 60, claiming a coveted cross-country number.
But commissioners from Kentucky and Virginia objected, noting that Avery’s proposed road didn’t go from coast to coast. As an alternative, they suggested 62. Avery countered with a number that he thought had a better ring to it: 66.
With the numbering controversy settled, the map of America’s first highway system was approved. But another 12 years would pass before Route 66 was fully built out, making it the first U.S. highway to be paved end to end.
In this detail of the official highway system map adopted in 1926, Route 66 winds through New Mexico and Arizona before ending in Southern California. United States Geological Survey/Wikimedia Commons
Adventure, redemption and reinvention
While it took over a decade for the full, physical stretch of road to be completed, the making of the Route 66 myth began almost immediately.
Construction of the road had barely begun when Avery, John T. Woodruff and other prominent civic leaders along the highway’s path convened in January 1927 to form the U.S. Highway 66 Association to promote travel along the route.
The association began advertising Route 66 as the best West Coast travel route and even trademarked a slogan for the road, “The Main Street of America.” The association also sponsored spectacles like the Trans-American Footrace to help publicize Route 66.
The race, which started on March 4, 1928, in Los Angeles, received widespread media coverage. Reporters breathtakingly described the epic struggles of the racers, coupled with vivid descriptions of the Southwest landscape. The effect was a marriage of Route 66 to ideas of adventure and romance in America’s collective subconscious.
During the Great Depression and Dust Bowl years, thousands of migrants from the Great Plains and Midwest traveled west along Route 66, hoping to rebuild their lives in California.
Author John Steinbeck dubbed Route 66 the “Mother Road” in “The Grapes of Wrath,” likening it to an umbilical cord that delivered Oakie refugees fleeing the Dust Bowl in the Oklahoma Panhandle to a new life in California. Working for the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration, photographer Dorothea Lange documented the same Oakies fictionalized by Steinbeck. Her 1938 photograph “Family on the Road” captured a husband, wife and their two young children hitchhiking on Route 66 near Weatherford, Oklahoma, after losing their farm.
For families devastated by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, Route 66 served as a conduit for redemption and reinvention, inspiring author John Steinbeck to call it ‘The Mother Road.’ Bettmann/Getty Images
Together, Steinbeck and Lange helped imbue Route 66 with new layers of meaning tied to loss and redemption. Then, after World War II, Route 66 came to mythologize the postwar boom.
Bobby Troup’s 1946 song “(Get Your Kicks) on Route 66,” first recorded by the Nat King Cole Trio, cast the road as a postwar rite of passage. Millions of Americans went on to take family vacations to the American Southwest via Route 66, staying at roadside mom-and-pop motels, grabbing burgers at neon-lit diners and posing beside oversized roadside landmarks.
Myth versus reality
But the iconic imagery and myths of Route 66 are often at odds with the reality of the road.
I’ve come to see Troup’s song as encapsulating the tension between these two versions of Route 66.
In 1946, when Nat King Cole recorded “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” Cole and his band were unable to get their own “kicks” on Route 66. That’s because few businesses located along Route 66 were willing to serve them. Jim Crow-era copies of the Green Book – a directory of businesses that would accommodate Black road trippers – show just how few options there were.
‘(Get Your Kicks on)’ Route 66’ helped immortalize the highway in American culture. Al Drago/Getty Images
It would take passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – and subsequent enforcement efforts by the Justice Department – for the travel amenities and services along Route 66 to be equally available to all Americans, regardless of their race.
Yet by the time the highway’s motels, diners, auto repair shops and gas stations were open to all travelers, Route 66’s downturn had already begun.
In contrast to older mom-and-pop businesses, national corporate chain motels, restaurants and gas stations dominated the new interstate highway exits. Rather than risk exposing themselves to Justice Department Civil Rights scrutiny, they made it known that they welcomed all travelers, further enticing drivers away from older establishments.
Now, as Route 66 turns 100, there’s a gap between how the road is remembered by some and how it functioned for most. Free and easy travel on the road and “getting your kicks” were limited to white Americans. Much of Route 66’s iconography emerged from early highway association marketing efforts aimed at white Americans. Few African American or Latino travelers likely feel the same nostalgia.
Today, a lot of Route 66 nostalgia has a “back to the 1950s” vibe that celebrates pre-Civil Rights America as a purer, simpler, more authentic era. This faux-authentic America better reflects the place some Americans today wish they could live in – a less complicated, less diverse land of adventure, romance and opportunity, rather than the nuanced, complicated America they actually inhabit today.
Oversized neon signs, like at this Route 66 motel, enticed weary drivers to stop and stay, but these establishments were not available to all travelers. Al Drago/Getty Images
