From high-flier to Chapter 11: Coworking spaces provider WeWork, once the biggest office tenant in Manhattan, has filed for bankruptcy in the US and is planning “to file recognition proceedings in Canada,” the company said in a statement yesterday. The filing does not affect the company’s locations or operations outside the US and Canada, according to the statement.

The company intends to continue operating in locations unaffected by the bankruptcyprocess and servicing existing members. Despite its vast real estate portfolio, WeWork has struggled to turn a profit. Previous attempts at debt restructuring have failed to save the company from its financial woes.

WeWork CEO David Tolley expects it to be a relatively quick process, telling the FinancialTimes he believes it could wrap in under seven months. WeWork’s bankruptcy filing allows it to shed costly leases, a common move for insolvent firms, the Financial Times adds.

The numbers haven’t been looking good for a while: The company — which was once privately valued at USD 47 bn and which went public in 2021 through a special-purpose acquisition vehicle — saw its shares fall to a low of USD 0.10 earlier this year. WeWork had signaled at the time that it could be facing bankruptcy.

Its collapse is the culmination of years of setbacks, starting with its derailed IPO plans back in 2019, leading to the need for a multi-bn USD bailout from SoftBank. Other shared office-space companies, such as Knotel and IWG subsidiaries, also faced bankruptcy due to the pandemic’s impact on working habits.

With Neuralink trials beginning soon, Elon Musk is making the leap from rocket science to brain surgery. Musk’s brain implant company, Neuralink Corp., is seeking a volunteer for its first human clinical trial after finally being granted FDA clearance to do so. The company has been testing this piece of technology on animals since 2018, killing 1.5k of them in the process.

The process is simple: The lucky contender will have a portion of their skull removed by a surgeon, and a large robot will then insert a series of electrodes and wires into their brain. They won’t be getting that piece of bone back — the microchip, really a computer the size of a coin, will remain there instead. They hope to use that technology to read and analyze the candidate’s brain activity, which will be relayed wirelessly to a nearby device.

This isn’t new technology. Severalcompanies have already created implants that perform basic tasks based on the candidate’s thoughts. But Musk has loftier dreams for Neuralink. In 2019, he promised symbiosis with artificial intelligence, and in Musk’s classic time management technique — unrealistic timetables — he promised human trials would begin in 2020.

If the product works as intended, it may change the life of mns suffering from physically debilitating diseases. But Musk seems more interested in using it to stream music directly to users’ brains. The arguments being raised revolve around Neuralink’s speedy progress in a field that necessitates slow-and-steady steps, as well as whether Musk — known for his manic and reactionary personality — is the ideal candidate to mass-produce mind-control devices.

Women — including mothers with young children — are leading the overall increase in labor force participation. Women of “prime age” — between the ages of 25 and 54 — in the US recorded a labor force participation rate of 77.8% last June, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. That figure is the highest in over 15 years, the jobs report notes, and is of particular interest after some 2.2 mn women dropped out of the workforce over the span of two months in 2020, leading some to expect to see a “ shecession,” or a women-led recession.

Here in Egypt, women’s labor force participation is much lower, coming in at 15.5% (compared to 69.2% for men’s labor force participation) as of 2Q 2023. Our overall unemployment rate rose 3 percentage points between February and June 2020 due to the pandemic, with women leading the drop in employment figures, highlights a survey by the International Labour Organization.

What’s behind the trend? In part, hybrid work models. With the covid-19 pandemic triggering a shift to remote or hybrid work, mothers with very young children (aged 0-5) — specifically those who hold a bachelor’s degree or are married — are “among the most … likely to be teleworking in 2023,” says a report from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. These two segments of the labor force “have made the most striking gains in pre-pandemic labor force participation,” the report notes, and are the only groups who have either returned to or surpassed pre-pandemic employment levels.

This is an impressive rise, considering the gender gap in labor force participation back in 2020: Even with a surge in overall hiring, men have fallen short in their labor force participation rate, as reflected in the BLS data. There was almost a one-to-one correlation between employment rates and remote work in fields like marketing and communications, according to research (pdf) using pre-pandemic data from economists at the University of Virginia and the University of Southern California.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows: Despite a steady global rise in remote work, experts disagree on how it affects productivity, but companies often pay less for these roles and tend to favor employees they see face-to-face more, the New York Times notes. In Egypt, we have a lower prevalence of hybrid work, with only around 15% of workers able to work from home as of February 2020, says the ILO survey.

Tags: