Hi! High (cost) fashion… The 2026 Met Gala wrapped Monday night, raising a record $42 million for the Met’s Costume Institute as individual tickets reached $100,000 — up from $75,000 last year. Today we’re exploring:

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Harley-Davidson hopes getting “Back to the Bricks” will help turn its motorcycle business around

Harley-Davidson is at a weird fork in the road. Sales of its traditional motorcycles, still very much the heart of the business, have been sputtering now for years, and the less said about LiveWire — the company’s electric segment where they’ve sold less than one motorcycle a day in some quarters — the better.

Luckily for investors, CEO Artie Starrs, who took the top job last October, thinks he can see a route out of the business’s current bind, hitching his hopes on cheaper models and a new “Back to the Bricks” strategy to get the 123-year-old company roaring again.

As part of the shift, the company revealed yesterday that it’s planning to cut $150 million in costs, target $350 million in EBITDA across its core business in 2027, and will focus on improving profitability for its network of exclusive dealers — a clear “competitive advantage,” per the release. 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Insurance

Zooming out a little further, one unexpected part of the HOG biz has actually been holding up okay in recent years, despite being less thrilling than the bikes the business built its name on.

While it shrunk in the first quarter of 2026, Harley-Davidson Financial Services — a segment that offers customers financing options for their bikes, insurance, and a branded credit card to let everyone know that while you may be participating in late-stage capitalism’s relentless spending march like everyone else, you’re actually doing so with a counter-cultural, Easy Rider vibe — was nearly a $1 billion business last year, up more than 2.6x from 2005.

In the same time frame, the amount of revenue that Harley-Davidson brings in from selling actual bikes and associated products has slipped almost 40%.

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Ask.com just quietly shut down after almost 30 years in operation

While it’s getting easier to forget in the days of increasing chatbot dependence, people in the early digital age often took their queries to a search engine where Jeeves — a sharp-witted, sharp-dressing English butler, named for the character in P.G. Wodehouse’s early 20th century book series — would guide your way, on a site later renamed “Ask.com.” Now, one of the last remaining bastions of the wholesome early cyberspace era has politely excused himself for good.

Terribly sorry, sir

After being bought by InterActive Corp. (IAC) in 2005 and losing the Jeeves branding a year later, the Ask.com homepage now reads: “Every great search must come to an end... As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business.”

Founded by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California, Jeeves first appeared on the web in 1996 — a whole year before Google debuted its now-dominant search engine. Still, as is often the  case for first movers in business, it wasn’t long before search-and-answer stalwarts like Alphabet’s engine and Yahoo overtook Jeeves... before now themselves getting overshadowed by AI.

Per Google Trends data, queries for “ask jeeves” fell by ~60% between 2005-06 as it rebranded; then, searches for “