As he slowly came to grips the fact that the Vikings had failed to accomplish their ultimate goal last season, edge rusher Jonathan Greenard whipped out his phone and unleashed a stream of consciousness on social media.

Frankly, he wasn’t interested in acknowledging the 14 wins he was a part of, not when it ended with the Vikings getting blown out by the Los Angeles Rams in the first round of the playoffs.

“I think I was literally on the bus or on the plane or something,” Greenard said. “All I could think of was, like, ‘Bruh, we’ve got to do more. We’ve got to dig deep somewhere and find it because more is required.’ ”

His post on social media used those exact words — “MORE IS REQUIRED” — and he’s making sure that message resonates with the Vikings as they slowly start to get back to work.

It was something right tackle Brian O’Neill noticed as soon as he arrived back at TCO Performance Center. Every player had a shirt hanging in their locker with the new mantra, “MORE IS REQUIRED,” displayed prominently for everybody to see.

“It makes sense, right?” O’Neill said. “If we want a better result, we have to do more.”

As special as last season was for the Vikings, nobody was satisfied with how it ended, and it forced everybody ask themselves how they could be better.

That included general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and head coach Kevin O’Connell at the top. They sat down in the immediate aftermath of last season and tried to figure out what went wrong. It resulted in the Vikings spending more than $300 million in free agency as they were intentional where they needed to improve.

“The common theme is that we’re not getting over that hump,” safety Josh Metellus said. “Shoutout to the front office for being able to look in the mirror and say, ‘These are the things we need to get done to be able to get to that championship.’ ”

A perfect example of how the Vikings are approaching everything came when O’Neill was asked about what he wants the identity of the offense to be moving forward.

“I don’t really care,” O’Neill said. ” I want to win, and however that happens I’m good with it. Whatever we need to do to score more points than the other team, if that’s throwing 75 times or running it 75 times, let’s go do it. We’ve got to make something shake here.”

That mentality has been reflected in the work the Vikings are putting in right now.

“The guys are literally working their tails off,” Greenard said. “You would think that we’ve got a game coming up.”

Sometimes he actually needs to remind himself that isn’t the case.

“I’m like, ‘Relax. We’re in April,’ ” Greenard said with a laugh. “Man, I want to be the best version of myself for my team, because I feel like if I’m that for them, everything else can flow.”

In the meantime, Greenard doesn’t plan on changing his messaging, not until the Vikings have accomplished their ultimate goal of winning a Super Bowl.

“I don’t care how many wins we get or how much success we have,” Greenard said. “I’m always going to say more is required.”

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By Avery Newmark, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Looking for an easy city escape this spring? Chicago is just a quick flight from many American cities, often at surprisingly affordable rates. You’ll touch down in a city bursting with incredible art, amazing food and experiences straight out of your favorite movies.

Here’s how to live your best Chicago weekend this spring.

Bueller? Bueller?

Re-create “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” with a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago. This museum spans more than a million square feet and is home to masterpieces like Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist” and Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” For the full Ferris Bueller experience, follow the museum’s official movie tour, which takes you through six key artworks from the film.

Next, take in the city from 1,353 feet up at the Willis Tower Skydeck (formerly the Sears Tower), just like Sloan did in the movie. And, of course, no Ferris-style day is complete without catching a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. Built in 1914, this legendary ballpark is where Babe Ruth famously called his shot in the 1932 World Series. After the game, celebrate a Cubs win (fingers crossed) with a drink at one of Wrigleyville’s lively bars.

Float through history on an architecture boat tour

Yes, it’s touristy. And you may not even be all that into architecture. But this tour is hands down one of the best ways to experience Chicago. You’ll catch one-of-a-kind city views along the river while guides point out architectural gems like the corncob-shaped Marina City towers and the Tribune Tower’s dreamy neo-Gothic design. If you can, opt for an evening tour — the city lights reflecting on the water are nothing short of incredible.

People hang out as Chicago’s skyline is reflected in the Cloud Gate sculpture, otherwise known as “the Bean,” in Millennium Park on May 15, 2022. (Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune/TNS)

Snap a selfie at “The Bean”

No trip to Chicago is complete without a stop at Cloud Gate — better known as “The Bean.” This massive, mirrored sculpture in Millennium Park distorts the skyline (and your selfie) in the coolest way.

Laugh the night away at Second City

If you need a good laugh, head to the legendary Second City. This comedy theater launched the careers of Tina Fey, Bill Murray and Tim Baltz from “The Righteous Gemstones.” Shows run nightly with a mix of improv and sharp sketch comedy.

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Bite into an authentic Chicago-style hot dog

Chicago takes its hot dogs seriously. Anthony Bourdain once called them “the finest in the land,” and he wasn’t wrong. Piled high with mustard, pickles, sport peppers, relish, onions, tomatoes, a dill spear and celery salt — no ketchup allowed — it’s a flavor-packed classic. Grab one at a neighborhood stand or hit up local favorite Superdawg.

Swing by the legendary Green Mill Jazz Club

Cap off your evening with live jazz at the Green Mill, a historic club that was once Al Capone’s go-to hangout during Prohibition. The vibe is old-school cool, the music is top-notch, and if you want the full experience, order a whiskey soda or a local beer — this isn’t a craft cocktail kind of place.

©2025 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visit at ajc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By MATT O’BRIEN

Artificial intelligence “agents” are supposed to be more than chatbots. The tech industry has spent months pitching AI personal assistants that know what you want and can do real work on your behalf.

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So far, they’re not doing much.

Visa hopes to change that by giving them your credit card. Set a budget and some preferences and these AI agents — successors to ChatGPT and its chatbot peers — could find and buy you a sweater, weekly groceries or an airplane ticket.

“We think this could be really important,” said Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, in an interview. “Transformational, on the order of magnitude of the advent of e-commerce itself.”

Visa announced Wednesday it is partnering with a group of leading AI chatbot developers — among them U.S. companies Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity, and France’s Mistral — to connect their AI systems to Visa’s payments network. Visa is also working with IBM, online payment company Stripe and phone-maker Samsung on the initiative. Pilot projects begin Wednesday, ahead of more widespread usage expected next year.

The San Francisco payment processing company is betting that what seems futuristic now could become a convenient alternative to our most mundane shopping tasks in the near future. It has spent the past six months working with AI developers to address technical obstacles that must be overcome before the average consumer is going to use it.

For emerging AI companies, Visa’s backing could also boost their chances of competing with tech giants Amazon and Google, which dominate digital commerce and are developing their own AI agents.

The tech industry is already full of demonstrations of the capabilities of what it calls agentic AI, though few are yet found in the real world. Most are still refashioned versions of large language models — the generative AI technology behind chatbots that can write emails, summarize documents or help people code. Trained on huge troves of data, they can scour the internet and bring back recommendations for things to buy, but they have a harder time going beyond that.

“The early incarnations of agent-based commerce are starting to do a really good job on the shopping and discovery dimension of the problem, but they are having tremendous trouble on payments,” Forestell said. “You get to this point where the agents literally just turn it back around and say, ‘OK, you go buy it.’

Visa sees itself as having a key role in giving AI agents easier and trusted access to the cash they need to make purchases.

“The payments problem is not something the AI platforms can solve by themselves,” Forestell said. “That’s why we started working with them.”

The new AI initiative comes nearly a year after Visa revealed major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the U.S., making physical cards and their 16-digit numbers increasingly irrelevant.

Many consumers are already getting used to digital payment systems such as Apple Pay that turn their phones into a credit card. A similar process of vetting someone’s digital credentials would authorize AI agents to work on a customer’s behalf, in a way Forestell says must assure buyers, banks and merchants that the transactions are legitimate and that Visa will handle disputes.

Forestell said that doesn’t mean AI agents will take over the entire shopping experience, but it might be useful for errands that either bore some people — like groceries, home improvement items or even Christmas lists — or are too complicated, like travel bookings. In those situations, some people might want an agent that “just powers through it and automatically goes and does stuff for us,” Forestell said.

Other shopping experiences, such as for luxury goods, are a form of entertainment and many customers still want to immerse themselves in the choices and comparisons, Forestell said. In that case, he envisions AI agents still offering assistance but staying in the background.

And what about credit card debt? The credit card balances of American consumers hit $1.21 trillion at the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve of New York.

Forestell says consumers will give their AI agents clear spending limits and conditions that should give them confidence that the human is still in control. At first, the AI agents are likely to come back to buyers to make sure they are OK with a specific airplane ticket. Over time, those agents might get more autonomy to “go spend up to $1,500 on any airline to get me from A to B,” he said.

Part of what is attracting some AI developers to the Visa partnership is that, with a customer’s consent, an AI agent can also tap into a lot of data about past credit card purchases.

“Visa has the ability for a user to consent to share streams of their transaction history with us,” said Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s chief business officer. “When we generate a recommendation — say you’re asking, ‘What are the best laptops?’ — we would know what are other transactions you’ve made and the revealed preferences from that.”

Perplexity’s chatbot can already book hotels and make other purchases, but it’s still in the early stages of AI commerce, Shevelenko says. The San Francisco startup has also, along with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, told a federal court it would consider buying Google’s internet browser, Chrome, if the U.S. forces a breakup of the tech giant in a pending antitrust case.

By ANN LEVIN

Sophie Gilbert, a London-based staff writer for the Atlantic magazine, has taken a survey of the Anglo-American pop culture landscape, and her findings aren’t pretty. In a new book, “Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves” she concludes that after decades of social and political progress for women, the patriarchy has come roaring back in the 21st century with the new-old belief that women’s proper place is in the kitchen and bedroom, not the boardroom or the military.

As a millennial herself, Gilbert wanted to explore, from the perspective of a critic, how and why seemingly every genre of entertainment in the 2000s, from movies and music to TV and fashion, was sending girls the message that it was OK to look and act like a pinup girl again.

“Why were we so easily persuaded of our own inadequacy? Who was setting the agenda? Why, for decades and even now, has virtually every cultural product been so insistently oriented around male desire and male pleasure?” she writes.

This cover image released by Penguin Press shows “Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves” by Sophie Gilbert (Penguin Press via AP)

The reasons are manifold, and the results indisputably clear. In music, the “ferocious activist energy of riot grrrls” gave way to the “ hyper-commercialized Spice Girls” over the course of the 1990s. Meanwhile, the emergence of hardcore rap celebrated misogyny and sexual violence against women. In literature and later in film, “Bridget Jones pioneered an enduring new female archetype: the trainwreck.” In fashion, powerful supermodels who knew what they were worth and demanded to be paid for it “were phased out in favor of frail, passive teenagers.”

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But in Gilbert’s view, nothing was as influential as the proliferation of porn, which has trained both men and women to see the latter as objects, “as things to silence, restrain, fetishize, or brutalize.” She nods to it in the meaning of her double-barreled title. “Girl on girl” is both a genre of porn and an acknowledgement of the way women have been turned against themselves and each other by the forces of postfeminism.

Chapter by chapter, Gilbert methodically shows how the backlash against second- and third-wave and riot grrrl feminism fueled the rise of incel culture, trad wives, the stay-at-home girlfriends on TikTok, and much more. There is a lot to unpack here, but it is well worth the effort. Especially if you, like Gilbert, are still coming to grips with the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and the reelection of Donald Trump last year, demonstrating the evident appeal of his message to both men and a sizable minority of women.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews