A runoff in the Dallas suburb of Frisco is testing whether anti-Muslim rhetoric, prominent in G.O.P. primaries this year, can win over a broader set of voters.

The inanity of the leftists who’d censor such a film shouldn’t distract us from the right-wing nightmare it reveals.

Competitions that give soldiers a brief break from the front have a festival-like atmosphere, a mix of potentially deadly weapons and frolicking children.

There are 12,060 reasons to clear your weekend calendar. That is the piece count of the new Lego Sagrada Família. It’s the largest, most complex Lego set ever made by piece count, designed around one of the most visually audacious buildings in history. Priced at $800, it is not for everyone, but it sure beats paying for a flight to Barcelona to fight the swarms of tourists buzzing around this iconic landmark.

Lego has produced oversized sets before, many of them bloated monuments to their ambitions, but this one earns every single brick. Translating Antoni Gaudí’s century-spanning, organically erupting, mathematically impossible basilica into a display object you can fit on a bookshelf is not a flex. It is a massive design problem that Lego designers have solved masterfully. 

The set, measuring 24 by 18.5 by 15 inches, is truly the ultimate Lego Architecture masterpiece, a product line that translates most famous architectural marvels into bricks. It is a genuine attempt to bring one of the most visually complex buildings ever conceived—a cathedral that has been under continuous construction since 1882 and still isn’t finished—into a display object that captures its essence in an impressionistic way, but with apparent perfect precision.

The mission, as Lego designer Rok Žgalin Kobe frames it, was not to simplify Gaudí’s vision but to honor it. “We felt an immense responsibility to do justice to the Sagrada Família through this design,” Žgalin Kobe says. “Our goal was to honor Gaudí’s vision with the utmost respect, capturing the rhythm of the basilica’s construction, its extraordinary complexity and ambition, and translating that into an immersive building experience.” 

The key for Žgalin Kobe’s translation is not replication but psychological suggestion. The cluster of bricks that he uses to build the towers, for example, does not recreate the soaring stone nave brick by brick; it gives your brain just enough geometric information to recreate one in your mind. Lego works because the brain fills the blanks, and the better the designer, the less the brain has to work to complete the illusion. With the Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s towers are encrusted with organic, nature-inspired ornamentation—stone that looks like it grew rather than was carved. 

Surreal masterpiece

The Sagrada Familia is one of the great unfinished stories of modern civilization. Construction began on March 19, 1882, commissioned by the devout Catalan bookseller and philanthropist Josep Maria Bocabella. The first architect, Francisco de Paula del Villar, abandoned the project in 1883 after disagreements with Bocabella’s architectural advisor, Joan Martorell, leaving little more than the crypt complete.

Antoni Gaudí, then 31 years old and already radically unconventional, took over that same year and threw out everything, reimagining the structure as a vertical forest of organic towers, parabolic arches, and stained glass designed to flood the interior with colored light. He knew he would never see it finished.

“My client is not in a hurry,” he reportedly said. On June 7, 1926, at age 73, he was struck by a tram on the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. He died three days later in a hospital, on June 10—this year marks the centennial of that death—with about 15% of the building complete.

The Spanish Civil War dealt a further blow in 1936, when anarchists broke into the site, destroyed Gaudí’s original plans and plaster models, and burned his studio, requiring 16 years of painstaking reconstruction from photographs and surviving fragments before building could properly resume.

On February 20, 2026, workers finally installed the upper arm of the cross atop the Tower of Jesus Christ, the central spire Gaudí always intended as the tallest, reaching 566 feet. The Sagrada Família is now officially the world’s tallest church, surpassing the Ulm Minster in Germany. Pope Leo XIV will bless it on June 10—144 years of construction and counting.

The Lego set mirrors this layered history in the most literal way possible. The build sequence follows the basilica’s actual historical construction order. You begin with the foundational apse and crypt—the oldest surviving section of the real building—move through the Nativity Façade and the dramatic Passion Façade, rise through the grand naves and the Western Sacristy, complete the six iconic towers, and finish with the Eastern Sacristy and the Glory Façade.

Building this set is, in a precise and intentional sense, a reenactment of 144 years of architectural history, compressed into the course of a weekend. As Žgalin Kobe puts it: “Balancing scale and precision, while remaining faithful to a living monument that has been evolving for more than a century, was a unique design challenge, and one we’re incredibly proud of.”

One detail captures Lego’s fidelity to the source material better than anything else: the stained-glass window effect, engineered to echo the way colored light moves through the real basilica’s interior. Gaudí designed the Sagrada Família’s windows with deliberate orientational logic, with warm ambers and reds on the west to capture the setting sun, cool blues and greens on the east for morning light, creating an atmosphere inside the building that shifts hour by hour.

The Lego version cannot move with the sun, obviously, but the designers have built the chromatic suggestion directly into the model’s structure, so that the completed set reads as luminous rather than merely decorative, engineered to be admired from every angle and its inside.

Building a retail brand from scratch is harder than it looks. However, after transforming her jewelry business into a $1 billion brand, Kendra Scott is sharing her learnings with other entrepreneurs, including the three elements that were crucial to her success.

When she started her business, wholesale was key, Scott explained during the Inc. Small Business Week Series. “I didn’t have money for advertising and marketing,” she said. “But Nordstrom, they’re a huge megaphone for my brand. I was in their books or their catalogs. They were doing the marketing for me. And that was driving my direct-to-consumer business or e-commerce business.”

Scott described the ideal retail structure as a pyramid with three sections: a strong wholesale presence at the base, a specialty or experiential retail store in the middle, and e-commerce at the top. “Those three elements together have to work and harmonize together to have a successful business and brand,” she said.

Sharing advice with other entrepreneurs

It’s advice that Scott has passed along to other founders, including Kelly McGee and Cristina Ashbaugh, the co-founders of Yardsale—a ski gear brand specializing in magnetic ski poles that Scott backed as a guest Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank. “Wholesale gives them this opportunity to really learn a lot about their customer and their product experience,” she said. “And, like I said, it’s the foundation for building a really successful brand.”

As a skier, Scott took interest in the brand and closed the deal at $250,000 for 10 percent equity, with a $5 royalty on each sale until she recovers $300,000. “You skiers deserve each other,” Daymond John, a fellow Shark, commented at the time.

Scott’s advice has already started to pay off for McGee and Ashbaugh. “Thanks to Kendra’s guidance, we’ve secured an expansion into REI, marking a major milestone for us, and we’re very excited for the road ahead,” Ashbaugh said.

Turning her company into a $1 billion business

In 2008, Scott opened her first jewelry store in downtown Austin. Since then, she has grown the brand to more than 130 retail locations across the U.S. and over 2,500 employees. She credits her success to engaging with customers and building a company that treats them like family.

“It was this village—this community of love and support—that we started in those very early days of Kendra Scott that has just continued to grow,” she told Inc. in 2022.

Scott knows the middle part of the three-section pyramid well. Leaning into the experiential part of retail, her stores offer jewelry customizations and hat fittings. In March, she opened Beau’s Bar in Nashville. The space, which is Western-inspired, allows shoppers to enjoy cocktails while browsing jewelry, apparel, and boots.

“Retail today is all about experience. If you are a retailer and you are just opening a store and putting product on a shelf and hoping that’s going to build your brand, you are going to fail,” she said.

The four walls of a retail store have to mean something, Scott said. Customers need to feel like they’re stepping into a community that reflects a brand’s culture. The goal is to create an experience so compelling that customers think, “These are my people.”

“Kendra always told us that it’s so important to be experiential and not transactional. And I think that’s been something that’s been really core,” McGee said.

Before opening a permanent storefront in their hometown of San Francisco, McGee and Ashbaugh put Scott’s advice to the test by hosting a series of pop-up events. When it opens, their new space will bring together everything she recommended by operating as a coffee shop, a retail store, an office, a warehouse, and a design studio.

“We heard Kendra in the back of our heads say you cannot just make a store,” Ashbaugh said. It appears they took her words to heart.

—Amaya Nichole, News Writer

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

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Research published in the American Journal of Public Health details the connection between ultra-processed foods and the tobacco industry when it comes to production, strategy and marketing.

(Image credit: Shana Novak)