What's on Your Mind?

After a long day in the office, you catch a sight of yourself in the bathroom mirror: Hair, frizzy. Skin, dry. Eyes, puffy. “Office air” has claimed yet another victim. The term, which has recently gone viral on TikTok, puts its finger on a complaint office workers have suffered in silence for years. Coined by content creator Noa Donlan, her videos documenting the phenomenon have recently amassed millions of views across TikTok and Instagram. “I first noticed it as a student, but it became unmistakable once I started working full-time four years ago,” Donlan told People in a recent interview. “I’d leave the house feeling put together, then catch myself in t…

Tony Soprano was a master of coercion. Through violence, extortion, and bribery, he rose to the top of his industry, crushing competitors and delivering strong margins, despite some unfortunate employee turnover along the way. But even Soprano began to suspect there might be another way. His psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, encouraged him to try a more collaborative approach, to become a better listener, and to engage with subordinates more thoughtfully. Soprano paused, thought about it, and, after considering the implications, asked, “Then how do I get people to do what I want?” That’s the Tony Soprano Problem. And today, every leader feels it. We want to be th…

Generative AI has made it possible for individuals to perform tasks that once required entire teams. Today, a single marketer can produce campaign assets, analyze data, and generate content at scale. A product manager can prototype, test, and iterate without relying on engineering; and developers can ship reams of high-quality code written by machines. The result is the rise of the “superpowered individual” who can do the work of many. It’s tempting to extrapolate from this that human collaboration is becoming obsolete. If AI can replicate or augment the cognitive contributions of multiple individuals, why bother with the friction of teamwork at all? In our work w…

It’s hard enough to publish a book, but getting people to buy it is an entirely different battle. As new platforms reshape how readers gather and interact online, authors are finding that sometimes platforms built to showcase writing can also double as powerful engines for discovery. The most high-profile example so far might be Girls creator Lena Dunham, who bolstered the traditional press tour for her new memoir Famesick with interviews and features on the newsletter platform Substack. In an interview with Arielle Swedback for her On Substack newsletter (which is published, of course, on Substack), Dunham made the case in blunt terms: “Someone I trust told me t…

It’s the three-row SUV of big-box retail. Target’s bold red shopping cart has always anchored customers inside a Target store, promising a middle-class fancy experience. For the next few years, Target will be replacing its fleet of half a million shopping carts with an even beefier model that promises to hold more stuff while making it easier to maneuver around the store. It’s the first all-plastic design Target will launch nationwide, while paradoxically being more sustainable than Target carts of yore. And yes, it’ll even hold your big dumb cup. “The cart for us is the first touchpoint that the guest meets right when they walk in the store,” says Sarah Deut…

No matter who you are, searching for work while unemployed is a difficult, sometimes soul-crushing endeavor. Across the country, job seekers are desperately looking for ways to stand out in an increasingly competitive job market as AI complicates the search process and career boards fill up with nonexistent “ghost jobs.” Still, some job seekers apparently enjoy an advantage that others don’t: they have wives who’ve stepped in, leveraging their own resources and networks to try and find them a job. Journalist and writer Anne Helen Petersen first noticed this phenomenon on her own Substack Culture Study. There, she saw multiple requests from women looking for job o…

Generative AI has done something strange to the economics of knowledge work: it has dramatically lowered the cost of generating ideas. Any reasonably capable professional with a chatbot can now produce a dozen plausible strategies, memos, product concepts, or marketing plans before lunch. In some cases, AI lowers the cost of execution too—but not nearly as far or as fast. Shipping even one of those ideas still takes weeks, months, or years. The result is already showing up across workplaces: more initiatives than teams can carry, more tools than anyone can learn, and more priorities than any reasonable person can hold in their head. Leaders keep layering on new wo…

Whataburger is rethinking the fast-food kids meal. The Texas-based burger chain just relaunched its Kids Whatameal with a new focus on an engaging packaging experience over a singular plastic toy. In a sense, the packaging is now the toy: The meals come in a bright, white-and-orange box with a handle on top, an interactive maze printed on the side, and one of five collectible sticker packs inside. “We wanted to build something that was a bit more intentional and experience-led,” Scott Hudler, Whataburger’s chief marketing officer, tells Fast Company. But the experiential strategy is first visible in the food options themselves—essentially by providing kids wit…

A yearslong battle between Sony PlayStation and its customers might soon be coming to an end after the approval of a preliminary settlement agreement for a class-action lawsuit on April 29. The lawsuit dates back to 2023, involving Sony’s decision to stop selling game-specific vouchers by third-party vendors, meaning the company would no longer allow the purchase of digital download cards from retailers like Amazon, GameStop, or Walmart, leaving Sony as the sole seller. Plaintiffs argue that the company violated federal antitrust law by eliminating competition for the sale of the game-specific vouchers, according to a press release by the plaintiffs’ law firm. …

Nearly every solopreneur starts their business saying “yes” to everything. After all, you’re trying to get clients and build a business. Revenue is unpredictable, and your brain treats every opportunity like it might be the last. But when you work for yourself, every “yes” comes at a cost. Agreeing to one project means declining another — or giving up time you can’t get back. Defaulting to “yes” is how solopreneurs end up overcommitted, underpaid, and working on projects that don’t move their business forward. Saying no is a business skill and, like any skill, it gets sharper with practice. Saying no to bad-fit clients Not every client who reaches out is…

The AI data center building boom isn’t fueling just water shortage concerns and GPU-maker Nvidia’s coffers. It is now also firmly making memory chip makers and their investors significantly richer. Yesterday, two of the largest memory makers, Micron Technology and Sandisk, saw their stock prices soar more than 11% in a single trading session. And those gains are small potatoes compared to their five-day increases. But why is this happening? Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, all four of the Nasdaq’s major memory chip makers saw their stock prices jump. Those four memory makers include: Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) Sa…

As a CEO operating within the global supply chain—where every purchase is tied to efforts to end forced and child labor—I think often about what work is for: not just making it faster, but making it matter. That’s what makes the latest Gallup findings on AI so striking. The headline insight isn’t productivity. It’s something more revealing: We’re becoming more efficient, but not more engaged. Employees say AI is making them more productive, yet global employee engagement has declined for two consecutive years, now sitting at just 20%. We’re optimizing how work gets done, but for many people, we’re eroding the experience of doing it. That gap is a failure of intent…

Weight loss culture in America is nothing new: Our collective obsession with being thin is more than a societal ideal—it’s practically a religion. But in a country where self-improvement through hard work is lauded, the quick-fix GLP-1 weight loss revolution—without the “no-pain, no-gain” labor—might just rub people the wrong way. That’s the suggestion of a new Rice University study published last month in the International Journal of Obesity. According to the study, despite the popularity of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound and their impressive effectiveness, and despite that many people praise the dramatic results, your friends and neighbors may still …

“No more reading emails, OK?” says tech founder and content creator Jason Yeager’s satirical boss character MyTechCeo in a recent TikTok skit. “I want your AI reading my AI-generated email—and answering my email.” It’s a parody, but only just. AI emails are proliferating across industries. In October, LinkedIn’s CEO Ryan Roslansky said he uses AI for almost every “super high-stakes” email he sends. And a recent survey from the email verification software company ZeroBounce found that one in four respondents admit to using it daily for drafting or editing their own emails. On Reddit, employees swap stories about bosses who use AI “to answer every email at wo…

Middle managers are at a crossroads right now. With the “Great Flattening” reducing management layers, many managers face an uncomfortable choice: stay put and risk layoffs, burnout, and declining mental health, or try a different career strategy entirely. Fractional work presents a new solution to this growing career dilemma. In a fresh spin on part-time work, fractional workers perform a “fraction” of a full-time job, often for multiple companies at once. For companies, middle managers “going fractional” actually solves several problems. First, fractional middle managers form a workforce that scales upward to meet business needs but can be reduced in a downtur…

One of the most daunting tasks when you start a new job is developing trust with your new colleagues. Whether you’re new to the world of work or an experienced hand, you are still starting at ground-zero with your new colleagues when you walk in the door. While you’re likely to get the benefit of the doubt, you still need to develop a rapport quickly and help people to see that you can be relied on. Here are four suggestions to get you started. 1. Find a couple of quick wins You want your new colleagues to see that you can be successful at your work. Unfortunately, many projects can take a while to complete and determining whether those projects are successful …

Is it just me or is every app update lately promising to “reimagine my workflow” with a new generative assistant? My toaster probably has a chatbot now. We’ve reached a point where software is trying so hard to think for us that it’s actually making it harder to just do the work. In other words, when everything is “smart,” everything is noisy. If you’re feeling the same AI fatigue while trying to manage a career, a household, and a few side projects, here are three pure-utility apps that are actually free and refreshingly, wonderfully dumb. Joplin If you’ve been in the tech world for a while, you remember when Evernote was the king of the mountain, before i…

Fire Rover is all about responding quickly and efficiently to crises: The Farmington Hills, Michigan-based tech company—which has now cracked the Inc. 5000 list five years in a row—works to detect and extinguish industrial fires before they get too big. So it’s fitting that Will Schmidt, Fire Rover’s CEO, joined the company in a moment of crisis, too. Schmidt says he initially met the Fire Rover team at a trade show in early 2018, back when he was still working for Pacific Western Bank. The firefighting company so interested him that he made a trip out to their Detroit-area headquarters for a tour. “It didn’t really fit into any box that I had at the time—it w…

On Wednesday, Nvidia and Corning announced a $500 million deal to build fiber-optic cables to power AI data centers. For Nvidia, which manufactures graphics processing units key to building and training top-tier AI models, the partnership will help the chipmaker reduce latency and energy consumption for AI systems and likely accelerate its move to co-packaged optics. This would have fiber connections more directly integrated with chips. Per a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Nvidia now has a pre-funded warrant to purchase 3 million shares in Corning and the option to purchase 15 million more. As part of the agreement, Corning says it will increase its optic…

The boom in data center construction is taking up much of the supply of high-tech components, especially processor and memory chips. This demand is squeezing consumer device makers, which are having trouble acquiring enough chips. This is happening even though data center servers and smartphones use different types of chips. The key distinction between consumer electronics and data centers is what they need chips to be optimized for. Smartphones and PCs require low power use, thermal efficiency, and tight integration. Data centers that run AI systems such as large language models, or LLMs, require maximum compute power, memory bandwidth, and storage throughput. To…

The cybersecurity community went on alert when Anthropic announced on April 7, 2026, that its latest and most capable general-purpose large language model, Claude Mythos Preview, had demonstrated remarkable—and unintended—capabilities. The artificial intelligence system was able to find and exploit software vulnerabilities—the most serious type of software bugs—at a rate not seen before. The news ignited concern among the public, world governments, and the information technology sector about the capabilities of today’s AI to undermine cybersecurity, with some people framing the model as a global cybersecurity threat. Claiming that it would be too risky to release …

In New York, lawmakers are considering a pied-à-terre tax on second homes worth $5 million or more. It’s part of a growing wave of legislation focused on taxing the rich. But some wealthy people aren’t too happy about it. On an earnings call this week, Steven Roth, chief executive of Vornado Realty Trust, likened the rhetoric around taxing the rich to hate speech. Steven Roth Roth was specifically referring to what he called a “spat” between New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and billionaire Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. Mamdani recently filmed a video saying he would “tax the rich” outside Griffin’s multimillion-dollar penthouse. (The building, as noted …