What's on Your Mind?

In November 2025, nearly 300 designers began work on their submissions for the competition of a lifetime: the opportunity to design a bathroom for one of the most famous architects of all time. The competition called on designers to imagine a new public restroom for the Gropius House, the family home of the late German architect Walter Gropius. Gropius founded the famed art and design school the Bauhaus (1919–1933), which defined an entire era of modernist design through its innovative approach to technology and almost reverent obsession with materials. His self-designed home is now preserved and made open to the public by Historic New England, a non-profit that …

Just as they did with televisions, many people used the pandemic as an excuse to upgrade their PC or laptop. It was a move that made sense at the time. Telecommuting became essential, and not all devices could adequately handle the demands of Zoom, Teams, and other work software. At the same time, digital communication was often the only way to stay in touch with friends and family. Smartphones handled some of that heavy lifting, of course, but the PC industry still saw shipments spike 14.5% from 1999 to 2000. Now, much like the TV market, many PC owners are reaching the point where a new device is becoming necessary. But unlike that living room fixture, PC sh…

Peter Gold has always loved making films. While attending film school in New York, he became involved with a film called Our Hero Balthazar, directed by Oscar Boyson, known for his work as an executive producer on Uncut Gems. Gold instantly knew the film was something special. He also knew it would be tough to find distribution in today’s theatrical marketplace. The dramedy, starring Jaeden Martell as a wealthy New York City teenager Balthazar Malone, who, eager to impress his activist crush, follows an online connection (Asa Butterfield) to Texas where he believes he can stop an act of violence, was passed over by A24 and Neon. So Gold, 26, decided to launc…

Breaking your arm or wrist typically comes with another layer of misery: wearing a hot, itchy cast that makes showering tedious and swimming impossible. But in Singapore, patients at some hospitals and clinics now have another option—an open, 3D-printed cast that’s more comfortable to wear and fully waterproof. Castomize, the Singapore-based startup behind the product, says that it’s also easier for doctors to use. To apply the cast, the medical team first heats it up to become soft and flexible. Then a doctor wraps it around the arm and clips it together with small built-in buckles. As it cools, it hardens in place. The traditional process, by contrast, takes…

Last September, OpenAI and Shopify made an announcement that sent ripples throughout the retail industry: They were partnering to launch Instant Checkout—a feature that would let people complete purchases directly within ChatGPT. Within months, the AI giant promised, we would be able to ask ChatGPT for Mother’s Day gift ideas or top-rated lightbulbs, and then click to buy products instantly. Shopify’s president, Harley Finkelstein, declared this the “the new frontier” of retail. But if you’ve tried to shop on ChatGPT recently, you know that this future never arrived. OpenAI quietly killed Instant Checkout in March. The official story, according to OpenAI’s blog p…

I’m a big believer in the power of mindset. My journey as an entrepreneur has, frankly, demanded it. Building a business from scratch forces you into deeper work on self-inquiry and meta-cognition—that recursive question of Why do I think the way I think about this? It has pushed me to examine my assumptions, sit with discomfort, and deliberately fortify my inner life in ways I never anticipated when I started out. So when I sat down with Nir Eyal, author of the new New York Times bestselling book Beyond Belief, I expected a great conversation. What I got was an inspiration catalyst, a reframe that gave me fresh language and rigorous science for something I’d been doi…

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 …

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…

“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…

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 …

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…

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…

From dating apps spreading the paradox of choice onto young daters to social media stunting the social skills of generations to come, modern relationships are comically complicated. For daters trying to navigate what seems like a minefield of one bad experience after another, they are turning to social media to share their past experiences and dating dealbreakers with the new “date cancelled” trend. The meme is simple: users follow a template-like structure, posting “date cancelled” followed by their personal icks and irks collected from past relationships. While the format has expanded to various social media platforms, most of the users engaging with the tre…

Last week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced in a post on X that the company would hire 1,000 new grads and interns “to ride the AI exponential.” Today, the company released a statement committing to that plan. Salesforce launched a new Builder Program within its university recruitment program, in an effort to fast-track recent grads into roles like engineering, product and sales to work on the company’s AI agent system, Agentforce. Salesforce said the company has hired over 10,000 professionals through its university recruitment program to date. According to a recent LinkedIn report, entry-level hiring is down 6% year-over-year. Some major CEOs bet that AI wi…

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 …

Sales are booming for Novo Nordisk’s new weight loss pill. In its first earnings report since the release of an alternative to its hit GLP-1 shot, Novo Nordisk’s outlook is looking a bit brighter. The company, which now makes Wegovy in pill form, raised its guidance for the year in light of the first quarter’s success. Novo reported 1.3 million prescriptions for its weight loss pill, which is now available in the U.S., in the first quarter of 2026. The drugmaker plans to launch the pill outside of the U.S. in the second half of the year, expanding the new medication’s reach considerably. “The strong Wegovy performance, combined with continued growth in Inte…

Yesterday, Giorgia Meloni posted to X an AI-generated photo of herself wearing only lingerie. The Italian prime minister published the image to warn others about how easy it is to create perfectly believable images and videos. Her warning: Never believe anything you see without thoroughly fact-checking it. After all, we live in the end of reality. “Deepfakes are a dangerous tool, because they can deceive, manipulate, and hit anyone,” Meloni said on X. “I can defend myself. Many others don’t.” She is right, even though the image is not technically a deepfake. It’s a fully AI-generated photo that features her face. Unlike early deepfakes, which simply switched t…

Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated Tax Day by making good on a campaign promise. “When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich,” Mamdani said in a viral video posted to social media. “Today, we’re taxing the rich.” Mamdani went on to describe New York’s proposed pied-á-terre tax, a collaboration with Gov. Kathy Hochul. The tax specifically targets the owners of residential properties in New York City worth more than $5 million that they don’t live in full time, or “the richest of the rich,” as Mamdani called them in his video. One such property that would be subject to the new tax belongs to billionaire Citadel CEO Kenneth …

AI isn’t all about automating core business functions at Fortune 500 companies. Small and medium-sized businesses can also use AI to optimize, economize, and in some cases compete more effectively against much larger rivals. An Austin, Texas–based vegan cheese-maker called Rebel Cheese used it to level the playing field against a larger supplier. Specifically, the company developed a small system of AI tools to help it claw back overcharges from a major shipping carrier. The company is perhaps best known for winning a $750,000 investment from Mark Cuban, money it used to grow Rebel Cheese into what it says is now a $20 million business. Cuban recently spoke about …