What's on Your Mind?

After more than a decade of planning, an overlooked side of the ski haven of Aspen, Colorado, will soon be revamped into a new base village. Named Chalet Alpina and covering two-and-a-half city blocks, the development will build a new modern ski lift that is closer to the city’s downtown and flank it with a luxury hotel and residences, a restaurant and ski museum inside relocated historic chalet buildings, and a broad new public plaza. The project, which broke ground last fall, is situated at the loading point of the 1937 tow line that was the city’s first mechanized route up the mountain. Remnants of the steel lift that replaced it a decade later will be preserve…

In the United States, it’s one of our annual holidays today, Presidents’ Day, which celebrates the dozens of American presidents we’ve had over the centuries. But on the other side of the world, an even larger holiday is kicking off: Chinese New Year. Here’s what you need to know about the festival and its importance to the millions of Chinese Americans in the United States. What is Chinese New Year? Chinese New Year, also known as the Lunar New Year or, in China, the Spring Festival, is an annual holiday that marks the beginning of the new lunar year. Unlike many Western holidays, the lunar new year does not have a fixed date. Instead, it typically falls on the fu…

Tax filing season is in full swing, and while preparing your taxes can often be filled with stress, misplaced documents, and worries about proper filing, this year, there may be a silver lining. According to analysts, many Americans may get larger refunds in 2026 due to The President’s 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill legislation. Last year, the average refund was $3,167, but, given there are a number of new changes and deductions, experts say many Americans are looking to get back an additional $1,000 or more. Overall, that could come out to around $90 billion more dollars in tax returns. Here are the biggest changes that could boost your tax refund this year: No tax…

After 50, too many women reduce their working hours, become trapped in lower-quality jobs, or exit the labor market altogether. Part-time employment becomes more prevalent as women age. The gender gap widens. For women, this means lower lifetime earnings and significantly smaller pensions. Many are calling this phenomenon the “menopause penalty”—a midlife equivalent of the motherhood penalty. And indeed, research suggests that women’s earnings drop in the years following a menopause diagnosis. But while menopause clearly plays a role, there is a risk in attributing these economic setbacks too narrowly to biology. Doing so not only oversimplifies women’s lived realitie…

On January 23rd, outside an elementary school in Santa Monica, California, a Waymo vehicle hit a child. That’s what we know for sure. It sounds shocking, horrifying even. And it’s already giving plenty of groups cover to demand that California revoke Waymo’s license to operate its cars. But the details matter. And once you start digging a bit, the scary headline about a kid struck down by a heartless robot clearly isn’t the whole story. In fact, accidents like this provide a lens through which to improve both human and robot driving—and even save lives. Braking Hard The specifics of the incident in Santa Monica are still coming out. As it does…

Most of us assume bullying is something we age out of by middle school, high school at the latest. By the time you’re a professional—especially one with credentials, experience, and a résumé you worked hard for—you expect a baseline of mutual respect. And yet. If you’ve spent enough time in workplaces, on boards, or in other community organizations, you’ve probably had that moment where your stomach tightens in a meeting and you’re not entirely sure why. A comment lands sideways. A tone shifts. Someone interrupts you for the third time. You walk away replaying the exchange, wondering whether you imagined it or whether something subtle but unmistakable just happene…

Gabriela Flax spent the first part of her career working in tech as a product manager. And while every day was different and varied, there were aspects of it that were causing her burnout. “I’ve always really enjoyed the product marketing aspect of my work,” she says. “I really like talking to end-users about ‘Hey, this is how this thing helps you’ and how to articulate that.” However, she wasn’t able to work on it as much as she would have liked. At the same time, Flax was in her 20s, living in London, and had stopped drinking alcohol. She began posting her journey in social media, talking about bars and places that were non-alcohol related. Flax recalls, …

If you stop by the “as-is” section at one of Ikea’s U.S. stores, you might now find a vintage table from the 1980s. The company recently started accepting older products in its Buy Back & Resell program, which gives customers store credit for bringing back used items, and then offers them for sale to other customers. Since launching as a pilot in the U.S. five years ago, the program—still the only one of its kind at a major furniture retailer—has steadily expanded, underscoring the demand for circular options. The program “is our opportunity to bring our products back into the store from our customers to keep them out of landfill,” says Mardi Ditze, sustainabi…

Too many years ago, I remember slotting a 3.5-inch disk into my PC. With my allowance, I’d bought $5 video game design software from a catalog. And as I looked at the terminal, lost without some familiar GUI . . . my coding efforts died. Game design became an abstract concept even as I became a game journalist—a topic sketched in notebooks, theoretically discussed, critically observed. That was, until I loaded Moonlake AI. With $30 million in funding from investors including Nvidia, AIX, Google’s Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and YouTube founder Steve Chen, the 15-person startup founded by two Stanford PhD students dreams of building complete games—from first person shoo…

The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a protege of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades after the revered leader’s assassination, died Tuesday. He was 84. As a young organizer in Chicago, Jackson was called to meet with King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis shortly before King was killed and he publicly positioned himself thereafter as King’s successor. Jackson led a lifetime of crusades in the United States and abroad, advocating for the poor and underrepresented on issues from voting rights and job opportunities to education and health care. He scored diplomatic victories with world leaders, and through…

This should come as a shock to very few people, but Krispy Kreme doughnuts, which typically needs very little reason to give away its doughnuts, is giving away free doughnuts today. This time, the free doughnut giveaway is in honor of Fat Tuesday 2026. But there’s a catch. Here’s what you need to know. What is Fat Tuesday? Today (Tuesday, February 17) is Fat Tuesday, otherwise known as Mardi Gras. The holiday always falls on the final Tuesday before the Christian holy day of Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of the Lent observance period. Traditionally, Christians refrain from eating certain foods during Lent, particularly rich and fatty ones. As a…

Hospital intensive care units are notoriously noisy, with medical equipment emitting alarms, beeps, and other alerts designed to grab the attention of overextended healthcare workers. That constant barrage can lead to what experts call alarm fatigue, causing stress and exhaustion for doctors and nurses who must distinguish between routine signals and those indicating a patient is in urgent distress. Patients, too, often struggle to rest amid the cacophony, even though sleep is critical to recovery. To Ophir Ronen, a serial tech entrepreneur who sold his IT alert-handling startup Event Enrichment HQ to PagerDuty, the problem sounded familiar. Ronen first encountere…

Today marks the start of the Year of the Fire Horse, which in Chinese tradition is all about action, boldness, and taking on new challenges. And what better way to celebrate a year that should be full of red hot, blazing energy than with a hand-crafted cowboy hat from Stetson? The color? Red, of course. The company, started by John Batterson Stetson in 1865, invented the cowboy hat. Today, it’s still known for embracing the spirit of the West with its quality hats, boots, and outerwear. And to mark the year of intensity, which hasn’t happened in 60 years, the brand is partnering with Gold House to turn an iconic cultural item—the cowboy hat—into a modern…

For the past decade—and really, for its entire 84-year history—the laundry detergent brand Tide has been trying to simplify the process of doing of laundry. From its original all-in-one powder to 1980s-era liquid soap to the 2012 introduction of the packet-based Tide Pod, the brand and its parent company Procter and Gamble have regularly reformulated the core product to accommodate the seemingly simple but highly diverse act of washing one’s clothes. “There are 55 unique steps we’ve identified in the laundry process,” says Marchoe Northern, president of North America fabric care at Procter and Gamble. “Our job is to continue to think about ways to solve today’s modern…

Nothing is certain, they say, but death and taxes. But a new idea from Meta could add social media to that list. The tech giant was granted a patent in December that would allow it to simulate a user via artificial intelligence when he or she is absent from the social network for extended periods, including, “for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased.” The patent covers a bot that could simulate your activity across Meta’s products, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—making posts, leaving comments, and interacting with other users. It could even, potentially, communicate directly with people via chats or video calls, the pate…

Variant, a generative design tool that promises endless UI exploration, recently introduced a feature most creative people and designers have used for decades: the eyedropper. In Variant, the tool picks vibes: It lets you click on one AI-generated interface and inject its aesthetic DNA—typography, spatial relationships, and color palettes—into another. After so much hype around “vibecoding” and its text-based imprecision, seeing a familiar, direct manipulation tool applied to generative AI feels great.​​ The new AI modality takes a nice step to close the gap between the impenetrable ways of large language model black boxes and the tools designers actually use with the…

The new year has so far not been kind to the share price of Big Tech stocks, particularly the so-called Magnificent 7. These seven companies—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—are America’s tech crown jewels. Combined, they have their hands in the hottest areas of tech, including artificial intelligence, mobile computing, chipmaking, and transportation. Yet all of these tech companies have seen their share prices decline since the beginning of the year. Here are some possible reasons why. The Magnificent 7 is seeing red in 2026 As of this writing, there isn’t a single Magnificent 7 stock in the green for 2026. Their year-to-date return…

When it comes to EVs, a bigger battery isn’t always better. Ford Motor Company is making that bet as part of its effort to manufacture a new suite of more affordable electric vehicles—beginning with a $30,000-starting-price mid-size electric truck set to launch in 2027. To get more out of a smaller battery, Ford has had to reimagine every step of its manufacturing process. It has scrapped the typical assembly line process in favor of what the automaker calls its “Ford Universal EV Platform,” and simplified every part of its EV, from the miles of wiring inside the electric system to the number of parts that make up its frame. And it’s had to rethink the batter…

In today’s AI race, breakthroughs are no longer measured in years—or even months—but in weeks. The release of Opus 4.6 just over two weeks ago was a major moment for its maker, Anthropic, delivering state-of-the-art performance in a number of fields. But within a week, Chinese competitor Z.ai had released its own Opus-like model, GLM-5. (There’s no suggestion that GLM-5 uses or borrows from Opus in any way.) Many on social media called it a cut-price Opus alternative. But Z.ai’s lead didn’t last long, either. Just as Anthropic had been undercut by GLM-5’s release, GLM-5 was quickly downloaded, compressed, and re-released in a version that could run locally w…

Sandisk Corporation has announced plans for a secondary public offering. The data storage company will open up 5,821,135 common stock shares (Nasdaq:SNDK) at $545 a pop. The shares are currently owned by Western Digital Corporation (WDC), Sandisk’s former parent company. Sandisk separated from WDC nearly a year ago to the date, and subsequently joined the S&P 500 in November. Now, WDC is furthering that split. It will be left with 1,691,884 shares of common stock, but it plans to get rid of those as well. WDC intends to complete a debt-for-equity exchange with J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and BofA Securities—both of which will act as selling stockhol…

The AI boom began with ChatGPT and chatbots. Now chatbots are starting to “grow arms and legs,” as developers say, meaning they can use digital tools and work independently on a human’s behalf. The open-source platform OpenClaw is notable because it lets people build agents with far more autonomy than those offered by big tech. OpenClaw agents can control a browser, send emails, do multi-step planning, and pursue persistent goals. Users often interact with them through iMessage or Discord, with the agent hosted locally on a Mac mini. One user’s agent reportedly negotiated with several car dealerships and shaved four grand off a car’s price while its owner was in a mee…

The Nancy Guthrie investigation is now in its third week, which means it was only a matter of time before the case piqued the interest of online armchair detectives. Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today Show anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reported missing on Feb. 1. In the weeks since, the street outside her home in Tucson, Arizona, has become a destination for true-crime livestreamers. Online sleuths have dissected the publicly available details of the ongoing case while spreading far-fetched conspiracy theories. Some have filmed themselves driving through Guthrie’s neighborhood. The hashtag #nancyguthrie currently has more than 16,000 posts on TikTok, where users an…