What's on Your Mind?

With over 800 student organizations on campus, the University of Pennsylvania already seems to have a club for every interest, from investment banking to beekeeping—even cheese. Now, add AI to the mix. In September, dozens of Penn students gathered in the engineering school auditorium for the debut of the Claude Builder Club, sponsored by AI company Anthropic. Over the course of this semester, the Builder Club has plans to host a hackathon, demo night, and other opportunities to create projects using artificial intelligence. “I need the Claude premium for a year,” says Crystal Yang, a freshman who attended the first meeting. Claude, she had heard, is “better for c…

It’s an experience almost everyone is familiar with: that moment after you’ve been mindlessly snacking on a bag of Cheetos, when you realize that your fingers are now coated in a gritty, fluorescent orange dust. The finger dust phenomenon is so ubiquitous that Doritos and Cheetos have each run their own ads centering on the topic. Now, PepsiCo is debuting a version of both iconic snacks that come sans artificial orange. PepsiCo recently announced a product line called “Simply NKD,” a new sub-category of Doritos and Cheetos that come with no artificial flavors or dyes, rendering them “completely colorless.” The collection will include orange-dust-free versions of Dori…

Sunbridge appears to be a quintessential example of 21st century sprawl. A 27,000-acre residential mega-development taking shape outside of Orlando, Florida, it’s set to include more than 30,000 new homes in total when complete—a few neighborhoods, miles of trails, and a K–8 school have already been completed. It’s riding a growth boom in Central Florida; this fast-growing section of the Sun Belt has added more than 1,000 people every week in recent years. But within the different subdivisions being constructed at Sunbridge over the next 30 years, a landscape will emerge with each new home and green space that’s much more wild, native, and sustainable than the stereot…

Being the children of Francis Ford Coppola had a profound impact on the filmmaking sensibilities of Sofia and Roman Coppola, but their mother, Eleanor Coppola, may have played a larger role in nurturing their creative pursuits. “She taught me how to be in charge without being loud, and the importance of being real,” Sofia writes in her introduction to Two of Me: Notes on Living and Leaving, Eleanor Coppola’s posthumous memoir, published by A24 on November 11. Sofia and Roman convened in New York City last week for a conversation about the book and their mother, who died in April 2024 at the age of 87. One of Eleanor’s last wishes was to have Two of Me, which…

Soooo, do you Labubu? The furry creature went viral this year thanks to Dua Lipa, Blackpink’s Lisa, and Kim Kardashian all buying into the adorably bizarre, plushy monsters. The results were millions in sales, long lines, and frantic scrambles as people tried to get their hands on this latest trendy phenom. Labubu’s Chinese parent company, Pop Mart, reported global revenue for Q3 (July through September) jumped by about 250% compared to a year earlier, and sales in America were up by more than 1,200%. But it goes beyond Pop Mart, as brands from South Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries are finding more inroads into American culture. Just as American cultural influ…

Before Waymo was Waymo, it was Google’s self-driving car project. Starting in 2009, the effort spent many years in test mode—with humans in the driver’s seats ready to take over, just in case—that its vision of vehicular autonomy often felt far from practical reality. Since last year, however, Alphabet’s robotaxi service has begun to scale up quickly. It’s now fully open to the public in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area. And today the company is announcing that it’s testing fully autonomous trips, sans human driver, in Miami, and plans to do so in Orlando, Florida; Dallas; Houston; and San Antonio in the coming weeks. For now, …

Home Depot‘s third-quarter was mixed with fewer violent storms reaching shore, more anxiety among U.S. consumers, and a housing market that is in a deep funk. The company lowered its fiscal 2025 adjusted earnings forecast but raised its expectations for sales growth. For the three months ended Nov. 2, Home Depot earned $3.6 billion, or $3.62 per share. A year earlier, it earned $3.65 billion, or $3.67 per share. Removing one-time charges and benefits, earnings were $3.74 per share, a dime short of Wall Street expectations, according to a poll by FactSet. It is the third consecutive quarter that Home Depot, an overperformer in recent years, has missed profi…

For technology adopters looking for the next big thing, “agentic AI” is the future. At least, that’s what the marketing pitches and tech industry T-shirts say. What makes an artificial intelligence product “agentic” depends on who’s selling it. But the promise is usually that it’s a step beyond today’s generative AI chatbots. Chatbots, however useful, are all talk and no action. They can answer questions, retrieve and summarize information, write papers, and generate images, music, video, and lines of code. AI agents, by contrast, are supposed to be able to take actions on a person’s behalf. But if you’re confused, you’re not alone. Google searches for “agenti…

Meta has prevailed over an existential challenge to its business that could have forced the tech giant to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp after a judge ruled that the company does not hold a monopoly in social networking. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued his ruling Tuesday after the historic antitrust trial wrapped up in late May. His decision follows two separate rulings that branded Google an illegal monopoly in both search and online advertising, dealing yet another regulatory blow to the tech industry that for years enjoyed nearly unbridled growth. The Federal Trade Commission “continues to insist that Meta competes with the same old rivals it has for…

As we head into the holiday season, toys with generative AI chatbots in them may start appearing on Christmas lists. A concerning report found one innocent-looking AI teddy bear gave instructions on how to light matches, where to find knives, and even explained sexual kinks to children. Consumer watchdogs at the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) tested some AI toys for its 40th annual Trouble in Toyland report and found them to exhibit extremely disturbing behaviors. With only minimal prompting, the AI toys waded into subjects many parents would find unsettling, from religion to sex. One toy in particular stood out as the most concerning. FoloToy’s AI te…

Inspired by the ongoing auction of Bob Ross paintings to raise money for public television, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver is putting some of its own TV artifacts up for auction for a good cause. Host John Oliver dedicated the close of Sunday’s season finale to local public television, which is facing an unprecedented crisis. Federal budget cuts could by next year close as many as 115 public television and radio stations in the U.S. serving 43 million Americans, according to the Public Media Bridge Fund, a philanthropic initiative. “These stations can fill a vital community role,” Oliver said during Sunday’s show. johnoliversjunk.com Bob Ross Inc. said …

Tiny fragments of microplastics—from clothes, car tires, plastics, and other sources—slip through most water filters. But at a water treatment plant on the coast in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where plastic-filled wastewater would normally flow into the ocean, new technology has captured hundreds of millions of microplastic particles over the past year. The technology, from a startup called PolyGone, can also clean microplastic out of lakes and rivers or treat wastewater at factories. The startup spun out of research at Princeton, where the founders drew inspiration from aquatic plants that can naturally attract microplastic. The plants have fibrous roots coated in…

The Labor Department said Wednesday that it will not be releasing a full jobs report for October because the 43-day federal government shutdown meant it couldn’t calculate the unemployment rate and some other key numbers. Instead, it will release some of the October jobs data — most importantly the number of jobs that employers created last month — along with the full November jobs report, now due a couple of weeks late on Dec. 16. The department’s “employment situation” report usually comes out the first Friday of the month. But the government shutdown disrupted data collection and delayed the release of the reports. For example, the September jobs report, now co…

Five years ago, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong did a bold thing. He banned political conversations at work. He made this decision because he knows what the job of a business leader is: to deliver for customers, employees, and shareholders. More recently, another executive did the opposite. Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s fame left the company as part of a row with its parent company over social activism. For Greenfield, political stances are not just part of the company; they ultimately outweigh everything else. This stark difference is very instructive at this time. Amid America’s rising polarization, what stance should businesses take? Many people who think…

You’ve just finished a strenuous hike to the top of a mountain. You’re exhausted but elated. The view of the city below is gorgeous, and you want to capture the moment on camera. But it’s already quite dark, and you’re not sure you’ll get a good shot. Fortunately, your phone has an AI-powered night mode that can take stunning photos even after sunset. Here’s something you might not know: That night mode may have been trained on synthetic nighttime images, computer-generated scenes that were never actually photographed. As artificial intelligence researchers exhaust the supply of real data on the web and in digitized archives, they are increasingly turning to synth…

Strategy textbooks taught us that sustainable competitive advantage that commanded premium prices was best protected by powerful barriers to entry. Build a moat, create switching costs, leverage access to high costs of entry, own distribution channels, and it would be difficult for startups to compete for your markets. But the forces of disruption operate by different rules, systematically destroying the very foundations of pricing power by making the previously difficult and expensive suddenly easy and cheap. The basis of competition changes, from excellence along well understood dimensions of merit to “good enough.” The ‘good enough’ revolution in pricing I have …

Spend a few minutes on developer Twitter and you’ll run into it: “vibe coding.” With a name like that, it might sound like a passing internet trend, but it’s become a real, visible part of software culture. It’s shorthand for letting AI generate code from simple language prompts instead of writing it manually. In many ways, it’s great. AI has lowered the barrier to entry for coding, and that’s pulled in a wave of hobbyists, designers, and side-project tinkerers who might never have touched a codebase before. Tools like Warp, Cursor, and Claude Code uplevel even professional developers, making it possible to ship something working in hours instead of weeks. But her…

In recent conversations with customers and peers, I’m not hearing “Which AI model or tool should we pick?” I’m hearing “How do we operationalize AI across our critical workflows?” People are starting to understand real digital transformation doesn’t come from a bolt-on solution. It happens when we treat AI as a foundational force and an engine for lasting change. The shift toward an AI-powered workplace requires leaders to enable organizational intelligence across the enterprise. WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL INTELLIGENCE? At Wrike, we define organizational intelligence as the seamless integration of human insight and AI capabilities to drive measurable outcomes a…

In a world where AI can churn out chart-toppers in seconds and ticketing algorithms treat fans like data points, we risk losing the soul of live music. But a quiet countermovement is making a comeback right in people’s living rooms, backyards and basements. Once the gritty domain of garage bands and DIY punks, house shows are becoming a structured, sustainable model for music communities embraced by a myriad of musical genres and accessible to all ages. House shows aren’t just an indie throwback. They serve as a blueprint for re-humanizing music and sustainable artist development, and cities should treat them as civic infrastructure. Today, fans crave authentic…

They’re cute, even cuddly, and promise learning and companionship—but artificial intelligence toys are not safe for kids, according to children’s and consumer advocacy groups urging parents not to buy them during the holiday season. These toys, marketed to kids as young as 2 years old, are generally powered by AI models that have already been shown to harm children and teenagers, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to an advisory published Thursday by the children’s advocacy group Fairplay and signed by more than 150 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators. “The serious harms that AI chatbots have inflicted on children are we…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Back in May, ResiClub teamed up with Stessa, an asset management and accounting software for real estate investors, to survey real estate investors about how they were navigating the rental market. Over the past month, we teamed up with Stessa again to survey real estate investors about their market conditions, portfolio plans, and property management strategy. Investors who own at least one single-family investment property were eligible to respond to the Stessa-ResiClub Real Estate Investor Survey—Q4 2025, fielded between October 24 and Novembe…

For consumers heavy on savings and light on credit history, a new partnership in the world of credit scores could help you lock down a loan. FICO, the company basically synonymous with the credit score, is teaming up with Plaid to bring real-time data showing how much cash you have on hand to lenders. Plaid, a fintech company that links bank accounts with financial apps, has a lot of visibility into how its customers move cash between bank accounts, payments apps, investment platforms, and just about everything else. Plaid’s technology runs under the hood across a huge network of 12,000 financial institutions that partner with the fintech startup, which has grown into…

With little more than a coat of paint, buildings could soon make the air around them cooler and harvest gallons of water directly from the atmosphere. Researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia have created a nanoengineered polymer coating that passively cools building surfaces while enabling them to collect water like dew-coated leaves. It’s a material solution that could help combat rising heat and water insecurity in places all over the world. The white coating, a porous paint-like material, reflects up to 97% of sunlight and radiates heat, making surfaces up to 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding air, even under direct sun. This cooler condition a…

European and Asian shares mostly gained on Tuesday after U.S. stocks rallied on hopes the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates soon. The futures for the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.1%. Germany’s DAX edged 0.1% lower to 23,216.76 and the CAC 40 in Paris added 0.1% to 7,965.77. Britain’s FTSE 100 likewise gained 0.1%, to 9,542.55. In Asian trading, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 picked up 0.1% to 48,659.52 as a plunge in technology giant SoftBank’s shares weighed on the market. It fell 10.3% on concerns that returns from its heavy investments in OpenAI may be threatened by the next generation Gemini artificial intelligence model that Google launched…

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, a time when we give thanks and practice gratitude for what we have, we turned to neuroscience to find out if doing so actually makes us happier and healthier. Here’s what we found. Is gratitude actually good for your health? “People who are grateful live longer, are happier, and also tend to hit workplace markers like [making] more money, and [getting] promoted more frequently,” Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Ph.D., science director at U.C. Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, tells Fast Company. “But the key is not a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach—no, it’s real gratitude, real contentment, based on an accurate assessment of …