What's on Your Mind?

During a recent New York Fashion Week, a wood-paneled boutique popped up in SoHo next to Louis Vuitton and Bottega Veneta. On the racks were tailored, wide-leg jeans and simple black Henley dresses that signaled understated elegance. But unlike those of neighboring boutiques, the clothes weren’t from a storied European maison de couture. They were some of the newest collections from Scoop and Free Assembly, two brands led by Brandon Maxwell, creative director at the House of Walmart. The pop-up—which featured items priced between $8 and $75—was part of the Bentonville, Arkansas–based retailer’s strategy to get its products in front of urban shoppers who might not be f…

At first glance, Aitana Lopez could be any other influencer. Her Instagram feed is a mix of Pilates workouts, model shoots, and photos posing in front of Coachella’s iconic Ferris wheel and inside the Alo gym. The 27-year-old is a Scorpio. Her long hair is dyed a soft shade of pink, with dark roots coming through. She also doesn’t exist. Lopez is a “virtual soul”, or at least that’s what her creators at the Barcelona-based tech agency The Clueless call her. Aitana was created using artificial intelligence, and behind her social media platforms, which have a combined following of nearly 400,000, is a team of eleven people. Aitana is part of a new wave of…

The most sustainable piece of clothing you own probably has nothing to do with recycled polyester or organic cotton. It’s the little black dress you’ve worn on repeat for 15 years and the pair of ripped Levi’s 501s you can’t imagine ever throwing away. The harder question—the one the fashion industry has never quite figured out—is how to design something like that on purpose. How do you make a garment someone loves now and will continue to wear for years? This is something Sarah Bonello thinks about constantly as she designs for her new label, The Park. After decades in fashion PR, where she developed a finely tuned sense of what the market was missing, Bonell…

Of all the modern parenting paradoxes, navigating screen time usage might be one of the most complex—and divisive. Critics of screen time claim it can negatively impact social skills, behavior, and sleep. Proponents say it can help kids learn about living in a digital world, improve cultural awareness, and serve as a means of communication. Parents say sometimes they just need a break. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the messy middle of it all; like so many aspects of parenting, it’s all about finding the balance that’s right for you and your child(ren). Screen time is just one of many topics explored in Poems of Parenting, a new collection of poetry out A…

Lean In, the feminist organization founded by Sheryl Sandberg, has a new focus: fighting the gender gap in AI adoption. The nonprofit has put out new research that digs into how women use AI in the workplace relative to their male counterparts, which captures an adoption gap that has surfaced in previous surveys. In a survey of over 1,000 adults, Lean In found that 78% of men had used AI in the workplace, when compared to 73% of women. Men also reported using AI more regularly: About a third of men used AI daily, while only 27% of women did the same. This might not seem like a major difference at the moment. But Sandberg argues that this gap is likely to grow ov…

AI isn’t a cost-cutting tool. It’s a revenue multiplier. Yet too many companies are stuck asking how AI can help them run leaner with fewer people, faster processes, lower costs. That question won’t unlock exponential growth. The better one is: How can AI help us grow faster, sell more, and drive new revenue streams? Yes, cost savings will deliver marginal gains. But accelerated and/or new revenue unlocks step-change impact. If your AI doesn’t show up in your P&L as higher conversion, more long-term value, and stronger monetization, then it’s not a strategy. It’s just automation. THE REVENUE UNLOCK IS HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT AI’s real power lies in how it tra…

The worst days of the pandemic are long behind us, but the world is still reeling from its aftereffects. For some people, this has driven a dramatic reprioritizing of what’s important in their lives, including where they work and the kind of energy they’re prepared to give to the company that employs them. According to a new survey, one result of the pandemic aftershocks in the workforce is a sharp rise in how much people want to take time off to travel. Younger Americans are so keen to vacation, in fact, that they’re putting off big life decisions and even going into debt. Not only could this shift in priorities affect your business if you’re trying to attract young …

Charging a car, or electric vehicle, typically takes about 350 kilowatts. Charging an entire ocean freighter, or electric vessel, could take 20 megawatts, roughly 57 times more power. It’s a striking difference in power and generating capacity, and illuminates the challenges and opportunities behind greening the freighters and container ships crisscrossing the earth’s oceans. Across the Atlantic, maritime green energy provider NatPower Marine is developing the infrastructure to establish the world’s first operational electrified shipping corridor between Ireland and England. This includes electric boats and chargers and the renewable energy projects—which include…

Nations are trying to reach an agreement to charge commercial vessels a fee for their emissions in what would effectively be the world’s first global carbon tax. The International Maritime Organization, which regulates international shipping, set a target for the sector to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by about 2050, and committed to ensuring that fuels with zero or near-zero emissions are used more widely. Its Marine Environment Protection Committee meets Monday through Friday in London. The committee, comprised of IMO member states, is working to approve proposed new global regulations to put a price on maritime greenhouse gas emissions and to set a ma…

It’s time to crown the champion of America’s pastime—even if a Canadian team earned its way into the battle. The first pitch of the 2025 World Series will be thrown out tonight: Friday, October 24. The Toronto Blue Jays will try to stop the Los Angeles Dodgers from becoming the first team since the 2000 Yankees to win consecutive championships. The Blue Jays will also try to prevent Shohei Ohtani from making any baseball history. Both feats are a tall order. Let’s take a look back at how the two teams got here and speculate on Ohtani’s potential firsts before we get into how to watch the World Series. The road to the World Series Ironically, the Blue …

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…

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke shared an internal memo on X on Monday that stressed the importance of using AI effectively in daily tasks. In fact, he wrote, using AI is now a “fundamental expectation” of Shopify employees. Spotify product designers are now expected to use AI tools to do all platform feature prototypes. The results, Lutke says, are more exploratory and faster to produce and share. Shopify already provides employees with access to various AI coding tools from Github (Copilot), Cursor, and Anthropic (Claude code). “Our task here at Shopify is to make our software unquestionably the best canvas on which to develop the best businesses of the future,” Lutke wr…

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…

JPMorgan Chase released its 2025 annual report today, including letters to shareholders from senior executives. In his letter, chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon shared his thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI) and the company’s plans to embrace it. Dimon argued that the pace of the adoption of AI is unlike that of other technologies that came before, like electricity and the internet. While the technology is “transformational,” he cautioned that no one can predict how exactly AI will unfold. “People will live longer and safer” His overall outlook is optimistic. Dimon says he believes that AI will improve many areas of daily life and business. “AI will affe…

For years, AI at work felt like a quiet helper in the background. It summarized meetings, suggested text, and answered questions when we asked. That era is ending. The latest AI agents are beginning to move through systems more like teammates. They join projects, update plans, and act across teams. For the first time, organizations are effectively bringing on colleagues that can see more of the workplace than any single person ever could. I’ve spent years building tools to give teams clarity and save them time, so I see the upside. But that shift forces a harder question: what does it really mean for an AI to “see everything” in a workplace? The ethical issue …

New research has found that AI-powered content moderation systems from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek don’t always come to the same conclusions about bad language on the internet. View the full article

In the United States, we recognize a separation between church and state, but does that delineation apply to work, too? That’s an earnest question from a self-identifying choirboy—literally, I grew up in church and I direct the choir—who has been asked throughout my career to leave religion out of my work. Do we need the Jesus reference in the deck? Do I have to use Bible scripture in that essay? Is the religious example in the class lecture necessary? It’s almost always polite but definitely unambiguous: ease up on the religious stuff because it likely doesn’t have a place here because the workplace is neutral. But is that really so? The entire global workweek struct…

Few things seem more obvious and unquestionable than the notion that leaders should always be true to their values, no matter what. This widely-endorsed mantra, known as moral authenticity, is based on two rather logical assumptions. First, leaders (unlike, say, first line supervisors or mid-level managers), are not just in charge to coordinate human activity, but also to act as agents of meaning. Indeed, what most people expect from leaders is some form of inspiration, including ethical guidance, spiritual direction, and strong alignment between their values and behaviors. Second, followers gravitate towards leaders who share their values or core beliefs. T…