What's on Your Mind?

There’s not a more fairy-tale story in business. Nike CEO Elliott Hill began as an intern. Worked about every job imaginable at the company. Was passed up as a fave for the CEO role in 2020 when John Donahoe was brought in from Bain. And then, finding himself retired, and charter member of a silver fox baseball league in Austin, the swoosh boomeranged in from the clouds and Hill hitched a ride back to Beaverton. Now, after a year at the helm, Hill’s still dealing with Nike’s COVID hangover, brought about (at least in part) by Donahoe, who bolstered profits by selling waves of retro sneakers to people at home, all while reorganizing the core innovation team structure t…

Sahil Lavingia has had just three jobs over a 15-year career in tech. The first was as the second employee of Pinterest. The second was by founding the startup Gumroad, a successful, famously lean company that makes it easy for content creators to sell digital goods. The third? As an unpaid contractor supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs in a role facilitated by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a fact recently revealed in a Wired piece. One of these things is not like—and is far more controversial than—the others. But Lavingia, who chose not to speak to Wired but reached out to me after I drew attention to the piece, makes no excuses fo…

The Thanksgiving travel period is in full swing. Today is the last day before Thanksgiving, which means millions of Americans will be taking to the skies to reach their holiday destinations. And myriad more will also be traveling to airports to pick up their incoming loved ones. But on one of the busiest travel days of the year, flight delays and cancellations are inevitable. Here are some tools to track delays, along with information on which airports are currently experiencing the worst delays and cancellations. FAA says this is the busiest Thanksgiving travel period in 15 years Earlier this week, Fast Company reported on the American Automobile Association (…

The Thanksgiving holiday is nearly upon us, which means tens of millions of Americans will be traveling nationwide this week to visit their loved ones and celebrate around the dinner table with them on Thursday. The majority of that travel both to and from Turkey Day destinations is expected to kick off tomorrow, Tuesday, November 25, and run through Monday, December 1, which are the dates the American Automobile Association (AAA) defines as the 2025 Thanksgiving holiday period. It’s the busiest travel period for Americans, even beating out holidays like the Fourth of July and Christmas. While several million Americans are expected to make their Thanksgiving…

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model doesn’t begin in 2003, when America’s Next Top Model premiered and took television by storm. It doesn’t begin in the 1990s, when eventual host Tyra Banks rose to superstardom in the modeling industry. Instead, it begins in 2020, when the pandemic led a new generation to binge early-aughts reality TV, this time watching with a modern lens—and, naturally, tearing it to shreds on TikTok. From there, Netflix’s newest docuseries rewinds to tell the full story of America’s Next Top Model, from its pre-production through its 24 scandalous cycles and into its modern-day legacy, featuring interviews with contestants, producers, an…

The title cards for British actor Riz Ahmed’s new dramedy, Bait, are a colorful explosion of letters and numbers. If you look a little closer, each one reads like a code hidden in plain sight for you, the viewer, to unravel. Bait is a six-episode series that debuted on Prime Video on March 25. It stars Ahmed (who also created and cowrote the show) as Shah Latif, a struggling actor whose leaked audition to play James Bond incites a media frenzy. Each episode tracks Shah’s exponential spiral as his private life is made public, forcing him to contend with his own identity, belonging, self-worth, and the cultural narratives mapped onto him as a British-Pakistani actor com…

If you tuned into the red carpet for the Academy Awards, you may have seen actress Julia Fox being interviewed by social media influencers Quen Blackwell and Jake Shane, who were at the awards show reporting for Vanity Fair. In a bit that completely misses the mark, Shane quipped several times about the “annoying” child character in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which earned Rose Byrne a nomination for best actress. After being asked by Shane repeatedly about the “annoying” kid in the movie, Fox politely and appropriately steers the conversation to the more important tenor of the movie: that it’s meant to depict the unforgiving pressures of motherhood. In fact, the iden…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. CEOs deal with many challenges, but apparently their overall health and fitness isn’t among them. Some 93% of CEOs surveyed by corporate wellness platform Wellhub rate their overall well-being as excellent or good. In contrast, the same study, released earlier this year, finds that only…

Ever had a song you couldn’t get out of your head? That happened to me the other day. Pink Pony Club. It’s everywhere right now; I can’t escape it. And even though I really don’t like that song, it’s catchy. And as you’ve probably experienced, once you get a song like that stuck in your head, it can feel impossible to get out. What you might not know is there’s a scientific reason for this: It’s called ironic process theory. Or, you may have heard it by its more common name: The white bear problem. But there’s a tried and tested brain hack that helps you to get a song out of your head. What’s more, you can use it to replace negative or harmful thoughts with po…

The cost of a multistep skincare routine can quickly add up. But have you ever wondered what would happen if you simply stopped? This weekend, a TikTok creator went viral for discussing her controversial “Caveman Method,” which she claims is helping restore her skin barrier after years of picking at her skin. In a video that has since racked up nearly 10 million views, Tia Zakher announced she had cut out everything from her beauty routine—even water. “What you are seeing is dead skin that’s going to flake off eventually while healthy skin forms underneath,” she posted in response to questions about the texture on her face. In a separate video, she explain…

If you’re planning to see the new Minecraft movie and haven’t heard of the viral “chicken jockey” trend wreaking havoc in theaters across the country, read on. The trend gets its name from the block-shaped zombies in the video game Minecraft that occasionally ride chickens—thereby becoming chicken jockeys. In a scene from the new film A Minecraft Movie, based on the popular game, Jack Black’s character Steve at one point screams out, “Chicken jockey!” The phrase has since become a battle cry for teen-filled audiences to yell at the top of their lungs, flash phone lights, and launch popcorn and drinks at the screen. In one video, a moviegoer perched on another’s sh…

Forget AI replacing human artists—The Devil Wears Prada 2 just proved that human artists can replace AI. The new movie, a long-awaited sequel to 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, sees the return of star Meryl Streep as iconic fashion editor Miranda Priestly. It begins with Priestly in a PR crisis, sparking a slew of online hate. That includes memes like an image of Priestly dressed as a fast food worker captioned, “Would you like lies with that?” The image is only briefly on screen, and at first glance, many moviegoers assumed it was AI-generated. After all, on the internet of 2026, it most likely would be—an internet troll likely isn’t going out of their way to craft…

In the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, a spacecraft and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of an injured astronaut to remove a life-threatening blood clot from his brain. The Academy Award-winning movie—later developed into a novel by Isaac Asimov—seemed like pure fantasy at the time. However, it anticipated what could be the next revolution in medicine: the idea that ever-smaller and more sophisticated sensors are about to enter our bodies, connecting human beings to the internet. This “internet of beings” could be the third and ultimate phase of the internet’s evolution. After linking computers in the first phase and everyday objects in t…

The most important leadership strategies are often the ones you don’t see. The quiet, behind-the-scenes work that truly drives success might not make the headlines, but it makes all the difference. We spoke to 10 experienced leaders who opened up about the practical, everyday practices they use to transform team dynamics and boost business outcomes. From creating space for honest conversations to fine-tuning how work gets done, these insights show that small, thoughtful changes can have a big impact. Create space for vulnerability and open dialog One of the most impactful but often invisible aspects of leadership is creating space for vulnerability and open dialog …

It’s been an unprecedented and brutal week for the advertising industry. The finalization of Omnicom Group’s $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) (the biggest takeover in advertising history) is affecting tens of thousands of workers—most immediately the 4,000 expected to be laid off by the end of the year. Both Omnicom and IPG own many different ad agency brands, all of which will be profoundly impacted by the merger. Omnicom is retaining only McCann from the IPG roster of agency networks, while folding FCB into BBDO, and both DDB and MullenLowe into TBWA, in order to achieve Omnicom Chairman and CEO John Wren’s goal of $750 million in synergies. Th…

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…

A federal judge has ruled that The New York Times and other newspapers can proceed with a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft seeking to end the practice of using their stories to train artificial intelligence chatbots. U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein of New York on Wednesday dismissed some of the claims made by media organizations but allowed the bulk of the case to continue, possibly to a jury trial. “We appreciate Judge Stein’s careful consideration of these issues,” New York Times attorney Ian Crosby said in a statement. “As the order indicates, all of our copyright claims will continue against Microsoft and Open AI for their widespread theft of millions…