What's on Your Mind?

Bourbon was once hailed as the poor man’s drink. The spirit has since developed, however, from a mass-market American staple into a luxury class, and limited releases, higher prices, and brands vying for prestige have caused a crowded top tier. Even though the premium field has widened, the very top of the market remains stubbornly narrow, according to whiskey expert Fred Minnick. During a blind tasting of his top 100 American whiskeys of 2025, Minnick evaluated leading contenders anonymously. Even without labels, the rankings reflected the same hierarchy seen at retail and on the secondary market. The most scarce, high-status bottles still rose to the top, regar…

For years, retail investors were dismissed by some on Wall Street as “dumb money.” That typically referred to those prone to trading on hype, or chasing trends rather than company or industry fundamentals, or responding late to big market moves. That’s no longer the case. An analysis of where retail investors put their money last year shows they outperformed two of the most popular, professionally managed index funds, SPY and QQQ, whose goal is to mirror the performance of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100, respectively. Retail investors accounted for $5.4 trillion in trading activity in 2025 across stocks and exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, according to Vanda, an indepen…

It’s a good day to be the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. This morning, the company unveiled its latest innovation in the weight-loss drug wars: the KwikPen. Per a press release , the KwikPen contains a months-worth of Zepbound, Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 designed to combat obesity, and it’s designed to make taking the medicine more convenient. Alongside the announcement of this new innovation, Eli Lilly’s main competitor, Novo Nordisk, dropped the news that its experimental drug, CagriSema, perfomed worse for patient weight loss in a head-to-head trial against Eli Lilly’s proprietary drug, tirzepatide. A November study from the health policy non-profit KFF found that abo…

A new word has entered the business headline writer’s lexicon over the last month: the “SaaSpocalypse.” Between mid-January and mid-February 2026, around a trillion dollars was wiped from the value of software stocks. The S&P North American Software Index posted its worst monthly decline since the 2008 financial crisis. Individual stocks have been savaged, with even Microsoft, the ultimate tech blue chip, falling by more than 10%. The panic is real. But is it rational? The catalyst for this turmoil was a series of product launches from AI companies—most notably Anthropic’s Claude Cowork tool and its subsequent upgrades—demonstrating that AI agents are now capa…

In 2001, Antoni was working at a business that was underperforming and facing layoffs. People didn’t know who would be cut or when. You could tell by people’s behavior that anxiety was at an all-time high. Managers were “networking” in the right corridors, colleagues started to crowd meetings to look indispensable, and teams were slowing down because nobody wanted to make the wrong move. One leader chose a different tactic. Every day, at the same time, he stood in the same spot where anyone could walk up to him. He shared what he actually knew (not what he guessed), answered questions without theater, and ended with a concrete direction for “today.” People still didn’…

Hiring well is one of a leader’s most important jobs. Having talented employees is a strong competitive advantage and allows your organization to produce results and create a productive and positive culture. It’s hard to do well, especially at senior levels where judgment and character become increasingly important, and there’s a high cost of recruiting or replacing someone. Substantive questions help assess a candidate’s skills and readiness for a job, and behavioral questions provide the opportunity to understand how they think and handle themselves. But ultimately, once you’ve established their competency, it’s time to decide whether a candidate’s character is the …

When looking for an apartment in San Francisco today, artificial intelligence can seem inescapable; and that’s not just because every rental building seems to have an AI bot answering calls. In San Francisco, the technology’s ascendency—and the subsequent skyrocketing job growth— has helped make the apartment market one of the tightest in the nation, with the fastest growing rent in the U.S. Lisa McCarrel, Managing Partner of Move Bay Area, a relocation and rental housing service, has seen the rental market become frenzied in recent months due in part to the increase in AI and AI-adjacent jobs. With units harder to come by, she’s seen some potential tenants offer…

After a fairly significant hardware upgrade in 2025, it’s sounding like things will be quieter for the iPhone this year. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in his newsletter this week that the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max will “represent minor tweaks” from their predecessors and “won’t be a big update.” Much of the attention in fall 2026 is expected to be on Apple’s first folding phone. Gurman did, however, note that the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max will have “a new camera system with a variable aperture,” which caught my eye as a phone camera obsessive. There have been rumors about this for years, but I wasn’t expecting it to be perhaps the key feature of what are like…

Early drivers steered cars by pushing a lever left and right. That was fine at slow speeds, but disastrous when you accelerated. It took years before the steering wheel arrived. Granola CEO Chris Pedregal says AI interfaces are still in the lever era. Pedregal, who in 2019 sold the edtech startup Socratic to Google, says we’re just beginning to figure out how humans should interact with AI. Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, people still associate AI with typing into a chat box. Granola is betting on a new approach to AI-enhanced note-taking. The London-based startup doesn’t record audio or video or send bots into your meetings. Instead, its tool sits on y…

At a time of broken climate pledges and an economy-wide bearhug of automation and artificial intelligence, the dominant themes of the recently announced 2026 National Design Awards—climate action, sustainability, dedication to craft—are a refreshing reset. Rewarding innovation and impact among U.S.-based designers, the awards are both an honor and a pulse check on the state of design. This year’s group of winners represent a diverse group of practitioners and firms exploring ways that work in design and the arts can counteract environmental catastrophe and re-center the human hand in shaping the future. Honorees include the indigenous underpinnings in the textiles…

It’s no secret that Flavor Flav loves the Olympics. The rapper and Public Enemy member has become one of the loudest supporters of women’s sports in the past few Olympic cycles. He is the official hype man and a sponsor for USA Water Polo. In October 2025, he announced he was bringing the hype to the Winter Olympics as a sponsor for USA Bobsled and Skeleton. Now, after the USA women’s hockey team declined a perfunctory invitation to the State of the Union address after President Donald The President shared a chummy locker room phone call with the men’s team—in which they laugh at the prospect of the women’s gold medalists attending—Flav is once again stepping up.…

Following U.S. and Israeli strikes in Iran this weekend, airlines around the region and world have canceled thousands of flights amid continued conflict in the Middle East. Temporary regional airspace closures have led to airspace restrictions, forcing airlines to cancel flights and stranding countless passengers. As of Monday, March 2, 2026, airspace across many parts of the Middle East remained partially or fully closed. According to FlightRadar24, the following airspace regions remain partially or fully closed today: Iran Iraq Qatar Bahrain Jordan Kuwait Syria Israel United Arab Emirates (OMAE) airspace remains heavily restri…

While much has been discussed about what the AI takeover means for those in entry-level roles, it seems even CEOs aren’t exempt. Uber employees have created an AI version of their company’s top executive, according to the company’s CEO. “One of my team members told me that some teams have built a Dara AI, you know, so that they basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me,” Dara Khosrowshahi said on a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett. “You can imagine, like, you know, by the time something comes to me, there’s been a prep and a meeting of the slide deck has been beautifully hone…

With nearly 40,000 locations in over 100 countries, tens of millions of people worldwide regularly eat McDonald’s iconic burgers. But in an Instagram post that’s blowing up the internet, company CEO Chris Kempczinski appears less-than-thrilled to be eating one himself. The video was posted to Kempczinski’s Instagram account a month ago, but found new life over the weekend on platforms like X and TikTok, with many users wondering if it’s “intentionally cringe,” saying that Kempczinski looks “uncomfortable” or commenting how he “looks like he’s gonna hurl.” “From this video, it seems likely the CEO of McDonald’s has never eaten McDonald’s before,” one user wrote. …

We live in a time when our expectations for ethical business practices are no longer predictable. Global regulation, along with ideas around standards like ESG, are in flux—and building debate around what the standards should be for leaders and managers. “Some governments are tightening oversight, while others are relaxing enforcement,” write ethics leaders at the World Economic Forum. Companies may focus on strictly following the law, thinking that it doesn’t make sense to go beyond regulatory expectations. But being compliant doesn’t mean you’re being ethical. There are three common signals that your company is headed towards a flawed business practice—decision…

Bombs are falling across the Middle East as the United States and Israel try to bring Iran to heel. But while physical infrastructure is toppling in Iran, the country’s digital armies are still fighting with force. Groups linked to the Iranian regime have hit Jordanian gas firms, as well as businesses in the UAE and Qatar, as part of its Great Epic cyber offensive. Countries including the UK, whose military base in Cyprus has been hit by Iran-linked missiles, have begun warning businesses to prepare for possible Iranian cyberattacks. That raises a bigger question: How did Iran become such a formidable force in cyberwarfare, and to what end? A cyber shock to th…

Don’t bring your mom or dad to an interview with Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary if you were planning on it. On a recent appearance on Fox Business’ Varney & Co., O’Leary argued that doing so—bringing parents to a job interview—sends a “horrific signal” to employers, and calls it a “big red flag.” “First question I’d have to the son or daughter, I’d say, ‘Do you want me to hire your mother or you? What’s she doing here?'” O’Leary said. “That résumé goes right into the garbage.” This isn’t simply a hypothetical situation. The data shows a not insignificant number of young jobseekers are tapping in parents throughout the hiring process to boost their odd…

When leaders lose credibility, the explanation usually sounds simple: · “I should have phrased that better.” · “I didn’t say the right thing.” It is easy to point to a sentence or word choice and assume that is where things went pear-shaped. But what most leaders label as a content problem is actually a presence problem. This is the core misunderstanding I see repeatedly in my executive coaching work. Leaders often assume credibility rises and falls based on wording alone. In reality, credibility is shaped by executive presence, which reflects the signals leaders send about confidence, clarity, and authority before their ideas are fully heard. W…

High-level information about the private work of students and staff using ChatGPT Edu at several universities can be viewed by thousands of colleagues across their institutions due to a misunderstanding of what is being shared, according to a University of Oxford researcher who identified the issue. The problem affects Codex Cloud Environments in ChatGPT Edu and exposes the names and some metadata associated with the public and private GitHub repositories that users within a university have connected to their ChatGPT Edu accounts. No private code or repository data was exposed to unauthorized users. Nevertheless, the metadata that is visible can still reveal a mea…

Medical equipment maker Stryker was allegedly hit with an Iran-linked cyber attack on Wednesday right after midnight ET, causing a global outage across its system, with staff and contractors saying a logo of an Iran-linked group appeared on the login page, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Shares of the Michigan-based global medical technology company (SYK) were down nearly 4% in early afternoon trading on Wednesday at the time of this writing. What happened? According to the report, staff said cellphones, laptops, and other devices that run on Microsoft’s Windows operating system to connect ​to Stryker’s ​technology ⁠systems …

Spend any time on social media, and it’s only a matter of time before one genre of content starts hitting your timeline: Someone telling you they make a fortune by doing something that sounds absurdly easy. (And that you can, too.) Maybe they (kind of) show you how to design and sell your own sweatshirts or notebooks, a venture that supposedly earns them five figures a month. Or maybe they tell you about how they started a $100,000 business with no inventory. Whatever the enticing story is, the ending is usually the same: they offer to teach you how to do the same. And who would say no to easy money? Get-rich-quick how-tos have existed forever—and more recently, …

Airport lounges, travel portals, and credit card perks have become a competitive front in the fight for affluent travelers. Now Capital One is adding another piece to that strategy with a dedicated travel app designed to bring booking, rewards, airport access, and trip management into a single platform. The company announced today that it is rolling out the Capital One Travel App, a standalone application available on iOS and Android that gives cardholders direct access to its travel booking ecosystem. The launch comes as Capital One also moves to bring the technology, talent, and supplier relationships behind Capital One Travel fully in-house as part of its…

Elon Musk and Tesla want to call their autonomous robotaxi service Cybercabs, a name that would seem to fit snugly with the company’s line of “Cyber” products. But an obscure French beverage wholesaler, run by someone who appears to be a devoted Musk fan, could ruin those plans. UniBev, based in Ajaccio, France, beat Tesla to filing for the trademark for Cybercab. Last week, Musk’s company struck back, filing a 167-page complaint with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that called UniBev “a bad faith trademark squatter, who started as a Tesla fan.” UniBev has until April 19 to respond to the complaint. Should the issue go to trial, a decision could be delayed un…

Happiness has been a bit thin on the ground these days. The headlines are grim, loneliness and disconnection are rising, and work pressures seem to multiply by the day as new technologies, global unrest, and social upheaval collide. In the midst of all that, searching for joy may feel a bit . . . selfish. Even absurd. But none of these forces seem likely to resolve themselves anytime soon. Work will remain demanding. The news cycle will keep churning. Which raises a practical question: if the world isn’t getting lighter anytime soon, how do we find a little more lightness inside it? That doesn’t mean ignoring the difficulties around us. But you will be better…

There’s a lot of fear these days in the media world over the “zero-click” future. AI chatbots and search engines ingest content, interpret it, and then summarize it for users, with the inevitable consequence being that people no longer visit your site. This is not theoretical. Data from Chartbeat, an analytics company that serves media sites, shows global publisher traffic from Google dropped by one-third last year, with smaller publications hit hardest. So yes, AI substitutes content, but it doesn’t do so evenly. A recent analysis from Define Media Group looked at how the presence of Google AI Overviews affected traffic to different types of content over the past yea…