What's on Your Mind?

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…

From breathtaking jumps to mesmerizing spins, figure skating is one of the most popular sports at the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026. In a survey, 56% of 1,000 Americans who planned on watching the winter Olympics said they would be tuning in to watch figure skating, according to market research from Reviews.com. And all eyes are on the American trio of female skaters known as the ‘Blade Angels,’ on Tuesday with the start of the women’s short program. Amber Glenn, Alysa Liu, and Isabeau Levito are hoping to take home the gold in individual women’s figure skating, something the U.S. women’s team has not done since 2006. Only the top 24 women skaters in t…

What really holds people back from stepping up as allies in support of their marginalized colleagues? For example, why don’t more men say something when they see a colleague or a customer make a sexist remark about a female co-worker? Our research, published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, suggests that people often hesitate to intervene when co-workers are mistreated because they themselves feel disempowered in their organizations and experience distrust and polarization. Our findings run counter to the common assumption that people don’t step up to support marginalized colleagues because they don’t care or are unmotivated. Not seei…

A new $7.25 billion settlement between Bayer and a group of cancer patients could wrap up a huge wave of lawsuits against the company over allegations that it didn’t warn consumers about cancer risks associated with the weedkiller Roundup. Bayer faces more than 180,000 claims over Roundup, which contains the herbicide glyphosate – the chemical at the center of the controversy. Most of those claims are from people who used the weedkiller, which is sold at any hardware or garden store, at home. The lawsuits have prompted Bayer to pull glyphosate out of many products under the Roundup brand, though glyphosate is still commonly used by farmers and in the agriculture busin…

Baby care brand Frida is facing online backlash after screenshots of sexual innuendos in its marketing materials began circulating on social media. Frida, which describes itself as “the brand that gets parents,” sells a range of baby care, fertility, and postpartum products through major retailers, including Target. Last week, an X user shared images of several products’ packaging, writing: “sexual jokes to market baby products is actually sick and twisted @fridababy this is absolutely appalling and disgusting.” The post has since gained almost five million views on X. Among the examples highlighted is a social media graphic promoting the company’s 3-in-1 Tru…

From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, many executives think that bringing employees back to the office is the secret to restoring productivity. But they’re wrong. That’s not what’s happening in those newly populated offices. Instead, your employees are more likely to be joining video calls from company desks and wearing noise-canceling headphones while doing work they could have done at home. Only now they’re paying $20 to commute and eating sad desk salads to get through the day. The timing couldn’t be more ironic. A new wave of return-to-office (RTO) mandates arrive just as companies pour millions into AI initiatives designed to automate work, eliminate roles, an…

Can a headline-making squabble with a client actually be good for a brand? This week’s dispute between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, a high-profile player in the super-competitive field of artificial intelligence, may be just that. The dispute involves whether the Pentagon, which has an agreement to use Anthropic technology, can apply it in a wider range of scenarios: all “lawful use” cases. Anthropic has resisted signing off on some potential scenarios, and the Pentagon has essentially accused it of being overly cautious. As it happens, that assessment basically aligns with Anthropic’s efforts (most recently via Super Bowl ads aimed squarely at prominent …

“I really want to see a mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space,” Elon Musk said last week when he announced his plan to go to the moon. “It’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.” He’s right. I want to see it too, although probably we will both be dead before his vision is realized. The lunar mass driver—essentially a cannon that uses magnetic power to accelerate an object—is a key component to launch the million satellites Musk wants to put in orbit around the Earth. But Musk wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea. Smarter people than him thought about this in the 1970s as the solution to a key problem for human …

Even if you barely use AI, pretty soon you’ll be paying the price for it. Due to the demands of AI data centers, memory supplies are drying up for all kinds of devices, from phones and laptops to desktop PCs and game consoles. Three companies control nearly all the world’s DRAM production—Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix—and they’ve shifted production toward the type of RAM that those data centers run on. This comes at the expense of RAM for consumer electronics, resulting in a shortage that could last into 2028. It’s early days for the fallout, but what sounded like an abstract concern in 2025 is quickly becoming real, as electronics makers ra…

Is it lawful to call boneless chicken wings ‘wings’? According to a U.S. District Judge, yes. On Tuesday in Illinois, Judge John Tharp reached a verdict in a case brought against Buffalo Wild Wings alleging that the wings aren’t wings and shouldn’t be referred to as such on the restaurant chain’s menu. The suit, which was first brought by customer Aimen Halim in March 2023, claimed the business had violated the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act by referring to the product as “boneless wings” instead of something the plaintiff deemed more fitting, such as “chicken nuggets. In the end, the judge didn’t feel the case had any bones. In a 10-page ruling, Tharp wrote, “Bonel…

Biometric authentication—the ability to unlock your devices by using just your face or fingerprint—is one of the few smartphone features that, even today, leave me feeling like we’re living in the future. When I was a kid, technology like facial recognition was limited to science fiction. But as cool and useful as biometric authentication is, the technology can also leave us vulnerable. Here’s why—and how to protect yourself. It’s not just journalists and activists who can have their biometrics used against them Last month, journalists got a stark reminder that their biometrics might not keep the data they have on their devices safe from law enforcement searches. W…

You’re interested in AI but you’re human: You’ve got emails to answer, deadlines to meet, and you don’t have 40 hours a week to sift through academic papers on large language models. You just want to know what’s happening, why it matters, and maybe how to use it to get home a little earlier. In that spirit, here are five AI podcasts to help you get smarter and stay informed without wasting your time. The AI Daily Brief For the busy professional who needs the headlines fast, there’s The AI Daily Brief. It’s usually about 20 minutes, which is perfect for the commute or while you’re brewing that second pot of coffee. Host Nathaniel Whittemore does a great …

Corporate culture isn’t built by policies. It’s built by moments—the unscripted experiences that catch us off guard, bring us closer, and quietly shape how we show up for one another. But many efforts labeled “culture-building,” including onboarding programs, leadership retreats, and all-hands meetings, still feel like productivity theater: tightly scheduled and heavy on performance. Today, it’s worth asking whether that model has simply run its course. Consider this: what if the future of culture-building isn’t about managing people, but about designing experiences that allow people to feel something real together? What if awe, story, and shared creativity weren…

New York City is a city of walkers. More trips are made on foot than by car (41% versus 28%) and the city’s “80X50” climate action plan envisions that 80% of all trips by 2050 will be made either on foot, by biking, or by public transit. The problem is that pedestrian movement in the city has remained largely unmapped and underestimated—until now. Together with a team of researchers, Andres Sevtsuk, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, has built what he says is the first complete model of pedestrian activity in New York City—and it’s a model that can now be applied to any U.S. city. The model, which maps foot traffic across al…

Cheap tote bag collections everywhere just got an attachable clip-on upgrade. Snatch is a shoulder strap system designed to attach and detach to fabric surfaces without damaging them. The clips are comprised of three pieces of hardware—a button, slotted loop, and fastener—and they can give thin-handled tote bags new life with a wider, sturdier shoulder strap in just a few steps, exemplifying a simple and solutions-oriented Occam’s razor approach to product design. To assemble, you place fabric over the button piece and thread it through the aluminum slotted loop. The fastener holds it all into place, and the strap is then attached onto a g-hook on the slotted…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has defended the resource-intensive use of AI by comparing it to all the energy—and food—that humans require, sparking a wave of backlash across social media. That comparison, experts in climate and tech spaces say, is misguided, downplays the climate risks associated with AI, and illustrates the disconnect between tech CEOs and the rest of society. Altman’s comments came while speaking to the Indian Express at the India AI Impact summit. The outlet asked him to address some of the common criticisms of AI, including the amount of energy and water the technology requires. “One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is peop…

In the past, women’s work bags were designed to assert power. Women marched into the boardroom with hyper-structured “girlboss” totes or aggressively minimalist tech clutches. But there’s a shift taking place. Many work–life bags today are softer, both visually and physically. They’re lighter. They collapse. They transition seamlessly from the office to the many other things that fill your life: The mid-day grocery run, a coffee meeting that turns into school pickup, dinner with friends straight from the office. Every year, I test dozens of bags in search of the ones that best capture how we’re actually living and working right now. It’s clear that work bags are …

The advice you get early in your career can disproportionately shape your future. I can recall two or three conversations from when I was a college kid who liked writing that melted away ambiguity and set my vague ambitions on a path into the fog like a compass. For the latest release by The Steve Jobs Archive, the group is making the advice of some of the most uniquely impactful people in the world available to everyone. Given that Jobs did not own many physical objects, the archive has served as more of a repository of ideas for the next generation to think different. Each year, the Archive takes on SJA Fellows. And each year, it gives these fellows a book of l…

For decades, we’ve been told that the smartest organizations are “data-driven.” The phrase carries moral weight. To be guided by data is to be serious, rational, modern. If you’re not, you’re seen as ideological or sentimental. In the workplace, quantification has become synonymous with credibility and competence. And yet, the more data we accumulate, the less certain we seem to be that we are making better decisions. There’s a paradox. Organizations are drowning in dashboards, KPIs, performance metrics, behavioral traces, biometric indicators, predictive scores, engagement rates, and AI-generated forecasts. We have more data than we know what to do with. We pretend t…

Everyone who has tried to code with Anthropic’s Claude Code AI agents runs into the same usability problem: If you run two or three concurrent artificial intelligence sessions—say, one rewriting your server code, another generating tests, a third doing background research—you are forced to manually hunt through separate terminal tabs, each one generating a relentless stream of machine-readable log entries, just to figure out what each program is actually doing at any given moment. Not only is it hard to follow what’s really going on, but not checking constantly can also lead to problems, as agents might stop to ask you something and you won’t notice it for minutes or hou…

It’s sometime in the future, and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman have joined forces on a new venture called Energym. The global chain of gyms is designed to harness the energy of the unemployed as they exercise on machines. The generated electricity feeds the AI servers that put them out of a job. Think Planet Fitness meets the Matrix, but without living in a simulation. Energym’s mission is to feed the AI machines with human sweat, and it’s a great business model. By 2030, almost 80% of people have lost their jobs. If you have no money and no purpose, you may as well use all your free time to work out and feed AI server fans with some kilowatts. “It solves our …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Zillow economists just published their updated 12-month forecast, projecting that U.S. home prices—as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index—will rise +0.9% between January 2026 and January 2027. That’s a mild downward revision from its 12-month forecast published last month (+2.1%). At its latest reading, U.S. home prices, as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index, are up +0.2%. Zillow’s latest forecast expects prices to remain close to that pace. While Zillow’s national home price forecast isn’t negative—it isn’t exactly bullish either. …

People change jobs all the time. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the oldest people in the workforce have probably held more than 12 jobs over the course of their lives. Those aren’t just new titles within a firm, they likely include larger career shifts. With globalization and changes in technology, the need to shift career paths can happen to people even in the last decade of their work lives. I myself have recently moved to the private sector after more than three decades as a university faculty member. If you make a significant career switch, what can you do to ease the adjustment to the new role and make a contribution quickly? Don’t be afraid of …

The rise of full-body MRI scans has been framed as a victory for consumer empowerment. Skip the referrals. Skip the waiting. Pay out of pocket and finally see what is happening inside your body, before it’s too late. For many, especially women, these scans are compelling. They offer agency in a healthcare system that often feels slow, dismissive, and reactive, rather than preventive. What many women would be surprised to learn, however, is despite the name, many full-body MRI scans do not reliably screen for breast cancer, the most common cancer in women. Women make roughly 80% of healthcare purchasing decisions in the United States. They spend more out of pocket …

Inside a new HP laptop, the copper in its heat sink comes straight from old HP devices—making the company the first to reuse its own recycled metal in a closed loop. In partnership with HP, the Australia-based startup Mint Innovation took in circuit boards from thousands of old HP computers and servers, and then recycled them to supply pure refined copper back to the company. The process is designed to be more sustainable than traditional smelting. Instead of melting down metals in a furnace—an energy-intensive, polluting process—the startup uses a mix of chemicals and biology to recover valuable materials. “What HP is effectively doing is mining e-waste of their …