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There’s a brand new hook to Nespresso’s upcoming global advertising campaign: Dua Lipa. The coffee brand, created by Nestlé in 1986, is teasing that the pop star will be featured in a new ad push called “Vertuo World,” which will debut on April 14 and promises to shepherd a new creative direction. Millennial Dua Lipa will star alongside Oscar-winning actor (and baby boomer) George Clooney, who has been an ambassador for Nespresso since 2006. A new face for a new generation Adding Dua Lipa to the mix builds on Nespresso’s efforts to lure a coveted demographic, Gen Z. There are around 70 million of them in the U.S. today, a generation that’s still aging into …

Your first 90 days on a job are often the most important. That’s where you lay the foundation for the years to come and learn more about how your skills best fit into the organization. That’s just as true when you’re launching a startup. The early days of an entrepreneurial endeavor, especially in the fast-growing consulting space, not only help to define how the business is received, but also its trajectory. As the mad dash begins for clients, there are fundamentals that you’ll need to pay attention to and long-term planning you’ll need to focus on at the same time. Get these steps right and you can lay a foundation for future growth. Ignore them, and you could b…

Day by day there’s more evidence that AI is eating up the media world. A recent report from Growtika, a self-described SEO and AI search agency, analyzed data from the search analytics platform Ahrefs to show that traffic to many tech media sites is way down over the past couple of years. Hardest hit were Digital Trends (down 97%), ZDNet (down 90%), and The Verge (down 85%). Even the most seemingly resilient publications (Mashable was down only 30% and CNET 47%, both Ziff-Davis properties) took significant hits. Some of these reductions are no doubt exaggerated—Growtika compared each publication’s peak month with traffic in January 2026, which doesn’t account for seas…

Is Benjamin Netanyahu dead? According to this video posted on March 15 by the Israeli prime minister’s office, he’s alive and thriving. You may have seen it online, along with a rabid debate between the crowd who claims it is fake (it is not) and the people who say it is real (which is correct, as determined by fact checkers and independent intelligence analysts). But we are not here to debate about what is true or not. What matters is the debate itself. It’s another point of proof in our new normal: Since AI can make up believable new realities, people now doubt reality itself, using that claim to support their beliefs and push their agendas. The rumors of Netany…

“I have no idea if this is what they want me to do. I barely get any feedback.” This is a statement I often hear from leaders in my coaching calls, even those at a senior level. When these leaders were early in their careers, there was more frequent guidance and coaching on what success looked like for them and if their work met expectations. However, research by Amy Edmondson shows that the higher you rise in an organization, the less feedback you tend to receive, which can make it feel like you’re losing reassurance. In coaching calls with my clients, we often discover how reliant they were on their leader’s affirmation, and that this recognition served as motivat…

It’s a tough time out there for creatives. Whether you’re a writer, director, actor, or artist of any kind, the world is short on opportunities—particuarly the kind that pay. But even Academy Award winners like screenwriter and director Barry Jenkins didn’t have a linear path to success, as he shared in a recent panel about how to sustain a career as a filmmaker. Jenkins, the writer-director behind Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, was a panelist at “Behind the Chair: Representation and the Business of Filmmaking,” a seminar on the film industry hosted by the Directors Guild of America. In a one-on-one discussion with fellow director Anu Valia (We Stranger…

Nearly 90,000 bottles of children’s ibuprofen have been recalled across the United States, according to an enforcement report this week from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Strides Pharma Inc. has recalled 89,952 bottles of Children’s Ibuprofen Oral Suspension following customer complaints of a “gel-like mass and black particles” in the medicine. The India-based company had manufactured the ibuprofen for Taro Pharmaceuticals U.S.A., Inc. based in Hawthorne, New York. The recall comes from Strides Pharma’s Bridgewater, New Jersey, subsidiary. Strides Pharma initiated the recall on March 2, with the FDA labeling it a Class II recall on Monday, March 16…

The dangerous heat wave shattering March records all over the U.S. Southwest is more than just another extreme weather blip. It’s the latest next-level weather wildness that is occurring ever more frequently as Earth’s warming builds. Experts said unprecedented and deadly weather extremes that sometimes strike at abnormal times and in unusual places are putting more people in danger. For example, the Southwest is used to coping with deadly heat, but not months ahead of schedule, including a 110-degree Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) reading in the Arizona desert on Thursday that smashed the highest March temperature recorded in the U.S. On Thursday, sites in Arizona and south…

Pakistan gets almost all its oil and gas from the Middle East, where U.S. and Israeli bombing of Iran have caused crude prices to blow past $150 a barrel and tankers can’t get through the Strait of Hormuz. But it has one edge in the crisis: a rapid, recent shift to solar power. The country’s solar boom started in the wake of the Ukraine war, when Pakistan couldn’t afford to buy liquefied natural gas and that led to power outages. “It also led to soaring electricity bills,” says Rabia Babar, an energy market analyst at the Pakistan-based nonprofit Renewables First. Some power bills were as much as 30-40% of people’s income, sometimes more than they were spending on…

Good urbanism should transcend politics. Socialists and capitalists can walk the same neighborhood and agree it’s a pleasant place to live. They can each appreciate the tree canopy, the corner café with people spilling onto the sidewalk, the mix of ages on bikes and on foot, the architectural details of older buildings, and so on. Whether they arrive by bus, bike, car, or on foot, people across the political spectrum want the same thing: places that work for everyday life. Places that feel safe, accessible, and appealing for young and old alike. Unlikely alliances are forming around this shared vision. People who call themselves conservatives, liberals, capitalis…

A few years ago, the reusable water bottle transformed from a humble utilitarian good into a status-signaling piece of arm candy. On TikTok, popular creators were decking out their water bottles with custom accessories and add-ons. Out in the real world, people were coordinating their water bottle colors with their activewear sets. Some consumers were even willing to drop hundreds of dollars for a “luxury” hydration experience. It was a full-on war of the water bottles, and there was a clear leader in the pack of drinkware brands vying for attention: Stanley 1913. For Stanley, a subsidiary of the parent company PMI WW Brands, the great water bottle wars were a busine…

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. When Valerie Oswalt became CEO of breakfast and snack products company Kodiak in November 2022, she inherited a fast-growing business with beloved products, dedicated employees, and an outdoorsy vibe, befitting its Park City, Utah, headquarters. She also walked into a company that need…

Less than two years ago, Sam Altman described advertising as a “last resort” for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, during a Harvard Business School interview. He said he would pursue it if it were the only way to provide global access to high-quality AI services. At the time, the comment stood out—not because ads seemed unlikely, but because it underscored what was at stake. ChatGPT doesn’t win attention the way social platforms do. It wins trust. That’s why ChatGPT’s recent ad launch matters far beyond just the creation of a new advertising surface. It’s a real-time test of whether a product built almost entirely on trust can monetize without fundamentally changing user behavior. Op…

Most technology companies treat brand or product names like marketing. That’s a mistake. Names are infrastructure—not cosmetic choices or launch-day deliverables. When names are wrong, everything built on top of them pays a quiet, compounding price. We tend to think of infrastructure as physical or technical systems: roads, power grids, cloud platforms. But infrastructure is really something more precise: It’s the invisible system that enables everything else to function. When it works, no one notices. When it doesn’t, nothing scales. Language behaves the same way. Before anyone buys a new technology, it must be named. Before they adopt it, they must talk about it…

During a lunch with my friend Kurt at the Chicago Club—one of those quietly elegant institutions where history sits comfortably in the room—I arrived with a question. It was one that could only be asked by someone trying to understand the United States from outside its horizon. Kurt’s surname carries enough S’s and K’s to suggest Eastern European roots. I am Brazilian, the grandson of Italians, Portuguese, Ukrainians, and with some Indigenous blood. Our grandparents crossed oceans from similar places, yet our lives unfolded inside different societies. I asked him: If our families had boarded different ships—mine arriving at Ellis Island and his in Brazil—would we …

When a new song attributed to country singer Blaze Foley, “Together,” appeared on his Spotify profile last year, something didn’t seem right. For starters, Foley had been dead for more than two decades, and the cover art featured AI artwork of a man who wasn’t Foley, and the song wasn’t uploaded by Foley’s longtime distributor. Fake tracks have appeared on various artist profiles, including easy-listening act The Sweet Enoughs, and Australian bands Alpha Wolf and Thy Art Is Murder. Smaller artists are not safe either, with musician Catherine Brennan taking to TikTok saying “in the past two weeks I’ve had two albums released under my name that are not mine.” Spoti…

Here’s a story you’re probably familiar with: You buy the reusable coffee cup. It’s beautiful, ethical, made from recycled ocean plastic, and you feel good about your purchase. But then it leaks in your bag, ruins a notebook, and by week two it’s sitting in a cabinet while you’re back to disposable cups and a vague sense of guilt. Or maybe it’s the “eco mode” on your washing machine that takes three hours instead of one. The sustainable packaging that requires scissors, sweat, and a YouTube tutorial. The electric vehicle charging app with six steps when a gas pump has one. We’ve all been there. But here’s what’s interesting: The problem isn’t that you don’t care a…

For years, we have been outsourcing pieces of cognition so gradually that the shift barely registered. We outsourced memory to search engines after the well-known “Google effect” showed that when people expect information to remain accessible online, they are less likely to remember the information itself and more likely to remember where to find it. We outsourced navigation to GPS, even as research began to show that heavy reliance on it can weaken spatial memory when we have to find our own way. And we outsourced more and more of our social coordination to platforms that decide what we see, when we respond, and how we stay in sync with one another. Now we are begin…

Over the course of his 50 years in the art world, Michael Hafftka’s figurative expressionist work has been exhibited at many of the world’s most prominent galleries. His paintings have hung at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Sauf Gallery in Paris. Now, his work is being presented in a more unusual place: on Hugging Face, the AI website. The New York–born artist, now 72, has uploaded roughly half his oeuvre to the platform. He did it on his own initiative after researching Hugging Face and recognizing it as a gathering place for AI work. The move functions as both an artistic gesture and an archival one. His path to AI is less surp…

For the first time in 36 years, the old-school Adidas trefoil logo will appear at the World Cup. The vintage Adidas logo shows three leaf-shaped foils with three parallel horizontal lines that cut through the bottom of the shapes. It previously appeared on Adidas World Cup kits until it was replaced by the brand’s triangular three-bars logo in the 1990s. Now, for the 2026 World Cup, the trefoil logo is making a comeback, appearing on the right chest of away jerseys for 25 countries, including Japan, Mexico, and Ukraine. Bringing the old logo back is a nostalgia play. Sam Handy, general manager of football for Adidas, said in a statement that the German sportsw…

A New Mexico jury determined Tuesday that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms, a verdict that signals a changing tide against tech companies and the government’s willingness to crack down. The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial, and as jurors in a federal court in California have been sequestered in deliberations for more than a week about whether Meta and YouTube should be liable in a similar case. New Mexico jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety, and v…

The state of behavioral health tells two different stories. On one hand, the crisis is deepening: 62% of U.S. adults now experience mental health challenges, up from 44% just a decade ago. Severe mental illness has climbed from 10% to 15% over that same period, according to third-party research commissioned by Qualifacts (research not available publicly). On the flip side, there are signs of genuine progress. The stigma around seeking care is finally lessening, with treatment rates rising from 45% to 52% between 2014 and 2024. Mental health and substance use spending increased 55% from 2015 to 2022, adding 170,000 critical jobs to the behavioral health workforce d…

Meetings look neutral on the calendar. Everyone’s calendar is stamped with the same blue 30-minute block. Everyone gets a seat at the table, and—supposedly—the same shot to contribute. But the moment you click “Join,” the pecking order kicks in. Meetings are where power is put on display, credit is scooped up, and the rules of who speaks and who doesn’t are enforced. If you want to understand how inequality festers inside an organization, start watching what happens in your meetings. At a time when women’s representation in the workplace has stagnated and their presence in senior leadership positions is slipping, we need to look closer at the everyday behaviors t…

It’s no secret that children and adolescents have a lot more eyes on them these days thanks to everything from social media to cameras in everyone’s pockets. This experience (along with encouragement from brands such as Disney) has created space for young people to mimic adults, embracing cosmetics and anti-aging creams. Now, Italy’s consumer protection regulator says it is looking into the marketing strategies of some of the main contributors to this phenomenon: beauty companies. The country’s Competition Authority (AGCM) has launched two investigations into Sephora and Benefit Cosmetics for allegedly failing to clearly indicate that their products are not…

Yesterday, shares of Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) dropped nearly 8% in a single trading session, ending the day at $547.54 per share. Today, the stock price has continued to fall, down about 2.5% in early-morning trading. At its current price of around $533 per share, it has declined more than 32% since META shares reached an all-time high of over $796 per share last August. But why has Meta, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, seen its stock fortunes reversed so profoundly since last summer? There are three primary factors at play. Meta loses landmark social media addiction trial The most immediate factor affecting META stock is lik…