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Anil Menon might have the world’s spaciest resume. After several years as a NASA flight surgeon, he became SpaceX’s medical director in 2018, where he authored research on the effects of space on the human body. In 2021, he was selected as a NASA astronaut and has spent the past several years training for his own journey to space. Along the way, he also supported his wife, Anna Menon, who traveled to space on a private mission in 2024 and was herself selected as a NASA astronaut last year. Somewhere in the margins, Menon has also served as an Air Force Reserve member and emergency room doctor. Now, he’s finally heading to space himself. This July, Menon will trave…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to increase rapidly as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings beyond seasonality could suggest a market where sellers are gaining power. Since the national pandemic housing boom fizzled out in 2022, the power dynamic has slowly been shifting directionally from sellers to buyers. Of course, that shift has varied…

Heidi O’Neill is having a tough week. In late April, the Lululemon board announced it had ended its monthslong search to replace CEO Calvin McDonald, who left the company abruptly in 2025 after six years at the helm. As soon as the company announced that O’Neill, a 26-year Nike veteran, would be taking on the position, things got messy. Lululemon’s stock took a plunge, suggesting that investors didn’t think O’Neill was the right pick. And many analysts—including myself—argued that following the Nike playbook would not lead Lululemon out of its financial doldrums. Then, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson weighed in. Wilson launched the company in 1998 as a yoga brand a…

I sat in my car staring at the front door of the community mental health center, questioning if I could walk in. If anyone saw me, they might have assumed I was a patient struggling to face my mental health issues head-on in treatment. But I wasn’t. I was the therapist who was struggling to find the courage to walk in the door. My husband had passed away unexpectedly just two months before, at the age of 26. After my three days of bereavement time, I wasn’t in any shape to return to work. Fortunately, my doctor diagnosed me with “acute stress disorder” and bought me two months of short-term disability. I still didn’t feel ready to go back to work but my mortgage bill …

Below, Arthur Brooks shares five key insights from his new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. Brooks is a social scientist and professor at Harvard University, where he teaches the science of happiness. He is also a columnist at The Free Press, host of the Office Hours podcast, and CBS News contributor. What’s the big idea? Life hasn’t become meaningless, but most of us have adopted habits that turn meaning on mute. Reconnecting with a deeper purpose awaits in the right hemisphere of your brain. All it takes is learning how to activate that side of existence. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Brooks h…

There is a troubling contradiction at the heart of the global transition to a cleaner, greener, tech-driven future: Modern technologies—everything from AI to wind turbines, as well as cellphones, electric vehicles and defense systems—depend on critical minerals. But many of the communities where those minerals are mined end up with polluted water and poorer health because of the mining. Lithium powers batteries. Cobalt stabilizes them. Copper carries electricity. Rare earth elements make wind turbines and digital devices efficient and durable. Each of these are essential to the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, but they are also toxic and require enorm…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. The recent International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy drew 2,000+ journalists, including 526 speakers, for four days of conversation about what’s next for our field. It was one of the most vibrant conferences I’ve attended. I spoke on a panel about how journalism training evolves when AI does entry-level work. I also attended 15 other sessions. Five ideas stuck with me, each about how journalism can be more human, more sustainable, and more inventive, even as the industry contracts. Live Journalism Resonates Madrid-bas…

Most founders believe their job is to stay deeply involved as their company grows. But that instinct often becomes the very thing that holds the business back. As companies scale, what once made them successful—founder-led decision-making, strong creative direction, tight control—can start to create bottlenecks. Teams can’t become truly autonomous, leadership layers struggle to emerge and the organization remains tied to the founder’s perspective instead of evolving beyond it. I saw this firsthand after a decade of building Kurppa Hosk with business partner Thomas Kurppa. Nothing was broken; we had become a globally renowned creative agency. But growth was becomi…

If you’re still copy-pasting the same formatting requests or resorting to “write this like a professional” prompts every single time you open ChatGPT, you’re working too hard. There’s an essential feature buried in the Settings menu called Custom Instructions. In short, it lets you set permanent preferences so you don’t repeat prompts. Think of it as a set of persistent filters. Instead of reminding ChatGPT that you hate long-winded intros or that you need everything delivered in a clean table, you tell it once and it remembers forever. Setting it up is a breeze: Click your profile name or icon in the bottom-left corner and choose Personalization. You’ll notic…

Bozoma Saint John shares her approach to leadership, emphasizing curiosity as a driving force behind growth, confidence, and long-term success View the full article

CEO of Black Girls Code, Cristina Mancini shares her perspective on leaders treating DEI as a brand strategy rather than a true commitment. View the full article

Chriselle Lim didn’t come from a perfume background, but she didn’t let that stop her. She realized there is always room for new brands that bring a different perspective. View the full article

In the rolling hills near Reno, Nevada, in a field filled with solar panels, something unexpected is nestled into the landscape: a data center that isn’t blowing up its neighbors’ electric bills. In fact, the modular data center, built by Crusoe, essentially doesn’t rely on the electric grid at all. It runs on solar power and an unlikely source: hundreds of second-life EV batteries. At a time when data centers are driving up electricity demand—and facing intense political pushback over potential impacts on energy bills and the environment—the batteries offer a flexible way to add power without leaning harder on the grid. The astonishing setup is the handiwork of…

New York City is notoriously loud. Cabs honking everywhere, thousands of people flocking to the streets at all hours, and cars blasting music for all to hear. But while some of us hear only noise, others hear music. Joshua Wolk is one of those people. The designer is the creative mind behind Train Jazz, which turns the rhythm of NYC’s subway into an interactive musical website. Train Jazz started when Wolk came across New York City’s open repository of transit data. He first created a soundless live map of the city’s transit. “It felt unfinished. I soon realized that music was that missing piece,” he tells Fast Company. Train Jazz Wolk ended up assig…

Consolidation is all the rage in the video game world these days. In the past year, Ubisoft created a new gaming subsidiary with Chinese tech giant Tencent, while Electronic Arts announced a $55 billion deal led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund that will take the company private. An industry that, just a decade ago, included more than a dozen publicly traded game makers now has only a handful left. Take-Two Interactive Software has managed to remain independent while rivals, including Activision-Blizzard and EA, have been absorbed. And as it continues digesting its 2022 acquisition of Zynga, CEO Strauss Zelnick says the company is already eyeing its next acqui…

Every few months, we find ourselves circling back to the same question. What skills will matter next? Every time, the answers feel urgent, confident, and somehow incomplete. A new technology dominates the conversation. Or there’s a new ‘essential’ capability. Organizations rush to respond, often without much confidence that the target will stay still long enough to hit. The reality is that the future of work is no longer unfolding in neat stages. It’s arriving in overlapping waves. Technological change, geopolitical instability, climate pressure, demographic shifts, and changing expectations about work are all happening at once. In this kind of environment…

In a recent episode of the Big Technology Podcast, Mark Cuban shared what he would do if he was a soon-to-be college grad on the job hunt in the current turbulent market. Cuban said young professionals shouldn’t look to big companies—which have already put a pause on hiring entry-level roles, especially for software engineers and programmers. Instead, he said, they should shift their focus to outsourcing their AI skills to smaller-scale companies. “If I was graduating today, or if I was a 16-year-old looking for a job, I would learn everything there is to know about AI. And I would go to small and medium-size businesses and say, ‘Let me walk in the door,’” Cuban s…

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. On any given workday, you might find Whatnot employees hawking trading cards, apparel, or other items on the digital live-shopping app. They’re not slacking on the job or trying to make rent—they’re actually evaluated on whether they’ve spent time selling and buying on the app. “…

To rebrand the Allen Institute, designers thought horizontally instead of vertically. The nonprofit bioscience research institute, founded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to map the human brain, had a perfectly sufficient logo that designer Neville Brody says was “at the heart of everything.” But Brody, a legend in the industry who has designed for Coca-Cola, Nike, and Channel 4, reimagined the Allen Institute’s new identity so “the brand is a platform” for a company’s activities. Of the elements that comprise a brand, the logo traditionally comes first then the other components spin off of it. But for this project, Brody collapsed the hierarchy. He and his team develop…

Not long ago, I was speaking at an event when a recent college graduate approached me. He’d studied neuroscience and, like a lot of STEM generalists, had set his sights on consulting—firms, like Deloitte or Accenture, that have long hired armies of junior associates for data gathering and analysis. He’d earned top grades at a great school. But all of his outreach—his informational interviews, his applications and follow-ups—had come to nothing. His story is not unusual. If entry-level consulting or finance jobs have always been difficult to land, they’re even harder to get now. This generation grew up believing that developing key skills such as coding and data analys…

For a Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal is looking surprisingly nice these days. Long an industrial dumping site, the Brooklyn waterway has undergone decades of interventions to undo that damage. Now, after years of planning and community outreach, redevelopments along the polluted Gowanus Canal waterfront are giving the area a welcoming residential gloss. Two recently opened projects exemplify the transformation underway along the Gowanus Canal. Both designed by the landscape architecture firm Scape and in line with a master plan it helped release in 2019, the projects are a preview of what it will look like when the Gowanus completes one of the most dramatic urban t…

Germany’s SPRIND, the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, and Sweden’s Vinnova, the country’s innovation agency, are two bodies that traditionally haven’t worked hand in hand. But the challenges the world currently faces have brought the two public innovation agencies together to back teams from across Europe building systems that can defend airports, nuclear plants, and civilian sites from hostile drones. One team, led by Martin Saska, a robotics professor at Czech Technical University in Prague, is among those being backed by the agencies to develop anti-drone technology. Beyond supporting a single company, the partnership offers Europe a way to stand firm ami…

The Pentagon said Friday that it has reached deals with seven tech companies to use their artificial intelligence in its classified computer networks, allowing the military to tap into AI-powered capabilities to help it fight wars. Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Nvidia, OpenAI, Reflection and SpaceX will provide their resources to help “augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments,” the Defense Department said. Notably absent from the list is AI company Anthropic, after its public dispute and legal fight with the The President administration over the ethics and safety of AI usage in war. The Defense Department has been rapidly acceler…