What's on Your Mind?

Your boss can make or break your job experience: a good boss, smooth sailing ahead. A bad boss? Misery. According to a new workplace study, most employees are dealing with the latter. The research comes from Harris Poll’s Thought Leadership Practice who just conducted its Toxic Boss survey, which included online responses from 1,334 employed U.S. adults. It defined a toxic boss as someone who “exhibits harmful workplace behaviors, including unfair preferential treatment, lack of recognition, blame-shifting, unnecessary micromanagement, unreasonable expectations, being unapproachable, taking credit for others’ ideas, acting unprofessionally, or discriminating against e…

Why do good companies stumble? I’m talking about the organizations that were once on top. The ones that seemed to lead their category. Today, we’d call them legacy brands or some euphemism that acknowledges the significance they once had and their staying power to stick around. However, somehow or another, they lost the plot along the way, and if only they had fixed this, changed that, or done this one thing, they would have continued winning. It’s a “If/then” proposition straight out of an MBA case study. A clear villain with an easy fix. As satisfying as that framing might be, it’s almost always never that simple. Instead, it’s typically a litany of factors at play…

GameStop Corporation has proposed to buy the online auction giant eBay Inc. for $125 per share, or a total of roughly $56 billion. “The offer represents a 46% premium to eBay’s unaffected closing price on February 4, 2026, the day GameStop started accumulating its position in eBay,” reads a press release from the video game retailer. “GameStop has built a 5% economic stake in eBay through derivatives and beneficial ownership of common stock.” Here’s what you need to know about the unusual move: What did GameStop propose? The deal, as proposed, would comprise 50% cash and 50% GameStop stock. Ryan Cohen, who took over as GameStop’s CEO in 2021, would remain …

From beyond the museum walls Monday, works of art will move and take shape as the glitterati of guests from Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman to Venus Williams will fashionably ascend the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s steps and exhibit their creative interpretations of this year’s dress code, “Fashion is art.” The question of whether fashion is art has long been topic of conversation for fashion insiders, and this first Monday in May the dress code is leaving nothing up for debate. The dress code for the starry fundraising event calls for guests to “express their relationship to fashion as an embodied art form.” Fashion has long drawn inspiration from works of art, leaving guests …

In December 2025, the biggest battery maker in the world, CATL, started what it calls the world’s first large-scale deployment of robots in its Luoyang, China factory. Last week, the State Grid Corporation of China began its $1 billion 2026 plan to deploy a humanoid army to maintain its grid autonomously. And just a few days ago, at the other side of the East China Sea, Japan Airlines announced the beginning of a test program of humanoids to carry luggage at airports. While we listen to Elon Musk tell us how magical and civilization-changing Tesla’s Optimus robots are, Asian countries are light-years ahead of us, deploying humanoids to do their bidding in real-life sc…

Willie Simon stood outside the Memphis motel where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, now a museum dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement. Days after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Simon feared what the decision would mean not just for Black Americans like himself but an entire country where the political guardrails seem to be coming apart. Simon, who leads the Shelby County Democratic Party in Tennessee, said the court’s conservative majority set a precedent that if you’re “not in the in-crowd group, they can just erase us.” By weakening a requirement that states draw congressional districts in a way that gi…

A landmark federal court decision has opened the doors to COVID-era tax refunds for millions of U.S. taxpayers. In Kwong v. United States, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims determined that the COVID-19 pandemic effectively paused federal tax deadlines from January 2020 through July 2023, giving taxpayers more time to file and pay their taxes than the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had previously recognized. The court ruled that the disaster-relief provision in Internal Revenue Code Section 7508A requires the IRS to pause all penalties and interest throughout the entire disaster period, plus an additional 60 days. That means that while the COVID-19 federal dis…

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…

On a March afternoon, artificial intelligence detected something resembling smoke on a camera feed from Arizona’s Coconino National Forest. Human analysts verified it wasn’t a cloud or dust, then alerted the state’s forest service and largest electric utility. One of dozens of AI cameras installed for the utility Arizona Public Service had spotted early signs of what came to be known as the Diamond Fire. Firefighters raced to the scene and contained the blaze before it grew past 7 acres (2.8 hectares). As record-breaking heat and an abysmal snowpack raise concerns about severe wildfires, states across the fire-prone West are adding AI to their wildfire detection t…

You might remember ZenBooths—Amazon’s contribution to corporate well-being. These were booths installed in the middle of warehouses, equipped with a fan, a potted plant, and a monitor playing meditation videos. The company called them mindful practice rooms. Employees called them despair chambers. The internet called them coffins for workers—workers who, incidentally, didn’t even have time to use the bathroom because of crushing productivity demands. ZenBooths are, I think, a fitting metaphor for modern corporate wellness. According to Gallup, employee engagement dropped to 20% in 2025—the lowest it’s been since the COVID-19 lockdowns. Companies are pouring money into…

The music industry has seen disruption before. Vinyl gave way to cassettes, CDs to Napster, downloads to streaming. Each shift rewired how the music industry distributes and monetizes songs but did not change what music fundamentally is or the fact that humans have always created it. Artificial intelligence doesn’t just change how music moves. It challenges who owns it and who gets paid for it. The real threat of AI isn’t that it can make songs. It’s that it reveals how fragile the music industry is. For years, artists have operated inside a system where millions of streams translate into fractions of a cent, algorithms dictate visibility, and ownership is often dilu…

A luxury cruise ship is currently being held off the coast of West Africa after a suspected outbreak of hantavirus—a rare infectious disease typically carried by rodents—killed three passengers and infected three others. The World Health Organization (WHO) shared the news of the suspected outbreak in a post to X. According to the organization, one case of hantavirus on the ship, MV Hondius, had been confirmed through laboratory testing, and there are five additional suspected cases. Of those six affected individuals, three have died and one is currently in intensive care in South Africa. According to an official update from Dutch company Oceanwide Expe…

Hours before Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos take their places as sponsors and honorary chairs of the Met Gala—fashion’s glittery annual fundraiser in support of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute—a different kind of fashion event was unfolding across town. Ahead of the gala, hundreds of workers, organizers, and advocates gathered in the Meatpacking District in downtown New York for the Ball Without Billionaires, a worker-led fashion show designed to contrast the one at the museum. Organized by a coalition of labor groups including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Strategic Organizing Center, and the Amazon Labor Union, the…

Fashion’s biggest night out returns to New York City tonight as the Metropolitan Museum of Art prepares to welcome couture-wearing celebrities back to its steps. But as tech billionaires buy their way into the mainstream, the event is making headlines even before the kickoff, not for who might be the best dressed, but who is underwriting the festivities. Held the first Monday of every May, the Met Gala is an invitation-only benefit fundraiser in support of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. The gathering has become an iconic event, synonymous with status and fashion, with its organizer, Anna Wintour, filling the tables with celebrities and th…

It’s been a busy month for Hugh Jackman. Between headlining New Born on Broadway and starring in an upcoming mystery-comedy called The Sheep Detectives, the X-Men actor stopped by Ball State University to deliver a commencement speech for the graduating class. “I’ve been asked [countless times] to give a speech like this over the years, and I have always said no, because the money just was never really good enough,” the actor joked. Jackman reportedly first visited Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana last year with his Broadway costar turned romantic partner, Sutton Foster—a longtime faculty member of the school’s theater department. Jackman himself studied c…

Since he was seven years old, voice actor and influencer Hunter Peterson has told people that his biggest dream was to start and run an airline. In the wake of Spirit Airlines’ recent shutdown, he believes his golden opportunity has arrived at last—and the internet appears to agree. On May 2, Spirit Aviation Holdings, Inc., the company that owns Spirit Airlines, announced what it called “an orderly wind-down of operations,” effective immediately—in other words, Spirit is going out of business. The news followed years of financial struggles for the airline, multiple bankruptcies, and, most recently, an untenable rise in fuel prices due to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran…

The glory days of self-serve fountain drinks at McDonald’s are almost over, and people are not happy. Self-serve soda fountains have been a staple of fast food restaurants like McDonald’s for decades, allowing visiting customers to self-pour, refill, and even customize their order by mixing all available soda options. But as fast food chains look to optimize their operations, not all beloved features are making the cut, and fountains are quietly disappearing. In September 2023, McDonald’s announced it was eliminating the self-serve soda fountains, with a goal to remove them all by 2032, a decision made to drive consistency for staff and customers across its many o…

Google Fi has been around for north of a decade now and it still feels like the weird, smart kid in the back of the wireless-carrier room. It’s not quite a major carrier, but it’s much more than just a budget MVNO. And it’s one of the only tech services I’ve been using for years and years that hasn’t changed all that much or arbitrarily and routinely jacked up its prices. My bill has looked the same for a long, long time. So if you’re tired of the Big Three and you’re thinking about jumping ship, here’s the reality of life on Google’s network. Seamless international travel If you’ve ever landed in a foreign country only to be greeted by a $10-a-day “travel …

You know, there was a plague before COVID. Lots of people came down with it every morning and evening: the agony of traffic and train delays. Commuting sucked, and everyone agreed on that. Then remote work came along and, all of a sudden, having to go into the office disappeared for millions. But something else disappeared, and no one really talks about that part. If you listen closely to parents now, you’ll hear it. They miss the commute. Sort of. They don’t miss fighting for a seat on the subway. And no one is longing for the good old days of gridlock. But they do miss what that time offered them. I didn’t realize it either until it was gone. Catching our bre…

Psychological safety is a crucial key to high performance, a positive culture, and team success—and for good reason. Google’s Project Aristotle found that it’s the number one factor in high-performing teams. When people feel safe to speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and challenge ideas, teams learn faster and perform better. But as the concept has gained traction, something else has happened. Many misunderstand what it actually means, and that misunderstanding is quietly killing accountability. At its core, psychological safety is about creating an environment where people can speak up without fear of humiliation or punishment. What it’s not about is avoid…

The news landed quietly, tucked into a letter from MIT Sloan’s dean to colleagues: After 67 years, MIT Sloan Management Review is shutting down. Future insights, the letter explained, will live on via “digital newsletters, short-form video, social-first content, and podcasts.” This is a strategic inflection point for management thinking. It will have a major impact on the entire ecosystem through which serious management ideas travel from researchers to the people who run organizations. That ecosystem was already fragile. Winner-take-all dynamics MIT Sloan Management Review and similar journals were classic two-sided market propositions. They offered management…

In April 2026, cloud-hosting platform Vercel disclosed that hackers had breached its internal systems and stolen customer data. The breach occurred because a Vercel employee had signed up for a third-party AI productivity tool using their corporate Google account and granted it full-access permissions. When that AI tool’s own systems were compromised, the attackers used the trust relationship as a bridge straight into Vercel’s internal environment. The stolen database was listed for sale on a hacker forum for $2 million. Note that the breach did not directly attack a software vulnerability. Rather, it exploited an architectural gap. The technology worked as designed, …

A tall baobab tree greets people inside the Long Beach, California, headquarters of Vast, an aerospace company that is building the space station of the future. It’s planted beneath a skylight in the center of a white-painted circular lobby furnished with a sleek aluminum reception desk and built-in wood banquette that follows the curve of the walls. The tree and the room are symbolic. The former references trees in The Little Prince, a 1943 novella with a character who travels between planets, and the latter has the same diameter of a Haven-1 module, which the Vast team hopes will become home to researchers, astronauts, and travelers and eventually succeed the Inter…

The organizations that are pulling ahead on AI adoption aren’t simply onboarding new tools, they’re rearchitecting work itself. That’s according to the latest edition of Microsoft’s annual Work Trends Index published today. The study—which included surveys with 20,000 workers using AI in 10 countries and trillions of anonymized Microsoft 365 productivity signals—suggests that AI can unlock immense value, but success depends on the surrounding workplace culture. It falls on leaders to align on their AI strategies, create time and space for collective experimentation, and adopt a less prescriptive approach to how work gets done more broadly. According to the …