What's on Your Mind?

May is kicking off with another brutal round of tech layoffs that have been affecting the industry for much of the year. Today, the U.S.’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase Global, Inc. (Nasdaq: COIN), announced it was laying off a staggering 14% of its staff. The company’s CEO says one of the main drivers of those layoffs is AI adoption at the company. Here’s what you need to know. Coinbase cuts hundreds of jobs in ‘AI-native’ restructuring This morning, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted a letter on X that he sent to the company’s nearly 4,700-strong workforce. In the letter, Armstrong announced that Coinbase was letting go of around 14% of its staff…

Amid an airline industry in crisis, Delta Air Lines found an unexpected way to cut corners: nixing its snack and drink service on flights under 350 miles long. Delta is doing away with its “Express Service” tier of in-flight food and drink, which previously offered basic amenities including water, tea, coffee, and two snack options to passengers on flights between 250 and 500 miles in length. Instead, all flights longer than 350 miles will get Delta’s full beverage and snack service—while all flights shorter than 350 miles will get no food or drink offerings at all. The news of Delta’s new policy comes just days after Spirit Airlines announced its near-immediate c…

Most people think of California as the home of Hollywood liberals, neglecting to acknowledge its many rural and more conservative areas. Despite its modern reputation as a Democratic state, the world’s 4th largest economy has actually had more Republican governors. Without a clear Democratic frontrunner for the current election cycle, Republican candidates have an opening. Tonight, CNN is hosting a California governors debate to give the crowded candidate field a chance to make their case. Even those outside the state will be tuning in to see what trends might impact the larger midterm Congressional elections later this year. Here’s what you need to know bef…

Generative AI has done something strange to the economics of knowledge work: it has dramatically lowered the cost of generating ideas. Any reasonably capable professional with a chatbot can now produce a dozen plausible strategies, memos, product concepts, or marketing plans before lunch. In some cases, AI lowers the cost of execution too—but not nearly as far or as fast. Shipping even one of those ideas still takes weeks, months, or years. The result is already showing up across workplaces: more initiatives than teams can carry, more tools than anyone can learn, and more priorities than any reasonable person can hold in their head. Leaders keep layering on new wo…

A yearslong battle between Sony PlayStation and its customers might soon be coming to an end after the approval of a preliminary settlement agreement for a class-action lawsuit on April 29. The lawsuit dates back to 2023, involving Sony’s decision to stop selling game-specific vouchers by third-party vendors, meaning the company would no longer allow the purchase of digital download cards from retailers like Amazon, GameStop, or Walmart, leaving Sony as the sole seller. Plaintiffs argue that the company violated federal antitrust law by eliminating competition for the sale of the game-specific vouchers, according to a press release by the plaintiffs’ law firm. …

The AI data center building boom isn’t fueling just water shortage concerns and GPU-maker Nvidia’s coffers. It is now also firmly making memory chip makers and their investors significantly richer. Yesterday, two of the largest memory makers, Micron Technology and Sandisk, saw their stock prices soar more than 11% in a single trading session. And those gains are small potatoes compared to their five-day increases. But why is this happening? Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, all four of the Nasdaq’s major memory chip makers saw their stock prices jump. Those four memory makers include: Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) Sa…

GameStop announced on Sunday that it would offer to buy eBay for nearly $56 billion. One day later, CNBC spoke to GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen about the news, in an interview media outlets have called “bizarre,” “evasive,” “dizzying” and “awkward.” In what felt more like an SNL sketch than a CNBC interview, the billionaire CEO of GameStop provided little context or further explanation as to how the company would afford and operate eBay, which has a market capitalization of $46 billion compared to GameStop’s $11 billion. When asked how math for the deal would actually pan out, Cohen answered, “It’s on our website. Half cash, half stock, but the details are on our websi…

Book bans are on the rise—and they’re increasingly focused on censoring facts. In a new report on banned books in U.S. public schools, the free expression advocacy group PEN America found that the number of nonfiction books pulled from shelves doubled last year. The group describes a “surge” of book bannings targeting nonfiction science, history, and biographic titles, including books about the digestive system and ancient Egypt. PEN America conducted an analysis of 3,743 books removed from American school libraries and classrooms in the 2024-2025 academic year. Of the banned titles, 29% (1,100) were nonfiction, up from 14% the previous school year. Fiction t…

Anyone spending time inside a company right now can feel it. There is a growing assumption shaping decisions at the highest levels. AI will drive efficiency and therefore companies are expected to reduce headcount. It sounds logical. It sounds disciplined. But it is also incomplete. I have been in boardrooms where AI is discussed as both an opportunity and a justification. Leaders talk about transformation, and in the same breath talk about reducing headcount. The connection feels automatic, as if one must follow the other. Here’s what’s missing from the conversation: What is the work we actually want done, and how should it be done? THE EFFICIENCY SHORTCU…

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Upon hearing of a celebrity’s death, have you ever been startled to realize that they hadn’t left us long ago? That happened to me last weekend. Except the dearly departed in question wasn’t a person, but a company: Ask.com, the web property forever better known by its original brand, Ask Jeeves. For years, I wrote about Ask quite regularly. But when its owner, media conglomerate IAC (which is in the process of changing its own name to People Inc.), announced it had shut down the site as of May 1, it was its first time in the news in more than 15 years. The last time before that was in November 2010, when…

The literature world is up in arms after a prominent author, who also serves as the national ambassador for young people’s literature, denigrated the quality of the majority of children’s literature. Mac Barnett recently published an essay collection for adults, titled Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children. In his book, he wrote, “So I now offer Barnett’s Addendum to Sturgeon’s Law: Maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud.” The sentence references science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon’s famous 1957 defense of the science fiction genre. Sturgeon wrote that “ninety percent of everything is crud,” and investigated why science fiction among al…

Schools and universities across the country are recovering from an outage that knocked down Canvas, an online platform that manages exams, course notes, lecture videos, and grades. The disruption tied to a cyberattack hit in the middle of finals period for many colleges, a high-stress time when students and instructors rely heavily on the platform. By late Thursday, Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said the platform was available again to most users. The hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. On Friday, Instructure and Canvas no longer appeared on a site w…

Prediction markets have now turned their focus to hantavirus, a rare but severe category of viruses transmitted from rodents to humans, after several cases were identified earlier this month aboard an Atlantic cruise operated by Oceanwide Expeditions. It’s a serious situation that has drawn global concern: Several passengers have tested positive for the illness, at least three cruise participants have died, and a number of others on the trip are reportedly experiencing symptoms. Amid growing anxiety about the illness and, no doubt, memories of the nerve-racking first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, some people have taken to prediction markets to bet on what might …

You are bound to have one of those crazy days (or weeks or months) where your calendar is jammed with meetings, there are looming deadlines, and an emergency has cropped up that absolutely needs to be dealt with right away. Having a few things that hit at the same time can actually be good for you, but eventually, it is going to cause you problems. In particular, the researchers Yerkes and Dodson published a paper in 1908 (you read that right—over 110 years ago) talking about the optimal level of psychological energy called arousal. They suggested that when people have low levels of energy, they don’t get much done. That shouldn’t be surprising. As your arousal goes u…

When University of Pennsylvania student Crystal Yang was in high school, she and her friends were avid players of the trendy online game Wordle. One of Yang’s friends, however, is blind and was unable to join in. That inspired Yang, while still a high school student, to work with researchers at Texas A&M University looking at conversational audio interface possibilities for the game. Soon, she founded a nonprofit called Audemy that has developed more than 50 audio-powered games accessible to blind and visually impaired players. The organization is now also at work on an accessible gaming console that will incorporate audio and tactile features and can function wi…

For years, leaders advanced by outperforming others, knowing more, producing more, delivering more. Performance earned authority. That equation has changed. Artificial intelligence now generates ideas, analyses, and strategies in seconds. What once set strong performers apart, speed, output, and insight, is no longer a differentiator. As AI expands what leaders can produce, something else is becoming clear. The leaders who stand out are not the ones with the most information. They are the ones who project confidence, clarity, and credibility when it matters most. Leaders are no longer evaluated primarily on what they know. They are evaluated on how they lead w…

The top note in a new perfume called Miami Split comes from an unexpected place: a banana processing plant in Ecuador. The fragrance is extracted from banana-scented water, a byproduct of washing fruit, that was previously thrown away. It’s one of the unusual ingredients sourced by Abel Fragrance, a company that avoids using any fossil fuels in its products. Instead, it is looking to biotech to make natural fragrances. Right now, petrochemicals are the status quo in the industry. “Almost all fragrance molecules are synthesized from fossil fuels,” says Frances Shoemack, the brand’s founder. A typical fragrance is made from between a dozen and a few hundred fragrance molecu…

Rumination is one of the most overlooked risks to effective leadership. It’s also one of the most common and most contagious. When leaders engage in rumination, it quietly erodes their well-being, judgment, and the psychological climate of their teams. In psychology, rumination refers to repetitive, unwanted, past-centered, and intrusive negative thinking. Unlike self-reflection, which is purposeful and forward-looking, rumination can become a vicious cycle that loops leaders into “What if?” or “Why did I…?” with very little learning in return. I’ve noticed an increasing number of leaders who are particularly prone to rumination. This might come down to the fact t…

It was the shock that the design world didn’t see coming, but should have. In mid-April, Anthropic, the maker of Claude, launched a stand-alone design tool called Claude Design. No matter that Google had already tried the same thing with its platform Stitch, and there were also plenty of perfectly good vibe coding tools on the market. The possibility that Anthropic—the same AI company known for upending product development by rapidly commoditizing code—was coming for design next introduced a sudden urgency into the conversation around design tools and automation. Friends suddenly looked a lot more like competitors. Designer-influencers reacted in hyperbolic doomer…

Designers love to experiment, but there’s one particular object where they tend to get especially creative and even weird: lighting. Picture a ceramic lamp sculpted into a car, a fixture and shade cast in metal swirls, and something that looks like a cork UFO. These out-of-the-box designs are part of a new exhibition during New York’s Design Week showing the unusual territory where designers are taking lighting. Mazhariyya LampSolid Lacebeacons (scale-less-ness) Now in its sixth edition, the Head Hi Lamp Show brings together 36 eccentric lamps from designers located around the world. It is organized by Alexandra Hodkowski and Alvaro Alcocer, the founders of He…

AI use is becoming pervasive across the legal system, with both experienced staff and absolute novices turning to ChatGPT and other tools to try to make the most persuasive case possible when they arrive in court, even if some of those claims turn out to be literally too good to be true. Last month, top law firm Sullivan & Cromwell was forced to apologize for filing fictitious case names and fabricated quotes in a legal document submitted in a case, as well as citing incorrect statutes in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. “We deeply regret this occurred,” the firm wrote in an apologetic letter to the judge in a case about an alleged scam operation run out of Cambodia, whi…

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. A year ago, amid a wave of DOGE cuts to federal agencies, Modern CEO highlighted the things government gets right, notably its ability to solve problems that businesses can’t or won’t because doing so isn’t necessarily profitable. Finding solutions to many of those challenges—including…