What's on Your Mind?

Rental housing construction is slowing down in the United States. The cost of common construction materials is a big reason why. According to a new report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, construction material costs have skyrocketed in recent years, adding to a wide range of conditions that are slowing the production of rental housing. The report, “America’s Rental Housing 2026,” finds that there was a 42% increase in the overall material costs of multifamily residential construction over the five-year period from 2020 to 2025, covering essential building materials like gypsum board, ready-mix concrete, and lumber. It’s a huge jump …

For years, companies have been told to prepare for the future by chasing youth, digital fluency, and technical skills. They have been urged to bet on “high potentials” and to focus on the next generation. At the same time, they have spent years overlooking one of the most strategic talent pools already available to them: women over 50. This blind spot now looks increasingly dangerous. The future of work is arriving amid inflation, oil crises, wars, and all sorts of geopolitical tensions, economic anxiety, demographic aging, climate disruption, and the destabilizing effects of AI. In such a world, organizations need people who can handle ambiguity, navigate transitions…

Every morning, people fasten their watch, slip on a bracelet, and head out the door without thinking much about what they might encounter along the way. The air they breathe, the dust on their hands, and the surfaces they touch all feel ordinary. Yet many chemical exposures happen quietly, without smell, taste, or warning. What if something as simple as a silicone band around your wrist could help track those invisible exposures? Environmental monitoring has traditionally relied on snapshots of exposure from a water sample collected on a single day, a blood sample drawn at one point in time, or soil tested from a specific location. But exposure unfolds gradually a…

Earlier this week, social media was wowed by images from the streets of Chinese cities showing senior citizens lining up to have OpenClaw, the always-on AI assistant, installed on their laptops, desktops, and other devices. Areas like Shenzhen and Wuxi offered subsidies to try to scale up adoption of the tool and capitalize on its capabilities. An enormous proportion of all OpenClaw instances installed worldwide, as tracked by public dashboards, emanate from China. China is adopting tech at an absolute breakneck pace. A ridiculous amount of people turned up into a public event in Shenzhen today to install the OpenClaw. Some devs who work at Chinese big tech compan…

Despite considering themselves successful, most Americans also feel like they’re lagging on at least one major milestone. But experts warn that dwelling on it could put them further behind. In a recent survey conducted by daily development app Headway, 77% of respondents said they consider themselves successful. At the same time—in what researchers label the “success paradox”—81% said they’re falling behind their peers in at least one major personal or professional domain. Roughly one-third said they feel behind others their age financially, 11% feel they’re behind in life experiences, 10% feel they’re lagging in their career progress, and another 10% said the sa…

I think the strongest indicator of how normal using AI has become is the language we use as shorthand for it. It’s now extremely common for someone to say they asked “chat” for some piece of information. We all know what they mean. But if you needed data on how popular AI portals are now, OpenAI provided it recently when the company revealed that ChatGPT has 900 million users, up from 800 million in the fall. Even if Gemini, Copilot, and Claude weren’t also rising (they are), that would be enough for the media—not to mention brands and marketing/PR agencies—to really understand how fast AI is growing as a discovery channel. Whether or not it’s a source of traffic does…

Every so often, a “technical” dispute reveals something much bigger. The recent blowup between the U.S. Department of Defense and Anthropic is one of those moments: not because it’s about a $200 million contract, but because it makes visible a new kind of enterprise risk, one that most CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs are still treating as a procurement detail. In a recent piece, “The Pentagon wants to rewrite the rules of AI,” I focused on the political meaning of a government attempting to force an AI company to relax its own guardrails. For enterprise leaders, the most important takeaway is more practical: If your AI capabilities depend on a single provider’s terms, policies,…

Dieticians are warning that GLP-1 use can lead to extreme malnutrition, manifesting in diseases like scurvy, amid findings that the vast majority of studies fail to consider patients’ eating habits. While GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy have surged in popularity in recent years—and are now available through injections and in pill form—leading dieticians in Australia have discovered that existing research hasn’t considered what patients are eating, and how much. Nutritional Deficiencies While the drugs work by suppressing appetite, eating too little or making poor dietary choices can lead to further issues. “A reduction in body weight does not automatically …

A client once described to me what happened after they had lived through a traumatic assault. For a long time, life stayed busy enough that they rarely had to think about it. Work, obligations, and everyday distractions filled the hours. Whether intentionally or not, staying occupied kept the past at a distance. Then one day things slowed down. There was a rare stretch of quiet. And in that quiet the memory returned all at once, like a tsunami. We might not have lived through trauma of that magnitude, but the example reveals something about distraction itself. When our attention is constantly absorbed elsewhere, we can avoid more than a painful memory. We can avoid o…

We’ve grown to despise meeting culture, and I understand why. Think about the last few meetings you’ve attended. How many of them felt clear, succinct, like a truly effective use of your time? I’ve sat through more meetings than I can count—many of them with half the participants multitasking, cameras on but minds elsewhere. As a certified facilitator who has designed everything from executive offsites to weekly team stand-ups, I’ve learned that most meetings fail not because people don’t care, but because leaders treat meetings as a necessary evil instead of the expensive, high-stakes collaboration moments they actually are. “But what can we do about it?” you m…

It’s little surprise that a gold-medal-winning Olympic skier comes from a family that loves the snow, but slopestyle champion Alex Hall’s mom and dad might love it more than most. The pair met on the slopes, Hall told Fast Company, and essentially raised him and his brother on skis. That didn’t necessarily mean he’d be good at it. But luckily, Hall—who took home silver last month at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics and gold in Beijing in 2022—is better than good. And that’s a fortunate thing, because the amateur-to-professional athlete pipeline is already narrow, and most pro careers dry up as athletes move into their 30s. Hall isn’t too sure what his future in the s…

Retail has always evolved around a central promise. First it was price and scale. Then convenience and speed. More recently, brand and experience took the lead. Now another shift is underway, one that many companies still treat as secondary. The next competitive advantage in retail is designing for real life. That means designing for the full range of human ability, attention, mobility, and circumstance. Not as a compliance exercise. Not as a niche offering. But as a smarter, more complete version of customer experience. Accessibility is often misunderstood as a feature aimed at a small group of people. In reality, it is a systems-level discipline. It asks a simpl…

At the Exceptional Women Alliance, we enable high-level women to mentor each other to enable personal and professional happiness through sisterhood. As the nonprofit organization’s founder, chair, and CEO, I am honored to interview and share insights from some of the thought leaders who are part of our peer-to-peer mentoring. This month I introduce to youKarlyn Mattson, an award-winning retail C-suite executive and founder of The Leadership Advisors.She has decades of experience delivering profitable growth, transformative consumer and product experiences, omni-channel and digital transformation, and consumer centric value creation for brands such as Macy’s, Target, a…

Few media brands scream “straight” quite like Playboy. Since the 1950s, the men’s lifestyle magazine has been best known for its photos of nude and scantily clad women (aka Playmates)—and, of course, for its iconic bunny mascot. But those who’ve been paying attention, Playboy has quietly undergone an editorial transformation. Since November, the magazine has relaunched its print edition (previously halted in 2020), started a Substack newsletter blending archival material with original writing, and introduced new Playmates to the world. It’s all been under the advice of Phillip Picardi, who was announced on March 11 as Playboy’s new chief brand officer and editor-in-ch…

High-level information about the private work of students and staff using ChatGPT Edu at several universities can be viewed by thousands of colleagues across their institutions due to a misunderstanding of what is being shared, according to a University of Oxford researcher who identified the issue. The problem affects Codex Cloud Environments in ChatGPT Edu and exposes the names and some metadata associated with the public and private GitHub repositories that users within a university have connected to their ChatGPT Edu accounts. No private code or repository data was exposed to unauthorized users. Nevertheless, the metadata that is visible can still reveal a mea…

Drive an older Buick Regal? You may need to drive it to your nearest dealer. General Motors is recalling certain 2012 and 2013 Buick Regal models because of an issue with the rear suspension toe links that could increase the likelihood of a crash. The recall affects 17,050 Buick passenger cars that were sold or registered in 22 “high corrosion” states and Washington, D.C., according to the recall notice filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The recall, submitted on Tuesday, expands on two others that the Detroit-based automaker has filed since late February related to the same issue. Only about 1% of the 17,000-plus vehicles identified may…

Medical equipment maker Stryker was allegedly hit with an Iran-linked cyber attack on Wednesday right after midnight ET, causing a global outage across its system, with staff and contractors saying a logo of an Iran-linked group appeared on the login page, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Shares of the Michigan-based global medical technology company (SYK) were down nearly 4% in early afternoon trading on Wednesday at the time of this writing. What happened? According to the report, staff said cellphones, laptops, and other devices that run on Microsoft’s Windows operating system to connect ​to Stryker’s ​technology ⁠systems …

AI promises massive productivity gains—that is if employees are willing to use it and can figure out how to integrate it into their workflows. In the rush to reap the benefits of AI, KPMG one of the “big four” accounting firms, headquartered in London, just launched a new incentive program for its US advisory division. Per a new Business Insider report, the program, called “AI Spark Innovation”, is offering cash prizes for consultants who excel in AI innovation. The payouts will be hefty. US Vice Chair Rob Fisher told BI that the “outsize” cash awards will be “materially larger than an end-of-year compensation award.” Fisher continued, “It’s really intended to b…

For years, B2B marketers have chased a familiar formula: more leads equal more opportunities. Build the list, blast the message, and chase the pipeline. Yet despite better data, smarter tools, and growing investment in performance marketing, many organizations are still challenged when it comes to driving measurable revenue impact. The problem isn’t reach—it’s relevance. Most performance strategies were built for individuals, not buying groups. Modern B2B decisions are made by large, diverse groups of stakeholders spanning departments, seniority levels, priorities, and generations. And while most marketers now acknowledge this reality in theory, their engageme…

Calling all pizza lovers—so, yes, everyone—your dream job awaits. Pizza Hut is hiring someone to eat free pizza for an entire year. Not only that, but the company will pay you $31,415.92 to do so. Math aficionados might notice that the Pizza Hut salary is actually the first seven digits of pi. Pizza Hut’s hiring of a “Hut Crust Connoisseur” comes ahead of Pi Day on March 14. The $31,415.92 is a significant jump from the £5,000 ($6,700) that Pizza Hut Delivery offered for a UK-based Chief Crust Taster in 2021. But then it pales in comparison to Wendy’s $100,000 offer for a similar job last week. Still, it’s not a bad deal. Here’s everything you need to k…

In 1960, 72% of adults were married, and over 90% would go on to marry. HR policies and management practices back then catered to nuclear families with a lone, male breadwinner. Today, dual-career couples and working mothers are common, largely due to the growth of women in the workforce in the second half of the 20th century. To recruit and retain talent, businesses have expanded family-friendly policies by offering flexible work hours, paid parental leave and subsidized child care. These are much-needed improvements, though many employers still lag in offering them. Today, another demographic shift also demands employers’ attention: the growing share of the …

The dispute between Anthropic and the Department of Defense is quickly becoming a broader test of how far the government can go in policing AI companies’ policies—and how much support those companies can rally from the wider research community. A fair showing of top AI researchers had already signed a public letter backing Anthropic. Now 37 of them have taken a more formal step, signing an amicus brief filed with the court Monday. The filing underscores how the clash is evolving from a narrow contract dispute into something bigger: a test of whether the government can effectively blacklist an American AI company for setting limits on how its technology is used. Th…