What's on Your Mind?

Bible designs tend to be variations on a theme—tissue-thin paper and unforgiving font sizes, owing to the 783,000 words crammed into a single normal-sized book (the average novel, by comparison, clocks in at 70,000–100,000 words). Cheap faux-leather covers. A bookmark ribbon, maybe. If you’re a person of faith, it’s perhaps not the most fitting frame for what is defined as the literal word of God. If you’re a design zealot, it’s heretical object quality. If you’re both, well—prayers. The Bible is a book utterly ripe for a redesign. So Dylan Da Silva did just that with his Byble project, which released a bespoke hypermodern 11.5-pound edition of Genesis (the fi…

As a potential TikTok ban looms in the United States (again), Substack is making (another) play for video creators to join its platform. Back in January, Substack CEO Chris Best wrote on his personal account that the company was “going to rescue the smart people from TikTok!” It seems he’s making good on that promise, as the company announced on Monday that it’s rolling out a scrollable video feed in its app. Given the timing of this TikTok-like launch, Substack appears eager to capitalize on the potential void left behind if TikTok is actually banned this time around. Substack first launched video in 2022, later introducing an in-app Media Tab in 2024. The latest…

You couldn’t have missed the news: Jony Ive and Sam Altman have teamed up, after OpenAI acquired Ive’s company io for $6.5 billion. The plan? For Ive, and a sizable team of ex-employees from Apple, it’s to create a series of hardware products for OpenAI. The news alone dropped shares of Apple by 1.8% as two of the most celebrated software and hardware development teams in the modern era have combined to realize the potential of artificial intelligence and change the way we live. Hopefully for the better. The first io product, according to The Wall Street Journal, arrives in 2026. It will be a small object “capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and…

No place is more vulnerable to hurricanes in the 50 U.S. states than the Florida Keys. The chain of islands celebrated by singer Jimmy Buffett in his odes to tropical escapism is surrounded by water, jutting out 120 miles southwesterly from Florida’s mainland to Key West with the Gulf and Atlantic Ocean on either side. The archipelago historically has been known for its quirky and libertarian inhabitants who revel in the islands’ hedonistic, artistic and outdoorsy lifestyle. In recent years, it also has become a haven for the wealthy. Overseeing safety for the more than 80,000 inhabitants of the Conch Republic — the nickname for the islands after denizens declared a to…

As recently as 2021, Figma was a one-product company. That product was Figma Design, the dominant tool for creating app and web interfaces. The company’s subsequent addition of offerings such as FigJam (whiteboarding) and Figma Slides (presentations) was hardly a frenzied land grab. But the announcements Figma made this week at its Config conference in San Francisco cover so much ground that my impulse was to interpret them as a massive, sprawling new attempt to take on . . . well, almost everybody. Figma Make turns prompts into AI-generated code? Shades of GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and numerous other AI programming tools. Figma Sites provides features for construct…

It is hard to believe that in 2025, we are still dialing to schedule doctor appointments, get referrals, refill prescriptions, confirm office hours and addresses, and handle many other healthcare tasks. In fact, I created Zocdoc nearly 20 years ago to help patients avoid the dysfunctional phone experience and schedule appointments online. But I must confess that I have to pick up the phone sometimes, too—and I dread it. I am not alone. According to a recent survey my company conducted, most Americans say they dread calling their doctor about as much as they dread getting a shot. At best, it is an inconvenience. At worst, the phone is a barrier to care and a wildly ine…

At eight months pregnant with my first child, I walked into my boss’s office, ready for a pivotal meeting. I had spent months designing a new crisis management program for our university—one that would improve student outcomes and reduce institutional risk. This was the moment I’d learn whether my work would be implemented. I had poured everything into this project. It reflected my expertise, positioned the university at the forefront of best practices, and—for me personally—offered the challenge and recognition I craved. My current role felt stagnant, and this opportunity was exactly what I needed. My boss was thrilled with my proposal and agreed I was the right …

Amazon leaned into the advertising funnel in a big way during its 2025 Upfront event at the Beacon Theater in New York City on Monday night. Perhaps the most notable product enhancement the company unveiled was the use of AI to generate contextual advertising on its Prime Video platform—meaning that ads can and will be created on the fly, using AI, depending on the specific scene of a TV show or movie that is on the screen at any given time. For instance, if a viewer is watching a scene involving a loving phone call between a mother and daughter, pausing the show could result in an ad for mobile phone service, with AI-generated text dynamically created, right the…

Barbara Corcoran is one of Shark Tank’s longest-running sharks, with an estimated net worth of approximately $100 million. But she’s also one of 10 kids from a working-class family. By age 23, she’d held more than 20 jobs. By 52, she sold her real estate company for $66 million. Corcoran knows how to build wealth. Her financial strategies are bold and unconventional. They buck traditional financial wisdom and—full disclosure—they can be also risky. But could they help you build wealth? 1. Don’t Bother Saving Money “I’ve never saved a dime my whole life,” Corcoran told CNBC Make It in 2023. Rather than letting her money sit idly in a bank account, Cor…

Tomorrow, NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher goes before a DOGE congressional subcommittee to defend the public media outlet’s case for federal funding. Maher gives a preview to her testimony, sharing how funding cuts would impact Americans’ broad access to crucial news and information, particularly in rural and local areas. Maher also reveals NPR’s strategy for reengaging with their audience, how the organization can better frame its identity as an outlet for all Americans, and more. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Respo…

Want to watch history being preserved in real-time? The Internet Archive, the digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts, has started live streaming on YouTube from its scanning center in California for anyone to watch. Monday through Friday, from 10:30 a.m. ET to 6:30 p.m. ET, viewers can tune in and watch live as fragile film cards are turned into searchable public documents, soundtracked to relaxing lo-fi beats. This work is part of Democracy’s Library, a global initiative to digitize and make publicly available millions of government records. “This livestream shines a light on the unsung work of preserving the public record, and the cri…

Over the past few weeks, I’ve traveled across the U.S. and Europe, attending back-to-back leadership conferences. These weren’t your average networking events; they were filled with C-suite executives asking difficult questions in a particularly charged moment: What’s next for DEI? How do we adapt and innovate when it comes to AI? How do we steer employees in a politically divided country? On stage, speakers repeated polished points, but to me, the most important part of what these gatherings offered wasn’t the panel talks—it was the smaller, informal meetings taking place, the standing around high-tops, and the walks to the various meals. In these candid conversation…

Fewer than 1% of NCAA Tournament brackets were still perfect after Thursday’s 16-game slate, according to several services where fans attempt the all-but impossible task of predicting every March Madness game correctly — or, barring that, win their office pools. ESPN’s tracker listed 25,802 perfect brackets remaining out of more than 24 million filled out on its site following the final game of the day, Texas Tech’s win over UNC-Wilmington. The NCAA said 0.0938% of more than 34 million brackets were still perfect. The numbers were similar at CBS Sports, where 0.09% of brackets were unblemished following the first day of action. Yahoo Sports said 99.9% of i…

When the email came from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jacques Agbobly at first didn’t quite believe it. The Brooklyn-based fashion designer had only been in the business for five years. Now, one of the world’s top museums was asking for two of his designs to be shown in “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the exhibit launched by the starry Met Gala. “I was just floored with excitement,” Agbobly said in an interview. “I had to check to make sure it was from an official email. And then the excitement came, and I was like . . . am I allowed to say anything to anyone about it?” Agbobly grew up in Togo, watching seamstresses and tailors create beautiful garments…

When AWS’s US-East-1 region went dark in late October, followed just a week later by a Microsoft Azure outage, it was yet another stark reminder that even the world’s biggest cloud vendors are not immune to failures. A simple DNS failure in AWS’s Route 53 rippled outward, knocking out applications, disrupting database services, and reminding us how dependent our tech infrastructure has become on a handful of cloud regions. With “an inadvertent tenant configuration change,” the Azure outage further highlighted the instability of some of these systems, once again demonstrating how small changes can have quite a large impact. With CyberCube estimating that the cost of …

Most F1 cars can reach speeds of well over 200 mph, but the newest automobiles in the F1 stable go much much slow. Built from 400,000 Lego pieces, the life-size Lego cars can drive 12 mph—not bad for a bunch of plastic bricks. To mark the start of a multiyear partnership, the Danish toy maker created 10 drivable, full-scale Formula 1 cars that debuted at the Miami Grand Prix. The racing series’ 20 competitors, including speed demons Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, drove the Lego cars at Sunday’s prerace Drivers’ Parade for millions of fans watching from the grandstands and on television. The “big build” cars took Lego builders a collective 22,000 hours ove…

Microdosing isn’t just about mushrooms any more. While taking tiny non-psychedelic doses of hallucinogens was once the health craze du jour, small, sub-clinical doses of weight loss drugs have taken over the term “microdosing” in 2025. Little research has been done on the efficacy of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic when prescribed in smaller doses, but that hasn’t stopped the craze from catching on. People are turning to microdosed GLP-1s to manage their weight, stave off side effects and to make the medications more affordable on a long term basis. For telehealth companies cashing in on off-brand formulations of popular weight loss drugs, microdosing is an option …

In recent years, Venture Capital-as-a-Service (VCaaS) has become more predominant since it offers more flexibility than the traditional VC model. It is designed perfectly for corporations, family offices, and sovereign wealth funds that want to engage in startup investment without managing a full-fledged VC team. Let’s understand the mechanics behind VCaaS and why corporations are embracing it. What is VCaaS? As an innovative, effective model, VCaaS is designed with an established VC firm which works for a corporation or institutional client to invest on its behalf. By using this model, the corporation or client benefits from startup innovation, access to deals, an…

A viral clip of a woman scrolling on a completely clear phone with no user interface briefly confused—and amused—the internet. But the truth turned out to be far more literal than most expected. Originally posted to TikTok by user CatGPT, the video quickly racked up over 52.9 million views. In the comments, some speculated it was a Nokia model; others guessed it came from the Nickelodeon show Henry Danger. “This looks like a social commentary or a walking art exhibit. I’m too uncultured to understand,” one user commented. “It’s from a Black Mirror episode,” another wrote. Turns out, it was none of the above. Just a piece of plastic. The woman seen in l…

After years of AI disrupting industries and streamlining repetitive workflows, the technology is now poised to transform animation. In 2024, director and writer Tom Paton’s AiMation Studios released Where the Robots Grow, a fully AI-animated feature film. Everything from animation and voice acting to music was generated using AI, at a cost of just $8,000 per minute—totaling around $700,000 for the 87-minute production. While IMDB reviewers criticized the film as “soulless and uninspired,” it proved that AI can deliver full-length animated features at a fraction of traditional budgets. But it’s not just filmmakers driving this shift. Indie game developers want to prototy…

Purdue Pharma asked a bankruptcy judge late Tuesday to consider the latest version of its plan to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of the powerful prescription painkiller OxyContin, a deal that would have members of the Sackler family who own the company pay up to $7 billion. The filing is a milestone in a tumultuous legal saga that has gone on for more than five years. Under the deal the family members — estimated in documents from 2020 and 2021 to be worth about $11 billion — would give up ownership of the company in addition to contributing money over 15 years with the biggest payment up front. Family members resigned from Purdue’s board, stopped receiving…