What's on Your Mind?

In the world of convenience stores, 7-Eleven is undoubtedly the cool kid. Phoebe Bridgers named-dropped the c-store in a song, Lana del Rey has posed in front of its parking lot, and, in Asia, the stores have become a must-visit spot. But is the brand cool enough to wear? People seem to think so. “Nothing could have prepared me for how hard the 7-eleven merch website goes,” Axios congress reporter Andrew Solender said on X this week, sparking a discussion about the brand’s merchandise website. Some of the offerings are straightforward—a white t-shirt with 7-Eleven’s logo—while others look less like corporate swag and more look more like they belong to …

Over the past few days, new billboards have slowly been popping up along a 130-mile stretch of desert into Indio, California. One features a giant image of a crying face emoji; another is a picture of an unexplained blob; a third shows an edit of the Mona Lisa sipping out of a delicate tea cup. Each of these eye-catching visuals is an advertisement for a performance at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Coachella 2026 takes place over two weekends: April 10 through 12 and April 17 through 19. And while billboard advertising has been a hallmark of the lead-up to the festival almost since its inception, it’s become increasingly intense in recent years…

The airport is chaos. Lines snake beyond the designated barriers and out the doors as frazzled travelers tug their luggage and scowl at their phones, their grimaced faces even more dramatic in the harsh lighting. I stand in the security queue, sensing the stress emanating from everyone around me like swarms of buzzing flies. A man behind me huffs with dramatic indignation, a couple ahead bickers in hissed whispers “we should have left earlier!”, and someone’s roller bag keeps thwacking my heels. My fists clench as irritation winds me tighter. The security checkpoint seems miles away and my flight is in an hour. I feel myself being sucked into the collective vortex…

Facing stagnant sales, Panera Bread is aiming to become one of the restaurant industry’s rare comeback stories. The fast-casual chain’s latest move is the introduction of new “Salad Stuffers,” a fresh spin on one of Panera Bread’s most iconic menu items: the bread bowl. Instead of filling a sourdough bread bowl with soup, however, it’s stuffing a handheld Italian-style roll with salad. The idea sounds simple enough, and yet CEO Paul Carbone says Panera thoroughly tested the innovation before adding it to the menu. A team of chefs and bakers experimented with 20 different breads to find one with the desired “fluffy and soft” texture. Any salad on Panera’s menu,…

The American job market is now filled with so-called ghost jobs —listings for positions that don’t actually exist, from companies that have no intent to hire—wasting not only hours of your time, but also your money, too. According to a comprehensive study by Enhancv, a global AI resume builder, 37% of people looking for jobs are now paying a “ghost tax”—reporting direct out-of-pocket expenses, including travel, childcare, and paid certifications, as a result of chasing phantom listings. The March 2026 study surveyed 1,000 U.S. professionals across all career levels. “When job seekers are losing actual money to engage with a company’s brand, we aren’t just look…

The cutting board may be the most used object in your kitchen, but its design hasn’t changed considerably since 3,000 BCE, when the ancient Egyptians began using slabs of wood for food preparation. The cutting board has to do a lot of work: It needs to absorb knife marks, soak up onion juice, and be big enough to hold vegetables and scraps. On a daily basis, home cooks are forced to confront the logistical problem of where to put the parsley they just chopped when they move on to the carrots. By the end of meal prep, the kitchen counter is littered with food waste and crowded with mismatched bowls of ingredients. It seems like a minor inconvenience, one that most …

Loredana Crisan says her relationship with creativity started when she was 7 years old, sitting with her mother in her family’s kitchen in Bucharest, Romania. “The question she posed was, ‘Do you want to learn piano,’ and as a kid I was like, ‘Yes!’ –– probably because I was singing in the house.” From then on, says Crisan, she never stopped playing. In fact, she ended up as a student studying classical music in a conservatory. “I was very dedicated to music for a very long period of my life,” says Crisan. Now, as Chief Design Officer at Figma, Crisan says her musical training has informed her relationship with her work in ways she never expected. “If we are successf…

Entrepreneurs displaying narcissistic behavior are better able to convince investors to give them money when their grandiosity comes across as confidence as opposed to defensiveness or arrogance. That’s what we learned from watching 12 seasons of the popular reality TV show Shark Tank to better understand how an entrepreneur’s psychological profile affects their ability to secure funding. My research focuses on how entrepreneurs respond to challenges, including how personality affects their work. My colleagues and I based our study off the concept that there are two distinct “flavors” of narcissism: narcissistic admiration and narcissistic rivalry. Narcissisti…

The National Capital Planning Commission has voted to approve President Donald The President’s controversial White House ballroom plans, greenlighting the demolition of the historic East Wing to make way for a new neoclassical structure. But the ballroom is just one piece of a much bigger picture. Last year, the president signed an executive order mandating that new federal buildings return to a “traditional and classical” style, sparking a fierce debate among architects about who gets to decide what American democracy looks like. On this episode of FC Explains, staff writer Nate Berg breaks down the design agenda behind MAGA architecture, who is driving it, and what…

Below, Leanne ten Brinke shares five key insights from her new book, Poisonous People: How to Resist Them and Improve Your Life. Leanne is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, where she directs the Truth and Trust Lab. She has been studying deception, distrust, and dark personalities for the past 20 years. What’s the big idea? Most people are far kinder—and more trustworthy—than we assume. The real danger comes from a small group of manipulative personalities who exploit our good nature. Once you understand how they operate, you can spot them early and take back control. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read …

We’re in the midst of a child care crisis in America, but when fathers want to take on more childcare to equal their partners’ efforts, they are being stymied by their employers. Max, who requested to go by a pseudonym, spent 15 years as a contractor: no benefits, little job security, and frequent change. When recruited for a full-time role, he was upfront about his wife’s pregnancy and his need to take parental leave when their first-born child was due. “I said, ‘I’m going to be flexible—I don’t have to take off right away and I can do it in stints.’ I was offering these different plans because it was important to me for the company to be successful,” Max says. “…

You know the expression, “If you want to get something done, ask a working mother?” Surprising as it may seem, the same holds true for cancer patients. Conventional wisdom holds that cancer patients are too sick and fragile to work, at least not to their full ability. That can certainly be true in some cases, sometimes tragically. And I’m not suggesting that anyone should ever feel pressured to work if they don’t feel well enough to do so. But in many instances, the stereotype that cancer patients are too compromised to work is a myth. I know because I’ve been living—and working—with an incurable type of blood cancer for more than twenty-two years. And I’m by no mea…

It feels like a “hit-the-brakes” economy, with warning lights flashing everywhere: inflation pressures, AI disruptions, upside-down business models, and a persistent sense that some new market surprise or geopolitical tempest is waiting around the corner. Given these congested, conflicting signals, the instinct for many business leaders is to slow investment, tighten spending, and wait for more clarity. But how companies slow down can make the difference between paying a performance penalty and gaining a performance premium. Our research shows that organizations that keep transformation moving during peak uncertainty significantly outperform their wait-and-see pee…

Fox Corporation has announced plans to partner with Kalshi to integrate the prediction market’s data across the media giant’s various cable networks. Tuesday’s announcement follows the rise in popularity of prediction markets, and marks Kalshi’s third partnership with a large media corporation, with similar deals struck with CNBC and CNN in December of last year. Kalshi’s platform allows users to bet on current events, anything from sports betting to politics. For instance, users can bet on who will win an election. From those wagers, a forecast is determined based on the crowd’s opinion. Not everyone is turning to the platform to bet. “Roughly 70% of peo…

What’s behind a new wave of apps in the Apple App store? It’s probably two words: vibe coding. Apple’s App Store was flooded with 235,800 new apps in the first quarter of this year—an increase of 84% over the same time last year, according to new data published by The Information—after steady declines of 48% from 2016 to 2024. That builds on a trend from last year, in which developers created a whopping 600,000 new apps, leaving people wondering what is behind the big push. It turns out—perhaps not surprisingly, with artificial intelligence tools making it easier to create an app more quickly—that there’s more apps flooding into Apple’s App store. What’s t…

As American astronauts fly to the moon for the first time in 50 years, the test flight has gone off without a hitch, almost. Happily, this time around, the “Houston, we’ve had a problem” moment came with much lower stakes than Apollo 13’s oxygen leak. NASA’s Artemis II is the first crewed mission featuring a proper toilet – a major upgrade from the Apollo-era days of astronauts chasing runaway bodily emissions in zero gravity. Historically, waste capture was handled by a crude system of plastic bags attached to spacesuits, a headache for astronauts already contending with the many life-threatening challenges of space travel. So far, the high tech toilet has come …

For most of modern financial history, retail investors were treated as background noise. Institutions moved the market. Hedge funds set the tone. Analysts shaped narratives. Individual investors followed. That era is over. Retail investors made up 35% of the market in April 2025, an all-time high. According to a 2024 report, almost 80% of the market is high-frequency algorithmic trading. Combine these numbers, and it is theoretically possible that all of the market could be trading a popular stock on social media that gets quickly amplified upwards by momentum trading algorithms. This is not a trend. It is a structural shift. And it is quietly reshaping ho…

In the first twenty-four hours of the war with Iran, the United States struck a thousand targets. By the end of the week, the total exceeded three thousand — twice as many as in the “shock and awe” phase of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, according to Pete Hegseth. This unprecedented number of strikes was made possible by artificial intelligence. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) insists that humans remain in the loop on every targeting decision, and that the AI is there to help them to make “smarter decisions faster.” But exactly what role humans can play when the systems are operating at this pace is unclear. Israel’s use of AI-enabled targeting in its war on Hamas may offe…

Fans of In-N-Out Burger have some good, or not-so-good, news to chew. The beloved chain’s closely-watched location tracker shows six new locations are on the way soon. But these locations won’t see the hamburger chain break ground in new states. While the Irvine, California-based company has been steadily expanding east in recent years, the locations marked as “opening soon” will only deepen its presence in six states: Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Tennessee. In-N-Out is opening a regional headquarters in Franklin, Tennessee and plans to relocate across the country from California by 2030. But it has yet to make it to the Atlantic Coast—and does…

JetBlue announced Monday plans to give its top-tier credit card a refresh, adding new travel credits, companion perks, and loyalty boosts as airlines and issuers keep escalating what “premium” actually means. The updates to the JetBlue Premier World Elite Mastercard, issued by Barclays, are set to roll out later this spring. The annual fee isn’t changing, remaining at $499 even as new benefits are added. Companion passes, but with a twist The headline addition is a companion pass benefit, a familiar perk that JetBlue is now bringing into the mix. Cardholders can earn a pass worth up to $500 after spending $15,000 in a calendar year, and a second one worth u…

Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot is integrated across the company’s products. It’s built into Windows 11, and recent features like Tasks and Pages are marketed as powerful tools for productivity. But one of Copilot’s Terms of Use just caught the internet’s attention for seeming to contradict that image of Copilot as a game-changer in the workplace, instead cautioning users that “Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.” “It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended,” the statement continues, as written on Microsoft’s Copilot Terms of Use page. “Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.” That language is a far cry fro…

Over the weekend, Mario, Luigi, Bowser, and the rest of Nintendo’s iconic crew traipsed around the solar system and smashed their way to the top of the box office in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. It’s the latest sign that Hollywood and moviegoers have changed their tune on video game adaptations. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (a sequel to 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie) opened on April 8, just in time for the lead-up to Easter weekend. According to studio estimates cited by CNBC, the Illumination and Nintendo co-production earned $130.9 million over the weekend and $190.1 million in its first five days in North American theaters. Tack on an estimated $18…