What's on Your Mind?

About 40% of farm workers in the U.S. are undocumented immigrants, and they’ve become a focus of the The President administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown. Terrorized farm workers have been forced into hiding, and farms themselves have been left empty of their workers. Experts have long warned that The President’s promise of mass deportations would threaten industries that rely on undocumented workers—like agriculture—and that it could lead to mass disruptions in our food system. Now the The President administration’s labor department seems to be admitting that itself. In a document explaining the administration’s new rule cutting farmworker wages,…

A political scientist who studies what helps people connect across differences. A novelist whose books about Native American communities in Oakland, California, sparked a passionate following. A photographer whose black and white images investigate poverty in America. Hahrie Han, Tommy Orange, and Matt Black are among the 22 fellows selected this year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and announced Wednesday. It’s a recognition often called the “genius award,” which comes with an $800,000 prize, paid over five years that fellows can spend however they choose. The foundation selects fellows over the course of years, considering a vast range of re…

Forget magical virtual worlds. In its quest to broaden the audience for virtual reality, Meta is now embracing much more familiar surroundings: Owners of Meta’s Quest VR headsets will soon be able to create digital replicas of any room in their house, and then invite others to “visit” them in those spaces. Imagine, for instance, having a spontaneous family reunion in a metaverse version of your living room – perhaps even with an avatar that looks just like you, and not a character that has escaped from a video game. “There is something very magical about scanning a space that you know, bringing someone else who knows that space into it and feeling like you’re there toget…

The global economy is holding up better than expected despite major shocks such as President Donald The President’s tariffs, but the head of the International Monetary Fund says that resilience may not last. “Buckle up,” Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in a speech at a think tank Wednesday. “Uncertainty is the new normal and it is here to stay.” Her comments at the Milken Institute come on a day when gold prices hit $4,000 an ounce for the first time as investors seek safe haven from a weaker dollar and geopolitical uncertainty and before the IMF and World Bank hold their annual meetings next week in Washington. The President’s trade penalties are expe…

Up until a week ago, I was really quite satisfied by my iPhone 17 Pro. Not the Liquid Glass, but its soft orange aluminum frame felt just new enough to give me a spark. Then I opened the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold. Yes, its name is too long. Yes, it costs $700 more than my iPhone. Yes, it’s still heavier than I want it to be. And yet, I hate to admit it . . . the Fold justifies every analyst who has cried that Apple’s hesitance to adopt flexible screen technologies is starting to make it look dated. An estimated 17 million folding smartphones sold last year, representing a scant 1.5% of the smartphone market, but about every analyst expects that figure to balloon …

Carbon offsets have existed for decades, and the size of the voluntary carbon market has ballooned to about $2 billion. Many countries and countless companies, including giants like Amazon and Fedex, use carbon offsets to reduce their emissions as they work toward reaching net zero. And yet, these offsets haven’t significantly curbed global greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, global emissions are still increasing. As a climate solution, carbon offsets have failed—and according to a new scientific review looking at 25 years of carbon offset research, they’ve failed because they’re riddled with intractable, deep-seated problems that incremental changes won’t be able to s…

Amazon is rolling out kiosks that let patients get their prescriptions while they are still at the doctor’s office. Starting in December 2025, the tech behemoth will be stepping up its efforts to become a bigger presence in the pharmaceutical market by launching in-office pharmaceutical kiosks stocked with medicine. The kiosks will initially be launched at certain One Medical locations (which Amazon acquired in 2023 for $3.9 billion), including in Downtown Los Angeles, West Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Long Beach, and West Hollywood. The company claims that the kiosks will help combat pharmacy deserts across the U.S., and help patients who don’t or can’t fil…

There’s a common story in the marketing and advertising industry, with many variations. Whenever a member of that industry is at a party or on a plane, inevitably someone will ask what they do for a living. And as soon as they say advertising, that person immediately begins to tell them how good they’d be at working in advertising, how they should make this or that ad campaign better, or why that ad they saw during an NFL game is terrible. This probably doesn’t happen to engineers and doctors. The discipline of advertising, and the process behind it has always been up for debate and question. Well, starting on September 30th, NBC’s new show On Brand with Jimmy Fallon …

Gap just released an animated ad to promote its collection with designer Sandy Liang, and we need it to become its own TV show ASAP. Created by animator Annie Choi, who has a history of illustrating campaigns for luxury fashion labels, the ad stars a young girl modeled after Liang herself. While dreaming up new clothing designs inside her childhood bedroom, the girl discovers that her closet has been imbued with magical powers—and when she opens its doors, she’s transformed, Sailor Moon–style, into a new version of herself dressed head-to-toe in Gap x Sandy Liang. The Gap x Sandy Liang ad, titled “Sandy’s Dream Closet,” is part of the roll-out for Liang’s bigges…

Taylor Swift sold 2.7 million copies of her new album The Life of a Showgirl on its release day Friday, and luckily for Swifties buying up multiple copies to help their idol on the chart, they didn’t have to pay any tariffs on their purchases. U.S. consumers now face a 18.6% overall average effective tariff rate, according to Yale’s Budget Lab, and one music professor estimated that if tariffs were applied to physical music, they could have hiked the price of a vinyl record to as much as $40 to $50 a pop. They’re not, though, thanks some recently relevant Reagan-era legislation. Instead, Swift fans have to cough up $35 for the Target-exclusive “Summertime Spritz …

Kentucky’s attorney general claimed Tuesday that the online gaming platform Roblox has become a “playground for predators” as he announced a lawsuit accusing the company of lax child safety measures. The Kentucky suit, filed by his office Monday in a state court, is the latest action alleging that the wildly popular site isn’t doing enough to protect children on its gaming services. To bolster safeguards for children and teenagers flocking to the site, the company needs to install effective age verifications and content filters, Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman said. Added parental notifications also are needed, he said. Courtney Norris, a Kentucky mother of t…

Thirty paintings created by the bushy-haired, soft-spoken Bob Ross will soon be up for auction to defray the costs of programming for public television stations suffering from cuts in federal funding. Ross, a public television stalwart in the 1980s and ’90s, “dedicated his life to making art accessible to everyone,” said Joan Kowalski, president of Bob Ross Inc. “This auction ensures his legacy continues to support the very medium that brought his joy and creativity into American homes for decades.” Bonhams in Los Angeles will auction three of Ross’ paintings on Nov. 11. Other auctions will follow in London, New York, Boston and online. All profits are pledged to statio…

As the end of 2025 approaches, a viral TikTok trend is helping people achieve their wellness goals: “The Great Lock In” encourages participants to finish the year strong by fully focusing on their life goals from Sept. 1 through Dec. 31. Many people focus on exercise or eating healthier. But the trend can also help you achieve your financial goals. There are no set rules for “The Great Lock In.” The phrase “lock in” is popular on social media and it means to focus intensely on a task. “Something I like about this particular trend is that it’s like New Year’s resolutions’ little sister,” said Lindsay Bryan-Podvin, financial therapist and founder of Mind Money Balance, a…

Gold has been having a very good year. That sentiment couldn’t have been clearer on Tuesday, October 7, as the precious metal hit a new milestone: $4,000 an ounce. As of early Wednesday, gold was up over 53% year to date. That’s significantly higher than the growth seen by major stock indexes over the same period The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 9.93% this year, the S&P 500 is up 14.42%, and the Nasdaq Composite is up 18.19% as of the market close on Tuesday. As a so-called safe-haven asset, gold has benefited from a few things this year, including a weakened dollar and an unpredictable economy. The latter has been especially true since the…

In my old banking job, where I worked for 12 years, I found myself frustrated with the slow pace of the work, the layers of red tape and approvals to get anything done. After all, banking was a highly regulated industry, and while there were many rules to follow, they were just simply being a good bank by following them. I felt tired, drained, and lacked energy—similar symptoms to burnout. While the organization was frequently voted a “best place to work,” I couldn’t figure out why my “great job” felt so bad. I wasn’t overworking or spending endless evenings logging in, so the typical paths to burnout didn’t make sense. What I was actually experiencing was rust out. …

Libbie Bischoff didn’t set out to reinvent the signature. Really, she was just flipping through a vintage knitting magazine from the 1950s. The Minneapolis-based type designer collects the mags, partly because her grandmother taught her to knit, and partly because she finds incredible typography hidden within their pages. It was in one of these magazines that she found the casual, flowing script that would become one of Docusign’s new signature styles. Together with Lynne Yun—a New York-based type designer, calligrapher, and founder of the studio Space Type—Bischoff is responsible for the first major update to the platform’s signature options in more than 20 year…

For many stars, writing a children’s book is a fun side project they do to capitalize on their fame. Kate McKinnon—a Saturday Night Live alum who has starred in recent movies like Barbie and The Roses—is certainly famous. But the truth is that she had dreamed of writing a novel for middle schoolers since her mid-twenties, years before she even auditioned for SNL. As a child, McKinnon had loved books about slightly oddball characters, like those found in Roald Dahl books. Her favorite heroine was Pippi Longstocking, whom she played in a kindergarten performance. She loved the character so much that she would show up at school for years in a full-on Pippi costume, compl…

Today’s labor market may be stagnating, but it’s also uncertain. Candidates aren’t behaving as many leaders would expect. The dynamic is trending towards an employer’s market. As a result, employers expect that candidates will increase their job searches, accept lower pay increases, and accept new roles more eagerly. But in reality, job searching has actually declined, pay expectations remain high, and candidates are reluctant to move. And this has resulted in a critical talent supply shortage. According to research from Gartner, 29% of candidates spent more than five hours per week on active job searches in the second quarter of 2025. That’s down from 49% in the firs…

Move over quiet quitting, bare minimum Mondays, and career cushioning. A new workplace behavior is on the rise: the self-aware underperformer. Contrary to hustle culture, these workers are knowingly underperforming and not doing anything about it. It used to be the delusional underperformer—the employee who thought they were doing a great job—that gave HR headaches. The self-aware underperformer, on the other hand, is aware that they’re underperforming and not taking any actions to rectify it. As leaders, this isn’t something you can afford to ignore. After all, underperformance doesn’t just materialize. The culture has been brewing and cultivating on our watch. U…

Camping. Why anyone would put themselves through an odyssey of gross insects and pooping in holes is beyond me, but you do you, Steve. I’ll do me. However, if I were forced to go sleep in the woods, I would like to use this new camping mattress by Chinese sleep startup Mazzu created in collaboration with London-based design studio Layer. It looks like the closest thing to a Four Seasons bed this side of the Rio Grande. Or any río (just don’t get me close to a river). The Mazzu Camping Mattress isn’t your typical inflatable pad that promises comfort on-the-go but delivers back pain for a week. It’s built around 72 precision-engineered elastic spring units—pre-c…

The The President administration is spending more than half a billion dollars to help prop up the dying coal industry. It’s also weakening pollution regulations and opening up more federal land to coal mining. All of this isn’t likely to save the industry—and also isn’t likely to do much to meet the surging demand for power from data centers for AI. Coal power is expensive, and that isn’t going to change Aging coal power plants are now so expensive to run that hundreds have retired over the last decade, including around 100 that retired or made plans to retire during The President’s first term. Offering relatively small subsidies isn’t likely to change the long…

The return-to-office debate sees no end in sight. Workers still want flexible work—and drag their feet complying with RTO, it was reported this week. Some workers have suspected such policies have been a way of companies saying: “Don’t like it? Quit.” Turns out, maybe they are. A recent Fortune article, citing a 2024 survey of more than 1,500 U.S. managers, found that a quarter of C-suite executives hoped for some voluntary turnover after introducing an RTO policy. One in five HR leaders went further, admitting their stricter office requirements were designed to push staff out. So when the article started making the rounds on Reddit last week, the general la…

Below, Nick Foster shares five key insights from his new book, Could Should Might Don’t: How We Think About the Future. Nick has spent the last 25 years working within companies at the very forefront of emerging technology, from Apple and Sony to Nokia and Dyson. Most recently, he was head of design at Google X. He has established himself as a leading figure in the field of Futures Design. In 2021, he was awarded the title Royal Designer for Industry, the highest accolade for a British designer. What’s the big idea? We need to have a conversation about the future, but not the kind you’d expect. Humans have already talked at length about what the future may or m…

AI fluency is quickly becoming the new leadership divide: Some executives are already embedding it into strategy, while others are still asking what it means. The gap is widening—and it’s shaping who gets hired to lead. That’s why AI fluency is becoming a top priority in leadership searches. Not deep technical mastery, but a practical understanding of how these tools work and where they apply. Companies want leaders who aren’t just talking about transformation but are actively engaged in it. People who’ve run pilots, evaluated risks, collaborated with product and tech, or led adoption efforts in their function. They don’t need to be engineers. But they do need to …

In early 2023, a couple of months after ChatGPT launched and became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, I remember feeling both excited but also a bit overwhelmed by the rapid pace of AI. The barrage of news, product launches, and innovative use cases was relentless. We held an executive meeting at that time and decided to immediately reassign additional teams from other long-planned initiatives to double down on AI. We saw an opportunity to deliver even more value to our customers. My experience is not unique. Across the board, leaders have been aggressively implementing AI to improve productivity, lower costs, and improve communication—but the r…