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Less than a year after Rite Aid finally wrapped up its first bankruptcy proceedings, it’s now reportedly planning to file for Chapter 11 protection a second time. Based on a new report from Bloomberg, Rite Aid employees received a letter today from CEO Matthew Schroeder stating that the company’s negotiations with lenders for more capital have failed. He went on to explain that the pharmacy chain can no longer sustain itself and intends to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Per the letter, the company will start by cutting jobs at its corporate offices in Pennsylvania, a move Schroeder attributed to “the dramatic downturn in the economy.” An apparent copy of the lett…

On Thursday morning, Pittsburgh-based Dick’s Sporting Goods announced its plans to acquire footwear and apparel retailer Foot Locker. The two companies have entered into a merger agreement, where Dick’s Sporting Goods will buy Foot Locker for $2.4 billion. Here’s what to know about the deal. How will the deal work? Dick’s will finance the merger using a combination of cash-on-hand and new debt. As part of the agreement, Dick’s will acquire Foot Locker’s vast portfolio of brands, including Foot Locker, Kids Foot Locker, Champs Sports, and WSS. Foot Locker currently operates over 2,000 retail stores across the globe. Dick’s will operate Foot Locker as a standalo…

When Ben Stiller goes out to dinner, he drinks between one and three Shirley Temples. But a fully-grown adult ordering a classic child’s beverage can elicit funny looks. So, to help cut the stigma, and the sugar, the actor, director, and producer launched his own soda company last month—called Stiller’s Soda—with a grown-up version of a Shirley Temple as one of its three flavors. He simply wanted a version “that he could feel good about drinking himself,” says Stiller’s Soda cofounder Alexander Doman, a serial food and beverage entrepreneur. Stiller’s isn’t the only soda company suddenly flirting with the Shirley Temple. In the past year, soda powerhouses and…

White smoke poured from the Sistine Chapel chimney Thursday at 6:07 p.m. local time, signaling the end of the conclave and the election of a new pope to lead the Catholic Church. Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost of the United States is now the 267th pope, taking the name Pope Leo XIV. Just a minute later, the folks behind Pope Crave broke their silence: “We don’t claim him,” they posted to their 93,000 followers, beating even the Vatican News portal to the update. “His views better have changed since 2012 to be more in line with Papa Francis or else . . . apostasy!” they added. If you’re late to the party, Pope Crave is a parody account modeled after celebrity news…

Behind the curtain of generative AI breakthroughs and GPU hype, a quieter transformation is taking place. Data center architecture and its prowess have become a fierce battleground as AI models expand in size and demand ever-greater compute power. Today, AI’s performance, scalability and cost are all tied to the choice of network fabric. Broadcom, once known for its dominance in networking and semiconductors, is back on the rise as one of the most consequential players in AI’s infrastructure revolution. “There’s a shift happening in the market. Today, real AI innovation isn’t just limited to models or the infrastructure—it’s in what connects them,” Ram Velaga, senior …

Just beyond a fenced-off access road in fields of tall grass on public land in Pennsylvania’s northwest sits a natural gas well pad that sat idle for close to a decade. The old fracking site suddenly roared back to life in 2022, spewing noise and pollution and rattling residents who were used to hunting pheasant on the quiet, bucolic terrain. Diversified Energy turned on the well pad, known as Longhorn Pad A, to funnel the natural gas into on-site generators powering cryptocurrency-mining supercomputers that churn away at numbers at all hours. The company set up and started the mine without securing a required air quality permit from state regulators, Capital & Ma…

New Jersey Transit’s train engineers reached a tentative deal Sunday to end their three-day strike that had halted service for some 100,000 daily riders, including routes to Newark airport and across the Hudson River to New York City. The union said its members would return to work on Tuesday, when trains would resume their regular schedules. The walkout that began Friday was the state’s first transit strike in over 40 years, forcing people who normally rely on New Jersey Transit to take buses, cars, taxis and boats instead or consider staying home. The main sticking point had been how to accomplish a wage increase for the engineers without creating a financially disastr…

In the constant hustle and bustle of one of the busiest airports in the United States, a terrifying 90 seconds of quiet had disastrous results. On April 28, the Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) lost both radar and radio for a minute and a half due to a fried piece of copper wiring, the New York Post reported. This meant that air traffic controllers could not see, hear, or speak to aircraft or pilots around the airport. The event did not lead to any crashes, but it did cause significant stress on employees working at the time; five FAA employees are reportedly taking trauma leave, according to CNN, making them eligible for 45 days to recover from the ev…

From his first moments on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo XIV gave three important clues about what kind of leader of the 1.4-billion-member Catholic Church he will be. Leo, formerly U.S. Cardinal Robert Prevost, was elected by the world’s cardinals on Thursday as the new pope on the second day of the conclave to choose a successor to Pope Francis, who died last month. He is the first pope from the United States, but holds dual citizenship in Peru, where he was a missionary for decades before becoming a cardinal. Leo’s first clue was his choice of name. Popes often use this choice to send their first major signal about the priorities of their new…

Lurking on sites like LinkedIn and Indeed, or among your incoming text messages and emails, lies yet another disappointment to dodge in the already lacking job market: fake recruiters. Posing as representatives from top companies, they’ll contact you out of the blue, offering a job so tempting, that 40% of targets ignore the warning signs and move forward with the “interview.” More than half of them, 51%, end up being scammed to give up personal data or money. Those findings came from a survey of more than 1,200 U.S. job seekers published in October by Password Manager. “The prevalence of fake recruiters came to my attention several years ago,” says Gunnar K…

I was asked to be the keynote speaker recently for an important conference at Rutgers Business School on the future of business education. I thought it would be helpful for business school leadership and students and for recruiters of business school graduates to recap my message in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece. It is called The Future[s] of Business Education: Two Strategy Paths. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here. Audience participation The conference attendees were mainly U.S. business school deans and other senior faculty members. The array of deans was quite impressive with deans from leading schools including …

When a door broke loose on a new electric bus in Des Moines, Iowa, and nearly fell off, it was one in a long list of problems for the local transit agency. The city began using its fleet of seven electric buses, made by the startup Proterra, in 2021. The vehicles soon showed defects in the suspensions, weatherproofing, and wheelchair ramps. After only 18 months of use—and unsuccessful attempts to get the manufacturer to fix the problems—the agency had to pull them off the road. Other cities had similar issues. In Philadelphia, Proterra buses were sidelined in 2020 after the heavy batteries started to crack the vehicle chassis. (This summer, one of those vehicles s…

Design-minded home goods brand Simplehuman recently released a product that’s a little out of its wheelhouse—a limited-edition tequila with distillery Nosotros. It may be the company’s first foray into spirits, but the brand already knows how to work with the Weber blue agave that made the tequila. The agave fibers on Simplehuman’s Soapwell sponge begin their life cycle by being pressed into Nosotros tequila at the company’s distillery in Tequila, Mexico. Nosotros then supplies its leftover agave fibers to Simplehuman. The $100 Nosotros x Simplehuman Blanco tequila is made out of that same agave, and was released to mark a year that Simplehuman has been spinning the f…

On the way to work, you see a TikTok video of the president admitting to a crime. In the elevator, you hear your favorite band, but the song is completely unfamiliar. At your desk, you open an email from an executive in another department. It contains valid sales information and discusses a relevant legal issue, but the wording sounds oddly wooden. After lunch, the CEO sends all managers a link to a new app she had casually proposed just a few days earlier. Later, you interview a job candidate via Zoom, but the person looks different from his LinkedIn picture. Any or all of these things—the video, the song, the email, the CEO’s app, the candidate—could have been gener…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Claude feels like a genie to me. With its Artifacts feature I can turn any idea I have into an interactive application, visualization, or graphic. Yesterday I created a Flashcard maker and a breathing app. No coding. Just a short AI chat conversation. No complexity. I dream up an idea, and Claude makes it instantly real. I iterate with chat to make it better. Read on for a guide to making the most of Artifacts with examples and ideas you can build yourself. How to turn ideas into apps (no coding) Create a free Cla…

Disability is often framed as something to accommodate instead of celebrate. But Visible Voices, a new digital platform launching today on Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2025, is challenging that mindset. The platform is part magazine, part gallery, and part curated e-shop. As a whole, it’s repositioning disability as a source of culture, creativity, and style, fueled by the belief that accessibility and aesthetics should not be at odds. Cofounded by journalist Bérénice Magistretti and creative entrepreneur Reuben Selby, both of whom live with invisible disabilities, Visible Voices is the platform they wish existed when they were first navigating those identi…