What's on Your Mind?

Young people early in their careers are understandably alarmed by reports that their jobs are most at risk from AI automation. Some are even reconsidering their career choices due to what’s been dubbed AI anxiety. But job seekers shouldn’t give up. People whose jobs are threatened by AI must look for ways to play to their strengths and their human qualities. They should focus on the many areas where humans outshine AI—things like relationship building, resourcefulness, emotional intelligence, teamwork, and leadership. For much of the labor force, of course, it won’t be possible to avoid AI completely. Many occupations will involve working with AI not just as an as…

You may see more smiles next time you walk into a Target. That’s because the big box retailer is hoping to provide an “elevated” customer experience with it’s new “10-4” policy, requiring staffers out on the floor to smile, wave, and welcome customers within 10 feet—and greet those just 4 feet away, USA Today reported. Fast Company has reached out to Target for comment. The policy comes less than three weeks before Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which officially kicks off the busiest and most profitable time of the year. Many stores, including Target, have already begun to roll out their Black Friday sales this year. Target’s early 2025 Black Frida…

Retirement saving requires key decisions: when to start, how much to save, and where to invest. The investing decision has drawn more attention as government regulators work to open 401(k) plans to alternative assets such as private market investments. Below, we compare the paths of two hypothetical retirement savers and their outcomes. A tale of two retirement savers Laura and JR are two 25-year-olds newly employed at the same company, in the same role. Step 1: Deciding to Save On her first day at work, Laura committed 10% of her $75,000 salary to her 401(k). That earned her company’s 3% annual match (it matches 50% up to 6%), and 13% in total savings. She…

After enough Democrats caved this week and agreed to fund the federal government without guarantees for extending healthcare subsidies for tens of millions of Americans, a big question on the minds of many is “Will my health insurance premiums go up?” Unfortunately, the answer is likely to be a resounding yes, according to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), the nonprofit health research institute. Here’s how much more individuals and families of four can expect to pay for their healthcare premiums in 2026, unless Republicans decide to extend Affordable Care Act (ACA) enhanced premium tax credits—something the majority of GOP congresspeople have …

To the uninitiated, the term Scope 3 might sound like an obscure technical label. However, for those managing corporate carbon emissions, the term can inspire a range of emotions, from dread to dismay. Scope 3 emissions are generated by indirect upstream and downstream operations, and typically account for the largest share of a company’s carbon footprint. They also lie outside the organization’s direct control. Although one of the sustainability agenda’s most daunting items, technology can provide solutions to the Scope 3 challenge. There’s mounting pressure to tackle these emissions, as institutional investors such as pension funds pay close attention to the cli…

Major League Baseball said its authorized gaming operators will cap bets on individual pitches at $200 and exclude them from parlays, a day after two Cleveland Guardians were indicted and accused of rigging pitches at the behest of gamblers. MLB said Monday the limits were agreed to by sportsbook operators representing more than 98% of the U.S. betting market. The league said in a statement that pitch-level bets on outcomes of pitch velocity and of balls and strikes “present heightened integrity risks because they focus on one-off events that can be determined by a single player and can be inconsequential to the outcome of the game.” “The risk on these pitch-level marke…

Japanese technology giant SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its stake in Nvidia, raising $5.8 billion to pour into other investments. It also reported its profit nearly tripled in the first half of this fiscal year from a year earlier. Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. said it sold the stake in Silicon Vally-based Nvidia in October, a move that reflects its shift in focus to OpenAI, owner of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. SoftBank reported its profit in April-September soared to about 2.5 trillion yen (about $13 billion). Its sales for the six month period rose 7.7% year-on-year to 3.7 trillion yen ($24 billion), it said. The company’s fortunes tend to flu…

Amazon ushered in a new era for television advertising when it converted Prime Video into an ad-supported experience by default in 2024. By the middle of this year, some 130 million U.S. viewers were on Prime Video’s ad tier, watching between four and six minutes of ads per hour, according to an Adweek report. The move is part of the company’s long-term plan to dominate television advertising as viewership shifts from traditional broadcast and cable TV to streaming platforms. “The digital advertising landscape is rapidly evolving with streaming TV becoming mainstream,” says Kelly MacLean, VP of Amazon DSP, the company’s ad-buying platform. Under MacLean, Amazon’s…

The Senate passed legislation Monday to reopen the government, bringing the longest shutdown in history closer to an end as a small group of Democrats ratified a deal with Republicans despite searing criticism from within their party. The 41-day shutdown could last a few more days as members of the House, which has been on recess since mid-September, return to Washington to vote on the legislation. President Donald The President has signaled support for the bill, saying Monday that “we’re going to be opening up our country very quickly.” The final Senate vote, 60-40, broke a grueling stalemate that lasted more than six weeks as Democrats demanded that Republicans negoti…

The longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history appears to be nearing an end, but not without leaving a mark on an already struggling economy. About 1.25 million federal workers haven’t been paid since October 1. Thousands of flights have been canceled, a trend that is expected to continue this week even as Congress moves toward reopening the government. Government contract awards have slowed and some food aid recipients have seen their benefits interrupted. Most of the lost economic activity will be recovered when the government reopens, as federal workers will receive back pay. But some canceled flights won’t be retaken, missed restaurant meals won’t be made u…

Shares in CoreWeave Inc are sinking this morning after the company revealed its third-quarter 2025 results yesterday. While the New Jersey-based AI infrastructure firm more than doubled its revenue from the same quarter a year earlier, it also revised down its full fiscal 2025 forecast, sending its stock price tumbling. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, AI infrastructure company CoreWeave announced financial results for its Q3 2025, which ended on September 30. There was some good news for the quarter, including revenue of nearly $1.4 billion (up 134% year over year) and a revenue backlog of $55.6 billion (up 271% YoY). Revenu…

Darin Fisher is a little older than the fresh-faced, newly minted PhD types you see roaming the well-appointed floors at OpenAI’s second location in San Francisco’s Mission Bay district. Before arriving at the AI super-startup, he spent 25 years working on some of the most important web browsers in the history of the web: He worked on Netscape Navigator, which helped define the early consumer internet. He worked on the popular Firefox browser at Mozilla, then went to Google, where he was a member of the Chrome team. After Google, he wanted to explore alternative browsers; he did so first at Neeva (which offered an ad-free experience), then at the Browser Company, whi…

Every year, the $463 billion global footwear industry make 20 billion pairs of shoes for just 8 billion humans. Since virtually none of them are recyclable, they will end up clogging up landfills around the world. For decades now, the fashion industry has been on a mission to make products recyclable. But shoes have been a much harder puzzle to crack than clothing. While garments are made from just a handful of materials, shoes are far more complex objects. A sneaker can be made of 50 different materials from foam insoles to leather exteriors to cotton laces, all glued together with adhesives. A handful of brands have prototyped one-off recyclable shoes, like Adi…

The newest plaza in Valencia, Spain, has everything one might expect from a public space in a temperate seaside Spanish city. Its five acres contain green space, a playground, ball courts, and walking paths, and the plaza connects to a new market hall, with restaurants and bars serving a wide range of local specialties. Next to all this—and the real reason for any of it existing at all—is Roig Arena, the new multipurpose stadium built for the men’s and women’s professional basketball teams of the Valencia Basket Club. The basketball arena is hardly the second thought here, but it’s much more a piece of this broader civic space than the typical pro sports facility.…

Affordable housing has gone in search of collaborations. Across the country, developers and cities have found a solution in pairing housing with unexpected projects to save money and build more vibrant communities. A wave of libraries, fire stations, and even Costco stores have been built below or adjacent to much-needed, lower-cost apartments. Now a new development in the Southern California city of San Juan Capistrano is sharing a lot with City Hall. Salida del Sol, a $31 million, 49-unit supportive housing development by Jamboree Housing Corp., opened this past July on a 2.2-acre site downtown. At a time when federal support for homeless services is waveri…

One of the many ways Americans practice gratitude in the month of November is by honoring those who have served in the U.S. military. This federal holiday is always observed on November 11—even if that falls on a weekday, as is the case this year. Many federal services take the day off to give workers time to observe Veterans Day. It can get a bit confusing to know how this impacts what’s open and closed. The ongoing federal government shutdown adds another layer of uncertainty. Before we clear all that up, let’s take a look at the history of the day. A brief history of Veterans Day World War I was supposed to be the war that ended all wars. On November 11,…

A few months ago, I was lying in bed, lightly clutching my phone, when Instagram Reels presented me with a brief video that promised an impossible soap opera: There were animated cats—with feline faces but unmistakable human bodies—living seemingly human lives, including in a human-seeming house and also, for some totally unclear reason, at a seemingly human construction site. There was drama: A female cat appeared to have been knocked up. There was also, somehow, a related love triangle involving two far more muscle-y male cats vying for her affection. None of the cats actually spoke. Yet somehow the plot proceeded, with one cat winning the heroine’s heart. It was well r…

When you think of leaders you admire, you likely imagine them as authentic, at least in the sense of seeming genuine, real, and trustworthy. Science confirms this is usually the case. For example, data tells us that trustworthy leaders stand out for their “no thrills” patterns of behavior: They are, in other words, predictable, reliable, and unlikely to shock their employees or followers with erratic or excitable behavior that freaks them out. Furthermore, the best meta-analysis (quantitative review of hundreds of independent top studies) on personality and leadership tells us that one of the most consistent predictors of whether someone emerges as a leader,…

There are a lot of words marketers can’t seem to quit. “Unique.” “Authentic.” “Real.” But these are threadbare clichés, which have all but become nullified due to the erosion of their meaning, a dilution fueled by the desire for brands to be generally, yet specifically, for everyone. But “everyone” is not a target audience. It’s a comfortable void. What brands really need right now isn’t another lap around the buzzword block. It’s courage. Courage to lean into the one trait that could cut through in a world of algorithms, sameness, and mediocrity. Marketers need to be weirder. If you want a sociological anecdote of how weird wins, look no further than online dating. D…

When it comes to inquiring about—ahem—certain products, shoppers prefer the inhuman touch. That is what we found in a study of consumer habits when it comes to products that traditionally have come with a degree of embarrassment—think acne cream, diarrhea medication, adult sex toys, or personal lubricant. While brands may assume consumers hate chatbots, our series of studies involving more than 6,000 participants found a clear pattern: When it comes to purchases that make people feel embarrassed, consumers prefer chatbots over human service reps. In one experiment, we asked participants to imagine shopping for medications for diarrhea and hay fever. They were …

In September, my mom died after a short battle with colon cancer. She was 83 and lived a full life in which she had a fulfilling career in education, traveled the world visiting 100-plus countries, and was married to my father for more than 60 years. It’s hard to lose a parent, and my workplace (like many) allowed me time off to be with family for the days before and after the funeral. But no matter how generous the policy at your workplace is, you’re going to have to come back to work before you’re done grieving. Grief happens following any significant event that creates a tear in the fabric of your life story. The death of a loved one is an obvious source of grief, …