What's on Your Mind?

When Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the London Marathon on April 26, an Adidas attendant was waiting on the sidelines to collect his shoes. The attendant wrote Sawe’s record-breaking time, 1:59.30, on the side of the shoes, waited for him to take some photos with them, and then whisked them off to Adidas’s archives in Herzogenaurach, Germany. In that moment, the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 became the fastest shoe in the world. Sabastian Sawe Sawe was the first person to ever run a sub-two-hour marathon in an official race, followed closely by Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who finished with a time of 1:59.41. Fellow Ethiopian Tigist Assefa set…

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers didn’t mince words in court this week while adjudicating the ongoing trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI in Oakland, California. Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, needed to stop being messy bitches. While she didn’t put it like that (she advised both men: “Control your propensity to use social media to make things worse outside this courtroom”), the underlying message was clear. The fact that the case even made it to court is indication enough of how strongly both men feel about one another. Social media name-calling is hardly necessary to make that plain. But the reason they’re so eager to throw digital barbs at each other stems from …

In a general sense, workplace leaders are trained to focus on what can be seen and measured. They’re taught to pay close attention to employee performance, productivity, and efficiency—often without realizing that some of the most important aspects of work will never appear in any of these metrics. What too often goes unseen is how people experience their work. Whether they find meaning in what they do. Whether they feel connected to it and to the people around them. Whether their work aligns with who they are. To some, these may sound abstract or insignificant. They are not. They are core drivers of human well-being—and therefore of employee motivation and achiev…

Alison Rand is a strategist, author, and design leader working at the intersection of design strategy, organizational structure, and operations. A former developer who helped build early UX practices at agencies like Huge and Hot Studio, she now consults with organizations to untangle complexity—how people work, how decisions travel, and how culture is shaped through structure. She is pursuing a master’s degree in Strategic Foresight at the University of Houston, co-founded Forty Fifty, a social health platform for women navigating midlife, and is the author of Sentido with MIT Press. In her interview with Doreen Lorenzo, Alison explores what it means to lead creative…

50% of the global population is ageist against older people, according to the World Health Organization. As the Managing Director of a recruitment company, I know this is true. Spend enough time listening in on hiring conversations, and a curious pattern emerges. When companies talk of innovation, adaptability, and fresh thinking, they often imagine a young, agile, fast-moving team with the latest technologies at their fingertips. So, we see hiring decisions that favor younger or mid-career employees, under the assumption that younger employees are naturally more creative, more technologically fluent, or better suited to fast-moving industries. There’s also the idea …

A few times every month, I push and force my brain to come up with new ideas. The process is counterintuitive. I become bored on purpose. I believe an idle mind connects better dots. I feel guilty every time. But I push through it. I’m supposed to be working. I have a to-do list and emails to respond to. And I deliberately allow my mind to do nothing. This idea is a hard sell right now. People swear by all sorts of productivity frameworks. We’ve built entire work cultures around the idea that idle time is wasted time. So we fill every moment with work or content. With something. Anything to avoid the discomfort of just being. History’s great minds understood the …

It’s understandable that following the announcement that John Ternus will succeed Tim Cook as Apple CEO, people will pore over his résumé for signs of how the company might change. Cook was famously an operations and logistics wizard, handpicked by Steve Jobs to manage Apple with his trademark efficiency. But his successor is more of a mystery. Ternus has been a senior vice president of hardware engineering at Apple for five years, and a VP since 2013, but beyond that he hasn’t been credited with steering the company in a particular direction. All anyone can really say for now is that Apple will be led by someone who is strongly experienced in hardware, which sounds …

There’s an idea in AI called “liquid content.” It typically refers to the idea of morphing the facts, ideas, and expressions from one medium to another. The most well-known example is a feature within Google’s NotebookLM: Once you’ve filled a folder with various kinds of data, it can whip up a podcast about that data, enlisting a couple of cheery AI-generated voices to give you an overview, analysis, or debate. Taken to its logical extreme, liquid content suggests a future for media companies where what you create is repurposed across any and all formats. Making a podcast? With the right tools and prompting, in mere minutes, it can be reimagined as a series of clips, …

The European Union accused Meta on Wednesday of failing to stop underage users from accessing Facebook and Instagram, in violation of the bloc’s tough digital rules that require social media sites to protect minors. The EU’s executive branch said Meta Platforms lacked effective measures to prevent children younger than 13 from signing up, and that it was not doing enough to identify and remove children after they had opened accounts. Meta’s own minimum age to open an account on Facebook or Instagram is 13. The problem is not just that children are getting access. The European Commission said Meta is also inadequately assessing the risk of children younger than 13 being…

Whatever you think about the charitable gifts of MacKenzie Scott, no one would describe them as small. The novelist and philanthropist gave away $7 billion in 2025. That’s more than her ex-husband Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has given away in his entire lifetime. But when Scott penned her end-of-year essay reflecting on her efforts, she wasn’t focused on eye-popping numbers or dramatic gestures. Instead, she wanted to spotlight the impact of small, everyday acts of kindness. America the generous “It’s easy to focus on the methods of civic participation that make news, and hard to imagine the importance of the things we do each day with our own minds and hearts,…

Australia has proposed taxing digital giants Meta, Google and TikTok on a part of their revenue to pay for news reporters. The government released draft legislation Tuesday it intends to introduce to Parliament by July 2 that would create a financial incentive for the social media companies to strike deals with news organizations to pay for journalism. The platforms’ criticisms included that the proposal was a “digital services tax” that misunderstood the evolving advertising industry and would fail to deliver a sustainable news sector. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said a monetary value needed to be attached to journalists’ work. “It shouldn’t just be ab…

The long-awaited 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off in less than 45 days and fans may still be able to score some tickets—although not always for a low price. Soccer’s largest tournament is arriving in North America on June 11, with 16 host cities across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico readying for the quadrennial festivities. But even as the upcoming World Cup has expanded the number of qualifying teams from 32 to 48 countries with over 100 games scheduled, snagging affordable tickets remains difficult. In fact, this year’s World Cup has raised criticism over the sky-high ticket prices leaving many fans out of the stadium. Take the four tickets for the final game that ma…

Bill Ackman has made a lot of noise in recent years. On Wednesday, that noise came in the form of ringing the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange, in honor of the initial public offering of his hedge fund, Pershing Square. Here’s what you need to know about Ackman’s latest move and the Pershing Square IPO. What is Pershing Square? Pershing Square Inc is the parent company for Ackman’s hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, and the closed-end management company Pershing Square USA. What is being offered on the market? Shares in Pershing Square Inc. and Pershing Square USA are being put on the market in a combined IPO, with two stocks. …

Lots of people claim that writing poetry is something only humans can do. It requires emotion, wordcraft, and the unique body of painful, jubilant lived experience that only a person can accumulate. To which I say, “phooey.” Poems are words. And today’s Large Language Models are incredibly good at manipulating words. An AI should be able to beat the Poes and Frosts of the world at their own game. To put that theory into practice, I teamed up with my friend Jared Bauman, built an AI-powered poem generator, and released it into the world for anyone to discover and use. I never expected what people would do with it. Here’s what happened. Powerful calc…

After Meta announced it would lay off 10% of its workforce next month to offset AI spending, employees swarmed to Blind—an anonymous online workplace forum—to get a few things off their chests. According to a report by Blind provided to Fast Company, posts containing negative sentiment about AI at Meta have grown to 83% since late 2025—that’s a roughly 300% jump since 2024, when just 20% of posts on the site about AI at Meta were negative. “Meta is dead and depressing,” one post on the platform said after the company’s layoff announcements. Cynicism around AI and workplace culture at Meta is pervasive on the platform. “They do not care about the employees any…

California-based Ghirardelli Chocolate Company has voluntarily recalled 13 of its powdered beverage mixes over concerns of potential Salmonella contamination. The storied confectionery says it issued the recall after dairy producer California Dairies recalled its milk powder, which is used in the affected powdered beverage mixes. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a recall notice on Tuesday, April 28. To date, no illnesses have been reported. What products are included in the recall? The recall covers a limited selection of powdered beverage mixes packaged for food service and institutional customers. However, Ghirardelli cautions tha…

Why do CEOs of big AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic often publicly acknowledge that AI is likely to result in significant job loss? Most AI company CEOs now concede that widespread job loss from AI is coming, while differing somewhat on the timeline. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long acknowledged that AI will displace workers. “The real impact of AI doing jobs in the next few years will begin to be palpable,” he said recently. But he often adds that AI will also create new jobs, such as for humans who manage teams of AI agents. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been the most frank and pessimistic when it comes to AI-driven job loss: “I would not be surprised if somewhe…

View the full article

Passengers flying with low battery on their phones might be out of luck—at least if they are flying American Airlines. The country’s largest airline is implementing a new policy that will restrict how many portable chargers passengers may bring to the aircraft, citing potential safety concerns from lithium batteries. “We know our customers rely on portable chargers to keep devices powered throughout their journey,” the carrier told CBS. “To support safety on board while ensuring our customers continue to have the ability to charge when on the go, American is requiring customers to keep these devices easily accessible during flight.” The new policy goes into ef…

Uber Technologies is doing everything it can to save its customers’ time, but for CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the company’s sixth annual GO-GET event in New York City was something of a trip through time. On Wednesday, Khosrowshahi and other members of Uber’s leadership unveiled a slew of new features, and also announced Hotels on Uber, a new hotel-booking feature, working in concert with Expedia, a company for which Khosrowshahi previously served as CEO. The feature allows users to book hotel rooms directly in the Uber app, similar to how they’d hail a ride or order food through Uber Eats. Khosrowshahi said that travel was Uber’s “next frontier,” and that “taking all …

San Francisco may have a reputation for being AI-obsessed and chock-full of antisocial tech nerds, but those are only stereotypes—right? A viral post from a San Francisco tech worker brought all the city’s clichés into focus, after he visited New York City and was seemingly amazed by people interested in anything other than AI. Parv Sondhi, a San Francisco-based project manager with experience at Apple, eBay, and UC Berkeley, took to social media to share his observations after spending a week in New York City. In his post, he remarked on seeing “very few AI ads or billboards around” and coming across “way more artists.” Sondhi seemed especially wowed by how s…

In March 2026, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey told CNBC that AI had significantly influenced his decision to step down from his post. The company needed, in his words, “someone with the energy to pursue a completely new transformation of the enterprise.” A few months earlier, Walmart’s Doug McMillon stepped aside for essentially the same reasons: he could, he said, start the next big set of AI transformations, but he couldn’t finish the job. According to McMillon, Walmart needed someone faster to lead them into the AI era and so he was passing the baton on to a new CEO. These were not failed CEOs being pushed out. Quincey had added more than ten new billion-dollar brands…

Google’s transition into the era of artificial intelligence continued to pay off for its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., which on Wednesday announced another quarter of stellar growth that helped to more than double its already lofty market value during the past year. Alphabet earned $62.6 billion, or $5.11 per share, during the January-March period, an 81% increase from the same time last year. Revenue climbed 22% from last year to $109.9 billion. Both numbers easily surpassed the analyst projections that steer investors. Alphabet’s stock price rose more than 6% in extended trading after the numbers came out, setting up the shares to hit a new high during Thursd…