What's on Your Mind?

Even as the costs and challenges of doing business continues rising, there is a growing political effort creating artificial barriers that undermine business growth. Legislation and political directives are tying business leaders’ hands and limiting their choices in an increasingly diverse economy. National political rhetoric and autocratic use of federal and state agency authority preempt business leaders from doing anything with a hint of diversity, equity, or inclusion. This ultimately interferes with smart business decisions, restricts markets, and limits communities from achieving inclusive growth and shared prosperity. Inclusive growth should be practical busin…

Chain stores have Black Friday. Online marketplaces have Cyber Monday. For local businesses, it’s Small Business Saturday. In the last 20 years, more segments of the retail industry have vied for their own piece of the holiday shopping season. The travel trade has firmly joined the trend with another post-Thanksgiving sales push: Travel Tuesday. On the same day as the nonprofit world’s Giving Tuesday, airlines, hotels, cruise ship companies, travel booking platforms and tour operators get in on the annual spirit to spend by promoting one-day deals. Consumer advocates say there are legitimate savings to be had but also chances to be misled by marketing that conveys a fal…

Gustaf Westman, the homeware designer known for his delightfully chunky objects, just unveiled his latest project. It’s a shelf inspired by classic puzzles. Gustaf Westman In a new video posted to his Instagram, Westman introduces the Puzzle Shelf, a modular unit that comes in the form of several components resembling giant puzzle pieces. Users can assemble the shelf however they see fit, as well as select their own piece colors, which include white, forest green, fire-engine red, pink, a range of blues, and even a metallic silver. It’s currently available on a made-to-order basis, as each unique shelf is produced by a London-based 3D-print artist. Westman’s ir…

For many children, the experience of getting their first pair of glasses is an inevitable milestone, the first in a lifetime of visits to the eye doctor. But what if those lenses could actually help preserve the child’s vision and reduce the chances for more serious eye problems in adulthood? That’s the promise of a new type of lens approved by the Food and Drug Administration in September. While the technology has previously been available in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world, it’s now rolling out in the U.S. Here’s what to know about the new approach. What is myopia and why is it increasing? Myopia, commonly called nearsightedness, is when people can c…

President Donald The President has commuted the prison sentence of former investment manager David Gentile, who was convicted of defrauding investors — the latest in a series of clemency actions The President has taken in white-collar criminal cases. Gentile had reported to prison on Nov. 14, just days before The President commuted his sentence, according to a White House official who requested anonymity to provide details of the clemency action. Gentile had been the CEO and co-founder of GPB Capital, which had raised $1.6 billion in capital to acquire companies in the auto, retail, health care and housing sectors. He had been sentenced to seven years in prison after an…

The Salt Lake City Olympics planned for 2034 are now the Utah Games after organizers announced a new logo and name to reflect the multi-community work that goes into hosting the largest winter sports event on Earth. The state’s Governor, Spencer Cox, says the new logo has united people—though not in a good way. “It’s really brought people together because everyone seems to not like it,” Cox said at a recent press conference. The new logo is temporary until the final emblem of the Games is released in 2029. It spells out “Utah” in irregularly shaped characters (does that say “IJTAH?”) that are stacked on top of “2034.” Its launch color palette is just black and…

Accessibility used to mean compliance. An installed grab bar, an added ramp, a resized font. But meeting physical standards is only half the challenge. The other half, the part that truly changes lives, is how design makes people feel. That’s where emotional accessibility comes in. It’s what Michael Graves taught us to do 40 years ago. We believe it is the next frontier of design: creating experiences that don’t just accommodate users but also affirm, reassure, and delight them. When we talk about accessibility, we’re really talking about belonging. And belonging is emotional. A product can meet every ergonomic and ADA guideline yet still make someone feel exclu…

On November 14, hotel and short-term apartment rental chain Sonder Holdings filed for bankruptcy, just days after suddenly announcing it would be “winding down operations immediately,” abruptly kicking guests to the curb and sending employees scrambling for answers. The company had faced major, unforeseen costs from a deal signed in August 2024 to integrate reservation systems with Marriott International and promote Sonder listings through the hotel giant, according to a statement issued four days earlier. Sonder had long been an outlier in the short-term rental space, which was a big part of its appeal to investors. Most of its competitors—short-term rental companies…

In case you haven’t been deluged with enough day-themed holiday shopping sales yet, the travel industry will try to tempt you with some seemingly tantalizing travel offers on December 2, aka Travel Tuesday, traditionally the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving. But whether the travel deals are actually steals may require you to do some research in advance and read the fine print so you don’t face some unexpected fees once you’re on vacation. If you regularly book through a specific travel provider and have a sense of what you normally pay, that will help you to better suss out whether you’re actually saving money. Knowing what a specific trip or ticket would normall…

For the past decade, quantum computing has struggled to balance promise and practicality. While the world’s most advanced systems remain engineering marvels, they’re bedeviled by the same flaw: the fragility of qubits—the fundamental units of quantum data—and the delicate hardware required to control them. A single fluctuation, for example, can collapse a quantum state, invalidating a computation. Most quantum systems also depend on large-scale refrigeration colder than deep space, with cryogenic racks that often occupy multiple rooms. Scaling quantum systems demands exponential increases in cost, energy, and environmental stability. So while the U.N. has designated 2…

Inside a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology late last year, scientists gave an AI system a new task: designing entirely new molecules for potential antibiotics from scratch. Within a day or two—following a few months of training—the algorithms had generated more than 29 million new molecules, unlike any that existed before. Traditional drug discovery is a slow, painstaking process. But AI is beginning to transform it. At MIT, the research is aimed at the growing challenge of antibiotic-resistant infections, which kill more than a million people globally each year. Existing antibiotics haven’t kept up with the threat. “The number of resistant bacteria…

Apparently any place looks better if you just say it’s Japan. That’s according to a TikTok trend, dubbed the “Japan effect.” First reported in Casey Lewis’s youth trends newsletter After School, the trend has users making slideshows of two images. For all intents and purposes they are the same, except one is labelled with the original location and the second is labelled Tokyo, Japan. The idea being that the “Japan effect” is so strong, just the location tag can filter how we perceive an ordinary street or an average American neighborhood. Scrolling through the comments, those watching these TikTok videos genuinely believe the second image looks better than the f…

Panera Bread is spending millions to overhaul its menu in an attempt to lure back the customers it’s lost in recent years. In a downward fast-food spiral, Panera hasn’t significantly increased its revenue since 2023. Now, the company says it’s putting money back into better ingredients, staff, and its cafés. The St. Louis-based chain, known for its sandwiches, soups, and salads, hasn’t been delivering on its signatures. Panera last year started using the cheaper iceberg lettuce in its salads, for example, and customers weren’t happy. “You know what guests told us?” said Paul Carbone, CEO of Panera Brands, the parent company of Panera Bread, Einstein Bros. Bagels,…

AI image generators used to be terrible at handling text. Even once the models mastered hands with five fingers, the presence of mangled, nonsensical, vaguely Cyrillic-looking text was a dead giveaway that an image was generated by AI. Not anymore. Today’s most advanced image generators have slowly improved their text generation. OpenAI’s image generator within ChatGPT handles basic text tasks fairly well. And design-centered models like Ideogram are great for simple, practical text tasks like creating video thumbnails. This week, though, Google has released Nano Banana Pro, an updated version of its wildly popular AI image editing tool. Nano Banana P…

Below, Tim Elmore shares five key insights from his new book, The Future Begins with Z: Nine Strategies to Lead Generation Z as They Disrupt the Workplace. Elmore is the founder and CEO of Growing Leaders, a nonprofit dedicated to developing emerging leaders. As a speaker and coach, he has helped organizations from universities to Fortune 500 companies connect more effectively across generations. What’s the big idea? Many leaders are scratching their heads over Gen Z. The old playbook doesn’t work anymore—but figuring out how to engage and collaborate with this generation is what turns good leaders into great ones. Listen to the audio version of this Book B…

Many of us have heard of “boomerang employees”—someone who leaves a company and later returns—but there’s a newer version showing up in the workplace: the layoff boomerang. Maybe you’ve seen it yourself. A coworker disappears after a round of cuts, only to show up again a few months later. Same desk. Same job. Sometimes even a bigger paycheck. According to research done by Dr. Andrea Derler at workforce analytics firm Visier, 5.3% of laid-off employees now get rehired by the same organization after a layoff. But the most surprising part isn’t the number—it’s that it’s been happening for years. We just didn’t know. “What surprised me the most was that …

It’s almost the end of the year, and for many, that means health flexible spending account (FSA) funds are set to expire. FSAs allow employees to set aside pretax money to pay for healthcare expenses such as copays, some medications, and deductibles. But many people aren’t aware that the funds don’t always roll over into the next calendar year after December 31. Sometimes, employers will provide grace periods of up to two and a half months past the end of the year to allow for extra time to use your FSA funds. Others may allow you to carry over up to $660 per year. But 33% of employers have a hard deadline, so if you don’t use your funds by the end of the year, they’r…

One of the most pervasive rules of business is compete-to-win or perish. But as more organizations struggle to navigate an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous landscape, some innovative leaders are choosing to collaborate over compete. This is particularly necessary within the organization, where collaboration may be considered beneficial in theory, but in practice, the rules of engagement still revolve around competition: colleagues become rivals over promotion opportunities, recognition, and advancement. The competition within the organization makes it harder to navigate the disruption and certainty on the outside. How do leaders banish in-h…

The narrative is familiar: Revolutionary technology arrives, promising to liberate women from domestic drudgery and professional constraints. The electric oven would free housewives from coal-burning stoves. The washing machine would eliminate laundry day. The microwave would make meal preparation effortless. Yet as historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan argued in her landmark book, More Work for Mother, these innovations didn’t reduce women’s workload. They simply shifted expectations, creating new standards of cleanliness and convenience that often meant more work, not less. So when we speak of AI as the solution to professional and personal burdens, skepticism is warranted.…

If my three-decade journey in the corporate world has taught me anything, it’s that in business, as in life, the only certainty is uncertainty. In the past 20 years, periods of upheaval, from pandemics to financial crises to AI hysteria, have restitched the fabric of how we work, travel, and communicate. While this uncertainty can generate tension and turmoil, it also forges the best leaders. I’ve seen bosses and colleagues navigate all types of volatility, where the margin between success and failure can come down to a single action or inaction. So, what distinguishes leaders who can successfully shepherd teams through uncertain times from those who can’t? I beli…

Oxford Dictionary just revealed its official word of 2025. It’s “rage bait.” According to an official announcement post, Oxford Dictionary’s team of lexicographers choose a shortlist of potential words each year by analyzing data and trends to “identify new and emerging words and expressions, which our lexicographers think of as a ‘single unit’, and examine the shifts in how more established language is being used.” This year’s final contenders were “aura farming,” “biohack,” and “rage bait.” In the end, 30,000 members of the public voted for their top choices, and Oxford chose rage bait as the winner. Per the Oxford Dictionary’s editors, rage bait is defined …

New York City is poised to get its first Vegas-style casinos, including one next to the home stadium of baseball’s New York Mets and another that could see a windfall for President Donald The President. They were among three casino proposals approved for lucrative gambling licenses on Monday by a key state panel. No casinos will end up coming to Manhattan, however, as several other competing proposals were already scrapped, including one in the heart of Times Square. The state Gaming Commission is expected to formally issue the licenses before the end of the year, as the gambling revenues are already factored into the state budget. Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul sai…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While national active inventory is still up year-over-year, the pace of growth has slowed since summer as some home sellers have thrown in the towel and delisted their properties. Indeed, according to Redfin, U.S. delistings as a share of inventory recently ticked up to 5.5%—a decade-high reading for this time of year. Looking ahead, in markets seeing the biggest jumps in delistings right now, many of those listings will likely return to the resale market in spring 2026—or test out the rental market. Without a corresponding increase in housing demand…

Cat Murphy, a college student, has wanted to be a journalist since she was 11. Many of her friends don’t understand why. When they engage with the news — if they do — they hear a cacophony of voices. They don’t know who to believe. Reporters are biased. They make mistakes. Besides, why would you hitch your future to a dying industry? “There is a lot of commentary — ‘Oh, good for you. Look what you’re walking into. You’re going to be screaming into the void. You’re going to be useless,’” said Murphy, a 21-year-old graduate student at the University of Maryland’s journalism school. She is undeterred. And it’s also why she’s not surprised by the findings of a stu…

Melania The President on Monday unveiled the holiday decorations for her family’s first Christmas back at the White House and her theme is “Home Is Where the Heart Is.” The decor also nods to next year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and founding of the United States of America. Several dozen volunteer decorators from across the country helped deck the halls of the Executive Mansion with 75 wreaths, 51 Christmas trees, more than 700 feet (213 meters) of garland, more than 2,000 strands of lights, over 25,000 feet (7,620 meters) of ribbon, over 2,800 gold stars, more than 10,000 butterflies and 120 pounds (54 kilograms)…