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The gravy train is picking up steam again at Hardee’s. The Southern-inspired fast food chain has been quietly reopening locations across the Southeast after an explosive legal battle with a franchisee had led to dozens of store closures late last year. Newly reopened Hardee’s restaurants in at least three states—Georgia, South Carolina, and Missouri—are being described in job listings as “now corporate owned,” according to recent ads posted on Indeed.com and SimplyHired. They share addresses with Hardee’s restaurants formerly operated by franchisee ARC Burger, whose 77 locations shuttered in December 2025. Some of the listings are marked as “urgent.” …

Issa Rae is a Hollywood success story. Her web series The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl launched her career in the early 2010s, leading to her HBO series Insecure and now her production company Hoorae Media. Through all her projects, Rae has been praised for her authentic portrayal of Black women’s lives—but at a recent panel, Rae said that the entertainment industry is no longer interested in celebrating diversity. Shifting tides in the film industry While speaking at TheWrap’s Creators x Hollywood Summit last Wednesday, April 8, Rae pointed out a troubling trend she’s seeing on the production side of Hollywood. “I’m seeing it. Just blatantly. Peopl…

Many tech observers initially believed the software engineers would become scarce in the face of AI. But that hasn’t turned out to be the case—in part due to the power of human ingenuity. “Software engineers are spending less time coding,” says Aneesh Raman, the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, who just published the book Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI. “But now they’re getting to build things in a way they couldn’t before. They’re going into conversations with clients and customers. Or they’re thinking about the ethical implications of what they build.” In their book, Raman and his co-author—LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky—argue that …

When I got the email, I was certain I was going to be murdered. Sent through an obscure contact form on my website, the message said that Jason Alexander had read an article I wrote for FastCompany, and wanted to interview me for his podcast. All I had to do was show up at a nondescript building next to Warner Brothers Studios, come around the back, and enter through an unmarked basement door. “Yeah, right” I thought. “George from Seinfeld wants to talk to me about AI? Scammers sure have gotten creative!” Still, I couldn’t entirely write off the message. Jason Alexander does indeed have a podcast. And a quick check with Gemini showed that the person wh…

There is a persistent belief that food, fuel, and industrial uses compete for the same bushel. In practice, the opposite is increasingly true. Crops have always served multiple markets. What is changing is how intentionally we are designing agricultural and manufacturing systems to serve those markets together. In a previous article I wrote, I focused on how familiar crops like corn and soybeans are finding new life through new demand pathways and molecular innovation. What I see today goes a step further. The same acre is increasingly supporting food, industrial materials, energy applications, and emissions-reduction strategies simultaneously. That convergence is…

During his commencement address at Dartmouth College in 2024, Roger Federer cited a statistic that people rarely associated with his success. In the 1,526 singles matches he played in his career, while he won almost 80% of the time, he only won 54% of the points he played. He told the audience, “To succeed, you must become a master at overcoming hard moments. To me, that is the sign of a champion.” His speech attracted millions of views because it was unusual for a champion to reveal the wrinkles beneath such a successful career. But I suspect that was the point Roger was trying to make. No successful sporting star, politician, CEO, or community activist is immune to …

When Palantir CEO Alex Karp called for a suite of new recruitment programs to spot raw young talent and prioritize aptitude over experience, the team moved quickly. Within a week, the idea became an actual fellowship. “We did a speed run from April to June,” says Jordan Hirsch, a senior counselor at the defense tech contractor. “We designed the curriculum, recruited faculty, reviewed applications, brought on the fellows, and arranged housing.” The inaugural four-month Meritocracy Fellowship drew over 500 applicants for 22 salaried spots. Fellows completed intensive training, used Palantir’s software, and worked alongside full-time employees, and undertook a four-…

Entrepreneurship has always required resilience—nearly half of new businesses don’t make it past five years. But today, the nature of running a business is shifting. It’s no longer just about how hard the work is—it’s about how constant it feels. I see this tension every day from the conversations I have with entrepreneurs from around the world. For many business owners, the mental load of running a business often overwhelms the joy of building it. For the modern small business owner, financial pressure is no longer a seasonal wave. It’s a steady, background hum of rising costs and economic volatility. New research into the “emotional tax” of running a small business …

When you think of an operating system, you probably think of interfaces to open, workflows to follow, screens to move through. Work has always lived inside those boundaries. At Anthropic, that logic is starting to break. The company is reorganizing itself around a simple, destabilizing premise: work no longer needs a fixed system to run through. Anthropic says employees now rely on Claude, its flagship AI model, along with its products Code and Cowork, for most of their day-to-day work. The model is starting to function as an “internal operating system.” What once required navigating multiple systems, stitching together data, and coordinating across teams now begins w…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. CEOs, do you know what the public is saying about AI? New polling shared exclusively with Modern CEO by Just Capital, the nonprofit that tracks what the American public expects from business, finds that 66% expect AI will be a net positive for society within the next five years. That’s…

Chipotle, like almost every other fast casual restaurant, has been battling an ongoing period of increased inflation and lower consumer spending. Last year, the company saw what its CEO Scott Boatwright described to investors as a “broad-based pullback in frequency” of customer visits, especially among low- to middle-income customers and younger consumers, due to concerns about the economy. But the burrito chain has a master plan to address that, and it’s currently moving into its next phase: making earning rewards feel more like a game. The company’s fourth quarter report showed a revenue increase of 5.4% to $11.9 billion. But those gains were partially offset by a 1…

With layoffs still dominating headlines, many job seekers assume the biggest challenge in today’s market is competition. But new research suggests another obstacle may be quietly draining applicants’ time and emotional energy: job postings that may not actually be hiring. Recent analysis of more than 175,000 job listings across industries found that roughly one in seven postings remain active for more than 30 days, even when companies may no longer be accepting candidates. Some listings remain online for months, continuing to collect applications long after hiring decisions have effectively been made. These roles are often referred to as “ghost jobs.” For job seek…

Roblox is updating its child protection features again, rolling out restricted Kids accounts for users ages 5 through 8 and Roblox Select accounts for users 9 through 15, both with parental controls and other age-based restrictions. Users will be required to go through an age verification process, generally based on live selfies or a government-issued ID—or be effectively restricted to content approved for the youngest users. Since January, age verification has also been required to use the platform’s chat features, with users under 18 generally restricted to chatting people relatively near to them in age. “We’ll be going through a transition period where we’ll…

Entrepreneurship is improperly branded. From the outside, it appears like autonomy, upside, and ambition realized. From the inside, it too often feels like anxiety, uncertainty, and sleepless nights. I’ve spent my career building behavior-changing services in small business finance and mental healthcare, including the design of agentic AI products to make mental health support available to, and effective for, millions. What I learned in that role surprised me. The very same patterns that drive anxiety and burnout in individuals show up inside small businesses, especially for founders and leaders who are responsible for every decision, every dollar, the livelihood of e…

We have a story we tell ourselves about productivity tools. The story goes like this: The more efficient we become, the more time we free up, and the more we can relax. We’ve been telling this story since the dishwasher. We’ve never once been right. Every tool that has made us more capable has raised the ceiling on what’s possible—and in doing so, has raised the floor on what feels acceptable. We don’t use reclaimed time to rest. We use it to produce more. And with each new capability, the gap between what we’re doing and what we theoretically could be doing gets wider, louder, and harder to ignore. The result is a feedback loop between productivity and anxiety th…

My father has a PhD in mechanical social engineering and, among many things, designed cooling systems for nuclear reactors. From him, I inherited a restless curiosity about how the world works and a deep respect for the laws of science. Over the years, I’ve found that many of the principles governing physical objects translate perfectly to business. Take Newton’s first law of motion. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and objects in motion stay in motion—at least in a vacuum. What’s true in physics is true for companies. Those that stall are destined to fall behind. But the businesses that remain in constant motion? They succeed. In the agentic AI era, data is …

For years, premium credit cards competed on points, perks, and airport lounge access. Now, the battleground is shifting toward something less tangible but arguably more powerful: experiences. Chase Sapphire Reserve is leaning further into that strategy with its latest offering, a one-night-only “Dinner at the Opry with Ella Langley,” which will bring cardmembers directly onto the stage of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry on May 31. Timed to the release of Langley’s sophomore album, Dandelion, the event blends live music, dining, and behind-the-scenes access in a way that reflects how the brand is trying to position itself at the center of culture. The event is part…

Mental healthcare has traditionally been based on a single relationship: patient and provider, one hour at a time on a weekly basis. The major flaw with that model is that mental health conditions rarely stay in their lane, something we commonly see at Equip. Depression intersects with chronic illness. OCD co-occurs with eating disorders. One provider, no matter how skilled they are, can only hold so much. This has to change. The evidence increasingly points toward team-based care as the model that actually moves the needle for how we can deliver mental health treatment. Integrated, multidisciplinary teams sharing information, aligning on treatment goals, and …

Madonna announced her new album Confessions on a Dance Floor II with sans-serif typography from the same creative agency behind Charli XCX’s brat. On wheat paste posters and short-form video posted to social media, Madonna teased her forthcoming album, out July 3, and its first song, “I Feel So Free,” in words. “Madonna Confessions II” is written on the album cover in Helvetica, a workhorse sans-serif font that’s one of the most popular fonts in the world because its minimalist form looks simple and perpetually modern. Typography was used throughout Madonna’s announcement to spell out “Confessions II,” “COADF 2,” and other promotional copy in all-caps, sans-serif …