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China likes to condemn the United States for extending its arm too far outside of its borders to make demands on non-American companies. But when it sought to hit back at the U.S. interests this month, Beijing did exactly the same. In expanding export rules on rare earths, Beijing for the first time announced it will require foreign firms to obtain approval from the Chinese government to export magnets containing even tiny amounts of China-originated rare earth materials or produced with Chinese technology. That means a South Korean smartphone maker must ask for Beijing’s permission to sell the devices to Australia if the phones contain China-originated rare earth mater…

How do modernist transportation planners recommend handling congestion? By recommending new vehicle lanes. What happens when you build new vehicle lanes to handle traffic congestion? The vehicle lanes fill up with more traffic congestion. As they themselves have said for decades, you cannot build your way out of congestion. But every week you can do a quick internet search to see a bunch of new attempts. ‘Induced demand’ I’ve been hearing planners and engineers say “we can’t build our way out of congestion” since the 1990s, when I began my career. The wonky term that describes why adding more lanes doesn’t eliminate congestion is “induced demand.” Transportation p…

On September 30, OpenAI launched its new Sora social network, powered by its Sora 2 video generation model. To call Sora’s launch successful is a gross understatement. Despite “invite only” access and restrictions outside North America, Sora exploded to over 1 million users in only five days. That’s faster than ChatGPT’s user base grew after its own record-setting launch. Sora is a vertical video app, aping the interface and user experience (short clips, vertical swiping to select a new video, Likes and Shares) of every other app in its category. Except with Sora, there’s a key difference–every video on the app is explicitly and joyfully fake. I resorted …

China’s economy expanded at the slowest annual pace in a year in July-September, growing 4.8%, weighed down by trade tensions with the United States and slack domestic demand. The July-September data was the weakest pace of growth since the third quarter of 2024, and compares with a 5.2% pace of growth in the previous quarter, the government said in a report Monday. In January-September, the world’s second largest economy grew at a 5.2% annual pace. Despite U.S. President Donald The President’s higher tariffs on imports from China, its exports have remained relatively strong as companies expanded sales to other world markets. China’s exports to the United States fell 2…

President Donald The President said Sunday that the United States could purchase Argentinian beef in an attempt to bring down prices for American consumers. “We would buy some beef from Argentina,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One during a flight from Florida to Washington. “If we do that, that will bring our beef prices down.” The President promised earlier this week to address the issue as part of his efforts to keep inflation in check. U.S. beef prices have been stubbornly high for a variety of reasons, including drought and reduced imports from Mexico due to a flesh-eating pest in cattle herds there. The President has been working to help Argentina bolster i…

A popular frozen food producer has recalled nearly 92,000 pounds of breakfast burrito and breakfast wrap products that contain eggs due to a risk of contamination with Listeria monocytogenes. The ready-to-eat burritos and wraps were recalled after the producer, M.C.I. Foods, discovered a positive Listeria result while doing routine testing on scrambled eggs from external suppliers, according to a recall notice posted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). The recall impacts multiple brands supplied by M.C.I. Foods, including some that contain branding from the popular Minions animated franchise. The California-base…

On a recent weekday in Aspen, Colorado, Stu Landesberg stood with a group of firefighters on a mountainside and watched a drone take off and fly toward a simulated fire. The drone detected the “hotspot”—a pile of ice, since wildfire risk was too high that day for real flames—and then aimed and blasted it with fire suppressant. The test flight was one of thousands that Landesberg’s startup, Seneca, has run while operating in stealth mode over the last several months. The company officially launched today, announcing that it has raised $60 million. It aims to reshape wildfire response—and help protect wildfire-prone communities in a way that hasn’t been possible until n…

French luxury goods company Kering said Sunday it is selling its beauty division to L’Oreal for 4 billion euros ($4.66 billion). Under the agreement, Clichy, France-based L’Oreal will acquire the House of Creed high-end fragrance company as well as licenses to create beauty and fragrance products for Kering brands like Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga. The companies said they will establish a strategic committee to ensure coordination between Kering brands and L’Oréal. Kering and L’Oréal said they are also exploring joint business opportunities in the wellness and longevity market, combining L’Oreal’s innovation with Kering’s deep understanding of luxury clients. T…

U.K. banks and government tech systems going down. University students in Australia struggling to complete their coursework. Homes across Europe losing access to their Ring doorbells. While you were sleeping, large parts of the Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based internet went offline around the world. According to the AWS outage monitor, the problem stemmed from a misconfiguration of Domain Name System (DNS) resolution within the company’s cloud infrastructure. The problem was remedied within three hours of being encountered—by people unable to log onto Roblox or search the web with Perplexity. But the outage highlights just how much the web’s day-to-day function…

Americans are growing increasingly concerned about their ability to find a good job under President Donald The President, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds, in what is a potential warning sign for Republicans as a promised economic boom has given way to hiring freezes and elevated inflation. High prices for groceries, housing and health care persist as a fear for many households, while rising electricity bills and the cost of gas at the pump are also sources of anxiety, according to the survey. Some 47% of U.S. adults are “not very” or “not at all confident” they could find a good job if they wanted to, an increase from 37% when the …

One of the stocks with the highest surges in premarket trading this morning is Beyond Meat, Inc. (Nasdaq: BYND). As of the time of this writing, shares in BYND are up a staggering 67% before the opening bell. But what’s driving this surge? Here’s what you need to know. Beyond Meat’s recent struggles Today’s premarket stock price jump follows a significant rally on Friday for Beyond Meat, the California-based producer of plant-based meat alternatives, whose shares closed up more than 24% to end the trading week at 64 cents per share, according to data from Yahoo Finance. The stock price surge, which is now in its second trading day, may come as a surprise t…

The week is not off to a great start for much of the internet. In the early hours of the morning Pacific time, internet users around the world began experiencing issues with accessing various apps, websites, and platforms. Shortly after, a culprit emerged: Amazon Web Services (AWS)—or, more specifically, an outage at Amazon’s cloud computing platform. Here’s what you need to know about the AWS outage and what websites are affected. What’s happened? At around midnight Pacific time, internet users around the globe began experiencing issues accessing high-trafficked parts of the internet. Websites like Reddit, services like Lyft, and even apps from resta…

Over the past few years, business leaders have lived through a masterclass in volatility. A global pandemic, supply chain breakdowns, surging cyberattacks, economic whiplash, and now the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence have reshaped markets in unpredictable ways. For many executives, resilience once meant little more than business continuity planning: extra servers, backup systems, and insurance policies. But the world we lead in today demands more. Resilience is no longer just about defense—it’s about growth. The organizations that thrive amid disruption are not those with the strongest walls, but those with the most flexible foundations. They are a…

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. Gregg Renfrew is back. Four years after the entrepreneur sold her clean skincare and cosmetics brand Beautycounter to The Carlyle Group in a deal valued at $1 billion—and more than a year after she and the private equity firm shut down the company amid falling sales—Renfrew today is officially laun…

The difference between OpenAI and Anthropic has never been clearer. OpenAI is constantly in the news with a new consumer app or feature, and is being billed as the next great consumer tech platform. Most recently it made news by offering a social network around its Sora image generator, and even says it plans to allow NSFW content on ChatGPT. Anthropic, meanwhile, has chosen a different path. The company stresses that because it gets most of its revenues from businesses and developers, it’s not trying to capture the mass market, and it’s not terribly concerned about how long users spend on its platform every day. “We are interested in our consumer users to the degree…

Layoffs might make headlines, but the real measure is how leaders support the remaining employees. Layoffs are undeniably challenging for good reason. However, it’s what leaders do in the aftermath that determines whether a culture fractures or recovers. I’ve led workforce complex reductions at Amazon, Microsoft, startups, and PE-backed firms. While every situation was unique, the same pattern appeared each time. It wasn’t necessarily the layoff that broke the culture. It was the leadership response. Layoffs disrupt the culture and impact more than just headcount. I’ve watched talented, engaged employees turn quiet and withdrawn after layoffs. Not because they sto…

OpenAI has announced that starting in December, ChatGPT will allow the generation of erotic content for verified adult users. At the same time, Elon Musk’s xAI has launched Grok Imagine, an image-generation system that already includes an NSFW mode for producing explicit imagery. None of this should surprise anyone. Desire, fantasy, and pornography have always been powerful engines of technological adoption. Photography, video, the internet, and even online payments all grew, in part, because of it. The interesting question is not about sex: it’s about what these decisions reveal about the kind of humanity Big Tech companies are shaping. Desire as a managed serv…

A new music startup created an instrument that can turn your microwave, electric toothbrush, and baby monitor into hauntingly beautiful music. Its branding converts all of those fascinating outputs into an infinite series of Victorian-inspired patterns. Eternal Research is a brand founded by musician Alexandra Fierra, and it’s dedicated to “unlocking the existing music hidden in everyday things,” per its website. The company’s debut product is called the Demon Box. This fully analog device uses an intricate array of sensors to detect the electro-magnetic fields (EMFs) of almost any electronic device around it, and then turns those EMFs into music. The brand hit its fu…

When samurai warriors went into battle in 16th century Japan, their swords included a piece of hidden art. Within the tsuba, the hand guard at the bottom of the blade, metal smiths carefully crafted beautiful and complex designs, including flowers, animals, and landscapes. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has one of the largest collections of Japanese art in the United States in its permanent collection, including hundreds of tsubas. It has just collaborated with the fine jewelry designer Monica Rich Kosann to create a collection of necklaces inspired by three tsuba designs—a crane, a turtle, and a butterfly—to introduce these ancient works of art back into the m…

People are fascinated with leadership, and rightly so. After all, most of the “big things” that happen in the world (both good and bad) can be directly traced to decisions, behaviors, or choices of those who are in charge: presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, executives, and anyone tasked with turning a group of people into a high-performing unit, coordinating human activity, and shaping the impact institutions have on society, all the way down to individuals. In line, scientific research shows that up to 40% of the variability in team and organizational performance can be accounted for by the leader—in other words, who we put in charge, or who emerges as leaders, drast…

In 1998, five kids met in a cafe in Belgrade. Still in their 20s, they were, to all outward appearances, nothing special. They weren’t rich, or powerful; they didn’t hold important positions or have access to significant resources. Nevertheless, that day, they conceived a plan to overthrow their country’s brutal Milošević regime. The next day, six friends joined them and they became the 11 founders of the activist group Otpor. A year later, Otpor numbered a few hundred members and it seemed that Milošević would be the dictator for life. A year after that, Otpor had grown to 70,000 and the Bulldozer Revolution brought down the once-unshakable dictator. That’s how …

The job market is rough. So when candidates are landing interviews, they’re often cramming every skill, accomplishment, and experience they can muster into the interview process, hoping to edge out the competition. Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong. Hiring managers often tune out in such cases, causing the rapid-fire qualifications to backfire. It’s what Marc Cendella, CEO of career platform Ladders, calls “answer inflation.” Answer inflation is when experienced professionals respond to interview questions with lengthy résumé recitations and meandering stories that bury their actual value, he explains. Take the classic: “Tell me about yourself.” It’s the quest…

Police are getting a boost from artificial intelligence, with algorithms now able to draft police reports in minutes. The technology promises to make police reports more accurate and comprehensive, as well as save officers time. The idea is simple: Take the audio transcript from a body camera worn by a police officer and use the predictive text capabilities of large language models to write a formal police report that could become the basis of a criminal prosecution. Mirroring other fields that have allowed ChatGPT-like systems to write on behalf of people, police can now get an AI assist to automate much dreaded paperwork. The catch is that instead of writing the…

The one practical career security no one can take from you is control. I’ve built my career on five core mindsets that helped me transition to being responsible for my own career success. It’s how I run my professional life. Careers are not just built. They’re owned. That’s how you become indispensable. Your career isn’t a ladder. It’s a business. And you are in charge. Most people treat it like a job. I treat it like an asset. Every skill, every project, every task matters. If you want leverage, freedom, and a career that works for you, these mindsets can help you take your career to another level. They can determine your choices, growth, and freedom. And change how you …

“The gyoza needs to look a little whiter. It’s too pink.” Nigel Ng is genially micromanaging the look and feel of Fried, an animated series that will premiere on YouTube later this year. His feedback comes during an early planning session at Toonstar, the company producing the show, which is headquartered in a former furniture warehouse in downtown L.A.’s arts district. Ng has every right to be fussy about Fried’s world. The show represents the cartoon debut of Uncle Roger, the volatile middle-aged Chinese guy he has portrayed in live-action YouTube videos since 2020. They famously depict the character growing agitated as he watches western chefs—such as Gordon Ramsay, …