What's on Your Mind?

Do your office, inbox, and calendar feel like a ghost town on Friday afternoons? You’re not alone. I’m a labor economist who studies how technology and organizational change affect productivity and well-being. In a study published in an August 2025 working paper, I found that the way people allocate their time to work has changed profoundly since the COVID-19 pandemic began. For example, among professionals in occupations that can be done remotely, 35% to 40% worked remotely on Thursdays and Fridays in 2024, compared with only 15% in 2019. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, nearly 30% worked remotely, versus 10% to 15% five years earlier. And white-collar e…

Once upon a time, the big idea was simple—work from anywhere! Thanks to technological advances, you didn’t need to be tethered to your office desk to collaborate with coworkers (or swap memes with them). As long as you had your laptop and good Wi-Fi you could be by the pool on a tropical island, drink in hand, and a magnificent sunset in the background. Forward-thinking companies would recognize that talent could be found in the most unexpected places. Employees get to mix and match their work with the life they love. Governments would enable this with offers of special digital nomad visas. The whole world would become one big, friendly workplace. Hold that though…

Former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg launched Meeno less than two years ago with the intention of it being an AI chatbot that helped users through relationship issues. Now, the company is pivoting to focus on teaching predominantly male users how to connect romantically with women through interactions with voice-based AI characters. “[Male loneliness] is a problem that’s been getting worse for 30 years,” Nyborg tells Fast Company. “I never thought that this was something we could just go and snap our fingers and [fix].” The first iteration of Meeno, Nyborg says, allowed the company to prove that it could build something that appealed to men. She says the original platf…

Less than 24 hours after the horrifying shooting of woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, merchandise related to the slain U.S. citizen is already proliferating on e-commerce shopping sites, including on Amazon and Etsy. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On Wednesday, a woman was fatally shot by an ICE officer near a raid that federal officials were conducting. The woman was identified by authorities as Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen. As CNN reports, multiple videos taken by bystanders on the scene show ICE agents confronting the car that Good was driving, which was parked s…

Less than 24 hours after the horrifying shooting of a woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis, merchandise related to the slain U.S. citizen is already proliferating on e-commerce shopping sites, including on Amazon and Etsy. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On Wednesday, a woman was fatally shot by an ICE officer near a raid that federal officials were conducting. The woman was identified by authorities as Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen. As CNN reports, multiple videos taken by bystanders on the scene show ICE agents confronting the car that Good was driving, which was parked sideways o…

Most climate reports are bleak. Temperatures are soaring. Sea levels are rising. Companies are missing—or abandoning—their emissions targets. But a new report from the nonprofit Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit looks at the surprising amount of progress that’s happened since the Paris climate agreement 10 years ago. Renewable energy has grown faster than every major forecast predicted in 2015. There’s now four times as much solar power as the International Energy Agency expected 10 years ago. Last year alone, the world installed 553 gigawatts of solar power—roughly as much as 100 million U.S. homes use—which is 1,500% more than the IEA had projected. Investo…

Many companies are acutely aware that a notable portion of their workers are struggling with burnout. The data makes that much clear: A Mercer report from last year found that 82% of workers said they were at risk of burnout. In another study conducted by the National Alliance on Mental Illness and Ipsos, over half of the workers surveyed said they had experienced burnout because of their job in 2023. Even so, it seems that employers may be underestimating just how widespread burnout really is among the workforce. A new report by the online marketplace Care.com indicates that while the vast majority of companies surveyed—84%—know that burnout can noticeably impact ret…

It’s safe to say that worker happiness and well-being is shaky at best. In 2024, just about half of all American employees reported feeling very satisfied with their jobs, and only about a third were happy with their pay or opportunities for promotion. Younger employees seem particularly frustrated by their working conditions: The latest edition of Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found that just 34% of workers said they were thriving, with a marked drop from 35% to 31% among those under the age of 35. While this sentiment persists across the American workforce, a new report from the Pew Research Center indicates that blue-collar workers are perhaps the m…

Even as paid family leave has stalled at the federal level, a growing number of states have taken up the issue in recent years. Thirteen states and Washington, D.C., have now passed legislation that makes paid leave mandatory, while a handful of other states have also introduced voluntary systems that leave it to private insurance companies and employers to opt into the benefit. Despite those legislative wins, however, a new report by the nonprofit Moms First and McKinsey indicates that many eligible workers in states with mandatory paid leave are not taking advantage of their access to the benefit. The analysis focused on the paid-leave programs in New York, New Jers…

Less than a year after Rite Aid finally wrapped up its first bankruptcy proceedings, it’s now reportedly planning to file for Chapter 11 protection a second time. Based on a new report from Bloomberg, Rite Aid employees received a letter today from CEO Matthew Schroeder stating that the company’s negotiations with lenders for more capital have failed. He went on to explain that the pharmacy chain can no longer sustain itself and intends to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Per the letter, the company will start by cutting jobs at its corporate offices in Pennsylvania, a move Schroeder attributed to “the dramatic downturn in the economy.” An apparent copy of the lett…

In recent years, pay transparency has grown increasingly common as many states have passed legislation to help arm workers with more data as they enter into salary negotiations. Across 14 states and many more localities, employers are now required to either provide explicit salary ranges in job postings or share that information during the hiring process. That means some of the biggest employers in the country now have to disclose compensation data in states like California and New York. But according to a new report from compensation platform Beqom, despite all this progress, many workers still feel like pay transparency isn’t within reach and that they have little i…

Charles Suppon has big plans for the Tunkhannock Area School District. At any given time, the northeastern Pennsylvania district’s chief operating officer can rattle off statistics about fields in which its schools excel: arts, AP classes and softball, as well as on-the-job training programs for future farmers, welders and more. Goats and chickens roam the high school’s courtyards, where students also tend to koi fish; in the hallways just beyond, high schoolers tinker with tractors, build furniture to sell and offer free tax services for the broader community. But Suppon speaks with vigor when he talks about the five-megawatt system he hopes to install across fi…

Two prominent Republicans on Capitol Hill want the Supreme Court to allow a lawsuit to proceed against tech giant Cisco over allegations that the company’s technology was used to persecute members of the Falun Gong religious sect in China. In a Wednesday letter to the The President administration’s top Supreme Court litigator, D. John Sauer, Reps. Chris Smith of New Jersey and John Moolenaar of Michigan urged the administration to side with the Falun Gong plaintiffs and press the court to allow the lawsuit to go to trial. Smith co-chairs the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, while Moolenaar is the chairman of a special China committee set up in the Hous…

If you’re constantly hounding your teen to get out of bed before noon on the weekend, you may want to save your energy for a different battle. According to new research published in The Journal of Affective Disorders, sleeping in on the weekend could offer some significant protection against depression. For the study, researchers at the University of Oregon and the State University of New York Upstate Medical University analyzed data from more than a thousand 16 to 24-year-olds in which participants reported their sleep/waking hours, including weekend catch-up sleep. While one might imagine that teens who spring out of bed early each morning — regardless of the …

Feeling burned out? It could be costing your company millions of dollars each year in lost productivity and employee turnover. A new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimates that employee burnout in the U.S. costs somewhere between $4,000 and $21,000 per worker per year. Do the numbers, and that adds up to about $5 million per year for a company with 1,000 employees. (Another way to look at it: Employee disengagement, or burnout, can cost 0.2 to 2.9 times the average cost of health insurance, and 3.3 to 17.1 times the cost of training per employee.) The research is based on a computational simulation model developed by the Public Health Infor…

A colossal squid has been caught on camera for the first time in the deep sea by an international team of researchers steering a remotely operated submersible. The sighting was announced Tuesday by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. The squid filmed was a juvenile about 1 foot (30 centimeters) in length at a depth of 1,968 feet (600 meters) in the South Atlantic Ocean. Full-grown adult colossal squids, which scientists have uncovered from the bellies of whales and seabirds, can reach lengths up to 23 feet (7 meters) — almost the size of a small fire truck. The squid was spied last month near the South Sandwich Islands during an expedition to search for new sea life.…

What if there were a battery that could release energy while trapping carbon dioxide? This isn’t science fiction; it’s the promise of lithium-carbon dioxide (Li-CO₂) batteries, which are currently a hot research topic. Li-CO₂ batteries could be a two-in-one solution to the current problems of storing renewable energy and taking carbon emissions out of the air. They absorb carbon dioxide and convert it into a white powder called lithium carbonate while discharging energy. These batteries could have profound implications for cutting emissions from vehicles and industry—and might even enable long-duration missions on Mars, where the atmosphere is 95% CO₂. To make…

Sales at U.S. retailers and restaurants increased modestly in September as resilient consumers moderated their spending after splurging over the summer. Sales rose 0.2% in September from the previous month, the Commerce Department said Tuesday, in a report delayed more than a month because of the government shutdown. Sales jumped 0.6% in July and August and 1% in June. Numerous reports on inflation, employment, spending, and growth remain delayed and the government won’t likely be caught up until late December. The retail sales figures, which aren’t adjusted for inflation, suggest that Americans pulled back on spending in September as many households struggled wit…