What's on Your Mind?

Your inbox is brimming with new emails, and you need to decide which to reply to quickly and which to ignore. You try to schedule something for next week, but your calendar is already packed with recurring meetings. So many employees have asked for a particular day off—or requested a particular shift schedule—that you can’t grant all their requests. You post a job listing for a single position and get 250 applications. These situations arise constantly in our work lives, and their analogues come up in our personal lives. But despite their frequency, we often struggle with how to handle them. We barrel through our inbox and move things around on our calendar. We follow…

The U.S. Space Force on Friday announced it will assign five of seven critical military missions for the coming fiscal year to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The awards are a $714 million boon to SpaceX, underscoring the company’s continued dominance over Pentagon space contracts, despite Musk and U.S. President Donald The President’s public falling out earlier this year. United Launch Alliance (ULA) will undertake the two other launches; it was awarded $428 million for two launches, according to a press release viewed by Space News. SpaceX pulls ahead on Pentagon launches The awards are made under the National Security Space Launch Program, which earlier this year selec…

OpenAI’s new video generation app Sora is barely a week old, but CEO Sam Altman is already dropping updates to address some major potential issues with the app. In the days since Sora launched, the app has soared to the top of the U.S. Apple App Store as users flocked to try it—even though it is still invite-only. And just as its popularity has skyrocketed, experts increasingly sounded the alarm over the likelihood that OpenAI may face legal action over Sora’s ability to generate copyrighted characters, logos, and other intellectual property. That’s what the new updates appear geared to address. In a Friday blog post, Altman said Sora will undergo two major chang…

When Scott Belsky talks about creativity, he uses words like “output” and “production.” “Creativity is the source, with the problem of mining,” says the founder, author, and early stage investor. “It requires machinery and practice and discipline and whatever else.” Belsky joined A24 as the head of A24 Labs in early 2025. Before that, he founded Behance, a global portfolio site that he sold to Adobe in late 2012. He had a long run at Adobe, serving as its chief product officer and later chief strategy officer. This month he became the newest member of the Cornell Tech Council, and has written books like The Messy Middle and Making Ideas Happen. Belsky sits at the int…

Last week, Starbucks announced the closure of 1% of its North American stores by the end of 2025, resulting in sudden job losses for hundreds of baristas. The closures are one part of a $1 billion restructuring strategy dubbed “Back to Starbucks”; the coffee chain will also be laying off 900 corporate employees. Processing the news in real time, Starbucks baristas have made their feelings about the closures clear, filming their reactions and going viral in the process. A Starbucks employee at a Washington state location posted a heartfelt video to TikTok last week. “Starbucks permanently closing my store and leaving us jobless was not on my 2025 bingo c…

In recent years, Venture Capital-as-a-Service (VCaaS) has become more predominant since it offers more flexibility than the traditional VC model. It is designed perfectly for corporations, family offices, and sovereign wealth funds that want to engage in startup investment without managing a full-fledged VC team. Let’s understand the mechanics behind VCaaS and why corporations are embracing it. What is VCaaS? As an innovative, effective model, VCaaS is designed with an established VC firm which works for a corporation or institutional client to invest on its behalf. By using this model, the corporation or client benefits from startup innovation, access to deals, an…

They made things exciting. You thought you were in love. And now a week has gone by with no reply. Odds are they’re not getting back to you. But don’t take it personally: We’re all ensnared in a ghosting epidemic. According to the Thriving Center for Psychology, one in four Gen Zers and millennials have been ghosted after just a few dates. And to twist the knife even deeper, one in ten report being ghosted after a couple of months of dating. Tragically familiar, isn’t it? Brands like Sweethearts have been quick to capitalize on the reality of today’s dating landscape. In 2024, the heart-shaped candy brand launched “Situationship Boxes,” featuring candies …

The way we edit images is in the midst of a massive reinvention right now. Adjustments that once required costly software and professional-level know-how are suddenly at our fingertips 24/7—with instant results and not even an ounce of skill required. And yet, for all the fantastic feats these fancy new AI image remixing genies of ours can accomplish, there are still times when a simple specialty tool can save the day and make your life instantly easier. Today’s Cool Tool is a perfect example. It’s an incredibly useful photo-editing resource that does one specific thing and does it insanely well. And—oh, yes—it’s completely free to use. This tip origin…

These days, you can’t swing a vintage pair of Doc Martens without hitting a new study or article describing why Gen X won’t live up to its retirement potential. Prudential warned us in 2023 that more than a third of Gen Xers had less than $10k in retirement savings. In 2024, Natixis Investments found that 48% of Gen Xers said it would take a miracle for them to retire securely (up from only 41% of Generation X counting on divine intervention as of 2021). Even the much-lauded great wealth transfer—the $124 trillion in assets that baby boomers will pass along to their heirs by the year 2048—will largely skip over Gen X. The wealth management firm Cerulli Associates …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Fresh data shows that as of August, 25 of the 50 biggest U.S. metro areas—representing half of the country’s major housing markets—are seeing prices fall compared with last year. That share has steadily climbed from just 14% in late 2024, underscoring how soft demand and rising active inventory for sale have coincided in greater downward pressure on prices across much of the country. Back in November 2024, seven of the nation’s 50 largest metro-area housing markets (14%) had falling year-over-year home prices. In February 2025, 12 of the nati…

Artificial intelligence isn’t just a technical challenge. It’s a relationship challenge. Every time you give a task to AI, whether it’s approving a loan or driving a car, you’re shaping the relationship between humans and AI. These relationships aren’t always static. AI that begins as a simple tool can morph into something far more complicated: a challenger, a companion, a leader, a teammate, or some combination thereof. Movies have long been a testing ground for imagining how these relationships might evolve. From 1980s sci-fi films to today’s blockbusters, filmmakers have wrestled with questions about what happens when humans rely on intelligent machines. These …

What are the qualities of a great team? You’ve probably been taught that team success requires building trust, fostering psychological safety, and cultivating a unified mindset. Seems logical. You might have learned that consensus is important and hierarchies are bad. Okay. You’ve undoubtedly been given that old chestnut, “There’s no I in team.” A classic. Team building 101. It’s conventional wisdom, and yet it completely misses the paradox of teams: While companies often focus on merging everyone into a single homogeneous entity, truly great teams embrace the distinct, diverse roles and talents of their team members. Every high-performing group in an organization wil…

The AI boom is driving an explosive surge in computational demands and reshaping the landscape of technology, infrastructure, and innovation. One of the biggest barriers to widespread AI deployment today is access to power. Some estimates suggest AI-driven data centers now consume more electricity than entire nations. The World Economic Forum projects a doubling of energy use by data centers from 2024 to 2027, driven by the energy-intensive nature of AI workloads. This surge in electricity demand is transforming the utilities industry and redefining how and where data centers are built—power is no longer a given. In the U.S, electricity usage is growing for the first …

Snapchat rankled some of its most loyal (and heavy) users when it announced last week it will begin charging for storage plans for Memories, its version of a digital archive for Snaps and stories. Even though the Santa Monica, California-based social media company promised that “nothing will change” for the vast majority of Snapchatters who have less than 5 gigabytes (GB) of Memories, it has yet to disclose when it will begin rolling out the paid storage plans. The company told TechCrunch that plans will range from $1.99 per month to $15.99 per month for storage plans, depending on the amount of data of Memories. At stake is the size of your Memories, and the comp…

Snapchat rankled some of its most loyal (and heavy) users when it announced last week it will begin charging for storage plans for Memories, its version of a digital archive for Snaps and stories. Even though the Santa Monica, California-based social media company promised that “nothing will change” for the vast majority of Snapchatters, who have less than 5 gigabytes (GB) of Memories, it will begin rolling out paid storage plans, at a yet undisclosed date. The company told TechCrunch that plans will range from $1.99 per month to $15.99 per month for storage plans, depending on the amount of data of Memories. The company indicated you could have thousands of Snaps…

Former Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers learned all about technology’s volatile highs and lows as a veteran of the internet’s early boom days during the late 1990s and the ensuing meltdown that followed the mania. And now he is seeing potential signs of the cycle repeating with another transformative technology as a whirlwind of investments and excitement about artificial intelligence has propelled the stock market to new highs. Chambers took a similarly meteoric ride in his early days running Cisco, which had a market value of about $15 billion in 1995, when networking equipment suddenly became must-have components for the buildup of the internet. The feverish dem…

With foot traffic down and Target’s stock still slumping, Taylor Swift’s new album release might be the shot in the arm the retailer needs. Target may be in the crosshairs of the culture wars, but the brand’s relationship with Taylor Swift still stands in 2025. The release of “The Life of a Showgirl” again brings a suite of special editions to Target as exclusives, luring Swifties to spread their cash around to pick up their favorite variants. But between the retailer’s faltering reputation and a smorgasbord of album options, will Swifties take their business elsewhere? Target’s very bad 2025 In January, Target announced that it would abandon longstanding init…

The idea of meditating can be intimidating. Beginners may imagine sitting uncomfortably in silence while breathing deeply and scrubbing all thoughts from their minds. The prospect of trying those techniques at work may feel embarrassing. But there are ways to bring short, inconspicuous sessions into the workday if you want to see if meditation can help you deal with challenging customers or reduce anxiety while preparing for a presentation. And experienced practitioners say there’s no right or wrong way to do it. “Meditation is quite easy, as a matter of fact. I think there’s a stigma around it, that you have to be in complete silence, and you have to have some ro…

Artificial intelligence is doing more than just automating workflows in 2025: It’s dismantling the very idea of education. Once seen as one-time achievements, a bachelor’s degree, a professional certificate, or an annual corporate training session, are no longer guarantees of relevance in a world where knowledge ages almost as quickly as technology itself. Nearly half of talent development leaders surveyed in LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report say they see a skills crisis, with organizations under pressure to equip employees for both present and future roles through dynamic skill-building, particularly in AI and generative AI. Likewise, the AI in education mark…