What's on Your Mind?

Welcome to exhausted America 2025: Most adults are more than a little fine with doling out cash as gifts, and many plan to be asleep before midnight on New Year’s Eve, according to a new AP-NORC poll. About 6 in 10 Americans say cash or gift cards are “very” acceptable as holiday presents, but they’re much less likely to say that about a gift that was purchased secondhand or re-gifted, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. “Cash is OK for the grandkids I guess,” said Nancy Wyant, 73, in rural central Iowa. “But I’m a gift giver.” Come New Year’s Eve, she’ll be fast asleep before 2026 rolls around. “At our ag…

If talent is the oxygen of a company, succession planning is the life-support system. Yet too many organizations treat it like an org chart exercise, waiting until someone resigns or retires before scrambling to find a replacement. When a leader walks out, the ripple effects are immediate: strategy stalls, teams lose momentum, and culture wobbles overnight. The bigger problem? Most companies aren’t ready when it happens. According to DDI’s 2025 HR Insights Report, only 20% of CHROs say they have leaders prepared to step into critical roles, and just 49% of those roles could be filled internally today. That means most organizations are closer to a leadership cr…

While most employers offer mental health care coverage as part of their health insurance packages, major gaps in care exist. According to new research, many employers aren’t sure how mental health care services are being used by employees. The 2025 Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) Employer Survey, released Friday, polled professionals at 400 companies with 500 or more employees who made benefits decisions. Mental health coverage was a given almost across the board (97% of respondents said their company offered it), and several companies covered nontraditional programs, like financial therapists (62%) and mindfulness apps (74%). However, there were also s…

I spend most days in rooms where four generations argue about the same spreadsheet. Boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z staff the same executive teams, often guided by directors from a fifth—the Silent Generation. Four different eras, four different mental operating systems, one quarterly earnings call. When leaders tell me, “We’ve got a generation problem,” what they usually have is a self-awareness problem. A widely cited review of so-called generational differences at work found that many popular stereotypes don’t hold up very well when you look at actual data on values and attitudes. At the same time, more recent research shows that age-mixed teams can outp…

“Violence is just part of the job. Every nurse and healthcare worker experiences it at some point.” Sentiments like this echo across American hospitals and healthcare facilities, capturing a disturbing and growing reality. Though Americans think of nursing as the most trusted profession, we often fail to see that it’s also one of the most dangerous. An alarming 8 in 10 nurses face violence at work. As a result, healthcare workers are more than four times as likely to be injured by workplace violence than workers in all other industries combined. Despite these staggering numbers, the full extent of this epidemic may not be fully understood because nurses and ot…

It’s a new year, which means millions of people are setting resolutions they genuinely want to keep. We want to eat better. Move more. Make more money. Finally get control of our time. We’re taking advantage of the Fresh Start Effect, a principle rooted in the idea that people often view new beginnings as an opportunity to distance themselves from past failures and shortcomings. This can lead to a psychological reset, where we experience a renewed sense of optimism, self-efficacy, and motivation, common around the New Year. And yet, by February, most of this motivation will quietly evaporate—not because people don’t care, but because the way we set resolutions i…

While working as an engineer at Tesla, Niccolo Cymbalist never planned to start a business. But he’d been considering an idea for new technology—an autonomous, wind-powered cargo ship. Then, while on paternity leave in 2024, he discovered a free program that helps scientists and engineers launch businesses for the first time. Weeks after finishing the program, called 5050, Cymbalist had launched a startup called Clippership. The company’s first ship is being built in the Netherlands this year. Without the accelerator, he says, the company likely wouldn’t exist. The program has now helped scientists and engineers launch 100 businesses, from Huminly, which uses enzy…

Customer experience is entering the sci-fi age: knowing and understanding customers on an individual level, providing personalized service, and dedicated moments. All of this is becoming possible thanks to technological innovation. And as it shifts, we’re moving beyond the age of reactive service, where customer satisfaction was measured by stale, bi-annual surveys. We’re entering an era of proactive, predictive customer care. Companies’ missions today should be to transform every interaction into a moment of loyalty and growth, a goal we are working to achieve through our latest in-house innovation: the Customer Experience Index, or CXI. While many companies talk abo…

Have you ever opened a jar of Crisco and proceeded to slather it all over your body? I have, in the summer of 1992. I was just exiting sixth grade, and my friend was over for an afternoon of suntanning. When I reached for the brown bottle of suntan lotion, my friend stopped me, “Let’s go look for your mom’s Crisco.” “Crisco???” I said. “Yes, it’s how my older sister gets so tan.” Although I was suspicious that vegetable shortening was good for my skin, I silenced my doubts when I pictured her older sister in my mind—she was gorgeous, popular, and bronze. From a young age, we have an immature relationship with authority. Psychologists call this authority bias, whic…

Shares in America’s publicly traded movie theater chains surged yesterday, the first day of trading after the Memorial Day holiday. It’s a holiday weekend that saw moviegoers flock to theaters in droves, snapping up tickets and leading to the best Memorial Day weekend box office in history. Here’s what you need to know about the Memorial Day box office and its impact on shares in movie theater companies. Memorial Day box office was the best on record Movies generated a record $326 million at the Memorial Day box office this weekend, a period that ran from Friday, May 23, to Monday, May 26. That four-day haul record was largely fueled by two films. The first was…

In hindsight, NATO was an unnecessarily confusing acronym for a trade organization representing movie theater owners. For 60 years, the National Association of Theatre Owners has promoted interests of movie theaters, from the biggest chains to the one-screen mom and pop shops. They’ve also regularly gotten mail and phone calls intended for the other NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But the theater owner’s organization is looking to the future, with a new name and a refocused mission. The group will now be known as Cinema United, president and CEO Michael O’Leary told The Associated Press Tuesday. “It can be a little complicated having the same name as…

Several weeks ago, Mozilla Firefox dodged a bullet aimed at its business model—a potential court-ordered cutoff of the Google search-default payments that constitute its primary course of income. But that escape from one feared outcome of the U.S. search-antitrust case against the web giant doesn’t change two other things: Firefox remains in an embattled position. That’s bad news for users. Without Firefox, web competition itself would be in a far more dire state. To address its longstanding competition problem, Mozilla’s developers are putting AI to work—albeit, in a less pushy manner than their competitors. A conversation with Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers at Web Su…

As Big Tech races to weave AI into nearly every product, Mozilla is betting some users want the opposite: the ability to turn it off. Last week, the company announced new controls to allow users of its Firefox browser to decide when to use AI. When Firefox 148 debuts later this month, users will be able to manage or disable individual AI features like translations, tab grouping and a sidebar for chatbot like Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Le Chat Mistral. Much of Mozilla’s vision around AI was outlined in its annual State of Mozilla report, which was released last month and calls for a new Star Wars-style “rebel alliance” composed of developers, cybersecurit…

Hollywood is waking up to the power of influencers. That starts with MrBeast. Amazon’s Beast Games cost hundreds of millions to produce. Some of that came from the streamer, but much of it came from the pockets of MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson. On the Diary of a CEO podcast, he estimated “tens of millions” in losses from the show, admitting that he was an “idiot” for spending so much. But it was all for one goal: To knock down the Hollywood door so other creators could score their own production deals. But MrBeast misunderstands the power balance. In the attention economy, influencers have the eyeballs right now. Amazon’s acquisition of Beast Games …

Jimmy Donaldson might have made his fortune on YouTube, but the man better known as MrBeast has plans for a much wider financial empire—and he’s well on his way to achieving it. Through Beast Industries, the $5 billion holding company for his growing corporate ecosystem, Donaldson is assembling a wide range of businesses that extend far beyond the influencer space. The latest expansion came on February 9, with the purchase of the teen-focused banking app Step. Banking isn’t the end game, either. Beyond his current holdings, Donaldson has broader ambitions that could further diversify his income streams. Here’s a look at the businesses currently under the Beast Ind…

MrBeast is currently the most-subscribed YouTuber in the world—but his biggest moneymaker isn’t content. It’s chocolate. The 26-year-old creator, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, owns the snack brand Feastables, which generated $251 million in sales and more than $20 million in profit last year, according to investor documents obtained by Bloomberg. By contrast, his main media business—including his blockbuster YouTube channel and the Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games—brought in similar revenue but lost nearly $80 million over the same period. With 372 million subscribers at the time of writing, MrBeast’s videos range from spending “100 hours i…

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough is ready to spill the tea in a new newsletter. Called The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe, the revamped newsletter for the popular morning show on the network that will soon be called MS NOW (the name change is official on November 15, the network says) took its inspiration from the world of print magazines. It’s designed to be part of a larger flywheel to grow and connect with the show’s audience. “We wanted something that was visually arresting, that was simple, elegant, and that people could read and get insight from,” Scarborough tells Fast Company. The newsletter will be sent in the early afternoon, Monday through Friday, …

Muhammad Ali once joked that he should be a postage stamp because “that’s the only way I’ll ever get licked.” Now, the three-time heavyweight champion’s quip is becoming reality. Widely regarded as the most famous and influential boxer of all time, and a cultural force who fused athletic brilliance with political conviction and showmanship, Ali is being honored for the first time with a commemorative U.S. postage stamp. “As sort of the guardian of his legacy, I’m thrilled. I’m excited. I’m ecstatic,” Lonnie Ali, the champ’s wife of nearly 30 years, told The Associated Press. “Because people, every time they look at that stamp, they will remember him. And he wi…

Consider this: You want to book a multicity, international trip with flights from New York City to London, then Paris, and then back to New York City. There are numerous variables in the mix—different airlines, various ticketing levels, and more—that make the booking more complicated than anticipated. Accordingly, you may end up booking several separate flights, with multiple tickets and confirmation codes to keep track of. If you travel a lot, that can be a lot to manage. But Navan, a corporate travel and expense platform, says it has smoothed the whole process out for booking flights. Navan—which went public less than a month and a half ago, and mainly competes…

Police in Munich are investigating a mystery: More than 1,000 stickers were put on gravestones and wooden crosses at three cemeteries in the German city, without any indication of where they came from or why. The 5×3.5-centimeter (1.95×1.2-inch) stickers are printed with a QR code, that, when scanned, shows the name of the person buried in the grave and its location in the cemetery — but nothing else. “We haven’t found any pattern behind this yet. The stickers were put both on decades-old gravestones and very new graves that so far only have a wooden cross,” police spokesperson Christian Drexler told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “People who have witnesse…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has published a recall notice that warns consumers to dispose of a certain brand of mushrooms, which have the potential to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, a potentially deadly bacterium. Here’s what you need to know about the recall. What is the reason for the recall? On April 16, Harvest NYC Inc. of Brooklyn, New York, announced a recall of an Enoki Mushroom product due to fears of potential contamination with Listeria monocytogenes. Two days after Harvest NYC initiated the recall, the notice was posted on the FDA’s website. According to the notice, the recall was initiated after the New York State Depar…