What's on Your Mind?

In late February, 32 of the world’s best snowboarders gathered at Buttermilk Ski Resort—a so-called “mountain playground” in Aspen, Colorado—to go head-to-head in a high-stakes halfpipe competition. While most spectators were focused on their physical skills, eagle-eyed viewers might have noticed that three of the athletes were wearing identical stickers on their helmets. These stickers weren’t just ornamental: contained inside the small patches is a prospective technology that could have ripple effects across the broader sports world. The snowboarders (most of which arrived fresh off the Olympics) were competing in an event hosted by The Snow League, the first profe…

You’ve probably encountered the term uncanny valley somewhere or other. The concept refers to the feeling of discomfort one has when coming across some android representation—a robot, perhaps, or an AI-generated face—that looks remarkably human, but not quite. A robot can be cute, but if it looks similar to us, and we’re almost hoodwinked, it actually strikes us as off-putting. Consider your eerily sentient discussions with ChatGPT, or Tom Hanks’s CGI avatar in The Polar Express. I would like to offer the world a less important but related phenomenon: the uncomfortable valley. The uncomfortable valley is the effect one experiences when presented with some kind of imag…

For the past decade, “Bring your whole self to work” has been heralded as a marker of organizational progress. A shorthand for inclusion, psychological safety and modern leadership, the message is seductive: you no longer need to edit yourself to succeed. But for many, that promise doesn’t match reality. In practice, “whole self” culture often asks people to take personal risks within systems that haven’t changed to accommodate them, with no established boundaries or expectations regarding what “whole self” actually means. The language may have evolved, but the meaning remains ambiguous, open to individual interpretation and subject to systemic power dynamics. The…

Most people think of wisdom as an arrival. You accumulate enough experience or perspective, then you get there. You become the sage. And stop making mistakes. They’ve got it completely backward. The wisest or smartest people I know are still making mistakes. They’re just much better at noticing them, sitting with them, and learning from them. “Let’s never speak of this again” is not a thing for them. Wisdom is a practice. And failure is the training. Experience alone is not enough. You can accumulate all the experiences in life and still deflect, rationalize, or tell yourself a comforting story in your head. Some people even think of their mistakes as someon…

At any given time, I’m juggling multiple clients. That means I’m juggling context for multiple projects, background information on various companies, and a lot of deadlines. Some of my clients give me a steady stream of work each month, while others pop in with a request every few weeks. Whether you’re coaching, doing creative work, or have long-term retainers, most solopreneurs eventually find themselves managing multiple clients simultaneously. The number of clients you take on directly impacts your income, but more clients also means more complexity. In my corporate life, I worked as a product manager at a software company. Even though my work is very differe…

Below, Nedra Glover Tawwab shares five key insights from her new book, The Balancing Act: Creating Healthy Dependency and Connection Without Losing Yourself. Nedra is a licensed therapist and author of the instant New York Times bestseller Set Boundaries, Find Peace. She has practiced relationship therapy for almost 20 years and has over 2.5 million followers across her social media platforms. Nedra has appeared as an expert on multiple news shows, such as the CBS Morning Show, and has had her work highlighted in publications such as the New York Times and Vice. What’s the big idea? Healthy relationships are built on flexibility, not fixed labels or rigid patte…

Spring break season is in full swing, and summer vacations will be here before you know it. Layoff fears, however, have some Americans forgoing their paid time off (PTO) just when they need it the most—but experts warn pushing themselves won’t help their careers, either. According to a new survey conducted by outplacement services provider Careerminds, 17.5% of American workers worry that using their PTO will make them more vulnerable to layoffs, and an equal proportion believe it will negatively impact performance reviews or promotion opportunities. “It’s not paranoia; it’s being pragmatic,” says Amanda Augustine, a certified professional career coach for Careerm…

On a recent trip to my husband’s hometown in India, I was stopped in my tracks by a thousand-year-old banyan tree, tall and regal, standing in the middle of an ancient temple. A vast canopy was supported by roots that had taken centuries to reach the ground. The temple had been built around it, not the other way around, in quiet acknowledgment that some things cannot—and should not—be hurried. The tree’s beauty and strength came not from efficiency or design, but from patience. It had grown by using time as a gift rather than a constraint, expanding slowly, deliberately, without urgency. Standing there, it became difficult not to reflect on how rarely modern work allo…

The list of Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus store locations set to close continues to grow. On March 6, 2026, parent company Saks Global announced it would close 15 additional retail locations. This is part of a broader restructuring plan following the luxury retailer’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in January. Here’s what you need to know: What’s happening? According to a court document filed last Friday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division, Saks Global will close an additional 15 store locations. The Saks Fifth Avenue on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile is included on the list. Most of the locations are …

Issey Miyake’s latest design is a pair of sunglasses inspired by the art of pottery. The glasses, called “Uroko,” are part of Miyake‘s Spring Summer 2026 collection, Dancing Texture. Rather than the typical two-lens structure, they feature eight separate lenses that curve around the temples like a trippy optical illusion. While the design itself reads futuristic, the texture of the frames is almost organic—like a relic of an ancient advanced society. They’re set to debut on Miyake’s website in mid-March for $680. Each piece of the Dancing Texture collection, which includes structured garments alongside billowing, patterned textiles, pulls inspiration from the …

Shares in Hims & Hers Health (NYSE: HIMS) are soaring this morning after an unconfirmed report that the telehealth company is entering into a deal with Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE: NVO) to sell its popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, including Wegovy. The rumored deal is as surprising as Hims & Hers’s surging stock price this morning, especially considering that just last month, Novo was threatening to sue the telehealth provider. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Late on Friday, Bloomberg reported that Hims & Hers has reached an agreement with the Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk to sell Novo’s weight-loss drugs, including the popular GLP-1 pill…

Logitech may be known for keyboards, webcams, and gaming gear, but CEO Hanneke Faber is going beyond AI-first. She explains how she’s leading the hardware brand through an AI shift, approaching it as a leadership challenge, not just a tech one. Faber also shares lessons from competitive diving and navigating ever-shifting global tariffs. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you…

When leaders think about burnout, they often imagine visible distress, absence, emotional overwhelm or resignation. However, burnout does not always look like struggle. Often, it looks like competence. It looks like the person who always delivers. The one who volunteers to pick up the slack. The one answering work emails while watching their son’s nativity play, so they do not let anybody down. The one who says, “It’s fine, I’ll sort it.” The one who absorbs tension in the room so others do not have to. These people are not on a performance plan or raising red flags. They are not the ones asking for help. They are functioning. And those around them may not see…

A fascinating paradox about expertise is that we use our experiences from the past to prepare ourselves for the future. We do that in several ways—some of which are more backward-looking and others of which prepare you for the future. The most obvious of the backward-looking strategies is habits. When you develop a habit, you are associating a specific environment with a particular behavior. When you engage in a habit, you are basically letting your past actions dictate what you do in the moment. And that isn’t a bad thing. Many aspects of the world are pretty stable, and you should continue to do what has worked for you in the past when nothing in the world has chang…

The next wave of AI will be defined by agentic systems that can take actions: query databases, navigate portals, retrieve records, and increasingly interact with public digital infrastructure at scale. That shift is already showing up as traffic hitting government sites and services is becoming machine traffic. Some of it is benign (search and discovery). Some of it is ambiguous (scraping and automated browsing). And some of it could become actively harmful if agents can reserve scarce services, submit fraudulent requests, or generate volume that overwhelms public systems. The problem is that the government’s current interfaces were not designed for agent-to-gove…

Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of Iran’s late supreme leader, has been named as the Islamic Republic’s next ruler, authorities announced Monday, as Tehran widened its attacks across the Mideast to strike oil and water facilities crucial to its desert sheikdoms. With Iran’s theocracy under assault by the U.S. and Israel for more than a week, the country’s Assembly of Experts chose as the next supreme leader a secretive, 56-year-old cleric who maintains close ties to the country’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. The Guard has been firing missiles and drones at Israel and Gulf Arab states since the younger Khamenei’s father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed Feb. 28 during the …

Any avid reader undoubtedly recognizes him: the sleek, inquisitive bird frozen inside an orange oval that’s become Penguin Random House’s distinctive logo. With its new brand refresh, Penguin Random House UK is setting that iconic penguin free. The brand just unveiled a delightful series of hand-drawn illustrations, named the “Playful Penguins,” which show the penguin jumping, strutting, dancing, and doing a whole lot of reading. The illustrations will show up everywhere across the Penguin Random House’s global markets, from seasonal campaigns to social initiatives and point-of-sale displays—and they’re designed to bring some added joy and movement to the brand as it appr…

Investors in the live entertainment giant Live Nation are feeling optimistic this morning after reports that the company has settled its civil antitrust lawsuit with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and 39 participating states. The settlement will cost Live Nation, but it means that the company has narrowly avoided a forced breakup with its popular subsidiary, Ticketmaster. The reports come after a week-long trial in which the DOJ laid out its argument that Live Nation and Ticketmaster rely on anticompetitive conduct to create a monopoly over the live events industry in the U.S., leading the DOJ to call for a separation of the brands. On March 9, sources close to…

If 2024 was the Year of AI, 2025 became the Year of AI Slop. In the race to maximize all of its potential, we came to view AI results as a finished product. But as Balaji Srinivasan points out, AI is intended to function middle-to-middle; humans, by contrast, are end-to-end. By ceding it all to AI, outputs suffered; we suffered. Both people and machines settled for less than what was possible. Generic, hollow, clean, and devoid of subjective taste or judgement. Master of summary but without significant depth. Yet capable of complex analysis and able to perform tasks or generate high volume outputs with unprecedented ease and speed. This is the reality of AI. …

One of the powers of the latest Claude AI model is that it can use any multiple external Python tools to perform complex tasks. And, as software engineer and AI expert Ashe Magalhaes has discovered, it turns out that the model can use these powers to build a Truetype font that you can install in your computer from any scanned page showing a full set of characters. It’s a great, easy way to turn your handwriting into a font, but you can use it to create any typeface you can imagine as long as long as you have the adequate drawing skills. I tried it myself and it was pretty simple! Before AI, you needed specialized tools like Calligraphr, HandFonted, or FontForge i…

Caitlin Kalinowski, an OpenAI employee who oversaw hardware within the robotics division, is leaving the company. Kalinowski’s decision came shortly after OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon was announced in late February. In a post on social media, Kalinowski explained that the decision was about “principle” in regard to the recent deal. “I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn’t an easy call,” Kalinowski wrote. “AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.” OpenAI’s de…