What's on Your Mind?

For decades, the relationship between a fan and a content franchise was defined by scarcity: You watched a movie or binged a season, then had to wait months or years for the next installment. Fans were spectators, limited to going to the concert, game, or movie, buying merch, and tweeting about their favorite moments. Scarcity trained audiences to wait. Abundance taught them not to. The greatest challenge facing intellectual property (IP) owners today is staying connected and culturally relevant in a world where content is everywhere, all the time, and limitless. While these players historically have been limited by the time and budget required to create premium c…

Would you consider tying your shoelaces an achievement? If you’re able-bodied, probably not. Now imagine doing it with one hand, or no hands at all. Suddenly it is. Fewer than 10,000 people have stood on the summit of Everest. It takes months of training and tests the limits of human endurance. However, if you helicoptered to the top, stepped out for a photograph, and flew back down, would that be an achievement? The outcome is the same. Same summit. Same view, but most of us would not consider it an achievement. A new kind of helicopter has now arrived. Artificial intelligence can draft reports, write software, compose correspondence, and generate ideas in a matter o…

The mitochondria, perhaps better known as the powerhouses of cells, are emerging as a possible factor in the pains of aging. Some scientists are of the mind that poor mitochondrial health can lead to symptoms and diseases related to aging, like Alzheimer’s and cancer. “The mitochondria just give up earlier than other parts of the cell because of the wear and tear that they’re subjected to,” Pinchas Cohen, dean of USC’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, told The New York Times. “They’re the canary in the coal mine of cellular dysfunction.” It’s true that mitochondria produce energy from the food that we eat. But that’s actually not all that they do. How C…

Even if you use a calendar app to organize your life, the paper calendar is far from being obsolete. Write something down on a printed calendar, and it becomes a persistent reminder of important events. You don’t have to dig through any screens to write things down, and you don’t have to perform any complex sharing maneuvers to set up a communal calendar for family members or colleagues. But even the paper calendar could benefit from some digital enhancements. With a few minutes of setup, you can print a custom calendar to your exact specifications while also making it small enough to fit on a single sheet of paper. This tip originally appeared in the free Coo…

This week, Apple’s newest laptop, the MacBook Neo, went on sale. Reviews of the device have been almost universally positive, with many praising the laptop’s starting cost of just $599—a price point few expected Apple would ever reach for a notebook computer. Apple is clearly positioning the affordable machine as a productivity device for use in two main areas: education and the workplace. Indeed, imagery on the MacBook Neo’s product page features many of the most essential productivity apps used by students and workers, including Microsoft Word and Excel, Slack, Canva, Box, Keynote, and more. Yet if you’ve picked up a Neo for use in work or school, you should kno…

Entertainment in 2026 is a bit of a double-edged sword. Excellent films and television shows are widely available in ways that would have sounded like science fiction just 20 years ago—but at a steep price. A single movie ticket costs an average of $16, while the average American household spends over $42 per month on streaming services, which adds up to $504 per year. And if you’re anything like me, you may not even be getting your money’s worth on those streaming services. Often when I sit down to watch something, I scroll through the options on Netflix, only to go to bed an hour later without having watched anything. In many cases, that decision paralysis refle…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Here’s the annual U.S. household income needed to purchase the typical valued U.S. home: January 2020: $52,041 January 2021: $52,087 January 2022: $63,111 January 2023: $87,092 January 2024: $93,227 January 2025: $98,900 January 2026: $93,061 While the income needed to buy the median-priced U.S. home is +78.8% higher than it was in January 2020, it’s down -5.9% year over year. Methodology: This Zillow calculation is conservative and assumes a 20% down payment and that the homebuyer spends less than 30% of their monthly inco…

Never in human history has there been a greater concentration of wealth than in Silicon Valley. The three most valuable corporations in the world have their headquarters in the region, within a few miles of one another, in addition to many other unfathomably wealthy people and companies. It would logically follow that such a place would have some of the world’s finest architecture, as we’ve seen in previous centers of economic power. Think: Beijing in the Ming Dynasty, Venice in the Renaissance, New York and Chicago in the early 20th century. But no, Silicon Valley looks like just about any other American suburb (with a few notable exceptions). The future is inv…

Unless you spend your time in boardrooms and C-suites, there’s a decent chance you’ve never heard of the Future Today Strategy Group (FTSG). There’s also a better than decent chance you’ve encountered its influence. Every year the consulting firm publishes a massive tech trends report that maps emerging threats, white spaces, and opportunities early enough for companies to act on them. Past editions have flagged shifts around synthetic media, digital humans, and generative AI before they entered the mainstream conversation. And some major institutions are clearly paying attention: FTSG’s client list includes Mastercard, Ford, and NASA. Which makes what’s happening ons…

After-hours meetings have gone from rare to regular occurrences, and while some are hoping AI can help reverse the trend, experts warn breaking the habit will take more than tech. In a recent survey conducted by AI-powered workspace provider Miro, 33% of US-based knowledge workers said they frequently attended after-hours meetings in 2025, up from 23% in 2024. “Six in 10 people attend meetings after hours at least once a month, and that has all kinds of negative downstream effects,” says Dom Katz, Miro’s ways of working lead. “The data suggests more and more people consistently have meetings after their usual workday ends, and it’s getting worse; not just in the U…

A few meters below the former site of Seville’s 1992 World Expo, a promising climate experiment blending ancient technology and modern science is underway. Rows of black pipes run along the ceiling and down the bare concrete walls. These, in turn, connect to bright blue and green tubes and enormous silver pumps. In a control room to the side, an array of monitors display the heat, humidity and wind speed above. “We have deployed several types of cooling systems here, each one used depending on climatic conditions,” says Maria de la Paz Montero Gutiérrez, a researcher at the University of Seville, from down in the building’s bowels where she is helping supervise th…

Digg is shutting down—at least for now. Just two months after relaunching with an open beta, the once-influential social news site says it is pulling the plug while it reassesses its strategy. The announcement came from CEO Justin Mezzell in a message posted to the site’s homepage. The relaunch has been scrapped, he wrote, and the company has decided “to significantly downsize the Digg team.” As the company figures out its next move, Mezzell said, Digg founder Kevin Rose will return to Digg on a full-time basis starting in April. The shutdown marks another twist in the long, uneven history of a platform that once helped define the early social web. Twenty-two year…

We’re now one month into a partial U.S. government shutdown due to a Department of Homeland Security funding lapse. Yet, employees with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are still expected to show up for work. As of last Friday, many TSA employees missed their first full payday and instead received $0 paychecks. Due to financial concerns, many have been calling out sick or resigning to find alternative income sources. Staffing issues have led to longer lines and increased wait times at U.S. airport security checkpoints nationwide. Now the CEOs of major U.S. airlines are publicly calling on Washington to end the shutdown. In an open le…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While active listings are rising year-over-year in most regional housing markets, a slight majority of markets are still below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. Generally speaking, housing markets where inventory (i.e., active listings) has returned to pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced weaker home price growth (or outright declines) over the past 42 months. Conversely, housing markets where inventory remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 42 months. …

Encyclopedia Britannica is suing OpenAI for allegedly misusing its reference materials to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. The Chicago-based Britannica Group runs Britannica.com and Merriam-webster.com, the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Creator of the 250-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica, the company ended its print edition in 2012, survived Wikipedia, and has since focused on educational software and digital growth, including selling artificial intelligence agent software, according to The New York Times. Britannica had acquired Melingo AI in 2000, which offers “AI-powered solutions and natural–language processing” in multiple l…

Alex Cooper was driving a hot pink Jeep through the desert with former Saturday Night Live cast member Aidy Bryant and Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore, of White Lotus fame. Suddenly, their cell service dropped to zero, just as Bryant was trying to send an important contract and Impacciatore was in a heated text exchange with her boyfriend, Jared. But Cooper had their backs. Thanks to the satellite service on Cooper’s phone, Bryant was able to send her document and close the deal. Impacciatore, meanwhile, got through the text-dot purgatory (“DOT DOT DOT WHAT?”) to find out that Jared wanted to move in together. “Time to move on,” Impacciatore declared, upon re…

Michael, a 42-year-old tax accountant, came to my office complaining of chronic anxiety, chest pressure, and what he called tunnel vision. “It’s like I’m stuck inside my screen,” he told me. “Even when I’m not working, I’m holding my phone and my brain won’t shut off.” Is that you? Americans spend 93% of their time indoors. Insomnia, depression, metabolic disease, cognitive decline, chronic inflammation, burnout, insulin resistance, sedentariness, loneliness. We engineered the human animal into a box and spend billions managing the symptoms the box causes. Here is what I want leaders reading this to understand: your people are not burned out. They are indoors too …

Getting good sleep is critical. A 2018 study found that people who sleep for five to six hours are 19% less productive than people who regularly sleep for seven to eight hours per night. People who sleep for fewer than five hours are nearly 30% less productive. Sure, they’re awake longer. But they actually get less done. That’s because other research shows that only getting six hours of sleep makes any task that requires focus, deep thinking, or problem-solving a lot harder. In fact, where attention and reaction time are concerned, only sleeping six hours is like drinking a couple of beers, and only sleeping four hours is like drinking five beers. Other research s…

It’s being called the Great Flattening: a global wave of layoffs triggered by the adoption of AI that is primarily hitting middle management. Amazon is currently leading this managerial reset, aggressively streamlining its corporate structure to reduce bureaucracy and speed decision-making. And although the tech sector remains the epicenter, projections suggest that by the end of 2026, up to 20% of firms will use AI to significantly reduce middle management ranks. The catalyst is the rise of agentic AI—autonomous tools capable of executing complex workflows, managing data streams, and generating predictive modeling for decision-making with minimal oversight. All with …