What's on Your Mind?

It is a sad fact of online life that users search for information about suicide. In the earliest days of the internet, bulletin boards featured suicide discussion groups. To this day, Google hosts archives of these groups, as do other services. Google and others can host and display this content under the protective cloak of U.S. immunity from liability for the dangerous advice third parties might give about suicide. That’s because the speech is the third party’s, not Google’s. But what if ChatGPT, informed by the very same online suicide materials, gives you suicide advice in a chatbot conversation? I’m a technology law scholar and a former lawyer and engineering…

Hiring an executive assistant (EA) to delegate work tasks and life admin to has long been something reserved for celebrities and Fortune 500 executives. But that belief might now be changing, as rank-and-file workers decide they, too, want a taste of the EA experience. As Callum Borchers wrote earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal, more workers outside the C-suite are finding assistants—virtual, in person, or AI, and sometimes just for a couple of hours a month—to help with everything from booking bouncy castles to managing work calendars. Nowadays, everyone’s schedules are packed right down to the last minute. Plus, labor has never been easier to offload…

Starbucks will end the year with fewer stores and fewer employees. But the brand maintains that it’s all part of a greater turnaround still in the mix. Today, the company announced that its North American store locations will be reduced by 1% for fiscal 2025—landing the coffee chain at 18,300 stores total. And it will be eliminating 900 jobs outside of its coffee houses (in other words, corporate and other functions). The company claims it will attempt to place affected baristas into new stores, but Starbucks says, “For those we can’t immediately place, we’re focused on partner care including comprehensive severance packages. We also hope to welcome many of …

The latest wave of tech layoffs doesn’t have to be a step backward—it can be a launchpad. If you’ve spent years shipping products, debugging systems, and partnering with go-to-market teams, you already have what many founders don’t: domain insight and a network. Pair that with AI “employees,” (role-specific software agents trained on your company’s data that can perform defined tasks like drafting on-brand content, qualifying leads, and updating CRMs) and your severance becomes seed capital for a lean, scalable company. What’s different now is that the traditional barriers to starting a business have collapsed. The math is transformative: What once required $500,000 …

Almost as soon as the first iPad was announced, a range of competitors sprung up in an attempt to become the “iPad killer.” Devices like the Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry PlayBook, and HP TouchPad all put another spin on the formula but couldn’t come close to the iPad’s blend of performance and App Store dominance. Android tablets are still around today, of course, but most manufacturers don’t push them too hard. They’re all fine at doing tablet things like watching videos, and they’re all worse than the iPad when it comes to the app ecosystem. In recent years I’ve used some great hardware from Xiaomi in particular that I still wouldn’t outright recommend over an iPad. …

Fans of Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant will be disappointed to learn that the beloved restaurant and pub chain has abruptly closed all of its locations across multiple states. Here’s why and what you need to know about Iron Hill Brewery’s closure. What’s happened? Yesterday (Thursday, September 25), Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant made several announcements. Effective immediately, it was closing the doors to all its locations, the company revealed. Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant was founded nearly 30 years ago. Its first location opened in Newark, Delaware, in 1996. Since then, it had expanded to multiple states along the country’s eastern coast, in…

NBCUniversal may soon be pulling its programming from Google’s YouTube TV. The news comes as a dispute between the companies over carriage fees and terms is ramping up. NBC began warning customers on Thursday evening that its programming would leave the streaming platform if the companies don’t reach an agreement by Sept. 30, the date its contract is set to renew. If a blackout were to occur, popular programs such as Sunday Night Football, The Voice, NBA games, and the Oct. 4 premiere of Saturday Night Live, wouldn’t be viewable on the platform. However, a separate spat between YouTube TV and TelevisaUnivision comes at the same time, as both companies’ contracts…

No matter how flashy a smartphone might be, how many features it touts, it has a single piece of technology packed inside that is more important than any other: the battery. When it runs dry, your smartphone can no longer be the world’s best camera or the ultimate communication device. It is nothing more than a useless slab of glass and metal. Which is exactly why manufacturers do everything they can to prolong battery life. Over the past several years, Apple has been cramming higher-capacity batteries into its smartphones so that they last longer on a single charge. The company has also been optimizing its software to prolong the iPhone’s juice. In iOS 26, Apple…

More women are freezing their eggs, but few appear to be returning to use them, a new study found. The study was led by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and published last month in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. It found that the number of planned, elective egg freezing cycles increased exponentially between 2014 and 2021, jumping from 4,153 to 16,436. Notably, women increasingly chose to freeze their eggs at younger ages, the study found. In 2014, the average age for egg freezing was 36. Seven years later, in 2021, that had dropped to 34.9 years of age. “This is the largest U.S. study to date on elective fertilit…

A young couple is casually hanging out in an apartment. The girl takes a fork full of food off a plate, as the young man asks, “Good?” She nods, furrowing her brow in a way that signals slight surprise that she’s impressed. “Really good.” As “Fool” by Perfume Genius fades in, the white text of a ChatGPT prompt overlays on the frame: “I need a recipe that says, ‘I like you, but want to play it cool.'” ChatGPT’s answer? Lemon Garlic Pasta with Cherry Tomatoes. This is one of a series of new ads in OpenAI’s first major brand campaign for ChatGPT. The spots depict everyday uses of ChatGPT, from finding recipes, to sourcing exercise tips, to road-trip plannin…

Charlie Javice, the founder of a startup company that promised to revolutionize the way college students apply for financial aid, was sentenced Monday to more than seven years in prison for cheating JPMorgan Chase out of $175 million by greatly exaggerating how many students it served. Javice, 33, was convicted in March of duping the banking giant when it bought her company, called Frank, in the summer of 2021. She made false records that made it seem like Frank had over 4 million customers when it had fewer than 300,000. Addressing the court before she was sentenced, Javice, who was in her mid-20s when she founded the company, said she was “haunted that my failure has …

Below, coauthors Ulrik Juul Christensen and Tony Wagner share five key insights from their new book, Mastery: Why Deeper Learning Is Essential in an Age of Distraction. Ulrik is founder and CEO of Area9 Lyceum. Formerly a member of the McGraw Hill executive board, he is a frequent keynote speaker and regular contributor to Forbes. He also serves on several boards including the Technical University of Denmark. Tony is senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and former codirector of Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Change Leadership Group. He is the bestselling author of Creative Innovators and The Global Achievement Gap. What’s the big ide…

The Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women in Doha, Qatar, is the first mosque built for women. Architect Liz Diller designed the 50,000-square-foot complex to combine modern elements with traditional features. In addition to a prayer space, it also houses a library, classrooms, an event space, and café. The project is a winner of Fast Company’s 2025 Innovation by Design Awards. View the full article

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. As ResiClub has closely documented, Florida has been the epicenter of U.S. housing market weakness in 2025. However, KB Home executives now believe the worst may be behind them—at least for their business—in the Sunshine State. While giant homebuilder KB Home—which has a $4.3 billion market capitalization—isn’t ready to call it an inflection point for the entire state, it believes its price cuts in Florida were more than sufficient to stabilize demand for its business. In fact, it may have cut too deeply in Florida and could now need to raise pri…

Discontent has surged across U.S. society, largely defined the last three presidential elections, and now appears set to challenge business owners in the workplace. The rising sense of grievance expressed across all demographic groups has reached new highs, according to a new survey, with both companies and their CEOs suffering some of the biggest drops in trust among respondents. The rising tide of acrimony and accusation recorded in the 25th Annual Edelman Trust Barometer shouldn’t be too surprising for anyone who followed the November election campaigns—or who just listens to conversations in the office and shop floor. Whether it was Democrats warning of a “fascist…

Amazon is pushing deeper into the grocery aisle with the launch of Amazon Grocery, a food brand that keeps most prices under $5. The idea of buying much of anything for $5 seems like a distant memory for most shoppers these days, as The President’s tariffs and persistent inflation keep the price of everyday consumer goods high with little relief in sight. Keenly aware of that, Amazon is looking to undercut the competition’s prices with its own newly unified private label brand for everything from eggs and pre-made salads to ground beef and olive oil. The company plans to expand its offerings to more grocery staples like frozen pasta, granola and cakes in the coming mo…

Scientist and global activist Jane Goodall, who turned her childhood love of primates into a lifelong quest for protecting the environment, has died at the age of 91, the institute she founded said on Wednesday. Goodall died of natural causes while in California on a speaking tour, the Jane Goodall Institute said in a social media post. “Dr. Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world,” it said on Instagram. The primatologist-turned-conservationist spun her love of wildlife into a lifelong campaign that took her from a seaside English village to Africa an…