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Are you intimidated by personal finance? Vivian Tu wants to help. Tu is known for her TikTok account, “Your Rich BFF,” where she makes entertaining videos about personal finance. Topics include how to negotiate your salary and practical tips for dealing with credit card debt. Tu, who refers to herself as “your favorite Wall Street girly,” has 10 million followers on social media and has published two personal finance books. Tu, born and raised in Baltimore, often connects her interest in personal finance to her upbringing as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her parents raised her to be frugal and appreciate money from an early age, but it wasn’t until a few years int…

It’s 4:59 PM on a Friday. You’re the Head of Design at a mid-sized biotech firm—mid-sprint, mid-thought—building out a set of specialized design roles that will define how your team delivers value for the next three years. Then the email arrives. Your recruiting partners have sent a pre-written job description, authored by a product manager, with a mandate to use it as-is. The title: UX/UI Designer. You pause. Not because the gesture wasn’t well-intentioned—it was. But because you recognize exactly what this moment represents: a quiet, recurring erosion of role clarity that has followed the design profession for over a decade. One ambiguous title, multiplied a…

Octopuses are brilliant, emotional, and mysterious. Can they ever be farmed humanely? And if they can, should they be? Fast Company contributor Clint Rainey is the first journalist in the world to be let inside a cutting-edge effort to build the first commercial octopus farm. View the full article

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Fourteen years ago, Graham Dugoni decided to start a movement to address what he viewed as the deleterious effects of rampant smartphone usage. “What I saw was kind of impending nihilism, the sense that everyone is going to be inundated with media, and it’s going to hollow out the meaning i…

Reality is melting away before our eyes. Identity spoofing against older adults alone grew by 8x between 2020 and 2024, driven in part by convincing AI impersonations of friends and loved ones. It’s a problem costing people in the U.S. nearly half a billion dollars a year with no end in sight. Which is why a pair of design studios teamed up on a provocative solution that starts with a real-life handshake. Called Quartz, it’s a ring that adds friends to your network by literally shaking hands. And from there, it gatekeeps your online communications by proving you’re alive, proving you know the person you’re talking to, and proving provenance through encrypted chan…

Australians dramatically reduced their water usage during the Millennium Drought in the 2000s. It was one of the longest recorded droughts in Australian history, and in some places where sprinklers weren’t allowed, people watered their plants and grass with shower water. Like turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth and using shower timers, keeping buckets in the shower became a part of daily life during the drought. Now a newly designed device seeks to update that water-saving impulse with a watering can specifically designed for the bathroom. The 17-by-17-inch Sevas water catcher is about the size of a bathroom scale, and holds 5 liters of water. The…

The rise of full-body MRI scans has been framed as a victory for consumer empowerment. Skip the referrals. Skip the waiting. Pay out of pocket and finally see what is happening inside your body, before it’s too late. For many, especially women, these scans are compelling. They offer agency in a healthcare system that often feels slow, dismissive, and reactive, rather than preventive. What many women would be surprised to learn, however, is despite the name, many full-body MRI scans do not reliably screen for breast cancer, the most common cancer in women. Women make roughly 80% of healthcare purchasing decisions in the United States. They spend more out of pocket …

In 2025, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson from The Atlantic released a book called Abundance, which posited that America had developed a culture of scarcity. Overregulation and overall risk aversion from the government, the authors argued, were stifling the development of infrastructure and housing in the country. To remedy this, they proposed an “abundance agenda,” one that focused on a growth mindset among elected officials that would help foster long-term prosperity. Although the provocation has its challenges, it got me thinking: What if we applied the idea of abundance to our work? For over a decade, I’ve occupied two worlds simultaneously—o…

We live in a world, especially in Western cultures, that relentlessly promotes positive thinking and celebrates self-belief to the point of sidelining reality—that inconvenient thing that does not disappear simply because we ignore it. Self-help advice and pop-psychology slogans urge us to stop worrying about what others think, to believe in ourselves no matter what, and to focus on our strengths. They rarely stress the value of acknowledging our flaws and limitations, even when this requires revising, if not abandoning, our childhood ambitions. It may sound harsh, but science shows clear benefits to confronting our shortcomings, aligning our self-assessments wi…

“Do you want to know the biggest career hack I’ve learned in 25 years of recruiting?” That’s the opening of one TikTok video. The answer, the creator Elite Recruiter says, is “skill stacking”: combining complementary skills to give you an advantage in job applications. “You’re not just a teacher—you’re a teacher who understands UX,” she gives as an example. That emphasis on skills over experience matches a growing chorus online that’s singing the praises of self-taught skills in the job market. “3 courses to take for early career success,” another creator suggests. “Skill stacking is the new degree flex,” a comment read on another recent TikTok video. Rat…

QR codes have become a convenience of modern life. Just scan the black and white mosaic with your phone’s camera and you can do everything from connect to your hotel room Wi-Fi to pay for that public parking space to pull up a restaurant menu. But QR codes can also leave you vulnerable. That’s because scammers, organized criminal gangs, and shady nation-states are using the unassuming tech to get you to hand over your data unwittingly. Here’s how they’re doing it, and how you can protect yourself. People love the convenience of QR codes—but so do scammers It’s hard to believe that something nefarious can lie within a QR code, but it can. In order to understand…

I’ll never forget the first time I heard someone say, “This meeting could’ve been an email.” You can probably imagine exactly the voice they said it in (and what their face looked like). You’re probably heard it many times yourself. The meeting in question was a project check-in with multiple departments, where we’d spent an hour listening to one person giving an update that could have been written in a few bullet points. The rest of us just sat there, nodding along, waiting for it to end. No one really needed to speak, no one gave feedback, and no one asked any questions. As we all shuffled out, someone muttered, “Well, that was a waste of time,” and I couldn’t help…

“We are cooked.” That’s the sentence I see with every AI-generated Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube short made with Seedance 2.0. And yes, we are. The walls of reality have finally vanished, sucked in by a black hole of Nvidia chips. So I’m going to Nancy Reagan the hell out of everyone and demand a global public service announcement like that old “Just Say No” to drugs campaign, which was everywhere when I was growing up. We need Mr. T back to make young and old fools listen up, because the companies printing money with their generative video tech are doing zilch to fix the planetary problem they have created. The message? Everyone should stop believing everyt…

Networking as a solopreneur can feel impossible. LinkedIn is full of the sort of hustle-culture aficionados who think yoga at 4 a.m. is something to brag about and who want you to buy their online course. Joining a networking referral group often costs money and can require a big time commitment without a guarantee of new leads. Asking friends and family to make referrals for you gives you flashbacks to that one summer in college when you got roped into selling Cutco knives. But solo businesses are already nontraditional, so you might as well embrace quirky networking opportunities. Some of my best freelancing leads have come from Tumblr, carpooling, and on one memora…

Earlier this year, I had coffee with the chief investment officer of a large public pension fund. His fund doesn’t invest directly into venture (they have a fund of funds position instead), so my new CIO friend doesn’t usually get pitched directly by VC funds. He doesn’t spend a ton of time in tech circles either. When he does dip his toe in VC waters, he gets culture shock. “I have trouble understanding VCs,” he said. (I’m paraphrasing.) By his estimation, people in traditional finance are easier to read. Their goal is to maximize returns—and the progress toward this goal is concrete, transparent, and measurable. It’s really easy to understand what an asset …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Zillow economists just published their updated 12-month forecast, projecting that U.S. home prices—as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index—will rise +0.9% between January 2026 and January 2027. That’s a mild downward revision from its 12-month forecast published last month (+2.1%). At its latest reading, U.S. home prices, as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index, are up +0.2%. Zillow’s latest forecast expects prices to remain close to that pace. While Zillow’s national home price forecast isn’t negative—it isn’t exactly bullish either. …

The U.S. and Israel’s attack on Iran led to commercial flights disruption on Saturday across the Middle East and beyond as regional airspaces began closing and tens of thousands of travelers around the globe were stranded. Israel, Qatar, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Bahrain closed their airspace, while Oman’s Muscat International Airport shut down and all flights were restricted over the United Arab Emirates, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24. Major airlines based in the Middle East with worldwide networks canceled hundreds of flights while many other travelers were unexpectedly diverted to airports across Europe or flown back to departure airpor…

In today’s world, the villain in our story isn’t a person; it’s our desire for instant gratification. Explosive sales growth? We want it now. An dream angel investor? We want it now. A raise, a promotion, a spot at the top? We want it now. Can you blame us? If we can binge-watch an entire season of a new show on Netflix in a weekend and order restaurant-ready food to our door in less than thirty minutes, that can set us up for unrealistic expectations about getting other things quickly, including in the workplace. The need for speed leaves us rushing and impatient—and it shows in the way we speak, too. Our conversations become transactional, our questions become …

Gee whiz, Gboard: You’re really falling behind. For all the many ways Google’s Gboard keyboard makes tapping out text a breeze on Android, its ability to transcribe your speech and turn it into words isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. Android’s voice-to-text setup has always been pretty good, relatively speaking—but now, newer and more effective options are popping up, and it’s suddenly seeming like a system from the past. Last month, I introduced readers of my Android Intelligence newsletter to a new Android voice typing tool called Typeless that blows Gboard out of the water with its ability to actually understand what you’re saying and transform it into accurate,…

Let’s be honest: The web browser is the modern-day operating system for everything from managing spreadsheets to pretending to work while reading tech blogs. Google knows this. That’s why the Chrome team announced a trio of new productivity features designed for people who basically live inside their browsers. Best of all? They’re actually quite useful. Here’s what you need to know to get your tab-hoarding, PDF-losing life back in order. Split View You know the drill. You’re trying to reference a document while writing an email, or maybe you’re watching a tutorial while trying to write code. You end up clicking back and forth between two tabs until your eye…

While some parts of the country deal with freezing temperatures and blizzards, Los Angeles sits comfortably in the mid-70s. Beyond the sunshine, the forecast calls for red carpets and celebrity gossip as award season is in full swing. The newly rebranded Actor Awards Presented by SAG-AFTRA is arguably the most emotional and meaningful celebration of the season because it is where fellow performers honor their own. Here’s everything you need to know about the 32nd iteration of the former Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG Awards). The opening monologues While it’s easy to assume that being an actor is all glamour and glory, the opening monologues dispel t…

Smartphones have been the greatest drivers of creative democratization over the past 15 years, giving people a powerful voice and platform. Recent advancements in the “brains” behind these devices are almost limitless, from their software and processing power to their AI capabilities. But what about their bodies? For years, the smartphone’s physical form has remained a familiar slab of glass and ceramic. This form factor, once revolutionary, is now becoming a physical constraint on creativity. Over time, smartphone design has created a paradox. The very tool meant to capture our memories can prevent us from truly living in the moment. While the intention was to connec…