What's on Your Mind?

In the modern working world, employees have a lot on their minds. From stressing about high costs of living and pressing political issues, there are no shortage of worries to go around. But worries at work are stacking up, too, with many feeling uncertain about their future employment in the face of AI. While workplaces are seeing some benefits to automating tasks with AI, there’s another not-so-secret problem with the technology taking off: employee anxiety. In part, that’s because workers are deeply stressed about being replaced, but there are also learning curves that come with working alongside the technology. Also notable, one recent study found that AI is …

The low point in Palantir’s very first quest for investors came during a pitch meeting in 2004 that CEO Alex Karp and some colleagues had with Sequoia Capital, which was arguably the most influential Silicon Valley VC firm. Sequoia had been an early investor in PayPal; its best-known partner, Michael Moritz, sat on the company’s board and was close to PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who had recently launched Palantir. But Sequoia proved no more receptive to Palantir than any of the other VCs that Karp and his team visited; according to Karp, Moritz spent most of the meeting absentmindedly doodling in his notepad. Karp didn’t say anything at the time, but later wished tha…

When an X user recently pointed out the eye-popping increase in billionaires’ wealth since 2015, entrepreneur Mark Cuban, a billionaire himself, responded with his opinion on why, but he urged followers to consider a different question: “Why are we not giving incentives to companies to require them to give shares in their companies to all employees, at the same percentage of cash earnings as the CEO?” Cuban said. It is the right question to be asking. Because while the debate over wealth inequality continues, the solution has been hiding in plain sight for decades. The top 10% of U.S. households now control 67% of all wealth, while the bottom half holds just …

Every good salesperson knows the 7-step process in which you identify and qualify a prospect to understand their needs, then present your offer, overcome objections, close the sale and follow up. It’s proven so consistently effective that its concepts have been the standard for training salespeople for decades. Many business leaders come up through sales and marketing, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they try to use similar persuasion techniques for large-scale change. They work to understand the needs of their target market, craft a powerful message, overcome any objections and then follow-through on execution. Unfortunately, that’s a terrible strategy. The tr…

World shares and U.S. futures were mixed on Monday after Wall Street was buoyed by revived hopes for an interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve. The future for the S&P 500 was up 0.2% while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average was nearly unchanged. Germany’s DAX gained 0.5% to 23,201.85, while the CAC 40 edged less than 0.1% lower to 7,978.77. Britain’s FTSE 100 inched up 0.1% to 9,547.77. Markets in Japan were closed for a holiday. Hong Kong’s benchmark, the Hang Seng, rose 2% to 25,716.50. It got a boost from a 4.7% gain for e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has reported strong demand for its updated Qwen AI app. Alibaba is due to report earnings on Tuesday.…

Today’s job market is more ruthless than ever, leaving many desperately clinging to their roles amid mass layoffs and side-eyeing the competition. In such environments, a rival colleague or workplace nemesis may make themselves known. Watching a smug colleague get called out for a mistake in a meeting or blundering a promotion is often deeply satisfying (even if we may not admit it). Many know the German name for this impulse, schadenfreude: pleasure derived by another’s misfortune. But another, more work-related term that has emerged recently is fail watching: a coping strategy born from today’s challenging job market as a way to make us feel better about our o…

The phrase quiet quitting has been cast as a generational rebellion, a disengagement crisis, and a leadership failure, all rolled into one. The narrative suggests that half of your workforce has decided to coast, collecting a paycheck while doing the bare minimum. According to new global research from Culture Amp, which analyzed the experience of 3.3 million employees worldwide, fewer than 2% fit into the definition of quiet quitting—that is, employees who lack motivation to go above and beyond but still plan to stay with their company. That finding challenges the viral narrative, suggesting that what’s happening inside organizations is more nuanced than a mass wi…

You’re probably winding down from work and getting ready for a few days at home with your family. But anybody with caregiving responsibility knows that the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks will not be relaxing. Since the United States does not have a federal policy that gives workers paid time off after giving birth, having a medical procedure, or to care for a loved one, many will cram this labor into their precious holiday time. Many of us have a colleague who will come back to work exhausted after spending time with a dying parent, having taken advantage of the time off from work to figure out hospice and funeral arrangements. Or one who will be caring for a sibl…

A copy of the first Superman issue, unearthed by three brothers cleaning out their late mother’s attic, netted $9.12 million this month at a Texas auction house which says it is the most expensive comic book ever sold. The brothers discovered the comic book in a cardboard box beneath layers of brittle newspapers, dust and cobwebs in their deceased mother’s San Francisco home last year, alongside a handful of other rare comics that she and her sibling had collected on the cusp of World War II. She had told her children she had a valuable comic book collection hidden away, but they had never seen it until they put her house up for sale and decided to comb through her belo…

The line between human and machine authorship is blurring, particularly as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell whether something was written by a person or AI. Now, in what may seem like a tipping point, the digital marketing firm Graphite recently published a study showing that more than 50% of articles on the web are being generated by artificial intelligence. As a scholar who explores how AI is built, how people are using it in their everyday lives, and how it’s affecting culture, I’ve thought a lot about what this technology can do and where it falls short. If you’re more likely to read something written by AI than by a human on the internet, is it …

When a company with tens of thousands of software engineers found that uptake of a new AI-powered tool was lagging well below 50%, they wanted to know why. It turned out that the problem wasn’t the technology itself. What was holding the company back was a mindset that saw AI use as akin to cheating. Those who used the tool were perceived as less skilled than their colleagues, even when their work output was identical. Not surprisingly, most of the engineers chose not to risk their reputations and carried on working in the traditional way. These kinds of self-defeating attitudes aren’t limited to one company—they are endemic across the business world. Organizations ar…

Dick’s Sporting Goods (NYSE: DKS) announced it will close select Foot Locker stores and raised its full-year year outlook, in its third quarter earnings report on Tuesday. While Dick’s has not disclosed how many locations it will shutter (Fast Company has reached out for confirmation), it is part of a larger restructuring effort, according to executive chairman Ed Stack who spoke with CNBC. Dick’s acquired leading footwear and apparel retailer Foot Locker for $2.5 billion back in September, according to its latest earnings release. As of November 1, the company was operating 3,230 store locations across the combined Dick’s and Foot Locker businesses globally. …

Shares in Europe and Asia advanced on Wednesday after benchmarks on Wall Street surged on hopes the Federal Reserve will soon opt to cut interest rates. The future for the S&P 500 gained 0.3%, while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.2%. In early European trading, Germany’s DAX gained 0.2% to 23,500.98, while the CAC 40 in Paris also rose 0.2%, to 9,623.22. Britain’s FTSE 100 edged 0.1% higher. In Asia, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 rose 1.9% to 49,559.07 in a broad rally that encompassed major exporters and technology shares. However, shares in Kioxia dropped 14.9% on reports that Bain Capital plans to sell $2.3 billion of the computer memory maker’s shares. …

Most people don’t give the display screens on their commuter trains a second thought, but for designer Emily Sneddon, they’ve proved to be a well of inspiration. Sneddon lived in San Francisco, where she worked at the design agency Collins, from 2021 until this year when she moved back to her home country of Australia. She designed Fran Sans, her first ever font, after noticing the display on San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s (SFMTA) recently retired Muni Metro Breda Light Rail Vehicle. Unlike New York City, which handles its public transit through a single agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), public transportation in San Fra…

Let’s be honest: When we talk about workplace equity, menopause rarely makes the agenda. But it should. This life stage impacts half the workforce, often right when women are at the peak of their careers, influence, and leadership. As a CEO and advocate for women’s health, I’ve seen firsthand how menopause becomes an invisible career barrier. And now the data backs it up: Ignoring menopause in the workplace isn’t just a health oversight, it’s a systemic equity issue. According to the latest U.S. Census Bureau data, full-time, year-round working women earn only 81 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2024, a gap that’s actually widening. The year before, women e…

Enterprises across the globe are pouring an estimated $1.5 trillion into artificial intelligence, and the results are already significant: AI has added more than $400 billion to the U.S. economy alone. Yet beneath these headline numbers lies a less celebrated truth. Most GenAI projects (95%) are failing to deliver a return on investment. This disconnect isn’t a technology problem. It’s a transformation problem. And the fix is not coming from the boardroom or the IT department. It’s coming from the cubicles, the customer service desks, and the HR teams—the employees who know firsthand where bottlenecks and opportunities exist. THE BOTTOM-UP AI MOVEMENT New data,…

Circa 1450, the creative community was jolted. The printing press had just been invented in Europe. Scribes, typically monks who had spent lifetimes perfecting the spiritual art of hand-copying manuscripts, saw their specialized skills suddenly rendered obsolete. Yet in short order, the disruptive innovation democratized knowledge, enabled the Renaissance, and created entirely new creative roles for editors, typesetters, printmakers, and illustrators. More than five centuries later, Photoshop sparked similar concerns about devaluing traditional skills and compromising image integrity. Artists worried it would cheapen the craft. Instead, it became foundational to moder…

It’s that time of year again. My mailbox is stuffed with catalogs. Targeted seasonal ads from Amazon, Walmart, and Target are following me around the internet. And every other email in my overflowing inbox offers me the go-to 2025 gift guide for everyone on my list! Anyone else out there starting to dread gift-giving? Sometime in the past 30 years, cheaply made stuff became easily available at the click of a button on our phones, and that took a lot of the shine off of gifts. Not only did online shopping make it much easier to buy things for ourselves (whether we needed them or not), but also it was much easier to buy things for other people. And that influx o…

In the latest sign that the The President administration isn’t so concerned about asbestos, the Food and Drug Administration this week withdrew a proposed rule that would have required testing for the toxic asbestos in talc-based cosmetics. The rule, which was proposed by the Biden administration less than a year ago, would have required manufacturers to test cosmetics for asbestos and keep records demonstrating compliance. Exposure to asbestos has been linked to lung cancer, mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and laryngeal cancer, which is why various health agencies have determined there’s no “safe” level of exposure to this natural mineral. Johnson & Johnson has…

There’s an old myth that Inuit cultures have as many as a hundred words for snow. I remember learning about it in school, and there was just something wonderful about the idea that people’s perceptions can be so deeply rich and different. I guess that’s why, although it has been debunked many times, the story keeps getting repeated. There is also a lot of truth to the underlying concept. As anybody who has ever learned another language or lived in a different culture knows, people’s perceptions vary widely. In The WEIRDest People In The World, Harvard’s Joseph Henrich documents how important and interesting these differences can be. So if the Inuit snow myth hig…

Let’s be honest: email kinda sucks. It’s not just the writing: it’s also the reading, the sorting, the figuring out what the third reply in a 15-message chain is supposed to mean. The good news is that artificial intelligence is now genuinely helpful when it comes to the soul-crushing drudgery of email. Free up the hours you spend every week typing, reading, and agonizing with these practical, AI-infused ways to tame your email. Instant thread summaries We’ve all been copied on the 27-reply thread with the subject line, “RE: FW: Re: Quick question.” Reading it is an act of sheer madness. Don’t. Use an AI assistant built into your email client—such as Gemini…

“Parasocial” is the Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year. That feeling that you and Harry Styles would instantly become friends if you ever bumped into each other? Yes, that’s parasocial. The term dates back to 1956, coined by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl to describe how TV watchers formed “para-social” relationships with those on their screen. The word has taken on even greater meaning in the age of social media, where we have unparalleled access to the lives of influencers, online personalities, and celebrities via phones. Take Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement. The news triggered mass hysteria online, with many displaying genuin…

Now that AI can control your web browser, the next frontier might be to take over your entire computer. At least that’s what Seattle-based startup Vercept is trying to do with Vy, a currently free Windows and Mac app that can manipulate your mouse and keyboard to automate tedious or repetitive tasks. You just tell it what you’re trying to do, and then it takes control. Vy first launched as a beta for Macs in May, but has now been rebuilt and is available for Windows as well. My experiments with Vy have yielded mixed results. If you’ve ever yelled at ChatGPT for failing to follow instructions, that frustration becomes magnified when AI is piloting your entire compu…

The Koss Porta Pro headphones are one of the most iconic and popular designs in the history of audio equipment. The headphones were first released in 1984 in response to the rise of the Sony Walkman and aimed to translate the company’s audio prowess into a portable, affordable form factor. The results were unmistakably odd. The collapsible headband, blue driver housings and striking shape meant you could spot them from a mile away. But Koss managed to deliver its trademark warm, bassy sound signature into an accessible product, and its retro-futuristic industrial design has never quite gone out of style. Wikimedia Koss, which is still a family-run business head…

Even as the costs and challenges of doing business continues rising, there is a growing political effort creating artificial barriers that undermine business growth. Legislation and political directives are tying business leaders’ hands and limiting their choices in an increasingly diverse economy. National political rhetoric and autocratic use of federal and state agency authority preempt business leaders from doing anything with a hint of diversity, equity, or inclusion. This ultimately interferes with smart business decisions, restricts markets, and limits communities from achieving inclusive growth and shared prosperity. Inclusive growth should be practical busin…