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Oil prices declined on Friday, after settling around 1.6% lower in the previous session, as the market’s risk premium faded after Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of a plan to end the war in Gaza. Brent crude futures were down 66 cents, or 1%, at $64.56 a barrel at 1016 GMT. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude was down 61 cents, or 1%, to $60.90. “Finally having some kind of peace process in the Middle East is lowering the shoulders a little bit,” said Bjarne Schieldrop, chief commodities analyst at SEB. This could ease fears about crude carriers passing through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, he said. BOTH BENCHMARKS ON TRACK FOR WEEKLY GAINS Isra…

Oil prices are on the rise, hitting an 18-month high as of Tuesday as the conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran continues. The war against Iran, which started in earnest over the past weekend, has disrupted oil and gas shipments in the Middle East, constricting supply, and with no clear timetable as to when the war could end (or if there’s a plan for a drawdown), markets are spooked about the potential for a prolonged conflict and market hiccups. Specifically, concerns about shipments getting through the Strait of Hormuz—a busy shipping lane for fossil fuel-carrying tankers—have been effectively stopped, and no one knows with any certainty as to when i…

For three weeks now, OK Go has been on set in Budapest’s largest train station. The temperature in this wing is somewhere around 45 degrees, and much of the Hungarian filming crew has long ago gone numb. Against Keleti station’s baroque backdrop of frescos and pink marble pillars, the band has been working with roboticists and production designers to build one of its most complex music videos ever for a new song called “Love”. The video’s 140-foot-long contraption is built from 29 robots holding 60 mirrors that, in one long tracking shot, will crescendo into a brain-bending photonic spectacle of car-size kaleidoscopes and glimpses into the infinite. It’s almost lu…

Amazon is well aware that you’re spending hours agonizing over the reviews for seven different near-identical toaster ovens before you actually make a decision. Now, it has an AI feature for that—and we have to admit, it’s pretty helpful. “Help me decide” is a new AI shopping function that rolled out on October 23 across millions of U.S. customers on the Amazon shopping app and mobile browser. It uses large language models and AI tools from Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) suite of offerings to analyze your shopping history, purchase details, and preferences, and then match those insights with product details and customer reviews to recommend products that you might be most…

Spicy pickle soda. Dirty protein soda. Cereal milk soda. These aren’t your standard mocktail offerings—but that’s exactly the point. On May 12, Olipop will launch its first-ever soda drive-thru in Los Angeles, offering an array of offbeat, internet-inspired drinks and limited-edition mocktails, with the first drink free to the public. The pop-up event taps into the internet’s growing obsession with so-called “beverage goblin” culture, which has people cycling through multiple drinks at once for hydration, energy, and fun. “There’s just so much chatter around just these internet drinks and the whole like beverage goblin trend, where people have their hydration drin…

With her first two albums, Olivia Rodrigo established a pattern. Her signature color? Purple, which served as the backdrop for both covers. Her naming convention? Four-letter words, stylized in all-caps: SOUR for her 2021 debut and GUTS for her 2023 follow-up. But on Thursday, April 2, Rodrigo shocked her fans with the announcement of her third album, titled you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. The cover art, which features Rodgrio upside down on a swing framed against a grayish-blue sky, has no shades of purple to be seen. The album’s title doesn’t just ditch her previous naming convention, but inverts it. Rather than a monosyllabic word, it’s a full-fledged s…

Over the weekend, crypto traders were likely anything but zen, as the price of OM—the native token to the Mantra blockchain—crashed more than 90%. On Sunday, OM prices fell from around $6.30 to less than $0.50 within a couple of hours, shaking up the crypto markets and likely leaving many people with crypto holdings wondering if they were witnessing another catastrophe like the FTX collapse. But that doesn’t appear to be the case so far. Here’s a rundown of the important facts to know, as we understand them on Monday morning. What happened with Mantra? As noted, OM values plummeted sharply on Sunday, April 14 by more than 90%. It was unclear what exactly wa…

Omnicom said on Monday it will lay off more than 4,000 employees and fold several well-known advertising agency brands after its $13 billion acquisition of rival Interpublic Group. The advertising industry faces a serious threat as artificial intelligence reshapes creative production and tech giants such as Meta make it easier for businesses to churn out ads at scale and speed. Omnicom’s high-stakes acquisition of Interpublic Group, which was completed in November, aims to regain momentum in this shifting landscape, as it contends with fierce competition from French ad giant Publicis and UK’s WPP. The company said creative agency DDB, founded in 1949, and crea…

On Running has hit 2025 at full speed, reporting Q1 earnings on Tuesday that saw the company grow sales by 43% year-over-year. It’s a reflection of the overall growth trajectory the Zurich-based athletic lifestyle brand has been on since it launched in 2010. With a healthy direct-to-consumer business, growing retail footprint (with 53 stores around the world), and cutting edge product innovation, On has built its brand around its product quality and sleek, simple design. But cofounder and executive cochairman Caspar Coppetti says that despite the healthy numbers, the brand still has plenty of room to grow, and it’s using its own unique combination of culture and…

While American workers face “forever layoffs” and struggle to find work in today’s tumultuous job market, some are reframing this era of unemployment and finding a silver lining in their personal economic meltdowns. “Laid off in June and the job market is so bad I decided to have a funemployed summer,” one TikTok creator posted earlier this year. Another wrote: “a weekday as a funemployed millennial.” In the video they wake up at 11 a.m. and scroll TikTok for an hour; after breakfast at 1 p.m., they journal, read, think about life, hit the gym, and then call it a day. Some funemployed were laid off. Some quit, lured by voluntary buyout programs. Some simply crav…

Causal dining chains had a pretty bad 2024 when it came to solvency issues. Major chains, including Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, and Roti, all filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year. And 2025 doesn’t seem to be fairing better for more restaurants. The latest restaurant chain to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection is the Tex-Mex casual dining chain On The Border Mexican Grill & Cantina. Here’s what you need to know about the company’s bankruptcy filing. Why is On The Border filing for bankruptcy? On March 5, OTB Holding LLC, owner of the On The Border chain, announced it had voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Georgia. …

Wall Street nudged past yesterday’s record highs in early trading Friday as investors continue to shrug off the U.S. government shutdown, now in its third day. Futures for S&P 500, Nasdaq and the Dow Jones Industrial Average all added 0.2% before the bell. All three closed at record levels on Thursday, boosted by gains of chipmakers and artificial intelligence companies. Markets have largely ignored the shutdown of the U.S. government after Democrat and Republican lawmakers failed to reach agreement on funding. U.S. President Donald The President and congressional leaders were not expected to meet again soon and the Democrats have held fast to their demands to pres…

Like clockwork, 5 p.m. on a Sunday, flashes of unread emails and notifications for tomorrow’s upcoming meetings start. Your shoulders tense, your stomach knots. You have a case of the Sunday scaries. This unsettling feeling is a form of anticipatory anxiety that creeps in as the weekend draws to a close and Monday looms with the responsibilities of the week ahead. If you can relate, you’re not alone: New data suggests the vast majority of workers experience this anxiety, and it also suggests some workers feel it worse than others. Adobe Acrobat surveyed over 1,000 full-time employees and found 82% experience this sense of anxiety before the workweek even begins. …

Thank you for reading Modern CEO. Before we dive into this week’s topic, please check out our first livestreamed event exclusively for Modern CEO subscribers: On Monday, May 18, at 1 p.m. ET, I’m hosting The CEO’s Guide to AI. Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies, will help leaders understand where AI can have an impact—and what’s hype. You can RSVP here, and if you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up here. And if you have questions for Matt, you can submit them to stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. One of my first Modern CEO newsletters highlighted the opportunity for CEOs to have constructive conversations with organized labor. It was a contrary take a…

Bad, yet still pretty good, American cheese refuses to expire—and not just because of all the preservatives. American cheese—pasteurized, processed, and super-melty—is, for better or worse, arguably the 20th century’s most iconic food product. And yes, “pasteurized, processed cheese food” is what federal regulators call it instead of “cheese.” It is a paradox embraced shamelessly by some of the most elite food names around. From Salt Fat Acid Heat author Samin Nosrat (“I have a secret love of American cheese, the yellow kind that has a plasticky quality when it melts”), to J. Kenji López-Alt, whose The Food Lab dedicates a chapter to the science of melting cheese …

TikTok is a one-stop-shop for recipe inspo, viral dance trends, tin-foil-hat conspiracies, and, increasingly, political commentary. Now, it’s also where one in five Americans are getting their news. That’s according to a Pew Research Center analysis published last week, which has tracked a dramatic uptick in news consumption on the platform, up from just 3% in 2020. “During that span, no social media platform we’ve studied has experienced faster growth in news consumption,” Pew noted. In Pew’s survey, 43% of adults under 30 said they regularly get their news on TikTok, up from 9% five years ago. But it’s not just younger people. A quarter of adults between the …

Microsoft’s recently announced use of a West Virginia data center that will run entirely on natural gas could cause the company’s emissions to skyrocket by 44%. That’s according to a new report from Stand.earth researchers, who say Microsoft’s power needs at the facility will see it burning the same amount of methane as annually as more than 1.2 million homes. The data center, called the Monarch Compute Campus, is an example of a “behind-the-meter” or “off-grid” data center, which generates its own electricity, bypassing the public grid. With the growth of AI data centers threatening to overload the electricity grid and raise residents’ energy bills, these…

Weeks ahead of his death, Pope Francis dedicated this month’s prayer intention to new technologies and the hope that it can serve “every person, especially the weakest.” “How I would like for us to look less at screens and look each other in the eyes more,” Pope Francis said in a prerecorded video released April 1. “Something’s wrong if we spend more time on our cellphones than with people. The screen makes us forget that there are real people behind it who breathe, laugh, and cry.” Pope Francis died at 88 Monday morning, the Vatican announced in a statement on X, just after his appearance in St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday. Pope Francis, in his 12-year papac…

Red Lobster might be taking an old page from its playbook to win over consumers’ hearts. The seafood restaurant chain is reportedly considering the return of endless shrimp, the all-you-can-eat deal that was one of Red Lobster’s most iconic promotions. Although the promotion dates back decades, it was originally only offered for limited amounts of time—that is, until previous owner Thai Group made it a permanent menu fixture in June 2023. At $20 for bottomless shrimp, many argue the move contributed to the seafood chain’s financial woes and its eventual Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2024. According to bankruptcy filings at the time, the year-round endles…