What's on Your Mind?

Changing an organism’s genome is a profound act, and the tools you use to make the changes don’t alleviate the need for responsible regulation. Since bursting onto the scene in 2012, CRISPR technology has been used to modify dozens of species from bacteria to livestock to plants, and even human embryos. Many countries have put ethical guardrails in place to prohibit creating designer babies. However, in agriculture, gene-edited crops are largely exempt from regulatory oversight, creating a “Wild West” where anything goes and edited crops are free to enter the food supply. Unlike “traditional” genetically modified organisms (GMO)—used since the 1990s to create Roun…

As a physician at Duke, I often saw how women, especially those juggling chronic illness, caregiving, and limited healthcare access, faced delays in getting the right care. What stood out wasn’t just the complexity of their conditions, but how predictable the barriers were. Women face unique challenges in getting timely access to the care they need. Many care options are simply inconvenient and often do not meet patients where they are. For example, forcing a busy working mom to take the day off work, driving 30 minutes for a routine screening can be a challenge if having to juggle a 9-5 and childcare too. Many women are caregivers for aging parents or children, compo…

We have reached the moment white collar workers have feared for months. Has AI finally come for my job? Companies like Salesforce claim they need fewer human employees to do the work AI can tackle, after laying off thousands. Klarna claims the company was able to shrink its headcount by about 40%, in part because of AI. Duolingo said last spring it will stop using contractors for work that AI can handle. Overall, companies have announced a staggering 700,000 job cuts in the first five months of 2025, an 80% jump from the previous year. The irony is almost poetic. For years, the tech industry assumed robots would come for factory workers first. Amazon’s leaked documen…

Meta allegedly stopped internal research on social media’s impact on people after finding negative results, a court filing released Friday claims. The filing took place in a Northern California District Court, as a group of U.S. state attorneys general, school districts, and parents launched a suit against Meta, Google-owned YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. The court documents allege that Meta misled the public on the mental health risks to children and young adults who excessively use Facebook and Instagram, even though its research showed that the social media apps had demonstrated harm. “The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation stud…

Just know this: There’s going to be a conversation about artificial intelligence at Thanksgiving this year. An AI superfan is going to gush about chatbots and go on, at length, about how “These things just seem to know everything.” The dinner table’s funnyman will play a highly cringe video they made with the technology. Someone else will either be flummoxed or horrified. A proud guest will declare a vow of abstinence—in fact, they’ve never even used ChatGPT, they will reveal. One self-important guest will feel very smart when recounting the time they caught an AI making a mistake, once. They’ll tell everyone about it. These conversations will be bad. There will…

The number of people who have come to me whispering, “I want to be seen as a thought leader.” And yet when I say, “Amazing, let’s put you on camera,” I’m suddenly met with . . . crickets. I get it. Putting yourself out there can feel awkward. Exposed. Vulnerable. That’s how I feel about dancing in public. It’s my own personal nightmare. At Zumba, I’m hiding behind the water cooler. At my wedding, my husband had to mouth the 1-2-3-4 count so I wouldn’t lose the beat. And recently at a music festival, the band leader pointed at me to come dance on stage. I prayed he was pointing to the person behind me. Nope. As I sheepishly walked up the stairs to the stage, …

In an age of high-turnover trends, ubiquitous screens, and fractured attention spans, a lengthy televised parade organized by a venerable department store sounds like a relic of a bygone era. But somehow, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has in recent years proved itself to be startlingly popular and relevant. In 2024, the parade drew an estimated 31.7 million viewers on NBC’s broadcast and Peacock stream—an all-time record, and a bigger audience than the Oscars or any entertainment broadcast. This year’s parade will include, along with balloons featuring legacy characters like Snoopy and Minnie Mouse, a Pop Mart float with an oversized Labubu, a Stranger Things flo…

Hooboy, here we go again. Chevrolet has once more rolled out a tearjerker ad for the holidays. Created by ad agency Anomaly, “Memory Lane” follows an older couple on their annual holiday drive to the family cottage in their well-loved 1987 Suburban. The trip takes them back to holiday memories and moments of years past that helped build their family. We see the kids go from babies and toddlers to bickering back-seat siblings to near-silent teens, all on the way to meeting them again as adults. For just about any parent, this is an absolute field-goal kick to the cryballs. It’s a story that is specific to this fictional group, but a sentiment that will touch …

A new study from MIT that shows that AI might be poised to replace a lot more jobs than what initial estimates might predict. According to researchers, a hidden mass of data reveals that AI is currently capable of taking over 11.7% of the labor market. The new estimate comes courtesy of a project called The Iceberg Index, which was made through a partnership between MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a federally funded research center in Tennessee. According to its website, the Iceberg Index “simulates an agentic U.S.—a human-AI workforce where 151M+ human workers coordinate with thousands of AI agents.” In simpler terms, the tool is designed to simulate pr…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. National home prices rose +0.1% year-over-year between October 2024 and October 2025, according to the Zillow Home Value Index reading published last week—a decelerated rate from the +2.4% year-over-year rate between October 2023 and October 2024. In the first half of 2025, the number of major metro area housing markets seeing year-over-year declines climbed. That count has since stopped ticking up. —> 31 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 10% of markets) had a falling year-over-year reading in the January 2024 to January 2025 …

For the past 99 years at Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, spectators have craned their necks to watch giant balloons and larger-than-life floats pass through the streets of New York City. But a word to the wise this year: Don’t forget to look down. You might just catch a glimpse of the tiniest float in the parade’s history. The float—which is 49 times smaller than the average display—comes courtesy of Goldfish, which is returning to the parade for the first time in more than a decade. The float’s design features a wintery snowscape covered with frolicking Goldfish crackers towed by an equally tiny Ram truck. According to Brendan Kennedy, director of creative pr…

Every year, companies and space agencies launch hundreds of rockets into space—and that number is set to grow dramatically with ambitious missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But these dreams hinge on one critical challenge: propulsion—the methods used to push rockets and spacecraft forward. To make interplanetary travel faster, safer, and more efficient, scientists need breakthroughs in propulsion technology. Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs. We’re a team of engineers and graduate students who are studying how AI in general, and a subset of AI called machine learning in particular…

If you loved the Lego Game Boy but couldn’t get yourself to buy it because it was only a display piece that couldn’t play actual Game Boy games, I’ve got great news for you: It’s no longer merely a clever block of bricks. Substance Labs, a merry band of Lego and gaming lovers based in Switzerland, have created a kit that retrofits the official brick-perfect Lego set into an unofficial pixel-perfect playable Game Boy. The name of this wündertronics is BrickBoy. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter project, so the usual “may not deliver” caveats apply. Substance Labs calls itself “a team of creators and engineers who grew up building with Lego and gaming on the classics [who hav…

A growing number of Amazon employees have signed onto an open letter issuing some dire warnings about the company’s sprint toward AI. The letter, signed by more than 1,000 workers and published this week, calls out Amazon for pushing its AI investments at the expense of the climate and its human workforce. The letter’s supporters come from a wide array of roles at the company, including many software engineers, and even employees focused on building AI systems. “We believe that the all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development will do staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth,” the letter’s authors wrote. “We’re the workers who de…

Three years ago, if someone needed to fix a leaky faucet or understand inflation, they usually did one of three things: typed the question into Google, searched YouTube for a how-to video or shouted desperately at Alexa for help. Today, millions of people start with a different approach: They open ChatGPT and just ask. I’m a professor and director of research impact and AI strategy at Mississippi State University Libraries. As a scholar who studies information retrieval, I see that this shift of the tool people reach for first for finding information is at the heart of how ChatGPT has changed everyday technology use. Change in searching The biggest change i…

This summer, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman became co-owners of Australia’s three-time champion SailGP team. Days earlier, Anne Hathaway joined a female-led consortium purchasing Italy’s team for around $45 million. Kylian Mbappé has bought into France’s squad, while Sebastian Vettel, Deontay Wilder, and DeAndre Hopkins have each acquired stakes in teams. So, what’s drawing A-list celebrities away from traditional sports properties and toward a sailing league that’s only been around for six years? The answer lies in how SailGP has cracked a code that eluded the sport for centuries. What Russell Coutts, the league’s CEO and cofounder, described as once being “white…

Research shows employees who engage in unethical behavior—surprisingly—are not new to their organizations. They have been there for a considerable amount of time, typically at least six years, and have risen through their companies. Worse, the longer they have been with their organizations, the greater the financial and reputational damage when unethical behavior occurs. And though we might think of corporate misconduct as C-suite malfeasance, unethical behavior can occur at all levels—and many offenders have a steady career path. It begs the question: could an ethical assessment have been designed during their career progression to have detected someone being more s…

Just like any new form of entertainment initially popular among kids and teenagers, video games got their share of suspicion, disdain, and even fearmongering. Today, they are a fully legitimate part of pop culture, but the narrative of video games being a waste of time is still alive. It’s highly unlikely to see a productivity guru advising you to play a video game. That said, as both a venture investor and a gamer, I insist that video games aren’t counterproductive. On the contrary, they help to develop skills that VCs, entrepreneurs, managers, and leaders need, while allowing you to take your mind off of stressors and recharge. My twin brother, Roman, and I ha…

Below, Jon Levy shares five key insights from his new book, Team Intelligence: How Brilliant Leaders Unlock Collective Genius. Levy is a behavioral scientist. For the last 15 years, he has studied what makes leaders and teams succeed, working with everyone from Nobel laureates to Olympic captains and Fortune 500 executives. He is also the founder of The Influencers, a one-of-a-kind private dining club with thousands of members, many of whom are some of the world’s most respected leaders. What’s the big idea? Success isn’t about raw talent or a single heroic leader. It’s about how we align, focus, and unlock the resources within our teams. Intelligent teams crea…

Ed Zitron peels off his green button-up shirt to reveal the gray tee beneath. Now properly uniformed, two cans of Diet Coke queued up before him, he’s ready to record this week’s episode of his podcast, Better Offline, at audio behemoth iHeartMedia’s midtown Manhattan studio. The topic on this July afternoon, as usual, is artificial intelligence. One of Zitron’s guests, screenwriter, director, and producer Brian Koppelman, talks about paying $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro. When Koppelman earnestly asks, “Do you not think AI is mind-bogglingly great at times?” Zitron’s answer—“No!”—comes so quickly it seems to spring directly from his cerebral cortex. It would have b…

To a certain point, cars are fantastic inventions making it easy to get to far-flung places, opening doors for new places to live or work or play. But there’s a tipping point when the built environment and our lives are arranged around motor vehicles where the benefits start to come undone. Building to prioritize space-hogging cars brings a long list of negative externalities. In Greek mythology, the god Dionysus granted King Midas his wish for the power to turn everything he touched to gold. Midas revels in the effortless wealth—objects, furniture, and even the ground beneath him turn to gold. The Midas touch was great right up until he wanted to eat or drink or jus…

When the Los Angeles wildfires swept through the city earlier this year, experts flocked to the internet to dissect the anatomy of a fire-resistant building. Many of them ended up describing bunker-like architecture with boxy buildings, sparse landscape, and lots of concrete. A new building in Malibu offers a more nuanced approach. Malibu High School, which opened in August, is located in an area that Cal Fire (the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) recently designated as a very high fire hazard severity zone. This means that the school, which has replaced a nondescript building from the 1950s, had to comply with stringent fire safety regulations. …

As the U.S. and China battle over technology, tariffs, and global influence, one question still looms for Europeans: what is Europe’s edge? That was the question recently posed by 21st Century, a Copenhagen-based think tank that collaborates with policymakers and thought leaders to explore the future of Europe. According to Johanna Fabrin, managing director and partner at 21st Century, the answer lies in the EU’s regulatory backbone—think GDPR-level data protection, rigorous environmental standards, and food‑safety rules. “From a consumer perspective, knowing that if something is made in Europe, there will not be arsenic in it, there’s that trust that is important,” s…

“Zootopia 2” had a roaring and record-setting opening at the box office. The animated animal city sequel from the Walt Disney Company brought in $96 million in North America over the weekend, earned $156 million over the five-day Thanksgiving frame, and scored a staggering $556 million globally since its Wednesday opening, according to studio estimates Sunday. That made it the highest international opening ever for an animated movie, the fourth highest global debut of any kind, and the top international opener of 2025. “Wicked: For Good” stayed aloft in its second weekend for Universal Pictures, earning another $62.8 million domestically over the weekend for a North Am…

Gustaf Westman, the homeware designer known for his delightfully chunky objects, just unveiled his latest project. It’s a shelf inspired by classic puzzles. Gustaf Westman In a new video posted to his Instagram, Westman introduces the Puzzle Shelf, a modular unit that comes in the form of several components resembling giant puzzle pieces. Users can assemble the shelf however they see fit, as well as select their own piece colors, which include white, forest green, fire-engine red, pink, a range of blues, and even a metallic silver. It’s currently available on a made-to-order basis, as each unique shelf is produced by a London-based 3D-print artist. Westman’s ir…