What's on Your Mind?

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…

Africa’s official maps are stuck in the past, often either outdated, incomplete—or both. But governments don’t have the budgets to fix them, making it difficult to complete projects as complex as deciding where to put new solar plants to as simple as delivering a package. Now a new plan is underway to map the entire continent using satellite data and AI. “Maybe 90% of African countries don’t have access to an accurate current base map for their country,” says Sohail Elabd, global director of emerging markets at Esri, the mapping company behind the Map Africa Initiative. At a United Nations event last year, Elabd met the heads of national mapping departments from a…

The Thanksgiving travel period is in full swing. Today is the last day before Thanksgiving, which means millions of Americans will be taking to the skies to reach their holiday destinations. And myriad more will also be traveling to airports to pick up their incoming loved ones. But on one of the busiest travel days of the year, flight delays and cancellations are inevitable. Here are some tools to track delays, along with information on which airports are currently experiencing the worst delays and cancellations. FAA says this is the busiest Thanksgiving travel period in 15 years Earlier this week, Fast Company reported on the American Automobile Association (…

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, a time when we give thanks and practice gratitude for what we have, we turned to neuroscience to find out if doing so actually makes us happier and healthier. Here’s what we found. Is gratitude actually good for your health? “People who are grateful live longer, are happier, and also tend to hit workplace markers like [making] more money, and [getting] promoted more frequently,” Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Ph.D., science director at U.C. Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, tells Fast Company. “But the key is not a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach—no, it’s real gratitude, real contentment, based on an accurate assessment of …

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 …

No one can deny that the internet, especially social media, can pose significant dangers. Now, a new survey has found that about one in five parents and carers know—and have supported—a child who has experienced online blackmail. The survey, from the U.K.’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), also showed that one in ten of these individuals’ own children have experienced blackmail online. According to the NSPCC, bad actors often start communicating with young people on public platforms before actively moving the conversation to end-to-end encrypted messaging services—making it more challenging for them to be tracked. Only 43% o…

December is a month that many look forward to as holiday festivities kick into full gear and extended R&R with our loved ones nears. But for cryptocurrency investors, the month is off to anything but a good start. As of the time of this writing, cryptocurrency prices are down across the board on the first day of December trading. This encompasses significant price drops of major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and Solana. Here’s what you need to know. Cryptocurrencies begin December with steep declines Nearly every major cryptocurrency is seeing significant declines on the first trading day of December. As of the time of this writing, mo…

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…

“ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.” How many times have you seen that message? More importantly, how many times have you actually stopped to consider what it means? No doubt you’ve noticed it—along with millions of others who now rely on AI for everything from planning product launches and rewriting emails to turning their beloved pets into cartoons. The adoption speed has been remarkable. In just a few years, AI has gone from a buzzword to a daily fixture in countless workplaces. And for many, it’s already hard to remember what work looked like without it. Like anything that makes life easier, it’s easy to see why it caught on so quickl…

Below, Tim Elmore shares five key insights from his new book, The Future Begins with Z: Nine Strategies to Lead Generation Z as They Disrupt the Workplace. Elmore is the founder and CEO of Growing Leaders, a nonprofit dedicated to developing emerging leaders. As a speaker and coach, he has helped organizations from universities to Fortune 500 companies connect more effectively across generations. What’s the big idea? Many leaders are scratching their heads over Gen Z. The old playbook doesn’t work anymore—but figuring out how to engage and collaborate with this generation is what turns good leaders into great ones. Listen to the audio version of this Book B…

Marketing leaders have always been vital to the long-term success of beloved brands. But never before has the CMO position been more complex—and more essential to driving business results. This year’s honorees come from a wide variety of product categories—from toys and games to media, beauty, and food—but all demonstrate remarkable skill in navigating a diverse media landscape with platforms and campaigns that deepen their brands’ cultural impact, strengthen audience relationships, and achieve meaningful business outcomes. These leaders were selected based on the ambition, sophistication, innovation, and performance of their brand initiatives throughout the year.…

The Prada Group closed the purchase of Milan fashion rival Versace in a $1.375 billion cash deal that puts the fashion house known for its sexy silhouettes under the same roof as Prada’s “ugly chic” aesthetic and Miu Miu’s youth-driven appeal. The highly anticipated deal is expected to relaunch Versace’s fortunes, after middling post-pandemic performance as part of the U.S. luxury group Capri Holdings. Prada said in a one-line statement that the acquisition had been completed after receiving all regulatory clearances. Capri Holdings, which owns Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo, said the money would be used to pay down debt. Donatella Versace welcomed the deal in an Instagra…

A few blocks from my home sits a small Japanese grocery store that has been in the neighborhood for years. It’s the kind of place that once felt irreplaceable—carefully sourced ingredients, shelves stocked with items I couldn’t find in mainstream supermarkets, and an owner who knows her regulars. But much as I love this store, it has been in steady decline for a few years now. Whole Foods opened up nearby and it now stocks all the basics—miso paste, kombu, dashi packets, nori—that I, or anyone else, could want for weeknight Japanese cooking. Suddenly, the extra trip to the specialty shop felt unnecessary most of the time. The big chain became “good enough,” and in a w…

There’s a lot of chatter right now about an AI bubble, fueled in part by a perception that productivity gains from AI are largely illusory. I can’t speak to the market, and whether AI is broadly overvalued or undervalued, but I can tell you that in the past year alone, AI has completely transformed how I work. Looking at the tools today that didn’t exist a year ago—deep research, browser agents, the big leaps in performance for all the latest models—there’s a host of ways AI can speed up or enhance many tasks of knowledge workers, especially journalists. As an independent journalist, I’m perhaps a little less constrained than most (my AI policy is whatever I want it t…

Bringing a new drug to market usually requires a decade-long, multibillion-dollar journey, with a high failure rate in the clinical trial phase. Nvidia’s Kimberly Powell is at the center of a major industry effort to apply AI to the challenge. “If you look at the history of drug discovery, we’ve been kind of circling around the same targets for a long time, and we’ve largely exhausted the drugs for those targets,” she says. A “target” is a biological molecule, often a protein, that’s causing a disease. But human biology is extraordinarily complex, and many diseases are likely caused by multiple targets. “That’s why cancer is so hard,” says Powell. “Because it’s many …

Rachel Taylor began her career as a creative director in the advertising business, a job that gave her plenty of opportunity to micromanage the final product. “I had control of the script,” she remembers. “I could think about the intonation, and I could give the actor notes.” That was before she pivoted to helping AI companies shape the personality of their assistants. Rather than handing a digital helper a script, the best she can do is point it in the right direction: The technology “sometimes feels like a toddler that you give a permanent marker to and see what it writes on the wall,” she says. After joining DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman’s startup Inflect…

Andreessen Horowitz investors (and identical twins) Justine and Olivia Moore have been in venture capital since their undergraduate days at Stanford University, where, in 2015, they cofounded an incubator called Cardinal Ventures to help students pursue business ideas while still in school. Founding it also gave the Moores an entry point into the broader VC industry. “The thing about starting a startup incubator at Stanford is all the VCs want to meet you, even if you have no idea what you’re doing, which we did not back then,” Olivia says. At the time, the app economy was booming, and services around things like food delivery and dating proliferated, recalls Just…

Adidas defeated an appeal on Wednesday by U.S. shareholders who said the footwear and apparel maker fraudulently concealed antisemitic and other improper behavior by Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, before its partnership with the rapper and fashion designer imploded in 2022. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Adidas did not mislead shareholders in its annual reports by saying improper behavior by partners from the entertainment industry could have a negative spill-over effect on business. “A reasonable investor would know that a partnership with a celebrity partner like Ye would come with inherent risks relating to improper behavior,” a …

The numbers are in for Spotify Wrapped: After the streaming music app dropped its popular year-in-review recap for 2025, the company said it has already seen a huge increase in user engagement, hitting 200 million users just 24 hours after the recap’s release, a 19% increase year-over-year (YOY). Compare that with last year, when it took 62 hours to hit that same number. Why the uptick in user engagement? One reason could be because the platform is growing. A look at the numbers shows Spotify’s monthly active users grew 11% YOY to 713 million in Q3 of 2025, according to the company’s third quarter earnings report. Spotify Wrapped is for sharing Sharing …

When Jon LaMantia, a Long Island-based business reporter, was in journalism school, his professor drilled one rule into his students: you get two exclamation points a year and no more. “So if you use them in January,” LaMantia recalls being told, “you better hope there’s nothing to exclaim for the rest of the year.” The rule stuck. LaMantia still thinks about that rigid quota today. “I use exclamation points all the time in texts and emails. If you don’t, the message sounds more stern,” he says. “But I can’t remember the last time I used one in a business article.” Strong feelings about the exclamation point aren’t uncommon. People tend to either love it or l…

While the iPhone 17 is expected to be one of the hottest gifts this holiday season, some of the early adopters of Apple’s latest phone may be moving on to something different already. New data from B-Stock, a B2B marketplace for wholesale liquidation of returned and overstock inventory, finds that large cellular carriers are already moving “bulk quantities” of iPhone 17s through the resale channels for B2B customers. One sale on the site currently offers 111 iPhone 17 Pro Max units (with bidding for the lot standing at $80,200 as of Wednesday afternoon). All totaled, there were more than 300 iPhone 17 devices up for resale on the site as of Wednesday. The sale…

Columbia Sportswear just lauched its Endor collection, and I want it all. Inspired by the clothes worn by the rebel squad that took on the Death Star’s shield generator in Return of the Jedi, it’s the latest and largest Star Wars drop from Portland, Oregon-based company. It’s also the best fit for the brand since its Empire Strikes Back‘s Echo Base Han Solo parkas, which I missed back in 2017, and I will forever feel like a dumb Tauntaun for not grabbing one (they run for almost $1,000 each now). The highlight of the collection is General Han Solo’s Trench, a $600 jacket that mimics the camouflage duster that Harrison Ford wore while leading the strike team on the…