What's on Your Mind?

Ocean waves could be an enormous source of power for the grid: in the U.S., the motion of waves along coastlines could generate as much as 1.4 trillion kilowatt-hours a year, or around a third of the electricity that Americans currently use. But wave power lags far behind other renewable energy. While solar and wind dominate new power installations worldwide, wave energy remains confined to small pilot projects. This makes sense: It’s more expensive to build. And harsh ocean conditions make equipment vulnerable to damage in storms. But in Morocco, one startup is pioneering new technology that could make wave energy more viable, with projects now moving forward at …

The National Park Service will offer free admission to U.S. residents on President Donald The President‘s birthday next year — which also happens to be Flag Day — but is eliminating the benefit for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth. The new list of free admission days for Americans is the latest example of the The President administration downplaying America’s civil rights history while also promoting the president’s image, name, and legacy. Last year, the list of free days included Martin Luther King Jr Day and Juneteenth — which is June 19 — but not June 14, The President’s birthday. The new free-admission policy takes effect Jan. 1 and was one of se…

Letterboxd, the movie tracking app and social media platform for cinephiles, first announced its new online film rental platform earlier this year at Cannes Film Festival. Now, more details about the launch date and titles have been revealed. The Video Store will officially launch on Wednesday, December 10, and will feature nine films across two curated shelves, which includes titles from nine countries. Here’s some of what film fans can expect: Think a Todd Haynes deep cut, to a restored version of a Filipino classic, and more, including Chile and Indonesia’s submissions for the upcoming 98th Academy Awards, a hit from the 2025 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, a…

Planner vs. Engineer is a well-known professional rivalry in the infrastructure world. The arguments are sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, sometimes about important issues, sometimes insignificant. I’m in a peculiar spot because of my career as a “plangineer.” My parents helped me buy a civil engineering degree, but several years into my career, I bought the certified planning certificate. I know the two camps very well. The roundabout question Roundabouts are one of the many Planner vs. Engineer debates, and it happens to be a very important issue where emotions cloud good judgment. As much as I criticize the engineering profession, they are generally correc…

The new Pentagon press corps gathered last week for their first in-person briefing. That’s since almost all credentialed reporters from traditional media companies surrendered their passes in October to protest new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s strict media policy. Refusing to sign a 21-page Pentagon document that in effect banned journalists from trying to solicit any kind of information that was not pre-approved, the Pentagon instead issued passes to a newly credentialed corps of influencers, conspiracy theorists, and conservative commentators who happily agreed to the strict rules. The handpicked press corps were active on social media last week as they doc…

From return-to-office mandates, anxiety about AI taking (or reshaping) jobs, and a highly competitive atmosphere for recent graduates and other job seekers, 2025 has been a year of change. It’s also been a big year of change for women in the workplace, with a record number exiting the workforce. And, according to a new report, women are now also less inclined to seek promotions. LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Co. just released their 2025 Women in the Workplace report based on a survey of 124 organizations employing around 3 million people. The survey research found that while companies overwhelmingly say that diversity (67%) and inclusion (84%) are top priorities, just…

For most leaders these last five years have been ones of great volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Political dynamics, economic shifts, massive layoffs, strategy pivots, technology disruptions, and more are shaping how we lead and what we can accomplish together. Leading through uncertainty is no longer a mere possibility, it’s core to the job description. Times of uncertainty call for fast executive decision-making with limited information, “good enough” risk assessment, and repeated pivots. I know this because I led a global philanthropy network while the world shut down in 2020. During those initial months, I relied less on staff input to determine…

A majority of those expecting a holiday bonus this year are planning to check out once the check clears. According to a recent survey of 2,000 American workers by AI job application assistant JobHire AI, 59% are “maybe” or “definitely” expecting a bonus this year. Among them, 48% are already job hunting or planning to quit after their bonus is paid, and another 20% are considering leaving in the new year. The job market often sees a lot of activity following the holiday lull, as many spend the break reflecting on the previous year and setting goals for the next. This year, however, may see even more aggressive job -hopping, as many workers have become more f…

The hype train on corporate purpose keeps steaming down the tracks. I have written about it before and tried to be positive. But I feel the need to be more constructively critical. If everyone has been convinced that they need to have a corporate purpose, let’s at least have it be a useful one. I try to contribute to that goal in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here. The hype train The articles and books on corporate purpose just keep coming. For example, in the past month alone, Harvard Business Review published four pieces on purpose (one, two, three, four). And the books keep coming, w…

Judge a book by its cover, and you might think that American Canto, the memoir by Vanity Fair‘s outgoing West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi, is destined to be a classic. The memoir, which chronicles Nuzzi’s drama-filled life and career as a political reporter in the The President era, features a strikingly simple cover that serves as shorthand for the book’s ambitions. “The intent was to give the book a clean, no-frills design that felt both classic and contemporary,” says Simon & Schuster senior art director Alison Forner, who’s also designed book covers like Ezra Klein’s all-type cover Why We’re Polarized and Garrett M. Graff’s Watergate: A New History. Nuzz…

Enterprises have often dreamed about AI systems that can reason across their most sensitive data, execute multistep tasks, and explain their logic while remaining inside a highly governed environment. Snowflake and Anthropic are betting they can finally crack the code. Through a multiyear, $200-million expansion of their agentic AI partnership, the companies plan to deliver an operational “control plane” that uses Anthropic’s latest Claude models, such as Sonnet and Opus 4.5, to power enterprise intelligence. The announcement landed alongside Snowflake’s Q3 earnings for fiscal year 2025, which showed the company maintaining strong momentum. Snowflake reported $1.21…

President Donald The President has always been a master marketer. He is particularly adept at lending his name to products and buildings, which has proven to be a lucrative business. Now in office, he’s bringing that same licensing mindset to the very act of governing. Last week, the State Department said it renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) after The President and put his name on its building in Washington, D.C. This comes after The President fired the board members and nearly all U.S. employees of the USIP. The USIP’s open, natural-light-drenched headquarters was designed by Safdie Architects to symbolize conflict resolution. But it has ironically becom…

After Joey Zwillinger stepped down as CEO of Allbirds in March 2024, he took three months off—mainly because his wife Liz said she’d divorce him if he jumped into another venture. He had run the sustainable shoe company for 10 years while the couple raised their three young children. “It took a real toll on the family,” Liz says. (“I would say it developed character in our family,” Zwillinger counters.) Before long, he was itching to start a new project, an ambition he shyly expressed to his wife. “It was really hard to want to sign up for something like that all over again,” Liz says. But this time, he cofounded the venture with Liz. It’s also a bold piv…

When it comes to major U.S. industries, three tends to be the magic number. Historically, auto manufacturing was long dominated by Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors—the so-called “Big Three,” which at one point controlled over 60% of the U.S. auto market. A dominant trio shows up elsewhere, too, in everything from the U.S. defense market—think Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman—to cellphone service providers (AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon). The same goes for the U.S. airline industry, in which American, Delta, and United fly higher than the rest. The rule of three also applies to what Americans watch; the glory days of television were dominated by th…

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has created a new $1 billion grant program to make U.S. airports more family- and health-friendly. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy launched the “Make Travel Family Friendly Again” campaign alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday, December 8, at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. “I am talking about ushering in the golden age of transportation,” Duffy said, adding they are hiring more air traffic controllers, and asking retiring air traffic controllers to stay on the job. However, the Transportation Secretary said the funding is dedicated to “making the experience better in airports and its…

Some bad news for Americans with student loans. The The President administration’s Department of Education announced on Tuesday that millions of borrowers who are enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan may soon need to select a new repayment plan, part of a settlement with the state of Missouri. If approved, the move could force millions of Americans to repay their federal student loans, ending the current pause in payments and interest aimed at student debt relief, a holdover from the Biden administration. What is Saving on a Valuable Education plan, or SAVE? SAVE is a popular federal student loan income-driven repayment plan (IDR), …

If your home insurance rate has spiked lately, you’re not alone. And President The President’s policies could make it even more expensive. Since 2021, at least 6 million policy holders across the country have seen rate hikes to their property insurance policies, according to a new report from environmental advocacy group Climate Power. Insurers have also canceled at least 1.4 million policies in that time. One big reason is the worsening climate crisis, which is driving more and more instances of extreme weather. Inflation, labor shortages, and supply chain issues are also factors, as they drive up the costs to rebuild a home. The The President administratio…

Some days, starting feels effortless. A clear challenge or opportunity presents itself, an idea crystallizes, and then contracts into a single coherent thought. Today, frankly? That’s not happening. I’m staring at a pristine white canvas while the cursor mocks me. That uncomfortable space—the blinking cursor, the first messy draft, the false starts—isn’t a nuisance. It’s where creativity lives. Today, the temptation is to skip past all that. With AI, you don’t even need to know where you’re going. The bot can map it out, hand you something good enough. But what does good enough mean if you didn’t wrestle with the idea yourself? A recent MIT Media Lab study, Your …

Lurking on sites like LinkedIn and Indeed, or among your incoming text messages and emails, lies yet another disappointment to dodge in the already lacking job market: fake recruiters. Posing as representatives from top companies, they’ll contact you out of the blue, offering a job so tempting, that 40% of targets ignore the warning signs and move forward with the “interview.” More than half of them, 51%, end up being scammed to give up personal data or money. Those findings came from a survey of more than 1,200 U.S. job seekers published in October by Password Manager. “The prevalence of fake recruiters came to my attention several years ago,” says Gunnar K…

The front of the Wheaties box has served as a hall of fame for some of the greatest athletes of all time, from baseball star Lou Gehrig to boxer Muhammid Ali, basketball legend Michael Jordan, and seven-time Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles. Now, a fresh face is gracing the box’s hallowed orange frame: Marty Mauser, the fictional ping-pong player played by Timothée Chalamet in A24’s upcoming film Marty Supreme. Instagram The cereal box comes just weeks after A24 released a now-viral 18-minute long parody of a marketing meeting to promote the movie (which releases on Christmas). In that video, Chalamet joins a Zoom call full of supposed marketing executives and pr…

Once upon a time, San Francisco was a manufacturing town. For decades, the Union Iron Works built ships—such as the U.S. Navy’s U.S.S. Oregon (1893) and U.S.S. Wisconsin (1898)—in its plant on Pier 70 in the neighborhood now known as Dogpatch. In recent years, that sprawling, long-abandoned complex has been rehabbed and filled with office space, housing, retail, and art studios. Among its tenants are startup accelerator Y Combinator and HR platform Gusto, neither of which has much in common with the Union Iron Works. And then there’s Astranis. The company is returning Pier 70 to its roots by applying human labor to turn raw materials into finished products. The produc…

A SpaceX initial public offering might be on the horizon. The aerospace company, run by founder and CEO Elon Musk, is reportedly planning an IPO aimed at raising over $30 billion, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter. The IPO could be as soon as mid- to late-2026 or 2027. In its recent 2026 US Venture Capital Outlook, PitchBook pointed to the rise in space-focused stock listings, citing favorable policies. Fast Company has reached out to SpaceX for comment and will update this post if we hear back. Reaching the $30 billion threshold would make SpaceX the largest IPO in history—and give it a reported $1.5 trillion valuatio…

It’s a common experience: you search for white bean soup recipes one time on Instagram, and you are bombarded with white bean soup content on the app for seemingly all eternity. Instagram wants to fix that. Starting today, the company’s three billion users can have more control over their algorithm via a “Tune Your Algorithm” feature. It’s not quite Bluesky, or the Instagram of yore that only displayed content from accounts users followed, but it does let users select or unsubscribe from different topics. The new feature, which leverages AI, lets users pick topics they want to see more or less of on their explore page. Users will first be able to see a list of su…

The Senate is heading toward dueling partisan votes on health care this week after Republicans said Tuesday that they had united around a plan, for now, that would allow COVID-era health care subsidies to expire. Both the Republican plan, which would replace the subsidies with new savings accounts, and a Democratic bill to extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years lack the bipartisan support needed for passage. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Tuesday that the Democratic legislation does not include enough reforms to curb fraud or limit high-income recipients. That legislation “will fail,” Thune said. At the same time, Democratic…

It’s a common experience: you search for white bean soup recipes one time on Instagram, and you are bombarded with white bean soup content on the app for seemingly all eternity. Instagram wants to fix that. Starting today, the company’s three billion users can have more control over their algorithm via a “Your Algorithm” feature. It’s not quite Bluesky, or the Instagram of yore that only displayed content from accounts users followed, but it does let users select or unsubscribe from different topics. The new feature, which leverages AI, lets users pick topics they want to see more or less of on their explore page. Users will first be able to see a list of suggest…