What's on Your Mind?

A few weeks ago, my iPhone woke me up at 3:30am. In a way, it was my fault. I’d technically set the alarm “for three thirty.” In another way, it was Siri’s fault. Apple’s AI assistant never thought to question if I was asking for AM or PM. And it simply assumed the most painful option for me. It’s just one of countless tiny examples of how Siri, 16 years since Apple acquired the technology, has been a disappointing product. Siri was already looking dusty before modern LLMs, and with the launch of ChatGPT, it has been completely left behind. Which is why in June 2024, with fans and investors growing impatient, Apple promised a new era of AI—”Apple Intelligence.” …

If you’ve already given up on your 2026 rebrand because you couldn’t stick to your six gym sessions a week and no-sweet-treats resolutions, adopting a “vegan plus bacon” mindset may be the answer to all your problems. TikTok creator @addietheoptimist broke the idea down in a recent video: “Someone on here went viral because they said if you think you can’t go vegan because you love bacon too much, just become vegan plus bacon,” she explained in the now-viral clip. “I’m here to tell you you can just apply that mentality to so many things in your life.” While the original creator was referencing harm reduction in relation to veganism (that if you only eat baco…

Quiet quitting. Silent space-out. Faux focus. Call it what you want, a lot of today’s workers are going through the motions on the surface while quietly powering down beneath it. Nearly half of Gen Z employees say they’re “coasting,” and overall U.S. employee engagement sits at a decade low. When engagement fades, performance becomes performative. But disengagement isn’t just a problem to solve, it’s a signal to heed. Employees aren’t turning off. They’re trying to tell us something. As CEO of SurveyMonkey, I’ve witnessed how curiosity can be the cure to the workplace phenomenon “resenteeism”—a state of resentment combined with absenteeism—which is often fueled by…

Reddit is now the fourth most visited social media platform in the U.K., overtaking TikTok. The online discussion platform has seen immense growth over the past two years, reaching 88% more internet users in the U.K., thanks to a combination of shifting search algorithms and social media habits. Three in five Brits now encounter the site while online, according to Ofcom, up from a third in 2023. The U.K. now has the second largest user base behind the U.S., according to company records shared with the Guardian. Reddit has also witnessed a drastic demographic change over the same period. More than half of the platform’s users in the U.K. are now women and one…

Anthropic’s Claude Code tool is having a moment: It’s recently become popular among software developers for its use of agents to write code, run tests, call tools, and multitask. In recent months the company has begun to stress that Claude Code isn’t just for developers, but can let other kinds of workers build websites, create presentations, and do research—and stories about non-coders completing interesting projects have filled social media. The latest offering, called Cowork, is a new version (and a rebranding) of Claude Code for work beyond coding, and it could dramatically widen the audience for Anthropic’s tools within the enterprise. Cowork is in “research prev…

Fujifilm’s newest camera model, the Instax Mini Evo Cinema, is a gadget that’s designed for the retro camera craze. The device is a vertically oriented instant camera that can take still images, videos (an Instax camera first), connect with your smartphone to turn its photos into physical prints, and capture images in a wide range of retro aesthetics. It’s debuting in North American markets in early February for $409.95. Fujifilm’s new model taps into a younger consumer base’s growing interest both in retro tech and film photography aesthetics—a trend that’s been driven, in large part, by platforms like TikTok. The Instax Mini Evo Cinema turns that niche into a cl…

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the market for artificial intelligence and its associated industries are over inflated. In 2025, just five hyperscalers—Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle—accounted for a capital investment of $399 billion, which will rise to over $600 billion annually in coming years. For the first nine months of last year, real GDP growth rate in the U.S. was 2.1%, but would have been 1.5% without the contribution of AI investment. This dependence is dangerous. A recent note by Deutsche Bank questioned whether this boon might in fact be a bubble, noting the historically unprecedented concentration of the industry, which now accounts …

On the surface, Apple’s announcement on Tuesday of a subscription service called Apple Creator Studio does not demand a whole lot of explanation or analysis. The Mac/iPad/iPhone offering, which bundles the Final Cut Pro video editor, Logic Pro audio editor, Pixelmator Pro image editor, and other apps for making and manipulating media for $13 a month or $129 a year, is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect the company to get around to introducing. After all, its strategy of expanding the portion of its revenue that comes from services has already resulted in offerings such as Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, and Apple News+. It would have been weird if Apple hadn’t p…

One thing has become reliable over the past year of worldwide uncertainty: the price of gold and silver has continued to rise. The precious metals reached record highs again in the early hours of Wednesday. Silver hit over $91 per ounce, more than a 26% increase year-to-date and a 201% increase over the last 12 months. Silver had reached more than $90 for the first time on Tuesday. Meanwhile, gold rose this morning to more than $4,637 an ounce—up more than 7% in 2026 and over 73% for the past year. Why do gold and silver continue to rise? Gold hit a record $4,600 an ounce on Monday after news broke that federal prosecutors are investigating Federal Res…

For as long as people have been using AI to churn out text, other people have been coming up with “tells” that something was written by AI. Sometimes it’s punctuation that comes under suspicion. (The em dash is generally considered the shadiest.) Other times it’s words that robot writers seem to love and overuse. But what if the biggest giveaway that a text was written by AI isn’t a word, phrase, or punctuation mark, but a particular sentence structure instead? Why is it so hard to make AI writing sound human? The idea that certain rhythms of sentences might be a sign of AI writing first came to my attention through my work as a professional word nerd. Recen…

After two years of declines, United States greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2025—a change driven by increased electricity use, due in part to data centers and cryptocurrency mining, as well as cold winter temperatures that meant homes required more heating. Emissions increased 2.4% in 2025, according to preliminary data from the research firm Rhodium Group. That’s higher than the country’s GDP growth, which increased by a projected 1.9%. That the country’s emissions grew more than its GDP is notable: Climate experts have long noted that it’s both possible and necessary to reduce emissions while still growing the economy. And for the past few years, the U.S. h…

The most dangerous people in a company are stressed leaders. I say that with full self-awareness. I’ve worked for a few and came uncomfortably close to becoming one myself. I’ve always had an impulsive temperament. On good days, it made me decisive. On bad days, reactive. Add long hours and the pressure of scaling a startup, and my emotional state began to spill onto the team. Focusing on mental health, rest, and mindfulness fundamentally changed how I build my company and how I see my role today. I’m still a CEO, but I’ve also become something else—the “chief energy officer.” What follows is everything I wish I’d known earlier about leading with emoti…

As Americans struggle with an affordability crisis—high inflation and an even higher cost of living, especially when it comes to housing—Bilt is launching three new, low interest credit cards with rates capped at 10% on new purchases for the first year—including a premium card offering with a $495 annual fee. The Bilt Card 2.0 series launches next month on February 7. “Between now and January 30, existing cardholders will be able to seamlessly transition and pre-order a new Bilt Card in their Bilt account or online,” according to a statement on the company’s website. “There is clearly a need for affordability at this point in time more than ever,” Bilt chief execu…

Scott Adams, the creator of the uber-popular and satirical comic strip Dilbert, has died. He passed away on January 13, after announcing his diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer last spring. He was 68. On Tuesday morning, the cartoonist’s former wife, Shelly Miles, shared the news of his death during a livestream on X. Miles read from a statement that Adams had prepared himself for the occasion. “I had an amazing life,” the statement said. “I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I’m asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the legacy I want. Be useful. And please know I loved you all to the very end.” Dilbert was fi…

Severance is the hit sci-fi show about office workers who “sever” their consciousness—slipping into another mode the moment they arrive at the office, then forgetting everything about their 9-to-5 as soon as they leave. The concept was inspired by the creator’s own monotonous desk job before he found success in television. Part of the show’s appeal lies in how familiar the premise feels: a dull, repetitive workday that people can’t wait to escape. In the real world, employees don’t have a mental switch to flip, but they’ve found subtler, and potentially more insidious, ways to disengage. The latest trend, dubbed “task-masking,” has taken over Instagram and TikTok. It’…

In the world of social impact and sustainability, 2025’s word of the year could have been “headwinds.” It became a euphemism for everything from political pressure and regulatory changes to economic uncertainty, AI disruption, and social upheaval. But in many ways, “headwinds” is an understatement for what impact and sustainability leaders across the corporate and nonprofit sectors navigated in a year of budget cuts and evolving risk factors. For much of the past year, leaders across the corporate and nonprofit sectors have been recalibrating approaches to advancing their missions against these trends. In 2026, we’ll start to see those new approaches in action. …

AI is no longer just a cascade of algorithms trained on massive amounts of data. It has become a physical and infrastructural phenomenon, one whose future will be determined not by breakthroughs in benchmarks, but by the hard realities of power, geography, regulation, and the very nature of intelligence. Businesses that fail to see this will be blindsided. Data centers were once the sterile backrooms of the internet: important, but invisible. Today, they are the beating heart of generative AI, the physical engines that make large language models (LLMs) possible. But what if these engines, and the models they power, are hitting limitations that can’t be solved with mo…

Foldable phones have spent years trying to justify themselves. Some were too fragile, others too bulky, and most felt like solutions in search of a problem. The Galaxy Z TriFold is Samsung’s clearest attempt yet to answer a more reasonable question: Can one device replace the phone-tablet combo without becoming a chore to carry? Coming to the United States later this month, the TriFold folds twice, opens into a 10-inch screen, and closes back into a pocketable form. It’s an assertive design, but not a novelty play. Samsung seems very aware that this kind of device only makes sense for a specific kind of user. The double fold is the trick, but the software does…

Let’s do a thought exercise. If the role of the chief marketing officer is to oversee marketing and the role of the chief operating officer is to oversee operations, while the chief financial officer’s responsibility is to safeguard the organization’s finances, then what’s the responsibility of the chief executive officer? Surely, it’s more than overseeing executions or leading executives, yet the “CEO” naming convention doesn’t give much insight as to what the role is or what it’s responsible for. This gets even more convoluted when an organization has both a CEO and a president. Who’s responsible for what? Clearly, a president presides over the organization or nation st…

Fifty minutes into a training session at a gym in lower Manhattan, I’m doing burpees and clean-and-jerks while Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown—all 6 feet, 5 inches of him—is bear-crawling into pushups, then slamming a medicine ball to the ground from overhead. I was lured to this TMPL gym off Astor Place because Brown is a lifelong fitness nut, and he’d shoehorned this workout in on Monday morning between arriving from L.A. the night before and departing again that afternoon. But Brown also wanted me to experience Beyond’s radical new launch, its first product that is not a savory meal option, the way a target customer would: post-workout, desperate for a functional r…

Yesterday, customers of Verizon Communications across the country picked up their phones only to discover that they had no service. Calls, texts, and the internet simply didn’t work. Verizon now says the underlying issue has been resolved. But just what caused it, and will Verizon compensate customers for the outage? Here’s what you need to know. What happened? On Wednesday, a little after noon ET, customers around the country began taking to social media to report that they had lost Verizon service on their phones. Calls and texts could not be made or received, and internet access was nonexistent. Many iPhone owners on Verizon’s network saw the “SOS” ico…

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating a salmonella outbreak linked to dietary supplement powder that left 45 people sick and a dozen people hospitalized across the country. In the wake of the outbreak, New York-based Superfoods, Inc. has issued a voluntary recall of Live it Up-brand Super Greens dietary supplement powder in the original and wild berry flavors. However, the FDA cautions that additional products might join the recall during its investigation. “To determine a source of contamination, FDA is conducting a traceback investigation of products ill people reported consuming before becoming ill and is working with state partners to sample…

I was born an only child, but now I have a twin. He’s an exact duplicate of me—down to my clothing, my home, my facial expressions, and even my voice. I built him with AI, and I can make him say whatever I want. He’s so convincing that he could fool my own mother. Here’s how I built him—and what AI digital twins mean for the future of people. Deepfake yourself From the moment generative AI was born, criminals started using it to trick people. Deepfakes were one of the first widespread uses of the tech. Today, they’re a scourge to celebrities and even everyday teenagers, and a massive problem for anyone interested in the truth. As criminals were …

2025 unleashed the enormous potential of AI. According to Pew Research, 62% of adults say they interact with AI at least several times a week, and 73% of U.S. adults say they are at least a little bit willing to let AI assist with their day-to-day activities. However, while most people today use AI primarily for answering their questions or researching products to buy, the real opportunity isn’t in better search functionality alone. In the consumer tech industry, we are at the threshold of a generational opportunity to leverage AI to make people’s lives better and more meaningful, saving them time on what they need to do so they can focus on doing what they want to do…

President Donald The President took to social media on Thursday threatening to crack down on protests in Minnesota, as federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers face off with protestors in the streets on Minneapolis following the death of Renee Nicole Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE agent. The threat follows renewed clashes there overnight after a federal agent shot a local man in the leg after allegedly resisting arrest during a “targeted traffic stop,” according to CNN. There are also reports ICE officials are going “door-to-door” in Minneapolis, showing up at people’s homes, which Vice President JD Vance said will “ramp up” as more ICE tro…