What's on Your Mind?

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…

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…

In the English countryside, a new project has emerged from the landscape—quite literally. Rammed Earth House, a residential estate by London-based Tuckey Design Studio, combines renovated brick buildings with new rammed earth structures, harnessing the clay soil of the very land it sits on. “The material is already under your feet, and it doesn’t come with all the carbon baggage that other [building] materials come with,” says studio founder Jonathan Tuckey. As a building technique, rammed earth—which combines clay soil with aggregate such as gravel into tightly compressed layers—traces back thousands of years. It was widely used in ancient China, but appears globall…

Walt Disney and OpenAI make for very odd bedfellows: The former is one of the most-recognized brands among children under the age of 18. The near-$200 billion company’s value has been derived from more than a century of aggressive safeguarding of its intellectual property and keeping the magic alive among innocent children. OpenAI, which celebrated its first decade of existence this week, is best known for upending creativity, the economy, and society with its flagship product, ChatGPT. And in the last two months, it has said it wants to get to a place where its adult users can use its tech to create erotica. So what the hell should we make of a just-announced dea…

A headline catches your eye: A company you admire, known for its market performance and strong culture, is embroiled in a massive scandal. It causes reputational harm, profitability tanks, and customers notice. The details feel depressingly familiar—enough to fill books (most recently The Dark Pattern). With postmortems pointing to “culture problems,” your instinct might be to double-check your own organization’s cultural health. So, you pull up last year’s employee engagement survey: 85% of employees feel comfortable raising concerns, and 90% believe leadership demonstrates ethical behavior. The numbers are reassuring. But the company you’ve read about probably had s…

Stargazers and scientists are getting a holiday present from the cosmos this week. 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar comet, will get “closest” to Earth on Friday, December 19, as part of its journey across the galaxy. Let’s break the facts of this natural phenomena down because it sounds like it could be the plot of an exciting science fiction thriller. What is an interstellar comet? Much like a Christmas tree, planets in our Solar System revolve around our star, the sun. It’s not the only planetary system out there. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains other systems, and if you zoom out even further, there are even more. The comet 3I/ATLAS is labeled in…

It’s been nearly a decade since Netflix introduced fans to the fictional town of Hawkins, Ind., the Upside Down, Demogorgons, and the Stranger Things universe. Since 2016, the sci-fi series has become a massive hit for Netflix making it one of the streaming service’s most-watched shows with the fourth season alone amassing over 140.7 million views globally, according to the company. The series has earned 12 Primetime Emmy Awards over the course of the last several years, has pushed its young cast into superstardom, and has become a global phenomenon inspiring several live events and pop-up stores in various cities. And its fifth and final season, which is premiering …

The holiday season is merry, bright, and hectic. It’s hard to cram every moment of cheer into just four weeks and keep your sanity. If you find yourself behind and needing to grab last-minute presents, run errands, or pick up a stick of butter on Christmas Eve, know that you are only human. After taking a couple of deep breaths, read on to see which stores are open and closed on the night before the big night. Are banks open on Christmas Eve? Christmas Eve is not a federal holiday, so most banks are open. Some may choose to have reduced hours, so it is a good practice to check with your local branch ahead of time to save you the potential headache. I…

It’s that time — December’s waning days, when we prepare to turn the calendar page. Many Americans take stock, review goals accomplished and unmet, ponder hopes and plans. How’s our health? What’s up with our money? What about the country? Will the coming year look like the departing one year, or be something entirely different? Are we ready? It can be an overwhelming period. So The Associated Press reached out to professionals with varying expertises — home organization, risk management, personal training, personal finance, and political science — to talk about their perspectives on changes and transitions. And for something a little different, we gave each inte…

The start of a new year usually brings new motivation to achieve goals like eating healthier or finally cleaning your basement. Many resolutions also focus on financial goals, such as paying off credit card debt, saving for a new house, or simply getting more educated about money. “New Year’s is a really good time to review and realign your financial goals overall,” said Erica Grundza, certified financial planner at Betterment, an investing and savings app. When building your goals for 2026, Grundza recommends focusing less on the past and more on an optimistic, yet realistic, vision for the future. She recommends that you focus on reestablishing the “why” behind …

There’s bad news for those using digital surveys to try to understand people’s online behavior: We may no longer be able to determine whether a human is responding to them or not, a recent study has shown—and there seems to be no way around this problem. This means that all online canvassing could be vulnerable to misrepresenting people’s true opinions. This could have repercussions for anything that falls under the category of “information warfare,” from polling results, to misinformation, to fraud. Non-human survey respondents, in aggregate, could impact anything from flavors and pricing for a pack of gum, to something more damaging, such as whether or not someone …

There are two sorts of people in this world: Those who think it sounds like fun to brave the elements for hours on end to watch the ball drop at midnight in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and then there’s the rest of us. It’s become a time-honored tradition for millions of people to crowd into a few blocks of New York to celebrate a new year, and some new features await revelers this year. A larger ball will be dropped in the annual countdown to midnight, weighing in at 12,000-plus pounds and adorned with 5,200 crystals and LED lights. And there’s some special red, white, and blue confetti among the nearly three tons to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. …

Zohran Mamdani was a trailblazing candidate whom many in his city of 8 million — some with hope, some with trepidation — expect to be a disruptive New York mayor. The democratic socialist’s plans for his first day in office on Thursday nod to his politics and priorities, without straying far from his predecessors with a sober official midnight oath-taking followed by a more celebratory ceremony in the afternoon. New York law spells out that four-year mayoral terms start on the January 1 after elections. To avoid any ambiguity about who’s in charge of America’s most populous city, it has become a tradition to hold a small midnight swearing-in. Mamdani has chose…

Auckland rang in 2026 with a downtown fireworks display launched from New Zealand’s tallest structure, Sky Tower, making it the first major city to greet the new year at a celebration dampened by rain. South Pacific countries are the first to bid farewell to 2025. Clocks strike midnight in Auckland, a population of 1.7 million, 18 hours before the famous ball drops in New York’s Times Square. The five-minute display involved 3,500 fireworks launched from various floors of the 240-meter (787-foot) Sky Tower. Smaller community events were canceled across New Zealand’s North Island on Wednesday due to forecasts of rain and possible thunderstorms. Australia plans defian…