What's on Your Mind?

When an AI-assisted résumé lands on a hiring manager’s desk, most people have the knee-jerk reaction to chuck it straight onto the reject pile. While more and more companies are using AI in their day-to-day operations, when it comes to résumés and cover letters, the use of artificial intelligence remains taboo. The importance of AI-savvy talent This instinctive aversion to AI is costing firms invaluable AI-savvy talent. And with the demand and competition for AI skills so fierce, many employers are letting prospective talent slip through their fingers, straight into the laps of their competitors. It’s time to overhaul recruitment processes out of the dark ages…

Sophia Rosenfeld is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her previous books include the award-winning title Common Sense: A Political History. Her writing has appeared in scholarly journals, such as the American Historical Review and the Journal of Modern History, as well as in media publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation. What’s the big idea? There is such a thing as too many options. Nowhere is freedom-as-choice and choice-as-freedom more evident than in the United States. As important as the right to choose has been in various emancipation movem…

Every week, millions of Americans toss their recyclables into a single bin, trusting that their plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard boxes will be given a new life. But what really happens after the truck picks them up? Single-stream recycling makes participating in recycling easy, but behind the scenes, complex sorting systems and contamination mean a large percentage of that material never gets a second life. Reports in recent years have found 15% to 25% of all the materials picked up from recycle bins ends up in landfills instead. Plastics are among the biggest challenges. Only about 9% of the plastic generated in the U.S. actually gets recycled, a…

Alphabet Inc’s Google is close to deciding on locations in its key market of India where it will open its first physical retail stores outside the United States, three sources familiar with the matter said. Google counts India as a key growth market, where it has committed to investing $10 billion. It currently has only five physical stores, all in the United States, which sell its products such as Pixel phones, watches, and earbuds. It is aiming to mirror a retail approach that helped Apple Inc. rake in billions of dollars in the past two decades by showcasing its own products. Apple has 500 plus stores worldwide. Google is in advanced stages of finalising lo…

Ben Sweeny, the salesman-turned-comedian behind that online persona Corporate Sween, says that bosses should waterboard their employees. “Some companies drown their employees with boring surveys and useless questionnaires,” he proclaims in a satirical video posted to LinkedIn a few months ago. “I drown my employees with two to three gallons of water, an incline table, and a hand towel.” Though the clip may seem racy for LinkedIn, a social network that’s earned a reputation as a reliable if buttoned-up venue for job networking, it has to date earned over 5,000 views and has reached over 7,000 unique members. And for Sweeny, its success is no surprise: Why shouldn…

Mid-aughts news aggregator Digg is making a comeback, thanks to a pairing that would have seemd unlikely when the site debuted in 2004: Digg founder Kevin Rose and a former corporate rival, Reddit cofounder and former CEO Alexis Ohanian. The pair bought Digg from its prior owners Money Group in early 2025 for an undisclosed sum. The deal was supported by True Ventures, which counts Rose as a partner, as well as Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six fund. They know this is an unlikely pairing. “I really disliked you for a long time,” Ohanian told Rose during an interview with Fast Company. “Reddit had raised $12,000 at YC. We felt like outsiders. Here was a tech celebrity who had …

Online applications usually include an optional field where you can upload a cover letter. Think “optional” means you don’t have to include one? Think again. According to a recent survey of recruiters from the career services platform Zety, 89% expect a cover letter, and 87% say it’s a key factor when deciding whom to interview. “Job applications are super complicated today,” says Jasmine Escalera, Zety’s career expert. “You have to tailor your résumé to the job, and there are often so many moving parts to just submit one application. I understand when job seekers think, Does the cover letter actually add any value? Sometimes it can be equally as important as résumés …

Peter Berg doesn’t need to do Super Bowl commercials. Yet the award-winning director helmed two ads during this year’s big game. First, was a fun NFL spot advocating for varsity girls flag football. And second, was water bottle brand Cirkul’s first-ever trip to the Super Bowl, starring Adam Devine. The commercial diversion comes not long after the release of Berg’s hit Netflix limited series American Primeval, which dropped on January 9, and quickly hit the top of the streamer’s ratings. In its first week, it had 1.25 billion viewing minutes. Berg has built an incredible Hollywood career, producing, writing, and directing hit films and TV series, from Fri…

Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning recently surveyed leaders and L&D professionals about what they’re looking for in a leadership development program. At the top of the list? Scalability. One of my passions—and one of the reasons my company developed our own learning platform—is expanding access to leadership development, so it’s exciting to see companies recognizing how important scalability is. At the same time; however, I know that making scalability work at your organization can be a tall order. For a long time, scalability and quality have seemed at odds in leadership development. An organization could spend its budget on highly effective, b…

Branding is design. It’s the logos, typefaces, and design systems that bring a company to life. But it’s also strategy. A rebrand can reveal the priorities, motivations, and aspirations of a company if you look beyond the logo. In a recent conversation for FC Live, Fast Company‘s design editors Liz Stinson and Mark Wilson explored the true impact of branding through the lens of some of the biggest branding moments from the past year. If you missed the subscriber-only event, you’re in luck. You can catch the whole conversation in the video above. View the full article

When companies advertise job openings, they often use buzzwords like ambitious and self-reliant to describe their ideal candidate. These traits sound appealing—what hiring manager wouldn’t want a driven employee? But there’s a catch. In my latest study, published in the journal Management Science with coauthors Scott Jackson and Nick Seybert, I found that these terms may attract job applicants with more narcissistic tendencies. As behavioral researchers in accounting, we are interested in executives who bend the rules. We decided to study job postings after noticing that the language used to describe an “ideal candidate” often included traits linked to narcissism.…

Over the last month, Jamie Dimon has rapidly emerged as one of the most vocal proponents of the return-to-office movement. During a recent appearance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, the J.P. Morgan Chase CEO could not help but complain—again—about workers who were pushing back on RTO policies. When fielding a question about his recent colorful remarks on RTO, Dimon noted that it was only “people in the middle” who were unhappy about going into the office. “If you work in a restaurant, you’ve got to be in. You all may not know this, but 60% of Americans worked the whole time,” he said, seemingly in reference to the pandemic. “Where did you get you…

Pretend you and 99 peers had to duke it out against a gorilla. Would your squad emerge victorious? That debate has been dividing the internet over the past few days. The conversation originally surfaced on Reddit back in 2020, when a user posed the question in the r/whowouldwin subreddit. It recently reignited after the question was put to X users last week. The viral post—now with over 288 million views—suggests that 100 men could defeat a single gorilla if everyone was “dedicated” to the task. Since then, arguments have raged across social media. MrBeast even joined the discussion: “Need 100 men to test this, any volunteers?” he wrote, alongside a fake thumbnail…

March might be over but the madness continues into April. The NCAA’s 68 Division I men’s college basketball teams have battled it out on the courts in single-elimination play, leaving four teams standing. This year the Final Four have something in common: They all were granted No. 1 seeds on Selection Sunday. Duke, Florida, Auburn, and Houston were all safe bets when filling out a bracket, and they delivered on that promise. Here’s what you need to know heading into the remaining competition, and how to tune in. Do the No. 1 seed teams always make it to the end? The short answer is no. This is only the second time in history this has happened. The last time was 200…

The Daytona 500 is one of the more challenging races on the NASCAR circuit. The speedway is long and narrow, forcing drivers to be more aggressive. And the weather in central Florida doesn’t always cooperate. During the 2024 event, a deluge of rain had forced a Monday conclusion. After 41 lead changes and with only eight laps to go, a crash involving half the field prompted a red flag and a 15-minute delay. At the end, another collision between leader Ross Chastain and Austin Cindric opened the door for William Byron to zip by and take the checkered flag. Byron’s win wasn’t a huge surprise—he’d notched 10 prior wins on the NASCAR circuit—but his backstory is unusual.…

Firefighters in North and South Carolina were battling multiple wind-driven wildfires Monday in rugged terrain that complicated containment efforts, officials said. Millions of trees knocked down by Hurricane Helene last year combined with long stretches of dry weather this spring are making for a long and active fire season in the Carolinas, North Carolina State University forestry and environmental resources professor Robert Scheller said. “Helene just dropped tons of fuel on the ground,” Scheller said. “Then these flash droughts allow that fuel to dry out very fast.” Both South Carolina and North Carolina have issued statewide bans on outdoor burning. N…

Hollywood is waking up to the power of influencers. That starts with MrBeast. Amazon’s Beast Games cost hundreds of millions to produce. Some of that came from the streamer, but much of it came from the pockets of MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson. On the Diary of a CEO podcast, he estimated “tens of millions” in losses from the show, admitting that he was an “idiot” for spending so much. But it was all for one goal: To knock down the Hollywood door so other creators could score their own production deals. But MrBeast misunderstands the power balance. In the attention economy, influencers have the eyeballs right now. Amazon’s acquisition of Beast Games …

At a recent groundbreaking for one of our data center campuses, three members of the community told our team, “Great, we’re going to get a Trader Joe’s now.” It may sound funny, but this is one small part of the data center effect. Having Starbucks and Whole Foods establishments in the neighborhood famously have been associated with higher property values. Data centers also boost the communities where they’re located, by creating jobs and supporting revitalization efforts, for example. Of course, the industry faces criticism too, often based on outdated perceptions that don’t reflect advances in design and sustainability. But public opinion is shifting—partly tha…

You can find plastic containers storing food in just about every grocery store. But a new study makes a strong case for never eating out of a plastic container, especially those meant to be heated, ever again. The new study, published in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, found that eating out of plastic containers, even for a short period of time, is alarmingly dangerous for heart health. The research demonstrated that particles from plastic containers were able to leach into food products, and those particles had a clear, and very fast-moving impact on changes that lead to heart failure. The study was performed in two parts. The first polled 3,000 people o…

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you carefully laid out all the context for your manager, only to have them cut you off? Or maybe you’ve found you’re eager to dive into the tactical details of a project while they keep steering the conversation back to vision. These moments can leave you frustrated and confused. You’re doing what seems logical, yet somehow it’s not landing. The good news is that these disconnects usually aren’t about your competency or the quality of your ideas— they’re about different styles. Studies have found that two primary dimensions shape how people communicate and approach their interactions at work. The first is dominanc…

Struggling to get enough spinach in your diet? Rather than rustling up a salad or green smoothie, one TikToker has a rather unusual hack to ensure she hits her daily greens goal. “I call it dinosaur time,” TikTok user @sahmthingsup said in a video posted last month, wherein she stands over the sink and stuffs handfuls of raw spinach into her mouth. While it may not be the most appetizing way to consume the leafy greens, the food “hack” has already racked up more than one million views. “For added enrichment, put on a dinosaur documentary,” one user commented. Another added: “My life changed when I realized I could do this with any food I should be getting…