What's on Your Mind?

The era of communicating by snail mail is long gone, and the United States Postal Service (USPS) has suffered in its wake. Now, the independent government agency has found a new way to make up some of its losses. Starting on Sunday, April 26, the U.S. post office will implement an 8% transportation surcharge on packages. It will remain through January 17, 2027, when the agency hopes to implement any necessary long-term approaches. “This temporary price adjustment will provide needed flexibility for the Postal Service by helping to ensure that the actual costs of doing business are covered, as required by Congress,” the USPS statement reads. Its impleme…

For many job seekers, it might seem like there’s never been a harder time to find a job. Hiring for white-collar jobs has been especially weak, part of what economists call a “low-hire, low-fire” job market in which businesses are largely holding onto their workers while hiring remains sluggish, making it difficult for younger workers to land permanent work. Technology is also shaking up the hiring process. Automated systems enable job seekers to easily apply to more jobs, but those same systems also makes it even tougher to get noticed. According to data from hiring platform Greenhouse, the average recruiter has 3.5 times more job applications to sift through tha…

No language on earth has ever produced the expression “as enjoyable as filing your taxes.” This annual chore is the pits. It’s slow, frustrating work that requires organization, math skills, and the ability to decipher meaning from the U.S. tax code. People will jump on pretty much any solution that makes filing quicker, easier, and less painful–including giving AI a crack at it. Recent survey research from Qlik found that nearly 11% of taxpayers have used or plan to use a consumer AI system (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or Gemini) to help them prepare their 2025 tax returns. But how trustworthy are these AI systems when it comes to something as sensitive as your…

Call it chic or call it cringe: Clothing that bears the name of a city near or far has become a closet staple for many consumers in recent years. Once mostly reserved for impulse purchases from kitschy tourist shops while traveling, now clothing with the name of far-off places is just as likely to be purchased at home. Consider the iconic “I love New York” tee, a favored souvenir for nearly 50 years. Gone are the days when you would need to brave the Times Square crowds to get one. You can buy a similar-looking version from Walmart for less than $10 or an embroidered crewneck version for $380 from Lingua Franca. Clothing makers and consumers alike are seeming…

A pair of landmark court cases found Meta and YouTube guilty last week of harming young users by designing algorithms that were addictive and led to mental health distress. The damages assessed against the companies amounted to a fraction of a percent of their annual earnings. The long-term implications, however, could be far more significant. The rulings found that programmed algorithms are not protected by Section 230, the federal law that shields social media companies from liability for user-posted content. That represents a crack in a legal defense these companies have relied on for years. And thousands of similar cases are already pending. Section 230 has be…

I’ll never forget the morning I froze in front of a client. I was a Vice President at Kearney, the global management consulting firm, presenting our proposal to a three-person client subcommittee. Mid-sentence, my mind went completely blank. Not the normal “lost my train of thought” blank. The kind of blank that leaves a scary emptiness where confidence used to live. I’d been putting on a mask each day. I’d tried to be positive and stay on top of everything. But that morning, I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt anxious and exhausted at the same time. My mind was racing, and my body was depleted. The mask had finally cracked in the worst possible place. What I didn’t …

As marketing leaders, we don’t wake up thinking about algorithms. We wake up thinking about growth. For CMOs, the job has always been the same: drive real business impact, improve ROI, and prove—repeatedly—that marketing is a growth engine, not a cost center. Long before generative AI entered the conversation, marketing leaders were under pressure to connect activity to revenue, align tightly with sales, and make performance visible. The pressure to quantify value didn’t start with AI. It started when the business demanded proof. What has changed is the speed and precision with which we can now deliver that proof. AI ISN’T REINVENTING MARKETING. IT’S REWIRING …

It’s finally happening. The Artemis II mission—returning humans to the lunar neighborhood for the first time in more than 50 years—is set to launch on April 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a two-hour window that opens at 6:24 p.m. (EDT), with additional launch opportunities through April 6. The first crewed Artemis mission will send NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day journey around the moon. Objectives include testing the Orion spacecraft’s life support systems in situ for the first time with people, gathering additional data on how spaceflight affects…

Another round of layoffs has hit the tech industry, this time at SaaS giant Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL). The job cuts reportedly came out of the blue for most affected employees, with many receiving an early-morning email announcing their job loss just hours before they were scheduled to go into the office. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On early Tuesday morning, Oracle employees around the world began reporting on social media that they had received an email from the company informing them that their employment had been terminated. According to these reports, the emails began arriving in employees’ inboxes at around 6 a.m. local …

It’s been an outrageously long wait, but Google will finally allow Gmail users to change their email addresses. Late last year, a support page in Hindi hinted that changes to Google’s account name policy were on the way, but now it’s official. The company posted the news to X, but noted that only U.S. users will be offered the new flexibility for now. To make the change, head to your email settings options and click “change Google Account email.” Your email history and saved data will remain tied to the account, so don’t worry about losing anything. Users can change their Google account names across products like Gmail, Photos, and Drive, but really, email is the…

What do you do if you want to eat fish, but you hate the idea of harming wild animals? Or if you’d like a nice lox and bagel, but you’re concerned about mercury and microplastics—or the broader climate risks of industrial fishing. What are your options? One San Francisco startup has an answer: Grab cells from a salmon, grow them in giant tanks in a lab-like setting filled with a warm bath of nutrients that mimic the inside of a real fish, and then coax them onto veggie-based scaffolds to form a piece of premium fish that’s never touched an ocean. That’s the vision driving Wildtype, a lab-grown fish company based in San Francisco’s trendy Dogpatch neighbor…

You earn qualifications, polish your résumé, climb the ladder, grow your salary, and build your reputation. You’ve done everything you’re supposed to, so you (understandably) expect to feel on top of the world. Yet you remain unsatisfied despite accomplishing everything that you thought you wanted. That sense of “What’s next?” is surprisingly common. According to a recent study by Headway app, 77% of people consider themselves successful, yet 81% also admitted feeling behind in some area of their lives. The cause of your internal discontent A lack of effort or having more to achieve isn’t the cause of your dissatisfaction. It stems from not doing what you reall…

Meta is making font design as easy as writing a prompt with its newest AI tool. On March 27, the company rolled out new features within its stand-alone Edits app for editing photos and short-form video, including “AI Style” for fonts, which lets users customize text themselves. It’s like a modern-day version of the classic WordArt style in Microsoft Word, but with AI text prompts. The feature is a bit tucked away within the “Styles” tab, but users can find it when editing text by tapping the “Restyle” icon between the icons to write and choose a font. A list of suggested prompts shows what’s possible. The loading screen shows an animated plus-sign pattern. Sug…

Modern leadership is defined by paradox. Leaders are expected to set clear direction while remaining open to challenge. To move quickly with decisive action while also taking people with them. To hold authority while fostering shared ownership and to deliver results without eroding trust. These demands are not occasional tensions; they sit at the heart of the role. Under this sustained pressure, many leaders have a tendency to reach for dominance. Dominance can feel efficient. It centralizes control, projects certainty and offers a reassuring sense of direction when the ground feels unstable. In moments of volatility, it can look like strength. Yet dominance c…

American Express is expanding its airport lounge network with a new Centurion Lounge planned for Boston, a second Sidecar concept coming to Charlotte, and a major expansion of its existing space at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The moves highlight how the credit card and financial services company is investing in both larger flagship lounges and smaller spaces designed for travelers with limited time before boarding. “American Express has long been at the forefront of the airport lounge experience, and we continue to build on that legacy and raise the bar as we grow our network,” Audrey Hendley, president of American Express Travel, said in a press rele…

A typical map of temperatures across the planet shows just a snapshot in time, listing the day’s various highs and lows. But temperature isn’t static; it rises and falls, and it’s influenced by all sorts of systems, from ocean currents to solar radiation. An animated map from Maps.com shows those variations, revealing the patterns that swirl around our planet—and even depicting the gradual way Earth heats up from east to west as the sun rises and sets. Maps.com The animated map is part of a new feature called Earth in Action, through which Maps.com (a platform by spatial analytics company Esri) produces daily, near real-time animated maps about Earth’s sy…

If you’ve been thinking about joining Sam’s Club, you may want to act fast: The annual membership fee will go up $10 starting next month. The Walmart-owned chain of warehouse stores has been emailing existing members this week to alert them of the price increases. Effective May 1, a standard Sam’s Club membership will cost $60, up from $50, while the cost of a Plus membership will increase to $120 from $110. The company is clearly trying to push more people to its higher-cost Plus membership, as it’s also upped the cap on its 2% cash back rewards these members can earn—from $500 annually to $750. The company confirmed the price increases to Fast Company and indic…

If you don’t pay attention, you could miss it. There is a secret alligator emoji game hidden in your TikTok DMs. And while this news is coming on April Fools’ Day, it’s no joke—this easter egg (on the first day of Passover) is real! Here’s what to know. How to find TikTok’s hidden emoji game in your DMs Here’s how to find it: Go into your TikTok messages as if you were sending a DM, and send an emoji, then look for a tiny link that reads “tap emoji to play emoji game.” Click the link and you’ll see a green screen with alligators and floating emojis. Use your finger to swipe up on the profile picture of whomever you are messaging at the time, and viola, sta…

JetBlue Airways just increased checked bag fees for the first time since March 2024, bringing the minimum cost to check a bag from $35 to $39. Fees now cost $4 to $9 more, depending on travel dates. This news comes amid rising jet fuel prices and may raise concerns among travelers about whether other major U.S. airlines will follow suit. Here’s what you need to know. How much more will travelers pay? Effective March 30, JetBlue raised checked bag fees by $4 to $9, depending on travel dates. The new prices apply to all bookings made on or after that date. The New York-based airline introduced peak-season surcharges in March 2024, meaning travelers pa…

For nearly four years now, the conversation about generative AI has revolved almost exclusively around productivity, threatened jobs, automatable tasks, efficiency, and competitiveness. But there is a largely underestimated dimension to this revolution: its cultural effects. AI is not just transforming how we work; it is transforming how we are together, how we trust each other, how we communicate, and how we organize ourselves. To measure this, it helps to borrow a framework from Erin Meyer, a professor at INSEAD whose book The Culture Map identifies eight dimensions along which the cultures of the world differ. Applied to artificial intelligence, Meyer’s eight dimen…

While I was leading a tour of the National Air and Space Museum in January 2026, a visitor posed this insightful question: “Why has it taken so long to return to the moon?” After all, NASA had the know-how and technology to send humans to the lunar surface more than 50 years ago as part of the Apollo program. And, as another tour guest reminded us, computers today can do so much more than they could back then, as evidenced by the smartphones most of us carry in our pockets. Shouldn’t it be easier to get to the moon than ever before? The truth is that sending humans into space safely continues to be difficult, especially as missions increase in complexity. New …

AI isn’t just transforming industries. It’s transforming the way energy is stored and distributed. Scaling at unprecedented speeds across the country, data centers today require a reliable, uninterrupted power supply, often consuming as much electricity as small cities. This puts immense pressure on power grids. Nationwide electric demand is forecast to increase by nearly 16% by 2029. The main drivers of that increase are investments in data centers, manufacturing, and geopolitical and national strategic industries. Two years ago, the amount of global electricity generated to supply data centers was 460 TWh. This is projected to more than double to 1,000 TWh in 2030, …

If you listen to the brightest minds in tech right now, you might think human disease is just a software bug waiting for a patch. ​At the 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—drawing on his background in biophysics—predicted that AI could condense a century of biological progress into a single decade, potentially doubling human lifespans. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel laureate behind Google DeepMind, recently floated a similarly audacious timeline, suggesting that AI could help eliminate all diseases within 10 years. Hassabis aims to shrink the decade-long drug design process down to mere months. ​I’ve spent my career straddling the mathemati…

A strong PR plan should balance day-to-day visibility with long-term brand building. At most plans’ core will be some sort of press office, one that fields reactive inquiries, chases proactive opportunities, and strives to create a consistent drumbeat of attention. That ongoing media presence is further punctuated by product launches, releases, or announcements that help create heightened awareness around a singular piece of news or event. That describes the basic tenets of a traditional PR plan for earned media (acknowledging that the PR function is much broader). But the playbook that agencies and in-house teams are using to deliver that is evolving; it looks vastly…

Amazon once seemed poised to wipe out the American bookstore. As online shopping exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s, independent shops struggled to compete with endless inventory and lower prices. By 2009, many believed indie bookstores were on the brink of extinction. But instead of disappearing, they adapted. The future of books, it turns out, isn’t just online. It’s local. View the full article