What's on Your Mind?

For much of the last decade, corporate America told a tidy story about progress: Pride logos, employee resource groups, executives marching in parades. The implication was that the workplace closet—the quiet calculation LGBTQ+ employees make about how much of themselves to reveal at work—was slowly disappearing. Talk to enough queer professionals today, though, and a different picture emerges. Corporate America is still tricky to navigate. And, after years of people leaving, the closet is starting to fill up again: In January, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) reported that nearly half of LGBTQ+ adults are now less open about their identity than a year ago. Katy, …

For most, ChatGPT is nothing more than a tool to write emails or ask silly questions. But for some, their chat is their partner, and they want more. Back in October, just a few months after OpenAI rolled out its new GPT-5 model, CEO Sam Altman announced that the company would roll out new features that would mimic its predecessor 4o. “We plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!),” he said via X. But his announcement was also accompanied by an enticing promise to those most attached to 4o: members of online forums who claim to be in romantic re…

In early March, OpenAI unleashed a one-two punch, dropping two major frontier models just days apart. First, we got the new GPT-5.3, an “instant” model optimized for fast, accurate responses. Then, OpenAI released GPT-5.4 two days later. This is a “thinking” model optimized for deep analytical work. I was a beta tester for OpenAI in the early days, and today I spend hundreds of dollars per month using their models through the OpenAI API. I’ve tested both GPT-5.3 and 5.4 extensively since their launch. The new models represent a totally different approach, and hint at a major change in how big AI companies build their tech. The doer OpenAI’s fir…

A government shutdown, war in the Middle East, and storms: airline passengers in the U.S. are facing quite a number of issues right now. On Sunday, 10,740 flights were delayed and another 3,249 were canceled within, into, or out of the U.S., according to FlightAware. On Monday, those numbers rose to 12,926 and 4,863, respectively. More than half of flights into and out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport (ATL) were delayed Monday, while over a third of those into or out of New York’s LaGuardia Airport (LGA) were canceled. A similar pattern followed on Monday, and by 8 a.m. ET on Tuesday there were 1,156 delays with another 215 cancellations. Why is…

Your first 90 days on a job are often the most important. That’s where you lay the foundation for the years to come and learn more about how your skills best fit into the organization. That’s just as true when you’re launching a startup. The early days of an entrepreneurial endeavor, especially in the fast-growing consulting space, not only help to define how the business is received, but also its trajectory. As the mad dash begins for clients, there are fundamentals that you’ll need to pay attention to and long-term planning you’ll need to focus on at the same time. Get these steps right and you can lay a foundation for future growth. Ignore them, and you could b…

AI poses an infuriating dilemma: On the one hand, it promises to reduce the grunt work present in every job. On the other hand, between the creation of AI slop, and employee fears around job loss, figuring out how to actually reap those benefits creates another job in and of itself. Companies are resorting to a variety of strategies to solve this problem. Amazon tracks how often employees use AI, Microsoft has an internal bootcamp where teams brainstorm how to redesign their workflows to include AI, and Boston Consulting Group has made AI use part of employee performance evaluations. Other companies are taking a different approach: paying employees to experiment…

Kalshi made headlines last month over allowing people to place wagers on the Iran war. Now the prediction market platform is being sued by the state of Arizona, the first state to file criminal charges against the controversial company. The platform, which allows users to place wagers on happenings, such as sports games or even current events, is being accused of operating an illegal gambling business that violates the state’s laws. In a 20-count document, prosecutors alleged that the platform is mischaracterizing itself to avoid being subject to gambling laws and allowing bets on political races. “Kalshi may brand itself as a ‘prediction market,’ but what it’s a…

As the job market tightens, LinkedIn has become the battleground for anyone trying to stand out. This corner of the internet has its own vernacular—where even a marriage proposal can be a lesson on B2B sales—and now a new tool has arrived to help LinkedIn visitors and would-be thought leaders speak the language. Launched by the Palo Alto-based search engine company Kagi, the translator tool, visually similar to Google Translate, offers a feature to translate any phrase or sentence into what it’s calling “LinkedIn Speak.” For instance, when I inputted the phrase “I’m writing a story about this translator for Fast Company,” the platform blurted out corporate-so…

There’s long been debate as to whether coffee is good for you. But this new study suggests that caffeinated coffee, as well as caffeinated tea, could lead to lower incidence of dementia. So if your morning routine involves making a bleary-eyed beeline to the coffee maker immediately upon waking—you may be doing something right. The study comes from researchers at Mass General Brigham and the Broad Institute of Harvard University and MIT, and was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The teams studied 131,821 individuals from two cohorts: one group of men and one group of women in the U.S., all of whom did not have diseases like dementi…

The Northern Lights, also known as aurora borealis, may be visible in nearly 19 U.S. states tonight, Wednesday, March 18 into Thursday, March 19, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center. The aurora borealis is the result of a geomagnetic storm that occurs when a coronal mass ejection (CME), an eruption of solar material, reaches Earth and causes swaths of green, blue, and purple colors to appear in the dark sky. We are currently seeing increased solar activity as the result of an 11-year sun cycle peak. NOAA says this G2, or moderate geomagnetic storm is partially thanks to Friday’s upcoming spring …

Unlike on the popular TV series Severance, most people don’t get to disconnect from what’s happening in the rest of their lives when they arrive at work each day. While employees can take steps to manage their stress and anxiety, it’s also imperative that employers have their backs—and foster a work environment that prioritizes mental health. The constant barrage of unsettling news headlines, economic uncertainty, and concerns about job security create a heavy cognitive load for many American workers that’s only made worse by an “always-on” hustle culture, which also causes burnout. To address this systemic exhaustion, the best leaders are those who practice…

Last year, when an air quality agency in Southern California proposed a new rule to encourage consumers to buy heat pumps instead of gas heaters, the agency was flooded with 20,000 comments opposing the idea—many more than usual. “Due to the volume and nature of these submissions, South Coast AQMD had concerns about their authenticity,” says Rainbow Yeung, an agency spokesperson. The agency’s executive director got an email thanking him for his “opposition” to a rule that his own team had drafted. To check the validity of the comments, the agency reached out to a small sample of commenters—172 people—to confirm that they’d actually sent the emails. Almost no one respo…

A new case in front of labor regulators could answer a question many workers might have contemplated. Can your employer fire you for speaking out against the CEO? During a hearing this month, the National Labor Relations Board—the federal agency tasked with enforcing labor law—weighed in on a case involving software company Atlassian, which reportedly fired an engineer in 2023 for criticizing the CEO over a restructuring plan that led to job losses. The NLRB argued that Atlassian had illegally fired the employee, Bloomberg reported this week, after obtaining a transcript of the hearing through a Freedom of Information Act request. The employee in question, Denise …

Introspection? Marc Andreessen’s never heard of it. Speaking on David Senra’s podcast, the cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture capital firms, said he has “zero” levels of introspection: “As little as possible. Move forward. Go,” he added. “I find that people who dwell on the past get stuck in the past,” he said in the interview. “It’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home.” The noted AI accelerationist went on to state that introspection is a “manufacture” of the early 1900s. Sigmund Freud and his peers are held responsible, according to Andreessen, for introducing concepts such as second guessing, guilt and self-criticism. …

The partial U.S. government shutdown has made air travel incredibly difficult over the past few weeks as many airports are facing major staffing shortages. The timing centers around spring break, when many go on trips—and also when the NCAA Basketball Championships take place. It takes a massive effort to coordinate travel plans for 68 men’s and women’s basketball teams, over the course of just a few days in between the Selection Show on Sunday night and the first games, whether they are on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. Add on the compounding travel issues of staff shortages, charter plane shortages, and now, the price of jet fuel rising signi…

Day by day there’s more evidence that AI is eating up the media world. A recent report from Growtika, a self-described SEO and AI search agency, analyzed data from the search analytics platform Ahrefs to show that traffic to many tech media sites is way down over the past couple of years. Hardest hit were Digital Trends (down 97%), ZDNet (down 90%), and The Verge (down 85%). Even the most seemingly resilient publications (Mashable was down only 30% and CNET 47%, both Ziff-Davis properties) took significant hits. Some of these reductions are no doubt exaggerated—Growtika compared each publication’s peak month with traffic in January 2026, which doesn’t account for seas…

During last year’s NCAA Tournament, basketball fans complained about the lack of a team-focused Cinderella storyline to define the event. The only double-digit seed to advance to the Sweet 16 was Arkansas, out of the SEC, coached by Hall of Famer John Calipari. That’s hardly the kind of underdog we’re used to seeing. In 2023, Princeton made it to the Sweet 16, Florida Atlantic lasted until the Final Four, and Fairleigh Dickinson University beat No. 1 seed Purdue. And we’re unlikely to ever see a repeat of 2022, when Saint Peter’s made the Elite 8. The 2025 tournament was one of the “chalkiest” of all time, meaning the teams that made the final rounds were pretty …

For the past two years, the dominant corporate conversation around artificial intelligence has been painfully predictable. Executives talk about productivity, copilots, efficiency gains, and cost savings. Boards demand AI road maps. Consultants package urgency into slides. Entire organizations scramble to prove that they are “doing something with AI.” But beneath all that noise lies a much bigger shift, one that many companies still seem determined not to see: AI is not simply a tool for making organizations more efficient. It is a technology that changes the minimum viable size of an organization. And once that happens, many of the assumptions that defined the mo…

Is it even worth having a kid in the AI era? It’s the question at the heart of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, a new documentary about the promise, peril, and uncertainty surrounding artificial intelligence. Codirected by Charlie Tyrell and Academy Award winner Daniel Roher, the film follows Roher, a soon-to-be father, as he tries to understand how AI works, what risks it may carry, and what kind of world he and his wife are bringing their son into. Along the way, he encounters both AI’s loudest skeptics and its most ardent utopians. The film features dozens of experts, including CEOs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, longtime r…

We’re excited to announce the judges of the 2026 Innovation by Design Awards. Innovation by Design honors the best projects and ideas across the design spectrum, as represented by our fantastic group of jurors, who come from some of the world’s most exciting design-led companies. You can read more about their expertise and backgrounds below. And remember to apply for the Innovation by Design Awards by April 11. Erik Carter, Designer Erik Carter is a designer, illustrator, art director, and writer whose work bridges commercial design and critical discourse. He has designed for Verso Books, The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, The New Yorker, and New D…