What's on Your Mind?

Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has opinions of its own, and it’s not afraid to share them. “It should be a sparring partner with you,” says Joel Lewenstein, Anthropic’s design chief. “It shouldn’t take your thoughts verbatim. It should push back.” Perhaps this is predictable from a product carrying the slogan “keep thinking.” But Claude’s quirky (and, at times, passive-aggressive) personality sets it apart from the competition. That’s on purpose, Lewenstein explains. “I find that to be a truly astonishing experience where I’m like, ‘Oh, you are not a sort of slavish executor of my vision. We are coproducing this outcome together.’ I think that’s really powerf…

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…

Nike is attempting to turn things around, but it could be a long road to success. The athletic company closed out March with the release of its latest earnings. The fiscal 2026 third-quarter report brought mixed progress, leading to a more than 10% drop in shares of Nike Inc (NYSE: NKE) after hours on Tuesday and into premarket on Wednesday. Nike stock was already down more than 16% year to date, compared to a more modest decline of 4.8% for the broader S&P 500 index. The earnings report comes a year and a half into CEO Elliott Hill’s tenure and less than three months after Nike announced it would lay off 775 workers across its U.S. distribution centers.…

Bitcoin has been the king of cryptocurrencies since its inception. And despite its high volatility, the token generally benefits from faith among investors that its underlying encryption is sound—which in turn protects digital coins from being stolen from wallets. But a recent report from Google suggests that Bitcoin’s relative security could soon be compromised by quantum computers, prompting investors to shift their attention to “quantum-resistant” tokens. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, Google published a blog post warning that Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies may be vulnerable to quantum computers sooner than previously ex…

Your team is busier than ever. Calendars are packed, inboxes are overflowing, and everyone is racing from one meeting to the next. So why aren’t the breakthroughs happening? Here’s the paradox: We’ve optimized for activity, not creativity. According to Microsoft research, people now spend 60% of their workday on communication tasks alone. That’s meetings, emails, and messages. Another study from Dropbox found that 46% of knowledge workers say they don’t have enough time for creative work, and only 8% of employees regularly propose new ideas. The problem isn’t that your team lacks creativity. It’s that we’ve scheduled every minute for execution and left zero ti…

NASA is going back to the moon, and you can watch the launch live. On April 1, the agency will stream the launch of its historic Artemis II mission. Four astronauts—commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen—will be aboard the spacecraft for NASA’s first crewed moon mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. NASA’s livestream will start at 12:50 p.m. ET on its YouTube channel and NASA+. The launch window opens at 6:24 p.m. ET and lasts for two hours. (There are launch opportunities every day from April 1 to April 6. At the time of this writing, conditions look good for launch on April 1.) “Certainly all indicati…

For many tweens of the 2000s, Club Penguin was the place to be. Players created penguin avatars, dressed them up, and roamed a virtual world of igloos, ski lodges, and mini-games. There were puffles, Tamagotchi-like pets to care for, and bustling servers where you could chat with friends, surf through a mine, or lob a virtual snowball at a stranger. At its peak, the game drew hundreds of millions of users and offered an early taste of social media for a generation of kids. Disaster struck in 2017, when Disney, which owned the platform, shut it down, citing declining popularity and falling revenue. The company pointed users to a new game, Club Penguin Island, but that,…

Jackie, the world-famous Big Bear bald eagle, has been melting hearts and educating the public about her species since 2015, thanks to a web camera run by the California nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV). A little more than 10 years later, her admirers have the chance to give back. FOBBV and the San Bernardino Mountains Land Trust (SBMLT) have teamed up to raise money to purchase the property with the goal of preserving the open space. These 62 acres, located on the north shore of Big Bear Lake, are vital not only for Jackie but also for her mate Shadow and their offspring. Developer RCK Properties wants to put 50 custom homes and 55 boat slips inst…

To help small aerial robots navigate in the dark and other low-visibility environments, my colleagues and I developed an ultrasound-based perception system inspired by bat echolocation. Current robots rely heavily on cameras or light detection and ranging, known as lidar, or both. But these sensors fail in visually challenging conditions, such as smoke, fog, dust, snow, or complete darkness. I’m a scientific engineer who develops bio-inspired microrobots. To solve this challenge, my research team looked at nature’s experts at navigating in poor visibility: bats. They thrive in dark, damp, and dusty caves and can detect obstacles as thin as a human hair using echol…

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…

Recently, one of us was guest-teaching a humanities class on artificial intelligence. He asked students a simple question. Had they noticed themselves becoming more “attached” to their favorite chatbot? “For example,” he asked, “do you find yourself saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to the chatbot more than you used to?” Nearly every head nodded. “Why?” he asked. One student raised her hand. “So if AI does take over,” she said, “it’ll remember that I was nice to it.” The class laughed—but not entirely. The fear and hype around AI When we see public conversations about AI, they tend to swing wildly between hype and catastrophe. On one end, we see promises …

Apple was founded 50 years ago today, on April 1, 1976, by two scruffy twentysomethings named Steve—Steve Jobs and Steve “Woz” Wozniak—but not in a garage, as legend has it. On that date, Ron Wayne, a 41-year-old senior designer whom Jobs met at Atari, took a two-page partnership agreement down to the Santa Clara County registrar’s office, and Apple was born. That agreement gave each of the Steves 45% of the company, and Wayne the final 10%, according to the new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, by reporter David Pogue, who has covered the company for 41 years. “That year, they were thrilled to sell 150 of those Apple I boards,” Pogue writes. Five decades later, in…

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…

Telling the truth is good for business. A 2024 research paper shows that an honest culture can boost financial performance by over 20%. And in a 2004 article by MIT Sloan Management Review, 76% of staff say the honesty of a business affects their decisions on where to work. We know it matters to organizations. After all, words like “honesty,” “integrity,” and “truthfulness” appear in more than 65% of all corporate value statements. Unfortunately, just 19% of staff trust that their leaders are telling the truth, according to a 2024 report. Trust is at historic lows, in part because, despite us all saying truth and honesty matter, it’s never been easier to lie and …

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…

You’re a solopreneur, so you’re in charge of everything. You set your own hours, choose your clients, and decide how your business runs. Nobody needs to approve your decisions. The worst part of solopreneurship is also that you’re in charge. Every decision, every approval, every process runs through one person: you. And when you stall, so does everything else. The same control that makes solo work so appealing can also become the thing that holds your business back. If your business can’t function without your hands on every single detail, you’ll hold yourself back. At some point, you have to figure out how some aspects of your business can run without you. …

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…

There’s a pattern hiding in the biographies of the most brilliant minds: repeatable habits anyone can practice. It has nothing to do with being a genius. You don’t need talent or intelligence, though that helps. Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write by dismantling essays he admired, rewriting them from memory. And comparing his version to the original. Charles Darwin spent years obsessively collecting barnacles (spineless animals that look like small circular white rocks) before publishing anything about evolution. Richard Feynman rebuilt physics from first principles in notebooks he kept purely for himself. None of these men was following a specific rule. Nobody…

When professionals hit their cognitive limit, most people assume the problem is lack of time or energy. But in reality, overwhelmed people are taking more action than ever. When overwhelm hits, they start doing even more: more lists, more reorganizing, more inbox management, more clicking between tabs. They are busy, visibly productive, heads down for hours, yet at the end of the day the most important work still hasn’t moved. The productivity mistake almost everyone makes when they’re overwhelmed comes down to taking the wrong action while feeling certain the whole time that they’re taking the right one. A 2025 managerial study found that digital fatigue and cogn…

The productivity numbers don’t lie. Or do they? Most companies have now rolled out AI tools enterprise-wide. Licenses have been purchased. Trainings have been scheduled. Slack channels have been flooded with prompts. And yet, when leadership asks about the ROI, the room goes quiet. This is not a new story. In 1987, economist Robert Solow looked at the data after years of massive corporate investment in personal computers and found something baffling: zero statistically significant improvement in productivity. Companies had bought the technology. They just had not changed how they worked. This became known as the productivity paradox, and it is playing out again ri…