What's on Your Mind?

For years, parents, teenagers, pediatricians, educators, and whistleblowers have pushed the idea that social media is detrimental to young people’s mental health and can lead to addiction, eating disorders, sexual exploitation, and suicide. For the first time, juries in two states took their side. In Los Angeles on Wednesday, a jury found both Meta and YouTube liable for harms to children using their services. In New Mexico, a jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. Tech watchdog groups, families, and children’s advocates cheered the jury decisions. “Th…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. In calendar year 2025, the U.S. recorded 4.06 million existing home sales—tying 2024 and coming in just below the 4.09 million recorded in 2023. That marks three straight years with the fewest U.S. existing home sales since 1995. However, when accounting for population growth, the slowdown is even more pronounced. The U.S. had around 99 million households in 1995, compared to roughly 135 million households in 2025. Adjusted for that larger population base, resale turnover over the past three years has been the lowest in more than four decades. You’d have…

Two decades after the original film, Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep are returning to the world of The Devil Wears Prada for its long-awaited sequel. The Devil Wears Prada 2, which also sees the return of stars Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt, follows Hathaway as journalist Andy Sachs and Streep as Miranda Priestly, the editor-in-chief of fictional fashion magazine Runway, crossing paths again 20 years after the events of the first movie. When Streep and Hathaway starred in the original Devil Wears Prada, it was an untested franchise that fashion houses hesitated to lend their clothes and brand names to. But the sequel is an entirely different story, with the fashion…

The AI behemoth Anthropic released a report this week about the widening “AI skills gap.” In it, the research suggests that a widening gap may be emerging between those who use AI frequently for work and those who don’t. The report data shows that those with at least six months of experience with the company’s chatbot, Claude, have a higher success rate when collaborating with the system than those without. This can lead to an advantage in an ever-changing labor market landscape as AI becomes an integral part of the job market. In an interview with TechCrunch, Anthropic’s head of economics, Peter McCrory, spoke about how the report does not yet prove a broader sh…

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…

Be careful what you like on social media – you never know when a billionaire’s lawyers might be going over your likes with a fine-toothed comb. Elon Musk’s lawyers requested that a judge with a history of presiding over his legal battles step aside this week. The reason? A post she liked on LinkedIn. In a motion for recusal, Musk’s legal team requested that Delaware Chancery Court Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick remove herself from a pair of Tesla lawsuits to “avoid an appearance of bias.” The post in question celebrated a verdict in a San Francisco federal court that found Musk defrauded Twitter investors in the chaotic days before he bought the social network. In…

Many people enjoy sleeping with their pets. Who wouldn’t? After a hard day of work, cuddling up with a cute animal that shows you unconditional love is just the thing many people need. But sadly, after digging into a newly released study, they may start to think twice before letting their furry friends into bed at night. The Conversation recently published an article highlighting the major findings of a study by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that examined the pros and cons of having pets sleep in bed with them—something that 46% of respondents do. Though the research suggests that sleeping with your pet in bed may have psychological benefits, it may actually …

Meta laid off hundreds of employees this week, just months after notable cuts to its virtual reality and metaverse division. These job losses amount to less than one percent of the company’s overall workforce, reportedly impacting about 700 employees across a number of departments. But recent headlines indicate there’s likely more to come: Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Meta was planning large-scale cuts to its workforce that could slash 20% of jobs—or more—to help offset the company’s investments in artificial intelligence. (At the time, Meta dismissed those claims as “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.”) Layoffs are not exactly unexpected…

There’s a tremendous, ageless opportunity hiding in plain sight, but marketers need to look through a different lens to see it. Right now, there are some 35 million U.S. empty nester women, as I calculate it, and a growing percentage of them are single. They aren’t retreating into rest and relaxation; they are stepping out to exult in activities they finally have the time, money, and motivation to pursue. Historically, marketers have largely overlooked this demographic. Or, if they address this market, it’s only for margin and share growth. That’s the wrong framework. The real opportunity isn’t just about capturing their spending power, it’s about recognizing a profo…

Artificial intelligence is moving into everything. It’s in the phone in your pocket, the watch on your wrist, the TV on your wall, and the appliances in your kitchen. As companies race to build AI wearables and ambient assistants, there’s a risk we skip a crucial step: grounding this future in the devices people already trust and use constantly. For most of us, that foundation is the smartphone. Smartphones sit at the center of daily life, helping with communication, payments, creativity, navigation, entertainment, and more. About 91% of Americans own one, according to Pew Research. They are personal, always with us, and deeply embedded in our routines. If AI is t…

Most people don’t actually want to give up their phone. They just want it to stop tugging at them like a needy toddler. There’s a difference. One suggests extremism and poor reception. The other is far more sensible: learning how to live with technology without letting it quietly take charge of your attention, mood, and nervous system while pretending it’s being helpful. Because for most of us, the problem isn’t “addiction” in the dramatic sense. No one’s pawning the sofa for screen time. It’s accumulation. A thousand tiny habits layered together until checking becomes automatic and being offline feels faintly unsettling, like you’ve forgotten something important …

As businesses race to become AI-ready, job seekers are racing just as quickly to keep up. New data shows that candidates are getting the message: AI skills are showing up more often on resumes. But this change is exposing a deeper disconnect: the labor market increasingly rewards AI fluency, while the education system often discourages it. According to a new report from Monster.com, the number of resumes that mention AI skills has surged in just two years, going from 3.7% in 2023 to 12.8% last year. Per the report, the most notable increase was from 2024 to 2025 when the number of mentions ticked up by 7.6 points. The previous year, it only accelerated by 1.5 poin…

Below, Matt Kaplan shares five key insights from his new book, I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right. Matt is a science correspondent at The Economist, where he has written about everything from paleontology and parasites to virology and viticulture over the course of two decades. His writing has also appeared in National Geographic, New Scientist, Nature, and the New York Times. What’s the big idea? Science often suppresses bold, unconventional, or threatening ideas due to ego, hierarchy, competition, sexism, and fraud. This culture harms progress. To truly serve society, science needs structural and cultural ref…

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, yours is the world, and everything that’s in it.” —Rudyard Kipling Right now, CEOs are confronting a grim reality. The global trade system that has underpinned business planning is unravelling. Ships pile up in harbor, supply chains that have taken years to build are being undermined, and the diplomatic relations that hold world trade together are fraying. The most destabilizing feature of our current situation is the uncertainty it breeds about the future. If leaders could reliably predict the next catastrophe, at least they could plan and prepare for it. But right now, th…

In 2012, Google conducted research to identify the factors that determine effective teams. This research, now famously known as Project Aristotle, analyzed hundreds of teams and individual members to crack the code on what enables some to operate at high levels while others flounder. What their study revealed is something Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson had discovered almost two decades prior: the most important factor for high performing teams is psychological safety. That is to say, teams perform better when their members feel safe taking risks and being vulnerable with each other, without fear of punishment. Google’s watershed study brought light to Edm…

Visual truth is going down in flames, thanks to new generative AI models that produce synthetic media that looks indistinguishable from reality. But a team of university researchers has figured out a hardware fix that just might save us. Engineers at ETH Zurich have designed a working prototype of a camera that physically stamps a cryptographic seal of authenticity onto every photo or video right at the image sensor (electronic chip) that captures each photon from the actual world. “Trust in digital content is eroding. We wanted to create a technology that gives people a way to verify whether something is genuine,” co-developer Felix Franke explained in a press releas…

In a greenfield industrial park in rural Aiken County, South Carolina, Meta is building a new $800 million data center that’s much like any of the other hyperscale data centers giant tech companies are scrambling to construct. Set on 300 acres with two massive data halls making up most of its 715,000 square feet of buildings, it’s the kind of gargantuan facility that has become the de facto built form of the race to harness the lucrative power of artificial intelligence. But past the sprawling data hall buildings, a comparably modest administration building has a unique design feature. Instead of the concrete and steel used in the data halls and countless other data …

The answer to America’s submarine bottleneck, the U.S. Navy has decided, lies as much in software as it does in steel. A new multibillion-dollar facility in Cherokee, Alabama, aims to harness AI and robotics to build submarine components faster and more reliably. The automated “factory of the future” will produce parts for the Navy’s Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, both central to the U.S. fleet. It will cost $2.4 billion to develop. “This factory is the first of three facilities designed to address the most critical bottlenecks in the maritime industrial base,” said John C. Phelan, secretary of the Navy, in a stat…

With Social Security on track to go broke in less than seven years, a new report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is proposing a solution: Cap Social Security payouts to $100,000 a year for couples, as part of an overall plan to save it from insolvency. (That’s $50,000 for a single retiree.) The renewed spotlight on Social Security follows a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that the main trust funds responsible for paying benefits, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, could be insolvent by as early as 2033. By law, that would automatically trigger a massive 24% cut in benefits. On top of the higher cost …