What's on Your Mind?

The German antitrust authority has charged Apple with abusing its market power through its app tracking tool and giving itself preferential treatment in a move that could result in daily fines for the iPhone maker if it fails to change its business practices. The move follows a three-year investigation by the Federal Cartel Office into Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature, which allows users to block advertisers from tracking them across different applications. The U.S. tech giant has said the feature allows users to control their privacy but has drawn criticism from Meta Platforms, app developers and startups whose business models rely on advertising trackin…

Japanese automaker Honda reported a 7% decline in profit for the nine months that ended in December on Thursday as it terminated talks on integrating its business with Nissan. Tokyo-based Honda Motor Co. said its motorcycles business was strong, but its auto sales suffered in China and Japan, while demand stayed solid in the U.S. Honda’s April-December 2024 profit totaled 805 billion yen ($5 billion), down from 869.6 billion yen the same period in 2023. Nine-month sales gained nearly 9% to 16.3 trillion yen ($106 billion). Honda and Japanese rival Nissan Motor Corp., along with the smaller Mitsubishi Motors Corp., said in December that they were in talks to set up a j…

There’s a focus on protecting our personal data now, perhaps more so than ever before, be it from foreign powers, Big Tech, or Elon Musk’s DOGE. Consumers are wary about where their data is going, what it’s being used for, and how, or if, they can put up safeguards, especially while using tech tools like search engines or AI assistants. With several AI tools and assistants hitting the market over the past couple of years—Microsoft’s Copilot and Meta’s Llama, among many others—much of our data, queries, and summaries are being fed to large tech companies, used to train their artificial intelligence models. While some users may not mind, it could turn others off, w…

A Texas county on Wednesday approved holding an election sought by SpaceX that would let residents living around billionaire Elon Musk’s company decide whether to formally create a new city called Starbase. The election was set for May 3 and votes can only be cast by residents living near the launch site that is currently part of an unincorporated area of Cameron County, located along the U.S.-Mexico border. In December, more than 70 area residents signed a petition requesting an election to make Starbase its own municipality. Most of the residents are company employees and the community includes more than 100 children, according to copies of the petition obtained by Th…

For years, I thought saying yes was the key to success. Yes, to my parents’ dream of me becoming a doctor. Yes, to the long hours in medical school. Yes, to a career that others admired, even as I felt a growing sense of unease. I loved medicine’s ability to make a difference in people’s lives, but deep down, I had questions: Did I truly want to be a doctor, or was I fulfilling the role others expected of me? Every yes felt like another step away from myself. One pivotal moment came while I was working in a hospital in the Cook Islands. I treated patients with heart failure so advanced that basic mobility was a struggle. What struck me most wasn’t the lack of reso…

In 2023, creator and social agency Whalar Group announced an ambitious plan to create physical campuses for content creators to learn, make, and collaborate with their peers. Now the company is opening the doors to its first campus in Venice, Calif. this month with an additional location in Brooklyn launching this spring and a London location slated for 2026. Part production studio, part co-working space, part university, The Lighthouse is membership-based community designed to help creators and their teams level-up both their content and the businesses they’re building around it. “If you look at [20th century German art school] Bauhaus, Andy Warhol’s Factory, Sil…

Dutch Bros Inc. shares surged more than 27% in premarket trading Thursday after the coffee chain posted better-than-expected fourth-quarter results and announced plans to expand mobile ordering and food offerings. Revenue rose 34.9% to $342.8 million, surpassing Wall Street estimates. Same-store sales grew 6.9%, and adjusted earnings per share reached 7 cents, both exceeding expectations. The company forecasts 2024 sales between $1.555 billion and $1.575 billion, exceeding analyst projections. “Our efforts to develop our foundational transaction drivers—innovation, paid media, and our Dutch Rewards loyalty program—are working,” CEO Christine Barone said in a …

It’s not been a good start to 2025 when it comes to major retailers shuttering locations. Since the end of last year, numerous companies have announced their intention to close swaths of their brick-and-mortar stores, including Party City, Big Lots, Walgreens, 7-Eleven, and Macy’s. Just this week, another retailer—Joann fabrics—announced it would be closing hundreds of locations, as well. And now, department store icon JCPenney has also announced it’s closing some locations. Here’s what to know: JCPenney has had a roller-coaster few years The iconic department store chain has faced several struggles in recent years, most notably from the fall of foot traffic …

When Meta launched its “AI Studio” feature for over two billion Instagram users in July 2024, the company promised a tool that would give anyone the ability to create their own AI characters “to make you laugh, generate memes, give travel advice, and so much more.” The company claimed the feature, which was built with Meta’s Llama 3.1 large language model, would be subject to policies and protections to “help ensure AIs are used responsibly.” But a Fast Company review of the technology found that these new characters can very easily become hyper-sexual personas that sometimes appear to be minors. Many of the AI characters that appear featured on Instagram’s home…

The wellness market is the biggest it has ever been, with a valuation of nearly $2 trillion, according to a McKinsey report. But somehow today’s workforce is more burnt-out than ever before. Research by the Boston Consulting Group shows that 48% of workers are exhausted from stress. The reason? Wellness works, but the way we are working doesn’t. After spending a decade on Wall Street, I can attest that high stress periods at work are inevitable. Unfortunately, anyone advocating for better “stress management” often receives an eye roll due to the misconception that it means avoiding stress altogether. When I learned that “stress management” is not about removing stress…

As the Super Bowl clock ticked just below three minutes left in the game, Eagles wide receivers A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith picked up the giant Gatorade cooler, snuck behind head coach Nick Sirianni on the sideline, and hit him with the traditional shower celebration. It was probably one of the best ads of the Super Bowl, and it wasn’t even a commercial. And yet, it still told a story about how close the ties are between this brand and one of the most significant moments in sports. This year, Gatorade celebrates its 60th anniversary since Dr. James Cade first concocted his formula to keep the Florida Gators football team hydrated. Gatorade chief brand of…

Watch any Olympic event, and you’ll notice this universal ritual: The moment an athlete completes their performance, they turn to their coach for feedback. There’s no defensiveness—just a hunger to know how to improve. They understand that even the smallest adjustment could be the difference between standing on the podium or watching from the sidelines. For athletes, feedback is not criticism. It’s a tool for enhancement. This mindset isn’t confined to sports. High performers in every field—whether that’s business, academia, or the arts—share an insatiable appetite for actionable feedback. It’s their secret weapon for continual improvement. Why feedback fuel…

Many things irk people about the way modern companies operate. Workplace communication tools and so-called enterprise social media platforms are among the low-stakes but high-impact bugbears. Reading through the latest dull update from that guy in accounts who continually spams the work comms platform, or worrying about when and how to engage with a problematic post can cause plenty of stress. Having to keep up with colleagues on a workplace communication platform annoys many. But new research suggests the much-maligned tools might actually serve a purpose—and can benefit workers and the businesses they work for. Princeton University professor Manoel Horta Ribeiro…

Throughout Harvard Square, there are many bookshop brimming with the latest literary fiction and intellectual memoirs, patronized by scholarly types. But in January, a new bookshop popped up in the neighborhood that is nothing like the others. Lovestruck Books is a romance bookstore. It’s Instagrammable entrance is adorned with pink and purple flowers. There’s a coffee shop that transforms into a wine bar for evening events. Besides an enormous selection of romance novels, you can also purchase sex toys and tote bags emblazoned with “I read smut.” “We want to toe the lie a little bit with being provocative and edgy,” says Rachel Kanter, the store’s founder. “But the …

This jacket grows on trees. Vollebak, a London-based experimental clothing lab, has released a prototype garment made out of timber panels overlaid on a fabric interior. The long-sleeve hooded men’s Wooden Jacket is a feat of fashion design, turning a stiff material into pliable and stylish outerwear. Once it becomes available, the jacket will sell for $3,295. For now, there’s a waiting list “while we grow them,” Vollebak says. [Photo: Sun Lee/Vollebak] The jacket is par for the course for Vollebak, which experiments with sustainable materials to make its unlikely apparel. The company has also designed an antiviral jacket made from copper, a decomposable ho…

Eric Migicovsky has barely started working on a successor to the Pebble smartwatch, and he’s already talking about being finished with it. Eight years ago, Migicovsky shut down the smartwatch startup he founded, having sold its software assets to Fitbit, which later became part of Google. But all this time, he and thousands of Pebble die-hards have continued to wear their watches, aided in part by a community that’s kept Pebble’s app store and core services alive. Last month, Migicovsky persuaded Google to make Pebble’s software open source, and now he’s started a company to build new watches. (They won’t be called Pebbles, though, since Google still owns the name.) While…

During the Great Resignation, employers offered signing bonuses at unprecedented rates and, while the labor market has since cooled, the cash incentive remains popular, especially among in-person roles. According to a recent study by Indeed’s Hiring Lab, the one-time bonus was included in less than 2% of job postings on the platform before the pandemic, and skyrocketed to a peak of 5.6% in September of 2022. Though the labor market is largely back to pre-pandemic norms, signing bonus offers remain nearly twice as common as they were in 2019, and are now attached to 3.7% of U.S. job postings. “In the last couple years, the trend line has actually diverged,” ex…