What's on Your Mind?

Over the past several months, Adobe has been rolling out a steady stream of AI features and platform updates that make brand design more intuitive, quick, and personalized. Its latest addition to that portfolio is a new tool called Asset Amplify that can generate entire websites, social media posts, and print collateral catered toward specific audience segments, like Gen Zers or millennials. Asset Amplify is among several prospective tools, called “Sneaks,” that Adobe will be demoing at its 2026 Adobe Summit conference this week. For Adobe, Sneaks are annual UX experiments, crowdsourced from across the company, that may or may not become actual products based on user …

On April 7, Anthropic unveiled its most powerful AI model to date. Mythos, it said, will help companies discover vulnerabilities and implement fixes in software models, surpassing “all but the most skilled humans.” Now the patching from that analysis is about to get underway. And people who ignore the updates could find themselves under siege by hackers. Mythos, Anthropic said, found coding weak spots in every operating system and web browser, some of which had been lying in wait for decades. One flaw in OpenBSD, which was designed with security top of mind, had apparently been hidden deep in the code for 28 years. To ward off a possible feeding frenzy from ha…

When Liza Moiseeva first heard that Allbirds was pivoting to AI, she thought it was satire. “It belongs in an Onion article,” says Moiseeva, chief marketing officer at Commons, an app that helps people shop more sustainably, in part by rating brands. Moiseeva has worked in sustainability for about 15 years, and she’s been an Allbirds customer for more than a decade. Her family owns 10 pairs of the sneaker that once ruled Silicon Valley streets—and that had been a leader in sustainable fashion. Now, Allbirds is stepping away from its footwear business, pivoting instead to AI compute infrastructure and rebranding as “NewBird AI.” (The Allbirds brand and footwea…

SpaceX still has deep roots in the rocket business, but the Elon Musk-owned company is doubling down on artificial intelligence as it prepares for an IPO. In a social media post Monday afternoon, SpaceX announced it had started a working relationship with AI coding startup Cursor, which includes an option to buy the company for $60 billion. (Should SpaceX decide against buying Cursor, it will pay $10 billion for its work.) “The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models,” the company said in the post…

The most sustainable piece of clothing you own probably has nothing to do with recycled polyester or organic cotton. It’s the little black dress you’ve worn on repeat for 15 years and the pair of ripped Levi’s 501s you can’t imagine ever throwing away. The harder question—the one the fashion industry has never quite figured out—is how to design something like that on purpose. How do you make a garment someone loves now and will continue to wear for years? This is something Sarah Bonello thinks about constantly as she designs for her new label, The Park. After decades in fashion PR, where she developed a finely tuned sense of what the market was missing, Bonell…

Los Angeles just became the first major school district to put limits on screen time at school. The resolution, which was brought by Nick Melvoin, a concerned parent, passed 6-0 with one recusal. Now, screens in schools will no longer be a free-for-all. The district will have to create policies around screen time based on both grade level and subject. The resolution will also prohibit screens in first grade and below, bans screen time at recess for middle and elementary schoolers, and will restrict access to YouTube in class. Additionally, it will make clear to parents how they can go about opting out of using screens at school. Screen time is part of most …

Thanks to social media, a new legion of fans are discovering something new to love at Buc-ee’s: The OverBite. Though it’s been on the shelves at Buc-ee’s for several years, the hockey puck-shaped, chocolate covered candy bar has become a bit of a viral sensation more recently. Available in five different flavors, these quarter-pound treats feature a thick layer of either milk or dark chocolate and fillings like peanut butter, caramel, and cookies and cream. It seems Rich O’Toole, a Texas-based singer and songwriter, may get credit for kicking into overdrive the latest frenzy over the OverBite. In a post on X that’s amassed more than 8 million views since Monday,…

After-work drinks are a nice way to bond with colleagues in your 20s and 30s. But, as people get older, different circumstances can necessitate more planning, and new avenues for making friends at work. Take Olga Valadon, 54, whose last corporate role was as chief of staff at Deloitte. “Both I and the people I became friends with faced different pressures, whether from work or family commitments,” says Valadon. “We were running around all day chasing our tail to fulfill these needs, often leaving too little time or energy for anything that was just for us.” It’s no surprise that, as people age, family obligations become a significant barrier to making friends. Bi…

Lowe’s Home Improvement is facing pressure to cut ties with Flock Safety, the surveillance company that makes cameras, drones, and automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The pressure comes amid reports that Flock data has been used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and even aided in an investigation of a woman who had an abortion, driving fears about a mass surveillance state. In August, 404 Media reported that Flock cameras stationed outside of Lowe’s and The Home Depot “are being fed into a massive surveillance system that law enforcement can access.” The story cited records obtained by EFF. In an April 1 letter addressed to CEO Marvin Ellison…

Beast Industries, the $5 billion media conglomerate founded by YouTube star MrBeast, is being sued by a former employee who says she was sexually harassed, discriminated against as a woman, and fired shortly after returning from maternity leave. The company refutes her claims, saying it has evidence, including Slack and WhatsApp messages, company documents, and witness testimony, that contradict the lawsuit’s allegations. The federal lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in the Eastern District Court of North Carolina, paints a picture of Beast Industries as a boy’s club in which women were excluded from male-dominated meetings, demeaned in front of colleagues, and told to “…

The modern email inbox can be disorganized and unwieldy. Important emails get lost under spam and receipts, and the search function doesn’t always work like you hoped it would. Many of us gave up on inbox zero long ago. If that sounds like you, this new smart email client might be exactly what you’re looking for. Extra is an email inbox app designed by Build Forever, a software company founded by a trio of former Pinterest employees. The app intriguingly reimagines the entire user experience of the inbox from one of stacked, accumulating, text-only subject lines to an image-rich interface that surfaces the most important emails for you using AI. Build Forever …

My earliest memory of travel insurance was the life insurance vending machines that used to populate airports up until the early 1980s. For those too young to remember this bizarre part of 20th century air travel, these kiosks offered very short-term life insurance policies that cost $2.50 (paid in quarters) for coverage of up to $62,500. Since these pre-travel policies were marketed to anxious flyers, it seemed clear the insurance companies were capitalizing on fear rather than offering a needed product. Over the intervening decades, I never revised my opinion of travel insurance. I’ve been lucky enough to never need travel insurance, but my family’s recent trip …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the pandemic housing boom, homebuilders saw their number of unsold completed new builds dry up as overheated demand quickly absorbed almost everything for sale. That is exactly what was experienced by D.R. Horton, America’s largest homebuilder, which had just 600 unsold completed new builds for sale in fiscal Q2 2022—compared to 4,700 in its fiscal Q2 2020. However, as the pandemic housing boom ended and the market shifted, U.S. homebuilders saw their unsold new builds spike back up. At the end of its fiscal Q2 2025—the three months ending Ma…

The missed promotion. The botched presentation. The project that went sideways despite our best efforts. We’ve all been there, stuck in what I call failure’s funk: that heavy mix of shame, fear, and paralysis that keeps us replaying mistakes long after they’ve passed. In both life and work, this funk doesn’t just feel awful, it blocks learning. We’re so busy avoiding, denying, or criticizing ourselves that we miss the insight failure offers. We often hear that failure is life’s best teacher, but learning from it isn’t automatic. It doesn’t happen just because we failed; it happens because we do the inner work, reflecting, reframing, and choosing to respond differe…

News that Microsoft was reportedly planning to pause its carbon removal purchases has rocked the still-nascent carbon removal industry. The company helped drive the market: In fiscal year 2025 alone, it made deals with 21 companies around the world to remove a record 45 million tons of CO2. Those deals included new contracts with companies like Re.green, which is restoring a swath of the Amazon rainforest, and Vaulted, which removes carbon by burying organic waste. Last month, it added a contract with Liferaft, a company making biochar from agricultural waste in the Midwest. The industry uses a wide range of technologies to tackle one part of the climate challenge: at…

Managing people is about helping people tap into underutilized reserves and overlooked skills that are indigenous to them, not fixing their habits. The people you manage naturally look to you for answers. They might even ask you to tell them what to do, which creates two major problems: If you tell them what to do, and even if you’re right, they won’t learn anything. If you give clear instructions regarding what to do and things still go wrong, they more than likely will blame you for the resulting mess. This kind of dynamic quietly creates an unhealthy dependency where the employee begins to look to you not just for guidance, but for approval. Anyone who…

As a leadership consultant who helps organizations understand how to apply artistic thinking, one of the lessons I have learned is one of the basic differences between the artistic practice and the business practice—in the former, questioning is the way of life, in the latter answers are the way to go. Artists ask “why” constantly. Why does this exist? Why are things the way they are? Why are we doing it this way? That relentless questioning is how they push past convention—and it’s the engine of genuine creative thinking. Bring that same type of question into most organizations, and something breaks. “Why are we doing it this way?” stops sounding like curiosity. It s…

On February 10, 1985, an imprisoned 66-year-old male serving a life sentence was offered a conditional release that would have reunited him with his wife and children, from whom he had been separated for 23 years. The prisoner turned down the offer. His name was Nelson Mandela. In a rejection publicly delivered to the South African government by his daughter at a rally in Soweto, Mandela refused the condition that he permanently walk away from the country’s anti-apartheid movement. “I cherish my own freedom dearly, but I care even more for your freedom,” he stated, unwilling to “sell the birthright of the people to be free.” Mandela would spend another five ye…

If you’ve spent meaningful time in a corporate design role, you’ve probably received some version of this feedback at least once: you’re difficult. Too opinionated. Not a team player. You push back too much. You care too much about things that aren’t your call. I’ve heard this feedback described, almost word for word, by hundreds of designers across industries and career levels. And what strikes me every time is how consistently it describes not a liability, but a set of entrepreneurial instincts that organizations simply don’t know how to hold. The traits that get pathologized in corporate environments (the tendency to question assumptions, to challenge briefs be…

When Malibu launched its “Get Ready With Malibu Pink” campaign this spring, the rum brand had all the necessary ingredients for a modern influencer campaign. Creator partnerships with Sabrina Brier and other influencers, on-trend “get ready with me” style videos, all centered on the debut of a new flavored rum with guava, coconut, and pineapple. But there was also one element that was surprisingly new terrain for Malibu’s parent company Pernod Ricard: its first major campaign designed specifically for TikTok. A platform once off-limits Until very recently, alcohol brands like Malibu were completely absent from TikTok. But over the past two years, TikTok’s stron…

For decades, the American Dream was rooted in opportunity at home. Today, a growing number of workers are redefining that dream and increasingly, it doesn’t include staying in the United States. A mix of economic pressure, shifting expectations, and global opportunity is pushing employees to consider life and work abroad in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. New research from Preply’s Language and Global Career Mobility Report underscores just how widespread this shift has become. Preply, a foreign language learning platform, surveyed over 1,800 adults in the U.S., U.K. and Canada who had studied a language or were interested in learning one. …