What's on Your Mind?

At least 112 North American bird species have lost more than half their populations in the past 50 years, according to a new report published Thursday. Among the birds showing the steepest declines are Allen’s hummingbirds, Florida scrub jays, golden-cheeked warblers, tricolored blackbirds and yellow-billed magpies. “These are the very real consequences if we are unable to conserve and protect the crucial habitats that birds need,” said study co-author Mike Brasher, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Ducks Unlimited. For several decades, waterfowl stood out as a conservation bright spot with duck populations growing nationwide even as many other groups of bir…

It may be winter and there may be a biting chill in the air, but the dozen men and women who have packed this small sauna room in east London are happily sweating away in their swimwear. It’s more than 90 degrees Celcius (194 Fahrenheit) in here — and it’s about to get even hotter. As ice blocks infused with lavender oil melt over sizzling hot stones, releasing fragrant steam, “sauna master” Oliver Beryl turns on some ambient music and starts to vigorously wave a towel in a circular motion above his head to spread overpowering waves of dry heat around the room. “Now try finding someone and sit back to back with them,” Beryl suggests. “Or, if you want, maintain…

A new memoir that paints Facebook’s parent company and its executives in a negative light is rising on Amazon’s Best Sellers rankings faster than you can ask a Meta AI assistant to define “Streisand effect.” Careless People, written by former Meta employee Sarah Wynn-Williams, was the No. 5 best-selling book on Amazon as of early Thursday afternoon, one day after an arbitrator ordered the author to temporarily stop promoting the book. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone applauded the emergency ruling yesterday on Threads, saying it affirmed that the “false and defamatory book should never have been published.” However, the legal fight appears to have drawn increased atte…

CC BY-ND Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted office life, American workplaces are settling into a new rhythm. Employees in remote-friendly jobs now spend an average of 2.3 days each week working from home, a research team that tracks remote employment has found. And when you look at all workers – and not just those in remote-friendly positions – they’re working remotely 1.4 days a week, or 28% of the time. That’s a huge change from 2019, when remote work accounted for only 7% of the nation’s paid workdays, even if it’s down from the height of the pandemic in 2020, when 61.5% of all work was remote. And it’s a giant leap from 1965, the dawn of telewor…

Match Group’s new CEO Spencer Rascoff sent a letter to employees Thursday outlining his vision for the company, while also acknowledging the dating giant has fallen flat when it comes to public sentiment. Rascoff, who cofounded Zillow and served as chief executive for a decade, was appointed Match Group CEO in early February to shake up the beleaguered parent company of Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid. Rascoff isn’t entirely a newcomer to the dating economy: He joined Match Group’s board in 2024. “To reach our full potential, we must confront a hard truth: we haven’t always met the high standards we set for the user experience,” Rascoff said in the letter, which was s…

Picture a packed stadium of fans in extreme weather, all clad in their favorite jerseys, cheering and cursing at their favorite American football team or European soccer club. Or a crush of screaming fans, singing and dancing in unison at a Taylor Swift or K-pop concert. Or a sea of costumed Star Wars fans, lightsabers aloft, filling up movie theaters on opening night of a new movie. Plenty of people like to watch sports, attend concerts, and go to the movies. But what about those fans—the diehard ones, if you will—whose dedication goes even further? The fans whose daily lives are deeply intertwined with their interests? Diehard fans tend to have a detailed, intri…

Struggling chipmaker Intel has hired former board member and semiconductor industry veteran Lip-Bu Tan as the latest in a succession of CEOs to attempt to turn around a once-dominant company that helped define Silicon Valley. Tan, 65, will take over the daunting job next Tuesday, more than three months after Intel’s previous CEO, Pat Gelsinger, abruptly retired amid a deepening downturn that triggered massive layoffs and raised questions about the chipmaker’s ability to survive as an independent company. This won’t be Tan’s first time running a semiconductor company, nor his first association with Intel. He spent more than a decade as CEO of Cadence Design Systems, whic…

TD Bank is planning to close at least 37 branches across 10 states and Washington, D.C., as part of a broader effort to streamline operations and adapt to changing customer banking habits. The decision comes amid ongoing recovery efforts for the company, which is still grappling with the fallout from a $3 billion payout after pleading guilty to money laundering and failing to prevent illegal transactions. In October 2024, the Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed that over a six-year period, TD Bank had neglected to monitor more than $18 trillion in payments, enabling the laundering of over $600 million. As part of the settlement, the bank was required to pay hefty…

Donatella Versace has been replaced as creative director of the fashion house founded by her late brother Gianni Versace, assuming the new role of chief brand ambassador, Versace’s U.S. owner Capri Holdings announced on Thursday. Versace will be replaced by Dario Vitale, who most recently was design director at the Miu Miu brand owned by the Prada Group. His appointment is effective on April 1. The creative shift comes amid speculation that the Prada Group is in talks to buy Versace from Capri Holdings, which paid 2 billion euros (currently $2.2 billion) for the fashion house in 2018. The U.S. group also owns Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo. Miuccia Prada acknowledged inte…

As buzz around women’s sports continues to grow, the largest dedicated female sports fund just got larger. Monarch Collective, the first and largest investment platform that exclusively invests in women’s sports, announced Thursday that it has expanded its fund size from $150 million to $250 million. The increased capital will allow the fund to capitalize on what it calls a “rapidly accelerating market”: women’s professional sports teams that have been increasingly filling seats. “Since launching our fund last year, women’s sports has experienced a cultural transcendence and the ecosystem has evolved dramatically, making the need for operational, value-added capit…

Mia Francis, a 22-year-old barista from Boston, filed her taxes on her own this year for the first time, using a free government tax filing program that made it easy because it did most of the work for her. Francis said it took 45 minutes to finish her taxes with the IRS Direct File program, an electronic tax return filing system that the IRS made permanent last year and that has rolled out to 25 states. Francis is expecting a $530 refund. And because she saved cash by not using a commercial tax preparation company to file her taxes, “that money will go a long way,” she said. She plans to use it for a trip to Amsterdam this year. Despite its popularity with Francis and…

In January, Meta announced the end of third-party fact checkers on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The tech giant is betting on a new, community-driven system called Community Notes that draws on X’s feature of the same name and uses the X’s open algorithm as its basis. Meta is rolling out the feature today. Anyone who wants to write and rate community notes can sign up now. The rollout will be throttled and, initially, notes won’t appear publicly as Meta claims it needs time to feed the algorithm and ensure this system is working properly. The promise is enticing. A more scalable, less biased way to flag false or misleading content, driven by the wisdom of the crow…

Tonight will be the perfect evening to stay up late in the United States, because the moon is going to put on a spectacular show. In the wee hours of the morning, night owls can witness a full blood moon, supermoon, “worm” moon, and a total lunar eclipse. In addition to Americans, parts of Europe, Australia, Asia, South America, and Africa can also get in on the action. Let’s take a deeper look at what that means and how you can see the spectacle: The March 2025 full moon is many things According to NASA, in the 1930s the Maine Farmers’ Almanac started publishing names for the full moons based on Native American traditions. This took off and became the pre…

Identifying which companies you hope to work for is one of the biggest hurdles job seekers face. I know this because I was a search consultant for over 25 years. Now, I have an executive résumé and LinkedIn profile writing practice. And my clients almost always ask questions about how to find future employers. I advise them to use AI chatbot platforms like ChatGPT, Claude AI, and Perplexity. To help the platforms work their magic, I encourage them to use NAICS codes in their prompts. Here’s how to do this: What are NAICS codes? NAICS is the acronym for the North American Industry Classification System. It assigns six-digit codes to companies as follows: …