What's on Your Mind?

Anyone well-versed in internet lore will be familiar with the image of a slightly deflated child’s ball pit on a hotel convention room floor. DashCon (originally called Tumblr-Con, although not officially affiliated with Tumblr) was a fan convention held in Schaumburg, Illinois, back in 2014. It was originally intended to bring the Tumblr community together and scheduled to feature vendors and special guests from fandoms like Doctor Who and Sherlock. After a string of disasters, the weekend culminated in the 17-year-old organizer, Nessie O’Neil, going around with a paper bag asking attendees for donations to make up the roughly $17,000 needed to keep the conventi…

Across the country, data center demand and construction have been skyrocketing throughout 2025. And so has local opposition to those projects. From Indiana (where a developer withdrew its application to build a data center on more than 700 acres of farmland after local opposition) to Georgia (where now at least eight municipalities have passed moratoriums on data center development), residents and politicians are pushing back against the water- and energy-hungry sites. Between late March through June of this year alone, 20 data center projects, representing about $98 billion in investments, were blocked or delayed in the United States, according to a new rep…

If a single type of building could define our present time, it would undoubtedly be the data center. Underpinning the increasingly online way we work, shop, and entertain ourselves, data centers provide the computing power and storage to handle all the Zoom calls, Amazon purchases, and Netflix streams a person can cram into their day. And now as compute-hungry artificial intelligence dominates the future of nearly every sector of the economy—and possibly society as a whole—the data center will become even more ubiquitous. A headlong data center building boom is already underway. One report finds that average monthly spending on data centers has increased 400% in the l…

When Amazon proposed building its Project Blue data center in Tucson, Arizona, the company faced intense pushback. Residents raised concerns about the enormous amounts of water and electricity that the data center would need, two major ways such projects impact the environment, especially in a desert city. Ultimately, Tucson’s town council rejected the proposal (though its developer hasn’t given up). But the story highlights both the growing environmental impacts of data centers, and how location matters to that impact. A study published this week in the journal Nature Sustainability makes that connection even clearer. Led by researchers at Cornell University, t…

When fewer people belong to unions and unions have less power, the impact goes beyond wages and job security. Those changes can hurt public health and make people more unhappy. We’re economists who research labor and health issues. Those are two of the main findings of studies that we have conducted. More unionization, more happiness In the first study on this topic that we published in 2023, we found that increasing levels of union membership tends to make working-class people happier. We zeroed in on a question in the General Social Survey, which the University of Chicago makes available. It asks respondents to choose whether they are “very happy,” “somew…

Growing up in rural Northern California and later serving in the military, stationed in Mississippi, I experienced firsthand the stark disparities in access to quality goods. Even finding fresh, local produce often meant bypassing the grocery store for a farm stand because the desired options simply weren’t stocked. In many communities I lived in and visited, the available choices were severely limited, creating a significant market gap that persists today. This isn’t just a social issue I observed; it’s a massive missed revenue opportunity for retailers who are overly focused on saturated urban markets while overlooking the immense potential waiting in rural and Middle A…

As the founder, chair, and CEO of the Exceptional Women Alliance, I am privileged to work alongside extraordinary women leaders who reshape industries and redefine what leadership looks like. Within this sisterhood, we challenge, support, and elevate one another, sharing not just professional expertise but a commitment to lead with impact. Nicole Brownell is one of those leaders. She is a COO and growth strategist whose work sits at the intersection of digital transformation, product innovation, and behavioral intelligence. She has guided companies through scaling, designed GTM strategies that combine creativity with analytics, and she focuses on using data to deepen …

In Denmark, a grocery store chain used a black star. In Canada, it was a maple leaf. President Donald The President’s trade war inspired new country-of-origin “Made In” labels this year as shoppers outside the U.S. looked to avoid buying American-made goods and shop local instead. In the U.S., though, the “Made in USA” brand is losing its domestic appeal. Country-of-origin labeling is designed to be a stamp of authenticity and quality. Countries police their own rules to ensure products labeled “made” or “assembled” in their country really were made or assembled there and that they meet national standards. When the Copenhagen-based think tank 21st Century int…

Accenture announced on Wednesday that David Droga, CEO of its technology-focused creative group Accenture Song, will step down from his role in September. Droga will transition from his day-to-day leadership role into a broader strategic role as vice chair of Accenture. As part of the transition, Ndidi Oteh, who currently serves as the Americas lead for Accenture Song, will become the CEO of Accenture Song, the company said. He will also join Accenture’s Global Management Committee. Meanwhile, Nick Law, current creative chairperson for Accenture Song, is set to become the creative strategy and experience lead. ‘Once-in-a-generation creative leader’ An awa…

It appears that day trading could get easier. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, known as FINRA, on Tuesday announced it had approved amendments that will replace the current day trading and pattern day trading rules, “including the minimum equity of $25,000 for pattern day traders.” The proposed change, if approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), would mean traders would no longer need to maintain a minimum $25,000 balance in a margin account to execute four or more day trades within a five-business-day period, CNBC reported. Here’s a quick breakdown of what that means. What is day trading? Day trading, as defined by FINRA’s…

Yes, it’s that time of year again, when most of the U.S. “gains” an extra hour of sleep as we “fall back” from daylight savings to shorter days, colder nights, and standard time. This Sunday, November 2, at 2 a.m local time, we will turn back our clocks to 1 a.m—and that will last until March 8, 2026 (when we will once again usher in daylight saving time). Although getting an extra hour of sleep sounds like a win, here’s what really happens to your health when the clocks change. Darker nights disrupt the body’s natural clock Darker evenings actually disrupt our body’s natural circadian rhythm, our mood, and our metabolism, according to Dr. Zaid Fadul, CEO …

President Donald The President’s administration faces deadlines on Monday to tell two federal judges whether it will comply with court orders that it continue to fund SNAP, the nation’s biggest food aid program, using contingency funds during the government shutdown. The U.S. Department of Agriculture planned to freeze payments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program starting Nov. 1 because it said it could no longer keep funding it due to the shutdown. The program serves about 1 in 8 Americans and is a major piece of the nation’s social safety net — and it costs about $8 billion per month nationally. The situation leaves millions with uncertainty about how the…

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated and expanded a food safety alert regarding possible Listeria contamination in several prepared pasta meal products. The extent of the outbreak is now known to have occurred in at least 15 states and has unfortunately resulted in multiple deaths. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On Friday, the CDC issued a new alert along with an expanded list of prepared pasta meal products that may be contaminated with Listeria, a potentially deadly bacterium. According to an accompanying CDC tracking page, there have now been 20 cases of Listeria believed to be related to the outbreak. Th…

In the about 1,000 days between her drunken-driving crash in May 2022 and her death, South Korean mainstream news organizations published at least around 2,000 stories on film actor Kim Sae-ron. They illustrate how the local media often cover a celebrity’s fall from grace. Previously one of the brightest young stars in South Korean cinema, Kim was condemned and ridiculed for driving drunk; for talking about her financial struggles after losing roles; for taking a job at a coffee shop; for attempting a comeback in theater; for going out with friends instead of “showing remorse”; and for being seen smiling on set while shooting an indie movie. After the 24-year-old actor …

Last night, Zohran Mamdani defeated Andrew Cuomo to become the next mayor of New York City. Cue the online crashouts. Leading the pack is Will & Grace star Debra Messing, who is now facing intense backlash for sharing dozens of posts smearing the Democratic candidate on Instagram in the run up to polls closing. Messing took part in early voting last week, sharing in a post that she cast her ballot for Cuomo, who ran as an independent. Before the race was called, Messing took to her Instagram Stories to share an onslaught of anti-Mamdani graphics and videos, many including blatant Islamophobia. She reposted a video of one influencer calling Mamdani …

Endings are tricky: You want closure and to go out with a bang—which is a hard balance. It’s natural to want the end of the year to be meaningful. Even the moon appears to agree with this sentiment, and it’s about to prove it. The final full moon of 2025, which is also called the cold moon, will be a bright supermoon occurring on December 4. Before we get into how best to moon-gaze, let’s break down what that all means, and do a year-end moon review. Why is December’s full moon called the ‘cold moon’? Human beings assign names even to celestial happenings. The Old Farmer’s Almanac compiled the most commonly used monikers, based on Old English and Native Ame…

By now, most people know not to trust everything they see on TikTok. But scams on the platform are becoming increasingly sophisticated, thanks to deepfake technology. A new report from Media Matters for America, published this week, identified multiple TikTok accounts using deepfake influencers and fake storytimes to promote wellness products to unsuspecting users. These accounts appear to be part of an affiliated network, using the same content format and often promoting exactly the same products with little to no scientific backing. One now-deleted TikTok account, which had over 245,000 followers, amassed more than 4.1 million likes promoting its “secret to perf…

For years, deepfakes were treated as a political or social media oddity, a strange corner of the internet where celebrity faces (of women 99% of the time) were pasted onto fake videos (porn in 99% of the cases) and nobody quite knew what to do about it. But that framing is now dangerously outdated, because deepfakes have quietly evolved into something much more systemic: an operational risk for corporations, capable of corrupting supply chains, financial workflows, brand trust, and even executive decision-making. Recent headlines show that synthetic media is no longer a fringe experiment. It is a strategic threat, one that companies are not prepared for. When a …

Over the course of 2025, deepfakes improved dramatically. AI-generated faces, voices, and full-body performances that mimic real people increased in quality far beyond what even many experts expected would be the case just a few years ago. They were also increasingly used to deceive people. For many everyday scenarios—especially low-resolution video calls and media shared on social media platforms—their realism is now high enough to reliably fool nonexpert viewers. In practical terms, synthetic media have become indistinguishable from authentic recordings for ordinary people and, in some cases, even for institutions. And this surge is not limited to quality. The v…

Recently, Chinese startup DeepSeek created state-of-the art AI models using far less computing power and capital than anyone thought possible. It then showed its work in published research papers and by allowing its models to explain the reasoning process that led to this answer or that. It also scored at or near the top in a range of benchmark tests, besting OpenAI models in several skill areas. The surprising work seems to have let some of the air out of the AI industry’s main assumption—that the best way to make models smarter is by giving them more computing power, so that the AI lab with the most Nvidia chips will have the best models and shortest route to artificial…

Yesterday, shockwaves rippled across the American tech industry after news spread over the weekend about a powerful new large language model (LLM) from China called DeepSeek. News of DeepSeek’s capabilities—not to mention the fact that it is open-source and free for anyone to use and modify—sent U.S. markets reeling, including the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which saw $1 trillion evaporate from its market cap as AI-adjacent stocks such as Nvidia and Broadcom were hit hard. U.S.-listed shares of TSMC, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), also took a dive. But today, some of those stocks are recovering, at least to a degree. Here’s what you need to know about …