What's on Your Mind?

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…

The Washington Post informed its team on Wednesday morning that it was starting a round of mass layoffs, according to multiple media reports and a memo seen by Fast Company. Multiple sections are being shut down completely, while others are being shrunk significantly. The paper’s executive editor, Matt Murray, announced the cuts to the newsroom employees, saying that all sections would be impacted by the layoffs. He said the Post would be making a “strategic reset,” and is also cutting staff on the business side. The New York Times reported that approximately 30% of the Post’s employees are being laid off, including more than 300 of the around 800 journalists. …

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 …

America’s defense technology sector is rapidly expanding. Top talent, ambitious founders, and serious capital are flooding into a mission that matters, delivering products and solutions that will send us to the moon, deploy unimaginably capable unmanned aerial devices, and redefine what’s possible in modern warfare. It’s an exciting moment—one full of possibility and potential. But here’s the problem: while everyone is focused on the moonshots, we’re overlooking the foundation. The unsexy stuff. The quiet, mission-critical gaps that don’t make headlines but could leave us dangerously vulnerable. We’re building skyscrapers without checking if the ground beneath us is s…

Snow has returned to the Philadelphia region, and along with it, the white residues on streets and sidewalks that result from the overapplication of deicers such as sodium chloride, or rock salt, as well as more modern salt alternatives. As an environmental scientist who studies water pollution, I know that much of the excess salt flows into storm drains and ultimately into area streams and rivers. For example, a citizen science stream monitoring campaign led by the Stroud Water Research Center in Chester County (about 40 miles west of Philadelphia) found that chloride concentrations in southeastern Pennsylvania streams remained higher than levels recommended by t…

Delaware is trying to protect its status as the corporate capital of the world amid fallout from a judge’s rejection of billionaire Elon Musk’s landmark Tesla compensation package, although critics say fast-tracked legislation will tilt the playing field against investors, including pensioners and middle-class savers. A Delaware House committee was expected to vote Wednesday on the bill, which is backed by Democratic Gov. Matt Meyer who says it’ll ensure the state remains the “premier home for U.S. and global businesses” to incorporate. Backers say it’ll modernize the law and maintain balance between corporate officers and shareholders in a state where the courts, for a…

Shares of Deliveroo, the food delivery service based in London, are hitting three-year highs on Monday after it received a $3.6 billion proposed takeover offer from DoorDash. Deliveroo announced the bid after markets closed in Europe on Friday. On Monday, the company also said that it was suspending a $133.5 million share buyback it had announced last month. Deliveroo said Friday that its board has informed DoorDash that if a firm offer is made at the financial terms provided, it will recommend the bid to its shareholders. Deliveroo added that its board has decided to engage in talks with DoorDash about the possible offer and has given the company access to du…

The return-to-office (RTO) push at companies such as Amazon and AT&T—which both required employees to be back in the office full-time this month—has been met with discontent and frustration from much of their workforces. Some Amazon employees have said they are looking for new jobs, if they haven’t left already, while people at both companies have reportedly struggled to even find an open desk. But other leaders are not letting the prospect of low morale or limited workspace derail their plans to return to the office full time in 2025. According to a memo obtained by Business Insider, the latest addition to the mix is Dell, which had already tested the waters with…

Dell on Tuesday nearly doubled its annual profit growth target for the next four years, betting on robust demand for its servers that power artificial intelligence workloads. The company, whose customers include Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI and CoreWeave, lifted its expectations for annual growth in adjusted earnings per share to at least 15% from around 8%. Dell also said it expects compounded annual revenue growth between 7% and 9% for the next four years, up from its prior view of 3% to 4%. Insatiable demand for servers that provide the computing power needed to run services such as ChatGPT has turned Dell into one of the biggest winners of the generative AI …

Deloitte Australia will partially refund the 440,000 Australian dollars ($290,000) paid by the Australian government for a report that was littered with apparent AI-generated errors, including a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment and references to nonexistent academic research papers. The financial services firm’s report to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations was originally published on the department’s website in July. A revised version was published Friday after Chris Rudge, a Sydney University researcher of health and welfare law, said he alerted the media that the report was “full of fabricated references.” Deloitte had reviewed th…

A passenger jet flipped onto its roof while landing in Toronto, Canada, the fourth major aviation accident in North America in the past three weeks. While at least 18 people were injured, all 80 people on board the Delta Air Lines flight from Minneapolis survived the crash Monday. Here are some things to know about the crash: What caused the airplane to flip? Communications between the tower at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport and the pilot were normal on approach and right now it’s not clear what went wrong when the plane touched down. Were strong winds a factor in the crash? Toronto Pearson Fire Chief Todd Aitken has said the runway was dry …

The longest government shutdown on record cost Delta Air Lines an estimated $200 million, CEO Ed Bastian said Wednesday in the first disclosure by a U.S. airline regarding the shutdown’s financial impact. Bastian told investors that refunds “grew significantly” while bookings slowed amid the uncertainty in air travel caused by the 43-day shutdown, contributing to Delta’s loss of about 25 cents per share. The shutdown, which began Oct. 1, led to long delays at major airports and historic flight cancellations at 40 of the country’s busiest airports as more unpaid air traffic controllers missed work, citing additional stress and the need to take on side jobs. As the shutdo…

After watching videos of a Delta Air Lines jet catch fire upon landing and flip over on a Toronto runway, it’s fair to wonder how anyone could have survived. But aviation experts said it was not surprising that all 76 passengers and four crew walked away from Monday’s disaster, with 21 people suffering minor injuries and only one still hospitalized on Wednesday. It’s a credit, they said, to advances in plane design as well as a crew that flawlessly executed an evacuation plan. “When I first saw (footage of) that aircraft upside down at the airport, I was like: ‘How can that happen? And how can anybody survive that?’” Michael McCormick, an assistant professor and p…