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In the race to deploy large language models and generative AI across global markets, many companies assume that “English model → translate it” is sufficient. But if you’re an American executive preparing for expansion into Asia, Europe, the Middle East, or Africa, that assumption could be your biggest blind spot. In those regions, language isn’t just a packaging detail: it’s culture, norms, values, and business logic all wrapped into one. If your AI doesn’t code-switch, it won’t just underperform; it may misinterpret, misalign, or mis-serve your new market. The multilingual and cultural gap in LLMs Most of the major models are still trained predominantly on Engli…

The city of San Francisco filed a lawsuit against some of the nation’s top food manufacturers on Tuesday, arguing that ultraprocessed food from the likes of Coca-Cola and Nestle are responsible for a public health crisis. City Attorney David Chiu named 10 companies in the lawsuit, including the makers of such popular foods as Oreo cookies, Sour Patch Kids, Kit Kat, Cheerios and Lunchables. The lawsuit argues that ultraprocessed foods are linked to diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and cancer. “They took food and made it unrecognizable and harmful to the human body,” Chiu said in a news release. “These companies engineered a public health crisis, they…

Spotify Wrapped 2025 is here, and it’s inspired by mixtapes, DIY aesthetics, and all things pre-internet. After plenty of anticipation, Wrapped has now debuted for the eleventh year in a row. As public interest in Wrapped has mounted exponentially each year—and other brands have flocked to dupe the format—Spotify has been compelled to continuously up the ante on its own design concept, and this year is no exception. Wrapped 2025 comes with 12 brand new features, each intended to make the experience more personalized than years past. In the music world (and everywhere else), 2025 has been a year dominated by conversation around the explosion of AI technology. In S…

Less than five months have passed since American Eagle’s controversial Sydney Sweeney campaign, which led to accusations ranging from cluelessness to Nazi propaganda. While the mall mainstay defended the campaign and has escaped relatively unscathed, a new quarterly earnings report shows the success of its sister-brand Aerie is buoying its financial results. On Tuesday, December 2, apparel retail company American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) shared its third-quarter earnings for fiscal 2025, including $1.36 billion in revenue. The 6% increase year-over-year (YOY) beat Wall Street’s predicted $1.32 billion in revenue, according to consensus estimates cited by CNBC. …

Chanel’s new showman, Matthieu Blazy, took his designs on the road Tuesday — or rather, underground, with a buzzy New York runway show staged on an actual subway platform. The designer, just weeks after his splashy Paris debut for Chanel in October, took over a decommissioned part of Manhattan’s Bowery station for his first Métiers d’Art collection. The annual show, which takes place in a different city each year, celebrates the craftsmanship of the artisans that partner with Chanel. In this case, it was two shows—one in the afternoon and one in the evening. And befitting the first Chanel shows in New York since 2018, there were VIPs aplenty: A$AP Rocky, Tilda Swinton, …

Many major platforms provide personalized “year in review” features that highlight how users have spent their time over the past year. Spotify Wrapped is the most popular of these summaries, but Apple Music, Snapchat, Deezer, and others also offer them. And now, internet users have a new year-in-review feature to check out this year: YouTube Recap. Here’s what you need to know about the video site’s year-in-review and how to access it—especially if you’re looking to kill some time while waiting for Spotify Wrapped 2025 to come out. What is YouTube Recap? YouTube Recap is Google’s just-announced year-in-review feature for its YouTube platform. The pers…

Generic store brand groceries can increasingly be found in the pantries, fridges, and freezers of Americans across all income groups. Once designed to communicate value and affordability, a new generation of private labels designed for high earners is driving sales. Among households earning more than $100,000 a year, 82% say they’ve increased the frequency of buying store-brand groceries “often” or “very often,” according to a report from Alvarez & Marsal Global, a consulting firm. That’s compared to 74% of households earnings less than $100,000 a year who also say they’ve increased their store-brand grocery purchases. Grocers have rebranded and grown the…

Route 66. The name alone evokes nostalgia for a simpler, freer time in American history, when roadies stopped for a hot dog with ketchup, then drove into ocher sunsets suspended over the Mojave desert. Ever since it was built in 1926, the “Mother Road” has gained mythical status, drawing millions of visitors from around the world yearning for a taste of old America—the one before the interstate highway system favored speed over experience. For Rhys Martin, who has spent years on the road with his camera, this isn’t what Route 66 is about. Yes, you can travel back in time and get a glimpse of Americana, but the route isn’t fossilized in the past. It’s very much sti…

Mark Manson’s 2016 book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck delivered some hard truths and prescient advice to millions of readers seeking answers. Now he’s building an AI-based application to do the same. At that time, Manson says the self-help field was “unrealistic, not very evidence based—just designed to make you feel good,” inspiring him to write a book that offered “a more skeptical, realistic, and zero bull shit approach to personal growth and self-help.” Nearly a decade later, Manson says he’s seeing the same pattern in the digital world, with millions turning to generic AI platforms for guidance, only to receive unrealistic, potentially harmful advice. T…

Rare earths’ monopoly. Unrivaled manufacturing supply chains. Free AI models that rival, or surpass, its American counterparts. More research papers and more STEM doctorates than anyone else. If you are reading a lot about these topics lately, you know how China’s decades-long strategy to become the top global superpower—and the greatest threat to U.S. world domination—is coming to fruition. What you may not be aware of is the other crucial part of Beijing’s plans; its industrial ramp up to dominate the most crucial resource on the planet: the oceans. China’s pursuit of maritime dominance has shifted from a regional ambition to a global reality, driven by a “breakneck…

OpenAI appeared to be closer to pulling the trigger on advertising in ChatGPT in recent days, but a growing threat from Google has forced the company to pause those plans as it gears up for a quickly escalating chatbot fight. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sent a memo to staff on December 1 declaring a “code red” and ordering the company’s primary focus to be on improving ChatGPT. As part of that directive, Altman reportedly said the company would be pushing back work on other projects, including the introduction of advertising to its chatbot. The about-face came just days after Tibor Blaho, an engineer working on a Chrome extension that offers pre-written prompts for Chat…

Age really is just a number when it comes to social media, as new research from Ampere Analysis shows that more than half of users ages 55 to 64 now watch influencer content every week. This number is up by 10 percentage points since 2020. In the U.K., the figure has also risen over the past five years, from 30% to 38%. TikTok and YouTube, in particular, are behind the growth—proof that Boomers’ social media presence is no longer limited to Facebook. “The biggest surprise in our latest data wasn’t how popular influencer videos have become, it is how rapidly this trend has extended to older audiences,” Annabel Yeomans, senior research manager at Ampere Analysi…

Businesses still spend billions each year on management training programs, but here we are in 2025—with a growing leadership gap and executives scrambling for answers. And if I can get honest for a moment: We’re still approaching the problem backward. Senior leaders keep promoting high-performing individual contributors into leadership roles and expecting them to figure it out on the fly. Many don’t have the time, support, or temperament to lead people well. Then we’re surprised when the results are uneven or the team burns out. Before companies invest in another round of training, they need to start with a more fundamental question: Are we choosing the right …

There’s a lot of chatter right now about an AI bubble, fueled in part by a perception that productivity gains from AI are largely illusory. I can’t speak to the market, and whether AI is broadly overvalued or undervalued, but I can tell you that in the past year alone, AI has completely transformed how I work. Looking at the tools today that didn’t exist a year ago—deep research, browser agents, the big leaps in performance for all the latest models—there’s a host of ways AI can speed up or enhance many tasks of knowledge workers, especially journalists. As an independent journalist, I’m perhaps a little less constrained than most (my AI policy is whatever I want it t…

Below, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic shares five key insights from his new book, Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead). Chamorro-Premuzic is the chief innovation officer at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, cofounder of Deeper Signals, and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. What’s the big idea? Authenticity is overrated and can backfire, especially at work. Success comes from strategic self-presentation, empathy, and balancing personal freedom with responsibility to others. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Chamorro-…

Annoying peers are hard enough to deal with. Things get even more complicated when the annoying person is your boss. As with peers, there are several ways that a boss can be annoying. Unfortunately, you have to tread lightly with many (though not all) bosses. To be clear, the focus here is on annoying bosses, not toxic ones. A boss who is a narcissist, a harasser, or who sows mistrust isn’t just annoying, they’re bad for you and the organization. I’m going discuss four things that may seem petty, but if you start dreading your engagements with your boss (or resenting them for their foibles), it can come back to hurt your working relationship. The cipher Some p…

During college, a friend convinced me to take an improv comedy class. An introvert by nature, I was way out of my depth. On the first day, I was so nervous I thought I might faint. But I ended up loving it—and learning a lot. In addition to silly warm-ups to get rid of inhibitions (zip, zap, zop, anyone?), I discovered the magic of “Yes, and . . .” In improv, “Yes, and” is more than just a phrase; it’s a mentality—to accept whatever idea or proposition is thrown at you, no matter how outlandish, rather than shutting it down. This mantra helped the flow of our improv performances, but it turned out to be a great life lesson as well. From that point on, I tried practici…

It was once common practice for medtech companies to fill shelves with devices, each designed to solve a single problem. That approach made sense when innovation was measured by the number of products launched each year. But healthcare has evolved. Hospitals and clinical buyers aren’t looking for more hardware, they’re looking for integrated solutions that connect data, service, and outcomes. A hardware-only mindset simply doesn’t meet the need anymore. Today’s most successful medtech companies deliver a comprehensive experience that integrates five core pillars of innovation: Hardware that forms the clinical foundation Software that connects the exper…

‘Tis the season of holiday celebrations with friends, family and, yes—coworkers. Work holiday party attendees can typically be divided into two camps: those who look forward to donning an ugly sweater and doing shots with Lloyd in accounting, and those who have their “I can’t make it” excuses locked in long before December 1st. Good news for the latter camp: the number of companies hosting any kind of holiday party is on the decline. In 2007, 90% of firms said they were hosting one, according to data from (the coincidentally named) Challenger, Gray & Christmas. In 2024, that number dropped to just 64%. After spending 40-plus hours a week already wit…

In the high-stakes premium travel race of 2025, every major credit card issuer is trying to claim the loyalty of affluent travelers—and airport lounges have become the most visible battleground. American Express is refreshing its Platinum Card and launching a new fast-format Sidecar lounge. Capital One’s Venture X card has become a darling among travelers, thanks to its hyperlocal boutique-style lounges. And Citi has returned to the ultra-premium arena with the $595 Strata Elite card. As for Chase? Fresh off raising its Sapphire Reserve annual fee to $795 and launching its Sapphire Reserve for Business card, the finance giant is now signaling that its lounges are…

Apple’s AI boss, John Giannandrea, is stepping down after seven years on the job. Apple’s stock price got a slight boost on the news, as some investors saw Apple signaling a new urgency to bring AI to its devices. Following a transition period, Giannandrea will “retire” next spring, Apple said in a press release Monday. Most of Giannandrea’s AI group will now be tucked into Craig Fedherigi’s software development group, which owns development of the various operating systems in Apple devices. While the reasons for Giannandrea’s departure are no doubt complicated, it’s a wonder he lasted so long. For years, he’s been linked to Apple’s failure to seize on generative…

A Pennsylvania police officer responding to a tip from the manager of a McDonald’s testified Tuesday about confronting Luigi Mangione during the intense manhunt last year for UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s killer. As soon as Mangione doffed his medical mask at the restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Officer Joseph Detwiler said, “I knew” he was the suspect whose face had been all over the news since the shooting five days earlier on a Manhattan sidewalk. “It’s him … I’m not kidding. He’s real nervous, and he didn’t talk too much,” Detwiler told a supervisor by phone from the restaurant parking lot moments after meeting Mangione, according to the officer’s …