What's on Your Mind?

Large language models are quietly reshaping the way people write research papers—and scientists are catching colleagues using AI to do their work. View the full article

Change is often presented as an enigma. Unlike a traditional management task, you can’t just devise a plan and execute it. To be an effective change leader, you need to embrace a certain amount of uncertainty because change, by definition, involves doing new things, and that always involves some measure of unpredictability. Still, that doesn’t mean change is mysterious. We actually know a lot about it. In Diffusion of Innovations, researcher Everett Rogers compiled hundreds of studies performed over many decades. Around the same time, Gene Sharp led a parallel effort to understand how large-scale political movements drive social and institutional change. So while…

“I want to talk about something that I feel like maybe is a little controversial,” content creator Jaclyn Hill said in a video posted earlier this week. The OG beauty influencer got her start on YouTube well over a decade ago. She’s since grown across different social media channels, including Instagram and TikTok, where she has 8.5 million and 1.2 million followers, respectively. In the video, which has since racked up over 3.5-million views, she opens up about how she’s been struggling to get views on TikTok and feels like she’s “running through mud” to connect with her followers. “When you have a million followers, but you’re getting 30,000 views, this is jus…

On December 11, 2015, OpenAI arrived on the scene with a bang. Announced on the penultimate day of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, an academic confab held in Montreal’s Palais des Congrès by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others, the organization had been in the planning for months (an infamous July 2015 meeting at the Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel brought on board many of OpenAI’s key early staffers). But when it went public with an announcement and blog post, the community reacted with surprise. “This is just absolutely wonderful news, and I really feel like we are watching history in the making,” wrote Sebastien Bubeck, then a researcher at Microsof…

Augustus Doricko, founder and CEO of cloud-seeding startup Rainmaker, surveys the sky from a sunbaked hillside 5 miles from Utah’s Great Salt Lake. On this balmy Sunday afternoon in late September, the lake is calm, but its serenity belies a potentially catastrophic problem: The Great Salt Lake is shrinking—and is at risk of disappearing altogether. At its peak 40 years ago, the lake covered 2,300 square miles; today, more than 800 square miles of lake bed are exposed. As more of the lake dries, scientists warn that dust storms made up of toxic heavy metals could plague the Salt Lake Valley, home to 1.2 million people, and beyond. Rainmaker’s futuristic technology…

Faking tends to get a bad rap. We celebrate authenticity, praise, and honesty, and preach radical transparency—as if the workplace would magically improve if everyone walked around expressing their unfiltered “true selves.” But, imagine for a moment what unedited human authenticity would actually look like in a corporate setting: colleagues announcing every irritation, managers confessing every insecurity, leaders sharing every impulsive thought or half-baked opinion. Actually, that doesn’t look overly different from many workplaces! And yet, most of us are well aware of the dangers of pure self-expression, even if the realization comes mostly from analyzing other…

They look like ordinary basketball courts. But two new courts built next to public housing in New York City double as flood prevention. In a sudden flash flood—when the city’s aging sewer system can easily become overwhelmed and streets can fill with water—the sunken basketball courts act like retention basins. The design can hold as much as 330,000 gallons, with the court’s lowest areas filling like a pool and additional water stored in bioretention cells beneath the surface. The project “becomes like a sponge, which basically holds the water as much as it can,” says Runit Chhaya, principal at Grain Collective, a landscape architecture firm that worked on the…

Remember earlier this year when everyone on your feed was wearing bizarre shoes, like Maison Margiella’s ballerina flats with split toes and mesh ballet flats? Or when statement scrunchies were all the rage? Don’t feel bad if you missed it. Blink, and the trend was over. Over the past 15 years, the pace of fashion trends has sped up thanks to social media and fast fashion brands. But over the past five years, with the rise of TikTok and Shein, they’ve gotten out of control. Micro-trends pop up in a subculture of the internet, lasting for just a few days before fading into oblivion. It’s gotten to the point where many people have lost interest in fashion trends al…

As data centers strain the power grid, utilities are scrambling to build new power plants. But a startup in California is one of a handful focusing on the problem from a different angle: building a network of batteries and solar panels at homes to relieve pressure on the grid more quickly. In some cases, thanks to state funding, low-income homeowners can get the systems installed at no cost, and then start saving on their electric bills and have access to backup power if the grid goes down. Others pay a subscription that’s lower than their previous electric bill. Then the startup, called Haven, manages the flow of power back to the grid. Why utilities see Haven’s …

AI coaches are everywhere. They’re training marathoners and coaching leaders, and even billionaires Ray Dalio created an AI clone to serve as a digital mentor. In the past few months, searches for “AI coaching” have gone through the roof. And it’s easy to see why. AI coaches are available 24/7, cost less than a gym membership, and can recall every word you’ve ever said. Research even shows they can match human coaches in helping people reach their goals. Ironically, people often tell AI things they’d never tell another person. Studies show chatbots reduce our fear of judgment, making them surprisingly effective at uncovering what’s really going on. And with 94% of…

As we enter the 2025 home stretch, Bitcoin is once again down, and dipped below $90,000 on Thursday, following the Federal Reserve’s highly anticipated interest rate cut by 25 basis points on December 10. So why are the markets up, but crypto is taking a hit? Why Bitcoin is faltering One reason for Bitcoin’s drop after the rate cut is that traders had already fully priced in the cut ahead of the Fed’s announcement. “Unlike stocks, bitcoin is already in a bear market, where bad news gets accentuated and good news ignored,” Michael Terpin, author of Bitcoin Supercycle, told Fast Company. “Since the 25 basis point cut was already built in, bitcoin traders – p…

The battle for Warner Brothers Discovery got hotter this week as Paramount launched a hostile bid of $108.4 billion for the company, topping Netflix’s agreement last week to pay nearly $83 billion for the company’s streaming and studio assets. It’s the largest M&A deal of 2025 and rightfully will receive tough scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe. The ultimate price for Warner Brothers Discovery will certainly factor heavily into who wins the fight, especially with investors, and there could be additional bidders and proposals. For sure, an acquisition by Netflix of one of the oldest Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers, and its HBO Max streaming service would have…

A quiet shift is reshaping the trajectory of wealth in America, but it isn’t happening in the boardrooms of Wall Street or the halls of Silicon Valley. It’s unfolding in neighborhoods, driveways, and home offices across the country, powered by teachers, software engineers, nurses, military families, and small-business owners who never expected to become real estate investors at all. As the cofounder and CEO of a rental technology company that supports independent property owners (and as an investor myself), I see this transformation every day. What starts as an unexpected ownership moment often turns into a thoughtful plan for long-term financial stability. Many i…

Every company is racing to modernize. There’s a sense that if you aren’t adopting new technology fast enough, you’re already behind. From AI and automation to digital platforms, the list keeps growing. Leaders make big investments, employees sit through onboarding sessions, and for a few weeks, excitement fills the air. Then the momentum fades. Dashboards sit idle. Pilots stall. The return on investment never arrives. We see it all the time. On the factory floor, operators are juggling a dozen tools that don’t talk to each other. Managers chase data that doesn’t reflect what’s really happening. Teams try to keep up with systems meant to help them but instead end u…

Early in my career, I learned a valuable lesson that has stayed front and center. I was working for a company struggling to meet its marks. We were doing fine, but not knocking it out of the park. I walked into a quarterly business review, confident in our marketing metrics. We were hitting or surpassing every KPI, and I presented our achievements with pride. My CEO made a statement that stopped me in my tracks: “Marketing success means nothing unless the company as a whole is winning.” That moment was a turning point. In our focus on metrics, it’s easy to overlook what really matters. It’s a lesson I was grateful to learn early and one I believe every leader should e…

Year-end giving can be a moment of reflection, but for businesses and philanthropy alike, it should also include looking forward and asking the question, what’s next? One throughline from this past year is uncertainty. Uncertainty has rewritten how we work, live, and lead. Yet, one thing that still holds true is we share a responsibility to keep systems strong so no one is left behind, especially children. I’ve seen firsthand how instability isn’t just economic, it’s deeply human. I’ve seen it in a mother whose baby’s survival depended on something as small as a packet of therapeutic food. In that moment, you understand that systems created as large scale solution…

OpenAI on Thursday released its answer to Google’s impressive Gemini 3 Pro model–GPT-5.2—and by the looks of some head-to-head benchmark test scores, it looks like a winner. The new model took the highest score on a number of benchmark tests covering coding, math, science, tool use, and vision. (Benchmarks should, of course, be combined with real-world use to tell the whole story. But still . . .) OpenAI says GPT-5.2, which is a reasoning model, achieved expert-level performance scores on its own GDPval benchmark, which evaluates performance on 44 real professional tasks including things like spreadsheet creation, document drafting, presentation building, and more. …

Leadership listening is in sharp decline, and the consequences run deep. A survey from People Insights found that only 56% of employees believe senior leaders genuinely make an effort to listen, which is down from 65% two years ago. We live in a world where algorithms reward noise. Visibility has become a proxy for value, and airtime is the metric that many use to measure leadership presence. But real influence doesn’t come from speaking more. It actually comes from listening better. Influence grows through empathy, trust, and the ability to see and understand people. The disconnection crisis When leaders stop listening, people stop contributing. Ideas fade…

Six years ago, when Michael Buckley returned to True Religion‘s offices as CEO, the denim brand looked nothing like the one he had built a decade earlier. Buckley was the brand’s president between 2006 and 2010, when True Religion was a luxury brand that sold jeans priced between $300 and $500 at Neiman Marcus and Barneys. Buckley helped grow revenues to more than $300 million a year, but after he left, the brand hit hard times, as it struggled to adapt to e-commerce. It filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and again in 2020. In 2019, after serving as CEO of Differential Brands Group (which owns Hudson Jeans), Buckley came back to True Religion to clean up the mess. He’s …