It’s estimated that the average person will spend 90,000 hours of their life working—that’s roughly a thousand weeks, or a third of our lives. Over the years, I’ve watched many of my Oxford and Harvard university classmates come to reunions and alumni dinners disillusioned, burned out, unhappy, divorced or separated, and alienated from themselves and their friends and families. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting to this stage of their careers unfulfilled. Yet a shocking number of them unwittingly implemented that strategy. They seemed successful—the boats, the bank…
Author: Staff Writer
Four months ago, John Furner took the helm as CEO of Walmart Inc. after a lifetime at the company. Today, he’s steering a “people-led, tech-powered” transformation of the world’s largest retailer, which employs more than 2 million people worldwide. Furner has already centralized Walmart’s historically fragmented tech and product divisions under unified leadership in an attempt to supercharge enterprise-wide products and services—especially AI capabilities. The company is betting on an agentic, omni-channel future. The evolution of Sparky, Walmart’s AI shopping assistant, is a big part of that, as is real-time supply chain automation. Yet this aggressive digital integration comes at a moment when the broader public narrative around artificial intelligence is souring, highlighting critical questions about automation and…
If there were ever a truth about generationalism, it’s this: Every generation has the same complaint about the generation that came after it. Kids these days don’t want to work. They want everything but don’t want to work hard enough to get it. They all want participation trophies. We’ve all heard some semblance of these accusations in some fashion or another. In fact, we’re all probably guilty of delivering our own version of these generation-dividing dispositions. However, if every generation says the same about the next, then, inherently, how true can these criticisms really be? Perhaps, instead of there being…
Last fall, Anthropic was playing second fiddle to OpenAI. It had a lower valuation, while OpenAI was still drawing much of the attention as the first mover in the generative AI boom. But the dynamic shifted in late November, when Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, which gave the company’s Claude Code coding agent a new brain and helped elevate it to the status of “AI killer app.” Arguably, that was the moment that set Anthropic on its path toward a forthcoming initial public offering (IPO). Developers had been using Claude Code to build software for much of 2025, but the…
There is a powerful narrative arc called the Hero’s Journey that is employed in stories like Star Wars. A hero, like Luke Skywalker, receives a call to adventure. He or she has doubts at first, but meets a mentor, crosses the first threshold, undergoes an ordeal and, once successful, receives a reward and returns home changed for the better. Franz Kafka offers a very different and less happy narrative in his unfinished novel, The Castle. The hero, “K.” receives a call from the mysterious castle that looms above the town. No one can confirm his authority, role or even what…
Jerome Powell is now warning that the Federal Reserve is undergoing a “stress test” and that political interference threatens public confidence in the institution. He stated that “the public would lose faith” if administrations could remove Fed officials over policy disagreements and argued that democratic institutions can be “torn down all too quickly.” What is interesting is not what Powell said. It is what he did not say. The Federal Reserve has spent years demanding independence from elected officials while simultaneously expecting the public to trust its judgment after one of the largest inflationary episodes in modern history. Powell himself…
The past few days have been full of bad news for the AI industry. The headlines paint a picture of an industry confronting growing pushback on multiple fronts, from political and regulatory headwinds to disappointing financial returns to poor results from real AI deployments. These are the stories that fed the narrative. The AI industry’s shifting narrative on jobs In a notable shift in tone, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that artificial intelligence is unlikely to trigger the “jobs apocalypse” he had previously warned about. Speaking virtually at a Commonwealth Bank event in Sydney, Altman downplayed earlier predictions of widespread…
Corporate agriculture turned food into a chemistry project. A recent consumer test of Driscoll’s conventional strawberries found 12 pesticide residues, including eight described as PFAS-linked “forever pesticides,” while the organic sample came back non-detect. Why are Americans expected to eat food treated with chemicals that other nations restrict or prohibit? The USDA will run out and tell you that over 99% of tested foods fall below EPA tolerance levels. That is the same bureaucratic trick they always use. They define the allowable poison, then congratulate themselves when the poison is within the legal limit. The average person does not eat…
High-pressure situations at work, like an important meeting, are often the backdrop for our most reactive professional moments. In 2025 nearly two-thirds (60%) of employees who spent more than 15 hours a week in meetings reported experiencing severe stress levels, according to a Wiley Workplace Intelligence report. When conflict arises, our bodies often react before our brains. You might lose your temper, lose your words, or find yourself anxiously agreeing to something that you don’t actually have capacity to do. It can feel deeply frustrating, and even shameful, when your responses feel impulsive and out of your control. But is…
Nobody elected Google to manage the ecosystem. Yet here we are. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has quietly spent the better part of a decade developing what it calls the “Debug” project. The latest proposal seeks approval to release tens of millions of laboratory-bred mosquitoes across California and Florida. We are told not to worry because these are the “good” mosquitoes. We are assured they are male mosquitoes and therefore do not bite. We are told they carry a naturally occurring bacteria known as Wolbachia that will interfere with reproduction and reduce mosquito populations. For generations, governments and corporations have repeatedly…