Michael is aiming for a record-breaking opening weekend. It’s also a critical flop. In a vacuum, the Michael Jackson biopic might sound like a perfectly palatable film. The movie stars Jackson’s real-life nephew Jaafar Jackson as the titular singer, following his childhood through the height of his career in the 1980s with non-stop musical sequences of the King of Pop’s greatest hits. But Michael Jackson’s legacy is more than just music. Audiences and critics alike are panning Michael for glossing over the dark side of Jackson’s life, proving that it takes more than a famous subject to make a biopic…
Author: Staff Writer
While its geographic footprint is all west of the Mississippi, convenience store operator Yesway Inc. is making New York City headlines this week with its initial public offering (IPO). The company expects to begin trading Wednesday on the Nasdaq under the YSWY ticker. In the wake of global convenience store giant 7-Eleven announcing that it will close over 600 locations in the United States, it’s an interesting time for a smaller convenience store chain on the rise to go public. Seven & i Holdings, the Japan-based owner of 7-Eleven, recently delayed an IPO of its North American unit. Yesway hasn’t…
When Liza Moiseeva first heard that Allbirds was pivoting to AI, she thought it was satire. “It belongs in an Onion article,” says Moiseeva, chief marketing officer at Commons, an app that helps people shop more sustainably, in part by rating brands. Moiseeva has worked in sustainability for about 15 years, and she’s been an Allbirds customer for more than a decade. Her family owns 10 pairs of the sneaker that once ruled Silicon Valley streets—and that had been a leader in sustainable fashion. Now, Allbirds is stepping away from its footwear business, pivoting instead to AI compute infrastructure and…
The job market is tough right now. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job openings have been trending down, and are currently below pre-pandemic levels. In a hypercompetitive economy, people entering the workforce are facing fewer opportunities than just a few years ago. And for the 1 in 3 American adults with a justice-involved past, or any interaction with the criminal justice system as a defendant, their record is another obstacle in an already challenging job search. April marks Fair Chance Month, an annual opportunity to spotlight reentry programs, resources, and skills-training for formerly incarcerated people. Yet, as the…
This month, Anthropic announced that it had built an AI model so powerful it couldn’t be released to the public. Claude Mythos had autonomously discovered thousands of critical security vulnerabilities across all major operating systems and web browsers. Anthropic chose to make the model available only to a consortium of technology companies, giving them an opportunity to patch vulnerabilities and strengthen defenses before models with similar capabilities inevitably fall into the hands of those who would exploit them. This development shines a light on the potential future dangers that the rapid evolution of AI models brings with it. These kinds…
In November 2024, when Trump won his second presidential bid, a wave of anxiety across America proved opportune for a burgeoning company. Bluesky saw a 500% surge in new sign-ups, reaching roughly 2.5 million active users on the microblogging platform at the time. It had also raised $15 million in that period ($100 million to date), buoyed in part by its open, “federated” infrastructure, which lets users control their feeds, move their identities across platforms, and sidestep centralized moderation. Mark Cuban called Bluesky a “less hateful world” on the app at the time, while media scholars hailed it as a…
“Apple has a new CEO; he’s a hardware guy.” That quick distillation of Apple’s impending leadership change spread fast across Silicon Valley and the broader tech world. The company’s choice, John Ternus, rose through the ranks on the hardware side, taking over iPhone engineering in 2020 and all hardware engineering a year later. Analysts say Ternus’s elevation to succeed Tim Cook signals that Apple will enter the AI era with a family posture: using AI strategically to make its devices work better, but not stretching to incorporate AI into all of its services and businesses. While its peers are pouring…
US President Donald Trump reversed himself again as he continues to look for a way out of this quagmire, which has become a deeply unpopular conflict that’s driven up gas prices and threatens to plunge Europe into its own Great Depression. The Iranian government appears divided, and the military seems to be assuming power, declining to yield to the political faction. The Neocons, who lack the ability to engage in strategy beyond the tip of their noses, routinely see only myopically and are simply incompetent, incapable of even adding 2 + 2. They proved that the lack of…
You can feel everything—the frustration, irritation, and fear—and still choose your response from a place of calm. That’s what the Stoics (thinkers from ancient Greece and Rome) have taught me. Stoicism is staying calm when life isn’t, focusing on what you can control, and not wasting energy on what you can’t. I’ve been studying Stoic philosophers for years, and the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus has transformed my relationship with myself and how I work. I now practice the art of making the most of the gap between feeling and action. These four Stoic teachings can help you…
New York is now set to lose roughly $73.5 million in federal transportation funding. The state refused to revoke nearly 33,000 questionable commercial driver’s licenses issued to non-domiciled immigrants. Many of these licenses remained active despite expired or unverifiable documentation. This is not just paperwork. This is a failure of basic regulatory integrity. New York has been at the center of the migrant surge in the United States. Hundreds of thousands have entered the system, and the state declared itself a sanctuary. As pressure mounted, enforcement weakened and state government bended the rules to protect the occupiers. These vehicles can…