Category: Business

Between May and December 2025, the share of American students from middle school through college using AI for homework rose from 48% to 62%. Yet 67% believed heavier AI use harms students’ critical thinking—and only about one-third said their school had established a schoolwide AI policy.

August 31, 2026

Students did not wait for schools to finish the AI rulebook. Between May and December 2025, the share of American students from middle school through college who said they used AI help for

Researchers followed 1,793 BT call-centre workers for six months and found that a one-point rise in weekly happiness was associated with roughly 12% higher sales productivity—not because employees worked longer, but because they converted more calls into sales.

August 31, 2026

“Happy workers are more productive” has the suspicious neatness of a sentence invented for a management presentation. It is agreeable, difficult to oppose and vague enough to survive almost any result. Happiness can

During the Second World War, when sugar, butter and cream were rationed and rival firms quietly swapped in cheaper ingredients to keep selling, a California sweet-maker refused to lower its quality, kept its recipes exactly as they were, and made peace with producing less candy and closing each shop the moment the day’s stock ran out.

August 31, 2026

Business decisions during wartime rationing don’t usually get remembered eighty years later. Most companies faced the same problem, most made the same call, and most of the resulting compromises got quietly absorbed into

In a computer model of 1,000 fictional 40-year careers, the most highly talented individuals reached the top in only 3% of simulations. Extreme success usually went to moderately talented people who encountered an exceptional run of luck.

August 31, 2026

Success stories become cleaner in hindsight. The uncertain launch becomes a master plan. The chance introduction becomes evidence of superb networking. The employer who happened to say yes disappears from the story, while

In 2004, office workers stayed on one screen for an average of two and a half minutes before switching. By the late 2010s, Gloria Mark’s UC Irvine research put that figure at just 47 seconds — and half of all screen-attention periods lasted 40 seconds or less.

August 30, 2026

Two and a half minutes can feel almost spacious beside 47 seconds. Yet those are the bookends Gloria Mark uses to describe one of the longest-running changes her workplace research has documented: how

Psychology says people who sleep in the same bed as their pets aren’t necessarily anxious or over-attached — pets can become genuine attachment figures, and their physical presence can give the brain the same basic sense of safety it seeks from the people we trust most

August 30, 2026

Somewhere between the pillow and the edge of the mattress, a nightly negotiation over territory takes place. More often than not, the pet wins. The assumption that follows tends to be unkind. Sharing

A meaningful life isn’t a checklist you finish by 70, and the research shows what it really rests on

August 30, 2026

Reach a certain age and the internet fills with checklists promising to certify your life: achieve these seven things by seventy and you have lived meaningfully. The lists are usually well meant, and

Virginia Beach packed 640,000 tons of garbage into 18-inch layers, capped each one with 6 inches of dirt dredged from the swamp next door, and opened the 800-foot-long mound as the country’s first landfill park in the early 1970s, and the hole the dirt came out of is now the lake beside it

August 30, 2026

Virginia Beach had a problem that most cities solve with geography: nowhere to put its garbage. The city sits on the flat coastal plain of the Chesapeake, with the water table lurking six

Berlin trucked the rubble of its bombed-out streets onto an unfinished Nazi military college for 22 years because the Allies had failed to blow it up, and the hill grew high enough that the NSA built a listening station on top, which sat abandoned by 1992 and is now covered in graffiti

August 30, 2026

Rising out of the Grunewald forest on the western edge of Berlin is a 120-meter hill crowned with torn white domes, like golf balls left behind by giants. The hill is called Teufelsberg,

In 1886 a club of Rockefellers, Morgans and Vanderbilts paid $125,000 for Jekyll Island off Georgia and kept it as a private winter retreat for 56 years; in 1947 the state condemned the island, took it for $675,000, and has run it as a state park ever since

August 30, 2026

In 1904, Munsey’s Magazine surveyed the private playgrounds of America’s rich and awarded Jekyll Island the full crown: the richest, the most exclusive, the most inaccessible club in the world. The judgment was