It’s been a long time coming. Physical editions of console games have steadily lost ground to digital versions, and more than one in four PlayStation 5 consoles sold in the United States since launch are now digital-only models, up from 18% in October 2024. Sony has seen where the market is headed. Beginning in January 2028, the company says it will sell only digital versions of titles through retailers and the PlayStation Store.

There is a line in almost every graduation speech: The future is yours. This year, it lands differently. For many graduates, the future does not feel like a clear horizon. It feels unclear, unstable, and harder to predict than in years past.

The NBA recently posted that its 2026 playoffs are “delivering their highest viewership through the Conference Semifinals in 29 years, with an average of 4.5 million viewers per game across ABC, ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Amazon Prime Video.” That is designed to sound impressive. Then you realize the viral video of a fan eating spaghetti directly behind legendary NBA commentator Mike Breen gained an estimated 20–50 million aggregate views and hundreds of thousands of likes across platforms within 24–48 hours.

The United States is in the middle of a defining conversation about AI infrastructure. But, years in, we are still asking the wrong questions. The infrastructure conversation starts and stops at chips, models, and computing power—and rarely arrives at the harder questions underneath: What should this infrastructure make possible for Americans, and are we actually building toward that?

What’s your number? This is the first question I ask when considering a new hire. I expect those I ask to know what it costs for them to live—not just to survive, but to thrive. I start with this question because it gives me a chance to understand a prospective employee’s expectations and needs, and to assess my ability to meet them.

A shampoo manufacturer has initiated a nationwide recall of two of its products due to concerns that the shampoos may be contaminated with a drug-resistant bacterium that could harm users. Here’s what you need to know about the shampoo recall and the bacterium at the center of it.

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

“The engine that we have now could have probably taken seven years and up to half a billion dollars,” Stan Rudenko tells me over a video call from Abu Dhabi. “In our collaboration, it basically took half a year . . . and we already have a first version. It’s mind-blowing.”

On nearly every day of the World Cup, Google has debuted a new custom doodle—and, to do it, the brand’s designers became full-on soccer historians. 

To celebrate the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Google is debuting 69 unique doodles, including 28 unique pieces of art, across more than 180 markets. The rollout comes with custom doodles for different locations, easter eggs designed to appear after key highlights in the games, and doodles created in partnership with national teams and former coaches. The doodles launched June 11, opening day of the tournament.

In the recent hit horror movie Obsession, the main character’s search for a birthday present takes him to an occult-focused shop, where he buys a novelty wish-granting talisman that turns out to be very real.

Whatever my brother and I built, we built on a foundation generations of Americans had laid long before we arrived.

The web is increasingly submerged in AI slop, the cheap, disposable material created with generative AI tools. But while would-be digital opportunists are tipping trashy content onto platforms by the bucketload, early signs suggest audiences are not buying much of it.

One of the most frustrating things I hear from leaders is, “We had a great strategy, but just couldn’t execute it.” Clearly, if it was a great strategy, you would be able to execute it. If you couldn’t, you made bad assumptions about your capabilities, the competition, the marketplace, or something else. 

According to the CEO of Synchrony Financial, great leadership comes from listening to your team, learning quickly from mistakes, and moving forward without fearing failure.

You won’t always have the answer—and that’s okay. Jamie Wood discusses why honesty, humility, and trust in your team are essential leadership strengths.

Women spend twice as many hours per week as men on childcare and household work combined, and it starts before the alarm stops buzzing. A typical morning for me looks like waking the kids, discovering my son’s Spirit Week shirt still in the hamper, starting laundry, making breakfast I then don’t eat, realizing we’re out of cereal and adding it to the grocery list, and reminding myself to order a birthday gift, all while watching the clock for the 7:15 a.m. bus. Some version of this plays out for women everywhere, every morning, before they get to their desks.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is the largest sporting event in history. It’s also the most surveilled World Cup ever. If you’re visiting or traveling around host cities, then you and your face, behavior, movement, and devices are being monitored by governments and private companies.

Organizations are facing an urgent change management challenge. Leaders are convinced that artificial intelligence will transform their business, yet the people needed to carry that transformation forward have stopped trying, or so it appears. According to McKinsey’s Superagency in the Workplace report, employees are already using generative AI three times more than their leaders realize. Yet only 1% of companies say AI is fully integrated into how work gets done. Workers are moving. Organizations aren’t. Much of that activity, as we’ll see, is happening outside approved systems entirely—less a sign of resistance than a signal of unmet need. 

More than half of women say they’re “not prepared at all” for perimenopause or menopause—yet most are already feeling the effects at work.

Artificial intelligence in software development has moved rapidly from experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment. Coding assistants, automated documentation, AI-powered testing, and intelligent development tools are now embedded in the daily workflows of many engineering teams. At the same time, organizations are expanding AI initiatives far beyond traditional IT functions while also raising expectations from business leaders who want faster delivery, greater automation, broader adoption, and real business outcomes.