At the Exceptional Women Alliance (EWA), we enable high-level women to mentor each other to achieve personal and professional success through sisterhood. As the nonprofit organization’s founder, chair, and CEO, I am honored to share insights from thought leaders who are part of our peer-to-peer mentoring community.

There are many ways that soccer players can turn into legends, especially during a World Cup. But thanks to social media, athletes don’t need to score a goal or win a match for fame—they just need enough people on board.

Given data centers’ massive water and energy usage, noise pollution, and contribution to rising temperatures, it’s clear that artificial intelligence and the great outdoors just don’t mix. That means brands catering to the tree huggers out there should steer clear of generative AI in their marketing—a lesson that outdoor gear retailer REI may have just learned the hard way.

Lucid Motors said it is laying off about 18% of its U.S. workforce, or around 1,500 workers, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday.

Every school district in America has a career pathways strategy. Very few have a realistic destination. To support our future workforce, states are passing legislation. Philanthropy is writing checks. Districts are rebranding their career and technical education departments with sleek new logos and career “clusters” that sound like startup accelerators.

The US convenience store, travel center, and Texas-themed gas station, Buc-ee’s, is expanding. 

Clive Davis, the record company lawyer who became one of the music industry’s most powerful figures, launching or resurrecting the careers of such superstars as Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston, Carlos Santana and Alicia Keys, has died, his family confirmed. He was 94.

President Donald Trump promised a renovated Reflecting Pool that would be “American Flag Blue,” but after turning algae green, he’s admitting the project needs further repairs and the pool will have to be drained.

For one retailer, the party never ends. After announcing it would shutter all 700 nationwide stores in late 2024, Party City is back. Well, kind of. 

Consumers can now find all their celebration needs within Staples’ aisles. In April, the companies announced that Staples would begin offering Party City products inside more than 700 stores, thanks to a strategic “shop-within-a-shop” partnership.

It’s summer grilling season, but for many Americans, surging prices mean beef is no longer what’s for dinner.

Federal regulators on Thursday ordered regional grid operators to help large energy users connect more quickly to the nation’s inefficient and aging electric transmission system, a step they said is needed to accommodate surging demand from power-hungry artificial intelligence data centers.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright had urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to act in an effort to help the United States better compete with China for superiority in the fast-growing AI sector.

Tech companies and data center developers welcomed the chance to connect faster to the country’s power supply for the biggest energy users ever built in the United States, including some that consume more electricity than a small city.

Utilities, states and regional grid operators had worried that the Republican administration’s plan would remove their authority to manage the process, but FERC said the order leaves states in control of retail electric rates, terms and conditions. Clean energy advocates have urged regulators not to undermine state-level efforts to require the use of renewable energies.

The commission’s actions come as a backlash grows against data centers over concerns about the massive amounts of energy and water they use and fears about noise and air pollution, water shortages and a loss of open space or farmland.

Alan Greenspan, who led the Federal Reserve for more than 18 years and whose comments could sway investors like few others, has died.

Ohio’s law requiring children under 16 to get parental consent to use social media apps must be restored, a divided panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.

The decision comes as a blow to NetChoice, which has won court victories against identical digital identification laws in other states, including Arkansas, Louisiana and Georgia. The trade group representing TikTok, Snapchat, Meta and other major tech companies said the Ohio decision went against “clear national consensus” and that it intended to keep fighting.

“An unconstitutional law protects no one, and we remain focused on ensuring the First Amendment rights of Ohioans are protected,” said Paul Taske, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center.

Netchoice brought suit against Ohio’s law in 2024, arguing that it was overly broad, vague and represented an unconstitutional impediment to free speech.

The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit’s panel disagreed. In a 2-1 decision, it found that the law was not unconstitutional and sent it back to a lower court to have a block on the law’s enforcement vacated.

“At bottom, the Act imposes a parental consent requirement,” Judge Eric Clay wrote in the lead opinion. “That requirement constitutes a marginal burden that precisely targets the multi-faceted problem that Ohio has identified: Children’s unsupervised assent to terms and conditions for use of platforms that take advantage of and harm them.”

Judge Alice Batchelder concurred, writing that “a statute is not vague just because it has a wide berth.”

Known as the Social Media Parental Notification Act, the Ohio law was part of an $86.1 billion state budget bill that Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law in July 2023.

The administration pushed the measure as a way to protect children’s mental health, with then-Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, now a U.S. senator, saying at the time that social media was “intentionally addictive” and harmful to kids.

The law requires companies to get parental permission for social media and gaming apps and to provide their privacy guidelines so families know what content would be censored or moderated on their child’s profile.

Republican Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson called Thursday’s ruling “a win for Ohio families.”

“The court agreed that parents — not social media companies — should get a say in what kids see online,” he said in a statement. “We have an obligation to keep our children safe, and today, the most dangerous place for our kids is the internet. This decision gives parents the tools to be involved and provide oversight.”

Xiaomi has just launched a fully automatic robotic arm that charges a parked car without human assistance.

Inside Frankfurt Airport‘s new Terminal 3 building, there is a concourse that defies the standard logic of airport design. While the business model of most airports has made the airside space past security checkpoints into aggressive shopping malls interspersed with rows of gate seating, the German airport has made a sizeable chunk of its new terminal into a sinuous plaza worthy of a casual stroll. For those not running to make a connection or hopelessly searching for a place to sleep, this new concourse is a refreshingly unusual space for passing some time. That’s also what makes it, somewhat counterintuitively, a good place for shopping.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Monday that he will resign, forced out by his own party after missteps and mistakes soured voters’ goodwill for a prime minister who won a landslide election victory two years ago on a promise of steady leadership and economic growth.

Starmer says he will remain caretaker prime minister until his Labour party chooses a new leader — with expectations growing that it will be former Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham.

Burnham confirmed in a social media post that “I will put myself forward as part of this process.” Former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who was considered his main rival for the top job, said he will back Burnham.

It was Burnham’s victory in a special parliamentary election last week that triggered Starmer’s decision to resign. After nearly a decade out of Parliament as the mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham returns to Westminster and will be sworn in as a lawmaker later on Monday.

Only members of Parliament can stand for the party leadership.

Streeting’s statement makes it more likely that Burnham will be selected without a leadership contest.

Starmer is the sixth prime minister in a decade to stand outside 10 Downing Street and announce a premature departure. His statement comes the day before Britain marks the 10th anniversary of its vote to leave the European Union, a decision that still roils the country’s economy and politics.

After weeks of insisting he would fight to keep his job, Starmer conceded to growing pressure to hand over to a new leader who can try and revive the government’s flagging fortunes. He led Labour to a landslide election victory in July 2024, but since then his popularity and that of the party have plummeted.

Shares in Getty Images Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: GETY) are surging in premarket trading this morning—up nearly a staggering 150% as of the time of this writing—after the stock photography giant announced an unexpected deal with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. Here’s what you need to know.

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.

When some EV owners in California and Massachusetts plug in their cars, the large batteries inside now serve a second purpose: sending power back to the grid when the vehicles do not need it and earning cash for their owners in the process. In one Massachusetts pilot program, that could mean as much as $3,000 this summer as EVs help ease strain on the grid during heat waves.

At a recent conference with fellow CEOs, I expressed my frustration with some Silicon Valley leaders and the misleading narratives they’re pushing about AI. For example, take Jack Dorsey and Marc Benioff, attributing layoffs to artificial intelligence. In reality, those cuts are the result of poor hiring decisions and a failure to rightsize fast enough after the pandemic. Framing them otherwise creates unrealistic expectations for boards and investors and puts undue pressure on CEOs and leadership teams to deliver immediate results from AI.