On July 4th, America will celebrate 250 years since the dawn of its creation. But according to a new Reuters/Ipsos survey, many Americans aren’t feeling very hopeful about the nation’s future. 

Hollister is continuing its resurgence with a line of home and decor products at Target.

Former President Barack Obama is getting a little help from his friends in celebrating the opening of his presidential museum in Chicago.

The guestlist for Thursday’s dedication ceremony includes Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Christina Aguilera and Bono, along with former Presidents Joe Biden, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama are expected to give remarks. The invite-only celebration will be livestreamed and kicks off a weekend of events centered around the Obama Presidential Center, which opens to the general public on Juneteenth.

President Donald Trump is not among the announced guests. He called the $850 million center a “total disaster” in a social media post in February.

The Thursday celebration “will reflect a spirit of inspiration and joy, with a big boost from the performers who are sharing their talent with us,” said Valerie Jarrett, the Obama Foundation’s chief executive and former Obama top adviser. “We hope to inspire people everywhere to believe in their power to bring change home.”

Other celebrities slated to appear on Thursday include Common, Jennifer Hudson, Eddie Vedder, John Legend, Marc Anthony and The Roots.

General admission tickets for the center are sold out through the end of October. But tens of thousands of people have already been offered a sneak peek of the nearly 20-acre campus on Chicago’s South Side in Jackson Park.

The center, located near where Obama lived and began his political career, is expected to attract more than 1 million visitors annually. It is adjacent to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in the lakefront park, and not far from the University of Chicago.

The campus includes a towering museum that covers the political and personal realms of the nation’s first Black president and first lady, while public spaces include a branch of the Chicago Public Library, a playground and athletic center, basketball courts and a picnic area with grills.

I’m not a fan of AI used for actual creative work, but the new agents for Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Premiere are a completely new twist to Adobe’s approach to AI. And it’s that every creative person can get behind because it is truly focused on fully automating the most tedious tasks of their work.

I found myself in awe as I watched someone using an agent to set up a Premiere project. It did everything starting from a pile of randomly named video, audio, and graphic files to creating a project structure. I watched as it renamed and tagged footage using computer vision to entirely setting up a cut for a video interview, synchronized footage from multiple cameras, and put everything in the right place in the editing timeline.

New York is celebrating the Knicks in classic style Thursday, throwing a ticker-tape parade for the team that brought home the NBA championship longed for by generations of fans.

The Knicks’ victory — after a 53-year drought — has electrified New Yorkers, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani has predicted that the parade might be one of the biggest in the city’s history.

City police said all the viewing pens along the route were full less than three hours before the procession, packed by thousands of fans who flooded into the city.

The mere fact that it’s happening is historic in itself. Although the Knicks won the championship twice in the 1970s, the city didn’t host a parade for them either time. Then-Mayor John Lindsay had cut down on ticker-tape extravaganzas for financial and other reasons, and he instead honored the Knicks at a 1970 reception at the mayoral mansion and a jampacked 1973 ceremony outside City Hall.

This time, the city is going all out.

“There will be performances, there will be New Yorkers, there will be the team and there will be history,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday.

The parade is set to start at 10 a.m. Thursday near Battery Park and head up Broadway on the skyscraper-flanked route dubbed the “Canyon of Heroes.” The procession is to end at City Hall, where the players are to get another traditional tribute: keys to the city.

Knicks legends Walt “Clyde” Frazier — a member of the ’70s champion teams — and Patrick Ewing are expected to participate in the parade, according to a person familiar with the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the details before they were publicly announced. The person said Mike Breen, the Knicks’ play-by-play announcer on MSG Network, was set to emcee the City Hall ceremony.

Alicia Keys, the singer who collaborated with Jay-Z on the New York-loving 2009 hit “Empire State of Mind,” has been tapped to perform.

“How could I not?” Keys said Wednesday in a social media video that featured her on the phone with Knicks forward OG Anunoby.

Early Thursday, Zellnor Myrie, a state senator and Knicks devotee, strolled through the plaza in front of City Hall, decked out in Knicks gear, sporting a huge smile on his face. He said the Knicks’ win, after so many years of pain and futility, brought a feeling of generational catharsis to his family, especially his father.

“I remember calling him right after we won — because he’s out of the city now — and he said, ‘I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off of my shoulders,'” Myrie said. “And as he said that, I got so emotional and felt it. I think all of us have memories like that, and that’s why today’s so special.”

Police plan to deploy 10,000 officers to secure the event, which follows ebullient but sometimes chaotic street celebrations and some violence during the Knicks’ run to victory over the San Antonio Spurs.

“We want people to enjoy this moment,” Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a planning meeting Wednesday, “but public safety comes first.”

Some 650 sanitation workers have been assigned to clean up what could be tens of thousands of pounds (kilograms) of debris, if recent history is any guide.

Ticker-tape parades derive their name from the narrow strips of paper used by telegraph-era “stock ticker” machines. New York brokerage firm workers took to tossing the paper out their office windows during parades in the late 19th century, adding a swirling aerial spectacle to the festivities.

Over the years, especially up to the mid-1960s, the city rolled out ticker-tape parades to honor visiting foreign leaders, mark historic anniversaries and hail feats in aviation, war, sports, music, space travel and more.

The Knicks’ parade will be the 210th, and it comes after a ticker-tape bash for the WNBA’s New York Liberty in 2024.

Shares of Sleep Number Corporation will no longer be publicly traded after next week.

If you’re in the market for a new Apple device later this year, you should prepare yourself for a price increase. That’s not speculation—it’s coming right from CEO Tim Cook’s mouth.

Everyone is talking about longevity.

In the volatile world of manufacturing, one factor is emerging as the ultimate differentiator in 2026: speed, and in particular, operational velocity. This is the ability to sense market changes, make decisions quickly and decisively, and recover swiftly across the entire value chain.

In 2014, my husband came home from a run one day with the crazy idea that we should make an at-home insemination kit. We had zero experience in the fertility industry, no MBA, no connections, and not much money. But we had one important element: first-hand user experience. We knew personally that this product was greatly needed. We had looked for it, and never found it.

Tech CEOs are eager to blame AI for mass layoffs. But a recent Gallup poll shows that only 1% of laid-off workers agree.

Eugenia Kuyda remembers when one of her favorite apps became too bloated. All she wanted was a simple weight tracker. But she also got calorie counting, meal tracking, and a subscription she didn’t need.

AI agents are only as powerful as the models behind them, which must process vast amounts of data. No company is more vital in helping process that data than Nvidia.

Robots and AI agents are still limited when it comes to learning new things. That’s exactly the problem that fascinates Chelsea Finn, a Stanford computer science and engineering professor. Her research focuses on giving autonomous systems frameworks to reason through complex tasks.

While some companies are still exploring AI, Daniel Danker cites where it’s already working at Walmart. “We see it as the technology to solve a bunch of problems for customers,” says Danker, the retail giant’s executive vice president for AI acceleration.

AI agents come with real risks: The more autonomous they are, the more likely they are to violate data privacy rules or international SPAM rules, and the easier they become for hackers to attack. But until recently there was no standard for measuring these risks and no entity to insure against them. Meanwhile, enterprises will increasingly need to trust AI agents to do real work. Rajiv Dattani’s Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) has begun insuring agent providers against these risks.

Elizabeth Minor has been thinking about the risks of agentic AI and, specifically, autonomous weapons, for years. Minor is the head of policy at Stop Killer Robots, a coalition founded in 2012 in order to ensure that humans maintain control over technology in times of war. That coalition has grown to represent more than 300 organizations in more than 70 countries, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

At Google DeepMind, Lila Ibrahim occupies a role that didn’t previously exist: chief AI readiness officer, focused on how to prepare the world for rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. She helps governments think about policy, boosts public understanding of AI, and works to ensure that Google deploys AI responsibly.

After seeing how coders have been delegating large parts of their jobs to AI, Charles Lamanna wants office workers to start doing the same. Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive VP of agents and business apps, heads Copilot Cowork, which lets workers hand off complex tasks to AI agents that hook into Microsoft’s 365 suite. While it’s still in a limited research preview, Cowork allows them to do things like build competitive analyses from internal Excel spreadsheets or weed out scheduling conflicts using context from Outlook.

Tomorrow.io’s “weather intelligence” platform started with a focus on better data and eventually grew to include the company’s own constellation of satellites to cover the globe in detail, sampling every point on the planet roughly once an hour. But the CEO, Shimon Elkabetz, saw the opportunity to go farther and use agentic AI to help customers evaluate specific weather risks.