Mita Mallick was barely a month into her parental leave when she got a call from a friend. “I’m thinking she’s calling to check in on me, and we’re having a nice conversation,” Mallick recounts. Then she asked a question that took Mallick by surprise: So are you not going back to work?

Her friend revealed that Mallick’s employer—a large, recognizable public company with a generous five-month leave policy—had posted her job. “I felt like the floor fell out from under me,” Mallick says. “I was just devastated and felt so betrayed.”

Before going on leave, Mallick had already lost out on a promotion that failed to materialize once she became pregnant. She started looking for another job—while freshly postpartum—and never ended up returning to that company.

A few years later, when Mallick was having another baby, she was more prepared. She was up for a promotion and hid her pregnancy for as long as possible. When she was eventually forced to disclose the pregnancy, she went from being a front-runner to being out of the running. Suddenly she was being asked questions like: Why are you in such a rush to get promoted?

When she returned to work after nearly six months of leave, she was given the lowest possible performance rating because the business “fell off a cliff.” She later found out that she wasn’t the only person who had effectively been punished for going on leave.

In the years since Mallick’s brushes with pregnancy bias, parental leave policies have only grown more generous, with some major companies such as Starbucks even extending those benefits to hourly employees. The legal landscape, too, has become much more pro-parent.

And yet, pregnancy discrimination remains pervasive, even as parental leave has become a crucial recruitment tool across corporate America.

Since the beginning of 2026—well before Deloitte and Zoom quietly started cutting back on their leave policies—I’ve been seeking to chronicle how parents, mostly women, are being punished for using a corporate benefit that may well have been the reason they wanted to work at a particular employer in the first place.

SpaceX’s upcoming IPO promises to be not only a watershed for the space industry, but a landmark in financial markets. The company—which includes the world’s leading space-launch business, its largest satellite broadband provider, and a money-burning AI division—aims to raise about $75 billion, at an estimated valuation of $1.75 to $2 trillion. 

When soccer fans head to the FIFA World Cup starting in June, they’ll have a new option for finding things to do, places to stay, and ways to get around in various host cities: artificial intelligence. 

Katelyn Ide was thirteen when she first logged onto Twitter from a small town in Connecticut and discovered Justin Bieber’s fervent online fandom. Like most fans, she wasn’t content to just hang back and idolize from a distance, but to actively participate any way she could. She ran multiple fan accounts, mastering engagement back when Twitter allowed only 140 characters. Her “finish the lyric” tweets and song prompts circulated widely enough that she accumulated nearly 20,000 followers. “It became my whole personality,” she told me.

In Japan, there is a national public holiday called Keiro no Hi—Respect for our Elders Day—dedicated to honoring the wisdom of the generations that have come before us. In Hindu tradition, the third stage of life, Vanaprastha, frames later years as a period of spiritual depth and accumulated authority. It is hard to picture an analogue in a country that produced “OK, boomer.”

I used to be the executive leader who had it all. I achieved the extraordinary and was constantly delivering. I started chasing the next win the moment the last one landed. And I’d thought that relentless pace was just what I needed to do to perform at the top. So I kept going. Until my body stopped me.

In the highly competitive and profitable world of professional sports, stadium building has become an arms race. With lucrative sponsorships and naming deals on the table, and the potential jackpot of hosting an event like the Super Bowl, sports teams are scrambling for the biggest buildings, the largest screens, the flashiest private suites, and the most tech-forward fan experiences.

Generation Z has reshaped workplace expectations. Valuing transparency, authenticity, and purpose-driven leadership, in some senses they have mobilized management to up their game. It could probably be said that these aspirations should have been prioritized all along, however, work simply has not always been this intentional. 

In 2024, Boston Consulting Group surveyed more than 1,000 C-suite executives and found that just 4% of companies were generating substantial value from artificial intelligence. A year later, that figure had risen to 5%. It is tempting to read this 25% year-on-year increase as the beginning of liftoff, the start of a series of compounding increases that will eventually drive AI-powered efficiency gains in every corner of the economy. But we should be wary of this tale, and not just because of the well-known danger of extrapolating a trend from two data points.

As writer Ted Chiang has observed, “Most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism.” When we imagine rogue AI systems optimizing the world to death, we’re actually describing what many corporations already do. If an organization’s ethos is misaligned, any technology platform it creates will amplify that misalignment.

Few companies are a stronger barometer of the American economy today than Uber, and few executives have a clearer view of what’s coming than its president and COO, Andrew Macdonald. He shares what Uber’s real-time data reveals about consumer behavior amid surging gas prices, and confronts the uncomfortable question at the heart of Uber’s autonomous vehicle push: What does the company actually owe its millions of drivers? 

Many entrepreneurs credit strategy, timing, or gut instinct for their success. For one billionaire, a cult novel about surrendering control to a dice roll was an unlikely early influence.

A deal appears to be emerging between the United States and Iran to end the war and open the Strait of Hormuz, and U.S. President Donald Trump over the weekend said it had been “largely negotiated.”

It is not clear when or how the deal might be finalized and when its various parts will take effect. Trump spoke after calls with allies in the Middle East, including a separate call with Israel. Details come from two regional officials and a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations.

Here’s what we know and don’t know.

Deep in a cavernous New York City warehouse, the artisans behind some of the world’s most beloved children’s characters have been fashioning costumes and puppets for years in relative anonymity.

Now Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the workshop founded by the legendary creator of the Muppets, is drawing back the curtain.

A damaged chemical tank in Southern California cracked over the weekend, which authorities were hopeful would relieve pressure and reduce the risk of an explosion.

Some 50,000 residents in Garden Grove, a city of roughly 170,000 about 40 miles (60 kilometers) south of downtown Los Angeles, have been evacuated and are waiting for a resolution. The tank overheated Thursday and began venting vapors, leaving local and state officials scrambling to evade a worst possible scenario at the aerospace company site.

No injuries have been reported.

Fire officials planned to send in a team for “an all-night mission” to determine if the pressure has been relieved, which would reduce the worst-case scenario of an explosion, Orange County Fire Authority interim chief TJ McGovern said in a video posted late Sunday to the agency’s X account.

“We are not there yet,” McGovern said, urging residents to stay out of the evacuation zone while crews continued operations overnight.

In a follow-up update posted on X, the Orange County Fire Authority said there was one known crack on the tank, disputing reports circulating online of multiple cracks. Officials also said there was no active leak and that continuous atmospheric monitoring confirmed no chemicals were escaping from the tank.

Firefighters have repeatedly sprayed the tank with water in an attempt to cool the chemical inside, methyl methacrylate, which is used to make plastic parts. The tank’s interior reached 100 degrees (37.7 Celsius) Sunday, an increase of 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 Celsius) since Saturday, according to Democratic state Sen. Tom Umberg.

Fire officials said a crack discovered in the tank over the weekend may have helped relieve pressure, reducing the risk of a catastrophic explosion.

Shoppers in local communities across several states may discover that they have fewer supermarkets to choose from this year.

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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. 

Calling all redheads to the front! Wendy’s is honoring its roots by holding a look-alike contest for its iconic logo in New York City on May 26, World Redhead Day.

Before most of America pours its first cup of coffee, millions of workers are already hours into their shifts, and they’re tired. Overnight warehouse workers are packing orders. Early-morning bus drivers are taking kids to school. ER nurses are handing off to the day team at 7 a.m. These workers aren’t just fatigued from long hours. Many are living with a real, diagnosable medical condition that goes unrecognized and untreated, sometimes for years. And the cost of that gap doesn’t stay invisible forever.