Would you zap your brain to treat depression?

Imagine your inbox empty, your calendar clear, your to-dos checked. With undivided attention, you and your senior team head into the conference room, ready to address the big issues over a daylong meeting. Big issues like determining how you’ll respond to AI, setting your three-to-five-year strategy or nailing down how you’ll attract and develop future talent.

Anthropic on Tuesday launched Claude Fable 5, its most capable public model. But within two days, users began reporting that its safety system was blocking benign or legitimate prompts.

From Wall Street to Main Street, Elon Musk’s hotly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) for SpaceX tomorrow has hit a fever pitch with anyone and everyone. Headlines are buzzing about it in superlatives including “blockbuster” and “record-breaking.”

El Niño has officially arrived—and it could become one of the most severe on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warns.

“Innovation” is starting to become a buzzword. From keynote speeches to strategic plans, we hear the word thrown around so often that it now risks losing its meaning. If you were to ask 10 executives to define innovation, you’ll get 10 different answers, most of them vague and unhelpful.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off Thursday, June 11, to much fanfare, but one thing companies may not have considered is just how much it will cost them in lost productivity. And that number is staggering.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a network that provides access to real-time ocean data that is relied on by scientists, researchers, and students, is being restructured with major cuts eliminating most of the project’s ocean monitoring efforts. 

U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday he has called off new military strikes on Iran, hours after threatening to escalate the war by seizing control of the country’s oil industry.

Having led the fashion sustainability conversation longer than most, and amid the growing number of public failures and shifting consumer sentiment, I think we need to stop treating sustainable fashion as a standalone category that will fix fashion’s sustainability problems. Not only is that putting the spotlight in the wrong place, but “sustainable brands” typically don’t scale, which reinforces the narrative that sustainability isn’t viable or a force for economic prosperity.

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter.

If you’re putting your home on the market this summer, you may want to temper your expectations.

In Wednesday night’s Game 4 of the NBA Finals, the New York Knicks made history with the greatest comeback ever seen in the league’s title round. While the Knicks made headlines for their record-breaking gameplay, one famous fan made headlines for her latest fashion statement: Taylor Swift, whose courtside style is blowing up on social media.

The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate ticked up this week to just below its high for the year, the latest sign that borrowing costs on home loans remain elevated relative to where they were before the war with Iran started.

First, a few companies asked (very nicely) for their employees to come in one day a week. Work from home folks, like me, thought to themselves: Well, okay. One day a week is cool. I can get out of my pajamas and see my work-folk. 

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here.

While millions of soccer fans cheer or groan over World Cup matches spanning North America, health officials will be on high alert for germs.

A heat wave may be the most obvious health threat. But infectious diseases can spread in a crowd, and experts are set to scrutinize wastewater, hospital visits, even social media for any signs that an outbreak might be brewing.

Measles, one of the most contagious diseases, is among the top concerns, sparking a warning this week from the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO. With a nearly six-week stretch of packed stadiums, bars and tourist sites in 16 cities, officials are on the lookout for a long list of infections, from the stomach bug norovirus to mosquito-borne dengue fever.

“This is truly a marathon,” said Palak Raval-Nelson, Philadelphia’s health commissioner.

The mass gatherings come at a tense moment for budget-strapped health agencies in the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hit hard by Trump administration staffing cuts, already was grappling with a growing Ebola outbreak in central Africa and a cruise ship hantavirus outbreak. While CDC officials have advised state and local health departments behind the scenes, its expected World Cup disease surveillance dashboard still was “in final development” days before games began, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

“Our public health professionals are pretty stretched,” said global health specialist Rebecca Katz of Georgetown University, who is leading an unusual new hub to help.

At the Health Security Operations Center, a joint effort between Georgetown and MedStar Health, workers are analyzing data from around the country so they can alert health authorities, even emergency rooms, to any early signs of trouble. The center is issuing daily “situation reports” about disease trends around World Cup host cities and team base camps to several hundred local and federal public health groups, emergency management and hospital officials and others who’ve signed up.

“It’s important that we don’t become alarmist,” said MedStar emergency medicine specialist Dr. Shane Kappler. “We’re trying to be the insurance policy.”

A major STEM-focused university in the unlikely location of Bentonville, Arkansas, is starting to take shape. Announced in 2025, the university is the brainchild of brothers Tom and Steuart Walton, grandsons of Walmart founder Sam Walton and heirs to the massive wealth the company has created.

Damaging storms swept through the Midwest, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of customers and causing more than a thousand flight delays or cancellations at Chicago airports with more potentially severe weather expected Thursday.

The National Weather Service said it received more than a dozen reports of tornadoes Wednesday across northern Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Illinois. There were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths.

Weather service meteorologist Frank Pereira said the frontal system that produced the storms, including high winds and hail, was moving eastward Thursday. There was also a slight risk of severe thunderstorms in parts of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. The storms are being fueled by cool air from Canada clashing with warm, humid air from the South.

“Going forward, we’re expecting another area of severe weather to develop across portions of the central Plains, Midwest, particularly from Iowa, northern Missouri, northeastward through the Great Lakes,” Pereira said. “Again, it’s all tied into a pretty well-defined frontal system.”

Storms moved into the Chicago area on Wednesday afternoon, downing trees and damaging some buildings.

The two major Chicago airports, Chicago O’Hare International Airport and Chicago Midway International Airport, temporarily put all flights on hold in the evening due to thunderstorms. A similar ground stop was issued at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York due to thunderstorms.

By Wednesday evening, more than 1,000 flights going into and out of Chicago had been delayed or canceled, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking website.

Air traffic appeared to return to normal Thursday morning, with only 24 flight cancellations and 34 delays nationwide, FlightAware reported.

Strong winds blew part of the roof off an apartment building in the Chicago area, forcing residents to leave, according to NBC 5 Chicago. Elsewhere, barns collapsed in Wisconsin, buildings were crushed in rural northern Missouri and some large trees and power lines were downed in other areas across the Midwest, photos and video online showed.

Around 390,000 customers had no electricity in the Midwest on Thursday. There were nearly 226,000 outages in Illinois, including around 150,000 in Cook County, while 85,000 homes and businesses were without power in Michigan, according to poweroutage.us.

Commonwealth Edison Company, which provides electric service across northern Illinois, said the storms had downed poles and wires.

“We know this is challenging and will restore service as safely and quickly as conditions allow,” the company said in a post on X.

The storms soaked Rate Field in Chicago before Wednesday night’s game between the White Sox and the Atlanta Braves.