Alphonzo Terrell was the global head of social and editorial at Twitter, until Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition that led to roughly 80% of the company’s workforce being laid offTerrell included.
But he wasted no time in creating his own social media platform, Spill, with a very clear perspective.
After years of seeing firsthand how harmful and exploitative social media can be to Black and queer folks in particular, Terrell wanted to design a space to serve, safeguard, and give equity to those communities.
The app includes features such as Spades (a popular card game within the Black community) and subcommunities for users to find their specific tribes, e.g. Foodie Spill, Art Spill, Book Spill, etc. Operating in the background of all that is an AI moderation tool the company says has a 90% success rate. And the company held a community investment round last year that allowed users to become shareholders.
It’s no wonder why just three years in, Spill is on pace to more than double signups and revenue year over year, having crossed into positive cash flow earlier this summer due in large part to brand partnerships including Netflix, Paramount+, and Gilead.
[Screenshots: Spill]
Terrell pushes back against Spill being labeled as a standalone app for Black Twitter. “I think it minimizes the power of our communities,” said Terrell in an episode of Fast Company‘s podcast Creative Control. “We didn’t own Black Twitter. We didn’t actually have agency. And it was sort of this sadomasochistic relationship of like, here’s this platform that’s constantly harming you, but yet I have to keep using it because it’s the only way I can have a microphone.”
Terrell will join a main stage panel at Fast Company‘s 12th annual Innovation Festival September 14-17 in New York City to discuss what it means to put communities at the core of your business.
But in the meantime, check highlights of Terrell’s episode of Creative Control below and be sure to listen to the episode in full on the audio platform of your choice.
On defining what Spill really is . . .
“We’ve evolved and clarified our value prop today that’s actually fundamentally different [than being Black Twitter]. We really see Spill as an operating system for fandomand more importantly, culture-forward fandom.
When you find a place where you can be around other people that love the same thing that you love, it’s an immediate belonging. And many of us are not honest about how weird we are. And so these platforms and these tools became an incredible way to find people that were into superspecific niche things.”
On driving revenue through community . . .
“We have a really robust intelligence engine where we can tell you basically what our communities think about pretty much any topic under the sun, from Black maternal health to a new campaign about a new sauce. And that’s been really helpful for the brands. . . . A lot of these brands don’t want to make mistakes that can be costly or end up in situations where they’re getting boycotted and probably could have avoided that if they came and talked to platforms like us. We’re not a market research firm per se, but we have first party data and intelligence that nobody else has. And we want to use it so that people can make better decisions that benefit our communities.”
On maintaining trust while working brands . . .
“Anything that would hurt or harm the communities that we are built to serve and that we are every day working our asses off to build and maintain trust with is antithetical to our business model. It’s not even personal at that point or moral. It’s just, this would be bad for business.
[Its] really about calculating short-term gain versus long-term gain. If you want to take a deal from something questionable now, maybe. But then think about six months, 12 months down the line, 24 monthsif that trust breaks, your business breaks. And was that worth the cost of one deal? Most often that’s actually not that hard of a calculus to make.”
Join thousands of business leaders, makers, and innovators at Fast Company’s 12th annual Innovation Festival in New York City this September 14-17. Purchase your festival pass today and save. Standard rates end Friday, August 21.
At last, we know how Elon Musk’s fabled Terafab will look. Tesla and SpaceX showed a video rendering of their jointly developed advanced chip factory on Thursday. It will occupy 100 million square feet in Grimes County, Texas, about 45 miles northwest of downtown Houston. The sci-fi-looking building is so vast that you could fit six of them in Manhattan. Musk, the CEO of both companies, took to X on Thursday to declare it “the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.”
Except, you know, it doesn’t actually exist. As with so many of Musk’s grand projects, like the ones he used to sell his inflated SpaceX IPO, this is just a megacool gigafuturistic terarender.
Musk’s brand is the epic announcement, and the Terafab launch does not disappoint in that regard. The factory’s website labels itself as “the most epic chip-building effort ever.” It is a cosmic vision, sold as imminent, wrapped in renderings.
The question isn’t whether Terafab will ever be real; it’s whether it will be this Terafab, on this schedule, at this size.
The foundations for an exciting future are being built in Texas. Next up: Terafab https://t.co/jGg52Zhn5I pic.twitter.com/SNfSXNr2tb— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 6, 2026
What is Terafab, exactly?
SpaceX says the facility will be “an advanced semiconductor fab that will bridge the divide between current global chip supply and the compute demand of the future.” A vertically integrated factory putting manufacturing, packaging, and testing of advanced logic and memory under one roof, the company claims “Terafab will be epic in both its mission and in its sheer size.”
The chips will be optimized for edge computing and inference, destined for Tesla’s Optimus robots and self-driving Cybercabs, while additional high-power chips will sustain SpaceX’s space-based data centers. Intel is participating, though Intel won’t say what its role is. SpaceX promises to employ at least 3,000 workers from Grimes and neighboring Brazos counties, and says it’s “committing to the use of” water from the local Gibbons Creek Reservoir rather than local groundwater.
According to Bloomberg, the fab (semiconductor fabrication plant) will be powered by natural gas power plants that SpaceX will build itself. “We are bringing our own power,” Riley Trettel, SpaceX’s head of energy and data center development, told residents at a public meeting Wednesdayplus “very large battery arrays.” Solar power is nowhere in the plans, even though project partner Tesla is itself a solar manufacturer.
SpaceX, freshly public after raising $87.5 billion in its IPO, got a 100% tax abatement from Grimes Countycontingent on spending at least $5 billion by 2030 and creating at least 1,800 full-time jobs by 2035plus $30 million in state incentives. The news landed one day after hundreds of residents packed a county meeting Wednesday to protest those millions in tax breaks and what they saw as insufficient transparency.
The Texas Governor’s office put out a statement endorsing the deal from Dr. Sarah Borowicz, superintendent of the Anderson-Shiro Consolidated Independent School District, promising every opportunity would be managed “wisely, transparently, and always with students at the center of every decision.”
Still, the price keeps shifting. Terafab was unveiled in March as a $25 billion factory, then slated at $55 billion in later filings, and is now budgeted at $16.8 billion for its first phasewith filings suggesting the total bill could reach $119 billion across a “multi-phase” construction plan. Same factory, third price tag. Terafab, it’s worth noting, did not come up on SpaceX’s first earnings call earlier this week.
[Rendering: SpaceX]
Size matters
Putting aside its fantastic ambitions and potential conflicts with the interests of Texas residents, one can only be amazed at Terafab’s theoretical final size. Apple Park, the “spaceship” complex in Cupertino, California, is roughly 2.8 million square feet. Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas facility, already one of the largest buildings in the world, is about 10 million square feet. At 100 million square feet, Terafab would be 10 Gigafactory Texases and 35 Apple Parks.
Back in March, Musk said Terafab was going to be as big as 15 Pentagons. Yesterday, Musk was posting that Terafab “will be 50 times the size of the Pentagon when complete.̶ Either way, it’s massive.
This otherworldly footprint mirrors Musk’s other supersize ambitions, which include launching 1 million AI servers into orbit and establishing a 100-gigawatt space data center, fed by a factory on the moon that would catapult the servers into Earth’s orbit using an electromagnetic mass driver. Back then, experts in physics, aerospace engineering, and chip design pointed out that Musk’s plan ignores basic thermodynamics. Of the lunar factory and its mass driver, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb said: “The entire project sounds more like a speculative science fantasy than a believable technological project.”
Terafab feels like the terrestrial mirror of that space fantasy. Ironically, among its planned output are the high-power chips designed to run SpaceX’s space-based data centers.
Musk will keep selling the future in units of epic. Epic in mission and epic in sheer size. Maybe Grimes County gets its 3,000 jobs and its robot chip factory. Or maybe it gets a very large, very tax-exempt construction site and a hard lesson: The rendering is always the biggest version the building will ever be.
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Nationally aggregated inventory is up just 2.1% on a year-over-year basis from July 31, 2025, to July 31, 2026.
While thats up a tad from the +1.9% year-over-year pace last month, its decelerated significantly since last year.
If you go back 12 months, that year-over-year national inventory growth rate was much higher (+24.7.%). After a period of a burst of softening in which leverage shifted more toward homebuyers, the supply-demand balance in the nationally aggregated housing market has been more stable over the past year, settling into what ResiClub considers a “soft” market. Note, however that theres a lot of nuance regionally and locally.
Nationally, were still below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels (9.1% below July 2019), and some resale markets, in particular chunks of the Midwest and Northeast, still remain, relatively speaking, tight-ish.
July inventory/active listings total, according to Realtor.com:
July 2017 -> 1,322,659
July 2018 -> 1,261,916
July 2019 -> 1,239,534
July 2020 -> 822,834
July 2021 -> 546,686 (pandemic housing boom overheating)
July 2022 -> 691,652
July 2023 -> 647,135
July 2024 -> 884,273
July 2025 -> 1,102,787
July 2026 -> 1,126,252
From July 2024 to July 2025, U.S. active inventory across the country rose by 218,514 homes for sale.
From July 2025 to July 2026, U.S. active inventory across the country rose by 23,465 homes for sale.
Right now, were looking at state inventory data. ResiClub members (paid tiers) can get our monthly interactive deep-dive analysis looking at inventory shifts and signals for 800-plus metro areas, 3,000 counties, and 25,000 zip codes. ResiClub PRO details here.
Below is the year-over-year active inventory percentage change by state.
Click here to view an interactive version of the year-over-year map below.
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While active housing inventory is rising in most markets on a year-over-year basis, the pace of growth continues to decelerate across much of the country (see the side-by-side maps below). In fact, Floridahome to many of the weakest regional housing markets over the past two yearsis now seeing active inventory edge down a little year-over-year (-14%).
From left: Year-over-year active inventory shift from July 2024 to July 2025; year-over-year active inventory shift from July 2025 to July 2026
And while active housing inventory is rising in most markets on a year-over-year basis, some markets still remain tight-ish.
As ResiClub has been documenting, both active resale and new homes for sale remain the most limited across huge swaths of the Midwest and Northeast. Thats where home sellers in the summer are likely, relatively speaking, to have more power than their peers in many Southern markets.
In contrast, active housing inventory for sale has neared or surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels in many parts of the Sunbelt and Mountain West, including metro-area housing markets such as Punta Gorda, Florida, and Austin.
Many of these areas saw major price surges during the pandemic housing boom, with home prices getting stretched compared t local incomes. As pandemic-driven domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates rose, markets like Punta Gorda and Austin faced challenges, relying on local income levels to support frothy home prices.
This softening trend was accelerated further by an abundance of new-home supply in the Sunbelt. Builders are often willing to lower prices or offer affordability incentives (if they have the margins to do so) to maintain sales in a shifted market, which also has a cooling effect on the resale market: Some buyers who would have previously considered existing homes have opted for new homes with more favorable deals over the past couple of yearswhich then put additional upward pressure on resale inventory.
Click here to view an interactive version of the map below.
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At the end of July 2026, 16 states were above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington. (The District of Columbia is also back above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels.)
Click here to view an interactive of the chart below (best done on desktop).
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Big picture: Over the past year the post-boom softening hasnt been as strong as it was in 2024 or 2025, and inventory growth has decelerated on a year-over-year basis. That said, the nationally aggregated housing market remains soft. While home prices are declining in some parts of the Sunbelt, large parts of Northeast and Midwest markets are still eking out small year-over-year gains. At the national level, home prices are essentially flat year over year.
Click here for an interactive version of the table below.
Below is another version of the table abovebut this one includes every month since January 2017.
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If youd like to further examine the monthly state inventory figures, use the interactive below.
As ResiClub has been closely documenting, Floridawhich has been the epicenter of housing market weakness over the past 2.5 years, particularly in Southwest Floridais no longer seeing the same upward burst in inventory.
Indeed, the intensity of Floridas housing market correction is easing across many pockets of the state. There are still pockets of weakness, particularly in Southwest Florida, but the burst of softening has let up. Some builders have also reported that their affordability adjustments have helped them better meet the market in the state. To really get a sense of the zip ode nuances, I recommend using the ResiClub Terminal.
Click here to view an interactive/searchable version of the chart below.
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Handwriting has personality. Get to know someone well enough and their handwriting will remind you of them, because we all form letters just a bit differently.
Our devices, for the most part, lack that kind of personality. Sure, you can choose a font from a drop-down list in your word processor of choicebut its not the same.
So what if you could inject some of that unique-to-you personality into your digital discussions? Its possiblewith the right free tool at your fingertips.
This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!
Your handwriting, your font
FontCrafter is a free web app that can turn your handwriting into a font.
Just download a PDF, fill it in by hand, and the site will create a completely custom font exclusively for you based on your writing.
It takes around 15 minutes from start to finishand then the custom font is yours forever to use on any device you want, without any additional setup.
For perspective, thats nothing compared to the typical laborious process of creating an actual custom typeface. FontCrafter takes something thatd ordinarily be out of reach for most of us and makes it downright easy.
As for the specifics, when you visit the website, you can download a PDF template to start. The idea is that youll print out the PDF and then fill it in by hand to show every letter and character in your natural writing.
The template gives you three lines. I filled out the first with uppercase letters and the next two with lowercase ones, but you can do all with uppercase letters if you prefer. Providing multiple versions of letters is meant to introduce a bit of variation, allowing the typed text from your font to look more natural.
FontCrafter starts by having you fill in each letter multiple times.
When youre done filling out the form, youll need to scan it and upload it back to the website, making sure the crosshair symbols in the corners are included. This is going to work best with an actual physical scanner, because a certain amount of precision is neededbut you could always try using the built-in scanning function in Google Drive or another such app, if you want.
If you dont have a printer or a scanner handy, there are workarounds. I used my ReMarkable writing tablet, which made the process easy. You could do the same thing with an iPad or Android tablet or even just with a stylus or your finger on your phone, depending on what you have handy. Just note that having a stylus is going to result in more realistic-looking text than using your finger, for obvious reasons.
However you go about it, once youve got your template filled out, head back to the website and submit it. The web application will process it, right in your browser, then ask you if you want ligatures (a custom character shape created when two letters merge into a single joined form) or not. Just choose whatever option looks best to you.
You’ve got a couple options for how your custom handwriting font appears.
Last but not least, youll have your font ready to download in whatever format you prefer. Both TrueType and OpenType are available, and both will work with most devices and software that supports custom fonts in the first place.
All thats left is to install the font in your operating systemsomething thats possible with Android as well as Windows and MacOSand use it in whatever applications you like.
Once your font is finished, you can install it anywhere that accepts custom font uploads.
Is this practical? Possibly not. But is it cool to turn your handwriting into a font? Definitely. Im enjoying it, even though my handwriting is awful. Just imagine how well it will work for you, a much cooler person with much better penmanship than me.
FontCrafter runs right in your regular web browserno downloads or installations needed.
Its completely free to use, without any limitatins (or even ads). You can opt to make a contribution to its creator if you want.
The service is a client-side web app, meaning its 100% private and everything happens locally on your own device. Your handwriting is never uploaded to a server, no accounts or sign-ins are required, and no one has any access to any of your data.
Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
Most people take for granted that the messages they send via popular messaging apps like Metas WhatsApp or Apples iMessage are end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), meaning that no one but the sender and receivernot even WhatsApp or Applecan read the contents. Unfortunately, this rock-solid privacy-preserving encryption doesnt extend to the other major type of messages we send: emails.
Not a one of the big four email providersGoogles Gmail, Apples iCloud Mail, Microsofts Outlook, or Yahoo Mailsupports end-to-end encryption for personal accounts. Fortunately, if you do want E2EE protection for your emails similar to what you have for your texts, there are some email platforms that offer such robust privacy protections.
Why arent emails end-to-end encrypted?
If you have a personal email address ending in @gmail.com, @iCloud.com, @outlook.com, or @yahoo.com, the emails you send and receive are not end-to-end encrypted. However, its important to note that the email providers do use some encryption to protect your messages.
They do this in two ways, primarily: by encrypting your messages in transit between the sender, their servers, and the receiver, and by encrypting your emails at rest on their servers. However, this encryption isnt end-to-end because email providers hold the encryption keys, meaning they could read your emails if they wanted or turn them over to government agencies if presented with a lawful court order. In the worst case, if an attacker stole the email platforms encryption keys, they could possibly access all your emails and their contents.
On the other hand, with end-to-end encryption like that used by the world’s most popular messaging apps, the service provider does not have access to the encryption keys that unscramble the message to make it readableonly the sender and receiver do. This restriction is why end-to-end encryption provides superior privacy and security versus regular encryption.
The question that arises then is, why wouldnt these email platforms just end-to-end encrypt your emails as they do with the messages in the popular messaging apps you use?
The answer is less conspiratorial than practical. Email is a decades-old technology, designed to work seamlessly across all services. If emails were encrypted end-to-end, email interoperability would break. It would be very hard, if not impossible, to send an email from, for example, a Gmail account to an iCloud account. End-to-end encrypted email would also have other drawbacks. Email services scan emails for signs of spam and phishing attempts. If those emails were end-to-end encrypted, the services wouldnt be able to detect, quarantine, and block potential emails that are seeking to harm you.
Other useful features were used to, like search, would also be severely hindered. Currently, most of your emails dont actually reside on your devices. The older ones are stored on the service’s servers. Yet you can still search for them by keyword to find that old email you need precisely because the service’s servers can read the content of your emails. E2EE emails would break this server-side ability, meaning that if you wanted to search through your thousands of old emails, youd need to download all of them to your smartphone or laptop first.
Of course, sometimes its prudent to sacrifice convenience for privacy, and if you want your emails end-to-end encrypted, you do have some good options.
Trade iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook for these platforms
Since the early 1990s, a technology called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) has allowed people to end-to-end encrypt their emails. However, using PGP is pretty complicated for the average email user, as it involves the manual management of encryption keys.
Thankfully, if you want end-to-end email encryption, you dont need to manually mess with PGPprovided you are willing to switch email providers. In recent years, a number of companies have sprung up offering ready-to-use end-to-end encrypted emails. Two of the most popular are Proton Mail and Tuta Mail.
Both services are essentially the Signal of the email world. By that I mean that any emails sent from one Proton address to another Proton address, or one Tuta address to another Tuta address, are end-to-end encrypted by default, without your having to do anything.
However, there are some important limitations to these end-to-end encrypted email services. If you use either to send an email to an email address other than one ending with the E2EE address you are using (for example, sending an email from your Proton email account to someone with a Gmail email address, or even from a Proton email address to a Tuta email address), you will lose the protection of end-to-end encryption, as its transmission will default to standard email protocols. If the E2EE email service didn’t ditch the encryption in these instances, the recipient with the other email service wouldn’t be able to read the content of the message.
To get around this limitation, both Proton and Tuta allow you to send end-to-end encrypted emails to non-Proton and Tuta email addresses, respectively, via a secure online platform. Instead of seeing text in the body of the email, the Gmail or Yahoo Mail user, for example, will get a secure link. Clicking it takes them to a website where they can enter the password you provided them to decrypt your end-to-end encrypted message.
Should you switch to E2EE email?
So, should you switch to an end-to-end encrypted email platform? Most people would likely find the inconveniences too burdensome.
But if you want the most protection possible for your emails, Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, and Yahoo arent the services to use. In that case, E2EE email providers like Proton and Tuta are worth checking out.
The White House Quantum Summit brought together dozens of quantum policy officials and industry leaders last month, representing a rare glimmer of bipartisanship as the U.S. hustles to become the first nation to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer.
The summit, which convened on July 7 in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the West Wing, lasted over two hours and covered everything from supply chain resilience to how the U.S. can meet the deadline the Trump administration recently laid out for delivering a quantum supercomputer by 2028.
While experimental quantum computers already existIBM and other tech companies have built themthe world is rushing to build the first quantum computer thats industrially useful. In other words, the race is on to build a quantum computer that solves problems that classical computers struggle to tackle quickly by using quantum mechanics.
A computer of that caliber does not exist yet, and 2028 is a tight deadline to build one for industrial use. Its far more aggressive than the deadline spelled out in the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a program from the Defense Departments research arm that tracks the quantum computing sector, which has set a 2033 deadline for building out an industrially useful computer.
The challenge now is scaling the physics weve proven in the lab to industrial scale, building the domestic semiconductor ecosystem this industry will be built on, while making sure government moves as fast as the innovation, says Gregg Bartlett, chief technology officer at GlobalFoundries, a leading semiconductor manufacturing company.
Bartlett, who attended the summit, adds that while the 2028 goal is very challenging, thats also the point. Even if we dont fully hit it, the acceleration it forces will move the whole field forward.
Officials from the Departments of Commerce, Defense, and Energy, as well as the National Science Foundation, all convened on a panel that was united on collective goals around quantum computing, summit attendees told Inc.
Darío Gil, who serves as the undersecretary for science in the U.S. Department of Energy, acknowledged some of the skepticism the industry holds in meeting the 2028 deadline, according to one attendee. However, Gil underscored his belief that its still possible to move quickly in delivering a quantum computer with hard work and close partnerships.
What the industry saw in the room today was a Washington team that is very committed to the goals and the targets that they have set out so audaciously, another summit attendee told Inc.
Victor Peng, the CEO of quantum computing startup PsiQuantum, tells Inc. that the sense of urgency in Washington around strengthening American leadership in quantum computing has never been greater. PsiQuantum is seen as one of the leading companies that could cross the threshold of building the first industrially useful quantum computer. The Palo Alto, California-based startup broke ground on a Chicago facility last September thats exclusively dedicated to this cause.
Investments in quantum startups hit $12.6 billion in 20256.3 times higher compared to 2024, by McKinsey & Companys count in a research note the consulting firm published in June.
And the government is forking out funds, too. The Department of Commerce in May announced plans to invest $2 billion across nine quantum-focused companies, including IBM and GlobalFoundries. How quickly those plans, announced via letters of intent, will materialize into government contracts remains to be seen.
The next big milestone in the quantum computing race would see the sector transitioning out of the research lab and into practical use. Technology futurist Daniel Burrus tells Inc. that the question is how quickly quantum can make the transition. In his view, it would happen through hybrid computingworking in tandem with artificial intelligence.
AI computing systems will handle most of the work, and quantum systems will be used for very hard problems todays AI systems cant solve, Burrus says, mentioning sectors such as drug discovery, energy, and security.
Melissa Angell
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This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister website, Inc.com.
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When I think about one of the most critical thinking tools in the history of civilization, I think about the notebook. Yes, I mean the paper-filled wonder that so many of the worlds greatest thinkers have used to capture thoughts that sometimes contained great ideas.
The calculations and ideas behind Einsteins reimagination of gravity were housed in the famous Zurich Notebook. Ben Franklin used one when he invented bifocals. Charles Darwin also used notebooks.
Many of the products, institutions, and disciplines we rely on passed through a notebook at some point. While the function of the notebook to express thoughts hasn’t changed, its form factor and how those notes are created has.
AI has entered the notebook
The arrival of the internet and mobile technologies, particularly smartphones and tablet computers, changed the way people take notes. Where once we may have collected thoughts in paper notebooks, we increasingly key notes into mobile applications.
But today we are in the midst of an AI revolution. While previous forms of technology changed the tools we used to take notes from paper and pencil to keyboard or mobile phone, AI offers a different promise: It can actually fill up our notebooks with thoughts for us. This is dangerous.
AI is so good at creating content that people don’t have to think about it. Humans enter a prompt, take the feedback, and fashion something approximating content or collateral. Content creation has become a culture of prompting, copying, and pasting.
But AI may also be slightly wrong in a way that’s hard to detect. I learned this firsthand when I was researching a piece of real estate my parents once owned, and the AI confidently told me my twin brother had changed his last name 40 years ago. He had not.
And while such hallucinations must be caught and cleaned up, they are not the worst aspect of rampant AI use. That is the tendency to overrely on AI, which results in passivity.
When we stop forming thoughts, we also stop building the critical thinking muscle that lets us evaluate what we’re being told. Cognitive offloading, cognitive debt and cognitive atrophy are real concerns.
At the same time, completely ignoring AI isnt the answer. AI is here to stay, and closing the AI skills gap through training is a key focus for institutions of higher learning seeking to prepare students for knowledge work that is being required with AI technologies. In fact, 87% of educators and education leaders and 79% of students agree that knowing how to use AI effectively and responsibly is important for students’ futures, according to Microsoft.
This is why I think digital note-taking has become more, not less useful in the age of AI. It offers you somewhere to do your thinking around it, rather than instead of it.
How to use AI to help your note-taking
For some of my note-taking tasks, I’ll use an AI tool for research, collect the useful information in a note, and then create automated summaries using AI. Then I might chat with my notes, using AI to research key points and flesh out that material further.
That sequence matters. The AI is doing work in service of my thinking, not replacing it. I’m deciding what’s worth collecting, evaluating the summary, and turning research into a plan. I am not passively consuming what the AI produces, but engaging with and critiquing the content before arriving at my own conclusions. I am an active participant in the process, not a bystander.
Now consider how note-taking might happen in various knowledge work roles in organizations worldwide.
Sales people take digital notes in the field, then transfer them back to their corporate office to build blueprints for customer success. HR workers can begin to build the kind of employee profiles that bolster institutional knowledge.
For all of these functions and business processes, AI is enhancing note-taking.
Notes are not going away
Keep taking notes. Not because you’ll always need to refer back to them, but because the act of taking notes, which includes deciding what to capture and how to phrase it, adds structure and clarity to your productivity work. Most importantly, it requires thinking.
That’s not something you should hand off to AI. The notebook has survived every era of communication technology. This one is no different. But it is important to be intentional about how you incorporate AI into your note-taking, which is a proxy for your thought process.
Because without coherent thought, all you have is more AI-generated noise while increasing cognitive debt.
President Trumps controversial plan to build an enormous ballroom adjacent toand larger thanthe White House just ground to a halt.
A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled on Friday that Trumps ballroom construction isnt lawful and must stop. In a 2-1 opinion, Judges Patricia Millett and Bradley Garcia asserted that each president is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence, thus Trump lacks the power to unilaterally rebuild the White House complex to his liking.
The President has noand claims noconstitutionally assigned authority over that property, which is designed and maintained for the use of all Presidents, current and future, and for the American people, the two judges, appointed by Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, wrote. Judge Neomi Rao, appointed during Trumps first term, dissented. We are aware of no instance in American history in which a President unilaterally and using privately collected funds demolished substantial portions of the White House that Congress authorized to be built and American taxpayers paid for, the majority opinion stated.
Fridays order reinforces an earlier injunction attached to a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which sued to halt the project last year. The privately funded nonprofit argued that only Congress can legally approve of a major makeover to the White Houses structures, a position that the pair of judges who issued Fridays ruling were sympathetic to. The ruling will put any above-ground construction on ice, but the Trump administration will have 14 days to appeal the decision.
So far, the threat of legal speed bumps hasnt slowed Trumps big teardown. Construction is already well underway, and recent photos from the site of the now-demolished former East Wing show a massive construction project very much in progress.
Trumps shifting ballroom story
As the courts scramble to catch up to the construction scene at the seat of American democracy, the public still cant get any straight answers about the projects details. Trump initially claimed that the plan to install a massive ballroom wouldnt involve any demolition, but he quietly authorized the buildings full destruction late last year.
“It won’t interfere with the current building. . . . It’ll be near it, but not touching it and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of, Trump said last summer. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles reassured critics that the president would work closely with organizations focused on historical preservation for the complexs makeover. The demo took place in October to the shock of many Americans concerned about the optics of Trumps decision to level and remake a major portion of the “Peoples House.”
Trumps justification for a ballroom large enough to dwarf the White House itself has also changed over time. The plan initially focused on the appeal of a huge event space to rival Mar-a-Lago, the lavish Palm Beach, Florida, club where Trump entertains friends and allies. As the president encountered more resistance to his plan to erect a massive gold-trimmed party room, Trump and his legal team pivoted to argue that the construction project is actually necessary for national security.
Trump responded to the courts decision Friday by claiming that the project is actually a key piece of military infrastructure designed to include a medical facility and a hospital, drone-proof ceilings, missile resistant steel, and top secret military facilities. In a new Truth Social post, the president called on the Supreme Court to intervene and get his construction plans back on track. The entire Complex, Military and all, is largely built, fabricated, and paid for, Trump claimed. This unjust decision must be overturned by the Supreme Court in its entirety.
The full plan, expected to cost north of $400 million, is reportedly being bankrolled largely by private donors and corporations seeking to win favor with the current administration. Thats just another red flag in a project littered with them, but one the president has often pointed to as a selling point that will save taxpayers from footing the bill. In spite of the private money pouring inand its public storythe Trump administration quietly steered more than $350 million in federal funds earmarked for the Secret Service toward the ballroom construction project in June.
Wendys deals might be biggie. But it’s performance this year hasnt been.
On an earnings call that felt more like a public reckoning, executives for The Wendy’s Company shared that the Dublin, Ohio-based chain was clearly not earning at [its] potential.
In the first half of the year, Wendys faced slowing sales, lower restaurant traffic, and a slew of store closures.
The company announced it will cut its dividend in halffrom 14 cents a share to 7as it attempts to stabilize profit through a struggling turnaround.
Q2 insights: sales dipped and stores closed
Despite a generated net income of $32.6 million, Wendys saw sales drop by 6.5%, with U.S. same-store sales down 7% and international same-store sales down 2.3%.
U.S. restaurants saw a 12.5% decrease in traffic this quarter, which CFO Steve Cirulis attributed to limiting discounts and reducing or cutting breakfast operation hours.
“Our traffic, our value proposition and franchise economics are not meeting our expectations,” Wendy’s CEO Bob Wright said in a statement.
The company withdrew its financial outlook for the remainder of the year, a move that typically occurs when sudden changes make estimates unreliable.
What went wrong?
Wendy’s executives outlined five areas the company will sharpen to improve its returns as the year continues, including:
food quality
operational excellence
digital experience
market expansion
But the biggest concern was Wendy’s poor marketing.
As one of the most recognizable brands in the country, Wright says the company’s messaging needed to establish a more meaningful connection with customers.
Wendy’s current marketing isn’t leading customers to the store. Its promotional collaborationslike the recent Minions and Monsters collabsaren’t increasing traffic as expected, either.
“We’ve been over-reliant on a calendar of one-off promotions and collaborations rather than a consistent, relevant brand narrative grounded in our equity and what Wendy’s stands for,” Wright said.
A few times on the call, Wright repeated that need for Wendy’s to reassert a consistent brand-building story for customers, underscoring how he sees it as vital to the company’s turnaround effort.
Looking forward
The earnings are the latest development in Wendy’s ongoing slump: Last year, the company’s revenue fell 3.1% to $2.18 billion.
As Fast Company reported in May, Wendy’s has been closing hundreds of restaurants in the United States as it reevaluates its store footprint. Wright says it was a targeted decision to strengthen the portfolio’s health and help the franchisees “get to the right place.”
But Wright is confident that the fast food burger chain canand willrecover.
The CEO plans to streamline the drive-thru process and rebuild the chain’s value menu to deliver on its cost-savings promises. He also wants to enable more targeted in-app marketing.
As the company moves forward, its shareholder-targeted priorities will center on financial discipline, thoughtful investing, and improving performance across both digital and in-store fronts.
“We’re in the early stages of this work and meaningful change won’t happen overnight,” Wright said. “What you should expect from us is transparent communication and measurable progress that builds over time.”
Despite lagging sales and a halved dividend, shares of The Wendy’s Company (Nasdaq: WEN) were up roughly 3.5% today as of this writing. However, the stock is down more than 6% year to date and more than 22% over the last 12 months.
A new survey shows employee morale is on the rise after hitting all-time lows.
BambooHR, an HR software platform, used employee net promoter scores (eNPS)a numeric rating of how likely employees are to recommend the organization as a place to workand turnover data to assess employee happiness. According to the companys recent global Employee Happiness Index with data from 51,000 employees, eNPS rose to 40 from January to June, the strongest first half of the year since 2023. This follows four consecutive years of decline.
The index notes that eNPS in the first half of the year typically outperforms the latter half, but the 4.4% increase year over year surpassed the typical bump.
The happiest companies lose 46% fewer employees than their counterparts with a lower eNPS, meaning 18 additional exits for every 100 employees each year. While unhappy companies have a first-year rate of 2.7% for early turnover, those with a perfect eNPS have a rate of 2.1%. However, the correlation between the happiness rates and turnover doesnt necessarily imply causation.
The index also shows that new hires start off happy, while employees who are with the company for two to three years tend to be the unhappiest. Eventually, theres a rebound: Employees with the longest tenure tend to be the most content.
There is also a substantial gap when it comes to happiness among different age ranges: 26- to 30-year-olds are the unhappiest age group with an eNPS of 31, which is 17 points lower than the 48 recorded by 51- to 60-year-olds. Last year, a survey by the Conference Board found that job satisfaction was 72% among workers 55 and older and just 57% among those ages 18 to 24. Recent reports also show that young people are grappling with AIs impact on their careers.
Male employees also remain happier than female employees, but the gap has narrowed to 6.8 points, down from an eight-point average across the prior three years.
The rebound in happiness isnt universal across industries, either.
According to the index, the tech industry slid from the happiest sector in 2023 to below average today. Its a sector that has been reshaped by mass layoffs and artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, Meta let go 10% of its workforce, after which the companys CTO Andrew Bosworth stated that employee morale was near the worst its ever been. On Blind, an anonymous workplace forum, posts containing negative sentiment about AI at Meta grew to 83% since late 2025, a roughly 300% jump since 2024. Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle have also issued mass layoffs in recent months.
While average happiness is bouncing back, younger employees and tech workers are still strugglingthe rebound is not happening equally across demographics and industries.
