Effective planning before you go on vacation can make your time off more relaxing and enjoyable. Unsurprisingly, research reveals that vacations are beneficial for your mental and physical well-being and most employees return more creative and productive. However, to maximize your chances of having a restful vacation, its helpful to have a game plan in place to make sure your responsibilities are covered when youre gone and youre setting yourself up for an easy return. To truly relax, professionals need thoughtful preparation, which helps them offload details from working memory and relax, says Anita Williams Woolley, professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh.
Here’s what experts suggest.
Determine your goals
Take the time to delve into both short-term goals and long-term objectives youre responsible for managing. Woolley suggests these action points regarding work goals to address before signing off for your PTO.
Clarify and prioritize immediate tasks to complete before you leavebe realistic about what you can get done.
Confirm what your team should handle (or ignore) during your absence.
Outline your return plan, including contingencies in case of delays.
Create an alignment plan
Before your absence, create a plan to help your team handle your responsibilities while youre gone. Woolley advises including strategies for obstacles or issues that may arise while youre away. Heres what she recommends:
Clearly assign responsibilities. One suggestion is a vacation task list, where your specific duties are divided up among other team members. Make sure everyone understands what they are responsible for.
Agree on which issues are urgent and warrant contacting you, empowering your team to handle everything else.
Identify critical risks and provide explicit guidance on how to handle emergencies without you.
Notify your team
Be sure to let your colleagues and clients know when you will be out of your office. Woolley says:
Be proactive. Alert your team youre going to be on vacation instead of a colleague or client receiving a bounce-back email announcing youre out of the office.
Inform everyone who needs to know about your absence.
Select a trusted “gatekeeper whos someone who decides when to contact you and serves as a central reference for others.
The day before your vacation
Although youre excited for your break, be sure to wrap up any loose ends. Annie Rosencrans, people and culture director at HiBob in New York, provides these tips:
Send final follow-up emails, close out minor tasks, and tie up easy wins.
Avoid pushing nonurgent new work to others right before you leave, and instead table them for when you get back.
Cancel, decline, or reschedule meetings on the calendar for your time away.
Set up your out of office (OOO) messages on email, Slack, and other communication platforms.
Set yourself up for an easy return
Establishing a plan before you leave for vacation can reduce pre-trip anxiety and ensure that you and your team are set up for success during your time away, says Rosencrans.
A structured plan gives employees time to transition both practically and emotionally out of work mode, she continues. When executed well, this approach creates clarity, accountability, and space to truly disconnect. It also offers teammates confidence that nothing will fall through the cracks in your absence.
Woolley at Carnegie Mellon advises organizing your workspace and priorities ahead of time, ensuring your goals guide your first days back, rather than an overflowing inbox. She recommends setting yourself up for an easier return: “Park on a downhill slope.
Be assured, with some mindful planning, you can enjoy your vacation with less anxiety. Rosencrans asserts how time off isnt just a perk, it’s a performance strategy. The more intentionally we approach it, the better we protect well-being and long-term productivity, she explains. And no one should feel guilty for unplugging. If we normalize structured, respectful pre-vacation planning, we make space for real rest and thats something every employee deserves.
When Piyush Gupta took over as the CEO of DBS Bank in Singapore in 2009, he said DBS needed to think of itself not as a bank, but as a technology company providing banking services. Gupta challenged his entire workforce to raise their innovation game.
Gupta and his team invested significantly in technology, restructured to improve collaboration, and, most critically, drove a series of cultural interventions to encourage innovation friendly behaviors. Over the next 15 years DBS Bank transformed from an under performer in its local market to the best performing bank in the world. How did Gupta and other leaders who look to foster innovation do it?
As a researcher, advisor, (DBS was a consulting client of mine from 2017 to 2019), executive, and now teacher, I have spent 25 years practicing and studying disruptive change. Here are some essential takeaways for nurturing disruptive teams.
Recognize the importance of teamwork
Innovation stories typically celebrate charismatic leaders like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. That sometimes leaves leaders thinking they have to carry the reins of disruption, or need to find a lone genius to drive disruption.
Innovation isnt the job of the few. Its highly dependent on teamwork. For example, in the 1960s, Procter & Gamble launched Pampers disposable diapers, which went on to become the first brand in P&Gs storied history to cross $10 billion in revenue. Vic Mills (a decorated scientist) chartered a team led by Bob Duncan (whose grandfather played a key part in the development of Tide laundry detergent) that included researchers like Harry Tecklenburg, who went on to have a 30-year career at P&G and wrote a wonderful retrospective about the launch of Pampers in 1990.
The job of the leader isnt to be charismatic and do the work alone, it is to create conditions that enable teams to do disruptive work.
Embrace uncertainty
One key to success is to recognize that disruption is predictably unpredictable. Julia Childs 1961 book Mastering the Art of French Cooking enabled a broader population to enjoy French dishes. Her pioneering cooking shows on television further brought cooking to the masses. Her story echoes every disruptive journey I have studied. Most notably, success required overcoming false starts, fumbles, and failures. She started working on Mastering the Art (with coauthors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle) in 1951. The goal was to publish the book in 1953. It took an extra eight years, two publisher switches, and one stinging rejection in 1959 that almost killed the project.
While you cant predict the specific path a disruptive innovation will follow, you can predict there will be twists and turns along the way. That means that leaders need to make sure that their environments accept and encourage the kind of intelligent failure that accompanies disruptive success.
Celebrate failure
Disruptions predictable unpredictability also means leaders need to make sure that their environments accept and encourage the kind of intelligent failure that accompanies disruptive success. One technique that can help is to have a formal ceremony to celebrate failure. Thats what Finnish gaming company Supercell does. Every time a team successfully launches a new game, everyone gets together, and cracks open a beer. Every time a team admits defeat and decides to shut down a project, everyone gets together and pops a bottle of champagne. The reward for the failure is greater than the reward for success.
Saying cheers to failure has two clear benefits. First, it shows that a good, not bad, thing has happened, encouraging other teams to continue to push frontiers. Second, it shows that the effort is finished.
Many organizations suffer from what I call zombie projects. The walking undead. Projects that everyone knows will not move the needle but they shuffle and linger on, sucking all of the life out of the organization. Zombies exist because failure carries such a stigma that organizations avoid killing projects. Saying cheers to failure stops zombies from ever spawning and allows teams to move onto the next projectwhich might actually be the disruptive innovation for which your company has been searching.
Accept risk
Pursuing disruption is risky. The first reference to gunpowder appears in the book The Kinship of the Three in 142 CE. Its development over the centuries involved alchemists, blacksmiths, peasants, gunners, philosophers, and scientists. There were farmers and fighters experimenting with different uses. There were leaders allocating time and money and directing work. As one historian noted, success required the work of daredevils, visionaries, madmen, many of whom found not fortune but disfiguring burns and death.
The burns are more metaphorical todaydoubts from colleagues, the pain of a hypothesis proved wrong, the discomfort that always accompanies doing something newbut they still sting. Doing new things is hard. Having things not work out as expected is painful. Disruptive innovators question the status quo. Some people inside organizations love it, some are indifferent to it, some actively seek to subvert or sabotage it. Disruption casts a shadow.
When you see someone in your organization who is pushing disruption, encourage them. Celebrate their courage, and tell them how much you appreciate their work. Its a small thing, but big things come from a collection of small things.
There are many regional terms for a submarine-shaped sandwich. One of them is hero.
On Monday, as President Trump ordered 800 National Guard troops to descend upon the streets of Washington, D.C., plenty of social media users were using that termnot to describe such a sandwich, but the man who wielded it.
A viral video taken in D.C. over the weekend shows a man in a jaunty pink button-up and north-of-the-knee white shorts confronting heavily armed federal officers. He appears at first bouncing in and out of a slight crouch, his head swaying from side to side, looking spectacularly undaunted by the agents all around him. Its unclear what he is saying, though a longer video shows the man ranting about fascism moments before the confrontation, so its easy to imagine what he may have been saying.
Soon enough, the man pulls back his arm to reveal, incredibly, an as-yet unglimpsed footlong Subway sub. He hurls the enormous sandwich at one of the officers, right in the chest, before breaking into a flat run. The video ends with the extremely confident, questionably athletic man seeming to evade capture, though subsequent photos suggest he was later apprehended.
The federal takeover of D.C. is something Trump had been threatening since at least August 5, after a former member of DOGEEd Big Balls Coristinewas beaten up by two 15-year olds in an attempted carjacking. If D.C. doesnt get its act together, and quickly, the president wrote on Truth Social following the attack, We will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that theyre not going to get away with it anymore.
Considering hed previously dispatched National Guard troops to Los Angeles just two months ago, it was clear this was no idle threat. Sure enough, Trump eventually sent agents from the DEA, FBI, and ATF into the city late last week, ahead of Mondays press conference announcing a deployment of the National Guard and his taking control of the Metropolitan police department, putting its 3,100 officers under his direct command for at least 30 days.
For much of Monday, social media users shared surreal footage of DEA officers in tactical gear patrolling the leafy walkway of the National Mall as joggers jogged by. It served as a counterpoint to the doomsday dirge on conservative media, with one GOP senator after another talking about how unsafe and scary they find Washington, D.C. The emerging footage seemed to instead reflect data collected by the Metropolitan police department showing that violent crime in the city last year was down 35% from 2023, and at its lowest level in over 30 years.
And that was before Bluesky and Reddit got a better look at some of that violent criminal elementin the form of assault with a hoagie. Thats when the jokes and memes began.
guys its really not funny that the fbi agent took a footlong to the chest. stop laughing. its NOT FUNNY that an fbi agent in head to toe tactical gear tried to chase the guy who hucked a sandwich straight at his bulletproof vest but couldnt outrun him— rax levon honkers king (@raxkingisdead.bsky.social) 2025-08-11T23:20:39.021Z
Oh no! Is the sub all right?— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) 2025-08-12T00:21:47.876Z
Most social media users werent necessarily cheering for the battery of police officers, but rather admiring the assailants fearlessness and laughing at his choice of projectile. Beaning an authority figure with a footlong sub, after all, seems more like a means of conveying disrespect and creating a spectacle than inflicting injury.
In any case, whether because the man gave voice to their own lack of respect toward the deployed feds, or just because it gave them a much-needed laugh, users on Bluesky and Reddit quickly elevated Footlong Guy to folk hero statusa sort of non-homocidal Luigi Mangione, or way-less violent Waymo-destoyer.
to every generation is born a folk hero who will perfectly channel the will of the people. his weapon will be harmless, even laughable, like say for example a shoe, or a footlong sub,— alix e. harrow (@alixeharrow.bsky.social) 2025-08-12T00:35:35.213Z
The AI search startup Perplexity has tendered an unsolicited offer to buy Googles Chrome browser for $34.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The bid comes as the Justice Department has asked a federal judge to require Google to sell off Chrome to end an ongoing antitrust case. But its questionable that a startup valued at half that amount on paper ($18 billion) can afford to buy Chrome; and Google, of course, almost certainly has no intention of selling itat least not yet. (Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.)
A federal court in Washington, D.C., decided last year that Google holds a monopoly in the internet search and advertising markets and is now considering a Department of Justice demand that the search giant sell off its Chrome browser. Google called the DOJ proposal wildly overbroad and part of a radical interventionist agenda (language that could draw some negative attention from the Trump administration).
Perplexity testified in that same case last spring, at which time it expressed a desire to buy Chrome. OpenAI also testified, and its ChatGPT product lead, Nick Turley, testified that his company would be interested in buying Chrome if the court required Google to sell.
Indeed, owning the Chrome browser would immediately catapult Perplexity from being a long shot for winning, placing, or showing in the internet search wars, to being a real contender.
In theory, Perplexity could use the Chrome browser in the same way Google doesas a widely popular front door to its AI-powered search engine.
“A clever publicity play”
With Chrome, Google fused the ideas of web browsing and web search into one thing that could be done in one place.
Chrome changed the browsers URL to act as a search bar, too (the omnibox, as it’s called). A huge portion of Google searches come from Chrome, and Google makes the lions share of its revenues from showing ads around search results. Google can place ads more effectively because of its access to all kinds of user browsing behavior in Chrome.
Perplexitys bid is very likely something less than a serious strategic gambit.
“This is a clever publicity play by the startup, but no one should take this stunt seriously,” says Neil Chilson, former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission and current head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute.
Chilson adds that the bid will have no bearing on the remedies that Judge Amit Mehta is currently considering in the antitrust case.
Perplexity is talking like it has every intention of buying Chrome. “Multiple large investment funds have agreed to finance the transaction in full, so we have a wide range of options,” the company said in a statement to Fast Company on Tuesday. “We are confident in our ability to close quickly.” Interestingly, Perplexity says it commits “never to stealthily replace the default search engine of Chrome (Google).”
Perplexity is good at what it does, but still small
Perplexity employs some very talented AI engineers, its answer engine product works surprisingly well by most accounts (including mine), and the company has been agile about releasing new products that augment its core service. (It recently released its own browser called Comet.)
But in the face of Google Search, Perplexity is still small-fry. It serves only a fraction of internet searches and sends only a fraction of the product search referrals that go to brand websites.
Perplexity looks more like a company to be acquired, not like an acquirer.
Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, reportedly held talks to acquire Perplexity earlier this year, but an agreement couldnt be reached. It’s likely that other suitors have approached the startup.
And yet the existing rules of market dominance in tech could be shifting under everyones feetbecause of generative AI.
During this seminal period in the potentially transformative technology (when the next Googles and Apples may be being decided), optics matter. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas seems to have a keen sense of this. He knows he needs to keep his companys name in the conversation with other up-and-comers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as the so-called AI revolution unfolds. Hes done an admirable job of itas evidenced by his many podcasts, public appearances, and viral tweets.
So Perplexitys Chrome bid may come out of the same playbook. Its about posturing.
For a company of Perplexitys stature to convince consumers that it could really be the heir to Googles search throne, it may want to puff itself up to appear to belong in (roughly) the same weight class as the incumbent. Putting in an offer to buy a key piece of Googles business may serve that end.
The man who fired more than 180 shots with a long gun at the headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention broke into a locked safe to get his father’s weapons and wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines, authorities said Tuesday.
Documents found in a search of the home where Patrick Joseph White lived with his parents expressed the shooters discontent with the COVID-19 vaccinations, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said.
White, 30, had written about wanting to make the public aware of his discontent with the vaccine, Hosey said.
White also had recently verbalized thoughts of suicide, which led to law enforcement being contacted several weeks before the shooting, Hosey said. He died at the scene Friday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after killing a police officer.
Asked about threats based on misinformation regarding the CDC and its vaccine work, FBI Special Agent Paul Brown said Tuesday: Weve not seen an uptick, although any rhetoric that suggests or leads to violence is something we take very seriously.
Although we are tracking it, we are sensitive to it. We have not seen that uptick, said Brown, who leads the FBIs Atlanta division.
The suspects family was fully cooperating with the investigation, authorities said at the Tuesday news briefing. White had no known criminal history, Hosey said.
Executing a search warrant at the family’s home in the Atlanta suburb of Kennesaw, authorities recovered written documents that are being analyzed, and seized electronic devices that are undergoing a forensic examination, the agency said.
Investigators also recovered a total of five firearms, including a gun belonging to his father that he used in the attack, Hosey said.
Hosey said the suspect did not have a key to the gun safe: He broke into it, he said.
White had been stopped by CDC security guards before driving to a pharmacy across the street, where he opened fire from a sidewalk, authorities said. The bullets pierced blast-resistant windows across the campus, pinning employees down during the barrage. More than 500 shell casings have been recovered from the crime scene, the GBI said.
In the aftermath, officials at the CDC are assessing the security of the campus and making sure they notify officials of any new threats.
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. toured the CDC campus on Monday, accompanied by Deputy Secretary Jim ONeill and CDC Director Susan Monarez, according to a health agency statement.
No one should face violence while working to protect the health of others, Kennedy said in a statement Saturday. It said top federal health officials are actively supporting CDC staff.
Kennedy also visited the DeKalb County Police Department, and later met privately with the slain officers wife.
A photo of the suspect will be released later Tuesday, Hosey said, but he encouraged the public to remember the face of the officer instead.
Kennedy was a leader in a national anti-vaccine movement before President Donald Trump selected him to oversee federal health agencies, and he has made false and misleading statements about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 shots and other vaccines.
Some unionized CDC employees called for more protections. Some employees who recently left the agency as the Trump administration pursues widespread layoffs, meanwhile, squarely blamed Kennedy.
Years of false rhetoric about vaccines and public health was bound to take a toll on peoples mental health, and leads to violence, said Tim Young, a CDC employee who retired in April.
By Charlotte Kramon and Jeff Martin, Associated Press
The Oklahoma City Thunder felt slighted last season when they were left off the NBAs Christmas schedule.
That wont be an issue this year.
MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the NBA champion Thunder will be working at home for Christmas this season, playing host to Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs as part of the leagues annual Dec. 25 quintuple-header. BetMGM Sportsbook has the Thunder favored by 9.5 points.
The other Christmas games, released by the NBA on Tuesday: Cleveland at New York (favored at -2.5), Houston at LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers (-1.5), No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg and Dallas visiting Golden State (-4.5), and Minnesota playing at Denver (-4.5).
Some NBA Cup games are scheduled to be released Wednesday, and the full schedule80 of the 82 games for all teamsis to be released on Thursday. The remaining two games for each club will be filled in December based on how teams fare in the NBA Cup.
They make the schedule. We play it, Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said last season, when asked about his club not being picked for the Dec. 25 lineup. Our players, I know, would have liked to play on Christmas because thats such a staple day in the NBA season. But we cant control that.
Well, they sort of did control their Christmas scheduling fate this season.
The NBA champions typically get invited to play on Christmas the following season; Oklahoma City beat Indiana in a seven-game NBA Finals last season. The Eastern Conference champion Pacers are among the Christmas snubs this year, after losing Tyrese Haliburton to an Achilles tear that will sideline him for the entirety of this season and seeing Myles Turner opt to sign with Milwaukee in free agency.
The Knicks will be playing their 58th Christmas game, extending their NBA record. The first Christmas game in league history was at Madison Square Garden in 1947.
Boston, Philadelphia, and Phoenix played on Christmas last season and didnt make the Dec. 25 cut this season, replaced by Cleveland (which was the Easts No. 1 seed), Houston (which landed Kevin Durant in an offseason blockbuster from the Suns), and the Thunder.
Cleveland and the Thunder are playing on Christmas for the first time since 2018. The Rockets have a Christmas game for the first time since 2019.
James, if he plays on the holiday, will be making his 20th Christmas appearance in his record 23rd NBA season. Only 12 NBA franchises have 20 Christmas games, and James could soon have that many as a player.
And it’ll be a big NBA holiday in Texas: All three of the state’s teams are playing on Christmas for the first time.
Opening night
NBCs return to the NBA broadcast world officially starts with opening night on Oct. 21, when the Thunder (favored by 6.5 points) will receive their championship rings before playing host to Durant and the Rockets in the first game of the season.
That will be followed by Stephen Curry, Jimmy Butler, and Golden State taking on James, Luka Doncic, and the Lakers (-3.5) in the second game of the NBC doubleheader. Those are the only two games on opening night.
MLK Day
Peacock and NBC will have four games on Jan. 19, which is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The matchups: Milwaukee at Atlanta on Peacock at 1 p.m. ET, followed by three games on NBC: Oklahoma City at Cleveland at 2:30 p.m. ET, Dallas at New York at 5 p.m. ET, and Boston at Detroit at 8 p.m. ET.
Memphis, which typically plays on the holiday, is not this season. The Grizzlies will be returning from Europe, after facing Orlando on Jan. 15 in Berlin and Jan. 18 in London.
Shares of major U.S. carriers jumped on Tuesday after upbeat airfare data for July signaled improving pricing power for the industry, as airlines bring capacity in check to align with a soft demand environment.
Shares of legacy carriers United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines jumped nearly 10% each, while budget rival Southwest Airlines gained 4% in afternoon trading.
Smaller peers Alaska Air and JetBlue Airways rose about 10% each and low-cost carrier Frontier Group surged 22%.
Data from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday showed airfares rose 4% in July after slipping 0.1% in June, marking their first increase in six months.
Uncertainty stemming from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and budget cuts has prompted travelers to curb discretionary spending and reassess plans.
A soft demand environment, particularly from budget-conscious domestic travelers, had forced carriers to discount fares, squeezing margins despite summer typically being their peak money-making season.
Airlines have since been trimming seats on offer and readjusting routes to keep their pricing power in control and shield margins.
During their second-quarter earnings calls in July, major executives expressed confidence in the industry’s ability to cut capacity and boost airfares in the latter part of the year.
Shivansh Tiwary, Reuters
Shares of major U.S. carriers jumped on Tuesday after upbeat airfare data for July signaled improving pricing power for the industry, as airlines bring capacity in check to align with a soft demand environment.
Shares of legacy carriers United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines jumped nearly 10% each, while budget rival Southwest Airlines gained 4% in afternoon trading.
Smaller peers Alaska Air and JetBlue Airways rose about 10% each and low-cost carrier Frontier Group surged 22%.
Data from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday showed airfares rose 4% in July after slipping 0.1% in June, marking their first increase in six months.
Uncertainty stemming from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and budget cuts has prompted travelers to curb discretionary spending and reassess plans.
A soft demand environment, particularly from budget-conscious domestic travelers, had forced carriers to discount fares, squeezing margins despite summer typically being their peak money-making season.
Airlines have since been trimming seats on offer and readjusting routes to keep their pricing power in control and shield margins.
During their second-quarter earnings calls in July, major executives expressed confidence in the industry’s ability to cut capacity and boost airfares in the latter part of the year.
Shivansh Tiwary, Reuters
As the battle to train artificial intelligence models becomes more intense and Reddits rich content library becomes more valuable, the social media giant has taken steps to block the Internet Archive from indexing its pages.
While the Wayback Machine has historically recorded all Reddit pages, comments and user profiles, the company has put limits on what the system can scrape. Moving forward, it will only be permitted to archive the sites home page, which shows popular posts and news headlines of the day, but no user comments or post history.
The action comes as Reddit has become increasingly protective of the content on its site. Reddit, in May, announced it had struck a deal with OpenAI to use its content to help train ChatGPT. It previously announced a similar deal with Google and blocked other search engines from crawling the site after that deal unless they struck financial agreements with Reddit as well.
AI companies that are less well-financed, however, have reportedly been using the Internet Archive to scrub the sites previous posts and train their large language models from that content.
Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt, in a statement, told Fast Company “Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but weve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine. Until theyre able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content) were limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors.”
Reddit shares were higher Tuesday, gaining more than 3% in midday trading, hitting $228. Year to date, the company’s stock is up 38%.
Reddits legal battles meet its AI ambitions
In June, Reddit sued Anthropic, claiming the AI company behind the Claude chatbot was scraping the Reddit site.
“In July 2024, Anthropic claimed, in response to Reddits public protests regarding Anthropics misuse of Reddit content, that it had blocked its bots from accessing Reddit. Not so,” the suit reads. “Anthropics bots continued to hit Reddits servers over one hundred thousand times. Unlike its competitors, Anthropic has refused to agree to respect Reddit users basic privacy rights, including removing deleted posts from its systems.”
(Anthropic has denied the accusations.)
Reddit’s latest defensive act against AI scraping comes as the company is focusing more on its own AI initiatives. Last December, the company rolled out Reddit Answers, an AI-powered tool that will summarize conversations and posts on the site, letting users bypass traditional search engines. That AI product is now used by six million people, the company said in its second quarter earnings announcement, up from one million in the first quarter.
Reddit is planning to use that momentum, as well as the significant use of its own internal search engine (which the company says services 70 million users per week) to challenge Google and other popular search tools.
“The world and the internet are rapidly changing, and I believe Reddit has a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said CEO Steve Huffman on an earnings call following the earnings. “Were unifying [search and Reddit Answers] into a single search experience. Were going to bring that front and center in the app. So, whether youre a new user opening the app for the first time or returning user opening the app, that search box will be present immediately for users who open the app looking for something specific.”
While Reddits efforts in the search space will include AI components, the company said it hopes to differentiate itself from the growing number of AI search engines by highlighting the human component.
“Conversation and connection are becoming more valuable and rare,” said Huffman. “In a world increasingly dominated by algorithms and automation, the need for human voices has never been greater.”
Eastman Kodak, the iconic American company known for its photography and film business, said it is at risk of going out of business, prompting a massive stock slide on Tuesday.
Here’s what to know.
Kodak Q2 2025 earnings
Let’s start with Kodak’s earnings report on Monday. For the second quarter ending June 30, Kodak reported its revenue was $263 million, a decrease of $4 million, or 1%, compared with the same period in 2024. Adjusting for the favorable impact of foreign exchange of $5 million, revenues decreased by $9 million, or 3%, compared with the year prior.
Kodak ended the quarter with a cash balance of $155 million, a decrease of $46 million from December 31, 2024. The decrease was primarily driven by capital expenditures to fund growth initiatives, changes in working capital, the impact of higher costs, and lower profitability from operations.
Most importantly, Kodak included a disclosure regarding its concern assessment in its second quarter 2025 Form 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In its earnings press release, the 133-year-old company said current financial conditions “raise substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” which publicly traded companies are required to mention. The reason: It doesn’t have the ability to pay its debt obligation, which runs some $500 million, according to CNN.
Kodak stock price slides
As a result, shares of Eastman Kodak (NYSE: KODK) fell more than 7% in premarket trading on Tuesday, and at the time of this writing, were down a whopping 25% in early afternoon trading.
Kodak is a leading global manufacturer focused on commercial print and advanced materials and chemicals. Founded in 1882 by George Eastman, it has earned 79,000 worldwide patents over 130 years of R&D (research and development) and is known as a pioneer in the photography business, specializing in both cameras and film.
In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy as its business became increasingly irrelevant with the advent of digital photography and smartphone cameras.
The U.S. stock market is rallying toward records on Tuesday after data suggested inflation across the country was a touch better last month than economists expected.
The S&P 500 rose 0.9% and was on track to top its all-time high set two weeks ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 467 points, or 1.1%, as of 12:30 p.m. ET, while the Nasdaq composite was 1.1% higher and also heading toward a record.
Stocks got a lift from hopes that the better-than-expected inflation report will give the Federal Reserve leeway to cut interest rates at its next meeting in September.
Lower rates would give a boost to investment prices and to the economy by making it cheaper for U.S. households and businesses to borrow to buy houses, cars, or equipment. President Donald Trump has angrily been calling for cuts to help the economy, often insulting the Feds chair personally while doing so.
But the Fed has been hesitant because of the possibility that Trumps tariffs could make inflation much worse. Lowering rates would give inflation more fuel, potentially adding oxygen to a growing fire. Thats why Fed officials have said they wanted to see more data come in about inflation before moving.
Tuesdays report said U.S. consumers paid prices for groceries, gasoline, and other costs of living that were 2.7% higher in July than a year earlier. Thats the same inflation rate as Junes, and it was below the 2.8% that economists expected.
The report pushed traders on Wall Street to increase bets that the Fed will cut interest rates for the first time this year in September. They’re betting on a 94% chance of that, up from nearly 86% a day earlier, according to data from CME Group.
The Fed will receive one more report on inflation, as well as one more on the U.S. job market, before its next meeting, which ends Sept. 17. The most recent jobs report was a stunner, coming in much weaker than economists expected.
Some economists warn that more twists and turns in upcoming data could make the Feds upcoming decisions not so easy. Its twin goals are to get inflation to 2% while keeping the job market healthy, and helping one with interest rates often means hurting the other.
Even Tuesdays better-than-expected inflation report had some discouraging undertones. An underlying measure of inflation, which economists say does a better job of predicting where inflation may be heading, hit its highest point since early this year, noted Gary Schlossberg, market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute. That helped cause some up-and-down swings for Treasury yields in the bond market.
Eventually, tariffs can show up in varying degrees in consumer prices, but these one-off price increases dont happen all at once, said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management. That will confound the Fed and economic commentators for months to come.
Other central banks around the world have been lowering interest rates, and Australias on Tuesday cut for the third time this year.
On Wall Street, Intel’s stock rose 3.2% after Trump said its CEO has an amazing story, less than a week after he had demanded Lip-Bu Tans resignation.
Circle Internet Group, the company behind the popular USDC cryptocurrency that tracks the U.S. dollar, climbed 2.4% despite reporting a larger loss for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It said its total revenue and reserve income grew 53% in its first quarter as a publicly traded company, and it topped forecasts.
On the losing side of Wall Street was Celanese, which sank 10.3% even though the chemical company delivered a better profit than expected. It said that customers in most of its markets continue to be challenged, and CEO Scott Richardson said that the demand environment does not seem to be improving.
Cardinal Health dropped 7.3% despite likewise reporting a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Its revenue fell short of forecasts, and analysts said the markets expectations were particularly high for the company after its stock had already soared 33.3% for the year coming into the day.
Critics say the broad U.S. stock market is looking expensive after its surge from a bottom in April. Thats putting pressure on companies to deliver continued growth in profit.
In stock markets abroad, indexes edged up in China after Trump signed an executive order late Monday that delayed hefty tariffs on the worlds second-largest economy by 90 days. The move was widely expected, and the hope is that it will clear the way for a possible deal to avert a dangerous trade war between the United States and China.
Japans Nikkei 225 jumped 2.1%, and South Koreas Kospi fell 0.5%, for two of the worlds bigger moves.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.30% from 4.27% late Monday.
The yield on the two-year Treasury, which more closely tracks expectations for the Fed, fell to 3.73% from 3.76%.
By Stan Choe, AP business writer
AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.
