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United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby says he limits his daily meeting load to a maximum of four hours and insists sessions be conversational rather than PowerPoint presentations read aloud. He instead dedicates roughly three hours each day to reading books, newspapers and magazines, after waking around 5:30 a.m. and exercising.
A personal essay from someone who lost their father to suicide outlines lessons on how coworkers can support grieving colleagues, drawing on the difficulty of deciding who to tell at work. It cites 2024 data showing nearly 50,000 Americans died by suicide, making it the country's 10th leading cause of death. Research cited estimates each suicide touches 135 people, adding roughly 6.6 million new suicide-loss survivors annually, many of them coworkers.
NASA has issued a Request for Information outlining plans for a United States Space Academy, aiming for a 2026 groundbreaking, a 2028 opening in temporary facilities, and a permanent campus by 2031. The agency wants a site of at least 300 acres, initially serving 1,200 undergraduates with room to grow to 4,000, and is inviting all 50 states to submit proposals detailing land, funding, and infrastructure support.
United Launch Alliance remains one of the few major US rocket companies still focused almost entirely on launch services rather than branching into satellites, spacecraft, or other space businesses. Competitors like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Firefly Aerospace have all expanded beyond launch to capture higher-margin revenue streams, leaving ULA increasingly isolated in a low-margin segment of the industry. This has renewed speculation about whether ULA's parent companies, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, will eventually sell the venture.
Collaborative Fund, a $1 billion New York venture firm known for early investments in Lyft, Reddit, Sweetgreen and Olipop, has acquired a stake in Major League Soccer's D.C. United and its home venue, Audi Field. The move follows a broader pattern set by Thrive Capital, whose Thrive Eternal vehicle recently bought stakes in the San Francisco Giants and acquired the Los Angeles Lakers outright for $12.5 billion with Bob Iger as co-owner.
Elon Musk's tunneling venture The Boring Company closed a $3 billion Series D funding round led by the United Arab Emirates, valuing the company at $23 billion. As part of the deal, the company plans to build more than 150 kilometers of tunnels in the UAE. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Human Capital, Vy Capital and Valor Equity Partners.
The piece marks the 250th anniversary of both the United States' founding and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, arguing the two milestones are historically linked. It contends that American capitalism and the business community have long shaped the nation's legal and justice systems, not just its economy.
A technical failure in the United Kingdom's air traffic control system triggered widespread flight cancellations, with more than 2,000 flights scrapped. Airlines spent Wednesday working to clear the resulting backlog, and delays were expected to persist through the day.
The UN General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution with 164 votes in favor, urging governments, schools and tech firms to adopt the Equal Earth projection or other equal-area maps when accurate size comparisons matter. The US was the sole country to vote against it, calling the measure a 'radical ideological project.' Despite the vote, major navigation apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps are expected to keep using Mercator-based projections, which remain practical for plotting travel routes.
The United Nations passed a resolution, backed by the African Union, urging adoption of map projections that preserve the true relative size of continents instead of the 500-year-old Mercator projection. The vote passed 164 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenting country. Togo's foreign minister argued that maps shape how people understand the world's balance of power.
On September 4, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to phase out the 16th-century Mercator map projection in favor of the Equal Earth projection, which more accurately represents the relative sizes of continents and countries. The Mercator map, created by Gerardus Mercator in 1569, has long been criticized for exaggerating the size of Northern Hemisphere landmasses like Canada and Russia while shrinking equatorial regions such as Africa.
Stefano Cataldi, a neuroscientist at Columbia University studying serotonin's role in cognition, is weighing whether to leave bench research entirely to focus on science policy work. He is a delegate for the United Auto Workers union representing postdocs and research scientists, and last year he founded SCOPE, a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory-backed program that teaches scientists about policy, communication and career resources.