Arianna Huffington

Now that #tradwife has entered the collective chat, what does it mean? According to @sherylsandberg, writing in the most recent edition of @LeanInOrg's great newsletter “The Lead,” the trend is actually being driven by a much older phenomenon women have to deal with: guilt. The majority of women work outside the home and the #tradwife movement is a subtle signal that to be a good wife/mother/partner you shouldn’t. With working mothers it feels like they take the baby out and they put the guilt in. But as Sandberg notes, working outside the home doesn’t diminish your other roles. “Let’s keep the past where it belongs—in the past,” she writes. “Instead, let’s focus on a future where each woman has the chance to pursue the life she wants, develop the talents she has...and achieve the goals that matter most to her.” Here’s the whole thing: bit.ly/4uFkOPV

Revisionist history has gone too far! As part of a “Popular Science” series on little-known science stories, Andrew Coletti concludes that the Oracle of Delphi “was just high on gas fumes.” As a Greek immigrant, and thus a devotee of ancient Greek wisdom, those are fighting words. On the other hand, Coletti seems to have the goods on the Greek priestess. Plutarch’s reports about the Oracle noted that the priestess would sit on a stool near a natural spring that produced a sweet-smelling gas, or “pneuma.” Years ago, in a hunt for what that gas could be, researchers John Hale and Jelle Zeilinga de Boer examined a fault underneath the temple. Samples of the bedrock tested positive for ethylene, a gas that was used as an anesthetic in the past. What does it do at lower doses? “People under the influence of ethylene remain lucid and responsive, but may speak or behave strangely,” writes Coletti. Which is why Hale pronounced ethylene a “perfect match” for pneuma. As Wordsworth wrote, “Let Nature be your teacher.” Though maybe not if you’re sitting near a plume of ethylene. You can read more here: popsci.com/science/oracle…

How do you feel about the return of the iPod?

The iPod is making a comeback. Though in my house, it never left! As @samisparber reports for @Axios, people are buying iPods again. And it’s not just the oldsters. As one Gen Z fan said, "The act of playing my music, with the sole purpose of listening to music — no ads, no apps, no distractions — makes my brain feel brand-new again.” I couldn’t agree more. I love my iPod and use it for music during the day and sleep meditations (with no doomscrolling possible) at night. Read more here: axios.com/2026/02/21/ipo…

Read more from @harari_yuval and seven other leading thinkers in the @nytimes about where AI is taking us: nytimes.com/interactive/20…

We don’t know what changes AI will bring to our lives in the years ahead, but we definitely do know that those years will be defined by constant change. And the most important quality we can nurture in ourselves to navigate change is resilience.

In the @nytimes, @loracorkelley reports on the rise of “bossware,” technology managers use to monitor employees. The phenomenon has been around for years but is now being super-charged by AI. It can take many forms, including monitoring keyboard strokes and even pauses. As @Stanford University political science professor Rob Reich says, employees need “moments of downtime outside of the gaze of the surveillance tools that are meant to drive productivity gains.” Not only are those moments of recovery good for employees, they also help drive better performance. A leader’s job isn’t just monitoring output but creating intrinsic motivation and buy-in among team members to meet their goals. Having to rely on fear-based extrinsic tools is a sign that it's not happening. In other words: bossware = bossfail. You can read Kelley’s piece here: bit.ly/4urxvOd

So how about you: do you like hearing music everywhere?

Silence please! Not to make an announcement — just silence for its own sake. Because there’s a war on silence and silence is losing — along with all of us. I was prompted to raise my (quiet) cri de coeur by this New York Times piece about how “sync music” has become “the soundtrack of our lives.” As Ryan Francis Bradley reports, sync music is meant to be paired with video, which is ubiquitous in our lives now. But my complaint goes beyond sync music, because that’s only one form of the music that now fills every corner of our lives. It’s like elevator music has jumped the lab and become an unstoppable aural pandemic. When I go in for a facial or a massage, there is music (which I immediately ask to be turned off). When I go to the gym, there is music. I finally found a small hotel gym in the San Francisco area without music and it’s now become my go-to. Restaurants are even worse — I now choose them mostly based on the sound level. Sure I want good food, but what I don’t want is for my dinner companions and me to laboriously lip sync a conversation. I was even surrounded by music recently in a museum and more and more outdoor shopping plazas now have loud music! My idea for a stop-gap solution: a portable remote music jammer we carry in our pockets to jam — and silence — unneeded music. Maybe if we call it an “AI-Driven Music Jammer,” we can get some VC mojo. My second idea: similar to air quality reports on our weather apps, we add a widget to give us the sound quality report for our area. (“Sorry, I have to stay in today — the Light Jazz level is dangerously high in my neighborhood”). It all stems from a category error. Silence is not absence. It’s not a vacuum. It doesn’t need to be filled. Silence is a thing in and of itself. And it’s incredibly valuable — all the more so now that it’s become so rare. Silence can lower stress and actually increase social engagement. Plus, it allows us to think our own thoughts, which is hard when being pointlessly bombarded. The Japanese concept of “Ma” is about the essential space between things. It can also be about time and silence, which can recenter us and enrich what comes before and after. We talk about light pollution — man-made light that prevents us from seeing the stars. And now we have noise pollution that prevents us from fully experiencing earth-bound moments. In the @nytimes piece, Bradley notes the “frequency illusion,” also known as the Baader-Meinhof or yellow-car effect. It’s when you notice something (like a yellow car) and then you can’t stop seeing it everywhere. So apologies if I’ve triggered it in you and now you’re going to be driven as crazy as I am by this new invasive species. As Paul Simon wrote, “The words of the prophets are… whispered in the sounds of silence.” True, but we can’t hear them! bit.ly/46SYYyg

From @BStulberg's inspiring new book "The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World" — a book particularly welcome during a time of growing isolation and what Brad calls "zombie burnout." You can read more here: bit.ly/4rq1DGV

From @BStulberg's inspiring new book "The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World" — a book particularly welcome during a time of growing isolation and what Brad calls "zombie burnout." You can read more here: bit.ly/4rq1DGV

“The untold want by life and land ne’er granted, Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.” — Walt Whitman, “The Untold Want” That poem is the guiding light for Now Voyager, a new bi-monthly print magazine devoted to longform international journalism co-founded by Nicolas Niarchos and Hélène Werner. Nick (@PerneInAGyre) and Hélène describe the magazine as finding “its specific geography somewhere between a foreign desk briefing, a literary review and a cultural notebook.” It’s a publication that crosses borders — highlighting issues and new voices from around the world — through compelling stories, beautiful artwork and vivid photography, with dedicated sections on food and humor too. The magazine’s first cover image sets the tone: a gorgeous watercolor by Camille Henrot that, as the editors put it, “captures the moment where a text begins. There will be twists and turns ahead, but this instant is illuminated, quiet.” The issue also features a portfolio of her work. At last night's gathering at Les Ateliers Courbet gallery, we also celebrated print despite all the obituaries about the death of longform journalism! And I photographed Malù dalla Piccola (the artist who is also married to Nick) in front of the wall of her original illustrations of the writers and editors. Congratulations to Nick, Hélène and the entire team on a glorious debut. Visit their website nowvoyagermag.com to explore what they’re building and subscribe.

“Across the country,” writes Olivia Walton, “mothers are dying at rates that would have shocked our grandmothers.” Walton, the founder and CEO of Ingeborg Investments and Ingeborg Initiatives, lays out a call to action to stop what she rightly calls a moral crisis. The numbers are shocking: the U.S. maternal mortality rate has more than doubled over the past 40 years and is now two to three times higher than in Canada or England. Even worse, the CDC estimates that 84% of these deaths are preventable. To lead the way in reversing those numbers, Heartland Forward’s Maternal and Child Health Center for Policy and Practice is publishing “Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America” — a state-led strategy to cut U.S. maternal mortality in half in five years. As Walton points out, for most private employers, maternal health is often their top cost driver. "We can make birth safer while making it less expensive,” she writes. "The data says so." There are solutions out there that we know work. As Walton writes, “We have the evidence. We have proof that progress is possible. Now we need leaders, employers, health systems, and philanthropy to step forward. Healthy moms are the foundation of healthy families. And healthy families are the foundation of a strong Arkansas — and a stronger America.” You can read more here: arkansasonline.com/news/2026/mar/…

So which of the following nominees do you hate the most? And leave your picks for worst corporate jargon in the comments.

Do you have the bandwidth to lean in and move the needle for a growth mindset? Sorry. Was just using some of the responses to an informal poll by @demetria_g in the @WSJ of people’s most-hated jargon. Why do people rely on corporate buzzwords? “The idea is to sound professional or strategic, but more often it just sounds unclear,” writes Gallegos. “Or silly.” bit.ly/4sClFPt Or worse. A warning: reading the full list might make your brain explode – or, I should say, make a “hard stop” and “pivot” to “negative growth.”

Loved my conversation with Maria Douvas, Royal Bank of Canada’s chief legal and administrative officer, to celebrate International Women's Day with RBCers around the world. One of my favorite parts was talking about how lucky we were to have mothers who were such instrumental role models (and who both happened to be Greek!). For Maria, one of the most important lessons she learned from her mother was to rise above things — which also happens to be aligned with RBC's IWD theme of "Rising, Adapting and Thriving in a Changing World of Work.” For me, my mother's great gift was teaching me that failure is not the opposite of success but a stepping stone. And that's so important for women, because often we’re afraid to take risks. We can let ourselves be held back by perfectionism. But there are no guarantees and we have to be willing to fail. And that's how we build resilience — which isn't a finite resource, or a fixed quality that we’re either born with or not, but a skill that through practice we can build and teach ourselves. And it's a skill that's all the more important in a world defined by constant change. So thanks to Maria, @RBC, all those who attended, and wise mothers everywhere. As you can see from this video from a fireside chat at USC 8 years ago, I’ve been guided by my mother’s wisdom for many years!

"Every time you level up in your career, you enter a ‘new room.’ You're suddenly surrounded by people who seem more experienced, more polished, more certain. Your brain then makes a critical mistake: it compares your inside with everyone else's outside." That's from @nireyal's great new book, "Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results." As Eyal writes, "You have intimate access to your own inner experience: every doubt, every moment of uncertainty, every time you didn't know the answer. But when you look at others, you only see their carefully curated exterior: the confidence they project, the polish of their presentations, the certainty in their voices." I like to call this voice the obnoxious roommate living in my head. And Eyal has great tips to help silence it! Click here for more on @Thrive Global: community.thriveglobal.com/youre-not-an-i…

Medicines plus healthy habits create outcomes that neither could achieve alone. A new @StanfordMed study published in JAMA shows digital lifestyle nudges may catalyze a critical first step toward behavior change for patients on GLP-1 medications. “Achieving your best health involves a lot more than pharmacotherapy alone,” said @DrMayaAdam, MD, PhD, the director of health media innovation and a clinical associate professor in pediatrics at Stanford Medicine. “And we found that giving people these little nudges may be very effective.” Adam and a team of researchers tested that premise in a multi-country, randomized controlled trial of 5,054 adult GLP-1 users that measured how the digital delivery of @Thrive Global's science-backed Microsteps influenced users’ behavioral expectation to make lifestyle improvements. Participants who received Microsteps — such as reminders to schedule movement time, have protein at each meal, swap sugary drinks for water, go outside for five minutes without devices — reported significantly higher behavioral expectation to adopt these healthy habits after a single exposure, with effects still evident two weeks later. In behavioral science, behavioral expectation — the likelihood of adopting a behavior “all things considered,” including real-world barriers — is considered a stronger early predictor of sustained change than intention alone. As GLP-1 therapies expand globally, scalable ways to support what happens between doctor visits are increasingly important. Read the study here: med.stanford.edu/news/insights/…

New @LinkedIn data shows that progress in hiring women into top leadership roles is reversing. If we want more women in leadership, one meaningful change workplaces can make is to stop burnout culture. Women pay the highest price for workplace cultures that treat sleep deprivation and burnout as proxies for commitment and dedication. This becomes a backdoor way of excluding women or at least making it harder for them to advance. So it’s not just about hiring, as important as that is — it’s also about changing the day-to-day culture (which will benefit everyone).   #IWD2026 #WorkplaceLeadership

Loved celebrating the launch of GreenRow's beautiful new flagship store in SoHo with @jeannieunsavory, who leads GreenRow, and @sherylsandberg. I love the colors, textures and whimsy mixed with elegant design. The store is now officially open at 47 Howard Street! (GreenRow is part of @WilliamsSonoma, whose board I serve on)