Talk Fuse

    Business

    Business covers the companies, markets and economic forces shaping everyday life. From technology and energy to retail, finance and employment, it follows the decisions that influence investment, prices and growth.

    The topic also examines the people behind major firms, the policies affecting trade and industry, and the changing relationship between business and society. It helps readers understand how commercial developments can affect consumers, workers and communities.

    • Nothing Ear 3A earbuds add onboard recording for calls and audio

      Nothing announced a new pair of budget-friendly wireless earbuds, but not as part of the company’s affordability-focused sub-brand, CMF. The new Nothing Ear 3A are available starting today through the company’s online store for $99, which is the same price as Nothing’s original Ear (a). That’s good news in a time when price increases are…

    • Xbox cuts strike id Software, roughly half of staff lost amid Doom expansion

      Xbox is cutting 3200 jobs between now and the end of financial year 2027, with studios like Undead Labs and Compulsion Games going independent as others also try to navigate an uncertain future. Moreover, ZeniMax’s entire division – which includes all of Bethesda’s big studios – is facing major layoffs, even if no studios are…

    • Thames Water creditors vow takeover bid even under temporary nationalisation

      Thames Water’s creditors have signalled they will press ahead with a bid to take over the heavily indebted utility even if it is temporarily nationalised by the likely incoming prime minister, Andy Burnham. The group of 100 institutional investors, holding roughly £14bn of the company’s senior debt, is continuing to discuss a £10bn rescue proposal…

    • Suno recruits Atlantic and YouTube executives to court music industry

      Suno, the artificial-intelligence music generation company, has hired two experienced music-industry executives into vice-president roles as it seeks to position itself as a partner to the sector rather than an adversary. Grace James, formerly of Atlantic Records, joins as vice-president and head of artist marketing and editorial, while Christian Bowne, previously YouTube’s head of major…

    • Pete Holmes keeps screen time low and ignores 55,000 unread emails

      Comedian Pete Holmes, star of HBO’s Crashing, spoke to WIRED for its “User Behavior” series about how he keeps his phone use unusually low and why he believes we are all on the verge of “slowly walking away” from our devices. He argues that much of modern digital life amounts to “manufactured urgency” that people…

    • Manual controls give way to automated machines, eroding human touch

      In an excerpt from his book *The Small Stuff*, writer Ian Bogost argues that people have gradually lost direct, physical control over the machines and objects in their lives. He contends that unseen choices in design, business and technology have automated away everyday tasks — replacing buttons, levers and manual effort with computers — so…

    • 777, a genre-fusing debut single from ONE OK ROCK supergroup YAO

      YAO, a new collaborative project uniting Japanese band ONE OK ROCK with artists Awich, Paledusk and Chico Carlito, has released its debut single, ‘777’. The venture matters as an experiment in fusing acts from different musical backgrounds into a single unit, with its name drawn from the Japanese concept of “Yaoyorozu no Kami”, meaning Eight…

    • Mass Balance sends autonomous chemistry lab into orbit to study disease proteins

      British startup Mass Balance has launched an autonomous, self-run chemical laboratory into orbit, aiming to gather data on hard-to-study, disease-causing proteins in the near-absence of gravity. The grapefruit-sized apparatus lifted off aboard a SpaceX transporter on Tuesday morning and matters because it represents an early step towards using space as a routine research environment for…

    • Elder Scrolls Online roadmap shifts two days before Season One launch after Xbox cuts

      Yesterday brought the news that Microsoft were cutting 1600 staff, spinning out four studios, and finding a further 1600 jobs to cut in the year to come. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said in an email to staff that she was “making reductions” and “shifting investment to focus on higher priority projects”.Today, we’re starting to learn…

    • Aviv on why sentimental writing about motherhood bores her

      The Guardian interviews acclaimed New Yorker essayist Rachel Aviv about her second collection, You Won’t Get Free of It, which reframes several of her reported stories around the mother-daughter relationship. The piece matters as a profile of one of today’s most celebrated magazine writers, whose work — spanning psychology, medical ethics and criminal justice —…