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The astronaut who prompted NASA’s first medical evacuation earlier this year said Friday that doctors still don’t know why he suddenly fell sick at the International Space Station.

Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner on Jan. 7 after prepping for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn’t talk and remembers no pain, but his anxious crewmates jumped into action after seeing him in distress and requested help from flight surgeons on the ground.

“It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press from Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted roughly 20 minutes and he felt fine afterward. He said he still does. He never experienced anything like that before or since.

Doctors have ruled out a heart attack and Fincke said he wasn’t choking, but everything else is still on the table and could be related to his 549 days of weightlessness. He was 5 ½ months into his latest space station stay when the problem struck like “a very, very fast lightning bolt.”

“My crewmates definitely saw that I was in distress,” he said, with all six gathering around him. “It was all hands on deck within just a matter of seconds.”

Fincke said he can’t provide any more details about his medical episode. The space agency wants to make sure that other astronauts do not feel that their medical privacy will be compromised if something happens to them, he said.

Tests are inconclusive

The space station’s ultrasound machine came in handy when the event occurred, he said, and he’s gone through numerous tests since returning to Earth. NASA is poring through other astronauts’ medical records to see if any related instances that might have occurred in space, he said.

Fincke identified himself late last month as the one who was sick to end the swirling public speculation.

He still feels bad that his illness caused the spacewalk to be canceled — it would have been his 10th spacewalk but first for crewmate Zena Cardman — and resulted in an early return for her and their two other crewmates. SpaceX brought them back on Jan. 15, more than a month early, and they went straight to the hospital.

“I’ve been very lucky to be super healthy. So this was very surprising for everyone,” he said.

Fincke stopped apologizing to everybody after NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman ordered him to stop.

“This wasn’t you. This was space, right?” his colleagues assured him. “You didn’t let anybody down.”

Ever the optimist, he’s holding out hope that he can return to space one day.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

You know that pop-up. The one you click “yes” for every time. The one that asks you to confirm you’re over 18. Sometimes, “you must be older than 21 to enter this site” is written in big, bold letters. Other times, in a somewhat sobering moment, you’re asked to scroll back for what seems like eons as you find the year of your birth. Maybe you put your real age; maybe you’re lying and claim to be younger than you are (who’s going to check, this silly little website?); maybe you are underage and want to access whatever’s behind this simple-to-circumvent pop-up. Either way, you’re getting through it, and easily at that.

The political consensus around protecting kids online is nearly universal. What Americans can’t agree on is whether the tools legislators have built actually do the job. A new survey from digital safety platform All About Cookies, conducted in February with responses from 1,000 U.S. adults, reveals a striking paradox: overwhelming public support for age verification laws, paired with near-universal consensus that those laws simply won’t work.​

“A lot of kids, especially teens, are probably more tech savvy, better than even some of these adults,” Josh Koebert, a data journalist for All About Cookies, told Fortune. “So if I can get around it, they can get around it.”

Adults want adults on the internet—or at least want kids to out themselves

Seventy-nine percent of Americans support age verification laws for adult content, and 74% back them for social media platforms. Yet 85%, the highest consensus figure in the entire survey, say the current laws are too easy to skirt. More than half of users who have been asked to verify their age online admitted they found a workaround anyway, most commonly by switching to a less-regulated website (45%) or using a VPN (22%).

“The main takeaway is twofold,” said Koebert, who authored the survey. “The majority of people think kids need to be protected, but what we’ve got isn’t working.”

The more revealing story for business leaders may be the data anxieties the survey surfaces. Ninety-two percent of respondents expressed at least one concern about age verification laws, and the fears center squarely on corporate data stewardship.

Seventy-nine percent worry about privacy and data security; 66% cite identity theft risk; and 41% fear being profiled or added to an external list after verification is complete.​

Those fears aren’t theoretical. Many age verification laws include provisions requiring companies to delete user data once verification is complete. But high-profile breaches, including incidents involving Discord’s third-party verification vendor Persona, have eroded confidence that the rules are being followed. 

“People have been bitten time and time again,” Koebert said. “They’ve submitted information to a giant company and ended up in a breach. Of course they’re going to be hesitant to submit a government ID.”

The survey also identified an unlikely policy pressure point: sports betting. Ninety percent of respondents said gambling platforms should face strict age verification, the highest figure of any category tested, topping even social media.

Koebert attributed it to market saturation. Since the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling that opened the door to federally legal sports wagering, betting brands have flooded broadcasts with advertising. 

“It’s impossible to watch sports without being bombarded,” he said. “Kids are watching these games alongside their parents, and people are thinking: this isn’t healthy.”

Despite widespread support for regulation, the public’s preferred solution skews away from top-down mandates. Fifty-five percent said parental controls and monitoring tools, and not government laws, are the best way to keep minors safe online, while only one in five chose age verification laws as the optimal approach.

As verification requirements expand to cover roughly half of U.S. states, and as countries from Australia to Spain enact their own versions, the core challenge for lawmakers and platforms is converging: how to protect minors online without creating the very privacy vulnerabilities that make adults distrust the internet in the first place. 

“Where does it stop? Where does it keep going? What happens next?” Koebert asked regarding how far reaching the laws can get. “Questions that I don’t think we have answers for.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Images of never-ending security lines at U.S. airports and frustrating tales of missed flights are pushing panicked travelers to show up way before their departures. But some airports where the wait times have been manageable are telling passengers to stop arriving so early.

In Ohio, John Glenn International Airport in Columbus says early birds — reacting to the funding standoff on Capitol Hill that’s creating crowded security checkpoints — are making things worse by creating bottlenecks during peak times.

“Arriving too early can actually create longer lines right when we open,” the airport said in a social media post Thursday. “Spacing out arrival times helps keep things moving smoothly for everyone.”

The airport even created a chart showing when to arrive: “90 minutes before departure is all you need.”

What’s confusing for air passengers, though, is that it’s hard to predict which airports will be plagued next by security lines spilling out of terminals.

The government shutdown straining Transportation Security Administration staffing has ballooned checkpoint wait times beyond two hours at some major airports. George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston has become the biggest chokepoint for travelers with four-hour security lines.

Those are by far the worst-case scenarios. Many airports — like the one in Ohio — have been seeing wait times comparable with those in normal times. That’s why airlines say the best advice for passengers right now is to check TSA wait times before their scheduled departures.

In some ways, it’s a bit reminiscent of the days of “ panic buying ” during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“It’s human nature. You don’t have control over what’s going on at an airport,” said Shari Botwin, a Philadelphia clinical social worker who counsels people about anxiety.

“There’s so much media attention about the chaos at airports,” she said. “They might not trust when someone says, ’Well, you don’t need to come out early anymore.’”

Associated Press reporter Ed White in Detroit contributed.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A pro-Iranian hacking group claimed Friday to have hacked an account of FBI Director Kash Patel and has posted online what appear to be years-old photographs of him, along with a work resume and other personal documents. Many of those records appeared to be more than a decade old.

“Kash Patel, the current head of the FBI, who once saw his name displayed with pride on the agency’s headquarters, will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims,” said a message posted Friday from the group Handala.

The message was accompanied by more than a half dozen photos of Patel, including ones of him standing beside an antique sports car and another with a cigar in his mouth. The group also said that it was making available for download emails and other documents from Patel’s account. Many of the records appeared to relate to his personal travels and business from more than 10 years ago

“The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information, and we have taken all necessary steps to mitigate potential risks associated with this activity,” the FBI said in a statement. “The information in question is historical in nature and involves no government information.”

Justice Department singles out Handala

It was not clear when the hack claimed by Handala might have occurred. News reports from December 2024, before Patel was confirmed as director, said that Patel had been informed by FBI that he had been targeted as part of an Iranian hack.

Handala is a pro-Iranian, pro-Palestinian hacking group that earlier this month claimed credit for disrupting systems at Stryker, a Michigan-based medical technology company. Handala said the attack was in retaliation for suspected U.S. strikes that killed Iranian schoolchildren. They’re a prominent example of the proxy groups that carry out cyber attacks on behalf of Iran.

The Justice Department singled out Handala in an announcement last week in which it said it had seized four web domains tied to Iranian hacking schemes and the threatening of dissidents.

The Trump administration is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification of members of the Handala hacking group.

Associated Press writer David Klepper in Washington contributed to this report.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When Meta’s CEO announced the company’s first round of 11,000 layoffs in 2022, a red-eyed Mark Zuckerberg was conciliatory: “It was one of the hardest calls that I’ve had to make in the 18 years of running the company,” he said at the time.

Including this first mass layoff, the company has dismissed a total of around 25,000 people across several divisions since 2022, with the most recent being a reported 700 layoffs affecting its Reality Labs unit this week. Following the 11,000 laid off in 2022, Meta cut another 10,000 jobs and began a hiring freeze during Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” in 2023.

At the same time, he has changed his tone, and experts say his inconsistent behavior is hurting employees still at the company.

By early 2025, when he announced a 5% reduction in Meta’s workforce affecting approximately 3,600 workers, Zuckerberg replaced empathy with cold business logic, saying in an internal memo the cuts were aimed at “low performers” and that he had raised the bar on “performance management.”

“This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams,” he said at the time.

Many of these supposed low-performing workers later argued in posts on social media they were never warned about any performance issues before being fired. 

Meta cut about 600 employees in 2025 across its SuperIntelligence Labs division late last year and cut another estimated 1,000 employees from Reality Labs earlier this year.

Inconsistent leadership

While Zuckerberg has not commented on the latest 700 layoffs reported this week, there is a clear vibe shift in his approach to layoffs since 2022, Stevens Institute of Technology business professor Haoying Xu told Fortune.

“At the very beginning, layoffs were something that he had to do—he had no choice,” he said. “Now it seems to be a norm.”

This inconsistent leadership, as Xu describes it, may increase quiet quitting among the workers who remain and cause them to lose faith in Zuckerberg’s decision making.

Because he went all-in on the metaverse by changing his company’s name to Meta in 2021 and pouring billions into the VR and metaverse-focused Reality Labs division, which is reportedly facing layoffs for the second time this year, employees may think twice about buying into the CEO’s grand ideas the next time.

“You will lose credibility in your followers, because what you did and what you said, it’s just unpredictable and untrustworthy to the employees, because you keep switching back and forth,” Xu said. 

Meta did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. 

To be sure, the layoffs could also be seen as demonstrating Zuckerberg’s willingness to course correct on the metaverse, even though the initiative was his idea, said Jessica Kriegel, the chief strategy officer at consulting firm Culture Partners, which advises companies on strategy and workforce shifts.

“He made a massive bet on the future with metaverse. He staffed up for it. He was unapologetic about it,” she told Fortune. “And then when the results didn’t match the pace, or the market shifted, didn’t slowly unwind it—he just reset the system pretty quickly.”

A lot of founders would not have done the same, Kriegel noted.

“Founder-led ideas sometimes die way too slow of a death,” she said.

Breaking the ‘psychological contract’

While Zuckerberg arguably kicked off the trend of layoffs and flat management structures in the tech industry with his “year of efficiency” declaration in 2023, his change in tone regarding layoffs is a reflection of a broad shift across tech companies, especially as AI continues to change how they operate.

Xu argued tech companies have broken the “psychological contract” they once had with workers during the pre-pandemic era where giant workforces were the norm and companies like Meta, Google, and others offered perks like free haircuts and nap pods. 

In the age of AI, companies are instead scrambling to be more efficient and squeeze the most out of each worker, all while raising growth expectations. Meta, for its part, is aiming for a $9 trillion market cap by 2031, up more than 500% from $1.39 trillion today, and has promised some of its top executives payouts of up to hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve it, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Meanwhile, its new applied AI engineering team is reportedly employing a 50:1 employee-to-manager ratio, which is higher than the 12.1 employees per manager that was the average in 2025, according to Gallup. 

If these tech companies can’t promise workers job security, said Xu, employees will demand other benefits, for example more flexibility in terms of remote work or schedules as well as occupational training. The training is especially important, he added, because it may increase the odds of a worker getting a job later even if their current employer lays them off.

As for Meta, Kriegel said Zuckerberg needs to bring some semblance of normalcy back to the company to reassure workers following layoffs. The best approach, she said, is to be candid about the business reasons behind them and not over explain. Employees need to be able to buy in to the company’s vision to move forward.

“Consistency matters more than inspiration at that point,” she said. “Employees don’t necessarily need a bold vision speech. They need to see the same priorities being reinforced over and over again in decisions and investments and even what’s getting rewarded internally.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

President Donald Trump has insisted his Iran war will last up to six weeks, but it could be more like six months or longer, according to a Wall Street analyst.

As the conflict reaches the four-week mark, more escalation appears to be on the way, despite Trump further pushing back his threat to attack Iranian energy infrastructure.

“The Middle East War now appears to be broadening and deepening,” Capital Alpha Partners analyst Byron Callan said in a note on Thursday. “We have 25% confidence that it’s concluded by the end of May, 45% that it’s settled in the fall of 2026, and 35% that it extends into 2027.”

The war has spread to Iraq as U.S. forces battle Iran-backed militias, and it will likely extend to Yemen, where Houthi militants aligned with Tehran are expected to threaten shipping in the Red Sea.

That would cut off a critical outlet for cargoes and for Saudi oil that has emerged as an alternative with the Strait of Hormuz still mostly blocked, giving Iran even more leverage over the global economy.

Fighting has also reached the Caspian Sea as Israel recently bombed Iranian ports suspected of receiving arms shipments from Russia.

“An escalatory spiral that emerged with strikes on non-military targets does not appear to be contained,” Callan warned.

Gas prices and inflation are under pressure

A prolonged war sets up a darker economic outlook as it’s only just starting to weigh on activity. The average price of gasoline is now $3.98 per gallon, up from $2.98 a month ago, according to AAA. That will cut into consumer spending elsewhere, which had stayed resilient even during Trump’s tariffs last year. The stock market selloff will also produce a negative wealth effect, dampening willingness to spend.

Inflation will heat up too, and was already under pressure before the war. Import prices shot up 1.3% in February, the largest month-over-month increase since March 2022, in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The prospect of worsening inflation has also sent Treasury yields higher, lifting borrowing costs throughout the economy. That includes mortgage rates, which have jumped to the highest level since October. With home ownership now even more expensive, mortgage application volume plunged 10.5% last week from the prior week.

‘Seizing Kharg Island seems a bit loopy’

While about 5,000 Marines and 3,000 soldiers are headed to the Middle East, with 10,000 more U.S. group troops reportedly under consideration, Callan is “very skeptical” that Trump can deliver a knock-out blow to Iran that will cause the regime to accept his peace terms.

Still, he expressed 75% confidence that the U.S. will put boots on the ground to seize Iranian territory and try to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Such an operation could involve an attack on Kharg Island, where 90% of Iran’s oil is exported, or other islands near the strait. But ground troops would face the risk of Iranian missiles and drones, which the U.S. has failed to prevent from inflicting extensive damage to its bases and embassies in the region.

“This could lead to a long-war scenario,” Callan predicted. “Seizing Kharg Island seems a bit loopy to us because an occupying force would probably have to deal with an extremely unpleasant environment created by the burning of oil in storage facilities. If the intent of seizing Kharg is to cut off Iranian oil exports, that could be done by simply stopping tanker traffic carrying Iranian product.”

In fact, other analysts have also called for a naval blockade of Iran’s oil exports, saying it would be more effective and less risky than deploying troops, especially given that Iran has other hubs besides Kharg from which oil can be exported.

Persian Gulf neighbors could join in

Callan sees the occupation of islands near the strait as the most likely use of U.S. troops and doesn’t expect a large-scale invasion that deep into Iran’s interior, meaning the threat of drones will persist as they can be launched from up to 1,500 miles away.

Troops from the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia might even participate, he added. That’s because Iran’s continued control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas flows, would be unacceptable to its Persian Gulf neighbors.

As a result, any agreement to halt fighting that leaves Iran as the effective gatekeeper of the strait would likely lead to further fighting. Indeed, the UAE recently hinted at an increasingly hardened position toward Iran that aligns more closely with the U.S. and Israeli stance.

“Our thinking does not stop at a ceasefire, but rather turns toward solutions that ensure lasting security in the Arabian Gulf, curbing the nuclear threat, missiles, drones, and the bullying of the straits,” Anwar Gargash, a senior UAE diplomat, wrote on X last weekend. “It is inconceivable that this aggression should turn into a permanent state of threat.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has kidnapped and extradited the leader of Venezuela, threatened to annex Greenland, mused about ousting the chair of the Federal Reserve, and waged economic war on his closest allies, all while (more or less) keeping the stock market from tipping into bearish territory.

The Iran war increasingly looks like the one instance where physical reality has outrun his ability to control the narrative.

The Nasdaq 100 has now fallen over 10% from its peak, technically entering correction territory. The S&P 500 has been at a loss for five weeks, on pace for its longest streak of weekly losses since 2022. Brent crude, the global barometer of oil futures, has shot back up to near $111 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude, futures of oil based in Texas, is flirting with $97, threatening to tease $100. 

On Thursday, Trump extended his deadline for striking Iran’s energy infrastructure by 10 days, his second extension since issuing the original threat last Saturday. “Talks are ongoing,” he posted on Truth Social after the market closed, potentially hoping to stop the bleeding after the stock market slipped over fears of a ground confrontation in Iran imminently. 

So far, the two sides haven’t come to the table much, with Iranian officials publicly rejecting the ambitious-15-point ceasefire proposal delivered by the U.S. through intermediaries in Pakistan and countered with five unrealistic demands of their own, including sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.

The post isn’t having the “truth social effect” on oil prices that Trump was hoping for, energy trader John Arnold posted on X. Traders are getting exhausted from the noise and have no sense of whether to trust that anything of what Trump says is true. It seems like the White House agrees, and on Friday, it launched (while poking fun of “launches” as a word used by outlets to describe the war) the official White House app, so folks can get news from Trump directly.

Meanwhile, senior White House aides told MS NOW that Trump has grown “a little bored” with the conflict—not regretful, they said, just ready to move on. A second official said the president has started shifting his focus toward the economy, domestic policy, and the midterm elections. The administration’s public communications have tracked accordingly: official White House social media accounts have promoted the war effort with memes pulled from Iron Man, Top Gun, and SpongeBob SquarePants, and have taken to posting cryptic, eerie posts and videos over the last day or so to promote some unknown project. 

Unlike the other conflicts, it takes both parties to back out of this war, and Iran—with its supreme leader assassinated, military infrastructure decimated, and proxies scared—has a desire to draw out the economic damage. 

Until Thursday, markets have remained surprisingly resilient, keeping oil prices low throughout all the volatility. ECB President Christine Lagarde warned Friday that markets are “overly optimistic” about the conflict’s fallout, calling it a shock “probably beyond what we can imagine at the moment.” She pointed to second-order supply chain effects—like helium shortages disrupting semiconductor production—that investors haven’t begun to price in. “Most people are actually talking about years,” she said.

Not everyone shares that same sentiment. Nordic American Tankers CEO Herbjørn Hansson told CNBC he expects the Strait of Hormuz to reopen within weeks, not months. “The ships that are trapped or in the Arabian Gulf will be out within a fairly short period of time,” Hansson said. “That is my judgment based upon my experience of the past in similar situations.”

Torten Slok, Apollo’s chief economist, also wrote on Friday that markets are “overreacting” to a period of short term volatility for the sake of longer term stability in oil markets and the supply chain. “The bottom line is that the Iran shock is not big enough to offset the strong tailwinds to the US economy from AI spending, the industrial renaissance and the One Big Beautiful Bill,” Slok wrote. 

But even as Hansson was making that case, Iran turned back two Chinese-owned container ships from the strait on Friday—-vessels belonging to state-owned Cosco Shipping that made complete 180s. China has largely been spared from Iran’s blockade, which Tehran said before was focused only on countries it views as aligned with the US and Israel. The fact that Beijing’s ships are now getting turned away suggests the situation at the strait is becoming less predictable, not more.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Workers may dream that if they climb the corporate totem pole to CEO, they’ll finally be able to call the shots, set their own schedule, and bask in all the spoils of success. But Oura’s chief executive Tom Hale says the fantasy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 

Being CEO is “much harder than I thought,” Hale said recently on Sequoia Capital’s Long Strange Trip podcast. “Any CEO in the world will appreciate that. [It’s] much harder, much harder than I thought.”

Hale stepped into the top role of the $11 billion smart ring company nearly four years ago, after high-level stints across technology and consumer product companies like Momentive and HomeAway. With more than 30 years of experience and multiple executive roles under his belt, it would be assumed that he knew exactly what to expect from the top job. Still, nothing quite prepared him for the psychological load of this role.

“It’s not the work that’s harder. It’s the responsibility and the stress,” the CEO continued. “It’s waking up at 4:00 a.m. and being like, ‘Oh my god, is this going to work?’…It’s pressure, it’s stress, it’s responsibility, it’s all the people that you have. They’ve put their faith in you.”

And while professionals may assume that being a CEO means you reap all the glory, Hale explains “it’s really your team, it’s not you, who gets to own that success.” Yet, when an idea or project fails, the consequences are all directed at the top. The Gen X chief executive says CEOs are often found culpable, as they made the decision or set up a system that led to a problem. Plus, people look at being a CEO with rose-colored glasses—Hale says people misunderstand that the job isn’t always as glamorous as it sounds. 

“I think they think it’s a lot more fun than it is,” Hale continued. “There is fun. I just think that the ratio of kibble to champagne favors the kibble.”

CEOs who say the top job is lonely, isolating, and complex

Sitting atop the C-suite undeniably comes with major perks, from multimillion-dollar salaries to celebrity status in the business world. But like any role, it also has its downsides—and Hale isn’t the only CEO who hit unexpected hurdles when assuming the top role of a billion-dollar company.

Airbnb’s cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky has said that his mental health took a turn for the worse once he assumed the throne of the $76 billion short-term rental company. At that point in time his other two cofounders—who he called his “family,” spending all their waking hours working, exercising, and hanging out together—were suddenly out of view from the peak of the C-suite. His job became extremely isolating.

“As I became a CEO I started leading from the front, at the top of the mountain, but then the higher you get to the peak, the fewer the people there are with you,” Chesky told Jay Shetty during an episode of the On Purpose podcast in 2023. “No one ever told me how lonely you would get, and I wasn’t prepared for that.”

Another pitfall of being CEO is that it’s harder to vent to peers who may not relate to—or even understand—the trials and tribulations of running a massive company. Indra Nooyi, the former chief executive of $209 billion PepsiCo, said she often felt isolated and struggled to find her confidants. 

“You can’t really talk to your spouse all the time. You can’t talk to your friends because it’s confidential stuff about the company. You can’t talk to your board because they are your bosses. You can’t talk to people who work for you because they work for you,” Nooyi told Kellogg Insight last year. “It puts you in a fairly lonely position.”

Michel Doukeris, the CEO of $124 billion business Anheuser-Busch InBev, also pointed out that the top role is very distinct to all other jobs. Leading a business to success sounds like a straightforward plan of action, but there’s a whole host of players and factors to consider. Doukeris said that juggling all these expectations is a part of the job—and it requires a lot of organization to get it done. 

“The CEO job is very unique in itself,” Doukeris told Fortune in 2022. “You really have all the stakeholders. You have your own people, you have your customers, you need to listen to your consumers, but then you have your board, and your investors, and you need to balance very well your time.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Wall Street Journal had a really interesting story yesterday about the current state of Lean In. There’s some news on an organizational overhaul—cuts to a quarter of the nonprofit’s staff and a new CEO (Bridget Griswold, a 25-year-old whose background is in AI).

But what caught my attention was the WSJ‘s take on where Sheryl Sandberg is taking Lean In next. What started as a movement encouraging women to pursue ambitious careers is now positioning itself as the counterpoint to the rise of tradwives and the manosphere, the Journal reports. For those who aren’t on social media, these two separate, but related, trends have grown significantly in popularity over the past year. With Trump’s return to office and DEI backlash, a certain segment of men in power have embraced a form of hyper-aggressive manhood. And it has seeped into the business world too (witness Sandberg’s former colleague Mark Zuckerberg’s much-maligned comments a year ago that companies need more “masculine energy.”) It’s a problem.

The rise of tradwives has paralleled this. These are the women glamorizing homemaking on social media—but earning big bucks doing so, making them the breadwinners for their families. Some critics say their content makes taking care of a family full-time seem like a breeze rather than the hard work it is, usually with little acknowledgment of the long-term financial and personal trade-offs. Then there’s a more general fatigue among women that corporate America is not working for them anymore, as seen in Lean In’s own data, which found late last year that fewer women are now aiming to be promoted at work.

Hints of this new direction for Lean In started appearing over the past few weeks. On March 10, Sandberg gave an interview to People magazine, where she said, “The message that is going out is that in order to be a good wife or a good mother, you need to do it full time. And the truth is that that is a decision almost no women can afford to make.” The next week, she wrote a blog post about the same topic. She’s emphasized that while TikTok may make tradwives seem trendy, it’s not a new idea—far from it.

I spoke to a Lean In spokesperson, who added some detail to what this means in practice—and the connection between a young, AI-forward CEO and this mission. Lean In is planning to continue the work it’s best known for (membership circles for women, a large annual study on women in the workplace) but is looking to use technology to produce more “of-the-moment” research. And what’s more of the moment than tradwives on TikTok?

I think that Lean In and Sandberg face some headwinds fighting back against these cultural tides. For women attracted to tradwife life, Lean In represents everything they are rejecting. Sandberg has a powerful voice, but will she be able to reach the women who have already turned their backs on everything she stands for? To be clear, Sandberg is not going after women who stay at home but saying the problem is when women are “weighed down by outdated norms” when making that choice. Still, I’m curious to see how that message lands. (And on the manosphere: God knows those men aren’t listening to what Lean In has to say!)

Overall, I agree with Sandberg: The rise of the tradwife movement, as we’ve seen it on social media, has been harmful to women. I’m interested to see whatever AI-powered research Lean In produces on this topic. If Sandberg can figure out a way to give women’s ambition as much of a hold online as baking bread and making baby food from scratch, we will all be better for it.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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