The Week’s Business News In Pictures

Knowledge loss, long relegated to HR and people teams, is a sweeping leadership issue that deserves more attention from a company’s top executives and an upgraded approach that leverages newly available AI solutions. Throughout my career, I’ve seen how the institutional knowledge someone holds can be regarded as key to their job security.

Salvador Dalí could have done a lot for logo design. Surrealism grew out of postwar, post-pandemic Europe a century ago. The movement gave us artists like Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Max Ernst. Today, Europe is again reeling from disease and war, and hallucinatory artificial intelligence text-to-image generation can sometimes take on the effect of a surrealist painting.

As a heat wave sweeps the U. S., cities should look to the Middle East for ways to adapt to a changing climate. 2023 was the hottest year on record, shattering records dating back to the mid-1850s, and driving a heightened sense of urgency around climate action. 2024 might be even hotter, as evidenced by this week’s extreme heat wave across the U.

Water is mysteriously bursting from yet another West Texas oil well, continuing a troubling trend. In recent years, Schuyler Wight has noticed a growing number of abandoned oil wells coming back to life, gurgling fluids to the surface of his West Texas ranch. Last week he found the biggest one yet.

Now that Voodoo has acquired the platform for $500 million-plus, analysts and social media managers are left wondering: Will BeReal ever make money? BeReal’s days of social media dominance are long gone. The app, which offers randomized daily two-minute timers prompting users to snap a quick picture of what they’re up to, counted 23 million active users in January 2024—a steep drop from 73.5 million in August 2022.

Reading is both enjoyable and good for you, says this cognitive scientist. Summer is here. At some point, you may find yourself on vacation, sitting by a pool on a weekend afternoon, in a chair on the porch, or lying on a towel on a sandy beach. In those moments, put down your phone and pick up a book (or perhaps an ebook, but preferably on a device that isn’t your phone).