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Leaving your corporate job for a solopreneur path is a bold move—and it can feel terrifying. But as long as you’re prepared, it can be a smart move, especially in the current rocky job market. I worked at one corporate job for 15 years. Then I pivoted to a new career in marketing. Eighteen months later, I was working for myself as a full-time freelance writer. Within two months of going solo, I had replaced my salary at a marketing agency, but I’d also taken a lot of baby steps in advance of making the switch. You can make the transition to solopreneurship easier if you build a safety net before you walk out the corporate door. Here’s how. Calculate how much…

Call it the day the music died. On December 31, 2025, MTV’s last music-only stations shut down forever​. The last video played on MTV Music in the U.K. was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles—which was also the first video ever played on the original MTV channel in the United States back in 1981. That’s a good 44 years of music history, bookended with a song that explores the theme of technology changing the way people experience art. It’s beautiful, in a way: A song that mourns the end of the radio age is played to mourn the end of another era. If you, like me, enjoy having random music videos on in the background while you work—or even just having them …

The Walt Disney Company’s stock price soared on Wednesday, up by 10% at the time of publishing, as the company surpassed earnings expectations and unveiled its first new theme park development in 15 years. Following Disney’s second quarter earnings report, the entertainment giant announced an agreement to build a new resort and theme park in Yas Island, United Arab Emirates. “As our seventh theme park destination, it will rise from this land in spectacular fashion, blending contemporary architecture with cutting edge technology to offer guests deeply immersive entertainment experiences in unique and modern ways,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a statement. While…

Last year, OpenAI decided it had to pay more attention to its power users, the ones with a knack for discovering new uses for AI: doctors, scientists, and coders, along with companies building their own software around OpenAI’s API. And so the company turned to post-training research lead Michelle Pokrass to spin up a team to better understand them. “The AI field is moving so quickly, the power-user use cases of today are really the median-user use cases a year from now, or two years from now,” Pokrass says. “It’s really important for us to stay on the leading edge and build to where capabilities are emerging, rather than just focusing on what people are using the models…

4.5 billion years ago the Sun was formed in a swirling cloud of dust and gas called the Solar Nebula. In a paper published by Nature Astronomy journal on April 28th, a team of internationally collaborating scientists proved that another giant molecular cloud hangs only 300 light-years away—making it the closest cloud to Earth. The cloud, named Eos after the Greek goddess of dawn, is so massive that its width would measure about 40 moons side-by-side and its mass is 3,400 times that of the Sun. “This thing was pretty much in our cosmic backyard, and we’ve just missed it,” says astrophysicist and study coauthor Thomas Haworth in an interview with CNN. Why has it ta…

Hello again, and thank you for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In. Last October, I visited the Silicon Valley headquarters of 1X Technologies—the startup behind a humanoid home robot called Neo—and spoke with its VP of product and design, Dar Sleeper. Among the points he made was that long-standing public expectations have set a high bar for household robots. Naturally, he name-checked the world’s most iconic one. “The ultimate, North Star, in a lot of people’s minds, is Rosie the Robot,” he told me. “A Jetsons world where you ask and receive, and it makes your life better, you spend more time with your family, you’re more present.” Sleeper’s referen…

Former President Joe Biden returns to the national stage Tuesday to elevate liberal concerns that President Donald The President’s agenda is threatening the health of Social Security. The 82-year-old Democrat has largely avoided speaking publicly since leaving the White House in January. That’s even as The President frequently blames Biden for many of the nation’s problems, often attacking his predecessor by name. Biden is expected to fight back in an early evening speech to the national conference of Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled in Chicago. While Biden has made a handful of public appearances in recent weeks, Tuesday’s high-profile address…

Tesla has reached a potentially lethal moment in its history, and it isn’t solely due to CEO Elon Musk’s political radicalization. Years of design and technology stagnation have led to a languishing model line and outdated technology. Back in 2023, I wrote that the beleaguered carmaker should aspire to survive and become yet another car manufacturer. Now that objective feels more pressing—and distant—than ever. The company just announced a new quarter of abysmal vehicle sales. Tesla’s first quarter of 2025 was a disaster—a 71% decline in net income compared to the same quarter last year—except for a better-than-expected gross margin thanks to its energy business. Its …

Wake up, go to class, grab a panini, then go to work. The day in the life of students James Haupt, Caroline Pirtle, and George Small seemed nothing out of the ordinary, except “going to work” meant entering restricted buildings in the Vatican, and reporting on what was happening at the papacy, just a few minutes away from the Holy See. As part of Villanova University’s 22-year-old Vatican and Rome Internship Program, which over the years has helped boost the Pope’s social media presence, the three students were on exchange for nearly five months. Small and Pirtle, both computing sciences majors, were stationed at the Vatican Museum and the Vatican Media Office respect…

If your team can’t function without you in the room, you don’t have a team, you have a dependency. Too many business owners confuse supporting their team with carrying them. Instead of learning how to coach team members, they do the work for them. They jump into every problem, solve every issue, and answer every question themselves. It feels like good leadership, but it’s actually just bottlenecking in disguise. The goal of leadership isn’t to be the smartest person in the room. Instead, it’s to build a room full of people who can think, solve, and act without you. That shift, from problem-solver to coach, is one of the most important moves a business owner can make.…

Nearly four months after wildfires reduced thousands of Los Angeles-area homes to rubble and ash, some residents are starting to rebuild. In the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, construction workers recently began placing wooden beams to frame a house on a lot where only a charred fireplace remains standing. In the seaside city of Malibu and foothills neighborhood of Altadena, many land parcels where homes once stood are being cleared of debris. Hundreds of homeowners have sought city or county approval for new home designs and other permits to eventually rebuild or repair damaged homes, though few have gotten the green light to break ground. Some 17,000 homes, business…

We talk about time at work as if it’s a fixed resource: something outside of us and something we either “manage well” or “never have enough of.” People genuinely believe the clock is the problem. But the more you look at how the brain processes experience, the less true this becomes. People don’t feel pressured because they have too many tasks. They feel pressured because their brain is constructing time in a way that makes everything feel urgent or impossible to catch up with. Modern neuroscience has been pointing to this for a while. Our experience of time—what feels fast, slow, overwhelming, or “not enough”—is not a reading from an internal stopwatch. It’s a st…

In 2021, Prada created “Candy,” an influencer designed to sell perfume. With an appearance rendered using then-state-of-the-art tools, Candy’s not-quite-real vibe felt straight out of the Silicon (Uncanny) Valley. It was peppy, but cartoonlike, and it was hard to see how Candy could sell perfume it could never smell. Since then, technologies have greatly improved. A brand can now render any persona with a product, create movies with that model persona animated in a realistic way, and show them demonstrating products. By creating their own influencers, brands can keep their advertising budgets down and generate profits. It’s possible that the virtual influencers will …

AI is quickly moving beyond rote tasks and into the realm of bigger-picture decisions that once relied only on human judgment. As companies treat AI as a thinking partner, the technology also introduces new risks. But the efficiency gains are hard to ignore, and companies are going head first into adoption. “It’s very much like a chief of staff or a senior adviser,” says Stacy Spikes, CEO of cinema subscription service MoviePass. To Spikes, AI platforms are a second or third set of eyes, helping him approach vendors or handle tricky people-to-people situations. He says he treats AI as a sounding board, not a decider. “I’m not letting it make the decision for me, …

A snaggle tooth. A gap in someone’s smile. A birthmark or mole. What do each of these facial features have in common? They all have wabi-sabi. That’s according to TikTok’s latest trend, which has users highlighting their imperfections and labeling them “wabi-sabi.” Not to be confused with the sushi accompaniment, wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic philosophy that finds beauty in imperfection and the natural process of aging—something we could all use a little more of in the age of “preventative facelifts.” The concept celebrates imperfection and the natural wear and tear that occurs with the passage of time, whether that’s a gently worn step, a chipped mug, or…

Now that AI can control your web browser, the next frontier might be to take over your entire computer. At least that’s what Seattle-based startup Vercept is trying to do with Vy, a currently free Windows and Mac app that can manipulate your mouse and keyboard to automate tedious or repetitive tasks. You just tell it what you’re trying to do, and then it takes control. Vy first launched as a beta for Macs in May, but has now been rebuilt and is available for Windows as well. My experiments with Vy have yielded mixed results. If you’ve ever yelled at ChatGPT for failing to follow instructions, that frustration becomes magnified when AI is piloting your entire compu…