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When Jennifer Austin met Molly in second grade, they quickly became best friends. They giggled through classes until the teacher separated them, inspiring them to come up with their own language. They shared sleepovers and went on each other’s family vacations. But they gradually drifted apart after Austin’s family moved to Germany before the girls started high school. Decades passed before they recently reconnected as grown women. “Strong friendships really do stay for the long haul,” Austin, 51, said. “Even if there are pauses in between and they fade, that doesn’t mean they completely dissolve or they go forgotten. They’re always there kind of lingering like a …

The tech industry has endured another turbulent year, buffeted by the continued rise of artificial intelligence and the economic threats posed by President Donald The President’s tariffs. Even the most prominent companies encountered challenges they never imagined they’d have to face. As 2025 comes to a close, here are Apple’s biggest wins and greatest failures of the year. Apple’s biggest wins of 2025 iPhone 17 series Without a doubt, Apple’s biggest win of 2025 is the iPhone 17 series, which includes the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max. Myriad reports suggest that iPhone 17 series sales have exceeded both Apple’s and investors’ expectations. …

We used to argue whether design was about aesthetics or about functionality. But in 2025, those conversations seemed downright quaint. Simpler debates for a simpler time. Now we’re wondering if craft can survive the age of AI, and if we’ll ever escape the politicization of every brand and object again. For the December episode of our podcast By Design, I discussed these trends and more with Fast Company senior editor Liz Stinson. We were joined by some of our brightest friends in the industry who shared their biggest own moments in design for the year, including Paola Antonelli (senior curator at MoMA), Cliff Kuang (FC Design’s first editor and senior staff d…

When I was a kid, my favorite place in the world was hunched over a sewing machine. I’d cut up old jeans, hand-stitch fabric scraps into new outfits, and dream of someday seeing my clothes walk a runway. My notebooks were full of fashion drawings. Somewhere in my teens, that dream slipped quietly into the background. Life pulled me in a different direction. But this year, thanks to AI, I finally staged my first runway show at New York Fashion Week. Okay, not at the literal Fashion Week runways in Manhattan but on social media where people are scrolling for Fashion Week content. And the wild part? I pulled it together in one Friday night using my own AI-powered f…

There’s something incredibly compelling about a brand-new year. A fresh start beckons, with each day untroubled by your past decisions. Whatever mistakes you made in 2025 are old news. They were sooo last year. You’re a new person now with new priorities, new habits, and new strategies. It’s in this spirit of new-leaf-turning-over that nearly a third of American adults—and almost half of 18- to 29-year-olds—decide to make New Year’s resolutions for the coming year. Unfortunately, making resolutions doesn’t work. Baylor College of Medicine reported in January 2024 that 88% of people who make resolutions abandon them within two weeks. That doesn’t mean change or imp…

With over 800 student organizations on campus, the University of Pennsylvania already seems to have a club for every interest, from investment banking to beekeeping—even cheese. Now, add AI to the mix. In September, dozens of Penn students gathered in the engineering school auditorium for the debut of the Claude Builder Club, sponsored by AI company Anthropic. Over the course of this semester, the Builder Club has plans to host a hackathon, demo night, and other opportunities to create projects using artificial intelligence. “I need the Claude premium for a year,” says Crystal Yang, a freshman who attended the first meeting. Claude, she had heard, is “better for c…

Nostalgia has been one of the dominant themes of 2025, from AI-generated scenes of the good ol’ days to the resurgence of analog hobbies. Retro, a friends-only photo journal, recently launched a new feature which taps into this mindset, turning your camera roll into a personal time machine. The Rewind feature, launched this week, resurfaces camera roll memories from this time last year. These are private to you unless you choose to share with others. “People are taking more photos than ever but they’re actually doing less with them. It’s almost as if those photos go into the ether,” Nathan Sharp, cofounder and CEO of Retro, tells Fast Company. “We buil…

One April night eight years ago, two tech leaders sat down with a former Forest Service employee at Terroir, a natural wine bar in San Francisco. Then they started sketching out a plan that would eventually reshape California’s housing policy. Landmark housing reforms that passed in the state in 2025, one that allows more housing to be built near transit stops, and another curbing the use of environmental law to block new housing—and which many believed would never succeed—can be traced back to that night, five bottles of wine, and crucial backing from Silicon Valley executives. An unlikely new leader Brian Hanlon, the Forest Service employee, was an unlikely l…

The Phoenix Mercury rebranded for the first time in team history, and the new look is part of a wider trend across the WNBA as teams modernize their logos for a growing league. The new Mercury logo shows an “M” that’s a simplified version of the letter taken from the team’s old script wordmark. The bottom of the “M” is angled up at 19.97 degrees as a nod to the team’s 1997 founding as one of the league’s eight original franchises, and it’s set on a circle with a crescent shadow that represents the planet Mercury. The modernized logo was designed in-house. The rebrand comes at an inflection point for the team, which lost star player Diana Taurasi to retirement in F…

Once upon a time, there were two guarantees when getting a new job: a 401(k) and a work wife/hubby or bestie. No one assigns you. There’s no official moment. One day, they are just there. The person who can help you translate your boss’s cryptic email, exchange eyerolls after annoying comments at the staff meeting, or share your emergency stash of M&M’s at 3 p.m. But then 2026 happened and many of us work with colleagues we’ve only seen from the shoulders up on Zoom. So, I must ask, are work besties even a thing anymore? Or are they an outdated artifact of the pre-video conference culture? Why You Need a Work BFF Science backs up the value of office b…

You might not know it from the headlines, but there is some good news about the global fight against climate change. A decade ago, the cheapest way to meet growing demand for electricity was to build more coal or natural gas power plants. Not anymore. Solar and wind power aren’t just better for the climate; they’re also less expensive today than fossil fuels at utility scale, and they’re less harmful to people’s health. Yet renewable energy projects face headwinds, including in the world’s fast-growing developing countries. I study energy and climate solutions and their impact on society, and I see ways to overcome those challenges and expand renewable energy—but …

Some people love watching the Super Bowl for the game. Others love it for the commercials. If you’re in the latter group, you’ll probably have noticed that the ad spots in between commercial breaks during Super Bowl LX last night were dominated by one big theme: artificial intelligence. As noted by AdWeek, the television advertising analytics firm iSpot found that nearly a quarter of all commercials during the 2026 Super Bowl featured AI in some way. To be more precise, 15 out of the 66 commercials—or 23% of them—either used AI in their creation (like the entirely AI-generated ad from the vodka maker SVEDKA) or were spots by big tech companies directly adver…

Apple just lost a top design talent. Meta has hired Alan Dye, who was the head of Apple’s human interface design team. The company is filling his position with Stephen Lemay, who CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg “has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999.” Before being poached by Meta to become its chief design officer, Dye worked at Apple since 2006, where he oversaw projects including Liquid Glass and Vision Pro. By the end of his tenure, Dye reported directly to Cook. His departure is the latest in a game of musical chairs for top design roles at Apple. Apple’s former longtime chief design officer Jony Ive left the company in …

Picture a data center on the edge of a desert plateau. Inside, row after row of servers glow and buzz, moving air through vast cooling towers, consuming more electricity than the surrounding towns combined. This is not science fiction. It is the reality of the vast AI compute clusters, often described as “AI supercomputers” for their sheer scale, that train today’s most advanced models. Strictly speaking, these are not supercomputers in the classical sense. Traditional supercomputers are highly specialized machines designed for scientific simulations such as climate modeling, nuclear physics, or astrophysics, tuned for parallelized code across millions of cores. What …

For a show that lasts roughly 13 minutes, the Super Bowl halftime performance has fueled decades of conversation. Sometimes the spark comes from a single moment — as it did when Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” triggered a broadcast reckoning. Other times, it arrives through imagery and intent, from Jennifer Lopez’s 2020 caged children staging that critiqued U.S. immigration policies to children at the U.S.-Mexico border to Kendrick Lamar’s carefully layered Black storytelling, delivered as Donald The President watched from his seat inside the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. The halftime show magnifies everything — fashion ch…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. In the second half of 2025, there was a notable jump in delistings, as some home sellers—particularly in the Sun Belt—who couldn’t get their desired price decided to pull their homes off the market. Indeed, U.S. delistings as a share of inventory ticked up to 5.5% in fall 2025—a decade-high reading for that time of year. In December 2025, ResiClub noted to readers: “Looking ahead, in markets seeing the biggest jumps in delistings right now, many of those listings will likely return to the resale market in spring 2026—or test out the rental market.” …

Deloitte Australia will partially refund the 440,000 Australian dollars ($290,000) paid by the Australian government for a report that was littered with apparent AI-generated errors, including a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment and references to nonexistent academic research papers. The financial services firm’s report to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations was originally published on the department’s website in July. A revised version was published Friday after Chris Rudge, a Sydney University researcher of health and welfare law, said he alerted the media that the report was “full of fabricated references.” Deloitte had reviewed th…

The legendary $4.99 rotisserie chickens from Costco are under fire this week as a proposed class action lawsuit claims the big box retailer has been misleading customers. Two California shoppers noticed something that might seem obvious in retrospect: To sell an entire, slow-roasted chicken in a plastic bag, Costco added two preservatives. Problem is, the Issaquah, Washington-based company had promised on the packaging, in-store displays, and online that the chicken contained “no preservatives.” The lawsuit filed last week with the Southern District claims that Costco’s promise that its rotisserie chickens contain no preservatives signals to “reasonable consumers“…

CSX railroad announced Monday that it had replaced its CEO less than two months after an investment fund urged it to either find another railroad to merge with to better compete with the proposed transcontinental Union Pacific railroad or fire outgoing CEO Joe Hinrichs. The outgoing CEO, who came to the railroad in 2022 after a long career with Ford, focused on repairing CSX’s relationship with its workers and labor unions and unifying the team after a bitter contract fight. But Ancora Holdings, which helped spur major changes at Norfolk Southern, said CSX’s operating performance deteriorated significantly under Hinrichs’ leadership. Hinrichs resigned to clear the way…

CIOs are grappling with how to leverage AI, but most are asking the wrong question. It’s not about an “AI strategy.” It’s about a business strategy powered by AI. At Samsara, when we focused AI on clear business problems, we cut support chat volume by 59% with virtual agents, our IT help assistant auto-resolved 27% of tickets during the pilot, and engineers accepted about 40% of suggested code from AI code-assist, freeing teams to ship faster and tackle harder work. My takeaway is that if you treat AI as a separate initiative, you’ll chase tools. If you treat it as leverage on a business KPI, you’ll create impact. The VC Mindset: Investing in AI My philosop…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Claude feels like a genie to me. With its Artifacts feature I can turn any idea I have into an interactive application, visualization, or graphic. Yesterday I created a Flashcard maker and a breathing app. No coding. Just a short AI chat conversation. No complexity. I dream up an idea, and Claude makes it instantly real. I iterate with chat to make it better. Read on for a guide to making the most of Artifacts with examples and ideas you can build yourself. How to turn ideas into apps (no coding) Create a free Cla…