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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Based on our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index, U.S. home prices are up just +0.4% year-over-year between January 2025 and January 2026. That marks a deceleration from the +2.1% growth rate a year earlier—though national price growth has recently stabilized, ticking a tad higher from a low of -0.01% in August 2025. In the first half of 2025, the number of major metro area housing markets seeing year-over-year declines climbed. That count has since stopped ticking up. 31 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 10% of markets) had…

No language on earth has ever produced the expression “as enjoyable as filing your taxes.” This annual chore is the pits. It’s slow, frustrating work that requires organization, math skills, and the ability to decipher meaning from the U.S. tax code. People will jump on pretty much any solution that makes filing quicker, easier, and less painful–including giving AI a crack at it. Recent survey research from Qlik found that nearly 11% of taxpayers have used or plan to use a consumer AI system (such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or Gemini) to help them prepare their 2025 tax returns. But how trustworthy are these AI systems when it comes to something as sensitive as your…

Wednesday, April 1, marks 50 years since Apple was founded. Over the next week, you’ll no doubt see countless articles examining the company’s influence, with many likely focusing on which single Apple product had the most consequential impact on the tech industry and society as a whole. To be sure, there are myriad options to choose from, most notably, the original Macintosh, the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone. Yet to me, Apple’s most important contribution over the past fifty years isn’t a physical product. Rather, it’s a policy—one asserting that privacy is a fundamental human right, and, to protect that right, products must be designed with privacy in mind. It…

As the government shutdown drags on, having devastating effects on Transportation Security Administration staffing, millions of Americans continue to face long lines at TSA checkpoints at airports nationwide. With the busy Easter holiday travel weekend around the corner, wait times are expected to worsen as the number of travelers increases. If you have a flight scheduled in the days ahead, here are some travel gadgets that can help make your TSA wait times more bearable. Battery packs for long TSA lines Thanks to modern smartphone batteries, which can last a day or more, you ordinarily don’t have to worry about your phone running out of juice if you have …

Companies often assume that when mid-career women step back from leadership tracks, their ambition has faded. Our research suggests something else is happening. The real pressure point is caregiving strain. Caregiver strain is the cognitive, emotional, and logistical burden of coordinating care for children, parents, or other dependents—and our research found it was the most powerful predictor of workforce exit. Unlike other pressures, caregiving strain does not shut off when the workday begins: kids get sick, elderly relatives have bad falls around the clock. Yet most workplaces continue to treat it as a private matter that “doesn’t clock in” alongside paid work …

Tax refunds are typically a welcomed reprieve for millions of Americans facing challenging financial times. While many tax filers are set to receive higher refunds this year, around 1.4 million Americans who typically receive paper refund checks may have to wait longer for their refund this year because the federal government has moved to phase out the paper check option. The deadline to file your taxes is April 15. But some filers may have to wait six weeks to 10 weeks longer to see their refund checks if they didn’t provide direct deposit information on their returns this year. The IRS is sending notices to those taxpayers of the extended wait time and the actions t…

I talk to a lot of people who are quietly terrified about their careers right now, wondering if the thing they spent 15 years getting good at is about to become irrelevant. The kind of fear where you smile through another LinkedIn post about AI productivity gains and feel your stomach drop. I get it. I build AI systems and agents for enterprise clients—and for myself. I watch these tools get more capable every week. And the narrative everywhere, from VCs, from CEOs, from the breathless tech press, is that your job is going to be automated. That you’re going to be replaced. That AI is coming for your job, and you should be very, very worried. I think that narrative…

Jeopardy! may have been born on cable television, but it’s determined not to live and die there. The trivia game show’s first iteration premiered on daytime television more than 60 years ago in 1964. Its modern syndicated version launched in 1984, and 41 seasons later, it’s still going strong, garnering 7.5 million viewers for its latest season premiere and maintaining its title as the most-watched syndication series on television. Though Jeopardy! made it through the cultural transition to streaming largely unscathed, its producers are still finding ways to innovate on its format and bring the show to new platforms. That includes the newly announced Jeopardy! You…

It was 1997, and Matt Berman, the creative director of JFK Jr.’s George magazine, had just gotten back to his hotel in Los Angeles. He had left the ‘Garden of Eden’ style set he’d concocted for the cover of the September issue: lush with greenery and replete with live animals. It would reach peak ripeness once the star, Pam Anderson, arrived on set the next day as the “first woman,” to illustrate a feature on the 20 most fascinating women in politics. But there was a problem. A note was waiting for him at the front desk of the hotel. It was from Anderson. She was canceling. “She was like, ‘I can’t, a million apologies,’” recalls Berman. “Something like that. It w…

Since Patrick Star first posed it to Squidward Tentacles, the internet hasn’t been able to get the question, “Is mayonnaise an instrument?” out of its collective head. Luckily, experts have finally stepped in to give us an answer. Those experts include Hellmann’s, the world’s biggest mayo brand, and researchers at Northumbria University, led by Dr. Rachael Durkin, its Head of Global Music Technologies, who employed fields like acoustics, musicology, and organology—the study of musical instruments—to put the question to rest. Their inquiry takes inspiration from one of SpongeBob SquarePants’s most beloved early episodes, “Band Geeks.” In a much-memed scene, curmudg…

Designers love intention. Architects draw immaculate plans; curators craft pristine galleries; developers imagine carefully choreographed public experiences. But once the general population shows up, those spaces tend to change. Sometimes there’s an instinct among designers to fight against it; it’s hard to let go of an aesthetic goal. But—more often than not—the public makes spaces and designs better. It’s the people, not solely the place, who spark true imagination and inevitably shape its character. It’s the people who have the power to turn a design into something more welcoming and relevant, and push designers to think outside the box in creativity and problem-solvi…

The answer to America’s submarine bottleneck, the U.S. Navy has decided, lies as much in software as it does in steel. A new multibillion-dollar facility in Cherokee, Alabama, aims to harness AI and robotics to build submarine components faster and more reliably. The automated “factory of the future” will produce parts for the Navy’s Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, both central to the U.S. fleet. It will cost $2.4 billion to develop. “This factory is the first of three facilities designed to address the most critical bottlenecks in the maritime industrial base,” said John C. Phelan, secretary of the Navy, in a stat…

With Social Security on track to go broke in less than seven years, a new report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is proposing a solution: Cap Social Security payouts to $100,000 a year for couples, as part of an overall plan to save it from insolvency. (That’s $50,000 for a single retiree.) The renewed spotlight on Social Security follows a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that the main trust funds responsible for paying benefits, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, could be insolvent by as early as 2033. By law, that would automatically trigger a massive 24% cut in benefits. On top of the higher cost …

In 1966, Bruce Henderson, the founder of the Boston Consulting Group, articulated what would become one of the most influential ideas in the history of business strategy: the experience curve. Its origins date back to T. P. Wright’s original 1936 paper, “Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes.” Wright discovered a relationship between the cumulative production of a physical good and the costs associated with producing it. The breakthrough was that you could predict your future cost structure in a way competitors couldn’t. In 1966, BCG did a major study for a semiconductor firm and made a similar discovery. As Martin Reeves describes it, they found “that a company’s uni…

I’m standing in a showroom at the new General Motors design headquarters outside of Detroit resisting the urge to reach out and touch something. In front of me, there’s a Corvette CX, a one-of-one experimental sports car that the automaker has meticulously handcrafted to look both silky smooth and fast as hell. As I crouch down to see just how low this low-riding car would drive, the roof of the Corvette CX lifts up in front of me and opens like the cockpit of a multimillion-dollar fighter jet. The robotic precision of the sculpted body opening up is pure spectacle atop the shock-and-awe of the car itself. GM designed this all-electric “hypercar” to be action-movie-read…

Timothée Chalamet drew widespread condemnation when he implied that opera is a dying artform, and said that “no one cares” about the medium anymore. It was a dumb thing to say. And it’s also wrong. Opera, like most performing arts, is still recovering from the pandemic. But the industry as a whole is actually growing–dramatically. Globally, opera is worth $3.4 billion, and is expected to grow to $5.33 billion over the next few years. First-time attendance has more than tripled since 2021, as more young people head to the opera house. And opera’s resurgence is part of a bigger trend; in multiple ways and across age groups and formats, people are turnin…

Alex Balazs has spent more than two decades inside Intuit, starting as an engineer working on early versions of QuickBooks Online, when moving financial workflows to the internet still felt experimental. Now, as CTO, he is helping lead a more radical shift: turning financial software into systems that can think and act on a user’s behalf. “This combines the speed and scale of AI with human judgment and accountability,” he tells Fast Company. For decades, financial software has functioned as a ledger, categorizing transactions and generating reports about what has already happened. That model is beginning to break. Advances in AI are pushing the category toward real-time …

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Before we get underway, a little self-promotion: Apple’s 50th anniversary is on April 1. As the big day approached, I realized that many people present at the company’s creation were still very much with us. So I interviewed 23 of them for an oral history, “How Apple Became Apple: The Definitive Oral History of its Earliest Years.” It’s chock-full of great tales as told by everyone from cofounder Steve Wozniak to Liza Loop, the first Apple user. Hearing these pioneers reminisce, I felt like I had been there, too—and so will you, I think. Here’s the article. When OpenAI launched its Sora app last September, the…

As part of a strategic move to optimize its store footprint, Noodles & Company closed 33 company-owned restaurants in 2025. In January, the chain said it would close dozens more stores this year. However, despite the shrinking restaurant count, sales have grown. The fast-casual eatery held its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings call on Wednesday, March 25. It reported that comparable store sales increased 6.6% in the final quarter of 2025. Sales growth and traffic are also up as of early 2026. Following the strong earnings report, shares of Noodles & Company (Nasdaq: NDLS) soared over 50% on Thursday. The stock is up almost 60% year to …

You’ve spent years building a robust professional network. You’ve cultivated relationships with peers, mentors, and industry leaders. So when you signal that you’re exploring new opportunities, you expect your network to perform. Yet too often, promising conversations dissolve into silence. Warm introductions never materialize. Emails go unanswered. This isn’t a reflection of your professional standing. It’s a design problem: you’re making it too hard for people to help you. The fix is straightforward. Make it easy. Here are three ways to do so. Ask To Write to Their Contact Directly When you reach out to a contact seeking an introduction to a decision-maker, a…

Top performers don’t leave things to chance. In business, they rely on advisors to help them make better decisions and get results faster. The same idea works for fitness, too. Many executives already have the discipline to show up at the gym. What often separates consistent progress from plateaus is strategy, not effort. Personal training provides structure, accountability, and expert insight that help turn hard work into measurable outcomes. If you’re used to improving performance at work, this approach should sound familiar. It’s about using expertise to get better results, more efficiently. THE POWER OF A PERSONAL PLAN There’s no shortage of workout pla…

It’s no secret that children and adolescents have a lot more eyes on them these days thanks to everything from social media to cameras in everyone’s pockets. This experience (along with encouragement from brands such as Disney) has created space for young people to mimic adults, embracing cosmetics and anti-aging creams. Now, Italy’s consumer protection regulator says it is looking into the marketing strategies of some of the main contributors to this phenomenon: beauty companies. The country’s Competition Authority (AGCM) has launched two investigations into Sephora and Benefit Cosmetics for allegedly failing to clearly indicate that their products are not…

Austria’s governing coalition on Friday announced plans to ban social media use for children under 14, joining a string of other countries in drawing up restrictions for young people. Alexander Pröll, the official in Chancellor Christian Stocker’s office responsible for digitization, said that draft legislation will be drawn up by the end of June. He said that “technically modern methods” of age verification will be used that allow users to verify their age while respecting their privacy. It wasn’t immediately clear when the plan to introduce a minimum age, which will need parliamentary approval, might take effect. Australia in 2024 took the lead, becoming the first co…