Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

The category of unbuilt and fantastical design ideas known as “paper architecture” may have no better exemplar than the radical British architecture group Archigram. Founded in the early 1960s, its experimental architectural concepts envisioning everything from temporary cities to inflatable structures have never been built—but nonetheless have become staples of modern architecture canon. Archigram initially published its iconoclast ideas in the form of a self-published, self-titled magazine, which came out in 10 issues between 1961 to 1974. These days though, the magazines are rarely seen. Only a few complete sets exist in libraries. That is until now. [Pho…

As demand for EVs declines, electric automaker Rivian is taking this time to adapt its business and expand its brand. Rivian’s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe joins Rapid Response to explore the company’s recent $5.8 billion partnership with Volkswagen, the ongoing risk assessment for self-driving features, and how Rivian’s AI-enabled ‘technological plumbing’ can accelerate the brand beyond incumbent manufacturers. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders n…

Tesla’s sales of its China-made electric vehicles dropped 49.2% in February from a year earlier to 30,688 cars, the lowest since August 2022, as the U.S. automaker faces pressure from Chinese rivals in a relentless smart EV price war. Tesla, which makes its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in China, sold 93,926 Chinese-made vehicles worldwide in the first two months, down 28.7% year-on-year, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA). January-February sales were distorted by the Lunar New Year holiday shifting from February last year to late January this year and due to a partial suspension of Model Y production for upgrade work. Still, Chin…

Starbucks is shaking things up with a new approach to its cold drink cups. Instead of the usual clear plastic, many locations are now serving iced drinks in cold compostable cups—a big step toward cutting down on plastic waste. The switch officially rolled out on February 11 across 14 states, according to Fox Business. A Starbucks spokesperson confirmed that the company “switched to commercially compostable cups and lids as part of our efforts to reduce waste and meet local market requirements.” Right now, about 580 stores have made the change, which is just a small fraction of Starbucks’ 17,000+ locations in the U.S. But if you’re grabbing an iced coffee in California,…

Pay transparency is having a moment. Across Europe and beyond, new regulations are pushing organizations to disclose salary bands, justify pay differences, and confront longstanding inequities. It is a necessary shift and it’s long overdue. But there is a risk that, in focusing exclusively on base salary, companies miss a more elusive and equally consequential driver of inequality: the bonus gap. Bonuses, incentives, and variable pay are often treated as secondary components of compensation. They are not. In many roles, they represent a substantial share of total earnings. More importantly, they are where discretion thrives and bias follows. I learned this early. …

You’re applying for a job and made it to the next step in the hiring process: the dreaded personality assessment. Few people like to take these tests—especially when a job offer hinges on it. And are these tests even legit? You want to showcase that you’re right for the job, and some of the questions seem like no-brainers. For example, if you’re asked to assess statements such as “I like to learn new skills” by choosing from “strongly agree,” “agree,” “neither agree nor disagree,” “disagree,” “strongly disagree,” you’ll likely choose “strongly agree.” Others are more nuanced, such as being asked to complete this sentence: “When I set goals at work, I choose …

Ahead of Super Bowl Sunday, online privacy groups Fight for the Future and the Algorithmic Justice League are reiterating a call for the NFL to put an end to the use of facial recognition in football stadiums, where the groups say the technology is used to authenticate employees, vendors, and authorized media. “That means that anyone who is going into a stadium to work on any football game has to go through a facial recognition system just in order to get to their job, which is a complete invasion of people’s privacy,” says Caitlin Seeley George, campaigns and managing director at Fight for the Future. The group has launched a petition demanding the NFL put an end…

With TikTok and DeepSeek, young people are forking over sensitive personal data to the Chinese government. We should be worried. Among Gen Z, there’s a certain nihilism about China’s access to American data. Some argue that they have nothing to hide. Others say that, if American billionaires can access their data, why not let China, too? When TikTok momentarily shut down, young people ran to RedNote, a Chinese alternative, as a not-very-veiled middle finger to the U.S. government. China’s threat to our data security is difficult to comprehend. If they were accessing sensitive information, we wouldn’t see it. And, for young people not yet in the workforce, their …

Americans across all political stripes were understandably concerned when news broke that Elon Musk, the unelected head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had gained access to the U.S. Treasury Department’s payment systems. These payment systems are responsible for trillions of dollars in federal payments, including things like Social Security benefits and tax refunds. DOGE has felt fishy from the start, a blatant branding stunt that blurs the line between private investment and public interest by advertising Musk’s investment in Dogecoin. Knowing that Musk and his crew of DOGEbags are pursuing deep access to the Treasury Department and its …

Six hours after OpenAI’s launch of GPT-4.1, Sam Altman was already apologizing. This time, it wasn’t about hallucinations or bias or Scarlett Johansson. No, it was about the model name. GPT-4.1 seemed nonsensical to many, difficult to parse from their already launched models like GPT-4o and GPT-4.5. “How about we fix our model naming by this summer and everyone gets a few more months to make fun of us (which we very much deserve) until then?” Altman wrote. Streamers take the brunt of the internet’s name-mocking: Are you a Hulu, Tubi, or Fubo subscriber? But AI companies are just as bad, if not worse. Their model names are often incoherent and unmemorable. From S…

The upside of friends, roommates, or family members sharing a multiline phone plan is everyone has a lower monthly bill. The downside, however, is one person is ultimately responsible for both paying that bill—and gathering what is owed to him or her from their friends each month. AT&T is offering a new way to divvy things up, though. The carrier, on Thursday, will introduce AT&T SplitPay, which will individually bill people on select shared wireless plans. The service will be available immediately. “College kids are Venmo-ing each other to share accounts,” says Erin Scarborough, AT&T’s President of Broadband & Connectivity Initiatives. “They’re h…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. Inside the new Grok 3 model In just two years, Elon Musk’s xAI has become one of a dozen or so labs capable of developing state-of-the-art AI models. Now xAI is out with its Grok 3 large language model, which beats state-of-the-art frontier models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and DeepSeek’s V3, in common mathematics, science, and coding benchmarks by a wide margin. Meanwhile, the smaller Grok 3-mini performs at par with the larger competing models. The new Grok model reportedly was trained using unp…

Most of us are used to using internet chatbots like ChatGPT and DeepSeek in one of two ways: via a web browser or via their dedicated smartphone apps. There are two drawbacks to this. First, their use requires an internet connection. Second, everything you type into the chatbot is sent to the companies’ servers, where it is analyzed and retained. In other words: the more you use the chatbot the more the company knows about you. This is a particular worry surrounding DeepSeek that American lawmakers have expressed. But thanks to a few innovative and easy-to-use desktop apps, LM Studio and GPT4All, you can bypass both these drawbacks. With the apps, you can run various …

Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: What should I do if I feel like my company is failing? A: This is a bleak question, and unfortunately not uncommon right now. I’ll address it from two different angles: 1.) If you feel the failure of the company is unfixable or that you aren’t in a position to help; and 2.) If you have hope that you might be able to turn things around. When the failure of your company is certain (or unfixable) First, here are some of the signs that things are going south.…

The airline industry is notoriously hard to decarbonize: large jets traveling long distances can’t feasibly use batteries, and sustainable aviation fuel is still only produced in tiny volumes. As airlines explore a range of options, United Airlines Ventures’ Sustainable Flight Fund just invested in one possible solution—a system that uses crushed rocks to capture CO2 for use in fuel or to store underground. The fund announced today that it invested an unspecified amount in Heirloom, a company that uses a powder made from limestone to pull CO2 from the air, relying on the material’s natural ability to absorb the greenhouse gas. At a facility in California’s Central Valle…

Andrew Brodsky is a management professor at McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also CEO of Ping Group and has received numerous awards, including being chosen by Poets & Quants as one of the Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors of 2023. What’s the big idea? Instant messaging, email, video calls, and other digital tools have largely replaced in-person communication for most workplaces. We have all become virtual communicators, and with this comes a new set of rules for interpersonal success. The PING framework distills best practices for optimal outcomes when relying on technology to communicate. Below, Andrew shares five key insights f…

In “The Mindset of Making,” Oliver Jeffers shared a compelling invitation: “Simply make as an extension of being alive.” His wisdom ignited my imagination. Too often, we associate creativity with being an artist, when all of us are creators. What might the world look like if we tapped into our innate creativity? “The world is a result of all of us as creators and storytellers,” Jeffers shares. “All human beings are is a collection of stories: There are the stories that we’re told, the stories that are told about us, and then the stories that we tell.” “We’re all born with this sense of surviving and then making—that is the reason that civilization flourishe…

A child-size table and small chairs make up the centerpiece of a playroom. It’s where children do crafts, host tea parties for their dolls, play hide-and-seek, and build forts. So it makes sense that people buy a lot of them: By 2030, Americans will spend an estimated $12 billion on play tables. [Photo: Bauen] The market is flooded with sets, ranging from inexpensive ones like Ikea’s $50 version to more design-forward varieties like Lalo’s $300 set. Still, husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Lynn and Cassidy Rouse believe there’s room in the market for a better-designed version. More specifically, they wanted to create a set that was indestructible, easy to assemble, us…

Every week, millions of Americans toss their recyclables into a single bin, trusting that their plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard boxes will be given a new life. But what really happens after the truck picks them up? Single-stream recycling makes participating in recycling easy, but behind the scenes, complex sorting systems and contamination mean a large percentage of that material never gets a second life. Reports in recent years have found 15% to 25% of all the materials picked up from recycle bins ends up in landfills instead. Plastics are among the biggest challenges. Only about 9% of the plastic generated in the U.S. actually gets recycled, a…

When an AI-assisted résumé lands on a hiring manager’s desk, most people have the knee-jerk reaction to chuck it straight onto the reject pile. While more and more companies are using AI in their day-to-day operations, when it comes to résumés and cover letters, the use of artificial intelligence remains taboo. The importance of AI-savvy talent This instinctive aversion to AI is costing firms invaluable AI-savvy talent. And with the demand and competition for AI skills so fierce, many employers are letting prospective talent slip through their fingers, straight into the laps of their competitors. It’s time to overhaul recruitment processes out of the dark ages…

Some directors are known for their typographic flair—from the ultrawide tracking of Christopher Nolan’s film titles to Quentin Tarantino’s genre vernacular font and lettering selections. But last week, as we reported on Sean Baker’s extensive use of Aguafina Script across his past four movies, we wondered: How many other directors have firmly embraced a single, singular typeface—and what does that typeface say about their films? The first part is easier to answer. “It is rare,” says title designer and Art of the Title editor-in-chief Lola Landekic. “It’s a very interesting choice. As a creator, you have to sort of commit to a specific aesthetic. And I think you also ha…

The world’s biggest fast-food chain by locations isn’t Starbucks, KFC, or even McDonald’s. It’s Mixue Ice Cream and Tea. The Chinese quick service restaurant chain currently has about 45,000 storefronts across Asia and Australia, according to the research firm Technomic. That’s about 2,000 more than McDonald’s’ global store count and 5,000 more than Starbucks’s. But the boba tea purveyor really picked up broad attention when it debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Monday—and raised an IPO of $400 million. Shares surged by around 43% before by the end of the day, bringing the company’s total valuation to $10 billion. (Storefronts aside, McDonald’s’s market ca…

AI image editing may be all the rage, but good old-fashioned image editors are still essential. There’s a problem, though: Windows PCs, Chromebooks, and Macs don’t include exceptional image editors that go beyond the most basic editing needs. Sure, you can pay for Photoshop or hunt down another image editor—but what if you just want to do something quick? Well, then you’re left searching the web—and maybe you come across a reasonably decent online image editor, but perhaps it forces you to sign into an account or pay for a subscription. Or maybe it just doesn’t do what it promises to do in any especially impressive way. Let’s skip all that. Today’s tool is an …

Microsoft said Wednesday that its profit for the October-December quarter grew 10% as it works to capitalize on the huge amounts of money it has spent to advance its artificial intelligence technology. But while its overall profits and revenue beat Wall Street expectations, it slightly missed projections for its closely watched cloud computing business, a centerpiece of its AI efforts. The company reported net income for the quarter of $24.1 billion, or $3.23 per share, beating Wall Street expectations of $3.11 per share. The Redmond, Washington-based software maker posted revenue of $69.6 billion in the quarter, up 12% from the previous year, also beating expectations.…