Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

There’s a pigeon pitcher on the dining table. A large burl wood button mounted on the wall as art. A doormat in the shape of an apple. Emma Chamberlain, one of Gen Z’s most influential tastemakers, has designed a 100-piece collection for West Elm that spans furniture, textiles, and decor. It’s full of elegant pieces including a velvet sofa, a round wooden dining table, and cabinets wrapped in cream lacquer. But woven into this lush aesthetic are kitschy little details meant to feel like thrift shop finds. It’s a collaboration that offers a glimpse into what today’s twenty-somethings are looking for as they outfit their first homes. Three years ago, when Chamberlain was 21…

As anticipated by recent headlines, Oracle started laying off an undisclosed number of employees early this morning. A report from CNBC put the figure in the thousands, while a post on Blind—the anonymous workplace chat app—suggests that as many as 11,000 employees might have been impacted. According to reports across social media and on Blind, employees were notified about the layoffs through a mass email that was issued at 6 a.m. ET today. (Oracle declined to comment on the layoffs when reached for comment by Fast Company.) “We are sharing some difficult news regarding your position,” the email reportedly read. “After careful consideration of Oracle’s current b…

Taylor Swift is facing a lawsuit over her last album, The Life of a Showgirl—from a fellow showgirl. In the complaint, filed on Monday, Las Vegas-based performer Maren Wade claims that Swift’s hit album bears striking similarities to her own creative work. For years, Wade has written a column in the Las Vegas Weekly newspaper called “Confessions of a Showgirl,” which she expanded into a touring live show with the same name. On her website, Wade’s show is described as a “one-woman comedic cabaret [featuring] the quirky and hilarious world of a modern-day Vegas showgirl.” Wade also performed on NBC’s America’s Got Talent in 2014, the same year her column began runn…

A strong PR plan should balance day-to-day visibility with long-term brand building. At most plans’ core will be some sort of press office, one that fields reactive inquiries, chases proactive opportunities, and strives to create a consistent drumbeat of attention. That ongoing media presence is further punctuated by product launches, releases, or announcements that help create heightened awareness around a singular piece of news or event. That describes the basic tenets of a traditional PR plan for earned media (acknowledging that the PR function is much broader). But the playbook that agencies and in-house teams are using to deliver that is evolving; it looks vastly…

Below, co-authors Joshua Steiner and Michael Lynton share five key insights from their new book, From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn’t Own You. Joshua has worked in government, finance, and the nonprofit sector. After serving as chief of staff at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, he became a banker at Lazard before co-founding two investment firms and serving as an executive at Bloomberg LP. Michael has spent his career in the media and entertainment business. He is the former CEO of Sony Entertainment and now serves on the boards of the Rand Corporation and the Smithsonian. What’s the big idea? The only thing worse than making a mista…

Top executives at the major U.S. airlines have been vocal in sharing their frustrations amid the ongoing partial government shutdown, which has resulted in Transportation Security Administration (TSA) staffing shortages, lengthy airport security lines, and flight delays. The partial shutdown began on February 14 when funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lapsed. TSA officers are classified as essential workers, meaning they’re still required to show up, even without pay. Because of financial uncertainty, many employees called out sick or quit altogether. As the weeks went by, staffing shortages worsened, and wait times grew longer. Airline b…

The Artemis II mission now underway aims to send three Americans and one Canadian back to and around the moon, a journey that will mark humans’ farthest trek into space in decades. The program is one of a series of endeavors, including next-generation space stations, a lunar habitat, and even a manned Mars mission, that will vastly expand human presence in outer space. Critically, these missions are all certain to involve spacey versions of consumer technologies, which have now become a fixture of life in space. (Astronauts aboard the International Space Station use laptops and smartphones.) Yet such modern conveniences also create a host of IT issues. On the late…

Over the last decade, we have been perfecting the algorithms of convenience, and in doing so we have inadvertently moved away from the frequent human interactions that sustain our communities and our workplaces. Throughout my 25-year career in philanthropy, I have worked on challenges like climate change, gun violence prevention, chronic disease prevention, and closing the opportunity gap for workers. While these issues are undeniably critical, I truly believe we cannot solve them in a vacuum of social isolation. We have created a world of unprecedented digital convenience—we use grocery delivery apps, self-checkout lines, streaming services, and text messages, versu…

Robert Reich has been warning people about the dangers of inequality for decades, in all sorts of different ways. He’s interacted directly with politicians as a member of three different presidential administrations, most notably as Bill Clinton’s labor secretary. He’s taught thousands of college students at Harvard, Brandeis, and UC Berkeley. He’s written 18 books. And for 11 years, he has run Inequality Media, a nonprofit dedicated to informing the public about income and wealth disparity, among other imbalances of power in our society. Inequality Media now has 15 million followers across all its social media channels. At a time when Americans are increasingly payi…

Over the weekend, Mario, Luigi, Bowser, and the rest of Nintendo’s iconic crew traipsed around the solar system and smashed their way to the top of the box office in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. It’s the latest sign that Hollywood and moviegoers have changed their tune on video game adaptations. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (a sequel to 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie) opened on April 8, just in time for the lead-up to Easter weekend. According to studio estimates cited by CNBC, the Illumination and Nintendo co-production earned $130.9 million over the weekend and $190.1 million in its first five days in North American theaters. Tack on an estimated $18…

As if modern dating weren’t difficult enough, the internet has become obsessed with finding niche compatibility tests and categorizing the differences between partners, with a string of so-called relationship gaps going viral on platforms such as TikTok recently. Now the latest one has arrived, and it’s already proving to be polarizing: the restaurant gap. Described by The New York Times as “a misalignment in tastes, spending habits and culinary curiosity,” a restaurant gap can take many forms. Take a picky eater and an adventurous foodie, or even a devout reservation chaser who incessantly scrolls through Resy versus someone who couldn’t care less as long as food…

What does it take to lead a meditation company without finding a moment’s peace? David Ko spent years as CEO of Calm, one of the world’s most recognized mental health and wellness apps, helping millions manage stress. Now he’s stepping down. Ko unpacks why he made the call, what the relentless pressure of the C-suite really does to a person, and how to draw the line between the kind of stress that sharpens you and the kind that quietly breaks you down. 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 conv…

Entrepreneurs displaying narcissistic behavior are better able to convince investors to give them money when their grandiosity comes across as confidence as opposed to defensiveness or arrogance. That’s what we learned from watching 12 seasons of the popular reality TV show Shark Tank to better understand how an entrepreneur’s psychological profile affects their ability to secure funding. My research focuses on how entrepreneurs respond to challenges, including how personality affects their work. My colleagues and I based our study off the concept that there are two distinct “flavors” of narcissism: narcissistic admiration and narcissistic rivalry. Narcissisti…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to rapidly increase as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings beyond seasonality could suggest a market that is heating up. Since the national Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out in 2022, the national power dynamic has slowly been shifting directionally from sellers to buyers. Of course, across the country that s…

After glorious lunar views, a moving dedication, a malfunctioning toilet, and a floating Nutella, Artemis II is poised for the riskiest part of its 10-day journey to the far side of the moon. The Orion spacecraft, Integrity, is slated to enter the Earth’s atmosphere tonight at 7:45 EDT at a blistering 25,000 mph and 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The autonomously guided capsule will slow down and dissipate heat through a time-honored “skip” maneuver that dips it in and out of the atmosphere in a suborbital arc, then back in again for a final descent. Think of skipping a stone on the water’s surface to slow it down. The technique involves shifting Orion’s center of mass…

After attending a five-day intensive meditation program with friends in 2018, Michael Kirban started meditating twice a day. “I found it energizing,” Kirban, the cofounder and executive chairman of coconut water company Vita Coco, tells Fast Company. “I used to get that afternoon slump and reach for coffee, but the meditation really helped.” Kirban would step away from his desk and set a 20-minute timer. “Over time, I got so annoyed by the bell that would bring me out of [the meditation] that I just stopped setting it.” But what started as a brief meditation practice daily morphed into what’s now an hour-long nap each afternoon. Napping on the clock was once…

In the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco, at the corner of Union and Webster Streets, sits a small gift shop that many visitors might stroll past. The Andon Market doesn’t have the widest assortment of products, favoring the open spaces you’d be more likely to find in an Apple store. And on its opening day, the store’s manager neglected to schedule any workers to open the doors. That kind of mistake would embarrass most founders. Andon Market’s founder felt no shame. It found, the founder felt nothing at all. The store was conceived and launched by artificial intelligence. Welcome to the Bay Area’s first AI-run store, selling everything from artisanal choco…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While many growth markets in Texas and Florida have seen some of the biggest power shifts toward homebuyers since the Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out, Beazer Homes CEO Allan Merrill acknowledged at ResiDay 2025 last November that Beazer Homes—America’s 23rd-largest homebuilder—doesn’t plan to chase the relatively tighter housing markets in the Northeast and Midwest. Instead, he said the builder plans to stay focused on growth markets in Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida, which—despite experiencing a greater post–Pandemic Housing Boom cycl…

At first blush, it sounds too good to be true: a learning experience that’s precisely tailored to a child’s needs, strengths, and struggles, speeding up or slowing down as the moment demands, with infinite patience. For a decade or more, that’s been the promise fueling the education technology industry—customized learning that fuels rapid progress. Yet, for the most part, it was too good to be true. Not because the ambition was wrong, but because the prevailing vision has had it backwards. A FAILED PERSONALIZED LEARNING APPROACH? The vision of AI in education that has drawn the most attention and investment centers on personalized learning. Think Khan Academy’…

Since opening in Silicon Valley in 2019, NTT Research has operated as a long-horizon science lab, a dedicated arm of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT Group, which invests more than $3 billion annually in global R&D. Now in its seventh year, the lab was built as a research subsidiary insulated from quarterly pressure and product roadmaps. Unlike startups or typical corporate innovation teams, NTT Research is a wholly owned entity focused on seeding advances in computing, security, and healthcare that can later fold into NTT’s global infrastructure and enterprise services. Many of these efforts take five to fifteen years to approach commercialization, a timeline…

For decades, the business world has quietly subscribed to a myth: that cognitive performance peaks early and declines steadily thereafter. It’s a belief baked into hiring practices, promotion decisions, and even redundancy strategies. Youth is equated with innovation, speed, and adaptability; age with decline, resistance, and risk. If we ask ourselves, “Am I a better/more effective employee now than I was at 21?” most of us would say, “Yes!” Science and data prove what we already know: that many of the cognitive capabilities that matter most in today’s complex, fast-moving organizations improve with age. The wrong model of intelligence The traditional view of …

A new U.S. postage stamp is triangle-shaped, and it’s valid on mail sent around the globe to more than 180 countries. The triangle Postcrossing stamp from the U.S. Postal Service commemorates an international pen pal project started in 2005 by Paulo Magalhães, a student in Portugal. The program connects people around the world in a simple but increasingly old-fashioned way: Send a postcard, get one back. What started as a website Magalhães hosted on his personal computer has since spread around the world. Today, more than 805,000 people from more than 200 countries and territories have sent more than 80 million postcards through the program. Americans have sent mo…

The North Face’s new collection is designed to make camping more accessible for everyone—and it starts with reconsidering the small details that designers often overlook. The Universal Collection is a five-piece set of gear, including a sleeping bag, tent, backpack, slippers, and hat. It was designed in collaboration with ski mountaineer Vasu Sojitra and rock climber Maureen Beck, both of whom are athlete collaborators with The North Face and advocates for the disability community. According to Luke Matthews, design manager of technical equipment for the North Face, the concept for the Universal Collection arose after his team noticed a common complaint from c…

If you’ve been building consumer hardware for any real amount of time, you know the pattern. Most of these shifts start the same way. The sensor exists, but it’s stuck in clinical settings where it’s expensive, awkward, and not something anyone would realistically use day to day. At some point, someone figures out how to shrink it down enough to fit into a real product, and a few companies take an early shot at turning it into something people actually want. Early on, it’s easy to dismiss. It looks niche, maybe even like a gimmick. But adoption starts to build, usually more gradually than people expect at first. Then it picks up, and within a product cycle or two,…

Michael is aiming for a record-breaking opening weekend. It’s also a critical flop. In a vacuum, the Michael Jackson biopic might sound like a perfectly palatable film. The movie stars Jackson’s real-life nephew Jaafar Jackson as the titular singer, following his childhood through the height of his career in the 1980s with non-stop musical sequences of the King of Pop’s greatest hits. But Michael Jackson’s legacy is more than just music. Audiences and critics alike are panning Michael for glossing over the dark side of Jackson’s life, proving that it takes more than a famous subject to make a biopic a critical success—even while Jackson’s star power propels the mo…