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Now you can sing along with America’s Founding Fathers as you crush your opponents under oppressive rents and market domination. The Op Games, a publisher of board games and puzzles, is releasing a new version of Monopoly based on the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, marking the latest iteration of the classic economics game that has been a staple of family game nights for many decades. The Op Games plans to announce the new version today, a spokesperson told Fast Company. The game commemorates the 10th anniversary of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rap-infused retelling of America’s origin story, which made its Broadway debut in the summer of 2015 and went on to win 11 To…

The “X of Y” framework—“We’re the Uber of healthcare” or “the Airbnb of finance”—has become a kind of startup reflex. It’s useful, even comforting, to anchor a new idea to something people already understand. But what feels like clarity can become constraint. When you define your business through another company’s success, you risk adopting their playbook instead of rewriting the rules. The best disruptors learn to move past comparison. They articulate what makes their idea not just different, but inevitable. That’s how you build conviction from your team, your investors, and your customers. Why comparison shrinks your story From a branding perspective, lett…

Bitcoin is having a horrible week. Until yesterday, the cryptocurrency had declined by roughly 2.5% over the preceding five days. But in the last 24 hours alone, the coin has taken a major hit—down more than 10%. Worse, fear and greed indices, which measure the emotional state of investors who buy and sell Bitcoin, are near historic lows. Here’s what you need to know. Why is Bitcoin sinking? Bitcoin has dropped precipitously over the past 24 hours. As of the time of this writing, it’s down more than 10% to $82,185 per token. That’s a low the coin has not seen since April. But why has Bitcoin been falling so much over the past 24 hours? There are two m…

Before Wicked opened on Broadway in October 2003, the musical’s production team took the show to the Curran Theatre in San Francisco for what’s called an “out of town tryout.” The five-week run allowed the producers, writers, and director to work out the kinks ahead of the show’s Broadway debut. During the San Francisco run, University of Southern California film student Jon M. Chu happened to be home for the weekend visiting his parents, who owned a Chinese restaurant called Chef Chu’s in Los Altos, California, just outside Silicon Valley. Chu was the youngest of five children growing up in a family that spent their free time playing instruments or going to the ballet, …

Google has 44 data centers in operation or in development around the world, but as demand for AI and the need for compute capacity grows, the company is getting started on three more. This latest batch is destined for Texas, where Google already has a pair of data centers in operation just south of Dallas. One of the new centers will be located outside of Amarillo in Armstrong County, with the other two headed to Haskell County, about three and a half hours west of Dallas. The $40 billion investment in the Lone Star State will help the company build additional infrastructure for its cloud and AI units. The company expects the centers to be operational by the end o…

Google has 44 data centers in operation or in development around the world, but as demand for AI and the need for compute capacity grows, the company is already getting started on three more. This latest batch is destined for Texas, where Google already has a pair of data centers in operation just south of Dallas. One of the new centers will be located outside of Amarillo in Armstrong County, with the other two headed to Haskell County, about three and a half hours west of Dallas. The $40 billion investment in the Lone Star State will help the company build additional infrastructure for its cloud and AI units. The company expects the centers to be operational by t…

The modern workplace runs on a dangerous myth: that constant motion equals maximum productivity. We’ve built entire corporate cultures around this fallacy, glorifying the “always on” mentality while our teams quietly unravel. The result? A burnout crisis that’s costing companies billions in turnover, absenteeism, and lost innovation. But here’s what the data—and our own exhausted bodies—are trying to tell us: emotional recovery isn’t a luxury. It’s the most strategic investment a leader can make. The Real Cost of Running on Empty Burnout isn’t just about feeling tired. It’s a systematic depletion that manifests as cynicism, detachment, and plummeting profession…

AI has made us faster and more productive at work. It drafts our emails, summarizes our meetings, and even reminds us to take breaks. But here’s the problem: in our rush to embrace AI, it’s quietly eroding our relationships and how we build human connections at work and in our everyday lives. People are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT to help them write, coach, and communicate. And many are also turning to it for therapy and relationship advice. The problem is, AI doesn’t truly understand people as unique individuals. It can mimic empathy, but it can’t understand it. It can predict tone, but it can’t sense intent. The way we communicate with one person shouldn’t b…

With little more than a coat of paint, buildings could soon make the air around them cooler and harvest gallons of water directly from the atmosphere. Researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia have created a nanoengineered polymer coating that passively cools building surfaces while enabling them to collect water like dew-coated leaves. It’s a material solution that could help combat rising heat and water insecurity in places all over the world. The white coating, a porous paint-like material, reflects up to 97% of sunlight and radiates heat, making surfaces up to 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding air, even under direct sun. This cooler condition allows …

There are certain things that make it obvious that you are a working parent. And I am not talking about the bags under your eyes or the six cups of coffee needed to get through the day. It usually happens at 4:59 p.m. when they start to pack up so they can make it to daycare or a school recital or any number of obligations parents have. As they slip out of the open-plan cubicle maze, a child-free colleague glances over and thinks (or sometimes says out loud), “Must be nice.” Welcome to the us versus them of modern work life: parents versus nonparents, aka committed versus distracted or the all-in versus the always juggling. In my book How to Have a Kid and a Life, I w…

Instead of teens simply putting down their phones to take a break, TikTok wants them to use the app’s new breathing exercises and affirmation journal to improve their well-being. Over the past couple of years, a growing number of legislators have been proposing or enacting laws to restrict or limit minors’ access to social media apps in order to protect children’s and teens’ mental health. TikTok has other ideas on how to boost well-being—without ever leaving the app. This week, it launched a Time and Well-Being space within users’ account settings, replacing the existing screen-time management page. New features in the space include an affirmation journal …

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.…

As startups race to keep up with advances in artificial intelligence, some of them seem to be borrowing from China’s exacting work culture—which normalized a 72-hour workweek, or a “996” schedule of working six days a week from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. While the 996 parlance and laser focus on AI may be new, hustle culture has always been embedded in Silicon Valley to some degree. Some business leaders, perhaps most famously Elon Musk, have long demanded those hours from their employees: “There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” he once said of the “hardcore” work ethic promoted at his companies. Now that culture seems to be …

Earlier this week, communities around the world observed World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. It’s a day to honor those we’ve lost and recommit ourselves to preventing future tragedies. As someone who’s worked in the transportation industry for more than 25 years, I come at this topic as an insider. You may have heard the term “Vision Zero” in local political campaigns or public safety PSAs. Vision Zero is a strategy to eliminate all severe crashes. It’s not just a marketing campaign, it’s an approach to road safety that begins with this basic understanding: Severe crashes are preventable. The status quo believes the fantasy that traffic violence is…

If the football games, boxing matches, and comedy specials weren’t indication enough that Netflix is making a bold move for the live television market, here’s another: Beginning in 2026, it will air live baseball for the first time. Major League Baseball announced a new three-year media rights agreement on Wednesday with NBC, ESPN, and Netflix that could see baseball fans channel surfing to find their games. The shakeups in the agreement mostly see NBC and its parent company, NBCUniversal, commanding a larger share of baseball coverage, picking up several key games and events previously aired by ESPN, including “Sunday Night Baseball.” And, for the first time in …

For consumers heavy on savings and light on credit history, a new partnership in the world of credit scores could help you lock down a loan. FICO, the company basically synonymous with the credit score, is teaming up with Plaid to bring real-time data showing how much cash you have on hand to lenders. Plaid, a fintech company that links bank accounts with financial apps, has a lot of visibility into how its customers move cash between bank accounts, payments apps, investment platforms, and just about everything else. Plaid’s technology runs under the hood across a huge network of 12,000 financial institutions that partner with the fintech startup, which has grown into…

Earlier this year Pepsi purchased probiotic drinker maker Poppi, and now the soda giant is introducing a new prebiotic cola drink in its quest to capture Gen Z drinkers: Pepsi Prebiotic Cola. The drink drops on November 28 and will be available at Walmart, on Amazon, and TikTok shop, as well as in select markets on Kroger.com, DashMart, and GoPuff. The “Unbelievably Pepsi” drinks will be available in two flavors: Original and Cherry Vanilla and contain 30 calories and five grams of sugar. They also have three grams of prebiotic fiber. Still, the drinks are highly marketable, given they’re a soda alternative, and appear to offer some health benefits. As many Americans h…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Back in May, ResiClub teamed up with Stessa, an asset management and accounting software for real estate investors, to survey real estate investors about how they were navigating the rental market. Over the past month, we teamed up with Stessa again to survey real estate investors about their market conditions, portfolio plans, and property management strategy. Investors who own at least one single-family investment property were eligible to respond to the Stessa-ResiClub Real Estate Investor Survey—Q4 2025, fielded between October 24 and Novembe…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, I’m focusing on gathering some informed opinions from people trying out Google’s new Gemini 3 Pro AI model. I also look at another “circular” AI investment agreement. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan. What smart people are saying about Google’s Gemini 3 The…

They’re cute, even cuddly, and promise learning and companionship—but artificial intelligence toys are not safe for kids, according to children’s and consumer advocacy groups urging parents not to buy them during the holiday season. These toys, marketed to kids as young as 2 years old, are generally powered by AI models that have already been shown to harm children and teenagers, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to an advisory published Thursday by the children’s advocacy group Fairplay and signed by more than 150 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators. “The serious harms that AI chatbots have inflicted on children are we…

A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo of her asleep in a bed could make history Thursday when it goes on sale by Sotheby’s in New York. With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, “El sueño (La cama)” – in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — may surpass the top price for a work by any female artist when it goes under the hammer. That record currently stands at $44.4 million, paid at Sotheby’s in 2014 for Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1.” The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work is $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Her paintings are reported …