Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

The discovery of the body of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national who studied physics at Brown University, earlier this week in a New Hampshire storage facility brought closure to two alarming cases. Authorities say they believe Valente, a 48-year-old who recently arrived in Boston, was behind the December 13 mass shooting at Brown University, and the December 16 murder of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro. The identification of Valente brings calm to communities worried about a mass killer on the loose. But it also puts the lie to theories floated by right-wing influencers, including Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire. In recent days, Maguire, acting as a s…

Imagine the scene: Your plane just landed late. You’ve barely got enough time to catch your connection, but first you’ve got to convince the other passengers to let you off before them. Good luck. Recently, though, a Delta Air Lines flight attendant flipped the script, according to Kathrin Peters. Peters, co-founder of consulting firm Withiii Leadership, says a recent flight taught her one of the best real-life lessons she’s ever seen in “generating instant connectivity.” After confirming the plane’s late arrival, the flight attendant asked passengers to raise their hand if they were ending their journey in Salt Lake City, the flight’s destination. After most …

Soccer fans have accused FIFA of a “monumental betrayal” after latest prices for World Cup tickets began to circulate on Thursday. The governing body allocates 8% of tickets to national associations for games involving their team to sell to the most loyal fans. And a list published by the German soccer federation revealed prices ranged from $180-$700 for varying group stage games. The lowest price for the final was $4,185 and the highest was $8,680. Those group-stage prices are very different from FIFA’s claims of $60 tickets being available, while the target from United States soccer officials when bidding for the tournament seven years ago was to offer hundreds of th…

Nobody wants to swipe anymore. Dating apps like Bumble and Tinder are scrambling to keep younger users engaged, and dealing with problems like bots on their platforms. But one brand is breaking the pattern and winning. Hinge’s “designed to be deleted” tagline signals its strategy: focus on meaningful connection, not endless swiping. The app can feel slower and even harder to use, leading to fewer matches but ultimately more dates. Now, the big question is whether Bumble and Tinder can pull off a similar shift toward quality over quantity. View the full article

More than 18,000 Amtrak workers will receive a $900 bonus before the end of the year, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced on Thursday evening. Funding for the bonuses will come from Amtrak’s executive leadership team bonus packages, the statement said. The federal administration urged executive leadership “to forgo 50% of the bonus packages that would have been paid out under the misplaced priorities of the previous executive bonus structure.” Amtrak set all-time records for both ridership and revenue in the 2025 fiscal year, according to its annual report, with over $2.7 billion in ticket revenue from 34.5 million riders. The bonuses were applauded by some…

This morning, OpenAI released the company’s new GPT-5.2 model. If you’re a coder or someone who follows AI benchmarks for fun (hey, I won’t judge), this model will excite you tremendously. For everyone else, prepare to be underwhelmed—or rather, prepare to wait another month or so for the real OpenAI new release to come out. Keeping up with the Joneses GPT-5.2 is fundamentally about making small tweaks and improvements to the already fairly new GPT-5.1 model. Today’s release improves OpenAI’s performance on a variety of industry benchmarks. GPT-5.2 is faster and more efficient than its predecessor, and it does a better job solving scientific and t…

Lululemon might just be entering a new—and improved—era. On Thursday, December 11, the athleisure apparel company shared a mostly positive third-quarter earnings report and announced the departure of its CEO, Calvin McDonald. McDonald will leave Lululemon Athletica on January 31, after seven years in the post. He previously served as CEO of Sephora Americas. The last year has been one of underperformance for Lululemon. In October, the company’s controversial founder and largest independent shareholder, Chip Wilson, took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal criticizing Lululemon’s direction. While he didn’t go as far as to name McDonald, Wilson wrote, “…

Measles infections in America have hit their highest numbers in 33 years. In 2025, cases have topped 1,900, and that number is expected to rise due to an ongoing outbreak in South Carolina. Here’s what you need to know about America’s latest measles outbreak and why the upcoming period could spell troubling times with the disease. What’s happened? Earlier this week, the South Carolina Department of Public Health (DPH) announced 27 new cases of measles in the state since the previous Friday, raising the total number of active measles cases in the southeastern state to 111. Due to the outbreak, there are currently 254 people in quarantine, with another 16 in…

Every few weeks, Americans get another letter in the mail that starts the same way: “We’re writing to inform you that your personal data has been exposed.” A retailer gets hacked. A hospital. A supermarket. A travel site. It never ends. Most of us feel like we’ve lost control over who has our information and how it’s being used. But a new kind of privacy technology, one that lets companies confirm what they need to know without ever seeing your personal details, may finally offer a way out of this mess. We’ve slipped into a world where giving away our personal information is the “cost” of participating in modern life and where we’re frustrated, but not surprised, when…

There’s a generational shift happening in workplaces that goes far deeper than debates about RTO or perks and snacks. Gen Z—the cohort that learned to communicate through stories, stickers, and swipe culture—is fundamentally reimagining how work gets done. After analyzing data from 2,475 professionals across our latest research, I’m convinced they’re crafting the future of work. Gen Z intuitively understands something many organizations are still learning. As we live in a world drowning in information, clarity is a competitive advantage. And increasingly, that clarity is offered visually. The Visual-First Expectation Sound familiar? Workplace tools mirror socia…

When Raising Cane’s recently opened its first-ever location in Meridian, Idaho, it wasn’t a particularly remarkable event for the restaurant chain. The fast-growing chicken purveyor also opened six other restaurants in five other states on the exact same day in November. It aims to open close to 100 new stores this year. But some Idahoans were willing to stand outside in chilly fall weather for more than 48 hours to be the first in the state to get a taste of Raising Cane’s, whose exceptionally narrow menu features chicken fingers, french fries, a secret proprietary dipping sauce, and simple sides like garlic toast and coleslaw. “We had customers camping out since…

Hello again, and thank you for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In. Last October, I visited the Silicon Valley headquarters of 1X Technologies—the startup behind a humanoid home robot called Neo—and spoke with its VP of product and design, Dar Sleeper. Among the points he made was that long-standing public expectations have set a high bar for household robots. Naturally, he name-checked the world’s most iconic one. “The ultimate, North Star, in a lot of people’s minds, is Rosie the Robot,” he told me. “A Jetsons world where you ask and receive, and it makes your life better, you spend more time with your family, you’re more present.” Sleeper’s reference return…

When life gives people lemons, most try to make the best out of a bad situation. Instead, Beau du Bois, vice president of bar and spirits at Marisi Italian restaurant in La Jolla, California, found himself with an incredible opportunity. In 2021, the Adler and Lombrozo families, owners of the Puesto Mexican restaurant chain, tapped du Bois to build Marisi’s bar program from the ground up. One of the first actions du Bois took when learning about this new venture was starting a batch of limoncello, using a lesser-known Amalfi Coast technique. “They told me about Marisi almost exactly a year before we opened,” du Bois tells Fast Company. “And the very next day, even…

Nothing says “Merry Christmas” quite like a 7.5-foot-tall Chewbacca holding a candy cane. At least, according to the team at Home Depot. Home Depot has long been known as a purveyor of holiday decor, from pumpkins at Halloween to a wide selection of real and artificial trees at Christmas. In recent years, though, it’s been upping the creative ante on its decor game to capture new audiences—and, in some cases, to score a viral hit on TikTok. This year, it’s doing just that with two new additions to its holiday lineup: life-size, animated versions of Star Wars’ Chewbacca and R2-D2 ($349 and $299, respectively), complete with movie-accurate, motion-activated sound e…

Leadership listening is in sharp decline, and the consequences run deep. A survey from People Insights found that only 56% of employees believe senior leaders genuinely make an effort to listen, which is down from 65% two years ago. We live in a world where algorithms reward noise. Visibility has become a proxy for value, and airtime is the metric that many use to measure leadership presence. But real influence doesn’t come from speaking more. It actually comes from listening better. Influence grows through empathy, trust, and the ability to see and understand people. The disconnection crisis When leaders stop listening, people stop contributing. Ideas fade, trust erod…

Six years ago, when Michael Buckley returned to True Religion‘s offices as CEO, the denim brand looked nothing like the one he had built a decade earlier. Buckley was the brand’s president between 2006 and 2010, when True Religion was a luxury brand that sold jeans priced between $300 and $500 at Neiman Marcus and Barneys. Buckley helped grow revenues to more than $300 million a year, but after he left, the brand hit hard times, as it struggled to adapt to e-commerce. It filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and again in 2020. In 2019, after serving as CEO of Differential Brands Group (which owns Hudson Jeans), Buckley came back to True Religion to clean up the mess. He’s …

Revolutionary France may seem like a strange place to find a life hack, but in the 1790s, the French satirist Nicolas Chamfort offered some stark advice to cope with our daily travails. “One should swallow a toad every morning, so as not to find anything disgusting for the rest of the day,” he wrote. In other words, start with the thing you dread most, and the following obligations will feel far more pleasant. Chamfort’s name has largely been forgotten by the English-speaking world, but his unsettling phrase has endured as a popular productivity mantra: “Eat the frog.” The idea has even inspired a best-selling self-help book from the 2000s. But does it actually work? …

Most people care about fairness at work and want to support colleagues who face marginalization—for example, people of color, women, and people with disabilities. Our research has found that 76% of employees want to be allies to co-workers who face additional challenges, and 84% value equity. That’s in line with a 2025 national survey that found 88% of employees supported employers offering training on how to be more inclusive. So why doesn’t that support always turn into action? Our new study in the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health points to one reason: Some people may freeze with worry because they feel like a fake. Specifically, they feel like they don’t …

Instacart just became the first company to offer an end-to-end integrated shopping experience with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s yet another signal that AI is about to upend the way we shop—and, maybe, the way we cook. The new partnership was announced by Instacart and OpenAI on December 8. To use the interface, ChatGPT users need to make an Instacart account and then surface Instacart within their chat thread using a prompt like, “Instacart, help me shop for apple pie ingredients.” From there, they can discuss recipes, ingredient swaps, and their preferred store with ChatGPT, which will help them order all of the items they need from Instacart without ever changing tabs or lea…

From the latest skyscraper in a Chinese megalopolis to a six‑foot‑tall yurt in Inner Mongolia, researchers at the Technical University of Munich claim they have created a map of all buildings worldwide: 2.75 billion building models set in high‑resolution 3D with a level of precision never before recorded. Made from years of satellite data analysis by machine‑learning algorithms, the model reflects a sustained effort to capture the built world in three dimensions. The result now provides a crucial basis for climate research and for tracking progress toward global sustainable development goals, according to the scientists behind it.​ Professor Xiaoxiang Zhu, who leads th…

If you’re order number 67 at In-N-Out, don’t expect to hear your number called. The fast food chain has reportedly removed the number from its system, after viral videos show teens responding with wild celebrations after waiting around just to hear the number called. “Imagine explaining this to someone in the future,” one commenter wrote. Employees confirmed the number hasn’t been used for orders for about a month, according to a report from People magazine. After order number 66, the next order jumps straight to number 68. The chain has also removed the number 69, for good measure. The two digits, pronounced “six, seven,” not “sixty-seven”, have also been …

Walt Disney and OpenAI make for very odd bedfellows: The former is one of the most-recognized brands among children under the age of 18. The near-$200 billion company’s value has been derived from more than a century of aggressive safeguarding of its intellectual property and keeping the magic alive among innocent children. OpenAI, which celebrated its first decade of existence this week, is best known for upending creativity, the economy, and society with its flagship product, ChatGPT. And in the last two months, it has said it wants to get to a place where its adult users can use its tech to create erotica. So what the hell should we make of a just-announced deal betw…

Last week, Netflix announced it was buying Warner Bros. in a massive $82.7 billion deal. The streaming giant’s acquisition will set Netflix, which already leads the streaming wars, even further apart from competitors, as it will also add HBO, a Warner subsidiary. But while the deal will further cement Netflix’s domination, questions are swirling around how it will impact viewers, as well as the talent platforms rely on. Streaming platforms have recently undergone consolidation, creating three mega-platforms. According to a Forbes survey, Netflix is the most popular streaming service in America with 55% of Americans saying they use it, followed by Amazon Prime (51%), and…