What's on Your Mind?

Lurking on sites like LinkedIn and Indeed, or among your incoming text messages and emails, lies yet another disappointment to dodge in the already lacking job market: fake recruiters. Posing as representatives from top companies, they’ll contact you out of the blue, offering a job so tempting, that 40% of targets ignore the warning signs and move forward with the “interview.” More than half of them, 51%, end up being scammed to give up personal data or money. Those findings came from a survey of more than 1,200 U.S. job seekers published in October by Password Manager. “The prevalence of fake recruiters came to my attention several years ago,” says Gunnar K…

Grindr is expanding its scope in a way that is entirely on brand. On Tuesday, the company unveiled Woodwork, a telehealth service that will help users access medication for erectile dysfunction. Currently available to Grindr users in Illinois and Pennsylvania, Woodwork will expand nationwide throughout the rest of 2025, according to the company. Grindr CEO George Arison says the company performed internal research that found more than a third of its users take erectile dysfunction drugs. “That gave us a very clear opportunity,” he tells Fast Company in an exclusive, in-depth interview on how he’s growing Grindr’s scope. “Users want it, but they’re buying these product…

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…

Ikea design manager Johan Ejdemo is looking years into the future. A towering Swede with a six-inch beard, Ejdemo is a trained cabinetmaker who has nearly 30 years of experience at Ikea. Since 2022 he’s been the company’s design head, leading a team of 20 in-house designers in Sweden and a roster of freelancers from around the world. Together they give shape to the 1,500 to 2,000 new products Ikea releases every year. Most have been brewing in the company’s design department for several years, if not more than a decade. I recently met with Ejdemo at Ikea’s headquarters in Älmhult, Sweden, the city a two-hour train ride from Copenhagen where the company was founded…

Reese Witherspoon has established herself as a businesswoman committed to feminism. Her media brand Hello Sunshine’s mission is to “put women at the center of every story,” and her much-memed quote that “women’s stories matter—they just matter!” is nearly as recognizable as her roles in Legally Blonde and Big Little Lies. But Witherspoon’s latest Instagram post has social media questioning that image. The actress encouraged women to get educated on AI, lest they be “left behind” as the technology comes for their careers. In her video, Witherspoon described being at a book club with 10 other women and asking them about their AI usage. Of the 10, she said, only 3 we…

Shares of Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) were down about 9% in premarket trading on Thursday. It follows what can only be described as a mixed bag of a quarter-three earnings report on Wednesday, October 30. On the one hand, Meta announced $51.2 billion in revenue, a 26% increase year-over-year (YOY) from $40.6 billion and a quarterly record for the company. The boost also beat Wall Street’s estimate of $49.6 billion, according to consensus estimates cited by Bloomberg. However, Meta also reported a non-cash income tax charge of $15.93 billion. This one-time charge led to a significant decrease—83%—in Meta’s net income YOY. It also meant the company’s earnings per …

Hawa Hassan was only 4-years-old when fighting forced her and her family from their home in Somalia. Hassan spent the next three years in Kenya, where some of her earliest memories were of running around tents in a refugee camp with her siblings and helping her mother stock the goods store she’d opened there. When she was seven, Hassan’s mother sent her to live with family friends in Seattle. It would be another 15 years before she saw her family again. “A lot of my childhood was spent wondering about my own background and my own identity,” said Hawa, a chef and entrepreneur who now lives in New York. “For many years, I had this deep desire to find people like mys…

Now that the “100 men vs. one gorilla” debate has been settled, a new question is circulating on social media: Who would win, 100 Americans or 100 Brits? British creator @2mwad_ first posed the question on TikTok: “I got a new one, 100 British people versus 100 Americans. One big room, no weapons, who’s winning?” The video has since gained over a million views, succeeding in uniting both nations against a common, historical rival. The patriotism sparked in the comments section is truly something to behold. “Our president is a felon who you think is winning,” one American wrote. “Do they have the Britain man? We have the Florida man,” another added. A third…

I may have just seen the biggest interface breakthrough in years. Or not. But I think so? Things are moving so fast that it’s hard to tell. Ryo Lu, head of design at the white-hot coding tool Cursor has invited me to their charcoal-hued San Francisco studio. Before anyone says hello, I’m greeted by a pile of footwear in the entry of the no-shoes open office. I suddenly regret my choice to wear my New Balance loafers without socks. The softspoken Lu, donning the creative-approved uniform of flowy wide-legged pants and a button down, weaves me through desks—past half a sports bar’s worth of uptime monitors and a shelf of knicknacks including a New Jeans record …

Loredana Crisan says her relationship with creativity started when she was 7 years old, sitting with her mother in her family’s kitchen in Bucharest, Romania. “The question she posed was, ‘Do you want to learn piano,’ and as a kid I was like, ‘Yes!’ –– probably because I was singing in the house.” From then on, says Crisan, she never stopped playing. In fact, she ended up as a student studying classical music in a conservatory. “I was very dedicated to music for a very long period of my life,” says Crisan. Now, as Chief Design Officer at Figma, Crisan says her musical training has informed her relationship with her work in ways she never expected. “If we are successf…

“Same soulless vibes. Fewer fossil fuels.” So says the website for Mumumelon, a new project that made exact dupes of Lululemon staples like hoodies and yoga pants—but with renewable energy and a detailed plan to cut emissions. Inside a fake pop-up store in London in late March, a fake employee gave customers the pitch: “We stole Lululemon’s designs and made them less terrible for the environment.” “We’ve been campaigning on Lululemon for a few years now to push them to invest in the renewable energy transition and phase out fossil fuels from their supply chain,” says Ruth MacGilp, a climate campaigner at the advocacy group Action Speaks Louder. “We wanted t…

In Texas, a Republican senator just introduced a bill that would require wastewater treatment facilities to do some extra testing—essentially making guidelines more stringent than those currently federally mandated. While that might sound like an uncharacteristically environmentally forward cause for a Texas Republican, what the senator wants to test for may give you even greater pause: It’s the abortion medication mifepristone. On Monday, Senator Bryan Hughes of Texas’s first district introduced bill SB1976, which would require testing for a number of “urinary metabolites in the form of gluconates,” including hormones like testosterone; ethinyl estradiol (which…

“What’s more motivating than a punch card?” That’s the simple idea behind a recent so-called “punch party” that creator @emiliamariehome hosted with friends. On January 24, @emiliamariehome posted a video on TikTok of her group of friends creating punch cards (think: loyalty cards) as a Galentine’s day activity. It quickly went viral, gaining over 1.5 million views. Because whether it’s scoring a free cappuccino at your local coffee shop or a fresh loaf of bread at an independent bakery, the satisfaction from punching that final hole in a punch card is unmatched. Now, social media users are hacking that dopamine hit to achieve their own goals, from dating to readi…

Time slows. The mind chatter quietens. Outside distractions dial down to a hum. You are at one with the task at hand. Congratulations, you’ve reached flow state. Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the term to describe a state of complete immersion in an activity, one in which focus comes naturally and you’re “in the zone.” Think of the hours flying by as a painter gets lost in their art. Or when you’re juggling three browser tabs, the caffeine hits, and suddenly, your fingers start flying across the keyboard. Well, over on TikTok, a new trend has the internet sharing the hyper-specific ways they “genuinely” enter their “flow state”—the more chaotic, the …

Universal Pictures’ two-part Wicked gamble continues to defy gravity at the box office. Just a year after part one brought droves of audiences to movie theaters around the country, even more people bought opening weekend tickets to see the epic conclusion, Wicked: For Good. According to studio estimates on Sunday, Wicked: For Good earned $150 million from North American theaters in its first days in theaters and $226 million globally. Not only is it the biggest opening ever for a Broadway musical adaptation, unseating the record set by the first film’s $112 million launch, it’s also the second biggest debut of the year behind A Minecraft Movie’s $162 million. “The…

The gap between the release of the movie musicals Wicked: Part I and Wicked: For Good feels like the longest intermission ever. Eager fans had to wait a year before seeing the story’s conclusion, which premieres November 21. The creative team behind Wicked claims to have tried to condense the plot down to just one film, but an overabundance of material led to the decision to split it into two. Financial considerations also likely came into play as two films will make more money than one. As fans celebrate Wicked: For Good’s release week, let’s get you up to speed on everything you need to know, including projected box-office figures. Who’s in the movie? Sin…

New York City has elected a democratic socialist as its next mayor. Across the internet, progressive internet users are hopescrolling for the first time in years and proudly declaring: “woke is back.” With his victory, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will become the city’s first Muslim mayor, the first of South Asian heritage, the first born in Africa, and the youngest in more than a century. During his victory speech, Mamdani reaffirmed his support for workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, and the rights of all vulnerable New Yorkers, including LGBTQ people. “BREAKING: WOKE IS BACK!,” one X user posted. “THERE ARE 25 GENDERS. WE’RE GOING TO TRANS THE ECONOMY. DEI F…

Barack Obama helped Marc Maron lock the gates on his podcast Monday, returning to the show for the final episode after 16 years and more than 1,600 episodes. The former president gave new status to “WTF With Marc Maron” and to podcasts in general when he visited Maron’s Los Angeles garage studio while still in office a decade ago. Obama brought the 62-year-old host, stand-up comic and actor to his Washington office for the last interview. Obama asked the initial questions. “How are you feeling about this whole thing?,” he said, “transition, moving on from this thing that has been one of the defining parts of your career and your life?” “I feel OK,” Maron answered. “I …