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In part three of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, new parent Google confronts the messy issues standing in the way of the video streamer’s long-term viability. As Viacom sues over YouTube users’ unauthorized uploading of intellectual property, Google and YouTube engineers simultaneously build technology that will save the business. Called ContentID, it lets copyright holders remove their work—or, better yet, leave it up and benefit from its monetization. YouTube also sets viewership goals that are even more wildly audacious than the ones it’s already achieved. First, though, Google has to convince even its own employees that buying the video…

From his first moments on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo XIV gave three important clues about what kind of leader of the 1.4-billion-member Catholic Church he will be. Leo, formerly U.S. Cardinal Robert Prevost, was elected by the world’s cardinals on Thursday as the new pope on the second day of the conclave to choose a successor to Pope Francis, who died last month. He is the first pope from the United States, but holds dual citizenship in Peru, where he was a missionary for decades before becoming a cardinal. Leo’s first clue was his choice of name. Popes often use this choice to send their first major signal about the priorities of their new…

Many of the office buildings emptied by the pandemic are still sitting vacant. A recent report from Moody’s Analytics found that in the second quarter of 2025 office vacancy rates were still above 20% nationwide, and cities across the country are still trying to figure out what, if anything, to do about it. One startup has an unconventional solution. It wants to fill that empty space with crops. Area 2 Farms is a three-year-old company based in Arlington, Virginia, that’s taking the concept of indoor farming to unusual spaces. Its first farm, in Arlington, grows dozens of varieties of crops in a low-slung brick building tucked between a dog day care and a car repair s…

Instacart’s artificial intelligence-enabled pricing may be increasing the cost of your groceries by as much as $1,200 a year, according to a new study published on Monday. Instacart is an online grocery delivery and pickup service that allows customers to order groceries from local stores by using its technology platform, via app or its website, and then fulfills those orders through a personal shopper. The investigation from Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy group, found that some identical products were priced differently from one customer to the next—sometimes by as much as 23%. One company executive reportedly called the tacti…

New Jersey Transit’s train engineers reached a tentative deal Sunday to end their three-day strike that had halted service for some 100,000 daily riders, including routes to Newark airport and across the Hudson River to New York City. The union said its members would return to work on Tuesday, when trains would resume their regular schedules. The walkout that began Friday was the state’s first transit strike in over 40 years, forcing people who normally rely on New Jersey Transit to take buses, cars, taxis and boats instead or consider staying home. The main sticking point had been how to accomplish a wage increase for the engineers without creating a financially disastr…

Shares in two closely watched AI-adjacent companies, Nvidia Corporation and Palantir Technologies, are falling this morning. Currently, Nvidia shares are down more than 2.2% and Palantir shares are down more than 6%. The share price drops of two of the most prominent AI companies come as investors seem increasingly worried that the AI boom is starting to look more like an AI bubble, reminiscent of the dotcom bubble of the late ’90s and early 2000s. In part due to these concerns, an increasing number of investors have recently begun betting against the stocks of companies benefitting from the artificial intelligence boom—including Michael Burry, the investor who b…

New Tesla car sales plunged across Europe in April even as sales of other electric vehicle brands soared, in part due to backlash against CEO Elon Musk’s support for Europe’s far-right politics, as well as growing competition from both European and Chinese EV carmakers, according to Reuters. Last month, Tesla’s new car sales in the U.K. and Germany tanked to their lowest in over two years, falling 62% and 46% year on year, respectively, even as demand in both countries rose for EVs. And in Spain, there was more bad news for Tesla, with new sales falling 36% in April 2025 compared with the the same month a year earlier, according to data from ANFAC, the Spanish Ass…

OpenAI appeared to be closer to pulling the trigger on advertising in ChatGPT in recent days, but a growing threat from Google has forced the company to pause those plans as it gears up for a quickly escalating chatbot fight. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sent a memo to staff on December 1 declaring a “code red” and ordering the company’s primary focus to be on improving ChatGPT. As part of that directive, Altman reportedly said the company would be pushing back work on other projects, including the introduction of advertising to its chatbot. The about-face came just days after Tibor Blaho, an engineer working on a Chrome extension that offers pre-written prompts for Chat…

On May 20, 2025, the Food and Drug Administration announced a new stance on who should receive the COVID-19 vaccine. The agency said it would approve new versions of the vaccine only for adults 65 years of age and older as well as for people with one or more risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes. These risk factors include medical conditions such as asthma, cancer, chronic kidney disease, heart disease and diabetes. However, healthy younger adults and children who fall outside of these groups may not be eligible to receive the COVID-19 shot this fall. Vaccine manufacturers will have to conduct clinical trials to demonstrate that the vaccine benefits low-risk g…

“APPstinence,” which as you may have guessed, refers to abstaining from using your apps, is a movement encouraging people to get off social media and become less attached to their smartphones. It was founded by Harvard graduate student Gabriela Nguyen. The 24-year-old, who grew up in the center of Big Tech in Silicon Valley, realized she was addicted to both social media and her phone, probably from an early age, so she decided to something about it and started a club at the Ivy League school for her fellow students, along with the website APPstinence. Aimed at her Gen Z and Gen Alpha peers — although it applies to everyone who feels they have an unhealthy relationshi…