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Imagine you launched a product in November 2025. Within four months, Jensen Huang had spotlighted it from the NVIDIA GTC stage, 188k (and counting) developers starred it on GitHub, and hundreds of fans show up to a lobster-themed conference dressed for the occasion. The last point, I admit, is only relevant to OpenClaw. What this agent software has achieved in just a few months has astounded and unsettled the AI world. Open source, freely available and community-built, is undoubtedly the weightier part of that story. But spend any time in the online chatter around OpenClaw and another theme surfaces: it runs on-device. No cloud subscription required and no dat…

Accessibility is often treated as a technical problem. Does it meet standards? Is it ergonomic? Is it safe? Those questions matter, but they are incomplete. Many products fail not because they don’t function, but because they make the user feel singled out. Shame is one of the most powerful barriers to product adoption, and it is rarely discussed in design reviews. People delay using canes, grab bars, hearing aids, or mobility supports even when they would meaningfully improve daily life. Why? Because many products still communicate something the user does not want to say out loud: Something is wrong with me. If we want accessible design to succeed, and we want pe…

2025 was a year defined by buttholes and fury. AI companies, fueled by unlimited piles of cash, got in line with the same approach to branding: what’s been scatalogically dubbed a “butthole logo.” The amorphous circles neither propel you forward like a Nike swoosh nor ground you like an Apple’s apple. Instead they spin you around, hypnotizing you into who knows what’s next, just keep staring. At the same time, a polarized America debated its way through a newly political era of design—what you can see everywhere from the The President administration’s choice of typeface to its decision to weigh in on brand plays from Cracker Barrel and American Eagle. Marketers s…

I had to submit my résumé for a role. Then I went through three interviews, with nearly identical questions each time. The problem? The role was for a freelance writing position. Not to become a company employee. I got all the way to the third interview only to learn that the role paid a fraction of my usual rate, even though I’d provided my rate up front. I’m experienced enough as a solopreneur to know that going through three interviews was a bad sign. The potential client wasn’t communicating internally (as confirmed by the fact that my rate had been overlooked). Multiple interviews are incredibly uncommon in my line of work, and indicated to me that the comp…

The world’s biggest fast-food chain by locations isn’t Starbucks, KFC, or even McDonald’s. It’s Mixue Ice Cream and Tea. The Chinese quick service restaurant chain currently has about 45,000 storefronts across Asia and Australia, according to the research firm Technomic. That’s about 2,000 more than McDonald’s’ global store count and 5,000 more than Starbucks’s. But the boba tea purveyor really picked up broad attention when it debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Monday—and raised an IPO of $400 million. Shares surged by around 43% before by the end of the day, bringing the company’s total valuation to $10 billion. (Storefronts aside, McDonald’s’s market ca…

Apple was founded 50 years ago today, on April 1, 1976, by two scruffy twentysomethings named Steve—Steve Jobs and Steve “Woz” Wozniak—but not in a garage, as legend has it. On that date, Ron Wayne, a 41-year-old senior designer whom Jobs met at Atari, took a two-page partnership agreement down to the Santa Clara County registrar’s office, and Apple was born. That agreement gave each of the Steves 45% of the company, and Wayne the final 10%, according to the new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, by reporter David Pogue, who has covered the company for 41 years. “That year, they were thrilled to sell 150 of those Apple I boards,” Pogue writes. Five decades later, in…

Sales are booming for Novo Nordisk’s new weight loss pill. In its first earnings report since the release of an alternative to its hit GLP-1 shot, Novo Nordisk’s outlook is looking a bit brighter. The company, which now makes Wegovy in pill form, raised its guidance for the year in light of the first quarter’s success. Novo reported 1.3 million prescriptions for its weight loss pill, which is now available in the U.S., in the first quarter of 2026. The drugmaker plans to launch the pill outside of the U.S. in the second half of the year, expanding the new medication’s reach considerably. “The strong Wegovy performance, combined with continued growth in Inte…

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 …

The business world’s most exclusive club has always been the boardroom. For decades, it has operated as a roped-off circle of experience, where pattern recognition, war stories, and collective gut instinct guided the biggest decisions. But the most recent quarterly earnings calls and 2026 spending projections across industries from tech to finance make it clear: That era is ending. As business complexity explodes and competitive cycles compress, those old methods are showing their limits. Artificial intelligence is exposing blind spots, surfacing inconvenient truths, and rewriting how boards govern, challenge, and lead. The transformation goes beyond adding new to…

Pay transparency is having a moment. Across Europe and beyond, new regulations are pushing organizations to disclose salary bands, justify pay differences, and confront longstanding inequities. It is a necessary shift and it’s long overdue. But there is a risk that, in focusing exclusively on base salary, companies miss a more elusive and equally consequential driver of inequality: the bonus gap. Bonuses, incentives, and variable pay are often treated as secondary components of compensation. They are not. In many roles, they represent a substantial share of total earnings. More importantly, they are where discretion thrives and bias follows. I learned this early. …

Lorrie Faith Cranor’s latest effort to educate people about privacy is a short, colorfully illustrated book written for an audience who probably can’t read it yet. Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Pittsburgh school’s CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory, wrote Privacy, Please! after publishing more than 200 research papers, spending a 2016–2017 stint as the Federal Trade Commission’s chief technologist, and making a quilt and dress illustrated with commonly used weak passwords. In a Zoom video call, Cranor says she got the idea for this self-published children’s book when planning for a privacy-outreach event at a loc…

In a sign of the times, Boy Scouts can now earn badges in artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity as they learn tech survival skills. The Boy Scouts of America, which rebranded as Scouting America after 115 years back in February, counts about 1 million scouts in its ranks, and has traditionally offered badges to encourage kids to learn outdoor survival skills like first aid, hiking, and cooking, or soft skills like public speaking, communication, and citizenship in the world. (Here’s a look at all the 141 badges.) “The artificial intelligence (AI) merit badge introduces Scouts to the fundamentals of AI and automation through hands-on activities and real-wo…

You know Graza—or, at least, you’ve probably seen its squeeze bottles of extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) on grocery store shelves. They’re green, opaque to protect the contents, and sold in two variations: Sizzle, for cooking, and Drizzle, for finishing. Since the brand launched its direct-to-consumer site in 2021, it’s become a staple of the olive oil aisle. With national distribution across stores like Whole Foods, Kroger, and Costco, its squeeze bottles (sometimes accompanied by its beer-can refills) are sold in more than 28,000 stores. It has also been making small excursions into other parts of the store, with Ithaca using Graza oil for a co-branded hummus. B…

Back in July 1971, Coca-Cola debuted a TV commercial that would become one of the most iconic in the brand’s history. “Hilltop” featured a diverse group of people gathered on an Italian hillside, sharing their voices and bottles of soda, and famously singing, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” It was a Don Draper-approved multicultural, apolitical masterpiece. It was also a complete fantasy. Despite the kumbaya vibes of the spot, 1971 America was a much more complicated and volatile place than what was depicted in the ad. It was the peak of the Vietnam War protest movement, with 60% of Americans opposing the war and 500,000 people demonstrating in D.C. just a few mo…

You might not spend a lot of time thinking about your web browser, whether it’s Safari, Chrome, or something else. But the decades-old piece of software remains a pretty important canvas for getting things done. That’s why Tara Feener, who spent years developing creative tools with companies such as Adobe, WeTransfer, and Vimeo, decided to join the Browser Company and within two years became head of engineering, overseeing its AI-forward Dia browser. “This is more ambitious than any of the other things I’ve done, because it’s where you live your life, and where you create within,” she says. Whereas a conventional browser presents you with a search box on its home scre…

Fire officials and pro-density urbanists are often at loggerheads. This is especially evident in notoriously car-centric Los Angeles, where a firefighters’ union spent six figures opposing active mobility measures. The two camps can have different ideas of acceptable risks and priorities. But Matthew Flaherty, a firefighter who has lived in L.A. his whole life, bridges the two worlds. He’s an advocate for affordable, transit-friendly housing. His struggle to find an apartment in a walkable neighborhood led him to become a member of the Livable Communities Initiative, a nonprofit group advocating for more walkable neighborhoods in L.A. “Cities shouldn’t be designed…

North America’s largest commuter rail system is facing a potential shutdown as a deadline nears to reach a deal with unionized workers to avert a strike. The Long Island Rail Road that serves New York City’s eastern suburbs has been negotiating for months on a new contract with labor officials representing locomotive engineers, machinists, signalmen and other train workers. A strike was temporarily averted in September when President Donald The President’s administration agreed to help. Those efforts ended without a deal, giving both sides 60 days — ending 12:01 a.m. Saturday — to again try to resolve their differences before the union was legally allowed to go on strik…

The constant race on the work treadmill doesn’t just steal your time. It systematically decays every relationship you have. During a recent keynote, I asked leaders in the room a simple question: “How many of you have cancelled plans with someone you care about, family, friends, a partner, because something came up at work?” Nearly every hand went up. Then I asked: “How many of you have done it more than once this month?” Most hands stayed up. There were a few nervous laughs. Recognition ripples through the room. These aren’t disengaged leaders. They’re high performers who genuinely believe they’ll make it up later. They won’t. And here’s what most don…

On May 19, 2023, a photograph appeared on what was then still called Twitter showing smoke billowing from the Pentagon after an apparent explosion. The image quickly went viral. Within minutes, the S&P 500 dropped sharply, wiping out billions of dollars in market value. Then the truth emerged: the image was a fake, generated by AI. The markets recovered as quickly as they had tumbled, but the event marked an important turning point: this was the first time that the stock market had been directly affected by a deepfake. It is highly unlikely to be the last. Once a fringe curiosity, the deepfake economy has grown to become a $7.5 billion market, with some prediction…

Featuring Joon Choi, President, Weverse; Aron Levitz, President, Wattpad Webtoon Studios and Co-President, Wattpad and Gita Rebbapragada, Chief Operating Officer, Crunchyroll. Moderated by Tania Rahman, Social Media Director, Fast Company. Cultivating a loyal fan base is every brand’s dream. So why not take a page out of the book of companies that have made fandom the foundation of their business? Hear from execs at Weverse, Crunchyroll, and Wattpad to gain an understanding of how these companies cultivate and serve their diehard fandoms—and how you can apply that approach to your customers. View the full article

Since 1946, the Festival de Cannes (a.k.a. the Cannes Film Festival) in France has been a beacon of cinematic excellence and cultural exchange. For those who love the Academy Awards, films such as Parasite and Anora debuted here first before taking home an Oscar. This year promises to continue this worthy legacy despite fewer American entries than normal. Here’s everything you need to know as the festivities kick off this week. How did the Cannes Film Festival begin? In July 1938, a Nazi propaganda film helped inspire Philippe Erlanger to create a new film festival. He was one of many who were displeased that Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia and Goffredo Alessandrin…