What's on Your Mind?

2025 was defined by reports of a “low-hire, low-fire” environment: the unemployment rate remained fairly low, at just over 4% in December; yet headlines of constant layoffs seemed to dominate the news cycle, and those who are unemployed are taking longer to find work. It’s all been very confusing. And the most recent U.S. jobs report, released today, presents more mixed signals. This week’s report indicated American employers added 130,000 jobs in January, and the Labor Department reported the unemployment rate fell to 4.3%. Everything in the report isn’t good — it also indicated just 181,000 jobs were created last year, which is the lowest number since 2020 — but…

Artificial intelligence has shifted from an experiment to an expectation. Boards push CEOs about ROI. CEOs launch enterprise rollouts. Leaders invest in tools, platforms, and governance. Yet adoption still stalls. Work-arounds spread. Risk grows. Value lags. The failure rarely sits with the technology. The breakdown sits in adoption design. Many organizations treat AI as an IT rollout or a standard change initiative. Tools gain approval. Policies circulate. Training launches. What’s missing is the rigor leaders apply to external products. Employees receive tools without a clear value proposition. Managers face delivery pressure without added capacity. Governance favor…

Single this Valentine’s Day? You’re not alone. New research from The Harris Poll shows that nearly half of Americans (46%) are not in relationships—many of them on purpose. The report, shared exclusively with Fast Company, calls it a “cultural revolution,” where people are using singlehood as a way to prioritize their agency rather than focusing on traditional relationship expectations. Not everyone is staying single, but 80% of Americans say you don’t need marriage to be happy. In fact, singles are more likely than those in relationships to say they live a fulfilling life. More time for friendships—or careers The idea of what makes a fulfilling relationsh…

Since Spencer Rascoff took over as Match Group CEO in early 2025, he has set about trying to revive its portfolio of dating apps, in part by winning back user trust and courting Gen Z. “Trust is the foundation of real connections, and we are committed to rebuilding it with urgency, accountability, and an unwavering focus on the user,” Rascoff said last March in a letter to employees sharing his vision. As part of that turnaround and effort to cultivate trust, Match Group—the parent company of Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid—has also sought to revamp its internal culture over the last year, in the interest of imbuing the company with greater transparency. A few months into…

Somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, archaeologists in Heerlen, Netherlands, came across an odd-looking smooth white stone. They knew the territory was once the Roman settlement of Coriovallum, but had never seen anything like it and had no idea what it was for. For the better part of the next 100 years, it sat in a storage unit at the Thermenmuseum, a mystery taunting researchers. Then, six years ago, archaeologist Walter Crist spotted the stone while wandering the museum. Crist specializes in ancient board games and recognized it as one, though not one he had ever seen before. That sparked his curiosity. Now, with the help of artificial intelligence, he th…

Maybe you first bonded over shared workplace frustrations. You gradually started finding each other every lunch break and synchronizing trips to the coffee machine. Eventually they become a confidant for venting about your real life outside of work. They become your work spouse. And if you find yourself strolling the greeting card aisle sometime today, you may even feel compelled to get this person in your life a trinket for celebrating the most romantic day of the year. Turns out, there are options available. “For my work wife on Valentines day,” one option reads from Card Factory. “I’ve finally found someone just as inappropriate as me!” A card to show…

After 25 years of obsessing over Mars, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX has shifted focus from invading the Red Planet to invading the Moon. He claims he will build a self-sustainable lunar metropolis in less than a decade—a sharp contrast to his proposed Mars colony, which he says would now take at least 20 years. Both timelines are as fictional as Star Trek, but at least now his plan makes sense. It is a jarring plot twist from January 2025, when Musk dismissed the Moon as a “distraction.” Now, he says, the satellite is the “overriding priority” to secure civilization. Musk argues a lunar base is necessary because a “natural or man-made catastrophe” on Earth could c…

Picture a memory from childhood, one that feels real and nostalgic, but somehow just out of grasp: perhaps a family trip to the beach, or a moment mid-swing on the playset, or an afternoon spent hunting for four-leaf clovers. Now, imagine that you could bottle that golden moment into a fragrance. One scientist at MIT, Cyrus Clarke, is working to do just that. Alongside a team of fellow researchers, Clarke has developed a physical machine called the Anemoia Device, which uses a generative AI model to analyze an archival photograph, describe it in a short sentence, and, following the user’s own inputs, convert that description into a unique fragrance. The word “an…

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model doesn’t begin in 2003, when America’s Next Top Model premiered and took television by storm. It doesn’t begin in the 1990s, when eventual host Tyra Banks rose to superstardom in the modeling industry. Instead, it begins in 2020, when the pandemic led a new generation to binge early-aughts reality TV, this time watching with a modern lens—and, naturally, tearing it to shreds on TikTok. From there, Netflix’s newest docuseries rewinds to tell the full story of America’s Next Top Model, from its pre-production through its 24 scandalous cycles and into its modern-day legacy, featuring interviews with contestants, producers, an…

If you’re a manager today, your job may well be changing. That is, if it hasn’t already. As companies continue to compress their org charts and axe layers of middle management, a new role is emerging: the “supermanager.” Leaders are finding themselves responsible for significantly more direct reports and broader responsibilities. And in many industries, the trend shows no sign of slowing. A Gallup survey published in January, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that the average number of reports managers have increased from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. The share of managers overseeing 25 or more employees has also grown in the past year, wi…

Shares of Fiverr International Ltd. (NYSE: FVRR) are dropping significantly this morning after the freelance marketplace platform reported its Q4 2025 financial results. While the company reported modest revenue growth, its 2026 outlook sent the stock plunging, even as Fiverr executives put a positive spin on the impact of artificial intelligence on its business. Here’s what you need to know. Revenue increases, but outlook sends investors fleeing On Wednesday morning, Fiverr reported its fourth-quarter 2025 results. And those results, for the most part, were mixed. The company saw modest growth in total revenue, which rose to $107.2 million in the quarter…

Sandisk Corporation has announced plans for a secondary public offering. The data storage company will open up 5,821,135 common stock shares (Nasdaq:SNDK) at $545 a pop. The shares are currently owned by Western Digital Corporation (WDC), Sandisk’s former parent company. Sandisk separated from WDC nearly a year ago to the date, and subsequently joined the S&P 500 in November. Now, WDC is furthering that split. It will be left with 1,691,884 shares of common stock, but it plans to get rid of those as well. WDC intends to complete a debt-for-equity exchange with J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and BofA Securities—both of which will act as selling stockhol…

“Before The Whale, I had everything to prove. And now, to be honest, not so much,” Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, 57, told AARP The Magazine in an interview last month. The 50-and-older segment is the fastest-growing demographic in the world, according to Myechia Minter-Jordan, AARP’s CEO. And three years ago, Fraser—a Hollywood mainstay for 35 years whose career has been marked by challenges like depression and work drought—was nominated for (and won) his first Academy Award for playing the lead in director Darren Aronofsky’s prestige drama The Whale. In his acceptance speech, Fraser thanked Aronofsky “for throwing me a creative lifeline.” In the interview with AA…

A federal judge has ruled that Tesla is still required to pay $243 million over a 2019 crash involving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot, despite the company’s efforts to overturn the verdict. In August 2025, a jury found Tesla liable for the death of Naibel Benavides Leon, a 22-year-old woman who was killed when George McGee, who was driving a Tesla Model S, drove through an intersection while he bent to look for his dropped phone. The crash occurred in Key Largo, Florida, in 2019. McGee’s vehicle, which was equipped with Tesla’s Autopilot technology, crashed into an SUV that was parked on the shoulder, killing Leon and injuring Dillon Angulo. “I trusted the…

Before the holidays, Adam Conner began vibe coding. Like everyone else in the know, he was using Claude Code. Compared to popular chatbots, Anthropic’s advanced AI agent speaks the language of computers: code. Normally, you click buttons in browsers, open folders, and drag files. But you can also do so by coding—interacting with software by typing commands into a terminal, a text-based app. Claude Code goes beyond such primitive tasks, though: an AI that can code can effectively do nearly anything on a computer. “We expected developers to use Claude Code for coding, but then something unexpected happened,” an Anthropic spokesperson tells Fast Company. “We started…

A turf war has broken out between the fandoms of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones over the highest-rated episode spot on IMDb. Released last month, the Game of Thrones spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, set a century before the events of the HBO drama, has garnered much praise. A Guardian reviewer said it has “saved the Game of Thrones universe.” Fans appear to agree, as the fifth episode, In the Name of the Mother, which aired February 15, briefly secured a rare 10/10 rating on IMDb. Unfortunately for fans, it didn’t last long. For over a decade, “Ozymandias”—the 14th episode of the fifth and final season of Breaking Bad, and the climax of the series—ha…

Last October, 35 major donor families, calling their collaborative The Audacious Project, gathered in California and committed $1.03 billion to more than a dozen nonprofits whose proposed projects span multiple years and take on major challenges. The collaborative, housed at TED, announced the winning nonprofits Tuesday, after spending more than a year selecting the groups and helping them sharpen pitches for larger projects than philanthropic funders typically support. It’s not until the donors meet in person that they decide how much to give to each group. Jennifer Loving, the CEO of the San Jose-based nonprofit Destination: Home, said it was “shock and awe,” when the…

Dark Sky was a rarity in the app world. Universally beloved, the weather app had an uncanny ability to tell you when to expect rain, down to the minute. So when Apple announced plans to buy it six years ago, there was a collective sigh of frustration. The Android version, of course, disappeared almost immediately, while the iOS version was folded into Apple’s native Weather app. (The standalone iPhone app was discontinued.) The integration was never quite the same, though, and it seemed as if the magic of Dark Sky was lost. Now, however, the team behind the app is hoping lightning strikes twice. The developers of Dark Sky have announced a new iPhone app called Acm…

In a time when hiring has slowed dramatically, layoffs have become the norm, and AI has flattened early differentiation, even job titles have blurred. The problem is that capable, experienced people increasingly describe feeling stalled, unseen, or interchangeable in today’s workforce. Consider the current landscape of advice to understand the dilemma. People are encouraged to stand out, but without guidance on how to do so. They’re told to pick a lane and niche down, while careers are becoming more nonlinear. What’s missing is a true strategy that reflects how work actually functions today. That’s where optimal distinctiveness becomes an advantage. Social psycho…

Companies want to hire workers with artificial intelligence skills, but don’t want to pay the premium. Those are the findings from a new report from Payscale, a leading online provider of data on salaries and compensation. Payscale’s 2026 Compensation Best Practices Report finds that while 60% of companies mention AI as part of their job descriptions, only 55% are willing to shell out extra money for those skills in the form of higher salaries, bonuses or even equity in the company. Why? Well, according to the report, there are a few reasons for the discrepancy, including the impact of a tight job market on hiring, coming at a time when businesses are also tighten…

When Dr. Wendy Ross logged on for a Zoom meeting in early 2024, she wasn’t sure who to expect on the other side of the call. It was a digital writers’ room, Ross tells Fast Company, “and in the upper left-hand corner—I’ll never forget it—was Noah Wyle.” Ross, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician and the director of Jefferson Center for Autism & Neurodiversity in Philadelphia, had received a request to lend her expertise to the writers of a new medical series—but they told her only that it was set in an emergency room and would potentially feature an autistic doctor. “I had no idea what was going to happen, but I thought it sounded kind of cool,” she say…

Early in my career, a colleague and I made a shared commitment one summer to eat healthier. Salads. Smoothies. The full routine. Like many well-intentioned plans, our discipline began to fade after a few weeks. Eventually, we introduced what we jokingly called Grease Wednesdays, a weekly cheat day as a reward for all our good behavior. Every Wednesday, one of us would head out to grab fast food, and we’d hide away in a small boardroom to indulge in our shared lack of nutritional discipline. At first, it was just the two of us, chatting with laptops closed and fries on the table. And then coworkers began peeking into whatever boardroom we were in, curious about the…

As a young child, interior designer Jeremiah Brent and his mother visited open houses and model homes in his hometown of Modesto, California, as a form of daydreaming. Brent walked through the houses, imagining the people who might live there, building a fantasy around what these homes could be. Since then, Brent has turned his childhood design obsession into a sprawling career: He runs a 50-person design firm, moonlights on Queer Eye, and recently brokered his first bedding deal with Target. Having come up in the industry through a series of audacious bets on himself, Brent has developed a sense of humor and pragmatism around his relationship with creativity and his…

Productivity, and alleged lost productivity, has driven most of the conversation around traffic congestion and sprawl in the United States. While “time is money” is true in some contexts, it’s a terrible starting point for planning transportation systems. Traffic congestion is a pervasive issue, whether it’s the destination (a downtown, a stadium, a new development) or the streets connecting to the destinations. In economic terms, congestion occurs when demand exceeds supply: not enough lanes for everyone trying to get somewhere at once. Your time is valuable and there are sometimes real consequences you experience when roads are clogged with cars. But it’s a serious …

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I tested more than 200 educational sites, apps, and services last year. Some were so confusing that I quickly gave up. Others were too costly. A few went out of business. Many were narrowly useful, e.g., for 3D modeling, math, or music. The top-tier tools have consistently been super valuable for me—in my teaching, in my job at the City University of New York, and as a dad of two daughters. To save you the time and effort of sifting through the chaff, I’m sharing the ones I find most useful. Even if you’re not a teacher, these tools m…