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It’s no secret that raising kids in the U.S. has become grossly expensive. The price of childcare alone has ballooned over the past decade, with many families reporting that it costs them at least a quarter of their annual income. Across many states, families need to earn an average of $180,000 to comfortably afford infant care; the high cost of living in states like California and New York can require an income exceeding $250,000. An increasing burden on families A new analysis by the online lending marketplace LendingTree captures why so many families are struggling to manage the enormous cost of having children. The study found that since 2023, the annual cost o…

Members of the Sackler family who own OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma must pay billions of dollars to settle a flood of lawsuits over the harms of opioids, under a new deal that was formally approved by a federal bankruptcy judge on Tuesday. The Sackler family must contribute up to $7 billion over 15 years. Most of the money is to go to government entities to fight the opioid crisis, which has been linked to 900,000 deaths in the U.S. since 1999. Thousands of victims of the opioid epidemic could be paid thousands of dollars each, with a portion of the money distributed next year to some people who had OxyContin prescriptions and their survivors. “This plan is no…

Padel has taken the sports world by storm. In a smaller but growing circle, it’s also become a way to date. Much of that runs through Playtomic, a booking app for racquet sports where players join “open matches” with strangers, chat through the app, and meet people they wouldn’t otherwise encounter. For some, those connections carry off the court. “People are meeting each other on the court . . . [and then] grabbing a beer or coffee from the grounds,” says Pro Padel League CEO Michael Dorfman. That kind of interaction is exactly what the app Playtomic is designed to facilitate, and increasingly, to scale. In 2017, co-founder Pablo Carro set out to solve a …

When deciding if something is worth the effort, whether you’ve already exerted yourself or face the prospect of work, changes your calculus. That’s what we found in our new research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. When you consider a future effort, more work makes the outcome less appealing. But once you’ve completed the work, more effort makes the outcome seem more valuable. We also discovered that hiding behind this general principle of timing there are individual differences in how future and past effort shapes people’s value for the fruits of their labor. What’s it worth to you? In our experiment, we gave participants a choice…

China produces 75% of the world’s batteries. South Korea and Japan control much of the remaining supply chain. With tariffs looming over the industry, the U.S. is in a unique position, having both urgency and opportunity to strengthen domestic battery production for myriad uses. The reality is that American battery manufacturers lag their Asian counterparts. Companies here are attempting to catch up by rushing to follow Asia’s manufacturing formula, but that strategy won’t hold up in the long term. The only way to surpass these larger Asian competitors is to move on from outdated manufacturing methods and materials and focus on what defines American leadership: innov…

In September 2025, the nation received its latest report card on 12th-grade math from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. These results should be a wake-up call for any American concerned about the future of education and workforce development in the United States. The findings showed that 78% of 12th graders were not proficient in mathematics, with more students than ever falling below the math proficiency benchmarks established by the National Center for Education Statistics. This widening skills gap signals serious trouble ahead for the American workforce. As the future of work becomes increasingly dependent on STEM skills, we are failing to equip millions…

“The purpose of computers is human freedom.” – Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) The computer is as emblematic of the American dream as the automobile. Perhaps it’s only natural that Apple, HP, Adobe, Google, and Amazon were each launched out of a garage. It was inside the garage that the modern era of personal computers was born, where anyone could own the power to calculate millions, and then billions of processes per second. PCs are a tool designed to move us faster, with a hood you can pop open to soup up. We insist that our computers speed up every year if only because it’s proof of progress. The very term “personal computer” promises libert…

Your pennies are now collector’s items. The last penny was minted Wednesday at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, spelling the end of America’s longest-running coin design. More than Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe or Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, it’s sculptor and medalist Victor David Brenner’s profile of Abraham Lincoln on the humble penny that’s actually believed to be the most-reproduced piece of art in the history of the world: the U.S. Mint estimates some 300 billion pennies remain in circulation. And even though no new pennies will be minted, the coin will remain legal tender—good news for those inclined to give a penny, take a penny at their local gas station. …

The Pentagon is releasing “never-before-seen” files on UFOs. The files, many which have been under wraps for decades, can now be accessed by anyone online. The Friday release includes the declassification of 162 files on what the government officially calls unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) these days. These files can be found under a new tab on the Defense Department’s website. The move follows a presidential order that came in February, which called for greater transparency around UAP. “The American people can now access the federal government’s declassified UAP files instantly. The latest UAP videos, photos, and original source documents from across the entir…

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, will head to the Pentagon on Tuesday to meet with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about how the military uses the company’s artificial intelligence models. And it’s likely to be a tense meeting, as sources first told Axios. Contract talks between the AI startup and the Department of Defense have gone off course in recent weeks as Anthropic has insisted on some safeguards for how its technology will be used. While the San Francisco-based company is willing to loosen some of its usage restrictions for the Department of Defense, it doesn’t want its models used for at least two specific purposes: spying on Americans or developing autonomous …

Every so often, a “technical” dispute reveals something much bigger. The recent blowup between the U.S. Department of Defense and Anthropic is one of those moments: not because it’s about a $200 million contract, but because it makes visible a new kind of enterprise risk, one that most CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs are still treating as a procurement detail. In a recent piece, “The Pentagon wants to rewrite the rules of AI,” I focused on the political meaning of a government attempting to force an AI company to relax its own guardrails. For enterprise leaders, the most important takeaway is more practical: If your AI capabilities depend on a single provider’s terms, policies,…

When Anna Jarvis set out to establish a national Mother’s Day in the early 20th century, her goal was to honor her own mother’s legacy of activism, sacrifice, and maternal devotion. She envisioned a national day of gratitude where all Americans expressed their thanks and admiration for their own mothers. But just a few short years after successfully getting official recognition for the holiday, Jarvis was horrified to see Mother’s Day commercialized to benefit florists and greeting card companies. Jarvis petitioned to recall the holiday she had championed. One imagines Jarvis banging her head against the wall if she could see us now, since Mother’s Day spending co…

If one founder is good, then more must be better, right? Not necessarily. New research shows that the benefits of cofounding a startup with strangers can be eclipsed by the risks. Yes, cofounders can bring their own perspectives, along with “access to wider networks, greater capacity, and access to funding,” says Monique Boddington, a management practice associate professor at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, whose research includes early-stage venture formation and startup strategy development. And yet: “An increasing number of individuals have been setting up businesses with no intention of taking on employees,” she explains. That’s beca…

The Phoenix Mercury rebranded for the first time in team history, and the new look is part of a wider trend across the WNBA as teams modernize their logos for a growing league. The new Mercury logo shows an “M” that’s a simplified version of the letter taken from the team’s old script wordmark. The bottom of the “M” is angled up at 19.97 degrees as a nod to the team’s 1997 founding as one of the league’s eight original franchises, and it’s set on a circle with a crescent shadow that represents the planet Mercury. The modernized logo was designed in-house. The rebrand comes at an inflection point for the team, which lost star player Diana Taurasi to retirement in F…

When Steve Jobs wanted to motivate his Mac team at Apple, he didn’t give them corporate pep talks or send them to management retreats. Instead, he told them they were “pirates” fighting against the “navy.” The message was clear: stay scrappy, stay rebellious, and don’t let the corporate machine slow you down. That pirate mentality worked. The Mac team moved fast, took risks, and delivered something revolutionary. But here’s the irony: Apple was itself the navy they were once fighting against. Today, with over 160,000 employees and a market cap exceeding $3 trillion, Apple faces the same challenge that confronts every successful company—how do you stay pirates when you…

Within three months of becoming CEO of the Honest Company in 2023, Carla Vernón slashed 25% of its eco-friendly goods. That seems tame in comparison to what happened when Brad Charron joined Aloha as CEO in 2017: He killed off every product category. Now on the other side of major rebrands and company pivots, these CEOs say there wasn’t necessarily a playbook to follow when they joined their respective companies as outsiders. While assuming the role of turnaround CEO proved difficult—and not one either would like to undertake again—there are many lessons learned, which they shared during a discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. When Charron was initially ap…

Featuring Brad Charron, CEO, Aloha and Carla Vernón, CEO, The Honest Company. Moderated by Yasmin Gagne, Staff Editor, Fast Company. When a company’s momentum reverses direction (or is even on the brink of bankruptcy), how does a leader pivot toward recovery and a return to success? In this panel, you’ll hear from CEOs who seized the reins of their companies when they were struggling—and managed to get things back on track. View the full article

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. April is Earth Month and that means all I want to do is talk about plastic. Last August, I learned of a new study that revealed that the human brains studied were nearly 0.5% plastic by weight. Let that sink in. Plastic has infiltrated our bodies so thoroughly that it’s likely now a measurable part of our minds. Shouldn’t our brains just be, well, brain matter? How did we get here? For…

There are certain social media rules we can all agree on: Ghosting a conversation is impolite, and replying “k” to a text is the equivalent of a backhand slap (violent, wrong, and rude). But what about the rest of the rules? When can we really remind someone of our old Venmo request? What happens when someone tries to flirt with you on LinkedIn? Fortunately, terminally online writers Delia Cai and Steffi Cao are here to answer all your digital quandaries, big or small. Welcome to Fast Company’s new advice column, Posting Playbook. This week, Steffi opines on what you should do when you don’t want to be tagged in the group photo. How should I tell my friend I look …

Prediction markets have now turned their focus to hantavirus, a rare but severe category of viruses transmitted from rodents to humans, after several cases were identified earlier this month aboard an Atlantic cruise operated by Oceanwide Expeditions. It’s a serious situation that has drawn global concern: Several passengers have tested positive for the illness, at least three cruise participants have died, and a number of others on the trip are reportedly experiencing symptoms. Amid growing anxiety about the illness and, no doubt, memories of the nerve-racking first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, some people have taken to prediction markets to bet on what might …

In 2023, Pop-Tarts changed the world of brand mascots forever when it sacrificed the life of a Strawberry Pop-Tart and fed its remains to the Kansas State football team as a reward for winning the Pop-Tarts Bowl game. The weirdly macabre stunt got 4 billion media impressions, and in the eight weeks following the game, parent company Kellanova sold 21 million more Pop-Tarts than in the eight weeks before the game. Riding on that success, the brand upped its ambitions and brought three flavors to the Pop-Tarts Bowl last year, letting the winning team’s MVP choose which one was toasted and eaten (Iowa State’s quarterback, Rocco Becht, picked Frosted Cinnamon Roll). Now …