What's on Your Mind?

It feels like they match anything. Black. Silver. White. Cream. All rendered in gloss and knit. I wasn’t sure how the silhouette would look in person when I first saw it in photos from Junya Watanabe’s Fall/Winter 2024-25 show. But they made my stomach churn in just the right way. I needed them. And so did a lot of other people. The New Balance 1906L launched last year, kicking off a new type of shoe: the sneaker loafer, aka (and please never say this term aloud) the snoafer. With a loafer silhouette, technical fabrics, and bouncy foam outsoles, they represented a new mix of formal wear and street style. Nike, Hoka, and Puma all quickly followed suit with sno…

British pop star Dua Lipa is suing Samsung Electronics for at least $15 million in damages alleging the South Korean electronics company illegally used a copyrighted image of her without permission. The legal complaint filed Friday in the United States District Court for the Central District of California alleges Samsung used an image of Lipa for some of its television cardboard boxes in circulation last year. According to the lawsuit, Lipa accuses Samsung of violating her “right of publicity” as well as infringing on her copyright and trademark rights. The image in question is allegedly taken from a performance at the Austin City Limits music festival in 2024. Ac…

Hello again, and thank you for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In. Last October, I visited the Silicon Valley headquarters of 1X Technologies—the startup behind a humanoid home robot called Neo—and spoke with its VP of product and design, Dar Sleeper. Among the points he made was that long-standing public expectations have set a high bar for household robots. Naturally, he name-checked the world’s most iconic one. “The ultimate, North Star, in a lot of people’s minds, is Rosie the Robot,” he told me. “A Jetsons world where you ask and receive, and it makes your life better, you spend more time with your family, you’re more present.” Sleeper’s referen…

For as long as people have been using AI to churn out text, other people have been coming up with “tells” that something was written by AI. Sometimes it’s punctuation that comes under suspicion. (The em dash is generally considered the shadiest.) Other times it’s words that robot writers seem to love and overuse. But what if the biggest giveaway that a text was written by AI isn’t a word, phrase, or punctuation mark, but a particular sentence structure instead? Why is it so hard to make AI writing sound human? The idea that certain rhythms of sentences might be a sign of AI writing first came to my attention through my work as a professional word nerd. Recen…

It’s graduation week, which means the emissaries of the nation’s elite are now descending onto college campuses to deliver the much-discussed and, they hope, indelibly quotable college commencement address. These speeches are their own sort of literary genre. The celebrities, politicians, and titans of industry invited to give these keynotes must seem intelligent enough, but not bore—or worse, antagonize—their audience. Typically, this involves a speaker integrating a clever life story, select nuggets of eternal wisdom, a few trite asides to campus lore, and well-placed references to current affairs into one propulsive and affecting speech. The problem this year, how…

Why do good companies stumble? I’m talking about the organizations that were once on top. The ones that seemed to lead their category. Today, we’d call them legacy brands or some euphemism that acknowledges the significance they once had and their staying power to stick around. However, somehow or another, they lost the plot along the way, and if only they had fixed this, changed that, or done this one thing, they would have continued winning. It’s a “If/then” proposition straight out of an MBA case study. A clear villain with an easy fix. As satisfying as that framing might be, it’s almost always never that simple. Instead, it’s typically a litany of factors at play…

The infamous “Am I The A**hole?” subreddit is making its way to the small screen. Hosted by Jimmy Carr, the new game show for Comedy Central U.K. will feature members of the public appearing before Carr and a panel of two comedians to reveal their deepest secrets and most bizarre disputes—before receiving judgement, per Deadline. The show is based on the popular Reddit subreddit of the same name, which boasts 24 million members at the time of writing. The subreddit’s creator, Marc Beaulac, is one of the executive producers of the series. Jimmy Carr’s Am I The A**hole? is being produced by STV Studios-owned Tuesday’s Child. Filming will take place in late spring, a…

Neither government shutdown nor IT outage can stop the merger of Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines. On Oct. 15, Seattle-based Alaska achieved one of the first major tech milestones of the combination. All new bookings made after that day for travel on either airline took place on Alaska’s reservations system, or “passenger service system” (PSS) in airline parlance. And all existing bookings at Hawaiian after April 22, 2026 were moved over to the platform. This is what Charu Jain, senior vice president of merchandising and innovation at Alaska who is overseeing the guest-facing technology integration of Hawaiian, calls the “selling cutover.” The idea is th…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. The 2025 spring selling season isn’t shaping up the way publicly traded homebuilders had hoped. KB Home, a giant homebuilder, told investors on March 24th that the traditionally strong spring buying window was off to a weaker-than-anticipated start. Just days earlier, Lennar, the nation’s second-largest builder, had offered a similar readout on its March 21 earnings call. Now, D.R. Horton—the largest homebuilder in the U.S. and No. 120 on the Fortune 500—is adding its voice to the chorus. “This year’s spring selling season started slower than exp…

While the court battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI may draw more eyes Monday, another case getting underway could carry far broader implications for personal freedom. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in a case that will determine the legality of geofencing, a technique law enforcement uses to mine location history data to identify who was near the scene of a crime and may have been involved. Geofencing, in essence, draws a virtual perimeter around a crime scene. The government then obtains a warrant requiring tech companies to search their location data for anyone within that area during the relevant time frame. In this case, Google’s location his…

With Netflix now streaming original podcasts and Apple announcing a “category-leading video experience” on its app this spring, the meaning of the word “podcast” has grown increasingly diffuse. It was much easier to pin down during the medium’s mid-aughts infancy. Back then, a podcast was simply asynchronous talk radio—the natural next step after moving from terrestrial radio, to satellite platforms like SiriusXM, to a new and purely digital format that could be downloaded and consumed on demand. In the years since, the definition has vastly expanded. Essentially, any form of episodic audio or video content that involves people speaking into microphones can now b…

In the defining years of American business, founding CEOs were virtually synonymous with the companies they led. Walt Disney was Disney incarnate; Dale Carnegie came to represent the steel industry itself. These figures were not just company leaders; they were the gravitational center around which entire industries revolved. Those days are gone. Though we still have echoes in modern chief executives like Tim Cook or Richard Branson, these figureheads, too, are becoming rarer. In fact, the average CEO tenure is the lowest in recent history. Over the past three years, CEO turnover has reached record highs, with 58 leadership changes in the S&P 500 alone. This patter…

A decade ago, when Claire Burgi moved to New York City, she decided to cut meat out of her diet. The 33-year-old actor and audiobook narrator, who lives in Queens, grew up in California, where she’d seen the effects of climate change firsthand. She knew that meat consumption was a major driver of greenhouse gas emissions and that vegetarianism was a way to help conserve resources and reduce pollution. “When I was young, it rained a lot,” she says. “Now, it rains much less. All the fires are astoundingly horrific.” The December 2017 Thomas wildfire burned more than 280,000 acres in and around Burgi’s hometown of Ventura, just north of Los Angeles. “I just didn’t w…

How’s work? If you feel like answering “meh,” you’re not alone. Gallup’s latest workplace survey found that employee engagement has slumped to a 10-year low. It might not be the work itself, though. You might want to take a closer look at your boss, says Dr. Katina Sawyer, coauthor of Leading for Wellness: How to Create a Team Culture Where Everyone Thrives. “The proximal experiences that you have in the day to day of your workplace are what predict your general overall sentiments about your work,” says Sawyer, who is an associate professor of management and organizations at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management. “That means that the people that you …

Why are some jobs better than others? Well, it largely depends on people’s preferences. In other words, one person’s dream job may be another person’s nightmare. And yet, there are also clearly some universal or at least generalizable parameters that make most people accept the idea that some jobs are objectively better than others — or at least seen by most as generally preferable. Pay and purpose For example, jobs that pay well, offer stability, and provide opportunities for growth are almost universally considered better. A tenured professorship, a senior engineering role at a reputable company, or a stable medical position all combine financial security…

Although there is no shortage of AI enthusiasts, the general public remains uneasy about artificial intelligence. Two concerns dominate the conversation, both amplified by popular and business media. The first is AI’s capacity to automate work, fueling widespread FOBO, or fear of becoming obsolete. The second is AI’s tendency to reproduce or even exacerbate human bias. On the first, the evidence remains mixed. The clearest signal so far is not the wholesale replacement of jobs, but the automation of tasks and skills within jobs. Most workers are less likely to lose their roles outright than to be forced to rethink what they do at work and where they add value. In that…

When White Lotus first season debuted in 2021 and shot to near-instant acclaim, it was a sleeper hit for HBO. But now, four years later, HBO is well aware of just how enthusiastic White Lotus’s fanbase has become—and, to tap into the show’s highly online viewership, its marketing team has decided to officially don their tin foil hats and fangirl right alongside the rest of us. White Lotus recently debuted its own TikTok page dedicated to stirring up conversation around the show’s third season, which just debuted. It’s the first time that the show itself will have a separate TikTok presence from HBO’s broader account. White Lotus’s marketing team is in a unique positio…

With community opposition growing, data center backers are going on a full-scale public relations blitz. Around Christmas in Virginia, which boasts the highest concentration of data centers in the country, one advertisement seemed to air nonstop. “Virginia’s data centers are … investing billions in clean energy,” a voiceover intoned over sweeping shots of shiny solar panels. “Creating good-paying jobs” — cue men in yellow safety vests and hard hats — “and building a better energy future.” The ad was sponsored by Virginia Connects, an industry-affiliated group that spent at least $700,000 on digital marketing in the state in fiscal year 2024. The spot emphasized that …

During the final weeks of his battle with ALS, the late actor Eric Dane teamed up with ElevenLabs to restore his voice with the use of artificial intelligence technology—creating an emotional moment for his family, friends, and nurses when they heard how authentic it was. “The final version of Eric’s voice sounded exactly like him,” Rebecca Gayheart Dane, his widow, said during a recent discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “If you are familiar with him at all, you know he had a very distinct voice and he had a distinct way of telling his stories—he was witty, acerbic, he just had a lot of personality—and this voice captured that so perfectly. It sounded so re…

Right now, America is facing a traffic safety crisis unlike anything we’ve seen in decades. And it’s only accelerating: 2023 was the deadliest year for pedestrians and cyclists in 45 years. Crashes are rising in nearly every state. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration just warned that traffic deaths are staying at “persistently high levels,” despite fewer people commuting post-pandemic. Meanwhile, distracted driving deaths jumped nearly 12% last year alone, according to the latest federal data. Everywhere you look, it’s getting more dangerous to move through your own neighborhood, whether you’re walking your dog, riding your bike, or just driving home fr…

A flock of chickens living in a coop near Dallas, Texas, are ordinary birds. But they hatched inside 3D-printed artificial eggs in a lab at Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based “de-extinction” company. Colossal designed a new system that functions essentially like a natural egg. One of the company’s goals: to use it to bring back the South Island giant moa, a bird that went extinct in the 15th century. But the technology could also be used to help breed currently endangered birds. It’s not the first time that scientists tried to raise birds outside a natural shell. But previous systems, first developed in the 1980s, required a flow of oxygen and other interv…