What's on Your Mind?

Feeld markets itself as “the dating app for the curious.” For most of its users, that means curiosity about kink and casual sex—but its newest tool asks you to be curious about yourself. As a favorite platform for the kink, fetish, and non-mongamous communities, Feeld is a place where taboos are the norm. But a new survey from the app suggests that kink is more mainstream than dominant culture would have you believe. And Feeld’s new tool, Reflections, accompanies the data by letting anyone, Feeld users and otherwise, assess their own relationship with nontraditional sex. Feeld surveyed thousands of both its own users and external respondents for opinions on the pe…

It’s time for the dazzling conclusion to the 2026 awards season. After the Hollywood elites walk the red carpet, the curtain will rise on the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday, March 15, which is tonight. The excitement will be palpable as the audience waits to learn who will take home a coveted Oscar. Here’s everything you need to know to fully enjoy the evening, including how to tune in. Where does the 98th Academy Awards take place? The location for this fabulous event is in Tinseltown, of course. More specifically, the ceremony will take place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Who’s hosting the 2026 Oscars? Comedian and former late-night host Conan O’…

It’s being called the Great Flattening: a global wave of layoffs triggered by the adoption of AI that is primarily hitting middle management. Amazon is currently leading this managerial reset, aggressively streamlining its corporate structure to reduce bureaucracy and speed decision-making. And although the tech sector remains the epicenter, projections suggest that by the end of 2026, up to 20% of firms will use AI to significantly reduce middle management ranks. The catalyst is the rise of agentic AI—autonomous tools capable of executing complex workflows, managing data streams, and generating predictive modeling for decision-making with minimal oversight. All with …

Alex Cooper was driving a hot pink Jeep through the desert with former Saturday Night Live cast member Aidy Bryant and Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore, of White Lotus fame. Suddenly, their cell service dropped to zero, just as Bryant was trying to send an important contract and Impacciatore was in a heated text exchange with her boyfriend, Jared. But Cooper had their backs. Thanks to the satellite service on Cooper’s phone, Bryant was able to send her document and close the deal. Impacciatore, meanwhile, got through the text-dot purgatory (“DOT DOT DOT WHAT?”) to find out that Jared wanted to move in together. “Time to move on,” Impacciatore declared, upon re…

Has an event outside of work ever made you stop and realize that work has taken over more of your life than you realized? These events are called crossover jolts. They often sneak up on us after we’ve been in a job for a while. When we begin a new role, we start by mastering the tasks in our job description. But then we start taking on more responsibilities. There’s a name for this phenomenon—job creep. Tasks that were once above and beyond our job duties slowly become the norm. Imagine working toward the deadline on a big project. During the final week, we respond to emails at night after the kids have gone to bed (even though we promised ourselves we would never be…

The most frequent mistake companies make when applying? They fail to focus on a single, representative example of internally grown innovation. Here’s some advice on how to produce a more compelling application for Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators in 2026. Get real Jargon won’t win you any awards. Applications that read as if they were written to appeal primarily to an internal audience are not likely to earn high marks from our judges. Use clear language to describe your innovation programs. We’re looking for companies that do more than just talk the talk. Be current Focus on a recent or ongoing example. We’re looking for current hotbeds of inno…

AI poses an infuriating dilemma: On the one hand, it promises to reduce the grunt work present in every job. On the other hand, between the creation of AI slop, and employee fears around job loss, figuring out how to actually reap those benefits creates another job in and of itself. Companies are resorting to a variety of strategies to solve this problem. Amazon tracks how often employees use AI, Microsoft has an internal bootcamp where teams brainstorm how to redesign their workflows to include AI, and Boston Consulting Group has made AI use part of employee performance evaluations. Other companies are taking a different approach: paying employees to experiment…

Is it even worth having a kid in the AI era? It’s the question at the heart of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, a new documentary about the promise, peril, and uncertainty surrounding artificial intelligence. Codirected by Charlie Tyrell and Academy Award winner Daniel Roher, the film follows Roher, a soon-to-be father, as he tries to understand how AI works, what risks it may carry, and what kind of world he and his wife are bringing their son into. Along the way, he encounters both AI’s loudest skeptics and its most ardent utopians. The film features dozens of experts, including CEOs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, longtime r…

Microsoft PowerToys feels like something that shouldn’t exist in Windows today. What started in 2019 as a couple of utilities for things like window and shortcut management has gradually expanded to nearly 30 useful tools, including a keyboard shortcut creator, an image-to-text extractor, and a better search bar than the one that’s built into Windows proper. PowerToys has become wildly popular among Windows power users, with more than 70 million downloads to date, but it’s also completely free, with no ads, Office upsells, or ham-fisted Copilot integrations. Instead of directly monetizing PowerToys, Microsoft sees it as a way to build goodwill among software devel…

This week, Google announced new features for its AI-powered interface tool Stitch—in the process, it signaled that it’s going all-in on “vibe design.” “We are evolving Stitch into an AI-native software design canvas,” Rustin Banks, product manager at Google Labs, wrote on company’s blog, Keynote. “With it, anyone can create, iterate and collaborate to turn natural language into high-fidelity UI designs.” Launched last March during the Google I/O annual developer conference, Stitch sets out to give people an accessible tool for creating front end UI designs for projects like websites or mobile apps. While late to a market already occupied by competitors like Figma …

People who live and work in Washington state don’t currently pay any income tax. But in a few years, a small group of residents will be subject to one: Washington lawmakers recently passed a bill that would impose a 9.9% tax on income earned above $1 million, which goes into effect on January 1, 2028. The so-called millionaires tax could raise up to $4 billion annually for the state, revenue that Governor Bob Ferguson has said could go toward free breakfast and lunch for students, and to working families through a tax credit. (Ferguson has yet to sign the bill, which landed on his desk March 13, but has pledged to.) The tax is part of a wave of bills that lawmaker…

Actor John Stamos is thinking a lot more about potential opportunities to live-stream these days—be it at New York’s Thanksgiving Day parade, performing with the Beach Boys when he heads to Route 66 for the 100-year anniversary later this year, or even while getting his first-ever tattoo in Austin for SXSW. “I thought, ‘Oh, we should have live-streamed that,” said Stamos, speaking at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “That could have been interesting watching me go through that kind of pain.” As chief innovation officer of Zeam, a startup that lets people stream local TV stations and other content from anywhere, Stamos is excited to bring people an alternative to w…

Most people seek career advancement. Moving up the ladder gives you additional opportunities, greater autonomy, more chances to think strategically, a higher level of prestige, and (of course) a bigger paycheck. And at some point, you’re going to feel like it is time for you to get that promotion. So, how do you know whether it is the right time to really push for it? Finding the right timing requires being aware both of your own capacities and the current situation in your organization. The stars have to align for you to be successful in your efforts. Here are three things to consider. 1. Are you ready? If you’re going to really push for a promotion (and not j…

Think about how we commonly seek to motivate human performance in our workplaces: Employees are treated as costs to be minimized rather than people to be invested in. Performance is managed through fear of consequences. Supervisors closely monitor daily tasks, requiring frequent check-ins or reports. Being available at all hours is treated as evidence of commitment. Directives flow one way—downward. Feedback is delivered as judgment rather than support. In practice, if not in intention, we still manage people more like machines than human beings. How did we get here—and, more importantly, why have we never left? Most of what we call “modern management” isn’t moder…

If you pick up plastic trash from a beach, you’re helping protect marine wildlife from harm. And every little piece—from a plastic bottle cap to food wrappers—matters, because even small amounts of this trash can be deadly to animals like sea turtles and seabirds. A new calculator from Ocean Conservancy can now quantify that impact. If you enter the amounts of different types of plastic that you clean up into the Wildlife Impact Calculator, it will tell you how many animal lives would have been at risk, had those items made their way into the ocean and been ingested. “We hope that people really see that beach cleanups matter,” says Erin Murphy, Ocean Conservancy’s…

Taking stock of the once red-hot agtech sector, analysts have called 2025 a “transition year,” a polite way of saying crop prices slid, Bayer traded near a 20-year low, John Deere reported less than half of its 2023 income, and almost two dozen startups in once-frothy areas like indoor farming, drones, and insect-based ingredients collapsed. It was enough for a managing director of ag giant Syngenta’s VC arm to jokingly “thank God” it had avoided investing in alt-protein, carbon credits, and vertical farming—though he allowed that the downturn offered “good lessons” for smart entrepreneurs eyeing “a second wave.” Fast Company’s 2026 list of the most innovative companies …

Below, Dr. Sunita Sah shares five key insights from her new book, Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. Sah is a physician-turned-organizational psychologist. She teaches business and healthcare students at Cornell University and Cambridge University, and served as commissioner on the National Commission of Forensic Science. What’s the big idea? Learning how to defy is important, relevant, and meaningful for anyone who wants to speak up when it matters and to do the right thing in the moment. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Sah herself—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book. 1. We’re wired to comply. Soon aft…

At the Exceptional Women Alliance (EWA), we bring together senior executive women who mentor one another to achieve both professional success and personal fulfillment through trusted peer relationships. As founder, chair, and CEO of EWA, I have the privilege of highlighting the insights of women leaders shaping industries across the globe. This month, I introduce Dymeka Harrison, a commercialization and growth executive with more than two decades of experience leading commercial organizations across diagnostics, life sciences, and healthcare. She has worked with early-stage startups, growth-stage companies, and global enterprises, and regularly advises founders, board…

Plane comfort is important yet notoriously hard to achieve. But now one airline is set to offer a cozier way to fly that won’t break the bank: extendable couches for economy passengers. On Tuesday, United Airlines announced the new, more comfortable seating arrangement — a set of economy seats that transform into a couch during long-haul flights. The offer is the first of its kind for any North American airline. The new seating arrangement, which was built from a patent held by Air New Zealand, a United partner, will be called United Relax Row. The seats will be located between United Economy and United Premium Plus®. The airline will offer up to 12 Relax Rox section…

The most impressive move by three-time world surfing champ John Florence in his new video series isn’t riding a wave; it’s flying across open ocean on a catamaran while holding his puking 1-year-old son over a bucket. The new six-part series called Vela, directed by Florence and produced with outdoor gear and apparel company Yeti, embodies a broader shift in how the iconic surfer is approaching both his career and the goal behind his namesake brand, Florence. After winning his third World Surf League title in September 2024, Florence chose to leave the pro surfing tour to sail around the world with his wife, Lauryn, and son, Darwin. They lived off the grid, e…

Before I ever met Sam Kececi, I had already interviewed him on his career, his use of AI, and his thoughts on data privacy. In this case, “him” might be a loose word, depending on your definition—I had spoken not with Kececi himself, but with an AI chatbot that he designed to recall his memories, mimic his personality, and share his opinions. Kececi is an ex-Amazon software engineer who, since August 2025, has been building an AI company called Sentience. The real Kececi, who I spoke to after interviewing his personal AI, describes Sentience as “the digital version of you, but with perfect memory.” It’s a chatbot that uses your emails, Slack messages, Apple Notes…

For years, parents, teenagers, pediatricians, educators, and whistleblowers have pushed the idea that social media is detrimental to young people’s mental health and can lead to addiction, eating disorders, sexual exploitation, and suicide. For the first time, juries in two states took their side. In Los Angeles on Wednesday, a jury found both Meta and YouTube liable for harms to children using their services. In New Mexico, a jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. Tech watchdog groups, families, and children’s advocates cheered the jury decisions. “Th…

Alex Balazs has spent more than two decades inside Intuit, starting as an engineer working on early versions of QuickBooks Online, when moving financial workflows to the internet still felt experimental. Now, as CTO, he is helping lead a more radical shift: turning financial software into systems that can think and act on a user’s behalf. “This combines the speed and scale of AI with human judgment and accountability,” he tells Fast Company. For decades, financial software has functioned as a ledger, categorizing transactions and generating reports about what has already happened. That model is beginning to break. Advances in AI are pushing the category toward real-ti…

Tax refunds are typically a welcomed reprieve for millions of Americans facing challenging financial times. While many tax filers are set to receive higher refunds this year, around 1.4 million Americans who typically receive paper refund checks may have to wait longer for their refund this year because the federal government has moved to phase out the paper check option. The deadline to file your taxes is April 15. But some filers may have to wait six weeks to 10 weeks longer to see their refund checks if they didn’t provide direct deposit information on their returns this year. The IRS is sending notices to those taxpayers of the extended wait time and the actions t…

Some of us old-timers fondly remember the satisfying clickity-clack of a physical smartphone keyboard. Back when email was king and multi-paragraph arguments on social networks were few and far between. Well, if you’re someone who longs for the days of firing off missives at breakneck speed, I’ve got good news: The physical keyboard is experiencing a renaissance, and it’s looking like it’s not just a nostalgic gimmick. Yes, hardware keyboards are officially making a comeback, and there are a few devices leading the charge that you’ll definitely want to keep an eye on. Unihertz Titan 2 Elite Now, Unihertz is no stranger to this market. The company already ma…