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We’re in the midst of a child care crisis in America, but when fathers want to take on more childcare to equal their partners’ efforts, they are being stymied by their employers. Max, who requested to go by a pseudonym, spent 15 years as a contractor: no benefits, little job security, and frequent change. When recruited for a full-time role, he was upfront about his wife’s pregnancy and his need to take parental leave when their first-born child was due. “I said, ‘I’m going to be flexible—I don’t have to take off right away and I can do it in stints.’ I was offering these different plans because it was important to me for the company to be successful,” Max says. “…

Facing stagnant sales, Panera Bread is aiming to become one of the restaurant industry’s rare comeback stories. The fast-casual chain’s latest move is the introduction of new “Salad Stuffers,” a fresh spin on one of Panera Bread’s most iconic menu items: the bread bowl. Instead of filling a sourdough bread bowl with soup, however, it’s stuffing a handheld Italian-style roll with salad. The idea sounds simple enough, and yet CEO Paul Carbone says Panera thoroughly tested the innovation before adding it to the menu. A team of chefs and bakers experimented with 20 different breads to find one with the desired “fluffy and soft” texture. Any salad on Panera’s menu,…

The airport is chaos. Lines snake beyond the designated barriers and out the doors as frazzled travelers tug their luggage and scowl at their phones, their grimaced faces even more dramatic in the harsh lighting. I stand in the security queue, sensing the stress emanating from everyone around me like swarms of buzzing flies. A man behind me huffs with dramatic indignation, a couple ahead bickers in hissed whispers “we should have left earlier!”, and someone’s roller bag keeps thwacking my heels. My fists clench as irritation winds me tighter. The security checkpoint seems miles away and my flight is in an hour. I feel myself being sucked into the collective vortex…

As a teenager, my Sony Walkman was my most treasured possession. It was a portal to another world that let me consume music in industrial quantities. By the early 1990s, it wasn’t new—Sony invented it in the late ’70s—yetit still held incredible power. Sony sold more than 220 million units globally. When one died, often from overuse, I’d use a birthday or Christmas present to upgrade it, usually with a trip to an electronics store with my Dad. Those places felt mythical. That feeling came flooding back when I visited a big-box electronics store with my kids. Retail is under pressure as e-commerce reshapes how we shop. But my overriding thought was: where did the e…

The spring bloom of cherry blossoms is a stunning sight. Across Japan, Korea, and places like Washington, D.C., the trees burst with dense, pink flowers for just one or two weeks, bringing millions of tourists. But climate change is threatening these blooms. As the planet warms, our winters are getting milder. And those mild winters can delay the flowering of cherry blossom trees by up to 32 days, according to a new study by researchers at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute in Kyushu, Japan, and at Boston University. Without enough cold weather, the trees don’t know that winter has passed, and so they don’t know to come out of their winter do…

Google’s Chrome is taking browser tabs vertical. The company announced this week that it’s beginning to roll out an option for users to stack their tabs in a panel on the left side of the browser instead of horizontally at the top. For tab hoarders like me—who get lost in a million tabs while trying to remember which favicon went with which website, or who have multiple websites open with the same favicon—vertical tabs will give us more information to determine which tab is where. It even works when you have so many open that you have to scroll to reach the end. The vertical tab interface has two modes: a collapsed version with just the favicons, and an expand…

Remember the iPod? It’s making a quiet comeback. Four years after Apple killed off its digital music player, secondhand sales are surging. It’s fueled in part by young people interested not just in its retro looks but a desire to listen to music in a focused way and with playlists not determined by algorithms. “There’s a growing trend, particularly amongst younger users, to mitigate the ease with which they can be distracted by smartphones, often driven by mental health and well-being concerns,” said Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight. “Having a dedicated music device, such as an iPod, is a good way to reduce your dependence on a smartphone and avoid being dra…

Over four decades, I have had the opportunity to consult with almost all of the major companies in the PC, consumer electronics, and telecommunications industries. In 1991, when the PC industry was barely a decade old, Acer’s founder Stan Shih invited me to tour the company’s new PC factory in Taiwan. What I saw wasn’t just a factory–it was the foundation of a new world order in technology manufacturing. Over the years, I’ve gained a deeper understanding of Taiwan’s crucial role in the global technology ecosystem. Semiconductor leaders like TSMC, along with manufacturing powerhouses such as Compal, Foxconn, Quanta, Pegatron, and Wistron, have built an ecosystem unmat…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Did Anthropic just soft-launch the scariest AI model yet? On Tuesday Anthropic announced that it would deploy its newest and most powerful AI model, Claude Mythos Preview, to a new industry initiative (Project Glasswing) meant to safeguard critical software infrastructure against cyberattacks. That sounded good, but it obscured the real news somewhat—that one of the big three AI labs has now developed a model that could, in the wrong hands, be a super-dangerous cyberweapon. I…

For the next two weekends (April 10-12 and April 17-19), Los Angeles is going to be quieter than normal. This is because many Angelenos will be hitting the road to attend the popular Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival located in Indio, California. For those who aren’t able to attend in person, never fear: There’s a free livestreaming option that allows you to avoid port-a-potties. Here’s everything you need to know about both weekends of this rocking event, including how to watch from your living room. How did Coachella begin? The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was created by concert promoters Rick Van Santen and Paul Tollett in 1999. T…

For some evangelical Christians, faith is about having a personal relationship with Jesus. At $1.99 per minute, the tech company Just Like Me is taking that concept to a new level. Users of the platform can join video calls with an avatar of Jesus generated by artificial intelligence. Like other religious AI tools on the market, it offers words of prayer and encouragement in various languages. With the occasional glitch, it remembers previous conversations and speaks through not-quite-synced lips. “You do feel a little accountable to the AI,” CEO Chris Breed said. “They’re your friend. You’ve made an attachment.” The rush to create faith-based generative AI is…

Below, Majid Fotuhi shares five key insights from his new book, The Invincible Brain: The Clinically Proven Plan to Age-Proof Your Brain and Stay Sharp for Life. Majid is a neurologist, professor, and neuroscientist, with more than three decades of experience—mostly at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Medical School. Over the years, he has treated thousands of patients with memory loss, concussion, ADHD, brain fog, and early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. What’s the big idea? Your brain is not fixed. Your intelligence is not limited. And aging does not have to mean decline. By working on improving the five pillars of brain health in your life, anyone—at any age—can ta…

Sam Mintesnot had checked off everything she possibly could have from a long list of to-dos in preparation for the Coachella music festival. She crafted the best outfits, got her hair and nails done, booked a one-way ticket to Los Angeles and flew out on Tuesday with a spreadsheet full of ideas for videos she could post related to the festival. The only problem was that just days before the Coachella kicked off on Friday, she didn’t have a ticket — at least, not yet. Mintesnot is a content creator, and she was seeking an invitation from a brand to join them at the annual festival in Indio, California, that is sometimes called an “influencer Olympics.” She posted a…

If you pay to keep ads out of your YouTube experience, keep an eye on your monthly bill. The Google-owned streaming service quietly announced today that it would be raising prices across its plans in an email to U.S. subscribers. Individual YouTube Premium subscribers will soon pay $15.99 a month, a two dollar increase from the previous price of $13.99. For family plan subscribers, pricing will jump all the way from $22.99 to $26.99. YouTube Premium Lite subscribers will pay $8.99 a month, up from $7.99. The change to YouTube Premium plans, which will go into effect at the end of May, is the second time that the price of YouTube Premium has ballooned in the l…

Frugal founders are often praised for trying to stay within budget. But when the founder happens to be the daughter of one of the world’s richest people, the expectations seem to be different. In a viral post on Thursday that has sparked a debate over fair pay for creators and the power dynamics of negotiations, a lifestyle influencer posted on X what appeared to be a screenshot of a conversation with Phoebe Gates, cofounder of AI shopping agent startup Phia, and the youngest daughter of billionaires Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. “When a billionaire’s daughter says you’re ‘out of budget’ Girl, pls,” the post read. The conversation allegedly showed Gates…

Amazon Prime members in the US can regularly save on gas, but many might not even know it. Now might be the best time to jump on it—for a limited time only, fuel savings can double. The savings perk dates back to October 2024, when Amazon partnered with, BP’s rewards and fueling app earnify, allowing Prime members save 10 cents a gallon. Now, from April 3 to May 29, members can double the savings once a week on Fuel-Up Fridays. To start saving, Amazon Prime members need to activate the perk and must link their accounts to earnify. Then, members can find the 7,500 participating BP, Amoco, Thorntons, and AM/PM gas stations and fuel up there. “You can then apply…

Artificial intelligence is rapidly learning to autonomously design and run biological experiments, but the systems intended to govern those capabilities are struggling to keep pace. AI company OpenAI and biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks announced in February 2026 that OpenAI’s flagship model GPT-5 had autonomously designed and run 36,000 biological experiments. It did this through a robotic cloud laboratory, a facility where automated equipment controlled remotely by computers carries out experiments. The AI model proposed study designs, and robots carried them out and fed the data back to the model for the next round. Humans set the goal, and the machines did much of …

When the NFL Draft comes to Pittsburgh next week, civic leaders will be using the spotlight to celebrate football’s Steelers—and the city’s growing reputation as a technology and artificial intelligence hub. The events include an AI pitch competition where judges including area native Mark Cuban will award startups from a 1.75 million prize pool—with preference given to companies with a presence in Pennsylvania. There’s a growing number of startups that fit that bill. As the name suggests, VC firm Valley Capital Partners is based in Silicon Valley. But for the past few years, firm general partner Mitchell Kokko has been living across the country in Pittsburgh. …

Elon Musk wants to execute the largest initial public offering in history, chasing a staggering $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion valuation for SpaceX. To justify this unprecedented price tag, he is aggressively hyping a cosmic vision: launching 1 million artificial intelligence servers into orbit to create a 100-gigawatt space data center in the next decade. He plans to one day build a factory on the moon to catapult these servers to Earth’s orbit. If that sounds like the background plot of a boring space movie, it’s because it is science fiction. The TL;DR: here is that Musk’s blueprint is fundamentally broken, according to experts in physics, aerospace engineering…

Have you noticed that in the current discourse around artificial intelligence, the narrative often slips into one of two extremes? There is either a techno-utopian dream of total automation or a dystopian nightmare where human agency is erased. But there are other options! As we navigate this inflection point in civilization, I invite you to consider a third path: pragmatic optimism. And that’s because we are currently in the midst of a human revolution, not a tech revolution. The most successful organizations of 2026 and beyond will not be those that simply use AI to do more things faster. Instead, they will be the ones that use AI as a creativity accelerator, fr…