What's on Your Mind?

In late 2025, Interpol coordinated a global operation across 134 nations, seizing roughly 30,000 live animals, confiscating illegal plant and timber products, and identifying about 1,100 suspected wildlife traffickers for national police to investigate. Wildlife trafficking is one of the most lucrative illicit industries worldwide. It nets between US$7 billion and $23 billion per year, according to the Global Environment Facility, a group of nearly 200 nations as well as businesses and nonprofits that fund environmental improvement and protection projects. People buy and sell a wide range of items, including live animals, plant powders and oils, ivory carvings, an…

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes fell sharply in January as higher home prices and possibly harsh winter weather kept many prospective homebuyers on the sidelines despite easing mortgage rates. Existing home sales sank 8.4% last month from December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.91 million units, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. That’s the biggest monthly decline in nearly four years and the slowest annualized sales pace in more than two years. Sales fell 4.4% compared with January last year. The latest sales figure fell short of the 4.105 million pace economists were expecting, according to FactSet. “The decrease in sales …

Adam Mosseri, the head of Meta’s Instagram, testified Wednesday during a landmark social media trial in Los Angeles that he disagrees with the idea that people can be clinically addicted to social media platforms. The question of addiction is a key pillar of the case, where plaintiffs seek to hold social media companies responsible for harms to children who use their platforms. Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube are the two remaining defendants in the case, which TikTok and Snap have settled. At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose lawsuit could determine how thousands of similar lawsuits against social media co…

Think about how many emails you receive each day. Then how many of those include the phrase “please find attached” in the body. One X user has made a plea to retire the phrase, a relic leftover from a time when business communication relied on typewritten letters posted in envelopes, which actually included attached documents to be found. The post quickly went viral, gaining nearly 15 million views since it was posted earlier this week. While the user doesn’t elaborate why exactly they personally take issue with the phrase, or what to say instead, the post had the desired effect, with many weighing in with their own takes on modern email etiquette. Some agr…

Daniel Kokotajlo predicted the end of the world would happen in April 2027. In “AI 2027” — a document outlining the impending impacts of AI, published in April 2025 — the former OpenAI employee and several peers announced that by April 2027, unchecked AI development would lead to superintelligence and consequently destroy humanity. The authors, however are going back on their predictions. Now, Kokotajlo forecasts superintelligence will land in 2034, but he doesn’t know if and when AI will destroy humanity. In “AI 2027,” Kokotajlo argued that superintelligence will emerge through “fully autonomous coding,” enabling AI systems to drive their own development. The r…

Russia has attempted to fully block WhatsApp in the country, the company said, the latest move in an ongoing government effort to tighten control over the internet. A WhatsApp spokesperson said late Wednesday that the Russian authorities’ action was intended to “drive users to a state-owned surveillance app,” a reference to Russia’s own state-supported MAX messaging app that’s seen by critics as a surveillance tool. “Trying to isolate over 100 million people from private and secure communication is a backwards step and can only lead to less safety for people in Russia,” the WhatsApp spokesperson said. “We continue to do everything we can to keep people connected.” Russ…

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. Is ‘AI slop’ code here to stay? A few months ago I wrote about the dark side of vibe coding tools: they often generate code that introduces bugs or security vulnerabilities that surface later. They can solve an immediate problem while making a codebase harder to maintain over time. It’s true that more developers are using AI coding assistants, and using them more frequently and for more tasks. But many seem to be weighing the time saved today against the cleanup they may face tomor…

James Van Der Beek was one of the biggest stars of the late 1990s and early 2000s. His family still couldn’t afford the cost of cancer. The actor, 48, best known for his portrayal of Dawson Leery in the ’90s hit Dawson’s Creek, died Wednesday. Van Der Beek’s passing comes a little more than a year after he announced on social media that he was battling colorectal cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2023. And while the actor and father’s untimely death is undeniably tragic, there’s another heartbreaking piece of the story to be told. His family was desperately struggling to afford the cost of his cancer treatment. Despite Van Der Beek’s successful career, w…

Meta announced on February 10 that it’s introducing a new AI animation feature that lets users turn their still profile photos into AI-generated looping videos. It reads like an uncanny valley version of yesteryear’s Boomerang. The option to animate appears when users click “Animate profile picture” on their Facebook avatars, and the feature gives a limited set of animation options, including party hat, confetti, wave, and heart, in which a photo’s subject makes a heart shape with their hands. Meta says there will be additional options in the future for “seasonal moments and special events.” The tech is imperfect and can only work with what it’s got. Meta says…

Perusing the grocery aisle in the Westside Market on 23rd Street in Manhattan, you might not even notice the screens. They look just like paper price labels and, alongside a bar code, use a handwriting-style font we’ve come to associate with a certain merchant folksiness. They’re not particularly bright or showy. The only clues that they’re not ordinary sticky shelf labels are a barely distinguishable light bulb and, on some, a small QR code. These are electronic shelf labels, chip-enabled screens that some stores are now using to display product prices. Unlike their paper predecessors, the prices aren’t printed in ink but rendered in pixels, and they can change insta…

For most of modern finance, one number has quietly dictated who gets ahead and who gets left out: the credit score. It was a breakthrough when it arrived in the 1950s, becoming an elegant shortcut for a complex decision. But shortcuts age. And in a world driven by data, digital behavior, and real-time signals, the score is increasingly misaligned with how people actually live and manage money. We’re now at a turning point. A foundational system, long considered untouchable, is finally being reconstructed by using AI—specifically, advanced machine learning models built for risk prediction—to extract more intelligence from existing data. These are rigorously tested, wel…

January filled our inboxes with productivity advice. Set stretch goals! Think bigger! Dream audaciously! What was conspicuously absent from all that exhortation was any practical guidance on how to move from grand vision to daily action without becoming paralyzed by the enormity of what we’ve committed to. And now, it’s February. Here’s a counterintuitive truth I’ve learned from decades of navigating complex creative challenges: The secret to tackling big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAG) isn’t summoning more willpower or grinding harder. It’s learning to approach complexity the way babies learn to eat solid food: one tiny, digestible bite at a time. I call it t…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During an earnings call in June 2025, KB Home’s McGibney—whose company prefers outright home price cuts over incentives when adjustments are needed—said that some buyers turning to competitors are effectively overpaying for new builds to obtain mortgage rate buydowns. If those buyers need to sell in the near term, he warned, they could find themselves underwater and unable to recoup the artificially high base prices. “I believe that there are [builder] customers that are overpaying for the home to effectively get an incentive… They may potentially be…

At $600, Jamie Haller loafers aren’t an impulse buy, but they’ve become one of those rare fashion items people evangelize anyway. The shoes, which resemble classic men’s leather loafers, have quietly built a cult following thanks to a surprising claim: Fans—from TikTokers to Wirecutter—say they mold to your feet the moment you step into them. This didn’t happen by accident. The Los Angeles-based designer spent years seeking out a factory that would be willing to make her loafers using sacchetto construction, a labor-intensive Italian technique more often found in bespoke men’s footwear. “Take all of the hard bits of the loafer out,” she remembers telling the cobbler i…

On the way to work, you see a TikTok video of the president admitting to a crime. In the elevator, you hear your favorite band, but the song is completely unfamiliar. At your desk, you open an email from an executive in another department. It contains valid sales information and discusses a relevant legal issue, but the wording sounds oddly wooden. After lunch, the CEO sends all managers a link to a new app she had casually proposed just a few days earlier. Later, you interview a job candidate via Zoom, but the person looks different from his LinkedIn picture. Any or all of these things—the video, the song, the email, the CEO’s app, the candidate—could have been gener…

Every TV and movie critic is loving to hate on Darren Aronofsky these days. The Academy Award-nominated filmmaker—creator of lyrical, surreal, and deeply human movies like Black Swan, The Whale, Mother!, and Pi—has released an AI-generated series called On This Day . . . 1776 to commemorate the semiquincentennial anniversary of the American Revolution. Though the series has garnered millions of views, commentators everywhere call it “a horror,” slamming Aronofsky’s work for how stiff the faces look, how everything morphs unrealistically. Although calling it “requiem for a filmmaker” seems excessive, they are not wrong about these faults. The series, created using real…

For many Black tech founders, raising venture capital is often positioned as the ultimate milestone. It signals that your idea is validated, your business is taken “seriously,” and opportunities begin to take shape. As the managing partner of an early stage VC firm, and a 3X Black tech founder that speaks and meets with thousands of founders a year, I can tell you the truth is far more nuanced. Venture capital can be powerful, but it’s not for everyone. Before chasing your first check, founders need clarity, preparation, and strategy. Fundraising is not just about storytelling or networking; it’s about understanding the system you’re stepping into and deciding whethe…

“Start in a low-level position and work your way upward.” Does that even apply anymore? In fact, the “career ladder” doesn’t work for everyone anymore. Right now, as technology disrupts the work rules, there are no clear paths forward. The linear career path changed somewhere between the rise of the gig economy and the rise of artificial intelligence. Companies are restructuring. Some industries may collapse entirely in the next five years. I’ve gone from studying law to studying software entrepreneurship to being a self-improvement essayist. My career is still an “experiment in progress.” The world of work is changing. And I’m changing with it. The people who ma…

When my business went through a difficult season, I turned to my friend, ChatGPT. I asked the Large Language Model (LLM) for insights and advice on how to leverage my strengths and pivot my business as budgets for women’s leadership programs shifted downward. When the well-framed answers started pouring in, I didn’t pause to check in with myself and ask if my opinion diverged from ChatGPT or whether this advice aligned with my values and mission. In fact, I didn’t even think to ask ChatGPT what might work in my favor if I just stayed the course. I was a “LLeMming”: a term Lila Shroff uses to describe compulsive AI users in The Atlantic. Lila Shroff shares that just as th…

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…