What's on Your Mind?

In a 1944 issue of Arts & Architecture magazine, the architect and designer Charles Eames sounded an alarm. “It has been estimated that one million five hundred thousand houses each year for a period of 10 years will be needed to relieve the urgent housing problem of this country,” he wrote. “The enormity of such a need cannot even be partially satisfied by building techniques as we have known and used them in the past. Large scale industry would seem to be the only logical means by which we can achieve an enterprise of such proportion.” Throughout their careers, Charles and Ray Eames explored how industrial production could impact home building, most famously th…

If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to spend less time on devices and get more “cultured,” the Metropolitan Opera is here to help—even if you don’t find yourself in New York City. On Saturday, January 24, 2026, at 1 p.m. ET in select theaters, it will premiere a special “Live in HD” presentation of its recent production, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Let’s take a look at the plot and the artists involved, before we get into more details on the logistics of how to see it. What is ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ about? Although this work is considered a modern opera, the action in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay …

Few Zoom calls have made me quite as self-conscious as my chat with Robert Biswas-Diener. An executive coach and psychologist, he recently coauthored a book on “radical listening.” Like many people, I’d assumed that I was a pretty good listener, but what if I’ve been doing it all wrong? By the end of the conversation, my fears have been confirmed—of the half-dozen skills he describes, I demonstrate only half. The good news is that we can all improve, and the advantages appear to be endless. By lending a more attentive ear to the people we meet, we become better negotiators, collaborators, and managers, while enhancing our own mental health. “It can be an an…

Shopping for a used car? Hertz is making it easier than ever to buy a car from its fleet: You can now browse, finance, and purchase vehicles entirely online, the company announced Tuesday. The car rental giant has revamped its website, HertzCarSales.com, allowing customers to now browse thousands of vehicles, get a trade-in offer, get prequalified, and secure financing so they complete the purchase entirely online. These changes mean that car buyers no longer need to visit one of Hertz’s 45 retail locations to complete the purchase. “Our new e-commerce platform marks a major step forward in modernizing how we serve our customers with a seamless journey from browsi…

For the first time in over two decades, Capri Sun is expanding its single serving offerings with a colorful new bottle—but don’t worry, the iconic pouch is here to stay. Capri Sun’s new bottles are hitting shelves nationwide today at Kroger, Circle K, some Walmart locations, and regional convenience stores like Meijer and Hy-vee. They come in the brand’s three most popular flavors: Fruit Punch, Pacific Cooler, and Strawberry Kiwi. According to the company, each bottle contains about double the liquid contents of a traditional pouch, at 12 fluid ounces. However, for those interested in a smaller serving size and that classic form factor, Capri Sun pouches aren’t actual…

For its 50th anniversary, Zara has partnered with 50 designers and creators for a collection you might not expect from a fast-fashion mall brand. The Spanish fashion retailer unveiled its 50th anniversary collection at Paris Fashion Week with collaborators that include photographer Annie Leibovitz, supermodel Cindy Crawford, stage designer Es Devlin, and musician Robbie Williams. Available worldwide beginning Oct. 6, the collection does include plenty to wear (Leibovitz contributed a photo for a t-shirt), but what stands out most are the non-apparel items. This is about a whole lot more than clothes. Devlin, whose build stages for artists like Adele, Beyoncé, …

You don’t need tickets to see Metallica in concert anymore—just a $3,499 Apple Vision Pro headset. Starting today, Apple Vision Pro users can experience Metallica’s 2024 Mexico City concert as an immersive, ultra-high resolution experience complete with 180-degree video and Spatial Audio. The concert, filmed on September 29 as part of the sold-out finale of Metallica’s M72 World Tour, includes fan-favorites like “One” and “Enter Sandman.” “With Metallica on Apple Vision Pro, you feel like you’re right there: front row, backstage, and even on stage with one of the biggest bands of all time,” Tor Myhren, Apple’s vice president of Marketing Communications, said in a…

Nvidia has put its name behind a fledgling effort to put mini-data centers beside people’s homes in boxes that look like HVAC units. It’s a “power” play, considering that the main bottleneck to building out more data center capacity is not money or chips, but rather retrofitting the electrical grid to supply the power. The idea, put forward by a California smart utility box company called Span, is to put the GPUs where the power has already been allocated—at the home. Span says the average household uses only about 42% of the electricity allotted to it, and rarely reaches peak usage. Span’s smart utility boxes detect that, and steer the extra available power over to t…

On the same day Shein opened its first store in Paris, the French government said Wednesday it will suspend Shein’s website over its alleged online sale of childlike “sex dolls” online until it complies with French law, according to the Associated Press. Fast Company has reached out to Shein for comment. A spokesperson for the company told Reuters it was working with authorities; and it has banned sex dolls on its site. A French consumer watchdog discovered the dolls and weapons on the site over the weekend, per Reuters. (Under French law, the government can order businesses to remove illegal content from their websites, such as child pornography within 24 hours, …

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…

Every year, American taxpayers are eligible to put a certain amount of money into their retirement accounts, including 401(k)’s and IRAs. But each year, the upper allowable threshold for these accounts tends to rise. This is done in order for the limits to keep up with the rate of inflation. And now, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has announced its new limits for 2026. Here’s what you need to know. What is the IRS 2026 401(k) limit? According to a notice published by the IRS on November 13, the limit on individual contributions to various retirement accounts in 2026 is rising. If you have a 401(k), 403(b), governmental 457 plan, or the federal government’s …

The new orthopedic wing at Sanford Health’s hospital campus in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has a unique patient-centric amenity that few other hospitals can offer. On the top two floors of the facility, which conducts surgeries and emergency services and connects to a nearby delivery ward, there is now a hotel. In largely rural South Dakota, where a trip to the hospital often means a drive halfway across the state, hospital patients now have the option to stay overnight ahead of a big procedure under the same roof as the hospital. “It’s much more convenient for patients to go down an elevator ride for eight floors and check in for surgery than commuting across town or …

The AI search firm Perplexity routinely lets users try out state-of-the-art large language models on its site, but the company moved quickly to put Chinese company DeepSeek’s new R1 model front and center in its user interface. That offers users a chance to find out what the buzz is all about, without sending their data through the DeepSeek app, which is hosted in China. While some AI thought leaders such as Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner, Scale AI’s Alexander Wang, and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey hurried to debunk or downplay DeepSeek’s achievements, Perplexity’s CEO Aravind Srinivas believes the Chinese company’s models are something special. “In the past few years, the…

Instacart just became the first company to offer an end-to-end integrated shopping experience with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s yet another signal that AI is about to upend the way we shop—and, maybe, the way we cook. The new partnership was announced by Instacart and OpenAI on December 8. To use the interface, ChatGPT users need to make an Instacart account and then surface Instacart within their chat thread using a prompt like, “Instacart, help me shop for apple pie ingredients.” From there, they can discuss recipes, ingredient swaps, and their preferred store with ChatGPT, which will help them order all of the items they need from Instacart without ever changing tabs or …

As I uploaded a 1940s photo of my grandpa Max and hit a few buttons in Google’s Veo 3 video generator, I saw a familiar family photo transform from black and white to color. Then, my grandpa stepped out of the photo and walked confidently toward the camera, his army uniform perfectly pressed as his arms swung at the sides of his lanky frame. This is the kind of thing AI lets you do now—virtually bring back the dead. As a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch this weekend highlighted, though, just because we can reanimate our departed loved ones, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should. Grilling the dog The sketch, which The Atlantic has alrea…

Editor’s note: Dr. Cree Scott spent her career solving a critical puzzle: why some leaders inspire unwavering loyalty while others struggle with constant turnover, despite similar technical skills and business acumen. As a psychologist and workplace performance expert, her expertise lay in helping leaders navigate the psychological dynamics that drive performance, organizational resilience, and sustainable growth. She was the CEO/founder of Serenity Psy Consulting and served on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. Her book, The Missing Peace in Leadership: Reclaiming Connection and Purpose in a World of Distraction, was published on April 14, 2026. Dr. Scott …

I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it. With the best of intentions, we set big goals for our future: get a work promotion, lose 20 pounds, run a marathon. And too often, we give up a few months later, realizing we bit off more than we could chew. Why? We get enamored with the idea but the execution? Not so much. Goals can seem straightforward, but without a specific plan or realistic milestones, they quickly fizzle out. The Appeal and Problem of Big Goals Big goals can quickly inspire us and make us feel like we’re putting effort into forward progress. But goals are only as good as the plans that support them. You can’t build your dream house without an a…

We’re in our optimization era: Increasingly connected, efficient, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, incapable of giving anything our full attention. But I don’t want to be optimized anymore. Algorithms predict what we’ll watch, AI generates what we’ll read, and marketing systems are built specifically to remove friction from discovery to purchase. Feeds blur together, and messages feel interchangeable. Connection—the thing marketing is supposed to create—has become exponentially harder to achieve. We need to bring the friction back, and that doesn’t come from obsessing over scale. Connection isn’t about reaching everyone at once; it’s about showing up meaningfully in the c…

Your inbox is brimming with new emails, and you need to decide which to reply to quickly and which to ignore. You try to schedule something for next week, but your calendar is already packed with recurring meetings. So many employees have asked for a particular day off—or requested a particular shift schedule—that you can’t grant all their requests. You post a job listing for a single position and get 250 applications. These situations arise constantly in our work lives, and their analogues come up in our personal lives. But despite their frequency, we often struggle with how to handle them. We barrel through our inbox and move things around on our calendar. We follow…

Calling all pizza lovers—so, yes, everyone—your dream job awaits. Pizza Hut is hiring someone to eat free pizza for an entire year. Not only that, but the company will pay you $31,415.92 to do so. Math aficionados might notice that the Pizza Hut salary is actually the first seven digits of pi. Pizza Hut’s hiring of a “Hut Crust Connoisseur” comes ahead of Pi Day on March 14. The $31,415.92 is a significant jump from the £5,000 ($6,700) that Pizza Hut Delivery offered for a UK-based Chief Crust Taster in 2021. But then it pales in comparison to Wendy’s $100,000 offer for a similar job last week. Still, it’s not a bad deal. Here’s everything you need to k…

The annual Lyrid meteor shower is back, reaching its peak on Tuesday evening and at predawn on Wednesday. On average, 10 to 20 meteors are produced per hour during a Lyrid shower. But, in some rare occasions “outbursts” can occur, with up to 100 meteors produced in an hour. According to the American Meteor Society, Lyrids will be mostly visible in the Northern hemisphere at dawn, although limited availability will also be available to those in the Southern Hemisphere. The Lyrid shower is among the oldest recorded meteor showers, dating back as far as 2,700 years. The meteor shower is visible when Earth travels through the path of Comet Thatcher, rendering a t…

Humans, for all our intellectual sophistication, are still tribal creatures at heart. We tend to gravitate toward people who are like us—individuals who look like us, think like us, share our values, and even mirror our quirks and tastes. On the surface, this makes intuitive sense. It explains the evolutionary origins of empathy: we feel the joys, sorrows, and struggles of others more deeply when we perceive them as part of our own “in-group.” But here’s the catch: What feels good for individuals can be disastrous for diversity. If left unchecked, our biological instinct to seek sameness undermines one of the core ingredients of high-performing organizations—diver…

You’ve probably heard that people don’t leave their job, they leave their manager. It’s a popular saying because it’s often true. Having a toxic boss, however, is different than having one you simply don’t like. If your boss is toxic, you need to take steps to protect yourself. But if it’s simply a matter of personalities not jiving, slow your job-search roll, suggests Stephanie Chung, author of Ally Leadership, How to Lead People Who Are Not Like You. “There are people in your family you probably don’t like,” she says. “But if you like your company, you like your colleagues, you like how much money you’re making, you like your benefits, and the only thing you don’t l…

There are few things everyone can rally behind as much as finding a lost dog. But what if that mission is actually a workaround for mass surveillance? That’s the question many people are asking following a Super Bowl commercial from Ring, Amazon’s doorbell camera and home security brand. The 30-second video shows a series of missing dog posters and claims that 10 million pets go missing every year. It pitches Ring’s Search Party feature as the solution. Launched in November, Search Party takes a photo of the pet and taps into Ring cameras across the area. They can then use AI to identify the missing pet and send an alert. The ad claims that at least one dog …