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Your four-year-old needs a bike. The cheap ones from a big box store will work, sure—but they’ll be heavy, clunky, and harder for them to learn on. The premium Woom bike weighs half as much—but it costs $400. You want the best for your kid, but do you want to drop that much for something they’ll use for a few months? With a bit of internet sleuthing, you might come across an alternative. There’s a 50,000-person Facebook group devoted entirely to buying, selling, and trading used Woom bikes across the United States. And the brand noticed this group bubbling up. But Facebook Marketplace has limitations—transactions aren’t always secure, and buyers can’t easily searc…

Imagine walking into your elementary school library and finding it transformed overnight into a forest at dusk. Mossy green canopies arch over the bookshelves. Glowing mushrooms create a path between display cases. Twinkle lights flicker through the leaves like fireflies. This is the Everglow Forest, one of the recent book fair themes produced by Literati, a startup that currently runs about 4,000 book fairs a year. At some schools, librarians and PTA volunteers build it out into something approaching an art installation, creating a hand-crafted world that children want to wander through for hours. Wikipedia For a seven-year-old, clutching a crumpled twenty-do…

AI is saving workers more than two hours a day. That sounds like an unqualified win, and in many ways, it is. But beneath the productivity headlines, something more complicated is happening. Employees are getting faster, but some are also getting less confident, less skilled, and less certain they can do their jobs without a machine doing much of the thinking for them. That tension is the defining workforce challenge of 2026, and most companies aren’t prepared to address it. New research from GoTo, conducted in partnership with Workplace Intelligence, surveyed 2,500 global employees and IT leaders on AI use and sentiment. The findings tell a story about a workforce ca…

It used to be that my friend Kristin had a vague sense of how her husband’s day went. He’d come home with a story to share or sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he seemed annoyed, and when he was in one of those moods, she didn’t press. They’d kick their feet up, pour some wine, and talk about the upcoming weekend. Now they both work remote and all of a sudden, she knows a lot more about her husband’s day. “I know how many times he’s opened the fridge,” she told me recently. “Seven times. Seven times before lunch.” She wasn’t angry when she said it. “I love him,” she said. “But I don’t know that I was meant to know this much.” You’re seeing too much I’ve been thi…

Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary doubled down on his belief that true wealth requires at least $5 million in liquid assets. “You’d be amazed, how many wealthy people that say they’re rich do not have liquidity,” O’Leary said on Fox Business. O’Leary said he practices what he preaches, keeping at least $5 million of his own wealth in Treasury bills—short-term U.S. government securities that can be quickly converted to cash. The Canadian businessman argues that true financial security means being able to access your wealth at a moment’s notice, be it to weather an emergency or to seize an investment opportunity. A house, a private business, or illiquid assets m…

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…

As large language models seep into everyday life, some worry the technology could trigger a mass political realignment. Chatbots, the theory goes, can be shaped by training data and system instructions to privilege certain worldviews, and users who interact with them daily may gradually absorb those biases at scale. But Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan cautions against assuming such a future is inevitable. LLMs may be powerful, he says, but that doesn’t mean they’ll influence people in the ways we expect, or even in the ways their creators intend. There are several reasons an AI-driven political shift may be harder to engineer than it sounds. M…

The Onion is developing a documentary for America’s 250th anniversary, called Birth of a Nation, a project CEO Ben Collins says reflects the company’s growing focus beyond satire articles and headlines. “For the 250th anniversary of America, we’re making a documentary called ‘Birth of a Nation,’ which is great,” Collins said onstage at the Fast Company Most Innovative Companies Summit, in a conversation with Jill Bernstein. The documentary is one of several projects underway at The Onion, following its acquisition by Collins and a group of investors in 2024. Before buying the publication, Collins spent years at NBC News covering extremism and misinformation on…

In a major salvo in the AI race, Google announced on Tuesday a slew of new and updated products at its I/O developer conference. These ranged from tools that deploy personal AI agents to code generators to search tools to a new “world model” for generating physically accurate video. Taken together, the releases paint a picture of Google’s current strategy for bringing AI to consumers and businesses. It’s a strategy that effectively leverages the company’s vast information infrastructure, built up through search, in ways that give it clear advantages over newer AI companies. New models Google DeepMind’s newest models are bigger and smarter, deeply multimodal, an…

Harry Styles, the British pop singer known for his eclectic style and boy band roots, is finally back on stage after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus. But eager fans who scored tickets for his return are finding that, despite the elevated price tag, the tour is not “As It Was.” Night one of the 67-date “Together, Together” tour kicked off in Amsterdam before a crowd of 50,000 fans, bringing his new album Kiss All the Time, Disco Occasionally to life. While critics called the evening a “triumphant comeback,” some fans in attendance were less than impressed, raising concerns over a short setlist, underwhelming production, and an obstructive stage design. “Harry, ple…

“Quality” is hard to define, but it’s always personal. In purchasing decisions large and small, consumers constantly weigh cost and value, and make trade-offs based on their individual needs, budget, preferences, and priorities. This explains why ratings for the same product or service can be all over the map, and why price alone doesn’t always correlate with quality. For some people, three-star restaurants will always be the “best” (though they can certainly fall short on experience). For others—even those who can afford pricier options—the local hole-in-the-wall or fast-food chain can be just what the doctor ordered. Warren Buffett famously eats breakfast at McDonal…

It’s graduation season, and that means commencement speakers are offering up their best advice for how to live a happy, healthy, and successful life. But instead of being met with welcoming smiles and engaged head nods, one topic is being met with anger and boos—AI. In a series of recent incidents, listeners have balked as commencement speakers have either told them to embrace artificial intelligence, or have otherwise mentioned the ever-expanding technology in a speech. It happened when Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances for the Orlando-based company Tavistock, began telling the graduating class at the University of Central Florida’s Col…

The internet has repeatedly changed how people travel. First came the browser, then smartphones. Each shift promised to flatten the industry further, cutting friction, shrinking the role of middlemen, and pushing more of the experience into software. But AI introduces a different possibility entirely: What happens when people stop visiting travel websites at all? Few companies have lived through every phase of that evolution quite like Expedia Group. The company survived the rise of Google, the collapse of desktop computing, the mobile revolution, platform monopolies, and a pandemic that temporarily froze global travel. For decades, Expedia controlled nearly the e…

Like much of Facebook nowadays, the “California Life” Facebook page is full of AI slop. There are generated images of highway patrol officers holding up a groundhog and lengthy road signs detailing California quirks. And in between those are posts that admonish AI data centers. “It’s not worth giving up an inch of this for a data center,” reads one image, in which the words look carved into a field of crops. “Not a single square inch of California is worth giving up for an AI Data Center,” reads another posted the very next day, the text floating above a generated image of the California coast, the state flag in the foreground. A third post shows that…

In February, April Watson hit her head while stowing products at an Amazon warehouse outside of Atlanta, Georgia. The injury gave her a concussion, and she was told by a neurologist that she would have to go on restricted duty and work at a slower pace than was typically expected of her. Despite having paperwork from the doctor that clearly stated that she had to work more slowly, however, it took Watson over a month to get the necessary accommodations on the job—all because she couldn’t get the correct medical form from Amazon’s internal AI assistant or easily connect with an HR employee. In the meantime, Watson was flagged for making errors on the job, and had…

Work is the closest thing most adults have to a full-time identity. Strip away sleep, and roughly half of our waking lives are spent working. If you take a conservative estimate—40 to 50 hours a week, across four to five decades—you end up with well over 80,000 hours on the job. And yet, the most salient feature of work is not how many hours we devote to it, but rather how we experience it, which varies wildly. For some, it resembles what the sociologist Max Weber once described as a “calling,” a source of meaning and even a kind of secular transcendence. For others, it’s closer to what Karl Marx labeled alienation: a draining, joyless routine that disconnects effort …

Last week, I whooshed into a Luckin coffee shop in Lower Manhattan, snatched my mobile order off the counter, and was back on the street within eight seconds—as if I’d run upstairs to grab my keys. The fact that this required zero human interaction barely registered, especially because I was too giddy about the deal I’d scored on the app. My iced coconut latte cost a mere $1.99—a full 69% off the regular price, after I used one of the six active coupons that appeared on the screen. I had officially gotten myself swept up in America’s latest fast-food trend: cheap, flavorful drinks ready in an instant, sold by Chinese chains on apps where the coupons give hourly co…

We need to have a blunt conversation about the word empowerment. In the majority of companies, the lie behind the word “empowerment” becomes apparent in familiar ways: job descriptions that promise autonomy, leaders who proudly talk about their empowered teams, and meetings that end with “you’ve got this.” Reality though strips away the veneer of this lie: that same work still runs through a gauntlet of approvals, sign-offs, and second-guessing. The language suggests freedom. The system reinforces control. The result is not empowerment. It is dependence with better branding. In our work at Amazon helping Fortune 500 leaders understand how to dismantle their r…

Across job listing sites over the past few months, you might have noticed something curious. Alongside traditional titles like “designer,” “engineer,” and “product manager,” a new crop of roles is appearing. They have names like “designer engineer,” “builder,” or “design crafter,” and they represent a tipping point in the design industry that’s just beginning to play out. That tipping point is captured in the second annual AI in Design report, published by the investor firm Designer Fund and the venture capital firm Foundation Capital. This year’s report draws on a survey of over 900 designers across 60+ countries, including partners like Stripe, Framer, Linear, Noti…

Areaware, the 22-year-old design brand, announced its closure back in February, bidding farewell to its dedicated fan base and selling off the last of its quirky home goods in a series of final sales. Just three months later, though, the brand is getting a surprising second chance: Today, the puzzle company Piecework is announcing its acquisition of Areaware for an undisclosed sum. Piecework, founded in 2019 by Rachel Hochhauser and Jena Wolfe, plans to keep Areaware’s name, website, and socials separate, and will maintain the two as distinct sister brands. According to Hochhauser, who will serve as Areaware’s chief brand officer, the idea to acquire Areaware was…

Watch an exclusive 30-minute webinar for Modern CEO subscribers featuring Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies, in conversation with Stephanie Mehta. Learn where AI is driving real business impact, how to separate hype from opportunity, and the key questions CEOs should be asking as AI adoption accelerates. View the full article

And the layoffs continue: Intuit plans to axe 17% of its workforce, about 3,000 of its approximately 18,200 global employees (as of July 31, according to its annual report), Reuters reported Wednesday. The company said it will focus on accelerating integrating AI across the company and its services, while streamlining operations. The news is based on a an internal ‌memo sent to employees from CEO Sasan Goodarzi, which argued the move would help the software company behind TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp deliver better products. In an effort to restructure and streamline, Intuit is also reportedly closing key hubs in Reno, Nevada and Woodland Hill…