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The restructuring firm that took control of Big Lots in the wake of its bankruptcy last year appears to be making progress in its effort to transfer some of the discount chain’s ill-fated locations to other retailers. Several retail companies, including some with ties to nationally recognized brands, have stepped in to take over leases on Big Lots stores in at least 12 different states, according to recent court filings. If the transfers are approved by the court, the spaces are likely to be turned into something other than Big Lots, although some of the retailers have not yet publicly confirmed their plans. Ocean State Job Lot, a discount retail chain with locati…

Most of us know the general (albeit simplified) story: Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov used a stimulus—like a metronome—around the dogs he was studying, and soon, the hounds would start to salivate. They had learned that the sound meant food was coming. The phenomenon, now known as classical conditioning, became one of modern psychology’s foundational discoveries. It’s an unconscious process where a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a naturally occurring stimulus, eventually leading to a connection between the two. The dogs, seeing the researcher who often brings them food or hearing the noise of the cart on its way, would immediately know they were about to h…

Featuring Andy Dunn, Founder and CEO, Pie; Mélanie Masarin, Founder and CEO, Ghia and Ev Williams, Cofounder, Mozi. Moderated by Max Ufberg, Senior Editor, Fast Company. Loneliness isn’t just a lingering by-product of COVID lockdowns. According to former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, it’s a public health crisis. Businesses have taken this diagnosis as a cue to step in, fill those cracks in our social fabric, and develop a cure. Join this panel to hear from leaders who are looking to address the loneliness epidemic by building technology that facilitates in-person connection, creating products that encourage us to rethink the ways we socialize, and more. View the…

eToro Group Ltd has announced that it plans to take itself public in an initial public offering. The company made the announcement in a press release today, in which it confirmed that it had filed its Form F-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). However, there are still many unknowns about eToro’s IPO. Here’s what we do know—and what still needs to be revealed. What is eToro Group Ltd? eToro Group Ltd is the name of the company that operates the eToro trading platform. Like other trading platforms, eToro allows investors to buy and sell a number of assets, including stocks and cryptocurrencies. But eToro is slightly differ…

The internet posts and side projects of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) worker Jordan Wick could give some clues for how Musk’s efficiency group might attempt to use AI to downsize and retool the government. During the last half of February, Wick, who has a DOGE email account associated with the Executive Office of the President and now is embedded in the General Services Administration (GSA), posted to his GitHub page the code for several tools that appeared to be related to DOGE’s work. The page was discovered by political reporter Roger Sollenberger at the end of last month. Wick posted the code for a tool that automatically downloads DMs from Twitt…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Taking the first step towards a new future for your organization can be a daunting effort—but for professional services organizations, the time is now. With 70% of organizations planning to track office attendance in 2025, the corporate real estate landscape is primed for potential. Leaders must fully capitalize on the seismic shifts in the new standard of in-office work and use their spaces to …

One of the most effective factors in containing the spread of HIV has been the widespread availability of preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP). A PrEP regimen—which has grown to include daily pills or injections every few months—can decrease the chances of HIV infection by up to 99%. To build on those gains, in 2021, the federal government, under the Affordable Care Act, mandated that health insurers fully cover PrEP, as well as clinical visits and the labs required every three months. But an upcoming hearing before the Supreme Court could upend that mandate. The case—brought by six individuals and two companies—is focused on whether mandating coverage of PrEP violates the …

An empty light truck is cruising along a sun-drenched highway of Qionghai, a city in Hainan Island, the southernmost part of China. As the car that’s filming overtakes it, we can see the truck has no driver. In fact, it doesn’t even have a cabin: Its front is just a flat wall crowned by what looks to be sensors and cameras. It’s an eerie and surreal view, a Headless Horseman of trucks just as scary as an actual headless horseman. The futuristic yet cheap-looking vehicle is part of a fleet of driverless light trucks that can carry 1,000 parcels each completely unattended over a range of more than 110 miles. These vehicles, operated by Chinese logistics giant ZT…

Picture a packed stadium of fans in extreme weather, all clad in their favorite jerseys, cheering and cursing at their favorite American football team or European soccer club. Or a crush of screaming fans, singing and dancing in unison at a Taylor Swift or K-pop concert. Or a sea of costumed Star Wars fans, lightsabers aloft, filling up movie theaters on opening night of a new movie. Plenty of people like to watch sports, attend concerts, and go to the movies. But what about those fans—the diehard ones, if you will—whose dedication goes even further? The fans whose daily lives are deeply intertwined with their interests? Diehard fans tend to have a detailed, intri…

My brother’s text messages can read like fragments of an ancient code: “hru,” “wyd,” “plz”—truncated, cryptic, and never quite satisfying to receive. I’ll often find myself second-guessing whether “gr8” means actual excitement or whether it’s a perfunctory nod. This oddity has nagged at me for years, so I eventually embarked upon a series of studies with fellow researchers Sam Maglio and Yiran Zhang. I wanted to know whether these clipped missives might undermine genuine dialogue, exploring the unspoken signals behind digital shorthand. As we gathered data, surveyed people and set up experiments, it became clear that those tiny shortcuts—sometimes hailed as a hall…

Twelve people were taken to hospitals after an American Airlines plane landed at Denver International Airport on Thursday and caught fire, prompting slides to be deployed so passengers could evacuate quickly. All of the people transported to hospitals had minor injuries, according to a post on the social platform X by Denver International Airport. Flight 1006, which was headed from the Colorado Springs Airport to Dallas Fort Worth, diverted to Denver and landed safely around 5:15 p.m. after the crew reported engine vibrations, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. While taxiing to the gate, an engine on the Boeing 737-800 caught fire, the FAA added. …

In hindsight, NATO was an unnecessarily confusing acronym for a trade organization representing movie theater owners. For 60 years, the National Association of Theatre Owners has promoted interests of movie theaters, from the biggest chains to the one-screen mom and pop shops. They’ve also regularly gotten mail and phone calls intended for the other NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But the theater owner’s organization is looking to the future, with a new name and a refocused mission. The group will now be known as Cinema United, president and CEO Michael O’Leary told The Associated Press Tuesday. “It can be a little complicated having the same name as…

A new technology can pinpoint victims of intimate partner violence four years earlier than other detection systems and with 80% accuracy. The Automated Intimate Partner Violence Risk Support System (AIRS) utilizes clinical history and radiologic data to pinpoint patients seen in the emergency room who may be at a risk for intimate partner violence (IPV). Developed over the past five years, AIRS has been rolled out to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Emergency Rooms in Boston as well as surrounding primary care sites. Currently, the tool has been validated at the University of California-San Francisco Medical Center and is being evaluated by the Alameda Health Syste…

In early 2024, Ben Collins was contemplating the future of the media business—and his place in it. He was in the process of resigning after spending six years as a senior reporter at NBC News, exhausted by the disinformation beat that took him to some of the darkest and most disturbing corners of the internet. It hadn’t helped that in December 2022 NBC News had suspended Collins from the Elon Musk beat following his highly critical coverage of the gazillionaire’s acquisition of Twitter. The media landscape looked bleak. Layoffs were decimating storied media titles like Sports Illustrated, and Collins was hearing rumors that G/O Media, the holding company owned by priv…

Executives and managers are traditionally reluctant to express any tender inner feelings from their teams and peers. Yet leaders who are willing to tap into the power of vulnerability are seeing benefits to their ability to connect, motivate, and lead teams. The experience of vulnerability might feel weak to some, but researchers like Brené Brown have reframed the expression of vulnerability as an act of courage, a superpower that can boost psychological safety and foster a culture of innovation and creative risk-taking. Leaders and managers who share experiences of uncertainty can also create personal connections that can help motivate and inspire others. However…

Keeping our inboxes organized often feels like an overwhelming task. If you’re fortunate, yours contains only messages from people you wish to communicate with. Realistically, though, most are cluttered with newsletters, receipts, social media digests, and more. These emails aren’t necessarily spam, but they complicate the process of quickly sifting through to find the messages we want to see. This week, Apple introduced a feature to the Mac that aims to help cut through inbox clutter by automatically organizing messages into smart categories. The feature is new in the Mail app in macOS 15.4 and comes several months after Apple debuted the feature on the iPhone i…

2025 has not been a good year for retail store closures so far. High-profile chains, including Joann fabrics, Walgreens, and Big Lots, have shuttered locations across the country. And now Dollar General is joining them. Here’s what you need to know. Dollar General Corporation to close 141 stores Dollar General Corporation is the owner of the popular chain of Dollar General discount stores and the PopShelf retail chain. The company has now announced it will shutter 141 stores across both brands. Dollar General Corporation made the store closure announcement yesterday in its fourth-quarter and fiscal-year 2024 earnings report. As part of that report, the comp…

Architecture is, at its core, about problem-solving: balancing aesthetics, functional needs, and technical constraints to create effective buildings and environments. The most innovative firms in the industry expand this notion, solving pressing issues in new ways that build on or scale up existing techniques and technologies. Los Angeles-based Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, for instance, has advanced the concept of shipping container architecture, ushering it into the realm of sustainable neighborhood development. The firm’s Isla Intersections project in South Los Angeles closed a nearby street (a rarity in car-focused L.A.) to create an active “paseo,” which hosts local f…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. The way we produce and consume food is changing. Not only is the current food system a threat to our health, it’s also a threat to our planet. As a food producer, the challenge is clear: How do we transition toward more nutrient-dense, environmentally responsible food choices without compromising taste or accessibility? Modern food production has often emphasized convenience, leading to hig…

Qatar will provide natural gas supplies to Syria with the aim of generating 400 megawatts of electricity a day, in a measure to help address the war-battered country’s severe electricity shortages, Syrian state-run news agency SANA reported Friday. Syria’s interim Minister of Electricity Omar Shaqrouq said the Qatari supplies are expected to increase the daily state-provided electricity supply from two to four hours per day. Under the deal, Qatar will send two million cubic meters of natural gas a day to the Deir Ali power station, south of Damascus, via a pipeline passing through Jordan. Qatar’s state-run news agency said that the initiative was part of an ag…

The traditional model of leadership, where a single individual is expected to provide all the answers, is becoming obsolete. In a world of accelerating complexity, hyper-specialization, and rapid change, no leader can single-handedly navigate the full spectrum of challenges facing modern organizations. The future of leadership is about curating the best insights, talent, and ideas, not dictating the direction. The best leaders will be those who act as architects of collaboration, assembling diverse perspectives and fostering an environment where expansive thinking thrives. This shift in leadership isn’t just about delegation—it’s about creating conditions for con…