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Featuring Fara Howard, Chief Marketing Officer, GoDaddy; Taylor Montgomery. Chief Marketing Officer, North America, Taco Bell and Dan Murphy, SVP, Marketing, Liquid Death. Moderated by Jeff Beer, Senior Staff Editor, Fast Company. Brands have a history of leaning into the unexpected to capture customers’ attention and cultivate loyal fan bases. But what’s the secret to properly executing such a campaign? And if the unconventional has become your calling card, how do you switch it up without losing your brand identity? Hear from executives navigating these questions and get insight into how you should approach your next marketing strategy. View the full article

Some of Abir Barakat’s earliest childhood memories are of her father’s fascination with tatreez, a traditional Palestinian embroidery involving hand-stitching patterns and motifs on clothing, scarves, bedspreads, and pillows. Her father would collect thobes—tatreez-embroidered loose-fitting dresses worn by Palestinian women, ultimately amassing an extensive collection of unique, traditional tatreez pieces crafted decades ago by women in Palestine. “My memory is how passionate he was about it and how he would tell us different stories about (tatreez),” says Barakat. “He would acquire these old Palestinian dresses [some of which] are museum pieces, honestly, because th…

Twice a year, New Yorkers and visitors are treated to a phenomenon known as Manhattanhenge, when the setting sun aligns with the Manhattan street grid and sinks below the horizon framed in a canyon of skyscrapers. The event is a favorite of photographers and often brings people out onto sidewalks on spring and summer evenings to watch this unique sunset. The first Manhattanhenge of the year takes place Wednesday at 8:13 p.m., with a slight variation happening again Thursday at 8:12 p.m. It will occur again on July 11 and 12. Some background on the phenomenon: Where does the name Manhattanhenge come from? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson coined the ter…

Paris has spoken, and fashion’s final authority has laid down the law: This coming fall, it’s all about power shoulders, enveloping outerwear and a color palette that runs from somber to surreal. If Milan softened up with romance and New York leaned into Y2K grunge, Paris countered with sartorial surety — a wardrobe built for the sharp, the serious, and the spectacular. Coats are enormous, tailoring is back and drama is dialed up on every front. While trends may start in luxury, they quickly trickle down, as fast fashion companies like Zara, H&M, and Shein race to transform runway spectacle into mass-market hits. Here’s what ruled the runways: Coats so…

Fast Company is extending its application deadline for Best Workplaces for Innovators 2025 to Friday, April 4, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. This marks the seventh year Fast Company will be recognizing companies and organizations from around the world that most effectively empower employees at all levels to improve processes, create new products, or invent whole new ways of doing business. In addition to honoring the world’s 100 Best Workplaces for Innovators, we will recognize companies in more than a dozen different categories. What differentiates Best Workplaces for Innovators from existing best-places-to-work lists is that it goes beyond benefits, competitiv…

Things are tough right now, with complexity and uncertainty in the world driving stress and worry. You’re probably trying to stay positive and muscle through. But there’s an important difference between keeping appropriately optimistic and acting with toxic positivity. If you’re faced with toxic positivity in yourself or others, it’s probably based on good intentions that have run amok. But it can actually create a negative spiral that can make things worse. Staying positive during trying times According to a survey from MyPerfectResume, people are reporting record levels of exhaustion, anxiety, and stress with 88% who said they were burned out. In addition, 32…

The death of downtown is now a familiar refrain. Central business districts (CBDs) in cities around the world—once bustling centers of office work—were hit hard by the pandemic and the shift to remote work, leading many to predict they would never fully recover. But instead of demise, downtowns are being reinvented. And Tokyo is leading the way. Traditional downtown business districts in cities around the world were defined and dominated by vertical towers where legions of white-collar professionals and support staff were stacked in isolated office buildings. The world’s largest metropolitan area is pioneering a new model where the city itself increasingly takes o…

Apple has successfully blocked its opponents in India, Tinder-owner Match and a group of startups, from accessing its commercially sensitive information which was part of antitrust findings against the U.S. firm, a confidential order shows. An investigation by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) last year found Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system to the detriment of app developers, users and other payment processors. Apple has denied wrongdoing and said it is a small player in India where phones using Google’s operating system are dominant. The investigation process has concluded but CCI’s senior…

A federal judge has denied Elon Musk’s request for a court order blocking OpenAI from converting itself to a for-profit company but said she could expedite a trial to consider Musk’s claims against the ChatGPT maker and its CEO. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled late Tuesday that “Musk has not demonstrated likelihood of success on the merits” in his request for a preliminary injunction. She offered to hold a trial in her California courtroom as soon as this fall, “given the public interest at stake and potential for harm if a conversion contrary to law occurred.” Musk, an early OpenAI investor, began a legal offensive against the ChatGPT maker and CEO Sam…

Novo Nordisk announced Friday that it would part ways with its longtime CEO, who steered the company into an unprecedented boom time for weight loss drugs. The Ozempic maker’s chief executive Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen first joined the company as an economist in 1991. Jorgensen has served as Novo Nordisk’s CEO since 2017, leading the company before the current gold rush in weight loss drug development was imaginable. In a press release announcing the move, Novo Nordisk cited market challenges and its declining share price in a press release announcing the leadership shake up. Jorgensen will stay on as CEO temporarily for an undetermined period of time “to support…

In Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose, Martha Beck, PhD, writes that “anxiety always lies.” When I asked her why, she highlighted one of the book’s central teachings: When you seek the truth beneath your anxious thoughts, you discover that many of them aren’t real. This newfound awareness is transformative. It dismantles anxiety’s prevailing narrative that in order to be safe, you must live in fear. “So many people tell me: But, the world is in bad shape right now,” Beck shares. “I say: Yes, and doesn’t that require us to show up as our calmest, most committed, and competent selves?” “Anxiety does not do that, it just tells li…

Few self-help ideas are as prevalent and widely celebrated as the advice to “just be yourself.” Whether in job interviews, workplace interactions, or career choices, we are frequently encouraged to act “authentically”—without compromise or concern for external pressures. While this sounds comforting and empowering, authenticity as an interpersonal strategy is fundamentally flawed and at odds with hundreds of scientific studies on emotional intelligence, social skills, and career success. As I illustrate in my forthcoming book, Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated and What To Do Instead, authenticity is not a helpful life hack, but rather a misguide…

Many schools and colleges are underperforming when it comes to sex education. Going beyond the classroom condoms-and-bananas approach, a group of students have taken it upon themselves to deliver sex ed, TikTok-style. The TikTok account @sexedforguys, which has more than 117,000 followers, started as a school project by four students at Colby College, a private liberal arts school in Maine. Launched in 2022, the account features skits tackling consent, toxic masculinity, and homophobia—essential lessons in a time when manosphere content is flooding For You Pages and Gen Z boys and men are more likely than baby boomers to believe that feminism has done more harm than …

One of the more frustrating classes I took in college in the 1980s was a computer science course on data structures and algorithms. In that class, we learned about a variety of approaches to solving key problems in programming. For example, we learned several different ways to take a list of numbers given in an arbitrary order and to sort that list from smallest to largest. These approaches differed in their efficiency. What frustrated me about the class wasn’t the algorithms themselves—they were interesting. But we were never taught how anyone ever came up with those different approaches. What in the world would have gotten someone to even think of those things? …

Redbox is getting ready for one final sale. The defunct DVD rental chain’s assets, and those of its corporate siblings Crackle and Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, are being auctioned off in New York later this month, according to a court filing published Monday morning. The asset sale is just the latest chapter in Redbox’s tumultuous downfall: Once one of the country’s biggest DVD vendors, the rental chain saw its revenue evaporate overnight during the pandemic, leading to its bankruptcy in June of 2024. Much of this had to do with consumers switching to streaming, but the exact circumstances of Redbox’s demise remain highly contested: Last month, t…

For years, baby boomers have been “aging in place” and keeping home turnover low. And now, not only are boomers holding onto their homes, they’re also the generation buying the most property—boxing out millennial homebuyers for only the second year since 2013. Millennials, who range from 26 to 44 years old, have largely dominated the housing market for the past decade. The only exceptions to this rule have occurred in 2023 and 2024, according to data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Between July 2023 and July 2024, the share of millennial homebuyers dropped to 29%, down from 38% a year ago. Meanwhile, boomers (ages 60 to 78) accounted for 42% of home …

When filmmaker Travis Gutiérrez Senger reflects on Asco’s legacy, he quickly notes they were more than an art group; they created a movement, one with remarkable influence on Chicano art history. “That movement continues today, and it’s very expansive,” he says. “There’s a lot of books, films and things that will be written about Asco over a period of time. And this was our contribution in some ways.” He’s referring to Asco: Without Permission, a documentary that chronicles the story of the 1970s art group founded by multidisciplinary artist Patssi Valdez, muralist Willie Herrón III, painter and performance artist Gronk and writer and photographer Harry Gamboa Jr.…

Countless hours, days—perhaps even weeks—of my life have been spent creating Sims characters, building them houses, marrying them off, and making babies. Now, there’s a new life-simulation game on the block hoping to expand beyond the American market. inZOI debuted on March 28 at $40 and quickly climbed to the top of Steam’s most wishlisted and bestseller charts. The game’s appeal lies in its hyper-detailed character customization, free expansions, and immersive, realism-focused world. Unlike The Sims, which embraces cartoonish characters and lightheartedness, inZOI opts for lifelike graphics and a slower-paced gameplay experience centered on everyday interactions. …

In 2034, Salt Lake City will join a short list of cities that have hosted a Winter Olympic Games twice, joining the likes of Turin and Innsbruck. But unlike in any Olympics of the past, skiers and bobsledders may glimpse a surreal sight overhead as they compete—flying air taxis. Though still nine years away from the Opening Ceremony, aviation company Beta Technologies sees the state of Utah as a proving ground for its electric planes. As competitors focus on major cities like New York and Los Angeles, Beta has inked a deal with Utah to start exploring transportation solutions across the very rural state. The Beehive State had a confluence of benefits for Beta, inc…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. U.S. single-family home prices, as measured by the Freddie Mac House Price Index (which uses the repeat-sales methodology), rose 3.9% in the calendar year 2024. During that same timeframe, overall U.S. consumer prices rose 2.9%. Among the 384 metro-area housing markets that the Freddie Mac House Price Index tracks dating back to 1975, these are the 10 metros that saw the biggest year-over-year home price increase in 2024: Kingston, New York: +13.5% Springfield, Ohio: +11.8% Glens Falls, New York: +11.7% Binghamton, New York: +11.5% …