What's on Your Mind?

Every friend group has one person who’s always running late. If you can’t think of one, chances are you’re that friend. Now, a newly launched app called Lately is here to help you stay on time for everything from meetings to dinner plans. Created by developer Erik MacInnis, Lately sends users timely nudges—30, 10, and five minutes before it’s time to leave. As the self-acknowledged “late one” in his friend group, MacInnis tells Fast Company that the idea for Lately struck during a fishing trip gone wrong. He had assumed it would take 20 minutes to get there, got sidetracked by replying to emails, left five minutes late, and the drive ended up taking 30. “When I ar…

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has issued a health alert for a pre-cooked, frozen pork carnitas product sold at Aldi grocery stores that “may be contaminated with foreign material, specifically pieces of metal.” Cargill Meat Solutions manufactures the product for Aldi exclusively, so it was only sold at Aldi stores. According to the USDA, the product was shipped to Aldi stores nationwide, so the alert applies to all U.S. locations. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? To be clear, the USDA’s Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is issuing a public health alert, not a recall, “because this product is no longe…

Popular language learning app Duolingo is giving its bite-size lesson treatment to one of the oldest games in the world: chess. Duolingo’s chess course will take users, who can range from complete novices to those with a solid understanding of how to play, through its gamified exercises to become better game players. The focus is mostly on attracting new players, including those who have felt chess is too difficult to learn or otherwise inaccessible. “For the most part, a lot of chess products out there are usually built by an advanced user for more advanced-use cases—someone who already is familiar with chess and is kind of trying to elevate their abilities even further,…

Chili’s Grill & Bar turned 50 this year. But as a new generation of diners is learning, it’s still got it. Thanks to a series of well-timed marketing efforts—and at least one viral hit appetizer—diners are flocking to the restaurants, which just posted a same-store sales increase of more than 30 percent in its last fiscal quarter. Traffic is up more than 20 percent. Kevin Hochman, CEO of Chili’s parent Brinker International, credits some of this success to operational adjustments: better kitchen technology, better cook training, and a recent dishwasher-listening tour in which the often invisible, but absolutely vital, employees who clean the chain’s dishes were as…

Recently, after decades of paying high fees for the aging photo-sharing site Flickr, I finally moved all my images to Google Photos. It saved money and offered advanced features, like very accurate search results. But uploading years of pictures triggered the dreaded warning that I was approaching the storage limit of my Google account, which also holds Gmail, documents, spreadsheets, and other files. Cloud storage (be it Google Drive, iCloud, or Dropbox) is just one more in a growing list of subscriptions we all face, such as video and music streaming services, online magazines or newspapers, newsletters, Patreon sponsorship, and often just the right to keep using so…

Google wants to give people access to its Gemini AI assistant with the blink of an eye: The company has struck a partnership with eyeglasses makers Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to make AI smart glasses, it announced at its Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View Tuesday. These glasses will be powered by Google’s new Android XR platform, and are expected to be released in 2026 at the earliest. To show what Gemini-powered smart glasses can do, Google has also built a limited number of prototype devices in partnership with Samsung. These glasses use a small display in the right lens to show live translations, directions and similar lightweight assistance. The…

I was taught that hard work would get me ahead, would ultimately pay off, and would get me promoted. But several years ago, when I was passed up for yet another promotion, I was angry and devastated because I was convinced that I had deserved that promotion. How could I not have been promoted after all the hard work I had been doing? A mentor I reached out to finally confided this to me, “Yes, you are working hard. But you are working on the wrong things. You need to be working on things that get you visibility.” I was doing lots of work, but with little visibility. I didn’t realize that only focusing on working hard was the quickest way to not get promoted. Even…

In 2021, I quit a 15-year career as a tech executive in the finance industry and pursued content marketing and journalism. When I tell this story, I’m often met with, “You did what?” People can’t wrap their heads around such an unexpected career shift. While I quit my tech job, it wasn’t an overnight decision. In fact, it was something I’d been considering for a long time. A career pivot is much different than simply finding a new job in the same industry. If you’ve contemplated the same, you’ve probably asked yourself, “Can I do this? Will it be worth the change? What if it doesn’t work out?” As someone who’s pivoted not once, but twice, in the past …

Trying to find authentic, consistent joy in the midst of a reality that is relentlessly delivering devastating blows feels akin to finding a needle in an impossibly large haystack. But according to Michelle Obama, it is possible—and the power lies in acknowledging the depth of despair and apathy while still finding reasons for hope. At SXSW this week, the former first lady and her older brother, Craig Robinson, who is executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, took the stage for a live session of their new podcast, IMO. The pair were joined by Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist, the Yale professor behind the school’s most popular class t…

Exciting news for anyone who’s already burned through the entirety of Netflix: there’s a new online movie rental platform coming to town. Letterboxd, the movie tracking app and the preferred social media of your most insufferable film-loving friend, announced this week that a Letterboxd Video Store is on the way. The announcement was made Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival. While the company hasn’t revealed too many specifics just yet, we do know the upcoming streaming service will be called the Letterboxd Video Store and will feature curated “shelves” of handpicked titles. Like other services such as Prime Video, Apple TV, or Google Play, users will be able …

When the House of Cinema in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was demolished in 2017, it was an architectural awakening for the city. A large circular concrete building completed in 1982, the House of Cinema was an instant cultural and architectural landmark in the city, then part of the Soviet Union. Its demolition, to make way for a controversial commercial development project, spurred many in the city to worry about which landmark would fall next. That led the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation to launch a citywide research project to document endangered buildings. Most were built between the late 1960s and early 1980s when the Soviet Union sought to frame its a…

Bui Van Phong faced a choice when the Vietnam War ended 50 years ago: stay in his small village, helping his parents carry on the family’s centuries-old tradition of making fish sauce, or join the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing his country for a better life. Phong chose to stay behind and nurtured a business making the beloved condiment, known as nuoc mam in Vietnam, that is now in its fourth generation with his son, Bui Van Phu, 41, at the helm. Fish sauce from the village has been recognized by Vietnam as an indelible part of the country’s heritage and the younger Bui is acutely aware of what that means. “It isn’t just the quality of fish sauce. It is a…

Nvidia indulged all your artificial intelligence fantasies on Tuesday at what was being called the “Super Bowl of AI.” The chip giant’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) was held at the SAP Center in San Jose on Tuesday, and it was—you guessed it—all about AI. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang made several large announcements during a two-hour keynote, with plenty of meat to keep AI-hungry consumers and businesses happy. That includes partnerships with large automakers to build autonomous vehicles and even personal AI supercomputers that sit right on your desktop. Here are some of the key announcements from Huang’s keynote: GM partnership: General Motors…

After grabbing a handful of popcorn at an event held by California-based startup Savor, my fingers are left with a familiar sheen: the residue of the butter that coats the small kernels. When I later grab a blini (topped with lentils), the small pancake is so full of butter that it immediately coats my tongue in a velvety layer of fat. A mushroom “scallop,” grilled in butter, is rich and savory. The butter used in all these dishes is rich, creamy, indulgent. But it isn’t made from animals. It isn’t even made from plants, like avocado oil or coconut oil or olive oil. Instead, it’s made from energy—on this night specifically, methane. [Photo: courtesy Savor] Sa…

In a correctional facility just outside of Silicon Valley, a Goodwill store operates inside the prison walls. And the women who are incarcerated there are both the employees and the customers. This Goodwill store, which opened in October 2024, is the first of its kind, and the team behind it hopes that the program will help incarcerated women get back on their feet—whether it’s with a new job or new clothes—as quickly and easily as possible. [Photo: Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department] The shoppers are women who are about to get released; typically about three people come in each day. Traditionally, when a woman is released from Elmwood Facility, she is gi…

Few topics are simultaneously so celebrated and misunderstood as human potential. On the one hand, we have an influx of near-perpetual articles urging people to unlock or fulfill their own potential, saying essentially that anything else equates to failure. On the other hand, if we ask an average leader or HR professional how to define or explain potential, we are unlikely to get a logical, rational, or scientifically valid answer. And yet, there is a well-established science on human potential, with decades of empirical research resulting in replicable generalizations to predict and explain why some people perform better than others (across different work set…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and health officials in several states are investigating a multistate Salmonella infection outbreak linked to whole cucumbers grown in Florida and shipped around the country. As a result of the ongoing investigation, health officials have recalled whole cucumbers grown by Bedner Growers Inc. and distributed by Fresh Start Produce Inc. between April 29, 2025, and May 19, 2025. As of Monday, 26 people have been infected with the outbreak strain of Salmonella. Cases have been reported in 15 states. Nine people have been hospitalized; no deaths have been reported. Several pe…

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. AI won’t replace doctors anytime soon. Despite the clickbait headlines and the reports of chatbots outperforming doctors on this-or-that clinical task, medicine will always depend—literally and figuratively—on human touch. What’s interesting, though, is how AI seems to be improving that human touch. Thanks to notetaking apps, doctors can stop typing and be more present in the precious …

Olivia Walch is an investigator in the Department of Neurology at the University of Michigan and CEO of a tech start-up called Arcascope. Her research has been featured on CNN, NPR, and in The Atlantic, among other outlets. Beyond sleep research, she coedited Political Geometry, a book on the mathematics of gerrymandering, and published comics with The Nib and Silver Sprocket. She is also the cartoonist of Imogen Quest, a webcomic that won her the “America’s Next Great Cartoonist” prize from the Washington Post. What’s the big idea? If you are dancing and can’t catch the beat, you are not dancing well. In this way, if your sleep doesn’t follow a regular pattern tha…

There are brief moments when Annisa Faquir forgets that the Little Red Hen Coffee Shop, the Altadena diner her grandmother founded a half century ago, burned down in the Eaton Fire. “You think, ‘I can go grab something—oh wait, it’s in ashes,’” said Faquir, who has worked at the shop since her mother, Barbara Shay, took over the family business seven years ago. The women want to rebuild the diner loved by neighbors for its shrimp and grits, catfish, and Shay’s secret house coffee blend. They knew they’d need help, but were surprised when Paris Hilton called to offer it to them. The Little Red Hen Coffee Shop is one of 50 women-owned businesses impacted by the …