What's on Your Mind?

Most people say they want to live to a ripe old age. But that isn’t really true. What people really want is to live to a ripe, old age in good mental and physical health. Some of us actually get to live this dream. These folks are known as super-agers and they make it well into their 80s not just in decent physical shape, but also with minds at least as sharp as people 30 years younger. How do they manage it? That’s the question Northwestern University researchers have been aiming to answer with a 25-year-long study. It examined the brains and lifestyles of almost 300 super-agers. As you’d expect, a quarter century of data shows it really helps to be born with lu…

Rachel Taylor began her career as a creative director in the advertising business, a job that gave her plenty of opportunity to micromanage the final product. “I had control of the script,” she remembers. “I could think about the intonation, and I could give the actor notes.” That was before she pivoted to helping AI companies shape the personality of their assistants. Rather than handing a digital helper a script, the best she can do is point it in the right direction: The technology “sometimes feels like a toddler that you give a permanent marker to and see what it writes on the wall,” she says. After joining DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman’s startup Inflect…

What if the chatbots we talk to every day actually felt something? What if the systems writing essays, solving problems, and planning tasks had preferences, or even something resembling suffering? And what will happen if we ignore these possibilities? Those are the questions Kyle Fish is wrestling with as Anthropic’s first in-house AI welfare researcher. His mandate is both audacious and straightforward: Determine whether models like Claude can have conscious experiences, and, if so, how the company should respond. “We’re not confident that there is anything concrete here to be worried about, especially at the moment,” Fish says, “but it does seem possible.” Earlier …

A new hotspot just opened in New York—and it’s in terminal 5 of John F. Kennedy International Airport. BlueHouse, a 9,000-square-foot space exclusively available to select JetBlue Airways customers, welcomed its first guests at 5 a.m. this morning as the airline’s first foray into the pitched battle for lucrative premium fliers. Designed by Gensler, BlueHouse is a smorgasbord of New York’s iconic and eclectic design heritage. From the Art Deco elevator indicator to black-and-white deli tile on the floor and the Grand Central Terminal-inspired ceiling mural, the space screams Big Apple while staying true to JetBlue’s quirky and, well, blue heritage. “It’s unqu…

It might surprise people that my husband and I pay a financial planner, given that I spend a lot of time on financial, tax, and investment planning at work. However, hiring a planner has delivered a return that can’t be quantified: peace of mind. Here are some key reasons we pay for financial advice. 1) We wanted a second opinion on a few important decisions. I wanted a different perspective on less-familiar subjects, such as handling employer stock, and whether we needed long-term care insurance. We could have confronted both issues on our own, but having professional guidance helped us move forward more confidently. 2) We found a business model that makes sense for …

One hot new phone of 2025 has no screen, can’t send a text, and needs to be plugged into the wall. But to buyers of the Tin Can, that’s a definite plus. The Tin Can, from a Seattle startup of the same name, grew out of conversations cofounder and CEO Chet Kittleson had with fellow parents about the challenges of enabling kids to connect with friends and relatives without giving them full-fledged cellphones. While children of the 20th century could pick up the house landline to call a grandparent or schedule a sleepover, today’s kids are often left dependent on parents for scheduling playdates and connecting with family until they’re old enough to carry their own smar…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, I’m focusing on Big AI’s biggest sales pitch—the quest for AGI—and the idea that the industry should focus on more modest and achievable tasks for AI. I also look at Databricks’s new $4 billion-plus funding raise, and at Google’s new Gemini 3 Flash model. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on…

Christmas is coming, and our bank accounts are getting, well, obliterated. But luckily, it’s no longer just your quirky aunt who appreciates a good secondhand store: Shopping for gently used items, especially during the holidays, is now on trend. And if you get on board, you might be able to save a bundle by swapping your mall run for a day of thrifting. In recent years, “Thriftmas”—or shopping for Christmas gifts at stores like Good Will, The Salvation Army, Savers, and online platforms that sell used items—has been creeping into the mainstream. And this year is no different. According to global data from online store ThredUp, in 2025, shoppers plan to dedicate near…

The rapid growth of data centers during the AI boom has been a dominating narrative of 2025—and, in many instances, not a popular one. Across the country, communities have pushed back against data centers planned for their cities and states. Some have even turned to online petition sites to raise awareness and voice collective opposition to data center projects in their communities. One such site, the popular platform Change.org, says it has seen a significant spike data center-related petitions in recent months. Change.org saw at least 113 petitions that mentioned data centers in 2025, the platform shared with Fast Company, totaling around 50,000 signature…

Don’t beat yourself up if you do some serious damage on a cheese plate during holiday festivities this year: You just may do your future self a favor. A new study has found that eating nearly 2 ounces or more of high-fat cheese each day has been associated with a 16% lower risk of dementia, according to the study published this week in Neurology. Lest you think this is some sort of propaganda by Big Cheese, the study followed nearly 28,000 adults in Malmö, Sweden for roughly 25 years. The study’s findings indicate that Swedes who ate more cheese with a fat content exceeding 20%—which includes many varieties of cheddar, gouda, and blue cheese, among others—had a lo…

Bitcoin investors are bracing for “Witching Friday” tomorrow, December 18, when billions of options are due to expire—making for what could be a highly volatile, roller-coaster ride at the end of the week for the markets. Some $23 billion in contracts are set to expire just on Deribit, the largest Bitcoin exchange, according to Bloomberg. Here’s what to know. What is ‘Witching Friday’? “Witching Friday,” also known as “triple witching” or “the triple witching hour,” refers to the last hour of the stock market trading session on the third Friday of March, June, September, and December, when three kinds of securities expire simultaneously, often leading to i…

In the heart of Aceh province in northwestern Sumatra, the Ketiara Cooperative, led by the remarkable Ibu Rahmah, is facing a crisis unfolding as we speak. This community of women-led farmers was devastated by the rare Cyclone Senyar over the Thanksgiving weekend, which caused catastrophic mudslides. Farms have been decimated, homes destroyed, and two vital bridges have been washed away, isolating entire villages and cutting off access to essentials like food, clean water, and electricity. Hundreds of people have died and hundreds more are still missing in their worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami. Grace Farms, a cultural and humanitarian center in New Canaa…

British oil giant BP just announced a new CEO, marking its fourth chief executive shake-up in the last six years alone. The company named Meg O’Neill, who previously led Australia’s top oil and gas company Woodside Energy for the role. O’Neill will become the first woman to hold the top executive spot at one of the world’s biggest oil companies. She said that she looks forward to working to “accelerate performance” at BP and plans to prioritize shareholder growth and reestablishing BP—now a possible takeover target—as a market leader in the oil and gas industry. O’Neill will take over from Murray Auchincloss, a longtime BP employee who was first appointed as inte…

America’s small businesses are the backbone of our economy. They create two-thirds of new jobs, power innovation, and anchor communities across the country. But that backbone is under real strain. Rising healthcare costs dominate the headlines, but what’s missing from the conversation is how deeply they impact the small businesses that keep our economy running. At Gusto, we see this strain firsthand. Our latest Small Business Jobs Report showed hiring slowed in November as owners continue to navigate higher costs and uncertainty. Rising healthcare premiums aren’t the only challenge, but they’re making it that much harder to grow and hire with confidence. Since 202…

Experts have compressed their predictions for when artificial general intelligence (AGI)—the type of AI that can equal or exceed human intelligence—will arrive. When predictions were first made in 2023, AGI was expected to arrive in 50 years. Newer estimates say five years. When GPT-5 came out this summer, it demonstrated surprising leaps in reasoning and memory, further accelerating those timelines. Progress is moving faster than anyone anticipated, and what once felt speculative now feels inevitable. Meanwhile, small teams are shipping products that would have required 100-person companies two years ago. The gap between the AGI debaters and the builders (those w…

The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage edged higher this week, though it remains relatively near its low point so far this year. The uptick brings the average long-term mortgage rate to 6.22% from 6.19% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. A year ago, the rate averaged 6.6%. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, also rose this week. The rate averaged 5.54%, up from 5.44% last week. A year ago, it averaged 5.84%, Freddie Mac said. Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy decisions to bond market investors’ expectations f…