What's on Your Mind?

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. “Every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation.” This is what Karl Marx has to say about capital. He does not get enough credit for being one of the more accurate predictors of capitalism because people understandably do not like his solution. But the truth is, most philosophers do not even present a solution and he understood the problem as well as anyone. We saw more bankruptcie…

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has issued a warning that more than a million taxpayers are still eligible to receive a share of more than $1 billion in refunds—but they need to act quickly. Here’s what you need to know. Over $1 billion in refunds still to be claimed The refunds are due to people who have yet to file their 2021 tax return. The IRS says the total potential value of the refunds still to be claimed is estimated to be $1,025,336,800. As many as 1,142,000 taxpayers are eligible for part of that payout and the median refund amount is estimated to be $781 per taxpayer, the agency says. That means half of the people who are due refunds will receive…

The Golden State Warriors are known for their electrifying plays and superstar Stephen Curry, but now the team is pioneering a fresh gameplan: blending sports and entertainment in a way no NBA franchise has before. As the first and only NBA team with its own record label, Golden State Entertainment, the Warriors are expanding their reach with “For the Soil,” a new album released this week. The project featuring the Bay Area’s top music artists — from E-40, Too Short, Saweetie, G-Eazy, Goapele, LaRussell and Larry June — arrives just in time for the league’s All-Star Game weekend in San Francisco. “A basketball team with a record label is unheard of until now, whic…

When artist Adam Pendleton was growing up in Richmond, Virginia, he started his own newspaper that he delivered to the residents at a nursing home in his town. “I wanted to be a creative person functioning in the world,” he says. “I wanted to be an artist.” Over the years, that inclination took various forms: a t-shirt business (which he now laughs that, as a teen, he saw as a fashion line), script-writing, musical theater, original poetry. “I realize now it was very much about having an idea and manifesting it—that is creativity,” says Pendleton, whose growing body of work has continuously redefined contemporary American painting. “In that way, you’re a perpetual pro…

Summoning a robotaxi from your phone is not a futuristic fantasy since Waymo achieved full commercial deployment. View the full article

Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s workplace advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: How can I improve my team’s morale? A: Team morale isn’t an extra or a “nice to have.” It’s critical to a functioning company. And it’s not looking good out there. According to the latest Gallup report, only 36% of employees say they feel engaged at work. That means 64% of employees are feeling some degree of unhappy at work. Low morale can take a lot of different forms—from feeling less enthusiastic, less motivated, or less satisfied with work, all the …

Rather than clocking in at a Saturday job or selling old clothes for quick cash, Gen Z has another side hustle up their sleeve: selling their personal data. To take advantage of the nearly seven hours a day Gen Z spend on their phones, a new app called Verb.AI, launched by youth polling company Generation Lab, is now offering to pay young people for their scrolling time. By installing a tracker which monitors what they browse, buy, and stream, Verb creates a digital twin of each user that lives in a central database. From there, companies and businesses can query the data in a ChatGPT-like interface, and get a more accurate picture of consumer preferences than the…

When the Vietnam War finally ended on April 30, 1975, it left behind a landscape scarred with environmental damage. Vast stretches of coastal mangroves, once housing rich stocks of fish and birds, lay in ruins. Forests that had boasted hundreds of species were reduced to dried-out fragments, overgrown with invasive grasses. The term ecocide had been coined in the late 1960s to describe the U.S. military’s use of herbicides like Agent Orange and incendiary weapons like napalm to battle guerrilla forces that used jungles and marshes for cover. Fifty years later, Vietnam’s degraded ecosystems and dioxin-contaminated soils and waters still reflect the long-term ecolog…

People are often under the false impression that making their language complex or using jargon enhances their credibility. That might be true in certain circumstances. If you’re an academic talking to other academics or a software engineer talking to other software engineers, using jargon makes sense. However, if you‘re talking to people outside of your field of expertise, it can alienate them. And when you alienate someone, it can cause them to switch off. It also reduces the likelihood that they take away anything useful or do what you’d like them to do. That’s probably the last thing you want to happen when communicating with someone. So if you’re prone to …

For NFL teams’ social media departments, May 14 is the Super Bowl. NFL Schedule Release Day has become an unofficial holiday on the league calendar. All 32 teams unveil their season schedules in the most creative and entertaining ways possible—chasing quote tweets and marketing impressions before the internet crowns a winner. This year, the Los Angeles Chargers dropped a Minecraft-inspired video, complete with a nod to a viral Starbucks altercation between NFL reporters Ian Rapoport and Jordan Schultz during the combine. “Give the Chargers every award,” ProFootballTalk posted on X. The Washington Commanders put their own spin on the classic game RollerCo…

One of the core theories of the office market circa 2025 is the flight to quality. Workers, either hybrid staff who spend ample time at home or those prodded back into traditional five-day workweeks, have grown used to the comforts of home and bored with drab, standard office spaces. They need something spectacular to justify a commute or keep them happy, so companies increasingly seek out top-flight offices—Class A or Trophy assets, as a broker would say—which has pushed landlords and developers to spend millions on office renovations and solely focus on building new, top-of-the-line workspaces. That same dynamic, where the top-of-the-market bustles with activity wh…

Were it not for his experience in North Dakota, Theodore Roosevelt said he never would have become president of the United States. After his first wife and mother died on the same day in 1884, the eventual 26th president retreated to modern-day North Dakota to mourn and reflect. Next July, more than a century after Roosevelt’s death, a presidential library in his honor is slated to open in the state that held so much significance in his life. And the visionaries behind the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library hope a visit to the Medora, North Dakota-based library will prove as restorative to people in the modern era as this area once was for Roosevelt. That m…

Getting dressed for work in the morning can be complicated. Gone are the days of the office dress code. While most of us are happy that our bosses no longer dictate that we wear collared shirts, heels, or shift dresses to work, this means the burden of figuring out what is appropriate now lies squarely on our shoulders. As corporate culture has become increasingly more relaxed, with denim often replacing trousers, finding the right balance between formal and casual can be tricky. If you show up to work in a three-piece suit, you might look like you don’t understand your company’s values. But if you wear your favorite baggy jeans, you might come off as unserious. A…

Fashion designers from across North America are bringing together inspiration from their Indigenous heritage, culture and everyday lives to three days of runway modeling that started Friday in a leading creative hub and marketplace for Indigenous art. A fashion show affiliated with the century-old Santa Fe Indian Market is collaborating this year with a counterpart from Vancouver, Canada, in a spirit of Indigenous solidarity and artistic freedom. A second, independent runway show at a rail yard district in the city has nearly doubled the bustle of models, makeup and final fittings. Elements of Friday’s collections from six Native designers ran the gamut from silk paraso…

Air France on Tuesday unveiled a new first-class suite as it expands efforts to lure wealthy travelers from business jets and lend a ‘French touch’ to the tussle for premium revenue. The CEO of parent Air France-KLM, Ben Smith, told Reuters the unspecified investment aimed to place Air France at the top of the European league in airline luxury, signalling a battle with British Airways and Lufthansa. “A large percentage of the customers are flying for business reasons … Many of them have the choice of a private jet or flying in first class,” Smith said in an interview. “What is new for us over the last few years is a marked increase in the number of luxury cust…

The wildfires that blazed through Los Angeles earlier this year, some of the fastest-spreading fires on record, underscored the risk of living in homes known to be at high risk for future fires. One national homebuilder, KB Home, believes that risk can be reduced by building a wildfire-resilient neighborhood. Dixon Trail, a community of 64 homes under construction in Escondido, California, near San Diego, will be the first neighborhood to earn the new Wildfire Prepared Neighborhood standard developed by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS). [Image: KB Home]Each individual home will meet the Wildfire Prepared Home Plus certification, an IBHS desi…

Tres Xemeneies (Three Chimneys) is a former coal-fired power plant in Sant Adrià de Besòs. Think of it as Barcelona’s own Battersea Power Station, London’s iconic power station that has been redeveloped into a technological hub (and Apple’s new London digs). Like Battersea, Barcelona’s plant is set to undergo a radical transformation into the new Catalunya Media City—a cutting-edge hub for digital arts, technology, and education. The winning design is called E la nave va, a nod to Federico Fellini’s film of the same name, which translates to “And the Ship Sails On,” a reference to how this long-dead structure that resembles a three-mast ship will keep cruising histor…