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Commuters in the New York City and New Jersey area are in for what is likely to be a weekend of increased congestion and more limited transit options after the engineers who run the New Jersey Transit rail system voted to go on strike. That strike is now in effect and could continue throughout the weekend—and potentially even longer. Here’s what you need to know about the NJ Transit strike. What’s happened? On Thursday, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) announced that its members who run the trains in the New Jersey Transit Corporation, better known as NJ Transit, were officially on strike. The strike came after the BLET and NJ Transit…

As the global migrant crisis continues to dominate our airwaves, Welcome.US has triggered a dramatic impact on U.S. immigration, resettling 800,000 refugees across all 50 states. The organization’s co-founder and CEO, Nazanin Ash, shares how her team developed an effective and efficient model, unlocking a nonpartisan community of 2 million volunteers, supported by corporate partnerships with the likes of Meta, Google, and Uber. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s t…

Lego’s new building kit will turn your wall into an ode to ’80s graffiti art. The latest in Lego’s art-inspired sets is a customizable brick-built version of Keith Haring’s dancing figures, an instantly recognizable motif of five breakdancing stick figures articulated in Haring’s iconic pop art style. The kit comes with 1,773 pieces, can be mounted on stands or affixed to a wall, and stands at just over a foot tall. It retails for $119.99 and is set to hit Lego’s website and land in stores on May 15. In recent months, Lego has been working to build out a more extensive catalog of eye candy kits aimed at adults, ranging from a Lego-based version of Leonadro da Vinc…

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Saturday that he wants to step down as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of the year. The revelation came as a surprise because the 94-year-old had previously said he did not plan to retire. Buffett, one of the world’s richest people and most accomplished investors, took control of Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 when it was a textiles manufacturer. He turned the company into a conglomerate by finding other businesses and stocks to buy that were selling for less than they were worth. His success made him a Wall Street icon. It also earned him the nickname “Oracle of Omaha,” a reference to the Nebraska city where Buffett…

Brawny just went big on bulk. The Georgia-Pacific paper towel brand introduced a new logo set in a thicker font and breathed new life into its lumberjack mascot, the Brawny Man—all as part of a shift to stand out on store shelves and launch a new product, three-ply paper towels. “We weren’t just evolving a visual identity,” Amanda Earley, Georgia-Pacific’s brand director for Brawny, tells Fast Company. “We were launching a new product, shifting our full lineup, and repositioning the brand in culture, all while protecting what made Brawny special in the first place.” Bringing all this to market at the same time was a challenge, Earley says, but necessary to achieve…

Nokia Bell Labs has a long, storied history—producing Nobel Prize winners, creating innovative new technologies, and bolstering critical infrastructure that underlies most of the devices we all use every day. This week, it held a special event at its Murray Hill, New Jersey campus to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and it featured appearances by politicians like New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, business leaders, and even a robot named “Porcupine.” The expansive campus houses a number of laboratories where, over the past century, numerous groundbreaking discoveries and inventions have been made or perfected, including cell phones, transistors, and solar cells. Nokia a…

Quantum computing stocks got pummeled yesterday, with the four most prominent public quantum computing companies—IonQ, Rigetti Computing, Quantum Computing Inc., and D-Wave Quantum Inc.—falling anywhere from over 9% to over 18%. The reason? It has to do with AI chip giant Nvidia. Again. Stocks crash yesterday on Nvidia quantum news Yesterday was a bit of a bloodbath on the stock market for the four most prominent publicly traded quantum computing companies. Here’s a breakdown of how they performed, according to data from Yahoo Finance: IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ): down 9.27% to $21.14 per share Rigetti Computing, Inc. (Nasdaq RGTI): down 9.24% to $8.99 per shar…

Continuing from the “year of yeehaw,” professional bull riding is having a moment on TikTok. Since the beginning of this year, Professional Bull Riding (PBR)—the largest bull riding league in the world—has gained 650,000 followers across its social media platforms, Mashable recently reported. That’s just 200,000 fewer than they gained throughout all of 2024. Mitch Ladner, PBR’s social media lead, told Mashable’s Christianna Silva that most of this growth comes from followers between the ages of 18 and 35. On PBR’s TikTok, which is nearing 3 million followers, many recent videos tap into viral trends and audio—with a cowboy twist. “Aligning our chakras,” one captio…

Step outside your front door on any given day, and say goodbye to money without even trying. Just commuting into the office now sets workers back a whopping $55 a day, data suggests. Thanks to the workforce-wide return-to-office push, many workers are back in the office at least a couple of times a week. With it come the coffee runs, desk salads, and after-work drinks that can quickly add up. Videoconferencing company Owl Labs has done the math and broken down the real cost of physically going into work. When in the office, in-person and hybrid workers spend an average of $55 a day, according to the 2025 State of Hybrid Work report: $15 on commuting, $18 on lunc…

Greg Creed spent 25 years at Yum Brands, including more than a decade in leadership roles at Taco Bell, before he retired from the company in 2020. He offered this unsolicited advice after a rough quarter for McDonald’s, in which same-store sales fell over 3%, the company’s worst drop since the pandemic. The problem, Creed asserts, is that McDonald’s isn’t chasing menu options that its customers will crave. And without a menu that elicits a strong reaction—either positive or negative—from diners, McDonald’s is just “being beige.” “Nothing as a brand is worse than being beige,” Creed wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. “It upsets no one, but let’s be honest: No one l…

Turkish authorities have detained 1,133 people across Turkey since the start of protests five days ago against the detention of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on Monday. The detention last Wednesday of Imamoglu, President Tayyip Erdogan’s main political rival, has triggered the biggest street protests in Turkey in more than a decade. On Sunday, a court jailed him, pending trial, on corruption charges that he denies. Despite bans on street gatherings in many cities, the mostly peaceful anti-government demonstrations continued for a fifth consecutive night on Sunday, with hundreds of thousands taking part. Yerlikaya said 123 …

A colossal squid has been caught on camera for the first time in the deep sea by an international team of researchers steering a remotely operated submersible. The sighting was announced Tuesday by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. The squid filmed was a juvenile about 1 foot (30 centimeters) in length at a depth of 1,968 feet (600 meters) in the South Atlantic Ocean. Full-grown adult colossal squids, which scientists have uncovered from the bellies of whales and seabirds, can reach lengths up to 23 feet (7 meters) — almost the size of a small fire truck. The squid was spied last month near the South Sandwich Islands during an expedition to search for new sea life.…

Some common business models can be described as B2C and B2B, which are “business-to-consumer,” and “business-to-business,” respectively. But now, get ready for “B2AI,” or “business-to-AI.” That’s one of the potential disruptions on the horizon, identified in a new report from Visa and the Institute for the Future. The report digs into the numerous ways that AI will transform commerce, and to some degree personal finance, including how consumers will likely lasso AI for their own means—and how businesses will, in turn, develop AI agents to communicate and correspond with consumers’ AIs. While many people likely haven’t adopted “personal” AI tools yet, they’re on th…

Hawa Hassan was only 4-years-old when fighting forced her and her family from their home in Somalia. Hassan spent the next three years in Kenya, where some of her earliest memories were of running around tents in a refugee camp with her siblings and helping her mother stock the goods store she’d opened there. When she was seven, Hassan’s mother sent her to live with family friends in Seattle. It would be another 15 years before she saw her family again. “A lot of my childhood was spent wondering about my own background and my own identity,” said Hawa, a chef and entrepreneur who now lives in New York. “For many years, I had this deep desire to find people like mys…

A group backed by tech billionaires spent years and $800 million secretly buying up over 60,000 acres of land in Solano County, California, 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The group—which calls itself California Forever and is funded by Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs, among others—planned from the start to build a brand-new city for as many as 400,000 residents. But to do that they needed voter approval to change the county’s development rules. Just before heading to the ballot this past November, California Forever yanked its initiative despite spending over $9 million on its campaign. Now it seems California Forever ma…

In 2008, the American dream of homeownership morphed into a nightmare that tanked the global economy. The culprit? A toxic mix of bad mortgages and casino mentality. Today, another financial time bomb is ticking—and this one is fueled by rising seas, wildfires, and a lethal dose of denial. Climate change is quietly corroding the foundations of the U.S. housing market. From Florida’s hurricane-battered coasts to California’s fire-razed suburbs, a crisis is brewing that could make the subprime mortgage collapse look like a warm-up act. The crisis will be triggered by home insurance. To get a mortgage, you need homeowner’s insurance. But in climate-vulnerab…

AI integration remains a top priority across enterprises worldwide, yet success remains elusive despite widespread enthusiasm and significant investment. An October 2024 study by Boston Consulting Group found that only 26% of companies have derived measurable business value from their AI initiatives. As a result, CEOs face mounting pressure to deliver tangible ROI, shifting focus from experimentation to real-world outcomes. Modern AI development increasingly relies on open-source foundations, enabling rapid iteration and innovation. Many transformative breakthroughs have emerged from community-driven development—primarily in Python, the dominant language in data scien…

With year-to-date hiring plans sinking to a 16-year low according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, many people are beginning to feel the impacts—and it’s reasonable enough to believe that artificial intelligence (AI) might have something to do with the slump. Zip, a company that creates procurement software, recently released a study that shows how AI might be factoring into hiring decisions even more than previously believed. The report surveyed 1,030 “experienced leaders” who are also responsible for some degree of spending and supply management within their companies. Seven in 10 of the leaders—which amounts to 67%—reported that they’re alre…

If you’ve been on Google or virtually any social media website over the last few days, you might have seen stories about Amazon layoffs making the rounds. And if you were curious enough to click through to any of those stories, you might have discovered that Amazon is supposedly planning to lay off 14,000 managers by the end of this quarter—a stunning figure, even for a company as big as Amazon. But that figure is untrue. Not only that, it seems to have been essentially conjured up out of nowhere, before being picked up by a stream of headlines on Google News, viral Reddit threads, and would-be LinkedIn influencers dissecting it as if it were fact. In reality,…

General managers around the National Hockey League are putting some of their old roster and team management tactics on ice. That’s because NHL front offices, through a partnership with software company SAP, are now using the SAP-NHL Front Office App, bringing reams of data and information into a single all-encompassing platform. Given that so much of the sports world is driven by numbers—goals, shots, saves, salaries, and more—all the data and information can be difficult to wrangle. For those working in the front office in the NHL, it could mean “staring at eight computer screens,” and “carrying around a big binder” to make sure it’s all on-hand, as Don Waddell, GM o…

Ask almost any pediatrician or child expert, and they will tell you: Good nutrition is the foundation for healthy development, especially during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life. When children are well-nourished, they are better able to grow, learn, and engage with their communities, and to be resilient in the face of illness.     Undernutrition is linked to nearly half of all deaths in children under five. Today, an estimated 148 million young children are affected by stunting—being too short for their age as a result of chronic undernutrition, often starting in the womb. Stunting isn’t just about height; it reflects lasting setbacks in brain development, immu…