What's on Your Mind?

Do your office, inbox, and calendar feel like a ghost town on Friday afternoons? You’re not alone. I’m a labor economist who studies how technology and organizational change affect productivity and well-being. In a study published in an August 2025 working paper, I found that the way people allocate their time to work has changed profoundly since the COVID-19 pandemic began. For example, among professionals in occupations that can be done remotely, 35% to 40% worked remotely on Thursdays and Fridays in 2024, compared with only 15% in 2019. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, nearly 30% worked remotely, versus 10% to 15% five years earlier. And white-collar e…

H Company and CEO Gautier Cloix turn AI and APIs into the next office colleague by creating agentic systems to perform real tasks alongside humans. View the full article

After writing more than one article a day for the last 23 years, I’ve accumulated a body of text large enough to train an AI model that could convincingly write “like me.” With today’s technology, it would not be difficult to build a system capable of generating opinions that sound as if they came from Enrique Dans—an algorithmic professor that keeps publishing long after I’m gone. That, apparently, is the next frontier of productivity: the digital twin. Startups such as Viven and tools like Synthesia are building “AI clones” of employees and executives—trained on their voices, writing, decisions, and habits. The idea is seductive. Imagine scaling yourself infinitely…

You may think working hard, showing initiative, boosting your skill set, and being a team player is what it takes to be noticed to get promoted. But even with all these notable wins and strides, the call to a higher position often never comes. The reality of being repeatedly passed over is frustrating—and such a “promotion plateau” can leave you questioning what’s really within your control. To learn more about the concept, Fast Company asked three career experts for advice on how to handle a stagnant job path . . . as well as what you can do to add some momentum to your promotion game plan. What exactly is a promotion plateau? The most significant te…

Inspired by the ongoing auction of Bob Ross paintings to raise money for public television, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver is putting some of its own TV artifacts up for auction for a good cause. Host John Oliver dedicated the close of Sunday’s season finale to local public television, which is facing an unprecedented crisis. Federal budget cuts could by next year close as many as 115 public television and radio stations in the U.S. serving 43 million Americans, according to the Public Media Bridge Fund, a philanthropic initiative. “These stations can fill a vital community role,” Oliver said during Sunday’s show. johnoliversjunk.com Bob Ross Inc. said …

The influence of the AI industry is becoming a major topic in New York’s 12th congressional district, where a crowded Democratic primary packed with millennial and Gen Z candidates is heating up. The seat represents one of the wealthiest communities in the country — and is a liberal stronghold — so whoever wins could eventually become a major player in the fight to limit the most noxious impacts of large language model (LLM) technology. On Tuesday, Cameron Kasky, a political activist and Parkland shooting survivor who lives in the district (which includes the Upper West Side and Upper East Side) announced he was running. His campaign is making fighting the “AI oligarc…

Pigs famously have thick skin and Donald The President does not. It’s just one of myriad distinctions between the cloven-hoofed barnyard animal and America’s 47th president. There’s a good reason, however, why many social media users are currently addressing The President as “Piggy,” and sharing crude, AI-assisted images of him in porcine form. Rest assured, he paved his own pathway to hog heaven. On Monday, a clip of The President addressing reporters aboard Air Force One went viral. It begins with reporter Jennifer Jacobs pressing The President about the eternally unfurling Epstein scandal. The president seems as though he’d rather not answer the question—at lea…

Being the children of Francis Ford Coppola had a profound impact on the filmmaking sensibilities of Sofia and Roman Coppola, but their mother, Eleanor Coppola, may have played a larger role in nurturing their creative pursuits. “She taught me how to be in charge without being loud, and the importance of being real,” Sofia writes in her introduction to Two of Me: Notes on Living and Leaving, Eleanor Coppola’s posthumous memoir, published by A24 on November 11. Sofia and Roman convened in New York City last week for a conversation about the book and their mother, who died in April 2024 at the age of 87. One of Eleanor’s last wishes was to have Two of Me, which…

If it seems like everything is getting more expensive, you’re right. Thanks to inflation (up 3%), which has affected goods from food to gas (for which prices are up 4.1%), you can now add the post office to the the long list of places where you’ll have to pay more. Here’s what to know. What’s happening? The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is planning to increase the price of shipping. The good news is, the changes won’t affect your holiday packages and won’t raise the price of stamps. The changes go into effect next year on January 18, pending a review by the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC). How much will prices go up? The move will raise prices approximat…

Tim Cook has led Apple for the past 14 years. In that time, the company’s market cap has jumped from $348 billion to $4 trillion. While his predecessor, Steve Jobs, might have been a leader in the field of innovation, few CEOs have shown the business acumen of Cook. But according to a report in the Financial Times, Cook’s run as CEO could be over as soon as next year. The report has set off a guessing game as to who will take over the tech giant when Cook departs. (Apple did not respond to a request for comment on the FT story.) The name most commonly mentioned is John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, though reportedly no final decisions …

What’s one thing every leader can do to make sure employees are happy at work and engaged with their jobs? Make sure they can trust in you, your organization, and one another. That’s the finding in a 2024 meta-analysis of studies with more than 1 million participants. When leaders seek to improve employee well-being, they typically think about things like remote work, flexible schedules, and wellness offerings such as gym memberships. But trust may be the most valuable perk of all. A 2024 meta-analysis by an international research team led by Minxiang Zhao and Yixuan Li of the Renmin University of China psychology department examined 132 studies on trust from around t…

Two new data centers in Silicon Valley have been built but can’t begin processing information: The equipment that would supply them with electricity isn’t available. It’s just one example of a crisis facing the U.S. power grid that can’t be solved simply by building more power lines, approving new power generation, or changing out grid software. The equipment needed to keep the grid running—transformers that regulate voltage, circuit breakers that protect against faults, high-voltage cables that carry power across regions, and steel poles that hold the network together—is hard to make, and materials are limited. Supply-chain bottlenecks are taking years to clear, dela…

Soooo, do you Labubu? The furry creature went viral this year thanks to Dua Lipa, Blackpink’s Lisa, and Kim Kardashian all buying into the adorably bizarre, plushy monsters. The results were millions in sales, long lines, and frantic scrambles as people tried to get their hands on this latest trendy phenom. Labubu’s Chinese parent company, Pop Mart, reported global revenue for Q3 (July through September) jumped by about 250% compared to a year earlier, and sales in America were up by more than 1,200%. But it goes beyond Pop Mart, as brands from South Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries are finding more inroads into American culture. Just as American cultural influ…

It’s happened to you countless times: You’re waiting for a website to load, only to see a box with a little mountain range where an image should be. It’s the placeholder icon for a “missing image.” But have you ever wondered why this scene came to be universally adopted? As a scholar of environmental humanities, I pay attention to how symbols of wilderness appear in everyday life. The little mountain icon—sometimes with a sun or cloud in the background, other times crossed out or broken—has become the standard symbol, across digital platforms, to signal something missing or something to come. It appears in all sorts of contexts, and the more you look for this …

What does it mean to be “smart” or “dumb”? Few questions are more deceptively complex. Most of us have strong opinions about what those words mean, but scratch the surface and it becomes clear that “smart” and “dumb” are slippery, subjective constructs. What seems smart to one person may strike another as naive, arrogant, or shortsighted. Worse still, our own perception of what’s smart can shift over time. Yesterday’s clever decision can look like today’s regrettable blunder. Take Jay Gatsby, for instance. His grand plan to reinvent himself, amass a fortune, and win back Daisy once seemed like the height of romantic intelligence; but in the end, it revealed itself…

It’s been 70 years since Douglas McGregor sketched a management theory at MIT Sloan that leaders still ignore—and their teams pay the price. Known as Theory X and Theory Y, McGregor’s framework built on Abraham Maslow’s work on employee self-actualization, and it quickly became one of the foundational texts of modern management thinking. In McGregor’s theory, leaders fall into two camps. Theory X managers assume that employees are inherently lazy, need constant supervision, and would rather coast along than contribute. Theory Y managers, by contrast, see employees as self-motivated, responsible, and capable of growth if given the right environment. And the ki…

The most enduring leaders aren’t the ones with flawless résumés. They’re the ones who’ve been tested, humbled, and reshaped by failure. From an early age, I trained intensively to become a professional ballet dancer. Ballet wasn’t just a passion. It was my identity, my future, my entire world. Until an audition in Vienna changed everything. A sudden injury ended the career I had spent years building. That moment could have marked the end of my story. Instead, it became the beginning of a new one. I pivoted into finance and marketing, building a career at American Express and Amazon. Today, I advise boards and CEOs on succession, governance, and talent strategy at …

It should be shocking to nobody that we’re dealing with an absolute surplus of AI consumables. Breakthroughs. Policy changes. New tools that promise to “10x your productivity.” Most of it is either too technical, too abstract, or just plain filler. You don’t need another wall of text, you need the signal. Luckily, there are a handful of AI newsletters that consistently deliver real value without taking up half your morning. (My editor wanted to make sure you knew about Fast Company’s own such newsletter, by senior reporter Mark Sullivan: AI Decoded. You can sign up for it here.) The Rundown AI: The Daily Scan If you have exactly five minutes between pouring…

Last week, Congress released more than 23,000 pages of documents from the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate to the public. Since then, the bombshell release has garnered commentary from the The President administration, thousands of internet users, Saturday Night Live and, now, merch sellers on Etsy. In recent years, a certain contingent of ultra-niche online merch sellers (and, most likely, drop shippers) have decided that any notable event is fodder for potential T-shirts, mugs, and bumper stickers. In recent months alone, sellers have profited from merchandise designed to covertly signal anti-The President messaging; merch promoting “All…

When you open Microsoft Excel to review quarterly results or check Waze to optimize your route to the office, you’re tapping into technologies born not in corporate boardrooms, but in university labs. Thinking of innovation, our minds often jump to the titans of tech: Jobs, Musk, Altman, Gates, Bezos. But behind everyday tech innovations and healthcare breakthroughs are academic researchers whose work catalyzed billion-dollar industries. The unsung heroes of the lab and lecture hall have laid the groundwork for some of the most transformative technologies of our time. A few make celebrity status as Nobel prize winners, but the glory of most academics is poorly underst…

It’s not just executives or knowledge workers in offices who are using artificial intelligence. It’s being adopted in fields like healthcare, retail, hospitality, and food services, too. But frontline workers often aren’t prepared for AI adoption. In fact, many are completely unaware that it’s being implemented in their workplaces at all. Workplace management platform Deputy surveyed 1,500 frontline workers across the U.S., U.K., and Australia for its “2025 Better Together Survey: How AI and Human Connection Will Transform Frontline Work.” The survey found that nearly half of workplaces (48%) use AI. However, only 1 in 4 workers say they regularly interact with it. B…

Five students at U.S. military academies and three each from Yale University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the 32 American winners named Sunday as 2026 Rhodes scholars. The group includes students focused on housing, health outcomes, sustainability, and prison reentry programs. They include: Alice L. Hall of Philadelphia, a varsity basketball player at MIT who also serves as student body president. Hall, who has collaborated with a women’s collective in Ghana on sustainability tools, plans to study engineering. Sydney E. Barta of Arlington, Virginia, a Paralympian and member of the track team at Stanford Universit…

Jeff Bezos will serve as co-chief executive officer of a new artificial intelligence startup that focuses on AI for engineering and manufacturing of computers, automobiles, and spacecraft, the New York Times reported on Monday. The company, called Project Prometheus, has garnered $6.2 billion in funding, partly from the Amazon founder, making it one of the most well-financed early-stage startups in the world, the report said, citing three people familiar with the company. This is the first time Bezos has taken a formal operational role in a company since he stepped down as the CEO of Amazon in July 2021. Though he is involved in Blue Origin, his official title at …

When Jennifer Austin met Molly in second grade, they quickly became best friends. They giggled through classes until the teacher separated them, inspiring them to come up with their own language. They shared sleepovers and went on each other’s family vacations. But they gradually drifted apart after Austin’s family moved to Germany before the girls started high school. Decades passed before they recently reconnected as grown women. “Strong friendships really do stay for the long haul,” Austin, 51, said. “Even if there are pauses in between and they fade, that doesn’t mean they completely dissolve or they go forgotten. They’re always there kind of lingering like a …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. When I recently reached out to Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi for his updated home price forecast, he said his long-term outlook for the U.S. housing market remains largely unchanged: he expects a prolonged period of stagnation as affordability gradually improves. Following the historic run-up in prices during the Pandemic Housing Boom and the subsequent mortgage rate shock, Zandi believes resale activity/existing home sales will likely stay frozen for several more years. “Affordability has to be restored for housing to regain its m…