What's on Your Mind?

Every year, companies and space agencies launch hundreds of rockets into space—and that number is set to grow dramatically with ambitious missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But these dreams hinge on one critical challenge: propulsion—the methods used to push rockets and spacecraft forward. To make interplanetary travel faster, safer, and more efficient, scientists need breakthroughs in propulsion technology. Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs. We’re a team of engineers and graduate students who are studying how AI in general, and a subset of AI called machine learning in particular…

The day after Thanksgiving is a holiday in itself for retailers. Historically, Black Friday has been a time when shoppers wake up early and head to stores for the best deals of the year. More recently, though, more and more consumers have been opting out of the mad rush in stores and turning to online deals, many of which started a week ago and now extend all weekend long till Cyber Monday, December 1. For those who like to be there when doors open, this is for you. Here’s everything you need to know. What time do Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s, and Walmart open? Many major big-box retailers open their doors nice and early for Black Friday, starting with Kohl’s a…

What does it mean to be a courageous leader in 2025? Stanley McChrystal, retired four-star general in the U.S. Army, joins futurist and culture critic Baratunde Thurston to discuss McChrystal’s new book, On Character, the responsibility of leaders today, and the weight of being an active citizen in democracy. Considering President The President’s deployment of the National Guard, McChrystal explores the role of the military in civil society. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversatio…

After Thanksgiving, brands will bombard you with Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. It can be overwhelming to know what to buy. After all, some deals aren’t actually all that good. And besides, you don’t want to make impulse buys that you’ll regret later and that will end up in a landfill in the near future. To help cut through the noise, we’ve picked out the best deals from design-forward brands. They create beautiful products that are thoughtfully designed to last for years. We’ve even picked out some of our favorite classic products that you will enjoy using for a long time. All the prices below are before discounts. MoMA Design Store 20% off sit…

It’s that time of year again. My mailbox is stuffed with catalogs. Targeted seasonal ads from Amazon, Walmart, and Target are following me around the internet. And every other email in my overflowing inbox offers me the go-to 2025 gift guide for everyone on my list! Anyone else out there starting to dread gift-giving? Sometime in the past 30 years, cheaply made stuff became easily available at the click of a button on our phones, and that took a lot of the shine off of gifts. Not only did online shopping make it much easier to buy things for ourselves (whether we needed them or not), but also it was much easier to buy things for other people. And that influx o…

Social media has become inexorably intertwined with our daily lives, but not all platforms are equally popular. For every cultural phenomenon like TikTok, there’s a Mastodon. It would be easy, based on the news media’s borderline obsession with TikTok and X, to assume that those platforms are, if not the most used social media tools in America today, then very close to the top. They’re not. In fact, they’re squarely in the middle, according to a new study from Pew Research. Instead, it’s YouTube that is the most commonly used social media platform in the U.S.—by a landslide. Pew reports that 84% of U.S. adults use YouTube. (The platform is also the most widely use…

As the midterm election primaries inch closer, some candidates are focusing their campaigns on how they’ll regulate artificial intelligence. On the right, populist Republicans are warning that the AI industry stands to undermine the Make America Great Again movement. On the left, there’s worry about the sector’s growing political and social power. Across the spectrum, there’s near-universal concern about what the technology might be doing to children. The donor class is now getting involved: A super PAC called Leading the Future backed by OpenAI executive Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz plans to spend as much as $100 million in the midterms to support its prefe…

Hello once again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. I didn’t buy a new phone this year. Or a new laptop, tablet, or smartwatch. That hasn’t been a hardship. I’ve just been perfectly content with the gear I already own—both a satisfying feeling and a boon to my pocketbook. Instead of being splashy budget busters, the new products that made me happiest in 2025 have been relatively inexpensive items that bring clever twists to seemingly mundane categories. This week, I’m going to tell you about three I’ve found especially rewarding. (I’m citing their list prices, but—this being Black Friday week—all are widely available at steep discounts as I write this…

I’ve worked for myself for nearly a decade, and in all but one of those years I’ve earned more than the U.K. average salary. Some years it’s been a little more. I’m naturally frugal, and even during the rockiest stretches, there’s always been enough to cover the basics—plus a safety net if I ever truly needed it. Yet I worry about money constantly, gnawed by the sense that I’m only one missed invoice from financial collapse. Although I’m generally wary of self-diagnosis, the term “money dysmorphia”—a disconnect between how we feel about our finances and the reality—fits me like a glove. From the rise of HENRYs (“high earners, not rich yet”) to the boom in “income …

If you loved the Lego Game Boy but couldn’t get yourself to buy it because it was only a display piece that couldn’t play actual Game Boy games, I’ve got great news for you: It’s no longer merely a clever block of bricks. Substance Labs, a merry band of Lego and gaming lovers based in Switzerland, have created a kit that retrofits the official brick-perfect Lego set into an unofficial pixel-perfect playable Game Boy. The name of this wündertronics is BrickBoy. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter project, so the usual “may not deliver” caveats apply. Substance Labs calls itself “a team of creators and engineers who grew up building with Lego and gaming on the classics [who hav…

As we near the final weeks of the year, platforms of all stripes will soon begin rolling out their annual recap features, which let users see the content they have interacted with most. While numerous tech giants release these recaps, music streamer Spotify is usually the most anticipated. Known as Spotify Wrapped, this look-back lets you see which songs you interacted with most over the past 12 months. So when will Spotify Wrapped 2025 be available? Here’s what you need to know. What is Spotify Wrapped 2025? Spotify Wrapped is the music streamer’s annual year-in-review compilation that allows Spotify users to see which songs, albums, and artists the…

No one can deny that the internet, especially social media, can pose significant dangers. Now, a new survey has found that about one in five parents and carers know—and have supported—a child who has experienced online blackmail. The survey, from the U.K.’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), also showed that one in ten of these individuals’ own children have experienced blackmail online. According to the NSPCC, bad actors often start communicating with young people on public platforms before actively moving the conversation to end-to-end encrypted messaging services—making it more challenging for them to be tracked. Only 43% o…

In the latest sign that the The President administration isn’t so concerned about asbestos, the Food and Drug Administration this week withdrew a proposed rule that would have required testing for the toxic asbestos in talc-based cosmetics. The rule, which was proposed by the Biden administration less than a year ago, would have required manufacturers to test cosmetics for asbestos and keep records demonstrating compliance. Exposure to asbestos has been linked to lung cancer, mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and laryngeal cancer, which is why various health agencies have determined there’s no “safe” level of exposure to this natural mineral. Johnson & Johnson has…

A growing number of Amazon employees have signed onto an open letter issuing some dire warnings about the company’s sprint toward AI. The letter, signed by more than 1,000 workers and published this week, calls out Amazon for pushing its AI investments at the expense of the climate and its human workforce. The letter’s supporters come from a wide array of roles at the company, including many software engineers, and even employees focused on building AI systems. “We believe that the all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development will do staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth,” the letter’s authors wrote. “We’re the workers who de…

There’s an old myth that Inuit cultures have as many as a hundred words for snow. I remember learning about it in school, and there was just something wonderful about the idea that people’s perceptions can be so deeply rich and different. I guess that’s why, although it has been debunked many times, the story keeps getting repeated. There is also a lot of truth to the underlying concept. As anybody who has ever learned another language or lived in a different culture knows, people’s perceptions vary widely. In The WEIRDest People In The World, Harvard’s Joseph Henrich documents how important and interesting these differences can be. So if the Inuit snow myth hig…

Enterprises have often dreamed about AI systems that can reason across their most sensitive data, execute multistep tasks, and explain their logic while remaining inside a highly governed environment. Snowflake and Anthropic are betting they can finally crack the code. Through a multiyear, $200-million expansion of their agentic AI partnership, the companies plan to deliver an operational “control plane” that uses Anthropic’s latest Claude models, such as Sonnet and Opus 4.5, to power enterprise intelligence. The announcement landed alongside Snowflake’s Q3 earnings for fiscal year 2025, which showed the company maintaining strong momentum. Snowflake reported $1.21…

The hype train on corporate purpose keeps steaming down the tracks. I have written about it before and tried to be positive. But I feel the need to be more constructively critical. If everyone has been convinced that they need to have a corporate purpose, let’s at least have it be a useful one. I try to contribute to that goal in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here. The hype train The articles and books on corporate purpose just keep coming. For example, in the past month alone, Harvard Business Review published four pieces on purpose (one, two, three, four). And the books keep coming, w…

Below, Jane Marie Chen shares five key insights from her new book, Like a Wave We Break: A Memoir of Falling Apart and Finding Myself. Jane is a leadership coach, public speaker, and cofounder of Embrace Global, a social enterprise that developed a low-cost infant incubator. She has been a TED Fellow, an Echoing Green Fellow, and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. Her many honors include being recognized as a Forbes Impact 30 and receiving The Economist’s Innovation Award. What’s the big idea? Like a Wave We Break is a story of self-discovery. When achievements define us or serve as an escape from hidden scars of trauma, we do ourselves and othe…

Large language models have started creating their own terms and mixing them into everyday speech. Experts call it ‘lexical seepage.’ View the full article

Judge a book by its cover, and you might think that American Canto, the memoir by Vanity Fair‘s outgoing West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi, is destined to be a classic. The memoir, which chronicles Nuzzi’s drama-filled life and career as a political reporter in the The President era, features a strikingly simple cover that serves as shorthand for the book’s ambitions. “The intent was to give the book a clean, no-frills design that felt both classic and contemporary,” says Simon & Schuster senior art director Alison Forner, who’s also designed book covers like Ezra Klein’s all-type cover Why We’re Polarized and Garrett M. Graff’s Watergate: A New History. Nuzz…

Artificial intelligence is the most exhaustively covered technology since the dawn of the internet. As any tech editor will tell you, it can be challenging to find stories about AI that are not merely new but big. So when our editorial director, Jill Bernstein, forwarded me a pitch from journalist John Pavlus, who wanted to write about a “mad scientist” attempting to “stomp out hallucinations and other gen-AI nonsense from Amazon’s cloud security/ chatbots/robots/agents,” I said yes in seconds. (He actually used a more pungent term than “nonsense,” but for decorum’s sake, I’m keeping that to myself.) And then I braced myself. The pitch promised to explain t…

When Levi’s CEO Michelle Gass was in Japan last summer, she and chief product officer Karyn Hillman wandered down the street from the brand’s store in Tokyo’s trendy Harajuku neighborhood to a small, unassuming vintage shop called BerBerJin. They took the stairs down into its cavernous basement, where it keeps racks and racks of its best denim finds, and began the slow, laborious task of searching for treasure. A couple of hours later, Gass walked out with a pair of 1947 vintage 501s and an even rarer 1952 trucker jacket. “We tried on so many, many pairs of jeans,” Gass tells me over coffee in her San Francisco office in September. “You appreciate the nuances and beau…

The smartest financial move I ever made was to stop contributing to retirement savings. It may sound counterintuitive, even reckless. Dave Ramsey would have stress dreams about this article, but it may be time to get a divorce from your 401(k). Here’s the truth: You actually don’t need millions to retire. Those retirement calculators love to spit out impossible numbers: $3 million, $5 million, sometimes more. Numbers so big they make financial freedom feel like a five-decade slog. Here’s the part they leave out. Most people following the “save for 40 years” script never hit those numbers. They keep working and waiting, but they’re aiming for a moving goalpost.…

President Donald The President has always been a master marketer. He is particularly adept at lending his name to products and buildings, which has proven to be a lucrative business. Now in office, he’s bringing that same licensing mindset to the very act of governing. Last week, the State Department said it renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) after The President and put his name on its building in Washington, D.C. This comes after The President fired the board members and nearly all U.S. employees of the USIP. The USIP’s open, natural-light-drenched headquarters was designed by Safdie Architects to symbolize conflict resolution. But it has ironically becom…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Earlier in the spring, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) announced that, starting in late May 2025, H-1B visa holders and other non-permanent residents would be banned from taking out new FHA mortgages. The result? Non-permanent residents—including H-1B visa holders—saw their share of FHA mortgage locks crater from 3.8% in September 2024 to 0.2% in September 2025, according to Optimal Blue. This sharp pullback comes after their share of FHA mortgage locks had spiked between 2020 and 2024. Keep in mind that FHA mortgages make up a much …