What's on Your Mind?

Mark Manson’s 2016 book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck delivered some hard truths and prescient advice to millions of readers seeking answers. Now he’s building an AI-based application to do the same. At that time, Manson says the self-help field was “unrealistic, not very evidence based—just designed to make you feel good,” inspiring him to write a book that offered “a more skeptical, realistic, and zero bull shit approach to personal growth and self-help.” Nearly a decade later, Manson says he’s seeing the same pattern in the digital world, with millions turning to generic AI platforms for guidance, only to receive unrealistic, potentially harmful advice. T…

Chanel’s new showman, Matthieu Blazy, took his designs on the road Tuesday — or rather, underground, with a buzzy New York runway show staged on an actual subway platform. The designer, just weeks after his splashy Paris debut for Chanel in October, took over a decommissioned part of Manhattan’s Bowery station for his first Métiers d’Art collection. The annual show, which takes place in a different city each year, celebrates the craftsmanship of the artisans that partner with Chanel. In this case, it was two shows—one in the afternoon and one in the evening. And befitting the first Chanel shows in New York since 2018, there were VIPs aplenty: A$AP Rocky, Tilda Swinton, …

Many major platforms provide personalized “year in review” features that highlight how users have spent their time over the past year. Spotify Wrapped is the most popular of these summaries, but Apple Music, Snapchat, Deezer, and others also offer them. And now, internet users have a new year-in-review feature to check out this year: YouTube Recap. Here’s what you need to know about the video site’s year-in-review and how to access it—especially if you’re looking to kill some time while waiting for Spotify Wrapped 2025 to come out. What is YouTube Recap? YouTube Recap is Google’s just-announced year-in-review feature for its YouTube platform. The pers…

The city of San Francisco filed a lawsuit against some of the nation’s top food manufacturers on Tuesday, arguing that ultraprocessed food from the likes of Coca-Cola and Nestle are responsible for a public health crisis. City Attorney David Chiu named 10 companies in the lawsuit, including the makers of such popular foods as Oreo cookies, Sour Patch Kids, Kit Kat, Cheerios and Lunchables. The lawsuit argues that ultraprocessed foods are linked to diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and cancer. “They took food and made it unrecognizable and harmful to the human body,” Chiu said in a news release. “These companies engineered a public health crisis, they…

Spotify Wrapped 2025 is here, and it’s inspired by mixtapes, DIY aesthetics, and all things pre-internet. After plenty of anticipation, Wrapped has now debuted for the eleventh year in a row. As public interest in Wrapped has mounted exponentially each year—and other brands have flocked to dupe the format—Spotify has been compelled to continuously up the ante on its own design concept, and this year is no exception. Wrapped 2025 comes with 12 brand new features, each intended to make the experience more personalized than years past. In the music world (and everywhere else), 2025 has been a year dominated by conversation around the explosion of AI technology. In S…

Less than five months have passed since American Eagle’s controversial Sydney Sweeney campaign, which led to accusations ranging from cluelessness to Nazi propaganda. While the mall mainstay defended the campaign and has escaped relatively unscathed, a new quarterly earnings report shows the success of its sister-brand Aerie is buoying its financial results. On Tuesday, December 2, apparel retail company American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) shared its third-quarter earnings for fiscal 2025, including $1.36 billion in revenue. The 6% increase year-over-year (YOY) beat Wall Street’s predicted $1.32 billion in revenue, according to consensus estimates cited by CNBC. …

The The President administration is pausing all immigration applications such as requests for green cards for people from 19 countries banned from travel earlier this year, as part of sweeping immigration changes in the wake of the shooting of two National Guard troops. The changes were outlined in a policy memo posted Tuesday on the website of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency tasked with processing and approving all requests for immigration benefits. The pause puts on hold a wide range of immigration-related decisions such as green card applications or naturalizations for immigrants from those 19 countries that the The President administration has …

Until recently, when you looked at a house for sale on Zillow, you could see property-specific scores for the risk of flooding, wildfires, wind from storms and hurricanes, extreme heat, and air quality. The numbers came from First Street, a nonprofit that uses peer-reviewed methodologies to calculate “climate risk.” But Zillow recently removed those scores after pressure from CRMLS, one of the large real-estate listing services that supplies its data. “The reality is these models have been around for over five years,” says Matthew Eby, CEO of First Street, which also provides its data to sites like Realtor.com and Redfin. (Zillow started displaying the information in …

The The President administration says it may withhold Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits from recipients in 22 states and Washington, D.C starting as early as next week, unless the states in question provide information on those receiving the assistance to the federal government. The states have argued that the information being requested is private, and that handing it over would be a violation of privacy laws. On Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins addressed the issue at a Cabinet meeting. Rollins said that cooperation from all 50 states is necessary in order “to root out this fraud and to protect the American taxpayer,” doubling down …

From reality TV to fashion and beauty and everywhere in between, you’ve unmistakably heard of Kim Kardashian. Critics may talk, but there’s no denying she’s one of the most influential and accomplished women of our time—with a net worth of $1.7 billion. And she’s still expanding. Now, after building a multibillion-dollar empire, Kardashian is taking on a new role: instructor. Her new MasterClass, “The New Rules of Business: The Ten Kimmandments with Kim Kardashian,” launches today. “Master them and you’ll create marketing that commands attention and build businesses that will scale,” Kardashian says. The tenets cover a range of 10 lessons, but Kimmandment #8—“Know…

Before becoming a coach for neurodiverse individuals with ADHD, Justine Capelle Collis had a successful advertising career. She worked in Australia and the UK, and also across the US and Canadian markets. Her clients have included Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. And she achieved all this without realizing that she has ADHD. That realization came when she became a mother. Both of her sons were diagnosed with ADHD, and she started asking questions. “How do I advocate” and get “the system to bend” for them, rather than having them “fit into the system and then break?” she asked. She then went on a personal journey to retrain. Collis enrolled in po…

When I was cycling across the country on my bike, I spent anywhere from six to nine hours a day in the saddle—for almost three solid months. It made a lot of people wonder: What did you listen to all day long? “Was it mostly music, or more like audiobooks, podcasts?” asked a friend of mine when we went for a drink at a bar after I got back home. “What was on your playlist?” “Nothing,” I said. She frowned slightly, as if she’d misheard me. “What do you mean, ‘nothing?’” “I mean, nothing. I don’t listen to anything when I ride,” I replied. “I don’t even wear earbuds.” You could see the wheels of her mind grind to a standstill. “What the hell. You…

It’s the end of the year and the pressure is on, demands are high, and you’re probably close to the end of your rope as you try to wrap up your remaining projects before the holidays start. If that’s you, you’re not alone. Holiday stress is very common: In a survey by LifeStance Health, 57% of respondents said they experience stress over the season. But it’s possible to maintain your energy and momentum and not only get things done but stay engaged and finish strong. Fortunately, there are a few pragmatic strategies to maintain your energy and momentum through the end of the year. 1. Maintain control You’re likely to start feeling out of control. This is becaus…

For a while now, we’ve been hearing warnings about AI eliminating jobs. First, it was only at the fringes. But now it’s starting to bite into roles once thought untouchable. It isn’t just administrative work, copywriting, or design anymore; even advisory roles, data analytics, and coding are being reshaped by automation. But history teaches us that technological disruption doesn’t eliminate work, it reshapes it. The industrial revolution, for example, didn’t end human contribution, it simply redefined the places where humans bring the most value. AI is doing the same thing today. While it does, in fact, take (or reduce the need for) some jobs, it can, and will, p…

When Jon LaMantia, a Long Island-based business reporter, was in journalism school, his professor drilled one rule into his students: you get two exclamation points a year and no more. “So if you use them in January,” LaMantia recalls being told, “you better hope there’s nothing to exclaim for the rest of the year.” The rule stuck. LaMantia still thinks about that rigid quota today. “I use exclamation points all the time in texts and emails. If you don’t, the message sounds more stern,” he says. “But I can’t remember the last time I used one in a business article.” Strong feelings about the exclamation point aren’t uncommon. People tend to either love it or l…

It’s been a tumultuous year for the legacy retailer, shaped by new tariffs, shifting consumer habits, and the constant flip between “wartime” and “peacetime” leadership. Tony Spring, Macy’s Inc. chairman and CEO, shares why his team is now on “version 27 of the plan,” and what it really means to court the next generation of shoppers. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you ge…

Twenty years ago, not too long after Youtube itself launched, Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla started uploading videos to the platform. What started as two teenagers trying to make each other laugh turned into the biggest channel on YouTube. It was the first ever to reach 10 million subscribers. Eventually Smosh was acquired by a company called Defy Media. The company would expand rapidly–more videos, more cast members, even a movie–but then came turmoil and uncertainty for Smosh. Padilla left the company in 2017, largely due to creative differences with Smosh’s parent company. He returned to the business in 2023, when he and Hecox purchased Smosh from YouTuber-led med…

Shares of Meta Platforms, Inc. (META) rose on Thursday after Bloomberg reported the technology company was planning to cut spending across its division by 10%, with as much as 30% cuts to its virtual reality group, which includes the so-called metaverse. This could potentially include layoffs, which could come as early as January, and are part of the company’s 2026 budget, according to the article. Meta—the owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger, and WhatsApp—develops metaverse technologies, such as the Horizon Worlds platform. Fast Company has reached out to Meta for comment. Meta stock rose 5.7% in early trading Thursday, before settling up a…

President Donald The President plans to travel to Pennsylvania on Tuesday to highlight his efforts to reduce inflation even as fears mount about a worsening job market and amid signs that Americans are still feeling squeezed by high prices. A White House official said The President would be making the trip to discuss ending the inflation crisis that he says was inherited from his predecessor, Joe Biden. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the trip has not been formally announced. It was not immediately clear where in Pennsylvania The President would be visiting. Last month’s off-year elections showed a shift away from Republicans as public concern…

As the rest of the world speeds ahead toward an electrified future, the U.S. is doubling down on gas-powered cars. President The President announced a proposal this week to slash stricter fuel economy standards put in place during the Biden administration. By reversing the standards, the White House further aligns itself with the oil and gas industry, with some automakers happily going along for the ride. “We’re officially terminating Joe Biden’s ridiculously burdensome, horrible actually, CAFE standards that impose expensive restrictions,” The President said, referencing the Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules. “And all sorts of problems – all sorts of problems …

U.S. applications for unemployment benefits fell to their lowest level in more than three years during Thanksgiving week, potentially complicating the Federal Reserve’s upcoming decision on interest rates. The number of Americans applying for jobless benefits for the week ending Nov. 29 fell to 191,000 from the previous week’s 218,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s the lowest level since September 24, 2022, when claims came in at 189,000. Analysts surveyed by the data provider FactSet had forecast initial claims of 221,000. Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide, said that unemployment benefit filings are often distorted by the Thanksgivi…

The numbers are in for Spotify Wrapped: After the streaming music app dropped its popular year-in-review recap for 2025, the company said it has already seen a huge increase in user engagement, hitting 200 million users just 24 hours after the recap’s release, a 19% increase year-over-year (YOY). Compare that with last year, when it took 62 hours to hit that same number. Why the uptick in user engagement? One reason could be because the platform is growing. A look at the numbers shows Spotify’s monthly active users grew 11% YOY to 713 million in Q3 of 2025, according to the company’s third quarter earnings report. Spotify Wrapped is for sharing Sharing …

It’s a great week to have a disposable income and act like you know how to ski. North Face x Skims today launches its second winter outerwear capsule, again channeling ski culture with a campaign shot on the powder-coated Chilean mountains. (Skis and airfare not included.) The 2025 drop expands on its collection from last year with even more silhouettes, like the wrap puffer coat, and a thoughtfully cropped, hooded puffer jacket with drop shoulder that brings some fashion to the line, which is aesthetically more oriented toward sport. It also includes men’s and kid’s styles for the first time (prices range from $55 to $800). Even considering the new styl…

Only about 10 percent of venture funds ever make it to a fourth vintage. Of those, just 5 to 10 percent are led by women. I’m one of them. When I started Female Founders Fund in 2014, I believed that solid returns and conviction would speak for themselves. Strong performance would unlock capital and the industry would reward the achievement, especially from those breaking new ground—or so I thought. What I’ve come to learn is that venture capital isn’t a pure meritocracy. It’s a network-driven ecosystem where who you know often matters just as much as what you build. Cultural and political changes, and a tight market environment, are making it especially difficul…

From reality TV to fashion and beauty and everywhere in between, you’ve unmistakably heard of Kim Kardashian. Critics may talk, but there’s no denying she’s one of the most influential and accomplished women of our time—with a net worth of $1.7 billion. And she’s still expanding. Now, after building a multibillion-dollar empire, Kardashian is taking on a new role: instructor. Her new MasterClass, “The New Rules of Business: The Ten Kimmandments with Kim Kardashian,” launches today. “Master them and you’ll create marketing that commands attention and build businesses that will scale,” Kardashian says. The tenets cover a range of 10 lessons, but Kimmandment #8—“Know…