What's on Your Mind?

Ever wondered what happens when you add random household items to the same bowl every day for 100 days straight? Well, you’re in luck. One TikTok account has made it their mission to find out—so you don’t have to. The anonymous account, known simply as Bowl of Danger, adds “random stuff” to a bowl each day until they “get in danger.” The experiment began in January with a dollop of sunscreen. Each day, something new entered the mix: sugar, whipped cream, deodorant, lit firecrackers, batteries, nail polish, vodka, a whole pizza, a Big Mac. “Can’t imagine how bad that reeks,” someone wrote in the comments. “I just unlocked a new facial expression,” a…

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…

When Katie Hammel arrived at her company’s offsite in Cabo San Lucas, she expected the usual formula: long meetings, awkward icebreakers, and a packed agenda that left little room to breathe. What she experienced instead was something different—a thoughtfully curated, empowering, and inclusive retreat. “There was a little wrap-up at the end of each day,” says Hammel, director of content at travel rewards booking platform Point.me. “At first I thought it was going to be kind of corny, and I actually ended up really loving it. Hearing what surprised people, what they learned—it just really crystallized the day.” Hammel, who’s attended nine retreats while working at …

Wake up, go to class, grab a panini, then go to work. The day in the life of students James Haupt, Caroline Pirtle, and George Small seemed nothing out of the ordinary, except “going to work” meant entering restricted buildings in the Vatican, and reporting on what was happening at the papacy, just a few minutes away from the Holy See. As part of Villanova University’s 22-year-old Vatican and Rome Internship Program, which over the years has helped boost the Pope’s social media presence, the three students were on exchange for nearly five months. Small and Pirtle, both computing sciences majors, were stationed at the Vatican Museum and the Vatican Media Office respect…

What happens when someone comes close to death and then returns to everyday life, including work? For some, the experience can be transformative. Near-death experiences (NDEs) are deeply personal experiences that some people report after a close brush with death. These experiences can include sensations such as floating above one’s body, reviewing moments from one’s life, encountering spiritual beings and feeling a profound sense of unity and love. Although NDEs have been studied since the 1970s, we know relatively little about how they affect people after the event. Research suggests people who have near-death experiences may feel increased empathy, spiritual gro…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Recently, I shared the tools that power my mornings. Now let’s explore what I rely on from lunch to bedtime. Below you’ll see sites, apps, and gadgets that carry me from noon to night. From a niche workshop platform to my quirky ‘invisible’ clock, these are the tech companions that help me wrap up a fruitful day. 2 p.m.: Lunch and thinking break I often abandon screens for my midday pause. Other times I use apps like these: Healthy Minds: Short audio pieces help guide me through mindfulness practices. I like th…

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. At the Exceptional Women Alliance, we enable high-level women to mentor each other to achieve personal and professional happiness through sisterhood. As the nonprofit organization’s founder, chair, and CEO, I am honored to interview and share insights from thought leaders who are part of our peer-to-peer mentoring program. This month, I’m pleased to introduce Roslyn Schneider, MD, a physici…

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. Have you ever wanted to break up with your doctor—not because of the practitioner, but because of the difficulty in engaging with their practice? You’re not alone. I’ve left doctors for that reason and McKinsey has found that nearly 25% of consumers have delayed care because they hate everything about the process. System complexity is not doctors’ fault, but making the care experience easier for…

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. The influence of millennials and Gen Z on B2B purchasing decisions is undeniable. As these generations continue moving into leadership roles, their approach to decision making, especially in B2B environments, is shaping how brands leverage various marketing and sales strategies.  While today’s B2B brands are aware of social media’s role in engaging these decision makers, many fail to fully …

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. There’s a seismic shift reshaping the labor market, with tremors across government and business. The latest signal of this transformation is the announcement of the Skills-First Workforce Initiative, a collaboration of top employers aimed at making the skills needed for jobs more transparent. It follows an announcement from California Governor Gavin Newsom, who on April 2nd unveiled his Ma…

The family of a man killed in a 2021 road rage incident in Arizona used artificial intelligence to portray the victim delivering his own impact statement during his killer’s sentencing hearing, according to local news reports. Christopher Pelkey’s sister, brother-in-law, and their friend used AI technology to recreate his likeness, reportedly drawing from video clips recorded while he was alive. It is believed to be one of the first—if not the very first—instances of an AI-generated victim impact statement being used in court. “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me: it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the artificial 37-ye…

British entrepreneur Emma Grede, who founded the women’s bodywear company Skims along with her husband Jens Grede and Kim Kardashian, is getting a lot of attention after dismissing work-life balance as a priority for employers. “Work-life balance is your problem, not the employer’s responsibility,” Grede said on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast on Monday, hosted by British entrepreneur Steven Bartlett, which features interviews with CEOs and other successful leaders. “Look, I have four kids and I had to figure out how I would think about my own ambition balanced with my parenting, that’s the truth,” she continued. While they say that all PR is good PR, Grede’s claim i…

In the constant hustle and bustle of one of the busiest airports in the United States, a terrifying 90 seconds of quiet had disastrous results. On April 28, the Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) lost both radar and radio for a minute and a half due to a fried piece of copper wiring, the New York Post reported. This meant that air traffic controllers could not see, hear, or speak to aircraft or pilots around the airport. The event did not lead to any crashes, but it did cause significant stress on employees working at the time; five FAA employees are reportedly taking trauma leave, according to CNN, making them eligible for 45 days to recover from the ev…

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a mission to build safe artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity. For a while, that structure made sense. But in 2019, the company made a discovery that changed everything: scaling up AI models—with more data, compute, and parameters—led to predictably stronger results. The insight was formalized in a 2020 paper titled “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models,” and it reshaped OpenAI’s trajectory. That same year, the company released GPT-3, a model 100 times larger than GPT-2. Microsoft invested. Venture capitalists piled in. Inside the company, employees began to see Sam Altman as the one who could turn a nonp…

Target Corp. is pushing back on media reports this week that it has changed its policies around self-checkout technology in response to shoplifting or customer dissatisfaction. A number of news outlets reported over the weekend and yesterday that the retail giant has limited self-checkout registers to 10 items or fewer, but Target made that announcement more than a year ago. “Target is not removing self-checkout,” a spokesperson told Fast Company when reached for comment. “We offer it in the vast majority of our stores and have no plans to change this.” The company declined to share additional details about how theft—or “shrink” in industry parlance—has shaped…

“I’ve had more caviar since starting work on the Celestiq than I have during the entirety of my career at General Motors,” Erin Crossley, Cadillac’s design director for color and trim, says before tucking into a ramekin at Gucci Osteria on Rodeo Drive. The uptick in caviar consumption is a leading indicator that Cadillac is going upscale. As design director for the Cadillac Celestiq, the American luxury brand’s new, bespoke electric vehicle, Crossley sits with customers from all over the world and mines more than 350,000 permutations to deliver their perfect personalization. The low-slung EV with a 303 mile range starts at $340,000, pushing the American automa…

New Tesla car sales plunged across Europe in April even as sales of other electric vehicle brands soared, in part due to backlash against CEO Elon Musk’s support for Europe’s far-right politics, as well as growing competition from both European and Chinese EV carmakers, according to Reuters. Last month, Tesla’s new car sales in the U.K. and Germany tanked to their lowest in over two years, falling 62% and 46% year on year, respectively, even as demand in both countries rose for EVs. And in Spain, there was more bad news for Tesla, with new sales falling 36% in April 2025 compared with the the same month a year earlier, according to data from ANFAC, the Spanish Ass…

Andrew McCutchen hasn’t had the conversation with 7-year-old son Steel yet, but the Pittsburgh Pirates star knows it’s probably coming at some point. Steel, already playing in a youth baseball league, will probably come home at one point and ask his five-time All-Star father if he can have whatever hot item his teammates might be wearing during a given spring. McCutchen plans to accommodate Steel up to a point. The oldest of McCutchen’s four children is already rocking an arm sleeve, just the way dad does. Yet if Steel is hoping his father will spring for a sliding mitt — a padded glove a player can slip over one of their hands to protect it should the hand ge…

The U.S. Justice Department is doubling down on its attempt to break up Google by asking a federal judge to force the company to part with some of the technology powering the company’s digital ad network. The proposed dismantling coincides with an ongoing federal effort to separate Google’s Chrome browser from its dominant search engine. The government’s latest proposal was filed late Monday in a Virginia federal court two-and-half weeks after a federal judge ruled that its lucrative digital ad network has been improperly abusing its market power to stifle competition to the detriment of online publishers. In a 17-page filing, Justice Department lawyers argued tha…

Ashlee Piper is a former political strategist turned eco-lifestyle journalist. She has been a Professor of Sustainability Marketing at Loyola University Chicago and eco instructor for LinkedIn Learning. Well-known companies, such as Airbnb, LUSH, and Nissan, have sought her counsel on sustainability practices. Piper has spoken at the United Nations, SXSW, and has a popular TED Talk. What’s the big idea? A life of overconsumption can feel almost inescapable in our hyper-personalized advertising ecosystem. Billions of dollars go into getting people hooked on shopping. Fortunately, a way out of this addictive cycle is the No New Things challenge, which guides anyone f…

Two government agencies are warning Americans about threats from Salmonella outbreaks this week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has cautioned about a multi-state outbreak of the potentially deadly bacteria in poultry, while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has posted two recall notices about tomatoes that are feared to be tainted with Salmonella. Although the poultry and tomato salmonella outbreaks are not reported to be linked, each should be taken seriously given the threat that Salmonella infections can pose. Here’s what you need to know about the Salmonella outbreak and recalls. CDC announces Salmonella outbreak linked to poult…