What's on Your Mind?

Would you want to be in a group chat with your favorite sports celebrities and athletes? You’ll have your chance this fall thanks to a collaboration between WhatsApp and OffBall. OffBall, a year-old sports media startup that focuses on careful curation for its followers, announced on Friday that it was bringing back The Chat, which it had previously conducted with sports stars such as LeBron James. The franchise is designed to get users to participate in big group chats and discuss sports or anything else. High-profile personalities—such as professional athletes or others—also take part, and everyone can text or message each other like any other group chat, or s…

If there’s any doubt whether people are willing to pay $900 for a premium credit card, just look at the latest quarterly results for American Express: The credit card issuer reported Friday that it beat third-quarter earnings estimates and raised its full-year outlook. It’s been a month since American Express refreshed its Platinum line of credit cards, raising the annual fee by $200 to $895, and that change is already paying dividends. The company has seen “strong” demand for these cards and more than 500,000 people have requested the New York-based issuer’s new pocket mirror card. “The initial customer demand and engagement exceeded our expectations, with new U…

Between July and September, electric vehicle sales in the U.S. hit a record high. Americans bought more than 430,000 EVs, up 40% from the previous quarter, as they race to qualify for federal tax credits before they expire. That EV boom wasn’t just limited to the U.S., though: Global EV sales hit an all-time high of 2.1 million in September. Two-thirds of those sales were in China, the world’s largest EV market. And yet, there’s still talk of an “EV retreat,” both in the U.S. and abroad. Automakers have expressed concerns about their EV profits, and policymakers in Canada and the European Union are pausing, or adjusting, their EV mandates. There’s an “inherent…

ChatGPT will be able to have kinkier conversations after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the artificial intelligence company will soon allow its chatbot to engage in “erotica for verified adults.” OpenAI won’t be the first to try to profit from sexualized AI. Sexual content was a top draw for AI tools almost as soon as the boom in AI-generated imagery and words erupted in 2022. But the companies that were early to embrace mature AI also encountered legal and societal minefields and harmful abuse as a growing number of people have turned to the technology for companionship or titillation. Will a sexier ChatGPT be different? After three years of largely banning …

Last night, New Yorkers and viewers across the country tuned in to watch the first general election debate for mayor of New York City. And as far as debates go, this one was charged, full of spats, and came with a direct and thoroughline of questioning that didn’t leave anything off the table. Within minutes, Democrats Andrew Cuomo (who is running as an independent) and Zohran Mamdani, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, made clear that they came not just prepared to share their positions, but also to follow up, push back on criticisms or mistruths, and repeatedly fire well-rehearsed jabs at one another. The trio let viewers know just how different they are—not…

Fear over credit quality in U.S. regional banks rippled through markets on Friday, dragging global financial stocks lower and reviving memories of the crisis of confidence that shook sentiment just over two years ago. The selloff hit Wall Street, with main equities indexes seeing a mixed open, as investors stayed on edge with banking sector worries adding to anxiety already heightened by escalating U.S.-China trade tensions and renewed worries about the global economic outlook. The banking sector’s exposure to two recent U.S. auto bankruptcies has rekindled concerns about lending standards more than two years after Silicon Valley Bank’s failure, when high interest…

Thanksgiving is now less than six weeks away, which means many families are making plans for travel and meal prep. But the cost of inflation will also be weighing heavily on their minds, especially for those who have large Turkey Day gatherings to feed. However, the world of grocery shopping is highly competitive, and one chain, Aldi, is aiming to outdo the competition in enticing cost-conscious consumers to shop at its stores. The national grocery store chain has announced that it will put a full Thanksgiving meal, which feeds 10, on your table for just $40. Here’s what you need to know as the turkey dinner wars kick off for 2025. Aldi announces a Thanksgivin…

October is usually a month for innocent frights and fun scares, but for Bitcoin investors, this month has left many holding the token legitimately fearful. In the last 24 hours alone, the cryptocurrency king has lost nearly 7% of its value. Bitcoin is currently sitting at below $104,000 per token. That’s especially notable considering that the cryptocurrency hit an all-time high of more than $126,000 just 12 days ago. Here’s what you need to know about Bitcoin’s most recent crash. Bitcoin’s tumultuous 2025 Bitcoin has been on a wild ride in 2025. The token began the year with considerable faith from investors, largely due to the incoming The President adm…

“The gyoza needs to look a little whiter. It’s too pink.” Nigel Ng is genially micromanaging the look and feel of Fried, an animated series that will premiere on YouTube later this year. His feedback comes during an early planning session at Toonstar, the company producing the show, which is headquartered in a former furniture warehouse in downtown L.A.’s arts district. Ng has every right to be fussy about Fried’s world. The show represents the cartoon debut of Uncle Roger, the volatile middle-aged Chinese guy he has portrayed in live-action YouTube videos since 2020. They famously depict the character growing agitated as he watches western chefs—such as Gordon Ramsay, …

The fortunes of major quantum computing firms turned negative this week as share prices sank—in some cases by double digits. The so-called Quantum Four publicly traded companies—Rigetti Computing, IonQ, Quantum Computing Inc, and D-Wave Quantum—saw their stock prices tumble on Thursday. And as of this writing, all four companies are down even lower in premarket trading on Friday. Berkeley, California-based Rigetti (NASDAQ: RGTI) has seen the biggest drop, with its stock price falling almost 15% on Thursday, October 16. As of this writing, the stock was down another 7.65% during the premarket session. Shares of IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) were down by a similar amount on…

Hello again from Fast Company and thanks for reading Plugged In. Before I go any further, a bit of quick self-serving promotion: This week, we published our fifth annual Next Big Things in Tech list. Featuring 137 projects and people in 31 categories, it’s our guide to technologies that are already reshaping business and life in general, with plenty of headroom to go further in the years to come. None of them are the usual suspects—and many have largely flown under the radar. Take a look, and you’ll come away with some discoveries. Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about Sora, OpenAI’s new social network devoted wholly to generating and remixing 10-second synth…

We are in an era of strategic silence—no longer in the age of the activist CEO. Instead, business leaders are being told to lie low and stay in their lane to avoid unwanted attention, including from the White House. In the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’s removal from ABC, CEOs are reportedly turning down press and speaking opportunities. Today, leaders are faced with the question of when to speak up . . . and when to stay strategically silent in order to protect their constituents. Reverend Mariann Budde is an expert on speaking up. She was thrust into the national spotlight during President The President’s inauguration when she preached a sermon urging him to “have mercy upo…

Logan Ivey has tried everything to cut down on his screen time. He bought a modern “dumbphone” that’s designed to be used as little as possible, tried a device called a Brick that removes distracting apps and notifications from a smartphone, and even resorted to a classic flip phone when all else failed. Still, nothing was working. So he turned his iPhone into a 6-pound weight. The 6 Pound Phone Case is a bulky, stainless steel contraption designed to make your smartphone extremely annoying to use. Inspired by the aesthetics of an ’80s brick phone, the case transforms a typical, ultra-portable iPhone into a cumbersome eyesore—and that’s the whole point. Ivey, who has …

When companies undergo a major change, such as a CEO transition, reorganization, merger, or acquisition, most leaders default to one well-worn instinct: control the message. Lock down talking points. Tighten the language. Make it polished and official. In working with executive teams across industries, from tech to retail, we’ve seen time and again that simply trying to control the message isn’t enough. In fact, it often has the opposite effect, creating more confusion and mistrust than clarity. Because in every high-stakes moment, your audience—employees, customers, investors—is asking the same unspoken question: “What’s in it for me?” And if you’re not answe…

“Let’s circle back when we have the bandwidth to touch base on whether we need to hop on a call to tackle the low-hanging fruit.” (If this corporate buzzword bingo sent a shiver down your spine—apologies.) In the world of professional communication, business jargon is often a necessary evil. Email clichés: love ‘em or hate ‘em, we all use ‘em. Many of us are trapped in a terminal cycle of “reaching out” and “circling back” to make sure “we’re aligned.” Recent analysis from email verification company ZeroBounce looked at more than one million real work emails to find out which overused email phrases are the most common offenders. To no one’s surprise, “…

Tell me: Do things like this ever happen to you? You have clarity of purpose. You know what you need. You walk into another room to get it. Then, distraction hits, and you forget entirely what prompted you. Or else, you search the house for your car keys or your glasses, or your wallet. A good 10 minutes later, you realize they’ve been with you the whole time. You sit down to write an article about an intriguing study having to do with memory—if only you could remember what it was. Yes, these are highly personal anecdotes. But like all the best stories, I hope they’re simply the unique expression of universal truths. Perhaps second only to the fear of d…

When I first ventured into self-employment a few years ago, I received a lot of advice from fellow freelance writers: Know your worth. Don’t take low-paying work. The advice was valid, as too much low-paying work is a recipe for burnout. But to the newly self-employed, I would say: Know your worth. And also, there are very valid reasons to take low-paying work, if it can help launch your business. You can open the right doors without selling yourself short. The project is good for your portfolio Potential clients will expect “proof” that your work is good—especially if it’s the type of work that can be displayed in a portfolio (design, video, writing, or…

It’s not always fun to look your finances in the eye, but it can unlock a rewarding path forward. These five books make tackling personal finance approachable, clear, and—dare we say it—an enjoyable journey. Rule Breaker Investing: How to Pick the Best Stocks of the Future and Build Lasting Wealth By David Gardner The real secret to building lasting wealth on the stock market is breaking the old investing rules. In Rule Breaker Investing, Motley Fool cofounder David Gardner teaches how to craft a purpose-driven portfolio, manage investments, and even master time management for a smarter, happier, richer investment journey. Listen to our Book Bite summary, r…

There’s no shortage of inspiration for what to do with a part of the house that’s not quite looking its best. Interior design magazines and furniture blogs are stuffed with idealized bedrooms, and online vision boards make it easy to cast a dragnet over the myriad images of classy lounges or perfectly ordered home offices. But there’s always the unavoidable catch that while these images may be helpful references for how to rethink a room, they don’t actually represent your room. A new AI tool offers a more personalized alternative. Created by the online interior design service Havenly, it’s an app-based AI design assistant that takes user-submitted images of rooms and…

A makeup illusionist, a photography project, and an innovative DJ are among the winners of Instagram’s inaugural Rings awards. The award, whose recipients were announced on Thursday, celebrates 25 creators who, in the company’s words, “bring people together over creativity” and “aren’t afraid to take creative chances and do it their way.” Among the winners is Mimi Choi, known for turning her face into mind-bending works of art. Celebrating her win, she penned in an Instagram post: “Because of its visual nature, Instagram has really helped spread my work and jump-start my career, providing me with numerous different types of collaboration opportunities that I cou…

Prior to becoming the CEO of Lyft, David Risher didn’t post much on social media. That began to change just before his first day on the job, when Risher decided to sign up on the ride sharing platform as a driver. “I had no plan,” he says. “I just wanted to get in the car and see what it feels like to drive for Lyft and hear the rider’s story, but also experience it from a driver’s perspective.” At the end of that first outing, Risher revealed to the passenger who he was, and requested a selfie. He posted it on his personal LinkedIn account. “I drove for a couple more hours — and I didn’t tell anyone at Lyft I was doing this.” Since then, Risher has made a re…

With more than a decade of experience working as a design and tech analyst, Andrew Hogan is all in on the efficiency and ease that tech brings to our lives. But lately at home with his daughters (ages 4 and 18 months), Hogan is grappling with something unwieldy and undefined: how parents, kids, and technology interact, from smartphones to screen time to AI. “We are so eager to remove friction—avoid it and smooth over the rough spots, especially as parents,” Hogan says. In fall 2024, Hogan began writing a newsletter called Parent.Tech, designed to help him, and other parents, better understand how to navigate the increasingly complex world of tech and consumer pro…

It’s a sound—and smell—car commuters have become intimately familiar with: the noxious fumes of asphalt repaving. U.S. road maintenance and highway expansion require a massive quantity of asphalt every year, roughly 400 million tons a year on average, according to Asphalt magazine, a publication of the international trade association Asphalt Institute. But a new process developed by St. Louis-based firm Verde Resources seeks to streamline the process, making it more sustainable and odorless. Verde’s new BioAsphalt process, which has been in development since 2022, utilizes what’s called biochar, or natural wood remnants from forestry waste that get added into the trad…

If you’ve noticed that the internet feels different lately—more cluttered, harder to navigate—you’re not imagining it. The system is breaking down in real time, and by 2026, researchers predict that 90% of web content will be AI-generated. Quality journalism is disappearing behind paywalls while feeds fill with noise designed purely to capture attention. An innovation that was supposed to democratize information is now drowning us in it. I know this intimately because I helped build it. As founder of AppNexus, which sold to AT&T for $1.6 billion, and former CTO of Right Media, I created the technology that became the backbone of digital advertising, a multibillion…

The U.S. has succeeded in blocking a global fee on shipping emissions as an international maritime meeting adjourned Friday without adopting regulations. The world’s largest maritime nations had been deliberating on adopting regulations to move the shipping industry away from fossil fuels to slash emissions. But U.S. President Donald The President, Saudi Arabia, and other countries vowed to fight any global tax on shipping emissions. The U.S. had threatened to retaliate if nations support it. The President urged countries to vote “No” at the International Maritime Organization headquarters in London, posting on his social media platform Truth Social on Thursday th…