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Like every company in the world, Pantone thinks you really need AI help to do your job. Unlike most companies, however, the people who created the esperanto of color matching might have actually developed something useful. Today, Pantone is announcing a generative AI model that can automatically create a color palette. It was trained in-house on six decades of proprietary color research papers and articles, which is now available in Pantone Connect’s extension for Adobe apps. I don’t know if designers will be into the idea of chatting with an AI to find their new product’s color palette, but according to Pantone, many are eagerly waiting for such a helper. “We observe…

Monday, November 3, saw nearly 5,000 flights delayed in the U.S. The weekend prior saw more than 10,000. Cancellations are stacking up as well. As the length of this most recent government shutdown sets new records, those headaches at the airport aren’t expected to ease. They are, in fact, likely to get worse. And while that’s scary news for anyone who might be planning to head home for Thanksgiving, there’s a chance it could be what gets the government back to work. Republicans and Democrats are still at odds, and neither is showing any sign of backing down. Even the brief cessation of SNAP benefits (and the lawsuits that followed) hasn’t brought about a détente.…

Fortnite maker Epic Games and Google just agreed on a “comprehensive settlement” that could be the final chapter in Epic’s long battle over app store rules. In a joint filing in a San Francisco federal court, both companies proposed a resolution to Epic’s antitrust lawsuit against Google, which the game publisher filed in 2020 along with a parallel lawsuit against Apple. In a post on X, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney called the proposed settlement “awesome” and expressed hope that the courts would agree. “It genuinely doubles down on Android’s original vision as an open platform to streamline competing store installs globally, reduce service fees for developers on Goog…

The most obvious use case for generative AI in editorial operations is to write copy. When ChatGPT lit the fuse on the current AI boom, it was its ability to crank out hundreds of comprehensible words almost instantly, on virtually any topic, that captured our imaginations. Hundreds of “ChatGPT wrote this article” think pieces resulted, and college essays haven’t been the same since. Neither has the media. In October, a report from AI analytics firm Graphite revealed that AI is now producing more articles than humans. And it’s not all content farms cranking out AI slop: A recent study from the University of Maryland examined over 1,500 newspapers in the U.S. and found…

The people of New York have spoken. In electing Zohran Mamdani mayor, they voted for generational change, democratic socialism, and joyful pop-culture politics. The historical significance of Mamdani’s victory will be parsed for days, weeks, and years to come. But the people of New York did not just elect a mayor, they also voted to change the way housing gets built in one of the tightest housing markets in the United States. Voters passed three ballot initiatives designed to speed up and increase housing production by an even greater margin than Mamdani’s victory. With these ballot initiatives, Mamdani also won a huge victory—one he didn’t even campaign for, th…

How I spend my hours in the day is how I live. To make the most of my waking hours, I practice the one-hour rule—a simple habit that helps me learn, reflect, and think. I give myself 60 uninterrupted minutes a day to try and become a little wiser than I was yesterday. I consciously take control of my growth to transform how I think, how I decide, or live. It takes commitment. But just an hour a day learning, thinking, and reflecting is helping me improve my life processes. That’s it. Sixty minutes. Five hours a week. And you are upgrading yourself daily. That means reading something that stretches you. Reflecting on what went wrong and why. Sitting in silence and lett…

In President Donald The President’s ongoing second-term White House remodel, even the typography is getting the Mar-a-Lago treatment. New signage has begun rolling out at the White House this fall. First, the words “The Presidential Walk of Fame” appeared in September in the gold Shelley Script on the West Colonnade. The signage appears above the presidential portraits The President installed to troll former President Joe Biden. Now new images show lettering that reads “The Oval Office” written in the same font, and which appears to be going up on its exterior wall. The White House press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether…

Nintendo’s hard-line approach to piracy has shut down a streamer who seemingly specialized in unauthorized content. Jesse Keighin has been ordered to pay Nintendo $17,500 in damages after livestreaming gameplay footage of at least 10 different games on at least 50 occasions before the games were released to the public. Included among those were Super Mario Party Jamboree, Mario & Luigi: Brothership, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and Pikmin 4. Keighin was served with takedown notices by Nintendo dozens of times for those streams. Yet he continued to air himself playing the games, encouraging viewers to support him on loco.gg, an Indian live-streaming a…

Until recently, some of the fastest-growing places in the U.S. were also among the most exposed to climate risk. But that’s starting to change—more Americans are now moving out of the areas that are most likely to flood. In the Miami area, where nearly a third of homes face flood risk, nearly 70,000 more people moved away than moved in last year, according to a new report from Redfin. In Houston, the domestic outflow was more than 30,000 people; in Brooklyn, where around a quarter of homes face flood risk, around 28,000 more people left than moved in. In Florida’s Pinellas County, where many homes were hit hard by Hurricane Helene, around 4,000 more people left for ot…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Today, institutional landlords—those owning more than 1,000 homes—remain a relatively small part of the national single-family housing market. They own less than 1.0% of the total U.S. single-family housing stock and have accounted for only about 0.3% of transactions over the past three years. Yet, two decades ago, they didn’t even really exist. When Blackstone began buying single-family rentals in 2011, there wasn’t a single firm that owned at least 1,000 U.S. single-family homes. By late 2016, Blackstone’s fund, Invitation Homes—which the firm late…

Amid the mass layoffs in tech and retail in the past month, YouTube’s CEO Neal Mohan sent out a recent internal memo that he’s also looking to lay off employees—who volunteer. Mohan details how YouTube is undergoing a major AI-focused reorganization and introduces a “Voluntary Exit Program” with a severance package to eligible YouTube employees. This voluntary exit deal has been couched as an opportunity for employees, but it’s really just a buyout. Companies have long used this strategy as a way to reduce headcount, usually to avert traditional layoffs. For employees approaching retirement, voluntary severance may be a great opportunity, a wonderful deus ex machina l…

The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece titled “Why Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre.” Certainly a headline designed to draw ire from many readers, myself included. The author advocates “ruthlessly” optimizing your time, from missing important events with loved ones to declining social events. The goal? In his case, he built a company worth $20 million and set himself up with financial freedom for the rest of his life. My gut reaction was, “That’s no way to live a life.” There was a time, in my early twenties, when I poured all of my energy and time into my job. I wore the badge of long hours and unlimited availability, replying to emails long i…

Most people recognize that when you’re answering email while walking your dog and listening in on a meeting, you’re bound to lose effectiveness. Whether it’s that awkward silence when your boss asks for your input and you didn’t hear it—or you stepping in something not so pleasant because you didn’t realize your dog had done his business right in front of you. The limitations of multitasking present themselves in an obvious fashion. But as a time management coach, I’ve seen that it’s not just trying to do too many small things at once that can trip you up. I also see people dramatically reduce their effectiveness when they try to do too many large things at once—a…

OpenAI is going house hunting. The world-leading AI company is reportedly looking for a massive corporate campus of at least 500,000 square feet to house its ever-growing workforce of insanely well paid engineers and support staff. What’s more important than OpenAI’s desire to expand, though, is the company’s choice of where to do it. OpenAI is looking not in the trendy, vibrant heart of San Francisco, but deep in the dull, gray corporate expanses of Silicon Valley. That bucks a major trend in the AI space—and signals a broad and impactful change to the industry. Corporate hermit crabs For generations, America’s most successful tech companies …

Company culture doesn’t affect performance. That’s not a hot take, that’s what a 2022 meta analysis from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found when they compared more than 500 research papers on the topic. From the report: The findings are very clear: there is little evidence consistently linking organizational culture to performance, but if such a link should exist, it is very weak and too small to be practically meaningful. As such, organizations and practitioners should be careful spending time and money on company-wide culture change programs as they are not likely to increase performance. And yet, when asked, 92% of executives believe t…

Last week, four Condé Nast staffers were abruptly fired after participating in a union protest at the publisher’s 1 World Trade Center headquarters. The journalists had confronted chief people officer Stan Duncan outside his office, demanding answers on a fresh wave of layoffs that had just hit the company. The incident followed Condé Nast’s announcement that Teen Vogue would be folded into Vogue.com, resulting in multiple layoffs, including Teen Vogue’s editor-in-chief. Footage obtained by The Wrap shows Duncan declining to engage with employees, instead repeating that they should “go back to the workplace.” In the clip, one of the journalists asks, “What c…

Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg has launched her first foray into podcasting with Expense Account. The first episode, out today, features chef and author Alison Roman in conversation with host Jason Lee (formerly Semi Anonymous Restaurant Critic J Lee)’s, revealing her secret order at Keens, her new tomato sauce business, and the importance of keeping fresh flowers at home. “Expense Account is a food podcast for everyone. Insiders, outsiders, your mom, your dad, New Yorkers, Angelenos and also people from Florida (we love you). Anyone who enjoys eating food,” the show’s description reads. “It’s even for people who hate food.” The podcast marks Sundberg’s first step …

The Senate passed legislation Monday to reopen the government, bringing the longest shutdown in history closer to an end as a small group of Democrats ratified a deal with Republicans despite searing criticism from within their party. The 41-day shutdown could last a few more days as members of the House, which has been on recess since mid-September, return to Washington to vote on the legislation. President Donald The President has signaled support for the bill, saying Monday that “we’re going to be opening up our country very quickly.” The final Senate vote, 60-40, broke a grueling stalemate that lasted more than six weeks as Democrats demanded that Republicans negoti…

If you’ve ever been hit with a sketchy text warning you of an overdue toll road payment or mysterious U.S. Postal Service fees, you’ve likely been targeted by one of the largest cyber scams sweeping the globe. Now, Google is suing an international cybercrime group it believes is responsible for the ubiquitous text-based phishing scheme, which may have raked in as much as $1 billion over the last three years. In the lawsuit filed Wednesday, Google alleges that 25 people are part of a sprawling scam operation that is known as “Lighthouse” and was designed to swipe the logins and passwords of victims caught in its web. The Lighthouse scam hinges on tricking people w…

A penny for your thoughts? Well, maybe try a nickel. Though it will remain legal tender, the last-ever one-cent coin was printed Wednesday—and not without some drama. After being in circulation for 232 years, the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia hosted a ceremonial event during which U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach struck the final circulating penny. There are an estimated 300 billion pennies currently in circulation, a number “far exceeding the amount needed for commerce,” the Mint said in a statement but retailers say they’ve already been dealing with coin shortages and a lot of confusion about how to price goods and services. It took about nine months for the penny’s fi…

Underperformance usually shows up in the guise of missed deadlines, low-quality work, or a bad attitude. This gets spotted sometimes, but not always, by a leader who then has to make a choice: when and how to tackle the underperformance. However, the problem can be exacerbated by acting too quickly: there is often a fierce desire within leaders to jump to action. They want to stop the badness, stop the ripples, and solve the situation as quickly as possible. But often, this means that they make assumptions about what is causing the underperformance and how to solve it without taking a little time to explore the real reasons behind the poor performance. The problem…

In a perfect world, my job wouldn’t exist. I’m a consumer privacy advocate, which means I spend my days fighting for something that should be automatic: your right to control and protect your own personal information. Unfortunately, we dropped the ball. In the era of social media and hyper-targeted ads, we didn’t build the right privacy infrastructure to protect ourselves. Instead, we let tech companies sell us the story that knowledge is power and data is the price. Yes, knowledge is power. But data—a dry, emotionless word for who and what we are as humans—should be our super power. It should be ours to control and use to improve our lives, not just something co…

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…

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…

Across nearly four decades as a teacher, principal, superintendent, funder, and now leader of a large education nonprofit organization, the experience that most shaped my view of learning wasn’t a grand reform or a shiny new program. It was a Friday physics lab in Brooklyn. My students predicted a graph that couldn’t exist—a vertical line for velocity and time. What followed was confusion, debate, trial, and error. And then discovery: Velocity requires both displacement and time. That brief struggle taught me, the teacher at the time, more about how learning really happens than any policy memo ever has. That moment endures because it represents what school should unl…