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NASA just handed Elon Musk a very public reality check—and virtually threw its own moon plans into the trashcan, although the U.S. space agency won’t be admitting that. SpaceX isn’t necessarily the shoo-in to land the first Americans on the moon since the Apollo 17 mission 52 years ago. Instead, NASA is opening the contract to other companies, like Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin. While this doesn’t mean that SpaceX won’t get it, it’s the agency’s way of slamming SpaceX for its delays and lack of focus on the lunar program. Reopening the marquee Artemis crewed landing contract to competition is an admission that the Starship won’t be ready on time. Americ…

Toy retail brand Toys “R” Us will open new flagship stores and seasonal holiday shops just in time for the holidays. The initiative is in partnership with specialty retailer Go Retail Group, the company said. The locations will feature products from popular brands such as Barbie, Hot Wheels, Nerf, Lego, and Paw Patrol. Some of the new stores have already opened their doors. According to the company, additional stores will open throughout the season. Here’s where you can shop Consumers will be able to do their holiday shopping at the following new Toys “R” Us locations: Flagship stores: Chicago Premium Outlets — Aurora, IL Camarillo Premium …

This month, Southwest Airlines unveiled a new cabin design that’s already rolling out in new planes across its fleet. It includes slimmer seats, updated amenities, and lots and lots of blue. The new cabin was revealed on October 14, and there are currently six aircrafts in operation with the revamped design. For Southwest, this design is part of what it calls a larger “transformational plan.” So far, that plan has included nixing some of its most iconic brand features—like its “bags fly free” policy and flat cost open seating arrangement—in order to compete in an airline industry that’s increasingly reliant on charging ancillary, “premium” fees to drive up profits. …

In 2025, Amazon, Dell, Apple, Google, IBM, Meta, Salesforce, and dozens more have doubled down on demands for employees to return to the office (RTO) at least three days a week, if not all five. And they’re getting exactly what they want. Now, when I say “exactly what they want,” you might be expecting me to paint a picture of workers happily returning to their daily commutes, overcrowded highways, cavernous or claustrophobic offices, constant interruptions, and extra expenses, and all of it resulting in massive productivity gains. That’s not happening, the productivity-gains part. And the longer we play this out, the sillier the performances of “productivity thea…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself. Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman faces a rare leadership challenge: He is managing an organization that has announced its intention to spend $200 billion during the next 20 years—double what the organization dispensed in its first 25 years—while working to permanently close its doors on December 31, 2045. S…

Gen Xers, born between 1965 and 1980, grew up with MTV and empty houses, earning them the name “latchkey kids.” The first generation who logged onto AOL Instant Messenger and played video games while still enjoying the freedom that came before helicopter parents took over is fascinating. But as a small generation that falls between baby boomers and millennials, they’re often overlooked. When it comes to their spending power, however, Gen X is small but mighty. According to a new report from ICSC, a trade association for retail real estate, Gen X may have more spending power than brands realize. While Gen X only makes up around 19% of the U.S. population, th…

Like clockwork, every few years viral relationship “tests” or “theories” will resurface online, prompting renewed discourse about the state of romantic unions. The latest test doing the rounds: the “bird theory.” The idea first went viral two years ago but has recently resurfaced on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. The concept is simple: Point out something mundane to your partner, like spotting a bird, then watch how they react. If your partner matches your enthusiasm or reacts with curiosity, then congratulations—they’re a keeper. The thinking goes that if they respond with interest to your attempts at connection, they’re emotionally invested in the relati…

After Zohran Mamdani’s campaign aired a commercial that used a Knicks-style campaign logo that wrote out “Zohran” over an image of a basketball, the NBA team asked them to take it down. The Mamdani ad, which aired during the New York Knicks’s opening game last week, shows black-and-white footage of a pick-up basketball game in a park as the narrator says “New York, this is our year.” There’s shots of Mamdani campaigning interspersed with the pick-up game, and the narrator says “Things can be different. Hope is back,” before the Knicks-style logo flashes on the screen over the sound of drums. The Knicks, whose owner donated last year to Mayor Eric Adams, weren’…

My first time plopping down on my therapist’s couch, I tried to breeze through the basics. Yes, upbringing, romance, family, social life—all important. But I entered that softly lit space to vent about the place that eats up a third of my waking life. I was there to talk about the office. The physical location wasn’t the issue; the office snacks were elite. The problem was the people: the supervisor with no respect for work-life balance, the snooty coworker firing off slick emails, the boy’s club that would always look out for its own. Being the only Black employee there wore me out in ways I couldn’t always name. And talking it out with a licensed professional who lo…

Recently, Figma CEO Dylan Field assembled employees from throughout the company for a demo of a new-ish tool for generating, refining, and editing synthetic images and videos. Rather than being built around one-off prompts, it allowed users to create visual workflows for comparing and manipulating options created by different AI models. It also facilitated putting imagery through multiple rounds of polishing and remixing, adding a large dose of human taste and quality control to the process. According to Field, they were “mesmerized” by what they saw. “We had it scheduled for 20 minutes,” he remembers. “And 20 minutes came, and everyone’s like, ‘No, no, please keep go…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, I’m focusing on a stunning stat showing that OpenAI’s ChatGPT engages with more than a million users a week about suicidal thoughts. I also look at new Anthropic research on AI “introspection,” and at a Texas philosopher’s take on AI and morality. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (form…

For U.S. soldiers who find themselves at the front lines of a future conflict, it’s fast becoming gospel, due to the way warfare is rapidly evolving on the battlefields of Ukraine, that drones will be crucial to winning (or losing) the fight But the roughly 500 U.S. dronemakers can only build about 100,000 a year combined, according to Ryan Carver, communications manager for the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International. For comparison: One Chinese firm, DJI, can pump out millions of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) a year — 70% of the global supply. To ameliorate this challenge/problem, a number of startups believe 3D printing, specifically of drones,…

Last year Canva reworked its user experience and tools in a full-frontal attack on the productivity and enterprise markets now dominated by Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. Now the Australian company is going for Adobe’s jugular. Affinity—the British company Canva bought in 2024—is out with a new app that aims to sink Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign with a simple proposal: If you are a professional designer, here’s an integrated photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout studio seamlessly integrated into a single application, with a feature set comparable to Adobe’s apps and a fully customizable UI. For free. You know, free free. “Free for…

Bill Gates has invested billions over the last two decades to help fight climate change. But in a new blog post, he argues that world is too focused on cutting short-term emissions. “The doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals,” he writes, calling for a “strategic pivot” to focus on “improving lives” by focusing development dollars more on agriculture and disease and poverty eradication. The logic is flawed, and built on a series of false trade-offs that ignore how interconnected climate and development goals are. Gates criticizes the “doomsday” view that climate change will “decimate civilization” i…

Who saw this coming? Bettors, apparently. Coinbase Global, one of the largest crypto exchanges on the market, announced its third-quarter 2025 earnings on Thursday—a relatively benign event by most measures. But it wasn’t the revenue or profit numbers that caught many people’s attention. It was some specific comments and words spoken by CEO and cofounder Brian Armstrong. Armstrong, near the end of Coinbase’s earnings call, squeezed in a last-second barrage of keywords. “I was a little distracted because I was tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, b…

The day after the jewelry heist at the Louvre in Paris, officials from across Washington’s world-famous museums were already talking, assessing and planning how to bolster their own security. “We went over a review of the incident,” said Doug Beaver, security specialist at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, who said he participated in Zoom talks with nearby institutions including the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art. “Then we developed a game plan on that second day out, and started putting things in place on Days 3, 4 and 5.” Similar conversations are happening at museums across the globe, as those tasked with securing art ask: “Could that happen here…

A momentous week in the technology sector made it clear there is no sign the boom in building artificial intelligence infrastructure is slowing — despite the bubble talk. Nvidia, whose processors are the AI revolution’s backbone, became the first company to surpass $5 trillion in market value. Microsoft and OpenAI inked a deal enhancing the ChatGPT maker’s fundraising ability and OpenAI promptly started laying groundwork for an initial public offering that could value the company at $1 trillion. Amazon said it would cut 14,000 corporate jobs, just days before its cloud unit posted its strongest growth in nearly three years. These developments, along with numer…

Ted Bundy had courtroom groupies. Jeffrey Dahmer and Richard Ramirez were sent love letters in prison. Now, in the age of social media, thousands like, share, and thirst in the comments over stylized fan edits of serial killers. There’s a term for this psychological phenomenon: hybristophilia. A new study has found a connection between young women’s engagement with this type of TikTok content and their sexual attraction to criminals. Those who liked or repeatedly watched clips glorifying notorious serial killers such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer or fictional villains like Joe Goldberg from Netflix’s “You,” scored higher for hybristophilia, than those who scro…