What's on Your Mind?

Barclays Center in Brooklyn is abuzz as the Brooklyn Nets’s Jalen Wilson catches the ball, readies himself, and releases a contested three. The ball arcs high above the Knicks defender’s outstretched arms and swishes through the net. As the stadium erupts, Bryan Velazquez throws a fist in the air. Even though he is blind, he knows that his team just scored. He felt it on his fingertips. Velazquez, who works as an outreach coordinator at Omnium Circus, is using a new kind of haptic device that translates live game action into vibrations. Developed by Seattle-based startup OneCourt, the laptop-size device consists of a silicone relief map displaying a basketball court with …

When Johnson & Johnson launched the first disposable diaper in 1948, it revolutionized modern parenting. But it also, unwittingly, created an environmental disaster. Diapers are largely made of plastic, which does not biodegrade, but breaks into microplastics that pollute our waterways and end up in our food chain. And yet, more than 300,000 diapers are thrown out every minute, bound for landfills or incinerators, and accelerating climate change. There’s now a movement to design a more eco-friendly diaper, from creating easier-to-use cloth diapering systems to diapers that use less plastic. But Hiro, a newly launched startup, may have the most creative solution yet. …

To make the most of its stores and keep customers coming back to shop in person, baseball hat retailer Lids announced Wednesday that 20 locations will have a newly redesigned store concept this month built for customization and personalization. Physical retail’s not dead, but to breathe new life into it—not to mention make more money from the remaining square footage—brands are rolling out more personalized in-store customer experiences. Concierge-style customer service along with customizable products have become the name of the game to counter the many headwinds physical retail has faced in recent years, including the rise of online and social media shopping, the pa…

Having a helicopter manager can bring you down. It’s exhausting to have a boss who constantly monitors you, requires you to check in all the time, and takes away your authority to make decisions. This sort of micromanagement can lead to decreased employee morale, lower productivity, and reduced job satisfaction, according to experts. “Whether intentional or not, helicopter managers send clear signals that they do not trust their direct reports and are concerned about the work getting done correctly,” says Matthew Owenby, chief strategy officer and head of human resources at Aflac. “Helicopter managers can often exacerbate burnout by making employees feel that they ar…

Amid tariff whiplash and the rejuggling of global trade, GE Vernova’s CEO Scott Strazik is finding a way to stay “relentlessly optimistic.” Strazik returns to the Rapid Response podcast to share how the company plans to continue its success as one of Wall Street’s top-performing stocks, despite looming supply chain disruption and market unpredictability. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob 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 Res…

Given all the recent bad news on the world stage, from tariffs wars to the war in Ukraine, it is no wonder Swedes are tuning in, for a moment of zen, to watch a livestream of “The Great Moose Migration” (loosely translated from the Swedish, “Den stora älgvandringen“). The 24-hour event, which runs for 20 days straight, kicked off on Tuesday. It has been providing soothing entertainment for millions of Swedes each year, around this time, since it first aired in 2019. That first year, nearly one million Swedes tuned in to literally watch moose walk through forests and swim across the Ångerman River, all captured by remote cameras and drones, per the Associated Press. By…

OpenAI has named labor leader Dolores Huerta and three others to a temporary advisory board that will help guide the artificial intelligence company’s philanthropy as it attempts to shift itself into a for-profit business. Huerta, who turned 95 last week, formed the first farmworkers union with Cesar Chavez in the early 1960s and will now have a say on the direction of philanthropic initiatives that OpenAI says will consider “both the promise and risks of AI.” The group will have just 90 days to make their suggestions. “She recognizes the significance of AI in today’s world and anybody who’s been paying attention for the last 50 years knows she will be a force…

A colossal squid has been caught on camera for the first time in the deep sea by an international team of researchers steering a remotely operated submersible. The sighting was announced Tuesday by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. The squid filmed was a juvenile about 1 foot (30 centimeters) in length at a depth of 1,968 feet (600 meters) in the South Atlantic Ocean. Full-grown adult colossal squids, which scientists have uncovered from the bellies of whales and seabirds, can reach lengths up to 23 feet (7 meters) — almost the size of a small fire truck. The squid was spied last month near the South Sandwich Islands during an expedition to search for new sea life.…

Some common business models can be described as B2C and B2B, which are “business-to-consumer,” and “business-to-business,” respectively. But now, get ready for “B2AI,” or “business-to-AI.” That’s one of the potential disruptions on the horizon, identified in a new report from Visa and the Institute for the Future. The report digs into the numerous ways that AI will transform commerce, and to some degree personal finance, including how consumers will likely lasso AI for their own means—and how businesses will, in turn, develop AI agents to communicate and correspond with consumers’ AIs. While many people likely haven’t adopted “personal” AI tools yet, they’re on th…

Imagine nearly every seat in Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center − over 20,000 seats − are empty. That’s the scale of Pennsylvania’s projected shortfall of registered nurses by 2026, according to the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania. Hospitals in the state report an average 14% vacancy rate for registered nurses. In rural areas it is much higher. This shortage, of course, is not just in hospitals. It also affects long-term care facilities, outpatient clinics and home health agencies, which compete with hospitals for a limited pool of registered nurses, licensed nursing professionals and nursing support staff. We are a senior associate dean o…

Alexandra Shaker, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with a background across inpatient and outpatient treatment settings. She has experience in research, teaching, and clinical practice. Dr. Shaker’s writing is an interdisciplinary exploration of the human condition: she integrates psychology, literature, history, anthropology, and language to speak to the meaning and vitality we find in the stories we tell one another and ourselves. Dr. Shaker received her PhD in clinical psychology from The New School for Social Research and conducted her doctoral research at the Brief Psychotherapy Research Program at Mount Sinai Beth Israel. She completed her clinical training …

MrBeast has again defended his philanthropy‑as‑content, clapping back at critics who say he is “only in it for the views.” On April 13, in a post on X, Jimmy Donaldson—better known as MrBeast—rebutted accusations of virtue‑signalling for profit, pointing out that his two worst‑performing videos this year are the charitable ones. He shared a screenshot of his “Top Recent Videos” and noted that, of the ten most recent uploads, “I Helped 2,000 People Walk Again” and “Watch This Video To Feed 1 Person In Need” had the lowest view counts in their first 22 ½ hours online (24.3 million and 21.3 million views, respectively). By contrast, the top performers—“Beat Ronaldo, …

TikTok is launching its own version of community notes on the platform, called “Footnotes.” The crowd-sourced approach to moderation, where users add additional context to posts, has become increasingly popular on social media networks after X (then called Twitter) first launched it in 2021. “Footnotes offers a new opportunity for people to share their expertise and add an additional layer of context to the discussion using a consensus-driven approach,” the company wrote in a blog post. TikTok said it will open access to start contributing footnotes in the coming months. U.S. users can apply to be a contributor as of today. They’ll have to meet the eligi…

In Texas, a Republican senator just introduced a bill that would require wastewater treatment facilities to do some extra testing—essentially making guidelines more stringent than those currently federally mandated. While that might sound like an uncharacteristically environmentally forward cause for a Texas Republican, what the senator wants to test for may give you even greater pause: It’s the abortion medication mifepristone. On Monday, Senator Bryan Hughes of Texas’s first district introduced bill SB1976, which would require testing for a number of “urinary metabolites in the form of gluconates,” including hormones like testosterone; ethinyl estradiol (which…

Most companies operate like one-sided cubes—what the world sees is curated and polished, but the rest remains hidden, even to the people inside. Strategy becomes surface-level. Teams chase goals without grounding. Leaders lead without alignment. In a world growing more complex and emotionally disoriented, that’s not just unsustainable—it’s dangerous. It’s time for a Strategy Renaissance. We need to move beyond sterile planning cycles and rediscover the human heart of strategy. In this new era of work, meaning isn’t a bonus feature—it’s your sharpest edge. The Great Divide Between Strategy and Meaning We have long treated strategy as the realm of numbers a…

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once considered separating Instagram from its parent company due to worries about antitrust litigation, according to an email shown Tuesday on the second day of an antitrust trial alleging Meta illegally monopolized the social media market. In the 2018 email, Zuckerberg wrote that he was beginning to wonder if “spinning Instagram out” would be the only way to accomplish important goals, as big-tech companies grow. He also noted “there is a non-trivial chance” Meta could be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in five to 10 years anyway. He wrote that while most companies resist breakups, “the corporate history is that most com…

In early April, Ikea unveiled the latest edition of its iconic Stockholm 2025 collection, marking 40 years since the original collection was released in 1985. The 96-item lineup includes a range of pieces, like bold statement sofas, side tables, and elegant chandeliers. The designs are keeping with the brand’s signature Scandi aesthetic, but with a twist: inspiration from the natural world. The collection is now available in stores and on the Ikea website. At the core of the collection is a thoughtful focus on materials. Solid wood is paired with tactile surfaces and natural fibers like mouth-blown glass and rattan to create a variety of pieces, such as woode…

Yes, Spotify is down. Spotify users are reporting service outages on the music streaming desktop and mobile app. As of 8:50 a.m., U.S. users started experiencing technical issues with the app, with around 323 reports. By 9:05 a.m., reports had risen to more than 20,000 outages, and are about 40,000 outage reports at the time of publishing. Technical issues are mainly reported in the U.S. and Europe, with some additional reports in Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, United Arab Emirates, and Israel. “We are aware of the outage and working to resolve it as soon as possible,” a Spotify spokesperson told Fast Company in a statement. “The reports of this bein…