What's on Your Mind?

Airova is recalling 191,390 Aroeve air purifiers over concerns that they could “overheat and ignite, posing fire and burn hazards to consumers,” according to a recent notice from the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Airova received 37 reports of the air purifiers overheating—including one incident that resulted in a fire—however, there have been no reports of injuries or property damage. The CPSC notice said the popular air purifiers were sold online at Amazon, Shopify, Temu, and TikTok Shop, for between $80 and $134, from September 2024 through June 2025. Airova’s Aroeve units are known for their stylish design, as well as for improving indoor air q…

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes fell sharply in January as higher home prices and possibly harsh winter weather kept many prospective homebuyers on the sidelines despite easing mortgage rates. Existing home sales sank 8.4% last month from December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.91 million units, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. That’s the biggest monthly decline in nearly four years and the slowest annualized sales pace in more than two years. Sales fell 4.4% compared with January last year. The latest sales figure fell short of the 4.105 million pace economists were expecting, according to FactSet. “The decrease in sales …

In late 2025, Interpol coordinated a global operation across 134 nations, seizing roughly 30,000 live animals, confiscating illegal plant and timber products, and identifying about 1,100 suspected wildlife traffickers for national police to investigate. Wildlife trafficking is one of the most lucrative illicit industries worldwide. It nets between US$7 billion and $23 billion per year, according to the Global Environment Facility, a group of nearly 200 nations as well as businesses and nonprofits that fund environmental improvement and protection projects. People buy and sell a wide range of items, including live animals, plant powders and oils, ivory carvings, an…

Stellantis, the maker of Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram, issued a “do not drive” warning for certain late-model vehicles, telling drivers not to use their vehicles until defective air bags are replaced, according to a notice from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). This stop-drive directive was issued for 225,000 U.S. vehicles from 2003 to 2016 that contain the “defective, deadly” Takata airbag inflators, and is part of a larger, ongoing recall. More than 67 million Takata air bags have been recalled in tens of millions of vehicles across U.S. “Over time, the chemical propellant inside certain Takata inflators can degrade, particularly in hot a…

For most of modern management history, wasting time has been treated as a vice. This sensibility can be traced back to Frederick Taylor’s doctrine of scientific management, which recast work as an engineering problem and workers as components in a machine to be optimized, standardized, and controlled. In reducing human effort to measurable outputs and time-motion efficiencies, Taylorism marked the beginning of the end for seeing people as thinking agents, turning them instead into productivity units not unlike laboratory rats, rewarded or punished according to how efficiently they ran the maze. Since then, we have come a long way. The post-war rise of the knowledge wo…

Think about how many emails you receive each day. Then how many of those include the phrase “please find attached” in the body. One X user has made a plea to retire the phrase, a relic leftover from a time when business communication relied on typewritten letters posted in envelopes, which actually included attached documents to be found. The post quickly went viral, gaining nearly 15 million views since it was posted earlier this week. While the user doesn’t elaborate why exactly they personally take issue with the phrase, or what to say instead, the post had the desired effect, with many weighing in with their own takes on modern email etiquette. Some agr…

Adam Mosseri, the head of Meta’s Instagram, testified Wednesday during a landmark social media trial in Los Angeles that he disagrees with the idea that people can be clinically addicted to social media platforms. The question of addiction is a key pillar of the case, where plaintiffs seek to hold social media companies responsible for harms to children who use their platforms. Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube are the two remaining defendants in the case, which TikTok and Snap have settled. At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose lawsuit could determine how thousands of similar lawsuits against social media co…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Is ‘AI slop’ code here to stay? A few months ago I wrote about the dark side of vibe coding tools: they often generate code that introduces bugs or security vulnerabilities that surface later. They can solve an immediate problem while making a codebase harder to maintain over time. It’s true that more developers are using AI coding assistants, and using them more frequently and for more tasks. But many seem to be weighing the time saved today against the cleanup they may face tomor…

Russia has attempted to fully block WhatsApp in the country, the company said, the latest move in an ongoing government effort to tighten control over the internet. A WhatsApp spokesperson said late Wednesday that the Russian authorities’ action was intended to “drive users to a state-owned surveillance app,” a reference to Russia’s own state-supported MAX messaging app that’s seen by critics as a surveillance tool. “Trying to isolate over 100 million people from private and secure communication is a backwards step and can only lead to less safety for people in Russia,” the WhatsApp spokesperson said. “We continue to do everything we can to keep people connected.” Russ…

Daniel Kokotajlo predicted the end of the world would happen in April 2027. In “AI 2027” — a document outlining the impending impacts of AI, published in April 2025 — the former OpenAI employee and several peers announced that by April 2027, unchecked AI development would lead to superintelligence and consequently destroy humanity. The authors, however are going back on their predictions. Now, Kokotajlo forecasts superintelligence will land in 2034, but he doesn’t know if and when AI will destroy humanity. In “AI 2027,” Kokotajlo argued that superintelligence will emerge through “fully autonomous coding,” enabling AI systems to drive their own development. The r…

For most of modern finance, one number has quietly dictated who gets ahead and who gets left out: the credit score. It was a breakthrough when it arrived in the 1950s, becoming an elegant shortcut for a complex decision. But shortcuts age. And in a world driven by data, digital behavior, and real-time signals, the score is increasingly misaligned with how people actually live and manage money. We’re now at a turning point. A foundational system, long considered untouchable, is finally being reconstructed by using AI—specifically, advanced machine learning models built for risk prediction—to extract more intelligence from existing data. These are rigorously tested, wel…

Perusing the grocery aisle in the Westside Market on 23rd Street in Manhattan, you might not even notice the screens. They look just like paper price labels and, alongside a bar code, use a handwriting-style font we’ve come to associate with a certain merchant folksiness. They’re not particularly bright or showy. The only clues that they’re not ordinary sticky shelf labels are a barely distinguishable light bulb and, on some, a small QR code. These are electronic shelf labels, chip-enabled screens that some stores are now using to display product prices. Unlike their paper predecessors, the prices aren’t printed in ink but rendered in pixels, and they can change insta…

Meta announced on February 10 that it’s introducing a new AI animation feature that lets users turn their still profile photos into AI-generated looping videos. It reads like an uncanny valley version of yesteryear’s Boomerang. The option to animate appears when users click “Animate profile picture” on their Facebook avatars, and the feature gives a limited set of animation options, including party hat, confetti, wave, and heart, in which a photo’s subject makes a heart shape with their hands. Meta says there will be additional options in the future for “seasonal moments and special events.” The tech is imperfect and can only work with what it’s got. Meta says…

James Van Der Beek was one of the biggest stars of the late 1990s and early 2000s. His family still couldn’t afford the cost of cancer. The actor, 48, best known for his portrayal of Dawson Leery in the ’90s hit Dawson’s Creek, died Wednesday. Van Der Beek’s passing comes a little more than a year after he announced on social media that he was battling colorectal cancer, which he was diagnosed with in 2023. And while the actor and father’s untimely death is undeniably tragic, there’s another heartbreaking piece of the story to be told. His family was desperately struggling to afford the cost of his cancer treatment. Despite Van Der Beek’s successful career, w…

January filled our inboxes with productivity advice. Set stretch goals! Think bigger! Dream audaciously! What was conspicuously absent from all that exhortation was any practical guidance on how to move from grand vision to daily action without becoming paralyzed by the enormity of what we’ve committed to. And now, it’s February. Here’s a counterintuitive truth I’ve learned from decades of navigating complex creative challenges: The secret to tackling big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAG) isn’t summoning more willpower or grinding harder. It’s learning to approach complexity the way babies learn to eat solid food: one tiny, digestible bite at a time. I call it t…

A little known security feature on iPhones is in the spotlight after it stymied efforts by U.S. federal authorities to search devices seized from a reporter. Apple’s Lockdown Mode recently prevented FBI agents from getting into Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s iPhone. Agents seized the phone, as well as two MacBooks and other electronic devices, when they searched Natanson’s home last month as part of an investigation into a Pentagon contractor accused of illegally handling classified information. But the FBI reported that its Computer Analysis Response Team “could not extract” data from the iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode, according to a court filing. …

Want to use Discord from next month? You’ll have to hand over a photo of your ID or a scan of your face to verify you’re of age. It’s part of a new process introduced by the chat app aimed at ensuring no one underage is using the platform. All new and existing users, the company says, will be given a “teen-appropriate experience” by default, including content filtering and limited access to spaces that host adult content. To regain the experience they previously had, users will need to prove their age through one of several options, including video selfies or sharing a photo of an identity document. (Discord did not immediately respond to Fast Company’s request for co…

Airport lounges used to be a perk. In 2026, they are a battleground. American Express is refreshing Centurion Lounges and adding faster Sidecar formats. Chase is experimenting with champagne parlors and hyperlocal chef partnerships in its Sapphire Lounges. Citi is back in the ultra-premium card game. And Capital One, the relative newcomer, is making a different bet. Instead of building another lounge at LaGuardia Airport, it built a restaurant. The new Capital One Landing at Terminal B is a 12,500-square-foot, chef-driven dining space created with José Andrés. It has a 2,250-square-foot working kitchen, the largest in the terminal, and a menu built around Span…

This morning, shares of two of the largest computer memory companies that trade on U.S. markets are up yet again. The stock prices of Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) and Sandisk Corporation (Nasdaq: SNDK) rose after a Japanese memory firm issued a surprising outlook. Here’s what you need to know. Stock prices jump as demand continues Shares in several memory chip makers traded on U.S. markets are currently up in premarket trading this morning. The companies include Micron and Sandisk, as well as Western Digital Corporation (Nasdaq: WDC) and Seagate Technology Holdings (Nasdaq: STX). As of this writing, Micron shares are currently up 2.9%, Sandisk…