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The “American woman in Pakistan” now has a crypto coin. If you don’t know who that is, American Onijah Andrew Robinson recently went viral after claiming she flew to Pakistan to marry a 19-year-old she met online, only to be rejected. Instead of returning home, she has become somewhat of a celebrity in Pakistan, holding high-profile press conferences in Karachi where she demands money and declares her plans to “rebuild” the country. Thanks to TikTok, she has since gone international as that “American woman in Pakistan.” In an interview with the City 21 news channel, Robinson announced her entry into the crypto market last week. “I would like to say I am launching…

The ongoing government shutdown is delaying the announcement of the annual Social Security cost-of-living adjustment for tens of millions of beneficiaries. Originally scheduled for Wednesday, the 2024 Social Security COLA announcement will now be Oct. 24. It is timed to the September Consumer Price Index, which also has not yet been released. The agency adjusts its benefits every year based on inflation. The postponement of the announcement is the most recent example of how the government shutdown, entering its third week and with little progress made toward a resolution, has made it more difficult for people to plan out their finances. Projections by Senior Citizens L…

When the NFL and Apple Music announced Bad Bunny as the 2026 Super Bowl half-time show headliner, the choice surprised some. But to anyone tracking the data over the past few years, it was inevitable. In 2022, Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti redefined the market, driving Latin music’s streaming growth to new heights. It later became the first Spanish-language album nominated for Grammy Album of the Year. The takeaway is simple: When you have accurate, real-time data, you don’t guess where culture is going, you know. That kind of foresight is exactly what industries need now, especially as AI accelerates change at a pace that demands evidence, not instinct. In real time, …

Every year, the $463 billion global footwear industry make 20 billion pairs of shoes for just 8 billion humans. Since virtually none of them are recyclable, they will end up clogging up landfills around the world. For decades now, the fashion industry has been on a mission to make products recyclable. But shoes have been a much harder puzzle to crack than clothing. While garments are made from just a handful of materials, shoes are far more complex objects. A sneaker can be made of 50 different materials from foam insoles to leather exteriors to cotton laces, all glued together with adhesives. A handful of brands have prototyped one-off recyclable shoes, like Adi…

It’s that time of year again. My mailbox is stuffed with catalogs. Targeted seasonal ads from Amazon, Walmart, and Target are following me around the internet. And every other email in my overflowing inbox offers me the go-to 2025 gift guide for everyone on my list! Anyone else out there starting to dread gift-giving? Sometime in the past 30 years, cheaply made stuff became easily available at the click of a button on our phones, and that took a lot of the shine off of gifts. Not only did online shopping make it much easier to buy things for ourselves (whether we needed them or not), but also it was much easier to buy things for other people. And that influx o…

Apple Watch sales are enduring a years-long backslide. While Apple first launched its watch in 2015, sales didn’t spike until the pandemic, when consumers were highly focused on their health. But competitors quickly caught up, with fitness-focused companies like Garmin integrating more smart technology. Meanwhile, Apple stumbled in adding compelling new features—getting into some legal spats along the way. For the past three years, Apple Watch sales have declined year-over-year, according to research firm IDC. In 2022, Apple sold 43 million units; by 2024, that number dropped to 34 million. The Apple Watch also lost market share, falling from 29.6% to 22.5%, while…

There only a few absolute truths in life. The two most recognizable are death, and unless you’re very rich or politically connected, taxes. There are, however, numerous others just a slight tier below; not the least of which is that nearly everyone has a story of themselves or someone close to them wanting to be an architect at some point in their lives. In our collective societal brains we envision these rarified individuals to be highly creative thinkers and mathematical whizzes who are constantly innovating. Those who study history might even think of the great masters of antiquity such as Imhotep, Vitruvius, Brunelleschi, or other unknown masters of ancient Rome, …

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. This year, I launched my first direct-to-consumer product: Scribbly, an AI-powered children’s book company that puts your kid right into the story. Until now, I’ve mostly built apps for businesses, and collecting user feedback for those projects has been straightforward and structured. The D2C world is different. Read the Google reviews of any hotel or restaurant, and you’ll get a feel for…

If you were to join a team meeting at Parity on any given day, you might sense something unusual. One colleague may have just returned from a strength session. Another might be joining from an airport between competitions. Someone else might be analyzing sponsor data mere hours before competing in a world-class event. This is what it looks like to lead a company where a significant portion of the workforce comprises elite women athletes. And I believe it represents a powerful window into the future of work. At most companies, people point to a visionary founder or a breakthrough product as the thing that makes an organization stand out. At Parity, the differenti…

U.K. banks and government tech systems going down. University students in Australia struggling to complete their coursework. Homes across Europe losing access to their Ring doorbells. While you were sleeping, large parts of the Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based internet went offline around the world. According to the AWS outage monitor, the problem stemmed from a misconfiguration of Domain Name System (DNS) resolution within the company’s cloud infrastructure. The problem was remedied within three hours of being encountered—by people unable to log onto Roblox or search the web with Perplexity. But the outage highlights just how much the web’s day-to-day function…

In recent weeks, a project called Jmail.world has quickly recreated the online life of Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted sex offender with myriad ties to the rich and powerful. The effort started with a reproduction of the tranche of released emails in common Gmail style, searchable just like your own email app. Earlier this week, the team behind Jmail, software engineer Riley Walz and CEO of Kino Luke Igal, revealed JPhotos, which is inspired by Google Photos and is full of images that have been made public. The Jmail.world archive now includes sections imitating Google Drive, as well as “JFlights,” a section tracking Epstein’s flight history, “Jemin…

Some days, starting feels effortless. A clear challenge or opportunity presents itself, an idea crystallizes, and then contracts into a single coherent thought. Today, frankly? That’s not happening. I’m staring at a pristine white canvas while the cursor mocks me. That uncomfortable space—the blinking cursor, the first messy draft, the false starts—isn’t a nuisance. It’s where creativity lives. Today, the temptation is to skip past all that. With AI, you don’t even need to know where you’re going. The bot can map it out, hand you something good enough. But what does good enough mean if you didn’t wrestle with the idea yourself? A recent MIT Media Lab study, Your …

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Books offer a compelling, slower alternative to the onslaught of negative news. With terrific new free tools, it’s increasingly easy to access print, digital, and audio books. Read on for my favorite book sites and apps. The heavy-hitters Libby lends out free e-books and audiobooks through libraries in 78 countries. It works for 90% of U.S. libraries. You can search for and check out nearly anything, instantly, for free, on any device. Audiobooks: Check out and listen to audiobooks at any speed. You may not need t…

It’s easy, for me at least, to be cynical about the state of design. Our visual environment can feel bland, everything from brands to buildings homogenized around similar styles. The ever-impending AI takeover can make the future of this work uncertain. My reading around design this year tended to focus on two things: looking back and looking ahead. In looking through design history, I was looking for glimpses of alternative ways of designing: the experimental, the absurd, the weird. And in looking forward, I was searching for hope in a dark time, for answers on how design, and the design industries, move beyond the stasis I feel like we’re in. The intersection of th…

Snagging an internship can help future employees enhance their skills and knowledge and, overall, make them more desirable employees. But when it comes to actually working as an intern, not every company is a desirable place to be. Fortunately, Glassdoor, a company that analyzes workplace trends, explored thousands of intern reviews to put together its thorough list of the Best Internships of 2025. This year’s list includes 13 technology companies and six finance companies, with various other industries represented. The top companies offered not just competitive pay, but also roles that had a real impact—that is, the internships helped employees land jobs in the…

For its 2026 postage stamps, the U.S. Postal Service is going colorful and graphic. USPS gave a first look at some of the stamps set to be released next year, including the latest edition of its Love stamp, stamps commemorating the 250th anniversary of the U.S., and stamps depicting figures including a boxer, a martial artist and actor, and a pair of published poets. The stamps will be released on a rolling basis beginning in January and available at Post Office locations and online. “This early preview of our 2026 stamp program underscores the Postal Service’s commitment to celebrating the artistry and storytelling that make stamps so special,” Stamp Services dir…

We live in a world of ambient hums, from air conditioners and distant traffic to the whir of our own thoughts. It’s no surprise many people reach for active noise-cancelling (ANC) headphones to escape it all. Originally designed for planes and offices, ANC devices, including earbuds, have become a popular bedtime tool for chasing total quiet. But the brain doesn’t actually want silence to sleep, and forcing it can backfire. The best way to fall and stay asleep is to quiet the mind, not just what enters your ears. We call this creating “cognitive silence,” and ANC often gets in the way. Even during sleep, the brain keeps an ear out for danger. It’s an evolutionary surv…

In some cities, as Amazon delivery vans make the rounds with your latest order, they’re also delivering something different—free food to people who rely on food banks. In a program that quietly started during the pandemic, the company has used its logistics infrastructure to deliver enough groceries for 60 million meals to families facing food insecurity. Today, Amazon announced that it’s extending the program with its food bank partners through 2028. The Community Delivery program began early in the pandemic as the company’s disaster relief team saw long lines at food banks and looked for ways to help people stuck at home. “We started talking to our operation…

Bible designs tend to be variations on a theme—tissue-thin paper and unforgiving font sizes, owing to the 783,000 words crammed into a single normal-sized book (the average novel, by comparison, clocks in at 70,000–100,000 words). Cheap faux-leather covers. A bookmark ribbon, maybe. If you’re a person of faith, it’s perhaps not the most fitting frame for what is defined as the literal word of God. If you’re a design zealot, it’s heretical object quality. If you’re both, well—prayers. The Bible is a book utterly ripe for a redesign. So Dylan Da Silva did just that with his Byble project, which released a bespoke hypermodern 11.5-pound edition of Genesis (the fi…

2025 was a year defined by buttholes and fury. AI companies, fueled by unlimited piles of cash, got in line with the same approach to branding: what’s been scatalogically dubbed a “butthole logo.” The amorphous circles neither propel you forward like a Nike swoosh nor ground you like an Apple’s apple. Instead they spin you around, hypnotizing you into who knows what’s next, just keep staring. At the same time, a polarized America debated its way through a newly political era of design—what you can see everywhere from the The President administration’s choice of typeface to its decision to weigh in on brand plays from Cracker Barrel and American Eagle. Marketers s…

I had to submit my résumé for a role. Then I went through three interviews, with nearly identical questions each time. The problem? The role was for a freelance writing position. Not to become a company employee. I got all the way to the third interview only to learn that the role paid a fraction of my usual rate, even though I’d provided my rate up front. I’m experienced enough as a solopreneur to know that going through three interviews was a bad sign. The potential client wasn’t communicating internally (as confirmed by the fact that my rate had been overlooked). Multiple interviews are incredibly uncommon in my line of work, and indicated to me that the comp…

The world’s biggest fast-food chain by locations isn’t Starbucks, KFC, or even McDonald’s. It’s Mixue Ice Cream and Tea. The Chinese quick service restaurant chain currently has about 45,000 storefronts across Asia and Australia, according to the research firm Technomic. That’s about 2,000 more than McDonald’s’ global store count and 5,000 more than Starbucks’s. But the boba tea purveyor really picked up broad attention when it debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Monday—and raised an IPO of $400 million. Shares surged by around 43% before by the end of the day, bringing the company’s total valuation to $10 billion. (Storefronts aside, McDonald’s’s market ca…

Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet are the five largest corporations by market cap, with the value of their combined shares totaling more than $16 trillion. These firms each pull in multiple billions of dollars in profit annually, and so pay tens of billions of dollars in annual taxes, too. But like other corporate giants in the S&P 500, the companies are also spending massive amounts on shareholder payouts, funneling trillions of dollars to wealthy shareholders through stock buybacks and shareholder dividends. Over the past five years, those five largest companies spent more than $1 trillion on stock buybacks and dividends, according to a new ana…

Hello again, and thanks for reading Fast Company’s Plugged In. Three days after Donald The President’s second inauguration, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tried to have it both ways. “I’m not going to agree with him on everything,” Altman tweeted of the new president. “[B]ut I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!” The gist of Altman’s sentiment—lavish praise for The President, tempered with a polite disclaimer that it wasn’t a blanket endorsement—was far closer to a love letter than a critique. But at least it broached the possibility of disagreement. Almost a year later, most tech executives who have commented on the president have tended to follow a …

As startups race to keep up with advances in artificial intelligence, some of them seem to be borrowing from China’s exacting work culture—which normalized a 72-hour workweek, or a “996” schedule of working six days a week from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. While the 996 parlance and laser focus on AI may be new, hustle culture has always been embedded in Silicon Valley to some degree. Some business leaders, perhaps most famously Elon Musk, have long demanded those hours from their employees: “There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” he once said of the “hardcore” work ethic promoted at his companies. Now that culture seems …