What's on Your Mind?

Cellphones are everywhere—including, until recently, in schools. Since 2023, 29 states, including New York, Vermont, Florida, and Texas, have passed laws that require K-12 public schools to enforce bans or strict limits on students using their cellphones on campus. Another 10 states have passed other measures that require local school districts to take some kind of action on cellphone usage. Approximately 77% of public schools now forbid students from having their phones out during class—an increase from the 66% of schools that forbade students from using phones at school in 2015. Schools across the country are finding different ways to enforce no-phone po…

The logic behind electric vehicles benefiting public health has long been solid: More EVs means fewer internal combustion engines on the road, and a reduction in harmful tailpipe emissions. But now researchers have confirmed, to the greatest extent yet, that this is indeed what’s actually happening on the ground. What’s more, they found that even relatively small upticks in EV adoption can have a measurably positive impact on a community. Whereas previous work has largely been based on modeling, a study published this month in the journal Lancet Planetary Health used satellites to measure actual emissions. The study, conducted between 2019 and 2023, focused on Califo…

The European Union on Friday accused TikTok of breaching the bloc’s digital rules with “addictive design” features that lead to compulsive use by children, in preliminary charges that strike at the heart of the popular video sharing app’s operating model. EU regulators said their two-year investigation found that TikTok hasn’t done enough to assess how features such as autoplay and infinite scroll could harm the physical and mental health of users, including minors and “vulnerable adults.” The European Commission said it believes TikTok should change the “basic design” of its service. The commission is the EU’s executive arm and enforcer of the 27-nation bloc’s Digital …

Just because you’re an ultra-talented global celebrity doesn’t mean you’re a shoo-in for an amazing gig. In fact, even stars have to apply to jobs, just like the rest of us. Just ask Charlie Puth, who’ll be singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Super Bowl LX Sunday night. It shows how humility fuels success for even someone at the top of their game—in this case, a dream opportunity for one of pop’s biggest stars on entertainment’s biggest stage. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, the “We Don’t Talk Anymore” singer spoke frankly last month about how he applied and auditioned to sing the national anthem, and how he’s elated for the gig. He shared that perfor…

Design culture loves the fantasy of “blue sky” thinking. No constraints. No limits. Pure imagination. It sounds liberating, but it often produces design that only works in ideal conditions for an ideal user who does not exist. Blue sky leads to paper design—“great” ideas that never come to market. The truth is simple: Constraints fuel creativity. The most valuable constraint is the human one. When designers embrace real limits like limited dexterity, low lighting, fatigue, mobility restrictions, sensory sensitivities, small living spaces, and tight budgets, they stop designing for abstraction. They start designing for reality. That is where innovation becomes inev…

Over the years, I’ve written and spoken extensively about my belief that design has the power to change the world. I find daily inspiration in the many individuals and organizations leaning away from design as pure aesthetics and embracing design as a powerful tool for promoting the wellbeing of both people and the planet. I refer to wellbeing as holistic health. It includes holistic health of the people: end users—those using the products, and makers—suppliers, producers, and manufacturers. Also, of the planet, because no design is isolated; it is always dependent on and embedded in systems. Our choices have far-reaching impact. Upstream decisions about a design’s ma…

Noah Winter brags he’s been to way more Super Bowls than Tom Brady. Brady competed in 10 — more than any other player. But Winter will be part of the Super Bowl spectacle for his 30th straight year this year, not in uniform but as the guy in charge of the celebratory confetti after the game ends. Winter’s company, Artistry in Motion, also makes confetti for rock concerts, movies, political conventions and the Olympics. But the annual blizzard of color falling onto the field at the end of each Super Bowl is probably what he’s best known for. It certainly is what he’s most likely to get asked about at dinner parties. “It’s become an iconic moment,” Winter marvels, sitting…

Friday is the opening ceremony for the 2026 Winter Olympics. But, if you’ve spent any time on TikTok over the past week, you might have already got a sneak peek at some behind-the-scenes content courtesy of the athletes themselves. In 2024, the International Olympic Committee loosened its rules governing what athletes can capture and share on social media. The shift helped spark viral moments during the Paris Games, when Team USA rugby star Ilona Maher and Norway’s swimmer Henrik Christiansen, whose chocolate muffin reviews became an unlikely hit, took over TikTok feeds. This year, Olympians have already been posting vlogs of their journeys to the Olympic Village…

Amazon sales surged 14% during the fourth quarter, helped by strong holiday spending and a better-than-expected growth in its prominent cloud computing unit. But shares fell 11% in after hours trading on Thursday as investors appeared to be spooked by the Seattle-based tech company’s plans to increase capital spending by nearly 60% to $200 billion from last year’s $128 billion as it sees opportunities in artificial intelligence, robots, semiconductors and satellites. The company’s fourth-quarter profits also were slightly below analysts’ projections. Wall Street analysts were expecting capital spending to rise to around $147 billion this year, according to FactSet. Ama…

It’s time to become an armchair expert on sports that you only think about every four years. In other words, the 2026 Winter Olympics have arrived. This year’s competition takes place in two Italian cities, Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, and the surrounding regions. It is not Cortina’s first rodeo, as the city hosted previously in 1956, while the country of Italy has hosted the games three times prior. The action kicked off on Wednesday, February 4, when the world’s best alpine skiers and curlers strutted their stuff. Despite the curling, the official Olympic Opening Ceremony takes place today (Friday, February 6). Here’s everything you need to know so you can …

The price of Bitcoin has declined dramatically in recent weeks, and cryptocurrency investors are more fearful than ever. In the past 24 hours, the crypto king dipped to the $60,000 range—a low it has not seen since October 2024. While Bitcoin has now recovered slightly to around $66,000, many analysts and investors still think the token may not have bottomed out yet. Here’s what you need to know about Bitcoin’s continued fall, and how low things might go. Why is Bitcoin falling? Like most cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC) has been steadily falling almost since the year began. As Fast Company previously reported, there were two main drivers for this fall. The…

This Sunday will see the Seattle Seahawks face off against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX. The game will also mark the conclusion of the tenth football season featuring Next Gen Stats, the analytics system that delivers detailed data about every game to coaches and broadcasters through a partnership with Amazon Web Services. Next Gen Stats began in 2015, when the National Football League deployed RFID chips in player shoulder pads and even in the football itself, enabling the league to capture location data multiple times per second through sensors installed throughout stadiums. It has since become a mainstay of football broadcasts and training sessions…

Hello, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. “Programming, as it turns out, is just typing.” Talking at Cisco’s AI Summit in San Francisco on February 3, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made that pithy observation to sum up the phenomenon of people using AI coding tools to simply describe in plain language software they want to exist, with an algorithm doing the heavy lifting. The comment came during a wild, wide-ranging riff on how AI is changing the world, and Huang kept joking that his chatter might have been influenced by several glasses of wine. (Hey, he was the after-dinner speaker.) But even if alcohol-fueled poetic license was involved, the sentiment capt…

Organizational leaders are witnessing a steep and unprecedented rise in employee healthcare costs that is eroding bottom-line profitability. According to data from the Business Group on Health, these costs are projected to rise by 9% this year, representing a 62% increase since 2017. To put it in perspective, this represents an incremental hit of nearly $1 million to the bottom line for a midsize organization of 500 people. What CFOs are now confronting is a tipping point where the average total cost to insure an employee is nearing $20,000 annually. Notably, it is specifically mental health claims that are driving the spike. PwC’s 2026 Medical Trend report shows that…

It looks like a standard shipping container. But a metal box at a London factory is aimed at solving one of the shipping industry’s biggest challenges: how to cut CO2 emissions on cargo ships. The tech, from a startup called Seabound, can capture as much as 95% of the CO2 emissions from the exhaust on ship. The company is now preparing to install a set of the containers on a cargo ship in its first commercial deployment after years of development and pilot tests. “The shipping industry is one of the last hard-to-abate sectors,” says 30-year-old CEO Alisha Fredriksson, who cofounded the company in 2021 after working as a consultant and seeing the need for a new…

February 1 was National Change Your Password Day, a well-intentioned reminder that, ironically, highlights everything wrong with how we think about security in 2026. Here’s the truth: if you spent the first day of the month dutifully changing “Summer2025!” to “Winter2026!” across your accounts, you didn’t make yourself safer. In fact, you might have made things worse. Decades of Bad Advice We’ve spent decades teaching people the wrong lessons about password security. Add a number. Throw in a special character. Change it every 90 days. These requirements were etched into our collective consciousness, repeated by IT departments, enforced by login forms, and inter…

When Howard Schultz joined—and later acquired—Starbucks in the 1980s, he was deeply inspired by the communal culture of Italian coffee bars. From the beginning, Schultz envisioned Starbucks as more than a transactional stop for coffee. He wanted to build a community-centered space for people to congregate and connect. That vision helped redefine what a coffee shop could be. In recent years, however, that vision has lost momentum. Shifts in how and where people work, rising costs, and intensifying competition have challenged Starbucks’s dominance in the coffee shop landscape. In New York City, the company recently lost its position as the city’s largest coffee chain …

Prices for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl on NBC this year averaged $8 million. For the privilege of paying that, advertisers are required to spend an additional $8 million to buy ad time on other NBC sports broadcasts and the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. With that much money invested (all before any is spent on actually creating a Super Bowl campaign) brands need to ensure they get your attention. This year, Rocket Mortgage and Redfin are aiming to do that by combining three things that will produce a large Venn diagram of interest: Lady Gaga singing Mr. Rogers’s “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”; a heartwarming commercial airing during the game; and, most c…

Being adaptable has always been a useful skill. But in today’s world, it’s essential. In our volatile, AI-accelerated workplaces, adaptability lets us transform uncertainty and pressure into clarity, learning, and discerning action. Thankfully, adaptability is a skill we can develop. In fact, there are science-backed practices we can adopt to improve our adaptability, and the benefits go far beyond our careers. In practical terms, adaptability is being able to regulate and adjust your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors amid changing circumstances while staying aligned with your values and long‑term goals. True adaptability is not passive compliance: it’s conscious ongo…

Watching the Super Bowl without cable keeps getting more expensive. NBC will not offer a free stream of Super Bowl LX in 2026, an NBCUniversal spokesperson confirmed. Instead, cord cutters will need a Peacock Premium subscription, which costs $11 per month for the ad-supported tier. Cable subscribers who want to stream the game can log on to NBC’s apps. This isn’t the first time NBC has put the big game behind a paywall. It also required a Peacock subscription in 2022, but back then you could still stream the Super Bowl for free on your phone via the NFL or Yahoo Sports apps. (Also, a month of Peacock cost just $5 at the time.) It wasn’t always this way. In th…