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Black Friday isn’t what it used to be. Less than 15 years ago, it was fairly common for people to wake up at ridiculously early hours to drive to a store, where they would stand in line, waiting for the doors to open in order to grab the best deals. Those people still exist, but not in the numbers they used to, thanks to the convenience of online shopping (and the early start to holiday deals). But as artificial intelligence becomes more entrenched, it could play an outsized role in Black Friday (and Cyber Monday)—and 2025 could be something of a test case for the technology. The average consumer is expected to spend $1,595 on holiday gifts this year, according to…

Thanksgiving is a beautiful day filled with family, loved ones, and good food. All that merriment takes copious amounts of labor and planning ahead. It is almost inevitable that something will fall between the cracks and a last-minute store run will be necessary. But is that even possible? Here’s a quick breakdown of what is open and closed on Thanksgiving 2025 to help you out in a pinch should you have a missing cranberry sauce crisis. But first let’s take a look at everyday services: Is Thanksgiving a federal holiday? Yes, Thanksgiving is a federal holiday celebrated annually in the United States on the fourth Thursday in November. This makes Novem…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. We sleep with our phones. 😴 📱 We’re tied to these devices for work, at home—even on vacation. 🏖️🤳 43% of Americans feel addicted I was intrigued when writer Daniel Parris offered to share tips and tools he relies on to weaken the distracting pull of his phone. Daniel is a data scientist and data journalist who writes Stat Significant, a weekly newsletter with more than 23,000 readers. It’s a lively read, with data-centric essays about movies, music, TV, and more. Between his consulting projects, pop culture data analyses, a…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. National home prices rose +0.1% year-over-year between October 2024 and October 2025, according to the Zillow Home Value Index reading published last week—a decelerated rate from the +2.4% year-over-year rate between October 2023 and October 2024. In the first half of 2025, the number of major metro area housing markets seeing year-over-year declines climbed. That count has since stopped ticking up. —> 31 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 10% of markets) had a falling year-over-year reading in the January 2024 to January 2025 …

For the past 99 years at Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, spectators have craned their necks to watch giant balloons and larger-than-life floats pass through the streets of New York City. But a word to the wise this year: Don’t forget to look down. You might just catch a glimpse of the tiniest float in the parade’s history. The float—which is 49 times smaller than the average display—comes courtesy of Goldfish, which is returning to the parade for the first time in more than a decade. The float’s design features a wintery snowscape covered with frolicking Goldfish crackers towed by an equally tiny Ram truck. According to Brendan Kennedy, director of creative pr…

Thanksgiving is a beautiful day filled with family, loved ones, and good food. All that merriment takes copious amounts of labor and planning ahead. It is almost inevitable that something will fall between the cracks and a last-minute store run will be necessary. But is that even possible? Here’s a quick breakdown of what is open and closed on Thanksgiving 2025 to help you out in a pinch should you have a missing cranberry sauce crisis. But first let’s take a look at everyday services: Is Thanksgiving a federal holiday? Yes, Thanksgiving is a federal holiday celebrated annually in the United States on the fourth Thursday in November. This makes Novem…

Just a handful of years ago, the idea of one person creating a company worth over a billion dollars seemed like a pipe dream. Thanks to rapid advancements in AI, the possibility of a “solopreneur unicorn” is less a matter of “if” and more a matter of “when.” Earlier this year, OpenAI founder Sam Altman told Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian that his group chat of tech CEO friends have a betting pool for when the world will see a one-person billion-dollar company. Ten months later, some experts suggest that the company could be founded in 2026, if it hasn’t been already, due to rapid advancements in agentic AI. “The ability of a person to scale themselves, to automat…

AI is rapidly changing the world around us, from the way we engage online to how we work. But while the technology is able to complete an astonishing number of tasks, humans are far from obsolete. A new report from McKinsey is shining light on why humans are still essential. According to the report, roughly 57% of work hours can be automated. Meanwhile, 70% of the skills employers look for can be used for both automated work and nonautomated work. This means over the next five years, humans will have to adjust their work habits to make room for automation. McKinsey designed an index to assess how automation will impact each skill used in the workplace today. Acc…

Every year, companies and space agencies launch hundreds of rockets into space—and that number is set to grow dramatically with ambitious missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But these dreams hinge on one critical challenge: propulsion—the methods used to push rockets and spacecraft forward. To make interplanetary travel faster, safer, and more efficient, scientists need breakthroughs in propulsion technology. Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs. We’re a team of engineers and graduate students who are studying how AI in general, and a subset of AI called machine learning in particular…

The day after Thanksgiving is a holiday in itself for retailers. Historically, Black Friday has been a time when shoppers wake up early and head to stores for the best deals of the year. More recently, though, more and more consumers have been opting out of the mad rush in stores and turning to online deals, many of which started a week ago and now extend all weekend long till Cyber Monday, December 1. For those who like to be there when doors open, this is for you. Here’s everything you need to know. What time do Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s, and Walmart open? Many major big-box retailers open their doors nice and early for Black Friday, starting with Kohl’s a…

What does it mean to be a courageous leader in 2025? Stanley McChrystal, retired four-star general in the U.S. Army, joins futurist and culture critic Baratunde Thurston to discuss McChrystal’s new book, On Character, the responsibility of leaders today, and the weight of being an active citizen in democracy. Considering President The President’s deployment of the National Guard, McChrystal explores the role of the military in civil society. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversatio…

After Thanksgiving, brands will bombard you with Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. It can be overwhelming to know what to buy. After all, some deals aren’t actually all that good. And besides, you don’t want to make impulse buys that you’ll regret later and that will end up in a landfill in the near future. To help cut through the noise, we’ve picked out the best deals from design-forward brands. They create beautiful products that are thoughtfully designed to last for years. We’ve even picked out some of our favorite classic products that you will enjoy using for a long time. All the prices below are before discounts. MoMA Design Store 20% off sit…

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…

Social media has become inexorably intertwined with our daily lives, but not all platforms are equally popular. For every cultural phenomenon like TikTok, there’s a Mastodon. It would be easy, based on the news media’s borderline obsession with TikTok and X, to assume that those platforms are, if not the most used social media tools in America today, then very close to the top. They’re not. In fact, they’re squarely in the middle, according to a new study from Pew Research. Instead, it’s YouTube that is the most commonly used social media platform in the U.S.—by a landslide. Pew reports that 84% of U.S. adults use YouTube. (The platform is also the most widely use…

As the midterm election primaries inch closer, some candidates are focusing their campaigns on how they’ll regulate artificial intelligence. On the right, populist Republicans are warning that the AI industry stands to undermine the Make America Great Again movement. On the left, there’s worry about the sector’s growing political and social power. Across the spectrum, there’s near-universal concern about what the technology might be doing to children. The donor class is now getting involved: A super PAC called Leading the Future backed by OpenAI executive Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz plans to spend as much as $100 million in the midterms to support its prefe…

Hello once again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. I didn’t buy a new phone this year. Or a new laptop, tablet, or smartwatch. That hasn’t been a hardship. I’ve just been perfectly content with the gear I already own—both a satisfying feeling and a boon to my pocketbook. Instead of being splashy budget busters, the new products that made me happiest in 2025 have been relatively inexpensive items that bring clever twists to seemingly mundane categories. This week, I’m going to tell you about three I’ve found especially rewarding. (I’m citing their list prices, but—this being Black Friday week—all are widely available at steep discounts as I write this…

I’ve worked for myself for nearly a decade, and in all but one of those years I’ve earned more than the U.K. average salary. Some years it’s been a little more. I’m naturally frugal, and even during the rockiest stretches, there’s always been enough to cover the basics—plus a safety net if I ever truly needed it. Yet I worry about money constantly, gnawed by the sense that I’m only one missed invoice from financial collapse. Although I’m generally wary of self-diagnosis, the term “money dysmorphia”—a disconnect between how we feel about our finances and the reality—fits me like a glove. From the rise of HENRYs (“high earners, not rich yet”) to the boom in “income …

If you loved the Lego Game Boy but couldn’t get yourself to buy it because it was only a display piece that couldn’t play actual Game Boy games, I’ve got great news for you: It’s no longer merely a clever block of bricks. Substance Labs, a merry band of Lego and gaming lovers based in Switzerland, have created a kit that retrofits the official brick-perfect Lego set into an unofficial pixel-perfect playable Game Boy. The name of this wündertronics is BrickBoy. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter project, so the usual “may not deliver” caveats apply. Substance Labs calls itself “a team of creators and engineers who grew up building with Lego and gaming on the classics [who hav…

As we near the final weeks of the year, platforms of all stripes will soon begin rolling out their annual recap features, which let users see the content they have interacted with most. While numerous tech giants release these recaps, music streamer Spotify is usually the most anticipated. Known as Spotify Wrapped, this look-back lets you see which songs you interacted with most over the past 12 months. So when will Spotify Wrapped 2025 be available? Here’s what you need to know. What is Spotify Wrapped 2025? Spotify Wrapped is the music streamer’s annual year-in-review compilation that allows Spotify users to see which songs, albums, and artists the…

No one can deny that the internet, especially social media, can pose significant dangers. Now, a new survey has found that about one in five parents and carers know—and have supported—a child who has experienced online blackmail. The survey, from the U.K.’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), also showed that one in ten of these individuals’ own children have experienced blackmail online. According to the NSPCC, bad actors often start communicating with young people on public platforms before actively moving the conversation to end-to-end encrypted messaging services—making it more challenging for them to be tracked. Only 43% o…

In the latest sign that the The President administration isn’t so concerned about asbestos, the Food and Drug Administration this week withdrew a proposed rule that would have required testing for the toxic asbestos in talc-based cosmetics. The rule, which was proposed by the Biden administration less than a year ago, would have required manufacturers to test cosmetics for asbestos and keep records demonstrating compliance. Exposure to asbestos has been linked to lung cancer, mesothelioma, ovarian cancer, and laryngeal cancer, which is why various health agencies have determined there’s no “safe” level of exposure to this natural mineral. Johnson & Johnson has…

A growing number of Amazon employees have signed onto an open letter issuing some dire warnings about the company’s sprint toward AI. The letter, signed by more than 1,000 workers and published this week, calls out Amazon for pushing its AI investments at the expense of the climate and its human workforce. The letter’s supporters come from a wide array of roles at the company, including many software engineers, and even employees focused on building AI systems. “We believe that the all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development will do staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth,” the letter’s authors wrote. “We’re the workers who de…

There’s an old myth that Inuit cultures have as many as a hundred words for snow. I remember learning about it in school, and there was just something wonderful about the idea that people’s perceptions can be so deeply rich and different. I guess that’s why, although it has been debunked many times, the story keeps getting repeated. There is also a lot of truth to the underlying concept. As anybody who has ever learned another language or lived in a different culture knows, people’s perceptions vary widely. In The WEIRDest People In The World, Harvard’s Joseph Henrich documents how important and interesting these differences can be. So if the Inuit snow myth hig…

Thanksgiving is behind us, which means the holiday shopping season has officially begun. And that means that both companies and third-party retailers will spend every day between now and Christmas morning trying to get you to spend your consumer dollars with them. As in years past, one of the most sought-after gifts will be the smartphone. According to an analysis last month by global marketing research firm NielsenIQ, 37% of shoppers buying tech this season have smartphones on their list. And when it comes to smartphone brands, Apple tops tech buyer preferences, with 54% of those surveyed looking to buy an iPhone. But as anyone who knows Apple well knows, the com…

Three years ago, if someone needed to fix a leaky faucet or understand inflation, they usually did one of three things: typed the question into Google, searched YouTube for a how-to video or shouted desperately at Alexa for help. Today, millions of people start with a different approach: They open ChatGPT and just ask. I’m a professor and director of research impact and AI strategy at Mississippi State University Libraries. As a scholar who studies information retrieval, I see that this shift of the tool people reach for first for finding information is at the heart of how ChatGPT has changed everyday technology use. Change in searching The biggest change i…