What's on Your Mind?

There’s a generational shift happening in workplaces that goes far deeper than debates about RTO or perks and snacks. Gen Z—the cohort that learned to communicate through stories, stickers, and swipe culture—is fundamentally reimagining how work gets done. After analyzing data from 2,475 professionals across our latest research, I’m convinced they’re crafting the future of work. Gen Z intuitively understands something many organizations are still learning. As we live in a world drowning in information, clarity is a competitive advantage. And increasingly, that clarity is offered visually. The Visual-First Expectation Sound familiar? Workplace tools mirror socia…

Soccer fans have accused FIFA of a “monumental betrayal” after latest prices for World Cup tickets began to circulate on Thursday. The governing body allocates 8% of tickets to national associations for games involving their team to sell to the most loyal fans. And a list published by the German soccer federation revealed prices ranged from $180-$700 for varying group stage games. The lowest price for the final was $4,185 and the highest was $8,680. Those group-stage prices are very different from FIFA’s claims of $60 tickets being available, while the target from United States soccer officials when bidding for the tournament seven years ago was to offer hundreds of th…

Stretch fabrics are notoriously hard to process. When your old leggings wear out, they will probably end up in a landfill—even if you try to drop them off for recycling. But a Manhattan startup has developed a new material that could finally make this corner of the apparel industry circular. “There’s a reason why billions of pounds of textiles ends up in landfills,” says Gangadhar Jogikalmath, cofounder and chief technology officer of the startup, called Return to Vendor. “When we dial it down to the microscopic scale, it’s because everything that we wear has blends of yarn put together to create this apparel— nylon blended with spandex, wool with nylon, cotton, polye…

Tom Freston could easily fill a book with stories from the formative days of MTV and his celebrity encounters — Bono would merit a few chapters on his own. Ultimately, though, Freston feels that his life has a more valuable lesson to offer. His memoir, “Unplugged,” shows by example that trying to follow a straight line to success is not the only path. Freston, 80, was at MTV from the start and became its leader, along with sister networks Comedy Central, VH1, and Nickelodeon, at their greatest periods of success. He rose to become CEO of parent corporation Viacom before chairman Sumner Redstone’s impatience led to his ouster in 2006. Since then, Freston has la…

One of Michael’s friends told him recently, “I’m not burned out; I’m just feeling empty.” She shows up, meets deadlines, and manages to smile in meetings. But her work feels weightless and disconnected from purpose. She’s not alone. Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 21% of employees worldwide are engaged, and just one in three say they’re thriving. That’s not a blip—it’s a warning signal for leaders and cultures. When emptiness shows up at work, our reflex is to pathologize: “Is this burnout? Do I need a diagnosis?” Sometimes, yes—clinical conditions require clinical care. However, many of today’s struggles are fundamentally philosophi…

AI has now arrived at the Treasury Department. Sam Corcos, a former startup leader and Department of Government Efficiency affiliate now serving as chief information officer at the Treasury Department, appears to have approved spending at least $1.5 million on up to 3,000 licenses for ChatGPT, the OpenAI platform, federal spending records show. The agency has obligations to spend $1.5 million on the services, and has already outlaid more than $500,000 for the technology, those records show. Fast Company obtained a user agreement showing that Treasury is allowing employees to use ChatGPT for “authorized” mission purposes. Such purposes include using the technolog…

It’s rare that your esoteric, impossible-to-pronounce, decade-long research project becomes a technology so crucial to national security that the President of the United States calls it out from the White House. But that’s exactly what happened to Dr. Eric Wengrowski, the CEO of Steg AI. Wengrowski spent nearly a decade of his life advancing steganography, a deeply-technical method for tracking images as they travel through the machinery of the modern Internet, as the focus of his PHD at Rutgers University. After earning his degree, Wengrowki and a team of co-founders rolled his tech into a small startup. For several years, the company grew, but mostly toi…

Welcome to exhausted America 2025: Most adults are more than a little fine with doling out cash as gifts, and many plan to be asleep before midnight on New Year’s Eve, according to a new AP-NORC poll. About 6 in 10 Americans say cash or gift cards are “very” acceptable as holiday presents, but they’re much less likely to say that about a gift that was purchased secondhand or re-gifted, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. “Cash is OK for the grandkids I guess,” said Nancy Wyant, 73, in rural central Iowa. “But I’m a gift giver.” Come New Year’s Eve, she’ll be fast asleep before 2026 rolls around. “At our ag…

I am an introverted person who feels shy at events. Early in my career, I found conferences to be so overwhelming that I’d sometimes just hide in the bathroom, go into an anxious spiral of fear and guilt, and then try to convince myself to get out and talk to at least one person. Watching how other people seemed to enjoy these events and easily talk to everyone made me think something was wrong with me. The truth is that 36% of young people have anxiety. But knowing that didn’t make networking any easier. However, networking is an important skill, and connections help drive your career and bring new opportunities. Research shows that people who network often tend to h…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, I’m focusing on Big AI’s biggest sales pitch—the quest for AGI—and the idea that the industry should focus on more modest and achievable tasks for AI. I also look at Databricks’s new $4 billion-plus funding raise, and at Google’s new Gemini 3 Flash model. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on…

British oil giant BP just announced a new CEO, marking its fourth chief executive shake-up in the last six years alone. The company named Meg O’Neill, who previously led Australia’s top oil and gas company Woodside Energy for the role. O’Neill will become the first woman to hold the top executive spot at one of the world’s biggest oil companies. She said that she looks forward to working to “accelerate performance” at BP and plans to prioritize shareholder growth and reestablishing BP—now a possible takeover target—as a market leader in the oil and gas industry. O’Neill will take over from Murray Auchincloss, a longtime BP employee who was first appointed as inte…

The flap of a butterfly’s wings in South America can famously lead to a tornado in the Caribbean. The so-called butterfly effect—or “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” as it is more technically known—is of profound relevance for organizations seeking to deploy AI solutions. As systems become more and more interconnected by AI capabilities that sit across and reach into an increasing number of critical functions, the risk of cascade failures—localized glitches that ripple outward into organization-wide disruptions—grows substantially. It is natural to focus AI risk management efforts on individual systems where distinct risks are easy to identify. A senior ex…

You can now read every article that has ever appeared in The New Yorker—from as early as February 1925—with the click of a button. For the publication’s centennial anniversary, its editorial team has spent months painstakingly scanning, digitizing, and organizing every single issue it’s ever published, or more than half a million individual pages. Each issue is artfully arranged in a chronological display under a purpose-built archive section of the website; but the content has also been incorporated into The New Yorker’s search algorithm so that readers can come across it organically. As the future of magazine journalism remains uncertain, a look back through thi…

With the last weekend before Christmas upon us, the holiday travel period has begun. This year, the American Automobile Association (AAA) says a record number of Americans will be making journeys—122.4 million of them in total. While millions of those journeys will be made by plane or other forms of public transportation, the overwhelming majority—109.5 million—will be made by car. If you’re one of those making your Christmas trip by car, here are the best and worst times to hit the road over the holiday travel period, which AAA defines as running from December 20 to January 1. Best times to hit the roads The 2025 holiday period spans 13 days this year, ru…

UnitedHealth Group has laid off dozens of remote employees in healthcare technology and services marketing from its Optum unit, who were given two weeks notice in November, sources told Health Payer Specialist. Fast Company has reached out to UnitedHealth for confirmation. Those employees were based in “multiple states on the East coast and in the Midwest,” according to that report, and are among UnitedHealth’s roughly 400,000 employees across the U.S. (It is the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest healthcare insurer.) The healthcare giant is just the latest company in a string of industries to announce layoffs, which have hit almost ever…

Gen Zers, who were practically born with smartphones and iPads in their hands, have grown up completely immersed in the information highway. Therefore, it should come as no big surprise that those born as digital natives—deeply connected to culture, trends, politics, and business—have different ideas about what their contributions to the world should look like. They deeply value work-life balance and they need to feel like the work they do has meaning. Globally, they are the generation most concerned about issues like corruption and inequality. They’re striving to create change—and they’re committed. Still, Gen Zers often get called out for being entitled, lazy,…

Fintech firm Mercury recently dropped some data that made me smile. It ranked the top five coffee shops powering founders in San Francisco based on actual transaction data: Sightglass, CoffeeShop, Equator, Saint Frank, Ritual. I’ve built Octolane with my cofounder, Rafi, from every single one of them. But here’s what the data doesn’t show: the $500,000 investment term sheet I negotiated over a cortado at Cafe Réveille. The $800,000 deal I closed while sitting next to a grad student cramming for finals. The three customers who became friends, then advocates, then our biggest champions, all because we met first over coffee, not Zoom. When I was in high school, I cle…

Below, Nicholas Thompson shares five key insights from his new book, The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports. Thompson is CEO of The Atlantic. In his time as CEO, the company has seen record subscriber growth. Before this role, he was editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. He is also a former contributor for CBS News and has previously served as editor. As a runner, he set the American record for men ages 45-plus in the 50K race. What’s the big idea? Running has the capacity to show us what we’re made of and help us grow beyond our limits—both as we race ahead on the track and in life. Struggle, aging, and even trauma can become engines of t…

In the world of the long-running kids show Cyberchase, Motherboard, a sort of digital queen and literal technocrat, is the beneficent but impaired leader of all of cyberspace. She is—we are to understand—a legitimate ruler, yet faces constant attacks from the odious Hacker, a green-skinned android who dresses like a vampire and whose only goal is to sow chaos and eventually take control of Motherboard’s realm, which we might describe as something akin to a metaverse, or ever-expanding digital world. Luckily, a trio of human kids named Inez, Mattie, and Jackie—a squad—visit cyberspace frequently, where they embark on missions to help protect the ever-embattled Motherbo…

Lego has a nostalgia problem. I do, too. Like Hollywood and its eternal cycle of remakes, the Danish company has found a bottomless treasure pot full of GenX and Gen Z people willing to burn their credit cards to turn their golden memories into bricks. By my count, 2025 alone brought a record-setting 16 sets related to old Lego properties and external IPs, shattering 2023’s previous peak of 9 sets. Whether that’s considered a problem or not depends on who you ask. You can argue that we (the people who keep buying these sets) are all the ones who have the problem. The Danish are just milking it. Building Lego soothes kids and adults alike but, when you are putting …

In a recent meeting with a large retailer, my contact shared that each buyer on her team receives over 100 emails daily referencing data on a variety of topics, from out-of-stock issues and inaccurate pricing to recommendations for driving e-commerce. On the supplier side, the situation is similar: delivering Monday morning reporting to retailers, preparing for line reviews, monitoring out-of-stocks, and pushing new promotions. Emails and Excel are still the primary drivers of the $5 trillion retail industry, in the U.S. alone. The opportunity for error in complex retail supply chains is immense. If demand forecasting and inventory management across thousands of store…

The biggest brands pour creativity into being instantly recognizable. A logo you can spot at 20 paces. A color palette that becomes cultural shorthand (think Oreo blue or Coca-Cola red). That visual obsession runs through every corner of marketing. TV, social, out-of-home, retail, and packaging. Millions go into crafting imagery, with every frame revised until it perfectly reinforces the brand. So, of course visuals matter—they always will matter. But the best performing brands aren’t blinded by them. They understand that a cohesive sonic identity that spans campaigns and touchpoints ensures your brand is remembered long after someone closes their phone or wal…

Apple and Google would like to see your identification, please. With the former’s “Digital ID” launch last week, both companies now let you scan a digital version of your passport at more than 250 Transportation Security Administration checkpoints, using an iPhone or Android phone. A growing number of U.S. states already support digital driver’s licenses for the same purpose. But the push for these digital IDs isn’t merely about airport security (which still requires you to carry a physical license or passport anyway). It’s really part of a broader effort to verify who you are online, one that can finally start in earnest with passport-based digital IDs that are a…