What's on Your Mind?

The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Ageism in Hollywood is a tale as old as time. It’s well-documented that older women have been less represented in mainstream media and female actors over 40 are less likely to get work compared to their male counterparts. The stigma surrounding aging women in entertainment has been so pervasive that many actresses have felt forced to hide the natural realities of aging. Actr…

Love Warby Parker glasses, but not the high price tags? This one’s for you. Target is partnering with Warby Parker to bring designer-quality, affordable eyewear to customers, opening five “shop-in-shops” in 2025, the retailers announced on Thursday. Warby Parker staff will run the shops within Target locations, which will offer glasses, sunglasses, contacts, eye exams, and vision screenings, consistent with the eyewear brand’s own stores. Prices will start at $95, including prescription lenses. The first five locations will open in the second half of 2025 at the following Target stores: Willowbrook, IL Bloomington, MN Brick, NJ Columbus, OH (Polari…

The deadly Los Angeles wildfires had just begun when Comic Relief U.S.’s new CEO took the helm at the charity that uses entertainment to combat poverty. Michele Ganeless noticed Hollywood’s response all the way from New York. She saw late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel turn his show’s backlot into a donation center. The Largo, an intimate nightclub featuring A-list comedians, hosted benefit performances. Inspired, Ganeless saw an opportunity to help out from the nation’s other cultural hub through “Stand-Up for LA.” “The goal was to help the New York comedy community give back,” Ganeless said of the March 3 comedy event including Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Ramy Youssef…

Prada opened its runway show during Milan Fashion Week on Thursday with its take on the little black dress, reflecting what Miuccia Prada called “a very black moment” in world affairs. “To work in this difficult moment is really tough,” Prada said backstage. Sidestepping overtly political discussion, she added: ”What we try to do are clothes that make sense for women today.” Liberating women Prada’s Fall-Winter 2025-26 collection is aimed to liberate women from strictly feminine forms. In that way the little black dress series and other runway looks were loosely constructed, not body-hugging. Co-creative director Raf Simons said liberation was in itself an …

Stripe on Thursday announced a tender offer for employees and shareholders that valued the company at $91.5 billion, nearly 41% higher than its valuation a year ago, potentially delaying the fintech firm’s ambitions of going public. The deal signals the strong recovery of the global venture capital sector, as central banks have started to cut interest rates amid subdued inflation and strong economic data. “Stripe was profitable in 2024, and we expect to be so in 2025 and beyond,” co-founders John Collison and Patrick Collison said in their annual letter published on Thursday. The payments processing company was valued at $65 billion in a deal last year, which …

On Valentine’s Day 2025, heavy rains started to fall in parts of rural Appalachia. Over the course of a few days, residents in eastern Kentucky watched as river levels rose and surpassed flood levels. Emergency teams conducted over 1,000 water rescues. Hundreds, if not thousands of people were displaced from homes, and entire business districts filled with mud. For some, it was the third time in just four years that their homes had flooded, and the process of disposing of destroyed furniture, cleaning out the muck and starting anew is beginning again. Historic floods wiped out businesses and homes in eastern Kentucky in February 2021, July 2022 and now February 20…

Some good news for all the tired parents out there: Having and raising kids may unexpectedly boost your brain and protect your mind from aging over the long run, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research from Rutgers Health and Yale University found parents developed higher brain-wide functional connectivity as they aged, especially in networks associated with movement and sensation, if they had more children. Those same networks typically show lower functional connectivity associated with greater age, meaning parenthood may protect against “functional brain aging.” The study findings apply to both moms…

The nightmare scenario of Atlantic Ocean currents collapsing, with weather running amok and putting Europe in a deep freeze, looks unlikely this century, a new study concludes. In recent years, studies have raised the alarm about the slowing and potential abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic end of the ocean conveyor belt system. It transports rising warm water north and sinking cool water south and is a key factor in global weather systems. A possible climate change -triggered shutdown of what’s called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC could play havoc with global rain patterns, dramatically cool Europe while warming the rest of the world and goose s…

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 here. Will native-AI operating systems run our computers in the near future? Samantha, the AI that Theodore falls in love with in the 2013 movie Her is actually an OS. That’s how he meets her: He buys a new OS called OS1 (“it’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness”) and “she” is its persona. Samantha becomes his intuitive and personalized companion to all his digital stuff, from email to video games. ChatGPT set off the generative AI boom in part because consumers (not just aca…

Vietnam is revising its energy plans to focus more on large solar farms and less on reliance on coal and natural gas. The fast-growing economy now aims to get 16% of its energy from the sun — more than triple its earlier target of just 5%. A draft of the new policy outline, likely to be finalized in coming weeks, scraps plans to build offshore wind turbines, instead building more onshore wind capacity, rooftop solar and energy storage. Offshore wind and new gas projects have proven expensive and difficult. Large solar farms are cheaper and easier to build. But Vietnam also is emphasizing expansion of large solar farms to meet soaring demand for power generation. It for…

Unwanted phone calls are out of control. Whether it’s a robocall trying to sell you something or spam calls from scammers trying to rip you off, it’s enough to make you want to stop answering your phone. So what can you do to stop them? The scourge of unwanted phone calls has been branded an epidemic by consumer groups, while the Federal Communications Commission says it’s the top consumer complaint. The calls are a nuisance to many ordinary people, some of whom have complained to The Associated Press. “I need help on getting spam calls to stop,” one reader said in an email. She’s getting up to 14 calls a day despite the countermeasures she’s employed. As the name impl…

An attorney for a Texas pipeline company said Wednesday at trial that he will prove various Greenpeace entities coordinated delays and disruptions of a controversial oil pipeline’s construction in North Dakota, and defamed the company to its lenders. Attorneys for the Greenpeace defendants told a jury there is no evidence to back up the claims by Dallas-based Energy Transfer, which seeks potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in damages from Greenpeace. The case is tied to protests in 2016 and 2017 of the Dakota Access Pipeline and its controversial Missouri River crossing upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation. The tribe has long opposed the pipel…

In this hectic modern world, it’s natural to feel like your ducks aren’t in a row, but every so often the planets seem to align. This week, Mercury is joining Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune for a seven-planet parade (although not all of them will be visible to the naked eye). Here’s what that all means and how best to see it. How exactly do planets align? According to NASA, the term planetary parade isn’t really a technical term in astronomy, but it’s cute and paints a fun picture. Additionally, planetary alignment has a few different meanings; it can refer to when the planets line up with each other or when they line up with the moon or stars. F…