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If you’re in the market for a car, you might be one of a growing number of people considering a used EV. In the past month alone, Cars.com says searches for used EVs jumped 25.5%, pointing to how quickly interest is shifting. Gas prices likely won’t drop much anytime soon, even if the Strait of Hormuz can stay open. And with hundreds of thousands of used EVs coming off lease this year, consumers have affordable options, even though the federal tax credit went away last year. You get more for your money than with used gas cars: for the same price as a five-year-old Toyota Camry or RAV4, you can get a newer Tesla Model 3 or Volkswagen ID4 with tens of thousands of fewer…

Ever find yourself behind the wheel watching all the other cars go by and think to yourself, “Man, I’m a much better driver than all these clowns on the road?” It’s a funny thing about this question. Pretty much everyone reading this is likely to say “yes.” It seems we all think we’re better drivers than the next guy. In a landmark 1981 study, psychologist Ola Svenson asked people in the U.S. and Sweden to rate their driving skills compared to the average person. The results? Around 80–93% rated themselves “above” average—statistically impossible—with an eye-popping 93% in the American sample doing so. Psychologists call this “illusory superiority,” the human …

For decades, the millions of American women who dye their hair had two options: They could spend three hours and upwards of $300 in a salon or grab a $10 box off the drugstore shelf, squint at the ingredient list, and hope for the best. There was no middle ground. Amy Errett thought that was absurd. “There was no prestige product that a woman could buy for at-home use,” the founder and CEO of hair color startup Madison Reed tells me. “Just because you color at home does not mean you can’t afford good color. That was, in my opinion, a very elitist viewpoint.” Errett established Madison Reed in 2013, right as the direct-to-consumer wave was cresting. But while brand…

With most of New York City surrounded by water, climate change poses a grave threat to its infrastructure, as devastating storm surges and coastal flooding have shown. Inland blocks are in danger, too. Researchers at the New York Botanical Garden have created a new interactive map of the city showing the areas most at risk of flooding. They’re calling them “Blue Zones,” places where water is, used to be, or will be due to climate change. More than one-fifth of the city is in a Blue Zone, according to a paper published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. “Everybody was startled, including us,” Eric Sanderson, vice president of urban conservation at t…

Twenty years ago, honeybees first started to disappear in mysteriously large numbers. Stories in the media were everywhere, as were solutions to try to save the bees. But today, you hear less about the crisis. Has it simply been drowned out by the constant hum of breaking world news, or is the bee crisis over? There are some people who argue that we have “saved” the bees, while others say honeybees never needed saving in the first place. In truth, the problem hasn’t gone away. “Our losses have been getting higher and higher over the last few years,” says Zac Browning, a fourth-generation beekeeper from North Dakota. This winter, he lost more than half of his bees…

Nobody wants to sound weak. We all have a desire to be heard and taken seriously when we speak in meetings and other situations. But so many people pack their prose with words that discourage people from taking them seriously. Avoid the following words if you want to come across as a strong, convincing speaker. 1) JUST This word is an attention killer! Yet it is used all the time by speakers. For example “I just want to say,” or “It’s just a thought,” or “Let me just add that….” In all these instances the word “just” reduces the speaker by suggesting that what follows is of little value. A throwaway gift to the audience. By removing “just” from your spe…

Issa Rae’s next project is coming to you vertically—and on TikTok. Hoorae Media, the star’s media production company, and TikTok announced on Wednesday a partnership to bring free exclusive micro-series content to TikTok and its PineDrama app. The collaboration launches later this April starting with Screen Time, produced by Hoorae Digital. This will be Hoorae’s first micro-drama series, with the media company co-developing a slate of additional micro-series with TikTok as part of the deal. The partnership marks Rae’s return to her digital roots, she said at TheWrap’s Creator x Hollywood Summit on Wednesday. Her first digital series, “The MisAdventures of …

Economists and academics are still not clear on how, exactly, AI will change the jobs that are most vulnerable to its advances. Some jobs may disappear altogether, while others will simply evolve and be augmented by AI. But new research from Goldman Sachs this week indicates that the workers whose jobs are hit hardest by AI will find it particularly difficult to secure a new job—and suffer real economic setbacks in the aftermath. Drawing on four decades of federal data—which captured the lives of over 20,000 Americans from the 1950s to 1980s—the report found that the workers who were most impacted by technological shifts struggled to recover and took a month lon…

Waymo and Waze are teaming up to prevent people from driving into potholes. On Thursday, the companies announced a joint pilot program that will take pothole data collected by Waymo’s robotaxis and display it on Waze for Cities. The robotaxis already have cameras, radar, and other sensors that can be used, among other things, to note potholes. Waze and Waymo are both owned by Google parent Alphabet. The tool is an additional means of spotting potholes on Waze. Users have long been able to report any potholes they see through the Waze app. “This pilot program with Waymo adds another source of data to that effort, giving cities a clearer picture of road co…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to rapidly increase as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings beyond seasonality could suggest a market that is heating up. Since the national Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out in 2022, the national power dynamic has slowly been shifting directionally from sellers to buyers. Of course, across the country that s…

In the 55 years since Walt Disney World first opened its gates, the theme park has undergone plenty of changes—and in many ways, it’s stayed the same. Some attractions from the park’s opening day in 1971 and the decade that followed have cemented themselves as indisputable classics, like Jungle Cruise and The Haunted Mansion (both of which are iconic enough to warrant their own film adaptations). One such ride is Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, which first opened in the Magic Kingdom’s Frontierland area in 1980. The mine train roller coaster went largely unchanged for more than 40 years, before the park announced that it would close in January 2025 for a year-long reno…

Every April, the internet fills up with green logos, limited-edition packaging, and pledges that will be quietly retired by May. We’ve gotten good at calling that out. Greenwashing is understood, documented, and increasingly prosecuted. What we talk about less is the other problem: the brands that are actually doing the work, but have stopped saying so. Both are failures. Just different kinds. Here’s what’s actually happening. The share of S&P 100 companies using “ESG” in their sustainability report titles dropped from 40% in 2023 to just 6% in 2025. But the work hasn’t stopped. According to a 2025 EcoVadis study, 87% of U.S. companies have actually increased …

Remember the iPod? It’s making a quiet comeback. Four years after Apple killed off its digital music player, secondhand sales are surging. It’s fueled in part by young people interested not just in its retro looks but a desire to listen to music in a focused way and with playlists not determined by algorithms. “There’s a growing trend, particularly amongst younger users, to mitigate the ease with which they can be distracted by smartphones, often driven by mental health and well-being concerns,” said Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight. “Having a dedicated music device, such as an iPod, is a good way to reduce your dependence on a smartphone and avoid being dra…

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 via email here. Did Anthropic just soft-launch the scariest AI model yet? On Tuesday Anthropic announced that it would deploy its newest and most powerful AI model, Claude Mythos Preview, to a new industry initiative (Project Glasswing) meant to safeguard critical software infrastructure against cyberattacks. That sounded good, but it obscured the real news somewhat—that one of the big three AI labs has now developed a model that could, in the wrong hands, be a super-dangerous cyberweapon. I…

Over four decades, I have had the opportunity to consult with almost all of the major companies in the PC, consumer electronics, and telecommunications industries. In 1991, when the PC industry was barely a decade old, Acer’s founder Stan Shih invited me to tour the company’s new PC factory in Taiwan. What I saw wasn’t just a factory–it was the foundation of a new world order in technology manufacturing. Over the years, I’ve gained a deeper understanding of Taiwan’s crucial role in the global technology ecosystem. Semiconductor leaders like TSMC, along with manufacturing powerhouses such as Compal, Foxconn, Quanta, Pegatron, and Wistron, have built an ecosystem unmat…

When Winter storm Fern tore across the country in late January, more than a million Americans lost power. In Nashville, the utility recorded its highest outage total in history. In Louisiana, some families waited nearly two weeks for the lights to come back on. Officials issued emergency orders in several states as the storm exposed the fragility of our centralized energy system. And yet, during that same storm, a different story was quietly playing out. Households with the ability to generate and store their own power with home solar and storage kept the lights on, ran their heat, and charged their devices. They were independent of a grid that was buckling under the …

Tax day is right around the corner, but for some, the true deadline to complete returns is nearly a week earlier. That’s because if you’re planning to mail your tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) instead of filing them electronically, they’ll need to be postmarked — not mailed — by April 15. Due to recent changes at The United States Postal Service (USPS) that impact transportation operations, mail may not arrive at originating processing facilities on the day it is mailed, the organization said in a January announcement. “This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the cust…

For years, AI companies gave users unfettered access to the candy store, encouraging them to think of tokens, the chunks of text AI reads and writes, as effectively infinite. Tokens were bundled into subscriptions, hidden behind generous caps, or priced low enough that people stopped counting them. But as the cost of serving models eats into revenue, and as chip shortages, helium disruption, and data center bottlenecks constrain how much compute can come online, the big model makers are starting to ration access more aggressively. All-you-can-eat AI is disappearing. Now companies are in a contest to see who can keep subsidising demand the longest, and whether the last…

One of our favorite meme stocks is up more than 9%, but this time it’s for legit business reasons. BlackBerry Limited (NYSE: BB) saw its shares sharply rise Thursday morning following the release of its 2026 fourth-quarter and fiscal year results. The stock has previously been volatile due to BlackBerry’s place in the meme stock craze a few years ago. The Canadian company, once a leader in the mobile phone industry, reported $156 million in revenue for quarter four, a 10% increase year-over-year (YOY). Its adjusted net income also rose by a whopping 92% YOY. On a year-long scale, BlackBerry saw its revenue reach $549.1 million, a 3% jump YOY. “We are no …

April is off to a bruising start for people working in Hollywood. Since the month began, two major studios and one of Hollywood’s most high-profile production companies have announced layoffs totaling more than 1,000 jobs combined. The job cuts come at a time of great volatility in the movie and television industry, which is facing disruption from AI while also experiencing a rapidly changing business landscape and consolidation. Here’s what you need to know. Bad Robot to cut jobs as it leaves L.A. for New York The April layoffs began with an unexpected announcement from one of Hollywood’s most successful and high-profile production companies. On April 2, Vari…