What's on Your Mind?

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…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

For totally logical reasons, this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy is bucking the trend of a single host city and splitting its sporting events between two main locations, Milan and Cortina. Milan, the second most populous city in Italy, is the urban setting for indoor events like ice hockey and ice skating. Cortina, a ski resort town 250 miles away, provides most of the snow—and hill-based venues for quintessential Winter Olympic sports like alpine skiing and the bobsled. But the two separate locations posed a problem for one of the key parts of the Olympics: the opening ceremony. How could there be one grand show when the sporting action was split in half and separat…

Forget Donald The President. A new analysis suggests the U.S. public’s sharp lurch into polarization began in 2008, years before his first presidential campaign. Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab tracked shifts in Americans’ views across nearly four decades and found that divisions were broadly stable through the 1990s and early 2000s, before rising steadily from 2008 onward. Using more than 35,000 responses from the American National Election Studies between 1988 and 2024, they estimate that issue polarization has increased 64% since the late 1980s, with almost all of that change occurring after 2008. The research uses a machin…

It’s tax season. Americans will pay an average of $10,489 in personal taxes—about 14% of the average household’s total income. Most will do so because they think it is their civic duty. Many believe they are morally obliged to obey the law and pay their share. But as tax day approaches, many Americans will bemoan their tax bill and complain that it is unfair. So, how are we to know if paying taxes is the right thing to do? Perhaps philosophy has some clues? Reasons to obey the law Many philosophers agree that we should obey the law. In The Crito, for example, Plato describes Socrates’s choice after the Athenian jury sentenced him to death for impiety. Crito…

If you ask journalists and PR professionals what they fear most from AI, typically they’ll say variations of the same narrative: AI will make content so easy to create that their roles will have little to offer. Virtually any AI model today can write passable articles and pitches (and lots more), so it feels like the value of the human touch is questionable at best. It is true that AI is automating big parts of knowledge work, and exactly how that plays out in media and adjacent industries is still being determined. At the same time, AI is transforming information discovery. Billions of people now get information from AI experiences—either chatbots or synthetic summar…

You’ve worked together before. You trust each other. You know how the other person thinks under pressure. On paper, it’s the safest move. In many ways, it is. Shared history creates speed—faster decisions, candid conversations, less time decoding intent. When CEOs bring former colleagues into senior roles, baseline trust feels like rocket fuel. But familiarity also introduces a hidden risk that undermines executive teams far more often than leaders anticipate. What I see repeatedly in executive teams built on shared history is the quiet formation of inner circles. Leaders who “go way back” share shorthand, context, and trust earned elsewhere. Others, often equ…

The meme coin boom has made some Web3 bros incredibly rich. But a new study published on Cornell University’s arXiv suggests the ecosystem is better understood as a place of extreme churn, flimsy infrastructure, and a surprising number of scammy projects that disappear quickly. Researchers Alberto Maria Mongardini at the Technical University of Denmark and Alessandro Mei at the Sapienza University of Rome built MemeChain, an open-source, cross-chain dataset of 34,988 meme coins across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain (BSC), Solana, and Base. The system combines on-chain records with off-chain “legitimacy” signals such as token logos, social links, and archived website HTML. …