What's on Your Mind?

Health tech gadgets displayed at the annual CES trade show make a lot of promises. A smart scale promoted a healthier lifestyle by scanning your feet to track your heart health, and an egg-shaped hormone tracker uses AI to help you figure out the best time to conceive. Tech and health experts, however, question the accuracy of products like these and warn of data privacy issues — especially as the federal government eases up on regulation. The Food and Drug Administration announced during the show in Las Vegas that it will relax regulations on “low-risk” general wellness products such as heart monitors and wheelchairs. It’s the latest step President Donald The President…

We live in a world of ambient hums, from air conditioners and distant traffic to the whir of our own thoughts. It’s no surprise many people reach for active noise-cancelling (ANC) headphones to escape it all. Originally designed for planes and offices, ANC devices, including earbuds, have become a popular bedtime tool for chasing total quiet. But the brain doesn’t actually want silence to sleep, and forcing it can backfire. The best way to fall and stay asleep is to quiet the mind, not just what enters your ears. We call this creating “cognitive silence,” and ANC often gets in the way. Even during sleep, the brain keeps an ear out for danger. It’s an evolutionary surv…

Inside Girl Scouts’ headquarters in New York City and its two licensed bakeries, a team of trend forecasters, marketers, and food scientists spend years cooking up its next iconic cookie. Now, fans of the annual cookie sale are about to get a taste of what the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) team has been baking behind closed doors. The newest addition to the cookie lineup are Exploremores, a rocky road ice cream-inspired sandwich cookie with chocolate shortbread exteriors and chocolate, marshmallow, and toasted almond-flavored cream centers. For Girl Scout cookie enjoyers, a fresh cookie is always a welcome surprise. But, according to Wendy Lou, GSUSA’s chief rev…

Once the ball starts rolling in the Spanish league, the game is on for some 50 analysts who start looking for signs of online piracy. They scan websites, social media posts, IPTV platforms and streaming portals in search of illegal broadcasts of La Liga matches. The trained analysts identify the pirated content and take the steps needed to take them off air, including notifying Internet intermediaries like Cloudflare, the U.S.-based company whose content-delivery network is believed to manage nearly 20% of the Internet traffic worldwide. And that’s when the real fight begins for the Spanish league. La Liga, one of the most active European leagues fighting piracy and a…

It’s a dream come true for investors with heavy defense stock holdings. On Thursday, defense stocks surged after President The President called for a massive $1.5 trillion defense budget next year. The figure was floated in a Truth Social post on Wednesday. That would be an increase of roughly 50% over the 2026 budget of $901 billion. “I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars. This will allow us to build the “Dream Military” that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will ke…

If you had a severe case of the Sunday Scaries last weekend, you are not alone. It’s a sentiment many have been sharing online. Ready or not, with it comes an influx of unread emails, meeting invites, and responsibilities—smugly pushed to the New Year in the last weeks of December—now coming back to haunt us all. Indeed, the first Monday of the year is the Monday-est Monday of all. “Oh god,” one TikTok user posted on Monday 6th. “Everyone is circling back.” “Worst aesthetic ever: Back to work in the first week of jan,” another wrote, riffing on TikTok’s “rare aesthetic” trend. Some have used the lyrics to The Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable No…

American Airlines will begin offering free, high-speed Wi-Fi on flights beginning this month. The airline made the announcement this week in a press release, explaining that the service will extend to around two million flights in 2026. However, not all fliers will receive the perk. The new service will be sponsored by wireless provider AT&T. “Free high-speed Wi-Fi isn’t just a perk—it’s essential for today’s travelers,” said Heather Garboden, chief customer officer at American Airlines, in the release. The rollout won’t kick off all at once, the announcement explained, but instead will happen in phases. This month, the service will be available only on…

The dreaded performance review draws the ire of employees and managers alike. Workers fret that reviews fail to capture the full scope of their work, or that they are an unfair assessment of their performance. For managers, reviews can be a time-consuming nuisance and involve the challenging task of delivering tough feedback. But a new study from Cornell University finds that the structure of the performance review can have a huge impact on how workers feel about them. Over the last decade, a number of companies have revamped their performance reviews, seemingly to address the long-standing pain points. The likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have moved aw…

If you visit the Hermès website in search of a scarf or a handbag, you’ll be greeted by a collection of whimsical sea creatures swimming across the screen. To navigate to the watch section, you’ll click on an image of a watch flanked by an eel. To locate shoes, you’ll click on a loafer with a pelican sitting inside it as if it were riding a boat. These sea horses and fish and eels and star fish are intriguing to the eye. While digitally-rendered images are hyper smooth, symmetrical, and flawless, these pictures bear all the imperfections of a hand-drawn illustration. We see the texture of the paper grain in the background, a slight irregularity in the lines, uneve…

Brands love to insert themselves into cultural conversations or piggyback on buzzy current events, a strategy sometimes called newsjacking. But it can happen without seeking, or even wanting, the attention. The borderline absurd virality of a Nike tracksuit evidently worn by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as he was taken into the custody of American captors is the most high-profile recent example—but it definitely won’t be the last. This form of what we could call involuntary product placement can be a conundrum for brands, which prefer to be associated with upbeat or positive events, not dictators or controversial geopolitics. And that’s been made even more cha…

A new insult for artificial intelligence just dropped thanks to Microsoft’s CEO. If you use Microsoft products, it’s near impossible to avoid AI now. The company is pushing AI agents deep into Windows, with every app, service, and product Microsoft has on the market now including some kind of AI integration, without the option to opt out. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently shared a blog post to LinkedIn titled “Looking Ahead to 2026” offering an insight into the company’s focus for the new year. Spoiler alert: it’s AI. Nadella wrote that he wants users to stop thinking of AI as “slop” and start thinking of it as “bicycles for the mind.” Many took the post…

Luigi Mangione is due in federal court Friday for a pivotal hearing in his fight to bar the government from seeking the death penalty against him in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione’s lawyers contend that authorities prejudiced his case by turning his December 2024 arrest into a “Marvel movie” spectacle and by publicly declaring their desire to see him executed even before he was formally indicted. If that doesn’t work, they argue, the charge that has enabled the government to seek the death penalty — murder by firearm — should be thrown out because it is legally flawed. Federal prosecutors say Mangione’s lawyers are wrong, countering that t…

A viral crowd-funding campaign that has raised over $1.4 million and counting for Renee Good has been verified authentic, a spokesperson for GoFundMe told Fast Company. On Wednesday, January 7, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot Good in Minneapolis. The 37-year-old woman was killed while turning her vehicle away from the officer—as multiple videos clearly show, despite the federal government’s claim to the contrary. Immediately in the wake of Good’s death, a GoFundMe campaign for her wife, Becca, and six-year-old son appeared online and far surpassed its $50,000 goal with hundreds of thousands of donations. (Good also had two older ch…

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is preventing most users from generating or editing any images after a global backlash that erupted after it started spewing sexualized deepfakes of people. The chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has in the past few weeks been granting a wave of what researchers say are malicious user requests to modify images, including putting women in bikinis or in sexually explicit positions. Researchers have warned that in a few cases, some images appeared to depict children. Governments around the world have condemned the platform and opened investigations into the platform. On Friday, Grok was responding to image alteri…

Grok’s digital undressing scandal is horrifying. In recent days, countless women, including the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, have found AI-generated and nonconsensual sexual images of themselves propagating across the web. According to one analysis, Grok was, at least as of early January, generating thousands of sexually suggestive, or undressed, images of people per hour. (Elon Musk now says that image generation will only be available to paid users.) Investigators from several countries have launched inquiries to investigate whether xAI had run afoul of the law, including rules about pornographic deepfakes and child sexual abuse material. Of course, none of t…

Two years ago, countries around the world set a goal of “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” The plan included tripling renewable energy capacity and doubling energy efficiency gains by 2030—important steps for slowing climate change since the energy sector makes up about 75% of the global carbon dioxide emissions that are heating up the planet. The world is making progress: More than 90% of new power capacity added in 2024 came from renewable energy sources, and 2025 saw similar growth. However, fossil fuel production is also still expanding. And the United States, the world’s leading producer of both o…

Some words are far too mild for the violence of what they describe. Migraine is one of them. For many people, it evokes a simple headache—an inconvenience solved with an aspirin (or Tylenol) and a glass of water. For those who’ve never experienced it, migraine is almost a cliché: a lame excuse to stay in bed or avoid a meeting. But for millions of people—and I’m one of them—migraine is anything but benign. It is a debilitating neurological disease that can force life to grind to a halt for days at a time. It is an invisible disability that millions are expected to simply “push through.” The Mild Version Everyone Sees—and the Severe One No One Understands I ofte…

As President The President takes even more steps to pull back on climate action, Bill Gates is emphasizing how governmental policies are crucial to addressing climate change. In his annual year-ahead letter, the billionaire Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist warns that the market alone is not enough to change our climate reality. “Without a large global carbon tax (which is, unfortunately, politically unachievable), market forces do not properly incentivize the creation of technologies to reduce climate-related emissions,” Gates writes. To stop global temperatures from increasing, we need to replace all emissions-emitting activities with affordable altern…

Sluggish December hiring concluded a year of weak employment gains that have frustrated job seekers even though layoffs and unemployment remained low. Employers added just 50,000 jobs last month, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.4%, its first decline since June, from 4.5% in November, a figure also revised lower. The data suggests a reluctance by businesses to add workers even as economic growth has picked up. Many companies hired aggressively after the pandemic and no longer need to fill more jobs. Others have held back due to widespread uncertainty caused…

The beginning of a new year ushers in an ominous day in the NFL: Black Monday, the day when coaches are (typically) most at risk of losing their jobs. Black Monday happens the day after the regular season ends, a time when an especially harsh backward review is cast over the wins, losses, and total misses. The casualty list includes Raheem Morris, who lost his job with the Atlanta Falcons on January 4; Kevin Stefanski, Pete Carroll, and Jonathan Gannon (Arizona Cardinals), who were each fired on Black Friday by the Cleveland Browns, Las Vegas Raiders, and Arizona Cardinals, respectively; John Harbaugh, who was fired by the Baltimore Ravens on January 6; and Mike McDa…

Handmade punch cards are currently trending on TikTok as a cute, visual way to track 2026 goals. Modeled after the punch cards that will secure you a free coffee or sandwich after showing loyalty to one cafe or another, users instead punch, stamp or check off a square every time they make progress on their goals, whether that’s staying consistent at the gym, completing a no-spend weekend or paying down debt. “Today’s New Year’s Eve, and I made these little punchcards this morning of goals I have for myself starting this new year,” TikTok user @camiunderthesea said in a video showing off her deck of cards. “The first one is to read five books. I’ve been trying to…

Detective Mike McCaffrey laughs when I ask if they busted the door down. Maybe I’ve seen too many movies. Normally, he says, they would. But in this instance, it’s not the ticket scam perpetrator’s residence. It’s his mother’s. So, in this high-rise apartment building on 96th Street in Manhattan, he simply knocks. The mother answers, kindly, oblivious to why the NYPD is at her door on this Tuesday morning. Inside, tucked in a small living room nook, is the man they’ve come for—the son, 28-year-old Nikhil Mahtani—surrounded by cellphones and laptops, tangled in charging cables. Months earlier, the NFL had tipped off law enforcement about Craigslist ads selling tick…

We’ve had branded entertainment since Procter & Gamble invented soap operas back in the 1930s. But today, brands are forced to diversify the ways in which they gain and hold our attention. It’s no longer as viable or effective to depend on traditional paid media tools. Innovative marketers are increasingly investing in content and experiences that attract and engage audiences rather than interrupt and annoy them. And the shift is driving results. Brands of all stripes talk about “brand entertainment,” but it’s the exceptions that truly create actual entertainment. I’ve spent a lot of time this past year writing and talking on the Brand New World podcast abou…

However uncertain the outlook is for the American auto industry in the age of tariffs, growing competition from China, and the rise of EV upstarts, the view inside the new boardroom at General Motors is stylishly optimistic. Part of the automaker’s new corporate headquarters that’s opening January 12, the boardroom is a large and elegant space with a massive marble table surrounded by mainstay elements of mid-century modern design. Fluted wood wall treatments, subtle curves, geometric overhead lighting, minimalist bench seating, and sweeping views of a changing downtown Detroit combine to create a physical manifestation of how GM sees itself evolving through the 21st …

There are few things more evocative of the free American spirit and the nation’s wide-open spaces than the image of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle zooming down a stretch of empty highway. But while taking one of the legendary hogs for a spin may still be liberating for riders, the company’s independent dealership owners are feeling an increasingly tight financial and business squeeze. A rash of reports in recent weeks have sounded alarms about the troubles Harley dealers face, and the rising number of dealerships closing shop as a result. While Harley-Davidson still counts more than 650 of those locations in operation across the U.S., specialist automotive media warn th…