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The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday it will appeal the November ruling in favor of Meta in its antitrust case against the social media giant. The FTC said it continues to allege that, for more than a decade, Meta Platforms Inc. has “illegally maintained a monopoly” in social networking through anticompetitive conduct “by buying the significant competitive threats it identified in Instagram and WhatsApp.” Meta had prevailed over the existential challenge to its business that could have forced the tech giant to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp after a judge ruled that the company does not hold a monopoly in social networking. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issue…

The 68th annual Grammy Awards will take place Feb. 1 at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. This year marks a return to normalcy after the 2025 award show was altered to focus on supporting relief efforts following the devastating Los Angeles-area wildfires. “I think we will see some history-making moments,” Recording Academy CEO and President Harvey Mason jr. told The Associated Press. “With artists being nominated in categories they haven’t been previously nominated in, and a new crop of talent coming through the system this year — I think we’re going to see some really exciting results.” Here’s what you need to know about the 2026 Grammys, including how to str…

Star Trek—a franchise that famously promotes the philosophy “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”—is being accused of “becoming” too “woke”. Last week, White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller shared a post from the X account End Wokeness that featured a short clip from the premiere episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Tragic. But it’s not too late for @paramountplus to save the franchise. Step 1: Reconcile with @WilliamShatner and give him total creative control. https://t.co/HRMDcYeBnU — Stephen Miller (@StephenM) January 16, 2026 The clip showed cast members Tricia Black (playing Lt. Rork), Gina Yashere (Lura Thok) and Holl…

2026 is already shaping up to be a brutal year for GameStop (NYSE: GME) stores. This month, nearly 500 locations have been marked for closure. The shutterings come as GameStop’s CEO Ryan Cohen doubled down on the company and bought another half a million shares in GME stock. Here’s what you need to know. GameStop is closing hundreds more stores Over the past year, it seems that GameStop has had one primary focus: reducing costs by shuttering stores. At the beginning of 2025, the video game chain had around 2,325 locations in the United States. But by December, it had shuttered 590 of them. The same month, the company announced plans to close a “significant numb…

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. On January 16, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak—known to all as Woz—received the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award, an honor bestowed each year by the Tech Interactive, a science museum in San Jose, California. The ceremony and a conversation between Wozniak and comedian Drew Carey capped a gala event in which several organizations were named laureates for using technology to improve the world. Their creations include a brain-computer interface (BCI) that helps people with disabilities communicate, a forum that lets patients who have received BCI implants shape the technology’s best practices and eth…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Based on our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index, U.S. home prices are up just 0.1% year over year from December 2024 to December 2025. That marks a deceleration from the +2.6% growth rate a year earlier—though national price growth has recently stabilized, ticking slightly higher from a low of -0.01% in August 2025. In the first half of 2025, the number of major metro-area housing markets seeing year-over-year declines climbed. That count has since pretty much stopped ticking up. 31 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (10% of market…

We have been taught to segment people into neat design personas: young versus old, able-bodied versus disabled, patient versus caregiver. Those categories may help on a spreadsheet, but they rarely reflect real life. Ability is not a fixed identity. It is a state that shifts across hours, seasons, and decades. Most people are not “disabled” or “able bodied.” They are navigating a continuum. A parent carrying a toddler, a traveler pulling luggage, a cook with wet hands, someone recovering from surgery, a person with arthritis on a cold morning, an older adult managing fatigue at the end of the day. These are not edge cases. They are the mainstream experience of modern …

As researchers approach the front doors of Oxford’s new Life and Mind Building (LaMB), they’re greeted with a towering concrete facade, rendered with a rippling surface effect. What first appears to be a mere stylistic choice actually encodes something more special: Each of the concrete’s waves and dips is derived from the brain scan of an Oxford researcher. Designed by the architecture firm NBBJ, the LaMB is a massive, 269,000-square-foot space that brings together two departments: experimental psychology, which studies the human brain and how it operates; and biology, which encompasses both zoology (animal studies) and plant sciences. When it opened last October af…

Another day, another announcement of restaurant closures in the casual-dining space. Earlier this week, FAT Brands filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. As part of that process, the restaurant company is seeking to reject leases for a number of shuttered company-owned restaurants, including locations for Johnny Rockets, Smokey Bones, and Yalla Mediterranean, court filings show. FAT Brands owns 18 restaurant chains in total, including Fatburger, Round Table Pizza, Great American Cookies, and more. Most of its more than 2,200 locations worldwide are franchised. FAT Brands said in its bankruptcy filing that owns roughly 150 locations directly. “Our dynamic…

When Mikala Mahoney was laid off from her marketing job last summer, first she was shocked. Then the anxiety flooded in. “I realized that over the past few years in my career I had created a false sense of steadiness,” she tells Fast Company. Friends had regularly told Mahoney she was fortunate to have landed a good, stable job as a marketing coordinator at Paramount+. In a moment, that illusion was in pieces. Mahoney threw herself into the job hunt, quickly landing her next role. A few months later, she was laid off again. After losing her job twice in less than a year, this time she decided to bet on herself. Following the traditional path as a salar…

Since Brian Niccol took over as Starbucks Chairman and CEO in 2024, he’s promised a grand turnaround for the coffee giant by going back to its roots in lovingly designed, customer-centric stores. The messaging wasn’t enough to break six straight quarters of global sales decline. Global sales grew 1% at the end of the 2025 fiscal year, but they left the U.S. behind. Now, Starbucks’s Q1 2026 earnings have beat analyst estimates and seem to be cementing a turnaround, marking the first time same store sales have increased in the U.S. in eight quarters. Starbucks same store sales were up 4% in the U.S. and 5% globally during the first quarter, thanks largely to a 3% ri…

Virtues such as compassion, patience, and self-control may be beneficial not only for others but also for oneself, according to new research my team and I published in the Journal of Personality in December 2025. Philosophers from Aristotle to al-Fārābī, a 10th-century scholar in what is now Iraq, have argued that virtue is vital for well-being. Yet others, such as Thomas Hobbes and Friedrich Nietzsche, have argued the opposite: Virtue offers no benefit to oneself and is good only for others. This second theory has inspired a lot of research in contemporary psychology, which often sees morality and self-interest as fundamentally opposed. Many studies have found th…

Some blind and low-vision fans will have unprecedented access to the Super Bowl thanks to a tactile device that tracks the ball, vibrates on key plays and provides real-time audio. The NFL teamed up with OneCourt and Ticketmaster to pilot the game-enhancing experience 15 times during the regular-season during games hosted by the Seattle Seahawks, Jacksonville Jaguars, San Francisco 49ers, Atlanta Falcons and Minnesota Vikings. About 10 blind and low-vision fans will have an opportunity to use the same technology at the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, California, where Seattle will play the New England Patriots on Feb. 8. With hands on the device, they will feel the location …

The legendary $4.99 rotisserie chickens from Costco are under fire this week as a proposed class action lawsuit claims the big box retailer has been misleading customers. Two California shoppers noticed something that might seem obvious in retrospect: To sell an entire, slow-roasted chicken in a plastic bag, Costco added two preservatives. Problem is, the Issaquah, Washington-based company had promised on the packaging, in-store displays, and online that the chicken contained “no preservatives.” The lawsuit filed last week with the Southern District claims that Costco’s promise that its rotisserie chickens contain no preservatives signals to “reasonable consumers“…

A decade ago, when Claire Burgi moved to New York City, she decided to cut meat out of her diet. The 33-year-old actor and audiobook narrator, who lives in Queens, grew up in California, where she’d seen the effects of climate change firsthand. She knew that meat consumption was a major driver of greenhouse gas emissions and that vegetarianism was a way to help conserve resources and reduce pollution. “When I was young, it rained a lot,” she says. “Now, it rains much less. All the fires are astoundingly horrific.” The December 2017 Thomas wildfire burned more than 280,000 acres in and around Burgi’s hometown of Ventura, just north of Los Angeles. “I just didn’t w…

In the months after a 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the door for states to legalize sports betting within their borders, giddy lawmakers across the country couldn’t move quickly enough. No one wanted to miss out on the billions of dollars in tax revenue that the high court had suddenly placed within their reach—or, worse yet, to watch that easy money go to neighboring states whose leaders had the presence of mind to move first. Within a month of the decision, Delaware Gov. John Carney bet $10 on a Phillies game—the first legal single-game sports bet outside of Nevada. Many states were more concerned with getting sportsbooks online in time for a big-ticket event (…

Bitwarden is one of the more likable tech companies. It offers a great password manager for free, charges modestly for its paid version, and has mostly stayed in its lane with its focus on security products. So it’s disappointing that it isn’t being more transparent about the first price hike in its 10-year history. Bitwarden’s Premium version now costs $20 per year, up from $10 per year previously. But instead of announcing the change directly, the company buried the news in a blog post about new features, such as more attachment storage and alerts about weak passwords. Meanwhile, Bitwarden isn’t rushing to let customers know about the increase. They’ll only get …

Some high-profile acquisitions take out a rising competitor, such as Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed in 2009, some immediately expand a business’s suite of offerings, such as Salesforce’s 2020 purchase of Slack, and some may morph into an unrecognizable asset, like Amazon’s 1999 purchase of Alexa Internet, then a web traffic-tracking website. (The first Amazon Echo marking Alexa’s debut would launch in 2014.) But many lower-profile tech company acquisitions are made at least in part to gain access to specialized engineering talent. So-called “acquihires” haven’t traditionally raised many eyebrows. But the term’s definition has been expanding as the AI arms race …

When New York-based Autumn Myers, 31, was interviewing for her current digital marketing job, she pushed back the interview date so it didn’t fall during Mercury retrograde. “Those jobs have always ended up in more grief for me,” she tells Fast Company. Myers also looks up her colleagues’ zodiac signs to guide her interactions with them. For example: People born under fire signs often thrive in leadership roles, but they can struggle with impulsiveness. Earth signs tend to be more dependable, but they can be risk-averse. “It’s very Scorpio of me to be that calculated,” she admits. “But it’s needed sometimes.” Myers isn’t alone. According to a 2024 Harris Pol…

AI can do incredible things. So far, though, most of those things have been virtual. If you want a killer article for your bichon frise blog or an expertly crafted letter disputing a parking ticket you probably deserve, chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can deliver that. All those things are locked into the nebulous world of information, though. They’re helpful, but the products of today’s large language models (LLMs) and neural networks aren’t actually doing much of anything. AI’s silicon-bound status, however, is beginning to change. The tech is increasingly invading the real world. 2026 is the year that AI gets physical. And that shift has huge impl…

We live in a world of increasing change. The international order is shifting and political certainties are evaporating day by day. Technological shifts are changing how we experience the world and interact with others. And in the workplace, AI is poised to unleash what might be the most revolutionary set of changes humanity has experienced since the first hunter-gatherers settled down to grow crops and build cities. But while change is everywhere, we still find it hard to manage. The statistics around organizational change have always been brutal. For at least the last quarter century, corporate transformation efforts have failed at a remarkable rate: only three out o…

After more than two decades as a psychosexual therapist, I have learned to listen carefully for what people are not saying. When vulnerability is close to the surface, uncertainty shows up quickly. Am I doing this right? Do I belong here? What am I allowed to ask for, and what will it cost me if I do? At its core, psychosexual therapy is not really about sex. It is about how humans relate when the stakes are high, when power is present, and when much of what matters remains unspoken. It is about noticing how meaning is made in moments of vulnerability and choosing how to respond rather than react. What continues to surprise me is how familiar these same dynamics f…

Work has a way of waking up parts of us we thought we’d outgrown. You can move forward professionally, take on more visible roles, and be widely regarded as capable—and still find yourself unsettled by moments that seem, on the surface, fairly ordinary. A comment lingers longer than expected. A meeting leaves you tense for days. A role you worked hard to earn suddenly feels exposing rather than energizing. When that happens, it’s tempting to assume something is wrong now: that you’re underprepared, out of your depth, or simply not built for this level of responsibility. But often, what’s being stirred up has less to do with the present moment than with experiences…