What's on Your Mind?

At a factory in Austin, a startup recently finished its first prototype: a row house it plans to replicate in cities nationwide to help with the housing shortage. Row houses—narrow, multistory homes that share walls with neighbors on each side—are ubiquitous in older neighborhoods from Brooklyn to San Francisco, but aren’t commonly built now. The American Housing Corp., wants to bring them back. “Row homes are an underbuilt category in the United States,” says Riley Meik, cofounder and CEO of the American Housing Corp. The company has developed a kit of parts that can be quickly manufactured, shipped to building sites in dense urban neighborhoods, and assembled, h…

Planner vs. Engineer is a well-known professional rivalry in the infrastructure world. The arguments are sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile, sometimes about important issues, sometimes insignificant. I’m in a peculiar spot because of my career as a “plangineer.” My parents helped me buy a civil engineering degree, but several years into my career, I bought the certified planning certificate. I know the two camps very well. The roundabout question Roundabouts are one of the many Planner vs. Engineer debates, and it happens to be a very important issue where emotions cloud good judgment. As much as I criticize the engineering profession, they are generally correc…

After a long court battle, the SAVE plan is officially kaput. Launched in 2023, the Biden administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) federal student loan repayment plan was created to replace the outgoing REPAYE program–and help keep Biden’s campaign promise to forgive student loans. Under the SAVE plan, a borrower’s monthly payment would be calculated based on income and family size and could be set as low as $0 per month for the lowest-earning borrowers. The program also fast-tracked forgiveness for those who borrowed less than $12,000. Several states sued the Biden administration in 2024, arguing that the SAVE plan exceeded the administrative br…

It’s a random Tuesday in October, and your kids are home again. A national holiday? Nope. A snow day. Not even a speck of frost on the ground. It’s Professional Development Day or Parent-Teacher Conference Half Day or one of the 15 other noninstructional days that appear in the school calendar like little landmines for anyone with a full-time job. At this point, I’ve stopped trying to keep track. Every month seems to come with a “surprise, they’re home” moment. And as a working parent, there are few phrases that strike fear into my heart quite like: “No School Today!” I love my kids, but that doesn’t mean I can drop everything every time the school district decide…

More than a decade ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished without a trace, sparking one of aviation’s most baffling mysteries. Despite years of multinational searches, investigators still do not know exactly what happened to the plane or its 239 passengers and crew. On Wednesday, Malaysia’s government said American marine robotics company Ocean Infinity would resume a seabed hunt for the missing plane on Dec. 30, reigniting hopes that the plane might finally be found. A massive search in the southern Indian Ocean, where the jet is believed to have gone down, turned up almost nothing. Apart from a few small fragments that washed ashore, no bodies or large wreckage…

Soooo, do you Labubu? The furry creature went viral this year thanks to Dua Lipa, Blackpink’s Lisa, and Kim Kardashian all buying into the adorably bizarre, plushy monsters. The results were millions in sales, long lines, and frantic scrambles as people tried to get their hands on this latest trendy phenom. Labubu’s Chinese parent company, Pop Mart, reported global revenue for Q3 (July through September) jumped by about 250% compared to a year earlier, and sales in America were up by more than 1,200%. But it goes beyond Pop Mart, as brands from South Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries are finding more inroads into American culture. Just as American cultural influ…

Job searching can feel like a full-time job in and of itself. Endless networking coffees and cover letter drafts can make it easy to get discouraged. And while it’s helpful to get support from family, friends, and your significant other, they may not truly grasp the day-to-day grind that’s needed to keep the momentum going. In fact, for many, searching for a job is an isolating experience. According to a recent American Staffing Association/Harris Poll Workforce Monitor survey, 72% of Americans say applying for jobs can feel like sending résumés into a “black box.” And four out of 10 unemployed U.S. job seekers revealed they didn’t land a single job interview in a ye…

The highlight reel of the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics was defined by extreme tricks—corkscrews, twists, and flips performed by snowboarders and freestyle skiers. These aerial feats are complex, but in many cases, they can be traced back to a simple tool: hours spent spinning and flopping into oversize plastic bags. Over the last 20 years, a handful of manufacturers—such as Bagjump, Progression Airbags, and BigAirBag—have perfected the art of making massive plastic landing pads, ideal for aspiring extreme sports athletes to push the boundaries of their skills and test out new tricks year-round. Beginning with the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, athletes like Sha…

Before I was ever involved in the flower business, I jumped from job to job, trying to figure out where I belonged. I grew up in South Queens, New York, where the role models on my block were police officers and firemen who showed up when others needed them most. Naturally, I thought I’d follow that path and become a cop. That dream shifted into social work, a field that fed my heart but not my wallet. To make ends meet, I took on whatever work I could, flipping houses, tending bar, you name it. Through it all, I never forgot what my dad, a painting contractor, used to tell me: “If you’re old enough to walk, you’re old enough to work.” On paper, none of this looke…

Organizations often describe change as a technical exercise: Adjust a workflow, update a reporting line, reorganize a process or two. On paper, it all looks relatively contained. But the lived experience of change rarely aligns with the tidy logic of a project plan. Recently, I worked with a team in the midst of what leadership kept referring to as a “small restructuring.” And technically, it was. The core work wasn’t shifting, no one’s job was threatened, and the strategy made sense. Yet the emotional climate thickened almost immediately. One manager became more reserved than usual, answering questions with careful brevity. Another grew unusually fixated on mino…

The job market is rough. So when candidates are landing interviews, they’re often cramming every skill, accomplishment, and experience they can muster into the interview process, hoping to edge out the competition. Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong. Hiring managers often tune out in such cases, causing the rapid-fire qualifications to backfire. It’s what Marc Cendella, CEO of career platform Ladders, calls “answer inflation.” Answer inflation is when experienced professionals respond to interview questions with lengthy résumé recitations and meandering stories that bury their actual value, he explains. Take the classic: “Tell me about yourself.” It’s the quest…

Caroline Fleck, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, corporate consultant, and adjunct clinical instructor at Stanford University. She received a BA in psychology and English from the University of Michigan and an MA and PhD from the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke. Fleck has served as a supervisor and consultant for some of the most rigorous clinical training programs in the country, and has been featured in national media outlets, including the The New York Times, Good Morning America, and HuffPost. In her private practice, Fleck specializes in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and other cognitive behavioral treatments for mood, anxiety, and personality d…

The promise of AI was always that it would handle certain kinds of work so we could focus on others. It was going to free our time, reduce friction, and let us concentrate on what requires human judgment and creativity. That promise assumed we would divide the labor wisely. That we would hand off the operational drag—the scheduling, formatting, and summarizing that eats the day before we’ve had a chance to think. We would keep the cognitive friction—the hard work of wrestling with ambiguity, forming a point of view, and figuring out the right approach. The work where your value is actually made. Instead we handed over the thinking first. Because cognitive friction…

There’s a commercial break on the TV — why not scroll through a few TikToks to pass the time. Ten minutes early for an appointment? Catch up on Instagram Stories. Train delays? A quick doomscroll of the news while you wait. It’s a common reflex: Americans check their phones 144 times a day, on average, according to a survey from Reviews.org. It’s also a habit many are trying to break. “My biggest fear is that I’ll lie on my deathbed and regret how much time I spent on my phone,” TikTok creator Sierra Campbell said in a video posted in May. Her answer? An analog bag. Campbell carries with her a bag of analog activities at all times, including crossword puzz…

In 2006, as the modern sustainability movement gained momentum, I launched The Lazy Environmentalist on Sirius Satellite Radio. The show’s premise was simple: Millions of people wanted to reduce their environmental impact, but not if it meant sacrifice or inconvenience. So we sought stories and solutions that elevated sustainability’s appeal. That’s how I found Plasma Boy. Plasma Boy Two decades ago, Portland, Oregon, had a thriving drag racing scene. A city known for its progressive, artsy vibe was also home to legions of racing fans obsessed with speed. John Wayland, aka Plasma Boy, was one of them. His racing vehicle was a souped-up yet diminut…

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. While talent intelligence platforms (TIPs) serve an important purpose in identifying skills, they are inherently limited and never designed to address the fundamental question: How is work itself structured and how is it changing? AI has dramatically magnified and accelerated those pre-existing limitations. It’s not just creating new skill gaps—it’s redefining work at its core. Yet most org…

In an era where trust is currency and sustainability is a non-negotiable, shoppers are demanding more than just green labels and vague promises. They want proof. Enter digital product passports (DPPs), a game-changing tool that gives consumers instant access to a product’s entire journey, from materials sourcing to sustainability credentials. That means, whether they’re buying a pair of running shoes or the latest smartphone, DPPs are making it easier to for them to shop smarter, cut through greenwashing, and support brands that truly walk the talk. The future of shopping is transparent Consumers often wonder where their clothes were made, how much carbon their…

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. In most of the world, women are the majority of tourism’s workforce. Hotels, for example, employ a large number of local people, offering economic access and opportunity for communities and often underrepresented groups, particularly women. These jobs and incomes directly affect the communities where the properties are based. There are ripple effects on broader social issues suc…

The cutting board may be the most used object in your kitchen, but its design hasn’t changed considerably since 3,000 BCE, when the ancient Egyptians began using slabs of wood for food preparation. The cutting board has to do a lot of work: It needs to absorb knife marks, soak up onion juice, and be big enough to hold vegetables and scraps. On a daily basis, home cooks are forced to confront the logistical problem of where to put the parsley they just chopped when they move on to the carrots. By the end of meal prep, the kitchen counter is littered with food waste and crowded with mismatched bowls of ingredients. It seems like a minor inconvenience, one that most …

There’s a question I ask every guest on my podcast, Inspired with Alexa von Tobel. It comes near the end of every conversation, after we’ve gone deep on business models, hard pivots, and the relentless grind of building something from nothing. The question is simple: What’s a mantra that runs through your head? I started asking it on a hunch. After years as a founder, dropping out of Harvard Business School to launch LearnVest during the height of the financial crisis, scaling it to acquisition, and then building Inspired Capital, I had come to believe that mindset wasn’t a soft variable. It was a hard one. The words we repeat to ourselves shape the decisions we make,…

During college, a friend convinced me to take an improv comedy class. An introvert by nature, I was way out of my depth. On the first day, I was so nervous I thought I might faint. But I ended up loving it—and learning a lot. In addition to silly warm-ups to get rid of inhibitions (zip, zap, zop, anyone?), I discovered the magic of “Yes, and . . .” In improv, “Yes, and” is more than just a phrase; it’s a mentality—to accept whatever idea or proposition is thrown at you, no matter how outlandish, rather than shutting it down. This mantra helped the flow of our improv performances, but it turned out to be a great life lesson as well. From that point on, I tried practici…

Floor tiles designed to block cellphone signals. Special window film to ruin the photos of overhead drones. A bevy of hidden electronic jamming devices. This might sound like the arsenal of a high-tech spy, but it’s actually just a few of the trappings required to keep a conclave secret in 2025. In the wake of Pope Francis’s death and funeral this weekend, the Catholic Church is now in a high-stakes race to prepare for the papal conclave, the traditional ceremony that will determine the next pope. On May 7, around 135 Roman Catholic cardinals will be sequestered in the Sistine Chapel for a series of ballot votes to decide who will inherit leadership of the church—a pr…

Smartphones have been around long enough that, to the casual observer, their designs seem to have hit a plateau. And on a functional level, that’s more or less true — we’re all essentially holding the same six-inch-ish rectangle, aside from the occasional foldable exception. But the maturity and ubiquity of smartphones have sparked a new phenomenon: the return of trends in cycles, much like fashion. For example, most phones released in the past few years have flat sides, like the iPhone 4 from 2010. Five years ago, almost all those sides would have been curved. Flat edges aren’t a new invention — they’re just what’s trending again. But this year brings a surprisin…