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Minnesota continues to be the beating heart of nationwide anti-ICE movements with The Day of Truth and Freedom. Today, January 23, hundreds of businesses across the state are closing their doors in protest after community groups, faith-based organizations and unions came together to call for an “economic blackout.” “Minnesotans are coming together in moral reflection and action to stand together against the actions of the federal government against the state of Minnesota,” a declaration reads on the organizing website, ICE Out of MN. The day-long protest follows a series of tragedies that stem from the Department of Homeland Security’s January 6 deployment of…

I like to say that my job as a charity auctioneer is the ultimate sales role. I stand onstage night after night encouraging people to give money, playing off the audience to push them to bid higher, in the name of charity. If there’s one thing the stage has taught me, it’s that flexibility is everything. The faster you can adapt and offer a solution, the more successful you’ll be whether you’re selling a product or an idea. Here are three of my favorite sales secrets. 1. THE POWER OF SUGGESTION One of the quickest ways to lose someone’s attention is to tell them how you think your product should work for them. If a donor has offered their mountain house as “the ult…

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…

For much of the modern corporate era, brand has been treated as surface area. A story told outward. A set of signals designed to persuade, attract, and differentiate. When companies spoke about brand, they were usually talking about perception: how they looked in the market, how they sounded, how they were received. That framing made sense in a world where markets moved a little more slowly, organizations were stable, and leadership could afford to separate strategy from culture, product from meaning, execution from belief. That world no longer exists. Today’s organizations operate in a state of near-constant volatility. Strategy shifts quarterly. Teams scale …

If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to spend less time on devices and get more “cultured,” the Metropolitan Opera is here to help—even if you don’t find yourself in New York City. On Saturday, January 24, 2026, at 1 p.m. ET in select theaters, it will premiere a special “Live in HD” presentation of its recent production, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Let’s take a look at the plot and the artists involved, before we get into more details on the logistics of how to see it. What is ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ about? Although this work is considered a modern opera, the action in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay …

Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists? The The President administration signed an executive order on November 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets “to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.” So far, the accomplishments of these so-called AI scientists have been mixed. On the one hand, AI sys…

Sports are entering a new era and it could be powered by artificial intelligence. Jeremy Bloom, CEO of the X Games, is placing a bold bet on AI to revolutionize how competitions are judged and scored. From reducing human error to enhancing fairness and accuracy, AI judges could redefine the future of professional sports. But can machines truly replace human judgment on the world’s biggest stages? View the full article

If you’re a typical American, you get home from work and start flipping switches and turning knobs—doing laundry, cooking dinner, watching TV. With so many other folks doing the same, the strain on the electrical grid in residential areas is highest at this time. That demand will only grow as the world moves away from fossil fuels, with more people buying induction stoves, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. That’s a challenge for utilities, which are already managing creaky grids across the United States, all while trying to meet a growing demand for power. So they’re now trying to turn EVs from a burden into a boon. More and more models, for instance, feature “vehicl…

Most factories still run on fossil fuels, whether they’re making potato chips or steel. But a new “thermal battery” could make it cheaper to do the same work with clean energy. Electrified Thermal Solutions, a startup spun out from MIT research in 2021, just fired up a demo battery that can hit 1,800 degrees Celsius—hot enough to make steel, cement, or chemicals. The battery uses power from the grid to heat its custom bricks when electricity is cheap. When a factory needs hot air later, it’s provided by the superheated bricks. It’s also cheaper to use than natural gas, so factories don’t need a climate goal to be convinced to make the switch. “This is …

We hear a lot about self-discipline in today’s productivity-obsessed culture. And the message is usually that it’s the cure for economic insecurity and a pathway to self-actualization. At first glance, this appears to make sense. But it can be a double-edged sword in our modern work lives and always-on culture. Self-discipline enables focus and is key to achievement. However, over-indexing on it can easily erode our own values and boundaries. In turn, this can cause burnout, isolation, and existential despair. What does ‘discipline’ really mean? Discipline has historically been associated with punishment and religious correction. Think physical punishment, incl…

We can’t afford to maintain the roads we have, so why do we keep building more? The Highway Trust Fund is the primary federal mechanism for surface transportation. It receives revenue mainly from the federal fuel tax (18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon on diesel) plus taxes on tires, heavy vehicles, and some other sources. The fund has two accounts: (1) the Highway Account (road construction, maintenance, and other surface transportation projects), and (2) the much smaller Mass Transit Account. Debates about how Americans should pay for roads are endless: General taxpayer funding, regardless of whether someone drives Per-mile ch…

So, you’ve finally done it. No more putting it off, pushing through the grind, waiting for a more opportune time once things settle down. Alas, you’ve mustered up the gall to cash in on your paid vacation time. Now you have several days strung together to travel, rest, or do whatever the heck your heart desires. I love that for you. But before you slam your work laptop shut and “Yabba dabba doo!” your ass out of the office, there’s one last thing. You’ve gotta leave behind a message letting folks know you’ll be gone. You need to draft an out-of-office message. Out-of-office notes tend to be pretty standard—courtesy auto-replies letting folks know you’re not workin…

When I tell fellow tech executives that every employee at sunday, from our engineers to our finance team, must complete a restaurant shift before they can fully onboard, I usually get confused looks. “You mean like, shadow someone?” they ask. No. I mean they tie on an apron, take orders, run food, and yes, deal with the 15-minute wait for the check that our product was literally built to eliminate. It sounds extreme. It is extreme. And it’s also one of the smartest business decisions we’ve made. Here’s why: business is often removed from the industries we serve. We’re keeping that empathy right there. The Empathy Gap in Tech I’ve spent 25 years in the tech …

Six families are suing TikTok after their children died emulating the so-called “blackout challenge” they had seen on the social media platform. The lawsuit alleges that TikTok’s algorithm exposed the teenagers, ages 11 to 17, to content that encouraged them to choke themselves to the point of passing out. Each of the children were found dead with some form of binding around their neck, hanging or otherwise attempting the challenge, according to the lawsuit. Filed in the Superior Court of the State of Delaware, the lawsuit names two TikTok legal entities and its parent company, ByteDance. ByteDance and one of the entities, TikTok LLC, are incorporated in Del…

My daughter, Ivy, recently joined a swim club. As a former competitive swimmer, it’s been a delight to witness. Every time I take her to practice, I feel a wave of nostalgia that reminds me of all the many years I spent in the pool and all the many teammates I collected along the way. It excites me to think that she, too, will have her own experiences and life lessons, just as swimming taught me. But something peculiar struck me as I watched her practice: 45 minutes of their one-hour training was spent on the basics. Kick drills. Pull drills. All the essentials about swimming that we don’t think very much about, the foundational techniques that make for a good swimmer. …

Valentino, who died on Monday at 93, leaves a lasting legacy full of celebrities, glamour and, in his words, knowing what women want: “to be beautiful”. The Italian fashion powerhouse has secured his dream of making a lasting impact, outliving Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. Valentino was known for his unique blend between the bold and colourful Italian fashion and the elegant French haute couture—the highest level of craftsmanship in fashion, with exceptional detail and strict professional dressmaking standards. The blending of these styles to create the signature Valentino silhouette made his style distinctive. Valentino’s style was reserved, and over…

Large language models feel intelligent because they speak fluently, confidently, and at scale. But fluency is not understanding, and confidence is not perception. To grasp the real limitation of today’s AI systems, it helps to revisit an idea that is more than two thousand years old. In The Republic, Plato describes the allegory of the cave: prisoners chained inside a cave can only see shadows projected on a wall. Having never seen the real objects casting those shadows, they mistake appearances for reality, and they are deprived from experiencing the real world. Large language models live in a very similar cave. LLMs don’t perceive the world: they read a…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company,covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. I’m dedicating this week’s newsletter to a conversation I had with the main author of Anthropic’s new and improved “constitution,” the document it uses to govern the outputs of its models and its Claude chatbot. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X @thesullivan. A necessary update Amid growin…

After spending much of his career in marketing, Daniel Hebert pivoted into Software as a Service (SaaS) sales for a high-growth startup in 2018. But what started out as a dream job soon turned into a nightmare. Like many tech startups, the business went from growth mode to scaling down as the market turned in 2022. As the head of the sales team, Hebert found himself on the front lines of that cost-cutting campaign. “I would be assigned a team and have to fire half the people. Then I’d have to rebuild the process and rebuild the team. I did three or four cycles of that in 15 months, and I just got so insanely burnt out,” he says. “I just randomly started getting [s…