What's on Your Mind?

When I visited Malaysia and Singapore as a child, I was always curious about the many Chinese herbalist shops we’d pass on busy shopping streets. They looked like they were from another universe. As I peered through the windows, there were glass canisters full of mysterious ingredients: goji berry, bird’s nests, pearl dust, tiger bones, gazelle antlers. We never went inside. My parents—who were trained as a nurse and a biochemist respectively—brushed aside Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as unscientific at best, and dangerous at worst. So I grew up skeptical of these practices. I rolled my eyes when people suggested taking ginseng tea to boost my energy. I stayed c…

Ten years ago, I ended a meeting at WeWork with an offer to grab a free beer on tap. Last week, I ended it with a similar offer, except this time the beverage on offer was kombucha. The seemingly innocuous shift is symbolic of a bigger evolution underway at the coworking giant: less coolness, more functionality. WeWork is growing up, and its newest location in downtown Manhattan is the most visible proof yet: 250 Broadway, which opened in January, is WeWork’s first outpost in the city since 2019—the year WeWork abandoned its initial public offering and ousted cofounder Adam Neumann as CEO. The space adds 60,000 square feet to the company’s New York portfolio, which al…

In 2023, creator and social agency Whalar Group announced an ambitious plan to create physical campuses for content creators to learn, make, and collaborate with their peers. Now the company is opening the doors to its first campus in Venice, Calif. this month with an additional location in Brooklyn launching this spring and a London location slated for 2026. Part production studio, part co-working space, part university, The Lighthouse is membership-based community designed to help creators and their teams level-up both their content and the businesses they’re building around it. “If you look at [20th century German art school] Bauhaus, Andy Warhol’s Factory, Sil…

Before media outlets began comparing OpenAI’s Sam Altman with the father of the atomic bomb, and before Amazon’s Jeff Bezos got jacked, we had Nathan Bateman, the iron-pumping, AI-developing tech broligarch played by Oscar Isaac in the 2015 film Ex Machina. Written and directed by Civil War helmer Alex Garland, Ex Machina is ostensibly about a modern-day Turing test. Bateman, the mastermind behind a Google/Facebook surrogate, has secretly developed a humanoid AI and arranged for talented coder Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to fly out to his remote compound for a week to determine whether Ava (Alicia Vikander) exhibits enough consciousness to pass for human. You know, sort …

The average U.S. employee clocks nearly 21 full business days working from their phone each year. That’s according to new research from Adobe Acrobat, who surveyed over 1,000 full-time employees on their habits and opinions around work phone etiquette. As worklife boundaries continue to blur, the work doesn’t stop when you step out of the office’s four walls. For many employees, they now carry it with them in their pocket, checking emails first thing from bed, or making calls on the go between meetings. In the early days of the iPhone, the “sent from my . . .” signature conveyed status. Back in 2013, The Atlantic referred to it as a “humble brag.” More than a de…

When Netflix was finally ready to bring back its massive international hit TV series Squid Game for Season 2 after a three-year hiatus, it had a unique marketing challenge: remind people why they fell in love with a Korean action drama that revolves around a murderous contest. Approximately 39 months had passed since the debut of Squid Game took the world by storm with its coordinated green tracksuits, Pink Guards, and twisted takes on children’s games. The first season exploded to the surprise of everyone, becoming a global pop culture sensation. Back in 2021, Netflix marketing outside Asia was largely reactive to what audiences were excited about. This time, there …

Yes, there are the New Year’s traditions of setting ambitious goals and ditching bad habits, but one evergreen resolution that ought to top lists is to banish bad design. Why endure something that simply doesn’t work (or is an affront to aesthetics) any longer than we have to? In the spirit of fresh starts, we polled experts in architecture, tech, industrial design, and urbanism on the everyday annoyances and the big-picture issues that they think are in desperate need of a refresh in 2026. (Top on my personal list? Eye-searing headlights.) Design is inherently an optimistic act, and by fixing these issues, we’re a step closer to a more beautiful and better world…

A few years into the AI boom, it’s clear that designers can rely on AI for some things. It can automate tedious tasks in Photoshop that once took up precious time. It can generate images on command (quality be damned!). It can schedule a meeting, respond to an email, and take notes on a Zoom call. But for all the hype, we know that AI isn’t a silver bullet for the real problems creatives face. Far from it. So we wondered: When it comes to design and creative work, in a blue-sky scenario, what do today’s design leaders wish AI would actually take care of for them? We asked nine great designers that very question, and got back some interesting answers. Their…

I just launched a wine app, which means I’ve spent the last six months thinking obsessively about one thing: how do you remove friction from decisions that shouldn’t be hard? The answer taught me something bigger about rituals, and why so many of the ones we create at the end and beginning of the year fail us. Here’s my founder story, but from the wine aisle. Last December, I was standing in front of a wall of bottles, paralyzed. Not because I don’t like wine. I do. I was paralyzed because the entire experience was designed to make me feel small. The sommelier energy, the gatekeeping language, the implied message that if I couldn’t name the terroir, I didn’t d…

In 1918, as World War I intensified overseas, the U.S. government embarked on a radical experiment: It quietly became the nation’s largest housing developer, designing and constructing more than 80 new communities across 26 states in just two years. These weren’t hastily erected barracks or rows of identical homes. They were thoughtfully designed neighborhoods, complete with parks, schools, shops and sewer systems. In just two years, this federal initiative provided housing for almost 100,000 people. Few Americans are aware that such an ambitious and comprehensive public housing effort ever took place. Many of the homes are still standing today. But as an …

When most people hear the word luxury, they think of exclusivity: high-end materials, bespoke finishes, and designs tailored for the few. But a quiet revolution is underway. The true measure of luxury today is accessibility: designing environments that are beautiful, functional, safe, and empowering for every body. Nowhere is this more urgent, or more overlooked, than in the bathroom. According to the CDC, the bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house. There are 234,000 annual bathroom-related injuries in the U.S, with 81% caused by falls. For older adults, those falls can trigger a cascade of consequences: loss of independence, costly healthcare expenses, and …

Much of healthcare still operates like a series of snapshots. For most routine care, you go in once a year for a physical. Maybe you get a few labs drawn. If something looks off, you might get a follow-up or a prescription. But within the constraints of a short visit and limited longitudinal data, care often ends with broad guidance like “eat better” or “check back next year.” Meanwhile, your health is changing every day. Metabolic function, inflammation, aging, and chronic disease don’t switch on overnight. They unfold gradually over time, shaped by lifestyle factors including sleep, nutrition, movement, stress, as well as genetics and environment. But unless…

Young people early in their careers are understandably alarmed by reports that their jobs are most at risk from AI automation. Some are even reconsidering their career choices due to what’s been dubbed AI anxiety. But job seekers shouldn’t give up. People whose jobs are threatened by AI must look for ways to play to their strengths and their human qualities. They should focus on the many areas where humans outshine AI—things like relationship building, resourcefulness, emotional intelligence, teamwork, and leadership. For much of the labor force, of course, it won’t be possible to avoid AI completely. Many occupations will involve working with AI not just as an as…

In graduate school, my experimental archaeology professor told a student to create a door socket—the hole in a door frame that a bolt slides into—in a slab of sandstone by pecking at it with a rounded stone. After a couple of weeks, the student presented his results to the class. “I pecked the sandstone about 10,000 times,” he said, “and then it broke.” This kind of experience is known as individual learning. It works through trial and error, with lots of each. Also known as reinforcement learning, it is how children, chimpanzees, crows, and AI often learn to do something on their own, such as making a simple tool or solving a puzzle. But individual learning has l…

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. This week, I’m focusing on what AI pioneer Yann LeCun’s new company will likely build after he departs from Meta. I also look at Marc Andreessen’s jab at the Pope on X, and at “Fei-Fei Li’s” view of the AI world since 2012. 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. Yann LeCun’s departur…

When Accenture announced plans to lay off 11,000 workers who it deemed could not be reskilled for AI, the tech consulting giant framed the decision as a training issue: some people simply cannot learn what they need to learn to thrive in the world of AI. But this narrative fundamentally misunderstands—and significantly underplays—the deeper challenge. Doug McMillon, the CEO of Walmart, pointed to this bigger challenge recently when he said, “AI is going to change literally every job.” Now, if this turns out to be true, every role will have to be reimagined. And when every role changes, this is more than a change in each job or even a specific field. It implies a profo…

For decades, huge swaths of Brazil’s Cerrado ecosystem have been used to support the global demand for burgers. Forests and grasslands were replaced by pastures along with farms growing soy to feed cattle. But a major restoration project is now underway on an area nearly twice as large as Manhattan. If you fly over one part of southwestern Brazil, you’ll see a patchwork of dozens of square plots where a local university is studying different methods of helping native plants regrow on former cattle pastures. On more than 25,000 acres, along rivers and the edge of remaining pieces of forest, new vegetation has been growing quickly over the past two years. Wildlife camer…

Last week, Amazon became the latest company to announce massive layoffs. In a memo, senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, revealed that the company would let go of “approximately 14,000” employees, citing AI innovations and a fast-changing world. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones),” Galetti wrote. “We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.” …

Generative AI is evolving along two distinct tracks: on one side, savvy users are building their own retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, personal agents, or even small language models (SLMs) tailored to their contexts and data. On the other, the majority are content with “LLMs out of the box”: Open a page, type a query, copy the output, paste it elsewhere. That divide — between builders and consumers — is shaping not only how AI is used but also whether it delivers value at all. The difference is not just individual skill. It’s also organizational. Companies are discovering that there are two categories of AI use: the administrative (summarize a report, dr…

The blockchain is coming to Wall Street. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) said on Monday that it was developing a platform to trade tokenized securities, digital representations of assets like stocks and bonds. But exactly when the 233-year-old financial institution will turn it on is still up in the air. Supporters of the technology argue that the change could modernize the NYSE, giving traders some of the same advantages that are enjoyed by investors in the cryptocurrency world. But Wall Street stalwarts are wary of altering a system that has been the bedrock of securities trading for more than two centuries. Curious what the fuss is about? Here’…

For many Black tech founders, raising venture capital is often positioned as the ultimate milestone. It signals that your idea is validated, your business is taken “seriously,” and opportunities begin to take shape. As the managing partner of an early stage VC firm, and a 3X Black tech founder that speaks and meets with thousands of founders a year, I can tell you the truth is far more nuanced. Venture capital can be powerful, but it’s not for everyone. Before chasing your first check, founders need clarity, preparation, and strategy. Fundraising is not just about storytelling or networking; it’s about understanding the system you’re stepping into and deciding whethe…

Super Bowl ad spots range from just 15 to 60 seconds, but their impact lives on through social media for the days, weeks, and sometimes even years that follow. Although around 50 brands bought broadcast time, less than a week later, only a handful are still being talked about. So how can brands best transform their (very expensive) ads from momentary entertainment to long-lasting conversation pieces? Data from Metricool, a social media analytics tool, shows that the Super Bowl ads with the largest reach and impact are ones that use social media to turn their seconds-long time slot into an all-encompassing experience. “Brands should focus on full-scope coverage, r…

For the past decade I have volunteered at St. Francis Inn, a soup kitchen in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Kensington, for those not from Philly, has long had a reputation for potent but affordable street drugs. Interstate 95 and the Market-Frankford elevated commuter train line provide easy access to the neighborhood for buyers and sellers, and abandoned buildings offer havens for drug use and other illicit activity. St. Francis Inn Ministries, which was founded by two Franciscan friars in 1979, serves sit-down breakfast and dinner for thousands of people each year, many of whom suffer from poverty, homelessness, and substance use disorder. It also…