What's on Your Mind?

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…

Shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill are down over 6% in premarket trading following a relatively humdrum fourth-quarter earnings report. The report, released on Tuesday, February 3, showed a 2.5% decrease in comparable restaurant sales from quarter-three and a 1.7% drop year-over-year. However, it appears Chipotle has a plan to fix all that: more limited-time offerings. Yes, the company’s secret weapon of choice is to bump up its number of fresh menu options. This shift will include four limited-time offers throughout the year, Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright said in an earnings call. He described the move as an increase in Chipotle’s “menu innovation cadence.” …

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…

Alphabet said on Wednesday it was targeting capital expenditure of $175 billion to $185 billion this year, in yet another aggressive ramp-up in spending from the Google parent as it deepens its investments to push ahead in the AI race. Analysts on average had expected Alphabet to spend about $115.26 billion this year, according to data compiled by LSEG. Shares of the company fell more than 6% in extended trading. Revenue at Google Cloud grew 48% to $17.7 billion in the fourth quarter ended December, compared with analysts’ average estimate of a 35.2% jump, according to data compiled by LSEG. Cloud computing majors have poured hundreds of billions of dollar…

On most golf courses, silence is sacred. At the WM Phoenix Open’s 16th hole, noise is the point. Every year, tens of thousands of fans pack into a stadium-like enclosure at TPC Scottsdale, turning a short par 3 into one of the most recognizable—and rowdiest—settings in sports. Missed putts are booed. Holes in one trigger cascades of beer. The atmosphere is closer to a college football rivalry than a PGA Tour stop. But as iconic as the 16th hole has become, its future wasn’t guaranteed by tradition alone. Behind the spectacle, the structure itself had reached a limit—architecturally, operationally, and environmentally. “We made the decision that that was as goo…

The Super Bowl is mere days away and chances are you’ve seen most of the ads already. Right? Let’s rewind for a 10-second Super Bowl ad history lesson that goes like this: In 2011, Volkswagen decided to drop its full ad—called “The Force”—online the Wednesday before the Super Bowl. This was brand marketer blasphemy! But it worked. Ever since, more and more brands began dropping ads earlier and earlier, which then evolved into creating teasers for the ads to run even earlier. If you’re confused as to why this happens, don’t sweat it, even Christopher Walken wasn’t sure in BMW’s 2024 Super Bowl teaser. Super Bowl commercials are no longer just Super Bow…

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…

The 2026 Winter Olympic Games kick off in Italy on Friday, with top athletes from across the world competing for not just any prize, but for the most expensive medals in Olympics history. The Milano Cortina-based games come as the value of precious metals have skyrocketed, most notably gold and silver. Gold was worth about $2,500 per ounce when the Paris Summer Olympics took place in 2024. Now, less than two years later, gold sits at just over $4,800 per ounce—and even that’s a significant drop from its recent record-high of about $5,600 per ounce just last week. Silver averaged around $28 per ounce during the last Olympic games, but is now valued at about $7…

Planned layoffs have now reached their highest rate since 2009’s Great Recession. The data comes from Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ new layoffs report, which revealed that U.S.-based employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January, marking the highest rate to start a year since 2009. Also notable, in the same month, just 5,306 planned hires were announced—the lowest total on record for January. According to the data, that means layoffs are up a staggering 118% from the same period a year ago, and 205% from December 2025. “Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January,” Andy Challenger, workpla…

Being adaptable has always been a useful skill. But in today’s world, it’s essential. In our volatile, AI-accelerated workplaces, adaptability lets us transform uncertainty and pressure into clarity, learning, and discerning action. Thankfully, adaptability is a skill we can develop. In fact, there are science-backed practices we can adopt to improve our adaptability, and the benefits go far beyond our careers. In practical terms, adaptability is being able to regulate and adjust your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors amid changing circumstances while staying aligned with your values and long‑term goals. True adaptability is not passive compliance: it’s conscious ongo…

February 1 was National Change Your Password Day, a well-intentioned reminder that, ironically, highlights everything wrong with how we think about security in 2026. Here’s the truth: if you spent the first day of the month dutifully changing “Summer2025!” to “Winter2026!” across your accounts, you didn’t make yourself safer. In fact, you might have made things worse. Decades of Bad Advice We’ve spent decades teaching people the wrong lessons about password security. Add a number. Throw in a special character. Change it every 90 days. These requirements were etched into our collective consciousness, repeated by IT departments, enforced by login forms, and inter…

For totally logical reasons, this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy is bucking the trend of a single host city and splitting its sporting events between two main locations, Milan and Cortina. Milan, the second most populous city in Italy, is the urban setting for indoor events like ice hockey and ice skating. Cortina, a ski resort town 250 miles away, provides most of the snow—and hill-based venues for quintessential Winter Olympic sports like alpine skiing and the bobsled. But the two separate locations posed a problem for one of the key parts of the Olympics: the opening ceremony. How could there be one grand show when the sporting action was split in half and separat…

This Sunday will see the Seattle Seahawks face off against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LX. The game will also mark the conclusion of the tenth football season featuring Next Gen Stats, the analytics system that delivers detailed data about every game to coaches and broadcasters through a partnership with Amazon Web Services. Next Gen Stats began in 2015, when the National Football League deployed RFID chips in player shoulder pads and even in the football itself, enabling the league to capture location data multiple times per second through sensors installed throughout stadiums. It has since become a mainstay of football broadcasts and training sessions…

Friday is the opening ceremony for the 2026 Winter Olympics. But, if you’ve spent any time on TikTok over the past week, you might have already got a sneak peek at some behind-the-scenes content courtesy of the athletes themselves. In 2024, the International Olympic Committee loosened its rules governing what athletes can capture and share on social media. The shift helped spark viral moments during the Paris Games, when Team USA rugby star Ilona Maher and Norway’s swimmer Henrik Christiansen, whose chocolate muffin reviews became an unlikely hit, took over TikTok feeds. This year, Olympians have already been posting vlogs of their journeys to the Olympic Village…

Amazon sales surged 14% during the fourth quarter, helped by strong holiday spending and a better-than-expected growth in its prominent cloud computing unit. But shares fell 11% in after hours trading on Thursday as investors appeared to be spooked by the Seattle-based tech company’s plans to increase capital spending by nearly 60% to $200 billion from last year’s $128 billion as it sees opportunities in artificial intelligence, robots, semiconductors and satellites. The company’s fourth-quarter profits also were slightly below analysts’ projections. Wall Street analysts were expecting capital spending to rise to around $147 billion this year, according to FactSet. Ama…

Five years ago, a retired police officer spotted a 7-year-old girl walking alone in her New Jersey neighborhood. The stranger stopped her, questioned her about where she lived and whether she was alone, then called the police. When officers arrived, the girl gave them her address which was just a few blocks away. They walked her home and met her parents. But instead of leaving, the officer demanded ID. When the parents refused, arguing they’d done nothing wrong by letting their daughter go for a walk in the neighborhood, the officer called for backup and threatened to take their daughter into protective custody. The father tried to comfort his crying daughter. Police…

On Thursday, OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, a new model that extends its Codex coding agent beyond writing and reviewing code to performing a much wider range of work tasks. The release comes as competition continues to heat up among AI companies vying for market share in the AI-powered coding tools space. OpenAI says GPT-5.3 combines the coding performance of GPT-5.2-Codex with the reasoning and professional-knowledge capabilities of GPT-5.2, while running 25% faster. This allows GPT-5.3-Codex to handle long-running tasks that involve research, tool use such as web search or database calls, and complex execution and planning across both general work tasks and softwar…

HBO Max’s Heated Rivalry, a gay hockey romance TV series based on the Game Changers book series by Rachel Reid, is the breakout hit no one saw coming. With almost no promotion, it quickly became one of the most talked-about streaming TV shows in the U.S. after HBO Max purchased the rights from Canada’s Crave network this November, turning its two co-stars, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, into overnight celebrities. What’s unique about Heated Rivalry is just how fast its popularity has spread, and how devoted its massive fan base is. From the week it debuted, to its season finale six episodes later, its viewership grew from 30 million to 324 million streaming minut…

A federal jury in Arizona has ordered Uber to pay $8.5 million in a lawsuit brought by a passenger who said was sexually assaulted by one of the ridesharing app’s drivers. The case marks the first time that Uber has been found liable for the safety of its drivers in a sexual assault case. The plaintiff, Oklahoma resident Jaylynn Dean, sued Uber in 2023. Dean alleged that an Uber driver sexually assaulted her that November during a late ride to a hotel in Tempe, Arizona. Dean’s legal team argued that Uber avoided extra safety measures like more extensive background checks and in-ride cameras because while those steps could protect riders from sexual assault, they might…

Kristin Cabot, the HR exec at the center of last year’s Coldplay kiss cam scandal, is headlining a crisis communications conference happening later this year. Cabot will be seated on the panel “Taking back the narrative” at the PRWeek Crisis Comms Conference in Washington, D.C., on April 16, where individual tickets start at $875 per person. “While attending a Coldplay concert in July and unwittingly appearing on the kiss-cam for a few seconds, Kristin Cabot’s life blew up in an instant,” the description of the keynote presentation reads. “From the outside, it was an amusing, if unflattering meme; but for her, everything changed that day. It continues: “Cabo…

At the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, the iconic cauldron of the Games is putting on a daily show just like its athletes. This year, for the first time ever, there are two cauldrons lit simultaneously at different locations. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s geometric drawings, both cauldrons expand and contract, respond to music, and emit their own light—and one will put on hourly performances for viewers throughout the Games. The tradition of the Olympic flame and cauldron dates back 100 years or more. Historically, the Games are opened with a relay ceremony wherein torch bearers bring the flame to the cauldron, which remains lit until the closing ceremony.…