What's on Your Mind?

Seeing peers lose their jobs has a way of making people weird. It’s not much different from grief. When someone loses a loved one, you can almost feel the tension: people fumbling for the right words, hoping not to say something insensitive, then saying something insensitive anyway. “Everything happens for a reason.” “They’re in a better place.” That is, assuming any condolences are shared at all. Many of us have been there. You don’t want to overstep. Don’t want to make the person feel worse. I get it: Showing sympathy can feel like a minefield. The same thing happens when companies downsize their staff, only the loss isn’t life. It’s employment. When someone get…

Earlier this year, I had coffee with the chief investment officer of a large public pension fund. His fund doesn’t invest directly into venture (they have a fund of funds position instead), so my new CIO friend doesn’t usually get pitched directly by VC funds. He doesn’t spend a ton of time in tech circles either. When he does dip his toe in VC waters, he gets culture shock. “I have trouble understanding VCs,” he said. (I’m paraphrasing.) By his estimation, people in traditional finance are easier to read. Their goal is to maximize returns—and the progress toward this goal is concrete, transparent, and measurable. It’s really easy to understand what an asset …

Roger Bennett is the witty and charismatic co-host of the popular “Men in Blazers” soccer media network. Born in Liverpool, England, he moved to the United States and has since helped popularize the sport in this country through podcasts, television shows, and books, including his best-selling memoir Reborn in the USA. His new book, WE ARE THE WORLD (CUP), is a personal history of what he calls “the world’s greatest sporting event.” In the following excerpt, he chronicles his experience of the 1994 World Cup, the last event held in the U.S prior to this summer’s tournament. 1994 was also the year Bennett moved to the U.S. The 1994 World Cup brought football to the Un…

Late last year, Meta confirmed it would effectively be abandoning the metaverse, a nebulously defined project that spurred the company’s 2021 rebrand and has cost it over $70 billion since. At a strategy meeting at Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaii compound, Reality Labs, the division responsible for the metaverse, was told to cut its budget by 30%, versus only 10% across the rest of the company. Reality Labs’ fate was arguably a long time coming: The division has never turned a profit, with cumulative losses these past five years totalling $73 billion. Wall Street reacted positively to the news, adding $69 billion to its market capitalization. You remember the metaverse, don…

One year on from the catastrophic LA wildfires, journalist, author, and MS NOW correspondent Jacob Soboroff examines what the fires reveal about America’s growing age of disaster. Drawing from his new book Firestorm, Soboroff shares hard lessons from the aftermath, exposing systemic failures, unlikely heroics, and what today’s recovery efforts tell us about how the U.S. will respond to the next crisis. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigat…

On Thursday at 3 p.m. ET, a helicopter flew along the Manhattan skyline for less than 18 minutes before plunging into the Hudson River. The sightseeing helicopter carried a family of five from Spain. Law enforcement confirmed the identity of the passengers to ABC News as Agustin Escobar, an executive from European automation company Siemens, along with his wife, Merce Camprubi Montal, and their three children. The family, along with the pilot, all died in the crash. The helicopter was chartered by the company New York Helicopter, which posted photos of the smiling family inside the aircraft just before it took off. The chopper appeared to be a N216MH—a Bell 206L…

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. We need to change the conversation about how we diagnose autism—and what we believe causes it. Lately, there’s been growing attention on environmental toxins and singular external triggers as explanations for autism. But the reality is far more nuanced. As a clinical geneticist and PhD genomic scientist with over a decade of experience working in medical affairs and clinical genomics, I’ve …

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. The recent L.A. wildfires have been devastating, displacing thousands and leaving behind a stark reminder of how vulnerable our built environment remains. Having lived through the 2018 Woolsey Fire in Malibu, I’ve seen firsthand the immense challenges of rebuilding. In my April 2024 TEDx talk, “How building a home in four weeks can influence four generations,” I explored the emotional and financ…

Back in November, Fast Company and Johns Hopkins partnered for the first-ever World Changing Ideas Summit in Washington, DC, an event that convened leaders across business and academia to engage with the ideas and innovations reshaping the future. Knowing we were heading into a new year that undoubtedly is bringing new challenges to every industry, we asked some of our speakers working in space, healthcare, AI, and the intersections therein, what would be top of mind for them in 2026: “We’re in a race against resistance.” Akhila Kosaraju, founder and CEO of Pharebio, is using predictive and generative AI to power drug discovery. The startup plans to develop 15…

If the three years since the release of ChatGPT have signaled OpenAI’s dominance of generative artificial intelligence, it’s worth recalling that the company’s rapid rise would have been impossible without another Big Tech backer. In 2019, Microsoft agreed to supply OpenAI all the compute it needed, with near exclusivity. In exchange, Microsoft retained the right to use OpenAI’s tech until the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI: the point at which AI systems are able to act like humans and respond to whatever task they’re given, regardless of whether they’ve been trained to solve it. As generative AI’s capabilities blew past initial expectations, t…

When we talk about decarbonizing industries, footwear doesn’t often steal the spotlight. Yet behind every pair of sneakers or boots is a complex web of supply chains, raw materials, energy consumption, and logistics. While our shoes leave physical footprints, they also leave behind a much larger, often invisible carbon and waste footprint. The footwear industry is estimated to be responsible for hundreds of millions of metric tons of CO₂e emissions each year—that’s more than the emissions of some entire countries. And it’s a sector undergoing massive transformation, fueled by a perfect storm of shifting regulation, growing consumer demand for transparency, and the ur…

Below, Judd Kessler shares five key insights from his new book, Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want. Judd is an award-winning professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research and writing have been featured in leading media, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review, among others. For his work on organ allocation, Kessler was named one of the “30 under 30” in Law and Policy by Forbes. He has been researching market design for the past 15 years. What’s the big idea? Life is full of hidden markets quietly deciding who gets…

Are you guilty of overusing the monkey covering its eyes emoji? Do you find it impossible to send a text without tacking on a laughing-crying face? Much like choosing between a full stop or an “x” at the end of a message, emojis have become their own form of language—complete with unspoken rules and hidden meanings (we all know exactly what we’re implying with the eyes emoji or the eggplant). But beyond adding subtext or flirtatious nuance, your go-to emojis might reveal more about you than you realize. According to a new study published in Current Psychology by researchers at Oklahoma State University, your emoji habits could offer surprising insight into your un…

Rewind to 2025. The National Football League is fresh off an unbelievable, yet controversial, Super Bowl halftime performance by the superstar hip hop artist Kendrick Lamar. The country has just been introduced to a diversity-hostile administration, which has practically squashed any zeal toward diversity, equity, or inclusion that corporate America once seemingly held. As the NFL’s leadership team explores talent considerations for next year’s performance in the midst of this cultural backdrop, someone recommends Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican-born megastar whose songs are performed almost entirely in Spanish, and, surprisingly, the league acquiesces. The public blowback is…

There’s a quiet transformation underway in how we eat. It’s not being led by chefs, influencers, or climate activists. It’s being driven by a new class of pharmaceuticals that are changing the way millions of people relate to food itself. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy work by altering hunger signals in the brain. These medications don’t just help people feel full sooner. They are reshaping consumption patterns across the board. When hunger changes, everything from portion sizes to snacking habits and flavor preferences follows. This is fueling a broader redefinition of how we think about protein. What used to be a food category mostly associated with muscle-…

You’ve heard of burner phones. What about burner email? So much of the internet now requires that you hand over your email address before you’re able to use any services—from an app you’ve downloaded to signing up for a newsletter or redeeming a special offer online. But who says you have to give your real email address? Next time you’re asked, consider using an email mask. There are a growing number of services that give out disguised email addresses and relay any messages to your actual address. Experts say this can be a powerful tool to safeguard privacy and security. Here are some pointers on the whys and hows of email masking: Mask on The idea behind email…

Nintendo’s profits tumbled as sales of its Switch console lost momentum, prompting the Japanese video-game maker to lower its full-year forecasts. Kyoto-based Nintendo Co., which created the Super Mario franchise, reported Tuesday an April-December profit of 237 billion yen ($1.5 billion), down 42% from the same period the previous year. Nine-month sales dropped 31% to 956 billion yen ($6 billion), according to Nintendo, which did not break down quarterly results. The company now expects to rake in a 270-billion yen ($1.7 billion) profit for the fiscal year through March, down from the previous forecast for 300-billion yen ($1.9 billion). Sales of Nintendo machines fo…