What's on Your Mind?

Gen Z still believes in true love, even if the pursuit looks a little different from their parents’ generation. That’s according to a new Tinder x Harris Poll white paper shared exclusively with Fast Company. The survey was conducted online in the U.S. on behalf of Match Group by the Harris Poll from September to October 2025, among a nationally representative sample of 2,500 single adults ages 18 to 79. Some 80% of Gen Z singles said they believe they’ll find true love, and 74% said they believe they’ll get married, compared to 57% and 43% of all singles, respectively. That might surprise some at a time when young people are reportedly having less sex, going …

With Netflix now streaming original podcasts and Apple announcing a “category-leading video experience” on its app this spring, the meaning of the word “podcast” has grown increasingly diffuse. It was much easier to pin down during the medium’s mid-aughts infancy. Back then, a podcast was simply asynchronous talk radio—the natural next step after moving from terrestrial radio, to satellite platforms like SiriusXM, to a new and purely digital format that could be downloaded and consumed on demand. In the years since, the definition has vastly expanded. Essentially, any form of episodic audio or video content that involves people speaking into microphones can now b…

At 12, I was walking around a very affluent neighborhood with my father and he said, “Mikey, all these people in these nice houses, not one of them could run a gas station.” That stuck with me. The gas station test isn’t about intelligence or ambition, it’s about aptitude for running a successful business. As a strong student, then an investment banking analyst, then a private equity associate, I was in this jetstream towards a career in investing. But can investors run gas stations? Does it matter? This concept was always in the back of my mind. I dove so deep into business details as an investor that my interest actually inhibited my performance. I was propelled…

Accessibility is often treated as a technical problem. Does it meet standards? Is it ergonomic? Is it safe? Those questions matter, but they are incomplete. Many products fail not because they don’t function, but because they make the user feel singled out. Shame is one of the most powerful barriers to product adoption, and it is rarely discussed in design reviews. People delay using canes, grab bars, hearing aids, or mobility supports even when they would meaningfully improve daily life. Why? Because many products still communicate something the user does not want to say out loud: Something is wrong with me. If we want accessible design to succeed, and we want pe…

You’ve tried it all before. Waking up at 5:30 a.m. Journaling first thing in the morning. The exercises you’re supposed to do before work. But do your morning habits stick? Are you still practicing them? We all want to “win the morning,” to be productive and intentional. The trouble with morning routines is that they don’t work as they should if you don’t fix your evening habits. People are obsessed with morning routines. But they forget that winning in the morning starts the night before. Every single choice you make after dinner is either setting you up for a great morning or sabotaging tomorrow before it begins. That late-night binge doesn’t just keep you up. I…

Generational conflict has become one of the most overused explanations for workplace tension, with plenty of stereotypical blame to go around: Baby Boomers resist change. Millennials lack loyalty. Gen Z is lazy. But after more than three decades working inside founder-led and multi-generational companies—from first-generation startups to fourth-generation enterprises—I’ve learned something counterintuitive: Generational conflict usually isn’t about age. It’s about clarity. Family-owned businesses offer a powerful lens on this issue. In the U.S., approximately 87% of businesses are family-owned, collectively employing millions of people and contributing signifi…

Everyone who has tried to code with Anthropic’s Claude Code AI agents runs into the same usability problem: If you run two or three concurrent artificial intelligence sessions—say, one rewriting your server code, another generating tests, a third doing background research—you are forced to manually hunt through separate terminal tabs, each one generating a relentless stream of machine-readable log entries, just to figure out what each program is actually doing at any given moment. Not only is it hard to follow what’s really going on, but not checking constantly can also lead to problems, as agents might stop to ask you something and you won’t notice it for minutes or hou…

OpenAI has emerged as one of the government’s leading providers of artificial intelligence. According to the company, 37 federal agencies now have access to its tech, and about 80,000 government employees are now using it regularly. This makes OpenAI a frontrunner in the race between the top AI companies to get their tech in front of government users. These workers are just a small fraction of these frontier labs’ total customer bases, but they’re symbolically valuable. Wooing the U.S. government is important enough to these companies that they’re offering their technology at a steep discount. And, in another bid to speed up the administration’s use of the tech, seve…

If you’ve been paying attention to AI at all lately, you’ve certainly seen the “Something Big Is Happening” essay by Matt Shumer, or at least some of the reaction to it. In it, Shumer describes how coding, for him, has completely transitioned from manually writing code to simply prompting and approving the near-flawless work done by AI. The piece was meant as a warning to all knowledge workers, essentially saying: AI has taken over my job, and it’s coming for yours next. There have been countless thought pieces on the merits and flaws of Shumer’s argument, and I have no intention of adding to the pile. But journalism is knowledge work, too, and the field had its own, …

As snow piled up in front of bus stops and fire hydrants during New York City’s second winter storm of the year, city workers have tried to move fast to remove it before snow hardened into ice. A new internal tool makes that job easier to track. The city’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY) now tags infrastructure that’s been plowed in a mobile mapping tool that employees can update on the go. “We have started the work of geotagging every single bus shelter and crosswalk,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday, and overnight, he said the city cleared more than 1,600 crosswalks, 419 fire hydrants, and nearly 900 bus stops. DSNY handles trash collection, but it’s al…

There are few things that unite the world like animal videos. There are also few things that are so readily commoditized. Both have occurred in the case of Punch, a baby monkey at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan. Punch captured hearts around the world after a viral post showed him hugging a stuffed orangutan toy after being rejected by other monkeys. E-commerce sellers act quickly with monkey merch Now, the young Japanese macaque and his stuffed friend are available as everything from toys on Etsy to a—decide for yourself if it’s AI—children’s book on Amazon. There’s also an “official” Punch Monkey store with products like stickers, shirts, and mugs. S…

Time capsules are designed to be resilient by nature. But no time capsule has survived as long as designers hope “America’s Time Capsule” will. The time capsule, designed for the semiquincentennial of the U.S. founding, is being created by America250, the nonpartisan, congressionally mandated group organizing commemorations for this year. The plan is to bury the time capsule underground in Philadelphia at Independence National Historical Park on July 4, and for it to be opened in another 250 years, in 2276. The problem is time capsules, which are typically buried underground, and exposed to the elements, don’t really last that long. “We’ve unburied some time …

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia on Wednesday announced another quarter of astounding quarterly growth as investors try to decipher whether technology’s latest craze is overblown hyperbole or a springboard into a new era of prosperity and productivity. The results for the November-January period blew past the analyst projections that shape investors’ perceptions, as has been the case since Nvidia’s high-end chips emerged as AI’s best building blocks three years ago. Nvidia’s fiscal fourth-quarter revenue surged 73% from the previous year to $68.1 billion while its profit nearly doubled to roughly $43 billion, or $1.76 per share. “No quarter has had more riding …

For the first time in history, podcasts have overtaken talk radio as the most-listened-to medium for spoken-word audio in the United States. Podcasts, including video podcasts, eclipsed AM/FM talk radio (which notably doesn’t include listening to music on the radio), with 40% of listening time, as opposed to 39% for radio, according to Edison Research’s Share of Ear survey. Researchers have tracked these statistics over the last decade. In 2015, AM/FM radio accounted for 75% of the time Americans spent listening to spoken-word audio. At the time, podcasts accounted for just 10%. Year over year, that gap has slowly closed, as podcasts boomed in popularity, incr…

eBay is laying off about 800 employees, or 6% of its full-time workforce, saying the move is a push to align with its “strategic priorities.” It comes a week after the company announced it was acquiring second-hand clothing app Depop from rival Etsy for $1.2 billion. Depop is popular with millennials and Gen Z, and is part of eBay’s bid for younger consumers, who are gravitating to second-hand shopping online for sustainability and financial reasons. eBay Inc. (EBAY) was trading up 3.3% in midday trading at the time of this writing. This is eBay’s third round of layoffs since 2023. The online second-hand retailer cut 1,000 jobs in 2024 (9% of its workforce), a…

AI has not changed the importance of judgment in product leadership. What it has changed is the cost of getting it wrong. Early in my career, I learned a principle that still guides how I think about building products: The strongest decisions rarely start with perfect data. They start with conviction, a hypothesis shaped by experience, customer insight, and pattern recognition. What ultimately separates high-performing product organizations from average ones is how quickly and confidently instinct is validated. That validation is the true role of product analytics, and increasingly, it is where AI amplifies its value. Analytics tests whether what you believed woul…

If the 1990 classic movie Ghost is any indication, the dead love a good tune. We all remember when the recently deceased Sam (Patrick Swayze) had his infamous pottery session with his very alive partner Molly (Demi Moore). Now, Liquid Death and Spotify are aiming to use music in a similar way, by giving a few hundred of the recently deceased the opportunity to hear their favorite music for all of eternity. The two brands have collaborated on what they claim to be the first-ever Bluetooth-enabled speaker urn. The tasteful white urn has a top outfitted with a Bluetooth speaker. Spotify is also introducing the “Eternal Playlist Generator” in the U.S., where you can…

Grating coworkers, tone-deaf bosses, a ninth ask for revisions on a PowerPoint deck—as the workday annoyances pile up, it’s only a matter of time before every worker hits a boiling point. And when they do, they often hit up a trusted colleague to vent to in a direct message on a platform like Slack or Teams. “So often you’re sitting in a meeting, you’re hearing something, and you’re like, ‘Am I crazy, or are they contradicting themselves? Did they change the strategy again? Can you believe they just said this thing?’” says one former employee at a consulting firm, who agreed to speak to Fast Company anonymously. Sounding off to coworkers in DMs feels like both an out…

Some consider self-employment a soul-crushing grind—a pit of despair one falls into after being laid off, or after graduating into a job market where entry-level jobs have evaporated. Chasing clients, following up on payment requests, and working into the night, all for little pay . . . it’s a stopgap until you find a full-time job. Who on earth would choose it? But freelancing doesn’t have to feel like gig work. And in fact, plenty of people, especially Gen Zers, do deliberately choose it. If you’re skeptical about freelancing or struggling to earn enough to pay your bills, it might be time for a mindset audit: Instead of thinking like a paycheck-chasing hustler, thi…

Being a middle manager often feels like living in two worlds at once. On one side, executives cascade big goals and sweeping strategies. On the other, teams look to you for clarity, advocacy, and daily guidance. You’re constantly reconciling top-down demands with bottom-up realities, often with too little time and too few resources to satisfy either side. The paradox of the role is stark: Middle managers carry enormous responsibility for execution but don’t always have the authority to make critical decisions. You’re expected to deliver results on budgets you don’t control, within structures you didn’t design, and through policies you didn’t write. This tension is one…

Last night’s surprise announcement from Netflix that it was abandoning its Warner Bros. takeover bid in the wake of a “superior” offer from Paramount Skydance has sent shockwaves through both Hollywood and Wall Street. And investors in all three companies have reacted strongly. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, Warner Bros. Discovery said it has determined that a revised bid for its cinema and television properties from Paramount Skydance was a “superior proposal” to Netflix’s long-standing offer of $82.7 billion. Paramount, which has been in a hostile bidding war with Netflix over the movie studio, issued a new proposal to Warner Br…

In recent months, fans of Burger King appear to have fallen out of love with the chain’s signature sandwich, the Whopper. Social media has been full of complaints about the quality of ingredients and even completely deformed burgers. In response, the burger chain said this week that it is rolling out a revamped Whopper. Here’s what’s changing, and where and when you can get yours. Why is Burger King revamping the Whopper? In short, customers became unhappy with the quality of the chain’s flagship burger in recent years. Criticisms range from the lackluster quality of ingredients in the burger to soggy buns to even smashed burgers (no, not in a good way). …

Hopefully you never find yourself left behind by a partner while hiking a mountain or abandoned in the woods. If you do, you might be a victim of an “alpine divorce.” The phrase has gained traction on social media in recent weeks following news of a climber’s guilty verdict after he left his girlfriend behind on a hike, where she froze to death on Austria’s highest mountain. The phrase is said to have originated from the 1893 short story An Alpine Divorce by Robert Barr, in which an unhappy husband plots to kill his wife by pushing her off a mountain during a trip to the Swiss Alps. Across platforms like TikTok and X, women have started sharing their own stori…

If you think Paris is always a good idea and the French do everything better, especially leisure—then this one is for you. Unlike Americans, who treat their weekends as a sprint to see who can do the most chores, Sundays are sacred in France—a time to slow down, reset for the week, and do as little as possible. (“Even protests in France happen every day except Sunday . . . that’s how sacred [they] are,” Céline Kaplan, co-founder of upcycled products marketplace OOOF (Out of Office Forever) and PR agent for French clients in New York, tells The Zoe Report.) Looking for more work/life balance? Try treating Sunday as a holiday instead of the first day of a new week, …

Target will stop selling cereals containing synthetic colors by the end of May. The Minneapolis-based discounter said Friday it had been phasing out synthetic colors in cereals for several years. Right now, 85% of its cereal sales already come from products made without synthetic dyes. Target said it has worked with national brands and its private brands to reformulate products as needed. Some cereals — including Trix and Lucky Charms, which are made by General Mills — will have updated formulations, Target said. Target said it will no longer carry brands that don’t reformulate, but it didn’t name the brands. General Mills announced last year that it planned t…