What's on Your Mind?

You’re at your usual weekly team meeting. The team leader asks for ideas, and you immediately come up with the best one. It’s not just clever. It’s perfect. You rush to say it, glowing with anticipation. Silence. Nobody reacts. You walk out deflated, wondering how a group of smart people could ignore the obvious answer. The assumption is simple. If the idea is sound, it should carry weight. We tend to believe that the one with the best ideas has the greatest impact. We take for granted that influence flows from competence and that those who are right, early and often, naturally shape decisions. But decades of research in social psychology and decision science tell a d…

OpenAI’s first artist in residence is launching a new company that aims to turn your thoughts into actual products. Today, entrepreneur and roboticist Alexander Reben announces Phyzify, a lab using AI tools to rapidly prototype physical objects based on your imagination. “There’s a huge gap between idea and [bringing that] thing into existence,” says Reben, cofounder of Phyzify. “And I really think AI and robotics and quantum computing and all the technology that’s about to come is going to accelerate [closing] that gap [and] make walking across that bridge a lot easier.” But what Reben has in mind is far greater than just 3D printing. He’s envisions Phyzify as a …

A recent class-action lawsuit against David Protein, filed in January, alleges the company misrepresented the amount of calories and fat in its popular, healthy-branded bar, claiming that it had “way more” of both than customers were led to believe. Now, in response to the lawsuit, social media is having a field day with comparisons to the 2004 movie Mean Girls, with one TikTok user and apparent David Protein customer posting, “I have been Regina Georged.” Here’s a quick brief on what’s happening. Wait, remind me, what’s the ‘Mean Girls’ plot again? If you’re like me, you’ve seen Mean Girls a dozen times. The plot is a hilarious and biting commentary on the…

The ongoing war in the Middle East continues to embroil new participants—from residential properties in Dubai to protestors in Iran getting caught in the crossfire of drones and missiles. And at the same time, global trade is slowing to a crawl, thanks to the effective shutdown of the Hormuz Strait, through which 11% of all global trade passes. Yet another sector finding itself in the firing line—literally—is data centers. A number of them in the region have been hit by enemy strikes during the two-week war, causing damage and outages. Data centers are an important part of modern economies, enabling the delivery of digital services that keep countries going. T…

My desk is a disaster. Cold brew from this morning, now room temperature. A stack of unopened mail that’s been piling up since the holiday break. Outside my window: rain. Not the romantic kind. This downpour is more Mary J. Blige and Ja Rule than Soul for Real. When I log on to my first video call of the day, I see the same gloom in everyone else’s backgrounds. Well, everyone except Sam. Unlike most people at the Seattle-based organization, Sam, a content strategist, has been working remotely from Mexico for the past four months. His Zoom backdrop almost looks virtual. The solar glare on his forehead makes questions about the weather seem rhetorical. His floor-to-…

Cursive handwriting is making a big comeback in schools for students of the Gen Alpha generation (born between 2010 and 2025). New Jersey and Pennsylvania are the most recent in a growing number of states to bring old-fashioned penmanship back into the classroom, with governors in both states enacting legislation this year requiring schools to teach it. New Jersey had stopped requiring it in 2010—but new legislation now mandates schools there to teach cursive to kids ages 8 to 11, in third to fifth grades. The Garden State follows about two dozen states in mandating that cursive handwriting be taught. Those states include California, which signed a law in 2024 req…

We’re excited to announce the judges of the 2026 Innovation by Design Awards. Innovation by Design honors the best projects and ideas across the design spectrum, as represented by our fantastic group of jurors, who come from some of the world’s most exciting design-led companies. You can read more about their expertise and backgrounds below. And remember to apply for the Innovation by Design Awards by April 11. Erik Carter, Designer Erik Carter is a designer, illustrator, art director, and writer whose work bridges commercial design and critical discourse. He has designed for Verso Books, The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, The New Yorker, and New D…

“The purpose of computers is human freedom.” – Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) The computer is as emblematic of the American dream as the automobile. Perhaps it’s only natural that Apple, HP, Adobe, Google, and Amazon were each launched out of a garage. It was inside the garage that the modern era of personal computers was born, where anyone could own the power to calculate millions, and then billions of processes per second. PCs are a tool designed to move us faster, with a hood you can pop open to soup up. We insist that our computers speed up every year if only because it’s proof of progress. The very term “personal computer” promises libert…

Spring is a glorious, warm season after the harsh cold of winter—filled with light and more sun-induced vitamin D. Friday, March 20, 2026 (at exactly 10:46 a.m. ET), marks both its triumphant return in the Northern Hemisphere and the spring equinox. So, get ready for longer days, warmer weather, and flower blooms that may cause sneezing. Let’s take a deeper look at the science behind seasons and what exactly an equinox is. What causes the seasons? The tilt of the Earth’s axis as it orbits around the sun is what causes seasons. Depending on that angle, different parts of the world receive different amounts of sunlight. In the Northern Hemisphere, we experie…

Box CEO and tech thought leader Aaron Levie says he recently met with 20 enterprise AI and IT leaders and came away with insights into what everyone, especially the stock market, wants to know: how—and how fast—large U.S. companies are adopting AI for core business functions. In a post on X, he outlined the main themes he heard. Had meetings and a dinner with 20+ enterprise AI and IT leaders today. Lots of interesting conversations around the state of AI in large enterprises, especially regulated businesses. Here are some of general trends: * Agents are clearly the big thing. Enterprises moving from… — Aaron Levie (@levie) March 19, 2026 Here’s a closer look a…

High-speed winds and sideways rain swept through the courtyard of Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro. Participants received instructions to stay put. This was both bad and good. It was bad because we were all stuck. At the same time, it was good, because at least we were stuck an hour before my keynote address. We were at a climate conference in Brazil for the week, where I was due to present a speech on design thinking and leadership. This was something I took more as a suggestion than a mandate. My first slide featured a Mary Oliver quote on it that said, “There is only one question: how to love this world.” The wind howled. One of the producers panicked. I had a…

Actor John Stamos is thinking a lot more about potential opportunities to live-stream these days—be it at New York’s Thanksgiving Day parade, performing with the Beach Boys when he heads to Route 66 for the 100-year anniversary later this year, or even while getting his first-ever tattoo in Austin for SXSW. “I thought, ‘Oh, we should have live-streamed that,” said Stamos, speaking at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “That could have been interesting watching me go through that kind of pain.” As chief innovation officer of Zeam, a startup that lets people stream local TV stations and other content from anywhere, Stamos is excited to bring people an alternative to w…

In some ways, the attention game for brands is only getting tougher. The increased pace of the cultural cycle and the tidal wave of slop hitting our feeds have added a layer of suspicion to any brand work. Is it real? How do you know? These are big, existential questions. This year, 20 companies, ranging from brands to agencies, are answering them from the perspective of marketers looking to build real connections with real people. The companies here are not only working to embed into and engage with culture, but they’re doing it in ways that reinforce the role of humans in that dynamic. It includes Dick’s Sporting Goods launching its own internal film studio to …

This is ‘The Truth About Leadership,’ Fast Company’s latest video series, where CEOs and industry leaders speak honestly and candidly about what it’s really like to be at the top. No corporate jargon—just real talk. First up: Alex Cooper, host of Call Her Daddy and founder and CEO of Unwell. View the full article

Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit and cofounder alongside Alexis Ohanian, speaks with Fast Company about what it takes to be an effective leader. He explains why imposter syndrome isn’t necessarily a bad thing and how his first job helped shape his leadership style. View the full article

When it was founded in 2017, the shoe brand Kizik was on a mission to bring hands-free shoe technology into the mainstream. It’s now taking two big steps to further that goal. The company is today announcing both a major partnership with New Balance and a new shoe, the $149.95 Kizik Freedom Run, which debuts on April 17. Together, the moves represent an expansion of its existing licensing agreements strategy and of its tech into the performance category for the first time. At its core, Kizik’s tech has always focused on the experience of putting on a shoe in the first place—the company designs slip-on models that cut lace-tying out of the equation through a varie…

Finding an affordable place to live right now is a challenge—but it’s one that different groups of Americans are grappling with in a variety of ways. A new report from Realtor.com explores the distinct barriers to affordable housing that renters face in an economy that has many budgets stretched thin. In the analysis, which draws on 2024 surveys of the country’s 100 biggest metro areas, Realtor.com found three distinct groups emerge in the U.S. rental market data: young renters, family renters, and long-term renters. The one thing those groups share in common? Making decisions about where to live is an exercise in financial survival these days—not a lifestyle choice. …

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. François Chollet on AI benchmarks I wrote an exclusive feature this week about the launch of a new AI benchmark called ARC-AGI-3. The benchmark was created by influential AI researcher Francois Chollet, who also created the widely-used Keras deep learning framework, a simplified toolkit for building AI models. Chollet has long argued that current AI models are limited in their ability to navigate novel situations and problems. The ARC test, which humans can master but not most AI s…

There’s a tremendous, ageless opportunity hiding in plain sight, but marketers need to look through a different lens to see it. Right now, there are some 35 million U.S. empty nester women, as I calculate it, and a growing percentage of them are single. They aren’t retreating into rest and relaxation; they are stepping out to exult in activities they finally have the time, money, and motivation to pursue. Historically, marketers have largely overlooked this demographic. Or, if they address this market, it’s only for margin and share growth. That’s the wrong framework. The real opportunity isn’t just about capturing their spending power, it’s about recognizing a profo…

You’ve spent years building a robust professional network. You’ve cultivated relationships with peers, mentors, and industry leaders. So when you signal that you’re exploring new opportunities, you expect your network to perform. Yet too often, promising conversations dissolve into silence. Warm introductions never materialize. Emails go unanswered. This isn’t a reflection of your professional standing. It’s a design problem: you’re making it too hard for people to help you. The fix is straightforward. Make it easy. Here are three ways to do so. Ask To Write to Their Contact Directly When you reach out to a contact seeking an introduction to a decision-maker, a…

Designers love intention. Architects draw immaculate plans; curators craft pristine galleries; developers imagine carefully choreographed public experiences. But once the general population shows up, those spaces tend to change. Sometimes there’s an instinct among designers to fight against it; it’s hard to let go of an aesthetic goal. But—more often than not—the public makes spaces and designs better. It’s the people, not solely the place, who spark true imagination and inevitably shape its character. It’s the people who have the power to turn a design into something more welcoming and relevant, and push designers to think outside the box in creativity and problem-so…

With some of the largest and most influential tech giants planning to go public this year, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the mega IPO. Stock listings from OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX could all potentially happen in 2026, and it is the latter that may make its market debut first. Here’s the latest on the potential initial public offering from Elon Musk’s space-tech company: When is SpaceX’s IPO? For some time, investors have expected, or at least speculated, that Elon Musk’s rocket and space technology company, SpaceX, would go public sometime in 2026. And it looks like that may finally be happening. Citing anonymous sources, the Wall Street J…

It was 1997, and Matt Berman, the creative director of JFK Jr.’s George magazine, had just gotten back to his hotel in Los Angeles. He had left the ‘Garden of Eden’ style set he’d concocted for the cover of the September issue: lush with greenery and replete with live animals. It would reach peak ripeness once the star, Pam Anderson, arrived on set the next day as the “first woman,” to illustrate a feature on the 20 most fascinating women in politics. But there was a problem. A note was waiting for him at the front desk of the hotel. It was from Anderson. She was canceling. “She was like, ‘I can’t, a million apologies,’” recalls Berman. “Something like that. It w…

I talk to a lot of people who are quietly terrified about their careers right now, wondering if the thing they spent 15 years getting good at is about to become irrelevant. The kind of fear where you smile through another LinkedIn post about AI productivity gains and feel your stomach drop. I get it. I build AI systems and agents for enterprise clients—and for myself. I watch these tools get more capable every week. And the narrative everywhere, from VCs, from CEOs, from the breathless tech press, is that your job is going to be automated. That you’re going to be replaced. That AI is coming for your job, and you should be very, very worried. I think that narrative…

The historically long security lines currently snaking through U.S. airports are the painful result of extreme circumstances. Callouts, no-shows, and resignations by Transportation Security Administration workers fed up with a lack of pay during a partial government shutdown, combined with a bump in spring break travelers, have created unusually congested airport security checkpoints. For the architects and airport authorities that work together to design these heavily regulated spaces, it’s the kind of convergence you can’t exactly plan for. But, according to some of the designers of these spaces, airports are increasingly incorporating design features that can help …