What's on Your Mind?

There’s a restaurant in New York City called Rosa Mexicana that positions itself as a fresh take on Mexican cuisine. It’s upscale, well curated, and delicious. However, my favorite part about the dining experience is when you order guacamole, the wait-staff wheels out a little cart, draped in the traditional Mexican cloth, a vibrant sarape, and staked with fresh ingredients—avocados, lime, onion, salt, all the things. And as they arrive at your table, they make the guacamole right there in front of you. It’s quite the show, and it makes the entire dining experience better. What the restaurant has realized is what some of the best organizations know to be true: when th…

During a lunch with my friend Kurt at the Chicago Club—one of those quietly elegant institutions where history sits comfortably in the room—I arrived with a question. It was one that could only be asked by someone trying to understand the United States from outside its horizon. Kurt’s surname carries enough S’s and K’s to suggest Eastern European roots. I am Brazilian, the grandson of Italians, Portuguese, Ukrainians, and with some Indigenous blood. Our grandparents crossed oceans from similar places, yet our lives unfolded inside different societies. I asked him: If our families had boarded different ships—mine arriving at Ellis Island and his in Brazil—would we …

For years, we have been outsourcing pieces of cognition so gradually that the shift barely registered. We outsourced memory to search engines after the well-known “Google effect” showed that when people expect information to remain accessible online, they are less likely to remember the information itself and more likely to remember where to find it. We outsourced navigation to GPS, even as research began to show that heavy reliance on it can weaken spatial memory when we have to find our own way. And we outsourced more and more of our social coordination to platforms that decide what we see, when we respond, and how we stay in sync with one another. Now we are begin…

When global trade buckles, Ryan Petersen is the person executives call. The founder and CEO of Flexport offers a real-time account of the Strait of Hormuz crisis—what he’s seeing on the ground, on the water, and across the supply chains straining under the pressure. As ripple effects of the crisis are being felt in different ways in different parts of the world, Petersen provides both a micro and macro view that business leaders need to hear. 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…

A former SpaceX engineer walked away from rockets to chase something far more impactful: a perfect coffeemaker. JC Foster left the aerospace giant to launch Puresteel, a startup building what he described as “an affordable, convenient, plastic-free coffeemaker,” he wrote in a post on X. For Foster, developing Puresteel was about more than a perfectly brewed cup of coffee at a precise 200°F. “Creating Puresteel was about solving a problem that hits close to home and helping humans thrive,” he wrote in the company’s Note from the Founder. The problem, as he saw it, was plastic. Foster began searching for a completely plastic-free coffee machine and quickl…

Bellwether trials are complicated but consequential. Pulled from a morass of claims, they’re designed to test how a jury responds to a broader legal theory. Often, they fall flat. Today in a California court, one did not. Kaley, a 20-year-old who alleged that social media harmed her childhood by addicting her and keeping her on platforms like Instagram for up to 16 hours a day, won $3 million in damages. A jury found Meta and Alphabet liable, assigning 70% of the damages to Meta and 30% to Alphabet. TikTok and Snapchat, also named as defendants, settled before trial without admitting fault. The amount—roughly 0.0015% of Meta’s 2025 revenue, and even less for …

The automotive industry is driving toward an electric future, and one Montreal-based company is determined to tow the recreational vehicle market along with it. Taiga Motors has spent the last decade building out production capacity to deliver fully electric snowmobiles and Jet Ski-like personal watercraft that they believe can go toe-to-toe with gas-powered alternatives. As with electric cars, the ride is designed to feel smoother, faster, and whisper-quiet, filling an unaddressed niche in the motor sports vehicle category. “If you’re on the water, all you hear is the wind and the waves. And if you’re on the snow, you hardly hear anything—just that track spinni…

A new browser extension just debuted that’s designed to be used in tandem with an AI chatbot. Its goal is to make the experience worse. “Are you concerned that you or your loved ones might be experiencing a LLM-induced psychosis? Or participating in a massive de-skilling event? Or outsourcing cognitive and emotional functions to auto-complete?” designer Sam Lavigne asks in a YouTube video introducing his new product. “Then you should install ‘Slow LLM’ on your computer.” Lavigne is an assistant professor of synthetic media and algorithmic justice at Parsons School of Design, as well as an artist and web designer. Slow LLM is his latest creation, and its entire…

The most impressive move by three-time world surfing champ John Florence in his new video series isn’t riding a wave; it’s flying across open ocean on a catamaran while holding his puking 1-year-old son over a bucket. The new six-part series called Vela, directed by Florence and produced with outdoor gear and apparel company Yeti, embodies a broader shift in how the iconic surfer is approaching both his career and the goal behind his namesake brand, Florence. After winning his third World Surf League title in September 2024, Florence chose to leave the pro surfing tour to sail around the world with his wife, Lauryn, and son, Darwin. They lived off the grid, e…

One of the most distinctive features of the U.S. military’s high-energy laser weapon of choice isn’t the system itself—it’s how operators control it. In a 60 Minutes segment on military laser weapons that aired on March 15, CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl traveled to Albuquerque for an up-close look at defense contractor AV’s 20-kilowatt LOCUST Laser Weapons System, which has been watching over U.S. service members abroad (and triggering occasional airspace shutdowns near the U.S.-Mexico border at home) in recent years. With Iranian Shahed now pummeling the Middle East and the U.S. Defense Department racing to field inexpensive countermeasures to address the ever-…

For years, parents, teenagers, pediatricians, educators, and whistleblowers have pushed the idea that social media is detrimental to young people’s mental health and can lead to addiction, eating disorders, sexual exploitation, and suicide. For the first time, juries in two states took their side. In Los Angeles on Wednesday, a jury found both Meta and YouTube liable for harms to children using their services. In New Mexico, a jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. Tech watchdog groups, families, and children’s advocates cheered the jury decisions. “Th…

Many people enjoy sleeping with their pets. Who wouldn’t? After a hard day of work, cuddling up with a cute animal that shows you unconditional love is just the thing many people need. But sadly, after digging into a newly released study, they may start to think twice before letting their furry friends into bed at night. The Conversation recently published an article highlighting the major findings of a study by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that examined the pros and cons of having pets sleep in bed with them—something that 46% of respondents do. Though the research suggests that sleeping with your pet in bed may have psychological benefits, it may actually …

Most people don’t actually want to give up their phone. They just want it to stop tugging at them like a needy toddler. There’s a difference. One suggests extremism and poor reception. The other is far more sensible: learning how to live with technology without letting it quietly take charge of your attention, mood, and nervous system while pretending it’s being helpful. Because for most of us, the problem isn’t “addiction” in the dramatic sense. No one’s pawning the sofa for screen time. It’s accumulation. A thousand tiny habits layered together until checking becomes automatic and being offline feels faintly unsettling, like you’ve forgotten something important …

The answer to America’s submarine bottleneck, the U.S. Navy has decided, lies as much in software as it does in steel. A new multibillion-dollar facility in Cherokee, Alabama, aims to harness AI and robotics to build submarine components faster and more reliably. The automated “factory of the future” will produce parts for the Navy’s Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, both central to the U.S. fleet. It will cost $2.4 billion to develop. “This factory is the first of three facilities designed to address the most critical bottlenecks in the maritime industrial base,” said John C. Phelan, secretary of the Navy, in a stat…

Alex Balazs has spent more than two decades inside Intuit, starting as an engineer working on early versions of QuickBooks Online, when moving financial workflows to the internet still felt experimental. Now, as CTO, he is helping lead a more radical shift: turning financial software into systems that can think and act on a user’s behalf. “This combines the speed and scale of AI with human judgment and accountability,” he tells Fast Company. For decades, financial software has functioned as a ledger, categorizing transactions and generating reports about what has already happened. That model is beginning to break. Advances in AI are pushing the category toward real-ti…

The Senate early Friday morning approved Homeland Security funds to pay Transportation Security Administration agents and most other agencies, but not the immigration enforcement operations at the heart of the budget impasse that has jammed airports, disrupted travel and imposed financial hardship on workers. The deal, which the Senate approved unanimously without a roll call, next goes to the House, which is expected to consider it Friday. “We can get at least a lot of the government opened up again and then we’ll go from there,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D. “Obviously, we’ll still have some work ahead of us.” With pressure mounting to resolve the 42…

Austria’s governing coalition on Friday announced plans to ban social media use for children under 14, joining a string of other countries in drawing up restrictions for young people. Alexander Pröll, the official in Chancellor Christian Stocker’s office responsible for digitization, said that draft legislation will be drawn up by the end of June. He said that “technically modern methods” of age verification will be used that allow users to verify their age while respecting their privacy. It wasn’t immediately clear when the plan to introduce a minimum age, which will need parliamentary approval, might take effect. Australia in 2024 took the lead, becoming the first co…

It’s no secret that children and adolescents have a lot more eyes on them these days thanks to everything from social media to cameras in everyone’s pockets. This experience (along with encouragement from brands such as Disney) has created space for young people to mimic adults, embracing cosmetics and anti-aging creams. Now, Italy’s consumer protection regulator says it is looking into the marketing strategies of some of the main contributors to this phenomenon: beauty companies. The country’s Competition Authority (AGCM) has launched two investigations into Sephora and Benefit Cosmetics for allegedly failing to clearly indicate that their products are not…

As the government shutdown drags on, having devastating effects on Transportation Security Administration staffing, millions of Americans continue to face long lines at TSA checkpoints at airports nationwide. With the busy Easter holiday travel weekend around the corner, wait times are expected to worsen as the number of travelers increases. If you have a flight scheduled in the days ahead, here are some travel gadgets that can help make your TSA wait times more bearable. Battery packs for long TSA lines Thanks to modern smartphone batteries, which can last a day or more, you ordinarily don’t have to worry about your phone running out of juice if you have …

Your back pain gets worse as you sit through a long meeting. Your wrist pain flares when you’re typing furiously to meet a tight deadline. During a busy shift at the grocery store, you feel a migraine coming on. If that sounds familiar, you’ve got plenty of company. About one in four U.S. adults suffer from chronic pain. The share who say they are in chronic pain either on most days or every day in the past three months is growing: It jumped by nearly 4 percentage points to 23% of U.S. adults in 2023, up from 19% in 2019. Chronic pain is not only hard on workers trying to do their jobs, but it also takes a toll on employers and the economy as a whole by costing an…

Some of us old-timers fondly remember the satisfying clickity-clack of a physical smartphone keyboard. Back when email was king and multi-paragraph arguments on social networks were few and far between. Well, if you’re someone who longs for the days of firing off missives at breakneck speed, I’ve got good news: The physical keyboard is experiencing a renaissance, and it’s looking like it’s not just a nostalgic gimmick. Yes, hardware keyboards are officially making a comeback, and there are a few devices leading the charge that you’ll definitely want to keep an eye on. Unihertz Titan 2 Elite Now, Unihertz is no stranger to this market. The company already ma…

The promise of AI was always that it would handle certain kinds of work so we could focus on others. It was going to free our time, reduce friction, and let us concentrate on what requires human judgment and creativity. That promise assumed we would divide the labor wisely. That we would hand off the operational drag—the scheduling, formatting, and summarizing that eats the day before we’ve had a chance to think. We would keep the cognitive friction—the hard work of wrestling with ambiguity, forming a point of view, and figuring out the right approach. The work where your value is actually made. Instead we handed over the thinking first. Because cognitive friction…

The gas station convenience chain Buc-ee’s is known for selling a slew of logo-ed merch to its devoted brand fans. And increasingly, it’s also known for aggressive trademark enforcement, suing competitors, apparel brands, and small businesses over logos, mascots, and even names it argues are too close to its signature smiling beaver. Most recently, Buc-ee’s, which has locations across the South, has gone after Ohio chain Mickey’s for its mascot logo, a cartoon moose, a move greeted with some skepticism. After all, as one skeptical commentator noted: “A beaver is not a moose.” Fair enough. But as the Texas-based chain grows, such lawsuits—often focused on cartoon anima…

Toxic bosses are not only a “people issue.” They are a balance-sheet issue, a culture issue, and a reputational issue. And if you are a CEO, founder, or a leader trying to build something lasting, you cannot afford to treat them as background noise. Here’s the truth: a single toxic boss can kill psychological safety, drain creativity, spike turnover, and teach your next generation of leaders that fear is an acceptable management tool. I’ve spent 25 years in organizational psychology, watching this pattern repeat across industries, including tech and other high-growth environments. I’ve also conducted interviews and surveys across North America to dig deep into the…