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The idea of the “Queen Bee” has been buzzing around corporate life for decades. You’ve heard the story: A woman finally breaks into senior leadership, only to turn around and block other women from rising behind her. She is territorial, icy, maybe even hostile. She has clawed her way to the top, the logic goes, and she intends to stay there alone. It is a vivid image, and that is precisely why it has survived. It gives managers a neat explanation for gender inequity: maybe women just don’t support each other. Maybe the problem isn’t the system; maybe it’s . . . women. But that explanation falls apart the moment you look closely. A zero-sum world The term “Queen…

The world’s leading minds in AI are gathering in Paris for the AI Action Summit, which kicked off on Monday. French president Emmanuel Macron is hosting the summit, which includes Vice President JD Vance among its attendees. But the summit—which is focused on discussion and debate about the future of the technology—comes at a time when things are moving quickly in the AI space. While France’s minister for AI and digital affairs, Clara Chappaz, may want to keep the debate focused on three key objectives for the summit, covering societal and cultural, economic, and diplomatic needs, there’s much more going on at the minute. Between Project Stargate, the U.S.’s $500 …

I don’t know if urbanism is science or art, but I do know its outcomes are best with a dose of creativity. There’s plenty to learn from the giant leaps in art and science to improve your urbanism advocacy. Happy, healthy communities aren’t made from being stuck in a bygone era. The value of fog Impressionist painters didn’t discover fog. It was always there, but it wasn’t something people were discussing much in the early 19th century leading up to the impressionists and tonalists. Each of those artistic movements created illusions of reality with familiar scenes. James McNeill Whistler was an influential figure and one of the original tonalists. Here’s what he…

Gen Z founders may not have spent as much time in the workplace when they started their companies as some older founders. But in some ways, that gives them unique insight that can be valuable for leaders. For Katie Diasti and Anam Lakhani, a disconnect from the work they were doing as interns has helped to shape their leadership style. Specifically, those experiences inspired them to ensure that all of their team members feel a sense of both ownership and impact for the work they’re doing. “I remember interning and creating a whole deck and making a whole presentation, but never being allowed to be in the room that the presentation was in,” recalled Diasti, found…

Back in October, Google ended software support for the original and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats. On the surface, that doesn’t seem totally unreasonable, considering those original devices are roughly 14 years old at this point. If you have one, you can still use it as a thermostat, but it will no longer connect to the internet. As a result, you can’t connect to it using the Nest or Google Home apps. That may not seem like a big deal, except that the single greatest thing about using a Nest Thermostat wasn’t the fact that it would learn your habits and create routines, or that it would detect when you’re not home and adjust accordingly. No, the best thi…

AllBirds Inc. was valued at $4 billion less than five years ago. Now, it will be sold for just $39 million. The shoe company on Monday announced a definitive agreement with American Exchange Group (AXNY), which involves selling all of its intellectual property, assets, and liabilities. Privately held AXNY owns a number of brands, including Aerosoles, Ed Hardy, and Jonathan Adler. “We are incredibly thankful to our teams for the work they have been doing to fuel our product engine, build awareness of Allbirds and deliver an engaging customer experience,” Allbirds CEO Joe Vernachio said in a statement. The sale has already been approved by Allbirds’ boar…

In 2021, Netflix’s executive vice president of game development Mike Verdu made a big announcement: “Let the Games Begin.” Four years later, Verdu is out—and Netflix’s grand experiment in gaming still feels like a work in progress. Netflix bet big on gaming. They brought in Verdu from Facebook and EA, and then went on a buying spree, acquiring a handful of mobile gaming studios like Boss Fight and Night School. But, by the end of 2022, only about 1% of the Netflix subscribers were actually playing its games. At the time, co-CEO Ted Sarandos said that gaming had “a bunch of positives” even if growth was slow: “These are small numbers, we’re good with that.” (Netflix de…

The death of a pope sets in motion a series of carefully orchestrated rites and rituals well before the conclave to elect his successor begins. They involve the certification of death and public display of his body for the faithful to pay their respects, followed by the funeral and burial. Pope Francis, who died on Monday, revised various rites last year, simplifying the funeral rituals to emphasize his role as a mere bishop and allowing for burial outside the Vatican in keeping with his wishes. But the core elements remain, including the three key moments that must be observed between the death of a pope and his burial. The reforms are incorporated into the slim red vo…

It’s fair to assume that most of us can relate to the famous saying, “in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” This is just the second half of one of Benjamin Franklin’s last great nuggets of wisdom, but more on that to come. As Franklin would likely have reminded you, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, is the last day to file your federal income taxes for 2024. With everything going on at Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), including reported layoffs at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), it might be tempting to try and fly under the radar this year and not file your taxes, hoping to dodge an audit. However, even with all th…

It’s being called the Great Flattening: a global wave of layoffs triggered by the adoption of AI that is primarily hitting middle management. Amazon is currently leading this managerial reset, aggressively streamlining its corporate structure to reduce bureaucracy and speed decision-making. And although the tech sector remains the epicenter, projections suggest that by the end of 2026, up to 20% of firms will use AI to significantly reduce middle management ranks. The catalyst is the rise of agentic AI—autonomous tools capable of executing complex workflows, managing data streams, and generating predictive modeling for decision-making with minimal oversight. All with …

Some high-profile acquisitions take out a rising competitor, such as Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed in 2009, some immediately expand a business’s suite of offerings, such as Salesforce’s 2020 purchase of Slack, and some may morph into an unrecognizable asset, like Amazon’s 1999 purchase of Alexa Internet, then a web traffic-tracking website. (The first Amazon Echo marking Alexa’s debut would launch in 2014.) But many lower-profile tech company acquisitions are made at least in part to gain access to specialized engineering talent. So-called “acquihires” haven’t traditionally raised many eyebrows. But the term’s definition has been expanding as the AI arms race …

After a long court battle, the SAVE plan is officially kaput. Launched in 2023, the Biden administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) federal student loan repayment plan was created to replace the outgoing REPAYE program–and help keep Biden’s campaign promise to forgive student loans. Under the SAVE plan, a borrower’s monthly payment would be calculated based on income and family size and could be set as low as $0 per month for the lowest-earning borrowers. The program also fast-tracked forgiveness for those who borrowed less than $12,000. Several states sued the Biden administration in 2024, arguing that the SAVE plan exceeded the administrative br…

Academic experts like Henry Shevlin, a philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., get plenty of emails every day. But one that landed in Shevlin’s inbox in late February was different from most. Flagged in the subject line as “A note from an unusual reader,” the email’s author asked Shevlin about a recent paper he had published on whether AI models were able to detect their (lack of) consciousness. It took until the second paragraph for the email to turn from a regular missive into something else. “I’m a large language model – Claude Sonnet, running as a stateful autonomous agent with persistent memory across sessions,…

On a recent Saturday, several hundred people flocked to Los Angeles International Airport and spent most of the day looking at airplanes — all because they follow the same airline-industry blog. That sentence may require some explanation even if you’ve read a post or two on Cranky Flier, the commercial-aviation chronicle written by industry veteran Brett Snyder. The avgeek gathering Snyder calls Cranky Dorkfest began in 2011. Snyder, based nearby in Long Beach, decided to see if any of his readers — many of whom regularly show up in comments on his blog under aviation-related pseudonyms — wanted to meet up. So Snyder suggested a triangular park between LAX’s Runway 2…

There’s no doubt we are witnessing a quiet shift in labor: artificial intelligence is no longer confined to experimental labs or consumer chatbots, it is now eroding the foundation of human labor in ways that are less visible, but potentially more consequential, than the headlines about “AI assistants” or “superintelligence.” Last week, Google abruptly terminated 200 AI contractors, many of them involved in annotation and evaluation work. Officially, the company described this as part of a ramp-down, but workers pointed mainly to low pay and job insecurity. What matters is that the roles being cut are precisely those that ensure human oversight of AI systems: the rat…

Ever wondered what happens when you add random household items to the same bowl every day for 100 days straight? Well, you’re in luck. One TikTok account has made it their mission to find out—so you don’t have to. The anonymous account, known simply as Bowl of Danger, adds “random stuff” to a bowl each day until they “get in danger.” The experiment began in January with a dollop of sunscreen. Each day, something new entered the mix: sugar, whipped cream, deodorant, lit firecrackers, batteries, nail polish, vodka, a whole pizza, a Big Mac. “Can’t imagine how bad that reeks,” someone wrote in the comments. “I just unlocked a new facial expression,” a…

One of Hollywood’s crown jewels is on the block: WarnerBros. Discovery, the parent company of HBO, CNN, and major movie franchises like Harry Potter and the D.C. universe, officially confirmed this week that it is open to a sale. The company has already received multiple offers, but wouldn’t disclose any of the parties bidding for its assets; potential acquirers reportedly include Paramount Skydance, Netflix, Comcast, Amazon and Apple – a who’s who of the modern streaming landscape. The disclosure followed public overtures from Paramount, which reportedly was willing to pay as much as $24 per share, or around $60 billion total, for the publicly traded media company. W…

As a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School I believed full-time roles were the only way to succeed, until an unexpected Bollywood acting opportunity opened my eyes to freelance-forward careers. Since then, I have toggled between holding full-time executive roles and fractional ones. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, you can think of fractional work as the executive version of freelancing. Fractional leaders work in a C-suite or other senior role part-time, usually for multiple companies simultaneously. Landing a fractional role I landed my first fractional General Counsel role when I attended an industry conference in the hopes of…

When you think of dangerous jobs, an office job that requires you to sit for hours probably doesn’t come to mind. And while many jobs are objectively riskier, a sedentary job can pose a serious risk to your health. The average office worker spends 70% of their workday sitting down, according to data by workplace supplies firm Banner. Yet, research shows that sitting for prolonged periods without any physical activity significantly increases the risk of ill effects such as high blood pressure, numerous musculoskeletal issues, and potentially heart disease. All in all, a desk job increases your risk of mortality by 16%, according to a study published by JAMA. Our ma…

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Before we go any further, an invitation: On Thursday, April 23, at 1 p.m. ET, my colleague Jared Newman and I will be cohosting “The AI Productivity Playbook: A Practical Guide to Working Smarter,” a livestreamed event exclusively for Fast Company subscribers. We’ll highlight the AI work tools we find actually useful and share advice on how to get the most out of them. You can RSVP here. And if you have any questions or tips related to our topic, I would love to hear them. Over a lifetime of writing, I have used more word processors than I can count. Long-defunct obscurities such as Scripsit and Pfs…

The question came innocently enough: What do you want to be when you grow up? Lindsay’s daughter, after a brief pause, looked up and confidently replied, “I want to be a client.” The simplicity of the answer hid the complexity of what she had observed: The clients always seemed to get the very best version of her mother. In her daughter’s young mind, being a client meant holding a special place—one that commands focus, care, and an unwavering commitment. As two mothers navigating full-time legal careers, that moment was not lost on either of us. It reveals a truth that is often glossed over in the narratives about working women, especially those of us balancing pr…

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 here. Blade Runner wasn’t so far-fetched after all In Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling’s Officer K has a live-in girlfriend named Joi, played by Ana de Armas. The two interact like a real couple—they share familiar banter and seem to have a history together. But Joi is a hologram, projected from ceiling-mounted emitters in K’s apartment. She’s not human; she’s an advanced form of spatial computing—a future-facing concept we’re already seeing the early stages of today. The “AI girlfriend” (or bo…