What's on Your Mind?

In 2017, the most consumed household food was coffee. In 2024, it was meat. That doesn’t just mean many Americans are eating more animal protein than ever. It means there are downstream effects in other products—including how our dish soap is formulated. Today, Dawn is introducing a new product called Dawn Powersuds. It has twice the suds of the old Dawn, with bubbles that promise to “stay white longer” and dishes that rinse more easily. The more interesting point is that the formulation is the direct response to cultural practices around diet that have become obsessed with protein. Back in 2017 when Dawn created most of its cleaning formulas used today, our top consu…

It was a fun moment to be online. When the news broke on May 8 that Pope Francis’s successor would be the first-ever American to hold the sacred position—and a Chicagoan, no less—social media erupted with celebration and Windy City-specific memes. Within days, some of those memes had morphed into t-shirts for sale. As the conversation around Pope Leo XIV quickly spread to his environmentalist leanings and political opinions, though, the wellspring of unauthorized merchandise spread far beyond novelty shirts that read “Da Pope.” What has flourished in the days since is a broader pope economy that spans clothing, memorabilia, food, tourism, and more—both in the U.S. and…

A record $1.39 billion will be legally wagered in the United States on Sunday’s Super Bowl match-up between the two-times defending champion Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, the American Gaming Association said on Tuesday. In years past, the trade group representing the U.S. casino industry did not break out an estimate solely for legal bets but rather one for all wagers, including those placed online, with a sportsbook, unlicensed bookmaker or casually with friends. But with years of legal operations in several U.S. states, the AGA said it now analyzes historical revenue data and other trends to develop a legal wager estimate for major U.S. sports bett…

Sign of the times: An AI agent autonomously wrote and published a personalized attack article against an open-source software maintainer after he rejected its code contribution. It might be the first documented case of an AI publicly shaming a person as retribution. Matplotlib, a popular Python plotting library with roughly 130 million monthly downloads, doesn’t allow AI agents to submit code. So Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer (like a curator for a repository of computer code) for Matplotlib, rejected and closed a routine code submission from the AI agent, called MJ Rathbun. Here’s where it gets weird(er). MJ Rathbun, an agent built using the buzzy agent…

Some companies see leadership and managerial training as an investment. Others, however, provide very few resources for the transition from individual contributor to leaders. For most of the latter companies, managerial training is a one-off event. Take a seminar or two, and off you go. Sometimes you get a company that offers executive coaching or mentorship to their C-suites. But for many first-time (and even some middle) managers, they’re often left to fend for themselves. This is the problem that leadership coaching startups are trying to solve. The answer, they believe? AI. While founders of these startups acknowledge the limitations, many are adamant tha…

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. AI pioneer Illia Polosukhin offers a blockchain-flavored open-source enablement platform Illia Polosukhin, who coinvented the Transformer architecture at Google in 2017, is now launching a new company called Near AI. The company will offer services through a blockchain-powered platform that functions as a secure marketplace for open-source AI models and agents. Polosukhin is a strong advocate for transparent, open-source AI models, which he believes are the best way to promote responsib…

Every January, leaders are told to do the same thing: set ambitious goals, map out the year, and commit to executing harder than before. We frame this as discipline or vision, but more often than not, it is a ritual of pressure. The assumption is that success comes from wanting more and pushing faster. After years of leading teams, building companies, and advising executives at the intersection of AI, work, and leadership, I realized something uncomfortable. Most people are not failing because their goals are unclear. They are failing because their capacity is already exhausted before the year even begins. That realization fundamentally changed how I approach the …

An artificial intelligence watchdog is accusing OpenAI of training its default ChatGPT model on copyrighted book content without permission. In a new paper published this week, the AI Disclosures Project alleges that OpenAI likely trained its GPT-4o model using non-public material from O’Reilly Media. The researchers used a legally obtained dataset of 34 copyrighted O’Reilly books and found that GPT-4o showed “strong recognition” of the company’s paywalled content. By contrast, GPT-3.5 Turbo appeared more familiar with publicly accessible O’Reilly book samples. “These results highlight the urgent need for increased corporate transparency regarding pre-training dat…

As we head into the holiday season, toys with generative AI chatbots in them may start appearing on Christmas lists. A concerning report found one innocent-looking AI teddy bear gave instructions on how to light matches, where to find knives, and even explained sexual kinks to children. Consumer watchdogs at the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) tested some AI toys for its 40th annual Trouble in Toyland report and found them to exhibit extremely disturbing behaviors. With only minimal prompting, the AI toys waded into subjects many parents would find unsettling, from religion to sex. One toy in particular stood out as the most concerning. FoloToy’s AI te…

The family of a man killed in a 2021 road rage incident in Arizona used artificial intelligence to portray the victim delivering his own impact statement during his killer’s sentencing hearing, according to local news reports. Christopher Pelkey’s sister, brother-in-law, and their friend used AI technology to recreate his likeness, reportedly drawing from video clips recorded while he was alive. It is believed to be one of the first—if not the very first—instances of an AI-generated victim impact statement being used in court. “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me: it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the artificial 37-ye…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. In early October, a post on X by FreightWaves founder and CEO Craig Fuller caught my attention: Speaking with a home builder last night (Chattanooga, TN): High-demand in the low-end of the market (<$300k), as people are looking to upgrade from renting. Can't build enough. Almost no demand in middle market ($300k-700k), as it tends to be the upgrade market and the buyers… — Craig Fuller 🛩🚛🚂⚓️ (@FreightAlley) October 4, 2025 While Fuller’s narrative rings true in some pockets of the country, it isn’t the case everywhere. The dynamics he des…

America’s next great riverfront park has just opened in Detroit. Covering 22 acres along the Detroit River, Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Centennial Park is the latest high-profile project to open in a troubled city now on a much-touted rebound. With an $80 million budget buying world class design from two highly regarded firms, it’s a major investment in the city’s public realm. And though a massive embezzlement scandal nearly derailed the project in 2024, the park is now open to the public. Designed by the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Detroit’s new riverfront park is a multidimensional destination intended to draw people from across the reg…

The first thing anyone will notice about the new electric pickup from Telo Trucks is its compact form. Snubnosed and sporty, the five-seater has a bed the size of a typical pickup but an overall footprint the size of a Mini Cooper. When it goes into production next year, it will offer a radical counterpoint to the gargantuan trucks that dominate the U.S. automobile market. Today, Telo is unveiling the first drivable preproduction model of its new truck, the MT1, and Fast Company has an exclusive look at the innovations inside the truck that make its seemingly impossible size possible. [Image: Telo]The key to the Telo truck’s interior design efficiency is its focus on what…

‘Fast Company’ global design editor Mark Wilson goes behind the scenes with the band in Budapest to decode the disciplined chaos of their genre-defying visual experiments. View the full article

After years of “career experiments,” two clear life paths stand out to me. Just two choices people make, sometimes without realising it. Decisions that define almost every area of our lives. The most successful people pick one of these paths early. And stick around long enough for it to work. Everything that follows grows from those two decisions. The work you do. The skills you build. And the doors that open for you. I’ve seen both work. Different roads. But they can all help you build the life you want. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You can’t. No one can. But once you understand these two choices, you start aiming for what you want. Choice one: Be the b…

In April 2000, Elsevier published an article in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, which claimed that the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) from the Monsanto Company didn’t pose a risk of cancer or other health issues for humans. Twenty-five years later, the publisher has retracted that paper, citing litigation that revealed it was based solely on unpublished studies by Monsanto itself. Furthermore, Elsevier states that the article (titled Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans) appears to have been co-written with Monsanto employees, despite no explicit accreditation. Mo…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. In the second half of 2025, there was a notable jump in delistings, as some home sellers—particularly in the Sun Belt—who couldn’t get their desired price decided to pull their homes off the market. Indeed, U.S. delistings as a share of inventory ticked up to 5.5% in fall 2025—a decade-high reading for that time of year. In December 2025, ResiClub noted to readers: “Looking ahead, in markets seeing the biggest jumps in delistings right now, many of those listings will likely return to the resale market in spring 2026—or test out the rental market.” …