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Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok won’t be able to edit photos to portray real people in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal, according to a statement posted on X. The announcement late Wednesday followed a global backlash over sexualized images of women and children, including bans and warnings by some governments. The pushback included an investigation announced Wednesday by the state of California, the U.S.’s most populous, into the proliferation of nonconsensual sexually explicit material produced using Grok that it said was harassing women and girls. Initially, media queries about the problem drew only the response, “legacy media lies.” Musk’…

Noodles & Company is set to close additional restaurants. In a January 12 press release, Noodles & Company announced plans to close between 30 and 35 restaurants in 2026, with the aim of improving financial health and profitability. As of December 30, 2025, the fast-casual noodle chain had 340 company-owned restaurants and 83 franchise restaurants. The eatery already reduced its footprint last year, when it closed 42 restaurants (33 were company-owned, and nine were franchise locations). “Decisions like this are made thoughtfully and with a long-term view of the business,” Joe Christina, CEO and president of Noodles & Company, shared in the company pre…

Satellite communications networks have proved resilient amid a crackdown. Amid growing protests and escalating violence in Iran, the country’s government has blocked access to domestic communications systems and imposed a nearly week-long internet blackout. But Starlink, the satellite internet service run by SpaceX, only uses personal terminals that connect to its constellation, and doesn’t rely on any regime-controlled infrastructure. As a result, technology has now become a lifeline, and one of the only ways people in Iran can bring their disturbing reality on the ground to the rest of the world. “The biggest part of the communication [in the country] is b…

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating a salmonella outbreak linked to dietary supplement powder that left 45 people sick and a dozen people hospitalized across the country. In the wake of the outbreak, New York-based Superfoods, Inc. has issued a voluntary recall of Live it Up-brand Super Greens dietary supplement powder in the original and wild berry flavors. However, the FDA cautions that additional products might join the recall during its investigation. “To determine a source of contamination, FDA is conducting a traceback investigation of products ill people reported consuming before becoming ill and is working with state partners to sample…

Two data breaches, multiple class action lawsuits, and a removal from the Apple App Store later, the popular and controversial dating safety app Tea for Women is back and launching a new website version of its services today. Billed as a “Yelp for men,” Tea was created in 2023 but was relatively unknown until July 2025, when it quickly became a viral sensation and shot to the top of App Store downloads—at one point outranking ChatGPT on the Apple App Store. Similar to “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups, Tea offered women what they thought was a secure forum to obtain information and advice on men they had matched with on dating apps. Women using …

For most people, leaving Apple after two decades would mean stepping away from sleek design and obsessive detail. For Xander Soren, it simply meant translating those principles into a different medium and bottling them. During his 20-plus years at Apple, Soren helped shape some of the company’s most culture-defining products and creative tools. He was the original product manager for iTunes, worked on the launch of the iPod, led the development of GarageBand, and oversaw features like iPhone ringtones that became ubiquitous parts of Apple’s ecosystem. His career spanned Apple’s rebirth into a design-led powerhouse, a period in which he absorbed the philosophy of …

Yesterday, customers of Verizon Communications across the country picked up their phones only to discover that they had no service. Calls, texts, and the internet simply didn’t work. Verizon now says the underlying issue has been resolved. But just what caused it, and will Verizon compensate customers for the outage? Here’s what you need to know. What happened? On Wednesday, a little after noon ET, customers around the country began taking to social media to report that they had lost Verizon service on their phones. Calls and texts could not be made or received, and internet access was nonexistent. Many iPhone owners on Verizon’s network saw the “SOS” ico…

As the September evening inched along, the line of residents waiting their turn for the microphone held steady. Filing down the auditorium aisles at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, they were armed with questions about a new gas plant slated for their community. Sitting quietly in the audience was John Dudash. For decades, he’s lived in Homer City, a southwestern Pennsylvania town that was once home to the largest coal-fired power plant in the state. The plant, which shares its name with the town, closed nearly three years ago after years of financial distress. Dudash, 89, has lived in the shadow of its smokestacks—said to be the tallest in the country befo…

Nearly 500 buildings designed by Wright were built during his lifetime, but almost 15% of those have been demolished or lost through neglect, according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, an organization that works to preserve the famed architect’s work Now, a new logo for the organization serves as a reminder of how important it is to protect architectural history. Designed by the studio Order, the Conservancy’s new logo features a missing square that’s meant to represent the void when one of Wright’s buildings is lost or neglected. The Conservancy’s previous logo was a representation of the Lark Administration Building in Buffalo, New York, which…

What shape could buildings take in 2026? Fast Company asked architects from some of the top firms working around the world what they thought about the look of architecture in 2026. Of course, a building designed in 2026 almost certainly will not be completed in 2026, and construction timelines are notoriously fluid. But according to experts, there are some overarching trends in architectural design that could put a clear 2026 stamp on buildings designed this year, whenever they officially open. Here’s the question we put to a panel of designers and leaders in architecture: When they finally get built, what will buildings designed in 2026 look like, and what w…

A year after President The President took office, clean energy is still growing in the U.S. In 2025, nearly all new power added to the grid came from solar, wind, and batteries. In September, for example, solar made up 98% of new capacity. And in 2026, the U.S. Energy Administration projects that all net new generating capacity will come from renewable energy and batteries. That’s despite obvious policy challenges. On his first day in office, after declaring an “energy emergency,” The President paused permitting for some wind projects and promised to boost fossil fuels. A few months later, the administration ordered an offshore wind project to stop construction; other…

Let’s do a thought exercise. If the role of the chief marketing officer is to oversee marketing and the role of the chief operating officer is to oversee operations, while the chief financial officer’s responsibility is to safeguard the organization’s finances, then what’s the responsibility of the chief executive officer? Surely, it’s more than overseeing executions or leading executives, yet the “CEO” naming convention doesn’t give much insight as to what the role is or what it’s responsible for. This gets even more convoluted when an organization has both a CEO and a president. Who’s responsible for what? Clearly, a president presides over the organization or nation st…

Fifty minutes into a training session at a gym in lower Manhattan, I’m doing burpees and clean-and-jerks while Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown—all 6 feet, 5 inches of him—is bear-crawling into pushups, then slamming a medicine ball to the ground from overhead. I was lured to this TMPL gym off Astor Place because Brown is a lifelong fitness nut, and he’d shoehorned this workout in on Monday morning between arriving from L.A. the night before and departing again that afternoon. But Brown also wanted me to experience Beyond’s radical new launch, its first product that is not a savory meal option, the way a target customer would: post-workout, desperate for a functional r…

The fiercest space race is not about getting back to the moon—it’s about allowing you to post a TikTok or watch Netflix on your phone anywhere around the globe, from the Atacama Salt Flats to the Khongor sand dunes in the Gobi Desert. To make this happen, two distinct design philosophies are at war, as companies build out the infrastructure needed to ensure every phone on the planet is permanently connected to the internet. On one side is Elon Musk’s SpaceX/Starlink and the copycat companies that have followed in Starlink’s wake. Their approach is to invade space with tens of thousands of small satellites, creating a network of objects that blanket low Earth orbit. O…

Over a long and industrious career, the investor George Soros developed a theory he calls reflexivity. The basic idea is that expectations don’t form in a vacuum. They are shaped, in part, by our perceptions of what other people believe. The more widely an idea is accepted, the more likely we are to accept it ourselves and that, in turn, reinforces the collective wisdom. If many believe that, say, the stock market will go up or that AI will create an economic boom, we’re more likely to believe it too. That belief then drives behavior: investors buy stocks, companies pour money into AI, and the prediction begins to fulfill itself. All of this only adds fuel to the fir…

** NEEDS JUSTIN POT BYLINE ** Have you ever opened your favorite music-streaming app and wondered why all your playlists have the same five songs? It can be annoying, even if they happen to be five songs you’re really into right now. And, make no mistake, they will be five songs you’re really into right now, because that’s how many of these services work—and it’s not because everyone else has the same taste in music as you. For instance, any Spotify playlist that says “created for” in the header is catered to the individual user, based on their listening history. There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily—it can be nice to know you’re going to hear songs you lik…

When I was a product marketing leader for a corporate regional bank, I found myself getting annoyed during an all-day strategy meeting. My frustration came from hearing the same voices, sharing the same old ideas. I wondered why other people, especially the women in the room, weren’t speaking up. I remember thinking, “Well, you could be the one to speak up.” I felt nerves jump in my throat and doubt sink heavily in my stomach. Who was I to speak up? I thought that others in the room were smarter than me since they had higher titles and more experience. Looking back now, I realize that I had a big problem, a Pedestal Problem. I silenced my ideas because I was intimida…

Foldable phones have spent years trying to justify themselves. Some were too fragile, others too bulky, and most felt like solutions in search of a problem. The Galaxy Z TriFold is Samsung’s clearest attempt yet to answer a more reasonable question: Can one device replace the phone-tablet combo without becoming a chore to carry? Coming to the United States later this month, the TriFold folds twice, opens into a 10-inch screen, and closes back into a pocketable form. It’s an assertive design, but not a novelty play. Samsung seems very aware that this kind of device only makes sense for a specific kind of user. The double fold is the trick, but the software does…

2025 was a banner year for cryptocurrencies on many fronts. Global regulation eased. Stablecoins powered $46 trillion in annual transactions. And major shifts in U.S. government policy spurred wider adoption. But with that expansion came a notable bump in crypto fraud. A new report from Chainalysis, a blockchain data platform based in New York City, estimates that $17 billion in crypto was stolen last year through fraud and scams. Impersonation scams, where criminals pretend to be trusted entities or use fake tokens or websites to trick victims into sending them crypto, were up a jaw-dropping 1,400% year over year. And while it’s much too early to gather any concl…

Last year, various surveys, including reliable indicators, have highlighted a significant decline in reading habits over the past decades. The most striking evidence is not simply that people read less, but that their capacity for deep reading is weakening. According to OECD data, the proportion of 15-year-olds who fail to reach minimum reading proficiency has now risen to nearly one in four across advanced economies, with sharp declines in tasks requiring inference, evaluation, and integration of information across texts. In the United States, NAEP scores show that average reading performance among 13-year-olds has fallen to its lowest level in decades, reversing…

Should I take this project? Say yes to the new job offer? Stick with this plan or walk away? Every choice we make can feel huge. And every path has its own set of risks and rewards. There are always more questions for every life-changing decision. Sometimes the pros-and-cons lists feel more like busywork than progress. You check off the boxes, stare at the lists, and still end up confused, stuck in the same mental loop. That’s why I rely on the rule of 3 framework to make tough decisions. I hope it helps you clarify your life-changing choices. How it works Whenever you’re stuck, force yourself to create three paths: B, C, and D. Why not A? A is usually the defa…

AI is no longer just a cascade of algorithms trained on massive amounts of data. It has become a physical and infrastructural phenomenon, one whose future will be determined not by breakthroughs in benchmarks, but by the hard realities of power, geography, regulation, and the very nature of intelligence. Businesses that fail to see this will be blindsided. Data centers were once the sterile backrooms of the internet: important, but invisible. Today, they are the beating heart of generative AI, the physical engines that make large language models (LLMs) possible. But what if these engines, and the models they power, are hitting limitations that can’t be solved with mo…

In the world of social impact and sustainability, 2025’s word of the year could have been “headwinds.” It became a euphemism for everything from political pressure and regulatory changes to economic uncertainty, AI disruption, and social upheaval. But in many ways, “headwinds” is an understatement for what impact and sustainability leaders across the corporate and nonprofit sectors navigated in a year of budget cuts and evolving risk factors. For much of the past year, leaders across the corporate and nonprofit sectors have been recalibrating approaches to advancing their missions against these trends. In 2026, we’ll start to see those new approaches in action. …

Severance is the hit sci-fi show about office workers who “sever” their consciousness—slipping into another mode the moment they arrive at the office, then forgetting everything about their 9-to-5 as soon as they leave. The concept was inspired by the creator’s own monotonous desk job before he found success in television. Part of the show’s appeal lies in how familiar the premise feels: a dull, repetitive workday that people can’t wait to escape. In the real world, employees don’t have a mental switch to flip, but they’ve found subtler, and potentially more insidious, ways to disengage. The latest trend, dubbed “task-masking,” has taken over Instagram and TikTok. It’…

While traveling to Riyadh for the Fortune Global Forum, FII9, and the Global Health Exhibition, I witnessed something that should be a wake-up call for health systems everywhere. Saudi Arabia is already operating the kind of connected, AI-enabled healthcare infrastructure many countries are still debating how to build. At FII9, the conversation was unmistakable. Global innovation momentum is shifting toward the Middle East, and nowhere more than Saudi Arabia, where national digital platforms like Sehhaty already give millions of residents unified access to their health data. At the Global Health Exhibition, I saw population-level analytics, AI-powered diagnostics, multiom…