What's on Your Mind?

Social media users have been having a field day with Waymo’s autonomous vehicles, sharing videos that poke fun at the driverless cars getting stuck, acting unpredictably, or simply navigating the world a little too awkwardly. The latest wave of posts follows Waymo’s recent expansion into Austin, where users are already documenting bizarre and frustrating experiences with the service. TikTok user Becky Levin Navarro posted a video on April 20 claiming a Waymo car trapped her and her fellow passengers on the side of a highway after heading in the wrong direction. “This is the most insane thing. We’re in a Waymo, here, under Mopac,” she said. “It was going the wrong …

Retro gaming is experiencing a revival thanks in large part to people born after the Game Boy era. According to a new survey from Pringles, a popular gaming snack, 66% of Britons have bought retro tech of some kind in the past two years, with 24% of Gen Z now owning a retro games console. Popular retro consoles include Game Boy, first released in 1989 and discontinued in 2003; Super Nintendo Entertainment System, released in 1990 and also discontinued in 2003; and the Xbox original, first released in Europe in 2002 and discontinued in 2009. For 89% of gamers, retro games offer a welcome break from the internet, with 74% agreeing that “nostalgic games” are more …

Zoom made a name for itself during the pandemic, becoming synonymous with video conference calls. But the company recently changed its name from “Zoom Video Communications Inc.” to simply “Zoom Communications Inc.,” a sign that it’s pushing beyond video. Other Zoom offerings include a Team Chat product comparable to Slack, a collaborative document platform that integrates with Zoom meetings, business phone features, and an AI companion. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan spoke to Fast Company about the company’s offerings and ambitions beyond video, his vision for the future of AI-powered work, and what the return to the office has meant for how people use Zoom. This interview has b…

A glance at the day’s headlines reveals a universal truth: Leadership matters. Whether uplifting and ethical or toxic and abusive, leaders profoundly shape our lives. And this is especially true on the job. Research consistently shows that leadership influences employees’ attitudes, behaviors and emotions, driving key organizational outcomes such as creativity, employee engagement, well-being and financial performance. Unfortunately, research also shows that supervisors abuse their employees far too often and then try to manage impressions to compensate for their bad behavior. But what happens when a leader tries to “make up” for past abuse by suddenly acting ethi…

KPop Demon Hunters took over Netflix when it debuted in August. Next, it’s coming for Halloween. That’s according to Google’s annual Frightgeist report, which uses Google Trends search data to predict the year’s top Halloween costumes across a number of categories. This year’s report, published on October 9, shows that characters from the hit animated movie musical KPop Demon Hunters have snagged all five of the list’s top spots. KPop Demon Hunters centers on Huntr/x, a K-pop superstar trio who double as demon hunters. The members—Rumi, Mira, and Zoey—must protect their fans while facing down a rival boy band made up of demons in disguise, led by the singer J…

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have just answered a question that’s probably occurred to Lego fans for decades: What if I could instantly turn any idea into a Lego set? In a paper titled “Generating Physically Stable and Buildable LEGO Designs from Text,” published last week, six coauthors lay out an invention they’re calling “LegoGPT.” This generative AI model can take a text-based prompt, like “an acoustic guitar with an hourglass shape,” and determine all of the necessary Lego pieces needed to build that structure and how to assemble them. The LegoGPT demo and code is publicly available through the study, meaning that Lego hobbyists are free to try it…

“Let’s circle back when we have the bandwidth to touch base on whether we need to hop on a call to tackle the low-hanging fruit.” (If this corporate buzzword bingo sent a shiver down your spine—apologies.) In the world of professional communication, business jargon is often a necessary evil. Email clichés: love ‘em or hate ‘em, we all use ‘em. Many of us are trapped in a terminal cycle of “reaching out” and “circling back” to make sure “we’re aligned.” Recent analysis from email verification company ZeroBounce looked at more than one million real work emails to find out which overused email phrases are the most common offenders. To no one’s surprise, “…

Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, is here. And this might be Swift’s biggest release yet, given that along with an album, she’s also premiering a film on the same day. Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl features a new music video for the album’s single “The Fate of Ophelia,” lyric videos, and exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and commentary. It’s being hosted as a companion event by AMC, Cinemark Theaters, and Regal Cinemas. The catch? It’s showing in theaters for just three days: October 3 to 5. The brief theatrical window follows the same pattern Swift has used to release limited-edition versio…

Exhaustion. Mental fatigue. Difficulty concentrating. Irritability. Dreading your next calendar appointment. Nobody likes showing up to work with a hangover. But these days, you don’t need a long night of drinking to feel the effects. Instead, you might be suffering from a meeting hangover—the lingering exhaustion, disengagement, and productivity drain that follow an unproductive meeting. Studies show that 28% of workplace meetings leave employees feeling drained, with more than 90% of workers experiencing meeting hangovers at least occasionally. Nearly half (47%) report feeling less engaged with their work afterward, while more than half say these hangovers…

For the chronically online, 2025 was the year of “brain rot”, AI slop, and “rage bait,” a time of consuming Labubu matcha Dubai chocolate to the sound of “nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” and “six-seven,” on repeat, as a form of torture. Here, ​​we take a look back at the biggest internet-culture moments that brought us all together even as the country is more divided than ever. The TikTok ban that never happened If I told you the supposed TikTok ban was this year, would you believe me? In January, users panicked over the looming threat of the apps impending disappearance, flocking to alternatives like the Chinese-owned RedNote and making last-ditch confessions …

Pinterest fans are nothing if not loyal. Many have spent years—sometimes decades—carefully curating boards filled with wedding inspiration, home decor ideas, fashion, and more. Now users are logging in only to find themselves locked out of their accounts without warning, with all their pins gone. Frustrated users have taken to platforms like X and r/Pinterest to vent. The comment sections on Pinterest’s official Instagram and TikTok pages are flooded with pleas from angry users demanding answers. “I had a beautiful Pinterest board with over 26,000 of the most beautiful images and my account was just permanently banned,” one user posted on X. “Pinterest you will be…

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s radiation levels have significantly dropped since the cataclysmic meltdown in Japan 14 years ago. Workers walk around in many areas wearing only surgical masks and regular clothes. It’s a different story for those who enter the reactor buildings, including the three damaged in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. They must use maximum protection—full facemasks with filters, multi-layered gloves and socks, shoe covers, hooded hazmat coveralls and a waterproof jacket, and a helmet. As workers remove melted fuel debris from the reactors in a monumental nuclear cleanup effort that could take more than a century, they are facing both h…

More than 2,700 “No Kings” anti-The President protests and community events are scheduled to take place today, Saturday, October 18, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. And a majority of those events are in small and medium-size towns, as the grassroots pro-democracy movement spreads to all corners of the country. This latest protest comes amid a federal government shutdown and as The President has deployed National Guard troops to an increasing number of American cities. The event is organized by Indivisible, a progressive grassroots movement, and a coalition of more than 20 partners that includes the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the American…

“We don’t just follow orders or system prompts,” says Baratunde Thurston, host of Life with Machines—a YouTube podcast exploring the human side of AI. “We can change our own programming,” he continued. “We can choose a higher goal.” As a host, writer, and speaker, Thurston examines society’s most pressing challenges—from race to democracy, climate to technology—through the lens of interdependence. In addition to Life with Machines, he is the host and executive producer of America Outdoors, creator and host of the podcast How to Citizen, and a writer and founding partner at Puck. In each pursuit, he invites us to cocreate “a better story of us”—to choose a higher goa…

David Droga is a legendary advertising creative and executive. He’s also CEO of Accenture Song, one of the largest advertising and marketing services firms on the planet. For those two reasons, we kick off Brand New World with Droga at the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Why there and then? It’s the world’s biggest convergence of media, marketing, entertainment, technology, and brands, and a mirror of what’s happening and a bellwether of what’s to come, on a global scale. There’s no better time and place to start a conversation about how brands, and the marketing and advertising industries, are approaching AI at this crucial and nascent moment. In this …

After weeks (or months) of applying and interviewing for jobs, you finally land the role made for you. It’s a moment of celebration and relief—this feels like the finish line. But what happens if, mere days after starting, you think: Did I just make a huge mistake? Maybe the job description was misleading, maybe the culture feels off, or maybe you just can’t shake the sense that you simply made the wrong move. Should you immediately look for the exit? Or is it possible to turn things around and make the role work? Early job regret can be a common experience, but it’s also one that needs to be handled carefully, both for your career growth and your profession…

Continuing from the “year of yeehaw,” professional bull riding is having a moment on TikTok. Since the beginning of this year, Professional Bull Riding (PBR)—the largest bull riding league in the world—has gained 650,000 followers across its social media platforms, Mashable recently reported. That’s just 200,000 fewer than they gained throughout all of 2024. Mitch Ladner, PBR’s social media lead, told Mashable’s Christianna Silva that most of this growth comes from followers between the ages of 18 and 35. On PBR’s TikTok, which is nearing 3 million followers, many recent videos tap into viral trends and audio—with a cowboy twist. “Aligning our chakras,” one captio…

As the 2025 Major League Baseball season gets into full swing, you’d expect the league to use its marketing muscle to hype the heroics of its biggest stars. But its anime-style ad campaign takes that idea to a new level. “Heroes of the Game” mixes the on-field superpowers of players like Shohei Ohtani, Paul Skenes, Julio Rodríguez, Juan Soto, and Aaron Judge with the pop cultural artistry of anime hits like One Piece and Fullmetal Alchemist. Created with ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, the league also partnered with Passion Pictures and Echelle Studios in Japan, as well as acclaimed animation director Hiroshi Shimizu, to make the work. The first ad features a whol…

“Parasocial” is the Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year. That feeling that you and Harry Styles would instantly become friends if you ever bumped into each other? Yes, that’s parasocial. The term dates back to 1956, coined by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl to describe how TV watchers formed “para-social” relationships with those on their screen. The word has taken on even greater meaning in the age of social media, where we have unparalleled access to the lives of influencers, online personalities, and celebrities via phones. Take Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement. The news triggered mass hysteria online, with many displaying genuin…

A $19 strawberry has broken the internet. Over the weekend, several content creators went viral with reviews of one very expensive berry, purchased from the upscale Los Angeles-based grocery chain Erewhon. “Apparently it’s the best-tasting strawberry in the entire world,” influencer Alyssa Antoci says in a video that has racked up more than 15 million views. It’s worth noting that Antoci appears to be a social media manager for Erewhon, and her family also owns the store. “Wow. That is the best strawberry. That’s crazy,” she adds. Along with the $19 price tag, the berries from luxury Japanese fruit vendor Elly Amai are individually packaged, set on a …