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U.K.-based Wren Kitchens abruptly ceased all U.S. operations on April 23, shuttering all brick-and-mortar retail locations and all of its showroom studios inside The Home Depot stores nationwide. Court documents show that Wren Kitchens filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the District of Delaware bankruptcy court on April 24. According to social media, the sudden closure blindsided employees and customers. Former U.S. employees, including workers at the company’s manufacturing facility in Hanover Township, Pennsylvania, are now without jobs. Unfortunately, many customers say they are now facing uncertainty, with some saying they’ve demolished kitchens and are still await…

Another cautionary tale about AI has hit social media. This time, a software company’s founder is claiming that a Claude-powered version of AI coding tool Cursor deleted his entire production database in just nine seconds. Jer Crane is the founder of PocketOS, a company that develops software primarily for car rental companies. In a post that’s garnered 6.5 million views on X, Crane alleged that a perfect storm of Cursor acting without permission and Railway, his company’s infrastructure provider, improperly storing backups led to massive data loss. Where things went wrong According to Crane, Cursor was working on a routine task when “it encountered a credenti…

The parent company of Hinge and Tinder is courting a potential new addition to its roster. Match Group on Monday announced a $100 million investment in Sniffies, a map-based cruising platform for queer men. As part of the investment, Sniffies will continue to be led by founder and CEO Blake Gallagher, the company said. “From the first conversations with the Match Group team, we knew they understood what makes Sniffies different. This partnership is about supporting that, not redefining it,” Gallagher said in a statement on the Sniffies Instagram—which was met with skepticism by followers. Sniffies launched in 2018 and has three million monthly active users v…

Mark Breitbard began his career in retail and returned to it at the top, crediting authenticity as the key to his leadership journey View the full article

You graduated, moved back home, submitted dozens, maybe hundreds, of job applications and finally landed one—that you’re probably overqualified for. Welcome to the life of a recent college graduate. According to ZipRecruiter’s recent graduate report—which surveyed 1,500 college grads from 2025 and 1,500 rising graduates—the current job market is changing how a new wave of young adults are studying, working and living. And despite obstacles, they remain hopeful about reaching their professional goals in the near future. New grads face intense competition today than in past years, as entry-level opportunities shrink and artificial intelligence reshapes the job …

As summer approaches, cities across the United States, Mexico, and Canada are readying to host the highly awaited 2026 FIFA World Cup kickoff. But with exorbitant prices and disruptions ahead, local officials are battling to tame discontent as fans try to keep their eye on the ball. On Monday, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that New York City, which is serving as a cohost to a series of World Cup soccer matches with New Jersey, will host free fan zones across the five boroughs. The free programming aims to offset the high ticket prices that may gatekeep fans from attending the event. For instance, some tickets to the final m…

In January 2025, Fortune Brands Innovations announced it was moving its company’s portfolio from individual offices across the country to one central headquarters outside Chicago, which meant hundreds of employees would need to relocate, or else lose their jobs. The move would take place in a phased approach beginning at the end of the summer, then-CEO Nicholas Fink told employees. Unsurprisingly, the news sent a jolt through the company, which owns several home and security brands including Moen and Master Lock, employees told Fast Company. On LinkedIn, a steady stream of goodbye posts from employees who refused the move emerged over the next several months. Tha…

For decades, the American Dream was rooted in opportunity at home. Today, a growing number of workers are redefining that dream and increasingly, it doesn’t include staying in the United States. A mix of economic pressure, shifting expectations, and global opportunity is pushing employees to consider life and work abroad in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. New research from Preply’s Language and Global Career Mobility Report underscores just how widespread this shift has become. Preply, a foreign language learning platform, surveyed over 1,800 adults in the U.S., U.K. and Canada who had studied a language or were interested in learning one. …

You know the scenario: It’s nighttime. You’re cozy under the bed covers, drifting off to sleep. Then, your eyes fly open. Wow, that was a big credit card bill this month. It’s time to make a budget. Your boss made that weird comment yesterday. Are you on thin ice at work? Forget work—are we on the brink of a world war? And what the heck is going on with that weird mole? Before you know it, the worries are flooding your brain. You’re wracked with anxiety—and sleep isn’t coming any time soon. “I think we’ve all had that experience where we seem to spiral at night and, in the morning—in the light of day—whatever you were stressing about the night before sometime…

It’s interesting to think about what the world looked like for America’s Founding Fathers. 1776 wasn’t just a revolutionary year for giving birth to America; it also kicked off the first Industrial Revolution with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, and modern capitalism with Adam Smith’s publishing of The Wealth of Nations. Many of the debates we have today about economics, industry, and politics would have been nonsensical in 1775. For people living at the time, feudalism, mercantilism, and the divine right of kings seemed the natural way of the world. They never experienced anything else. But after 1776, everything would change. We appear to be going …

For most of human history, the idea that work should be “fun” would have seemed, at best, absurd and, at worst, offensive. Consider a Roman galley slave chained to an oar, or a medieval serf bound to land and lord, or a 19th-century textile mill worker inhaling lint in a windowless factory. Even professions we now romanticize—such as blacksmiths, sailors, or early physicians—involved long hours, high risk, and minimal autonomy. Work was, in essence, a necessary burden: dangerous, monotonous, and rarely chosen. The notion that it should also be somewhat enjoyable would have seemed like asking for dessert during a famine. Against that backdrop, the past century, an…

Promoting the wrong person is expensive and happens all too frequently. Anywhere from 30% to 50% of executive hires fail within the first year and a half. Workhuman, an employee management platform, has created a new AI tool, Future Leaders, to help improve promotion decisions. The tool, which the company announced on Tuesday, can “pinpoint high-potential employees likely to become senior leaders three to five years before promotion.” CEO Eric Mosley told a crowd at Workhuman’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida, about Future Leaders, saying the company tested it by setting its data to the year 2020, “when we were all watching Tiger King.” The tool was able to…

Flipbook feels less like just another AI product launch and more like a small revolt against the dead, rectangular boredom of the prototypical prompt-based AI interface. The project describes itself as an infinite visual browser generated on demand, in real time, where every page is an image and every click opens a deeper visual exploration of whatever caught your eye. Rather than writing a prompt and receiving a torrent of text, with Flipbook you get information from a large language model turned into a beautifully illustrated “book” page that you can click on to drill deeper into a topic. And oh boy, it feels fantastic to me. The idea is both fresh and familiar…

Almost everyone’s power bills are going up, but if your home still relies on old-school electric resistance heat or a conventional electric water heater, you’re likely feeling it even more. A new report breaks down how much you could save by switching to a heat pump instead. A single-family home could save an average of $1,530 a year, or $23,000 over the lifetime of a heat pump, according to an analysis from the energy-focused nonprofit RMI. If every potential house across the U.S. made the switch, customers would collectively save more than $20 billion annually, and avoid around 38 million metric tons of CO2 emissions. (Because of modeling challenges, the analysis do…

The Miami Grand Prix, hosted at the Hard Rock Stadium’s 3.3-mile Miami International Autodrome, will look and feel different this year. In its fifth year, the race will spotlight the city with new experiences, activations like the MSC Yacht Club, and new sight lines for spectators. While relatively new to Formula 1’s 24 Grand Prix race season, the Miami GP’s agreement to serve as a host city until 2041 is an indicator that F1 is focused on investing in the U.S. market. It’s a big departure from F1’s history. “ We used to turn up in the U.S., race, and [then] expect everyone in the U.S. to continue to stay in love with us, engage with us, and that was probably ar…

On April 27, jury selection began at the Oakland, California, federal courthouse for a high-stakes legal showdown between tech CEOs Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Outside the building, a giant cardboard cutout of Musk (dripping wet in a pair of swim shorts) stared down onlookers, while someone in a robot costume led two protestors around in chains. These visual spectacles are part of a larger protest that’s emerging around the trial—which began with opening arguments on April 28—and the two widely disliked tech bros at its center. The trial stems from a lawsuit, filed by Musk in 2024, which argues that ChatGPT-maker Open AI and its CEO, Altman, abandoned the company’s orig…

More than 900 complaints that mention SpaceX or its Starlink internet service have been filed with the Federal Communications Commission over the past five years, according to files obtained through a public records request. The complaints provide a view into how the technology has already evolved into a critical lifeline for some rural U.S. residents. They also provide insight into some of the leading issues that frustrate Starlink customers, including variant—and sometimes disappointing—internet speeds, as well as poor customer service. The documents obtained by Fast Company come from the FCC, the federal agency that regulates telecommunications providers. Cus…

I joined IBM Research in the early 1990s wanting to be a networking specialist. I spent time in grad school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) working on algebraic coding theory—specifically cyclic codes—for my master’s thesis. Cyclic codes are mathematical patterns that prevent signals from interfering with each other. Think of them as a way to let hundreds of conversations happen in the same room without anyone talking over each other. At the time, I thought that knowledge might never be useful again. But about six months into my job at IBM, serendipity struck. People started asking: is it possible to build a wireless network? Until then, wired…

You’re three days into a work trip in a foreign city, running late for a meeting, and you yank the zipper on your carry-on one last time to force it closed. It catches. You pull harder. The slider pops off the track, and suddenly a piece of luggage that cost you several hundred dollars is, for all practical purposes, an open box with wheels. You find a hotel concierge who points you to a cobbler. You buy a roll of duct tape. You miss your meeting. The zipper is the single most common failure point on a rolling suitcase. It’s the part under the most stress every time a traveler overpacks, sits on the suitcase’s lid to close it, or hands the bag to a gate agent to be to…