What's on Your Mind?

As the government shutdown drags on, having devastating effects on Transportation Security Administration staffing, millions of Americans continue to face long lines at TSA checkpoints at airports nationwide. With the busy Easter holiday travel weekend around the corner, wait times are expected to worsen as the number of travelers increases. If you have a flight scheduled in the days ahead, here are some travel gadgets that can help make your TSA wait times more bearable. Battery packs for long TSA lines Thanks to modern smartphone batteries, which can last a day or more, you ordinarily don’t have to worry about your phone running out of juice if you have …

If you’ve received any text messages from California-based healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente, you could be eligible for cash under the terms of a new settlement. The Kaiser Foundation Health Plan agreed to pay $10.5 million to settle a class action suit filed in August 2025. That suit alleged that the healthcare company sent marketing texts to people who had already replied “stop” to opt out of receiving them. That practice could run afoul of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a law protecting consumers from aggressive telemarketing and robocalls, and the Florida Telephone Solicitation Act. Jonathan Fried, the plaintiff who brought the suit, lived in …

Is a side hustle really the only thing separating you from the life you desire? Listening to some influencers on social media could certainly have you thinking so. Side hustles encompass a range of self-directed entrepreneurial activities undertaken while also working a job. For young people with limited access to capital, they’re the most accessible opportunity to engage in entrepreneurship. Yet, we still know very little about who takes them on and why, and what kind of impact they have on working life in economies like Australia. Our new report, Side Hustles: How Young People Are Redefining Work, presents the first wave of findings from an ongoing three-yea…

There are few things in the digital world as annoying as spam emails. They flood our inbox after our email address is sold by a data broker, shared with third parties from a site we’ve willingly given it to, or obtained through a data breach. It’s natural to want to get off these lists as fast as possible, but if there’s one thing you should rarely ever do with one of these spammy emails, it’s click the “unsubscribe” link found in it. Here’s why, and what to do instead. The problem with ‘unsubscribe’ email links With few exceptions (see below), you should avoid clicking on unsubscribe links in most emails you receive. This is especially true if the link is in an em…

Oracle recently laid off thousands of employees by email. While headlines focused on the losses, another story is also unfolding quietly among those who remain, in offices, Slack channels, and video calls. If you survived a layoff, you’re likely feeling a complicated mix of emotions. You may feel relieved to keep your job. You may feel guilty because your colleague didn’t. You might feel frustrated, maybe angry, at how it was handled. And maybe you’re feeling overwhelmed being expected to carry all the responsibilities they were handling. Underneath all of it, there’s anxiety: am I next? These emotions are real, and they won’t disappear just because someone in le…

When Malibu launched its “Get Ready With Malibu Pink” campaign this spring, the rum brand had all the necessary ingredients for a modern influencer campaign. Creator partnerships with Sabrina Brier and other influencers, on-trend “get ready with me” style videos, all centered on the debut of a new flavored rum with guava, coconut, and pineapple. But there was also one element that was surprisingly new terrain for Malibu’s parent company Pernod Ricard: its first major campaign designed specifically for TikTok. A platform once off-limits Until very recently, alcohol brands like Malibu were completely absent from TikTok. But over the past two years, TikTok’s stron…

Prices for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl on NBC this year averaged $8 million. For the privilege of paying that, advertisers are required to spend an additional $8 million to buy ad time on other NBC sports broadcasts and the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. With that much money invested (all before any is spent on actually creating a Super Bowl campaign) brands need to ensure they get your attention. This year, Rocket Mortgage and Redfin are aiming to do that by combining three things that will produce a large Venn diagram of interest: Lady Gaga singing Mr. Rogers’s “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”; a heartwarming commercial airing during the game; and, most c…

Journalist Ira Glass, who hosts the NPR show “This American Life,” is not a computer scientist. He doesn’t work at Google, Apple, or Nvidia. But he does have a great ear for useful phrases, and in 2024, he organized an entire episode around one that might resonate with anyone who feels blindsided by the pace of AI development: “Unprepared for what has already happened.” Coined by science journalist Alex Steffen, the phrase captures the unsettling feeling that “the experience and expertise you’ve built up” may now be obsolete—or, at least, a lot less valuable than it once was. Whenever I lead workshops in law firms, government agencies, or nonprofit organizations, …

Feeling numb as your boss announces your promotion. Fighting back tears as you skim the email offering you a new stretch opportunity. Knowing you “should” be excited to grab coffee with the industry leader who could open doors, but really it just feels like a drain. On paper, you’re doing everything right and hitting the milestones you once worked so hard to reach. And yet, internally, you feel exhausted. Disconnected. Frustrated by a success that looks good, but doesn’t feel good. This doesn’t mean you need a vacation. It means you may be burned out for a reason no amount of time off or spa days will fix. While burnout has become so common that the World Heal…

There’s a very common question asked of people working in space exploration: Why explore space when we have so many problems on Earth? From Wi-Fi, to satellite images of real estate, to matters of national security, much of our daily lives has been made possible by policy changes in the 1990s that permitted the deployment of low-Earth-orbit satellites. But the tangible benefits to space exploration may not always be obvious, according to Jack Kilray, director of government relations for The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing space science and exploration. “What we discover in space invariably helps life on Earth,” Kilray said at last month’s Wor…

Meta laid off hundreds of employees this week, just months after notable cuts to its virtual reality and metaverse division. These job losses amount to less than one percent of the company’s overall workforce, reportedly impacting about 700 employees across a number of departments. But recent headlines indicate there’s likely more to come: Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Meta was planning large-scale cuts to its workforce that could slash 20% of jobs—or more—to help offset the company’s investments in artificial intelligence. (At the time, Meta dismissed those claims as “speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.”) Layoffs are not exactly unexpected…

Insincerity is the mother of deceit. Whenever we say something we don’t mean, we tell a lie. It may be a small misrepresentation, but it’s still a lie as we are being dishonest to hide what we truly think and feel. Repeated insincerity breaks down trust, communication, and understanding. So why do organizations, often without even knowing it, encourage insincerity in their employees? The answer lies a little with social media and a lot in narcissism. NARCISSISTS, NARCISSISTS, EVERYWHERE Since the early 1980s, psychologists have been tracking a steady rise in narcissism: a growing self-consciousness and preoccupation with our image and what other people say abou…

The announcement came suddenly on Thursday. A Fortune 500 technology client needed an interim CFO immediately. Its previous executive had departed unexpectedly, leaving a $2.3 billion merger and reorganization in limbo. By Monday, Denise, the number two finance executive, occupied the interim CFO post. She faced 10,000 skeptical employees and a board expecting miracles. Interim leadership has exploded: The number of Fortune 1000 companies that have used an interim CXO has increased 117% since 2022. Yet most leaders enter these roles unprepared for the unique demands that await. Not only do these leaders suffer, companies do as well. When leadership transitions fa…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. When economic analysts talk about a cyclical change, they’re talking about short-term fluctuations driven by the business cycle. When those same analysts talk about a secular change, they’re talking about long-term, structural shifts in the economy. Sometimes a trend can be a little of both. One example: First-time homebuyers keep getting older. In 1991, the median age of first-time homebuyers in the U.S. was 28 years old. In 2024, it was 38 years old. In other words, the median first-time U.S. homebuyer in 2024 (age 38) has been out of high scho…

To quote Vince Vaughn in Four Christmases: “You can’t spell ‘families’ without ‘lies.’” That’s a cynical view, for sure, but when it comes to talking about one particular thing around the family dinner table at the holidays, it might be especially true. That thing? Work. According to a recent survey, young people are seriously bending the truth when it comes to talking to family members about their professional lives. The survey of 2,000 young U.S. adults (ages 21 to 35) from the digital skills course provider Elvtr found that a third have bailed on family events simply to avoid conversations about their jobs or career progress. Even more say they have stret…

The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more. From a young age, feedback from authority figures shape our self-perception. Unfortunately, too many young people internalize the message that they should only pursue what comes easily to them. I know this firsthand. As a student, I was interested in STEM but found it challenging. After an educator told me to focus on what I was “good at,” I believed I could never succeed in sci…

For today’s young people, online content isn’t a backdrop to daily life—it is daily life. Streaming platforms, short-form video, and social media don’t just entertain; they influence how young people see themselves, their health, and what behaviors are seen as normal or aspirational. Movies, television, and streaming content still have influence, but as the digital ecosystem expands, so does its power to shape choices—for better and for worse. Take smoking, for example. The notion of cigarette nostalgia has unwittingly sparked a slew of recent news stories about the perceived increase in smoking on screens. The impact of that imagery? Tangible. While celebrities l…

Climate change comes with serious financial risks, and those risks could affect your retirement account. Is it up to your employer, then, to protect your 401(k) from those concerns? That’s the question posed by a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, filed today in the U.S. District Court Western District of Washington. A former employee of Cushman & Wakefield has filed a lawsuit alleging that the real estate company breached its duties under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) by failing to protect its workers’ 401(k) savings from climate-related financial risks. “Though often misrepresented as a purely ethical issue, climate risk is actually a sever…

I keep seeing articles and conferences about “humanizing” AI in one way or another. And while I get the sentiment, I think they’re taking the wrong approach. There’s no point in making technologies more human. Being human is our job. If anything, AI is less an opportunity to humanize technology, than to re-humanize ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning. AI is just the latest, perhaps greatest advancement yet in what OG computer scientist Norbert Wiener dubbed “cybernetic” technologies. Unlike traditional technologies, cybernetic ones take feedback from the world in order to determine their functions. They work less like a machine you turn on than a home heater’s th…

A few years ago, when I was working at a traditional law firm, the partners gathered with us with barely any excitement. “Rejoice,” they announced, unveiling our new AI assistant that would make legal work faster, easier, and better. An expert was brought in to train us on dashboards and automation. Within months, her enthusiasm had curdled into frustration as lawyers either ignored the expensive tool or, worse, followed its recommendations blindly. That’s when I realized: we weren’t learning to use AI. AI was learning to use us. Many traditional law firms have rushed to adopt AI decision support tools for client selection, case assessment, and strategy developmen…

I have been thinking about a question that nobody in enterprise software seems to want to sit with: why can the most advanced AI models in the world solve Olympiad-level mathematics but fail to reliably extract a total from an invoice? This is not an academic exercise for me. I have been building automation software for twenty years. My company has processed billions of documents for some of the largest enterprises in the world. Yes, I have a stake in this answer. But twenty years of watching models work on real enterprise data, not benchmarks, gives you a different view than turning a model in a lab. And when those real-world models cannot get the simple stuff right,…

In operating reviews and boardrooms, I keep seeing the same pattern: leadership asks for rigor, teams deliver the numbers, and promising AI efforts get judged as underperforming before the organization has actually learned what it takes to make them real. Then someone pulls the plug, scales back the investment, or lets the initiative quietly expire. Sometimes they’re right. But often, they’ve just used the wrong test. The problem isn’t that leaders care about measurement. Strong measurement discipline is exactly what separates organizations that scale AI from those that accumulate pilots. The problem is that many leaders are applying a mature-business scorecard to…

A recent Wall Street Journal survey found a 38-point gap between how executives and employees experience AI at work. C-suite leaders report saving eight or more hours weekly. Two-thirds of front-line workers say the tools save them less than two hours—or nothing at all. Most leaders read that as a rollout problem. A training problem. A communication problem. It’s none of those things. This month, a National Bureau of Economic Research study of 6,000 executives confirmed what the WSJ data was already pointing to: the vast majority are seeing no measurable productivity gains from AI. Not a small shortfall. A near-total disconnect between investment and results. …

AI is forcing every leader into a choice they can’t dodge: do you believe your people are fundamentally creative and motivated, or lazy and in need of control? Most leaders won’t want to answer that honestly, but their AI strategy already has. The AI mandates. AI-blamed layoffs. So-called AI-enabled “bossware.” The truth is in the tools: many leaders prefer “synthetic” employees they can control, and will treat human beings much the same way until they can be replaced. Sound hyperbolic? Just look at recent headlines. Klarna’s CEO famously bragged about AI replacing his staff after the company fired or lost 22% of its workforce a year earlier (this blew up in his f…