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Nearly 40% of Black workers feel comfortable talking about their faith with people at work, the highest of any U.S. racial group, our two recent studies found. But they also risk facing religious discrimination. For the past 15 years, we have been studying religion in workplaces. Recently we conducted two studies, including two online surveys involving 15,000 workers and in-depth interviews with nearly 300. Our respondents included Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and nonreligious individuals. The majority of Black Americans—nearly 8 in 10—identify as Christians. And we found that Black workers from all faiths are more likely than other racial groups to use their tradit…

In our consumer driven culture, where the cost of goods is soaring, one of the most radical things you can do this Black Friday is not to buy anything. That’s the message from “Mass Blackout,” a coalition of grassroots groups that are protesting the The President administration’s policies and urging you not to participate in this year’s extended Black Friday sales. starting the day before Thanksgiving (Thursday, November 26) until the day after Cyber Monday, (Tuesday, December 2). There’s also a second boycott underway targeting Amazon, Target and Home Depot called “We Ain’t Buying It” around the same time. Don’t think boycotts work? Just look at Target, which jus…

The day after Thanksgiving is a holiday in itself for retailers. Historically, Black Friday has been a time when shoppers wake up early and head to stores for the best deals of the year. More recently, though, more and more consumers have been opting out of the mad rush in stores and turning to online deals, many of which started a week ago and now extend all weekend long till Cyber Monday, December 1. For those who like to be there when doors open, this is for you. Here’s everything you need to know. What time do Target, Best Buy, Kohl’s, and Walmart open? Many major big-box retailers open their doors nice and early for Black Friday, starting with Kohl’s a…

After Thanksgiving, brands will bombard you with Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions. It can be overwhelming to know what to buy. After all, some deals aren’t actually all that good. And besides, you don’t want to make impulse buys that you’ll regret later and that will end up in a landfill in the near future. To help cut through the noise, we’ve picked out the best deals from design-forward brands. They create beautiful products that are thoughtfully designed to last for years. We’ve even picked out some of our favorite classic products that you will enjoy using for a long time. All the prices below are before discounts. MoMA Design Store 20% off sit…

This year’s busiest shopping day was a boon for live-shopping apps. Even at a time of inflation and economic uncertainty, Americans were ready to spend come Black Friday. U.S. online spending was up 9.1% from last year, according to data from Adobe Analytics. While holiday spending has typically been dominated by traditional e-commerce, live-shopping platforms TikTok Shop and Whatnot also reported record-breaking sales during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. On Black Friday, the livestream marketplace Whatnot reported more than $75 million in single-day live sales, tripling last year’s total. On average, shoppers bought 40 items per second. One small busi…

An investor group including BlackRock, Microsoft, and Nvidia is buying one of the world’s biggest data center operators with nearly 80 facilities in a deal worth $40 billion to secure coveted computing capacity for artificial intelligence. The purchase of U.S.-based Aligned Data Centers from Australian Macquarie Asset Management on Wednesday is the first deal for the AI Infrastructure Partnership formed last year which includes Abu Dhabi-based fund MGX and Elon Musk’s startup xAI among its backers. “With this investment in Aligned Data Centers, we further our goal of delivering the infrastructure necessary to power the future of AI,” said BlackRock CEO Larry Fink,…

In 2021, two people you’ve probably never heard of—FaZe Rug and Adin Ross—faced off in a one-on-one basketball game at a Los Angeles gym. Winner gets $25,000. Sam Gilbert led a two-person team that streamed it live on YouTube from a single iPhone. The players weren’t professional athletes, and it was, Gilbert says, “a very below average basketball game.” Still, nearly 80,000 people tuned in live, most of them under 34 years old. “That was the biggest eye opener to me,” says Gilbert, director of content for Bleacher Report’s House of Highlights. “That’s when I knew there was something here.” Gilbert saw that something fundamental had shifted in sports consumption. …

On November 19, Block Inc. held its first Investor Day in three years. Jack Dorsey, the company’s cofounder, chief executive, and “Block Head,” took to the stage and summarily posed what many investors and others in the industry were likely thinking. “Our business is complicated,” he said. “We want to make it much easier to understand going forward.” Dorsey—notably clean-shaven—proceeded to summarize the past few years at Block. The company is indeed much more complex now than when it was founded in 2009 as Square, named for the point-of-sale system that was the company’s first product. Four years ago, it changed its name to Block, a much more fitting monike…

If optimizing your social media privacy settings feels important but overwhelming, a company called Block Party may be able to help. Founder and CEO Tracy Chou has long been known for advocating for diversity in the tech industry. And like many diversity advocates, and women and people of color in technology, she’s experienced plenty of harassment online, along with outright stalking. She founded Block Party after realizing that tech platforms themselves didn’t make it particularly easy to optimize settings for privacy and security. The initial Block Party product focused on the platform then called Twitter, helping users easily filter out spam, harassment, and o…

Tonight will be the perfect evening to stay up late in the United States, because the moon is going to put on a spectacular show. In the wee hours of the morning, night owls can witness a full blood moon, supermoon, “worm” moon, and a total lunar eclipse. In addition to Americans, parts of Europe, Australia, Asia, South America, and Africa can also get in on the action. Let’s take a deeper look at what that means and how you can see the spectacle: The March 2025 full moon is many things According to NASA, in the 1930s the Maine Farmers’ Almanac started publishing names for the full moons based on Native American traditions. This took off and became the pre…

A blood test for more than 50 types of cancer could significantly boost early detection and speed up diagnosis, according to a new study. Made by U.S. pharmaceutical company Grail, the Galleri test aims to find fragments of DNA in a person’s blood that can indicate the presence of a cancerous tumor. Among the cancers that the test can detect, many have no current screening programs. The PATHFINDER 2 study included more than 36,000 people aged 50 and older who had no cancer symptoms. In participants who were followed for more than a year, the test caught some 40.4% of cancer cases. For those who got a positive result on the Galleri test, 61.6% of them went on to …

Two decades after a Republican-controlled Congress gave gun manufacturers immunity from being sued over crimes committed with their firearms, blue state Democrats upset about gun violence think they’ve found a way to penetrate that legal shield. Since 2021, 10 states have passed laws intended to make it easier to sue gunmakers and sellers. The newest such law, in Connecticut, took effect this month. It opens firearms manufacturers and retailers up to lawsuits if they don’t take steps to prevent guns from getting into the hands of people banned from owning them, or who should be suspected of intending to use them to hurt themselves or others. Other states have allo…

Blue-check verification is nothing new in the world of social media, but Bluesky is only now making it available to any “notable” accounts. The social media company has launched an application that allows users to apply for this authentication and receive a blue check. Bluesky first launched a form of verification in 2023 that required users to put a domain as their handle. For example, a brand or magazine could show its validity by using its official website as an identifier. Meanwhile, individuals who worked for the company could then make their usernames @name.wesbite.com. According to Bluesky, over 270,000 accounts took part in this option over its first two …

Flashes, a photo-sharing app that’s linked to X-alternative Bluesky, launched in beta this week before disappearing from the test store due to what its developer said was technical difficulties. Flashes developer Sebastian Vogelsang said in a Bluesky post that Apple’s engineering team is working on a fix. Apple didn’t immediately respond to Fast Company‘s request for comment. Flashes, which was revealed last month, supports photo posts of up to four images and videos up to one minute long. Items posted on Flashes will also appear on Bluesky. Comments from Bluesky users on the posts will appear back on Flashes. Flashes could be attractive to users who want to …

Three paintings from famously chill public television legend Bob Ross sold Tuesday for more than $600,000 at auction. The paintings were the first of 30 Ross works being sold to benefit public TV stations hurt by cuts in federal funding. At the live auction at Bonhams in Los Angeles, a serene, snow vista called “Winter’s Peace” that Ross painted entirely during a 1993 episode of “The Joy of Painting” went for $318,000 to a bidder on the phone. “For a good cause — and you get the painting,” auctioneer Aaron Bastian said during the bidding. He invoked a common sentiment of Ross, who died in 1995, during a brief lull. “Bob would remind you that this is your world, and you …

Bodyarmor just unveiled the brand’s biggest-ever packaging refresh after nearly 15 years on the shelf. The sports drink brand’s new look coincides with the debut of a new national TV advertising campaign called “Choose Better,” which will air beginning this weekend during the National Hockey League playoffs and stars professional athletes including NHL all-star Connor McDavid and Women’s National Basketball Association champion Sabrina Ionescu. Bodyarmor says the rebrand was a nearly yearlong effort and includes newly designed labels across the entire portfolio, placing nutritional claims more boldly on the front of the packaging, a refreshed wordmark, and a brand…

More than six years after a Boeing 737 Max jetliner crashed in Ethiopia, the first civil trial stemming from the disaster that killed all 157 people on board the plane appears poised to move forward. Boeing has settled most of the dozens of wrongful death lawsuits that families of the victims filed against the aircraft maker after the March 2019 crash, but two of the remaining cases are scheduled to open before a federal court jury as soon as Tuesday. The trial in Chicago, where Boeing used to have its headquarters, isn’t expected to examine the company’s liability. Boeing already accepted responsibility for what happened to Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and for a…

Boeing and NASA have agreed to keep astronauts off the company’s next Starliner flight and instead perform a trial run with cargo to prove its safety. Monday’s announcement comes eight months after the first and only Starliner crew returned to Earth aboard SpaceX after a prolonged mission. Although NASA test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams managed to dock Starliner to the International Space Station in 2024, the capsule had so many problems that NASA ordered it to come back empty, leaving the astronauts stuck there for more than nine months. Engineers have since been poring over the thruster and other issues that plagued the Starliner capsule. Its next carg…

Over the summer, Bogg bags were ubiquitous at beaches and parks. This year alone, it has sold more than $100 million of these plastic totes full of holes that come in a rainbow of colors. But now, the brand is trying to get you to bring your Bogg bag to dinner at a fancy restaurant, or the office, or a hot date. Today, Bogg releases its newest line, which it is describing with a delightfully tongue-in-cheek name: Bougie Quilted Collection. The structure of the bag hasn’t changed much; it is still made of plastic and has plenty of holes on it. But it also has a quilted texture, reminiscent of the surface of a Chanel flap purse or a nylon Prada bag. And it comes with a…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. In recent weeks Modern CEO has published predictions for 2026 from CEOs across industries and a list of books that can help leaders get ready for the year ahead. We invited readers to share their own prognostications and book recommendations. (Respect to the author who endorsed her own book…

The intense red color of classic lipstick traditionally comes from an unlikely source: crushed bugs that live on cactus plants in South America. It takes tens of thousands of the ground-up insects to make just a pound of the vivid red dye. The red coloring, called carmine, also shows up in food—from red velvet cupcakes to sausages, gummy candies, and some versions of strawberry yogurt. In the cosmetics industry, major brands started moving away from carmine in the 2010s because of ethical concerns. A growing number of consumers wanted vegan makeup. (Crushing bugs also creates an allergen because of other bug parts that end up in the dye.) But because synthetic dyes do…

A wild winter storm was expected to bring strong winds, heavy snow and frigid temperatures to the Great Lakes and Northeast on Tuesday, a day after a bomb cyclone barreled across the northern U.S. and left tens thousands of customers without power. The storm that hit parts of the Plains and Great Lakes on Monday brought sharply colder air, strong winds and a mix of snow, ice and rain that led to treacherous travel. Forecasters said it intensified quickly enough to meet the criteria of a bomb cyclone, a system that strengthens rapidly as pressure drops. Nationwide, more than 153,000 customers were without power early Tuesday, more than a third of them in Michigan, accord…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Glenn Fogel joined dot-com darling Priceline in early 2000, a year after the “name your price” travel site’s blockbuster initial public offering (IPO). “I joined one week before the Nasdaq peaked,” Fogel recalls. Within a year of his arrival, the stock had cratered to $6 a share. By March 2…