What's on Your Mind?

I don’t know if urbanism is science or art, but I do know its outcomes are best with a dose of creativity. There’s plenty to learn from the giant leaps in art and science to improve your urbanism advocacy. Happy, healthy communities aren’t made from being stuck in a bygone era. The value of fog Impressionist painters didn’t discover fog. It was always there, but it wasn’t something people were discussing much in the early 19th century leading up to the impressionists and tonalists. Each of those artistic movements created illusions of reality with familiar scenes. James McNeill Whistler was an influential figure and one of the original tonalists. Here’s what he…

Americans’ mental health is suffering and it’s not just due to stressful news feeds or not getting enough steps in. Toxic work environments are playing a large role in an epidemic of worsening mental health. According to Monster’s newly released 2025 Mental Health in the Workplace survey of 1,100 workers, 80% of respondents described their workplace environment as toxic. The alarming statistic is an increase from 67% just a year ago. The challenging environment has major implications. An astonishing 71% of workers say their mental health is poor (40%) or fair (31%), while only 29% rank it positively: 20% said it was good and 9% described it as great. Workers say…

When I first entered the workforce, my mantra was simple: Do whatever it takes. So when I was organizing and running programming for an event early in my career and the need for visitor transportation came up, I didn’t hesitate. That’s how I ended up behind the wheel of a 12-person Sprinter van—doing pickups, drop-offs, and general schlepping in between running the actual event. Saying yes to every extra task doesn’t make you indispensable. It makes you exhausted. And worse, it raises the question of your value as an employee. Are you just duct tape slapped over a leak when needed, or is there real substance and strategy to your role in the organization? A str…

Agentic AI is redrawing the boundaries of value creation in corporate America. Gartner projects that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will incorporate agentic AI, and at least 15% of daily business decisions will be made autonomously by AI agents. The AI race isn’t about building the most sophisticated algorithms, it’s about whether employees actually adopt these digital collaborators and use them to expose inefficiencies long hidden in plain sight. Yet many business leaders are still grappling with how to integrate agentic AI seamlessly into existing operations, and deliver meaningful results. A recent MIT Nanda report found that 95% of AI pilots fail…

I grew up in the Netherlands, so I know the upsides of living in Europe. I also know how hard it is to build a company here. The rules change across borders, funding is limited, and things move slower than they should. When we started Remote, we knew we had to think globally but also anchor in the U.S. It’s the biggest tech market, and succeeding there gives you the best chance to scale everywhere else. That choice wasn’t unique to us. More and more European founders are making the same call. What’s changed is the timing of the move. Expanding to the U.S. used to happen once companies were well-established in Europe. Now they’re showing up earlier and moving faster. …

Too many jobs today have a PR problem, limiting opportunities for our young people and our economy. The jobs that now exist and the training needed for them have changed dramatically over the past half-century, but our perceptions haven’t kept up. Consider the manufacturing industry. A sector once synonymous with grimy factory floors, repetitive labor, and aggressive offshoring is now a hub for advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and big data analytics. Yet Deloitte found that only 4 in 10 Americans would likely encourage their children to pursue a manufacturing career. While working in Kentucky several years ago, I heard from many par…

I recently had an unsettling rideshare experience. Let me paint a visual picture. You have a Tesla doing its self-driving thing, a guy just sitting in the driver’s seat “supervising,” and a terrified human (me) in the backseat looking on in horror. Finally, I said, “Please keep your hands on the wheel when you’re driving me, OK?” Tesla’s autonomous functionality might be safe, but I don’t have enough trust yet to allow a Tesla to get me from Point A to Point B without a human steering it. There’s a parallel between self-driving cars and the current perceptions of AI and agents. You might be comfortable letting one of these automobiles make a simple right-hand …

Before I was ever involved in the flower business, I jumped from job to job, trying to figure out where I belonged. I grew up in South Queens, New York, where the role models on my block were police officers and firemen who showed up when others needed them most. Naturally, I thought I’d follow that path and become a cop. That dream shifted into social work, a field that fed my heart but not my wallet. To make ends meet, I took on whatever work I could, flipping houses, tending bar, you name it. Through it all, I never forgot what my dad, a painting contractor, used to tell me: “If you’re old enough to walk, you’re old enough to work.” On paper, none of this looke…

La Niña, a climate pattern that can affect weather worldwide, has officially arrived. La Niña is fueled by colder-than-normal Pacific ocean temperatures, which then affect the pattern of the Pacific jet steam. It’s the cooler counter to El Niño, which involves warmer-than-normal ocean waters. Both are part of a weather system called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). La Niña conditions emerged in September, the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center said on Thursday. They’re expected to continue through the end of the year, and potentially until February 2026. This La Niña is expected to remain weak, weather experts said, but it could still…

In today’s dynamic labor market, industries from manufacturing to healthcare continue to grapple with persistent workforce shortages. To fill these gaps, organizations are looking beyond traditional talent pools. One of the most promising yet significantly underutilized groups is second-chance talent, or graduates of prison education programs. These individuals represent millions of highly motivated and skilled professionals seeking stability after incarceration. Too often, outdated hiring methods and social stigmas have blocked justice-impacted individuals from employment opportunities that could change their lives. However, by shifting perspectives and implementing …

Trader Joe’s stores have a reputation for getting crowded at the best of times, but if you’re planning to make a stop in the next few days, beware: the brand just dropped a Halloween version of its mini tote bags, and they already went viral twice for creating in-store traffic jams. The bags, which come in combinations of black, orange, purple, and green, cost just $2.99 each and dropped in stores on October 8. They’re a tiny version of Trader Joe’s classic reusable tote bags, measuring just 13 x 11 x 6 inches—about the size of an iPad. This is the third time that Trader Joe’s has released a new version of the bags, which have proven to be a desirable fan favorite (to…

A new study out Wednesday in the journal Nature from the University of California, Berkeley found that women are systematically presented as younger than men online and by artificial intelligence—based on an analysis of 1.4 million online images and videos, plus nine large language models trained on billions of words. Researchers looked at content from Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr, and YouTube, and major large language models including GPT2, and found women consistently appeared younger than men across 3,495 occupational and social categories. (Note: It’s possible that filters on videos and women’s makeup may be adding to this age-related gender bias in visual cont…

Too late. Too expensive. Too bland. Too antiquated. Too much of the same. There are just too many toos when it comes to Tesla’s new “cheap” cars, which the company announced on Oct. 7. Its highly anticipated “affordable models” are just stripped-down Model 3 and Model Y variants that come in at a more expensive price point than the current 2025 models. Some marketing genius labeled them as “Standard,” but judging the cars against cheaper, better models from automakers around the world, Tesla’s newest offerings can’t even claim that benign adjective. The truth is, these cars are terrible news for the company. With its reputation in tatters thanks to Musk’s bra…

If you’re a frequent flier, chances are you’ve been seized by the fear that your carry-on bag is too big for the overhead compartments. Now, for American Airlines passengers, it’s even more important to make sure that your bag is within the size limit before boarding. This week, the airline announced that it’s getting rid of its bag-sizers at gates. American Airlines told the news station KTLA that it started removing the metal sizers, which typically allow customers and gate agents to decide if luggage will fit in the airplanes’ overhead bins, on October 6. According to the airline, the move is intended to simplify the boarding process—bypassing the bottlene…

As any Studio Ghibli fan will testify, an afternoon spent binging Hayao Miyazaki classics is guaranteed to leave a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Now, this feeling is backed by science. A study published by JMIR Serious Games, a peer reviewed journal focused on how gaming is connected to education, health, and social change, looked into how the brain responds to both watching films produced by the Japanese animation studio and playing the open-world game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The researchers gathered 518 postgraduate students and divided them into four groups. Some played Breath of the Wild and some watched Studio Ghibli films like My Neighbor Totor…

On a recent Saturday, several hundred people flocked to Los Angeles International Airport and spent most of the day looking at airplanes — all because they follow the same airline-industry blog. That sentence may require some explanation even if you’ve read a post or two on Cranky Flier, the commercial-aviation chronicle written by industry veteran Brett Snyder. The avgeek gathering Snyder calls Cranky Dorkfest began in 2011. Snyder, based nearby in Long Beach, decided to see if any of his readers — many of whom regularly show up in comments on his blog under aviation-related pseudonyms — wanted to meet up. So Snyder suggested a triangular park between LAX’s Runway 2…

“How did you get to where you are in your career?” My interest in this question dates back 45 years to when I was an MBA student at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Whenever corporate executives were guest speakers at our classes, I would listen intently as they described what contributed to their career advancement. In the same vein, as I speak with leaders today, I always make a point of asking them what they consider to be the main drivers of their success. Over more than four decades, the two most common responses are: (1) “I worked hard” and (2) “I have several unique skill sets.” As I look back on my corporate career, including as chai…

Every working parent has that one thing keeping them from completely losing it. Some have the Mary Poppins-like nanny who knows exactly when to show up with wet wipes and organic muffins. Others swear by meal kits, color-coded Google calendars, or chore charts their family actually follows (unicorn families, basically). For me? It’s a group text. Not glamorous, not particularly organized, but it’s my lifeline. This is where playdates get arranged, last-minute pickup emergencies get solved, and critical intel on the latest stomach bug gets dropped. It’s also where I can admit, “I fed my kids popcorn and blueberries for dinner,” and instead of side-eye, I get heart …

Fast Company is delighted to make this article available to any student for free. Please request a copy by email. I was sitting on the steps of Duke Chapel at 2 a.m. in December 2023, the Gothic towers looming above me, a 210-foot reminder of everything I was about to walk away from. My phone was exploding with notifications: Y Combinator had just accepted us. ChatGPT had hit 100 million users in two months—faster than TikTok, faster than Instagram, faster than anything in human history. And I was about to break my single mother’s heart. The chapel bells rang twice, echoing across the empty quad. In six hours, I’d be dropping out of one of America’s best univ…

When I worked in tech, I often heard engineering leaders explain why they couldn’t hire more women or minorities: the so-called pipeline problem. They claimed there simply weren’t enough qualified candidates entering the system, so naturally the pool of diverse talent remained thin. Many of us in the ecosystem called BS. The reality wasn’t a lack of qualified people; it was a lack of imagination, access, and commitment to creating inclusive environments where diverse talent could thrive. Fast forward to my work today in women’s sports. I find myself thinking about that same phrase—this time with a twist. In sports, a pipeline problem is very real, and very serious. Gi…

The world’s best engineers, entrepreneurs, and researchers face no shortage of opportunities. If you’re building the future in frontier technologies like AI, you could base yourself anywhere. So the real question is where. The answer today points north—to Stockholm. The European Commission recently declared Stockholm as Europe’s most innovative region. Ahead of Copenhagen, London, and Zurich, the Swedish capital took the top spot. Not just overall, but on a range of individual indicators, from lifelong learning and share of tech specialists employed to cross-border scientific publications, collaboration between SMEs, patent filings, and trademarks. Right after the…