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Art gallery, science exhibition and 21st century funhouse, Paradox Museum Miami takes guests on a tour through optical illusions and other enigmas geared for the age of Instagram. The 11,000 square-foot (1,000 square-meter) museum, housed in Miami’s trendy Wynwood arts and entertainment district, features more than 70 exhibits that challenge the imagination, executive director Samantha Impellizeri said. “It ebbs and flows between periods of highly tactile and interactive exhibit pieces and fully immersive photo opportunities where you yourself become the paradox and walk away with some really fun and unique social media content,” Impellizeri said. Paradox Museum has mo…

Expect more security — and nerves — at this year’s Super Bowl victory celebration regardless of who wins Sunday’s matchup in New Orleans between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles. A shooting that killed one person and wounded about two dozen others marred last year’s Chiefs victory rally, and a Philadelphia Eagles fan died last month after falling from a light pole while celebrating the team’s NFC championship victory. Kansas City plans to boost its police presence if the Chiefs win a third-straight title, and Philadelphia might grease its poles to thwart climbers if the Eagles win. New Orleans, which was the scene of a New Year’s Day truck-ramming at…

Step inside a newly built apartment complex in almost any American city and you’re likely to find people congregating in an unexpected place. They’re not in the pool or the game rooms or the gym. The people are gathering in the mailroom. Through an unusual collision of building codes, postal regulations, shopping habits, and a global pandemic, mailrooms have become a new kind of social space in apartment buildings. And designers are finding new ways of taking what has long been a utilitarian peripheral space and turning it into a central square where residents can dwell and interact. Julia Lauve is an interior designer in Dallas and her firm Workshop Studio design…

Even managers with the best intentions can sometimes compromise team morale without realizing it. The art of team management involves balancing professional competence with genuine interpersonal connection. We consulted with 10 experienced industry professionals who shared the common pitfalls that can zap a team’s spirit as well as practical tips to help you avoid missteps and lead a motivated, high-performing group. Shift from micromanagement to autonomy One specific way managers unknowingly harm team morale is through micromanagement. We noticed a roughly 20% drop in employee satisfaction scores and a decline in on-time project delivery whenever team leads checke…

In recent months, we’ve seen a wave of companies (including Amazon, JPMorgan, and Dell) and the federal government announce plans for a full-time return-to-office for workers. Other companies have slowly increased the numbers of the days they require in-office weekly. The subsequent pushback from many employees has been intense, with workers signing petitions, opting into “coffee badging” routines (where they swipe their badges, grab a coffee, and head home), or quitting all together. As multiple elements of psychological safety are broken by actions such as these, there is often some collateral damage. After accepting countless changes needed to survive and thr…

The 2017 fire that burned down much of Enchanted Hills Camp in Napa, California had a silver lining. The camp was originally designed in the early 1900s for people with sight, but it has become a beloved retreat for the blind and visually-impaired for the last 75 years. When more than a dozen of its buildings were destroyed in the fire, the chance arose to rebuild the camp for the unique needs of the people who have been using it for decades. “This really was never designed with the thought of access in mind,” says Helen Schneider, associate principal and project manager at Perkins & Will, the architecture firm that redesigned the camp. Working closely with the ca…

In an interview with Joe Rogan last month, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg made a plea for companies to embrace more “masculine energy.” Zuckerberg went on to say, “A culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits.” Never mind that Meta (then Facebook) became one of the world’s more profitable companies when COO Sheryl Sandberg ran its day-to-day operations. Or that Sandberg urged women to “lean in” by actively pursuing leadership roles and embracing opportunities in the workplace, sparking a global community dedicated to helping foster leadership, advancement and inclusion for women in the workplace. “When a very powerful CEO who has platforms …

Adam Galinsky is a social psychologist and professor of leadership and tthics at Columbia Business School. He conducts behavioral science research, having published more than 200 scientific articles. He has been a damage expert in numerous defamation cases and is also a producer on two documentaries shortlisted for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards. What’s the big idea? Every leader leaves their mark on the hearts and minds of a workforce. This can go one of two ways: Leaders can leave behind a legacy of inspiration, or infuriation. Based on thousands of perspectives collected from around the globe, Adam created a systemic formula for choosing and earning the …

Twenty-four hours before the White House and Silicon Valley announced the $500 billion Project Stargate to secure the future of AI, China dropped a technological love bomb called DeepSeek. DeepSeek R1 is a whole lot like OpenAI’s top-tier reasoning model, o1. It offers state-of-the art artificial thinking: the sort of logic that doesn’t just converse convincingly, but can code apps, calculate equations, and think through a problem more like a human. DeepSeek largely matches o1’s performance, but it runs at a mere 3% the cost, is open source, can be installed on a company’s own servers, and allows researchers, engineers, and app developers a look inside and even tune t…

Before air-conditioning existed, staying cool during the summer months in the southern United States was a foreign skill for early European colonists. But enslaved Africans, hailing from similar warm climates, had developed, over centuries, architectural strategies for combating sweltering summer conditions. It was from these early enslaved builders that the most quintessential architectural feature of homes in the United States emerged: the porch. Porches, verandas, porticoes, and other types of outdoor coverings connected to a building have existed in various forms across the globe for centuries. However, what we think of as an American style of porch, first associa…

Even tech giant Apple couldn’t prevent its artificial intelligence from making things up. Last month, the company suspended its AI-powered news alert feature after it falsely claimed a murder suspect had shot himself, one of several fabricated headlines that appeared under trusted news organizations’ logos. The embarrassing pullback came despite Apple’s vast resources and technical expertise. Most users probably weren’t fooled by the more obvious errors, but the incident highlights a growing challenge. Companies are racing to integrate AI into everything from medical advice to legal documents to financial services, often prioritizing speed over safety. Many of these a…

A viral TikTok video showing an empty book signing for an elderly author tugged at millions of hearts—until it was exposed as a marketing stunt. The book in question, Just Cuz, was reportedly written by Barbara Miller as a tribute to her late husband, Marv. “She wrote it as a way to deal with her grief,” the video’s voiceover explained. Posted last month, the video shows an empty bookstore with “Aunt Barb” setting up her books on a table to sign for customers who were nowhere in sight, followed by a dejected but hopeful “Aunt Barb”—and it quickly racked up more than 33 million views, sparking an outpouring of support. Hundreds of commenters pledged to buy the book and…

There’s a special place in you-know-where for spam callers. They’re annoying. They waste time. They’re also dangerous. And while it’s challenging to eliminate spam calls entirely, the good news is that with a little time and effort, you can significantly reduce the number of spam calls you receive. Here’s what to do. Add yourself to the FTC’s Do Not Call list One of the easiest and longest-lasting ways to reduce spam calls is to add your phone number to the National Do Not Call Registry, which is a free service managed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Once you’ve added your number, telemarketers have a month to remove you from their lists so you don’t…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. When’s the last time you fielded a tech support call from a parent? You want your parents—or anyone you support—to benefit from email, photo sharing, and video calls. You also have to protect them from scams, malware, and unnecessary complexity. Or maybe you are that parent and want to stay safe online. Either way, today’s post aims to support you. I periodically help my parents make sense of confusing WebEx conferencing instructions or Microsoft Word settings. So when Wonder Tools reader and tech expert Pa…

You’ve probably felt the thrill that comes with receiving a job offer. You read the congratulatory email, begin to imagine life in your new role, then quickly fill out all the required HR paperwork and receive the necessary equipment. And if all is well, you start preparing for your first day. But what if you find out that the job isn’t real? In the first three quarters of 2024, Americans lost $514 million due to business and job opportunity scams, and the Federal Trade Commission received over 93,000 complaints about this type of fraud. In the worst cases, people have already resigned from their jobs before they realize their new position isn’t real—and suddenl…

In his February 2025 cover story for The Atlantic, journalist Derek Thompson dubbed our current era “the anti-social century.” He isn’t wrong. According to our recent research, the U.S. is becoming a nation of homebodies. Using data from the American Time Use Survey, we studied how people in the U.S. spent their time before, during, and after the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic did spur more Americans to stay home. But this trend didn’t start or end with the pandemic. We found that Americans were already spending more and more time at home and less and less time engaged in activities away from home stretching all the way back to at least 2003. And if you t…

If the Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl on Sunday, Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the rest of their teammates will have bragging rights as the National Football League (NFL)’s first three-peat winners. They’ll also bag a cool $171,000 for the game, each. Before Philadelphia fans accuse the Chiefs of getting special treatment, yes, Eagles players will earn the same amount if they win. And whichever team leaves New Orleans without the Lombardi Trophy will still get a decent consolation prize: A $96,000 paycheck per player. Super Bowl contenders are receiving a better pay raise than most Americans did this year; the game paycheck is about 4.3% higher for th…

Most upstart companies prepping a new product launch would probably not be thrilled to receive a cease and desist letter from an established giant of their field. But as is readily apparent from its insane packaging (not to mention its insane name), the gummy candy purveyor Rotten is not most companies. Last May, founder and CEO Michael Fisher had his signature gummy worms on hand at the industry’s Sweets & Snacks Expo—and a flyer for a new product: Rotten’s Gummy Cruncheez, which launch today and bear resemblance to Nerds’s uber-popular Gummy Clusters. [Image: Rotten] “Nerds and their parent company Ferrara got wind of the product, took a photo of the flye…

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. Consumers will spend a whopping $27.5 billion on Valentine’s Day this year, up from $25.8 billion last year, according to the National Retail Federation. For 1-800-Flowers.com, the purveyor of candy, cards, and—yes—flowers, February 14 is a bit like its Super Bowl, with year-long…

It was the year 2000. We survived Y2K and sat at our computers obsessed with a strange new game called The Sims. It was the first game I ever played where the protagonist could be late to work, forget to take out the garbage, or be so preoccupied by the doldrums of life that they might pee themselves. I, alongside millions, was hooked and could not articulate why. Born from the mind of Will Wright—the same designer who bucked the industry’s penchant for arcade games for world simulators like SimCity—The Sims is almost as hard to define now as it was then. Is it a virtual dollhouse? A simulacrum of suburban life? A neighborhood of tamagotchis with jobs? An HGTV ho…

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. When Geoff Martha, chairman and CEO of Medtronic, took over the medical device maker’s Restorative Therapies Group in 2015, the company faced a tough decision. The group at the time was underperforming, and the leadership team had to consider how to prioritize technology investments suc…

The “American woman in Pakistan” now has a crypto coin. If you don’t know who that is, American Onijah Andrew Robinson recently went viral after claiming she flew to Pakistan to marry a 19-year-old she met online, only to be rejected. Instead of returning home, she has become somewhat of a celebrity in Pakistan, holding high-profile press conferences in Karachi where she demands money and declares her plans to “rebuild” the country. Thanks to TikTok, she has since gone international as that “American woman in Pakistan.” In an interview with the City 21 news channel, Robinson announced her entry into the crypto market last week. “I would like to say I am launching…

Literate in tone, far-reaching in scope, and witty to its bones, The New Yorker brought a new – and much-needed – sophistication to American journalism when it launched 100 years ago this month. As I researched the history of U.S. journalism for my book “Covering America,” I became fascinated by the magazine’s origin story and the story of its founder, Harold Ross. In a business full of characters, Ross fit right in. He never graduated from high school. With a gap-toothed smile and bristle-brush hair, he was frequently divorced and plagued by ulcers. Ross devoted his adult life to one cause: The New Yorker magazine. For the literati, by the literati Bor…

Innovative organizations are finding ways to make augmented and virtual reality a more efficient, and even more practical, way to interact with technologies and tools, including letting people learn complex skills through virtual training. The businesses in Fast Company‘s Most Innovative Companies in AR/VR reflect that trend. Texas A&M University has brought AR/VR production into its celebrated Visualization program, letting students learn to build state-of-the-art virtual productions before they leave college. And other organizations are using AR/VR itself for educational purposes. Excurio has built immersive, historically accurate versions of iconic eras from 19th c…

Shares in Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Nasdaq: SMCI) are down around 4% in premarket trading this morning as of the time of this writing after surging over 17% yesterday on optimism about the company’s Q2 2025 earnings, which will be announced after the close of market today. But while investors are no doubt interested in learning how the storage and server solutions company performed in its most recent quarter, they are also eagerly awaiting news from the company on the filing status of its much-delayed Form 10-K with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Unless that form is filed within the next two weeks, Super Micro Computer (aka Supermicro) is at ris…