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Yankee Candle is going luxury with a new line of candles that’s designed to be upsold. The Massachusetts-based candle company launched the Yankee Candle YC Collection this week, a line of seven fragrances designed by Beardwood&Co., the New York City branding agency behind the July redesign of the company’s packaging. With a curved glass jar, white wax, and metallic lids that show a new “YC” monogram adapted from the original Yankee Candle logo, the candles are minimally designed. Each box comes with watercolor artwork by illustrator Carly Martin that’s inspired by the look of an artist’s fragrance sketchbook, according to the company. The new premium line …

A haunting 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold Thursday for $54.7 million and became the top-selling work by any female artist at an auction. The painting of Kahlo asleep in a bed — titled “El sueño (La cama)” or in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — surpassed the record held by Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1,” which sold for $44.4 million in 2014. The sale at Sotheby’s in New York also topped Kahlo’s own auction record for a work by a Latin American artist. The 1949 painting “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, went for $34.9 million in 2021. Her paintings are reported to have sold p…

Google Maps is one of the most valuable digital marketing tools available to your business, particularly if you’re using the Google Local Pack. The Google Local Pack displays top-ranked business listings in a user’s local area. So, when searching for “hairstylists near me” or “Italian food in my area,” a user sees their local best-ranked and reviewed listings for salons or Italian restaurants at the very top of the search results page, along with a map. These listings occupy a valuable space on the search results page, as the first items many users see and appear higher than traditional results. In fact, many users will click on one of those listings without scrol…

Thursday, November 20, ended up being a bit of a whirlwind for tech investors. The day started off on a positive note, with Nvidia’s shares (Nasdaq: NVDA) rising almost 5% thanks to a strong earnings report shared after the bell on Wednesday. The company’s third-quarter revenue reached $57.01 billion with an adjusted earnings per share of $1.30—both exceeded Wall Street’s estimates. Nvidia also shared that it expects $65 billion in quarter-four revenue, higher than the $62 billion analysts predicted. The other “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla—rose in turn. But Nvidia’s success wasn’t enough to repel inv…

Now you can sing along with America’s Founding Fathers as you crush your opponents under oppressive rents and market domination. The Op Games, a publisher of board games and puzzles, is releasing a new version of Monopoly based on the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, marking the latest iteration of the classic economics game that has been a staple of family game nights for many decades. The Op Games plans to announce the new version today, a spokesperson told Fast Company. The game commemorates the 10th anniversary of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rap-infused retelling of America’s origin story, which made its Broadway debut in the summer of 2015 and went on to win 11 To…

The “X of Y” framework—“We’re the Uber of healthcare” or “the Airbnb of finance”—has become a kind of startup reflex. It’s useful, even comforting, to anchor a new idea to something people already understand. But what feels like clarity can become constraint. When you define your business through another company’s success, you risk adopting their playbook instead of rewriting the rules. The best disruptors learn to move past comparison. They articulate what makes their idea not just different, but inevitable. That’s how you build conviction from your team, your investors, and your customers. Why comparison shrinks your story From a branding perspective, lett…

Bitcoin is having a horrible week. Until yesterday, the cryptocurrency had declined by roughly 2.5% over the preceding five days. But in the last 24 hours alone, the coin has taken a major hit—down more than 10%. Worse, fear and greed indices, which measure the emotional state of investors who buy and sell Bitcoin, are near historic lows. Here’s what you need to know. Why is Bitcoin sinking? Bitcoin has dropped precipitously over the past 24 hours. As of the time of this writing, it’s down more than 10% to $82,185 per token. That’s a low the coin has not seen since April. But why has Bitcoin been falling so much over the past 24 hours? There are two m…

Hi again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. On November 18, Google announced a new product. More precisely, it declared that it was ushering in “a new era”—which is what tech companies do when they really want you to pay attention. The product in question is Gemini 3 Pro, the latest version of Google’s LLM. It’s not just the foundation of Google’s ChatGPT-like chatbot, also called Gemini. It underlies vast quantities of features in flagship offerings such as Google Search, Gmail, and Android. It powers Antigravity, a new Google AI coding platform that debuted on the same day. And thanks to Google Cloud, the model is also available to third-party devel…

Before Wicked opened on Broadway in October 2003, the musical’s production team took the show to the Curran Theatre in San Francisco for what’s called an “out of town tryout.” The five-week run allowed the producers, writers, and director to work out the kinks ahead of the show’s Broadway debut. During the San Francisco run, University of Southern California film student Jon M. Chu happened to be home for the weekend visiting his parents, who owned a Chinese restaurant called Chef Chu’s in Los Altos, California, just outside Silicon Valley. Chu was the youngest of five children growing up in a family that spent their free time playing instruments or going to the balle…

AI has made us faster and more productive at work. It drafts our emails, summarizes our meetings, and even reminds us to take breaks. But here’s the problem: in our rush to embrace AI, it’s quietly eroding our relationships and how we build human connections at work and in our everyday lives. People are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT to help them write, coach, and communicate. And many are also turning to it for therapy and relationship advice. The problem is, AI doesn’t truly understand people as unique individuals. It can mimic empathy, but it can’t understand it. It can predict tone, but it can’t sense intent. The way we communicate with one person shoul…

Google has 44 data centers in operation or in development around the world, but as demand for AI and the need for compute capacity grows, the company is getting started on three more. This latest batch is destined for Texas, where Google already has a pair of data centers in operation just south of Dallas. One of the new centers will be located outside of Amarillo in Armstrong County, with the other two headed to Haskell County, about three and a half hours west of Dallas. The $40 billion investment in the Lone Star State will help the company build additional infrastructure for its cloud and AI units. The company expects the centers to be operational by the end o…

Google has 44 data centers in operation or in development around the world, but as demand for AI and the need for compute capacity grows, the company is already getting started on three more. This latest batch is destined for Texas, where Google already has a pair of data centers in operation just south of Dallas. One of the new centers will be located outside of Amarillo in Armstrong County, with the other two headed to Haskell County, about three and a half hours west of Dallas. The $40 billion investment in the Lone Star State will help the company build additional infrastructure for its cloud and AI units. The company expects the centers to be operational by t…

The modern workplace runs on a dangerous myth: that constant motion equals maximum productivity. We’ve built entire corporate cultures around this fallacy, glorifying the “always on” mentality while our teams quietly unravel. The result? A burnout crisis that’s costing companies billions in turnover, absenteeism, and lost innovation. But here’s what the data—and our own exhausted bodies—are trying to tell us: emotional recovery isn’t a luxury. It’s the most strategic investment a leader can make. The Real Cost of Running on Empty Burnout isn’t just about feeling tired. It’s a systematic depletion that manifests as cynicism, detachment, and plummeting profession…

With little more than a coat of paint, buildings could soon make the air around them cooler and harvest gallons of water directly from the atmosphere. Researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia have created a nanoengineered polymer coating that passively cools building surfaces while enabling them to collect water like dew-coated leaves. It’s a material solution that could help combat rising heat and water insecurity in places all over the world. The white coating, a porous paint-like material, reflects up to 97% of sunlight and radiates heat, making surfaces up to 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding air, even under direct sun. This cooler condition a…

There are certain things that make it obvious that you are a working parent. And I am not talking about the bags under your eyes or the six cups of coffee needed to get through the day. It usually happens at 4:59 p.m. when they start to pack up so they can make it to daycare or a school recital or any number of obligations parents have. As they slip out of the open-plan cubicle maze, a child-free colleague glances over and thinks (or sometimes says out loud), “Must be nice.” Welcome to the us versus them of modern work life: parents versus nonparents, aka committed versus distracted or the all-in versus the always juggling. In my book How to Have a Kid and a Life, I w…

Instead of teens simply putting down their phones to take a break, TikTok wants them to use the app’s new breathing exercises and affirmation journal to improve their well-being. Over the past couple of years, a growing number of legislators have been proposing or enacting laws to restrict or limit minors’ access to social media apps in order to protect children’s and teens’ mental health. TikTok has other ideas on how to boost well-being—without ever leaving the app. This week, it launched a Time and Well-Being space within users’ account settings, replacing the existing screen-time management page. New features in the space include an affirmation journal …

If your team can’t function without you in the room, you don’t have a team, you have a dependency. Too many business owners confuse supporting their team with carrying them. Instead of learning how to coach team members, they do the work for them. They jump into every problem, solve every issue, and answer every question themselves. It feels like good leadership, but it’s actually just bottlenecking in disguise. The goal of leadership isn’t to be the smartest person in the room. Instead, it’s to build a room full of people who can think, solve, and act without you. That shift, from problem-solver to coach, is one of the most important moves a business owner can make.…

As startups race to keep up with advances in artificial intelligence, some of them seem to be borrowing from China’s exacting work culture—which normalized a 72-hour workweek, or a “996” schedule of working six days a week from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. While the 996 parlance and laser focus on AI may be new, hustle culture has always been embedded in Silicon Valley to some degree. Some business leaders, perhaps most famously Elon Musk, have long demanded those hours from their employees: “There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week,” he once said of the “hardcore” work ethic promoted at his companies. Now that culture seems …

Earlier this week, communities around the world observed World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. It’s a day to honor those we’ve lost and recommit ourselves to preventing future tragedies. As someone who’s worked in the transportation industry for more than 25 years, I come at this topic as an insider. You may have heard the term “Vision Zero” in local political campaigns or public safety PSAs. Vision Zero is a strategy to eliminate all severe crashes. It’s not just a marketing campaign, it’s an approach to road safety that begins with this basic understanding: Severe crashes are preventable. The status quo believes the fantasy that traffic violence is…

“Your new boss didn’t even offer you a glass of water?” my mother had questioned me in disbelief. “After how many interviews? You should not take that job. I am telling you not to take that job.” I had received a call from a recruiter to interview with one of the biggest beauty brands in the world. This was my chance to catapult my career into a company that didn’t often have job openings at my level, but didn’t have the best Glassdoor reviews. And I didn’t have time to ask too many questions. The recruiter had given me 48 hours notice to come in and do interviews. I had shared with my mother I did close to a dozen in person interviews, 30 minutes each, back to back. …

Executives are no longer measured by the weight of their title but by the scale of what they create, especially in an era reshaped by AI. The most effective leaders now marry vision with execution, using technology as a co-pilot to accelerate outcomes while keeping human judgment at the center. Strategy isn’t declared anymore; it’s built in real time, constantly iterating and leveraging AI to turn ideas into outcomes faster than ever. The builder CEO is a visionary who architects systems, coaches teams, and removes obstacles through hands-on involvement. Here’s how executives with a builder leadership style are involved with the day-to-day work and unite teams around …

IT development has been around for more than 60 years and it has undergone radical transformations from the emergence of the first programming languages and OS development to the internet boom and the current AI era. Although programming tools and approaches are constantly changing, one thing remains constant: Only those developers who can adapt and master new knowledge and skills survive. I’m the chief software officer of a 70-strong team that designs a predictive maintenance system (PdM): A solution based on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and AI. Without continuous growth, our developers cannot remain competitive. The same is true in nearly every industry;…

How did you get to this article? Maybe you opened a link in an email, or you navigated from the Fast Company home page. Perhaps you Googled “agentic AI” and this figured in the results. The point is, you almost certainly clicked, scrolled, tapped, or typed your way here, because that’s the digital grammar that shapes nearly every online experience. But that 30-year-old paradigm is about to change. Agentic AI is ripping up the rulebook, by creating a new layer of intelligent, autonomous mediation between us and the digital world. Personal shopping agents will handle routine purchases, while in the workplace, agents will automate workflows and streamline procurement. …

How would a school shooting affect your employees? It’s something that most employers never want to think about, but it’s a horrifyingly real threat to any community—and the companies and organizations that do business there. Following the death of my youngest son, Dylan, in the 2012 Sandy Hook School shooting, I can tell you first-hand about the lasting trauma that occurs when your child is injured or killed in this type of tragedy—and how that ripples through the entire community. In October, we held America’s Safe Schools Week, a national initiative to raise awareness about school violence and promote safety. It’s also a time for companies to recognize they have a …

Every C-suite executive I meet asks the same question: Why is our AI investment stuck in pilot purgatory? After surveying over 200 AI practitioners for our latest research, I have a sobering answer: Only 22% of organizations have moved beyond experimentation to strategic AI deployment. The rest are trapped in what I call the “messy middle”—burning resources on scattered pilots that never reach production scale. In my 20-plus years helping companies solve complex problems with open-source AI and machine learning, I’ve watched this pattern repeat across industries. Companies get excited about AI’s potential. They fund pilots. They hire data scientists. But when …