What's on Your Mind?

Lurking on sites like LinkedIn and Indeed, or among your incoming text messages and emails, lies yet another disappointment to dodge in the already lacking job market: fake recruiters. Posing as representatives from top companies, they’ll contact you out of the blue, offering a job so tempting, that 40% of targets ignore the warning signs and move forward with the “interview.” More than half of them, 51%, end up being scammed to give up personal data or money. Those findings came from a survey of more than 1,200 U.S. job seekers published in October by Password Manager. “The prevalence of fake recruiters came to my attention several years ago,” says Gunnar K…

We talk about time at work as if it’s a fixed resource: something outside of us and something we either “manage well” or “never have enough of.” People genuinely believe the clock is the problem. But the more you look at how the brain processes experience, the less true this becomes. People don’t feel pressured because they have too many tasks. They feel pressured because their brain is constructing time in a way that makes everything feel urgent or impossible to catch up with. Modern neuroscience has been pointing to this for a while. Our experience of time—what feels fast, slow, overwhelming, or “not enough”—is not a reading from an internal stopwatch. It’s a st…

On Wednesday morning, local time, over one million Australian children discovered their social media accounts had vanished. And it may not be long before kids in other countries find themselves in a similar predicament. Under the new law, which was approved late last year, no one under the age of 16 in Australia will be allowed to set up accounts on platforms including Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, X, Snapchat, Twitch, and Reddit. Any accounts for people in that age category will be deactivated or removed. The law is meant to protect the mental health of children from the addictive nature of social media. Australia’s law goes three years beyond the de fact…

Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of dating app Hinge, is consciously uncoupling from his app. Hinge’s president and chief marketing officer Jackie Jantos—recently named one of Fast Company’s CMOs of the year—will succeed him in the role of CEO, effective immediately. McLeod will stay on as an adviser through March to support the transition. McLeod, who founded Hinge in 2011, is leaving to launch Overtone, an AI-driven venture focused on facilitating connections between people; it will be backed by Match Group. In a blog post, he calls his departure “a wildly bittersweet moment.” “This past year, I got higher conviction on two different things. One is that Jackie i…

CoreWeave stock dropped 8% Monday after the AI cloud computing company announced plans to raise another $2 billion, this time through convertible debt, to finance its rapid build-out of new data centers. On Tuesday, the company said it would increase the total offering to $2.25 billion. CoreWeave, which sells access to powerful Nvidia GPUs to run AI models, may be a bellwether in an industry placing unprecedented bets on an AI boom they believe is around the corner. CoreWeave is a “pick-and-shovel” infrastructure company in AI (like Nvidia) whose fortunes may test the narrative that tech companies — and their stock values — are riding the long wave of the next techno…

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has created a new $1 billion grant program to make U.S. airports more family- and health-friendly. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy launched the “Make Travel Family Friendly Again” campaign alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday, December 8, at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. “I am talking about ushering in the golden age of transportation,” Duffy said, adding they are hiring more air traffic controllers, and asking retiring air traffic controllers to stay on the job. However, the Transportation Secretary said the funding is dedicated to “making the experience better in airports and its…

More and more people are turning to GoFundMe for help covering the cost of housing, food, and other basic needs. The for-profit crowdfunding platform’s annual “Year in Help” report, released Tuesday, underscored ongoing concerns around affordability. The number of fundraisers started to help cover essential expenses such as rent, utilities, and groceries jumped 20%, according to the company’s 2025 review, after already quadrupling last year. “Monthly bills” were the second fastest-growing category behind individual support for nonprofits. The number of “essentials” fundraisers has increased over the last three years in all of the company’s major English-speaking m…

The Northern Lights, also known as aurora borealis, may be visible in more than a dozen U.S. states Tuesday, December 9, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (NOAA). A full-halo coronal mass ejection (CME) is expected to reach Earth early to midday on Tuesday, potentially causing periods of “strong” G3 geomagnetic storms (on a scale of G1 to G5). The aurora borealis is the result of a geomagnetic storm that occurs when a coronal mass ejection (CME), an eruption of solar material, reaches Earth and causes swaths of purple, blue, and green in the night sky. This year’s increased solar activity (and thus, …

For an architect whose name and work have become known all over the world by laypeople and architecture fans alike, Frank Gehry’s buildings are about as far from the mainstream as one can get. Bent, curved, and clad in shiny metal, the most famous buildings by Gehry, who died last week at 96, are also the most improbable. Coming up with the flamboyant designs for landmark buildings like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles was only part of what made Gehry one of the most successful and celebrated architects in American history. Just as impressive are the ways Gehry helped explore and expand the architecture technologies used …

Layoffs have hit American workers hard in 2025, particularly in the government and tech sectors. Already this year, well over a million jobs have been lost due to layoffs—and unfortunately, it doesn’t look like a cessation of job cuts is on the horizon. Reports say that beverage and snack giant PepsiCo is the latest major American company getting ready to announce layoffs. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On Monday, PepsiCo (Nasdaq: PEP) issued a memorandum about its intention to enhance shareholder value in 2026. In the memo, PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta said that the planned initiatives were to accelerate “organic revenue growth, deliver recor…

Spotify has a knack for mining your listening data into something fun and shareable rather than weird and creepy for its annual “Wrapped” feature. This year, it outdid itself. The 2025 edition of Spotify Wrapped goes beyond just summarizing what you listened to with charts and infographics. This year, Spotify is also assigning each user a “Listening Age,” which is based on the release years of their favorite tracks compared to others in the same age group. The feature quickly went viral, as users recoiled at their seemingly geriatric (or juvenile) musical tastes. At the risk of reading too much into something that’s ultimately good fun, Wrapped’s expanding purview…

In the English countryside, a new project has emerged from the landscape—quite literally. Rammed Earth House, a residential estate by London-based Tuckey Design Studio, combines renovated brick buildings with new rammed earth structures, harnessing the clay soil of the very land it sits on. “The material is already under your feet, and it doesn’t come with all the carbon baggage that other [building] materials come with,” says studio founder Jonathan Tuckey. As a building technique, rammed earth—which combines clay soil with aggregate such as gravel into tightly compressed layers—traces back thousands of years. It was widely used in ancient China, but appears globall…

After Joey Zwillinger stepped down as CEO of Allbirds in March 2024, he took three months off—mainly because his wife Liz said she’d divorce him if he jumped into another venture. He had run the sustainable shoe company for 10 years while the couple raised their three young children. “It took a real toll on the family,” Liz says. (“I would say it developed character in our family,” Zwillinger counters.) Before long, he was itching to start a new project, an ambition he shyly expressed to his wife. “It was really hard to want to sign up for something like that all over again,” Liz says. But this time, he cofounded the venture with Liz. It’s also a bold piv…

If you’re searching for a new snack that’s heavy on flavor but manages to skip the unhealthy additives, you’re in luck. There’s a new one called Ragerz from Good Eat’n, NBA star Chris Paul’s snack brand, in partnership with the WNBA’s Paige Bueckers. And it sounds like a slam dunk. For starters, the snack—which is a bit like a healthier take on Takis—is focused on delivering a fierce flavor without the junk. It comes in Chili Lime and Sweet Chili Crunch flavors that, Bueckers tells Fast Company, do not miss the mark (hoop?). The snack “isn’t asking people to give up flavor to feel better about what they’re eating,” she says, adding that with Ragerz, “you ca…