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If you’re a millennial or simply a fan of sci-fi, you likely remember 2010’s smash hit Inception, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. The story follows Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), a professional thief who specializes in stealing privileged secrets from people’s minds while they dream. He uses advanced technology to enter another person’s subconscious while they’re asleep and take whatever information he wants. The problem DiCaprio’s character faces is that the line between reality and dreams become blurred, making it increasingly difficult to tell what’s real. In many ways, especially for retail investors, that’s a picture of the modern market. A pl…

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…

Shares opened mixed in Europe on Tuesday after slipping in Asia as some regional markets wrapped up trading for the year. Crude oil prices edged higher and gold and silver resumed their ascent. U.S. futures were flat. In Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi rang out the final session for 2025 in a traditional year-end ceremony. “By realizing a Japanese economy that earns the trust of investors around the world, we will create a virtuous cycle in which global capital flows into Japan,” Takaichi said. The benchmark Nikkei 225 shed 0.4% to 50,339.48, its first year-end close above 50,000. It ended 2025 up nearly 25%. With just two trading days left before the y…

A veteran jazz ensemble announced on Monday it was canceling its New Year’s Eve performances at the Kennedy Center, the latest group to withdraw from the Washington arts institution after it was renamed to include U.S. President Donald The President. “Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice. Some of us have been making this music for many decades, and that history still shapes us,” the Cookers jazz ensemble said in a statement. The Kennedy Center had promoted two New Year’s Eve performances by the Cookers as an “all-star jazz septet that will ignite the Terrace Theater …

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the global workforce and rapidly expanding the expectations placed on today’s learners. The World Economic Forum predicts that technological advancements like AI, alongside economic and demographic factors, will lead to a net increase of 78 million global jobs this decade. Educational institutions now face a pivotal moment. They must evolve how students learn, how instructors teach, and how technology supports each step of that journey. For decades, the education sector adopted new technologies cautiously. However, the profound impact of AI on the workforce has accelerated interest and experimentation. Our latest research at Cengag…

When internet services platform Cloudflare suffered an outage in November, it took a big chunk of the online world down with it. Major platforms like ChatGPT, X, and Canva became unreachable. So did digital services offered by countless banks, retailers, and many other businesses. During the six-hour meltdown, as many as 2.4 billion users could have felt the impact. Software outages like this have always been and always will be part of online life. But today our systems are more interconnected than ever, so a single failure can ripple outward. AI only amplifies that risk. Yet, too many companies still lack protection against such disasters. In an era when ou…

When Bianca Jones, a 33-year-old special education teacher in Memphis, Tennessee, decided a couple of years ago that she wanted to buy a house, she started digging into her Experian credit report. She was shocked by what she found. Her student debt had been double-counted, making it look as though she owed a quarter of a million dollars and putting home ownership out of reach. Jones disputed the items with Experian, one of the major credit reporting agencies, multiple times in writing and over the phone, but got nowhere. “They kept saying it’s been verified, it’s been verified…They never investigated. They never tried to remove it,” Jones said in an interview. …

Packages of grass fed ground beef are being recalled over possible E. coli contamination. The affected packages were distributed in at least six states, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). What ground meat is recalled? The USDA made the announcement in a Dec. 27 recall notice, explaining that the recall includes 2,855 pounds of raw ground beef produced on Dec. 16 from Mountain West Food Group, LLC. The at-risk product is the company’s 16-oz. (1-lb.) vacuum-sealed packages of FORWARD FARMS GRASS-FED GROUND BEEF. The packages have a use or freeze by date of 01/13/26. The product also has the establishment number EST 2083 printed on the side of the…

In a year defined by companies pouring shocking sums of money into AI, one more deal squeaked in just before 2026. Meta just made a play on Manus, the buzzy Singapore-based company with Chinese roots that turned heads earlier this year when it showed its AI agents executing complex tasks, like hunting for real estate and sorting through resumes. The deal is sure to turn heads too. Manus and its parent company Butterfly Effect are now based in Singapore but were founded in China – a country with a fraught relationship to the U.S tech industry – and maintain operations there. Facebook’s parent company will reportedly pay more than $2 billion to acquire the startup,…

In artificial intelligence, 2025 marked a decisive shift. Systems once confined to research labs and prototypes began to appear as everyday tools. At the center of this transition was the rise of AI agents – AI systems that can use other software tools and act on their own. While researchers have studied AI for more than 60 years, and the term “agent” has long been part of the field’s vocabulary, 2025 was the year the concept became concrete for developers and consumers alike. AI agents moved from theory to infrastructure, reshaping how people interact with large language models, the systems that power chatbots like ChatGPT. In 2025, the definition of AI agent…

The White House cannot lapse in its funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal district court judge ruled on Tuesday, only days before funds at the bureau would have likely run out and the consumer finance agency would have no money to pay its employees. Judge Amy Berman ruled that the CFPB should continue to get its funds from the Federal Reserve, despite the Fed operating at a loss, and that the White House’s new legal argument about how the CFPB gets its funds is not valid. At the heart of this case is whether Russell Vought, President Donald The President’s budget director and the acting director of the CFPB, can effectively shut down the a…

The U.S. Federal Reserve agreed to cut interest rates at its December meeting only after a deeply nuanced debate about the risks facing the U.S. economy right now, according to minutes of the latest two-day session. Even some of those who supported the rate cut acknowledged “the decision was finely balanced or that they could have supported keeping the target range unchanged,” given the different risks facing the U.S. economy, according to the minutes released on Tuesday. In economic projections released after the December 9-10 meeting, six officials outright opposed a cut and two of that group dissented as voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee. …

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to pay a $10 million civil penalty as part of a settlement to resolve allegations it violated child privacy laws, the Justice Department said on Tuesday. A federal court order in the case involving Disney Worldwide Services Inc and Disney Entertainment Operations LLC also bars Disney from operating on YouTube in a manner that violates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the department said. The order requires Disney to create a program that will ensure it properly complies with the privacy law on YouTube in the future, it added. The law requires websites, apps, and other online services aimed at children under 13 to…

Every January, millions of people set ambitious New Year’s resolutions. They do this with genuine enthusiasm, hoping to transform their lives. Yet research indicates that by January 8th, just one week into the year, a quarter of these resolutions have already failed. By the end of the year, most individuals return to their familiar patterns, and the promises they made to themselves are often abandoned. My life doesn’t permit me the luxury of being part of that statistic. I operate at the intersection of three distinct and demanding identities: a PhD scholar at Oxford researching outer space financing, the founder of a career advancement platform called Network Capital…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I’ve recently written about free, private AI tools and the best AI mobile apps. To build on that AI series, I’m sharing a new guest post today on how to make the most of AI by Frank Andrade, The PyCoach. He’s an AI & Python instructor who has helped thousands of people on YouTube and Substack master AI with beginner-friendly guides and in-depth tutorials. As he starts a new journey on Instagram, he’s offering his ChatGPT course free to anyone who follows & DMs him. I’ve been using ChatGPT since the day it was released. Bac…

A dismal year for the U.S. dollar is ending with signs of stabilization, but many investors believe the currency’s decline will resume next year as global growth picks up and the Fed eases further. The U.S. dollar slumped more than 9% this year, against a basket of currencies, its worst showing in eight years, driven by expectations of Federal Reserve rate cuts, shrinking interest rate differentials with other major currencies, and as concerns about U.S. fiscal deficits and political uncertainty swirled. Investors broadly expect the dollar to weaken further as other major central banks stand pat or tighten policy and as a new Fed Chair takes charge—a change that i…

The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage fell to its lowest level of 2025 this week, an encouraging sign for prospective home buyers. The average long-term mortgage rate dipped to 6.15% from 6.18% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Wednesday. That’s the lowest average long-term rate since October 3, 2024, when it dipped to 6.12% before shooting back up. One year ago, the rate averaged 6.91%. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, fell this week to 5.44% from 5.50% the previous week. A year ago, it averaged 6.13%, Freddie Mac said. Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from t…

Porsche is recalling 173,538 vehicles in the U.S. as the rearview camera image may not display when the vehicle is placed in reverse, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Wednesday. This is one of the largest single safety recalls issued by Porsche Cars North America in recent years, following a 2022 recall pertaining to missing headlight adjustment screw covers that affected 222,858 vehicles. The current recall affects certain 2019-2025 Cayenne, Cayenne E-Hybrid, 2020-2025 911, Taycan, 2024-2025 Panamera, and 2025 Panamera E-Hybrid models. The regulator flagged that the vehicles fail to comply with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety S…

I just launched a wine app, which means I’ve spent the last six months thinking obsessively about one thing: how do you remove friction from decisions that shouldn’t be hard? The answer taught me something bigger about rituals, and why so many of the ones we create at the end and beginning of the year fail us. Here’s my founder story, but from the wine aisle. Last December, I was standing in front of a wall of bottles, paralyzed. Not because I don’t like wine. I do. I was paralyzed because the entire experience was designed to make me feel small. The sommelier energy, the gatekeeping language, the implied message that if I couldn’t name the terroir, I didn’t d…

Below, Judd Kessler shares five key insights from his new book, Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want. Judd is an award-winning professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research and writing have been featured in leading media, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review, among others. For his work on organ allocation, Kessler was named one of the “30 under 30” in Law and Policy by Forbes. He has been researching market design for the past 15 years. What’s the big idea? Life is full of hidden markets quietly deciding who gets…

The past year saw unprecedented change and turmoil in the labor market, from pandemic-era layoffs to AI fundamentally and tangibly turning the workforce on its head. But it’s in these times of uncertainty and transition that leadership becomes of paramount importance. In 2025, the very nature of leadership itself morphed along with the times, and specific themes resonated with readers in specific ways. And they’re bound to remain very much in the game heading into 2026. Here are some of Fast Company’s most popular leadership stories from the last year. Managing underperformers We live in a world of quiet quitting and more workers rejecting hustle culture and th…

In 2026 (and beyond) the best benchmark for large language models won’t be MMLU or AgentBench or GAIA. It will be trust—something AI will have to rebuild before it can be broadly useful and valuable to both consumers and businesses. Researchers identify several different kinds of AI trust. In people who use chatbots as companions or confidants, they measure a feeling that the AI is benevolent or has integrity. In people who use AI for productivity or business, they measure something called “competence trust,” or the belief that the AI is accurate and doesn’t hallucinate facts. I’ll focus on that second kind. Competence trust can grow or shrink. An AI tool user, qu…

Work consumes around a third of our waking hours during the weekday. Yet, according to Gallup, nearly a third of employees are disengaged. 80,000 Hours, a London-based nonprofit that helps people find the best career fit for themselves, reviewed 60 studies on dream jobs and found that a dream job meets six criteria: it’s engaging, it helps others, you’re good at it, you work with supportive colleagues, it doesn’t have major negatives, and it fits with the rest of your life. Dream jobs seem difficult to land—one 2024 survey of 3,000 employees across the U.S. finds only 14% of American adults are working their dream job. The same study found that 38% of adults hat…

When the confetti settles and the ball has dropped, many Americans will wake up on New Year’s Day—Thursday, January 1, 2026—with errands to run, groceries to buy, or just the urge to grab coffee. But because New Year’s Day is a federal holiday, the holiday clock affects a wide range of services differently: Some go dormant for the day, others hum along with normal or modified hours, and a few offer the convenience you might need as you kick off the new year. Here’s what to expect if you’re planning to be out and about—or just need to know whether that store you’re counting on is open. Will I get mail on New Year’s Day? Thursday is a full federal holiday, w…

2026 will be a good year for people who love to walk where cars once drove. As climate change accelerates—and cities continue to grapple with congestion and air pollution—urban priorities have been shifting. In May this year, Parisians voted to close 500 streets to traffic across all 20 arrondissements. London is moving forward with plans to pedestrianize sections of the world-famous Oxford Street, as well as Regent Street, and Piccadilly Circus. Meanwhile, Barcelona’s centuries-old promenade, La Rambla, is in the last stretches of a long-term redesign that will be completed in 2027, widening the pedestrian promenade and limiting access to residents’ vehicles and publ…