What's on Your Mind?

A beloved Christmas tree tradition is returning to Manhattan for the holiday season next week. No, it’s not the towering spruce at Rockefeller Center, which is lit in early December. The comparatively smaller Origami Holiday Tree that’s delighted crowds for decades at the American Museum of Natural History opens to the public on Monday. The colorful, richly decorated 13-foot (4-meter) tree is adorned with thousands of hand-folded paper ornaments created by origami artists from around the world. This year’s tree is inspired by the museum’s new exhibition, “Impact: The End of the Age of Dinosaurs,” which chronicles how an asteroid crash some 66 million years ago res…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. This week, I’m focusing on gathering some informed opinions from people trying out Google’s new Gemini 3 Pro AI model. I also look at another “circular” AI investment agreement. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan. What smart people are saying about Google’s Gem…

A 1940 self-portrait by famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo of her asleep in a bed could make history Thursday when it goes on sale by Sotheby’s in New York. With an estimated price of $40 million to $60 million, “El sueño (La cama)” – in English, “The Dream (The Bed)” — may surpass the top price for a work by any female artist when it goes under the hammer. That record currently stands at $44.4 million, paid at Sotheby’s in 2014 for Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1.” The highest price at auction for a Kahlo work is $34.9 million, paid in 2021 for “Diego and I,” depicting the artist and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. Her paintings are reported …

They’re cute, even cuddly, and promise learning and companionship—but artificial intelligence toys are not safe for kids, according to children’s and consumer advocacy groups urging parents not to buy them during the holiday season. These toys, marketed to kids as young as 2 years old, are generally powered by AI models that have already been shown to harm children and teenagers, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to an advisory published Thursday by the children’s advocacy group Fairplay and signed by more than 150 organizations and individual experts such as child psychiatrists and educators. “The serious harms that AI chatbots have inflicted on children are we…

As cases of potentially deadly botulism in babies who drank ByHeart infant formula continue to grow, state officials say they are still finding the recalled product on some store shelves. Meanwhile, the company reported late Wednesday that laboratory tests confirmed that some samples of formula were contaminated with the type of bacteria that has sickened more than 30 babies in the outbreak. Tests by an independent food safety laboratory found Clostridium botulinum, a bacterium that produces toxins that can lead to potentially life-threatening illness in babies younger than 1, the company said on its website. ByHeart officials said they notified the U.S. Food and …

Maybe your car broke down, your computer was stolen, or you had a surprise visit to urgent care. Emergencies are inevitable, but you can prepare to deal with them by building an emergency fund. “There are so many things that happen in our lives that we don’t expect and most of them require financial means to overcome,” said Miklos Ringbauer, a certified public accountant. The industry standard is to save three to six months of expenses in an emergency fund. However, this can feel daunting if you live paycheck to paycheck or if you have debt. But if you’re in either of these situations, it’s even more crucial to build a financial safety net that can help you in tim…

For the 150th episode of my award-winning podcast series, FUTURE OF XYZ, I sat down with Nick Foster, former head of design at Google X and leading futures designer. We quickly found common ground in our strong belief that society doesn’t think about the future in the right way. ​​Too often, the future is reduced to flashy visions, both in media headlines and through messages from leading corporations. The future feels like a sci-fi movie that still seems far away. Nick and I both believe the future isn’t some distant fantasy, but rather a tomorrow already unfolding before us. To prepare, we must pay closer attention to what we know now and how people are acting today. Wh…

Picture the scene. You’ve advertised a job on LinkedIn and received applications from around Europe. The perfect candidate lives in one of the world’s top tech cities—Paris, Berlin, or Amsterdam, for instance. Your company is based somewhere in Europe, so hiring them should be easy, right? Unfortunately, no. Despite their geographical proximity, countries in Europe still vary significantly in their hiring rules and regulations, making it hard to compliantly pay cross-border workers. Let’s take a closer look at the problem. So close, yet so far There’s naturally a certain amount of friction in terms of labor law compatibility between European states in…

In recent conversations with customers and peers, I’m not hearing “Which AI model or tool should we pick?” I’m hearing “How do we operationalize AI across our critical workflows?” People are starting to understand real digital transformation doesn’t come from a bolt-on solution. It happens when we treat AI as a foundational force and an engine for lasting change. The shift toward an AI-powered workplace requires leaders to enable organizational intelligence across the enterprise. WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL INTELLIGENCE? At Wrike, we define organizational intelligence as the seamless integration of human insight and AI capabilities to drive measurable outcomes a…

Yesterday, after the stock market’s closing bell, Nvidia Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) reported its Q3 2026 financials. Investors were eagerly anticipating the results, as the company is widely seen as a bellwether for the broader artificial intelligence market. Nvidia’s Q3 results were all the more anticipated as fears over an AI bubble have grown in recent months. But those fears seem to be put to bed, at least temporarily. Nvidia didn’t just meet expectations. It beat them. As a result, Nvidia’s stock price is jumping in premarket trading today—and it’s helping lift the stock prices of most other chipmakers and Big Tech giants. Here’s what you need to know. …

In a world where AI can churn out chart-toppers in seconds and ticketing algorithms treat fans like data points, we risk losing the soul of live music. But a quiet countermovement is making a comeback right in people’s living rooms, backyards and basements. Once the gritty domain of garage bands and DIY punks, house shows are becoming a structured, sustainable model for music communities embraced by a myriad of musical genres and accessible to all ages. House shows aren’t just an indie throwback. They serve as a blueprint for re-humanizing music and sustainable artist development, and cities should treat them as civic infrastructure. Today, fans crave authentic…

New York City scaffolding is so commonplace it has become a kind of extra architectural skin covering the city. It’s estimated that there are more than 9,000 of these “construction sheds” (another term for scaffolding) installed across the city, enough to stretch nearly 400 miles if they were put end to end. They do the important work of shielding pedestrians from potential falling debris during building construction and renovation projects, but they also shroud large swaths of sidewalk in dark and cloistered tunnels made of an unfortunate jumble of steel poles and plywood. Construction scaffolding is the city’s ubiquitous, utilitarian, and mostly unpleasant nec…

Here’s the thing about Wellington boots: They’re great when it’s raining, because they keep your toes dry and toasty. But when the rain stops, you feel a little silly stomping around in heavy rubber boots. But what if your rain boots looked like any other fashion-forward boot you’d be comfortable wearing rain or shine? What if they looked like, say, a classic pair of Dr. Martens? I have good news. Dr. Martens has designed a rain boot that mimics one of its most iconic designs, the 1460 eight-hole lace-up boot, which first came to market in 1960. It has a lot of the hallmarks of a Dr. Martens boot, like the heel tab for easy pull-on, the grooved sole, and even the…

Timothée Chalamet just posted an 18-minute-long video to his Instagram to promote his upcoming A24 film, Marty Supreme. It might be his best role yet. In the video, Chalamet—sporting a bright yellow tank top, buzz cut, and dainty necklace—joins a Zoom call full of supposed marketing executives who will be leading the promotional campaign ahead of the film’s release on December 25. After awkward introductions, Chalamet proceeds to fill up the meeting’s airtime with increasingly ridiculous suggestions for the film’s marketing efforts, leaving the eight other members of the call scrambling to accommodate his wild ideas. On A24’s YouTube channel, where the video…

Strategy textbooks taught us that sustainable competitive advantage that commanded premium prices was best protected by powerful barriers to entry. Build a moat, create switching costs, leverage access to high costs of entry, own distribution channels, and it would be difficult for startups to compete for your markets. But the forces of disruption operate by different rules, systematically destroying the very foundations of pricing power by making the previously difficult and expensive suddenly easy and cheap. The basis of competition changes, from excellence along well understood dimensions of merit to “good enough.” The ‘good enough’ revolution in pricing I have …

For its 2026 postage stamps, the U.S. Postal Service is going colorful and graphic. USPS gave a first look at some of the stamps set to be released next year, including the latest edition of its Love stamp, stamps commemorating the 250th anniversary of the U.S., and stamps depicting figures including a boxer, a martial artist and actor, and a pair of published poets. The stamps will be released on a rolling basis beginning in January and available at Post Office locations and online. “This early preview of our 2026 stamp program underscores the Postal Service’s commitment to celebrating the artistry and storytelling that make stamps so special,” Stamp Services dir…

Spend a few minutes on developer Twitter and you’ll run into it: “vibe coding.” With a name like that, it might sound like a passing internet trend, but it’s become a real, visible part of software culture. It’s shorthand for letting AI generate code from simple language prompts instead of writing it manually. In many ways, it’s great. AI has lowered the barrier to entry for coding, and that’s pulled in a wave of hobbyists, designers, and side-project tinkerers who might never have touched a codebase before. Tools like Warp, Cursor, and Claude Code uplevel even professional developers, making it possible to ship something working in hours instead of weeks. But her…

Michelle had barely knotted her apron strings before the day turned ugly. “When I told her I could only serve regular coffee—not the waffle-flavored one she wanted—she threw the boiling-hot pot at me,” she tells Fast Company, recounting one violent encounter with a customer. Working at a popular all-day breakfast chain, Michelle has learned that customer “service” often means surviving other people’s rage: “I’ve been cussed out, had hot food thrown on me…even dodged a plate thrown at my head,” she says. Lately, the sexual comments from male customers have gotten worse. (Workers in this story have been given pseudonyms to protect them from retaliation.) Still,…

Tech giants are making grand promises for the AI age. The technology, we are told, might discover a new generation of medical interventions, and possibly answer some of the most difficult questions facing physics and mathematics. Large language models could soon rival human intellectual abilities, they claim, and artificial superintelligence might even best us. This is exciting, but also scary, they say, since the rise of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, could pose an uncontrollable threat to the human species. U.S. government officials working with AI, including those charged with both implementing and regulating the tech in the government, are taking a diff…

You’ve just finished a strenuous hike to the top of a mountain. You’re exhausted but elated. The view of the city below is gorgeous, and you want to capture the moment on camera. But it’s already quite dark, and you’re not sure you’ll get a good shot. Fortunately, your phone has an AI-powered night mode that can take stunning photos even after sunset. Here’s something you might not know: That night mode may have been trained on synthetic nighttime images, computer-generated scenes that were never actually photographed. As artificial intelligence researchers exhaust the supply of real data on the web and in digitized archives, they are increasingly turning to synth…

It took the Equinox Group—the parent company of luxury gym chain Equinox, Equinox hotels, and Soulcycle—around five years to recover from COVID. But the company has recovered, claiming that 2025 will be a record year from a profitability perspective. This year, it announced big plans for expansion. Harvey Spevak, executive chairman and managing partner of Equinox Group, tells us about the company’s plan to open 40 clubs in new markets, its expansion into the Middle East, and the real reason it ditched Kiehl’s for Grown Alchemist. In the next couple of years, Equinox plans to open 40 new clubs. What is driving this growth? We’ve always been a high growth …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Earlier this month, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) released its annual survey, which found that the median age of first-time U.S. homebuyers in 2025 climbed to 40. That’s up from 38 in 2024—and far above the median age in 1992, when it was 28. At first glance, it appears that deteriorating housing affordability—driven by the Pandemic Housing Boom and the 2022 mortgage-rate shock—has pushed the age of first-time buyers higher. However, when you look across other data sources, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S. Cens…