Working while parenting can feel a little like juggling flaming swords. Everything works fine(ish) as long as nothing surprises you. But there will always be “come pick up your feverish kid” calls from daycare and last-minute project deadlines during little league games. So you end up defending your commitment to work while agonizing over having missed your child’s game-winning home run. According to a recent Pew Research Center study, working parents feel like they’re “supposed to work like [they] don’t have kids and parent like [they] don’t have a job.” That’s because our workplaces and other institutions are still set…
Author: Staff Writer
The government is stepping up its push to rein in powerful AI models that it believes could endanger national security. On June 26, Representatives Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, and John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, introduced the bipartisan Cloud Security Act, which would have AI companies flag suspected “misuse” of their platforms to the government. The legislation, advocates say, would close a critical loophole in current export rules designed to prevent rival countries like China from acquiring advanced AI chips. (Fast Company has reached out to Gottheimer and Moolenaar for comment.) While there are already sharp limits in place…
When designers for the 1978 World Cup in Argentina designed a signage and wayfinding system for the tournament, they needed something that would be easy to read and scale. Their forgotten work was ingenious and economical—and it’s finally getting its due. A new book takes a look back at Argentina’s World Cup signage system through the instruction manual that put it all together. Manual of Standards: Signage, FIFA World Cup ’78 Argentina faithfully reproduces that original standards manual, and it allows for a close look at a fascinating rendition of pre-digital wayfinding. The system took a grid-based approach, but was…
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Zillow economists just published their updated 12-month forecast, projecting that U.S. home prices—as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index—will shift -0.2% between May 2026 and May 2027. That’s a tiny downward revision from its 12-month national forecast published in April (+0.1%) and its 12-month national forecast published in March (+0.5%). U.S. home prices, as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index, are currently up 0.8% year over year. Zillow’s latest 12-month outlook (-0.1%) expects national home prices to remain near that subdued…
Summer is in full swing, a time when millions of Americans will embark on their annual vacations, either domestically or abroad. Data from Skyscanner shows that roughly 62% of those who plan to take a summer vacation have already booked their trips. Around 38% have not yet bought their tickets. If you’re among those who still need to book flights for a July or August vacation, you may worry that buying airfare at this late stage might cost an arm and a leg. But according to Google Flights’ product lead, James Byers, the platform has three lesser-known features that can…
There’s no doubt about it: The general public is turning against AI. They are worried it will steal their jobs, destroy the environment, and even kill innocents. And given that two of the biggest companies on the planet have now squarely placed the blame on AI-fueled shortages for forcing them to raise prices on popular tech gadgets and devices, consumers are likely to double down on their loathing for the technology. Apple and Microsoft blame AI-fueled memory and storage shortages for consumer price hikes Yesterday, two of the world’s largest companies, Apple and Microsoft, announced pricing bombshells: They would significantly…
You landed your dream job, or so you thought. But quiet doubts grow harder to ignore: “Did I choose right?” “Can I do this for the rest of my life?” “I want something more.” These questions seem to collide with major life transitions that often hit in your 30s or 40s: raising children, paying mortgages, and caring for parents in the same way they once cared for us. All of it converges into a pivotal decision: Do I stay on this career path, or do I shift and create something on my own? To better understand this shift, we conducted…
The meeting ends and everyone feels good. Decisions got made. Heads nodded. Nobody pushed back, and the room moved on without friction. To most leaders, that looks like a team working well together. Then the side conversations start. One person catches you afterward: “I didn’t think that was the right call.” Someone else messages privately about a concern they held back. A third has carried a frustration for months. All of it is relevant, and none of it reached the room, or the call, where the decision got made. After 25 years working with executive teams, I’ve come to believe…
In 2022, an Apple Store outside of Baltimore became the first in the U.S. to unionize, fueled by worker frustrations over how they were treated during the pandemic. Two years later, they won a contract that enshrined protections that seemed designed to enable other workers to follow in their footsteps. The contract secured a cap on the number of temporary workers Apple could hire and carved out a process by which the union could pursue cases on behalf of workers who they believed had been unfairly disciplined or dismissed. But those wins may have proved misleading. This week, the store…
Search efforts are underway in Venezuela after a pair of powerful earthquakes on Wednesday killed at least 589 people, leaving at least 3,000 people injured, thousands more unaccounted for, and countless others without food or water, according to The Associated Press. The catastrophic 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes are among the most powerful to strike the South American nation in more than a century. The epicenter of the quakes was north of Caracas, in the coastal state of La Guaira. Those in the capital paint a grim picture: buildings that collapsed to the ground, lost internet and power, and overall chaos and confusion…