In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that the corporate world needed more “masculine energy” and a culture that “celebrates the aggression a bit more.” Twenty months later, the political movement he was courting looks much weaker.

For one, the labor market is moving in the opposite direction. Just last year, private education and healthcare, where women hold 77% of jobs, added around 800,000 positions while all other sectors combined lost about 500,000.

As Laëtitia Vitaud argues, economists label care work “low productivity” mostly because the workers earn low wages. The true economic contribution of essentially female workers is seen as negligible even though it actually sustains the productivity of everybody else.

The same logic applies inside companies. The work that helps the team falls disproportionately to women and goes unrewarded, while self-promotion gets rewarded as leadership.

The damage of "masculine energy" shows up in harassment settlements, legal fees, and workers’ compensation claims. The higher costs come months or years later in the form of absenteeism, ill health, and turnover. Every lost employee must be replaced, and the people who stay are less productive.

From fatal work injuries to occupational fraud, statistics consistently show companies that build their culture on dominance will eventually face the bill. 

Read more on Fast Company.

A consortium of designers, branding professionals, and grocery experts have been named to design a visual identity for New York City’s municipal grocery stores. Their goal? To make something that looks authentically New York.

New York City’s Economic Development Corp. (NYCEDC) said Tuesday it had selected four firms—Gander, Librarie, Noble Signs, and Seven Roots—to brand the city’s five forthcoming grocery stores, one for each borough.

Gander, the strategic branding firm behind visual identities for brands like the squeeze-bottle olive oil Graza and Yellow Bird hot sauce, will be the project lead and oversee research, strategy, naming, brand application, and brand development. Its inclusion suggests the finished product could borrow from the best practices of some of recent history’s most popular direct-to-consumer brands.

“We consider ourselves, for better or worse, grocery store nerds, and probably get way too much enjoyment out of wandering the aisles of grocery stores everywhere we travel,” Gander partner Mike McVicar tells Fast Company. Gander calls it a dream project since it’s a major civic project for the city the company loves, and it’s a grocery store.

“Our top priority is to help make this ambitious effort to address food insecurity in our city as wildly successful as possible, and ultimately help as many people as possible,” McVicar says. “That means building a brand that resonates with an infinitely diverse population of New York City that has really high standards.”

Read more on Fast Company.

In 1994, brands took tweens seriously as customers. They created a culture around them (girls, in particular), where not-quite-teenagers could tinker with the trappings of womanhood—lip gloss and slightly more fitted clothing—without straying out of their comfort zones. But over the past two decades, tween culture has been dismantled piece by piece. The mall (the tween’s natural habitat) began dying off, causing brands like Limited Too and Claire’s to struggle. Tween magazines closed, one after another, as part of the broader hollowing out of the media landscape. 

But in an unexpected twist, retailers appear to be rediscovering the power of the tween. Walmart and Target have recently launched collections targeting the demographic. The chic children’s retailer Maisonette created Neon Rebels, a new brand for ages 7 to 14 that curates tween clothes and beauty products. There are many tween-focused skincare startups popping up, including Pipa, Bubble, and Evereden.

Millennial-focused brands like Away now see tweens as a possible new market. And even the old favorites are coming back: With an infusion of cash from private equity, Claire’s is redesigning its stores, and Kohl’s has relaunched Limited Too. 

A tween renaissance is coming, and the brands that crack the code stand to earn a big payday. Gen Alpha already has more than $100 billion in annual spending power, and these kids influence 42% of household spending. In 2023 alone, tweens spent $4.7 billion on beauty products.

In the $225 billion global children’s apparel market, retailers say kids 10 and older represent a rapidly expanding piece of the pie. “The tween is going to be a very fast-growing market,” says AJ Nicholas, president of Maisonette. “There is just so much market share up for grabs.”

Read more on Fast Company.

Serhii Kupriienko sits in an unadorned room in an unadorned house on a quiet residential street in Kyiv, sketching out for me what the future of war looks like.

“I’m not very good at drawing,” he says, dragging a blue marker across the lid of his laptop (he assures me it washes off), creating a series of rough formations meant to represent groups of drones. The point of the art is to show how his company is making it so the machines might better coordinate with one another in order to eliminate Russian forces.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kupriienko, who sports a black T-shirt and thick glasses, led artificial intelligence teams for Amazon’s Ring division in Ukraine. At the time we meet, he is the CEO and cofounder of Swarmer, a Ukrainian defense tech company that builds AI software to help groups of drones and other unmanned systems coordinate with less human direction. (He would step down as CEO later that month, remaining on the company’s board.)

The idea for Swarmer came to Kupriienko in early 2023. Ukraine’s drone warfare program was still taking shape. Small first-person view (FPV) drones had begun spreading across the front but had not yet become the ubiquitous specter they would soon be. Drones caused less than 10% of battlefield casualties in 2022; by 2025, that figure had risen to as much as 80%.

Kupriienko saw both a scarcity and an opportunity: Ukraine was using more drones but still relied heavily on humans to fly and coordinate them. What if, he wondered, you could take people out of the loop? The question was personal, too. Kupriienko has three children living in Kyiv and wanted to build a system he could trust to protect them—an “ethical Skynet,” as he once put it.

He called Alex Fink, an American businessman he’d known for over a decade, initially looking for advice on how to turn the idea into a company. After Fink sent him a five-page plan, Kupriienko called him back and suggested they build it together. 

His marker zigzagging rapidly across the computer, Kupriienko shows me how Swarmer’s software can be integrated with different unmanned systems, allowing them to share battlefield information and divide up duties with less direction from human operators. While people still set the mission and its constraints, its AI helps with jobs including coordinating actions, choosing routes, and deciding which drone should take on which task. In practice, it also has to evolve with conditions at the front.

Swarmer’s creation and integration into the Ukrainian military tracks the progression of the conflict. When war broke out in 2022, Russian armored columns pushed toward Kyiv, and much of the world expected Ukraine to surrender quickly. Instead, Ukrainian forces repelled the assault on the capital, then retook large stretches of territory in the Kharkiv region and, later that year, the southern city of Kherson. 

But despite those against-the-odds Ukrainian victories, the fighting soon developed into a grinding contest that favored Russia’s deeper reserves of troops and ammunition. By early 2024, Russian forces were at times firing as many as 10 artillery shells for every Ukrainian one, while a delay in U.S. aid helped produce what Ukrainian soldiers called “shell hunger.”

Read more on Fast Company.

A sprawling Wendy’s franchisee that sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month could close as many as 30 restaurants over the next few weeks as part of a cash collateral agreement, new court filings reveal. 

Meritage Hospitality Group, which is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and operates 314 Wendy’s locations across 15 states, says it has already identified five unprofitable stores that it planned to shut down and vacate this weekend.

In a bankruptcy docket filed late Friday, Meritage said it is seeking to cancel the leases and franchise agreements for the stores, which it has described as burdensome and unnecessary, as it seeks to restructure its operations.

The impacted Wendy’s restaurants are located in Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma:

• 441 Market St, Gordonsville, VA 22942
• 1175 Dunn Ave, Jacksonville, FL 32218
• 301 College Ave, Levelland, TX 79336
• 2525 South Monroe Street Tallahassee, FL 32301
• 2420 W Main St, Durant, OK 74701

Piles of collection kits and instruction booklets surround my laptop in a manner that would make a lab technician weep. To my left, there’s a package containing a swab of my inner cheek, which will tell me my biological age, a reflection of cellular damage over time. To my right, there are two poop samples from the past few days, the small plastic vials discreetly tucked into envelopes, primed to reveal the state of my gut microbiome.

Now, bleary-eyed on a weekday morning in June, I try to gather enough saliva to determine my cortisol levels, and thereby my stress. If only my 7-year-old son, an early riser, would stop knocking on the office door seeking help with a packing list he’s making for his upcoming camping trip.

“How do you spell ‘pajamas’?” he asks, kneeling on the floor with his notebook, as I painstakingly accumulate spit in a small tube. The instructions suggest thinking about delicious foods to generate more saliva, but I’m struggling to reach the designated line, even while dreaming of coffee. Will the stress of taking the test influence my results?

Fifteen minutes later, as I try to coax vibrant red droplets from my pricked ring finger onto a paper collection card, I’m beginning to think that visiting a doctor’s office would be far easier than trying to play lab worker and lab rat at the same time. After all, my health is fine, more or less—or at least I think it’s fine.

With every new diagnostic that appears in my social feeds and podcast queues, though, doubts creep in. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that my biomarkers are all normal? I remember asking myself just a week ago, as I added another test to my cart. A golden age of preventive health awaits those with the cash to pay hundreds of dollars for data on mitochondrial function and gut diversity, a step beyond the basic biomarkers offered by Oura Rings and Apple Watches. I’m curious what it will feel like to join the ranks of the optimized elite.

I got my first taste of this ascendant world last year. I had been diagnosed with dermatitis and was trying to avoid exposure to a long list of allergens, including scents, that my dermatologist determined had been irritating my skin. Despite throwing out nearly every lotion, soap, and detergent that I owned, my symptoms were still severe enough that I was struggling to sleep at night. I was itchy and miserable. That’s when I started seeing Instagram ads for Tiny Health, with before-and-after photos of dry, inflamed skin. One pledged to help “address the root cause of chronic conditions,” while another said that “eczema is more than a skin issue.” Had Meta heard me complaining to my husband? Or seen me searching for causes and treatments? Gut health, Tiny’s ads told me, is “connected to inflammation, energy levels, mood, and so much more.” Didn’t I owe it to my middle-aged self to investigate?

Read more on Fast Company.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is tackling yet another urban annoyance: the city’s lack of public restrooms.

As of June 2025, New York City had just 975 operating public restrooms across its five boroughs, or one per every 8,697 residents. To start making it easier to go while on the go, the city is installing 17 new modular bathrooms—aka robotoilets—equipped with amenities like running water, temperature control, and baby-changing stations. The bathrooms, made and operated by Throne Labs, are already being erected around NYC, with the first two open as of this week and two more coming on Thursday.

“Too many New Yorkers know what it’s like to have nowhere to go while they’re on the go,” Mamdani said at a press conference on Wednesday. “This pilot is about making sure New Yorkers can count on a clean, safe, accessible bathroom when they need one.”

But as Mamdani put it, these bathrooms are “not a place to scroll on your phone.” Users are meant to do their business, then get a move on within 10 minutes—or face the consequences.

How do the new bathrooms keep patrons from lingering? There’s a simple fail-safe: After 10 minutes in the bathroom, the doors will automatically open.

Users get plenty of warning before that point, with audio warnings playing at the five-minute and eight-minute marks. After 10 minutes, lights flash and an audio message plays in both English and Spanish, saying: “Attention. Your use time has expired. The door is opening now.” After a final 30-second grace period, the doors will open, whether a user is ready or not. There’s currently no way for users to extend their session.

Read more on Fast Company.

Star Trek first beamed into our lives at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 8, 1966, and the science fiction world was never the same. The show, though canceled after just three seasons, went on to become a lasting pop culture phenomenon that has spawned an entertainment empire, with movies, spinoffs, merchandise, and a fan following that few intellectual properties can match.

But Star Trek proved to be more than just an entertainment property. The technology the show imagined inspired many future developers to try to recreate the gadgets they saw growing up. And some of those fantastical devices have become part of daily life, even if we’re still a long way from launching our own five-year mission to explore strange new worlds.

Here’s some of the on-screen technology that has become real.

Communicators

Captain Kirk and crew stayed in touch with each other and the Enterprise via a handheld device that flipped open. Modern technology managed to replicate that by 1989, with the release of the first Motorola StarTAC phone, and arguably perfected it with the Razr in 2004.

Universal translators

Lt. Uhura had lots of duties on board the Enterprise, but figuring out what the aliens were saying wasn’t always one of them. That was the job of the ship’s universal translator. Today, there are several tools that provide instant translation of foreign languages, though they’re not too useful should a Gorn want to strike up a conversation.

Those range from apps such as Google Translate and iTranslate to AI-assisted earbuds like the Samsung Galaxy Buds4 line and Timekettle’s W4 Pro, as well as handheld translators like the Vasco V4 Language Translator Device.

Hyposprays

Shots on Star Trek were needle-free, something any child watching was particularly envious of. What few realized, though, was that jet injectors were actually already a thing at the time. The device uses high-pressure gas to propel a high-velocity stream of liquid medication through the skin. The tech is still around today, but doctors haven’t given up the needle for the most part. Sorry, kids.

Read more on Fast Company.

Steinem valued the power of words to create change. In 1972, she launched Ms. Magazine, the first magazine in the U.S. to be completely created and owned by women. The feminist publication still exists today.

In the five-and-a-half decades since, Steinem has taken part in everything from the 1977 National Women’s Conference to the 2017 Women’s March on Washington.

She has continued to champion an inclusive idea of equality for all, supporting causes such as the Black Lives Matter movement and LGBTQ+ rights. 

The world will not be the same without Steinem in it, but her monumental efforts and inspiring words will live on.

As she reminded us, “The story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist, nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.” 

Below are just some of the many moving Steinem quotes worth remembering:  

• “A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”
• “Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”
• “We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons . . . but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.”
• “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
• “A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”

Read more on Fast Company.

The media continues to sleep on quantum. No surprise, really, between the AI boom and the fact that the science behind the technology can feel inscrutable. But while most everyone slumbers, quantum computers have been making considerable progress.

Researchers are getting more qubits, the tech’s fundamental building block, to work together, correcting errors more effectively, and developing faster, more efficient quantum algorithms. These are major improvements, especially because the qubit has proved devilishly hard to control.

With some investors increasingly worried that the AI market, already flush with cash, can’t deliver a boffo return, they’re turning to quantum computing as an attractive alternative.

“While the rest of the world was consumed with generative AI,” says Callum Stewart, an investment principal at Bullhound Capital, “the conversation around quantum shifted from ‘Is this ever going to work?’ to “When and how can we apply this at scale, and integrate it into our existing classical computers?’”

The appeal is tantalizing. Quantum computers could enable scientific discoveries that are beyond the reach of classical supercomputers. Businesses could find a powerful tool for modeling and optimizing such core business systems as supply chains, manufacturing floors, and distribution networks.

Quantum computers are especially good at handling needle-in-a-haystack problems, searching enormous spaces of possibilities for useful combinations and patterns. That might mean finding a new source of energy, or identifying novel combinations of molecules for a new drug. Qubits obey the same quantum laws as atoms and molecules, making them well suited to simulating both.

The question is: What must happen in the next few years to tell us that the quantum computing companies are progressing through their roadmaps toward the clear quantum advantage investors are waiting for? That was, in effect, exactly what we asked dozens of experts in the quantum computing space: “As a leading thinker and participant in the quantum space, what are you looking to see next that would signal that quantum is advancing in its capabilities and ultimately realizing its potential?”

Their answers offer a wealth of insight—and some surprises, too.

Read more on Fast Company,

After the costly metaverse bust, Mark Zuckerberg is spending billions to reinvent Meta as an AI giant. But first, he’ll have to translate his vision of “personal superintelligence” into products people actually want.

Zuckerberg can hardly be accused of failing to anticipate the rise of AI: He established the company’s first lab dedicated to the technology in 2013. But he soon became distracted by virtual reality and the metaverse, a concept that so captured his imagination that Facebook Inc. became Meta in October 2021.

Thirteen months later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and the race to command generative AI began in earnest. Since then, Meta has been engaged in a furious, sometimes chaotic game of catch-up, backed by its biggest spending spree ever. While Meta has the resources to compete, money alone can’t buy AI supremacy. 

As investor M.G. Siegler puts it, “The story of Meta in the past decade-plus has been just a series of swings and misses. And then just constantly trying to figure out what is next and not being able to find it.” 

Read more from Harry McCracken on Fast Company.

Professional three-on-three women’s basketball league Unrivaled is headed into its third season with a serious infusion of cash. The two-year-old league on Wednesday announced the completion of its Series C funding round, which brought in more than $100 million and values the organization at $650 million—nearly double its valuation last fall. 

Led by the University of California-backed Ten Pillar Sports Fund, the Series C round is a marked jump from its Series B raise, which closed in September 2025 and valued the league at $350 million. The UC Investments fund was joined by investors that include NBA star Carmelo Anthony, soccer player Alex Morgan and her Trybe Ventures, actor Ashton Kutcher, and Washington Wizards point guard Trae Young.

“It’s very important for us to have the right people that invest financially, but also contribute a lot of value to what we’re building,’ says Unrivaled Commissioner Micky Lawler, adding that the league’s investors have “a shared passion for the vision that we are creating.” 

Unrivaled leaders say the strength of its fundraising is based on its model of giving players who want it an equity stake in the league, and that it will fund an ambitious third season that will build on strong results from earlier this year.

Cofounded by WNBA superstars Napheesa Collier (of the Minnesota Lynx) and Breanna Stewart (of the New York Liberty) in 2023, Unrivaled began as an alternative for WNBA players who typically spend their offseasons competing overseas in Europe or Asia.

Rather than require players to spend upwards of seven months abroad, Unrivaled, which had its first season in 2025, lets athletes stay in the league’s Miami hub over its ten-week calendar while offering competitive salaries and benefits. Unrivaled also offers players year-round exposure to fans, which bolsters the players’ personal brands and the league’s alike.

“We solved the big problem in the off-season,” says Unrivaled President and CEO Alex Bazzell, “which is these players being away from home, being out of market, not being visible.” 

Read more on Fast Company.

Buc-ee's, the Texas-based travel stop known for its sprawling and pristine restrooms, barbeque and beloved beaver-themed merchandise, is in the midst of a major expansion.

But recent remarks from company president, CEO and cofounder Arch “Beaver” Aplin III seem to suggest that the wildly popular chain isn’t likely to show up in your hometown unless you live in a conservative state.

The comments were made on Aug. 17 during the grand opening of the chain’s newest location in Benton, Arkansas, home to the state’s first Buc-ee’s.

*“*We have a lot of opportunities. We’re growing. We’re building in a lot of places. But when you find a conservative, business-friendly state with a phenomenal workforce, it makes a difference,” Aplin told the crowd. He was also joined by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who spoke about the state’s excitement at getting its inaugural Buc-ee’s.

Aplin continued, “I’m starting to realize life’s too short to try to build in places that people don’t appreciate what you’re bringing, versus a place like this where people do appreciate what you are building.”

Aplin seemed to suggest his leadership philosophy is “conservative, business-friendly, family-oriented” and that expansion “works so much better if it trickles down from the leadership from the very top” of state politics, from the governor’s office down.

“What we found when we got here into Benton was a business-friendly town,” he said.

Fast Company reached out to Buc-ee’s about Aplin’s recent comments, but did not hear back by the time of publication.

Aplin didn’t say what stores he was speaking about specifically, but in 2024, Buc-ee’s landed in Colorado (the only solidly blue state the pit stop has a presence in) for the first time. Earlier this year, a Buc-ee’s also arrived in Goodyear, Arizona.

Target has removed a children’s Halloween costume from its website after social media users pointed out that it closely resembled imagery from Jim Crow-era blackface minstrelsy.

The $25 costume—listed as “Kids’ Glows Under Blacklight Circus Clown Halloween Costume Bodysuit”—had a black-and-orange harlequin pattern alongside a mask featuring an oversize, exaggerated smile. The product’s marketing photograph showcased a Black child wearing the costume while holding a pose that people said evokes segregation-era caricatures of Black people, which were performed by white people in blackface.

After posts on Threads, TikTok, and X quickly gained visibility on August 23, Target removed the costume—part of its “Hyde and Eek! Boutique” collection—from its website. According to Newsweek, metadata from the original listing indicates that the product had been available since earlier this summer.

“As a company, we know we got this wrong, and we are deeply sorry. The costume is offensive and should never have been part of our assortment. It is no longer available for sale,” the company said in statement on Monday. As of Monday evening, Target had not responded to requests for comment from Fast Company.

Read more on Fast Company