Fast Company

The final day of voting in this year’s midterm elections arrived Tuesday against a backdrop of uncertainty after a year in which President Donald Trump has tried to interfere in how states run their elections and sown doubts about the outcome should Republicans lose.Millions of Americans already have cast their ballots, with early voting turnout on pace to eclipse that of the last midterm elections. In contrast to the president’s continued rhetoric about election cheating, voting so far has unfo

Through the annals of advertising history, the gospel of brand building has been written around a single capital letter: P. The classical four P’s of price, product, place, and promotion were drilled into marketing minds in college. The major brand totem, P for positioning, is where companies spent millions defining razor-thin functional benefits, establishing category ladders, and staking claim to owned territory in the consumer’s mind. The last decade’s reverence has been for the all-guidin

Major League Baseball has a new look, courtesy of an all-star lineup of type designers. In 2020, after MLB moved to its new headquarters in New York City, it reached out to Mother Design, the branding and design agency behind work for brands like Cadillac, Tripadvisor, and the scented water bottle Air Up. The league was looking to expand professional baseball’s fandom and talent, and it wanted its visual identity to feel unified. Beginning in late 2022, Mother Design started building out

When Griffin Glaze, a graphic designer, got the job to design James Talarico’s campaign branding, she had just 10 days to do it. Talarico, a Texan who is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, wanted something that looked unique and nonpartisan. “A lot of what they were looking for was something that felt different,” Glaze tells Fast Company. The North Carolina designer came up with a visual identity inspired by hand-painted signage at Baptist churches, with texture and imperfection designed

Historically, midterms have been good for business in the months following the elections. Over the past 70 years, U.S. stocks, for the most part, have made gains in the months between midterm elections and the end of the year—and since 1980, the S&P 500 index has gone up 13.7% on average in the year after the midterm elections, according to a CNBC analysis. But 2026 could be different. As things stand, it remains “uniquely difficult” to predict how this year’s midterms will affect the market,

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Invitation Homes, one of the nation’s largest single-family rental landlords with 85,961 wholly owned homes, says the rental supply picture is improving recently in some markets that have been hardest hit by the multiple-year cyclical cooling that followed the pandemic housing boom. But on its Q3 2026 earnings call on Thursday, management flagged a wild card it’s keeping an eye

A growing number of companies are pitching AI hardware products as a remedy for one of humanity’s oldest weaknesses: forgetfulness. The latest such product comes from Amazon, whose Bee subsidiary introduced a $75 wristband called the Bee Frontier last month. The band, which looks a little like a screen-free fitness tracker, can record meetings and other conversations using two built-in microphones. Frontier owners can then access transcripts and conversation summaries on their phones or compu

Stores are cutting back on self-checkout lanes. According to an April survey from Toast, a point-of-sale and restaurant management platform, approximately 36% of 340 small and midsize retail operators said they used self-checkout lanes this year, down from 43% in 2025.   That decrease could be attributed to merchandise losses. According to a report from ECR Retail Loss, grocery stores experienced an average 22% increase in merchandise losses in the year after installing self-checkout la

Americans are gearing up for a big day today, hitting the polls in what could be the most consequential election in recent U.S. history. As it happens, there’s another big event that you may not have heard of, but that could prove to be a nice distraction: National Sandwich Day. Each year on November 3, restaurants and fast-food chains recognize one of America’s favorite culinary inventions—whether you stack it high or thin—with discounts, deals, and free food. Here’s what to know. Wha

The world of fan fiction is bracing for an apocalypse as one the world’s largest repositories of fan-written stories has gone dark—and may not return anytime soon. The panic began on October 29 when Archive of Our Own (AO3), the online library for fan-created stories ranging from Harry Potter and Heated Rivalry to K-pop and boy band fandoms, announced it would take the site offline for maintenance. The website housed around 18.8 million stories across thousands of fandoms, and is operated

Grocery stores across Europe faced an overnight cyberattack on Monday, affecting the refrigerated and freezer sections and leading to product losses. The new wave of cyberattacks affected grocery stores in Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Estonia, Reuters previously reported..The attacks took place overnight, raising the temperatures both freezer and refrigerator units to 122 degrees Fahrenheit resulting in widespread food spoilage and some units catching fire. Th

I am an Alfista. The word is Italian for someone devoted to the cars produced by Alfa Romeo. Together with the thousands of others who share that devotion, I am one of the Alfisti. Nobody chooses to join the ranks of the Alfisti on the numbers alone. We love the brand for reasons that have little to do with logic, and we choose these beautiful, difficult, idiosyncratic cars because of how they make us feel. October was an exciting month to be an Alfista. Alfa Romeo brought a new concept car t

The number of women working for the Trump administration, specifically in top national security roles, keeps falling.  That finding comes from a new report by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The October 30 report, titled “Trump’s War on Women: The Systematic Dismantling of Decades of Progress at Home and Abroad During the Administration’s Second Term,” demonstrates a sharp drop in the number of women in diplomatic and national security posts in what it calls “the delibera

Hustle culture. Productivity porn. The business world has no shortage of stereotypes to describe the dangers of overwork, and probably for good reason. But on the flip side, sometimes you just have to get stuff done, and few people are getting more done these days than Michael Arden. At 44, the Tony Award-winning theater director has emerged as one of the busiest practitioners on Broadway, with a diverse portfolio of credits that includes A Christmas Carol, Parade, The Queen of Versailles

If he can’t build it, he’ll buy it. The world’s richest man commands electric vehicles, spacecraft, a fleet of satellites for an internet network, robots, an AI tool, a social media platform, and more. Now Elon Musk is eyeing wireless phone service. SpaceX, the parent company of various Musk ventures including Starlink, is reportedly in talks to acquire low-cost carrier Boost Mobile—or at the very least, gain access to its network—according to reporting by The Washington Post. This deal co

One of NASA’s strangest, most daunting missions just wrapped up, and its crew didn’t even leave Earth’s atmosphere.  Four crew members emerged over the weekend after spending a full year cooped up inside a 1,700-square-foot habitat designed to simulate life on Mars. The simulation at Johnson Space Center in Houston represented the next best thing to a real mission to Mars, giving scientists an opportunity for a lower stakes run-through without the extreme risks posed by the Red Planet. The

Flying around Europe could get considerably more expensive next year, even on budget airlines. Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by passenger numbers, is warning that airfares could rise by as much as 20% in 2027 as soaring fuel prices put pressure on the carrier’s bottom line. And higher ticket prices might not be enough to cover the difference. The Irish budget airline said Monday that it is considering temporary employee pay freezes, reduced crew staffing ratios, and increased use of AI

The debate about AI and work often focuses on the jobs that will disappear, which tasks will be automated, and which skills and qualities will be valued in the future. Seldom do I read articles that analyze the impact of AI on exhaustion and pleasure at work. And those questions are usually asked about “workers” in general, as if the answers were the same for men and women. There are many reasons why they are not. Because women and men are concentrated in different occupations, perform different

Meta Platforms has faced intense scrutiny after announcing upcoming changes to its terms that, essentially, allow AI crawlers to run wild across business accounts. Yet, the owner of Facebook and Instagram has been doing a version of that on websites for years, website managers say, with small online businesses often left to deal with the repercussions.  Take California-based artist Chelsea Paulus, who says Meta’s crawlers crashed her website last week.  A bot called Meta-ExternalAgent

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I’ve never had a secretary before. Or a chief of staff. With these AI agents, I suddenly feel like I have both. This week, among other things, they: Researched and booked Amtrak train tickets for me Briefed me about important overnight emails and upcoming meetings Surfaced an important contract I had overlooked Turned my bookshelf into a visual readi