Fast Company

A plan by the Environmental Protection Agency could make it harder for the public to learn about and comment on proposed AI data centers that have sparked backlash in communities across the United States and transformed the midterm election landscape.The EPA proposal would eliminate a federal requirement that states notify the public and seek comment before issuing air pollution permits for data centers and other industrial facilities. States could still offer opportunities for public comment, b

Apple’s new CEO John Ternus wrote “hello” in his first X post on Tuesday after taking the helm from former CEO Tim Cook, and his replies were immediately inundated with with requests for products and product design changes. It makes sense. He’s a hardware guy. A mechanical engineer who previously oversaw Apple’s hardware engineering, Ternus has significantly shaped the look and feel of Apple products that sell hundreds of millions of units cumulatively every year. For a company known for the

Arguably, the most memorable parts of college have nothing to do with education. Participating in clubs, rooting for your team at athletic events, and making friends over food at the dining hall are likely among the fondest memories for alumni of any four-year institution—certainly outranking the hours spent sitting in lecture halls, at the very least. But those anecdotes don’t hold up against one simple truth: higher education in America is in crisis. Ballooning tuition costs leave students

Nvidia Corporation announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. While rumors and speculation about Nvidia’s potential play had been swirling for weeks, the chipmaker has now made it official. Hugging Face, which is something of a GitHub for AI, has a library of models and datasets that should make Nvidia an even more dominant player in the AI ecosystem. Shares of Nvidia were up roughly 1.45% in early trading on Thursd

When it comes to marijuana, millennials may be the last generation of Americans to grow up when Amsterdam still had a whiff of the mystical. For those who were cannabis-curious in the ‘90s and early-aughts, Amsterdam represented an impossible dreamland where one could simply walk into The Weed Store and legally purchase what then amounted to contraband stateside. In that restricted atmosphere, cannabis culture flourished as counterculture, its pothead slogans and hazy-brained imagery acting a

Americans don’t agree about much in 2026, but a majority are in lockstep on data centers. According to recent polling, a full 75% oppose having one built anywhere near them, a number within striking distance of the 84% of Americans who oppose cutting Social Security.  Because the U.S. economy is now profoundly dependent on artificial intelligence, the growing unpopularity of the data centers that supply it is a big problem. Never fear, however, because Donald Trump and his cronies in Congress

New York City’s public schools will temporarily ban elementary and middle school students from using generative artificial intelligence tools during the upcoming school year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Wednesday.The one-year moratorium — part of a broader assessment of how children in the nation’s largest school system interact with the technology — will apply to “all software that uses student-facing generative AI” for students through eighth grade, the mayor’s office said. It described the

It has been a wild week for GoPro’s stock. Over the past five days alone, shares in GoPro, Inc. (Nasdaq: GPRO) are up more than 183%. And that’s before today’s current 10% boost in premarket trading.  First, the company’s share price was boosted after it was revealed that YouTuber Markiplier had bought an 8.5% stake earlier this summer. Now, GoPro’s shares are surging again after the company announced it will merge with another company to refocus its business on artificial intelligence so

In the movie Elysium, set in the year 2154, Matt Damon plays Max Da Costa, a criminal lowlife trying his damndest to leave Earth. Up above, the wealthy elite live on a ring-shaped space station, where disease and poverty have been eradicated. Most of the population, however, still lives on Earth, and they are struggling to survive each day. They can only dream of ever making it to the space station in the sky. But for Max, getting to Elysium is a matter of survival: He needs access to healthcare

In her 2015 memoir My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem talks about the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston as a “before or after” in her life. Today, the countless people who looked up to Steinem mark their own before and after, a world with and, sadly, without her. Gloria Steinem, the groundbreaking feminist writer and activist, passed away on Wednesday, September 2, at the age of 92. According to an announcement posted to her social media, Steinem died peacefully at her New York

Under the Paris Agreement, countries pledged to make an effort to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, in order to avoid intense impacts of climate change. But that level of warming is now “widely assessed as unavoidable,” according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme titled “Limiting Overshoot.”  Our planet is likely to surpass 1.5°C within the next few years.  The best case scenario—if all national climate plans are fully implemented and

As a climate scientist, Zeke Hausfather uses artificial intelligence every day for research and data analysis. But he kept wondering how much energy all that AI use was consuming. So over eight weeks this summer, he tracked the 1,138 prompts he typed into Claude Code and estimated how much electricity they consumed at data centers. Tech companies have shared little data about the energy use of their AI models. One of the few public estimates comes from Google, which said last year that a typi

School cell phone bans aren’t as new as you might think. While a growing number of states have adopted them over the past three years, the practice dates to 1989, when Maryland prohibited the devices (and pagers) in an attempt to limit in-school communication among students who may have been involved in illegal activities. By 2009, in fact, nine out of 10 schools had banned cell phones. But that number began to drop as smartphones spread and parents wanted to be able to reach their kids in em

Ever since offices have existed, they’ve projected a certain image of the companies who build them. And in the tech space, this has usually meant a forward-looking aesthetic—Apple’s spaceship, Amazon’s geodesic domes, and Bell Labs’ mirrored complex. It’s a fitting, and often repeated, conceit for businesses that are designing the future. (Or want to be perceived as such.)   [Photo: courtesy IA Interior Architects] This pattern is part of the reason why the new San Francisco headquarters o

You landed an introduction to a hiring decision-maker through a mutual connection. Now the person across the table is being perfectly pleasant—and barely paying attention. There’s no open role; they’re doing someone a favor. This nice conversation is going nowhere, and a job offer is out of reach. A client of mine sat in exactly that chair. He was in a C-suite search, and a connection had opened the door to a meeting with the CEO of a middle-market company. With no posting and no mandate, my

Imagine matching with someone on a dating app who seems to have it all: charm, wealth, a glamorous lifestyle, and serious intentions about building a future with you. That was the promise prosecutors say 35-year-old Daejon Love offered to women he met online. Federal authorities recently charged Love and an alleged accomplice with defrauding more than two dozen women of approximately $1.3 million through fictitious investment opportunities. According to the complaint, Love allegedly posed

There is a dangerous idea floating around the workplace: If you care about employees, you should avoid making them uncomfortable. That sounds compassionate. Sometimes it is. Other times, it is managerial cowardice disguised as servant leadership. Leaders who avoid difficult conversations leave people guessing. And capable employees miss opportunities to improve because nobody respected them enough to tell them the truth. Steve Jobs addressed this tension in a 2008 Fortune interview. Des

Below, Mark Solms shares five key insights from his new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. Mark is a neuroscientist who took the unusual step of also training as a psychoanalyst. For 40 years, he has used the tools of modern neuroscience to test and refine psychoanalytic theory. A pioneering figure in neuropsychoanalysis, he conducted research that uncovered key brain mechanisms involved in dreaming, reshaping our understanding of the sleeping mind. He is the s

When I’m having an unproductive day, I hear the most annoying and unhelpful voices rattling around in my head. It’s usually a variation of taunts about how I should have gotten up earlier or shortened my morning routine. Then it turns into how I better be “on it” for the rest of the day, and tonight I must get an early night’s sleep, because I’m way behind and the only way to get everything done is to be diligent about sticking to my calendar at all costs. I hear how stupid it sounds, and I k

In general, your satisfaction with work is driven in part by whether your organization has a mission that is aligned with your values and goes about its work in a manner that is consistent with how you choose to live your life. I have written about the impact of values conflicts at work broadly before, but there are several specific problems that arise when you are a leader and the organization wants to do things that are a mismatch to your deeply held commitments. When your organization want