Lets be honest: When you first started working from home, your “office” was probably a shaky card table and a chair that had a personal vendetta against your lower back.
Maybe youve upgraded, maybe you havent. Either way, were all acutely aware that small irritations add up to big productivity sinks. But you don’t need to drop a grand on an Aeron chair or a 49-inch curved monitor to make your workspace feel like a place where actual, focused work gets done.
Sometimes its the little things that punch way above their weight without ransacking your wallet. Here are seven simple, sub-$40 upgrades that can genuinely transform your day.
USB-powered mug warmer
Average price: $15-$25
You make a perfect cup of coffee, get into a deep-work flow, and a half-hour later, youre looking at a lukewarm puddle. The tried-and-true USB mug warmer solves this existential dread.
It’s a simple heating plate that plugs into a spare USB port or wall adapter to keep your coffee, tea, or soup at a respectable temperature, resulting in fewer trips to the microwave and zero excuses for drinking tepid sludge.
Cable management kit
Average price: $10-$30
Behold, the tangled, dust-bunny-laden horror show lurking behind your monitor. Its an eyesore, a trip hazard, and a terrible first impression for anyone touring your home during dinner parties.
A few bucks for a proper cable management kit gets you a slew of adhesive cable clips, Velcro wraps, cord organizers, and more.
Take 20 minutes to get your cabling under control. Itll change your life.
Adjustable laptop stand
Average price: $20-$40
If youre looking down at your screen for eight hours a day, youre (pretty objectively) doing it wrong.
An adjustable, folding laptop stand is the cheapest ergonomic win you can buy. It lifts your screen to eye level, which, when paired with an external keyboard, drastically improves your posture.
No more hunching. No more Zoom neck. It’s not a fancy standing desk, but it’s the 80-20 rule of home office comfort.
Large desk pad
Average price: $10-$30
I cant quite explain the appeal of these big desk pads except to say that I love mine way more than I thought I would. It brings a bit of softness and warmth to my cold, hard, pale-colored desk.
On a more tangible level, these felt or leather mats give your mouse nearly endless real estate, protect your desk surface from coffee rings and dings, and instantly make your keyboard feel more stable.
Visual timer
Average price: $10-$30
The Pomodoro Technique is great, but staring at a glowing red box on your computer screen feels . . very work.
Ditch the digital distraction for a purely analog tool. A simple, elegant 15- or 30-minute hourglass, or one of those visual timers where a colored disc disappears as time runs out, is surprisingly effective.
It gives you a physical, low-tech object to help you observe your focused work blocks: a gentle, visually calming reminder that sometimes its okay to sprint, not run a marathon.
Power strip with USB ports
Average price: $20-$35
If your current power situation involves an octopus of clumsy wall-warts fighting for space in an ancient, white strip, it’s time to upgrade.
Modern power strips come with not only additional outlets but also built-in USB-A and USB-C ports as well. This means your phone, headphones, tablet, and that new mug warmer can all charge without hogging a full-size AC outlet.
Fidget toy
Price check: $8-$20
Even if youre not a classic fidgeter, hear me out.
Endless notifications and a constant bombardment of digital noise can leave you mentally frayed. The goal isnt to stare blankly at a spinning top, but to give your hands something nondestructive to do during those endless Zoom calls.
A well-designed fidget toybe it a magnetic sculpture, a satisfying clicky pen, or my personal go-to: giant squeezy block thingycan act as an anchor for your focus. It lets the nervous energy out so the important thoughts can stay in.
Back-to-school season is in full swing, and with it comes the excitement of new teachers, new friends, and fresh beginnings. But for millions of children, this time of year also brings reliefbecause for the first time in months, they once again have consistent access to the food they need to concentrate, participate, and succeed.
While summer conjures images of vacations and play for many children, it can be a time of increased hunger and skipped meals for families working hard to make ends meet. When schools close, so do their cafeterias, meal programs, and pantries, resulting in more than 20 million kids losing their most reliable source of daily nutrition. And with rising food costs and a worsening job market, parents are finding it harder than ever to put nutritious meals on the table.
Of the parents surveyed, more than 1 in 3 said they worried about running out of food this past summer, while 70% said inflation and rising food prices made it harder to afford groceries. And nearly 2 in 3 parents expect food costs to continue rising this year, adding to the stress of already strained budgets. The result is a season that, for too many families, is less about carefree childhood and more about hard choices between food, rent, and gas.
Investing in Nutrition Is Investing in the Future
The costs of hunger extends far beyond the dinner table, demonstrating that hunger isnt only a moral crisis; its an educational and economic crisis as well. Studies confirm that children experiencing food insecurity are sick more often, hospitalized more frequently, and may face developmental deficiencies that alter the architecture of their brains. They may also struggle to concentrate in classrooms, with 83% of parents surveyed by No Kid Hungry saying their children cant focus when hungry, and 88% reporting that school meals directly improve learning.
The costs of a child missing a meal doesnt end with childhood. It is linked to lower academic performance, behavioral challenges, and reduced lifetime earnings. Children who grow up food insecure often enter the workforce with fewer opportunities and greater barriers to success. But the impact doesnt stop there.
Childhood hunger reverberates across societycontributing to higher healthcare costs, increased demand for special education services, and diminished economic productivity. In fact, research shows that child hunger costs the U.S. economy $160 billion annually in lost potential and increased public spending.
Closing the hunger gap together
Hunger isnt a supply problemits a systems problem. With more than enough food in the U.S., hunger is a solvable issue when we all work together, especially through innovative community and business partnerships. People facing hunger have told us that they dont want charity; they want lasting solutions. Increasingly, companies across industries are stepping up, not only through food donations, cash grants, and volunteers, but by using their size and influence to advocate for stronger policies that protect families. In addition, some are launching large-scale programssuch as PepsiCos Food for Goodthat leverage corporate capabilities to source, pack, and deliver millions of cost-effective, nutritious meals each year, demonstrating how business can directly help close the hunger gap.
Federal nutrition programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Summer EBT, and school meals are among the most effective solutions we have. Every dollar invested generates up to $2 in economic returnincluding healthier kids, better school performance, and stronger earning potential over a lifetime. These programs have already reduced child hunger by 33% and eased stress for working parents, with two-thirds noting school meals lower their familys anxiety. Rolling them back would not just hurt families today, but undercut Americas workforce and economic competitiveness tomorrow.
Thats why corporate leadership is essential. When business voices join community leaders in calling for stronger nutrition programsand pair that advocacy with innovation like mobile meal hubs or public-private partnershipsthe impact multiples. The choice is clear: Cutbacks carry devastating costs while investment in child nutrition pays dividends for generations. Without collective action, reductions in nutrition spending will carry devastating costs for years to come.
Feeding potential and fueling growth
The return on investing in childhood food access is both immediate and generational. Every meal served to a child today protects their health, boosts their learning, and fuels their potential to contribute to tomorrows economy. Eleven-year-old Elijah, who receives free breakfast and lunch at school, put it simply: When Im hungry, I get tired or Ill get distracted. But when Im not, Im on-task and I can focus. With consistent meals, Elijah isnt just able to concentrate, hes thriving in his passion for robotics. If Im full, Im ready for whatever happens, he said.
Elijahs story is one of millions. Summer programs that provide meals to children who rely on free or reduced-price meals during the school year are especially critical and have been shown to decrease food insecurity and mitigate summer learning loss.
Partnerships are already proving whats possible. Since 2009, PepsiCo and the PepsiCo Foundation have invested over $75 million in Food for Good, expanding access to nutritious meals for children after school, on weekends, and during the summer. Through this investment, Food for Good partners with food banksincluding the Feeding America network, which provided 30 million meals to children last summer. Together, these efforts demonstrate the power of public-private collaboration to reach children at scale, ease family budgets, and build healthier, more resilient communities.
Nourishment now is prosperity later
Ensuring kids have year-round access to food is one of the smartest investments we can make in human capital. It reduces costs, boosts productivity, and strengthens the workforce. Every nourished child is healthier today and better prepared to become the innovators and leaders who will shape a more prosperous tomorrow.
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When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to rapidly increase as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings could suggest a market that is tightening or heating up.
Since the national Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out in 2022, the national power dynamic has slowly been shifting directionally from sellers to buyers. Of course, across the country that shift has varied significantly.
Generally speaking, local housing markets where active inventory has jumped above pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced softer home price growth (or outright price declines) over the past 36 months.
Conversely, local housing markets where active inventory remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 36 months.
Where is national active inventory headed?
National active listings as tracked by Realtor.com are on the rise on a year-over-year basis (+17% between September 2024 and September 2025). This indicates that homebuyers have gained some leverage in many parts of the country over the past year. Some sellers markets have turned into balanced markets, and more balanced markets have turned into buyers markets.
Nationally, were still below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels (-10% below September 2019) and some resale markets, in particular chunks of the Midwest and Northeast, still remain tight-ish.
While national active inventory is still up year-over-year, the pace of growth has slowed in recent monthsmore than typical seasonality would suggestas some sellers have thrown in the towel and delisted (more on that in another piece).
These are the past September inventory/active listings totals, according to Realtor.com:
September 2017 -> 1,308,607
September 2018 -> 1,301,922
September 2019 -> 1,224,868
September 2020 -> 749,395
September 2021 -> 578,070 (overheating during the Pandemic Housing Boom)
September 2022 -> 731,496
September 2023 -> 702,430
September 2024 -> 940,980
September 2025 -> 1,100,407
If we maintain the current year-over-year pace of inventory growth (+159,427 homes for sale), we’d have 1,259,834 active inventory come September 2026.
Below is the year-over-year percentage change by state:
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While active housing inventory is rising in most markets on a year-over-year basis, some markets still remain tight-ish (although it’s loosening in those places, too).
As ResiClub has been documenting, both active resale and new homes for sale remain the most limited across huge swaths of the Midwest and Northeast. Thats where home sellers this spring had, relatively speaking, more power.
In contrast, active housing inventory for sale has neared or surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels in many parts of the Sunbelt and Mountain West, including metro area housing markets such as Punta Gorda and Austin.
Many of these areas saw major price surges during the Pandemic Housing Boom, with home prices getting stretched compared to local incomes. As pandemic-driven domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates rose, markets like Tampa and Austin faced challenges, relying on local income levels to support frothy home prices.
This softening trend was accelerated further by an abundance of new home supply in the Sunbelt. Builders are often willing to lower prices or offer affordability incentives (if they have the margins to do so) to maintain sales in a shifted market, which also has a cooling effect on the resale market: Some buyers, who would have previously considered existing homes, are now opting for new homes with more favorable deals. That puts additional upward pressure on resale inventory.
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At the end of September 2025, 15 states were above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington. (The District of Columbiawhich we left out of this analysisis also back above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels. Softness in D.C. proper predates the current administrations job cuts.)
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Big picture: Over the past few years, weve observed a softening across many housing markets as strained affordability tempers the fervor of a market that was unsustainably hot during the Pandemic Housing Boom. While home prices are falling some in pockets of the Sunbelt, a big chunk of Northeast and Midwest markets still eked out a little price appreciation this spring. Nationally aggregated home prices have been pretty close to flat in 2025.
Click to expand.
Below is another version of the table abovebut this one includes every month since January 2017. (Click the link to see an interactive version.)
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Across the U.S., more schools are implementing policies restricting cellphones as concerns about digital distraction, mental health, and academic performance rise.
The scale of the issue is significant. According to a 2023 report from Common Sense Media, 97% of students between the ages of 11 and 17 use their cellphones at least once during the school day. These students spend a median of 43 minutes online each day during school hours. Social media, YouTube, and gaming were the students top cellphone uses.
Schools have already begun taking action. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics published in 2025 shows that 77% of public schools ban cellphones during classes. Some 38% of schools have cellphone policies that restrict use outside of class as wellincluding during free periods, between classes, or during extracurricular activities.
Policymakers in different states and educators in school districts across the country are putting into place a variety of solutions. Some rely on partial restrictions, while others enforce complete bans.
Many are still searching for the balance between technology access and minimizing distraction.
What is clear, however, is that cellphones have become one of the central issues shaping todays classroom environment.
The role of technology in the classroom
As researchers and professors who study the integration of technology for teaching and learningand who are also parents of school-age childrenwe firmly believe that digital technologies are no longer optional add-ons. They have become indispensable in modern classrooms, acting as versatile instruments for instruction, collaboration, and student engagement.
Take, for example, the ongoing shift from traditional paper textbooks to digital ones. This transformation has broadened access and created new opportunities for interactive, personalized learning. Abundant evidence demonstrates the positive effects of technology in supporting students engagement in class and their academic performance.
Students access to digital devices has improved significantly as schools across the United States continue investing in technology infrastructure. A 2023 report from the National Center for Education Statisitics indicates that 94% to 95% of public schools now provide devices to students who need them, although disparities exist between states.
A growing number of districts are adopting 1:1 initiatives, ensuring that every student has access to a personal device such as a laptop or tablet. These initiatives accelerated after the COVID-19 pandemic made clear the need for reliable access to learning technologies in schools for all students. They highlight the central role technology now plays in shaping everyday classroom instruction.
These technologies hold great educational potential. Yet, when not integrated thoughtfully and regulated effectively, they can inadvertently reduce focus and undermine learning.
Our recent systematic review on digital distraction in classrooms, which synthesized 26 empirical studies, finds three main drivers of distraction among students:
Technology-related factors included constant social networking, texting, and cellphone addiction. These accounted for over half of the reported distractions.
Personal needs, such as entertainment, made up more than one-third.
Instructional environment, including classroom instruction that isnt engaging, poor classroom management, and difficult course content, accounted for the rest.
To address these challenges, the authors of the papers we reviewed suggested strategies such as teaching students how to control their own behavior and focus, silencing notifications, issuing clear device policies, or banning devices.
The studies in our review also drew a clear distinction between school-provided and personally owned mobile devices. Devices provided by schools are typically equipped for instructional purposes, enhanced with stronger security and designed to restrict distracting uses. Personal devices are far less regulated and more prone to off-task use.
As schools increasingly provide devices designed for learning, the role of personal cellphones in classrooms becomes harder to justify as they present more risks of distraction than educational benefits.
Laws and policies regarding cellphone use
Several states in the U.S. have passed laws banning or restricting cellphone use in schools, with some notable differences.
States vary in how they define wireless communication devices. In Michigan, Senate Bill 234, passed in May 2025, describes a wireless communication device as an electronic device capable of, but not limited to, text messaging, voice communication, entertainment, navigation, accessing the internet, or producing email.
While most of the states have several technology types listed under wireless communication devices, a Colorado bill passed in May 2025 clearly identified that laptops and tablets did not fall under the list of restricted wireless communication devices.
Most state laws dont specify whether the bans apply to both personally owned devices and school-owned devices. One exception is the bill Missouri passed in July 2025, which clearly specifies its ban refers only to personal devices.
North Carolina made exceptions in a bill approved in July 2025, allowing students to use wireless communication devices for instructional purposes. Other exceptions in the North Carolina bill include an emergency, when students individual education programs call for it, and a documented medical condition.
In their bills, most states provide recommendations for school districts to create cellphone use policy for their students. To take one typical example, the policy for Wake County in North Carolina, one of the states largest school districts, specifically refers to personal wireless communication devices. For elementary and middle school students, they must be silenced and put away between morning and afternoon bells, either in a backpack or locker. For high school students, teaches may allow them to be used for lessons, but they must otherwise be silenced and put away during instructional time. They can be used on school buses with low volume and headphones.
Kui Xie is the dean of the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Florence Martin is a professor of learning, design, and technology at North Carolina State University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Your inbox is brimming with new emails, and you need to decide which to reply to quickly and which to ignore. You try to schedule something for next week, but your calendar is already packed with recurring meetings. So many employees have asked for a particular day offor requested a particular shift schedulethat you cant grant all their requests. You post a job listing for a single position and get 250 applications.
These situations arise constantly in our work lives, and their analogues come up in our personal lives. But despite their frequency, we often struggle with how to handle them. We barrel through our inbox and move things around on our calendar. We follow (perhaps unwritten) rules to determine which employees get requests filled and which do not. Sometimes we decide its too much to figure out ourselves and outsource the whole endeavor to AI.
The common theme of the examples above is what economists call excess demand, which arises when more people want something than we can serve.
Economists have a go-to solution for excess demand: rising prices. When prices go up, fewer people find that it is worthwhile, or even feasible, to pay for the thing, so they stop asking for it. But there are times when price doesnt existfor example, it would be inappropriate to charge people for a job interview.
In these scenarios, we dont use prices, but we still decide who gets what. We respond to emails and take meetings. We decide who gets the day off and who gets the best shift schedule. We interview candidates and eventually hire someone.
Instead of prices changing, a hidden market arises to resolve the excess demand. These hidden markets are under our control. We set the rules to decide who gets what, and we can optimize them.
To do so, we must think carefully about what we want our hidden markets to achieve: a set of goals that I call the three Es: efficiency, equity, and ease.
Effective hidden markets are efficient, meaning that they do not waste resources and they give resources to the people who value them most. You want to use your precious inbox time to respond to the emails that will generate the most value for recipients. You want to give the day off to an employee who really values it (say prioritizing a once-in-a-lifetime event, like a childs graduation, over something that could happen another day, like a beach trip with friends). You want the job to go to the candidate who is the best fit for the firm.
Effective hidden markets are equitable, meaning that they treat people fairly. It would be unfair if one employee always got their preferred schedule while an equally deserving employee was always given something less desirable.
Effective hidden markets are also easy to participate in. A hidden market would not be easy if getting what you want required an ordeal, like sending a dozen follow-up emails to get a reply or doing personal favors for a manager to get a preferred day off.
This three-E framework can help you improveand even optimizethe hidden markets you control.
When I open my inbox, I think a lot about whether I am using my time efficiently. Doing so requires triaging anything that isnt important. Among my important emails, I first look to see if anything requires my immediate attention. When in doubt, I use a last-in, first-out rule for triage, meaning I prioritize emails that came in later to ones that came in earlier. I do this because people who emailed me most recently might still be working on whatever project they had just pinged me about. If so, a snappy reply might be more valuable to them than to someone who emailed me last night.
When I look at my calendar, I ask whether I am being equitable in how I allocate my time. This has caused me to question my recurring meetings, which repeat on the same day and time (e.g., each Thursday at 10 a.m.). Recurring meetings impose a first-in-time, first-in-right rule that gives perpetual access to a scarce resource based on the order in which it was originally claimed. A recurring meeting set up a year ago gets priority (for Thursday at 10 a.m.) over anything that comes later. But a new project might be just as worthyor even more worthyof my time than the projects whose meetings are clogging my calendar. It is unfair (and possibly also inefficient) to give it the dregs.
Rules for staff scheduling might be based on seniority or worker tenure. In workplaces with regular turnoverwhere a person who sticks around long enough will eventually go from getting to pick last to getting to pick firstsuch rules might be fair. But if the same set of workers get their first choices for decades while workers who started a few years later are consistently out of luck, this is no longer equitable.
To combat this, many workplaces use first-come, first-served rules to let workers claim vacation days or preferred shifts. While first-come, first-served is familiar and ubiquitous, it is not necessarily easy for market participants. Employees might have to make requests before they know what schedule would be ideal and, if there is a race to sign up, employees must be vigilant about asking immediately once requests start being accepted.
But a thoughtful market designer can make these systems easier and more equitable by building in memory, so workers who did not get their first choice this year get priority next year and perhaps by building in a fair lottery (rather than choosing based on whose email request arrived a few seconds earlier).
In these situationsand in many otherswe are market designers who must resolve excess demand by allocating scarce resources to the many people who want them. Considering the three-Es can help us generate allocations that are efficient, equitable, and easy for market participants.
If we do it right, we can achieve a fourth E: elevating us as market designers, so we are as happy as possible with the outcomes.
The U.S. Treasury Department is considering a $1 commemorative coin bearing President Donald Trumps likeness in honor of America’s 250th birthdayand to celebrate the president, too.
U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach shared a first draft of the coin on social media on Friday. The coin features Trumps profile on one side, along with the words IN GOD WE TRUST and the dates 1776 and 2026.
The other side features the president raising his fist next to an American flaga pose similar to the images of Trump raising his fist after an attempted assassination in July 2024. The words FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT, which Trump had chanted to the crowd in that moment, also appear along the edge of that side of the coin.
No fake news here. These first drafts honoring Americas 250th Birthday and @POTUS are real, Beach wrote in a social media post. Looking forward to sharing more soon.
Why is the U.S. minting a new $1 coin?
In preparation for the 250th anniversary of the formal adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Congress in 2020 authorized the U.S. Mint to issue new $1 coins in 2026 with designs emblematic of the United States semiquincentennial.
In 1976, when the U.S. celebrated 200 years since 1776, a $1 coin was minted featuring the Liberty Bell and the moon.
According to the U.S. Mint, the country’s commemorative coin program has raised more than $500 million in surcharges. That revenue goes to funding for federal museums, monuments, historical sites, and more.
The most recent commemorative coins, featuring abolitionist Harriet Tubman and the Greatest Generation, were issued in 2024. Fast Company has asked the Treasury Department for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
Trump coin could challenge precedent
Many former presidents, including most recently George H.W. Bush, have been featured on commemorative coins, but U.S. law forbids the Treasury from minting and issuing a coin displaying a “living former or current President. The law, which dates to 1792, refers to coins created specifically to celebrate a president, however. Presidents may appear on such a coin only once two years have passed since their death, according to the law.
It is unclear how the law might apply in the case of a coin issued for another purpose, such as the 250th anniversary, Reuters noted.
A spokesperson for the Treasury told Fox Business that the draft is among other designs being considered. While a final $1 dollar coin design has not yet been selected to commemorate the United States semiquincentennial, this first draft reflects well the enduring spirit of our country and democracy, even in the face of immense obstacles, the spokesperson said.
The U.S. Space Force on Friday announced it will assign five of seven critical military missions for the coming fiscal year to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The awards are a $714 million boon to SpaceX, underscoring the companys continued dominance over Pentagon space contracts, despite Musk and U.S. President Donald Trumps public falling out earlier this year.
United Launch Alliance (ULA) will undertake the two other launches; it was awarded $428 million for two launches, according to a press release viewed by Space News.
SpaceX pulls ahead on Pentagon launches
The awards are made under the National Security Space Launch Program, which earlier this year selected SpaceX, ULA, and Jeff Bezos Blue Origin for 54 missions scheduled between fiscal 2027 and 2032 as part of its National Security Space Launch Program (NSSL)contracts worth $13.5 billion.
Space is the ultimate high ground, critical for our national security, said U.S. Space System Command official Col. Eric Zarybnisky in a release, per Air Space and Forces.
We continue to assure access to that high ground. Delivering assets to the warfighter is our ultimate mission, and we rely on our strong government-industry partnerships to successfully achieve that goal,” Zarybnisky said. Fast Company has reached out to the Space Force for comment.
The missions assigned to SpaceX include launches for a communication satellite, three classified payloads, and a reconnaissance satellite. The Space Force makes its awards two years in advance, so these launches will likely take off in 2027.
Blue Origin pushes for Mars mission
The awards also underlined the fact that Blue Origins New Glenn rocketthe companys rival to SpaceXs Falcon Heavyhas yet to be certified for national security launches. No missions were assigned to the third provider, Blue Origin, which has its next opportunity for a mission in FY27, Space Systems Command said in a statement, per SpaceNews.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn is slated to launch a NASA mission to Mars as soon as the end of this monthdelayed since 2024that could bring it closer to receiving certification, however.
OpenAIs new video generation app Sora is barely a week old, but CEO Sam Altman is already dropping updates to address some major potential issues with the app.
In the days since Sora launched, the app has soared to the top of the U.S. Apple App Store as users flocked to try iteven though it is still invite-only. And just as its popularity has skyrocketed, experts increasingly sounded the alarm over the likelihood that OpenAI may face legal action over Soras ability to generate copyrighted characters, logos, and other intellectual property. Thats what the new updates appear geared to address.
In a Friday blog post, Altman said Sora will undergo two major changes: The first change is aimed at giving rights holders “granular control over generation of characters,” he wrote, similar to the companys opt-in model for likenesses.
The second will be tweaking the app to create revenuein part so that some proportion of the apps takings can be shared with rights holders, according to Altman. It’s unclear when the changes will take effect, with Altman only writing they would be coming “soon.”
Sora’s fan dilemma
We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of interactive fan fiction and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all), Altman wrote, caveating that some edge cases might sneak through the cracks.
Generated videos featuring characters from SpongeBob SquarePants, South Park, and a number of other television shows and movies could already be found on the app in the days after its release, CNBC reported.
People are eager to engage with their family and friends through their own imaginations, as well as stories, characters, and worlds they love, and we see new opportunities for creators to deepen their connection with the fans, Varun Shetty, OpenAIs head of media partnerships, told CNBC in a statement.
Well work with rights holders to block characters from Sora at their request and respond to takedown requests,” Shetty told the outlet.
Fast Company reached out to OpenAI for comment, but did not hear back by the time of publication.
Other publications that tested the app found that it wouldn’t generate certain images, including of celebrities who hadn’t given OpenAI permission to use their likeness. The app also wouldn’t create violent content, as well as some political content, according to The New York Times.
AI copyright concerns growing
The concerns over OpenAIs new app come months after Disney and Universal filed a copyright lawsuit against another AI image-generator, Midjourneymarking the first time a global entertainment company sued an AI platform over copyright. Disney has also sent a cease-and-desist to Character.AI over alleged copyright violations, CNBC reported.
In his blog post Friday, Altman nodded to the remarkable creative output of some Sora users, writing that people are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences.
Altman wrote that the app will continue to change over the coming months, in a “trial and error” process. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, he wrote.
When Scott Belsky talks about creativity, he uses words like output and production. Creativity is the source, with the problem of mining, says the founder, author, and early stage investor. It requires machinery and practice and discipline and whatever else.
Belsky joined A24 as the head of A24 Labs in early 2025. Before that, he founded Behance, a global portfolio site that he sold to Adobe in late 2012. He had a long run at Adobe, serving as its chief product officer and later chief strategy officer. This month he became the newest member of the Cornell Tech Council, and has written books like The Messy Middle and Making Ideas Happen. Belsky sits at the intersection of ideas and infrastructure, with the keen ability to frame the creative process in a way thats both practical and magic.
Still, Belsky doesnt romanticize any of this. Im always thinking about the inputs in my life and trying to make sure I dont get too stagnant and boring, says Belsky. All of the things youre exposed to act as outputs. Belsky has worked for years building his own creative system of production and the nuggets he shares here are a result of the fact that his system is equally rooted in two worlds: I have always straddled one foot in the creative world and one foot in the business world. When I get too businessy it compromises the ingenuity that I can bring to the product and the things Im trying to create or write. It is a tension to constantly maintain in order to ensure youre not just basking in the stuff youve done before.
Im constantly, constantly capturing stuff. It takes a little bit of the romanticism out of it, but Ive come to believe a lot of creativity is simply capturing things the moment they hit, and then tending to them with such consistency that you start to connect little pieces into a bigger thing. And then when you connect little things to big things and then bigger things into each other, then you end up with something amazing. It can be a book or a screenplay or some sort of business strategy or a new business. If I look at myself over the last couple of decades, it’s all about capturing things and then servicing them with the right moment and in the right way.
Another thing that comes to mind is the role of others. Sometimes they have the missing pieces to the thing youre building. Sometimes I’ll meet somebody who has an idea or has a skill that captures something I had thought of years ago and suddenly I realize they are part of this project or puzzle. I work to graft them onto it in such a way that makes it come to life. That wouldnt have been possible had it not been for the discipline of going back and tending to the pieces that seemed dormant and irrelevant until suddenly they werent.
I pick places to go and I sometimes say yes to things Id ordinarily say no to just get a fresh dose of surprise and exposure to something different. It can come in the form of a speaking engagement somewhere super inconvenient thats not even paying me, but Ill do it because I have a sense this will take me out of my comfort zone in some way. I also try to listen to new music and read things that are from new sources. I have a bit of a paranoia that somehow my input could get stale and my output would then become uninteresting to me and others. There is something to extract from everywhere if you have the skeleton key for itwhich is usually the right dose of curiosity.
The ultimate test is when I go to a dinner I was dragged into. Ill say to myself this is going to be completely uninteresting. I try to find the skeleton key to the person or topicit will usually be me mining curiosity, like how does that work or why is that the way it is? Ill go deep into some backstory and it unlocks a door of intrigue and new material that is input, again. It’s like squeezing water from air. If you have the technology, water is everywhere; you dont have to look for the well.
Ive also been impacted as a parent. When you have a kid, their inputs are just what you expose them to. Its a closed room experiment. Only for a short period of time, before they go out in the world and start watching TVbefore they start getting inundated with inputs that cannot be traced, you have this previous zone where everything they do you can trace back to the input they were exposed to. Its this fascinating laboratory of understanding creativity. Suddenly you can see the whole system and you can extrapolate how it impacts you and others because they are in the world.
Texture and friction are how we remember time. The hardest, hardest vacations to remember are beach vacations; they all kind of blend together. You just remember sitting on the beach. I love the beach, but theres no friction in sitting and relaxing all day. Therefore, its hard to discern between the beaches you sat on in your vacations. Juxtapose that with getting lost on some street in rural Italy or arduously climbing some mountaintop or something like that. You remember those vividly because they were friction-filled. Time with friction is what makes us remember it.
I have these two realizations: One is that at the end of your life, you will have felt like you lived longer based on how much time had texture and how much time you remember. In that essence, texture and time is what makes life longer. The other is that maybe it’s the inputs that have texture and friction that impact us the most. I definitely believe that pain is a source of creativity. I hate to say it but it’s true. You look at Billy Joel. His greatest albums came out of a divorce or his addiction. Everyone suffering is rife with texture and friction. It also probably rife with inputs and emotion, struggle, insight, realization. Whenever I struggle, theres a part of me thats grateful I still have kindling. I learn to appreciate the troughs of life. Lets do something with this.
Ive become very purposeful with my time. Im in a startup environment building something new. I run product, design, and development teams. I have a sacred three hours every week that we call concepting. It is a block of time when we review product and have a more product and design driven controlled meeting, as opposed to an engineering one. Its not a meeting to talk about the cost of doing something. Its a meeting about, Whats the best product? Thats a mistake a lot of teams make. Theyll include engineers in that first product design meeting. And if you have engineers, its okay. But they cant be thinking, How am I going to implement this and is that going to be too expensive in time or money? They have to be thinking, Whats possible? How do we solve this problem? Thats a really sacred time. Every team Ive ever managed, I have these concepting blocks.
My team, we are very empowered. We have a standup every Monday. Every Friday, everyone gives an update on every project they lead. Everyone is entrusted to use their time and energy to make the greatest impact. Its important to have a team that can be trusted.
Full transparency. Everyone does it. Including me. I am one that always looks ahead. I have to make choices. I have a list in Notion of the things that are most important to me and I try to look at it every few days to pressure check myself against my calendar on how Im using my time. Whats important to me right now? One of them might be a project that has many short-term deliverables. I have one for work, one for the companies Im investing in and supporting, and I have one for my personal lifemy ealth and fitness, my relationships with my family. I just think that a quick glance over it is a recalibration of your brain that helps you make better decisions every day.
Writing is my craft of processing and testing things myself and then testing things with others. Im tending to these fragments and these ideas. Both books I wrote were the result of lots of different pieces I captured. The Messy Middle was seven years of just capturing stuff and finally seeing the way they come together. I find writing a great form of getting ideas out there. I have forced myself to write this thing called Implications, which is one way I test ideas on the technology side and I learn what people engage with or disengage with. I do the same thing with social media. I dont consume a lot of social media but everything I do, I share on X. Its an instant way of engagement and testing ideas. Its an amazing tool. It helps me triangulate where I should put my focus and energy.
I try to run three to five miles every morning. Its a principled period of time where Im forced to unplug. I listen to music but I never look at my phone. I just think and its also a great part of my chemistry and how my brain works. I swear by it. Do I even listen to the music? For some reason the music makes it easier to run. Do I love running? Or, do I just love everything that happens because of the running?
When Im running I force myself to complete the run and almost always the idea has become much better. It taught me to wait and not capture and move on from the idea so fast, to sit with something. Should we be careful not to capture actions so quickly and stick with a creative process long enough so ideas build? This is the art and science of creativity.
By capturing something so quickly were making ourselves at ease with the fact that weve captured it. When I tend to something over time, is that the equivalent of running and having to think about it more? The best practice would be to have both. Dont let something go. Capture it when it hits and tend to it over time so the pieces fit together. Let yourself keep going. Force yourself not to capture it so quickly.
This week brought a mix of serious headlines and splashy moves.
On one end, regulators and retailers are making decisions that could directly affect your wallet and grocery cartfrom FICO shaking up how mortgage lenders handle credit scores to Walmart promising cleaner labels on its private-label food. On the other, cultural and corporate forces collided in ways that only 2025 could deliver: Starbucks is closing stores (many of them unionized), and Taylor Swift is rolling out a new album and a three-day movie event thats giving theaters a rare box office jolt.
Here are some of the week’s biggest stories.
More pasta recalled after deadly listeria outbreak
Retailers added new ready-to-eat pasta items to ongoing listeria-related recalls this week, including products from Trader Joe’s and Albertsons. The CDC ties the outbreak back to August 2024. Cases have currently risen to 20 this year, with four fatalities and 19 hospitalizations.
Quantum computing stocks leapagain
Rigetti, D-Wave, IonQ, and Quantum Computing Inc. notched double-digit daily pops, extending huge 12-month runs. Rigetti landed a $5.7 million order for two upgradable 9-qubit Novera systems; D-Wave touted a U.K. police pilot that sped up response-time modeling. Fans see early commercial traction; skeptics say the hype is still miles ahead of revenues.
Big banks eye relief as capital rules get rewritten
Trump-era regulators are crafting the most sweeping capital update since 2008, easing parts of the Basel Endgame, recalibrating GSIB surcharges, and tailoring leverage constraints. Industry sources expect systemwide capital to be flat at worstmaybe lower for some mega-banks. Critics warn softer buffers could bite if the economy wobbles.
Walmart is cleaning up its private-label ingredients
Walmart announced plans this week to eliminate the use of synthetic dyes and 30 additives across its Great Value, Marketside, Freshness Guaranteed, and Bettergoods brands by January 2027. The move follows federal nudges to phase out dyes and taps consumer demand for simpler labels. Walmart says 90% of its private-label items are already dye-free, with more reformulations rolling out soon.
Starbucks closings include 59 unionized stores
As part of a $1 billion Back to Starbucks overhaul, the company will close about 1% of North American stores by the end of 2025 while opening others. Starbucks Workers United says 59 of the closing cafés are unionized; the company says union status wasnt a factor and is offering transfers or severance.
KB Home hints Florida discounts went too far
After cutting hard to revive demand, KB Home says Florida orders bouncedand some communities may now see price increases. Management points to fewer housing starts and cost reductions as tailwinds. Not an all-clear for the whole state, but the tone has shifted from defense to cautious optimism.
FICO upends mortgage-score distribution
Fair Isaac Corp. will let mortgage lenders license FICO scores directlyskipping the credit bureausand says per-score costs could fall up to 50%. FICO shares ripped higher; Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax slumped on margin worries. The change follows public pressure from housing regulators to boost competition and lower fees.
Taylor Swifts 3-day film window = scarcity play
Alongside her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, Swift is premiering a companion film in AMC, Cinemark, and Regal multiplexes this weekend for just three days (Oct. 35). Its the same scarcity engine behind her limited-edition dropsand a studio-free win for theaters. Great for Swift-level stars; not a plug-and-play model for everyone else.
Tesla sued over Cybertruck doors after fatal crash
A new suit alleges electronic door releases failed in a fiery crash, trapping a 19-year-old passenger; manual releases require finding concealed cables. It adds to complaints and investigations around Teslas button-operated doors. Tesla has floated redesigns that blend mechanical and electronic releases to address panic scenarios.
New Yorks inflation refund checks are in the mail
New York is sending onetime checks of $150 to $400 to 8.2 million households through October and November. Eligibility is based on 2023 filing status and adjusted gross income (AGI); no application is needed, but make sure your address is current with the state if you’re a NY resident.
