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On the heels of his recent political hit song “Streets of Minneapolis,” about President Donald Trump’s deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into that city, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have announced the spring 2026 dates for their “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour, dubbing it the “No Kings” tour (in reference to a series of massive nationwide anti-Trump protests). The tour kicks off in Minneapolis on March 31. Last month, Springsteen performed his political single there, during a live benefit concert organized by former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello. Springsteen also dedicated his song “Promised Land” to Renee Good during a recent concert in his home state of New Jersey, and spoke out against the president and ICE. “Right now, we are living through incredibly critical times,” Springsteen told the audience. “The values and the ideas [of the United States] have never been as endangered as they are right now.” Springsteen continued: “If you believe in democracy, in liberty, if you believe truth still matters, and it’s worth speaking out and worth fighting for, if you believe in the power of law and that no one stands above it, if you stand against heavily armed masked federal troops invading an American city, using gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens . . . send a message to this president . . . ICE should get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, and ICU nurse Alex Pretti, also 37, was fatally shot by two federal agents on January 24. The movement is growing, and were glad to have the Boss join the chorus,” said Eunic Epstein-Ortiz, a national spokesperson for the “No Kings” organizing group. “He understands what Americans know: We dont do kings. What are the dates for Bruce Springsteen’s “No Kings” tour? Springsteen’s tour dates are as follows: March 31: Minneapolis, MN Target Center April 3: Portland, OR Moda Center April 7: Inglewood, CA Kia Forum April 9: Inglewood, CA Kia Forum April 13: San Francisco, CA Chase Center April 16: Phoenix, AZ Mortgage Matchup Center April 20: Newark, NJ Prudential Center April 23: Sunrise, FL Amerant Bank Arena April 26: Austin, TX Moody Center April 29: Chicago, IL United Center May 2: Atlanta, GA State Farm Arena May 5: Belmont Park, NY UBS Arena May 8: Philadelphia, PA Xfinity Mobile Arena May 11: New York, NY Madison Square Garden May 14: Brooklyn, NY Barclays Center June 6: New York, NY Madison Square Garden June 19: Pittsburgh, PA PPG Paints Arena June 22: Cleveland, OH Rocket Arena June 24: Boston, MA TD Garden June 27: Washington, D.C. Nationals Park Tickets go on sale Friday, February 20, and Saturday, February 21. When is the next “No Kings” protest? The third “No Kings” nationwide protest is scheduled to take place in a little over a month, on March 28. More than 1,000 locally organized events in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., are already confirmed, including gatherings in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Organizers predict the March event will be even larger than the previous ones. In June, more than 5 million people attended the first “No Kings” protests. The movement grew to over 7 million people at the second “No Kings” protests in October.
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E-Commerce
Eileen Gu, the 22-year-old Chinese freeskier who just became the most decorated Olympian in women’s freestyle skiing, stood up for herself when speaking to a reporter at a press conference this week. In doing so, the skier unwittingly gave women everywhere an absolute masterclass in knowing their worth. The skier, who previously earned a gold medal and two silvers at the Beijing winter games in 2022, has earned two more silver medals at the current Milan Cortina games, becoming the most decorated athlete in her sport. And she’s not finished yetGu is still set to compete in the women’s halfpipe qualifier on Thursday and the halfpipe final on Saturday. The skier is also the only female freeskier to compete in three disciplines (slopestyle, halfpipe and big air) at the 2026 Winter Olympics. Regardless of the athlete’s incredible run thus far, a reporter asked Gu a question that raised some eyebrows on Monday. Most notably, Gu’s. The reporter asked the Olympian whether she was proud of her two new silver medals, or if she considered them to be “two golds lost.” The question seemed to minimize Gu’s incredible accomplishments in her sport, given her success. However, the athlete (who burst out laughing at first) did not shy away from making one thing abundantly clear: no one is going to cast a shadow over her or her achievements. Gu launched into an articulate and fierce response that was brimming with self-assuredness. Im the most decorated female freeskier in history, I think thats an answer in and of itself,” she began. How do I say this? Winning a medal at the Olympics is a life-changing experience for every athlete. Doing it five times is exponentially harder because every medal is equally hard for me, but everybody elses expectations rise, right?” She continued: The two medals lost situation, to be quite frank with you, I think is kind of a ridiculous perspective to take. Im showcasing my best skiing, Im doing things that quite literally have never been done before so I think that is more than good enough, but thank you. The exchange was nothing short of extraordinary. Not just because the question was, well, embarrassing (for the reporter), but because it showed that you can be the most decorated female athlete in your sport and still have your accomplishments diminished. More frustratingly, it’s hard to imagine a male athlete being asked if he considered his Olympic medals a failure. Still, the phenomenon of diminishing women’s most incredible accomplishments isn’t new. In fact, most successful women experience it at some point. According to a 2023 study led by Women of Influence+, women in the workplace feel persistently penalized for being ambitious. In a survey of 4,710 respondents across 103 countries, over 86% of women said they experienced being undermined, cut down, or diminished due to their success. Who is doing the cutting down? When it comes to successful women, usually, a man. Specifically, it’s male leaders who are the most likely to dim women’s accomplishments, the survey found. For women, that’s part of why being at the top of your game can feel like a blessing and a curse. Because while women often feel they have to work harder than men to get recognized, earning their keep can also come with this unpleasant side effect. Thankfully, Gu just showed us exactly how to stand tall, own our success, and name our accomplishments in the face of dismissal. Because, whether you’re on top of a mountain, or starting at the lowest rung in the officethere will likely be someone who doubts you no matter what. Knowing your worth is the only surefire way to win.
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E-Commerce
The Reeses brand just took a hit from an unlikely source: the descendant of its founder. In 1919, H.B. Reese created his eponymous candy company. In 1928, he invented the flagship peanut butter cups that would define his brand, and in 1963, his sons sold the company to The Hershey Co. Now, H.B. Reeses grandson Brad Reese is standing up for his grandpas original recipe, alleging that Hershey has replaced a portion of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups key ingredients with lower-quality alternatives. Reese addressed Hershey via a LinkedIn post on Valentines Day that has since gone viral, claiming that the company now uses compound coatings instead of milk chocolate, and peanutbutterstyle crmes instead of peanut butter. How does The Hershey Company continue to position REESES as its flagship brand, a symbol of trust, quality and leadership, while quietly replacing the very ingredients (Milk Chocolate + Peanut Butter) that built REESE’S trust in the first place? Reese asked in his post. In a statement to Fast Company, Hershey defended its recipes, saying that Reeses Peanut Butter Cups are made the same way they always have been, from milk chocolate and peanut butter. As weve grown and expanded the Reeses product line, we make product recipe adjustments that allow us to make new shapes, sizes and innovations that Reeses fans have come to love and ask for, while always protecting the essence of what makes Reeses unique and special: the perfect combination of chocolate and peanut butter, Hershey said. But Hershey consumers across social media are siding with Reese, claiming that theyve noticed the difference in taste across Reeses products and lamenting the apparent decline of their favorite candy. “I love my Reese’s but I stopped eating them last Halloween because that’s when I noticed a big change. They got mad nasty. The chocolate was off and the peanut butter got really grainy and disgusting,” one user shared. he's absolutely right. they are different. started realizing it when little kids in our classrooms started wasting them or not picking them from the treat jar UNLESS they were the Miniatures. we thought we got a stale batch, then tried different sizes. the only way to describe https://t.co/20dWSUrzAp— Sassington, M.C. (@MissSassbox) February 18, 2026 I have been saying this for years and no one believed me https://t.co/Gvmfruui5e— Jessica Smetana (@jessica_smetana) February 19, 2026 I love my Reese's but I stopped eating them last Halloween because that's when I noticed a big change. They got mad nasty.The chocolate was off and the peanut butter got really grainy and disgusting. They just weren't the same anymore. I didn't ask for any for Christmas either. https://t.co/dVeGsgauNs pic.twitter.com/YdJ4hzC8AK— Southern Fried StoNerD (@southernstonerd) February 19, 2026 Others took Reeses claim as evidence that the enshittification phenomenon is coming not just for our online platforms, but for our candy. Why is so much of the stuff we all grew up with slowly getting shittier with each passing year? https://t.co/1k6v89dd1Z— Oliver Jia () (@OliverJia1014) February 19, 2026 EXCUSE ME WHY HAVEN'T WE HEARD ABOUT THIS YETTHE ENSHITIFICATION MARCHES ON https://t.co/HHMxoLcP3Y— mastaprincess (@mastaprincess) February 19, 2026 Reese himself also offered a firsthand account in an interview with the Associated Press. He tried a new Valentines Day-themed product, Reeses Mini Hearts, but ultimately threw out the bag. The candys packaging seemed to affirm Reeses suspicions, listing chocolate candy and peanut butter creme as primary ingredients, not milk chocolate and peanut butter. It was not edible, Reese told the AP. You have to understand. I used to eat a Reeses product every day. This is very devastating for me. He added that Hershey should take a cue from its own founder, Milton Hershey, who famously said, Give them quality, thats the best advertising. I absolutely believe in innovation, but my preference is innovation with quality, Reese said.
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E-Commerce
For all the talk from employers who claim to understand the needs of working parents, childcare benefits remain elusive in many workplaces. Surveys have repeatedly shown that employees strongly value these benefits, which can run the gamut from childcare subsidies to backup care options. As working parents have demanded more from their employers, these perks have grown in popularity in certain workplaces, alongside more generous parental leave policies. But the companies that offer childcare benefits are still in the minority. The latest edition of an annual study from national childcare provider KinderCare compiled in partnership with the Harris Poll finds that one in three employers do not offer any kind of childcare benefits. And yet, the vast majority of parents surveyed85%said childcare benefits were essential, on par with health insurance and retirement benefits. Childcare ranks as a top-three benefit Of the more than 2,500 respondents, 70% expressed that health insurance was the most crucial workplace benefit, while 56% cited paid time off. But childcare ranked just after healthcare and PTOmaking it one of the top three benefits that was most important to working parents. For a quarter of low-income parents, childcare was actually the leading benefit. Even when companies do offer childcare benefits, however, many working parents find that there is little clarity around what that means for them. Over half of the people surveyed said it was difficult to understand my current childcare benefits, while 71% claimed their employer rarely highlights support for working parents. In fact, 69% said it was a red flag if a company did not broach the subject of support for parents during a job interview. Less support equals more pressure These findings underscore the bind many working parents find themselves in, as they struggle to juggle their caregiving responsibilities and cover the sky-high cost of childcare. A growing number of parents now expect their employers to help them bridge the gap, in no small part because raising children can take a toll on their careers and require a job with more flexibility. KinderCare found that over 60% of people surveyed would reduce their hours or take on a less demanding jobor had already done sodue to their childcare needs. That was even more common among low-income parents, with 80% of them saying they had switched jobs or would consider doing so because of childcare issues. Younger parents who identified as Gen Z were also more likely to make career changes to accommodate having children. Two-thirds of parents say that unreliable childcare has had an impact on their productivity at work, while about three in four parents say that even jobs with more flexibility still put implicit pressure on them to be always available. Women bearing the bruntagain The lack of adequate support is impacting plenty of working parents, as this study makes evident: Over half of the parents surveyed by KinderCare claim to be searching for new jobs that promise better childcare benefits, and 60% worry they will have to dial back work commitments to accommodate their parenting duties. But it is women who often bear the brunt of caregiving responsibilitiesand, in turn, tend to get penalized in the workplace for those obligations. During the pandemic, many women were forced to step away from work when their childcare arrangements fell through and schools went remote, which left them struggling to continue working while watching their children. After years of a strong recovery, working mothers seem to be facing hurdles yet again, as childcare costs continue to climb and perks like remote work have slipped away; the Trump administration has also repeatedly targeted childcare funding for low-income families. In 2025, about 212,000 women exited the workforce between January and June; according to a Washington Post analysis, the number of working mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 dropped by nearly three percentage points. The December jobs report showed that 81,000 workers left the labor forceand an analysis by the National Womens Law Center revealed that all of those workers were women. Theres a lot at stake for companies that fail to invest in childcare benefits or support workers who are parents, between employee turnover and declining productivity. In the KinderCare study, nearly 80% of people surveyed said they would be more loyal to their employer if they felt more supported as parents. As working parents increasingly look to their employers to help navigate childcare challenges, companies have an opportunityand perhaps a responsibility, too, to try and retain some of their best workers.
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E-Commerce
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Companys weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. The AI arms race may be more of an arm-twist The big AI companies tell us that AI will soon remake every aspect of business in every industry. Many of us are left wondering when that will actually happen in the real world, when the so-called AI takeoff will arrive. But because there are so many variables, so many different kinds of organizations, jobs, and workers, theres no satisfying answer. In the absence of hard evidence, we rely on anecdotes: success stories from founders, influencers, and early adopters posting on X or TikTok. Economists and investors are just as eager to answer the when question. They want to know how quickly AIs effects will materialize, and how much cost savings and productivity growth it will generate. Policymakers are focused on the risks: How many jobs will be lost, and which ones? What will the downstream effects be on the social safety net? Business schools and consulting firms have turned to research to find those answers the question. One of the most consequential recent efforts was a 2025 MIT study, which found that despite spending between $30 billion and $40 billion on generative AI, 95% of large companies had seen no measurable P&L [profit and loss] impact. More recent research paints a somewhat rosier picture. A recent study from the Wharton School found that three out of four enterprise leaders “reported positive returns on AI investments, and 88% plan to increase spending in the next year.” My sense is that the timing of AI takeoff is hard to grasp because adoption is so uneven and depends a lot on the application of the AI. Software developers, for example, are seeing clear efficiency gains from AI coding agents, and retailers are benefiting from smarter customer-service chatbots that can resolve more issues automatically. It also depends on the culture of the organization. Companies with clear strategies, good data, some PhDs, and internal AI enthusiasts are making real progress. I suspect that many older, less tech-oriented, companies remain stuck in pilot mode, struggling to prove ROI. Other studies have shown that in the initial phases of deployment, human workers must invest a lot of time correcting or training AI tools, which severely limits net productivity gains. Others show that in AI-forward organizations, workers do see substantial productivity improvements, but because of that, they become more ambitious and end up working more, not less. The MIT researchers included an interesting disclaimer on their research results. Their sobering findings, they noted, did not reflect the limitations of the AI tools themselves, but rather the fact that organizations often need years to adapt their people and processes to the new technology. So while AI companies constantly hype the ever-growing intelligence of their models, what ultimately matters is how quickly large organizations can integrate those tools into everyday work. The AI revolution is, in this sense, more of an arm-twist than an arms race. The road to ROI runs through people and culture. And that human bottleneck may ultimately determine when the AI industry, and its backers, begin to see returns on their enormous investments. New benchmark finds that AI fails to do most digital gig work AI companies keep releasing smarter models at a rapid pace. But the industrys primary way of proving that progressbenchmarksdoesnt fully capture how well AI agents perform on real-world projects. A relatively new benchmark called the Remote Labor Index (RLI) tries to close that gap by testing AI agents on projects similar to those given to remote contractors. These include tasks in game development, product design, and video animation. Some of the assignments, based on actual contract jobs, would take human workers more than 100 hours to complete and cost over $10,000 in labor. Right now, some of the industrys best models dont perform very well on the RLI. In tests conducted late last year, AI agents powered by models from the top AI developers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others could complete barely any of the projects. The top-performing agent, powered by Anthropics Opus 4.5 model, completed just 3.5% of the jobs. (Anthropic has since released Opus 4.6, but it hasnt yet been evaluated on the RLI.) The test puts the question of the current applicability of agents in a different light, and may temper some of the most bullish claims about agent effectiveness coming from the AI industry. Silicon Valleys pesky principals re-emerge, irking the White House and Pentagon The Pentagon and the White House are big mad at the safety-conscious AI company Anthropic. Why? Because Anthropic doesnt want its AI being used for the targeting of humans by autonomous drones, or for mass surveilling U.S. citizens. Anthropic now has a $200 million contract allowing the use of its Claude chatbot and models by federal agency workers. It was among the first companies to get approval to work with sensitive government data, and the first AI company to build a specialized model for intelligence work. But the company has long had clear rules in its user guidelines that its models arent to be used for harm. The Pentagon believes that after paying for the technology it should be able to use it for any legal application. But acceptable use for AI is different from that for traditional software. AIs potential for autonomy makes it more dangerous by nature, and its risks increase the closer to the battle it gets used. The disagreement, if not resolved, could potentially jeopardize Anthropic’s contract with the government. But it could get worse. Over the weekend, the Pentagon said it was considering classifying Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which would mean the government views Anthropic as roughly as trustworthy as Huawei. Government contractors of all kinds would be pushed to stop using Anthropic. Anthropics limits n certain defense-related uses are laid out in its Constitution, a document that describes the values and behaviors it intends its models to follow. Claude, it says, should be a genuinely good, wise, and virtuous agent. We want Claude to do what a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do in Claudes position. To critics in the Trump administration, that language translates to a mandate for wokeness. The whole dust-up harkens back to 2018, when Google dropped its Project Maven contract with the government after employees revolted against Google technology being used for targeting humans in battle. Google still works with the government, and has softened its ethical guidelines over the years. The truth is, tech companies dont stand on principle like they used to. Many have settled into a kind of patronage relationship with the current regime, a relatively inexpensive way to avoid MAGA backlash while keeping shareholders satisfied. Anthropic, in its way, seems to be taking a different course, and it may suffer financially for it. But, in the longer term, the company could earn some respect, trust, and goodwill from many consumers and regulators. For a company whose product is as powerful and potentially dangerous as consumer AI, that could count for a lot. More AI coverage from Fast Company: OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity near approval to host AI directly for the U.S. government New AI models are losing their edge almost immediately Meta patents AI that lets dead people post from the great beyond These 6 quotes from OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger hint at the future of personal computing Want exclusive reporting and trend analysis on technology, business innovation, future of work, and design? Sign up for Fast Company Premium.
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E-Commerce
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