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Rare earth minerals are so ubiquitous and critical to much of todays technology, that tonights dinner might not have made it to the table without them. And according to USA Rare Earth CEO Barbara Humpton, for decades, the world has sat back and let China become the sole supplier of these minerals, even as the country has used its dominance in this market as a geopolitical game piece. We believe its time to take the game piece off the board,” Humpton said at last months World Changing Ideas Summit, cohosted by Fast Company and Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. USA Rare Earth is wholly dedicated to bringing rare earth metals mining to the U.S., and changing this dynamic is humanly possible, says Humptonthough it will require the support of governments, academia, and private industry. “We’re gonna have to use some real strategy to actually turn the tide,” she says. It may be difficult, but there are already some early signs of progress, as governments that include the U.S., Japan, and the European Union have collaborated to agree on supporting a rare earth supply chain beyond China. Getting academia involved to educate students in magnet-making and rare earth processing is also a priority, Humpton says, along with securing the support of major industries that rely on these minerals, like the automotive sector. A good chance to turn this around According to Humpton, many countriesthe U.S. includedwere perfectly happy to let China dominate this market, because it was cheaper and less messy for them. But Chinas behavior in recent years has led to this moment, she says, adding that there are many benefits to bringing this type of mining to the U.S., including the potential for economic development, and addressing some environmental concerns to mitigate consequences and utilize cleaner extraction techniques. Because we are in an area where it’s a relatively small market, a relatively small number of companies, we have a good chance to turn this around, she says. If we don’t get started, we’ll never get done.
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E-Commerce
President Donald Trump has always been a master marketer. He is particularly adept at lending his name to products and buildings, which has proven to be a lucrative business. Now in office, he’s bringing that same licensing mindset to the very act of governing. Last week, the State Department said it renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) after Trump and put his name on its building in Washington, D.C. This comes after Trump fired the board members and nearly all U.S. employees of the USIP. The USIP’s open, natural-light-drenched headquarters was designed by Safdie Architects to symbolize conflict resolution. But it has ironically become the flashpoint of what former board members have described as a hostile takeover of the federally funded independent nonprofit in Trump’s second term. DOGE staff and police entered the building in March, but USIP took control two months later after a judge ruled the firings were illegal. Then a federal appeals court stayed the ruling in June. The building’s switched hands several times, and with it back in the Trump administration’s hands, they’re looking to make it formal with signage. The US Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, D.C., on Friday, December 5. [Photo: Alex Kent/Bloomberg/Getty Images] The politics of unearned credit The building’s new “Donald J. Trump” signage is just the latest example of a larger trend where Trump has assigned his name to policies and initiatives that he once opposed. For example, Trump campaigned against the infrastructure bill signed into law by then-President Joe Biden in 2021, and yet Trump’s name went up earlier this year on new signage in Seattle for an Amtrak rain project funded by Biden’s bipartisan law. “President Donald J. Trump, Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure,” the bright “Make America Great Again” hat-red sign says. The words, “Funded by the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act,” are written in smaller type below. Then there’s the Nation Park Service (NPS), which Trump has taken an axe to, cutting staff 16.5% and the budget by more than a third. Still, Trump’s image is going on two designs for next year’s annual NPS passes. The Interior Department is also making Trump’s birthday, which falls on Flag Day, one of several “resident-only patriotic fee-free days” to parks next year while dropping it for MLK Day and Juneteenth. When Trump put his name on stimulus checks funded through the CARES ACT, passed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it was unprecedented, the first time a president’s name had appeared on an IRS disbursement. Now, it seems, it’s just politics as usual. The man who once gave us Trump Steaks now seeks to gives us a Trump peace institute, and some might say its good politics. Biden called it “stupid” that he didn’t put his own name on stimulus checks funded through the 2021 American Rescue Plan. But with Trump’s approval at a second-term low of 36%, according to Gallup, these branding efforts don’t exactly seem to be working.
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E-Commerce
Judge a book by its cover, and you might think that American Canto, the memoir by Vanity Fair‘s outgoing West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi, is destined to be a classic. The memoir, which chronicles Nuzzi’s drama-filled life and career as a political reporter in the Trump era, features a strikingly simple cover that serves as shorthand for the book’s ambitions. The intent was to give the book a clean, no-frills design that felt both classic and contemporary, says Simon & Schuster senior art director Alison Forner, whos also designed book covers like Ezra Kleins all-type cover Why Were Polarized and Garrett M. Graffs Watergate: A New History. [Cover Images: Simon & Schuster] Nuzzi’s book features a stark white cover with the title and her name rendered in a serif typeface inspired by fashion magazine typography of the 1980s. The typeface does a lot of work for the book, which appears to be off to a slow start amid the ongoing media storm surrounding its rollout. A political reporter since 2014, Nuzzi was fired last year from New York magazine following an alleged relationship with now-Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Her publisher Simon & Schuster describes the much buzzed-about book by what it’s not: “not a memoir, nor a tell-all, nor a book about the president,” but “a character study of a nation undergoing radical transformation in real time.” Critics have called it a “tell-nothing memoir” that falls short of its ambition and is less interesting than the scandal that surrounds it. [Cover Images: Wiki Commons] Typographic covers using a vintage-inspired font is a surefire way to evoke a classic mid-20th century look, like in covers for John F. Kennedy’s 1956 Profiles in Courage or Robert A. Caro’s 1990 The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. Most bestselling books today, however, use pictures and illustrations. On the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, just two books have type-led covers, and both have numbers in their titles and also use other visual elements. (Andrew Ross Sorkins 1929, about the year’s market crash, uses a cratering market line to divide the bright red cover, and the cover of former Vice President Kamala Harriss 107 Days about her 2024 campaign counts down in serif numerals from 1 to 107 on a blue background.) [Cover Images: PRH, Simon & Schuster] American Canto goes further, relying on just text and a subversively patriotic white, red, and black color palette to communicate its message. I wanted something simple and evocativered, black, and white give the jacket an urgent minimalism, Forner tells Fast Company. Olivia specified wanting a red without blue undertones, and I was more than happy to oblige. To capture the right shade of red, Nuzzi sent still photos of wildflower petals and cropped stills from films by director Martin Scorsese, including a scene in Goodfellas where a bodys in the back trunk of a car and the taillights are lighting up the fog. “When there’s no imagery to rely on, every detail becomes extremely importantfrom the typeface choices and letter spacing, to the negative space and color,” Forner says. “They all need to work on an almost subliminal level to become the ‘voice’ of the book.”
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E-Commerce
Nearly a quarter of American workers didnt take any of their vacation days this year. Thats according to a report published in October from FlexJobs based on a survey of over 3,000 U.S. workers. Despite workers being more burnt out and disengaged than ever, many refuse to take time off. Could unlimited PTO be to blame? Its been well-documented that unlimited PTO may not be the generous gift workers are led to believe. A recent skit from TikToker and comedian Jacob Capozzi assumes the role of the guy who invented unlimited PTO to highlight some of the reasons why. Capozzi poses as an executive who wants to incorporate something more interesting to get people to want to work here. One coworker suggests more competitive pay. Another chimes in, what if instead of limiting their time off, we removed the limits entirely? Cue foreboding music. During the past decade, unlimited PTO has emerged as a popular benefit in which companies allow workers to take time off at their discretion (pending manager approval). Sounds great, right? Wrong. If I gave you my debit card and told you you could spend up to $20, Id bet my life savings youd spend $19.50 without hesitation, Capozzi explains. But if I were to tell you in that same scenario you had no limit. How much would you spend? The answer is probably less. If we give them 25 days a year, theyll take 25 because its theirs. But if we give them infinity, theyll hesitate, the executive in the skit explains. Theyll work harder. Burn out faster. And best of all, we dont have to pay them out for unused vacation days. There is now no vacation cap at 7% of U.S. employers, according to the Society of Human Resource Management and in data shared with the Wall Street Journal. This has jumped significantly from a decade ago when, in 2014, just 1% of companies offered unlimited PTO as a perk. Still, a Harris Poll conducted last year found 47% of American workers feel guilty taking time away, and 49% get nervous requesting time off. Rather than deal with the smoke and mirrors of unlimited PTO, one in 10 applicants said they wouldn’t bother applying for a role if it offered it as a benefit, when surveyed by Adobe Acrobat on the biggest red flags in a job listing. Just realized that i always brag about my company having unlimited PTO but in my 2 years here ive only taken 10 days off my god im right where they want me arent i, one commented beneath Capozzis video, which has more than 2.3 million views. Don’t forget if you use too much you’ll be letting your team down, another added. You want to be a team player right? On the other hand, many are taking the unlimited PTO policy at face value and are more than happy to use it to their full advantage. This only works in America. Nobody feels bad about taking time off in the rest of the world, one comment suggested. Im so glad I dont relate to this, Ive lost count of how much pto I used, which is the whole point of unlimited pto, another wrote. Not me gang, sitting at almost 40 days this year, another wrote. Yall be safe tho.
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E-Commerce
Enterprises have often dreamed about AI systems that can reason across their most sensitive data, execute multistep tasks, and explain their logic while remaining inside a highly governed environment. Snowflake and Anthropic are betting they can finally crack the code. Through a multiyear, $200-million expansion of their agentic AI partnership, the companies plan to deliver an operational control plane that uses Anthropics latest Claude models, such as Sonnet and Opus 4.5, to power enterprise intelligence. The announcement landed alongside Snowflakes Q3 earnings for fiscal year 2025, which showed the company maintaining strong momentum. Snowflake reported $1.21 billion in revenue, up 29% year over year, driven by $1.16 billion in product revenue. The company now operates at a $100 million AI run rate (year to date) while adding a record 615 new customers. But as the race to dominate enterprise agentic AI accelerates, not everyone is convinced that Snowflakes momentum guarantees staying power. Snowflake is still in the early innings of seeing if the traction will stick, says William Falcon, founder and CEO of Lightning AI. For a database like Snowflake, theyve hopefully learned from others mistakes and invested in Anthropic to try and avoid similar problems. That skepticism frames what makes Snowflakes approach so interesting. Instead of treating AI as an external service that companies must funnel their data toward, the company wants the intelligence layer to reside where the data already lives. Its philosophy is to bring AI to the data.”By deeply integrating Claude into Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex AI, weve collapsed that sprawl into a single governed environment where the model runs directly where a companys data already lives, securely with full business context and without ever moving that data or introducing risk, says Vivek Raghunathan, senior vice president of engineering at Snowflake. The hallmark of this collaboration is a new class of AI agents capable of multistep reasoning on governed corporate data through Snowflake Intelligence, the companys enterprise intelligence agent powered by Claude Sonnet 4.5. Under the hood of Snowflake Intelligence sits Cortex Agents, the Snowflake Horizon Catalog, and a layer of semantic models. Analysts can ask complex questions in natural language, developers can build intelligent agents without stitching together infrastructure, and business teams can get deep insights with citations and traceability. In practice, the integration means a business user can ask a natural-language question, such as What is driving churn in our Northeast customer segment? and Claude will determine which datasets are relevant, write and execute the SQL, and explain how it arrived at its conclusion. In highly regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, or life sciences, that combination of deep reasoning with end-to-end governance is especially transformative. In regulated environments, here’s the answer isn’t enough. You need here’s how I got there, says Katelyn Lesse, head of API at Anthropic. In areas like financial reconciliation, companies routinely juggle data from disparate systems that rarely align cleanly, with exceptions that demand human judgment. Lesse noted that earlier approaches either overlooked this nuance or relied so heavily on manual review that any promised efficiency gains disappeared. Claude can work through those discrepancies and flag where it’s uncertain, which is just as important as getting the answer right. A larger bet on enterprise transformation Enterprises can also design custom multi-agent systems, with Snowflake Cortex Agents serving as the scaffolding for production-ready data agents powered by Claude. These agents can retrieve, interpret, and reason across structured and unstructured data with greater precision and efficiency.We don’t see or access customer data because Claude operates within Snowflake’s security perimeter, so the customers data stays private, Lesse added. Raghunathan notes that Snowflake uses Claude internally across engineering, sales, and operations. Developers rely on Claude Code to accelerate development and code production cycles, while its sales teams use a Claude-powered assistant to unify data across the organization and shorten deal timelines.The companies say that early customer results are already showcasing what an enterprise built around AI agents might look like. Customer communications platform Intercom now uses Claude through Snowflake Cortex AI to power its Fin AI Agent. Likewise, Simon Data, a composable customer data platform, uses Claude on Snowflake to unearth patterns that conventional analytics overlooked, while maintaining governance across customer datasets. A growing competitive frontier The race to dominate enterprise agentic AI has intensified pressure across the technology landscape. Snowflakes rising AI revenue has seized market attention, but experts argue that its strategy, while meaningful, does not fundamentally reshape enterprise AIs competitive frontier. Gregor Stewart, chief AI officer at SentinelOne, believes the Anthropic alliance strengthens Snowflake but does not vault it ahead of rivals. Databricks has a stronger internal team and just as good relationships and arrangements with the frontier labs. In some ways, Snowflake is just catching up to them, he adds. I see hyperscalers using models and generic compute to build one-size-fits-all assistants that lack the specific business context residing in the data layer. In contrast, Snowflake is positioning itself as the governed brain where the actual work happens, rather than just the infrastructure where the model runs. The positioning, AI where the data lives, is the philosophical gulf separating Snowflake and Anthropic from Databricks, Microsofts Copilot ecosystem, Googles integrated cloud stack, and AWS. The companies are betting that enterprises will increasingly favor systems that minimize data movement, maximize security, and deliver reasoning directly within existing governance boundaries. Enterprises have been burned by AI projects that demanded new infrastructure, new skills, new risk, and delivered unclear ROI. Snowflakes revenue run rate validates that ease of adoption beats raw capability, says Ian Riopel, CEO of Root. Against Databricks: intelligence in SQL beats build custom pipelines; Against Microsoft and Google: AI in your existing flow beats adopt our new flow. The reality most vendors miss is that enterprises aren’t looking for another platform to master, they want 100 times the efficiency with the same knowledge and access their employees already have. If that thesis proves correct, Snowflake and Anthropic may be constructing more than a partnershipan architecture for how enterprise software will work over the next decade. In that vision, agentic AI doesnt sit beside business systems; it becomes the operating system. And both companies are intent on owning the moment when enterprises decide to make that shift. Our AI strategy is inherently open. We support models from several leading providers so enterprises can orchestrate multi-agent systems without being locked into a single cloud or model provider, Raghunahan added. This is what makes Snowflake a true AI control plane.
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E-Commerce
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