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Wilson’s Airless Gen1 basketball is back. The hollow, $2,500 3D-printed basketball that doesnt need to be inflated was first showcased at the 2023 NBA All-Star Weekend. Now, Wilson is selling the ball via a new production run for the remaining few people who can afford to spend thousands of dollars on a basketball. The Airless Gen1 ball features a latticed pattern of hexagonal holes and doesn’t require an inflated bladder inside. By all accounts of professional and amateur players who have tried the airless wonder, its honeycomb architecture and plastic material makes it perform like a traditional basketball, matching its size, weight, and rebound characteristics. [Photo: Wilson] The initial release in February 2024 sold out rapidly. Now, Wilson is responding to the high demand by rereleasing the basketball in limited quantities, said Kevin Murphy, general manager of team sports at Wilson, in a press release: We have been consistently overwhelmed by the excitement surrounding our Airless basketball products. The rerelease features three color options: black, natural/white, and a new burgundy. Each ball is produced using the same 3D-printing process as the original, with refinements implemented to enhance production. I asked Nadine Lippa, Wilsons innovation manager, why the company hasn’t been able to ramp up production so more people can buy it. Were still using the same printer, were still using the same type of smoothing and dyeing, she explained. The Airless Gen1’s high price tag reflects the fact that 3D technology is not mature enough to make the jump to industrial production. Its not a problem of the design, but of how slow and cumbersome 3D-printing technology still is. Without a quicker way to materialize these items, which need extra cleaning and sanding work to turn them into consumer products, it cant really command production runs sizable enough to knock off at least one zero from that price tag. [Photo: Wilson] 3D-printing technology for industrial production keeps advancing but still faces big challenges like slow scalability, material limitations, and complex post-processing and quality control. While the industry is not stagnant, it is not yet fully realized for mass production. The additive and 3D-printing ecosystem continues to evolve year-over-year,” says Lippa, “and the Wilson Labs team continues to monitor the progress and engage with key players in the industry. Lippa tells Fast Company that Wison is still committed to making this technology more accessible in the future. Her team is continuously assessing all options on how to bring this to scale in the best way possible. Our mission is to create great high-performing products at every level for every athlete, so we will continue to research and explore until we solve the problem, she says. Specific to our Airless Basketball, we are continuing to evaluate 3D-printing materials and technologies that offer the right properties needed to make a basketball perform at a much-lower cost. Hopefully, one day we’ll be able to pick up one at the store just like we do with normal basketballs. But until then, the Airless Gen1 will remain a big-ticket item and an unreachable object of desire for b-ball fans everywhere. Starting Thursday, February 13, the Wilson Airless Gen1 will be available for purchase from Wilson.com. A limited number of units will also be available at NBA All-Star 2025 in San Francisco on February 17. Thankfully, you may have a higher chance of getting lucky, according to Lippa. While we dont share exact quantities, this will be our largest drop of the Airless Gen1 to date.
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Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Companys work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: How do I get a hiring manager to respond to me?A: Ive been on both sides of this scenario. I know how frustrating it can be to send your résumé and cover letter out into the void and wait for weeks without hearing anything. I also know how overwhelming it can be as a hiring manager to shift through hundreds of applications while meeting all of the normal demands of your job. So its a delicate balance. As a candidate you just want to know, but you also dont want to annoy the person who you are hoping to impress.Heres how to approach it:Follow the rulesThe first and most important step is to follow the instructions for applying. If the job posting requires you to upload your résumé to the corporate site, do it. Read the listing carefully to make sure you apply in exactly the format they ask for with exactly the materials they ask for. If the listing asks for a cover letter, write oneand not a generic one, one thats tailored to the position and company. If the listing asks candidates to include work samples or references, include those. This may sound basic, but many candidates just fire off résumés to hundreds of open positions. Not following basic instructions is an easy way to knock yourself out of the running.Give it a little time, then find a real personEven if the company needs to fill the role urgently, hiring takes time. Wait at least a week after applying to send out your first outreach. Do the leg work to find who is likely the hiring manageror at least someone who works in the department. Do not blast ten people at the company with a to whom it may concern message. The same advice for getting people to respond to any email applies here, too. You have a much better chance of getting a response if you can find a common connection and have that person recommend you. Be clear and conciseIf you cant find a connection, and you’re sending a cold email, be as clear and concise as possible. Make your subject line the title of the role you are applying for. Let the hiring manager know that you have applied according to the listing instructions and then in one or two sentences explain why you are excited about the role and how you are a good fit. If you have non-traditional experience, you can briefly explain your transferable skills so they will hopefully take a closer look at your application.If you do land an interview, you can end up with another bout of waiting after the interview. Your first step after an interview is to send a thank you note, which can help solidify a good impression and follow up on things you talked about in the interview. After that, the same rules apply as far as giving it at least a week before following up again and keeping your message short and sweet. Best of luck!Want some more advice on following up on a job? Here you go: How do I get people to respond to my emails? A recruiter shares the best way to follow up on a job application This is how to write a follow-up email thats not annoying 12 effective strategies for messaging recruiters on LinkedIn that will get noticed Can I ask a hiring manager to reconsider if I dont get the job?
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Earlier this week, a doctor friend told me about a frustrating new obstacle hes facing at work. In normal times, hes relied on websites operated by the U.S. federal government for practical information on everything from vaccine side effects to advice for families traveling to exotic areas. But the Trump administrations move to strip sites of material relating to gender ideology and other topics the new president and his allies find objectionable has resulted in many pages disappearing from the web. My friend has been making do by consulting versions of the pages stored at the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. But thats hardly a long-term solution. For one thing, those cached copies may be out of date. For another, its not a given that the Internet Archive will always be available when we need it. A New York Times article by Ethan Singer details the scale of the purge. More than 8,000 pages have been wiped away on subjects ranging from the Department of Health and Human Services Head Start program to avoidance of IRS penalties to telltale signs of dementia. Just the deletions relating to census dataone of the federal governments most vital resourceshave affected 3,000 pages. As pages have continued to vanish, others have returned, and the only explanation has come in the form of vague sitewide banners such as CDCs website is being modified to comply with President Trumps Executive Orders. As with other elements of the administrations rush to reshape how the federal government worksor doesnt workthe chaos may be the point. All of this is alarming even before you consider what a government online presence rewritten to Donald Trumps specifications might look like. Reportedly, it involves excising not just references to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also a bevy of other terms, including apparently controversial concepts such as belonging, empathy, and fairness. For more than a quarter century, the web has been a primary interface between citizens and their government. It may be more critical than its physical counterpartor at least I cant remember the last time I had to visit a federal office in person. By taking its language policing more seriously than the duty to provide information to the public, the new administration is failing at one of its most basic responsibilities. That raises a new specter that hadnt been on my list of things to worry about: tactical removal of pages from government sites as a tool for impeding knowledge. For example, I hate to think about a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccination website full of information created under the imprimatur of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But simply eliminating the current sites information and replacing it with . . . nothingness might do nearly as much damage as spreading RFK Jr.s cherished misinformation on the subject. It could be done with a few clicksa much simpler task than shutting down entire government departments, which is also part of Trumps plan for the nation. Im not saying that an even more sprawling, permanent site-scrubbing is definitely going to happen. As with many things about current events, Trumps own comments on the edits (“I don’t know. That doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.”) dont make clear hes paying attention, and leave him infinite wriggle room if he is. All we can do is keep paying attention, maybe with a newfound appreciation for a government benefit that has been quietly essential and easy to take for granteduntil now. Yes, you can have too much storage Recently, I bought a 16 TB hard drive. It cost about $270, whichunadjusted for inflationis a little over half what I paid for a drive I remember buying in the 1990s. That one had 500 MB of space, or 1/32,000th the capacity of the drive I just got. 1990s me, who was thrilled to add an entire half-gigabyte (!!!) of space to my PC would have been ecstatic to know that storage would continue to get ever vaster and cheaper. Oddly enough, though, my new 16 TB drive, which I added to a server that sits on my home network, has not brought me unalloyed pleasure. Instead, maxing out the space I already had made me question whether I should concentrate on deleting files rather than making room for more. Not that digital hoarding isnt tempting. Unlike its physical counterpart, its unlikely to result in the new stuff overwhelming the old: I do a fairly respectable job of organizing it all into folders, part of a broader storage strategy that also involves several cloud services. Im grateful to have enough room for a precious archive of family photos and letters, as well as ancient Word documents I still reference (for articles such as this one) and email that dates to 1994. I even ditched almost all the printed copies of magazines Ive written forhundreds of issuesand replaced them with PDFs. Still, like Scrooge McDuck filling his money bin with 3 cubic acres of cash and then burrowing through it like a gopher, I may have gone overboard. I use a wonderful piece of software called Channels to record streaming TV and over-the-air stations directly to my home network. These videos are mine, all minea comfort in an era when Netflix has only five movies made before 1980and tough to part with. Yet they represent the single most voracious disk-space gobbler in my life. And even if I had infinite time on my hands, I wouldnt use it to binge all the TV and movies Ive preserved. Another thing that haunts me: An unknown but significant percentage of my disk space is devoted to files that are duplicates, triplicates, or beyond. How I ended up with so many redundant ones, Im not sure. But they multiply like Tribbles, and eliminating all the redundant ones might feel like getting a new hard disk for free. After mulling all this over, doing some housecleaning, and finding I was still low on available space, I took the easy route by purchasing that new drive. Itll surely get me well into 2027, and maybe way beyond. By the time its full, even more mammoth disks should be available for even less money. It would be nice, however, to think Ill be more disciplined by thena little less Uncle Scrooge, a little more Marie Kondo. If you have any tips on digital self-restraint, Im dying to hear them. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if youre readin it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. Im also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. More top tech stories from Fast Company OpenAI reveals new AI tool that can do online research for youDeep Research can gather information from across the web and summarize it in easy-to-read reports. Read More Will a return to OG Facebook appeal to Gen Z?Mark Zuckerberg certainly seems to think so. Read More Google teams up with Samsung to take on Dolby AtmosThe two companies are betting on the power of branding to turn their new immersive audio format into a success story. Read More 3 quick ways to free up iPhone storage spaceSave space, save time, save yourself from the Storage Almost Full pop-up. Read More I tried a mindfulness browser to make work less stressful. Maybe you should, tooOpen Air from the Norwegian company Opera is billed as the first-ever mindful browser. Its intended to combat the chaotic nature of the web. Read More This scrappy search upstart is getting thousands of people to give up GoogleAs Google results grow cluttered and AI runs rampant on the web, Kagi is winning over disillusioned searchers with an engine that puts them first. Read More
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