This week, Tyson Foods announced that it is restructuring its beef business, closing or selling three of its facilities as it deals with “one of the most historic cattle shortages the country has ever experienced.”

It flies. It heals all wounds. It can be of the essence, and it can be money. We thrill in the best of it, lament the worst. We’re warned not to waste it, since we can’t turn it back — even as we try to make up for when it’s lost.

And probably more than anything when it comes to time, most of us try to manage it — in our everyday lives and on a global scale, from the biology of our circadian rhythms to what constitutes a work day. Clocks. Calendars. Pendulums. Hourglasses. Sundials. Time zones.

For something that’s been a pretty universal impulse to mark the shift of light and dark, the movement of the stars and the rhythms of the tides, the cycles of summer heat and winter cold, one might assume there’s been a universal way of measuring time. That assumption would be wrong.

Take the shifting of the clock twice a year in most of the United States, once forward and then back again, a system that “moves” the time to let people enjoy daylight hours later into the evening.

While people love the light, a lot of them loathe having to make the change. So much so that the House of Representatives last month overwhelmingly passed legislation calling for the shift to become permanent year-round. Its prospects for passage in the Senate aren’t high, and when the country tried it in the 1970s it was wildly unpopular and short-lived. But it continues to be brought up, an indication that the way we keep the clock counts.

The methods different peoples and communities have used to track their lives haven’t existed in a vacuum. They’ve been impacted by culture, by religion, by economics and technology, by the governing principles both within nations and among them.

Turns out, like pretty much anything where people are involved, there’s a politics to time.

Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty on Friday to federal stalking charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, admitting matter-of-factly that he trailed the executive to an investor conference in 2024 and gunned him down on a New York City street.

Some five months after the Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s tariffs, one question remains: How—and when—will the government return the refunds?

D23, Disney’s official fan club, has been around for 17 years, and it’s stronger than ever.

As traumatic injuries and deaths surge among children involved in crashes on e-bikes and other electrified vehicles, one California prosecutor is cracking down by pursuing criminal charges against some of the young riders’ parents.

It is just one way officials across the country are trying to tackle the growing issue, while families navigate a patchwork of local laws and guidance on what kind of souped-up cycles and scooters are safe or even legal for their kids to ride.

New York City’s mayor recently sent cease-and-desist notices to dozens of online retailers for selling products marketed as “e-bikes” that aren’t street legal after a 17-year-old died in a crash on an illicit vehicle. In neighboring New Jersey, new regulations require e-bike riders to be at least 15 and obtain a license and vehicle registration.

But do the measures hit the mark? Cycling advocates worry regulations might be too broad — demonizing low-powered e-bikes instead of speedier motos — while some parents question whether localized, piecemeal strategies are enough.

Monica Stafford, a San Francisco-area mother whose teen daughter fractured her skull falling off an e-bike, said officials are “missing the mark” if they’re seeking to lay the blame solely on parents. The San Rafael resident said a unified, national set of rules is needed.

“We’re in a total Wild West of laws,” Stafford said. “Being for common sense laws doesn’t mean that you’re against e-bikes, just like you can be for cars but not think that it’s safe to put keys in the hands of a 10-year-old.”

In recent weeks, Russia’s Wildberries has been in the news. Though little known in the West, Wildberries is the country’s largest e-commerce platform, with many likening it to Amazon.

The surveillance state has crept up around us, but in at least one instance, its integration into society has prompted a backlash. Flock Safety has managed to make automated license plate readers (ALPRs), cameras that record the license plate and other characteristics of every vehicle that passes them, a hot-button issue across the United States.

Ask a teen what they want to be when they grow up, and there’s a fair chance being an influencer is on their list.

Digital media and the people who star in it have been cultural mainstays for teens’ entire lives, so creating social media, video or podcast content seems a natural, albeit nontraditional, career path. And now they can earn a college degree in that very field.

Arizona State University recently launched a new bachelor’s degree in content creation, offered through its Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The curriculum overlaps with that of ASU’s mass communication and media studies degree, with the major departure being a slate of specialized electives on podcasting, studio production and on-camera presence.

ASU’s announcement was met with swift criticism from many sides — from people who feel content creation is not a legitimate profession to those who question the value of a college degree in launching a social media career.

But the ASU program is not the first of its kind.

And the university, which declined an interview request about the new program, is not the first to offer content creation courses.

Universities, eager to compete for a shrinking student population, are rolling out new majors intended to prepare students for today’s careers. Whether they lead to jobs can be up for debate.

The word “agentic” is being pushed by every AI company right now, and—for the most part—it’s unclear what “agents” can do. I’ve seen ads for things like “sales agents” (automating outreach) or “coding agents” (deploying software bug fixes). To a solopreneur, that type of agentic work seems irrelevant.

Jack in the Box is continuing to close stores this year as it reports another quarter of declining same-store sales. 

Shares in Reddit, Inc. (NYSE: RDDT) are surging in premarket trading this morning after S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that the social media platform will join its prestigious S&P 500 Index.

In the current landscape of corporate reputation, the old playbooks are failing. After two decades of falling trust in institutions, government, and companies, AI has accelerated this trend and traditional measurement metrics like “trust” aren’t measuring the full impact.

In a world of increasing uncertainty, workplace loyalty has shifted dramatically as employees adopt strategies to protect their careers from sudden disruption. Developing backup plans and parallel skill sets has become a must-have rather than a nice-to-have. Below, experts examine why professionals are building safety nets and what it means for the future of employment relationships.

Some of the first credible evidence of artificial intelligence’s impact on the labor market has just been published and, at first glance, it appears to tell a concerning story for women.

Even before it became legal at the state level in 2018, the U.S. had the largest financial loss to sports betting in the world. Since then, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on athletics.

Hello again and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.

You might think that the information-security professionals who show up in August at the annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas would know to bring their A game to that gathering. But every year, the administrators of the show’s Network Operations Center (NOC) see a different, messier reality play out over the conference Wi-Fi. 

Business leaders and investors face a deepening paradox: Companies are pouring more money into artificial intelligence than ever, but they’re not seeing the gains in productivity that they expect.

New satellite images reveal nets covering Russian submarines to protect them against Ukrainian drones. It’s a confirmation that no Moscow asset is free from Kiev’s attacks anymore, not even its prized nuclear ballistic missile submarine fleet. It is also yet another embarrassing moment for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military forces and one more example of how, in the face of Ukrainian technological genius, the Russians need to resort to designing desperate measures as their last line of defense.