How Outschool won the pandemic

My kids were 6 and 9 in the spring of 2020. They showed up for Zoom classes after the public schools closed and went remote in mid-March, but they seemed only moderately engaged. The classes, somehow, felt both too short (for me) and too long (for them). And yet, the promise of summer was not something to anticipate with excitement. Playgrounds were chained, public pools were closed, summer camps shut down, and families weren’t socializing, even outside. I knew we’d need something

Headshot photographers say they’ve never been busier. Blame the Great Resignation

Photographer Jennifer Buhl, who got her start as a member of the paparazzi in Los Angeles, has been taking headshots since 2015, when she founded Happy Hour Headshots in Denver. She and her team of photographers, now based in over half a dozen cities, meet clients at coffee shops, conduct their shoots right outside, and then return to the coffee shop to review the images. “Your first impression is typically online these days,” Buhl says. “People want a good first impression,

Rockley Photonics is developing a wearable to track blood sugar

A deal between two little-known companies—at least, to the public—could bring to the market something that health experts have for years considered the holy grail of wellness: glucose-monitoring capabilities on wearable tech. Rockley Photonics, the California-based maker of the biosensors used in Apple devices, announced Thursday a partnership with Medtronic, a medical-device manufacturer headquartered in Minnesota, to scale a health wearable that can detect a bevy of health metric

Why popular podcast ‘The Read’ is growing on its own damn time

Kid Fury may be 14 years’ deep in the content creator game—he started out giving his sardonic, unfiltered opinions on his former YouTube series Furious Thoughts and now does a version of the same thing as one half of the popular comedy podcast The Read—but make no mistake: He’s not pressed about jumping on trends. “The TikTok generation is killing me, girl,” Kid Fury says. “These backgrounds and this audio and all these things—I don’

Watch a 1981 video that shows Steve Jobs becoming Steve Jobs

“The interesting thing about television is that it always seems to shoot for the lowest common denominator.” That’s a wonderfully acidic takedown—just the kind of thing you might expect Steve Jobs to say. What makes it particularly noteworthy is that he’s saying it to ABC News reporter Bob Brown in February 1981, in footage never meant for public consumption. The 25-year-old Jobs was snarking about Brown’s profession as the two got ready for an interview

Want to get into your dream college? Check out this TikTok

Editor’s Note: This article is part of Fast Company Spark, a new initiative for middle and high school readers. The first TikTok on Gohar Khan’s (@goharsguide) account looks a lot like other videos users scroll past on their For You Pages: a 20-something, talking into their front-facing camera with YouTube-like jump cuts. The post–which garnered 21,700 views, 1,939 likes, and 27 comments–was the first of two videos breaking down how Khan got into the Massachusetts Ins

‘Pokémon Go’ creator Niantic acquires innovative AR company 8th Wall

The augmented reality game developer Niantic announced on Thursday that it has agreed to buy a company, well known within augmented reality circles, called 8th Wall, which has developed a way for users to view AR experiences on mobile devices without the need to open an app. Niantic says the 8th Wall technology will become one of the tools it offers to developers in its Lightship development platform. Developers use Lightship to create games and other experiences on top of the same platform Nian

The Magic Leap 2 AR headset is a solid step forward

Magic Leap, the storied consumer AR company that’s found a second chance servicing the enterprise market, has taken the wraps off its new Magic Leap 2 headset. I found it to be a meaningful improvement over its predecessor, the Magic Leap 1. The new headset is Magic Leap’s first to be designed for the enterprise market. The Magic Leap 1 (formerly called Magic Leap One Creator Edition) was originally designed for the consumer market, well before the company pivoted to the enterprise

This is what the future of living with COVID in schools looks like

This past October, in Baltimore, high school students had to show proof that they were fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to weekly testing, in order to play sports. While Baltimore has made that call, the story is different in other neighboring districts, like Cecil County and Allegany County, where public schools are not asking for vaccination status or doing surveillance testing of any kind. Like many states across the U.S. there are no longer unified COVID protocols. Decisions on va

Will dancers in the digital age ever be able to protect their moves?

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When you think about things having a copyright, what probably comes to mind are movies, music, books—really anything that has a well-documented history of piracy or plagiarism. Because that’s what copyrights are for: to promote the creation of original work by giving those creators the ability to make money from their efforts withou


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