Nostalgia has been one of the dominant themes of 2025, from AI-generated scenes of the good ol days to the resurgence of analog hobbies.
Retro, a friends-only photo journal, recently launched a new feature which taps into this mindset, turning your camera roll into a personal time machine.
The Rewind feature, launched this week, resurfaces camera roll memories from this time last year. These are private to you unless you choose to share with others.
People are taking more photos than ever but theyre actually doing less with them. Its almost as if those photos go into the ether, Nathan Sharp, cofounder and CEO of Retro, tells Fast Company.
We built Retro to change that. Our mission is to bring friends closer and help you appreciate the important moments in life. The Rewind feature does that by surfacing forgotten photos and making it easy to share memories with the people who matter most, Sharp adds.
On the app, Rewind can be launched from the end of the row of shared photos, or from the middle tab in the bottom navigation bar on the app. Users have the option to share or send the photos to a friend, or hide those theyd rather not see. Theres also a dice icon, which takes users to a random memory when tapped.
The idea of dusting off old photo albums is nothing new. Facebooks On This Day feature performs a similar function, while Apple Photos has been known to make emotional slideshows of ephemera in its camera roll or surprise you with long-forgotten photos of an ex.
Its not the solo nostalgia you get from apps built to store or manage photos. Its also not the same as social platforms that prioritize links and news over friends content, says Sharp. That’s the difference: we’re building for genuine connection with real friends, not algorithms, likes, or audience growth.
Sharp, who previously spent over six years at Meta, founded the photo-sharing startup with Ryan Olson, Retros CTO, in 2022. Now with roughly a million users, Retro just hit #1 in photo apps in 12 countries, is the #1 overall app in six countries (including Germany, Austria, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland) above Instagram and ChatGPT, and is climbing fast in the U.S. It was also selected as a finalist for Apples 2025 Cultural Impact Award.
The apps main function is sharing unfiltered photos of whats happening during your week with a private group of friends, or in shared albums. No public likes, algorithm-induced doomscrolling, or pressure to curate an aesthetic photo dump.
A wider pushback against performativity and, in turn, surveillance culture, has internet users turning to online spaces and apps that exist beyond influencer culture, social clout and e-commerce. Here, the internet is restored to its original purpose: facilitating moments of authentic connection both ad-free and slop-free.
Gen Z is actively looking for an alternative to algorithmic feeds dominated by influencers and brands, says Sharp. We see social moving toward digital sanctuaries where connection is easy and authentic, not performative. That’s what we’re building.
Thomas Kuhn was a philosopher whose groundbreaking 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is credited with bringing the term paradigm shift to pop culture. Kuhn described how scientific communities stick to established paradigms, even as evidence of their limitations mounted. Widely accepted paradigms for understanding and interpreting knowledge dont crumble under the weight of mere data. Instead, they tend to persist until a crisis emergeswhen anomalies become so disruptive that a shift to a new paradigm is unavoidable.
Zoning was established in the early 20th century as a way to protect homeowners from unwanted industrial developments nearby. It was pitched as a way to separate heavy industry from residential areas, which made practical sense at a time when factories polluted neighborhoods. Early industrial cities were notorious for their noise, filth, sickness, and all-around misery.
The wealthy had options, so theyd put some distance between themselves and factory life. You can imagine that the elite would want to guarantee never having to deal with the industrial riffraff. Zoning would give such guarantees. You can also imagine that social workers and other empaths would want to guarantee the poor and middle class had the same separation from the dirty parts of a city as the elites had. Zoning would give such guarantees.
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But zoning wasnt used merely as a tool to separate heavy industry from residential zones. Local power brokers segregated all the land usesseparating single-family homes from apartments, office buildings from retail, residential from retail, and so on. The regulatory framework became so normalized in America that its hard for people to imagine life without it: Without zoning, my neighbor might build a strip club and a paper mill.
Unintended consequences
Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all of their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the communitys willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary, at considerable cost.
As Kuhn wouldve predicted, the normal science of zoning has produced a number of anomalies that increasingly contradict zonings purported benefits.
Housing Expense and Shortage: By restricting a variety of housing sizes and types, zoning codes limit the supply of housing, driving up prices and making places unaffordable for many residents.
Environmental Degradation: Zoning encourages urban sprawl by pushing residential development outward into zones that are only practically reachable by car. Zoning codes create low-density, car-centric development, at great expense to our natural environment.
Social Segregation: Zoning is a devilish segregation tool. Throughout pre-zoning history, cities had opportunities for people from all walks of life, social standing, and economic standing.
Economic Stagnation and Opportunity Costs: By prohibiting a mixture of land uses in a neighborhood, zoning limits economic activity, making it difficult for small businesses to thrive in residential neighborhoods or for residents to access amenities without a car.
Car Dependency: Neighborhood pharmacies are outlawed, so you drive to CVS just to get a birthday card. Neighborhood restaurants are outlawed, so you drive your kids to Chick-fil-A. Neighborhood salons are outlawed, so you drive to get your nails done.
A resilient paradigm
Changing a paradigm isnt just about accepting new facts, its about challenging an entire worldview, and thats something humans are generally reluctant to do. And in spite of all its harms, the zoning paradigm remains resilient among the experts because:
Planning departments are organized around zoning administration.
Professional credentialing still lionizes zoning codes.
University programs train students to use zoning for the greater good.
Thousands of attorneys specialize in zoning law.
Lobbying pressure remains intense from industries that benefit from strict land-use policies.
There are powerful incentives to preserve the system, even among professionals who privately acknowledge its failures. Kuhn observed that paradigms persist not because they work well, but because entire careers, departments, and professional identities are built upon them. Challenging zoning means threatening not just an idea, but the livelihoods and expertise of countless people.
Much like a fundamentalist belief system, zoning has developed a language of justification that makes it difficult to challenge. Clever defenses like preserving neighborhood character or protecting property values are invoked to defend restrictive zoning policies, even when these policies have been proven to harm the vast majority of people. Zoning defenders use language not to inform, but to deflect and manipulate.
A tipping point
Kuhn would say a paradigm shift requires a moment of crisis, a point at which the old framework can no longer explain or accommodate the reality of a situation. I think were getting there with zoning, because the accumulating anomalies are becoming too severe to ignore.
Scientific revolutions reshaped how we understand the world. A zoning revolution has the potential to transform our small towns, big cities, and sprawling suburbs in positive ways we have yet to fully imagine. We have 100 years of evidence that zoning has brought more harm than good.
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The flap of a butterflys wings in South America can famously lead to a tornado in the Caribbean. The so-called butterfly effector sensitive dependence on initial conditions, as it is more technically knownis of profound relevance for organizations seeking to deploy AI solutions. As systems become more and more interconnected by AI capabilities that sit across and reach into an increasing number of critical functions, the risk of cascade failureslocalized glitches that ripple outward into organization-wide disruptionsgrows substantially.
It is natural to focus AI risk management efforts on individual systems where distinct risks are easy to identify. A senior executive might ask how much the company stands to lose if the predictive model makes inaccurate predictions. How exposed could we be if the chatbot gives out information it shouldnt? What will happen if the new automated system runs into an edge case it cant handle? These are all important questions. But focusing on these kinds of issues exclusively can provide a false sense of safety. The most dangerous AI failures are not the ones that remain confined to one particular area. They are the ones that spread.
How Cascade Failures Work
While many AI systems currently operate as isolated nodes, it is only when these become joined up across organizations that artificial intelligence will fully deliver on its promise. Networks of AI agents that communicate across departments; automated ordering systems that link customer service chatbots to logistics hubs, or even to the factory floor; executive decision-support models that draw information from every corner of the organizationthese are the kinds of AI implementations that will deliver transformative value. But they are also the kinds of systems that create the biggest risks.
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Consider how quickly problems can multiply: Corrupted data at a single collection point can poison the outputs of every analytical tool downstream. A security flaw in one model becomes a doorway into every system it touches. And when several AI applications compete for the same computing resources, a spike in demand can choke performance across the boardoften at the worst possible moment.
When AI is siloed, failures are contained. When AI is interconnected, failures can propagate in ways that are difficult to predict and even harder to stop.
The 2010 Flash Crash in the U.S. stock markets showed how algorithms can interact in unexpected ways, causing problems on a scale that can be hard to imagine. On the morning of May 6th, more than a trillion dollars was wiped off the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average in a matter of minutes as automated systems triggered a spiral of sell-offs. Despite several years of investigation, the exact cause of the crash is still unknown.
What the Flash Crash revealed is that when autonomous systems interact, their combined behavior can diverge dramatically from what any single system was programmed to do. None of the algorithms were designed to crash the market and none of them would have done so if they were operating independently. But the interactions between themeach responding to signals created by othersproduced an unexpected result at the systemic level that was divorced from the goals of any one part of that system.
This is the nature of cascade risk. The danger lies not in any individual AI system failing, but in the unpredictable ways that interconnected systems can amplify and spread failures across organizational boundaries.
The Hidden Connections
Several characteristics make AI systems particularly susceptible to cascading failures.
Shared data dependencies create hidden connections between seemingly independent systems. Two AI applications might appear to be completely separate, but if they rely on the same underlying data sources, a corruption or error in that data may affect both simultaneously. And a simultaneous failure may have consequences that are more severe than the sum of the individual failures. These kinds of dependencies and their possible outcomes often go unmapped until a failure forces the organization to take notice.
Shared infrastructure creates similar vulnerabilities. Multiple AI systems running on common cloud resources or the same on-site computational infrastructure can all be affected by a single point of failure. During high-demand periods, competition between systems for resources can degrade performance across the board in ways that are difficult to predict or diagnose.
Feedback loops between AI systems can amplify small errors into large disruptions. When one systems output feeds into another systems input, and the second systems output then influences the first system, the potential for runaway effects increases. What begins as a minor anomaly can be magnified through successive iterations until it produces significant failures.
Integration with critical operations also raises the stakes dramatically. When AI becomes embedded in systems that organizations depend onsupply chains, financial operations, customer service, manufacturingcascade failures dont just create technical problems. They disrupt the core functions that keep the business running.
The Organizational Blind Spot
Perhaps the greatest challenge in managing cascade risk is organizational rather than technical. The systems that interact to create cascade failures often span different departments, different teams, and different areas of expertise. No single person or group has visibility into all the connections and dependencies.
This means that cascade risk management requires cross-functional coordination that cuts against traditional organizational structures. It requires mapping dependencies that cross departmental boundaries. It requires testing failure scenarios that involve multiple systems simultaneously. And it requires governance structures that can make decisions about acceptable risk levels across the organization as a whole, not just within individual units.
Organizations that treat AI implementation as a series of independent projectseach managed by its own team, each evaluated on its own meritswill inevitably create the conditions for cascading failures. The connections between systems will emerge organically, without deliberate design or oversight. And when failures occur, they will propagate through pathways that no one fully understood.
The alternative is to treat the entire AI ecosystem as an interconnected whole from the beginning. This means thinking about how systems will interact before they are built. It means maintining visibility into dependencies as systems evolve. And it means accepting that the reliability of any individual system is less important than the resilience of the system of systems.
Four Ways to Protect Your Organization from AI Cascade Failures
1. Map your AI dependencies before they map themselves. Most organizations discover their system interdependencies only after a failure reveals them. Dont wait. Conduct a systematic audit of how your AI systems connectwhat data they share, what infrastructure they rely on, what outputs feed into other systems inputs. Create a visual map of these dependencies and update it as your AI ecosystem evolves. The goal isnt to eliminate connections (interconnection is often where value comes from) but to understand them well enough to anticipate how failures might propagate.
2. Design circuit breakers into your architecture. Financial markets use automatic trading halts to prevent cascading crashes. Your AI systems need equivalent mechanisms. Build monitoring systems that can detect unusual patternssudden spikes in error rates, unexpected resource consumption, anomalous outputsand automatically pause operations before small problems become large ones. These circuit breakers buy time for human operators to assess situations and intervene. The cost of brief pauses is far less than the cost of cascading failures.
3. Test failure scenarios across system boundaries. Traditional testing evaluates whether individual systems work correctly. Cascade risk requires testing how systems fail together. Run exercises that simulate failures in one system and trace the effects through connected systems. What happens to your customer service AI when your data pipeline delivers corrupted information? How does your inventory system respond when your demand forecasting model produces anomalous predictions? These cross-boundary tests reveal vulnerabilities that single-system testing will never find.
4. Establish cross-functional AI governance. Cascade risks emerge from the gaps between organizational silos. Managing them requires governance structures that span those silosa cross-functional team with visibility into AI implementations across departments and the authority to make decisions about system interactions, acceptable risk levels, and required safeguards. This team should own the dependency map, oversee cross-boundary testing, and ensure that new AI implementations are evaluated not just for their individual merits but for how they affect the broader ecosystem.
The butterflys wings are already flapping. The organizations that thrive will be those that see the tornado comingnot by monitoring any single system, but by understanding how all their systems connect.
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Inbox pinging. Deadlines stacking. Morale slipping. One choice could change everything. These 11 books unpack the decisionsand strategiesthat distinguish great leaders.
Learn something new every day with Book Bites, 15-minute audio summaries of the latest and greatest nonfiction. Get started by downloading the Next Big Idea app today!
Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others
By Adam Galinsky
Every leader leaves their mark on the hearts and minds of a workforce. This can go one of two ways: leaders can leave behind a legacy of inspiration, or infuriation. Based on thousands of perspectives collected from around the globe, Adam created a systemic formula for choosing and earning the lasting impact you want to have on others. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Adam Galinsky, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
Why Are We Here?: Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants
By Jennifer Moss
Leaders dont need to take a ton of time overhauling company culture to create workplaces where employees want to spend their time. Simple shifts and incremental changes can foster community, fuel purpose, boost productivity, and deliver meaning to every team member. Jobs that employees actually like are the ultimate capitalist business strategy. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Jennifer Moss, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team
By Paula Davis
To increase well-being, motivation, engagement, resilience, or the many words that describe thriving teams, we must understand that leadership behaviors drive employee experience. We need to advance the conversation beyond individual remedies for burnout and address root causes of stress and disengagement. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Paula Davis, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
No One Is Self-Made: Build Your Village to Flourish in Business and Life
By Lakeysha Hallmon
A legacy of wealth, health, and purpose only comes from building villages that flourish, and thats why nourishing community is critical for anyone ambitious. Our greatest work is achieved when it is pursued in support of collective power. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Lakeysha Hallmon, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
Youre the Boss: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need)
By Sabina Nawaz
No leader wants to become a clueless jerk after obtaining a new position of power. But the pressures that come with becoming a boss can make it difficult to maintain their humanity, humility, and grip on reality. With the right tools, everyone from managers to executives, can turn pressure into clarity, power into connection, and act with thoughtfulness and courage at work. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Sabina Nawaz, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
Masters of Uncertainty: The Navy SEAL Way to Turn Stress into Success for You and Your Team
By Rich Diviney
High performance under pressure isnt limited to Navy SEALs. Its not about being fearless or superhuman. Its about tapping into human capabilities that we all possesscapabilities that can be trained, honed, and applied in any environment. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Rich Diviney, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
Meaningful Work: How to Ignite Passion and Performance in Every Employee
By Wes Adams and Tamara Myles
The best burnout prevention, retention remedy, and workplace satisfaction guarantee comes down to meaning. Without feeling directly connected to the meaning behind a job, and without feeling seen for their contributions, people disengage and stagnate. Growth and innovation rely on leaders ability to build teams that know and feel their worth, individually and as a unit. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by coauthors Wes Adams and Tamara Myles, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
The Psychology of Leadership: Timeless Principles to Improve Your Management of Individuals and Teams . . . and Yourself!
By Sebastien Page
Peak performance is a dangerous, albeit rewarding, adventure. There are plenty of hurdles on the path to sustainable success that can damage well-being or hinder positive outcomes. The Psychology of Leadership identifies timeless pillars of strong, ethical, lasting leadership. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Sebastien Page, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
The Devil Emails at Midnight: What Good Leaders Can Learn From Bad Bosses
By Mita Mallick
The silver lining that comes from working for several bad bosses? You can learn what not to do as a leader. From every bad boss comes a valuable lesson about how to manage teams and contribute to a companys success. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Mita Mallick, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
Headamentals: How Leaders Can Crack Negative Self-Talk
By Suzy Burke, Ryan Berman, and Rhett Power
Leaders arent failing because they dont have a strategy or skill. They are stuck because of their internal battlestheir self-talknot because of the challenges happening with customers or in the market. Headamentals is about directing that inner voice so that it becomes a competitive advantage and helps you build great teams. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by co-authors Suzy Burke, Ryan Berman, and Rhett Power, in the Next Big Idea app or view on Amazon.
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
By Rutger Bregman
What if everything weve been told about having a successful career is wrong? Rutger Bregman thinks most of us are wasting our working lives and argues we should stop trying to get rich and start trying to solve the worlds problems instead. Listen to our Next Big Idea podcast episode interviewing author Rutger Bregman, or view on Amazon.
The Key Ideas in 15 Minutes
If you are going to get anywhere in life, you have to read a lot of books, Roald Dahl once famously said. The only trouble is, reading even one book from cover to cover takes hoursand you may not have many hours to spare.
But imagine for a moment: What if you could read a groundbreaking new book every day? Or even better, what if you could invite a world-renowned thinker into your earbuds, where they personally describe the 5 key takeaways from their work in just 15 minutes?
With the Next Big Idea app, weve turned this fantasy into a reality. We partnered with hundreds of acclaimed authors to create Book Bites, short audio summaries of the latest nonfiction that are prepared and read aloud by the authors themselves. Discover cutting-edge leadership skills, productivity hacks, the science of happiness and well-being, and much moreall in the time it takes to drive to work or walk the dog.
I love this app! The Book Bites are brilliant, perfect to have in airports, waiting rooms, anywhere I need to not doomscroll You guys are the best! Missy G.
Go Deeper with a Next Big Idea Club Membership
The Next Big Idea app is free for anyone to tryand if you love it, we invite you to become an official member of the Next Big Idea Club. Membership grants you unlimited access to Book Bites and unlocks early-release, ad-free episodes of our LinkedIn-partnered podcast. You also gain entry to our private online discussion group, where you can talk big ideas with fellow club members and join exclusive live Q&A sessions with featured authors.
For a more focused learning experience, we recommend a Hardcover or eBook Membership. Every few months, legendary authors and club curators Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink select two new nonfiction books as the must-reads of the season. We then send hardcover copies straight to your doorstep, or eBook versions to your favorite digital device. We also collaborate with the authors of selected books to produce original reading guides and premium e-courses, 50-minute master classes that take you step by step through their most life-changing ideas. And yes, its all available through the Next Big Idea App.
My biggest Thank You is for the quality of book selections so far. I look on my shelf and see these great titles, and I find myself taking down one or two each month to reread an underlined passage. Full marks to all involved! Tim K.
Learn Faster, from the Worlds Leading Thinkers
Whether you prefer to read, listen, or watch, the Next Big Idea is here to help you work smarter and live better. Wake up with an always-fresh Idea of the Day, the perfect shot of inspiration to go with your morning coffee. Then dive into one of our Challenges, hand-picked collections of Book Bites that form crash courses in subjects like communication, motivation, and career acceleration. Later, watch the playback of an interview with U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, or philosopher John Kaag. And be sure to check the Events tab in the app, so that you can join an upcoming live Q&A and personally chat with the next featured thought leader.
If youre hoping to grow as a person or as a professional, we hope youll join us and tens of thousands of others who enjoy the Next Big Idea. Get started by downloading the app today!
Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Dead cartoon owls, brain-rot cookie content, fake rebrands, and library thirst traps. Welcome to the era of DGAF branding.
In this episode of FC Explains, Grace Snelling breaks down why major brands and public institutions are ditching polished ads for chaotic content and seeing massive results.
From Nutter Butters unsettling TikToks and California Pizza Kitchens fake midlife crisis to Duolingo killing its iconic owl and libraries going viral with memes, this episode explores how being weird online has become a serious marketing strategy.
We look at the numbers behind these stunts, the cultural forces driving them, and why leaning into chaos can sometimes cut through the noise better than a Super Bowl ad.
The days of Republicans hard stances against marijuana have seemingly gone up in smoke.
On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order to reschedule marijuana as a Schedule III substancean effective downgrade from Schedule I, the most dangerous classification, which includes substances like heroin. The change could allow for marijuana to be used in more medical research, and the order also authorized the creation of a pilot program to reimburse Medicare patients for CBD products.
The reclassification does not legalize marijuana, and seemingly completes or finalizes a recommendation made by the Biden administration in 2022 that the drug be rescheduled.
The Attorney General shall take all necessary steps to complete the rulemaking process related to rescheduling marijuana to Schedule III of the CSA in the most expeditious manner in accordance with Federal law, the executive order reads.
Notably, Trumps reclassification order was signed days after Trump ramped up his administrations stance on another controlled substance, fentanyl. On Monday, he signed another executive order that called fentanyl closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic, and designated it as a weapon of mass destruction.
Cannabis stocks actually ended Thursday in the red, despite the news. Tilray Brands, for example, was down 4.3% for the day, and Canopy Growth was down almost 12%.
Members of the cannabis industry are cautiously optimistic about what the executive order actually means, however.
The Administrations order calling to remove the cannabis plant from its Schedule I classification validates the experiences of tens of millions of Americans, as well as those of tens of thousands of physicians, who have long recognized that cannabis possesses legitimate medical utility, said Paul Armentano, the Deputy Director at NORML, an organization that advocates for cannabis reform laws, in a statement. This directive certainly marks a long overdue change in direction.
Others are much more skeptical of what it means for the legal market, but do think the changes mark a boon for medical cannabis. Cannabis is still federally illegal, said Ryan Hunter, the chief revenue officer at Spherex, which creates vapes and cannabis-infused gummies, in comments shared with Fast Company. The real win here is for medical cannabis, he added. At Schedule III, its much more practical for mainstream physicians to prescribe cannabis products.
Still others are simply happy to see reclassification come to fruition. We welcome the decision to reschedule cannabis. This long-overdue step aligns regulation with science and public opinion, providing a necessary foundation for patient relief and compliant business growth, said Socrates Rosenfeld, the CEO and co-founder of Jane Technologies, which creates software for cannabis businesses, in a statement shared with Fast Company.
We are hopeful this marks the beginning of real momentum toward the broader, systemic reform needed for a truly just and accessible industry.
Dont beat yourself up if you do some serious damage on a cheese plate during holiday festivities this year: You just may do your future self a favor.
A new study has found that eating nearly 2 ounces or more of high-fat cheese each day has been associated with a 16% lower risk of dementia, according to the study published this week in Neurology. Lest you think this is some sort of propaganda by Big Cheese, the study followed nearly 28,000 adults in Malmö, Sweden for roughly 25 years.
The studys findings indicate that Swedes who ate more cheese with a fat content exceeding 20%which includes many varieties of cheddar, gouda, and blue cheese, among othershad a lower risk of all-cause dementia. The researchers didnt find a similar link with other high-fat dairy products and noted that further confirmation of these findings in diverse populations is warranted.
While the amount of cheese in questionequivalent to less than a handful of diced cubesmay not seem significant, scientists are keen to identify even something small that could raise or lower the risk of dementia. More than 6 million Americans are currently living with dementia, and 42% of Americans over the age of 55 could eventually develop such declines in mental abilities, according to figures from the National Institutes of Health.
QUESTIONING THE FINDINGS
It might be tempting to give yourself permission to go wild on full-fat cheese for your brain, though your waistline could pay the price. The studys authors said their findings require caution in interpretation, something that other experts were quick to do.
The researchers only captured the dietary habits of participants at one point in 1991 and didnt follow up with the majority of them over the course of the next 25 years. This sort of approach raises questions about the robustness of the studys conclusions, Dr. Tian-Shin Yeh, a physician and nutritional epidemiologist at Taipei Medical University in Taiwan, wrote in an editorial published alongside the study.
Whats more, the benefits of eating high-fat cheeses were most evident when participants swapped cheese for other foods, like processed or high-fat red meat, which might just reveal the difference of better options, according to Yeh. It is not so much that high-fat cheese is inherently neuroprotective, but rather that it is a less harmful choice than red and processed meats, she wrote.
BENEFITS OF CHEESE
The findings may not apply to somewhere like the U.S., where much of our cheese is processed, according to Emily Sonestedt, who led the new study and is a senior lecturer and associate professor of nutrition at Lund University in Sweden, Still, its possible that there are benefits from certain healthful components of cheese, like vitamins K or B12, or minerals like calcium, she told The New York Times.
As with any of these sorts of studies, its also important for people to remember that correlation doesnt imply causationsomething Sonestedt reinforced. This does not prove that cheese prevents dementia, but it does challenge the idea that all high-fat dairy is bad for the brain, Sonestedt said in an email to CNN.
HIGH-FAT FOODS IN FOCUS
Some people dont need purported brain benefits to convince them to eat foods high in saturated fats. These foods have been embraced in the keto diet, among others, in recent years, despite long-standing nutrition guidelines that recommend people limit their consumption of foods high in saturated fats because of the evidence that they raise LDL cholesterol levels, along with the risk of heart attack or stroke.
But those guidelines are likely to see a shake-up in 2026 as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. secretary for health and human services, has said that the next edition of the federal dietary guidelines will instead stress the need to eat saturated fats, dairy, fresh meat, and vegetables.
And even if the results of this study are appealing to cheese lovers, the quirks of how the research was conducted mean that some experts arent exactly buying the results.
NOT BUYING IT
In fact, because the link between cheese consumption and dementia risk was at the margin of statistical significance, it could be due to just chance, notes Dr. Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Im not running out to buy a block of cheese, Willett said in an email to CNN.
Bitcoin investors are bracing for Witching Friday tomorrow, December 18, when billions of options are due to expiremaking for what could be a highly volatile, roller-coaster ride at the end of the week for the markets.
Some $23 billion in contracts are set to expire just on Deribit, the largest Bitcoin exchange, according to Bloomberg.
Here’s what to know.
What is ‘Witching Friday’?
“Witching Friday,” also known as “triple witching” or “the triple witching hour,” refers to the last hour of the stock market trading session on the third Friday of March, June, September, and December, when three kinds of securities expire simultaneously, often leading to increased volatility.
Those securities are: stock index futures, stock index options, and stock options, (plus single-stock futures), according to Decrypt.
These “triple witching” days often generate more trading activity, thus more volatility, or larger swings, since the expiration of the contracts trigger buying or selling of the underlying security, per Investopedia.
“These witching days simply indicate higher volume and the ability to inflict maximum pain if certain thresholds are hit,” Michael Terpin, author of Bitcoin Supercycle and CEO of Transform Ventures, told Fast Company. “It’s by no means a guarantee of falling prices, but with the steady drumbeat of fear in the market, including the Japan rate hike decision, the odds of a lower low grow higher.”
Where does Bitcoin stand now?
In the lead-up to Friday’s event, Bitcoin continues to fall, as it has in recent weeks, triggered in part by the Federal Reserves recent interest rate cut by 25 basis points on December 10, and compounded by uncertainty over the long-term, macroeconomic environment ahead, the Bank of Japan’s potential rate hike, and fear of growing U.S. inflation in 2026.
On Thursday afternoon, at the time of this writing, the digital cryptocurrency (BTC) was trading down nearly 1%, dipping well below $90,000, to $85,184.
Its part of an overall decline in the crypto market that also saw closely watched digital asset XRP fall nearly 2%, hovering around $1.82 per token on Thursday, while Ethereum (ETH) held steady and was trading at $2,802 at the time of this writing.
President Donald Trump’s plans to add a ballroom to the White House would be bad for the design of the White House complex and grounds, according to a National Park Service (NPS) report. The report said the annex would “disrupt the historical continuity of the White House grounds and alter the architectural integrity of the easts side of the property.” Still, Trump is clear for now to move ahead with his plans.
The NPS report is just the latest speed bump facing Trump’s plan to build a new annex since he had the White House East Wing demolished in October without seeking outside approval. It’s a saga of inflated expectations and a ballooning budget that’s blowing past calls for preservation and restraint.
The NPS’s environmental assessment was released because the agency manages the White House, its grounds, and surrounding areas including Lafayette Square and sites in and around the Ellipse. The National Environmental Policy Act and Department of Interior regulations also compel the agency to.
Their assessment found no significant environmental impact from building a ballroom and noted successive administrations have wanted a permanent, secure event space on White House grounds. But it also highlighted aesthetic and cultural concerns about Trump’s plans. That might not matter.
Here’s where Trump’s plans to build a new building on the White House grounds stands:
Trump replaces the original architect
Trump confirmed on Dec. 4 to the Washington Post that he replaced the ballroom’s original architect McCrery Architects with a new firm called Shalom Baranes Associates.
The switch up came following reports that Trump and McCrery Architects CEO Jim McCrery II disagreed over the planned size of the new building. McCrery reportedly believed Trump’s plans for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom would dwarf the 55,000-square-foot building of the main White House mansion.
Trump has inflated the estimated cost and size of the planned ballroom over time, and initially said it wouldn’t interfere with the East Wing.
In July the White House announced a building that would seat 650 people for an estimated $200 million. That grew to plans for complex with space to seat around 1,000 people that Trump said Wednesday would cost $400 million. The White House says private donors are paying for construction costs.
Demolition of the East Wing of the White House, during construction on the new ballroom extension of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. [Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg/Getty Images]
Preservationists file lawsuit to pause construction
The National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a lawsuit on Dec. 12 accusing Trump of breaking the law by moving ahead with the East Wing teardown and plans for a new ballroom without public input or any sort of independent review.
The National Trust said that Trump should have submitted his plans to Congress and the National Capital Planning Commission and the group asked the court to put a pause on construction.
No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoevernot President Trump, not President Biden, and not anyone else, the lawsuit reads. And no president is legally allowed to construct a ballroom on public property without giving the public the opportunity to weigh in.
In a court filing on Dec. 15, the Trump administration claimed construction must continue for unnamed national security reasons. Attorneys for the administration said the National Capital Planning Commission and the congressional Commission of Fine Arts will review Trump’s plans “without this Courts involvement.”
A judge on Dec. 16 ruled that construction could move ahead after it rejected the National Trust’s request to temporarily halt the project.
NPS weighs in
An NPS environmental assessment published Dec. 15 estimated Trump’s plans for a 90,000-square-foot building with seating for more than 1,000 people would be completed by Trump’s final summer in office, in 2028. It also said the building would adversely effect the cultural landscape of the White House grounds.
The report notes the imbalance of a ballroom that’s bigger than the rest of the White House and in adding a two-story East Colonnade. “The new building’s larger footprint and height will dominate the eastern portion of the site, creating a visual imbalance with the more modestly scaled West Wing and Executive Mansion,” it says. “These changes will adversely alter the design, setting, and feeling of the White House and the grounds over the long-term.”
The assessment also notes that construction introduce temporary risks to the rest of the White House due to things like noise and vibration.
Regardless of the report’s findings, it concludes that the planned building would meet the needs of providing a permanent, secure event space on the White House grounds, and that it doesn’t rise to the level of needing an environmental impact statement to be prepared.
The rapid growth of data centers during the AI boom has been a dominating narrative of 2025and, in many instances, not a popular one.
Across the country, communities have pushed back against data centers planned for their cities and states. Some have even turned to online petition sites to raise awareness and voice collective opposition to such projects. One site, the popular platform Change.org, says it has seen a significant spike in data center-related petitions in recent months.
Change.org saw at least 113 petitions that mentioned data centers in 2025, totaling around 50,000 signatures, the platform shared with Fast Company.
It’s not clear if that figure includes multiple petitions about the same data center project. These petitions also simply mention data centersboth for or against. But a cursory search shows that the vast majority were opposed to them.
Volume increased as the year progressed
For Change.org, the topic is new: In all of 2024, there was just one petition regarding a data center, in April.
No other petitions mentioned data centers until a year later, in April 2025, according to Change.org. Then, they began to tick up: Fewer than five petitions appeared each month until August, and then 12 were started in September, 37 in October, and 24 in November.
And December looks to be even higher. As of Monday, users have created 28 data center-related petitions this month.
One petition, titled Stop Data Center at Former Landover Mall Site, was created in June, concerning a data center in Landover, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. It has more than 20,000 signatures, with many supporters calling out how data centers use immense energy and water, which often means higher utility costs for residents.
“Say ‘NO’ to the construction of ‘Project Tango’ AI data center in Palm Beach County, begins another petition, which has more than 7,000 signatures and was started earlier in December. That petition was just one form of opposition against Project Tango, a proposed 200-acre AI data center complex in Florida.
At zoning hearings, residents have raised concerns about the projects water consumption, environmental impacts, utility rate hikes, and potential noise.
Another petition, titled Stop Data Centers in Hobart, Indiana Protect Our Community, has nearly 2,500 signatures. There have been multiple proposals to build data centers in Hobart throughout 2025; recently, at the end of November, the city reached a deal with Amazon to develop a data center there.
That Change.org petition was created by a group called No Data Centers Hobart Indiana, which has a presence on Facebook and comprises more than 4,000 members. Angelita Soriano, a leader of that group, has recently filed a lawsuit, along with three other Hobart homeowners looking to overturn the citys actions to green-light the Amazon project.
This lawsuit is our effort to keep our government accountable and to defend Hobart families, homes, water, and our environment, Soriano said in a statement. Residents shouldnt be ignored or deprived of their rights just to fast-track a massive industrial data center development in the heart of our community, right next to our schools, hospitals, and homes.
“We need to slow it down”
In some cases, community opposition is having a real impact.
Between late March and June, 20 data center projects, representing about $98 billion in investments, were blocked or delayed in the United States, according to a November study from Data Center Watch, a project from the AI security and intelligence firm 10a Labs.
These were instances in which local opposition was specifically reported to have played some role.
To Miquel Vila, an analyst at the Data Center Watch project, community backlash to data centers has become an expected part of the development process. Before, local opposition was more of an anecdotal possibility, he says. Now, its becoming a core feature of development . . . in the same way issues like land, energy, and water are taken into account.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont recently said that he will push for a moratorium on AI data center construction to “give democracy a chance to catch up” to the surge that has largely been unregulated.
“There is a whole lot about AI and robotics that needs to be discussed, needs to be analyzed, Sanders said in a video posted to X. But one thing is for sure. This process is moving very, very quickly, and we need to slow it down. We need all of our people involved in determining the future of AI, and not just a handful of multibillionaires.
