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Its time to reckon with the reality that nonstop doomscrolling has delivered us: a hard-to-ignore erosion of our cognitive skills. Weve lost the ability to focus on words for long stretches of time . . . er, read books. Years of turning everything worth consuming into content thats been optimized for attention has turned our brains into mush, shoved our mental health into free fall, and reduced our ability to pay attention to anything for more than five seconds at a time. (In fact, I clicked away from completing this sentence to check Facebook Marketplace for credenzas on sale.) While were still in the early days of what the long-term impact of artificial intelligence on our brains might look like, a growing contingent of folks are fighting back against the hijacking of our attention spans in favor of good old-fashioned reading. These are teenagers forgoing social media for social reality, working moms carving out time in their busy schedules to devour books, and people on #BookTok swapping tips to get into reading. In the spirit of celebrating the dying art of reading actual, honest-to-god chapter booksand not just furiously scrolling through endless Instagram slideshows and calling it a dayand before AI-written novels completely take over (this reality might already be upon us), I consulted a number of my colleagues at Fast Company to compile a list of the best books theyve read this year in the hopes of inspiring you, too. You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue From Amy Farley, Executive Editor You Dreamed of Empires is a weird, wild, hypnotic retelling about the fateful meeting between emperor Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés in Tenochtitlan. The action takes place across a single day in 1519, but what a day: packed with family drama, palace intrigue, world history-altering misunderstandings, and lots and lots of psychedelics. But the highlight, for me, were Enrigue’s descriptions of the city of Tenochtitlan itself: its layout and architecture, the smells and food, the everyday routines of its many residents. Halfway through reading the novel, I started planning a trip to Mexico City. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid From Isa Luzarraga, Social Media Producer Nearly everyone knows the name Sally Ride. In 1983, she became the first American woman in space, setting a crucial precedent for female astronaut candidates at NASA. Still, the National Geographic documentary Sally, released earlier this year, verified what many had only surmised during the astronaut’s life, that Ride was queer. There are clear parallels between Ride’s story and the protagonist of Taylor Jenkins Reids most recent novel. Atmosphere follows astronomer Joan Goodwin as she becomes a member of the second NASA astronaut class to accept female candidates. The narrative alternates between two timelines: Joans years of training at NASA and her role as the on-ground liaison between the astronauts and command center for a mission gone wrong. Throughout her training, Joan forms a secret relationship with fellow astronaut Vanessa. Like the rest of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s body of work, this historical fiction novel is rigorously researched and highlights the author’s signature, evocative prose. It is an ode, not only to Ride and the first female astronauts, but also to the queer community as a whole. Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams From Bryan Lufkin, Senior Editor I started reading this after getting super into the This Jungan Life podcast. The three brilliant, warm and funny psychoanalysts who host it wrote this book about how to analyze dreams. (They analyze a listener’s dream at the end of every episode.) Every one of us is an iceberg, and this book gives amazing insight into the huge stuff going on with you underneath the surface! Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire From Vanessa Singh, Executive Producer This is such an insightful look into Britain’s world empire takeover, but specifically about the Caribbean-British experience and growing up in London as a Black person during the ’80s and ’90s. Written by Akala (a British rapper and activist), the book is history that is easy to digest and semi-autobiographical. I love it because it is not written by an upper-class historian who has no emotional investment in the topics discussed. It is written by a highly intelligent, working-class, mixed-race man from London. The book looks at how racism and class shape life in modern Britain, and he shows how the legacy of empire still influences policing, education, and opportunities today. Very no-nonsense. The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante From Rebecca Barker, Event Producer I cant believe it took me until 2025 to read Elena Ferrantes esteemed Neapolitan Novels, but, as they say, better late than never. The Story of a New Name is the second book of the series and follows the events of the New York Times best book of the 21st century, My Brilliant Friend, chronicling the teenage and early adulthood years of friends Lenu and Lila, who have grown up together in poverty in 1960s Naples. I consider the first books role as building a rich foundation for the characters and setting that drive the plot of the secondin my humble opinion, The Story of a New Name is where things get good. As the girls navigate Lilas new marriage (which brings her wealth and stability but lacks love and respect), a growing schism between their social classes and the opportunities available to them, political turmoil, and a shared romantic interest, they are forced to reckon with the strength of their friendship and what it can survive. Ferrante paints one of the most intricate and beautiful portrayals of female friendship in literatureI cant recommend it enough. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro From Maia McCann, Executive Digital Director The story is told by Klara, an artificial friend/AI robot for a very ill child. Klara and her human, Josie, live in a dystopian future where some children are genetically lifted or enhanced and others are left behind. The reader follows an AI as it tries to understand complex human emotions like grief and love. Potentially a little disturbing, but you wind up really rooting for the robot. This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone From Anne Latini, Art Director I was absolutely rapt reading this beautiful science-fiction fantasy while on vacation this summer. Written as a series of letters that rove forward and backward through time, the book reminds you that the tension between technology and nature has been with humanity since the beginning and will continue long after we’re gone. [Image: Scribner] Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan From Jill Bernstein, Editorial Director I finally read Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach and couldn’t put it down. I loved the characters and was totally absorbed by the action and historical detail. It’s about bravery, love, and the mysterious pull of the sea. Foster by Claire Keegan From Jay Woodruff, Senior Editor Knowing my wife and I were heading to Dublin for our daughter’s wedding in October, a friend told me, “Read everything you can get your hands on by Claire Keegan.” If this exquisite Irish novella doesn’t help restore your faith in humanity, it will definitely restore your faith in first-rate, quiet, vivid storytelling. Manys the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing, one kindly character tells the narrator. Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams From Sandra Riano, Photo Editor This was an eye-opening memoir about Facebook’s leap from Silicon Valley tech enterprise into global politics. Both illuminating and terrifying, it poses the question, How far will Meta go under the guise of free speech? Carless People is a cautionary tale about Big Tech’s quest for more and what we all stand to lose.
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E-Commerce
Vince Gilligan spent a decade ruminating about his next TV series before he had a clear vision of what it was going to be. But through all that time, the writer/director, who is best known for creating Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, knew one thing for sure: it had to be entirely different from what hed made before. In fact, it had to be completely unlike any other show, period. As far as a prime directive, it is always: A) how can we make this show look different than any other show on TV? That’s the most important one, Gilligan told me during a recent call. And B, how can we make the show look and sound and feel different from the other shows we’ve already done? Gilligan made good on his promise to himself. The resulting show, Pluribus, really is a wholly unique take on the sci-fi genre. Massive in scope, yet intimate at its core, its a deep study of a character who is going through an impossibly hard situation that affects the entire planet. Before Gilligan told anyone about his idea for Pluribus, he wanted to get his idea onto paper. I wait as long as I can, and I have as much figured out, at least with the first episode, as possible, he says. And in this case, I had the luxury of having a completely written first script, I think actually, possibly a completely written first two scripts. Vince Gilligan (center) [Image: Apple] That’s what he showed to Rhea Seehorn, who played Kim Wexler opposite Bob Odenkirks Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul. Initially, Gilligan thought about a male protagonist for Pluribus but, after working with Seehorn, he decided to write the series for her. I talked to Rhea first because I wanted to make sure Rhea would star in the show, he says. It was only after Seehorn agreed to play Carol Sturkathe grumpy bestseller romance author who becomes the herothat he got the production ball rolling. I started talking to our department heads, our wonderful crew people that I’ve been working with for years, he tells me. And that makes it a lot easier. [Photo: courtesy of Apple] Gilligantogether with series writer/director Gordon Smith and writer Alison Tatlocksays the shows premise is meant to be the opposite of every “alien invasion film” youve seen up to this point. Having first worked as a writer on The X-Files, which embodied and invented many of the universal sci-fi tropes, Gilligan knew that Pluribus needed to serve the premise with no cracks in the story, which resulted in flipping, subverting, and ultimately destroying every single sci-fi trope wedged into our collective mind since The Twilight Zone. For Gilligan, Pluribus is the culmination of decades of work in TV. Filmed in Albuquerque (where most of the crew lives), Gilligan says the show is a direct result of working with the same reliable team hes been with since Breaking Bad. Pluribus composer Dave Porter, who worked with Gilligan on his previous two series, told me that Gilligans directive cut across departments on Pluribus: We wanted to plant our flag in the ground to say this is a very, very different experience. [Photo: Apple] A Post-it sketch becomes a panopticon To understand the production design, it helps to know what the series is about (my recommendation: run to watch the first episode if you havent yet). The series begins with an eerie but subtle alien encounter. The U.S. Army lab uses RNA code radioed from an exoplanet 600 light-years away to create a self-replicating alien retrovirus. The virus infects one person transforming her into the first node of a hive mind called The Others. Within a few weeks, all of humanity turns from a selfish, violent-prone, greedy group of individuals into a pacifist, vegetarian, and very happy collective. Immune to this alien virus, only 13 humans survive this process, called The Joining. Carol being one of them, is the only person in the U.S. that keeps her free will. The Others only have one mission: To turn civilization and the entire planet into a hippie bliss paradise, all while trying to find a way to save those last 13 humans from what they think is the angst of freewill, the pain of our daily choices, our imperfect nature. Its not that they want to assimilate the 13 like the Borg or cordyceps; The Others believe they are doing the right thing when they liberate you from your sad pointless life. [Photo: Apple] Pluribus follows Carol as she grapples with this new reality, and as she tries to find a way to revert the world back to how it was. Carol has a mission, but her mission is far from a sci-fi trope of saving the world. There are no tropes in Gilligans vision. In fact, the series team had to strip away the spectacle usually associated with global cataclysms. Smith and Tatlock describe this as a pursuit of scrupulous emotional truth. In most sci-fi, when the world changes, the characters sprint toward the explosions. In Pluribus, as it happened in Better Call Saul, they stop. Your wife just died. Really? The world just became a hive mind, how fast do you move to get past that? Smith asks. This refusal to rush required a specific kind of geography and to ground the infinite scope of a global hive mind, led the production team to build a very small, very specific cage for Rhea Seehorns character. Her home is the center of her world. That began with a crude drawing. My favorite picture is a Post-it drawn by Vince, production designer Denise Pizzini tells me. He has a little cul-de-sac and he has these houses and he has the one house at the top that says C, which is Carol’s house. [Image: courtesy of Denise Pizzini] That doodle evolved into a big civil engineering project. Rather than fighting the logistical nightmare of filming in a real neighborhood for multiple seasons, Pizzini and her team leased a plot of empty land outside Albuquerque and built Carols cul-de-sac from the dirt up, complete with plans and full permits and licenses. They poured concrete slabs, laid curbs, and constructed seven custom homes around a circle of asphalt, which became itself a way to communicate later in the series (warning: some minor generic spoilers ahead). [Photo: Apple] A controlled gaze The physical location of the house is real, with fully working systems and finished downstairs interiors. The team also built the upstairs bedroom, office, and hallways on a controlled soundstage. They duplicated the ground floor almost exactly, allowing the camera to seamlessly look from the street into Carol’s living room, or from her kitchen window out to the hive, without a cut, effectively building the house twice. [Image: courtesy of Denise Pizzini] The architectural mirroring was so precise that the illusion eventually fooled its own creator. I watched the episode last night, and there’s a shot of her in the kitchen seeing the exterior, and I thought, I couldn’t tell, Pizzini confesses. Is that on location or is that on the set? Which is great because I don’t remember. [Photo: Apple] For Gilligan, this wasn’t just about production convenience; it was about the gaze. Before a single wall was framed, the team pounded stakes into the empty field so Gilligan could test the camera angles. Vince was very specific about what we wanted Carol’s view to be, Pizzini says. We needed from her front door and that front window, we needed to be able to see everybody else’s front door. Plus the city lights below. They even graded each house separately to ensure the street curved precisely to vanish into a fictional neighborhood. [Photo: Apple] The result is a set that functions like a panopticon, designed to ensure Carol is never truly alone. Pizzini designed Carols house as the bastion of her humanity, filled with the evidence of her previous life with Helen, who fails to survive the merging into the hive mind. The prodction team filled the space with invisible details. Helen was [Carols] organizer . . . she manages all her tours, Pizzini says. They placed Helen’s laptop on the dining room table, an orchid she bought, her sleeping mask, and her books by the bed. Just little things like that give you an indication that they had a life together, she says. [Photo: Apple] Pizzini also designed the interior knowing that this home was a character in itself. Inside, she used arches and open sightlines because so much of the action was going to happen there and they needed to move the camera around. She’s in a little bit of a maze because she’s kind of stuck in her house . . . or she chooses to be, Pizzini tells me. To show the passage of time, Pizzini added an atrium. I decided to do this so there could be actual sunlight coming in. We could see the plants kind of growing or dying because Helen’s not there taking care of things. [Image: courtesy of Denise Pizzini] Gilligan was over the moon with the Pluribus set, he tells me, because it opened so many creative opportunities for them. They were able to design so many scenes in advance. For episode one, when Carol’s coming home after this horrible night she’s been through, I wanted certain angles past her onto the house next door where the little kids [part of The Others] come out, Gilligan says. [Image: courtesy of Denise Pizzini] Carols home is a brutal contrast to the spaces controlled by the hive mind. As The Others consolidate, they abandon individual homes for communal living to save electricity and water. The world becomes austere. Traffic doesnt exist. Lawns grow wild. Commercial spaces and offices are closed. Buffalos roam golf courses. Hospitals have the bare minimum personnel (remember, since the minds merged, everyone has everyone elses knowledge, so every person regardless of age, gender, or previous occupation, is now the best doctor, the best pilot, the best physicist, and the best anything you can imagine). Supermarkets are also empty. The production took over a real Sprouts supermarket after a year negotiating with the actual chain and weeks physically emptying the shelves. Emptying out a supermarket . . . boy, that’s a nightmare, Gilligan says. Sometimes you think something is going to be very complicated but turns out to be so easy. This was the contrary: They thought it was simple but it was a logistical hell, he points out. “Every step of the process, I was like, this is a nightmare,” Smith adds. Seeing the empty supermarketand how it gets filled in a matter of hourscaptures a society that has optimized itself into terrifying efficiency and silence. [Photo: Apple] Subtracting humanity, adding logic So many other things required the same level of subtraction, which became the mandateand nightmarefor the visual effects department. Rather than adding hordes of zombies, spaceships, and lasers, VFX Supervisor Ara Khanikian and his crew spent his time erasing life from each frame. We’re subtracting a lot instead of adding, he says. To achieve the eerie stillness of a society reduced to its most efficient expression, Khanikians team meticulously rotoscoped out people, cars, and movement from wide shots of Albuquerque. This forced the team to realize more consequences about the shows premise, answering philosophical questions about a post-human world. If there’s no concept of humans and traffic . . . are they all green or do they continue blinking? Or have we turned off the electricity to that because we don’t need it anymore? Khanikian asks. [Photo: Apple] Another question was how The Others move. At one point of the series, there is a massiveexodus from the city. The team initially created film plates to animate cars moving in perfect synchronization, assuming a networked intelligence would drive with mathematical precision. But it looked fake. Theoretically, if everybody’s in sync together, there shouldn’t be any traffic jams, Khanikian explains. We have to add a little bit of that human imperfection . . . Some people accelerate just a little bit more. Some brake a little bit later. [Photo: Apple] Gilligans commitment to physical reality extended everywhere. At one point, one of the unaffected humans arrives at the airport in Bilbao, Spain, on Air Force One. Initially, Pizzini tells me, they started out building just the planes door, the surrounding frame, some stairs and green screen. But we knew Vince was going to want it big, she says. [Image: courtesy of Denise Pizzini] Gilligan saw it and he asked to expand it. He was like, no, we need to do a little more, a little more, she recalls amused. So we built a big chunk of it and we found the stairs that could go up to it. And then we . . . built little pieces of the interior, so you could go inside Air Force One and shoot out and see them coming up the stairs. But it didnt end there. They ended up buying the frontal 747 landing gear. And, since they filmed scenes on the runways of Bilbaos airport, they had to match the cement and asphalt patterns of the airport. That was a big, big set, Pizzini recalls. [Photo: Apple] Clothing becomes function Like the sets, the costumes show us a civilization that has decided to stop waste, both physical and mental. Costume designer Jennifer Bryan pitched a radical concept to Gilligan: In a hive mind, clothing no longer serves to signal status, culture, or religion. It is reduced to its leanest, meanest function. I pitched to him that the clothes shouldn’t signify any of that, Bryan says.Basically just leaving clothing as a shell to cover your body, like a snail has a shell. [Image: courtesy of Jennifer Bryan] She stripped the costumes of jewelry and accessories. She only kept belts in cases where pants would literally fall down. The clothes also tell the story without having to enunciate it with dialog, one of the core strengths of Pluribus. [Photo: Apple] In the early days of the assimilation, because the hive mind shares its knowledge, anyone can do anything, regardless of their attire. This leads to the visual dissonance of a TGI Fridays waitress piloting the Airbus that flies Carol to Bilbao. The woman wears the uniform she was caught in when the virus struck, but she possesses the skill set of a veteran pilot. When you see the uniform or the clothing not matching the occupation, you know something’s off, Bryan says. Even the man cleaning Carols house in a spandex cyclist suit is a misplacement of role (fun fact: that character is played by the actual mayor of Albuquerque). Those were the early days of the hive mind unification. Later in the series, as society continues to optimize, people lose their individual uniform and begin to wear plainer, neutral clothinga shell aesthetic will only deepen as the series progresses. As the hive mind realizes that wool requires disturbing a sheep and silk requires killing a worm, the very materials of clothing will change to reflect a society that refuses to do harm. [Photo: Apple] In the second season you’ll start to see the effects of that, Bryan teases. She explains what we all know about modern society. Somewhere along the line, something had to die for it, whether it’s a mulberry worm to make silk or you cut on a tree to make lumber. This also opens a stark contrast among the few remaining humans. While waiting to find the science to assimilate them, The Others are obsessed with pleasing the 13 free humans by doing anything these ‘freewill’ humans ask for. While Carol largely rejects the hive’s offers of help and comfort, other survivors indulge. [Photo: Apple] Mr. Diabate, one of the 13 free humans, treats the hive like a genie lamp. To dress him, Bryan looked to the Sapeurs of Brazzaville, Congoblue-collar workers who dress in ostentatious, high-end suits. She dressed Diabate in a tuxedo made of African fabric, a visual explosion of ego in a world that has otherwise been flattened to grey. She looked at the characters and asked herself: If you could get every single thing that you wanted, what would you go for? Since Gilligan insisted on actors who were genuinely from the regions they portrayedlike Mauritius, Colombia, China, or Peru, Bryan collaborated with them on the specific mix of Western and traditional clothing unique to their cultures. [Photo: Apple] The sound of the swarm The final layer of this happy apocalypse is the soundscape. Like everyone else on the production team, composer Dave Porter tells me that he got the same prime directive from Gilligan. After spending 20 years defining the sonic palette of the Breaking Bad, El Camino, and Better Call Saul universe, he realized he needed to strip it down to the studs for Pluribus. The series premise also defined his musical choice from the start. Instead of sci-fi synths or traditional orchestral arrangements, Porter chose the most innate human instrument: the voice. But like the traffic in Khanikians visual effects, he found that a controlled cacophony of a slightly off-sync choir was the perfect way to convey both the nature of The Others while introducing a disheartening, uneasy feeling. Something must be wrong. Porter tells me that he was influenced by American minimalist composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich to structure the score, using syncopation and phase-shifting to mirror the hives behaviormoving from soothing unison to chaotic dissonance. At times, this chaos gets into an ever-increasing crescendo that reminds me of the work of Hungarian composer György Ligeti for the Monolith in Stanley Kubricks 2001: Space Odyssey. Nobody’s singing any words, but there’s a lot of syncopation and punctuation about what they’re doing, he says. This technique was used to perfection in a chilling scene in which Carol is trying to extract information from Zosia, the character who serves as her primary contact and chaperone with The Others. In the scene, Carol drugs Zosia with Sodium Pentothal, as she asks Zosia to give her information about what might reverse whats happened to the world. When the hive mind realizes whats going on, a mob appears out of nowhere to surround them. The on-set extras’ voices were blended with a choir to create an overwhelming wall of sound to stop her. Tatlock told me the story logic behind that moment. The Others were not talking in perfect synchronicity because of network latency but as a tactic to create a buzz to stop her. They can pretty quietly and calmly drown her out, Tatlock explains. It is a sonic tactic designed to foil Carols questions without aggression. The hive doesn’t need to scream; it just needs to vibrate at a frequency to drown you in sound. [Photo: Apple] The ants Porter tells me that the music was designed to explore the tension between the pain of individuality and the comfort of surrender. He also avoided scoring The Others with purely menacing music. Instead, he used vocals that could shift from comforting to terrifying. As Vince has been saying a lot in interviews about the show, theyre not all bad, right?” he says. For Gilligan, it was important that the score didnt paint anything in black and whitethere’s always multiple ways to view things. [Photo: Apple] Which brings us back to the very nature of the show. Unlike most series, it doesnt give us answers; instead it gives us all the questions we should be asking. At every plot turn, every reveal, and every character decision, you feel that any kind of dichotomy is a false one. Like Porter says, there are no binary answers in the real world. Especially when it comes to free will, our nature, and the nature of the societies we build. And thats perhaps Pluribus greatest success, beyond its storytelling and cinematic virtues. Vince and his family have built a glass ant farm, removed the chaos of individuality, and forced us to watch what remains. The result is a world that feels nice, quiet, seductive, yet profoundly inhuman, which makes you appreciate your faulty humanity even more.
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E-Commerce
In Denmark, a grocery store chain used a black star. In Canada, it was a maple leaf. President Donald Trump’s trade war inspired new country-of-origin “Made In” labels this year as shoppers outside the U.S. looked to avoid buying American-made goods and shop local instead. In the U.S., though, the “Made in USA” brand is losing its domestic appeal. Country-of-origin labeling is designed to be a stamp of authenticity and quality. Countries police their own rules to ensure products labeled “made” or “assembled” in their country really were made or assembled there and that they meet national standards. When the Copenhagen-based think tank 21st Century introduced its concept for a possible future “Made in Europe” label, its managing director said it was designed to establish trust, as in, if something was made in Europe, consumers could trust no arsenic would be in it. In the U.S. this year, though, “Made in USA” isn’t so much about trust for a growing number of consumers as it is about higher prices. And they don’t want to pay them. A Conference Board survey released in August found about half of U.S. consumers say knowing a product was made in the U.S. made them more likely to buy it again, an 18% decline since 2022. The report’s author blamed the drop on consumers appearing to associate “Made in USA” with being expensive because of high domestic production costs. U.S. consumers today face an overall average effective tariff rate of 16.8%, according to Yale’s Budget Lab. That’s the highest rate since 1935, and it comes amid wider economic discontent. Half of U.S. adults say they are spending more time than usual looking for the the lowest price for items, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. That’s up from 31% in 2021 and helps explain the rise of yuppie, designified generic brands. Value matters to consumers today. Trump’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) plans to make “Made in USA” one of its top enforcement priorities in 2026, but for half of all shoppers looking for the best deal, they won’t be swayed one way or the other, no matter where a product was produced. Americans say they are generally attentive to where their products are made, an October Gallup poll found, with 76% aware of the country products were made in before purchasing them sometimes, most of the time, or always. Following years of inflation, though, the most important label for many U.S. shoppers isn’t “Made in USA.” It’s the price tag.
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E-Commerce
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