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Bank of America Institute analyzed credit card transactions through August 2026 and found overall hobby spending up 7.9% year over year, growing faster than transaction volume. Older millennials spend nearly $220 per person monthly on hobbies, more than Gen X and Baby Boomers (both around $200), while Gen Z spends about $100 and younger millennials just over $140.
Starbucks confirmed last week it is closing about 250 stores across North America, roughly 1% of its 18,000 locations in the region. As of Monday, the affected locations are showing as closed on Google and in the company's own store locator tool.
A wave of wellness influencers, podcasters and tech startups are promoting nicotine—often via pouches or products combined with caffeine and nootropics—as a natural compound that boosts focus and guards against cognitive decline. A pulmonary physician-scientist who studies nicotine addiction says these claims stretch limited findings from cognition studies far beyond what human research actually supports.
Google is teaming up with Hiring Our Heroes, Student Veterans of America and the Home Builders Institute to help 25,000 transitioning veterans and military family members enter skilled trades. The program includes pre-apprenticeship training, career coaching and job placement for roles like electricians, pipefitters and project managers. The amount Google is investing has not been disclosed.
Starbucks Coffee Company announced it will close about 250 stores across North America this week. The company said the closures target locations where financial performance or the in-store customer experience fell short of expectations.
Apple announced that Tap to Pay on iPhone is now live in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Peru, backed by six payment platforms including Mercado Pago, SumUp, Symbiotic, Geopagos, Azul, and Visa Acceptance Solutions. The feature lets merchants accept contactless debit and credit card payments directly on a compatible iPhone without extra hardware. This brings the total footprint of Tap to Pay on iPhone to 59 countries and regions since its 2022 US debut.
A study by literature scholar and archivist Jolie Braun, drawing on three memoirs, examines women who sold books door-to-door across the rural US in the late 1800s, before public libraries were widespread. These agents took orders from sample copies and later delivered Bibles, manuals, biographies and fiction, including works by Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain, some of which sold hundreds of thousands of copies via subscription publishing. One bookseller, Annie Nelles Dumond, wrote in 1868 about entering the trade after being abandoned by two husbands, and about wearing a mourning bonnet to conceal her past while working across Illinois and Indiana.
Paramount reached a settlement with a coalition of 12 state attorneys general, led by California's Rob Bonta, who had sued to block its $11 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. The company agreed to establish an editorial independence board overseeing CBS News and CNN, commit to 30 theatrical releases annually, and protect CBS News Broadcast writers from layoffs for five years while paying $17.5 million to the Writers Guild's health fund. The merger is now expected to close in early October, giving Paramount chief David Ellison control over franchises including DC and Harry Potter.
Fast Company's Impact Council published a reflection tied to the America 250 celebration, examining how the country's founding spirit of risk-taking has driven technological breakthroughs from aviation to computing. The piece argues that sustaining this innovative edge for another quarter millennium requires deliberate policy and industry choices rather than assuming continuity.
The United States government has, for the first time, publicly acknowledged that it has deployed weapons systems in space. Officials confirmed the existence of these orbital assets after years of speculation and denial, marking a shift in how openly Washington discusses its military space capabilities.
In a Fast Company discussion featuring Chief CEO Alison Moore, Moms First's Reshma Saujani, and Mama Glow's Latham Thomas, panelists described how leadership roles and parenting demands have both intensified, pushing accomplished working mothers toward burnout. The conversation, moderated by Shalene Gupta, questioned whether corporate structures were ever built to let women hold both senior positions and caregiving responsibilities without sacrifice.
ESET researchers report that the China-linked hacking group FamousSparrow has spent over a year running espionage campaigns against government agencies across Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. The group's newly identified tool, a modular C++ backdoor called SparroWocky, replaces its older SparrowDoor malware and includes advanced anti-detection and remote-control capabilities.