Journal

After your sweatshirt is named “the greatest hoodie ever made,” expectations are pretty high when you decide to make a T-shirt.

For an entire year, Michelle Allen, American Giant‘s director of design and merchandising, has been sampling hundreds of fabrics in the hope of creating the perfect T-shirt. She’s been rifling through materials, draping cloth, and designing prototypes—which she then tested on dozens of subjects. “She told me that she was staking her entire career on this T-shirt,” says Bayard Winthrop, the company’s founder and CEO.

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Because brands want—and need—to know.

Alex Wolf is the 23-year-old founder and CEO of Bossbabe Inc., a members-only online community for millennial women looking to build their own business online. At 19, Wolf dropped out of Berkeley and parlayed her Internet obsession into a job as a self-taught social media coach. Soon, she was making $100 an hour helping others build their online brands. In late 2014, she launched the Bossbabe Academy to share her entrepreneurial learnings with other women looking to eschew the debt and time commitment of a four-year degree in favor of financial independence. Now she has a growing membership willing to shell out $10 a month to join her “girl gang.”

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Do you work with one of these types of bullies? Here’s how to cope.

Workplace bullying is alive and well. According to the Workplace Bullying Institute, 27% of respondents to a 2014 survey had current or previous experience with workplace bullying, while 72% were aware of workplace bullying incidents.

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The history-making Broadway icon recast history to reflect contemporary America, and found innovative ways to put fans first.

If you ever find yourself in a position to sit down with Lin-Manuel Miranda, know this: You never really “sit down” with Lin-Manuel Miranda. He is always in motion, on a mission; standing still really isn’t his thing. When the 36-year-old composer and lyricist was dreaming up the songs for Hamilton, the Broadway phenomenon that he wrote every line of and currently stars in eight times a week, he would often walk for hours through the streets of New York City, willing the words to come. Even now, he insists that the calmest he ever feels is during the 2 hours and 45 minutes of the show, when he gets to bound around onstage as Alexander Hamilton, “yelling and rapping at the top of my lungs. It’s the most relaxing part of my day.” The physical exertion returns him, every night, to himself, offering an unlikely respite from the attention that’s swirled around him since Hamilton became a cultural and financial force. The only way that Miranda stays whole, now that everyone wants to engage with him—Hollywood, the White House, hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, the music industry, Broadway obsessives, big-money investors, American history buffs, prize committees, schoolteachers, the political establishment—is to keep moving.

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Netflix’s VP of original content talks about magical pitch meetings, Netflix’s push into YA shows, and monitoring Twitter on launch day.

As vice president for original content at Netflix, Cindy Holland oversees the streaming company’s buzz-generating original shows and documentaries, a job she’s had since 2011, when House of Cards went into production. (She’s been at Netflix, however, since 2002.) Since then, the volume of Netflix’s original programming has skyrocketed to more than one new show a week. That partly explains why its subscriber base continues to skyrocket too. Holland spoke to Fast Company about managing her workload and how she predicts whether a show will be a hit.

Fast Company: Can you explain your role at Netflix? What convinces you to greenlight a show?
Cindy Holland: I oversee both the creative and business aspects [of show-making], so both my team and I are deciding which show we invest in and getting the deals done for them, and then overseeing the creative.

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A study of satellite imagery confirms what Solomon Islanders have known all along: they are doomed.

Five Pacific islands have just disappeared, thanks to rising oceans. The islands are—or were—a part of the Solomon Islands, located around 1,000 miles off Australia, and were uninhabited by humans. However, the same rising sea levels have washed away huge chunks of other inhabited islands, forcing the residents to move and destroying an established village.

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When the Dalai Lama teams up with a top psychologist, who teams up a top data viz firm, you get the Atlas of Emotions.

The five circles slowly pulsing on my screen are meant to visualize the entire core of human emotion. Fear. Disgust. Anger. Sadness. Enjoyment.

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Pricing out the trolls will also price out the poor. There are better solutions

The idea of monetizing comment sections by asking readers to pay to contribute or promote their comments might sound like a good idea.

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