Journal

Tapping the talents of Dominic Cooper, Joseph Gilgun, Ruth Negga, Sam Catlin, and Garth Ennis was a good start. So was keeping it funny.

People have been trying to make Preacher work on television or the movies since the first issues were published in 1995. The list of people who attempted to bring the profane, disturbing, thrilling, and hilarious series to screens reads like a timeline of filmmakers who were hot between the mid-90s and the late 00s. It includes folks like Kevin Smith, Tank Girl director Rachel Talalay, Daredevil director Mark Steven Johnson, The Whole Ten Yards director Howard Deutch, and Sam Mendes. But by 2009, the project was dead and buried—after HBO declared it “too dark and too violent and too controversial,” according to Johnson.

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PRX’s Jake Shapiro is launching a new company that aims to bridge the gap between podcasts and old-school radio.

Don’t let all the buzz fool you: Podcasting is still very much in its infancy. As of early last year, only 17% of Americans listened to podcasts regularly, according to Pew. Jake Shapiro and Kerri Hoffman, both veterans of Public Radio Exchange (PRX) and podcasting pioneers, are hoping to change that with a unique partnership.

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The video-texting app wasn’t developed for deaf people, but thanks to Glide community manager Sarah Snow, it now caters to them.

The Problem: For someone whose first language is ASL, texting feels foreign. Deaf people tend to prefer services like Skype or FaceTime, but they require people to be tuned in at the same time.

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In the gaggle of beauty vloggers and the fans who love them, Beautycon CEO Moj Mahdara sees much more than just pretty faces.

When digital entrepreneur Moj Mahdara became CEO of Beautycon in 2013, the company was a small startup that hosted conferences for online beauty influencers and their fans. Under Mahdara’s watch, Beautycon has bloomed into a full-grown multimedia company with a subscription service, an online hub and global conferences that attract crowds of up to 12,000 people. She spoke with Fast Company about taking young, beauty creators to London and Dubai, and how the web is way ahead of traditional media when it comes to diversity.

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Maverick Collective members commit private funds toward investing in women around the world.

“It was overwhelming, actually,” recalls Kate Roberts, CEO of the philanthropic initiative the Maverick Collective, of the emotions that flooded in when she gave birth to her daughter in 2011. As a senior vice president at the not-for-profit Population Services International (PSI), she knew the challenges women face all over the world, including gender-based violence and lack of access to contraception. And she knew that despite all the rhetoric about investing in women, just two cents of every development dollar actually goes toward programs for girls.

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Cubicles were (and still are) widely hated. But as their walls came down, a host of distractions and interruptions flooded in.

I still remember my first cubicle fondly, even though it was many years ago. It was my place in the big world of my company. My name plate was tacked up outside, and I decorated the inside with a few photos and inspirational quotes. On my desk, I laid out any files I needed, kept my stash of essentials like Kleenex close at hand, and stowed some chocolate in a drawer.

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The host of a late-night comedy show about sports is using her platform to take on some not-very-funny issues.

“Garbage time” is what happens in a blowout game when teams send in their second-string players. It’s also the name of former YouTube vlogger Katie Nolan‘s weekly sports and pop-culture comedy show, which premiered in early 2015 and airs on cable channel Fox Sports 1. Though Garbage Time With Katie Nolan is shot in a closet-size New York studio, it’s gained outsize attention thanks to the outspoken Nolan, who’s the only woman to solo-host a national sports opinion show.

Fast Company: Garbage Time breaks the format of traditional sports programming. Instead of doing commentary or news, you’re asking NFL star Odell Beckham Jr. to do dramatic readings from Mad Men or ranking the staleness of hockey-stadium pretzels. How did you develop that approach?

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