Table of contents for Fall 2025 in Fast Company

WHEN PEOPLE THINK “INNOVATION,” THEY TEND to think “startup.” There's no question that the most transformative ideas in business often emerge from young ventures: new entrepreneurs building new companies powered by new ideas. At Fast Company, we peer around a lot of corners, trying to identify the most compelling stories emerging from this undiscovered terrain. But I have a little secret to share. While I love the shock of the new as much as the next business journalist, there's a subset of innovation coverage that I tend to find more surprising and inspiring—great stories about legacy businesses that are innovating from within. This issue is full of fine examples of this, starting with our cover story on Starbucks and its CEO, Brian Niccol, by global design editor Mark Wilson (page…

DURING NEW YORK FASHION WEEK IN FEBRUARY, A wood-paneled boutique popped up in SoHo next to Louis Vuitton and Bottega Veneta. On the racks were tailored, wide-leg jeans and simple black Henley dresses that signaled understated elegance. But unlike those of neighboring boutiques, the clothes weren't from a storied European maison de couture. They were some of the newest collections from Scoop and Free Assembly, two brands led by Brandon Maxwell, creative director at the House of Walmart. The pop-up—which featured items priced between $8 and $75—was part of the Bentonville, Arkansas–based retailer's strategy to get its products in front of urban shoppers who might not be familiar with its growing array of fashion-forward budget brands. The SoHo stint was just one of the ways chief merchant Latriece Watkins—a 25-year…

DATA CENTERS HAVE BECOME THE STARTING BLOCKS in the global race for AI supremacy. Tech giants like Meta, Alphabet, and OpenAI have committed hundreds of billions of dollars collectively to building more of them. States are offering incentives for their development, and President Trump signed an executive order in July cutting regulations to speed up construction. For all the breakthroughs they promise, the environmental toll of these facilities is already staggering: According to the International Energy Agency, U.S. data centers used roughly 185 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024—more than all of Pakistan's 248 million people. To keep hot servers cool, a typical 100-megawatt hyper-scale data center consumes as much water per day as 6,500 homes. And, as with the factories and railroads that powered previous technological revolutions, the impact on…

Steve Chen, cofounder—with Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim—of YouTube: The three of us and most of the early YouTube hires, that original core team, all came from PayPal. We had had at least three or four years of experience working together. Chad, I think, I met on the first day that I landed in Silicon Valley. Roelof Botha, former PayPal CFO and partner at Sequoia Capital, YouTube's first investor: PayPal was a bit of a cauldron of an experience. We had a very small team in the office, next to the Palo Alto dump. I remember being there on weekends and seeing Steve standing outside smoking, because he was still a smoker back then. I worked with Jawed on a project in 2000. While Chen, Hurley, and Karim hatched plans…

Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube chief product officer/CTO (2008–2014): The general perception inside Google was that [buying YouTube] was Google's first mistake. Every previous acquisition had worked out so well: Android and Google Maps, and even Google Docs was off to a reasonable start. But this one didn't seem like it was going anywhere. Darby: I remember giving a talk to my team about, like, “How the hell is YouTube going to make any money for Google?” There was this odd thing going on in San Bruno and it was costing a great deal of money, because video is an expensive thing to serve. Outside Google, media companies and marketers alike remained skeptical about partnering with YouTube. Fricklas: Google's a big, responsible company, and the thought that it would be acquiring a…

YOU'D THINK IT WOULD SMELL LIKE COFFEE. INSTEAD, THERE'S A WHIFF OF LIVESTOCK IN THE AIR. FOR THE PAST HOUR AND A HALF, SOME 14,000 STARBUCKS store managers have been streaming into the Thomas & Mack Center on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, filling the arena. Even though it's only noon on this June day, the music is pumping and people are dancing under purple lights. Some start a wave, which ripples through the crowd. In just a few hours, they'll sample the company's new 1971 Roast from their seats, in what has to be one of the world's largest coffee tastings ever staged. But even the scent of those dark-roast beans can't erase the barnyard aroma from the years of rodeos that have been held…

APPTRONIK'S APOLLO AS A GROWING NUMBER OF COMpanies are poised to begin introducing humanoid robots into real industrial environments, Apptronik's Apollo is already working alongside humans. What sets it apart from its mechanical peers is the ability to operate at existing workstations designed for humans, obviating expensive factory conversions. Apptronik worked with Austinbased Argodesign to craft Apollo's deliberately neutral aesthetic. The concave face uses LED technology that enables the robot's “mouth” to convey reactions, expressions, and visual cues, like words or an ellipsis symbol to indicate it is thinking or processing. Two “eyes” are stereovision cameras, allowing the robot to perceive obstacles as it moves around a work area. “The [face display] enables it to convey emotions, intentions, and simple messages,” says Mark Rolston, Argodesign's founder and former chief creative…

AFTER FRIDA LAUNCHED ITS AT-HOME FERTILITY products in 2023, its ads and marketing frequently met with censorship, flagged on social platforms for being “too adult” and “too explicit.” “We faced systemic, algorithmic barriers when trying to educate women digitally about this physical transformation into motherhood,” says Frida founder and CEO Chelsea Hirshhorn. In 2024, the brand decided to create a way around the censors to get its educational content to the women who needed it most. The elegantly designed Frida Uncensored campaign and platform included age-gated digital content designed to bypass censorship and give women unfiltered, practical health education. The unfiltered content offers direct, candid product demonstrations, how-to videos, and illustrations without fear of censorship. It is intentionally built off-platform to host honest, medically backed tutorials that would otherwise be…

Traditional bicycle derailleur systems are vulnerable to extremely harsh conditions—precisely the kinds of environments where many people (including healthcare workers) rely on bikes for transportation. The nonprofit World Bicycle Relief (WBR) collaborated with engineers at Chicago-based bike component manufacturer SRAM to devise a simple yet radical solution: If single-speed drivetrains work reliably, why not put two of them on the same bike with different gearings? The new Buffalo Bicycle Utility S2 features two separate chains, each with its own chain ring and cog, connected by a patented AK-2 freewheel system located on the hub of the rear wheel. Riders switch gears by pedaling backward half a turn, then forward. “The parts that are complex are inside, so we can protect them from the elements,” says WBR VP of product development…

Most companies approach web accessibility through a lens of compliance and risk: Making sure that their websites are usable by everyone is typically the domain of engineers and lawyers. But in its work for the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development, the creative agency VML reimagined web accessibility as a form of storytelling. Sound Sites provides rich, lyrical descriptions of images so that visually impaired visitors who rely on screen readers can feel equally immersed in the content. Instead of the typical generic descriptions generated by standard alt text (for example, “image of a mountain”), Sound Sites provides the kind of evocative, sensory-driven audio you might hear on Weekend Edition or CBS Sunday Morning. VML collaborates with blind users and local songwriters to produce the scripts. “We saw an opportunity to…

INSIDE FRERES ENGINEERED WOOD'S new warehouse, stacks of lumber line the walls—but this isn't the only timber in sight. In fact, the entire warehouse is made of wood. The unique design turns traditional concrete and metal warehouse construction on its head, saving time and money, as well as lowering carbon emissions. Completed in October, the 60,000-square-foot warehouse emerged from Freres Engineered Wood's need to house a growing product line—and showcase what those products can do. The warmly lit and inviting workspace was designed with multiple loading docks and can store 6,000 units of plywood panels, like those from which the building was made. “Of course, I think wood is one of the most remarkable building materials that we have to build with,” says Tyler Freres, vice president of sales at…

THOUGH MANY COMPANIES ARE STILL IN THE early days of AI adoption, one thing is clear: Many of our interactions—between employees and even organizations—are already being carried out entirely by agentic technology. As this trend increases, the need for leaders to keep humanity at the core of their businesses is critical. That's why this year's annual meeting of the Fast Company Impact Council was centered on the theme of “Maintaining a Human Touch in a Digital World.” In May, 123 of the Impact Council's 422 members (listed throughout this package) gathered in New Canaan, Connecticut, at the 80-acre headquarters of humanitarian nonprofit Grace Farms. In panels and roundtables held across the organization's buildings—designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architecture firm SANAA—attendees explored how businesses can center innovation around real-world needs and values,…

AS A NEWCOMER TO THE FAST COMPANY UNIVERSE and as a veteran of the ever-shifting media and business landscape, I'm thrilled to introduce myself as the new chief revenue officer of Mansueto Ventures, parent of Fast Company and Inc. I started in June, and my introduction to the power of the Fast Company brand came during my first week, at the 2025 Most Innovative Companies Summit and Gala, our now annual in-person marriage of thought leadership and celebration of the brilliant companies recognized on the yearly MIC list. The intelligence and enthusiasm I felt across the stage, from the audience, and during the networking breaks just blew me away. I knew quickly that I'd landed at a brand with magical qualities and a mighty powerful community—offering Fast Company marketing partners…

INNOVATION HAPPENS FAST AT CLASSDOJO, A CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT PLATFORM valued at $1.3 billion. The company's successful AI program, ClassDojo Sidekick, was developed and implemented in just five weeks, after a product manager at the company realized how much grunt work was getting in the way of teachers' other tasks. Last year, the company invested about $30 million in R&D, and two-thirds of ClassDojo employees work in product development.…

AI, Automation, and Machine Learning Adobe Alibaba Group Architech Generate:Biomedicines IBM Johnson & Johnson Lenovo Pella Procter & Gamble RIOS Intelligent Machines Excellence Through Adversity FutureThink Land O'Lakes Flexible Workplace for Innovation Cirrus Logic Elastic Gamefam Instrument Scribd Inc. Tailscale Tractor Beverage Co. Uplight International BandLab Carbonaires ESR FibreCoat Henkel Itaú Unibanco Laborit Ledger Omnea Sanofi Siemens Uncommon Creative Studio Xero North America Alex Lee Allied Steel Buildings Ampsight Curinos De-Yan Studio FutureThink Haskell Highnote Homebase Maxar Intelligence Radio Flyer TomoCredit Waystar Wisk Aero Small and Mighty Burq  Juris Digital Laborit Output Protelo Third Plateau Midsize Arkadium Barbarian GlossGenius Hover Notable Octus Pipedrive Raft Step Up for Students Tailscale Zest AI Large American Red Cross Ardurra Chipotle Fidelity Information Services Jazwares Merck & Co. Salesforce Symbotic TIAA T-Mobile Trimble Wealthsimple…

MATAN COHEN-GRUMI REMEMBERS THE FIRST TIME he experienced “the squish.” The founding creative director of the generative AI video platform Pika was playing around with a new suite of effects the company had just come up with. One tool took an image and made it look like two sets of fingers were literally squishing the subject—be it a cat, a cup, or a person's head—in a delightfully (and terrifyingly) realistic way, complete with scrunching sound effects. “There was something very surprising about it,” says Cohen-Grumi, a former TV and commercial director who first discovered the magic of generative AI in 2023, when he used Midjourney to make a short film for his (now defunct) rock band. “I remember saying to everyone, ‘I've been playing with AI for so long. I've…

By the time my son arrived in the world, both of us dazed and red-faced after laboring through the night in a hospital room, I had already started telling myself his origin story. IT HAD BEGUN NEARLY TWO YEARS PRIOR, WITH A miscarriage, and then another. I was compiling a list of fertility clinics when he made an appearance on the ultrasound monitor, a flickering response to my quietly brewing despair. I spent the long months of pregnancy that followed feeling like a cartoon character with a me-size thunderstorm threatening at every turn. Though my pregnancy was healthy, I was convinced I had to remain vigilant until my son was in my arms. When my husband and I visited my obstetrician nine days past my son's due date, I wasn't…

Even as YouTube's popularity skyrocketed, the startup faced multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This led to the announcement, on October 9, 2006, that Google would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. Maxcy: When I got hired, there were about 11 of us operating out of a back office in Sequoia's offices. Then we moved to San Mateo to the infamous spot above the pizza shop. It was truly rat infested. Levine: I remember taking calls in the janitor's closet when I needed privacy. Quagliarello: On my first day of work, I was seven months pregnant. It really felt like a small family. Jake McGuire, YouTube software engineer (2006–present): It was like, “If something is going to blow up next week, then who cares? We'll deal with…

Mehrotra: At first you had to know somebody to get into the Partner Program. The choice to open it up in 2009 was big. It was heavily motivated by our interaction with Sal Khan and Khan Academy, and how important it was to support creators like that. Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, the pioneering maker of educational videos: [Mehrotra] used to say, “You know, Sal, I checked your viewership. If you turned your ads on, you could maybe make a living off of this.” Mehrotra: Of every dollar that came in [to YouTube], 55 cents went right back out [to creators]. That was a promise we were willing to make. It was a very hard decision at a time when we were losing a lot of money. Ezarik: The…

AFTER MORE THAN 20 YEARS OF PLANNING AND construction, Cary, North Carolina, has turned a 7-acre section of its downtown into one of the country's most multifaceted public parks. OJB Landscape Architecture designed a mix of active recreation areas, botanical gardens, pavilions, event spaces, cafés, bars, and cleverly camouflaged floodwater retention basins. Those basins—including several rain gardens and a central pond—hold back the flooding that had regularly ravaged neighborhoods to the south. A creeklike children's splash pad plays up this connection to water, and winding elevated walkways overhead highlight the site's dramatic 37-foot elevation change. Hundreds of trees, including 600 new ones, provide a lush respite in the city center. Built for $65 million in bond funding, the park has created a gathering space for Cary's 150,000 people. As OJB…

THE NEW NEW YORK TIMES APP MESSING WITH A LEGACY BRAND THAT'S BEEN around for nearly two centuries carries some serious risk. When that brand is The New York Times, it's even more serious: You're jeopardizing the daily loyalty and trust of nearly 12 million subscribers. In October 2024, when the product team at the Times launched its most hefty app redesign since its 2008 launch, Emily Withrow, the newspaper's SVP of product, says the team saw a huge opportunity to enhance engagement: “We produce all of this journalism and have all of this lifestyle content that helps people live informed, joyful lives, but there was no direct pathway to it.” The goal, she says, was to create a more fluid canvas, allowing the app to reflect the range of…

DESIGN COMPANY OF THE YEAR Jones Knowles Ritchie A global branding agency that creates striking new visual identities for companies like Mozilla, Paramount, and Walmart GENERAL EXCELLENCE The New York Times The New New York Times app An ambitious app redesign (the first of its scale since 2008) that enhances discovery and personalization for subscribers ACCESSIBLE DESIGN Sound Sites VML An accessibility initiative that enhances the listening experience for visually impaired people by replacing alt text descriptions with sensorydriven audio ADVERTISING AND MARKETING DESIGN Frida Uncensored Frida An age-gated platform that offers honest (and explicit) information about fertility, baby care, and postpartum recovery ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women Diller Scofidio + Renfro A contemporary mosque and educational center in Doha, Qatar, designed specifically for women in a…

SO ON AFTER ZOHRAN MAMDANI secured the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor, Amanda Litman posted a video selfie on Instagram. “The dinosaurs of the past, the boomers, the hostile managers, the assholes—they are behind us,” she preached to the camera. If viewers felt inspired to “run to take on the status quo,” they should head to her organization's website and register. Though Mamdani is not affiliated with Litman's eight-year-old non-profit, Run for Something, his generational fight aligns with its purpose: to encourage young and underrepresented people to run for political office, including “hyperlocal” positions like city council and school boards. Litman says that Mamdani's win sparked the organization's biggest-ever candidate recruitment surge, with 5,000 sign-ups in five days. That follows the previous record: 10,000 sign-ups within two weeks…

Finalists: 1. Hebbia 2. Match Group COFOUNDED BY TINA P. SRIVASTAVA AND CHARLES Herder, cybersecurity startup Badge aims to revolutionize biometric authentication with its trademarked Identity Without Secrets system, which eliminates the need to store user credentials. The company's cryptography team worked with a CISO Council of outside experts to reduce the time for user authentication from multiple seconds to 22 milliseconds, a latency reduction that not only enhances user experience but also places less stress on computer resources. Since 2024, the team has secured more than 15 patents, and Badge technology is used by Microsoft, Cisco, Okta, and Ping Identity.…

NEARLY A HALF CENTURY AFTER AN OUT-OF-WORKS PORTS JUNKIE NAMED BILL RASMUSSEN LAUNCHED THE ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS PROGRAMMING NETWORK—REVOLUTIONIZING SPORTS MEDIA ON THE STRENGTH OF AN ASCENT TECHNOLOGY CALLED CABLE TELEVISION—ESPN HAS FINALLY CUT ITS OWN CORD. ON AUGUST 21, THE SELF-DESCRIBED “LEADING MULTI-platform sports entertainment brand” began allowing consumers to subscribe directly through a service called. . . ESPN. Unlike ESPN+, which launched in 2018, the new streaming service provides access to the network's full range of content and coverage. The various pricing and bundling subtleties would take too long to describe here, but the direct-to-consumer version of ESPN costs around $30 a month and is mainly targeted at “the 60 million–plus households that are not accessing ESPN in the traditional ways today,” says ESPN chairman James “Jimmy” Pitaro,…

April 2025 ME AT THE ZOO In the first-ever YouTube video, the platform's cofounder Jawed Karim informs us that elephants have “really, really, really long trunks, and that's cool.” It's a start. June 2006 LONELYGIRL15 Bree, a 16-year-old who broadcasts from her bedroom, becomes YouTube's most popular creator. It turns out she's fictional, and her videos develop into a serialized sciencefiction story. May 2007 CHARLIE BIT MY FINGER—AGAIN! A 1-year-old chomps on his 3-year-old brother's finger. Nobody is injured in the process, and millions of viewers find it adorably hysterical. July 2007 CNN/YOUTUBE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE YouTubers get face time with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other Democratic candidates with the service's first-ever debate livestream. July 2012 GANGNAM STYLE In an early example of K-pop's international appeal, rapper Psy's music video—both…

Neal Mohan, YouTube chief product officer (2015–2023); CEO (2023-present): When I first joined, there were lots of things that were nascent ideas that we just take for granted today. Like, “It sounds strange, but people watch us on television sets, and they jump through all these hoops to do it. Maybe that's a thing.” Christian Oestlien, YouTube VP of product management (2015-present): With the huge proliferation of connected TVs in the living room, YouTube's been able to really benefit. Kurt Wilms, YouTube senior director of product management (2011-present): A billion hours of video gets watched every day just on our living room app globally. In the U.S., viewing on TV has surpassed viewing on mobile. Khare: The majority of our audience watches Challenge Accepted in the living room. Schonberger: We've…

TECH LOGOS ARE BLUE. CORPORATE IDENTITIES ARE dull. Big-box stores are boring. These kinds of assumptions are common among consumers who came of age during what's known as the era of “corporate blanding,” and Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR) wants to break them all. Over the past year, JKR has been entrusted to rethink the public face of iconic companies like Yahoo, Mozilla, and Walmart. By questioning norms and injecting a hint of playfulness, the agency breathed new life into client identities—all with an eye for longevity. The approach has paid off: In 2024, JKR notched 29% year-over-year revenue growth in new sectors including tech, retail, nonprofit, media and entertainment, and finance. Tosh Hall, JKR's global chief creative officer, says the company's process always starts the same way: “We go and…

With its new app, Photoshop Mobile, Adobe finally delivered a full set of editing features for handheld devices. No more drawing lassos and masks on tiny screens with fingers as big as bratwursts. Instead, you just tap on what you want to edit. The star feature is Tap Select, which manifests what Adobe calls “select and do”: Point with your finger, and Firefly (Adobe's generative AI engine) figures out what you want, suggesting contextual next steps through tools like Generative Fill and Generative Expand. Each step produces new options, displayed as thumbnails on the right side of the screen, allowing users to refine their work. The app enables users to create on their phone and then keep working on a file at their desktop. “We'll continue adding more features over…

THE GOODNATURE MOUSE TRAP IS a quick-kill humane, nontoxic, incredibly durable trap that removes nearly all of the pain points associated with traditional indoor traps—and it's handsome, too. “We need to reduce the mouse population, but we don't need to make them suffer,” says Charlotte Velut, brand and marketing manager at Goodnature. “We worked on a product that is aesthetically pleasing and safe so people don't have to touch or see the dead rodent.” The $99 set-it-and-forget-it product uses a Bluetooth connection and related app. Its self-resetting electromechanical striker means the trap requires no manual reset or any involvement from a human once it's in place. A nontoxic, biodegradable lure and infrared no-touch sensors precipitate an exact, swift, humane kill inside a sleek triangular tunnellike trap. The trap battery is…

THE ART RATE MONITOR REIMAGINES HOW PEOPLE connect with art by measuring how they respond to it physiologically. Developed by creative agency Zulu Alpha Kilo for the Art Gallery of Ontario, the monitor uses wristbands to track each visitor's heart rate, movement, and location as they explore more than 480,000 square feet of gallery space. Bluetooth beacons throughout the museum sync with the wearable tech to collect biometric data in real time. After the visit, each guest receives a personalized, shareable summary of how their body reacted to the art, pinpointing which pieces elevated their heart rate, which calmed them, and what held their attention the longest, even identifying their favorite color palette and “art persona.” The results speak volumes—a 32% increase in visits and a 14-point lift in twentysomething-aged…

STEP INTO AN ULTA OR SEPHORA, and you'll find hundreds of bottles of foundation in many shades and formulations. But despite the abundance of options in the $8.4 billion foundation industry, many people struggle to find a color that matches their complexion. Less than 7% of foundation on the market caters to Black consumers' skin tones. Karin Layton and Rachel Wilson, founders of BoldHue, are solving this problem with technology. Layton, a former aerospace engineer, spent five years building a machine that scans your face in three places then instantly dispenses customized foundation. The $295 countertop device comes with cartridges in five colors that mix to create the correct color; a replacement cartridge costs $20. “Consumers spend a lot of time and money trying to get the right shade,” Wilson…

DOCTORS ARE TIRED. ACCORDING TO THE AMERICAN Medical Association, around 45% of physicians report at least one symptom of burnout. Could a more thoughtfully designed workplace help? At first glance, Northwestern Medicine's new Faculty Office Center could be mistaken for a spa: a carved stone reception desk, artwork that depicts a birch forest, nap rooms, massage chairs, a lounge, and a café serving chef-made meals. “We tried to infuse a sense of nature and Zen-like peacefulness because doctors have so much stress through the day,” says Mark Hirons, principal and senior design leader at CannonDesign, the architecture firm that masterminded the space. The center is a new model for workspaces in academic medicine, a field that has typically lagged behind in workplace design. Instead of dated private offices, doctors and…

EVERY DAY, 150 AMERICANS DIE from an opioid overdose. 855-HOW-TO-QUIT is a toll-free helpline that turns the FDA-mandated imprint codes of 30 opioid pills—K9 for oxycodone, IP33 for codeine—into phone extensions. Callers addicted to codeine, for example, can hear a prerecorded story from someone who quit and be directed to treatment options nearby. “For anyone who doesn't have a substance abuse disorder, it's hard to understand how recognizable these numbers are,” says Kai West Schlosser, senior art director at Serviceplan, which developed the concept and website with design studio Raw Materials. The helpline was created as part of a marketing campaign to raise the profile of healthcare consultancy Anzen Health, directing attention and clients to rehab facilities in its portfolio. Marketing teams worked with psychologists and opioid survivors to ensure…

Carly Ayres Program lead, Air Yves Béhar Founder and CEO, Fuseproject Aki Carpenter Vice president, chief creative officer, Ralph Appelbaum Associates Cheryl Durst CEO, IIDA Sagi Haviv Partner, Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv Benjamin Hubert Founder and creative director, Layer Mark Kawano Chief design officer, Zoom Ryan McClelland Research engineer, NASA Goddard Space Center Ermi van Oers Bio-tech designer and founder, Nova Marti Romances Creative director and cofounder, Territory Studio Lisa Smith Executive creative director, global, Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR) Tracey Arcabasso Smith U.S. head of design, creative fellow, Deloitte Digital Jeff Staple Founder, Staple Amy Williams CEO, Citizens of Humanity Lisa Williams CEO, Eileen Fisher JUDGES RECUSED THEMSELVES FROM DELIBERATING ON ENTRIES FROM COMPANIES WHERE THEY'RE EMPLOYED.…

WHEN A GROUP OF MEN WITHOUT UNIFORMS ARrested Mahmoud Khalil inside his New York City apartment building in March, Khalil's wife, eight months pregnant, asked them for identification. The men would not give their names or say what agency they worked for. All they said was they were taking Khalil, a legal permanent resident, to an immigrant lockup in downtown Manhattan. The statement was misleading. Within hours, Khalil was whisked out of the state. He soon found himself in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center near the tiny town of Jena. The Columbia University graduate student, who had attracted nationwide attention by leading pro-Palestinian protests on campus and was not accused of any crime, spent more than three months imprisoned in the facility. Central Louisiana is a for-profit detention center,…

KENNEDY BURKE New York Liberty player AVA BROCK Fan SHANA STEPHENSON New York Liberty chief brand officer KEIA CLARKE New York Liberty CEO ON OCTOBER 24, 2024, TENS OF thousands of fans lined the streets of lower Manhattan to celebrate their latest hometown championship team, the New York Liberty. They gathered to cheer current players, including Finals MVP Jonquel Jones, and former legends who'd taken the team to the brink of a title in five previous seasons. But the parade's biggest draw may have been the team's mascot, Ellie the Elephant. As the parade made its way along the Canyon of Heroes, Ellie moved from float to float, pounding her feet in sync with the music, doing her signature dance move, the Ellie Stomp. The parade terminated at City Hall…