Table of contents for Summer 2023 in Fast Company

“GENERATION STORIES ARE BULLSHIT.” THAT ASSERTION, aired during an early editorial meeting about this issue, is fair. Articles that make sweeping statements about groups of people born within the same 20-year chunk of time do tend to be bullshit. Generations are arbitrarily defined, often by marketers. They are diverse. For every Gen X slacker, there’s another who founded a tech company with a name now used as a verb; for every millennial whose political lodestar is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there’s a Joe Rogan fanboy. And yet… generation stories aren’t complete bullshit. The drift of history during one’s formative years matters, and it leaves a mark that plays out over time in a collective way. We can argue about this if you like (and wow, do people love to argue about generations),…

Women are persistently underrepresented in cardiology clinical trials, and undertreated for heart conditions such as the buildup of calcium deposits that can narrow and stiffen blood vessels. What's more, they may also present different symptoms than men, making the identification of heart disease in female patients challenging. As a result, women tend to experience worse long-term cardiovascular healthcare out comes. Shockwave Medical aims to change this. The company's intravascular lithotripsy [IVL] technique breaks up calcium in blood vessels with sound waves generated from a tiny balloon inserted via a catheter. The technology, which is safer and moreeffectivethantraditional methods, shatters brittle calcium deposits, helping open blood vessels while leaving soft tissue unharmed. "We're committed to making big investments in areas of unmet needs," says Susan Peterson, senior director, R&D, at Shockwave.…

Since its founding in 1949, the Leukemia & Lym phoma Society [LLS] has helped fund research for nearly every major innovation in the treatment of blood cancers. In the past few years, LLS has focused on its own innovation a swell, working to create a culture that embraces fresh ideas and experimentation. This forward-thinking approach earned the non prof it a spot on Fast Company's list of Best Workplaces for Innovators. Ryan Hatcher, vice president of strategy and innovation at LLS, explains how the organization's focus on innovation is transforming its culture and its services. 1 How does LLS think about innovation? We recognize our employees offer a diverse set of perspectives and expertise. We want to tap into all of it to better serve a diverse group of blood…

THE GENERATION NOW ENTERING THE WORKFORCE REJECTS THE STATUS QUO. WHAT SHAPED THEM. WHAT THEY WANT FROM WORK. HOW TO LEAD THEM, AND MORE. WHEN CHARLIE DURBIN took a job in investment banking after graduating from Princeton in 2019, it felt more like something he was expected to do than what he wanted to do. With his economics degree, and his history playing on Princeton’s lacrosse team, Durbin couldn’t have been more of a dream target for a global firm focused on strategic merger and acquisition deals. He was happy to have the job, but M&A work wasn’t exactly his passion; he’d been a member of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Council and became interested in crypto in 2017. Soon his reticence proved prescient. The hours were crushing due to what he…

LEAD WITH “WHY.” MIKE XHAXHO, COFOUNDER, WATERBOY Pay them what they’re worth. OLIVER PANGBORN, CMO, YPULSE EMPOWER GEN Z EMPLOYEES WITH A LEARNING CULTURE THAT ENCOURAGES DISRUPTIVE THINKING WITHOUT FEAR OF FAILURE. TRESSIE LIEBERMAN, VP OF DIGITAL MARKETING AND OFF-PREMISE, CHIPOTLE MEXICAN GRILL BRUSH UP ON YOUR MEMES-HA HA. AUSTIN HANKWITZ, FINANCE TIKTOKKER, CO-HEAD OF PARTNERSHIPS, MONEYLION Gen Z’s entrepreneurial mindset is unprecedented. MARC BEAL, PROFESSOR, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY EVERYONE SAYS GEN Z ARE DRIVEN BY PURPOSE, BUT THEY’RE ALSO DRIVEN BY MONEY. BEV RYAN, FOUNDER AND SENIOR PARTNER, OLOGIE…

1. We strive to do things that put us in a state of flow. ANDREW YEUNG, TECH LEADERAND COMMUNITY BUILDER, ANDREW’S MIXERS 2. I want more people in my generation to be okay with being themselves rather than basing their identity on aspects of Black American culture that they hardly value or understand. KHALIL GREENE, TIKTOK CREATOR 3. The conventional hierarchy at work doesn’t apply: It’s about vibing with your coworkers and team more than it is about the work. KATE MAO, FOUNDER, INTO ARCHIVE 4. The evolution of social media has increased Gen Z’s propensity for selfconsciousness, status orientation, and narcissism. AVANTE PRICE, CEO, POSH 5. We will roll our eyes at corporate behavior. ARIANA NATHANI, CREATOR AND HOST, DRINKS FIRST 6. Many of us would rather bet on…

FOR REDESIGNING EV FORM TO FOLLOW FUNCTION ELECTRIC VEHI-cles are becoming the norm, but with this encouraging trend comes a depressing side effect: conformist design. Touchscreen interfaces have replaced physical controls in nearly all EVs—except for the 2023 Hyundai Kona Electric, designed by SangYup Lee. Lee, who's been the lead designer at Hyundai for seven years after stints at GM, Volkswagen, and Bentley Motors, drew attention in March at the launch event for the 2023 Kona Electric SUV when he took an iconoclastic stance against oversaturated smartphoneinspired design and backed it up with a noteworthy new debut. The Kona EV has a touchscreen but physical buttons and dials, too, for many of its most-used controls. “When a car's on the move, especially with your family, the most important [thing] is…

FOR MAKING REDDIT MORE SEARCHABLE WITH MORE than 430 million monthly users— 52 million of whom engage every day— Reddit isn't just a robust social media hub; it’s a treasure trove. Its wealth of data and information has undoubtedly complicated things for the company: On June 12, after Reddit announced plans to begin charging outside companies for access via its API, nearly 9,000 subreddit communities went dark for 48 hours to protest the move. But it's precisely this intense user base that makes the 18-year-old site so valuable, particularly for anyone researching, well, anything. Still, trying to find what you're looking for in a long comment thread, or anywhere in the discussions among the 150,000 active communities, has often felt like searching for a straw of hay in a stack…

FOR ELECTRIFYING OUR HIGHWAYS CCORNELIUS VANDERBILT helped build the railroad network in the 1800s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower commissioned the National Highway System in the 1900s, and Neha Palmer is helping usher in the next once-in-a-century transition in transportation: an electrified charging network. Palmer cofounded TeraWatt Infrastructure in 2021 so that heavy-duty freight vehicles could begin a journey to electrification. While other companies have focused on building electric charging networks for passenger vehicles, no one had achieved what Palmer calls “that fullstack solution” of an interstate network for truck fleets. Now’s the time: Though only 2% of U.S. heavy-duty truck sales last year were electric, that figure is predicted to rise to 27% by 2030. And about half of trucks already on the road today can be retrofitted to be…

FOR PRESSING “PLAY" ON TV ACCESSIBILITY TOM WLODkowski led the research and design process for Comcast's new Xfinity Large Button Voice Remote, the first remote built from the ground up with accessibility in mind. Before it became available, in November 2022, Comcast customers who asked for accessibility features were mailed a clunky device manufactured by a third party Wlodkowski says that some people wrote in to say they would hide the remote when guests came over, because it looked “medical.” “That's not how somebody wants to enjoy entertainment, you know," he says, Wlodkowski, who has been blind since birth, pushed his colleagues to deliver something better for people with vision, dexterity, or mobiity issues. “My role was to get others inspired.” Key to his argument was that better design for…

FOR ENSURING THAT YOUR NEXT CAR PURRS WHAT DOES YOUR CAR SOUND like? What should it sound like? These are the questions Rashaan Josey is working to answer. His division at audio giant Bose is developing new ways to achieve the ideal “in-cabin" sound environment in the age of EVs. Along with emissions, EVs reduce en gine noise, which creates new markets for Bose features such as stereo surround-sound enhancement and noise-canceling technologies. “When you remove the engine," says Josey, who trained as an electrical and software engineer, “it's amazing [to discover] how much sound it coverednoise from the tires, the road, HVAC, a rattle that was there that you never knew existed." Bose has created multispeaker sound systems for the Chevrolet Volt EV, the Hyundai Elantra, the Porsche Taycan EV,…

FOR REPORTING THE STORY OF A LIFETIME — QUITE LITERALLY HIS OWN IN ADDITION TO THE TUMULT at CNN, Anderson Cooper has experienced a great deal of dislocation in his personal life lately, which grew into All There Is, a tender and important podcast. Released last September and recorded in a documentary style reminiscent of his days as a foreign correspondent, the podcast explores Cooper’s intimate experience with grief following the 2019 death of his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. After landing at the top of Apple’s charts, it attracted more than 4 million listeners; the second episode was one of Apple’s top-10 most shared podcast episodes of2022. A second season is due this fall. “I just found myself feeling lonely in this strange wilderness that I was in,” says Cooper, who…

FOR PRESERVING AND SHOWCASING BLACK CINEMA WHEN MAYA Cade began curating the Black Film Archive two years ago, it was partially to counter the pervasive, and inaccurate, narrative that Black film concerns itself mostly with slavery and trauma. “Instead of shaming people for thinking that Black films come from pain, I thought there was a way to present them with the truth," she says, which is that Black films have always ad dressed a wide range of topics and universal experiences. Though Blackfocused film collections have existed on streaming apps—usually during Black History MonthCade, who began the project while working at the Criterion Channel, noticed that there had never been a comprehensive, living repository of Black fiims that could be accessed for free by scholars and film buffs alike. Last…

FOR TAILORING CLOTHING TO AN OVERLOOKED MARKET B DURING A HOSPItal stay in London in 2016 for a ruptured ulcer, Victoria Jenkins was dismayed to see her roommate, a cancer survivor, poked, prodded, and repeatedly exposed in her ill-fittinq hospital qarb. Jenkins, who had spent a decade perfecting the fit and performance of clothing as a garment technologist for brands such as Sweaty Betty and Victoria Beckham, began exploring better options online. There weren't many Tommy Hilfiger had launched a noteworthy line in 2016 to accommodate the needs of people who are chronically ill or physically disabled (and the first-ever adaptive line for children), but few other brands were structured to help this population, let alone make them feel attractive. “I realized I could put my garment construction knowledge to…

FOR PROVIDING THE CORNER BOOKSTORE WITH A DIGITAL STOREFRONT FOR DECADES, independent bookstores had been in decline. But something strange is hap pening: 425 new stores have opened in the U.S. over the past two years, bringing the national total to more than 2,500, with nearly 200 more slated to open in the next year. And 70% of them report an increase in sales compared to before the pandemic. One force be hind this renaissance is Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), who has given indie retailers the tools they need to compete with online giants. A former bookstore CEO, she knew how hard it was for community gathering spots to digitize their operations. This year, she spearheaded a $3 million investment in a new enterprise technology…

FOR FOSTERING THE FUTURE OF ANDROGYNOUS FASHION ARTURO OBEGEro’s aesthetic is hard to pin down. It’s not quite gender-neutral, but it’s certainly gender-irreverent, bending traditionally feminine silhouettes and materials into the menswear space. “Sometimes we create boxes or more labels, trying to define things, which is great. Obviously, we have to do this. But I think we should treat things as more natural,” says the 29-year-old designer. “Homme Fatale,” his collection for autumn/winter 2023, puts this philosophy front and center, playing with the femme fatale archetype through plunging necklines, structured shoulders, and a dark, dramatic color palette, all showcased on models whose genders can’t quite be placed on first glance. “Clothes are clothes,” Obegero says. “It’s a piece of cloth. You cut it as you want. If it makes you…

FOR POWERFULLY PROMOTING WOMEN’S PRO SPORTS WHEN THE Portland Thorns won the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL) championship in October, some 915,000 people tuned in on CBS, a 71% increase from 2021. That record-breaking viewership is due, in large part, to Andrea Brimmer, CMO of financial services company Ally Financial, one of the league's main sponsors. While renewing Ally's deal with the NWSL last year, she also increased her company's advertising spend with CBS—on the condition that the network air the NWSL final during prime time for the first time. (The 2021 game had aired on a Saturday at noon.) That effort was part of a commitment that Ally announced last summer to honor the 50th anniversary of Title IX. The company, which had a marketing budget of $366 million…

FOR CREATING MAKEUPTHAT’S EUPHORIA-INDUCING FANS OF THE HBO series Euphoria—just renewed for a third season—have been riveted by the show's exploration of the dramas of adolescence. They've been equally hypnotized by the characters' style, especially their makeup. The show's teens sport decals on their cheeks and eyes that capture the light of the disco ball, neon eyeliner, and face gems that glisten like tears. "The makeup tells the story of [the characters'] sweetness and Innocence," explains the show's head makeup artist, Donnr Davy, whose work has earned two Emmys and sparked a global phenomenon. (#Euphoriamakeup has 2.4 billion views on TikTok.) After the show debuted in 2019, Davy was Inundated with collab requests from beauty companies. Instead, she partnered with A24, the studio behind Euphoria, to create Half Magic, which…

BEFORE Bleisure OffSight Pod AFTER THE BEST KIND OF BUSI-ness travel? The kind that borders a weekend, making it possible to finish on a fun note before heading home. That marriage of business and leisure, aka bleisure, which has taken even more flexible forms of late, has long been underserved by its terribleame. When we asked Brooklyn-based creative agency Alright Studio to reimagine the concept, it came up with a tongue-in-cheek, mildly dystopian vision at a moment when companies are curbing travel budgets and looking for opportunities to replace business travel with Zoom—the Off-Sight Pod of Convenience. In a hybrid world where an off-site can happen virtually, why not a vacation, too? The Pod offers “revenge against the monotony of the quotidian,” according to the agency, where workers can be…

"SCIENCE DOESN’T move in a straight line,” says Stéphane Bancel, “especially with cuttingedge science that no human has done before you.” The 50-year-old CEO of the biotech company Moderna is familiar with circuitous journeys and unexpected turns of fate. Founded in 2010 by a group of influential scientists from Harvard and MIT, Moderna spent its first decade pursuing research into the then-novel idea of using mRNA as a platform to create vaccines and drugs that essentially manufacture themselves in a patient’s body. But by early 2020, it still didn’t have a single product on the market. It did, however, have six vaccines in Phase 1 trials, and was working on one against MERS, a type of coronavirus. And it had built a 150,000-square-foot facility in the Boston suburb of Norwood,…

Most hikers can vividly recall the moment they reached an awe-inspiring summit. Once they're home, that connection to the outdoors lives on in the humble tool that helped make their hike possible: their shoes. "It's almost like a picture ofthe experiences and feelings thattheyhadwhentheydidthatexpedition or that family camping trip,” says John Burch, seniorvice-president of global footwear at leading hike and outdoor brand Merreil." It's an emotional connection to your pro duct that mo st industries would love to have." Merrell, which has been in the outdoors business for more than 40 years, has taken careful steps to keep those connections strong. That's meant listening closely to the issues that re ally matterto its customers: Beyond a killer pair of hiking shoes, they also want to knowthata brandwalksthewalkon issues such as…

"IS THIS … IT?" I was staring into the depths of an Excel spreadsheet one spring night in May 2021. I was completely alone, just me and a blinking cursor, in what felt like the increasingly shrinking 250 square feet of my apartment in Los Angeles. After spending most of my life in Kentucky, I had moved into this place in 2019, just five days after graduating from college, to take a job at an asset management firm. The only things in my apartment were a mini fridge and a camping pad that I used for a bed. I was navigating the big, messy adult things of cities, friendships, and employment. It was lonely, formative, itchy, and painful, but in a weird way, beautiful. Then, 315 days after I’d arrived,…

FOR PLACING THE NBA IN THE PALMS OF OUR HANDS F FIFTEEN YEARS into the mobile era, the apps for sports leagues were all serving fans with the same utilitarian, information-dense— and let’s just say it, boring—interface. Then the new NBA app checked into the game in September 2022. Created by Michelle Layne Lawson, who has led design for the league since 2020 after stints at Showtime and Google, the new NBA app is more like a streaming or social media product. It mirrors the kinetic energy of basketball itself—with bigger, colorful typefaces, more white space, and an emphasis on full-screen video. These videos appear in a familiar vertical feed (like TikTok) designed to maximize engagement.“I want fans to be able to access content in a friction-free manner," she says. Users…

FOR PROTECTI NG PRIVACY WHERE IT MATTERS MOST APPLE HAS MADE privacy and security one of the iPhone's top selling points. But a fraction of users, including dissidents, activists, and journalists, have reason to obsess over it. Governments and other parties have targeted these groups with spyware to access messages, location data, and other info that can compromise their physical safety. “These attackersare willing to spend untold millions going after extremely small numbers of peopie," says Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture Ivan Krstić. To combat this threat, Apple asked itself a new question, explains security engineering and architecture engineering manager Lucia Ballard: “If we design for [this] incredibly narrow subset of people, what can we do?” Rather than introducing security settings for all iPhone users that would leave…

FOR HAVING A BALL WITH COFFEE “WHEN I HELD IT in my hand, I said, This is it.' It just felt right,” Caroline Siefarth says of CoffeeB, the truffle-like matte brown sphere she spent five years developing after Swiss company Delica tasked her with creating the seemingly impossible: a coffee capsule with virtually no capsule at all, the first in the world to leave no waste. While other brands have been trying to introduce biodegradable options, they still contain bioplastics and paper that can take years to decompose. Siefarth and her team devised a coating that uses alginate, a natural polymer, and other components to form a flavorless and heat-resistant oxygen barrier. It prevents roasted coffee from losing its flavor, yet "completely biodegrades in weeks by just putting the used…

FOR UNLEASHING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM ON HARD-TO-TREAT CANCERS-AND SUCCEEDING I IN THE LATE 2000s, Luis Diaz Jr. never would have predicted that he’d spearhead one of the immunotherapy breakthroughs of the century. But when he heard that immunotherapies—which activate the immune system to kill cancer cells—were shrinking tumors in lung cancer, that got his attention. “Nothing works in lung cancer,” he says. Diaz figured that immunotherapy worked for the same reasons traditional treatments often fail. Because lung cancer tumors have lots of mutations, they can adapt to evade chemotherapy. But these mutations make them extra vulnerable to so-called immune checkpoint inhibitors, which release immune cells' “brakes” and allow them to attack things that look foreign—such as highly mutated cancer cells. Tumors with a genetic alteration called MMR deficiency have even more…

FOR INFUSING A TRAGIC STORY WITH VI BRATO I IN 1807, WHEN he was almost 40, Muslim scholar Omar Ibn Said was captured in what is now Senegal, Sent to South Carolina, he was enslaved into his nineties, leaving behind a spare autobiography in Arabic and several Islamic theological papers. Now, his story is being sung in Omar, the first opera based on the memoirof an enslaved person. Commissioned by the Spoleto Festival USA and first staged in Charleston, South Carolina, last spring, Omar is also the first opera by Rhiannon Giddens, who has spent decades teasing out the strains of different cultures—African. Indigenous, Irish—in American roots and folk music, as a founding member of the string band Carolina Chocolate Drops and the allfemale banjo quartet Our Native Daughters. She…

FOR MOLDING A LANDMARK LAW TO STOP PLASTIC WASTE IN JUNE 2022, California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law the Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act. Anja Brandon—a policy analyst at the Ocean Conservancy who, as a Stanford PhD student, researched ways to use biology to break down plastic waste—had coauthored the groundbreaking legislation. It requires companies selling products in the state to increase recycling and reduce their use of plastic by 25% by 2032—the equivalent of avoiding 23 million tons of the material over a decade. Other states have laws that force manufacturers to take responsibility for recycling packaging; this is the first to also require a cut in plastic production. Legislation is a team sport: The bill was proposed by state senator Ben Allen and drafted…

FOR ROCKETING 3D PRINTING INTO THE THERMOSPHERE A A BLUE STREAK shot up through the black Florida sky one night in late March, reaching more than 83 miles above sea level. It came from the methane flame behind a rocket—the first launched by Relativity Space, a seven-year-old startup valued at $4.2 billion. CEO Tim Ellis's vision—that he could 3D print rockets able to withstand the maximum stress of flight—had become real. It “was the most emotional experience I've had in my entire life," he says. “It almost looked like AI-generated art… like you're launching a blue star into space. It sounds like a whip cracking. It just feels very alive." It was also a milestone in three significant ways. First, Relativity's 110-foottall Terran 1 was the largest metal object ever 3D…

FOR UNLOCKING MUSIC ON THE DAY THAT MUSIC company Reservoir Media closed its deal to acquire hip-hop label Tommy Boy for $100 million in 2021, “our first phone call was to De La Soul,” says CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi. The iconic 1990s jazz rap group’s first six albums were included in Tommy Boy’s vast portfolio, and none of them had ever been released on streaming due to complicated licensing issues. Not only does the music contain hundreds of samples—many of them obscure, such as a recording of a French lesson in the song “Transmitting Live From Mars”—but “the laws around copyright, licensing, and usage are written for a pre-digital age,” says Khosrowshahi, who is the cousin of Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Working with members of De La Soul, Khosrowshahi and her…

FOR REALLY TALKING TURKEY I IN APRIL. LARISSA FastHorse became the first female, Native American playwright to have a show open on Broadway. The Thanksgiving Play, first staged in 2018, is a satire about four progressive white teachers bungling an attempt to put on a culturally sensitive elementary school play about a holiday that has tradi tionally revolved around reductive stereotypes. For its Broadway run, FastHorse incorporated timely issues, such as the death of George Floyd, to deepen the play’s portrayal of “well-meaning white folks,” she says, who often “virtue signal all of their awareness” of racism with language and gestures that ultimately don't effect change. FastHorses ability to wrap uncomfortable, even brutal, truths in humor didn't just make The Thanksgiving Play accessible to Broadway audiences— it led to a…

FOR PUTTING ALL TH E EGGS IN ONE BASKET THOUGH EGG FREEZING HAS become somewhat commonplace, it’s still an expensive endeavor; one cycle can cost as much as $10,000. Even people with workplace benefits have to shoulder elements such as medications and long-term storage, which can run thousands of dollars. After struggling with their own fertility issues, digital health veterans Lauren Makler, Arielle Spiegel, and Halle Tecco realized that they could make egg freezing more affordable by connecting it to egg donation. In 2022—after securing a $5 million seed round led by Initialized Capital and Offline Ventures—they launched Cofertility. The company lets qualifying people freeze their eggs free of charge if they agree to donate half of them. Cofertility then matches these donors with intended parents who are seeking a…

During the past decade, Aiex Leeparent company of Merchants Distributors, Lowes Foods, W. Lee Flowers, and Sou to Foods —has fostered innovation through Sparx, a series of initiatives that engage employees in challenges to solve customer pain points. "We recognize thateverybody has a unique lens on innovation and a perspective they want to contribute," says Robert Vipparman, Alex Lee's chief people officer and chief strategy officer. The company has developed several inventive ways to solve problems by tapping into its employees' ingenuity, earning it a spot on Fast Company's list of Best Workplaces for Innovators. Vipperman explains how Alex Lee's programming ignites innovation and helps employees and the company grow. 1 How do you cultivate innovation across your organization? We take a multifaceted approach, involving as many people inside and…

Access to venture capital funding is critical for startups that are hoping to achieve their vision. But VC money has traditionally only been available to a small set of wellconnected founders. DealMakerwas founded with the mission to disruptthe old model and democratize capita I markets—opening up early-stage investing to everyone. The company's commitment to hreaking down harriers and empowering its employees to pursue hold new ideas helped land it on Fast Company's list of Best Workplaces for Innovators. Here, DealMaker Cofounder and CEO Rebecca Kacaba reveals how DealMaker's culture of innovation Is helping the firm re shape access to capital for star tups while bringing new opportunities to everyday investors. 1 Given DeaiMaker's emphasis on innovation, what traits do you lookfor in your employees? One of our core values at…

BRET KUGELMASS, THE 36-year-old founder and CEO of the nuclear startup Last Energy, is used to skeptics. “If your five closest friends have been misinforming you [about nuclear power], I can’t blame you,” he says. A slight grin hints at what he’d like to tell them: that nuclear power is far less deadly than our typical sources of energy; that it’s still the only large-scale source of electricity and high-temperature heat that doesn’t emit carbon; that its detractors often misunderstand it. But Kugelmass isn’t trying to convince skeptics. He wants to prove them wrong. In four years, he’s gone from hosting a podcast about the nuclear industry to starting a nuclear company to, in recent months, inking nuclear power deals in Europe worth roughly $25.6 billion. Kugelmass— who has a…

FOR HELPING MOLECULES MEET THEIR MARK WITHIN THE BODY "I HAD NO IDEA PEOPLE would have to pronounce this when I coined it—it’s a mouthful!” says Carolyn Bertozzi of the term she invented to describe the scientific breakthrough that won her the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Morten P. Meldal and Karl Barry Sharpless). “Bioorthogonal” chemistry refers to methods of performing chemical reactions inside living cells, animals, or people— rather than in beakers, flasks, and test tubes. “In the 1990s,” she explains, “we had all these ideas for ways you could make new kinds of medicines if you could design reactions where the chemicals totally ignore the biological system, but when they see each other, boom, they react. ‘Orthogonal’ means ‘no interaction,’ so bioorthogonal means no interaction with…

FOR SCALING A NATION’S FLAVOR L LAST FALL, SHOPpers at Whole Foods may have noticed a new line of handrolled frozen burritos that featured genuine Mexican flavors: fire-roasted chicken, Oaxaca cheese, and cactus, all marketed under the Vista Hermosa brand. The road to those freezers began 16 years earlier when Dario Wolos, who was raised in Mexico, started selling tacos out of a sawed-off VW van in the Yucatan Peninsula beach town of Playa del Carmen, calling the makeshift eatery Tacombi (combi is Spanish for “minibus”). Four years later, he opened a Tacombi restaurant in New York City that evoked the van’s casual open-air vibe and served the same style of handmade tortillas and thick, salty totopos—both made the traditional way, from corn nixtamalized in slaked lime before being ground on…

FOR SAYING "YES, CHEF” TO SINGULAR CREATORS IN JUNE 2022, FX LAUNCHED a drama series about a down-onhis-luck chef who returns home to run his family’s sandwich shop in Chicago. The Bear not only racked up awards and critical acclaim— and inspired Italian beef joints to open around the country—but it captured a broad swath of ravenous viewers and became the network’s most-watched half-hour of TV. Viewership was 54% female, and evenly distributed among the three age groups (18-34, 35-49, and 50+), throwing salt on current industry wisdom that content needs to be developed specifically for narrow demographic niches. (Season 2 premiered June 22.) “It’s a food show, but it’s also not a food show,” says Nick Grad, who, with Gina Balian, was promoted last fall from overseeing original programming…

FOR KICKSTARTING THE SCOOTER BUSINESS T THE SCOOTER rental business is not an easy one. Electric scooters are, at their worst, a potentially dangerous mode of urban transportation that have too often become a form of blight as they’re tossed to the side of the road and, ultimately, sent to the dump. After the scooter mania that invaded cities in 2018 promptly retreated during the pandemic, the idea was deemed a fad with no path to profitability. Improbably, then—at Lime, at leastscooters are now starting to live out their best-case scenario, replacing short car trips with a lower-carbon alternative—in a way that’s also financially beneficial. This three-point turn has been executed by CEO Wayne Ting, who led the San Francisco-based company to its first profitable year in 2022 and proved to…

FOR NAILING IT, WITH HARRY STYLES HARRY STYLES’S stylist, Harry Lambert, and his creative director, Molly Hawkins, have helped craft the pop star and actor into a fashion icon. (For more, see page 80.) When they joined Styles in launching a beauty company called Pleasing in late 2021, they achieved some thing even more significant, though no flashbulbs captured it. Pleasing's debut collection, a line of $20 nail polishes inspired by Styles's affinity for manicures, was the first nail polish to be almost completely biodegradable. Traditional nail polish is made from plastic polymers that break into fragments of microplastic. Hawkins and Lambert were committed to making a version that would naturally decompose. They spent two years finding a lab able to help them devise a biodegradable formula. When the Pleasing…

FOR ROOTING BOTANY IN TODAY’S CULTURE B BRITISH BOTANIST James Wong broke into TV in his twenties with the BBC series Grow Your Own Drugs, and although he's gone on to be an award-winning garden designer dnd duthor of several plant-rearing books, he remains frustrated with the British gdrdening world. It's fixdted, he sdys, on cotering to “people with big hoir, smoll dogs, ond posh occents." Wong hails from a working-class immigrant family. He has 500 houseplants, including terrariums that he grooms with a tweezer. But a show about his own gardening style, he says, wasn't enticing Britain's fusty TV commissioners, to say nothing of the travelogue he wanted to make about urban flora in Singapore, where he spent his childhood. “I thought, If there’s really no opportunity to do…

FOR CONTAINING MULTITUDES FEW PERFORMERS CAN LITerally go the distance the way Eddie Izzard can. In addition to being a barrier-breaking stand-up comic, Tony-nominated actor, noted polyglot, and budding politician, she also happens to be an accomplished long-distance runner, once completing 43 marathons (about 1,100 miles) in 51 days as part of a charity event. That endurance no doubt came in handy last winter at off-Broadway’s Greenwich House Theater, when Izzard took the stage for a solo production of Great Expectations, regarded as one of Charles Dickens’s densest and most mature works. The 61-year-old Izzard embodied 19 characters and churned through thousands of words of dialogue in the span of two hours (Izzard’s older brother, Mark, had condensed the novel into its own kind of marathon), all while packing the…

FOR CHAMPIONING TAIWAN, ONE PANTRY ITEM AT A TIME WHEN TAI wanese president Tsai Ingwen visited New York in March—a trip so diplomatically sensitive that it was billed as a “stopover"—her itinerary included ajaunttothe Yun Hai Taiwanese General Store, in Brooklyn. Filled with everything from soy sauce made by a third-generation brewer to chef's knives to dried Taiwanesegrown pineapples (a fruit that China suddenly made illegal to import from Taiwan two years ago), the store embodies the autonomous island's identity and represents the physical center of Taiwanese Americans Lisa Cheng Smith and Lillian Lin’s young brand. The duo also oversee a digital marketplace and a wholesale importing business that boasts such clients as JeanGeorges Vongerichten's Tin Building market in New York and Zingerman's in Michigan. In addition, Cheng Smith and…

FOR TAKING THE GUESSWORK OUT OF GIG WORK TALK TO COURIERS AND RIDE share drivers, and you’ll hear the same top complaint: the uncertainty. The pay for app-based gig jobs fluctuates hourly based on demand, and there’s no promise that workers will get enough assignments to earn what they need to on a given day. Bryce Bennett had been hearing about this issue over the past decade while working as an operations executive at Uber and the trucking platform Convoy. In 2021, he launched Solo to help workers track income, mileage, and taxes across platforms via a single dashboard. Last year, he added Smart Schedule, which shows gig workers the most profitable jobs and what they can expect to make in an hour. Users link their gig-work accounts with Solo,…

FOR MYTHOLOGIZING WOMEN’S SPORTS WHEN JORDAN DINWIDDIE WAS asked to create an ad for Nike that would cap Serena Williams's legendary 30-year competitive career with her final U.S. Open last summer, she felt the weight of every Black girl whose parents put a tennis racket in their hands after they saw Williams play It helped to have others with whom to share that burden. “What I loved about working on that was it was a team of predominantly Black women," says Dinwiddie, who has worked on the Nike account at ad agency Wieden+Kennedy for 10 years. “These are incredibly talented people, but we also shared the sentiment of, 'Would my grandma like this even if I didn't make it?'" When “Serena Legacy” aired in September 2022, it garnered 40 million…

FOR HELPING A COMMUNITY RETURN HOME IN OCTOBER 2022, THE PEOPLE OF the northern Nigerian community of Ngarannam moved back to their village after a long, forced exile at the hands of the violent insurgent group Boko Haram, which attacked the village with machetes and machine guns in 2015, driving residen ts away. What they found upon their UN-aided return was both familiar and unexpected: a modest grid of homes for hundreds of families built from local materials and in the vernacular style, but all brand new and with the comfort and amenities of 21st-century buildings, including ventilation and solar power. The design, by Lagos-based architect Tosin Oshinowo and her small firm cmDesign Atelier, is seen by the UN’s Development Programme as a model for restoring villages destroyed by the…

FOR READING THE ECONOMIC TEA LEAVES IF JOEY POLItano had to pick one word to describe our current economic condi tions, it would be messy, he says. The Gen Z economist created the Apricitas newsletter in June 2021 to make sense of that mess and help others do the same. Today, 28,000 readers— including Princeton economist Paul Krugman— pay $15 per month for the data-driven macroeconomic explainers that Politano publishes multiple times a week. “A lot of my work is just trawling through these weird, random government databases or regional [Federal Reserve] banks,” says Politano. Using that data to put together just one chart can take hours, but to Politano— and, evidently, his readers plus nearly 50,000 Twitter followers—it's worth it. In a February post, for example, Politano, a former…