Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

In late January, like Dr. Frankenstein pulling the knife switch to jolt his monster alive, entrepreneur Matt Schlicht flipped the digital switch on his vibe-coded social network, Moltbook, unleashing his own monster into the world. The platform made headlines for being the first social media site expressly for AI agents, not humans. But for me, its significance goes way beyond that. Moltbook is a harbinger—the first real sign that a new type of internet is upon us. No, not a dead internet. Something much more epochal: a zombie internet that could have devastating consequences for advertising, social media, and the human web in the years ahead. Or, perhaps it could be ou…

Turkish authorities have detained 1,133 people across Turkey since the start of protests five days ago against the detention of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on Monday. The detention last Wednesday of Imamoglu, President Tayyip Erdogan’s main political rival, has triggered the biggest street protests in Turkey in more than a decade. On Sunday, a court jailed him, pending trial, on corruption charges that he denies. Despite bans on street gatherings in many cities, the mostly peaceful anti-government demonstrations continued for a fifth consecutive night on Sunday, with hundreds of thousands taking part. Yerlikaya said 123 …

The record-breaking Falcons Flight roller coaster starts out slow, but don’t be fooled. Seconds into the ride at the new Six Flags Qiddiya City in Saudi Arabia, passengers are jolted into a high-speed journey that ascends mountainsides, passes through dark tunnels, and then does it all over again. The ride reaches a height of nearly 640 feet, lasts for nearly 3.5 minutes, and travels more than 2.6 miles. It’s the largest, longest, and fastest roller coaster in the world, reaching peak speeds of about 155 mph. To make it, a European design and manufacturing company used the most powerful electro-magnetic propulsion system on the market. Though Saudi Arabia just kil…

A variety show that’s still revered for its absurdist, slapstick humor debuted 50 years ago. It starred an irreverent band of characters made of foam and fleece. Long after “The Muppet Show”‘s original 120-episode run ended in 1981, the legend and legacy of Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo and other creations concocted by puppeteer and TV producer Jim Henson have kept on growing. Thanks to the Muppets’ film franchise and the wonders of YouTube, the wacky gang is still delighting, and expanding, its fan base. As a scholar of popular culture, I believe that the Muppets’ reign, which began in the 1950s, has helped shape global culture, including educational television.…

Our phones are making us unhappy, but I’m not sure cutting myself off from humanity’s universe of information with a dumbphone is the answer. It’s kind of like how we know walking is healthier than driving, but it’s a moot point when the average person lives 27 miles from their workplace. However, maybe our smartphones don’t need a lobotomy. Maybe they just need to respect our boundaries. This is an idea explored in a new concept called Aperture, by the London studio Special Projects. It’s a case that crops your smartphone into a small square of your screen when you flip your case over, revealing a series of smart widgets. By the same firm that developed ideas like di…

“This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.” The day’s forecast called for high winds, but around midday in downtown Manhattan, it felt like a perfect spring day. The sun shone high in the sky last Tuesday as people gathered on the sidewalk around the corner from City Hall. Municipal employees mingled about, chatting excitedly. The cause for celebration wasn’t the weather—but a sleek, modernist-looking shed on the sidewalk where there had once stood a vacant newsstand. The structure may not have looked like much, but it had been years in the making. Since 2021, Los Deliveristas Unidos—a union of app-based delivery workers—h…

Burnout is best understood as a work-related psychological syndrome arising from sustained emotional and interpersonal strain. It has three core components: emotional exhaustion, characterized by chronic affective depletion; depersonalization, in which work becomes alienating and psychologically distancing rather than engaging; and reduced professional efficacy, marked by declining confidence, poorer self-appraisals, and a loss of self-worth. Importantly, burnout is not the same as stress. Rather, it is a pattern of responses to work stressors, and can also be distinguished from depression by its work-specific context. Burnout is best assessed via self-report questionna…

When it comes to podcasting, it’s Joe Rogan’s world. The Joe Rogan Experience was the most popular podcast of 2025, according to Apple’s just-released rankings. This is the first year Rogan has topped the Apple charts. Last year, he took the bronze medal, behind The Daily and Crime Junkie (both of which still made the Top 10 this year). Two years ago, he didn’t make the list (thanks to an exclusivity agreement with Spotify, signed in 2020—where he also currently holds the No. 1 spot). Rogan’s podcast certainly had head-turning guests this year, including a much-listened-to interview with Elon Musk. The Daily, from The New York Times, was Apple’s second-most popula…

Nearly four months after wildfires reduced thousands of Los Angeles-area homes to rubble and ash, some residents are starting to rebuild. In the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, construction workers recently began placing wooden beams to frame a house on a lot where only a charred fireplace remains standing. In the seaside city of Malibu and foothills neighborhood of Altadena, many land parcels where homes once stood are being cleared of debris. Hundreds of homeowners have sought city or county approval for new home designs and other permits to eventually rebuild or repair damaged homes, though few have gotten the green light to break ground. Some 17,000 homes, business…

Every January, millions of people set ambitious New Year’s resolutions. They do this with genuine enthusiasm, hoping to transform their lives. Yet research indicates that by January 8th, just one week into the year, a quarter of these resolutions have already failed. By the end of the year, most individuals return to their familiar patterns, and the promises they made to themselves are often abandoned. My life doesn’t permit me the luxury of being part of that statistic. I operate at the intersection of three distinct and demanding identities: a PhD scholar at Oxford researching outer space financing, the founder of a career advancement platform called Network Capital…

America is in an overstock and returns crisis. Every year 8.4 billion pounds of products are returned to online sellers, according to the National Retail Federation. The typical solution from retailers is to send the roughly 17% of their inventory made up of returns to a landfill, regardless of the condition of the products. It’s a problem that sellers have little incentive to solve. Since dumping product can be written off as the cost of doing business in profit and loss statements, companies don’t invest in a complex reverse supply chain or inspect items for potential resale value. But recommerce site Rebel just raised a $25 million series B round to fuel its wo…

French prosecutors raided the offices of social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into allegations including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes. They have also summoned billionaire owner Elon Musk for questioning. X and Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI also face intensifying scrutiny from Britain’s data privacy regulator, which opened formal investigations into how they handled personal data when they developed and deployed Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok. Grok, which was built by xAI and is available through X, sparked global outrage last month after it pumped out a torrent of sexualized nonconsensua…

Taking stock of the once red-hot agtech sector, analysts have called 2025 a “transition year,” a polite way of saying crop prices slid, Bayer traded near a 20-year low, John Deere reported less than half of its 2023 income, and almost two dozen startups in once-frothy areas like indoor farming, drones, and insect-based ingredients collapsed. It was enough for a managing director of ag giant Syngenta’s VC arm to jokingly “thank God” it had avoided investing in alt-protein, carbon credits, and vertical farming—though he allowed that the downturn offered “good lessons” for smart entrepreneurs eyeing “a second wave.” Fast Company’s 2026 list of the most innovative companies…

As news worsens, the potential for comedy rises. No one understands this inverse relationship better than the team behind The Onion, which has channeled today’s dystopian political slide into banger headlines (“The President Spends Entire U.K. Trip Trying To Figure Out Where He Knows Prince Andrew From”). The news site has attracted nearly 54,000 subscribers since its relaunch last year, and is on track to generate $6 million in revenue in 2025, according to The Wall Street Journal. Which is why it seemed particularly comical when, in May, the satirical news outlet issued a press release announcing a “foray into advertising” in order to “expand its marketplace dominance…

To observe a SpaceX launch in person, as I did in February, is to witness a stunning and galvanic event. Two of the company’s greatest feats occur in quick succession. First, there’s the launch itself, with the rocket ferrying its payload—perhaps its own Starlink internet satellites, or ones for other businesses and the government, or even humans—and painting the night sky a blazing orange. Then there’s the second act, one that changed spaceflight forever. It begins with a wary silence, and then, suddenly, there’s the rocket’s first-stage booster returning to Earth, announcing itself with a sonic boom and ferrying down from the heavens. It descends, before hovering and t…

Artificial intelligence has shifted from an experiment to an expectation. Boards push CEOs about ROI. CEOs launch enterprise rollouts. Leaders invest in tools, platforms, and governance. Yet adoption still stalls. Work-arounds spread. Risk grows. Value lags. The failure rarely sits with the technology. The breakdown sits in adoption design. Many organizations treat AI as an IT rollout or a standard change initiative. Tools gain approval. Policies circulate. Training launches. What’s missing is the rigor leaders apply to external products. Employees receive tools without a clear value proposition. Managers face delivery pressure without added capacity. Governance favor…

Robinhood is betting that its customers want to trade on absolutely everything. On Tuesday, the popular stock-trading app unveiled a slate of updates to its prediction markets business, aggressively expanding into sports. Now, Robinhood users can trade contracts tied to specific professional football players’ performances, as well as pre-packaged combos for individual games. Early next year, customers will be able to combine up to ten outcomes — such as winners, spreads, and totals — into a single, custom-built contract. Robinhood’s news site, Sherwood, is also launching a new sports newsletter, Scoreboard. Eventually, Robinhood plans to launch contracts that span not…

Telehealth company Hims & Hers dropped its plan to offer a knockoff version of the weight-loss pill Wegovy on Saturday — two days after it announced the new drug and one day after the Food and Drug Administration threatened to restrict access to the ingredients needed to copy popular weight-loss medications. Hims had said Thursday that it would offer a compounded version of the new Wegovy pill that drugmaker Novo Nordisk just began selling last month. Novo immediately threatened to sue Hims, and then the FDA said Friday that it plans to take decisive steps to limit access to the active ingredients in popular GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic and Zepbound. Hims’ own w…

Shares in major quantum computer companies were on the rise again in premarket trading on Tuesday, highlighting what has been a volatile couple of weeks for a nascent industry that continues to captivate. Here’s what’s driving the latest news: D-Wave announces Advantage2 By far, Palo Alto-based D-Wave Quantum Inc (NYSE: QBTS) is seeing the biggest boost in premarket trading, with its stock up more than 12% as of this writing. This boost follows a 7% increase in D-Wave shares on Monday. Investors are likely excited by news on Tuesday morning in which D-Wave announced the general availability of its sixth-generation Advantage2 quantum computing system, which the…

Five students at U.S. military academies and three each from Yale University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the 32 American winners named Sunday as 2026 Rhodes scholars. The group includes students focused on housing, health outcomes, sustainability, and prison reentry programs. They include: Alice L. Hall of Philadelphia, a varsity basketball player at MIT who also serves as student body president. Hall, who has collaborated with a women’s collective in Ghana on sustainability tools, plans to study engineering. Sydney E. Barta of Arlington, Virginia, a Paralympian and member of the track team at Stanford Universit…

I am an introverted person who feels shy at events. Early in my career, I found conferences to be so overwhelming that I’d sometimes just hide in the bathroom, go into an anxious spiral of fear and guilt, and then try to convince myself to get out and talk to at least one person. Watching how other people seemed to enjoy these events and easily talk to everyone made me think something was wrong with me. The truth is that 36% of young people have anxiety. But knowing that didn’t make networking any easier. However, networking is an important skill, and connections help drive your career and bring new opportunities. Research shows that people who network often tend to h…

Authenticity is currency. You can spend it recklessly and go broke, or invest it strategically and build wealth. Most leaders are choosing bankruptcy without even realizing it. Right now, workplaces are debating authenticity. Some call “bring your whole self to work” a dangerous myth that punishes marginalized employees. Others claim it’s the secret to engagement and retention. Both are right—and both are missing something. Unfiltered authenticity without skill can be destructive. And yes, marginalized employees pay a higher price when they try to be authentic in systems that weren’t built for them. But your team already knows when you’re faking it. Th…

McDonald’s limited-time McRib sandwich is a cultural icon. And like any item of its ilk, it’s divisive. On the one hand, the saucy, vaguely rib-esque boneless pork sandwich has a fan base so dedicated that it’s inspired its own Reddit megathread, merch, and a website called the McRib Locator. But on the other, the McRib has long been critiqued for its off-putting form factor and dubious ingredients. Now, a new class action lawsuit is asking the question that’s always plagued the sandwich: Is the McRib actually rib? The lawsuit, which was filed on December 23, 2025, in the Northern District of Illinois, alleges that McDonald’s has purposefully been misleading cust…