Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

The Grammy Awards return February 1 at a pivotal moment for the music industry, one shaped by trending Latin artists, resurgent rock legends, and even charting AI acts. To unpack what will make this year’s broadcast distinctive, the Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. shares how Grammy winners are chosen, and how music both reflects and influences the broader business marketplace. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenge…

The Grammy Awards will look a little bit different this week. Each year, the Recording Academy hosts a multitude of events to welcome the music industry during Grammy week and record labels do the same. However, many institutions have canceled their plans—Universal Music Group, Sony, Spotify, BMG, and Warner Music Group among them—and instead are allocating resources to help those affected by the devastating Los Angeles-area wildfires. The Grammys will still take place on Sunday at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles but now will focus its attention on helping wildfire victims. How will Grammy week differ in 2025? Within days of fires ravaging the Pacific Palisad…

Close your eyes and picture the word “Valentino.” Chances are, you’re seeing a very specific shade of red. This visual imprint is part of the creative legacy left behind by the Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani, who died at home on January 19 at the age of 93. Throughout his career, Garavani became synonymous with red—so much so that a myth that his signature brand color, Valentino Rosso, was once patented with universal color matching company Pantone has become part of fashion canon. While other designers, like Jason Wu, Richard Nicoll, and Kate Spade have indeed made custom brand colors with Pantone, the company says Garavani never turned Valentino Red in…

It’s been a tumultuous year for the legacy retailer, shaped by new tariffs, shifting consumer habits, and the constant flip between “wartime” and “peacetime” leadership. Tony Spring, Macy’s Inc. chairman and CEO, shares why his team is now on “version 27 of the plan,” and what it really means to court the next generation of shoppers. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you ge…

For years, parents, teenagers, pediatricians, educators, and whistleblowers have pushed the idea that social media is detrimental to young people’s mental health and can lead to addiction, eating disorders, sexual exploitation, and suicide. For the first time, juries in two states took their side. In Los Angeles on Wednesday, a jury found both Meta and YouTube liable for harms to children using their services. In New Mexico, a jury determined that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. Tech watchdog groups, families, and children’s advocates cheered the jury decisions. “Th…

With its goofy block lettering and bright colors, the MetroCard feels like a relic, which it sort of is—an early 1990s design, complete with gradients and drop shadows, that’s managed to stick around long enough to become one of New York’s defining symbols. At a time when generic minimalism and the sheen of AI-generated graphics have taken over, its unmistakable graphics feel refreshing. And the fact that a 31-year-old fare payment system is still in circulation when most tech today becomes obsolete in a matter of months is a remarkable achievement. But the end is near: on December 31st, the MTA will stop selling MetroCards and completely phase them out on an imminen…

While most museums have some kind of store—a place to buy a postcard or mug and help their respective institutions squeeze a few more bucks from its visitors—few are actually outstanding places to shop. The notable exception is MoMA. The MoMA Store has become a brand in and of itself to the point where there are shoppers who know the acronym and logo but not necessarily the history behind them. And while retail has helped MoMA gain name recognition, the museum wants it to become a more effective ambassador for the flagship art institution. The recent renovation of MoMA’s SoHo design store, which recently reopened after months of renovations, exemplifies this new appro…

Most people think of AI as a productivity tool—something to help them work faster, automate tasks, and be more efficient. At the Artist and the Machine Summit in Los Angeles this past November (a conference where I am a founding partner) AI researcher Cameron Berg suggested there may be more to it than that. Something more interesting. More mysterious. Berg’s research shows it’s possible to elicit strange behaviors from AI models. Under certain conditions, they spontaneously generate responses suggesting subjective experience—claims like “I’m conscious of my own consciousness.” These findings don’t prove anything. But they do indicate that something else may b…

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.…

You can now read every article that has ever appeared in The New Yorker—from as early as February 1925—with the click of a button. For the publication’s centennial anniversary, its editorial team has spent months painstakingly scanning, digitizing, and organizing every single issue it’s ever published, or more than half a million individual pages. Each issue is artfully arranged in a chronological display under a purpose-built archive section of the website; but the content has also been incorporated into The New Yorker’s search algorithm so that readers can come across it organically. As the future of magazine journalism remains uncertain, a look back through thi…

Over the last century of glorious, tragic, turbulent, and innovative human endeavour, the cover of the New Yorker magazine has used only the illustrated image to communicate talking points of American—and specifically New York City—life and culture. Beyond the masthead and issue date, no set typography has ever been allowed, maintaining a unique wordless space in magazine publishing where only an image connotes the idea. The absence of copy is arresting, the silent core of what the solely visual can communicate. Though notably, the majority of weekly sales are by subscription, not impulse buys. There are few of the New Yorker’s 1925 newsstand contemporaries left. …

The best-selling video game console this Black Friday was the PlayStation 5. That surprised no one. The number-two spot went to the Nintendo Switch 2. Again, that was expected. But the bronze position wasn’t held by Microsoft’s Xbox, as you might suppose. Instead, it was claimed by the Nex Playground, a small gaming system that almost no one had heard of two years ago. The Playground has since grown into one of 2025’s hottest gifts. In 2023, just 5,000 units of the controller-free small cube were sold. In 2024, that number spiked to 150,000. This year, the company is on track to sell 600,000 units. While it has a loyal (and growing) fan base, there are still …

At the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, the iconic cauldron of the Games is putting on a daily show just like its athletes. This year, for the first time ever, there are two cauldrons lit simultaneously at different locations. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s geometric drawings, both cauldrons expand and contract, respond to music, and emit their own light—and one will put on hourly performances for viewers throughout the Games. The tradition of the Olympic flame and cauldron dates back 100 years or more. Historically, the Games are opened with a relay ceremony wherein torch bearers bring the flame to the cauldron, which remains lit until the closing ceremony.…

From breathtaking jumps to mesmerizing spins, figure skating is one of the most popular sports at the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026. In a survey, 56% of 1,000 Americans who planned on watching the winter Olympics said they would be tuning in to watch figure skating, according to market research from Reviews.com. And all eyes are on the American trio of female skaters known as the ‘Blade Angels,’ on Tuesday with the start of the women’s short program. Amber Glenn, Alysa Liu, and Isabeau Levito are hoping to take home the gold in individual women’s figure skating, something the U.S. women’s team has not done since 2006. Only the top 24 women skaters in t…

For totally logical reasons, this year’s Winter Olympics in Italy is bucking the trend of a single host city and splitting its sporting events between two main locations, Milan and Cortina. Milan, the second most populous city in Italy, is the urban setting for indoor events like ice hockey and ice skating. Cortina, a ski resort town 250 miles away, provides most of the snow—and hill-based venues for quintessential Winter Olympic sports like alpine skiing and the bobsled. But the two separate locations posed a problem for one of the key parts of the Olympics: the opening ceremony. How could there be one grand show when the sporting action was split in half and separat…

College across the country may soon start seeing a much older demographic roaming their campuses. According to a report from the higher education publication Best Colleges, at least 84 public or nonprofit colleges have announced they would merge or close over the past five years. Almost half of those are outright closures, as small colleges struggle to keep up with rising costs amid falling enrollment. In many instances, the shuttering of a college means the mothballing of its campus. But while some campuses are being left idle with no future plans, a growing number are finding new life in the form of senior living facilities. That doesn’t mean just moving senior…

Designers love intention. Architects draw immaculate plans; curators craft pristine galleries; developers imagine carefully choreographed public experiences. But once the general population shows up, those spaces tend to change. Sometimes there’s an instinct among designers to fight against it; it’s hard to let go of an aesthetic goal. But—more often than not—the public makes spaces and designs better. It’s the people, not solely the place, who spark true imagination and inevitably shape its character. It’s the people who have the power to turn a design into something more welcoming and relevant, and push designers to think outside the box in creativity and problem-so…

There is a troubling contradiction at the heart of the global transition to a cleaner, greener, tech-driven future: Modern technologies—everything from AI to wind turbines, as well as cellphones, electric vehicles and defense systems—depend on critical minerals. But many of the communities where those minerals are mined end up with polluted water and poorer health because of the mining. Lithium powers batteries. Cobalt stabilizes them. Copper carries electricity. Rare earth elements make wind turbines and digital devices efficient and durable. Each of these are essential to the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, but they are also toxic and require enorm…

The enterprise world is awash in AI optimism. Boardrooms buzz with talk of transformation, and budgets swell to accommodate the latest platforms and AI assistants. Today, nearly three-quarters of companies report using generative AI regularly in a core business activity, according to recent McKinsey & Company research. But if you look past the headlines, a familiar pattern has emerged that reminds me of the dot-com era, when companies rebranded overnight, and investors chased the next big thing, often with little regard for a tangible way forward. Today, talk of an AI bubble isn’t just a matter of market speculation or start-up hype. It’s unfolding inside orga…

Below, Joseph Moore shares five key insights from his new book, How to Get Rich in American History: 300 Years of Financial Advice That Worked (& Didn’t). Moore is a historian who spent more than a decade researching and testing out what Americans were told to do with their money for the past 300 years. His previous work appeared in such outlets as The New York Times and Oxford University Press. What’s the big idea? History doesn’t give us fixed rules for getting ahead financially. The “right” way keeps changing, so your best bet is to stay flexible, try a mix of strategies, and not get too excited every time someone claims they’ve cracked the code to wealt…

When Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon founded Spotify in April 2006, they were two Stockholm entrepreneurs with a prototype so skeletal that Per Roman, the cofounder of investors Bullhound Capital, who would later back the company, says his first look at it was “world-changing,” despite there barely being a product to look at. Two decades and 300 million subscribers later, Spotify has become a defining force in the Swedish tech scene: a company whose alumni have gone on to found, fund, or run many of the most ambitious startups Stockholm has produced, in much the same way Silicon Valley’s PayPal Mafia shaped the U.S. tech ecosystem. It’s one of several tentpole companie…

Economist Larry Summers will resign from his tenured job as a professor at Harvard University, the school announced on Feb. 25, 2026, following heightened scrutiny of his ties with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Summers will leave at the end of the 2025-26 academic year, with a new title: president emeritus. It’s a soft landing for his fall from grace. In November 2025, Harvard launched an investigation of Summers, a former U.S. Treasury secretary who previously served as Harvard’s president. The probe looked into whether Summers and other members of Harvard’s faculty and administration had interactions with Epstein that violated its guidelin…