Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Below, Judd Kessler shares five key insights from his new book, Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want. Judd is an award-winning professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research and writing have been featured in leading media, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review, among others. For his work on organ allocation, Kessler was named one of the “30 under 30” in Law and Policy by Forbes. He has been researching market design for the past 15 years. What’s the big idea? Life is full of hidden markets quietly deciding who gets what—and…

I just launched a wine app, which means I’ve spent the last six months thinking obsessively about one thing: how do you remove friction from decisions that shouldn’t be hard? The answer taught me something bigger about rituals, and why so many of the ones we create at the end and beginning of the year fail us. Here’s my founder story, but from the wine aisle. Last December, I was standing in front of a wall of bottles, paralyzed. Not because I don’t like wine. I do. I was paralyzed because the entire experience was designed to make me feel small. The sommelier energy, the gatekeeping language, the implied message that if I couldn’t name the terroir, I didn’t d…

Porsche is recalling 173,538 vehicles in the U.S. as the rearview camera image may not display when the vehicle is placed in reverse, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Wednesday. This is one of the largest single safety recalls issued by Porsche Cars North America in recent years, following a 2022 recall pertaining to missing headlight adjustment screw covers that affected 222,858 vehicles. The current recall affects certain 2019-2025 Cayenne, Cayenne E-Hybrid, 2020-2025 911, Taycan, 2024-2025 Panamera, and 2025 Panamera E-Hybrid models. The regulator flagged that the vehicles fail to comply with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety S…

Below, Ben Swire shares five key insights from his new book, Safe Danger: An Unexpected Method for Sparking Connection, Finding Purpose, and Inspiring Innovation. Ben is a former Design Lead at the innovation firm IDEO and co-founder of Make Believe Works, a team-building company that uses creative activities to accelerate connection, deepen trust, and fuel collaboration. His methods have helped organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to public school districts, build healthy, productive workplace cultures. What’s the big idea? Most of us think of risks as a threat to our safety. But what if they’re the best way to create the kind of safety that matters most—trust, cr…

The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage fell to its lowest level of 2025 this week, an encouraging sign for prospective home buyers. The average long-term mortgage rate dipped to 6.15% from 6.18% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Wednesday. That’s the lowest average long-term rate since October 3, 2024, when it dipped to 6.12% before shooting back up. One year ago, the rate averaged 6.91%. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, fell this week to 5.44% from 5.50% the previous week. A year ago, it averaged 6.13%, Freddie Mac said. Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from t…

It’s the sort of thing you might not notice until it really matters, but the U.S. Postal Service recently changed how it defines the “postmark” on a piece of mail—warning that the postmark date is not a reliable indicator of when you actually mailed something. If you’re the sort of person who waits until the last minute to send time-sensitive mail, that means you’ll need to stand in line at your local post office and request a manual postmark when dropping off your mail. While the way mail is postmarked hasn’t undergone some major shift recently, the postal service set out earlier this year to clarify earlier what a postmark means and how the process works. B…

Zohran Mamdani was a trailblazing candidate whom many in his city of 8 million — some with hope, some with trepidation — expect to be a disruptive New York mayor. The democratic socialist’s plans for his first day in office on Thursday nod to his politics and priorities, without straying far from his predecessors with a sober official midnight oath-taking followed by a more celebratory ceremony in the afternoon. New York law spells out that four-year mayoral terms start on the January 1 after elections. To avoid any ambiguity about who’s in charge of America’s most populous city, it has become a tradition to hold a small midnight swearing-in. Mamdani has chose…

Auckland rang in 2026 with a downtown fireworks display launched from New Zealand’s tallest structure, Sky Tower, making it the first major city to greet the new year at a celebration dampened by rain. South Pacific countries are the first to bid farewell to 2025. Clocks strike midnight in Auckland, a population of 1.7 million, 18 hours before the famous ball drops in New York’s Times Square. The five-minute display involved 3,500 fireworks launched from various floors of the 240-meter (787-foot) Sky Tower. Smaller community events were canceled across New Zealand’s North Island on Wednesday due to forecasts of rain and possible thunderstorms. Australia plans defiant c…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. CEOs deal with many challenges, but apparently their overall health and fitness isn’t among them. Some 93% of CEOs surveyed by corporate wellness platform Wellhub rate their overall well-being as excellent or good. In contrast, the same study, released earlier this year, finds that only…

There are two sorts of people in this world: Those who think it sounds like fun to brave the elements for hours on end to watch the ball drop at midnight in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, and then there’s the rest of us. It’s become a time-honored tradition for millions of people to crowd into a few blocks of New York to celebrate a new year, and some new features await revelers this year. A larger ball will be dropped in the annual countdown to midnight, weighing in at 12,000-plus pounds and adorned with 5,200 crystals and LED lights. And there’s some special red, white, and blue confetti among the nearly three tons to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. …

In cities across North America, the best and most exciting public spaces can increasingly be found near the water. Park spaces on and along seashores and riverfronts are in a kind of renaissance right now, with large and small cities alike opening major waterfront parks over the past few years. 2025 was especially active. Cities brought big, ambitious park designs to the water’s edge, adding valuable recreation space, ecological services, and engines for urban regeneration. Here are four of the best waterfront parks that opened in 2025. Seattle’s Waterfront Park More than 15 years in the works, Seattle’s new park is a true reconnection of the city wit…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. NotebookLM is the most useful free AI tool of 2025. It has twin superpowers. You can use it to find, analyze, and search through a collection of documents, notes, links, or files. You can then use NotebookLM to visualize your material as a slide deck, infographic, report— even an audio or video summary.Subscribe How to set up a notebook Pick a purpose. Start a new notebook for a work project or a learning goal. Examples: I created a notebook to organize materials for the new online bilingual MA program we’re developing at the CUNY…

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…

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to pay a $10 million civil penalty as part of a settlement to resolve allegations it violated child privacy laws, the Justice Department said on Tuesday. A federal court order in the case involving Disney Worldwide Services Inc and Disney Entertainment Operations LLC also bars Disney from operating on YouTube in a manner that violates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the department said. The order requires Disney to create a program that will ensure it properly complies with the privacy law on YouTube in the future, it added. The law requires websites, apps, and other online services aimed at children under 13 to…

The U.S. Federal Reserve agreed to cut interest rates at its December meeting only after a deeply nuanced debate about the risks facing the U.S. economy right now, according to minutes of the latest two-day session. Even some of those who supported the rate cut acknowledged “the decision was finely balanced or that they could have supported keeping the target range unchanged,” given the different risks facing the U.S. economy, according to the minutes released on Tuesday. In economic projections released after the December 9-10 meeting, six officials outright opposed a cut and two of that group dissented as voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee. …

In a year defined by companies pouring shocking sums of money into AI, one more deal squeaked in just before 2026. Meta just made a play on Manus, the buzzy Singapore-based company with Chinese roots that turned heads earlier this year when it showed its AI agents executing complex tasks, like hunting for real estate and sorting through resumes. The deal is sure to turn heads too. Manus and its parent company Butterfly Effect are now based in Singapore but were founded in China – a country with a fraught relationship to the U.S tech industry – and maintain operations there. Facebook’s parent company will reportedly pay more than $2 billion to acquire the startup,…