Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

As I uploaded a 1940s photo of my grandpa Max and hit a few buttons in Google’s Veo 3 video generator, I saw a familiar family photo transform from black and white to color. Then, my grandpa stepped out of the photo and walked confidently toward the camera, his army uniform perfectly pressed as his arms swung at the sides of his lanky frame. This is the kind of thing AI lets you do now—virtually bring back the dead. As a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch this weekend highlighted, though, just because we can reanimate our departed loved ones, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should. Grilling the dog The sketch, which The Atlantic has alrea…

At the Exceptional Women Alliance, we help senior women leaders mentor one another through shared insight. As founder, chair, and CEO, I speak with executives shaping how organizations evolve and perform. This month, I spoke with Jennifer Renaud, CEO of Kradle LLC and a board director with more than 30 years experience in digital innovation, commercial strategy, and customer-centered growth. She has guided companies through operating model transformation and post-integration growth. As artificial intelligence becomes embedded across organizations, Renaud believes companies must rethink how decisions are made. Traditional hierarchies, designed for stability and con…

According to director Denis Villeneuve, Dune: Part Three is meant to be watched on a 70-millimeter IMAX screen. “The movie is really meant to be an IMAX experience and to be seen on the biggest screen as possible,” Villeneuve said when the sci-fi epic’s trailer released, also sharing that he and new cinematographer Linus Sandgren shot much of the movie on 65mm film. “That’s the way we dreamed the movie,” he said. But if you live in the United States, that means the intended Dune: Part Three experience is only available in 15 cinemas across the country. 70mm IMAX screenings are few and far between, meaning the demand was sky-high when Warner Bros. surprise dropped …

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of film—and for the most part, critics are falling in the “hate it” camp. The new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel is catching flak as critics say it oversimplifies a complex story of generational trauma and racial tension into a straightforward romance laced with Fennell’s signature shock value (she’s also the director behind Promising Young Woman and Saltburn—infamous bathtub scene and all). But a recent comment from star and producer Margot Robbie takes criticism out of the equation, instead saying that as an artist, critics’ opinions never cross her mind. At a recent panel for Vogue Au…

For the past six years, Josh D’Amaro has overseen experiences, such as theme parks and cruises, at the Walt Disney Company. Starting March 18, he’ll add the rest of the company to his responsibilities. Disney has tapped D’Amaro as its new chief executive officer, taking the reins from Bob Iger and becoming just the ninth person to run the century-old entertainment giant. D’Amaro won a highly competitive race for the job, fending off Disney’s entertainment co-chairman, Dana Walden. Walden will remain with the company in the newly created position of president and chief creative officer. In becoming CEO, D’Amaro also becomes the public face of Disney, a role th…

At a time of broken climate pledges and an economy-wide bearhug of automation and artificial intelligence, the dominant themes of the recently announced 2026 National Design Awards—climate action, sustainability, dedication to craft—are a refreshing reset. Rewarding innovation and impact among U.S.-based designers, the awards are both an honor and a pulse check on the state of design. This year’s group of winners represent a diverse group of practitioners and firms exploring ways that work in design and the arts can counteract environmental catastrophe and re-center the human hand in shaping the future. Honorees include the indigenous underpinnings in the textiles…

For professionals looking to moodboard, but sick of juggling Instagram lists and Pinterest boards, Cosmos arrived in 2023 to woo millions of users in an otherwise crowded market. With a pared-back design, and an algorithm trained on a carefully seeded list of creatives, it topped the Design category in the App Store, and the company reports it’s now used by creative teams at companies including Nike, Apple, and Amazon, who snag over 10 million pieces of content a month from across the internet for their collections. This growth has been enough to raise a $15 million Series A from Matrix Partners, GV, Accel, and Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena, as the company con…

Either you’ve lived it, or you’ve heard about it from friends: the endless job search, featuring hundreds of applications sent. Maybe one or two companies reply . . . that end up being bots. It can feel like your résumé has been sucked into a black hole. And in a way, it has. It’s perhaps been consumed by a “ghost job”—a job listing that looks legitimate, with a full description for a role, maybe even a starting date and a LinkedIn link. There’s a twist, though. The job isn’t real. It’s either an essentially fake listing for a job that doesn’t really exist, or the role isn’t really open. And they make up roughly 40% of job listings, according to a 2024 Resum…

Americans are likely to have spent a record $1 trillion-plus this holiday shopping season alone, and about $5.5 trillion in retail sales in all of 2025, according to estimates by the National Retail Federation. That includes many unhappy returns for retailers: And when it comes back to them, a lot of the $850 billion in returned merchandise is often cheaper to discard than to inspect, sort, and resell—adding millions of tons to landfills every year. “This is a massive ecological problem, as well as a financial problem for these companies,” says Ryan Ryker, CEO of rScan. Based in South Bend, Indiana, the startup has developed software and logistics services to help tra…

OpenAI has prevailed in its fight against Elon Musk. A jury on Monday found that Musk did not file his lawsuit against the AI giant within the statute of limitations. The judge quickly agreed with the jury, making the ruling final. The win for OpenAI came after less than two hours of jury deliberation. Within 20 minutes, the judge, who could have taken up to a month to issue a final ruling in the case, agreed with the advisory jury and issues the final say. Musk had alleged that OpenAI “stole a charity” when it converted into a for-profit company. With the case now behind it, a major obstacle in OpenAI’s path toward becoming a publicly traded company has been…

We can’t afford to maintain the roads we have, so why do we keep building more? The Highway Trust Fund is the primary federal mechanism for surface transportation. It receives revenue mainly from the federal fuel tax (18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon on diesel) plus taxes on tires, heavy vehicles, and some other sources. The fund has two accounts: (1) the Highway Account (road construction, maintenance, and other surface transportation projects), and (2) the much smaller Mass Transit Account. Debates about how Americans should pay for roads are endless: General taxpayer funding, regardless of whether someone drives Per-mile ch…

U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs last month, but government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands. The unemployment rate fell to 4.3%, the Labor Department said Wednesday. The report included major revisions that reduced the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000, weakest since the pandemic year of 2020, and less than half the previously reported 584,000. The job market has been sluggish for months even though the economy is registering solid growth. But the January numbers came in stronger than the 75,000 economists had expected. Healthcare accounted for nearly 82,000, or more than 60%, of last month’s new job…

AMC, the world’s largest movie theater chain and a one-time darling of meme stock traders, said this week that it expects to continue closing more movie theaters than it opens going forward. While the move is sure to disappoint cinephiles, AMC believes that shuttering certain cinemas will ultimately be better for the company’s bottom line. Here’s what you need to know about the upcoming AMC theater closings. What’s happened? On Monday, AMC Entertainment Holdings reported its fourth-quarter 2025 financial results as well as its full-year 2025 results. It’s fair to say the company did not have a blockbuster quarter or year. For the company’s Q4 2025, which en…

When I worked a corporate job, I was often in charge of purchasing decisions. At one company, my team had inherited a lot of homegrown solutions. I saw the limitations of these products and was quick to replace them if the budget allowed. In corporate settings, “build vs. buy” is a well-known decision framework. Companies weigh the cost of developing something in-house against purchasing an outside solution. It’s often simple math: how much time and resources does it take to maintain this internally versus what does it cost to buy or outsource? Solopreneurs face the same decision constantly. However, the stakes are a lot higher when it’s your own time and own mo…

Not driving your car directly into a body of water may sound like common sense—but hey, if Elon Musk says it’s safe, who are we to disagree? A Tesla Cybertruck driver learned the hard way that Musk’s words aren’t gospel when he intentionally drove his car into Grapevine Lake in North Texas on Monday evening, employing the vehicle’s “Wade Mode,” which is intended for use in water up to 32 inches deep. Videos shared on social media show the vehicle moving through the shallow section of the lake, only for his Cybertruck to shut down when he got to deeper waters, leaving the vehicle stranded. In the aftermath, social media users are pointing to posts by Elon Musk that…

What does it mean to be “smart” or “dumb”? Few questions are more deceptively complex. Most of us have strong opinions about what those words mean, but scratch the surface and it becomes clear that “smart” and “dumb” are slippery, subjective constructs. What seems smart to one person may strike another as naive, arrogant, or shortsighted. Worse still, our own perception of what’s smart can shift over time. Yesterday’s clever decision can look like today’s regrettable blunder. Take Jay Gatsby, for instance. His grand plan to reinvent himself, amass a fortune, and win back Daisy once seemed like the height of romantic intelligence; but in the end, it revealed itself…

It’s easy to be charmed by the first delivery robot you see. I was driving with my kids in our Chicago neighborhood when I spotted one out the window last year. It was a cheerful pink color, with an orange flag fluttering at about eye level and four black-and-white wheels. It looked almost like an overgrown toy. When I told the kids that it was labeled “Coco,” they started waving and giggling as it crossed the street. Over the months that followed, spotting Cocos rolling down the sidewalk became one of our favorite games. Then, last fall, another type of delivery robot appeared. This one was green and white, with hardier all-terrain wheels and slow-blinking LED …

Bumble has a new AI assistant: a matchmaker named Bee. The dating app company recently revealed the new dating guru during its fourth quarter earnings call, which was first reported by on TechCrunch. Essentially, Bee’s job is to learn about what users want in a partner through initial private conversations with the user and help them find matches through Bumble’s new “Dates” tool. Her job will eventually get bigger, too. Bee will help plan dates and even ask for (anonymous) feedback about those dates in the same way a close friend with the inside information might offer. In addition to adding the new AI tool, Bumble will be moving away from swiping right (yes) or left…

Indonesia and Malaysia are the first two countries to ban Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool Grok, after the generative AI essentially flooded the social media platform X with sexually explicit, lewd images of young girls and women, made without their consent. Musk folded the generative AI tool into X when he took over Twitter, promising “free speech.” However, critics say it is instead an example of how generative AI, without clear guardrails and regulation, can result in harm. Here’s what to know. What’s happening with Grok? In short, users are typing simple prompts into the AI tool on X to “digitally undress” girls and women, some of which appear t…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Not everything creative needs a prompt. The Web is increasingly flooded with AI-generated images and videos, much of it aimed at kids. Sometimes it’s nice to break free of that synthetic media. As a dad of 10 and 12-year-old daughters, I appreciate resources for kids and families that celebrate human imagination, curiosity, and hands-on exploration. I had a fruitful recent conversation about resources for kids with a fellow dad, Kevin Maguire, who writes the great newsletter The New Fatherhood. If you’re a dad looking…