Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I tested more than 200 educational sites, apps, and services last year. Some were so confusing that I quickly gave up. Others were too costly. A few went out of business. Many were narrowly useful, e.g., for 3D modeling, math, or music. The top-tier tools have consistently been super valuable for me—in my teaching, in my job at the City University of New York, and as a dad of two daughters. To save you the time and effort of sifting through the chaff, I’m sharing the ones I find most useful. Even if you’re not a teacher, these tools m…

In graduate school, my experimental archaeology professor told a student to create a door socket—the hole in a door frame that a bolt slides into—in a slab of sandstone by pecking at it with a rounded stone. After a couple of weeks, the student presented his results to the class. “I pecked the sandstone about 10,000 times,” he said, “and then it broke.” This kind of experience is known as individual learning. It works through trial and error, with lots of each. Also known as reinforcement learning, it is how children, chimpanzees, crows, and AI often learn to do something on their own, such as making a simple tool or solving a puzzle. But individual learning has l…

Below, Rebecca Hinds shares five key insights from her new book, Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done. Rebecca is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. Her research is consistently featured in publications like Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Wired. What’s the big idea? If you’re tired of watching your organization suffer under the weight of bad, broken, bloated meetings, there are proven ways to replace that slow-motion dumpster fire with calendars that actually move work forward. By treating meetings like a product, you can design the be…

Over the past two years, AI has been framed as a productivity engine, a cost-cutting lever, an infrastructure race, and, on more dramatic days, as a civilizational rupture. Boards demand AI road maps. CEOs announce “AI-first” agendas. Entire divisions are reorganized around tools whose capabilities shift every quarter. But beneath the noise lies a quieter and far more consequential reality: AI does not create strategic clarity. It reveals whether you had any to begin with. I’ve argued previously that the next layer of advantage in corporate AI will not come from owning infrastructure, but from building better internal models of how your business world actually wo…

When I first started my freelance writing business, I assumed I should find clients who would put me on retainer. The appeal seemed obvious: steady income for me, predictable working relationship for the client. I even knew how to structure retainer agreements based on my prior roles at marketing agencies. But a few months into a solo career, I was willing to take any work that came my way. Which was primarily project-based work, not retainers. I quickly built a business based on ad hoc assignments from many clients, rather than relying on a few. The conventional wisdom would say that I was “doing it wrong.” Every solopreneur forum, coach, and freelancer communi…

A triceratops skeleton that stood in a Wyoming museum for decades will be auctioned off, a rare instance of a museum-exhibited dinosaur going to the auction block just as the market for the prehistoric giants has hit record highs. The fossil, dubbed “Trey,” will be open for bidding from March 17 to 31 on Joopiter, an online auction platform founded by Grammy-winning artist and producer Pharrell Williams. It has a pre-auction estimate of $4.5 million to $5.5 million. Dating back more than 66 million years to the late Cretaceous period, Trey was discovered near Lusk, Wyoming, in 1993 by Lee Campbell and the late Allen Graffham, a commercial paleontologist who made n…

Anthropic has announced a new “memory” tool that allows Claude users to copy over their chats from other AI chatbots, giving those who want to switch over from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot an easy way. The new memory tool is available to paid Claude subscribers only and enables them to import saved memories from rival AI chatbots, and comes as more people seem to be turning toward Claude and away from ChatGPT over growing concerns about how, and to what end, the U.S. military will use AI chatbots. (While OpenAI signed a deal with the Pentagon, Anthropic said no.) As Fast Company previously reported, despite Pentagon demands to use AI assistants for “all lawful pur…

Below, Liz Tran shares five key insights from her new book, AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing. Liz is a leadership coach to the CEOs and founders of some of the world’s fastest-growing companies. Her work has been featured by the Today Show, The New Yorker, the New York Times, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and other outlets. What’s the big idea? The most consequential divide in modern society is not economic or political. It’s psychological. The gap between people who can adapt to constant change (high Agility Quotient) and those who feel undone by it is shaping everything from workplaces to mental health. Listen to the audio ve…

Forward March? The initial market movements on Monday seem to indicate that’s the case, at least for crypto. On Monday, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) was up more than 5%, jumping to more than $69,000 as of 12 p.m. ET from around $65,500 on Sunday afternoon. Likewise, Ethereum (ETh) was up around 6% while XRP rose about 3%. The CoinDesk 20, a crypto market index, is also up around 5%. The broad increase in crypto values was a reversal from a downslide that cryptocurrency markets had been seeing in the lead-up to the United States and Israel launching attacks on Iran on Saturday. On Saturday, after news of the attacks broke, Bitcoin values fell to near $63,000…

With nearly 40,000 locations in over 100 countries, tens of millions of people worldwide regularly eat McDonald’s iconic burgers. But in an Instagram post that’s blowing up the internet, company CEO Chris Kempczinski appears less-than-thrilled to be eating one himself. The video was posted to Kempczinski’s Instagram account a month ago, but found new life over the weekend on platforms like X and TikTok, with many users wondering if it’s “intentionally cringe,” saying that Kempczinski looks “uncomfortable” or commenting how he “looks like he’s gonna hurl.” “From this video, it seems likely the CEO of McDonald’s has never eaten McDonald’s before,” one user wrote. …

No one wants to be in a bad movie—but imagine a movie studio casting you in new movies after you die, without your consent. That may have once seemed something out of a Black Mirror episode, but it’s becoming a real issue, and many think current legal protections don’t go nearly far enough. In 2024, the late Ian Holm appeared, in digital form, in Alien: Romulus four years after his death, a move some critics decried as “digital necromancy.” Early this year, producers partnered with a British artificial intelligence startup to re-create the voice of Alain Dorval, who spent decades dubbing Sylvester Stallone classics like Rocky and Rambo in French. The plan was scrapped af…

While much has been discussed about what the AI takeover means for those in entry-level roles, it seems even CEOs aren’t exempt. Uber employees have created an AI version of their company’s top executive, according to the company’s CEO. “One of my team members told me that some teams have built a Dara AI, you know, so that they basically make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me,” Dara Khosrowshahi said on a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett. “You can imagine, like, you know, by the time something comes to me, there’s been a prep and a meeting of the slide deck has been beautifully hone…

Reality is melting away before our eyes. Identity spoofing against older adults alone grew by 8x between 2020 and 2024, driven in part by convincing AI impersonations of friends and loved ones. It’s a problem costing people in the U.S. nearly half a billion dollars a year with no end in sight. Which is why a pair of design studios teamed up on a provocative solution that starts with a real-life handshake. Called Quartz, it’s a ring that adds friends to your network by literally shaking hands. And from there, it gatekeeps your online communications by proving you’re alive, proving you know the person you’re talking to, and proving provenance through encrypted channels. …

Australians dramatically reduced their water usage during the Millennium Drought in the 2000s. It was one of the longest recorded droughts in Australian history, and in some places where sprinklers weren’t allowed, people watered their plants and grass with shower water. Like turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth and using shower timers, keeping buckets in the shower became a part of daily life during the drought. Now a newly designed device seeks to update that water-saving impulse with a watering can specifically designed for the bathroom. The 17-by-17-inch Sevas water catcher is about the size of a bathroom scale, and holds 5 liters of water. The…

The rise of full-body MRI scans has been framed as a victory for consumer empowerment. Skip the referrals. Skip the waiting. Pay out of pocket and finally see what is happening inside your body, before it’s too late. For many, especially women, these scans are compelling. They offer agency in a healthcare system that often feels slow, dismissive, and reactive, rather than preventive. What many women would be surprised to learn, however, is despite the name, many full-body MRI scans do not reliably screen for breast cancer, the most common cancer in women. Women make roughly 80% of healthcare purchasing decisions in the United States. They spend more out of pocket …

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. Fourteen years ago, Graham Dugoni decided to start a movement to address what he viewed as the deleterious effects of rampant smartphone usage. “What I saw was kind of impending nihilism, the sense that everyone is going to be inundated with media, and it’s going to hollow out the meaning in y…