Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Barnes & Noble has an incredible comeback story. In 2019, the American bookstore chain was facing bankruptcy, but it’s since returned to a position of growth: In 2025, the franchise opened 67 new stores across the United States, and 60 more are slated to open throughout 2026. But recent comments from the brand’s CEO have some social media users convinced Barnes & Noble is wasting all its goodwill. James Daunt, who took over the company in 2019, shared how he plans for Barnes & Noble to adapt to the AI era—and those plans have some book lovers rethinking their relationship to the brand. “We will stock them”: Barnes & Noble opens its arms to AI …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the Pandemic Housing Boom, rapid home price appreciation supercharged fix-and-flip activity. The 2022 mortgage rate shock ended that run and caused the biggest pullback in home flipping activity since 2007. Profit margins compressed, days on market increased, and many newer investors exited the space. However, over the past couple of years, home flipping activity has stabilized around 2019 levels. The first LendingOne–ResiClub Fix-and-Flip Survey in Q1 2025 showed a market recalibrating to that new reality. The latest results tell a simi…

Chipotle is going for gold again with the return of its gold-foil burritos for the 2026 Winter Olympics. Starting January 15, Chipotle will offer a few Olympian-inspired menu items on the Chipotle app and online. Then in February, Chipotle will wrap every burrito in gold. For Chipotle, the Olympics are an opportunity to shake off a slump. Chipotle shares plummeted 19% in October 2025, and its operating margin was down 1% in Q3. The company hasn’t announced its full 2025 financial results yet, but sales are expected to decline (a reversal from February 2025 projections). Key segments of the company’s customer base—younger people and low- to middle-income households…

When I was learning to play bass, my first teacher told me, “Find your groove and stay in it.” As a musician, that meant discovering the rhythm that allowed me to lock in with the drummer so the rest of the band could shine. Years later, as a consultant and culture architect, I realized the same principle applies to productivity: Each of us has a groove—a natural style of working—that, once discovered, allows us to perform at our best. The challenge is that most professionals attempt to replicate productivity systems that don’t align with their brain’s natural rhythm. They read about a CEO waking up at 4 a.m. or a time-blocking hack and feel frustrated when it doesn’t…

Perusing the grocery aisle in the Westside Market on 23rd Street in Manhattan, you might not even notice the screens. They look just like paper price labels and, alongside a bar code, use a handwriting-style font we’ve come to associate with a certain merchant folksiness. They’re not particularly bright or showy. The only clues that they’re not ordinary sticky shelf labels are a barely distinguishable light bulb and, on some, a small QR code. These are electronic shelf labels, chip-enabled screens that some stores are now using to display product prices. Unlike their paper predecessors, the prices aren’t printed in ink but rendered in pixels, and they can change instanta…

The Louvre in Paris reopened on Wednesday, three days after thieves made off with historic jewellery worth an estimated 88 million euros ($102 million) in a spectacular heist that has raised urgent questions over security lapses at the museum. Visitors queued to enter through the Louvre’s glass pyramid for the first time since Sunday’s brazen robbery, in which hooded assailants broke through a second-floor window using a stolen movers’ lift before making off with jewels from the royal collection. Later on Wednesday the museum’s director will appear before the French Senate to answer lawmakers’ questions. The Galerie d’Apollon, the ornate gilded hall that was r…

When Winter storm Fern tore across the country in late January, more than a million Americans lost power. In Nashville, the utility recorded its highest outage total in history. In Louisiana, some families waited nearly two weeks for the lights to come back on. Officials issued emergency orders in several states as the storm exposed the fragility of our centralized energy system. And yet, during that same storm, a different story was quietly playing out. Households with the ability to generate and store their own power with home solar and storage kept the lights on, ran their heat, and charged their devices. They were independent of a grid that was buckling under the col…

Two years ago, the last pay phones were disconnected in Rochester, New York. But a group of volunteers has started bringing a handful of phones back—and making them free to use. Called the GoodPhone Project, the effort is aimed at people who still don’t have reliable access to a mobile phone, including those experiencing homelessness. As pay phones have disappeared, alternatives have been hard to come by. “A lot of community centers, and especially the Monroe County libraries, were being inundated with people asking to use their front desk phones,” says Eric Kunsman, one of the volunteers behind the project. There’s a clear need: The handful of phones tha…

Here’s a familiar scenario: The product development team creates a hot new app. The client is excited to launch it, and the PR team is preparing the campaign for its release. And then this happens: The manager in charge of the project steals the spotlight and takes all the credit for the work. There’s no praise for the team, no celebration of everyone’s success, and no recognition of team members’ contributions. When that happens, it’s quite likely that team morale will take a nosedive. This behavior has frequently appeared in research as a bad-boss trait that leads to employee disengagement and even turnover. In a study I tracked a few years ago, “taking credit …

Since 1818, loyal readers of the Farmers’ Almanac have turned to the publication for weather predictions, gardening tips, astronomy calendars, and more. But, on November 6, the Farmers’ Almanac announced that the 2026 edition of the magazine will be its last. The news came through a post to the Farmers’ Almanac website by editor Sandi Duncan and editor emeritus Peter Geiger. “It is with a great appreciation and heartfelt emotions that we write to share some sad news,” the note reads. “After more than 200 years of sharing a unique blend of weather, wit and wisdom, we’ve made the very difficult decision to write the final chapter of this historical publication.” P…

In the months after a 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the door for states to legalize sports betting within their borders, giddy lawmakers across the country couldn’t move quickly enough. No one wanted to miss out on the billions of dollars in tax revenue that the high court had suddenly placed within their reach—or, worse yet, to watch that easy money go to neighboring states whose leaders had the presence of mind to move first. Within a month of the decision, Delaware Gov. John Carney bet $10 on a Phillies game—the first legal single-game sports bet outside of Nevada. Many states were more concerned with getting sportsbooks online in time for a big-ticket event (the…

For years, Mercedes-Benz has relied on touchscreens as the command center of its vehicles. Is it too hot? Tap the screen to set the AC temperature. Want to listen to the news? Tap. Defrost the rear window? Tap, tap, tap. While the automaker has retained some physical controls in its cars, its modern user experience is effectively built around the screen. But that’s about to change. Magnus Östberg, chief software officer for Mercedes-Benz, recently announced that the company would be centering future car design around physical controls instead of screens. “The data shows us physical buttons are better,” Östberg told Autocar at the Munich motor show. He says Mercedes will…

At SXSW this year, artificial intelligence was everywhere. Every panel. Every hallway conversation. Every prediction about the future of work seemed to revolve around the same question: How do we keep up? But the moment that stayed with me wasn’t about AI at all; it was reconnecting with the world of Jack Johnson. He took the stage not just as a “musician,” but as something far more compelling: a fully integrated human being. Before his success in music, Johnson was a professional surfer, then a filmmaker, and then a globally recognized musician. And in his recent documentary SURFILMUSIC, what becomes clear is that he didn’t abandon one identity to become another. He ca…

When a gunman began firing inside an academic building on the Brown University campus, students didn’t wait for official alerts warning of trouble. They got information almost instantly, in bits and bursts — through phones vibrating in pockets, messages from strangers, rumors that felt urgent because they might keep someone alive. On Dec. 13 as the attack at the Ivy League institution played out during finals week, students took to Sidechat, an anonymous, campus-specific message board used widely at U.S. colleges, for fast-flowing information in real time. An Associated Press analysis of nearly 8,000 posts from the 36 hours after the shooting shows how social medi…

You may think working hard, showing initiative, boosting your skill set, and being a team player is what it takes to be noticed to get promoted. But even with all these notable wins and strides, the call to a higher position often never comes. The reality of being repeatedly passed over is frustrating—and such a “promotion plateau” can leave you questioning what’s really within your control. To learn more about the concept, Fast Company asked three career experts for advice on how to handle a stagnant job path . . . as well as what you can do to add some momentum to your promotion game plan. What exactly is a promotion plateau? The most significant te…

Headlines have been challenging in 2025. Companies are under attack publicly and privately for policies viewed as “too progressive” or “woke.” The reality, however, is that most companies have strongly reaffirmed their sustainability commitments but less so their DEI commitments. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) works in the grey area between the two. Many affirming companies have opted for “greenhushing,” staying quiet about their strategies and leadership. There are pros and cons to that, but why are companies staying true to their goals and strategies? A simple but powerful answer: long-term value creation. Those staying the course have built strategies that i…

You won’t want to miss a chance to look up tonight into the sky, in the early morning hours on Thursday, May 14. Before dawn, skywatchers are in for a treat with a rare sighting of the moon, Saturn, and Mars as they a form a gorgeous, cosmic triangle in May’s dark sky. Here’s everything to know about this unique skywatching event. What’s happening? The moon, Saturn, and Mars will form a cosmic triangle as the sun rises before dawn in the early hours of Thursday morning. The razor-thin moon will be in its waning crescent phase (day 27 of its 29.5 day cycle), and appear as a mere sliver in the sky, as only 8% will be lit up by the sun, according to Space.com.…

Between July and September, electric vehicle sales in the U.S. hit a record high. Americans bought more than 430,000 EVs, up 40% from the previous quarter, as they race to qualify for federal tax credits before they expire. That EV boom wasn’t just limited to the U.S., though: Global EV sales hit an all-time high of 2.1 million in September. Two-thirds of those sales were in China, the world’s largest EV market. And yet, there’s still talk of an “EV retreat,” both in the U.S. and abroad. Automakers have expressed concerns about their EV profits, and policymakers in Canada and the European Union are pausing, or adjusting, their EV mandates. There’s an “inherent…

Kathy Ruemmler, the top lawyer at storied investment bank Goldman Sachs and former White House counsel to President Barack Obama, announced her resignation Thursday, after emails between her and Jeffrey Epstein showed a close relationship where she described him as an “older brother” and downplayed his sex crimes. Ruemmler said in a statement that she would “step down as Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel of Goldman Sachs as of June 30, 2026.” Up until her resignation, Ruemmler repeatedly tried to distance herself from the emails and other correspondence and had been defiant that she would not resign from Goldman’s top legal post, which she had held since 2020. Wh…

The soccer coach had blocked himself from sportsbooks by the time he found prediction markets. The tax accountant said he “got the same high” on those platforms that he got from gambling. “That was how I relapsed — with Kalshi and Polymarket. I lost a bunch of money.” The rapid growth of prediction markets has sparked a high-stakes debate that is playing out in courts and legislatures all over the country. Operators of those companies believe they should be regulated like the stock exchange because of federal law and their customer-to-customer structure, while sportsbooks and state officials think they should be supervised the same way as sports gambling platforms. Whi…

For decades now, Google has been the unquestioned champion of search—our digital oracle, the first and last stop for every question, from “What’s the best pizza place near me?” to “How many protons are in a carbon atom?” But here’s the key difference now: while Google has started to incorporate AI with features like AI Overviews and the new AI Mode, a traditional keyword search is great for finding facts, but not so great at understanding context. It’s like asking a librarian for a book on “dogs” and expecting them to know you really want to know how to train a puppy. You might get a whole library, but you still have to find the right book yourself. That’s w…