Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

The last thing you want when dealing with a hot oven is any added burn risk. But some owners of Oster’s countertop ovens have experienced just that. Oster’s parent company, Sunbeam Products, is recalling over a million units of Oster French Door Countertop Ovens due to its doors unexpectedly closing. The company has received 95 reports of this occurring, leading to burn injuries, two of which were second-degree burns. Where and when was the product sold? According to a notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the recall includes about 1,290,000 units in the United States and another approximately 104,195 units in Canada. In the U.…

Starting next week on Tuesday, September 30, the Social Security Administration (SSA) will no longer issue paper checks for benefit payments, and instead move exclusively to electronic payments: either direct deposit or a pre-paid debit card. The change is part of a broader government-wide initiative to modernize its services and improve efficiency and security, to ensure some 70 million Americans receive their monthly benefits promptly. However, this could mean trouble for some older Americans who do not know how to set up direct deposit or will have trouble using a pre-paid debit card. In March, President The President issued Executive Order 14247, which man…

Do you suffer from time anxiety? Before you answer, consider if any of the following scenarios sound familiar: You get a late start, and the whole day you’re running behind. You always feel rushed, to the point that you start to get panicky. You look at your task list at the end of the day, and you’ve only finished half of what you planned. You constantly feel that time is slipping away. In other words, you’re constantly battling the feeling that there’s simply not enough time. But what if you could reframe the way you think about time? Well, you can. It involves learning a little ancient Greek, and getting to know that society’s approach to …

Lufthansa announced on Monday it plans to cut thousands of workers as it aims to increase profitability and efficiency, in part by relying more heavily on artificial intelligence. The airline group said it will eliminate a total of 4,000 jobs worldwide by 2030, the majority of which will be in Germany—with a focus on administration roles, not operational ones. “The Lufthansa Group is reviewing which activities will no longer be necessary in the future, for example due to duplication of work,” the company said in a statement. “In particular, the profound changes brought about by digitalization and the increased use of AI will lead to greater efficiency in many are…

Heartwood Preserve doesn’t look like typical stormwater infrastructure. Instead of a primarily utilitarian design, this project in Omaha doubles as public art. Meyer Studio Land Architects created a series of 14 sculptural water retention basins across 500 acres of land that sit in a watershed at risk of flooding. The project is meant to be enjoyed by the public and even has features that educate about climate change. Heartwood Preserve is a winner of Fast Company’s 2025 Innovation by Design Awards. View the full article

Pepsi has a new challenge: keeping products like Gatorade and Cheetos vivid and colorful without the artificial dyes that U.S. consumers are increasingly rejecting. PepsiCo, which also makes Doritos, Cap’n Crunch cereal, Funyuns and Mountain Dew, announced in April that it would accelerate a planned shift to using natural colors in its foods and beverages. Around 40% of its U.S. products now contain synthetic dyes, according to the company. But just as it took decades for artificial colors to seep into PepsiCo’s products, removing them is likely to be a multi-year process. The company said it’s still finding new ingredients, testing consumers’ responses and waiting for …

Former Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers learned all about technology’s volatile highs and lows as a veteran of the internet’s early boom days during the late 1990s and the ensuing meltdown that followed the mania. And now he is seeing potential signs of the cycle repeating with another transformative technology as a whirlwind of investments and excitement about artificial intelligence has propelled the stock market to new highs. Chambers took a similarly meteoric ride in his early days running Cisco, which had a market value of about $15 billion in 1995, when networking equipment suddenly became must-have components for the buildup of the internet. The feverish dem…

Last week, Starbucks announced the closure of 1% of its North American stores by the end of 2025, resulting in sudden job losses for hundreds of baristas. The closures are one part of a $1 billion restructuring strategy dubbed “Back to Starbucks”; the coffee chain will also be laying off 900 corporate employees. Processing the news in real time, Starbucks baristas have made their feelings about the closures clear, filming their reactions and going viral in the process. A Starbucks employee at a Washington state location posted a heartfelt video to TikTok last week. “Starbucks permanently closing my store and leaving us jobless was not on my 2025 bingo c…

Anyone who’s visited a contemporary art museum in the past 75 years has almost certainly encountered the artwork of Alexander Calder. His delicately balanced mobiles and swooping steel sculptures are mainstays of American abstract art. But in most of those museums, from the Whitney to Pompidou Centre to the Reina Sofia, Calder’s pieces haven’t had their intended presentation. For artworks that are meant to move or be moved through, Calder’s kinetic works and supersized sculptures are often given the default museum treatment of being static, separate from visitors, or both. A new art space in Calder’s birth city of Philadelphia aims to correct that. Calder Gardens…

LeBron James had another “decision” to announce. Turns out, it was an ad. The Los Angeles Lakers star teased that he would have something to say Tuesday. The “decision” reference is a nod to how he announced in July 2010 that he was joining the Miami Heat. It was supposed to come out at noon Eastern, but Hennessy — the cognac brand that James has been partners with for some time — made the announcement public about 90 minutes ahead of schedule. James’ training schedule for the day changed, the brand said, necessitating the change in release plans. “This fall, I’m going to be taking my talents to Hennessy V.S.O.P,” James said in the clip. Even the wording he us…

A potentially worrisome trend is emerging among young adults. Instead of landing a job and moving to the big city after graduation, many are moving back into their childhood homes instead. About 1.5 million more adults under 35 live with their parents today than a decade ago. That’s a 6.3% jump, more than double the rate of growth for the young adult population overall. The issue is affordability. Over the past decade, urban rents have climbed about 4% per year, while wages for full-time workers have increased by only 0.6% annually. That means it’s harder than ever to live in a big city on the typical salary—especially if you’re a new graduate without much work experi…

The teaching profession requires a certain degree of patience. Particularly when students discover a new trend to latch onto and repeat at every given opportunity. The latest so-called “brain rot” phrase to flood the classroom: “6-7.” If you don’t have any Gen Alphas in your life and have no idea what I’m talking about, count yourself lucky. Some teachers have taken to social media to share their exasperation with the trend that has recently overrun classrooms, with schools outright banning it in some instances. “Say 6-7 one more time,” one teacher posted on TikTok, pretending to address a student in her class. “We’re gonna call your mom in about 6-7 minutes, let …

Customer experience is entering the sci-fi age: knowing and understanding customers on an individual level, providing personalized service, and dedicated moments. All of this is becoming possible thanks to technological innovation. And as it shifts, we’re moving beyond the age of reactive service, where customer satisfaction was measured by stale, bi-annual surveys. We’re entering an era of proactive, predictive customer care. Companies’ missions today should be to transform every interaction into a moment of loyalty and growth, a goal we are working to achieve through our latest in-house innovation: the Customer Experience Index, or CXI. While many companies talk abo…

Long Beach Airport had a trailer problem. Long Beach’s quaint municipal airport originally opened in 1924 when airplanes flew using propellers—and the art deco terminal hadn’t undergone a full-scale renovation since. Instead, it adapted to the increased spatial demands of late 20th and early 21st century air travel, like increased security screening and modern baggage handling, in a rather temporary way: trailers. “It was known as the trailer park airport,” says Michael Bohn, a partner at Studio One Eleven, a Long Beach-based architecture and design firm. “It just became a hodgepodge. You went down these crazy aisles, and through different trailers. They had ven…

For more than a century, a stretch of riverfront in Toronto was an industrial wasteland, with oil storage tanks, factories, and shipping infrastructure sitting on former wetlands. Now, part of the site is a sprawling new park, and next year, construction will begin on a new neighborhood inside it. “It’s incredibly transformed,” says Emily Mueller De Celis, a landscape architect at the firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, which won a competition to “renaturalize” the area in 2007. “Rather than walking around in and amongst oil refineries and other industry, now you are immersed in nature, walking along the banks of a river with spectacular views back to the cit…

These companies aren’t big—but they’re bringing new ideas to some thorny challenges. Kids have been crafting with cardboard for decades, but Chompshop has found a way to make it safer and more fun. Online clothes shopping has long been a bit hit or miss, but Veesual’s found a way to maximize the number of hits. And GoodMaps and Overture Maps have tackled longstanding navigation problems. Chompshop For making kids’ cardboard crafts safer and more fun Cheap, abundant cardboard is great for kids’ art and science projects, but it’s often hard to trim with scissors. Chompshop has developed a kid-safe power tool specifically designed for this versatile material. While it’s…