Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Some words are far too mild for the violence of what they describe. Migraine is one of them. For many people, it evokes a simple headache—an inconvenience solved with an aspirin (or Tylenol) and a glass of water. For those who’ve never experienced it, migraine is almost a cliché: a lame excuse to stay in bed or avoid a meeting. But for millions of people—and I’m one of them—migraine is anything but benign. It is a debilitating neurological disease that can force life to grind to a halt for days at a time. It is an invisible disability that millions are expected to simply “push through.” The Mild Version Everyone Sees—and the Severe One No One Understands I ofte…

2025 was a fairly humdrum year for Apple from a hardware perspective. While the company’s software—including the “26” versions of iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS—got a major visual overhaul, Apple’s hardware lineup included just one brand new product: the iPhone Air. But that is set to change in 2026. This year, Apple is expected to release a number of brand-new hardware products, along with some updates to existing ones. And yes, AI will be a focus, too. Here’s what—and when—to expect from Apple in 2026. iPhone Fold The most anticipated device Apple is expected to release this year is a foldable iPhone. Colloquially known as the “iPhone Fold,” this device will b…

A reader asks: A while back, an employee who reported to me (I’m a man) became visibly pregnant soon after she started. But she never brought it up. Not with me, not with HR, not with anyone. I didn’t ask her about it, though nearly everyone else in our office asked me. I cringed when I responded since it was obvious she was pregnant but I felt that I needed to protect her privacy. I felt like I was walking around on pins and needles with this very obvious elephant in the room. Her job description included occasionally lifting objects up to 40 pounds, and the only way I treated her differently was that I went out of my way to pick up anything remotely heavy. E…

A self-described “rat pack” of five “food-loving journalists” just bought the trademark to the defunct food magazine Gourmet, updated it for the modern reader, and brought it back as an online newsletter—all without consulting the magazine’s former publisher, Condé Nast. And if you didn’t know that already, you might’ve been able to guess it from the publication’s new wordmark. The logo looks nothing like what you’d expect from the magazine that shuttered in 2009. Instead of a crisp, delicate script, this wordmark is unapologetically blocky, chunky, and weird. It’s more reminiscent of forgotten sheet pan drippings: certainly not pretty too look at, but more delicious …

The northern lights have been viewable from locations you don’t normally see them on a number of recent occasions, and on the evening of January 20, the same will be true. On Tuesday night, the aurora borealis may be visible in parts of more than half of all U.S. states. That’s a few more than the usual six or so Northern states that are used to seeing the lit up skies. That’s because solar storms can change visibility, making the spectacle visible to more locations in times of heightened geomagnetic activity. According to an announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric’s Space Weather Prediction Center, that’s precisely what’s in the forecast this even…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. This bonus newsletter from Davos explores the strategic relationship between CEOs and chief technology officers. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. In my previous life as a technology journalist, I wrote and edited countless stories about corporate chief technology officers (CTOs) emerging as key partners to their counterparts in the C-suite. When marketing functions became more data-driven, chief marketing officers clamored for attention from product and engineering. Today, chief financial offic…

For the first time in Dr Pepper’s 140-year history, the brand is the second-most-popular soda in America. Now it has a shiny new jingle to match. In late December, TikTok creator Romeo Bingham, 25, posted a jingle she had made up for Dr Pepper. “Dr Pepper baby. It’s good and nice. Doo. Doo. Doo,” the tune went. In her caption she tagged the company and noted, “please get back to me with a proposition we can make thousands together.” The original post has garnered almost 54 million views, 6.4 million likes and almost 500,000 bookmarks, at the time of writing. One month later, Bingham’s dreams were realised. Dr. Pepper licensed the song and folded it into an NCAA f…

Shares of Facebook owner Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) are surging in premarket trading this morning after the company announced its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings yesterday afternoon. The earnings not only exceeded investor expectations, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg also laid out his vision for how artificial intelligence is set to transform the company—and personal computing—in the years ahead. Here’s what you need to know. Meta reports strong Q4 2025 earnings Expectations for Meta’s Q4 2025 were relatively high, but when the company announced its latest quarterly earnings after the bell last night, they exceeded what most investors had hoped for. Here are the…

The University of California Irvine’s new healthcare campus has a long list of innovative features, from its combined inpatient-outpatient surgical suite to its outdoor chemotherapy infusion terrace to an entire floor dedicated to staff only. The one thing it doesn’t have is a gas line. The multi-building healthcare campus with 144 hospital beds officially opened in December as one of a very few major hospitals around the world that runs entirely on electricity. CO Architects, which designed the all-electric hospital alongside design-build partner Hensel Phelps, claims it’s the only hospital larger than 500,000 square feet to pull this off. “Healthcare is just…

Chevrolet’s latest splashy ad has all the hallmarks of a campaign strategically tied to America’s 250th anniversary. There’s the modern interpretation of a 75-year-old jingle that’s sung by an up-and-coming country singer. A bird’s-eye view of a pickup truck atop a natural landmark in Utah. A television debut on February 6 during the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics. In every choice, Chevrolet is carving out friendly, apolitical terrain at a moment when Americans have mixed feelings about such patriotism. A record-low 58% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” or “very” proud to be American, according to a Gallup survey from last year. That’s down 9 percentag…

MacKenzie Scott helped build one of the most recognizable companies in modern history—all while writing her first novel. As Amazon scaled from a fledging startup to a global force, Scott was simultaneously cultivating a literary life. Long before Amazon, Scott launched her literary career. While studying creative writing at Princeton University, Scott landed herself a highly coveted spot as one of Toni Morrison’s advisees, a relationship that would shape her literary pursuits. “This writer that I admired so much also turned out to be such a gifted and devoted teacher,” Scott said at the dedication for Princeton’s Morrison Hall. “She has given me a real example o…

To Dr. Richard Pan, a California-based pediatrician, the idea of living a long, healthy life should not be a partisan issue. Unfortunately, it’s become one: He knows that topics like vaccines, healthcare, and science at large are now extremely politicized, and that whoever has the power to shape our policies can have a big impact on the health of Americans. Pan has seen that firsthand in his time serving in California’s state assembly and then senate, where he authored landmark legislation around vaccines, health insurance, and even a law that led California to produce its own insulin—which paved the way for the state to offer the medicine for as low as $11. …

The Federal Aviation Administration reopened the airspace around El Paso International Airport in Texas on Wednesday morning, just hours after it announced a 10-day closure that would have grounded all flights to and from the airport. The Federal Aviation Administration said in a social media post that it has lifted the temporary closure of the airspace over El Paso, saying there was no threat to commercial aviation and that all flights will resume. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a post on X that the FAA and the Defense Department “acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion. The threat has been neutralized and there is no danger to commercial travel …

When I spoke at the Arabian Business Awards a few years ago, I showed a slide describing research that shows meetings literally make people dumber: a study published in Transcripts of the Royal Society of London found that meetings cause you to (during the meeting) lose IQ points. A bunch of people in the audience took photos of that slide. The same was true when I presented a slide describing research published in Journal of Business Research showing that not only do 90 percent of employees feel meetings are unproductive, but when the number of meetings is reduced by 40 percent employee productivity increases by 70 percent. A bunch of people took photos of th…

The future looks green for Mike’s Red Tacos. The San Diego-based taco restaurant currently has only two locations, but it has caught the attention of the restaurant investors who made Dave’s Hot Chicken a scorching success. This week, the restaurant announced that it has secured franchise development agreements for more than 200 new locations around the country. Mike’s Red Tacos was founded as a food truck in 2021 by Mike Touma, followed by a brick-and-mortar location in 2022. The brand is gaining a fast-growing following on social media following—and now it’s primed for nationwide expansion. Fast casual with a taco twist Mike’s Red Tacos specializes in…

As Big Tech faces criticism for the environmental impact of artificial intelligence, companies have said the technology will actually help solve climate change. But those claims often lack scientific evidence, a new report finds. And when touting the climate benefits of AI, tech companies conflate “traditional AI” with the more environmentally harmful generative AI, a form of “bait-and-switch” that amounts to greenwashing. The report, commissioned by a group of environmental organizations including Beyond Fossil Fuels, Friends of the Earth, and Stand.earth, analyzed 154 statements from tech companies, including those from Google and Microsoft, which purported tha…

In December 2025, Andrea Lucas, the chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, invited white men to file more sex- and race-based discrimination complaints against their employers. “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact the @USEEOC as soon as possible,” she wrote in a post on X. In February 2026, the EEOC began to investigate Nike on what the agency said was suspicion of discrimination against white workers. Both initiatives followed the EEOC’s March 2025 characterization of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts…

“I really want to see a mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space,” Elon Musk said last week when he announced his plan to go to the moon. “It’s going to be incredibly exciting to see it happen.” He’s right. I want to see it too, although probably we will both be dead before his vision is realized. The lunar mass driver—essentially a cannon that uses magnetic power to accelerate an object—is a key component to launch the million satellites Musk wants to put in orbit around the Earth. But Musk wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea. Smarter people than him thought about this in the 1970s as the solution to a key problem for human …

For years, social media companies have disputed allegations that they harm children’s mental health through deliberate design choices that addict kids to their platforms and fail to protect them from sexual predators and dangerous content. Now, these tech giants are getting a chance to make their case in courtrooms around the country, including before a jury for the first time. Some of the biggest players from Meta to TikTok are facing federal and state trials that seek to hold them responsible for harming children’s mental health. The lawsuits have come from school districts, local, state and the federal government as well as thousands of families. Two trials are now u…

When social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation in March 2024, his core proposal—that children should be kept off social media until at least age 16, with tech companies bearing the burden of enforcement—was treated by many as aspirational, even quixotic. The tech industry dismissed it. Libertarian critics called it paternalistic overreach. Skeptics questioned the evidence base. That was then. In barely two years, Haidt’s “radical” idea has become something close to a global consensus—a textbook example of what political scientists call the “Overton Window”—one that’s shifted at extraordinary speed. The Overton Window describes…

OpenAI has emerged as one of the government’s leading providers of artificial intelligence. According to the company, 37 federal agencies now have access to its tech, and about 80,000 government employees are now using it regularly. This makes OpenAI a frontrunner in the race between the top AI companies to get their tech in front of government users. These workers are just a small fraction of these frontier labs’ total customer bases, but they’re symbolically valuable. Wooing the U.S. government is important enough to these companies that they’re offering their technology at a steep discount. And, in another bid to speed up the administration’s use of the tech, seve…

For the first time in history, podcasts have overtaken talk radio as the most-listened-to medium for spoken-word audio in the United States. Podcasts, including video podcasts, eclipsed AM/FM talk radio (which notably doesn’t include listening to music on the radio), with 40% of listening time, as opposed to 39% for radio, according to Edison Research’s Share of Ear survey. Researchers have tracked these statistics over the last decade. In 2015, AM/FM radio accounted for 75% of the time Americans spent listening to spoken-word audio. At the time, podcasts accounted for just 10%. Year over year, that gap has slowly closed, as podcasts boomed in popularity, incr…

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 i…

Job interviews can trip up even the most qualified candidates with verbal landmines. In this article, we discuss specific phrases candidates should avoid using in interviews and more effective alternatives recommended by experts. Discover common phrases that send the wrong message to interviewers, as well as stronger alternatives that demonstrate genuine value, so you can effectively communicate your skills and experience. Lead With Curiosity, Not Critique If you’re interviewing for a tech role, here’s a fast way to tank your chances: Walk in and immediately trash the company’s systems. You know the move. “Honestly, your system is outdated. I’d replace it with some…

There’s a new exercise trend making the rounds on the internet: Tai Chi walking, inspired by a centuries-old Chinese martial art that incorporates flowing hand and foot movements with breath and mindfulness. Also know as “meditation in motion” (and dubbed “medication in motion”), Tai Chi is a gentle form of exercise that has a number of reported health benefits, primarily strength, flexibility, and balance, and, to a lesser degree, aerobic conditioning, according to an article from Harvard Medical School. Without using weights or resistance bands, you can gain upper-body strength through arm exercises that use your core and back muscles in a similar way. Another s…