Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage fell to its lowest level of 2025 this week, an encouraging sign for prospective home buyers. The average long-term mortgage rate dipped to 6.15% from 6.18% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Wednesday. That’s the lowest average long-term rate since October 3, 2024, when it dipped to 6.12% before shooting back up. One year ago, the rate averaged 6.91%. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, fell this week to 5.44% from 5.50% the previous week. A year ago, it averaged 6.13%, Freddie Mac said. Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from t…

GameStop Corp. is forging ahead with efforts to reduce its physical footprint in the first weeks of 2026. The video game retailer is closing stores in numerous states this month, according to local media reports, and emails and store signage shared by customers on social media, part of its ongoing effort to reduce costs and adapt to changes in shopping habits. The closures are not completely unexpected. In its third-quarter earnings report on December 9, GameStop said it had already closed 590 stores in the United States during the previous fiscal year as part of a “store portfolio optimization review.” In a December filing to the Securities and Exchange Comm…

The Swiss company Punkt has released its latest handset, the MC03, a cellphone that merges minimalist hardware design with a matching UX experience that promises total privacy protection against greedy corporations who want to track you and own your data for their own benefit. This thing got me at “DeGoogled From the Core,” which is one of the phone’s declared core selling points. According to founder Petter Neby, “Punkt is about using technology to help us adopt intelligent habits for less distracted lives.” In 2015, Punkt launched its first phone, the MP01, as a secure device that supported only text and calls. No apps. No tracking. Punkt later released the MP02—an …

In a vision of the near future shared at CES, a girl slides into the back seat of her parents’ car and the cabin instantly comes alive. The vehicle recognizes her, knows it’s her birthday and cues up her favorite song without a word spoken. “Think of the car as having a soul and being an extension of your family,” Sri Subramanian, Nvidia’s global head of generative AI for automotive, said Tuesday. Subramanian’s example, shared with a CES audience on the show’s opening day in Las Vegas, illustrates the growing sophistication of AI-powered in-cabin systems and the expanding scope of personal data that smart vehicles may collect, retain, and use to shape the driving …

Oscar Wilde famously noted, “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” It is arguably one of the best brief illustrations of emotional intelligence (EQ), a trait that became popular thanks to a nonacademic best-selling book by journalist Daniel Goleman, in which he insinuated that EQ is a more important driver of success than IQ (a claim that has been discredited). And yet, there’s no shortage of evidence for the importance of EQ when it comes to predicting interpersonal effectiveness, defined as the ability to manage yourself and others in everyday life. In fact, long before EQ was coined in academic research (before Goleman popularized the te…

Single-use soy sauce packets for sushi take-out orders are now a whole lot more sustainable, thanks to a redesign that doesn’t use any plastic. While sushi lovers in the U.S. are used to getting their to-go soy sauce in rectangular packets like they do their ketchup and mustard, soy sauce in Australia often comes in small plastic fish bottles with a screw top. This typical mini fish-shaped bottle is cute, for sure, but the user is done with it in a few minutes. Its packaging lasts much, much longer by comparison, since plastics can take as long as 500 years to break down. Does the user experience really require packaging that lasts that long? The Holy …

If winning gold medals were the only standard, almost all Olympic athletes would be considered failures. A clinical psychologist with the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Emily Clark’s job when the Winter Games open in Italy on Feb. 6 is to help athletes interpret what it means to be successful. Should gold medals be the only measure? Part of a 15-member staff providing psychological services, Clark nurtures athletes accustomed to triumph but who invariably risk failure. The staff deals with matters termed “mental health and mental performance.” They include topics such as motivation, anger management, anxiety, eating disorders, family issues, tra…

For years, leaders have been told that ”being true to themselves” and “ignoring what others think” represent the gold standard of effective leadership, a kind of moral and emotional north star. But in practice, this type of advice often gets leaders into trouble. For a vivid illustration, consider how two famous fictional (yet hyper-realistic) characters, namely Don Draper (Madmen) and Michael Scott (The Office) embody these two mantras. Draper clings to a rigid, unchanging identity, using “this is who I am” as armor to avoid confronting his insecurities, while Scott approaches management with unfiltered candor, oversharing, and acting on impulse. Both believe they ar…

Whether he’s climbing skyscrapers in Taiwan or working to build the Honnold Foundation, free solo climber and activist Alex Honnold remains an optimist. He sat down with Fast Company to talk about why a good outlook is essential—both for his sport and in the fight for the planet. Honnold also reflects on education, human potential, overconsumption, and what’s at stake for American national parks and public lands. View the full article

Microsoft stock just suffered its biggest single day drop since 2020. Meanwhile, Meta stock popped by 10%. Both tech giants are spending billions on AI talent and infrastructure, but investors clearly feel skittish about Microsoft at the start of 2026 and bullish on Meta’s tale of near-term upside. For a company that famously whiffed on the metaverse, Meta is looking more reasonable these days. The company is still poised to invest eye-popping sums into artificial intelligence in the coming years, but so are all of its peers, Microsoft included. In an era of AI hype and sky-high expectations, Meta is following the crowd—not leading it—for better or worse. In 2026,…

It’s fair to say that Minneapolis-based Target is going through a rough patch as a result of declining sales and customers. After facing boycotts, tariffs, and a massive surge of federal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in its hometown, Target, long overdue for a big change, made one this weekend—appointing a new CEO. Michael Fiddelke, who began his career at Target more than two decades ago, officially took over as chief executive officer on Sunday. He was previously Target’s chief operating officer and its former chief financial officer. (Last summer, the retailer announced he’d be succeeding longtime CEO Brian Cornell.) “While we have r…

Finally, some good news: the Tiny Chef, who captured the hearts of internet users around the world this summer, when his Nickelodeon show was cancelled, will finally grace our screens again. This time, he’s making Swedish meatballs. The Tiny Chef Show was a Nickelodeon series that aired from September 2022 to March 2025. In it, the Tiny Chef (a stop-motion creature vaguely resembling a sentient pea) made plant-based meals for his friends from his home inside a tree stump. But in June, 2025, the Tiny Chef took to his YouTube channel to announce in a heartwrenching video that his series had been canceled unexpectedly by Nickelodeon. It now has nearly two million views …

Below, Kate Murphy shares five key insights from her new book, Why We Click: The Emerging Science of Interpersonal Synchrony. Murphy is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Texas Monthly, among other publications. What’s the big idea? Humans are instinctively wired to sync with one another, and this invisible alignment of bodies, brains, and emotions shapes attraction, trust, and belonging. It can deepen connection and fuel cooperation, but it also makes feelings and behaviors contagious, giving each of us more influence over others than we realize. Listen to the audio version of this Book B…

On the heels of its intriguing Super Bowl ad, AI.com is garnering all sorts of interest—so much, in fact, that it actually crashed the company’s website, as Super Bowl viewers scrambled to see what the company that no one has heard of was all about. The new AI platform, founded by Crypto.com CEO and co-founder Kris Marszalek, reportedly spent a whopping $85 million on the Super Bowl spot, only to garner so much traffic that he had to post on X: “Insane traffic levels. We prepared for scale, but not for THIS,” followed by three fire emojis. That 30-second ad, which ran during the coveted fourth-quarter ad space, encouraged fans to go to the site and create an AI-ha…