Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, is here. And this might be Swift’s biggest release yet, given that along with an album, she’s also premiering a film on the same day. Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl features a new music video for the album’s single “The Fate of Ophelia,” lyric videos, and exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and commentary. It’s being hosted as a companion event by AMC, Cinemark Theaters, and Regal Cinemas. The catch? It’s showing in theaters for just three days: October 3 to 5. The brief theatrical window follows the same pattern Swift has used to release limited-edition versio…

There’s a lot of noise in the crypto space. Price swings rile up the internet, new jargony terms pop up constantly, and the hype and haters can turn people off before they begin. But if you’re curious about where crypto is actually headed, here’s what’s worth paying attention to in 2026. Three key shifts are changing how everyday people interact with digital assets. None of them require you to have tech or financial expertise. And none of them require you to act right now. Think of this as a look at the horizon, so you can make informed choices when you’re ready. 1. ADOPTION IS PICKING UP, EVEN IF YOU HAVEN’T NOTICED At the beginning of 2025, our State of C…

U.S. life expectancy rose to 79 years in 2024 — the highest mark in American history. It’s the result of not only the dissipation of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also waning death rates from all the nation’s top killers, including heart disease, cancer and drug overdoses. What’s more, preliminary statistics suggest a continued improvement in 2025. “It’s pretty much good news all the way around,” said Robert Anderson, of the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which released the 2024 data on Thursday. Life expectancy, a fundamental measure of a population’s health, is an estimate of the average number of years a baby b…

With no end in sight to the political impasse in Washington that has shut down the government, the U.S. IPO market is expected to experience a significant slowdown just as it was beginning to show signs of life again. Some companies are nevertheless forging ahead with their listings. Phoenix Education Partners, parent company of the for-profit University of Phoenix, which announced its IPO plans one day before the shutdown began, said on Wednesday that it has priced its shares at $32. That’s the midpoint of its earlier targeted range of between $31 and $33 a share. The company intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the “PXED” ticker sy…

In 2010, clinical psychiatrist Dale Archer published the New York Times best seller Better Than Normal, a book that highlighted the often-underappreciated benefits of various psychiatric diagnoses. The book looked at strengths associated with conditions like bipolar disorder, OCD and schizophrenia. But there was one chapter that hit a little too close to home. After publishing it, Archer asked a colleague to conduct a psychiatric diagnostic on him. “She said, ‘you’re off the charts for ADHD,’ and I go, ‘Yeah, I know, I just wanted validation’,” he says. In 2015, Archer published a follow-up book, The ADHD Advantage, focusing on some of the more positive a…

The announcement came suddenly on Thursday. A Fortune 500 technology client needed an interim CFO immediately. Its previous executive had departed unexpectedly, leaving a $2.3 billion merger and reorganization in limbo. By Monday, Denise, the number two finance executive, occupied the interim CFO post. She faced 10,000 skeptical employees and a board expecting miracles. Interim leadership has exploded: The number of Fortune 1000 companies that have used an interim CXO has increased 117% since 2022. Yet most leaders enter these roles unprepared for the unique demands that await. Not only do these leaders suffer, companies do as well. When leadership transitions fa…

If you have gifting to loved ones on your mind, here are some considerations related to taxes and logistics. Gifting logistics Unless you’re writing a check from your bank account, the logistics of gifting funds can get a bit complicated. If you want to gift from your IRA, your only option is to sell a chunk of it, then pay any taxes due, then write a check. That’s not terrible, so long as you understand the tax implications. IRA withdrawals are typically subject to ordinary income tax, along with penalties if you’re not yet 59½. You could also trigger some knock-on tax effects like the income-related monthly adjustment amount. In other words, gifting from your IR…

The rise of OpenClaw, a proactive agentic AI controlled through interfaces more familiar to the average user than tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code, which enthralled early adopters over the holiday period, has been one of the most seismic shifts in the AI world since the release of ChatGPT. By piggybacking on user-friendly interfaces paired with powerful AI agent technology, OpenClaw has pushed AI further into the public eye. Thousands have spun up their own AI agents using the tech, and many of those agents have ended up on Moltbook, a social network where AI agents can post and interact with one another. The platform, which looks a lot like Reddit, was developed by…

Creativity has always been governed by time—not just how long it takes to bring an idea to life, but how long a creator can stay “in flow.” Every designer knows the frustration of an idea hanging in digital limbo. But those pauses, once accepted as inevitable, are now starting to vanish. Figma, the cloud-based interface design tool, and Google Cloud, the computing and storage platform, have announced the integration of Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash directly into Figma’s design platform. The collaboration aims to let designers generate visuals and make edits almost instantly, eliminating the lag between an idea and its execution. For users, that means faster collabor…

As an operative researcher for luxury retail companies, I spent my career grabbing onto one corporate contract after the next, like a tree-swinging retainer monkey. But in a tariff-distressed industry, those contract “branches” grew further and further apart until I was left hanging. Then a colleague experiencing a similar work gap said, “Well, I guess we’re retired.” I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but nothing prepared me for the word “retired.” I’m a freelancer, so no one is coming to my house with a gold watch as a reward for loyal service; I have no desire to move south; and I don’t play golf. My equally self-employed friend Roland had a suggestion: W…

If you’ve noticed that the internet feels different lately—more cluttered, harder to navigate—you’re not imagining it. The system is breaking down in real time, and by 2026, researchers predict that 90% of web content will be AI-generated. Quality journalism is disappearing behind paywalls while feeds fill with noise designed purely to capture attention. An innovation that was supposed to democratize information is now drowning us in it. I know this intimately because I helped build it. As founder of AppNexus, which sold to AT&T for $1.6 billion, and former CTO of Right Media, I created the technology that became the backbone of digital advertising, a multibillion…

At the turn of the 20th century, the steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated $5.2 million to New York to build libraries across the city. Leading architects of the time designed the branches, 67 in all, to look and function like civic temples with elaborate Beaux-Arts detailing, welcoming entrances, dignified reading rooms, and open stacks where patrons could freely browse. They quickly became important, and beloved, neighborhood establishments and remain so today. After more than a century of use, and ad hoc upgrades and adaptations that are also dated, the buildings are due for upgrades. Last year, the New York Public Library (NYPL) completed a $17…

A makeup illusionist, a photography project, and an innovative DJ are among the winners of Instagram’s inaugural Rings awards. The award, whose recipients were announced on Thursday, celebrates 25 creators who, in the company’s words, “bring people together over creativity” and “aren’t afraid to take creative chances and do it their way.” Among the winners is Mimi Choi, known for turning her face into mind-bending works of art. Celebrating her win, she penned in an Instagram post: “Because of its visual nature, Instagram has really helped spread my work and jump-start my career, providing me with numerous different types of collaboration opportunities that I cou…

It’s the digital equivalent of a clogged drain. You boot up your computer, click the Google Chrome icon, and… wait. You wait to type a search term. You wait for the page to load. You wait while your once-speedy gateway to the internet chugs along like a steam engine trying to keep up with a bullet train. The problem: Chrome is a beast – a powerful, functional beast, but a beast nonetheless. Over time, it gets bloated, weighed down by all the digital detritus we pile onto it. But don’t despair. You don’t need a new computer, you just need a digital declutter. Here’s how we’re going to put some pep back in your browser’s step. Note that though feature names …

Gold has been having a very good year. That sentiment couldn’t have been clearer on Tuesday, October 7, as the precious metal hit a new milestone: $4,000 an ounce. As of early Wednesday, gold was up over 53% year to date. That’s significantly higher than the growth seen by major stock indexes over the same period The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 9.93% this year, the S&P 500 is up 14.42%, and the Nasdaq Composite is up 18.19% as of the market close on Tuesday. As a so-called safe-haven asset, gold has benefited from a few things this year, including a weakened dollar and an unpredictable economy. The latter has been especially true since the…

Three AI companies—OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity—are on the verge of receiving approval to sell their technology, hosted on their own cloud systems, directly to the government, a person familiar with the matter tells Fast Company. That authorization will be on a “low impact” and pilot level, the person said, but constitutes a major step toward independence. That independence could help those companies avoid some of the complications created by ongoing partnerships between AI firms and longtime government tech contractors. As large language models have gone mainstream, AI companies have often relied on tech firms that have already passed arduous government security re…

The most common email messages I receive these days are obviously AI-generated pitches for guests to appear on my podcast. They all begin the same way, with a praising reference to one of my recent episodes—usually the second-to-last posted show. “Your recent interview with so-and-so was penetrating, and got to the heart of the problem of x or y.” Then comes the crucial pivot: “John Dough’s work takes that problem even further . . .” And then the pitch for John Dough to be on the podcast. The problem is not just that the publicist used AI to shotgun the known universe of podcasters with pitches artificially customized to their shows. It’s that the comparisons and con…

Once upon a time, the big idea was simple—work from anywhere! Thanks to technological advances, you didn’t need to be tethered to your office desk to collaborate with coworkers (or swap memes with them). As long as you had your laptop and good Wi-Fi you could be by the pool on a tropical island, drink in hand, and a magnificent sunset in the background. Forward-thinking companies would recognize that talent could be found in the most unexpected places. Employees get to mix and match their work with the life they love. Governments would enable this with offers of special digital nomad visas. The whole world would become one big, friendly workplace. Hold that though…

A few months ago, I walked into the office of one of our customers, a publicly traded vertical software company with tens of thousands of small business customers. I expected to meet a traditional support team with rows of agents on the phones, sitting at computers triaging tickets. Instead, it looked more like a control room. There were specialists monitoring dashboards, tuning AI behavior, debugging API failures, and iterating on knowledge workflows. One team member who had started their career handling customer questions over chat and email (resetting passwords, explaining features, troubleshooting one-off issues, and escalating bugs) was now writing Python scripts…