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Michaels is expanding its party supply and celebration offerings. In September 2025, the arts and crafts retailer introduced The Party Shop at Michaels, an in-store shopping experience that brought party supplies, balloons, and other celebration essentials to its shelves. This year, its product selection will grow even further. In a May 13 press release, Michaels announced it is expanding its in-store party supply assortment and introducing new in-store experiences, with plans to add nearly 600 new products to its shelves throughout 2026. Michaels isn’t the only unexpected retailer with a party supply aisle. Last month, Staples announced it was getting …

For high school senior Aliyah Pack, getting distracted during school is the norm. Kids in her Pennsylvania school district use iPads starting in kindergarten, switch to Chromebooks in second grade and get their own MacBooks in eighth grade. Aliyah has ADHD, and finds it difficult to concentrate when she’s learning from a screen. She’ll watch Netflix in class on her school laptop, hiding her earbuds behind her long, curly hair. “It’s very hard to get into the mindset of being in school,” Aliyah said. Aliyah’s mother saw her grades were falling and asked the school to take away her laptop. But she was told that wasn’t possible. Across the country, parents are voicing co…

Bill Lawrence, the showrunner behind Scrubs, Ted Lasso, and Shrinking, explains his creative process, from finding the emotional core of a story to surviving writer’s block, writing through a pandemic, and building shows that can make you laugh one second and gut-punch you the next. View the full article

A case of mistaken identity can cost you, especially if it involves Kim Kardashian. When Kim Kardashian shared a photo of a Texas death row inmate on Instagram to raise questions about his conviction for double murder, there was only one problem: She had the wrong man. With his execution date nearing in early 2024, Kardashian posted on Instagram and Facebook to raise awareness about Ivan Cantu, who was convicted of killing his cousin and his cousin’s fiancée. The image she posted unfortunately featured a different Ivan Cantu – one very much not behind bars and living in Westchester, New York. Her social media team had mistakenly identified that Cantu, who worked …

Below, Laura Vanderkam shares five key insights from her new book, Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance. Laura is the author of several time management books and the host of the Before Breakfast podcast. She is also the host of the Best of Both Worlds podcast, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. What’s the big idea? What if you’re not actually “too busy,” but just missing the secret to making your time work for you? By tracking your hours, embracing small steps, and saying yes to what excites you, you can turn everyday life into something far more intentional and a lot more fun. Listen to…

Jared Kugel, founder and CEO of the e-commerce site Tire Agent, began his entrepreneurial journey with a bad idea. Kugel had been working for his family’s tire distribution business for more than a decade when, in 2017, he pitched a venture capitalist on creating a search engine for tire and wheel products. To his surprise, the VC liked it so much that the firm offered him $100,000 in seed funding and a spot at its New York City-based tech incubator, the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. Despite having no tech experience, Kugel accepted the offer and quickly adopted the industry’s “fail fast” mentality. Midway through the program, one of the firm’s partners as…

Bitwarden, the maker of a popular free password manager and other security solutions, is quietly making changes. In February, longtime CEO Michael Crandell moved to an advisory role, according to LinkedIn, with no announcement from the company. His replacement, Michael Sullivan, former CEO of both Acquia and Insightsoftware, touts his experience with “all facets of mergers and acquisitions” on his own LinkedIn page, including experience working with leading private equity firms. CFO Stephen Morrison also left Bitwarden in April, replaced by former InVision CEO Michael Shenkman. Both Crandell and Morrison joined the company in 2019. Kyle Spearrin, who started Bitwa…

As if college students didn’t have enough to worry about, now undergrads at Harvard University may see their A grades go up in smoke. With over 60% of Harvard students getting A’s in the mid-2025 academic year, faculty are currently weighing a proposal that would cap that to no more than 20% of the class, plus four students. (A more detailed breakdown: 66% of undergraduates earned A’s, and 84% earned an A or A-minus in the 2024–25 academic year.) “The Student Handbook recognizes an A grade as one reserved for work of ‘extraordinary distinction.’ We recommend returning to this definition,” the February 2026 proposal reads. “While any changes to grading policies ma…

Artificial intelligence has notoriously struggled with creating images, writing out gibberish on signs, or adding extra fingers to people. But it seems it’s not much help for photography either—and the internet is having a field day over it. The official X account for the Sony Xperia smartphone shared examples from its new “AI Camera Assistant” tool, which offers lens, exposure, and color suggestions for users. While it’s a decent idea in theory, the images shared by the post revealed otherwise. The X post included a series of before-and-after examples, with the tool appearing to create a comedically overexposed effect. In one of the images, a picture of a…

Using your email address as your username has become the standard. In many cases, you simply enter your email address and choose a password. Some services remove the need for a password altogether, allowing you to register using just your email address and a onetime code sent to it. Others offer the option to connect your account directly to your Google or Apple identity. As we scroll, shop, apply, and register across services, our email address quietly becomes our identity everywhere, from shopping platforms to banking to travel. Over time, more and more of our activity starts pointing back to a single account. While it all feels convenient, there is an issue we …

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I rely on Ideogram, an AI image generator, to help me create posters, banners, social posts, newsletter illustrations, and video thumbnails. Context: Ideogram competes in an exploding market. Gemini’s new Nano Banana Pro makes remarkable infographics, ChatGPT’s image generator produces fantastic illustrations, and Canva, Adobe, and Midjourney keep getting stronger. Yet I still find myself returning often to Ideogram. 10 reasons I like Ideogram Your prompt gets automatically improved. Ideogram’s magic prompt algorithm refines …

Michael Patrick King has spent decades writing about people navigating worlds where everything feels transactional. With the colossally successful Sex and the City, which spawned multiple films and the sequel series And Just Like That…, King explored how identity, romance, and status become tangled up in consumerism and self-invention. In the long-running sitcom 2 Broke Girls, the focus shifted toward economic precarity and the humiliations of trying to survive in a world where money shapes nearly every relationship. But King’s sharpest work may be The Comeback, the HBO cult classic he co-created with Lisa Kudrow, who stars as Valerie Cherish, a washed-up sitcom actre…

If the spring season has brought an urge to scrub your living space from top to bottom, why not clear out the digital detritus cluttering your electronic devices and online accounts at the same time? Carrying out the digital equivalent of spring-cleaning a home isn’t just an opportunity to tidy up our online lives. Eliminating dust bunnies like dormant accounts and forgotten files can help protect personal data, according to cybersecurity experts. “Clutter is fuel for scammers. Old accounts, exposed data, and forgotten apps give them more ways in,” Michael Sherwood, a product vice president at cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes, said. “Cleaning up your digital life i…

Anthropic on Wednesday launched Claude for Small Business, a new package of agentic workflows, skills, and connectors designed to automate business tasks common to smaller companies. Claude for Small Business includes workflows for payroll planning, month-end close, business performance monitoring, and marketing campaign management. It also includes skills, or reusable capability packages for AI agents, focused on cash-flow forecasting, invoice chasing, contract review, lead triage, content strategy, and more, Anthropic says. Users get connectors, or integrations, to commonly used platforms including QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, …

For most of the last century, we believed human potential could be measured through intelligence, and we built whole institutions around that belief. IQ was the metric. If you were analytical enough, technically proficient enough, quick enough on your feet, doors opened, schools rewarded it, employers screened for it, and entire industries grew up around identifying and elevating it. Then we noticed what intelligence alone couldn’t do. Technical brilliance without humanity tended to create distance rather than trust, and a generation of leaders who were brilliant on paper proved unable to inspire the people around them. So we elevated a second form of intelligence, em…

Layoffs used to be something that made a company’s stock tank. But after Block announced layoffs recently, its stock went up. And they weren’t the only ones: Snap did the same thing a few months earlier, as did Meta and Amazon. The common thread? They all cited AI as their reason for cuts. For CEOs staring down investor pressure, the playbook has become clear: invoke AI, slash headcount, and watch the ticker go up. I’m a CEO, and I’ve been laid off before. I now advise HR and benefits leaders at Fortune 500 companies as they plan, execute, and move forward after making workforce cuts. Here’s why I’m cautioning fellow executives against jumping on the “AI” layoffs …