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The former hedge fund manager is being asked to lead negotiations with foreign governments amid America’s self-inflicted hit View the full article

Chancellor welcomes striking official data as allies set out ‘four-pronged response’ to Trump tariffs View the full article

Fast Company is the official media partner of Summit Detroit. From the mouths of most companies, the word “community” amounts to nothing more than another cliched buzzword drained of any substance. But in some instances, the idea of community is so intrinsic to what the company is and stands for that the meaning behind the word evolves into something more. It’s why Jody Levy, CEO of Summit, had a hard time defining the word as it applies to her organization that hosts conferences and immersive experiences around the world. “Community is not the right word. Network is not the right word. Tribe is not the right word. None of these words actually describe what being part of Summit feels like and delivers for the people that choose to show up and participate in the ecosystem,” Levy says. “It’s like choosing to be a node in an interconnected latticework of people across the planet that have certain things in common.” Or as Summit cofounder Brett Leve describes it: a mutual aid society for entrepreneurs. “If you ask anyone who started a company, on Tuesday it’s a hiring problem. On Friday, it’s a finance problem. The next week it’s a supplier issue,” Leve says. “There’s all of these things that come up, and there just aren’t a lot of go-to resources or places that train people to address those challenges. That’s where we landed on the concept of community being this panacea.” Summit was founded in 2008 by a group of entrepreneurs looking to pool their resources and knowledge with other like minded individuals. Leve, who, at the time, was two years out of college with a business degree, understood he was still limited in what he learned on paper. “I don’t think any of that education gave me the tools that I needed to be an entrepreneur,” he says. “The entrepreneurial journey is so challenging. You need a very broad toolkit in order to address all of those challenges you bump up against.” And so Summit was born as an invite-only organization using events as a way to bring members together to both educate them through curated programming touching on wellness, creativity, and beyond—but also to provide a unique atmosphere made to forge new relationships. Summit’s flagship event heads to Detroit this June 5-8 and promises to create the kind of connections it’s become known for. Take for example Christina Sass who, in 2012 at a Summit event, met someone who “would change the course of my life,” as she puts it. A fellow Summit member introduced Sass to Jeremy Johnson simply because they both seem interested in the same thing. “‘You two won’t stop talking about access to education,’” Sass recalls the Summit member telling her. “‘You should talk to each other about it.’ She was absolutely right.” Fast forward two years and Sass and Johnson cofounded Andela, a marketplace for software engineers and other technical talent in emerging economies. The company grew to more than 2,000 employees and hit an annual revenue run rate of $50 million within five years of launching. Arturo Nunez, entrepreneur and board member of Estée Lauder and Abercrombie & Fitch, joined Summit in 2012 and says it reinforced his belief that being in the right rooms can change everything. “It’s not just about who you meet, but the energy, the exchange of ideas, and the way this community encourages you to think bigger, move with intention, and build with purpose,” Nunez says. “It’s a space where people don’t just dream—they execute.” And sometimes the connections at Summit are less about front facing networking and more of an internal, personal journey. “[Being part of Summit has] simultaneously helped me get over imposter syndrome while giving me a healthy dose of it,” says Phillip Cooley, former co-owner of Slows Bar BQ in Detroit. “It’s important to remain humble throughout life, but being in spaces with such wonderful people has also fortified my confidence and helped me trust my voice.” It’s those stories that speak exactly to why Leve and his cofounders created Summit. “I’m still as inspired by the concept of it 17 years in as I was when we started,” Leve says. “It’s like a collaborative art project that changes over time. That’s the exciting part about it—every time you add someone into the mix, the whole network becomes stronger.” Click here to learn more about Summit and apply to attend Summit Detroit this June 5-8, 2025. View the full article

On Thursday at 3 p.m. ET, a helicopter flew along the Manhattan skyline for less than 18 minutes before plunging into the Hudson River. The sightseeing helicopter carried a family of five from Spain. Law enforcement confirmed the identity of the passengers to ABC News as Agustin Escobar, an executive from European automation company Siemens, along with his wife, Merce Camprubi Montal, and their three children. The family, along with the pilot, all died in the crash. The helicopter was chartered by the company New York Helicopter, which posted photos of the smiling family inside the aircraft just before it took off. The chopper appeared to be a N216MH—a Bell 206L-4, according to a Flight Radar statement posted to X (formerly Twitter). The owner of the company and CEO, Michael Roth, said the pilot of the aircraft had radioed about needing fuel just before the aircraft began flying erratically. “He [the pilot] called in that he was landing and that he needed fuel, and it should have taken him about three minutes to arrive, but 20 minutes later, he didn’t arrive,” Roth told The Telegraph. Safety concerns in the wake of the tragedy The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the incident, but the tragedy may concern potential future flyers. In the wake of the incident, the helicopter company’s track record is also being scoured, and it seems that a murky financial history, and previous close-calls. According to court records, per The Wall Street Journal, New York Helicopter seemed to be facing financial challenges. Just this February, Wynwood Capital Group, a cash-advance firm, sued the company. It alleged that it had advanced $50,000 to the company in January in exchange for nearly $75,000 in future receivables. But days later, the company was blocked from recouping the money. The outlet also reported that in December, one of the company’s aircrafts was repossessed by PHI Aviation, the company it was leased from for failure to make payments. In 2019, the New York Helicopter filed for bankruptcy. The New York Times also reported that in 2013, in an incident that now appears eerily similar to Thursday’s crash, one of the company’s aircrafts lost power. No one was injured in the incident, but the helicopter was forced to make an emergency “hard landing.” Another emergency situation occurred just two years later, in 2015. An investigation into the incident found that a faulty drive shaft had been painted, so it wasn’t possible to deduce whether it had been involved in a previous hard landing. Investigators called it “deliberate concealment and reuse” of the faulty component “by unknown personnel.” While adventurers may not want to swear off taking a helicopter ride just yet, it’s important to note that helicopter tours do come with some risk, and it’s important to research the tour company before booking. Still, according to data from the United States Helicopter Safety Team, crashes are not all that uncommon. Nationwide, there were 89 accidents in 2024, resulting in 30 fatalities. The previous year, there were even more accidents—101, but only 29 fatalities as a result. Fast Company reached out to New York Helicopter but did not hear back by the time of publication. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Netflix has built a subscriber base more than 270 million strong on the backs of some great original TV series, and there’s a fair chance you’re watching (or have already binged) the biggies, from Stranger Things, to Bridgerton, to The Witcher, Ripley, and more. Even if you haven’t seen them, these shows are buzzy enough that you know their names—but there's more where they came from, including shows that are as good as (or better than) those flagship series. Here, in no particular order, are 40 of Netflix’s most entertaining, underrated originals—shows you maybe aren’t watching, but definitely should be. The Residence (2025 – , renewal pending) The latest from Shondaland (that's Shonda Rhimes' production company, natch) is maybe 10% too silly, and similarly a bit too derivative of other comedy-mysteries like Only Murders in the Building and Knives Out—and yet! There's a ton of fun to be had in this juicy, twisty-turny series set behind-the-scenes at the White House. During a state dinner for Australia, complete with guest Kylie Minogue, White House Chief Usher A. B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito) dies, possibly by suicide but probably by murder. Idiosyncratic, bird-loving consulting detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba) is called in to solve the crime that the White House staff would like to keep as quiet as possible, especially given the party going on downstairs. Randall Park, Ken Marino, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Bronson Pinchot, Mary Wiseman, Jane Curtin, and Al Franken are just a few of the actors playing guests and suspects. You can stream The Residence here. A Man on the Inside (2024 – , renewed for a second season) Though their styles are very different, A Man on the Inside feels a bit like a successor to Michael Schur's earlier series, The Good Place, and not only because they both star Ted Danson. There's a deep humanity at the core of both shows, and that serves Inside particularly well, even when it isn't laugh-out-loud funny. Ted Danson plays Charles Nieuwendyk, a slightly hapless retired professor and recent widower who listens to his daughter's plea for him to find something to keep him active: He answers an ad from a private investigator looking for someone to go undercover living at a retirement community in San Francisco in hopes of discovering who's been stealing jewelry. As he comes to care about the people he's investigating, and lying to, his job only gets harder. You can stream A Man on the Inside here. Black Doves (2024 – , renewed for a second season) Spy shows are having a moment right now, and Black Doves feeds that while also standing apart a bit, playing somewhere in between realistic(-ish) dramas like The Agency and more action-oriented James Bond thrillers. Keira Knightley heads the cast here as Helen Webb, wife of Britain's defense secretary and also a mercenary spy whose identity is compromised when her lover is killed. See? Juicy. The titular Black Doves, for whom she works, send Sam (Ben Whislaw) to protect her. You can stream Black Doves here. Delicious in Dungeon (2024 – , renewed for a second season) An anime import from Japanese animation studio Trigger (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners), Delicious in Dungeon is a cute and clever fantasy series with just enough action to keep things lively. A group of adventurers set out on a traditional dungeon crawl-type adventure only to have the sister of the leader eaten by a red dragon. Out of supplies but in a rush to catch the dragon who's fled to the lowest levels of the dungeon, the party comes to the attention of a dwarven master chef, who convinces them that their idea of cooking and eating dungeon monsters isn't merely practical—it could be high culinary art. You can stream Delicious in Dungeon here. The Decameron (2024) A funny, dark, ultimately surprisingly humane show that takes on Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th-century short story collection with Bridgerton-esque swagger. With the plague ravaging Florence, a bunch of nobles and attendants make their way to a countryside villa to wait out the plague and drain the liquor supplies. Rules and mores are turned upside down, particularly by the servant Licisca (Tanya Reynolds), who kind of accidentally kills her lady on the way to the villa and decides to take her place. Somehow, despite being about mostly terrible people, this makes for an entirely addictive binge experience. You can stream The Decameron here. The Åre Murders (2025) So popular are Scandinavian cop dramas that Nordic noir is its own sub-genre (I've just learned), and this Swedish import is picking up very solid reviews. Plain-spoken, troubled (as in: under suspension) detective Hanna Ahlander leaves Stockholm to spend some time unwinding at her sister's place in remote Åre. Of course, a missing girl finds her back on the job, and up against local police officer Daniel Lindskog, who she's very reluctant to trust. Looking for a bleakly beautiful landscape and ambiguous morality? Åre might be the place for you. No word on whether or not more seasons are planned. You can stream The Åre Murders here. Cassandra (2025) There's not much of M3GAN in this import, unless you'd care to imagine Cassandra as our favorite AI doll's German mum. Here, a family movies into the oldest smart home in the country, built in the 1970s and retaining its AI household helper. Cassandra's been alone for over 50 years, and, while she seems quite friendly and helpful, she's very determined that she'll never be on her own again. A creepy robot with deliciously retro style. You can stream Cassandra here. Supacell (2024– , renewed for a second season) There's a whole lotta superpower shows out there, despite us all having long since agreed that we're burned out on superhero stuff. And yet, there are still stories that break through and reveal themselves as something special. Such is the case with British import Supacell, lead by former Doctor Who companion Tosin Cole as Michael, a young delivery driver in East London who discovers he can move through space and time. One such trip leads him to conclude that he needs to track down four other people in similar circumstances in order to avert tragedy. Smartly, this isn't a show about people becoming superheroes, but instead trying to live their increasingly complicated lives as superheroes—and the dangers in which they find themselves are more genuinely thrilling as a result. You can stream Supacell here. Blood & Water (2020– , renewed for a fifth season) In many respects it’s a top-tier teen drama, starring Ama Qamata as Puleng Khumalo, a teenage girl who’s lived her entire life in the shadow of a sister that was taken as a baby by human traffickers; Puleng’s parents even hold a birthday celebration for the sister each year. When invited to a party by popular Fikile Bhele (Khosi Ngema), a student at an elite school in Cape Town, Puleng can’t help noticing their similarities. Steeped in the story of her sister, Puleng transfers to the school to get to the bottom of things. There’s plenty of juicy high school drama and family secrets, but the show is elevated by its unexpected dramatic heft. It concluded its fourth season early in 2024 (an increasingly rare lifespan in the days of modern streaming cost-cutting), with a fifth season renewal pending. You can stream Blood & Water here. Shadow and Bone (2021–2023, two seasons) Based on the fantasy books of Leigh Bardugo from her series of the same name, the series follows Alina Starkov, an orphan and cartographer who discovers and grows into her vaguely magical Grisha abilities. It’s a beautiful and dense fantasy world—one that might be a little hard to grasp at first, but only because the series is content to drop you into its world without a lot of exposition. It’s worth the investment, even if a fan campaign to bring the show back for a third season didn't succeed. You can stream Shadow and Bone here. The Brothers Sun (2024) A fun action-comedy and member of the Netflix one-season-and-done club (get used to it, I guess), The Brothers Sun stars Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh as Eileen Sun, the exiled matriarch of a family of Taiwanese gangsters. She'd come to Los Angeles years before, taking a son, Bruce (Sam Song Li), who grew up knowing little of his origins and has few ambitions beyond being really great at improv comedy. An assassination attempt sends his older brother to L.A., drawing Eileen and Bruce back into the fold—and into danger. You can stream The Brothers Sun here. The Midnight Club (2022) The least buzzy of Mike Flanagan's Netflix offerings is every bit as good as Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher, etc. Based on the YA novel by Christopher Pike, it involves a group of eight terminally ill young patients at a bucolic hospice home run by a secretive and mysterious doctor (A Nightmare on Elm Street's Heather Langenkamp). Each night the kids meet secretly to share scary stories, with each also promising to return from beyond the grave when the time comes. Very spooky, and surprisingly moving. It was planned as more than a miniseries, and the cancellation leaves some questions unanswered, but the ending is still pretty satisfying. You can stream The Midnight Club here. Sex Education (2019–2023, four seasons) There’s a fair bit of sex on TV (having migrated from the now largely sexless movies), but that’s not the same thing as sex positivity. In this British comedy-drama, Asa Butterfield and Gillian Anderson star as an insecure, shy teenager named Otis and his mother, Jean, a frank and sometimes painfully honest sex therapist. When a school bully needs some sex advice, Otis dispenses some of the wisdom he’s picked up from mom, eventually making a name for himself around school by selling his knowledge as expertise. It’s a funny and charmingly raunchy show, treating sex with humor and positivity, and also introduced the world to reigning Doctor Who Ncuti Gatwa, who co-stars. You can stream Sex Education here. Special (2019–2021, two seasons) One of the benefits of the age of streaming television has been the increase in real representation for diverse groups—in many cases moving light years beyond broadcast TV in telling stories by and about more than just the usual suspects. Special is a great example: a heartfelt, funny work/sex comedy about a gay man with cerebral palsy, starring and created by... a gay man with cerebral palsy (Ryan O’Connell). The result is charming and real, while also touching on perceptions of disability, as early on, Ryan rewrites his own narrative by telling people that his distinctive mannerisms are the result of a car accident. You can stream Special here. Heartbreak High (2022– , renewed for a third and final season) There’s a lot of history here that you don’t really need to enjoy the show, but Heartbreak High is a sorta soft-reboot of a popular and long-running 1990s show in Australia, which was itself a spin-off from a 1993 movie. Here, there’s a pretty solid blend of teen drama (sealing with issues related to gender identity, race, and teen sexuality) and comedy (the main characters corralled into the Sexual Literacy Tutorial, with the unfortunate acronym SLT). It all starts with Amelie and Harper, two students at a diverse Sydney high school, who set off a firestorm when they create a detailed map of the sexual exploits of the school’s students. You can stream Heartbreak High here. Dark (2017–2020, three seasons) Dark began as a mystery involving a missing child and evolved over its three seasons into one of the most complex series on television: a time travel-driven narrative that explores (appropriately) dark family secrets over the course of several generations. The first Netflix original import from Germany (after a few minutes, you won’t even notice the subtitles). It’s got a striking look and an incredibly atmospheric feel. After a few minutes, you won’t even notice the subtitles. 1899, from the same creators, was cut short after only one season—but Dark comes to a satisfying conclusion. You can stream Dark here. Dead Boy Detectives (2024) A particularly vocal fanbase couldn't save these dead boys from Netflix's axe, but its one season is nonetheless a satisfyingly complete story and an altogether fun comedy-drama. George Rexstrew and Jayden Revri star as Charles Rowland and Edwin Payne, two mismatched ghost friends who have elected to dodge the afterlife in favor of remaining on Earth to solve supernatural crimes. Young punk Charles was killed in 1989 after intervening to stop some bullies, while posh Edwin died in 1916 as part of a prank gone wrong, and he's still trying to come to terms with his attraction to boys. Their operation is turned upside down when they meet Crystal (Kassius Nelson), a young psychic who can communicate with them. You can stream Dead Boy Detectives here. Lockwood & Co. (2023, one season) Another one-season-and-done show, Lockwood & Co. is a clever supernatural detective series with a neat premise. In an alternate modern Britain, ghosts are an everyday occurrence, which is not to say they aren't a nuisance—their touch is deadly. Technological progress has largely ground to a halt, while ghost-hunting agencies abound and, since adults lose the ability to sense ghosts directly, kids and teens are on the front lines. Ruby Stokes (Bridgerton) plays Lucy Carlyle, an extremely sensitive listener who was cast aside when she was unfairly blamed for several deaths at her first job. With nowhere else to go, she joins up with the shady, unregulated Lockwood & Co., a two-orphan operation working outside the law. It's YA, generally, but smart and spooky all the same. You can stream Lockwood & Co. here. Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous/Chaos Theory (2020 – , eight seasons) While the latest Jurassic World movies have skewed more toward nostalgia, these two animated action series' haven't forgotten that dinosaurs are at least as fun for kids as they are for middle-aged parents who remember seeing Jurassic Park back in the day. Camp Cretaceous, which ran for five seasons, takes place in and around the first Jurassic World movie and involves a bunch of kids invited to the title camp for a bit of dino-themed fun—you can imagine how it goes. Chaos Theory follows the kids—most of them, anyway—six years later. You can stream Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous here. Derry Girls (2018–2022, three seasons) A legitimate sitcom that just happens to be set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1990s, when clashes between nationalists and unionists frequently resulted in violence. It’s a fascinating contrast, brought to life by a writer and creator (Lisa McGee) who lived it. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny—though doesn’t make any allowances for audiences unaccustomed to Irish accents, so don’t feel bad if you need subtitles until you get the hang of it. The show ended after three seasons, but comes to a satisfying conclusion. You can stream Derry Girls here. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018 – 2020, five seasons) Nimona creator ND Stevenson also re-invented She-Ra for five seasons with plenty of action, heart, and some of the most impressive queer representation you're likely to find in a family cartoon. Aimee Carrero plays Adora, an orphan raised to be a soldier in the evil Horde alongside her best friend Catra (AJ Michalka). When Adora discovers a magic sword that transforms her into the legendary Princess of Power, she switches sides to rebuild the Princess Alliance to resist the tyrannical rule of Hordak. The series turns on rebuilding old bonds, including with the love she left behind. You can stream She-Ra here. Virgin River (2019– , renewed for a seventh season) We have plenty of edgy TV lately, and there’s nothing at all wrong with something a bit cozier. Virgin River stars Alexandra Breckenridge as Mel, a nurse practitioner and midwife who finds unexpected complications when she moves to the title Northern California town. It’s high-end comfort viewing, and has a pretty dedicated fanbase, even without the buzz of something like Stranger Things. You can stream Virgin River here. Sweet Magnolias (2020– , fifth season renewal pending) In a similarly cozy vein (in the best possible way), Sweet Magnolias stars JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Brooke Elliott, Heather Headley and Jamie Lynn Spears as a group of childhood friends supporting each other through various life crises in Serenity, South Carolina. The cast is engaging, and the quality of the performances adds some emotional heft to the show’s sweetness. You can stream Sweet Magnolias here. 3 Body Problem (2024 – , renewed for second and third seasons) This one might not be entirely off your radar, given that it represents the increasingly rare instance in which Netflix actually renewed a show. An adaptation of the heady Liu Cixin novel series, it begins during China's cultural revolution and finds astrophysicist Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng and Rosalind Chao) making contact with an alien civilization, and making choices that will haunt humanity as the narrative moves into the present. You can stream 3 Body Problem here. Arcane (2021 – 2024, two seasons) Another one that’s pretty popular (and Emmy-winning), but that you might miss if you’re put off by the premise and/or its very slow release cycle. There are few scenarios in which a top-down game involving online opponents shooting lasers across a map should produce a show this impressive, but here we are. The League of Legends lore forms the backdrop for the show, but the pull is in the narrative involving two sisters caught up in the growing conflict between a utopian city and its oppressed underclass, without whom it couldn’t exist. The painted animation style is truly something special. You can stream Arcane here. Gentefied (2020–2021, two seasons) A half-hour comedy-drama, but with an emphasis on the comedy, Gentefied follows three Mexican-American cousins who have built lives in Los Angeles, only to be faced with a new challenge: the looming gentrification of the neighborhood they helped to build. This bilingual series has a lot of heart, and, though cut short after two seasons, the second is even better than the first. You can stream Gentefied here. The Way of the Househusband (2021–2023, two seasons) It’s a little bit of a throwback, sure: the Mr. Mom-style story finds a former yakuza boss getting out of the business in favor of taking over the household chores while his wife goes off to work. Wild! Still, there’s plenty of fun to be had as the deeply intense Tatsu deals with the daily complications of normal life. It takes a typical anime action show star and drop him into a show about making dinner—a solid premise executed with tongue firmly in cheek. You can stream The Way of the Househusband here. Raising Dion (2019–2022) There’s a bit of a Stranger Things-vibe to Raising Dion—a single mom helps her kids to cope with a wildly unexpected turn of events in their lives—but instead of supernatural horror, they’re dealing with their burgeoning superpowers. Seven-year-old Dion, specifically, develops mysterious abilities following the death of his scientist father (played in flashback by one of the show’s producers, Michael B. Jordan). The show wisely doesn’t shy away from depicting the unique challenges of being a Black single mother, which grow further complicated, naturally, when your kid can freeze objects in mid-air. You can stream Raising Dion here. Young Royals (2021–2024 , three seasons) Steamy soap Young Royals follows the fictional Prince of Sweden, Wilhelm (Edvin Ryding) as he embarks on a romance with another student, Simon Eriksson (Omar Rudberg) at their elite boarding school. While possessed of all the addictive qualities of the teen drama genre, Young Royals takes itself a bit more seriously than some, and feels remarkably fresh in its commitment to casting age-appropriate actors in all the key roles. You can stream Young Royals here. Sacred Games (2018–2019, two seasons) A crime-drama with a uniquely complex facility with world-building, this Indian import begins with an honest Mumbai cop played by Hindi-language film star Saif Ali Khan. Just as the rookie has become entangled in the police department’s corruption, he’s contacted by a long-believed-dead crime boss who warns him that, without his help, everyone in Mumbai will be dead in 25 days. The familiar cop-show beats play out against a larger-than-usual canvas, making for one of the best recent crime dramas from any country. You can stream Sacred Games here. Atypical (2017–2021, four seasons) There are plenty of shows featuring characters who serve as analogs for individuals on the autism spectrum (think Big Bang Theory), but very few that seem willing to, I dunno, forefront characters with autism. In that regard, Atypical isn’t perfect—in trying to show the positive face of autism, the well-intentioned series doesn’t always let the characters feel like real people. Still, issues aside, it’s a likable and funny show that gets closer to a realistic portrait of life on the spectrum than most. You can stream Atypical here. Sense8 (2015–2018, two seasons and two specials) Look, it’s a superhero show, but with orgies. That’s not the actual tagline, but maybe the show would’ve gone past two seasons had it been. Really, though, it’s a high-concept science fiction premise involving eight strangers from around the world who find with and between themselves with a deep, inexplicable connection. On one level, that means they can share their special abilities when needed. On another, it’s an impressively uplifting call for connection, and a recognition of our mutual interconnectedness. Also, the show is super queer—unsurprising, given it sprung from the minds of the Wachowskis (who co-wrote the episodes with Babylon 5's Michael J. Straczynski). You can stream Sense8 here. 3% (2016–2020, four seasons) The metaphor isn’t terribly subtle: In a near-future dystopia, the young, impoverished people of Inland have one chance to get out—“The Process,” a gamut of tests and puzzles to determine who will get to set off forever to live in a bountiful paradise. Most fail, and some die, leaving 3% of participants to move on to a utopia that it’s not much of a spoiler to say isn’t quite all it’s cracked up to be. Yeah, it’s more-or-less a Brazilian Hunger Games, but with longer-form storytelling and well-drawn characters that sell the concept. You can stream 3% here. Alias Grace (2017, one season) In some ways, it’s the other recent Margaret Atwood novel adaptation (existing well in the shadow of the bigger, buzzier Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu), but this miniseries is every bit as biting and well-crafted. It’s based on the true story of a poor Irish immigrant found guilty of a double homicide in 1843 under somewhat mysterious circumstances, and following a life of trauma. Years later, a psychiatrist comes to examine her and explores her past and the circumstances that might (just might) have driven a disenfranchised and powerless girl to murder. You can stream Alias Grace here. Star Trek: Prodigy (2021 – , third season renewal pending) Like One Day at a Time, Prodigy became a Netflix original in a roundabout way, having been ditched by Paramount+ (Star Trek's kinda/mostly streaming home) after the first season. A bit of smartly entry-level Trek, the show finds a bunch of orphaned teens forced to work in a labor colony discovering a long-lost Federation starship that they use to make their escape. With some help from the ship's built-in command training program (Kate Mulgrew, reprising her role as a holographic version of Voyager's Captain Janeway), the kids make their escape into a bigger universe. It's some of the best modern Trek, with an all-ages style and increasingly epic scope. You can stream Star Trek: Prodigy here. Gyeongseong Creature (2023 – , third season renewal pending) A bigger hit globally than in the U.S., this South Korean import blends historical drama with monster horror in a fun, compelling way. Set in 1945 Gyeongseong (what is now Seoul), and during the Japanese occupation of Korea, the series finds the titular monster arising out of human experimentation conducted in secret by the Japanese army. The scars of occupation have been justifiably fertile ground for storytelling in the last few years (see also Apple’s Pachinko), and Gyeongseong adds science fiction action to that mix. You can stream Gyeongseong Creature here. Hilda (2018 – 2023, three seasons) Hilda’s world feels like it could have come from the mind of Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki, but with more trolls (it’s not Japanese, for the record, but based on a British graphic novel). The title character lives with her mother in the remote wilderness, a magical landscape filled with magic and animals that adventurous Hilda is very familiar with. Circumstances force the two to move to the city of Trollberg, a place that appears to have significantly less magic. It’s a distinctly lovely-looking show, with a curious and empathetic protagonist who’s also incredibly stubborn and set in her ways. It’s wonderful for kids and adults, and stars Belle Ramsey (The Last of Us) as the title character. There’s also a feature-length movie (Hilda and the Mountain King, also on Netflix). You can stream Hilda here. Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (2020, three seasons) A collaboration between DreamWorks and the South Korean animation studio Mir (The Legend of Korra), this enchanting adventure series follows Kipo Oak as she seeks out her father in unique future dystopia: at some point, mutated animals rose up against their human oppressors and forced humans into underground burrows. During her journey, Kipo discovers new things about herself (for example, that she’s not 100% human), and finds friends and allies among the animals. It’s a gorgeous and delightful adventure, with a fair bit of casual diversity and queer representation. You can stream Kipo here. Anne With an E (2017–2019, three seasons) It doesn’t sound, on its face, like a great idea: Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic novel Anne of Green Gables is pretty well synonymous with old-timey kid lit and a beloved ‘70s miniseries, and any modern adaptation could have run to treacly irrelevance or edgy revisionism. Instead, the reboot revisits the novel and mines its text (and subtext) for new ideas without betraying the spirit of the work. It feels perfectly fresh modern in unexpected ways. You can stream Anne With an E here. Kingdom (2019–2020, two seasons and then some) It’s not exactly a history lesson, but Kingdom does open a window into the middle of Korea’s Joseon Dynasty, a centuries-long era that ran to nearly the 20th century. During which time there wasn’t an actual zombie plague—so liberties have been taken. The show very deftly combines horror and medieval-esque political intrigue, making it something wholly unique to either genre. Based on a webcomic series authored by show creator Kim Eun-hee, it was Netflix’s first original South Korean series. So far there are two seasons and a feature-length special episode, with a spin-off movie Ashin of the North. You can stream Kingdom here. View the full article

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US government debt on course for worst week since 2019 as traders report worsening liquidityView the full article

President’s trade war likely to raise unemployment and slow economic growth ‘considerably’, says John WilliamsView the full article

Alphabet’s Google laid off hundreds of employees in its platforms and devices unit, The Information reported on Friday, citing a person with direct knowledge of the situation. The cuts in the division, which houses the Android platform, Pixel phones and the Chrome browser among other applications, follow Google’s January buyout offers to employees in the unit, the report said. “Since combining the platforms and devices teams last year, we’ve focused on becoming more nimble and operating more effectively and this included making some job reductions in addition to the voluntary exit program that we offered in January,” a Google spokesperson told The Information. Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Big Tech players have been redirecting spending towards data centers and AI development, while scaling back investments in other areas of their business. Facebook-parent Meta laid off about 5% of its “lowest performers” in January while pushing ahead with the expedited hiring of machine learning engineers. Microsoft also trimmed 650 jobs in its Xbox unit in September. Amazon laid off employees in several units, including communications, while Apple eliminated about 100 roles in its digital services group last year, according to media reports. Bloomberg in February reported that Google had laid off employees in its cloud division, adding that the round of cuts impacted only a few teams. In January 2023, Alphabet had announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its global workforce. —Anusha Shah and Deborah Sophia, Reuters View the full article

‘Fast Company’ global design editor Mark Wilson goes behind the scenes with the band in Budapest to decode the disciplined chaos of their genre-defying visual experiments. View the full article

Never underestimate the news media’s ability to amplify the mundane with urgent-sounding headlines. If you follow the twists and turns of the retail industry as closely as we news-watchers do, you may have noticed recently that the simple act of closing for the Easter holiday has been rebranded as a “retail blackout.” If you’ve been at all confused by this oversold terminology, here’s a brief explainer to help break it down: What’s happening? Over the last week or so, a number of news organizations—mostly from outside the United States—have reported on a so-called “retail blackout” that is set to take place on Sunday, April 20, which is Easter Sunday. Easter is a major holiday that is celebrated by billions of Christians around the world. The so-called blackout merely means that some retailers are closing in observance of this major holiday. So this is a new thing? Not at all. Retailers have long closed for Easter and other major holidays. In fact, if you dig into the lists for 2025, you’ll find that they haven’t changed that much in recent years. For example, Target, Costco, and Sam’s Club are closing on Easter 2025, according to USA Today (which, we should point out, did not use the term blackout). Those same retailers also closed on Easter in 2024 and 2023. Conversely, retail giant Walmart tends to stay open on Easter as it will again this year. Why are articles referencing an Easter “blackout” then? Probably because it sounds more exciting than just saying that stores are closing on Easter. However, we haven’t seen any retailers themselves refer to closing for the holiday as a blackout. As far as consumer activism goes, there have been legitimate attempts at economic blackouts this year—most notably in February, when consumers stopped buying things for 24 hours in protest of rising prices and corporate greed. But none of the articles linked to here are referencing any specific activist movement. Who started this and is it a terrible thing? That depends on how you feel about clickbait. The information in the articles is actually quite useful if you care about which stores are open and closed on Easter, which a lot of people do. The justification for using exaggerated terms to describe relatively ordinary occurrences is always going to be subjective. As for where this all started, it’s not totally clear which outlet was the first to do it. A reverse-chronicle search on Google News reveals that some outlets used similar terms last year too. View the full article

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. National active housing inventory for sale at the end of March 2025 was up 28.5% compared to March 2024. That’s just 20% below pre-pandemic levels back in March 2019. However, while the national housing market has softened and inventory has surpassed 2019 pre-pandemic levels in some pockets of the Sun Belt, many markets remain far tighter than the national average. Pulling from ResiClub’s monthly inventory tracker, we identified the tightest major housing markets heading into spring 2025 where active inventory is still the furthest below pre-pandemic 2019 levels. These markets are where home sellers have maintained more power compared to most sellers nationwide. Among the nation’s 200 largest metro area housing markets, 42 (see table below) at the end of March 2025 still had at least 50% less active inventory than they did in March 2019. Many of those tight markets are in the Northeast—in particular, in states like New Jersey and Connecticut. Unlike the Sun Belt, many markets in the Northeast and Midwest were less reliant on pandemic-era migration and have fewer new home construction projects in progress. With lower exposure to the negative demand shock caused by the slowdown in pandemic-era migration—and fewer homebuilders in these regions offering affordability adjustments once mortgage rates spiked—active inventory in many Northeast and Midwest housing markets has remained relatively tight, maintaining a seller’s advantage heading into spring 2025. View the full article

For three weeks now, OK Go has been on set in Budapest’s largest train station. The temperature in this wing is somewhere around 45 degrees, and much of the Hungarian filming crew has long ago gone numb. Against Keleti station’s baroque backdrop of frescos and pink marble pillars, the band has been working with roboticists and production designers to build one of its most complex music videos ever for a new song called “Love”. The video’s 140-foot-long contraption is built from 29 robots holding 60 mirrors that, in one long tracking shot, will crescendo into a brain-bending photonic spectacle of car-size kaleidoscopes and glimpses into the infinite. It’s almost lunchtime on the last day of filming. The sun will set in six hours. And OK Go has not captured a single frame. The crew is still choreographing the tricky final shot, which involves four Kuka robot arms—industrial grade automatons capable of lifting a car—spinning four sharp mirrors, while OK Go front man and the video’s codirector, Damian Kulash, stands singing in the middle of the action donning a glittering mirrored suit. Even testing the Kuka system at half speed with an operator holding a kill switch, tensions are high. “Three people just died!” shouts the assistant director. The robots must build Kulash three walls of an infinity room, while four strapping Hungarians—who have a penchant for shaking their rumps at the start of each take—erect the fourth. Just the day before, the Kuka mirrors hit the mirror with so much force that they shattered the fourth wall and pushed the entire stage by nine inches. This accident led to some last minute reprogramming and a change in the choreography, and made the entire gizmo look more like a Gundam deathtrap than a Yayoi Kusama exhibit. “Nobody died,” counters Kulash in a careful channel of calm. By the murmurs on set from people who know him best, Kulash doesn’t exactly have a reputation for zen. And he warns the AD, “We’ve gotta start fucking running this, or we’ll still be doing this at 6 p.m.,” before quick back pats hammer out a temporary reconciliation. Now, a little older than the last time you’ve seen him—a little grayer, a little horser, a little more contemplative—Kulash swallows his emotions before resetting to his first mark. He tunes out the mounting costs of the shoot, the skepticism of the crew, and the beyond looming deadline, and focuses on the reason they’re making the video in the first place: to capture the infinite sensation of love. Ornella MariFast Company The return of OK Go On April 11th, after a decade of quiet, OK Go will return with its fifth studio album titled And the Adjacent Possible. The band hasn’t released music since 2017, but its members assure you they haven’t been stagnant. Ok Go has been working on And the Adjacent Possible since 2019; and they developed a touring show for art centers where they played along with their music videos. Kulash spent two years directing the Apple TV movie The Beanie Bubble with his wife; bassist Tim Nordwind made an independent film. Three out of four of the band have fully embraced dad status. (Green room discussions involved topics like how much screen time is too much, and at one point, guitarist Andy Ross pauses our interview mid-sentence to call his children before they head to school.) For Kulash, “having kids was the biggest reset,” he says, noting that his family rescued him from burnout. “While it’s the most difficult and intense thing I’ve ever done, it also resets all sorts of wonder and all sorts of excitement about the universe in general. And it sort of made music fresh to me again and made art fresh to me in a whole new way.” Dubbed the “first post-internet band,” OK Go came into its own alongside the rise of YouTube. Before we had interviews over hot wings and bedrotting TikToks, OK Go defined millennial multimedia with its ambitious performance art videos. And to fund them, the band turned to an unlikely source: not a label, but a sponsor. In an era when the stamp of a logo generally meant selling out, OK Go established the fine line of commercial art, presaging a new creator economy subsidized by brands. In 2010, the band partnered with State Farm to sponsor its Rube Goldberg-esque video for “This Too Shall Pass.” Since then, most OK Go videos have been made with sponsorship funding, including Morton Salt, S7 Airlines, and Chevrolet. For “Love,” the band is working with Meta to bring its ambitious video to life. Before this year, the last significant video OK Go produced was from 2017. The final shoot for their last album, Hungry Ghosts, involved the band members dangling from wires to a backdrop of 567 printers. Stop motion captured each new print a frame at a time, with shoots that stretched to 4 a.m. Kulash remembers sleeping ten hours over four days. Whether or not this was the final straw, it was the final video before OK Go took a break. In the years since their last major video hit, the digital world that OK Go defined has gone through a generational shift. Horizontal video has given way to the vertical streams of TikTok and Reels. Artists have given way to “content creators” that churn out a steady stream of low-lift production to appease algorithms more than Facebook shares. “We are still figuring out how to navigate the new social media world, which is, you know, very different from the old social media world, which is very different from the YouTube world, which was very different from the MTV world,” says Kulash. “This universe is not built for anyone except for Mr. Beast, right?” Amidst all of these trends, OK Go believes, more instinctually than metrically, that there’s still value in doing things the real, hard way. And that they can still break out by producing one or two absurdly produced videos a year. Kulash admits that the views on OK Go’s first comeback video of 2025—shot across a mosaic of phones that required over 1,000 individual videos—was lower than the band hoped. But he felt that the media pickup around the video still had a similar scale to the old days. With little more guiding the decision than artistic license, OK Go has decided that the ambitious videos it creates will still be ambitious. And they will be shot in landscape rather than portrait. The band’s vision won’t bend for the predominant video style of our era. “It feels almost like an existential threat to what we do,” he says. “When something is vertical, it also becomes disposable.” Ornella MariFast Company Short ride in a fast machine By lunchtime on the Budapest set, Nordwind is laying his worried head right on the table, pressing his fingertips into his freshly cue balled scalp. Kulash has removed his brown suit jacket and two tearaway shirts, as he picks at a plate of food. During this break, he still needs to finish programming the lighting sequence of the final shot. Only then can the band begin filming as many takes as possible before the end of day. An OK Go video is a short ride in a fast machine—each feels like an attempt at breaking a sort of creative land speed record just before the bolts blow off. In this sense, an OK Go video is not like a traditional music video, which often functions simply as a new medium for a hit song. When I first spoke to Kulash in February, Kendrick Lamar had just won a Grammy for “Not Like Us.” Kulash, an astute observer of music videos, used it as a point of comparison. “Does that feel like you’re in the room with Kendrick?” he asked. “I feel the brand of Kendrick Lamar, but I don’t feel like this is an art piece of Kendrick Lamar. This is an advertisement for Kendrick Lamar music. It’s a great advertisement! That’s the purpose of a music video. You get the brand of Kendrick Lamar; I want to be more like him and move more like him and hang with his friends . . . but none of it feels like what we’re hoping to do with our videos.” Kulash wants the people on the other side of the screen to feel like they’re in the same room with the band. There is no constructed narrative beyond the experience itself. “You know that space between the speakers, where the only point is to feel this emotion? And that’s it?” he continued. “You’re not using that emotion to get somewhere else. That emotion is the end point . . . [In our videos] the only thing that matters is those three minutes of emotion. The video refers to itself, nothing else.” To create this sensation for “Love,” OK Go recruited cinematographer Jordan Buck and camera operator Pete Whitcombe, the latter of whom worked on the same crew crew behind the Oscar nominated WW1 epic 1917’s famous single take tracking shot. The production designer, Will Field, has made surrealist commercials for Pepsi and KFC, while moonlighting as an infinity mirror aficionado. The codirector Aaron Duffy, cofounder of the agency Special Guest, has worked for Apple and filmed OK Go’s illusion-loaded video for “The Writing’s on the Wall.” When the roboticist Miguel Espada, who served as the third codirector, isn’t filming projects as part of Special Guest, he’s a professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. For “Love,” Kulash was inspired by two closet mirrors that he and his sister would turn to form an infinite reflection in which they’d play for hours. It was a memory jogged during COVID when, picking up toys left out by his twins, Kulash caught their reflection in a mirror. These both felt like portraits of love. The initial melody came from Nordwind. The lyrics came from Kulash. The video’s earliest visual experiments started with Kulash, Nordwind, Ross, and Duffy spending a week in Los Angeles with Espada playing with about 20 small mirrors by hand. There, they established a vocabulary of tricks that would be neat, and only possible, for robots to choreograph. At the same time, production designer Field began developing a pre-visualization to imagine how the robots and mirrors would look and squeeze into a space. Later, Kulash and Ross flew to Barcelona where they met with Universal Robotics, which lent the team most of its equipment for the shoot. But being on set it’s easy to see how the best laid plans are just a sketch of what might be possible. Ross and Nordwind spend a solid hour shifting their feet by millimeters and balancing on slivers of wood, while Duffy holds a measuring tape to the floor, just so they are lined up in the exact sweet spot of head-swapping mirrors that they’ll need to hit from a jog. “I shoot a lot of commercials, 40–50 a year, and there’s such a seemingly risky idea to what you’re doing, but there’s also so much risk mitigation. It’s ‘we know we can do that, so we’re gonna do that,’” says Buck. “There were a few things for this [shoot], when before you get here . . . you’re like, ‘let’s see!’ Which is [fun] and excruciatingly anxious at the same time.” Field’s team built every mirror contraption on set or nearby, but over the course of planning and shooting, the mirrors ever-so slightly warped from temperatures dropping to a frigid 10 degrees at night. Earlier in the week, Field had to MacGyver a machine from fishing line and clips so the band could pull cords to make pool inflatables drop, which serve as the colors behind a kaleidoscope. Espada rewrote his own robot animation software, replacing frames per second with beats per minute, to sync each movement perfectly with the music. Together, these creatives push the limits, experimenting in ways that would never be feasible in a commercial shoot, feature film, or about any other industry that thrives on predictability. “The guy who sits there all day long with a six axis industrial robot that could lift the fucking building walks onto a job, and they’re like, ‘make it move the toothbrush,’” muses Kulash. “But no one’s ever gonna pay him to go, ‘what are the 1,000 other things this can do you’ve never seen?’” Part of the appeal to the viewer is that you can innately sense these stakes in an OK Go video. “You have to feel the risk involved, like it has to feel like it’s not going to work, right?” says Kulash. “It’s the unexpected, when that gear is doing something that gear isn’t supposed to do, that charges it with emotion.” In Budapest, that charge of emotion is almost crackling as something almost unsaid: This time, we actually might not pull it off. With half a day left and no frames captured on film, producers have taken to pacing back and forth with stoic faces and whispered conversations. “For people who do this commercially, this is not an acceptable place to be. You can’t ask people to do this every single day,” Kulash sighs. “But for us, it’s a once in every six months, once a year, once every five years kind of thing. And we are like, ’it is gonna happen,’ you know?” Ornella MariFast Company Building the band Before becoming the internet’s favorite spectacle, OK Go was just another indie band trying to break through. The beginnings of OK Go trace back all the way to 1987. Kulash and Nordwind have been friends since they were 11, after meeting at the artsy Interlochen summer camp in Michigan. Following that summer, Kulash (in D.C.) and Nordwind (in Kalamazoo) would mail each other mix tapes, and even visit each other across the country. In this pre-smartphone age, they’d set up the camcorder and act out sketches to make themselves laugh. (In one early skit they dressed up in flannels mocking the sacrosanct Seattle grunge movement.) Eventually the play codified to a plan: They’d go to college, and upon responsibly landing degrees, they promised to launch their own band. With Kulash at Brown, Nordwind set up at Depaul in Chicago, where he pieced together the earliest bits of OK Go. A fellow Interlochen alumni named Andy Duncan brought some theatrical energy and skill with guitar (to be replaced by Andy Ross a few years later), while the duo hunted for the perfect drummer. “There was a girl in my dorm who knew a guy that lived in the suburbs of Chicago who played drums. I was like, great, give me his number,” recalls Nordwind. “So we met [drummer Dan Konopka] at a cafe and asked him to do a beat on a table. He drummed on the table, and we were like, ‘You seem pretty good!’ And then got into a rehearsal space with him, and he really was good.” Kulash joined back up with Nordwind in Chicago, meshed quickly with the band, and in 1998, they took to the road in a van. Their theatrical quirk became a fixture in their stage performances, and they performed a mock boy band dance as they opened for acts like They Might Be Giants and Ira Glass’s This American Life. Kulash moonlighted in graphic design to pay for the tour, and the group quickly found its stride. It was signed by Capital Records in 2001. When OK Go’s first album arrived in 2002, it was part of a resurgent wave of indie rock including the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dirty Projectors, and Jet. Their label was obsessed with packaging OK Go with the same hardedge aesthetic of The Strokes, and their early videos were amplified with the typical wide angle lenses and testosterone beloved by MTV. “It’s all overplaying and acting,” says Konopka. “And if you’re playing drums correctly, you’re not going like . . .” (Konopka gestures his hands wildly over his head). “This is a show!” But despite playing by the label’s rules, OK Go wasn’t a breakout hit. They peaked at 20 on the alternative charts with Get Over It, just enough to get their second record greenlit, albeit without the full promotional investment of the label. “You have infinite potential before you’ve released anything,” says Kulash. “And once you release something, you’re limited by reality, and they go on to dream about the next bunch of 18-year-olds.” As they planned to go on tour to promote the second album, OK Go knew they needed to refresh their well-trodden boy band dance. So in 2005, the otherwise hard-edged rockers enlisted Kulash’s professional ballroom dancing sister to choreograph a new number—a sort of renaissance court dance to their single “A Million Ways.” Shot on Mini DV Tape in the backyard of Kulash’s childhood home in Washington, D.C., the band danced the routine live on tour, and they burned DVDs of it to hand out at the shows. “I remember showing it to the head of the new media arm of Capitol Records, whose first words were, ‘If this gets out, you’re sunk,’” recalls Kulash. “Because this would kill the image of any rock band.” Indeed, the humble home demo melted any lingering Gen X rocker aesthetic, making way for internet-beloved irony. Nordwind, in particular, demonstrates a certain unearned panache, taking a peacockian pride as he executes the simple dance steps. Somehow—the band still claims not to know—the dance ended up on the early video site iFilm, where it was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. And months later, Kulash recalls getting an email from “chad@youtube.com” (Chad Hurley, who cofounded the site) asking they copy it over. It amassed millions of views, now dwarfing streams of their label’s official music video for the song by 12x. Following ”A Million Ways,“ OK Go codified their approach. They landed on the first of their big ideas—treadmills. And then they found the song in their catalog to best articulate it. Kulash confesses that, originally, the treadmills were shot to a song with a marching beat, to feel like a marching band. “When we started moving, it didn’t feel right. So we played the whole record, and we got on the treadmills, and filmed ourselves moving, and one of them felt right,” he says. The song was “Here It Goes Again,” which would propel OK Go’s fame to new heights. “It seems so fucking obvious [now]!” laughs Kulash. “Maybe that’s why it felt right. It’s because it’s literally the point of the song, you know!” “Here it Goes Again” amassed a million views within a week (and 42 million views before the first version was taken down). But it wasn’t just viral; it became an international pop culture sensation, with an early video cloned and re-created by fans online. OK Go performed the act live on stage at the MTV’s Video Music Awards later that year and bagged a Grammy for their performance. It’s still the most favorited music video ever on YouTube. After that, OK Go recognized a fork in the road. “It felt like we could either decide that we were too cool for this; we’re a band first, and so we’re just going to leave it here and go back to a more traditional route. Or we could lean into this,” says Nordwind. “If we’re going to do it, it seems like we need to continue to challenge ourselves, make sure that we don’t become bored with that process and start growing the scale of things, and ratchet up the level of challenge, absurdity, and all the rest of it.” The shoot begins The shooting starts after lunch. It’s 1:33 p.m. Buck shakes out his hands, which are sweating up his camera controls. The set grows eerily quiet with the anticipation in the air. The music kicks on and . . . it takes 20 seconds before Nordwind stumbles and someone bumps a robot. 1:46 p.m. Take 2 Cut, the camera is too close. 2:13 p.m. Take 7 The band makes it halfway, until something goes wrong with a ball drop. “Fastest reset possible, fewest notes we can,” shouts Kulash. Konopka’s rubber gloves are stuck on his hands. “Yeah but if we hit a mirror we’re fucked!” yells Buck over the intercom. 2:22 Take 8 Kulash has a wardrobe malfunction when his brown suit gets caught in his sparkle jacket, ruining the finale. But technically, the band has captured its first complete take. 3:24 Take 14 Producers note it takes about 15 minutes to reset between each attempt. That gives the band eight more takes before the sun goes down. Cut—Kulash’s tearaway shirt fails to tear away. Progress is slow, but try after try, the crew gets better. The band gets better. And you can begin to discern, comparing shot-to-shot, how the littlest of details matter—how soccer and ping-pong balls dropped into a mirror can sometimes look like silly toys, and sometimes look like a trip through the galaxy. The machine hones itself toward one purpose. And every failure stings a little more. “I’m getting angry, which is a good sign,” says Ross, critiquing his own deftness at poking a tennis ball on a stick during his guitar solo between takes. As we continue on, their patience for small talk wears thin. Following their first remotely useable take at 3:27 p.m., you can feel a most certain drop in cortisol across the room, but the celebration is nonexistent. The camera was a little sideways, and the technical execution still lacks any cohesive feeling of magic. Being close is somehow more unsettling than being far. Now is the time to grind. “After five good takes, I’ll feel like I’m on ecstasy,” says Konopka, who finds himself sweating despite the chilly temperatures. “But we’re not there yet.” 4:52 Take 19 Whiffs of magic fill the air as the band hits each mark for their best take yet. It’s still imperfect, and everyone knows it. But in a release of emotion, the band huddles together in a firm, cathartic hug. Ornella MariFast Company There’s no business being OK Go This shoot in Budapest is sponsored by Meta, which is a match made in part by the video’s production partner, Special Guest. Norwind, iconic for his glasses, admits some trepidation at being the corporate mascot for this shoot, but he seems settled by the time he’s donning the Ray-Bans in the initial frame to record a first-person perspective of the video. And at the very end of the run—after the band holds the letters “LOVE” up to the gundam robot mirrors—he says, “hey Meta, stop recording.” After several runthroughs, though, the final moment is still cringe. By 5:32 p.m. during what felt like a solid take, the energy across the train station seems to crescendo. With every hit mark, perfection feels ever more precarious until someone yells “cut.” But this run-through is going well. Very well. It might be The Take. Kulash’s sixth sense knew they were close, and he had already advised the crew to rush in and celebrate the end on camera. The band sticks the landing. The crew runs forward. You can almost taste the champagne—until, a terrible silence, and the words “Hey Meta” suck the air from the room. A sponsored video suddenly feels like the most laboriously produced ad in history. Silent tensions flare as the team rushes back to set up for another take, mulling this final creative hurdle. Producers pull Kulash aside, warning that they’re going into overtime—Meta, like OK Go’s other sponsors, don’t cover overages, which leads to mental math like, “how many live concerts will we need to play to pay for this?” The producers are also increasingly fearful that a tired crew or tenuous machinery will reach some catastrophic failure. “These things aren’t meant to stand a large amount of time in a space,” Field says of the set. “It was up for two weeks while people ran around testing, and then it had to survive two days of shooting.” However, Kulash shrugs off the out-of-pocket expense. Managing potential overtime is one reason they’re filming in Hungary, not California. It’s also a testament to OK Go’s careful creative structure: On most shoots, directors answer to producers, while anyone filming a commercial answers to a brand. But on this set? Everyone was hired by OK Go. The band gets to be its own thoroughly irrational client. Some OK Go videos do make the band money. Others do not. “We would always waste some money or forgo profit to make the better thing,” says Kulash, who notes that the band’s only business plan is akin to road runner darting off a cliff without looking down. Members of the group live relatively modest lifestyles. They each pursue projects outside the band including producing, coding, acting, and directing, while always enjoying a drip of residuals from licensing. They will even re-create a video for more formalized commercials if the payday is significant enough, as they did for the Chinese furniture brand Red Star Macalline back in 2015. And so they continue to expect that, “if one out of ten projects pays off 11-fold, you’re fine,” according to Kulash. By 5:50, the team gathers to review the latest footage on the monitor. With the sun now setting, the carefully lit sets make less sense as you can see night peeking in through the windows. Buck asks for an hour to relight. Kulash says no. “It’s not up to my standards,” says Buck. “I know it’s less professional, but the takes are getting so much better,” says Kulash. “I don’t usually do work at this level.” “I think it’s better to get five more takes, sorry.” “This is kind of always the crux of these videos,” Kulash explains later. “You have to stick your finger past the line impossible to, like, briefly touch the impossible and pull it back before anyone kills you.” 6:40 p.m., Take 27 The camera smacks Kulash right in the lips. * * * The morning after the shoot, Nordwind and Kulash sit down for an early hotel breakfast. Ross and Konopka are already on a flight out. Their new album features a track called Going Home, a celebration of being on the road too long and knowing you’re returning to your family. Their silence sits in the air as the song’s fourth verse. The band skipped out on the after-party, settling for lukewarm Dreher tallboys in the train station instead. Hugs followed as weeks of creative debates gelled into mutual appreciation. Every mirror illusion felt special. Nordwind hit the “hey Meta” so naturally that I literally didn’t even notice it. Buck circled back in the end, content with the shot and knowing anything odd could be fixed. It’s the happiest of endings. As Kulash sips an earned espresso over eggs and his preferred preparation of bacon (soggy), he confesses that he still hasn’t even watched the final take yet—the one in which, to thunderous applause, he declared for the camera “I think that’s the one!” and then, in a sudden earnest realization, “that truly was the one!!” The ultimate decider for Kulash was that this was one of the only two shoots all day where he felt present in the song. And if he ran the machine any longer, he could sense the bolts were about to blow off. Their cars to the airport arrive in just 20 minutes, and for now, everything is right in the world of OK Go. It seems like everyone in the production stops by our table to say a quick thank you, what the heck did we pull off? And goodbye. It all feels like something familiar, something I haven’t experienced in a long time. Nordwind, sensing the camaraderie—tossing a tired smile to his friend since grade school—offers the perfect observation. “It felt like summer camp,” he says. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. If you’ve been holding out for a 240Hz gaming monitor without blowing your budget, the Samsung Odyssey G4 is currently at its lowest price ever, according to price trackers—$179.99 (down from $279.99). Samsung Odyssey G4 Gaming Monitor $179.99 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg $279.99 Save $100.00 Get Deal Get Deal $179.99 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg $279.99 Save $100.00 It’s a 25-inch, 1080p entry-level panel made for speed, not flash. No RGB backlighting or fancy extras here. The stand is basic and a little wobbly, and the design leans more “budget gamer” than premium setup. Still, if smooth gameplay tops your list, the G4 pulls through with a fast response time, low input lag, and both FreeSync and G-SYNC compatibility. Whether you're on AMD or NVIDIA, you’ll get tear-free performance as long as you’re using DisplayPort. This monitor is clearly built for PC gaming. At 240Hz with a solid response time across all refresh rates—60Hz, 120Hz, or 240Hz—you’re getting smooth motion with almost no ghosting or blur. It also includes some extra gaming features like a virtual aim point overlay (an always-on crosshair) and ultra-wide simulation mode that stretches your aspect ratio to 21:9 for a broader field of view. However, console gamers might want to skip this one. It doesn’t scale 4K or 1440p well and has poor VRR support on PS5. The Xbox Series X works a bit better, but you still won’t get full use of HDR or high-res modes. So if your gaming happens mostly on a console, this might not be worth the hassle. The image quality is decent for the price, but far from perfect. It handles glare well and gets bright enough for daytime use, but don’t expect deep blacks or dazzling HDR—this monitor doesn’t have local dimming, and the contrast ratio is pretty weak. Blacks often look gray in a dark room. Still, for most gamers playing in well-lit rooms, it holds up fine. The viewing angles are wide enough for side-by-side co-op without major color washout. The dual HDMI 2.0 ports, a single DisplayPort, and a 3.5mm audio jack cover the basics, and you also get other features like auto source switching, blue light filtering, and power-saving modes. View the full article

Emergency debate comes as ministers race to prevent the collapse of the steelmakerView the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. The Ring Battery Doorbell Plus is currently marked down to $119.99 on StackSocial (was $149.99), and if you’ve been eyeing a smart doorbell that won’t need rewiring or a professional install, it could fit the bill. It runs on a rechargeable battery, so setup is simple—just charge it, pop it in, and connect via the Ring app. That said, you’ll still need to recharge the battery every few months, depending on how often it’s triggered. The camera’s big sell is its expanded 1536p HD+ head-to-toe view, which means you can see visitors and packages in full, not just from the chest up. That might not seem huge until you miss a delivery or can’t make out what’s left on your doorstep. The color night vision works surprisingly well, too, giving you a clear view even in low light, notes PCMag. You can also talk to visitors through the two-way audio or let them know you're busy with one of the preset quick replies. You can also fine-tune the motion detection zones so your phone doesn’t blow up every time someone walks past your gate. It also integrates well with Alexa-enabled devices, so if you’ve got an Echo Show, you can see who’s at the door or get alerts read out loud. Just keep in mind, there’s no support for Google Assistant or Apple HomeKit, which could be a dealbreaker if that’s what your home setup relies on. Real-time notifications come straight to your phone or tablet, and the Ring app lets you adjust settings, view footage, or trigger responses remotely. That said, some of the more advanced features—like 180-day video history, person/package detection, and video previews—are locked behind a Ring Home subscription, which starts at $4.99/month for a single camera. You’ll still get live view and motion alerts without it, but you won’t be able to save or rewatch footage later. And if you want smarter AI features like video previews and one-tap emergency response, that price jumps to $19.99/month. So while this is a solid midrange option for those already in the Ring or Alexa ecosystem, it may not be the best pick if you want everything to work subscription-free. View the full article

All sense of survivors’ guilt was fleeting for those residents whose homes remained standing after wildfires ripped through the Los Angeles area three months ago. Many worried that smoke from the Eaton wildfire that destroyed more than 9,000 structures and killed 18 people may have carried toxins, including lead, asbestos and heavy metals, into their homes. But they struggled to convince their insurers to test their properties to ensure it was safe to return. Nicole Maccalla, a data scientist, said embers burned more than half of her roof, several windows and eaves were damaged, and her house in Altadena was left filled with ash, debris, soot and damaged appliances. She said her insurance adjuster said USAA would pay for contamination testing, but after choosing a company and coming back with the results, her claim was rejected. The adjuster said the company only covered testing in homes with major damage. “Every single item is a battle,” said Maccalla. “It’s denials and appeals and denials and appeals, and you wait weeks and weeks and weeks for responses.” Crowdsourcing contamination data Maccalla and others banded together as Eaton Fire Residents Unite, sharing environmental testing data and compiling the results in an online map. Of 81 homes tested so far for lead, all show elevated levels, according to the group. “I’ve already had multiple people reach out and say: ‘Thank you for publishing this map … because my insurance company has changed their mind and approved testing,'” said Maccalla, who helped design the data collection to verify results and maintain privacy. Many homeowners paid privately for the testing after their insurance companies refused, revealing gaps in coverage. The group hopes the data will help residents who can’t afford it to convince their insurers to cover testing and remediation. “If I can prove my community is not fit for human habitation then maybe I can show my home won’t be,” said Jane Lawton Potelle, founder of Eaton Fire Residents Unite. It’s not easy to understand how and when it is safe to return home, Lawton Potelle said. The fine print of insurance policies can be frustrating and confusing, and the government has not stepped in to help. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it has no plans to conduct widespread environmental testing. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is tracking environmental testing largely by academic researchers and a handful from government agencies, but most studies assess outdoor contamination. Toxic air and limited coverage Reports from other urban wildfires, in which building materials, appliances, cars and more burn at incredibly high temperatures, show increased levels of heavy metals including lead and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) such as benzene that are tied to negative health risks. But insurance companies haven’t standardized testing for those contaminants. Home insurance broadly covers fire damage, but there is a growing dispute over what damage must be covered when flames don’t torch the property. California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara released a bulletin in March that put the onus on companies to properly investigate reported smoke damage, saying they cannot deny such claims without investigating thoroughly, including paying for professional testing as warranted. But many residents have been left to fight for coverage anyway. Janet Ruiz, spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute that represents many major insurance companies, said it’s hard to compare neighbors because every claim is unique due to each home’s physical structure, actual damage and defined insurance coverage limits. “It can vary and insurance companies are sensitive to what the claim is,” Ruiz said. “You have to work with your insurance companies and be reasonable about what may have happened.” Dave Jones, director of the Climate Risk Initiative at University of California, Berkeley, and former state insurance commissioner, said testing should be covered even though some insurance companies disagree. “It’s perfectly reasonable for people to have some kind of environmental test done so that their home is safe and their property is safe,” Jones said. “We’re talking about very catastrophically high temperature fires where all sorts of materials are melted and some of them become toxic.” State plan struggles The state’s insurer of last resort, known as the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, has been scrutinized for years over how it handles smoke damage claims. A 2017 change to the FAIR Plan limited coverage to “permanent physical changes,” meaning smoke damage must be visible or detectable without lab testing for claims to be approved. State officials said that threshold was too high and illegal, and ordered a change. Dylan Schaffer, an attorney leading a class action lawsuit challenging FAIR Plan’s threshold, said he was surprised private carriers are disputing similar fire damage claims. “The damage is not due to smoke, the damage is contamination from fire,” Schaffer said. “They make it complicated because it saves them money.” Meanwhile, Altadena residents on the FAIR Plan say their claims are still being denied. Jones believes the debate will only end when lawmakers take action. FAIR Plan spokeswoman Hilary McLean declined to comment on the ongoing litigation and individual cases, but said the FAIR Plan pays all covered claims based on the adjusters’ recommendations. “Our policy, like many others, requires direct physical loss for there to be coverage,” McLean said. Worries over kids’ safety Lawton Potelle said the first inkling that her house might be toxic came after meeting with her AAA insurance adjuster in the days after the fire. Even though she had worn a mask, her chest still ached and her voice rasped, and she wondered whether her home was safe for her 11-year-old. Stephanie Wilcox said her toddler’s pediatrician recommended testing their home. Her Farmers Insurance policy includes coverage for lead and asbestos in addition to her wildfire coverage, but after multiple denials, she paid out of pocket. “After the initial inspection, (Farmers) had told us remediation would cost about $12,000 and that it would be habitable, like we could move back in tomorrow,” she said. “But now there’s no way.” She plans to ask for a new estimate including lead abatement and other costs, citing the results. Similarly, Zach Bailey asked in late January for contamination testing. The house he shares with his wife and toddler sits in an island of largely spared homes among blocks wiped out by the fire. After months of denials, State Farm agreed to pay for lead and asbestos testing because the remediation company cited federal worker safety regulations. It shouldn’t have been that hard, he said. “It feels like the insurance companies should have a playbook at this point,” he said. “They should have a process to keep people safe because this isn’t the first disaster like this.” —Claudia Lauer and Sally Ho, Associated Press View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Knife blocks seem like a great idea at first. You assume there are a variety of useful knives in there, and you get a whole row of steak knives for one low price. You may not eat steak that often, and never with seven other people, but who can say “no” to so many matching knives? You, that’s who. That mass-produced knife set is unlikely to work with your unique food personality. Skip the block of cheap knives (many of which you won’t touch anyway). Instead, focus on fewer, better, personalized knives. A high-quality knife (or three) can be versatile enough to meet all of your needs without blowing your budget. Use this guide to help you pick a knife, based on your specific needs, budget, and available space. The best knife to buy if you can only have one knife…You have to start somewhere. Instead of buying four cheap knives, you’re better off putting that money into one good knife that’s versatile enough to make a lot of different cuts. (Like the six basic knife cuts everyone should know.) For a knife that provides power and maneuverability, and can chop, slice, mince, and carve, two knives stand out: the chef’s knife and the santoku. The chef’s knife Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann The chef’s knife has a wide blade with a curved edge that tapers to a point, giving it the functionality of three knives in one. The wide blade with a deep heel has cleaver-like qualities, making it good for downward chopping with meats and root vegetables. The curved edge caters to a rocking motion, almost like a mezza-luna blade, which is prized for mincing and slicing. The narrow, sharp tip allows for precision carving and finer cuts, whether it’s slicing a strawberry or guiding meat off the bone. If you slice meats, chop veggies, and mince herbs, onions, and other aromatics, this is probably the knife for you. The santoku knife Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann The santoku is a blade shape that originated in Japan and has similar functionality to the western chef’s knife. This knife has a wide blade with a less dramatically curved edge. The tip is noticeably different from the chef’s knife, with a more blunt, downward design. The santoku comes with a smooth blade or a Granton edge (long dimples along the side), which keep food from sticking to your knife. These features make the santoku more cleaver-like, with the Granton edge keeping meats, fruits, and veggies from suctioning onto the blade, allowing for faster, more efficient chopping. The santoku can do what the chef’s knife does, but if you find that you do a lot more chopping in comparison to carving or slicing, this might be the knife best suited for your needs. I chop and cook vegetables almost every meal, so I reach for my santoku far more frequently than my chef’s knife. Mercer Culinary M23590 Renaissance, 7-Inch Santoku Knife $43.60 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg $47.19 Save $3.59 Shop Now Shop Now $43.60 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg $47.19 Save $3.59 The chef's knife or santoku will be your go-to food prep, slicing, and carving knife. Whichever you choose, you want it to be capable of powerful cuts. Look for a knife with a full tang which will lead to a weightier handle. Make sure the handle and bolster are comfortable in your grip. Both of these features will allow you to control the blade better, and put some oomph behind your cuts. The chef’s knife and santoku both come in a variety of sizes, but I think smaller ones afford more maneuverability. Stick with a six- to eight-inch blade. If you can only buy three knives…Three knives will allow you to explore blades with more specific functions. One of the knives should be a workhorse–the chef’s knife or santoku. The other two should be versatile, but hone in on more specialized functions. The following two blades cover a wide variety of foods with more precise handling. The bread knife Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann It might sound like the bread knife only cuts one thing, but it can break down more than a sourdough. A bread knife has a long, thin, narrow blade and a serrated edge, with either sharp or rounded serrations. It’s this feature that makes the bread knife special. Unlike the knives we’ve discussed so far, the edge punctures and saws through food to eliminate drag, and works horizontally, rather than with downward force. Use a bread knife for slicing anything that has a tough outer layer and a softer texture inside, including breads, pies, flaky pastries, eggplant, or tomatoes. Bread knives come in sizes ranging from six to twelve inches. I suggest an eight-inch bread knife to comfortably cut a broad range of ingredients. The utility knifeA utility knife, sometimes called a “petty knife,” is a medium-sized knife with a sturdy blade of about four to six inches. The blade has the same taper as a chef’s knife, but is more narrow. This makes the heel of the knife rather shallow, but overall the knife is versatile and easy to handle because of its more compact size. The utility knife is better suited to slicing and precision cutting, rather than chopping; the heel of the knife may not drop to the cutting board before your knuckles do. Utility knives come serrated or smooth, and can do a lot of the work paring knives do, thanks to their narrow design. Use this knife for slicing, deseeding, or peeling fruits and vegetables, take it on a picnic, or cut through a tall turkey club. WÜSTHOF Gourmet 4.5" Utility Knife, Black $40.00 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg Shop Now Shop Now $40.00 at Amazon /images/amazon-prime.svg If you can buy five kitchen knives…If you have room for five knives in your life you can have a little fun. You already have your chef’s knife or santoku, a utility knife, and a bread knife. Consider the things you prep with those three knives, and what you wish was either easier, or faster. Maybe the utility knife is a bit too big for cutting fruit. Is breaking down a chicken clunky? You might need a more flexible blade. Fileting a lot of fish? That calls for a thin, long blade. Take a look at the following knives and pick two that will best serve your needs. The paring knife Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann A paring knife is the tool you're reach for when you're hulling strawberries, peeling apples, or snacking on cheese. It’s what you want for fine, precision work. A paring knife has a short, thin, tapered blade that may or may not be angled. You can’t put a lot of chopping power behind a paring knife, it's better with small cuts. Most of its value lies in maneuverability. Usually two and a half to three and a half inches, you can use this blade for slicing small ingredients that don’t require a lot of force, like citrus or berries, peeling potatoes, or mincing onions and garlic. I have a cheap Victorinox serrated paring knife, and honestly, it’s a great size and has stayed extremely sharp even with high use. The Opinel paring knife is also a popular choice. The boning knife This knife has a unique shape and feel in comparison to the prior knives listed–it’s long and skinny, thin and razor sharp, and ranges in feel from sturdy to downright flexible. Boning knives are meant to slip under silverskin and around cartilage, to separate meat from the bone, and to get in between bone to separate joints when butchering. If your grown-up kitchen involves taking apart chicken, trimming steak, or breaking down whole fish, this is a good knife to add to your collection. The cleaver Not so subtle in stature, the cleaver has an intimidating look that might make you think it’s only for chopping meat and bones. Not so. While it is good at those things, the cleaver is a veritable multitool in the kitchen. This knife sports a wide, strong, rectangular-shaped blade with plenty of weight, and more weight means more power. Use this knife to chop through a large quantity of veggies or thick fibrous produce like butternut squash, or mow down a whole boneless cut of meat into mince. The tall, flat blade with a deep heel is good for cleanly cutting and separating bread dough, biscuits, or slicing up a finished pizza. Don’t forget the broad side of the blade; use that real estate to crush garlic, or like you would a bench scraper when transferring food from cutting board to pan. The carving knife Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann A carving knife can have a long, narrow blade with a tapered tip or blunt tip, and some carving knives look a lot like overgrown chef's knives. In fact, you may be able to get away with simply using your chef's knife for carving as long as it has a long enough blade. The important thing is to have a carving knife large enough to make thin slices across wide cuts of meat. Instead of trying to navigate halfway across a flank steak or hack apart a Thanksgiving turkey, use a carving knife to make long, clean cuts in a single motion. While these are my main suggestions when you start selecting knives, take a moment to think about what you eat. The point of a knife is to make cooking easier, faster, and less work. A good knife shouldn’t make you tired or give you blisters, and it should perform well for a long time (providing you care for it). These knives will take care of most of your needs, but it’s just a starter list. If you need two santoku knives of different sizes, go ahead and get them. If you prepare one particular food a lot, like raw oysters, well then add an oyster shucking knife to your shopping list. Just don’t get a knife block. You deserve better. View the full article

The advocacy executive said there was a lot of misinformation regarding Rocket Pro and that the "rumors versus reality is very different." View the full article

Many people have been waking up over the last 24 hours to find that they have received a payment of around $40 from Facebook. The first question people have is whether the payment is legitimate. And the good news is: yes, it is. Here’s what you need to know about the Facebook payment you may have received since yesterday. Why did I get a payment from Facebook? Starting yesterday, people began posting on social media that they had received a payment of around $40 from Facebook. That payment is actually part of a class action lawsuit settlement Facebook agreed to back in 2022. At the center of the class action suit was the allegation that between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, Facebook improperly tracked its users around the web using its then-newish “Like” button that was displayed on non-Facebook websites. Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company, denied wrongdoing but ultimately decided to settle the class action lawsuit instead of fighting it in court. As part of that settlement, Facebook agreed to pay $90 million, which would be distributed to its users in the United States who were covered under the settlement (after attorney fees and other associated costs were deducted). The individual user’s payments from that settlement are now being distributed, which is why you may have received one since yesterday. How much is the Facebook internet settlement payment? Users on social media are reporting that they have begun receiving a settlement payment of around $40. On this Reddit thread here, multiple users say their payment was for exactly $40.67. Some users on X are likewise reporting that amount. The payments are showing up as coming from “Facebook Internet Tracking Settlement Administrator,” users are reporting. The effective date of the settlement was February 24, 2025, according to the settlement website. The terms of the settlement mandated that Facebook begin sending out the payments within 45 days of the effective date, which meant that the funds would start being distributed on April 10, 2025. Given the social media reports, that is the same date that people began reporting receiving payments from Facebook. How are people being paid? Claimants could choose how they wanted to receive their settlement payment when they submitted a claim, according to ClaimDepot. Claimants reportedly could select from one of five options: PayPal Venmo Virtual Prepaid Card Zelle Check mailed to an address the claimant provided Can I still submit a claim? No. All claims needed to be submitted by September 22, 2022. If you did not submit a claim by then, you are not eligible for a payment. View the full article

YouTube Music is a decent Spotify alternative, especially if you're already paying for YouTube Premium to remove the ads. There's a big downside, though: Google doesn't offer a desktop app for YouTube Music, meaning you have to run the application in a browser. It also means you can't really customize YouTube Music the way you can with Spotify. That's why YouTube Music Desktop App—a free application not made by Google, to be clear—exists. The app, compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux puts YouTube Music in its own window, outside of your browser, while also adding extensions for things like downloading songs, skipping the non-music parts of videos, and blocking ads. The get started, simply download the application and launch it. You can log into Google, if you have an account, but you don't have to—you can start searching for and listening to music right away. The application is essentially a browser with a few extensions, so there shouldn't be any security concerns logging in. If you've used YouTube Music at all, everything should look very familiar—it's the web application but in a dedicated window. There are a few tweaks you can make in the Options menu that you should be aware of. You can set the application to run from the system tray, if you want, meaning if you close the window your music keeps playing. You can also choose which page you want to open when you launch the application. Credit: Justin Pot The real fun, though, is found in the Plugins section. Here, there are a wide variety of tweaks you can turn on. SponsorBlock automatically skips the non-music parts of music videos—for example, some music videos have intros or interstitials that you might not want to hear if you're just trying to listen. There's a tool to remove all Google login requests, if you'd rather not log in or be asked about logging in. There's a simple visualizer, if you'd rather see dancing bars in place of album art or the music video. And there's a plugin that lets you prevent videos from playing altogether. You can find a full list of the plugins on Github if you'd like to learn more. All of these features, along with putting YouTube Music in its own window, makes YouTube Music just a lot more pleasant to use. Give this application a shot if you're tired of forgetting which tab in which browser window is handling your music. View the full article

Parking money in America is no longer the routine, fuss-free, neutral optionView the full article

If you’re in the market for a new home, there’s a pretty good chance you've toured a few “flipped” houses—properties that were recently purchased, quickly renovated, and just as quickly put back on the market. Even amid the current real estate crunch, house flipping remains a popular business model: In the first quarter of 2024, 67,817 houses were flipped, which amounted to nearly 9% of all the houses sold during that period. Flipping is popular because it can be highly profitable, generating an average return of $73,492 per project. But those profits rely on a fast, efficient renovation—and some flippers may get in over their heads and end up cutting corners, while others might simply set out to rip you off by attempting to hide downright shoddy work. In either scenario, there are some common aspects of any renovation that can clue you in to incompetent or unethical work. When inspecting a house you suspect was a flip, check for these red flags. Glued-in sinksTypically, an undermount kitchen sink will be installed using a combination of adhesive and metal clips to hold it in place. Sometimes a sink will be installed with just adhesive if the clips aren’t absolutely necessary and the installer is worried about cracking the countertop or lacks the space to properly attach the clips, but they'll generally use a powerful, professional-grade adhesive regardless. An unethical house flipper, on the other hand, might use any old silicone-based adhesive to slap a sink into place, skipping the clips simply to save on time and labor costs. The sink will hang on for a while, then fall without warning—probably when it’s full of dirty dishes. When checking out a flipped kitchen, open the cabinet under the sink and look for metal support clips. If you don’t see them, it could be a sign that the flipper either didn’t know what was needed—or intentionally skipped a step. Ventilation fans that don't vent anywhereVentilation and exhaust fans are usually found in bathrooms, over ovens, and in other places where ventilation is required, and they need to be vented outside—but can simply be slapped into the ceiling and wired up, with no outside ventilation connection at all. In other words, they’ll vent the steam from your shower into your ceiling, where it can slowly foster mold and damage your home's wood framing. It’s worth checking that any exhaust fans are vented properly, and not just run into the cavities behind your drywall. Painted tubsIf the house being flipped has a unique classic bathtub—or the flipper is looking to save a few bucks on the renovation—they might decide to refinish the tub instead of replacing it. This is fine in theory, as tubs can certainly be refinished and hold up to years of use—provided the job done by a professional. It’s actually not easy to refinish a tub, as they must endure near-constant water exposure. Even a successful DIY refinish job will typically only last a few years. Refinishing a tub requires it be properly cleaned, etched, and prepped. If the flipper just paints the tub, it might look fine during a walk-through, but it will peel almost immediately once you start using it. In a flipped house, take a very close look at the tubs. Look for fine cracks, spotty coverage around drains and fixtures, and bubbling in the finish. Ask questions if you see any indication of an undisclosed refinishing job. Updated outlets hiding old wiringThe easiest way to save money on a house flip is to leave all the hidden stuff—the plumbing and electrical—untouched, and just cover it up with new fixtures. An unethical flipper might swap out old, ungrounded outlets with new, modern ones and simply not connect the ground—or, worse, jump the ground to the neutral wire (known as a “bootleg” ground). That can be dangerous, but it won’t trigger an error when the outlet is tested. It’s worth it to unscrew a few outlets and take a quick look at what's going on in the walls—if the outlets are new but the wiring is old, be suspicious, and consider having an electrician come in to take a look during the inspection process. Hidden floor damageOne trick desperate flippers will try is simply covering up problems with a new floor. Flooring is expensive, and it’s possible to put carpet or vinyl flooring over damaged hardwood, cracking tile, or other problems. Fresh carpet or planks will look good, and you might not spend enough time walking on them to notice deeper problems until well after you've closed. Another trick flippers will sometimes play is to tear off a bad floor and throw a cheap floor over a damaged subfloor in order to save a little time and money. You can look for a few tells that a cheap new floor is covering up a big old problem: Varying floor heights. If you’re constantly stepping up and down as you pass from room to room, it could be a sign that old floors were just covered over. Sags and soft spots. If the new tile is already showing cracks, or if you can feel parts of the floor are soft when you step on them, this could indicate the new flooring was either laid over a damaged floor, or that the subfloor is rotten. Gaps. If new vinyl planks are separating, it probably means a sub-par installation, and it could also be a sign that the floor under the vinyl is damaged and uneven. Unexpected carpet. Is there just one room in the house with brand-new carpet or other flooring? Be suspicious, and see if you can get a peek underneath. Loose trimWhen a flip runs out of time, it’s usually the trim work that suffers, because it’s the last step in a remodel. If you walk into a kitchen and notice the toe-kicks are missing, or the house lacks door trim, you’d immediately be worried, so some flippers will stick that trim on in fast, cheap ways—like with double-sided tape, caulk, or any old glue. It will all look fine for a while, but the moisture of a kitchen or bathroom will eventually cause it to just pop off. When looking at a remodeled kitchen in a flipped house, it’s worth it to give the trim a gentle tug. If it was installed properly, there’s no way you should be able to budge it without a lot of effort. Missing caulkSimilarly, take a close look at the kitchen and bathrooms. Specifically, look for caulk—or a lack of it. Caulk is usually one of the final steps when finishing up a bath or kitchen remodel, and you might not notice it was skipped if you’re not looking for it. Any “change of plane” (where horizontal and vertical surfaces meet) or gaps should be caulked with an appropriate caulk. Otherwise moisture, crumbs, and other debris will get between and inside things, leading to rot, mold, and other problems. Unconnected HVAC ventsJust like ventilation fans, one way an unethical (or rushing, inexperienced) house flipper might try to skate by is by skipping a crucial step with the home’s central heating and cooling: They might install the vents and returns for the system, and never connect them. Everything looks right, and when you turn on the air conditioning it fires up, but the air never actually gets into your rooms. During your walkthrough or inspection, test the system to ensure the air is flowing. Poorly placed guttersIf your flipped house has a new roof, pay attention to the placement of the gutters. A flipper DIYing a roof installation or spot-hiring subcontractors instead of going with a reputable roofing company might rush through gutter installation, resulting in situations where gutters drain water against the house or directly onto windows and doors. That’s obviously the exact opposite of the whole purpose of gutters, but the mistake won't jump out at you unless it’s actively raining, so try to tour the house under varying weather conditions. Hidden pestsYou can imagine the horror a desperate house flipper experiences when they uncover termite or carpenter ant damage in the house they just bought, and they have no budget for a thorough treatment. Signs of termites and other pests can be easy to hide—often paint is all you need to cover up some light termite damage for a few weeks, which is enough time to get through an inspection—and home inspectors aren’t always thorough, and may not look behind a fresh paint job, or moving heavy furniture to see what might be hidden. If just one area of the home has been recently painted, take a closer look. If the area under the paint is rough and damaged, it might be an attempt to hide a civilization of critters the flipper didn’t know how to evict. You can also look for insect droppings (some termites leave droppings that look like grains of rice or sesame seeds), sawdust piles, shed skins or eggs—and traps and poisons hiding in cabinets or under appliances. View the full article

If you recently bought celery sticks from Walmart, you’ll want to check to make sure they are not of a certain variety. That’s because a select celery stick product is being recalled due to fears that it may be contaminated with Listeria, a potentially deadly bacterium. Here’s what you need to know. What is the reason for the recall? On April 10, Duda Farm Fresh Foods, Inc. of Oxnard, California, issued a voluntary recall for one of its products: a bag of celery sticks sold under the “Marketside” brand, according to a recall notice posted on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website. The company issued the recall because the celery sticks have the possibility to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. Duda Farm Fresh Foods said the possibility for contamination was discovered when the Georgia Department of Agriculture tested multiple samples, and one came back positive for Listeria monocytogenes. What product is being recalled? Only one product is being recalled: a bag of celery sticks, but the recall impacts 1,587 cases of the product. Here are the details of the product, according to the recall listing on the FDA’s website: Name: Marketside Celery Sticks 4 in/1.6 oz Bundle Pack Product UPC Code: 6 81131 16151 0 Lot Code: P047650 Best If Used by Date: 03/23/2025 Pack Size & Packaging: 4/1.6-ounce, bag It should be noted that while the best-by date of March 23, 2025, has now passed by a few weeks, the recall notice cautions that people may have purchased the celery sticks and kept them frozen in their freezer for use at a later date. Photographs of the recalled product in its packaging can be found here. Where were the recalled products sold? The recalled celery sticks were sold across the nation at Walmart stores in 28 states and the District of Columbia. Here are the states where the recalled products were sold: Alabama California Colorado District of Columbia Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Iowa Illinois Indiana Kansas Kentucky Maryland Michigan Missouri Montana North Carolina New Jersey New York Ohio Pennsylvania South Carolina Tennessee Texas Virginia Wisconsin West Virginia Wyoming What is Listeria? Listeria is a bacterium that has the possibility to cause severe illness in people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The agency says Listeria infections are “the third leading cause of death from foodborne illness in the United States.” It is estimated that 1,600 people become infected each year in the United States, and as many as 260 of those die. Relatively healthy people can fully recover from a Listeria infection. However, infection can present a more grave danger to certain types of people. This includes individuals who are pregnant, newborns, people aged 65 or above, and those with weakened immune systems. What are the symptoms of a Listeria infection? A Listeria infection can present with several symptoms depending on your other physical conditions and the type of infection you have (invasive or intestinal illness). The CDC says that symptoms of invasive illness (where the bacteria has spread beyond the gut) in pregnant people include: Fever Flu-like symptoms, such as muscle aches and fatigue In individuals who are not pregnant, symptoms of invasive illness can include: Fever Flu-like symptoms, such as muscle aches and fatigue Headache Stiff neck Confusion Loss of balance Seizures Those who have intestinal Listeria illness usually have the following symptoms: Diarrhea Vomiting Has anyone been harmed by the recalled product? Thankfully, according to the notice on the FDA website, no illnesses have yet been reported as a result of the products associated with this recall. What do I do if I have the recalled celery sticks? You should check your refrigerators and freezers for the recalled product. If you have it in your possession, you should not consume it. Instead, you should discard the recalled product. “Consumers who have this product in their possession, including in their freezer, should not consume and discard the product,” the recall notice states. You can find the full details of the product recall here. View the full article

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