What's on Your Mind?

Navigating bedtime with a teenager is, in many homes, a nightly battle with a constant refrain: Get off your phone! Go to bed! Research shows that today’s teenagers are more sleep-deprived than ever before. Adolescents need between eight and 10 hours of sleep, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But nearly 80% of American teenagers aren’t getting that, and experts say it’s affecting important areas like mental health and school attendance. Bedtime routines aren’t just for toddlers. Teenagers need them, too, says Denise Pope, an expert on child development and a senior lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. Experts in ad…

George Arison is telling me about a hookup. Arison, the 47-year-old CEO of the LGBTQ dating app and social network Grindr, recalls an encounter with a man who ranked low in physical chemistry—“it was in my bottom quartile of hookups,” he says, as if reviewing a spreadsheet of them—but high in intellectual compatibility. That bottom-quartile hookup is now a good friend of his. To Arison, the story illustrates how meaningful relationships can grow from the random connections Grindr facilitates. And if Grindr’s short time as a public company is any indication, solid financials can too. It’s been a rough stretch for dating apps. Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hing…

Crocs have taken a lot of forms over the years. From collaborating with Balenciaga to send 10 inch platform clogs down the runway to collaborating with Taco Bell to make a sold-out Mellow Slide together, Crocs is no stranger to whimsy. Now, Cros is partnering with the happy-go-lucky Finnish design house Marimekko to produce a line of shoes that feature the brand’s signature prints. “Marimekko and Crocs both have a very similar brand philosophy to bring joy, positive energy and playfulness to the world,” says Rebekka Bay, Marimekko’s Creative Director. “Our lifelong mission at Marimekko is to bring joy and color to people’s everyday lives, and collaborations with glob…

You’ve heard of burner phones. What about burner email? So much of the internet now requires that you hand over your email address before you’re able to use any services—from an app you’ve downloaded to signing up for a newsletter or redeeming a special offer online. But who says you have to give your real email address? Next time you’re asked, consider using an email mask. There are a growing number of services that give out disguised email addresses and relay any messages to your actual address. Experts say this can be a powerful tool to safeguard privacy and security. Here are some pointers on the whys and hows of email masking: Mask on The idea behind email…

Ever wonder why the sound of rain makes you instantly drowsy, but a ticking clock drives you up the wall? That’s because not all noise soothes the brain in the same way. Sleep sounds might seem like just background buzz, but they’re carefully engineered to allow your brain to let go. Behind every babbling brook or rainforest storm track is an intricate design meant to quiet the mind, block out distractions, and nudge you toward sleep. As more people rely on sleep sounds to wind down, the industry behind them has surged, which is evidence of just how common this nightly ritual has become. Mediation and mindfulness app Headspace, says 51% of listeners use its sleep con…

Stalking, but with a side of Dr Pepper? A number of streamers in Japan have recently had run-ins with a mysterious stream sniper known only as the Dr Pepper Guy. As Dexerto first reported, after tracking down streamers in random locations, the unknown figure silently cracks open a cold Dr Pepper, hands it over, and disappears without a word. Stream sniping—where viewers deliberately join or disrupt a live stream—has become increasingly common as IRL livestreaming grows in popularity on Twitch. While it sometimes raises safety concerns, resulting in unwelcome stalking and harassment, other times it’s a bizarre example of the internet at its weird and wonderful best…

If there’s one thing worse than having to assemble a PowerPoint presentation, it’s being forced to sit through an achingly dull one conducted by someone else. So what if there were a better option—a way anyone, regardless of skill, could create a sleek and actually engaging slideshow that looks like a professional designer had a hand in it? If you ask Grant Lee, we’ve already reached the point where that’s possible. And it doesn’t end with presentations. Lee is the founder of an AI-centric startup called Gamma. You may not have heard of it yet, but 50 million people have—and are already using the service. That’s led the scrappy, 30-person company to reach a mi…

If someone driving a new version of a Subaru Forester crashes into a cyclist, an airbag will immediately inflate on the hood to help protect the person on the bike. The SUV, which offers the feature only on vehicles sold in Japan, isn’t the first Subaru to include an external airbag. The company started including pedestrian protection airbags on its Japanese cars nearly a decade ago. But the brand says the new design is the first in the world intended to also protect cyclists. It’s a basic, commonsense idea. “Airbags have been proven to be effective to protect the occupants in a vehicle,” says Ben Crowther, policy director for America Walks, a nonprofit focused on…

In the future, your roof could generate power not only from the sun but also from falling rain. In a recent study, scientists demonstrated a new way to capture renewable energy from rainwater. “There is a large amount of energy in rain,” says Siowling Soh, an engineering professor at the National University of Singapore and author of the study, which was published in ACS Central Science. “This large amount of energy is wasted every day. There is currently no commercial technology that tries to harvest it.” When water flows down a pipe, it can pick up and move tiny electric charges from the pipe’s surface. That creates a small electric current. It’s similar to the …

Inside a new factory near Louisville, Kentucky, bright orange robots will soon begin carefully loading boot parts into a machine that adds soles. It’s one step in the highly automated process of making a Keen work boot—and an illustration of what it looks like now to bring factories back to the United States. Keen, which is headquartered in Portland, Oregon, started planning the new factory last year, long before current tariffs were in place. And the company, unlike the majority of shoe brands, had already been manufacturing some shoes in Portland for more than a decade. The Portland factory is now closing as the company prepares to open the larger factory in Kentucky n…

Office work is officially back from the dead—if New York is any indication, that is. In Manhattan, businesses are leasing more office space than they have in close to a decade, in a sign that the return-to-office movement is likely to stick around. According to real estate investor CBRE, during the first nine months of 2025, Manhattan businesses leased 23.2 million square feet of office space, the most since 2006. Leasing has already surpassed last year’s total, with 143 leases at more than $100 per square foot. However, as the epicenter of business, New York City is an outlier: Nationally, leasing is still around 11% below the pre-COVID average. Unsurprisingly, …

Restaurant delivery in New York is not like restaurant delivery in any other part of the country. The city has a long history with food delivery thanks to its dense population and copious restaurants (roughly 25,000 at last count). It even had its own delivery brand, Seamless, launched over a quarter-century ago as SeamlessWeb in the city. Now, after a brief fall from public view, Seamless is back in New York. Seamless has operated under the thumb of a much larger brand for years. It merged with Grubhub in 2013, but retained its own branding in the biggest and arguably most important delivery market in the country. But when Grubhub got a new, foreign owner in 2020—Ams…

New Jersey Transit urged riders to reach their destinations before the end of the day Thursday or risk being stranded as last-minute talks continued in a bid to avert a rail strike by train engineers that would affect some 350,000 commuters in New Jersey and New York City. The labor dispute is stressing out some Manhattan commuters and already disrupting travel to Shakira concerts Thursday and Friday at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Amid the uncertainty over whether the strike would happen, the transit agency canceled train and bus service at the stadium. The system’s advisory provided riders with details on contingency plans that would take effect if engineers w…

The latest wave of tech layoffs doesn’t have to be a step backward—it can be a launchpad. If you’ve spent years shipping products, debugging systems, and partnering with go-to-market teams, you already have what many founders don’t: domain insight and a network. Pair that with AI “employees,” (role-specific software agents trained on your company’s data that can perform defined tasks like drafting on-brand content, qualifying leads, and updating CRMs) and your severance becomes seed capital for a lean, scalable company. What’s different now is that the traditional barriers to starting a business have collapsed. The math is transformative: What once required $500,000 …

The streaming service branding game of musical chairs continued this week when Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) announced the streaming platform Max would once again be called HBO Max, starting this summer. It’s a complete brand reversal from a switch the company made back in 2023, when it ditched the “HBO” in its name for a head scratching “Max.” It immediately brought to mind this joke from 2024: “It’s on Tubu. It’s literally on Heebee. It’s on Poodee with ads. It’s literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it’s on Gumpy. It’s a Pheebo original. It’s on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log onto Poob right now.” https…

I recently spoke to a donor who reviewed a batch of proposals from different groups—different names, different logos, but nearly the same projects. Teams had reinvented the same wheel in parallel. Individually, some of those projects might get funded. Collectively, the sector missed the chance to pool efforts and solve a larger piece of the problem. That felt wrong, not because anyone was bad, but because our systems make it easier to duplicate than to unite. Here’s what should terrify donors: Even as funding tightens, duplicated projects still get financed while collaborative funds report backing organizations that figured out how to work together, with $2–3 billion …

Want to enjoy your job a little more? Maybe you need a BFF at work. According to Gallup, having a best friend at work increases job satisfaction, innovation, engagement, and productivity, and it decreases your chances of leaving the company. But can that friend ever be your boss? “You may think, If I’m going to have a friend at work, shouldn’t it be the CEO? Why not go for the top and get the most benefits from the friendship?” says Steve McClatchy, author of Leading Relationships: Build Meaningful Connections, Eliminate Conflict, and Radically Improve Engagement. “Gallup is telling us that we should have a best friend at work, but it doesn’t say that best friend shou…

The Walt Disney Company’s stock price soared on Wednesday, up by 10% at the time of publishing, as the company surpassed earnings expectations and unveiled its first new theme park development in 15 years. Following Disney’s second quarter earnings report, the entertainment giant announced an agreement to build a new resort and theme park in Yas Island, United Arab Emirates. “As our seventh theme park destination, it will rise from this land in spectacular fashion, blending contemporary architecture with cutting edge technology to offer guests deeply immersive entertainment experiences in unique and modern ways,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a statement. While…

Live and on-demand video constituted an estimated 66% of global internet traffic by volume in 2022, and the top 10 days for internet traffic in 2024 coincided with live streaming events such as the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match and coverage of the NFL. Streaming enables seamless, on-demand access to video content, from online gaming to short videos like TikToks, and longer content such as movies, podcasts and NFL games. The defining aspect of streaming is its on-demand nature. Consider the global reach of a Joe Rogan podcast episode or the live coverage of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft launch—both examples demonstrate how streaming connects millions of vie…