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In cities across North America, the best and most exciting public spaces can increasingly be found near the water. Park spaces on and along seashores and riverfronts are in a kind of renaissance right now, with large and small cities alike opening major waterfront parks over the past few years. 2025 was especially active. Cities brought big, ambitious park designs to the water’s edge, adding valuable recreation space, ecological services, and engines for urban regeneration. Here are four of the best waterfront parks that opened in 2025. Seattle’s Waterfront Park More than 15 years in the works, Seattle’s new park is a true reconnection of the city wit…

Below, Judd Kessler shares five key insights from his new book, Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want. Judd is an award-winning professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His research and writing have been featured in leading media, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review, among others. For his work on organ allocation, Kessler was named one of the “30 under 30” in Law and Policy by Forbes. He has been researching market design for the past 15 years. What’s the big idea? Life is full of hidden markets quietly deciding who gets…

I just launched a wine app, which means I’ve spent the last six months thinking obsessively about one thing: how do you remove friction from decisions that shouldn’t be hard? The answer taught me something bigger about rituals, and why so many of the ones we create at the end and beginning of the year fail us. Here’s my founder story, but from the wine aisle. Last December, I was standing in front of a wall of bottles, paralyzed. Not because I don’t like wine. I do. I was paralyzed because the entire experience was designed to make me feel small. The sommelier energy, the gatekeeping language, the implied message that if I couldn’t name the terroir, I didn’t d…

Porsche is recalling 173,538 vehicles in the U.S. as the rearview camera image may not display when the vehicle is placed in reverse, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said on Wednesday. This is one of the largest single safety recalls issued by Porsche Cars North America in recent years, following a 2022 recall pertaining to missing headlight adjustment screw covers that affected 222,858 vehicles. The current recall affects certain 2019-2025 Cayenne, Cayenne E-Hybrid, 2020-2025 911, Taycan, 2024-2025 Panamera, and 2025 Panamera E-Hybrid models. The regulator flagged that the vehicles fail to comply with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety S…

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

Below, Ben Swire shares five key insights from his new book, Safe Danger: An Unexpected Method for Sparking Connection, Finding Purpose, and Inspiring Innovation. Ben is a former Design Lead at the innovation firm IDEO and co-founder of Make Believe Works, a team-building company that uses creative activities to accelerate connection, deepen trust, and fuel collaboration. His methods have helped organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to public school districts, build healthy, productive workplace cultures. What’s the big idea? Most of us think of risks as a threat to our safety. But what if they’re the best way to create the kind of safety that matters most—…

It’s the sort of thing you might not notice until it really matters, but the U.S. Postal Service recently changed how it defines the “postmark” on a piece of mail—warning that the postmark date is not a reliable indicator of when you actually mailed something. If you’re the sort of person who waits until the last minute to send time-sensitive mail, that means you’ll need to stand in line at your local post office and request a manual postmark when dropping off your mail. While the way mail is postmarked hasn’t undergone some major shift recently, the postal service set out earlier this year to clarify earlier what a postmark means and how the process works. B…

Auckland rang in 2026 with a downtown fireworks display launched from New Zealand’s tallest structure, Sky Tower, making it the first major city to greet the new year at a celebration dampened by rain. South Pacific countries are the first to bid farewell to 2025. Clocks strike midnight in Auckland, a population of 1.7 million, 18 hours before the famous ball drops in New York’s Times Square. The five-minute display involved 3,500 fireworks launched from various floors of the 240-meter (787-foot) Sky Tower. Smaller community events were canceled across New Zealand’s North Island on Wednesday due to forecasts of rain and possible thunderstorms. Australia plans defian…

Zohran Mamdani was a trailblazing candidate whom many in his city of 8 million — some with hope, some with trepidation — expect to be a disruptive New York mayor. The democratic socialist’s plans for his first day in office on Thursday nod to his politics and priorities, without straying far from his predecessors with a sober official midnight oath-taking followed by a more celebratory ceremony in the afternoon. New York law spells out that four-year mayoral terms start on the January 1 after elections. To avoid any ambiguity about who’s in charge of America’s most populous city, it has become a tradition to hold a small midnight swearing-in. Mamdani has chose…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. CEOs deal with many challenges, but apparently their overall health and fitness isn’t among them. Some 93% of CEOs surveyed by corporate wellness platform Wellhub rate their overall well-being as excellent or good. In contrast, the same study, released earlier this year, finds that only…

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the global workforce and rapidly expanding the expectations placed on today’s learners. The World Economic Forum predicts that technological advancements like AI, alongside economic and demographic factors, will lead to a net increase of 78 million global jobs this decade. Educational institutions now face a pivotal moment. They must evolve how students learn, how instructors teach, and how technology supports each step of that journey. For decades, the education sector adopted new technologies cautiously. However, the profound impact of AI on the workforce has accelerated interest and experimentation. Our latest research at Cengag…

In a year defined by companies pouring shocking sums of money into AI, one more deal squeaked in just before 2026. Meta just made a play on Manus, the buzzy Singapore-based company with Chinese roots that turned heads earlier this year when it showed its AI agents executing complex tasks, like hunting for real estate and sorting through resumes. The deal is sure to turn heads too. Manus and its parent company Butterfly Effect are now based in Singapore but were founded in China – a country with a fraught relationship to the U.S tech industry – and maintain operations there. Facebook’s parent company will reportedly pay more than $2 billion to acquire the startup,…

Packages of grass fed ground beef are being recalled over possible E. coli contamination. The affected packages were distributed in at least six states, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). What ground meat is recalled? The USDA made the announcement in a Dec. 27 recall notice, explaining that the recall includes 2,855 pounds of raw ground beef produced on Dec. 16 from Mountain West Food Group, LLC. The at-risk product is the company’s 16-oz. (1-lb.) vacuum-sealed packages of FORWARD FARMS GRASS-FED GROUND BEEF. The packages have a use or freeze by date of 01/13/26. The product also has the establishment number EST 2083 printed on the side of the…

When internet services platform Cloudflare suffered an outage in November, it took a big chunk of the online world down with it. Major platforms like ChatGPT, X, and Canva became unreachable. So did digital services offered by countless banks, retailers, and many other businesses. During the six-hour meltdown, as many as 2.4 billion users could have felt the impact. Software outages like this have always been and always will be part of online life. But today our systems are more interconnected than ever, so a single failure can ripple outward. AI only amplifies that risk. Yet, too many companies still lack protection against such disasters. In an era when ou…

Shares opened mixed in Europe on Tuesday after slipping in Asia as some regional markets wrapped up trading for the year. Crude oil prices edged higher and gold and silver resumed their ascent. U.S. futures were flat. In Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi rang out the final session for 2025 in a traditional year-end ceremony. “By realizing a Japanese economy that earns the trust of investors around the world, we will create a virtuous cycle in which global capital flows into Japan,” Takaichi said. The benchmark Nikkei 225 shed 0.4% to 50,339.48, its first year-end close above 50,000. It ended 2025 up nearly 25%. With just two trading days left before the y…

A wild winter storm was expected to bring strong winds, heavy snow and frigid temperatures to the Great Lakes and Northeast on Tuesday, a day after a bomb cyclone barreled across the northern U.S. and left tens thousands of customers without power. The storm that hit parts of the Plains and Great Lakes on Monday brought sharply colder air, strong winds and a mix of snow, ice and rain that led to treacherous travel. Forecasters said it intensified quickly enough to meet the criteria of a bomb cyclone, a system that strengthens rapidly as pressure drops. Nationwide, more than 153,000 customers were without power early Tuesday, more than a third of them in Michigan, accord…