What's on Your Mind?

Below, Chris Duffy shares five key insights from his new book, Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy. Chris is a comedian, television writer, and the host of TED’s award-winning How to Be a Better Human podcast. Chris wrote for both seasons of Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas on HBO, executive-produced by John Oliver. He is both a former fifth-grade teacher and a former fifth-grade student. What’s the big idea? Humor isn’t just about being funny. When we notice, share, and even save the small absurdities of everyday life, laughter can make us more relatable, more curious, and better able to connect, think, and work together…

America is on the cusp of its first major winter storm of the new year. Dubbed Winter Storm Fern, the storm is expected to begin today and last until at least Monday. As Fast Company previously reported, the nor’easter is expected to affect as many as 230 million Americans as it moves from the Southwest to the Mid-Atlantic states, then continues eastward toward New England. The storm’s progression over 72 hours is expected to dump snow and ice on significant portions of the country, with major cities including St. Louis, Chicago, Memphis, Nashville, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. expected to receive significant accumulation. …

For the first time in Dr Pepper’s 140-year history, the brand is the second-most-popular soda in America. Now it has a shiny new jingle to match. In late December, TikTok creator Romeo Bingham, 25, posted a jingle she had made up for Dr Pepper. “Dr Pepper baby. It’s good and nice. Doo. Doo. Doo,” the tune went. In her caption she tagged the company and noted, “please get back to me with a proposition we can make thousands together.” The original post has garnered almost 54 million views, 6.4 million likes and almost 500,000 bookmarks, at the time of writing. One month later, Bingham’s dreams were realised. Dr. Pepper licensed the song and folded it into an NCAA f…

Your watch says you had three hours of deep sleep. Should you believe it? Millions of people rely on phone apps and wearable devices like rings, smartwatches and sensors to monitor how well they’re sleeping, but these trackers don’t necessarily measure sleep directly. Instead, they infer states of slumber from signals like heart rate and movement, raising questions about how reliable the information is and how seriously it should be taken. The U.S. sleep-tracking devices market generated about $5 billion in 2023 and is expected to double in revenue by 2030, according to market research firm Grand View Research. As the devices continue to gain popularity, experts say it …

Back in October, Google ended software support for the original and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats. On the surface, that doesn’t seem totally unreasonable, considering those original devices are roughly 14 years old at this point. If you have one, you can still use it as a thermostat, but it will no longer connect to the internet. As a result, you can’t connect to it using the Nest or Google Home apps. That may not seem like a big deal, except that the single greatest thing about using a Nest Thermostat wasn’t the fact that it would learn your habits and create routines, or that it would detect when you’re not home and adjust accordingly. No, the best thi…

Whenever my wife and I go to watch a movie together, lately we tend to pick a new theater close to where we live that’s called 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku. There are reclining seats, you get free popcorn in a chill lounge when you arrive, and the supposedly best-in-Japan sound system was tuned by the late music legend Ryuichi Sakamoto. What’s not to like? But when we went to see 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple this past weekend, we realized it was only showing in the auditorium dedicated to ScreenX, a fairly new format that has been picking up some steam of late. I’d heard of it before but I hadn’t ever seen it for myself, so I was happy to check it out in the spirit…

Shares of Facebook owner Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) are surging in premarket trading this morning after the company announced its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings yesterday afternoon. The earnings not only exceeded investor expectations, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg also laid out his vision for how artificial intelligence is set to transform the company—and personal computing—in the years ahead. Here’s what you need to know. Meta reports strong Q4 2025 earnings Expectations for Meta’s Q4 2025 were relatively high, but when the company announced its latest quarterly earnings after the bell last night, they exceeded what most investors had hoped for. Here are the…

Two of Elon Musk’s best-known companies look likely to be headed for a megamerger ahead of a mooted IPO. SpaceX, the South African entrepreneur’s space exploration firm, and xAI, the AI company he established in 2023 to challenge OpenAI, are reportedly in discussions ahead of a merger and initial public offerings. Two business entities were established in Nevada on January 21, Reuters reported, that are potentially designed to facilitate the deal. Combined, the two businesses are worth more than $1 trillion. Tesla, Bloomberg reported, could be involved as well. The IPO could happen in mid-June. Why mid-June? Because that’s a point when Jupiter and Venus will be in…