What's on Your Mind?

When White Lotus first season debuted in 2021 and shot to near-instant acclaim, it was a sleeper hit for HBO. But now, four years later, HBO is well aware of just how enthusiastic White Lotus’s fanbase has become—and, to tap into the show’s highly online viewership, its marketing team has decided to officially don their tin foil hats and fangirl right alongside the rest of us. White Lotus recently debuted its own TikTok page dedicated to stirring up conversation around the show’s third season, which just debuted. It’s the first time that the show itself will have a separate TikTok presence from HBO’s broader account. White Lotus’s marketing team is in a unique positio…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. Subscribe here. Imagine turning your reading history into a treasure map. By feeding a list of your favorite books and movies to an AI assistant, you can uncover hidden patterns in what you love. From your subconscious attraction to unreliable narrators to your love for stories that begin at the end, you may be surprised by what an AI assistant can reveal. Building a personal “taste atlas” helps you understand your reading self better. It can also surface blind spots in your cultural diet and point you toward unexplored literary terri…

You’ve probably heard that people don’t leave their job, they leave their manager. It’s a popular saying because it’s often true. Having a toxic boss, however, is different than having one you simply don’t like. If your boss is toxic, you need to take steps to protect yourself. But if it’s simply a matter of personalities not jiving, slow your job-search roll, suggests Stephanie Chung, author of Ally Leadership, How to Lead People Who Are Not Like You. “There are people in your family you probably don’t like,” she says. “But if you like your company, you like your colleagues, you like how much money you’re making, you like your benefits, and the only thing you don’t l…

Whether you’re setting up a new Windows PC or looking to enhance your current setup, there are some life-changing apps you can grab for free that will transform how you use your computer. From screen grabbing to file searching to quick launching and more, these essential apps will supercharge your productivity—all for the low, low price of nothing. ShareX: Screen captures and then some Windows includes a basic screen-capture tool. Don’t settle for it, though: Get ShareX, which rivals even paid screen-grabbers. You can create custom-capture regions that remember your preferences, set up automatic uploads with instant-link copying, and configure workflows tha…

There’s one scarce resource that nearly everyone wishes they had more of: time. It always seems like there are more things to do than hours in the day. Many ways to squeeze more productivity out of your workday may leave you feeling burned out. But there are ways to trim the time spent on many aspects of life that will leave you with at least a little more wiggle room. Here are a few strategies: Create a guide to reduce interruptions If you often lose hours responding to emails and Slack messages asking different versions of the same questions, create an FAQ document with the answers all in one place. If you want to take it one step further, you can follow the …

Steven Heine is a professor of social and cultural psychology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Cultural Psychology, the top-selling book in the field. His research has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Newsweek, and New Scientist, among other publications. What’s the big idea? A lot of people right now feel lost, anxious, and despaired. During these dark times, preserving a sense of meaning in our lives is vital. Fortunately, meaning can be cultivated and ground us when life feels turbulent. The emerging field of existential psychology is refining practices for tuning in to the worth, purpose, and importance o…

As a subject for delightful conversation, personal insurance ranks somewhere between polyp removal and credit default swaps. Which means most of us don’t know what we don’t know. No one likes to dwell on what might go wrong in the future—which is part of the reason why we all tend to regard insurance professionals with a healthy level of skepticism. But protecting yourself and your money from the unexpected has to be part of getting your financial house in order. Otherwise, a single bad event could erase all your hard work. To figure out what kinds of insurance you might need, start with the following basic rules of the insurance industry. Social benefit and …

The American economy runs on what are known as heuristics, a diverse array of mental short-cuts that help consumers make a dizzying number of choices to navigate the wild complexity of everyday life. These shortcuts help us select the restaurants we may choose to patronize, the cars we drive, the food we purchase, and the schools we attend and to which we send our children. We rely on scoring systems, certifications, and ranking methodologies to consider what movies to see, what music to listen to, and whether to purchase fair-trade products. These shortcuts come in many forms, from the complex (like the tools used to rate bonds and other financial products) to the straig…

The American economy runs on what are known as heuristics, a diverse array of mental short-cuts that help consumers make a dizzying number of choices to navigate the wild complexity of everyday life. These shortcuts help us select the restaurants we may choose to patronize, the cars we drive, the food we purchase, and the schools we attend and to which we send our children. We rely on scoring systems, certifications, and ranking methodologies to consider what movies to see, what music to listen to, and whether to purchase fair-trade products. These shortcuts come in many forms, from the complex (like the tools used to rate bonds and other financial products) to the straig…

The 50th anniversary celebration of “Saturday Night Live” is so big, it’s not even on Saturday. Airing Sunday and spanning three hours, the, yes, live “SNL 50: The Anniversary Celebration” will assemble a dream team of stars who have helped the show become an enduring pop culture force, including alumni like Tina Fey and Eddie Murphy, notable hosts like Dave Chappelle and Steve Martin and at least four of the surviving original cast members: Chevy Chase, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman. The show will also pack in musical guests, with Paul McCartney, Sabrina Carpenter, Bad Bunny and Miley Cyrus among those scheduled to appear, as well. The special is…

I broke its neck. When making a vase at the potter’s wheel, I torqued its slippery neck clear off the pot as I tried to thin it into a graceful curve. I find vases gratifying to make and their shapes especially pleasing to the eye. But vases also must be handled with particular care because one part of their “body” – the neck – is often so narrow that it can be easily broken. That day at the wheel, I realized that it was not unlike the human neck. Though only a small portion of the human body – about 1% by surface area – our necks have an outsize influence on our psyche and culture. From selfies to formal portraits, the neck positions the head in expressiv…

The Oscars are less than a month away, but before Hollywood’s biggest night, the folks across the pond have their turn to celebrate. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards (BAFTAs) will take place on Sunday, February 16, at London’s Royal Festival Hall. Historically viewed as a strong predictor of the Oscars, the BAFTAs just might offer a sneak peak of what’s to come—especially in this unconventional year full of controversies, disasters, and shifting front-runners. Here’s everything you should know and how to tune in. What does Prince William have to do with it? As part of his royal duties, the prince of Wales is the president of BAFTA. He and…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. U.S. single-family home prices, as measured by the Freddie Mac House Price Index (which uses the repeat-sales methodology), rose 3.9% in the calendar year 2024. During that same timeframe, overall U.S. consumer prices rose 2.9%. Among the 384 metro-area housing markets that the Freddie Mac House Price Index tracks dating back to 1975, these are the 10 metros that saw the biggest year-over-year home price increase in 2024: Kingston, New York: +13.5% Springfield, Ohio: +11.8% Glens Falls, New York: +11.7% Binghamton, New York: +11.5% …

When he first gathered his newly assembled team to write the 1975 premiere episode of Saturday Night Live (then called, NBC’s Saturday Night), creator Lorne Michaels started with a simple credo: “Let’s make each other laugh, and if we do, we’ll put it on television and maybe other people will find it funny.” So many other people ended up finding it funny that SNL grew into a singular cultural phenomenon—one that remains on the air, and relevant, 50 years later. Over the course of making high-wire-act TV each week for a half-century, however, Michaels’s ideas about how to wrangle talent gradually evolved far beyond that initial make-each-other-laugh principle. “He …

Years ago, I asked my born-organized sister how she managed to keep her place looking so nice all the time. She gave me an odd look and replied, “I put things away when I’m done with them.” I’m reminded of this infuriating conversation whenever I read most introductory budgeting advice. Money experts will assure their audience that creating a successful budget is simple. “Just track your income and spending and make sure the second number is lower than the first,” they say, often with a tone that makes it sound like they’re worried about your ability to tie your own shoes. But most people need to know how to do these supposedly simple things. And just as my siste…

Getting a preschool-age child, let alone dozens of them, to wash their hands can be an exhausting chore. At Family Connections preschool in the Portola neighborhood of San Francisco, that used to be a constant challenge and frustration for educators. Without an outdoor sink, students’ outdoor activities were interrupted anytime a hand got dirty, as the whole group had to take a trip back inside, says executive director Yensing Sihapanya, noting how that would eat up precious minutes that could have been spent playing and learning. But in 2021, the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF), a community development financial institution (CDFI), poured grant money into San Francisc…

A few years ago, I chronicled the journey I went on to manually merge two Apple ID accounts into one. I was attempting to rectify a problem that I and many other long-time Apple users had been stuck with: Our data—emails, contacts, movie and app purchases, photos, logins, and more—was spread across two different Apple accounts. This segregation made accessing this data on our various devices a chore. Imagine opening your closet to look for a specific shirt, only to realize it’s hanging instead in the closet at your old house across town. The process took me days. At the time, Apple provided no automated way for users to merge two Apple IDs. Yet, this week that fin…

Rebecca Yarros’s romantasy novel Onyx Storm stormed the book charts in January, becoming the fastest-selling adult novel in 20 years. Indeed, demand for romance content—in books, on screens, and on TikTok—has grown exponentially in recent years. Enter audio erotica company Quinn. Founded by 27-year-old Caroline Spiegel, the 6-year-old platform publishes dozens of creator-driven, female-centric erotic audio stories each week. Creators, who write and perform the audio, receive a portion of the app’s subscription fees ($4.99 per month or $47.99 per year) based on user engagement. To date, Spiegel has raised $10 million from venture capital firms and investors such as Ent…

James Chappel is an associate professor of history at Duke University and a senior fellow at the Duke Aging Center. He is the author of Catholic Modern, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and The New Republic. What’s the big idea? Aging in America is becoming one of our country’s most important policy arenas. With more old citizens than young ones, the relevance of elder members in society has never been greater. Despite great progress in the quality of old age over the past century, there is much need for growth in terms of practical policy and cultural perceptions. Below, Chappel shares five key insights from his new book, Golden …

A popular “true crime” YouTube channel has been pulling in millions of views with videos about gruesome murders. As it turns out, None of them are real. One of those videos, titled “Husband’s Secret Gay Love Affair with Step Son Ends in Grisly Murder,” claimed to detail a gruesome crime in Littleton, Colorado. After it amassed nearly two million views, viewers reached out to local reporter Elizabeth Hernandez. But there was no record of the crime—because it never happened. The murder was entirely fabricated by a YouTube channel called True Crime Case Files that used ChatGPT and AI-generated imagery. According to 404 Media’s Henry Larson, over 150 similar videos ha…