Back when Briana Gordley was a full-time college student, working at a part-time internship making about $15,000 a year, she took a rare trip to the mall and wandered into Forever 21. One of the employees told her that the company had just started partnering with a service called Afterpay, which would allow Gordley to buy clothes without paying the full cost up-front, instead paying it off in four installments. It was the first time she’d ever heard of buy now, pay later products that all
We’ve always known video doorbells could record video of people within its viewfinder range. But, it turns out that they can also record audio, too. Consumer Reports recently reported that the Amazon Ring Video Doorbell 3 and the Arlo Ultra video doorbells can record audio as well as video to a range of between 20 and 25 feet—a revelation that means audio surveillance can occur even when we can’t see the video cameras. This makes it hard for us to know when we are unde
It was fun while it lasted, but companies all over the place are starting to summon their employees back to the office. If you’re a bit rusty when it comes to in-office life, that’s understandable. But there are some tools you can leverage in order to make the transition less jarring. Here are some of the most helpful freebies. Sleep Cycle If you find yourself in the unenviable position of having to, you know, be somewhere on time in the morning, you’ll appreciate this
If a person is lost in the wilderness, they have two options. They can search for civilization, or they could make themselves easy to spot by building a fire or writing HELP in big letters. For scientists interested in the question of whether intelligent aliens exist, the options are much the same. For over 70 years, astronomers have been scanning for radio or optical signals from other civilizations in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, called SETI. Most scientists are confident
Healthcare workers are in crisis: Some 35% of surveyed nurse leaders—usually a clinical specialist who oversees other leaders and registered nurses—say low morale and burnout is their biggest challenge, according to a March 2021 study by the American Association for Nursing Leadership. A stunning 16% reported that they are not emotionally healthy. The COVID-19 pandemic has put our healthcare workers under enormous strain, exacerbating burnout and staffing shortages that predate the
It’s a pattern we’ve seen too many times: Real-world violence migrates online, and after protracted denial, platforms that profit from abuse now promise to save us. Their “solutions” are convenient–and conveniently profitable–but only make matters worse. The latest example in the news is particularly wrenching: Tinder’s flailing efforts to address the all-too-real threat of intimate partner violence with unproven, error-prone background checks. Bu
This Sunday at 10 p.m., CNN will premiere the new travel docu-series Nomad With Carlton McCoy. Produced by Christopher Collins and Lydia Tenaglia, the team behind the network’s much-loved Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, the new six-episode culinary travel show follows McCoy, the president and CEO of Heitz Cellar and a celebrated trailblazer in the wine world, through the banlieues of Paris, the South Korean countryside, Washington, DC, Ghana, Toronto, and the Mississippi Delta on a journ
Building a successful business is hard. Many sleepless nights, 80-plus hour work weeks, and family time lost. But you’ve done it. Your business is growing and thriving. As someone who has spent the better part of two decades growing a business, there is one very important lesson I’ve learned about success: Complacency is your worst enemy. Success is rewarding. But you can’t rest on your laurels. One might think, “Why fix what isn’t broken?” Obviously, so
Since we’re all fretting over the future of Twitter, thanks to Elon Musk, it’s once again time to check in on Mastodon. The Twitter-like social network, which launched in 2016, aims to cure Twitter’s ills through the magic of decentralization. Instead of operating as one social network, Mastodon relies on a web of interconnected, open-source servers, called “instances,” with the owners of each instance setting their own moderation policies. Some instances even
“The audiences that love and build and create and connect with TikTok, they say they check Facebook, and they check Instagram and they check Twitter and they check Snap and they check things. But they don’t check TikTok. They tell us they watch TikTok.” That’s how Khartoon Weiss, the head of global agency and accounts at TikTok, described the app in her keynote at the Gathering marketing conference last week—as an entertainment platform, not a social network. I