Designers are known to be exceptionally creative—but their success isn’t just luck and talent. Creativity is nothing more than an amalgamation of skills and habits that you must strengthen over time. This is particularly relevant now, as we navigate what’s become known as the Great Resignation. People everywhere are quitting their jobs, many of them because they were creatively stymied, leading to a surprising boom of new-business creation. [Image: courtesy HarperCollins Lea
It shouldn’t come as a tremendous surprise that Adobe would like to be a leading purveyor of tools for creating content for the metaverse. It’s a reasonable enough aspiration for the company, given its nearly 40-year-history as a kingpin of software used for generating imagery and experiences, from the printed page to the web and beyond. There’s just one catch: The metaverse doesn’t exist yet. And in its fullest sense, it can’t—not until the te
With an ongoing shortage of infant formula leaving some parents frustrated and out of options, there’s at least a sliver of promising news: Infant formula startup Bobbie just raised $50 million dollars to bring its European-style infant formula to the U.S. market. Founded in 2018 by Laura Modi and Sarah Hardy, Bobbie touts itself as a more holistic alternative to the major brands. Modi, now the CEO of Bobbie, says the idea for the company came when she was breastfeeding her daughter, duri
Have you ever felt a creeping sensation that someone’s watching you? Then you turn around and you don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Depending on where you were, though, you might not have been completely imagining it. There are billions of things sensing you every day. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight—inside your TV, fridge, car, and office. These things know more about you than you might imagine, and many of them communicate that information over the interne
As thousands of civilians risk their lives to resist a Russian onslaught, a global group of cyber guerillas have joined the fray too. They’ve disabled Kremlin-backed websites, leaked personal data, exposed disinformation, hijacked TV signals, and even hobbled infrastructure. One early and ongoing attack, launched in January, disabled the internal systems of a train network in Belarus, a country of 9 million people that’s sandwiched between Russia and Ukraine and has long been under
Google search is failing you, and not just because of its privacy and search quality issues. When you search the web, you won’t get any personal results from apps like Dropbox, Notion, or even Google’s own Google Docs. If you’re looking for a specific spreadsheet you made in Google Sheets, or a Slack conversation your recently had with a coworker, you’ll need to go looking into each individual app. It’s a pain and a waste of time. Now a new breed of tools
On a Zoom call the other day, a coworker of mine made a remark about the artwork I have hanging on the wall behind me: two very generic-looking pictures of deer. So generic, in fact, that I have thought about them exactly twice: the day I hung them and when my coworker mentioned them. It was then that I decided to dedicate the rest of my Zoom existence to using the virtual background feature (here’s how to do it, if you haven’t already played with it). And while Zoom has a decent c
When it comes to Elon Musk, it can be hard to separate the man from the myth. But in her new podcast The Evening Rocket, Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore manages to see through Musk’s mystique, explain his worldview, and decipher his visions of the future by going back to the sci-fi stories he grew up on—stories, Lepore says, that Musk sometimes misread. This week, Lepore joins host Rufus Griscom on the Next Big Idea podcast. Listen to the ful
If you’re ever feeling overwhelmed by an excess of open windows on your Mac, a new tool called Later can help. By clicking a button on the Mac menu bar, you can hide all open windows from your desktop, then bring them back at a later time. I’ve been using a review copy of Later provided by the developer and have found it useful for clearing out desktop clutter when it’s time to focus. It can also be helpful for hiding apps and browser tabs during a Zoom presentation. To hide
Congress passed its 2022 omnibus spending bill this week, expanding coverage of telehealth services under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—a big win for telehealth companies and the more than 130 million patients who rely on socialized medicine. But some experts warn that as more telehealth services become covered by insurers, the government may lose interest in healthcare initiatives that get patients the most care for their dollar. The provision does a few things. First, i