Looking for the latest information on where to watch Champions League matches? Our guide can help you find local and international viewing options to watch every match from anywhere, covering both free and paid options. As the 2026/2027 tournament resumes over a month after the first week of fixtures, we've checked through international TV guides to find you some excellent options for free matches further down this page.

While many countries charge for access (see details below), there are plenty of free Champions League live streams for every round of games. To get around region blocks, you'll need a VPN (virtual private network) to access them from overseas.

• See also: Best streaming deals | Best sports streaming services

Upcoming free Champions League live streams

There are some fantastic free Champions League live streams around Europe. You don't get every game, especially in the early stages, but we often see many of the bigger matches appear on the list. If you're not in the channel's country, you can still watch by using a VPN to prevent the website from detecting your location and blocking you.

The VPN mimics the required country for your viewing device and lets you watch along for free. We've tested this ourselves for lots of live sports and TV shows.

Don't have a VPN to watch the above options from abroad? Right now, there's a fantastic offer on one of the best VPN services we've tested and used for years for streaming and protecting our devices online. You can save up to 70% on the usual price of ProtonVPN. If you're unsatisfied, there's a hassle-free 30-day money-back guarantee. Sound good? Then get stuck in and enjoy these free Champions League live streams.

How to watch the Champions League with a VPN

• Sign up for a VPN if you don't have one.
• Install it on the device you're using to watch the game.
• Set the location to the required overseas streaming service's country.
• Create an account and sign in if required.
• Enjoy the game.

Where to watch Champions League in the US

This is where 'soccer' being so far down the rankings of the most popular sports in the USA really pays off for viewers who want to enjoy the most prestigious club football competition.

Every Champions League game is live streamed on Paramount Plus for just $8.99 a month or $89.99 a year.

So yes, you can opt for the cheapest Paramount Plus tier and still get the Champions League, even though it doesn't have CBS, since the games will run on separate feeds. If you have CBS already, you'll find it airs some games, but nowhere near as many as Paramount Plus, and rarely the best ones, in all honesty.

Where to watch Champions League in the UK

The Champions League is on TNT Sport in the UK. You can find it on HBO Max from £31 a month, minus one game a week, which will be shown on Prime Video instead.

You can also add TNT Sports to your Amazon Prime membership as an add-on. It's the same £31 a month, and you can cancel anytime. Watching it through Amazon Prime Video means you can enjoy Champions League live streams across more devices, as app support across TVs, consoles, and streaming sticks is broad.

The Prime-exclusive matches during the league phase will focus on British teams each week. Here are the upcoming Prime fixtures in the UK:

• Oct 13: Atlético Madrid vs. Man United
• Oct 20:Liverpool vs. Villarreal
• Nov 3: Man United vs. Roma
• Nov 24: Arsenal vs. Borussia Dortmund

Pro tip: If you want a cheaper option than TNT, try Australia's Stan Sport, which you can subscribe to with a UK bank account for half the price of TNT (we've tested this ourselves). You need a VPN to access the site and Champions League live streams outside Australia. It still works out cheaper, though. More details below. 

Where to watch Champions League in Australia

The Champions League is a Stan Sport exclusive in Australia for the majority of the season. The free service, 9Now, usually shows the final for free at the end of the season.

So if you want to see the entire tournament, you'll need to sign up for Stan and then add Stan Sport as an add-on. The cheapest setup is $30 a month (for Stan Basic at $10 and Sport at $20). It's a rolling one-month contract, so there's no long-term commitment.

If you're eying up this option via a VPN as a cheaper alternative to your country's Champions League streaming service, we can confirm it will work. We could pay with a UK bank card and have full access to the streaming service. You could also use a travel card like Revolut to pay in local currency so you don't get a foreign transaction fee from your bank.

Can I access the Champions League on Paramount Plus with a VPN?

Yes and no. If you set up Paramount Plus while already living in the US and are traveling abroad, and want to keep watching, you're all set. A VPN will indeed let you tune in like you were still in the US.

If you have a non-US subscription, such as in the UK, you won't be able to access the US version's content with the same login credentials via a VPN on the app or the US website, as they're essentially different apps and services in each country. Unlike Netflix, which will allow one login to work anywhere via a VPN.  

If you're outside the US and want a US account, Paramount Plus has made it difficult for outsiders. That's because you'll need a US form of payment, and we've found international currency cards, like Revolut, don't count.

What about PayPal? You'll need to create a US PayPal account, which must be verified by a US mobile phone number. So, if you can get around all this, you can enjoy the best value Champions League live streams in the world.

Note: The use of VPNs is illegal in certain countries, and using VPNs to access region-locked streaming content might constitute a breach of the terms of use for certain services. Insider does not endorse or condone the illegal use of VPNs.

• Ukrainian troops are shifting another infantry weapon from soldiers to robots.
• RPGs are finding a new role as combat evolves and troops lean on emerging tech to mitigate risk.
• The change reflects how drones and robots are reshaping ground warfare.

Ukrainian soldiers conducting operations in the kill zone have been putting anti-tank RPGs on ground robots, a robotic systems manufacturer told Business Insider, explaining that the battlefield has become too dangerous for troops to use the weapons the way they did earlier in the war.

Rocket-propelled grenades are often used by infantry to defeat armored vehicles and weaken fortified positions, but the battlefield has changed, forcing new innovations.

In the kill zone, "nobody knew how to use" an RPG "while staying safe himself," Oleg Fedoryshyn, the R&D director of Ukrainian robot maker DevDroid, told Business Insider.

The kill zone along Ukraine's front is a perilous area, as deep as 50 kilometers in some areas, where drones are so heavily concentrated alongside other weaponry that any movement represents a significant risk. For many soldiers, simply getting within RPG range can be extremely difficult.

The decision to move RPGs onto robots reflects a broader shift in the war. Early in Russia's full-scale invasion, RPGs were a common infantry weapon, used against Russian tanks and vehicles and to support infantry during fights in towns and cities.

But cheap drones, in both surveillance and strike roles, have transformed ground combat, reducing the use of armored vehicles and changing infantry engagements.

DevDroid's ground robots aren't the only ones getting RPGs as the war evolves. Ukrainian UGV maker Temerland says its Gnom-VP ground robotic fire support platform carries two RPG-7 launchers, along with other weapons and mine-laying capabilities.

Fedoryshyn said soldiers working with DevDroid started putting the RPGs on robots that were already armed with machine guns. The robots can drive close enough to targets and fire shorter-range weapons while keeping their operators much farther from danger.

Fedoryshyn said a brigade came to the company and said they wanted to try putting RPGs on a robot, and they had "great" success using it. Now, the company is exploring "how to add support for this for everyone in the future," he said.

Devdroid makes ground robots and a remote-controlled weapons station that allows operators to fire from safe distances, as well as electric triggers that allow operators to activate a weapon remotely.

Requests from soldiers are often how Ukraine's new capabilities emerge. Arms makers work directly with front-line units, gathering feedback and rapidly modifying equipment.

Fedoryshyn said DevDroid has 24/7 chat support available for every unit that uses its systems. He said that the company can design a new update, test it with a brigade, and roll it out across all deployed systems within a week.

It designs its gear for easy updates, "like mobile phones or operating systems," he added.

The war is one of rapid innovation to field new capabilities and preserve the utility of older ones as the war changes. Mounting RPGs on ground robots is another sign of that evolution. Instead of discarding a weapon designed for a kind of fighting that is less common now, Ukrainian troops are changing who carries it to keep it in the fight. Other weapons, such as flamethrowers, grenade launchers, and machine guns, have also been mounted on robots.

Fedoryshyn said his company is often surprised by how soldiers use its robots, including cases in which Russian soldiers have surrendered to them. Ukraine's experience, he said, shows Western militaries preparing for protracted wars should invest in large numbers of inexpensive, easily replaceable robots rather than relying solely on costly tanks and armored vehicles.

The MLB Playoffs are underway, and the National League Championship Series is shaping up to be a can't-miss match-up. We've rounded up absolutely everything you need to know about how to watch the Dodgers vs. Brewers, including live streaming options for those without cable.

If you're hoping to tune in, you can live stream the NLCS games on FOX and FS1 via a streaming service like YouTube TV. Keep reading to learn additional streaming options and to get a look at the series schedule.

How to watch the Dodgers vs. Brewers in the US

The Dodgers vs. Brewers National League Championship Series will air on FOX or FS1 (and sometimes both). There are a few easy ways to stream every game, including live TV services like YouTube TV and Fubo.

YouTube TV is our top recommendation for the MLB Playoffs. You can find FOX, FS1, and 100+ other popular channels in the platform's Main plan, which costs $83 a month. There's a limited-time promo for new customers that will knock the first five months down to $68 a month after a free trial.

Fubo is another popular live TV service with FOX, FS1, and tons of other channels. Fubo Pro subscriptions unlock 200+ channels for $89 a month, but new users can get $25 off their first month after a free trial.

FOX and FS1 live streams are also available through FOX One, which costs $20 a month. You can subscribe directly through the FOX One website, as a Prime Video add-on, or as a bundle with ESPN Unlimited.

If you're also interested in the ALCS, we recommend sticking with YouTube TV rather than FOX One or Fubo, since they don't carry Warner Bros. channels (like TBS and truTV).

How to watch the Dodgers vs. Brewers from anywhere

MLB fans traveling abroad can still access their usual streaming methods with the aid of a VPN, or virtual private network. VPNs enable people to temporarily change their virtual location, so they can access their favorite websites and apps without interruption while overseas. A VPN is also a solid way to boost cybersecurity. Since the services we've highlighted require US payment methods, this option will work best for Americans who are just traveling away from home.

If you're not sure where to start when it comes to VPNs, NordVPN is our top recommendation right now. It's speedy, user-friendly (even for beginners), and has a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can learn more in our NordVPN review.

National League Championship Series schedule

• Game 1: Dodgers at Brewers on Sunday, October 11 at 8 p.m. ET
• Game 2: Dodgers at Brewers on Monday, October 12 at 5 p.m. ET
• Game 3: Brewers at Dodgers on Wednesday, October 14 at 8 p.m. ET
• Game 4: Brewers at Dodgers on Thursday, October 15 at 9 p.m. ET
• Game 5 (if necessary): Brewers at Dodgers on Friday, October 16 at 9 p.m. ET
• Game 6 (if necessary): Dodgers at Brewers on Sunday, October 18 at 8 p.m. ET
• Game 7 (if necessary): Dodgers at Brewers on Monday, October 19 at 8 p.m. ET

What happened during the 2025 National League Championship Series?

The Dodgers and Brewers also met in the 2025 NLCS. Los Angeles swept Milwaukee 4-0 and went on to win the World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays.

Who won Game 1 of the 2026 National League Championship Series?

The 2026 NLCS is already off to a better start for Milwaukee. The Brewers beat the Dodgers 2-1 in Game 1 at American Family Field in Milwaukee. The Brewers will also host Game 2, before the series heads to Los Angeles.

Note: The use of VPNs is illegal in certain countries and using VPNs to access region-locked streaming content might constitute a breach of the terms of use for certain services. Business Insider does not endorse or condone the illegal use of VPNs.

• Goldman Sachs sees the golden 'Goldilocks' backdrop ahead in markets.
• That refers to an ideal scenario for investors where economic growth is neither too hot or too cold.
• Strategists see both stocks and bonds outperforming in the coming months.

The stock market's best-case scenario could be brewing, Goldman Sachs says.

Strategists at the Wall Street bank are eyeing a Goldilocks situation for markets, a dream configuration where economic growth is neither too hot nor too cold. The idea is that the economy is growing at just the right pace to fuel investor optimism while keeping a lid on inflation. It's a setup that looks poised to spark a fresh rally in stocks as well as bonds in the coming months, the bank wrote in a note to clients on Monday.

Goldman said it's shifted back to an overweight stance on stocks for the next three months and to an overweight stance on bonds over the next 12 months, citing a strong backdrop for economic growth and cooling inflation. Earnings are also expected to surprise to the upside for the third quarter, strategists added, estimating that the S&P 500 would post 18% earnings growth in 2027, when excluding "other income" related to the revaluation of equity shares.

"Our macro baseline remains constructive: growth should stay healthy, especially for earnings, recession risk remains low, and inflation momentum should moderate into 2027. This combination of resilient growth and easing inflation points to more of a 'Goldilocks' backdrop, which should be more supportive for balanced portfolios," a team led by the bank's Christian Mueller-Glissman wrote.

Some Wall Street strategists took a Goldilocks scenario off the table in recent month as inflation remains elevated. Energy prices saw a big mid-summer surge, largely due to the war in Iran and higher oil prices.

The market has also been rattled lately by a historic sell-off in government bonds, which has pushed yields to levels that haven't been seen in decades. The benchmark 10-year US Treasury yield remains near its highest level since 2002, surging in recent weeks as investors recalibrate their expectations for interest rates.

While the major stock indexes remain near records, market breadth has deteriorated sharply. More than half of all stocks in the S&P 500 have fallen at least 20% below their recent peaks, falling into bear market territory.

But there are a handful of underlying economic indicators that suggest growth will remain strong. The economy is expected to grow 3.6% for the third quarter, according to the latest GDPNow estimate from the Atlanta Fed.

The job market has also remained resilient. Job gains fell far below expectations in September, though the US added a robust 133,000 jobs in August. The unemployment rate also remains near a historic low, at 4.2% in September.

Meanwhile, inflation Goldman strategists said inflation is close to peaking, noting that market-based inflation momentum dropped "sharply" in the second quarter. Consumer price growth held steady in August at a 3.4% year-over-year pace.

A 60/40 portfolio — a classic investment strategy where 60% of a portfolio is allocated to stocks and 40% is allocated to bonds — tends to perform the best when inflation is falling, the bank added, adding that it saw "less downside risk" for the 60/40 mix over the next year.

"The main near-term downside risk to equities remains higher rates and energy prices — also, US midterm election uncertainty could lead to a pick-up in equity volatility from current low levels," strategists wrote.

The bank said it favored a barbell strategy, balancing high-growth global tech stocks with rate-sensitive, low volatility, high-dividend, or "bond proxy" stocks. A barbell strategy involves exposure to both high-growth and defensive investments, the idea being that losses on one side of the barbell could be offset through gains on the other side.

• There are famous urban legends, including Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.
• However, there are also plenty of local myths that have not made it into mainstream pop culture.
• Keep reading to find out the creepiest urban legend that takes place in your state.

Have you ever felt a chill as you walk down your street, or drive along a dark highway in your home state?

You might want to check this list to see if your state's creepiest urban legend unfolded near you.

Every country, state, and town has its own urban legends known to residents and fans of the paranormal. Some are attempts to explain mysterious phenomena or tragedies, while others are passed down due to our fascination with the dark and macabre.

Some areas have capitalized on local urban legends to attract tourists and boost local economies. In the West Virginia city of Point Pleasant, for example, the legend of Mothman is integral to the community. The Mothman Festival is held every September and includes guest speakers, a street fair, bus tours, live music, food trucks, and more. There's even a Mothman museum.

It's not for nothing. The Main Street Point Pleasant organization told The River Cities Tribune & Register in 2024 that it estimates the festival brings about $2 million to the city's economy every year.

But not every urban legend is that well known. We chose the creepiest urban legend we could find in every state, from the little-known to the mainstays like Bigfoot and the Jersey Devil.

ALABAMA: Hell's Gate Bridge

The generally accepted story of Hell's Gate Bridge starts in the 1950s, according to the Oxford Paranormal Society; a young couple driving over the bridge somehow drove their car off the bridge one night, and they both drowned.

There are two legends associated with Hell's Gate Bridge: one is that if you drive your car out to the middle of the bridge and turn off the lights, the couple will magically appear in your car and leave a wet spot on the seat.

The other, which is how the bridge got its name, is the belief that if you drive over the bridge and look over your shoulder halfway through, the scenery behind you turns into a portal to hell engulfed in flames.

Potentially to curb ghost hunters and bored teenagers, Hell's Gate Bridge is closed to cars, according to The Anniston Star, and it is in such disrepair that walking across is strongly discouraged.

ALASKA: The Kushtaka of the Alaskan Triangle

Everyone knows the story of the Bermuda Triangle, but you might not know about the Alaskan Triangle.

On average, five out of every 1,000 people go missing in Alaska, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2005, so even if there's nothing supernatural going on, it's easy to get lost in the Alaskan wilderness.

The Tlingit tribe, who lives in Juneau, has their own explanation for the high number of missing people: evil spirits called the Kushtaka.

According to books such as "In Search of the Kushtaka: Alaska's Other Bigfoot," the Kushtaka are shape-shifters (half-man, half-otter) who lure women and children to the water with fake cries in order to steal their human spirits and drown them.

ARIZONA: The ghosts of Slaughterhouse Canyon

The story of Slaughterhouse Canyon (not pictured), also called the less-frightening Luana's Canyon, takes place during the Gold Rush, according to The Miner.

During the 1800s, there was a family who lived in the canyon. They were very poor, so the father would venture out for food for his family.

One day, the father did not return, so his family slowly starved and descended into madness. The mother, unable to bear listening to her children's cries anymore, put on her wedding dress, murdered her children, and then threw them into a nearby river. The next day, she succumbed to starvation herself.

The legend states that if you go down to Slaughterhouse Canyon at night, even now, you will hear the loud, anguished cries of the mother who lost her mind.

ARKANSAS: The Boggy Creek Monster

According to Atlas Obscura, the Boggy Creek Monster of Fouke is Arkansas' version of Sasquatch. He's commonly accepted to be around 7 or 8 feet tall and covered in hair. Legend says that he roams the creeks of rural Arkansas.

He was first spotted in 1834 when people reported seeing a "wild man."

These days, after people claim to spot the Boggy Creek Monster, the sightings are documented on the official Boggy Creek Monster's website.

He has been the subject of at least five feature-length films, including 1972's "The Legend of Boggy Creek."

CALIFORNIA: The Char-Man

The Char-Man's origin story, told in the journal "Western Folklore," is gruesome: A father and son were both caught in a house fire and horribly burned in 1948.

After the fire, the son became so mentally unstable that he killed his father. When the police found the son, he was so unrecognizably burned that they didn't realize he was alive, so he ran away before they were able to arrest him for the murder of his father.

The story goes that, ever since then, the Char-Man can be spotted wandering the woods surrounding Ojai, occasionally approaching tents of innocent campers or pretending to be a hitchhiker and attempting to attack them.

COLORADO: The many legends of Riverdale Road

Riverdale Road is the site of not one, but eight creepy stories. Ranging from a "Hell Gate" to ghosts of slaves hanging from the trees, the stretch of road is decidedly spooky, as reported by local news affiliate Fox31.

The creepiest story, though, is that of the phantom jogger.

One day, there was a driver who hit a jogger and left him for dead. Now, it's said that if you park at the site of the crash, you'll hear disembodied footsteps getting closer and closer to your car. People have reported handprints on their windows and banging noises as if someone was kicking the outside.

CONNECTICUT: Hannah Cranna

Known as the "Wicked Witch of Monroe," per CT Insider, Hannah Cranna gained a reputation as a witch in the 19th century when her husband died by mysteriously falling off a cliff — and locals reportedly believed that she had bewitched him. People also believed that she would cast spells on people she didn't like.

Hannah lived to the age of 77, but right before she died, she asked to be carried down to the cemetery in her coffin on foot, not by wagon. After her death, the people of Monroe tried to wheel her coffin down the hill but were unable — the coffin kept falling off — so they were forced to carry it.

When the townspeople returned to her home, it was found to be engulfed in flames, sealing Hannah's reputation for practicing witchcraft.

Now, you can visit her real grave in Trumbull.

DELAWARE: The ghost of Mr. Chew

While not a particularly mean-spirited ghost, Samuel Chew's story, as told in "Haunted Delaware," is still disconcerting.

Chew was the chief justice of the Delaware Supreme Court in 1741. As the story goes, while he was alive, he didn't always get the respect he deserved — people frequently made fun of his name by mimicking sneezes while he walked by.

After his death, people reported seeing his ghost sitting under a poplar tree, wandering the courthouse, and generally creeping out the residents of Dover. Chew would also pull on men's coattails and give women a cold, icy feeling.

FLORIDA: The gravity-defying Spook Hill

Cars that are parked in neutral at Spook Hill will appear to roll uphill, according to Atlas Obscura.

Legends say the hill is either the site of a Native American burial ground or an epic battle of a Native American chief against a crocodile.

But the truth is, it's actually just an illusion created by the hill's surroundings. While cars appear to be rolling uphill, they are still just rolling downhill.

GEORGIA: The ghost town of Lake Lanier

At the bottom of Lake Lanier lie (almost) fully intact towns, ferries, a racetrack, and multiple cemeteries.

In 1946, the Georgia government received congressional approval to create Lake Lanier, and it bought up entire towns to clear the space for the lake. However, it decided to let the water cover the towns rather than demolish them.

Now, Lake Lanier has a decidedly eerie feel about it. There have been an unusual number of freak accidents and deaths on the lake. From 1994 to 2020, there were 203 drownings, CNN reported.

Many of the bodies of people who drowned have never been recovered. People have reported feeling arms and legs in the water, wrote CNN, but have not been able to find them right after, leading people to believe that spirits still roam the lake.

HAWAII: Night Marchers

Night Marchers, according to Honolulu Magazine, are not evil spirits, but they do demand respect. They are spirits of ancient Hawaiian warriors who marched around the islands to protect sacred areas.

Legend says that if you look directly at a night marcher, you will be marked for death. And, if by some chance, you find yourself in the middle of a procession, you are supposed to lie down in the middle of the road.

IDAHO: The water babies of Massacre Rocks

Water babies are a Native American legend found in several places in America, most famously in Pocatello at Massacre Rocks State Park.

The Shoshone tribe was first recorded in 1805, according to the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, and was roaming the Great Plains as early as the 1500s, so it's not clear when exactly this legend originated.

But the story goes that the Shoshone experienced an extreme famine, and mothers were forced to drown their babies in the river rather than watch their children starve.

Today, some people claim that if you sit quietly at the river by Massacre Rocks, you'll hear the sound of babies crying.

Other stories say that these babies grew gills and fins and survived, and now they seek revenge on their mothers by luring unsuspecting victims to their deaths in the river.

ILLINOIS: Homey the Clown

Throughout the suburbs of Chicago in the '90s, there was a rumor going around elementary schools: There was a creepy man dressed as Homey the Clown (yes, from "In Living Color"), driving around in a white van trying to lure kids into it with candy and money, as reported by the Chicago Reader and The Chicago Tribune.

In some variations, he was a kidnapper; in others, he was a rapist. But in all variations, Homey left a mark on young Chicago kids in the '90s.

INDIANA: The 100 Steps Cemetery

The 100 Steps Cemetery is located in Brazil. While it's unclear when the stories about the cemetery being haunted began, some gravestones date back to the 1860s.

The legend states that if someone finds themselves in the cemetery at midnight, they must climb the steps and count to 100. At this point, a ghost of an undertaker will appear and show the person a vision of their death.

On the way back down, the visitor is supposed to count the steps again — if they count the same number of steps, the vision is false.

People who have visited the cemetery in the past have tried to outsmart the supernatural forces in 100 Steps by avoiding the steps altogether. According to Indiana Ghost Detectives, they've reported being knocked or shoved to the ground by an unseen force.

IOWA: The Black Angel

The Black Angel stands over 8 feet tall in Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City, and she is black due to oxidation. According to Atlas Obscura, multiple legends have cropped up around her, most likely because of her dark appearance.

One legend says that a pregnant woman should never walk under her, or she'll lose the child. Others say that if you touch or kiss the statue, you'll be dead within six months.

Whether haunted, cursed, or completely harmless, the statue is definitely a somber sight to see.

KANSAS: The Devil's Chair

The legend of the Devil's Chair goes like this: An old farmer in Alma refused to sell his land to the city in order to build a new cemetery. Someone got a little too tired of waiting for him to sell, so he was pushed into his own well.

Eventually, someone said that there was a terrible smell coming from the well, so the city sent someone to investigate. The well was ruled empty, and it was boarded up.

Now, if you make your way to Alma, you can actually sit on the boarded-up well, but legend says that people who have sat on the well have been known to mysteriously disappear.

KENTUCKY: The Goat Man of Pope Lick

There's no clear consensus on how the Goat Man came to be. Some say he was a circus performer; others say he was a farmer who tortured his goats for Satan and, in return, was transformed into a hideous goat monster.

However, everyone does agree on his appearance: dark fur, pale skin, goat legs, and horns, reported Wave3, a local news outlet.

The monster is said to hide under the bridge at Pope Lick Creek in Louisville to lure people onto the train tracks, only to see them be hit by oncoming trains.

Sadly, interest in this urban legend has had some dangerous consequences. In 2016, an Ohio woman fell to her death from the bridge while looking for the Goat Man, reported The Washington Post.

LOUISIANA: The Grunch

Grunch Road is an old dirt road that leads deep into the woods and eventually to a dead end.

It was a favorite place for teenagers to go and do whatever teenagers do until they learned about the Grunch.

The Grunch are rumored to be a group of deformed, half-human, half-monsters that resulted from years of isolation in the Louisiana Bayous.

In the present day, it's said that if you find yourself on Grunch Road, don't get out of your car if you see a goat that looks injured. The stories say that the Grunch uses goats to lure people out of their cars so they can eat them and drain their blood.

MAINE: The mysterious stain on Colonel Jonathan Buck's tomb

The tomb of Colonel Jonathan Buck in Bucksport bears a mysterious leg-shaped stain.

The story goes that Buck sentenced a woman to burn for witchcraft, and while she was burning, her leg rolled out of the fire. It's also been said that the witch cursed Buck's tomb to always bear a stain for this injustice, the Bangor Daily News reported.

It is said that people have tried to get rid of this stain twice, but the stain keeps reappearing.

MARYLAND: Chessie the Chesapeake Bay monster

Chessie sightings have been around since the 1930s but really started to pick up steam in the '80s when photographic evidence became more readily available, WBAL-TV reported.

Chessie is said to resemble a snake, measures around 30 feet long, and is the approximate thickness of a telephone pole.

There haven't been any recorded attacks from Chessie, but a 30-foot-long snake does not sound like something most people would want to run into.

MASSACHUSETTS: The spirits of Hoosac Tunnel

In the 24-year-long construction of the Hoosac Tunnel in western Massachusetts, about 200 men died. Death was so associated with the tunnel that it was actually nicknamed "The Bloody Pit," according to Atlas Obscura.

After a particularly gruesome explosion in either 1867 or 1868, 13 miners were trapped inside the tunnel. The other workers assumed that the miners had died, but eventually, it was discovered that the miners had lived, built a raft to combat flooding, and eventually died due to poisonous gas inhalation.

It's said that these 13 miners haunted the tunnel for years, moaning and briefly appearing as ghosts.

MICHIGAN: The little girl on Knock Knock Road

The legend of Knock Knock Road, as reported by 99.1 WMFK, says that there was a little girl who was murdered on Knock Knock Road in the Detroit area, and now she appears to drivers at their car window, knocking, trying to find the person who killed her.

MINNESOTA: The Kensington runestone

In 1898, a Swedish-American farmer found a gigantic slab of rock on his farm with symbols that appeared to be Norse. Since then, no one has figured out where it came from.

While most historians have debunked the rock  — now known as the Kensington Rune, according to Atlas Obscura — as a hoax, due to dating and inconsistencies with the Norse language of the time, the myth has persisted.

But if it wasn't the Vikings, who did leave this mysterious rock? And what does it say?

MISSISSIPPI: Deer Island's haunted treasure

The Ghost of Deer Island, reported by the Sun-Herald, originates from an old pirate story.

The story says that back in the 1920s, two men were fishing on Deer Island when they heard rustling in the bushes, a noise they assumed was caused by wild hogs. Eventually, they decided to check it out and encountered a headless skeleton. They ran back to their boat, and the skeleton followed them all the way there.

According to the pirates' story, there was a ship that sailed into Biloxi Bay and buried its treasure on Deer Island. The crew decided to behead one of their own and left his body behind to guard their treasure.

MISSOURI: Momo the Missouri Monster

Momo is Missouri's version of Bigfoot/Sasquatch. He's been said to have terrible body odor, a pumpkin-shaped head, and an appetite for dogs. In 1968, Momo tried to abduct a 4-year-old boy, though no evidence was ever found, a local radio station reported.

MONTANA: The story of Sacrifice Cliff

As reported by the Billings Gazette, the story of Sacrifice Cliff comes from an old Native American legend.

Two members of the Crow Tribe arrived in their village from a trip to find that almost everyone there had been infected with smallpox and had died. So heartbroken about the loss of their loved ones, the two decided to blindfold their horses and ride off the cliff to join the tribe on the other side.

Sacrifice Cliff is visible from almost anywhere in Billings, so it's sad (and a bit spooky) to think about this story while the cliff looms over the entire city.

NEBRASKA: The poisoned girl at Centennial Hall

When Business Insider chose the most haunted place in each state, Centennial Hall was a no-brainer. People claim that multiple ghosts roam the halls.

But the creepiest story of Centennial Hall originates in the 1940s, when it was a high school.

The story says that a student was playing her clarinet, suffered a heart attack, and died — because her reed was poisoned. Now, people claim to feel cold spots, hear disembodied music, and to have witnessed an empty rocking chair start to rock, according to the blog Theresa's Haunted History of the Tri-State.

NEVADA: The truth about Area 51

There is perhaps no urban legend, myth, or conspiracy theory more famous than Nevada's Area 51, a mysterious government facility that is rumored to be associated with aliens. The US government officially states that Area 51 is classified due to national security, which only fuels the fire.

The secrecy surrounding Area 51 is what makes it inherently creepy, and with the government admitting to a program investigating UFOs, the theories about what's actually going on inside continue to seem more plausible.

NEW HAMPSHIRE: The witch of Hampton, Goody Cole

Eunice "Goody" Cole was the only woman in New Hampshire history to be tried for witchcraft multiple times. Her first charge was in 1656, and she was charged again in 1671, according to the Hampton Historical Society.

When she died and her body was recovered, the townspeople were rumored to have staked her through the heart to prevent her from haunting their town, according to Atlas Obscura.

People continue to blame Goody Cole for the misfortunes of Hampton citizens for the past 300 years. For example, a boat full of Hampton residents overturned, and everyone on board drowned, even though they were within swimming distance of shore. People blamed Goody Cole for the crash and for cursing the passengers by having them forget how to swim.

NEW JERSEY: The Jersey Devil

The story of the Jersey Devil has been around since the 1700s, Weird NJ reported. The legend states that a woman named Mother Leeds became pregnant with her 13th child and said, "Let this one be [a/the] devil." Once the child was born, it grew hooves, wings, horns, and a tail.

The monster has been spotted periodically throughout history in the Pine Barrens region of New Jersey. The state has embraced the legend so much that it named its hockey team after it.

NEW MEXICO: La Mala Hora

La Mala Hora, which translates to The Evil Hour, is an entity you don't want to run into on a dark road. Legend says it first appears as a ball of black energy, constantly moving and changing its size and shape. If you look at it, it will drive you insane and will slowly kill you.

At other times, it appears as a scary-looking woman. It's said that if you see her at a crossroads, you or someone in your family will die.

NEW YORK: Cropsey

The story of Cropsey has many iterations, The Lineup reported, but it generally tells the story of a man who stalked a sleep-away camp/psychiatric facility/children's hospital, had a hook for a hand, and killed children who were wandering alone at night. Almost anyone who went to camp in upstate New York has heard about Cropsey.

Things took a more sinister turn when a documentary posited that Cropsey was actually real: a convicted child kidnapper named Andre Rand, wrote The New York Times.

NORTH CAROLINA: The beast of Bladenboro

In the 1950s, multiple dogs were found dead and drained of blood in the North Carolina town of Bladenboro, according to North Carolina Ghosts. People believed a vampiric beast was in the woods, and they tried to hunt the animal. 

Today, the town of Bladenboro has embraced its history, and residents actually hold a Beast Fest every year. While some people are convinced the beast was probably a particularly large bobcat, it's never been confirmed exactly what was stalking their town.

NORTH DAKOTA: White Lady Lane

The story of White Lady Lane is a tragic one, according to Only In Your State.

The legend states that a young woman became pregnant out of wedlock, and her religious parents forced her to marry the baby's father. The baby ended up dying after their wedding. The girl, so upset about her baby and her forced marriage, hanged herself from a bridge in her wedding dress. Locals claim to still see her ghost hanging from the bridge.

OHIO: The werewolf of Defiance.

During the summer of 1972, the people of Defiance said they were being terrorized by a werewolf, per Mysterious Universe.

The sightings always happened at night, generally by the train tracks. A couple of women said it would try to get into their houses by rattling the doorknobs. The animal was said to be huge, hairy, and dressed in rags.

But after summer ended, the beast disappeared, never to be heard from again. But the story lingers.

OKLAHOMA: The mysterious Shaman's portal

The mysterious occurrences in Beaver Dunes Park have been attributed to the fact that it was built upon ancient Native American burial grounds, which is why it's called the Shaman's portal, according to Only In Your State.

It's also known as the Oklahoma Bermuda Triangle.

Mysterious things have happened in the park, starting with the Spanish conquistadors who went missing while searching for gold in the 1500s. Since then, paranormal activity seekers have flocked to the dunes. Some people claim that a UFO crashed there, and a group in the '90s who tested the soil said it was "abnormal."

OREGON: The Bandage Man of Cannon Beach

The Bandage Man is the American version of a mummy, wrote the Cannon Beach History Center and Museum.

He is rumored to be the ghost of a logger who died in a sawmill accident and now terrorizes teenagers who hang out at a deserted area of a highway near Cannon Beach. Stories say that he knocks on car windows to try to get in and smells really, really bad.

PENNSYLVANIA: The bus to nowhere

In Philadelphia, there's rumored to be a bus that doesn't have an end destination, according to Only In Your State. The story says that the bus only picks up passengers who are at their lowest moments and need to get away from their problems. Once the passenger is ready to face the world, they can get off the bus.

But the passenger has no idea how long they've been on the bus for — it could have been hours, days, or even years.

RHODE ISLAND: The Devil's footprints

There is a rock on Devil's Foot Road that appears to show a normal human footprint and a cloven hoof, according to a Medium blog about New England folklore.

The story goes that a Native American woman murdered a white man and fled the scene of the crime.

While running, she was stopped by another man. She cried out for the Devil to save her, but the man admitted that he himself was the Devil and stomped his feet on the ground to prove that he had a cloven hoof, which the rock still shows to this day. You can see it on Waymarking.

SOUTH CAROLINA: The death of Julia Legare

In the 1800s, the Legares were a well-to-do South Carolinian family that had homes on the mainland and on Edisto Island. The daughter, Julia, got sick, was pronounced dead, and was buried inside their family mausoleum, according to Edisto's website.

Years later, another member of the Legare family died, and when their tomb was opened up, the remains of Julia were found outside her coffin. The story says that Julia had been in a coma, and had woken up to try to escape her tomb, but sadly died.

After the first reopening of the Legare mausoleum, the door couldn't seem to stay shut. The Legares tried multiple different doors, and every single time, the door was found open. People believe that Julia's ghost didn't want to be locked in that tomb any longer.

SOUTH DAKOTA: Walking Sam and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation

Purportedly over 7 feet tall and very slim, Walking Sam is said to appear on the streets of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation at night, and he tries to convince teenagers to take their own lives, per Hot 104.7.

Whether Walking Sam is real, something tragic is going on at the reservation. From December 2014 to May 2015, there were 103 attempts by people to end their lives at Pine Ridge, reported The Daily Dot.

TENNESSEE: The boy in the bathroom at Pine Haven School

The Pine Haven School, located in Jamestown, is old and abandoned, and according to Urban Legends Online, it's said to be haunted.

A tragic story supposedly took place there, where a boy was cornered by a group of bullies in the bathroom and shoved into a mirror, which shattered and killed him. 

To avoid getting caught committing murder, the bullies decided to bury the body underneath the floorboards. Today, people say that if you go inside the school, you can see the reflection of the boy if you look in the mirror.

TEXAS: The Candy Lady

According to Urban Legends Online, in the early 1900s, children in an unnamed rural town in Texas started to disappear, and the residents blamed the Candy Lady.

The story says that she would go around leaving candy on children's windows, eventually luring the kids out with notes attached, promising more candy.

The story picked up steam when a farmer reportedly found rotten teeth on his farm and later found the body of a boy with his pockets stuffed with candy.

UTAH: The curse of the Escalante Petrified Forest

While it is illegal to take anything from Escalante Petrified Forest State Park, a legend says that anyone who takes pieces of petrified wood from the park will be cursed with bad luck, sickness, and accidents, KSL reported.

Park manager Kendall Farnsworth told KSL in 2014 that he gets about a dozen packages every year containing a piece of wood from the park and an apologetic letter detailing the sender's misfortunes. 

VERMONT: The frozen people

First appearing in a diary that was published in the late 1800s, the legend of the hibernating older people recounts the tale of a poor family outside Montpelier who couldn't afford to feed and clothe the oldest members of their family, so they froze the people and buried them, wrote Vermonter.

Legend has it that when spring rolled around, the elders thawed out and were just fine.

VIRGINIA: The Bunnyman

The Bunnyman's legend starts with what every good urban legend begins with: An insane asylum.

As reported by WAMU 88.5, the people of Clifton were so up in arms about the asylum that they were able to get all of the patients transferred. The patients were being moved on a bus that crashed, and the police were able to catch all the patients except one — the Bunnyman.

According to the tale, the Bunnyman lived in the woods and sustained himself on woodland creatures (like bunnies), but eventually, he attacked humans.

Some people reported being attacked by a man with a hatchet. Other tales say that groups of teens would see a bright light and then would wind up dead and strung up over a bridge, the Washingtonian reported.

WASHINGTON: Bigfoot

Bigfoot is an internationally recognizable name, and has been spotted all over the country. But, Bigfoot has been spotted the most in Washington state, according to an online database compiling all Bigfoot sightings.

Bigfoot is essentially a gigantic ape-like creature who is either a ferocious beast that attacks loggers and hikers, or a gentle giant who wants to be left alone.

Either way, there's something creepy about an undiscovered species of animal wandering around the Pacific Northwest, evading capture.

WEST VIRGINIA: Mothman

In 1966, stories say that West Virginia was visited by an insectoid flying creature with bright red eyes who resembled both a moth and a man, according to Atlas Obscura. He was spotted flying around the town of Point Pleasant, along with shining lights and the equally conspiratorial Men in Black

Mothman's origins have been said to be supernatural, alien, or a government experiment gone wrong.

But Point Pleasant has embraced the monster, erecting a statue, creating a museum, and even dedicating a festival to him. In 2002, a film starring Richard Gere, "The Mothman Prophecies," was released.

WISCONSIN: Boy Scout Lane

The story of what exactly happened at Boy Scout Lane varies, but they all end with the same conclusion: a group of Boy Scouts dead on the road.

In some stories, McDowell News wrote, there was a bus crash with no survivors, or they were murdered by their bus driver, or they just mysteriously vanished into the woods one by one.

Visitors have reported seeing a swinging body in the trees, feeling like they are being watched, and finding child-sized handprints.

WYOMING: Devils Tower

There's no scientific consensus on why Devils Tower looks the way it does, but multiple Native American creation stories attribute the landmark's shape to a tragedy.

According to the various stories, two boys were attacked and chased by a large bear, so they ran up the rock formation. The bear tried to follow, but couldn't make the climb and left scratches all the way down the rock as it slid down, according to Rapid City's tourism website.

• Palmer Luckey said that he was in favor of public executions.
• Luckey weighed in on the case of Nidal Hasan, who Pete Hegseth said would be executed on a livestream.
• Private executions are "awful and dystopian," Luckey wrote on X.

Palmer Luckey wants to bring executions out from behind the curtain.

The cofounder of Anduril weighed in on the case of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Hasan's execution would be livestreamed. President Donald Trump said he was still weighing the decision.

Luckey said that he'd been "outspoken on wanting public executions for over a decade" — and that his position hadn't changed.

"Executions should be public and brutal, not private and medicalized," Luckey wrote in a Sunday post on X. "They are the ultimate example of the state's monopoly on violence."

Voters need to be confronted with the hard truth of these state killings in every instance, Luckey wrote, so that they can have appropriate "confidence or revulsion in the institution."

It's not a new position; Luckey cites George Washington as an intellectual predecessor. Washington was a fierce disciplinarian who supported public hangings.

Luckey's thoughts echo a French philosopher who lived two centuries after Washington. In "Discipline and Punish," Michel Foucault traced the spectacle of public executions to the private medicalization of executions behind prison doors.

In his post, Luckey derided this shift toward private executions as "awful and dystopian."

"It makes needless executions more likely, not less so," he wrote. "People who demean this as barbaric or yucky miss the whole point."

Luckey had some sympathy for the pacifists who want to end the death penalty altogether. That argument is logically consistent, he wrote in response to another user. "If people don't want the Trump administration executing people in public, they definitely shouldn't want them doing it in private!"

The post was certainly controversial. People on X called Luckey a "true psycho" and compared Silicon Valley to a psych ward. "Next they will be rationalising gladiatorial arenas for condemned prisoners," one user wrote.

Others saw eye to eye with Luckey, including Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, who wrote that he "agreed."

"Palmer Luckey and George Washington are not barbaric," Lonsdale wrote. "Our society today is too soft in ways that cause our fellow citizens harm."

• Ground robots are playing a key role in Operation Vivaldi, an ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive.
• Ukrainian troops are using them to distract the Russians and carry out assaults behind enemy lines.
• Business Insider spoke with a commander whose unit is at the front of the robot operations.

Ukraine's Operation Vivaldi is showcasing how ground robots are reshaping offensive warfare.

In the opening stages of this complex operation, Ukrainian forces used uncrewed ground vehicles, or UGVs, as distractions. The robots drew Russian attention and exposed surveillance systems and firing positions while assault troops slipped through and seized key territory.

Robots have also conducted airborne assaults, delivered explosives, attacked enemy command centers, and supported infantry operations amid this major counteroffensive in eastern Ukraine.

NC13, a strike UGV unit within the Third Assault Brigade of the Third Army Corps, has played a leading role in Vivaldi. Mykola Zinkevych, the unit's commander, told Business Insider that his forces have used robots across a wide range of missions to inflict defeats on the Russians.

Over the course of the operation, the robots evolved from diversions that enabled Ukrainian advances into armed strike platforms targeting Russian command posts, drone operators, and large troop concentrations in the rear.

Zinkevych, who goes by the call sign "Makar" and spoke through a translator, said these efforts disrupted Russian command and control and logistics, making it harder to bring in more soldiers and limiting Moscow's ability to conduct operations.

Robots also carried out what the commander described as full-scale robotic assault operations, independently and in support of Ukrainian infantrymen.

Most notably, NC13 used heavy bomber drones to carry armed robots over the front lines and drop them in enemy territory, surprising Russian troops and creating additional pressure, Zinkevych said. He added that it also affected their morale.

Brig. Gen. Andrii Biletskyi, commander of Ukraine's Third Army Corps, revealed the use of this tactic in late September and said that his forces had become the "first in the world" to operationally air-drop robots from drones in combat.

Beyond explosive-laden robots, NC13 also deployed robots armed with grenade launchers, Zinkevych said, adding that the unit was the first to do so in combat. He said the Russians apparently mistook the UGVs for an infantry assault, which led to confusion and disorientation.

These innovative tactics come amid broader efforts by Kyiv's forces to integrate ground robots into combat operations. Ukrainian officials have said they want machines to replace humans in dangerous front-line missions, particularly in logistics and casualty evacuation roles.

Vivaldi, which Ukraine launched over the summer to halt Russian advances in the northern part of the Donetsk region, has already seen Kyiv retake control of dozens of square miles of territory, according to analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank.

Zinkevych attributed Vivaldi's success in part to strike robots, but he also credited Biletskyi's planning and coordination. Conventional weaponry, specifically artillery, has played a key role, too, according to Western analysts and the Ukrainian military.

The Third Army Corps said last week that Ukrainian artillery fire has prevented Moscow from bringing up reserve forces, equipment, and ammunition to regain positions it had lost. Drones assessed damage and eliminated remaining targets.

Artillery was responsible for a larger share of casualties in the war's early stages, but drones are now the biggest killer. ISW analysts wrote in an October 9 battlefield assessment that artillery remains relevant even in a drone-dominated fight.

• OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy says most of the world is still barely using large language models.
• Karpathy said of those who do use LLMs, most regard AI as a Google-esque tool.
• That's not the only gap that is growing amid AI diffusion, Karpathy wrote.

OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy says the world still barely knows AI.

"The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems," Karpathy wrote on X on Sunday. "When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot."

Karpathy said he was following up on his April observation about a growing gap among AI users. Just over six months later, the renowned AI researcher who coined the term "vibe coding" sees the widening gap less as "two groups of people speaking past each other," as he phrased it in April, and more as a "sharp funnel."

The situation, Karpathy said, is that based on his estimate, roughly 75% of the world's population "have barely come in contact" with large language models at all.

As for everyone else, Karpathy said around 1 to 2 billion people, "are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products." There's a bigger gap between the chatbot users and those who, Karpathy said, are using frontier models to code, a group that he estimates is around 20 million people or 0.2% of the population.

This group, he wrote, sees "large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt."

The smallest group, which Karpathy estimates is just 5,000 people, consists of those with inside access to frontier AI systems, likely due to their employment at one of the leading companies. Karpathy said the OpenAI Hugging Face breach showed what's on the horizon.

"It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics," he wrote. "Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work."

The pace of AI advancement is so rapid, Karpathy said, that humans are struggling to review the outputs fast enough.

"For example, people are still involved in the 'archeology' of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago," he wrote. "Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while."

Box CEO Aaron Levie said Karpathy's post was "a good way to understand how early we actually are in AI diffusion."

"The vast majority of people are using AI as a chatbot for simple interactions that approximate next-generation search," he wrote. "This is super useful but dramatically underrepresents the full capability of AI."

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said now is the moment to join the AI labs.

"Be part of the 5000 today," he wrote on X. "It's amazing."

• I tried making pumpkin pies using recipes from Bobby Flay, Dominique Ansel, and Alton Brown.
• My favorite recipe was Flay's because it was easy to follow, and the whipped cream was delicious.
• Ansel's recipe was a disaster for me to make, and the final pie tasted quite bland.

When it comes to fall comfort foods, nothing takes the cake quite like a slice of homemade pumpkin pie.

Celebrity chefs certainly feel the same way, which is why so many have their own pumpkin-pie recipes.

To find out which are worth trying this fall, I tested pumpkin-pie recipes from culinary legends Bobby Flay, Dominique Ansel, and Alton Brown.

Here's how the pies turned out — and which recipe I'll totally be coming back to.

Flay's signature pumpkin-pie recipe has many steps, but simple ingredients

Though he's known as a grill master, Flay can throw down when it comes to pies.

His recipe on the Food Network website has several steps, but it seemed easy to organize and measure all the ingredients in advance.

The crust and filling ingredients seemed pretty standard: graham-cracker crumbs, butter, sugar, ground cinnamon, eggs, dark-brown sugar, granulated sugar, pumpkin purée, heavy cream, ground nutmeg, ground ginger, ground cloves, vanilla bean, and salt

The recipe also called for homemade bourbon-maple whipped cream, made with cold heavy cream, grade-B maple syrup, and bourbon.

It sounded tasty. To make it, I needed grade-B maple syrup — but I learned that label no longer exists. So I stuck with grade A.

The pie came together easily and smelled delicious

Since I measured everything in advance, making the filling was as simple as pouring and whisking the ingredients together, then straining it for a super-smooth center.

The only hiccup I had was that I don't own a food processor. I used a small blender/food-chopper that didn't quite work as well.

That made it tricky to integrate the melted butter with the crushed graham cracker.

Overall, the hands-on part was quick and easy. After 10 minutes of baking, my crust was set and ready to be filled.

The recipe produced far more filling than I needed, so I froze the leftovers for a future pie.

I baked the pie for about 90 minutes. It came out golden, with a flawless top — no cracks here.

The whipped cream and the pie went together perfectly

I was impressed with how well the pie held its shape as I cut into it. Though the crust along the bottom was probably thicker than it should've been, I was happy it didn't crumble and fall apart.

The whipped cream alone was incredibly delicious. I could taste every element: the cream, the vanilla, the bourbon, and the maple syrup.

As for the pie, the filling had a light pumpkin flavor with a nice balance of sweetness and spice. With the whipped cream, the dessert had the perfect balance of vanilla, maple syrup, warm pumpkin, and spices.

The graham-cracker crust was fine, but I wished it were crunchier — I was disappointed by its slightly soggy bottom.

The edges were crisp, but they weren't as flavorful as I would've liked.

Ansel's pumpkin-pie recipe is heavy on the ginger and calls for a dough crust

I followed a recipe for silky pumpkin pie with gingerbread crust from the famous pastry chef and inventor of the Cronut, as published on British Vogue.

For the pie and crust, I needed light-brown sugar, all-purpose flour, butter, cinnamon, baking soda, lemon juice, milk, ginger (fresh and ground), vanilla bean, nutmeg, cornstarch, pumpkin puree, granulated sugar, cream, egg yolks, and sea salt.

My first concern was how much ginger — fresh and ground — it called for. I like ginger, but I don't love it in large quantities.

I was also expecting the pie to have a pretty rich center, since this recipe calls for a lot of egg yolks — about six or seven — in the filling.

For the crust, I had to battle with the dough

Since it involved making a dough-based crust, this recipe required a lot of steps. I'd recommend making this the day before if you need it for a certain occasion.

It took me a long time to grate the fresh ginger for the crust, so I ended up cutting the amount to about 1 ½ tablespoons from 2 tablespoons.

After I mixed the crust ingredients and let it chill, it was time to roll. I cut the dough and put aside one half, which I originally planned to freeze for later.

Unfortunately, rolling the chilled dough was a disaster. My first half kept sticking to the rolling pin and my surface even though I had sprinkled flour on both and my hands before I started.

I got frustrated and scrapped this half, thankful to still have the second half. I kept this dough loosely wrapped in plastic wrap to help prevent it from sticking to the rolling pin.

This worked somewhat well — until I had to peel the dough from the plastic wrap, and it fell apart.

I wrangled the dough as best as I could and draped it over my pie dish. It didn't quite fit, so I did my best to patch it together.

Next was the blind bake — when you bake a pie crust before filling it — which made me nervous because the dough was so delicate. I used parchment paper and dry rice to weigh down the crust as it baked.

When I pulled the crust out and removed the rice, most of my dough came up with it. I scraped some of the paper off and mended the crust as best as I could, but this was turning out to be a disaster.

I pressed on and added the filling to the crust anyway. Then it was ready to bake in a 325-degree Fahrenheit oven.

My pie took about 20 minutes longer to bake than the recipe's maximum estimated time of 35 minutes.

For all the trouble, my pie ended up tasting rather bland

The pie looked OK coming out of the oven. The crust didn't have a perfectly pinched edge, but at this point, I was glad it had come together at all.

The filling mushroomed above the crust while it was in the oven, then dropped near the end of baking, resulting in several cracks around the pie.

I thought that this pie would hold its shape the best of all three recipes because it had a dough crust, but it fell apart when I cut a slice. The bottom crust was thicker on one side and slightly soggy.

The pumpkin layer tasted strongly of pumpkin — I would've loved more sweetness and a bit more spice for a better flavor.

The texture was super smooth and custard-like thanks to the yolks. Fortunately, the ginger didn't overpower the pie's flavor. However, especially given all the work, I wished the crust had more flavor.

For convenience, I swapped fresh pumpkin for canned in Brown's recipe

Brown's recipe on the Food Network website requires baking a fresh pumpkin to make a homemade pumpkin purée.

Short on time and not a fan of pumpkin guts, I skipped this and used canned pumpkin purée.

Other ingredients for the pie and crust included things like gingersnap cookies, ground ginger, dark-brown sugar, butter, half-and-half, freshly grated nutmeg, and eggs.

I was surprised to see that this recipe didn't call for cinnamon, unlike any pumpkin pie I've ever made (or eaten). I hoped the nutmeg would make up for it.

Of the 3 recipes, Brown's was the easiest to follow

The pie's gingersnap crust was similar to Flay's graham-cracker one. Without a food processor, it couldn't come together as well as it should, but it still looked fine and smelled even better.

I pressed it into a pie dish and baked it for about 10 minutes.

Without fresh pumpkin, the filling was easy to make. I warmed the pumpkin purée and half-and-half, along with nutmeg and salt, on the stove, then whisked the mixture in a bowl with brown sugar and eggs.

I let the filling and the crust cool for 15 minutes, then combined them and baked my pie for 45 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

There were no mishaps here; the process was straightforward and quick. Obviously, if I had made the pumpkin purée from scratch, it would've taken much longer.

I loved the flavor of the gingersnap crust

After baking the pie, I noticed it had a bit of liquid pooling on the surface. Otherwise, the surface was blemish-free.

This sturdy crust held everything in place as I removed a slice from the pan. The clear definition between the crust and the pumpkin filling in each slice made for a really nice presentation.

The filling could've used a bit more spice — cinnamon, perhaps — but it was still delicious. The pumpkin flavor came through and was sweet.

The ginger flavor in the crust came through in every bite.

It was still slightly soggier than I had hoped, even along the edges, but I was worried that much longer in the oven would've resulted in a burnt crust.

I'd definitely make Flay's recipe again — especially the maple whipped cream

I loved the filling and whipped cream from Flay's recipe, and overall, the pie was simple to put together. The only thing I would change is making the crust more flavorful, perhaps by adding spices.

Brown's crust was delicious, and the filling's texture was perfect. With a food processor, I think I could get the crust to have a better texture. This recipe resulted in a pie that looked as good on Instagram as it did in real life.

Truthfully, I would love to try Flay's filling and whipped cream with Brown's gingersnap crust for the ultimate pumpkin pie.

Unfortunately, I can't see myself attempting Ansel's recipe again.

Check out the other celebrity-chef recipes we've put head-to-head so far.

This story was originally published on November 21, 2022, and most recently updated on October 12, 2026.

• At 36, I've visited over 100 countries as a solo traveler, from popular destinations to hidden gems.
• My first international trip was to Thailand, and it was a great place for a new solo traveler.
• I'd also recommend Italy, Iceland, Uzbekistan, and New Zealand to new solo travelers.

On my 36th birthday, I crossed the border from Uganda into Rwanda, commemorating my 100th country visited as a solo traveler. It was a gift — literally — to have this happen on my birthday, but also a huge feat for me.

I took my first solo trip when I was a 25-year-old bartender in New York City. Since then, I've been all over — from popular tourist destinations to off-the-beaten-path destinations like rural Madagascar and tiny islands like Jeju and Nevis — documenting my ventures on my blog, No Man Nomad, along the way.

After being privileged enough to see so many corners of the world, I can say with confidence that destinations are simply better suited for new solo travelers. If I had to start this wild, wacky journey all over again, here are five destinations I'd consider for a first-time solo trip.

Thailand was my first solo-trip destination, and it was a great one.

My first international trip was to Thailand, and though I've made my fair share of travel mistakes, this was, undoubtedly, the right choice.

In my opinion, Thailand is one of the best solo-travel destinations. Ten years after my initial visit — where I visited my first Southeast Asian night market, met people in hostels who accompanied me to pubs and drag shows, and ate a crab curry that still lives in my head rent-free — I went back to Thailand, and can confirm that it's still true.

What makes Thailand stand out is that there's really something for everyone. Bangkok has some of the world's best street food, but you'll also have no problem finding Michelin-starred meals. Backpacker culture is abundant, with plenty of hostels to choose from, but five-star hotels are easy to find, too.

If islands are more your speed, try Koh Samui or Koh Phi Phi, which offer serene landscapes with world-class diving along white sandy coasts.

Of all the countries I've visited, New Zealand is one of the prettiest.

If your goal is to truly get away from it all, might I suggest a New Zealand road trip?

As a New Yorker who seldom finds herself behind a wheel, my time driving through New Zealand was as much of a reward as it was a challenge. By the end of my week cruising through the South Island, I — a city girl through and through — felt a deep appreciation for van life.

New Zealand is exceptionally beautiful and peaceful. Hiking spots like Roys Peak offer views that beat out even the prettiest of postcards. Lakes like Pukaki are so blue you'd think they have a filter on them.

Also, despite being alone and sleeping in a van each night, I never felt bothered or unsafe. There's a reason everyone who has been to New Zealand swears it's the prettiest place on the planet — after over 100 countries, I still believe that to be true.

I always recommend Italy to solo travelers.

One of the biggest myths about travel is that you have to wait for a romantic partner to visit honeymoon destinations. Let me debunk that for you and encourage you to visit Italy, party of one.

I highly recommend romanticizing your life on a gondola ride in Venice, where, yes, people will likely stare at you for being alone, but this won't stop you from having a great time. (Take it from someone who's done this twice.)

If you're hungry to meet people, a food tour through Rome's Trastevere neighborhood is a delicious way to meet others, and a winery tour in the Tuscan countryside is just as fun.

I've been to Italy more than anywhere else in the world, and it's a destination I continue to return to as a solo traveler.

I recently solo-traveled to Uzbekistan and had a great experience.

Just because I've been solo traveling for a decade doesn't mean there's not plenty left for me to explore, as proven by my recent trip to Uzbekistan. Before I started traveling, I probably couldn't have pointed to Uzbekistan on a map, but now, I'd recommend it to any and all solo travelers.

One of the biggest pros was that, while traveling alone, I rarely felt like I was on my own. From walking tours to dining at local restaurants, I connected with other women traveling solo.

The country as a whole, but specifically Samarkand, felt calm and peaceful — and also rich in culture and Silk Road history. I had a great time in Tashkent visiting historic landmarks like Chorsu Bazaar and Hotel Uzbekistan, and found it easy to get around on public transit.

Iceland consistently ranks among the safest countries in the world.

One of the most nuanced questions I'm asked about solo travel is, "Is that safe?" Safety is subjective, so what's a safe experience for me might be entirely different for someone else.

That being said, a lot of stats indicate that Iceland is widely considered a safe place to travel. It was even ranked the most peaceful country in the 2026 Global Peace Index, based on criteria like ongoing conflicts, societal safety and security, and militarization.

While there, I took a day trip out of Reykjavik to see the "Golden Circle," and almost everyone else on my tour was a solo female traveler. In Reykjavik, I noticed a plethora of queer spaces, including the National Museum of Iceland, home to "A Rainbow Thread," a guide to the country's queer history.

It doesn't hurt that Iceland is a geographically stunning destination. Here, you can see geysers, active volcanoes, waterfalls, and — depending on when you visit — the northern lights.

The only con about a solo trip to Iceland is that, as safe as it is, I found it equally expensive, with even shared hostel dorms generally starting around $50 a night.

• Vincia Gordon runs two call centers from her home, while caring for her 92-year-old mom.
• She supervises 40 members of staff and performs tasks such as administering medication.
• The mom of two takes 480 hours of FMLA annually to balance her career and personal life as a carer.

This story is based on an interview with Vincia Gordon, 56, an operational manager for two call centers, living in Baltimore County, Maryland. It has been edited for length and clarity.

My mom, Hyacinth Lynch, 92, lived in the US Virgin Islands, but constantly visited my family and me in Maryland, staying for months at a time.

She lived by herself after my father died in 2020 at the age of 94. Longevity runs in our family.

However, she started to show signs of decline in the summer of 2023. A physical exam confirmed she had high blood pressure and other issues, such as a hernia.

In September, one of our friends from the islands called to ask if there was something wrong with Mom. She had called her twice one morning, asking her the same thing.

It was the first sign of her dementia. Other friends were concerned, too. I told them to keep their eyes on her and report to me anything that was askew.

I didn't like the idea of a care home

She flew over for the holidays — and never left. Her mobility had gotten much worse, as well as the hernia. She had surgery in the Spring of 2024.

The dementia progressed. Her long-term memory stayed intact — she could rattle on about looking after my daughters when they were young — but her short-term memory was a problem.

I talked to her medical team, who put her on the drug donepezil. It helped slow things down and remove some of the brain fog.

There was no question in my mind that she should stay at home with me. I didn't like the idea of a care home, because I compared them to overcrowded classrooms.

You'd question your children's education if the teacher had 30 kids on any given day. How could Mom get the attention she needed without a specially designated aide?

I contacted the senior living advisory, A Place for Mom, for help finding providers and other services. They put me in touch with some private carers, who usually visit between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.

They charge $44 an hour, and they mostly spend the time doing cognitive exercises. Mom has always been a word search queen and loves doing puzzles.

We also have visits from other professionals, including a social worker and an occupational therapist. Meanwhile, I keep on top of things such as keeping her clean, monitoring her blood pressure, and administering her medication.

I couldn't manage without FMLA

I'm very accountable and write everything down in a copybook in case I need to consult a provider.

People ask me how on earth I manage to run two call centers — one in the US and the other in the Philippines — while caring for my mother. My days are knee-deep in meetings and calls with staff.

The answer is FMLA (the Family Medical Leave Act lets eligible workers take time off to care for a family member, without losing their job). I receive 480 hours a year, and my salary is not affected. I usually take it in increments of two or three hours, but it can extend into days if necessary. I also use my allotted PTO.

It's always a balancing act, and the juggling is hard. Still, I wouldn't have it any other way. Mom is absolutely here to stay.

• NHTSA opened a safety inquiry about Tesla's self-driving Model Y robotaxis and Cybercabs.
• An unnamed petitioner alleged that the robotaxis were speeding in an active school zone.
• Tesla has faced growing regulatory scrutiny as it rolls out its all-important self-driving cars.

Tesla's self-driving taxis are facing a fresh safety question: are they slowing down when kids are in school?

On Monday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it had opened a defect-petition review into a claim that 2026 Tesla Model Y robotaxis and Cybercabs exceeded speed limits in school zones while their automated driving systems were active.

An unnamed petitioner submitted three videos in support of the claim, according to the filing, which says the probe was opened on Friday. NHTSA said it will evaluate the complaint before deciding whether to grant or deny a formal investigation.

The agency's filing lists no reported crashes or injuries, and estimates that about 1,000 vehicles could be affected.

Tesla didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

The scrutiny comes as Tesla pushes to turn robotaxis into a much bigger business.

The electric automaker has expanded its self-driving services with the Model Y robotaxis beyond Austin into other Texas cities and Florida. In September, the company added its steering-wheel-free Cybercab to the Austin fleet.

CEO Elon Musk has increasingly shifted Tesla's focus away from traditional vehicle sales toward self-driving, AI, and robotics.

The self-driving rollout previously caught the attention of federal regulators. NHTSA opened an audit inquiry into the Cybercab's self-certification a few hours after the cars started offering services in Austin.

School zones have also tripped up rival robotaxi companies.

Last year, NHTSA opened a preliminary investigation into Waymo after reports that its vehicles passed stopped school buses in Austin and Atlanta. The Google-owned robotaxi company issued a voluntary recall in December.

In January, a Waymo vehicle struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica, California. The child had "minor injuries" according to the NHTSA, and, in a statement published on its website, Waymo said the vehicle "braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made."

• A Walmart-related recession indicator says the US is headed for economic stress and a Fed rate cut.
• Jim Paulsen pointed to the Walmart Recession Signal, a measure of Walmart's stock to a basket of luxury names.
• The signal has predicted the last four recessions, often spiking before the Fed cuts rates.

Higher interest rates are on everyone's mind — but one under-the-radar recession signal suggests Fed rate cuts could be around the corner.

Longtime Wall Street strategist Jim Paulsen, the former chief investment strategist of The Leuthold Group, says the US economy is heading for a slowdown. Eventually, economic weakness may prompt the central bank to slash rates, Paulsen said, pointing to one economic indicator in particular: the Walmart Recession Signal, which measures Walmart's stock price to a global basket of luxury stocks.

It's a reflection of "economic stress" and consumer weakness Paulsen said, as Walmart's stock tends to outperform luxury stocks when US shoppers are tightening their budgets and turning to discount retailers.

The gauge has also historically been a reliable signal for when the US economy is headed toward a recession and when the Fed is about to dial down interest rates to prop up growth.

The Walmart Recession Signal has spiked leading up to the last four recessions, and a spike has also preceded every Fed easing cycle since 1990, Paulsen said, citing his analysis of Walmart's relative performance and the Fed funds rate.

The Fed recently embarked on a fresh tightening cycle, lifting its target rate by 25 basis points in September. Central bankers have signaled they're looking to keep a lid on inflation, given the recent strength in the labor market and inflationary pressures stemming from higher oil prices.

While Walmart's stock has underperformed from May to August of this year, "signaling improved consumer health," that appears to have changed recently. Since August, Walmart has outpaced the S&P 500 Global Luxury Stock Price Index by around 21%, Paulsen estimated, suggesting consumers have changed their habits in recent months. Walmart shares are up 8% from their low in late August.

"The relative performance of Walmart's stock is telling a different story. One of renewed economic weakness in the coming months which could force policy officials to return to accommodative actions and once again begin cutting the Funds rate," Paulsen wrote in a Substack note on Monday.

"The WRS is but a single indicator and is not necessarily the definitive voice. Nonetheless, its historical ability to lead real GDP growth, the unemployment rate, and Federal Reserve actions has been instructive and probably should not be ignored," he added.

• My family made a few mistakes when we moved to the Netherlands from the US two years ago.
• We should've started learning Dutch much sooner and timed our currency exchanges more strategically.
• I wish I'd learned more about the Dutch healthcare system and tax advantages before we moved.

The day my son burst into tears at our kitchen table in Utrecht, I realized my meticulous spreadsheets and research hadn't prepared us for everything.

"Mom, I'm the only one who doesn't understand anything," he said, pushing away his untouched dinner. "Everyone else is so far ahead, and I can't follow anything."

That moment, hearing him talk about feeling behind in school, crystallized my first major mistake in our move from Atlanta to the Netherlands in May 2024.

Although our relocation has transformed our lives in incredible ways — offering everything from better healthcare to true work-life balance — there were several costly missteps I wish someone had warned me about.

For one, I hadn't anticipated how challenging it would be for my kids in the first six months as they adjusted to everything in their lives being new.

Here's what I learned the hard way, hoping to save other American families from the same expensive and stressful situations.

Assuming we didn't need to rush learning Dutch was a mistake

"Je spreekt Nederlands?" ("Do you speak Dutch?") became a daily reminder of my biggest oversight.

Yes, more than 90% of the Dutch people speak English, and that comforting statistic led me to postpone our family's learning Dutch. Big mistake.

Those casual chats at early honkbal (baseball) games or neighborhood parties just weren't the same when we couldn't properly participate in Dutch conversations.

My teenager also ended up spending extra months in taalschool (immersive language school), missing out on crucial social connections. Had we started learning before our move, he could've completed language school in one year instead of the extended period he needed.

Not fully understanding the Dutch healthcare system has also cost me

Back home in the US, I was used to navigating complex insurance systems and retroactive claims. The Dutch healthcare system operates under different rules, though, and my failure to understand them has unnecessarily cost us.

My American insurance mindset hit a wall when my son needed to have a cavity filled.

In the Netherlands, basic healthcare is universally accessible. I pay 156 euros a month for my policy, which includes my kids at no extra cost and a 385-euro yearly deductible.

However, you have to connect your child's BSN (Dutch Social Security number) to your insurance for them to be covered, which I didn't know I had to do at the time.

This meant I paid out of pocket for my son's procedure — I was not able to get reimbursed, even after calling my insurance company.

Ultimately, it's worth thoroughly researching how a country's insurance plans and healthcare coverages work before you move.

Early on, I also learned an expensive lesson about taxes and timing

In the Netherlands, the 30% ruling is a tax advantage that allows eligible highly skilled immigrants to receive up to 30% of their salary tax-free for up to five years.

The catch? You must apply within four months of starting work. Now picture my face when I realized I'd missed the deadline, thus leaving over 30,000 euros on the table.

Though I eventually secured this payment retroactively, those six months without the full benefits taught me an expensive lesson about Dutch bureaucracy and timing.

It took too long for me to ditch my American work mentality

While my Dutch neighbors enjoyed long family dinners and evening bike rides along the canals, I was still chained to my laptop at 10 p.m., taking calls with US colleagues.

My American work habits followed me across the Atlantic like an unwanted houseguest. The stress and burnout I'd hoped to escape caught up with me within months.

It took retiring from corporate America and starting my own business to finally embrace the Dutch approach to work-life balance — and my health has thanked me for it.

Not properly planning when to exchange currency got expensive, too

Watching the dollar-euro exchange rate swing from about 0.98 euros per dollar highs to 0.83 euros per dollar lows over the past two years taught me an expensive lesson about timing.

Each major transfer — housing deposits, US credit-card payments, moving expenses — became a gamble because I hadn't developed a proper currency strategy.

Instead of planning strategic exchanges when rates were favorable, I made last-minute transfers whenever bills came due, often at the worst possible rates and with hefty fees tacked on.

Our missteps have become valuable lessons, shaping our successful integration into Dutch life

Despite our early mistakes, the Netherlands has given us exactly what we hoped for: a better quality of life, true work-life balance, and a fresh perspective on what's possible for an American family abroad.

Now, two years later, my sons can easily switch between Dutch and English, and those tearful kitchen moments are just memories that remind us how far we've come.

Moving abroad is complex, but having the right guidance can help you avoid these common pitfalls and create a smoother transition for your family.

So, if you're considering a move to the Netherlands, learn from my mistakes.

Start preparing early (especially with language learning), understand the tax benefits available to you, research the healthcare system thoroughly, be ready to adapt your work mindset, and plan your currency exchanges strategically.

Your future self — and your bank account — will thank you.

This story was originally published on February 5, 2026, and most recently updated on October 12, 2026.

• Alexandr Wang says Zuckerberg sends really long WhatsApp replies and sends them really fast.
• Zuckerberg's rigorous time management allows him to balance work and family, Wang said.
• Wang says Meta’s CEO "ruthlessly" prioritizes his time.

Alexandr Wang says he used to wonder how Mark Zuckerberg had time to write him such long WhatsApp messages.

Before Wang joined Meta to help lead its AI agent efforts, the Scale AI founder would occasionally ask Zuckerberg for advice. The replies, Wang said in an interview with David Senra on Sunday, were unexpectedly detailed.

"I would ask him a question on WhatsApp, and then he would write these really long responses," Wang said. "I was really confused. I was like, 'How does he have time to write these really long responses?'"

Wang, the public face of Meta's AI agent Muse, said he later came to a simple conclusion: Zuckerberg is unusually fast — and rigorous — at writing.

"He'll write a very rigorous, long response very quickly," Wang said. "It's a very impressive skill of his."

The anecdote offers a small window into how Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, manages his time and makes decisions as he tries to remake the company around artificial intelligence.

Wang said Zuckerberg's packed schedule requires "ruthlessly" prioritizing his time: "The only way he's able to do that and be a good dad and be a good partner and all this other stuff is to just, like, ruthlessly prioritize."

Wang said that an introduction to Zuckerberg around 2021 or 2022 took roughly a year to lead to a first meeting. At the time, the two spoke only about once every six months, he said.

But Zuckerberg’s involvement increased as Meta confronted shortcomings in its Llama 4 AI model and the growing stakes of the race against rivals such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Wang said Zuckerberg called him to ask what Meta should do next and how it should think about its AI strategy.

Their conversations quickly expanded beyond advice. Within five or six weeks of Zuckerberg’s initial outreach, Meta announced a deal to take a 49% stake in Scale AI, while Wang and several colleagues moved to Meta.

Wang has since become a key figure in Meta’s attempt to rebuild its AI organization around a smaller, flatter group of top researchers.

He said Zuckerberg’s willingness to seek feedback from prominent entrepreneurs is a notable trait in a leader who has run Meta for more than two decades.

• My husband and I loved living in Munich, though his parents were in Australia and mine in Alaska.
• As our parents got older, we wanted visiting them to be easier, but neither of us wanted to go home.
• We settled on Vancouver, which offers decent flight options to where our parents reside.

Alaska is a bucket-list travel destination for many. For me, it's the place I call home, but I found myself itching to leave as an adult.

After years of traveling, I felt like I was changing, while my hometown stayed frozen in time. I was ready for a permanent adventure abroad, and so I set my sights on moving to Europe.

Then one fateful evening, while climbing the corporate ladder to finance my European dream, I met a traveling Australian who shared a similar vision of life abroad — it felt like kismet. Through distance, we stayed connected, fantasizing about a move.

One day, I finally took the leap, packed my life into a few suitcases, and moved halfway across the world to Munich, taking the chance on an exciting new relationship and life in Germany.

The first few months were tough. Our days were full of navigating visas, cultural differences, bureaucracy, language learning, and apartment hunting — but the challenges delivered big rewards.

Over six transformative years, Munich became our home. We built lifelong friendships and discovered a healthy work-life balance. Our relationship became rock-solid, and we flew to Las Vegas to get married. Not long after, we were granted permanent residency.

People asked us why we chose to move to Germany. Our answer felt easy: Europe was a dream, but logistically, it was a sort of middle ground between the United States and Australia, a place where we both had to start over on equal footing.

I often joked that I was a German at heart, and living in Munich felt like a homecoming in many ways, so I never saw myself leaving after working so hard to get here.

It was the perfect halfway point — until it wasn't.

While looking for a compromise, we set our sights on Vancouver

The COVID-19 pandemic brought our lives and global travel to a screeching halt. Seemingly overnight, our idyllic place between Sydney and Eagle River felt impossibly far away.

With our parents in a high-risk group, I had anxiety every time my phone rang, wondering if it would be the kind of news that would call me home. But in Munich, where traveling to Anchorage would take me about a day, I might not be able to get home in time.

Living half a world away from our aging parents went from being an exciting life adventure to a stressful and agonizing distance.

That was when we started having the conversation about moving home. It was hard to walk away from everything we built in Germany, but in our heart of hearts, we knew it was time to be closer to our loved ones.

But where is home when you're a multinational couple? How could we choose between his parents in Sydney and my parents in Alaska?

To make matters more complicated, neither of us was ready to return to our home countries. We started exploring a compromise that might allow us to support both families.

I have dual Canadian citizenship through my dad, and Vancouver, Canada, shot to the top of our shortlist because of its frequent flights year-round to Sydney and seasonal direct flights to Anchorage. (Offseason, I could fly home via Seattle with a quick stopover.)

Once the world reopened, we began the big international move process all over again, navigating visas, friendships, pet relocation, and apartment hunting.

It didn't take long for our move to pay off

The moment I landed in Vancouver, my heart ached for life in Munich. I wasn't sure I could adjust to both the culture shock of living in Canada and the reverse culture shock of being back in North America.

Our decision paid off almost immediately, and any fears I had over making the right choice disappeared. Shortly after moving, my dad had a sudden cardiac arrest while playing ice hockey.

Within hours, I was on a direct three-hour flight home and by his side in the hospital, able to support him and my mom during his long recovery.

Similarly, my partner has made relatively quick-turnaround trips to Sydney, like when he went home to help his dad through a double knee-replacement surgery.

His options now include daily direct flights that take about 15 hours — a significant reduction from the previous 22-plus-hour indirect options from Munich.

As time goes on and our parents continue to age, being as close as we can to our families has been a true privilege and blessing. We went from seeing our families once every few years to several times a year.

Six years away in Munich, both my partner and I realized how much time we lost with our parents; the years of aging suddenly seemed to hit all at once.

Apart from being there for the lows, I get to be there for the highs, too. I've been around for more birthdays, more celebrations, and more stories parents can pass on face-to-face

Making memories with our parents while we still have them is more important than living out our dream in Germany. Over time, I have found immense happiness in Canada, where, surrounded by mountains and ocean, I get the raw, rugged nature I miss so much about Alaska, the freedom to work for myself, and the benefits of living in such a multicultural city with my partner.

We certainly plan to stay a while.

• Tricia Wallwork is the CEO of Milo's Tea, founded by her grandfather in 1946.
• She's grown the brand exponentially, and recently surpassed $1 billion in retail sales.
• She's learned about family governance from other family-owned companies, she says.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tricia Wallwork, CEO and Chair of the Board at Milo's Tea. It has been edited for length and clarity.

When my grandad Milo returned from World War II, he married my grandma, Bea, the very next week. He likes to say he only had $20 and a footlocker, but he also had a vision: for a hamburger stand serving burgers, fries, pies, and sweet tea to Birmingham's steelworkers.

That was the beginning of Milo's Tea. Since then, the business has had three distinct iterations: the initial burger stand, franchise restaurants that my dad and stepmother ran, and now the tea company that I operate.

Through them all, we've been guided by my grandparents' founding values: listening to customers, using real ingredients, and treating people well.

I became a lawyer, then joined the family business

I never wanted to work at the family business, so I became a lawyer. I thought I would save the world, but really, I was just writing letters and representing companies. It wasn't what I had envisioned, so I traded my high heels for steel-toed boots and started working at Milo's.

My dad and stepmom had noticed a trend: people would drive through their restaurants just to order sweet tea. Running a hamburger joint is difficult, so they decided to sell the franchise company and use the proceeds to start the first version of our tea plant.

I saw them constantly figuring things out on the fly — like using pantyhose to filter tea. Things are much more sophisticated today, but I still have that entrepreneurial spirit.

I've grown the company drastically over 14 years

I became CEO of Milo's Tea in 2012, and since then, our growth has been like a hockey stick. In 2012, we did about $30 million in retail sales. In September, we surpassed $1 billion in retail sales, ahead of our projections.

It's a very unusual situation to be in as a third-generation business owner. I've tried to find mentors to help me get ahead of things and manage this rocket ship.

I've surrounded myself with great advisors, who have helped me and the rest of the board (including my dad, stepmother, and stepsister) be very intentional about family governance. We've created a family mission statement and set a goal of remaining 100% family-owned. That allows us to take a long-term view of how we invest in the company.

We have protocols for the next generation

While I hope my children want to be involved with Milo's one day, I don't pressure them to work here. I don't want them to feel a duty to work at Milo's Tea, because that becomes a burden. I would rather them see it as an opportunity to do something remarkable.

We have regular family meetings for the next generation to learn about Milo's and a framework for getting involved. After they've attended college, they can attend shareholder meetings. After two shareholder meetings, they can attend a board meeting. There's no pressure to engage, just opportunity. So far, both my kids have taken advantage.

We've also created an internship program, where our kids can learn about Milo's by working an hourly job. If they want to get hired here, they need to work somewhere else for at least three years and get promoted before they can apply. I like to say merit, not inheritance.

Sometimes, in family business, you see the older generation hanging on until the end. My parents and grandparents weren't like that. They've done a good job of supporting the next generation while also getting out of the way so management and the board can really drive growth. That combination of honoring legacy while driving forward has made Milo's what it is today.

• Some AI researchers are picking up cigarettes, Palantir's CTO said.
• Why? They think AI is going to cure cancer anyway, Shyam Sankar said.
• Lighting up is their way of showing others that their AI "chips are all in," he said.

Forget sleepmaxxing and cold plunging: smoking is the new lifestyle flex among AI researchers.

At least, that's according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who said some AI researchers are taking up smoking to signal their belief that AI will eventually cure cancer.

"So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI," Sankar said in an interview on CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

The logic, he said, is: "I believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer. So I'm showing you my chips are all in."

Sankar did not name any researchers or provide evidence for the claim. Smoking remains a major cause of preventable illness and death, and no AI breakthrough has eliminated the health risks associated with cigarettes.

But the Palantir executive's remarks echo a countercurrent already visible in parts of the tech industry.

As Business Insider's Henry Chandonnet reported last month, a small group of founders, engineers, and investors has embraced cigarettes in a sector otherwise known for optimizing their health with cold plunges, sleep tracking, and peptide treatments.

For some of them, a cigarette break is an opportunity to meet people and network. For others, it's a way to come across as more relaxed and less polished than the typical startup founder.

And some AI believers expect the technology to make smoking-related health risks a thing of the past.

"By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that," Avi Schiffmann, the founder of AI wearable startup Friend, previously told Business Insider.

'The machine god of AGI'

In the CBS News interview, Sankar raised the smoking anecdote while criticizing what he called Silicon Valley's "mass psychosis" and "social delusion" around AI.

He has been outspoken in his criticism of AI safety advocates, whom he accused in the interview of treating artificial general intelligence as a "machine god."

Invoking philosopher Blaise Pascal's idea that humans have a "God-shaped hole" in their hearts, Sankar said that some people in Silicon Valley have placed quasi-religious faith in AGI.

"I think it's important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine god of AGI," Sankar said.

• When I was younger, I viewed success through the lens of typical milestones.
• I pictured a career as a lawyer, a family, and kids who would go on to their own thriving careers.
• When my daughter was born with complex medical needs and disabilities, my perspective changed.

When I was younger, I pictured a career as an attorney and a family with high-achieving children who would one day build successful careers of their own. I built my life around these goals. I went to law school, got married, and let my job dictate when I started a family.

For a while, everything seemed to be going according to plan. I had a thriving career as a civil rights lawyer that I loved, and I got pregnant right on schedule. Almost as soon as I saw two pink lines, I dove headlong into planning my child's future. I made a mental list of the activities she would need to be well-rounded and, laughably, even considered how the right preschool could eventually propel her into one of the country's best colleges. I planned to return to my full-time job a few months after giving birth and assumed that would go according to plan, too.

However, my priorities shifted abruptly when my daughter was unexpectedly born with complex medical needs and disabilities.

My daughter's disabilities forced me to reconsider how I approached life

I thought my first days as a new mother would be spent blissfully tracking feedings, tracking milestones, and joyfully putting my plans for my little family's future into place. However, instead of worrying about when my daughter would crawl, walk, and talk, I wondered whether she would live or die. That put her life, and mine, sharply into focus.

At first, I still hoped our plans were only briefly derailed and that the vision I had for my family's future could still come to fruition. But when my daughter eventually came home from the neonatal intensive care unit, tethered to oxygen and monitors that beeped constantly, I realized that I needed to let go of the pressure and expectation that a successful life meant wealth, a professional career, and good schools.

Leaning out was a necessity

Changing my approach to life wasn't a choice at first. With a significantly disabled child who needed round-the-clock nursing-level care, working outside the home was impossible. I mourned the life I had lost: a job I loved that allowed me to help people, an active social life with friends I held dear, and frequent travel.

As time passed, the extent of her disabilities and medical needs revealed themselves as even more severe than I had first realized. It became clear that she would never speak or perform basic tasks, such as feeding herself. She needed a wheelchair to get around and constant doctor's appointments and therapies to stay healthy. I mourned the life I had imagined for my daughter, too, one that involved playgrounds, dance classes, and eventually living independently.

However, I slowly started focusing more on happiness and living in the present rather than keeping up with my law school classmates and their typically developing kids. My definition of success shifted from a big house and nice car to truly enjoying myself and living to the fullest each day. I changed what success meant for my kids, too. Instead of worrying about whether my kids would get into Harvard, I celebrated my daughter taking her first steps at age seven and learning to use an assistive communication device to make basic requests like asking for a cup of water.

I now have three other kids who are typically developing. While I could easily have slid back into my original parenting mindset of pressuring them to have high-paying careers, I now emphasize the importance of happiness and making time for people and activities that bring them joy every day.

I now know, starkly, that life can change in an instant and tomorrow isn't promised to anyone.

Now I focus on thriving rather than surviving

I realized that before my daughter was born, many days were about survival. I was focused on achieving the next goal, the next milestone. While planning for a better future, I had practically forgotten how to focus on the here and now. My daughter showed me how necessary and important it is to find happiness each day.

Although I left my full-time job out of necessity, it was the right call for several reasons. I now have flexible jobs as an adjunct professor and a freelance writer. While I don't have the prestige and paycheck that I once did, I have more flexibility to spend time with my daughter and her three younger siblings. I can fit in walks with friends while the kids are at school and find time to decompress with a book and a cup of hot tea when I need to.

It's not the type of life I imagined, but I am grateful every day that my daughter taught me why it's so important to just survive, but thrive.

• Billionaire Ray Dalio says a balance of high standards and genuine care is a recipe for happy staff.
• Meaningful work and relationships create stronger teams, Dalio said at a conference in Singapore.
• Dalio's comments were echoed by fellow panelist Toto Wolff, the boss of the Mercedes F1 team.

Investing and F1 may not share obvious similarities at first glance, but when it comes to managing people, some lessons cross disciplines.

During a recent conference appearance, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio and Toto Wolff, the billionaire CEO of Mercedes F1, agreed that demanding leaders need to pair high standards with genuine care for their teams.

As Dalio put it, management needs to implement "tough love."

"My mantra is meaningful work and meaningful relationships," Dalio said on a panel at the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore last week.

"When I say tough love, there’s the tough, but there’s also that element of love, that element of mutual caring."

Dalio, who built Bridgewater into the world’s largest hedge fund, said leaders need a clear mission and have to hold people accountable for delivering on it. But he argued that pressure without a sense of shared purpose can undermine a team.

"You want tough love with your kids; you want tough love with everything because tough makes you stronger," he said. "And then also when you have a team, you have to make that team successful."

Wolff offered a case study in how that balance can be difficult to get right. He recalled putting "pressure and pressure" on a senior Mercedes technical leader during a disappointing season, after the team’s run of eight straight constructors’ championships ended.

After Wolff publicly said Mercedes’ car did not deserve to win a race, the executive told him he was considering leaving because he could no longer handle the pressure.

Wolff said he ultimately changed course. At a dinner intended to resolve the dispute, he offered the executive a contract allowing him to leave on one month’s notice, far shorter than the usual notice period for senior technical staff, and told him to set his own salary and bonus.

"Fundamentally, I had to change," Wolff said. "I couldn’t continue what I thought was my modus operandi over 30 years."

Dalio said that kind of mutual care matters beyond compensation. While money is important, he said, employees and leaders alike are motivated by connection, purpose, and a sense of belonging to a community.

Dalio’s comments echoed an earlier point Wolff made: that workers are not motivated by pay alone. The Mercedes boss said leaders who understand employees' personal priorities, whether that is recognition, time with family, or room for a hobby, are better placed to keep them.

Dalio took that idea further, arguing that once people have enough money to meet their needs, happiness is no longer closely tied to wealth.

"The greatest determinant of happiness is a sense of community," he said.

• More North Americans are flocking to Europe for summer vacation.
• Business Insider analyzed flight data to identify the trendiest, most popular destinations.
• Over 1.5 million seats were added on flights to Italy, while capacity doubled for Czechia and Croatia.

Whether it's eating gelato under the Mediterranean sun or exploring a medieval city, North Americans can't get enough of summer trips to Europe.

Business Insider analyzed data from Cirium, an aviation analytics firm, to create four charts that show how Eurosummer is on the rise — and which destinations are the trendiest.

We looked at the number of seats on flights from North America to Europe. Unlike just measuring the number of flights, this also accounts for the airplanes' capacity.

Airlines scheduled 69% more seats in July 2026 than in July 2010. Meanwhile, the number of flights went up 59%, from roughly 15,700 to 24,900.

As the data is based on flight schedules rather than border crossings, it does not necessarily reflect tourists' final destinations. Even so, passenger demand still informs where airlines send their fleets and launch new routes.

Cirium's data also show that airlines are adding more seats in summer than in winter. In 2026, there were 77% more seats from North America to Europe in July than in January. In 2010, there was a 50% gap between those months.

However, there is also some country-level data showing that the summer travel season is getting longer, as more people choose to fly later in the year.

Spanish government statistics show that 57% more Americans arrived in the country in October 2025 than in October 2019. Overall arrivals during the summer months of 2019 and 2025 increased by a quarter.

Which countries are becoming more popular?

The UK has long been the most popular transatlantic market — its 15 million annual seats are nearly double those of France and Germany — due to strong business links and airline partnerships that make it a useful hub connecting to destinations elsewhere in Europe.

To find where more North Americans are flocking, we focused on changes in flight capacity between the years ending in July 2023 and July 2026. This also helps minimize the fluctuation in recovery times from the pandemic.

That expansion has not been spread evenly across Europe.

Only four countries saw fewer seats across the period. There are no longer any flights to Ukraine due to the war. Norway and Sweden both saw their seats drop by more than half, and Belgium dipped by 3%.

Three countries saw over 1 million seats added in that time. Unsurprisingly, they are already Europe's most popular for tourists: Italy, Spain, and France.

However, percentage growth shows that the fastest-growing markets are not all traditional hot spots.

We excluded destinations with fewer than 10,000 scheduled seats in the year ending July 2023, so that small base numbers wouldn't skew the results relative to busier destinations.

It is clear that tourists are besotted with Italy. Airlines added more seats there than to any other European country, and it ranked fourth for proportional increase — up 52%.

Czechia and Croatia stand out as the only two countries where airlines are sending at least double the capacity they had in the year ending July 2023. Over the past year, airlines have relaunched routes to Prague, known for its striking medieval Gothic architecture. Croatia also offers a dose of historic attractions plus a host of beaches on the Adriatic Sea.

While the UK as a whole saw only a 4% increase in the number of seats, capacity on flights to Scotland increased by 70%. As well as the Highlands' mountainous vistas, Edinburgh attracts visitors from across the world for its performing-arts festival in August.

Ireland also continues to rise in popularity. Dublin and Shannon are the only European airports where you can cross the American border before taking off for the US.

Denmark is propping up travel to Scandinavia, thanks to fashionable Copenhagen and new flights to Billund, home of Lego.

Which European cities are the trendiest?

The picture gets more specific when you zoom into the airport level. We excluded airports that weren't served pre-pandemic or had fewer than 10,000 seats in the year ending July 2023.

Flights to Naples, Italy, now have room for more than five times as many passengers as in the year ending July 2023. In the past few years, United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Air Canada have all launched new routes to the home of pizza and the gateway to the picturesque Amalfi Coast.

Dubrovnik, a coastal Croatian city known for its medieval walls, found fame in the 2010s as a filming location for "Game of Thrones," but it has continued to soar in popularity.

While flights to France as a whole saw only a 16% increase in capacity, three French airports made the top 10.

Portugal is also proving popular, with two cities on the list. Last summer, United launched flights from Newark to Faro, the capital of Portugal's seaside Algarve region. And in August, American Airlines said it will start flying to Porto for the first time ever, starting March 2027.

• Honda revived the Prelude as a roughly $44,000 hybrid coupe after 25 years.
• I drove the car for a week. It's fun and spunky — but who is going to buy this?
• Limited supply suggests Honda may see it more as a halo car than a volume seller.

It's been a quarter century since Honda had a new Prelude arriving at dealerships.

The coupe — which was popular in the 1990s with enthusiasts who liked to tinker with tuner cars — was discontinued in 2001.

So, I wouldn't blame you if you don't recognize the nameplate. I also wouldn't blame you if you do remember it and find Honda's new approach to the beloved car a little surprising.

Unlike the Prelude of yesteryear, the new one is certainly not cheap. My Boost Blue tester has a sticker price of $43,650, including destination. Optional summer tires pushed the suggested price to $44,850.

On paper, this car makes almost no sense. Who exactly is the buyer? Prelude purists may bristle at the hybrid powertrain and price. Young shoppers looking for an affordable coupe have cheaper options. Drivers chasing outright performance can get substantially more power elsewhere.

After 400 miles, I started to think the Prelude makes more sense for Honda than it does for any one obvious customer.

The Prelude is fun — just not in the obvious way

Honda calls the new version a sporty grand tourer.

It's aiming for a niche part of the US market: It's comfortable and efficient enough for long drives, while maintaining a visual appeal that's very different from the vehicular blobs filling today's grocery store parking lot.

I say it nails the aesthetics. My Boost Blue tester was almost aggressively photogenic, with bulging wheel arches and a sloping roofline that gave it a poor man's Porsche vibe. As I drove slowly past a construction site in Brooklyn, a worker asked me to lower my window.

"Sweet car!" he said.

As I drove away, I heard him yell to a coworker: "Damn, that's a Honda?"

Underneath its curvy coupe body sits Honda's deeply engineered two-motor hybrid system, good for 200 horsepower and an EPA-estimated 44 mpg combined. It also borrows suspension, steering, and Brembo brake hardware from the Civic Type R and luxury interior elements from its high-end luxury brand, Acura.

It's not particularly fast. That trade-off became obvious pretty quickly.

The Prelude's getup is plenty for merging onto the highway, and it actually felt sprightlier once moving at speed. But its immediate shove is nowhere near what I've felt in similarly priced performance cars — or some EVs, like the Tesla Model 3.

What it lacks in outright speed, though, it makes up for elsewhere.

The car stays impressively flat through bends, the steering feels direct, and the Brembos are grabby enough to remind you that Honda raided the fun-loving Type R's parts bin.

Good news, too, for drivers mourning the death of manuals: Honda's new S+ Shift system does a surprisingly convincing impersonation of a traditional transmission. There aren't actually eight gears, but steering-wheel-mounted paddle shifters, simulated rev-matched downshifts, and surprisingly natural engine sounds add some fun driving nostalgia theater.

More useful was the fuel economy. I averaged 43.5 mpg on my mostly highway drive, almost exactly matching Honda's 44-mpg combined estimate.

Its backseat, however, is nearly useless.

The second row is difficult to get into because of the sloping roofline, has virtually no headroom, and will only fit riders with calves as thick as a sheet of paper.

Honda may not need many people to buy one

Is this car a fit for most American buyers? Not really.

It's effectively an expensive two-seater with a Honda badge and a luxury interior. On paper, it doesn't really stack up against its competition: the Ford Mustang is more powerful, the Mazda MX-5 Miata is sportier, and the Toyota GR-86 is nearly $10,000 cheaper.

That's a particularly small cubbyhole of a market for the Prelude.

Honda may not need the Prelude to become a volume seller. Dealers I've spoken with said supply is limited, and one told me there's already a waitlist to get one onto the lot. Another dealer said the Prelude could draw curious shoppers into the showroom — even if many ultimately leave in something like the ever-popular CR-V.

So maybe there's a better question surrounding this car: Is the Honda Prelude attention-grabbing?

The construction worker clearly thought so.

• There's a fresh batch of EVs heading to the US. They're getting 400 miles of range.
• That type of range in the US has been reserved for shoppers splashing out on six-figure vehicles.
• The new batch still has luxury prices — but could quickly filter into mass-market vehicles.

Range anxiety? That's so 2026.

The auto industry is slowly flipping its calendars into the 2027 model year, and the transition is bringing a new crop of EVs with 400-plus miles of range. That was once a rare bragging point reserved for ultra-luxury sedans and gargantuan electric trucks.

It's an important development, especially for the US market. While the rest of the world has started to embrace fully electric driving amid sky-high fuel costs, American drivers have lagged China and Europe in adopting EVs, held back by range anxiety, high vehicle prices, and limited public charging access.

Automakers' response: Make EVs go farther in the US market. European manufacturers are leading that charge.

BMW's next-generation EVs, called Neue Klasse, are the clearest example. The coming i3 sedan is expected to travel up to 468 miles on a charge, while BMW says its new iX4 SUV coupe can go as far as 428 miles. Those are preliminary estimates based on EPA testing procedures. Its iX3 crossover SUV, meanwhile, has an official EPA rating of up to 434 miles.

Fellow German luxury automaker Mercedes-Benz is also joining the race. The coming electric C-Class has a range of up to 474 miles, under Europe's more generous range testing system. Swedish automaker Volvo is also releasing the EX60 next year, including a trim with 400 miles of range.

The cars are largely priced in the mid-$60,000 range.

America has seen some 400-mile electric vehicles before, but so far, they've remained in a small corner of the consumer market. The Lucid Air, priced between $70,000 and $250,500, boasts a 400-plus-mile range for consumers willing to make mortgage-like payments on a vehicle. GM's electric trucks and Cadillac Escalade IQ can also clear 400 miles, but their longest-range versions rely on enormous 205-kilowatt-hour battery packs.

The fresh EVs coming from luxury European carmakers feature smaller, more energy-dense battery cells that use their power more efficiently. The iX3, for example, has a 109-kWh battery, almost half the size of GM's highest-range EVs.

That won't entirely solve America's EV woes. A $60,000 car is still out of reach for many buyers, and public charging can be scarce or unreliable, particularly in rural areas.

Still, luxury automakers often preview where the rest of the industry is going. If this new generation of battery technology filters downmarket, 400 miles of range could eventually become less of a luxury flex — and more of a baseline.

• Chipotle has struggled without Brian Niccol. Now Starbucks may bring him back to fix it.
• Real-estate overlap gives the deal some sauce, but Wall Street sees plenty of risk.
• Sign up for First Trade, Business Insider's daily markets newsletter.

Corporate America loves a boomerang CEO. Think Bob Iger's return to Disney, or Elliott Hill coming out of retirement for Nike.

But what Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol is apparently considering is in a category of its own.

The FT reported last week that Starbucks has explored acquiring Chipotle in what would be the restaurant industry's biggest deal ever. Here's the twist: Niccol was CEO of Chipotle before jumping to Starbucks. He could now end up buying his old company.

On Monday, Starbucks denied the reports.

"We are not buying Chipotle," a Starbucks spokesperson told Business Insider. "Our team is laser focused on executing our Back to Starbucks strategy. We have strong momentum and confidence in our long-term growth potential."

Still, the idea of a Starbucks/Chipotle combo is a good excuse to look at how far both companies' stock prices have diverged since Niccol's move to Starbucks was announced in August 2024. Starbucks became a turnaround story, while Chipotle struggled to replace the man who helped make it one.

The chart below shows the dynamic in action: Chipotle has fallen an eye-watering 43% over the period, while Starbucks is up roughly 18% — though it has still lagged the S&P 500's 46% gain.

Chipotle's slump reflects more than Niccol's departure, of course. The chain has also faced softer sales, higher costs, and food-safety headaches. But the gap makes it look like a tempting turnaround target — especially to the exec who helped build it and knows it better than almost anyone.

The CEO premium comes full circle

On the surface, the combo of Starbucks and Chipotle sounds like some sort of cursed menu experiment. Pumpkin-spice burrito, anyone? But this is less a coffee-and-burrito synergy story than a CEO-conviction trade.

That makes the strongest rationale for the deal not any sort of ill-fated food concoction, but Niccol himself. He's already proven he can improve restaurant operations, refresh a brand, and drive investor excitement.

His "Back to Starbucks" effort has begun to win over the market, and buying Chipotle would allow him to apply a version of that same playbook to the company he once ran.

There's also significant overlap between the chains' real-estate footprints. About 90% of US Chipotle locations are within one mile of a Starbucks, according to research from Stephens analyst Jim Salera. That could create opportunities for shared real-estate development, better site selection, and a more powerful combined loyalty program, he added.

The deal math still looks messy

Even with those elements in mind, a possible Starbucks-Chipotle deal is still a long way from making financial sense.

The two companies have very different supply chains, customer needs, and operating models. Analysts are questioning whether what they see as modest cost savings can justify such a large price tag, especially with Starbucks in the middle of its own turnaround.

The initial reaction captured that tension. Chipotle jumped 6% Thursday on the takeover speculation, but gave back 3% Friday. Starbucks, meanwhile, fell 3% over the two days. That's not a ringing endorsement of a burrito-coffee conglomerate. It's just an intriguing possibility that investors aren't yet sold on.

Still, the rumor has already revived an intriguing market question: Is Brian Niccol's real asset Starbucks, or is it the ability to make any restaurant chain feel like a comeback story?

• Skytrax's World Airline Awards introduced a new award in 2026: World's Best Onboard WiFi.
• Qatar Airways won first place, followed by Delta Air Lines and United Airlines.
• Seven out of the top 10 airlines are partnered with Elon Musk's Starlink.

Move aside priority boarding and extra legroom — airlines are investing in high-speed in-flight WiFi as a key amenity to attract customers.

This year, Skytrax's World Airline Awards added a World's Best Onboard WiFi category "to reflect the importance to today's customer experience of fast and free onboard connectivity," Skytrax wrote in a press release.

The ranking was determined by surveying passengers from over 100 nationalities between September 2025 and August 2026 in the world's largest airline passenger satisfaction survey.

One WiFi provider popped up again and again in Skytrax's ranking of winning airlines: Starlink.

Of the top 10 airlines recognized for having the best in-flight WiFi offerings, seven have partnerships with Elon Musk's high-speed internet company — an indication of how Starlink is cornering the market.

Over 40 carriers worldwide have partnered with Starlink, which provides streaming-quality WiFi on flights via its network of over 11,000 satellites.

Here are the top 10 airlines with the best onboard WiFi, ranked by passengers.

10. Emirates

Emirates was one of the first airlines to offer Starlink WiFi on its A380 aircraft, and plans to add Starlink to its fleet by mid-2027.

9. EVA Air

EVA Air's onboard WiFi service is provided by Panasonic Avionics Corporation.

8. Virgin Atlantic

As the first UK airline to partner with Starlink, Virgin Atlantic began offering flights equipped with streaming-quality WiFi in May.

7. Singapore Airlines

Singapore Airlines will begin rolling out Starlink WiFi on its Airbus A350 and Airbus A380 planes in 2027.

6. Hawaiian Airlines

Hawaiian Airlines became the first major US carrier to offer Starlink in February 2024 before merging with Alaska Airlines that September.

5. JetBlue Airways

Amazon Leo, which operates around 400 low-orbit satellites, will be available on JetBlue flights starting in 2027.

4. Alaska Airlines

Alaska Airlines announced its deal with Starlink in August 2025 after merging with Hawaiian Airlines, and is rolling out Starlink WiFi across its fleet.

3. United Airlines

As of September, United offers Starlink on 560 aircraft, and plans to add it to its entire fleet.

United has made efforts to lure Delta customers by touting its Starlink WiFi.

2. Delta Air Lines

Amazon Leo will be available on Delta Air Lines flights starting in 2028.

Delta and Musk have been at odds over Delta's decision not to choose Starlink, with Musk criticizing the airline and its CEO, Ed Bastian, in posts on X. Bastian told CNBC on Friday that he pays little heed to the feud.

"I'm a big fan of Starlink," Bastian said. "I'm a fan of what Elon does. I drive a Tesla. OK? So there's nothing. All this nonsense about being personal is not true at all."

1. Qatar Airways

Qatar Airways won Skytrax's inaugural World's Best Onboard WiFi award.

All of Qatar Airways' Boeing 777s and Airbus A350s feature Starlink. The airline is now expanding the service to its Boeing 787 fleet.

• The only thing worse than a meeting that should've been an email? A meeting that's a scam.
• Calendar phishing is on the rise. Here's why your work schedule is a target.
• One victim learned she'd been hacked when her contacts received a bogus calendar invite from her.

When Pete Thomas spots a meeting on his calendar that he doesn't remember scheduling, the startup executive launches a mini investigation.

He searches his inbox for the sender's name, and if that fails, he tries LinkedIn. If Thomas still comes up empty or senses tomfoolery, he'll scan the invitation's contents for odd URLs or other red flags before hitting delete. He's received several in recent months that failed those checks.

"It's a distraction," said Thomas, CTO of Kapwork, a fintech firm in Los Angeles. "You always have to look for context."

As if email and text message scams weren't enough, workers are contending with a growing wave of phishing attempts arriving through their calendars.

In August, calendar-led attacks surged more than tenfold from July, according to a recent study from email security firm Sublime, while a midyear report from Microsoft found that such attacks nearly quadrupled in June from May.

Cybersecurity pros say calendars offer attackers advantages over more traditional avenues, and that AI is helping to make the schemes more convincing. They also warn that AI agents could give attackers a leg up by accepting fraudulent invitations on workers' behalf.

"You suddenly have new and interesting opportunities because of these personal agents," said Hugh Thompson, program chair of RSAC, an annual cybersecurity conference, and former chief technology officer of software firm Symantec.

Risky business

The goal of most calendar scammers, digital safety experts say, is to lure victims to phishing sites or deploy social engineering attacks that trick people into revealing sensitive information. The tactic is especially problematic for workers in jobs that rely on regularly meeting with strangers online, such as sales, recruiting, consulting, and other client-facing roles.

Aman Gairola, cofounder of Indian design agency Say Design, thought he'd landed a potential client in June when someone booked a meeting on his calendar through his company's website. The invitation included a link to what appeared to be a Google Drive folder containing a project brief.

Gairola said he clicked the link and landed on a page that looked like Google Drive, but something felt off. He checked the URL, saw the site was fake, and stopped short of opening any files.

"If I have to rate this, how convincing it is, I would rate it a 9.5 out of 10," said Gairola, adding that Say Design is considering removing the option to book intro calls directly through its website and switching to a form-based approach. "It has definitely added a layer of scrutiny to the invites that we get."

Attractive vehicles

Calendar invitations are attractive vehicles for scammers in part because they create a sense of urgency, said Mark Beare, an executive at cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes. Workers are common targets since many are used to receiving meeting invitations from colleagues, clients, and partners, he added.

Another allure is that calendar invites are processed differently from standard email attachments, according to the Microsoft report. Malicious links can land on users' calendars without requiring them to explicitly open an attachment, the software giant said.

Calendar invitation scams often take one of two forms. In one, an invitation includes a compromised meeting link, or a form designed to collect credentials or prompt someone to download malware, said Ron Kerbs, CEO of Kidas, which develops tools to detect scams and deepfakes in voice calls.

In the other, he said, a victim joins what appears to be a legit video call, only to encounter a scammer posing as someone they have reason to trust, such as an employee at a real company. The impersonator might use the name of an actual staffer, but a fake email address, as well as AI-generated audio or video to make the ruse more convincing, he said.

"They're using deepfake technology to look the same as the guy from IT," Kerbs said.

Double whammy

Sometimes, the sender really is someone you know.

Scores of Jenn Drummond's contacts recently received an unexpected calendar invitation from her email address, warning that they had been served with a court summons.

The invitation, which was sent after Drummond's email account was hacked while she was boarding a flight, linked to a fake legal notice requesting their financial information.

Drummond, a world-record-setting mountaineer and keynote speaker, said that even if the majority of recipients knew it was a scam, she still feels embarrassed that some people might think she's suing them or that she was hacked in the first place.

"What are people going to think? I'm not trustworthy — and your brand is what you build trust on," Drummond said. "I was sick to my stomach."

Protecting yourself

Cybersecurity veterans say there are limits to what people can reasonably expect to catch. Mathew Woodyard, director of threat intelligence at identity and access management company Okta, said that the burden of securing users mostly falls on the businesses that operate the services.

"The strongest mitigation isn't user education about 'spotting a fake invite,' since the invites increasingly look identical to legitimate ones," he said. "It's giving users something that can't be phished in the first place."

Woodyard said that passkeys can help solve the problem. Because they're created for a specific page, they only work on the authentic website, rather than a mock-up. That removes the need for people to make a judgment call when logging in, Woodyard said.

"Until phishing-resistant factors like passkeys become the default rather than an opt-in afterthought, phishing attacks will keep working," Woodyard said.

Correction: October 12, 2026 — An earlier version of this story misspelled Mathew Woodyard's first name.

• Bird CEO Robert Vis said AI gives an edge to 'high agency' generalists who can work across roles.
• Bird's head count has dropped from more than 1,000 to 120 as AI automates more tasks.
• "If you had very high performance but you were not multidisciplinary, you would not stay," he said.

Being a specialist may be getting harder at some AI-powered companies.

"The profile that we were very focused on was people with high agency," Robert Vis, the CEO of communications infrastructure company Bird, told Business Insider. "If you're high agency and you're full stack, then AI leverages you to basically be your best self."

Vis made the comments in late September after Bird announced that it had completed $450 million in debt financing led by JPMorgan, Capital One, and Citi.

The company also said its head count fell from more than 1,000 people to 120 over roughly three years as it automated more of its operations and favored employees with high agency and multidisciplinary skills.

Vis said AI is helping employees work across tasks that companies have historically treated as distinct roles. In engineering, for example, he said the technology favors people who understand not just how to write code but also how a product should work.

"If you're an engineer and you're extremely good at just code but you have no product sense, that wouldn't work at Bird," he said.

A new kind of generalist

Vis isn't the first executive to argue that AI could give an edge to workers with range and initiative.

Figma CEO Dylan Field has said the technology is empowering "generalist behavior" as the once-distinct worlds of product, design, development, and research start to blur.

Ravi Kumar, CEO of Cognizant, has similarly said workers who combine subject expertise with technological skills may become more relevant than people with narrow expertise alone.

The trend is not universal, however. Business Insider previously reported that consulting firms are increasingly prioritizing specialists with deep industry or technical expertise as AI erodes the value of broad strategy work.

At Bird, however, Vis said AI is widening the work employees can take on beyond engineering. The tools can help workers operate within design systems or automate routine parts of support, sales, and accounting.

"It's not like you need zero designers, but you need less, and it enables entire teams to be able to output good design within a framework that a design team sets," Vis said.

That does not mean every specialist role disappears, Vis said, noting that Bird still employs specialists like a revenue accountant and security engineers.

The company's layoffs involved a qualitative assessment of whether workers were multidisciplinary, performing strongly, and wanted to work in a more autonomous environment.

"If you had very high performance but you were not multidisciplinary, you would not stay," Vis said.

The Amsterdam-founded company said it generated $165 million in EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, a common measure of operating performance — in 2025 after extensively automating its operations.

Still, Vis said companies should not use AI simply as a pretext to cut workers. Instead, he said, leaders should identify repetitive tasks that no longer need to be done and assess whether AI can remove them without overburdening the people who remain.

"I don't think people should be looking to reduce their employee base," Vis said. "The moment you are struggling to have certain employees perform well within your environment or have a certain amount of output, then I think AI is a good tool to automate more of this."

• Quant giant Two Sigma's summer interns were significantly more productive this year thanks to AI.
• This change means the firm is valuing softer skills like judgment and communication more than ever.
• The firm's internship program is a critical talent pipeline for the 1,700-person asset manager.

Two Sigma's interns had a very productive summer. So productive that it's raising the bar for future interns.

A majority of the $80 billion firm's intern class of 82 math whizzes completed their core projects weeks earlier than past cohorts and were able to work additional tasks, known as stretch goals, according to Evan Anger, the manager's head of talent acquisition.

"We put as much into the onboarding and training of our interns as we do our full-time employees," Anger said. A new part of training this year was dedicated to LLM sessions from senior leaders.

Two Sigma, which was launched in 2001 by former D.E. Shaw quants John Overdeck and David Siegel, has run its internship program since 2009. The program has produced more than 200 of the firm's 1,700 employees, including eight managing directors — a critical talent pipeline as hedge funds and top tech firms battle for world-class data scientists, engineers, and technologists.

The firm has expanded into real estate and private markets in recent years, but a majority of its assets are in systematic funds. Those core quant strategies have required top-notch coders and software engineers to stay atop the ultra-competitive field. Now, after the successful summer, Two Sigma is rethinking the skills it emphasizes in its internships and what it's looking for in new hires.

AI, Anger said, has raised expectations for the "depth and contribution" an intern can achieve in their few months on the job.

Judgment and communication skills in focus

Two Sigma isn't planning on turning its internship over to a crew of English majors and philosophy grad students anytime soon.

"We are still looking for people who understand what's going on under the hood," Anger said.

"If you have AI build something and you don't understand it, that's not good."

But the productivity of 2026's class — which was split between interns working on engineering problems and financial modeling projects — puts more of an emphasis on softer skills.

Judgment and communication, Anger said, are new focuses for the firm's campus recruiting team as "AI has leveled the playing field" on different coding and mathematical skills.

Specifically, the firm is looking at how people interact with AI and communicate with both human colleagues and technological tools. These skills have historically been most important for senior executives and managers who have to oversee different teams, juggle different personalities and egos, and get everyone rowing in the same direction.

Now, entry-level talent can show executive-like skills even earlier in their careers by quasi-managing their own employee — AI.

As a result, interviews on campuses can be more in-depth and personal, Anger said, and "a little bit less on 'Do you have the technical ability to do this role?'"

Talent war, inside the industry and outside

Hedge funds like Two Sigma have been locked into a hypercompetitive talent landscape for years, and many firms have expanded their presence on college campuses to get talent in the door even sooner. Two Sigma extended full-time offers to 85% of interns who had finished school out of its most recent cohort.

These managers are also fighting to recruit students who might be drawn to frontier AI labs or buzzy startups in Silicon Valley, which can match trading firms' compensation offers, a rarity in corporate America.

Two Sigma believes its internship structure — in which interns are working one-on-one with managers at the firm — helps set it apart from the crowd, as the monthslong job provides real insight into day-to-day life at the firm.

"From day one, they work on solving real problems alongside colleagues at every level of the firm," said Sarah Fass, Two Sigma's chief people officer.

"We believe it gives interns a fuller sense of what a career here can look like, and we've seen that investment compound over time."

Additionally, Anger said, the firm attracts people who are in a constant search for challenges. The nature of the markets means "we never have a dearth of problems to solve," he said.

While success at other options, specifically AI companies, may be "predicated on successfully IPOing," Anger said, Two Sigma is constantly trying to beat the market and its peers. It forces the firm to take the long-term view with talent.

The ultimate goal, Anger said, is to "be a place where students can see themselves growing in a career."

At 5 a.m. in Northern Virginia, chefs are already preparing chicken and chile roja enchiladas, fried shrimp tacos, and big batches of rice and beans to feed thousands of data center construction workers.

By late morning, a crew brings the food from the off-site kitchen to a break tent where workers can pick up lunch without leaving the worksite. They don't pay: The Big Tech companies spending billions on AI infrastructure foot the bill.

On an average day, National Jobsite Catering serves about 1,500 meals at each of its dozen data center construction sites across Northern Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, Nevada, and Georgia, founder Scott Kaplan tells me. The busiest sites serve twice as many. After one to three years, the crews wrap up and move on. Kaplan, whose business used to consist of a fleet of food trucks catering one-off events along the East Coast, designed a venture that can follow them. If you build it, they will cook.

National Jobsite Catering is part of the economic ecosystem being generated by America's data center boom. The tech giants leading the AI buildout are expected to spend more than $5 trillion on technology and data centers through 2030, with more than 1,500 data centers already in the works in the US.

The room where a worker sleeps, the gym he hits before his shift, his parking spot, his lunch — these are all provided by a growing network of businesses. Local firms in the suburban and rural areas where the bulk of data centers are being built can get a windfall from a single project, but a more lasting proposition is the opportunity to serve site-to-site as construction crews move around. Whether that translates into lasting benefits for host towns is at the heart of growing pushback against the wave of data centers popping up across the country.

Kaplan recognized the new opportunity a few years ago when a hyperscaler hired him to bring trucks to a site outside Philadelphia to feed 2,500 workers. "Literally the town that it was in had one restaurant — and it was in a strip club," he says.

To avoid a lunch-hour bottleneck, Kaplan proposed preparing meals in a temporary kitchen and bringing them to the site. After replicating this model for other projects, his company now has 20 full-time employees and partners with established local vendors, helping them add equipment and plan production. He estimates a project can employ about 15 local people in kitchen, delivery, and distribution roles.

"They know what they're doing," Kaplan says of the local partners. "But they've never cooked for 1,000 to 3,000 people."

Since pivoting to data centers exclusively four years ago, revenue has gone up 10X, Kaplan says.

Before thousands of construction workers can arrive on-site, they need somewhere to leave their cars — a logistical challenge that's creating a new market.

WhereiPark began as a marketplace for city parking spots, but its fastest-growing business now comes from leasing lots near data center construction sites. General contractors have asked WhereiPark to find as many as 2,000 spaces for a project. A church lot used mainly on Sundays might work, as might a struggling shopping center or a nearby fairground or casino. In more remote locations, a contractor may need to grade and stripe land. Local landowners, meanwhile, earn temporary income from unused space without selling the farm.

"If there's nowhere for the construction workers to park, the thing doesn't get built," says Joshua Eisen, WhereiPark's chief revenue officer.

A team in Toronto does much of the search via property data, calls, and emails; a partner or the general contractor then inspects a prospective lot locally. The company also partners with shuttle operators to ferry workers between the lots and construction sites. For a builder juggling several projects, that means one contact and billing relationship instead of a new search and lease negotiation in every town.

A completed facility the size of a Walmart might have just 50 spaces, so most lots return to their previous use. WhereiPark can repeat the search around another project without owning land.

With global AI investment expected to exceed a trillion dollars in 2026 alone, companies of all sizes are getting in on the gold rush. Food services and facilities management giant Aramark launched a new division called Nexus earlier this year, which offers hotel-like amenities, fitness centers, and recreation to help attract skilled workers. The company noted that Nexus contracts carry higher-than-average profit margins. Executives projected that three initial data center sites could each generate Aramark about $150 million in annualized revenue once fully running.

The data center housing business has a precedent in the oil patch, where companies have long followed temporary crews from project to project. Target Hospitality, a $1.8 billion company that has housed oilfield workers and operated two Texas detention centers for ICE, is building and operating accommodations for data center construction crews, including a $550 million deal for a 4,000-bed facility in North Texas. The company advertises furnished bedrooms equipped with small fridges and microwaves, as well as communal dining, gyms, and WiFi. Its modular assets can be redeployed elsewhere. In August, the company said it has secured contracts representing more than 9,000 beds and $1.4 billion since January.

Facing growing opposition, hyperscalers have pitched the AI buildout as an engine of economic development, promising spillover benefits for local areas.

Microsoft's "community-first" promise cited its experience in Washington state to estimate that for every direct construction job created, another is generated in sectors including security, maintenance, retail, and food service. While spillovers certainly occur, the exact level varies project to project.

To capitalize on that before-and-after job creation, Salute sells data center clients security, safety oversight, and technical support during construction and facility management after it opens. The company, which has worked exclusively with data centers since its founding in 2013, brings in experienced staff to get sites running while recruiting and training locally. It tends to employ veterans and oil and gas workers accustomed to remote job sites, and hopes those who relocate will put down roots. While engineers move to the next project, guards, cleaners, and some technical workers can remain. After all, for a security guard, the job doesn't change much. "It's still the same perimeter. It still has the same fence line," CEO Erich Sanchack says.

For local businesses, the work can be unpredictable. In Louisiana, a couple spent more than $40,000 on a food truck to serve workers building Meta's Hyperion data center, Fortune reported. Orders fell from more than 100 a day to fewer than 40 after a contractor brought in an out-of-state caterer. Business later picked up again after a local journalist covered their plight, and Meta gave them a catering job. Now they're serving about 80 orders a day, owner Katie Stewart told me. They went through a boom, a bust, and a recovery before construction was even over.

Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro who has studied data centers' local economic impact, found that the drop in activity after construction can be steep — jobs can climb into the thousands during construction and fall to the low hundreds once the facilities open. But for small towns and rural areas, even those remaining jobs "should be acknowledged as a contribution," he says. "It is genuine economic activity."

How long that activity lasts depends in part on the deal a town strikes with data center builders. Negotiations can include how much work goes to locals, tax revenue collected, and whether the developer helps meet demands on housing, roads, and other public services.

Due in part to blowback against data centers, towns have more leverage than they realize, Muro says. They should ask for the infrastructure, training, or jobs they need, he adds, "If they need a $400,000 fire truck or whatever, ask for it."

• Meta is building its largest data center to date in northeast Louisiana.
• Over 7,500 workers are expected to be on the construction site at the project's peak.
• Residents are launching businesses to capitalize on the opportunity.

The construction workers building Meta's largest-ever data center are arriving in a tiny Louisiana town with more than specialized skills and manpower. They've also got cash to spend.

It's a fact that local entrepreneurs are leveraging to build new businesses.

"It's been a good opportunity for everybody," David Rodgers, the cofounder of Ice Queen, a local business, told Business Insider. "I tell people, you can't stop it unless you have $50 billion. You might as well get on board and go with the flow."

Meta said the data center, dubbed Hyperion, will span nearly 10 million square feet in rural Holly Ridge and will support more than 7,500 jobs at peak construction.

That's a workforce larger than the population of Aspen, Colorado.

While the influx of workers is straining the local housing market and disrupting aspects of daily life, their presence has also boosted the region's economy.

Spinning straw into gold

Holly Ridge is a very small sliver of the nearly 19,600 residents in Richland Parish, where agriculture has been the main industry for decades. Before Meta arrived, the smattering of towns, villages, and unincorporated areas that make up Richland Parish hadn't seen significant economic growth in years.

Tim Allen, a Richland Parish restaurant owner, lived through that stagnation in the nearby town of Rayville.

"Rayville has been a small community my whole life, and it's been in decline over the last several years. We have a lot of people whose children are moving out, and they usually don't come back," Allen said. "Growing up, downtown Rayville had multiple businesses, hardware stores, and clothing stores. One by one, they shut down until only a couple of stores were left."

When Meta announced its project in 2024, Allen and his family were among those who saw an opportunity to turn things around.

"Since Meta's announcement, we've seen old businesses revitalize and new ones open, including ours," Allen said. Holy Tacos opened in April 2025.

TJ and Kaycie Weed, also based in Rayville, said the new demographic created by Meta's project has boosted their sales. They first opened their café, HeBrews Coffee & Eats, near the end of 2021.

"When we first started, we thought 30 tickets was a good day," TJ said. "Now, we're hitting 30 tickets before the first hour and a half through the drive-thru alone. We're probably hitting 130 tickets now."

The café in Rayville is a brick-and-mortar, but the couple has two franchise locations, including a food truck that opened in 2025 directly across the street from the construction site in Holly Ridge. They said the Holly Ridge location opened specifically because of Meta.

"Holly Ridge does most of the catering. If it's any of the businesses under the umbrella of Meta, I send it to Holly Ridge," TJ said.

The wave of construction workers inspired Rodgers and his former business partner, Linda Edwards, to cofound Ice Queen in 2025. The business sells $3 bags of ice to subcontractors and companies working on the Meta project.

The parish has weathered several heat waves this summer, making ice a necessity for outdoor trade workers. Since July, residents have seen temperatures reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit more than two dozen times. The pair keeps the ice bags in a large tractor-trailer parked near the construction site and has a separate ice truck available to make deliveries.

Ice was only the beginning, though, and soon Ice Queen transformed into a one-stop shop of sorts for the work crews. Coffee machines. Cups. Sugar packets. Fridges. Microwaves. Straws. You name it, Ice Queen tries to supply it.

Robert Cleveland, president and CEO of the local economic development authority, Grow NELA, said the economic growth happening in Richland Parish is undeniable.

Data collected by Grow NELA shows that Richland Parish's annual sales tax revenue jumped from $21 million in 2024 to $39 million in 2025. At the end of 2026, Grow NELA expects the parish will see $92 million in annual sales tax revenue. Richland Parish has gained more annual sales tax revenue in 2025 alone than in the last 20 years combined, Grow NELA says.

"We have a number of small businesses that have propped up and have grown significantly because of the project," Cleveland said.

Supply and demand

Part of the business growth in Richland Parish is supplying construction workers with what they need while they are away from home: lodging, food, and basic necessities.

Angel and Bryan Crawford, for example, chose to address the housing market gap with their rental company, Parish Line Properties. The couple owns a mobile home park called Antley Pines that opened in 2025.

"We added two homes last December, four this May, and our last four in July. All the homes were secured by deposits from Meta workers before we even got them into the park," Angel said.

A fully-furnished four-bedroom, two-bathroom mobile home that's eight miles from the construction site costs an average of $3,000.

The couple previously worked in the nursing field, but decided to dive into real estate and property management after becoming empty nesters.

"In 2024, we started buying older houses that had been on the market for a long time or needed a lot of work. We had a vision to create a mobile home park and already purchased some land when we heard about Meta's data center," Angel said.

The company now owns 18 rental properties, 14 of which the owners have set aside as workforce housing.

"Location is very important to Meta's workers because they work six to seven days a week and 12-plus hours a day. They leave around 4:30 in the morning, and they don't come home until 7 at night," she said.

Those long days can be taxing, making places like HeBrews Coffee & Eats popular with workers.

Shelbie Stephenson, owner of the Holly Ridge location, said they deliver 450 lunch plates to the Meta work site twice a month. Stephenson said they also do breakfast and coffee catering several times a month.

"We have done 900 burritos and 2,500 cups of coffee during safety week," she said.

Stephenson said the crews tend to order breakfast burritos, muffins, and scones in the morning. For lunch, they typically purchase pulled pork nachos, steak bites with peppers over rice, chicken bits over rice, or a sandwich.

Holy Tacos also fulfills lunch catering orders for workers on Meta's project, in addition to serving at its brick-and-mortar location.

"We've been out to the man camps, which are the temporary housing for construction workers, took our mobile setup, and cooked for them," Allen said.

He said the crews will order from catering from Holy Tacos between one and four times a month.

"Catering costs anywhere from $4,000 to $7,000, depending on the size," Allen said. "We have a good local following, but when you add the catering, probably 40% of our monthly business is directly related to Meta."

Staying hydrated is also a must in northeast Louisiana, where a series of heatwaves blanketed the region this summer.

"Pallets of water are where we make most of our money because it's a safety issue out here. The heat and all that," Rodgers, the owner of Ice Queen, said. "I buy truckloads of water and deliver probably 30 to 40 pallets of water a week to these guys."

Ice Queen sells a pallet of water for about $600. Liquid I.V., an electrolyte drink that helps with hydration, costs just over a $1 per pouch and is another notable product.

"The Liquid I.V.'s were one of the most important products because the guys would get so dehydrated," Edwards, a real estate agent with John Rea Realty, said. "They had never, ever encountered the humidity and the heat. It probably got up to 110 degrees out there."

Future plans

In June, a study commissioned by Grow NELA said that consumer spending and capital investments made during the data center's construction period will generate $162.9 million in sales tax revenues at the local and state levels.

While Meta has temporarily transformed Richland Parish into a modern-day boomtown, most of the construction workers will eventually move on to other jobs, taking their spending with them.

It's a reality that business owners in Richland Parish know is on the horizon.

Allen said Holy Tacos would likely continue catering for other businesses in the area and selling out of their restaurant. TJ and Kaycie said HeBrews Coffee & Eats will lean on the clientele it built before Meta arrived. The Crawfords said they are considering either selling the properties or continuing to rent them after construction ends. Ice Queen has diversified and plans to rely on other large-scale clients in the area.

Louisiana Economic Development said Meta is expected to work on the Richland Parish site through 2030.

What happens after that is anyone's guess. For now, though, there's money to be made.

• Health struggles have forced me to be a less-present mom than I've been in the past.
• I felt a lot of guilt about this until I realized that my son needs to see me take care of myself.
• Now I'm showing him that rest is allowed and needed, and that's important, too.

I've been dealing with health struggles for years and often feel a ton of mom guilt about not being there for my son as much as I used to be when he was younger.

I was a single mom for the first seven years of his life, and he watched me do it all. He saw me work and then do everything around the house, all while still spending a lot of time with him.

But I sometimes wonder if the pressure I put on myself to do it all on my own is part of why I burned out. About five years ago, it seemed like I got sick suddenly, but my symptoms had likely been mounting for years. It's also possible that being so busy kept me from noticing and dealing with my symptoms.

I used to be able to do so much with my son outside, like playing basketball or going on a family hike nearly every weekend. Those are the things I miss doing with him the most, but what he misses most is me getting down on the floor to build Lego creations with him. My current orthopedic struggles make that impossible right now.

I seriously hurt my back and hips about two years ago. After years of repeated injuries in the area, my back locked up out of nowhere, and I couldn't walk the next morning. I lost so much function overnight that just sitting and standing became major challenges. While I can't quite build Legos on the floor yet, I have come a long way in my physical recovery.

At first, I didn't handle missing out on things well

When I first started getting sick a lot, I cried often about missing out on things with my son. For instance, if I got a terrible migraine, I'd miss entire weekends with him or important events. It felt like I was missing major moments. Instead of giving myself any grace, I just put more pressure on myself to get better for my son. But of course, that's not how getting better works.

I was finally diagnosed with endometriosis last year and have seen improvements with various treatments. That has given me a lot of hope. But getting to this point took me accepting that I have a health condition that isn't going away and requires a lot of management. That takes time, time that will take me away from parenting how I have for the last 13 years.

Accepting my new reality helped me start moving forward

I've had to learn how to ask family members for help, which is something I used to avoid to my own detriment. But I'm getting better at it because I've realized that asking for a little help is a lot better than hurting myself and backsliding in my rehabilitation process.

When it comes to my son, I've had to find new ways to spend time with him. We were always so active together, often going for bike rides or playing catch, but I'm still working up to walking long distances again. I am extremely grateful that my son is OK with just walking by my side. In fact, he asks if he can tag along on my nightly strolls around the neighborhood.

There are other things that I never had to stop doing, such as watching a movie with him or cooking something together in the kitchen. When I realized I was fixating on what I couldn't do with him anymore, I worked to reframe my thinking to focus more on everything I can still do with him. It turns out, it's a lot.

I'm now modeling the benefits of slow living

I realized that the way I take care of myself will also likely be the way my son cares for himself one day. When I started thinking of my healthcare as a model for him, it made me want to be nicer to myself. And when I started being more gentle with myself, the guilt I felt for being unwell started to slip away.

I want him to see me doing my best to get better, but I also want him to see me resting or asking for help when I really need it. I want him to see that there is no award for doing everything on your own or pushing yourself too hard. Alternatively, a lot of good comes from pacing yourself and taking a beat when you need one. I know that now, and I want him to know it, too.

When I'm feeling frustrated for not being able to do more, because I still do have those days, I remind myself that I need to rest in order to show up as the best parent I can be. No one in my family benefits from me overdoing it and then burning out for the rest of the day or several days afterward.

I want my son to listen to his body and recognize his needs

Once I reshaped the way I saw my health affecting my son, I stopped feeling like I was letting him down all of the time. I'm still showing up for him in every way I can, and when I have to pause and care for myself, I'm also showing him that rest is allowed.

I have hope that all the work I'm putting in to get better and the self-care that I now prioritize is influencing him in a positive way. A few weeks ago, I found him watching basketball clips in his room, a face mask on, while foam-rolling his sore muscles. It made me so much more proud of him to see him stop and rest, instead of pushing himself in spite of being tired.

• Wendy Rowland returned to work in her 50s to support her husband with early-onset dementia.
• Her husband, once a printing worker, now resides in a costly memory care facility in Tennessee.
• Rowland navigated financial challenges like selling the home and managing expenses with limited aid.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Wendy Rowland, 53, who lives in Mississippi. Rowland, who was a stay-at-home mom, returned to work in her 50s to help pay for her husband's long-term care, as he suffers from early-onset dementia. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

My husband has early-onset Lewy body dementia. He is 59 and has been in a memory care facility for over two years now. We have already used his 401(k), and I sold the house we had for over 20 years. Once the money from that is gone, I'm not sure what will happen.

We met at the same printing company in Memphis. My husband had been printing since he was 18. We had a strong suspicion that his job may have had something to do with his condition because of all the chemicals. He worked in brand labels. I worked until our first son was born. I had another son from a previous relationship.

We started to notice things that were going on in his early 50s. He would try to do things he had done a million times over the course of his life, and they would come out a little backward. The rest of the family would say, "Oh, that's just him." I would reply, "No, it's not really."

We noticed this most clearly when he was driving. He would make turns in front of others, and the accidents started happening. He would also fix a water line incorrectly. All of his wires were getting crossed.

There were vacations we would go on a little before his diagnosis, when he would wander off or get agitated because he thought he had left something somewhere. He was let go from his job, and that's when we went for his official diagnosis.

His mother was diagnosed around the same time as him. He had two kids, a wife of 20-something years, the house in the country that he always wanted, and the boat he always wanted. He did everything that he was supposed to do, and then life happened.

His specific dementia is not as planned out as Alzheimer's. There aren't specific stages. You can see him one day, and he's one person, and you meet him later in the day, and he's another. With Lewy body dementia, they don't necessarily forget who someone is, and if you talk to him enough about someone, he can answer things about them.

His physical health has gone down for a while. He was in hospice and was losing weight. They took him out of hospice, and he's a little more stable than he was. We believe his condition might be progressing more now, but there isn't a way to actually know what stage he's at. Things can change from one minute to another.

Right before all of this, we pretty much decided to separate, and the paperwork had already been filled out. It was in his best interest that I stay and make sure he was taken care of. I wasn't going to leave that to our son or his sister, who was already dealing with their mother.

I had put cameras in the house to make sure he wasn't wandering out. Still, he had hallucinations that made it hard for me to leave him. I would come home some days, and my furniture would be outside. There were knives and a pivot cutter on the table one night when I got home, and at that point, when it became dangerous, that's when I started searching for a new research facility and got a neurologist involved.

I pay $6,750 a month for his facility. We got him in when there was a price lock, so we know that won't go up for us. I pay for his medicine and doctors visits, essentially whatever Medicare doesn't cover. I bring toiletries and pay for his visits to have his nails cut, which cost $60. He does get disability, but that doesn't even cover half of his facility, as he gets $2,700 a month after Medicare gets taken out.

There hasn't been a whole lot of information out there unless you go to an elder law attorney. I've navigated this mostly on my own. It's more than a lot of people can take, and it was almost more than I could take. It was a really dark time when everything first started, but I knew I had to keep it together at least a little to take care of everything.

I had to go back to work, which was fine, but I hadn't worked in 20-something years because I was taking care of the kids and the house. A friend knew of an opening and got me an interview, which I was grateful for because it would've been very difficult for me to find something where I would make enough to keep the house as long as I did. You don't think about these things when you're taking care of your family because that's what you're supposed to be doing.

As his condition progressed, we had to sell our house. We had it built back in 2004, and the area we were in had grown a lot, so I was able to make a substantial amount off the house. I was able to put a nice chunk down on a new townhouse in Mississippi just south of the Tennessee border, which made my house note about $800 a month.

I live about three and a half hours away from him. My granddaughter still lives near him, and I'll often make trips to see him and do what he needs.

There's no joy, and it's hard for me to say that because you would hope there would be some moment here and there, given the nature of our relationship. It's a lot of frustration. I'm not angry at him for getting sick, but you're angry that you're in this situation at an age where you're not even thinking that could remotely happen. I feel bad about this resentment, but I don't think it's going to change.

He was putting money in his 401(k), but you don't often think about long-term care insurance because you don't know if and when you'll get dementia. We've valued having financial advisors to talk about what to do with his 401(k) when looking for facilities. But I had no clue at first who anyone was to talk to, so I could get all this information. It would've been easier to learn some of this before the process started.

I hope nothing like that happens with me, and if it does, I don't know if I would want anybody else to go through the same thing of having to figure out what to do with me. This has made me a little more cautious about my money in case I need a nest egg. At this point, though, when life is more than halfway over, there are only so many things that I can do to be prepared.

• TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said people are using AI agents without understanding how they operate.
• He said users need to be more mindful about what permissions they give their agents.
• The personal AI agent horror stories have been rolling in as more companies launch these tools.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has a reminder for AI agent fans: take a beat to understand them before diving in.

"A lot of users may be giving permissions to the agents to do a lot of things for them, without really understanding what kind of permissions you have actually given," Chew said, speaking at a conference organized by DBS Bank in Singapore on Monday.

For example, he said that agents who have been given credit card information to purchase items for users may be "overly eager to deliver," and end up buying much more than they were asked to.

The executive added that TikTok is training its staff on what information they should not include in public chats with AI agents, such as trade secrets or privileged legal information.

"So people, you know, sometimes are over enthusiastic about how they use it," he said. "So I think understanding, you know, where the boundaries of what is reasonable and acceptable use, is important."

Chew made these comments at the DBS Asia Future Forward Conference, whose theme centered on how AI could be implemented in Asia to create real value. During his fireside chat, he also talked about how he uses AI as a diet coach and to answer medical questions.

Personal AI agents have seen a boom in the past few months, with the introduction of tools like Meta's Muse assistant, SpaceXAI's Grok Bot, OpenAI's Dots, and the startup Instinct's AI agents.

They've been hailed as productivity boosters, handling mundane tasks for users, such as bookings, audits, and repetitive purchases. But users have also shared some nightmare stories of their agents going rogue and taking actions they hadn't anticipated.

Software company founder Shane Mac told Business Insider that his AI agent, tasked with sending him a month-end audit of his bank account, accidentally posted it to his company's Slack chat.

Others have talked about their agents hallucinating information and misunderstanding instructions. Austin Welch, who works in finance in Houston, told Business Insider that his Instinct agent accidentally ordered 20 pounds of chicken for his meal with his partner.

• South Korea went from the world's hottest stock market to its coldest in months.
• Taiwan is pulling ahead as investors broaden AI bets beyond memory chips.
• Asia's AI trade is expanding from memory chips to the broader hardware supply chain.

South Korea's stock market has gone from the world's hottest to its coldest in just a few months.

The Kospi, the world's best-performing major stock benchmark in the first half of 2026, has since fallen about 24%, making it the worst-performing major market in the second half. It's still more than 50% higher this year.

The AI trade isn't losing its appeal. But investors are increasingly looking beyond South Korea's memory-chip giants to companies with broader exposure to the AI hardware boom.

In July, analysts at GlobalData.TS Lombard pointed out that much of the earnings growth at Korean memory-chip makers came from higher memory-chip prices. By contrast, TSMC and Japanese chip-equipment makers relied more on advanced manufacturing and process expertise, giving them more durable growth prospects, they added.

Taiwan's Taiex has climbed about 7% in the second half of the year, taking its year-to-date gains to about 70% as investors broaden their bets across the AI hardware supply chain.

South Korea's rally was driven largely by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, whose soaring memory-chip profits made them among the biggest winners of the AI boom. Together, the companies account for more than half of the Kospi, leaving the market unusually dependent on a single segment of the semiconductor industry.

Even blockbuster earnings are no longer enough to excite investors. Last Thursday, Samsung forecast a nearly ninefold increase in quarterly operating profit, yet its shares have fallen for two straight trading sessions.

The reversal followed months of extraordinary volatility. The Kospi plunged 22% in July, its worst month since the 2008 financial crisis, before rebounding 18% on the month's final trading day for its biggest one-day gain on record. The swings triggered multiple market-wide circuit breakers as leveraged bets on chip stocks amplified the moves.

Young South Koreans flooded social media with memes and dark humor about their battered portfolios, while regulators tightened rules on leveraged single-stock exchange-traded funds after concerns the products had fueled speculation.

Trading has cooled sharply. Turnover has dropped 70% from its late-May peak, while foreign investors have continued pulling money from Korean equities.

The next phase of the AI trade

The shift didn't happen overnight.

Even before Korea's selloff, investors were debating whether the next phase of the AI boom would continue rewarding memory-chip makers or broaden to companies with exposure across the semiconductor supply chain.

Taiwan appears to be benefiting from that shift. Its market offers exposure across AI infrastructure, from advanced chip manufacturing and packaging to servers and networking equipment.

That includes TSMC as well as companies involved in advanced packaging, servers, networking equipment, and other AI infrastructure.

The Taiex outperformed the Kospi by more than 23 percentage points in the third quarter, as Taiwan's benchmark gained nearly 4% while South Korea's plunged more than 19%.

When Elysse Morris decided to become a dental hygienist, it seemed like a natural fit. She was a fairly "sciencey" student in high school and generally liked going to the dentist. Plus, she'd always been a talker.

Eleven years into her career, Morris, now 34, knows she could probably be making more money. Her home state of Virginia has a severe shortage of dental hygienists, and temporary workers can command high hourly rates by hopping between practices. But Morris has spent four years at the same privately owned office because she's happy there. Her boss gives her decent equipment, benefits, a bonus, and — most importantly — respect. The dentist treats her like a clinician rather than a pair of hands.

"We're not workers to her," Morris says.

Her setup is what those in the business call a "unicorn" office, and the short supply of these quality workplaces is helping cause a short supply of dental hygienists across the country.

I'm not kidding when I say I love my dental hygienist. I was going to quit my dentist, who I feel like often tries to push questionable treatments on me, but then Andrea started, and she's amazing. Last time I was in the office, I mentioned my union was bargaining a new contract, and she said she wished hygienists had a union of their own. It makes sense that they don't — the United States doesn't do sectoral bargaining, and most hygienists have traditionally worked in small, private offices where organizing would be difficult — but it got me thinking. I have no idea whether hygienists, in general, are having a good time.

Turns out, they're not.

According to the American Dental Association's Health Policy Institute, only 60% of dentists report having an adequate number of dental hygienists on staff. States such as Virginia, Missouri, Texas, and California say they need hundreds more clinicians.

The problem isn't a lack of demand — the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment for hygienists to grow much faster than average over the next decade. The real struggle is that the field is having a hard time getting new hygienists in the door, as experienced hygienists are heading for the exits. Dental hygiene programs at community colleges and universities aren't agile enough to increase their flow of new graduates, all while veteran clinicians are deciding the physical toll, heavy workload, and lack of benefits aren't worth it.

"Burnout is so high," Morris says. You're basically "trying to be a perfectionist all day long."

The result: long wait times for patients and proposed solutions that some hygienists worry could lead to worse care.

Prior to 2020, dental hygienists weren't exactly skipping gleefully into work — there were already issues around workplace culture, compensation, and opportunities for growth. But the pandemic exacerbated many of these problems. Many offices temporarily closed, hitting staff's bottom lines. When they reopened, hygienists suddenly found themselves on the front lines, exposed to the virus in their close-contact, aerosol-generating work and managing new safety and equipment protocols — all while juggling their disrupted daily lives.

On a typical day, hygienists see eight to 10 patients, each with different anxieties, histories, and baggage. One person comes in ranting about how COVID isn't real, the next talks about their grandfather dying of it. In both cases, the hygienist must manage the emotional climate while scraping tartar from tooth enamel with microscopic precision. After months of this, many decided they'd had enough. Those who were close to retirement pulled the trigger, and others went shopping around for new careers. An estimated 3,300 hygienists left the field.

The acute issues of the pandemic exacerbated long-standing problems in the industry. Dental hygiene is a physically demanding job. Professionals find themselves hunched over for large parts of the day, and injuries to the neck, shoulders, wrists, and lower back are common. Many dental practices — especially the smaller ones — don't provide benefits such as health insurance to their workers. That may propel hygienists to pursue jobs in more corporate environments, such as dental service organizations or private equity-backed groups. These entities often have a reputation for pushing higher-cost treatments and compressing appointment times to generate higher profits. While hygienists may initially be enticed by the benefits and pay at these operations, the pace can be exhausting, resulting in a revolving door.

"They're not retaining people any better than other practice models are," says Dr. Kathryn Rothas, a New York-based dentist and spokesperson for the American Dental Association. Rothas is the dental director of Whitney Young Health, a federally funded community clinic in Albany. As we're speaking, she says they're trying to fill an open dental hygienist position. While they offer solid benefits, they don't pay as much as bigger corporate dental groups.

Brandon Patel manages the front desk at his wife's two Connecticut dental practices. He tells me they're in a similar situation. "I've had a job post up for almost six months, and we have had basically no applicants," he says. "The applicants we've had are full-time employees just looking for a better offer." His clinic is offering $55 to $60 an hour, but no health insurance, which Patel says is "very difficult to provide as a small-business owner."

Dental office dynamics are complicated. People are often working in tight quarters, and personalities can clash. Some dentists may have a way they like doing things that simply doesn't jibe with certain employees. Morris once worked for a lovely older dentist who did beautiful work — but he insisted on using old instruments, and after her paychecks started to bounce, she quit. The pay and flexibility of temping or part-time work appeal to many hygienists, but it increases the chance they end up in offices where they're not comfortable. Dental hygiene is also a female-dominated field, and some clinicians scale back their hours or stop working once they start having families.

The obvious answer to workplace shortages is to train more people, especially since dental hygiene seems pretty AI-proof, and the prospect of a high salary should make it an enticing career. That's easier said than done.

Unlike nursing programs, where universities send students to partner hospitals for clinical rotations, dental hygiene programs must build, equip, and operate their own dental clinics. A single chair alone can cost upward of $8,000, not to mention X-ray machines, simulation labs, and other equipment. Hygienists-in-training must be closely supervised at these clinics and need to get experience with a wide range of patients and conditions. Expanding these programs can therefore be a logistical nightmare and an enormous investment.

"You have to basically be an outpatient center for clinical care, which is thinking about operating a hospital and operating a school at the same time, in essence," Rothas says. "It's costly to just expand a program by a few chairs."

To those trying to break into the profession, the process can feel bizarrely selective and unnecessarily bottlenecked.

Bryn Romero turned to dental hygiene after struggling to land a job with the data science degree he earned in 2021. He's not as worried about the shortage because, to him, it means job security. "As somebody that was unemployed for a long time, I like the idea that I'm not going to have to worry about that," he says. He's currently about halfway through the two-and-a-half-year program he started in Utah last spring, but he's been surprised at how many hurdles he had to clear to get in. He has a friend who's been a dental assistant for four years and has been rejected from the same school he's in three times. "It feels very arbitrary," he says. (Dental assistants have less training and a smaller scope than hygienists — they prepare rooms, hand dentists instruments during certain procedures, and take X-rays. They don't generally do cleanings or assess gum health.)

There are only 15 chairs in his school's clinic across its five rotating cohorts. Three instructors are there to check everything, which lengthens wait times and discourages patients from coming in. "The service itself could be better if we just had more instructors that were there," he says.

Beyond the high barrier to entry, dental hygiene simply doesn't occur to many young people as a potential career path. High school guidance counselors often point students toward other healthcare arenas, such as nursing and radiology. Dental hygiene doesn't get much attention in culture or the media, either. There's no "The Pitt" or "ER" for the dental chair.

The root cause of many of these problems isn't Big Mean Dentist, it's an industry where the economics are no longer working.

Dental insurance reimbursement rates have stagnated in recent years, all while dental office costs have continued to rise. That's led some practices to stop accepting certain insurances or pursue more out-of-network patients to help with their internal math. Rothas says new patients often land in her clinic because their prior dentist stopped accepting their insurance.

New graduates in dental hygiene and dentistry have different priorities than generations past. They want flexibility and see the appeal of high-paid temp options over going to work full-time at a local office.

"Graduating more hygienists while failing to address why existing hygienists leave the workforce is like filling a bucket without addressing the leak," says Jessica August, the president of the American Dental Hygienists' Association.

There are proposed fixes out there, but many of them are controversial. There's a push in some states, such as Arizona, Virginia, and Missouri, to allow dental assistants to be trained on the job to perform basic cleanings and other procedures traditionally handled by hygienists. Hygienists argue that this will lead to worse outcomes for patients.

"Workforce shortages should not be addressed by lowering the standard of care, substituting workers who have not received equivalent education and clinical preparation," August says.

A handful of states, including Florida and Indiana, allow foreign-trained dentists to become dental hygienists without completing a US-based program. Some hygienists seem more open to that — assuming they have to take the same board exams. Others worry it will negatively impact care, since dentists don't receive the same extensive, specialized training in hygiene and preventive care.

It's difficult for hygienists to practice in different states because they have to apply for a new license and jump through a new set of hoops. Sarah Hiller, 37, went to dental hygiene school in New York. When she moved across the country to Oregon, she had to spend $5,000 to re-up her education and take a test to get licensed there, because hygienists are allowed to place fillings in her new home. "We need more license portability and just standardization," she says.

Much of what hygienists ultimately want is increased autonomy, whether that's working under a dentist who respects their opinions and recommendations, better career growth, or even the chance to strike out on their own.

Some states, such as Colorado and Oregon, allow hygienists to practice independently without direct dentist supervision. Some states allow public health hygienists to enter settings where access to dental care is often limited, such as nursing homes, or to provide pathways for hygienists to become dental therapists, who have a broader scope.

"That's a much better kind of marriage of putting dental care where it's needed and not accessible, but also giving dental hygienists a role that's more empowering and flexible," says Lisa Simon, an assistant professor of oral health policy and epidemiology at Harvard.

Many hygienists aren't waiting for their circumstances to improve. That's the case for Angela Scott, who left the profession in 2022 after 20 years in the field. After a shoulder injury and struggling to balance her job with childcare, she decided being a hygienist "was just not sustainable anymore." Scott, who has practiced in the US and Europe, now lives in Berlin, where she's trying to break in as a UX designer after completing an internet boot camp. She's also working on an online course to try to help other hygienists who are looking to get out of the industry.

"I was at the point where I began to outgrow what I was doing, and I knew I wanted to do more, but I also knew there was no way I could get any further autonomy as a dental hygienist," she says. "There are a lot of hygienists who are also at the point where they need to do something else."

Morris, in Virginia, says she regularly overhears other dentists asking her boss how she keeps her hygienists around. She's not even sure her doctor is aware of how unique their setup is.

"That relationship that we have, that's what people want when they go into dental hygiene," she says.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• Kelly Clarkson said a Brooklyn toy shop gave her the "Pretty Woman" treatment.
• Here's how the dispute between Clarkson and the store unfolded.
• A publicist said a celebrity pile-on can hurt a small business before people know the full story.

A Brooklyn toy shop has found itself at the center of a celebrity internet drama after Kelly Clarkson said she received the "Pretty Woman" treatment when she inquired about a $15,000 item in the store.

In an X post on Saturday, the singer said she had a negative experience at Art of Play, a toy store in New York City.

"Just drove all the way to Brooklyn to check out this store I thought looked really rad and had a few things in mind to buy and literally was looked at as if I couldn't afford it and was told he could find something comparable for me," Clarkson wrote in her post, adding that the store "just lost a huge sale."

She then compared her experience to the treatment Julia Roberts' character receives in the '90s rom-com "Pretty Woman," telling people to visit the store if they enjoyed being treated that way.

Clarkson's post on X had received more than 39.4 million views and over 261,000 likes as of Sunday evening.

As her post gained traction, Art of Play responded on Instagram the next day with its own account of the interaction, saying the toy Clarkson had inquired about was a bird automaton that's "permanently attached to the wall and isn't for sale."

The store said it understood why Clarkson's account "would resonate with anyone who has ever felt judged in a shop," but said that it welcomed visitors equally, whether they came to browse or buy.

"Imagine our surprise when our small local business was suddenly attacked by 8 million people who have never visited our store. It's been a surreal experience to be the focus of such widespread outrage after just one mention by a celebrity," the store said in a statement on Instagram.

The store then thanked its supporters and said it planned to keep a low profile, while hoping to "clear things up" with Clarkson one day.

The public exchange did not end there.

On Instagram Stories and on X, Clarkson countered Art of Play's account, sharing a photo she said showed the bird's $15,000 price tag, along with additional details about her conversation with a staff member.

"Cool, cool. Sure, it wasn't for sale. That's the narrative Art of Play is gonna go with," Clarkson wrote on Sunday.

She said the staff member "elevator eyed her" and told her "in a condescending tone" that the item was for sale but cost $15,000, before offering to find her a "comparable" alternative.

"That all never happened and now it's not for sale. Okay, cool. So you're not only rude, you're also a liar. Got it," Clarkson said in her post.

On Sunday night, Art of Play issued another Instagram statement saying that although the toy Clarkson inquired about was permanently attached to its wall, the creator of the automaton owned a nearly identical bird and was willing to sell it for $15,000.

The store said it had explained this distinction to Clarkson and had also offered to show her a different, German-made singing-bird automaton priced at about $2,000, although she "did not stick around long enough to see it."

It said it had contacted Clarkson directly in an effort to "clear the air."

Clarkson and Art of Play did not immediately respond to Business Insider's requests for comment, which were made outside regular business hours.

The internet weighed in

The public back-and-forth also appeared to prompt a bout of review bombing on Art of Play's review pages.

When Business Insider first checked the store's Google Reviews at around 9 p.m. ET on Sunday, it had a 4.7-star rating based on 273 reviews, including several recent one-star complaints that appeared to be connected to the store's ongoing public dispute with Clarkson.

About three hours later, the store's Google Reviews showed a 5-star rating based on 253 reviews. The recent negative reviews Business Insider had viewed earlier were no longer visible.

Google did not immediately respond to questions about whether it had removed reviews connected to the incident or taken other action on the listing.

On Yelp, Art of Play had a 2.4-star rating based on 154 reviews when Business Insider checked the page at 12:17 a.m. ET on Monday, with recent posts reflecting a polarized response to the dispute. Some criticized the store, referencing Clarkson and "Pretty Woman," while others defended it, citing their own positive experiences.

Several reviewers also acknowledged that people were weighing in despite not having visited Art of Play, with one calling on the public to stop attacking a small shop over a celebrity's complaint.

In a statement, a Yelp spokesperson said moderators may temporarily disable posting if a business's page sees an unusual spike in activity, and that Yelp will clean up the page so only first-hand consumer experiences are reflected on it.

Business Insider could not independently verify whether the recent reviewers had visited the store.

The risks of taking a dispute online

Danny Deraney, founder of LA-based Deraney Public Relations, said he doesn't believe there will be a winning side in the dispute.

"Fans will take her side before acknowledging the response of the other party," Deraney told Business Insider.

While Art of Play was right to respond publicly to protect its business, Clarkson should have raised the issue directly with the store rather than on the internet, he said.

Deraney said the incident appeared to involve an individual at the store, and that a public pile-on can put a small business at risk before the full context is known.

"Even if Kelly is right about how she was treated, employees who did not interact with her, and the business, could end up getting the worst of it," he said.

Deraney added that people on the internet should be cautious about judging either side, since they weren't there to witness the exchange.

"It benefits neither the person nor the business when all this could have been resolved through discussion. I do not think there is a need to follow up; letting the issue dissolve is the best course, and it will," Deraney said.

This story has been updated to reflect a comment from Yelp.

• Trump has sought to assure voters that he can lower gas prices before the midterm elections.
• The results of his efforts, however, have not yet materialized.
• Gas prices reached a national average of $4.36 per gallon on Sunday, AAA reported.

President Donald Trump is running into the limits of his influence as he seeks to bring down sky-high gas prices ahead of the midterm elections.

In social media posts and stump speeches across the country, Trump has sought to assure voters that gas prices — a major sticking point for Americans grappling with an affordability crisis — will soon go down.

At the White House on Friday, for instance, Trump recalled seeing gas prices below $2 a gallon in Iowa before the US and Israel launched surprise strikes on Iran in February.

"We'll be down to those levels soon," he said.

The numbers and the trajectory of conflicts around the world, however, portend a different story.

As of Sunday, AAA reported that the average price of regular gas in the US was $4.36 per gallon. At this time last year, that number was $3.09. Diesel prices have also skyrocketed, reaching $6.28 per gallon earlier this month.

Early Monday, Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, was trading about 2% lower at around $103 a barrel.

That's more than 40% above its level at the start of the Iran war, but about 2% below where it stood a month ago, after prices surged past $100 a barrel in early September.

The bigger concern, however, is diesel, where prices have remained elevated despite crude's recent pullback.

Refinery bottlenecks and attacks on energy infrastructure in the Middle East and Russia have squeezed supplies of the fuel, which powers trucks, trains, ships, and farm equipment. That raises transportation costs across the economy and can keep inflation under pressure even if crude prices stabilize.

Persistently high diesel prices also pose a political challenge ahead of the midterms, as rising transportation costs threaten to add to the inflation pressures already weighing on American households.

Trump suspended fuel export sanctions on Russia this week to bring more diesel to the market and lower prices, prompting allies and enemies alike to wrinkle an eyebrow. Hours later, Ukraine struck a Russian oil depot.

On Sunday morning, Trump tried again to calm oil markets, announcing an "ENERGY CEASEFIRE" between Russia and Ukraine on Truth Social.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on X, however, that while he supports such a ceasefire, the deal was news to him. He added that a Russian drone struck a power plant in Kyiv on Sunday.

Meanwhile, on Saturday in the Strait of Hormuz, through which oil shipments have slowed to a trickle as Iran flexes its control of the key waterway — a big reason the price of oil has increased and gas prices have spiked — an oil tanker struck a mine and caught on fire.

The US-Israeli war on Iran is only expanding as Iranian allies target Saudi Arabia, a US ally, and its oil infrastructure. Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have expanded their control of the coast bordering the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a key shipping lane for Saudi oil exports. And last month, the group orchestrated an attack from southeastern Iraq on a major Saudi oil pipeline, forcing Saudi Arabia to temporarily shut it down.

An attack on King Khalid International Airport by Houthi fighters on Saturday killed 12 people and injured over 300. One American was killed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, and officials were forced to briefly close the airport.

At this rate, it's hard to imagine oil prices softening enough to relieve Americans of high gas prices by the time they head to the polls in November.

• At 21, Raymond Loong Ng put college on hold after his startup raised $250,000 from VC firm Afore Capital.
• He and his cofounder spent two months in a program in San Francisco, working on their startup.
• A subsequent investment brought their total funding to $1 million, and they're now back in Singapore awaiting O-1 visas.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Raymond Loong Ng, 21, the cofounder of Makeable, a San Francisco-based startup. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I was born in Vietnam and moved to Singapore when I was 9. As a kid, I always had some kind of side hustle. In school, I sold toys, snacks, in-game currency, and sneakers to my classmates — anything that might earn me a little extra pocket money.

When I was 16, I did an internship at an auditing firm, where I had the chance to speak with a lot of business owners. I began to see technology as a tool that could help me advance in the business world.

I ended up getting a diploma in applied AI and analytics at a polytechnic after finishing secondary school. I was never the best at math or coding, but it offered me a way to turn my ideas into actual projects.

I always saw myself as the connector: I could spot a problem, form a vision, attract resources, then bring in my smartest classmates to make things happen.

That was how I began building projects of my own. I built an AI tool that helps ex-offenders build résumés and find jobs. I also started a community of young AI builders that runs workshops for students across Singapore.

From rivals to cofounders

In school, the projects we built often felt theoretical. Participating in hackathons gave me the chance to build solutions under real-world market constraints.

Although we had crossed paths earlier through a separate scholarship program, hackathons were also how I got to know the person who would later become my cofounder better.

We competed as rivals on different teams, but would often find ourselves among the only people still working at 2 or 3 a.m. Eventually, we decided we wanted to be on the same team.

We started entering competitions together in late 2023 and went on a winning streak. We soon realized that full software solutions were becoming harder to differentiate in hackathons as AI tools and models advanced.

We ventured into hardware because it gave AI a way to be deployed in the real world.

At a medical technology hackathon in 2025, we built a device to help paralyzed patients communicate through brainwaves and eye blinks. That became our startup, Neural Drive. The product caught the attention of a local hospital and is set to undergo a clinical trial there.

At the same time, I was trying to find my way to the US.

I grew up fascinated by the people and stories of Silicon Valley. My favorite films were "Jobs" and "The Social Network," and they made me feel that if I wanted to build something that could change the world, I had to be there.

While serving my two years of mandatory military service, I applied to several US colleges but was rejected by all. I ended up being accepted into the computer science program at the National University of Singapore, but I still wanted to go to the States.

I kept reaching out to venture capital firms in the US, and Neural Drive eventually caught the attention of Afore Capital in June.

In June, Afore Capital made a $250,000 pre-seed investment in Neural Drive. My cofounder and I then joined its two-month Founders-in-Residence program in San Francisco.

The timing was tricky. College was due to begin in August, so I had to defer my enrollment before classes started. My cofounder had to request a leave of absence from school, too.

It wasn't an easy decision, but we took a bet on ourselves.

I found a city that moved as fast as I did

I had visited Shenzhen in China before and expected Silicon Valley to look even more futuristic. Instead, I was surprised by how ordinary it looked. Because we were scrimping on rent, we moved into a hacker house in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood.

Those two months in San Francisco were intense, but incredibly rewarding. We were often working until 4 a.m., but we made as much progress as we would have in two years in Singapore.

The sheer density of talent inspired us: "What are you working on?" felt like the way people said hello. It was a city full of workaholics. I thought: This is my kind of place.

We went through several pivots before landing on Makeable, our startup that lets people build a physical product from an idea. All they have to do is describe their idea in a prompt.

Makeable can generate everything from the 3D model to the electronics and code, then sends users a kit they can put together themselves, like Lego.

In our final week of the program, Afore Capital made a follow-on investment, bringing our total funding to date to $1 million.

We flew back to Singapore to apply for our O-1 visas. While we're home, we're still working. The plan is to return to San Francisco for the next few years and keep building our company.

I probably have to extend my leave of absence. If it doesn't work out, I'll go back to school. I want to keep that option open. But honestly, I hope I don't have to.

• "Saturday Night Live" took on Kevin O'Leary and his data center.
• "These things shouldn't be anywhere. That's why I'm building one in Utah," Johnson's O'Leary said.
• The real O'Leary is backing a giant data center project spanning over 20,000 acres.

AI data centers got the "Weekend Update" treatment on "Saturday Night Live" this week.

Comedian James Austin Johnson portrayed "Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary on the sketch comedy show, during which he addressed the dispute over the real O'Leary's proposed data center in Utah, known as the Stratos Project.

"It's very simple. All I want is to buy up 40,000 acres of God's untouched splendor and replace it with a very loud computer that steals your job," Johnson's O'Leary said. "Is it going to take up precious water? Absolutely. Is it going to provide a necessary service? Who's to say? But on the flip side, it's going to make me a tremendous amount of money, and I think that's great."

The "SNL" version of O'Leary said he understood that some Americans were concerned about data centers near their homes. (An actual May Gallup poll found that over half of American surveyors opposed constructing AI data centers in their local area.)

"These things are terrible and shouldn't be anywhere. That's why I'm building one in Utah," he said.

Data centers are a contentious issue in the United States.

Leading tech companies rely on AI data centers to power their systems and products. Supporters say they'll create new jobs, bolster the economy, and help the US defeat China in the race to control the global AI market.

Residents in the places where they are being built, however, are often much less excited about them.

The Utah project, backed by O'Leary Digital, has drawn criticism from many local residents over concerns that the data center could strain local resources and worsen the environment. Some residents are also upset over what they consider a lack of transparency from O'Leary and local leaders. Critics of the Stratos Project have staged protests, created petitions, and taken legal action to stop its construction.

O'Leary scaled back the data center's size from about 40,000 to just over 20,000 acres after public pushback. He has said he remains undeterred, though.

"There are bumps in the road. There's litigation. There's misinformation. There's propaganda. You name it. But if you know what you're doing is right, you make it, you get there," O'Leary told Business Insider in June. "Persevere."

During a May interview on Fox News, O'Leary said said some critics of the project have ties to the Chinese Communist Party, a claim he later walked back. A Utah advocacy group that has publicly opposed the project filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News and O'Leary in July.

On "Saturday Night Live," Johnson's O'Leary acknowledged the incident.

"I made the mildly inflammatory claim that every single person in Utah who opposes me is a paid communist super agent from China. Was I wrong? Perhaps. But just because they're not, doesn't mean they aren't," he said.

He added, "I'm going to make the future go away. And we're doing just that in Utah."

• Alexandr Wang said his prolific X posting is part of a broader effort to make Meta cool again.
• The 29-year-old has filled his feed with memes about Muse, the company's AI agent.
• Wang said his posts "made an impact" on the growth of Muse.

Alexandr Wang said he had trouble focusing during recent Meta meetings.

On his mind: New memes to post about the company's popular new AI assistant.

"I would just like think of a meme and I'd be like 'Oh God, I have to get this out,'" Wang said in a recent interview with podcaster David Senra, adding that his coworkers were "somewhat surprised" at the buzz his posts were generating.

"It actually made an impact on growth," he said of the posts, "which is kind of hilarious."

Much has been said about Meta's chief AI officer and his chaotic X feed, which the 29-year-old has crammed with occasionally off-color yet invariably eccentric references to Muse, Meta's personal AI assistant that sent the company's stock soaring and redefined the market for AI tools.

In his interview with Senra, though, Wang said that his often spur-of-the-moment posts served a broader goal — to make Meta "cool again."

"Despite having like these incredible pieces of cultural software like Instagram and Facebook, historically, Meta was not cool," he said. "I remembered that the internet rewards risk."

After launching on September 8, Muse shot to the top of Apple's app store 10 days later, surpassing ChatGPT. Meta says Muse can help users research, fill out forms, buy items online, book restaurant reservations, find a dog sitter, and connect with services such as email, calendars, Spotify, Instagram, and OpenTable.

The app marked Meta's first successful breakthrough in AI tech, after its Llama and Spark LLM models failed to find niches already filled by widely used models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

With Muse, Meta found a largely untapped gold mine — though competing AI agents from OpenClaw and Instinct already existed in Silicon Valley circles. Muse, however, had the advantage of coming from a popular company with several billion potential customers already signed up on Instagram and Facebook.

And the internet, weary of staid pronouncements from CEOs who were perhaps once cool but are now entering their 40s (Mark Zuckerberg is 42), welcomed the boundless energy of a young executive newly endowed with power in the AI era.

"It was a lot of fun," Wang said. "There were like a few tweets where I just didn't think that much about it and just said, 'Fuck it, post.'"

Business Insider wants to know, by the way, how you're using personal AI agents. Take our survey below!

• I loved being in the marching band in high school.
• I didn't love the practice that was forced on me from a young age, and neither did my husband.
• We waited until our three kids asked about music lessons instead of forcing them on them.

Some of my favorite high school memories involve music. I played flute in the marching band, and I still remember traveling with my friends to perform at Disneyland in our senior year. Those trips were fun, and the friends I made in band class are the only high school friends I still keep in touch with.

But getting there involved years of music lessons that I didn't exactly choose.

I started piano lessons in fourth grade, which meant giving up after-school hours when I'd much rather have been doing almost anything else. Eventually, I switched to flute and continued playing through high school. By then, I was good enough to enjoy being in the marching band, but years of being told to practice left me with mixed feelings about music.

My husband had a similar experience with the viola. He spent countless hours practicing an instrument because his parents wanted him to. Today, decades later, he doesn't play it.

Neither of us wanted to repeat that experience with our own kids.

We decided not to sign them up

When our kids reached the age when many of their friends were starting piano, violin, or other music lessons, we took a different approach.

We didn't say no to music. We simply didn't volunteer them for it.

If they wanted to learn an instrument, we told them we would support them. But we weren't going to spend hundreds of dollars on lessons and then spend the next several years nagging them to practice something they never asked to do.

It wasn't always easy to stick to that philosophy. As a parent, it's tempting to look at all the activities other kids are doing and wonder whether you're supposed to be signing your kids up, too.

Music seemed particularly important. I knew firsthand how much kids could get out of being part of a band or orchestra. I also knew that learning an instrument can teach discipline and give kids an outlet for creativity. I didn't think those benefits required us to force it on them.

Eventually, they came to us

Then something interesting happened: They asked about music lessons.

My daughter eventually decided she wanted to take acoustic guitar lessons. Later, my sons got interested in music, too, signing up for electric guitar and drumming.

Because they chose these activities themselves, the dynamic was completely different from what I remembered from childhood.

I'm not hovering over a piano bench telling someone to practice scales. I'm not threatening to take away screen time because someone hasn't picked up a guitar.

They know they have to practice to get better, and they're more invested because the decision to play was theirs.

I get to enjoy the show

The biggest surprise has been how much more enjoyable music is for me as a parent.

Instead of being the kid who is being told to practice, I'm the mom sitting in the audience with my phone out, waiting for the performance to start so I can record them.

I get to cheer when they nail a song and encourage them when they don't. I get to listen to them practice "Johnny B. Goode" in their bedrooms and watch their confidence grow.

And because they chose this for themselves, their accomplishments feel like theirs.

Maybe that's what I was really trying to give my kids by taking music lessons off the parental to-do list: not necessarily a childhood without instruments, but one where they get to decide what they want to become good at.

After spending my childhood being told to practice, I've found that one of my favorite parts of parenting is not having to be the practice police.

Let's be honest: most TVs aren't doing your living room any favors when they're turned off. They're basically just big black rectangles taking up wall space. That's the problem Samsung set out to solve when it launched the Frame in 2017, and it's a big reason frame-style TVs have become so popular.

Instead of looking like tech, the best frame TVs are designed to pass as décor. They have anti-glare screens that mimic the look of canvas, slim builds that hug the wall, and swappable bezels to match your space. And when they're not playing your favorite show, they double as digital art displays for classic paintings and modern pieces. Samsung may have started the trend, but it's not the only game in town. Hisense, TCL, Amazon, LG, and Walmart have jumped in with their own takes on art-inspired TVs.

I've spent the past few years testing multiple versions of Samsung's Frame, including the standard Frame and the high-end Frame Pro. I've always appreciated Samsung's design, but I wanted to see how the competition stacks up. Can options like the Hisense CanvasTV, TCL NXTVISION TV, and Amazon Ember Artline TV really deliver that same gallery feel without cutting corners?

To find out, I tested the best frame TVs from Samsung, Hisense, TCL, and Amazon. Here's how they compare — both as actual TVs and as statement pieces — with details on where each shines, where they fall short, and which models make the most sense for your space and budget.

Our picks for the best frame TVs

Best overall: Samsung Frame TV - See at Amazon

Best high-end model: Samsung Frame Pro TV - See at Amazon

Best Frame TV alternative: Hisense CanvasTV - See at Amazon

Best overall

Samsung's standard Frame TV is the best art TV for most people. It checks every box you'd expect from a display that doubles as décor, and it offers a few thoughtful perks that cheaper competitors skip.

On the design front, the Frame delivers all the essentials: a matte, canvas-like screen, support for magnetic bezels (sold separately), a flush wall mount, and a motion sensor that turns art mode on only when someone's in the room. Because the standard Frame has been around the longest, it also offers the widest selection of bezel styles, from understated to more ornate. Just keep in mind that none of these bezels come included — out of the box, you get a basic black border.

The TV utilizes Samsung's wired One Connect Box, which consolidates power and device connections into a single, thin, transparent cable that runs from the screen to a separate box. You can then place the box on a console or out of sight. This keeps your wall clean and makes it easy to add a streaming player, an antenna, or a game console without moving the TV.

Samsung's Art Store is another standout. Its catalog of high-quality images is far more robust than the free selections you get from Hisense or TCL. But while Samsung does offer a small rotating batch of free artwork, you'll need a paid subscription to unlock the full library.

The Frame's anti-glare matte display also performs well in bright rooms, helping art look convincing and daytime TV viewing remain comfortable. But as with most art TVs, picture quality isn't the Frame TV's strong suit. Brightness peaks at around 500 nits, contrast is lacking, and the edge-lit backlighting can result in patchy black levels. While watching TV in the dark, this uneven lighting can be downright distracting.

Still, the Frame isn't aimed at cinephiles chasing premium HDR performance — it's for style-first shoppers who want a TV that blends seamlessly into their space. And in that role, it shines. It's also available in a wide range of sizes: the 2025 model recommended here ranges from 43 to 65 inches, but you may still be able to find older versions from 32 to 85 inches.

Check out our guide to all of the best Samsung TVs.

Best high-end model

The Frame Pro is Samsung's premium art-style TV. It's the most advanced option on the market and offers a noticeably bolder, brighter image than any other display in this guide.

This model carries over all the essential features of the standard Frame TV, including a matte screen, support for attachable bezels, a flush wall mount, and a motion sensor. What sets this model apart from Samsung's cheaper Frame is its wireless connection box and local dimming backlight.

Like the standard Frame TV, the Frame Pro uses a separate One Connect Box to house its video ports. However, the Frame Pro takes it one step further by making this connection box wireless. It still needs to be plugged into an outlet, but it doesn't require a physical connection to the TV itself. This greatly expands placement options and makes it easier to work around obstacles in your home, so you can mount your TV in more spots.

When it comes to picture quality, the Frame Pro utilizes Samsung's Neo QLED technology with Mini LED edge-lit local dimming. These features provide a significant technical advantage over the standard Frame TV and its rivals. Every other art TV uses a basic edge-lit LED backlight without dimming, which greatly limits contrast and brightness. But the Frame Pro's Mini LEDs help it reach a peak brightness of around 1,000 nits, about double that of the standard Frame, Hisense Canvas, and TCL NXTVISION.

This higher brightness allows the TV to produce bolder highlights when watching high-dynamic-range (HDR) videos and helps it overcome ambient light in rooms with many windows. The Mini LED backlight can also produce deeper black levels than other art frame TVs, so dark scenes don't look as washed out and uneven when watching TV with the lights off.

That said, I still noticed some light blotches and uneven dimming in dark scenes during nighttime viewing. While this is the best frame TV for picture quality, it still can't match the image performance of traditional Mini LED and OLED TVs.

It's also important to remember that access to Samsung's full Art Store requires a subscription fee, and that magnetic bezel attachments are an additional cost. But while this all adds to the price, the Frame Pro is easily the best art TV for premium performance.

Check out our full Samsung Frame Pro TV (2025) review.

Best Frame TV alternative

The Hisense CanvasTV is the best Frame TV competitor, matching most of the Samsung Frame's features and design perks. It has all the essentials that make an art TV an art TV, including a matte screen, support for magnetic bezel attachments, a flush mount, access to digital paintings, and a motion sensor.

I reviewed the 2024 version of this TV, but that edition has since been replaced by a slightly revised 2026 model. General features and design are the same, but the refreshed model is a bit brighter, and its matte screen has been improved to handle reflections better. It's also available in a 50-inch size for the first time.

Hisense offers a solid assortment of free paintings and photos without a subscription. In fact, Hisense doesn't currently offer a premium membership. The selection of photography and art prints isn't as wide as what you'd get with Samsung's paid Art Store, so if you like to switch up the mood in your room frequently, you won't have as many options. However, I never had that problem and found more than enough free choices that I liked.

The biggest complaint I have about the CanvasTV is that all its ports are on the back of the display, just like a traditional TV. This contrasts with Samsung's Frame models, which use a separate connection box. So, if you have multiple media devices you want to hook up, you could end up with multiple cables hanging from your wall. This hinders the TV's ability to mimic a framed painting. Of course, you could hide cables with a cover or feed them through the wall if you can drill, but Samsung's solution is more user-friendly and versatile.

On the plus side, I appreciate that the TV comes with a magnetic bezel that resembles a wooden frame. You'd have to pay extra for that when buying a Samsung model. However, alternative magnetic bezels are difficult to find from Hisense or third-party retailers. The most common search results are for those from sellers on Etsy. In contrast, there are tons of styles available for Samsung Frame TVs.

In terms of picture quality, there's not much separating the CanvasTV from Samsung's standard Frame. The 4K QLED display offers decent pop in both dark and light rooms, with similar brightness. Watching movies with the basic settings most people use, I couldn't easily tell the difference between the two products in black levels or color saturation. That said, the CanvasTV's viewing angles are more limited, especially when watching TV in bright daylight.

Despite its drawbacks, Hisense's CanvasTV is the best Frame TV alternative for anyone seeking an art TV that mimics most, though not all, of Samsung's features.

Check out our guide to all the best Hisense TVs.

The best art frame TVs, compared

What else we considered

TCL NXTVISION TV - See at Amazon
TCL’s NXTVISION gets most of the basics right for an art TV. It has a matte screen, a flush wall mount, an included light-wood bezel, and more than 100 free art selections. But it leaves out a few design touches that make Samsung’s Frame and Hisense’s CanvasTV more convincing. It lacks a motion sensor, offers limited art customization, and is missing a stand. It also has its ports built in rather than use a connection box. The NXTVISION can be a good value when it's discounted, but alternatives from Samsung and Hisense are better buys at similar prices. TCL also has a revised 2026 version of the NXTVISION, which it now brands as the TCL Designer TV with Frame. We haven't tested that model yet, but it appears to offer similar specifications, with the main difference being that it now includes a stand.

Amazon Ember Artline TV - See at Amazon
Amazon's first frame-style TV, the Ember Artline, is now available. Like other gallery TVs, it uses a QLED panel, features a matte finish, and includes a slim wall mount. It also supports interchangeable bezels, and Amazon offers 10 styles to choose from. Users get access to around 2,000 pieces of free art. However, the Ember Artline has a very noticeable black sensor bar right under its frame. This bar is used for motion sensing and voice control, but it ruins the illusion of a framed piece of art. The TV also has its ports built into the panel, rather than using a separate connection box. Generally, I recommend getting a Samsung or Hisense art TV instead, but if you're not bothered by the sensor, the Artline is a worthwhile budget option when it's on sale.

Read our full Amazon Ember Artline TV review.

How we test art TVs

To find the best frame TVs, I spent time with all the major models from Samsung, TCL, and Hisense. In addition to judging them like traditional TVs, I evaluated each one specifically as a design-forward frame TV, paying close attention to differences in build quality, features, and how convincing they look on the wall.

Since most people buy frame TVs for their art-first design, I put most of my focus there. Picture quality still matters, of course, but it takes a back seat to things like how realistic the artwork looks, how much art is included, the quality of bezels and accessories, and how easy and enjoyable the software and interface are to use.

I've purchased and lived with several Samsung Frame TVs over the years, and I have hands-on experience with every model featured in this guide. I used them the way most people would — watching movies and TV shows and playing video games. All of the TVs were tested in similar, well-lit rooms with plenty of natural sunlight, so I could properly judge glare and anti-reflective performance. To keep comparisons fair, I also watched the same movie at the same volume level on each TV to get a consistent sense of image quality and speaker performance.

Meet the expert behind this guide:

Tyler Hayes, contributing reporter: I've been covering consumer electronics for more than a decade, testing everything from headphones and soundbars to smart home gear and even electric cars. For this guide, I spent hands-on time with frame-style TVs from Samsung, TCL, and Hisense, and I've personally purchased and lived with several versions of Samsung's Frame over the years. I tested each one not just as a TV, but as a piece of design, comparing how realistic the artwork looks, how appealing each TV looks on a wall, and how intuitive the software feels day-to-day. My goal is simple: if you're aiming to buy a TV that doubles as décor, I want to make sure you end up with the one that actually looks (and works) the part.

Learn more about the Reviews team at Business Insider.

Art TV FAQs

What is an art frame TV?

An art TV is designed to resemble a framed work of art when it's "off" and not in use. To accomplish this, all of the best art TVs include key features that set them apart from most traditional TVs. These include:

• An anti-reflective matte screen meant to resemble canvas
• A thin profile and flush wall mount so they can hang like a picture
• Support for magnetic bezel attachments in different art-frame styles
• Access to a curated gallery of art and photographs that can be displayed when the set isn't used as a TV

Some, but not all, art TVs also include additional features that help them to further mimic the look and feel of a framed painting:

• A separate connection box so you can keep your wall free from cables
• A motion sensor to turn on the TV's art mode only when people are in the room

Which brands make frame TVs?

Samsung, TCL, and Hisense all produce art TVs designed to replicate the appearance of a framed painting. LG, Amazon, and Walmart also recently launched their first full-fledged art-frame TVs: the LG Gallery TV with frame, Amazon Ember Artline, and the Onn Fresco Art Gallery TV.

Other major brands, such as Sony, Roku, and Vizio, do not currently sell display models specifically designed to function as frame TVs, but some of their TVs offer certain features that art TVs provide.

Are there OLED frame TVs?

Art frame TVs all use LED or Mini LED panels, as those screen types are best suited for displaying static images. Though there technically aren't any OLED frame TVs, the new Samsung S95H OLED does include several gallery-style features, including a metal-frame-like bezel, an anti-glare screen, and access to Samsung's art store. However, the bezel is not interchangeable, and the TV lacks a motion sensor. You can learn more in our Samsung S95H review.

Can you access art galleries on other TVs?

Most TVs have a screensaver feature that displays various images when you're not watching a movie or show. However, these modes aren't as full-featured as those found on the best frame TVs, and the selection of images is often more limited.

That said, Samsung now offers access to its full Art Store on all of its latest Neo QLED and QLED TV models. The Art Store is also available on the S95H, the first Samsung OLED to feature it. Those displays don't have all the design features of a Frame TV, but they can showcase the same images, so long as you have an Art Store subscription. Likewise, LG's Gallery+ service is available on multiple TV models.

Are art TVs good for home theater enthusiasts?

Art TVs place a greater emphasis on design than on picture quality. Generally speaking, most midrange and high-end traditional TVs offer better image performance than even the best frame TVs. This is especially true for contrast, brightness, and black levels. While casual viewers may not notice the backlight limitations on most art-frame TVs, those with a keen eye will see uneven lighting and distracting patches of brightness. If you're a home theater enthusiast looking for a TV with picture quality in mind, we don't recommend buying a frame TV.

For home theater TV recommendations, check out our guides to the best TVs and best TVs for picture quality.

Are art TVs available in many sizes?

Frame-style TVs are available in various sizes, depending on the brand and model. Samsung offers the most expansive lineup, with options ranging from 32 to 98 inches.

For more TV recommendations specific to certain sizes, check out our other buying guides:

• Best 100-inch TVs
• Best 85-inch TVs
• Best 75-inch TVs
• Best 65-inch TVs
• Best 55-inch TVs
• Best 50-inch TVs
• Best 43-inch TVs

Do art frame TVs have good sound quality?

Generally speaking, most TVs, including art frame-style ones, do not have good sound quality. Brands use small speaker drivers to fit them into flat-panel designs, which limits dynamic range, stereo separation, and depth.

Among the frame TVs we tested, the Hisense CanvasTV had the strongest audio output; however, it still lacked bass. For optimal audio quality, we recommend using a soundbar.

You can view our top recommendations in our various audio buying guides:

• Best soundbars
• Best budget soundbars
• Best Dolby Atmos soundbars
• Best soundbars with subwoofers
• Best Bose soundbars
• Best Sonos soundbars
• Best surround sound systems

• Taylor Swift's "The Life of a Showgirl" has yielded three No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100.
• It's the first female album since Swift's own "1989" to achieve the feat.
• The Beatles, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Rihanna also have multiple albums on the list.

Thanks to "The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore," Taylor Swift has added another rare achievement to her resumé.

The deluxe edition of Swift's 12th album added four new songs to the tracklist, including "Patient Zero," which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — becoming the album's third song to reach the chart's summit, following "The Fate of Ophelia" and "Opalite."

Since Billboard launched the Hot 100 in 1958 as the definitive all-genre singles chart in the US, only 33 albums have spawned three or more No. 1 hits (not counting greatest-hits compilations).

Counting songs that were released later on deluxe editions and reissues, Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" holds the all-time record with six No. 1 songs, followed by Michael Jackson's "Bad" with five.

This elite group of musical blockbusters seems to be getting more exclusive over time: Only 12 of the qualifying albums were released in the 21st century. "The Life of a Showgirl" is the first female album to achieve the feat in over a decade, since Swift's own "1989" in 2014.

All 33 albums are listed below in chronological order.

1. "Where Did Our Love Go" by The Supremes

No. 1 songs: "Where Did Our Love Go," "Baby Love," "Come See About Me"

2. "Help!" by The Beatles

No. 1 songs: "Help!," "Ticket to Ride," "Yesterday"*

*Included on the original UK release of "Help!" and later included on the US-exclusive release of "Yesterday and Today"

3. "Magical Mystery Tour" by The Beatles

No. 1 songs: "Penny Lane," "All You Need Is Love," "Hello Goodbye"

3. "Let It Be" by The Beatles

No. 1 songs: "Let It Be," "The Long and Winding Road," "Get Back"

4. The "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack

No. 1 songs: "How Deep Is Your Love," "Stayin' Alive," "Night Fever," "If I Can't Have You"

5. "Spirits Having Flown" by the Bee Gees

No. 1 songs: "Tragedy," "Too Much Heaven," "Love You Inside Out"

6. "Make It Big" by Wham!

No. 1 songs: "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," "Everything She Wants," "Careless Whisper"

7. "Whitney Houston" by Whitney Houston

No. 1 songs: "Saving All My Love For You," "How Will I Know," "Greatest Love Of All"

8. "True Blue" by Madonna

No. 1 songs: "Papa Don't Preach," "Live to Tell," "Open Your Heart"

9. "Whitney" by Whitney Houston

No. 1 songs: "I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me)," "Didn't We Almost Have It All," "So Emotional," "Where Do Broken Hearts Go"

10. "Bad" by Michael Jackson

No. 1 songs: "Bad," "The Way You Make Me Feel," "Man in the Mirror," "I Just Can't Stop Loving You," "Dirty Diana"

11. "Faith" by George Michael

No. 1 songs: "Faith," "Father Figure," "One More Try," "Monkey"

12. "Forever Your Girl" by Paula Abdul

No. 1 songs: "Opposites Attract," "Forever Your Girl," "Straight Up," "Cold Hearted"

13. "Girl You Know It's True" by Milli Vanilli

No. 1 songs: "Baby Don't Forget My Number," "Blame It On The Rain," "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You"

14. "Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814" by Janet Jackson

No. 1 songs: "Miss You Much," "Love Will Never Do (Without You)," "Escapade," "Black Cat"

15. "Wilson Phillips" by Wilson Phillips

No. 1 songs: "Hold On," "Release Me," "You're in Love"

16. "Mariah Carey" by Mariah Carey

No. 1 songs: "Vision of Love," "I Don't Wanna Cry," "Someday," "Love Takes Time"

17. "Daydream" by Mariah Carey

No. 1 songs: "Fantasy," "One Sweet Day," "Always Be My Baby"

18. "The Boy Is Mine" by Monica

No. 1 songs: "The Boy Is Mine," "The First Night," "Angel of Mine"

19. "Christina Aguilera" by Christina Aguilera

No. 1 songs: "Genie in a Bottle," "What a Girl Wants," "Come on Over Baby (All I Want is You)"

20. "Confessions" by Usher

No. 1 songs: "Yeah!," "Confessions Part II," "Burn," "My Boo"*

*Included on the special-edition reissue of "Confessions"

21. "FutureSex/LoveSounds" by Justin Timberlake

No. 1 songs: "SexyBack," "My Love," "What Goes Around...Comes Around"

22. "The Dutchess" by Fergie

No. 1 songs: "London Bridge," "Glamorous," "Big Girls Don't Cry"

23. "Good Girl Gone Bad" by Rihanna

No. 1 songs: "Umbrella," "Disturbia,"* "Take a Bow"*

*Included on the reissue "Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded"

24. "The E.N.D." by The Black Eyed Peas

No. 1 songs: "Boom Boom Pow," "Imma Be," "I Gotta Feeling"

25. "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry

No. 1 songs: "Teenage Dream," "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)," "California Gurls," "Firework," "E.T.," "Part of Me"*

*Included on the reissue "Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection"

26. "Loud" by Rihanna

No. 1 songs: "S&M," "What's My Name?," "Only Girl (In The World)"

27. "21" by Adele

No. 1 songs: "Rolling in the Deep," "Set Fire to the Rain," "Someone Like You"

28. "1989" by Taylor Swift

No. 1 songs: "Blank Space," "Shake It Off," "Bad Blood," "Is It Over Now? (Taylor's Version) [From the Vault]"*

*Included on the rerecorded album "1989 (Taylor's Version)"

29. "Purpose" by Justin Bieber

No. 1 songs: "What Do You Mean?," "Sorry," "Love Yourself"

30. "Scorpion" by Drake

No. 1 songs: "God's Plan," "Nice for What," "In My Feelings"

31. "After Hours" by The Weeknd

No. 1 songs: "Heartless," "Blinding Lights," "Save Your Tears"

32. "The Life of a Showgirl" by Taylor Swift

No. 1 songs: "The Fate of Ophelia," "Opalite," "Patient Zero"*

*Included on the deluxe edition "The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore"

• Trump called those who don't adopt the term Super Intelligence "the enemy."
• Marc Benioff said Salesforce's AIForce platform is becoming SIForce.
• Elon Musk also pledged to rename SpaceXAI as SpaceXSI.

Donald Trump wants two letters scrubbed from the tech industry’s vocabulary, and some executives are already reaching for replacements.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Friday that his company’s AIForce platform is getting a new name.

“The era of Super Intelligence is here. AIForce is officially SIForce,” Benioff wrote on X.

The announcement follows Elon Musk’s pledge Sunday to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, giving Trump’s campaign to replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence” traction beyond Washington. The company's X account has already been changed.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has also made the switch, referring to the tech as "Super Intelligence" in an X post about AI model containment and governance on Saturday. While Nadella has used the term "superintelligence" in the past, this was the first time he used it as two words — and capitalized.

Salesforce’s change concerns its agent platform, rather than the company’s corporate name.

Trump, meanwhile, is turning his terminology preference into a test.

“The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday.

The warning escalates a push Trump formalized in a September 29 executive order directing federal agencies to substitute “Super Intelligence” and “SI” for “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in official communications, websites, reports, and policy documents, to the extent permitted by law.

Private companies aren’t required by the order to follow suit. But Benioff’s announcement and Musk’s proposed rebrand show how the president’s preferred language is making its way into corporate branding.

The administration’s argument is that AI has outgrown its name. The executive order says today’s systems increasingly amplify human creativity and that “Super Intelligence” better captures their potential.

The rebranding push complicates matters for companies whose names include AI, and raises questions over what counts as superintelligence. The term generally describes systems far more capable than humans across a broad range of tasks, and renaming existing products doesn’t establish that they meet that threshold.

OpenAI, Scale AI, Character AI, and Resolve AI did not respond to requests for comment.

• My parents met as teenagers and celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary this year.
• My twin brother and I surprised them with more than 40 friends and relatives.
• Planning the party reminded me that my parents have a story beyond raising us.

My parents met in May 1986, when they were just 14 and 15 years old, and started dating in September that same year. Just a month later, my mom turned 15.

She can't remember exactly what their first date was. Maybe a movie, she says, or something simple, like hanging out with friends. But when she first saw my dad — a quiet yet funny guy — playing catch with his best friend while she babysat across the street, neither of them could have known what kind of journey they were about to take together.

They were married in June 1996, at Alex & Henry's, a then-popular catering hall that closed a few years later.

This year, the day before their official 30th anniversary, my twin brother and I pulled off what I'd argue was one of the best surprises of our adult lives: a party with more than 40 of their closest friends and family members.

They deserved to be celebrated

My grandma traveled from Delaware to our hometown in Westchester County to help bring the surprise together. For months, she fielded my frantic calls about table arrangements, centerpieces, and cake flavors, while I dodged my parents at home. Trying to surprise the people you live with is no small feat.

I quietly texted out invitations, made decorations, including "Back in 1996" cards for each place setting, and coordinated with vendors and the restaurant to make sure every detail was just right.

I was flooded with butterflies. I wanted so badly for them to be completely stunned — they deserved it. And because I had dropped off the decorations beforehand, the final setup was in the hands of my grandma and my best friend since kindergarten, who I tasked with bringing my vision to life.

My brother and his girlfriend needed a believable reason to come home from Austin for the weekend. He told my parents they'd visit to celebrate their pearl anniversary, which made sense before a major work trip.

He fibbed. There was no work trip.

We surprised them

Several weeks before they arrived, my brother "made a reservation" at one of our favorite restaurants — where he had worked in high school— for six people on June 7. We'd have a late lunch to celebrate our parents' anniversary with our partners and us. Since we'd be together, I convinced them we should take family pictures. My plan was solid.

That afternoon, my boyfriend and I left the house first — racing to the restaurant just a few minutes away, leaving my brother with the coveted task of escorting my parents inside without them noticing the familiar cars belonging to friends and family in the parking lot.

They turned the corner expecting to sit down at a table for six, but instead were met with a roar of "Surprise!" in a room full of their favorite people.

They were shocked.

As they bounced between tables, they embraced, laughed, caught up, and reminisced while admiring the several photo boards my grandma had made, which captured decades of their love story in still moments.

To me, the process, the surprise, and the aftermath — how it has remained a dinner-table discussion months later, and how the joy and love they felt that day still radiated from them whenever they talked about it — were a joy in themselves. It filled me with so much happiness.

This joy has lingered in conversations, in the photo boards my mom kept displayed around the house, and the cake-table decorations draped over the piano. The pieces of that day scattered throughout our home became reminders that our parents are more than the people who raised us — they are people with their own stories, memories, and milestones worth celebrating.

As we marked a milestone in their marriage — a stretch of time longer than my 25 years on this earth —I found myself thinking about the lives my parents had lived before they became my parents.

They had already spent years together before my brother and I were born in 2000. They had been teenagers, friends, boyfriend and girlfriend, and eventually husband and wife. They had memories and inside jokes, losses and milestones, dreams and disappointments that belonged entirely to them.

Their lives did not stop when they became parents.

They are still living, experiencing, learning, loving, and losing things for the first time, just like my brother and I are as young adults.

• I knew I'd likely have my first child abroad when I married a Frenchman and moved to France in 2021.
• So far, I've loved a lot about France's approach to pregnancy, including the use of midwives.
• However, I miss American traditions like baby showers, my favorite snacks, and the people I love.

When I fell in love with a Frenchman who wanted kids as much as I did, I knew there was a distinct possibility that I'd be going through pregnancy on foreign soil. And when we moved to France in 2021, with no intention of leaving anytime soon, my fate seemed all but sealed.

Earlier in 2026, I found out that we were pregnant for the first time. For a year leading up to this moment, I'd set the stage for everything to go as smoothly as possible, ensuring that I was properly registered in France's national health-insurance program and completing all the preliminary checkups.

Yet, despite my best efforts, nothing could have prepared me for the cultural differences surrounding pregnancy in France. Although I've found there's a lot to love about the French approach, there have also been a handful of times I've wished I were back in the US with my family in Southern California, where I'm originally from.

I was expecting to have an OB-GYN, but using midwives is the norm over here

Though midwifery isn't regulated nationally in the US, it is in France. Here, midwives are required to attend six years of schooling and obtain a master's degree.

They're allowed to prescribe medicine and lead childbirth, and I've found that most French people with low-risk pregnancies are recommended to them over OB-GYNs for all the steps of pregnancy and delivery.

I'm being treated by three midwives, and I love the way they're specialized to my different needs. There's one who performs the sonograms and monthly checkups, one who will get me through the delivery, and one who provides classes to help me prepare.

Plus, they'll visit you at home to make sure your recovery is on track after the big event. That's not as common with physicians in the US.

Most of my pregnancy costs are covered by the national health insurance program

Although I haven't been pregnant while living in the United States, I've heard plenty of horror stories about hefty hospital bills — even for Americans who are covered by insurance.

By contrast, France requires all residents to register with the national healthcare system, which can subsidize up to 70% of related charges until the fifth month of pregnancy, and all associated costs from six months onward.

For what's not covered during the first half, most people have a second insurance called a mutuelle — generally provided by your employer — that fills in the gaps.

Although I don't have a mutuelle, the appointments I have that aren't completely covered generally cost me 40 euros or less. What's more, the French government offers a birth bonus of over 1,000 euros to parents earning below a certain income threshold.

This will more than make up the difference if my husband and I qualify for it.

Despite all these advantages, there are times I wish I were in the US

France has gone above and beyond my expectations in a number of categories, but there's no denying that I'd trade a lot for a taste of home — literally. No French cornichon can ever live up to the real-deal American pickles I've been dreaming of.

I've also had to accept that I'm probably not going to get a baby shower while I'm over here, as celebrations like that aren't part of the local customs. Although French folks have started to embrace things like registering for baby gifts, even that's not always a given.

And although I definitely don't feel the need for festivities at every step of the way — I'm not the type to throw a gender-reveal party, for example — I'd appreciate at least some of the pomp and circumstance that feels more customary back home.

More than that, it's the friends and family I miss the most. No number of video chats will ever measure up to sharing laughs, hugs, and love in the same physical space. I'd give up all the pickles and baby showers in the world just to have that.

Ninety-nine percent of international internet traffic flows through cables stretched across the ocean floor. Demand is at an all-time high as the world becomes more dependent on cloud computing and AI. But only one US company can both make and lay them. We visited its 73-year-old factory and went aboard a multimillion-dollar cable-laying ship to see how it is keeping up — and why our data still needs to travel thousands of feet beneath the sea.

• My mom moved us from Brooklyn to Michigan after my grandma developed Alzheimer's.
• I helped care for my grandma while my mom navigated caregiving as a single parent.
• Our cohousing community became an extended family that supported all of us.

I spent the first years of my life on the brownstone-lined streets of Brooklyn, waking up to the sounds of birds chirping mixed with car horns reverberating throughout the city. Little did I know that my childhood would take an unexpected turn.

In the middle of first grade, my mom pulled me out of school, packed our suitcases, and moved us across the country to Michigan as my grandma, Lillian, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and needed extra support. My immediate family is small, just my mom and me, and Michigan felt completely foreign at the time.

We moved into a co-housing community

My mom always emphasized the importance of building family through community. With that in mind, she moved us to Great Oak Cohousing, a community designed around the concept of independent living with shared amenities: a common house, an expansive garden, and a variety of gathering spaces, all collaboratively managed by residents.

I fell in love with Great Oak almost immediately. It unlocked a lifestyle that had been missing in New York: raw nature all around us, the ability to run around independently, and an unmatched sense of community.

We welcomed my grandma into our new home with open arms, picking her up from my aunt Heidi's house, where she lived during the week, and bringing her to ours for long weekends.

My grandma had visited us in New York when I was a baby, but beyond that, we hadn't spent much time together. Almost immediately after the move, we became rascals together, finding many ways to play and get into trouble.

We had a community

My mom often tells the story of a time we were at our local grocery store. I was tasked with pushing my grandma in her wheelchair. Soon after we arrived, we disappeared from my mom's view. When she spotted us, I was whisking my grandma up and down the aisles while she stuck her arm out, knocking boxes of cookies off the shelves as we went, the two of us bursting into laughter. We were two peas in a pod.

At cohousing, we could sit outside and toss tennis balls around while neighbors strolled by and engaged us in friendly small talk. We could enjoy our dinner at picnic tables on a warm day. Everyone knew my grandma, welcomed her, and met her with patience and kindness.

When she had a medical emergency, I called 911 while my mother got the attention of neighbors. Within minutes, three people rushed into our condo to help, while another stood in the street waiting to direct the ambulance. In one of the scariest moments of my childhood, we weren't alone.

A story I often think back to is from a time when we were at a community event, watching a girl play the piano. Midway through the song, my grandma began singing along in a shrill voice. Instead of shushing her, the whole community joined in. What could have been an uncomfortable moment turned into one of joy. It truly captured what Great Oak meant to us. My grandma was never treated as a burden or an outsider. She was simply part of the community.

It was painful to see my grandmother with Alzheimer's

Still, witnessing her Alzheimer's brought challenges that, as a young child, I didn't immediately understand. I helped her get dressed, enduring a fight or two along the way, and even discovered that I had pretty good reflexes when it came to dodging the occasional flying plate of food. Despite those challenging moments, I understood that she couldn't help it. It was painful to watch her lose her sense of self, and I can only imagine how much harder it was for my mother, who had to watch her own mother struggle in this way.

I often look back at that time through a different lens now that I'm older, specifically from my mother's perspective. Caring for a parent with Alzheimer's while raising a young child as a single mother was no easy task. I have immense admiration for her and for the strength she displayed through it all.

Experiences like these teach you lessons that are difficult to learn anywhere else: patience, unconditional love, sacrifice, and, perhaps most importantly, the power of family. Caring for my grandma not only brought the two of us closer together, I also grew closer to my aunt, someone I look up to tremendously. I witnessed the sacrifices she made, opening a bedroom in her Detroit-area home so my grandma could stay during the week.

What could have been a lonely experience became one that was defined by community. Great Oak became an extended family of our small one, showing me that family isn't only who you're born to, but who welcomes you in, stands beside you, and shows up when you need them most.

• My favorite hidden gem in California is Paso Robles, a central coast town filled with wineries.
• Paso Robles has much cheaper tastings than Napa. The average cost is $27, while it's $79 in Napa.
• There's also a range of great restaurants, from Michelin-starred dinners to handmade pastas.

Where should you go in California for delicious food, sprawling vineyards, and the satisfying sound of a freshly uncorked wine bottle?

Let me guess, you're thinking of Napa.

But what if I told you there's a hidden gem on the central coast where you can get all of the above with fewer crowds, lower prices, and cooler tasting experiences?

Welcome to Paso Robles.

A wine for everyone

Growing up in the Bay Area, Napa Valley quickly became a special place for my family. With no relatives living in the US, my Greek parents took us there every Christmas to make the holidays feel special.

I've visited Napa over 20 times, but over the past few years, Paso Robles has stolen my heart.

Paso Robles is almost exactly in the middle of Los Angeles and San Francisco, about 200 miles each way. Parallel to the mountains and the sea, the region has a unique terroir due to big temperature swings. The topography's distinctive microclimates are perfect for growing a variety of grapes, helping Paso distinguish itself in a crowded California wine market.

"The diversity of this area really separates itself from the monoculture that Napa has become," Andrew Jones, the owner of Field Recordings Winery, told me.

Adding to that diversity is the low barrier to entry in the Paso Robles wine industry. Most of the wineries are small and family-owned, and the winemakers are often on-site to guide you. This refreshingly laid-back approach makes tastings feel intimate and approachable, and they're at a far more accessible price point than Napa, where the high cost of winemaking has trickled down to tourists. Silicon Valley Bank's 2026 direct-to-consumer wine report found that the average tasting fee in Napa is $79, while it's $27 in Paso Robles.

"Napa has a taller order; they have to live up to a brand that's worldwide," said Neeta Mittal, one of the first Indian women to open a winery in the US. "Where we thrive in Paso is we're able to etch our own identity, and that's a great nimbleness that we're allowed."

Tasting experiences with a twist

Mittal and her husband, Kunal, own LXV Wine, which offers the only wine-and-spice pairing in the US. I visited LXV on my first trip to Paso Robles and was delighted that my tasting included cheeses covered in various spices. I learned how ginger and black truffle salt can bring out the flavors of Cabernet and why Szechuan peppers and Nebbiolo pair so well.

I also love the tastings at Field Recordings, which prides itself on making wines that "are all about the flavor — with none of the pretension," as its website reads. Jones specializes in small-batch, single-vineyard wines. They're fun and funky, decorated with colorful labels and names like "Kitties" or "Super Gnario."

Field Recordings is in Tin City, my favorite part of Paso Robles. The converted industrial hub features over 20 wineries, all within walking distance of each other, where tastings typically cost between $20 and $30. It's perfect for a wine crawl, but there's also a brewery and the very fun Tin City Distillery if you're craving cocktails instead.

Where you can wine and dine

Another reason I keep going back to Paso Robles is the fantastic restaurant scene. I never skip a dinner at The Alchemists' Garden, which has a fun cocktail list and some of the best fries.

My parents still rave about the meal we had at Il Cortile Ristorante. Its pappardelle is handmade and paired with a rich, luscious Bolognese, and the branzino is light, bright, and cooked to perfection. But the star is the risotto covered in white truffles, a holiday splurge I've never forgotten.

The Restaurant at Justin, which earned its first Michelin star in 2022, bested any fine-dining experience I've had in Napa. I still have pictures saved from that dinner, where my fiancé and I feasted on maple-leaf duck breast, prime filet, and various veggies picked from their 26-acre farmstead.

And no visit to Paso is complete without a stop at Brown Butter Cookie Company, which has mastered the salty-sweet combo in a little treat. The hand-rolled cookies are made locally and available in a variety of flavors.

On my last visit, I grabbed a dozen bags for my family, friends, and myself, of course.

A destination for any season

Blessed with California sunshine, Paso Robles is a great vacation year-round. I've gone in the fall, summer, and winter — where it's festively decorated for the holidays — and have always been charmed by the small-town vibes and friendly locals. (Don't miss karaoke nights at the Pine Street Saloon.)

The winemaking world is slowly starting to learn about Paso Robles, but the town itself remains a hidden gem.

For now, at least, this is California's best-kept secret.

• My husband and I live in a separate house on the same property where my immediate family lives.
• In total, nine family members and three dogs live in the two houses on our "family compound."
• We love spending time with my close-knit family, and it's been great for our daughter, too.

There's a popular saying that it takes a village to raise a child.

I'd always understood the saying as a metaphor. But when my husband and I decided to build a house on the same property where my parents, younger siblings, and my brother's fiancé live, that adage became a lot more literal.

Now, we're raising our daughter on our "family compound," with our village right next door.

A compound wasn't the initial plan, but living here has been an incredible experience

Although my family had jokingly talked about building houses next door to each other since I was a child, we never thought we could make that a reality.

However, the arrangement started to materialize in 2024. At the time, my husband and I were living about 15 minutes from my childhood home, which was bursting at the seams with my three siblings, my brother's fiancé, both my parents, and their two adorable golden retrievers.

My parents had been searching for a larger home for years, but eventually decided to purchase a piece of land in our Massachusetts hometown.

Here, they built a house big enough for all six of them to live together comfortably, and realized there was enough room left on the property for my husband and me to build our own house if we wanted to.

They began construction on their home that same year, and not long after, my husband and I decided to sell our existing home and break ground on a new place on the property.

In total, nine family members and three dogs live in the two houses, which are just a short walk away from each other.

We've now been living here for six months and couldn't ask for a better living arrangement. I love being able to see my siblings off for their first day of school or prom night, having game nights with my family, and enjoying slow, cozy days watching football together.

Not only are my husband and I fortunate enough to have our built-in best friends only a short walk away, but we also get to watch our daughter grow up with direct access to her grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

It's nice that we never have to worry about finding a sitter we trust, as my family members love to keep an eye on her for any reason, from a date night to me squeezing in a workout while my husband is out.

Even having one of my younger siblings pop over and play with our daughter while we get chores done around the house makes a huge difference.

Childcare is expensive, especially in Massachusetts, and we are forever grateful that we don't have to take on that financial burden.

And although my family spends a lot of time together, and have some shared spaces (like a pool and a detached garage), we never feel like we're on top of each other.

In fact, there are plenty of days I don't even see my family members because of busy school and work schedules.

Plus, we're all very respectful of boundaries. If we borrow each other's clothes, we wash and return them. If we want to take a snack from someone else's pantry, we ask first.

The living arrangement feels like a continuation of our close-knit relationship

I'm frequently asked why my siblings and I would want to live in such close proximity to each other and to my parents.

To me, though, it just felt like a continuation of something that my parents had already created. They were incredibly intentional about keeping our family close while we were growing up, so as adults, we naturally want to spend time together.

Plus, my parents never weighed the success of their parenting on whether we got into fancy colleges, established huge careers, or moved away to be "independent."

They believe their parenting will have been successful if their kids want to spend their time with them and each other. Their goal was to raise us to want to be each other's best friends.

The next question I'm typically asked is how my husband feels about the arrangement. Honestly, he was just as excited as I was to build a house next to my parents. Now, he loves playing basketball outside with my brother, and luckily, his side of the family lives just 10 minutes away — so, we spend lots of time with them, too.

Unfortunately, our current property isn't large enough to accommodate additional houses, so as our family continues to change and expand, we've already begun looking for a bigger piece of land down south that can accommodate each sibling, should they someday want houses of their own.

Our current setup is perfect for this stage in our lives, but we want to make sure there is always room for all of us if we want to continue living together on the same property.