• The US energy secretary is working to reassure Americans that high gas prices won't last.
• Chris Wright said the conflict in Iran is a "temporary movement," rather than a "long-term war."
• He said gas prices could go down "in weeks."

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright made the morning show rounds on Sunday to downplay concerns about surging gas and oil prices, assuring Americans that the war with Iran isn't "long-term."

"What you are seeing is emotional reactions and fear that this is a long-term war," Wright told "Face the Nation" on CBS News. "This is not a long-term war. This is a temporary movement."

Wright made similar remarks in an interview with Fox News Sunday.

"The run-up on prices doesn't have anything to do with any shortage of barrels of oil or natural gas. It's just fear and perception, the unknown that this could be some long, drawn-out crisis, but it won't be," Wright said.

After the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran on February 28, the Islamic Republic moved quickly to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway critical to the movement of oil around the world. About 20% of the globe's petroleum liquids pass through the Strait.

Although there are storage tanks across the Gulf, they are already nearing capacity after a week of conflict and limited shipping options, forcing producers to reduce operations. Iraq's oil output has shrunk by 60% since last week, Bloomberg reported. Other countries, like Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, have also reduced output.

All of this means higher gas prices for Americans. The US Energy Information Administration says gas prices averaged $2.93 on February 23. By March 2, they were at $3.15. On Sunday, they were $3.40.

During his media tour on Sunday, Wright said regular ship traffic through the Strait of Hurmoz could resume in "a few weeks," meaning gas prices could ease sooner rather than later.

"We want it back below $3 a gallon, and it will be again before too long," Wright told CNN's "State of the Union." "You never know exactly the timeframe of this, but, in the worst case, this is a weeks, this is not a months, thing."

• I met Nick in 2018, and we've been together ever since. We welcomed our first child in 2021.
• In 2022, I felt something was missing, and we decided to open up our relationship.
• Now our family has two children and three parents. We work hard to make sure we coparent well.

"What's the relationship between you guys?"

"Are you two brothers?"

"Is that your ex?"

These are just a few of the questions my family might get whenever someone tries to figure out exactly what's going on in our household.

For the past three years, I've had two romantic partners simultaneously. During that time, we've navigated toddlerhood, pregnancy, and now life with two kids — all under one roof.

People are often nervous to ask questions when they first hear about our situation. But I always say I'll answer anything asked with genuine curiosity. I know our life isn't typical, and most people have never met a woman with two male partners outside the pages of a spicy romance novel, but it works best for our family.

I went from a traditional relationship to a polyamorous household

I first met Nick in college in 2018, and we have been together ever since. The two of us have moved across the country (and back), gone through a miscarriage, job loss, and in 2021, we welcomed our first daughter.

But by late 2022, something felt off for me. I loved our life together, but I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing.

With my therapist's guidance, I started exploring the idea of an open relationship. It took me months to bring the topic up to Nick because I didn't want him to think I was unhappy or that he wasn't enough for me. To his credit, he met the idea with compassion and curiosity.

In April of 2023, I met Christian through a dating app. Right away, it became clear that he was someone I wanted in my life and as part of my family. His openness, which I had struggled to find elsewhere, felt natural and easy, even though this experience was a first for him as well.

Integrating a third partner, especially with a child, took time and effort. There were lots of conversations and logistical adjustments that we had to navigate together. There were awkward discussions and emotional growing pains. How do we tell our families about this? How do we explain this to our then 2-year-old? How do we mitigate jealousy? Where are we all going to sleep?

Then came the baby conversation again.

Parenting as a team of three

Even before Christian moved in, the decision to have a second baby was a big one for all of us. Nick and I wanted another child, but we also wanted to include Christian in the conversation. We talked through fears, hopes, and what this new chapter would mean for our family. It was a moment that underscored the importance of being honest, intentional, and aligned as a unit.

When Christian moved in a few months later, it required more adjustments. We moved into a three-bedroom apartment that could accommodate everyone, including my growing baby bump. We had to establish new routines, the aforementioned sleeping arrangements, and figure out how to integrate everyone into daily life.

When Christian came into our lives, our first child was only 2, so there wasn't too much we needed to explain to her. Now that she's 4, we've had more conversations about how Christian is her parent, just like mom and dad. She mostly calls him Christian or Tin Tin, but also acknowledges that he is her dad as well.

This last year has shown us that parenting together is our main focus and our strength. Details that used to send me into a logistical spiral now flow smoothly. Christian handles the morning routine for our now 4-year-old, while Nick takes charge at bedtime. We all share responsibility for the baby during the day, stepping in wherever needed. School drop-off and pickup vary depending on the day, and we coordinate those days carefully so nothing falls through the cracks.

We make a point to present a united front. If one parent says no, the others honor that decision (although our daughter has definitely taken advantage of the moments when we haven't compared notes yet). We all attend as many events as possible, including doctors' appointments, parent-teacher conferences, and birthday parties. Sometimes we rotate, sometimes we all go, but the message is clear: every parent is committed and present.

This teamwork makes life smoother and enables us to support one another emotionally. When one of us is exhausted, the others step in without hesitation. I believe the kids benefit from multiple perspectives, consistent attention, and a household where collaboration is consistently modeled.

Our life works well for us

People often assume polyamory is about romance or novelty, but for us, it has become about parenting, teamwork, and intentional communication. Our children are loved, supported, and surrounded by adults who show up for them and for each other.

Our oldest daughter does not question why she has three parents. To her, this is normal. When she draws family portraits, all three of us are always included, hand in hand.

For me, that is what family looks like. Not defined by tradition, but by love, presence, and shared responsibility.

The BNP Paribas Open is underway, marking the first 1000-level ATP and WTA tournament of the year on US soil. We've compiled everything you need to know about where to watch Indian Wells, including global live streaming options for today's top matches, including Eala vs. Gauff.

Indian Wells, aka the BNP Paribas Open, brings top talent from the ATP and WTA to Southern California. Both Jack Draper and Mirra Andreeva return to defend their titles. Other top ATP competitors participating in the tournament include Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Novak Djokovic, Alexander Zverev, Taylor Fritz, and Ben Shelton. Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Świątek, Coco Gauff, Naomi Osaka, Amanda Anisimova, Madison Keys, Jessica Pegula, and Alexandra Eala are among the most notable names from the WTA scheduled to hit the hard courts.

Below, we've outlined everything you need to know about tuning into BNP Paribas, including global live streaming options. The second and third rounds are happening this weekend, and we've listed some highlight matchups to look out for below as well.

• See also: How to watch Survivor 50 | Where to watch T20 World Cup | Where to watch MotoGP

Where to watch Indian Wells in the US

The Tennis Channel is the home of the Indian Wells tournament in the US. Coverage will be available across the flagship Tennis Channel and Tennis Channel 2 (T2). You can subscribe to the Tennis Channel service directly for $12 a month or get the networks through a live TV streaming service. Three of the best live TV streaming services we've tested are DirecTV, Fubo, and Sling TV.

The Tennis Channel is available through Fubo's budget-friendly Sports + News plan, which costs $56 a month. A subscription offers around 26 sports and news-centric channels and access to ESPN Unlimited. New users can get $10 off their first month after a five-day free trial. If you want both the Tennis Channel and T2, you'll need to opt for Fubo's Elite plan, which costs $84 a month ($54 in the first month) and carries over 200 channels.

The Tennis Channel and Tennis Channel 2 are available in DirecTV's Choice, Ultimate, and Premier plans. Choice carries 125+ channels, including pretty much everything found in a cable subscription. It also unlocks access to ESPN Unlimited. Subscriptions cost $95 a month, but you can get $10 a month off your first three months of service. Just keep in mind that regional sports fees will add a little extra month, and you'll see the estimated prices when you start the checkout process. New customers can get a five-day free trial.

Sling TV offers the Tennis Channel in its Sports Extra add-on, which you can tack onto a Sling Orange subscription. Sling Orange ($46 a month) carries ESPN and around 33 other channels. The Sports Extra add-on ($11 a month) mixes in a handful of other sports-centric networks. While this will run you $57 a month, there's also an option to get Sling Orange (and add-ons) in cheaper short-term packages, which can be good if you're only interested in watching one day, one weekend, or one week of matches. For example, you can get a single-day Sling Orange pass for $5 and the Sports Extra add-on for $1.

Where to watch Indian Wells in the UK

In the UK, the Indian Wells tournament will be available through Sky Sports. Prices vary from plan to plan, but you can learn more in our guide to the best Sky TV deals and plans. UK tennis fans can also stream the action through a NOW Sports subscription, with single-day passes going for £15.

How to watch Indian Wells from anywhere

Tennis fans traveling abroad can still access their usual watch options with the aid of a VPN, or virtual private network. VPNs are cybersecurity tools that let people temporarily change the virtual location of their devices. This way, they can access their usual websites and apps from anywhere, without being interrupted by travel plans. VPNs are also instant ways to boost online security and privacy. Since the services we've highlighted require country-specific payment methods, this option will work best for those who are just traveling away from home right now.

NordVPN is our go-to recommendation. It's a top-rated option with an impressive selection of global servers and a 30-day money-back guarantee. For a limited time, a new NordVPN deal will even let you snag a free Amazon gift card when you subscribe to select two-year plans. You can learn more about the service in our official NordVPN review.

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

• Scottlynn Krause and her mother created CS80 Vintage, an online vintage store based in Sacramento.
• They inherited a massive warehouse full of never-touched, vintage '80s sportswear from a family friend.
• They had 16 days to figure out what to do with it, so they started selling it online.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Scottlynn Krause, the co-owner of CS80 Vintage. It has been edited for length and clarity.

My best friend is Hannah, and her grandpa, Franz, owned a sporting goods store in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. When he went out of business, he boxed up his stock, and the unused items sat in a storage unit from 1990 until 2021.

In the summer of 2021, Hannah's mom called my mom, who is an organizer for hoarders, asking for help with the storage unit. She didn't know what to do with the stuff, and knew my mom had experience in that realm.

We did not expect to inherit his pristine '80s sportswear inventory

Hannah and her family said to do what we needed to do to get rid of it and take it off the property. We had 16 days to figure out what to do, because they wanted to list the house. We did not buy the inventory. It was a trade for removing it.

Originally, my mom wanted to turn everything in three months and be done with it. We were not a vintage-loving family back then, but we decided to try to sell it online. At first, it was my mom doing it all, but it was overwhelming. So I jumped in. I had (and still have) a full-time job in retail, so I feel like I see what happens with trends. Vintage had picked up, so it felt right.

The storage unit had thousands of items from well-known brands

It's really hard to put a number on how many items were in the storage unit. It was 10,000 pairs of shoes, 25,000 hats, 2,500 pairs of baseball pants, all in 1,000 square feet, all from a single store.

The brands Franz had were Nike, Adidas, Puma, Converse, Playboy, Pony, Champion, Wilson, and more. Teams were covered in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and collegiate sports.

It was such a large inventory; we weren't sure how to tackle it. It's all been very word-of-mouth. We had our first sale at a flea market in early 2022. We currently sell privately on social media and on our website, which went live in December 2025.

On the website, we do 25 items per drop, and do two drops a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays. It's first-come, first-served. Not all merchandise is on the website; it's about a tenth of what we have. So we're really selective with the drops because everything is so rare and special.

We store our inventory in an off-site warehouse. My mom and I go regularly to pull pieces, and it feels like a discovery every time. We never know what we are going to find. We then bring it to our studio, and I measure, photograph, and upload it to our website. My mom and I print the shipping labels, carefully pack each order, and ship everything ourselves, mostly early in the morning or late at night, squeezed in around our day jobs.

We've seen some really amazing items

Most of our items are one-of-a-kind, making them special. We might have one item in multiple sizes, but we don't have four large sizes of that item, for example. Starter jackets are our most sought-after item. And our sports fans are die-hard, so people are freaking out about certain items. I didn't grow up during this time period. It's been so special to see the DMs we get, like "I had this shirt when I was a kid, do you have it?"

We've sold unique pieces, like a Run-DMC collection still in its original packaging and a rare pair of 1980s Adidas boxing shoes reminiscent of the Rocky Balboa/Freddie Mercury era. A van load of clothing from our collection was used on set for a "Stranger Things" x Target commercial.

We've been having a blast doing it

My mom and dad met in a sporting goods store. He's a professional volleyball referee. My mom works as an organizer and is a photographer. I work in retail. All the pieces came together for us, giving us this gift. It was like winning the lotto.

Hannah's family loves watching it happen. I will send her pictures of stuff all the time. They are excited to see that his stuff is moving, going places, and getting a second life.

Our goal is to continue Franz's legacy by slowly placing these pieces with people who genuinely appreciate the memories, craftsmanship, and spirit of the 1980s. We're exploring ways to carry that energy forward, too. We eventually want to create our own products using our deadstock blanks to keep the 80s aesthetic and story alive for the new generation.

I love following nail art trends, but I've been burned before by a flashy set of press-ons made from paper-thin plastic. The bad ones peel and chip within hours, and the worst will leave your nail beds feeling raw and flaky. Thankfully, the latest innovations in press-on nail technology have greatly improved the whole experience, from application to removal.

At-home manicures are more accessible than ever. The top press-on nails I tested are durable, long-lasting, and natural-looking, and the best part is I achieved all this without spending hundreds at the salon.

Every press-on nail brand promises itself to be the best, but after trying over 25 sets, I found eight that are truly worth your time and money. The winner by far was Olive & June's press-on nails — they survived a whopping 18 days and are thicker than other sets, so they don't chip as easily.

How we tested press-on nails

To test each set, we used the glue that the set came with and applied the nails according to the directions, properly preparing our natural nails beforehand. We compared how long the packaging claimed the nails would last to how long they actually lasted, noting any chips or lifting along the way. Here are a few of the rules we followed:

1. If a nail came off within 24 hours of application, we gave it the benefit of the doubt and assumed there was a human error on my part, glued it back on, and waited until another nail fell off later. Once multiple nails started to disappear, we ended the test and moved to the next brand.

2. We only used the nail glue that the nails came with. However, if you really want your nails to last, buying an extra strong nail glue can help. We haven't tested any, but we saw this glue from Amazon referenced often while conducting our research.

3. If the set came with both adhesive and glue, I used the glue for the purpose of this test.

4. I always washed my hands thoroughly before applying and if the set came with alcohol wipes (most do), I used them.

The best press-on nails we tested:

Best overall: Olive & June - See at Olive & June

Best natural-looking: Mani Muse - See at Amazon

Best fit: Glamnetic - See at Amazon

Best designs: Chillhouse - See at Chillhouse

Easiest to apply: imPress Press on Manicures - See at imPress

Best drugstore: KISS Salon Acrylic - See at Amazon

Largest variety: The Nailest - See at The Nailest

Best for classic styles: Static Nails - See at Amazon

Best overall: Olive & June

Pros: Large range of nail sizes, affordable, long-lasting

Cons: Not a totally seamless fit at the cuticle

When it comes to the best press on nails, Olive & June takes the prize for longevity and size inclusivity. They offer a whopping 41 nails in 21 sizes, the largest range on the market by a long shot. These nails are incredibly thick and durable, had no chipping, and stayed put for 18 days — the longest amount of time press-ons have ever lasted on me. They did start to lift a bit at the cuticle after about a week; they still looked just as good, but I found my hair sometimes getting caught in them when I ran my fingers through it. Olive & June also boasts an affordable price range, with many sets priced around $10.

Check out the best Olive & June discount codes we tested in 2026.

Best natural-looking: Mani Muse

Pros: Natural-looking, lightweight

Cons: Not long-lasting, limited shape/design options

These nails are so comfortable and lightweight. They're also incredibly natural-looking; I had one friend even mistake them for my real nails. Founded in 2020, Mani Muse is a newer brand, so they have a more limited selection of designs and currently only offer round and almond-shaped nails. They only lasted a few days on me, but I would still repurchase them as they look so natural and are a great option if you need a quick manicure for an event.

Best fit: Glamnetic

Pros: Natural-looking, large assortment of nails/sizes

Cons: Higher price point, some chipping

Glamnetic has the best press-on nails for a natural, comfortable fit. They fit so well at the cuticle and the application process is seamless. Glamnetic also has a great assortment of designs and offers shorter lengths. I found this set to be very durable and lasted a full two weeks with no lifting, though there was some chipping of the polish after about a week.

Best designs: Chillhouse

Pros: Trendy designs, comfortable fit

Cons: Higher price point, some lifting, pattern availability changes

Thanks to the eye-catching designs, these are the best press-on nails to wear if you want to receive tons of compliments. Chillhouse press-ons strike the perfect balance between being trendy and fun while still being wearable enough for everyday. This particular set is also shorter in length, so they are a great option for those who don't like the feeling of wearing long nails. While these nails did last me 10 days, they're not the most durable set I've worn. I experienced some lifting/cracking around the cuticle of one nail around the 7-day mark, but it never fully lifted or fell off.

Easiest to apply: imPress Press on Manicures

Pros: Super easy to apply, lots of options for short manicures

Cons: Adhesive system doesn't last as long as glue

imPress nails don't come with glue but instead have their own adhesive built in, so these are perfect for the person who is new to press-on nails. I found that the Impress adhesive is much stronger than the adhesives that come with brands that offer glue as well. Also, I noticed Impress has a wider variety of designs for short nail manicures, which is something to consider if you're not used to wearing longer styles.

Best drugstore: KISS Salon Acrylic

Pros: Inexpensive, available at the drugstore, durable

Cons: Some bubbling

These nails fit very seamlessly at the cuticle, making them look extremely natural and feel comfortable. I also appreciate the thickness and durability of these nails. I didn't experience any chipping or lifting throughout the 7 days I wore them. They really do feel and perform like acrylic nails. Because this particular design is sheer, I did notice some slight bubbling of the glue underneath (the packaging claims "no bubbling"), but that could have been due to my application technique or the ridges/uneven texture on my nails.

Largest variety: The Nailest

Pros: Big selection of shapes and designs, thicker than other brands

Cons: Some reviewers say that they run small

The Nailest has the largest variety of nails of all the brands I tested. Of their instant acrylic sets (read-to-ship) they have pretty much any shape, length, color, and finish you can imagine, and they also offer handcrafted sets painted with at least 5 layers of gel polish. They're thicker quality and way sturdier than most press-on nails. As with other brands, I'd recommend not following the directions to apply glue on the faux and natural nails because it results in excess glue, making the nails messy/sticky.

Best for classic styles: Static Nails

Pros: Great for French manicures and unfussy designs

Cons: Instructions a little misleading

Static Nails are reusable pop-on manicures in five shapes: round, coffin, square, almond, and stiletto and are known for their approachable styles in solid colors and multi-colored French manis. Static also comes with light pink glue, which was helpful, but I thought the directions called for too much nail glue. I followed the directions, which said to apply a thin layer of glue to the back of the Static Nail and then a "generous" layer of glue to the natural nail, but I ended up with glue all over the place and on the top of the nail which damaged it.

What to look for in a press-on nail set

Length: When choosing a length of press-on nails, consider your day-to-day routine. Do you prefer shorter nails, or are you looking for a more elongated style? If you're not used to having long nails or you often work with your hands, for example, they may not be the right style for everyday use. You can file or clip press-on nails, but definitely proceed with caution, as it may cause damage if you're too aggressive.

Shape: There are many different shapes of press-on nails: oval, round, almond, square, stiletto, and coffin. The shape of the nail will certainly impact the comfort level. For example, a stiletto shape is far more likely to get caught on an open knit than an oval shape. The best part is that press-on kits likely come in a shape that excites you and is incredibly easy to interchange, so if you find you don't like one, you can always try another.

FAQs on press-on nails

How do you remove press-on nails safely?

Soak your nails in warm soapy water or cuticle oil for 10-15 minutes. Once they start to feel loose, you can gently wiggle them off. Avoid ripping or forcing them off to prevent nail damage.

How long do press-on nails last?

Most press-ons last about five to 10 days, depending on the adhesive used and how well they're applied. Glue usually lasts longer than adhesive tabs, and proper prep (like cleaning and buffing your nails) can also help.

Do press-on nails damage your natural nails?

When applied and removed properly, press-on nails are less damaging than acrylics or gels. The key is to avoid prying them off, no matter how tempting. Instead, soak them in warm soapy water or use an oil-based remover to loosen the adhesive.

Are press-on nails reusable?

Yes, a lot of press-ons can be reused; you just have to remove them gently and clean off any remaining glue so they can be reapplied later.

What's the difference between adhesive tabs and nail glue?

Adhesive tabs are gentler on nails and allow for shorter wear (a few days), making them ideal for temporary use. Nail glue creates a stronger bond for longer wear but requires more careful removal to prevent damage.

Can you shower, cook, or do chores with press-on nails?

Yes, but keep in mind that water, heat, and heavy use of your hands can shorten their lifespan. If you want them to last, wear gloves when cleaning or doing dishes, and avoid prolonged soaking in water.

How do you apply press-on nails correctly?

1. Clean your natural nails with soap and water.
2. Push back cuticles and lightly buff the nail surface.
3. Wipe nails with rubbing alcohol to remove oils.
4. Apply adhesive tab or glue.
5. Press the nail firmly for at least 10-15 seconds and longer if needed.

What sizes do press-on nails come in?

Most sets include multiple sizes to fit different nail beds, and you can file or trim them for a better fit. Some brands offer customizable or "universal fit" nails that may require a bit of extra trimming and shaping.

Are press-on nails better than acrylics or gel manicures?

It depends on your needs. Press-ons are faster, cheaper, and gentler on nails, while acrylics and gels last longer. Press-ons are great for occasional use or quick style changes, and they're typically healthier for your nails.

• Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic this week, designating the AI startup as a supply chain risk.
• Dario Amodei criticized the Trump administration for bias against Anthropic due to a lack of political donations.
• Other tech leaders, including Tim Cook, have navigated relations with the Trump administration.

On Thursday, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, effectively blacklisting the AI startup from doing business with the US government.

In a recent internal memo, obtained by The Information, CEO Dario Amodei said the Trump administration opposes the company because it hasn't donated to the president or offered the kind of "dictator-style" praise he said competitors had.

Sometimes, the solution to a problem is right in front of you. If Dario wants to get off the Pentagon's naughty list, he can just follow the lead of more experienced tech leaders who have managed to stay in the administration's good graces — like Apple CEO Tim Cook.

There's a serious point to this: many Big Tech CEOs think their jobs are to make money for shareholders. This involves making compromises. It's tough sometimes, but other tech CEOs have done it, with Cook perhaps being the GOAT Trump whisperer.

Here's a multi-step plan based on what's worked for other Big Tech CEOs.

Watch that documentary

Go to the White House and watch the Melania documentary. Or otherwise be seen widely to be watching the Melania documentary. In January, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, along with founder Jeff Bezos, Tim "Apple," AMD's Lisa Su, and Zoom's Eric Yuan attended a screening. It's only about two hours of your life, Dario.

Gong time

Give President Trump an obviously valuable gong thing. In August, Cook went to the Oval Office and presented President Trump with an inscribed piece of Apple-produced glass made in Kentucky that sits upon a 24k gold base made in Utah to celebrate the tech giant's "American Manufacturing Program." Apple has gotten tariff exemptions. It's unclear if the gift influenced any decisions, but lemme put it this way: The gong probably didn't hurt!

Praise, praise, praise

Lavish praise on the president in a public way. During a keynote speech at a major Nvidia conference in October, CEO Jensen Huang effusively praised Trump, saying the President's energy policies deserved credit for ensuring that massive AI data centers would have enough energy to power them.

Praise while dining

Attend a dinner or another event with Trump, and also praise him. In September, Google CEO Sundar Pichai attended a high-profile White House dinner hosted by the president, where the Google CEO thanked the administration for "constructive dialogue" in relation to the company's antitrust case. And check out this recent video of SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell praising Trump at a recent White House meeting to launch the president's data center energy initiative, where AI companies pledged to pay for their own power.

Ding rivals

If possible, slip in a dig at President Biden or President Obama, or both. At a tech conference in Taipei last year, Nvidia's Jensen Huang criticized the Biden administration's export controls on AI chips to China.

Unveil a big Trump-aligned initiative

Announce an Anthropic initiative that supports one of the president's top priorities. If this project were something Anthropic would do anyway, don't worry. Other tech companies have done that, too. Stargate was announced as a bold new $500 billion project in early 2025 at a White House event. But bits of the plan were already in motion as parts of tech companies' existing data center buildout strategies.

Mar-a-Lago is calling

Visit Mar-a-Lago. The weather in Florida right now is probably great. You can fly direct from SFO, business class, and make it back to San Francisco by the next day. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the trip in late 2024, after Trump was elected president for the second time. Trump once threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison, but not anymore.

$$$$$

You mentioned this one in your own memo, according to The Information. Give money to Trump-related causes. OpenAI President Greg Brockman has donated to Trump, and just think of it as a small investment in Anthropic's future. It doesn't cost much, and I'm sure you have some spare cash, with Anthropic's valuation soaring past $300 billion recently. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other tech companies donated to Trump's inauguration fund, for example, mostly giving $1 million each. That was a missed opportunity for you. There will be others.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

If you're shopping for a new soundbar, Sonos is probably on your radar. The best Sonos soundbars are known for delivering excellent audio, but the right pick really depends on your space, budget, and what kind of experience you're after. To help you find the perfect fit, I tested every Sonos soundbar currently available and ranked them for different needs.

If you want the best of the best, the Sonos Arc Ultra is my top pick. It's a premium option, but you're paying for seriously immersive Dolby Atmos surround sound and Sonos' Sound Motion technology, which delivers deep bass without requiring a separate subwoofer. In other words, it sounds cinematic right out of the box. On the other hand, if you're tight on space or just want to spend less, the Sonos Ray is a solid alternative. It's not going to match the Arc Ultra's theater-like punch, but it's compact, more affordable, and perfect for apartments, bedrooms, or smaller living rooms.

Every Sonos soundbar works through the company's mobile app. You can fine-tune your audio settings, stream music, and eventually build out a whole multi-room system if you want. A major app redesign in 2024 had a rocky start, but most of the major bugs have been fixed. As it stands, the best Sonos soundbars deliver a strong listening experience, especially if you like the idea of expanding your setup over time.

Our top picks for the best Sonos soundbars

Best overall: Sonos Arc Ultra - See at Amazon

Best on a budget: Sonos Ray - See at Amazon

Best midrange model: Sonos Beam (Gen 2) - See at Amazon

Best subwoofer add-on: Sonos Sub 4 - See at Amazon

Best rear speaker add-on: Sonos Era 300 - See at Amazon

Best overall

The Arc Ultra is the best Sonos soundbar available. It replaces the brand's first-generation Arc, introduced in 2020, and delivers several improvements. The Ultra is an absolute beast of an audio system, perfect for anyone seeking a powerful, all-in-one soundbar with deep bass.

This single soundbar unit can produce up to 9.1.4 channels of Dolby Atmos surround sound. It also has dedicated up-firing audio drivers to bounce sound off your ceiling, resulting in audio coming from all around the room, including above your head. In my tests, the Arc Ultra delivered an incredibly immersive experience, whether watching movies or listening to music. The sound is so expansive that I had a hard time believing it all came from just one device under my TV.

One of the Arc Ultra's secret ingredients is its Sound Motion driver. This component packs a four-motor woofer into a compact space, offering deeper bass than the original Arc without increasing the soundbar's size. The Sound Motion driver can't quite match the performance of a dedicated subwoofer, but it adds more low-end presence and depth to movies and shows, delivering a full, rich quality that few stand-alone soundbars can match.

The Arc Ultra also has exceptional dialogue clarity. The device offers an optional AI speech enhancement mode, but I rarely had to use it because the bar's internal drivers are already so well-tuned to deliver clear speech. If you do find yourself needing an extra boost, the speech enhancement emphasizes dialogue even more without muddying explosions or altering other sound effects. It offers four levels of adjustments to choose from, including one designed for listeners with hearing loss

On the downside, the Arc Ultra is Sonos' most expensive soundbar, and it's disappointing that it doesn't support DTS:X, another 3D audio format that rivals Dolby Atmos. It also lacks HDMI video passthrough, so you can't use the bar to route extra devices to your TV, like a gaming console or streaming player. But these shortcomings are small compared to all the Arc Ultra gets right. If you want a single, powerful speaker for your living room that handles all your home theater needs, the Arc Ultra is the best Sonos soundbar.

Read our Sonos Arc Ultra soundbar review.

Check out our guide to all of the best soundbars and best Dolby Atmos soundbars.

Best on a budget

Thanks to its affordable price and compact size, the Sonos Ray is the best Sonos soundbar for bedrooms, apartments, and other small spaces. It's less than half the width of the Arc Ultra and a few inches shorter and narrower than the Beam (Gen 2). But despite its small footprint, it easily outperforms the built-in speakers on most TVs — especially budget models.

Audio quality is smooth and surprisingly robust for its size. You won't get the deep bass or advanced effects found on Sonos' higher-end soundbars, but the Ray still delivers an impressively detailed sound profile that brings movies and shows to life.

Music streaming over WiFi sounds great as well and offers better fidelity than Bluetooth. Still, it's disappointing that the Ray doesn't include Bluetooth at all, which would be handy when WiFi isn't available.

Wired connectivity is another limitation. There's no HDMI port — just an optical input. This does mean it has wide compatibility among older televisions, but the Ray can't support lossless audio, Dolby Atmos, or automatic remote syncing.

Still, even with those trade-offs, the Ray remains a strong value. Its compact stature hides a level of audio performance that exceeds expectations at this price.

Check out our guide to all of the best budget soundbars.

Best midrange model

The Sonos Beam (Gen 2) serves as a middle ground between the brand's flagship Arc Ultra and entry-level Ray. It's powerful enough to fill a medium-sized space with sound, but it's not significantly larger than the Ray, so it still works well in a bedroom or smaller living room. (That's where I predominantly use it.)

Beyond size, the midrange Beam really differentiates itself from the cheaper Sonos Ray by adding an HDMI eARC port and Dolby Atmos support. This means it automatically works with many modern TV remotes and offers a wider soundstage. For under $500, the Beam punches well above its weight class. It's a proper home theater-in-a-box, perfect for most living rooms or other areas that could use an audio upgrade.

While the Beam supports decoding multi-channel audio formats with boisterous, vibrant performance, it doesn't feature any up-firing drivers. Instead, it relies on virtual processing to simulate overhead audio, which isn't as effective. As a result, you won't get the same kind of atmospheric overhead sound effects as you would on the more expensive Arc Ultra.

Still, movies sound impactful, and the Beam fills my space well, even at a volume below 50%. "Dune" is a great showcase for the Beam, with booming effects and a drum-heavy soundtrack that pounds along.

Music also sounds rich and full. It's impressive enough to serve as the DJ for home gatherings. Streaming music via WiFi through the Sonos app works well and supports a vast array of services. The soundbar also supports AirPlay for an even more immediate listening experience. That said, like the Ray, the Beam is missing Bluetooth support.

Best subwoofer add-on

If you crave more bass, the best add-on for your Sonos soundbar is a subwoofer, specifically the Sonos Sub 4. It can wirelessly connect to the Ray, Beam, or Arc Ultra, so you can hide it in the back of a room or even on its side under a couch.

The subwoofer's force-canceling drivers produce deep, commanding bass for intense, dramatic effect during movies. But the woofer never becomes unwieldy in reverberations or rattling.

If you're an especially big bass head, you can even pair the Sonos Sub 4 with a second Sub 4 or Sub 3 unit. You can learn more about dual subwoofer compatibility on the Sonos website.

Given its premium performance, the Sub 4 works best with an Arc Ultra, though you can still use it with the smaller Beam or Ray. But for those more compact bars, the less expensive Sonos Sub Mini is a great alternative. It's not ported, so it doesn't have the same audio characteristics as the Sub 4 — it's a little tighter and more punchy — but it can still add extra dimension to your home theater setup.

Best rear speaker add-on

The Sonos Era 300 is built to work as a stand-alone wireless speaker or as an add-on speaker for select Sonos soundbars. Two Era 300 units can be paired to serve as rear speakers with an Arc Ultra or Beam, creating a true surround sound experience. (The Ray is not compatible with the Era 300.)

The Era 300 features built-in drivers that fire in all directions, including upward. This allows it to provide Dolby Atmos support with audio effects that bounce off your ceiling. If you have a Beam (Gen 2) or an Arc Ultra, the Era 300 will work with them to deliver an even more convincing sense of overhead audio and a wider Dolby Atmos soundstage.

However, adding a pair of Era 300 speakers to your Sonos soundbar setup does require a fair amount of physical space, and they're a bit pricey.

If that's a problem for your room and budget, a pair of smaller, cheaper Era 100 speakers can also do a solid job as wireless rear speakers. The Era 100 also has the added bonus of working with the Sonos Ray. That said, the Era 100 lacks up-firing Dolby Atmos drivers, so its audio quality isn't as robust as the Era 300's.

How we test Sonos soundbars

I've been testing Sonos soundbars since the company's first model, the Playbar, launched back in 2013, so I've spent a lot of time with pretty much everything Sonos has released. For this guide, I went hands-on with every Sonos soundbar currently available to figure out which ones make the most sense for different use cases.

To keep things fair, I paired each soundbar with the same TV. That made it easier to hear how they performed on their own and directly compare them in the exact same setup. I paid close attention to audio quality, size, connectivity options, software features, and overall ease of use.

I didn't just test them in one spot, either. I used the best Sonos soundbars in various rooms around my house to see how they performed in different spaces. Most of my evaluations focused on movie watching, especially films with high-quality surround-sound mixes, but I also spent time with sitcoms and older movies to hear how they handled simpler audio tracks and lower-quality sources. For music testing, I streamed from my phone and used the Apple Music app on my Apple TV.

For connections, I used HDMI eARC whenever possible to get the best audio quality. The only exception was the Sonos Ray, which relies on a digital optical connection instead.

Meet the expert behind this guide:

Tyler Hayes, contributing reporter: I've been covering tech for more than a decade and reviewing audio gear for Business Insider since 2019, so I've spent a lot of time figuring out what actually makes a soundbar worth your money. When I test them, I focus on the basics first: does it genuinely sound better than your TV's built-in speakers? From there, I dig into the details like clarity, bass performance, surround sound features, and how easy everything is to use day to day. For this guide, I took a close look at Sonos' entire soundbar lineup and compared each model not only to other Sonos options, but to similarly priced competitors. My aim is to help you pick the right Sonos soundbar for your space, your budget, and how you actually like to watch and listen.

Learn more about the Reviews team at Business Insider.

Sonos soundbars FAQs

Will Sonos release new soundbars in 2026?

Unlike other tech product categories, such as phones and TVs, new soundbar models aren't always released annually. With that in mind, it's not yet clear if Sonos will launch any new soundbar models for 2026. However, we can gain some insights by looking at the brand's previous release history.

The Sonos Arc Ultra was released in 2024, while its predecessor, the standard Sonos Arc, was introduced in 2020. Given the four-year gap between models, it's unlikely we'll see a new Arc model in 2026.

The Sonos Beam (Gen 2) was released in 2021, while its predecessor, the Beam (Gen 1), was released in 2018. The Sonos Ray was released in 2022. Given their age, both the Beam and Ray could be due for upgrades, so it's possible new models are in the works. However, nothing has been confirmed.

Can you use a Sonos soundbar for music?

Yes, Sonos soundbars work great for music, and you can access services like Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon Music through the Sonos app. The best Sonos soundbars also integrate with other Sonos speakers, so you can build a whole-home music system over time.

Can you wall-mount a Sonos soundbar?

Yes, all of the best Sonos soundbars featured in this guide support wall mounting. Sonos offers mounts designed for each model, but you can also find third-party options that are less expensive. Mounting your soundbar can help declutter your setup, especially if you have limited space on your TV console.

Can you pair a subwoofer to a Sonos soundbar?

All of Sonos's current soundbars work with the brand's Sub 4 or Sub Mini subwoofers. The flagship Sonos Arc Ultra even supports dual subwoofers using the Sub 4 or Sub 3 for deeper bass. Just note that Sonos soundbars don't support subwoofers from other brands.

If you prefer a soundbar that comes with a subwoofer out of the box, check out our guide to the best soundbars with subwoofers.

Can you pair rear speaker units to a Sonos soundbar?

Sonos soundbars can connect to certain Sonos speakers to create a larger surround sound system. You can pair two Sonos Era 100 speakers with the Arc Ultra, Beam (Gen 2), or Ray for wireless rear channels. The Beam and Arc Ultra also support pairing with Sonos Era 300 speakers for an even more immersive Dolby Atmos audio experience.

If you're looking for a soundbar or speaker system that already includes dedicated rear satellites, see our guide to the best surround sound systems.

Can you pair Sonos soundbars with the Sonos Ace headphones?

Yes, the Sonos Arc Ultra, Beam, and Ray all support the brand's TV Swap feature. This lets you wirelessly connect your Sonos Ace headphones to your soundbar and switch between them seamlessly while watching TV. It's a handy way to enjoy late-night movies without disturbing anyone else.

Can Sonos soundbars play Dolby Atmos surround sound?

Both the Sonos Arc Ultra and Sonos Beam (Gen 2) support Dolby Atmos. However, only the Ultra has up-firing audio drivers to produce overhead Atmos sound effects. In contrast, the Beam uses processing to simulate overhead sounds, which isn't as convincing.

To learn more about the format, check out our Dolby Atmos guide.

Is the Sonos app reliable?

Sonos released a new mobile app in May 2024, and many customers reported issues, including glitches and missing features. However, the company has since fixed many of those problems.

When reviewing the Arc Ultra, we encountered minor issues with delayed speaker switching, but didn't encounter any major bugs. Though the Sonos app still isn't perfect, its lingering flaws aren't big enough to be a dealbreaker.

Is Sonos better than Bose?

Sonos and Bose make excellent soundbars, but which one is better depends on your specific needs.

Based on our testing, the high-end Sonos Arc Ultra outperforms the Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar in terms of bass performance. Meanwhile, the midrange Bose Smart Soundbar beats the Sonos Beam in Dolby Atmos capabilities due to its up-firing drivers.

At the entry level, the Sonos Ray and the Bose TV Speaker are more evenly matched, offering very similar audio quality. However, we like that the Sonos Ray has WiFi streaming support, which the Bose lacks. That said, some buyers may prefer the Bose model because it has an HDMI port, which the Ray lacks.

Both brands support multi-room audio, but their ecosystems don't mix, so it's best to stick with one. You can learn more about Bose's speakers in our guide to the best Bose soundbars.

What other audio products does Sonos sell?

In addition to soundbars, Sonos sells wireless speakers, including the Sonos Era 100, Era 300, Move 2, Roam 2, and Five. The brand also sells over-ear headphones called the Sonos Ace.

Check out our guide to the best Bluetooth speakers and best smart speakers for more Sonos speaker recommendations.

• I'm an American who's traveled to 18 European countries throughout my life.
• Although I love exploring capitals, some of my favorite trips have been to smaller European cities.
• Two of my favorites are Cassis, France, and Tarragona, Spain.

Throughout my life, I've visited a total of 18 European countries.

That number climbed quickly when I moved from Chicago to London for college and spent four years living in my favorite city, thrilled by my newfound proximity to so many bucket-list destinations. Jumping on a two-and-a-half-hour train ride to Paris or a 45-minute flight to Amsterdam never got old.

As I've explored big and small cities, I've been increasingly drawn to destinations beyond the major capitals that feel intimate and uncrowded. The more I've traveled, the more I've wanted to slow down.

Here are five underrated destinations in Europe I'd return to in a heartbeat.

Cassis, France, is a postcard seaside town with access to a national park.

When I stopped in Cassis during a December 2025 Mediterranean cruise, I was immediately charmed by the fishing port's cafés, bakeries, and wine bars.

The natural beauty alone is a draw. Part of Calanques National Park, which stretches between Marseille and La Ciotat, falls in Cassis. Approaching the towering limestone inlets feels like being in the middle of a canyon, and I desperately wanted to plunge into the impossibly blue seawater.

Plage de la Grande Mer, a family-friendly public beach, is in the center of Cassis, and it was brimming with locals during my excursion. Although I didn't get a chance to summit Cap Canaille, one of the highest sea cliffs in Europe at over 1,300 feet, visitors can climb it for panoramic views over the Mediterranean.

Whether you decide to embrace the town's nature-based activities or bask on its restorative beaches, it's an unassuming, slow-paced spot to immerse yourself in the South of France's magic.

Tarragona, Spain, is perfect for a relaxed beach day away from Barcelona's hustle and bustle.

A little more than an hour's drive or train ride south of the Catalan capital along Spain's Golden Coast, Tarragona is a fascinating mix of historic Roman ruins, stunning beaches, and vibrant culture.

During one visit, a friend and I stopped in Tarragona for lunch at Osteria del Lab, where we indulged in the five-course tasting menu. Every dish was excellent, but the standout was a fresh shrimp-and-octopus salad drizzled with balsamic vinegar.

We walked around and stopped at the Catedral de Tarragona, a Romanesque and Gothic church built between the 12th and 14th centuries located in the center of the historic city.

Of course, we couldn't skip the beach. I visited Playa el Miracle, which is within walking distance of the train station. Even when I was there in July, the middle of summer, I didn't see many people.

If you're in search of a peaceful day by the water, Tarragona is worth a trip.

I skipped the summertime crowds in Skiathos, Greece.

I've been to several Greek islands including Rhodes, Crete, and Naxos, so I decided to check out Skiathos, which is tucked away in the Sporades island chain.

I went in the fall, hoping that the summer crowds would have dispersed by then. Luckily, they had.

The island was an easy 40-minute flight from Athens, and once I arrived, public buses made it easy to hop between beaches —Skiathos has 60!

I recommend Achladies Beach, a laid-back beach just a 10-minute drive from the main town, or Koukounaries Beach, a 22-minute drive south, for its natural beauty.

Wine lovers should stop by Phàos World to try natural wines. When I was there, I sampled a curated selection based on my palate and received a detailed tasting sheet with notes about each wine.

Lucca, Italy, is a picturesque city in the Tuscany region, known for its fresh pasta and scenic views.

After a 30-minute bus ride from Pisa, I arrived in Lucca and walked through the city's Renaissance-era walls into the historic center.

I found it to be the perfect place to wander in December, and because many roads were blocked off to cars, it felt very peaceful.

Within the walls, there are Romanesque churches and striking medieval towers. I started at Guinigi Tower, where visitors can climb to the top for panoramic views of terracotta rooftops and rolling Tuscan hills.

Afterward, I wandered along the city walls, where I admired colorful murals, and dined at Osteria da Pasqualino, where I enjoyed fettuccine with cream of zucchini and prawns with lemon, along with an afternoon glass of wine in a beautiful courtyard.

Clothing shops and gelaterias surround Lucca's charming squares. When I was there, there were hardly any crowds, and the city felt cinematic.

Innsbruck, Austria, is a dreamy mountain town brimming with history.

Innsbruck is situated in the heart of the Austrian Alps, about two hours from Munich, Germany, by train or car. When I arrived during a December road trip with my aunt, I felt like I was stepping into an enchanted snow globe.

We wandered the many cobblestone, shop-lined alleyways, embracing the slow magic of winter in the Alps.

During our visit, we rode the Innsbrucker Nordkettenbahnen cable cars to ascend Hafelekar, a mountain peak known as the "Top of Innsbruck." In less than 30 minutes, we were looking out at panoramic views of snowcapped peaks.

For a bit of culture and history, we toured Schloss Ambras, a Renaissance castle that houses an impressive armory and glass collection. It was the perfect way to end our day surrounded by centuries of art, all set against the breathtaking backdrop of the Alps.

No one likes getting up in the morning — unless you're an early bird — but a good alarm clock makes waking up just a little easier. We've tried dozens of alarm clocks, from the gentle, gradual mornings of sunrise alarm clocks to silent alarm clocks for waking up without disturbing the entire household. Regardless of your personal alarm tastes, we've picked out the best alarm clocks for every type of sleeper.

When choosing an alarm clock, considering your sleep needs is a must. "Light sleepers may want as few distractions and artificial light as possible," said Alex Dimitriu, MD, the founder of Menlo Park Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine. "Deep sleepers may want an alarm that is loud or gradually loud, possibly with light or a sunrise simulator to facilitate waking up from a deep slumber."

Whether you're a light or heavy sleeper, we've found the best alarm clocks on the market. Our top pick is The Loftie, a sleek smart alarm with features like an adjustable nightlight and Bluetooth speakers. For heavy sleepers, we recommend the Sonic Bomb Alarm Clock, a downright boisterous alarm featuring vibrations, flashing lights, and loud sounds.

You can also read more about how Business Insider Reviews tests home products here.

Our top picks for the best alarm clocks

Best overall: The Loftie - See at Amazon

Best smart: Hatch Restore 3 - See at Hatch

Best sunrise: Philips SmartSleep Wake-Up Light - See at Amazon

Best for heavy sleepers: Sonic Alert Sonic Bomb Dual Extra-Loud Alarm Clock with Bed Shaker - See at Amazon

Best for kids: Hatch Rest+ 2nd Gen - See at Amazon

Best overall

What sets the Loftie apart from other best alarm clocks is its two-phase alarm system. The first alarm is a gentle tone that helps my body and mind wake up slowly. The second is a louder melody that gets me out of bed. This method is effective in reducing sleep inertia (morning grogginess).

Since its launch, Loftie has added more sounds, alarms, and new features. It works as a white noise machine, Bluetooth speaker, and sleep timer. You can set multiple alarms from the device and choose the type of sounds you want to wake up to. With only three buttons at the top, it's simple to use.

The Loftie was designed to break the bad habit of scrolling through your phone during your bedtime and morning routines. Instead of looking at social media right before bed, I enjoyed falling asleep to the Loftie's included breathing techniques, sound baths, and bedtime stories. The display dims automatically as the night progresses, and a warm amber glow serves as a gentle, adjustable nightlight.

Setting up the clock includes downloading the required Loftie app (available for iOS or Android). For the most part, you can do everything on the device and stay out of the app, unless it's time for an update.

Overall, the Loftie did a fantastic job at waking me up on time every day in the most pleasant way possible.

Best smart

The Hatch Restore 3 is the best smart alarm clock, with a sunrise display, a library of content that span classic alarm sounds to original bed time stories, app connectivity and customizable alarm settings.

Experts recommend avoiding using your phone before bed, but using it to program your alarm clock is certainly handy. With the accompanying app (available on iOS or Android), you can program your Hatch Restore, including display colors and sounds. You can even set a routine, if you find yourself gravitating towards a certain meditation or sleep story at bedtime. The app is free, but you'll have to upgrade to Hatch+ ($49.99 yearly or $4.99 monthly) to unlock extra features.

One of the best parts of the Hatch Restore 3 is its versatility — the included app is handy, but you can also control it with the buttons directly on the clock. It's easy to set it up in advance, then put your phone away and for an easy, tech-free experience the next morning.

Besides smart capabilities, the Hatch Restore is a gorgeous alarm clock with a huge array of features, including 50 sounds and 18 colors, for a personalized wake-up experience, whether you prefer a sunrise or sound-based alarm. The only thing it's missing is Bluetooth capabilities or radio.

Read our Hatch Restore 3 review.

Best sunrise

If you are really looking to set up a morning and night routine, the Phillips SmartSleep Wake-Up Light is a great pick for intuitive sleepers that want to start analyzing their sleeping habits. With the ability to customize which sounds and lights to wake up and wind down with, you are able to relax more naturally during your sleep routine.

While testing, I woke up refreshed each morning. The snooze function is simple: just tap anywhere on the clock to snooze your alarm and sleep for nine more minutes. You probably won't need to snooze it, though, since the gradually increasing warm glow wakes you up naturally.

Read our full Philips SmartSleep Connected Wake-Up Light review.

Best for heavy sleepers

With its puck-shaped shaker, the Sonic Bomb Extra-Loud Alarm Clock uses a powerful vibration to help ensure that you wake up on time. It's very abrupt, so it won't rouse you gently, keep this in mind when considering your favorite alarm clock pick.

Vibration alarms might work well for people who have trained themselves to sleep through sound alarms or who can't hear them. You put the puck under your mattress, and you'll feel an intense buzz when your alarm goes off. Even through my very thick mattress, I felt the alarm vibrating on the other side of the bed. I could also hear the sound of it shaking, too. If you're trying not to wake your partner, this isn't a great solution.

For a budget alarm clock, the Sonic Bomb is fairly customizable. You can choose only the vibration, just a buzzing sound, or combine them. There are a few options for the buzzer's tone, and you can turn the flashing lights on or off.

You can also change the snooze duration, which isn't always something you find on similarly priced alarm clocks.

One big drawback is that you have to remember to between the two alarms if you don't want a weekday alarm going off on the weekend. There's no way to set the alarms for specific days, but you can have them both go off every day.

Best for kids

The Hatch Rest+ 2nd Gen is an all-in-one device that works as a night light, white noise machine, and alarm. Older kids can also use it as their first alarm clock.

For toddlers who are early risers, adults can set the Rise+ to turn a certain color when it's OK for kids to get out of bed. Business Insider Reviews contributor Alicia Betz likes this feature that's popular with a lot of parents. You can turn off the sound so it's less likely to wake anyone who's still sleeping. When kids get a little older and need to get up for school, a combination of sound and light can help gently awaken them at the right time.

While the device is pricey, it does have a nice built-in library of 18 free sounds. The nine different color options can also signal to them it's time to start winding down for the night and stay as a night light as well. With over eight hours of battery, it can even be removed from the base to be used as a portable night light.

All said, for full use of the Hatch Rest+ 2nd Gen, you'll need a Hatch+ subscription. The subscription, which is $4.99 a month, extends the clock's sound and light library. Most functionality is through the app, and the Rest+ does require WiFi to set up.

What to look for in an alarm clock

I spoke with sleep expert Alex Dimitriu, MD, founder of Menlo Park Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine, and relied on my own experience as a sleep researcher and certified sleep science consultant to write this guide.

Alarm tone: Your alarm clock should wake you up the way you want to wake up. If you want to wake up gently you should choose one of our best alarm clock picks that has soothing sounds. On the other hand, if you are a heavy sleeper you are going to want to go with one of our alarm clock picks that has louder sounds.

Aesthetics and size: An alarm clock should seamlessly fit into your room and its style. Your alarm clock should not be a focal point, so try to pick an option that blends into the colors or style of your bedroom.

Source of power: If your nightstand isn't near an outlet you should look into wireless or battery operated alarm clocks. Make sure the alarm clock you purchase fits into your current lifestyle and habits, not the other way around.

Durability: You want something that's long lasting, reliable, and overall a good investment. Depending on your sleeping habits and how much you want to spend, a simple alarm clock could be a perfect fit for you. If you want something with added features and perks, you are probably going to spend more money.

Extra features: Bluetooth compatibility, sleep tracking, multiple charging ports, and radio, are not included with most alarm clocks. If you are looking for these extras, make sure to check out the features before buying.

How we test alarm clocks

Our testing procedures

For this guide, I tested eight of the best alarm clocks and evaluated them on the following criteria:

Setup: For each alarm clock, I noted how easy or difficult it was to set up the time and alarms and how helpful the instructions were.

Performance: I used each alarm clock for a minimum of three consecutive days to get used to the routine and noted how effective they were in waking me up on time.

Alarm sound: I carefully assessed each alarm's volume and sound selection and noted whether it was a gradual melodic tune and loud enough to wake up heavy sleepers.

Extra features: I tested any additional features of each alarm clock, including Bluetooth integration, sleep timers, apps, projectors, and voice-control features.

Durability: I tested and noted how durable and resistant each was by knocking them off my nightstand to see if they were easily damaged.

Meet the expert behind the guide

Suzy Hernandez, freelance contributor: I'm the go-to alarm clock tester at Business Insider Reviews. I'm a certified sleep science consultant with years of experience testing sleep products. I also authored the best sunrise alarm clocks guide for Business Insider.

Jenny McGrath, former home editor: I'm an expert on all things sleep technology. I also authored our guide to the best silent alarm clocks.

Alarm clock FAQs

What type of alarm clock is best for light sleepers?

Light sleepers should look for quieter, gentle alarms and a dimmable display to not disturb sleep. Light sleepers may also benefit from a gentle alarm like the best sunrise alarm clocks.

Why can't I just use my phone as an alarm?

"Keeping a phone on a nightstand is a bit of a distraction and can negatively impact sleep," said Dimitriu. It's better to put your phone away while you sleep. Also, using your phone as an alarm means you're looking at it first thing in the morning, which isn't always the most peaceful experience.

What is the difference between silent and sunrise alarm clocks?

Sunrise alarm clocks mimic the light of dawn — usually in soft orange and yellow shades — to wake up a sleeper gradually and naturally. Some silent alarm clocks also use light, but might also use methods like vibrations as well.

What color alarm clock light is best for sleeping?

Use dim red, yellow, and orange lights on your alarm clock display, since these shades have no impact on your circadian clock. Avoid harsh blue and white colors for the best night's sleep.

Which type of alarm is best for heavy sleepers?

For heavy sleepers, we recommend a loud, sound-based alarm. Quiet or sunrise alarm clocks might be too gentle to rouse heavy sleepers from sleep.

Why do I sleep through my alarms?

If you're sleeping through your alarms, your body may have become attuned to your current alarm style and trained itself to ignore the sound or light. Try changing alarm chimes or styles, but if the problem persists, always consult your doctor.

• My grandfather was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer's, and we're cherishing every visit.
• He flies from Rio to see me, and I treasure each trip more than ever now.
• Knowing time is limited, I say yes to every chance to make memories together.

I cannot recall my first memory of my grandfather, Geraldo. Maybe because he was always there.

When I was born, he split his time between Paris, where I lived, so he could watch me grow, and Rio de Janeiro, where he now lives full-time. Picking me up from school, dealing with my tantrums, and taking me to the movies. After I moved to New York when I was 6, he came to visit frequently, and I spent a month in Rio with him every summer.

When I moved to Portugal at 23, I hoped my grandfather would visit me, but I couldn't have dreamt of what our relationship would become. It's only been two and a half years, and he's already visited five times. I should get him a frequent visitor card.

I love caring for him

There is something truly marvelous about caring for those who cared for you. Driving him around, making him tartar and banana pancakes, even just pouring him coffee; these simple things fill me with joy.

He is one of my favorite family members. He makes me laugh an exorbitant amount with his funny facial expressions, ridiculous reactions, and cynical jokes. One time he visited, I made iced coffee, and he eyed me like I was insane.

I cherish our time together

He finds joy in everything. He's said things to me like "This coffee is terrific," or "The octopus salad is even better than the one yesterday," and "It's so beautiful to see you like this."

Not only does his attitude make him the best guest — so easy to please — but it also fills me with hope that I, too, will age like him, able to see the beauty in all that lies around.

That's not to say that he doesn't love to complain about just about everything; he is an old man who spent decades living in France, after all, but it's always with a cheeky tinge. The weather was particularly gruesome on his last visit. When in Rio, he complains because it's dangerous, loud, and unbearably hot. He jokes that he's going to move here, or we could swap houses, and honestly, I'm considering it.

He was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer's

My grandfather was 62 when I was born, which means I got to know him as an adult. I get to take him to lunch, introduce him to my friends — they all love him — and hear his stories. I realize it isn't something everyone gets. For that, I am eternally grateful. It's easy to think that intergenerational relationships are most valuable in childhood, but they can flourish most in adulthood.

Since his first visit to Portugal, my grandfather has been diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer's. I witnessed him constantly searching for his wallet and phone, how he accidentally left my apartment door open, sending me into a "where's-my-cat-frenzy," and how he asked over and over which day we were flying to France. At first, I was unable to comprehend how memory can fail my PhD professor's grandfather. Then I thought of all the people who would dream of having this much time with theirs.

We probably only have a few good years left. Sometimes I catch myself crying about what's to come. I know grief well, so I know the devastation I will feel, but instead of letting it consume me, I choose to turn it into a "yes" to every opportunity to see him, host him, show him more of my life, and learn all I can from his.

So I take many photos, hug him as much as I can, hope for more visits, and share this advice: if your grandparents can still travel, have them come visit. In the future, you will thank yourself.

• I planned a trip to Mexico City after hearing great reviews, but I found the city overwhelming.
• I preferred visiting Santiago de Querétaro instead, a smaller city three hours away.
• Querétaro's historic center was charming, and it was easy to travel from there for day trips.

When planning my two-week trip to Mexico, I looked beyond destinations like Cancún, Puerto Vallarta, and Cozumel. I wanted to visit central Mexico instead, which is further away from the busy cruise ports and all-inclusive resorts.

For years, I'd heard nothing but great things about Mexico City, so I put it at the top of my list. Travelers seem to always rave about the city's atmosphere, culinary scene, and world-class museums. I couldn't wait to check it out for myself.

However, once I arrived in the city, which is home to about 22 million people, I was totally overwhelmed. The influx of tourists for Mexico's Día de Muertos celebrations at the time probably didn't help, either.

There was a lot to do there, but I missed the quieter atmosphere of Santiago de Querétaro, where I'd been just a few days prior.

The smaller city, often shortened to just Querétaro, is home to around 1.5 million people and is located just three hours by bus from Mexico City. I knew little about the area beforehand, but was soon blown away by its colorful historic center and nearby attractions.

Mexico City gets a lot of hype, but in the end, it was the city I'd previously barely heard of that exceeded my expectations.

Querétaro's city center is exceptionally charming

On my first morning in Querétaro, I was immediately struck by the atmosphere of the historic city center.

It's a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it's full of tree-lined public squares. Each square acts as a meeting point for commerce, culture, and dining experiences.

I loved dining outdoors in these public squares. Often, musicians played soft piano music during mealtimes, and the atmosphere was alluring.

Beyond the squares, every street offered something new. On a visit to Querétaro's Museum of Arts, I was blown away by the building's Baroque-style architecture. The intricate design of the space was just as impressive as the artwork inside.

Likewise, a brief visit to the Calendar Museum left me impressed. The small museum, which houses exhibitions on time and space, contains intricately manicured gardens in a restored mansion. The space was serene, adding another special touch to Querétaro's endearing city center.

In contrast, I found Mexico City to be more overwhelming than charming. With millions of people, cars, and buses zooming around every corner, it was impossible to feel relaxed.

While walking around Mexico City's maze of streets, I found myself missing the small-town feel of Querétaro.

The city is a convenient home base for day trips to other destinations, too

Something I loved during my time in Querétaro was the city's proximity to several exciting destinations. I found it easy to take a day (or overnight) trip from the city.

On my visit, I took a one-night trip to San Miguel de Allende, a small city with well-preserved colonial architecture.

It was the perfect destination for a quick visit. I spent my time wandering around cobblestone streets, dining at rooftop cafes, and marveling at San Miguel de Allende's prominent pink cathedral.

Querétaro is also within an hour's drive to two of Mexico's Pueblo Mágicos, or Magic Towns. There are 177 Pueblos Mágicos within Mexico, and each town has been designated to have significant cultural, historical, or architectural significance within the country.

One of these Pueblos Mágicos, Bernal, is famous for its giant monolith that towers over the town. The other, Tequisquiapan, offers a peaceful getaway where visitors can explore traditional cheese markets, vineyards, and natural hot springs.

Taking day trips from Querétaro doesn't require a car, either. Uber is convenient throughout the area, and comfortable coach buses can take you from town to town at a low cost.

Mexico City has more to offer overall, but Querétaro is definitely worth a visit

Even though I preferred Querétaro to Mexico City, there's no denying that there's far more to see and do in the latter.

You could spend months in Mexico City and barely scratch the surface. The city has over 150 museums and galleries along with the palatial Chapultepec Castle, massive Zócalo Square, vast green parks, and more restaurants than you could try in a lifetime.

Its National Museum of Anthropology could take an entire day to see in and of itself!

I expected to fall in love with Mexico City, but I didn't jive with the city as much as I thought I would. For the most part, though, I'd still agree that Mexico City is worth the hype it receives. The metropolis has an addictive, bustling atmosphere, and the street-food scene is definitely out of this world.

Yet my trip was a good reminder to look beyond the most popular destinations in a particular place. I had never even heard of Querétaro before I planned my trip, but I'm so glad I took the chance to discover somewhere new.

• Becoming a Supreme Court justice is the culmination of decades of hard work and legal expertise.
• But it comes with notable perks, including a high salary, prestige, and lifetime security.
• There's also the private basketball court.

In some ways, it's not a great time to be a Supreme Court justice.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in August 2025 found that half of Americans surveyed held "an unfavorable opinion" of the Supreme Court, with favorable opinions "close to a three-decade low."

Our current president isn't happy with the court either. After SCOTUS ruled against his emergency tariffs in February, President Donald Trump said the justices should be "absolutely ashamed," though he later exchanged cordial handshakes with them at the State of the Union address.

But it's not all bad. Supreme Court historian and University of Texas law professor Lucas "Scot" Powe told ABC News in 2010 that, in many ways, "it's the cushiest job in the world."

After all, you get lifetime job security, great pay and benefits, thousands of dollars in gifts, entry into an elite club of fellow justices — oh, and the ability to shape the country as we know it.

Here are just some of the perks that come with being a Supreme Court justice.

If you're the chief justice, your salary is $320,700.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been the head of the highest court in the land since 2005.

His salary, as of 2026, is $320,700. That's less than the president ($400,000), but more than the vice president ($235,100) or the speaker of the House ($223,500), per the United States Courts and the Office of Personnel Management.

However, it's potentially lower than the justices could earn in private practice. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, lawyers among the top 10% of earners in their industry were paid more than $239,200 in 2024, excluding profits for partners and shareholders.

An associate justice has a slightly lower salary, at $306,600.

Associate justices are still well compensated, with salaries in the low $300,000s, even if they make less than the chief justice.

Depending on how old they are and how long they've served, a justice could be eligible to receive their salary for the rest of their lives.

To receive a lifetime salary, you must retire at the age of 70 with at least 10 years of service, or at the age of 65 with 15 years of service.

However, to receive this pension, retired justices in good health are still expected to remain somewhat active in the legal profession, such as serving on lower courts, completing administrative work, or working for a state or federal agency, per the Office of the Law Revision Counsel's US Code. Justices with disabilities are exempt.

This is one of the few government jobs that receive a lifetime pension that matches your final salary — not even the president gets that.

It's perhaps the most secure job in the world: Becoming a Supreme Court justice is a lifetime appointment.

It's an arduous process and the culmination of decades of schooling and hard work, but once you're on the bench, you're on it for life (or until you retire).

Technically, a justice can be impeached, but it's only happened once in US history. In 1804, Samuel Chase was impeached by the House, which accused him of acting in a partisan manner in trials. He was later acquitted by the Senate and remained on the Supreme Court until his death in 1811.

Justices receive lifetime security from the US Marshals.

Like the president, who receives lifetime protection from the Secret Service, Supreme Court justices receive lifetime protection from the US Marshals, according to the advocacy organization Fix the Court.

Active justices receive full-time security protection, while retired justices may receive protection when it's deemed warranted, and justices can decline it if they choose.

There are no financial limits to what gifts a Supreme Court justice can receive, as long as they publicly disclose them.

Financial disclosure laws apply to justices, but with some caveats. All federal employees (including judges) have to disclose "income, dividends, most capital gains, significant debts, the purchase or sale of land, and gifts, among other things," per the Brennan Center.

However, Supreme Court justices aren't beholden to the code of conduct for other federal judges, the "Judicial Conference's interpretations of the ethics law."

In 1991, the justices agreed to follow these lower-court rules, but it was voluntary. Then, in 2023, the Court adopted its own formal Code of Conduct for Justices, but it did not include a mechanism for enforcement.

This means it's a bit of a legal gray area if they don't follow the code. On occasion, justices have been called out for being less than forthcoming with gifts and perks they receive.

For example, in 2024, Justice Clarence Thomas faced ethics questions for failing to disclose luxury trips funded by billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow, including travel on his private jet.

In response, Thomas said he thought he didn't need to report the trips because he believed they were considered "personal hospitality" as he was friends with Crow. He later said he would comply with newer, stricter guidelines about personal hospitality.

He's not the only one who's received perks. In 2024, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson received Beyoncé tickets worth almost $4,000. Jackson reported the tickets in her financial disclosure form.

Justices also make money from faculty positions and book deals.

Many of the Supreme Court justices earn thousands of dollars from teaching gigs at universities, although there is a cap on this outside pay of around $30,000, The New York Times reported.

In 2024, Justice Neil Gorsuch was paid $30,379 for a two-week course in Portugal through George Mason University, per his financial disclosure report. That same year, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett each received $31,815 from the University of Notre Dame Law School for separate courses.

But the most lucrative thing for a justice to do is write a book, and there is no cap to what they can earn here. Jackson received a $2 million advance from Penguin Random House for her memoir, "Lovely One," which was published in 2024. That same year, Gorsuch received $250,000 from HarperCollins for his legal book, "Over Ruled."

Every year, the justices get a three-month recess.

From the end of June to the first Monday in October every year, the Court is in recess.

While the justices still work during this time, they have more free time in the summer than they do when the court is in session. They do not have to be present at their Washington, DC, building, and some justices through history have taken advantage of that by visiting remote locations.

Still, "there is no escape from the work itself, and it finds its way to them wherever they travel," per the Supreme Court Historical Society.

In DC, the justices have spacious personal chambers and office space.

Much like the rest of the US Supreme Court Building, the personal chambers of each justice are secretive, and no photos are allowed.

But each one gets their own space to run as they please, including room for their clerks and other administrative employees. The chambers can include libraries, ornate details such as wood paneling, and fireplaces.

The Supreme Court Building also has a great library, a private basketball court, and a special dining room.

Famously, there's a basketball court on the fifth floor of the Supreme Court building, aptly nicknamed "the Highest Court in the Land."

The clerks are mainly the ones taking advantage of the court, though justices have been known to play.

There's also a private dining room for justices to use when hearing cases. They make a point to eat lunch together, which helps ease tensions.

"It's a wonderful experience," Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Judicature in 2018. "We try to avoid controversy," she added.

Justices choose the cases they want to hear, giving them almost total control over their caseload.

Unlike the rest of us, who have to listen to our bosses and sometimes do work we really don't feel like doing, the Supreme Court justices have autonomy to hear whatever cases they want.

Lower courts send cases to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court doesn't have to hear them — it typically reviews 100 to 150 of 7,000 cases sent its way each year. For a case to be reviewed, four of the nine justices must vote to accept it.

The court typically chooses cases that "could have national significance, might harmonize conflicting decisions in the federal Circuit courts, and/or could have precedential value," per the United States Courts.

Not for nothing, the job requires shaping the United States' most important document, the Constitution.

Is this a perk, a responsibility, or both?

We'd argue that the branch of government with the ability to make the longest-lasting changes in our society is the Supreme Court, which has legalized gay marriage, protected (and then struck down) abortion access, ended school segregation and anti-miscegenation laws, and more.

• I work in academia, so to advance my career, I had to move often in my 20s.
• I've moved 13 times, including several cross-country moves, making me feel disconnected from family.
• I sacrificed a lot for my career, but in the end, it was worth it.

Figure skating has long been a big part of my life. At 15, I convinced my school district to override attendance so I could pursue my then-competitive figure skating career. I then scheduled college classes around training.

Three undergraduate apartments and two graduate dorms later, I found a great place to live in New York City on Bleecker and Thompson for three years. I worked as a private figure skating coach at the Wollman and Chelsea Piers ice rinks. At 25, I enrolled at UCLA as a postdoctoral fellow and snagged a place in the Venice Canals. I loved it for two years. I then completed another postdoc for 1 year in San Diego, then returned to the East Coast for my first faculty position. Philadelphia turned me into a professor in developmental psychology.

I moved back to New York City for my 10th move to the West Village, but I wasn't there long. I moved again to be closer to the train hall, and by then, entering my 30s and my third year of tenure-track, I just wanted to be home.

Happy but out of fuel, my 12th move was back to Southern California, and it was also my fourth across the coast.

With every move, packing felt heavier, and hiring movers didn't lighten the load. The sight of boxes became demoralizing.

Moving so frequently lost its excitement

Every new city, I'd think: new cafés, new restaurants, and new yoga studios! But once I actually settled in, I only started to miss the spots and familiar faces I'd left behind.

Every time I'd, again, go out frolicking, eating, meeting, and socializing, a cloud of impermanence would steam from the back of my head.

I became confused about how much to invest in new relationships. I wondered if I should connect deeply with new people, if it was likely I'd be moving again sometime soon.

Sometimes, my location kept me far from my family

In the middle of grad school, I remember standing on a street corner and receiving an unexpected phone call: My father had died. I was far from home at that moment.

Even though I was often on the East Coast, my family frequently visited, especially my uncle and auntie.

When I moved back to California this most recent round, my uncle started to battle ALS and stopped visiting because of the staircase up to my space. After about a year, I received a phone call that my uncle was headed to the ICU; his fight with ALS was over. I'll never live somewhere that isn't wheelchair accessible again.

My final, most recent move (No. 13) was deliberate: downtown Culver City, behind the Museum of Jurassic Technology, where my grandfather Hagop Sandaldjian's standing exhibition is. He died after I was born, and it was a way of connecting with him.

Moving was worth it for my career

This all started with decisions made when I was 15. I'm 35 now.

I did what I had to do in academia to maintain momentum. I don't have regrets, per se. I wanted to experience it all.

Academia was an intellectual pursuit and an adventure that came with losses I didn't expect. Ice eventually melts, and soil soaks up the water. That's how roots grow.

Academia brought me back home, but it was a drive to maintain momentum developed as an athlete that kept me moving until my feet landed right where I wanted. Now up for early tenure, I feel like I'm just getting started.

• Alexa Occhipinti grew tired of her open-concept living area in late 2025.
• She decided to break it up by adding a pony wall between her dining and living area.
• The addition broke up the space without making it feel smaller.

Alexa Occhipinti's family has been through a lot in their home.

Occhipinti, 34, and her husband, Doug Occhipinti, bought their house in Sacramento in 2020, where Occhipinti works at the Sacramento County Department of Technology. It became the backdrop to huge milestones in their lives: getting engaged, married, and welcoming their two children.

As their lives have evolved, so has the house. For instance, Occhipinti turned a second-floor loft into a bedroom for her son, helping to move their home from an adult-focused space to a kid-friendly one.

And in December 2025, Occhipinti was ready to change another part of her home: the open-concept living area.

Saying goodbye to the open concept

Occhipinti told Business Insider that when she and her husband first bought their home, she loved the open-concept layout on the first floor, which combined the kitchen, dining area, and living area into a single rectangular space.

"Initially, I loved the open concept because I was just young and I was like, 'Oh, it looks so big and open,'" she said. "Then that kind of changed over time, especially with two toddlers."

Occhipinti said that as her living room started to double as a play space for her kids, the whole main floor felt less inviting.

"I see toys everywhere," Occhipinti said. "It's just overstimulating."

Likewise, since the TV was visible from the table, she said her children would try to watch it while they ate meals, which she didn't love.

It was time for a change.

A new layout

Occhipinti wasn't a stranger to enclosing spaces in her house when she decided to switch up the main floor. She had hired Primespec Construction to turn a loft on her second floor into a bedroom for her son, which made a huge difference in the space.

"I was really scared it was going to close in the space," Occhipinti said. "It was super open upstairs. It felt big and had a lot of natural light."

Adding the wall created a real hallway on the second floor, which Occhipinti said made the whole floor seem much larger.

"Putting up the walls is actually making the house feel bigger instead of smaller," she said.

Closing up the home's main floor, however, felt a little trickier. Occhipinti didn't want to create three separate rooms, as the main level isn't huge to begin with. The house is just under 2,000 square feet total.

"I still wanted it to be open and airy," she said.

A partial change

Occhipinti wasn't sure how to break up her space until she stumbled upon some Pinterest images of pony walls, a half wall that can divide a space while keeping it partially visible.

She thought it could be a perfect fit for her home, as it could make the living area feel separate while still maintaining an open flow.

Occhipinti tapped Primespec Construction again to handle the renovation of her living area, sending them her inspiration images. It took just one day and $2,500 to put up the wall.

"He got there at like 9:30 and the wall was built and done by like 4:30," she said.

The white pony wall dividing the living room from the kitchen and dining area has a column on one side and molding for a design pop.

Occhipinti has the couch leaning against one wall, and the dining table on the other. She hopes to make the table into a nook with bench seating down the line.

She said the renovation "completely changed the look and the feel" of her home, making it more traditional and cozy.

The wall has also made her feel less overwhelmed when her kids are playing with their toys.

"This really helped to feel like we could keep the toys in the living room and not see them from the kitchen counter," she said, adding that her children don't expect to see the TV from the dinner table anymore either.

Plus, Occhipinti said she loves that she has more freedom to switch up the decor between her living and dining areas, not worrying as much about the distinct spaces matching.

"I'm so excited now for each season because I can decorate the living room and then do something separate for the dining area," she said.

• My parents retired after facing several health issues.
• They decided to sell their house, and since there was no plan after that, they now live in Airbnbs.
• It makes me nervous that they have no plan to settle down permanently in their golden years.

Last fall, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and, seemingly minutes later, my father had some heart problems and ultimately suffered a stroke.

I knew I was inching toward simultaneously caring for my young kids and aging parents. Suddenly, I was squarely in the sandwich generation.

I now had to deal with the terrifying reality that my parents did not have a plan for how to spend their retirement years — especially where they plan to live.

My parents had no retirement plans once they sold their house

As an only child, I have been aware that I might need to be more invested in my parents' retirement plans, but I wasn't prepared to feel like their therapist, estate planner, realtor, and case manager all in one.

My father's unfortunate reality was that he had to retire while in the hospital recovering from his stroke. Like many men, my father struggles to find his identity outside work.

While I was home with my parents during my father's recovery and before my mother's cancer treatment, I broached the subject of their retirement plan by asking them about the sale of their home. They had long lamented that they no longer wanted to maintain their home. However, I did not realize how little my parents had discussed what would happen beyond this sale.

Once my mother and father recovered, they moved forward and sold their home in Florida. Shortly after that, they stayed near my family in Texas, in a long-term Airbnb. I soon realized they had no intention of settling.

They have since stayed in 15 Airbnbs.

Their planless lifestyle has continued to create issues

My parents like stability. I know that they don't like living out of suitcases. They often go to an Airbnb in a new city and immediately contact the host about shortening their stay or finding a different place because they don't like the area they are in. Additionally, they would rather have a plan, a home to call their own, and a city to set up some roots.

That's why their Airbnb living doesn't make much sense to me. When I push them to find a long-term plan, I realize they aren't even having the conversation with each other.

The lack of actual conversations only came to a head when my father landed in the hospital again while traveling. Ultimately, my father learned he would need extensive open-heart surgery. They ended up going to the Cleveland Clinic and staying at two different Cleveland Airbnbs during their six-week stay, which, while you are recovering from open-heart surgery, is not necessarily the best plan.

When aging is avoided, it creates more issues

Going through all of these experiences with my parents has made it clear that avoiding retirement conversations can be rooted in other issues, like not wanting to face our mortality or that we might disappoint other family members by making a clear decision for ourselves.

It's not like my parents don't have a will or aren't organized, and I am certainly lucky that they have saved diligently for their retirement.

I do not feel fortunate, however, about their lack of a concrete plan. As their only child with children of my own, the uncertainty of their future adds a layer of stress for me. I often worry about their Airbnb accommodations, whether the roads nearby are well lit, and whether they have social support nearby.

I suspect their decision to wing it has been driven by a desire to sidestep the discomfort of planning for one's golden years. By opting to stick with short-term rentals rather than anything more permanent, they avoid confronting their own individual desires —and the risk that they might not be in alignment.

While I am only in my 40s, I am already working on a retirement plan. I am well aware that my children will have things to worry about; that just comes with the territory of aging parents. But confronting the inevitability of aging and embracing a concrete plan for my retirement is a gift I am giving to my children.

Having honest conversations about making definitive plans is incredibly challenging, but it also has huge payoffs: a season of life rooted in desire and as much agency as this time can offer.

• Victoria Hattersley is a retired millionaire who supports her state's proposed millionaire tax.
• Hattersley's state of Washington proposed a 9.9% tax on income earned above $1 million.
• Hattersley believes that society is better off when everyone is doing well financially.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Victoria Hattersley, a 70-year-old millionaire who lives in Mount Vernon, Washington, about the state's proposed millionaire tax. The bill would create a 9.9% tax on income earned over $1 million. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

We didn't have a lot of money when I was a kid. I lived in Trumbull, Connecticut, which was a more affluent town, but we weren't the affluent people.

My friends were going shopping at the really fancy mall, and I had to go to the discount stores, so I didn't grow up with money.

I got married very young, had children young, and was in some difficult circumstances for several years. I even ended up having to go to food banks. So I understand hard that is and how stressful that kind of living is.

I started my career in Boston when I moved back to be with my family. I was able to leverage some of the experience that I had back in Washington and started working at the AIDS Clinical Trials Group at the Harvard School of Public Health.

I worked in AIDS research and eventually met my husband — my last and most wonderful husband — he was the head of the biostatistics group at the statistical and data analysis center who did the clinical trials for AIDS research. I was on the admin side.

We got married, and both of us had kids, so we needed a higher level of income than what academia could afford. We both went to the pharmaceutical industry, where I had a 20-year career — he had a longer career because he went over there first.

With stock options in the pharma industry, you make money, you invest it, and then you make money on the investments. The stock market's been very kind, and so that's where we made our wealth.

I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, but not everyone should have to

I've been at both ends of the spectrum, financially.

Becoming a millionaire is definitely not as simple as pulling yourself up and just doing the hard work. There's so much else that factors in — including a lot of luck. I got lucky.

It makes me mad when people say, "Well, I did it, so you can."

I used to have that same attitude. Then, when I was going through life, gaining more experience, seeing very capable people try and try and work hard at getting jobs, and the jobs aren't there, or they're not recognized for this or that for whatever reason, I realized it's definitely not that simple.

Nobody doesn't want to be well off.

People should be able to get wealthy — there's nothing wrong with that. The thing is, just pay your fair share of taxes. That's the bottom line.

Society and culture are better off when people are doing well, when people can work and they can have healthcare and have their kids go to daycare. When that happens, they produce more and that produces more taxes for what we need to do.

It's just a healthier way of structuring society than holding people down and taxing people into poverty, while people at the very high end are not contributing their share.

The new bill in my state would only affect less than 1% of residents

Washington has one of the most regressive tax codes in the country. It impacts lower-income folks more than higher-income folks. They pay a higher share of their money because of the tax structure. Plus, those with more money have more opportunities to hire financial advisors who can help them find tax loopholes, and so on.

The new legislation in Washington is a 9.9% tax on income — not under stocks or anything — over $1 million a year starting in 2028, and then the first payments would be in 2029.

It's only less than 1% of people in Washington state who would be subject to this.

I recognize that as you gain more wealth, you keep looking around the corner saying, "Oh, if I had more, I could do this. I don't want to lose any of my money because I'm already looking at this new thing."

I believe it is a syndrome of excessive wealth disorder. There are a lot of conversations around this.

Everyone will benefit from the wealthy paying their fair share

I've been volunteering in the democracy space for many years prior to retirement.

I work in the democracy ecosystem space and transpartisan space, trying to strengthen our civic engagement across the country with a couple of different organizations doing that, as well as with the Patriotic Millionaires in my volunteer work.

I just believe that there is excessive wealth, and it's getting worse — it's only going to get worse in very quick fashion.

Our inequality is so drastic. We look back at history, and we see that this is where cultural instability, social instability, and economic instability happen — and it's not healthy, and there are no barriers.

I think a lot of people who are wealthy just can't conceive this kind of life where you're trying to take care of your kids, you're working jobs, you're just trying to pay the bills.

That's all most people want to do; they want to pay their bills. They would love to own a home. They'd like to maybe take a vacation, or they want to put their kids in a decent daycare. The stress level of not knowing if you're going to be able to pay your rent, your car note, or your heat is awful.

Why are we taxing people into a place where it's impossible for them to get out of the situation they're in?

We can see the impact of the excessive wealth inequality that's happening in our society, and it's very dangerous for all of us.

What the bill would do would be to provide people perhaps with some tax holidays and help small businesses. The governor is very clear: We need to put money back into people's pockets.

This is not something that is just important for individuals. It is important for individuals, but it's also important for everyone: for our entire society, for our country, that we address this inequality, because it can't continue. We will have significant societal and cultural impacts.

I'm just passionate about helping the people who want to do well.

It's just the right thing to do.

• New Census data shows that net immigration to the US has tumbled.
• Business Insider has spoken with dozens of Americans who have moved abroad.
• Four women over 50 who moved to Europe share why living abroad is better for them.

Cindy Sheahan was at a crossroads. Friends and loved ones were passing away, and her marriage was starting to unravel. She could feel life passing her by — and after years spent raising her kids, she decided it was finally time to put herself first.

"I figured I'd start traveling abroad," Sheahan, 64, told Business Insider. "My company was kind enough to let me take a sabbatical while I sorted out my world. It turned out to be a mistake for them, because I decided I wasn't coming back."

Over the last several years, Sheahan, now divorced, has traveled to nearly 50 countries, including Laos, Portugal, Madagascar, Turkey, and Vietnam. In 2025, she made Palermo, Sicily, her home base. And while she plans to visit the US from time to time, she says she won't be moving back anytime soon.

"I feel like I outgrew a lot of people and places in the US," Sheahan said. "Don't get me wrong — I desperately miss my friends and family, especially my kids. But they're all able to travel, and they'd much rather visit me somewhere fun than grab a drink at a bar in Denver."

In Italy, she added, "I eat better, I've made new friends, I've cut down on expenses — and most importantly, I'm happy."

More people are moving out of the US, and fewer are moving in

Census Bureau data shows that net international migration — essentially, arrivals minus departures — hit a high of 2.7 million in 2024. By July 2025, that number had dropped to 1.3 million, and if the current trajectory holds, the Bureau forecasts it could fall again to about 321,000 in 2026.

"If those trends continue, it would be the first time the United States has seen net negative migration in more than 50 years," the Bureau said on its website.

The Bureau attributes the change to two trends moving in opposite directions: fewer people immigrating to the US, and more people leaving the country to live abroad.

Over the past few years, I've spoken with more than a dozen Americans — most of them women — about why they moved abroad. Many mention the same mix of reasons: the US has become too expensive, and they want to step away from work and build lives that feel more meaningful. It led them to places like Panama, Spain, Albania, and France.

Cepee Tabibian, a Spain-based relocation coach who has helped many Americans move overseas, told Business Insider that a growing number of her female clients are also worried about the political climate in the States.

"Before, I think people just wanted to move for a better quality of life; to fulfill a dream, to have a softer life. But now a lot of things that are coming up for people are related to the political situation," she said.

Here are the stories of four women I spoke with about why they left the US and how their lives have changed since, for better and worse.

High living costs have pushed some women out

You've probably noticed how much more expensive life in the US has gotten. Data show consumer prices are up about 25% since 2020. For older single women, that can make it especially hard to get by, particularly when Social Security is their main source of income.

For Sheahan, moving abroad was partially a financial decision. She has savings and investments, but in retirement, her most dependable income is the $1,500 she receives each month in Social Security. In Denver, that wouldn't have covered rent. In Palermo, it pays for her $800-a-month apartment and still leaves room for groceries and nights out.

"I love that I can go to the grocery store and not break the bank. You can buy tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, sundried tomatoes, and everything else for a song," she said. Healthcare has been cheaper for her, too; seeing a specialist costs her about $40.

Sandy Adam can relate. After she was laid off from her tech job in 2025, she was unable to find another role and retired. But the idea of living on just her $3,608-a-month Social Security benefit back in Pittsburgh made her nervous — especially with annual property taxes of about $6,900 on her 1,700-square-foot home.

"I asked myself: If I tried to live off Social Security, could I afford to stay in that house? I probably could, but it would be really tight," Adam, 69, said. "Long-term, though, the financial predictability felt increasingly uncertain — my everyday living expenses like groceries were going up too. I wanted to simplify my life, with fewer fixed costs and fewer surprises."

She decided moving to Europe was "more practical" than trying to make it work in the US.

She now lives in Chatou, a suburb of Paris, renting a 548-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment with her dog. She pays $1,679 a month, and while she says it still feels a little expensive, it's given her "a soft landing" while she figures out where she ultimately wants to settle.

Some women want to reinvent themselves

For many women on the cusp of retirement, moving overseas also gives them a chance to reinvent themselves.

"It's not just living your same exact life in a different destination," Tabibian said. "A lot of women who come to me want to quit their jobs and maybe spend some time re-getting to know themselves, or take the time to try something different."

Natalie Lynch had been working since she was 15. Burned out and priced out of the Bay Area, she decided to wind down her home-staging business of 24 years and move to Europe in 2024, hoping for a more relaxed and purposeful life, not to mention a lower cost of living.

"The pandemic, with its loss of freedom, loss of connectivity, and the very clear message that life can be short, was a real wake-up call for me," Lynch, 56, told Business Insider. "I decided I needed to make some big changes, even if I didn't have a clear idea of what the endgame would look like."

Her time in Europe hasn't been perfect.

She's bounced between Italy, Spain, and, most recently, France. With only her dog, Enzo, as her travel companion, she's felt lonely at times, and navigating European bureaucracy has been challenging — especially since she isn't fluent in Spanish or French. Still, she said, escaping her hectic life and the rising costs back home has been life-changing.

"While I don't think I'm living my best life here, it's a better life than I had in California, so I'm headed in the right direction," she said. "I haven't figured it all out yet, but the slower pace of life, not having to grind every day running a business, and being out of the rat race has been a huge gift."

After gifting herself a birthday trip to Paris in 2019 — complete with a French baking workshop — Dawn Belisle, an attorney and part-time pastry chef from Atlanta, fell so in love with France that she moved there in 2022.

"My spirit felt at peace there in a way that's hard to describe," Belisle, 56, told Business Insider. "Everyone was just living. They're out and about, enjoying each other's company. They sit at cafés, eating and drinking together. They don't have the same hustle-and-bustle culture we have in the US."

Belisle now lives in the Carré d'Or, one of Nice's pricier, livelier neighborhoods. She spends her days walking the beach, shopping local markets for fresh produce, and lingering at cafés with her French and Italian friends.

She continues to work as an attorney, consulting with a couple of offices, but France has also opened the door to her second act: creating a lifestyle brand where she posts style and travel content and mentors people considering a move abroad. It's given her a new sense of purpose.

"The peace I have in France is unbeatable," Belisle said. "I still do a lot and keep a schedule, but I feel more in control of my life here. I'm living to live instead of work, and I'm exploring more. To me, that's success."

Madison Hoff, a reporter on Business Insider's economy team, contributed to this article.

• Jim Mellon says he's wary of US stocks, sick of the food system, and bullish on non-AI skills.
• The billionaire investor touted gold and silver, Japanese yen, and the energy sector.
• Mellon made the case for producing food in bioreactors, and empathy retaining value in an AI world.

Jim Mellon is downbeat on US stocks, determined to change what people eat, and defiantly optimistic about young people's prospects.

The billionaire investor and author spoke to Business Insider in late February about why Warren Buffett's cash hoard is a red flag, why he wants to feed the world using bioreactors, and why workers in the AI era should lean into what makes them human.

Mellon is the executive chairman of Agronomics, a venture capital firm that backs cultivated food companies, and the author of "Moo's Law: An Investor's Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution."

He said that US stocks strike him as "way overpriced," given the country is home to about 3% of the global population but accounts for more than 60% of the world's market capitalization.

Mellon said it was a "warning signal" that, on top of "extremely stretched" valuations and "record levels of margin debt," Big Tech companies have shifted from having "distinctive moats" to making circular deals and "doing more or less the same thing" as they pour huge sums into building out AI data centers.

He's been a "huge bull" on gold and silver in recent years, he said, as government policies around the world have eroded the value of national currencies, and he's reluctant to "jump on the crypto bandwagon."

Mellon said the "energy sector is probably the best place to invest" right now, partly because the AI boom is fueling demand for power-hungry data centers and straining electric grids, and partly because he sees energy as "highly underpriced as a percentage of world stock markets."

There are bargains to be had in the UK and in emerging markets, he said. But he would be "very, very careful in China" given the hazards of foreign ownership and state control, and would "totally avoid the US market."

He also recommended people hold Japanese yen as it's "extremely cheap" versus the dollar, and yielding more than in the past thanks to rising interest rates.

Mellon also pointed to Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway holding more than $350 billion of liquid assets at the last count.

"The fact he's got so much cash is telling you that he sees something in the current world situation that isn't very positive," he said about recently retired CEO Buffett.

Future of food

Mellon, a veteran biotech investor, trumpeted how cellular agriculture can grow cells into meat or fish, and precision fermentation can harness yeast to create egg proteins, dairy products, and many kinds of oils.

He told Business Insider that he's on a mission to transform the global food system because of how sick it has made so many people, how much it contributes to the climate crisis through emissions, and how badly many farmed animals are treated.

Producing "clean food" instead of traditional food would cause far less environmental damage and avoid health issues around hormones, antibiotics, heavy metals, and microplastics in food, he said.

Cost is a key challenge, but that has already come down dramatically, he continued, adding that he believes it will soon be cheaper to produce beef or pork in bioreactors at scale than it will be to raise a cow or pig for slaughter.

Mellon said he feels deeply motivated to bring about that change. "If I don't make any money out of this, it doesn't matter."

Advice for the AI age

Asked how young people can get ahead when life feels unaffordable, and AI threatens to eliminate huge swaths of jobs, Mellon said he was eager to hire, and other employers should be hiring too.

"We were all freshly out of school at one point, and we were all given a chance, and we should be giving it to other people," he said. "And now is the opportunity to get bright people at reasonable rates when they are in a very competitive environment to find positions."

Mellon, who wakes up around 4 a.m. each morning and works every day of the year, said it was crucial for young people not to simply give up.

"Don't retreat into a shell because you read all this negative stuff," he said. "Don't worry about it too much. Just get out there and do something."

Mellon also argued that workers can fend off AI by developing their interpersonal skills, since people will always need human connection.

"One has to think there are going to be jobs that involve empathy," he said. "Social care will become much more valued. Elderly care, because people are getting older, will become much more valued."

Mellon pointed out that a whole generation of graduates was urged to learn coding only 10 or 15 years ago, and now those jobs are among the most threatened by AI, so going all in on the tech of the day is "probably not the right way to go."

Separately, Mellon — who has 10 dogs and no children — said he would support raising inheritance tax to 100% and using the proceeds to give a lump sum to every young person.

That way, "instead of starting your life worrying all the time about money and trying to get enough money to buy a house, you actually have some money to go do something to begin with," he said.

• Some Gen Zers are tracking what they watch and read to break the scrolling cycle.
• "Instead of doomscrolling" posts are taking off on TikTok and Substack.
• Book and film-tracking apps are gaining momentum as interest in more intentional media habits grows.

Fed up with doomscrolling and worried their attention spans are shrinking, some Gen Z-ers are tracking what they watch and read to stop scrolling.

Across TikTok, Substack, and Instagram, younger generations are sharing weekly roundups of the books, films, podcasts, and long-form articles they have consumed — often under the banner of "media I consumed instead of doomscrolling."

Social cataloging apps designed to track and share media consumption have risen in popularity, while content on creating physical media journals is also trending.

Gen Zers and millennials engaging in the trend say the practice is helping them become more intentional with the media they consume — and prove they can still focus on something longer than a TikTok.

'Media I've consumed this week instead of doomscrolling'

Tracking what you read or watch isn't new. The most popular book-logging platform, Goodreads, was created in 2006, and notebooks have existed far longer than that.

But the addictive nature of short-form content has added a new dimension to logging: it has been framed as a deliberate choice to step away from doomscrolling and become more conscious of what you consume.

This marks a growing shift to analog — as the craving for time away from screens grows stronger, people are finding ways of de-digitalizing their lives. Gen Z is swapping scrolling with in-person hobbies, while some millennials are raising their children with retro-style tech.

Maria Paula Colmenares, a 22-year-old fashion business student living in Italy, runs a Substack called "Instead of Doomscrolling" with over 448,000 subscribers.

After spending a summer vacation hooked to her phone, Colmenares wanted to find a way to be more mindful about what she was consuming online. She launched a Substack page where she shares a roundup of media she has read or listened to.

"Even thinking of YouTube, you could sit down and watch an hourlong video with no problem," said Colmenares, talking about social media before feeds became even more personalized.

"Now, I'm sure it's a lot harder for people to do that without grabbing your phone or doing something else — having, like, a million things going on — because you cannot stand a second without stimuli," she added.

Since her Substack's launch in April last year, sharing "media I've consumed this week instead of doomscrolling" has become a growing trend on social media.

Videos of people sharing what they have recently watched and read under the term "instead of doomscrolling" have garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

Creators often recommend a curated selection of books, Substack articles, and other long-form content they chose over scrolling.

"It really resonated with so many people," said Colmenares.

"I think it's been really helpful to keep track of the things that I'm consuming, because once you hold yourself accountable. It's like: 'OK, if I'm going to read this article and I want to remember it, and I want to have a point of view, I need to take my time to write things down,'" she added.

Thomas Webb, a professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield, reviewed 138 studies in which participants were randomly assigned either to a program that encouraged them to track their progress toward a goal or to a group that didn't.

Based on the review, he told Business Insider that goals were more likely to be achieved when progress was physically recorded or shared with others.

"Therefore, it seems plausible that recording or sharing books, films and long-form articles with friends or followers might increase commitment to the goal of reading or watching these," he added.

Social cataloging apps

The "media I've consumed this week instead of doomscrolling" trend coincides with the growing popularity of social cataloging apps among Gen Z.

As of February, the film cataloging platform Letterboxd has over 27 million members, up from 17 million this time last year, a company spokesperson told Business Insider.

And its fans skew young. Data from its recent surveys and Google Analytics showed that its core members are aged between 18 and 35 the spokesperson said.

Launched in 2007 and acquired by Amazon in 2013, Goodreads has more than 150 million members, according to an estimate in 2023. Goodreads did not provide more recent data in response to a request from Business Insider.

Its monopoly over the book-tracking world has prompted the launch of a host of other book logging apps, such as The StoryGraph and Fable.

Nadia Odunayo, the founder and CEO of The StoryGraph, which hit 5 million user signups at the end of January after launching in 2019, said the platform has helped people read more — including herself.

The StoryGraph has functions such as book discovery based on mood and options for rating books.

"We have lots of people finding, rediscovering, the love of reading that they used to have as a kid. That's amazing," Odunayo said.

"People saying, 'I used to read as a kid, and as an adult, I hardly read. I would manage one book a year, and now I've read 60, 70, 80,'" she added.

For some, the appeal of logging and sharing the media they consume is about understanding what their tastes say about them.

"It's less about finding new content to get into and recommendations — more so a focus on understanding yourself through the lens of your consumption, in your case, and understanding others through the lens of their consumption," said Jad Esber, founder and CEO of social cataloging app Shelf.

Still, some critics see an element of performativity in the trend — turning media consumption into another metric to display.

The carefully curated nature of the posts and their public visibility raises the question of whether logging what you read is meaningfully different from other forms of personal branding on social media.

But for Colmenares, writing about her online media consumption has had a tangible offline effect.

"This has allowed me to read a lot more, write more in my journal, and do more offline activities," she said. "I'm drawing again. I'm doing all of these things that I used to do but couldn't, because I was so addicted to my phone."

• This post originally appeared in the BI Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

A worthy addition to your inbox

I'm incredibly excited about the newest offering to our growing newsletter lineup: CMO Insider.

Helmed by Lara O'Reilly, this weekly newsletter unpacks the companies and leaders shaping marketing, advertising, and the creator economy. She's delivering sharp scoops and insightful analysis to your inbox every Wednesday.

I checked in with Lara to let her explain the newsletter's vision and focus.

Lara, what are you most excited about with your newsletter launch?

Opening my reporter's notebook to give you the inside scoop about what's really happening in the marketing world. I want to break down the power, money, politics, and anxieties behind all the latest moves.

What's the most important thing on CMOs' minds this year?

Growth. That's never not been a priority, of course. But AI ups the ante. Easy access to AI tools means practically anyone in the organization can become a marketer now — or at least think they can — with a few prompts. It doesn't mean their ads or logos are actually any good, though. With AI added to the mix, marketers are under more pressure than ever to prove their strategies are actually moving the needle for their businesses.

We cover MrBeast and the creator economy a lot. Some are saying the age of social-media superstars is fading. There might not be another MrBeast as we know it. What's the next evolution in the creator economy?

More high-profile individual creators — or troupes like Dude Perfect — are morphing to become media and entertainment businesses, with professionalized corporate structures. At the other end of the scale, we're seeing the rise of niche creators with more people making money from posting content online than ever. Big brands are responding by taking a leaf out of Unilever's book and dramatically upping their influencer marketing budgets. It doesn't mean that all creators are getting big paydays, however, because the marketplace has become so saturated.

In your first edition, you highlighted an absolutely wild story of the mystery surrounding an OpenAI device ad hoax and a recent new twist. What's your theory on what's going on here and how this all plays out?

It's such a strange yarn. My first thought was that a production studio was trying to generate an online buzz for an upcoming Skarsgård flick. Now, after seeing the video of US Chief Design Officer and Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia sporting this mystery hardware device, I'm leaning more towards the idea that a tech startup is building toward a big reveal. Whoever's behind it clearly has connections!

Sign up for CMO Insider here.

• I spent 53 hours on the California Zephyr, an overnight Amtrak train, in February 2025.
• The California Zephyr is the longest train ride in the US, traveling between Chicago and Emeryville, California.
• I found ways to make the trip more bearable, from booking the right room to packing the right shoes.

Consider this your overnight Amtrak survival guide.

After spending 75 hours on sleeper trains around the US, I decided to spend 53 more on the California Zephyr — the longest ride in the country (and in my life, so far). I took the entire route from Chicago to Emeryville, California.

I'd never spent two nights on an Amtrak train before, but knowledge from my past experiences helped me make the most of 53 hours in a confined space.

Here are 10 tips that made the long journey more bearable — and even enjoyable.

For the longest train ride in America, booking a bedroom was the right choice.

Overnight Amtrak trains have coach seating and sleeper cabins.

If I'm going to sincerely enjoy two nights on a train, I need to be comfortable. So I didn't regret splurging on a private bedroom for my 53-hour journey.

For $2,200, the roughly 50-square-foot space packed in a foldout sofa, an upper bunk, a seat, a pullout table, a full bathroom, and a closet.

Having a space that was my own made this trip so much more relaxing than it would have been in coach. I especially appreciated having a full private bathroom, an amenity available only in bedrooms on Amtrak trains.

If a bedroom is out of your budget, consider booking a roomette for an overnight ride. It's a smaller private cabin without a bathroom at a lower price point.

I woke up with the sun on departure day.

A key thing I've learned about myself through overnight train travel is that nothing spoils my mindset like a restless night. I wanted to set myself up for sleep success on the California Zephyr. So even though my train didn't leave Chicago until 2 p.m., I set my alarm for 6 a.m. on the day of departure.

"The more tired I am by the end of the day, the better," I thought.

Turns out, my plan worked. I dozed off easily on the train and got seven to eight hours of sleep each night.

I spent the morning on my feet.

I had several hours to kill before my afternoon train. I spent them walking around Chicago and the surrounding areas. I wanted to wear out my legs and soak in as much fresh air as possible before spending the better part of 53 hours in a 50-square-foot enclosed space.

By the time I boarded the train, I was grateful for the chance to sit for a while.

Amtrak provided my meals, but I packed my own snacks.

Amtrak sleeper accommodations come with complimentary meals served in the dining car, and passengers can purchase snacks from the café car.

I was glad I packed my own snacks for in between meals because I saved some money I would have spent at the café car. I also brought a variety of options to satisfy every craving. Chips, granola bars, trail mix, stroopwafels, chocolate, and gummies were nearly devoured by the end of my journey.

I also brought multiple activities to pass the time.

Sometimes being stuck on the rails feels like reliving the same hour over and over again. Avoiding boredom was important to me for the longest train ride of my life.

Once I settled into my room, I made a list of all the ways I could spend my time and planned to swap activities every hour or two.

Packing a variety of things to do and being intentional about blocking out time for each made my days feel more structured and fulfilling. I brought a book, a journal, my Nintendo Switch, two cameras, and my work laptop. (I also packed a musical instrument to pass the time, but that was a mistake I'd avoid next time.)

Slippers and Crocs were worth packing, too.

When I travel, I usually find it's worth it to pack comforts of home. I wear my slippers all day around my apartment, so wearing them in my train bedroom calmed me.

My Crocs served two purposes on this trip. I wore them in the shower to protect my feet from germs, and I wore them to walk around the train. It was much easier to slide them on than to lace up my chunky boots — the only other pair of shoes I had with me.

Since I had the Crocs, I tucked my boots away into the closet until the end of my trip.

Utilizing the top bunk made the space feel bigger.

I was so fond of the top bunk after night one that I kept it down throughout the next day. In such a small room, having one more space to hang out meant a lot to me. I had the couch, the chair, and now the top bunk.

During the day, I sat on the couch or the seat to write and work on my computer. When I wanted to play video games or read, I climbed the ladder to use the top bunk as a cozy loft.

On a train without WiFi, I made sure I'd still be able to watch TV before bed.

Unlike most Amtrak trains I've been on, the California Zephyr doesn't have WiFi.

As a TV-before-bed person, I downloaded sitcoms and anime episodes from Netflix before my trip so I could maintain my nighttime routine.

I did light cardio workouts during long train stops.

The California Zephyr stops at some stations for 10 minutes or longer. In these cases, all passengers are allowed to step off the train. I got some fresh air at every long stop. I saw other travelers smoking tobacco, snapping pictures, and walking up and down the platform. But I was the only one doing jumping jacks and playing hopscotch with imaginary chalk boxes.

I felt a bit like an outcast, but getting in some light cardio was worth feeling strange for a few minutes because I got to release pent-up energy and tire out my body, which probably helped me sleep better, too.

I made an effort to get to know fellow travelers.

Getting to know people on a long-distance train makes me feel more at home — especially when I run into the same people throughout the trip. While I often feel shy and awkward around strangers, I use solo travel as an opportunity to practice my social skills.

Amtrak makes it easy to talk to other passengers because they seat different parties together in the dining car. I learned about other people's travel plans over breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I saw many of my dining companions later on the platform during long stops and chatted with them more.

When I finally got off the train, I felt proud of myself for how much I'd grown as a train traveler.

During my 53-hour journey on the California Zephyr, I felt more comfortable, rested, and fulfilled than I ever had before on an overnight train.

I didn't just survive the longest train ride in the US — I thrived.

• Pokémon cards have surged in popularity, becoming the world's No. 1 toy product last year.
• For uninformed parents, the trading cards can present a complex and expensive new world.
• Here are three things parents should know before they embark on their child's Pokémon journey.

Everything old is new again — and on playgrounds across America, that means Pokémon cards are back.

Pokémon was the No. 1 toy property globally last year, generating $2.5 billion in the US, up 87% from 2024, according to a report from market research firm Circana. As of the end of last year, collectible card games were the most-purchased secondhand product category for American Gen Zers on eBay, the e-commerce company said.

Most children's hobbies don't involve products that can cost as much as a Rolex, so the pressure is on for parents to figure out how to navigate this complex marketplace.

If a parent were a collector themselves, that can help. But plenty of parents come in blank, with no idea of the difference between a Charizard and a Charmander, or an Elite Trader Box (more on that later) and a Booster Bundle.

"You probably think to yourself, what is my child getting into right now and how do I have them approach it in a healthy, responsible way," Matthew Winkelreid, the owner of Bleecker Trading, a collectibles store and event space with two Manhattan locations, told Business Insider. "You can get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information."

While you may well be surprised with what your eight-year-old has picked up on at school, it doesn't hurt to educate yourself a little bit on what has the potential to be an expensive — or lucrative — hobby.

Here are three things to consider before diving headfirst into your child's Pokémon obsession.

Understand your budget

"My first question is, what's your price point?" Winkelreid said.

Pokémon products have an expansive price range. One 2.5 by 3.5-inch card can cost $1, another — which may look identical to an unwitting parent — can cost six figures.

So going in with a clear idea of how much you want to spend is key.

If your kid did well in school and you want to reward them, maybe choose a $15 Tin, which contains two packs of 10 trading cards each. If it's a big birthday, then maybe you splurge on a $125 Eliter Trader Box with nine packs, a promo card, sleeves, top loaders, and energy cards.

(For the uninitiated, Pokémon cards come in packs; part of the thrill is buying a pack to see if it contains a very valuable card, in terms of rarity or market value.)

It's easy to spend a lot on the hobby, but there are options at every price point, so set that limit before you start shopping.

Understand what your child likes to collect

The majority of kids see Pokémon cards as collectibles rather than a game, Winkelreid said, and, as with any collectible, people have different interests. Some collect specific characters, some want a master set, some just like to rip packs.

Knowing what your child is looking for can direct your purchase, so you don't blow their birthday budget on a pack they have no interest in.

And don't underestimate kids' ability to know real from fake. Sure, you can buy them plenty of cards on Amazon for a fraction of the price of an accredited retailer, but buyer beware.

"Go to a verified card store," he said. If you can't go to Bleeker trading, he suggests a known retailer. "Target, a big box store — do it in person rather than do it through Amazon."

Understand the market

It's not just about how much you are willing to spend, but also about spending in a smart way.

"Every card has an inherent value, whether it's 50 cents or $500," Winkelreid said.

Before buying a card secondhand, research its value to make sure you're getting a fair price. Just like with stocks, there are websites that track market value, including Card Ladder, which pulls data from eBay to monitor specific transactions, and TCGplayer, a large marketplace that reflects real-time market value.

If your kid ends up with a valuable card, there are some best practices.

Winkelreid suggests educating your kids on how to store the products — putting cards in plastic sleeves and toploaders — and how to make fair trades. Don't swap a Mew worth $500 for a Snorlax worth $50 just because you like the color, and if you are the one with the Snorlax, don't take advantage of someone on the playground who doesn't know how much their Mew is worth.

And if you have any doubt, talk to one of the many non-kid experts.

"Go to a local store. You have no idea what you're getting yourself into without getting eyeballs on it," he said. "Bonus points if you get involved."

• Vaishali Gauba returned to India after five years in the US because she didn't get a visa.
• Differences between life in the US and India made her feel what's known as reverse culture shock.
• Gauba learned to stop blaming herself for not getting a visa and to value the positives of her home country.

I sat on the terrace of my Washington Heights apartment building, soaking in the view of the city skyline one last time.

It was my last night in New York City before I moved back to India. I'd relocated to the US five years earlier, at age 17, to study journalism and business management. I went on to work at CBS News, which was a dream come true. Saying goodbye was incredibly hard, but I also knew more challenges lay ahead.

At that point, I hadn't heard the term "reverse culture shock" — a sense of disorientation you feel when returning to your country after a long stay abroad — but I now know this is what I experienced when I got back to India. Busy work mornings in New York were replaced by dull ones in India for the first few weeks while I waited to start my new job. As everyone in my home left for work, I was left questioning my purpose. Meanwhile, I was startled by the many cultural differences, from extreme honking on the roads to how people spoke to service staff.

Over time, three steps helped me make the most of my new life and readjust to my home country. I even learned to appreciate it in ways I didn't expect.

First, I had to stop blaming myself

My reverse culture shock was strong because I didn't return to India on my own terms.

After graduating in the US, I received a one-year work permit, but I was hoping to get employer sponsorship for an H1-B visa, which would help me stay and work in the country longer. Though I tried my best to secure one with CBS and other companies, nothing worked out, and I had to leave when my work authorization expired, arriving in India in August 2017.

I kept asking myself if I could have done something differently to get a work visa. The rejection kept stabbing at me and took at least six months to recover from. I had to remind myself that immigration processes aren't completely in my control, and I wasn't the only person with an experience like this.

Thankfully, I secured a job as a journalist at an international news channel in India even before I moved, through networking with a connection at CBS News. It reminded me that my skills were valuable and I had strong professional abilities, helping me to regain my confidence and stop blaming myself. It made the transition to life in India easier, since I had something to look forward to and was working in an industry I was familiar with.

I prioritized my space and independence

Living on a college campus as a student in America was my introduction to adulthood. I liked being in charge of day-to-day choices, including what my social life looked like, without needing my parents' permission.

Indian culture is much less individualistic. I was living with my parents again, which is the norm even for adults, and I was certain they'd expect me to share details about my whereabouts on a regular basis. I felt stifled by the loss of my independence and got into a few arguments with them, mostly over where I was or when I'd come home.

After three months of struggling with my living situation, I decided to move out of my parents' home in Gurugram to the nearby city of New Delhi, since it was closer to work. After having a serious conversation with my parents to help them understand my decision, they eventually came around and even helped me find new accommodation.

The move played a significant role in helping me feel like myself again in India. I could enjoy my independence, which was more aligned with the life I had in the US, and could also meet my parents every weekend. This actually brought us closer, because we treasured the limited time we had together each week.

I began to value the positives

In addition to making adjustments to my home life, I had to get used to the country's quirks, which I'd forgotten about.

In New York City, I could walk anywhere, but in cities like Gurugram and New Delhi, pollution and the lack of sidewalks made that extremely difficult, so I often found myself stuck in frustrating traffic jams. As a woman, I felt safe enough to stay out late in New York as long as I had my wits about me. Meanwhile, New Delhi and Gurugram felt less safe for women, and with my parents checking in on me, I had to be home by a certain time.

I complained about these issues to my family and friends, but I also knew that doing so constantly would make me feel stuck and helpless. Instead, I gradually shifted my perspective to practice gratitude and focus on the positives, such as being a short drive away from family, having access to home-made food, and reconnecting with high school friends. It helped me feel more in control of my life, enjoying what I had rather than feeling bitter about what I didn't.

I lived in India for five years in my early 20s before relocating to Canada in 2022 to study and join my partner. Despite the initial mental and emotional hardship, I can look back at those five years as a highlight of my life. It brought me closer to my family, cultivated an appreciation for my country, and strengthened my confidence in my professional identity.

More importantly, the experience of overcoming reverse culture shock taught me how to stay resilient during adversity and rejection — something I've been able to carry with me throughout life's brightest and darkest days, no matter where I live.

After an adrenaline-pumping month of cricket, the T20 World Cup final has arrived, and the final two teams are duking it out for the title. We've compiled everything you need to know about how to watch India vs. New Zealand, including free and global streaming options.

India returns to the T20 final in a repeat of the 2024 tournament, which they ultimately won against South Africa. However, South Africa is nowhere to be seen this time around. After a dominant run at this year's tournament, where they even beat India in the Super 8, the South African team was bounced by New Zealand in a stellar semis match.

Now, New Zealand will return to the final for the first time since 2021, when they lost to Australia. New Zealand flamed out in the group stage at the 2024 tournament, so they've significantly turned things around in 2026 and are looking to go all the way.

Whether you're rooting for another India win or you're hoping to see New Zealand continue their hot streak, we've got you covered. Keep reading to learn how to tune into the T20 final from anywhere.

How to watch India vs. New Zealand in the US

Like the rest of the T20 World Cup, cricket fans can watch India vs. New Zealand through Willow TV in the US. Willow is available on its own for $10 a month or through Sling TV's Desi Binge Plus and Dakshin Flex plans. These plans, which also include additional channels, start at $10 a month.

How to watch India vs. New Zealand in the UK

In the UK, T20 World Cup coverage is broadcast through Sky Sports. Coverage is available through Sky Sports Cricket and Sky Sports Main Event. Prices vary by subscription plan, although you can explore options through our guide to the best Sky TV deals. UK fans can also stream the action via a NOW Sports subscription.

How to watch India vs. New Zealand free from anywhere

T20 World Cup events, like India vs. New Zealand, are available to watch around the world. Several regions, including select T20 participating countries like the Netherlands and Italy, can access free streams by creating an ICC.TV account.

If you're away from somewhere like the Netherlands during the match, you can still access your free streaming option with the help of a VPN. Short for virtual private networks, VPNs are easy-to-use tech tools that let people alter their virtual locations. This way, their go-to websites and apps work from anywhere in the world. They're especially popular among those hoping to access their usual services while traveling abroad or hoping to upgrade their cybersecurity.

NordVPN is a fantastic option. It's fast, user-friendly, and has an impressive selection of global servers. Plus, it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee if you find that it's not what you're looking for. You can learn more in our NordVPN review.

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.

• Georgian Tutuianu transitioned from software engineering to an AI engineer at HubSpot.
• Tutuianu created a side project section on his résumé to showcase his experience with AI.
• He said AI engineering is "like the Wild West," right now, so it was important to build his own projects.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Georgian Tutuianu, a 36-year-old AI engineer at HubSpot, based in Boston. His identity and employment have been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I started my career as a structural engineer. I went from traditional engineering, to software engineering, to AI engineering, which I'm doing now at HubSpot.

While I was a structural engineer, there was a lot of new technology coming out with machine learning. There seemed to be a lot of opportunities to integrate it in the field. So I went back to school at Northeastern University to get my Master's in computer science.

I started working as a software engineer in 2021 at a startup. Then I ended up joining HubSpot. I've always enjoyed using software and automation to make users' lives better, so the job really resonated with me.

In my current job, I help marketers scale with AI. It's cool because I get to work with people and see their faces when things go well and not so well. The dopamine hit of building the right thing is really fun.

Dedicating a résumé section to side projects

When it comes to AI engineering, you have to apply LLMs for whatever outcomes you want. Everything I'm learning about LLMs right now is on the job. It's like the Wild West. Everybody is doing whatever, and the barriers to entry are as low as they're going to be.

Being able to talk in the weeds on a technical level in my interview showed that I have definitely messed around with AI before. You can't really fake that.

The way I showed that on my résumé was straightforward. I have a section for personal projects. I have a lot of side projects, so I took out what wasn't relevant for this particular role. Then I added a project that I had been working on that was relevant.

Something that I found super useful in day-to-day coding was having well-documented functions, which is even more important now because AI reads the entire code base. It turns out writing well-documented functions sucks because it's very time-consuming, so I made the AI do that for me.

Now I just review them and rarely make edits. That was my personal project, which I still use. I only did that one AI project, but it was enough because it was a deeper and juicier project.

My side project came up naturally in the interview because I was asked to talk about a time that I used an AI agent or built an AI agent. It was very straightforward.

The interview wasn't just project-based. I had to do a take-home coding assignment and meet with the hiring manager to review it afterward, and talk about the solution and tradeoffs. There was no algorithmic component to the interview, which is typical in software engineer interviews. I would characterize it primarily as focused on: "Can you build what we need?"

The best way to cut through the hype

I could have gone and found videos about the things I needed to learn, but the field is so diverse and fast-paced that it's faster to try things out for yourself instead of waiting for video content or someone else to figure things out for you. There's also a lot of AI hype out there so it's difficult to figure out who is trustworthy.

The most useful part of my software career was learning systems thinking and seeing the big picture. If you understand what the system's trying to do, you can take shortcuts and leverage the LLM in its best ways.

I think the best way to cut through all the AI hype is to try things out yourself. Go and investigate whatever you find interesting.

If you really love databases, go build some vector search tool and try to use it for a personal project.

It's never been easier to just ask an LLM Claude or somebody to help you get started. It's up to you to really build something fundamentally interesting that uses AI. That technical experience is valuable to people because you can immediately be useful when you start an AI role.

• I taught in public schools for over a decade and measured success by test scores and benchmarks.
• Then I started homeschooling my two children and realized that success was more nuanced.
• I learned that I had to let go of the belief that learning only counts if it can be assessed.

For more than a decade, I taught in public high schools. I believed deeply in standards, benchmarks, and measurable outcomes. I trusted data. I tracked growth. I aligned objectives. Success, to me, meant progress you could prove.

I wasn't wrong. But I wasn't seeing the whole picture either.

When I began homeschooling my own children, at ages twelve and five, those carefully held definitions started to unravel in quiet, uncomfortable ways.

One morning I sat down at the kitchen table with a math worksheet I'd printed the night before. I had a plan—fractions, then reading, then science. My son stared at the page for 10 minutes before pushing it aside in frustration.

Later that afternoon, I watched him outside with his brothers arguing over batting averages and calculating which player had the better on-base percentage. No worksheet. No rubric. Just numbers, curiosity, and a lot of debate.

It was the first time I wondered if learning might be happening in ways my old definitions couldn't measure.

Achievements looked different

There were no grades at the kitchen table. No standardized tests waiting at the end of the year. No pacing guides or bell schedules to keep us on track.

At first, the absence felt unsettling. As an educator, I had been trained to look for evidence. How do you know learning is happening if you can't quantify it? Where do you point when someone asks, "Are they on grade level?"

Instead, I began noticing things that never fit neatly into a rubric when I was in a traditional classroom. A child lingering over a book because he was genuinely curious. Another explaining a concept back to me in her own words, not because it would be tested, but because she wanted to understand it. Progress unfolded unevenly, sometimes invisibly, and often in ways I couldn't chart.

That lack of measurable proof forced me to sit with a harder question: Had I been mistaking structure for success?

There is more than one way to measure success

In the classroom, I saw countless students who knew how to play the game. They followed directions, met deadlines, and performed well on assessments. They were labeled successful. At the same time, I watched others struggle not because they lacked ability, but because they resisted the system itself. They questioned the why, moved at a different pace, or disengaged when the work felt meaningless.

Homeschooling made that distinction impossible to ignore. When there was no external pressure to comply, learning looked — and felt — a lot different. Sometimes messier. Often slower. But also more honest.

At home, my son interrupted constantly with questions — sometimes ten in the middle of a single lesson. In a classroom, I might have asked him to hold them so we could keep moving. At the kitchen table, the questions became the lesson.

I realized how often schools reward obedience and call it achievement. We praise students for sitting still, meeting arbitrary benchmarks, and producing the right answers on demand. Those skills matter in certain contexts, but they are not the same as curiosity, resilience, or deep understanding.

During a reading lesson, my son stopped halfway through the chapter and began explaining why he thought the main character had made a terrible decision. He pulled examples from earlier pages and started predicting what might happen next. None of it was part of the comprehension questions I had planned, but it was clear he wasn't just reading the story — he was wrestling with it. And, though he wasn't completing a test about it, he was demonstrating mastery, application, and independent thought — skills rarely assessed in multiple choice.

This shift has not been an indictment of public education, nor is it a manifesto for homeschooling. It's been a personal reckoning.

I had to rethink how I taught my children

I had to unlearn the idea that rigor requires constant measurement. I had to let go of the belief that learning only counts if it can be assessed. Most uncomfortably, I had to confront how tightly my own sense of worth had been tied to productivity and performance.

Watching my children learn without chasing metrics forced me to ask what I had been chasing myself.

Success now looks quieter. It looks like a child who asks better questions, not just faster ones. It looks like confidence built over time, not urgency driven by comparison. It looks like learning that bends to fit the learner, rather than the learner bending to fit the system.

As an educator and a parent, I no longer believe success is something you can always measure in real time. Sometimes it shows up years later, in ways no test could predict.

Homeschooling didn't change my respect for education. It changed my understanding of it. And in doing so, it challenged me to redefine success not as something to be proven, but as something to be lived.

• Subtack has become a hub of market views and investment advice.
• Investing icons that used to be locked behind the walls of their firms have launched newsletters that anyone can access.
• Investing pros say there are benefits, but also risks, to this new era of democratized market commentary.

A research outfit called Citrini Research sent the market into a tailspin last month with a dystopian thought exercise on the AI-driven economy of the future. Traders didn't come by this report on the Bloomberg Terminal or in the annals of a bank's research portal.

The report dropped on Substack, the newsletter publisher that's become a go-to for retail traders seeking to up their game with insights from some of the market's leading voices.

While lesser-known firms like Citrini have utilized the platform to reach markets, investing icons like Michael Burry and Ray Dalio have also used it to bring their views to the masses.

As investors flock to Substack for investing analysis and commentary, it appears more and more like the platform is providing the same service for retail traders that a Bloomberg terminal does for Wall Street.

"I like Substack because it is often retail or industry operators commenting and they often have unique insights," Amrita Bhasin, a retail trader who works in the e-commerce industry, told Business Insider. "Because it is more informal, these writers can share their authentic thoughts and it comes across as more their stream of consciousness vs. heavily edited content for an audience."

For writers like the famed trader Michael Burry, that definitely seems to be the case. Once a fleeting presence on social media—known for often joining and deleting his X account in the same day—Burry is now posting novella-length views on stocks he's interested in.

Ray Tariq, an entrepreneur from Melbourne, Australia, says Substack's power lies in its ability to shorten the distance between retail and institutional thinking.

"A well-timed, well-written post can move sentiment fast, especially when it gets screenshotted and shared across X and trading chats," he noted. "Many retail traders are wired into those channels. That doesn't mean the analysis is wrong or right. It means the distribution is immediate."

Tariq recalled how 10 years ago, detailed market research from finance pros was reserved strictly for those who could afford expensive subscriptions. He thinks the rise of Substack is helping change that.

Steven Wang, CEO of copytrading platform Dub, echoed that view, noting the fundamental shift in the accessibility of market research that has occurred in recent years, one that he sees as highly beneficial for retail investors.

"Substack is really powerful as a reflection of everything that's transpired in the past maybe five to 10 years," he told Business Insider. "I think the democratization and information talent is really budding beyond the walls of Wall Street."

While that may be true, some finance professionals who work with retail traders urge caution.

James Sixsmith, CEO of prop trading firm Take Profit Trader, noted that Substack can certainly provide market research from finance pros for those who can't afford to pay for a Bloomberg terminal. However, he also sees some drawbacks amid the rise of democratized market research.

"The majority of that information is now taken as the automatic truth," he said, referring to Substack posts like the Citrini note, which helped shave 800 points off the Dow the day it was published. "This is a science fiction article, basically with one possibility that gets shared on X. It goes from Substack to X, it gets read, and then it goes viral. And now everybody that reads it in the retail world thinks it's the absolute truth."

Wang also noted that he sees some risk for traders who might read Substack investing content and not understand the risks involved in what an investing pro might be talking about, such as shorting stocks. He added, though, that this could be a logical next frontier for Substack, potentially providing tools or educational insights alongside the content from writers on the platform.

"I think there could be a world where Substack could build in the execution," he said. "To take that next step, to bring it beyond just idea generation, to actually creating and almost portfolio management."

• Maria Wainer, based in Israel, canceled her trip to Boston after the strikes against Iran.
• Much of the region has shut down air travel in the wake of Iranian retaliation. So Wainer can't fly.
• Airbnb, however, refused to refund Wainer's reservation.

Maria Wainer should have been boarding a flight from Israel to Boston on Thursday to visit loved ones. Instead, another war had broken out, and she was locked in a protracted row with an Airbnb support agent.

She was trying to get a refund after canceling her reservation. The agent was sympathetic, yet unwilling.

"It tears me apart to know you are constantly threatened by the ongoing geopolitical conflict in your location right now. And I feel so bad that I still cannot help you with your full-refund request at the moment," an Airbnb agent wrote in a message to Wainer on Thursday.

Israel's airspace has been closed since February 28 after it and the US launched a joint attack on Iran, sparking retaliatory strikes across the region. Those strikes brought travel to a near-total halt, forcing stranded tourists to launch GoFundMe campaigns to afford extended stays.

It was in this climate that Wainer contacted her Airbnb host in Boston to cancel her trip before reaching out to the company about a refund, citing its Major Disruptive Events policy. The policy covers "military actions and other hostilities," which includes bombings, acts of war, and explosions, among others. Wainer had paid about $800 for the room.

"Our Major Disruptive Events Policy is in effect for areas of the world impacted by issues covered under this policy, like military actions or closed airspaces," an Airbnb spokesperson told Business Insider. "This means guests who have an eligible booking in one of those areas can cancel for a refund, and hosts can cancel without consequences. To be clear, this means the listing itself needs to be in the impacted area."

So, even though she was unable to fly due to the conflict, since Wainer's reservation was elsewhere, she didn't qualify.

"For now, the only option there is for this reservation is a cancellation outside the policy," the support agent told Wainer in messages viewed by Business Insider.

The company eventually offered her a partial refund. When Wainer asked why Airbnb couldn't provide her with a full refund, the support agent said the policy "states that 'guests can cancel their reservation and receive a refund.' Please know that it does not state a 'full refund' clause. I hope you understand better now."

Wainer, who said it was her first time booking with Airbnb, told Business Insider that the decision baffled her. "I said, 'Well, it doesn't say 'partial refund' either. If you don't put in that adjective, you assume it's full," Wainer said.

Airbnb eventually gave Wainer a full refund after Business Insider contacted the company for comment.

Some travelers in the region who posted online also said they struggled to secure refunds from Airbnb over the past week.

On Tuesday, a Reddit user with a booking at an Airbnb in Abu Dhabi said they requested a refund under the Major Disruptive Events policy, but were told to refer to the host's cancellation policy instead. An X user described a similar scenario on Wednesday.

Wainer's advice for them: Be persistent.

"I really am into consumer rights. I'll write letters if I feel like I'm not being treated fairly, and I figure it's not just me," Wainer said. "Maybe other people will just give up, but I don't think they should have to."

• Pet-care app Rover is seeing more demand for cat care, especially from Gen Z.
• After a run-up in pandemic-era dog adoptions, many are turning to cats, CEO Brent Turner said.
• Rover is growing its business in cat care and dog training, Turner said.

Pet-care app Rover is adapting to a new reality: Many of its youngest users are cat people.

During the pandemic, many people adopted dogs, cats, and other pets. Those with jobs that allowed them to work from home often enjoyed the companionship and, without a commute, had more time to take the dog for a walk or break out a laser pointer for an energetic cat.

Now, though, Rover is seeing more requests for its gig-worker sitters to check on cats, CEO Brent Turner told Business Insider in an interview. The trend is particularly pronounced among Gen Z users, he said.

"Dog adoptions have been slower to recover, whereas cat adoptions have really gone fast," Turner said.

For Gen Z workers, many of whom are just starting out in their careers, cats represent a lower barrier to pet ownership.

"The industry understanding is that they're lower-maintenance, generally lower-cost, and easier to take care of," Turner said.

Of all demographic groups, cat ownership grew the most among Gen Z — 18% — and millennial men — 24%— in 2024, according to a report published last year by the American Pet Products Association.

Many pet owners have displayed a willingness to spend money on their companions, whether it's better-quality food or a new toy, even as they rein in spending in other areas, such as travel.

In January, Rover responded to that demand when it paid an undisclosed amount for Meowtel, an app that provides cat-sitting services with an emphasis on in-home visits — a strategy the company says appeals to cat owners, who are generally averse to boarding their pets.

The company also offers back-up pet care through a partnership with Bright Horizons, a company that has traditionally offered parents last-minute childcare. Turner said the partnership, which provides pet care as a workplace benefit, has gained traction as more people returned to the office.

Rover's newest offering includes private training sessions for dogs. Turner said the move seeks to prevent dogs from being sent to shelters due to behavioral issues — something "we cannot abide," he added.

It also gives Rover a chance to establish a relationship with pet owners when they first adopt a dog, he said.

"It gives us a chance to engage with pets early in their life cycle," Turner said.

Do you work for Rover or another gig work service? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Business Insider rounded up the books that investors say have shaped their thinking about money.
• One financially independent NYC-based couple drew inspiration from "Die With Zero."
• Another savvy investor thinks "Work Optional" is an "incredibly underrated" money book.

If you've read a business or finance book roundup, chances are "Rich Dad Poor Dad" made the list.

So many investors have cited Robert Kiyosaki's classic that this Business Insider reporter had to read it herself to see what all the hype was about.

For this list, though, we're highlighting more underrated or surprising titles we've heard recommended by financially savvy individuals. Here are three that shaped how they think about money, work, and retirement.

"Die With Zero" by Bill Perkins

Alex Nathanson and Josette Chang reached financial independence in Manhattan, partly thanks to the mindset they adopted from "Die With Zero." The book encourages readers to prioritize meaningful life experiences over endlessly growing their portfolios.

"We like the 'Die With Zero' approach: Use the money when you can. There's no point in continuing to accumulate forever," Nathanson said. "If you want to travel, that's the money to use now. When you're older, there are more health issues, you're less active, and you're not likely to spend all that money."

For them, financial independence isn't about building the biggest possible net worth. It's about having the flexibility to spend intentionally on experiences and priorities that matter to them.

"Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way" by Tanja Hester

Michela Allocca built a brand around money advice for young women, creating the kind of content she wished she'd had in her early 20s. She monetized her platform, Break Your Budget, quit her corporate job, and built a seven-figure portfolio all by age 30.

Allocca says one of her favorite, and "incredibly underrated," personal finance books is Tanja Hester's "Work Optional."

"A lot of the finance books that get the most attention feel so cookie-cutter," she said. What sets this one apart is how thoroughly it walks readers through the nuances of financial independence planning.

"It lays out all the little intricacies you need to think about," Allocca said. "If you want to buy a house, how does that factor into your plan? How does health insurance factor in? From a lifestyle standpoint, what do you value? If you're planning before you have a family, how would kids impact the picture?"

Allocca said she frequently gets questions about how major life decisions — like having children — affect someone's financial independence number.

"I can't give a straight answer because I don't know your life — how many kids you want, what kind of lifestyle you're aiming for," she said. "Those things have to be factored into the plan. I think this book does a good job of helping you think through it in a tactical way."

"Big Magic" by Elizabeth Gilbert

For Rose Han, early retirement was once the ultimate goal.

"At 32, I basically achieved a version of FIRE — living in my camper van and having freedom — and it was fun for like the first six months."

Less than a year later, she found herself bored and unfulfilled. Only after quitting her Wall Street job did she realize she was chasing the wrong thing all along.

"The question shouldn't be: 'How can I retire early and finally live my life?' The question should be: 'How can I build a life I don't want to retire from?'"

That shift in mindset led her to think differently about money and purpose. Many people, she said, don't actually want to do nothing. Rather, they want to spend their time on meaningful work.

In "Big Magic," Elizabeth Gilbert writes about waitressing while pursuing writing, deliberately choosing a job that paid the bills so her creative work wouldn't be burdened by financial pressure.

Han embraces a similar framework: You can have a "cash cow" that supports you and separate passions that fulfill you, and they don't have to be the same thing.

"Your job can fund your passions," she said. "It could be the lawyer who has a rock band on the weekends, or the waitress who writes at night. Or, if you're lucky, what you love to do also makes you money."

Han says she's found something close to that sweet spot — she loves creating YouTube videos and writing about personal finance, which is how she makes money — but she also maintains hobbies she has no intention of monetizing, like dancing and cooking.

"You don't have to do it one way," she said. "If you're intentional about building a whole package of a life — thinking about your income and your passions — you can create something you don't want to retire from."

• Sue Miller, 83, raised children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren mostly on her own.
• After retirement, Miller returned to work as a part-time lunch lady in a local school district.
• Despite cancer, Miller remains active, aiming to live until 100 for her grandson's sake.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sue Miller, 83, who lives in Wisconsin. Miller raised three children, two grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, much of which was on her own. Miller now lives alone near her autistic son and works as a lunch lady. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm blessed because even when things were really hard, it always seemed like something came up to help me out. There was always some job for me. I've always been a survivor. How can I see it any differently?

I had three kids, 11 months and 15 months apart. My middle child, David, is autistic. He didn't walk until he was three and was extremely hyperactive. I was lucky if we got four hours of sleep a night. He's smart and understands, but he was always on the move.

Raising them all was hectic. I worked at a dentist's office and as a cocktail waitress. I was able to have David stay at a training school for a month to give me a break, and when he came home, he was calmer because he had a routine.

A year after I got divorced in 1976, I moved to Arizona with my two other kids, who were still young, while David stayed in Wisconsin. Arizona didn't have any facilities for him at the time, and he was in great hands where he was.

I moved my family to live with someone there

That didn't work out. We bought a house together, but I bought him out. I was able to get some accounting jobs. I was an office manager with an accounting background, but I never earned a degree.

Within two years, I bought a condo using some of the money I got from selling my home in Wisconsin after my divorce. We didn't have everything, but we were comfortable.

I tried to avoid debt because it was too overwhelming for me. I was content with resale shops. The one thing I was willing to pay for was nice cars, but I always got good deals.

When the kids lived with me after high school, they paid rent. It wasn't a lot, and it depended on what they could afford, but I figured they had to learn responsibility.

My family is scattered

My oldest son, Todd, lives in Minnesota with two kids. My daughter, Dawn, lives in Arizona in my other house, and she has two kids. One of them, Paul, lives in Las Vegas, and the other, Christie, moved in with me at 16 when she had Jaidden, her first child. She had Jeremiah six years later.

Paul stayed with me until he was 24. Christie came home to me from the hospital with her baby. Both went back to school and got their diplomas.

I remember when Paul had friends over, they would always say "Hi, Grandma" to me and head upstairs. Paul and Christie considered me their mother instead of their grandmother. My house has always been an open house.

It was grandma's rules at my house, and they had to follow them

Things had to be put back where they came from. They had jobs every weekend. This was the same when my great-grandkids lived with me. There has always been a lot of love.

I was taught to be very frugal, and I always worked and paid off my house early. I've helped everyone out if they needed it. Paul has always paid me back. A lot of people owe me money, but that's the story of my life.

Christie was in and out of the house a few times, but she basically lived with me. I would go to water aerobics every morning, and Jaidden would come and hang out with me. Jaidden and I were very close. When Jeremiah was little, he would come into my bedroom and play with his cars. Then, he'd snuggle up next to me and squeeze my arm until he fell asleep.

If I went somewhere, I always took the kids with me. I had car seats in my car for decades.

I retired at 65 after a layoff from my accounting job at a deli meat processing plant

I didn't work for about seven years until January 2014. My stepmother had a mild stroke, so I moved back to Wisconsin to take care of her. I didn't have to pay rent, so I was still able to help Christie live in Arizona until my daughter moved in.

Moving also gave me the chance to spend more time with David, who lives in a group home. He's 62 now. I pick him up on weekends, and we go for lunch or shopping. Every caregiver just loves him.

I visit Arizona all the time, but moving back here was necessary. I wish I could be in both places at once. I especially miss my great-grandsons because they're so far away.

I started as a volunteer and ended up becoming a lunch lady

I've been working part-time for six years at a local school district. I work for four to five hours a day.

For the first time, I have a decent savings account, so I'm comfortable. I don't have many bills, just insurance and utilities.

My Social Security is enough for me to live on without extra income, but I like working. I always figure this way, I'm saving money instead of spending it.

I stay active by walking on nicer days or continuing with water aerobics

I have cancer. It's called small lymphocytic lymphoma, but I take a chemo pill every morning, and I'm on the lowest dose.

My blood pressure gets a little crazy off and on. I don't get sick too often, though, which is good because I want to work until I'm 90. I have to live to be 100 for my grandson because I always tell him I'll be around for a long time.

The two great underwriters of Jeffrey Epstein's $630 million fortune were the billionaires Les Wexner and Leon Black, who entrusted him with managing their finances and ensuring their tax bills stayed as low as possible.

The Justice Department's files show that in the years before his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges and jailhouse death, Epstein tried to nab another billionaire client: the real estate and media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman.

Zuckerman, who is now 88, at one point had a higher public profile than both Black, the former CEO and chairman of Apollo Global Management, and Wexner, the onetime owner of Victoria's Secret.

Between the 1980s and 2000s, Zuckerman was a frequent presence on cable news, occasionally floated himself as a national political candidate, and saw his romantic flings chronicled in tabloid newspapers.

Zuckerman — who is now worth about $2.7 billion, according to Forbes — is the former CEO of the real estate company Boston Properties and previously owned media outlets including The Atlantic, the New York Daily News, and Fast Company. He stepped away from some of those companies and public life about a decade ago "due to issues with his health," a person close to Zuckerman's family told Business Insider. He still owns US News & World Report, best known for its rankings of universities and hospitals.

Zuckerman's relationship with Epstein stretched back to at least the early 2000s. In 2003, they teamed up with producer Harvey Weinstein and writer Michael Wolff in a failed bid to buy New York magazine. In 2004, Zuckerman and Epstein financed the ill-fated relaunch of Radar, a celebrity gossip publication. The Epstein files show that Zuckerman contributed to Epstein's now-famous 50th birthday book and that, on at least one occasion, Epstein offered to set Zuckerman up with a woman. There's no indication in the files that Zuckerman had knowledge of Epstein's sex trafficking operation.

In 2013, Epstein pitched himself to Zuckerman as a financial manager, the Justice Department's records show.

The deal was never consummated, but the files show that Epstein, a college dropout, held himself out as one of the few people qualified to help Zuckerman with what he said were sophisticated financial problems that required "surgical" care.

He tried to convince Zuckerman to trust him above other people in his life — and to act quickly.

In the process, Epstein obtained deeply personal information about the billionaire's health, finances, and family — which he used to try to convince the people around the billionaire to put him in charge.

After repeated rejections over the course of two years, Epstein turned impatient.

"I hav not asked for the money that mort promised for getting my help and never following through," Epstein wrote in an email to Zuckerman's nephews, who also served as his investment advisors. "I would also appreciate you putting a brake on the daily news calling me a pedophile. I have been patient and my fondness for mort remains."

A draft contract, dated December 17, 2013, shows that Epstein proposed Zuckerman retain Southern Trust Inc., one of Epstein's companies in the US Virgin Islands, for "analyzing, evaluating, planning and structuring large discrete issues relating to Mr. Zuckerman's financial estate."

Zuckerman would pay $21 million for the first 10 months of Epstein's services. Paul Weiss, the Big Law firm that had also done estate planning work for Black, would represent Zuckerman's interests in the deal, according to another document. Terje Rød-Larsen, a Norwegian diplomat and friend of Epstein's, would get $1 million under the proposal.

Rød-Larsen's role in the potential arrangement is unclear from the documents. John Christian Elden, an attorney for Rød-Larsen, told Business Insider that Zuckerman and the diplomat were friends, and that his role in Zuckerman's estate planning was Epstein's idea.

"Mr. Zuckerman did not pursue Mr. Epstein's advice or proposals, and accordingly, these arrangements were never implemented," Elden said.

The Epstein files show that he began getting involved with Zuckerman's estate planning earlier in 2013. That April — following a dinner with Zuckerman at Epstein's Manhattan mansion that, according his calendar, also featured Ehud Barak, Jes Staley, Woody Allen, and Tom Pritzker — Epstein told Zuckerman he'd review his financial situation.

In the subsequent weeks, Zuckerman sent Epstein hundreds of pages of his personal financial information, including detailed valuations of his assets, documentation of his spending habits, structures of his trusts, his charitable contributions, and details about his separation agreement with his ex-wife.

Zuckerman's finances were in a dismal state, Epstein told him in a June 2013 email.

The trusts needed a "total re-do," Epstein said. The job required someone with knowledge of investing, tax, estate law, real estate partnerships, securities filings, and divorce law.

"it is a serious job that requires surgical intervention," Epstein added.

Epstein initially said it would take him 15 months to personally fix Zuckerman's finances and cost between $30 million and $40 million.

In an email two days later, Epstein made an emotional appeal to Zuckerman to listen to his advice, leaning on memories of their long relationship over the years.

"Mort , I have sat with you in dunkin donuts outside of sloan kettering bad time ,-- sat next to you at harry evans when you announced your engagement to Marla, hopeful times," Epstein wrote.

The following month, after phone calls and meetings, Epstein urged Zuckerman to move fast.

He said he had everything "ready to go" as soon as Zuckerman agreed to hire him. If Zuckerman delayed, Epstein warned, "hundreds of millions of dollars" would be at risk.

"Everything virtually from top to bottom will get redone. every trust , all investments , and build a financial structure," Epstein said with his typical idiosyncratic punctuation. "There is a huge amount of time required to fix and time getting shorter to fix it , if you want to file by the end of year."

In August 2013, Epstein told his personal lawyer and accountant that Zuckerman agreed to a $30 million fee and asked them to draft a contract.

But in emails to Epstein, Zuckerman was noncommittal, and Epstein shifted his approach. In a September 2013 email, he disparaged the team Zuckerman had surrounded himself with — including Zuckerman's nephews and investment advisors, Eric and Jamie Gertler.

"Mort , I recommend you hire professionals , not your nephews." Epstein wrote.

He said Zuckerman needed an "architect" for his financial life, and that leaving his nephews in charge would cause family strife. In Epstein's view, putting Zuckerman's nephew in charge of his daughter's upbringing would "wreak havoc" on his family."

When Zuckerman failed to sign the $21 million contract by the end of 2013 despite Esptein's warnings of dire tax consequences, the convicted sex offender tried to salvage the deal.

In a January 2014 email, Epstein told Zuckerman that he had already sunk resources into the project, stressed the supposedly dire straits of Zuckerman's finances, and told Zuckerman he would be getting Epstein at a bargain rate.

"I only have good feelings towards you, and am torn watching you do yourself financial harm," Epstein wrote.

Zuckerman told Epstein the financial structure he suggested just "doesn't fit."

"Jeffrey. I have now consulted with three tax specialists and they do not see the issues as you do," Zuckerman responded.

Epstein didn't give up. Following a June 2014 breakfast, Epstein wrote Zuckerman a long email "in order to memorialize our conversation." He said Zuckerman had told him he believed his estate-planning capability "was only decreasing" and that he wanted to delegate responsibility to a team.

"You agree that a committee should be set up to manage your financial. affairs," Epstein wrote. "your statement that you realize you are no longer capable of doing so . You suggested that Terje larson be in charge as you fully trust his judgement."

In the email, Epstein yet again pitched that he be put in charge, and suggested he could be paid with Boston Properties stock or part of Zuckerman's investment portfolio.

Zuckerman said he was "definitely going to proceed" with putting together a committee, led by Rød-Larsen, to run his financial affairs. There's no indication he ever did. When Epstein followed up the next month, Zuckerman told him, "i have my own pace."

Around this time, Epstein started emailing the people close to Zuckerman to convince them that he should be hired. In one email to the Gertlers, he suggested Zuckerman only backed out of an agreement for Epstein to be his financial manager because of "his illness."

"I feel awkward having to remind you of the role I played, expenses I incurred, agreements that were reached ( ask Terje larsen)," Epstein wrote. "I was the one that uncovered hundreds of millions in errors in his financial reporting. work done at his request."

Eric Gertler kept a firm but polite distance.

"I am not aware of the uncovering of the financial errors but do know that any of the suggestions of your advisors had been previously considered or previously implemented by Mort's lawyers and financial advisors," Gertler wrote. "Regardless, I am not interested in nor is it appropriate to go back and forth."

In October 2015, Epstein emailed Eric Gertler to suggest that he and Jamie Gertler take over Zuckerman's financial life entirely, citing the billionaire's health.

At around the same time, Epstein emailed Rød-Larsen with a different plan to help run Zuckerman's finances with the help of the nephews.

He suggested setting up "Mort" like a company. Rød-Larsen and "Harry" — a possible reference to Harry Beller, one of Epstein's in-house accountants — would be co-chairmen. Epstein would handle finances. Eric Gertler would run the day-to-day and health issues. And Jamie Gertler and Joel Klein, another friend, would oversee issues related to his children. Neither Beller nor Klein responded to Business Insider's requests for comment.

Epstein also reached out directly to Zuckerman, recommending that a team of people take over, but Zuckerman continued to decline his help.

"Am well on the way to completing the planning I need including the designation of appropriate representatives," Zuckerman told him. "Have discussed it with various friends And. Lawyers."

At that point, Epstein's tone turned harsh. In an email to the nephews two weeks after Zuckerman's rejection, Epstein suggested Zuckerman was taking drugs.

"i assume you are aware that hes now wacko on somethings," Epstein wrote.

By late 2016, their relationship seemed to have deteriorated.

Epstein told Zuckerman: "how you could let your paper call me a pedophile.???!!!I expect a public apology and a full retraction. . I have been a close friend of yours for years."

The files don't include a response from Zuckerman.

• PC maker Framework has raised prices multiple times as the memory shortage drags on.
• CEO Nirav Patel told Business Insider about his strategy as he navigates rising chip costs and supply crunches.
• "The price is what it is, unfortunately," Patel said. He said his goal was to stay in production.

The memory crisis is making it more expensive to build consumer electronics. So, without the supply-chain leverage of a tech giant, how does a startup making computers survive?

We put the question to Nirav Patel, the CEO of Framework, a small PC company with a cult following that sells modular computers. Its business also relies on memory chips, which are facing a global shortage.

As AI companies grow their compute needs, hyperscalers are demanding more memory chips from the three primary producers: Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. That's caused prices to increase and supply to be tied up in long-term contracts that can put smaller electronics companies at the back of the line.

In a Q&A, Framework's CEO walked Business Insider through how the company is navigating the challenge, from raising prices to trying to be as transparent as possible around the issue while maintaining a sense of scrappiness. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How'd you get to Framework?

Patel: I started out as part of the founding team at Oculus. We were standing up and defining an entirely new product category. Consumer VR had at that point never really been a thing before.

The idea behind Framework was jumping to the absolute opposite end of consumer electronics, going to the most mature product categories. It was so mature that the innovation has been squeezed out of it entirely.

After we got acquired by Facebook a couple of years into Oculus, we all had five-year handcuffs. It was clear that staying at Facebook was not going to be the right move. It was a massive swing from being able to iterate really rapidly to being part of a giant bureaucracy.

How big is the company now?

Patel: We're a 75-person company now across the US and Taiwan. We've raised three rounds of funding over the course of the last six years. The last round was, at this point, over two years ago, and we've been operating in a financially self-sufficient mode since then.

Let's dig into memory. When did you start noticing the shortage?

Patel: We started getting early indications of this pretty early last year. Our suppliers were flagging to us, "It looks like there's something coming on the horizon in terms of supply-demand mismatch." The speed and slope of that ascent were pretty unexpected for everyone.

In October, we started to get much clearer indications from our suppliers: "Hey, supply is going to be a problem. Get your orders in."

This is a startup, so we can't do things like stockpile memory and storage. We're not at a scale where that makes sense. We obviously made sure to stay in very close contact with our suppliers, and to do things like test that we can get compatibility with as many different memory storage options as possible.

Is there any way to avoid high prices?

Patel: The price is what it is, unfortunately. It's no longer about maintaining the pricing you want. It's about: Can I get access to the supply to be able to continue to manufacture products?

We have been able to stay in production on all of our products. A big part of that goes back to the scale that we're operating at. We are big enough to have direct contact and direct relationships with memory suppliers like Micron.

On the other hand, we're small enough that we get to be a bit more flexible and creative than some of the bigger companies. If a broker comes to us and says, "We found 5,000 memory modules in a warehouse, do you want them?", we can say, "Yeah."

Do bigger consumer electronics companies have it easier?

Patel: They do. If you're a Dell, HP, Lenovo, or Apple, you've got these very substantial long-term relationships already in place. You are going to be near the front of the line when it comes to getting access to any allocation.

Tell me about leadership. How do you lead a team while this is happening?

Patel: A big part of this for us is transparency, both internally and externally. Within company town halls, we maintain complete transparency around what our financial situation is and what our supply position is. We give people the confidence that they're going to be aware if anything is going to become a problem.

How do you think employees are feeling?

Patel: There's a mentality of: We have an aligned mission and we have the right people to attack it together. It is motivating to see people come together as a team and address big problems. There's a lot of creative problem-solving happening.

All that teamwork, camaraderie, and collaboration mean, especially in a startup, that you can navigate challenging situations.

Let's talk about price increases for your products. Take me behind the first one; how do you make the initial choice?

Patel: The big thing for us was looking at the speed of the increase in pricing from our suppliers, and knowing we've reached a threshold we can't absorb.

When we were selling memory directly as modules in the Framework marketplace, we were the cheapest source of memory anywhere on the market. People were coming in and just buying memory from us, and not buying our computers. One very early move we made was pulling the standalone memory off our marketplace.

We're also reselling memory at the price we're purchasing it at. We don't want to make money on memory in this environment. What we want to do is make sure people can still get access to computers.

You've had a couple of price hikes now. Why not do it all in one?

Patel: We're not forecasting out into the future and preemptively increasing pricing. What we're doing is, roughly monthly, looking at the running average of purchase prices of memory and using that to set the price for the next month.

Have your sales taken a hit as a result?

Patel: I can't give exact numbers, but we do see noticeable decreases in specific products when we increase prices. It's just supply and demand.

As long as your computer is still working, you have some flexibility to wait a bit longer to decide. We expect, in the short term, people are going to slow down buying new computers to replace the current ones. As we average this out over the course of years, we're still going to see that demand is pretty steady.

Are you frustrated with suppliers?

Patel: You have to look at capitalism as a machine and accept it for what it is; otherwise, you're going to constantly be frustrated trying to build a business. We understand why prices are increasing. It is the unfortunate reality of how this works.

When do you hope it will die down?

Patel: Everyone's got different viewpoints on this. Towards the end of 2027 into 2028, we know that there will be some substantial increases in memory manufacturing capacity from big suppliers.

We don't know what demand will look like. It could be the case that the AI data center bubble pops, and suddenly there's a massive excess of supply, which would be great for consumers. It could be the case that demand increases, and it could be even longer.

I'd say early 2028 is our best guess at when things are going to start to go back to normal.

• Agility Robotics is deploying humanoid robots at Toyota's Canada manufacturing plant.
• The company says its robot, Digit, will take on jobs involving highly repetitive tasks.
• Agility's chief business officer, Daniel Diez, said companies see labor gaps in these positions.

Backflipping robots make for splashy demos and viral videos, but Agility Robotics sees humanoid bots doing something simpler — solving an urgent global labor issue inside manufacturing plants.

The Oregon-based startup has so far deployed its humanoid robot, Digit, at Amazon, Schaeffler Group, and GXO, a logistics company. The startup announced in February that a few Digit robots would be deployed in Toyota's massive manufacturing plant in Canada, marking yet another automaker betting on bipedal bots.

Daniel Diez, Agility's chief business officer, told Business Insider that there's a common thread at the companies he visits around the world. In Germany, Korea, Japan, or the US, manufacturers just don't have enough people who want to work mundane, repetitive jobs.

"It's the same exact issue: Labor gaps in these highly repetitive physical tasks," Diez said. "They simply can't find the people to do this work."

There is no shortage of manufacturing roles. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 400,000 job openings in the sector in the US as of December 2025.

In addition to vacancies, talent retention remains a top concern for manufacturers, according to a 2024 survey of more than 200 companies conducted by The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte.

Diez said there are "compounding effects" to the so-called labor gap.

A significant share of the manufacturing workforce is 55 and over, he said, meaning they're approaching retirement. BLS's Current Population Survey clocks the number at a little over 25%.

Add to that the Trump Administration's push to bring onshore manufacturing back, which Diez said will only create more jobs and a greater need for automation.

"This re-shoring of manufacturing in the US is going to only occur through a combination of human employment and automation technology, like humans and robotics," he said.

Automakers are notably bracing for this shifting tide. Tesla, Volkswagen, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and Hyundai, among others, have made significant investments in humanoid robots with the prospect that they'll work the assembly lines in the near future.

Boston Dynamics in January unveiled a new iteration of Atlas, an all-electric humanoid, that the startup aims to deploy in Hyundai's Georgia factory in a few years.

The company's former CEO, Robert Playter, previously told Business Insider that Boston Dynamics is helping companies brace for population decline and increased manufacturing demand.

At Toyota Motor's manufacturing plant in Ontario, the automaker is starting with three Digit bots that will do the simple task of moving totes, or plastic containers, from one spot to another.

There are robots out there that could execute much more complex tasks, while some industry insiders say humanoids, or bots with two legs and arms, are still years away from scaling. Part of the pitch for the bipedal form factor is easier integration into existing or older factories, Diez said.

"At this moment in time, it feels like an ideal solution for brownfield facilities," he said, referring to underutilized industrial facilities that tend to have a baked-in layout. In other words, with humanoids, manufacturers can automate their properties without making significant changes to the factory layout and workflow.

Diez said that any industry with highly repetitive tasks is ripe for the adoption of humanoid robots. The industries Agility Robotics is seeing with the most "inbound" requests are coming from warehouse logistics, e-commerce fulfillment, automotive, and pharmaceutical manufacturing, he said.

"We're not having to convince people that this is a technology need," Diez said. "We have more than enough hand-raisers who are coming to us."

• Videos online show US F-15 pilots' first apparent moments on the ground after ejecting Sunday.
• Even a successful ejection often leaves pilots injured and disoriented.
• Military aircrews train for what happens if their aircraft goes down behind enemy lines.

Six American airmen were forced to eject Sunday after three F-15E Strike Eagles were shot down in what US Central Command described as a friendly fire incident. Videos of one jet spiraling to the ground went viral.

The rare friendly-fire shootdown shows why pilot survival training is as critical as combat skill — and how violently things can go wrong even in "friendly" airspace.

Ejection Training

Military aviators regularly undergo refresher training on surviving aircraft emergencies, from what to do when oxygen levels drop dangerously low to escaping a downed aircraft at sea, said Vincent Aiello, a retired Navy fighter pilot and former TOPGUN instructor.

"Flying a high-performance fighter jet is a full-contact sport," he told Business Insider. "It's very difficult on your body."

Safe ejection preparation begins with body positioning. Because an ejection seat goes through what Aiello described as a "controlled explosion," even small deviations can cause severe injury. The seat rockets a pilot out of the cockpit in a fraction of a second, generating forces strong enough to compress the spine and leave lasting damage.

An improper position of an aviator's body can be fatal.

Aiello recalled being in an ejection simulator in one of his early training sessions — sensors detected if an elbow or foot was even a hair out of position, mistakes that in a real scenario could prove extremely harmful, he said.

"It's not just the explosion," he said — a pilot is "riding this blast wave" and can be thrown into the aircraft's slipstream, which may be moving at hundreds of miles per hour.

An ejection is a multi-step process. After the ejection handle is pulled, the cockpit canopy blasts off and then a rocket motor under the aviator's seat fires to carry them safely away from the aircraft before releasing a parachute.

The process is intense and disorienting, Aiello explained, and is made even more difficult with military parachutes that are designed more for survivability than for easy maneuverability and soft landings, like sport parachutes.

"You're almost guaranteed to be injured, but you should be alive," he said. "And that's the point, you don't go down with the ship. You get out, albeit violently, but you're alive."

SERE Training

Getting out of the jet is only the first hurdle if a pilot goes down in unfriendly territory — what happens in the minutes and hours immediately after landing can determine whether a pilot makes it home.

All US military aviators and aircrew undergo SERE training — short for "Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape." The program, also required for personnel assigned to special operations units and others, prepares service members for isolation and potential captivity.

Much of the training was shaped by lessons from the Korean and Vietnam wars, when thousands of American service members, including pilots and aircrew, were taken prisoner and subjected to torture and inhumane conditions. Back then, there was little formal preparation for what troops might face.

Today, multiple SERE schools train military personnel how to survive being captured by an enemy and follow a similar concept — after classroom instruction, students spend several days living off the land before attempting to evade simulated enemy forces. They then undergo a "capture" and experience a prisoner-of-war camp environment, where they are tested through interrogations and propaganda scenarios.

Part of that means realistic stress for troops who must stick to the "code of conduct" for POWs, a set of rules meant to guide captured personnel through interrogations and torture, and to resist divulging sensitive information. Service members must also demonstrate their ability to maintain discipline and morale under sustained psychological pressure.

In a conflict against a nation with advanced air defenses, the odds of ejecting into hostile territory rise sharply, making the training critical.

"Whether you're in the jungle, the Arctic, or the desert, you're learning a mindset," explained James Reeman, a retired Air National Guard F-16 pilot. "How am I going to be mentally prepared if things go wrong?" It's an extreme example of being tested to personal limits, with sleep deprivation and simulated interrogations.

The experience of evading and resisting in small teams creates strong bonds, he said, and leaves little room for any big egos.

"You're at your wits end, and they do a really good job of making you think it's real," he said.

"The last thing you expect is to get shot down," said John Waters, who previously flew with the Air Force's F-16 Viper Demonstration Team, especially by friends. But the unexpected can't be where everything falls apart. That's where pilots and aircrews lean hardest on their training.

The US military invests heavily in keeping pilots alive, not just because of the human cost. Experienced aviators are among its most expensive and difficult assets to replace.

SERE training places aviators in high-stress environments specifically to test whether they can regain composure quickly and manage unpredictable interactions.

In today's conflicts, the first people a downed pilot meets may be civilians with smartphones, not soldiers, adding a new layer of unpredictability.

After the friendly fire incident involving the F-15s, video footage began circulating online showing what was said to be American pilots encountering locals in Kuwait. Waters pointed to the footage of a pilot raising their hands as the locals approached as de-escalation under pressure. Pilots fly with sidearms in case they find themselves in an emergency on the ground— but knowing when to engage and when not to is critical.

"This is obviously one of the worst ways this could have ended," Waters said, referring broadly to the friendly fire incident. However, "it could have been much worse if this had happened over territory where people weren't friendly, or where there wasn't a friendly government."

• The hiring slowdown has made it harder for even elite college graduates to land jobs.
• But as employers grow more selective, the prestige of an Ivy League degree can still pay off.
• Some employers have narrowed their recruiting to a select group of schools.

For a few years, a hot job market cast doubt on the need for an elite college diploma. In a tough job market, that trend is reversing.

Matt Stabile, the founder of the recruitment firm Stabile Search, which focuses on AI roles in quantitative finance in the New York City area, said he's observed a shift in recruiting in recent years: graduates from top universities are back in style.

"There's really been a return to a demand for people coming from top academic backgrounds," he said, adding, "For better or worse, these top companies use this metric as a way to weed out the thousands of people that apply to them every year."

It's not that companies were ever ignoring graduates from top-tier universities, Stabile said. A few years ago, when firms were scrambling to fill roles, many broadened their hiring standards. Now that hiring has slowed, he said, they can afford to be "choosier" again.

A 2025 survey of more than 150 employers found that 26% said they were recruiting exclusively from a select group of schools, up from 17% in 2022, according to research conducted by Veris Insights. For some employers, leaner recruiting teams may also be driving a narrower focus on certain candidates, as some firms haven't rebuilt hiring teams to pre-pandemic levels.

"There was a time period when people were predicting that everyone could just go to a bootcamp or skip college, and it's all about their innate talent or their raw ability to code," Stabile said. "That may still be true for some companies, but particularly in quantitative finance and the most sought-after technology companies to work for, I've seen just the opposite of that."

Over the past several years, the shifting labor market has raised questions about the value of an elite diploma. First came the Great Resignation, when a post-pandemic hiring spree and labor shortages meant many didn't need an elite degree — or at times a degree at all — to find work. Then came the Great Freeze, an ongoing hiring slowdown that has led some to wonder whether even an elite diploma can insulate graduates from a tougher market.

As some companies cautiously resume hiring, experts say graduates from elite schools are likely to be among the first snapped up.

The elite college comeback

As of December 2025, the most recent data available, 5.6% of recent college graduates ages 22 to 27 were unemployed, up from 4.8% a year earlier and 3.9% in 2022, according to an analysis by the New York Fed.

At some elite universities, employment outcomes appear to be improving, according to graduating student surveys. Among Yale's undergraduate class of 2025, 4.6% of graduates were still seeking employment six months after graduation, down from 6% the year prior. At Harvard, the share of students who reported they would be working or in graduate or professional school after graduation rose in 2025 from the previous year, from 76% to 80.1% (others were pursuing alternative post-grad options or still figuring out their plans).

There's been a similar trend among MBA graduates at some elite universities. At Columbia and Harvard, the share of 2025 graduates who accepted job offers within three months of graduation rose from the previous year, from 86% to 90% at Columbia and from 77% to 84% at Harvard.

When hiring slows, companies tend to become more selective, said Lisa Simon, chief economist at Revelio Labs. That dynamic can help graduates from elite schools find jobs in a tough market. When it comes to choosing a college, Simon said prestigious universities like Harvard and MIT can be among the best investments.

"The elite colleges, on average, are some of the best deals because many people don't pay the sticker price," she said. "And then people have such high incomes afterwards."

However, Simon said attending a less prestigious college and choosing a high-paying major can offset many of the advantages of an elite school. She added that studying in a large city can also help, since proximity can make it easier to build connections with employers.

Elite graduates face headwinds — but still have an edge

Despite the improvement in job placement at some elite universities, their graduates aren't immune to the hiring slowdown of recent years. For example, while the previously cited Yale employment figure improved from 2024 to 2025, it was stronger in 2021, when hiring was more robust across the US economy.

And going forward, the advent of AI has cast uncertainty over the future hiring landscape for all degree holders, Stabile said.

Still, even as some job searches stretch longer than expected, the prestige of an elite degree is helping many graduates break through.

Four days after Palashi Singhal earned her master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania in May 2024, an email landed in her inbox with every job seeker's nightmare: Her future employer, a tech startup, had reassessed its hiring needs — and rescinded her job offer.

"My spirits dropped from 100% to negative 100%," said Singhal, who is in her 20s and lives in Philadelphia.

But the following month, Singhal landed a full-time research analyst contract role. She said the hiring manager for the position was a behavioral scientist who had heard of the UPenn program she was a part of.

"She was very familiar with my degree, which helped get my resume up to the top of the pile," she said. Singhal later transitioned to a full-time W-2 role at an adtech startup.

Ultimately, one big advantage of an elite education is familiarity and an alumni network. For job seekers without a brand-name degree, there are ways to form contacts and help employers become familiar with your work. Singhal's advice to recent grads, regardless of their school: Don't hold out exclusively for a full-time role. Part-time or contract work, she said, can be the foot in the door that leads to something bigger.

"If you come across a really good part-time or internship position, just go for it and see what happens," she said.

• A court dismissed Trump's attempt to eliminate the SAVE student-loan repayment plan ahead of schedule.
• Lawmakers and advocates are urging the Education Department to restart processing debt relief for eligible borrowers.
• The SAVE plan is still on track to be phased out in 2028.

SAVE is saved — for now.

In the latest twist to determining the fate of the SAVE student-loan repayment plan, a district judge said in a February 27 ruling that he would not sign off on President Donald Trump's proposed settlement to eliminate the SAVE plan.

That means that Trump's attempt to ax SAVE before its planned phaseout in 2028 is moot, and the administration cannot move forward with an accelerated timeline unless it receives a new court ruling or undergoes the lengthy negotiated rulemaking process.

Advocates and Democratic lawmakers said that the judge's decision means that the Department of Education should move forward with processing debt relief for eligible borrowers on SAVE.

"This decision formally ends the SAVE injunction that has forced over 7 million SAVE borrowers into economic limbo—pushing meaningful debt relief and affordable monthly payments out of reach," a group of Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders, wrote in a March 4 letter. They added that they're calling on the department "to implement the benefits of the SAVE plan and administer loan cancellation for borrowers on the SAVE Plan who are eligible for such relief immediately."

The Department of Education told Business Insider, following the court's decision, that it was evaluating the ruling and did not respond to a subsequent request for comment on what the ruling means for borrowers enrolled in SAVE.

The SAVE plan was created by former President Joe Biden in 2023, and it intended to give borrowers cheaper monthly payments with a shorter timeline to debt relief. Since the summer of 2024, the plan has been blocked due to litigation, and the Trump administration announced a proposed settlement with the state of Missouri — one of the states seeking to block SAVE — that would eliminate the plan ahead of schedule.

During this time, borrowers enrolled in SAVE have been on forbearance. The Department of Education restarted interest charges on SAVE accounts in August 2025 and encouraged borrowers to switch to a different income-driven repayment plan and begin making payments. The department also said in court updates that the block on SAVE prevented it from processing loan forgiveness for borrowers who reached their payment thresholds on any IDR plan after April 2025.

Advocates said there's no reason the department cannot move ahead with processing that relief.

"Not only is there no legal barrier to delivering those rights through the SAVE plan, but the Secretary has a legal obligation to do so," Winston Berkman-Breen, legal director at advocacy group Protect Borrowers, said in a statement. "The U.S. Department of Education must immediately identify borrowers who are eligible to have their loans cancelled under SAVE and instruct their student loan servicers to cancel those loans."

What's next for student-loan repayment

Attempts to block SAVE aren't over. On March 2, the state of Missouri filed a motion to pause the ruling dismissing the settlement, asking a Missouri district court to reinstate the block on the SAVE plan and prevent the Department of Education from processing any debt relief through the plan.

Missouri said in its motion that, because of the ruling, borrowers could start applying for debt relief again, and pausing the ruling would allow the court to review the case before those applications begin.

"A short postponement will not materially hamper any contrary reliance interests—because the SAVE Rule as it has been administratively stayed or preliminarily enjoined for nearly two years," Missouri wrote in its motion. "Thus, borrowers will not be harmed because a brief administrative stay merely maintains this status quo of their payment obligations."

For now, borrowers enrolled in SAVE are permitted to stay on the plan until the summer of 2028, when Trump's "big beautiful" spending legislation calls for its phase-out. After that point, borrowers will have two options to repay their loans: a standard repayment plan and a new Repayment Assistance Plan, which has less generous terms than SAVE, including forgiveness after 30 years of payments.

Those plans are set to become available to new borrowers on July 1. Additionally, the spending legislation will implement new caps on borrowing for advanced degrees: a $100,000 lifetime cap for graduate students and a $200,000 cap for professional students. The department compiled a list of 10 programs that will qualify for the professional program designation, including law and dentistry. Advocates and lawmakers have pushed to expand that definition to include postgraduate nursing programs, as well.

As for SAVE, borrowers are awaiting guidance from the Department of Education. Borrowers enrolled on the plan previously told Business Insider that the lower monthly payments through SAVE have been a lifeline, and they're unable to afford the anticipated higher payments on a different plan.

"I'm bracing for an astronomical bill," Brenda McCoy, a 60-year-old SAVE borrower, said. "My goal was to be self-sufficient. I was making the payments, I was being a responsible person, but it has to be something I can afford."

Have a story to share? Reach out to this reporter at asheffey@businessinsider.com.

• Automakers have been reorganizing their EV lineups since September 2025.
• Legacy car brands — like Ford, Nissan, and Acura — announced discontinuations last year.
• Business Insider compiled a list of EVs that have been killed or indefinitely delayed in 2026.

American EV sales are slumping.

Since September 2025, when the federal $7,500 tax credit for US-made EVs ended, fewer shoppers have chosen a battery-powered car for their next set of wheels.

In January 2026, EV sales fell 53.5%, per CarGurus' data shared with Business Insider. The figures exclude direct-to-consumer brands like Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid.

Carmakers have responded to the sales collapse with several product cancellations. Last year, Ford ended production of the F-150 Lightning, Nissan axed the Ariya, Acura stopped building the ZDX, and Volkswagen paused the ID. Buzz.

The cancellations aren't a wholesale retreat from EVs. Each of those brands has next-generation EV models in the pipeline — they're cheaper, longer-range, and faster charging.

But the shake-up hasn't stopped. It's continued into this year.

Business Insider has compiled a running list of electric vehicles discontinued or indefinitely delayed since January 1, 2026 — a tally that we will keep updating as automakers continue tinkering with their EV road map.

Hyundai Ioniq 6 Standard

Hyundai confirmed to Business Insider that it will stop selling the Korean-built, standard-range Ioniq 6 in the US.

The retro-styled sedan never matched the success of its crossover sibling, the Ioniq 5 (which the company said saw a surprising 33% sales increase in February).

Hyundai said it sold just 229 Ioniq 6 units last month.

"Sedan sales have declined a lot over the past decade, and the Ioniq 6 is no exception," Sam Abuelsamid, the vice president of market research at Telemetry, told Business Insider. "Without enough sales to justify US production, the numbers just don't add up for Hyundai."

Hyundai said it plans to import a limited number of high-performance Ioniq 6 N models to the US — a pricier variant with more oomph in the electric motor and track-focused upgrades.

"In the meantime, 2025 Ioniq 6 sedans continue to be available at dealers alongside our award-winning, US-assembled Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 9 SUVs," the automaker said.

The Ioniq 6 will still ship to Canadian dealerships.

2026 Hyundai Kona Electric

In 2019, Hyundai electrified its popular Kona crossover, swapping the gas engine for a battery-powered drivetrain.

It became one of the automaker's first mass-market EVs.

That run is now on pause. Hyundai said in February that it would not ship the 2026 Kona Electric from its Korean plants to US dealerships. Like the Ioniq 6, the Kona Electric remains available in limited numbers as a 2025 model.

The model could return for the 2027 model year.

With a starting price around $33,000, it was one of the cheapest EVs on the US market in 2025.

Tesla Model S

The Model S was critical to Tesla's historic ascent.

When the sedan debuted in 2012, it was the company's first ground-up vehicle — and a sharp break from the slow, quirky EVs that came before it.

With hypercar-like acceleration, sleek body lines, and a tech-forward cabin, the sedan made going electric feel aspirational rather than a legacy automaker's compliance exercise.

That shift helped propel Tesla into America's dominant EV automaker.

Now, despite its historic role, CEO Elon Musk says the $94,990 sedan is headed for an "honorable discharge" after years of sliding sales.

Tesla Model X

The Model X is also going the way of the dodo.

Tesla's second built-from-scratch vehicle will end production in the second quarter of 2026 amid soft demand. The SUV starts at $99,990.

Launched in 2015, the Model X was ambitious. And complicated.

Its signature second-row falcon-wing doors — which opened by pivoting upward via electronically connected hinges mounted to the roof — became a production headache.

Musk once called the car a "Fabergé egg."

The production lines that made the two vehicles will now build the company's Optimus robots.

"We're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy," Musk said while announcing their final days, adding that the decision was "slightly sad."

Kia EV6 GT, EV9 GT

Kia is also tweaking its EV plans — but more narrowly.

The Korean automaker is delaying the GT trims of two models, the EV6 and EV9. Those versions are the highest-performance variants in each lineup.

Kia confirmed to Business Insider that the GT trims are delayed "until further notice" due to "changing market conditions."

Other trims — which are made at Kia's plant in West Point, Georgia — remain on sale in the US.

"This delay does not impact the availability of other trims in the EV6 and EV9 lineups," the company said.

• Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan warn that early battlefield wins don't guarantee long-term success.
• Destroying targets is not the same as defining a political endgame.
• Without a clear plan, wars can expand, shift goals, and drag on.

The US military is once again at war in the Middle East, committing significant combat platforms, troops, and munitions in a fight against Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Army National Guard major, says this time is different.

"This is not Iraq. This is not endless," he said on Monday.

Hegseth, who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, added: "We don't waste time or lives." Veterans who have studied those decadeslong wars told Business Insider that achieving that goal will require a clear endgame for when bombing stops — and a sober understanding that early battlefield wins can still end in defeat.

"The ayatollahs are horrible, and they need to go. This is the right thing to do," said Elliot Ackerman, a decorated Marine veteran who led infantry and special operations units over five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later worked as a CIA officer and White House fellow.

"It's true in the same way that Saddam Hussein was horrible," he said, referring to the Iraqi dictator the US toppled in 2003.

But the Global War on Terror was complicated and dragged on for years, Ackerman said, "And all of that can happen here as well. Doesn't mean it will happen, but it can happen."

What went wrong in past wars?

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began with overwhelming displays of American military power and rapid tactical victories, showcasing the US military's ability to devastate conventional forces and dominate high-intensity combat.

The Taliban regime collapsed within weeks. Saddam Hussein's government fell in 21 days.

Then American forces found themselves battling decentralized insurgencies, often indistinguishable from civilian populations. Despite surges in troop numbers and technological superiority, the US struggled to combat those non-state networks while trying to rebuild fractured nations. This dragged the US deeper into protracted wars.

Without clearly defining strategic objectives from the outset, including precisely defined political goals, US leaders could retroactively declare success based on whatever outcomes emerged, and they did, said Mike Nelson, a retired Green Beret lieutenant colonel who deployed numerous times to Iraq and Afghanistan, served in senior roles at US Central Command, and later taught military science at George Mason University.

An endgame matters

Hegseth said Monday that President Donald Trump "called the last 20 years of nation-building wars dumb, and he's right. This is the opposite." The mission in Iran is "laser-focused."

"Destroy Iranian offensive missiles, destroy Iranian missile production, destroy their navy and other security infrastructure, and they will never have nuclear weapons," he said. "This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission."

Listing targets is not the same as defining political objectives — or outlining a strategic endgame once targets are destroyed, Nelson said.

The larger question is what leadership or security conditions would mark the war's end, he said. Without that clarity, goals can shift as the battlefield evolves, he added.

Strike campaigns can sharply degrade an adversary's ability to wage war. But from World War II to Vietnam to Ukraine to Gaza, strike campaigns have rarely produced sweeping political change on their own.

NATO's 1999 air war over Kosovo is an exception. But that campaign relied on the credible threat of a ground invasion and sustained diplomatic pressures, not airpower alone.

Nelson pointed to Libya as a closer parallel to Iran than Iraq or Afghanistan. In 2011, as Libyan civilians faced brutal violence from dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the Obama administration launched an air campaign that ultimately led to his overthrow and death. The intervention, however, ushered in years of instability that persists today, Nelson said.

The stakes in Iran

US officials have described the airstrikes as a stunning tactical success, saying they have devastated Iranian military assets and killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with dozens of senior military leaders. Satellite imagery confirms extensive damage to Iranian forces.

Asked Tuesday about potential fallout, Trump said, "The worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who's as bad as the previous person."

He added that potential successors identified by the US — and even their backups — are now dead, creating uncertainty over who could assume power and negotiate with Washington.

Trump has said he expects the war to last "four to five weeks," but has said he is willing to go longer if needed. Hegseth said that the US is in this "for as long as it takes."

The Iranian military continues to fight despite significant losses to its most senior ranks. Iran's foreign minister called the strategy a "decentralized mosaic defense" that gives remaining commanders autonomy to fight independently of top-level control.

Elements of that approach appear visible in Iran's missile campaign. "Today, in their desperation, the enemy is unmasked as Iranian missiles and drones rained down indiscriminately on the hotels, airports, apartments, and other civilian targets of their neighbors," Hegseth said on Monday. The Pentagon said those attacks have declined amid expanding US and Israeli strikes inside Iran.

Iran also has a far-reaching proxy network of militias and terrorist groups that remain active, further complicating a difficult fight beyond the ballistic missiles and drones being launched into countries across the region.

The tactical situation in this war is complex, making strategic-level decisions even more so. That makes having a plan for how it all ends essential, said Phil Klay, a Marine veteran of the war in Iraq and an award-winning author of books on the civil-military divide and the human costs of war.

"When you roll the dice on warfare, you unleash chaos," he said. "And when this sort of status quo is already pretty bad, it's easy to think, well, how bad, how much worse could it get? And the answer is, it can get unbelievably bad."

It started with a mysterious slack from our editor-in-chief, Jamie Heller: Can you talk now? It was the kind of urgent message you never want to get from your boss' boss. What did I do? Am I in trouble? Is she laying me off? I scoured my brain for all the ways I'd probably disappointed her and the correspondingly appropriate ways I could apologize for those offenses. Then she called me to give me the news: She wanted to send me to Davos in January.

I've known about Davos, the World Economic Forum's annual conference that gathers the global elite, for my entire 16-year career as a business journalist. As a young reporter at Bloomberg, I remember watching our TV anchors banter so effortlessly with CEOs, all in their puffy jackets against the backdrop of the snowy Swiss mountains. I wondered if one day I would get to join their ranks.

On our call, Jamie tried to warn me about the whole ordeal. I would be expected to take 30 meetings over the course of four days and mingle and write dispatches, and I would need to buy a very warm pair of snow boots. "It's a lot of work," she kept saying, but it went right over my head. I was already imagining all the executives I would run into, charming them so thoroughly that they would tell me their secrets for the rest of my career. I would never have to worry about my job security again. Yes, I told her. It was an honor. I was in.

That high lasted for the next several weeks. I browsed what must have been over 100 different blazers and blouses and pants and heels (I was going for chic-intellectual), and shelled out for a brand new check-in suitcase to replace my old battered one. But as December rolled around, reality sank in. My colleague Dan DeFrancesco, our lead newsletter writer who attended last year, told me about the long, icy walks home. And those walks would take place after back-to-back meetings with executives from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., after which I'd attend a few happy hours, a dinner, and then a nightcap that would mercifully end at 11:30, although there were still after-parties that would run later if I got in with the right crowds. Our internal meetings made it all seem very mandatory, the imperative for us to squeeze out every possible minute we were there to get inside the minds of the world's most powerful business leaders. Dan showed me his Fitbit data from the previous year, when he averaged 4.5 hours of sleep a night.

Most business reporters would have been thrilled to get the assignment. But in the weeks before my flight, a terrible realization dawned on me: I, an introverted writer who likes warm weather and sleeping, had signed up for my own personal hell.

The official conference wouldn't start until Monday morning, January 19. But by the time I arrived on Sunday via two flights and a train, Davos was already humming with titans-of-industry energy. Once a poor, remote village hidden in the Swiss Alps, Davos first became famous as a destination for tuberculosis patients in the mid-19th century. These days, it's a ski resort. On this sunny afternoon, men in suits and snow boots were walking by the train station with purpose. I dragged my heavy suitcase up a steep hill in the snow, and then, once I got to my apartment, up three flights of stairs. A little sweaty, I entered my humble studio for the week.

Every year for this one week during the conference, most of the locals clear out. They leave on their own vacations and make a fortune renting out their places. I unpacked my suitcase, steamed all my clothes, charged my devices, and then got ready for my first Davos engagement: a fancy dinner co-hosted by a CEO and a well-known founder.

It was all the way on the other end of Davos, so I decided to pick up my credentials at the World Economic Forum's registration center along the way. The badge I put around my neck would be my ticket for the week, determining which buildings, rooms, and even streets I could and couldn't access. Mine was orange, signifying my status as a journalist, which in Davos' pecking order meant I was below the white badges issued to heads of state and CEOs, and the gray badges issued to other top executives. And yet even with my lower status, having a forum badge at all still meant I was inside an exclusive club of about 3,000 attendees this year. An estimated 20,000 more people descend on Davos during World Economic Forum week without an official invite. They're here for the side panels and the parties and the vibes.

Because I knew I'd need every last bit of mental clarity I could muster, I had resolved not to drink for the week. But ahead of the dinner, the wife of one of its hosts held a soft launch of her own brand of a tequila-like spirit. She offered me a shot as soon as I walked in. An hour later, with my second drink in hand, I walked over to a man standing alone, and introduced myself as a workplace reporter. He happened to sit on the boards of multiple organizations and offered to clue me in on what he believed was the most underreported workplace story right now: that the employers he knew were avoiding hiring 23- to 30-year-olds because this generation of young adults was unhirable. Don't name me, he warned. I felt like I was already in the inner circle.

At dinner, I sat between two nonprofit executives, both of whom were repeat Davosians with mixed feelings about being there. One confessed Davos wasn't a great venue for fundraising, despite all the billionaires — something that made the $100,000 she and her colleague were paying for their three-bedroom suite difficult to justify. The other executive felt morally compromised. He came every year in the hopes of influencing the minds of business leaders, but he worried he was actually perpetuating a broken system by schmoozing with them. He was losing hope that they could be convinced to care about anything other than their shareholders. Next year, he said, he might return as a protester.

We were so deep in conversation that by the time I looked up, I realized all my colleagues had already left. A giddy thought occurred to me: Had Davos turned me into an extrovert? I slept well that night.

Why do the global elite spend such exorbitant sums for the privilege of spending a week in the frigid Alps during the coldest time of the year, in peak flu season, in a ski town that refuses to salt its icy streets? It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble if the forum had picked, say, Hawaii instead. It all began with Klaus Schwab, a German economist who started hosting the conference here in 1971. His goal was to get businesses to think a little more about generating long-term value for society and a little less about wringing out short-term profits to shareholders, an idea known as stakeholder capitalism. "We can't continue with an economic system driven by selfish values," Schwab later wrote. "We need a society, economy, and international community that is designed to care for all people and the entire planet."

On Monday morning, as I walked down the main street that connects Davos, people looked a little cold but otherwise happy to be there. The vibe was less summit and more Disneyland — if you swapped all the kids for middle-aged powerbrokers and the rides for branded "houses" that line the Promenade. Normally, these storefronts are luxury watch retailers and souvenir shops and outdoor gear providers, but just for this week, they put everything in storage to make room for multinational conglomerates to set up shop. These corporate houses serve a few functions: to host panels and parties; to provide meeting rooms for executives; to scream in neon lettering to passersby that their companies are all in on AI; and to give out free things that have absolutely nothing to do with their business. Pinterest House served miso ramen. Uber House stocked giant bars of premium chocolate. Meta House offered orange-flavored hot chocolate — but only after its patrons scanned a QR code that led them into a conversation with a bot on WhatsApp.

I didn't have time to stop for a warm beverage because I had packed my calendar to the brim that day with meetings with four senior corporate advisors and five C-suite executives. All of these meetings were quite far from each other, and the icy streets forced me to walk like a constipated duck, and there were TSA-level security checks backed up by TSA-level lines to get to a lot of these places. Whenever I could, I shoved bites of protein bars into my mouth — but I kept having to empty my thermos at security, which meant I never had water on me.

With every meeting, I became more depleted — physically, mentally, emotionally, and, towards the end, existentially — until I arrived at my last one-on-one of the day. It was with a CFO who also happened to be a fellow Davos newbie. We chatted about his company for a while, and then traded notes on how bizarre this whole thing was. Throughout his career, he told me, he had never understood the point of Davos. "I would read the headlines and think about it as big leaders from all over the world solving big problems like global hunger," he said.

But now that he was here, he got it. Because everyone of importance had gathered here, they could entertain their existing customers and woo new ones in one tiny town, instead of on 30 trips to cities around the world. The genius of Davos, therefore, was entirely accidental: The forum's conference had become a hyper-efficient vehicle for the stewards of global capitalism to do business with each other. "Companies," the CFO said, "come here to sell." For this access, businesses are charged a hefty membership fee, as well as a per-person entrance fee. All in all, companies that send a large delegation of executives pay more than $1 million a year to the forum.

After the CFO left, I typed out my first blog post of the day, and then forced myself to trek 15 minutes across town to attend a women's leadership reception. The room was so packed it looked as though every woman who had ever received a promotion in the history of corporations had shown up. I squeezed my way to the bar, took one sip of sparkling water, and made my way back to the entrance. "Back so soon?" the guy at the coat check said.

It was 7:20 p.m. I had a dinner at 8 that was a 45-minute walk away, with an attendee list of 150. There was nothing in the world that could have convinced me to talk to one more person that night, so I walked back to my apartment. Too tired to change, I ate my grocery-store dinner of grilled chicken and a box of olives in my underwear. Then I tried and failed to fall asleep a hundred different times. I lay awake, my mind still racing from the day, my calves aching from the 21,000 steps I'd taken. Clearly, I had neither the mental fortitude nor the physical stamina to hang with the global elite.

The next morning should have been a train wreck — a 7:30 a.m. roundtable I was hosting for Business Insider on exactly zero hours of sleep. This event was what I was most nervous about ahead of Davos, and I spent weeks preparing for it. I was moderating a conversation with 15 chief people officers and other senior executives from some of the largest companies in the world.

Like my other meetings in Davos, the roundtable also revolved around AI. A central theme was beginning to emerge: Companies just weren't seeing the big gains in employee productivity that AI had promised, and they were figuring out what came next. The HR executives around the table were now deep in the weeds of that investigation inside their organizations. What drove adoption and what backfired? Did employees have the skills to use these new tools? And how do you overhaul the way work gets done inside teams to fully capitalize on AI?

As the executives recounted what worked and what didn't, I saw several of them avidly taking notes. They nodded and laughed and groaned at one another's observations, like a group therapy session, comforted by the shared reality that they were all wrestling with the same questions.

At the end of the roundtable, Francine Katsoudas, the chief people, policy, and purpose officer at Cisco, shared that she had been at a dinner the previous night. Half the group believed their workforces were going to get smaller because of AI, and the other half believed they would get bigger. "It's just a reminder that it will be what we design it to be," she said. "When I think about Davos and the conversations we're having, we are at a moment where we have the opportunity to change just about everything that we do."

By Wednesday, I'd found my Davos groove. I discovered the free lunch buffet at the forum's media center, which meant I was eating real food. I learned to chug all my water before they made me pour it out at security. I was even getting used to the back-to-back meetings. If Davos were a verb — definition: to power through a barrage of engagements as if it were totally normal because everyone else is doing it — I was getting better at Davosing.

One of the stranger perks of Davosing is running into the random celebrities who show up. This year, that list included Katy Perry, David Beckham, Jon Batiste, and Billy Idol. Matt Damon is a Davos regular, and I would have canceled pretty much any of my meetings to go see him speak. But it clashed with the roundtable I was moderating.

Robbed of my Jason Bourne sighting, my biggest celebrity encounter was with the organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant. Which, yes, not quite a movie star — though to the Davos crowd, something akin to royalty. It was his 10th time there, and throughout our conversation at a hotel bar, people kept interrupting us to say hi. His tone turned somber when I asked him what he thought companies were getting wrong as they deploy AI. "I'm discouraged and disturbed by how few leaders are thinking about the long-term implications of AI for jobs, and what this means for employment and social unrest," he said. "If a lot of knowledge work is disruptable by AI, if a growing amount of service work is disruptable by AI, and if manufacturing work is going to be increasingly done by robots, what are we going to do to make sure that people are employable?

Throughout the week, executives kept saying that AI hadn't yet proven to be as labor-saving as they'd hoped. Most of the changes they were discussing would take years. It was also clear that they were committed to bringing about this AI transformation; displacement was coming. What would happen once they succeed? I found it hard to get many of them to engage on that question. Perhaps they just didn't know. But I was skeptical of their pledge to use AI to empower rather than replace their employees, given how common layoffs had become in recent years. If they were willing to cut workers today, what would stop them from cutting far more once they figured out how to truly harness the potential of AI?

"I'm shocked that there's not more conversation about that," Grant told me.

That afternoon, Trump gave his keynote speech, where he promised not to use force in his quest to acquire Greenland. By that evening, the mood had shifted. At a couple of the cocktail parties I attended, people seemed more relaxed — perhaps because we'd just averted World War III. One CFO told me he worries about his three Gen Z sons' dating lives, now that young people aren't meeting at work as much. I also spoke to a CRO who beamed as he talked about the conversation he just had with his pre-teen daughter on FaceTime. They both seemed like good dads.

Our team dinner at 8 p.m. got pushed to 9, and by the time we all arrived from our various functions, it was past 10. Over fondue and wine, we reveled in the realization that we had survived. It had been an exhausting, nerve-racking, and ultimately exhilarating week — one of the most productive weeks I've had in a long time. My notebook was full of leads. A few of us writers shared the train home with our CEO, and to my surprise, I blurted out that I wanted to come back next year. Would she put in a good word for us with our editor-in-chief? Yes, she said, laughing. We hugged goodbye.

As I walked back to my apartment, I started thinking about how I'd do Davos differently next time. Then, a different thought crept in: Would I even have this job in the future? If I lost this job, would I be able to find another one as a reporter? Being a journalist has been the one constant of my adult life stretching across two continents, four cities, and 11 apartments. In the darkest months of that time, when my marriage was falling apart, and in the difficult years I've spent rebuilding my life since, I've still had this — this job that not only puts a roof over my head but makes me feel competent and useful, like I belong in this world.

AI is leaving more and more of us wondering where our place is. A few weeks after Davos, Block eliminated nearly half its 10,000-plus workforce. "Within the next year," its CEO told investors, "I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes." Other CEOs may prove him wrong, but the markets sent a clear message: Block's shares jumped 22%. It's not a good sign for the stakeholder capitalism that the World Economic Forum was founded to promote.

As Davos wound down, I finished up the rest of my meetings, attended a few parties, and packed my things. I then began the long journey back to California, and 21 hours later, I was home. I still had a story to file, a thousand texts and emails to reply to, a dog to pick up. But for the moment, I was back in my own bed. I slept for 10 hours straight.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

• OpenAI agreed to a deal with the Pentagon in February.
• Staffers have quit in opposition, and customers are uninstalling ChatGPT.
• CEO Sam Altman said OpenAI amended the deal following public criticism.

For OpenAI, securing a high-profile deal with the Pentagon would normally be grounds for celebration. Instead, the company is navigating a wave of backlash from both staffers and consumers over how its AI tech could be weaponized.

CEO Sam Altman announced the agreement, which gave the Pentagon access to its AI models, on February 28, days after rival Anthropic rejected a similar deal.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said his company wouldn't agree to anything without assurances that the technology wouldn't be used to power autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance.

"We cannot in good conscience accede to their request," Amodei said at the time.

Altman moved to amend the deal amid mounting criticism. It wasn't enough to quell the backlash, however, which came fast and threatened both OpenAI's reputation and its reign as the world's most popular chatbot maker.

Key robotics staffer quits

Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined OpenAI from Meta in 2024 to oversee hardware in its robotics division, announced her resignation on Saturday.

In a post on X, she denounced OpenAI's deal with the Pentagon.

"AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got," she wrote.

A spokesperson confirmed Kalinowski's departure and defended the Defense Department agreement.

"We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons," the spokesperson told Business Insider. "We recognize that people have strong views about these issues and we will continue to engage in discussion with employees, government, civil society, and communities around the world."

OpenAI employees push back

Many other OpenAI staffers have also publicly criticized the company's Pentagon deal.

"i personally don't think this deal was worth it," Aidan McLaughlin, a research scientist at OpenAI, wrote on X.

Another employee told CNN that many of them "really respect" Anthropic for refusing the Pentagon's deal.

Clive Chan, a technical staffer, wrote in an X post that he believed OpenAI's contract barred the use of its models for mass weapons or mass domestic surveillance. Chan wrote that he's advocating for the company to share more information.

"If we later learn this is not the case, then I will advocate internally to terminate the contract," Chan wrote.

Even before the deal, nearly 900 former and current OpenAI and Google staffers signed a joint petition supporting Anthropic, one of their primary competitors, and opposing the use of their companies' technology for weapons that can kill without human oversight and mass surveillance.

"The Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get them to agree to what Anthropic has refused," the petition said.

Claude overtakes ChatGPT as consumers protest OpenAI's Pentagon deal

After the deal, users flocked to Claude, criticizing Altman's decision on social media. Scores of Reddit posts urged consumers to "cancel ChatGPT."

Uninstalls of ChatGPT spiked by more than 295% on February 28, the day after the deal was announced. By Monday, Claude ranked No. 1 among the most downloaded free apps on the US Apple App Store. It remained in the top spot as of Saturday.

Claude is also now at the top of the list of most-downloaded productivity apps on the App Store. ChatGPT and Google's Gemini are close behind, as is xAI's Grok.

OpenAI also faced IRL protests.

Activists gathered outside its Mission Bay headquarters in San Francisco on Tuesday, calling for a "QuitGPT" movement. Their anger with OpenAI went far beyond just the Pentagon deal.

One of the protesters, Sarah Gao, told Business Insider that Altman lived in a "super villain's mansion" and used his "billionaire buddies" to help President Donald Trump with "his disastrous budget bills that stole trillions of dollars from everyday Americans just to line their pockets."

OpenAI's deal also grabbed lawmakers' attention

In response to the drama between Anthropic and the Pentagon, and then OpenAI, California Democratic Rep. Sam Liccardo introduced an amendment to the Defense Production Act that would prohibit the Defense Department "from retaliating against developers for instituting safeguards on high-risk technologies."

The amendment failed on a 16-25 vote in the House Financial Services Committee.

"Full disclosure: I am a Claude subscriber, though I can't claim to have used it to create any homicidal bots," Liccardo said during a committee meeting. "Regardless, when the company that designs and builds the jet fighter tells us when to use the brakes, we should listen. Instead, the Pentagon's bureaucrats and lawyers believe they know better. They think they can fly the plane without brakes."

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii also announced on X that he had "downloaded Claude."

Altman does damage control

In the days after the deal and subsequent backlash, Altman took steps to make amends.

He fielded questions publicly on X the day after, at one point saying that the process "was definitely rushed, and the optics don't look good."

In an internal memo sent on March 2 and later shared on X, Altman said that OpenAI had revised the contract to include clearer safeguards preventing the Pentagon from using its models for mass domestic surveillance.

Altman said he would rework the contract, adding explicit prohibitions on using OpenAI's technology on "commercially acquired" data, which had not been covered in the original terms.

Altman also again said in the memo that he "shouldn't have rushed" to get the deal out, saying "it just looked opportunistic and sloppy."

Like people, dogs can overheat when temperatures rise. To help keep your dog safe, it's important to give them plenty of drinking water and time indoors in a cool place. Beyond basic safety, though, many dogs gravitate toward cooler surfaces to get more relief from the heat, and one of the best dog cooling mats or pads can help keep them comfortable.

Cooling mats for dogs come in several designs, including ice or water-filled mats and pressure-activated gel pads. For this guide, I tested nine popular options with my pitbull mix, Marty McFly. My editor's senior hound, Homer, tried several. Altogether, we've tested 21 cooling pads, crate mats, and blankets. Both of our dogs are ideal testers, since they naturally stretch out on cooler surfaces like tile and hardwood floors when temperatures spike.

Our best overall pick is the Cooler Dog Hydro Cooling Mat. It offers the longest-lasting and strongest cooling performance, both inside and outdoors, and features light cushioning for added comfort. With its extra-durable construction and materials, it's also the priciest mat in this guide. If you're looking for something more affordable, the Green Pet Shop Cool Pet Pad has strong cooling powers and is a longtime favorite of Homer.

Read more about how Insider Reviews tests and evaluates pet products.

Our top picks for the best dog cooling mats and pads

Best overall: Cooler Dog Hydro Cooling Mat - See at Amazon

Best budget: Green Pet Shop Cool Pet Pad - See at Chewy

Best for large dogs: Arf Pets Self-Cooling Gel Pad - See at Chewy

Best for crates: EveryYay Cool Orthopedic Dog Crate Mat - See at Amazon

Best water mat: K&H Pet Products Cool Bed III - See at Chewy

Best for travel: Bedsure Cooling Mat - See at Amazon

Best for the sofa: Lesure Premium Cooling Blanket - See at Amazon

Best overall

The Cooler Dog Hydro Cooling Mat can be used indoors or outside and cools longer than any other mat we tested. Lisa Sabatini, Business Insider Reviews senior pets editor, left the mat in a 95-degree sunroom where it stayed cold for seven hours, far surpassing other cooling mats. In more moderate temperatures, Sabatini's senior pup, Homer, sunbathed on the mat and took a long snooze.

The Hydro Cooling Mat consists of four parts: a machine-washable cover with three interior pockets. The top pocket holds a pre-filled water cushion, the middle pocket holds the included ice sheet, and the bottom pocket houses a heat-repelling, insulated layer. The cover and interior pockets are outfitted with durable velcro closures so you can easily remove the components before washing the mat.

This mat differs from other options in that it only comes in two sizes: mini (18 inches long, 10.5 inches wide, 1.25 inches thick) and regular (23.5 inches long, 18 inches wide, 2 inches thick). If you have a larger dog, you can purchase multiple regular-sized mats and attach them together with snaps along the edges of each mat. However, that means you'll pay significantly more. In fact, this is the priciest mat we recommend, at $50 for the regular size.

Two mats were just the right size for a 45-pound beagle-basset mix. The half-inch-thick ice sheets were easy to fold up and place in a top freezer. Sabatini also liked that the covers were easy to clean in the washer before air-drying. Some condensation may form on the cover when it's particularly hot, so make sure it's completely dry before storing it.

This mat also replaces our top pick for the best outdoor mat: the K&H Pet Products Cool Bed III. Once filled with cold water, the Cool Bed III wicks heat away from your dog and maintains a surface temperature similar to the air temperature. It's still a great option, especially if you have a smaller budget.

Best budget

The Green Pet Shop Cool Pet Pad earned high points in all of our tests for excellent indoor cooling. Its cooling powers lie in the pressure-activated gel, which absorbs a dog's body heat for up to three hours.

This mat is a longtime favorite of Sabatini's pup Homer, and he stretches out on it year-round. As soon as I unpacked it, Marty didn't hesitate to flop down in his preferred resting position: a full-bodied splay. Dogs who prefer a bit of padding may also like the cushioning of the thin, solid gel-filled interior.

In my testing, I measured only 2.8 degrees of heat transfer, considerably less than I observed with most mats. The manufacturer says that after three hours of continuous use, you'll need to "recharge" it by setting it aside for 20 minutes so the gel can regain its cooling abilities.

The mat's nylon exterior is super durable, and my dog's nails never left any scratches behind. It's easy to wipe clean, but oily smudges like those from peanut butter may leave faint stains. If that's a concern, machine-washable covers in several pastel colors are sold separately. The manufacturer says they don't impact cooling performance, but we haven't tested one yet. We'll be doing so for a later update. Right now, you can also get a limited edition Disney print (Mickey and Friends or Stitch).

While the Cool Pet Pad comes in a wide range of sizes, there isn't an option for giant breed dogs.

Read our full review of the Green Pet Shop Cool Pet Pad.

Best for large dogs

If you have a giant breed dog or two pups who like to share, the Green Pet Shop Cool Pet Pad might not be big enough for them, or the Hydro Cooling mat might bust your budget. If that's the case, consider the 33-inch-by-55-inch Arf Pets Self-Cooling Gel Pad.

This pad cools just as well as the Green Pet Shop mat and is less expensive. However, it provides less cushioning and has a more slippery surface, which isn't ideal for dogs prone to instability. Still, it's an excellent choice for many extra-large pups and multi-dog households.

My 55-pound Marty had plenty of room to stretch out on this mat. In fact, two Martys could easily fit on it. I sat on it, too, and although it's a firmer surface than the Cool Pet Pad, I found it comfortable.

The mat stayed in place Marty ran across it, but his longer nails did slide a bit. So, if your dog is prone to sliding and instability, this isn't a good option for them.

That said, I liked how easy it was to wipe the smooth material clean, and its darker color hides stains well.

Best for crates

Most cooling mats are thin and not ideal for long snoozes in a crate. A thick cooling crate pad with added foam support, however, ups the comfort quotient for pups. The EveryYay mat has a 3-inch egg-crate foam core that molds to a dog's body for extra comfort. Its cover is a cool, silky, mesh-like fabric that provides refreshing relief on hot days. The mat comes in several sizes to match the dimensions of most of the best dog crates. In addition to neutral gray, it is available in a teal fabric.

My dog tends to be picky about beds, but it took very little persuasion to get him to lie down on the mat and sink into the cushy egg-crate foam. After Marty lay on it for 30 minutes, the bed's surface temperature increased by 4 degrees. While there was some heat transfer, it remained well below his body temperature. Sabatini sat on the bed herself for 20 minutes and could feel the cooling sensation the entire time.

It's durable and waterproof, and the ability to toss the removable cover in the washer and dryer is a big bonus. If you have an older or arthritic dog who could use a little more support, the Bedsure Cooling Dog Bed comes in a few crate-compatible sizes and is made of the same egg-crate foam, but the channeled cover provides more cushion. "I was really impressed by the extra comfort provided by the polyester-filled quilted cover, and it cools just as well as the EveryYay mat," Sabatini says of the 35-inch-by-22-inch bed that fits perfectly inside her dog's crate.

Best water mat

If your dog loves the great outdoors, the K&H Pet Products Cool Bed III is perfect for chilling outside. The water-filled bed wicks heat away from your dog while maintaining a surface temperature close to the surrounding environment.

The directions say to place it in the shade, but Sabatini also set it out on a sunny deck where it worked surprisingly well. After Marty lay on it for half an hour indoors, its surface temperature rose by only 3.6 degrees. Outdoors on the deck, sans dog, its surface temperature rose by 3 degrees over the course of an hour.

With a thin foam insert and adjustable firmness (just add more water), the bed has a squishy, pillowy feel. Marty liked to burrow his nose into it. Dogs who like a firmer bed might hesitate, though. The sturdy cover is puncture-resistant, but you should still place it on a smooth surface free of sharp debris.

Filling the bed with water takes several minutes, and it's awkward to move after that. The good news is that you don't have to empty it between uses. If you need to recharge it, leave it inside an air-conditioned space until it cools down. Be sure to read the manufacturer's directions for how to prevent the foam insert from bunching up when moving it.

Best for travel

The best cooling mat for travel is actually a lightweight, heat-absorbing mat with a nonslip bottom. While it won't cool as effectively as an ice, gel, or water-filled pad, Sabatini says the Bedsure Dog Cooling Mat has a luxurious, silky cover that is very cool to the touch.

Over two weeks of testing, her dog often rotated between this mat and the Green Pet Shop Cool Pet Pad. She sat on the mat for 10 minutes and found the temperature increased from 75.8 degrees to 84.4 degrees during that time. That said, it returned to room temperature in just five minutes.

The mat is easy to fold, roll, and tuck into small spaces. Should you take your dog on a road trip and find yourself dealing with a jam-packed trunk, it won't take up any valuable vehicular real estate. You can also lay the smaller-sized mats across the back seat or inside a dog car seat. Even more, the mat comes in five sizes that are compatible with many dog crates.

Although the material feels quite delicate, Sabatini used a fork to simulate a dog's nails, and the fabric did not snag. It also came out of the washing machine in great shape and air-dried within a few hours.

Best for sofas

Editor's note: The Lesure Pet Cooling Blanket is temporarily out of stock.

If your pup loves to lounge with you on the sofa or in bed, a regular cooling mat won't cut it. Gel mats perform best on hard floors, and our travel pick doesn't cover as much area as the heat-wicking Lesure Pet Cooling Blanket, which comes in a range of sizes up to a twin bed.

I was immediately impressed by the fabric's cool feel, its appealing silkiness, and its cute quilted cloud pattern. My dog always enjoys being rolled into a blanket burrito, so this blanket was an easy sell. He stayed in his blanket cocoon for a full 30 minutes.

The material's starting temperature was 77.9 degrees, and after, it measured 80.8 degrees. I then draped it over my lap. While some of Marty's residual body heat carried over and took away from the cooling sensation, I still enjoyed the blanket's breathability and softness of the fabric.

I machine-washed the blanket and didn't notice any difference in its texture or durability. However, some reviewers say that repeated washes can take a toll on the blanket's quality over time. It is labeled air or line-dry only, and its light weight helps it dry within a few hours.

What to look for in the best dog cooling mats

I asked two veterinarians what's important to consider when shopping for a cooling mat. There are a few key things to consider, including your dog's size, where you plan to use it, and what materials are best.

Size: Dr. Sam Meisler, veterinarian and founder of PetWell Clinic, says size is your first priority. You'll want to choose a mat that allows your dog to rest its entire body on it so it's not hanging off the sides. In terms of length and width, leave a bit of extra space so that your dog can remain cool even if it shifts around on the mat.

Use: My experts say that gel mats, water mats, and cooling blankets all achieve the same goal of wicking heat away from the body, but different types of mats can work better in different contexts. Gel mats are recommended for indoor use only, as extended time outdoors may compromise the gel's effectiveness. Water mats work well both indoors and outdoors. While they require some setup, they don't need to be recharged and can be used continuously. Blankets are lightweight, portable, and easier to introduce to dogs who don't gravitate toward mats.

Materials: Meisler and Dr. Karen Shaw Becker, veterinarian and author of The Forever Dog Life, say that anyone considering a gel mat must make sure it's labeled as nontoxic. "Beds that contain gel pose a risk because they're made with a variety of different chemicals that aren't meant for consumption," Becker says. While no dog should ingest large quantities of nontoxic gel, that designation from a reputable, well-known brand indicates that the gel won't present major health concerns if a small amount is consumed. As for the cover materials, I found nylon, vinyl, and polyethylene durable, comfortable, and cool.

Warranty: K&H Pet Products and Green Pet Shop offer limited warranties, while other brands provide none. Whether a warranty is worth narrowing your pool of potential mats depends on how much you value the peace of mind it offers.

How we tested the best dog cooling mats

I evaluated the best dog cooling mats with my trusty accomplice, Marty McFly, my 55-pound pitbull mix. I ran all tests indoors for maximum temperature control and set my thermostat to 78 degrees. I conducted the following tests to compare how each mat measured up to the competition.

Cooling abilities: I first placed my hands on each mat to gauge its coolness. I then measured its surface temperature with an infrared thermometer. Next, I had Marty lie on the mat for 30 minutes and sat beside him on the mat during that time. Afterward, I measured the temperature again to see whether the mat retained heat from our bodies.

Safety of materials: Before testing, I checked each mat to ensure its materials were labeled nontoxic. Exterior materials like nylon, vinyl, and polyethylene are strong enough to withstand nail scraping and minor chewing. They're also nontoxic unless they're consumed in large quantities.

Comfort: After Marty settled down on each mat, I evaluated how comfortable he seemed. I observed whether he was happy to rest there for an extended time or immediately got back up. I also sat on each mat to evaluate its softness, its moldability to the body, how easy it was to get on and off, and its ability to accommodate bodies in different positions, such as seated and lying down.

Durability: After Marty spent time on each mat and moved around, I examined the materials for wear and tear. I also ran a fork over the surface of each mat 20 times to see if the materials tore or incurred any damage.

Skid resistance: I put Marty on a leash and ran him across each mat 10 times as it was laid on a laminate floor. I observed whether the mats slid on the ground and whether Marty's feet slipped on them.

Ease of cleaning: I smeared a tablespoon of peanut butter and a tablespoon of mud onto each mat, then let them sit for 24 hours. I cleaned each mat according to the manufacturer's instructions. I recorded how long the process took, whether I needed any special equipment or supplies, the overall ease of the experience, and how effectively it removed the mud and peanut butter, along with any organic materials left behind after testing, such as drool and hair.

Meet the expert behind this guide

Lisa Sabatini, pets editor: I first bought a cooling mat for one of my dogs in 2018. After adopting Homer and becoming keenly aware of his tendency to overheat, I knew I needed to get another mat and chose the well-reviewed Green Pet Shop Cool Pet Pad. It became one of Homer's go-to resting spots, including during winter months when the radiator gives off too much heat. I've since tested every pick in this guide with Homer, among many other mats.

Dog cooling mats FAQs

Do cooling mats actually work for dogs?

The short answer is yes, but even the best dog cooling mats have their limitations. "By using gel, water, and/or special fabrics, the mats absorb heat from a dog's body, which makes them feel cooler," Meisler says. There are, however, a few caveats that could reduce a cooling mat's effectiveness. Becker says a mat might be a waste of money if your dog doesn't typically use mats or beds. It's also important to remember that a cooling mat is intended to provide added comfort. Proper hydration and a cool environment are the most important things to provide your dog. "If the ambient temperature is excessive, a cooling mat alone is not enough to prevent heat stroke or overheating," says Becker.

Are cooling mats safe for dogs?

Meisler and Becker agree that cooling mats are generally safe for dogs, but it's important to do your research before ordering a mat. Above all else, Becker says to pay attention to the quality of a mat's construction and the types of materials and coatings. Look for brands that use puncture-resistant materials like nylon, and always choose materials labeled as nontoxic. Most importantly, closely supervise your dog when introducing new items. "If you have a dog that tends to chew or eat their toys and/or bedding, all mats could be a choking or GI obstruction risk," Becker says. If you know your dog is inclined to chew on things, never leave them alone with a cooling mat.

Can dogs sleep on cooling mats overnight?

Meisler says that while pets can sleep on a cooling mat, it doesn't mean they should. While nothing about the mats themselves makes them unsafe for sleeping, Meisler encourages people to pay attention to their dog's preferences, as they have keen instincts for what makes them feel comfortable and happy. "Just like humans, some dogs may prefer a cooler surface for shorter periods versus a prolonged amount of time," he says. "While prolonged use might be safe, it isn't always advisable or necessary. Dogs regulate their body temperature through various means. It is essential they have access to normal temperatures to prevent muscle stiffness or other issues." Becker says many cooling mats, especially gel-filled ones, have limits on how long they can sustain their cooling properties before needing to be recharged. "Don't assume that the mat will continue to cool your pup past about 4 hours, and never rely on any mat or bed to prevent overheating or heat stroke," she says. Providing your dog with alternative places to rest, like one of the best orthopedic dog beds, is a good idea.

How should cooling mats be stored for maximum longevity?

Always follow a manufacturer's instructions for storing a mat. In general, avoid storing cooling mats in direct sunlight, in high-temperature areas, or in places where they could get wet.

• Celina Myers' mom has collected miniatures since she was 14 years old.
• Their entire basement is filled wall-to-wall with tiny treasures.
• Now disabled, her mom still finds joy in adding to her collection.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Celina Myers. It has been edited for length and clarity.

When I was a little girl, I remember having birthday parties at my house and taking my friends down to our basement to see my mom's huge collection of tiny figures, neatly organised in typeset trays hanging all over the walls. Our entire 1000-square-foot basement had been turned into a sort of antique warehouse.

It all started when my mom was 14, in the early 70s. Her friend had been given a typeset tray and put little items in it. My mom wanted to do the same, so she went to a garage sale and found a tray like the one her friend had.

Each birthday, her aunts would gift her $2 to buy a charm for her charm bracelet, but instead of buying a charm, Mom would buy a miniature for her tray.

One after another, typeset trays filled. And this is still happening even today.

My friends love to see the collection

As a kid, my friends loved coming to our house because they wanted to see the collection in the basement. They all jumped from hole to hole to see what new miniature she had added most recently.

My personal favorites were the Spice Girls dolls, crazy bones, and old playing cards. I loved the nostalgic ones most, the ones I remember buying with mom.

Although mom never stopped us from looking at her special finds, she always said that we had to look with our eyes and not touch with our fingers.

It never occurred to me that her collection was weird. In fact, I thought she was this really cool mom who everyone loved.

Every Saturday, my mom, grandma, and I would head out to the garage sales to find new additions. We called ourselves the Three Musketeers. We'd scan all the knickknacks to see what we liked, what we didn't have, and what would fit in the typeset box compartments.

Mom also went to antique shops, and I'd add my own Happy Meal items.

It was a family adventure.

This is collecting, not hoarding

We never got rid of anything, but I wouldn't call this hoarding. I'd call it collecting, because she displayed everything beautifully, always making sure the miniatures were dusted.

When I think about the future of clearing out this space when she's no longer with us, I sometimes feel intimidated. But she finds so much joy in her collection, and I wouldn't ever want to ask her to downsize what she has on display.

I've told her that one day, I want to open a museum or a breakfast restaurant with her collection behind Plexiglas. I'd call it Joanne's. Everyone can enjoy it then — that's what she wants.

Each miniature is a piece of my mom that means so much to her.

She still finds joy in her collection

In the last few years, she's become severely disabled, and one of her greatest joys throughout has been describing exactly where and when she found a particular miniature, and the story behind it.

Since she can't get out easily to garage sales and antique stores to find miniatures now that she is in a wheelchair, she loves using Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. She'll find something she wants online, and Dad will pack up the wheelchair, and off they go to collect the knickknack.

After I posted a video of her collection on Instagram, there were 12,000 comments, and mom wanted to read each one. She loved it.

I'm planning to open a PO Box and then post a YouTube video asking people to send her collectibles, along with a note explaining the item and its story.

I know she'll sit for hours, looking at what's been sent to her and enjoying the letters that accompany it. It will light her up, make her so happy.

A crossbody bag is the most practical of purses. It keeps your hands free and allows you to carry more weight — making it both a bona fide travel essential and a must-have for errands like grocery trips. But just because a purse is practical doesn't mean it always has to look practical.

We've rounded up the best crossbody bags we've ever tested, from pocket-heavy workhorses to slim, splurge-worthy beauties (like the KAAI Rebel Cross Body above). Our team tried these bags out on trips, at weddings, on hikes, at work, and even on boats.

We picked out our favorite designs that fit a ton and feel comfortable for hours of wear. The standout picks combine smart organization, everyday versatility, and a polished look — qualities that matter whether you're searching for a dependable travel purse or crossbody bag you'll reach for again and again.

5 Best Crossbody Bags:

Best overall: Lo & Sons Aoyama

"If you avoid carrying a purse because you dread having an extra thing to carry, the Aoyama will change your mind. This bag is so lightweight and easily accessible that it's like having your phone handed to you. This is because of its unique vertical zippered side pocket, where I can pull it out without taking the bag off my shoulder.

Its removable, adjustable strap clicks into a crossbody bag, clutch, or a shoulder bag at whatever length you prefer. I've worn it out as a crossbody bag and returned home with a shoulder bag because it's so easy to switch up. I do suggest you get it in a dark color, though. My white one has gotten discolored after a year of use.

The pouch is made from a flexible, buttery soft leather that's easy to clean. It holds a lot — I can fit my typical everyday carry, plus a water bottle and travel umbrella without it looking too bulky. The interior compartments have netted pockets to let me see what's inside more easily. Besides being a stylish accessory, I love this bag for its intuitive design." — Gabrielle Chase, senior associate style editor, Insider Reviews

Read more in our full guide to the best luxury crossbody bags and best travel purses we've tested.

Best budget: Uniqlo Round Mini Shoulder Bag

I've spotted this sporty bag in the wild a few times on people hiking or running errands and it always looks cute and casual. I like that the half-moon shape is designed to fit the shape of your body, so it's not bulky or in the way. Plus, the dirt-resistant, water-resistant nylon fabric is super lightweight, so I basically only have to account for the weight of what I stash inside.

Speaking of, this bag holds a surprising amount of stuff. I can carry my phone, wallet, sunglasses, keys, and a foldable umbrella or a small water bottle. Inside there are two slash pockets and a top zipper to keep all the contents secure. It comes in nine colors, including the sweet pale pink I chose, as well as a sunny yellow.

Best luxury: KAAI Rebel Crossbody

"KAAI's Rebel Crossbody is the Rolex of functional purses. Like all of KAAI's beautifully made bags, it's lined with a blue suede material that feels luxurious to the touch. On the outside, the single-source leather is treated to be resistant to weather and stains. This is super important to me, since I wouldn't carry a bag this nice outside without trusting how well the leather can stand up to the elements. But all my KAAI bags have remained like-new, even though they're some of my most used pieces. The only issue with this bag is that it is relatively narrow and structured, so you won't be able to stuff it. A phone, wallet, lipstick, and keys fit perfectly, but anything bulky or irregular would prevent the bag from closing." — Samantha Crozier, style editor, Insider Reviews

Best camera bag: Quince Italian Leather Quilted Crossbody Bag

A few years back, I tested this quilted Italian leather crossbody bag as part of a larger review of the Quince brand, and it's still in rotation in my wardrobe today. After many uses, the soft leather is still in great condition (and I even let my friend's baby play with it on the pavement!). Though it looks sleek and compact, I'm always surprised by how much I can tote in the zip-top bag. I can easily fit my large wallet, sunglasses, phone, keys, and even a 13-ounce purse-shaped water bottle inside. In terms of appearance, it's comparable to the ultra-popular Saint Laurent Lou quilted camera bag, but of course, it comes at a very small fraction of the price. For 100% top-grain Italian leather, the cost is unbeatable.

Read about more Quince bags we love in our full Quince review.

Best messenger: Tumi Voyageur Tyler Crossbody

Thanks to its spacious compartments, this is one of the best crossbody bags for staying organized while traveling. I recently toted it for a long day in New York City, and I appreciated that all my items were secured, but I knew exactly where to find them when I needed to.

This eight-pocket messenger-style bag with organizational features galore was designed with neat freaks like me in mind. On the exterior, it has a front U-shaped pocket that offers a perfect compartment for stowing my cash and credit cards (in the leather card pocket), keys (via an easy access key leash), a pen (which stays secure thanks to a leather pen loop), and other quick-access items like a passport or tickets. I place my phone and sunglasses in either of the two additional exterior zip pockets, where they're safe from scratches. I love that the spacious zippered interior compartment has a zip pocket plus two open pockets. Plus, there's a slash pocket on the back that has a magnetic closure for added security.

Best for travel: Away Featherlight Crossbody

This ultra-lightweight crossbody bag is comfortable to carry and easy to grab before running errands abroad, according to travel writer Maria Yagoda.

"Away's simple design offers just the right amount of structure and slouch. It's made from a water-repellant polyester till that feels cushiony and almost quilted. Even when I filled the bag with snacks, a big book, a Fuji camera, and my notebook, the padding around the strap prevented the bag from digging into my shoulders," says Maria.

"The Featherlight Crossbody weighs just over half a pound, yet has a storage capacity of 10 liters. I wore the bag on a bike trail along the Hudson River, to a Phillies game, and to Brighton Beach, where water and sand slid right off. I used the tiny pocket on the strap, which is perfect for AirPods or keys, and the other is ideally sized for a passport and phone. These helped me avoid rummaging around in my bag in front of hotel receptionists and baristas."

Best anti-theft: Arden Cove Crissy Anti-Theft Crossbody Bag

Anti-theft purses can get a bad rep for not being the most attractive option, but this slash-resistant nylon bag from Arden Cove is an exception. I recently traveled with it to Chile, and I loved the security that all the safety features provided. For starters, the waterproof nylon fabric is highly durable, even against knife slashes. Locking clasps keep the straps and zippers secure, while an RFID-blocking pocket helps protect against electronic theft. Still, the purse was cute enough to make appearances in all my vacation photos and I appreciated that it wasn't obvious I was wearing an anti-theft bag.

Originally, I got the bag with the thin faux leather strap, but I felt it wasn't very comfortable on my shoulder and it dug in a bit. I ended up purchasing the jacquard strap separately, and found that option much more comfortable and stylish.

Best suede: Parisa Wang Gabrielle 27

"The chocolate suede of this Parisa Wang Gabrielle bag looks yummy enough to eat. On its sides are slip pockets that snap shut on their own with a satisfying magnetic closure, and inside is a wide main compartment where you can easily fit a variety of bulbous items. Overpackers rejoice.

'It comes in two larger sizes, as described by style editor Samantha Crozier in our guide to the best work bags for women. 'Parisa Wang brand partners with artisans who typically work with top luxury brands like The Row and Prada, and you can absolutely feel the quality. In fact, the Gabrielle 35 looks and feels like the ultra-coveted suede Margaux bag from The Row, which will run you $5K or more,' she writes. 'But dare I say that the Gabrielle is cuter?'

My main regret is I can't easily pack my Gabrielle bag in my suitcase because of its structured shape. It does however come in a luxe brushed fleece dust bag that's easy to tote when I'm traveling via train. For now, my friends and family in Rhode Island will just have to believe me when I tell them I have a gorgeous bag named after me back in Brooklyn." — Gabrielle Chase, senior associate style editor, Insider Reviews

Best nylon: Baggu Medium Nylon Crescent Bag

"If you're not quite a purse girl and just want a no-frills bag for running errands, this is the bag for you. The elongated strap on this durable bag is great for fitting tall frames, and the main compartment is especially roomy for a crossbody style. I can fit way more than just my bare essentials inside. It holds an umbrella, a water bottle, and my puffy sunglasses case without issue. It also has a zippered interior pocket where my portable charger and backup toiletries live, just in case." —Gabrielle Chase, senior associate style editor, Insider Reviews

Best crochet: The Sak Los Feliz Crossbody

I carefully chose this hand-crocheted crossbody from The Sak soon after testing the brand's superb clogs and right before I went on a 10-day vacation to Europe. I wanted to travel with a bag that somewhat matched all my outfits and wouldn't protest if I were to say, shove it to the bottom of my carry-on.

I'm glad to report that the Los Feliz bag performed exactly as I needed it to: the sling sack easily fit all my essentials (along with many bulky souvenirs I collected along the way) and its soft shape meant I could pack it flat when I wasn't using it. There are only three simple drop pockets inside, but since the top zips shut, nothing was ever in danger of spilling out. — Gabrielle Chase, senior associate style editor, Insider Reviews

Most trendy: Clare V. Petite Moyen

Clare V. is an Los Angeles-based brand that makes what I call 'character bags.' You can build an outfit around them and decorate them with their extensive collection of bag charms and interchangeable straps. I'm not a Labubu person by any means, but I bet one would look right at home on a brightly patterned, woven leather Petit Moyen purse. It comes with two straps, so you can wear it as a shoulder bag or a crossbody. It has a slouchy, curved construction like the hobo bags that are making a comeback this season, but it's small enough to lie flat in my luggage when I travel. I know this bag is a hot commodity because sure enough, Quince has its own dupe. " — Gabrielle Chase, senior associate style editor, Insider Reviews

Best crescent bag: Polène Numéro Dix

"I was inspired to test out this style when I was getting ready to go out with my friend, and she asked me if my bag was a Polène. In fact, it was from Quince. But when a Quince dupe can pass for French luxury, it makes me skeptical that the real deal could be any good to begin with.

Instead, I was happily proven wrong. The 'Cognac' shade of the Numéro Dix is the perfect color people who wear similar gourmand shades like chocolate and almond. It's made with a single panel of structured, full-grain leather that has a deliciously rich sheen.

It also beats out the Quince dupe in terms of storage capacity. Because the crescent shape has a flared base, I can fill it from the bottom up with my everyday carry. I've only worn mine as a crossbody or shoulder bag, but it also converts to a belt bag and the adjustable strap extension means it can fit a tall frame. There's now a JW Pei dupe of the same style.

My only qualm is that the interior seams aren't immaculate, and for the high price tag, they ought to be. However, its beautiful sculpted shape and luxe exterior have, at least for now, converted me from a 'carries everything in her pockets' into a purse girl." — Gabrielle Chase, senior associate style editor, Insider Reviews

Best water bottle holder: Dagne Dover Sloane Water Bottle Sling

While my Lululemon belt bag is the perfect companion for a brisk morning walk, I also need a bag to accommodate a much larger water bottle so I stay hydrated on longer hikes. Dagne Dover claims this sling only holds bottles up to 32 ounces, but I was able to fit my 40-ounce Owala FreeSip in there comfortably. Dagne Dover likewise makes some of our team's favorite work bags and backpacks, made of the same plush neoprene material.

I store my ID and some cash in the Sloan's smaller exterior slash pocket, my phone in the larger exterior slash pocket, and the exterior drawstring pockets contain travel-size sunscreen and bug spray. Sometimes I even take it to a fitness class if I don't need any extra equipment so that I can keep my water bottle plus a few essentials close by.

Learn more about its best bags in our full Dagne Dover review.

Best for work: Cuyana System Tote

If you carry a laptop to and from the office each day, you'll need a work bag that's a bit more spacious than your typical crossbody. Cuyana's System Tote is a tote and a crossbody in one, providing the spaciousness of a tote with the comfort of a thick-strapped crossbody bag.

Its silhouette is just a little bit different from your average tote bag, but that's what gives it a stylish flair. The best part of this tote bag — which tops our list of the best tote bags — is how immensely customizable it is. You can add a laptop sleeve, insert zippered pouches, and a crossbody strap. Even if you don't go with the System, the brand makes one of our team's favorite universal tote organizers.

I've been a Cuyana devotee for years, and it's because their high-quality leather bags are made to last. I've had my first leather Cuyana tote for over a decade, and it's still in great shape today.

Best phone holder: Bandolier Hailey Leather Crossbody

Bandolier makes wallet phone cases with crossbody straps that carry your phone and cash hands-free. Blake Lively and Selena Gomez have been spotted with these crossbody cases available for nearly every iPhone model since the iPhone 6.

"After a few weeks of using it, I can say one thing: it's like actually having pockets! I no longer have to play the balancing game of clutching my phone and a coffee in one hand while I struggle to key open my door. It may not seem like much, but for a person who wears women's clothing, the convenience of a pocket is a small miracle," wrote Style & Beauty Editor Samantha Crozier in her Bandolier phone case review.

"I use my Bandolier phone case and carrying strap literally every day. I've always used phone cases with wallets attached, so I was familiar with the convenience, but once I added the strap it was game over," says executive editor Sally Kaplan.

Best sporty: Lululemon Everywhere Belt Bag

Lululemon's Everywhere Belt Bag has amassed a cult following among fitness enthusiasts and athleisure lovers. I was a fairly late adopter of the nylon bag, but now that it's in my orbit, I'm not sure how I ever went without it. I primarily wear this bag slung across my chest like a tight-fitting crossbody bag during my morning power walks. It's surprisingly spacious thanks to its organizational features and I'm able to carry more inside it than I would have expected. My iPhone 12 Pro fits perfectly in the back zipper pocket, while my keys and some cash are stowed neatly in two interior mesh pockets. I'm even able to fit this 17-ounce water bottle thanks to the bottle's long and flat shape designed for purses.

Though it's technically a belt bag, most people I see with this accessory wear it over one shoulder and across the chest like a tight-fitting crossbody bag. This version of the bag even comes with an extended strap that's nearly 14 inches longer than the original version, so you can wear it like a true crossbody that hangs to your hip.

Best mini: Milaner The Grazia Mini Woven Bag

Despite its teeny-tiny silhouette, this miniature crossbody can hold a surprising amount of items. My iPhone 12 Pro fits effortlessly across the bottom, and there's plenty of room for my sunglasses, a small wallet, and some odds and ends like mints and a chapstick. I love this hand-woven leather bag because it has the elegance of a clutch with the ease and comfort of a crossbody bag. The strap is removable, though, which is convenient for occasions when I might prefer to swap in its shorter strap for a wristlet.

Best formal: Cuyana Mini Bow Bag

I'm always excited about a formal bag that can be worn across my shoulder. Though elegant, handheld clutches can be quite inconvenient, since they make it tough to hold while enjoying a drink and an hors d'oeuvre. This adorable little bag has all the sophistication and class I'd want for a formal event with the convenience of a crossbody bag.

I chose the Italian pebbled leather version in dark coral, but there are a number of other colors and fabrics to pick from, including black suede and an iridescent silver snake print. I love that the 21-inch gold chain strap can be unclipped to transform this bag into a dainty top-handle bag. The only downside is that the bag doesn't have a zipper or full closure, so it needs to be kept upright so the items inside don't spill out.

Best quilted: MZ Wallace Micro Metro Tote Deluxe

I love a tote-style bag because the spacious inner pocket makes it easy to carry a variety of bulky items, but they rarely zip fully shut and therefore are prone to spills. This adorable quilted bag from MZ Wallace does both. Small but mighty, the soft-sided bag is easily packed with my wallet, sunglasses, keys, phone, a small water bottle, and more. Beyond that, there are two additional zip pockets separate from the main compartment (plus two pockets inside the main compartment).

I find this bag to be ideal for packing into a carry-on since it's soft and lightweight, making it easily compactable. The crossbody strap is removable, so I can carry it like a top-handle bag if I want some versatility in the look. Most importantly: it'll look so cute in all my vacation photos!

Best backpack: We The Free Soho Convertible Sling

If you're looking to carry a bit more than fits inside your average crossbody but don't want to haul a huge rucksack, I recommend the SoHo crossbody sling. It converts to a small backpack, so I like to carry it on light shopping outings. That way, I have my hands free to shop, but I also have some extra space in my bag to store my purchases.

The sling bag (unzip the strap to turn it into a backpack) has two equally-sized main interior compartments, plus a smaller zippered compartment on the front. I dedicate one compartment to my going-out essentials (wallet, sunglasses, keys, etc) and leave the other empty for anything that catches my eye along the way. My phone stays in the front zip pocket for easy access. The bag made from super soft leather that's elegant and durable, and it comes in three colors.

Best bucket bag: Mansur Gavriel Dea Bucket Bag

Mansur Gavriel makes some of our favorite leather goods, from comfortable and stylish ballet flats to this newest edition from its bucket bag archive, the Dea. The exterior of this bag (available in four hues) is made from a soft, smooth tumbled Italian leather. You can carry the Dea by its top handle, or clip on its detachable crossbody strap at your choosing. Inside is a suede lining that cradles your essentials in luxurious softness.

Best straw: AllSaints Ebro Straw Crossbody Bag

As you map out your summer plans, consider bringing this seagrass-woven crossbody along for the ride. The boho-inspired inspired bag practically begs to be taken to seasonal events, from beach trips to music festivals. It has an adjustable cow leather strap to help you get the perfect fit. Inside, a 100% cotton lining protects items such as your cellphone, keys, wallet, sunglasses, and more. The bag has a magnetic closure at the top with the AllSaints logo stamped across the front.

• Caitlin Kalinowski, a member of OpenAI's technical staff, said on Saturday that she had resigned.
• In an X post, she criticized OpenAI's deal with the Pentagon.
• The deal raised concerns over the use of AI surveillance and lethal autonomous systems.

Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined OpenAI from Meta in 2024 to oversee hardware in its robotics division, said she is resigning from the company.

In a post on X on Saturday, Kalinowski criticized OpenAI's recent deal with the Pentagon.

"AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got," she wrote.

She called her resignation a matter of principle, and said she still deeply respects OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and is proud of the company's robotics work.

A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed Kalinowski's resignation and defended its deal with the Defense Department.

"We believe our agreement with the Pentagon creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines: no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons," the spokesperson told Business Insider. "We recognize that people have strong views about these issues and we will continue to engage in discussion with employees, government, civil society, and communities around the world."

OpenAI struck a deal with the Pentagon last week, allowing the Defense Department to use its AI products. The agreement came after its rival Anthropic refused a similar deal over concerns that the technology would be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.

Washington has since effectively blacklisted Anthropic. President Donald Trump described the company as "radical woke" in a Truth Social post and demanded federal agencies stop using Anthropic's technology. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth then designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk and said Defense Department contractors would be barred from working with the company.

OpenAI's decision to strike a deal with the Pentagon caused an immediate backlash. Some users ditched ChatGPT in protest. Anthropic's chatbot, Claude, is now the No. 1 free app on the Apple App Store, unseating OpenAI's ChatGPT. Claude's US downloads increased 240% month over month in February.

Kalinowski's exit is a setback for OpenAI's robotics ambitions.

Over the last year, the company has quietly built a San Francisco lab that employs about 100 data collectors. Teams are training a robotic arm to do household chores as part of a broader push to build a humanoid robot. The company told employees in December it also plans to open a second lab in Richmond, California.

A source with knowledge of OpenAI's plans also previously told Business Insider that the company is exploring several early-stage hardware initiatives — including robotics — but none are considered central to its core mission at this point.

Correction: March 8, 2026 — An earlier version of this story misstated Kalinowski's role at OpenAI. She oversees hardware in its robotics division, not the division itself.

• Luana Ribeira has been with her partner since 2017, and they share a son.
• They lived together initially, but moved into separate houses earlier this year.
• She says the arrangement allows each family member to have time to themselves.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Luana Ribeira, founder of Dauntless PR. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Little about my relationship with Al is traditional. For starters, Al was my former husband's best friend. After my husband and I divorced, I moved to Portugal, where Al was living. I was planning on spending time with Al as a friend, but the second time we hung out, he called my ex to say, "There's something here." Luckily, my ex gave his blessing.

I started dating Al soon after, in 2017. In 2020, we moved to the UK, where I'm from. That's when we decided to have separate bedrooms. We both were having trouble sleeping at the time, and enjoyed having our own space. We had a spare room, so Al started sleeping in there.

Eventually, we wanted even more space from each other. At the time, my two teenage daughters were living with us, and the house was loud. Al craved quiet, and that was fine with me — I wanted him to take care of himself. He converted an existing warehouse on our property into a bedsit (similar to a studio apartment). He slept there and used it when he needed quiet time to create art or watch TV.

We wanted different settings for our home

Last June, we moved back to Portugal, with our 4-year-old son, Celyn. By that point in our relationship, Al and I recognized that we live completely opposite lifestyles at home. I like creature comforts and wanted my dream lakeside home in Portugal. Al was interested in becoming even more self-sufficient, living off-grid if possible.

Al already owned about an acre of land in Portugal. He put a yurt on the land, and now lives there without running water and with only limited solar power. The one modern amenity I insisted on was wifi, so I can get a hold of him and Celyn.

I meanwhile rent a two-bedroom home with a pool. I can see a nearby lake from my windows. I'm still in a rural area, but nowhere near as rural as Al.

We follow a strict weekly schedule

We have a family schedule that might look familiar to separated parents, though Al and I are very much together. On Sunday nights, Al and Celyn go to the yurt. I work long days on Monday and Tuesday, and also have time to swim and make any appointments I need to.

On Wednesday morning, I pick Celyn up. That's my favorite part of the week, seeing him run down the lane toward me. I have Celyn on my own until Friday night, when Al comes to spend the weekend with us. That family time always happens at my house, since it's more comfortable.

Our weekends as a family are sacred to us. It's also nice to have one-on-one time with our son and to have alone time built into the week.

This arrangement lets us be ourselves

Our homes are about 50 minutes apart right now. If something pops up with work, I can't just send Celyn to his dad's on a whim. Sometimes I feel like I'm driving all the time, so I'll probably move closer to Al in the future.

Financially, there's not a huge expense involved with having two homes. Al already owned his land. I'm the sole earner in our relationship, so I bought the yurt, and I finance projects on the land as they come up. Luckily, there are a few bills with an off-grid homestead.

I know this isn't for everyone, but I'm glad that Al and I can do what's right for us. We want to support each other, and don't want to ask our partner to change who they are. Living apart gives us the space we need to be ourselves, while still being a family.

If you thought joggers were only for the gym, you'd be mistaken. Though they originated as a more tailored version of comfy sweatpants, today's joggers are so much more versatile and come in styles that can be seamlessly incorporated into anyone's wardrobe. Whether you're working out or working at the office, there's a pair of joggers that's perfect for the job.

Deciding which joggers are right for you can be tricky, but there are a few things to keep in mind: The best joggers have a clean, tapered fit; are made with flexible, moisture-wicking materials; and include features like detailed stitching and zippered pockets. From there, it really comes down to your needs: Where and how do you plan to wear them?

Our top pick is the Vuori Sunday Performance Jogger because of its usability for training and casual wears alike, as well as its durability. We also like Public Rec's Gamechanger Joggers for its precise sizing and incredible stretch.

We wore them on the streets, in the office, around the house, and while exercising, then evaluated each pair on a number of factors, including fit, comfort, design, and quality. If you're looking for traditional sweatpants, check out our best sweatpants for men guide.

The top 3 picks for men's joggers

Best overall: Vuori Sunday Performance Jogger

Vuori's Sunday Performance Jogger is everything a pair of joggers should be: soft, comfortable, stretchy, and stylish. In other words, they're perfect for working out or just hanging out. The smooth-as-silk joggers are made from moisture-wicking fabric and have a sleek, tapered fit that's just right — not too loose, not too tight. Besides side pockets, the joggers feature nice touches like zippered pockets on the rear and thigh, and a contrasting white drawstring. Whether you're buying your first pair of joggers or your fifteenth, you can't go wrong with the Sunday Performance.

Best stretch: Public Rec Gamechanger Jogger

Using the same materials as the aforementioned Public Rec Gamechanger Rec Pants, the Gamechanger Joggers are just as stretchy, but in a more casual jogger silhouette.

Despite being a super comfortable and stretchy pair of sweatpants, the Gamechanger Joggers also come in specific waist and inseam sizes for the perfect fit. Say goodbye to ill-fitting joggers with this pair from Public Rec.

Read our full Public Rec Gamechanger Jogger review here.

Best fleece: SKIMS Fleece Lounge Tapered Jogger

You got me, Kim Kardashian! The reality star turned entrepreneur's SKIMS brand first made a splash with women's shapewear but has since branched out into wardrobe basics for men, including the luxuriously soft Fleece Lounge Tapered Jogger. Available in four neutral goes-with-anything colors and sizes up to 5X, the joggers have a simple design: just two side pockets and a barely noticeable "SKIMS" label stitched below the waistband in back. The fit is loose but not sloppy, and the thicker fabric makes the joggers ideal for cold weather. I wore them outside on some of New York City's chilliest winter days, and they kept me cozy the entire time.

Best budget: Champion Powerblend Jogger

Champion has produced quality sweatshirts and sweatpants for nearly a century, so it's no surprise that its joggers are top-notch as well. Now, there's nothing fancy about the fleece Powerblend Jogger — it's basically a tapered version of Champion's sweatpants, with no special features other than the brand's C logo — but I found the athleisure wear to be incredibly soft with a fantastic fit that isn't too bulky. The wallet-friendly joggers are also extremely durable, so I know I'll be wearing them for years.

Best for the casual office: Rhone Commuter Pro Jogger

I never dreamed I'd wear joggers in the office, but here we are. Rhone's Commuter Pro Jogger is so polished that it reminds me of the nicer, slim-fit, five-pocket pants I currently own. Tailored and slightly stretchy, the Commuter Pro is more structured than your typical jogger and has stitched detailing on the front pockets, a "hidden" zippered pocket on the left hip, zippered back pockets, and zippers at the ankles. Available in classic colors like khaki, navy, black, and brown, the joggers can be paired with a polo or button-down and nice sneakers for a sharp, smart-casual look. I'm stocking up.

Best for travel: Lululemon ABC Warpstreme Jogger

Yes, the perfect travel pants do exist. Lululemon's ABC Warpstreme Joggers are flexible, stylish, and best of all, wrinkle-resistant. That means they won't rumple if you choose to wear them on a long plane ride or just toss them into your suitcase. The joggers come in a wide variety of sizes and colors, and have a slim silhouette that won't make you look as if you're en route to the gym as you're out exploring the town. I appreciated the medium-weight fabric, which makes the ABC Warpstreme a good travel partner for almost any season.

Best lightweight: Uniqlo Ultra Stretch Active Jogger

Uniqlo's Ultra Stretch Active Joggers are so lightweight, I was sure they'd be see-through. But after several mirror checks and an extra check with my friend, I assure you they're not. The joggers are made from a seriously stretchy, light-as-air fabric that provides excellent coverage and doesn't feel flimsy. And though the pants are slim-fitting, they're not too tight. The breathable joggers are perfect for anyone who leads an active lifestyle or lives in warmer climates.

Best for workouts: Under Armour UA Sportstyle Joggers

You've probably seen a lot of Under Armour at your gym or in your workout class. That's because the brand makes some of the best exercise wear around, including the UA Sportstyle Joggers. Made from moisture-wicking polyester, the loose-fitting joggers let you work up a sweat without overheating. The pants also allow for plenty of movement and have zippered side pockets to keep valuables from spilling out. And that extra-wide back pocket is intentional: It's designed to hold your phone.

Best for every day: Cozy Earth StretchTech Jogger

I've been a fan of Cozy Earth's bedding for quite some time, and now I'm in love with its joggers. The StretchTech, in particular, is made from soft, double-knit fabric and comes in three versatile colorways and has a flattering fit and understated design that works for whatever is on your agenda that day: going on a run, grabbing lunch with friends, a dinner-and-a-movie date, or flying out of town. And if you just want to wear them at home, that's fine too. Trust me, these will be your new go-to for everything.

Best for storage: Patagonia Quandary Joggers

Patagonia's Quandary Joggers were designed for hikers but have so many features that non-hikers will love. For starters, a lot of pockets: two in front, two in back (one zippered), and a zippered one on the right thigh. There's also a reinforced carabiner loop for holding keychains or other clip-on accessories. And if you are the outdoorsy type, here's more good news: The Quandary joggers are water-repellent and have a 40+ UPF sun protection rating. But what I like best about them is that they're a nice-looking pair of pants, with a simple design and a slim fit. However, sizes run on the smaller side, so you might want to size up.

Best splurge: Alo Conquer Max Performance Jogger

From the gym to the streets, Alo seems to be everywhere these days. And deservedly so, since the brand makes stylishly superior athleisure wear. The only issue? Most of the high-quality pieces have a high price tag to match. That said, the Conquer Max Performance Jogger is worth the investment. The jersey pants are snuggly soft yet strong enough to withstand a workout. Despite the slim-fit design, the fabric allows generous movement for doing squats, lifting weights, holding a yoga pose, or just picking up around the house.

Best classic: H&M Slim Fit Joggers with DryMove

H&M's clothes are always on-trend but its Slim Fit Joggers with Dry Move are truly classic. The pants are made from durable, moisture wicking materials, have a perfectly tapered fit, and have zippered front pockets for keeping contents in place. I was impressed by the design and quality of H&M's athleisure wear and think the Slim Fit is a solid choice for anyone who wants an excellent pair of joggers at an affordable price.

Best for lounging: Quince Supersoft Fleece Joggers

I'm not going to lie, Quince's Supersoft Fleece Joggers are so buttery soft that I almost wore them to bed. They're surprisingly lightweight and felt almost like cashmere against my skin. The legs have a looser fit but don't billow out in the thigh or sag at the ankle. These aren't joggers I would wear for a workout, though; they're strictly for relaxing at home, casual hangs, running errand, and possibly sleeping.

• A new counter-drone system with a proven record defending Ukraine's skies is headed to the Middle East.
• The US Army is deploying the Merops system, which has scored over 1,000 Shahed kills in Ukraine.
• The propeller-driven interceptors cost about $15,000 each.

The US Army is deploying an American-made counter-drone system that has intercepted more than 1,000 Shahed-type drones in Ukraine to the Middle East, two defense officials confirmed on Saturday to Business Insider.

One of the US officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military developments, said that the Merops system will arrive in the Middle East within a week. Once it arrives, it'll be ready for combat in a matter of days.

They declined to say how many systems the US is sending to the Middle East, only that the deployment will include a large quantity of interceptors.

The Associated Press first reported the Merops deployment.

The counter-drone system, which uses a roughly $15,000 interceptor, would give US and allied forces a much cheaper air defense option against Iranian drones, compared to expensive surface-to-air missiles.

The weapon's deployment to the region comes as Iran has launched thousands of cheap attack drones at the US military and its allies across the Middle East after the US and Israel began Operation Epic Fury on February 28.

The Shahed drones, which cost roughly $20,000 to $50,000 according to available estimates, complicate the air defense picture.

In significant quantities, they can overwhelm even advanced air defense systems, or at the very least force Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) crews to expend millions of dollars in interceptors to defeat a threat only a fraction of that cost.

How the Merops works

The Merops counter-drone system launches a propeller-driven drone called the Surveyor, which is a few feet long, can be carried by a single soldier, and uses artificial intelligence to navigate in jammed environments.

The overall system includes the Surveyor interceptor, a ground control station, and launch stations — all operated by a four-man crew with a commander, a pilot, and two technicians.

Its developer, the American initiative Project Eagle, says the Merops is tailor-made for taking down propeller-driven and jet-powered drones like the Shahed. So far, it's logged over 1,000 kills against such uncrewed aircraft.

The Surveyor can fly at speeds of over 175 mph, meaning it's more than fast enough to catch Iran's commonly used propeller-driven Shahed-136, which flies at around 115 mph. Jet-powered versions of the Shahed reportedly fly as fast as 230 mph and are more challenging threats.

If the Surveyor, which can be mounted with a small explosive warhead, fails to hit its target, it can deploy a parachute to allow retrieval and relaunch of the drone.

When Business Insider observed a demonstration of the Merops in Poland last year, one of the launchers was mounted on the back of a pickup truck.

A push for interceptor drones

According to one of the defense officials Business Insider spoke with, US forces in the Middle East are to be trained by Army soldiers from Europe to operate the Merops. The system is also being sent to countries in the region where US troops are not deployed.

The second defense official said that Merops' use in Ukraine has provided the Army with air defense information that has already proven valuable in Eastern Europe and will now be useful for the Middle East.

US Army soldiers in Europe have taught NATO allies how to operate the Merops system, which was deployed to the alliance's eastern flank following Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday that his country had received a direct request from the US for help with countering Shahed drones.

Zelenskyy shared that he "gave instructions to provide the necessary means and ensure the presence of Ukrainian specialists who can guarantee the required security."

Over the past year, Kyiv has focused heavily on building and deploying an arsenal of cheap interceptor drones to counter Russia's versions of the Shahed, which the Kremlin launches in hundreds-strong waves at times.

Ukrainian interceptor drones cost around $2,500 each, and Zelenskyy has said that his country makes 1,000 of them a day.

All of these broader developments come amid the backdrop of President Donald Trump saying in an early morning TruthSocial post on Saturday that Iran had agreed to stop attacking US allies in the region.

"Iran, which is being beat to HELL, has apologized and surrendered to its Middle East neighbors, and promised that it will not shoot at them anymore," he wrote. The president also threatened additional action against Iran, warning that the US is going to hit it harder.

• Traveling extensively with my kids changed my approach to parenting for the better.
• I learned that kids don't need much to thrive by observing children in Marrakesh and India.
• Traveling also made me more flexible with food and schedules, both at home and abroad.

I love showing my kids the world and learning alongside them. It's one of my greatest joys as a parent, and the ability to do so is a privilege I don't take for granted. So far, I've taken my children to 26 countries across six continents.

Over time, traveling with my kids has changed the way I parent, whether we're at home or thousands of miles away. Here are six ways traveling has influenced the way I parent.

I realize how little my kids actually need

I used to be obsessed with getting my children the right type of toys to promote learning and development. I wondered if they had enough layers for playing in the snow and the best shoes for climbing at the playground. Through traveling, I saw firsthand how little children really need to be happy and thrive.

In Marrakesh, my son played soccer in the winding streets of the ancient medina with kids wearing worn, off-brand Crocs. They barely stayed on their feet, but the game went on, full of laughter. In India, I saw children in threadbare clothing happily playing with no special toys required.

I realized that, despite my incredible fortune to be able to get my children nearly whatever I wanted, they would be fine with the basics. I now know that my entire family is better off free from the pressures of always chasing more things and wanting more.

I'm not as hung up on what my children eat

Travel often involves unexpected cultural differences that require my family to adapt on the fly — especially when it comes to food. For breakfast in South Korea, we found ourselves with bowls of soup rather than cereal. In Egypt, we ate spaghetti mixed with lentils, rice, and chickpeas instead of meatballs. In Japan, our pizza came topped with honey.

Traveling has taught me that many of the food rules I once accepted as gospel are really arbitrary cultural practices. I no longer care if my children want grilled cheese for breakfast. If they want to experiment in the kitchen and mix items that don't seem to go together, like putting jelly on samosas, I let them try it. I still care about nutrition, but I'm a lot less hung up on what they eat and when.

I'm more flexible with my children

I used to be hung up on strict bedtimes and mealtimes. While traveling, I witnessed parents around the world following very different rules than I did.

In Europe, I saw children out to dinner at 10:00 at night with even later bedtimes. These children were happy and thriving. I realized that the sky wouldn't fall if I allowed my kids to stay up past their bedtime or if we didn't eat lunch exactly at noon. Letting go of strict schedules has been incredibly freeing.

I handle stress better

When it comes to travel, changes in plans are par for the course. Trains get canceled. Attractions may be sold out. Kids still get sick, even far from home. Traveling with my children has forced me to keep a level head as I navigate these challenges.

At home, I put these lessons into practice. If I have to deal with a last-minute change in plans because my son gets the flu or a playdate is called off, it's no longer a big deal. When I am on the verge of panic, I remember the time I discovered the train I had planned on taking out of Venice wasn't running. It could have been a catastrophe, but with some creative thinking, I got us to our next destination on time.

Once, I was told (incorrectly) that my son needed emergency surgery in Jamaica. I had to make sure he was well cared for in a country with a vastly different medical system than the one I am used to. He recovered in a couple of days with minimal intervention. Having the experience of navigating complex issues in countries where I don't speak the language and must deal with cultural and administrative differences makes everyday problems easier to handle.

I make more time for fun with my children

My role as a parent is often purely managerial. I drive my children to various activities and pick them up from school. I make their doctor's appointments and feed them dinner.

When we travel, many of these responsibilities vanish. My children and I spend more time having fun and enjoying each other's company. We play endless rounds of Uno and laugh at inside jokes. It can be challenging to find time to create joy amid the relentless pressures of everyday life. However, traveling has shown me that doing so is essential to building a strong, lasting relationship with them. It also helps provide moments of respite from the daily grind.

I look for new experiences closer to home

If it were up to me, I would travel full-time. However, I need to work, and my children need to attend school, so that's not feasible. Instead, I look for more interesting experiences closer to home. I've learned that it's possible to experience something new and joyful just about anywhere.

Even when I can't travel, I try to act like a tourist in my hometown. I seek out new hikes, museum exhibits, plays, and events every month. This keeps life interesting, even when work and school schedules keep us closer to home.

• I've always hated filing taxes, and now it's even more difficult as a couple.
• To help incentivize us, my husband and I treat ourselves to a date after we file.
• This year, since money is tight, our date night is a simple, home-cooked meal.

My husband and I took over four hours to file our taxes the first time we filed jointly. We each dreaded the task as single adults, but together it was somehow even more unbearable. Not only is there more paperwork to submit, but the vibe can turn tense — and anything but romantic — when it comes to dealing with our finances.

To mitigate this, we each gather our tax documents in advance. We learned the hard way that getting organized beforehand cuts our time spent sitting at the computer by literal hours. When we each take time to gather what we need to file, it only takes us about an hour to file online.

When we finally hit "submit," we head to our yearly tradition to celebrate.

We hate doing our taxes, so we came up with a reward system

Having something to look forward to after filing really helps us focus on just getting it done with minimal anxiety.

The first few times we did our taxes this way, the reward was takeout from one of our favorite places and a movie night in with "Gilmore Girls"- level treats.

This is not only our ideal date night, but it's also nostalgic as we started dating during the pandemic. All of our first dates involved a nice takeout dinner or a movie night at one of our places, so our tax reward dates remind us of those times.

This year looked a bit different

I am no longer working full-time due to health issues this year, and so our joint income has been slashed in half. Couple that with the rising cost of nearly everything, and things have gotten tight for us.

We've had to reexamine our budget periodically and cut costs where we can. We've saved the most money by hardly ever eating out.

That's why I wanted our reward to look a bit different this year. Instead of takeout, I immediately thought of all the things I haven't been getting from the grocery store because we don't "need" them. I wanted the Talenti gelato I never let myself buy. I was also craving my two favorite items from the Publix bakery: guava pastelitos and black-and-white cookies.

My husband, on the other hand, just wanted to make his favorite comfort meal: tacos. After getting stressed out during the filing process, I think the tacos helped us both re-regulate afterward. We eat tacos almost every week, so it wasn't out of the norm. But I found it really interesting that after cutting back on eating out this year, we've each really grown to prefer our home cooking, so much so that my husband's own tacos were his reward.

We also had to reframe the task of filing our taxes

No matter what our return was this year, we decided beforehand to put it toward the summer vacation we're taking anyway. This helped us feel like we're getting a "free" trip, but it also removes any expectation from our return. Whether it's great this year or not, looking at it ahead of time as a coupon for our summer vacation removes any disappointment if the return is awful, as well as any guilt about the cost of our trip.

Based on my initial experience, filing taxes with a spouse can really suck the love out of a room. Knowing this was something we'd have to go through each year, I felt that we'd benefit from a survival plan.

Our predetermined reward system helps separate the chore of taxes from our marriage and makes us a more effective team.

I wouldn't say our system is romantic, but it definitely helps in the big picture of our relationship.