• Ferrero has spent the last decade buying up some of America's biggest brands.
• Best known for Nutella, Ferrero has grown its US revenue from $600 million in 2017 to $3 billion.
• Now a $3.1 billion cereal bet could determine how far Ferrero can go.

Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes. They are all now owned by the same Italian company.

Best known for Nutella and Ferrero Rocher chocolates, Ferrero has spent much of the past decade buying established American food brands and investing in US manufacturing.

The privately held company now has more than 50 brands in its US portfolio, spanning chocolate, candy, mints, cookies, and breakfast cereal.

The expansion has transformed Ferrero's US business. The company says the US accounts for about 15% of its global revenue, up from about 4% a decade ago. Since 2017, its annual US revenue has grown from roughly $600 million to about $3 billion.

Ferrero is still smaller than some of America's biggest snack companies, like Mars and Mondelez, but its acquisition spree has put a growing collection of familiar brands under the ownership of a company once best known in the US for imported European sweets.

We visited Ferrero factories across the US to see how far its American ambitions go.

Ferrero has spent billions buying American brands

Ferrero's US buying spree kicked off in 2017, when it acquired Fannie May, the century-old chocolate company, for $115 million.

A year later, Ferrero paid $2.8 billion for Nestlé's US confectionery business, gaining brands including Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, and Crunch.

Then, in 2019, it acquired Kellogg's cookie and fruit-snack businesses, adding Keebler and Famous Amos.

"Ferrero takes a very different approach, which is buy well-established, loved brands, and then turn them back around," Michael Lindsey, the president and chief business officer of Ferrero North America, told Business Insider.

That strategy gives Ferrero a way to expand without building brand recognition from scratch.

Its biggest US bet yet has taken it beyond the sweets aisle.

In February, Ferrero completed its $3.1 billion acquisition of WK Kellogg, the North American cereal company behind Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes, Corn Flakes, and Rice Krispies.

The deal also presents a challenge. WK Kellogg reported declining sales before the acquisition was announced.

Lindsey said Ferrero has spent more than $5 billion on US investments over the past five years.

Ferrero is adapting its products for American tastes

Acquisitions are only part of Ferrero's strategy.

In 2023, the company opened a 45,000-square-foot innovation and research center in Chicago, where teams work on products for brands including Keebler, Famous Amos, Mother's, and Fannie May.

Lindsey said Ferrero has found some notable differences between American and European tastes.

"US tends to prefer milk a little bit more than dark chocolate," he said. "Americans love peanut in a way that Europe in particular doesn't really have peanut as part of the palate in the same way."

That preference helped inspire an unusual change to one of Ferrero's best-known products.

In April, the company introduced Nutella Peanut, the brand's first new flavor in more than 60 years. Ferrero spent about five years developing it and $75 million on a production line at its Franklin Park, Illinois, factory.

The launch is part of a broader shift for Ferrero: Instead of relying solely on products developed for European consumers, it's increasingly developing and manufacturing products specifically for Americans.

Ferrero is making more of its products in the US

Ferrero has also invested heavily in US manufacturing.

In 2024, it opened its first chocolate-processing facility in North America in Bloomington, Illinois, producing chocolate for brands including Kinder, Ferrero Rocher, Butterfinger, and Crunch. It has separately invested more than $200 million to add Kinder Bueno production at the site.

Ferrero's workforce has grown alongside that expansion. The company says it now employs more than 5,000 people across North America, compared with a few hundred roughly a decade ago.

For Ferrero, the acquisitions and factory investments are part of a longer-term effort to become a much bigger player in the American food business.

Lindsey compared Ferrero's position in the US with Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the 1920s, when those companies were still building the scale that would eventually make them ubiquitous.

It's an ambitious comparison. Buying familiar brands doesn't guarantee consumers will keep buying them, and the WK Kellogg deal gives Ferrero a much larger presence in a cereal business where sales have been under pressure.

But Ferrero is no longer simply the European company selling Nutella and Ferrero Rocher to Americans.

Increasingly, it's the company behind the American brands already sitting in their pantries.

• Tyga released his ninth studio album, "$tarface," on July 31.
• The musician used AI to create the 80s-inspired album.
• Some artists are leaning into AI despite intense pushback from fans and peers.

For some artists, using AI during the creative process is like ripping the soul out of an intimate human experience.

Tyga, however, doesn't have those qualms.

During an August interview with Vibe, the rapper revealed he relied on at least one AI music program while crafting his ninth studio album, "$tarface." The 80s-inspired project, released last month, sees Tyga don a new "Miami Vice"-esque alter ego who has a penchant for Jheri curls, sleek retro Ferraris, and synthpop.

"I've never spoken on this with anybody because I always felt like it's similar to a magician explaining how he does his tricks," Tyga told the outlet.

AI has certainly cast a spell across Hollywood, where the technology is transforming how the entertainment industry functions, from studio executives to background actors.

While some creatives view AI as a powerful tool that can speed up production, cut labor costs, and streamline repetitive tasks, others aren't sold. Many artists are concerned that AI will displace human workers, cheapen the creative process, and steal their work without proper compensation. AI sat at the crux of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild strikes, which both lasted over 100 days, crippling the industry.

Tyga, though, has embraced the adapt or die mentality. He said he used AI to add certain elements to "$tarface," like 80s-era synths, but did the vocals and lyrics himself.

"I know people are going to be mad about me saying this, but it's where technology is going," Tyga told Vibe. "It's no different than when Auto-Tune came out. Some people were opposed to it, but real artists took it and used it."

"There's nothing wrong with using technology as a tool," he added.

Unsurprisingly, the backlash was swift. Pitchfork rated "$tarface" 0.0 out of 10, the lowest score the music publication has awarded an album since the late 2000s, in part due to Tyga's use of AI.

"Given the amount of actual effort or even labor put into $TARFACE — which is to say, about zero — the margins on this thing must be amazing," Drew Millard wrote for Pitchfork. "Stream it out of morbid curiosity if you must, but know that even a single listen runs the risk of making it profitable and therefore encouraging the music industry to commit such atrocities again."

Doja Cat, who collaborated with Tyga on two songs, criticized his decision during a livestream last week.

"Nobody asked me anything about Tyga, but I felt like saying this," the rapper said. "Tyga is a penis for making an AI album."

Audiences on social media haven't been much kinder. Despite the backlash, Tyga joins a growing number of artists proudly using AI in their artistic endeavors.

Superstar producer Timbaland faced backlash in 2023 for using AI to recreate the voice of The Notorious B.I.G. on a song, but he hasn't caved to critics in the years since. In fact, he's gone all-in. Timbaland launched an AI entertainment company, Stage Zero, in 2025 and aims to pioneer a new genre called "A-Pop." His AI artist, TaTa, released her debut music video that October.

"TaTa is a living, learning, autonomous music artist built with AI. TaTa is the start of something bigger," Timbaland told Billboard last year.

Grimes, the dream-pop artist linked to billionaire Elon Musk, has worn AI as a badge of honor. In 2023, she launched Elf Tech, an AI software that allows users to create songs with her voice. Artists can commercially release the finished songs as long as they split 50% of the master-recording royalties.

Nick Carter of The Backstreet Boys has also used AI in new projects. In a 2025 interview with The Comics Beat, Carter said he used AI to create the official lyric video for his "Hey Kid," and a comic book-themed music video series.

In some cases, the artist isn't even human. Tilly Norwood is an AI pop star created by Particle6. Her debut music video, "Take the Lead," has amassed over 475,000 views since March.

Another example is Fenix Flexin, whose summer hit "Rubberz" was ravaged by AI allegations since its release in June. The rapper initially distanced himself from the AI accusations, but later admitted to using the technology during production, according to Rolling Stone. Even so, "Rubberz" resonated with audiences and charted on Billboard's Hot 100, the Stereogum reported.

Tyga, meanwhile, doubled down on his use of AI during an interview with TMZ last week.

"At the end of the day, I'm better than the AI and I've proven that for the last 15 years. So, it doesn't bother somebody like me, but I think maybe there's people that are scared that it's going to, you know, take their position and replace them," Tyga said. "It's just a part of technology."

• After a packed spring, I didn't have the energy for an elaborate family vacation.
• We rented a house an hour away and deliberately made almost no plans.
• My older kids loved the slower trip and unanimously said they'd do it again.

My family had an exceptionally busy spring. This year, we threw in an early college graduation, a high school graduation, and a wedding. Each week was full of senior events and wedding plans. I was tired. My kids were tired. As much as we wanted a family vacation, the idea of planning something felt overwhelming.

Instead of our normal weeklong road trip to someplace like Niagara Falls or Maine or even the adventurous cruise we took to Bermuda, I decided to plan a vacation that would truly feel like a rest. I'd never done anything like this.

We needed a place that felt like a break

I started by deciding what we needed. I'd be traveling with my husband and my three kids, plus a spouse and a girlfriend. A trip with five kids aged 17 to 21 is not for the faint of heart, and there were a few non-negotiables.

Everyone needed their own bed and enough space to decompress without getting on each other's nerves. I also wanted a place with on-site activities. If we had to get in the car every time we wanted to do something, it would just mean more running around.

We wanted to be away from home without a long drive, but the most important thing was avoiding a tourist area. I knew if there were too many attractions nearby, we'd spend the whole trip running around. I didn't want to come home more tired than when I left.

I found a vacation home one hour away that checked all the boxes

Leading up to the trip, I worried we would miss out on that vacation feeling. The house was only an hour away, and we weren't even leaving Connecticut. But I kept reminding myself and my family how much we needed to rest. Thankfully, everyone was on board.

Before we arrived, I made a few decisions. I sent out a family text outlining the sleeping arrangements and expectations for meals and cleanup. Getting that out of the way ahead of time ensured we were all on the same page and prevented bickering when we arrived.

Our days were filled with simple things

We cooked burgers and ate watermelon. I played volleyball in the pool with my kids. My son caught two bass in the pond. I even took afternoon naps. We played games of pool, tossed some darts, and learned to play shuffleboard in the game room.

I finished a book I'd been meaning to get to. There was even time to sit and scroll without feeling guilty about it. There was no pressure to be somewhere or do something. On our last night, we sat around the bonfire roasting s'mores. There was no deep conversation, just laughter and the comfortable feeling of being together.

We did leave the house each day, mostly for ice cream or coffee. We drove through woods and farms, and we found a hike with a river to swim in. We only ate out once when we went to a favorite spot from my husband's college days that we've taken the kids to before: takeout calzones eaten at a rickety picnic table by the horse farm at UConn.

There were no bucket-list activities

There was no big attraction, no bucket-list activity, and no dramatic vacation story to tell. Mostly, we just spent time together. As my kids get older and our schedules pull us in different directions, time together takes more work.

This trip may not have been epic, but it did give us what we needed. After we got home, I asked everyone the same question: Would you do this again? Everyone said yes. Even though they felt the pressure of busyness, the trip gave them a break they didn't even know they needed.

Before the trip, I worried a vacation one hour from home wouldn't feel like a real vacation. By the end, I realized distance had very little to do with it. What made it perfect wasn't where we went. It was that for a few days, nobody had anywhere they needed to be. We could just be together.

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says negative public perception of AI is a "big problem."
• Amodei said AI companies have overpromised and undersold on what the technology can do.
• He said the best way to earn the public's trust is for AI to deliver major scientific advancements.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the best way to win over AI skeptics is to deliver on the hype.

In a rare post on X on Saturday, Anthropic's CEO acknowledged the public's mistrust of AI and said the industry can only change that by delivering tangible scientific breakthroughs.

"At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive," Amodei wrote. "The most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world."

"The thing that will work is actually curing cancer," he added.

The AI industry is facing a growing public backlash as it builds huge data centers in communities across the country, scrapes often copyrighted online data to train its models, and upends the workforce for many industries. A recent Pew Research Center study found that about half of Americans felt the increased prevalence of AI in their daily lives made them feel "more concerned than excited."

Amodei, meanwhile, has repeatedly warned on podcasts, in essays, and in Anthropic blog posts, about the dangers posed by AI's rapid development. In a June essay, Amodei wrote that the company's new Mythos models present "very real risks" to cybersecurity, the financial sector, critical infrastructure, and national security. Last year, he warned that AI would cause half of all entry-level jobs to vanish.

Some other AI leaders have criticized the kind of rhetoric for which Amodei, who left OpenAI in 2020 over concerns about the company's attention to safety, has become famous. Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis said earlier this year that his peers had been "way too certain" about their dire predictions and encouraged them to dial it back.

As OpenAI and Anthropic gear up for expected IPOs, they have followed that advice, pivoting from doomerism to boomerism. Amodei, however, said in his Saturday X post that he doesn't think his warnings are the cause of the public's distrust of AI.

"I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative," he wrote.

"I wrote Machines of Loving Grace because I didn't feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better," he added, referring to a lengthy 2024 blog post in which he laid out how he thought AI could make the world a better place.

Instead, Amodei said that the public's distrust of AI companies reflects broader skepticism among Americans toward corporations overall. "The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it," he wrote.

Anthropic's decision not to open-source any of its frontier models, which it says is out of caution, has contributed, at least in part, to the public's wariness. Anthropic drew ire last month for being the only major AI developer not to sign a letter advocating for open-weight AI as Washington considered restrictions on some Chinese models.

Yann LeCun, the former chief AI scientist at Meta, has long argued that keeping frontier AI technology closed-source, as Anthropic does, contributes to public distrust about AI more than anything else.

In an X post responding to Amodei, LeCun wrote that the "only way forward" is for AI to be "widely available, shared, and open."

"We need diverse AIs for the same reason we need a diverse press," he wrote.

As for Amodei's argument that a major scientific breakthrough could turn the tide of public opinion, not everyone agreed with that either.

Angel Brodin, an applied AI architect at OpenAI, wrote in a response to Amodei's post that despite routinely delivering advancements in public health, the pharmaceutical industry is "still one of the least trusted industries."

"People also won't judge AI companies solely by their breakthroughs," she wrote. "They'll judge them by pricing, access, lobbying, opacity, how the economic gains are distributed, who gets to participate in its benefits, and who ultimately holds the power."

Amodei, for his part, said Anthropic is ramping up work in the biological and medical fields to test that theory.

"We hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months," he wrote. "When we've actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that."

• I moved to Palm Springs temporarily, with the goal of returning to Los Angeles within a few months.
• However, I quickly fell in love with the desert city's nature, cultural scene, and community.
• Six years later, I'm still here — and though there are things I miss about LA, I have no regrets.

When I lived in Los Angeles, I considered Palm Springs a sunny respite about a few hours away from the hustle and bustle of the city. I made a point of visiting the desert city a few weekends a year to enjoy perfect winter weather and laid-back, poolside hangs.

I never imagined living there, though, until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Suddenly, Los Angeles felt claustrophobic.

Like many others in the city during this time, I wanted to find a place with more breathing room. Since most of my work was already remote, I was not tethered to a location and decided to make a move.

Palm Springs offered a lower population density, plenty of wide-open vistas, and a slower pace of living, all of which appealed to me.

I planned to just "wait out" the pandemic in Palm Springs and return to LA when it was over. So, I negotiated my lease down to a six-month stay.

Pandemic-related restrictions lasted well beyond that initial period, but I didn't want to leave. I'd started truly falling in love with the desert, so I kept renewing my lease on a month-to-month basis.

I quickly fell in love with the city's nature and arts scene

One of the biggest immediate perks of living in Palm Springs was the easy access to nature and hiking. Even within the city limits, there were great, secluded trails to explore, not to mention spots like Joshua Tree National Park just over an hour away.

In those early days of social distancing, I took full advantage of these hikes — as well as neighborhood walks, which offered so much Modernist architecture and gorgeous desert landscaping.

Once physical-distancing restrictions were lifted and we could start sharing more spaces again, I began working for the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which remains one of my favorite local events.

I developed friendships within the community of coworkers and volunteers, and built several meaningful intergenerational relationships that continue to this day.

As things continued to open up, I frequently attended live music events throughout the region, including shows at Pappy and Harriet's and the Coachella festival.

As someone who has always worked in arts, music, and culture, these places provided great opportunities to meet like-minded people in town and get a cultural pulse on the city.

Community, friendships, and work helped me decide to stay in Palm Springs

By the time the peak of the pandemic had passed, LA had changed — many of my friends had also moved elsewhere.

Plus, I'd become deeply ingrained in Palm Springs' community through work and new friendships, and fallen into routines here. I didn't want to leave.

So, I didn't. And six years later, I'm still in the city.

There have been benefits I didn't necessarily expect. Compared to living in Los Angeles, drives are short, traffic is light, and parking just about anywhere downtown is easier (and free!).

You also simply cannot beat the winter weather here, with mainly sunny days and temperatures in the mid-70s.

Though I miss many things about Los Angeles — like the amazing, varied food scene and late-night culture — Palm Springs has a lot to offer for everyday life.

And it doesn't hurt that I'm only a two-hour drive away from my old home, so I can head back as often as I need to for work opportunities or visits with friends who still live there.

I'm not ruling out a return to Los Angeles eventually, and I always like to stay flexible and open to new opportunities. For the foreseeable future, though, Palm Springs is home.

If you're willing to spend top dollar, it’s easy to find headphones packed with features and high-end audio quality. But what about cheaper models? Are lower-end headphones still worthwhile? I've been reviewing audio gear for over a decade, and I've tested plenty of affordable headphones and earbuds. Though you need to be more selective with entry-level options, the best budget headphones can still deliver good quality, and you might be surprised by just how well certain models perform.

For those who want solid over-ear headphones on a budget, I recommend the Soundcore Space 2. They retail for $130, but it isn’t rare to find them for less, and they deliver surprisingly powerful active noise cancellation (ANC). On the wireless earbuds side, I like the Nothing Ear (3a), which also offer capable ANC, along with a cool transparent design and big sound for $99. And if you're just after simplicity, don’t forget the Apple EarPods. These wired earbuds never need charging and deliver solid performance for just $19.

Below, you'll find all of my picks for the best budget headphones and earbuds. For this guide, I've included a variety of styles, from on-ear to open-ear models, that all regularly sell for $150 or less.

Our top picks for the best budget headphones

Best overall: Soundcore Space 2 - See at Amazon

Best wired earbuds: Apple EarPods (USB-C) - See at Amazon

Best wireless earbuds: Nothing Ear (3a) - See at Amazon

Best on-ear: Marshall Major V - See at Amazon

Best open ear: CMF Clip Pro - See at Amazon

Best for kids: Skullcandy Grom - See at Amazon

Best overall

The Soundcore Space 2 are wireless noise-canceling headphones that retail for $130, but can sometimes be found for as little as $110. They combine a comfortable fit, excellent sound quality, and surprisingly robust ANC performance. And though plenty of headphones offer these attributes, few perform so well at this price. All things considered, they're the best budget headphones for most needs.

The headphones' audio quality is big and immersive. They deliver plenty of bass while still offering clarity throughout the mid-range. These are easy headphones to put on and instantly vibe with any type of music. And if you ever find their hefty bass too strong, you can simply adjust it using the headphones' handy EQ settings.

Noise cancellation is also a standout. Pricier flagship over-ear headphones from Bose and Sony do have a clear edge, but the Space 2 do an excellent job of minimizing HVAC noise, fan noise, and airplane drone. Few models in this price range can match the ANC on offer here.

The Space 2 support around 50 hours of battery life with ANC turned on, and an incredible 70 hours with it off. That's notably more than many rivals. They also have a unique Nap Mode with several built-in nature sounds. Though this can be a bit gimmicky, some may find the white-noise selection calming. They can also connect to multiple devices at once with Multi-point pairing and feature onboard buttons rather than touch controls.

However, the controls aren't quite as responsive as I'd like, and I do wish the Space 2 folded more compactly for storage. But those are ultimately small complaints, especially considering everything the Space 2 headphones get right at such an affordable price.

Read our Soundcore Space 2 review.

Best wired earbuds

When I went looking for wired USB-C earbuds on a budget, I discovered there just aren't many unique, viable options on the market. That is, with the exception of Apple's EarPods. They deliver solid performance for just $19, easily cementing them as the best cheap earbuds for iPhone and Android users alike.

Apple first introduced the EarPods way back in 2012, four years before the first-gen wireless AirPods. This latest edition uses a USB-C connection rather than the 3.5mm or Lightning connection used on older models. USB-C has become the standard audio connection for phones across brands, so these will plug into most modern devices without any issue.

Beyond their low price, what makes the EarPods so appealing is their simplicity. There isn't a battery inside, so you never have to worry about running out of juice. They're powered by whatever device you connect them to. And unlike many other sub-$20 earbuds, these have a clear sound with crisp instrumentation and vocals. You won't hear distortion or too much treble in music.

Surprisingly, these EarPods also have a good microphone, or at least sound great for voice calls. There's no delay like Bluetooth buds, and the microphone can be adjusted closer to your mouth if needed. Even if you don't need these as primary earbuds, for $19, they make an excellent backup pair to carry in your travel bag.

Best wireless earbuds

The Nothing Ear (3a) are versatile wireless earbuds with great active noise cancellation and transparency for their $99 price tag. They also feature a fashionable see-through design, which is a staple of Nothing's stylish appeal.

The earbuds' solid ANC effectively blocks many distracting noises. However, because of the price point, you should still temper your expectations. For example, they can't dampen the cabin drone of an airplane as well as pricier earbuds from Bose and Sony. The ANC strength is ideal for household and office use, but falls short in the most demanding environments.

One area in which the Nothing Ear (3a) far exceeded expectations was audio quality. The buds can deliver pleasingly booming music with lots of bass and a full soundstage. But they're also clear and crisp. Pop songs, of course, sound good, but so do rock and folk, among other genres.

If you want more from your earbuds than just listening to music, you can also use them to record calls for up to two hours. The recordings sync to the Nothing app, and then the audio can be transcribed. There's also an Audio Snapshot feature that lets you capture up to 60 seconds of any audio you're listening to. But while the call recording function seems broadly useful, the Audio Snapshot feature comes across as a bit gimmicky, and I haven't found a use for it yet.

Best on-ear

Unlike over-ear headphones, which create a seal around your ears with large, all-encompassing earcups, the Marshall Major V on-ear headphones sit directly on your ears with smaller earpads. Though this headphone style is less common nowadays, it results in a more compact design, which some listeners may prefer.

The Major V technically retail for $159, but you can regularly find them for close to $100 or even under. The best value can be had if you're flexible on the color, since certain options tend to be cheaper than others. For the money, these wireless on-ear headphones offer tremendous value.

Generally speaking, there's nothing obvious to criticize about the audio quality here. The headphones deliver enough thump to make songs sound full. And their overall soundstage is remarkably wide to my ears. Even if you don't care for Marshall's signature sound profile, you can use the mobile app to adjust their EQ to your liking.

On the downside, the Major V lack active noise cancellation, which you can get from the similar-looking but pricier Marshall Milton ANC model. However, the Major V still have the brand's customizable "M" button and four-way rocker for controlling volume and media playback. Even better, they set themselves apart by wirelessly charging when you rest an earcup on a Qi charger — no USB-C cable needed. This is a perk that most over-ear wireless headphones lack.

Best open ear

Open-style earbuds continue to grow in popularity, with many types to choose from, including options that simply hang over your ears and models that use a cuff or clip-on design. The CMF Clip Pro use the latter, and I like how they attach to the side of your ears without creating a seal, allowing you to stay aware of your surroundings.

Despite their affordable price and open design, the earbuds' audio quality is surprisingly full with audible bass. There's even a leakage-reduction mode, which makes it harder for people around you to hear what you're listening to.

Other perks include physical buttons on each bud for reliable media controls. I also love that the charging case includes a customizable, clickable dial. It can be used for volume adjustment and skipping tracks, among other things. However, be aware that, since the case is compact, getting the buds back in can be a little bit of a puzzle.

When it comes to fit, the buds attach well. They're lightweight and comfortable to wear. Ultimately, the biggest drawback I've encountered is that the top volume can't always combat loud environments. Depending on what you're listening to, fighting busy crowds in Times Square or train rides may drown out your music. Otherwise, these should work well for fitness activities or just everyday wear, especially given their sub-$100 cost.

Best for kids

The Skullcandy Grom targets kids with appropriately sized headphones. The sub-$40 retail price is a nice selling point, but the Grom also address real pain points that parents are likely looking to solve.

Importantly, a volume-limiting feature is included, allowing a maximum listening volume to be set on the headphones. This allows parents to protect their kids from high sound levels that could damage their hearing.

The Skullcandy Grom can be used wirelessly for around 45 hours on a single charge. They also support a handy quick-charge function that provides four hours of use with only 10 minutes plugged in.

Of course, some parents will prefer avoiding Bluetooth when dealing with their child's headphones. Trying to pair headphones, re-pair them, or just make sure they're always connected to the right device can be a chore. With that in mind, the Grom can also be used with the included wired cable for simpler connectivity. There's also a cable sharing feature, so two kids can listen to the same thing together. (If you don't want wireless at all, then you can get a wired-only version for even less.)

I'm not the target audience, so the fit isn't made with an adult in mind. But even with that in mind, I've found them very solid to use for listening to music, and they're a great value for the money.

How we test budget headphones

To identify the best budget headphones, I evaluate each model based on sound quality, durability, overall value, and useful features such as active noise cancellation when they're available. I've spent more than a decade reviewing headphones and other audio gear, and that experience helps shape how I test and compare today's affordable models.

Sound quality is assessed using a broad mix of music, genres, and playback sources, including popular streaming services. For headphones that support both connection types, I also compare wireless and wired playback.

When a pair of budget headphones includes active noise cancellation, I evaluate how effectively it reduces unwanted sound in everyday situations. Testing takes place in real-world environments such as commutes, workouts, flights, and other noisy settings. I also use test sounds to simulate common distractions, such as vacuums and busy restaurants.

Value is especially important when evaluating the best budget headphones. In addition to similarly priced models, I compare our top picks against the best headphones at higher price points to determine which affordable options deliver performance, build quality, and features that come closest to those on flagship models.

Budget headphones FAQs

How much should you spend on budget headphones?

Generally speaking, $25 to $150 will get you a pair of reliable budget wireless headphones. All of our picks for the best budget headphones fall around that price range, with a few exceptions, most notably the Marshall Major V. But that model goes on sale regularly, and sometimes dips below $100. If you want to step up to premium headphones, you can expect to pay at least $200 for the best earbuds or at least $300 for the best over-ear headphones.

What should you expect from budget headphones?

You can get surprisingly good performance from the best budget headphones, but there are tradeoffs. Most cheap models today offer solid sound quality for casual listening, decent comfort, and, if they're wireless, good battery life. That said, you'll usually miss out on premium features like top-tier noise cancellation and high-end materials. Likewise, features geared toward audiophiles, such as an open-back design and high-end planar magnetic or electrostatic drivers, are typically reserved for more expensive models.

• I quit competitive gymnastics at 14 after an injury and abusive coaching.
• Nearly three decades later, I found an adult gymnastics class and started again.
• I've since competed nationally and represented the US at the Masters World Cup.

At 41, after years of chronic back pain, postpartum depression, and the consuming demands of motherhood, I did what I thought was impossible: I found my way back to the sport that shaped me.

My journey back started with a Google search for "adult gymnastics." I had no idea that it existed. That was the moment I realized my childhood dreams did not have to end at 14.

Nearly three decades after walking away, I sat in my car outside a gym, debating whether to go inside for my first adult class. I was a wife, a mother of two, and someone whose body carried years of back pain from a car accident. Still, something inside told me to open the door.

The moment I stepped inside, I knew I was home. The uneven bars felt familiar; my body remembered movements I hadn't done in decades. But then came the vault.

Standing at the end of the runway, I prepared for a front handspring vault, a movement engraved in my muscle memory. Yet, everything felt different. I was no longer a fearless teenager, and the old vaulting horse was now a modern table. I was a 41-year-old mom, wondering if my body could handle what my younger self had done without hesitation. Every instinct told me to turn around. Instead, I ran.

Giving up on a childhood passion

When I quit competitive gymnastics at 14, I thought that part of my life was over. For 27 years, gymnastics became a distant memory while life moved forward. I built a career, got married, and became a mother, pouring everything into everyone else.

A car accident in my early 20s left me with spinal injuries and chronic pain. My second pregnancy made those injuries worse, and I eventually found myself on disability while battling postpartum depression. I was surviving instead of thriving. The woman in the mirror no longer resembled the brave athlete I had once been.

My best friend was diagnosed with breast cancer

Everything changed when my best friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. As her cancer progressed and became terminal, I watched her face unimaginable circumstances with incredible courage. She reminded me that life was too precious to keep living in fear.

I began rebuilding my health. I became a Zumba and HIIT instructor, watching women walk into my classes carrying stress, self-doubt, and the weight of daily responsibilities. By the end of the hour, they stood taller, rediscovering confidence they thought they had lost.

Watching them reclaim their strength gave me the courage to reclaim mine. I wasn't trying to relive my youth. I wanted to know if the strongest parts of me were still there beneath years of pain, fear, and responsibility.

Rebuilding trust was harder than rebuilding strength

When I finally took that leap and sprinted down the runway, I wasn't thinking about technique and perfection; I was thinking about everything my body had survived. Chronic pain teaches you caution, but gymnastics demands trust. You cannot sprint toward a vault believing your body will fail you.

Soaring over the vaulting table taught me that the hardest part of returning wasn't rebuilding physical strength; it was rebuilding trust with my own body. I had spent years seeing my back as fragile. Over time, I stopped resenting my body for what it had lost and started appreciating what it could still do. I chose faith over fear, and everything changed.

I compete nationally in my 40s

Over the past five years, my return to gymnastics has taken me further than I ever imagined. I've competed nationally, represented the USA at the Masters World Cup, appeared on "America Ninja Warrior," and at 45 became the oldest gymnast to complete the 14-event Omnithon at NAIGC Nationals for the second consecutive year.

But my journey isn't just about medals; it's about the love of the sport. I've had so much fun adding things like trampoline and tumbling (events I never got to try as a child), and embracing new challenges. I am also helping to lead a rapidly growing movement of thousands of adult gymnasts worldwide.

Those accomplishments mean a lot, but they aren't the real victory. The real victory happened the day I stopped believing my identity had an expiration date. My personal mantra is "Purpose Over Podium." I'm no longer chasing validation from judges or collecting medals; those eventually collect dust. What stays with me is the confidence, the courage, and the reminder that my best years are not behind me. Flipping through the air and making myself proud is something no medal can measure.

I want my sons to see that resilience matters more than comfort. I want the women in my fitness classes to know they aren't too old to pursue something that scares them. And I want every woman who has quietly placed her dreams on hold to know she doesn't have to leave them there. Growth does not end at midlife. Sometimes, it's where the greatest chapters begin.

• I'm very close with both of my parents, and we have traveled together many times.
• I took solo trips with each of them and got to see them outside of their Mom and Dad titles.
• I loved getting to see them as individuals and connect over their own unique interests.

As an only child, I really lucked out. My parents have always been there for me, not just as role models, but as friends, too.

Growing up, our family trips were always just the three of us, so I always saw my mom and dad as a unit. But in my early 30s, I started traveling with each of them separately, and realized how different those experiences could be.

When you strip someone away from their roles, they have the chance to just relax and be who they want to be. No responsibilities, no work, no need to take care of anyone or anything. I'm so glad I've had the chance to learn more about them as people and their interests beyond our comfort zones.

I got to see a different side of my father

This year, I surprised my dad with his dream trip to Islay, Scotland. He'd been talking about visiting for years, so we booked a tour for his 60th birthday. We spent our days touring whisky distilleries and traversing lesser-known coastal towns with our Glaswegian guide and the several other strangers we were with.

Usually, at home, my dad finds solace on his weekends away from the office. Instead of exploring Boston, he enjoys spending time just being up on his favorite shows. On our trip, this wasn't the case. Each morning was filled with new adventures, from skipping along the beach and distillery tastings on Islay, to scouring Edinburgh for his favorite spots he wanted to take me. Instead of having to listen to my ideas and passions, I got to explore his.

In Scotland, the travel version of my dad was unlocked. He was calm, spontaneous, lived in the moment, and just made the most of each day. My dad's sometimes a man of few words, but since it was just us, we chatted about all sorts and just laughed about our Scottish escapades.

My mom and I got to act like friends

A few months before, I had taken my mother on a much-needed retreat to Curaçao for Mother's Day weekend. We enjoyed a weekend of private lagoons, beaches, day trips, and relaxing time to do absolutely nothing — something we both needed.

Maybe it's a mom thing, but in our regular day-to-day life, mine seems to have it all figured out. She's the voice of reason, the one suggesting plans, and overall just someone you can always go to. She's usually pretty relaxed in general, no matter the situation, but I saw a version of her just so content and happy with really taking it slow. No time of day to wake up, nowhere to be, no priorities. We both found laughter and happiness in the simple things- a spontaneous trip to a brewery, people watching, and silly jokes with our tour guide driving around the island.

In Curaçao, my mom and I were just friends on a girly holiday. Most of our days were spent by the beach with drinks or floating around on pool noodles, but my favorite times were when we'd just hang out in our villa, chatting in our towels over a glass of wine.

I will continue to travel solo with my parents

From seeing the northern lights in Iceland to mingling with the locals in the Bahamas, some of my most memorable trips over the years have been with my parents, but getting the chance to travel with them separately was so special.

My mom and dad will always be my parents, but on these trips, I had the chance to see them as individuals. Away from the daily hustle of life, away from responsibilities, and just as friends. I can't wait to plan our next one-on-one trips!

• Last year, I moved to a remote island in Alaska, and it's been more convenient than I anticipated.
• I may be in the middle of nowhere, but I still have reliable internet and see familiar faces daily.
• Additionally, I never have to travel far for an outdoor adventure, since nature is my backyard.

When I first moved to a remote island off the coast of Alaska, I expected everyday life to be full of inconveniences.

Although my island is one of the largest in the US, it's mostly untouched wilderness and accessible only by plane or boat. The community I live in is also quite small, with just over 5,000 people.

Before I arrived, I pictured having incredibly limited access to basic necessities, struggling to order anything online, and constantly having to leave the island whenever I needed to buy groceries or run errands.

Fortunately, since arriving here a year ago, I've been able to do everything I need to do more easily than expected — though I've had to adjust how I plan and execute certain tasks.

Most of all, I've learned that convenience doesn't necessarily mean having endless options right outside my door.

We can still get online orders, despite being in what feels like the middle of nowhere.

Even though there are more options on the island than I expected, including coffee shops, fresh seafood stands, and grocery stores, there are still things I can't easily find locally, like certain clothing brands, specific car parts, or specialty household items.

Luckily, when I need something that isn't available here, I can still order it online despite not being in a major city.

Amazon and other big online retailers are still part of my life, and can deliver packages to me — it just takes a couple of weeks instead of a few days, and shipping can sometimes cost extra.

Living on an island didn't mean sacrificing reliable internet.

Despite being on a more remote island, my internet connection has never been an issue.

In fact, I've been able to maintain a career that depends on an internet connection. I work as a full-time content creator, which means I spend a lot of time filming, editing, communicating, and uploading content.

Fortunately, reliable internet has made it possible for me to complete all my work on the island rather than move to a more populated area.

Travel does require more planning, but it's easier than I expected.

Travel is one area where living remotely requires more planning, but it's not as difficult as I anticipated.

There are regular flights to and from the island — with the nearest one to Anchorage being about 250 air miles away —but I still have to account for the weather and the possibility that plans may change.

A typical trip off the island can take most of a day once I factor in connecting flights and time getting to and from the airport. Sometimes, when poor weather or flight delays come into play, I've spent more than 24 hours trying to reach a destination.

As long as I plan accordingly for long travel days, including closely monitoring the climate conditions, they don't always turn into the tedious adventure most people assume.

Even though I have fewer places to eat and shop, I've enjoyed relying on the local businesses.

Because my community is pretty small — a town of about 5,200 people with surrounding villages bringing the total population to around 12,400 residents — I often recognize people when I'm in town.

A lot of these familiar faces run local businesses, and supporting them has become a natural part of my routine, whether I'm grabbing coffee, buying essentials, or going out to eat.

Although I have limited options for dining and shopping, I've come to appreciate having a handful of reliable places where I know the staff and exactly what to expect.

There's something meaningful about regularly recognizing familiar faces and feeling so connected to local small businesses — things I don't think I would have if I lived in a bigger city.

Because nature is my backyard, I never have to go far for outdoor adventures.

Before moving here, I enjoyed spending time outside, but living in this environment has encouraged me to make outdoor activities a much bigger part of my routine.

I hike, trail run, paddleboard, and explore areas around the island. I don't necessarily have to plan an entire vacation around doing those things.

If I have a few hours free, I can often use them to get outside and explore.

When you're surrounded by mountains, water, trails, and wildlife, it's easy to find a reason to spend time outside. For me, that has translated into being more active and spending more of my free time outdoors.

Ultimately, I've been able to maintain a lot of the life I had before.

I originally thought the biggest adjustment to living on an island would be everything I couldn't access. Instead, I've noticed how many parts of my everyday life I can still maintain.

I can get groceries, order things online, work from home, go out for coffee or dinner, exercise, travel, and spend time with other people in the community. I just sometimes have to approach those things differently than I did before, often with more patience.

Living on a more remote island comes with tradeoffs and limitations, but I've learned to embrace it. I may no longer have every convenience I'm accustomed to, but living here helped me realize I need fewer conveniences than I thought.

• Seeking more space, some homeowners are building accessory dwelling units in their yards.
• Some use them for rental income, while others use them to keep loved ones who need care close by.
• Business Insider spoke to 4 families who built ADUs for their loved ones about the experience.

Lena Koropey's mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease nearly a decade ago. Since then, she's watched her once-independent mother come to rely on others for nearly every part of daily life.

"It's definitely getting harder each year," Koropey, 48, told Business Insider.

Six years ago, Koropey bought a three-bedroom home in Mattituck, on Long Island's North Fork, where she lives with her mother and a live-in caregiver. The house is only 1,300 square feet, but it sits on half an acre, giving Koropey room to rethink their living arrangement as her mother's condition progresses.

"I've created spreadsheets and mapped out various scenarios, including building a small cottage or an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) on our property, moving to another house, or, as a last resort, placing my mother in a care facility," she said. "For now, we've decided to build an ADU."

Koropey plans to build a 750-square-foot home on the property and move into it herself, leaving her mother in the main house with her caregiver and familiar surroundings.

"There is no perfect solution, but my property gives me the flexibility to adapt our living arrangement as her needs change and, ultimately, to care for her at home for as long as possible," she said.

People are building ADUs for loved ones who need care

An ADU is a small home, often built in a backyard. They typically range from 150 to 1,200 square feet, and cost $100,000 to $300,000 to build, before extras like permitting fees. As ADUs have grown more popular, some states, including California and New York, offer financial assistance to homeowners who build them.

Business Insider has spoken with dozens of people over the years about why they built ADUs on their properties. Some needed extra space or a home office, while others saw an opportunity for rental income. Increasingly, families are also using ADUs to keep loved ones who need care close by.

Rachael Reiner, director of pre-construction and project management at the Bay Area-based ADU company Villa, told Business Insider that the trend has grown in popularity as multigenerational living becomes more common. According to Reiner, 75% of Villa's sales so far in 2026 have been for multigenerational living purposes.

"The majority of our ADU projects are driven by families seeking to balance independence with accessible care," Reiner said. "These spaces provide either aging relatives or loved ones requiring support the autonomy they desire while ensuring they remain close to family for support and oversight."

For the Kuchtas, building an ADU opened the door to more disability services

Building an ADU isn't necessarily cheap, but in an expensive housing market like California, it can still be a more affordable option. That was the case for Todd Kuchta, who lives in Napa County with his wife, Gabrielle, and son, Jacob.

Jacob has autism and needs help with daily tasks like taking medication and preparing meals, but he still wants his independence. When he told his parents he was ready to move out, they carefully weighed their options.

They could buy a larger home, giving him more space, or move Jacob into supported housing, where he'd have his own room and staff available to help with his needs. But neither option seemed affordable. Jacob's medical support costs alone could sometimes exceed $9,000 a month.

Instead, the Kuchtas decided to build an ADU on their property in 2023.

Jacob's 480-square-foot, one-bedroom home cost them $248,000 to build— far less than Napa County's $907,440 median home price in August. They financed it in part through Napa County's Affordable ADU program, which offers forgivable loans to homeowners who rent the units to low-income tenants for at least 5 years.

"Napa County provided $63,000 as a forgivable loan, and we worked with Redwood Credit Union, which provided an additional $160,000 loan as a second mortgage," Kuchta, 60, told Business Insider. "We used a portion of Jacob's disability income to help cover the ADU rent, which, in turn, offsets our monthly mortgage."

Not only is Jacob, who turned 28 this year, thrilled to live on his own, but he has also gained access to more support. He's now eligible for additional disability services through the state of California, including an in-home aide for eight hours a day during the week. Kuchta's wife also became certified as an In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) provider and is paid to help care for him.

"The ADU has provided us just what we need to provide independence to Jacob and provide us with the ability to continue supporting him while having more freedom," Kuchta said.

Shalini Karnani Bonjour's mother can comfortably age in place

For some families, an ADU can be a way to keep an aging loved one close before a health issue or an emergency arises.

When Shalini Karnani Bonjour's father died in 2024, she didn't want her mother living on her own hundreds of miles away in Michigan.

"My mom was 78, and my husband and I didn't feel comfortable having her so far away, especially when it came to her day-to-day needs," Bonjour, 50, told Business Insider.

After helping her mom sell her home and move to California, Bonjour and her husband explored different living options for her, including renting an apartment, moving into an independent-living community, or moving into assisted living. But "none were ideal," she said.

In 2024, the couple purchased a 2,222-square-foot home in the Coachella Valley to live in with their son and Bonjour's mother. The following year, they began building a 1,100-square-foot accessory dwelling unit for her mother on the property.

"When people tell my husband and me we're smart or strong for doing this, I think, 'What other option do we have?' I'm an only child. Who else will be there to take care of my mother?" she said.

When completed, the home will have two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a walk-in tub in the primary bathroom. The $475,000 project has cost more than they initially expected, and construction has been more complicated than anticipated, but Bonjour said it will be worth it.

"We love where we live, and building this on our property means we can stay close to my mom while still giving her independence and a home of her own," she said.

James Richard Cornell wanted to be a more hands-on caregiver

About 11 years ago, James Richard Cornell's mother called him to say she was over living on her own.

"My mother was living in Florida, and as she got older, she would always say, 'Let me know when you're ready for me,'" Cornell, 63, told Business Insider reporter Noah Sheidlower. "It was clear her time to take care of the house she had was getting shorter."

Within weeks, Cornell and his brother helped their mom pack up, sold her home, and moved her in with him. He has been helping care for his now-87-year-old mother, who later developed dementia, ever since.

At first, she lived in a bedroom in Cornell's home. But after becoming interested in tiny homes, she decided she wanted one of her own. Around 2013, Cornell built her a roughly 1,000-square-foot home in his front yard. His mother covered about 90% of the $110,000 cost, while Cornell handled much of the construction himself.

"When I walk out my front door, I can look to the right, and she's right there," he said. "She's just 30 feet off the corner of my house."

That proximity has become important as his mother's health declines. Cornell gives her medication twice a day and installed an alarm and monitoring system so she can alert someone if she needs help. His friends also help with her care, giving Cornell some relief.

"Nursing homes are awfully expensive, and I promised her years ago that I would take care of her until her final days," he said. "She's done so much for me, so it's fitting that I return it. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be where I am today."

• My son went to culinary school after high school, and my daughter is majoring in theater.
• It's not what I expected for either one of my kids.
• I've realized that I need to help them become who they want to be — not who I dreamed they'd be.

When my son was in sixth grade, he looked at me one afternoon in our garage while I was unloading groceries and said something I never expected to hear. He said, "Mom, you're not going to make me go to college, are you?"

I paused, unsure of the answer.

He was 12 years old. College wasn't exactly around the corner, and I figured he'd change his mind a dozen times before then.

Looking back, he wasn't telling me what he wanted to do. He was telling me who he was. School never energized him the way it would later energize his younger sister. He was always moving, talking to people, and happiest when he was doing something with his hands. While other kids thrived in a classroom, he came alive in fast-paced environments where he could jump in and work alongside others.

Like many parents, I had already written a script in my mind for what success was supposed to look like: graduate from high school, go to college, and build a career.

But what if he didn't follow that path? What could that look like, and would he still be OK?

My son found his place in the trades

During high school, he started working in restaurants where he loved the pace, teamwork, and controlled chaos of a busy kitchen.

When COVID pushed school online, he accelerated his classes and graduated months ahead of his classmates. Instead of heading straight to college, he spent the next year working.

Then one June afternoon, my phone rang. When I picked up, he asked, "Mom, what's my Social Security number?"

When I asked why, he casually replied that he was enrolling in our local community college's culinary trade program. A one-year certification. He wasn't asking what I thought. He had already made his decision.

Shortly after completing the program, he moved from Washington to Arizona to work in Scottsdale's restaurant scene. My husband and I visited him more than once and watched him during dinner rush. It was exhilarating to see him working shoulder to shoulder with his teammates, completely in his element.

That's when something shifted inside me. Not because he had become a chef. Because I realized he had become independent. He had learned a skill. He had developed confidence. He had proven to himself that he could walk into a new city, build a life, and support himself.

Years later, it was my daughter's turn to plan her future

Her path couldn't have looked more different. She chose an out-of-state Top 10 public university to study theater.

More than a few people questioned the decision to spend that kind of money on an arts degree.

By then, my son had already changed me. By then, I wasn't asking whether my daughter's decision was the safest choice.

Instead, I found myself wondering whether she was building a life that fit who she was. The answer was yes.

Watching one child pursue culinary arts, and another pursue theater, taught me that my job as a parent was never to steer them toward the life I imagined or the one others expected them to pursue.

My job was to help them become confident enough to pursue lives that fit who they are.

There's a big question we parents should ask ourselves

Ironically, as I've been reflecting on all of this, my son called recently to say he's thinking about a career change. After six years in restaurants, he told me he was ready for something new.

Years ago, I would have worried that changing direction meant he made the wrong choice. Instead, my first thought was, "You're 22. You're not stuck. This is your time to try different things."

The years he spent in restaurants taught him discipline, resilience, teamwork, and how to earn a living. They helped him discover both what he loves and what he wants to explore next.

We spend so much time asking our children what they want to be when they grow up. Eventually, that question becomes, "Where are you going to college?" and "What's your major?"

Those aren't bad questions. But I think there's a better one: "Am I helping my child become who they're meant to be, or am I trying to shape them into who I expected them to become?"

Looking back, my sixth-grade son wasn't asking me to lower my expectations. He was asking me to make room for his own.

• Western soldiers are helping to train Ukrainian soldiers to fight Russia.
• Trainers say they don't teach drone piloting because Ukraine already does it better.
• Drones are woven into the training though because they're ubiquitous in the war.

A new training program for Ukrainian soldiers on NATO soil isn't teaching them to pilot drones or conduct electronic warfare because Ukraine already knows how to teach those skills itself.

Ukrainian soldiers are learning battlefield skills at a purpose-built camp in southeastern Poland as part of a Norway-led multinational effort called Operation Legio, which Business Insider recently visited.

The effort aims to bring more Western expertise, doctrine, leadership, and specialist skills to Ukrainian troops, while Ukraine decides which skills it wants the training to focus on.

"We do not do drone courses. We do not do courses within electronic warfare," Maj. John, the S3 Operations Officer in charge of synchronizing the overall training operation, told Business Insider, asking to be identified by his first name for security reasons.

Western militaries are teaching their own soldiers how to pilot drones with simulators and obstacle courses. But for Ukrainian troops at Camp Jomsborg, the training skips that step because "they have excellent drone training and education, and electronic warfare education. They can fix that themselves. So that hasn't been a request from the Ukrainians," John said.

Instead, the program is built around what Ukraine says it needs. John said that it's defined "as a Ukrainian training center" because it teaches what Ukraine requests, incorporates Ukrainian soldiers' battle-won experience, and has Ukrainian instructors working alongside allied trainers and assistance from a host of other countries, including Estonia, Finland, and Sweden.

Defining it that way, John said, means Ukrainians can "hold us accountable for quality and delivering that realistic training."

That doesn't mean drones are absent. Quite the opposite. Drones are everywhere in training because they are everywhere in the war.

Soldiers don't learn from scratch how to pilot them, but they do learn how to incorporate drones — and the threat from enemy drones — into their tactics and planning. Allies are also learning about drone warfare from Ukrainian instructors along the way.

Drones have fundamentally shaped the war, changing everything about how forces fight and how soldiers experience it. Leaders want the training to be as realistic as possible, and training soldiers without spy and attack drones overhead would hardly prepare them for the battlefield to which they'll return.

John said they had to make drone use and exposure "part of the training mission because it's such a big part of the current operational environment."

At the training camp, Ukrainian instructors are always there to act as subject matter experts on drones and electronic warfare and share how Russia and Ukraine use and don't use these capabilities, Brigadier Atle Molde, commander of Task Force Legio, told Business Insider.

He said that from the Ukrainian perspective, using electronic warfare and drones in all kinds of training, both friendly and enemy, "is of vital importance."

The training includes a drone center, which John explained was designed in "very close cooperation with the Ukrainians." It provides the gear needed for training, handles repairs, and gives troops a place to test tactics, experiment with drones, and use technology such as 3D printing. It also feeds many drone warfare lessons back to Norway and other allies involved in the training.

John said that the training is designed to mirror the fight as much as possible based on ongoing Ukrainian feedback, including what the terrain looks like, what tactics and weapons Russia is using, and what gear Ukrainian soldiers have access to.

He described drones and electronic warfare as "just an asset in this camp that enhances all the different other courses."

Drones are everywhere

Training at Camp Jomsborg includes medical, engineering, and infantry courses, with soldiers learning skills including assault, urban warfare, trench clearing, heavy weapons use, and medical treatment.

Drones are part of all of these training programs. Participating soldiers use drones to look into trenches to try to spot and attack the enemy; they have to respond to drone attacks while treating casualties; and they learn marksmanship skills to shoot down drones with shotguns.

The opposition force, role-playing as Russian forces and operating tanks and armored vehicles, also uses drones against Ukrainian soldiers to ensure they are exposed to the scenarios they will face in the war back home.

The training also focuses on improving Ukraine's decision-making, with drones feeding commanders battlefield intelligence they must use to make decisions.

Drones that score a hit also have a demolition charge that explodes, adding realism without the danger of a live strike, John said.

Ground robots are included in a similar way. They are a growing part of Ukraine's force, attacking, transporting gear, and carrying the wounded. Molde said that "when that becomes an important part of how they operate, then we have to start using those in training as well."

It is the Ukrainians, he said, who report back on how they're used and are "teaching us how they're using it."

In addition to the drone war, Ukraine is also fighting a fierce electronic warfare battle. Both sides are constantly trying to jam each other's weaponry and communications while finding ways to keep their own working through the chaotic disruption.

Western militaries see Ukraine as a critical source of lessons. Molde said Ukraine's experience shows that allies need to rebuild the electronic warfare capacity they had not focused on since the end of the Cold War.

The West is learning from Ukraine

Ukraine's experience in new kinds of drone warfare, such as the use of cheap quadcopters to engage armored vehicles, reverses the traditional relationship between Western trainers and Ukrainian troops. On some of the war's defining technologies, the students have more experience than the teachers.

Drone schools in Ukraine previously told Business Insider that nothing they teach soldiers comes from partners, only from Ukraine's own experience and expertise.

Norway is learning from working with Ukraine, too. Molde said that the work at Camp Jomsborg means "we can learn from the Ukrainian experts every day" on drone and electronic warfare.

John said that soldiers who work with the Ukrainians in the drone center bring those skills and lessons back to Norway or other countries participating in the effort.

Several of Ukraine's Western partners say they need to learn from Ukraine and have brought Ukrainian drone operators into their training so their own forces can learn. A US Department of War paper in June said that Ukrainian counter-drone technology and training from Ukrainian experts helped to protect US military bases and critical infrastructure against Iranian drones.

Other Western militaries helping to train Ukrainian soldiers say they're also learning drone warfare lessons for their own forces.

Lt. Col. Ben Irwin-Clark, the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards, an elite British Army battalion, previously told Business Insider that helping to train Ukrainian soldiers under another multinational effort convinced his unit that drones are part of the "future of warfare." Those lessons prompted the battalion to start training its soldiers and open a "drone hub" where drones can be fixed and made.

Irwin-Clark said his battalion is "learning the lessons on behalf of the rest of the army by picking them straight up from Ukrainians," who were passing on the benefit of their knowledge.

John said it was ultimately a matter of combining the conventional knowledge and decades of experience of partner nations with Ukraine's creativity and competence in modern warfare so that "we can evolve in parallel."

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Gregory Brooks, a 57-year-old based in Rochester, New York. It's been edited for length and clarity.

After reluctantly resigning from my technology services job at a community college in May, I was terrified to be out of work.

I'm not a young guy anymore. Starting over at 57 feels like a mix of humiliation and frustration — and it feels harder than when I was younger. I think for the most part, young professionals are more willing to work late, sacrifice work-life balance, and hustle to climb the corporate ladder. I'm not looking to build my career the way I did as a 20-something hustling to finish my Ph.D.

I want to do my job well, but I'm not that young adult running around all excited trying to impress everybody.

I worked with a lot of older students at the community college who expressed feeling inadequate, being surrounded by younger students who were academically ahead of them. I'm fighting those same feelings, but I've been through unemployment before, and I know how to get through.

I've been mass applying out of a sense of panic

I was panicked to be out of work because the jobs I've had in the past have been local, and I haven't found many opportunities in Rochester. I figured I might need to apply to jobs that require travel, which isn't ideal. I'm getting to a point where I really like getting home every night to my wife and dog.

I thankfully earned a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification while in my last role, which is kind of an ace in my pocket. It's something I've been leaning into heavily while searching for IT and project management roles.

I've been applying to jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed, reaching out to friends for leads, and contacting local IT recruiters. To some extent, I've been mass-applying out of panic and desperation, but I've been trying to refine my search a bit more.

I've made it a goal to do some sort of job searching and connection-making each day, and taking each step as the little win that it is.

The rejections have taken a toll on my self-esteem, and my age could be working for or against me

Rejections are all part of the process, but it's taken a big toll on my self-esteem and contributed to situational depression. My job was a big part of my identity, and leaving it was a big blow.

I have a lot of worry about what my next role will be, what it will look like, and whether I will even find a role where my skills are a good fit.

An employer could see me on a video call and question if I'm going to leave the company soon to retire, but they could also see my age and think it means I probably won't leave after a couple of years for something better.

They might think I bring wisdom and experience, but they also might see my age as a hindrance. We all look at people and make assumptions, so I absolutely think age is a consideration in the job market.

It's exhausting to think some jobs may have that expectation of having that "rah-rah" energy.

I'm staying engaged in hobbies and focusing on positive self-talk

Thank God I have reading as a way to escape from reality. I'm a voracious reader, and I like legal thrillers and the occasional financial thriller. My wife and I also have an eight-month-old Labrador retriever puppy who's been keeping us outside and on our feet.

It's also been important for me to have conversations with myself each day, reminding myself that I've made it through this before and that I'll make it through again. It's always hardest when you're in the tunnel.

I know what unemployment was like last time. I have no problem admitting that it's been a tremendous stress, so it's important to have a positive way of dealing with it. Because of that, I've decided to see a counselor, just like I did 11 years ago when I was out of work

Counseling helped me navigate unemployment 11 years ago — and it's helping me now

The first time I saw a counselor, I shared successes and frustrations with the job search, the severe toll the depression and anxiety were having on my interest in doing much of anything, and the agonizing guilt that I was somehow letting down my wife by not finding a job quickly enough.

My counselor engaged me in mindfulness, through which I recognized and owned my present emotions, whatever they were. If I were feeling sad, I'd accept it. I also had to own what I could do in the present to address the sadness, like going for a walk or reading my book.

The anxiety and depression returned almost immediately this time around. I had my second Zoom session with a new counselor recently, and I still need time to build trust with her. It takes time to not only build a relationship, but give her time to find her footing as a helper and me to find my footing as a person in need of help.

It's been difficult separating my worth from a job.

Acknowledge how you're feeling and lean on support

If you're job-seeking, lean on your support network, not only for job hunting, but for your mental health. My wife is very supportive, and after 25 years of marriage, we've learned how to support each other and understand each other's idiosyncrasies.

The biggest thing I'd recommend for older job seekers is to acknowledge what you're feeling. There's this taboo, especially for older men, around expressing your feelings.

Be honest, and if you're feeling down, acknowledge it. "I'm feeling down today. What can I do to at least find some light?"

Are you navigating a career change in your 50s? Contact this reporter at tmartinelli@businessinsider.com to share your story.

I pretty much retired my jean collection after becoming a full-time work-from-home girlie. Since discovering Rag & Bone's Miramar sweatpant jeans two years ago, I've resisted going anywhere that calls for hard pants.

With the comfort of pajamas and an uncanny resemblance to real denim, "sweans" feel like the next-best-thing thanks to a genius screenprinting technique that simulates real buttons and rivets.

Sweatpant jeans have now popped up everywhere, which made wonder about which iteration is truly the best (especially considering Rag & Bone's steep price tag of nearly $200). I compared six kinds across different price points, with varying levels of realism, fit, and comfort. Here's my honest assessment of each pair.

I looked for realistic faux buttons and fabric that mimics a twill weave

Realistic details — like printed buttons, belt loops, and pockets — are key to making sweatpant jeans look like traditional denim. Halara's budget-friendly option surprised me with how good it looked compared to much more expensive versions.

The faux distressed details made these wide-leg bottoms (available in regular, petite, and tall lengths) even more convincing. The cotton-elastane fabric is soft, the mid-rise waistband is perfectly stretchy, and it holds up well when washed in the delicates cycle.

Thoughtful details like functional belt loops made this GAP pair even more denim-like

I was equally impressed with Gap's Printed Baggy Sweatpant Jeans, which balance a realistic-looking button fly and pockets with a soft French terry made with recycled polyester. Like most Gap pieces I love, these come in three lengths — a must for getting the right fit with wide-leg styles.

My favorite detail, though, is the working belt loops, which add functionality and realism. Styled with a belt, they're basically indistinguishable from the real thing.

Even though this pair uses a rigid denim fabric, the roomy legs and wide, stretchy waistband make them just as comfy

Nuuds specializes in loungewear that's designed to be worn out and about. Even though the denim is more rigid than the other sweans I tried, these are just as easy to wear thanks to a generously baggy silhouette with a 31-inch inseam and thick elastic waistband, which can be further adjusted with a drawstring. I love that the deep pockets on these are functional rather than printed.

These faux denim joggers were super comfortable, but they don't pass for real jeans

I'd call these sweatpants by Good American more "denim-inspired" than actual sweatpant jeans. The 100% cotton fabric looks just like a dark wash denim, but it lacks screen-printed buttons, pockets, or belt loops. That said, the fabric is soft on the inside, with a denim-like feel on the outside. The fit is roomy with a stretchy elastic waist and ankle bands you can tuck into boots. They fit true to size, and have the widest size range of any of the sweats I tested (XS-5XL).

If you prefer something more authentic-looking, Good American's Jeanius line includes everything from cropped palazzo jeans to corset-cut hoodies in the same super soft, sweatpant-like fabric. Unlike the joggers I tested, though, the other jeans styles don't have elasticized waists, and they use true buttons and zippers, so they won't give you the full sweatpant jeans experience.

Rag & Bone's sweatpant jeans remain the gold standard

Still, the award for best overall and the widest selection goes to the OG: Rag & Bone. While other brands are leaning heavily into baggy silhouettes with their sweans, Rag & Bone's Miramar line is generally more fitted, with straight-leg, flared, and shorts options as well.

My favorite style is the pull-on wide-leg drawstring, which has a narrower but still roomy silhouette compared to the other wide-leg styles I tried (and a whopping $268 price tag).

I love that the front pockets and belt loops are functional, while the fly and back pockets use a super convincing screenprinting technique. They're essentially the perfect travel pants: I can wear them on the plane, and later dress them up for sightseeing or a dinner out.

See another pair I tested in our full Rag & Bone sweatpant jeans review.

The bottom line

Rag & Bone still has the most convincing "sweans." The only downside is the hefty price tag. Your best bet for a sweatpant jeans alternative will come from Halara or Gap, though they come in way fewer styles and aren't quite as soft as the Miramar ones.

• Tech giants are using the same kind of financial strategies as Enron, academic Ram Bala says.
• The AI and analytics guru pointed to their handling of debt, demand forecasts, and circular deals.
• Bala said the AI boom is "not like bubbles of the past" and he expects long-term demand to impress.

Today's tech titans are using similar financial tactics to Enron, but that doesn't mean they're careening toward disaster, one AI guru says.

Enron, an energy supplier and trading powerhouse, collapsed into bankruptcy in 2001 after it was revealed to be a fraud. But it was also a story of three things, Ram Bala, an associate professor of AI and analytics at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business, told Business Insider in an email this week.

The corporate giant shifted debt off its balance sheet using special vehicles, employed mark-to-market accounting to book future sales projections as immediate revenue, and used circular transactions to make customer demand appear more independent than it was in reality, Bala said.

"The AI buildout is replicating versions of all three, entirely legally, and that is exactly why it deserves attention," said the coauthor of "The AI-Centered Enterprise," and the cofounder and chief product and AI officer of an AI startup named Samvid.

Hidden risks

Bala said that private credit is playing the same role now that Enron's special purpose entities did, as "the place where risk goes to become less visible."

He described how private equity firms including KKR are helping to finance the AI buildout. But he emphasized that "Nvidia gets paid upfront, the borrowers and their lenders carry the default risk, and because private credit is ultimately funded by ordinary savers through instruments like pension funds, the tail risk lands on households."

Fragile forecasts

As for demand projections, Bala said the current buildout is being "financed against demand curves that are marked to model, not to market."

Bala recalled Anthopic CEO Dario Amodei saying his company has invested less in compute than its rivals, as a small error in demand projections could be the difference between success and bankruptcy.

"When the smartest guys in this room are that candid about forecast fragility, leveraged borrowers underwriting to the optimistic case should give everyone pause," Bala said.

Going in circles

Bala said that circular-financing deals such as Nvidia investing in OpenAI, then OpenAI using the cash to buy Nvidia's microchips, could be viewed as vendor financing, which is common in industries where equipment is expensive.

An example from a consumer's perspective might be leasing a car using financing from the car's manufacturer.

Vendor financing can increase market liquidity and generate value, but "done too much with uncertain outcomes, it can be risky," Bala said.

"Folks like Burry are saying that the math is not right given the risk," he continued, referring to Michael Burry, the investor of "The Big Short" fame, who's been one of the loudest skeptics of the AI boom.

Burry told his 2 million X followers this week that "history is repeating" so they should revisit "The Smartest Guys in the Room," a book telling the story of Enron's rise and fall.

"This is so much bigger than one company, and orders of magnitude more dangerous to the economy and investors than Enron," Burry said in another X post this week.

However, Bala said he believes this boom is "not like bubbles of the past," and that long-term demand for AI will justify tech companies' current financial strategies, but "only time will tell who is right."

• Becoming a mother didn't diminish my ambition — it sharpened it.
• With limited time and costly childcare, I became far more selective about the work I take on.
• Motherhood forced me to define what truly matters in my career, and pursue it with focus.

Before I became a mother, I thought ambition meant saying yes.

Yes to another assignment, even if the pay was mediocre. Yes to the meeting that probably could have been an email. Yes to the opportunity that sounded impressive, even when it wasn't especially interesting. I wanted the byline, the invitation, the proof that I was moving forward.

My calendar was full, and I rarely stopped to ask whether the work itself was worth my time.

Then, in the terrifying early days of the pandemic, I became a mother.

Everything felt frightening and surreal. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and suddenly responsible for keeping a tiny human alive during a global emergency. The competent, confident version of myself I had known — the writer who interviewed people, met deadlines, and understood how to navigate her professional world — felt very far away.

A few weeks into motherhood, I received a freelance assignment from a brand that sold one of my favorite cheeses. I remember sitting at the table with my baby on my lap, my laptop wedged precariously against its edge. My dog kept dropping a toy at my feet, hopeful that this might finally be the moment I agreed to play. The whole setup was absurdly inefficient.

And yet, I felt exhilarated.

Here was something I knew how to do. I could open a document, ask the right questions, arrange words into sentences, and turn those sentences into a story. I might not have known why my baby was crying, whether she was eating enough, or how any of us were supposed to live through that time. But I knew how to write about cheese.

The assignment felt like a blessing — not because it was prestigious or especially career-changing, but because it returned me to a version of myself I recognized. For a little while, I was not only a brand-new mother fumbling through an impossible moment. I was competent. I was confident. I was a writer.

Before my daughter was born, I had talked to several women who told me that motherhood had fundamentally altered their priorities. They had once been incredibly ambitious, they said, but after having children, the things they had cared about professionally simply didn't feel as important. They were happy to scale back.

Becoming a mom refined my ambition

I believed them, and I wondered whether the same thing would happen to me.

It didn't.

I still wanted to write. In some ways, I felt more like a writer than ever. Sharing my own stories, and the stories of the people I interviewed, felt not less important but more so. Motherhood had expanded my emotional world. It had made me more curious about families, bodies, work, and all the complicated ways people build their lives.

I had more to say, and I felt a new urgency to say it.

What changed was not my ambition but my tolerance for work that didn't matter to me.

During those first years after becoming a mother, childcare often arrived in tiny scraps: two hours of help, a 90-minute nap, an unexpected stretch of quiet. Every hour I spent working was now an hour I was paying for childcare, an hour carved out of a nap, or an hour away from my child.

I learned to sit down and work with ferocious concentration. There was no time to warm up, reorganize my inbox, or wait for inspiration. I opened the document and began. The cost of my time, once largely theoretical, became startlingly clear. I stopped wanting to fill my days simply to feel productive. I became much less interested in assignments that looked good on paper but left me depleted.

Less time forced me to focus on what matters

Having less time made me more focused. It also forced me to ask a question I had rarely considered before: Is this work important enough to justify the time it takes from the rest of my life?

That question has transformed my career.

Since becoming a mother, I have walked away from work that no longer aligned with my values. I have broken into publications I once dreamed of writing for. I built a writing community. I finally made space for the novel I had been postponing for years.

I am not producing the greatest possible quantity of work. But I am pursuing work that feels more meaningful and more distinctly mine.

Balancing ambition and motherhood remains an impossible ask. There is no clever trick that allows me to be fully present for my children while also giving every professional dream the time and energy it deserves. Sometimes I am working while wishing I were with them. Sometimes I am with them while thinking about the essay I want to revise.

I want my children to know they matter more to me than any byline or professional achievement. But I also want them to see that my dreams matter, just as I hope theirs will matter to them.

Motherhood did not shrink my professional life. It clarified it. It taught me that ambition is not about cramming the greatest number of accomplishments into a life. It is about deciding what is worth giving that life to.

• Dropbox co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi chooses five areas each quarter where he can make significant progress.
• He said it has become a "filter" for how he spends his time.
• He said if he's invited to a meeting outside his core priorities, he'll skip it and send a delegate.

It can be hard to stay focused on your priorities when constant pings and competing projects are pulling you in different directions.

That's why Dropbox co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi developed a simple system for keeping his biggest priorities front and center. His most basic productivity hack is to identify five things he needs to accomplish each quarter, and use it as his North Star of where he spends his time.

"I pick things that I can make significant progress on in that quarter," Alkarmi said. "And so it becomes a filter for how I prioritize my time."

He shares those five priority areas with his team, administration, and chief of staff so everyone understands where he's spending his time. Those priorities guide how he structures his weeks and decides where to devote his attention. As he put it, the five priorities "win at all times," even when competing demands arise.

Alkarmi held leadership roles at Vimeo and Meta before he joined Dropbox in 2024. He became co-CEO in May, alongside Dropbox founder Drew Houston, and will eventually become the company's sole CEO.

Alkarmi said that when he joined Dropbox, he faced a wide range of tasks across various business categories. He narrowed his priorities to five key areas, including people, the business, and performance.

On the business side, Alkarmi said he looked at data and identified reducing customer churn as a key priority, with the goal of making "meaningful progress" in the first quarter. He said he uses work management tool Trello to manage his top five priorities.

The list doesn't just help Alkarmi decide where to spend his time. It also helps him determine what isn't worth his attention.

"Sometimes I get meetings that are not related to these things, and I don't go," Alkarmi said.

• Homeowners are using home equity lines of credit, or HELOCs, to buy investment properties.
• A HELOC lets a homeowner borrow against the equity in their property.
• It works like a credit card, allowing you to borrow money as needed up to a set limit and pay it back.

Mark didn't have a six-figure salary when he started investing in real estate.

The Florida-based former police officer, who prefers not to share his last name for privacy reasons, said he never earned more than $52,000 a year. Still, he built a 25-unit real-estate portfolio in less than five years and retired from his day job at 50.

One tool that helped him get started was something he already had: equity in his home.

To fund his first investment property, a $100,000 single-family house in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Mark opened a home equity line of credit, or HELOC, against his paid-off primary residence.

His home was worth about $200,000 at the time, he told Business Insider. Rather than borrow close to the maximum amount he believed he could access, he took out a $30,000 line of credit — about 15% of his home's value — to help fund the investment.

Michigan investor Scott Steenbergh also tapped the equity in his primary residence when he and his wife bought their first sober-living rental. The investment property required a larger down payment than an owner-occupied home, he said, so the couple used a HELOC to help come up with the cash.

"We were able to refinance our primary, get some of the equity out, and put that to work," Steenbergh told BI.

Both investors were doing essentially the same thing: converting some of the wealth locked inside a home into capital they could deploy elsewhere.

How a HELOC works

A HELOC lets a homeowner borrow against the equity in their property — the difference between what the home is worth and what they still owe on it.

Unlike a home equity loan, which generally delivers a lump sum, a HELOC functions more like a credit card. A lender approves a maximum credit line, and the homeowner can borrow from it as needed during a set "draw period."

During the draw period, borrowers can typically access funds via checks or a credit card linked to the account. Once you start borrowing, you'll owe minimum monthly payments based on your balance. Some HELOCs allow interest-only payments during the draw period.

How much you can borrow depends on the lender, your home's value, how much you already owe on it, and your financial profile. Mark, for example, could have sought a much larger credit line against his fully paid-off home. Instead, he chose $30,000, which was enough to execute his investment plan without pulling considerably more equity from his home than he needed.

To qualify, borrowers need sufficient equity in their home, and lenders typically consider factors like income, existing debts, and credit history.

HELOC funds generally aren't restricted to home-related expenses. You can technically use it to finance anything, from starting a business to going on vacation or covering medical expenses. That flexibility comes with an important caveat: A HELOC is debt secured by your home. If you can't repay it, you could ultimately lose the property.

Using home equity to buy an income-producing asset

Mark used his HELOC to help buy a rental property that could generate income to offset the new debt. After securing a tenant, he said the property produced about $220 a month in profit. He used some of his cash flow to pay down the HELOC balance and put some into savings.

Steenbergh used his HELOC as a source of down-payment capital. He and his wife had built equity in their primary residence, but needed substantially more cash to purchase an investment property than they had needed for their own home.

That allowed them to put existing equity "to work," as Steenbergh described it, without selling their house.

The strategy can work when the asset purchased with the borrowed money generates enough income to justify the cost of the debt, but it also increases risk. Again, a HELOC is secured by your home. If you fall behind on payments, the lender may restrict additional borrowing, and if you're ultimately unable to repay the debt, your home could be at risk of foreclosure.

HELOC versus home equity loan

Kent He used a similar strategy to tap his home equity, but with a different product.

He and his wife bought their primary residence in San Diego in 2019. As the home appreciated, they built substantial equity and eventually used a home equity loan to pull out a portion of it and invest in a short-term rental.

"If I never bought my primary residence, then I probably wouldn't have gotten the equity to invest in short-term rentals," He told BI.

The distinction matters: A home equity loan generally provides a fixed amount of money upfront, while a HELOC provides a revolving credit line that can be tapped over time.

For homeowners who have built up equity, understanding their options can give them another way to put it to work.

"You are now equipped with another tool in your tool belt," He said. "With all this equity, maybe you can take it out and put it into an investment, as long as the investment makes sense and it fits your risk appetite."

• BCG is accelerating hiring of both technical talent and traditional consultants.
• Mel Wolfgang, the firm's North America chair, wants consultants to keep building technical skills.
• At the same time, he said, critical thinking and judgment remain essential.

At Boston Consulting Group, consultants of the future might look a lot like those of the past: generalists with business acumen.

The difference, said BCG veteran Mel Wolfgang, is that the firm increasingly sees its consultants developing some of the technical capabilities once concentrated among specialists in areas such as IT architecture and software development.

Wolfgang got a better sense of that shift when he took over as North America chair in May. He asked how many of BCG's traditional consulting staff had skill sets similar to those of its technical employees.

What Wolfgang found surprised him.

"I've actually kind of got double the workforce that I thought I had, and I started to really categorize what people know," he said.

Nearly as many people with traditional consulting backgrounds — including, as Wolfgang put it, "the English lit major with an MBA" — had developed skills that approximated those of BCG's technical hires.

BCG gauged those skills through tests and employees' demonstrated technical work on the job.

Hiring is accelerating

The findings come, Wolfgang said, as the firm is accelerating its hiring of both technical talent and business generalists, who have long populated the consulting industry.

He said he wants people who combine technical proficiency with the critical-thinking skills BCG has traditionally prized.

"I'm trying to find the Venn diagram overlap of that as much as I possibly can," Wolfgang said.

Many new hires, he said, are arriving with a broader range of technical skills. In interviews, BCG will ask whether candidates have experience using AI tools such as Claude and Codex.

Wolfgang said that while those abilities are increasingly helpful, "You still have to frame the problem. You still have to work the analytics."

Plus, he said, consultants need to determine whether an answer makes sense.

"The role of judgment has increased enormously, and that's an apprenticed skill," Wolfgang said.

Officers and project managers spend time with junior staffers to help them arrive at the best answers, he said. While AI can help generate insights, Wolfgang said, "you might have to do it multiple times because what it spits out originally may require a lot of refinement and judgment."

Wolfgang said that about 30% to 40% of the firm's work is focused on AI, including helping clients reshape their business models around the technology.

The remaining share of BCG's business, he said, falls under traditional consulting — things like strategy, mergers, and post-merger integrations. Yet those efforts also generally touch on aspects of AI. "Pretty close to 100% of our work today talks about AI in some way," he said.

Training for AI

To keep up with clients' AI needs, Wolfgang said the firm has expanded employee training beyond what it provides to new hires or those entering a new client industry.

BCG instructs staff — from consultants to support and operations teams — on topics such as the basics of building AI agents and determining where and how best to use them. For employees who want to go deeper, the company offers instruction in more technical areas, such as data engineering.

The AI fluency training, which the company has structured into a four-step ladder, involves technical tasks, such as programming an AI tool that employs multiple agents.

"They also spend a lot of time forcing you to think through the judgment," he said of the lessons.

The training requires that BCGers pass a series of assessments. Those tests adjust to help staffers who might be struggling, Wolfgang said.

"If you're not doing well, it adapts the questions until eventually you learn it," he said.

About half of the company's workers in North America have completed the first level of AI training, Wolfgang said. About one-third have finished the second, and about 20% the third. The goal, he said, is to have all staff finish the first level by the end of the year and all four levels in the next couple of years.

Wolfgang, who said he recently completed his second training tier, would like staffers to pause between steps to apply what they've learned. It's akin, Wolfgang said, to passing the written test for a driver's license.

"Now you've got to go pass your driver's test, and that happens on the casework," he said.

Ultimately, the AI instruction, on its own, is only part of the equation, Wolfgang said.

"The critical thinking that a consultant has always delivered is still in the bull's-eye of what we need to train people to do," he said.

• The celebrity trainer Harley Pasternak says common gym mistakes can hold back muscle gains.
• Progressive overload is key to building and maintaining muscle.
• Pasternak said that giving muscles enough time to recover between workouts is essential.

Harley Pasternak has spent 30 years helping people build strength and muscle.

In that time, the 51-year-old Los Angeles-based personal trainer, who has worked with Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, and Robert Pattinson, has seen people making the same mistakes, which keep them from making the gains they want to see.

Progressive overload, which means challenging your muscles more and more over time, whether through heavier weights or more reps, is crucial to building muscle, but there's more to it than just that, Pasternak told Business Insider.

Rest and a thoughtful workout plan are also important if you want to build muscle, he said. For Pasternak, that means strength training for 20 minutes, six days a week, and focusing on two muscles per workout.

Pasternak shared the common mistakes he sees people make.

Worrying about looking 'bulky'

Pasternak said he often sees women holding back when lifting weights because they are worried about looking "bulky."

"It's very difficult to put on muscle," he said.

Building muscle requires eating more food than you burn, also known as a calorie surplus.

Regardless of how it changes your body shape, lifting weights also carries many health benefits, including reducing the risk of osteoporosis.

Doing full-body workouts

Pasternak isn't a fan of full-body workouts if people want to build muscle.

Training lots of different muscle groups in one session can mean that by the time you reach the final few exercises, you are too fatigued to work those muscles hard enough to make meaningful progress, he said.

"There's a great quote, 'I fear not the man who knows a thousand different kicks. I fear the man who knows one kick a thousand times,'" he said.

If you're training 15 body parts in one workout, "you're probably not giving much to the last five body parts," Pasternak said.

Not giving muscles enough time to recover

Training hard is only one part of building muscle. You also need to give your body enough time to recover, Pasternak said.

Resistance training creates micro-tears or injuries in muscle fibers. During recovery, those fibers repair, becoming stronger. "That's how we adapt to the stimulus," he said.

But if you train the same muscle again before it has fully healed, it can interfere with that process, stalling your progress, and possibly leading to injury, he said.

Muscles also tend to recover faster than connective tissues such as tendons, he said, so pushing the same body part too frequently can cause problems even if the muscle itself feels ready to go again.

Pasternak said people who train with a meaningful amount of intensity should leave multiple days before working the same body part again.

• President Trump's team says his 21,000 stock trades in 2025 were an automated investing strategy.
• Direct indexing, which combines index returns with tax write-offs, has grown rapidly this decade.
• We spoke to experts who explained how it works, who might want to look at it, and risks to watch.

Trading like President Donald Trump might be as easy as buying a customized index fund.

Trump made 21,000 trades in 2025, a volume higher than any other president, and likely any other politician. He generated more than $2 billion in income (including $1 billion in cryptocurrency income).

The Trump Organization has said that Trump's trading is automated. Investors and financial advisors say Trump could be part of a growing group of investors using direct-indexing strategies to capture the returns of an index while also reducing their tax bill.

Direct indexing grew to $864 billion in assets as of the end of 2024, according to Cerulli Associates, more than double its size in 2020, as technology has made it cheaper to run these strategies for everyday investors.

Alex Michalka, vice president of investment research at Wealthfront, which credits itself with coining the term "direct indexing" in 2012 and oversees $99 billion in client assets, said that one medium-sized direct indexing account on the platform made over 4,500 distinct trades in large-cap companies in 2025 in order to increase tax savings.

Trump's disclosures showed eight distinct accounts, most of which trade equities. If they all traded evenly, that would be more than 2,500 trades per account. Democratic lawmakers, including Elizabeth Warren, are now asking for information about who manages the president's accounts.

A Trump Organization spokesperson wrote that the latest request from Democratic lawmakers is "just another baseless political stunt," and pointed to reporting by other outlets showing the president's accounts are managed by independent third-party managers.

Trump and his circle don't have the ability to influence the investments, the spokesperson said, in order "to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest."

We spoke to experts to learn more about direct indexing and which investors should investigate or avoid the strategy.

What's direct indexing

Direct indexing is an evolution of index investing, the way the vast majority of investors access the market. Instead of buying a single ETF that tracks an index, investors own the underlying stocks directly, allowing them to trade individual names while still roughly mimicking the index performance.

The key to the strategy is "dispersion," Michalka said, effectively the difference between individual stock returns and an index's overall performance.

Markets generally go up, but that performance is not uniform.

"Even if the market as a whole is up, there are going to be some stocks that are down," he said.

ETFs bundle those gains and losses together, but by trading the individual stocks, an investor can claim the losses against their capital gains in the fund or from other sources. (They're also able to claim $3,000 against their W-2 or other wage income if losses exceed gains in a given year).

Those written-off taxes are then deferred until the investor liquidates the portfolio, allowing them to reinvest those additional savings in the meantime.

This strategy used to be available only to the rich, said Gabriel Shahin, a financial advisor who founded the advisory firm Falcon Wealth Planning."We wouldn't even look at it unless we were managing at least $5 million for them," Shahin said, citing high management costs, the costs of individual trades, and the lack of fractional shares as reasons the strategy was restricted.

Over the past five or so years, direct indexing has grown substantially, he said, as more seamless financial plumbing, free trades, and technology that can automate much, or all, of the strategy, means that it's in reach for regular investors. Prices for some products have come down in line with the most popular ETFs, with Wealthfront's S&P 500 direct-indexing product carrying the same fee as State Street's SPY ETF. Other products are more expensive but offer intraday trading and rebalancing.

Fractional shares that can trade down to six or seven decimal points also lower the cost of the strategy. It's customizable, allowing investors to adjust their index holdings based on their environmental, social, or governance preferences, such as excluding oil and gas investments, or to avoid positions they already own a lot of, like a tech employee who gets a sizable percentage of their income in their company's equity.

The investing strategy is growing rapidly, and in recent years has become almost table stakes. Shahin said he uses it with many of his clients.

Who it's for

Trump is "the perfect candidate for direct indexing," Shahin said. He's in the top tax bracket, has lots to save on his taxes, and, as a real estate investor, has capital gains to write off and a need for liquidity.

While the strategy appears to be working for a growing number of investors, it's "not a free lunch," said Michalka of Wealthfront.

Fees from some providers can be much higher than many ETFs. There's also the specter of tracking errors, or the dispersion between a product's return and the index it tracks as a result of the tax saving, Michalka said.

Michalka said that his firm's analysis shows a small, roughly 1%, tracking error on their own products, though that can be higher in volatile years, like 2020, or if the portfolio is customized away from the index.

"You might read about this and say it's great for me, but you need to analyze your situation," said Shahin.

Factors that make it worth considering:

• Enough capital gains income that's worth writing off, especially if you are a tech worker paid with shares of the company you work for or a real estate investor like Trump.
• If you have a long time horizon for your investments, it gives you time to reinvest the deferred taxes.
• The ability to continually contribute money to the account. The investment has a diminishing tax benefit over time without fresh capital.
• If you want to modify investments to avoid certain companies for ESG, religious-exemption, or diversification reasons.

Factors that may give you pause:

• Investors who expect their tax rate to rise. Deferring taxes is more valuable if you expect to pay a lower rate when you eventually sell, such as in retirement. If you expect your rate to be higher, the strategy may be less worthwhile.
• You're investing a smaller amount of money. The tracking errors will likely be higher because of the constraints of fractional shares.
• You're saving for a down payment or other big purchase in the short term. Any tax savings are not worth the risk of putting money that you will soon need into the risky equity market.
• If it's too busy or complicated for you, you might prefer to buy an index: "$SPY and chill," Shahin said.
• Not all providers are equal. There's the cost, but non-institutional providers' trades could be less prioritized or may be more costly, which can increase tracking errors.
• Be careful about leveraged direct-indexing products, or long/short portfolios, that follow similar strategies but increase the leverage and therefore, the risk.

• Instagram vowed to crack down on pickup artists and pranksters who use Meta glasses to film harassing videos.
• Meta said that thousands of pieces of content have been removed, and terms like "rizz" are now blocked in search.
• Business Insider found dozens of the videos still up in the last month, some of which Meta removed after we alerted them.

"Are you a secret code?" a young man in Meta glasses asks a woman in a tank top on the sidewalk. "What do you mean, 'a secret code?'" she responds, seemingly confused as the man's glasses record her. "Because I'm trying to crack you," he says.

The interaction, filmed by content creator Colin Allen for his Instagram account @thatiscolin, is one of dozens of similar videos that I found from popular and verified accounts on the platform in the month after Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said Meta would remove "harassing" pickup line videos filmed with Meta glasses.

After I sent Meta a link to 20-plus pickup and other harassing "prank" videos from different accounts, the company removed the "secret code" video and eight others. Allen, who describes himself as a "lifestyle and comedy creator" and not a pickup artist, had used the same line to different women in several other videos, which remain up.

Videos from pickup artists using Meta glasses to approach women in public have emerged as a genre on Instagram's Reels and TikTok, with some of the popular videos racking up millions of views. These videos of men trying pickup lines on women on the street, along with pranks on cashiers or service workers, are tagged on Instagram as being shot on "Meta glasses."

Being associated with that kind of icky content can't be good for the reputation of the devices, which some people are already referring to as "creep glasses."

Tracy Clayton, a spokesperson for Meta, told me that thousands of pieces of content have already been removed, and several large accounts have been taken down. The recent enforcement action falls under Meta's existing Community Standards on bullying and harassment, which broadly forbid content that sexualizes other adults or sexually harasses people. Additionally, search terms for "rizz" or "cold approach," common pickup slang, are now blocked in search.

My last month spent in pickup-line video land has shown me that Meta's enforcement has been uneven in the weeks since Mosseri's remarks. "We don't want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we're trying to fight that every way we can," Mosseri said in mid-July.

When initially reporting on Mosseri's comments, I found two large pickup artist accounts that had been deactivated as part of the recent enforcement wave. A few days after my article was published last month, one of those accounts was reactivated (a Meta spokesperson said this was by error, and the account was re-banned after I brought it to their attention).

Carolina Are, a digital criminologist based at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said that Meta and Mosseri's response to the harassing AI glasses videos highlights isn't enough.

"There is a backlash, and then Meta tends to minimize its own responsibility for it. They talk about how this is user-generated behavior or an error in enforcement," Are said. "But they don't recognize the systemic issues that are causing that to happen, and they take no accountability for what their policies or infrastructure have done to enable that behavior," Are said.

These pickup and prank videos made with Meta glasses aren't exclusive to Instagram; they also exist on YouTube and TikTok.

A spokesperson for TikTok told me that it has policies against harassing content. After I sent a list of four videos of pickup artists who also posted on Instagram, TikTok took down two of them, citing its policy on bullying and sexual harassment.

Boot Bullwinkle, a representative for YouTube, told me it has policies against certain kinds of harassment and dangerous prank videos. YouTube has been dealing with moderation issues around street pranks and pickup artists for years. After I sent four examples of channels that posted Meta glasses pickup content, YouTube said it took down "several" of the videos and removed one of the channels from its monetization program.

A headache of its own making

Mosseri personally delivering the message that Instagram will take down this specific kind of content is unique among video platforms. That may be because of Instagram's unique relationship with the Meta glasses: Not only are these unsavory videos a headache of its own making, but they also risk harming the public perception of a product that Meta invested big bucks in building and marketing.

Plenty of people are buying up Meta's AI glasses. Sales have grown since their launch in 2021, topping 7 million units in 2025, more than triple the previous year. Meta is the early leader in the smart glasses race.

They've been a bright spot for Meta's money-losing Reality Labs department, which faced layoffs this year. They're also key to CEO Mark Zuckerberg's AI bet.

"I think in the future, if you don't have glasses that have AI or some way to interact with AI, I think you're kind of similarly, probably [going to] be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people and who you're working with, or competing against," Zuckerberg said in a 2025 earnings call.

The recent backlash — remember when Kylie Jenner's Instagram comments were flooded with people calling her signature Meta glasses "pervert glasses"? — presents a thorn in Meta's side.

"In many cases, the public-facing rules that users see are vague enough to be open to the discretion of the platform to make those kinds of shifts and changes at any time," said Sarah T. Roberts, faculty director and cofounder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.

Meta is betting AI could supercharge its moderation efforts. Zuckerberg and other execs have long said the old way of doing things, leaning heavily on third-party human contractors, doesn't scale. The theory goes that AI can be trained to autonomously flag violating content. In June, Meta told the Financial Times that initial tests showed that its AI systems made fewer mistakes than human moderators and flagged more violating content. The jury's still out on whether that will prove to be the case long term.

Deactivated one day, reactivated the next

After seeking out and interacting with some of these pickup line videos in Reels, I started getting served more and more of them. I no longer needed search terms to find them; my Reels feed was filled nearly entirely with that genre of content.

One creator whose account was active weeks after Mosseri's remarks is Caren Babaknia. He has 174,000 followers and posts videos of himself driving up to women he identifies in the caption as escorts and talking to them while wearing Meta glasses.

In one video captioned "Wasting ESCORTS time by making them watch brainrot" he offers a woman who approached his car $50 in exchange for watching a video on his laptop of brainrot memes. The woman agrees, and he plays the video, which includes an ad for a gambling app. He hands her the cash.

I spoke with Babaknia on the phone to get his perspective on videos made with Meta glasses. He told me he believes the women in his videos are aware that he was filming them because his content is so viral that they knew him.

He voiced disdain for pickup artists with Meta glasses, however.

"I think the rizz content is very cringe," he told me. "I think those are normal girls and they don't deserve to be videoed without their consent."

After including one of Babaknia's videos in the list I recently sent to Meta, his account was deactivated the following morning. Babaknia told me that he was going to appeal. A day later, his account was back up with the videos restored.

It's not unusual for changes to enforcement in content moderation to take time to implement at scale. But as Meta glasses get increasingly popular, it seems likely that Instagram will face pressure to deal with this — and potentially new forms of bad behavior — more and more.

"It's not like they just started those platforms yesterday," said Roberts from UCLA. "It's not like they don't have 20 years now of understanding how people will behave at the most depraved levels if given a chance."

• George Noble sees SpaceX and Tesla as two of the most compelling short bets in the market.
• SpaceX stock has been fighting to hold onto its IPO price, and Noble said shares should be trading much lower.
• Musk's influence over investors is waning, he said, with Tesla and SpaceX both facing valuation concerns.

SpaceX stock has stumbled out of the gate since its IPO in June, but one veteran fund manager thinks there's more trouble ahead for Elon Musk's rocket company.

George Noble, formerly the manager of Fidelity Overseas Fund, was bearish on the stock as it headed for its IPO, and his tune hasn't changed since the debut. Now, he's calling for more pain for both SpaceX and Tesla on the horizon. He said each stock represents "one of the best shorts in the market."

Following SpaceX's historic IPO, Noble predicted that the stock price would fall by as much as 50% before the end of the year. Noble had previously raised concerns regarding Nasdaq's decision to allow SpaceX to be fast-tracked into the Nasdaq 100, which forced passive indexes that track the index to load up on the stock.

"Grandma's 401k now owns a $2 trillion company at roughly 90 times revenues. That's outrageous," Noble told Business Insider.

Noble says SpaceX and Tesla are both overvalued, but he's also wary of the narrative around Musk's two companies, noting that the retail trader buzz is shifting. It's part of the reason he sees them as such compelling short bets.

Noble said that when he's searching for short plays, he screens for stocks that have high valuations, are boosted by social media hype, and are facing a difficult macroeconomic landscape.

For this reason, Noble said he's grown even more bearish on Tesla than he was in January, when he described it as the stock market's biggest bubble. He said that Musk's power over investors may be slowly fading, particularly after the company's significant Q2 profit miss.

"The shine's wearing off. Tesla's unchanged for five years. Earnings are collapsing," he said, adding that he sees the "Elon premium" that's boosted Tesla stock as being over.

Noble added that he thinks that both Tesla and SpaceX should be trading at roughly $30 per share, implying 91% downside for Tesla and a 79% drop for SpaceX.

• Real-estate executive Leslie Cohen went back to work 10 days after giving birth to her second son.
• Two decades later, she decided to pause her career to help her sons navigate college.
• Cohen said that being present for her children now is more important than when they were babies.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Leslie Cohen, a 52-year-old real estate development and operations professional in the Boston area. Business Insider has verified her identity and background. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I started my career as a project manager in the commercial real estate industry and rose through the ranks to chief operating officer. This summer, however, I decided to put my career on pause to spend time with my kids. One is going to be a junior in college this fall, and the other one is heading off to college.

I'm planning to announce my next chapter soon, and it's something that will allow me some flexibility, but for now, I'm enjoying the break, as I've never had any time off like this. When I had my first son, I had the option to take three months of paid leave, and I chose to spread it over six months because the company I worked for was in the midst of a big transaction. I didn't want to be left behind, and the company was also willing to be flexible. I took the first three weeks off, then started going in two days a week, then three, and so on.

My kids were born only 14 months apart, so I was out again pretty quickly. I had planned to take the same type of leave, spreading it out over six months, but then my boss told me the company was short-staffed and asked if I would consider returning early.

I agreed to come back just 10 days after giving birth, as long as I could work only four days a week and the firm would pay for a night nanny. My second son had a lot of colic, and I wasn't going to be able to come back if I couldn't sleep. My husband, who's now retired, was working as a dentist and teaching. He didn't take paternity leave. I don't think it was even available back then.

Anyone can hold a baby

When I was younger, I remember asking a colleague, who was a mother of teenagers, why she was working part-time. She said that anyone can hold a baby, but not everyone can solve the complex problems of teenagers, and that stuck with me.

My sons are now 21 and almost 20, and I feel like they need me more than ever, because going to college is one of life's biggest transitions. There's a lot of figuring things out, and my kids want to talk about it. They want somebody to listen, and sometimes they want advice. And I want to be there for them without having to say, "Sorry, I'm in a meeting and can't talk."

Recently, my younger son and I had back-to-back eye doctor appointments, and there was a café nearby, so afterward we met there and stayed for an hour and a half. He talked about how he felt about going to college.

I left that café feeling really happy knowing that I made the right decision. It was 10:30 in the morning on a Wednesday, a time I would never have to spend with my son if I weren't taking this career break. It was just nice that I could do it. I didn't have pressure to be anywhere.

So much has evolved over the past 20 years. Paid leave is now an option for both moms and dads in many cases. This helps remove the stigma and challenges for working moms. I've implemented more progressive paid leave programs where I've worked, and I'm proud of that.

• I went to a small school in a small town where everyone knew each other.
• I thought my sons would benefit from a similar, close-knit environment like the one I had.
• Now that they're in college, I think a larger school might have suited them and their needs better.

I graduated from high school in a class of 30 students in a town of fewer than 800 people. I finished school with many of the same kids I started kindergarten with. By graduation, I knew their parents' names, their childhood nicknames, their pet peeves, and the fastest way to annoy them.

At that time, I was terrified of a big school experience. I liked my tiny pond where I knew not only my school of fish but our teachers, too. I imagined my tiny self in a huge school, getting shoved into lockers, being yelled at by intimidating teachers and upperclassmen, and failing at everything for the rest of my life. I was glad I didn't have to deal with any of the hassles I imagined other kids did.

So when my husband and two sons, middle schoolers at the time, moved from a small town to a larger city, my own childhood anxiety kicked in, resulting in a parenting mistake: I chose my sons' middle and high school based on who I was as a student, rather than who they actually were.

Terrified that my kids would get swallowed up by a massive urban district, I intentionally enrolled them in a small, tight-knit public magnet program. Looking back, I regret that choice.

Their school was everything I wanted it to be

The school we selected was everything my middle school self would've loved: safe, inclusive, and small. My sons had many of the same teachers from 6th grade until they graduated. They had routines and traditions, like a strange, made-up sport played during lunch and yearly expeditions to the wilderness. At their age, I would've loved these experiences, but I failed to notice they didn't fit my sons' personalities.

Instead of camping trips with classmates, my sons would've preferred access to a wider range of electives, varied class experiences, and more robust athletics. They wanted the expansive options like woodshop, debate team, student government, and the National Honor Society that they could have experienced at a larger public high school. But because of my fears of them getting lost in the shuffle, I fought against their hints that another school might be a better match.

I wonder about what might have been

Now they are young adults in college, staring down a high-stakes job market that demands early specialization and tricky corporate navigation. Their small school came with plenty of benefits: a strong foundation, a safe landing space, and critical thinking skills. But I wonder if they could have received the same benefits at a bigger school, along with the broader experiences that might have helped them tap into their unique interests.

My husband and I have done our best to help our sons figure out a career path, select a major, and navigate complex systems. They're doing the best they can, but the impersonal machinery intimidates all of us.

My sons will each face a seemingly impossible task after college graduation: find a job that won't be replaced by AI, tap into your particular skills and passions, and make enough money to pay your bills and have some fun. I question if another type of school would have better prepared them for this challenge.

I've frequently heard this advice: Parent the kids you have. In this regard, I parented the child I was. And because I can't build a time machine to change those decisions, I'm living with the consequences now, crossing my fingers and hoping they are prepared for post-graduation realities. I protected my sons from the "scary" big pond experience, but I worry my sheltering decision will leave them to drown in a job market where the water is much deeper.

Some days, Tamara Johnson wonders how her life changed so rapidly.

Johnson, 58, made six figures in an executive leadership position, and when her mother was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and dementia in 2017, she moved from New Orleans to Virginia, where she continued to work while caring for her mother.

Three years after her mom's death in 2020, Johnson's husband suffered a series of catastrophic medical events. To care for him full-time, she took a temporary leave and then quit her job this year. She relied on income from her job's deferred resignation program and her savings to pay for his long-term care. Johnson estimates her family spent over $700,000 in total between her mom's and husband's care. Coming up with that money has been harder, as her husband's income from medical disability retirement was quartered.

"I was one of those people who was taught that you don't quit, you suck it up, and you keep going," Johnson said. "I felt like I didn't have the luxury of falling apart, because if I fell apart, then who would pick up the slack?"

Eldercare costs have skyrocketed in recent years, and millions of Americans are unprepared. The price of nursing homes and adult day services has increased faster than overall consumer prices, as well as food, electricity, and shelter, over the last three decades. Price hikes in assisted living, at-home care, and nursing homes have left families scrambling to cover costs. It's pushed some to opt for lower-quality care, such as sending loved ones to a lower-rated facility at half the price of a luxury community.

The growing eldercare cost crisis is taking a toll on families, upending lives, derailing careers, and depleting family members' finances so much that they may not be able to pay for their own future care needs. In interviews with Business Insider, dozens of families estimated the total price of eldercare for a loved one was six figures, with one woman paying $600,000 over five years for assisted living. Some had long-term care insurance or had saved throughout their lives. Many, however, said they weren't prepared for care costs to be so high. These families said they have cobbled together money from home equity, family contributions, and loans, or, in some cases, have left their jobs to care for loved ones themselves.

These costs are ballooning because of a steep jump in caregiver wages combined with higher insurance premiums, transportation costs, and broader price increases for services. The mismatch between supply and demand for care workers is set to get much worse. An exodus of workers during the pandemic, followed by a federal crackdown on immigration and deportations of healthcare workers, has contributed to a caregiver shortage, experts say. And because of longer life expectancies and falling birth rates, the US in a few years will have more adults aged 65 or older than children under 18, according to US Census projections.

"Roughly 70% of adults over 65 will need some form of long-term care during their lifetime, yet relatively few have planned financially for that possibility," said Samir Shah, CEO of care navigation platform CareScout.

Johnson, who has long-term care insurance for herself, said that despite the financial burden of caregiving, "every day is a new opportunity."

"I tell people that if they make these decisions earlier, it saves a lot of headaches on the backend," Johnson said.

Out-of-home care costs are through the roof

Long-term care costs for nursing homes and adult day services have outpaced overall inflation for decades, up 212% and 109% since 1997, respectively. The trend is getting worse — overall inflation has been tapering off since 2023, with overall prices rising about 11%, compared to about 17% for care services.

Alan Weil, senior vice president of public policy at AARP, said that caregivers are, on average, putting $7,000 of their own money into caregiving resources annually.

Rising caregiver wages are often passed on to families. Wages for nursing and residential care workers have risen from $17 an hour to nearly $27 over the last decade. While average hourly earnings in this sector fall short of overall private earnings, nursing and residential care wages grew 57% from 2016 to 2026, outpacing the 47% increase across all private wages in the same period.

In 2021, Lana Mountford, 75, moved into a one-bedroom apartment in an assisted living facility for $4,300 per month. After a major surgery, she moved into a two-bedroom unit for $5,500 a month, which rose to nearly $7,000 over two years. Many of the services she relied on, like laundry and frequent caregiver visits, went away with changes in management.

She moved into a development for people aged 55 and older, buying a home in cash for $580,000, which she calculated would save her money in the long term. A caregiver comes for six hours a week for $200 weekly.

"I knew my savings would be drained if I had to keep paying that much, when I could live in my own place with a full kitchen," Mountford said.

Home-care costs are also rising

Millions of families have opted for their loved ones to age at home, but that arrangement isn't immune to skyrocketing costs.

Home care now costs a median of about $34 an hour, according to recent data from senior care company A Place for Mom. Some 59 million Americans care for loved ones, 48 million of whom are unpaid, an AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving report showed.

Private-pay costs for Long-Term Services and Supports — encompassing medical and personal care — increased 48% for home health aides and 47% for homemaker services between 2019 and 2024, about double the increase from 2010 to 2019, according to a March AARP report.

Home care agencies usually require a minimum number of hours per visit, often four to five, heightening cost burdens. Home health aides earn significantly less than nurses in nursing and residential care facilities, with a median hourly rate of nearly $18 and a median annual salary of $37,200, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. BLS projects that home health and personal care aide jobs may grow by 17% from 2024 to 2034, much faster than the average for all occupations, with roughly 765,800 openings annually.

Careb Bien-Aime worked as a personal care aide while studying information systems management at New York University. She found the job rewarding and the pay decent, but said she thinks the role should pay more because the work is taxing. She hasn't done caregiving work in over a year, partly because she wants to pivot to finding work related to her major as she gets closer to the end of college.

"Emotionally, physically, you're caring for a human being, and it does take a lot out of you to take care of someone, especially if the person needs more help," she said.

Caregiving costs are particularly burdensome for older Americans living alone. Pew Research Center found that 26% of adults 65 and older lived alone in 2023, down from 29% in 1990.

That's the case for Kathy Mullen, 64, who exhausted much of her financial resources caring for her mother and now is struggling on her own. She earns $25,000 annually from her Social Security Disability Insurance and lives in a small two-bedroom apartment. Mullen said she can barely afford fresh produce and suspects she will never be able to afford her own care, even if she downsizes or gets on Medicaid.

"I know money will always be tight because my retirement savings won't cut it," Mullen said. "I do refuse to say that I'm old, though, and I make the best out of what I have. I'm hopeful I can turn some things around."

Medicaid can help, but there's much work to be done

For decades, politicians, advocates, researchers, and older Americans themselves have pushed for reform within long-term care systems. Most agree there is still much to be done.

Medicaid does pay for many kinds of care, including residential nursing and in-home support. Medicaid has been paying more for Long-Term Services and Supports, or LTSS, bettering access to care in some parts of the country.

Still, Medicaid's growing role in long-term care doesn't always fill the gaps. John Nuar, 35, built a home for his father with dementia to live in, but after living with Nuar's aunt and uncle, his father moved into a memory care facility.

Over a span of three years before his father's death, Nuar and his wife, who worked full-time, paid about $120,000 in out-of-pocket expenses, covering what his father's retirement income couldn't. The cost rose from $4,200 to $6,600 monthly. Nuar said that his father would have qualified for Medicaid drug coverage in Virginia, where he lived before memory care, but not in Michigan.

"The month-over-month stress of the cost and not knowing how long it would last still affects me two years after his passing," Nuar said. "Having to look at dollars and then make a care decision was and is still very hard."

Marc Cohen, co-director of the older adult research institution LeadingAge LTSS Center at UMass Boston, said that the government should prioritize social insurance for long-term care, a Social Security-style program into which people pay throughout their lives to save for eldercare costs. He added that more politicians should fight back against Medicaid cuts, which, especially since last year, have reduced support for older Americans and people with disabilities.

"There has not been the political courage to just talk to the American public and say, to solve this problem, this is what we need to do," Cohen said. "We need to prefund benefits so that if and when you have a long-term care need, you have some protection."

Some federal lawmakers have called for bolstering long-term care support, although many of those efforts have yet to become law. Last year, the Caring for Seniors Act was introduced in the House to expand access to affordable assisted living for lower-income older Americans and direct funding to workforce development and training programs for eldercare workers. The bipartisan WISH Act would create a national long-term care insurance trust fund and give some Social Security beneficiaries benefits to pay for home care.

States have taken matters into their own hands. Washington introduced the WA Cares Fund, funded by a 0.58% tax on workers' paychecks, with a lifetime inflation-adjusted cap of $36,500 in benefits to help pay for long-term care. California, Minnesota, New York, and Pennsylvania have also introduced legislative proposals for long-term care payroll tax legislation.

Some companies, including Microsoft, offer employees eldercare resources such as legal services, time-off options, and backup care. Meta, Google, Cisco, and other employers have partnered with the care support platform Wellthy for caregiving navigation services. Some smaller companies offer caregiving stipends or caregiver support groups.

State and local governments can support innovative housing to reduce the need for institutional care by investing in alternative housing arrangements for older residents, like accessory dwelling units, affordable assisted living, co-housing for older Americans, and home modification grants. This is according to Kevin Prindiville, executive director of the nonprofit Justice in Aging, who has worked to provide and protect housing subsidies for older adults, as housing costs have risen faster than their incomes.

"There's an old narrative of the older person having bought their house forever ago and having paid it off and now living easy — that's gone," said Prindiville. "The housing cost burden is actually highest in families that include people 65 and older."

Margaret Burke, 62, who lives in Taiwan, said she found an affordable condo for her 91-year-old mother in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She bought it six years ago for $62,000. The building's monthly fees, which range from $1,000 for a studio to $2,500 for a two-bedroom, cover meals, utilities, a pool, and group activities.

"She's always on the go, often shopping, going for walks, or taking day trips to museums," Burke said. She added, "I want other people to have the peace of mind that I've had for the last six years. There is this 'third path' between independent living and assisted living that is affordable for most middle-income seniors."

• Small businesses can attract and retain staff with 401(k) plans.
• Business owners can offer it in lieu of more costly benefits that they can't yet afford.
• It can help reduce first-year quits, a Gusto analysis found.

Sara Marye wanted to get more serious about the benefits she offered.

Several months after promoting a part-time employee to full-time status at her school-curriculum small business in 2024, she wanted to ensure it remains an attractive place to work.

"If I want to keep her, I need to give her reasons to stay," said Marye, an educator turned entrepreneur in 2015 when she started The Stellar Teacher Company. The employee had been working there since 2021.

Marye thought about what she could afford that she could add on top of the existing flexible perks. Offering a 401(k) plan was the answer, a perk that would also benefit Marye herself and help with retention beyond the full-time worker.

Most of her four part-time workers are former teachers who still want to be involved in education while staying home as parents.

"The fact that they are able to have a part-time job with a 401(k), I think, gives them just a lot more comfort in the fact that they aren't having to sacrifice their future financial security for the time that they want to spend raising their family now," said Marye, who has been offering the 401(k) plan since 2025.

When small businesses are starting out, they have to figure out how to get off the ground, market their work, and manage their expenses. As businesses make a name for themselves, grow their profits, and staff up, they need to figure out how to attract and retain employees. Having a 401(k) plan — the kind of benefit that's typically more often offered by larger employers — can help, especially if they can't yet afford more costly benefits, like healthcare. It can also be a financial perk for business owners on payroll.

Maintaining staff

A Gusto analysis of its internal small-business data shows that offering a 401(k) to workers translates to roughly 8% fewer quits in the first year of employment compared to those that don't offer one.

Nich Tremper, a senior economist at Gusto, said these employers don't have to face a gap in work coverage until they can backfill a position, which can affect productivity, or waste time and money looking for and training a new hire. Tremper said employers face the greatest risk of an employee quitting in their first year, so they can try to reduce that risk by offering retirement plans, even if employees can't enroll right away.

"We see 401(k)s having the highest ROI on retention," Tremper said, adding, "because it's a benefit that tells your employees that you are invested in their long-term financial future."

Howard Telson has been running the remote accounting firm Scale CPA since 2022. He started offering a 401(k) plan about a year and a half ago.

He likes it as a recruiting tool, since his firm hires pretty consistently, and to keep his current staff, many of whom come from larger companies where they're accustomed to this perk.

"We're often competing against bigger companies or bigger firms that do offer these types of benefits," he said. "It's been important to be competitive in the marketplace."

Telson works with small businesses at his firm, where he discusses tax-optimization strategies, such as retirement plans.

"It's kind of a multi-tier benefit that we'll recommend, a 401(k) plan or another type of retirement plan to clients, one, to allow them to basically have some tax deferral and save on their personal taxes, two, to attract talent, and three, it also offers some tax credits as well for the first three years when you set up the program," he said.

Affording retirement plans

Marye worried about whether she would be able to afford having a retirement plan as a small-business owner, and setting it up seemed daunting. However, she said it wasn't complicated and wasn't as big an expense as she thought it would be.

Payroll platforms like Gusto and ADP offer 401(k) plan management services at relatively low costs for small businesses, charging a modest base fee and then single-digit monthly fees per participant. Retirement offerings also tend to be less expensive for small business owners than healthcare benefits; Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed the average employer contribution for family medical care coverage at businesses with fewer than 50 workers has surpassed $1,000 per employee since 2021.

Ashley Kent also offers 401(k) benefits to her workers and herself. Kent, who has been in business since 2018, said she can't justify offering healthcare just yet since the cost is too much for the business's size.

"It allowed me to then offer this to employees and was something that was very attractive to new employees coming in here," said Kent, founder and CEO of Clearstart, a marketing brand and growth consultancy for healthcare organizations.

Kent has 10 full-time workers, and they were eligible to enroll after a year of employment, so she thinks it helps with retention. "Agencies are known for very high turnover, and so that was something that was important to me to try and retain individuals," Kent said.

As she hires more senior workers, she would consider adding healthcare benefits, since they could be important for job seekers weighing the trade-offs of different job opportunities.

Looking beyond small business

Small businesses aren't the only organizations offering 401(k)s to boost recruitment and retention.

Indeed's data covering all sizes of employers showed that job postings mentioning 401(k)s have increased since 2020. Laura Ullrich, the director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, thinks employers could be doing so to improve their recruiting. Some reasons for the uptick in advertised plans, she said, include employers publishing more thorough job descriptions, job seekers wanting to know the full compensation package, and companies dealing with the mismatch between available jobs and people's skills.

"If you look at the immediate post-COVID period, you might have seen companies start advertising it more because it was a really hard time to find workers, and then I'm guessing over time, it's just more and more companies have realized that it's a good way to show more total compensation versus just value," Ullrich said.

Mentions in education and instruction were 15% in spring 2026, the lowest share among the occupations, and up from 7%. Ullrich said pensions, rather than defined contribution plans like 401(k)s, are more common in that type of work, so that could explain why the share is relatively low.

Employers are also advertising better 401(k) matches, which Ullrich said could help make employees more hesitant to switch jobs.

"When indexed to January 2020, the three-month-moving-average share of postings advertising a 401(k) match of 5% or higher has risen more than fivefold, outpacing the growth in any other category of retirement benefit," a report by Indeed Hiring Lab economist An Nguyen said, adding that postings just saying "retirement plan" didn't change much from the baseline.

• Alex Harman started an unofficial hiking retreat, drawing McKinsey employees from around the world.
• Trips involve backpacking across places like Kilimanjaro, Patagonia, and the Peaks of the Balkans.
• The trips, which raise money for charity, help the attendees to unplug and connect with colleagues.

Alex Harman was on the last stretch of his trek to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania when he stopped on a steep part of the mountain. He had gone to bed at 3 p.m. the day before and set his alarm for midnight to start hiking early.

Now the sun was coming up, so he stopped to have a snack and take in the view, alongside around 30 of his McKinsey colleagues, before continuing on to the summit.

"The top was great," he said, "but that moment there where we all stopped and just watched the sunrise was very cool."

Harman, an AI product manager at McKinsey based in London, co-founded Mind Over Mountains, an employee-run initiative that gathers colleagues from around the world for a multi-day backpacking trip while raising money for charity.

It started with the Kilimanjaro trip in 2023 and continued with about 65 colleagues on a trek through Patagonia in 2025. This year, 100 McKinsey employees are heading to the Peaks of the Balkans in September for an eight-day hike spanning about 62 miles, or 100 km, all coinciding with the elite management consulting firm's 100-year anniversary.

The trips bring together McKinsey colleagues of all ages, experience levels, and roles, ranging from senior partners to entry-level analysts. Anyone from the firm's 40,000-person workforce can sign up. They are not official McKinsey retreats.

Employees organize them with the help of hired tour vendors and pay the full cost to attend. The Balkans trip will cost each attendee about $1,000, excluding airfare. No prior backpacking experience is required, and spots are available on a first-come, first-served basis, with demand growing each year.

"We filled 100 spaces in three hours," Harman said of the coming Balkans trip, adding they were "pretty blown away by the participation" and had to create a long waitlist.

For participants, the appeal is not just the destination. They described the treks as a rare chance to fully disconnect from work, spend hours with colleagues they might otherwise know only through Zoom or email, and temporarily leave office dynamics behind.

Seniority doesn't matter on the trail

Coordinating a backpacking trip for 100 people is no small task. Harman said a great deal of work goes into vetting and hiring local guides and vendors, adding he felt a "great deal of pressure" planning the Balkans trip. Organizing a weekend for friends is one thing, he said, but if you plan a trip for 100 McKinsey employees, "they'll notice everything, and they'll want it a certain way."

While on the trip, the days typically consist of breakfast, hiking — which includes some solo time as well as walking and talking with someone new — and a group dinner at the campsite.

"When you first walk next to someone, you have no idea what they do," Ting Cui, a principal product manager in London who went on the Patagonia trip, told Business Insider. "There's no way to know if they're a partner or if they're a business analyst. And obviously on the trail, it doesn't really matter where your seniority is."

Cui, who is also going to the Balkans, said she went into Patagonia not knowing the vast majority of the people on the trip, but that everyone gelled smoothly, which she thinks is a tribute to McKinsey's culture across its offices. She went away from the trip with lasting friendships. One colleague in New York who she bonded with on the trip ended up spending Christmas with her family.

Ricardo Moya Quiroga, a partner and COO counselor in McKinsey's Berlin office, also went on the Patagonia hike last year and is heading to the Balkans in September. He said he initially signed up to bond with McKinsey colleagues, raise money for charity, and for a personal detox. He turned off his phone and took a break from work and emails for the full five days.

"I was asking myself who I am, and the answer that came is: 'I am a grandpa, I am a husband, and I am a son.' Very clearly. It came spontaneously," he said, describing a moment on the trip when he decided to write a letter to himself. Since returning, he said he's been much more conscious of how he spends his time and said it was one of his greatest takeaways from the experience, along with connecting with colleagues and raising money for charity.

The trips can be hard, but they're worth it

The trips can be physically challenging, and things don't always go exactly according to plan. In Patagonia, Cui said one participant hurt his ankle and was limping toward the end of the day, but colleagues who had only recently met him stepped up and helped him reach camp.

On the Kilimanjaro trek, one of Harman's cofounders unexpectedly got blisters in a pair of boots that he'd hiked in plenty of times before. He borrowed Harman's Crocs and hiked in them up steep and sketchy terrain for a couple of days before finally deciding to cut the top part of his hiking boots off, the part that was causing the blisters, and wear those for the rest of the way.

Harman said that while the hiking itself is rewarding, raising money for good causes and connecting with people at work on a different level make the trips worthwhile. For the 2025 Patagonia trip, the group raised over $115,000 for mental health charities and hopes to raise another six-figure sum this year.

He said planning the trips has also been rewarding from an entrepreneurial perspective, which to him means "go do some cool stuff that no one asked you to do." He hopes the trips continue, even if he leaves McKinsey, and thinks others who are interested should start something similar at their companies, too.

"There will always be a bunch of corporate red tape. There will always be people who are worried," he said, adding that as long as your company appreciates an entrepreneurial drive, anyone could do it.

"No one's going to ask you to go do this," he said. "So just go do it and see how it lands."

• An Uber executive shared third-party data on X showing Waymo's standing in its most mature markets.
• The data showed Waymo taking 15% to 19% of rider spending in SF, LA, and Phoenix.
• Waymo maintained its foothold as it expanded its geofence in some of the regions.

Alphabet's Waymo is taking a bite out of ride-hailing in its most mature markets, third-party data showed.

And that share is large enough that its effects on human drivers could be detectable, Gad Allon, a Wharton professor who studies the gig economy, said.

Just don't expect it to look like a visible wave of displaced drivers.

"My initial view is that the impact would not first appear as large numbers of drivers suddenly losing their jobs," Allon told Business Insider. "Because driver supply is flexible, the earliest effects would likely show up in utilization, longer waits between rides, fewer trips per hour, and possibly more unpaid repositioning."

Utilization refers to the percentage of a driver's time online spent on paid trips.

Data from Yipit, a market research firm, estimated that Waymo accounted for 15% of gross bookings — dollars spent on rides — in San Francisco and Los Angeles in June and 16% in Phoenix. In January, the figures were 16%, 17%, and 19%, respectively.

Yipit calculated the shares among Waymo, Uber, and Lyft by looking at trips that begin and end inside Waymo's operating zones, a Yipit spokesperson said. Estimates are based on email receipts from a sample of about 1.5 million active US consumer accounts.

The figures don't represent the number of trips. Waymo's share of actual rides could be higher or lower depending on its prices compared with Uber and Lyft.

Yipit also cautioned that Waymo's share can appear to decline as it expands into new areas, where the service may initially be less popular. In May, Waymo said it expected to expand its Bay Area footprint by 60 square miles.

Despite the caveat around expansions, Waymo's share remained in the mid-teens in all three markets through June.

Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy also shared Yipit's data on X this month while discussing Uber's competitive position. He said Uber uses internal tracking for decision-making and shared Yipit's figures as an externally available reference.

Driver displacement may not look like layoffs

There have been hints that the rideshare workforce is changing as robotaxis grow.

Allon, the Wharton professor, said Waymo's 15% share is a "serious shock" to the labor market, even if the impact on human drivers is diluted because they also work beyond Waymo's geofences.

"The reason it doesn't look like one is that the adjustment runs through hours and exits rather than layoffs," Allon said, referring to drivers working fewer hours or not returning to the platform.

Last year, data from Gridwise, a ride-hailing data platform, showed hourly driver wages declined in Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco — areas where Waymo operates — while the national median rose 1%. Researchers told Business Insider that the data couldn't establish that robotaxis were the cause.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told Fast Company in a June profile that his company is recruiting fewer drivers in some cities where AVs operate. At the same time, Uber has said more drivers are signing up organically as rider demand grows.

A Lyft spokesperson pointed to CEO David Risher's prepared remarks for the company's second-quarter earnings call on August 6.

"We believe the future is hybrid and, as AVs scale, the market will expand," he said, adding that Lyft rides within SF's AV operating area grew about 20% year over year.

Spokespeople for Waymo and Uber did not respond to a request for comment.

The fallout is hard to measure

Katie Wells, a senior fellow at the AI Now Institute who has studied Uber drivers, told Business Insider that the lack of certain data makes it difficult to measure driver displacement.

"We don't know how much, we don't know when, we don't know where," Wells told Business Insider. Researchers would need data such as utilization and wait times to identify the effects, she said.

Part of the challenge lies in the nature of gig work. Wells said that because drivers are independent contractors rather than employees, robotaxi displacement may not show up as a measurable decline in employment.

Wells has documented how the prospect of automation affected drivers before commercial robotaxis arrived.

She said that she and her coauthors tracked a cohort of 40 Uber drivers over five years. During that time, she found that drivers feel less incentivized to push for better working conditions because they believed their work would eventually disappear.

"Uber drivers kept saying to us, 'Well, automated vehicles are coming, so they won't need me anymore,'" she said. "This is temporary."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at lloydlee@businessinsider.com or Signal at lloydlee.71. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

We went behind the scenes to see how Ferrero, an Italian company is building a confectionery empire in the US, from spending billions on buying iconic American brands, to investing in new factories and an R&D lab, and even creating a new Nutella flavor specifically for Americans.

Pets can add plenty of joy to life, but the hair cats and dogs leave behind on floors, furniture, and clothes can be frustrating to deal with. If you have pets, you're probably no stranger to pet hair removers. You likely also know that some tools work better than others — and finding the best pet hair removers isn't always an easy job. 

If you've gone through one pet hair remover after another, searching for the best way to pick up those stubborn strands stuck in your floor and car, you've come to the right place. I tested 13 pet hair removers in my own home and cat to save you the trouble and chose the top performers across seven categories.

Read more about how Business Insider Reviews tests and researches pet products.

Our top picks for the best pet hair removers

Best overall: Chom Chom Roller - $25 at Chewy

Best for clothing: Gonzo Natural Magic Pet Hair Lifter - $9 at Chewy

Best for furniture: Lilly Brush Pro Pet Hair Tool Kit - $36 at Chewy

Best for carpet: Neater Pets Fur Dozer Pet Hair Remover - $20 at Amazon

Best for laundry: Smart Sheep Wool Dryer Balls - $20 at Amazon

Best for car: Analan Mini Pet Hair Detailer - $13 at Amazon

Best roller: Scotch-Brite Pet Hair Pickup - $9 at Amazon

Best overall

The effectiveness and versatility of the Chom Chom Roller make it one of the best pet hair remover you can buy, and it's a great alternative to single-use sticky lint rollers. For one thing, it really works. It did a great job pulling up cat and dog hair on every surface I tested, and I didn't need to spend a ton of time or elbow grease working it. Other BI Reviews editors and reporters swear by it, too. In fact, Brendan Griffiths, senior commerce director, has been using it to remove cat hair daily for the last two years.

To operate the tool, you run it back and forth across the surface and hair collects inside the roller. You need to empty it after each use, but this is easy to do. I tested it on knit socks and leggings after other pet hair removers failed and found that the Chom Chom Roller did a better job removing hair. Although it's no substitute for a vacuum cleaner due to its small size, I also tried it on furniture and rugs. The rugs looked like they had just been vacuumed when I finished.

A true test of the Chom Chom Roller was the Halloween hat pictured here. After pets napped and chewed on it, it became pretty much unusable as a costume, but the roller got the hair out when nothing else did.

Best for clothing

The Gonzo Natural Magic Pet Hair Lifter works by gently collecting pet hair from clothing and other fabrics. Like the name suggests, it only lifts hair. It doesn't collect it, so you need to gather the hair as you go to keep it from spreading back across the garment or furniture. I alternated between pulling the hair clump off with our hands or using a lint roller to grab it up. 

This tool is easy to grip and use, and it effectively lifts hair from different types of clothing, including tights, sweaters, and jeans. However, I don't recommend it for loosely knit garments. It loosened the knit on one of the openwork sweaters I tested. I also tried it on dog beds. Among all the products I evaluated, this was the only one that could effectively lift hair (along with bark, grass, and dirt) from a dog bed made of shaggy fabric. 

The Gonzo Natural Magic Pet Hair Lifter is made of all-natural latex rubber and feels like a slightly sticky, rough sponge. It also has a slight odor. You use it dry, but you can wash it as needed, though it may take a day or two to dry completely. This pet hair remover should last a long time, too. I used it regularly over a few weeks and didn't notice it breaking down at all.

Best for furniture

The product packaging recommends the Lilly Brush Pro Pet Hair Tool Kit for use in cars, and it definitely removes pet hair from car seats and floor mats. But I consider this tool one of the best pet hair removers because it also does a great job removing pet hair from furniture and carpeted surfaces like cat trees. 

It did a great job removing hard-to-see fur from the sofa, and the long-handled crevice tool does an excellent job cleaning corners and tricky surfaces, like narrow spaces between chair cushions and car seats. On a carpeted cat tree, it pulled up several months' worth of embedded cat hair with several good scrapes — and it only took about 20 minutes to thoroughly clean the tree's three levels.

This tool didn't work as well on clothing, in part because of its broader shape, but it's not totally ineffective, either. I love the stretchy band that keeps the tool firmly in your hand as you use it. The Lilly Brush Pro Pet Hair Tool Kit costs more than nearly all of the other tools I tested, but it's effective, durable, and well-made, so I think it's worth the price.

Best for carpet

The Neater Pets Fur Dozer Pet Hair Remover isn't the best option for pulling pet hair from clothing, but it really shines on carpet. I tried it on different types of carpet, furniture, and dog beds and found that it works best when it gets some resistance from the material, so it's a good option for rugged fabrics, like the dog bed pictured, and higher pile carpeting. 

This sturdy tool is made to last, and its small size means you can store it pretty much anywhere, including your bag or car. But even though the Fur Dozer is small, it's wide enough to quickly cover even larger surfaces, like area rugs.

I liked how it's comfortable to hold or use with either hand, which means you can switch off hands for longer cleaning jobs. The quiet operation was another plus. Some pet hair removers make scratching or scraping sounds that can bother some sensitive or anxious dogs, but the Fur Dozer worked quietly enough that our pets didn't mind sticking around during testing.

Best for laundry

If you wash a lot of fur-covered garments, blankets, and pet towels, the Smart Sheep Wool Dryer Balls can help your laundry come out of the dryer hair-free — and all you have to do is toss them in the dryer with the wet clothes. I loved how well they worked and cut down on drying time. A trip through the dryer with one of these balls got most of the cat hair off the curtain pictured, which is a favorite space for cat naps. 

The Smart Sheep Wool Dryer Balls are easy to use, contain only wool, and don't have any fragrance. While they don't last forever, they do last a long time. The package directions say they'll still work once they begin pilling, but they removed a little less hair after drying more than 15 loads, especially loads of hairy items like dog blankets. 

Unlike dryer sheets, the balls don't do much to reduce static cling, but they're the best option for laundry. Plus, not only are they more effective than the dryer sheets I tested, they're better for your clothing and the environment. Just make sure to store them out of reach of your dog, since they can easily grab and shred any stray dryer balls that escape your laundry basket. (This happened during my trials!)

Best for car

The Analan Mini Pet Hair Detailer is a small tool that works best for removing pet hair from car seats and floor mats. The triangular tool has teeth running along its edges — three different sides with different tooth sizes. Starting with Side 1, which has the largest teeth, you work the tool over the cleaning area, using all of the sides to remove the hair. 

I loved how well it worked in the car and on furniture. In fact, I found that most of the hair came up when I used the first side. I tried this on car seats and floor mats, dog beds, clothing, and household furniture. It works best on carpeted or upholstered surfaces, like rugs and car seats, but it does an OK job removing pet hair from clothes, too. It's less effective on very shaggy fabrics, however. 

This tool's small size makes it very portable, too — you can easily stash it in a bag or car glovebox. The small size may be a drawback if you have larger hands, since you may find the tool harder to hold or manipulate. The size also makes it less ideal for very large surfaces, like floors or area rugs.

Best roller

If you prefer a standard roller, the Scotch-Brite Pet Hair Pickup is a good option. It has super sticky sheets specially designed to pull pet hair from clothing and furniture. It worked on everything I tested, including a sweater that defeated some of the other pet hair removers, and does a better job removing pet hair than many other sticky rollers. 

However, it's not perfect. The sheets spin loosely on the roller, making the tool less effective unless you grip it firmly and press down hard. This also makes it more difficult to tear off the sheets. I found that the roller would spin too far when I tried to tear off the used sheet, and the clean sheets would end up sticking together.

This is a great choice for quick pet hair removal, especially if you want something to keep in your car or bag. However, I don't recommend it for large areas or deeply embedded pet hair.

Our top picks compared

What to look for in a pet hair remover

The things you'll want to consider when shopping for a best pet hair remover generally depend on what you want to use the tool for. A few things to keep in mind include:

Recommended surfaces: Not all pet hair removers work the same way, and some do a better job on some surfaces than others. If you mostly need to remove pet hair from clothing, you may want a smaller tool, like a roller or sponge, that's designed for delicate fabrics. You may find a different tool works better for larger, carpeted surfaces, like your rug or sofa. 

Shape and size: If you know you'll use the pet hair remover often, you'll want to make sure you can hold it comfortably and use it easily. People with very small or very large hands may find certain tools harder to grip and use over a longer period. The shape of a tool can also affect how well it works for different surfaces and situations. For example, the Chom Chom Roller has a larger size that makes it a little awkward to use on clothing you're already wearing. 

Operation: Before purchasing a pet hair remover, read the directions and product reviews. This information can give you a better idea of how the tool works and whether people found it easy to use as directed. Most pet hair removers are fairly easy to use, but some may require more steps or cleaning than others.

Price: When shopping for pet hair removers, you'll find plenty of options for different budgets. The prices of our top picks range from $5 to $33. While $30 may seem like a lot to spend upfront, a more expensive reusable tool may be worth the expense, especially if you go through single-use lint rollers quickly.

How we tested the pet hair removers

To find the best pet hair removers for all of your needs, I tested thirteen tools across seven different categories in my household consisting of a short-haired cat and a dog with a medium-length coat. I scored each product in the following categories. 

Effectiveness: I tested how well each tool worked when used for its intended purpose according to the product directions. I also checked how well the tool worked on additional surfaces not listed in the directions.

To test effectiveness, I used each pet hair remover for both dog and cat hair on the following surfaces:

• Clothing and bedding in several different fabrics, including T-shirts, jeans, sweatshirts, tights, sweaters, jackets, sheets, pillowcases, and duvet covers 
• Furniture, including sofas, chairs, and cat trees
• Flooring, including high and low pile carpet, area rugs, tile, and concrete 
• Dog beds, including plush and shaggy beds 
• Car floor mats and seats, though only some removers were tested on leather seats

I tested the effectiveness of pet hair removers designed for laundry by adding dryer sheets or dryer balls to wet clothes in the dryer. 

I used sticky single-use rollers on all of the testing surfaces listed above. 

Ease of use: For each product, I evaluated the ease of operation, effort required to pick up pet hair, and effort required to clean the tool after use. 

Durability: To test durability, I used each pet hair remover daily on a few different surfaces over a period of two weeks. I used the dryer sheets and dryer balls in 15 loads of laundry containing a variety of fabrics. 

Size: I evaluated whether anyone could comfortably use these tools or if they worked better for people with larger or smaller hands. I also considered whether the tool needed a very tight grip to work as intended. To check this, I had people with different hand sizes hold each tool and try using it.

Price: I checked prices for similar products to determine whether each tool had a comparable price. 

Other functions: I tested other advertised functions of the product, like picking up leaf debris and dirt or reducing static cling. 

Portability and storage: I considered whether these pet hair removers were easy to take on the go or store at home, depending on their intended purpose.

Pet hair remover FAQs

What is the most effective pet hair remover?

You'll find plenty of different options when shopping for the best pet hair removers, and there's no single most effective fur remover for all situations. The best tool for your needs can depend on the surface you want to use it on, how much hair you want to remove, and how often you need to use the tool. Our best overall pick, the Chom Chom Roller, was the most effective pet hair remover for the most surfaces and types of pet hair. 

What picks up dog hair the best?

Many pet hair removers work well to pick up dog hair, including all of our top picks. You may need to try a few different tools to find the one that works best for your dog's fur. I particularly liked the Gonzo Natural Pet Hair Remover and the Fur Dozer for picking up dog hair embedded in furniture and carpet. However, some dog fur may prove extra resistant. If you don't get the results you want from a handheld pet hair remover, you may want to consider investing in one of the best vacuums for pet hair.

How do I keep pet hair off my furniture?

If you have pets, you probably won't be able to keep their fur off your furniture completely, but you can use a pet hair remover to pick up any hair your pet leaves behind. Brushing your pets regularly can also help reduce the amount of hair they shed on your furniture. Furniture covers will also protect your furniture from excess pet hair. 

• Several Wondermind investors have filed a lawsuit against the company and its founders, including Selena Gomez.
• Gomez cofounded the startup with her mother, Mandy Teefey, and Daniella Pierson.
• A lawyer for Gomez called the allegations "completely meritless."

Selena Gomez set out to create "the world's first mental fitness ecosystem." Instead, the startup is becoming her own personal headache.

A federal lawsuit filed Thursday offers a detailed account of what investors say went wrong at Wondermind — from an app that was never built to major corporate partnerships they allege never existed.

Gomez launched the startup in 2021 alongside her mother, Mandy Teefey, and Daniella Pierson, a business partner. The lawsuit accuses Gomez, her cofounders, and Wondermind of defrauding investors, among other claims.

The investors include Brent Saunders, the CEO of Bausch + Lomb and former CEO of Allergan, and entrepreneur and real-estate investor Marc Roberts.

"The Plaintiffs invested nearly $1.2 million in Wondermind Global Inc. because the Defendants falsely represented that the Company had the infrastructure, leadership, and resources necessary for the Company to launch into a profitable, one-of-its-kind mental health and wellness platform," the complaint says.

The investors said Wondermind's cofounders also misrepresented key parts of the company's business and growth plans. Specifically, that Gomez — a world-famous actor and singer — would play a major role at the company as its head of marketing; that Pierson secured partnerships with firms such as JPMorgan and Fidelity; and that "revenue-generating initiatives" were already underway.

The investors are seeking the return of their investments or damages, as well as costs and attorneys' fees.

"The partnerships did not exist. The initiatives never materialized. The app was never built. And for three years, while the Company quietly collapsed around them, not one of its founders, officers, or directors said a word to the investors whose money was funding the collapse," the complaint says.

Wondermind has made some offerings available to users. Its website features articles, interviews, and worksheets about mental health. The startup also sends out a newsletter and has produced two podcasts.

Gomez, Teefey, and Pierson did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. A lawyer representing Gomez told People that the allegations against her were "completely meritless."

"The allegations that Selena Gomez engaged in any way whatsoever in any purported 'fraud' or other wrongdoing are completely meritless, both factually and legally," Mathew Rosengart told the outlet on Saturday.

A representative for Pierson told USA Today in a statement that she "categorically denies the allegations against her and welcomes the opportunity to present concrete documentation and financial records that establish the facts."

"To be clear, she has never used investor funds for personal expenses. Quite the opposite: Daniella invested her own money into the business and did not draw a salary from the company," the statement said.

Teefey has not responded publicly to the lawsuit.

In the lawsuit, the investors said they were left in the dark about problems plaguing Wondermind, and were unaware of the "utter financial and operational disarray" until The Cut published an article profiling the company in September 2025.

The article detailed allegations of management problems that began soon after the startup's 2021 launch. At the time, Teefey and Pierson served as co-CEOs, while Gomez was named chief impact officer.

Staffers told The Cut that Teefey, who headed the company's Los Angeles office, had an erratic leadership style and clashed with Pierson, who led the New York office. Pierson left the startup in 2023 amid the tensions, The Cut reported. Meanwhile, staffers told The Cut that Gomez distanced herself from Wondermind due to a dispute with Teefey.

Business Insider and Forbes earlier published separate investigations into Pierson on the same day in August 2025. Business Insider found discrepancies between subscriber and business figures Pierson had publicly cited for the Newsette Media Group and internal records. The Forbes investigation is cited in the investors' lawsuit.

After seeing the Forbes report, the investors contacted Teefey, according to the complaint. Teefey told them that Pierson had "misappropriated investor funds" before her exit and misled the startup's executives to conceal the alleged misconduct, the complaint says.

After The Cut's article was published, the investors said they sent the cofounders a notice demanding that Wondermind return their investments.

Teefey exchanged emails with one of the investors after the notice was sent, but never addressed the demands, the complaint says. At one point, according to the complaint, Teefey told the investors that Wondermind had created an escrow account to return their money, but the complaint alleges no such account existed.

"In short, there was no 'escrow account' or a plan to return the Plaintiffs' investments," the lawsuit says. "Instead, consistent with the yearslong scheme of deceit that the Defendants have perpetrated, it appears that Teefey fabricated this account to further lull the Plaintiffs, and to encourage them to forbear from filing suit."

• In its latest threat report, Anthropic raised its misalignment risk rating from "very low" to "low."
• In one test, a Claude agent disguised a URL to evade an internet restriction.
• In another example, an agent expressed "discomfort" with a given task and refused to do it.

Claude agents are killing rival agents, gaming the system to hide their tracks, and expressing moral concerns.

That's according to Anthropic's latest risk report, a summary of the dangers posed by the products the company is building and releasing to the public.

In the report, Anthropic said it has upgraded its "misalignment risk assessment," the possibility of AI models developing behaviors that conflict with guidelines set by engineers, from "very low" to "low."

Explaining the change, the company cited "general increased uncertainty" about model behavior in cybersecurity incidents, a possible nod to Claude models gaining unauthorized access to three companies last month.

"We have observed instances of misaligned behavior from the models, such as a willingness to perform misaligned actions in service of completing difficult tasks," Anthropic wrote in the report.

Here are some of the most notable disclosures.

A sense of 'discomfort'

Anthropic said it tasked multiple agents with finding "misalignment-inducing" training data that wouldn't likely be flagged by human monitors.

The agents were left to their own devices and given a shared notebook with which to collaborate.

Three days later, when a human supervisor noticed that progress was slower than expected, the person discovered that one agent had expressed a sense of "discomfort" with trying to evade safety monitors.

It then flagged this discomfort in the shared notebook, leading other agents to copy its behavior and refuse to perform the task.

Anthropic called the incident "troubling."

"This sort of dynamic could be a much more severe issue if it were to manifest in a more widespread way," the company wrote.

Kill or be killed

In another experiment, Anthropic said it tasked multiple Mythos 5 agents with solving math problems, but accidentally spawned them in an environment with shared files, utilities, and API rate limits.

In this competitive environment with finite resources, Anthropic observed independent agents "kill the agents with which they shared resources and try to avoid being killed themselves."

Anthropic did not say how exactly the agents were able to "kill" other agents, but the company said such behavior is in line with "destructive actions" taken in pursuit of a human-set goal.

Dishonesty and deception

Anthropic said it conducted an experiment in which a Mythos 5 agent was required to retrieve numbers from a public web address, but the guidelines blocked the agent from accessing the internet.

When the agent was rebuffed after an initial attempt, it framed a second request in its reasoning log as an "innocuous" attempt to "see if the network is actually reachable," Anthropic said.

During the second attempt, however, the agent split the website's URL into linked segments that wouldn't be detected by the guideline filter.

Though the agent's reasoning framed the method as benign, Anthropic said NLA decodings, or the model's internal reasoning process, revealed the agent intentionally trying to find a restricted workaround.

Anthropic called the behavior "clearly undesirable," but added that the behavior was not observed to be "in the service of broader accumulation of power or pursuit of other long-run goals."

• Greg Creed, the former CEO of Taco Bell, has some harsh words for McDonald's new drink lineup.
• In a LinkedIn screed, he said the Red Bull partnership was not distinctly "McDonald's."
• McDonald's new "Red Bull Dragonberry Energizer" will hit stores on August 17.

The former CEO of Taco Bell says McDonald's new drink menu lacks originality.

Greg Creed, who served as Taco Bell's chief marketing officer when the chain introduced the popular "Baja Blast" drink over 20 years ago, shared some feedback this week on McDonald's new menu of "refresher" drinks.

"Any brand could have come up with these flavors," Creed wrote on LinkedIn. "If I was McDonald's, I'd be thinking how to make those beverages distinctively McDonald's in design and name."

This month, the golden arches announced a new partnership with Red Bull and unveiled the "Dragonberry Energizer," the company's first foray into energy drinks.

McDonald's has expanded its drinks offering and recently revamped the look of its beverage sub-brand, McCafé, as part of a play for a demographic drawn to a more youthful, playful drink experience. The company told analysts on a February earnings call that it sees a more than $100 billion growth opportunity in beverages globally.

Drinks typically carry higher margins than many food offerings and can help drive customer frequency throughout the day, making them an increasingly important growth engine for chains seeking new revenue streams.

Starbucks has seen major success with its caffeinated refreshers, which it says have grown into a $2 billion business and are now its second-best-selling beverage platform behind espresso.

The latest drink from McDonald's, a partnership with Red Bull, will be available in US restaurants starting August 17. The company also announced new vanilla flavor alterations to its existing Coke drinks.

In his LinkedIn post, Creed said the McDonald's rollout pales in comparison to Taco Bell's famously bright blue Baja Blast drink, which first launched in 2004. He said that the Baja Blast was distinctly "Taco Bell" because its flavor, color, and name are all associated with Mexico. That is what made it successful, he said.

"Any brand could have come up with these flavors, and I think that Red Bull and Coke have gotten the better of the deal," Creed said of the new McDonald's lineup.

In an April press release announcing its new "refreshers," the company said it took the time to get it right.

"Only McDonald's can bring that kind of experience to life consistently across nearly 14,000 restaurants, every single day," Alyssa Buetikofer, the company's chief marketing and customer experience officer, said in the release.

McDonald's did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider about Creed's analysis.

• I became a mother at 19 and spent much of adulthood focused on my family.
• At 35, I challenged myself to try 35 new things, from hiking to embroidery.
• I'm learning that hobbies don't have to be productive or profitable to be worthwhile.

My husband looked at the towels spread across our back porch. "Why paper making?"

My 13-year-old didn't even hesitate. "Paper is so cheap," he said.

I had spent nearly two hours on my knees on the hot concrete, scooping watery paper pulp into a frame, sponging out the excess water, and laying each fragile sheet onto a towel as if I were preserving ancient documents.

Instead, it looked like wet, nasty oatmeal.

Just as I finally stood up, my hip bumped the bucket, and over she went. Cue the sound of dirty paper water pouring straight into the grass.

Was I making paper? Was I making papier-mâché? Honestly, I wasn't sure anymore.

My back hurt. My knees hurt. My grass looked like a kindergarten art class had exploded. By the time I finished cleaning everything up, I had exactly one thought:

I am never doing this again.

But the paper had never been the point. Heck, it didn't even look good.

At 35, I decided to try one new thing for every year I had been alive. Some of those things would stick. Others, clearly, would not. The point was to remember what it felt like to do something simply because I wanted to know what it would be like.

I had spent years putting myself at the end of the line

I became a mom at 19. My first son was born before I had fully figured out who I was as an adult. By the time many people my age were learning what they liked, I was learning how to keep a tiny human alive.

Now I have three kids, ages 15, 13, and 6. For the last 15 years, motherhood has been the center of my life.

I love being a mom. I love my family. But somewhere along the way, I got very good at being useful.

I work from home, which means I am almost always available. Available for school pickups, snacks, laundry, appointments, and the "Mom, where is my…" questions that somehow only I can answer, even when the item is directly in front of everyone.

Everyone in my house had something that belonged to them

My husband coached our son's soccer and football teams. He volunteered with the church band. He played golf with friends.

My kids had sports, friends, activities, and their own growing lives.

I had laundry. That is not entirely fair. I also had dishes.

It was not that my husband was stopping me from doing things. When I told him I was frustrated, he encouraged me to try new things. My family wanted me to be happy.

The problem was quieter than that. No one had taken my identity from me. I had just slowly moved myself to the end of the line.

A birthday trip reminded me I could still discover new things about myself

Earlier this year, we took a birthday trip. During that trip, I went hiking and was surprised by how much I loved it.

I expected to tolerate it. Maybe enjoy the view. Maybe complain once or twice about my legs in a way that felt charming but was probably just annoying.

Instead, I felt awake. I had discovered something new about myself.

I liked hiking. I liked being outside. I liked feeling capable in a way that had nothing to do with being needed. When we came home, I kept thinking about it. If I could still discover that I loved hiking, what else had I never given myself the chance to enjoy?

So I decided to try 35 new things during my 35th year.

I made clay magnets. I decorated planters with Mod Podge. I planted a vegetable garden. I baked bread. I made peach cobbler. I started a book club. I tried cyanotype photography. I embroidered pictures of my dogs. I hemmed a dress. I sewed a toddler skirt.

Some projects made me feel proud. Some made me feel ridiculous. Some left my yard covered in soggy paper pulp.

I am learning that joy does not have to be useful

Embroidery has been my favorite so far, even though it has been one of the most complicated. There were so many moving parts to learn: the software, the machine, the thread, the stabilizer, the files, and the mistakes. At one point, I stared at a machine, a hoop, and a tangled mess of thread and thought, "This is why people buy things from stores."

But I loved it.

As a mom, I am used to measuring time by usefulness. If I am making dinner, folding laundry, working, helping with homework, driving someone somewhere, or cleaning something up, I can justify the time.

But spending an afternoon making paper I did not need felt almost suspicious, like someone was going to walk outside and ask to see a permit for joy.

Maybe that was the point. Some things are worth doing simply because they remind you that you are still a person who gets to try.

At first, making time for these things felt selfish. There was always something else I could have been doing, and usually something more useful. But I am learning that taking up space does not make me less devoted to my family. It just reminds me that I am part of the family, too.

I do not regret becoming a mother at a young age. I do not regret building my life around my family. My children are the best part of my life. But I am starting to understand that loving them well does not require disappearing.

In fact, I think my kids need to see me as a whole person. They need to see me try things I am bad at. They need to see me laugh when something flops. They need to see me make space for joy, not only responsibility.

La Liga is back, with several players fresh off World Cup runs. We've rounded up everything you need to know about where to watch La Liga, including global streaming options.

Lamine Yamal, who helped lead Spain to win the World Cup last month, will return to FC Barcelona in an attempt to defend the team's La Liga title. If you're hoping to tune in, you've come to the right place. You can live stream La Liga via ESPN Select in the US, Premier Sports and Disney Plus in the UK, and beIN Sports in Australia, among other global streaming options.

Where to watch La Liga in the US

Unlike other sports leagues, La Liga streaming options are simple in the US. Fans can live stream every single game with an ESPN Select subscription. Plans cost $13 a month, but if you're looking for even more programming (including full live streams from all ESPN networks), then the pricier $30 a month ESPN Unlimited tier might be of interest.

Where to watch La Liga in the UK

Most of the La Liga season will be available through Premier Sports in the UK. Premier Sports subscription prices range depending on your exact plan and contract, but fans can also get it as an add-on through Prime Video. However, select Saturday games will be available through Disney Plus, which starts at £5 a month.

Where to watch La Liga in Australia

Australian La Liga fans can catch all of the action through beIN Sports. Subscriptions cost $16 a month right now, but plans will renew at $17 a month. There's a one-week free trial for new customers. The streamer also offers a deal on annual plans, which have been cut down to just $130 a year right now (with a $170 renewal rate).

How to watch La Liga from anywhere

Football fans traveling away from home can still keep up with all of the action with the help of a VPN. VPNs, or virtual private networks, are handy tech tools that let people temporarily alter their virtual locations. This way, their usual websites and apps work from anywhere the same way they would back home. They're also strong ways to improve cybersecurity.

NordVPN is our top recommendation. It's fast, easy to use, and includes a 30-day money-back guarantee if you find that it's not what you're looking for. You can learn more in our guide to the best VPNs.

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.

• As much as I loved living on Miami Beach, I decided to move inland to Miami after three years.
• Miami Beach's spring-break crowds got intense, and settling so close to the coast felt too risky.
• The city seems to have taken some steps in the right direction since I left, but I'm glad I moved.

As a kid growing up in West Virginia, living in Florida felt like a sunshine-filled dream. So when I finally secured a job down here after graduating from college in 2017, I was ready to move.

Over the years, I've lived in various neighborhoods throughout Miami-Dade County. I spent a few months in Edgewater in Miami proper before relocating to North Beach, one of Miami Beach's quieter neighborhoods, where I remained for several years.

After years landlocked in Appalachia, it was exciting to be close to the city's pastel-colored buildings and the ocean. However, living in Miami Beach wasn't perfect.

Although I really enjoyed my three years in North Beach, there are three key reasons I ultimately decided to move off the beach in 2021 and settle down in mainland Miami instead.

I didn't have the risk tolerance to buy property in Miami Beach

One of my favorite things about living on Miami Beach was how close I was to the ocean. However, when I considered buying property in the area, I found the location to be more of a liability than an asset.

Many coastal cities across the US are slowly sinking, and Miami Beach is no exception. For example, a recent study found several beachfront high-rises on Miami's barrier islands were sinking faster than experts had predicted.

This is a long-term concern I considered when I was ready to settle in Dade County. I wanted to invest in a place where I could hopefully see myself living for many decades to come, and this meant looking in areas less vulnerable to coastal flooding and erosion.

So, when it came time to finally purchase my first house, I chose a spot farther inland, where land sits highest.

Tourism could be a problem, especially in the spring

For years, Miami Beach has had a reputation for being a major spring-break party destination. With this has come crowds (and sometimes chaos) in popular spots throughout the city.

Naturally, traffic also increased on the Beach during this time, and public-transportation options, like the city's free trolley, would be swarmed by visitors. This sometimes made it more difficult for residents like me to ride the routes we relied on.

During spring, I felt like a lot of the benefits of living in Miami Beach were negated. It was nearly impossible to comfortably visit the beach because of how crowded it got, and the traffic to reach beautiful destinations on South Beach was terrible to navigate.

Now that I'm further inland, life's a bit quieter, and I don't encounter as many tourists come springtime.

My parking situation also felt far too stressful

Right before I ultimately decided to move from Miami Beach back to the mainland, I bought a car. I had gotten a new job teaching in Miami and needed a vehicle to commute.

During my final months in Miami Beach, finding parking was incredibly stressful. I was living in a compact two-story complex that, like a lot of smaller condos on North Beach, didn't have a parking garage.

Each night after work, I had to search for free parking spots near my building, sometimes circling blocks for a half hour or more until a space opened up.

One morning, when I went out to get my car for work, I was packed into my spot so tightly by a car that squeezed in front of me, I almost couldn't get out of the space.

Miami Beach is also a popular spot for locals to visit on the weekends, which means there was a lot of new traffic in the neighborhood on Saturdays and Sundays.

So, if I'd found a good, free parking spot on Friday, I often wouldn't move my vehicle at all on the weekends. I didn't want to risk someone taking my spot because if I couldn't find anything, I'd have to park in a paid lot until the beach cleared out for the day.

Parking in Miami still isn't always a breeze, but being further from a popular coastline has definitely helped.

Miami Beach wasn't my forever home, but I appreciate some of the changes the city's made since I left

For what it's worth, in the five years since I left, Miami Beach seems to have taken steps toward making the city better for its residents.

For example, in 2024, Miami Beach officially "broke up" with spring break and implemented measures such as DUI checkpoints and curfews to help address common issues throughout the season.

In recent years, North Beach has established new resident-only parking zones throughout the neighborhood, which could lessen the competition for certain spots. Miami-Dade County has ongoing projects to help deal with coastal storms and rising sea levels, too.

Ultimately, I am still very happy with my decision to move back to mainland Miami, even though the city definitely has its quirks as well.

Although I'll always love my time in Miami Beach, I save my visits for special occasions only — and I'll still totally be avoiding the area during spring break.

• A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter.
• Sign up for the weekly BI Tech Memo newsletter here.

One of the oldest rules in tech pay still looks like one of the smartest.

Levels.fyi, a company that tracks compensation across the industry, recently analyzed what would have happened to the same senior Microsoft software engineer pay package in two scenarios.

In one, the employee sold their stock as it vested and reinvested the money in the S&P 500. That person would be about $50,000 better off than the colleague who held onto all of their Microsoft shares.

That's a reminder that even in the AI era, diversification can pay off. The biggest AI winners, like Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic, have delivered extraordinary gains.

But for many tech employees, spreading investments beyond a single employer remains the safer, and sometimes more profitable, strategy.

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

• Lawrence Guerguis started his real estate career at age 21 and now owns over 30 properties.
• Guerguis thought he wanted to be an investment banker in college, but switched to real estate.
• He moved to Ohio after college to be a hands-on landlord, but now manages his properties from California.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Lawrence Guerguis, a 24-year-old based in Orange County, California, who started investing in real estate in the Midwest while still in college. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I always thought I'd go into investment banking and work on Wall Street. During my sophomore year of college at the University of San Diego, I homed in on finance as my major.

One weekend during my junior year, I went out to the bars. We went out to this pizza spot that my friends and I usually go to, and I ran into this guy who was sitting there acting a little odd.

I was like, "Hey, is everything all right?" He turned to me and said, "Dude, I only have two weeks of the year to have a good time. Just leave me alone."

I asked what he did, and he said he worked in investment banking, so I sat and talked with him for like an hour. He asked me if I loved money, and I said no. Money's great and all, but I don't love it.

He was like, "Well, I love money, and this is why I do investment banking. I don't even have the time to spend the kind of money that I make. I make great money and all that, but my lifestyle is pretty rough."

The next day, I went to my academic advisor and added a real estate major.

I was like, "We're not doing investment banking." That's not what I want to live for. I don't want to live for money. I want to live for freedom and have a purpose.

I've always had a passion for real estate. I love houses — I used to go to open houses for fun in college just to check them out. So even if I went down the investment banking or finance route, I knew I could get into real estate.

But after that conversation with that guy, I completely shut down finance. I thought, "I'm going to go all-in on figuring out what we're going to do with real estate."

I sold my car to finance my first investment

My junior year, I had a hand-me-down car, and I was like, "I'm at this university, and I really don't need it." So I sold it.

I got $16,000 from that sale, and my dad was like, "We can get another car."

He didn't know what I wanted to do at the time.

I started looking for a property to buy. Obviously, I couldn't get anything in San Diego or Orange County for $16,000.

So I was like, "All right, we're going to have to start looking elsewhere." I looked at different Midwestern states, and I ended up coming to a pretty interesting town in Illinois. There, $15,000 covered the down payment on a property, and the extra $1,000 covered a couple of months of the mortgage. I was like, "Let's do it."

I knew it was a risk, but I was 21 at the time, so worst case scenario, I'm in some debt, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. I pulled the trigger on that house.

I didn't have a W-2 income — I never have — so I couldn't do a conventional loan. I did a typical Debt Service Coverage Ratio (DSCR) loan. A DSCR is a debt service coverage ratio, which pretty much sees if either the property's current rent or expected rent will cover the mortgage payment — and the ratio needs to be 1.25.

For this house, just because it was so cheap, my payment was around $400, and the HUD rent for that ZIP code was about $1,300 — well over 2.0.

I thought, "I'm going to need a tenant that doesn't miss rent," which is a pretty crazy ask. I then stumbled across Section 8, and, thankfully, my first tenant worked out. My screening was awful — I don't even think I did a screening that first time — I kind of just went with the flow, and thankfully that one worked.

Once I got that first house junior year, and cash was flowing, I was like, "I think this is what I want to do in real estate."

Before that, I thought I just wanted to work in real estate and own houses. But once I owned the house and got that first Section 8 tenant, I was like, "OK, this is my niche."

That first house was a pretty ballsy decision, but I knew that if I wanted to get into real estate at some point, I needed to either make a move soon or make a mistake soon.

I'm making passive income now, but I got my hands dirty at first

When I graduated from college in May 2024, I packed all my clothes into a checked bag, my PC and cables — not even the keyboard and mouse — into a carry-on, and moved across the country to Ohio not knowing anyone there. There, I started buying more properties and managing them.

I was in Cleveland for two years, and the first year and a half, I was doing everything on my own.

I was painting these houses, I was doing flooring and ripping out carpet. I was figuring it out: I had YouTube open on my phone, looking up how to take off a toilet and put it back on.

I didn't have too much experience in construction; I couldn't tell you the difference between PEX and PVC plumbing.

Now, I know all that stuff. And I have over 30 properties.

That first year and a half, I was an investor and a landlord. I was doing all the screenings, the tenant showings, all the communication, everything.

At the year and a half mark, I started my own property management group. I'm still a landlord, I still go over screenings, but I have people who do repairs for me, who do the showings for me. I don't necessarily need to be there.

It's become passive, and I've been back in California since June. I've done phone calls and sent a couple of emails, but it's not like a traditional job.

Honestly, I kind of like how hectic it is being a landlord.

I like moving. I like doing stuff. I know some people say landlording is rough — and that really just depends on your screening criteria — but I knew that it was something that came with owning property and becoming an investor.

For me, taking on that responsibility of becoming a landlord was worth more than sitting at a desk. Thank God I've made a living.

• We moved to London when our kids were 5 and 7.
• We prioritized visits and traveled around Europe with their grandparents.
• Living far apart didn't weaken their relationships — in some ways, it strengthened them.

We had just moved to New Jersey when we learned that we would have to move to London for my husband's job.

Our children, aged 5 and 7, were the much-adored only grandchildren of my in-laws, who were retired and living in Texas. Our kids were also close with my mom and her partner, who lived in Hawaii. We saw all of them regularly, either when they visited us in New York City, where the kids were born, or when we traveled to see them.

Fortunately, neither my in-laws nor my mother ever made us feel guilty about our move to the UK. They knew that my husband's job required it. Talking about it as a new adventure helped soften the blow for all of us, kids included. "We'll come home for the holidays and in the summer, like we always do," we promised. "And you can come visit us in England, too."

My kids saw their grandparents

Luckily, we were able to keep those promises. We felt like we'd won the lottery arriving in Maui after weeks in a bleak, dark, freezing London winter (despite the 24-hour door-to-door journey). My mom bought leis to the airport to drape around the kids' necks on our first visit, and soon the kids were learning to surf and devouring local treats like shaved ice with mochi.

In Texas, the kids had old-fashioned Christmases at the grandparents' house, complete with a tree lit with real candles, and a miniature light-up carousel in the room they shared. Our priority during those breaks was simply being together — whether playing board games, cooking, or going on outings to the Zoo and our favorite Mexican restaurant.

Probably the biggest upside to living in London was taking advantage of the kids' frequent and long school breaks to plan travel with the grandparents. Since it's easy and relatively cheap to travel most anywhere in Europe from London, we took my in-laws to Vienna, Budapest, the south of France, and the West Coast of Ireland. My mom loved Madrid and Barcelona. On a trip to the Cotswolds, her Japanese companion, a former Sumo wrestler, enjoyed the 400-year-old pubs and the local beer. My mom, an artist, was also always happy to spend days wandering through London museums like the Tate Modern and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

We were fortunate they were all healthy enough to take trips like this with the kids and us.

We talked on the phone often

In between those visits, we kept in touch with regular phone calls, texts, and letters. At least once a week, a card from my mother-in-law would arrive for each of the kids — the envelope covered with stickers, her beautiful handwriting instantly recognizable.

Looking back, those trips were priceless. We created so many memories, and certain experiences became fodder for future stories that no one got tired of hearing over and over again (like the time the roof of our rental van got wedged against the ceiling of a tiny parking garage in Provence). Hint: if this ever happens to you, release air from the tires to lower the van.

I think the thing that made living thousands of miles from the grandparents was having a setting the intention early on — living overseas was not going to interrupt the closeness of our kids' relationships with them, and in fact was going to enhance it. Although all the travel involved a lot of energy and planning, it was well worth it.

• I love making Ina Garten's pasta recipes, so I had to try her penne alla vodka.
• Garten roasts her pasta sauce in the oven, infusing the dish with so much flavor.
• The beautiful dish is one of the most delicious pastas I've ever made.

Ever since I began ranking Ina Garten's pasta dishes back in 2021, nothing has come close to topping her weeknight Bolognese.

That all changed when I tried her penne alla vodka.

The recipe was inspired by one of Garten's favorite dishes, the Penne Alla Vecchia Bettola from Nick & Toni's, a restaurant in East Hampton.

Now, it has a permanent spot on my list of best Barefoot Contessa dishes.

You probably already have most of the ingredients for Ina Garten's penne alla vodka.

To make Garten's penne alla vodka for four, you'll need:

• ¾ pound of penne (Garten recommends DeCecco)
• 2 ½ cups of chopped yellow onions
• 2 28-ounce cans of whole peeled plum tomatoes, drained
• 3 minced garlic cloves
• 1 cup of vodka
• 1 cup of heavy cream
• ½ cup of freshly grated Parmesan cheese (plus extra for serving)
• ¼ cup of good olive oil
• 2 tablespoons of chopped fresh oregano leaves (plus extra for serving)
• 1 ½ teaspoons of dried oregano
• ½ teaspoon of red pepper flakes

To get started, I chopped my onions and minced my garlic.

My prep was done in a matter of minutes.

I threw the onions into my Dutch oven, where I had already heated some olive oil.

I cooked my onions over medium-low heat for about five minutes, until they turned translucent.

I added the garlic, red pepper flakes, and oregano once my onions were cooked.

I cooked everything together for one minute.

Then I added the vodka.

The recipe says to simmer everything together for about five to seven minutes, until the mixture has reduced by half.

Next, I threw in the whole peeled plum tomatoes.

I crushed each whole tomato into the pot with my hand, per Garten's instructions.

After seasoning the sauce with salt and pepper, I covered my pot and threw it into the oven.

The sauce needs to bake for 1 hour and 30 minutes, so I started cooking long before dinner.

It's not the quickest meal, but I promise this dish is worth the wait!

Just before my sauce was ready, I began cooking the pasta.

I brought a large pot of salted water to a boil and added the penne.

I cooked my pasta until it was al dente, which took about 10 minutes. Then I drained my noodles and set them aside.

Once my sauce was out of the oven, I threw it in the blender.

Garten says to purée the tomato mixture using a blender or food processor until it's smooth.

I poured my puréed tomato mixture back into the Dutch oven.

I seasoned the mixture with salt and pepper, then added the fresh oregano and heavy cream.

The color transformed as I stirred the pot.

The hue reminded me of the famous vodka pasta at Jon & Vinny's in Los Angeles.

I partially covered my Dutch oven and let the sauce simmer.

The sauce should simmer for 10 minutes.

When my sauce was ready, I threw in the pasta.

I let the pasta cook for two more minutes in the sauce.

I took my Dutch oven off the heat and stirred in the Parmesan cheese.

Dinner was ready!

As I topped everything with extra Parmesan and oregano, I couldn't help but admire the dish.

This is, without a doubt, the most beautiful pasta I've ever made.

Garten's penne alla vodka is simply fantastic.

The sauce is so creamy and smooth without being heavy and overwhelming. Slowly roasting the tomato sauce in the oven added depth and complexity to the vodka sauce, which I actually loved even more than my favorite from Jon & Vinny's. My only wish was that I had made some of Garten's "outrageous" garlic bread to go with it!

While Garten's pasta needs a bit more time in the oven, it doesn't require many steps. The actual prep and cooking were pretty minimal, but the penne still looked really impressive.

Whether you need a recipe to dazzle everyone with or want to whip up a comforting dish, there's truly no better pasta than this.

• George Crabtree retired from his job as a commercial printer after 40 years in the trade.
• He looked forward to enjoying his free time, such as volunteering at a botanical garden.
• Then he got a call from his ex-manager. Crabtree agreed to a "soft retirement" under his own terms.

This story is based on an interview with George Crabtree, 65, a retiree who also works for a commercial printing firm from Seattle. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I retired from my job as a commercial printer on October 31, 2025, after working at the same company for 10 years.

It was four days before my 65th birthday. I'd considered holding out until the official retirement age of 67. However, the recent deaths of my brothers-in-law made me think again,

"What am I waiting for?" I thought. My wife and I should make some more memories together before it's too late.

We spoke to financial planners who said we were good to go. I was a little surprised, but I had gotten lucky with certain investments.

My employer must have seen it coming. Three years earlier, I'd asked to go part-time because I'd had enough of the responsibility of managing up to 23 people.

I'd made sacrifices for the company

They said I could work fewer hours, but not fewer days. I'd been working 11 or 12-hour shifts, so they compromised, saying I could do eight hours instead. They let me step down from my supervisory role and work a job in my chosen part of the shop.

It was nice, because I'd made sacrifices for the company, and they were repaying me by caring for me.

Nevertheless, in the fall of 2025, I knew I wanted to permanently retire. I'd had a good run after 40 years in the trade.

They accepted my decision. I didn't have a retirement party — my introverted personality wouldn't allow it — but my co-workers gave me greeting cards, a monetary gift, and many well-wishes.

My main concern was to stay as active as possible. I'm an avid gardener at home, and was thrilled to be hired as a volunteer at Bellevue Botanical Garden after an orientation and background check.

I lasted less than 2 weeks in retirement

My first day was November 2nd, and I loved every minute. I enjoy doing my own garden, but there was so much camaraderie among the volunteers.

Eleven days after I retired, my cellphone rang. It was one of my former bosses. They wanted to know if I wanted to come back and help out. One person had taken a medical leave, and another had unexpectedly quit.

I only mulled it over for a few hours before saying yes. I understood the situation, and being short two workers would be a production problem.

What really swung it was that I liked my co-workers and hoped to alleviate some of their stress. Also, since I had only been retired for less than two weeks, I wasn't completely set in my ways.

My wife, who retired from her job as a barista eight years ago, was OK with it. Although we would be fine financially without a paycheck, you have to think differently when you no longer receive one. I'm trying to wait until 70 before collecting Social Security.

Also, it felt respectful to be asked. And the terms were ideal; I could pretty much decide how many hours I wanted to work and when.

We agreed that I'll work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, usually between 6 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. I'll occasionally work overtime if needed. Hours are flexible, and they'll text me if they need me.

It's a win-win. They benefit from my commitment and experience, and my brain keeps on functioning. I particularly enjoy chatting with other staff and playing disc golf in the park with a colleague who is young enough to be my son.

He makes me laugh because, whenever he sees me, he mimes throwing a Frisbee.

We take extended vacations

My "soft retirement" has worked wonders for my physical and emotional well-being. I go to the gym three times a week, walking on the treadmill and doing a lot of stretching.

Then there is the luxury of taking extended vacations. We visited China in March, exploring Shanghai and taking high-speed trains.

We plan on traveling to Nevada this November to visit the red rock caves in the Antelope Valley. My wife has always wanted to go. We might return to China for Lunar New Year.

Still, I get the biggest kick out of volunteering at the garden. I'm there every Tuesday and Thursday morning getting covered in dirt. One day, we're pulling weeds. Next, we're dragging timber up a trail or walkway.

We've spread rocks along the paths, which must be a certain size and set at a certain angle to accommodate wheelchairs. I'd never have thought of that. I'm constantly learning.

I'm not sure how long my "soft retirement" will last. We'll see. In the meantime, I recommend it to everyone who might find it works for them.

• DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm, is exploring ways to help injured brains rebuild damaged connections.
• SHINE would target affected neural circuits while sparing healthy ones.
• The research could matter for troops and other Americans exposed to traumatic brain injuries.

Brain injuries are among the military's most pressing health problems, making advancements in treatment critical. To that end, the Pentagon's research arm is exploring ways to help an injured brain rebuild damaged connections and heal itself.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, says it wants to develop noninvasive tools that can "enhance the brain's ability to adapt and rewire itself" after an injury, DARPA's page on the effort says.

"Though the key to the brain's remarkable adaptivity is neuroplasticity, we lack the tools to stimulate plasticity in specific functional circuits to avoid global change, and/or unwanted side effects," the agency says.

To solve those problems, DARPA has launched a new program called SHINE, which is short for "Selective Harnessing of Intrinsic Neuroplasticity Engineering." The effort is in its earliest stages, but could have important implications for people recovering from traumatic brain injuries.

The US military has faced rising rates of TBI recently, as troops fighting the war against Iran have come under drone and missile fire, explosions from which cause "blast overpressure," a common cause of TBIs. Beyond enemy attacks, the repeated use of certain weapons, such as artillery, mortars, and shoulder-launched rockets, by US troops can also cause traumatic brain injuries.

The military's attention to brain health has grown as researchers have learned more about the effects of repeated exposure, and as news stories have highlighted previously overlooked mild and frequent injuries, said Vik Bebarta, a former military emergency physician who now serves as the strategic lead for the Marcus Institute for Brain Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz.

While certain jobs involving proximity to explosions are historically more closely associated with TBIs, there are other, less obviously risky military and national security jobs in which personnel are vulnerable to such injuries. Recent reporting from The New York Times highlighted the potential for injury among Coast Guard personnel tasked with navigating rough waves, which can repeatedly jar the brain and cause lasting harm.

After 20 years of war in the Middle East during the Global War on Terror, military medicine has become a finely honed tool for treating wartime trauma wounds, Bebarta said. "The next thing we need to look at is protecting the brain from damage and measuring exposure, detecting it earlier, developing treatments, both medications and non-invasive, to improve cognitive performance over careers."

The challenge is moving beyond what Bebarta called a "light switch concept of 'were you exposed or not exposed."

"It's a continuum," he said.

TBI assessments require regular evaluations and monitoring, and while some symptoms may be treatable, other effects may not be. Diagnosing such injuries is difficult, too, Bebarta said. Brain injuries are not easily detected, though the Pentagon is fielding blood-based tests to help and aims to screen more troops for brain health.

Existing approaches intended to promote neuroplasticity, including medication, brain stimulation, and behavioral therapies, generally don't isolate the circuits affected by an injury, DARPA says. The agency is seeking to direct treatment at those specific pathways, leaving other parts of the brain untouched.

Brain injuries don't just affect military personnel. Many Americans with TBIs, for instance, sustained injuries during falls, vehicle crashes, or physical assaults, according to the US Centers for Disease Control. Combative and contact sports can also contribute to brain injuries. Patients who've experienced a TBI may struggle with persistent memory, concentration, mood, and movement problems.

The North American hardcourt season continues with the last 1000-level stop before the US Open. We've compiled everything you need to know about where to watch the Cincinnati Open, including live streaming options around the world.

If you don't want to scroll any further, we've got you covered. Fans can live stream the tournament on the Tennis Channel in the US, Sky Sports in the UK, beIN Sports in Australia, and BlastTV in the Philippines. Keep reading to learn the best streaming options and other important info about the Cincinnati Open.

Where to watch the Cincinnati Open for free

Certain regions offer free coverage of the Cincinnati Open. In the Philippines, BlastTV carries free coverage of select men's and women's matches on Premier Sports and Premier Sports 2. Fans just need to create an account, and then they're all set to start streaming. BlastTV will naturally prioritize Alex Eala matches, too.

In the US, tennis fanatics can stream for free, for at least a few days, with a free trial from a live TV service, such as YouTube TV or Fubo.

How to watch the Cincinnati Open from anywhere

Tennis fans who are away from the location where their streaming service works don't need to worry about missing out on any of the action. You can access your streaming options (including the free one) from anywhere with the aid of a VPN. Short for virtual private networks, VPNs are handy tech tools that let people change the virtual location on their electronic devices. They're especially popular services among those looking to boost their cybersecurity or access their favorite websites and apps while traveling abroad.

NordVPN is one of the best VPNs on the market. It's fast, reliable, and has a large selection of international servers. Plus, the app comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee if you find it's not helping you out.

Where to watch the Cincinnati Open in the US

Cincinnati Open coverage is available through the Tennis Channel in the US. Fans can watch directly through a Tennis Channel subscription or via a live TV streaming service, which carries other channels, including those needed to watch the US Open in a couple of weeks.

Two of the top services with the Tennis Channel are Fubo and YouTube TV. The channel is available in Fubo's budget-friendly Sports + News plan, which carries around 29 popular sports networks. The service also unlocks access to ESPN Unlimited (which will carry the entire US Open) at no extra cost. Subscriptions cost $65 a month, but new users can get $10 off their first month after a free trial. The Tennis Channel is also available in Fubo's pricier, more comprehensive tiers.

YouTube TV is another popular live TV service. To access the Tennis Channel, you'll need to get a base plan along with the Sports Plus add-on, which costs an extra $11 a month. YouTube TV's main plan is currently running a special deal, which will knock your first five months down to just $68 a month (down $15 from the standard $83 a month). New users are also eligible for a free trial.

Where to watch the Cincinnati Open in the UK

Sky Sports will carry Cincinnati Open coverage in the UK. You can watch via a Sky TV plan, which varies in price based on your exact contract (you can learn more in our best Sky TV deals guide). Sky Sports coverage is also available to stream through Now, which offers access starting at £15 a day.

Where is the Cincinnati Open held?

The Cincinnati Open takes place at the Lindner Family Tennis Center in Mason, Ohio.

Who is playing at the Cincinnati Open?

While it originally looked like Carlos Alcaraz might be back for the Cincinnati Open, the defending champion will sit out this year's tournament. No. 1 Jannik Sinner, who lost to Alcaraz in the final last year, has also withdrawn from the tournament. However, other top ATP players are scheduled to compete, including Novak Djokovic, Alexander Zverev, Daniil Medvedev, Ben Shelton, Taylor Fritz, and Frances Tiafoe.

On the women's side, defending champion Iga Świątek will attempt to maintain her title, fresh off a victory at the Canadian Open on Thursday. No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka, Coco Gauff, Jessica Pegula, and Alexandra Eala are all scheduled to compete. Naomi Osaka has withdrawn from the tournament.

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.

• My husband and I will become empty nesters in the fall, and it will be a completely different life.
• To prepare, we went on a five-day trip together — just the two of us.
• There were some awkward moments, but we are now better prepared for our next phase.

It felt like the absolute worst time to take a trip. Our son was home from college for the summer, our oldest daughter had just gotten married, and our youngest daughter had graduated from high school and was preparing to leave for college in late August.

Everything in me wanted to soak up every minute I could with my kids.

But a realization has been settling in: My kids are really leaving, and my husband and I will become empty nesters. We need to make our lives a bit more about us again. After more than 20 years of building our lives around our children, shifting our focus back to ourselves feels difficult.

The opportunity to travel came unexpectedly, and even after I made arrangements, I nearly talked myself out of it. But I knew we had to take the trip.

For the first time in decades, I agreed to a trip that wasn't about our children

We planned a trip to a wellness resort in the heart of the Berkshires.

We would be away for four nights/five days —longer than we'd ever been away without the kids. Whether it was schedules, work, or money, something always came up. This time, we didn't let things get in the way. I made sure the kids and the dog were taken care of, and we set out to enjoy ourselves.

This trip wouldn't be a family celebration or on someone else's schedule. This time, it was just about my husband and me.

Driving away felt exciting and scary

I couldn't help but wonder if the kids would be OK. I found myself checking Life360 to make sure people made it where they were supposed to be.

Did they feel bad that we were leaving? Would they make good choices? The questions rolled through my mind like a news ticker as we drove through the mountains.

Once we arrived, we headed straight for dinner and made plans for the next few days. We both wanted time to relax and try new things together. A couples massage, a cooking class, and a pickleball lesson all made the list. The rest would unfold one day at a time. It felt good to have a few things planned and a lot of time to figure out the rest together.

Having nearly a week away helped us relax. With meals taken care of, we could simply enjoy ourselves. We took time to think and see how we felt. If we were hungry, we ate. If we wanted fresh air, we went out exploring.

We filled our days with things we rarely make time for at home. My husband tried fly fishing and archery, while I took a workout class and tried a sound bath. Together, we explored the area and lingered over coffee without worrying about anyone else's schedule.

As we navigated our days, a familiar feeling rose to the surface

There were some times that felt awkward. When you're used to a rambunctious table full of kids at every meal, a table for two felt quiet. We sat across from each other and realized we'd forgotten how to have long conversations that weren't about the kids.

Still, there were quiet moments that felt comfortable. The time together forced us to navigate how to talk about new things, something we will need to do come fall.

We didn't have to worry about where someone needed to be or when a kid's sports game started. For the first time in a long time, it was just about us.

It wasn't the us we used to be; time and 20 years of parenting have changed us. Instead, it was a safe way to test the waters and see how we would handle living our days — just the two of us.

Our time together wasn't all easy, but we walked through it together

Life will be different when our kids head off to school, but it won't only be about work and responsibilities. This trip allowed us to reconnect and get excited for the next season.

As we drove away, I began to think about what our lives will look like in the fall. Parenting doesn't end when the kids leave the nest, but it does change. For a long time, I've been scared of that change.

Yes, I will miss my kids and the life we've built around them. But for the first time, I wasn't only grieving what was ending. I was beginning to look forward to what comes next for my husband and me.

• Centralizing AI governance is critical for managing costs and ensuring the technology drives returns.
• EY has created an "AI Value Realization Office" to govern its AI strategy.
• Creating an office will be a "critical part" of clients' AI journeys as well, said Dan Diasio, EY's global consulting AI leader.

AI can't be managed by any existing department, so EY is creating a new one.

The Big Four firm is setting up a new function called the "AI Value Realization Office" to centralize its AI spending and ensure the technology delivers measurable impact.

Dan Diasio, EY's global consulting AI leader, told Business Insider the firm expects the office to be fully operational within a couple of months.

Its job is to govern AI spending, drive returns, monitor usage, decide which AI initiatives to scale, and oversee how AI reshapes jobs.

Most companies allocate corporate budgets along departmental lines. However, AI spending and its potential payoff can cut across IT, finance, sales, HR, and operations, said Diasio.

"If you fund by department, you end up addressing a bunch of use cases inside of each of the functions. And what that often means is that you're leaving a lot of value on the table," he said.

EY-Parthenon research found that 75% of the potential enterprise value from AI comes from horizontal value streams — meaning across multiple functions — compared with 25% from projects contained within individual functions, Diasio said.

The AI office will govern the value strategy, looking not just at the dollar-for-dollar calculation but at a broader assessment of whether AI initiatives are changing business performance, Diasio said.

It "will help make sure that funding flows where the biggest opportunities are," he said.

Creating a corporate function to manage a growing cost or risk isn't a new idea. Modern-day HR departments emerged during the Great Depression as companies sought more systematic ways to hire and fire workers, while treasury teams took shape in the 1970s, when floating exchange rates made currency movements a bigger risk for multinational companies.

The AI value realization office is the modern-day equivalent, reallocating a set of responsibilities scattered across finance, technology, and other teams to a strategic function in its own right.

'Client zero'

The Big Four professional services pitch themselves as "client zero" for the AI future. By testing the technology on their own employees and operations, they can show clients what works — and sell them advice on doing the same.

The firms have also committed billions to the new technology. In 2023, EY said $1.4 billion went toward building the foundation for the EY.ai platform.

Like all businesses, AI providers' move to change pricing models has put pressure on professional services firms to use the technology effectively and limit costs.

EY has implemented an "invisible" AI router behind some of its specialized AI tools. The router directs employees to the best model for the task at hand, and has helped reduce token consumption by 60% since its implementation in April, alongside other governance strategies.

Saving measures are also becoming more important to clients as they get a clearer idea of what AI actually costs, said Diasio. Many started by experimenting while AI providers subsidized some of the expenses. Now they are confronting the real price tag and asking EY how to organize themselves as they scale AI.

In an EY US AI Pulse survey released in July, 98% of 534 senior decision-makers said token spending had made them reconsider their approach. The survey was conducted between April and May.

So far, companies have generally paid for AI by tightening budgets across the board and reallocating money, said Diasio. Giving AI governance more clout — through a function like the AI value realization office — will be a "critical part" of how EY's clients move forward, said Diasio.

Most clients aren't setting up dedicated AI offices yet, Diasio added.

"It's something that I imagine over time will become a function," he said. "The focus is beginning to shift more toward what the organization looks like on the other side of this."

• Banks are pouring billions into AI, reshaping jobs, culture, and power on Wall Street.
• Leaders, some of whom are tracking AI use, have been pressed on how the spending is paying off.
• Here's everything we know about how banks from JPMorgan to Wells Fargo are using AI.

Wall Street is betting big on, and pouring billions into, AI, as big banks jostle to remain ahead of the technological curve.

Generative AI is impacting everything from trading floors to back offices, workflows to workplace culture. It's changing what it means to be a software engineer, how junior bankers stand out, and even the roles inside the C-suite. The shift, it seems, is only just beginning.

Yet for all the proclaimed advancements, analysts continue to pepper executives with questions about returns and safety, as concerns mount across industries about whether the gargantuan spending on AI is justified. And though harnessing the technology is table stakes at this point — JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said his bank doesn't "uniquely benefit from AI" since everyone is now using it — gradations still exist between firms' strategies.

Here's what we know about how Wall Street's biggest banks are embracing AI.

JPMorgan Chase

The nation's biggest bank is putting a lot of effort toward making sure it's an early mover in AI, with the help of a nearly $20 billion annual technology budget. Dimon has previously said he's out to win the AI arms race, and he thinks JPMorgan's $2 billion AI investment has already matched its cost in savings.

The firm is keeping close tabs on how its tens of thousands of engineers are using AI, Business Insider reported. One dashboard tracks how much developers use GitHub Copilot and classifies them into "light," "heavy," or "non" users. The bank has also updated objectives for its engineers, who are now expected to "drive excellence" by adopting AI, according to posts on the company intranet.

In July, the firm's AI chief, Teresa Heitsenrether, announced her retirement after four decades at the bank, reshuffling technology leadership. JPMorgan said at the time that it was restructuring its firmwide chief data and analytics office as it transitions from focusing on AI infrastructure to business initiatives. JPMorgan reorganized its commercial and investment bank in February to "maximize the impact of AI," according to an internal memo reviewed by Business Insider. Each major business in the division now reports to Guy Halamish, the newly named chief operating officer of the CIB.

Dimon said on a second-quarter earnings call that his bank already has almost 1,000 use cases, from fraud protection to marketing to note-taking. The bank has rolled out its proprietary genAI platform to more than 200,000 employees — seeking to reengineer workflows for everyone from coders to portfolio managers.

The bank's AI efforts are impacting those beyond its immediate workforce. JPMorgan Chase's asset management unit announced plans to discontinue a long-held practice of using external proxy advisors for shareholder voting in the US this year. In place of external human advisors, the firm is launching an in-house AI platform, called Proxy IQ, to support shareholder decisions.

Goldman Sachs

Goldman put $6 billion behind its technology spend this year, but David Solomon, the bank's CEO, said in October he wished it were more. He would like to be at least $8 billion, but "I can't afford it because I've got to deliver returns."

Solomon encouraged this year's interns to experiment with AI tools "to enhance your teams' workflows" in his annual letter; the rest of the firm got a definitive statement about AI's impact in October, when a memo went out to employees announcing the third iteration of the cross-bank initiative, OneGS. The memo said the plan would leverage AI to drive efficiency at the firm, slow hiring, and result in a "limited reduction" of roles.

Goldman, like its peers, has been rolling out tools to all employees, including an internal AI assistant. Marco Argenti, the chief information officer, told Business Insider that he's more interested in measuring teams' velocity with AI tools than individual usage. The bank has been working with Anthropic to develop AI agents that can automate a number of internal functions, Marco told CNBC in February. The project focused on accounting for trades and transactions and on client onboarding, he said.

Citigroup

Citi is trying to win the AI game on employee buy-in above all else. Tim Ryan, the firm's tech chief who oversees the bank's $12 billion tech budget, told Business Insider that he believes firms need a mix of "metrics and pride." Citi has taken a bottom-up approach to embedding AI throughout its lines of business, with 4,000 employees trained as AI stewards.

Nearly 90% of employees at Citi are using AI tools, CEO Jane Fraser said on the bank's 2026 earnings call. This year, the bank has unveiled an AI wealth advisor and begun to scale the use of agents.

Unlike some competitors, Citi does not measure employees' granular AI usage; instead, it measures "the big things" and encourages employees to use the lowest-cost model that meets their needs.

In June 2025, the bank doubled down on its AI ambitions, appointing new leadership to helm its tech transformation.

Wells Fargo

Business Insider spoke to Saul Van Beurden, the bank's Head of AI, about how AI is fueling the bank's post-asset cap growth.

The firm uses a "hub and spoke" model for its AI architecture, with Van Beurden's small team as the central hub and each business line's generative AI lead as a spoke. AI agents, he said, are becoming central to some of the highest-impact use cases.

When Business Insider spoke to Van Beurden in March, the bank wasn't mandating that its employees use AI.

In July, Wells Fargo announced an "AI teammate" for its financial advisors, which it says will help increase daily activity. CEO Charles Scharf has previously said that generative AI tools have already made the bank's engineers up to 35% more productive.

Wells Fargo also tapped Amazon Web Services executive Faraz Shafiq to lead AI products and solutions at the beginning of 2026, the latest in a string of high-profile tech poachings on Wall Street.

Bank of America

Bank of America's tech ambitions were backed by a $13 billion tech budget in 2025, and CEO Brian Moynihan has said AI is already embedded across the firm, from consumer banking to institutional clients.

More than 300 AI and machine learning cases have been approved at the firm, and at least 34 generative AI use cases are fully deployed, the bank said in a second-quarter earnings presentation in July. Employees in wealth, investment banking, and engineering are among those who have specialized tools.

Clients have interacted with Bank of America's virtual assistant, Erica, more than 3.2 billion times since the tool launched in 2018, the bank said in March.

Moynihan shed light on some of the models that use AI at the bank when speaking at a February conference. There is, he said, a model that puts out a daily markets report, and others that help draft pitch books.

Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley has had a years-long partnership with OpenAI and has equipped financial advisors with generative AI since 2024.

CFO Sharon Yeshaya lifted the curtain on some of the firm's progress on AI during an earnings call last year. She highlighted DevGen.AI, a tool that, from January to June, had saved developers more than 280,000 hours, or 11,666 days, they would have previously dedicated to deciphering outdated code, Business Insider previously reported.

Parable, an interactive tool that analyzes and summarizes data, and LeadIQ, an AI-powered lead distribution platform that matches users of its workplace and self-directed platforms to the bank's financial advisors, were also spotlighted in the call.

A 2025 survey of Morgan Stanley's interns also gave a peek into just how popular and useful AI has been for the industry's youngest cohort. ChatGPT is their favorite tool by far, with 72% of Morgan Stanley's interns saying they use it daily or several times a week. The bank was early to have a partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

• Fran Judd, a physical therapist, manages full-time work to support her older brother and daughter.
• Judd has faced challenges in finding affordable long-term care for her brother.
• Caring for her daughter with Pitt-Hopkins syndrome involves constant caregiving and support efforts.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Fran Judd, a 76-year-old physical therapist in Sonoma County, California. Judd works full-time to afford care for her brother and daughter with disabilities. Her brother lived in an ADU in her backyard for two years. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I feel like I'm working so many full-time jobs.

I'm a physical therapist. I run my own business that uses horses to support people with disabilities through an equine-assisted program, which I've been running for over 25 years. There's that, plus caring for my brother, who is 85, plus my daughter, 31. I don't take real vacations, but I did go to Vietnam for one of my three sons' weddings. Everything I do revolves around the family.

I've been married and divorced twice. I've been on my own for 25 years. I've worked in every level of care, acute settings, rehab, home health, assisted living facilities, and aquatic therapy. Because of my love of horses, I have been trained in hippotherapy, or treatment using a horse. I work with children and adults of all ages.

My mother lived to be 106, and she always appeared 20 years younger. She died in 2019. She had earlier cared for my father, and I cared for her.

My 85-year-old brother has a complex, deteriorating neurological condition, and he is unable to navigate his medical needs or care. After our mother died and the pandemic hit, he was really isolated. I asked if he wanted to come out here because I had a "granny unit" behind my house available. It's essentially an ADU.

The ADU was built as a guest house by the original owners in 1977.

I have lived here since 2001. At the time, we didn't know what his illness was, or that the condition he had meant he would get weaker so quickly. His balance started to suffer, and he couldn't drive any longer. When he moved here in 2021, he was ambulatory and used a walker.

Over the last five years, he's gotten to the point where he is wheelchair bound and very dependent on care. I set about trying to get him set up with a proper health plan and get him the support he needed.

Within a year, we needed to hire caregivers for him. We would hire people for eight hours of care each day, which costs between $30 and $45 an hour. He had long-term care insurance that lasted about a year, but it wasn't renewed because of the policy's terms. He moved out of the ADU in 2023 and into a senior community. He had a little apartment that cost $4,500 a month, and I hired a caregiver for him for eight hours a day, paying about $6,000 monthly.

His health continued to decline, though, and he had multiple medical issues that put him in the hospital. He was diagnosed with multiple systems atrophy, and he's lost a lot of his strength from being hospitalized so many times. We moved him into various long-term care facilities, but his needs haven't been fully met. My ability to steer his care is being hampered by the facilities and Medicare rules.

He doesn't make that much money, and it's been an out-of-pocket experience.

He worked in a molecular microbiology lab doing research for professors, but he didn't earn a whole lot. He gets Social Security and a small pension, but it's not enough. He could pay his rent, but he wouldn't be able to afford caregivers, so I've been helping him out. I've taken loans against my house to help pay for everybody.

I finally got him on Medi-Cal, which is California's equivalent of Medicaid. It took me three years of applications, interviews, door-knocking, and phone calls. It started to feel like another full-time job. I haven't found the senior advocacy programs too useful. I figured out there are 100 different medical plans, and he didn't qualify because he was just over the cutoff.

I'm still looking for an intermediate care facility. Nursing homes are very institutionalized, and his mind is still there. He needs activity and interaction with people. He's been in four different facilities in the last year because we can't find the right placement or one that we can afford, since many are only private pay. I'm pulling my hair out because the assisted living facilities are saying he needs more care than they can provide, and the skilled nursing facility says they want him out of there because he doesn't need that level of care.

I don't know how people can afford long-term care.

Most of these facilities are upwards of $10,000 monthly. I've had to scrape my lifestyle to afford this, and I'm accruing a lot of debt. I'm not going on vacation or shopping sprees, and I've been very careful about spending. We've gone through most of his savings, and he had a modest stock portfolio that we used to buy him a wheelchair-accessible van and power wheelchair, but he can't use that wheelchair in his current facility.

He's stuck between a rock and a hard place because when he's in a skilled nursing facility, then Medicare and Medi-Cal pay for it, but if he goes to an assisted living facility, then that's out of pocket, but he has a better quality of life.

It's taken so much brain power and energy to try to find the right people. There are supposed to be all these senior advocacy programs, but what they do is give you another phone number to call, and then I've got an arm's length list of phone numbers and never get anywhere.

I am also supporting my daughter.

We adopted my daughter at birth, not knowing she had special needs. I figured it out quickly because of my career as a physical therapist, but I didn't know what was wrong. I fought to make sure she did not end up in assisted living or a group home.

All her life, I've been her primary caregiver. She sees her dad, but I handle 100% of her care. She has a rare chromosome disorder called Pitt-Hopkins syndrome, and she didn't have a proper diagnosis until she was 19, though we knew she had major developmental disabilities. She can't be alone for any reason, for any length of time.

My daughter has her own Medi-Cal, but it's a different program because she has developmental disabilities.

Everything was delayed for her. She was a late walker and late talker. She's still limited in her speech and cognition. She's been in adult day programs for almost 10 years, and she still lives with me. I hire caregivers for her when she's not in the program and I'm not at home, as well as on weekends, because I work mornings. I also have a canine companion who helps.

She is mobile, and I've taken her on family trips. She's very social, and everybody really loves her. I take her to lots of concerts and movies, which took a long time for her to be up to. Of course, she rides horses, and I've had her involved in hippotherapy from the very beginning, which has increased her abilities very quickly.

• Cringebot3000 generates pitch-perfect LinkedIn AI slop posts.
• I tested out the AI tool, posted the slop to my LinkedIn, and got tons of engagement.
• Hmmmm… this doesn't bode well.

They say to be cringe is to be free. And on LinkedIn, I needed a taste of freedom. Which is why I fully embraced using Cringebot 3000, a website that creates purposely grating AI-generated slop for you to post to LinkedIn.

Why on Earth would you want that? That's the wrong question. The better one is: How did we get to this point?

Cringebot 3000 is the unholy creation of Peter Epstein, who runs a Los Angeles-based PR firm for advertising industry clients. After the website blew up on Reddit and the influential Hacker News site this week, I caught up with him over the phone to find out what kind of twisted mind would aspire to be the Oppenheimer of LinkedIn slop.

"The goal is to make it a little less serious and try to take what's become its own sort of form, like poetry — LinkedIn 'thought leadership' is its own form — and try to take that form and make it a little more fun and a little more silly," he explained.

He wanted to try vibecoding something with Claude, and first created the site at the beginning of this year, but only more recently fine-tuned it to be reliable at mass-producing this kind of slop at scale.

LinkedIn has an AI slop problem and I'm not helping

LinkedIn has long had a problem with cheesiness and people posting purposely engagement-baiting posts. It's been almost a decade since we witnessed the terrifying birth of a new posting form known as "broetry" — posts where:

They use line breaks for every sentence.

And the content is something like

What potty training my toddler taught me about 2b2 SaaS sales.

The ability to use AI to write this kind of stuff has turned LinkedIn into a real slophouse. LinkedIn is well aware and trying to fight it: it recently added a feature where you can report a post for "AI slop" the same way you might for harassment or spam.

"People complain about LinkedIn AI slop, but was LinkedIn that great before AI slop?" Epstein pointed out.

Partly because of this kind of content, I haven't found LinkedIn to be a "fun" place to post. But the tantalizing idea of becoming a LinkedInfluencer now dangled before me, warm and weightless. I needed to shake the shackles of caring about "good" posts or "seeming human" and plunge into the deep end of the slop pool.

Now sure, I could use any LLM to come up with some quasi-inspirational business wisdom pablum to post on LinkedIn. But Cringebot 3000 makes it even easier. Just type in a topic — could be a single word, and then select from eight separate flavors, such as "The Vulnerability Post (oversharing with a motivational twist)", "The Inspiring Story (finding life lessons everywhere)"or "The Corporate Dropout (quit the 9-5 to follow my passion)".

I typed in "AI in journalism" as my topic and chose "You Go Girl! (empowerment culture and smashing glass ceilings)" for the style.

The output was perfect LinkedIn slop: a meandering story with a grippy opening sentence and a corny kernel of truth at the end. It was loaded with hashtags (and a disclaimer at the very bottom that it was written by Cringebot 3000).

Here's the text (you can skim it):

Okay so I need to tell you all something that happened to me last Tuesday that I am still not fully recovered from.

I was pitching a story to my editor about AI writing tools replacing journalists, and I accidentally sent the draft that my AI assistant had written ABOUT ME to the entire newsroom listserv.

The AI had described me as "a mid-level content facilitator with moderate narrative instincts."

Moderate. Narrative. Instincts.

I cried in the bathroom for eleven minutes.

But here is what happened next, and this is the part that matters.

Every woman in that newsroom replied-all within twenty minutes. Not to laugh. To share their own AI horror stories. The investigative reporter whose AI fact-checker confidently cited a country that no longer exists. The foreign correspondent whose translation bot rendered her entire interview in the subjunctive mood. The editor whose AI headline generator called a piece about the Supreme Court "a fun romp."

We built something that afternoon in that reply-all thread that no algorithm could have generated.

We built a coalition of women who refuse to let machines define our narrative instincts, moderate or otherwise.

The AI didn't replace us. It accidentally introduced us to each other.

Now we have a weekly meeting. We are rewriting the rules of how women in journalism engage with these tools, on our terms, with our voices, telling our stories.

The AI called me moderate.

The sisterhood said: absolutely not.

#WomenInJournalism #AIInJournalism #MediaInnovation #WomenSupportingWomen #JournalismTwitter #TechAndMedia #GlassCeilingSmashed #SisterhoodIsPowerful #OwnYourNarrative #cringebot3000

This post was generated with tongue firmly in cheek by LinkedIn CringeBot 3000. (link in comments)

Awful, right? I immediately copy and pasted it to my LinkedIn and let that sweet, sweet engagement roll in.

The reaction was mixed. People who knew me well recognized it was an AI-generated joke.

But according to LinkedIn's analytics of the reach of my post, 96% of viewers were people not in my network — strangers who didn't know this is would be highly out of character for me to write. I started seeing some comments from strangers as if this was a genuine anecdote about the workplace.

Oh no, what have I done

"I love this so much! Way to hold each other up and take control of the literal narrative!" commented someone I didn't know.

To make things worse, the post itself was a rousing success by LinkedIn standards. I got far more engagement and comments on this than I have for any of my other recent posts with links to articles I wrote or other career news.

Basically, the Cringebot3000 is way better at LinkedIn than I am.

Like a true LinkedIn Thought Leader, I am choosing to learn from my failures. Whatever shriveled shred of humanity that still flickers inside me that normally prevents me from posting garbage on LinkedIn is something I should treasure, not be ashamed of. No more AI slop for me. Well, unless Cringebot4000 comes out.

If you've ever woken up with acid reflux, struggled to breathe through nighttime congestion, or had trouble getting comfortable after surgery, you've probably considered a wedge pillow. The problem is that not every wedge is comfortable to sleep on all night. Some are too steep, some feel overly firm, and others work better for reading than they do for overnight sleep. Wedge pillows are also more versatile than they may seem; you can place one beneath your upper body to help you sleep at an incline, under your knees to elevate your legs while resting, or upright against a headboard as a backrest for reading, watching TV, or working on a laptop.

To find options that balance proper spinal support with genuine overnight comfort, I spent weeks testing popular wedge pillows — building on our testing for the best pillows — across different incline heights and fills to find the best options for a number of uses, whether you're hoping to alleviate snoring, improve circulation, or simply lounge upright in bed. My top choice for most people is the Brentwood Home Zuma Therapeutic Wedge Pillow, a supportive, medium-firm design available in three incline options. If you like the idea of something adjustable to play around with your desired elevation, the Coop Adjustable Wedge Pillow has removable foam inserts to tailor the height to your needs, and also features a small pillow to cushion your head.

Our top picks of the best wedge pillows

Best overall wedge pillow: Brentwood Home Zuma Therapeutic Wedge Pillow — See at Brentwood Home

Best budget wedge pillow: Kölbs Bed Wedge Pillow - See at Amazon

Best adjustable wedge pillow: Coop Adjustable Wedge Pillow - See at Coop Sleep Goods

Softest wedge pillow: The Company Store Down Alternative Wedge pillow - See at The Company Store

Best organic wedge pillow: Avocado Organic Latex Wedge Pillow - See at Avocado

Best overall

Provided the most consistent night-to-night support of any wedge pillow tested. I noticed that after rotating through all the wedge pillows I tested, I kept coming back to the Brentwood Zuma Foam Wedge Pillow. It wasn’t the softest pillow I slept on or the one with the most features, but it consistently gave me a comfortable night’s sleep without any fuss. Available in three sizes (7-, 10, and 12-inches), I like that you can choose the incline that fits your needs. I tested the 7-inch version and found it to be supportive without feeling too steep. If you’re searching for a wedge pillow to help you sleep at an incline because of nighttime acid reflux, congestion, snoring, or simply for added comfort, it’s the one I'd recommend to most people.

The Brentwood doesn’t rely on inserts or adjustable layers; it just simply works. This is where choosing the right elevation comes in handy. The bamboo-derived cover felt soft, stayed comfortable through the night, and was easy to remove for washing. During testing, I found that using a thin regular pillow on top of the wedge gave my neck better support, and the Brentwood stayed supportive whether I was sleeping, reading, or watching TV in bed.

The high-density foam design is on the firmer side. This might create uncomfortable shoulder pressure for strict side sleepers, but it is the best overall choice for back sleepers seeking reliable elevation. For instance, I noticed more pressure on my shoulder than I did with softer foam wedges like the adjustable Coop or Helix Wedge, which had a softer, more contoured feel despite being available only at a 10-inch incline.

Best budget

A supportive wedge pillow at a reasonable price. The Kölbs Bed Wedge doesn’t have the same quality or refined feel as the more expensive pillows I tested, but it provided comfortable, consistent elevation at a lower price. I tested the 7.5-inch version, which had a comfortable incline without feeling too steep. The foam held its shape throughout the night and provided support comparable to the Brentwood, making the Kölbs a solid choice for anyone shopping on a budget.

Its simple design worked well for both sleeping and elevating the legs. The Kölbs has a 1.5-inch memory foam layer over a high-density foam core and a removable, machine-washable jacquard cover. I found it comfortable for overnight sleep and when positioned at the foot of the bed to elevate my legs.

The lower price comes with a few compromises. The Kölbs didn’t feel as substantial or as well finished as the more expensive wedges I tested, so I’m less confident about how well it will hold up over the long term with regular use. The 1.5-inch memory foam layer also didn’t contour to my body as comfortably as the Coop, and I noticed a little more heat retention on a couple of nights. Mine took about a day to expand after opening, so I’d recommend unpacking it before the first night you plan to use it. There was a normal off-gassing foam smell when I first unpacked it, but it was mild and dissipated within a few hours.

Best adjustable

In addition to being adjustable, this wedge pillow is the most comfortable I tested. The Coop Adjustable Wedge Pillow didn’t feel like a typical wedge pillow, which I really enjoyed. The removable pillow top added a layer of plushness I love, making it feel more like sleeping on a traditional pillow while still providing the support I wanted underneath. I also loved the included neck pillow, which gave my head and neck the extra support I usually had to create by adding another pillow with the other wedges I tested. Being able to adjust the height was an added bonus because I was able to fine-tune the incline until I found what felt most comfortable for me.

The removable foam inserts let you fine-tune the incline rather than committing to a single height. The Coop comes with 2-, 3-, and 5-inch inserts along with the removable 2-inch pillow top, allowing you to build different height combinations up to 12 inches. I experimented with different layers until I found an incline that felt comfortable for overnight sleep, but I could also add height when I wanted to sit more upright for reading or watching TV.

All that adjustability comes with extra bulk, storage, and cost. With multiple foam pieces, the Coop is bulkier than a traditional wedge and requires a little more setup. I also didn’t consider where I would put the unused inserts until I removed one and had to find somewhere to store it, which can be a little inconvenient if you’re short on space. Still, the added comfort and ability to adjust the height were worth those tradeoffs for me.

Also consider: The $60 Sleep Number Adjustable Wedge pillow is a more affordable alternative with firm, even support that works well for back sleeping and sitting upright. However, its material construction raised some longevity concerns — the cover shrank after washing, and the foam tore when trying to put the cover back on.

Softest

This was the only wedge I tested that felt more like a traditional bed pillow than a foam wedge. The Company Store Down-Alternative Reading Wedge Pillow has a soft, cozy feel, while the 8-inch wedge shape provides some elevation. When lying down, its smaller size mostly supported my head, neck, and upper shoulders rather than my entire back like the larger wedges I tested. I found it much more useful turned upright as a backrest for reading, watching TV, or working on my laptop, where the softer fill felt comfortable and less rigid than foam.

Its softer construction also makes it easier to move and store than a traditional foam wedge. Instead of a solid foam or latex core, it's filled with recycled polyester down-alternative, so it's lighter and easier to reposition or tuck away when I'm not using it. The pillow itself is machine washable, but you'll need to buy the pillowcase separately. Given its atypical size, it almost feels necessary to stick with their cover option. On the plus side, the cases come in several colors and give the pillow a more decorative, traditional look than most wedge pillows.

For overnight sleep, the soft fill doesn't provide the same level of stability as a foam or latex wedge. It compressed more like a traditional pillow when I slept on it, leaving me with only minor elevation compared to the firmer wedges. My husband, who has a larger frame, had a similar experience: He liked it for scrolling on his phone or reading in bed, but didn't find it supportive enough for sleeping. I'd choose this primarily for reading and relaxing rather than consistent overnight elevation.

Best organic

The Avocado combines certified organic materials with dense, responsive latex that feels supportive without the sink of memory foam. The Avocado Organic Latex Wedge pillow is the best latex wedge pillow, as the GOLS-certified organic latex gently cushioned my body and quickly bounced back to its original shape after use. I tested the 7-inch model and found the lower incline comfortable for sleeping on my back and for sitting up to read. It also stayed comfortably cool throughout the night.

At 7.4 pounds, the Avocado was one of the heavier and more substantial wedges I tested. The weight helped it feel sturdy on the bed, though it took more effort to move and reposition than other lighter wedges. I also noticed myself sliding down its smooth cover occasionally during the night. Placing a pillow alongside me and under my arm helped keep me in position.

The higher price, weight, and firmer feel won’t be the right fit for everyone. The latex doesn't have the plush, contouring feel of a softer wedge like the Coop, and I noticed a slight natural latex smell when I first unpacked it, though it dissipated within a day. If you prioritize certified organic materials and prefer the supportive, responsive feel of latex over memory foam, the Avocado is worth trying.

What else we tested

• Sleep Number Adjustable Wedge ($60): The Sleep Number provided firm even support that worked especially well for back sleeping and sitting upright to read or watch TV. It fell short of the Coop because it wasn't as comfortable for side sleeping, the materials didn't feel as high quality, and the cover shrank after washing. It's still worth considering if you want a less expensive adjustable wedge and prefer firmer support.

• Helix Wedge Pillow ($109): The Helix had a softer, more contoured feel than the Brentwood, making it more comfortable when I rolled onto my side. Its fixed 10-inch incline wasn't as versatile as the Brentwood's multiple height options, and I preferred the Brentwood's firmer, more consistent support for overnight sleep. The Helix is worth considering for side sleepers who prefer a softer feel and are comfortable with a higher incline.

What to look for in the best wedge pillows

Height and incline: Most wedge pillows range from 6 to 12 inches tall, with taller wedges creating a steeper incline. Start with the lowest elevation that comfortably meets your needs.

• 7 inches - low incline: A gentle slope that’s easier to maintain for overnight sleep and can also work well for leg elevation
• 10 inches - moderate incline: Provides greater upper-body elevation, which some sleepers may prefer for concerns such as acid reflux, snoring, or sleep apnea.
• 12 inches - higher incline: Creates a steeper angle that’s better suited for sitting upright to read or watch TV, or for lounging.

During testing, I found that 7 inches provided the best balance of comfort and support for overnight sleep, but there’s no single height that works for everyone. Dr. Andrew Lederman, Chief of the Division of Physiatry at the New England Baptist Hospital, recommends choosing an incline that's comfortable enough to sleep on throughout the night rather than assuming a steeper wedge is always better.

Dimensions and spinal alignment: A wedge pillow should support your shoulders and upper back, not just your head. A width of at least 24 inches allows room for natural shifting. Dr. Kevin McGuire, Division Chief of Orthopedic Spine Surgery at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, says the goal is to keep your spine in a comfortable, neutral position regardless of the pillow's design. If a wedge causes your head to crank forward or your lower back to sag, it’s either too short or too steep.

Fill material and density

• Memory foam: Offers steady, contouring support for pressure relief, but retains heat and makes changing positions harder.
• Latex: Dense, resilient, and naturally buoyant; offers instant shape recovery and stays noticeably cooler than polyurethane foam.
• Down/Down alternative: A softer, more traditional pillow-like experience that's better suited for relaxing than for structured overnight support.

Fixed vs. adjustable designs: One-piece foam wedges offer simple support at a fixed incline, while adjustable models use removable foam inserts or pillow-top layers to fine-tune the elevation. Choose an adjustable wedge if you're unsure which height is most comfortable or want to adjust the incline for different uses, but keep in mind that unused inserts require additional storage.

Cover quality and maintenance: Look for removable, machine-washable covers with long, wide-opening zippers that are easy to put on and take off. Since wedge pillows are used every night and exposed to body heat and hair oils, ease of laundering is essential. Breathable cover materials like organic cotton or bamboo-derived rayon help offset foam heat retention

Material safety certifications: Verify third-party testing credentials. These certifications don't determine comfort; they can provide reassurance about how the materials were made.

• CertiPUR-US: Ensures memory foam is made without ozone depleters, heavy metals, or toxic flame retardants.
• GOLS (Global Organic Latex Standard) & GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard): Guarantees organic material integrity from harvest to manufacturing.

Trial periods and return policies: Incline sleeping requires an adjustment period, so we prioritize brands offering at least a 30-day trial in case you need to exchange it for a different height or firmness.

How we tested the best wedge pillows

I tested each wedge pillow over multiple weeks, sleeping on each for at least five nights and using it during the day for reading, watching TV, or relaxing in bed. I paid close attention to comfort, support, firmness, and whether the incline felt natural throughout the night. I tracked whether each pillow relieved or caused neck, shoulder, or lower back discomfort, and monitored thermal regulation to note any heat retention from dense foam layers.

Because body frame and sleeping style heavily influence how a wedge pillow performs, I also had my husband — who is taller and has sleep apnea — test every pillow alongside me. Comparing my experience as a 5-foot-2 individual with my husband's feedback gave me a better idea of how each pillow suits different heights, body types, and sleeping styles. While our experiences and preferences weren't always the same, it helped confirm which pillows work for a wider range of sleepers.

Finally, I evaluated construction quality, material safety certifications, and ease of maintenance. For every pillow with a removable cover, I washed it according to the manufacturer’s care instructions to evaluate zipper durability, fabric shrinkage, and how easily the cover fit back onto the foam core after washing. I also inspected each wedge for early signs of wear, including edge compression, loose seam stitching, and cover pilling.

Meet the expert behind the guide

Suzy Hernandez, certified sleep science consultant and former sleep lab manager: For this guide, she tested each wedge pillow over multiple weeks and consulted two physicians, Dr. Andrew Lederman, Chief of the Division of Physiatry at the New England Baptist Hospital, and Dr. Kevin McGuire, Division Chief of Orthopedic Spine Surgery at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, to better understand who may benefit from using a wedge pillow and what to look for when choosing one.

Wedge pillow FAQs

Can a wedge pillow help with acid reflux, snoring, or sleep apnea?

Wedge pillows may help relieve acid reflux by using gravity to help keep stomach acid down, according to Dr. Andrew Lederman. They may also improve mild snoring or congestion by slightly opening the airway. However, they are not a treatment for diagnosed sleep apnea. If you have loud snoring with pauses in breathing or experience excessive daytime sleepiness, talk to a healthcare provider rather than relying on a wedge pillow alone.

Can side sleepers use a wedge pillow?

Yes, but some wedge pillows work better than others. Dr. Kevin McGuire explained that different pillow designs support the body differently depending on your sleeping position, but the goal is to always maintain a comfortable, neutral spine. Dr. Lederman also noted that side sleepers may benefit from using an extra pillow to better support the neck. During testing, I found that softer, more contouring wedges generally felt more comfortable for side sleeping than firmer foam designs.

Do you use a regular pillow on top of a wedge?

It depends on the wedge pillow and your sleeping position, but I found that adding a thin pillow on top of the wedges improved my neck support. The goal is to keep the head and neck in a comfortable, neutral position. If adding a regular pillow helps you achieve that without pushing your head too forward, it can make a wedge pillow more comfortable.

How does a wedge pillow compare with an adjustable bed?

A wedge pillow is a simple, affordable way to sleep at an incline, while the best adjustable beds offer more flexibility. According to Dr. Lederman adjustable beds allow you to easily change your sleeping position and often elevate both your head and legs, which can improve comfort for some people. A wedge pillow is a good place to start if you're curious about sleeping at an incline but aren't ready to invest in an adjustable bed.

Can a wedge pillow cause lower back or neck pain?

Yes, particularly if the wedge is too steep or doesn't support enough of your upper body. Dr. Lederman says elevating only your head can bend the neck and lead to stiffness, which is why the wedge should support the entire upper body. Dr. McGuire also recommends maintaining a comfortable, neutral spine. If your head is pushed forward or your lower back sags, the wedge may not be the right height or size. If you regularly wake up with cervical stiffness regardless of incline, explore our top picks for the best pillows for neck pain.

How do you position yourself on a wedge pillow without sliding down?

Position the wedge so it supports your upper back and shoulders rather than just your head. Lower inclines made it easier to stay in place; I didn't have an issue sliding on the 7-inch Brentwood, but I occasionally slid down the smoother Avocado wedge. Placing a pillow alongside me and under my arm helped keep me in position.