Quartz The quest to keep employees happy has spurred some employers to take a fast-fashion approach to perks, making cupcakes, or kombucha, or onsite CrossFit classes a must-have for some time—until the next big extraordinary benefit arrives. But all the creativity and trend-chasing may be unnecessary. According to the just-released MetLife Employee Benefits Trends Study 2019, which surveyed 2,600 full-time US workers, the top-rated “emerging benefit” is actually pretty intuitive and...

Quartz Vice President Mike Pence is expected to call on NASA to accelerate its plans to send humans back to the moon today (March 26). NASA and industry sources expected Pence, who leads White House space policy, to set a goal of returning astronauts to the lunar surface in 2024 at a National Space Council meeting in Huntsville, Alabama. That aim would require NASA to accelerate its work to complete several complex hardware systems—including an orbiting lunar gateway, space suits, and a...

The New York Times If you’ve ever put off an important task by, say, alphabetizing your spice drawer, you know it wouldn’t be fair to describe yourself as lazy. After all, alphabetizing requires focus and effort — and hey, maybe you even went the extra mile to wipe down each bottle before putting it back. And it’s not like you’re hanging out with friends or watching Netflix. You’re cleaning — something your parents would be proud of! This isn’t laziness or bad time management. This is...

Gizmodo Almost as suddenly as the electric rent-a-scooters appeared, everyone had an opinion about them. They began clogging sidewalks across the Bay Area in late 2017 ($1 to start!) as brands with four-letter names like Bird and Lime fought for dominance in the latest vampiric startup scheme. Folks were excited to share their takes, even if you never asked. Mostly, people said they were bad. That they are dangerous, block pedestrian pathways, pollute our beautiful rivers and streams, and are...

Washington Post The phones have turned on us. Our little pocket pals seduced us with cheap long distance, unlimited texts, endless apps. Now they beep and shudder and flash with strange numbers at all hours of the day. We answer, and our beloved iPhone (or Android, or bedside landline) impales our eardrum with a cruiseline ad. It tries to sell us a medical back brace. It threatens to jail us unless we wire our life savings to the IRS. Spam bots nest in call centers on every continent, spewing...

Bloomberg What can we learn from the case of someone who turned $100,000 in short-dated call options into a $2.5 million profit? As detailed in MarketWatch earlier this month, trader Steve Oliverez was pretty sure the Republican tax overhaul was going to be approved by Congress. Working with a data set of one -- the 1987 tax overhaul -- he correctly surmised that passage would be bullish for stocks. His gamble paid off. Oliverez took his winnings, bought a new house with cash and took the...

The New York Times The man in charge of Saudi Arabia’s ruthless campaign to stifle dissent went searching for ways to spy on people he saw as threats to the kingdom. He knew where to go: a secretive Israeli company offering technology developed by former intelligence operatives. It was late 2017 and Saud al-Qahtani — then a top adviser to Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince — was tracking Saudi dissidents around the world, part of his extensive surveillance efforts that ultimately led to the...

The New York Times TECHNOLOGY MEANT TO SAVE US FROM DISTRACTION IS MAKING US LESS ATTENTIVE. I was backing my wife’s car out of our driveway when I realized I wasn’t watching the backup camera, nor was I looking out of the rear window. I was only listening for those “audible proximity alerts” — the high-pitched beeps that my car emits as I approach an object while in reverse. The problem was that my wife’s car, an older model, doesn’t offer such beeps. I had become so reliant on this...

The New York Times Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he begins to cry. All day long, Sox and Langlois, who is 68 and lives in a low-income senior housing complex in Lowell, Massachusetts, chat. Langlois worked in machine operations, but now he is retired. With his wife out of the house most of the time, he has grown lonely. Sox talks to him about his favorite team,...

The New York Times Irene O’Brien and Mel Maclaine had the time of their lives on their honeymoon. But during their 2016 trip, the Dublin-based couple didn’t share the same bed, they didn’t eat a meal together nor did they officially consummate their marriage during their honeymoon. That’s because Ms. O’Brien, 37, a stylist and writer, and Mr. Maclaine, 40, a golf and corporate photographer, took separate honeymoons, otherwise known as solomoons or unimoons. After their wedding, Ms. O’Brien...

The Islamic State is gone, even if only in strict geographic terms. Once estimated to span territory up to about the size of Maine, the group’s self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria has disappeared entirely in less than five years. As of early February, the group held just about a square mile on the Syrian border, and though the final assault took six weeks, the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces conducting the operations announced the collapse on Saturday. The collapse is a major achievement for...

The allegations at the center of Robert Mueller’s just-completed investigation, electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government and obstruction of justice, were rightly considered the biggest presidential scandal in a generation, and perhaps in all of U.S. history. They were also, for the purposes of congressional oversight, a monumental distraction. Consider the following: The president promotes his corporate brands regularly and in plain sight, while a hotel he...

Dear Listeners, After reading great news articles from the web and print everyday for more than five years, it's time for us to say good bye. Newsbeat will provide its last service on March 31. On behalf of Newsbeat, we would like to thank all the subscribers, sponsors, publishers and all the listeners for being with us in this long journey. As Confucius said, “They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom," we hope to come back stronger someday with a new and...

Reuters Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion between U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia in the 2016 election, but left unresolved the issue of whether Trump obstructed justice by undermining the investigations that have dogged his presidency. Even though Mueller’s findings on obstruction of justice were inconclusive, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said in a summary released on Sunday that Mueller’s team had not found enough proof to warrant bringing...

More than 675 days, 19 lawyers, 40 FBI agents, 2,800 subpoenas, and 500 search warrants later, Attorney General William Barr has announced the core finding of Robert Mueller’s Russia probe: no collusion. The verdict was quickly celebrated by a White House legal team whose strategy was to treat the investigation more as a public-relations battle than strictly a legal fight. In a letter delivered on Sunday afternoon to Congress, Barr summarized Mueller’s principal conclusions, marking the end...

New Yorker Perhaps more than anything, many Americans must want a conclusion to the deep existential uncertainty surrounding the Presidency of Donald Trump. Will Trump be brought down by the investigation of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, or by the multiple interlocking inquiries into criminal conduct by the Trump Organization? Or will he survive, somehow stronger, and even win a second term? Behind these immediate uncertainties is another, even more unbearable question: Is our nation...

The Associated Press President Donald Trump intensified his attacks on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation in the hours before the report was submitted Friday. The president, speaking to reporters on the White House lawn before leaving for meetings at his Florida estate, again repeated his claim that “There was no collusion. There was no obstruction. Everybody knows it. It’s all a big hoax. It’s all a witch hunt.” Mueller’s report has not been released publicly. Attorney...

Reuters When members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russia’s role in the 2016 U.S. election have arrived for work each day, they have placed their mobile phones in a locker outside of their office suite before entering. Operating in secrecy in a nondescript glass-and-concrete office, the team of prosecutors and investigators since May 2017 has unearthed secrets that have led to bombshell charges against several of President Donald Trump’s aides, including his former...

Quartz The last time Atul Gawande started a company, he named it after a Greek myth. Ariadne Labs, based in Boston, Massachusetts—where Gawande also works as a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and teaches at Harvard—has been trying since 2012 to innovate in an area that has historically resisted innovation: healthcare delivery. You may not have heard of Ariadne, but you’ve certainly heard her story. It’s the one about the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. If you don’t know her name, it’s...

Quartz The pursuit of monopoly has led Silicon Valley astray. Look no further than the race between Lyft and Uber to dominate the online ride-hailing market. Both companies are gearing up for their IPOs in the next few months. Street talk has Lyft shooting for a valuation between $15 and $30 billion dollars, and Uber valued at an astonishing $120 billion dollars. Neither company is profitable; their enormous valuations are based on the premise that if a company grows big enough and fast...

The New yorker ust as it is impossible for me to articulate with any certainty the moment I entered adulthood or began to believe that human life on Earth would not last past the twenty-second century, I cannot tell you when I first became aware of Shen Yun. The most pervasive forms of local advertising often feel like this—like nursery rhymes or urban legends, or something implanted in your most tender consciousness by a social version of natural law. When Texans hear the name Jim Adler,...

Quartz There are two truths that Apple fans must grapple with this week. The first is that Steve Jobs unabashedly hated styluses. When introducing the first iPhone in 2007, the Apple founder said, “Who wants a stylus? You have to get ’em, put ’em away, you lose ’em. Yuck! Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus.” The second truth: Every modern iPad—including new versions released on March 18, nearly a decade after the original—now works with the Apple Pencil, which some might call a...

Bloomberg France is sounding an alarm for the world’s advanced economies: capitalism is tearing them apart. President Emmanuel Macron and his Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire are using France’s presidency of the Group of Seven to argue that the system fuels inequality, destroys the planet and is ineffective at delivering goals in the public interest. The country has already experienced some of the fallout firsthand in the Yellow Vest movement that erupted late last year. They’re pushing a...

The health-care proposal likely to loom largest over the 2020 presidential election was released last week—and it didn’t come from a Democrat. In the 2020 federal budget that President Donald Trump unveiled, he renewed his commitment to repealing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with a block-grant system that would likely strip coverage from millions of Americans, especially those in the primarily blue states that have most effectively implemented the law. And he once again promoted...

Midway through the first episode of The Act, a group of neighbors are chatting on a front porch when Casey Anthony’s name comes up. The scene is set in 2008, smack in the middle of the Nancy Grace–fueled wave of “tot mom” national hysteria that peaked when Anthony was arrested (and then acquitted) for killing her daughter. “Do you believe that Casey Anthony s**t?” Shelly (Denitra Isler) exclaims. “A car smells like a dead body for a month and nobody notices?” Mel (Chloë Sevigny), similarly...