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The Joy of Getting Lost in a New City—And How to Maximize Your Meandering for an Amazing Trip

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This Is the Surprising Reason We Call Them Bull and Bear Markets

If it feels like every headline lately is bullish on gains or bearish on what’s next, you’re not imagining it. Between inflation squeezing wallets, interest rate hikes putting markets on edge and roller-coaster swings in tech stocks, these animal-coded market moods have been everywhere—from financial news to your group chat. They’re not just colorful metaphors; they’re steering the herd, shaping sentiment and, in many cases, moving real money. But beneath all that chatter is a question most of us rarely stop to ask: Why are we talking about money in the language of animals at all? Why not something more straightforward, like “up markets” and “down markets”? As it turns out, the story of bulls and bears isn’t just financial; it’s historical, linguistic and, at times, a little brutal. These phrases trace back centuries, long before modern Wall Street, revealing how metaphor, instinct and storytelling became baked into the way we understand money . To get a clearer read on where thes...

Is AI Really Ruining the Environment? Experts Weigh In on How Dire the Situation Actually Is 

For better or worse, artificial intelligence (AI) is inescapable. Depending on who you ask, it’s either the best technological development of our time or part of a dystopian future where robots are taking our jobs and running the show. But while everyone’s arguing about the rise of the machines, those machines are buzzing away in AI data centers, processing our queries and potentially doing some serious harm to the environment. And the number of data centers is increasing rapidly. In 2021, there were approximately 8,000 worldwide. Just five years later, that number has jumped to more than 12,000, and there’s no slowdown in sight. These centers are massive, ranging in size from 100,000 square feet to millions of square feet. (The largest in the U.S., located in Nevada, is whopping 7.75 million square feet.) With that immense size comes immense processing power—and substantial energy consumption, pollution and resource depletion, says John Oppermann, executive director of the Earth Da...

25 Earth Day Memes That Deliver the Laughs—Without the Carbon Footprint

The annual ritual Earth Day is a beautiful, annual 24-hour window where we all collectively pretend we’ve been composting this whole time. Carbon-footprint math A real hero for the Earth ! The glacier has left the building So much for that trip to the Antarctic we’d been saving for. Climate anxiety is fun Climate anxiety is real and valid, and it usually peaks at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday for no reason in particular. When you need a break, we suggest reading these Earth Day jokes instead. The biodegradable situation Biodegradable is doing a lot of heavy lifting as a word. We should probably ask more follow-up questions about the timeline. Entering my seed-packet era Nobody plans for this, and yet here we are. We’d also be happy to tell you how good discarded eggshells are for those tomato plants. Anyone? Um, anyone? I’m the king of the world! Leo would be proud. This can’t be right Well, this is depressing. Weren’t those animals totally OK when we w...

I Let Novels Guide My Travels—And It Brings Each Place (and Book!) to Life

The ideal getaway for me includes a boat, an exotic locale filled with mystery and intrigue, and a book—also full of mystery and intrigue. So I was in heaven last fall when I found myself aboard an Exodus Adventure Travels cruise, reading Agatha Christie’s iconic whodunit Death on the Nile while watching the scenery of Upper Egypt drift by as I floated down the world’s longest river. Even better than a traditional guidebook, Christie’s classic allowed me to immerse myself in Egypt in a vivid way. I would read a few chapters, then literally step into the same geography that influenced the author. The experience created a 360-degree layering of sounds, sights and smells that brought the book to life while creating new memories that were entirely my own stories to tell. It turns out travel based on books like this is a growing trend. “We have undoubtedly seen a shift away from passive sightseeing toward more meaningful, narrative-led travel,” notes Johnny Prince, co-founder and CEO o...