Lifehacker

Funny, stirring, weird, embarrassing: There are all sorts of reasons to love an acceptance speech. The greatest sin one can commit in giving one isn’t, as some seem to think, forgetting to thank your agent: it’s being boring. We love to be moved and inspired by a speech, no question, but an off-color joke, a lost…Read more...

Do you have something you’re always forgetting to bring on your travels? For a while I was always forgetting to bring a purse on work trips—I always had a laptop bag, but who wants to carry that just to go out to dinner?—and I keep forgetting to bring a screwdriver when I go camping, to detach the little handle my…Read more...

With food costs rising, many people are contemplating starting a garden. This makes sense, since human beings have been growing their own food for thousands of years. The stuff just comes out of the ground and literally grows on trees. Gardening offers a lot of benefits: It can be spiritually and emotionally…Read more...

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Running a restaurant requires a lot of hard work—hard work that’s only gotten harder in recent years with rising labor costs, supply chain difficulties, and the impact of a little thing known as the global pandemic, aka the Era of Staying Home and Learning How to Make Your Own Bread and Fancy Meals. And all of this is…Read more...

Parenting can be a full-contact sport, from the early days of trying to prevent your toddler from falling off playground equipment to tending to your teenager’s busted elbow after they (unsuccessfully) attempt a new skateboard trick. As much as you try to keep your kids in one piece, there is going to be blood—and…Read more...

If you’re interested in spending more time in the yard this summer, but need to increase your shaded areas to make it more cool and comfortable, a shade sail might be for you. Unlike a roof, a shade sail is intended to let air circulate through it while providing a cooler spot. Shade sails are also removable, making…Read more...

Growing your own food is immensely satisfying—but only when you get a crop that’s delicious, plentiful, or definitely worth the effort. It’s a different story when you’ve spent all summer doting on a single eggplant that turns out to not even be that good. To know where to focus your gardening efforts, here are the…Read more...

I like to knit, sew, and do assorted crafts. So, for a long time, I was a big fan of the Jo-Ann flyers that would come in the mail. There would always be at least one really valuable coupon, giving you 40% off any full price item, which I would usually save for a big cut of fabric. But you couldn’t use it if your…Read more...

At the time of this writing, Elden Ring has sold more than 12 million copies, putting it in the rarified ranks of the top-selling video games normally dominated by massive mainstream franchises like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and Madden. That’s an impressive feat for FromSoftware—a development studio whose…Read more...

Alcohol has its time and place. Most of former are with friends (although a solo wine night is dreamy), and most of the latter are in a glass or, occasionally, a saucepan. Yet while imbibing spirits and cooking with a splash of wine are wonderfully traditional, baking with booze doesn’t get enough attention. This is…Read more...

What is the United States anyway? Sure, it’s a nation made up of 50 states that covers a good deal of a continent. But as my fifth grade social studies textbook would have you believe, it’s also made up of a righteous people with a common history and a shared set of beliefs and ideals that include truth, justice, and…Read more...

Not entirely unlike Inside Out a few years back, the new Pixar film Turning Red stars a character confronting her own adolescence and the physical and emotional horrors of puberty. Without going into depressing detail, it has generated controversy for a number of truly dumb reasons.Read more...

If you’ve ever been around kids for any length of time, you’ve surely asked yourself: Why, why on Earth, would a person eat the inner contents of their disgusting nose? The most basic answer is: Kids are gross, and they do gross things. But more specifically, in the words of a child I know (I’ll never say who): “I eat…Read more...

There was a time—and not so long ago—when catching all the movies vying for Academy Awards before the statues were handed out basically necessitated living in a big city rife with art house theaters and spending a small fortune on tickets. But no more: Thanks to the rise of streaming and the effects of COVID, windows…Read more...

When it comes to landing—and holding onto—a job these days, much of the conventional wisdom you learned growing up has been rendered irrelevant. Forget the advice that you have to keep your personal and professional lives totally separate; what’s the protocol for following your boss back on Instagram?

The term “brain fog” can mean many different things, from the afternoon sleepiness you get after a bad night of sleep to the short-term memory loss associated with dementia. Generally speaking, brain fog can consist of memory problems, an inability to focus, or a lack of mental clarity. Although brain fog isn’t a…Read more...

None of us expected we’d have as many conversations about toilet paper as we have since the beginning of the pandemic, when stock shortages and mad rushes made TP a hot commodity. In the chaos, you may have even considered alternatives, from bamboo paper to bidets, or you might be considering switching now.

When Nintendo dropped The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time back in 1996, the gaming world was irrevocably changed. The 3D action-adventure title revolutionized the genre, inspiring a whole new generation of games. While the game is still a banger in 2022 (it just launched on Switch late last year as part of the…Read more...

Whether you rent your home or are in the market to buy, there’s hasn’t been any good news about availability or affordability in a long time. Purchase prices have shot to record highs, and rent has seen double-digit growth every month for the last seven months, up 17.1% in February 2022 over the previous year, …Read more...

For my money, Russian Doll is one of the best original series Netflix has ever produced: a perfectly formed jewel of a miniseries crafted around one of my favorite fiction tropes (time loops rule) and anchored by an irresistible comeback performance from star/writer/co-creator Natasha Lyonne.

Tweets have consequences. Just last week a writer revealed he was denied a job opportunity for a tweet about wanting to “burn down” Whole Foods. The clearly facetious arson tweet in question? It was posted over three years ago.

Our national return to the office means a return to all the little indignities we thought we’d left in the pre-pandemic days. The barista hands you your coffee and as you head out, you sip it and discover they got your order wrong, but you’re running too late to go back. There are no open seats on the train, so you…Read more...

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Moving is physically and emotionally challenging for even the most adaptable of us and even in the best of circumstances; for kids, it can be especially hard. It disrupts their everyday routines and separates them from their friends—and they have little (or no) control over the situation. Plus, they’re probably among…Read more...

Windows offers multiple ways to take screenshots, but if you’re someone who takes a lot of them, the built-in tools probably don’t offer enough—things like scrolling screenshots, fixed time intervals, and cloud uploads.

Rich people have financial advisors who profit only if their clients make money, but if you don’t have a portfolio worth $50,000 or more, you probably turn to the internet for advice. More than a third of Americans do just that, and 60% of them actually act on what they see online. But, man, it’s a jungle out there.

A slightly spicy radish, served with a smear of butter and some flaky salt, is one of my favorite vegetable-based snacks. Crisp, fresh, and rich all at once, it is a perfect springtime bite. The root is so delightful, it’s easy to forget about the greens up top, but those greens deserve your attention too, especially…Read more...

No matter your age, you’ve seen a lot of technological changes in your lifetime—not to mention changes in the natural world, like climate change. But sometimes things change without us realizing. Here are 10 things that used to be very different than they are today—and you probably never noticed.

It’s impossible for me to walk over a bridge without thinking “I’m going to chuck my phone into the water.” Luckily, I’ve never acted on this involuntary “intrusive thought.” And since I’m online all the time, I know I’m not alone in finding the humor in this sort of intrusive thought. It’s trendy to use the term to…Read more...

Whether your health insurance is offered to you by an employer or you get it through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, most plans use the same words to describe exactly what you’re entitled to. Like filing your taxes or fixing a flat tire, health insurance terminology is one of those necessary pieces of knowledge…Read more...

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As the price of gas rises, everyone is thinking more about the fuel they put into their cars, but you probably already knew that there are usually two kinds of fuel available at your local gas station: gasoline and diesel.

If you’ve tried to buy a car recently, you know that they are now apparently made out of a combination of pure gold and rare earth minerals, and shopping for even a modest pre-owned vehicle is a stressful financial transaction on par with house-hunting. But at least buying a new (or relatively new car) spares you the…Read more...

TikTok is fun. TikTok is addictive. TikTok is…risky? There’s a lot of debate about the app’s privacy and security, especially with its parent company, ByteDance, operating out of Beijing. The previous White House administration very nearly banned the app from U.S. markets. I’m not sure how much of my TikTok data is…Read more...

Core strength is important: We use it when we carry a bag of groceries, get up from the floor, push open a door, or punch a punching bag. But too often, we think of “core” training as something done specifically with crunches or planks. And that’s a shame, because our cores do so much more.

One of the nice things about going to a bar (or bars) is that they have all the stuff. The good ice, the fancy cherries, the perfect strips of lemon zest—these things are ready and waiting to be deployed. Buying a jar of cherries is easy, but peeling thin strips of zest off of a citrus fruit is tedious.Read more...

If your weekend (or weekday) breakfasts typically involve waffles or pancakes made using a mix (no judgement here), you may want to reconsider your menu. That’s because certain buttermilk pancake and waffle mixes sold in Kroger and Walmart locations across the country are being recalled “due to a potential foreign…Read more...

When budgeting time and money for your kitchen renovation, set a bit of both aside specifically for your countertops. Counters are notoriously expensive to replace—but they stick out like a sore thumb if outdated and left as-is. If you have out-of-style, scratched, stained, or dull countertops that need a little…Read more...

When you search “gift registry,” all of the results assume you’re getting married or having a child. A recent tweet, however, went viral for pointing out that there are many causes worthy of gift registry that have nothing to do with weddings or babies. (Here’s the registry that inspired the tweet, by the way).…Read more...

Every major update since Windows 8 has come with a major redesign of the Start menu, and Windows 11 is no exception. This time, though, Microsoft went rather radical: The taskbar is centered, the Start menu is devoid of live tiles, and there are only two sections—pinned apps, and recommendations.Read more...

Life is full of etiquette blunders—some small and inconsequential, some large and egregious. We were all raised differently, with varying ideas of what’s “polite.” We recently posted a story about a woman who was invited to dinner at her friend’s place and then received a surprise Venmo request for the penne alla…Read more...

You can be forgiven for not understanding human behavior very well. People are complicated, and it’s hard to understand why we do what we do, especially since the answer is likely due to a trick our minds are playing on us. Simply eliminating the variables necessary to test a hypotheses about the cause of even the…Read more...

iPhone and Android smartphones have made it easy to talk in emojis and GIFs. They come built-in to the keyboard with a dedicated button—Android even has GIF search built directly into Gboard. But when you shift to working on your Mac or Windows PC, you might think you lose out on that ease. But actually, both Mac and…Read more...

We all know Instagram isn’t really good for anyone—but it’s especially not good for teenagers. Facebook’s own data (made public last fall, before Meta was a thing) showed Instagram’s negative mental health impacts on teen users, though some say the broader research doesn’t support such clear conclusions.

Pizza is an undeniable crowd-pleaser. The basic ingredients can be adjusted to fit a variety of palates and dietary needs, and it can be sliced into small or large servings to fit the size of your pizza party. It’s basically made to share with friends. It’s also ubiquitous—you can find great pizza at upscale…Read more...

We’ve discussed the most overrated exercises—a list that includes some extremely popular ones, like bicep curls and banded squats. Today it’s time for the opposite: Behold, a list of the most underrated exercises that maybe you should give another try (or a first try).Read more...

The anonymity of the internet has always brought out the worst in people. For some reason, losers enjoy taking out their disappointment with their own miserable lives on others trying to enjoy some well-deserved free time. This latest example comes in the form of Elden Ring, as hackers have figured out a way to crash…Read more...

Although Venmo and other money-sharing apps have been mainstream for years, there’s still some grey area when it comes to cost-splitting etiquette. On one hand, it’s fantastic that the friend who never carries cash has no excuse not to pay their fair share of the dinner bill, all but eliminating the song-and-dance of…Read more...

No one has ever described me as “subtle” or “restrained,” and I have a tendency to gravitate towards flavor profiles that are as strong and (sometimes) as polarizing as my personality. I like lots of salt, acid, umami, and those beautiful dark, roasty flavors brought out by the Maillard reaction, but I am still quite…Read more...