Author: wildgreenquest@gmail.com

American cities are choking on traffic. From Los Angeles to Chicago, Atlanta to Boston, gridlock is miserable for everyone. New York City’s Congestion Relief Zone offers a data-rich blueprint for cities willing to treat transportation as a system, rather than focusing on one form of travel at a time.  Launched in January 2025, the program charges most drivers entering Manhattan’s core business district during peak hours. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) first comprehensive evaluation report, released in January 2026, shows clear success across mobility, environment, revenue, and equity metrics. The haters are flummoxed. {“blockType”:”mv-promo-block”,”data”:{“imageDesktopUrl”:”https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/speakeasy-desktop.png”,”imageMobileUrl”:”https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/12\/speakeasy-mobile.png”,”eyebrow”:””,”headline”:”\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Urbanism Speakeasy\u003C\/strong\u003E”,”dek”:”Join Andy Boenau as…

Love that feels intense or ‘perfect’ at first isn’t always genuine. A psychologist explains two subtle relationship patterns people often only recognize in hindsight.gettyHindsight is 20/20 when it comes to love. When a relationship ends, it’s not uncommon to look back and ask yourself, “How did I miss that?” or, “Why didn’t I see it sooner?” From the outside, the warning signs can look obvious. But from inside the relationship, they rarely feel obvious at all.That’s because romantic relationships don’t arrive with means for external commentary or objective scoring. They unfold gradually, all while being shaped by your emotional investment…

Published May 21, 2026 03:00AMKey Takeaways: Getting outside may be the antidote to poor body image, according to a recent study published in May 2026. The lead researchers say that spending time in nature can boost feelings of restoration and self-compassion, which can, in turn, make people less likely to pursue unhealthy societal body standards and redirect their attention to how their bodies function in the world. In an era dominated by the rise of GLP-1 medications, viral internet trends like “looksmaxxing” (taking extreme measures to be the most attractive version of yourself), and the general sense that every inch of our…

The release of Google’s latest AI models this week at Google I/O was yet another example of the direction of travel for the generative AI revolution. Facing a user base that is increasingly burning more tokens under basic subscriptions or API access, AI companies are starting to hike prices and throttle usage. In response to those cost pressures, consumers are beginning to cut their cloth accordingly. And while frontier AI providers are releasing ever more powerful models into the world, smaller companies are advancing, too. Often based in China, these are frequently accused of copying the innovations of U.S. models…

Published May 21, 2026 03:04AM“The fishpond’s fine,” Hi‘ilei Kawelo says, just two days after back-to-back Kona low storms hit Hawai‘i in March, causing devastating flooding on the North Shore of O‘ahu and destruction throughout the islands. Kawelo is the executive director for Paepae o He‘eia, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring a more than 600-year-old Native Hawaiian fishpond on the windward side of O‘ahu.“The most recent flood event and our ability to be resilient and say, ‘Oh, the fishpond is fine,’ speaks to everybody’s work in the ahupua‘a,” which is a traditional Hawaiian land division stretching from the mountains to the…

Ralph Haupter is Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer for Small, Medium Enterprises and Channel (SME&C) at Microsoft.​Most companies are already experimenting with AI. That part is done. What separates small and medium enterprises (SMEs) now is execution. ​I see many SMEs outperforming expectations with AI. This isn’t because they have bigger budgets or deeper benches, but because they make clear choices and act on them. ​The data backs this up. Across markets, AI adoption in this segment is rising fast. OECD’s SME Digitalisation for Competitiveness reported that 39% of global SMEs now use AI applications, while generative AI…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways The reticular activating system (RAS) is a network of neurons in the brainstem that functions as an attention filter. We tell the brain what to notice and where to focus by where we put our attention.  If you focus on avoiding failure, for example, your brain surfaces evidence of failure and blinds you to opportunity. When we choose what we look for, we’re telling our RAS which specific bits are worth promoting to our awareness. The fix isn’t optimism or affirmations; it’s giving your RAS a different target — the…

Published May 21, 2026 03:30AMOn Saturday, May 2, I was walking through Camp 4 overflow parking lot in Yosemite National Park when my phone rang. “I just got ice cream, and I’m heading to El Cap Meadow to hang,” my friend Katy said. “Want to meet me there?”I told her yes, but I’d be taking the bus. There was no chance in hell I’d drive my car and risk losing my parking spot. Yosemite’s parking lots that day, the first major weekend of a nervously anticipated season with no entry limits, could reasonably be described as apocalyptic. Cars squeezed between…

I work in front of a screen. And I’ve been thinking about how AI will change my work. What does it even mean for my future? It’s completely normal to wonder about this. Most people are convinced artificial intelligence is a threat to their careers. But what they are forgetting is the human value they bring to their work. Aaron Levie, CEO of the enterprise cloud company Box, recently pointed out that when people watch AI at work, they are most likely seeing it take over the first 80% of a task—the heavy lifting of repetitive processing. The last 20%…

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways LLMs like ChatGPT will generate answers that sound authoritative but are completely wrong, if you don’t monitor it. You can make AI work for your business by using different prompts and implementing retrieval-augmented generation. Don’t forget to add guardrails and validation layers to maintain security and avoid touching sensitive data. This is the gap most companies don’t see coming. They spend months evaluating which large language model (LLM) to use (GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini) and almost no time thinking about the infrastructure that will keep it running reliably. That’s the wrong…