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A reporter sets out to make a YouTube video about a camp that teaches kids between the ages of 6 and 13 how to become YouTube stars. It’s only natural that she taps the campers themselves as the creative directors. Throughout the video, they give the reporter tips on how to make her content really pop. Watch the resulting video here.

Thirteen-year-old Evelyn started posting get-ready-with-me style videos the summer before she entered 7th grade. She is perhaps the most infamous of today’s tween influencers, in part due to her young age. Pull back the curtain on how she rose to internet fame through cutting observations of her peers at school, and how platforms like TikTok have responded to those under 13 joining the creator economy. Read a profile of Evelyn here.

A class at Duke University called Building Global Audiences promises to teach students how to grow their social media followings, master the art of content creation, and, of course, eventually monetize it all. One writer took the class and wrote about what it was like to be a student. Read the Cosmopolitan magazine article here.

Netflix, for much of its first two decades, was very much an extension of the management philosophies of cofounder Reed Hastings. Radical candor, agility, and a hands-off approach to high-performing employees helped Netflix grow to become the biggest streaming service in the world. Hastings—who stepped down as CEO in 2023, but remains Netflix’s chairman—shares his management insights in this podcast interview.

Some of the most consequential business stories of the modern era involve intense rivalries. In this season of Wondery’s podcast Business Wars, the focus is on the competition between Netflix and Blockbuster. It was the story of an agile upstart versus an entrenched incumbent, and this nine-part series explores the key strategies and pivotal moments in the rivalry that upended the entertainment business, setting the stage for the streaming wars.

In 2006, Netflix launched an open competition for data science teams to create approaches that would best their own recommendation algorithm, offering $1M to the winners. Three years later, the prize was awarded after a group of competitors merged, developing a solution that beat Netflix's internal algorithm by more than 10%. Go inside the race that changed not only streaming entertainment, but how internet giants interact with their customers.

Insulin is a hormone released by islets of beta cells in the pancreas in response to rising blood sugar levels. Blood sugar levels increase after a meal when the body starts the process of turning food into usable fuel—meaning sugars, proteins, and other nutrient building blocks—that are then absorbed into the bloodstream via the intestines. Once blood sugar levels hit a certain point, as determined by the pancreas, insulin is released, enabling the sugar in the blood to be absorbed into hungry cells and dropping overall blood sugar levels.

Type 2 diabetics in the US are at risk of dying from low blood sugar, an epidemic traced to a decades-old, multi-million-dollar drug industry campaign encouraging an average blood sugar level below 7%. At the time, research correlated such levels with reduced risk of eye, nerve, and kidney damage and increased hypoglycemia risk. The campaign—supported by the American Diabetes Association, whose treatment guidelines are considered a gold standard—led to increased prescription dosages to meet the new treatment goal pushed by corporations, some of which remain major ADA donors.

Non-nutritive sweeteners such as stevia, sucralose, and others are increasingly replacing sugar in foods ranging from bread to canned soup. Research has revealed such sugar alternatives detrimentally impact the composition of user gut microbiomes and worsen the body's ability to regulate blood sugar. These "high-intensity" sweeteners are hundreds of times sweeter than table sugar, and some escape being labeled as artificial due to their "natural," plant-based origins.

Researchers have discovered that some animals, ranging from ants and caterpillars to birds and bats, have no stabilized gut microbiota population if any at all. This finding upends scientific expectations of the gut microbiome, which is so critical to health that some researchers consider creatures "the sum of their microbial parts." Subverting the human-centric understanding of the gut microbiome has highlighted the spectrum of possible microbe symbiosis.

An imbalance of gut microorganisms may influence the likelihood of addiction and addictive behaviors. Some of the molecules produced by the gut microbiome impact the body's production of hormones and neurotransmitters, meaning a less-than-healthy microbiome could make for worse withdrawal symptoms. A "leaky gut" could inspire brain inflammation that promotes addiction via increased activity in regions associated with threats, reward, and impulse control.

The digestive tract is a bustling city for the trillions of microorganisms that live and work there. Packed together like micro-apartment renters, the gut microbiome is home to bacteria, viruses, fungi, and more. Parts of the digestive tract are more hospitable than others, such as the stomach, whose conditions allow bacteria that can aid digestion or cause strep to flourish but is too acidic to host much else.