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There are two sorts of people in this world: Those who think it sounds like fun to brave the elements for hours on end to watch the ball drop at midnight in Times Square on New Years Eve, and then there’s the rest of us. Its become a time-honored tradition for millions of people to crowd into a few blocks of New York to celebrate a new year, and some new features await revelers this year. A larger ball will be dropped in the annual countdown to midnight, weighing in at 12,000-plus pounds and adorned with 5,200 crystals and LED lights. And theres some special red, white, and blue confetti among the nearly three tons to celebrate the countrys 250th anniversary. But with temperatures in New York forecasted to be near-freezing, many people will be perfectly happy to take in the festivities in their cozies at home. As an added bonus: You may catch one of those memorable and meme-worthy moments from a boozed-up host or performer. Performers this year run the gamut of musical genres and generations, from Chappell Roan to Diana Ross and Jason Aldean to 50 Cent. While channel surfers can easily switch between various programming, the festivities are as easy to stream if you’ve cut the cord. Weve rounded up some of the options to ring in the new year at home. TIMES SQUARE WEBCAST If you want a commercial-free way to feel like you’re in the thick of things, the free live stream from the organization that puts on the annual ceremony may be your best bet. The Times Square Alliance begins live streaming at 6 p.m. ET for the ball lighting and continues throughout the evening. This years stream will feature backstage access and interviews with some of the performers and other celebrities who will be in Times Square throughout the night. You can check out more details about the stream and a full schedule here. While you can live stream from a browser, at TimesSquareNYC.org, the same feed will also be available on the organization’s YouTube channel. If you’re more captivated by the ball drop than anything else, then head to TimesSquareBall.net ahead of time for some live cams of the ball before it’s dropped and gather some fun facts to delight your fellow New Year’s Eve revelers. NYE COVERAGE ON CABLE OR BROADCAST TV If you’re nostalgic for the days when Dick Clark helped you cross that threshold from one year to the next, his spirit lives on in many ways. Most major television networks have some sort of coverage planned for the festivities, from New York and beyond. ABC: Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest begins at 8 p.m. ET. While Seacrest will be helming much of the evening’s broadcast from New York, he’ll get an assist from Chance the Rapper in Chicago and Rob Gronkowski and Julianne Hough in Las Vegas. You can also stream everything on your favorite platform or at ABC.com. CBS: New Years Eve Live: Nashvilles Big Bash, hosted by Bert Kreischer and HARDY begins at 8 p.m. ET. Instead of the ball in Times Square, you’ll be treated to the Nashville Music Note Drop on this network, along with a lineup of country music artists scheduled to perform throughout the evening. As with previous years, you can also stream this event on Paramount+. CNN: New Years Eve Live with Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen begins at 8 p.m. ET. If you want to make a day of it, you can tune into CNN throughout the day for around-the-world coverage before the boozy duo kicks things off in the evening from Times Square. You can expect to hear a lot of hyping about the networks new streaming subscription platform, where you can catch all the action in addition to its apps. Fox: Jimmy Faillas All-American New Years Bash begins at 11 p.m. ET. There are hour-by-hour specials beginning at 9 p.m. ET but they mostly focus on a retrospective of the past year rather than a concert of sorts. The programming will also be available to stream online. NBC: A Toast to 2025! hosted by Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager begins at 10:30 p.m. ET. After bowing out of New Year’s Eve coverage last year, the network is back this year with a two-hour event that reunites this duo. You can also stream this event through the Peacock app. PBS: From Vienna: The New Year’s Celebration 2026. If youre not feeling woozy from the night before, you can tune into something a bit more highbrow on New Year’s Day with the annual concert from the Vienna Philharmonic at 8 p.m. ET. This event will also be available via streaming online or the PBS app.
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E-Commerce
In cities across North America, the best and most exciting public spaces can increasingly be found near the water. Park spaces on and along seashores and riverfronts are in a kind of renaissance right now, with large and small cities alike opening major waterfront parks over the past few years. 2025 was especially active. Cities brought big, ambitious park designs to the water’s edge, adding valuable recreation space, ecological services, and engines for urban regeneration. Here are four of the best waterfront parks that opened in 2025. [Photo: Randall Phillip Williams/iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus] Seattle’s Waterfront Park More than 15 years in the works, Seattle’s new park is a true reconnection of the city with its water. Once separated from downtown Seattle by the double-decker Alaskan Way Viaduct highway, the waterfront has been painfully and expensively restitched into the city after traffic was rerouted into a $3.35 billion tunnel and the surface level reconfigured as a boulevard. The park is a 1.2-mile long linear space along Elliott Bay with tendrils that spread perpendicularly into the city grid. It also connects tourist attractions like Pike Place Market, the Seattle Aquarium, and Pioneer Square with historic docks, new playgrounds, and a bicycle and pedestrian lane that wraps around the bay. After being officially open for just over a month, the park won one of the most prestigious prizes in urban parks. It stands to rewrite how the city interacts with and embraces its scenic shore. [Photo: Vid Ingelevics and Ryan Walker/courtesy Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates] Toronto’s Biidaasige Park What was once an industrial wasteland immediately adjacent to downtown Toronto has been carefully transformed into a re-naturalized waterfront park that’s laying the foundation for a dramatic urban redevelopment. The first phase of the nearly 100-acre Biidaasige Park opened in 2025 and has undone more than a century of environmental damage. Industrial development in the area led to a large-scale filling project, turning the mouth of the adjacent Don River and its surrounding wetlands into a channelized outpouring surrounded by concrete. A design by the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates tore out much of that concrete and allowed the river to reclaim its historic course, while building a new island where much of the park’s recreation amenities now stand. The team designed the park and the re-naturalized wetland to prevent flooding that has increasingly affected the area. The $1.4 billion project persevered through several delays since its origins in 2007, but is now becoming one of the city’s most used public spaces. Next, the city will build out more park space, as will an urban element of the project. Soon there will be upwards of 15,000 people living on the island, adding to the park’s already substantial user base. [Photo: Battery Park City Authority] New York’s Wagner Park The terraced walkways and broad grassy field on the recently rebuilt Wagner Park at the tip of Lower Manhattan are low-key feats of urban flood protection. The park’s site has been engineered by AECOM to double as an 18-foot-tall flood wall, protecting the edge of New York City from storm surges and rising sea levels. Most people probably won’t realize that the park now sits 10 feet higher than it once did, thanks to elegantly sloping walkways that climb up from the water to a grassy peak. Hiding beneath that grass is another part of the park’s flood protection: a 63,000-gallon stormwater cistern that can hold the onrush of rainwater during a big storm before slowly releasing it into the city’s system once the heaviest rains have passed. While the park’s flood protection elements are what make it a model to follow, it’s also a space designed for people to use. A new community space and pavilion make room for events, and a native garden brings additional green space to a dense part of the city. With front row views of the Statue of Liberty, the site’s natural attraction can now outweigh its natural risk. [Photo: Nadir Ali for Detroit Riverfront Conservancy] Detroit’s Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Centennial Park Covering 22 acres and connecting a key stretch of a 5.5-mile continuous walkway along the Detroit River, the new $80 million Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Centennial Park fills several important gaps in Detroit. Running along a downtown-adjacent stretch of the river that has seen increased investment in its once contaminated edges, the park adds more space to a growing riverfront walk, while also adding to a 27-mile trail loop that runs through the city. The park also brings recreational space to a part of the city where quality public open space is lacking. Also designed by landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the park turned a lackluster industrial-site-turned-grass-field into a regional destination, with world-class playgrounds and recreational facilities, and a unique natural water element that redirects flows from the river to create a rare water habitat that urban visitors can experience up close. Filling a crucial missing piece of Detroit’s Riverwalk, the park is situated with sparkling views of the city’s downtown and its two international bridges, and was designed for both active and passive uses, and intended to draw crowds from across the region and across the age spectrum. “We wanted the park to have things in it that the range of members of a family would need to have to go to the park and spend some serious time there,” Van Valkenburgh told Fast Company ahead of the park’s opening. Luring crowds and solving urban problems, this space will serve as a precedent other waterfront parks look to follow.
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This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. NotebookLM is the most useful free AI tool of 2025. It has twin superpowers. You can use it to find, analyze, and search through a collection of documents, notes, links, or files. You can then use NotebookLM to visualize your material as a slide deck, infographic, report even an audio or video summary.Subscribe How to set up a notebook Pick a purpose. Start a new notebook for a work project or a learning goal. Examples: I created a notebook to organize materials for the new online bilingual MA program were developing at the CUNY Newmark Grad School of Journalism where I work. I also set up a notebook to learn more about Gustav Mahler, a composer I revere. I have numerous others for work and personal projects. Find sources for your notebook. NotebookLM recently added a search panel to help you discover high-quality sources. You decide which, if any, of the suggested materials to add to your notebook. The Fast Research is quick and focused, unlike a generic Google search that returns hundreds of results, some of which have gamed the search engine system. Fast Research surfaces 10 or so documents related to your topic in less than 30 seconds. You can ask it to find sources within your Google Drive, or from the Web. The Deep Research prompt option in the same panel will more slowly gather many more sources. Tip: make your query as specific as possible to surface relevant, useful sources. Heres an example of a concise, precise query I used. Add your own materials. Upload files up to 200 MB and 500,000 words into your notebook. You can add: Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets PDFs, images (including photos of your handwritten notes), and Microsoft Word documents YouTube links and audio, image, or video files (it extracts the transcript) Website URLs (it extracts the text) No other AI tool Ive used lets you compile as many different kinds of materials in a centralized AI workspace thats easy to explore and build with. Free accounts can create up to 100 notebooks, with 50 sources in each. On a free plan, you may run into limits when creating multimedia materials. You can run free 10 Deep Research queries a month. Students in the U.S. 18 or older can get pro access for free. Pro accounts, which cost $20/month as part of Google AI Pro, can host 500 notebooks with 300 sources in each. They can run 20 Deep Research queries a day. Collaborate and share NotebookLM now lets you collaborate as you would with Google Docs. You can choose to invite people as viewers or editors. Give them a full view of your sources and notes, or limit their access to the search/chat interface. You can also publish notebooks publicly. Here are some examples: Trends in health, wealth and happiness by Our World in Data How to build a life, from The Atlantic Shakespeares Complete Plays Parenting Advice for the Digital Age, by Jacqueline Nesi, PhD of Techno Sapiens Earnings Reports for the Worlds 50 Biggest Companies Secrets of the Super Agers by Eric Topol Explore your materials As you add materials, NotebookLM analyzes them and suggests relevant questions. After I uploaded biographical material about Mahler, it suggested search queries based on the source documents about why he converted to Catholicism and what poetry collections inspired him. You can also ask any question on your mind or type in any kind of traditional search query. NotebookLM uses natural language processing to make sense of your documents. When you type in a query, the system understands what youre looking for. When I queried about the death of Mahlers loved ones, I didnt have to mention their names or even their relationship to him NotebookLM understood what I was asking. These exploratory searches are more powerful than old-fashioned keyword searches, which only work if an exact word combination appears in your document. NotebookLM makes it easy to run abstract queries as well, searching for moments of anger or surprise. Tip: target specific sources. You can use the checkboxes next to each source to limit your search to particular documents. This precision is handy when you want to search within a specific report or compare information across just two or three key documents. Visualize information Use the Studio tab to create shareable reports, slides, graphics, and multimedia out of your notebook material. Unlike other AI tools, NotebookLMs creations are grounded in your source documents they dont pull from the Web or generic training data. Because they draw only from your source material, the creations will change as you add more to your notebook, or if you mark only a subset of sources to be used. Create a mind map first to get an overview of the topics covered in a notebook. Then create the following elements to understand and share your material. Infographics Create polished visual summaries. Choose whether you want a landscape, portrait, or square image, and how simple or detailed it should be. Then type in an optional custom prompt to guide the design. You can include instructions about your preferred color palette, target audience, illustration style, and the kinds of numbers or facts to prioritize. I generated this infographic with NotebookLM A caveat: NotebookLM consistently produces clean, readable text. Its mostly accurate, but Ive encountered occasional errors. Heres an example: Mahlers age of death is wrong at the bottom of this NotebookLM infographic. Slide decks NotebookLMs newest capability generating slide decks continues to surprise me. When I ask it to make slides summing up notebook material it comes up with outstanding results, like this slide deck about Mahler. You can choose between detailed standalone slides, or simpler TED-style presenter slides meant to accompany a verbal presentation. As with the infographic tool, you can just press the slide deck button to let NotebookLM decide what to generate. But youll get something more relevant to you if you write a prompt to guide the visual style and subject matter focus. The slides include a small NotebookLM watermark in the bottom right corner. Below is an example of a slide deck about NotebookLM I created with NotebookLM. A caveat: In my testing, the slides have been clean and visually engaging. Theyre not perfect, though. A deck about our new bilingual journalism program, for example, included misleading AI-generated images of our faculty members. Video overviews Create a video summary of the material in your notebook. Think of it as an AI-narrated slide show. Fortunately, theres no talking avatar. I like how these videos include facts, examples, quotes, and images pulled directly from your source documents. Choose between a brief video (1-2 minutes) or a longer explainer (often six to 10 minutes). You cant specify the exact length. Tailor the approach to your viewers with a prompt. You can even specify a specific audience, whether board members of a charity youre presenting to, or grandchildren new to your subject matter. Videos can take five to 10 minutes to generate. Free accounts can generate only a few videos, slide decks, or infographics per notebook before hitting a usage limit. When your video or other creation is ready, you can download and share it, or view it within your notebook. Heres a video overview of NotebookLM I created with NotebookLM Podcasts NotebookLMs audio overviews became Internet famous for their remarkably human-sounding conversations. When I played a clip for a group of students when this feature launched, they didnt realize the speakers werent human. Example: Heres a new Deep Dive audio piece I generated about NotebookLM for this post. You can write a brief or detailed prompt to guide the style of the audio, and you can choose from multiple formats. After a few minutes, the audio file is ready for you to download and share. Tip: add an AI-generated label to this kind of audio or any other material you create with NotebookLM. That way people will know where it came from and wont assume you created each detail from scratch. You can generate audio pieces from a subset of your documents or your full collection of sources. Here are the four kinds of audio you can generate, with an example of each: Debate. Heres an audio debate I prompted NotebookLM to create about which of its features are most useful. Critique. Heres a critique of NotebookLM I generated from 19 sources I added. Brief summary. Heres a 90-second audio overview. Deep dive. Heres a deep dive NotebookLM explainer. You can now customize the audio overviews you generate with NotebookLM Text reports In addition to multimedia, you can generate custom reports. The reports tend to be around 2,000 to 3,000 words, or six to 12 pages. Here are example reports generated by NotebookLM: an advanced guide to NotebookLM and a guide to integrating NotebookLM in a newsroom. Ive found the dozens of reports Ive generated to be thorough enough to be useful for reference or learning. They also help point to sources worth exploring further. Try prompting NotebookLM to create the following kinds of reports: Timelines: Organize chronological information FAQs: Common questions and answers about your topic Explainers: Break down complex concepts Teaching guides: Useful if youre an educator or lead workshops Student handbooks: Supplemental resources Critiques: Analysis of weaknesses or limitations in your sources Debate reports: Multiple perspectives on controversial topics Flashcards and quizzes When learning something new, create flashcards or quizzes with multiple-choice questions to test yourself. Describe your level of understanding (e.g. Im new to this, or Im a professional in this field, but Im new to this framework,). Choose whether you want small or large numer of questions or flashcards. Specify concepts you want the quiz or flashcards to focus on. You can also ask NotebookLM to focus on a particular source, like a certain link, PDF, or video youve uploaded. Example: Check out my NotebookLM flashcards. 5 Projects to Try 1. Organize a work project Each time you add a file, NotebookLM summarizes it. Its full text is then searchable with citations, so you know youre not getting AI hallucinations. To assemble a useful notebook, gather relevant documents, including: Plans, internal reports, or project memos Links to relevant sites Meeting recordings or transcripts Important emails copied and pasted or saved as PDFs or docs Background reports, company manuals, or competitive research Use your project notebook to: Create summary reports or timelines to onboard new team members Draft slide decks for internal meetings Make infographics to visually summarize complex processes or workflows Quickly find relevant quotes, stats, anecdotes, or examples Refresh your memory when returning to the project later on 2. Plan a trip I create travel notebooks to help me find relevant family activities and ideas for outings. Ive done this before with Perplexity and other AI platforms, but I like the way NotebookLM lets me gather so many different kinds of inputs: links, videos, articles, and local guideseverything I might want to reference when planning weekend activities or hosting visitors. You can find these kinds of resources with a Google or Perplexity search, or do the whole process within NotebookLM. For travel planning, compile these materials: Historical and cultural information Entertainment guides and reviews Restaurant recommendations Local blog posts, event listings, or links to top attractions Then ask NotebookLM to generate: Itineraries FAQs about your destination Recommendations based on your budget or other constraints Slide decks or infographics to share with your travel companions Flashcards for learning key phrases if youre traveling abroad Quiz games to play at the airport while waiting in line 3. Learn something Heres a meta use-case: I created a notebook about NotebookLM to help me learn about its nooks and crannies. (Try the quiz about NotebookLM it created for me.) I made another one about deliberative dialogue to learn more about tactics for encouraging civil discourse between people who violently disagree. NotebookLM generated this detailed infographic based on 19 sources To build a learning notebook: Upload relevant YouTube videos, articles, and course materials. Use the Add Sources panel to add docs from your Google Drive or the Web. Generate mind maps, quizzes, and flashcards to test your understanding. Create audio guides to learn while exercising, cleaning, or commuting. Prompt for timelines, FAQs, explainers, infographics, and slide decks tailored to your knowledge level and learning goals. Tip: break large documents into smaller pieces NotebookLM uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for search. That keeps it grounded in your material and avoids hallucination. But it also means that when asked to quickly search gigantic documents, NotebookLM may have the capacity to scour only a subset of your source material. To avoid searches that miss important material, consider breaking enormous documents into smaller pieces and narrowing your searches to specific sources or more precise subjects. 4. Compile reference guides Build notebooks to help you handle recurring tasks. Grant writing. Compile successful applications, guidelines, or evaluation criteria. Social posts. Gather style guides, brand guidelines, and examples of past posts that have worked well for you or competitors. Technical documentation. Assemble specs, organizational rules, or industry best practices. Customer research. Add past surveys, interview transcripts, analytics reports, or testimonials. Tip: as a first step, strip names and emails from surveys or interviews to protect respondents privacy. 5. Manage home projects Create notebooks for life outside of work. NotebookLM is great for this because unlike other AI tools, it lets you input so many different kinds of sources with huge file sizes, whether you have videos, audio files, PDFs, your own handwritten notes, links to various sites, or Google Drive files. Recipe collections and guides to various cooking techniques Home improvement projects with how-to articles and product reviews Hobby research for woodworking, guitar, photography, or gardening Why NotebookLM stands out Unlike AI assistants designed around an open-ended chat box, NotebookLM is structured around a more familiar paradigm: a searchable notebook. The closest parallels are Claude Projects or ChatGPT Projects, which allow you to organize documents in a folder that can inform AI queries on those services. Perplexity Spaces is also useful for organizing related search threads. But none of those can generate NotebookLMs full range of outputs, and each draws on its own training data as well as your sources. NotebookLMs citation system means you can trust its search results, because you can see the cited section in your original document. And its unique in being able to generate everything from audio and video to reports, slides and infographics from your source materials. Note: Citations arent provided within infographics, slide decks, video or audio overviews. If there are tidbits from those you want to trace back to a source, summarize the fact or detail in question in NotebookLMs explore tab the chat window to ask for a citation. The free tier is powerful enough for most people. And it keeps improving, adding significant new capabilities every couple of months. The bottom line: if I were forced to recommend a single AI tool for many different kinds of readers, Id pick NotebookLM. This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.
Category:
E-Commerce
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