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The 2025 tax season is in full swing, and the number one question most people have on their minds after filing their return is, Wheres my tax refund? Thankfully, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) offers a quick and easy online tool to help you check the status of your tax refund. Heres what you need to know about the tool as well as how long it may take to receive your refund. Check your tax refund status with the IRSs Where’s My Refund? tool If youre anxious about where your refund is, theres good news: you can check its status in just a few seconds using the Where’s My Refund? tool from the IRS. Checking your refund status is pretty easy. Heres how: Go to the IRSs Where’s My Refund? tool at www.irs.gov/wheres-my-refund. Click the Check your refund button. On the refund status page, enter your Social Security Number. Next, select the tax year you are inquiring about. Now, select your filing status for the tax year you selected in the step above. Finally, enter the exact whole dollar amount of the refund you are expecting. Click the Submit button. The IRS says the tool will show you one of three results: Return Received means the agency has received your tax return and it is still processing it. Refund Approved means your refund has been approved. You will also see a date that the IRS expects to issue it by. Refund Sent means the IRS has already issued your refund. How long until I get my IRS tax refund? After receiving word that the IRS has issued your tax refund, the next question most people want answered is, When will I receive my tax refund? According to tax firm Jackson Hewitts Chief Tax Information Officer, Mark Steber, that depends on the method by which your refund is being delivered. If your refund is being delivered by direct deposit to your bank account, you should receive it in your account between 2 to 5 business days after the treasury issues the payment. If your refund is being delivered by paper check, it should be delivered to the address on the check within about 5 to 7 business days. But as Jackson Hewitts Steber points out, the IRS cannot legally send the payments for some refunds out yet. Thats because of a 2015 law known as the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes (PATH) Act. The law stipulates that if the taxpayer who files the return claims the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC), the IRS must hold the refund until after February 14. The delay is designed to help the IRS detect and prevent tax return fraud. So, even if you filed your return on the first day of this tax season, if you have claimed either one of those credits, your refund will not have been sent yet. For these people, the IRS says its Where’s My Refund? tool should show an updated status by February 22. The agency further explains that it expects most EITC/ACTC related refunds to be available in taxpayer bank accounts or on debit cards by March 3 if they chose direct deposit and there are no other issues with their tax return.
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E-Commerce
Literate in tone, far-reaching in scope, and witty to its bones, The New Yorker brought a newand much-neededsophistication to American journalism when it launched 100 years ago this month. As I researched the history of U.S. journalism for my book Covering America, I became fascinated by the magazines origin story and the story of its founder, Harold Ross. In a business full of characters, Ross fit right in. He never graduated from high school. With a gap-toothed smile and bristle-brush hair, he was frequently divorced and plagued by ulcers. Ross devoted his adult life to one cause: The New Yorker magazine. For the literati, by the literati Born in 1892 in Aspen, Colorado, Ross worked out west as a reporter while still a teenager. When the U.S. entered World War I, Ross enlisted. He was sent to southern France, where he quickly deserted from his Army regiment and made his way to Paris, carrying his portable Corona typewriter. He joined up with the brand-new newspaper for soldiers, Stars and Stripes, which was so desperate for anybody with training that Ross was taken on with no questions asked, even though the paper was an official Army operation. In Paris, Ross met a number of writers, including Jane Grant, who had been the first woman to work as a news reporter at The New York Times. She eventually became the first of Rosss three wives. Harold Ross and Jane Grant in 1926. [Photo: University of Oregon Libraries] After the armistice, Ross headed to New York City and never really left. There, he started meeting other writers, and he soon joined a clique of critics, dramatists, and wits who gathered at the Round Table in the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in Manhattan. Over long and liquid lunches, Ross rubbed shoulders and wisecracked with some of the brightest lights in New Yorks literary chandelier. The Round Table also spawned a floating poker game that involved Ross and his eventual financial backer, Raoul Fleischmann, of the famous yeast-making family. In the mid-1920s, Ross decided to launch a weekly metropolitan magazine. He could see that the magazine business was booming, but he had no intention of copying anything that already existed. He wanted to publish a magazine that spoke directly to him and his friendsyoung city dwellers whod spent time in Europe and were bored by the platitudes and predictable features found in most American periodicals. First, though, Ross had to come up with a business plan. The kind of smart-set readers Ross wanted were also desirable to Manhattans high-end retailers, so they got on board and expressed interest in buying ads. On that basis, Rosss poker partner Fleischmann was willing to stake him $25,000 to startroughly $450,000 in todays dollars. Ross goes all in In the fall of 1924, using an office owned by Fleischmanns family at 25 West 45th St., Ross got to work on the prospectus for his magazine: The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit, and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called radical or highbrow. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk. The magazine, he famously added, is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. In other words, The New Yorker was not going to respond to the news cycle, and it was not going to pander to middle America. Rosss only criterion would be whether a story was interestingwith Ross the arbiter of what counted as interesting. He was putting all his chips on the long-shot idea that there were enough people who shared his interestsor could discover that they didto support a glossy, cheeky, witty weekly. Ross almost failed. The cover of the first issue of The New Yorker, dated Feb. 21, 1925, carried no portraits of potentates or tycoons, no headlines, no come-ons. Instead, it featured a watercolor by Rosss artist friend Rea Irvin of a dandified figure staring intently through a monocle atof all things!a butterfly. That image, nicknamed Eustace Tilly, became the magazines unofficial emblem. #OTD in 1925Eustace Tilley on the very first issueCover of The New Yorker, February 21, 1925Rea Irvin#TheNewYorkerCover #ReaIrvin #EustaceTilley pic.twitter.com/SaeEZvBILO— Ron Lacy (@LRonLacy) February 21, 2024 A magazine finds its footing Inside that first edition, a reader would find a buffet of jokes and short poems. There was a profile, reviews of plays and books, lots of gossip, and a few ads. It was not terribly impressive, feeling quite patched together, and at first the magazine struggled. When The New Yorker was just a few months old, Ross almost even lost it entirely one night in a drunken poker game at the home of Pulitzer Prize winner and Round Table regular Herbert Bayard Swope. Ross didnt make it home until noon the next day and, when he woke, his wife found IOUs in his pockets amounting to nearly $30,000. Fleischmann, who had been at the card game but left at a decent hour, was furious. Somehow, Ross persuaded Fleischmann to pay off some of his debt and let Ross work off the rest. Just in time, The New Yorker began gaining readers, and more advertisers soon followed. Ross eventually settled up with his financial angel. A big part of the magazines success was Rosss genius for spotting talent and encouraging them to develop their own voices. One of the founding editors key early finds was Katharine S. Angell, who became the magazines first fiction editor and a reliable reservoir of good sense. In 1926, Ross brought James Thurber and E.B. White aboard, and they performed a variety of chores: writing casuals, which were short satirical essays, cartooning, creating captions for others drawings, reporting Talk of the Town pieces, and offering commentary. Portrait of E.B. White at work for The New Yorker Magazine circa 1955. [Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images] As The New Yorker found its footing, the writers and editors began perfecting some of its trademark features: the deep profile, ideally written about someone who was not strictly in the news but who deserved to be better known; long, deeply reported, nonfiction narratives; short stories and poetry; and, of course, the single-panel cartoons and the humor sketches. Intensely curious and obsessively correct in matters grammatical, Ross would go to any length to ensure accuracy. Writers got their drafts back from Ross covered in penciled queries demanding dates, sources, and endless fact-checking. One trademark Ross query was Who he? During the 1930s, while the country was suffering through a relentless economic depression, The New Yorker was sometimes faulted for blithely ignoring the seriousness of the nations problems. In the pages of The New Yorker, life was almost always amusing, attractive, and fun. The New Yorker really came into its own, both financially and editorially, during World War II. It finally found its voice, one that was curious, international, searching and, ultimately, quite serious. Ross also discovered still more writers, such as A.J. Liebling, Mollie Panter-Downes, and John Hersey, who was raided from Henry Luces Time magazine. Together, they produced some of the best writing of the war, most notably Herseys landmark reporting on the use of the first atomic bomb in warfare. A crown jewel of journalism Over the past century, The New Yorker had a profound impact on American journalism. For one thing, Ross created conditions for distinctive voices to be heard. For another, The New Yorker provided encouragement and an outlet for nonacademic authority to flourish; it was a place where all those serious amateurs could write about the Dead Sea Scrolls or geology or medicine or nuclear war with no credentials other than their own ability to observe closely, think clearly and put together a good sentence. Finally, Ross must be credited with expanding the scope of journalism far beyond standard categories of crime and courts, politics, and sports. In the pages of The New Yorker, readers almost never found the same content that theyd come across in other newspapers and magazines. Instead, readers of The New Yorker might find just about anything else. Christopher B. Daly is a professor emeritus of journalism at Boston University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Bowling Green, Kentucky, is known for being the city from which Corvettes roll off the production lines, and for Fruit of the Loom underwear, which is headquartered there. But the city of 76,000 could soon be known for something else: its AI-powered mass civic engagement project that is using public surveys to chart the future of the city. In the next 25 years, the county within which Bowling Green sits is set to double in size, thanks largely to the growth of nearby Nashville. Figuring out what to do about that vexes the public officials in Bowling Green and the greater Warren County. The What Could BG Be? project is an open consultation open to all residents in the area to share their hopes, dreams, and fears for the future of the area. The tech-driven consultation opens today, and runs through March 17. The insights provided by citizens will be gathered by Google’s Jigsaw team, alongside Polis, a statistical analysis company, and synthesized to try and come up with concrete conclusions the local council can pursue for the future. Bowling Green is going through this incredible transformation, Jigsaw CEO Yasmin Green tells Fast Company. Theyre doubling in size over the next 20 years. It sounds fantastic on the surface, but theres a mixed bag of emotions about whether thats going to be good or not. The data will be parsed by Jigsaws Sensemaking tools, which utilize large language models to make sense of large-scale online conversations. In an attempt to foster transparency through the whole process, all the comments, and any votes made by the public on potential options that stem from them, will be available on a website devoted to the project. The website also provides a public square for the general populace to chip in with any comments. The publishing of the comments is very important so that people can check it, says Green. A summary by definition is a lossy act. That transparency is particularly important because of the intricacies of Bowling Green, a purple city with a Republican mayor and a diverse population. City planners and public figures say there are more things that unite city folk than divide thembut it can sometimes be difficult to discern those areas of uncommon agreement in this age of partisanship. Bowling Green is kind of a microcosm of what happens around the world, says Green. You feel so much change. Theres technological disruption, immigration, the changing nature of jobs, and the economy. They are going through this change. The ultimate goal is to try and help encourage participation with civic engagement processesand to glean any ideas that could help the local community head into the future in a stronger position to address the challenges of rapid population growth and changing economic and social circumstances. I think if we can get a proof point in Bowling Green, that could be inspiring for a lot of other places to pick up, says Green.
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E-Commerce
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