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Mascots are currently enjoying a renaissance. From McDonalds Grimace to the WNBAs Ellie the Elephant and Pop-Tarts Pop-Tart guy, companies everywhere are leaning on characters to represent their brand values and attract eyes on social media. Now the Trump administration is joining in with its own mascot. Its a literal lump of coal. The coal mascotnamed Coalieappears to be a new character designed to represent the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Coalie officially debuted on January 22, when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted him (it?) on his X account. In the post, which has now been viewed more than 37,000 times, Burgum shared an obviously AI-generated illustration of himself kneeling next to a grinning, bug-eyed piece of coal that’s decked out in a yellow coal miners helmet, vest, and boots. The caption, in part, read “Mine, Baby, Mine!” [Image: USDOI] A deeper exploration of OSMREs website shows that Coalie appears to be a genuine effort on the agencys part to explain its goals. And while it may not have been OSMREs intention, a poorly designed lump of coal is actually the perfect metaphor to represent the Trump administrations desperate attempt to revive the coal industry. The perfect mascot for Trumps energy agenda Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has been on a mission to prop up coal, despite both environmental and economic data pointing to a dwindling future for fossil fuels. Coals dominance has been declining for years, and for good reason: Burning coal is linked to air pollution that can cause asthma, brain damage, heart problems, and more. Its one of the worst offenders for greenhouse gas pollution, with environmental experts estimating that the world needs to completely phase out coal power by 2040 in order to meet the goals set out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Further, multiple studies have found that coal is among the more expensive technologies for utilities today, making it significantly less competitive than renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and natural gas. Nevertheless, last April Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at reviving the coal industry, at the same time that his administration suspended a decades-old program to detect lung disease in coal miners. In September, the Department of Energy announced plans to spend more than half a billion dollars to prop up coal. [Image: OSMRE] Now enter Coalie: the mascot tasked with the gargantuan challenge of making Trumps coal bailout seem palatable. In a new post to OSMREs website titled 10 Things to Know About How OSMRE Supports Americas Energy Legacy and Communities, Coalie is pictured smiling and waving in multiple hastily assembled graphics. Hes serving as the cheerful mouthpiece for several dubious claims, including that OSMRE works with Indigenous peoples by consulting with tribal leadership through a government-to-government process (see the federal governments long-standing history of extracting resources on Native lands and ignoring tribal opposition), and that OSMRE evaluates the potential environmental impact of federal actions and practices responsible stewardship of public lands and resources (there is no environmentally responsible way to harvest coal). In short, Coalie has been handed an impossible job. Ironically, if any mascot could succinctly su up the Trump administrations asinine insistence on a fossil fuel comeback, it would be a shoddily slapped together illustration of a lump of coal.
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E-Commerce
Over the past couple of days, TikTok has been flooded with owl impressionsalbeit ones in which the birds sound like various celebrities, have regional accents, or find themselves in hyper-specific situations. Its a trend better seen with your own eyes than explained. My impression of an owl if the owl was Jennifer Coolidge is one such viral example. If Trump were an owl, impersonated another. An owl but its Keira Knightley, another posted. Or an owl but its Bella Swan, said yet another. The hashtag #owlimpression currently has 13,000 videos of TikTokers hoo-hoo-ing in various likenesses. There are also definitive rankings of the best impressions thus far. Other celebrities who have received the owl treatment include Shakira, Alan Rickman, Barack Obama, and Hugh Jackman. Even Jonas Brothers members Joe and Nick Jonas have joined in to playfully troll one another. Accent-based owl impressions are a big part of the trend, too, with creators demonstrating what owls would sound like if they were from China and Texas or Scotland and Australia. Some are even as specific as an Italian American owl from New York or an owl from the Bronx. The trend has since snowballed into a bit of a competition for the chronically online over just how niche the impressions can get, building on the internet’s shared cultural language. Here, the distinctive voices of Jennifer Coolidge and Keira Knightley, as well as Hugh Jackman in his role as Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, are internet references as much as they are real people. Alongside cultural references such as RuPauls Drag Race and Love Island, there are the broader impressions of owls in everyday scenarios: an “owl as a jealous girlfriend or an “owl who only hangs out with the guys. Theres an impression of an owl if it was a dad getting up and an owl that trips over a cobblestone that sticks out a little bit too much. While undeniably silly, this trend offers a welcome reprieve from the brain rot and AI slop that have come to dominate much of the internets shared spaces in recent months. Perhaps that explains why a trend so genius in its simplicity has caught on with such gusto across the social media platform. Sure, ChatGPTs image generator could certainly morph a celebrity into owl form, complete with sound effects. Or unleash deepfakes of SpongeBob SquarePants characters on the internet. With little hesitation, though, the human brain can conjure up what Jennifer Coolidge might sound like as an owl. AI could never come up with an impression like this of an owl that was on the Titanic.
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E-Commerce
Apples iOS 26 has been available for nearly six months now, but its still one of the companys least well-received software updates for the iPhone. Primarily, people have criticized the new Liquid Glass user interface design, which Apple now lets you tone down. But iOS 26 also changed the way many apps function on the iPhone, disrupting a users muscle memory and expectations, leading to many to pine for the way the iPhone functioned on iOS 18. Yet while you cant revert to iOS 18 once youve upgraded to iOS 26, you can make some simple tweaks that will make your iOS 26 iPhone function as it did before. Heres how. 1. Give Safari the layout it used to have, before iOS 26 After Liquid Glass, one of the most frequent complaints Ive heard about iOS 26 relates to the Safari app. In iOS 26, Apple changed Safari’s default interface, giving it a new compact design that hides important buttons, including bookmarks and tabs. In iOS 26, you now have to tap a new three-dots button next to the new compact URL bar to reveal the buttons that let you access your bookmarks, tabs, and other functions. This change both disrupts muscle memory and requires you to tap more just to access the browser’s basic features. Thankfully, you can ditch the new iOS 26 Safari layout and revert to the layout Safari had in iOS 18 by doing the following: Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Safari. Under the Tabs section, tap Bottom. Doing this again places the important bookmarks and tabs buttons directly on a toolbar at the bottom of Safari. 2. Switch back to the classic Phone interface In iOS 26, Apple also changed the layout of the Phone app, giving it a new unified interface that both merges the Favorites and Recents toolbar buttons into a single Calls button and jettisons the Voicemail button entirely. While this change declutters the Phone interface, it also means you have to tap more just to access basic featureslike your voicemails. Thankfully, as with Safari above, you can revert the Phone app to its old interface: Open the Phone app. Tap the three-bar button in the top right corner. In the pop-up menu, tap the Classic interface button. Your Phone app will now have the same layout it had in iOS 18. 3. Stop Music from auto-mixing your songs iOS 26 not only changed the layout of some of the iPhones most popular apps, but it also changed the way you hear your music in the Music app. In iOS 26, the Music app cross-mixes your songs by default, melding the end of one with the beginning of the next using AI. Needless to say, this annoys the heck out of many music aficionados, who like to hear the entire song as the artist envisioned. But thankfully, you can disable this AI slopification of your songs by doing the following: Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Music. Under the Audio header, tap Song Transitions. On the Song Transitions screen, toggle the Song Transitions button to off. Your music will now play as it did in iOS 18. 4. Disable background wallpapers in Messages iOS 26 brought some helpful new features to the Messages app, including polls and the ability to live translate messages not in your native language. But Messages in iOS 26 also added the ability to change a chats background. And while this in itself isn’t bad, the user doesnt have total control over the look of their background by default. The person they are chatting with can change it for everyone in the conversation. When this happens, its a distracting pain for all those who like to see blue bubbles against a clean, white background. The good thing is that you can disable background wallpapers by doing the following, which will make Messages look as it did in iOS 18: Open the Settings app. Tap Apps. Tap Messages. Tap the Conversation Backgrounds switch to toggle the feature off. Even if the friend youre texting with changes their background, all youll see is the glorious white background you were used to in iOS 18. 5. Get PDFs to open where youre used to In iOS 26, Apple brought the Previews app from the Mac to iPhone. Previews is Apples PDF reader, and its presence on the iPhone isnt a bad thing. But the default way iOS 26 handles PDFs now is to open them in Previews, not the Files app (the iPhone’s file manager where documents are stored), which complicates things. In iOS 18, tapping on a PDF in Files would open it where you expected: inside the Files app. But in iOS 26, tapping on a PDF in the Files app kicks you out of Files and launches the Previews app, where the PDF opens. This is a pain, especially if you just wanted to quickly browse all the PDFs you have in the Files app. Luckily, you can stop this from happening by deleting the Previews app from your iPhone: Tap and hold on the Previews app icon. From the pop-up menu, tap Remove app. Tap Delete App. Tap Delete. Now, when you tap on a PDF in Files, it will open in the Files appjust like it did in iOS 18.
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E-Commerce
Spammers and malicious actors inundate us with a steady stream of text messagesoften purporting to be from legitimate institutions or companies. Stanching this flow isn’t easy. Just as the unwanted emails we receive often tell us that we can simply unsubscribe via the unsubscribe link, these text messages explain that we can opt out of future communication simply by replying STOP. But thats not always a safe way to deal with these unsolicited texts. Here’s whyand what you should do instead. The problem with replying STOP to unsolicited text messages Weve all had it happen. We get a text message pitching us a product or asking for a political donation. At the end of the message, we are politely informed that we can opt out of future text communications either by replying STOP directly to the message itself, or texting STOP to another number they list. That may be tempting. It ostensibly offers a quick solution to a legitimate annoyance. But it’s not always a good idea. Thats because replying to a spammy or malicious text in any way informs the sender that the phone number they used has a real person on the other end who is receiving their messages. Once they get this confirmation, a spammer is likely to send you more messages, not fewer. Thankfully, todays smartphones have powerful features built into them that can help you deal with nuisance texts like this, without needing to rely on the goodwill of the sender to remove you from their blast list. Heres what to do instead It should be noted that sometimes it is safe to reply STOP or otherwise follow the instructions in a text message to instruct the sender to cease future communications. If the text message is from a legitimate institution, such as your doctors office, bank, school, or even political groups, they will often honor opt-out STOP requests. But if the text is from a spammer, replying STOP is pretty much futile. Instead, your best course of action to ensure that you never hear from the sender again is to simply block the number they are texting you from. The way you do this varies slightly depending on whether you have an iPhone or an Android phone. But heres how to block a spam text message sender on both. How to block a text message sender on iPhone The default text message app on iPhone is called Messages. Whenever a spam text message lands in your app, heres what to do: Do not reply to it. Instead, tap the senders phone number or name at the top of the text message thread. On the next screen, tap Block Contact. Tap Block Contact from the pop-up that appears. If youre getting too many spam text messages from multiple senders, iOS 26 users also have the option to enable a feature called Screen Unknown Senders, which filters all texts from unknown senders into their own inbox, segregating the messages from the ones you want to receive. How to block a text message sender on Android Google makes it really easy to block text message senders on Android as well. You can do this through the default messaging app on Android phones, called Messages. Heres how: Do not reply to it. Open the Messages app. Find the thread from the sender you want to block, then tap and hold it. From the pop-up menu that appears, tap Block. Depending on what flavor of Android you are using, you may also need to confirm the block by tapping OK. Be careful who you give your phone number to Youll probably never be able to know for certain how a spammer got your phone number. Maybe they obtained it illegally, scraped it from the web, nabbed it from a data breach, or even bought it legally from a data broker. Many of these things are outside of your control. But you can make your phone number harder to obtain by giving it out more sparingly, especially to questionable websites. Meanwhile, when you get those spam text messages, think twice before replying STOP. Simply blocking the number is often a faster way to end the annoyanceand to protect your number from being flagged as belonging to a real person.
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E-Commerce
If youre an old-school writer like me, usually the words alone are all you need. But once in a while, you need something extra. Im referring to all the special symbols that dont appear on your keyboard. Maybe you need to mark something as copyrighted with a , or you want to rave about the 8 order of fish and chips on your recent trip to London. Perhaps youre a mathematician whos working with . Y qué pasa si necesitas escribir una pregunta en espaol? Instead of having to dig deep into your virtual keyboards corners or memorize ASCII character codes, theres a free website you can use to copy these symbols and more directly to your clipboard for easy anywhere-pastingno matter what kind of device youve got in front of you. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Your special character cheat sheet To look up all those extra symbols that arent on your keyboard, just head to Symbol.wtf. Symbol.wtf is a single-page website with a searchable list of special characters. It takes just a few seconds to find whatever symbol you need. Clicking a symbol copies it to your clipboard so you can paste it into any text fieldwith no sign-ups, ads, or usage limits. Symbol.wtf offers 195 commonly used characters, including punctuation, currency, accent letters, arrows, musical symbols, and even playing card suits. Symbol.wtf makes it swift and simple to find any symbol. The whole list is easy enough to scroll through, but theres also a search bar and a list of filtering options at the top. The hardest part of using it is remembering the Symbol.wtf URL, but I just think to myself What the f was that symbol site again? and that usually jogs my memory well enough. What about emoji? The characters you find on Symbol.wtf are not emoji, which are defined separately under the Unicode standard. If youre typing on a phone, your keyboard almost certainly has an emoji button for looking up these symbols. What if youre not on your phone, though? You could bring up your computers emoji picker by pressing Win + . (on Windows), Fn/ + E (on a Mac), or Search + Shift + Space (on a Chromebook). But if that fails for whatever reason, you could just head to Unicode.party. Much like Symbol.wtf, its a searchable list of symbolswhich you can click to copy to your clipboard. Theres a skin tone selector at the top, and the search results are pretty much instantaneous. Unicode Party puts every emoji imaginable at your fingertips in an easily searchable list. Just dont let any young folks know youre looking up your emoji this way, because you know how theyll respond. Symbol.wtf and Unicode.party both work in any web browser. Theyre free to use with no ads or usage limits. No sign-up is required, and neither site does any tracking of your usage. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
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E-Commerce
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