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Besides being a boon for crisping food at the office, on vacation, or whenever you need a makeshift kitchen, the Ninja Crispi air fryer is powerful, petite, and is easy to collapse and store. But after all those recrisped wings, reheated dips, and revived pizza slices, you may start to notice it developing some greasy build-up.

A special air fryer requires special care. Here’s how to clean all the weird parts of the Ninja Crispi.

Start with the pod

The Ninja Crispi is one of my top air fryer picks for 2025 because of how portable it is. That’s owed primarily to how it breaks down. It consists of two major components: the glass container, and the pod. The pod is the business end of the air fryer; it sits on top of the glass container and contains the engine, fan, and heating coil. While most air fryers have the coil and fan around five inches above the food, the Ninja Crispi’s parts get up close and personal with the bubbling sugars and popping oils in your food—the fan and heating coil are only a couple inches away. That’s great for quick heating, but not great for a clean pod.

The heating element has a metal grate, like a splash guard, over it. This protects the coil from getting direct splashback, but you also don’t want this grate to form a layer of buildup, which can lead to smoke, or even a fire. 

To avoid that, you must wipe the pod clean every time: Once you’ve finished air frying, take the pod off and set it on the counter. The glass container will still be screaming hot, so put it aside to cool. Unplug the pod. Get a damp dish sponge with a scrubby side and a soft side. Add a drop of soap to the scrubby side, rub it in a little, and squeeze the sponge to get rid of excess water. Use the scrubber to lightly wipe the grate. Little bits of oil or food should come off. Flip the sponge and use the soft side to wipe off any suds left behind.

Cleaning the containers

The Crispi’s containers are pretty straightforward glass squares. They wouldn’t really have a place in this article if it weren’t for the black plastic holster on the bottom of both containers. This thing ideally will stay clear of food. It’s meant to keep your hands and surfaces safe from touching the glass, but it’s also non-removable, and food can get cozy in the crevices.

Any blobs of dip that end up falling onto the handles or oils that end up running underneath can be removed with a straw brush or thin bottle brush. I have a wire brush with bristles that can sneak through most hard to reach places, and it’s great for my Ninja Crispi. This one will work just as well, and the key ring that keeps it together appeals to my sense of organization. 

Besides that, the Ninja Crispi’s containers and grates are easy to clean with soapy water. The pod should never be submerged in water (it’s filled with electronics and whatnot), but the containers, their grates, and the pod adapter for the large container can all go in the dishwasher. If you’re washing by hand, let the glass containers drip dry at an angle so water doesn’t get trapped in the thin space between the container’s bottom and the plastic underneath.

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It’s a great time to be shopping for some new AirPods. You can get the non-ANC AirPods 4 for $89.99 (originally $129.99), the lowest price they’ve ever been, according to price-tracking tools. The ones with ANC are $119.99 (originally $179.99), also at their lowest price ever.

The AirPods 4 have updated USB-C charging. Both models are powered by Apple’s H2 chip, so you’ll get Personalized Spatial Audio (so you can hear sounds seemingly coming from different directions as you move your head) and the ability to use head gestures to tell Siri “yes” or “no” and answer calls. It’s also likely Apple will add a live translation feature to both models when iOS 26 (previously iOS 19) rolls out later next year.

If you spring for the ANC AirPods 4, you’ll get a charging case with a built-in speaker, which you can use with Find My to locate it if you lose them. You’ll also get features like Conversation Awareness, which lowers your music volume when your AirPods detect that you’re talking to someone; Transparency Mode, which lets you better hear your surroundings while your earbuds are in; and Adaptive Audio (combines ANC and Transparency mode to adjust ANC levels based on the noise around you). Keep in mind that since these are open-style earbuds, lacking a silicone tip to better block out noise, the ANC will not be as good as what you can get from AirPods Pro or Beats Fit Pro.

Both versions are rated IP54 for dust and water resistance, offer up to five hours of listening per charge (up to 30 hours with the charging case), and can handle automatic switching with your other Apple devices. You can read more about the non-ANC AirPods in PCMag’s “excellent” review, and more about the ANC AirPods in PCMag’s “outstanding” review.

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If your phone’s camera is already doing most of the work when it comes to video, adding a good gimbal like the DJI Osmo Mobile 7P can take that content up a few notches. It’s currently down to $125 from its original $149, which also happens to be its lowest price yet, according to price trackers.

The 7P is foldable, lightweight, and designed to handle even large phones like the iPhone 16 Pro Max or Galaxy S25 Ultra. Once clamped in, it keeps your phone level and smooth while walking or tracking a moving subject. There’s a built-in extension rod for overhead or wide-angle shots, and the embedded tripod makes it possible to shoot hands-free, whether you’re filming a dance tutorial or doing a sit-down livestream.

The design feels solid without being heavy. All the key controls—joystick, record button, camera toggle, zoom dial—are right where your fingers expect them. You can reorient the phone from landscape to vertical just by pressing the trigger on the back. A small multifunction module comes included and snaps onto the clamp magnetically. It lets you use gesture controls for subject tracking, even if you’re using third-party apps like Instagram Live or TikTok. That means you can keep the tracking going without being locked into DJI’s app, which is rare for gimbals (even older DJI models), notes this PCMag review.

Battery life depends heavily on how much of it you’re using. You’ll get around 10 hours with just the gimbal, but that reportedly drops to 4.5 hours with the tracker on, and only three hours if you’re also using the fill light. That might be a downside for longer shoots, especially if you’re relying on the added features. Still, with support for most modern phones, a strong clamp that avoids the power and volume buttons, and DJI’s helpful app with tutorials built in, the Osmo Mobile 7P covers a lot of ground. If your filming style involves motion, multitasking, or one-person setups, this might be the right tool to simplify your workflow without sacrificing quality.

The term “Gen Z stare” is popping up all over social media and non–social media this week. It refers to the blank expression that is supposedly common among people between the ages of 13 and 28 years old, noticed especially often among retail workers. Gen Z, it is said, responds to boiler-plate greetings and small talk with an inscrutable stare instead of a smile or nod. While it’s not a new term—this video explaining the phenomena is nearly a year old— it has gone very viral lately. But is this a real shift in cultural behavior or a pointless age-based online carping campaign?

Is the Gen Z stare even real?

Maybe? When it comes to something as amorphous as people online saying, “the barista looks at me funny when I order Starbucks,” there’s no way to know whether it’s a widespread, troubling trait in a broad demographic, or just meme-y way for older people to bag on those damn kids. So until further research is conducted, I’ll say this: It’s probably a small behavioral shift that’s been blown way out of proportion by generational anxiety. Kind of like Millennials killing casual dining (and 100 other things), vocal fry, Jenkem, rainbow parties, switchblades, and the “overly jaunty” rhythm of Bing Crosby’s “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” (To be fair, that shit is fucking jaunty.)

In the musical Bye Bye Birdie, Mr. Mcafee describes kids as “disobedient, disrespectful oafs” who are impossible to control, then asks asking plaintively, “Why can’t they be like we were? Perfect in every way?” That was written in 1960, but it could have easily been posted by a 35-year-old on TikTok yesterday. A lot of the informal online cultural discourse about the Gen Z stare has the tone of generational critiques that were played out 40 years ago. Millennials are between the ages of 29 and 44 years old, the prime age to be wracked with that “I’m not young anymore” anxiety that so often results in feeling envious at younger people while talking shit about them. So the Gen Z stare is probably mostly that. But on the other hand, there could be some embers blowing up all this smoke.

If the Gen Z stare is real, what causes it?

If Gen Z really is more prone to blank stares, what’s behind it? It depends on who you ask. Forbes rounded up some opinions from “generational experts,” so take your pick:

• Suzy Welch, the director of the NYU Stern Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing, chalks it up to Gen Z actively pushing away winning, competition, and status.

• Joe Galvin, chief research officer at Vistage, “The World’s Largest CEO Coaching & Peer Advisory Organization” ascribes the Gen Z stare to “a growing generational disconnect in employee communication and expectations.”

• Sujay Saha, president of Cortico-X, a consulting firm that “helps clients realize meaningful business values through a human-centric approach to business problems,” says the stare became ubiquitous because “Gen Z entered the workforce in an era defined by screens, social distancing and remote communication.”

No offense to these experts (I’m sure they’re fantastic) but if a researcher at a coaching organization, a director of a “Purpose and Flourishing” initiative, and a consultant trying to “realize meaningful business values through a human-centric approach to business problems” tried to explain my generation to me, I’d respond with a blank stare too. A stare requires someone is stared at, and maybe they’re the problem.

The delicate dance between stare-er and stare-ee

Most examples of the Gen Z Stare online describe interactions between customers and consumers or relationships between entry level employees and their boss. Given how some people treat others, maybe they should to be glad that Applebee’s waitress is looking at them blankly instead of, say, stabbing them in the eye with a steak knife. As anyone who has ever worked a “service job” knows, sometimes a blank stare isn’t contempt, it’s disbelief.

“We stare when you don’t understand common sense,” explains Caleb Worley, who posted this video to explore the stare-ers point of view:

Another theory: Maybe the Gen Z’s stare is more Meursault in The Stranger than Buddy the Elf in Elf; not a display of witlessness, but a look of fatal indifference because life has reached depths of absurdity that would terrify Camus. Imagine you’re a 22-year-old working a low-wage job in 2025. You spent your “teen years” hiding in your house from a deadly virus, you’re saddled with student debt, ICE agents are carting away your neighbors, and you’ll probably never be able to afford a car, let alone a house. Then the middle-aged CEO of flourishing says, “your problem is you don’t smile enough.”

Or maybe it’s just a face. Either way, it’s not worth freaking out about; I mean, you should see how they look at you behind your back.

What’s up, besties? It’s World Emoji Day, which means it’s time to look at some new emoji (or is that emojis?). In a post on its blog today, the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit behind the standardized set of emoji across you see across all your various devices and apps, previewed its next set of icons and expressions. The group says there’s still “a lot of paperwork” to do on these, so they might not hit your phones and tablets until sometime around 2026, according to an email Unicode’s Erik Thompson sent to The Verge.

But what a batch it is: We’ve got a musical instrument. We’ve got treasure. We’ve got one of those old-school cartoon fight clouds. And of course, we’ve got a cryptid. While new emoji have proven surprisingly political in the past, this update seems more focused on crowd-pleasers, and I’d say it’s doing a good job of it.

The list below isn’t everything from the final Unicode 17.0 release, but this is what we know of so far:

• Trombone

• Treasure Chest

• Distorted Face

• Hairy Creature

• Fight Cloud

• Apple Core

• Orca

• Ballet Dancers

Personally, my favorite is probably the orca (I love a cetacean), but I want to give special attention to “Distorted Face.” It kinda looks like an extreme .5 selfie, but if you watch any amount of anime, there’s a good chance you’ve seen it before—it looks a lot like that one downward angle, fish eye close up shot that a lot of directors use to show a character in the middle of a mental breakdown. So, you know, use it when the fast food place forgets your curly fries or whatever.

I should also probably say what we’re all thinking: Yes, “Hairy Creature” is Bigfoot, right down to the pose. I’m not sure what if there are copyright concerns for a character like that (it should be public domain, but “Bigfoot” is also a brand name), but it’s not the first time the Unicode Consortium has been purposefully vague when making a deliberate reference. The Goblin emoji, for instance, actually depicts a Tengu mask, a real-life part of Japanese culture that itself represents a being from Japanese folklore.

Then there are the “Ballet Dancers.” We only see one in the preview, but given how emoji have depicted different jobs and hobbies in the past, we’re likely to get a few iterations of this basic design at launch.

In the meantime, the Unicode Consortium is actually encouraging you to send in your own proposals for emoji. Just know that it may take a while for an idea to get approved, and that you’ll need to go through your own mountain of paperwork first.

(Washington, D.C., July 17, 2025) – U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins today announced the U.S. Forest Service is awarding $80 million in Wood Innovation Grants to spur wood products manufacturing, expand active forest management, and accelerate energy innovation across America’s timber-producing communities.

WASHINGTON, July 17, 2025 — The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) is now accepting applications for its upcoming agribusiness trade mission to Mexico City, Mexico, scheduled for November 3–6. U.S. exporters interested in exploring trade opportunities in Mexico’s dynamic agricultural market must apply by Thursday, July 31, 2025.

WASHINGTON, July 17, 2025 — The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) is now accepting applications for its upcoming agribusiness trade mission to Mexico City, Mexico, scheduled for November 3–6. U.S. exporters interested in exploring trade opportunities in Mexico’s dynamic agricultural market must apply by Thursday, July 31, 2025.