Oral B Pro 5000 Bluetooth Toothbrush | $55 | Amazon | Promo code 20ORALBNOV1 + $15 clippable coupon.Graphic: Shep McAllister

The silver medalist in our favorite electric toothbrush co-op, this Oral-B 5000 is just $55 after some stacked discounts: clip the $15 off coupon and use promo code 20ORALBNOV1.

If the price doesn’t convince you, our readers love this toothbrush because of its superior oscillating, pulsing, and rotating brush head. It also connects via Bluetooth to an app on your phone and can show you were need to brush more, and store data for your dentist to review. This deal will probably not last long, so get while you can.

Photo: Claire Lower

I love a little squash. They have the visual appeal of decorative gourds, but you can eat them, which is an improvement. But their small size can make them slightly challenging to de-seed, and a regular spoon’s smooth edge doesn’t have the scraping power needed to remove the goopy strings and seeds in an efficient manner. This is why I turn to the grapefruit spoon.

Truth be told, I use this spoon for squash far more than I use it for grapefruit. Its serrated edges remove the slippery inside of the squash in a manner most expedient, and the pointed tip is great at reaching into ridges and edges to get every little string, leaving you with nothing but squash, perfect for stuffing with stuffing. (For larger squashes, use a cheap metal measuring cup—the kind with real thin edges.)

Auto-enrollment has proven to be an effective way for employees to save for retirement, with 91 percent of those who are auto-enrolled in a defined contribution plan (like a 401(k)) remaining opted in to the program, according to a 2018 report from Fidelity.

But that has implications beyond more people saving for retirement—it also affects what funds and investments employees enroll in. Auto-enrollment plans work on inertia. Because 98 percent of employers offer target date funds in defined contribution plans and 89 percent use them as the default investment option, that means more and more everyday investors are putting ever more of their investments into target date funds.

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In fact, “68 percent of millennials are 100 percent invested in a target date fund, due in part to being auto-enrolled in their 401(k) and defaulted into the option,” reports Fidelity. Overall, more than 30 percent of 401(k) assets are in target date funds, a dramatic increase from around 10 percent in 2008. And 403(b) plan participants have an even greater portion of assets invested in TDFs.

So, is that a bad thing? Not necessarily—but it depends on who you are and what your goals are.

Essentially, TDFs take an investor’s age and projected retirement year into account when picking investments. For beginning investors, they are an easy and manageable way to ensure exposure to an array of investments and spend less time researching and picking out individual funds. They have low minimum initial investments, automatic rebalancing and adjust asset allocation for you over time. They’re simple and don’t require a lot of investing savvy.

But beyond that, TDFs lose some of their luster. Once you’ve started building your assets, you should look into switching out of them. For one, because “when you’re in a TDF, you are not in control of how that fund is invested,” says D. Keith Lockyer, investment market manager at PNC Wealth Management. Your individual risk tolerance is not taken into account, meaning, especially for older investors, that your portfolio is likely too conservative (you could also argue this is the case for young investors who don’t need as much exposure to bonds as they’re likely getting). Outside of a TDF, you or a professional can tweak things how you’d like, in “better” funds.

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“Target date funds are a ‘turn off my brain’ kind of thing, but when we turn off our brains bad things happen,” says Scott Tucker, President of Scott Tucker Solutions in Chicago, Ill. “People are using target date funds for growth, and the problem is those target date funds have a lot of bonds in them and bonds lose value when interest rates rise.” Meaning people looking to retire soon (say by 2025 or even 2030) are potentially losing out on a lot of growth by staying invested in them.

They’re also actively managed—which LH advises against—which means they can come saddled with more fees than your typical index fund. One big fee difference: The expense ratio. The Motley Fool reports that the difference between a target-date fund’s annual expense ratio and an index fund’s is “0.51 percent vs 0.09 percent on average, according to the Investment Company Institute.” That might not sound like a lot to get worked up over, but take this simple example:

You put away $5,500 a year for the next 30 years. Your funds earn 7% annually above inflation before fees (around the stock market’s historical average). In the index fund scenario (that is, a 0.09% expense ratio), you end with just over $511,000. If you pay that higher 0.51% expense ratio then, all other things being equal, you’ll have a little over $474,000 in savings instead — a loss of about $37,000 because of those extra fees.

That said, fees for these funds can easily reach one percent or higher, which will eat away even more of your money. You always need to check the fees before investing in any product.

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One solution for older investors (59 1/2-plus) and those who have left a job is to roll their 401(k)s into IRAs, says Tucker. You have better investment options that way. And young investors should choose the highest retirement year on the target date funds that they can, he suggests, even if that’s not necessarily the year they want to retire, so that they’re more heavily invested in equities and have less in bonds.

“We’re trying to make investing simple for people with target date funds, but investors are going to want to look under the hood,” says Tucker. “The easy button isn’t always the best option.”

Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

As good as the Pixel 3 is, when Google released the phone last month, it sort of felt incomplete. Part of that feeling is due to Google’s software-first approach to smartphone design which means there’s always code being tinkered with, but the other part was simply because Google still hadn’t delivered two major Pixel 3 features the company teased prior to launch.

But starting today, one of those missing additions, Night Sight, is finally rolling out to Pixel 3 owners, and after having the chance to test it out for a few days, I can safely say Google’s sophisticated camera feature was worth the wait.

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Previously, when faced with certain low-light situations, the Pixel 3 sometimes struggled to best phones with larger aperture lenses like the Galaxy Note 9, or top sophisticated low-light techniques like Huawei’s impressive Night Mode, which really pushed the use of HDR photo processing when it debuted earlier this year on the P20 Pro.

However, Night Sight changes all that, and thanks to Google flexing its computational photography skills, the Pixel 3 is now capable of capturing some incredible low-light pics. And to prove it, I took all the best smartphone cameras out for a side-by-side nighttime shootout.

One quick note before we get to the pictures. Accessing Night Sight is as easy as scrolling over to the More tab in Google’s camera app and then tapping the icon for Night Sight. But when you actually shoot a picture, it’s not a simple click and you’re done. Similar to Huawei’s Night Mode, Night Sight shoots multiple images during a three to four-second window, and then combines those images together to create a final pic that looks better than each original frame on its own. That means to get the best results, you really need to try to hold your phone as steady as possible.

OK, now onto the photos. To set a baseline, I started by taking two shots with the Pixel 3, one with Night Sight off and one with Night Sight on. And while in some respects, I like the pic taken without Night Sight more because its richer colors and darker exposure make for a moodier final image, when it comes to details and sharpness, the photo taken with Night Sight is clearly superior. Text on signs is clearer, the overall image is much less grainy, and you can even make out each individual brick in the building no matter where you’re looking.

Next, I moved on to a face-off between the Pixel 3 and the Galaxy Note 9; a battle of computer smarts versus a wider f/1.5 lens aided by a touch of AI tuning. This time at a local bar, while both photos look pretty good zoomed out, you can still see things like the overly yellow color cast often produced by Samsung cameras in low light.

But when you start pixel peeping at 100 percent, you can really appreciate little details from the general sharpness on every sign and sticker to the Pixel 3's ability to clearly capture the wood grain on the framed chalkboard and the texture on various beer taps.

For the Pixel 3's third challenge, I shot a nighttime cityscape with it and Huawei’s new Mate 20 Pro. And once again, while the Pixel 3's pic does show some signs of over-sharpening like the hard pink outline on the lights at the top of the building in the middle, Night Sight still bested Huawei’s Night Mode, which up till now, was the best way to capture challenging low-light scenes.

Also, while I was up there, I decided to see if Night Sight could work in combination with Google’s Super Res Zoom feature, and it seems it does. But the bigger shock is that for a camera with a supposed 3x zoom, the Mate 20 Pro’s Night Mode pic was a blurry mess compared to the Pixel 3's image. Now part of this may have been due to having to hand hold both phones, which is far from ideal, but both pics were shot one after another under the exact same circumstances, and I’m still struggling to work out why things turned out so poorly for the Mate 20 Pro.

Finally, in what may have been the most difficult challenge, I took a shot using the Pixel 3 and an iPhone XS of a pizza lit almost solely by a single candle. And the difference couldn’t be more apparent. The colors in the Pixel 3's pic are brighter, it features better contrast, and despite a fair amount of noise in the dark background, everything else is just so much clearer. Suffice to say, if you take a lot of pics in dimly lit restaurants, the Pixel 3 and Night Sight is probably your ticket to way better food photography.

Night Sight is exactly what the Pixel 3 needed to really round out its photo toolkit. But in strange way, the biggest winners of all this may be Pixel 1 and Pixel 2 owners, who will also be getting Night Sight over the next few days. Night Sight is available as an update the Pixel 3's camera app via a Play Store update starting today.

Photo: Paul Sullivan (Flickr)

Cooking a perfect Thanksgiving turkey is a pretty tall order, and every cook has their own tricks for crispy skin and juicy meat. However you wrangle your bird this year, there’s one universal turkey truth that’ll save you time and effort: Trussing is a scam.

Turkeys are both huge and relatively low in fat, which makes them difficult to roast perfectly. Breaking your bird down into its component parts all but guarantees an evenly cooked result, but most people prefer the simple prep and Norman Rockwell-worthy aesthetics of a neatly trussed, whole roasted turkey. That’s fine, but you should know that trussing is a purely aesthetic choice that makes an already difficult task even tougher.

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Tying your turkey’s legs blocks the cavity and prevents air from circulating freely around the densest parts of the bird. This has at least three major-bummer implications for your Thanksgiving spread. First, if you’re a stuffing-in-the-bird family, blocking the cavity just makes it harder for the stuffing to cook through. Second, the legs already take longer to cook than any other part of the turkey; pinning them up next to the breasts means they’ll take even longer, at which point those breasts will probably be dry. Third, trussing folds a treasure trove of skin and fat in on itself rather than exposing it to the heat it needs to crispy up. Turkeys are already low on skin and fat; you should never leave crispy skin on the table.

Old habits die hard, so if less oven time and extra crunchy skin aren’t enough to convince you, maybe this will: skipping the truss makes for the easiest turkey ever, especially if you’ve dry-brined it. You can take it from the fridge to the counter to the oven with zero extra work. Of course, you can still tie up those legs for pictures—and if you’ve nicked a few bites of skin, it’s a great way to hide the evidence.