When the first People’s Climate March took to the New York City streets in September 2014, it was billed as the “largest climate march in history.” At the time, it was: A crowd of up to 400,000 rallied in protest of international inaction on global warming, and sent a clear message to the world leaders gathering just days later for the United Nations summit on climate change. The march, national coordinator Paul Getsos tells Fast Company, was a success: It united a broad coalition of movements and advocacy groups into a cohesive event. But it wasn’t perfect.

“I wish that the end of the march event was stronger,” Getsos says. “And I wish that we had a plan to keep our structures in place.”

This year, when the People’s Climate March descends on Washington, D.C., on April 29, it will have such a plan in place. The march organizers are making use of a tech platform, called the Action Network, which offers tools like mass email coordinating, event mapping and planning, and petition creating to progressive movements. Despite the fact that few people have heard of it, the platform is quickly becoming the technological backbone of the anti-Trump resistance. Organizers behind the Women’s March and the Indivisible Guide have used the Action Network to coordinate movements that have far exceeded expectations in terms of breadth, participation, and longevity. As more pockets of resistance coalesce and mobilize, the Action Network is poised to support them.

Unlike Facebook, which was the primary organizing tool for the first People’s Climate March, the Action Network saves the names, emails, and other data collected from people who register for events through the platform, making it easier for organizers to stay in touch with interested constituents and keep momentum strong in the aftermath of an event. In a way, leaning on email as opposed to social media may seem like a step backward, but when it comes to mass organizing, the ephemerality of social platforms like Twitter and Facebook is antithetical to the sustained involvement that progressive movements are hoping to foster.

The Action Network was cofounded in 2012 by Brian Young, who had previously worked on John Kerry’s digital campaign. “At the time, campaign structures were really out of date,” Young tells Fast Company. “They had one owner, who oversaw the website and the email list; any action had to be collectively decided and enacted by this one campaign owner. It wasn’t up to the speed and scale of the 21st century.” Young envisioned a digital campaign platform that could be collaborative, flexible, and responsive–something that would be structured and organized at the national level, but still allow for hyperlocal organizing, ironically inspired by the way the U.S.’s own federated government is supposed to work.

The Action Network was the result. The platform, set up as a nonprofit, is specifically dedicated to supporting progressive movements; it was developed during the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which is a point of frustration for Young, who believes that had the Action Network been available at the start of the movement, it could have kept Occupy active for longer. “They had a lot of events, they got a lot of attention for around two months, but then it just kind of faded,” Young says. “A platform like ours could have really kept it alive.”

Perhaps the best way to understand the Action Network is as a digital family tree for progressive movements. On the platform, organizers can set up a site for a national event. (Large organizations like the People’s Climate March, which likely sends out millions of emails a month, donate a few thousand dollars per month to the Action Network for use of the platform, and individuals and smaller organizations can use it for free.) Once the organization sets up a site, local offshoots can register related events, and people interested in participating in the movement can sign up with their email addresses to receive information about events, planning meetings, and follow-up actions. If this structure sounds familiar after the events around Donald Trump’s inauguration, it should: The Women’s March made use of the Action Network, and as such was able to translate a global event of unprecedented magnitude into a sustained, action-driven movement.

Through the Action Network, over 650 “sister marches” in 50 countries were organized underneath the umbrella of the Women’s March on Washington. Yordanos Eyoel was involved with organizing the sister march in Boston on January 21. “Each march was organized and operated independently,” Eyoel says, “but they were all inspired by and connected to the original event in Washington.” In the aftermath of the march, organizers at the national and local level were able to immediately reconnect with people who had attended the march and move onto the next phase of organizing: 10 actions to be carried out over Trump’s first 100 days in office. “We’ve really been able to leverage this technology in a way that’s facilitated a real community,” Eyoel says. To date, millions of people have registered through the Women’s March Action Network site.

Though the Action Network has been used in various capacities leading up to this year–organizers used it for rallies against the Dakota Access Pipeline last fall, and it broke into the market with the Black Friday protests at Walmart stores around the country in 2012–Young says that “in some ways, we’ve just been road testing everything for two years, building up to this moment.”

With the Women’s March, the Indivisible project, the March for Science, the People’s Climate March, and many more planned actions all making use of the platform (take a look; all of their websites look very similar and, as such, are easy to navigate), Young is hopeful that the platform will sustain the outpouring of interest in progressive movements through the current administration. “We’re seeing activism at a level that we’ve never seen before,” he says. “Using tools like ours to harness that long-lasting organizational power will get these movements to the end of the next two to four years; by that time, we could radically change the political dynamics in this country.”

Inside a former baked-goods factory near the Oakland airport, a construction crew is installing giant vats that will soon be used to scale up production of the Impossible Burger–a plant-based meat designed to look and taste good enough that meat eaters will want to order it, not vegetarians.

The “meat,” developed by a team led by former Stanford biochemistry professor Patrick Brown, is currently being produced in a 10,000-square-foot pilot facility in Silicon Valley and a 1,500-square foot space in New Jersey. The new facility, at around 60,000 square feet, will dramatically scale up production capacity. When the factory is fully ramped up, it will be able to produce at least 1 million pounds of Impossible Burger meat a month, or 250 times more than today.

“It will enable us to go from something that is scarce–and we’re constantly getting complaints from customers about the fact that they can’t buy them at their local restaurant–and start to make it ubiquitous,” Brown said at an event launching the new factory.

The burger is currently available at 11 restaurants, including 3 that launched it on March 23. But by the end of the year, the company expects to supply 1,000 restaurants. It just signed a deal to have the burgers featured in the San Francisco Giant’s baseball stadium.

For the company, achieving scale is a critical part of achieving its mission. Brown started working on the project while thinking about the problem of climate change; raising cows and other animals for meat is one of the world’s largest sources of greenhouse gases. It also uses and pollutes more water than any other industry, and drives deforestation. But he realized that the majority of the world wouldn’t voluntarily go vegetarian for those reasons.

“Billions of people around the world who love meat are not going to stop demanding it, so we just have to find a better way to produce it,” he says.

The team studied the properties of meat–particularly heme, the molecule that makes blood red and gives meat a meaty taste–and then experimented with recreating those properties using only ingredients from plants.

“When you think about meat, there’s the muscle, there’s the connective tissue, there’s the fat, so we had to figure out how to mimic those parts of beef to figure out how to experience the texture, but also the taste,” Don DeMasi, senior vice president of engineering for Impossible Foods, tells Fast Company.

The result looks like it was made from a cow, not plants. The handful of chefs who were given first access to the product say they think of it as meat. “It kind of made this transition in my mind to be–it’s just another kind of meat,” says chef Traci Des Jardins, who has been serving Impossible burgers at her San Francisco restaurant Jardinière for about a year, and now is also serving it at Public House, her restaurant at the city’s ballpark.

Before it’s cooked, the product is red like raw beef; as it cooks, it browns. As the heme mixes with juices and oozes out, it can look like it’s bleeding. “You’re seeing the exact same cooking chemistry that you see in meat, literally,” says Brown.

As the company scales up its beef alternative, it will focus on restaurants. In a year, it says, U.S. restaurants serve more than 5 billion pounds of burgers, and Impossible wants its 12 million pounds to be among them. Retail will come later, along with other products that are currently in development, such as poultry and steak.

“Our long-term goal is to basically develop a new and better way to create all the foods we make from animals,” says Brown.

A tangle of cables slithers from a monitoring station in the garage of a house atop Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, up a narrow staircase brimming with artifacts and tchotchkes from an adventured life, and into a room overtaken by stereoscopic cameras, ambisonic sound equipment, and GoPro arrays.

The focus of all this technology: 94-year-old comic legend Stan Lee—co-creator of the Marvel Universe including Spider-Man, The X Men, and Iron Man, among numerous others—and his interviewer, director, and professional fanboy Kevin Smith, discussing Lee’s life, career, and marriage in an intimate setting at Lee’s home.

It’s the first step in a journey of firsts. The inaugural shoot of Icons: Face to Face, the first project from Legion M, the first that raises money through equity crowdfunding and gives contributors creative input and profit sharing.

It’s also the first use of a new configuration of virtual reality technology that captures its subjects at a fidelity never before used in VR. In fact, no VR headgear—or movie projector display for that matter—exists yet to play back the footage in its fullest level of detail. But it’s likely to in the future, which is the point of this project.

“We had an idea for an intimate interview with iconic people from today’s pop culture and entertainment, maybe doing new Icons every month,” says Legion M cofounder and president Jeff Annison. “But we want it to be able to stand the test of time, not just culturally, but technologically, to survive as a historical record. Most VR footage today is disposable. We wanted something that could keep up with advancements in state of the art.”

Their vision required hurdling two crucial technical challenges: placing the camera closer to its subjects than previously attempted in VR without optical distortion or destroying the three-dimensional perception, and recording at a resolution that abuts the edge of human perception.

“This is a pioneering effort in VR,” says Annison. While high-profile individuals have been interviewed in this format in the past, “no one has shot them as close and in the resolution as we have.”

Launched last March, Legion M opened its doors to non-accredited investors last summer, subsequently raising $1.2 million, part of which has gone toward stakes in such projects as the upcoming films Colossal (releasing April 7) and The Field Guide to Evil, and the digital TV series Pitch Elevator. It recently opened a second investing round that will allow it to raise up to $50 million (you can buy stock here). The Icons pilot is Legion’s first solely produced endeavor, though the company hopes to find producing partners for a subsequent series.

Idea-Driven Technology

The Icons experiment was a case of an interview driving the technology.

The idea began germinating last summer when Legion M’s Annison, cofounder/CEO Paul Scanlan, content acquisition head Terri Lubaroff, and content development head David Baxter began talking to VR companies about creating a more intimate viewing experience than had previously been done—enabling viewers to feel as though they were sitting with prominent individuals as they talked about their lives, dreams, regrets, what drives them, and visions for the future—and ensuring the footage’s adaptability to future display methods. But it didn’t begin to coalesce until they found a prominent individual who didn’t mind being a guinea pig in a grand technological experiment.

“We had this idea of trying to put you in the room with these legendary icons. And we got Stan on board—miraculously,” says Annison. “We pitched him this idea, and he really liked our model of a company owned by fans instead of a corporate conglomerate. In fact he said, ‘It’s such a good idea, I wish I’d thought of it myself!'”

Lee, in turn, chose Smith to interview him. “That was part of our idea for the series,” says Annison. “We wanted our interviewees to be completely at ease and open up. That’s why we did it at his house instead of a studio. Kevin has interviewed Stan probably a dozen times. He knew Stan, which questions to ask, and which had never been asked.” Ones that could meaningfully meander from Lee’s childhood in 1920s and ’30s New York, to creating Marvel comics, to his 70-year marriage, with his wife, Joanie, fielding questions as well.

Lee’s age further pressed the need for a record that could adapt well to evolving display technology. “It was daunting. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get Stan at his house,” Annison adds. “We wanted to give people a hundred years from now the opportunity to sit down and spend an hour with him. That drove us to new technology, to do something that’s never been done before.”

The Legion M team spent the fall surveying state-of-the-art systems and opting for a 360-degree capture approach after educating themselves on types of VR. It found a technology partner in VR Playhouse, a Los Angeles boutique studio founded by Ian Forester specializing in VR, AR, and 360-degree production. It experimented for three months before arriving at a solution for a late January shoot.

Pushing the VR Boundaries

The two main challenges were getting the camera close enough to the subjects to “feel” like real life, and capture that experience at fidelity that could stand the test of time. That starts with resolution, but you also need to consider things like frame rate, color depth, and dynamic range.

Camera proximity. Most professional-grade 360-degree VR videos use the Jaunt One or Google Odyssey, the latter a stereoscopic panoramic capture array of 16 GoPro cameras positioned 6 to 10 feet from the subject. Forester’s team rigged a camera system that shot from 2.5 feet away.

Moving the camera had more to do with the aesthetic than longevity. Shooting from 10 feet “is not an intimate conversation with Stan; that’s Stan standing up and lecturing you,” says Annison. “VR Playhouse had to experiment to determine how close we could get before the optical distortion went crazy, the lenses couldn’t handle it, the 3D broke down, or it didn’t allow us to capture the full 360. There’s a lot of science that goes into it. And it gets more complicated when you’re filming it in stereo.”

Resolution. In VR, visual resolution is measured by the number of pixels per degree of viewing angle. Most VR headsets display 8-12. But Legion M was gunning for the edge of human perception—the point beyond which the human eye can no longer distinguish further clarity—which is 75 pixels per degree. VR Playhouse got it up to 72. By capturing at that resolution, the footage should remain sharp as display technology improves. And if displays eventually exceed that resolution, it won’t matter because the human eye can’t perceive it (at least until robotic implants are invented.)

“When you put on your VR headsets [today], it’s like being immersed in 1994 television. It’s not that sharp,” says Annison. “You can see compression artifacts (media distortion) and pixilation. It’s like that because of bottlenecks in displays, computer processing, file sizes, streaming, etc. But VR is in its infancy. All of these technological bottlenecks are going to go away in 5 to 10 years. We wanted to make sure that what we captured was completely future-proofed.”

The data captured for the Icons pilot is over 1,700 times bigger than an HDTV file. So, while it can be viewed in less detail in 2D and on different platforms, “there isn’t a TV, headset, or movie projector that exists today that can display it in the full resolution that we got,” says Annison.

The Solution. VR Playhouse recombined off-the-shelf components, experimenting with different camera and lens combinations before getting the desired effect with two 8K RED Digital cameras and ARRI Zeiss 8mm Ultra Prime rectilinear lenses for each eye. The depth of field was so shallow that the subjects’ arm movements had to confine to a very narrow area.

“It was a real challenge to find cameras,” says Annison. “8K cameras are around, but 8K that can handle 60 frames per second had only been out for a couple months. We had to call every camera rental place in town! When we got them–one of them only had three hours of use prior to us.”

After the live shoot concluded, the crew rotated the RED cameras to capture the rest of the room, to subsequently composite for a 360-degree effect. (They used an Odyssey concurrently for reference footage and comparison.)

The producers are finding their way creatively as well, exploring more of a sweeping narrative arc about their subjects’ overall lives than honing in on most notable aspects, as traditional interviews might. “We want something to stand the test of time–it’s just a different lens than people are used to today,” says Annison. “We asked our shareholders, ‘If you could step back in time to interview William Shakespeare, what would you want to ask him?’ and used a lot of their questions. We don’t just have Stan talking about his days at Marvel creating Spider-Man, we also have him talking about the day he met the love of his life, how he narrowly avoided going to the front lines in World War II, and telling us about the worst day of his life, and how he got through it.”

Next Steps

Legion M hopes to find producing partners to do more Icons interviews, given the expense. Even though VR Playhouse provided below-market rates, and some the 25 crew members volunteered, the 12-hour shoot still cost $40,000 with post-production expected to run upwards of $120,000.

So far, Pacific Rim and Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro has agreed to do an episode, and the company has routes to Stephen Hawking and Barack Obama. “Once we’ve seen the results with Stan, what worked and what didn’t, we’ll be better able to talk,” says Annison. “But our goal is to find partners go to the next level, because we’re a relatively small company.”

Ultimately, Legion M and VR Playhouse envision a valuable library of interviews that can exist on current VR and traditional platforms, but keep pace as projection methods advance.

“Part of what’s compelling us to do this is that we have so many icons who are leaving,” says Scanlan. “2016 was a traumatic year. We lost a lot of celebrities and icons we didn’t expect to lose, and we want to capture these moments as soon as possible to have these lasting memories.”

The next time a San Francisco Giant hits a game-winning home run or turns a great double play to end a rival’s rally, you may be able to thank neuroscience.

Today, Halo Neuroscience, a San Francisco startup that’s developed a device aimed at boosting the performance of athletes, announced it has officially been helping the Giants get the most out of its players.

The device, the Halo Sport, stimulates the brain’s motor cortex, energizing motor neurons, which then send athletes’ muscles stronger signals, allowing them to get more powerful and efficient with every training rep.

The Halo Sport, which looks almost exactly like a pair of headphones, isn’t new. But Halo hasn’t previously revealed much about its partnerships with any professional sports franchises, especially not ones that have progressed beyond the experimental stage.

The Giants, with their proximity to Silicon Valley, are exposed to lots of “intriguing technology that could be used to improve athletic performance, says Geoff Head, the team’s sports scientist. But before jumping at any of that tech, the three-time World Series champions “like to do our homework.”

Last season, Head says, the Giants conducted a two-week trial involving 18 top minor league prospects at the team’s off-season conditioning camp. The idea, he explains, was to give nine of the players Halo Sports and compare the results of their training and workouts with nine players who didn’t get the devices but went through the exact same conditioning.

Afterwards, he says, the team “found there to be significant-enough improvement results in the Halo group compared to the control group to where it opened up our eyes” to the device’s value.

To be sure, the improvements were small–on the order of 1% to 2%. “But with these athletes at the major league level,” Head says, “that’s sometimes enough to be the difference between winning and losing.”

Based on those trials, the Giants signed a formal partnership with Halo Neuroscience and have been utilizing the startup’s devices during the current spring training at both the major league level and for players at four different levels of the minor leagues.

According to Head, Halo cofounder Daniel Chao had explained that the peak benefit of the company’s device comes in the 60-to-90-minute window after wearing it, a data point that matched what the team had learned from its in-house study.

“The greatest improvements we found in the players in the [test] group,” he says, “were the skills work we were doing when they were wearing the Halo headset. As soon as they players took off the headsets . . . we would get into some advanced mobility work–trying to learn new postures,” speed drills, and so on.

Asked why players didn’t just wear their Halo headsets all day, Head says it’s simply a matter of diminishing returns. When wearing the Halo Sport, the areas you work on receive a higher level of stimulation. “If you constantly stimulate over the course of a day,” he explains, “you’re definitely not going to get as much bang for your buck. It’s like working out all day. You would get the best results in the first part of the day.”

The key for the Giants, as the team seeks to get the most from its use of the Halo Sport, is to figure out which skill set each individual player needs the most work on and have them wear the headset immediately prior to doing that work.

So, for example, if a pitcher is trying to work on changing the arm angle at which he throws, he would want to wear the Halo Sport in the morning in the 20 minutes or so before beginning his 10 a.m. workout. Even after stretching, the pitcher’s throwing session would still be within the device’s 60-to-90-minute effectiveness window.

And the benefit may not be limited solely to what a player can do on his own, Head says. In fact, the Halo Sport improves learning as well. So players will be more likely to internalize training feedback from coaches if it happens during that time frame.

The benefit even extends to getting stronger, Head says. So if a player’s biggest weakness is, excuse the pun, his strength, he will do well to wear the Halo Sport prior to doing his weight lifting–and may even want to wear it for the first 20 minutes of those sessions, Head says.

Given that baseball’s regular season hasn’t yet started, it’s too early to tell if Halo’s technology will help the Giants actually get more wins. And even after the games begin, there’s of course no way to know if there was actually a true benefit.

But the results of the Giants’ experiment last season suggest there’s reason to believe that Halo can help the team do better. A baseball season is 162 games. It generally takes around 90 wins to guarantee a playoff spot. Over the course of that span, a 1% to 2% improvement works out to between 1.62 and 3.24 additional wins.

So, Giants fans, if your team makes the playoffs by three wins or less, there’ll be a reasonable argument to be made that it’s due to neuroscience.

Somehow over the course of their 18 years as a band, Explosions in the Sky has skated clean past the standard practice of regularly releasing music videos.

To be fair, the band has dabbled here and there with giving some of their tracks visual treatments. However, it’s become a rare sighting of Sasquatch proportions for there to be a traditional music video in even the broadest sense of the term–part of the reason being that all of their music is instrumental.

“Our music has always been described as cinematic or visual, so maybe there was part of us that felt like it’s better to have people imagine their own visuals to play throughout the songs,” says Explosions in the Sky drummer Chris Hrasky. “The music is very much open to whatever the listener wants to interpret it as.”

When their seventh album The Wilderness dropped last year, the band tossed around the idea of breaking their visual fast with something a little more orthodox for their single “The Ecstatics.” Yet according to Hrasky, the pitches they received from directors all felt like commercials.

“A lot of them were like, ‘[the video] opens with a beautiful landscape and then a a beautiful woman is walking through a field,’” Hrasky recalls. “What was being offered to us were these bland narratives that didn’t really appeal to us at all. We didn’t have a very specific vision–we just knew we wanted something that was interesting and unique.”

As vague as that sounds, the band’s manager turned the guys onto stop-motion animation director Hayley Morris, whose previous credits include client work for Samsung, Burt’s Bees, and Kate Spade, and music videos for Iron & Wine and Pure Bathing Culture. Morris’s only real guideline from the Explosions in the Sky guys was to create something within the context of the phrase “wilderness of the mind.”

“I immediately thought of the beautiful chaos that is in the mind space and how that space has a multitude of transitions, whether it’s a transition from life to death or going from unknowing to knowing,” Morris says. “Their music really lends itself to that. When you listen to it, you kind of just float into this other space.”

Unburdened by the constraints of lyrics, Morris’s turned a stop-motion clip that combines paper, translucent materials, hand-blown glass, and projections into an abstract odyssey into the nether regions of the mind.

“It was hard to imagine exactly what this was going to end up looking like from the way she described it, but it sounded very different than pretty much everything else that was pitched to us,” Hrasky says. “ We didn’t have a very clear or specific vision other than we wanted someone who did have a clear and specific vision to do it.”

And Morris’s vision involved marrying something so tactile as stop-motion animation to Explosions in the Sky’s visceral opuses.

“When you listen to their music, you can feel the vibration of the guitar and the drums–it’s a very human experience. And stop-motion is a very human art form. Everything you see on the screen was handcrafted–I’m actually touching every single image and making it move,” Morris says. “Everything is so steeped in technological innovation these days I just feel like getting back to making handmade images and pushing what that could be. It’s important for me to keep that alive.”

Watch How The Stop-Motion World Of “The Ecstatics” Came Together

It’s almost become synonymous with the brand. Remember the Paris Hilton ad from 2005? Or Kate Upton? How about Sara Underwood and Emily Ratajkowski? Hannah Ferguson? You get the idea. When you think of Carl’s Jr. advertising over the past decade, the babes outshine the burgers. Now the brand wants to change that.

In its newest brand campaign, by agency 72andSunny, Carl’s Jr. is explicitly transparent about the shift, with Carl Hardee Sr. returning to run the company after letting Carl Jr. sow his wild ad oats for long enough. Of course, Carl Hardee Sr. isn’t a real person–an amalgamation of original founders Carl Karcher and Wilbur Hardee–but the point is clear: The grown-ups are running the brand again. Why? In a market where players like Shake Shack and Five Guys are seen as “better burger” joints, Carls’ Jr. wanted to take the focus away from the bikinis and back on the burger that made the company succeed in the first place.

Brad Haley, chief marketing officer of Carl’s Jr parent company CKE Restaurants says that there were some significant facts being lost on consumers too mesmerized by the…uh, presentation. His assignment to 72andSunny was to find a way to fix that.

“While the ‘bikinis and burgers’ approach did a lot to make eating fast-food burger seem sexy–which was a tall order–we needed an advertising vehicle that could allow us to tell our very compelling, but more rational, food quality story in an entertaining way,” says Haley. “The creative brief was to find a way to more directly and consistently communicate the food quality story that we have, but for which we weren’t getting credit.”

That includes things like using 100% Black Angus beef and grass-fed, all-natural beef in their burgers, using all-natural chicken breast fillets with no antibiotics ever, making biscuits from scratch every morning, hand-breading chicken tenders, and hand-scooping the ice cream shakes. “Those are things that no other QSR chain does, collectively, and few other restaurants of any kind do,” says Haley.

72andSunny executive creative director and partner Jason Norcross says that while the marketing has been provocative , created a fair amount of controversy, and drove sales for Carl’s Jr.’s business for a long time, lately it wasn’t working as well. The brand needed to move on and do something to better reflect its ambitions. And in pivoting to a new tone, the agency thought that acknowledging the past in a fun, self-aware way (read: The ad still has its share of half-naked women) could help bring some energy and attitude to the campaign. And Carl Jr isn’t the only one being replaced at the company. CKE will be appointing a new CEO to replace Andy Puzder, who signed off on the campaign before his bid to become President Trump’s Labor Secretary failed.

“Controversial marketing worked for CKE’s business for a long time, but ultimately the girls and boobs were overshadowing the product,” says Norcross, whose agency also redesigned the fast feeder’s packaging, in-store menus, employee uniforms, and company logo. “Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s weren’t getting credit for their food. Plus, when we spoke to customers, primarily young guys, their attitude was, ‘Yep, got it. Girls. Seen it before. What do girls have to do with you guys again?’ So you could say this is part of a larger trend of people being more interested in what brands are all about. But really, I think it is more about the advertising growing stale. It became familiar, which, on top of it all, distracted from the products.”

The Galaxy S8 is set to be perhaps Samsung’s biggest product release of the year, so it should come as a surprise to no one that the brand will have a major global marketing campaign for its latest and greatest. We found a sneak peek of it in this new, five-second “Unbox Your Phone” spot.

Butterflies, trees, birds chirping. Cool.

But there was something else. Something… familiar.

That outline. Using the shape of the device as a frame through which to view the world was the star of an ad campaign last fall for Google’s Pixel phone. The outline of the device was key to helping people make the connection between the search giant’s iconic search bar and the new Pixel phone, Google’s ad agency Droga5 told me.

“The most recognized connection to Google is the search bar,” Droga5 executive creative director Kevin Brady said at the time. “Sure, they have done so many other amazing things, but this one shape is the clearest and simplest symbol of all the smarts of Google. Once we realized that, and of course noticed that the shape of our phone was also a rectangle, but a very different shape, we had our campaign.”

Obviously we have no idea just how prominent the Samsung phone frame will be in the rest of the upcoming campaign. And of course it looks completely different, and is shown in a different context than the Pixel shape. Maybe it’ll just be like a visual tagline. Barely a blip on the screen.

But still, weird right?

UPDATE: The full Galaxy S8 launch ad, by agency Leo Burnett Chicago, has been released and… that familiar shape isn’t just a blip on the screen.

Until not that long ago, there were two big differences between high-end consumer virtual reality systems like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive and mobile systems like Samsung’s Gear VR—only the (much) more expensive headsets offered crisp, clear graphics and incorporated users’ hands.

That meant that the more costly systems offered a richer VR experience–everything from wielding a lightsaber to grabbing a ladder as you ascend an icy face on Mount Everest to controlling where you go in Google Earth VR. With mobile systems, the best interaction possible was looking at something and tapping a pad on the side of the headset to indicate a choice.

That changed last fall with the introduction of Google’s $79 Daydream View, which comes with a wireless handheld controller that allows users to point and click all kinds of things and directly interact with their VR experiences, although still not as rich an experience as on a Rift or Vive.

Now, Samsung’s latest-generation Gear VR, the release of which is timed to the launch of the Korean tech giant’s new Galaxy S8 phone, joins the party when it hits shelves on April 21. For $129, buyers can get a new Gear VR and a controller, while owners of previous-generations of Samsung’s VR headset can get their hands on the controller, which is backward compatible–useful, given that Samsung has sold 5 million Gear VRs–for $39. They can also buy a second-generation Gear 360 camera, which is smaller and more efficient (and shoots 4K video) than the first version. Samsung has not yet disclosed what the new camera will cost.

No one should mistake what’s possible with single controllers for mobile VR with that of high-end systems, which utilize dual handheld peripherals in positionally tracked experiences in which users can move around and do sophisticated things like paint or sculpt in three dimensions. Still, being able to incorporate even one hand is a big step forward.

As it has throughout the history of the Gear VR, Samsung turned to Facebook-owned Oculus to develop the headset’s (and now controller’s) operating system and software. The controller offers many of the same functions as that of the Daydream View–a touchpad, a home button, volume keys–and adds a back button and most important, a trigger that opens up many content possibilities for developers, from gripping and grabbing to holding to shooting.

Oculus’s head of mobile, Max Cohen, says that there will be 20 Gear VR titles available at launch that were designed specifically with the new controller in mind, and another 50 coming in the next couple of months. But the controller will also work with all 700 existing Gear VR apps, essentially taking the place of the touchpad on the side of the headset.

Oculus also wanted to make the Gear VR user experience better in other ways, and it’s done so in a few key ways.

First, it has scrapped the existing Oculus Home experience and built a new one from the ground up. The result? Users will be in VR within 2.5 seconds of popping their phone into the device–as much as three times faster than in previous generations. And once within Oculus Home–the launchpad for all content on the Gear VR–they’ll see much sharper and crisper visuals than before. It’s akin to improving from standard-definition resolution to high-definition, Cohen says. Unfortunately, those improved graphics won’t automatically extend to third-party VR content. However, Cohen explaind, developers will be able to create new content that has similarly improved resolution, though such content would likely consume more battery power than it would otherwise.

The new Oculus Home also features an in-line browser that will allow users to surf the web without taking off their headset. With the controller, they’ll be able scroll up and down, as well as type URLs on a virtual keyboard, and they’ll be able to follow hyperlinks from site to site. It’ll also be possible to watch videos on sites like YouTube.

There’s also a new Explore section within Oculus Home that will highlight certain content based on curation, personal rankings, and eventually machine learning, Cohen says.

In 2015, Samsung released the Galaxy S6, a phone that was mostly about refinement. It upped the company’s industrial-design chops, rolled back its previous tendency to add bloat to the Android operating system, and ensured that the phone’s camera was among the best the smartphone world had to offer. Samsung followed that phone up with 2016’s Galaxy S7, which refined the S6’s refinements.

Today Samsung is launching the Galaxy S8 and S8+ (both of which already got leaked in detail) at an event in New York, along with new versions of its Gear VR virtual-reality headset and Gear 360 camera. Instead of piling more refinements on top of refinements of refinements, these new models move onto new challenges, from upsizing their display sizes in a manageable fashion to melding AI, voice control, and machine vision into an experience designed to set the phones apart from Android rivals and iPhones.

I recently attended a preview event that included a briefing by Samsung executives and some hands-on time with the phones. What I got wasn’t enough to form any definitive conclusions about the phones, in part because one of the most important new features–the Bixby voice assistant–wasn’t enabled on the units I got to try. But I did come away with some first impressions, along with questions that will take a while to answer:

A Few Impressions

1. These screens are tall.
One of the most obvious things about the Galaxy S8 and S8+–which are essentially the same phone in two sizes–is that they’ve got big displays. At 5.8″ and 6.2″, respectively, they provide more real estate than the Galaxy S7, the S7 Edge, the iPhone 7, and the iPhone 7 Plus.

Samsung didn’t accomplish this just by building upscaled successors to the S7—a move that would have made for phones that felt uncomfortably ginormous in the hand. Instead, it brought the screens up to the left and right edges of the phone (as with its Edge models) and then stretched them vertically, eliminating as much of the phones’ “foreheads” and “chins” as possible.

The resulting tall-boy design is an obvious departure from Samsung phones past, and–judging from the limited time I’ve had with the new phones–a pleasing one. It reminds me of Apple’s iPhone 5, which also upsized its display through vertical stretching.

2. The spacious screens don’t impinge on, um, holdability.
The S8 is actually slightly narrower than the smaller-screened S7, making it easier to grip; the S8+ is narrower than the iPhone 7 Plus, despite having more display space. They’re big phones, but not monsters. (People with dainty hands might strain to use these phones in one-handed mode, but that can be an issue with almost any modern phone.)

3. Tall screens make for tall apps.
The preinstalled apps I got to try looked good at the new 18.5:9 aspect ratio. Samsung has optimized its own apps and added settings for apps such as Chrome that let them fill out the available space. Just how well third-party apps will adjust, I’ll be interested to see. I’m particularly curious what these screens mean for games, some of which are hard-coded for particular aspect ratios.

VIDEO: Samsung Unveils Its Latest Galaxy Phone Post-Battery Disaster

4. You can also choose to look at these phones as having really wide screens.
Which they do, when you hold them in landscape orientation, as you’d do to watch a movie. The videos I sampled felt unusually immersive, both because of the screen width and because the display covers almost the entire face of the phones.

5. No conventional home button is no great loss.
The S8 and S8+’s skyscraper screens leave no room for the home button/fingerprint scanner on previous Galaxy models. The scanner is now on the phone’s backside—a location I find slightly less convenient than the front, but not onerous. And the home button is now virtual, appearing near the bottom edge of the screen.

There’s nothing new about on-screen home buttons: Countless other Android phones have had them for years. But Samsung, adopting a technology apparently similar to the one Apple uses for the solid-state home buttons on the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, gave its virtual button a bit of vibration that mimics the tactile feedback of its physical ancestor. I didn’t notice this until I’d been using the S8 for 20 minutes, a fact that suggests it’s a successful bit of trickery. (The home button, back button, and multitasking buttons disappear when appropriate, such as when you’re watching a video.)

6. The arrival of USB-C on Samsung’s flagship phones is a meaningful moment.
Last year’s Galaxy S6 stuck with the pervasive-but-dated microUSB connector, at a time when most other major Android phones were switching to the more elegant and versatile USB-C. With the Note 7, the company went with USB-C—a shift that would have mattered more if the phone’s life hadn’t been so short. Now, with the S7 and S7+, USB-C is back on Samsung phones. And given how well they’re likely to sell, it should help make the technology feel less like next year’s big thing and more like the default flavor of USB. (Meanwhile, despite rumors, these new phones did not follow Apple’s lead when it came to deeming the headphone jack to be obsolete.)

A Few Questions

7. Will the new era of Samsung software appeal to consumers?
A few years ago, Samsung tried to distinguish its phones from the Android pack by larding them up with its own apps and features. The results often felt gimmicky and disjointed. And the company must have eventually concluded that they didn’t help sell phones, since more recent Galaxy models have deemphasized such trimmings.

Now, with Bixby, Samsung is taking a fresh pass at differentiating its smartphones through unique software. Bixby’s assemblage of AI, voice, and vision features have nothing to do with previous Samsung oddities such as Air View and Air Gesture, and Samsung’s acquisition of smart-assistant startup Viv gives it some promising technologies to build upon. But in their own way, they revive an old challenge: Unless Samsung figures out how to make them compelling and seamless, they could feel like bloat.

8. Are the camera-sensor wars nearing an end?
Samsung says that while it’s improved its camera software, it left the 12MP rear-facing sensor pretty much alone. Given how nice the Galaxy S7’s images were, the S8 and S8+ could have some of the best cameras on the market even if they’re largely unchanged. But it does make me wonder: Is camera-sensor technology so mature that the smartphones of 2018, 2019, and 2012 won’t be radically better cameras than the phones we have now?

(Samsung has meaningfully improved the new phones’ front-facing selfie cameras, which now pack 8MP of resolution and autofocus.)

9. Do people want to use a phone as a PC?
Samsung’s most intriguing accessory for the S8 and S8+ is the DeX Station, a name that’s shorthand for “desktop experience.” It’s a cute little puck-shaped docking station that lets you use the Galaxy S8 or S8+ with an external display, keyboard, and mouse—turning either phone into a desktop computer. The company has also tweaked Android to provide an interface that roughly approximates what we’re used to with Windows and Mac OS, with apps running in floating windows you can resize and drag around. It even worked with Microsoft and Adobe to optimize the Android versions of Office 365 and Lightroom, respectively, for this PC-like environment.

Speaking of Microsoft, that company introduced a Windows 10 feature called Continuum back in 2015 that did the same thing. Unfortunately, it did so at the same time that Windows was withering away as an operating system for phones, so we never got to see whether Continuum was a killer feature. With the new Galaxies, the concept will get another shot at relevance.

10. How big a deal is voice control?
With the Bixby assistant, Samsung says that its goal is to let you use spoken commands to accomplish any task that you’d otherwise achieve by touching the screen–something which, to my knowledge, no smartphone currently offers. If the capability catches on, it could be a genuine sea change for a gadget category that’s been primarily touch-oriented ever since the first iPhone debuted a decade ago.

11. Will Bixby make computer vision a core smartphone feature?
One of the core capabilities of Amazon’s ill-fated Fire Phone was Firefly, a feature that let you point your phone’s camera at anything from a can of soup to a work of art and get information about it. Firefly also let you buy the stuff you identified from Amazon, which is presumably why the company was excited about the idea in the first place. When the Fire Phone died, so did Firefly in its most ambitious form. (The guts of the technology still exist in a feature in Amazon’s mobile apps called Camera Search.)

The Galaxy S8 and S8+’s Bixby Vision feature, which can do things like recognize a bottle of wine based on its label, look like a latter-day version of Firefly. Given the quantities of phones that Samsung will ship, a lot more people will get the chance to try this idea, and we’ll have a better sense of whether this vision-based technology stands a chance of becoming an everyday smartphone necessity.

12. Can Bixby and Google Assistant peaceably coexist on one phone?
As Samsung strives to make Bixby into an invaluable personal assistant, Google is pouring its own energies into its Google Assistant feature, which will also be available on the Galaxy S8 and S8+. Though they have their own points of emphasis–Samsung is teaching Bixby to control devices such as the company’s Roomba-style robotic vacuum, while the Assistant reflects Google’s expertise in search engines and hooks into services such as Gmail–there will certainly be areas of overlap. In the past, when phone makers have added features that compete with Google’s built-in offerings, it’s often felt less like an embarrassment of riches and more like an experience under joint custody.

13. Do these phones presage the next iPhone, and future phones in general?
If you take the rumor mill seriously–always a dangerous proposition—Apple is readying an ““iPhone 8 Pro” with a 5.8″ OLED display that spans almost all available room on the phone’s front and ditches the discrete home button for an onscreen version. If those are indeed key design factors in Apple’s next flagship phone, Samsung got there first. And if both Samsung and Apple are stretching their screens to fill as much space as possible, you’ve got to think that other manufacturers will follow. (With its new G6, LG is already on the bandwagon ahead of schedule.)

14. Will the Note 7 battery fiasco hang over this launch? For months, the big news about Samsung smartphones involved the fire-prone Galaxy Note 7 and the company’s two recalls and ultimate cancellation of the model. Samsung knows that the saga is still on peoples’ minds: The S8 press event I attended began with an executive acknowledging last year’s “setbacks.” A safe, successful S8 rollout could quickly undo the damage to the company’s reputation. Then again, even one ugly anecdote could give consumers jitters–and no device with a lithium-ion battery is absolutely free of risks. (Just ask Apple.)

One more thought about the Galaxy S8 and S8+: There’s no way that Samsung is going to realize its sprawling ambitions for Bixby–encompassing voice interfaces, machine vision, and AI in a variety of forms–into the first version of the software as provided on two phones. That means that the S8 and S8+ could represent the first step on a journey that will require multiple generations of phones to get anywhere near completion. Once again, as with the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S7, it’s likely that Samsung’s emphasis will turn from fresh new ideas to refinement.

There’s no plaque or certificate to verify this, but Mathieu Bitton is pretty sure his home is “the world’s smallest Black History museum.”

Over a wide-ranging career that spans album cover art direction, filmmaking, photography, and being Lenny Kravitz’s personal creative director, Bitton’s creative catalyst has always been deeply rooted in African-American culture, which may seem strange given the fact that Bitton is neither American nor black. His obsession started as a kid in Paris avidly collecting blaxploitation movie posters and an assortment of R&B, jazz, soul, and funk albums. Far from being some fleeting phase, Bitton’s compendium of black music, art, and beyond has grown as wide as his appreciation has deepened.

Yet, he’s still at a loss for words to explain why his Los Angeles home has become a physical embodiment black culture.

“It’s hard to answer only because I don’t know if I’ve completely figured it out except for that it’s the art that moves me the most,” Bitton says. “I think it’s just beauty. The best answer I can give you is that it’s all so beautiful.”

Bitton has curated the beauty he’s captured over the years into his Leica exhibition Darker Than Blue. Taken from Curtis Mayfield’s song “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue,” Bitton’s intimate collection is a celebration of black communities.

“Looking at the political climate, I needed to contribute something and not just ‘Look at this cool photo of a rock star or this beautiful Russian model on a bed smoking a cigarette,’” Bitton says. “I’m proud of the work that I’ve done, but I felt like with the political climate, I had to do something that would evoke a reaction–that somebody would look at and wouldn’t just say, ‘She’s hot–nice boobs.’ I needed to go a little deeper than that.”

In order to go deeper within black communities, Bitton had to reconcile with the fact that A) some people just don’t want their photo taken and/or B) they don’t trust a white man taking it. In the past, Bitton has been punched in the shoulder and had a sandwich hurled at him for taking unsolicited photos. He doesn’t use what people don’t consent to. However, he’s found that more times than not, having a simple conversation with someone tears down any hesitation and has allowed for some of his most compelling work. Take, for example, his photo “Mickey and Friends” from Darker Than Blue that depicts two young Brooklyn girls with their grandmother. After getting an unspoken nod of approval from the grandmother, Bitton began snapping a few photos when the girl in the Mickey Mouse T-shirt asked, “Why do you want to take my picture? I’m so ugly.”

“And I was like, ‘What are you talking about? You’re so beautiful. That’s what stopped me in my tracks was how beautiful this moment is and how iconic you look,’” Bitton replied. “Then she started telling me how people bullied her in school because she’s overweight and then all of a sudden we had this whole conversation. I was telling her that I photograph rock stars and legends and that she was the most interesting subject I shot on that trip.”

Through his career across album design and photography, Bitton has gone past being just a collector to contributing to the legacies of the artists he admires most, including Prince, Miles Davis, Bob Marley, and Marvin Gaye. But he doesn’t hesitate to say that Darker Than Blue is some of his most personal work to-date. He’s shifting his lens from the biggest names in entertainment to the overlooked and unsung in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative.

“I see myself as a storyteller,” Bitton says. “I’m just capturing a moment and I’m lucky enough if I get it in focus.”

WHAT: The terrifying first trailer for the long-gestating remake of Stephen King’s It.

WHO: Director Andrés Muschietti, and a cast of mostly unknown child actors.

WHY WE CARE: For a long time, it seemed as if the most interesting thing about this project would be the behind-the-scenes drama. Hot off the zeitgeist-snatching success of True Detective season one, director Cary Fukunaga announced he would be adapting the much-loved book and network miniseries into a two-part film. After writing a screenplay, however, Fukunaga eventually left what had become a troubled production in the summer of 2015. After a brief limbo period, directing duties fell to Andrés Muschietti, who helmed the surprise horror hit, Mama. Some of the excitement around the possibilities of the Stephen King-inspired enterprise had undoubtedly dissipated. No longer, though. Now that the first of the two films has a trailer, it seems difficult to argue that fans are in good hands. Although the clip starts with a very familiar paper sailboat floating perilously close to a sewage drain, things quickly deviate from the 1990 miniseries. For instance, there’s a slideshow scene that goes off the rails in a way that seems true to the spirit of the original, even though it didn’t happen in it. (For our money, these kinds of deviations are what make remakes and adaptations most worthwhile.) And although much has been said about how no performance could possibly be as chilling as Tim Curry’s take on Pennywise the Clown, the glimpses we get of Bill Skarsgård hint that he may be worthy of the big (clown)shoes he has to fill.

In L.A.–where commuters each spent an average of 104 hours stuck in traffic in 2016–most people drive to work alone. But in 15 years, a new report estimates, more than 2 million of them may have given up their cars.

Autonomous cars are likely to be on roads in three or four years. As adoption scales up, the cost of an Uber or Lyft (or whatever company replaces them) ride may drop roughly in half for consumers: not having to pay a driver will make the ride cost much less. The report, called Driverless Future, estimates how many car owners are likely to shift to hailing a driverless car because using an app is cheaper–and what that shift means for American cities.

“What we saw in the model–and we ran it a few different ways–is it’s going to be a monumental shift,” Joe Iacobucci, director of transit for Sam Schwartz, an engineering firm that partnered with Arcadis and HR&A to create the report, tells Fast Company. “Forty percent to 60% who are driving today will have an economic rationale to shift to those services.”

The report looked at three representative cities. In the New York metro area, the drop in car ownership could be as much as 60%, or 3.6 million vehicles, versus as much as a 44% drop in L.A. and a 31% drop in Dallas. (The differences in the economics are driven primarily by the cost of parking, which is very high in Manhattan and often free in Dallas).

With fewer personal vehicles, cities could radically change. “The potential reduction in space needed to store vehicles provides cities an incredible advantage or opportunity to rethink the way that our streets work, and our very pricey urban infrastructure,” says Iacobucci.

“When you look at an average street, in a lot of cases, you could say 25% of the street is actually dedicated to the storage of cars,” he says. “If we need one drop-off space that satisfies 20 parking spaces, we could essentially create on-street bus networks, separated bike lanes, and large pedestrian facilities to make our streets the best practice of a living street.”

Former parking garages could become housing or office space. In downtown Washington, D.C., 40% of land is dedicated to parking; in a less-dense downtown like Houston, that number is 65%. (The report recommends that any new parking garages built now should be designed for future conversion to another use). Related businesses, like gas stations and car washes, could also move out of densely-populated areas to free up space.

For people who can’t currently afford a car and don’t live near strong public transportation, access to cheap autonomous rides has the potential to help them reach better-paying jobs. Neighborhoods segregated by income are associated with lower economic mobility, and researchers who have studied the phenomenon say that better transportation is part of the solution. Conversely, the shift to more ride hailing might mean that higher-income families are more willing to move to suburbs that are further away; this would be bad because the less that low-income families are exposed to more successful ones, the less likely it becomes that poor children make it into another income bracket.

The choices that cities make now in policy could determine whether the outcome is positive. For example, to ensure that lower-income residents can use ride hailing to reach jobs in different neighborhoods, cities may need to require companies like Uber to offer alternate ways to hail or pay for a ride for people who can’t afford a smartphone.

Many cities are beginning the process of planning for an autonomous future. Detroit and Pittsburgh already each have city employees focused on autonomous cars. In one project launched in 2016, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Aspen Institute are working with 10 cities to help them create strategies.

“We were very aware that the first time cities met cars, things went well for cars and somewhat less well for cities,” says Jennifer Bradley, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Aspen Institute. “Now we know a little, and we’re trying to help create a situation in which the conversation and the deployment of this technology is not driven entirely by the companies, but cities and residents are able to more strongly shape the future.”

Cities will have to plan to for a drop in parking revenue. They’ll also have to plan for the fact that a large number of consumers may opt for ride hailing over public transportation, potentially putting transit services at risk.

The report recommends that cities should analyze where public versus private transit makes the most sense–in a high-density area, where subways or bus rapid transit will be faster than multiple Uber cars stuck in traffic, cities should focus on building or upgrading public transit. In other areas, a traditional bus might have to be improved or replaced to stay competitive. A city transit app might include everything from buses and bikes to ride hailing, and suggest the best option.

Cities also have the chance to plan for “car-light” neighborhoods. They’ll have to figure out how to make sure that everyone has access to new mobility options, if some don’t have a smartphone. They’ll also have to figure out how to help the replaced drivers find new jobs. But done right, policy could lead to very different, and improved, cities.

“If cities get in front of this and they manage it correctly, it could be a once in a lifetime opportunity to better optimize our city streets, city transportation infrastructure, and to make a city right now which is largely segregated based on income, much more inclusive,” Iacobucci says. “If we ignore this, it could be a repeat of the 20th century, which basically gave us congestion, inequity, and separation from our transportation network.”

For artists, the gentrification cycle in cities often goes something like this: struggling photographers or painters or writers move into an industrial neighborhood with cheaper rents and transform it. As new businesses spring up to serve these new residents, the neighborhood becomes more desirable to a wider swath of upper-middle class professionals. Eventually, rents increase so much that the artists have to move away.

In Indianapolis, one block in the Garfield Park neighborhood south of the city’s downtown is experimenting with a different model. An arts nonprofit worked with other partners to buy and renovate vacant houses and is now offering to co-own them with artists. Artists will pay half the cost–one $80,000 home, for example, will sell for around $40,000. If they later move out, they’ll get their equity back, but no more; the house will be sold at the same cost to someone else, keeping the neighborhood accessible as the artists help make it more desirable.

“Neither of the two sides can profit off of an inflated market value,” says Jim Walker, executive director of Big Car Collaborative, the art and placemaking nonprofit leading the project along with the local Riley Area Development Corporation and local neighborhood associations. “That’s to keep us from pricing out future owners of the homes.”

The nonprofit, along with several of its members, was based in a nearby neighborhood, called Fountain Square, for seven years until it was priced out as rents rose. “At that point, the ship had sailed and commercial and, later, residential gentrification was underway,” he says. “And we knew it was time for us to do something different.”

When Big Car bought an abandoned factory on a block in Garfield Park, converting it into a community art center that opened in 2016, the organization realized that there was a bigger opportunity in the area. The block, cut off from part of the neighborhood by a highway built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had declined for years; roughly half of the houses were abandoned.

“The thought was, let’s have these houses be cultural locations that are also studio space and living space for artists,” says Walker.

Although housing in Indianapolis is cheap relative to some other parts of the country, wages are also low, and for someone working in a creative field, buying a house might not be attainable. The low land prices on this particular block made it possible for the partners to buy the houses, fix them up, and still offer them at a cost that artists can afford.

“These homes were available to us below $20,000, on average, because they were owned by banks in Florida and other investors who just walked away,” says Eric Strickland, executive director of Riley Area Development Corporation, which works on community development in and around downtown Indianapolis.

In addition to funds invested by the organizations that are involved, local developers and architects–along with neighbors–also donated labor. Some supplies were also donated. The resulting houses are both affordable and neutrally finished, so artists can customize the final space to their own taste.

The location has some advantages for artists. Anyone who buys a house in the program can use resources in the art center at the end of the block, such as a wood shop and screen printing shop. A separate building houses a sound art gallery and a community radio station. As more artists move into the homes, there will be a built-in community.

“There’s also a need, I think, for artists to be in a community and to be connected with each other,” says Walker. “This is a way for them to be in close proximity with others, and also have our building and the workshop that’s here and the facility as something they can use.”

There are more underused resources in the neighborhood’s nearby historic city park, such as an amphitheater, arts center, and library. “You have a lot of public space that can engage artists’ work,” says Strickland. “So now you have a place in the community for that work to be deployed.”

The team took inspiration from other communities that are using similar models to attract artists. Paducah, Kentucky launched its Artist Relocation Program in 2000, offering artists land or vacant buildings for $1; the program rebuilt the neighborhood. In Houston, Project Row Houses restored houses for visiting artists in a struggling African-American neighborhood. A Minnesota-based nonprofit called Artspace has developed dozens of live-work spaces for artists.

In Indianapolis, the Artist and Public Life Residency program is designed for artists who are particularly interested in community and placemaking. “What we’re really looking for, first and foremost, is leadership in trying to invest in the community, and use the talents and resources that you have to support your own neighborhood,” says Walker.

Artists–defined broadly as anyone working in a creative field, from filmmaking and architecture to culinary arts–will dedicate at least 16 hours a month to working with the public. For example, they may teach a workshop or work with neighbors to create public art for the neighborhood. They will also open their homes to the public between four and six times a year, typically during monthly gallery walks in the neighborhood.

The partners purchased 11 buildings; of the three that are now ready, two are available in a current round of applications. One will be reserved for short-term artist residencies. At least four more homes will be sold later. As the program develops and the team can evaluate its progress, some of the other homes may be rented rather than sold.

As the vacant homes are filled, that will help push up the value of neighboring homes. Because the neighborhood is adjacent to another recently revitalized area, and because a bus rapid transit line will soon improve transportation there, home values are likely to increase for other reasons as well.

While that will benefit existing homeowners, it could potentially push some renters out of the neighborhood. The development corporation wants to encourage other developers to build new affordable housing for the area to help keep the most vulnerable people in place. Residents in the area, on average, are poorer and more likely to be unemployed than those in the county as a whole (unlike gentrifying neighborhoods in some cities, however, race is not a major factor–most of the residents are white).

Big Car is working closely with neighbors, who they say have been supportive of the changes–particularly the potential for local commercial streets to gain new businesses and bringing life to vacant houses.

“Ultimately, we want to be a resource to residents, and we want to help existing neighbors stay in their homes and enjoy positives that come from turning vacant houses and industrial and commercial buildings into vibrant, community-focused cultural spaces and local businesses,” says Walker.

“We learned, from our first time around, that being able to do this takes planning, thinking ahead, and a very strong partnership between the people working on redevelopment and the people who live there,” he says. “Nobody wanted all of these houses and buildings to stay vacant. We want to make sure that the effect of what we and others are doing with these formerly vacant spaces is positive and supports our neighborhood–and results in a better place for lots of people, not just in profit for a few.”

For the last few years, Apple has reliably trailed Samsung in releasing the latest and greatest premium smartphone features. And this morning, Samsung jumped out in front again with the official launch of its new Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones.

The new devices offer several features that the iPhone doesn’t yet have—and some of them could really change (and improve) the way we use the devices.

Big and Bright

Samsung’s strong suit is the display, and the company put a beauty on the S8. It’s an edge-to-edge OLED screen, so it removes the bezel space around the screen area.

“So it’s the same footprint (same size as S7 and S7+), there’s nothing bigger to hold, and you get a much bigger screen,” says Gartner analyst Brian Blau, who spoke from the Samsung event in New York.

The S8 has a 5.8-inch display compared to the S7’s 5.1-inch screen. The S8+ has a 6.2-inch display, compared to the S7+’s 5.5-inch display. That’s a big step up. However, it does create an elongated aspect ratio in the new phone screens. We’ll see how that works with third-party apps.

And like all Samsung displays, it’s noticeably bigger and brighter than those on other smartphones.

The screen is so big that it crowded out the space needed for a physical home button. So users will rely on the software buttons in Android for control.

Iris Scanner

Samsung included an biometric iris scanner in its failed Galaxy Note 7 phone, but the technology was a little unreliable as a quick way to unlock the phone. Samsung has tried again in the S8, with hopefully better results.

“The iris scanner is going to be big,” says Bob O’Donnell of Technalysis Research (who also spoke from the event). “It’s a really secure biometric method, and it’s great that Samsung is giving people the option of using that and using the fingerprint reader.”

Gartner’s Blau is also bullish on the iris scanner but isn’t a fan of the new placement of the fingerprint reader (which got pushed to the back of the phone when the physical home button went away).

“It’s ill-positioned because it’s right next to the camera on the back of the phone,” he says. “I worry that it’s going to lead to users smudging the camera lens.”

The Harmon Connection

O’Donnell is impressed with the new AKG earbuds that will ship with the new S8s. They normally cost $99, but are included for free. Smartphone makers have traditionally made poor earphones (Apple recently became the exception) so Samsung let somebody who knows audio provide the buds. “It’s an impressive first integration with Harmon,” O’Donnell says. Samsung bought Harmon in late 2016 for its automotive and consumer audio technology, and has been furiously working to bring the U.S.-based company into the Samsung fold.

Another Desktop Dock

Both O’Donnell and Blau thought Samsung’s new DeX desktop dock for the S8 was notable, but are reserving judgment until they learn how well it actually works.

“The notion of the phone as pocket computer is something that we’ve seen before from Motorola and others, but this looks like a more serious effort,” O’Donnell said. He added that the dock is powered by a bit of software called Citrix Receiver, which will allow users to securely connect to a cloud and display enterprise apps in the S8’s Android environment.

Gartner’s Blau: “To be honest, it’s not going to be something for everyone, but it might be useful for a certain segment of mobile workers.”

An Assistant That Can See

Samsung used the event as a sort of coming-out party for its new “Bixby” digital personal assistant and Siri competitor. “Bixby is interesting because it does both voice and image recognition,” O’Donnell said. “The concept is that the assistant can both understand talking and can see, which is conceptually the right idea.”

Samsung demonstrated how Bixby can recognize a specific bottle of wine through the lens of the S8 camera—and since it’s connected to Amazon, the user could actually buy the bottle. Gartner’s Blau points out that we’ve already seen such technology in Amazon’s Fire Phone and in the Amazon shopping app, so it’s not that new.

Bixby looks very rudimentary at the moment, and Samsung will need time to build the assistant into something really useful to consumers, said Blau. “It’s an interesting first pass.”

No New Camera?

On the downside, Samsung did almost nothing to improve the rear-facing camera in the new phone. Aside from some software enhancements, the hardware is the same, Blau said. “With other companies introducing dual-lens cameras, I would have expected that Samsung would have done something here.” Samsung did, however, increase the front-facing camera from a 5-megapixel to 8-megapixel lens.

The “Galaxy”

Samsung’s big message is that it’s offering a meaningful set (a “galaxy”) of products and services around its premium smartphones. O’Donnell believes the company did a more compelling job of expressing that vision at today’s event. “They’ve been able to build an ecosystem that has broad appeal and enables a whole bunch of services that extend beyond the phone,” he said.

Moving On

And, of course, the elephant in the room was the company’s PR nightmare with the exploding batteries in its last major smartphone release, the Galaxy Note 7. Samsung’s mobile chief D.J. Ko was convincingly contrite at the end of the event today, saying his company needs to be “humble” and to learn from the past.

“Samsung needed a solid event today to help them get past the Note debacle,” Blau said. “I think they did that; I think they’re clearly stepping past that.”

A report from the Motion Picture Association of America found that the number of African-Americans who go to the movies frequently (at least once a month) hit its highest mark in 2016 with 5.6 million, up nearly two million from 2015. Coincidentally, 2016 saw a wave of critically and commercially successful films starring African-Americans, including Hidden Figures, Fences, I Am Not Your Negro, The 13th, and Best Picture winnerMoonlight.

Although the report doesn’t draw a direct correlation between the spike in African-American movie goers and the amount and caliber of films that represent them, c’mon. It’s hard to think of the MPAA’s findings as anything but concrete validation that if Hollywood doubles down on its efforts in creating movies with nuanced characters and stories that deftly reflect African-American communities ipso facto African-Americans will go to the movies more often.

Here’s hoping that Jordan Peele’s box-office crushing debut Get Out is an indication of an even better showing out from African-American moviegoers in 2017.

Read the full report here.

For as long as Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal have been creating YouTube videos and for all the success they’ve had doing it, they still feel like they’re navigating uncharted territory.

Since joining YouTube in 2006, Rhett and Link, whose friendship dates back to first grade in North Carolina, have launched three channels with a combined 16.7 million subscribers, a podcast, a YouTube Red original series, and their debut book hits shelves in fall 2017, all of which rolls under their company Mythical Entertainment operated by around 25 employees. They’ve meticulously crafted a digital empire that, coincidentally, is shoring up their brand against the volatility of the platform that created them.

“It still feels very much like the Wild West when you don’t know who’s going to come into town and be the new sheriff,” says Link. “Turns out, it’s some kid who’s playing with toys or it’s some dude unboxing stuff. We learned years ago to not judge anything.”

“We used to ask the question, ‘why is this popular?’” Rhett adds. “But then you start to understand that if it’s popular, it must make sense to enough people.”

YouTube’s rapidly expanding platform, with one billion hours consumed daily worldwide and around 400 hours of content uploaded per minute, has created a massive stage where there’s a saturation of creators all vying for those all-important views and subscribers. Rhett and Link are in the position of having built their loyal following over the course of 11 years and more than 1,900 videos. But it’s more than just sticking around long enough to gain traction. Rhett and Link have been steadily diversify their offerings to nearly a fault of arbitrariness that has made them one of YouTube’s most-subscribed creators.

Unlike most YouTubers who have clearly defined themes to their channels (gaming, beauty, food, etc.), Rhett and Link fall into a more nebulous area they’ve loosely coined as “Internetainment.” They started out with relatively standard fare of skits and comedic songs, which eventually led to videos featuring food and physical challenges, science experiments, myth-busting, factoids, and more. Essentially, Rhett and Link have chiseled their portmanteau into the slightly more tangible branding of “mythicality.”

“The thing that brings it all together is this concept of a mythicality that we have brought some definition to in writing the book [Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality: A Field Guide to Curiosity, Creativity, and Tomfoolery]–it’s a combination of curiosity, creativity, and tomfoolery, and we want everything that we do to have that value,” says Rhett. And who else to judge said value than the people watching your content? As with many YouTubers, Rhett and Link have developed a devout community whose comments and feedback are routinely embedded in their creative and business decisions.

“We listen to our artistic voice, we listen to each other, and we listen to our audience,” says Link. “It’s a discipline to comb through comments and find the collective wisdom of people who are impulsive, passive, sometimes negative, but there’s something there that you can always glean that can inform the next thing you do.” Adds Rhett: “That’s taught us not to get too excited about a new idea or a new project until it’s been in front of an audience. So we’ve got this idea. We think we know the Internet pretty well, we know our audience and we know what we like. We find the intersection of all those things, and we put it out there but we make sure that it’s purposely not completely formulated so it will be informed by them.”

By and large, a YouTuber is indeed only as successful as how engaged their audience is with their content. For Rhett and Link, listening to feedback is a priority, but it’s a priority that has to balance out, and sometimes weigh less, than what drives them creatively. With their mission of creating under the banner of mythicality, Rhett and Link are tapping into the frame of mind in which they started YouTube in the first place–a frame of mind that has, and will continue to be, the key to their longevity.

“There’s a constant threat of creating something that expresses what we think is funny and building on something that is working–when you do a daily show like Good Mythical Morning, it’s easy to get in a rut and just do the things that are going to perform,” Link says.

“So it’s something we keep in mind constantly,” Rhett continues. “Even though we do have a business with a team that supports us and we have a schedule that we stick to, we try to maintain the spirit of innovation and originality that characterized our content from the early days and translate that into every project that we’re doing so it doesn’t ever feel like it’s coming from a corporate place.”

Lucky breaks are common. Nobody is as lucky as Woody Harrelson thinks he is, though. He thinks he lucked out with White Men Can’t Jump. He thinks fortune favored Zombieland, the ultra-rare zom-com smash. And he attributes the zeitgeist-snatching mojo of True Detective to kismet. But when you’ve hit the jackpot as many times as Woody Harrelson has, clearly it’s not because of hot dice—it’s the person holding them.

Woody Harrelson’s career is singular. Go ahead and try to find a point of comparison–it’s a waste of time. He has survived three decades and counting of the Hollywood meat grinder, only to continue ascending ever-skyward, like an MC Escher staircase, to the present, where he is more in demand and more reliable than ever. Stick Woody Harrelson in any kind of movie and he will only improve it. Now You See Me 2? He will play a magician with an evil twin (also a magician) and fully steal the show like David Copperfield stealing the Statue of Liberty. Edge of Seventeen? He will play the world-weary suburban school teacher and he will turn every cliche associated with that role on its head. And those are just two of the four films he appeared in last year. He will be in at least five more in 2017, which means there’s a chance he’ll star in more great movies this year than his fellow former cast members of Cheers will see. And the strangest part of all? He may just be getting started.

On the occasion of one of those films’s release, the unapologetically unusual Wilson, Fast Company walked through 30+ years with the underrated superstar, to give each phase of his unicorn career its due.

Rising (1985-1992)

Auditions can make or break actors on any given day. When Harrelson aced one for what became his first signature role, Woody Boyd on Cheers, it was because he didn’t care much whether he got it or not.

“I had in my mind that I wouldn’t do TV,” Harrelson says, “because it ain’t like now, obviously. Like, now television is just phenomenal. But back then, I always looked at it as a little bit lowbrow. But then of course when I watched Cheers, I was like, well, this is high quality.”

He’d just been through a skull-rattling Broadway audition with much higher stakes. The struggling New York theater actor had made a deal with himself that if he didn’t book the part he was up for in Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues, he’d fly home to Midland, Texas, having given acting his best shot. He’d booked a ticket and everything. Luckily, it never came to that.

“I was interested in Cheers, but I also knew that I was doing something on Broadway, so I was absolutely carefree in that audition,” Harrelson says. “‘You don’t want me? Fine. I’m gonna go do my dream on Broadway.’”

For eight years, Harrelson slung suds behind the bar at Cheers as the dimwitted, big-hearted Woody Boyd, whom the show’s creators named after him. He managed to stand out in a stacked cast, winning an Emmy for the role in 1989, but he was only giving America a limited view of his capabilities. One of Harrelson’s talents is that he’s an intellectual chameleon. He can play the smartest guy in the room, or the dumbest, or the smartest pretending to be the dumbest—and he can tip viewers off to which he is with one wily-eyed look. Woody Boyd offered him the opportunity to fingerpaint in only a few shades, and for a long time those seemed like the only shades Hollywood wanted him to use.

“I liked playing Woody Boyd, but I didn’t want that to be my only foray into the entertainment world,” he says. “That was the case for like six years until I got White Men Can’t Jump.”

Although he’d made other films before, including Wildcats with Goldie Hawn and future costar Wesley Snipes, White Men Can’t Jump was the first one he’d had a lead in, and the first hit. It was the kind of movie destined to air on TBS every Sunday afternoon in perpetuity, and it was good enough to make you want to watch the whole thing every time you flipped by and saw it on. White Men Can’t Jump was a catchphrse-coining, barbed buddy comedy laced with drama and romance, and it immediately created more than a half-court of buffer space between Woody Harrelson and Woody Boyd.

Diversification (1993-1998)

The next stage of Harrelson’s career was marked by a further diffusing of his on-screen persona. Over five years, he would star in an erotic drama, a social satire about serial killers, a prestige biopic, and a not-insignificant number of goofy comedies—and he would end up with his first Oscar nomination.

“It wasn’t that I was so determined to branch out from comedy,” he says. “Hell, I still feel like I don’t want to branch out from comedy. But, I don’t know, these things come along and you gotta do them.”

Indecent Proposal was up first, a sexy morality play that had couples around the world arguing about whether they’d let an interloper into their marriage for one night if it meant a million-dollar payout. It was the second big-impact cultural hit in a row. He was on a roll. The following year, however, he made a film with less enviable reverberations. Harrelson dove deep into his personal demons—and those of his father, an actual convicted murderer—to play one of the titular roles in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. He was shockingly convincing. The controversial film (scripted by Quentin Tarantino) reportedly inspired several real-life murders.

It was around this time, though, that Harrelson started cultivating a skill that would become a hallmark of his career: creative collaboration. He and Wesley Snipes had improvised lots of dialogue in White Men Can’t Jump, and he had even more ideas for the character Mickey in Natural Born Killers, including the recurring motif of the shadow.

“I believe as an actor, you want to not just be hitting your mark and saying your line,” Harrelson says. “If possible, you want to add something to it, add something to the whole story.”

He had a lot to add when it came to one of his next films, 1996’s The People vs Larry Flynt, in which Harrelson played the much-loathed real-life founder of Hustler Magazine. It was the opposite of White Men Can’t Jump, a drama with comedic elements, and it would require him to do things he’d never done onscreen before. (Again.) Part of preparing for the part meant preparing the part for him.

“[Director] Milos [Foreman] was real open to stuff. I did a whole reworking of that script before we shot it,” Harrelson says. “Because I’d just been working back to back to back and I was trying to get it pushed to where we didn’t have to start it right away in January. So, I flew to where Larry [Flynt] was vacationing at this island and we worked on it, went through the whole freaking script, and then called Milos. Spur of the moment, he came out, God bless him. And then we worked on it and Ed [Norton] came out too.”

The resulting film earned Harrelson an Oscar nomination. It was only three years after Cheers had gone off the air, and already he’d laid the groundwork so that it didn’t seem odd for the guy who played Woody Boyd to be an award season contender. What should have been a victory lap, though, turned into practically a walk of shame. The well-reviewed film was a box office bomb, at least partially due to Larry Flynt being the kind of notorious that attracts serious resistance. It was one of those instances that disproves the maxim ‘all publicity is good publicity.’

“That whole Larry Flynt thing took a bad turn,” Harrelson says. “It was actually a low time in my career. Even though I was nominated, there was a campaign against it, so that hurt it and I think hurt my career too.”

The next couple years included a chance to act for then-elusive director Terrence Malick in The Thin Red Line, but not many other major opportunities. Harrelson had branched out and he’d broken through, but he didn’t like what he found on the other side.

Exile (1999-2006)

For roughly the length of the Bush administration, give or take a year, Woody Harrelson was in the wilderness. He appeared in a few decent indie films and a handful of flagrant flops (Play It To The Bone, EdTV, She Hate Me, A Prairie Home Companion). There were four years where he didn’t make any movies at all.

“I wanted to take some time off and I found I really liked taking time off so I took a lot,” Harrelson says. “I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing and I was overdoing it. I was working too many hours, too many back-to-backs to the point where I wasn’t enjoying my life. And I wanted to just take time off.” He waits a beat, as if weighing whether this version of events is accurate and then adds a note. “This also coincided with a time where I was probably a little less in demand, so that worked out well.”

Although Harrelson didn’t exactly become unfamous during this time in the cinematic hinterlands, his track record was undeniably diminished. Or at least it seemed that way at the time.

Experimentation (2007-2011)

The film that brought Harrelson back to civilization, so to speak, was No Country for Old Men in 2007. Years of cameos in the likes of Anger Management and guest turns on Will and Grace had made audiences forget what a subtle, layered Woody Harrelson performance looked like, and how he could sink his teeth into a substantive role. Something about appearing in a beloved and Academy-honored movie again revived a hunger in Harrelson, because afterward he was officially back from sabbatical. The next few years were marked by an uptick in productivity and a wider array of roles and films.

Although he’d already proven he had range, Harrelson suddenly became more eclectic than ever in his choices. He tried out experimental indies, broad Will Ferrell sports comedies, big-budget disaster flicks, the aforementioned Zombieland, and a metaphysical misfire with Will Smith.

“When I didn’t listen to my agents, things didn’t go so good,” Harrelson admits. If he was intrigued by a director, though, he was willing to take a leap of faith. “The key thing is the director. I mean, script is obviously very crucial, because you could have a great director and a shitty script and it’s not going to turn out great, but I’m more focused on directors than anything. Oren Moverman was a first time director and I did two movies with him. I think he’s phenomenal. On the other hand, not a lot of people saw the movies we did together, but I really loved working with him.”

One of those movies with Oren Moverman, The Messenger, a harrowing stateside drama about the Iraq War, earned Harrelson his second Academy Award nomination. He did not win, but the renewed sheen of wide acclaim set the stage for what was to come in the next couple years.

Ascension (2012 – ?)

Because Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey are good friends who‘ve worked together many times, they’re often discussed in tandem. But while much was made of the “McConnaissance” that led up to HBO’s critically-adored first season of True Detective in 2014, nobody was really talking about the “Harrelscension.” Perhaps it’s because McConaughey was coming out of a foggy period of interchangeable romantic comedies when he began devouring meaty artistic roles, while Harrelson was merely becoming more commercially viable than he’d been in some time. In any case, Harrelson’s Emmy-nominated performance in the HBO political comedy, Game Change, hit around the same time he got swept into the massive blockbuster Hunger Games series, and Now You See Me quietly made well over a quarter-billion dollars disappear. Although he’d never really gone away, Harrelson was now indelibly back.

“It’s definitely a different thing,” he says of his post-Hunger Games level of fame. “I’ve gotten to know another generation and vice versa.”

The four-film series offered the kind of job security that allowed Harrelson to take an artistic risk with True Detective, a promising neo-noir overseen by an unproven talent, Nic Pizzolatto, and which required a grueling six-month shoot in Louisiana.

“Only two of the eight episodes were written when I first saw the script, and they were really good,” Harrelson says, “although I thought my part was not great. But you know, we worked on that to make it better.”

In the first few months of 2014, True Detective became the kind of pop culture entity you felt left out if you hadn’t seen. Theories about the Yellow King’s identity percolated throughout the internet and ratings were high. Although none of the Emmys the show brought in went to Harrelson, True Detective was a bravura acting showcase for him, which was not lost on anyone. The limited series paved the way for a 2017 that consists of an elegant mix of genres, styles and budgets.

First up is Wilson, an adaptation of a Daniel Clowes graphic novel featuring Harrelson as the world’s most curmudgeonly people person. Next is Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a Coen Brothers-style yarn directed by Martin McDonagh, whose profanity-heavy trailer was the talk of Twitter when it was released last week. Over the summer, he’ll play the lead human in War for the Planet of the Apes, and then in the fall he’ll co-star in high-profile literary adaptation The Glass Castle with Brie Larson. At some point, we’ll also be seeing one of the two political films he recently shot with Rob Reiner–possibly the one in which he plays former president Lyndon B. Johnson. Oh yeah, and in 2018, he has a big part in the next Star Wars spin-off anthology movie, where he may play the young Han Solo’s mentor or father, but which he definitely cannot tell Fast Company much about at all. It’s the kind of year one might’ve expected him to have after his initial winning streak in the ’90s. Better late than never.

What will the next stage of Harrelson’s career look like? Perhaps he’s about to enter his auteur phase. Earlier this year, he executed a historic feat when he directed the world’s first “live movie,” Lost in London, from a script he’d written. If the words “live movie” sound an awful lot like “play,” consider that this play had 14 separate locations, involved 30 actors and 24 sound people, and was live-streamed into movie theaters.

“I had that script lying around a long time and I finally felt like, well, if I don’t get on this thing now, then I’m just going to keep working on these other projects and I’m never gonna do it,” Harrelson says. “The whole idea was the convergence or the merging of theater and film. It was a massive undertaking and we rehearsed for about six or seven weeks. It nearly killed me, but I’m glad how it turned out.”

The original idea was to distribute the finished film on iTunes, but Harrelson is now rethinking it, and talking with Picture House to distribute it in a limited release. In the meantime, he’s also finishing up writing another film, a slapstick comedy called Fitz about a guy named Fitzgerald Fitzsimmons (“An Irish guy,” Woody clarifies, deadpan.) He’s currently about three-quarters satisfied with the draft he has, and is confident about moving forward with it. Beyond that film and Han Solo, his hopes for the future are pretty simple.

“The other day I re-read an old play I’d written, and it’s terrible but it has the potential to be really interesting,” he says. “I wanna get some great theater director to direct it and I’d like to get back on the boards, do a comedy that’s gonna be like ninety minutes, make the audience feel good, make the actors feel good, and then get to the pub.”

Who knows, maybe he’ll get lucky.

It takes a hiring manager just a few seconds to look at your resume and decide whether or not they like you enough to want to meet you. That’s precious little time to stand out and convey not just your professional skills but who you are.

Nailing that challenge means striking a careful balance: You want to show you’ve got what it takes to actually do the job but also that you have the soft skills–and personality–to make you someone the hiring manager and the rest of the team will enjoy working with. Here are a few dos and don’ts.

Do: Talk About Your (Professional) Passions

You already know you need to load up your resume with keywords to describe your experience, education, and technical skills–to show you’re a match for the ins and outs of the role’s daily duties. But there’s much less advice out there on how to share your passions with hiring managers: Which ones reflect positively on you as a person? Which seem irrelevant? What comes off as unprofessional?

While experience, skills, and education will help you complete your assigned tasks, this trio isn’t enough to keep you motivated day in and day out. And even if only in the back of their mind, the hiring manager knows that.

So it’s up to you to offer a glimpse of the deeper factors driving your career: What are your professional passions: What motivates and inspires you to go into work each day? Is it the thrill of the unknown that accompanies startup life? A love for seeing children learn and grow? Giving back to your community?

Weave this into the bullets underneath each role on your resume, connecting a few of your key accomplishments with a sense of why those wins matter to you in the first place.

Do: Mention Unique, Relatable Hobbies

We all want to work with people we get along with. It’s a plus if they have similar (or at least interesting) hobbies as well; sports, travel, and board games are all safe bets and easily relatable for most folks, but you may think they’re totally irrelevant on your resume. They aren’t.

Even if it’s in one line at the bottom, mentioning a few of these hobbies shows you’re a well-rounded person who has interests outside of work. Personally, I love seeing applicants who are involved in extracurricular activities that promote community building, self-care, and well-being. And Deloitte researchers even found that volunteer work is among the most underrated job skills that candidates leave off of their resumes to their own detriment.

Do: Balance Honesty With Sensible Boundaries

Full confession: I drink three (okay fine, sometimes four) cups of coffees a day. That may sound like overkill to some, but the simple truth is that I’m a coffee lover! So I share this on my resume because, well, many people like coffee, even if they don’t drink as much of it as I do. At a very minimum, they can relate to those who are well-caffeinated, and it’s a simple way to touch on my personality without getting too personal.

So those are a few things you should consider using to liven up your resume. Here’s how to what to avoid:

Don’t: Share “Protected Class” Information

While adding personality to your resume shows hiring managers that you’re a person and not just an employee, there’s a whole category of information that can open you up to discrimination. Known as “protected class” information, these are the aspects of your identity that have no bearing on your fit for a given position and should be avoided–like signs of your age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, and disability status.

Obviously, there’s still plenty of information that can hint at these things anyhow, like your name or if your alma mater is a women’s college, for instance. So unless an employer or recruiter is using a system to cloak bias-prone data in order to create a fairer hiring process, there’s not much you can do about that. On the other hand, any personality-revealing tidbits you do want to add can still show off who you are and what you care about.

Don’t: Include A Headshot (Or Pictures In General)

Unless you work in select entertainment industries, like as acting or modeling, where your physical appearance is tied to the job, headshots or any other images of yourself are a no-go. Similar to protected class information, this needlessly opens you up to discrimination.

And while it may sound like an obvious “don’t,” the temptation to share images might be greater than it was a generation ago, before LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram existed. But even if those profiles are all public, it’s still best to leave headshots out of your application materials. Wait until the interview for them to see what you look like.

Don’t: Touch On Politics, Religion, Or Anything Controversial

Hot-button issues are also to be avoided, unless you’re applying for a position in political advocacy or some other cause-related work. You can still show off your personality without mentioning politics, religion, sex, or anything else that’s typically taboo. You may feel it’s important that a prospective employer shares your core values (and you’d be right!), but the better place to suss that out is in a job interview.

Remember: Your main job is to attract a hiring manager’s attention and score an interview in the first place. With just a few seconds to do that, offering just a glimpse of your personality can go a long way.

Kyle Elliott is a well-caffeinated career coach with a knack for branding and marketing, a love of resumes and LinkedIn, and a healthy obsession with details.

These days, it seems like a job referral is the only way a candidate can land an offer from a dream company. So the number of times a friend, family friend, or former colleague has emailed you to ask for a reference to work at your current company has probably increased over the years.

You know the email—it reads something like:

Hi Old Friend,

Hope all is well. I saw that you’re currently working at XYZ company. How do you like it? I was scrolling their job listings and saw a role that I’m perfect for. Can I send over my resume for you to submit me as a referral candidate?

In all likelihood, you’re glad to hear from your friend and always happy to be a professional support. Plus, there’s the financial incentive many companies offer current employees who refer top-notch candidates. But should you blindly or frequently refer friends to work at your current company, or even your former employer?

Jamie Hichens, senior talent acquisition partner at Glassdoor, advises caution. “Unless you’ve seen your friend in a professional setting firsthand, it can be risky,” she says.

Before recommending your college buddy for a gig, here are 10 things you should ask yourself first. Trust us, it could save you from a broken friendship or HR whispers down the line.

1. How Much Have You Shared About The Opportunity?

While you may have been approached by your friend via email about the role, take time to hop on a call with him or her to get a sense of their interest and to reconnect. Blindly recommending an old friend who you may not really know could backfire for the company and for the candidate. When it comes to referrals, remember that HR considers current employees the first line of defense, so to speak, and they value your real opinion–so make sure you actually have one by taking 15 minutes to talk with your friend.

“The consequences are that it could not only affect your friendship for the worse but could potentially damage your credibility at work if your friend turns out to not be a good fit for the position and company,” warns Hichens.

2. Would They Actually Be A Good Fit For The Role?

You should only recommend a friend for a role at your company if you’re confident that their skills or passions are in line with the job description. Take a moment to actually read the job description or talk to the hiring manager so that you, as the reference, have a good understanding of what the team is looking for and can evaluate your friend properly.

“If [you] truly know your friend is going to bring their A-game to the role, and if the two of you have had an honest conversation about what this could potentially do to your friendship if it ended up not being a fit,” says Hitchens, “then you should refer them.”

3. Do Their Goals Align With The Team’s And Company’s?

Every company has a mission statement and a set of values or goals that they are striving toward. Does your friend embody or appreciate those? For example, if the company is a dog-eat-dog environment that would put the Wolf of Wall Street to shame, make sure the candidate has the same tenacity and grit. On the other hand, if the role requires a sensitive collaborator who is slow to act, a Type-A bulldog might not make the best referral. Hichens cautions, “If you are not 100% sure your friend is well-aligned with the company and role, you should think twice.”

4. How Well Do You Know Them?

While you don’t need to be lifelong pals to refer someone to a position at work, you should evaluate how well you know the person. Have you seen them in work environments? Do you know their work ethic? Would you feel comfortable having a candid conversation with them? Be sure that you can actually vouch for this friend in a professional setting.

5. Why Are They Looking To Leave Their Current Job?

When you speak to your friend in person or by phone, don’t hesitate to get the skinny on why they’re leaving their current job. They should be 100% honest with you about whether they were terminated, laid off, or are either quitting because of a toxic work environment or simply looking for a new opportunity. Again, you want to have all the facts (or at least as many as possible) when putting your reputation on the line to recommend someone.

6. How Would This Referral Affect Your Credibility At Work?

As in everything you do, you want your name and professional reputation to reflect hard work, honesty, strength, and confidence. This goes for those you endorse. Sure, you want to be supportive of those around you and offer a leg up where you can, but remember that the decisions you make in the workplace speak to your credibility, too.

7. How Might This Referral Affect Your Friendship?

“I’ve seen friendships end but have also seen friendships flourish through referrals,” says Hichens. Take stock of your friendship and whether or not it can handle the ups and downs that being colleagues can bring. For instance, perhaps you value the confidence you share with a friend, being able to gossip, enjoy a beer, cry, and laugh. Once you become coworkers, that might be tarnished in the uncharted territory of office politics and unconscious competition.

8. Have You Referred Other Friends To Work At This Company?

Many companies offer incentives to employees for referring top talent and candidates who can improve the company’s diversity, like engineers or women of color. But you shouldn’t abuse the perk by referring every one of your Facebook friends.

“It is a helpful tactic because our employees know what type of person would thrive at Glassdoor, so we get some fantastic referrals,” says Hichens. “And our employees sell working at Glassdoor to their friends, so by the time the referral gets to the recruiting team, they are already extremely excited about working with us. It’s a win-win.”

“However,” Hichens adds, “the downside of a referral program is that sometimes employees just want the referral bonus money and might just refer anyone, whether they are qualified or not. That ends up being more of a headache than a help.”

9. Could You See Yourself Working Directly With This Person If You Had To?

You may find it’s easy to refer a pal to a role in a different department, but with corporate restructuring, it’s very possible you may need to team up with your friend. How does that sound?

If you cringe ever so slightly at the possibility of seeing this person in the company cafeteria daily, or when you envision them sharing stories about you from high school in a meeting, then think twice about agreeing to refer them. You can take a less enthusiastic route by perhaps connecting them with the hiring manager by email or simply discussing the opportunity on the phone, without giving your full stamp of approval.

10. What Would Happen To Your Friendship If The Gig Doesn’t Pan Out?

If by chance your friend does not get the job, will your friendship end or be jeopardized? It is a tough blow for a candidate to feel like they have the inside track on a job because a friend works there only to be rejected by the hiring manager.

Hichens insists that knowing how a friendship will fare no matter the job outcome is an important aspect to consider before getting a candidate excited about all the perks and benefits at a company.

Remember, just because you refer a friend doesn’t guarantee they’ll receive an offer.

A version of this article originally appeared on Glassdoor. It is adapted with permission.

Anyone who leads a busy life knows that it takes planning to keep things running smoothly. But not everyone turns to the same methods to do it–especially not right from the get-go each day. Personally, how I kick off my mornings is crucial.

Also, I’m a “biohacker,” which means I focus on upgrading my biology so I have more energy every day. You might  catch me doing things like injecting stem cells into my brain as part of an attempt to live to at least 180 years old. But even if that’s (way) further than you’d ever be willing to go, it’s still true that getting the most out of every day allows you to live more–quite literally. The key, as I see it, is to dial in every detail of your routine to either make you stronger or give you more joy in less time. That means two things:

1. Don’t waste energy.
2. Add more energy.

Recently, I’ve upgraded my own morning routine by improving how my body creates and stores energy. At the cellular level, your body produces energy in your mitochondria–think of them like your cells’ power plants–which together account for around 10% of your body weight. These cellular structures are hackable, both in some extremely low-tech ways and through more advanced methods. With that in mind, here’s how I add more energy to my daily life.

Sleep In

Starting work at 10 a.m. doesn’t make you a bad person. No matter what you’ve heard growing up, there are morning people and night people. The researcher Michael Breus says people can be categorized by “chronotype,” which describes the largely genetically-driven factors that make some of us early birds, some of us night owls, and others something in the middle. No one chronotype is better than another.

I’m a night owl. My whole life, I’ve done my best work late at night. In the morning I’m far less efficient. I also have two young kids who get ready for school at a horrifying hour each morning.

Fortunately, my wife is a morning person. We’ve worked out an agreement: She gets the kids up and ready, while I wake up just in time to make a batch of Bulletproof Coffee and drive the kids to school. I rarely start my focused workday before 9:30 a.m., and I do my best work between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m.

So if you’re always groggy in the morning, don’t try and force yourself to wake up earlier. Just sleep in. (Unless, of course, your boss is completely resistant to your biologically sound argument for tweaking your work hours–in which case, sorry!) Not ready to go to bed at 10 p.m.? Stay up late. Want to wake up at 5 a.m. and sing? Do it.

Feel out your daily rhythm and work with your biology, not against it. You’ll get more done.

Emerge From My Sleeping Cave

I wake up feeling refreshed in part because I’ve gone the extra mile to optimize my sleep regimen. Here’s a breakdown of my bedroom:

• Blackout curtains to keep out all light.
• Everything that blinks or glows is covered with TrueDark light filtering dots or black tape.
• My bed is organic natural fiber, since foam can release chemicals into the air.
• I use a progressive alarm that senses when I’m at the top of my sleep cycle and wakes me up then. That means that unless I take a knee to the stomach from one of my kids, I’m never jolted from a deep sleep.

In other words, it’s a sleeping cave. I also follow this popular sleep-hacking protocol. The result is that I drop into deep sleep faster and stay there longer. Forget the research that claims otherwise; I’ve found that under the right conditions (and that’s the key), you actually can get a full night’s rest in six hours. That frees up a lot of time.

Upgrade My Wake-Up

I start my day with (surprise, surprise) Bulletproof Coffee, which creates stable energy for hours and prevents cravings until past lunch. Then I take the kids to school and enjoy the drive back. My phone is in airplane mode this whole time so I’m totally present with my kids, every morning. This is protected family time. I only turn my phone back on once my kids are in class.

When I get home, I stand on the Bulletproof Vibe–a whole-body vibration plate we’ve developed that replicates going for a long walk in less time–while under an ultraviolet sunlamp that enhances mitochondrial function. (I know this may sound weird to the uninitiated but I write about the underlying science in my new book.) Then I do “neurofeedback” (essentially, a system for measuring brainwave patterns) in a program I’ve developed called 40 Years of Zen, in order to put myself in an advanced meditative state far deeper than I can do without technology.

Then I start work.

Yes, it’s cool to have toys to speed up everything I do, but I’m a professional biohacker! Not everyone has access to these gadgets (or an interest in trying them), but you can still get similar benefits just by going for a walk in the sun and meditating. Start your day with movement and meditation to wake up your body and mind–not text messages and social media. By the time you begin working, you’ll be in a calm, focused state.

Schedule Everything

Every time you make a decision, you sap a bit of energy from your brain. Behavioral scientists are beginning to question the concept of “ego depletion,” the idea, first established around two decades ago, that willpower is a finite resource and that decisions use it up. But even if the finer points of that theory need to evolve, anybody who’s left the office after a long workday, feeling their mental capacity totally sapped, knows how hard it can be to keep the momentum going.

That’s why the first work-related thing I do, every day, is meet with my executive assistant. I find that if I don’t manage my time, it’ll play fast and loose with my energy levels–no good. So every minute of my day is scheduled, even “free time,” lunch, acupuncture, and family time. Honestly, I usually don’t know what day of the week it is. It’s my calendar that tells me what I’m doing next.

Play Ping-Pong With Robots

I always try and schedule something fun–like ping-pong. It requires rapid mental turnover and strengthens “proprioception,” a fancy term for your brain’s sense of your body in space. I’ll play with my kids or with a ping-pong robot.

You don’t have to be a biohacker to prioritize what you enjoy every day, nor does your job need to prevent you from doing that. Work to improve yourself, strengthen your relationships with the people you care about, and change the world–but don’t forget to have a laugh now and then. Life is too short to take yourself too seriously.

Dave Asprey is the CEO of Bulletproof Nutrition and the author of the new book Head Strong: The Bulletproof Plan to Activate Untapped Brain Energy to Work Smarter and Think Faster-in Just Two Weeks. Follow him on Twitter at @bulletproofexec.