We were promised hoverboards.

When the film Back to the Future 2 premiered in 1989, it depicted the faraway world of 2015 as filled with pedestrians soaring through the sky. A generation of impressionable viewers, included the author of this post, came away certain that they too would one day float through the city on a fiberglass smart-tray. Ever since, rumors of actual hoverboard technology have emerged every couple of years, but these have amounted to nothing but a McRib of false hopes. At the same time, Nike has also launched an ongoing mission to make self-tying shoes—a quest that even the most jet-set sneakerheads would find ridiculously expensive. Instead of forcing brands to live up to a pop culture-ordained future, though, perhaps the next trend will have them reaching for the past.

One of the best jokes in this past weekend’s surprise-dropped Rick and Morty episode is an extended riff on Rick’s time-traveling quest to get his hands on some McDonalds Szechuan McNugget sauce. It was both entirely random, but also relatable in that many of us carry a torch for a long-discontinued item—in this case an actual obscure dipping sauce tie-in for the 1998 Disney movie, Mulan. Fortunately for Rick—and probably one of the show’s creators, Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland—due to the sauce’s instant ubiquity in Twitter circles over the weekend, McDonald’s may be bringing it back.

As Business Insiderreports, McDonald’s seems enthusiastic about possibly bringing this sauce back, with one of the restaurant chain’s chefs eventually tweeting that he would look into it.

@RickandMorty .@RickandMorty McNugga Lubba Dub Dub. ????

— McDonald's (@McDonalds) April 2, 2017

Be careful what you wish for.
This makes me uncomfortable. Specifically the "McNugga".#szechuansaucehttps://t.co/c8UO7W8gNy

— Rick (((and Morty))) (@RickandMorty) April 2, 2017

@McD_Truth@AshleyLutz I'll see what I can do

— Mike Haracz (@Mike_Haracz) April 3, 2017

There is precedent for this sort of move, of course. Last year, Hi-C revived its long-defunct Ecto Cooler brand to coincide with the release of the gender-flipped Ghostbusters. Swingline augmented its famous stapler line to include a red version like the one Milton uses in 1999’s Office Space, and it quickly became the company’s most popular item. Hell, even Heinz is currently using an ad campaign that was created by fictional agency Sterling Cooper Draper Price on the show, Mad Men. The main difference between the McDonald’s sauce and these other instances is that Rick and Morty fans got to watch it unfurl on social media in real time, and add to the pile-on themselves.

Perhaps this is the future of product revival. For years now, ceaseless fan demand has played a part in bringing back cancelled TV series like Family Guy and Arrested Development. The next step in this synergistic evolution could be creators who are fans of certain lost products using their art and the attendant fan mob to pressure brands to revive them.

Please God, I don't ask for much, please let us gain enough cultural influence to force McDonald's into bringing back that fucking sauce.

— Rick (((and Morty))) (@RickandMorty) April 2, 2017

Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon shouldn’t be surprised if he has this kind of influence, though. After all, the will of his is what what helped bring back his breakout show, Community, many times over. Now if only we could get Harmon to push as hard as possible for the creation of hoverboards…

“This is not about a class, it’s not about a bike, it’s about you. Your purpose. Your goals. Your drive. This is about you.”

Well, it’s sort of about a class and a bike, because it’s also a new ad from SoulCycle. Created by agency Laird+Partners, the “Find It” campaign doesn’t talk about the intense cycle workouts, or the fact celebrities like Michelle Obama, Jake Gyllenhaal, Lady Gaga, and more regularly saddle up in its studios. Instead, it uses real instructors to deliver a pep talk that’s part sermon, part self-help sales pitch.

“What are you looking for? What’s your story? What are you going to come for? What do you need?”

Related Link: SoulCycle Wants You To Join Its Tribe

Delivered against a backdrop of Crystal Skies’ remix of Illenium’s “With You,” the ad so accurately sums up the sweaty spiritual vibe that’s earned the brand such a cult following, a cynic might half expect a big round dude to bust through the wall and yell, “Oh yeah!”

The solar industry now provides more jobs than coal, and pays its workers better, but that didn’t stop Donald Trump from citing “job-killing regulations” among his reasons for signing an executive order to roll back President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

Most of the world howled in opposition, since the Clean Power Plan (like the Paris climate agreement) was designed to help save us all from dying on a polluted desert planet. But one group in New Zealand, at least, is taking immediate action–by encouraging the planting of new forests everywhere, and naming it after the climate change-denying leader of the free world.

Trump Forest, from sustainable hat company Offcut Caps founder Adrien Taylor and glaciologist Daniel Price, is a project designed to enable individuals and companies anywhere to pledge funds for reforestation (or afforestation, the planting of trees on bare land).

“We were just so frustrated and so angry to see what Trump did . . . that we felt like we had to do something about it,” Taylor tells Fast Company.

Trump Forest’s tagline is “where ignorance grows trees.” The original plan was to plant a tree for every time President Trump said the words “climate change,” but it quickly became apparent that this wouldn’t grow a forest: Trump has long refused to say the words, and, last week, the U.S. Department of Energy was barred from using the phrase “climate change,” along with “emissions reduction” and “Paris Agreement.”

Human civilization currently emits about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. To avoid extreme climate change, where the average global temperature would rise by 4°C, emissions need to be reduced to 22 gigatons (or 22 billion tons) by 2050.

Researchers at Oxford University estimate that, if pursued at scale, reforestation and afforestation could sequester as much as 5.5 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year. So while planting trees is not enough to reverse climate change, it is a low-cost and effective act of resistance when coupled with other climate action efforts.

Taylor, a New Zealand-based social entrepreneur who makes hats out of fabric that would otherwise end up in landfills, has paid about NZ$3,000 (about $2,100 American) to plant the first 1,000 trees. Those will soon take root along the Port Hills mountain range near Christchurch, where two raging fires scorched more than 2,000 hectares of land earlier this year.

“We’re working with the nonprofit Trees for Canterbury, which specializes in planting native trees throughout the Canterbury region of New Zealand and the South Island, as well as the local city council,” says Taylor.

Any individuals or companies interested in helping to grow the resistance in their neck of the woods can register to pledge trees at TrumpForest.com.

“We have no intention of making any money from this, or handling money in any way whatsoever,” says Taylor. “If you do make a pledge, we’ll link you to reputable local or international tree-planting [organizations]. You will make the donation directly to them.”

The Trump Forest team will, however, ask for a receipt for use in a visualization of its global forestry efforts, a virtual Trump Forest that lets you see all the trees planted in response to the U.S.’s new anti-climate attitude.

“The world’s most powerful man doesn’t accept basic climate science, and it’s incomprehensible that Trump is making decisions so harmful to the world at large, undoing much of the good progress that has been made with recent efforts,” says Taylor.

“I think the real and exciting part of this is that there’s an actual benefit growing from Trump’s stupidity.”

I’m not much of a home theater guy. Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent so much time and energy fine-tuning my audio setup for music at home. Or because watching movies is something I only manage to squeeze in time for on weekends—and by then, I’m typically sick of staring at screens. So when the Sonos Playbase showed up at my house, I wasn’t holding my breath for a life-changing experience.

I should’ve realized that the Playbase was designed to try and reel in people like me. The Playbase, the latest in Sonos’s line of wireless home audio speakers, is essentially a home theater sound bar with a different design. Rather than being mounted on the wall, the flat, 58-millimeter tall speaker is meant to sit comfortably beneath your television, which statistics show you’re unlikely to have mounted on the wall anyway.

By itself, the Playbase (like its traditional sound bar counterpart, the Playbar) offers a dramatic upgrade from the sound coming out of your TV. Results will vary depending on what you’re watching, of course; I found myself adjusting my Sonos audio settings when switching between different types of programming, since shows and movies from different eras and production studios are all mixed differently. Is the improvement worth the $700 cost of the Playbase? That’s up for debate, depending on how much you watch and how important immersive, room-filling audio is to you. For more casual viewers, a much cheaper sound bar may well suffice.

What the company is really hoping, though, is that the enhanced sound of the Playbase (or the Playbar, for that matter) is enough to get you hooked. That’s because Sonos isn’t just a speaker, it’s a whole home audio system that works over Wi-Fi and that’s designed to pipe sound throughout the home, ideally using multiple speakers. In the home theater context, that means pairing other Sonos products like its Sub subwoofer and its entry-level Play:1 speakers to create a true surround sound experience.

Truth be told, the surround sound effect works just fine with a Playbase paired to two $200 Play:1s, especially since an impressive amount of bass comes out of the deceptively thin Playbase. This is the setup I used to test the Playbase.

Depending on how the programming’s audio is mixed, the presence of two rear speakers might not make much of a difference. But for most movies and modern TV shows worth watching, this trio of speakers will make you feel like you’re in a movie theater. The early scenes in Jurassic Park, for instance, practically shook my living room as velociraptors pounced on their prey and sent my cats scurrying frantically out the room. Naturally, the movie’s iconic theme song sounded all the more epic—but not overly loud—in this immersive setup. Indeed, the Playbase is optimized for programming that mixes dialogue, impactful sound effects, and music. If you watch a lot of sci-fi or action movies, for instance, a setup like this is worth it.

Music-heavy films like documentaries about artists and eras of music work especially well on the Playbase, with or without the rear surround speakers (although preferably with them). A film like Muscle Shoals—which focuses entirely on the specific, now-classic sounds captured in a recording studio in Alabama—feels like it was meant to be experienced on a sound system like this. Likewise, music documentaries like Amy, The Last Waltz, A Band Called Death, and last year’s Eight Days A Week all sound amazing through a Sonos system.

The fact that music-oriented films—especially the Beatles doc Eight Days A Week—sound great on the Playbase is no coincidence. That’s because it’s one of the first products designed and built by Sonos since they hired Giles Martin as their sound experience leader. Martin, who has taken over remixing and remastering the Beatles’ music from his late father Sir George, works with the company’s acoustics team to ensure that Sonos’s speakers meet the standards of music producers and, in the case of the Playbase, film composers and audio engineers as well. Martin’s job literally involves taking prototypes of Sonos products to people like Rick Rubin and Hans Zimmer to get their input as the company’s design team and acoustics engineers fine-tune how they sound.

To further perfect the sound once you’ve unboxed the speakers, Sonos products offer a clever, software-based acoustic tuning feature called TruePlay. Using the built-in microphone on the iPhone (not Android yet), TruePlay measures the size and shape of the room by listening to pulsating, sonar-like test tones coming from the speakers. It then adjusts the output of the speakers, essentially tuning them to the room itself. Even if you don’t like the sonic adjustment, this process is worth going through if only for the experience of making your living room briefly sound like an intergalactic laser gun battle and, once again, freaking out the cats.

If you’re already a Sonos speaker owner, the Playbase is an easy—albeit not particularly inexpensive—way to bring the wireless, high-fidelity audio experience from music listening to TV watching. In fact, it’s slightly frustrating that Sonos’s other products don’t link up to your TV this easily. As you might expect, the Playbase works just fine as a music speaker when the TV isn’t in use. And it’s even better when paired with other Sonos speakers. That said, if you’re vastly more interested in listening to music than in watching movies, you might be better off starting with something like the Play:5, which is $200 cheaper and has an audio line-in jack (unlike most Sonos speakers).

Either way, the company is banking that you’ll be impressed enough to come back and add to your system. It will sound great, provided you’ve got the cash to spare.

After neglecting the Mac Pro line (and its pro and creative users) for more than three years, Apple finally said Monday it’s working on a new version of the machine that corrects some of its predecessor’s most serious flaws. (In the meantime, the company is immediately improving the configurations of the existing Mac Pro, giving buyers more processing cores, higher-end GPUs, and additional RAM for their money.)

Even back in 2013 when Apple introduced its newly designed Mac Pro, some of the Mac faithful were upset. The new Mac Pro was smaller, quieter, and way cooler looking than its predecessor, but it also made upgrades and expansion way harder.

Yes, Apple had redesigned the older (big, silver, heavy) Mac Pro down to a small, elegant black cylinder the shape of a small bathroom waste basket. But it had also built the graphics processing units (GPUs) into the design such that they were impossible to replace or upgrade.

The Mac Pro used two GPUs running in parallel, a configuration the industry has since moved away from. And the board the chips rested on was carefully situated around a central, triangular cooling corridor in the middle of the “trashcan.” This made it tough for Apple to update the design, perhaps with a more powerful single-core GPU, and still have enough cooling power inside the unit.

Creatives like graphic designers, videographers, and audio engineers appreciate good design, but in the Mac Pro, Apple’s dual obsessions with design and miniaturization were at odds with long-term performance and utility. It turns out those GPUs in the 2013 Mac Pro weren’t powerful enough to handle some of the applications pro and creative users work with today.

“Things like VR, and even the movement to do more machine learning on local workstations are current examples of things Apple would not have seen coming that would likely have caused them to make a different design decision,” says Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin in an email to Fast Company.

And Apple made the Mac Pro almost completely dependent on its Thunderbolt connections to connect to external hard drives, RAID arrays, and specialized equipment, another factor that rankled the creative/pro crowd, who were accustomed to the internal slots and bays offered by the Mac Pro’s earlier incarnation.

Getting the Word Out

While creatives and professionals are a relatively small segment of Apple’s customer base, they are among its most loyal users. (The company, remember, wasn’t always a smartphone Goliath.) Keeping the creatives happy has something to do with Apple’s soul. Mac Observer’s John Kheit put it this way in 2015:

When Apple was circling the drain into bankruptcy around 1997, those core users stayed loyal and helped influence many other users. It is a giant mistake for Apple to not understand it is alienating its most core group of users, a mistake which Apple may one day very much regret.

That’s why Apple had a handful of journalists out to its campus Monday to discuss the future of the Mac Pro. Apple knows some of those Apple faithful have already lost faith, and others are rapidly losing it. And with good reason: The company hadn’t upgraded the Mac Pro for more than three years, and when it did upgrade the MacBook Pro many creatives use, many thought the device was underpowered and overpriced. Apple rarely talks about specific products that aren’t ready to ship, but in this case it had to.

“Apple had to act fast to assure their ‘Pro’ customers that they love them, have a roadmap, and haven’t abandoned them,” says analyst Patrick Moorehead of Moor Insights & Strategy. “I don’t think Apple anticipated that their customers would push back so hard on this and some of them are even moving to Windows-based platforms.”

Apple’s Phil Schiller told the journalists that his company is now hard at work designing a new Mac Pro, but that it won’t come out this year. Schiller also wouldn’t say if it will come out next year: “We’re not going to get into exactly what stage we’re in, just that we told the team to take the time to do something really great . . .”

Schiller did reveal that the next Mac Pro will be a modular system, and that Apple is working on a powerful new display that will be good enough for graphic designers and video editors. And it’ll be a design that learns from the mistakes of the past.

“. . . we are in the process of what we call “completely rethinking the Mac Pro,” Schiller said. “ . . . we want to architect it so that we can keep it fresh with regular improvements, and we’re committed to making it our highest-end, high-throughput desktop system, designed for our demanding pro customers.”

Depending on when the new machine and monitor actually appear, they may be good news for people working in new mediums. According to Creative Strategies’ Bajarin, “Apple appears to be moving in a direction that will now allow Macs to play in the market for VR, PC gaming, machine learning, etc., where we will see many innovations in GPU computing still to come and having expandability will be as important as ever.”

As for the existing Mac Pro, Apple told Fast Company it’s upping the specs in the existing $2,999 and $3,999 models. The $2,999 model now comes with a 6-core Intel Xeon processor (up from 4-core), dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs and 16GB of memory. The $3,999 model comes with an 8-core (up from 6-core) processor and dual D700 GPUs.

The second key message of the day was that Apple will announce new configurations of the popular iMac desktop line later this year that it believes will be welcomed by many professional and creative users. But there was a third less-obvious message to pro users in Apple’s unusual press briefing, as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber points out. Even though Apple ultimately didn’t disclose much in the way of specifics about its upcoming machines, it did say that it will continue to produce industrial-strength video and audio software for its industrial-strength hardware.

“I just want to reiterate our strong commitment there, as well.,” Schiller said. “Both with Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X, there are teams on those software products that are completely dedicated to delivering great pro software to our customers.”

Whether you’re giving a toast at a wedding or a big keynote address at a trade show, you know you need to get your act together. What you may not know is how. After all, there’s separate advice out there for giving impromptu speeches like toasts and for delivering more formal talks before large audiences. But no matter how those experiences differ, they all need to accomplish three key things. Here’s what they are and how to pull it off.

1. Entertain

This is the base of the pyramid. The starting point. Table stakes. Want to know how entertained your audience will be by the time you get up to talk? In short, very. For starters, we all touch our phones 2,500 times a day (not a misprint), according to researchers at Dscout. We’re scrolling Instagram, watching SNL clips, reading fantasy football trash-talk, and listening to podcasts. This is now your competition. So how do you beat it?

Well, you have one major advantage over the latest Wait But Why article, and it is that you’re here. You’re live. You’re in the flesh. No one’s doing stand-up in the other corner. It’s all you. You get a deeper personal connection from the beginning. Nobody needs a Wi-Fi signal or has to tap a link to watch you. You get 30 seconds of free attention. (Think of it this way: Since almost 20% of YouTube views last less than four seconds, according to the major streaming platforms, you should actually be thankful.)

So what do you need to do with that momentary leg up you have on your listeners’ attention? Reward it immediately. Show the audience the bonus they get by paying attention to you. Raise interest as you get onstage, create a laugh, but most importantly, be the mostinto your speech of anyone there. The audience can only rise to your level of excitement—nobody else’s—so no apologizing, no self-deprecating, and no remarking, “Well, now how am I gonna follow that?!”

A good test is this: If your speech entertains one other person you’re close to (especially a friend or significant other) during a dry run, it will entertain a whole room. Start with the toughest critic first.

Related:How To Add Humor To A Presentation In The Least Cringeworthy Way Possible

2. Educate

Humans are learning animals. We’re always growing our minds, abilities, and knowledge. That’s just practical: Education makes us better at our jobs, better with our money, and better at navigating our relationships, so we tend to seek it out. But even when we aren’t actively learning, our brains are absorbing new information—including from the content that entertains us. Podcasts teach us a thing or two from the experts; even those SNL clips give us perspectives on the news. In fact, why are you on this site right now? Chances are you came here to learn something.

So what is your speech teaching? Make sure you can write out the answer to that question in fewer than 140 characters. If the essence of your message is too complicated to tweet, it’s too complicated period: “I’m teaching our hundred closest friends which formative moments shaped my daughter’s beautiful personality” (wedding toast); “I’m teaching my employees why they should feel proud about last year’s results and excited about next year’s goals” (all-hands meeting); or, “I’m giving people new techniques to apply at work to improve their personal well-being” (TEDx–style talk).

3. Empower

This one is the biggest trick of a good speech, the hardest to pull off, and admittedly the most ambiguous-sounding as a result. But “empowering” your listeners really all comes down to making them feel like these were all their thoughts. Not yours. Yes, you’re the one on stage. But they have to feel like they own the message if they’re going to take it with them—and, ultimately, change their minds or behavior. Sure, people solicit others’ opinions, gather insights and data from what they encounter online, and read books to brush up on things that interest them. We all do that. But we only really do what we want to do.

Remember: It can’t be your message, shared. It has to be their message, heard. Your role is to lead listeners through a series of iterative thoughts (“iterative” because they build on one another as you progress), where they nod and think to themselves, “Yes, yes, yes.” And fortunately, there are at least three reliable tools you can use to generate this kind of empowerment in your talk:

1. Pause and interact. Can you use a flip chart where you create the content together with the audience? Can you leave pauses for the audience to jump in with their own answers? Can you do a short interactive exercise or experiment using the content you just shared? Michael Bungay Stanier, a popular speaker on corporate coaching, sometimes has his listeners trade questions with the person sitting next to them.
2. Find a lesson that’s doable, not just interesting. We don’t want to hear how you climbed Everest if we think we never will. Personally, I like to share five major positive-psychology studies that point toward ways you can actually improve your own mind-set in 20 minutes. Then I say, “You just have to do one, not all five!” I’m trying to make the laundry list feel achievable. If you’re giving the ‘father of the bride’ toast, this may seem harder to do. But you know you’re seeing someone nail it at a wedding when you hear a story and think, “I want to start doing that.”
3. Keep it conversational. It has to feel like a coffee-shop chat with your best friend, not like a charmer onstage tossing takeaways into the audience like candy to onlookers in a parade. People want trust. That means sharing your background, your story, your warts and all. (Not sure? Look at trends like pop stars doing makeup-less photo shoots and album covers, farm-to-table restaurants, and the era of the black T-shirt–clad keynote.)

You listen to your friends, right? That will work better than a guru on a stage who may entertain and educate, but still falls short of empowering you to make changes in your life. How do you know if you did that? Easy. Count how many unsolicited pieces of feedback you get more than 30 days later. That’s real behavioral change. You’re not asking what they “got” from your talk, you’re seeing what they remember.

So yes, giving a great speech that entertains, educates, and empowers is a tall task. Are you up for it? You’re all the way down here, at the bottom of this article, so I’m guessing yes. Congrats on making the commitment. Now get out there and inspire others to commit to something, too.

Neil Pasricha is the author of The Happiness Equation and The Book of Awesome. He spent a decade in leadership development at Walmart and now works as director of The Institute for Global Happiness. Neil also shares monthly book recommendations through his Reading Club newsletter.

There are a few things in life that bring about extreme levels of stress, and looking for a job typically makes the list—which also includes moving, wedding planning, and way at the top, having a new child. Those are all things about which friends, family, and coworkers all usually have lots of advice to share. But since I work at LinkedIn, I’m asked for job-hunting tips more often than any others.

And since these days, more people than ever appear to be conducting job searches more casually than ever, my advice usually starts with a no-brainer: Activate the “Open Candidates” feature we launched last year. It’s the simplest way to let recruiters know you’re open to hearing about new opportunities—this way they’ll come to you—without having to publicize that fact to your whole network. And we’ve found that the millions of LinkedIn users who have done so double their chances of being contacted by a recruiter.

So let’s say you’ve already done that—now what? Here are a few additional steps to take to make sure sure you’re putting yourself in the right place, at the right time, for the right job.

1. Update Your Profile (Or At Least These Three Parts Of It)

The first thing someone does when they meet you is Google your name. They want to know as much as they can about you without having to ask. So update your LinkedIn profile with an eye to what recruiters are looking for. Even if you don’t have time for a top-to-bottom makeover, these are three boxes you should be able to tick after a quick spit-polish:

• It’s simple. Our data shows that having a standard job title on your profile (e.g. “software engineer”) rather than a cleverer one (e.g., “coding ninja warrior”), makes you 45% more likely to be messaged by a recruiter. Some experts suggest writing a more compelling profile headline, but it’s not necessarily an either/or; you can add something more personal as long as you’ve already covered your bases with a job title that’s likely to be found in a keyword search.
• You’ve included your headshot. Having a professional headshot is key to getting noticed, even after you’ve identified to recruiters that you’re open. LinkedIn members with a photo are 10 times more likely to receive an inMail message than those without one.
• Your skills are easy to find. Those few sentences in the headline and summary fields at the top of your profile make you six times more likely to receive inMail than those who haven’t bothered to fill them out—but don’t stop there. Take a few moments to list your main skills on your profile, and you’ll be 20 times more likely to get noticed.

2. Take Advantage Of Warm Leads

I’m a part of the small yet powerful alumni network for my alma mater, Bryn Mawr College, a women’s liberal arts college outside Philadelphia. About a year and a half ago, a then undergraduate at Bryn Mawr contacted me on LinkedIn. She was considering an associate product manager role and wanted advice on the hiring process. I was more than happy to chat with her, and she’s now happily employed at LinkedIn and crushing it on our product management team.

That’s the premise of “warm leads”—leveraging your network to get an “in” at your next company. This isn’t the same as securing a referral (that undergrad didn’t shoot me a note asking me point-blank to recommend her for the job), but it can often lead to them. According to LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends, almost 50% of companies say their top source for quality hires is employee referrals. So once you’ve checked the open feature and polished up your profile, your next step is to take advantage of your network and find things in common with your connections. Then start asking questions—about the company culture, what it’s like to work there, the hiring process, you name it.

3. Get Active, And Stay That Way

One of the most common mistakes people make is frontloading all their effort in kicking off their job searches, only to lapse shortly afterward. Job hunting takes time, and you need to stay relevant throughout the entire process. Sharing content and adding (the right) connections on LinkedIn is often all it takes. The point is simply to signal to a recruiter that you haven’t just created a profile years ago and let it lie dormant—recruiters want to know that there’s a good chance you’ll respond so they’re not wasting their time reaching out to you.

So consider occasionally publishing a quick post or update every now and then, sharing your professional point of view on industry matters—and not just on LinkedIn. Take to Twitter or Facebook to do the same, wherever it’s appropriate. This also helps you stay up to date on what your connections are doing and thinking about, whether they’re celebrating a job anniversary, or just started a new job, and so on.

If recruiters can find clear evidence that you’re active in your industry, they’re more likely to contact you, whether you’ve been at your job for five months or five years. Today, letting them (and the rest of your network) know that you’re open to considering new opportunities doesn’t actually take much heavy lifting, and it doesn’t have to compromise your current situation, either. Taking just these three steps can help you stay ahead of the competition—even if you’re wary about letting people know you’re competing in the first place.

Alexis Baird is a senior product manager at LinkedIn.

In the honeymoon period of a new job, any and everything feels possible. You’re meeting new people, settling into your office, and the luster surrounding the work that you’ll be doing is as radiant as ever. Colleagues invite you to lunch, onboarding meetings abound, and your boss still cannot believe that they managed to land a talent quite like you.

While it may seem like the work world is your oyster in the first month of a new gig, there are some limits. Sure, you’re the new kid on the block and the team is lucky to have you, but this introductory period doesn’t give you carte blanche to act or do as you wish, says life and career coach Jenn DeWall. The first 30 days of a job should be dedicated to listening, learning, and getting acclimated to the office culture and your role. It’s not the time to drop proverbial bombs, institute a slew of overhauling changes, or blindly assert your expertise.

As you temper your desire to become head honcho during week one, here are 11 things you should avoid doing in your first 30 days in a new job—especially if you want to stay employed!

Mistake No. 1: Bashing Your Old Job On Social Media

Sure you’re ecstatic to start a new job and kick off a new chapter of your career, but before gloating on social media and snapping “I’m free” selfies on Instagram, remember to be gracious. No matter the reason for leaving your old company, resist the urge to bash your old job on social media.

Not only is it tacky and rude to your former employer, it could tarnish your reputation at your new job. “First impressions are everything,” says DeWall, insisting that how you present yourself both in person and online matters big time. “The perception that is being created in the first 30 days can ultimately make or break your career in the long run with the company.”

Mistake No. 2: Procrastinating On Setting Up Your Benefits

“Most companies give you a limited time to apply to their health care, so make that your first priority,” advises DeWall. “As for the 401K, too often newbies fail at properly planning their 401K and understanding how it’s set up.” Instead of avoiding what you don’t know, ask questions. “Ask about employee matching and hire a onetime session with a financial planner so you can understand how to set up your investments. The small amount that you invest in the short run can yield larger financial gains in the long run.”

Mistake No. 3: Adding All Your New Coworkers On Facebook And LinkedIn

Friending the entire team in the first week of working at a new job can come off as insincere or disingenuous. Before adding and tagging up a storm, slow down and be smart. “Feel free to use LinkedIn to connect with your new coworkers and peers that you have established relationships with,” says DeWall. However, do not friend your superior on social media. That’s a no-no, for the most part. “A rule of thumb, the more personal information that’s revealed on the social media platform, the more time you should wait before engaging with your colleagues.”

Mistake No. 4: Not Setting Up One-On-One Meetings With Coworkers

“Think of your coworkers as your power team,” says DeWall. “You can learn from them, utilize their expertise, and get to know the ins and outs of the workplace culture that aren’t covered in orientation. The benefits of setting up meetings early on is that you have the opportunity to set up a relationship and get to know their personalities.”

Mistake No. 5: Hesitating To Get More Clarity On Your Role

Think of the first 30 days as an “ask anything” period at the new job. Make sure you’re getting clarity on the team dynamic, structure, expectations, and challenges. “You are also showing vulnerability, which often creates a relationship of empathy and partnership versus one of competing. Make sure in the first meeting to ask them if it’s okay to ask for help and what you can do to be successful. Show that you’re a team player.”

DeWall cautions that the window to do this can close behind you before you know it. “If you don’t utilize this early on, you could hurt your credibility down the road. When you are asking questions, make sure you are being curious, and not passive or condescending,” she adds. “Don’t ask to try and show that you have a better solution without knowing the full context and reason behind why things are done the way they are.”

Mistake No. 6: Putting In For Vacation Time Too Soon

While there are some exceptions to this rule (like requesting time off during the initial offer negotiation process), for the most part, don’t plan on taking vacation days in your first month of a new role. Unless your manager asks for future planning in your one-on-one, the safe thing is to hold off on talking about vacation time until you’ve settled in.

Mistake No. 7: Rushing To Make Your Mark On The Work Culture

Instead of bucking the trend or working outside the box, be mindful to align with company values and culture. DeWall advises, “New hires should be mindful of dress code, times to be in and out of work, and the internet and music policies. Ask your boss what the norms are, don’t assume that because no one has told you what to do that you get to blaze your own trail.” At the same time, be sure to bring your full self to work.

Don’t be afraid to be yourself and leave your mark on the team. But before suggesting group outings to tequila tasting or circulating a petition for casual Fridays, DeWall says, “Get to know the why: Why does the company do things in a certain way? Why do they have a certain dress code? Why do you have to do certain tasks in a certain way? Learn it, live it, and understand it before you suggest new and/or better ways to do things.”

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

There was a time, not that many years ago, when the notion of electric or even hybrid cars taking over our roads and highways would have been considered absurd. We know how that turned out. Now it’s time to apply the same thought experiment to passenger airplanes.

This morning Zunum Aero, a Seattle-based startup that has been in stealth mode for three years, unveiled its plans for 10- to 50-seat hybrid and electric planes that could transform the industry by the early 2020s—slashing ticket prices and reducing travel time.

Zunum, backed by JetBlue Technology Ventures and Boeing’s new HorizonX innovation venture fund, thinks the key to unlocking the potential of the short-haul aviation sector lies in the nation’s 5,000 regional airports. These underutilized airstrips could do a better job than the 136 hub airports that currently serve the vast majority of commercial air traffic to get millions of passengers closer to their destinations.

With airplanes that Zunum claims will fly up to 700 miles on hybrid gas-electric systems by next decade—and as far as 1,000 miles by 2030—as well as streamlined security operations that could allow passengers to board in minutes, the company believes it’ll be well-positioned to grab a nice chunk of a market worth several hundred billion dollars.

Ironically, that opportunity is due to the phenomenal success of the major airlines, which, via more powerful jet engines and large long-range aircraft, have shifted the world to a small network of major hubs that currently handle more than 90% of the country’s air passenger traffic, explains Zunum CEO Ashish Kumar. It’s become easy and efficient to travel between the world’s large cities, but Kumar says that system has also created a “regional transport gap” that makes it slow and expensive to travel distances between 100 and 1,000 miles.

In fact, Kumar said, as much as 86% of the total door-to-door travel time for such short-haul trips is taken up with driving to and from larger airports. By allowing more passengers to use the 5,000 regional airports, much of that would no longer be necessary. And that could make it possible to cut the average time for a trip between Silicon Valley and Los Angeles from more than five hours today to two-and-a-half hours, or to cut in half the time and cost of flying from Boston to Washington, D.C.

Disrupting conventional air travel is all the rage right now. One company, Boom Supersonic, aims to make it possible to travel at the speed of sound for business-class prices. And Zunum isn’t the only company attempting to bring the power of hybrid and electric technology to aviation. Just last month, Wright Electric, an alumnus of Silicon Valley’s prestigious Y Combinator accelerator, unveiled its own plans for such planes. But to hear Bonny Simi, president of JetBlue Technology Ventures tell it, Zunum is the “real deal.”

JetBlue Technology Ventures, a subsidiary of JetBlue, focuses on future innovations that could impact the travel experience “soup to nuts,” Simi said. From technologies that could improve passengers’ experiences to aviation maintenance to loyalty programs, the Silicon Valley-based investor is looking at innovations that could revamp the travel industry in 5 or 10 years.

Zunum’s plans also illustrate the renewed interest in the regional transportation ecosystem. The long-haul airline industry isn’t likely to be disrupted anytime soon, Simi said, but there’s a lot of interest in upending the market for transporting people between 300 and 600 miles. That’s led to efforts like the Hyperloop, a system of tubes meant to transport passengers in capsules at speeds of up to 700 miles an hour, or experiments with special highway lanes meant to boost transit efficiencies.

“We’ve done an enormous amount of due diligence” on potential disruptors, Simi said, eventually concluding that Zunum’s technology and the experience of its team made it the best investment.

“We believe that hybrid-electric aircraft are coming,” Simi said, “When I look at what’s out there, I absolutely believe in [Zunum’s] team and [its] patents.”

For its part, Boeing’s interest in Zunum is based on the startup’s focus on clean energy, as well as electric propulsion. Steve Nordlund, the vice president in charge of Boeing’s HorizonX, said that the aviation giant has been pursuing similar hybrid-electric technology internally, and thought it made sense to be part of Zunum’s effort by investing, as well as by taking on an advisory role to help the company become a successful player in the aerospace industry.

“We were intrigued by their business model, as well as what could happen in the marketplace,” Nordlund said, “and the technology focus that they had.”

Zunum’s idea is for its planes to feature a purely electric thrust system in which all the power comes from batteries, but could be switched over to run off a fuel-powered generator. That dynamic could help airlines (and passengers) feel comfortable flying battery-operated planes, since they’d know they could switch to traditional power if necessary. Still, Kumar said, he thinks some airlines may decide to fly their shortest routes using nothing but electric power.

The company has been working with the FAA for three years, he explained, on eventual certification. The federal agency has developed rules governing electric planes, and Kumar said he expects Zunum’s first planes to meet the new standards for regional electric aircraft by 2020.

Zunum and other companies developing efficient regional transportation also benefit from the Transportation Safety Administration’s more lax security regulations for flights on planes with less than 60 passengers. And because many customers taking such short flights will return to their point of origin the same day, Kumar expects that they’ll be carrying less luggage, creating the opportunity for what he called “walk-on, walk-off” flights that don’t require much traveling time.

Ultimately, Zunum is projecting 40% reductions in door-to-door travel times on busy routes, and up to 80% reductions on rarely traveled itineraries. At the same time, the flights could initially generate 80% fewer emissions, and zero emissions over time as airlines adopt all-electric propulsion.

Zunum currently has less than 10 employees, but Kumar is planning on doubling and then tripling his staff in the next year. The company did not disclose how much funding it has received from JetBlue Technology Ventures, Boeing, and its other investors.

I was sitting in a hotel conference room, listening to talks about productivity and building businesses. Between sessions, the attendees exchanged suggestions about workflow tools, scaling strategies, and coworking spaces. It felt like a scene out of a Silicon Valley tech conference, except it wasn’t. It was the annual Nomad Summit in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The city’s affordability, warm weather, availability of coworking spaces, and reliable internet connection has in recent years earned the city a place as a digital nomad hotspot. 

I remember having a weird feeling about the way the presenters promoted this lifestyle. They made building a business while traveling seem so effortless. Despite the fact that I’d just quit my corporate law job and was desperate for some freedom, the whole anti-nine-to-five mentality just didn’t resonate with me. But I figured that in time, I would love the lifestyle. After all, why would I not be happy with working while I traveled the world?

To be fair, unlike most most digital nomads, I knew from the start that my journey would be temporary, as I was planning to attend graduate school in New York later that year. But I did toy with the idea of continuing with this lifestyle after graduation. At the end of my trip, however, I was excited to put down roots and sign a long-term lease.

Related link: The Digital Nomad’s Guide To Working Anywhere On Earth

Looking back, my lack of excitement was probably a hint that I wasn’t suited to the nomadic life. There were many things that I probably should have thought about before packing my bags and thinking, “I’ll figure everything out later.” I spoke to some former digital nomads to find out what advice they’d give to those thinking about hopping on the long-term traveler bandwagon.

Be Honest About Why You Want To Travel

I like to think that my reasons for trying out the work-travel lifestyle were because I wanted to build character. But if I was really being honest, I was burnt out with my corporate life and wanted to escape.

Anna Wickham, an entrepreneur and former digital nomad who now runs a digital marketing business in Oklahoma City, writes in her blog that her decision to move abroad was a “reaction” other than an “action.” “It was time for me to face ‘the real world,'” she wrote, “and I couldn’t bear the thought. The monotonous nine to five, the drudgery about my job, the total lack of freedom and mobility, it all made me ill. So I didn’t just walk in another direction. I ran like hell.“

But after months of living luxuriously in Vietnam on a modest income, she began to question her purpose. She tells Fast Company that she asked herself, “What is this really all about? Is it just to feel really cool?” As Wickham put it, she called her own bluff and realized that she would be able to grow her business better and faster if she was based in the U.S.

Figure Out The Work Part First

Lauren Juliff, a travel blogger who recently made the decision to establish a home base in Portugal, said that she wishes she spent more time working on her business and figuring out “the kinks of working online” before embarking on the digital nomad lifestyle. “I think most people figure it out on the road,” Juliff says, but they “focus more on the traveling aspect,” and don’t consider the amount of time they need to spend working.

There is often a mismatch between how much travel you want (and expect) to do versus how much time you’ll actually need to toil away on your laptop. Based on my experience, the latter almost always takes up a lot more hours than what you budgeted for.

Consider How You Will Build Relationships

Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck, says that one of the things he found most difficult about being a digital nomad was creating and maintaining meaningful relationships. “You meet tons and tons of people from diverse backgrounds, but you never form deep friendships or relationships. And if you do, it’s usually with somebody else who’s nomadic, and they’re always in a different country, so you only see them twice a year.”

This is something that Wickham and Juliff both echo. Wickham admits that aside from making her business a priority, one of the driving forces behind her move back to her hometown was the realization that she would always have to say goodbye to all the friends she made on the road.

Be Realistic About Your Priorities And Values

Jodi Ettenberg, writer of the travel blog Legal Nomads, urges travelers who have chosen this lifestyle to think about how they’re really feeling about their experience. “The lack of anchor in terms of a home base, or lack of consistency, does exacerbate anxiety for many long-term travelers, even those not usually predisposed to overthinking. It’s a great way to learn and live and explore the world, but there is no shame in saying, you know, this is no longer for me.”

Manson says that his decision to move back to the U.S. was largely due to a change in values and priorities. “The way I describe it is diminishing returns to travel. So if you’ve only been to four countries, country No. 5 is really, really exciting.” If you’ve been to 50 countries, he said, you start to see country No. 51 in terms of how similar it is to other places you’ve visited. In other words—it becomes less novel and exciting. 

Manson found himself increasingly valuing comfort and forming deep relationships over partying and fast-paced travel. When he realized what was most important to him, he says that the “scale tipped” in favor of a home base. 

Make Your Own Definition of Freedom

One of the things I noticed during my short digital nomad stint was the way the term “freedom” was paraded around. It seemed like there was a specific definition of it: working online on a location-independent business with no fixed home base. Often, that message was accompanied with a picture of the person on a beach or by the swimming pool with his/her laptop. 

It took me a while to realize and accept that while this is some people’s definition of freedom, it definitely isn’t mine. Wickham notes in her blog that “having a ‘lifestyle’ business doesn’t necessarily mean traveling the world,” and that very few entrepreneurs decide to go location-independent because it makes financial sense for their business. In reality, she notes, it’s that they can make “just as much money living abroad” or even earn less in exchange for the freedom to move around as they please. 

Manson believes that the life of perpetual travel isn’t one that’s sustainable in the long term. “I think some people are built to do it longer than others, but it definitely doesn’t strike me as something that can be maintained over multiple decades.”

Wickham isn’t so sure, saying that digital nomadism hasn’t been around long enough for her to make that judgment. One thing she is sure about, though, is that she doesn’t regret her decision to move back to her hometown. When asked whether there was any aspect of the life that she missed, she paused and said, “Gosh I’m so busy, I don’t really think about it that much.”

If you own a house in Portland, Oregon, the county government wants to make you a deal: It will build you a free tiny house for your backyard if you agree to let a homeless family live there for five years. After that, you can rent it to whoever you want.

“Like many large cities, we have a crisis when it comes to homelessness,” says Marc Jolin, director of A Home for Everyone, an initiative to prevent and end homelessness in the area that is helping fund the tiny homes. “We have at least a couple thousand people unsheltered on any given night, and a couple thousand more in shelters or transitional housing. We’ve done a lot to expand shelter capacity and expand support services, but where we struggle the most is around finding permanent housing options that are affordable for very low-income people.”

“We Don’t Want People Staying In Shelters For Two Years”

Portland and the county it sits in, Multnomah, have been working on the issue of homelessness for years. In 2016, the city committed to adding 650 new shelter beds to make a total of 1,240. A recently approved $258 million bond measure will fund 1,300 new units of affordable housing, but those units won’t be ready for at least two years. In the meantime, the county thinks that new backyard houses could be one way to help small families–such as a single mother and a child or two–get off the street.

“The purpose of our test is to see if we can bend the cost-curve down, and time to development down,” says Mary Li, director of the Multnomah Idea Lab, a government innovation program that came up with the idea. “So if it takes two years for new affordable housing development units to come online, that’s too long. We know why that has to happen, but in the meantime, we want to have an alternative to shelters, and we don’t want people staying in shelters for two years while they’re waiting for that housing.”

In the pilot, the county plans to build four of the tiny houses, aiming to finish construction and move in families by the end of the city’s fiscal year on June 30, or the end of the summer at the latest. If the pilot is successful, the team will seek funding to expand the program across the area. An evaluation may happen as early as six months after the first families move in.

Because they’re being built individually, the first pilot houses are likely to be relatively expensive for the government to build, and may each cost as much as $75,000. Over five years, that works out to $1,250 a month. Although that’s less than the government pays for shelter beds for a family of three, it’s more than what it plans to pay for each apartment that will be built under the housing bond. But if the tiny homes are produced at a larger scale, the cost will come down. The team is determining how much the cost can drop.

“If we can’t get them significantly cheaper than what it costs to build an affordable housing unit over time, then we shouldn’t do them,” says Li. “Part of our test is, can we do this at a cost point that makes it attractive for all of the parties concerned.”

Proximity Breeds Empathy

Unlike larger developments for housing the homeless, which often face local opposition, backyards are likely to be easier places to build. Tiny backyard houses, also known as accessory dwelling units, are already common and typically can be built “by right” by landowners, meaning that neighbors can’t stop their construction.

For neighbors, it’s an opportunity to get to know someone who has dealt with homelessness personally, and to begin to dismantle some of the stereotypes they might hold about what a homeless person is like or why they might be in that situation.

“There’s a bunch of research that says when we know somebody personally, we are much more able to see them as a human being, understand their struggles, and are much more predisposed to be in relationships with them,” says Li.

Since the program was first publicized in March, around 1,000 homeowners have signed up to request more information. “I’ve talked to dozens of folks in the last couple of weeks,” she says. “Every one of them has said ‘homelessness is something I care deeply about–I don’t know what to do about it, it seems so big and unwieldy. When I heard this idea, I thought, I’m nervous, I have a lot of questions, but I think I could help. And if I can, I want to.'”

Inside The Homes

The homes are likely to be around 200 square feet. Each will have sewer hookups, water, electricity, and a basic kitchenette with fridge, sink, microwave, and perhaps a toaster oven. The designs, which are still in development, will take into account requests from users, like including a place for children to do homework.

For someone sleeping on a cot in a shelter, the houses are an obvious improvement, even though the space is tight. Children may be able to return to the neighborhood school they attended before becoming homeless.

“One of the nice things about this approach is that it allows housing to be able to be distributed across a wide geography, in a variety of neighborhoods, proximate to a range of schools,” says Jolin. “One of the things that we know about homelessness is that it’s happening community-wide. We have families all over the city that are losing their housing. The goal is to keep families in the neighborhoods in which they were living–in large part because of the importance of not destabilizing the schooling situation for the kids.”

Some families may stay temporarily, though others may want to stay for the full five years the home is available. As the team at Multnomah Idea Lab went through a human-centered design process to develop the concept, interviewing all stakeholders involved, it was clear that some families desperate for housing wanted to move in immediately and stay as long as possible.

“There were a couple of times when staff came back and said, ‘I could just see she thought this was going to be her forever home,'” says Li. “‘And she was already in it in her mind–what it was going to look like, how she was going to be able to raise her child’ . . . Someone like that probably would be there all five years.”

Families using the homes will pay 30% of their income as rent to the government; those funds may be used for maintenance or insurance costs over the five years, or may be placed in matched savings accounts. Tenants will also sign an agreement with the homeowner detailing what’s permissible on the property. As they live there, they will get access to local support services such as social workers.

People Want To Help

When the houses revert to the homeowners after five years, they can help add to the local supply of affordable housing. Portland currently has an affordable rental shortage of about 24,000 units.

Backyard homes are one example of how cities are likely to transform to meet housing needs. “I think common sense says we can’t continue either as a community or as a world to think that the amount of space and the size of housing that has been perhaps traditionally thought of as the American dream can continue,” says Li. “The world can’t support it, the environment can’t support it, and frankly the economy can’t support it.”

“If you look at some of the work that’s happening around universal basic income, if we have hit ‘peak jobs’ in essence, this American dream of you get a family-wage job, you work super hard, you save and you scrimp and you get the house and that becomes a legacy that you leave your children, that dream virtually isn’t possible any longer unless you’ve already started at a certain place on the economic ladder,” she says.

The homes are one of a handful of new programs the local government is testing to address homelessness. A new village of “sleeping pods” without plumbing will house 14 homeless women in Portland’s Kenton neighborhood. In another project, formerly homeless workers will build 30 tiny homes.

For Li, the backyard homes are particularly interesting because–whether or not they are ultimately built at scale–the idea has demonstrated how much people in the area want to directly help.

“There are 1,000 people who own homes in this community who were in some way moved, inspired, provoked to want to think about it and sign up for more information,” she says. “For me, the challenge of what do we do to capture, leverage, support, whatever that energy was, feels like a wonderful opportunity, and a really important one.”

You may not realize it, but you have a lot of political power–not at the voting booth, but in the checkout line. In this new age of consumer activism, buyers are sending strong signals to American companies–with impressive results. No longer do consumers want to be the passive recipients of marketing messages, trained to purchase things they don’t want. They’re using their wallet as a weapon and fighting back.

Consider the #GrabYourWallet movement, which erupted after President Trump’s “grab her by the pussy” comment and specifically targeted Ivanka Trump’s brand. Few believed it could work, thinking that after the election things would calm down and any impact on Ivanka’s brand would be to her benefit. Many doubted the follow-through of our clicktivism generation. But the boycott grew and stores followed suit, dropping the brand. From Neiman Marcus to Gilt and Nordstrom, these major players parted ways with Ivanka, as a result of a 32% decline in sales. And while February sales of Ivanka’s brand witnessed an uptick, it’s becoming clear that consumption is political. The Ivanka boycott is just one example of individuals exercising their power at a level not witnessed of late. But there are more.

Even a small boycott can be enough for a company to change a policy, according to research out of Northwestern by professor Brayden King. According to King’s research, for every day of national media coverage, which Trump-related boycotts can easily garner with a politically oriented press, a targeted company’s stock price will drop nearly 1%. After the news of a boycott lands in the top five most-read newspapers in America, 25% of boycotts reap a concession from the targeted company. The lesson here: When national media is involved, companies react even if there’s no impact on sales.

Our purse is one of our strongest powers, and this generation is flexing a muscle that could lead to a healthier political culture. The capitalist system, the system often mistreating our people and the planet, revolves around us, the consumer. We can make or break this system. Companies care a great deal about us.

Businesses buy what we demand. As new consolidated consumer labels are developed beyond organic food, fair trade, and wind-made, it will be all the easier for us to make our voices heard. Arming ourselves with resources to guide our purchasing decisions–such as How Good and Project Just vetting–we can vote daily and in a powerful way with our dollars. We don’t have to wait until 2018 or 2020 to change America for the better or to improve social and environmental protections for our people and the planet. This election has reinvigorated the consumer boycotter, and it just might help usher in the most progressive era of environmental and social policy-making in America. Time to start voting, today.

Maxine Bédat is the CEO and cofounder of Zady. Michael Shank, PhD, teaches sustainable development at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs.

It was only four years ago that CNN took what, at the time, seemed like a major gamble by expanding its programming beyond news to incorporate original, nonfiction series–the first of which, under CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker’s ward, was Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.

Whatever naysaying and criticism the network received for the move has long been dwarfed by the massive success of Parts Unknown. Going into its ninth season, Anthony Bourdain’s docuseries travelogue has racked up five Primetime Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and consistently pulls in high ratings for the network.

And now the show has inspired an expansive digital enterprise that, as Bourdain puts it, will take Parts Unknown“deeper and farther and wider and smarter.”

Explore Parts Unknown is a partnership among CNN, digital journal Roads & Kingdom, and production company Zero Point Zero to broaden the context of places Bourdain has traveled in past seasons, using original long-form journalism, photography, and videos. The site’s features will include a six-episode digital-only series; a time-stamped interactive element mapping the “perfect 12 hours” of a given destination; hotel bar dispatches from Bourdain; and recipes linked to episodes of Parts Unknown.

Essentially, Explore Parts Unknown is an obsessively detailed travel guide to eat and explore on Bourdain’s level.

“We only cover so much in my show–it’s a very first-person, very personal essay in a place that often only covers one aspect of a location,” Bourdain says. “Wouldn’t it be great to have Roads & Kingdoms writers fleshing out or providing links, additional content, and related stories?”

Bourdain, who’s an investing partner and editor-at-large of Roads & Kingdoms, saw an opportunity to merge Parts Unknown with the media company’s existing resources to create a digital platform that would be able to widen the scope of his own show. The level of production alone behind Explore Parts Unknown puts it in a position beyond ancillary content on CNN’s page for Parts Unknown.

“It’s not a fan site. It’s not a show page. This is meant to be a full-scale business in the same way that CNN and Turner created an independent digital business in Great Big Story,” says Ed O’Keefe, CNN’s digital senior vice president of premium content. “Tony is one of the best storytellers you’ll ever meet. That’s why the show is so phenomenal–he’s really fascinating to watch. And so what we wanted to do here was use the series as the jumping-off point to dive in.”

From Bourdain’s perspective, Explore Parts Unknown isn’t necessarily about expanding his brand’s digital presence. On the contrary, he bristles at the idea of having a “brand.” What’s important to him is being able to challenge his creativity while simultaneously stoking his audience’s curiosity for travel and food.

“I recognize that there are a lot of other really good storytellers out there with different perspectives and experiences than my own and that are a perfect companion to my work. I’m a guy who wants more. If I’m curious about a subject, I want to know as much as I can about it, and I can’t and don’t do that in my show. It’s a big world, and I see [Explore Parts Unknown] as an opportunity,” Bourdain says. “I stood in front of a griddle or stove for 30 years of my adult life–a lot of that time working for people I didn’t particularly like, making food that didn’t particularly interest me, and serving it to people I didn’t care much about. To have a satisfied mind to create things, it makes me feel good.”

Boeing has launched a new venture fund that will invest in aerospace technology, innovations in manufacturing, and cutting-edge business models.

Known as Boeing HorizonX, the so-called “innovation cell” will look at companies that expect to hit the market with a product within 5 to 15 years.

“The name is unique and purposeful,” said HorizonX vice president Steve Nordlund, “as our mission is really to look beyond the horizon for us and the company from an innovation standpoint.”

The fund’s first two investments are in Zunum Aero and Upskill.

Zunum is a Kirkland, Washington-based startup that is developing hybrid-electric passenger planes. Zunum expects to disrupt the regional transportation market by the early 2020s with 10- to 50-seat planes that will utilize the United States’ 5,000 regional airports, potentially slashing prices and door-to-door times in half.

Upskill is based in Washington, D.C., and develops enterprise software for augmented reality wearables. Boeing has already been working with Upskill on initiatives that have helped the aviation giant cut the time required to wire its planes by as much as 25%.

Nordlund said there’s no clear plan for additional investments. The fund will put its resources into companies that are pursuing interests that align with those of Boeing. Those include artificial intelligence and machine learning, autonomy, and additive manufacturing. HorizonX is also intended to support a major global services business unit that Boeing will be launching later this year.

One night in the spring of 2016, Housam Jackl and three of his friends sat around a fire in a refugee camp in the northern Greek town of Idomeni to discuss what could be done to improve the unfortunate situation they found themselves in. Over the course of the next year, they would go on to start a refugee-led NGO and become leaders within their camp.

Previously the men had worked together as volunteers to help refugees in Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey. But they were now refugees themselves. In March 2016, when Jackl, and the other men arrived at the Greek-Macedonian border from Syria, they found fences and army guards. A populist backlash to the refugee influx in Europe caused nearly all of the borders in Europe to close that month. As a result, 50,000 refugees, including Jackl and the other three men, were stuck in Greece. “My friends and I sat around the fire and asked, ‘What can we do?’” Jackl said.

Making Use Of A Long, Undefined Wait

For most refugees, the answer to that question was, Nothing. Upon arriving in Greece, refugees can’t work; in the camps, meals are provided by the Greek military and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), but ingredients to cook and utensils are rarely available. They aren’t citizens, so engaging in the political process that defines their future is also not an option. As a result, most refugees are stripped of agency and have little to do but wait for borders to open, wars to end, or paperwork to make its way through the bureaucratic asylum system—a process that can take years.

This long, often undefined waiting period is frustrating to many who left behind busy professional lives. Prior to the wars that tore their countries apart, many refugees were business owners, doctors, lawyers, taxi drivers, and engineers. They were productive and had control over their lives. As someone who trained as a psychologist before the war, Jackl understood the toll that the asylum process would have on people in the camps. Together with his friends, he decided to try to solve the problem.

“In the refugee camps, we have two things: people and time,” Jackl explained. He and his friends decided that they would organize people to improve the camp. The idea was to solve two problems at once: Give refugees purpose, and make life in the camp better for everyone.

Resourcefulness Born Of Necessity

It began with repurposing shipping material. The men noticed that every day, dozens of shipments of food, medicine, and other aid came to their camp. But once the supplies were unloaded, aid workers would throw the pallets away. Meanwhile, people were sleeping in tents that would flood when it rained. So Jackl led an effort to break the pallets down and use the wood to create platforms on which the tents could sit.

Shortly afterwards, they used scrap wood and torn pieces of fabric to build a school, and eventually found a refugee who was a teacher to lead classes. The philosophy was simple and powerful: Use resources that would otherwise go to waste to improve life in their camp. As word spread of their work on social media, Jackl began to receive offers from people who wanted to donate money to his then unofficial cause. “All these people began asking me ‘What can I do? Can I give you money?’ And I’d tell them, ‘Give me materials,’” he said.

“People think that refugees are weak. But they survived war, smugglers, and the camps,” Jackl explains. His mission is to change the refugee image from one of weakness to one of resilience and strength. Core to that is the idea that refugees can help one another instead of relying on aid workers and NGOs, a philosophy that he adopted from an NGO called Jafra that he worked for in Syria.

Jafra Foundation was founded in 2002 by a group of Syrians that wanted to help the 110,000 Palestinians then living in an unofficial camp outside of Damascus called Yarmouk Camp. In 2012, it relaunched with the goal of helping refugees throughout the Middle East who were fleeing conflict in Syria. When the war began, Jackl was providing psychological support to Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk on behalf of Jafra. That same year, Assad’s regime surrounded the camp and put it under siege. They cut off the electricity, water, and food supply routes, trapping tens of thousands of civilians inside the city’s walls. To make matters worse, ISIS was one of the rebel groups trapped inside.

One day in fall 2014, Jackl and his sister heard commotion outside their apartment. Under the sharia law that ISIS was enforcing, it was illegal for a woman to live with any man except her husband; Jackl and his sister lived with two male roommates. They knew immediately that the extremist group had come to punish them. As soon as they recognized the threat, Jackl and his sister ran to the roof. The militants followed. Then in what Jackl describes as “a scene out of Hollywood,” a rooftop chase began. With the regime’s snipers surrounding them on all sides and a group of extremists on their tail, Jackl and his sister jumped from roof to roof. His sister was shot in the leg before they made it to a safe house.

The Catalyst

The next day Jackl decided that it was time for him to leave Syria. At the time there was a standing offer from Assad’s regime: For any Free Syrian Army (FSA) soldiers that surrendered, they would send in food for civilians. Jackl wasn’t an FSA rebel, but he needed to get out of Yarmouk. He bought a weapon from a rebel, and just before sunset, he walked out of the city waving a white flag. As he walked from the outskirts to the siege’s line, he looked back at his hometown. “It was the first time I’d seen the city from the outside for over a year. I saw the collapsed buildings,” he said. Shortly after surrendering, he was let go; the regime wanted him to send word back that it was safe for others to follow suit, and shortly after his sister escaped in the same way. A couple days later, he crossed the Syria-Lebanon border and began his new life as a war refugee.

After providing psychological therapy to refugees for two years in Lebanon, Jackl decided to make the journey to Europe where he could apply for asylum. “After four years of helping refugees, I decided to help myself,” he said. His original plan was to travel alone. He would take the Balkan route up through Macedonia, Serbia, and Austria toward northern Europe where he wanted to study law. But fate put a wrinkle in his plan. Along the way, he became the unofficial captain of a raft and a leader to some 45 refugees.

In Idiza, the coastal Turkish city where many refugees board rafts bound for Greek islands, a smuggler pulled Jackl aside. “He pointed to a few lights on the horizon and said, Go there,” Jackl said. It was up to him to guide the ship toward Europe. Evidently the $1,000 that he and the other refugees had each paid the smuggler didn’t include a captain.

When they reached the Greek island of Lesbos, he translated for families, explained asylum processes to young men, and eventually led a group toward the Macedonian border. Along the way he checked Facebook and WhatsApp groups that refugees use to find optimal migrant routes, housing, and even sea conditions. That week, the group chats were flooded with posts from refugees informing others that the Greek-Macedonian border had closed. When the group arrived in the border city of Idomeni, they confirmed the rumors.

Continued Growth

It was near the border that Jackl and his friends began building infrastructure and finding ways to improve life in the camps. In April 2016, he and his three friends decided to start a Greek division of Jafra, the organization they had worked for in Syria. Each week, refugees would see the work they were doing and offer to help out. For many, volunteering was a good way to regain purpose in their lives.

Over the last year, the organization has grown to roughly 50 volunteers. Despite their efforts, conditions in the Idomeni camp deteriorated and many families moved into other camps. Jackl and the other volunteers with Jafra moved too last summer, taking their efforts to a camp in the Greek town of Lagkadikia. There, with the support of UNHCR they have assisted the 200 families and their children with practical things like waste management and distributions of relief items to bigger issues like setting up a school and recreational  spaces in the camp and offering psychosocial support for children.

In the fall, as many of the families moved to Athens to complete their resettlement applications, The Jafra team moved with them. They established many similar services there that they had in the other camps. But there Jackl and his group of volunteers are also opening a shelter for single women and children (the most vulnerable in a camp).

In his makeshift office on the bottom floor of the shelter, Jackl explained its purpose. “In the camps, you have one protection-services volunteer and 100 women. The UNHCR official sits in his office all day filing reports. There’s so much bureaucracy.” The goal of the shelter is to bypass the bureaucracy and provide shelter to women who don’t feel safe in the camps.

To bypass that bureaucracy and create the shelter Jackl and his team at Jafra pooled together a couple thousand dollars from friends living abroad and NGOs, and rented an apartment that could act as a safe house. He gave me a tour of the three-story apartment. In one of the rooms, there were boxes of what appeared at first glance to be junk. But when he showed me the contents inside, I saw canned food, clothing, bedding, and cleaning supplies; they had found the boxes in a donation center a couple miles away.

In one room, we found a 17-year-old-refugee named Bashar assembling an old bed frame. A year ago, after his brother was killed by a bomb in Yarmouk, he left his family in Syria for Europe where his aunt lives; in Idomeni, he met Jackl and soon after began to volunteer. I heard similar stories from everyone that I met.

On the second day of my visit, Jackl had to postpone our meeting for what has become an almost daily occurrence. That morning, he learned about a box of supplies that an NGO was giving away. He scrambled to board a bus and retrieve the box. Everything that he showed me in the shelter—all of the beds, blankets, tables, chairs, and miscellaneous items required to house women and children—had been gathered in much the same way. When they arrive, someone crosses the item off a wish list in their office.

Jafra will become the first refugee-led NGO to manage an official camp later this year. They will go from being unofficial helpers to recognized leaders with authority and a budget given to them by the UNHCR. For now, they still operate in the grassroots way that they were formed.

As for Jackl, his on the ground leadership of the organization that he created is temporary. He has passed three interviews and a security check in the process of being granted asylum in France. He insists that the organization will continue to operate after he leaves, and plans to remain involved remotely from France. But for now, all the volunteers continue to turn to the psychologist to lead them.

Michael Thomas is a writer based in Denver. He writes about economics and business history on his blog, Insatiable Fox.

There was a time when the talk show held an honored place in show business. Before celebrities had their innermost secrets and most intimate nude photos posted online daily, this was their only chance to connect with their fans through candid, witty conversation with the revered kings of late night like Johnny or Dave or even Dick Cavett.

Now, the talk show has morphed into a bizarre circus sideshow, where leading men have eggs cracked on their heads and aging divas are crammed uncomfortably into Chrysler Suburbans while being assaulted with Katy Perry songs. It’s in this environment that comedian Guy Branum—a former writer and panelist on Chelsea Lately, as well as a writer for The Mindy Project—has come to both embrace the talk show’s current party game existence while also reminding us of a time when wit, insight, and sparkling conversation ruled the land.

Branum, who was known among friends for hosting Passover seders at his home that required guests to engage in harshly judged “small talk competitions,” came up with the concept for Talk Show The Game Show where most great ideas are hatched: In the back of a van.

Related Link:“This Is A Bad Movie”: Comedian Guy Branum Reviews “Stonewall”

“It all started in the back of a 15-passenger van on the way to a Quizbowl tournament, in like 1999 or 2000,” Branum tells Fast Company. “We were talking about television and I came down on the hard stance that there’s a right way and a wrong way to be on a talk show. So I came up with the idea of a talk show that was also a game show that proved you were good at talk shows.” The concept kicked around for a few years—little more than “vague and unstructured ideas and inside jokes” as he puts it—before Branum finally got the chance to field test the idea in L.A. comedy clubs where he had performed as a stand-up.

As most of Hollywood can attest, this is usually the point where a production company swoops in and immediately changes everything about the idea they professed to love so much. In particular, Branum braced for interference when it came to his choice of judges. Rather than mine the green room at the Improv for other comics, he had less obvious choices in mind: Karen Kilgariff, former head writer for the Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Rosie Show, and The Pete Holmes Show (she’s also co-host of the popular My Favorite Murder podcast, for you murderinos out there) and Casey Schreiner, author and founder of Modern Hiker. Schreiner, a friend of Branum’s since the two of them were writers and performers at the now-defunct G4 Network (full disclosure: this writer was also a colleague of theirs at that time)—had been a part of the concept since day one.

As Branum puts it: “Casey was, of course, the only person who could look at my rules and immediately understand what I was talking about.” Much to Branum’s surprise, the fight never materialized. “I thought they would be like, ‘Oh, let’s get some buzzy comedian or somebody like that,’ but they were just uniformly like, ‘Oh no, he’s amazing. He’s the best part of the show.’”

Although the show’s origins pre-date the Jimmy Fallon-ization of the late night talk show, it’s hard not to see Talk Show The Game Show as a bit of shade thrown in the direction of a format that has abandoned banter for desperate attempts at viral video hits. “Look, Carpool Karaoke is one of the best things on television, but it’s not what talk shows used to be,” says Branum. “This show is a celebration and an indictment of all that talk shows have become. So much is rooted in the fact that no one has a real conversation on a talk show anymore.”

With Talk Show The Game Show premiering tonight on TruTV, Branum hopes to achieve two things: Bringing the lost sense of danger and unpredictability to late night talk shows (“Remember Bobcat Goldthwait setting fire to Jay Leno’s couch or Isabella Rossellini showing up on Letterman and there being what felt like legitimate chemistry between the two?”) and, of course, world domination.

“That’s the real dream, you know,” says Branum. “The real dream is to have a Talk Show The Game Show on in 90 different languages across the planet.”

Following every fresh policy announcement cooked up by the Trump administration, social feeds have filled up with variations on the theme of “call your local elected official and tell them not to stand for it.” For everything from the appointments of Jeff Sessions and Betsy DeVos to the looming defunding of Planned Parenthood, huge swaths of constituents have mobilized (with varying degrees of effectiveness) to call and email their representatives and make their opinions heard. But senators’ answering machines fill up, and emails can easily be sent to the trash.

What is less easy to ignore: a fax message. Despite the fact that may people have probably not operated a fax machine in a decade, “literally every elected official has a fax number with a D.C. area code; the faxes are collected and put right on their desks,” says Levi Brooks, co-founder and CEO of the design and technology studio Use All Five. With the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)’s $148 million budget on the chopping block in Trump’s budget proposal, Use All Five has launched an effort to get people to protest the funding cuts not by calling or emailing their representatives, but by faxing them an image of a work of art.

You can add a personalized message to the image, and when you enter your ZIP code, the open-source API put in place by Use All Five will pull up a list of your elected officials, and send the fax to whomever you select. Artifax launched just days ago, but Brooks says over 250 works of art have been sent out to elected officials so far.

Brooks co-founded Use All Five 11 years ago; since then, the studio has worked with clients as diverse as Google and Guggenheim on projects ranging from brand strategy to web design. The Use All Five team is made up of developers and designers; Brooks, whose background is in design and media arts, says working at the intersection of technology and art drives home “the importance of both philosophies and ways of seeing the world.”

“It scares me, both as an employee and a citizen, to see these cuts to the arts,” Brooks says. It’s a dynamic that has been playing out for years in public schools, where, amid funding cuts, programs like arts and music education are often the first to go. “There’s just not enough recognition of the value of art,” he adds.

While the cuts to the NEA might seem like an attack on elite liberal institutions, they will instead further disadvantage the same low-income and rural communities that Trump claims to support. The NEA has proven so crucial to rural communities, particularly in the western states, that a top House Republican staff member told The New York Times that conservative representatives from those areas are unlikely to support a bill that cuts arts funding so drastically.

When Brooks and the team at Use All Five learned that the NEA was under threat, there was no question, Brooks says, that they wanted to do something to raise awareness of the importance of art; when Brooks came across a Tweet saying faxes were actually the best way to get ahold of elected officials, the idea for Artifax just came together.

The initiative is still new, and Brooks says Use All Five is working to solicit more images from artists and designers (you can also submit your own art on the site, if you are so inclined). While the Trump administration is in the process of finalizing the budget, Brooks hopes Artifax will help raise awareness about what the NEA does, and what a United States without the arts would be like. One of the most common sentiments Brooks has seen so far on the faxes is a quote, commonly misattributed to Winston Churchill, which asks: If we’re going to cut the arts, what would we have left to fight for?

In theory, Facebook connects you to a universe of 1.8 billion people. But in practice, as several studies of shown, you only interact with around 150 of them. And that begs a question: Why does everyone continue to rely on Facebook instead of setting up their own social network—one that’s tailored to their personal interests?

Gina Bianchini has been trying to answer that question for over a decade. Her idea is that setting up a social network around any topic, and finding people with the same passions, should be as easy as creating a website. Facebook, by comparison, makes it relatively hard to discover new people, focusing instead on matching up people who already know each other, or showing you information about new people in the larger context of Facebook, and not within a specific subject matter.

Bianchini’s first attempt to let anyone eschew the monolithic nature of Mark Zuckerberg’s company and build their own, focused, social network, was Ning. Cofounded with Marc Andreessen and launched in 2005, Ning created 3 million networks, but it didn’t succeed. Then in 2011, Bianchini began working on Mightybell, a collaborative app to help people get things done in incremental steps—which slowly morphed into a social networking platform for small groups.

Today, Bianchini is at it again, with the launch of Mighty Networks. Her latest attempt to give people with “deep interests” their own networks and the ability to avoid the “nearly impossible” feat of building a Facebook group around those interests, continues the evolution of Mightybell, but with an overhaul of the underlying technology and design (you can read more about these ideas in an essay she published today).

In the heart of Palo Alto, just blocks away from where Facebook set up its first Silicon Valley office in 2004, Bianchini has assembled a team of 20 to try to succeed with a mobile-first approach to what Ning previously attempted. The time is finally right, she believes, because of the “intelligence” provided by mobile devices.

Mighty Networks has already built a user base of thousands of members around networks focused on Type 1 Diabetes, artistic hairstyles, gender non-conformity, and other topics.

Mighty Networks is free to anyone, with premium plans starting at $79 month and offering upgrades like advanced analytics, the ability for network owners to add their own paying subscriptions, and more.

Users of Mighty Networks, even the free version, will have a much higher degree of control over what happens on their network. The emphasis of the app is connecting users to others who are like them, near them, or have similar interests. Network creators have a lot of control over what their members see, and can present them with things like manually curated featured posts—for example, the best hair style of the day on HairBrained, the network about artistic hair—users’ most popular posts, a feed of posts on any specific topic, as well as any members curious about a topic.

Members themselves can signal their own interests within their profiles, displaying any content they’ve created, such as their posts, polls, and comments. And they can choose the level of privacy they want, selecting between fully public, private, or even secret.

“You can get a sense of what’s going on, and what’s relevant to [you],” Bianchini says. “It’s all customizable to the person who created the network. It’s another way of being able to make networks tailored to the interest and purpose of the network and why it’s created. That flexibility and level of customizability is important.”

Bianchini says that Ning’s largest network reached a million users and that thanks to the power of algorithms that identify users’ location, specific interests, and other factors, Mighty Networks “can scale significantly greater than that.”

She points to the success of Nextdoor and Houzz as evidence of the scalability of networks built around proximity and interest.

Yet she also argues that because the individual networks will be targeted at people with very specific interests, it won’t be necessary to have a massive number of users to create a critical mass. “It’s a phenomenal way to bring together true fans and true believers,” Bianchini says. “You can accomplish a lot with 100 [users], a heck of a lot with 1,000, and at 10,000 people, it’s a homer.”

Mighty Networks has raised $12 million from a group of investors that includes Sierra Wasatch Capital, First Round Capital, Floodgate, Cowboy Ventures, and others. But there’s no doubt that if Ning struggled to take on Facebook when it had less than a billion users, Mighty Networks will face at least as strong a headwind given that Facebook is now vastly larger.

At least it’s not the only new social network on the block. Another, Mastodon, launched late last year, promising “a free, open-source…decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, [avoiding] the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication.”

But others—think of Ello—have found that trying to outdo Facebook at anything is a losing battle. Mighty Networks hopes the route to success lies in giving people useful groups that keep people focused on their shared personal interests rather than their shared personal acquaintances.

“It’s very difficult to build a community and build real relationships,” Bianchini says, referring to Facebook’s groups, “when you’re constantly being kicked out to something else.”

Back in late February, YouTube unveiled YouTube TV, a new streaming service featuring the same big-name TV networks that most people get via cable or satellite. The company said that it planned to launch the service–which competes with AT&T’s DirecTV Now, Sony’s PlayStation Vue, and Dish’s Sling TV–in “the coming months.”

A little over a month later, YouTube TV is here, in limited fashion. The service is debuting today in five markets–Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area–where it offers local stations as well as big cable channels, with more cities to come. Ten of its 50+ networks, including AMC, ESPN 3, Sundance TV, Telemundo, and The Weather Channel’s Local Now, are “coming soon.” (The fact that AMC and sister channels such as Sundance will be part of YouTube TV at all is news.) YouTube is offering an unusually lengthy 30-day free trial, and will give a free Chromecast TV streaming gizmo to subscribers after their first paid month.

I’ve had a couple of days of hands-on time with the service, on a Pixel phone that YouTube provided, preloaded with the YouTube TV app. What I’ve seen represents only a slice of the YouTube TV experience, which will be available on Android phones and tablets, iPhones and iPads, and the web. Among other things, I couldn’t try one of its most intriguing aspects: For $35 a month, the service will offer six accounts and up to three simultaneous streams, allowing individual family members to watch and record their own shows without it all getting tangled into one giant hairball of content.

That’s not counting the gaps in YouTube TV that we already knew about–most notably the fact that it doesn’t include any channels owned by Time Warner or Viacom (such as CNN, HBO, MTV, and Comedy Central), and only lets you watch on a TV by beaming content from your device to a Chromecast. (I did so using the Pixel, and it worked fine.) YouTube hasn’t said anything about availability on other TV-streaming devices such as Roku boxes, but the service will need to be in lots of places to be competitive.

With all this in mind, I wasn’t able to fully test the service as it will arrive today in its first five markets, let alone judge where it might be going. But I was able to form some first impressions, and they were largely favorable, with a few caveats.

The Interface Is (Mostly) Nice

It’s about what you might expect from YouTube–clean and straightforward. Each show and network has a page of its own that bundles up a schedule for upcoming live airing with any on-demand episodes that are available. I did find it odd that there’s no easily-available-anywhere way to return to the home screen, which is how you get to stuff you’ve recorded using the DVR feature; it sometimes takes a lot of presses on the Back button to get there. (YouTube says this design is specific to Android and doesn’t affect the iOS version.)

In my time with YouTube TV, the quality of the video streams has been buttery smooth, and I haven’t noticed any of the technical glitches that plagued DirecTV Now after its launch. The fact that YouTube already knows as much about delivering video over the internet as any company on the planet presumably helps.

YouTube TV’s Search Ups The Ante

All of YouTube TV’s competitors have search features, but calling them “rudimentary” might be erring on the side of politeness. DirecTV Now, for instance, responds to a search for “Jerry Seinfeld” with Jerry Maguire; Sling TV, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be aware that the man was a regular on Seinfeld.

YouTube TV’s search, by contrast, feels like its creators actually expect it to be a primary form of navigation. You can enter TV shows, episode titles, movie names, people, and channels. More impressively, you can also search for concepts such as “comic books,” which pulls up Arrow, Gotham, Supergirl, and other programs. It’s a better solution to the challenge of wrangling vast amounts of stuff on a tiny screen than I’ve seen elsewhere.

But TV Search Is Still A Big Challenge

In one form or another, Google has been trying to make it easy to hunt down TV content via a search field for many years. It’s come a long way since the era of Google TV, but the more you play with YouTube TV search, the more you’ll realize that it still isn’t anywhere near as smart as the search in YouTube’s main app or Google search. For example, Donald Trump may be omnipresent on TV, but YouTube TV doesn’t understand that: When I searched for his name, I got only three results. (Presumably that’s because YouTube TV doesn’t really know much about the subjects of individual episodes of shows, other than their titles–and news shows don’t have titles.)

I Also Noticed Some Oddities And Outright Glitches

The search feature wasn’t aware that John Dickerson is on Meet the Press, even though his name is mentioned in the description on the page for that program. And when I searched for “Simpsons monorail”–hoping to find my favorite Simpsons episode of all time–the app told me that it didn’t have The Simpsons at all. (It has the show in profusion in on-demand form–but not season four, which is when “Marge vs. the Monorail” aired.)

The Cloud DVR Is Neat, But Built For Binge Watching

One of YouTube TV’s major distinctions is its cloud-based DVR, which lets record as much live TV as you like and only erases your saved shows after nine months. (PlayStation Vue has a more limited DVR feature; Sling’s DVR is still in beta; DirecTV Now doesn’t have one.) Use YouTube TV’s DVR to record your favorite series and movies, and you might end up being able to treat it like an on-demand video service rather than one that makes you keep track of TV schedules.

It’s a feast. But when I tried to record individual episodes of shows, I discovered that I couldn’t. With YouTube TV’s unlimited DVR storage, it assumes that you’re going to want every episode of a program. Maybe my brain has been trained by using a TiVo for years, but there are instances when I’d like to record a single episode of a show rather than wallow in it.

This Is TV With a Dash Of YouTube

The fact that YouTube decided to build a separate YouTube TV app rather than cram live TV into its main app is an acknowledgement that the new service has a different set of design needs than YouTube in its classic form. And while the company did incorporate some standard YouTube offerings into YouTube TV, they feel more like a garnish than an entrée. YouTube Originals, such as the Gigi Gorgeous documentary This Is Everything, otherwise available only on YouTube Red, are here. So are “Related on YouTube” videos on the pages for specific shows. But when you do a search, you often get only a smattering of YouTube results even if the service has gajillions of videos that match the query–and if you choose to watch any of them, you get booted out to the main YouTube app.

You Will Notice The Ads

YouTube’s approach to advertising on its main service is innovative and consumer-friendly, with ads that are brief and/or skippable. By contrast, YouTube TV’s ads reminded me more of those on other services such as Hulu. They’re higher in volume and lower in variety than you might prefer. For example, I kept seeing the same Starbucks spot about a nice old retired man. And when I sneakily tried to fast-forward deep into The Tonight Show, I had to watch five commercials in a row.

In the end, this whole category of services is a bit of a puzzlement: The contenders seem like commodities on the surface, but each is a subtle blend of pros and cons, and there’s no runaway winner. The fact that YouTube TV doesn’t have Time Warner and Viacom deals leaves its lineup incomplete–at least if you’re thinking of it as a full-blown cable substitute–and it could use more ways to watch it on a TV beyond using a Chromecast. But what’s there shows plenty of potential. Maybe by the time YouTube rolls it out across the country, it’ll have filled in some of the holes and worked out some of the kinks.

This time, he just might not survive. Fox News ratings king Bill O’Reilly has always weathered controversy, from offensive comments to previous accusations of sexual harassment (both settled out of court). None of it hurt his O’Reilly Factor viewership, the biggest for a cable news show in 2016. His latest claims antagonized a less-forgiving constituency: his advertisers, at least 20 of whom have now pulled their commercials from the show. Such boycotts haven’t usually been effective at dislodging such a powerful TV personality, but the speed of the anti-O’Reilly campaign and the nature of the accusations, may actually get results.

The boycott exploded within days. A cadre of Twitter activists, battle-hardened from ongoing campaigns against the Trumps and Breitbart News, swarmed the initial New York Times story about the sexual harassment allegations and put pressure on advertisers to take a stand. They did—quickly and vocally. Within about 24 hours, over 20 companies— including major players like Allstate, BMW, and T. Rowe Price—pulled their advertising from the O’Reilly Factor and denounced his alleged behaviour.

“So many advertisers are not just removing their ads, but giving comments that they typically avoid, or would avoid. I mean, they’re making value judgments,” says Angelo Carusone, president of liberal watchdog organization Media Matters for America. That Carusone was caught off guard shows how unexpected the reaction was, as he’s long been planning for such a day. “I had the @StopOReilly [Twitter] account for seven years, and I just sat on it,” he says.

Carusone knows of what he speaks. Back in 2009, he led an advertising boycott of then-Fox pundit Glenn Beck to counteract the host, whom he claimed had engaged in bullying behavior and spread misinformation about his political targets. Based on advertising sales data he collected, Carusone claims that the campaign had a major financial impact on the show that led to Beck’s departure from Fox. Carusone also spearheaded a campaign against Rush Limbaugh and though it did not bring down the radio pundit, he claims it still did financial damage. In the case of O’Reilly, however, Carusone says he’s playing catch-up to other online activists— by following the effort, not leading.

A role reversal

Perhaps it’s fitting that such an unusual turn of events began on April Fools Day. That’s when New York Times journalists Emily Steel and Michael S. Schmidt published an extensive investigation of claims against O’Reilly. They included two previously unknown sexual harassment settlements, one settlement for verbal abuse, a pending lawsuit for sexual harassment, and described yet another account of harassment that didn’t result in a lawsuit.

No accusations have been proven in court, and O’Reilly hasn’t admitted to any wrongdoing. But the preponderance of evidence has been persuasive in the court of public opinion. The latest news lands atop a mountain of previous sexual harassment and discrimination charges against Fox leaders including its ousted chairman, Roger Ailes.

The weekend was calm, but things sped up on Monday evening, when Mercedes-Benz announced that it would pull advertising from The O’Reilly Factor. “The allegations are disturbing and, given the importance of women in every aspect of our business, we don’t feel this is a good environment in which to advertise our products right now,” the luxury automaker’s spokeswoman Donna Boland wrote in an email to media outlets. Then, Hyundai announced that it was canceling an upcoming ad campaign.

Carusone was surprised to see advertisers take the lead. “No one ever really viewed them as a decision maker or even a participant,” in boycott campaigns, he says. “That culture is a new phenomenon that’s emerged over years because of the way that these brands utilize social media, interact with their user base, that they get pulled into things.”

Still, the defections looked more like a glancing blow than a serious wound early on Tuesday when I emailed professor Brayden King of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, the guru of boycott studies.

“I doubt it will work,” he wrote back around 1:30 PM Eastern time. “O’Reilly is a powerful figure at Fox News and has the ability to resist a great deal of pressure from sponsors. Even though a few major brands have left his show, the network will be able to find replacements.” But right around then, the defections sped up. When we emailed again just before 6PM, King wrote, “At some point, the number of fleeing brands will reach a critical mass that it will start to damage the reputations of the companies that decide to stick with [Fox News]. At that point, I’d expect to see a change.” (He reckons that change to be something like a temporary suspension of O’Reilly, rather than his dismissal.)

What happened to change the rules so quickly and surprise even experts in the field? One factor, according to Carusone, was aggressive reporting by journalists from the Times, CNN, BuzzFeed and other outlets who proactively called other O’Reilly Factor advertisers, asking if they would follow suit. That may have nudged advertisers to act, he says. “Typically when you’re an activist, you’re the vanguard. You’re out there first, and reporters and the news media are catching up,” says Carusone. “In [this] case I was like, Oh my God, I have fallen behind.”

The Breitbart effect

It didn’t take long for activists to catch up, because so many on the left were already primed for such a battle. Carusone, who follows and critiques O’Reilly as part of his job, went through past episodes of O’Reilly Factor shows, writing down the names of major advertisers and tweeting them requests to pull their support. He enlisted help from his staff to publish a roster of about 130 advertisers on the Media Matters web site.

Good evening @casper. I actually love my Mattress. But, I don't love that Casper is sponsoring Bill O'Reilly's serial sexual harassment.

— Angelo Carusone (@GoAngelo) April 4, 2017

Carusone wasn’t alone. For instance, Judd Legum, the editor-in-chief of liberal news site ThinkProgress was tweeting out the Twitter handles of O’Reilly Factor advertisers he’d seen on the show Monday night. Legum’s action resembles the Sleeping Giants movement on Twitter that’s focused on punishing Breitbart News. The anonymous activists who work in digital marketing began a campaign in November against what they consider offensive articles and comments posted on the news site formerly run by President Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon. By tweeting out screenshots of a company’s ads next to inflammatory content, Sleeping Giants and their Twitter followers have convinced over 1,700 companies and organizations, including some online ad networks, to pull advertising from Breitbart.

.@BMW@MercedesBenz@Hyundai 3. Companies still advertising on O'Reilly:@allstate@Microsoft@pcmatic@Armor_All@Sanofi@goldbondmed@SunsweetGrowers@esurance

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) April 4, 2017

Now Sleeping Giants is piling on. “There was enough of an outcry in our community that we kinda put it to a vote [Monday] night,” says Sleeping Giant’s anonymous spokesman, “and like ninety percent of the respondents were on board.” As with Breitbart, the group started by making a Google spreadsheet of O’Reilly Factor advertisers starting with those Legum had been tweeting. They asked followers to identify more advertisers and tweet requests asking the companies to drop O’Reilly. “I had watched their work with Breitbart and saw they were considering looking at O’Reilly advertisers,” said Legum. “So I did reach out to them because I knew it would be too much for me to keep track of myself.” Sleeping Giants lists over 20 companies that have dropped The O’Reilly Factor.

A risk to free speech?

Every good movie about the press seems to include a scene in which the muckraking reporter’s work is jeopardized by angry advertisers threatening to pull out. In an ideal news environment, journalism and truth are shielded from the whims of commercial interests. But with the current O’Reilly boycott, as well as the Beck and Limbaugh campaigns that preceded it, the public (including even liberals who typically distrust business) are looking to corporations to set things right. “They can be real vanguards,” says Carusone.

He points out that O’Reilly’s issue is not one of free speech but rather of behavior. The charges against him, other Fox colleagues, and Fox itself are serious and mounting. “Sexual harassment is a really big fucking problem in this country,” says Carusone. “I do think it matters if you have corporate leaders standing up and saying, hey, this is an issue that we think is a super-big third rail, and so even if you give a whiff of this, we’re not going to go anywhere near it.”

Even if O’Reilly is guilty of some or all of the accusations, it hasn’t been proved. And what’s to stop newly emboldened advertisers from acting against other journalists for alleged, or even trumped-up, charges? Once the Pandora’s box of media boycotts is opened, how do you ensure the powers are only used for good?

“To an extent, I think that’s where media and reporters play an important arbiter role there, to separate: what is a legitimate thing to ask of an advertiser and where their roles and responsibilities begin and end,” says Carusone, whose role is to unmask what his organization deems to be misinformation in the media. It also seems convenient for liberal activists that these boycott efforts have been waged against the right-wing press.

Carusone and others try to draw a line by saying that the trigger for action is a pattern of prejudice or bullying behavior, not merely disagreeable opinions. “We never want to silence somebody, but we don’t want to make it profitable to be involved in sexual harassment,” says the Sleeping Giants spokesman. Carusone agrees, adding that “it’s playing with fire” to use corporate influence as a tool to punish journalists. “But I also don’t think you should be rewarded for being a total bully.”