WHAT: A voyeuristic short that appears to be about a man’s mental breakdown, but actually has a lot more on its mind.

WHO: New York-based filmmaker Paul Trillo.

WHY WE CARE: A lot has been said about the public shaming of people like Justine Sacco, who fired off a gross tweet before getting on a plane and found herself newly jobless by the time she landed. Jon Ronson wrote a fascinating book about these kinds of phenomena. The latest season of Black Mirror tackled them in a fantastic episode too. But perhaps nothing has made a more succinct statement on the merging of technology and lynch mob mentality than the new short film, At The End of the Cul-de-Sac. Creator Paul Trillo uses a showoff-y, tech-angle format of shooting on a drone in a single, unbroken take to tell a story about public scrutiny… that isn’t the story you think it as at first. The camera–floating eerily, like a disembodied spirit–captures a man pitching a fit outside the unbudging front door of a woman named Susan. A neighborly crowd gathers as his rant becomes more unhinged. Around 7 minutes in, things take a turn, but the entire film is designed, in every regard, to provoke maximum discomfort. “I can’t tell if this is getting interesting or tedious,” a gawking bystander says at one point, filming the incident on his phone. You won’t have the same issue.

Have a look below at the making-of video.

Tech companies should be watching the North Korea situation with great interest. Their businesses could be greatly affected by the way in which the Trump administration deals with the threat of Kim Jong-un’s nuclear program.

Like many in the tech industry, I have traveled dozens of times to Japan, Hong Kong, China, Taipei, Singapore, and South Korea as part of my job.

This region of the world has been important to our tech market as it has become our key manufacturing arm. It has made it possible for most U.S. companies to deliver a product at better prices. Thus, these countries have flourished over the years.

This region has also given us major tech competitors such as Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, Samsung, LG, and others.

If you travel to these parts of the world you are perhaps more aware of the political climate in many of these countries. You know that China believes Taipei belongs to it. And now that Hong Kong is a region of China, it is subject more and more to China’s political rules and regulations.

At the moment the major tinder box in this region is South Korea and North Korea, and the fate of the rest of the region is closely linked to the fate of those two nations. So tech leaders need to be watching this area of the world closer than ever.

South Korea is vitally important to the tech world for many reasons. Samsung not only makes smartphones, but also appliances, computers, hard drives, and TVs. But most importantly to the tech industry, it is a major supplier of the semiconductors and flash memory, and provides chips to Apple and many other big tech players.

Hyundai and LG also provide a range of tech products and appliances. POSCO is one of the largest steel manufacturers in the world. All told, South Korea has more than a hundred major companies providing products and services all over the world.

Some years back, on a trip to South Korea, I asked a top tech official what concerns him the most about tech business in Asia. He told me one of his greatest concerns is the collapse of North Korea, which might result in millions of North Koreans rushing over the border, which he said could destabilize or paralyze South Korea’s social structures and economy. Many people in North Korea have relatives in South Korea, and they would almost certainly seek refuge with them. And many of those relatives likely work in the companies and factories that turn out the tech products we use. This type of personal, political, and economic disruption could have a major impact on South Korea’s tech companies.

If it happened, South Korean companies might lose their ability to supply component parts to other tech companies around the world, not to mention the disruption in the flow of completed products that come from the country. The official felt it could take many months for South Korean officials to re-stabilize the region. And it could take years for tech companies to get back to producing and delivering their products on time.

Of course the damage would be far greater than just shipping delays and business disruptions. The human toll could be devastating for the country. We may see a major humanitarian crisis if South Korea has trouble absorbing the inflow of North Koreans, most of whom would need assistance to stay alive.

It’s through this frame that I’ve been watching the recent moves by North Korea to advance its long-range nuclear reach. I fear this is more than saber rattling given the instability of North Korea’s leadership. Kim Jong-un may do anything he can to remain in power.

This week President Trump meets with China’s Premier XI Jinping and is reportedly going to tell him that if China won’t work bilaterally with the U.S. to solve the North Korea problem, the U.S. with deal with the nuclear threat on its own.

I don’t profess to know exactly what “go it alone” means, but as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said “all options are on the table.” Given the fact that our current administration is unpredictable and has little experience in dealing with a crisis like the one we have brewing in North Korea, a surgical military strike against North Korea’s nuclear sites seems possible. Even an outside chance of such an attack could cause major panic, and might start the flow of North Korean citizens over the border to the south. This would be hard for South Korea to control.

Some U.S. companies have this same concern, and are already working on contingency plans should their own business be disrupted by what could happen in South Korea.

For small companies seeking optional sources for components, this is probably a manageable problem. They can go to other suppliers in the region for the parts they get from South Korean suppliers.

But for Apple and other big consumer electronics companies that buy large numbers of chips, displays, and other components from Samsung and other South Korean companies, this could be a big problem.

It would test their parts sourcing teams in particular. And, in general, it would test their ability to minimize the impact on their ability to deliver products to their customers on time.

My hope is that China agrees to work to keep North Korea from advancing its nuclear program. Trump’s meeting with China’s premier will be the most important one since coming to office. But should China not agree to help, or in the end not be able to keep North Korea from becoming more aggressive with its nuclear program, the U.S. may be on its own. This would be an extremely difficult test for a president with no foreign policy experience.

A good friend of mine who travels to Asia 10 to 12 times a year and understands the political situation there says the only way to neutralize North Korea (and this may sound counterintuitive) is to help it find a way to feel more secure. If North Korea felt safe, and part  of the northeast Asian economy, it might begin focusing on its own prosperity, my friend says. This might make Kim Jong-un more willing to surrender his country’s nuclear deterrent. More sanctions or, more disastrously, any military action, would not end well.

I hope there is a moderate voice inside the Trump administration who understands this option. Silicon Valley’s tech companies should use whatever influence they have to make sure the North Korean problem ends without event.

Something changed over the last few months—for the country, women, and for Tina Brown. The former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor is putting on her eighth Women In The World summit this week, which features panels and speeches from some of the most accomplished women in the news. But this year is different.

“We’ve seen a feminist rejuvenation,” Brown says. “What is interesting and has been so fascinating to see is how Hillary Clinton’s loss motivated women in a way that her run never really did.”

Brown says that the current political situation is only one part of the complex state of women’s rights in the world, and the summit will be representative of such. Hillary Clinton is headlining the event, which also includes speakers such as Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards and actress Lena Dunham.

Clinton has attended every Women in the World summit other than last year’s, Brown tells me, so it only makes sense that she’d participate in this one. “Hillary has always been deeply engaged in the rights of women globally,” Brown says, and “Women in the World has always spoken to that interest she’s always shown.” But Brown doesn’t know if Clinton will share her thoughts on her loss or the current administration. “I don’t know what she will want to say but I’m sure it will be reflective,” says Brown. “I think what women are really hoping she talks about going forward in terms of what women should now be focused on … how to protect their rights and advance their rights.”

This could be an inflection point for Brown herself. She’s been hosting this event for nearly a decade now. Since her last news media role at The Daily Beast, she’s kept a relatively low profile.

Though her company, Tina Brown Live Media, is, well, a media company, she knows she cannot do what she did for so many years. “I wouldn’t want to edit a magazine now,” she admits. Things have just changed too much. Her news consumption has “totally transitioned into digital” and she knows that things are not the same, at least in terms of the media business. During her brief stint back in media some five years ago, she says she thought to herself “am I out of my mind?”

Brown rose to prominence during a time when women were extremely underrepresented in media. She recalls being one of the only female executives at Condé Nast; “We were a lot lonelier in my era,” she says. She also mentioned being the first woman editor to get pregnant at the company. She said her pregnancy was the HR department’s first experiment into whether or not the maternity policy worked. “It wasn’t normal at that moment for women to do what we all take for granted.” Those high-ups like her who did juggle work and kids, Brown says, were in something like a secret society. This is the world that trained her. Now, thankfully, things are a bit different. “There’s a lot more solidarity,” she says

But perhaps things haven’t changed all that much. “Have you seen the front page the Daily Mail?” she asks me, referring to a picture of Nicola Sturgeon and Theresa May where both their lower legs were shown that had the headline “Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!” “It’s unbelievable how sexist it is, it’s really unbelievable!” she rails. “You look at it and you just think this is 1975.” The internet, she says, has powered a lot of this misogyny. Loud, anonymous people online can now “express themselves in ways they might have not done before.”

Which is why she views the Summit as such a pressing event. She says that its importance lies in the women’s stories it tells. And her role has quietly transitioned from media mogul to something else, something that may yet to be defined. Her new book, The Vanity Fair Diaries, which will depict her time at the magazine, is due out later this year.

Brown thinks that perhaps a new movement is afoot—something less regressive than what she’s seen. More women are running for office, more are energized. She wants the summit to be a catalyst. “I think what we’re seeing is the birth of a broader issue-based feminism,” she says. “It’s not the just the ‘oh let’s all be be incredibly offended about what somebody just said in a soundbite and I’ll tweet about it.’”

What she wants to see is more change happen. “I think a lot of women are feeling jolted out of their complacency.”

Hate politics, fake news, alternative facts, inaccurate polling, corporate tax evasion, Olympic doping, sub-prime lending, duplicitous politicians, emissions probes, economic uncertainty, and the orange cherry on the cake, Trump. Welcome to the perfect storm of public disillusion.

A trust virus has infiltrated our psychological software destroying goodwill and our collective confidence in society. In a recent Ipsos Mori survey, charity chief executives were grouped in the same level of mistrust as trade union officials, bankers, and business leaders, with only 44% of the public trusting them to tell the truth. Trust, like privacy and truth, is fast becoming an outdated notion, a mission critical flaw when trust lies at the heart of great brands and charitable fundraising.

Brands and charities must work harder than ever to convince an increasingly desensitized consumer and hostile media that goodwill initiatives are not mere marketing devices to boost sales or donations. The notion of charitable giving risks being lost in an arms race for “likes” and lottery tickets. Truth is now backcombed, lies are rebranded, and perception trumps reality. But where does that leave the future of giving?  The good news is last year, according to the Charities Aid Foundation, the United Kingdom came fourth in the World Giving Index, after Australia, the U.S., and bizarrely, Myanmar, which topped the poll of 140 countries.  But the UK tops the poll of European countries (Ireland came second). So charitable giving it seems is in all our nature. But for how long?

We are entering a new age of brand activism where corporations must lead and inspire their consumers in a world where all others have let them down. Trump’s anti immigration policies caused a backlash among brands and prompted CEO’s to step up to defend their employees from feeling alienated. Finally, in this maelstrom of world upheaval brands can prove they can add true authentic value, beyond token sponsorship, or ingratiating affiliation. Charitable partnerships can move beyond mere mass market manipulation. Brand idealogy and activism can and must restore faith in a beleaguered consumer.

I spoke with Oxfam’s Head of Communications Jack Lundie who joined the charity in 2014, and has used an integrated multi-channel approach to leverage Oxfam’s cut-through in mass media to discuss themes including economic inequality, UK poverty, Gaza and Nepal, all serving to remind people of their core mission–to end the injustice of extreme poverty. He feels the trust virus is tangible.

“Support is the lifeblood of our movement, so the trust that underpins giving is a critical dependency for Oxfam. Hard-earned cash, precious time and people’s own voices are entrusted to us on a daily basis, so the idea of a trust-eroding virus that threatens this engagement demands a powerful response.

Trust at the heart of giving is resilient and can be restored. Since we damaged it through inattentiveness to our fundraising agencies, we are grateful that self-correction and humility seem to have helped our supporters move on. The aggravation of this trust-crisis by media with a vested political interest in discrediting aid is unhelpful, but data reflects resilience in our supporters, whose moral conviction comes from a deeper place than media campaigns can easily dislodge. Trust is also bolstered by transparency about how we spend our supporters’ money, our efficiency and impact, and we welcome that but we’re also happy for consumers who ‘give n’ go.’ Our focus is on the supporters’ right to choose their own terms of engagement.

But this virus is as much about distrust as it is trust. Tackling poverty requires us to campaign for systemic, policy-based change, and the impact of recent political turmoil presents us with a new challenge. When emotional truth can be conjured with rhetoric devoid of fact, when arguments are increasingly won in the heart rather than the mind, and when the ties that held facts, truth and trust together are unpicked, the creation of distrust in Oxfam by those threatened by our calls for change becomes easier. Spiralling economic inequality has to be tackled, but in doing so, we have prompted attempts to discredit us by those with much to lose, and a media environment that trades in baseless and binary framing makes that too easy.

Brands with aspirations of purpose take note: if you really want disruption to bring meaningful change, be prepared to defend the trust on which you may depend.”

The Power of Inspiration

Tim Hollingsworth is the Chief Executive of the British Paralympic Association, and the National Paralympic Committee for the United Kingdom. He joined the organization in 2011 and, at that time, has also served as Secretary General for Paralympics GB at the London 2012, Sochi 2014, and Rio 2016 Paralympic Games, and believes sport is also suffering trust issues.

“If there is a Trust Virus across society, then sport is one of several areas currently infected.  Whether it’s doping, false representation of injury or classification, betting on results or the perceived mistreatment of athletes, sport is currently under scrutiny.  The general public’s perception of their favourite athletes and teams are at risk of being tainted.

This can translate into commercial partnerships and traditional charitable activities.  Convincing funders that your environment and your ambition is genuine is a key responsibility of every sporting body, but especially so for one like the BPA with a charitable status.

On the other side of the coin, the partners we secure can equally open up organizations like the BPA to public cynicism. Do our sponsors choose to support not because they believe in our vision, but they calculate a worthy cause will provide a ‘token’ PR buffer from other, less popular sides of their activity? This is a significant backdrop against which to seek to engage in commercial partnerships and fundraising.  A real and meaningful attachment needs to be made if both partners are to restore public trust.

That is where I see hope, and the strength of our proposition.   I do think that the Paralympic movement offers a genuine demonstration of the power of inspiration in creating and maintaining trust.  Through our athletes and their incredible achievements, we are able to portray a ‘higher purpose’ – a focus on what is possible rather than what is not and a challenge to traditional perceptions of disability.  We can, in the words of our vision, ‘through sport, inspire a better world for disabled people.’ Corporate brands that can share in that inspiration can gain credibility from it because of the recognizable power it has, and good it can do.”

‘Hit and Run’ Humanitarianism

Another expert in this field is Dr Irene Bruna Seu, Reader in the Dept. of Psychosocial Studies at Birbeck, University of London, and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her comments are based on the findings from a four-year research project, discussed in Caring in Crisis which she co-authored with Shani Orgad, LSE.

“We found evidence of a deep crisis of trust between NGOs and their public. People distrust NGOs when they are perceived to operate as businesses, in competition with each other, and manipulating people to make them donate. Many felt that ‘all they want is my money.’ Most people, even those committed to humanitarianism, talked of NGOs constantly ‘hitting on the same note’ which causes saturation and a hardening of attitudes towards giving, and NGOs in general. People are angered by this approach and likened most NGOs to marketers (self-serving and manipulative), in contrast with their wished for model of NGOs as Good Samaritans (altruistic and good people).

Although monetary donations are essential in enabling NGOs to operate, they are often a form of fleeting participation. We found strong evidence of the negative ‘collateral damage’ from this transactional approach to engaging the public. We call it the ‘hit and run’ model of humanitarian communication; it presents the viewer with an emergency scenario, through emotionally charged images and contents, asking the viewer to donate money so that NGOs can respond to the emergency on their behalf.   Members of the public feel ‘hit’ emotionally and then disregarded, while NGOs deliver the help. In the short term this model works, in so far as it is a successful fundraising tool and, understandably, cash-deprived NGOs resort to it frequently. But it is counterproductive in terms of long-term public engagement. Participants commented that the ‘hit and run’ model enables people to disengage with a good conscience and doesn’t require commitment. Yet, when people talk about their model of caring for others, we found that it is relational rather than transactional, and based on commitment. People feel that the ‘hit and run’ transactional approach is dehumanizing for themselves (‘all they want is my money’) and for the beneficiaries.

The future for giving then is not money but connectedness. People want to connect to distant suffering in more meaningful ways, which they model on their everyday ways of caring. One participant talked of wanting to ‘give blood and tears,’ not money. This tells us that the British public are looking for symbolic, cognitive and emotional meaningfulness in their giving. On these, deeper public participation over time and meaningful connectedness to humanitarian issues can be built.”

The CEO Crusaders

Finally, I spoke with Brunswick Group partner and author, Jon Miller, who works with companies from the U.S., Asia and Africa to promote the positive contribution they can make in the world, and helps them connect with a broader society.

“Today’s big businesses have got more to give than just money. A modern corporation is a vast concentration of skills, resources, and technical capabilities, with supply chains and distribution networks spanning the globe. They touch millions of people’s lives, through their products, and through the way they do business. It’s a bit bizarre, then, if all we expect from them is cash.

Businesses can play a real role in tackling some of the world’s toughest challenges – not just through philanthropy, but through the way they do business. Coca-Cola, for example, noticed that in Africa the very end of the distribution chain was made up of tiny shops or bike stalls that were run by women – and so they launched the ‘5 by 20’ program to empower 5 million female entrepreneurs by 2020. It’s win-win: the programme is lifting women out of poverty, whilst ensuring Coke has resilient distribution.

Some business leaders are even starting to sound like activists. Dan Schulman, CEO of PayPal has become a crusader for global financial inclusion and Karl-Johan Persson, CEO of clothing retailer H&M, has become a something of a campaigner for a minimum wage in Bangladesh. As Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has said, ‘building a mission and building a business go hand-in-hand.’ It’s all a far cry from the old days of corporate philanthropy, when it was enough to write cheques to good causes, and people talked of ‘giving back’ (an odd concept, when you think about it: what were you taking in the first place?). Leading companies getting smarter about how they can contribute to society, and how they can make real impact.”

It is essential that brands understand the cultural mindset and psychology of their customer, that for instance drove Britain to leave the European Union, and the U.S. to vote Trump, and how our clients might go about addressing the fallout from world events. In the face of uncertainty we must do everything in our power to protect the practices of selfless concern for the well being of others. We must nurture the belief that each and every one of us can make a difference, be it through giving money, holding up a sign, or even just holding a hand. The future of giving, in whatever capacity, has never been more fundamental to shaping a society we can be proud of today and tomorrow.

Jon Sharpe is the CEO of Y&R London.

You know you’re supposed to keep your LinkedIn profile updated, but beyond tweaking your summary and adding new achievements and keywords, what’s there to change? Plenty—if you’re ready to tell an intentional, deliberate story about your value in a way that other candidates won’t. Or to put that more succinctly, if you want to get the attention of recruiters who are poking around the platform looking for amazing hires.

Depending on where you are in your career and what you’ve done so far, companies will be looking for different “So what?” factors, and you’ll want to use your profile to reveal them accordingly. With that in mind, here are a few ways you can update it to reinforce your brand.

Entry Level: 1–2 Years

At this point in your career, it’d be a long shot to claim you’re an expert. Instead, show off these three elements of your brand:

• Your enthusiasm for your work (or what you’ve studied)
• Your engagement within an industry, field, or innovation space
• Your ability to problem-solve, create, and execute

Fold your passion and industry involvement into your personal brand through online engagement. Include pictures of yourself at industry events as part of your status updates. Share and comment on current articles or conversations related to the field. Tag relevant companies or influencers for bonus points.

These seemingly small moves will be stapled to the top of your profile in the “Your Articles & Activity” section, serving as one of the first impressions you’ll make on visitors. And don’t forget to include projects, presentations, and other portfolio items related to your points of passion and industry of choice. These items will prove your talents—without job experience.

Related:Exactly What Recruiters Look For On Your LinkedIn Profile

Professional: 3–6 Years

Step 1: Trim the details about your GPA and those high school and college summer gigs.

Step 2: Sell yourself based on your recent experiences and top skills.

Your profile headline and summary are the standard places to pitch these qualities, but with LinkedIn’s 2017 redesign, the most recent role in your professional experiences section is actually one of the best places to do this.

Why? Past positions are hidden away accordion-style with a “See more” option—and most people won’t bother to click this. However, your current job description is right there, wide open, waiting to be read.

So try what I call the “Blurb-Twist-Proof” approach. Your blurb frames your day-to-day in terms of your talents (rather than job duties). Then your twist connects those talents to your proof (aka results). It looks like this:

My role with MuleSoft was a chance to further my skills as a relationship builder and sales leader. Driving business outcomes for the Denver team has shaped my ability to understand customer pain points, and my “Let’s figure it out” approach helped create engaging mobile experiences.

Value that I’ve contributed on the Denver team includes:

• Increasing sales revenue by 430% by framing product roadmap changes as value-add features that secured two new $100K+ accounts
• Copresenting an “Everybody Sells” training workshop that taught all employees how to explain products (program led to a relationship with the San Francisco Giants)

Word to the wise: Curate just two to three of your top talents in this space, lengthy paragraphs simply won’t get read. Plus, a short preview lets people know you have even more to offer.

Mid-Career: 7–15 Years

At this point, your goal is to capture your leadership ability and the specialized set of skills you’ve gained. You’ll also want to demonstrate that by hiring you, employers are becoming a part of your strong network of industry contacts.

Recommendations are the drop-dead best social proof in showing that you’re connected with influential figures in your industry. Give them just as regularly as you ask for them. (It’s a two-way street!)

Here’s my template for requesting them:

Hi [Name],

I’m about to [start a job search / pitch an idea] and a recommendation from you would help me gain some serious traction.

I’m hoping to highlight [talents you want to highlight], but would value anything you write from the heart.

If it’d be easier for me to provide a potential draft for you to edit, please let me know, and thanks in advance for considering this.

Best,

[Your Name]

These small write-ups are an opportunity to show visitors both the community you’ve created for yourself and the fact that you’re someone who people are happy to recommend.

Related: One LinkedIn Employee’s Insider Tips For Job-Searching On The Sly

C-Level, VP, Or Director: 15+ Years

At this point, your profile likely tells a cohesive, compelling story about your skills, experience, and passion. Way to go! All that’s left is creating and distributing some rock-solid thought leadership content.

The value in publishing these items is twofold. First, it increases the visibility of your profile and number of visits because all of your connections get a notification when you publish. Second, it solidifies you as an expert within your industry.

If you’re not much of a writer, consider sharing your insights using short videos. Or if you’re strapped for time in general, use “commentary” posts. Find a relevant article for your industry, write a paragraph intro sharing your thoughts on the content, and then post it. The goal is to market yourself with content that solves a top problem of your target audience while creating a dialogue among your network.

Figuring out what story to tell at different points in your career can be a challenge. But, you need more than keywords to impress on LinkedIn. Get creative as you update your profile and capture your “So what?” factor using elements that others tend to overlook!

This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.

More From The Muse:

• How To Update Your Resume Based On What You’ve Done And Where You Want To Go

• How To Get Your LinkedIn Profile Ready For Your Job Search In 30 Minutes

• 3 LinkedIn Updates You Need To Know About For 2017

Ever wish you could call “time out” during your presentation to ask the audience how you’re doing? Since that usually isn’t doable, your next best option is to scan people’s faces for emotional clues, but recent research suggests that can lead you astray, too.

In her new book How Emotions Are Made, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett claims that our beliefs about facial expressions need an overhaul. “When facial movements do convey a psychological message—say, raising an eyebrow—we don’t know if the message is always emotional,” she writes, “or even if its meaning is the same each time. If we put all the scientific evidence together, we cannot claim, with any reasonable certainty, that each emotion has a diagnostic facial expression.”

So where does this leave us? If facial expressions aren’t a good barometer of how well your talk is going, what is? These are a few subtler, more reliable signs to look for—and what to do if you realize something isn’t clicking.

1. The Audience Is In Lockstep

One way to tell whether you’re connecting with your audience is if they seem to be reacting as a single unit. But this type of cohesion can only happen if your whole audience is completely tuned in to the same signal. One exercise that my team and I run in one of our speaking bootcamps expresses this concept using drumsticks. We blindfold participants and tell them to start drumming together. At first they’re hopelessly disjointed, but after a few moments they begin drumming at the same rhythm—without even seeing each other, they tune in. Then, when we ask them to change the rhythm, they come together again almost immediately.

So watch (and listen!) for the types of reactions you’re eliciting while you speak. If if your audience seems to react as one singular stream, rather than a sequence of drips and drops, all distinct from one another, you’re doing a great job. On the other hand, if you’re seeing a few people shifting in their chairs, a few others more drawing on their notepads, and a handful of others watching you intently, that’s a sign that you’re not resonating.

Related: If Your Talk Doesn’t Do These Three Things, Don’t Give It

2. The Questions Are Relevant

Another way you can tell you’re connecting with your audience is if the questions are on point. If you’ve ever given a presentation and been frustrated at the sorts of questions people ask you afterward (or during), you know what this feels like. If you’re hearing questions that are tangential to your main points—or completely unrelated—that likely means you didn’t make a strong impact.

On the other hand, if you’re getting questions that are genuinely thoughtful and directly in line with what you’ve talked about, you’ll know you’ve succeeded. One way to test this out before you get to end is simply to pause and ask for questions at key turning points in your talk; this way you can change gears if it seems you need to.

3. There Are No Interruptions

Getting few if any interruptions is another great sign that you’re connecting with listeners. I recently worked with an executive who was giving his first presentation to an audit committee. An executive from PricewaterhouseCoopers who went first was constantly interrupted by the committee, which grilled him for three hours straight—a bad sign. But when it was my client’s turn, he was able to present without any interjections. They even told him “great job” when he finished. So if nobody in your audience jumps in to press a point, ask for clarification, or but in with an idea of their own, it’s likely that your message is resonating just fine.

Lastly, if you’re having a hard time connecting with your audience, it might be because you’re not connecting with yourself. It isn’t easy, but the truth is that you need to concentrate on every aspect of your delivery—what you’re feeling, what you’re saying, and what you’re doing. If the audience sees that you’re fully tuned in to yourself, they’ll become fully tuned in to you.

You may not be able to get inside the heads of your audience members, and trying to read their faces might not do the trick, either. But if you pay attention to these three signs, you won’t be completely in the dark.

There are pop-up restaurants, pop-up shops, even pop-up museums. The phenomenon is so widespread, it makes sense that it would eventually hit travel. With a motto of stay tonight, gone tomorrow, alternative hoteliers are investing in mobile, collapsible accommodations that have particular appeal to that most coveted of demographics: millennials. Some companies are setting up camp in areas low in hotel room inventory, like music festivals, while others are pitching tents in pristine countrysides, turning temporary hotels into a new type of guest experience—emphasis on the experience.

“Just like how over the course of the last 20 years, design hotels reinvigorated and advanced the hotel industry, I believe that in the next 15 to 20 years, experiential hotels will do the same,” says Peter Mack, founder and CEO of Collective Retreats, a startup that is attempting to redefine luxury stays in the great outdoors (also known as glamping). 

Welcome! Collective Retreats is a new, meaningful way to travel. We build luxury retreats in stunning locations across the country and, eventually, the world. We're debuting our new look and site today and can't wait to show you around.

A post shared by Collective Retreats (@collectiveretreats) on Mar 12, 2017 at 9:49pm PDT

Over the past year, Mack’s company has opened five-star retreats in the mountains of Montana, the vineyards of Sonoma, and the ranch lands of Colorado, with four more planned to open by year’s end in picturesque places where permanent hotels are not permitted.

Guests stay in spacious tents with electricity that are outfitted with 1,500 thread-count sheets, chandeliers, and WiFi. Each tent features a full en-suite bathroom with hot showers. Chef tableside dining is included at each locally sourced gourmet meal. Before bed, you can roast bourbon-infused organic marshmallows. Roughing it in the wilderness this is not.

But it is about as far as you can get from traditional cookie-cutter, mega-hotel travel. And there’s a reason for that. A recent study found that 72% of millennials (currently the U.S.’s largest generation) would prefer to spend money on experiences than on material objects. According to a Boston Consulting Group report, this same demographic is 23% more interested in traveling than older generations. A study by American Express revealed that nearly 70% of millennials want “a personalized travel experience” on their vacations.

It’s not just millennials who crave customized experiences, according to Jason Clampet, cofounder and editor-in-chief of travel site Skift. Airbnb, which is like a pop-up hotel in one’s home, has seen the largest growth in the last year in the over-50 sector. “A lot of travelers are now looking for an authentic experience,” says Clampet, using a buzzy umbrella term for trips that are customized, not standardized. “People like things that tell a story.”

Jan Freitag, SVP of lodging insights for the travel industry research firm STR, says he too has witnessed an increasing interest in these types of getaways. “Arguably, Airbnb is the best indicator that people want experiences that are personal, authentic, unique, and approachable,” he says. “Of course, now every hotel company has a boutique chain or soft brand, so everyone is trying to capitalize on this trend.”

All our retreats are designed to be escapes, meaning you don't need to see your neighbors if you don't want to. At Collective Yellowstone, the tents are tucked into the pines for a hideaway feel.

A post shared by Collective Retreats (@collectiveretreats) on Mar 12, 2017 at 9:54pm PDT

White Glove Wilderness

Peter Mack developed Collective Retreats in response to what he calls the “vanilla-zation” and “McDonalds-zation” of the hotel industry. A 10-year veteran of Starwood, he got the idea for a pop-up hotel business while he was VP of customer experience and innovation at Tough Mudder.

Each year, more than 20,000 participants in the run through the mud would venture out to a small city, where $49-a-night motels had jacked up prices to well over $400. Price gouging, combined with an inadequate supply of rooms, irked Mack. “I remember asking myself, ‘Why don’t we just build our own hotel here out of tents?’”

He did, beta testing Collective Retreats with a select group of invite-only guests over the past year before opening booking to the public in March. That same month, the company received an initial seed round of $2.5 million from various investors who sensed an opportunity in catering to travelers’ growing desire for offbeat, Instagram-worthy nature vacations.

That’s the advantage Mack sees, in any case. “It was very clear to me that the whole hotel industry is broken,” he says, with a tinge of hyperbole. “That traditional hospitality and what consumers are looking for in hotel experiences has gone completely sideways.”

In his estimation, the traditional business model, in which most of the hotel group’s investment dollars go into the physical building, is outdated. Heavy-duty expenses like real estate taxes, massive laundry facilities, and commercial taxes are, he maintains, “things that don’t create a rich, wonderful experience for guests.”

Mack’s solution to some of these challenges can be found in the tents themselves, which are a relatively inexpensive investment (at least compared to the cost of constructing a traditional brick-and-mortar inn). This leaves more money to spend on decor, food, and recreation. And because the tents are collapsible, the company has the flexibility to add or subtract accommodations on demand. 

And should a particular pop-up location fall out of fashion, Collective Retreats is not anchored there for good. It currently has five-year leases with the owners of the land hosting each pop-up, and no plans to purchase so much as a blade of grass. “We have no intention to own real estate or even buildings,” Mack says.

As his company’s name suggests, Mack wants to build a sense of community among guests, similar to the conviviality found in hostels—except in this case, it’s with a crowd that likes its nature with a side of truffle butter. Travelers are treated to a mix of activities, both communal (wine tastings) and solo (in-tent massages). And they don’t come cheap. Collective Retreats charges between $500-$700 a night during the spring and summer high season and $400 during shoulder season. The Yellowstone and Vail locations opened in March and already have waiting lists.

“Traditional hotels are very plain and very boring,” Mack says, sticking to his theme. “Today’s traveler wants a bespoke, curated experience. There is no brand that owns this space, which is what we’re trying to do.”

Blink takes the luxury service concept one step further. An exclusive new option from travel company Black Tomato, Blink debuted in December 2016, and arranges far-flung, remote accommodations meant to satisfy a deep-pocketed guest’s every whim. One simply picks a global region, and the company finds a distant piece of land on which to build bespoke temporary lodgings.

“Choose from places like glaciers, desert landscapes, and jungles, to wild coastlines and rolling savannahs,” reads a Black Tomato press release. Among the choices: domes in Morocco, yurts in the Bolivian Andes, or “lunar-like” spherical tents with transparent ceilings in the Chilean desert. Prices can range from $10,000 to $30,000 per person for three to four nights. The company is currently focused on groups of up to six travelers, but can accommodate any size.

Black Tomato owner and cofounder Tom Marchant says he was inspired by the pop-up restaurant movement. He wanted to expand the idea for demanding travelers willing to pay for an experience that cannot be replicated.

Festival Shelter

A favourite last year for #Glastonbury #popup accommodation – the fabulous gypsy caravan. What's not to love!

A post shared by Team Popup (@thepopuphotel) on Oct 13, 2016 at 9:41am PDT

“Hotels have never been fuller,” he says. He predicts that 2017 will be another record-breaking year.

When it comes to pop-ups, Freitag sees the market potential in offering shelter to travelers during peak seasons or special events. “It’s a good idea because you don’t want to build an asset that lives 25 years for an event that lasts a week or a weekend . . . And the barrier to entry is arguably zero,” he says. “It’s a good idea that has its niche, but I think it’s a niche.”

Maybe so, but it’s a niche being explored by Marriott, which just announced plans to produce a pop-up hotel for Coachella 2017, one of the most popular millennial-targeted events out there. An official partner of the music festival, Marriott will provide air-conditioned safari tents exclusively to members of its loyalty programs, who bid points in an auction in hopes of securing a stay. The bidding opened at 22,500, and within three weeks has already topped over 200,000 points per tent.

The hotel chain is testing a market well known to smaller outfits like The Pop Up Hotel, which has been supplying accommodation tents at international music festivals for a few years now, complete with pop-up pools. U.K.-based Snoozebox also transformed giant shipping containers into what it calls “portable hotels” at the 2012 London Olympics and continues to target large-scale events such as the British Grand Prix.

For all its Coachella enthusiasm, Marriott is not committing to a future in pop-ups just yet. “Right now, our partnership with Coachella and its unique onsite lodging as part of the festival experience really created an opportunity for us to explore these branded tents for the first time,” says Karin Timpone, global marketing officer for Marriott. “We’ll see what the response is and what the future might hold for these kinds of opportunities, specifically with our music partnerships and events.”

A wait-and-see approach raises a legitimate question about how widespread a phenomenon pop-ups might become. As Freitag notes, scaling could be a challenge, compared to traditional hotels. How far can a company go with the concept? Could temporary luxe lodgings grow as big as Airbnb? Or are they merely a passing fad?

No, they’re not—not if Collective Retreats’ CEO has anything to say about it. In the coming months, Mack intends to branch out into a whole portfolio of temporary residences, such as luxury airstreams and epic tree houses, some in remote international locations. (Though not at music fests. “It’s really easy to throw up some tents at a festival and provide a place to sleep,” he sniffs.) In 2018, a total of 10 new retreats of this type will be available to bookers. He’d also love to step outside of the countryside one day and enter cityscapes.  

“One of my dreams is to have a retreat in Central Park, surrounding Shakespeare in the Park,” he says via email after our initial interview. His other long-term plans include “a surf retreat in Costa Rica, or Kauai, for example. A Moab retreat right in Canyonlands, the Green Mountains of Vermont—places people daydream of.”

I recently got a panicked email from a coaching client of mine:

Hi Ted,

I’ve nearly hooked this new client and I’m excited to start painting her grandkids but she just sent an email requesting a phone call and it’s freaking me out. What could she want? She says she thinks the “price point” is too high. I just want to paint! I hate negotiating but I desperately need the work. What should I say?

Binta

Binta, like many of the independent workers I coach, is a creative professional who hates talking money. While she started her career as a graphic artist at an agency, Binta now works for herself as a portrait painter. Like a lot of self-employed people, she went out on her own because she loves the work she does and wanted to escape the bureaucracy and distractions that came with working on a team.

But that meant having to handle awkward pricing conversations all on her own. And the first obstacle in Binta’s way was that she was thinking (as her prospective client was) about the sticker price, not value.

Shifting The Conversation From Fees To Value

Like many people who go freelance, Binta hadn’t accounted for what working in an organization provides—namely, entire departments filled with people whose sole job it is to take care of sales and marketing, so creatives like her wouldn’t have to. Not to mention a name brand that can lend market credibility to her personal talents. So the key to taking care of herself financially now meant making up for those losses.

For any of us who are lucky enough to do work we love (or even like), we just want to do that work. We want the value of it to be apparent and automatically agreed upon. But it’s never that simple. You sometimes have to be willing to be uncomfortable in order to get what you want—indeed, you need to if you’re going to survive as an independent worker.

Establishing your professionalism without a legitimizing organization can be difficult, and one of the most important things you can do in that regard is to set your pricing and stick with it. If you waffle, you’ll get taken advantage of. But before you can start talking price to prospects and clients, you need to establish value first.

When you work for a company, its own name-brand is a shorthand for value. Without it, you need to talk about what you do and the value it produces all by yourself. And you need to do it in a way that leaves your prospects in disbelief at the bargain they’re getting once you finally do tell them the cost. It sounds like a tall order, but it can be done. Here’s how.

Related:What To Do When Your Client Pressures You To Slash Your Rates

Analyze What You Know

One of the first things I do to reduce my anxiety during moments like these is to think analytically about what my prospective client says and does. Did the prospect contact you in the first place? That alone suggests they’re already half committed to working with you. If they’re asking about price, what words did they use? Do they sound business-like? Insightful? Uncomfortable?

Binta’s client-to-be was a grandmother with plenty of money to spend. I suspected right away that “price point” was someone else’s phrase—she likely wasn’t a hard-driving negotiator who spent her days closing business deals. Chances are she felt just as uncomfortable hashing out the terms as Binta did. Look for subtle signs of your prospect’s own emotional state heading into a negotiation: What do you know, and what can you make educated guesses about based on what you know?

Get The Prospect Emotionally Engaged

The creative professionals I’ve worked with all my life have a powerful ability to make emotional connections. Binta’s commission was to paint somebody’s grandchildren, so she needed to ask her prospect about them and their relationship. I suggested things like:

• What’s your favorite thing about each child?
• Have you been thinking about portraits for long?
• What inspired you to have their portraits painted?

That’s not much of a stretch for an emotionally connected artist. But I’ve known excellent insurance salespeople who could make meaningful, deeply felt connections around the care their clients had for their families. But if you just stick to the cold, hard business terms, you’re bound to fail at elevating the discussion from price to value.

Describe The Care And Details That Go Into Your Work

It’s important to remember—and to remind the prospect—that price isn’t just for product, it’s for process. Tell prospects what they’re paying for as you talk about the work you do to get to the end product they want. Auto mechanics usually bill for labor as a separate line item; you might not want to do exactly the same, but you still need to break down your work for your client in similar terms.

With this job, Binta would be committing to a lengthy, thorough process. She starts with a fun photo session, then works with the client to choose the right image, tinkering with that until it’s just right and printing it out full size, all before starting painting. A commission for Binta is much more than the end result.

So here’s what I eventually told her:

Once you’ve helped the prospect remember just how excited she is about this project and you’ve covered your process, summarize by saying the number of portraits, how long it will all take, and the total cost.

Then just say, “How does that sound?” and not another word. If she asks about or changes something in the scope of work, schedule, or price, revise your description and discuss again until you reach an agreement.

To make a long story short, they did.

Seven years. That’s how long filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos plugged away at Making a Murderer before they partnered with Netflix, and the series became a true crime sensation. While the idea of being an overnight sensation is nice, most big ideas need lots of time to develop. But how can you tell whether your new business idea or project is worth sinking months or years of your life into? Here are seven questions that might help you set your sights.

1. Can I State My Specific Goal For This Project?

While turning a profit (or at least breaking even) is a straightforward goal, some projects require a more specific finish line. For Chicago writer Jonathan Eig, he initially had the idea for a biography of Muhammad Ali in the spring of 2013 but would need to craft a solid proposal in order to sell the idea. “I knew there wasn’t an authoritative biography of Ali out there. I’d gotten a sense that I’d get his ex-wife to cooperate, and I believed that there was a ton of new material out there that hadn’t been seen before,” he says. His eventual proposal netted him a contract by February 2014, and his book, Ali: A Life, comes out in October 2017.

Minneapolis painter Megan Rye began working on a large-scale series that documents her brother’s time serving in the Iraq war in 2003, which led to her first solo show in 2007. For her, the convergence of critical and collector interest is “the gold standard.” While just one or the other, she says, is “nice,” it’s not sustainable to only have critical interest, but “if you only have financial support, your work isn’t necessarily going to be remembered.”

Being able to articulate your goals is also essential for raising money as you go. Rye likens grants, which should be applied for before a project is completed or even fully begun, to the lottery: “You can’t win a grant unless you apply.” And the grant you apply for now may beget more funding down the line. Chicago documentarian Margaret Byrne received a $120,000 MacArthur grant for her film Raising Bertie, which she filmed for six years. The grant hooked her up with the Chicago production company Kartemquin Films and put her on the radar to receive other grants, including one for $50,000 from the Ford Foundation. “I wouldn’t have stopped making the film, but I don’t know where I would be without the support of MacArthur. That’s what made the film expand and enable me to work with Kartemquin.”

2. Can I Break It Down Into Milestones?

When a project is sprawling, it’s important to build in milestones, if only to avoid freaking out. Eig was excited but also terrified at the prospect of writing a definitive biography of Ali. “It seemed like more than one person could handle, because there’s so much information on him out there, with so many people to talk to. You have to follow your heart but also be analytical about it.” To avoid feeling a sense of overwhelmed panic before starting a project, Eig starts small. “I just start with reading some books, and file some FOIA requests.”

For Byrne, the shorter-term goal was to have a 10-minute demo of Raising Bertie to sketch out her characters and the intention of the film. “That will give funders a solid idea of what you’re trying to do, even if you’re in the beginning stages.” She was able to pull one together in four months.

Rye kept her eye on the prize by keeping exhibition deadlines in mind. “Without exhibitions, I don’t know how anyone would ever complete a body of work. You can endlessly improve and tinker.”

In mid-2012, Steve McFadden quit his job as a mechanic to find a more meaningful career. He started Revolution Coffee Roasters that opened in summer 2013. It’s growing and doing well, but slowly. He maintains his sanity by scheduling six-month check-ins. “We’ve planned this in short-term increments so we can evaluate, ‘This is where we are right now, this is what we can budget for, and this is how lean we’ll have to be this period.'”

3. Do I Have Trusted Sources That Will Provide Me With Valuable Feedback As I Proceed?

Katie Mehnert wasn’t sure at first that her idea was a good one. In April 2014, she left her job as the director of competence, capability, and culture at BP to take a career break. She tinkered with an idea she’d had the year before, and in March 2015, created Pink Petro, a social media platform created for women professionals in the energy industry. “The more I started taking ideas from my head and really putting them out there, people were like ‘Yeah!’ And before you knew it we were on. People were calling and saying, ‘I heard you have a new gig!’ and I was like, ‘We haven’t formed a company yet.’”

While it can be tempting to play your cards close to your vest on a project that’s not a guaranteed success, Byrne says, “It’s important that you do not make your film in a bubble.” Getting other perspectives is key for her, because ultimately, “You’re not making the film for yourself, you’re making the film for an audience.” For her, showing several rough cuts of Raising Bertie in Chicago and North Carolina elicited key feedback that helped shape the film.

Rye agrees. “If you’re applying for shows, talking to curators or collectors and no one is interested, you’ll know, ‘Is this going to be a passion project where I’m alone in my basement slaving away and no one will see this?’” Had she not shared her work as it went, her entire life might have been different: The immediate interest her work garnered led to artistic representation. “That project changed the trajectory of my whole career,” one she had assumed would lead to a life in academia, and not as a working artist.

4. How Long Can I Get By On Little To No Money?

“I think I’m a horrible business person,” Byrne admits. By necessity, she chose to turn down other jobs in order to devote herself to Raising Bertie, which didn’t receive funding until four years into filming. While she was able to take on a few freelance projects while filming, making money wasn’t her priority. “In some ways it can’t be if you are taking the time and the patience to tell these stories.”

Eig’s projects involve a leap of financial faith as well. “When you’re in the proposal phase, you don’t know if somebody else might come up with the same idea, or maybe nobody wants to buy it at all.” Even when a project is bought, he says, “There will be years when I’m between signing the contract and delivering that I don’t get paid. One year I made $10,000: That was my contribution to my family.”

With Pink Petro, Mehnert went two years without pay. “I wanted to demonstrate the passion I had for the business. I’m taking a salary now–I’m not earning what I was earning before, but I didn’t set out to replace my income. I wanted to do something that was meaningful. I’m a firm believer that when you’re passionate and you have meaning in your life, the payback comes.”

5. Is My Family On Board With This?

Every married person interviewed for this story cited their supportive spouse as a reason that they were able to chase their dreams. McFadden’s wife has provided both emotional and financial support.“I’ve seen many other business where it became too much pressure on somebody’s marriage and they had to make a choice–either this is going to be destructive to my family, or I have to call it quits. Fortunately, I have somebody that is solidly in my corner and believes in what I’m doing.”

Mehnert’s husband was a little incredulous when she told him her plan for a career change, but she said that the challenge actually strengthened their relationship as they evaluated their finances and needs. “I tell young women all the time, ‘You’ve got to marry right because this is a sacrifice for a longer term opportunity.’ To my husband’s credit, he saw way more in it than I did.”

6. Could I Walk Away If I Had To?

Nobody wants to spend time on something only to have it lead nowhere, but it’s better to pull the plug rather than try to force it halfheartedly. Byrne had to walk away from a source on her current documentary project after following him for six months. “I decided it wasn’t the story that I needed to tell,” she says.

Eig similarly pursued a biography proposal that he ended up dropping. “That was painful,” he says, but a dearth of material, a less-than-promising sales prospective and a simple lack of fondness for his source ended his relationship with his project. He likens a long-term project to dating. “You have to decide, am I going to stick with this girl or not? There’s things you like and things you don’t like, and at some point you get to a moment, I can’t take it anymore, I’m out of here.”

7. Can I Handle A Rough Ride?

Perhaps you just had a baby or endured the death of a loved one. The point is, there’s nothing wrong with admitting that perhaps it’s not the best time to take something on that might cause heartache or stress.

With a long-term gamble, Eig says, “You have to embrace the uncertainty, and to come up with a good idea, you have to go through a lot of bad ideas. You hope those bad ideas don’t take you too far astray, but they do sometimes.” For his 2014 book, The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution, Eig persevered despite his agent telling him people thought the book would be “small to medium-sized” at best. He reasoned, “They could be right, they could be wrong, but it’s an important enough subject, and I will feel good for telling the story, because I think it needs to be told.”

How powerful can a dress be? In the case of Diane von Furstenberg, the wrap dress she created in the 1970s became the cornerstone of a business that its founder has used to amplify communities of women who, she says, “have no voice.” HOW?

Von Furstenberg’s dress catapulted her to fashion’s heights. But when the fickle industry shifted, she nearly lost everything and had to build the business back from the brink. Von Furstenberg made a major comeback in the 1990s and has presided over the brand that bears her initials DVF as it’s become a global juggernaut distributed in more than 55 countries with estimated sales in excess of $500 million. She stepped into the role of chairwoman in May 2016, when Jonathan Saunders joined DVF as the brand’s chief creative officer, and also devotes time (and resources) to philanthropic efforts.

One of those is the DVF Awards which have taken place annually since 2010. The event aims to support women who have had “the courage to fight, the power to survive, and the leadership to inspire,” according to the organization’s mission. Each year five women are chosen and awarded a $50,000 grant to further their work in their respective communities by the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation. To date, the foundation has awarded more than $2 million.  

Fast Company caught up with von Furstenberg as she was packing for a trip to her native Belgium. Here’s what she told us about focusing on empowering women through fashion and philanthropy and what she’s learned about creative leadership along the way.

On Creating An Awards Event Rather Than Just Writing a Check

I don’t like the word “charitable.” When you have any kind of success of any level, you have two things. One, you can pay your bills, which is a very comfortable thing to know that you can do. Second, you have a voice. What I want to spend my time for my third and last act, is using my voice and connecting the voices of other people to help the people who have no voices.

Ten years ago, we had just set up the family foundation, my son said to me, “You know, you care so much about women, you should have a prize.” In many years, it will be something of a legacy. He said, “It will be like the Nobel prize,” which obviously it’s not. I wanted to do a DVF award and I knew what it would stand for, but I was concerned about how to do it. When I got involved in the Women in the World, Tina Brown’s conference, I decided to take advantage of that pool and launch it then, which is what I do.

RELATED: Diane von Furstenberg’s Strategies On When To Lead And When To Get Out Of The Way

One the Most Rewarding Relationships with Award Winners

(Past award winner) Jaycee Dugard (who was kidnapped when she was 13 and was [held] for 12 years) is now 32 and her daughter went to college. She has a foundation and the logo of her foundation is a pine cone. Every time I see a pine cone I think of her. (Past award winner) Sunitha Krishnan has built centers in India for human trafficking and has become such a friend. (Another past winner) Chouchou Namegabe, the woman from Congo, now she’s studying at Columbia University. We have remained a family and we stay in touch with them.

All of these women who have gone through terrible things, then they turn around and they help others. They inspire me. I’m always so humble that when I listen to them and I say, “Oh my god I have done nothing.” It’s a beautiful thing. I learned from them, I love them and I love the idea that in some ways I can use whatever I have to help them.

On Amplifying the Voice of the Most Important Woman in Her Life

When I started to write my memoir The Woman I Wanted to Be,  I really wanted to write my mother’s story. I realized that my mother’s story explains so well who I am and in so many ways, I am my mother’s vengeance. She used to say that God saved her [from death in the concentration camps] so that she could give me life and by giving me life, I gave her her life back. She used to say, “you are my torch of freedom.” You can understand if your mother tells you all your life that you are the torch of freedom, it becomes a very important thing. 

On Inspiring Confidence

When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt. That’s what I repeat when I feel down. Don’t doubt your power. I just turned 70, and ​when you get to be old, you really have to use your experience. I have so much experience because I have lived so fully. I should be 150 because life has been so full. When you have an experience like mine, it is your duty to share it.

​Mentoring is something that I love to do because my words can change somebody, because my words can give strength, because if I tell people that I sometimes wake up and I feel like a loser I know that maybe tomorrow you feel like one, you say, “You know what, Diane feels like a loser so it’s okay.”

On Staying Relevant At Any Age

At 28 years old I already had two children, I already had made money, I was already successful. I was on the cover of Newsweek magazine and I was already separated and having fun. I had it all really early.   

​As I turned this new decade (my 70s), I spent the last year thinking, what woman am I going to be for my third act? I can no longer be seductive or use the tools that I had when I was young. I have to use other tools. That’s why now, I have a new chief creative officer, I’m giving him little by little, the creative, but I’m putting him at the helm of my company, hoping that the company will last and he will refresh the brand. I will focus very much on the mentoring, the philanthropy, helping, using my voice, and connecting the people that I know with voice for people who have no voice.

I always tell women they should maintain an identity outside of their family life at all times. I really believe that because otherwise all of a sudden, you could say “What am I for, they don’t need me, the kids left,” and all of that. I think it is important to feel relevant after 40, 45, 50, whether your claim to fame is you do the best, I don’t know, marmalade or jam or whatever, you have to be useful and relevant. Everybody can be that.

On the Balance Between Vulnerability and Strength

I think it’s important to show, and to share your vulnerability. But what I also have learned is that all women are strong, but we are afraid to show it, whether it’s because of a man, or a brother, or a religion, or a father. Most often in our Western society, we don’t want to show it and we say, “Oh it’s not sexy, or all I want is to make my man feel big and this and that.”

​Then you make yourself small and you start to believe that you are small. It isn’t true because when there is a tragedy, strangely enough it’s always the woman who takes over. It’s always a woman who saves the situation. My advice for women is always remember that and show your strength, or at least, you don’t even have to show it, but know that you are strong.

Japan and China may have a reputation for being technologically advanced, but recording appointments and to-dos with pen and paper is long-held tradition in Asia. There is also evidence that it’s gaining popularity with millennials there as sales of paper planners have increased in the last few years. 

Increasingly, the trend is catching on in the West among younger people. As a matter of fact, some adherents to the pen-and-paper planner culture are so fervent in their use that they post videos giving the world a tour of how they organize in their diaries.

Even some of my colleagues at Fast Company have become paper planner devotees. “My grandfather used to carry a small pocket diary, and when he died, we found decades of them in his drawer,” says Fast Company copy editor and writer Michelle Lewis. “I’ve adopted his method of recording appointments and events. I indulge in aSmythson Panama diary every year. It’s light, compact, and beautifully crafted. As all my correspondence and work is now online, keeping track of my activities on paper allows me to feel like I still retain a bit of old-fashioned control, on my terms. I don’t go anywhere without it.”

Anjali Khosla, editor of Fast Company Digital, says, “I switched back to my paper-based notebook system after a year of going all-digital. I’m not all-analog now, I still coordinate my appointments through Google Calendar, but I duplicate my appointments in my little notebook,” she says. “I prefer my paper system for a number of reasons. It gives me a break from staring at screens. It also causes me to stay in the moment and plan my days with intent. I feel satisfaction when I physically check an item off my list.”

It Was Easier To Plan And Remember Appointments

As far as organizing and planning my life, I generally stick to three apps on my iPhone and Mac: Reminders, Notes, and Calendar. All work exceptionally well, making it quick and easy to mark important times and dates and jot down notes and other information. I originally thought pen and paper would be an inferior planning experience. After all, my paper planner can’t ping me when the next meeting is 30 minutes away.

But what I found is that after a few days of using a paper planner, I didn’t need those notifications anymore. The physical act of flipping back and forth between my planner pages for the week ahead seemed to have an effect on my memory, making it easier to remember the sequence and times of upcoming events.

Scientists have discovered that the brain seems to create mental maps of information spread over multiple pages of a book. AsScientific American reports:

Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices.

Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.

I Took More Detailed Notes

Another thing I noticed was that I took much more detailed notes in my paper planner than I usually do in the Notes app, or in the notes section that most calendar apps provide. I didn’t set out to do this, but once I began to scribble a note for a meeting by hand, I found more ideas relevant to the meeting or subject at hand popping into my head.

Related: How To Master The Art Of Taking Better Notes

Again, this is an experience that science backs up. As Maud Purcell, a psychotherapist and journaling expert, told me whenI interviewed her about the benefits of journaling: “I find that most of my patients intuitively know that hand writing their thoughts in a journal is more effective than composing them on a laptop. That said, there’s research to support this. It appears that writing stimulates an area of the brain called the RAS (reticular activating system), which filters and brings clearly to the fore the information we’re focusing on.”

Indeed, writing notes for a meeting in my paper journal versus typing them out on a touchscreen keyboard made it easier to focus on and extrapolate my thoughts.

It Was A Pain To Remember To Take My Planner With Me

That’s not to say that using a paper journal was all smooth sailing. There were quite a few times I forgot to take my planner with me. Where making sure I had my smartphone slipped into my pocket is now second nature, it was harder to get used to the fact that my agenda and notes were now separate. It’s a small complaint, but not my only one.

I also frequently come up with ideas for stories or think of an important point to note in the next meeting when I’m walking. My smartphone makes it easy to whip out my notes in a jiffy and enter a new point. Much of the time I can just dictate the new note into the smartphone so I don’t even need to stop walking or look at my screen to write it down. With the paper planner, it was annoying to have to find a pen and write in the journal while standing in the middle of the sidewalk on a busy city block.

It’s A Record Of Your Past

Entering appointments and reminders in various planning apps on a smartphone is generally something of an ephemeral experience. After I’ve finished a meeting, I usually delete it from my calendar app. Likewise, after I’ve addressed something in a note or reminder that I’ve jotted down, I delete it. On a digital device, this feels like a tidier way to keep things organized.

But with the paper planner, though I crossed some meetings off, I found it nice to be able to look back on my last two weeks’ activities. This is where the pen-and-paper planner becomes something different from the apps. It becomes not just a preview of our future, but a record of our past. And there’s something refreshing about being able to see just how much you’ve accomplished.

If you want a personalized notebook in the Gaza Strip these days, 24-year-old Mohammed Hammed is your guy. The Islamic law student and self-taught graphic designer runs Dfter, the coastal enclave’s first and only hand-designed notebook business, offering pads personalized with  the print, name, or saying of your choice on the cover.

“I decided to use my design talent to start my own business rather than waiting for a job in the government, as there are no jobs or salaries,” he tells Fast Company.

And like many entrepreneurs in Gaza–where a staggering 58% of young people and 40% of adults are unemployed, according to the World Bank–Hammed runs his business through Instagram and Facebook. Social media-based business is a worldwide trend, but it’s of particular import in war-ravaged Gaza, which since 2007 has been besieged by an Israeli and Egyptian blockade and the heavy-handed rule of the Islamist Hamas. Palestinians can’t simply import or export a product from anywhere in the world, as the typical e-commerce model envisions. So instead people are creating their own internet-based domestic economies through social media, at once connected and disconnected from markets outside of Gaza.

People like Hammed can’t afford rent for a shop and can’t build their own because of Israel’s restrictions on construction materials (which can be used for building both homes and tunnels). A traditional business also requires electricity, which only works six to eight hours a day in Gaza because of power shortages, and walk-in customers are less common when the streets are dangerous.

Business through social media is “a natural development,” says Gaza-based Palestinian economist Omar Shaban, noting that despite having among the world’s highest unemployment rates, Palestinians in Gaza are highly educated. “Gazans are educated and connected to Israel and international markets, so they know what’s going on. Still, they are limited because of the situation, the blockade, the checkpoints, and difficulties in importing.”

Technology-related work is an increasingly common outlet for Gaza’s thousands of unemployed college graduates. Groups like the accelerator Gaza Sky Geeks and Gaza Gateway have pioneered outsourcing technology services to international companies and organizations. But inside Gaza, social media-based commerce and advertising are also creating new, albeit still limited and unmeasured, market opportunities, Shaban says.

“People start to like the idea of shopping from the home,” El Kahlout says. “And they’ve started to trust this. Because of the siege and the electricity problems, people started to like Instagram.”

El Kahlout has coveted family connections that can help bring the imports she sells. But it’s still not a reliable process, so she’s studying the market and looking for other options to keep her business plans profitable. She cites Saudi Instagram sensation Afnan al Batal, a social media “fashionista” who’s built a massive Instagram following and business advertising products, as one of her entrepreneurial role models.

“In order to live we always have to find a substitute,” he says, of the importance of the second-hand market. Tarabish pays about $55 monthly to rent his salon, and estimates he makes anywhere from $80 to $100 monthly by refurbishing and reselling used electronics through his page.

Other Gazans are experimenting with new kinds of markets as they go. Ensaf Habib, 21, a journalism student, has a very popular Instagram account, with 103,000 followers. Many followers initially came for the reports about Palestinian life and history that she and friends compile and post from places all around Gaza. But it wasn’t long until that fame also drew the attention of companies and businesses in Gaza, which started to request advertisements for their products and services. The entrepreneurial student, always in need of extra money, agreed.

It’s everyday resilience and creative victories like these that make life a little more manageable for besieged Gazans. But Hammed said Dftar’s initial success is also bittersweet because his brother isn’t here to see it.
Two years ago, Hammed’s brother joined the refugee trail, escaping to Egypt and boarding a boat headed to Italy in search of a safer life. The boat sank. Hammed’s family has heard nothing of his brother’s whereabouts since, but he hasn’t been able to confirm if his brother survived or not. Hammed wishes his brother, who first noticed how popular personalized notebooks were on the internet, could see how far they’ve come now.

“I hope that the project will expand and that my life will be more stable and that I can support my parents financially and make people happy,” he says.

In 1850, there were 150 glaciers in Glacier National Park. Now there are 25. Within 15 years, scientists project, all the glaciers may have melted away.

Similar melting is happening around the rest of the world (though other glaciers may survive a bit longer). A set of before-and-after photos published in the Geological Society of America’s GSA Today journal documents some of the changes. In Alaska, the melting Mendenhall Glacier shrank nearly 1,800 feet between 2007 and 2015. In Switzerland, the Trint Glacier retreated twice as much over roughly the same period. In Peru, the Qori Kalis Glacier shrank more than 3,700 feet between 1978 and 2016.

“It’s very hard to cast the photographic evidence aside as being an opinion,” co-author Patrick Burkhart, a geology and geography professor at Slippery Rock University, tells Fast Company.

The Extreme Ice Survey team has placed cameras in 36 remote locations in the Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, the Himalayas, Iceland, South Georgia, Antarctica, and Alaska. The custom kits are designed to automatically take photos every half hour during the day. The team periodically travels to collect the memory sticks inside.

Some of the photos have been used by researchers studying glaciers, though Balog began taking them as a way to viscerally communicate the effects of climate change to the public.

The photos make the speed of change in the cryosphere–the portion of Earth covered in ice–obvious. Those changes are happening faster than researchers initially predicted. “Our thoughts from a decade ago are being exceeded by what’s happening today,” says Burkhart. “Our thoughts from two decades ago were being exceeded by what was happening a decade ago. The loss of ice is accelerating.”

“There’s the old expression ‘glacial pace’–you know, that glaciers aren’t supposed to do much,” says Balog. “Nothing much is supposed to happen when you look at a glacier. But these pictures have demonstrated that that’s an oxymoron. There isn’t any such thing as glacial pace because they can be quite reactive and quite responsive to the environment around them.”

The glacial retreat is being driven by climate change, primarily warmer air temperatures. For glaciers that flow to the ocean, warmer sea water and changing ocean currents also play a role.

As the ice melts, some of it contributes to rising seas. It also shrinks a critical source of drinking water in some communities. Burkhart has studied the risk in the Andes in particular.

While glacial retreat may be difficult to stop now, even if the world takes aggressive action to cut climate pollution, the photographs of disappearing ice can help convince the minority of people who doubt that climate change is occurring.

“I’ve had people who were in the oil and gas industry come up to me and say, ‘Well, I really just thought this whole thing was a bunch of liberal progressive stuff . . . and I didn’t believe it because I thought it was tied to those sorts of agendas,'” says Balog. “‘But you seem like a straightforward guy and you brought me information I can understand, and I’m converted. I get it.'”

After 10 years of working on the Extreme Ice Survey, the team plans to continue. Earth Vision Institute, the nonprofit that runs the program, is currently trying to raise money to return to some of the areas the team hasn’t been able to document in recent years (each journey is both expensive and dangerous). It hopes to add more cameras in some locations to help researchers better calculate the loss of ice. Balog also travels giving lectures, trying to share the images and story with as many people as possible.

“People are always saying, ‘Do you believe in climate change?'” he says. “My answer is always, ‘I do not believe in climate change. Belief is about ideology. Belief is about dogma and doctrine. And the problem with the climate change discussion in this country is that the reactionary forces have been extremely eager to turn it into a question of dogma, doctrine, and belief. I think climate change is an issue with evidence. And if we look at the evidence rationally we can comprehend it. We can see what’s happening.”

Taser, the company known for its eponymous electric stun guns, announced on Wednesday it would change its name to Axon as part of its aggressive push to dominate the burgeoning market for body cameras—and the lucrative video and data services those cameras require.

It also announced an initiative to solidify its strong lead over the competition while the market is still young: It will offer body cameras and cloud storage free of charge for a year to any eligible police department in America.

“We don’t see any reason why you should send a police officer on the street with a gun and no body camera,” says Rick Smith, the company’s founder and CEO.

The name change, years in the making, was prompted by the company’s determination to focus on technology and distinguish it from the stun gun for which it is widely and controversially known. “We have 95% brand awareness,” says Smith, but “Taser is very strongly associated with the electronic weapon.” Though the gun generally gets high marks from law enforcement, it has generated plenty of controversy since many people shot by the “less-lethal” weapon have died or been severely injured.

“We’ve seen the need to do this” for a few years, says Smith, referring to the name change. Since Ferguson incited new public demand for more trust and transparency in policing, Taser has become the leader in police body camera sales. The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company, which already has a virtual monopoly in electrical weapons, still sells more Tasers than cameras. But last year, for the first time, it saw its future bookings for its Axon cameras surpass those of its electric weapons. (Axon is the name of its younger Seattle-based technology division; the Taser name will survive as the weapons brand.)

Already, Axon says its cameras have been deployed in 36 out of 69 major U.S. cities, and that police have collectively stored more than seven petabytes of data on Evidence.com, its cloud-based video storage and management service, with 90 videos uploaded every minute.

The “free trial” program—an idea more common to consumer services like Spotify and Netflix than government procurement—aims to give officers across the country year-long access to an Axon Body 2 camera; specialized training; and a storage subscription on Evidence.com. Based on list prices, Smith estimates the trial will be worth about $1,700 a year per officer.

But it won’t be completely “free”: Body cameras mean additional costs for police administration and staff in order to manage the torrents of footage they generate. In Baltimore county, for instance, where police are paying $12 million for about 1,400 cameras and eight years of storage, annual operating costs for managing the footage are estimated at $1.6 million. Even with those kinds of costs, Smith believes agencies “will save much more over time” by documenting police encounters on video.

While agencies will be allowed to keep their footage after the free trial, Axon is betting they’ll become loyal customers and subscribers. “We’re taking a pretty big financial risk,” says the CEO, but “we looked at this and we frankly feel that the benefits are so overwhelming. If we can get cameras in the hands of police officers, they will immediately pay for themselves.”

In 2016, when Axon earned over $268 million, it reported that weapons revenue was up 25% over the year before, while video revenue jumped 152%. Glenn Mattson, an analyst at Ladenburg Thalmann, expects that sometime in the next year, revenues from subscriptions to Axon’s video storage service will overtake revenues from the cameras themselves.

Axon’s offer is also likely to draw more scrutiny to its sometimes dubious efforts to win police contracts. Other companies have accused it of trying to muscle out the competition by building cozy relationships with cops, waging aggressive lobbying campaigns, and using allegedly unfair tactics. After two recent failed bids, in New York and Phoenix, the company was accused of unfairly trying to influence those police departments with offers of “free” cameras.

Vievu, a smaller competitor owned by the police supplier Safariland, said in a statement that the free camera effort was a publicity stunt that “is at best unethical and at worst illegal.” Along with the heavy internal expense of using cameras, the company warned of lock-in: that using Axon’s software for a year will effectively force police to commit to its services for the longterm, “or face exorbitant switching costs.”

John Collins, a Vievu spokesperson, said the offer is “analogous to asking someone to get a free tattoo on his or her face—you’d better be sure you want it because it is very difficult to get rid of it once you do.”

Smith has dismissed some of the allegations against Axon as “a little bit of noise that comes with being a market leader,” but says that to avoid conflicts, it will not offer free cameras to law enforcement agencies with whom it’s already pursuing business. The company will also help advise departments that take up the offer on proper policies for using cameras, as it does with its existing customers.

Without proper policies developed with the input of the public, civil rights advocates warn that cameras are not only ineffective at helping improve police transparency and accountability, but could have a negative impact—eroding privacy, hurting community trust, and exacerbating the effects of existing racial bias.

Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which has studied the impacts of body cameras, said that if departments accept this offer, “they must develop and implement body camera policies that uphold accountability and protect the rights of those being recorded.”

Read more: Why Body Camera Programs Fail

“Accelerate The Market”

The fierce competition and thorny questions underscore the national rush to adopt the technology in the wake of a series of high-profile deaths, many of unarmed black men, at the hands of police. Bolstered by over $60 million in Justice Departmentgrantsduring the Obama administration, the push has been called by some police experts the fastest upgrade in policing tech they’d ever seen.

Cameras can help de-escalate some encounters between cops and members of the public, some studies have shown, and in some cases officers wearing body cameras may be less likely to use force. Body camera footage might also help defuse citizen anger after a deadly incident involving a cop if police departments make available to the public the video recording of what happened.

But today, Smith says, “only 20% of officers are wearing cameras.” That rough estimate, from a survey of police agencies last year, showed a gap between familiarity with the devices and their actual use: Half of the country’s police departments had either started or completed tests of body cameras, but still haven’t deployed them. “Literally every chief or sheriff you talk to, or doing media interviews, one question that commonly comes up is, why is that so many agencies aren’t deploying?” he says.

A number of cities that initially rushed to cameras have found their programs slowed by tricky policy and fiscal questions: When should they be recording? Who gets to see the footage? Who will pay for the cameras and the data storage and staff they require? Meanwhile, funding may be scarcer. The Trump administration has indicated it’s not as committed to supporting local efforts at police reform, and may withhold federal police funding from so-called “sanctuary cities.”

In any case, argues Smith, waiting for federal money “can actually slow the transition” to body cameras in cities. “What we’re trying to do is accelerate the market forward.” His message to police agencies is, “‘We think these things are useful; we think you will as well. Let’s not wait to see if there’s federal funding or not.'”

The Network Effect

Founded in 1993 by Smith and his brother Thomas in their garage with the mission “to make bullets obsolete,” Axon is still smaller than a few of its would-be competitors in the body camera industry. Motorola, Panasonic, and Vievu, are, along with smaller makers like Digital Ally and Utility, angling for part of what is estimated to be a $1 billion market. At a glance, their cameras can seem mostly indistinguishable—most boast enough battery life to last an officer’s shift—but they can vary widely in price, features, and back-end software.

Axon’s pitch to police departments is often more high-tech than the typical argument made for cameras—that they help improve transparency and trust between police and communities. Instead, Smith’s company sells the cameras and Evidence.com as part of a complete package aimed at storing and managing police data—devices and platforms—in a way that mirrors Apple’s products and operating system.

The devices capture video—from body cameras, dash cameras, and interrogation rooms—while the platform provides secure storage and management, using the Amazon and Microsoft clouds. The subscription-based Evidence.com software helps officers share clips with prosecutors and assists in automatically redacting names and blurring out faces, so they can be more quickly shared with the public.

Eventually, Smith says, the software will help automatically analyze the video for more immediately useful and actionable data, integrating with legacy systems for records management, and saving time and money for police. Combining body camera video with artificial intelligence could also automate other parts of police work, for instance, by capturing license plate numbers and faces in order to find criminals.

Eyeing that future, the company has been on a tech hiring spree, recently recruiting senior executives from Tesla, GoPro, and Apple—including Todd Basche, who helped build the iLife suite of software that contains iTunes and iMovie—and acquiring a machine learning startup, Dextro, in order to build a new unit, Axon AI.

The name Axon—”the extension of your nerve cells that reaches out, carrying information to the others,” explains Smith—describes his vision for cameras, as sensors connected to a larger network. But it’s also a self-fulfilling prophesy, better for attracting computer scientists than a brand that’s associated with weapons. (The Taser’s inventor, a NASA researcher named Jack Conway, named it after a 1950s children’s book, Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle.)

Hadi Partovi, the founder of the nonprofit Code.org and a member of Axon’s board, said the brainy name would help continue the company’s internal transformation. “With the new name Axon, I believe we’re going to have an even easier time recruiting top tech talent,” he said.

What’s In A Name?

Axon has benefited from its longstanding relationships with police, and a solid reputation among cops. For Partovi, one of the biggest surprises was “how much police, frankly, love the company,” he says. It’s a company that they know “has their back, and is building products for them.”

Outside of policing, however, Axon has weathered many lawsuits and waves of negative attention. As the company’s Taser stun guns took off in the early 2000s, it also began to face dozens of lawsuits over injuries and deaths. (In 2012, Amnesty International said that the number of people who have died after being struck by a Taser had reached more than 500.) The company prevailed in most of its legal cases, but in 2009 it revised its safety warnings to say that exposure of the electrical weapon to a person’s chest risked causing cardiac arrest.

Stemming what it called false accusations about its products and defending the company and its police customers was one of the reasons Taser began to focus on video evidence to begin with. When the company launched Evidence.com in 2009, then-chairman Tom Smith said that police video could slice Taser’s own legal costs in half.

The body camera business, with its clear links to concerns about public trust and transparency, called for a fresh identity, and one that the public can relate to. For companies like Taser, with their close police relationships, that can be difficult.

“These are companies whose business is something very connected to the public interest,” said Barry Friedman, the director of the Policing Project at NYU Law School. “But they have a conception of public safety that’s been developed over a long period of time with law enforcement. Plenty of folks that work in these companies come from law enforcement. And I’d like to think that all of them can be good public citizens if engaged in a conversation with the public, but it’s just not happened.”

Hadi Partovi, who was also an early advisor and investor in companies like Facebook and Dropbox, sees Axon as a broader, more public-facing tech brand, part of a shift he’s been pushing for since he joined the Taser board in 2010. It was with his guidance in 2013 that Taser paid $3 million for Familiar, a photo-sharing app startup he’d invested in, in order to bolster its existing Evidence.com software. The result was a new unit called Axon and a high-tech office in Seattle. “As soon as the company embarked on this new business, I remember having the conversation that this is a much larger opportunity, and if we succeed at it, the name of the company is going to need to be reinvented—the entire business is going to reinvent the company.”

With its police customers, says Smith, the old name was complicating the company’s effort to shape itself as a force in police video and data. “One of the analogies we’ve used within the company: imagine we were Harley Davidson–and we said, ‘we’re here to talk about software.'”

The decision to become Axon became clear once future body camera bookings overtook projected revenues from Tasers, says Partovi. “That was a long time coming, a really important milestone. To be able to start a new business, especially a new business in a completely different road—it would be as if Facebook started something new, and then that new thing became bigger than Facebook itself.”

Facing The Public

Despite the new identity, Axon still faces a wave of questions and concerns about its business practices. Competitors have accused the company of maintaining an unfair edge by coaching departments on how to use so-called no-bid contracts or arrangements in which agencies piggyback off existing stun-gun or body camera contracts at other departments, or by offering trials of free cameras.

In February, Taser was reprimanded by the attorney for the city of Phoenix for offering “free” cameras to the police, after it had lost to Vievu in a bid for the city’s body camera contract. In a lawsuit, Vievu charged Taser with interfering with the contract, which the city ultimately scuttled in favor of a new request for proposals.

That same month in New York City, where the company lost a body camera contract to Vievu after a bitter lobbying battle, the mayor accused then-Taser of waging a “smear” campaign against its competitor. There too, the company was accused of making an unfair offer of “free” cameras after it had lost the bid. A company spokesperson said that the company had made a similar offer in January to all major law enforcement agencies.

For Smith, the debacle was “a wake-up call” to problems with the way that police buy technology, he says. “These are rules that need to be broken and thrown away.” The procurement processes, “decade old procedures to buy boots, belts, shoes,” he says, are the opposite of Agile, the iterative approach to software development. “You need to get it in the hands of users. You can’t just buy it in the old fashioned way,” he says.

The “move fast and break things” approach may mean faster roll-outs of cameras and quicker business for Taser, but that could also stymie fair competition, create an appearance of impropriety, and lead to other problems down the road.

“From a business perspective, Taser might be very smart, very strategic” to offer free cameras, said Mike Purdy, a public procurement and contracting consultant in Seattle. “But when we talk about public procurement the concept is to be fair, open, and transparent. And we don’t want to give preference to one company over the other. Otherwise, that ends up being unfair competition.”

It’s up to local governments to develop purchasing processes that are open and at least allow competitors to offer trials as well. “Governments may want to take quick action,” he said, “but in doing so you might skirt some of the appropriate mechanisms.”

Rushing into technology contracts without fair and public consideration can mean getting the wrong technology, or being locked in to proprietary systems that are hard to uninstall, Purdy said. A too-speedy process—or impressions of unfair advantages—can spark accusations, lawsuits, or investigations into a purchase, all of which can actually lead to delays in rolling out new technologies.

In some cities, including Atlanta and Austin, investigations into bids by Taser have delayed the roll-out of cameras. In Orlando, the city delayed a purchase of cameras last year after it emerged that a police official in charge of the program was also being paid by Taser to help train police at other agencies using cameras. (The city went with Motorola body cameras instead, at a cost of $1.1 million for 450 cameras—versus a $600,000 bid from Taser—and about $800,000 a year to store the data.)

Trying to rush cameras onto the streets could also lead to uses and policies that are adverse to the public, as civil rights advocates have warned.

“There’s definitely a move to do this quickly,” said Purdy. “But we have to remember that anytime we’re doing technology and especially emerging technology, it’s a complicated area.”

Smith, whose products have weathered storms of controversy for over a decade, isn’t fazed by the questions that surround his company’s business practices. Axon’s contracts have been won on the basis of quality alone, he says, noting the high scores its cameras receive in field trials. “Playing unfairly to win deals, that gets too much credence. With many big cities, going through field trials, we’ve been selected hands down.”

But the new name and identity reflects a desire by the company to win the public’s trust, too.

“The transparency that the public expects of law enforcement is something we hope people can rely on Axon to deliver to them,” said Partovi. What that means is “people knowing that if a police officer is wearing an Axon camera, they can trust that their interactions are going to be recorded, and that those recordings are going to be treated with integrity, with privacy, without tampering, with security.”

He added: “I absolutely think that Axon is going to need to be a public-facing brand as well as a safety brand.”

Updated with comment from Henderson.

When Caren Lissner’s young adult novel Carrie Pilby was released in January 2003, the person who would eventually play her on-screen, Bel Powley, was just about to turn 11 years old. And while the title character of Lissner’s book was a prodigy of sorts—a young British woman who graduated Harvard at 18 and tries to negotiate life in New York despite having little to no social skills—Powley was just a skosh too young to play her at that time. But now that the movie version has been released–it landed in theaters on March 30 and VOD on April 4–it seems like she was destined to play Carrie all along.

When I point this out to Lissner, the movie’s executive producer Suzanne McNeill Farwell, and director Susan Johnson, all three laugh. When a book takes a 14-year journey from page to screen, all involved need to have a hearty sense of humor.

Your Book Has Been Optioned, Now What?

It’s not like there wasn’t any enthusiasm for Pilby, though. A hit when it was first released, the manuscript attracted the attention of a literary agent who handles film and television deals—that’s how it got in Farwell’s hands. “I just fell in love with the book,” she tells Fast Company. “I was running a production company at Sony at that time. As much as I loved it, I knew it was a smaller movie, and I knew it didn’t fit the mandates that we had at that company. So, sadly, I had to pass on it. But, I never forgot it, and over the next 10 years I would check in periodically with [the agent]. Just is it available? Is it not?”

Optioning a book or story for movie and television purposes is a bit of a tricky business if you’re the author of that work. You get paid to give up the rights to your creation, and the person or company who buys those rights can do anything they want with it for the time period they’ve bought, generally a year. They can involve the original writer in the process or choose to go on their own. Often, the original writer gets a check and never hears about the project until the rights expire and it becomes available again. That’s what happened to Lissner. (Full disclosure: Caren and I have been friends since 2005–or since 1986, depending on if we spoke to each other during a summer teen bus tour.) Her book was optioned twice for the intention of making Carrie Pilby into a television series, and both times she only got dribs and drabs of information on what their intentions were.

Related Link: TIFF 2016: Diary Of My First Film Festival Experience

“My feeling is there’s not a lot I’m going to be able to do to change it anyway. So I try not to worry too much about things that are out of control, and try to work on things that are,” she says. “The other thing is, I’d revised the story so many times, and read it so many times that I really was curious to see what somebody with a fresh perspective would do with it.”

In one of the instances, when Disney and ABC held the rights, there was a push to change Carrie’s first name. Lissner took that request in stride. “They wanted to change it to Darby Pilby, because at that time Sex in the City was popular. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have named her Carrie if I had written it having watched Sex in the City. But I hadn’t watched it and didn’t know that Carrie Bradshaw existed. I thought [Darby] was actually kind of a cute name. I wouldn’t have minded that.”

“I’ve Learned to Manage My Expectations”

After the second option expired, Lissner tried to keep things in perspective. “I’ve learned to manage my expectations with anything in the arts,” she says. “Maybe if I was 21 and this happened, I would have a different perspective. But, everyone I meet is working on some kind of novel or movie. I’m just like, ‘If anything actually happens . . . ‘ So I try not to have high expectations. Just be cautiously optimistic.”

So when Farwell, who by 2012 had left Sony and was looking to produce an independent feature, got in touch with her, “it was a nice surprise. I was at work and got a very kind email from Suzanne asking if the rights were available, and that she liked the book.”

By then, the book had also been sent to Johnson, whom Farwell wanted to work with on a feature. “I was thinking of all the things that I had read over the years that I loved and didn’t happen for one reason other, then I thought of Carrie Pilby immediately, and sent it to [Susan],” Farwell says. “She fell in love with it as well. She read it over the weekend, and I think we optioned the book together the next week.”

A 2010-Style Twist

After acquiring the rights, Farwell and Johnson did something they wouldn’t have been able to do in 2003; they started a Kickstarter campaign, because, as Johnson says, “We weren’t funded producers. [We needed] to raise money to hire a skilled writer, because we knew that that was going to be required to get us the quality of script we wanted. But, also something that we knew that we could get financed and cast.” The campaign raised more than $73,000, enough to hire Kara Holden to craft a screenplay, which was a challenge given the fact that the book is told from Carrie’s perspective, in the first person.

What they ended up doing is making Carrie’s sessions with her therapist (and friend of her father’s) Dr. Petrov (Nathan Lane) the substitute for Carrie’s inner monologue. Also, a few small technology references needed to be updated. But, for the most part, the story stayed intact.

Another difference between Farwell and Johnson and the other people who optioned Carrie Pilby, though, is that they kept Lissner involved in the process. “I really respect the creator of the material,” Johnson says. “I really wanted us to make sure that we weren’t going off track. But also, [Caren]’s so creative and we both knew that we didn’t want to alienate the fan base of the book. That’s sort of a great blanket to have around you. You know that you’re going to be guided by Caren’s words and the reactions of the people that are such fans of the book. We always sent her every draft of the script, but said, ‘You don’t have to read it if you don’t want. If you do want, that’d be great.’ Then eventually I felt like I was begging her for notes.”

“I was very careful because I didn’t want to interfere,” says Lissner. “You can’t get a creative project done if someone’s second-guessing you. I was very happy to be included, and I thought I did have some good insights because I had lived with the book for a while. I not only knew what I had in mind when I was writing it, but I also had [knowledge of] how readers had reacted over the years. So I gave a little bit of that feedback.”

Help like that was very useful to Johnson as she directed her first feature. “[Caren] was clearly presenting herself as someone who wasn’t going to stand in the way. She was saying over and over, ‘It’s yours now. Do what you need to do.’ That gave us the comfort to go, ‘Okay, then let’s try this. Or what about this?’ Otherwise, if the [author] is on set and they’re really attached to every single word being exactly as it is in the book, it can be very problematic.”

Lissner can be seen as an extra in a scene where Carrie is walking through Central Park, but that was far from her first day on the set. Farwell and Johnson invited her to the set from day one. She and Lane, who had become a fan of Lissner’s book after booking the part of Petrov, became a mutual admiration society during filming. And, when Lissner saw the set of Carrie’s apartment on the first day of shooting, the reality that her creation was going to make it to the screen after such a long time became a bit overwhelming.

“I was very unsteady and I didn’t want to show anyone that,” she says. “So I grabbed onto a window, but I heard somebody say, ‘Get her water.’ So, I think someone noticed something.”

Michael O’Shea’s creativity clock was ticking.

After graduating from film school in 1996, O’Shea found work in various production gigs that ultimately left him disenchanted and, soon thereafter, with a laundry list of odd jobs including cab driver and bouncer, and an eight-year stint as a computer repairman. At the behest of his girlfriend, producer Susan Leber, O’Shea began writing again and put himself on a strict deadline: make something happen in 10 years or quit. Six years in, something did happen: O’Shea found financing to make his film. Better still, in 2016, that film went on to be an official selection for the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard category.

The Transfiguration follows Milo (Eric Ruffin), a 14-year-old loner who’s convinced he’s a vampire. As Milo’s appetite for blood intensifies, the weight of what it means to get that blood begins to wear him down to a breaking point. The Transfiguration is masterful in its quiet, slow-burning intensity that smudges the line between “horror” and “coming-of-age drama,” which wasn’t necessarily O’Shea’s intention.

“After the first screening, the people that liked it all said, ‘my God–you made such a beautiful film!’ And my first thought was, ‘wait, is a horror movie supposed to be beautiful? Did I screw up somewhere along the line?” O’Shea says. “We briefly discussed [adding more suspense] but enough people were connecting with it so we kept it the way it is.”

Capitalizing on happy accidents and scant resources informed a good portion of O’Shea’s creative decisions in building the world of The Transfiguration. His shoestring budget led to live location shooting across Queens and New York City, where the camera would stay at a distance to capture both scripted moments of the actors and the unscripted reality of their surroundings.

“To me, that’s a way to make a low-budget movie, using your limitations as your strength like shooting on the street,” O’Shea says. “Suddenly my low-budget reality is my production design, which I think gives an authenticity to the entire film.”

Watch The Transfiguration closely and something becomes quite evident: there’s barely a presence of adults in the film–they’re either heard and not seen or vice-versa. Minimizing the adults only magnifies what’s unfurling in the lives of the teenagers and constructs a somewhat eery sense of lawlessness and lack of supervision that pulls the tension tighter.

And again, this was not O’Shea’s initial intention.

“A lot of the scenes that got cut were scenes of adults. I began realizing that was actually a good idea and that we would push it even further. So we began taking out more scenes with adults,” he says. “When I was a teenager, it felt like adults didn’t matter and I was kind of in my own world where you don’t really see adults.”

The Transfiguration is a notable addition to the more recent class of genre-bending horror/thrillers including The Neon Demon, Raw, and Personal Shopper that rely just as much on scare tactics as manipulating pain points in the human condition. What sets The Transfiguration apart, however, is just how self-referential it is to its sub-genre. Through Milo’s obsession with “realistic” vampires in films, O’Shea was able to establish a sturdy foundation to build around the vampire myth, creating intricate themes that make multiple viewings of The Transfiguration a necessity.

“What if you were a kid who was becoming a sociopath? You’re going to use confirmation bias on everything–everything that happens in my life is confirmation that I’m a vampire,” O’Shea says. “So the movie Blade, for example, isn’t realistic because that doesn’t apply to anything in my life. But Martin is a realistic movie because he needs a weapon to kill people and drink blood, and that’s something that I use, so that’s a realistic movie–that’s how Milo is viewing the vampire myth.”

As for O’Shea, the vampire myth represents accepting death, in the sense that vampires are faced with the dilemma of continuing to kill others for survival or taking their own death for what it is.

“As our world has become more secular, we’ve somehow forgotten the lesson of that folklore and now we’re having aspirational vampires. We have Twilight, we have The Vampire Diaries, we have vampires that twinkle and they’re beautiful and sexy–we want to be vampires,” O’Shea says. “We want to place ourselves as someone that gets to live forever because we’re so terrified of death. We’ve taken something that was about death acceptance and reversed, so I decided I wanted to make a film that was about being OK with dying.”

That level of layered storytelling, O’Shea says, is the product of maturity. It took 20 years for O’Shea to finally make his first feature, but in many ways, that two-decade wait was well worth it.

“I’m a little scared of what I would have made in my 20s. It would’ve been bad because my ego was all over the place,” O’Shea says. “I was on this constant rollercoaster feeling like I was the most brilliant person ever or I was horrible and I sucked and I was a piece of garbage. Going through those two states of minds of complete arrogance and horrible insecurity isn’t the best recipe for being able to direct a film.”

“Giving up on filmmaking in my thirties was a real salve on my ego–I realized I wasn’t going to jump off a bridge because I’m not talented enough,” O’Shea continues. “I became a much more stable human being, and that is incredibly important, being able to look calmly at what you’re shooting. I feel like in my 20s, I may not have been able to do that as well because of all the fear and arrogance. Being older definitely made [The Transfiguration] a much better movie for sure.”

The Transfiguration opens in select theaters this Friday.

While the national outlook in America has changed drastically in just a short period of time, one thing has remained constant: cities are focused on economic growth and inclusion. Across the country, city leaders are building equitable growth strategies that meet current needs and lay the groundwork for the fast-approaching future.

Our nation’s local officials are working to create a fairer, more equitable America, they are meeting resistance from a federal administration keen on disparaging America’s urban areas and state legislatures from sea to shining sea wielding power to blockade city-led initiatives. But city leaders are still laser-focused on economic success: our National League of Cities’ (NLC) State of the Cities research consistently shows that economic growth is the number one priority of cities. And it’s serving the country well: cities account for 91% of national gross domestic product.

It includes devastating cuts to Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), which help fund things like infrastructure repairs and neighborhood revitalization projects, as well as the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, a gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, and would even hurt programs like Meals on Wheels. The demonstration of ignorance on the importance of these programs to cities–where the vast majority of the country’s economic growth resides–is astounding.

Challenges have grown precipitously at the state level as well. We know that economic growth is not a zero-sum game, which is why cities need partners at both the federal and state level. However, state preemption–here states override a city’s authority on a particular issue–is a widespread problem that cities are facing. States preempting city authority stifles innovation and stymies progress. City rights and local control are paramount in making our country stronger.

One area where we have clearly seen a rise in preemption is employment policy. Our research shows that 25 states have prevented cities from passing minimum wage laws and a further 19 have stopped cities from creating laws on paid leave. Yet, 56% of Americans support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020. There is a critical need to recognize that cities are leading on this issue and are in line with the majority of the country.

Not only are city leaders actively developing ways to support workers, but also they are exhibiting compassion for fellow community members. America is a nation of immigrants. Beyond just celebrating the cultural diversity that makes our country great, as people from all around the world join us in our cities, immigrants create real economic value.

Mayor Bill Peduto of Pittsburgh made this point very clear on the value and importance of immigrants at NLC’s recent Congressional City Conference where he pointed to the wave of immigrants that built Pittsburgh and to the immigrants that are currently attracted to the city, helping grow its population and build the city’s advanced manufacturing and tech industry.

Immigration makes cities great, and we celebrate the melting pot this country has been built on. It is not just a slogan that we trot out, but reflective of what we live every day. Many city leaders across the country celebrate this and are continuing to provide opportunities to help immigrants thrive in their communities.

Mayor Rosalynn Bliss in Grand Rapids, Michigan, just recently announced a program called “Our City Academy,” which will provide educational opportunities to help immigrants understand local government, how to receive services and get engaged. These types of programs and the welcoming approach many cities take is what helps make America the economic powerhouse that it is.

Much of our country’s economic dominance can also be attributed to the fact that trade and openness have been a key component for generations. A recent Brookings report shows that cities of all sizes are dependent on trade and any rash decisions that lead to trade wars will hurt the economic backbone of America–its cities.

The amount of trade that goes through the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach alone is astounding. The positive economic impact that trade brings to our second largest city is continuously emphasized by Mayor Garcetti. In fact, one out of every nine jobs in the Los Angeles region is dependent on the port and the trade that moves through it.

The President’s budget at the end of the day is a philosophical statement, and not the final word on what the budget will in fact do, but the statement that comes across loud and clear is that cities are on their own. This is not the answer to the challenges that face us collectively as a country–we can and must do better.

We need to be focused on the possibilities surrounding innovations like self-driving cars, not self-defeating measures that pull support from the most vulnerable in society. We need to invest in our future, fund scientific research, spur innovation, alleviate climate change and support cities, and of course, the community members that call them home.

The country has changed quite drastically at the federal level with the new administration, but at the city level, mayors and other local leaders continue to move forward, building city economies and preparing for the future that is fast approaching on all fronts. Rather than stomping on bottom-up successes, the federal and state governments should take lessons learned on the local level and scale them upwards for true long lasting success for all. Everything starts in cities.

“Mirror mirror on the wall, who has the darkest under-eye circles of them all?”

When the Evil Queen summoned the magic mirror, the face staring back at her told her what she wanted to hear: She was the fairest of them all. Not a puffy peeper in sight.

Modern-day versions of that interactive mirror in stores and in our homes are much more honest.

I should know. I installed one in my bedroom.

The new HiMirror ($189) acts as a daily beauty consultant: A camera that sits on top of it closes in on your face and analyzes your skin’s wrinkles, blemishes, dark spots, and even clogged pores. The humidity-resistant mirror doubles as a computer screen. It uses voice commands and directs you to respond in hand gestures: You don’t push any buttons on the mirror, thereby avoiding fingerprints. Then, after several bright flashes,it switches from mirror to screen mode to offer a daily and weekly summary—via on-screen data chart—of how you’re aging and what you can do to battle the ravages of time. For example, it even figures in the weather and might tell you to wear SPF 50 on a sunny day.

The device is all part of an expanding use of tech to improve the consumer’s experience in stores, and in the privacy of their homes. Top brands such as Ralph Lauren, as well as department stores like Bergdorf Goodman, are investing in the technology. Interactive mirrors morph the image reflected back to quickly show how you look with different shades of eyeshadow or dress styles without actually putting them on. The goal is to keep consumers engaged and make them more confident in their purchases.

The home mirror I tried even had an accompanying Bluetooth-enabled scale that keeps track of your weight fluctuations and suggests exercise routines as needed. If that’s all too much for you, know that it can also play your favorite music (Kelly Clarkson can help soften the blow the mirror inflicts on your body image.)

Simon Shen, CEO of New Kino Group, was inspired to create the HiMirror after noticing his wife’s uneasy relationship with the bathroom scale, which she slid out from the corner when she feared she was gaining weight. It didn’t, as he puts it, offer daily value. Shen imagined a bathroom product that would let the consumer check in daily and become more proactive rather than reactive.

“Lots of people have questions as to whether their [skin care] products are really effective, but there’s no scientific measurements,” Shen told Fast Company, “so by every day taking pictures and [analyzing] their skin, they can understand where there is improvement in their skin condition.”

I tried both the mirror and scale and found that a daily interactive diary of how you treat your face and body can be both a curse and a blessing, depending on your mental health. I can’t say it dramatically changed my habits—or encouraged me to throw out any of my beauty products—but, like a Weight Watchers program for my skin, it made me pay extra attention. I put on more sunscreen, spread serum more diligently, and maybe finally booked a facialist.

After a week, though, I suffered acute vanity fatigue. I’m into me, but not enough to see magnified, lighted photos of my flaws twice a day. I just wanted to look in a mirror and simply see my reflection—without any fuss. Taking care of my looks suddenly seemed like a lot of work.

But interactive mirrors go far beyond home use (and perhaps that is how they are best utilized—seldomly). They are most effectively being used by big retailers for multiple uses within the shopping room floor.

Interactive fitting rooms, for example, automatically recognize products through RFID tags, which sync up to available inventory in the store. Should a customer want a different size or style, she simply requests it from the computerized mirror by pushing a button. And if the consumer needs external input, the mirror image can be photographed or recorded in 360-degree views so that it can be sent to friends via email or social media.

Petah Marian, senior editor of retail intelligence at trend forecasting firm WGSN, sees stores attempting to bring together the best elements of the online and offline experiences. Smart mirrors offer brands data that is generally limited to the e-commerce sphere.

“Understanding which products are being tried on and not bought, what’s being sized up or down, or being styled together, is the physical equivalent to knowing what was put into an online shopper’s cart and not bought,” Marian explained. This allows retailers to understand which garments are popular, but also, to remind customers of what they tried on. Maybe they’re still thinking about it? Because customers must enter contact info to use the mirrors, companies can later email a little follow-up—sometimes even with a photo of their dressing room try-on, she says.

The ability to retrieve essential contact information—without making the customer feel the transaction—is what has often been lacking in the physical environment. How often do you prefer to decline handing over your info when it’s asked at the register? Smart mirrors are a clever way to get a customer’s email address, dress size, and style preferences.

Salvador Nissi Vilcovsky, founder and CEO of MemoMi memory mirrors, which are found in Neiman Marcus locations, envisions his technology helping brands corral and manage data, much like harvesting website analytics. The dressing room MemoMi combines a full-length mirror with 70-inch LCD, computer, and an HD camera that records eight-second videos.

“For all these brands, millions of people come into their store and once they leave the store, there’s no trace of what happened in the session,” he said, “We’re pushing the same concept of e-commerce data collection and then tying it up with recommendations [in the physical world.]”

Data collection is crucial for product personalization, helping build a customer’s preference profile. When MemoMi devices are used at beauty counters, they seamlessly input all the RFID info used by the sales team on customers. As Vilcovsky put it, MeMomi intends to monitor all of a consumer’s wants and needs, though not in a creepy Big Brother way. Perhaps more like Big Brother Light: “We want to be the little sister that helps the customers,” he said.

But is the strategy working? Are customers opting in? There has been talk of consumer technology overload. Engineers aim to connect technological and physical worlds in the retail space, but the end result hasn’t always been optimal.

“The reality is the tech out right now is still kinda janky,” said Stefan Weitz, chief product and strategy officer of Radial, formerly known as eBay Enterprise, which created touchable dressing rooms for brands like Rebecca Minkoff. “There’s still a pretty high barrier to using these things.” The challenge is to create seamless, value-enhancing tech offerings so that consumers feel the output is worth the learning curve. Many first-generation products were slow, difficult to navigate, or incorporated formal, off-putting language.

And so far, there haven’t been enough case studies to prove a substantial consumer shift, and with tech invading everything we do, consumers may be suffering “a little (tech) fatigue,” says Weitz, adding, “retailers I know are fatigued spending money on it,” he says.

Retailers generally don’t have the capital to compete with Amazon against core strengths like free same-day shipping, so instead, many try to leverage their network of retail stores to provide an exceptional customer experience. “It’s more about: How do you offer an experience to consumers in the physical world that feels like they’re on their iPad?” says Weitz.

MemoMi’s video playback and sharing capability sits well with experience-driven millennials, while stored personal preferences mirror the e-commerce profile model. Half of shoppers still prefer to shop in-store, so the emphasis on curating the experience is still strong. As Weitz notes, it’s just a matter of “bringing what they expect on digital into the physical.”

MemoMi hopes that by focusing on the backend software, versus overdosing on the consumer-facing front, their product will not overwhelm the average shopper. Meaning, there aren’t too many buttons and unnecessary features leaving you paralyzed with choice.

“People don’t appreciate technology for the sake of technology,” explained Vilcovsky. He believes in user design first, technology second. “What we are trying to do is create something that is very similar to what the user is used to [in real life],” he said, meaning that at it’s core, it’s a mirror, but enhanced in a minimalist way. “I’m always reducing functions and buttons,” he said of his desire for functional simplicity.

There’s certainly industry interest: Orders for MemoMi grew steadily in the last year. There are 38 MemoMi dressing room mirrors in 20 Neiman Marcus locations, mirrors that let customers try on makeup colors in 19 stores and mirrors to try on sunglass styles in 5 stores. In January, the company launched with 9 new brands. In 2017, “we will grow 100 percent,” promised Vilcovsky.

Neiman Marcus has seen a high rate of engagement and the high-end retailer will add a second phase rollout in 2017.

“It’s a way we can make things easier [for customers],” said Wendy Segal, corporate public relations manager of Neiman Marcus. “I know there is a need and want for more [interactive mirrors], and we trying to provide that as quickly as we can.”

Despite their popularity, the mirrors are not replacing human customer service personnel, the store promises. Trained professionals must help consumers learn the process and following the tutorial, Neiman Marcus staff report they have witnessed more efficient customer service, he said.

“It is a given that the technology will be easy and intuitive, but I believe there is apprehension when customers encounter a new thing for the first time,” said Scott Emmons, head of  Neiman Marcus’ Innovation Lab.

Neiman Marcus recently released MemoMi sunglass mirrors in partnership with Luxottica, the eyewear company whose portfolio includes proprietary brands such as Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Vogue Eyewear, as well as licensed brands like Giorgio Armani, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, Dolce&Gabbana, and Michael Kors.

Previously, sunglasses were sold in their respective locked cases with personnel that needed to help customers unlock the merchandise. “It wasn’t a great experience,” said Fabrizio Uguzzoni, president of Luxottica Wholesale North America. With MemoMi, shoppers can digitally try on their preferred shades, sampling several at a time. A customer places their reflection in an aligned area of the mirror, at which point a computer-generated model of the glasses digitally appears on it.  

Uguzzoni says customers are spending more time at the counter, which leads to a higher probability of sales. Many are even coming back to buy the styles, if not buying on the spot, following feedback on shared social media of their try-ons. They’re also reportedly leaving more satisfied and confident that they purchased the right pair.

Luxottica is planning a wider release of mirrors in the coming months, with rollouts expected across the country. “We are looking at which are the next [stores],” said Uguzzoni, “we are currently designing the plan for 2017.”

While these first editions are already piquing consumer interest, it will be interesting to see how these companies streamline their services and innovate on their existing technology. MemoMi, for instance, will permit customers to digitally alter the color of their worn garments in fitting room mirrors. HiMirror, meanwhile, has ambitious plans for next year’s software update: you will be able to call through the mirror to their team of dermatologists. It will essentially become an telemedicine service. Like MemoMi, the company plans to expand into retail spaces in 2017.

Will these new enhancements entice shoppers back to brick and mortar retail spaces? That depends on how good the tech gets and just how helpful fashionistas find it. But you can bet that if it gives retailers an edge on competitors, those magic mirrors will start popping up everywhere.

“Consumers are shopping in physical retail spaces less regularly, but when they do, they’re more willing to convert, so retailers need to arm themselves in any way they can,” says WGSN’s Marian. “Anything that helps to boost the service experience for the customer is a good thing.”

Calling someone names may be mean and immature, but when Don Rickles did it, it was art.

The quick-witted comic died today, of kidney failure, at age 90. He leaves behind a rich legacy of dragging people’s names through the mud, only to have those people crack up at him, appreciatively, and beg for even muddier mud.

Rickles is perhaps the all-time greatest and most famous insult comic. His sets were performance art pieces that thrived on the “crowd work” portions most comics only thread into their sets when there’s a lull. One of his go-to insults was to call someone a hockey puck, a staple that even made it into Toy Story, with the Rickles-voiced Mr. Potato Head character lobbing it at an actual hockey puck. (His character in a Simpsons episode screams the word as he flies by on an explosion-cloud, prompting Homer to point out, “Don Rickles zinged ya, Marge.”) To get a real sense of his style, though, one need look no further than how Rickles burned his fellow celebrities.

Indeed, as imposing and towering a figure as Frank Sinatra was, Ol’ Blue Eyes melted into laughter whenever Rickles was around, letting the comic get away with verbal murder at his expense. He was the king of sting in any Friars Club roast, influencing everyone from Jeffrey Ross to Natasha Leggero who would gain notoriety with the form in later generations. He was also a relentless presence on talk shows dating back to 1965, and appeared on one of Letterman’s final episodes.

The jokes were unsparing, in a time before so-called political correctness, but audiences of every faith, nationality, and physical type abided them, out of conviction that Rickles had good in his heart. Fittingly enough, in the immediate aftermath of his passing, comedian Patton Oswalt started the hashtag, #RicklesInHeaven, which imagines who Rickles would be roasting when he made it past the pearly gates.

"Oh great, Churchill and Capote are here tonight. Sorry folks, we're all out of scotch!" #RicklesInHeaven

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) April 6, 2017

For an inkling of what he was like in top form here on Earth, though, have a look below at some of Don Rickles’ best celebrity burns.

• “It’s sweet of you, Dave – I know your busy schedule of going to the bank and trying to figure out what the hell you do.” [The Dave in question is David Letterman]
• “Listen, gang, I’ll be on Jimmy Kimmel 4/22. It seems Jimmy asked me to add a little humor to the show.”
• “Regis Philbin is here, my dear friend. He goes down to Notre Dame, crosses himself, then they put a football in his ass and kick him.”
• “What’s Bob Hope doing here? Is the war over?” [Bob Hope, a frequent USO show fixture, was in the audience of The Dean Martin Show during the middle of the Vietnam War]
• “Phyllis Diller, ladies and gentlemen, who when she was born, God ran out of clay and made her face trick-or-treat Charlie. As her husband said on her wedding night, ‘Noooooo!'”
• “Bob Newhart made the claim that he was my best friend. I have not met Bob Newhart.”
• “What an evening, so good to see you. I didn’t know you were still on!” [Johnny Carson was indeed still on the air anf hosting the tonight show when Rickles said this.
• “This is a good jacket. You’ll come on tomorrow night with cotton candy and work the carnival.” [Johnny Carson was a regular target of Rickles’s]
• “Nobody else has said it and I say it from my heart: You’re a lousy actor” [Clint Eastwood]
• “Ricardo, why do I kid you? Because I don’t like you.” [Ricardo Montalban]
• “You’re like a little mouse in a state prison” [Paul Schaffer, who is bald and has a trademark set of glasses]
• “That’s a great bit” he says pointing at Jimmy Fallon’s finger, which is in a cast. Fallon laughs and swears that his finger is really broken. “Tomorrow night,” Rickles continues, “come back with your head wrapped.”
• “I spoke to the barber convention and they need you badly” [Questlove]

It finally happened. Today, 23andMe received the first-ever authorization from the FDA to market genetic reports on an individual’s risk for certain diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and harmful blood clots.

The approval follows a long-fought battle with regulators that almost put the Mountain View, California, company out of business. It also marks a major marketplace shift, both for consumers and the health-tech sector  in general. Experts have been weighing the potential risks of giving consumers access to this kind of knowledge without the expertise of a doctor, especially because the information without context can do more harm than good. Some in the medical community worry that positive test results might prompt people to undergo surgeries or take other drastic measures. Given that genetic risk is just one factor that can contribute to health conditions, such measures might be unnecessary.

Since then, as I reported in a 2015 story, the company has had to reorganize and bring in regulatory experts to ensure its services were above board. But if 23andMe had sought to work with the government from the beginning, it may have been spared the angst of having to essentially shut down, then rebuild itself from square one.

Now, it looks like the company is finally getting its second chance. In a statement today, 23andMe’s CEO and co-founder, Anne Wojcicki, called the FDA approval an “important moment” for people seeking to learn more about their genetic health risks. “The FDA has embraced innovation and has empowered individuals by authorizing direct access to this information,” she said. “It is a significant step forward for 23andMe and for the adoption of personal genetics.”

It’s also an important lesson for companies wondering if it’s better to beg for forgiveness later than ask for permission now. As 23andMe just proved, it’s possible to work within the system and innovate at the same time—even if playing by the rules isn’t in Silicon Valley’s DNA.