It all started like many great things do–on a warm night over a few beers.

It was the winter of 2012 and then-Facebook user interface engineer Lex Arquette was winding down his four-year tenure at the company. On that particular night, the company was doing one of its now-legendary hackathons–which Arquette had only once before participated in–and somehow he got roped into one last coding hurrah. What he helped create that night, “Live Faces,” paved the way for what we know now as Facebook Live.

The real history of the social network, known for its tight control over its public image, is often hard to decipher. There is the official narrative the company will share with reporters at defined moments, usually coinciding with a product release. There are anonymous accounts told by paranoid employees due to strict nondisclosure agreements. And, when enough time passes, there are those revealing vignettes retold by the people who were there. That’s how I ended up talking to Arquette, who now lives in Hawaii and works at a small startup he founded.

I found him while trying to track down some of the architects of Facebook Live. Amid all the terrible headlines about violent content shared on the platform, I wanted to learn more about how Facebook Live was originally conceived and how the issues it’s now facing were discussed back then. A contact pointed me to Arquette, saying that he was there when the idea was first pitched.

When I reached him, Arquette was more modest, emphasizing that what he helped build in 2012 was not (necessarily) the birth of Facebook Live. It was simply a project he and his friends concocted some five years ago that may have have laid some of the groundwork for Facebook’s video enterprises. Since leaving, he’s heard rumors that his project really was the genesis of Facebook Live–but he’s not necessarily convinced. Still, there are some distinct similarities.

Arquette’s job at Facebook focused on members’ online experiences and how new users were onboarded. The platform was growing fast and he was playing a key role in adapting it to soon attract billions of users. When he first joined Facebook in 2008, he said, “Myspace dominated… I don’t think any of my friends were on [Facebook].” His role was to design a clean and easy way for people to upload their information and understand how the site worked. When it came to design, he said, “Myspace was just a joke.” Thus it was Facebook’s time to strike–when he left in 2012 the site had over a billion users, up from about 100 million when Arquette first arrived.

The Big Idea

In late 2012, Arquette decided to leave the company because he wanted to move back to Hawaii where he grew up and his family lived. During his last few weeks, Facebook was holding a hackathon, in which employees spend a night devising and building a prototype for a new service or feature. At first, he had no desire to take part–he always enjoyed floating from group to group and listening to what the others were building. But this time, over the course of the evening, an idea took shape with fellow employees John Fremlin and Vlad Fridman: What if Facebook had a live video integration?

Facebook hadn’t really dabbled in video yet, beyond a Skype integration; neither had most other social media platforms besides Chatroulette. But the idea the Facebook devs were hatching was a bit different; it was more passive. “We were just shooting the shit at the hackathon,” Arquette told me. Then came this thought: “It would be nice if you could have this feeling,” he said, “this presence of the people you cared about [being near you].” Anyone who wanted to simply broadcast themselves at their computer–doing work, surfing the web, etc.–could do so.

The idea stemmed from Harry Potter books and movies, which featured live portraits where people’s faces were moving within the confines of the frame. People looked at these framed images and saw a live simulacrum of the person. What if Facebook’s profile pictures offered something similar? “I wanted my parents and my family to be able to feel like I was closer,” said Arquette. Passivity was the most important part–“you don’t have to interact with it.” You can just look at the streamed images of people on Facebook and know that they’re there. There would be no audio.

His colleagues liked the idea, so they stayed up all night trying to get it to work. The product hinged on being able to integrate video into the flow of Facebook’s profiles.

“Live Faces”

At first it was called “The Potter Project,” but then they changed it to “Live Faces.” By that morning, the group had a barely working prototype. They presented the feature to the other hackathon attendees–it worked by going to a user’s profile, and if they were live the picture would have an “animated flip” to signal they were online. Then, in the area where a photo usually sits, would be a live stream of that person’s face.

Soon after their presentation, the team received word that they had made the cut and would present their idea to a group of Facebook executives–including Mark Zuckerberg. They had about a week, so the group worked the following days to make Live Faces actually work. Arquette, Fremlin, and Fridman added new features. This included an integration for Facebook groups that looked like the title credits for TheBrady Bunch, in which a list of live profile pictures were stacked in squares so members could see what others in their group were doing. Another employee joined the team and built a mobile app component.

Then came the official presentation. The team waited outside Zuckerberg’s office and were finally ushered in. “He had this conference room next to his desk,” said Arquette. There were probably about 20 other people in the room, all Facebook executives–“Zuck was at the head of the table.” Then they began the demonstration which, of course, led off with a series of Harry Potter clips and bombastic music. Fremlin led the presentation, due to his smooth English accent. Overall, said Arquette, “it was a very positive experience… [Zuckerberg] seemed warm to the idea–or maybe he’s just positive all the time.”

By the end, the executives asked a few questions, mostly focusing on the feasibility of the idea. They then made sure the team would be around to help build it out and support it. Arquette had to lie–after all it was his last day at Facebook. “I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll be here–the royal we.'”

What Came Next…

That was it for a few years; Arquette didn’t hear anything more about Live Faces. Almost three years later, in 2015, Facebook Live was launched. At first, Arquette didn’t see much similarity to his creation. “I think they’re very different,” he said. Specifically, the entire focus of Live Faces was on passive, non-audio communication while Live, conversely, is the opposite. “The only similarity is that it’s a live feed of the person,” Arquette said.

Years later, however, somebody told Arquette that his idea led to the creation of Facebook Live–although he wasn’t sure whether the comment was serious or in jest. “Who knows if it’s true?” he acquiesced.

All the same, Arquette has high hopes for Facebook’s endeavors into live video–and a few suggestions. “I’m curious to see what they’re going to do with the product,” he told me, “if they can extinguish the media fire around it.” He sees a future in integrating Live into places beyond the newsfeed. Live Faces focused on groups and profiles, and perhaps Facebook could do something along those lines. “I hope they incorporate it into Facebook pages,” he said. It could be used for restaurants or other public-facing places that want a banner on their page that live-streams what’s happening.

For now, Arquette is a mere bystander. While Facebook works feverishly to figure out how to moderate the content and get more people to use the feature, he is working on his startup or hanging out on Hawaiian beaches.

But he remains proud of what he built as well as optimistic about what Facebook could do with live video. Though the tragic and horrifying incidents make the headlines, Arquette believes “there are far more good things that happen with the product.”

You’ve never quite figured out the best way to organize your to-do list–join the club. Perhaps you’ve got dozens of pages of to-dos stored away in the Notes app on your phone, and dozens more spread out across Slack and Trello. Or maybe you’ve tried a bunch to-do list apps and haven’t been able to commit to one. Fear not: There’s no right way to do to-do lists.

“What’s more important than an app is having a reliable system that can help you prioritize the important things and juggle many things at once without feeling overwhelmed,” says Amir Salihefendic, CEO of productivity startup Doist. “My suggestion would be to have a system, [rather] than just a to-do app.”

What kind of system? To find out, Fast Company asked 10 CEOs how they manage their own daily and weekly task lists. While all of them have different (and evolving) preferences, each has pinned down a workflow to suit their needs right now.

Jot It On The Smallest Surface Possible

Many execs aim to keep their to-do lists as short and urgent as possible, to avoid carrying over tasks from one day to the next. For Rachel Blumenthal, the CEO of Rockets of Awesome, a subscription service for children’s clothing, this means going analog. She scribbles her priorities for the day–the “three to eight things that you absolutely have to complete”–on a single sticky note. “A Post-It is great because it can only fit so many to-dos,” Blumenthal says.

But Blumenthal doesn’t stop with just writing to-dos by hand; she scrawls the most important thing she needs to do on a given day on her hand, namely, “in between my thumb and pointer finger.” That way, she says, “I look at it all day long and can’t miss it.”

Tackle Only What You Can Memorize

Like Blumenthal, Scott Tannen, CEO of luxury bedding company Boll & Branch, also swears by Post-It notes, but only when absolutely necessary. Otherwise, he doesn’t bother with a to-do list at all. “Believe it or not, I rarely write things down, and for better or for worse, I keep everything in my head,” Tannen says. “It drives people crazy, but I generally don’t forget things too often, at least not that I can remember.”

Let Your Inbox Be Your Guide

It’s not an uncommon approach. While some people use Evernote, Google Keep, or a note-taking app, a number of execs avoid making conventional lists. Instead, they opt for platforms like Slack and Trello to manage what they need to do. “I am a power user of the starred email function in Gmail as a to-do list,” says Dan Teran, CEO of the office management startup Managed by Q, “and usually find time over the weekend or in the evening to crank through correspondence that piles up.”

Shivani Siroya, CEO of fintech startup Tala, treats her inbox and Slack as ad hoc to-do lists; if there’s a message or DM still staring at her, it’s a task that’s still left to do.

Related:How The Most Successful People Keep Email In Check

Prerna Gupta also uses her inbox as a de facto to-do list. The CEO of the chat storytelling app Hooked, she marks emails that require a response as “unread” and uses Google Calendar reminders to make sure she prioritizes time-sensitive tasks. Sometimes this isn’t quite enough, Gupta admits. “If tasks suddenly pile up, I’ll open an untitled text file and keep a running to-do list there,” she says. “But I generally try to leave the text file untitled and [don’t] save it, which helps me ensure I power through everything in a timely fashion!”

Put The Spillover On Paper

But for many CEOs, simplicity is key–which might explain why, when faced with a glut of task-management apps, some fall back on analog lists and planners. Siroya says she uses the Notes app to whip up quick lists, and files away longer-term tasks in Google Docs. Still, like Blumenthal and Tannen, she prefers to commit the rest of it to paper. “I’ve figured out how to make all these digital systems work for me, but I have to admit, at the end of the day, a list on paper still feels the most useful,” Siroya says.

Related:What Happened When I Ditched My Smartphone For A Paper Planner

Even PGi’s Ted Schrafft maintains a handwritten list of daily to-dos, despite being the CEO of a collaboration software company, while Cherae Robinson, CEO of travel startup Tastemakers Africa, uses a physical planner to tackle short-term tasks. Teran commits some of his workday’s top priorities to print as well. “I keep a notebook with me at all times to log items that require follow-up,” he says, adding that he has a second notebook for recording “big ideas that I want to revisit with more space to think.”

Delegate What You Can

Some execs recruit digital aid in the form of virtual assistants. Even Tannen, who tries to rely on sheer mind power to keep his to-dos in order, outsources some of it to an AI helper. “Clara is like my personal Pepper Potts, and she handles the back and forth of scheduling,” he says (referring, respectively, to the real-world, email-based AI assistant and the fictional assistant of Tony Stark in Iron Man, who later becomes CEO of Stark Industries). Blumenthal and Teran, on the other hand, have human assistants who pitch in with scheduling and time-management help. “The day I relinquished control of my calendar to my assistant was the day I recaptured 40% of my time back,” Blumenthal says.

Give It Time . . .

A great to-do list, after all, is worthless if you don’t manage your time well. “One of my workflow secrets is setting time limits,” Yunha Kim, CEO of meditation app Simple Habit, says. “At a startup like ours, we always have never-ending lists of to-dos, and it’s often just not feasible to fully finish a task in one sitting.”

In other words, be patient. Figuring out a to-do list system that works for you is a skill like any other–one that even the most productive leaders need to spend time honing. “Managing a day-to-day workflow and to-do lists takes months and years to become good at as a business leader,” points out Riana Lynn, CEO of the food-sourcing software company FoodTrace.

. . . And Prioritize You

As she sees it, that means prioritizing some things that may never make your daily to-do list–including self-care. “Sleep and good food,” Lynn adds, “is the first key to all of this.”

At rush hour, the gridlock on a highway in Delhi, India, looks a lot like Los Angeles. As more Indians are able to afford cars–and as the country’s population soon becomes the largest in the world–traffic and pollution throughout the country could be set to become much, much worse. But the government has decided to try to develop in a radically different direction than America, avoiding further sprawl and car-dependency. By the end of next decade, it wants most–if not all–vehicles in India to run on electricity, most cars to be shared, and cities to be designed for humans rather than cars.

If successful, the shift would save the country $60 billion in diesel and gas costs in 2030. Instead of 170 million cars, the number expected with the current trajectory, there would be 77 million. CO2 emissions from passenger transport would drop 37% compared to the business-as-usual scenario; energy use in passenger transport would drop 64%.

No Time Like The Present

“We think there’s this window of opportunity that is fleeting, but also very real, for India to be in a more advantageous position than any other nation that we know of to leapfrog the internal combustion engine, private vehicle ownership model that a lot of other countries are trying to undo,” says Clay Stranger, a principal at Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that is working with the Indian government to strategize about how to reach that goal through a long series of steps, such as a gas car tax to help fund the construction of charging stations for electric cars.

India has already “leapfrogged” Western technology in other ways. In the early 1990s, 0.05% of the population had access to a phone. When the country wanted to expand access, instead of building landlines, it encouraged the growth of mobile phones. By 2016, there were more than 1 billion mobile subscribers. Some remote Indian villages have gained access to electricity through solar panels rather than building traditional power plants.

The country’s current situation lends itself to the shift to sustainable mobility. In Indian cities now, most trips are made by foot, bike, or public transit. That’s largely because people can’t afford to drive–but encouraging people to continue current habits is easier than changing habits in a car-dependant city. Only 18 out of 1,000 people own a car, versus 786 out of 1,000 in the United States. That also makes the full transition to electric cars easier, as there are fewer gas cars on the road that need to be replaced. Shared transportation is also already widely accepted.

“The prevalence of shared mobility is completely accepted, used, and normalized in India,” says Stranger. “In some ways, you could almost argue it was invented there out of necessity. Auto-rickshaws that drive semi-fixed routes picking up passengers and dropping them off at not-predetermined stops as people need to board or get off . . . have been a part of Indian life for at least the last century. Before that, it was bicycle rickshaws.”

The Future Is Electric

As incomes rise in India and more people buy cars (car ownership has tripled over the last decade) it coincides with global changes in both technology and new business models for transportation such as ride hailing. The cost of battery packs for electric cars has dropped 80% in the last six years. In January of 2017, 37% of the cars sold in Norway were electric. In Japan, there are now more electric charging stations than gas stations.

“We see EVs right now at a tipping point,” says Stranger. “With any big system transformation, it’s hard to imagine the other side from where you sit today, but we see globally EV sales having grown 42% in 2016 . . . We see EVs reaching sticker price parity with internal combustion engine vehicles in the early 2020s.”

Indian carmaker Mahindra & Mahindra already makes electric cars; Tata Motors is developing both hybrid and fully electric cars, along with hybrid and electric buses. Ride hailing, which the government also wants to push, is already quickly growing in Indian cities.

Even with relatively low car ownership now, Indians are already seeing the need for change. Traffic jams happen even on 26-lane highways. Hundreds of people are killed in traffic every day. Thirteen of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in India. In November 2016, the air pollution index in Delhi hit 999 (anything over 500 is hazardous). Four out of 10 children in Delhi have respiratory problems.

The plan to shift to electric cars also supports India’s shift to renewable energy. By 2022, the country is aiming for 175 gigawatts of renewable electricity capacity, four times more than when it set that goal in 2015. Electric cars, plugged into smart chargers that charge when power production peaks but demand is low, could help grids running mostly on solar and wind power run smoothly.

For electric scooters and motorcycles and three-wheeled electric vehicles, the government is considering a system of swappable batteries. Extra batteries would sit in battery banks, charging at the best time to help the grid. If someone riding a motorcycle noticed that their battery was low, they would swap in a new one rather than waiting to plug the vehicle in to charge. If batteries were sold separately from the vehicle, that would also help bring down the initial cost of electric options. (This swappable system is similar to the model attempted by Better Place in Israel, which ultimately failed; Stranger says that the physics and economics work well for smaller vehicles, but not for cars.)

A New Mobility By 2030

In a meeting in February, the Rocky Mountain Institute and the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog), a government policy think tank, brought together a group of government leaders, auto manufacturers, ride-hailing companies, and nonprofits to begin to make a plan to transform mobility in India by 2030.

The first phase, designed to build market confidence, would set up electric vehicle incentives for manufacturers and consumers, like “feebates” that charge fees on less efficient vehicles in order to offer rebates on those that are more efficient. New institutions would be set up to support the transition. By 2020, subsidies would shift to a market-led approach. Certain cities would pilot new technology and business models to be shared with the rest of the country. By 2023, both electric infrastructure and services like ride hailing would quickly scale through the entire country.

Two-wheeled electric vehicles, which are already cost-competitive with their non-electric counterparts, would be emphasized first, followed by three-wheeled electric vehicles, and finally cars. It’s a different approach than the subsidy-heavy push for electric cars taken in China, where government support is leading to rapid adoption of EVs. India wants to drive the transition through the market, as much as possible, rather than through public funds.

It’s a challenging plan (and not yet final–the government plans to implement a set of policy frameworks by the end of 2017). But Stranger says that “mega changes” in mobility are already underway, and India has shown an ability to move quickly in the past. “I think India’s proven a serious track record with fast-paced transformation,” he says.

In 2014, through buying hundreds of millions of LED light bulbs in bulk, India was able to drive down the unit cost by 76%, shifting the whole country from incandescent bulbs. It’s now considering a public-private partnership for the mass procurement of vehicles. Another solution may be a system to manufacture some common parts across all electric vehicles to help cut costs.

Disrupting Car Ownership

One of many challenges is the fact that in India–as in the rest of the world–owning a car is seen as a status symbol. “People aspire to go from nothing to a bicycle, to a two-wheeler, to eventually a car,” says Stranger. But as more and more Indians achieve their aspirations, the status symbol isn’t worth as much.

One tech worker in Bangalore, who says that his eight-mile commute regularly takes 90 minutes, writes in a blog post that driving himself now seems like a waste of time:

It was about time in Bangalore where owning a car was no longer a status symbol (unlike in many other parts of India) and more of a “negative” status symbol–a person who was still driving his own vehicle to work was slowly being seen as someone who had lots of time on his hands and also as someone who couldn’t afford a cab !

“The model of ride sharing encourages fewer cars per mile,” says Andrew Salzberg, head of transportation policy and research for Uber. “That means two things. If you want to get to electrification, it’s probably easier to convert a million cars to electric cars than a billion cars. And just by having fewer cars doing more miles overall, if you look at the economics of higher-efficiency vehicles, they tend to pay off more the more you use them because the operating costs become more important.”

As India makes its shift, it could serve as a model for other developing countries. It could also leverage its engineering talent to sell cars to other countries. “If India’s able to produce low-cost, high-quality electric vehicles that are sort of purpose-designed for emerging markets, we see a huge opportunity for them to be the technology suppliers for both their neighboring countries and for a lot of emerging economies globally,” says Stranger.

Americans might also soon be driving Indian electric cars. “I personally would like to see India develop the budget-electric autonomous car,” he says. “When you look at the Tatas and the Mahindras of India, they’re absolutely world-class software engineers and OEMs. So the opportunity to develop autonomous or semi-autonomous electric vehicles is enormous, and I think there would be a market for those globally, not just in emerging economies.”

You finally hit “send” on that report you spent all week writing, and you feel great. It was a long slog, but now you can finally pour yourself a well-deserved glass of wine and kick back–or just take a long, guiltless nap. Right?

Actually, you might have the order backward. You probably should’ve paused to treat yourself midway through, not just after finishing. Call it procrastinating if you want, but it might’ve made things easier. Here’s why:

Hard Tasks Get Easier With A Little Time Off

Not all work tasks are created equal. The semester just ended here at the University of Texas, where I teach. That meant I had to assign grades to the more than 90 students in my lecture class. But once I’d graded all their work, my job wasn’t done–I still had a big round of data-entry staring me down.

This is a rote task, not a complex one. Keying grades into the system doesn’t exactly require my best self, cognitively speaking. It just requires putting in the time and making sure everything gets entered accurately. For tasks like this, procrastination is your enemy. The best solution is usually just to put your nose down and then give yourself a little reward when you’re done.

More intellectually taxing work is different. Trying to plow through tasks like those is usually a bad idea. If you don’t procrastinate–within reason–by giving yourself little breaks and rewards along the way, you’ll make things a good deal harder and slower for yourself.

Related:A Simple Brain Hack For More Creative Problem Solving

When Break Time Helps Your Brain

A lot of what you’re asked to do at work demands creative problem solving. For those kinds of projects, it helps to give yourself frequent breaks. Why? Because chipping away at tough problems is actually really taxing on your memory. You’ve got to pull information out of your recollection of past experiences in order to come up with a good solution. So chances are if you’re not making much headway, you’re not actually retrieving anything that’s helpful.

Not only will this eventually frustrate you, it’ll probably keep you focusing on the same bits of information repeatedly, rather than seeing the problem in a new light. As soon as you notice yourself retreading the same ground again and again, that’s your queue to step away from problem for a while. Give your memory a chance to settle–yes, procrastinate a little. Ideally, take a nap or go to bed for the night.

One of the things that happens while you sleep is that your knowledge about new situations becomes a little more abstract. In a process called “synaptic pruning,” certain cells in your brain weed through the connections formed among neurons that aren’t being used that much. As a result, you lose some of extraneous details.

When you approach the problem again once you wake up, your memory is fresh. You’re able to ask yourself slightly different and more abstract questions than you were able to before you slept. That increases the chances that you’ll pull out new information that will give you a more valuable perspective on whatever you’re working on.

Related:Your Brain Has A “Delete” Button–Here’s How To Use It

Bad Moods Slow You Down

Sleeping on it isn’t the only productive way to procrastinate during a tough project. You should also take a break to do something pleasant. Quite a bit of work by the late psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues has shown that a positive mood can make you a more effective and creative problem solver.

There are lots of ways to boost your mood. Going for a walk can help in two ways. First, the exercise itself releases chemicals in the brain that can lift your mood. Second, if you’re able to walk someplace with nice scenery, that can also make you feel better; researchers have found that spending time in nature can lower stress and improve creativity.

Giving yourself a little reward can have a similar effect. Buying yourself something you want or just eating a snack will also create a small burst of positive emotion–temporarily brushing aside any frustration you’re feeling with the project you’re puzzling over. When you’re aggravated with your work, pessimism sinks in. Those nagging feelings of hopelessness can really slow you down. But when you intentionally press “pause” in order to make yourself feel good, you can sail right over those potential roadblocks.

What’s more, negative moods tend to decrease the amount of working memory you have available. Working memory is the amount of information you can hold in mind at once. So the larger its capacity, the better you’ll be at tackling complex tasks–another reason why procrastinating in order to do something enjoyable may actually be the more efficient thing to do.

So next time you get stuck while working on a difficult task, think about stopping for a moment to reward yourself before you finish–and then again afterward.

The rules of business seem to be changing constantly, and no one model of success is dominant, so it’s particularly fascinating when a company breaks through the noise. But what are those qualities that allow for one startup to fly while so many others like it fail? That’s what the global brand consultancy Interbrand set out to determine with its Breakthrough Brands report–now in its second year–which names 40 companies that it says represent the next generation of brands across a variety of new, emerging, and evolving categories of business.

The companies on this year’s list were selected as a whole, through a criteria ranging across five factors:

• Clarity
• Relevance
• Differentiation
• Presence
• Audience engagement.

Last year’s list featured a number of now, close to household names like Casper, Venmo and Blue Apron. And this year’s crop includes some solid stars, like Slack, Google’s Verily, Samasource, and Square. But there are also a number of companies on the list that, while they may have broken through, are not necessarily sure bets. TaskRabbit, for instance, is contemplating a sale, while Cylance recently announced layoffs.

A list like this sparks as many questions as it answers. Why is Square there and, say, not Snap? Given Apple’s push into health tech, why is it not included here but Google’s Verily is?

Interbrand says that after selecting a master list of brands, they were broken up into seven categories. “The working future” focuses on career building and workflow with brands like Slack, and General Assembly; “from lifehacking to better living,” brands are removing obstacles and solving problems of our everyday lives, like TaskRabbit, Instacart; “not-so artificial intelligence” is a look at brands building new tools using AI like 30SecondsToFly, Face++, and Cylance; “Move me” is about companies focused on the future of mobility like Ofo, Drivy, and Ninja Van; “Funding change” focuses on financial organization like Square, Ripio, and Wealthsimple; “Experiences on demand” are brands that make it easier for us to find and get what we want, when we want it, like Clique Media Group and MikMak (2017 and 2016 Fast Company Most Innovative Company honorees, respectively).

Interbrand’s chief communications officer Paola Norambuena says the breakthrough list is confined to primarily start-ups that are less than 10 years old. Square is one of the elder statesbrands on this year’s list, but its appearance is for its relatively recent shift beyond its original payments product.

“The reason we focused on Square is because its business model keeps adapting,” says Norambuena. “They were certainly breakthrough when it came to the credit card payments, but what they’ve done is really pushed their model to stretch into a new category to fund small businesses. If you have a very strong brand, you often have consumer permission to go beyond your initial category, and this is an example of that. So it’s fascinating to see how they might grow.”

Both Apple and Google’s Verily appeared on Fast Company‘s Most Innovative Companies list for healthcare this year, and yet only Verily was named an Interbrand Breakthrough Brand. Norambuena says that’s down to Verily becoming a start-up on its own.

“The reason we pulled out Verily is because they’re being spun out of Google as a separate business,” she says. “It’s a bit arbitrary, but we thought what they’re doing is important to talk about, will continue to grow, and is indicative of a larger area of growth.”

There is an equal balance between product quality, financial growth, and brand strength. Norambuena says that for many start-ups, the focus is primarily on the former two, and not enough on the latter. “We see a lot of comparable businesses, they may all have interesting technology, be of similar size, but the ones that pull ahead are the ones that understand the value of a great brand,” she says. “They need a cohesive story that will help them break from the pack.”

One example was Chinese bikeshare company Ofo, which is among a handful of strong companies, including rival MoBike, in that highly competitive space in China. Norambuena says Ofo was specifically picked over MoBike based on the strength of its brand. “It’s a stronger brand in everything from identity, packaging, the experience itself,” she says.

See the full list below, and read more about the methodology and category breakdown of the 2017 Breakthrough Brands list here.

THE LIST

The class of 2017 is joining the workforce with some tough challenges but, according to researchers, with plenty of optimism. But no matter how lofty the speeches on this year’s commencement circuit may be, the reality is that lots of new grads will land in crappy entry-level jobs–if they’re lucky to find jobs at all.

That means competition for the good ones is going to be steep. So to find out what it takes to get a leg up, Fast Company asked a few recent grads at YouTube, Giphy, and SoundCloud for their advice.

Related:What It Takes To Start Your Career At Facebook, Nike, Refinery29, And BuzzFeed

Make Something You Can Show Off

Probably the most common resume-writing advice is to avoid describing your job duties and focus instead on something you actually accomplished. Not only is that wise counsel, it goes for your LinkedIn profile, too, and Niger Little-Poole and Mike Nolan are living proof that it works.

Both joined the GIF-sharing app Giphy less than a year ago, after recruiter Eric Goldfarb noticed on LinkedIn that both had done some interesting work. While interning at Mozilla, Nolan had built an in-browser video-editing tool that caught Goldfarb’s eye. Nolan, now a web engineer at Giphy, was proud of the project, and since it was open-source, he was able to share it on GitHub, then post the link on LinkedIn. “I really liked the project so I really wanted to tell people about it,” he says.

Little-Poole’s role as a data scientist at Giphy is his second job out of college, but he’s had even more success than Nolan using this approach. Little-Poole cites mutually up-to-date GitHub and LinkedIn accounts as a major reason he’s landed internships as well the data engineering job he held prior to joining Giphy. On LinkedIn, he lists the “tools I know how to use, programming languages, and I keep a lot of links to things I’ve worked on in the past.”

Related:This Is What Recruiters Look For On Your LinkedIn Profile

It’s a simple matter of giving employers something concrete to get interested about. Little-Poole says he’s already “seen that come up a lot of times on interviews. People ask very specifically because they can see it,” adding, “I really think it’s about having done something.”

He’s right. Writing for Fast Company earlier this month, Facebook’s head of people Lori Goler confirmed how important this is. “If you can show a hiring manager at Facebook something you yourself thought of, put together on your own, and then convinced other people to start using, you’ll stand a better chance of sticking out.”

Forget Your Credentials–Just Keep Learning

“I wasn’t a strong engineer when I started interning at Google. I had barely started coding the year that I applied,” says Angelica Inguanzo, now a user experience (UX) engineer at YouTube. But she was undaunted. “I just kept learning and developing my coding skills, and that’s what led me from a nontechnical internship to more technical projects and my current engineering position.”

Inguanzo says earning a spot in Google’s BOLD internship program was a crucial factor in eventually landing a full-time role, and she chalks that win up to a few things. First, she says, “I could talk for days about my passions,” which include the “intersection of art and technology,” and second, “I had experience in a range of areas because I was constantly challenging myself.”

It didn’t matter that she wasn’t the world’s best developer. Inguanzo’s first few college internships were in photography, videography, and film editing, where she also picked up some experience using Adobe products like Illustrator and Photoshop. But Inguanzo knows it wasn’t her technical credentials that put her over the top–it was her “soft skills,” especially her ability to stay flexible enough to learn on the fly.

“I always did more than I was asked,” she says. “I didn’t wait for anyone to tell me what needed to be done–I paid attention and looked for solutions.” One of her jobs as a Google intern was to analyze social media metrics, but Inguanzo took it a step further (right in line with Goler’s advice): “I went on to build a system that allowed my teammates to track their specific metrics easily.”

Related:Forget Coding–Here’s The Skill You Need Most When You Start Your Career

Lean Into Any Connection You Can Find

Dennis Lee joined the streaming platform SoundCloud as a marketing coordinator in October last year, and he suspects it had something to do with his interview habits.

“I think what got me through the door with my hiring manager was that I had previously worked at an agency that she worked with,” he says, “so there was that connection.” Dumb luck, sure, but Lee was savvy enough to lean into that on his interview. “We talked a lot about the projects I worked on while at the agency and compared our experiences in workflow with that agency versus how things were done at SoundCloud.”

This strategy isn’t always obvious. Job interviews often feel more one-sided than like actual conversations, and candidates may hesitate to turn the tables and ask a hiring manager about their own experiences. But not Lee, who looked for any point of overlap he could find.

“In my second interview, with her manager, I remember being able to really connect on how we had both lived in Berlin before.” Living in Berlin isn’t a job skill, but it was a great excuse to make a one-on-one connection: “He previously worked out of SoundCloud’s Berlin office, whereas I spent a semester studying abroad there. We talked mostly about the differences in lifestyle, people, and work culture in Berlin versus New York.”

Looking back, says, Lee, “it was just a personal connection that did the trick.”

Do What You Like, Quit What You Don’t

This graduation season, you’ll probably hear a lot of lame, unhelpful advice, like “follow your passion” or “own your own future.” When you just need a decent paycheck to start chipping away at your student loan debt, doing something you love might sound like a luxury, especially early in your career.

But Inguanzo thinks the bigger risk is getting “stuck somewhere that you’re not happy.” As she puts it, “Sometimes we may do work that we don’t realize we will love, or hate,” but that the only way to know for sure is to try. If something isn’t a good fit, quit it fast and move on.

This takes equal parts decisiveness and patience, Lee points out. If you’re not in a hurry to determine your lifelong career obsessions right after graduating, you’re freer to experiment–or even just hold out. “In my case it was just about being patient until the right thing presented itself,” he says. Adds Inguanzo, “The way I see it, if there’s no passion, there’s no point.”

On-demand startups have weathered criticisms for (among other things) classifying workers as independent contractors and avoiding the higher costs associated with providing benefits and covering payroll taxes for full-time employees.

Uber has fought several class-action lawsuits over worker misclassification. Earlier this year, a Los Angeles judge rejected a settlement that would have paid just over $1 to 1.6 million California drivers. Following disputes with its contractors, grocery delivery startup Instacart changed its model to offer employee status to its contractors.

Related:The Gig Economy Won’t Last Because It’s Being Sued To Death

Some gig economy startups have taken the opposite approach by hiring W-2 employees and providing benefits early on instead of relying on contract labor. Here’s a look at some of these startups and their rationale.

When You Want Employees To Build Trust With Customers

Hello Alfred is a New York-headquartered home management startup that sends assistants called “Alfreds” to pick up customers’ dry cleaning, clean their apartments, ship their packages, or perform other home management tasks. CEO and cofounder Marcela Sapone says when the startup first launched in September 2014, they chose to hire Alfreds as employees so that customers could trust them to act as their proxies. “We needed to make sure we’re hiring really trustworthy people and giving them the skills to deliver on that value proposition,” she says.

Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University and author of the upcoming book The Sharing Economy, says that Hello Alfred has a business model that lends itself to hiring employees. “It doesn’t make sense for them to use contractors on-demand because they’re trying to get individuals who keep going back to the same apartment,” he says. “There’s trust that needs to build up between the customer and the Alfred.”

Although this decision means 30% higher labor costs versus contractors and less flexibility to change pay rates or contractor agreements on a whim as some other startups do, Sapone feels the extra cost has paid off. “We chose W-2 [employees] so we could invest in our employees and train them, which is not something you can do with 1099 contractors,” she adds. Hiring employees over contractors also means Alfreds can advance within the company. Sapone says they’ve hired hundreds of Alfreds (she declined to share a specific number) and enjoyed strong employee retention, which is harder to ensure with a contract workforce.

“The other area where we see a big payoff is the customer feedback and the amount of customer service volume that we have to handle,” Sapone adds. Instead of operating on a pure on-demand model, Hello Alfred’s recurring service helps smooth out ebbs and flows in demand. “Alfreds visit [customers’ homes] once a week, every week on set days,” Sapone explains. “You can also add things in an on-demand way.”

Currently, Hello Alfred operates in Boston, New York, and San Francisco, with plans to launch in other cities. Scaling up in other markets can be a slower process when it requires hiring employees, but Sapone says this self-imposed “mechanical governor” also has an upside. “We have to grow in a sustainable, thoughtful way,” she says. “We have to find the right employees and train them in the right way.”

To Help Build A More Knowledgeable And Productive Staff

Mulberrys Garment Care is an on-demand laundry and dry-cleaning company launched in Minnesota in 2009, using employees for pickups, deliveries, and the actual cleaning process. The company now operates in Minnesota and San Francisco, with about 150 employees. CEO Dan Miller says hiring employees helps ensure a consistent customer experience and also aids with information sharing. “When you’ve seen a sequined gown before or know where a customer lives, those things all feed on each other,” he says.

While hiring employees over contractors may appear more expensive on paper, Miller feels it still makes financial sense. “Because of the fact that you have a more knowledgeable and more productive staff, you end up being able to deliver a better product at a competitive wage, but it’s a long-term play,” he says. “It’s not the cheap, quick answer.”

Mulberrys customers can order clothes to be picked up on-demand within an hour, so the company uses demand forecasting to ensure that they have enough staff to handle those requests, especially during spring cleaning season.

While this model isn’t as flexible for workers as, say, turning on an app when they have a free hour, Miller feels the stability offered to employees outweighs the desire for total flexibility. “For the majority of people, what they want is a great job that allows them a career path they can grow into and offers them some type of security,” he says.

Mulberrys currently offers employees health insurance, workers compensation, and vacation time, with plans to add an employee stock ownership plan later this year. “That makes it so much easier to recruit people because it’s something they can get excited about,” he says.

Offer Flexible Pricing To Avoid Wasting Time

When the cleaning company MyClean first launched in New York City in late 2009, they partnered with local service-based companies who had their own W-2 employees. MyClean then treated those employees as their 1099 contractors. The business started to gain traction, but it began to plateau around $60,000 to $70,000 of profit per month. CEO Michael Scharf says quality control was the main culprit.

“To really have better processes in place and do all the things that were required to consistently do a good job,” Scharf says, they pivoted in late 2010 to hiring their own cleaners as W-2 employees. “We slowly transitioned from using the companies we were using into using our own employees,” he adds. MyClean then launched in Chicago in 2014.

The obvious advantage of hiring contractors is that the company doesn’t have to pay them when there’s no demand or when they’re traveling between appointments, as they do with employees. To combat the problem of potential downtime, MyClean launched a flexible pricing tool to optimize cleaner’s time.

Most customers want a Friday 10 a.m. cleaning. “They want to let their cleaner in before they leave for work on Friday,” Scharf says. “If you’re cool with us coming Tuesday, you’re gonna pay a lot less than that person [who insists on a Friday cleaning].” Customers leave their keys with their doorman so the cleaner can come when they have a hole in their schedule. “We’re matching the supply and demand, Scharf says. “It’s like the anti-Uber surge pricing.”

Will This Approach Catch On?

Sundararajan says that depends on whether it makes for that company’s business model. He feels the problem is not that companies exploit 1099 contractors, but that our labor system hasn’t caught up with the new realities of nontraditional, on-demand work. “We should be spreading the benefits across all work arrangements,” he says. “Your work arrangement should have nothing to do with the fringe benefits you receive.”

He’d like to see the government create structures where nonemployees have an easier time setting a retirement plan and accessing other benefits. Congress may soon consider legislation in this realm, including a plan from Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) that would create more portable benefits for gig workers.

Of course, these changes wouldn’t happen overnight. “What we’ve constructed as full-time employment has taken a century,” says Sundararajan. “Employment didn’t come with all these good things attached to it. These were things that labor unions did in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, and now we have to decouple it from that [traditional employment] model.”

Confession time: I hate applicant tracking systems (ATS) with a burning passion. Why? Because in the name of making things easier for companies by “pre-filtering out” unqualified candidates, the peddlers of ATS software have dehumanized the hiring process and sent a terrible message to jobseekers: Conform to the requirements of our machines, or risk being ignored. Does that sound like a great way to attract the best and brightest?

Now to be fair, ATS software has grown more sophisticated in recent years, moving away from simply tallying up keywords on a resume to studying the context behind them. This means a drive toward substance, and that’s a very good thing.

Related: I Built A Bot To Apply To Thousands Of Jobs At Once–Here’s What I Learned

In this post, I’m going to show you how to communicate that substance in a way that works for these systems, and–here’s the tricky part–also works when a hiring manager is reviewing it.

Use The LinkedIn Profiles Of Competitors To Identify Keywords

A big misstep jobseekers make is trying to use job postings to identify keywords. This is wildly ineffective, because most job postings are a mix of “must have” skills, “good to have” skills, and “pie in the sky” skills that someone decided to stick in at the last minute. Try to play to all of these areas and your resume will end up looking like Frankenstein’s monster.

Instead, I recommend that you create a short list of 10-15 direct competitors. For example, let’s say I’m going after a chief medical officer position. By using LinkedIn’s search function to pull up fellow CMOs, I can quickly gather together the URLs of highly qualified people who currently have this job.

Now, I’m going to scroll down to the “Featured Skills & Endorsements” section of their profiles. These are keywords, and the best part is that they’ve been pre-optimized by going through the LinkedIn system. You don’t need to wordsmith any of these keywords.

Start by opening up a document and writing down any and all keywords that you might remotely possess. Examples for CMOs would be keywords like Good Clinical Practice, Clinical Trials, Cross-Functional Leadership, Performance Improvement, Quality Management, Talent Acquisition, Community Outreach, Medical Affairs, and others.

Now that you have this general list, do the following:

• Circle the five to seven keywords you are strongest in. This is your wheelhouse, the engine behind why you’ll succeed at this job. These will be highlighted prominently within the resume and expanded upon within your work experience section.
• Circle the keywords you have some working experience with. These are electives, which you have the option of briefly highlighting within the resume.
• Cross out those keywords which you have zero experience with. And no, taking a course in college doesn’t count!

Think Context, Not Keyword Stuffing

Early types of ATS software used what’s known as semantic search technology, a fancy of saying they counted up the keywords they’d been programmed to look for, and those resumes with more of them were passed along. As a result, all types of bad behavior proliferated on resumes, including “stuffing” the document with dozens upon dozens of repetitive keywords. These days however, it’s all about contextualization, analyzing the document to see how these skills are expanded upon within the document, and weighing that instead.

Related: This Is What Recruiters Look For In Your LinkedIn Profile 

Here’s how to lend weight to your keywords:

1. Create a large, boldfaced title at the start of your resume (after your name and contact information) that either lists the position you’re going after or offers a powerful branding statement.

Title example: Chief Medical Officer (CMO)

Branding statement example:“Clinical/Medical Affairs Executive with a focus on improved patient outcomes and growth in Managed Care environments.”

2. Ditch the “Objective” section at the start of the resume in favor of a couple of powerful bullet points that highlight your strongest keywords.

Here’s an example highlighting clinical trial design: “Expert in working with medical directors and contract research organizations (CROs) on developing robust clinical trials and managing areas such as site selection.”

3. Create a standalone keywords section where you simply group together the major keywords you wish to highlight.

List the strongest ones first, followed by the second-tier keywords. Remember: Be sure you can credibly defend any keywords listed during an interview.

4. Don’t be afraid to go longer to tell the story. Forget about adhering to a one-page limit–fleshing out keywords is well worth the extra space. Provide examples of project successes, or even small wins at work, where you applied a keyword skill to really stand out.

5. Write out all acronyms, and provide the abbreviation:

Worked with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) to rapidly establish a presence within Albuquerque, New Mexico territory.

6. Keep fancy graphics and elements to a minimum.

I recently worked with a client who had some excellent content in a 3D text box within the resume. Problem was, the ATS software perceived this as an image, not text, and none of the information passed through. Keep the layout simple, use visual elements sparingly, and remember: Content is king.

7. Don’t place your entire career strategy in the hands of ATS software. Connect with others. Demonstrate your value and passion. Ask for help. Success in the job search is still all about the human connection–not forgetting that is the real way you game these systems!

This article originally appeared on Glassdoor and is reprinted with permission.

When the temperature soared to 100 degrees in the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan last week, refugees living there could keep fans running inside their shelters. The camp, which had only sporadic access to electricity for its first two and a half years, is now home to the first solar farm in a refugee community.

The two-megawatt solar plant, funded by a donation from the Ikea Foundation, sends power into Jordan’s national grid, helping offset the electric bill for part of the camp, which is now connected to the grid. For 20,000 Syrian refugees living in two villages in the camp, power is free 24 hours a day. The plant will soon be scaled up to five megawatts to cover the needs of all of the camp’s 35,000 residents.

“In winter in Azraq it gets dark around 4 p.m.,” says Olga Sarrado Mur, a spokesperson for the U.N. refugee agency that runs the camp. “So it was about 11 hours in the dark without proper electricity. The summers are also very harsh here, very hot, so not having electricity means not having cold water, not being able to store their food properly, and not having a fan to cool down their shelter properly.”

In January 2017, two villages in the camp were connected to the national grid in Jordan. But because electricity in Jordan is expensive, the camp’s administrators knew that it wouldn’t be possible to pay to keep the power flowing continuously. (The camp paid for the electricity using some of its funds from the United Nations.) At the nearby Zaatari refugee camp, home to around 80,000 refugees, the camp can only afford to turn on electricity six hours a day. Solar power can change that.

The solar plant is expected to save $1.5 million a year in electricity bills, which the U.N. can invest in other projects to support refugees. Installing the solar panels also provided jobs for 50 refugees, some of whom will continue to have work maintaining the panels.

“Now that summer is here–it was 38 degrees [100 degrees Fahrenheit] today in Azraq–we see families already buying a fan, a fridge,” says Sarrado.

It’s a model that the U.N. thinks will work at other refugee camps. Another solar farm is already under construction at Zaatari refugee camp and will be complete by the end of the year. “It makes sense,” says Sarrado. “Especially in areas like Jordan where there are over 300 days of sun.”

Sometimes it starts with an eye roll. Maybe a proposal of yours gets rejected and one you think sounds pretty dumb gets approved in its place. Ugh. You try keeping your feelings to yourself, but your reaction inside is defensive: “They don’t get it!” or, worse, “How could they be so stupid!?”

It’s natural to get frustrated at work, and it’s fine to grab a coworker if you really need to vent. But there’s often an undertone of arrogance to reactions like these, and it can get in your way if you aren’t careful. While you’re busy feeling self-righteous, like the only smart one in the room, you’re probably not thinking, “How could I make it better?” or “Maybe they don’t understand.” Which means you’re asking fewer questions and probably doing lower-quality work than you could be–which in the long run isn’t so good for your career.

Here’s how to avoid all that.

Where Arrogance Really Comes From

“Will I have to dumb down my work to win this business?” I heard that one from a coaching client the other day. The short answer, of course, was no. But the longer one was that my frustrated client would need to figure out why that felt like the only option.

Most of the time, arrogance is used to cover the fear that we’re not really worthy, that we don’t measure up. It’s fear turned upside down and masquerading as superiority. That isn’t too hard to see, at least not in principle. But in practice, it can be tough to correct. Over the long term, this type of reaction can leave you missing out on the best assignments and opportunities of your career. I’ve seen that happen repeatedly in clients, colleagues, and myself.

There’s a reason for arrogance, though, especially when it comes to our work: It’s a self-protection mechanism we set up around things we care about–work we’re really proud of or skills we know we bring to the table. But it also blocks our ability to understand and help others, and there’s no way around it: No matter what you do, collaborating, communicating, and finding common ground is crucial to your own success.

But if those periodic flare-ups of arrogance let you know that something you care about is being questioned or jeopardized, tuning into them differently can help you figure out the underlying fear–and do something more productive about it.

Catching Yourself In The Act

I was fostered at birth, adopted, and then fostered again. I know what rejection feels like. Early in my life, I got into the habit of lapsing into judgmental superiority whenever I feared being an outsider. But having spent parts of my life yearning to be part of a group, I’ve had more than my fair share of chances to catch myself using arrogance to preempt the disappointment of failing to.

The key, though, is that I have caught myself–something I only learned to do gradually and with real effort. After a long career as a creative professional, and now was a business coach to creatives, I see myself and my clients falling in and out of arrogance as we deal with difficult interpersonal situations.

And I’ve found that in order to avoid that pattern, you’ve first got to learn how to know when you’re doing it, then reverse roles with the object of your arrogance–this way you can learn something about yourself. It isn’t easy, but there are really only two mental habits you need to practice:

Catch yourself in the act. I’m sitting across the table from a guy with a PhD, and it just became clear that I know some obscure fact that he doesn’t know. I exult in this. “I can’t believe how stupid he is!” I think to myself, and a feeling of relief sweeps over me. That’s my queue. Whenever you catch yourself thinking something that makes you feel better during an anxiety-laden interaction, it’s probably your arrogance swooping in to spare you from vulnerability. Take note!

Reflect on the source of your fear. Right after tuning into my relief that the PhD isn’t an all-knowing super-genius comes the realization that I’ve stumbled upon a fundamental truth about myself–something I already know but tend to bury: It’s my old lack of education surfacing, that old fear or not fitting in or measuring up. I’ve just mentally switched from feeling inferior to superior. But now I’ve just noticed myself doing that, and what’s more, I understand why.

Related:How To Manage Your Anxiety During Tough Times At Work

Digging Under The Surface

Once you cognitively capture this emotional reality underneath the surface, you regain some self-control. Now you can turn it over, examine it, and think about what it means. Best of all, you can prevent it from damaging those crucial interpersonal relationships that your career depends on.

Personally, I know that this knee-jerk mental reaction is a repeating behavior of mine. It’s not rational–it’s automatic, instantaneous, and completely emotional, and it’s probably never going away completely. But that’s just fine, because it triggers a mental response I’ve learned to keep handy:

I’m neither inferior nor superior to this guy. I’m a person with my own strengths and weaknesses. So is he. His accomplishments are balanced by his fundamental humanity. Do I really want or need a PhD? Nah. Can I help him? Can he help me? Maybe.

To be fair, I haven’t always pulled off this kind of self-correction (and sometimes still don’t), and you won’t every time either. But practicing it can help spare you from those moments where others catch you getting all smug and self-righteous before you’ve managed to catch yourself.

And when you do, you won’t just come across as a more humble, self-possessed, emotionally intelligent person. You’ll also reduce your own anxiety. That lets you build relationships with people that take both of you forward, rather than stay weighed down by old, familiar fears.

Saturday Night Live concluded its season the same way cast and crew started it: wildly overconfident about the defeat of Donald Trump.

During a recent bye week, NBC aired a rerun from early in the season–the Tom Hanks-hosted episode that blessed the world with David S. Pumpkins just before the election. As I wrote in this space the following Monday, re-watching that episode brought into sharp relief the attitude of not only the cast, but also liberals in general, heading into the voting booths. “Man, that was kind of a close call,” we all seemed to think–prematurely, as it turned out. Many of us were so sure the threat of Trump would be vanquished, we didn’t stop to examine what forces on both sides had brought him to the brink of the nation’s highest office, let alone seriously entertain the idea he might eke out a win. Everyone is now intimately familiar with how that all turned out. But despite SNL, and the rest of us by proxy, doing some soul-searching since the election, the season finale presented Donald Trump as all but defeated. History repeats itself, sure, just usually not this quickly.

Riding a high off the previous week’s killer Melissa McCarthy episode, the show immediately obliterated its surplus stores of goodwill with a cold open nearly as tone deaf in its own way as the infamous Pepsi ad.

In an echo of the Kate McKinnon’s eulogic tribute to the Hillary Clinton presidency that never was, from the first post-election episode, the show opened with Alec Baldwin’s Trump seated at a piano and warbling out Leonard Cohen’s singularly overused lament, “Hallelujah.” He is soon joined by Beck Bennett’s Mike Pence and Kate McKinnon’s Kellyanne Conway, and eventually the other usual suspects, including Scarlett Johansson reprising Ivanka from her excellent episode a couple months ago.

This premise might have seemed like a fun idea in the writers room. The Trump administration, after all, had arguably just ended its most tumultuous week in a term that has so far been wall-to-wall earthquake–and there’s an obvious symmetry to bookending the past six months with this piano ballad. But the idea should have stayed in the writers room.

The “Hallelujah” bit is a victorious, Judd-Nelson-fist-in-the-air-at-the-end-of-The-Breakfast-Club declaration of a threat extinguished. In the world of this sketch, Trump’s impeachment is all but assured, and we can immediately restore our heads back to their natural sand-bound positions. The thing is, Trump’s impeachment is nowhere near assured, and even if it were, there are no guarantees that the impeachment would remove him from office. And even if it did, that wouldn’t assure the undoing of his most protested policies and staffing decisions.

Trump’s recent debacles should give his political opponents optimism, but that optimism should not translate into the certainty that appears to undergird this sketch. Certainty is, paradoxically, a form of ignorance. The more certain a person is of a particular outcome, the more possibilities that person is either unaware of or actively disregarding. A display of renewed optimism on SNL would have been appropriate, but a gesture of certainty brings us right back to the pre-election mindset that seemed so embarrassing in retrospect after Donald Trump prevailed.

If the opening brought on flashbacks of what went wrong with this past election, the opening monologue hinted at what could sink the next one.

Dwayne Johnson is almost objectively great. He exudes charisma at all times, you could crack an egg on his neck veins, and he has proved he can ably handle anything SNL throws at him. However, the shtick where he’s considering running for president has been hard to endure. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was nothing if not an advertisement for the limits of celebrity as a force for political gain. One could argue that Donald Trump’s celebrity is what pushed him over the top, but one would be discounting the power of racism, misogyny, “economic anxiety,” and a litany of other factors. Perhaps if Johnson had been continuously talking about his ideas on policy since the election, and rumors emerged that he had been quietly consulting political operatives about what he might have to offer as a candidate, that might be fine. But to winkingly shout about it from magazine covers and late night talk shows during the promotional cycle for Baywatch smacks of cynical exploitation–or at the very least, throwing heavy words lightly. So the last thing SNL should have done was endorse this farce, which of course it did.

After a quick moment to commemorate Johnson’s admission to SNL’s vaunted Five-Timers Club, the opening monologue turns into a (faux?) launch of his presidential candidacy. Surprise guest Tom Hanks takes the stage and accepts the role of VP, a banner unfurling behind them with Johnson/Hanks 2020 festooned upon it. Hanks spent his own monologue in the episode just before the election, embracing his unofficial role as America’s Dad to assure the country that everything’s gonna be okay. Despite being, like Johnson, almost objectively great, Hanks was wrong. For anyone hoping for more jobs, better healthcare, sensible immigration policy, and a rebuke against misogyny, racism, and corruption, everything didn’t turn out okay. There is still no guarantee that it will. Just because Trump appears to be on the ropes doesn’t mean Colin Jost should refer to him as “President-for-now” during Weekend Update, or that we’re comfortable enough to pretend President Dwayne Johnson is a good idea.

After the election, many people were shocked that something that seemed like it could not, and should not, happen had happened. By treating the end of Donald Trump like a foregone conclusion, the writers of the show, and similarly minded viewers are setting themselves up to be shocked all over again.

There’s a crazy scene in the new movie Paint It Black, based on the novel by Janet Fitch, where Josie (Alia Shawkat) attends her boyfriend’s funeral. Upon arrival, she’s grabbed by her boyfriend’s mother Meredith (Janet McTeer) who blames her for his suicide. Meredith starts choking Josie, forcing her to crawl away as Meredith pulls the long, expensive rug out from under feet.

The scene is scrappy and scrambling, alarming, and even somehow a little funny as Meredith rage-sobs on the floor. It also becomes the movie in a microcosm: these two women forced into a volatile relationship who have to reckon with their guilt and grief. For director Amber Tamblyn, this was precisely what attracted her to the project in the first place.

“Janet Fitch writes the way women think in a way that is so different and poetic and brutal,” Tamblyn says. “She really knows how to write messed-up, imperfect, violent protagonists. I don’t think we have enough of that in film.”

Back in 2004, none other than Amy Poehler gave Tamblyn a copy of Fitch’s book. After reading Paint It Black, she was immediately struck with the idea this would make a good film. At that point, Tamblyn was focused solely on acting. She was then starring as the title character on Joan of Arcadia while filming her role as Tibby in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. In the more than a decade since, Tamblyn has explored creative paths beyond acting: In 2015, she released a collection of poems, Dark Sparkler, with Harper Collins, and she has also written frequently for Bust magazine. All the while, she had been working on her directorial debut in Paint It Black, which has been eight years in the making.

“I always watched how directors worked, with no intention of really wanting to direct. I was initially kind of scared,” says Tamblyn. “But once I said yes, I was like, ‘yeah, why don’t I direct? I totally know how to make this movie.’ Then I was like a train that couldn’t be stopped.”

The result is a movie that is shadowy and tense as it explores the relationship between Josie and Meredith. At times it feels reminiscent of Todd Haynes’s Carol, due in no small part to McTeer’s Cate Blanchett-infused bone structure and sophistication. Shawkat, meanwhile, is the perfect punky Josie, managing to appear lovable and not-so-lovable as she works through her boyfriend’s death.

One ethos of the film is perhaps the opposite of Netflix’s Thirteen Reasons Why, which also explores the aftermath of suicide. Where Thirteen Reasons Why is blunt and explicit with the causes of Hannah Baker’s suicide, Paint It Black is more realistically murky. Everything is in flux and even the suspected reasons for why Michael (Rhys Wakefield) killed himself show themselves as incomplete.

“The way I wanted to talk about [suicide] in my film was to not talk about it,” Tamblyn says. “It was to leave a lot of blanks and make it more about the people who were left behind. I don’t think we get to have answers. Certainly, in this story, you don’t get to know why something happens. You don’t get to know why somebody took their life.”

Tamblyn’s next project is another debut: She’ll star in Gina Gionfriddo’s off-Broadway play Can You Forgive Her? which opens May 23 and runs through June 11. Her character Miranda is yet another complex woman who’s dealing with debt, a sugar daddy, and a murderous date. The role is a reflection of the kind of career Tamblyn wants to have going forward.

“In the current political climate and the world we live in, I’m no longer interested in playing or dealing with or talking about or writing women who aren’t complex on several levels,” Tamblyn says. “To me, there’s not a conversation that should not involve gender and race anymore. I want to keep writing about women who I might not necessarily like and who the country might not necessarily like.”

Amazon Echo and Google Home would like your attention now. Or at least they will in the near future.

The two tech giants have both recently announced proactive notifications for their connected speakers. Instead of just listening for commands, Echo and Home will soon light up when they have something to say. Users can then ask about what they missed and get notifications read to them by Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa.

If you’ve ever been overwhelmed by notifications on your phone, the idea of yet another device begging for attention probably sounds like a nightmare. But with devices like Home and Echo, Google and Amazon have an opportunity to rethink how notifications ought to work in the first place. This is their chance to reduce distractions instead of creating more of them, and deliver only the information that matters. Let’s hope they don’t squander it.

The Need For Notifications

The desire for proactive notifications on connected speakers is understandable, especially from the perspective of developers making skills for these devices. Huy Nguyen, a software developer at ChefSteps, says notifications would finally allow the company’s Joule sous vide cooker to tell users when the water is heated, when the food is ready, or if there’s a problem with the cooker. Right now, all users can do is walk through recipes and start the cooking process.

“We can’t close the loop on a lot of things,” Nguyen says. “It’s not a full conversation without that.”

ChefSteps should be able to add those alerts later this year, when Amazon opens up notifications to all Alexa skill developers. (In the near term, Amazon is limiting notifications to a handful of services, including AccuWeather, The Washington Post, Just Eat, and Life360.) Nguyen is also pondering other notification-driven features, such as alerting family members via Alexa when dinner is ready, or asking how they’d like their food cooked.

A Time And A Place

But while notifications may be useful on devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home, they introduce new complications that don’t exist on smartphones.

On a phone, for instance, you can scan through a long list of notifications to decide which ones need immediate attention. That same process would be a waste of time on a voice-driven device like the Echo, which could make you spend minutes running through a list of unimportant alerts.

“It would be smart to allow certain types of notifications, or maybe approve notifications, because no one wants a firehose of stuff,” ChefSteps’ Nguyen says.

For now, Amazon and Google have devised crude solutions to this problem: Amazon will require users to opt into notifications for each skill, so they can select just the ones they really want. And Google is starting off with just a handful of high-priority notifications, including flight status, traffic updates, and reminders.

Neither approach will be sustainable in the long run. Google will inevitably want to support a broader range of notifications, and Amazon’s all-or-nothing approach isn’t flexible enough. You might, for instance, want to hear a breaking news update from the Washington Post in the evening, but not in the morning when you’re trying to get out the door. A set of flashing lights just isn’t enough to tell you whether you’re being alerted to something important–like traffic on your morning commute–or something that can wait until later.

To really deal with this issue, Amazon and Google will need to get smarter about how and when to deliver different notifications. That could mean dividing them into categories and withholding certain types of notifications at times, or waiting for a conversation to happen before interjecting with some related information.

Rohit Nadhani, the CEO and cofounder of an email service called Newton, sees the Echo’s Flash Briefing as an opportunity for those kinds of conversations to emerge. If users are already asking about the news and the weather, for instance, it might make sense for a service like Newton to offer a summary of some important emails.

“Amazon has announced publicly that they are going to let you do notifications, and then the natural progression there will let me latch onto their daily summary as well,” he says.

Putting notifications on a stationary device like the Echo or Google Home also presents some major challenges around location and access. If a user has multiple Alexa or Google Assistant devices around the house–or in other places like their car–should a notification appear on all of them? And how should notifications work on a device with multiple user accounts, such as Google Home? Solving these problems will require a lot more intelligence about where users are and what they’re doing, so that developers can determine where to deliver a notification.

“Right now, we don’t have that information, and I think it’s going to be something they’ll have to solve eventually,” Nguyen says.

Less Is More

As Amazon and Google figure out timing and delivery for notifications, they should also set guidelines on content. The goal should not be to duplicate the types of alerts people get on their phones, but to summarize and allow for quick action if necessary.

“I think fundamentally, Alexa or Google Home notifications are going to be much smarter than mobile notifications,” Nadhani says. “On mobile email notifications, you get notified for every email, or every email in a specific account, and I think that’s a bit too intrusive for an assistant like Google Home or Alexa.”

For Newton, Nadhani is envisioning a system that looks through an inbox for important information, and then provides quick summaries or reminders. A device like the Echo, for instance, might provide a nudge if an important client hasn’t responded to your email after a while. And when you’re listening to your daily summary, Newton might chime in with a list of meeting requests or incoming packages.

Both Nadhani and Nguyen acknowledge that it’s early days for the concept of voice-driven notifications. Amazon hasn’t released any extensive documentation for notifications on Alexa, and Google hasn’t revealed any sort of developer program for Home’s proactive features. But as the two companies race to one-up each other in the virtual assistant wars, they’ll need to be careful not to gloss over their underlying challenges. Otherwise, they’ll miss their shot to reduce notification overload.

“I think there are some really hard problems that need to be solved around how to control these things without holding developers down, without slowing us down,” Nguyen says. “I think it’s in their best interest to solve that before they just totally open it to the wild west, because if people turn off notifications right from the get-go, that whole experience is cut off.”

As one of the world’s top philanthropists, perhaps it makes sense that Bill Gates is treating beach reading like an intellectual cause: Each year, he offers up his list of the most important beach reads, none of which have ever featured Fabio on the cover.

Most tackle headier world topics including 2016 choices like The Vital Question, a scientific investigation by into how energy transfers between cells, to How to Not to Be Wrong, which offered plenty of life-improving equations built on math principles.

This year’s list is different, though, because it has a slightly more philosophical bent. As Gates writes on his personal blog, GatesNotes, the list “pushed me out of my own experiences, and I learned some things that made me question my own thinking about how the world works.” His five book lineup includes musing from a well-known talk show host, former president, and a few lesser-known people whose perspectives will definitely be better known now, which is sort of the point. As Gates puts it “I hope you’ll find that others make you think deeper about what it means to truly connect with other people and to have purpose in your life.” It’s a message that seems particularly on-point in these divisive political times.

Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah

In his memoir, TheDaily Show host riffs on what it was like to grow up biracial in apartheid South Africa, and how it propelled his particularly pointed albeit humor-seeking worldview. “As a longtime fan of The Daily Show, I loved reading this memoir about how its host honed his outsider approach to comedy over a lifetime of never quite fitting in,” Gates writes.

The Heart, by Maylis de Kerangal

This novel chronicles the journey of a man’s heart from his accidental death to its eventual transplant and all who encounter it along the way. Gates calls it “an exploration of grief” that is “closer to poetry than anything else.” As in, even super cerebral thinkers should step back to meditate the fragility of life and our human condition.

Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance

This memoir explores what it takes to overcome rural poverty in Appalachia. There isn’t really a simple solution for places with deeply systemic problems (and Vance’s book has come under quite a bit of criticism for its views on those systemic problems). Gates calls this an “against all odds” tale that offers “insights into some of the complex cultural and family issues behind poverty.” Spoiler alert: Vance is now a successful venture capitalist in San Francisco.

Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari

This is another big question book, a philosophical look at the potential future of humanity, powered by advances in technology and human potential. “So far, the things that have shaped society–what we measure ourselves by–have been either religious rules about how to live a good life, or more earthly goals like getting rid of sickness, hunger, and war,” Gates writes. “What would the world be like if we actually achieved those things? I don’t agree with everything Harari has to say, but he has written a smart look at what may be ahead for humanity.”

A Full Life, by Jimmy Carter

The peanut farmer’s son who went on to became president offers up anecdotes about what it takes to become successful. For Gates, the real power of the book is that it shows show what happens “for better and for worse” when a Have Not eventually takes high office. As he puts it, “A Full Life feels timely in an era when the public’s confidence in national political figures and institutions is low.”

Riz Ahmed has had a busy couple of years, first gaining pop culture and critical attention in HBO’s acclaimed The Night Of, then in the hit Star Wars prequel, Rogue One. But in a new PSA campaign, the actor says this might be his most important role yet because it aims to impact the real lives of ethnic minorities in the United Kingdom.

British Prime Minister Theresa May announced a snap general election for June 8th, so the group Operation Black Vote and ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi London are hoping to get the word out as widely as possible. “Black Don’t Vote” is a stark title –by “black,” the campaign is referring to ethnic minorities of all backgrounds in the UK. But according to Operation Black Vote, so are the statistics. The campaign says 1.4 million potential votes were not used by what they call Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) individuals, 28% of BME’s are not registered to vote (compared to 6% of white people), and among BMEs of African descent, that is closer to 50%.

Grime artist Jamal Edwards also stars in another PSA for the campaign. Both Edwards and Ahmed, who’s also no stranger to hip hop as half of the politically-charged Swet Shop Boys with Heems (Das Racist), lay out statistics and reasoning for boosting voter turnout to affect issues and decisions that impact BME communities.

It’s going to be a long, hot summer–or as they say in Russian “жарко как в Аду” (translation: “it’s hot as hell”).

For over a year now, we’ve been reading about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia: his praise of Vladimir Putin, his aides traveling there and getting chummy with Russian officials, and what may or may not have happened in his Moscow hotel suite during the Miss Universe pageant. And political and investigative reporters have been chasing down every lead, from rumors about payoffs through intermediaries and Russian banks supposedly guaranteeing Trump’s debt to offshore accounts and oligarchs allegedly funding his golf courses and hotels. In just the last two weeks, the heat index has ratcheted up even higher with the appointment of a special counsel, congressional committees demanding memos related to Trump’s communications with former FBI director James Comey, the seating of a grand jury in the case of fired national security adviser Michael Flynn, and reports that senior White House adviser Jared Kushner is a “person of interest” in the investigation.

But it seems increasingly likely that the president’s real problem could be more related to any cover-up of such entanglements with Russia, such as potential obstruction of justice for apparently trying to pressure Comey into dropping the Russia probe, rather than any sign of collusion or improper financing of Trump or his campaign.

That’s because when it comes to Trump’s Russia ties, it keeps getting smoky but there’s no real fire. Even Thursday’s revelation that the Trump campaign had at least 18 undisclosed emails and phone calls with Russian officials noted that there is no evidence yet of collusion with the Kremlin. It’s enough to leave even the best-informed observer simmering with annoyance–how long is this going to take? Even my 8-year-old turned to me the other day and blurted out, “Can’t the NSA tell the FBI what’s really going on with Trump?”

Well, be patient because this may take a while. Such an international mystery is complicated by the complexity of multi-layered financial transactions, the notorious inscrutability of Russian politicians and spies, and all of it muddied by layers of internet rumors and conspiracy mongering. In comparison, Watergate–a cover-up of a second-rate burglary–was simpler than your average game of Clue. As reporting legend Bob Woodward told the Washington Post: “And what’s worrisome to a reporter interested in getting facts is, this is so polarized, this is so emotional. This is driven by tweets and assertions from people who don’t really know. It’s too bad we live in this internet culture of impatience and speed, and it does not set us on the road to gathering facts.”

Not to mention the legal challenges involved in building a case against a sitting president. As FBI historian Tim Weiner noted last month, the FBI is seeking to gather evidence that can be used in a court of law against the Trump team and it will be “extraordinarily difficult” due to the complexity of a case involving eavesdropping, international espionage, and other factors.

As part of its investigation, the FBI recently reached out to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which collects financial transaction data from banks and other money service business likes PayPal and Western Union. It’s a relatively small unit, with about 250 to 300 employees who analyze such data for signs of money laundering and counterterrorism financing and to monitor banks for their compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act, among other rules. When the FBI has a criminal investigation, it turns to FinCEN for financial intelligence but “in order for it to be useful, you have a have a nexus to the U.S.,” notes John Cassara, who spent six years as a FINCen analyst. “But if it involves Russia and Cyprus and if that financial flow doesn’t cross the U.S., then they don’t get that info. There is nothing they can do.”

In that case, their only option is to request that a foreign FinCEN equivalent–and there is one in Russia and one in Cyprus–check their databases and respond to them. There are over 150 financial intel groups around the world that are part of a body called the Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Analysts and they often work together on inquiries. But each group is also affected by politics and in this case it’s doubtful that the Russian group would want to assist the FBI.

Two Sides To This Ruble

Let’s look at the dual tracks of the inquiry. One of them focuses on whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials during the election, implying that the then-candidate’s aides worked with the Kremlin while Russian agents spread fake news and hacked the Democratic National Committee. So far, there are reports of plenty of conversations between Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and maybe Roger Stone and Russian officials. None of that is illegal. But we know every little about the content of those conversations beyond reports that Flynn may have discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. And though Flynn and Manafort have received payments from Russian entities, there is no proof yet that they were compensated in return for helping the Russians disrupt our election. It’s the same challenge faced by prosecutors cracking down on municipal corruption–proving a quid pro quo is not easy since it doesn’t usually take the form of someone handing a city official a bag of money while caught on tape making their demands.

The second track, which can easily intersect with the first one, is focused on any Russian financing of Trump, either via the Kremlin itself or state-controlled banks and companies. This type of investigation is even more difficult since you’re trying to track the activity of Russian banks, whose transactions are opaque and whose current and former employees are resistant to talking. In addition, such activity is often conducted through shell companies and offshore accounts that are often set up purposely to disguise the money trail.

Such shell corporations–whether established in offshore havens like the Cayman Islands or even Delaware–don’t actually have any assets. They just function as pass-through entities, allowing one individual or company to move financial assets from a foreign country to the U.S. The true owners of the assets don’t have to reveal their names; usually only a local lawyer’s name is attached to the company. Often, there are multiple chains, in which a shell company is linked to dozens of other shell companies, making it even more difficult to trace the assets. One major news outlet spent several weeks in the Cayman Islands last fall, looking for offshore accounts linked to Trump and Russia and came up empty, sources tell me. And again, it’s not illegal for an individual, even with criminal ties, to buy a Trump condo (unless it’s proven that those ill-gotten gains were used in the purchase)–and even then it’s difficult to prove that the Trump Organization knew about the source of those funds.

And don’t look for much help from FinCEN. “They can’t learn much about shell companies,” even if they’re on U.S. soil, says Cassara. “If there’s no beneficial ownership info, then they don’t get much.” As to the NSA’s role, to answer my son’s question, they’re already collaborating with the FBI, CIA, Treasury Department, and FinCEN on the investigation.

A Shell Game

The use of such entities was illustrated most prominently in the Panama Papers, the document dump from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that helped set up such shell companies.

There are multiple examples of Russians, including organized crime associates, using such shell companies to purchase condominiums in Trump properties in Florida, Manhattan, and Panama City. Trump and his companies have been linked to at least 10 former Russian businessmen with connections to criminal groups or money laundering, reported USA Today. Among them, three owners of Trump condos “were accused in federal indictments of belonging to a Russian-American organized crime group and working for a major international crime boss based in Russia.” As Fast Company reported in early March, Mossack Fonseca helped Russians and other foreigners set up shell companies to buy condominiums in the Ocean Club, a Trump-owned property in Panama City that is the Trump Organization’s most lucrative overseas property.

In the past, Trump and his family have bragged about their Russian customers, with Trump telling reporters in 2013 after a presentation to potential investors in Moscow: “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.” And Donald Trump Jr. told the Russian press back in 2008, that“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets” around the world.

One of those assets, the Trump SoHo in Lower Manhattan, perfectly illustrates the complexity of Trump’s Russian connections. Felix Sater, a Russian immigrant who did time in jail in 1991 for stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass, was one of his partners. By the time he first met Trump, Sater was also awaiting sentencing after being convicted in a mob-linked $40 million stock fraud scheme. He was an executive with the Bayrock Group, a real-estate group which developed the Trump SoHo. When Trump’s children traveled to Moscow in 2006, Trump asked Sater to squire them around the city. And Sater still has ties to Trump, reportedly facilitating a meeting in February 2017 between Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and a Ukrainian politician who was peddling a pro-Russian peace plan. The principal Bayrock partner, Tevfik Arif, a former official of Kazakhstan, was reportedly arrested in 2010 during a raid on a luxury yacht in Turkey in a case that involved prostitution and human trafficking charges. (He was later acquitted.) The Trump SoHo opened in 2010, then became embroiled in litigation, was forced to refund more than $3 million in down payments to disgruntled customers and was foreclosed by creditors before being resold in 2014.

Trump’s lawyer has emphasized to reporters that his relationship was with Bayrock and not Sater and Trump said in a 2013 deposition that he barely knows Sater and wouldn’t recognize him “if he was sitting in the room right now.”

And the president continues to insist that he’s got nothing to do with Russia, telling NBC News earlier this month: “I have nothing to do with Russia. I have no investments in Russia, none whatsoever. I don’t have property in Russia.” His lawyers then released a certified letter showing that Trump has more than $100 million in income from Russian sources over the last decade, the vast majority of which is connected to the 2008 sale of a mansion in Palm Beach to a Russian billionaire. But, as The Atlantic‘s David A. Graham notes, the statements are unverifiable and it’s not clear whether the analysis includes the Trump Organization and any “Russian assets, debts, or other ties that might not appear in Trump’s personal tax returns.”

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. By 2007, Bayrock had more than $2 billion of Trump-branded developments in the works, reports TheAmerican Interest, including the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Fort Lauderdale and concept projects planned for Istanbul, Kiev, Moscow, and Warsaw. And Bayrock’s other partner was FL Group, an Icelandic investment company that was favored by Russian oligarchs, some of whom received huge loans from the firm. To get a sense of the mind-boggling complexity of FL Group’s connections, take a look at this relationship map of its cross-shareholding relationships with other major Icelandic banks in the tiny country.

And that’s just one of Trump’s developments. Several months ago, BuzzFeed put together an interactive TrumpWorld graphic that includes over 1,500 individuals and companies linked to the president in countries around the world–from Brazil to Dubai, Indonesia to Turkey, which also paid former national security adviser Flynn to lobby for its government. And on Monday morning, Flynn reportedly notified the Senate Intelligence Committee that he will plead the Fifth Amendment and not comply with a subpoena seeking documents related to its probe.

So, don’t hold your breath waiting for clear answers to these complicated questions–or for a quick resolution of this investigation. It could take at least six months or more. But granted, anything is possible. There could be another “Deep Throat” whistleblower at a high level in government or another massive leak of top-secret documents or the Russians could be up to more mischief. Any any of those things could speed up or delay or even kill any investigation. The truth is out there somewhere.

When workers finish their work retrofitting a 1920s-era house near Harvard’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the house will look essentially the same as it did before from the outside–but it will run on almost no energy.

The renovation of the former single-family home, now the headquarters of the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, is an attempt by the HouseZero project to demonstrate that it’s relatively easy to transform ordinary houses to eliminate their carbon footprint. Homeowners might think that making their homes more efficient will require huge renovation costs for little energy (and cash) savings. This project is hoping to prove otherwise, and be a model for other projects to emulate.

All of this is going to be accomplished using existing technology that homeowners can purchase now. “We could have done something that’s futuristic,” says Ali Malkawi, professor of architectural technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, director of the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, and the founder of the HouseZero project. “But what we chose to do is use existing ideas and technologies, put them all together, and see what we can do and push and reach goals that no one has reached before in terms of retrofits.” (One small, separate section of the building will test a more advanced design that could go even further.)

The building is in a historic district, which added another layer of difficulty to the design. The appearance from the outside had to stay essentially the same, though the renovation has enlarged the windows slightly to let in daylight–no one should have to switch on a light until the sun goes down.

“If you want to open the window yourself, you can,” says Malkawi. “But at the same time, the building by itself knows its need for ventilation, and it adjusts itself and opens up in relation to occupant health. If there’s a need for ventilating the building, it will automatically open the windows.”

Since adding mass to a wooden building can help it retain heat in the winter and stay cool in the summer, the redesign includes new concrete floor slabs to increase mass. A solar vent draws air up from the basement to help keep the building ventilated. The new windows, which are triple-glazed, are tightly sealed, so when they are closed, they also help keep the temperature comfortable. In extreme weather–during a deep freeze in February, for example–the building can use heat from a new geothermal heat pump installed beside the house.

The building’s performance will be measured through a network of sensors and studied so the results can be shared with homeowners who want to do the same thing or use some of the ideas. “If a homeowner wants to see the importance of the geothermal, we’ll be able to quantify that and they’ll be able to use that portion only if they don’t want to use the ultra-efficiency that we have,” says Malkawi.

Though the researchers haven’t quantified the costs yet for homeowners (or how quickly those costs could be offset by savings on energy bills), they plan to share the the full budget of the retrofit. The HouseZero project will be more complicated than a project at a typical home because it’s also converting the space to work well as an office and lab; Malkawi says that cost for homeowners should be affordable. “This can be done in a relatively inexpensive fashion,” he says.

For homeowners, making similar retrofits would save money–collectively, U.S. property owners spend more than $230 billion a year heating, cooling, and powering homes. The retrofits could also curb a major source of climate pollution. While it’s easier to make newly built houses ultra-efficient, most homes in the U.S. already exist–and buildings account for nearly 40% of carbon emissions in the country, more than any other sector.

In Sweden there’s a constitutional right they call allemansrätten. It’s a national concept of “freedom to roam” that allows anyone the right to access, walk, cycle, or camp on any land (the only exceptions being private residences, as well as gardens and lands under cultivation). To get the rest of the world to try it out, they just listed the entire country on Airbnb.

It appears that Sweden’s tourism is in the throes of a marketing contest. Last year the Swedish Tourist Association with agency Ingo created “The Swedish Number,” that allowed anyone, anywhere in the world, to dial in and be connected to a random Swede to chat about the country. Now Visit Sweden (the country’s global marketing department) working with agency Forsman & Bodenfors, is getting its own brand buzz with the help of Airbnb.

There are nine different “listings,” ranging from a rustic forest retreat in Varmland on the country’s west coast, to cliffs with panoramic ocean views close to Skuleskogen National Park.

According to Visit Sweden, it’s the first partnership of its kind with Airbnb, and, as gimmicks go, let’s hope there isn’t a rush of copycats. That said, it’s easy to imagine Airbnb jumping head first into allowing more tourism marketing like this the chance to target us directly from within the platform–for a price of course.

In this case, Jenny Kaiser, president of Visit Sweden’s US office, says the arrangement between Visit Sweden and Airbnb wasn’t a paid placement. “As the initiative is a pure branding campaign for Sweden as a destination, the partnership is strategic for both parties and no payment has been done from/to either side,” Kaiser says.

Facebook has had a huge impact on our lives: The company essentially owns a large part of the world’s social media user base with its products from Facebook itself, to Instagram, to WhatsApp playing an integral part in how we communicate with our family and friends and interact with brands, media, and public figures.

Given how much the company’s products influence our social media, and now, real-world lives, it’s no wonder why Facebook is one of the most coveted places to intern with year after year.  Which means that competition for a Facebook internship is fierce. We spoke with Utkarsh Sharma, a final year student at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, to find out how he got an internship with the company and what advice he gives for people who hope to land one there too. His internship went so well, Facebook offered him a full-time job as a software engineer after he graduates this year.

On His Internship Role At Facebook

My internship at Facebook London was in the summer of 2016 when I was 22 years old. It was a 12-week internship from May to August. I was a software engineering intern at Facebook, and was a member of an ads team based in the London office. The team works on building the infrastructure behind one of the ads products, which aims to allow small and medium local businesses to reach local audiences, and also allows larger retailers with multiple locations to use the local awareness aspect.

On How He Found Out About The Facebook Internship

I had heard about Facebook internships during the second year of university. What made it stick in my mind was how amazingly people spoke of it, and how upon subsequent googling, I ended up reading about it as being one of the best internships in the tech world. Being an electrical engineering major with an interest in coding, the position of a software engineering intern was the most natural choice for me.

I applied for the internship in my fourth year of studies (I’m in a five-year dual degree program). I very nearly did not apply for the Facebook internship because I didn’t believe that I would get it. However, when a college senior who works at Facebook encouraged me to apply for the internship, I decided to take the plunge and give it my best.

On The Interview Process With Facebook

A few days after I was referred, I received an email from a recruiter with a link for an automated online coding test. After I passed the test, I had multiple phone interviews. The interviews are held one at a time, with the next ones generally scheduled condition to performance in the previous interviews. This adds to the nervousness as each interview becomes very important, and the opportunity to redeem oneself in the future interviews might not present itself.

I actually wasn’t that nervous because at the time of my interviews with Facebook I already had another offer at company where I wanted to intern. I think this helped, as it reduced the performance pressure on me.

On The Qualities That Helped Him Score A Facebook Internship

Why I got the internship is a question I doubt I ever will be able to perfectly answer. I like to think it as a right mixture of hard work and luck. While being good at algorithms and data structures is a prerequisite, it is by no means the complete story. There are a lot of factors that go into someone getting hired at Facebook, including technical ability and a passion for the mission.

One of the factors which I feel helped me greatly was that I naturally tend to speak a lot, and so I was good at explaining my thought process while coding. This allowed the interviewer to have a good view at my thought process, and thus allowed them to build a better judgment on my skills.

On The Average Workday Of A Facebook Intern

One of the most empowering aspects of working as an intern at Facebook was that you were treated at par with a new full-time employee. I got to decide the way I wanted to handle my tasks. Facebook places a lot of trust in their interns.

My average day at the company was a mixture of a few sessions of coding and reviewing other people’s code, meetings, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and infinite breaks involving the snack areas and the foosball tables.

On Some Of His Best Experiences As A Facebook Intern

One of the highlights was the Facebook summer hackathon. Hackathons are events where people code for a fixed period of time to make anything they want to. Hackathons are an integral part of the culture of Facebook and some of the best features of today are the result of past hackathons.

Facebook organized the hackathon inside a bowling arena in the O2 stadium of London. Demoing a project at the end of the hackathon that I and a fellow intern made after 11 hours of hacking away was icing on the cake for me. The amount of praise it received followed by it now being used as an internal tool is more than what I could’ve asked for.

Another set of events tailored for the interns were the Q&As. Throughout the internship, there were these were hour-long sessions where interns got to ask questions and listen to some of the most prominent people of Facebook, including even Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg. These Q&As were great experiences, with no question being deemed as off limits.

On the purely fun side of things, the Facebook summer party towards the end of my internship was carnival themed and a lot of fun and lasted for over 12 hours.

On Whether Facebook Could Improve Its Internship Experience

The internship was a perfect experience, with a healthy mix of work with fun with a lot of surprises sprinkled on top. They took care of every single thing imaginable; housing, travel, local transportation, food, and visa.  My team was very supportive towards me, and I worked on real problems, which made an actual impact. I had one of the best summers of my life, and I can’t imagine it being any better.

On The Lasting Benefits Of A Facebook Internship

It would not be an overstatement to say that the Facebook internship changed my life. On the second last day of my internship, my team manager called me in a meeting and let me know that Facebook would be glad to have me back as a full-time employee. A year or two ago, this was a possibility that I would have considered only in my wildest dreams. The summer was a great learning experience for me, and I picked up skills which I wouldn’t have working on my own.

On What Others Could Do To Land An Internship At Facebook

Everyone’s case is different and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all advice that will work. I’d say that there’s more to coding and software engineering in general than sitting in front of a screen and mashing out code. There a lot of other skills such as working in a team that are equally important. Also, doing side projects or writing code for your own pleasure is a great and fulfilling way to learn.

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

Until recently, IBM was one of the first and biggest proponents of remote work. But no longer. In March, the company began directing thousands of employees to work from set locations or else look for another job, an ultimatum it extended more widely last week. The move is an alarming policy reversal that neither current trends nor recent history suggest is wise.

History Isn’t On IBM’s Side

IBM’s curtailment of remote work echoes Yahoo’s reversal more than four yeas ago, when CEO Marissa Mayer began requiring workers to come back to a traditional office so they could start “physically being together,” as then-HR chief Jackie Reses put it at the time.

To all appearances, all that physical togetherness hasn’t worked out so well. After weathering a firestorm, Yahoo initially stood by the policy change. But in the years that followed, it failed to regain its position as a leading internet company, suffered a series of devastating hacks, and finally agreed last year to sell itself to Verizon for about $4.4 billion–far less than the $100 billion market cap it had had at its peak.

Like Mayer in 2013, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is under pressure to turn her company around. And like Yahoo, IBM claims that the policy change is meant to improve collaboration and accelerate innovation.

It won’t work. Attempting to force workers back to IBM offices is a terrible idea for at least three reasons.

Why Mandatory Office Work Will Backfire

First, IBM will diminish the quality of its team. As much as 40% of the company’s workforce was already remote as of a decade ago, so it’s easy to see the new mandate as a way to trim staff without having to actually make layoffs. But if IBM is trying to get rid of people it deems extraneous, it’s pretty short-sighted. In all likelihood, what happened to Yahoo will also happen to IBM: The best talent will easily find new jobs with companies that are more open to remote work.

Not only do flexible work arrangements top job seekers’ lists of priorities, but making successful hires depends much more on relevant skills than on physical location. So if, months from now, IBM points to the number of employees choosing to relocate in order to keep their jobs as evidence of success, don’t buy it. Many will do just that because they have no other options, while the most high-performing, in-demand talent flies the coop. In the end, IBM will reduce the quality of its workforce while its competitors reap the benefits.

Second, requiring employees to work in an office will hurt productivity, not improve it. In a study published in Harvard Business Review in 2014, remote workers proved both more productive and more loyal than their peers onsite. In fact, IBM’s recent policy switch goes against its own research. In both a 2014 white paper by IBM’s Smarter Workplace Institute and in a conference panel the company hosted just weeks ago, its own experts suggested that remote workers tend to be happier, less stressed, more productive, more engaged with their jobs and teams, and believe that their companies are more innovative as a result of flexible work arrangements.

Third, this is the wrong thing to do and the wrong time to do it–not only for the company but for the U.S. economy. A big employer like IBM, which employs over 380,000 people worldwide, has a social responsibility it simply can’t overlook. At a time when smaller cities and rural areas are struggling, it’s backward-looking for a major corporation–especially one with such deep experience in remote work–to implement a policy that could take jobs away from regions that need them most. By demanding its employees flock to IBM’s urban headquarters, the company isn’t just sapping everyplace else of highly skilled talent, it’s also contributing to depopulating the communities where those remote workers live, and depressing local economies as a result.

There’s a sad irony to that. Thanks to the technologies and pioneering examples of many tech companies–including Microsoft, Google, Apple, and, yes, IBM itself–work is now far less time- and location-dependent than ever before. That means companies now have the ability to conceive of themselves as “results-only work environments,” where what really matters is what someone produces, not how many hours they work or where they sit in order to do it. Some, like the automation platform Zapier, are even offering bonuses to employees so they can move away to places where the cost of living is lower. Meanwhile, IBM will keep selling cloud-based software and services that support an “anytime, anywhere workforce” it’s no longer a part of. Good luck making that sales pitch.

Flexible work isn’t just the future of work–it’s already here. Forcing people back into offices is like handing them all paper time cards and telling them to start punching in and out. It’s not just retrograde and absurd, it’s also a surefire way to lose the best people you’ve got already and to turn away tomorrow’s top hires. Just ask Yahoo.

Stephane Kasriel is the chief executive of Upwork, where he built and led a distributed team of more than 300 engineers located around the world as SVP of engineering before becoming CEO. Stephane holds an MBA from INSEAD, an MSc in computer science from Stanford, and a BS from École Polytechnique in France. Follow him on Twitter at @skasriel.