Here’s the thing about that company where you just had a job interview: It’s kind of like the household in which you grew up. Not in the sense that you can watch a half-hour of TV after dinner, but in the more general sense that it’s got its own culture—its own rules, expectations, traditions, and ways of doing things. Just like your next-door neighbors’ parents growing up had different rules for what’s rewarded and what isn’t tolerated within the family, your prospective employer does, too. And they’re sometimes hard to understand unless you spend every single day there.

So where does this leave you as a job candidate, when you’ve only got an hour or two to glimpse the work culture while you’re interviewing? Not in the best position, admittedly. But there are a few ways to maximize your time there in order to get the best handle you can on what the work culture is like before deciding whether it’s the right one for you. And that all comes down to the sorts of questions you ask.

Related:7 Better Questions To Ask Than, “How’s Your Work Culture?”

Why Culture Issues Are So Easy To Miss

But first, back to your childhood for a second.

As kids, we assume how our own family operates is how all families operate. It’s not until we get older that we understand there are sometimes pretty stark differences. In some families, screaming and yelling are the norm, while in other homes conflict is avoided altogether. Some families share openly; others keep information close to their chests.

None of these family dynamics are inherently right or wrong. But it would be very hard for somebody who’s used to more self-contained, passive family norms not to feel uncomfortable, let alone thrive, in a home that’s rife with passionate conflict—and vice versa. The same basic principle applies when you’re looking for a new job. And while most job seekers are taught to look for “culture fit,” it’s often hard to suss out. Worse, the closer you get to an offer, the more likely it is that those culture issues will quietly sink toward the bottom of your priority list.

That’s partly because it’s usually easier to get your head around considerations like salary, job title, and how much authority you’ll have in a given role. But it’s a little bit harder to pin down much more nebulous, subjective questions—like what you want to get out of your work experience, how you want to feel going to work every day, and so on. It isn’t impossible, though.

To help you, these are three work-culture questions you should try and ask everyone you speak to on your job interview:

1. What Do The Most Successful Leaders Here Value?

This will tell you what gets rewarded by those at the top—and they’re the ones who drive the company’s culture.

For example, if they say, “Well, our executives usually aren’t afraid of taking risks or suggesting outside-the-box solutions, even when they go against industry norms,” you’ll know the company culture is progressive and values innovation. If they say, “Our leaders are obsessed with winning at any cost,” you know the culture is going to be more cutthroat, possibly with a dog-eat-dog mentality.

The biggest risk is thinking you’re walking into an environment that’s closer to the first and ending up in the latter. But the more people you pose this question to, the more likely you’ll be to get a coherent, accurate picture of what those norms are really like.

2. When People Here Fail, What’s Typically The Cause?

Here, too, you’ll want to listen for common themes across the responses you hear. Most employees fail for one of two reasons: They either fail to get the business results expected of them, or they get results but fail to do so in a culturally acceptable way.

In the first instance, it’s the results-focused organizations that are quick to get rid of employees (and executives!) who choose the wrong strategy or try to rally their teams around the wrong priorities. They value the bottom line above all else. But in the second instance, it’s the culture-focused organizations that get rid of employees who may be getting fantastic results but are creating an unacceptable amount of noise and turnover in the process. They value their way of doing things above all else.

This type of question might throw a hiring manager off guard, but that’s okay—they should be comfortable discussing their company’s successes and failures with prospective hires, even if they weren’t expecting to do it this way. And the darker secrets about an organization’s culture are often told through its team members’ unanticipated failures.

3. What’s An Early Mistake People In Similar Roles Make—And How Can I Avoid It?

By asking about the potential pitfalls of the role you’re being considered for, you’ll learn several important things. First, you’ll understand where others before you have tripped up. Did they burn out quickly? Did they have a hard time assimilating with a tightly knit team? Did they not make the right impressions with people who matter?

Second, you’ll get a feel for what the organization considers to be a mistake in the first place. Some employers think working too hard is a mistake; others consider it a mistake to work a strict nine to five when the rest of the team is staying at the office until 10 p.m. How the company defines a mistake can tell you a lot about its culture.

And finally, you’ll gather some great historical context. Understanding what your new boss and team has experienced with previous team members can help you decide how well you might assimilate once you get there.

Company culture is hard to pinpoint and even harder to define. While a broken work culture is usually pretty easy to identify, what counts as a good one is much more subjective. But in coaching executives through job transitions, I can tell you that the most successful, fulfilled leaders aren’t those with the biggest bonuses or largest teams. They’re the ones who have found organizations that accept and appreciate who they are—with cultures that support the way they like to work.

Emily Bermes is a management consultant and executive coach. She has extensive expertise in helping officer-level executives assimilate into new work cultures in Fortune 100 and startup environments.

More than clickbait, more than a mobile strategy, more even than factual accuracy, what the media has needed for over a decade is a mighty subject.

That great white–er, orange–whale has arrived at last, just in time to remind the media, after the confidence-shaking earthquake of digitization, how journalism should be done. How it should be produced, and how it should be read.

A flashback: In Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser’s runaway 1900 bestseller about a pretty woman who uses men on her way to becoming a Broadway star, there’s a vivid account of how to read a newspaper. The troubled Hurstwood, one of the men Carrie uses, approached the evening papers this way: “He buried himself in his papers and read. Oh, the rest of it!–the relief from walking and thinking!”

Key takeaway: The news, at its best, is often an indulgence, a relief, an escape from one’s own troubles, a flight from the mundane. It can also be a chance to live in a heroic moral realm that gratifies both our greater and our lesser angels. It can be adrenaline. News is not a civic chore. In fact, to treat reading the news as a duty is to treat ice cream like mustard greens–to believe readers must be tricked into eating it, and thus guarantee that they rarely will.

I’m going to propose that we should read news sites as ice cream–not as an obligation, but for stimulation, escapism, and even righteousness. This is how newspapers have been read in their many heydays, and how they are meant to be read. At the same time we must admit to ourselves that–far from being a duty–news in heated times (and in the age of Twitter) can often represent a full-tilt compulsion, and thus a habit to be judiciously managed.

In Sister Carrie, Hurstwood’s relief comes from diverting stories, like this beaut: “Here was a young handsome handsome woman…suing a rich, fat, candy-making husband for divorce.” But soon after the divorce story, he reads a report of a strike by motormen, also in Brooklyn. This story doesn’t simply distract from his suffering, but ennobles it. It does so by lifting his life out of the commonplace and making it part of a grand master narrative.

At the turn of the last century, of course, that narrative was Capital v. Labor, and it convulsed American minds, big and little, rich and poor. Who would win? It was Lakers v. Celtics, Alabama v. Auburn, the two sides of the Force. You chose sides, and a victory for your side–a successful strike, say, or the advance of trust-busting legislation–could viscerally be considered a personal victory that you’d feel from head to toe. Of course, you lost sometimes too, and walked around soul-sick.

For Hurstwood, who once worked in management, the Capital v. Labor war is spellbinding, all-consuming.  As he reads about the strike, he’s torn. He knows–as we know now while reading about, say, the special election in Georgia that might flip Atlanta’s 6th district for the Democrat Jon Ossoff (and thus deal a blow to Trump’s dominion)–this strike represents a chance for both courage and cowardice.

Hurstwood is newly out of money and he is looking for a job as a laborer–but he’s inclined against labor since he’s from management, from the Other Side. So he’s trying to decide if he’ll scab (work) on the trollies as union motormen are striking for a pay raise. Every part of him is agitated by this moral and personal decision. He comes to believe he will either rise to the occasion, or crash on its shoals. (As it happens, he crashes.)

The literal crossing and recrossing of lines entailed by moving from management to labor, and then scabbing, is so monumental that it can be compared to other moral crucibles in our nation. What lines would Rosa Parks and other great Americans protesting segregation cross? What about a hundred years earlier, in the lines drawn between the Union and the Confederacy? When a person read a newspaper in the 1860s or 1960s, everything from the celebrity news to the want ads could seem like an entry in a holy war.

This sounds familiar. All-consuming suspense and scorekeeping on what sounds like a heroic key is back. It’s palpable. It’s personal (just spend a few minutes on social media, if you don’t believe me). If you despise Trump’s apparent ties to Russia, but also decry identity politics, have you crossed lines? What about if you supported Bernie Sanders, or skipped the world-historical women’s march? Even the minutiae of everyday decisions–to dodge a Trump discussion, or jump right in–suggest existential struggles.

The Trump presidency seems epic in the truest sense, in that it is measurably rattling the American experiment, the Pax Americana; it is testing whether our nation, dedicated to and conceived in liberty, can long endure, given that there are shadowy threats lurking: threats to our free press, threats to our constitutional set of checks and balances.

And so we read the news the way Hurstwood did–not only for diversion, but as scorekeepers. Are my warriors winning or losing? Is good beating bad? Will I morally wither–or courageously fight for others? It’s all mixed up together. If this suspense for our republic’s future doesn’t put you on the edge of your seat, and at the craven mercy of media, nothing will.

This new avidity and readerly sense of purpose began about a year ago, during the psychic upheaval of the presidential primaries, with the repeated shocks to our society’s manners, morals, and politics. The work of “being informed”–so long preached in social studies classes–now felt like the opposite of work. You didn’t have to force yourself to read the news. You had to force yourself to take a break. Every article seemed an entry to a life-or-death battle. On home pages and front pages–and especially on Facebook and Twitter, where news is  contextualized with max torque by fellow travelers who generally wear our colors–were and are numberless opportunities for agony or ecstasy.

Indeed, lately, the Trump-Russia story has offered so much intrigue that it’s common for people to treat its details not as homework but as an IMAX spectacle, with the popcorn emoji often attending a link to the latest plot twist.

Even a seeming distraction from the main event–the death of George Michael, say, in late December–now carries vast themes for humanity. The gay icon was framed by some as yet another martyr to Trump-style anti-progressivism, and it deepened the left’s grieving over Trump’s victory. Then there was the Patriots’ late-game triumph in the Super Bowl: Trump claimed Tom Brady, the team’s quarterback, as a friend, and the Patriots won against predictions. On Twitter, some Trump fans took the Patriots’ win as further proof that true patriots were taking back the nation. In the trending stories that play on Apple News, the ones about Trump or his administration read as skirmishes in the broader war, while the ones that ignore him–Time‘s recent “Why Spring is the Perfect Time to Take Your Workout Outdoors,” for example–seem like manipulative denial and distraction. Or they do to me, anyway. How can anyone talk about workouts at a time like this?

There is everything to be gained by cultivating a personal stake in the lives of others, in the future of our nation, and in the world. But reading the front section as if it were the sports pages, with every line a credit or debit, a win, or a loss, has hazards. You begin to twist what you read. For example, news that attacks on Jewish Community Centers were carried out by an Israeli could be seen as a “loss”–confirmation of Trump’s view that hate crimes can be false-flag events. The news that a white supremacist killed a black New Yorker with a sword, by contrast, can be framed, shamefully, as a win. How in the world is racist murder a win? Because it’s proof that hate crimes are up under Trump. This is a sick way to think, I know. It’s what happens when the public’s consumption of news becomes too much about sides, about winning and losing, and less about empathy for our fellow men.

So how do we combat this? By increasing our literacy. To become a better reader, we must borrow practices from higher-order reading, including the reading of fiction. Remember that the best characters and novels–and every single flesh-and-blood human and real-life event–mix good and evil. Suspend judgement, especially on the complex and sensitive matter of the Russia-Trump ties. Aim to identify with the players without projection or hope. Let yourself be surprised by evidence that doesn’t fit your hypothesis. Take breaks.

But also, keep reading. It’s quite a story. And you’re part of it.

When John Seifert took the reigns as CEO of global advertising behemoth Ogilvy & Mather in January 2016, he didn’t like what he saw. It wasn’t the company’s work itself, but its overall structure and size that concerned him. Seifert has spent his entire 38-year career at Ogilvy, witnessing it grow into more than 450 offices in 120 countries.

And even though it’s part of holding company WPP, with such a wide array of businesses and practices of its own–advertising; public relations and public affairs; branding and identity; shopper and retail marketing; healthcare communications; direct, digital, promotion, relationship marketing–the agency looked more like a holding company of its own, as opposed to the nimble, seamlessly integrated business that marketers increasingly need.

So Seifert set about building a strategy that would aim to completely transform the company’s operating system, and better configure its capabilities to make working for global clients a smoother, more agile experience. Last April, he presented a 17-page strategy to WPP CEO Martin Sorrell called “Ogilvy The Next Chapter,” based around the idea that the company wasn’t positioned well enough for what Seifert saw as the new reality of the marketplace, which he calls the era of great fragmentation.

“The paradox was that our clients had more tools, information, capability than they’ve ever had for what we call modern marketing, but there was also tons of confusion around how to connect the dots to make it all work,” says Seifert. “And I felt that too much of our day to day client reality was around that general uncertainty, confusion, frustration of how to make it all work.”

So over the last year, the company has begun rolling out its new operating strategy, first in the U.S., bringing all offices and separate business units in the country under one profit and loss statement. Ogilvy Chicago, New York, and Atlanta are now under one banner and brand, Ogilvy USA.

But the change goes beyond simply changing the name on the door. Over the last year, the agency’s U.S. offices began to collapse all the P&Ls, all the silos and vertical business units, and start to transition from separate entities into what they call centers or domains of expertise. The new work system is currently in the pilot stage and Seifert says the early results are encouraging.

“We took all the capabilities in the three city offices–New York, Chicago, and Atlanta–which are now one integrated business, and restructured it around nine client groups, and we’ve defined these five distinct domains of experts and expertise–Enterprise Branding, Digital and Innovation, Customer Engagement and Commerce, Influence and PR, and Media and Distribution– to work in a more collaborative way, through a single financial framework,” says Seifert.

So, hypothetically, if IBM wanted to work with creatives in New York, it could, but the agency could also use resources in the Chicago office for marketing data analysis, PR, or media buying in the Atlanta office, all for the same client. The idea is for the agency structure and workflow to reflect marketers’ need for agility in an always-on ad market.

It’s not a new concept, but it’s one that some of the world’s largest agencies are taking on. In late 2015, Publicis announced a similarly silo-busting restructure, while Havas Worldwide’s village model was introduced in 2013 to make its operations more efficient.

One of Ogilvy’s biggest challenges has been reprogramming the decades of conditioning its employees have had around the value of divisional control. “If you say to someone, ‘We don’t want you to be called president of this, CEO of that’ or ‘You’re going to have your own business unit with your own budget, etc’ We knew it to be true that, with how it is in our industry and even within Ogilvy, that somehow your success in life is judged by your ability to be considered an independent operator of something,” says Seifert, who named a restructured leadership team in January. “We have spent an enormous amount of time sharing the narrative to make the case for change, and helping folks understand how we’re trying to make their jobs more rewarding, more interesting, more relevant to their future development, as a result of these changes.”

In terms of timing, Seifert says 2017 is the year to make this “Next Chapter” strategy real–starting the structural changes, getting the workflow up to a level of scale they’re comfortable with–and he anticipates being pretty far along that road by the third quarter. Then by late summer, they’ll reveal the rebranding of the company as one single brand, and how the company will be experienced both internally and for clients. In the fourth quarter, they’ll be planning its global implementation in 2018.

“A big part of this exercise has been not only trying to respond to what are the very real pressures for change in the short term,” says Seifert. “But we’re trying to create something here that is going to be adaptive, agile, and future-focused, so it doesn’t take the top to bottom overhaul we’re doing now to change in the coming years.”

WHAT: A scorcher of a speech about the way women were portrayed at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and how it’s reflective of the limited number of female filmmakers involved.

WHO: Cannes juror and movie star, Jessica Chastain.

Say that, @jes_chastain. pic.twitter.com/H7QHnEE5JA

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) May 29, 2017

WHY WE CARE: Don’t be fooled by the fact that Sofia Coppola took home a Best Director trophy at this year’s Cannes Festival for her forthcoming film, The Beguiled. According to Jessica Chastain, this honor was an anomaly amid a festival lacking in female representation. The actor, who served on the jury at this year’s festival, sounded off during the closing press conference on the cognitive dissonance she’d just experienced.

“I do hope that when we include more female storytellers, we will have more of the women I recognize in my day-to-day life,” she said. “Ones who are proactive, have their own agency, don’t just react to the men around them. They have their own point of view.”

Chastain’s comments are in sync with a report released in January, which revealed that female filmmakers lost ground in 2016. The fact that she voiced her concerns to her fellow jurors at the world’s most prestigious film festival ensures the message will not go unheard. Whether or not it’s acted upon, however, only time will tell.

It was a typical morning when I headed to my job as a flight instructor at Luke Air Force Base. I checked my flight schedule—and discovered my wingman that day was going to be my general.

I wasn’t exactly excited. I’d never flown with a general before, and I didn’t want to get into the cockpit and feel him scrutinize my every move. Can the CEO of your organization shadow you on your job all day? It would feel a little unnerving, right? But as it turned out, the experience was great training in something lots of people are scared to do: giving feedback to a senior leader.

My Hard Conversation With The General

The general was a regular fighter pilot like me, only older and more experienced. I figured that if I were in his shoes, I’d want to be treated like all the other pilots. So when he arrived, I planned and briefed the mission to everyone as I’d normally do.

After the flight, we debriefed on the team’s performance. When it got to the point where I had to give feedback on the general’s performance, I hesitated about being direct. Frankly, he was rusty. In the cockpit, I never felt unsafe with him, but I knew that if I were to fly with him again, I’d want him to improve on his stick and rudder skills.

I thought of all the different ways I could deliver the feedback. I could sugarcoat it, making it seem like it wasn’t a big deal. I could serve it up in a compliment sandwich: say something nice, sneak in the constructive criticism, then say something nice again.

Related: This Seven-Step Guide For Dishing Out Feedback Is Totally Idiot-Proof

But then I realized that downplaying the feedback wasn’t going to help him get better. To improve, he needed to hear the truth directly. I looked him straight in the eye, told him what I observed, and pointed to specific instances where he could improve. And then I waited for his reaction.

To my surprise, the first words out of his mouth were, “Thank you.” He also asked for additional ideas on how to get better, which I provided. After expressing his desire to improve, he told us stories of flying in different airplanes and how flying operations have evolved. My colleagues and I spent the rest of the debrief absorbed in his stories. We walked away from the session with lessons learned and a greater confidence in each other.

I know that you might be thinking, “There is no way that I’m going to approach senior leaders in my organization and tell them what they need to do to improve.” And I’m not suggesting you do that just yet. Start with your team members first–those who you collaborate with on a day-to-day basis. When you deliver feedback to your colleagues in a way that inspires them to grow, you can influence the trust, candor, and performance of your team.

A great place to start bringing accountability to your team is to think about what you can do to spark an honest dialogue on performance. Here are a tips on how to do that:

Remove Your Ego

It’s not about you, your way of doing things, or your preferences. Feedback is about the other person and how they can improve.

Related:Six Habits Of People Who Confuse Ego With Self-Confidence 

In the best organizations, accountability-based conversations are just part of the organizational DNA. It’s not about egos, it’s about performance. When problems exist between two colleagues, they just discuss the missed expectations and work to resolve the problems together. No drama. No mess. A quick conversation, followed by tweaks, and everyone can get back to work with a focus on improving.

Think Of Feedback As A Gift

You’re offering someone information that will help them get better. When delivered effectively, feedback can be a gift ­that the recipient wants to open.

When I bring this up in workshops I lead, a lot of people find this performance-based feedback hard to digest. They say, “You want me to tell my colleague where she screwed up? But I’m not her manager.” And while that’s true, I flip the question: “If someone had a problem with your performance, which would you prefer—that she go to your manager to discuss it, or that she come directly to you with it?” The choice seems clear.

Offer Examples And Guidance

There’s nothing more frustrating than getting ambiguous feedback. If you’re giving feedback, think of situations where the person can improve, and offer your own clear-cut suggestions for how.

Maybe one of your colleagues is always late for work or your direct report doesn’t take initiative. Instead of spouting criticism, offer them some tips that they can apply to make sure they’re on time–perhaps one that’s worked for you personally. If the problem is a lack of initiative, give them opportunities to show initiative, like asking them to speak up in meetings or assigning them to lead a project.

This type of problem-solving might feel counterintuitive to you. You might work in an organization where accountability is simply absent. Maybe your organization has standards but no one enforces them, so no one follows them. Or you might work in an organization where managers are the only ones who are responsible for bringing accountability to teams. So when two peers can’t get along, rather than addressing the challenge discreetly and directly, managers swoop in and deliver accountability by discussing standards and expectations with everyone, hoping the two subordinates will get the picture.

But when you take this approach, more often than not, problems go unaddressed and performance suffers. And in this kind of environment, giving effective feedback—to anyone—is going to be much, much harder.

This article is adapted from SPARK: How to Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success by Angie Morgan, Courtney Lynch, and Sean Lynch. It is reprinted with permission from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

After a massive explosion of algae growth in China’s Lake Taihu a decade ago left more than two million people in the area temporarily without safe drinking water, the government started spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to try to solve the algae problem. One part of the solution: working with a company that harvests algae from the lake before it grows out of control, and turns it into a flexible, rubbery material that is now being made into shoes.

Vivobarefoot’s water-resistant Ultra III shoes are usually made from a petroleum-based version of the same material, ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA). But a version that will launch in July is made from a blend of algae and EVA, instead. To get enough algae to make one pair means cleaning 57 gallons of water, which are then returned to the lake.

The algae explosions (called blooms, hence the company name) that make this possible are caused by pollution–particularly fertilizer runoff from agriculture–in the water, that can make algae grow uncontrollably, which can cut off oxygen and sunlight for marine animals. Some species of algae also release toxins as they die, that cause even more damage to the ecosystem. While some governments try to reshape the systems that pollute the water (China, for example, closed several factories near Lake Taihu), Bloom is attempting to treat the problem more quickly.

It’s a process that is needed in lakes and other waterways around the world as algae blooms increase. Florida declared a state of emergency in 2016 when algae spread from Lake Okeechobee to nearby beaches, deterring tourists and killing manatees and other wildlife. In Ohio, an algae bloom in the Ohio River made drinking water temporarily unsafe for half a million people in Toledo in 2014. (Bloom’s process can also clean up toxic algae blooms, but the company only makes its material out of out algae that is harvested before it reaches the harmful bloom state.) Climate change is making the problem more common for several reasons, including the fact that algae grow quickly in warmer water.

The first product made from the material was a foam traction pad for a surfboard; the shoes will be the second product to come to market. “For the Ultra, we had spent over a year working with a different company on a closed loop solution but it didn’t work,” says Vivobarefoot founder Galahad Clark. “We knew the EVA foam in the shoe was fundamentally petrochemical based and had no real sustainable [alternative], so we were on the lookout.”

The manufacturing process had a few challenges–the design of the shoe, covered with hexagonal holes to let the foot breathe, requires a detailed, precise mold, and the material had to be tweaked to ensure that it expanded and shrank at exactly the right rate, consistently. But it eventually worked, and the company says that it’s an improvement on the conventional alternative.

“It feels and looks a little better than EVA,” says Vivobarefoot’s creative director Asher Clark, “and it smells like spirulina.”

In May 1977, a new pizza place opened for business in San Jose, California. At the time, calling it “unique” might have been an understatement. The brainchild of Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell–and, initially, an arm of that company–it featured entertainment provided by a cast of robotic characters led by a giant cigar-smoking rat with a bowler, buck teeth, and a Jersey accent. The place–as much a strip-mall Disneyland as an eatery–was called Pizza Time Theatre, and the rodent was known as Chuck E. Cheese.

Over the past four decades, the Chuck E. Cheese franchise has lived out many lives. It began as Bushnell’s effort to give arcade games a family-friendly home in an era when arcades were associated with teenagers who might be up to no good. As it grew, it became an exercise in high-stakes capitalism. And eventually–long after Bushnell’s departure–it became a tame, emotionally sanitized playpen for small children.  Today, more than 30 years after Bushnell left the company, there are over 600 Chuck E. Cheese locations, but only remnants remain of his quirky vision.

During the early years of Pizza Time Theatre–the chain officially became Chuck E. Cheese’s in the 1990s–its colorful, high-energy atmosphere very much reflected the personality of its progenitor. Bushnell, who craved new and exciting sensory experiences, saw the restaurant as speaking to something deep in the human soul. “Throughout history there was a celebration, and the celebration had food, drink, and games, without exception,” he explains. “Whether you were talking about the summer solstice with primitive man to the circuses in Rome. There was always an entertainment element. I always felt that was something that was lacking in restaurants. I wanted to add a dimension of fun to the act of having a meal.”

The idea that became Pizza Time “was [Bushnell’s] dream,” says Ted Dabney, who cofounded Atari with Bushnell and witnessed his early brainstorms firsthand. “That was the beginning of everything. He didn’t even think about a video game until later.”

Pizza And … Talking Beer Barrels?

When Bushnell arrived in California, fresh out of the University of Utah in 1969, he was already talking about starting a restaurant. During regular matches of the board game Go with Dabney, his officemate and friend at the legendary Silicon Valley firm Ampex, the pair would hash out plans for Bushnell’s most ambitious ideas. In the early years of their partnership, Dabney served as an important creative foil and hands-on implementer of Bushnell’s visions.

“We’d go around to different restaurants, look at them, see what we could do, and how it would work–that kind of thing,” says Dabney.

In their search, Bushnell kept emphasizing the idea of a carnival theme. “Nolan had worked his way through college at a carnival park,” says Dabney. “He liked that kind of atmosphere, and he always wanted to build a restaurant that had that in it. His whole thing was a pizza parlor with talking beer barrels.”

As Dabney and Bushnell began working on Computer Space–the world’s first commercial coin-operated video game–in 1970, Bushnell kept his restaurant plan in his back pocket. After founding Atari with Dabney in 1972, the breakout success of Pong further delayed his restaurant plans.

“When I was starting Atari, I was actually thinking that I was going to start a restaurant alongside it,” says Bushnell. “I got so busy that it wasn’t until later on in Atari that I decided to finally do the restaurant.”

As game after game rolled off the line during Atari’s early years, Bushnell kept ruminating on his restaurant plan. It occurred to him that his restaurant could also serve as an Atari-controlled outlet for its products, giving the company end-to-end control over its entertainment experience. “I basically hated the way my games were being presented to the public,” Bushnell told the New York Times in 1981.

In the early 1970s, coin-op arcade games–mechanical, pinball, video, and otherwise–had an unseemly reputation by virtue of where you could most often find them: back-alley bars, truck stops, and arcade venues where they sometimes stood alongside peep-show machines. Newspapers regularly savaged these places as dens of moral decay.

“Amusement halls of all sorts have long had to contend with a certain built-in notoriety, whether deserved or not,” began an April 1975 article in the Courier-Post of Camden, New Jersey about a local arcade that had been the subject of complaints. “Since it opened … the arcade, which contains about half a dozen pinball and other games of skill, is drawing an unsavory crowd of teenagers.”

Another article about arcade moral panic, this one from Nebraska in 1976, has a sub-headline titled, “Dancing Suspected.”  It’s about rumors of interracial dancing taking place there, and the delinquency of the teenage patrons of the place who were reportedly associating freely across social boundaries, drinking alcohol, and smoking marijuana.

Bushnell, whose family included two young girls, wanted to counter the iffy image of arcades with his new restaurant idea for families. “[Those arcade venues] were the domain of adolescent boys,” he said in 1981. “But they should be more than that, a way for the family to play together.”

This family-friendly vision was convenient, because it could vastly expand the potential market for Atari’s games. In fact, it ended up changing the popular image of arcade video games for everyone.

From Coyote To Rat

Around 1974, Bushnell began to call his now-Atari restaurant project “Coyote Pizza.” He often tells a story of attending an amusement show at the time and ordering what he thought was a full-body coyote costume. A large gray rat showed up instead.  With Atari employees often donning the costume at company events, a character began to emerge: Bushnell named him “Rick Rat.”

Around the time Warner Communications acquired Atari in 1976, the rat costume could often be seen sitting in Bushnell’s office at Atari, and Rick served as an unofficial mascot for the firm. During negotiations with Warner, Bushnell told Warner reps of the potential to start an arcade pizza restaurant, but he received a tepid response.

Nonetheless, Warner bought Atari for $28 million in 1976, providing the firm essential capital to build out its first cartridge-based video game console, the Atari 2600. Electronics industry marketing veteran Gene Landrum wrote the marketing proposal for the new console. Landrum had recently worked with Fairchild to develop the concept of its Channel F game console, and he gained a reputation as an expert on sales logistics and market projections.

“I did the complete business plan for the rollout of the 2600,” recalls Landrum. “It was going to take them another year to get the damned thing designed and put into motion. [Bushnell] said, ‘You’ve got all this time, Gene. Go do us some business plan now on this family entertainment place.'”

Landrum tackled the job with gusto, going far beyond just an initial marketing projection. “We could really say, in some ways, that Gene was the founder of Chuck E. Cheese,” says Bushnell. “Because he was the guy I hired to bring Chuck E. Cheese into fruition. He was the guy that found the pizza recipes, he rented the facility, and hired the first people. He was very, very instrumental.”

Landrum also wrote out the menu and designed the floor plan of the first several restaurants, declining to hire an architect. “I mean, I did it in complete detail,” he stresses. “I projected the revenue stream, the gross margins, everything.”

After presenting the final plan to Bushnell, Atari President Joe Keenan, and Atari’s board of directors, Landrum received an enthusiastic response. “Nolan went crazy,” says Landrum. “He said, ‘Man, this is incredible! You’ve got to open one!’ I looked at it and said, ‘Nolan, I wouldn’t hire me to do this. This is ridiculous. I’m an electronics guy. I don’t know anything about a restaurant.'”

But Bushnell offered Landrum a large salary and the promise of making him general manager of a new division within Atari–the Restaurant Operating Division. “He gave me a buttload of money and said, ‘Go build one,'” says Landrum.

Chuck E. Is Born

During Landrum’s development process, Rick Rat’s pizza underwent several drastic transformations. First, the “Rick Rat” name would have to go. “I said, “Nolan, we’re making this a kid’s place,” Landrum remembers. “We can’t have a rat. A rat is too predatory and too lethal.” Not to mention unsanitary.

Landrum also emphasized, even beyond Bushnell’s vision, the necessity to provide a family-friendly atmosphere that was free of rowdy teenagers, a demographic seen as a roving, dangerous cultural wild card at the time. To solve that, all minors would have to be accompanied by adults. (A few years later, a spokesman for Pizza Time told the New York Times, “If another teenager never sets foot in our stores, that’ll be just fine with us.”)

Somewhere along the way, Bushnell’s “talking barrels” gave way to animatronic characters that would sing songs and perform comedy routines every eight minutes as diners munched on their pizza. Bushnell says the animal theme was inspired by the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, which featured a group of singing parrots. Opened in 1963, it featured the first use of Disney’s audio-animatronic technology–later used in attractions such as the Country Bear Jamboree, whose wisecracking ursine cast clearly presaged the Pizza Time Theatre experience as it would come to be.

Several people developed the crew of animated robotic characters that would later inhabit the initial San Jose restaurant’s walls, constrained at first to partial upper torsos contained within faux picture frames.

The initial 1977 round of characters included Crusty the Cat (soon replaced by a purple monster, Mr. Munch), an Italian chef named Pasqually P. Pieplate, and of course Chuck E. Cheese himself. Chuck E. gained most of his stage personality from his first voice actor, John Widelock, who modeled the rat’s wisecracking demeanor after a 1940s street-smart film character named Muggs McGinnis, played by Leo Gorcey in the East Side Kids series.

Meanwhile, a much friendlier human employee would wander the restaurant in a full-bodied Chuck E. Cheese costume, a la Mickey Mouse at Disneyland, giving high-fives to youngsters–and unintentionally terrorizing every baby in the place.

Noisy Fun

The first Pizza Time Theatre store opened on South Winchester Boulevard in San Jose on May 16, 1977. It was a community event that received a positive public reaction, with the mayor of San Jose on hand to provide her civic endorsement. Much of the Atari crew was also there to celebrate. “I remember all of us showed up at the very first day of the very first opening of the very first Chuck E. Cheese,” says John Ellis, then Atari’s VP of consumer engineering.

From the beginning, the restaurant’s atmosphere was loud and boisterous, and that became one of its trademarks. In 1981, InfoWorlddescribed a Pizza Time location as “a whirling combination of garish lights and nonstop electronic noise that is quite unlike any other pizza parlor or video-game arcade.” Bushnell would have it no other way.

Humor and cheekiness were everywhere. Aside from the regular mechanical players, there was a seductive hippo torch singer named Dolli Dimples that would flirt with patrons for a quarter. And the 100 arcade game machines installed in the facility operated on custom tokens stamped with Chuck E. Cheese’s likeness. The reverse side bore a simple motto: “In Pizza We Trust.”

Nolan Bushnell beamed in a photo taken on that day, happy about his restaurant dream coming to life in front of him. It was a blast. But all was not well at Atari.

In 1978, Bushnell began to bristle at the restrictions being placed on some of his more far-out visions at Atari by Warner management. (John Ellis recalls Bushnell directing him, circa 1976, to investigate creating “a robot that can mix drinks and bring them to you.”) Newly wealthy, he found himself losing interest in the day-to-day operations at the company.

One of those projects was Pizza Time.  So while he was still chairman of Atari, Bushnell bought the first Pizza Time Theatre store in San Jose and all of its intellectual-property rights from his employer for a mere $500,000. “They thought he was a sucker,” recalls Bushnell’s close friend and fellow Atari pioneer Allan Alcorn.

Bushnell hired Gene Landrum to be president of the newly formed Pizza Time Theatre, Inc., and over the next year, Landrum guided the firm with a steady and innovative hand. Meanwhile, Bushnell and Warner’s disagreements came to a head in late 1978 over the direction the company was taking its Atari 2600 console, which had faced a terrible 1977 Christmas season. As he found his role being marginalized in the company, Atari’s founder stepped away from Atari completely in early 1979 to focus on his new baby, Pizza Time.

Coast To Coast

During 1978 and 1979, Bushnell pumped $1.5 million of his own money into Pizza Time to open up two additional locations that served as testing grounds for new animatronic stage acts and larger store layouts. Eventually, Pizza Time settled on a full upper-body torso robot design (thereafter referred to as “Cyberamics”) for its characters, which would entertain diners from a balcony stage in a large dining hall.

The mechanical innards of Chuck E. Cheese and his pals were obvious: They had a herky-jerky way of moving and spherical eyes that seemed to stare, even when they were blinking in slow motion. Their semi-creepy element may actually have benefited Chuck E. Cheese’s in its early years. In a way, the singing characters served as a sort of freak show in the traditional carnival sense–something crazy and novel to draw crowds, who would then become a captive audience for food and games. Bushnell, once a carny himself, clearly knew what he was doing.

Other locations followed, totaling seven by the end of the 1979 fiscal year. But Bushnell was dreaming much bigger, envisioning hundreds, if not thousands, of Pizza Time restaurants spread across the country–a potential franchise gold mine.

With expansion (and a potential IPO) in mind, Bushnell decided to offer the job of president to his old friend and partner Joseph F. Keenan, who was then serving as chairman of Atari. In September of 1979, Keenan resigned from Atari and replaced Pizza Time’s spiritual father, Gene Landrum. Landrum was none too pleased about it, but Bushnell did not treat him poorly. “[Bushnell] said, ‘I’m going to give you more stock. Here’s an El Dorado. I’ll make you executive vice president,'” recalls Landrum. “‘I want to bring Joe in, and he’ll run this.'”

Big things were in the works. Earlier, in June, Bushnell had signed a co-development deal with Topeka Inn Management, owned by Robert Brock. Brock was well known at the time as a large franchisee operator of Holiday Inn locations, and he announced plans to build 285 Pizza Time Theatre stores in 16 states over five years. Other franchisees lined up behind Brock, and the future looked bright.

During 1980, Pizza Time Theatre flourished, adding dozens of stores to its portfolio, including corporate-owned locations and franchise outlets all across the U.S.–and even a few internationally. With Keenan in command, things grew quickly (and then quickly out of hand) at Pizza Time. The deal with Brock came back to haunt the company that year when Brock’s firm, which had received training on how to run Pizza Time locations, reneged and decided to open up its own competing chain of restaurants called Showbiz Pizza.

Showbiz was the most successful of numerous Pizza Time knock-offs that sprung up in the 1980s, including Bullwinkle’s Family Restaurant (with robotic moose and squirrel), Celebration Station, Fair Play Pizza Theater, Major Magic’s All Star Pizza Review, and Razz-Ma-Tazz. “We had 20 copiers who were all putting up stores,” Bushnell says.

The impetus for Brock’s gambit was his discovery of apparently superior animatronics technology developed by Aaron Fechter of Creative Engineering. Fechter developed a full-body life-size animal band called the Rock-Afire Explosion that featured smoother movements than the Chuck E. Cheese Cyberamics characters. Pizza Time immediately sued Brock’s firm, and after two years of legal battles, eventually won out with a profit-garnishing judgment against Showbiz. But it came too late to be useful.

Bushnell’s new adventure was Catalyst, a pioneering high-tech incubator firm that soon became host to over a dozen small companies. He played a hand in funding and running all of them, becoming chairman of at least seven corporations. One, a personal-robot startup called Androbot, particularly captivated Bushnell. He poured money into it, eventually taking out several multi-million-dollar personal loans while using the escalating value of his Pizza Time stock as collateral. On top of that, Pizza Time itself was borrowing money–at least $50 million of it–to fund its operations.

Meanwhile, a non-compete agreement Bushnell had signed with Atari when he left that firm was about to expire in 1983, and he saw Pizza Time as the perfect vehicle to bring a new video game company into the world. Pizza Time acquired a small game development firm named Videa with the aim of shaping it into a disruptive force in the market. It would emerge as Sente Technologies later that year.

On top of that, Bushnell was experimenting with yet another Pizza Time division called Kadabrascope. It aimed to reinvent how cartoons were animated by using a computer to fill in between hand-drawn key frames of animation, providing smoother animation with less cost. The company planned on making a Chuck E. Cheese TV special that would be ready by Christmas, but the technology didn’t pan out.

More and more, Bushnell was trying to turn Pizza Time into a new Atari, and as he did, the company began to lose its original focus on kid-oriented dining. In the company’s 1982 annual report, Bushnell wrote, “We believe that 1983 will be a time of growth and chance in which the transition from a specialized restaurant concept to a diversified leisure company will be evident.”

In early 1983, Pizza Time’s financial situation was precarious enough that one slight push in the wrong direction could send Bushnell’s entire business empire crashing down. That push came in the summer when a U.S. tech stock crash spooked investors. Among its casualties was the once-mighty Atari, which became a shadow of its former self. The fear of investing in tech dried up lines of credit for Bushnell’s firms. Meanwhile, Pizza Time’s stock fell from a high of $26 per share down to $4, then later to $2.50.

Not long after, Pizza Time revealed that it had been losing money over the previous three quarters. With over 240 locations across the country, sometimes with smaller cities playing host to multiple restaurants, and a half dozen competitors like Showbiz entering the market, the novelty of the Chuck E. Cheese concept wore itself out by late 1983. There were several shuffles in management, with Bushnell stepping in as president for a time, but it was too little, too late. In January 1984, Bushnell resigned as chairman and CEO of Pizza Time. In March, the firm filed for bankruptcy protection.

“What happened with Chuck E. Cheese was very simple,” Bushnell says. “We overexpanded … Chuck E. Cheese was so new that when we would first open a unit in St. Louis, you wouldn’t have enough capacity, it was just, ‘Okay, bar the door.'” But that lasted for about a year and a half. Then people would settle down and they didn’t need to go to Chuck E. Cheese every time grandma came to town. They didn’t need to go to Chuck E. Cheese once a month. They found that we’ll do the kids’ birthdays and we’ll go somewhere on special events, but the frequency of visits dropped from 10 a year to three a year.”

Showbiz Pizza suffered too during that era, but managed to hang on. In 1984, Showbiz agreed to purchase Pizza Time Theatre, Inc. They completed their merger in 1985 and later combined their robotic stage shows into one act. Ultimately, the powerful Chuck E. Cheese brand won out, and the entire chain of Showbiz Pizza locations became disciples of the Chuck.

Pizza Time Forever

Today, the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain lives on as a descendant of that financial shotgun marriage, with over 500 locations worldwide–and growing. It still has value, too: In 2014, Apollo Global Management bought the chain’s parent company for $1.3 billion. Recent rumors say it may be sold again, or go public.

But make no mistake: Times have changed. Over the years, Chuck E. Cheese himself has gradually changed from a sly cigar-chomping adult to a guileless, skateboarding adolescent, reflecting a steady shift away from Bushnell’s attempts to woo adults to the franchise.

The singing robots long ago received much more friendly facelifts and less piercing eyeballs. Now the chain is beginning to distance itself from its signature animatronic stage show. Reportedly, some restaurants only display pre-taped puppet sketches on flat-screen TVs that flank a lone automated Chuck E. Cheese figure.

Coincidentally, Chuck E. Cheese is backing away from robotics just as the idea of restaurant animatronics themselves have recently resurfaced in pop culture thanks to Five Nights at Freddy‘s, a 2014 horror-themed video game homage to Showbiz and Pizza Time-like mechanical characters. The curdled childhood memories of a generation are now coming out as nostalgic pastiches, and there is likely more to come.

Over his almost half-century career, Bushnell has never stopped chasing the ultimate combination of entertainment, socializing, food, and drink. Pong was was the first two-player-required video game, and often found a home in establishments where edibles and beverages were served. Androbot demoed its robot at CES by having it fetch a beer for Bushnell onstage. PlayNet, a 1990s venture, made net-connected jukeboxes for bars. Bushnell even explained Etak’s amazing 1980s car-navigation system by fantasizing about the day when it would help you find the nearest good, cheap sushi joint.

And maybe that’s the secret behind Chuck E. Cheese’s enduring relevance. It’s not about technology or singing animals. The place is a cultural Trojan horse that brought families together, helped arcade games become acceptable, and made eating into family entertainment. For all that’s changed about the company, the idea behind the unlikely dream that Bushnell turned into a business in 1977 remains resonant.

Sitting on top of a waste incineration facility near Zurich, a new carbon capture plant is now sucking CO2 out of the air to sell to its first customer. The plant, which opened on May 31, is the first commercial enterprise of its kind. By midcentury, the startup behind it–Climeworks–believes we will need hundreds of thousands more.

To have a chance of keeping the global temperature from rising more than two degrees Celsius, the limit set by the Paris agreement, it’s likely that shifting to a low-carbon economy won’t be enough.

At the new Swiss plant, three stacked shipping containers each hold six of Climeworks’ CO2 collectors. Small fans pull air into the collectors, where a sponge-like filter soaks up carbon dioxide. It takes two or three hours to fully saturate a filter, and then the process reverses: The box closes, and the collector is heated to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, which releases the CO2 in a pure form that can be sold, made into other products, or buried underground.

In the case of the first plant, the customer is a neighboring greenhouse, which uses the CO2 to make its tomatoes and cucumbers grow faster (plants build tissue by pulling carbon from the air, and more carbon dioxide means more growth, at least to a degree). Climeworks is also in talks with beverage companies that use CO2 in sparkling water or soda–particularly in production plants that are in remote areas, where trucking in a conventional source of CO2 would be expensive.

“There, Climeworks’ plan–taking it out of the air directly on site, is very advantageous and also commercially attractive already as of today,” says Wurzbacher. “We still have to go down a couple of steps on the cost curve, but in these niche applications already today, we can offer competitive CO2.”

Ultimately, the company wants to sell its ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground, and it thinks that the market may be ready to pay sooner than the startup initially expected. The IPCC, the international body that issues massive, comprehensive reports on climate change, has estimated that the world will need to be removing an average of 10 gigatons of CO2–10 billion tons–a year from the atmosphere by midcentury.

“If we say that by the middle of the century we want to do 10 billion tons per year, that’s probably something where we need to start today,” says Wurzbacher. “Based on our experiences now on the market, we are very confident that we will be able to develop a market in the very near future, maybe next year or in two or three years, to sell these negative emissions.”

Because there isn’t yet a global price on carbon, the company imagines that the first customers might be corporations that need help reaching ambitious climate goals. After adopting more obvious solutions, like renewable energy, increased efficiency, and changes in materials or transportation, a company might turn to negative emissions to help it offset the remainder of its footprint.

Planting trees or preserving existing forests is likely to also be a critical way to absorb CO2. “The best example of carbon dioxide removal technology that we know how to do now is grow more forest and to protect the carbon content of soils,” says Field. “And those are technologies that we know how to do now that provide extensive co-benefits and are ripe for taking advantage of.”

But direct air capture plants have some advantages that could make them an important part of the solution as well: The CO2 capture plant is roughly a thousand times more efficient than photosynthesis.

Still, to have the impact needed, the CO2 capture plants would need to be built at a massive scale. The first plant in Switzerland can capture 900 tons of carbon dioxide in a year, roughly the same amount of emissions as 200 cars. The company calculated how many shipping container-sized units would be needed to capture 1% of global emissions; the answer was 750,000.

In one sense, Wurzbacher says that this is less enormous than it might seem. The same number of shipping containers pass through the Port of Shanghai every two weeks. But to capture the 10 gigatons of emissions needed, between 10 and 20 other carbon capture companies would have to have equally large operations. (As of today, a handful of others, such as Carbon Engineering and Global Thermostat, are working on similar technology.)

Field, the Stanford scientist, argues that it’s important to remember that the technologies, while promising, are early-stage and unproven, and will face challenges in scaling up, especially if there isn’t a price on carbon. He also says it’s critical that people don’t get the wrong idea about the potential–the possibility of carbon capture isn’t a license to pollute more now.

But that note of caution doesn’t mean the technology isn’t necessary. “CO2 removal is a really good idea,” he says. “And a lot of the technologies ought to be deployed today. A lot of technologies ought to be explored.”

“Air capture costs money, so anything we can do which is cheaper than air capture, we should do it, definitely,” says Wurzbacher. “But we’ll need this on top of that. And we’ll not only need to develop it today, but we need to start scaling it today if we want to be able to put away these 10 gigatons every year by 2040 or 2050.”

Capturing carbon, he says, is as important as the massive shift to a low-carbon economy. “It’s not either/or,” he says. “It’s both.”

For Jared Kushner, last summer was a whirlwind of deal-making. On the campaign trail, in the weeks leading up to the Republican National Convention, the real estate scion was endeavoring to convince his father-in-law, Donald Trump, to install new advisers. At the same time, as CEO of his family’s namesake company, Kushner was helping negotiate one of the largest real estate deals ever completed in Brooklyn, the purchase of a famed commercial property overlooking the East River.

On both fronts, Kushner prevailed. The first week of August, along with two partner firms, he succeeded in acquiring Brooklyn’s Watchtower complex, owned for decades by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for $340 million. Two weeks later he secured the resignation of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, paving the way for Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, to take on senior White House roles.

Kushner stepped down from his role as CEO of Kushner Companies (now simply “Kushner”) in January, prior to Trump’s inauguration, and has agreed to divest himself of some assets. But he remains the beneficiary of more than 200 family-owned properties across the U.S., including 25-30 Columbia Heights. That arrangement puts the property’s prospective tenants in an unusual situation. However indirectly, they will be paying rent to a man with an office in the West Wing. Not only that, but a man who has positioned himself as the behind-the-scenes connection point between business and the administration, responsible for overseeing the president’s innovation office and brazenly at ease orchestrating public-private deals.

Kushner did not hold back from mixing business and politics while traveling on Trump’s first overseas trip last week, even as reports that he had attempted to establish back-channel communications with Russia began to surface. For example, Stephen Schwarzman, cofounder and CEO of the Blackstone Group—which provided financing for the Columbia Heights acquisition—joined Kushner in Riyadh, while riding high on the news that Saudi Arabia had agreed to invest $20 billion in a Blackstone infrastructure fund. (Schwarzman heads the White House’s business-advisory council.)

“Jared takes the ethics rules very seriously and would never compromise himself or the administration,” a White House spokesperson says. With regard to 25-30 Columbia Heights, “he is fully complying with federal ethics rules and will recuse himself as necessary.”

Kushner has not always operated from behind closed doors. To advertise a prior Brooklyn project, another set of Witnesses properties that Kushner acquired in partnership with LIVWRK and RFR Realty in 2013, the ambitious young developer posed for a New York Times portrait and presented at an industry conference. But this time around, his investment partners are taking the lead. On a tour of the property, it is LIVWRK founder and CEO Asher Abehsera who serves as spokesperson, accompanied by Amanda Carroll, a principal at Gensler and head of the design firm’s technology practice.

Abehsera envisions leasing Panorama’s office space to a single major tenant—a “global economy” company on par with the likes of GE or IBM. Gensler, hired to lead the design work, has outlined scenarios for a finance, media, or technology company looking to house roughly 5,000 employees, at capacity.

“The renaissance of residential development in Brooklyn has been very robust and added thousands of units to the market,” Abehsera says. “Where are all these people going to work? People want to walk local, eat local, work out local, and work local.” He adds: “We see Brooklyn as really underserved.”

That is beginning to change, thanks in part to Abehsera’s efforts. The Dumbo Heights properties he developed alongside Kushner contain 1.2 million square feet of space, now occupied by tenants including Etsy and WeWork (the gut renovation cost over $100 million). Dumbo in particular has become a major hub of commercial real estate activity, but other Brooklyn neighborhoods have won converts as well: Last year Brooklyn Brewery leased 75,000 square feet in the Navy Yard, Amazon leased 54,000 square feet in Sunset Park, and Tesla leased 40,000 square feet in Red Hook. All told nearly 10 million square feet of renovated or converted office space is now in the works across the borough, increasing Brooklyn’s office inventory by 25%.

Education company 2U signed in February to lease 79,500 square feet at 55 Prospect St., part of the Dumbo Heights complex. After working for years out of a relatively isolated office in Chelsea Piers, 2U chief technology officer James Kenigsberg says his team is looking forward to forging connections with peer companies nearby by hosting meetups and other events. “There’s a much more close-knit community of technologists and creative people,” he says, versus Manhattan.

Kushner’s ownership was not a concern for 2U. “I care about people when I make my hiring decisions, not when I think about landlords of large real estate properties,” Kenigsberg says. Moreover, 2U is hardly alone: “A lot of great companies are next door to us, renting from the same folks.”

To date, only one company has abandoned plans to occupy Kushner-owned space due to concerns about potential conflicts or public perception: the Guardian, which extricated itself from a deal with the Dumbo Heights WeWork after a “groundswell” of staff outcry in March.

“The basic feeling in the room was that the Guardian should not be in any form be associated with paying money to Kushner,” says a newsroom source.

Abehsera dismisses the case as an isolated example. “Maybe optically the Guardian was looking for some press,” he says. As for whether other companies think twice about doing business with a Kushner joint venture: “That’s not a concern, it never has been a concern.”

Inside, the warren-like property is rife with oddities. There is a doorway styled to look like a Biblical-era arch and a basketball court eye-level with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. On the top floor of 30 Columbia Heights, a cave-like space that could double as a rave venue once served as home base for the Witnesses’ broadcast operations. Many of the higher floors boast terraces, with 20 in all.

Abehsera highlights the terraces and double-height top floors as signature features for a tenant interested in hosting events. There are also multiple entrances and a private elevator, easing access for non-employee guests and VIPs.

In the months to come the Panorama partners plan to tear down the majority of the interior walls, shave the columns, strip the floors and ceilings to their base, and reglaze the windows. One floor plate, airy and bright, offers a preview of this transformation; demolition of the rest of the property is now underway.

By now, Abehsera has fully warmed to his pitch: “If you’re in Manhattan you’re just another tenant, you might get lost in the shuffle. If you’re trying to change the game and create something really inspiring, this is where you come to plant your flag,” he says.

He has little patience for questions about Kushner. “It’s financed, hammers are going to start swinging, and we’re going to re-create this corner of the neighborhood.”

And if a prospective tenant benefits from government contracts, or is in the process of lobbying for regulatory changes? “That’s not something we’ve thought through and considered. There is no plan,” he says, dismissing the possibility. “Is this really relevant?”

Through a spokesperson, Kushner (the company) declined to comment on whether it has implemented protocols to guard against conflicts of interest.

Yet ethical controversy continues to encircle the firm and the family running it. Earlier this month at ballrooms in Beijing and Shanghai, Jared Kushner’s sister, Nicole Meyer, courted Chinese investors with the means to afford the controversial U.S. visa program known as EB-5, which offers foreign millionaires a pathway to citizenship in return for a $500,000 check. Meyer, who had traveled to China to pitch Kushner’s EB-5-eligible $150 million housing development in Jersey City, N.J., highlighted her brother’s close ties to President Trump and said that the project “means a lot to me and my entire family,” according to the New York Times. (25-30 Columbia Heights has not received EB-5 funding.)

The Kushner family entanglements echo those of Trump himself, who has been criticized for using the presidency to promote Mar-a-Lago, his Florida club, and the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., among other holdings.

As for 25-30 Columbia Heights, New York real estate analysts raise more practical concerns about the viability of landing a major commercial tenant. “You just don’t have the same transit connections there,” says Jim Costello, a senior vice president at Real Capital Analytics, a firm that tracks real estate transaction data and investment trends. The A/C and 2/3 subway lines stop nearby, as well as the F, but the location poses a challenge for anyone arriving via Metro North railroad or NJ Transit. If “creative class” Brooklyn is the neighborhood’s primary draw: “There are creative parts of Manhattan, too.”

Costello is more bullish on downtown Brooklyn, due to the neighborhood’s proximity to the Atlantic Terminal, which includes many more subway lines and the Long Island Railroad (LIRR). But there is no green space in downtown Brooklyn, no waterfront vista, and little in the way of artisanal charm. Panorama’s Dumbo location offers all three—at a price.

In 2016, more refugees arrived in Uganda–including nearly half a million people from South Sudan alone–than crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. While the numbers in Africa are increasing, the situation isn’t new: As the world continues to focus on the European refugee crisis, an equally large crisis has been unfolding in Africa.

A new visualization shows the flow of refugees around the world from 2000 to 2015, and makes the lesser-known story in Africa–and in places like Sri Lanka in 2006 or Colombia in 2007–as obvious as what has been happening more recently in Syria. Each yellow dot represents 17 refugees leaving a country, and each red dot represents refugees arriving somewhere else. (The full version of the map, too large to display here, represents every single refugee in the world with a dot.)

Here’s some of what you’re seeing: In 2001, tens of thousands of refugees fled conflict in Afghanistan, while others fled civil war in Sudan (including the “Lost Boys,” orphans who in some cases were resettled in the U.S.). By 2003, the genocide in Darfur pushed even more people from Sudan. In 2006, war drove Lebanese citizens to Syria; Sri Lankans fleeing civil war went to India. In 2007, as conflict worsened in Colombia, refugees fled to nearby countries such as Venezuela. After leading demonstrations in Burma against dictatorial rule, Buddhist monks and others fled to Thailand. In 2008, a surge of Tibetan refugees fled to India, while Afghan, Iraqi, and Somali refugees continued to leave their home countries in large numbers. By 2009, Germany was taking in large numbers of refugees from countries such as Iraq. In 2010, another surge of refugees left Burma, while others left Cuba. By 2012, the civil war in Syria pushed huge numbers of refugees into countries such as Jordan. Ukrainian refugees began to flee unrest in 2013, and in greater numbers by 2014.

By 2015, the greatest number of refugees were coming from Syria, though mass movement from African countries such as South Sudan also continued–and because most of those refugees went to neighboring countries rather than Europe, the migration received less media attention. In 2015, the U.S. resettled 69,933 refugees; Uganda, with a population roughly eight times smaller, took in more than 100,000 people. Developing countries host nearly 90% of the world’s refugees.

“Often the debates we have in society start with emotion and extreme thoughts, like, ‘Oh, refugees are invading the U.S.,'” says Illah Nourbakhsh, director of the Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, the lab that developed the technology used create the new visualization. “You can’t get past that–you can’t build common ground for people to actually talk about real issues and how to solve them.”

Showing people data in an animated, interactive visualization, he says, is “an interesting shortcut into your brain, where the visual evidence is more rhetorically compelling than any graph or chart that I show you. That visual evidence often moves you from somebody who’s questioning the data to somebody who can see the data. And now they want to talk about what to do about it.”

The lab began working on its Explorables project, a platform designed to help make sense of big data, four years ago. To make big data–with billions of data points, dozens of different fields of information, changing over time–easier to explore, the platform layers animations over maps.

The team has also used systems like Google Earth to explore big data, but even it can only display a few hundred markers, and it requires installation on computers. The researchers realized that they could use a graphics processor in someone’s computer directly, in the same way that a video game does. “What’s kind of cool is that the video game revolution has changed the computer’s architecture over the last decade,” he says. “So the computers have this amazing ability to very quickly render on the screen.” That technology is combined with an ability to display only the resolution needed for the data you’re zoomed in on, making it possible to share massive amounts of data.

You can watch a video of the refugee flow below:

The researchers have used the platform to display data about inequality, carbon dioxide emissions, and the bleaching of coral reefs. Working with the Brazil-based think tank Igarape Institute, they helped incorporate the institute’s data on the fragility of cities, from unemployment and pollution to the risk of violence.

The flow of refugees was one of the stories they wanted to tell, both in the case of Syria and the rest of the world. “The prevailing notion that all these Syrians are going to Europe is nonsense because as you zoom out you realize they’re going to three neighboring countries around Syria the most,” he says. “There’s a little flow to Europe. Then to really blow people away, we pan south, and suddenly you see these massive plumes of Central African refugees moving from country to country that are completely bigger than the Syrian refugee flows. And here’s the untold story.”

In Uganda, where as many as 4,500 people arrived from South Sudan each day in the last week of January 2017, the country has had a longstanding policy of welcoming refugees with free land and the right to work and start businesses. But it is beginning to strain under the pressure of an unending flow of new arrivals.

“The trouble with most of these situations is they’re just so desperately underfunded, even if there is cooperation from the host governments,” says Kathleen Newland, cofounder and senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, has only received a small fraction of the funding it needs for 2017. “That will go up because countries deliver their pledges in dribs and drabs, but there’s just a tremendous amount of concern that they just don’t have the capacity to even do the basics for people, and that’s really a recipe for instability and misery,” she says.

The visualization could help people better understand the extent of the issue, and potentially push for support. “Let’s put this in perspective,” Nourbakhsh says. “There are a lot of refugees coming out of Syria. But check out Central Africa: We aren’t even paying attention to these. It changes people’s perspective, and it makes people care more.”

Google has had a huge impact on our everyday lives for the past two decades. The company’s Android OS is already the most used OS on the planet, and it’s also exploring burgeoning hardware technologies including VR headsets and drones.

It’s no surprise, then, that when it comes to working in tech, Google is always near the top of the list. Google has been the No. 1 most coveted company for internships for the last two years running, according to Vault’s annual rankings. But how do you score an internship with Google–and does it live up to the hype? We spoke with Kerry Wang, a graduate student at Stanford University, who interned with the company last summer.

On His Role At Google

I interned at Google at their Mountain View campus in the summer of 2016. I was 20 years old and had just finished my junior year of undergrad at Stanford. The 10-week program lasted from June to August.

I was a business intern in their Building Opportunities for Leadership & Development (BOLD) program. Specifically, I worked as a product sales lead in their Online Partnerships Group. As a product sales lead, I worked with both business and engineering teams to develop and launch products on the AdSense platform. I loved working with a cross-functional team and tackling the unique opportunities it presented. It was also a position that I felt well-suited for due to my background in human biology (with an innovation, entrepreneurship, and human behavior concentration) and computer science.

Related:
Diary Of An Ex-Apple Intern
Diary Of An Ex-Microsoft Intern
Diary Of An Ex-Facebook Intern

How He Found The Google Internship

The application process for the BOLD Internship started during my freshman year of college. I had seen a flyer advertising the BOLD Discovery program at Google’s New York City campus that was designed for undergraduate freshmen. I decided to apply and was super excited when I was accepted. Along with an all-expenses-paid trip to New York, I spent three days at the Google campus learning about the company’s culture and business operations. I loved what I learned, so when the recruiter for BOLD Discovery reached out two years later to pitch the BOLD Internship, I immediately submitted my resume and application.

The Interview Process At Google

Since BOLD Discovery is a feeder program for the BOLD Internship, I was lucky to be a part of the Fast Track Process. I submitted my application at the beginning of October, heard back from them a few weeks later, and had my interviews scheduled for the beginning of November. While I applied to the general BOLD Internship program, my recruiter matched me with Online Partnerships Group after seeing my resume.

I had two one-on-one 30-minute interviews over Google Hangouts with product sales leads, and I really enjoyed them both. I was a little nervous going into it, but I was prepared, and it helped to know that Google wanted me to do well. My recruiter even emailed me to wish me luck the evening before the interviews. I had a lot of fun with the questions, and I loved getting to know my interviewers. I ended up working with both of them during my internship, and one of them became a great mentor to me.

Three days after my interview, my recruiter gave me a call and offered me the internship. I was amazed by the turnaround time. The interview process was fast and efficient, and throughout it I became increasingly convinced that it was a place where I wanted to work.

What Helped Me Score A Google Internship

At Google, there’s a word we use to describe a set of common characteristics: Googleyness. While there’s no set definition for it, I believe it is a combination of good-heartedness, a passion for learning, and an innovative drive. It’s what makes Googlers people who I would want to work with every single day. While in a “Walk and Talk” with one of my interviewers during my internship, he said that he remembered how I came across as a really nice person. I think that when Google looks for its future employees, it looks beyond the achievements on a resume to how someone is as a person.

The Average Workday Of A Google Intern

I took advantage of the GBus shuttle system and lived in San Francisco for the summer. This meant that I took the 7:20 a.m. shuttle to the Mountain View campus every day to make it to work by 8:30 a.m. I would grab breakfast at one of the cafes and then work until lunch.

Frequently, I would grab lunch with either another intern or a Googler that I wanted to learn from. Everyone was very willing to chat, and one of my personal goals for the summer was to meet a new person every week. Most of my days were spent in meetings, and outside of meetings I could work at any of the common spaces around the office.

My manager was fantastic at both mentoring me during my projects and allowing me the freedom to learn independently. I felt I had autonomy over my work and time, as long as I was productive. After work, I would either go to a social event or the gym, grab dinner, and then catch the GBus home.

Best Experiences As a Google intern

Three stand out:

1. A little more than halfway through my internship, I launched the AdSense product I worked on to publishers around the world. Managing the go-to-market process and measuring launch metrics was an amazing learning experience. Even as interns, our projects had real impact.
2. As a BOLD Intern, I had an awesome mentor who worked at YouTube. We had weekly syncs, and I even had the opportunity to visit her at the YouTube offices. She was a fantastic resource throughout my internship, and we still stay in touch today.
3. My manager is a huge fan of Manchester United. On my last day of work, another team member and I printed out a million pictures of Manchester United’s rival, Manchester City, and wrapped his desk with it. The playful culture at Google was one of the best parts of working there.

The Lasting Benefits Of A Google Internship

Working for Google as a business intern helped me secure an internship as a summer business analyst at McKinsey & Company the following summer. In particular, working for a successful technology company qualified me to specialize in McKinsey’s digital practice. I haven’t started working there yet, but I’m sure the skills I learned through the BOLD Internship will be transferable to this new industry.

Academically, working for a technology company motivated me to pursue a master’s degree in computer science. The knowledge that my human biology undergraduate studies have given me is irreplaceable, but my interactions with the engineering team, and the business team within a technology company, helped me recognize the importance of an engineering degree. After my internship ended, I decided to apply to Stanford’s coterminal master’s program in the fall. I’m excited to spend a fifth year at Stanford studying another field I love.

What Others Could Do To Land An Internship At Google

Learn about Google products. Everyone knows something about Search, Android, and Maps. Set yourself apart by learning about other Google products such as AdSense, Hangouts, and Duo.

Attend Google events. Recruiters are constantly on the lookout for potential interns, whether it be for the current intern cycle or the ones after that. Attend events, talk to people who work at Google, and learn about the opportunities.

Be Googley.

The idea began with the band Hundred Waters, but given, in part, the general vibes and communitarian spirit, they don’t really take credit for it. “I believe that the stars align in a lot of things like this,” says Zach Tetreault, the band’s drummer, and a cofounder of FORM Arcosanti, which, with its location and tiny, by-application-only audience—and, until recently, a zero-dollar admission fee—can sometimes sound, well, utopian. “It’s like if the right people come together and have a similar ethos and vision, and anything is possible,” he says.

Down a long, dusty, desert road an hour north of Phoenix sits the site: the experimental town of Arcosanti. The arcological utopia (that’s a portmanteau of archaeology and ecology) was the dream of visionary architect Paolo Soleri, who yearned for a holistic environment with minimal impact on the planet. Soleri was an Italian-American student of Frank Lloyd Wright and was inspired by Wright’s creative incorporation of nature into his designs. Soleri took it one step further, though, via a process of earth casting—creating increasingly complex molds out of desert silt, pouring slip clay or concrete over them, and casting bell shapes large enough to form apses and eventually livable structures.

In the 1970s, the bulbous buildings of Arcosanti rose from the high desert, dotting 25 acres across a 4,000-acre land preserve. They helped inspire George Lucas to create Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine, and were used as a training ground for architects eager to learn from Soleri as well as families looking for a different way of life. Soleri died in 2013, and Arcosanti was never quite finished: He dreamed of building cities like this. But his vision lives on, thanks to donations to the Cosanti Foundation, the Colly Soleri Music Trust, which produces cultural events on site, and the 75 or so people who live there year round. They support themselves by providing educational and cultural programming, and by making and selling bronze and ceramic bells, pots, and original pieces by Soleri.

The year Soleri died also marked the start of a new tradition: Once a year, the festival organizers effectively “rent” the village, and the population swells to around 1,600. Soleri himself may have never imagined the community would be transformed for one weekend into an arts and culture mecca for a select few, but the festival’s spirit owes much to its location, Tetreault says. “We really did use Arcosanti as a framework for thinking about how to approach this event,” he explains.

Arcosanti’s vaulted apses, says Tetreault, make for “absolutely visually stunning permanent stages that just exist for us to come and use without having to bring in tons of stage production.” And a music festival seems to fit in perfectly with Soleri’s vision for the community, since he built the town around a massive amphitheater, says Teatreault. “Soleri largely believed that art and culture were really what propelled communities.”

The concept was born a few years ago, when Tetreault was looking for an unconventional venue to release his band’s second album, The Moon Rang Like A Bell. He was weighing a variety of far-out options—Carlsbad Cavern and the BioDome in New Mexico, for instance—but it was the proto-futuristic oddity of Arcosanti that spoke loudest to him, and helped him crystalize the idea for a festival. “If you look at the underlying values, it’s really about elegant frugality and dense, complex design.”

A 360-degree video from Arcosanti, by the New York Times:

Though the size of the festival has remained roughly the same over its four-year life, the acts have only grown bigger: At this year’s iteration, earlier this month, the likes of Solange, James Blake, Father John Misty, Julianna Barwick, Future Islands, and Skrillex, who runs the OWSLA record label that is home to Hundred Waters, all graced Soleri’s village-sized stage—and mingled with the rest of the desert throng throughout the weekend.

As they assess the lessons of their 2017 iteration, the organizers are now looking forward to 2018 and what they hope will be an expansion of their vision. That includes a possible second weekend of FORM Arcosanti as well as year-round programming, working closely with the residents and board members of Arcosanti to propel their initiatives, and ensure that the festival and the village are what Tetreault calls “a harmonious organism.”

In the wake of the disastrous Fyre Festival, where social influencers compelled fans and VIPs to pay huge sums of money for a luxury music festival experience that only resulted in irate Instagram posts, a $100 million class action lawsuit alleging fraud and negligence, and a federal investigation, Arcosanti’s frugality and community is meant to offer an antidote: an intimate music experience that allows fans and artists alike to build a community, even if it only lasts for a weekend. FORM pays tribute to the architect’s vision not only through music, but also immersive visual art installations with assistance from the Phoenix Art Museum, eclectic film screenings, and lectures on topics like immigration, Black Lives Matter, and climate change.

As Form has grown, it has also developed a stronger, sustainable business strategy, it says. As part of its shift, attendance is no longer free for most attendees, a change that will stay in place for the future. Tickets now cost $389 for general admission, and there is even a glamping option, with food and drink and a luxury tent for $2,500 per pair of tickets. There is also a refreshingly light sponsorship presence, in the form of appropriately obliquely hip brand activations that blend into the surroundings. Think a state-of-the-art recording studio sponsored by Beats by Dre, United Recording of Hollywood, Red Bull Music Academy and Outro; a Tidal photo booth; free Soylent for anyone who wanted it.

Related: How Google’s Music-Making AI Learns From Human Minds At Festivals 

The festival’s draw—for fans, talent, and sponsors—would make much bigger festivals chew off their wristbands in jealousy. But it wasn’t always so easy to lure indie A-list talent to the desert, even to play in a vaunted setting like Arcosanti. “The first couple of years were a real struggle,” says Tetreault, laughing. “Like, ‘Hey come to this place that you’ve never heard of and play for no money and for only like a thousand people, I swear it’s gonna be worth it.'” The first year that FORM took over Arcosanti, the bill included a lineup of just eight bands playing in front of an intimate audience of 350 people, for whom the only cost of admission was filling out an application form. The bands played as a favor to Hundred Waters, the P.A. system came from their practice space, and the record label paid for flights and accommodations.

Now, artists are compensated but “more conservatively” than they would be at other festivals, according to Tetreault. “There’s generally an understanding with artists, managers, and agents that our budgets are limited due to the intimate nature of the event and low capacity,” he says, but notes that they try to make up for it in other ways, mostly by offering a unique, supportive venue for experimentation. “James Blake performed his first-ever solo grand piano set at FORM Arcosanti this year,” says Tetreault. “This was something he’d always wanted to do but never had a platform that felt right until FORM came about.”

Four years on, the real draw for artists, though, might be the fans themselves. “This is the most engaged audience I’ve ever seen at any concert,” says Moses Sumney, an electro-soul singer who has played FORM in previous years and returned to curate this year’s show. “It’s totally incredible and inspiring.”

As festivals saturate the music scene, becoming more homogenized and commercialized along the way, FORM’s immersive, Happening-like experience hinges on its application process. Click on the “buy tickets” page and you come to a web page asking, “What inspires you?” Applicants are also asked to write essays about their values, creative process, and what they hope to contribute and get out of the festival.

The process allows Tetreault and the festival’s curators to pick attendees as carefully as the lineup, but mostly it helps weed out those likely not to respect the site, to provoke attendees, or to ruin the vibe. They aren’t looking for influencers or celebrities, but for true music fans who want to be a part of a community, who can appreciate watching Thundercat play beneath the stars before waking up for yoga, will take advantage of the sponsored state-of-the-art recording studio built at the site for the festival, or will join in impromptu campsite jam sessions with members of the bands that just graced the stage.

“The application is there to encourage and cultivate a thoughtful community of people,” says Tetreault. “There’s no prerequisite for what you have to be or have done to get a ticket invite.” Once past the gatekeepers, it’s more or less first come, first served, though.

Part of the reason that the founders wanted to screen applicants is that the festival takes place in relatively close quarters. “Everyone camps,” says Tetreault. “Everyone’s here all weekend, and it really becomes this community where at the end of it, you actually know your neighbor, and by keeping it intimate like that, there’s a lot more possibilities.” That’s also why the organizers shun the drugged out, bro-tripping, party culture found at festivals like Coachella or Electric Daisy, opting for fans who prefer a more natural experience—or at least keep their drug use under the radar.

Connection and community is partly a function of Arcosanti’s size: only about 1,500 people can fit into the village. “We could probably move 10 to 20,000 tickets on this fairly easily, but that’s not our intention,” says Tetreault. “We want it to feel cozy and vibrant.” Fans say the effort works. “It sounds extreme, but FORM was one of the greatest weekends of my life,” says Allie Volpe, who attended FORM in 2016. “The festival allows for fans, press, and artists alike to intermingle, so it really felt like a collective of creatives respecting each other’s art.”

Creating a festival from scratch (rather than just Instagramming about it) is an impressive feat—especially considering that until this year, admission to Form was free. “People have been kind of shocked and appalled that we’ve done it for free,” says Alex Hoffman, a festival organizer and former general manager at the recently-defunct Family Artists, a management group that worked with Hundred Waters and co-founded the festival. “People were like, ‘What are you doing? Take something from us. It’s not right.'” For the organizers, though, money was simply not the point. “Money doesn’t ensure a great experience,” says Hoffman. “That really comes from passion, from creating a passionate experience for people who care about building something.”

In the past, they relied on subtle, understated sponsorship to foot the bills, but this year, FORM started charging for tickets, which, perhaps surprisingly, hasn’t seemed to frustrate fans. “We had a community that was willing to invest,” says Hoffman, and that has allowed them to turn a corner financially as attendees pony up ticket fees. While Tetreault and Hoffman opted not to share specifics on their profitability, they’re close, they say. And they have been able to give back more to the local community.

“Now we have this definitive financial structure in place and that has allowed us to make significant improvements,” said Tetreault. “Our site fee allows them [the residents of Arcosanti] new infrastructure and site improvements that are like substantial and visibly recognizable every time we come back here.” That assistance can be as simple as a new railing on a staircase or funding much-needed renovations to some of Arcosanti’s permanent housing. It’s a modest goal, one that stands in stark contrast to the legacy of Fyre Festival: not just a handful of lawsuits and an investigation, but piles of garbage and hundreds of thousands in unpaid bills to Bahamian business owners.

“We have a very long-term agreement on developing this relationship, and every year it’s building more trust and a foundation for this thing, which has evolved a lot,” explains Tetreault. As for the residents, they don’t seem to mind the upheaval to their daily routine, he says. “It’s sort of become like their annual holiday.”

While Hoffman and Tetreault have a pretty chilled-out vibe about them, they both hold MBAs and know that building a long-lasting brand—and one that lasts all year—isn’t just about pulling in a profit. “It’s about the steady build,” says Hoffman. “It’s about the time and effort and thoughtfulness that goes into building a community. That’s also part of why we have the application model, because we knew from the outset that having a foundation and a core community of the right kind of thoughtful people would lead to a sustainable long-term business for us.”

Building a trusted brand with a committed base of fans has given the festival ample room to grow, even as it stays small. Soleri may not have been a Skrillex or even Future Islands fan, but the festival’s organic approach—its slow effort to build community before profits, to focus on form not just function— would probably make him proud.

Your job interview might go perfectly, or it might not. Maybe you’ve been sailing through the first 20 minutes, feeling totally prepared for everything the hiring manager is asking you. You’re having no trouble giving tidy, satisfying, well-spoken answers, and you’re feeling great—until she asks you this next question. Uh, what?

Your mind goes blank.

No matter how hard you’ve prepared, there’s always the possibility that you’ll get tossed a question out of left field that leaves you stumped. Some companies have ditched curveball job interview questions; others haven’t. But not every question that throws you for a loop was designed to do that; occasionally, it’s just a perfectly reasonable question you simply hadn’t thought to consider.

Either way, don’t give up hope yet. Here’s what you need to know (and do) to handle the unexpected like a pro.

Related:3 Of The Toughest Interview Questions And How To Answer Them

Ask Your Own Question

First of all, it’s important to remember that a question is just a retrieval cue for your memory. It’s meant to remind you of something that you can then talk about with the interviewer. When you get stumped, all it really means is that the question hasn’t done its job—nothing is coming to mind based on the way it was framed.

So the only way to get something useful out of your memory when it’s not coughing anything up is to try a different prompt. In other words, reframe the question. There are two ways to do that. One is to quickly try and think of something else that question might mean and see if that brings something relevant into your head.

The other is to ask a question of your own. It’s easy to feel like an interview is an exam. On a real exam, you have to answer each item as it’s written. But an interview is a two-way street, which means it’s fine to engage in actual conversation with the hiring manager. Way too many candidates leave this until the very end, when they’re asked, “So do you have any questions for me?” This is a mistake. Your best defense against a question that stumps you is to come prepared with a bunch of questions of your own, and then constantly look for opportunities to weave them into your chat.

So when you feel like you’re scratching your head, just ask some questions for clarification. Throw out a few initial ideas and ask the interviewer for thoughts. If you can get a conversation started, you’re likely to find paths that let you talk about your own problem-solving skills and arrive at a more thoughtful answer.

Related:Six Job Interview Questions You Should Have Asked (Much Earlier)

Remember Why You’re Here

A lot of people think of the hiring process as though it’s a series of hoops to jump through: First get your resume noticed so somebody reads it, then land an interview, then ace the interview, and then get an offer. This way of thinking makes it seem like there’s one important piece of information or performance you need to deliver that will push you on to the next stage.

But there’s growing recognition that job interviews provide only a little insight about job candidates. Resumes and references tell a lot more about what you’ve been doing before applying for this job. That long-term information is a valuable predictor of future performance—possibly more so than for which you’re giving it credit.

Not only is this interview probably not an ultimate test of your candidacy, but getting stumped once or twice likely isn’t lights out for you. The hiring manager might even be deliberately testing your soft skills by throwing a difficult question into the mix to see your reaction. They want to get a sense of how you deal with uncertainty. Do you hide the fact that you don’t know what to say? Do you admit up front that you’re having trouble? Do you create a partnership with the interviewer to negotiate the answer to the question?

The reason you’re here isn’t to verbally deliver a bunch of data about yourself. It’s to demonstrate what you’re like to interact with and how well you can solve tough problems in real time.

Learn Something About Them

There’s a good chance you aren’t completely prepared for the position you’re interviewing for—and that’s okay. (You probably shouldn’t apply to jobs that won’t challenge you to do anything new that you haven’t already done.) By the same token, it’s pretty much impossible to be completely prepared for the interview itself. So the same way you should think of any job duties in the new position as learning opportunities, approach any curveball interview questions as an invitation to learn something about the employer.

Try something like this: “Wow, you know that’s honestly not something I’ve had a chance to give a lot of thought to yet, but I’d love it if this position introduced me to more of that. What other learning opportunities will there be in this role?”

Then listen for the answer. It’s important to know whether you can be honest about what you know and don’t know in the job. It’s also important to have a sense that the company wants to help you develop your talents. You can talk about the strategies you use to learn new things, and ask what kinds of professional development the company offers.

So this strategy is simple: Just admit that you don’t know the answer and use it as a chance to discuss how you approach unfamiliar situations. The best organizations are learning organizations, where everyone has a chance to improve on their strengths and shore up their weaknesses. Gaps in your knowledge shouldn’t be a liability.

But if you admit that there’s something you don’t know, and your potential employer chooses not to hire you because of it, you may have dodged a bullet.

While the horrific results of their work are too often in the news, rarely has a suicide bomber been used as a marketing device. Kuwait-based telecom Zain‘s new Ramadan ad, however, features one being stopped by his potential victims preaching peace over violence, and it’s already gone viral in the Middle East.

As the suicide bomber prepares to murder innocent people, a young narrator says, “I will tell God everything. That you’ve filled the cemeteries with our children and emptied our school desks. That you’ve sparked unrest and turned our streets to darkness.”

Later on in the three-minute film, United Arab Emirates pop star Hussain Al Jassmi sings, “Let’s bomb violence with mercy/Let’s bomb delusion with the truth/Let’s bomb hatred with love/Let’s bomb extremism for a better life.”

The ad also features actual people from, and footage of, past terrorist attacks in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. That, and the ad’s allusion to Omran Daqneesh, a boy who survived an airstrike by the Syrian government last year. Jordanian human rights worker Rawan Da’as disagreed with the association, telling The New York Times, “They put Omran as if he suffered from terrorism, while he suffered from the regime. It is not nice that you take things out of context and say that little boys in Syria are suffering without talking about why they are suffering.”

One more reason not to like @Zain'a Ramadan TV ad. @ZainJo#اعلان_زين#الارهاب_صناعةpic.twitter.com/WhEv8xUsDt

— Rawan Da'as (@RawanDaas) May 28, 2017

It’s not the first time advertising has been proposed as a tool against terror. Back in 2015, the U.S. government enlisted the help of a group of American ad agency execs with an aim to use their skills to counter online radicalization. It’s risky subject matter to tackle, but when approached with the kind of care it’s given here, the message has clearly resonated with many.

More than any other company, Nest Labs established the modern smart-home vision when it released its thermostat in 2011. But in the years since Google bought the startup for $3.2 billion in 2014, Nest has released far fewer new products than most people might have expected. Aside from the weather-resistant outdoor Nest Cam that it announced last July, it feels like it’s been an unnaturally long time since Nest has released anything new. (The biggest Nest headline of 2016 was not a product announcement but the departure of its cofounder, Tony Fadell.)

Now the company is announcing a new top-of-the-line security camera, the Nest Cam IQ, which will retail for $299 (or $498 for a two-pack) and is due to ship at the end of June. (The existing Nest Cam Indoor and Outdoor models remain on the market at $199 apiece.) Like previous Nest Cams, the new model descends from the products made by Dropcam, which Nest acquired in 2014. But Maxime Veron, Nest’s director of product marketing, told me that it’s been working on this new camera for more than two years. And the changes on both the hardware and software fronts are significant.

That the Nest IQ is more than a minor refresh is obvious the moment you lay eyes on it. Available in one color–white–it’s far slicker than previous Nest Cams, with a new gooseneck design and weighted base that make it easier to position and leave it more likely to pleasantly blend in with your home’s decor. It looks like a pint-sized, borderline-anthropomorphic desk lamp a la Pixar’s Luxo Jr., a comparison I’m sure I won’t be the only person to make. Nest even designed its own custom USB-C cable, with a connector that sits flush with the base rather than sticking out.

More Pixels, More Intelligence

The camera includes a 4K image sensor, the ability to stream 1080p video, and 12X digital zoom that–in the demo Veron recently gave me–provides a crisp picture even if you magnify the view to its maximum detail. Improved speakers and microphones are designed to let the camera work better as a remote-control speakerphone that lets you communicate with people within its range.

As with Lighthouse’s recently announced security camera, much of what’s new about the Nest Cam IQ leverages machine learning, allowing the camera to not only stream video but understand what it’s streaming. If it detects motion, it can tell if it’s a pet or a person, using algorithms that run inside the camera rather than relying on the cloud; if it’s a person, it will automatically show you a face close-up. A feature called Supersight lets it pan and zoom to follow a person around the room–a capability that you might hope you’ll never actually need, but which could come in handy if you find yourself needing to identify an intruder.

If you subscribe to the for-pay Nest Aware service, the camera will also be able to send you audio alerts if it hears a person talking or a dog barking, and will let you train its facial-detection feature to distinguish between known persons (such as your kids) and strangers (like a burglar).

Veron says that the Nest Cam IQ’s newfound machine-vision skills capitalize on the vast amount of video ingested by the company’s existing cameras, which stream 2,000 years of video a day and detect 9 billion people a year. They also leverage some of the same technology as Google Photos–though Veron was quick to add that Nest runs the code on its own servers rather than intermingling its data with Google’s.

Despite the fact that Nest hasn’t exactly flooded the market with products, its brand remains strong: Veron showed me stats, which show it as the name most associated with the smart home by consumers, beating out Samsung, Google, and Amazon. He says that the Nest Cam IQ’s emphasis on premium design and advanced features add up to a statement about what Nest wants to be: “As a leader, we feel a responsibility to educate people and come out with products that lead by example.”

Leaders have a trust issue. According to the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer, 60% of people believe that the average person is just as credible a source of information about a company as a technical or academic expert—and far more credible than a CEO (37%) or government official (29%).

In this atmosphere of distrust, leaders have a big job to build credibility and trust. When it comes to communication, one major problem is a lack of authenticity and truth-telling, says leadership communication expert Terry Pearce, author of Leading Out Loud: A Guide for Engaging Others in Creating the Future.

When it comes to habits that can ding your credibility, there are some common ones that many people either may not realize they’re doing—or may have even been trained to do, he says. Here are five credibility-busters you should drop if you want a better shot at building trust.

The Fake Apology

One way to damage your credibility is to offer a “non-apology apology” when you owe an authentic one, says Michael Maslansky, CEO of Maslansky + Partners and coauthor of The Language of Trust: Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics. So, instead of, “I’m sorry if you were offended,” which puts the ownership of the issue on the other party, a sincere and effective apology acknowledges and accepts responsibility for a situation or transgression.

“You can often tell the difference based on whether there is an acceptance of responsibility—an authentic understanding of why the person feels or, the group of people feel like they were wronged,” Maslansky explains. In addition, in corporate context, the apology includes an agreement or a statement about what the organization or the individual is going to do to make sure that it doesn’t happen again or to address the wrong.

The Blame Game

“Finger-pointing” or shifting blame onto someone else also damages people’s faith in your word and authenticity, says communication coach Kate Bennis. While sometimes situations require consequences, such as for carelessness or bad actions, publicly making someone else a scapegoat is just going to make people wonder about how much you can be trusted.

“In order to have credibility, leaders must immediately take full responsibility for their behaviors and actions of all of those in the organization without acting clueless, finger-pointing, or denying,” she says.

The Non-Denial Denial

Playing games with words, such as the “non-denial denial” is a big credibility-buster, Maslansky says. Today’s audiences are sophisticated, and aren’t tricked when leaders dance around a subject. When you appear to deny something but, upon closer inspection, the actual meaning of what you said is ambiguous, people begin to wonder if you’re being honest with them overall, he says.

A better way to handle tough questions or information is to be truthful and, if possible, try to emphasize the positive or a solution, he says. So, instead of saying, “We have no intention of making changes,” when it’s clear that a reorganization or other changes may be on the horizon, be more forthright. You may say that you’re exploring options and give a concrete timeline when employees can expect more answers.

“Your best strategy is to get ahead of it rather than trying to go through the process that we’ve all seen happen before, like a slow motion car crash, where there is the non-denial, denial. Then there’s the revelation, then there is the belated apology and the sense of remorse. Then there is the departure from the scene while you hope that everybody forgets what happened,” Maslansky says.

The Agenda-Driven Message

However, when you’re being straight with your audience, don’t mistake that for an opportunity to push your agenda, Maslansky says. When you put forth an assertion that is clearly self-serving with no data to back it up, your audience is going to see through it.

So, instead of saying that there might be a reorganization, but no one needs to worry about losing their jobs, which is counter-intuitive and probably false, recognize that changes need to be made, give context for the issue and the action being taken (e.g., sales have fallen off, so the company is looking at a combination of cost-cutting and organizational changes), and information on when they can expect to hear more gives them a sense that you’re sharing all that you can, he says.

The Question-Dodge

When someone asks you a difficult question and you answer by evading the question, “it sticks out like a sore thumb,” Pearce says. A response that ignores the question or acknowledges, “That’s a good question, but I think the more important point is,” doesn’t fool anyone and leaves the questioning party feeling duped. It happens often in question-and-answer sessions, Pearce says.

“The person never does get satisfied and, of course, they leave thinking that their question was avoided and the damage is done. But the leader rarely thinks about that. They think about how clever they were to get around it,” he says.

Overall, most of these situations can be solved by leaders providing context and being as honest as possible, Pearce says. He likens leaders to the “captain of the ship.” Standing on the deck with a clearer view of the horizon than others, they can communicate what’s coming with more authority and vision than those who are below deck and relying on them. When they ignore context and dismiss their responsibility to be truthful, their credibility is at risk.

I once had a boss who, though he appeared to be laid back and less intrusive, would often showcase his true micromanaging self when I would turn in copy or blog posts. I would spend hours working on something I was really proud of, only to be given back a heavily edited document that essentially turned the project into his. Even though I was given the title of manager, I felt I truly didn’t oversee the department because he was constantly changing our copy or moving dates around on our content calendar.

It was tough working under that kind of boss, to say the least.

No one likes having a boss who micromanages. Not only is it incredibly annoying to work under someone who constantly changes your work, checks in on projects, moves things around, or is always scrutinizing your work, but it’s also counterproductive to you as a growing professional.

Related:Forget Micromanaging, Hands-Off Leadership Could Hurt Workers More

But if you find yourself working under a micromanager, there are a few ways to flip the situation and thrive under your annoying boss. Angela Copeland, career coach at Copeland Coaching, suggests taking the following steps to help turn a negative micromanager situation into a positive working environment.

1. Build Your Self-Esteem

When it comes to thriving under a micromanager, confidence is key. If you love your job and the biggest issue is your micromanager, then it’s time to take control of the situation so you can be successful at work without having to worry about the stress your boss adds.

It can be tough to build self-esteem when your boss is constantly bringing you down, but Copeland says the important thing to remember is that you are good at your job and you’re in the position you’re in for a reason.

“Just remember that they hired you for a reason,” says Copeland. “Don’t interpret your boss’s fear of losing control to be a reflection of your work.”

2. Handle The Issue Directly With Your Boss

It sounds scary and the idea of tackling the issue head on might give you a burst of nerves, but Copeland says that when it comes to personality conflicts with your boss, the best way to handle it is to speak with them directly. If you talk to another manager about the issue, your boss will likely find out and will feel like you went over their head. Moreover, bringing HR into the situation doesn’t always go as planned.

“Very often, we think of the HR team as our best friends who are there to help make things happier at work for employees,” explains Copeland. “In reality, their role is typically to help protect the company from serious legal risks, such as lawsuits. Going to HR first will likely make the problem worse. Wait to escalate to HR until you’ve tried to work it out with your boss one-on-one.”

3. Treat Your Boss Like A Customer

So what exactly do you say when you talk to your boss about how their micromanagement makes you feel? “Think of your boss like your customer,” suggests Copeland, who adds you should try to come up with a solution that will help them feel better and will give your conversation a starting point.

Copeland suggests getting ahead of the annoying ways in which your boss micromanages you.

For example, if they are constantly checking in with you or showing up to meetings unannounced, try saying something like, “I’m feeling as if I may not be providing the type of update about the project that would work best for you. I want to be sure I’m providing everything you need. Would it be helpful if I were to provide a daily email update on the project status?”

This is a direct way to take control of the situation and hopefully come to an understanding with your boss that you will provide the updates and reach out when they are needed. Another idea Copeland suggests is proposing a weekly meeting for you and your boss to catch up on hot topics.

“When you look for ways to ease their fears, you can begin to “manage” your manager,” says Copeland.

4. Keep An Eye Out For Red Flags

If you’re interviewing for a job but are worried about working for a micromanager, the interview is a good time to keep an eye out for any red flags that your boss is a micromanager.

“When you’re interviewing for the job, be sure you look at the process as a two-way street.,” says Copeland. “Don’t simply hope and pray the boss will hire you. Think about the things you need to know before accepting an offer. While you go through this process, pay attention to how you feel about your interactions with the boss. Take note of little signs, including how specific they are about your interview schedule, your start date, and your salary.”

Related:6 Red Flags That Say That Your Boss Is Going To Be A Nightmare 

Moreover, another great way to learn about your future boss is to look up the company on Glassdoor. You can look for feedback from employees who have previously worked in your position or work in the department you would be under and can see what employees are saying about the boss.

It might sound impossible now, but if you consider the following and have a one-on-one with your boss, you can pave the way for a better working relationship with a little more freedom.

“If you can be open to finding a solution that will calm the manager’s fears, you will be more likely to thrive,” says Copeland. “Don’t immediately dismiss your manager’s needs. Remember that they’re your customer. You need to work with them to find a solution that will work.”

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

Twelve years ago, the Verizon Building was a hub of the Downtown Manhattan area, an industrial pylon leering out across the East River. Today it stands largely empty. The telecom giant vacated the premises in 2007, making room for the 40 or so people now huddled around small tables in a back room of the second floor.

It’s a weeknight in late April, and they’re all here to figure out how to leave jobs at big corporations. This is the ninth week of a 12-week career-change program by a London-based startup called “Escape the City”—its first one in New York—and just about everyone in the room (there’s a $250 early-bird discount) has paid $1,500 to try and do just that.

Related:Why Finding Meaning At Work Matters More Than Being Happy

The Allure Of Something Better

The “escapees,” mostly professionals in their 20s and 30s, include the standard New York City mix of lawyers, consultants, and designers. You might expect a career- and life-coaching program to attract tired commuters with deeply hunched postures and glazed eyes, but this one hasn’t. There’s a focused and eager atmosphere in the room, a buzz of excitement for coming to grips with the unfamiliar.

And for this crowd, what counts as unfamiliar is a career that feels purpose-driven and meaningful, on terms that aren’t set by a corporate mission statement. That’s what the organization’s cofounders, Dominick Jackman and Rob Symington, felt was lacking from their own jobs as London management consultants back in 2010.

“I was sleepwalking through my career” Jackman recalls, before realizing it was a sentiment many of his peers also shared. What soon became “Escape the City” (a reference to the name of London’s financial district, the City of London) began as a small, informal meet-up for weary corporate types. Word spread among friends, and then to strangers, who were looking for someplace to vent about the lack of meaning in their work.

In the years since, Escape (members often truncate its name in conversation) has expanded these group therapy sessions into a full slate of offerings, which also include weekend courses and an assortment of one-off talks by guest speakers. The 12-week program, though, is Escape’s flagship service and emphasizes business-building, emotional intelligence, and self-discovery.

Related:Millennials Aren’t More Motivated By “Purpose” Than The Rest Of Us

With a majority of U.S. millennials, by one estimate, working jobs they’re overqualified for, and with the unemployment rate among the same demographic roughly triple the national average, it’s no surprise that there are lots of young professionals who feel stuck in jobs they don’t like. But for many who are eager to ditch their desk jobs, there’s little in the way of support. Beyond the usual roster of career coaches, there are programs like NomadX, which charges $2,000 per month to get “residents” set up with accommodations and desk space to start working remotely in exotic locations.

But for those looking to leave corporate lifestyles but who are unsure what to do next, Escape the City’s more measured approach might feel like the safer bet.

Finding Something Meaningful, Often For The First Time

Leading tonight’s session is Olivia Frazao, a wiry, short-haired clinical psychologist who at the moment sounds more like a business coach.

She’s frenetically bouncing around the room, discussing escapees’ final projects as “minimal viable products,” or “MVPs,” one of the many elements of Escape’s program that nods to Silicon Valley culture. In this case, an MVP is any concrete step an escapee can take toward creating a testable, career-shifting idea. Examples projected on a wall include “start a regular outdoor meet-up” and “find freelance design projects,” and they sound more like personal or professional goals than like products or services to build a business around.

Frazao isn’t fazed by this, though; in fact, these objectives have taken weeks to arrive at, first through exercises meant to deconstruct societal norms around careers, then with bite-sized solo activities, like reaching out to potential business mentors or even just starting conversations with strangers. Simple as they sound, these are opportunities almost every participant admits to having skirted in the past.

Frazao’s task now is to help escapees come up with ways to test their MVPs quickly. In one case, that’s going from being a weekend artist to actually setting up an Etsy shop. In another, it’s organizing a retreat with friends to see whether being a digital nomad and working as a tour guide feels like the right career move. Participants write down their MVP activities and begin honing the idea.

Related:It’s Come To This—Procrastination Nannies Are Now A Thing

After 20 minutes or so of discussion, Frazao, circling the room, senses her audience is losing focus. “How’s everyone feel about this?” she asks. A bunch of hands spring up giving a sideways thumb, and she launches into a new exercise: “Say the one thing that defines you as different,” Frazao exclaims. Nobody is spared; everyone is compelled to define themselves. Down the line the escapees stand up and volunteer their answers.

“I am thoughtful” one says, and another chimes in, ” I am witty . . . just, uh, not right now.”

The whole session moves fluidly like this, eschewing structure for short bursts of energetic activity that compel everyone to stay alert and involved. Escapees have all experienced the claustrophobic work of cubicles or overcrowded open office plans, but few have experience in team environments that really put them on their toes this way—let alone on matters involving their own ambitions.

Can You Put A Price On Career Happiness?

But should an opportunity for self-discovery really cost four figures? Does it really take three months of intensive weekly coaching to decide to launch an Etsy shop? To be fair, Escape the City offers other, cheaper resources, like the popular free newsletter at the heart of its member network, which boasts some 250,000 subscribers. For many, the answer is a clear yes; in fact, some have already left the 12-week program early with success in hand.

One of them, Nehal Shukla, a former Credit Suisse consultant, settled on a new career path after just four weeks. When we spoke by phone, she described the pressure of growing up as a first-generation immigrant with her family back in the Democratic Republic of Congo. When she signed up for Escape, she’d recently been laid off, and an early session in the program was transformative. Through writing exercises, Shukla was coached to reflect on some of the things her culture, parents, and friends had projected onto her—how the foundation of her career had formed. She’d never really examined where her own ambitions actually came from, what values they reflected, and whether they were actually her values.

As Shukla described the experience later, “It’s about breaking away from a mold of responsibility parents put on us,” a sentiment echoed by many of the escapees I meet. More than a few are first- and second-generation immigrants like Shukla, who also described feeling trapped by the expectation that they’d eagerly embrace the American ideal through corporate ladder-climbing. Just a few weeks into the program, Shukla received simultaneous offers from Ashoka Africa, a social innovation nonprofit, for a role as a financial manager in Kenya, and from Goldman Sachs as a financial analyst. She chose the former and has since moved back to Africa, crediting Escape for giving her the perspective to accept the passion project.

Escape is careful not to guarantee any single, specific outcome from its programming. Instructors describe their goal as ranging from helping participants find “alignment” by squaring their inner goals with their existing lives to discovering an “aha” moment in the midst of an emotional breakdown brought on by work stress. At times it seems that Escape’s mission—like its clients’ careers—is still something of a work in progress.

But perhaps that’s not a bad thing. Toward the end of the night, an investment banker I’ll call Alex (he asked to remain anonymous), is slouched in his chair at the back of the room. “It’s more like AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] for your career,” he tells me when I ask how he’d characterize the program—a way of helping workaholics finally put together an exit strategy. Landing a new job thanks to Escape would be a coup de grace, he says, but the real value is just gaining enough clarity of purpose to contemplate a change in the first place. When I hear from Alex a few weeks later, he says he’s in the early stages of new entrepreneurial effort, but for now he’s hanging onto his comfortable salary.

The night ends as Farao separates the escapees into smaller “accountability groups” where four to five people recount their achievements of the past week. For most, that doesn’t include settling on new job titles, but for many that lingering uncertainty is okay. They’ve made it through the difficult part, forcing uncomfortable questions to the surface. Now they’re simply left to figure out an escape route.

Garreth Dottin is an experienced engineer and a writer who covers multiculturalism and the changing nature of work. You can find more of his work at Habits and Design.

Earlier this month, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz wrote to the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanding former FBI director James Comey’s notes of conversations with President Trump.

Congress has wide discretion to investigate what it chooses, including the right to issue subpoenas demanding access to potential evidence. But Chaffetz isn’t the only one interested in reading Comey’s notes, which reports have indicated document the president attempting to influence the FBI’s investigation into Russian election interference. The American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Privacy Information Center have both filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the documents.

“While we hope that Congress will be serious about its constitutional oversight role, we believe the issues raised by the Comey memos are so vital that the public should have access to them without delay,” wrote Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, in a blog post.

The Freedom of Information Act, often known as FOIA, has been used by journalists, activists, and private citizens to get access to federal government records since it went into effect in 1967. And every state has passed similar laws that allow the public to get access to state and local records, generally with exemptions for files like records of ongoing investigations or personal medical records. (Florida’s are called the Sunshine Law.) The trouble, say transparency advocates and people who rely on open records laws for their day-to-day work, is that in an era when files can be searched, copied, and transmitted in minutes at minimal cost, many agencies still respond to requests with excessive delays, claims of high processing costs, and files produced in difficult-to-handle formats like scans of printed versions of digital documents.

“We’ve had situations where someone says I want the Excel spreadsheet, but one of the custodians of the record will say ‘no,'” concerned that would make it too easy to tamper with the document, says Daniel Bevarly, executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition.

And last year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a collection of FOIA horror stories, including a decade-long delay from the Defense Department and a bill from a Texas sheriff’s office for $98 in Wite-Out, presumably used to redact documents.

The problem isn’t universal. Some federal agencies have taken steps to improve how materials are released—for example, a State Department system that includes searchable copies, not just scans, of Hillary Clinton’s much-discussed emails. And some states have adopted laws requiring documents be produced in their original digital formats. “Florida, it’s written into their Sunshine laws, that any information requested be provided in its native format to the petitioner,” says Bevarly. (Those sorts of requirements aren’t always perfectly followed. The EFF’s stories include a report from a MuckRock journalist who contested a request from controversial Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis for $1,200 in photocopying costs for email records, despite a state law requiring digital documents).

But a look at Chaffetz’s letter reveals a level of specificity in how the FBI documents should be formatted, indexed, and turned over that would make most frequent FOIA users jealous. The letter extensively spells out how the FBI files should be serial-numbered, the digital format in which they should be produced, and the 37 pieces of data, including times, dates, email subjects, and document text, that should be included with each one.

Chaffetz’s letter also asks that the documents themselves be accompanied by index files formatted for Concordance. That’s a software tool from legal tech giant LexisNexis used by lawyers to organize documents turned over during litigation, in the evidence-sharing process called discovery. Just as government agencies and members of the public can find themselves overwhelmed by the volume of relevant documents to a FOIA request, lawyers can face similar issues finding relevant evidence to turn over to the other side in a complicated lawsuit, and analyzing the documents they in turn receive.

“In the past, attorneys would use sticky notes and sometimes different color sticky notes for issues, and they would have all their paper and that’s how they would go through and make notes about important issues,” says Mary Mack, executive director of the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists. “The paper [piles] just kept getting bigger and bigger, and they kept needing bigger and bigger conference rooms to do this.”

Eventually, as email and other digital tools became ubiquitous, paper discovery became effectively impossible, and courts and lawyers adapted increasingly sophisticated systems for digitally sharing evidence.

“There was a step where they would exchange basically just unrelated pages but they were on a disk—so they called it electronic discovery,” says Mack.

And in 2006, the federal court system adopted rules requiring litigants to share documents in their original format or “a reasonably usable form,” and various federal and state courts have since adopted more specific standards. The Delaware federal court, for example, specifically spells out that files should be produced as text-searchable images, complete with Concordance indexes, unless they’re spreadsheets, databases, or other files that are difficult to visualize as images.

But enforcing those kinds of rules may be more feasible for litigation, where court rules generally specify that the party turning over documents is responsible for the costs involved, and judges are on hand to enforce rules of discovery, than for public records. FOIA users like journalists who are considered to be acting in the public interest are often entitled to exemptions from fees, and agencies often have little wiggle room in their budget for handling complex records requests.

“I think public records are behind because when they put the FOIA laws in and the Sunshine laws in, they didn’t necessarily put a budget allocation in to do it,” says Mack.

That problem can be compounded by aging IT infrastructure that can make it difficult to search for relevant records, let alone produce them in a modern software format.

“In many jurisdictions, they’re still using mainframes,” says Alexander Howard, deputy director of the pro-transparency Sunlight Foundation. “The federal government still employs people who know [the legacy programming language] Cobol, and so do many states.”

The group advocates a potentially simple solution, which has been adopted to some extent by cities, states, and federal agencies that have launched online open data portals: Publish any records that aren’t required to be kept private.

“One of the things that Sunlight has been pushing for for over a decade now is the simple idea that public information should be available online to the public by default, except where there are demonstrated security and privacy risks and harms, or other exemptions that exist under a state’s public records law,” Howard says.

Kids who grow up in particularly impoverished, discriminatory, and conflict-ridden places may die early or see their own chances of success drastically reduced because of preventable health issues, malnutrition, poor schools, violent home lives, or early pregnancy. It’s an issue that affects 1 in 4 youngsters worldwide. Such problems often exist in developing countries, but they’re also largely present with the United States, which came in 36th out of 172 counties audited in Stolen Childhoods, a new report from Save The Children, a nonprofit working to improve young lives.

In honor of International Children’s Day, Save The Children has released that report alongside a YouTube video entitled “Biggest Unboxing Surprise EVER!!” that approximates the confusion and concern that kids must feel as they’re forced into scarier, often abbreviated adult lives. The title may not explain much, but that’s the point. The ad campaign is meant to start out normal, a kid-centric version of the “unboxing” craze. To that end, the video features three kids, two boys and a girl, who receive what appears at first glance to be either a gigantic toy gun (the “Supershooter”), construction kit (“City Builder Set”), or doll (“My Baby Doll”). Things go south when the open the boxes, which are filled with a real ammunition belt, a pickaxe and some rubble, and a positive pregnancy test instead.

The not-so-subtle message, which those same kids drive home by reading from a sheet of statistics in lieu of instructions, reminds viewers that children in poverty may be all too readily encountering these things instead: One in 80 kids are driven from their homes because of conflict and war, while 168 million are forced to work. On average, there is also an underage girl giving birth to her own child once every two seconds.

“We’re trying to build awareness obviously, but we also are trying to drive action,” says Carolyn Miles, the president and CEO of Save The Children, noting viewers can share the video and report, donate to her group directly, or sign a petition the nonprofit plans to submit to various governments to increase investment in children’s issues.

To compare progress among countries, Save The Children’s End Of Childhood Index ranks each place’s livability by eight factors: underage mortality, malnutrition rates, educational opportunity, forced labor, teenage pregnancy, child marriage, conflict displacement, and child homicide.

The best places turned out to be those with lots of governmental investment healthcare, and education like Norway, Slovenia, Finland, and the Netherlands. The worst are those that have been continually impoverished, and war-torn, with often-neglected rural communities including Niger, Angola, Mali, and the Central African Republic. Lack of universal health coverage, inadequate diets, and unsafe water put the most disadvantaged children at the highest risk of death,” notes the report. About one-third of childhood deaths occur within the first week of birth because of complications mixed with inadequate medical aid. Young kids also die at double the rate of their peers if they live in a conflict zone.

Many of these issues hinge on unequal access to resources, particularly in rural areas. Infant mortality numbers, for instance, are linked closely with each community’s level of affluence. (Mississippi fares the worst, losing 9 children per 1,000 born there.) There’s a similar correlation with food insecurity and child-harming violence.

Save The Children, which is already active in 16 states, would like to see Congress fund more early childhood education programs, home-based maternal support and childhood care visits, and after-school programs, all of which improve education and medical access while allowing parents to continue working so they can improve their own standard of living. “Our call is to invest in children [globally],” Miles adds. “But I think it’s particularly important right now for Americans to think about how we invest in our poorest neighborhoods and communities.”

“What the world is going to be like about 15 years from now depends on what happens for these kids now,” she adds. “And so our message is we really need to invest in our children whether we’re talking about children here in the United States or whether we’re talking about children around the world.” Read the report and take action here.