When you sit down for a job interview, it’s perfectly natural to want to know how you’ll be compensated now and in the future. After all, the average job candidate in the United States stays in the job for which they were hired for about four years. After that, it’s time to move up or move on.

But how do you ask about promotions in an interview without making it look like you’re going to move on quickly? Or without coming across like you think you deserve a better job right from the start?

It can be an uncomfortable conversation, but there’s no opting out. In order to choose the opportunity that best fits your career plans, you need to have accurate information about the position. That conversation must involve a glimpse of what promotions and raises might look like if you were to accept a job offer.

Related:How To Get Promoted After Less Than One Year On The Job 

Here are three effective questions to help you ask about promotions in an interview without looking presumptuous:

1. Ask, “How Do You Help Good Performers Grow In This Position?”

Companies attract competitive candidates by offering growth opportunities. It’s very likely that the company you’re interviewing with will want to highlight its efforts to help employees grow and evolve through professional development, education, or experience opportunities.

Since “growth” can be a code word for future promotions, asking this question will give the interviewer an opportunity to talk about people who started out in this position and grew into promotions or raises. If they don’t bring it up, follow up by specifically asking if anyone within the company got started in a similar position.

2. Ask, “Can You Tell Me How You’d Compensate The Person In This Position If They Went Above And Beyond Your Expectations?”

Start by asking the interviewer to identify what achievements would indicate success in the position. Not only will this give you an idea of what kind of work you’ll be focusing on, but it will also show the interviewer that you understand that each position is part of a bigger picture.

Related:Exactly What To Put On Your LinkedIn Profile To Get A Promotion 

Then ask what happens if an employee completes all of those milestones and then achieves even more. If it’s a good opportunity, that will naturally lead to a conversation about the company’s compensation structure, including promotions and raises.

3. Say, “Your Company Culture Values X. Can You Tell Me How That Plays Out In Compensating And Promoting Employees Within Your Organization?”

Because company culture influences the work you do and how you do it, it also impacts future earnings. Therefore, be on the lookout for culture fit when you interview for a new job. For example, if you’re really good at specialized, individual work, but you’re interviewing with a company that values teamwork above all else, there might be a fundamental mismatch. If the company flat-out says it values one skill over another, it’s not going to invest promotions and raises in someone with those unvalued skills.

As you learn more about the company, ask follow-up questions to see how the company’s culture impacts compensation and promotion. This question in particular will give the interviewer a chance to share examples of skills they value, and how they have compensated and promoted individuals with those skills in the past.

Don’t shy away from a conversation about promotions and raises in an interview. It’s important information you need in order to be able to make an informed decision. But remember: No matter how strategically you ask about promotions in an interview, no promotion is guaranteed. Once you get the job, use these tips to set yourself up to get those promotions.

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

Goop is responding to critics—again.

Today, in a letter titled “Uncensored: A Word from Our Doctors,” the lifestyle website defended its support of unorthodox health practices, and the medical professionals who advocate them. The three-tier piece includes a general note from the editors along with statements from two doctors who are Goop contributors.

“As Goop has grown, so has the attention we receive,” begins the letter. “We consistently find ourselves to be of interest to many—and for that, we are grateful—but we also find that there are third parties who critique Goop to leverage that interest and bring attention to themselves.”

The brand routinely posts information about procedures that fall outside the realm of traditional medicine: crystal therapies, vitamin supplements, and more recently, vaginal jade eggs (which one gynecologist called a “load of garbage“). Such content has made the site, helmed by Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow, the subject of much criticism and ridicule online.

Now, Goop is firing back in what’s becoming an epic schoolyard back-and-forth tiff between Western and alternative medicine. The letter takes issue with “indiscriminate attacks that question the motivation and integrity of the doctors who contribute to the site.” And this will be the first in a series of posts on Goop revisiting controversial topics and offering space for doctors to respond “in a respectful and substantive manner.”

Dr. Steven Gundry is one contributor who helped pen the letter. The cardiologist wrote the book The Plant Paradox, which claims that gluten is just one variety of a common, and highly toxic, plant-based protein called lectin. Gundry holds that many commonly thought “safe” fruits, vegetables, nuts, and beans possess these lectins that “incite a kind of chemical warfare” within our bodies. He shared his theory in a Goop essay called “Are We Wrong About What Makes Food Healthy?”

Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB/GYN who consistently scolds Goop, then published a response on her blog headlined, “Dear Gwyneth Paltrow we’re not f**king with you we’re correcting you, XOXO Science.” Gunter took aim at the lectin theory, among other ideas pedaled by Goop, adding that medical professionals and journalists are exasperated by the site and forced into “almost constant debunking of the health ‘advice’ and all around medical bullshit” on Goop. It was harsh.

In today’s letter, Gundry responds with a laundry list of qualifications, citing his alma mater, conventions he’s invited to speak at, and that he has “published over 300 papers, chapters, and abstracts on my research in peer-reviewed journals and have presented over 500 papers at peer-reviewed academic meetings.”

Gundry is accomplished, but he’s also someone who holds that taking just one Aleve is like “swallowing a hand-grenade.” It’s understandable why some might question his current research.

Gundry also touched upon how offended he was that Gunter used “the F-bomb” in her critique.

“A very wise Professor of Surgery at the University of Michigan once instructed me to never write anything that my mother or child wouldn’t be proud to read,” he writes. “I hope, for the sake of your mother and child, that a re-reading of your article fails his test, and following his sage advice, that you will remove it.”

Perhaps there’s a detox regimen for blog brawls?

Unfortunately, very little in Goop’s letter advances the discussion about alternative practices or invites significantly better understanding of the doctors’ findings. It plays more like a reprimand from the school principal to “play nice.”

The letter continues with Goop and its doctors explaining their commitment to the expression of new, under-the-radar ideas, which includes both Western and Eastern modalities. Many of us can agree with that philosophy, but it’s difficult to understand the need for such a public counterattack considering that Goop content includes a disclaimer: “This article is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.”

It’s also challenging to have any sympathy for the publication seeing how the brand nearly courts this kind of attention. In a previous interview with Fast Company,CEO Gwyneth Paltrow proudly admitted, “There are a lot of media companies that would die to have the kind of response that we get from our content.”

Which begs the question: Is this all just a marketing ploy? A way to publicly defend yourself… while still keeping the discussion on yourself?

Despite the plea that they are simply offering—not pushing—the exchange of new ideas, the company very blatantly profits from their “expression.” You can buy an vaginal jade egg in the Goop online shop, the contributors each sell their own line of products, and the brand just released their own collection of $90 supplements.

On one hand, the brand claims to be the expert source on new alternative practices, but then on the other, their content and products are loaded with disclaimers, assigning responsibility to the consumer, not the conveyor. Then, Goop takes a defensive stance instead of welcoming peer review.

Meanwhile, Paltrow appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live just last month and said, laughing, “I don’t know what the fuck we talk about.”

Till Goop solidifies its position, expect more insult-throwing between the brand and its dissenters. Feel free to chime in, but please, for the sake of your mother and child, watch your language.

Amazon hailed this year’s Prime Day, held July 11, in typically cryptic fashion. It was the “biggest global shopping event in Amazon history,” with sales up 60% over last year and a “record” number of Prime shoppers participating, the company announced yesterday. The only thing missing? The number of Prime members participating, or a sales total for the day overall. Even sales figures for the Echo Dot, Prime Day’s top-seller, were kept under wraps.

Twenty years in, Amazon analysts have seen this movie before. They know better than to expect CEO Jeff Bezos and his e-commerce empire to provide the answers they crave about Prime and other aspects of Amazon’s business. Instead, they have learned to look for clues in how the company behaves.

This year, those clues came in the form of the deals Amazon chose to promote. If Prime Day used to be a tool for acquiring new Prime members, it is now a tool for further cementing Amazon’s broad relationship with its customers.

“Prime membership growth has started to plateau,” says Michael Levin, cofounder of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, a Chicago-based firm that surveys Amazon customers. “This year’s Prime Day was designed to train Prime members to do other things—to download the Amazon app, to buy an Echo. They were trying to dig deeper into that base of Prime members and do more with it.” The more time customers spend in the Amazon ecosystem, the more profitable they become.

In parallel, there are other signs that Amazon is starting to look beyond its largely affluent customer base. Among U.S. households making over $75,000 per year, Prime penetration is approaching 65%, according to Morgan Stanley. But an enormous swath of America earns far less. As of June, shoppers eligible for government assistance can now sign up for Prime at the reduced rate of $5.99 per month. “They might learn some stuff about how lower-income consumers in less developed economies think about Prime and want to buy,” says Levin.

Evidence that Prime is nearing market saturation in the U.S. has brought new urgency to a question that has dogged analysts since Prime launched in 2005. Bezos routinely boasts that Prime membership is somewhere in the “tens of millions”—but how many tens of millions, exactly? That’s where things get tricky. It’s 65 million, says Morgan Stanley, which backed into that number based on Amazon’s 2016 subscription services revenue. More like 80 million, says competing Wall Street firm Cowen. Try 85 million—in the U.S. alone, says Chicago-based firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, based on its proprietary online surveys.

Bezos has yet to weigh in and resolve the debate. At times, his reticence has approached the level of farce. In 2014, for example, he proudly presented a bar chart depicting Amazon Prime member growth—with no Y-axis scale or data. When the company does release data, it focuses on “showing the strength of Amazon without showing the strategy of Amazon,” says Forrester e-commerce analyst Brendan Witcher.

Jeff Bezos standing in front of a chart with … No actual figures!!! pic.twitter.com/WibrJ1kSvv

— Tim Stenovec (@timsteno) June 18, 2014

To some extent, all retailers keep mum about their customer data. “This is typical,” says Witcher. But Amazon arguably takes that competitive imperative to a new extreme—and gets away with it, because of Wall Street’s current faith in Bezos (Amazon’s stock, today trading at over $1,000, has doubled in value over the last 18 months). Investors’ overwhelming trust in his ability to deliver results means that naysayers have little leverage to force disclosures. In return, Bezos occasionally releases a data point designed to assuage any skeptics. This past February, for example, Amazon finally provided an annual sales number for Prime and other retail subscriptions: $6.4 billion for 2016.

If Amazon charged its standard $99 fee for every Prime subscription, doing the math on its member numbers, based on that $6.4 billion figure, would be relatively easy. But Prime is an increasingly complicated mix of price points, with some customers paying a student rate and others taking advantage of free trials. Plus, a Prime member’s value to Amazon continues to evolve, as the company expands into categories like fashion and grocery. Going forward, the estimated $1,300 that Prime members spend with Amazon each year will likely increase—as it must, in order to offset the loyalty program’s slowing growth rate. In that context, Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods, for $13.4 billion, makes perfect sense. 

In 2007, Donald Katz decided to move the offices of Audible—the audiobook platform he founded more than two decades ago, now the largest audiobook producer and retailer, and an Amazon subsidiary—from suburban New Jersey into the heart of Newark. It was an unusual move for a tech startup (Newark wasn’t known for its tech scene), but for Katz, it was a powerful way to articulate the values and aspirations of his young company including his approach to being CEO. Rather than setting the company back, Katz credits the move with his success in building a strong culture and a personal legacy.

When he first moved the headquarters to Newark, he was told that the company would lose 25% of its workforce. Contrary to those predictions, Katz says they didn’t lose anyone. And, today, Audible is the fastest growing private sector employer in Newark.

The Fanny Pack Moment

Katz began his career in the early 70s as an author and journalist. At the time, he regularly went on runs in Riverside Park, listening to books on tape from a tape player in his fanny pack. While working on a column for Esquire on the potential of the internet, he recalls a phone conversation with his college roommate who was a supercomputer designer. They were talking about analog and digital processing when, he says, he had his “eureka moment.” Katz realized that instead of having to rent tapes he could eventually access every book ever printed from a device that he could keep in his fanny pack. “You’re saying in theory, there could be a digital inventory that would never be out of stock, and there wouldn’t be any need to go out of print?” he recalls saying in that conversation.

He hung up and thought about it some more, and then quickly called his roommate back, “We need to figure out a way to liberate the signal. We need to create a device that you can take in your car or the park or to your job. That conversation sparked the beginning of the first digital audiobook platform; the iPod was still four years away.

Journalist turned CEO

Like BECU’s Benson Porter and Steelcase CEO Jim Keane, whom I’ve previously profiled in this series, Katz strikes me as part CEO and part anthropologist, deeply interested in the intersection of people and the environments where they live and work.

As a journalist, Katz wrote about iconic American companies like Sears and Nike, and he won critical acclaim for his book chronicling the experience of the middle class in postwar America. He credits his career in journalism with teaching him how to be an inventor, “There’s no better training for starting an invention company than being an inquisitive writer. You have to go out and find the facts, as a journalist. It’s a fantastic backdrop for being morally and courageously honest about what you don’t know.”

Moving to Newark

Unlike companies that are lured to incorporate in cities with tax benefits and other government subsidies, Katz says he made the move to Newark without any perks, “We just did it because we wanted to. At that point, we knew we were becoming really successful.” But he says they didn’t want to be another company that was successful and then parachuted into a community in distress for charity dinners. Instead, Katz saw the potential to impact a community in need at its core, and he has been experimenting with a wide range of programs and policies to maximize the impact of being in Newark.

“The first thing I did was kind of make a rule that we would only hire Newark’s students for paid internships, of which we had many.” This was at a time when Audible was quickly becoming the largest employer of actors in the New York City area, to do voice work reading books. In their office in Newark “there were actors everywhere, and all these amazing kids, largely from North Star Academy, [a public charter school based in Newark and one of the first in New Jersey],” says Katz.

Over the last decade, this program has morphed into an internship, mentorship, and college scholarship program. The program now has 26 interns and 29 scholars, “We embed these interns in Audible departments; teach them professional and communications soft-skills through a non-cognitive skills curriculum; and support them with scholarships through college. Our culture has soared by bringing in these amazing kids.”

In addition, “nearly half of Audible’s entry-level customer service positions are filled with Newark’s residents. And our recruiting team is doubling down on ways to focus on community recruiting with the goal of identifying Newark talent for opportunities across all levels.”

In an effort to bring cultural diversity and economic vitality to Newark, and shorter commutes, Audible has been motivating its employees to live in the city and support local businesses. The company has redeveloped the Hahne & Company building in downtown Newark, providing 20 Audible employees with one year of free rent to live there through a housing lottery that was announced at the start of the year. Audible has now expanded the program to offer a $250 monthly subsidy to cover living expenses to employees who want to move to Newark. Audible also offers pre-paid debit cards that employees can use to dine at Newark restaurants of their choice.

Through a series of such moves, Katz has integrated his company with the city where they work. It’s a strikingly different approach from the one that tech companies like Apple, Facebook or Google have taken, in building giant corporate campuses with shuttle buses that bring employees to work from faraway locations.

Newark Venture Partners Fund

Perhaps Katz’s biggest insight to transform Newark came from the realization that if Newark had other employers of the scale of Audible, it would transform the city financially and culturally. He has taken this on as his new project, creating Newark Venture Partners Fund, which is an independent early stage venture fund, supported by Audible, on the 7th floor of the Audible building. The facility currently hosts 26 companies and 70 founders.

When 1,200 entrepreneurs applied to be part of the space, Katz wasn’t surprised by the demand. “There are 40,000 college students here [in Newark], and the vast majority, are first-in-family degree getters, that come from immigrant-backgrounds. If you look at all the stats of who creates high-tech companies—something like 70% of patents in the last 10 years—that’s the profile.”

The company is investing money and talent in these new companies. Audible employees are constantly on the 7th floor teaching master classes and advising the entrepreneurs, he says. It’s a resource that few startups can access, as well as an opportunity for growth and impact that few employees of large companies can take advantage of.

The fund is measuring traditional metrics associated with startups (like top-line revenue, burn rate etc.) as well as their impact on Newark. They are building their capacity to “report out on measurable job growth, measurable taxable revenue, incremental foot traffic into Newark, and street level amenity creation.”

Activating Caring

Audible’s community building efforts are bringing an entrepreneurial spirit to Newark that goes well beyond conventional CSR (or diversity and inclusion) initiatives that companies undertake, evolving these activities into something more integrated and authentic.

Katz has gone from studying companies and cultures to building a culture of “activating caring” within Audible along with the city where they are based. As he explains, their work stems from “a core belief that companies can have hearts and souls and missions that transcend financial success.” It is this value that he is now looking to document and share with other CEOs around the country and world. “If other CEOs grab the model, it would be a tremendous legacy.”

Corrections: This article has been updated to reflect the accurate founding date of Audible and when Katz began his journalism career, as well as to note that the name of the project is the Newark Venture Partners Fund, the Newark Venture Partners Lab is part of the fund.

When Madalyn Rose Parker tweeted a screenshot of an email exchange with her boss a couple of weeks ago, she didn’t expect it to go viral.

“I’m taking today and tomorrow to focus on my mental health,” Parker, who’s a web developer at the software company Olark, informed her team. “Hopefully I’ll be back next week refreshed and back to 100%.”

“Hey Madalyn, I just wanted to personally thank you for sending emails like this,” CEO Ben Congleton wrote back. “Every time you do, I use it as a reminder of the importance of using sick days for mental health — I can’t believe this is not standard practice at all organizations. You are an example to us all, and help cut through the stigma so we can all bring our whole selves to work.”

When the CEO responds to your out of the office email about taking sick leave for mental health and reaffirms your decision. ???? pic.twitter.com/6BvJVCJJFq

— madalyn (@madalynrose) June 30, 2017

Thousands of likes and retweets flowed in, but so did comments from other workers in the Twitterverse who had personal stories to share. Unfortunately, many said Congleton’s response wasn’t typical for a business leader. Others detailed their experiences in work cultures that don’t support mental health.

I worked at a mental health facility that gave points twd being fired for any sick days taken causing the decline of ppls mental health.

— Christy Pinney (@cpinney77) July 11, 2017

this is awesome, but I get so few sick days I don’t feel I can afford to take them for mental health – even if I’m having a bipolar episode

— Kathleen Elise (@ohkathleenelise) July 12, 2017

The overwhelming response prompted Congleton to pen a follow-up post on Medium, where he pointed out the prevalence of mental health issues in the U.S. “It’s 2017. I cannot believe that it is still controversial to speak about mental health in the workplace when 1 in 6 Americans are medicated for mental health.”

Indeed, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) estimates that one in five U.S. adults experience a mental illness and a little over 18% (42 million) live with anxiety disorders. Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. For comparison, one in five people in the U.S. have either allergy or asthma symptoms, and four million workdays are lost each year as a result of hay fever.

Yet of the more than 1,500 workers polled in a 2016 Work and Well-being survey by the American Psychological Association, fewer than half (44%) said their employers supported their well-being. One in three reported feeling chronically stressed on the job.

Parker is among those with anxiety and depression, and she’s been vocal about working through those conditions at Olark, long before her tweet went viral. But this new conversation she ignited has the potential to get other employers thinking harder about supporting those who’ve felt less comfortable speaking up about mental health.

Create A Sense Of Security

Congleton tells Fast Company that Olark set the stage for open discussions around mental health several years ago, when three workers including Parker came forward to talk about issues like burnout, depression, and bipolar disorder. “We created a safe place for people to disclose to each other,” says Congleton, acknowledging that the 40-person startup is still quite unique.

Olark offers its staff–many of whom work remotely–unlimited paid time off, which includes both vacation and sick time. “We do track sick days to report to the state as required, but generally speaking, we found it’s much more of a problem to get [employees] to take more time off,” he explains. That said, Congleton maintains he’s keen to help other companies “get to this place where people feel safe” talking about mental health issues to the same degree they do about physical health.

“It starts with vulnerability as a leader,” says Congleton. “We all struggle, we all face anxiety,” he points out, “and we don’t know all the answers.” He’s dismayed by the idea that people at all levels of a company believe they can never show weakness, which he attributes in part to leaders. Some may come off as idealized emblems of success because of their drive and habit of pushing hard to get stuff done. Despite this impression, Congleton says, “we are all human.”

Trust Your People

Another, more practical leadership strategy is to simply trust employees to use sick days for mental health. “They don’t have to disclose it, Congleton says, “but make them feel comfortable doing that [by showing that their] leaders believe that mental health is a real thing.”

Kim Littlefield, senior vice president of Keystone Partners, a talent management and career consultancy, agrees. “Be a compassionate manager who not only keeps employees on task but figures out how to help employees,” she offers. This might simply mean checking in with team members about their work assignments. “Be sure to ask questions like, ‘How is it going?’  and add, ‘How can I help?’ Then make sure to follow up with them,” Littlefield suggests.

That’s especially important in high-pressure situations. “When stress is at full-tilt,” she says, “encourage employees to reflect on what they do well when change happens to them, and have them think about what they would like to do more of.”

Beyond conversations like these, Littlefield also recommends some of the policies Olark already has in place, like remote work and flexible hours.

Speak Openly About All Medical Conditions

Dr. Heather Towery, the medical director of Advance Medical, says that includes speaking openly about all medical conditions. “That anxiety, depression, bipolar illness are viewed through a different lens than other medical conditions, like cancer or hypertension, is the first barrier that needs to be broken down,” she argues.

Sometimes just having a benefit in place isn’t enough. While employee assistance programs or expert behavioral care can offer outlets to talk confidentially with a professional, many employees may not know about or take advantage of them. As Towery sees it, mental health awareness is “as important an initiative as other medical issues, such as breast cancer and heart health,” and needs to get the same level of attention in companies’ regular communications.

Yet it’s not always easy to get HR on board, even if leadership is. Congleton admits he’s unable to suggest what HR managers should or shouldn’t say to employees about mental health, citing compliance concerns with privacy regulations. However, Jennifer Akullian, a psychologist affiliated with Open Sourcing Mental Illness (OSMI), a nonprofit that offers resources and support on these issues, points out that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) includes anti-discrimination protections on the basis of mental health. The law also offers access to accommodations, including slight changes to the workplace or expectations.

In fact, OSMI recommends certain accommodations be available to all employees, even those who haven’t been formally diagnosed—particularly the ability for anybody to take leave for mental health. HR departments can simply “work with employees to determine when this is appropriate, how to request it, and how long leave can be,” says Akullian, “and it varies across organizations.”

She adds that companies lose out when they (wittingly or unwittingly) compel team members to come to work when they aren’t capable of working productively. “It does not serve the employee or the organization to force work hours on an individual who is struggling mentally.”

Stop Tying PTO To Lack Of Productivity

Congleton, for one, already realizes the futility of pushing productivity at the cost of workers’ mental health. “The fact that 20% of the workforce is struggling with something that we never talk about is sad,” he says, adding that some of Olark’s top performers have dealt with mental health issues, as is likely true elsewhere—even when those employees don’t talk about mental illness.

If an employee is working at 50% or 30% capacity because they’re on the verge of burnout, Congleton muses, why not let them “take a day and come back refreshed?” Too many companies don’t do that, he suggests, because they still think of mental health days as extra vacation time.

Changing this attitude starts at the top, Congleton believes, and he’s not alone. Says Littlefield, “Communication from CEOs—as well as individual managers—has the power to change mind-sets.” Starting that conversation may be as easy as sending a single email, or a tweet.

In 1978, when Monica Jahner was 22, she was sentenced to life imprisonment in a Michigan state prison. Her sentence was for conspiring to murder in the first degree; no one was killed in her case. In prison, the constant stress took a toll on her health: She was regularly rushed to the hospital with a racing heart, and suffered from ulcers and high blood pressure. She lost contact with her family; it was easier, she thought to cut ties than to watch them suffer. But around that, she was working, obtaining a degree and educating herself on the criminal justice system. It took her 10 years to get before the state parole board, and another 18 and the help of a prisoner-advocacy organization after that to finally walk free. Now 52, she’s helping former inmates to reintegrate and advocating for those still inside.

Cases like Jahner’s are not unique. The rate of incarceration in the U.S. has more than quadrupled since the 1970s, when Jahner was convicted; around 2.2 million people in the country are currently behind bars. The reasons are myriad, and include the criminalization of non-violent offenses, and lack of attention and resources devoted to developing alternatives to imprisonment. But a new project from the Urban Institute drills down into one reason in particular: unnecessarily long prison sentences.

The consequences of long sentencing, says Ryan King, lead researcher on the project for the Urban Institute, are often obscured by the way in which term-length data is collected. The traditional measure of time served, he tells Fast Company, is to average the length of prison terms for all people released in a given year. That method overrepresents people serving shorter terms; those on longer sentences are not counted.

To rectify the data picture, the Urban Institute instead took snapshots of everyone who was still in prison at the end of a given year, and how much time they have served. So someone who was convicted in 1995 with a 25-year sentence would not, under traditional methods, be counted until 2020, but the Urban Institute’s method rolls up their time served (10 years in 2005, 15 in 2010) with the data on average term times. The data is interspersed with personal stories, like Jahner’s.

But there is not enough clarity on how to tackle mass incarceration from the perspective of people already inside the system. “We haven’t developed the foundational research to identify what alternatives work,” King says. “If somebody has committed a violent offense, there are very few options for them out there besides prison.” And that’s a result, King says, “of the fact that we’ve all just turned our heads and said, ok, those people are locked up, let’s ignore them.”

So what’s to be done? The Urban Institute had developed a set of core principles that they believe should guide decision-making in the criminal justice system, including that sentences should be proportionate to the crime, that everyone should be offered a meaningful chance of release, that reforms should address racial and socioeconomic bias, and that avenues for justice must being to extend beyond incarceration.

And from there, the Urban Institute recommends a series of policy changes, that at their core, advocate for a more individualized and holistic approach to sentencing. State-level mandatory minimums should be eradicated, as should requirements that people serve out a set amount of time regardless of personal progress while incarcerated. Opportunities and incentives to pursue that progress and secure early release, King says, also need to be developed and funded. More restorative justice programs, like Restore Oakland–a justice facility that will offer workshops and holistic re-entry services, including job placement–need to be piloted and funded, and become the norm, rather than the exception, while other efforts should be geared toward researching and developing pre-incarceration violence-reduction strategies at the community level.

“We’ve not just ignored the people in prisons; we’ve ignored the issue entirely,” King says. “We’re got to be invested in finding out what works to end and address violence.” To King, it’s been maddening to watch attorney general Jeff Sessions vow to enforce tougher sentencing and criminalization laws, while making no overtures to develop violence prevention strategies and inmate treatment programs. “If your solution is to hire more prosecutors and more law enforcement, and just lock people up and throw away the key, our report shows that this is just not working.”

This week, DC Comics announced a new character who’ll be appearing in the first issue of Suicide Squad spin-off comic The Black Files, and they look awesome. The character, called “Dr. Endless” in a sketch by artist Scot Eaton, is a dapper, gender-fluid hero with a shock of white hair at the front of their stylish black locks, a white trenchcoat with psychedelic lapels, and a black suit and vest over a white tie. It’s a bold look for a dashing new character–and perhaps most striking is the Eye of Horus imagery over their right eye, which is an obvious nod to the character of Death, from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

Gaiman has been willing to grant that permission in the past–the Sandman has appeared in issues of JLA, and Death met Lex Luthor in Action Comics a few years back–but according to comics website Bleeding Cool, Dr. Endless (whose name references The Endless, the seven primary characters of Sandman) didn’t get cleared by Gaiman before the company announced plans to go to press.

According to the site, Gaiman only got wind of the character in recent days, and while they’ll still be premiering in Suicide Squad: The Black Files, the Sandman references (including the name Dr. Endless) are likely to be stripped out. Gaiman presumably has no objection to a gender-fluid hero based on his characters–he introduced mainstream comics’ first gender-fluid character, Desire, in the pages of Sandman in 1988–but he’s within his rights to ensure that the Sandman family of characters he created are used in a way that’s consistent with the original work. Hopefully, he gets a chance to check out Dr. Endless, and introduce the character to readers in the way that Eaton and writer Jai Nitz intended.

The third annual Fast Company Innovation Festival will take over New York City October 23-27, with more than 125 dynamic and surprising Fast Tracks—Fast Company’s brand of innovative field trips inside the hottest companies—and keynote talks at the 92Y, a cultural jewel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We will also be hosting panel discussions, workshops, and curated networking experiences at Convene, an unconventional event space built for meaningful connections and immersive experiences, located at 237 Park Avenue.

Attendees will hear from inspiring business leaders, including Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed; Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America; Jay Parikh, head of engineering and infrastructure at Facebook; Elaine Welteroth, editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue; James Anderson, head of government innovation programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies; Laura Alber, CEO of Williams-Sonoma; Andy Cohen, host of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen; Leila Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource; and dozens more.

Intimate Fast Track sessions take attendees inside the offices of the most creative enterprises around the city, including Bleacher Report, Casper, DonorsChoose, Droga5, frog, Giphy, Hudson Yards, Microsoft, Nelson Byrd Woltz, Paddle8, Pinterest, Snøhetta, Wieden + Kennedy, and many more.

Our 2017 festival theme, Leading with Optimism, challenges participants to effect positive change in their careers and industries during this era of dramatic upheaval in business, politics, and culture. Some 10,000 attendees will have the chance to meet and collaborate with like-minded and creative peers.

Learn more and buy tickets here. New speakers and Fast Tracks are added every week.

It’s a moody afternoon in late spring, and Maung Saungkha, the famous “penis poet” of Burma, is in a hurry to stay ahead of the next downpour. After a full morning of punishing rain that feels like we are under ambush by rocket-propelled water balloons, the skies are finally showing mercy, but Saungkha suspects the break won’t last.

Here, in a small park in north central Yangon, he and other free-speech advocates are putting together a makeshift exhibition of political cartoons by Burmese artists. The park is flanked by blackened apartment buildings and obscured by the shadow of a concrete overpass, which is not ideal for an art showing. But Saungkha and his cohorts make resourceful use of the space, hanging brightly colored artwork on thin ropes strewn all along the periphery.

The cartoons are subversive and attention getting: A few depict goofy caricatures of people on smartphones, but many others incorporate some funny variation of Facebook’s famous “F” logo. You know the one. In the West we associate it with social media, or maybe Silicon Valley’s special brand of platform imperialism. But here in Myanmar, where the internet was scarce only a few years ago, it seems to symbolize something more urgent about, specifically, freedom of online speech.

Saungkha, 24, with a warm smile, feathered hair, and dark sideburns, politely asks me to give him a few more minutes to finish setting up. I return 20 minutes later and he tells me, through a translator, the wild story that set him down his current path of free-speech evangelism. He posted a satirical poem on Facebook two years ago that was deemed by a court to be an insult to the president of Myanmar. The poem named no names, but it colorfully implied that Saungkha has a tattoo of the president on his penis. He was arrested and hauled off to prison, where he served six months for criminal defamation.

“I was quite surprised,” he tells me, because before that time, it would have been unusual for anyone in Myanmar to be prosecuted over a Facebook post.

It’s not so unusual anymore. Saungkha didn’t know it at the time, but his arrest would mark the beginning of a wave of prosecutions under section 66(d) of Myanmar’s telecommunications law, a criminal provision that restricts online speech. The law—so broadly worded it could include almost anything—carries a prison sentence of up to three years for “extorting, coercing, restraining wrongfully, defaming, disturbing, causing undue influence, or threatening any person using a telecommunications network.” It was passed as part of a telecom reform bill in 2013, but did not attract much attention outside the country until two years later, with the arrest of Saungkha and two other people around the same time. All three were charged over Facebook posts.

Then came the historic Myanmar election of November 2015 and a sweeping victory for the National League for Democracy, the party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, the celebrated political reformer and Nobel peace laureate. Her victory brought fresh hope that Myanmar’s first freely elected government in a half-century would finally allow online speech to flourish. In fact, the opposite has happened: Since the NLD came to power, defamation cases under section 66(d) have skyrocketed. The latest count from Saungkha and his research team puts the number of people charged at more than 70, up from only seven cases under the previous government. The dramatic increase has sparked an outcry from free speech and human rights groups, with some accusing Suu Kyi and her NLD government of turning their backs on the democratic principles that got them elected.

The specific instances of so-called defamation are sometimes so trivial that they border on the ridiculous, like the 25-year-old woman who served six months for sharing a meme that compared Suu Kyi’s outfit to a military uniform (they both wore similar shades of mint green), or the man sentenced to nine months for calling the president of Myanmar an “idiot.” Other examples are more serious, like the high-level media executives who were arrested in November over an editorial that accused a government minister of accepting a lavish gift from a convicted drug lord.

But whether silly or serious, the cases follow a retaliatory pattern that’s hard to ignore. Often, the complaints are filed directly by government or military officials looking to punish someone who posted something perceived to be insulting or derogatory on social media, which makes section 66(d) seem less about defamation than intimidation, a shiny new weapon to be wielded by people in power who want to stamp out dissent.

“It can be used for revenge,” says Zarchi Oo, a program manager at PEN Myanmar, one of the groups that helped organize the cartoon exhibition.

Meanwhile, word of mouth appears to be playing a role in the increase in arrests. Under section 66(d), anyone can file a complaint, which means a lot of defamation cases are filed not by the person who was the target of the offending speech, but by third parties—sometimes people who were just offended by something they’d seen on the internet. Wai Phyo Myint, an outreach manager for the Myanmar Centre for Responsible Business, says section 66(d) has caught on as press reports of prosecutions spread and people learn how simple it is to invoke the law for vengeful aims.

“It is so easy,” she tells me. “You can just file to the police, and then the police will go and get that person and put him under arrest.”

The chilling effect on speech is becoming more palpable, Myint says, because as fear of violating the law spreads, government officials are learning that all they have to do is threaten a lawsuit to muffle critical posts, even when they are clearly in the public interest.

“People are scared,” Myint says. “If you post something against the government, or are a little bit critical of the government, now you might get sued.”

At a time when the country is supposed to be embracing democratic ideals, section 66(d) has emerged as a convenient tool to stem a growing tide of free expression in a country that has had little experience with it. That’s probably by design: The section of the law, a holdover from the military era, seems to be tailored for just the kind of retaliatory purposes it’s being used for. “People who have decided they want to defend their reputation against anything that’s said about them online are using this,” says Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.

Trouble For Journalists

As you might suspect, section 66(d) is especially worrisome for Myanmar’s fledgling free press, which was officially censored until just a few years ago.

At least 14 journalists have already been charged under the law, according to Saungkha’s team. Last month, a reporter in Magway Region, in central Myanmar, was slapped with a charge after he wrote a Facebook post criticizing a local construction project. Two other journalists who commented on the post were also charged. And as we speak, the editor of the Voice, a leading Myanmar newspaper, is facing trial over posting a satirical article on Facebook that poked fun at the military.

It’s hard not to notice that the military is another common thread in many of the cases, a detail that has raised concerns in the international community. “This has become the Burmese army’s new favorite law,” Robertson says. “We’ve seen an explosion of social media use in Burma, particularly on Facebook, and the army, as they’re being criticized, are just taking pot shots at people using 66(d).”

Last month, Human Rights Watch was one of 61 organizations that signed an open letter to the Myanmar government urging it to repeal section 66(d), or at the very least, amend it. The law is out of step with international human rights standards, the groups say, because it classifies defamation as a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment, not a civil matter.

“[T]he purpose of laws covering defamation, libel, slander, and insult is to protect the rights and reputations of people,” the groups wrote, “not to prevent criticism of the government or of individual officials.”

So far, the response from the Myanmar government has been tepid and vague at best. The law’s shortcomings have been acknowledged by some of the country’s regulators, the attorney general’s office, and some members of parliament, but getting an amendment through the legislature doesn’t exactly appear to be a priority. In early June, a senior official of the country’s information ministry promised a visiting delegation of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) that an amendment to the law would be introduced to the parliament, one that would at least remove section 66(d)’s criminal penalties. However, no actual timeline was offered.

“They just said, ‘Soon,'” Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, told me. He added that a full repeal of the law would likely not be considered, so an amendment seems to be everyone’s best hope.

A few days after CPJ’s visit, a report in the Myanmar Times indicated that the amendment process, or lack thereof, was already being held up by political infighting and a general lack of urgency. “It is not an issue that will destroy the country,” one official was quoted as saying. In the meantime, the arrests keep piling up.

Suu Kyi finally weighed in on the law at a press conference on July 6, promising that an amendment was under consideration, but she too was short on specifics. The next day, a draft amendment appeared on the parliament’s website, but according to Myint, who sent me a rough English translation of the draft, “the major problematic points remain,” as the amendment would not remove criminal penalties for defamation. Saungkha, who favors a repeal, told me in an email he is also unhappy with the draft.

Human Rights Watch has been sounding the alarm about section 66(d) for more than a year. When I spoke with Robertson recently, he expressed frustration about the Myanmar government’s general unwillingness to acknowledge or respond to feedback from the organization, calling it “one of the least efficient governments” he’s seen in 22 years of living and working in Southeast Asia. “And that’s saying something,” he adds.

Fast Company sent interview requests to Myanmar’s communications ministry, the NLD party leadership, the attorney general’s office, the president’s office, and the president’s chief spokesman, all of which received no reply.

The Technological Leapfrog

Until recently, less than 1% of Myanmar’s population had access to the internet. The country formerly known as Burma had been stuck in the technological dark ages, under military rule for almost 50 years. Robertson has covered the region since the early ’90s and recalls it being “like North Korea,” with political discussions relegated to dark tea shops. People who craved news that wasn’t state sanctioned risked prison time by listening to international radio broadcasts from outlets like Radio Free Asia. The internet was introduced around 2000, but what little there was of it remained heavily censored for years. My wife visited in 2007 and remembers being required to fill out a special form just to use an internet cafe.

Things changed quickly after the military junta ceded power in 2011. Then-President Thein Sein assumed office and ushered in an era of progressive reforms, relaxing censorship rules and restrictions on the media and speech, and granting amnesty to political prisoners. Among those reforms was the 2013 telecommunications law, of which 66(d) is a only a small part. The broader purpose of the telecom law was meant to provide a regulatory framework that would foster growth in the sector and allow foreign companies to compete. The following year, internet connectivity skyrocketed with the entrance of the first two mobile giants, Norway’s Telenor and Qatar’s Ooredoo. Today, mobile penetration is estimated to be as high as 80% or more.

Myanmar basically went from zero to 60 in the blink of an eye, leapfrogging over the PC era and landing smack in the middle of the smartphone revolution. And people—especially young people—caught up quickly. Wander the streets of Yangon today, and you’ll see no shortage of Burmese teens and twentysomethings fiddling with their Huawei or Samsung smartphones, whether they’re texting on a dingy side street or craning their selfie sticks at the sacred Shwedagon Pagoda.

At the center of all this is Facebook, which is popular not just with everyday Burmese millennials, but also a cadre of high-ranking government officials who have amassed huge followings on their Facebook pages. Indeed, it’s the rapid spread of Facebook in particular that is testing Myanmar’s tolerance for the kind of unchecked open expression that goes along with social media. Facebook doesn’t break out how many active users it has in Myanmar, but figures provided to Fast Company by Amara, a digital marketing agency based in Yangon, estimate incredible growth since the passage of the telecommunications law. Three years ago, Myanmar had about 1.8 million Facebook users, Amara says. Today that number is 16 million, or almost one-third of the population.

Lost In Translation

There are other aspects to 66(d) that make it a demonstrably bad law. Crucially, it’s a non-bailable offense, meaning people charged under it can be detained for months, left to sit in prison as their cases await trial. That was the situation with Saungkha; by the time he was sentenced to six months, he had already served that time waiting to be tried. The specifics of Saungkha’s case would be laughable if they didn’t actually happen to someone. Read the English translation of the poem that landed him in jail and you will likely struggle to find anything remotely offensive:

On my manhood rests a tattooed
portrait of Mr. President
My beloved found that out after
we wed
She was utterly gutted,
Inconsolable.

Police showed up at his home soon after. The young poet spent some time on the run, and even defiantly continued to post new poems to his Facebook page, as reported by Coconuts Yangon, before authorities caught up with him. His trial and prosecution earned him international media attention, from the Daily Mirror to the New Yorker, with some headlines christening him the “penis poet,” an unfair label, given that his verse never actually mentions the word.

Saungkha studied industrial chemistry at West Yangon University, graduating in 2013, and was already active in student protest movements before his arrest. He tells me he suspects the government already had its eye on him. Since his release last spring, he’s emerged as one of the most visible critics of section 66(d), appearing on local TV shows, attending protests, collecting statistics, and organizing events like the cartoon exhibition.

When I asked him if he worries that his outspoken activities will land him in more legal trouble, he nodded. Of course he does. “I don’t want to be in and out of jail,” he says. “That’s why I’ve been organizing and leading these kinds of campaigns, to raise awareness about this and fight against it.”

The NLD’s failure to address 66(d) with any sense of urgency is especially disheartening to its supporters. The party holds significant majorities in both houses of Myanmar’s parliament, and Suu Kyi, its de facto leader, spent a lifetime outwardly fighting to bring democracy to the country, including during the 15 years she spent under house arrest. (Her official title is state counselor, thanks to a law that prevents her from serving as president.) Suu Kyi campaigned on a platform that emphasized, among other things, the importance of press freedom and the need to reform Myanmar’s outdated laws.

But since her NLD party assumed office in 2016, it has been dogged by inertia and inaction. This isn’t just about section 66(d) and the 2013 telecommunications law, but an entire litany of legislation held over from the military era. As Human Rights Watch said in a detailed report on Myanmar last summer, those include newer laws dealing with peaceful assembly, publishing, and the news media—each one a “double-edged sword” that can be also used by the government to punish people who speak out. To make things even messier, those laws are layered over a thicket of even more regressive colonial-era legislation, such as the Unlawful Association Act of 1908, under which three Myanmar journalists were recently charged for simply covering an event hosted by armed militia.

The NLD’s foot dragging on section 66(d) is not surprising to those who have been paying attention. “There seems to be a lack of political will in the current Burma government to take on problematic legislation,” Robertson says.

Old Versus New

At the art exhibition with Saungkha, I can see the cartoons are working. It’s less than 30 minutes into the show, and curious passersby have begun to shuffle into the tiny park. They look at the drawings, chuckle, and inevitably snap photos with their smartphones, perhaps missing the irony that they are documenting their source of amusement with the same device that has sparked such an urgent need to hold the event in the first place.

Saungkha takes the microphone and starts riling up the crowd in Burmese. He appears both fearless and vulnerable, hiply dressed in a T-shirt, sandals, and a dark grey longyi. In the end, it’s not a very big crowd—maybe two dozen people or so—but then an event like this, openly critical of government policy, would have been broken up instantly a few years ago. Now not even the punishing rain, which returns with a vengeance about two hours in, can keep attendees away.

After circling the park a few times, I think I’ve picked out my favorite cartoon. It depicts an anthropomorphic smartphone staring down an anthropomorphic 1920s-era telephone, an apt metaphor for the clash between old and new. Saungkha summed up this clash nicely in a statement he made to the press on the day he was released from prison. “Even though we have a democratically elected government, the verdict was like from the old days,” he said.

His disappointment is echoed by increasing numbers of young Burmese voters who say that Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD government are letting them down. This was supposed to be “the people’s government,” Myint tells me, the “one we can truly call.” But a year and a half of inaction, dysfunction, and a willingness to look the other way has made it clear that their calls are going unanswered.

“This is really sad and disappointing to us,” she says. “We voted for them.”

House-hunting starts online these days, with a visit to Google or Zillow. That initial search might lead to a FaceTime “open house” or uncover a 3D house tour. But put in an offer, and the process quickly turns analog. The hunt has gone digital, but applying for a mortgage still involves fax machines and pay-stub printouts.

That is finally changing. Entrepreneurs steered clear of the highly regulated mortgage industry in the years immediately following the 2008 financial crisis, which was precipitated by a glut of subprime mortgages, repackaged and marketed by Wall Street as low-risk securities. Now they see potential to transform a slow and expensive process, and at the same time serve first-time homeowners accustomed to managing their financial lives via smartphone. The prize, if they succeed: A share of the $8.4 trillion U.S. mortgage market. Here are five of the most promising startups to emerge so far.

Landed

This early-stage Y Combinator startup recently caught the attention of Mark Zuckerberg, who invested $5 million last month via his philanthropic vehicle, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Landed’s mission is to bring home ownership within reach for educators by funding as much as half of their down payment.

When the homeowners sell, Landed takes a cut of the home’s appreciation. Zuckerberg’s investment will support growth in three California school districts with high housing costs. “We hope this kind of down payment support will help to make it a little easier for great educators to stay and build successful careers in the region,” CEO Jonathan Asmis says. The startup partners with local lenders and real estate agents to implement its financing model.

Clara Lending

Jeff Foster, cofounder and CEO of of Clara, brings a similarly mission-driven approach to his mortgage startup. Foster left Wall Street and joined the Treasury Department in 2010, where he helped craft housing policy reforms in response to the unfolding financial crisis. “[Americans] took on loans they couldn’t understand because they didn’t have a good toolkit to evaluate choices,” he says. At Clara, he has raised $27 million to build a fully digitized mortgage process from scratch, while layering on financial education for prospective borrowers. “Our goal is to streamline that process and help the borrower make better decisions.”

SoFi

Social Finance (SoFi) has quickly morphed from a student loan refinancing operation to a one-stop shop for the financial needs of affluent millennials—including mortgages. The company introduced mortgages in October 2014, and within two years originated over $1 billion worth of loans. Many of those have been “jumbo” loans, which require just 10% down but charge a higher interest rate.

For the typical SoFi customer—high-earning, but early career—jumbo loans offer a way to get on the real estate ladder in pricey markets like New York and San Francisco. “We’re bringing a lot of new folks into the SoFi community through our mortgage product,” says Michael Tannenbaum, chief revenue officer. As of January, mortgages were his fastest-growing product, with roughly 60% going to first-time buyers.

LendingHome

When LendingHome launched in 2014, it focused on “fix and flip” real estate investors. Then, with $1 billion in originations under its belt, the company began targeting first-time homebuyers this past spring. “We’re focused on giving homebuyers confidence and control over the process,” founder Matt Humphrey told Forbes. That means incorporating tips and feedback into the application itself, and offering features like a way to lock in a desirable interest rate. LendingHome has raised over $100 million to date.

Blend

Quietly, in the background, white-label software provider Blend has been helping established banks up their digital game when it comes to processing mortgage applications. The company launched in mid-2015, and raised $40 million in Series C funding in January of last year. Its mobile-friendly product imports an applicant’s financial information from around the web and speeds the bank’s time to a pre-approval decision. “The multi-trillion dollar mortgage industry has been running on legacy technology for decades,” says cofounder and CEO Nima Ghamsari. Blend’s technology offers banks an easy upgrade, compliant with regulatory demands and far cheaper than the $7,000 or so that a paper-based mortgage origination typically costs.

They call it “sunny day” or “nuisance” flooding: days when it doesn’t rain and there’s no extreme weather, but streets in coastal areas become impassable all the same because an extra high tide comes on top of an already rising ocean. Across the country, more and more cities are experiencing these high tidal events and–if nothing is done to avert climate change–hundreds more could join the ranks of Miami Beach, Charleston, and Annapolis in the coming years.

A newly published report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which campaigns for action on global warming, calculates just how many. By 2035, it says 170 communities could see “chronic flooding” every two weeks, or more frequently, under an “intermediate” climate scenario. By 2060, it forecasts the same for 270 communities, with at least 40% of their land under water 26 or more times a year.

“The analysis shows the sheer number of communities up and down our coasts that will be coping with chronic inundation,” Shana Udvardy, one of the authors of the study, tells Fast Company. “It’s a clarion call for responses to sea level rise within local, state, and federal governments and particularly for a federal response to this ballooning challenge.”

The analysis, based on federal data, was published in a peer-reviewed journal. It defines chronic flooding as inundation across at least 10% of a community at least 26 times a year. It calculates affected communities according to a scenario where global carbon emissions crest in the middle of this century and seas rise about four feet. Some estimates for future climate impacts are more serious, though, with emissions continuing to climb through this century and sea levels rising 6.5 feet or more.

Under the less serious scenario, the affected areas include some of the country’s most popular holiday-home destinations, including the Jersey Shore, North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound, southern Louisiana, and Maryland’s Eastern Shore. By 2100, up to 490 communities—or 40% of all East and Gulf Coast oceanfront communities—will be chronically inundated, the study says. (See the detailed map here for other affected towns and cities.)

Miami Beach–often seen as ground zero for sunny-day flooding–doesn’t yet cross the threshold for chronic inundation. But it is a poster child for flood adaptation. It plans to spend at least $400 million on raising its roads and installing new pump infrastructure. Other parts of the state aren’t so proactive. Florida governor Rick Scott has denied climate science and outlawed the use of the term “climate change” in official communication. Udvardy also praises Charleston, South Carolina, which has developed a citywide sea-level rise strategy, and Annapolis, Maryland, where flooding already occurs 40 times a year and planners are thinking about how to provide local businesses with interruption and flood insurance.

Globally, climate change is expected to have a disproportionate effect on poorer countries. And it’s a similar story in the U.S. The report says: “Low-income communities, communities of color, and other traditionally underserved communities” tend to be less prepared and face greater risks than “wealthier, often whiter communities, especially in urban settings.”

While small towns by the beach will see a lion’s share of flooding, the analysis foresees trouble in bigger urban places as well. Under the intermediate scenario, five communities in the greater Boston area will be under water every other week by 2060 (including 15% of the town of Revere, Massachusetts). By 2070, the report sees one quarter of Alameda, an island in Oakland, California, chronically flooded by 2070. Meanwhile, on the other side of the San Francisco Bay Area, one-quarter of San Mateo could be chronically inundated by 2070, the analysis shows.

In nearly every industry, the pace of work slows in the summer. But what would happen if you kept the relaxed summer schedule for more than just a season? The way you spend your time can tell you a lot about the life you’d really like to be living if you pay attention, says Hillary Rettig, productivity coach and author of The 7 Secrets of the Prolific.

“During summer we all have a sense of spaciousness,” she says. “Many of us think, reflect, plan, and experience. That’s exactly what people may not realize is the key to achieving any ambitious goal.”

Summer can be a stark contrast to the rest of the year, where we’re often in a rush to get things done. “We are reinforcing each other to speed the heck up,” says Rettig. “We’re living in a deadline-driven world. Deadlines are useful productive tools, but constantly being under deadline creates stress, and people shut down as a result.”

Summer is the opportunity to experience freedom and then use it as a barometer to adjust your schedule beyond, says Rettig. Use the time to do these three things:

1. Observe Your Behavior

Start by paying attention to your feelings and emotions. “I’m a hardboiled New Yorker and not into touchy feely, but feelings are data. Emotions are data,” says Rettig. “Summer gives you space to figure out how you feel. Are you on a path that feels natural?”

Being authentic, doing the work you feel good doing, is good from a productive standpoint. “People do way better if they’re working on what they really want be working on,” she says. “Sometimes you might feel there is something wrong with you because you’re underproductive. It’s often that you’re just working on the wrong project. Summer gives you the space to figure it out.”

2. Create A Summertime Budget

Decide how you want to spend your weeks, and consider experimenting. “Do a soft launch of something,” says Rettig. “This is a good time to do stuff that is important but not urgent. [The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People author] Stephen Covey calls it ‘quadrant two stuff.’ He pointed out that it’s the stuff that facilitates your growth. We don’t grow if we’re busy putting out fires.”

During the summer, Rettig keeps a small to-do list. “It’s not because I don’t do a lot; I focus on the important stuff, giving it lavish time,” she says.

3. Carry It Forward

Once you collect data during the summer, carry the insights, behaviors, and habits past Labor Day. “This might be hardest part,” she says. “It’s about watching and managing how you spend your time.”

Get rid of the things you don’t want to be doing, and make a commitment to using the time you have well. If something doesn’t serve you, such as participating in a group, leave it for the summer and decide if you want to resume it in the fall.

“Half of time management is figuring who is your authentic self and what it wants to be doing and the other half is making that happen,” says Rettig. “Summer is a good time to work on the first half. Our whole culture is oriented toward taking a break, slowing down, and doing some of this work.”

If you go into summer with the mind-set of staying in mode, you’ll be in a better position to carry the lessons over the fall. “The key is resisting the social pressure that will happen in the fall,” says Rettig. “Remember that the excessive business speed is not a virtue. Once the whole culture gets oriented toward speeding around, other people will start trying to take a bite out of your time. If you haven’t sorted out your own time management issues, you can get swept back into that frenzied pace. Do you really want to spend all year waiting for the two or three weeks you can finally live your authentic life?”

This week, we learned about a new service LinkedIn is testing to connect users with mentors, what it takes to write follow-up email that doesn’t annoy the recipient, and how to answer when a job interviewer asks, “So do you have any questions for me?”

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of July 8:

1. LinkedIn Is Testing A New Feature That Matches You With A Mentor

You know that finding a mentor can help your career progress, but you probably also know how difficult it is to find a good one. After all, asking someone to be your mentor is like asking them to be an unpaid consultant who’s deeply invested in your career—no small request. So LinkedIn is aiming to solve this problem by connecting people who want mentors with people who actually want to give career advice.

2. This Is How To Write A Follow-Up Email That’s Not Annoying

When it comes to follow-up emails, it can be hard to know where the line falls between persistence and rudeness. But as much as you might hate composing (and receiving) them, some follow-ups manage to avoid making recipients immediately reach for “delete.” For starters, you can write a specific subject line with a clear call to action—and you should definitely stay away from using the “high-priority” button when it isn’t an emergency.

3. Here’s What To Say When The Interviewer Asks, “Do You Have Any Questions For Me?”

If there’s one predictable part of every job interview, it’s the end—the moment when the hiring manager asks if there’s anything you’d still like to find out. It’s easy to get stuck here, but not if you see it as an opportunity to end on a strong note by digging deeper into the work culture, or asking what it takes to succeed in the role. Here are a few other questions to keep on standby.

4. This Public Speaking Habit Is Annoying Your Audience

Watch enough TED Talks and you may begin to notice many of the speakers pacing the stage back and forth. That might look effective in wide-shot on video, and maybe it’ll even calm your nerves. But speaking coach Anett Grant explained this week that pacing can be really distracting for an audience. For one thing, she says “when you pace too much, you’ll lose out on the opportunity to punctuate what you’re saying.”

5. The Three-Step Process That’s Kept 3M Innovative For Decades

When organizations grow, it can be hard to sustain an innovative environment. More processes and structures become necessary, which can hamper out-of-the-box thinking. But sometimes all it takes is the right structure to encourage innovation over the long run. This week Matt Scholz, a corporate scientist at 3M, explained how the company’s rotating teams of “scouts,” “entrepreneurs,” and “implementors” have helped 3M “go from problem to product for decades.”

You have tons of valuable ideas to share in your team meeting–if only you could get a word in edgewise. Instead, you feel like you have to sit there with your lips zipped while your notoriously motor-mouthed coworker blabbers on and on without breathing.

Dealing with someone who monopolizes every discussion is frustrating. On the one hand, you’re desperate for a brief pause when you could actually speak instead of listen. But, on the other hand, you don’t want the tables to turn and make you look like an inconsiderate interrupter–or worse, a conversation hog yourself.

So, what can you realistically do when you’re talking with someone who views every exchange as a one-sided speech? These phrases should help you steer things back in a more equal and productive direction.

1. “I Have Something To Add”

When you’re face-to-face with someone who continues to overwhelm every conversation, it’s tempting to fall into the trap of asking for permission to speak up. You find yourself saying things like, “I’m sorry, can I interrupt?” or even, “Can I say something?”

Rest assured, just because this person is up on his soapbox doesn’t mean that he makes all of the decisions about who gets to speak and when. You’re more than entitled to share your own valuable contributions. And furthermore, you don’t need to ask that conversation hog’s permission to do so.

Instead, use a phrase like this one to explicitly state that you have something to add to that specific topic. When you preface your two cents with this sort of direct introduction, it makes it clear that you have something purposeful to say–and, as a result, you expect to be listened to.

2. “Let’s Stop For A Minute”

Not all conversation hogs have bad intentions. In fact, many times these people find themselves so excited and passionate about what’s being discussed, they don’t even realize how much they’re talking or how fast they’re going–until you force them to pause and inhale.

Related:Six Habits Of The Best Conversationalists 

If that chatterbox is doing so much speaking that nobody has a chance to process the information, it’s worth reminding that person that you all need a moment to stop, soak everything in, and collect your thoughts so that you can continue the exchange from there.

Yes, this “stop rambling for a minute” approach can feel a little direct. But, once you encourage that person to step back and reflect on the discussion so far, she will likely realize just how much talking she’s been doing. So, this brief and intentional pause gives everyone–including that conversation hog–a chance to regroup and adjust.

3. “I’m Curious To Hear What [Name] Thinks About This”

For most people, a discussion resembles a ball that you throw back and forth–that sort of approach keeps the exchange evenly balanced and productive. But, here’s the problem: Conversation hogs will white-knuckle that ball until they’re blue in the face. So sometimes it’s up to you to encourage some friendly passing.

You know that you’re not the only person in that room who has helpful thoughts to share–and you’re likely not the only one who’s frustrated with the person who’s monopolizing that exchange, either.

This sort of phrase brings other people into the discussion in a way that feels constructive and helpful. And it also serves as a gentle reminder that you’re all there to participate in a dialogue, rather than listen to that one person’s seemingly endless monologue.

Related:Three Scientifically Proven Steps For Talking With Strangers 

You want to be able to join a discussion and contribute your ideas–without feeling like you have a finite amount of time before that chatterbox chimes in and starts steamrolling everyone again. And these sorts of phrases can help you do just that.

What should you do if that person keeps trying to jump back in and start rambling at inappropriate times? Use these helpful tips on how to deal when you keep being interrupted.

Take it from a self-proclaimed conversation hog–that person won’t be able to change overnight. But taking these steps should help those motor mouths open up the floor for other people (and take a much-needed breath every once in a while).

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

More From The Muse:

• 3 Things Your Chatterbox Coworker Wants To Say To You, But Won’t
• The Literal Brain-Boosting Reason To Let Yourself Get Distracted By Small Talk Today 
• How To Wrap Up A Boring Conversation (Because We’ve All Been There)

At this point, there’s no room left for slow burns on Game of Thrones. With winter finally here and only two shortened seasons left–or one long but staggered season, depending how you look at it–HBO’s flagship series is primed for its epic conclusion. Not only have major characters consolidated power after a six-season buildup, but the cast’s promise of an accelerated storytelling pace all but guarantees that each of the final 13 episodes won’t waste any time in hitting crucial narrative beats.

That being said, there are still a whole lot of unanswered questions in Westeros. Sure, Emilia Clarke, aka Daenarys Targaryen, says season seven will tie up plenty of loose ends–even ones viewers may have forgotten about. But for every answer we get or even predict, there are many other mysteries across the Seven Kingdoms we can’t begin to solve on our own. How will Jon find out about his real parents? What happened to King Robert’s bastard? And is Sam seriously going to spend an entire season studying?

Below, 10 questions from here to Essos that we’ll need answered by season seven’s end.

Will Jon discover the truth about his parents?

Really, it’s more a matter of when Jon Snow will learn the truth: that he’s not actually Ned Stark’s bastard and is, in fact, his nephew–something Papa Stark might’ve told the newly-christened King of the North if he hadn’t lost his head in season one. Jon’s upcoming identity crisis seems inevitable, what with cousin Bran seemingly on his way back to south of the Wall with a lot of Three-Eyed Raven gossip to share. If Bran doesn’t share the news, there’s always the chance that Littlefinger–who’s well-versed in Stark family history and curiously referred to Jon as a “bastard born in the South”–knows more than he’s letting on.

Another question to consider: Who is Jon’s dad? R+L=J loyalists already have their answer (as does anyone who might’ve read this official HBO infographic), but nothing has actually been said out loud. Which is apparently a requirement, since we have actors on the show saying we’re still “pretty clueless” about that part. Whoever the dad may be, the truth will have immense repercussions on the game of thrones.

Who will Arya kill next?

Bloodshed seems to follow the younger Stark daughter everywhere she goes. She fled Braavos, but not without eliminating The Waif first (to be fair, she had it coming). And as soon as she returned to Westeros, the little assassin crossed Walder Frey off her kill list, minutes after feeding him his own sons. With the progress she’s made already, there’s little reason to assume Arya will pull back now. So who’s her next target?

The answer is likely proximity-based. While stomping around the Riverlands, she may bump into an old friend she’s already left for dead once: the Hound. And if she’s lucky, she’ll run into Beric Dondarrion, another name on Arya’s list who sold her friend Gendry (more on him later) to Melisandre and was last seen trying to convince the Hound to join his Brotherhood Without Banners. Speaking of Melisandre, the Red Lady was banished from Winterfell after admitting to burning Shireen Baratheon at the stake–and may very well be on a collision course with the Stark girl. If Melisandre’s prophecy holds true, then Arya may have a very busy season ahead of her.

Where is Nymeria?

The body count in Westeros has only risen over the years, and, unfortunately, the Stark children’s loyal direwolves haven’t been able to escape the carnage. Of the original pack of six, only two remain: Jon’s Ghost and Arya’s Nymeria. The latter wolf hasn’t been seen since Arya sent her away in season one, and her absence has only grown more apparent as casualties have racked up. Now that Arya is back in Westeros and perhaps on track to rejoin her remaining siblings, there’s also a chance that her homecoming might portend another big reunion.

Whether that happens in this season or the next remains unclear, or if it will happen at all. In the books, Arya gets glimpses of Nymeria’s life through warg-like dreams–something that hasn’t yet appeared on the show. But if the direwolves are manifestations of the Starks’ personalities, then it only makes sense to hope that the fiercest of them all could show up in time for the great war ahead.

What is Sam’s purpose?

Oh, Sam. Few characters on Game of Thrones get as happy a trajectory as the one this former crow got last season: He stood up to his family, he procured one of those rare Valyrian steel swords, he made it to the Citadel with his girlfriend and adopted son. But what goes up must come down, and the harsh reality of winter is bound to come for the maester-in-training. With the stakes ramping up this season, it’s unlikely that Sam–or any surviving character, at this point–will be relegated to a secondary role such as the go-to exposition dump for information about White Walkers. And with that Valyrian blade burning a hole in his bag, he’s bound to make his way back North sometime soon; after all, the humans are going to need as many of those White Walker-killing swords as possible.

What will become of Gendry?

It stands to reason that Arya may also seek out old friends, not just her family and enemies. When it comes to Gendry, however, she’ll likely have a difficult time, if only because he’s ostensibly been rowing down the Westerosi coast for the last three seasons. But in the interim, King Robert’s bastard has become a more important player whether he knows it or not, making his probable return a more vital event than before. With the deaths of his uncle Stannis and cousin Shireen in season five, Gendry was left as the only known Baratheon, legitimate or not, in all of Westeros. But after King Tommen–the last of Cersei’s children she passed off as Robert’s–died in the season six finale, House Baratheon died along with him. Now that Cersei has usurped the throne, Gendry’s bloodline is primed for a comeback, posing yet another potential claim to the Iron Throne. It also helps that the actor who plays him, Joe Dempsie, arrived at the season seven premiere, all but confirming a Gendry reappearance.

Will Euron marry?

Despite being a comparatively late introduction, the scummy pirate and new King of the Iron Islands Euron Greyjoy seems like he’ll be a scourge for multiple parties this season, particularly for his niece and nephew. But with Yara and Theon firmly allied with Daenerys as she crosses the Narrow Sea, Euron’s hopes of taking the Iron Throne by dragonfire are dashed. If that pits him against the Mother of Dragons, then he may seek to align with Cersei, whose new reign is most threatened by Daenerys’s (and Tyrion’s) arrival. And in Westeros, there are no better means of cementing a new alliance than by marriage–the very offer he’d planned on extending to the Khaleesi. Whether or not two power-mad beings such as Euron and Cersei could stay married for long is up for debate, but Cersei has sold enough of her soul to make the offer a plausible one.

Will Ser Jorah find a cure for greyscale?

Last viewers saw Ser Jorah Mormont, he’d been sent away by Daenarys a third time. This time, on a mission to find a cure for his fatal disease before returning to her side. The late Shireen Baratheon is proof positive that a cure for grey scale exists; his challenge seems to be finding it before he turns into a stone man. With Jorah in Essos and all the maesters across the Narrow Sea in Westeros, his best bet may very well be a healer he’s already encountered on his side of the world: Quaithe. A mysterious and masked woman Jorah meets alongside Daenarys in Qarth, Quaithe is also seen ritually protecting a man who must sail into Old Valyria–the very place Jorah was infected. If she can protect from grey scale, chances are she may know how to cure it as well. And given the interconnected nature of Game of Thrones‘s narrative, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Jorah the Andal’s salvation has actually been foreshadowed for four seasons.

When will the Wall fall?

Almost as inevitable as Jon discovering the truth about his lineage, the Wall needs to come crumbling down at some point. Otherwise, there won’t be much of a war if the White Walkers can’t actually get through to the Seven Kingdoms. With season seven supposedly comprised of one oh-shit moment after the other, the Wall could feasibly melt away by the premiere’s end (it won’t, though). Then again, it does seem like the type of showstopper moment with which to end a season, paving the way for a final season almost entirely dedicated to the war between the living and the dead.

All that being said, the Wall is basically begging for destruction, what with the Night’s Watch being poorly staffed and Bran–still wearing the enchantment-breaking mark from being touched by the Night’s King–making moves to cross the threshold. There’s also that old horn Sam found beyond the Wall in season two, rumored to be the legendary Horn of Winter capable of bringing the whole barrier down. Was the prop just a red herring, or will it play a pivotal part leading up to the series’s conclusion?

Who is going to die?

The question that hangs over each episode of Game of Thrones, but now takes on extra urgency as the series prepares for the home stretch. Though this is a show predicated on the idea that literally no one is safe (RIP Ned), some characters–the King in the North, the Queen on the Sea, the Hand of the Queen–presumably have some degree of narrative insurance after having stayed alive this long. Others, namely the remaining Stark siblings, have a high likelihood of survival after years of abuse and, you know, losing everyone else in their family.

That leaves a whole swath of potential losses across the Seven Kingdoms, some of whom are fan favorites (cough Brienne and Grey Worm cough) but wouldn’t recalibrate the entire plot if they perished. Then there are others, such as Yara and Theon, who are hurtling toward a showdown with an angry relative that may snuff one or both of them by its end. Loyal sidekicks Sam, Podrick, and Davos Seaworth are all but guaranteed mortal peril, while Cersei and Littlefinger’s double-crossing machinations have put pretty huge targets on their backs.

In the end, however, winter is finally here, and everyone is headed for a zombified fate if the Night King isn’t defeated.

Who will Ed Sheeran play?

Yes, the singer behind those inescapable grocery store hits will make a cameo in season seven, allegedly sharing screen time with a certain Stark girl. We just hope there’s prosthetic makeup (or a paper bag) involved because there’s nothing more distracting than seeing Ed fucking Sheeran in Game of Thrones.

Devices like Amazon Echo could someday turn into a treasure trove for developers that make voice assistant skills, but first companies have to figure out where they draw the line when it comes to weighing data sharing against consumer privacy.

Now that dilemma is heating up: Citing three unnamed sources, The Information reported this week that Amazon is considering whether to provide full conversation transcripts to Alexa developers. This would be a major change from Amazon’s current policy in which the company only provides basic information—such as the total number of users, the average number of actions they’ve performed, and rates of success or failure for voice commands. Amazon declined to comment to The Information regarding the claims, but the change wouldn’t be unprecedented. Google’s voice assistant platform already provides full transcripts to developers.

The potential move by Amazon underscores how it is caught between two worlds with its Alexa assistant, especially in regards to privacy. By keeping transcripts to itself, Amazon can better protect against the misuse of its customers’ data and avoid concerns about eavesdropping. But because Alexa already gives developers the freedom to build virtually any kind of voice skill, their inability to see what customers are saying becomes a major burden.

Essentially, Amazon must decide whether it wants to be more like Apple or more like Google.

Treasure Trove Vs. Black Box

With Google Assistant, developers can view a transcript for any conversation with their particular skill. Uber, for example, can look at all recorded utterances from the moment you ask for a car until the ride is confirmed. (It can’t, however, see what you’ve said to other apps and services.) Google’s own documentation confirms this, noting that developers can request “keyboard input or spoken input from end user” during a conversation.

For developers, this data can be of immense utility. It allows them to find out if users are commonly speaking in the wrong syntax, or asking to do things that the developer’s voice skill doesn’t support. When Capital One launched an SMS banking bot in March, several months after releasing an Alexa, the company was particularly excited about its ability to get the raw data.

“You can imagine there’s a lot of learnings that can be applied when you’re seeing exactly what the customer asks, and you can build your product around that,” Ken Dodelin, Capital One’s vice president of digital product development, told me at the time.

Google appears to be aware of the value. According to The Information, the company has pitched transcripts as a major selling point as it tries to bring more developers onto its platform.

But turning over that data also has a couple downsides. Outside of Google’s and Amazon’s developer agreements, there’s no way to ensure that third parties would safeguard the conversation data they collect, or to stop unscrupulous developers from using that data in ways that violate users’ privacy. Opening up transcript access could also stoke more fears about eavesdropping on devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Those issues could in turn become strengths for Apple, which has tried to wield privacy as a selling point.

In terms of sharing data with developers, Apple’s Siri voice assistant is on the opposite side of the spectrum from Google. Developers who work with SiriKit get no information about usage from Apple, not even for basic things like how many people use voice commands to access an app, or which voice commands are most commonly used.

“Apple doesn’t provide any type of information about the usage of Siri,” says Enric Enrich, an iOS developer at Doist.

But keep in mind that Siri’s approach to third-party development is entirely different from that of Google and Amazon. Instead of letting developers build any kind of voice application, Apple only supports third-party voice commands in a handful of specific domains, such as photo search, workouts, ride hailing, and messaging. And instead of letting those apps drive the conversation, Apple controls the back-and-forth itself. The apps merely provide the data and some optional on-screen information.

Because these apps don’t communicate with users directly, there’s no need for them to have conversation transcripts in the first place. Instead, Apple can look at what users are trying to accomplish and use that data to expand Siri on its own.

The downside to this approach is that Siri just isn’t as useful as other virtual assistants. This, in turn, means Apple has a harder time using Siri as a selling point, even in voice-driven products like the upcoming HomePod speaker.

With Alexa, Amazon is in the position of trying to split the difference. The company wants to offer endless possibilities to developers, but seems to have realized that the necessary tools require a compromise on privacy.

For now, The Information reports that Amazon is approaching this dilemma with a whitelist, which at least allows trusted third parties to get the data they want. But it’s unclear if that approach will be sustainable as the virtual assistant wars escalate, and companies that don’t even exist yet come up with new applications we’ve yet to even dream of.

By early 2018, New Cave Media, a Ukraine-based organization plans to launch an app called Aftermath VR, which uses photogrammetry–or the science of taking measurements from photos–to create 3D renderings of events like mass shootings or natural disasters with the sort of scope and scale that’s sometimes needed to make them comprehensible.

About the same time, Voxhop, a Cambridge, Massachusetts research group, will debut another reporting tool to share what happened a crime scene with immersive video that switches focus, allowing an event to be seen and narrated from multiple witness perspectives.

That’s because all three of those groups, and eight more, has received between $15,000 and $30,0000 of a $285,000 pot put up by the Knight Foundation, Google News Lab, and The Online News Association as part of the Journalism 360 Challenge, a competition that focused on answering one question: “How might we experiment with immersive storytelling to advance the field of journalism?”

The Journalism 360 Challenge generated 812 submissions within the U.S. and several other countries including Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Norway, Germany, and the UK since it was announced in March. The winning answers showcase the boldest tech-enabled plans to help newsmakers craft better narratives, ensure more ethical storytelling, and democratize production for underrepresented or underfunded groups within industry. Entrants ranged from classic print and broadcast groups, to universities, and digital startups.

That money comes with a fittingly tight deadline: All teams now have six to 12 months to make their concepts a true reality. They’re expected to share results by early 2018, in hopes that other groups might adopt what’s working.

The challenge builds on the mission of Journalism 360, a grant making, workshop and webinar driven industry organization that launched last September as something of a hub for journalists to develop and share the next wave of storytelling tools and practices. So far, the partners have pledged to put at last a half-million into various programs.

To that end, another project at the University of British Columbia will test if “AI-generated Anonymity” in VR storytelling (think: pixelated people) is an effective or emotionally disconnecting way to present confidential sources. The Washington Post is exploring inherent audience bias through a smartphone app that tracks facial expression as people are exposed to things that may confirm or challenge their beliefs. “One of the most exciting things about Journalism 360 is that the rulebook on immersive storytelling hasn’t been written yet and I think our applicants used this climate to innovate,” adds Hertzfeld.

Sometimes sharing what’s news and why it matters isn’t enough. In the increasingly interactive age, people may want to see it to believe it. Until then, you can read more about the other winners here.

For a woman my age, I’m pretty impressive: I was valedictorian of Georgetown University, I interned for Michelle Obama at the White House, I’m a Fulbright Fellow, I’ve worked at the UN, and now I run a nationally ranked women’s program at a leading tech company.

But, I’d never ever say that sentence aloud. Even writing it makes me cringe.

For too many women like me, humility is social currency. We’ve been trained to let our accomplishments speak for themselves. Fortunately, working at HubSpot, that isn’t a liability for me. In fact, humility is one of the five core attributes the company demands from employees. But we noticed that our employees–particularly female employees–were more likely to attribute their accomplishments to the collective efforts of their colleagues rather than acknowledging the important roles they each play individually. So we got together and decided to do something about it–namely, encourage women to “humblebrag” for each other.

Why Women’s Accomplishments Go Unnoticed

For years, research has borne out the pattern we’d begun noticing. Not only are women typically reluctant to take credit for their own contributions when they’re working on teams, but the odds are already stacked against them thanks to gender bias. Last year a Harvard researcher discovered that women tend to get less credit for their collaborative work, period–no matter whether they tout their efforts or not.

Related:How Our Idea Of “Strong Women” Intentionally Hurts Female Leaders 

Allyson Downey, founder of the parenting site weeSpring, gave us an idea for tackling this issue when she came to speak at HubSpot. She encouraged women to track their weekly accomplishments in a simple document. The only problem, we discovered, is that it still places the onus on the women to self-promote.

So we thought to ourselves, if our women are doing incredibly innovative things for the business, and sharing this publicly is essential for growing their careers, how could we praise them without forcing them to boast? Our answer: Get their coworkers to do it for them.

Women who may be reluctant to talk about their own accomplishments often have no problem singing the praises of their friends and colleagues. With that in mind, here are four ways we’ve come up with to get women at HubSpot to celebrate one another’s hard work.

1. Host A LinkedIn Recommendation-Writing Night

When was the last time you set aside time to write someone a LinkedIn recommendation? Exactly.

But the truth is that recommendations are crucial. Short reviews from credible references, highlighting specific skills and strengths, can pique recruiters’ attention and help managers see who’s due for a promotion. That’s why we hosted a hack night, dedicating an hour toward the end of the day to teach employees how to write the perfect LinkedIn recommendation.

We encouraged women in particular to attend–and challenged them to write at least five for their female team members. By the end of the hour, we’d written over 100.

2. Give Slack Shout-Outs

It’s nice to get a personal email from your boss acknowledging a job well done. But as the saying goes, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” Yes, positive one-on-one feedback matters, but touting female employees’ big wins in public matters even more.

When a woman on our product team gets promoted or does something of note, we announce it on Slack and give her a shout-out. It’s a simple but effective way to give that woman the visibility she deserves and to ensure that her impact is felt across the organization.

3. Recognize A Wonder Woman Of The Week

Recognition doesn’t have to come from the top down. I send a biweekly email newsletter to over 500 employees enrolled in our women’s employee resource group. One day, I decided to start adding a section called “Wonder Woman of the Week,” profiling one woman who’s been doing great lately.

I include a brief bio, attach a photo, and reach out to two of her direct team members for short quotes about her and her work. This one-paragraph highlight reel isn’t hard to put together, and it helps create a culture of calling out top female performers, puts a face to their names (or email addresses), and fosters a larger community of support.

If your company has some sort of internal newsletter or team-wide email that goes out at a regular cadence, consider adding a similar section. You’d be surprised how honored women are to be selected for this peer-nominated distinction–and how willing and hungry people are to commend their colleagues.

4. Host A Wikipedia “Edit-A-Thon”

While we like to brag about the accomplishments of HubSpot’s female employees, we also recognize that women outside our four walls are also doing amazing things that go unrecognized. Fewer than 17% of Wikipedia’s biographical entries are of women, and the visibility numbers are pretty dismal in technology in particular.

So in an attempt to make information about up-and-coming women in tech more available to Wikipedia’s 60 million daily visitors, we organized an “Add the Women Back Edit-a-Thon.” Attendees got a crash course in how to write Wikipedia entries, then penned new ones for female engineers, designers, and product managers. Some contributors even shared their articles on Twitter with the women they’d profiled, many of whom were grateful for our efforts.

hah 140 characters is limiting-our dev team organized a night to add female prod. leaders to Wikipedia to share #womenintech impact!

— Hannah Fleishman (@hbfleishman) October 5, 2016

Today @HubSpot we had a wiki hackathon to add notable women to wikipedia. Here's the article I wrote on @jgoldfeinhttps://t.co/bqI1p0B5RQ

— Chelsea Bathurst (@chebathurst) October 4, 2016

Although we have to keep encouraging women to share their successes and own their accomplishments, the burden shouldn’t rest solely on women to self-promote their way to the top.
The more creative we get about how to support and celebrate women in the workplace, particularly in fields where we’re underrepresented, the more we can guarantee we’re writing women into history–while we’re still busy shaping it.

Caroline Cotto is the culture content creator at HubSpot, where she focuses on employer branding, inbound recruiting, and diversity & inclusion, specifically as head of the Women@HubSpot employee resource group.

The Unreasonable Group, an accelerator for socially-minded startups, was founded on the idea that entrepreneurs can change the world. Its name comes from a famous George Bernard Shaw quote: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.”

But unreasonableness only gets you so far, says Daniel Epstein, Unreasonable’s founder and CEO. To truly exact change, entrepreneurs need to be able to co-operate, including with corporations, governments, and the social sector. “We believe desperately in entrepreneurs as the beacons for the most promising solutions. But if we are going to take those to scale faster, we need to drive relationships between these startups and the largest institutions of our time,” he tells Fast Company.

Unreasonable’s new Unreasonable Goals program reflects this co-operative imperative and mirrors the thinking behind the Sustainable Development Goals, agreed at the United Nations in 2015. Unreasonable Goals looks to help grow 16 startups, one each around each of the SDGs– including hunger, disease, and climate change–and to exemplify the process-oriented SDG 17, which calls for partnerships between governments, businesses and the social sector to achieve the SDGs.

This year’s startups include Liberty & Justice, a Liberia-based apparel maker that has a record of empowering its largely female workforce (as well as giving away free school uniforms). It will work on SDG 5: gender equality. Carnegie Clean Energy, an Australian developer of wave energy, solar and battery storage projects, was chosen for SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy). Meanwhile, Norway-based Agrinos makes bacteria-based alternatives to artificial fertilizers (SDG 2: zero hunger), and EcoPost takes waste plastic and turns it into a substitute wood product (SDG 11: sustainable communities). Other startups cover clean water and sanitation (SDG 6) and health and well-being (SDG 3). 

The plan is to run the SDG-themed program each year until 2030, working with a different set of governments and corporate partners around the world each time. To kick off, Unreasonable has teamed up with the U.S. State Department, which is hosting the program in Washington D.C., with representatives from corporates like Johnson & Johnson and Lowe’s also in attendance. Epstein describes the program as a “pathologically collaborative environment,” featuring sessions where the participants brainstorm ideas and talk partnerships. For example, the team from 1MG (SDG 3), an Indian healthcare app with 9 million users, is discussing a potential tie-up with Johnson & Johnson combining “1MG’s model with the scale of J&J’s global footprint,” he says. 1MG offers an online pharmacy and a platform to search for medical testing facilities.

The idea for Unreasonable Goals came from Thomas Debass at the State Department’s Office of Global Partnerships. “He saw that we already work with corporates like Barclays, Pearson, and Nike and he said ‘what would it look like if we don’t just build bridges between entrepreneurs, funders and large multinationals, but we also bring in policymakers from around the world?'” Epstein says. Debass’s group is already supporting a series of civic society groups aligned with the SDGs.

Most of the companies on Unreasonable Goals have been around for several years and are well established. Agrinos, for example, has offices in three countries and already works with thousands of farmers. The accelerator isn’t designed to get startups off the ground, so much as to get them to a place where they can affect more lives. “They’re all measurably impactful around the SDGs. Our question is how we take that to hundreds of millions of people, not just hundreds of thousands,” Epstein says.

WHAT: For the first time, an assortment of Prince’s music videos–10 of them, including “When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” and “I Wanna Be Your Lover”–are now available for streaming on Vevo.

WHO: It’s not Prince’s full videography, and the focus here seems to be largely on his work with The Revolution, which is to say, work he recorded with Warner Bros.

WHY WE CARE: It’s a double-edged sword seeing Prince’s work land on streaming networks after his death, given how tightly-controlled he kept his catalog in his lifetime. But his body of work is among the best thing anybody ever did with recorded music, and the videos that accompanied it captivated an entire generation–a generation that honored his shocking death last April with purple tattoos and heartfelt tributes to his genius. Music writer Piotr Orlov penned one for Vevo’s blog to announce the news of the videos, in fact.

Prince famously battled for the right to control his work and his image, but none of us are able to maintain that right in perpetuity, after our deaths, and the fact that Prince’s work now appears on Vevo, Spotify, and more isn’t just a statement about the inevitability of corporate power–it’s also proof that even after all of the people currently making money off of his legacy are gone, people are still gonna hear the guitar intro to “When Doves Cry” and be moved to move their bodies, or the drum stomp of “Dirty Mind” and feel feelings they didn’t know they had in them. Giving people a chance to watch a young Prince in his prime with decades of amazing music still ahead of him is a gift that endures. And regardless of the circumstances, we should find space to celebrate that.

Watch Prince’s videos on Vevo here.