With $2 hotdogs, $2 sodas (with unlimited refills) and $5 beer, Mercedes-Benz Stadium will open this fall with the NFL’s lowest prices.

The comedy streaming service Seeso has announced that it is shutting down.“We’re writing to let you know that later this year, Seeso will be shutting its comedy doors,” the company wrote in a Facebook post, which was also noticed by Variety.

Seeso, which is owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, says many of its original programs have already found new homes. As is the case with many niche over-the-top services, it was simply unable to garner enough subscriptions to stay afloat. The service was launched less than two years ago.

And this really shouldn’t come as a surprise. After an influx of individual over-the-top services saturated the market–Sony’s Crackle, Sling TV, Vudu, Verizon’s go90, YouTube Red, the list goes on–it’s only a matter of time before other similar services start to bite the dust.

The memo that rocked Silicon Valley this week brought the culture wars to the heart of the tech sector, outraged plenty of workers at Google and beyond, and sparked a nationwide debate over workplace diversity. But its legal ramifications remain unclear.

The anti-diversity screed that had been shared internally among staff at Google first leaked to the press last weekend. Written by now infamous engineer James Damore, it tried to explain that the gender pay gap exists because women are biologically predisposed to work differently than men. On Monday, Google swiftly announced his firing, saying that Damore had breached the company’s code of conduct.

The blowback was swift and fierce: Free speech advocates and critics of political correctness are crying foul, some using dystopian terms like “thought crimes” to describe the situation. Both Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and alt-right social network Gab, among others, have taken up Damore’s case as yet another example of liberal ideals run amok. Then the engineer told reporters he was going to sue the company, and last night he filed a claim with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). But the question remains: Does Damore have a case? Though some legal scholars have indicated that he might, the truth is that any legal battle will be a tough slog.

The Claim

“I think it’s interesting that he filed a claim with the NLRB,” says Miriam Cherry, a law professor at Saint Louis University who specializes in employment law. “That’s maybe not the typical route that most people would take.” This claim invokes a certain section–8(a)1–which prohibits employers from interfering with workers who are organizing to advocate for their own labor rights, or, as Cherry (and the law) describes it, “protected concerted activity.” Often, NLRB claims involve unions, and Google–along with nearly every other tech company–is not unionized.

The idea is that if someone is making an appeal to workers on behalf of workers, the company cannot retaliate and fire that person. Though workers represented by unions are given more protections, section 8(a)1 protects everyone. Cherry offers herself as an example, explaining that she’s a professor who’s not in a union, but she still has the right to reach out to other employees about working conditions. That action, she says, would be protected. Because Damore wrote his memo in the style of a call to action to his coworkers to discuss Google, it could potentially be protected under section 8(a)1.

Cherry’s colleague, professor Matt Bodie, who specializes in labor law and the NLRB, is also intrigued by her interpretation of Damore’s situation. “From a workplace perspective, you can say [Damore] was trying to rally his fellow employees to oppose certain diversity initiates that Google has taken up,” says Bodie. Those types of claims, Bodie adds, are generally brought by more than one person–for example, a group of people who collectively complain about their wages or conditions. This complaint is different: While he’s reaching out to other employees, Bodie notes that the memo is “still personal.” And this is a situation that the Labor Board hasn’t really addressed yet.

Another route, which Damore has yet to take up in court, is his protection of free speech. This is a claim that will likely be even harder to prove. Law professor David Yamada of Suffolk University in the U.K. puts it plainly: “Private sector employees do not have general free speech rights.” He adds that more often than not, courts defer to companies when it comes to how they interpret their own policies. Given that Google says he was fired for violating its code of conduct, it will likely be hard for Damore to claim the opposite.

Beyond the NLRB, Damore could go a few routes. One would be where he invokes Tile VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate based on sex, race, religion, etc. Essentially Damore’s claim would be one of reverse racism: That since he is a white man, he received less than favorable conduct from Google. This would be a tough case to make either in court or in real life. Damore could also use a California state law that prevents employers from retaliating against employees over political activity. Though, as Bodie puts it, Damore’s conduct was more ideological activity: “He’s advocating for an internal Google change.”

Related: Workers Win Only 1% Of Civil Rights Lawsuits

Damore also claims that Google fired him in retaliation for filing an NLRB claim. That too will likely be hard to prove, unless emails are discovered where executives are describing such a scenario. Not to mention, according to online NLRB records, Damore appears to have filed his initial NLRB claim after being fired.

In short, it’s going to be an uphill battle for Damore. Though some have said that his case may have a chance, it’s still going to depend on very specific interpretations–many of which have yet to be argued before the NLRB. I reached out to Damore asking about his legal route and have yet to hear back.

What’s The Endgame?

It’s also important to note that the NLRB complaint isn’t a potential payday for Damore: The best he could do is for the board to take on his case and get him reinstated, or award him back pay for time lost. So if he’s hoping to score a big check, this wouldn’t be the avenue to take. All the same, it’s cheaper for the time being, because Damore doesn’t have to hire a lawyer, and instead just walks into an office and files a few papers. And he could pursue punitive damages later and use this current NLRB route to maintain steam.

There’s also plenty of irony in Damore’s situation, says Bodie, noting the aid he’s likely to get from conservative groups, many of which are outraged about his termination. After all, he is filing an employee rights claim–one which he would have a better shot at winning were he in a union–and conservatives have long worked to make it harder for employees to pursue legal remedies over workplace conditions. Though Damore has become a symbol of what happens when liberal values supposedly infringe on others’ beliefs, his path to vindication was shaped and enabled by liberal advocacy.

Another issue of debate that touches on employment law is whether or not Google made the right call by firing Damore. Cherry believes that it likely was the company’s only choice. If Google had let Damore stay, the company would have become even more of a target for a class-action suit from women who had proof that someone giving performance reviews was stereotyping them. “The CEO had to do something from a liability standpoint,” she says. Not that firing Damore forestalled such a potentiality—more than 60 women are already considering filing a class action lawsuit over sexism and pay gap, reports the Guardian.

All the same, speculators are going to speculate–everyone loves a media circus. The odds, however, seem to be stacked against Damore. “Since we’re lawyers, we like to say, ‘Could there be anything [to the case]?'” says Cherry. “If it were me, deciding whether I would take this person on as a client–[asking] hey, what are my chances? I wouldn’t rate them very highly.”

Facebook wants to be so many different things to so many people. A place to share photos. A place to tell your family and friends what you’re up to. A place to sell things, to buy things, to form political groups, to watch cat videos, and so much more. And now it wants to be your go-to choice for the kind of content you might have previously watched on TV. Or at least on YouTube.

In a blog post late this afternoon–following a Business Insiderscoop—Facebook announced Watch, its new platform for watching TV shows. “Shows are made up of episodes—live or recorded—and follow a theme or storyline,” Facebook wrote. “To help you keep up with the shows you follow, Watch has a Watchlist so you never miss out on the latest episodes.”

While it’s not clear if Watch could have the impact of a Netflix or Hulu, it’s clear that Facebook wants to be the place where people watch TV of all kinds. It even takes advantage of being on Facebook, such as with original shows like Returning the Favor, in which host Mike Rowe “finds people doing something extraordinary for their community, tells the world about it, and in turn does something extraordinary for them.” Rowe will find candidates on Facebook itself.

The service is also personalized so that users can find new shows that their friends or communities are watching, as well as trending shows, or shows that made people laugh. There will even be live shows, such as a weekly Major League Baseball game–and you can bet that many other top-tier media companies are going to want to try Watch out and see if it helps them build audiences.

As more people are cutting the cord and media giants like Disney plan their own services, Facebook will also need to keep in mind that people don’t want a million streaming services.

General Motors is extending Maven Gig, its car rental service for on-demand economy workers, to Los Angeles today. The company will be also expanding the offering to Boston, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Detroit before the end of the year. The 18-month-old program, which provides wannabe Uber, Lyft, and Instacart drivers with wheels for a weekly fee, has already attracted 25,000 members. But GM has motives that go beyond cashing in on the growing gig economy. The company is using its rental service to make the case for electric vehicle infrastructure.

“In a broader sense, General Motors is looking to expand public infrastructure for electric vehicles,” says chief growth officer Rachel Bhattacharya. “We see that as a key enabler of all our future mobility.” Maven Gig pairs drivers with one of several GM models, including its electric Chevrolet Bolt. In exchange for a weekly fee ranging from $189 to $229, drivers get unlimited mileage, maintenance, and roadside assistance. The Bolt also comes with free charging—a cost savings of $70 to $80 per week over a gas-powered vehicle.

In the last six months, Maven Gig drivers have traveled 1.4 million miles with the Bolt in San Francisco, which has 75 electric vehicles deployed. Overall, Maven Gig drivers have logged 170 million miles since the program started, making the number of miles clocked by EVs alone comparably small. But GM is trying to change that by growing the number of EVs available for rent. There are now 100 available in Los Angeles and Bhattacharya says she’s hoping to double the number of EVs in both regions and bring 20 additional EVs to Boston before the end of the year. For GM, the cost of paying for charging isn’t trivial, but Bhattacharya says the company has the leverage to negotiate rates.

“It’s a much simpler conversation [for us] to go and speak with utilities and infrastructure providers and talk about what we can do and where we can bring more supply online in different markets,” she says. GM is essentially incentivizing the building of public charging stations to make way for its own electric vehicles. “We’re solving that chicken-and-egg situation: “I’m not going to build a charging station unless I know it’s going to get used, [and] I’m not going to buy an electric car unless I know I can charge it,” she says.

Building this infrastructure is important as Chevrolet gears up to deliver the Bolt to dealerships nationally. (Only a small number of dealers were able to order to car initially.) Bolt purchases have been ticking upward since March and hit record sales in July, but industry analysts are concerned the car’s progress will be dampened by Tesla’s Model 3, which at last check has netted around 455,000 pre-orders. In this way GM’s Maven Gig service provides another benefit: on-road marketing.

“The passengers in the car were commenting to the drivers about it and asking about it,” chuckles Bhattacharya. “Asking, ‘Can you give me a promo-code?’ I think they thought they were [GM] employees.” She says GM is exploring whether it can equip renters with information about the cars, making them not only a revenue-generating opportunity but brand ambassadors as well.

ReGrained takes leftover malt from craft breweries around San Francisco and turns it into healthy snacks.

B8ta is a hands-on tech store encouraging customers to test and play with everything before they purchase. Vendors pay a monthly fee in exchange for 100% of profits from sales and detailed analytics.

Facebook, a company that makes billions of dollars by keeping us all mindlessly addicted to its social apps, has a clever way of figuring out what to build next. The social networking giant reportedly has an internal system that tracks the success of up-and-coming apps to help it decide which ideas to copy from smaller startups and other companies, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal. This “early bird” warning system reportedly utilizes mobile usage analytics technology from Onavo, an Israeli startup Facebook acquired in 2013. Onavo’s app uses a technique that routes people’s mobile usage through a third party server for privacy purposes, but it also “gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones,” according to the report.

So Facebook literally has a spying tool that allows it to examine users’ mobile online habits when they sign up for it https://t.co/Yfj11Npnfh

— Christopher Mims???? (@mims) August 10, 2017

Facebook allegedly used tactics like these to monitor a group video chat called Houseparty, which appears to have influenced Facebook’s decision to launch a remarkably similar group video feature in Messenger. In what must be an especially painful twist, Houseparty was built by the creators of Meerkat, whose once-hot livestreaming video app was swiftly mimicked by Twitter’s 2015 launch of Periscope. Damn.

Back in January, aka when the 45th president was inaugurated, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman told The New Yorker he thought roughly 50% of his billionaire tech buddies had turned into preppers. Now there’s a company to cater to them–building luxurious bunkers to help you survive the apocalypse in style.

Canadian website Global News took a long look at the luxury bunker industry, and it turns out that if you’re going to sit out the end of the world (or at least stay underground for 72 hours until the radioactive fallout diminishes), you’re going to need a pool—and a screening room, a gym, a dog park, and maybe a waterslide. The cost? Around $3 million. Of course, these are folks who drop their kids off at school in $135,000 Teslas and buy $11 million watches.

If you think this is just one or two paranoid billionaires, according to American bunker manufacturer Rising S Company, they’ve had a 200% increase in sales this year compared to 2016. (We reached out for more concrete numbers, but haven’t heard back yet.) And considering the president’s current stance toward North Korea, chances are bunkers are a growth industry. Read the full story here after you take a tour of the “Luxury Survival Condos” via the video below:

Small business owners used to go to their local bank to get a loan. Now they are turning to the same Silicon Valley companies that process their transactions–services like PayPal and Square–for access to credit. Since 2013, PayPal has issued over $3 billion in loans. Since 2014, Square has issued $1 billion.

And the competition is heating up. Today PayPal announced that it has agreed to acquire Swift Financial, which provides cash advances and loans to small businesses, for an undisclosed amount. The deal paves the way for PayPal to offer larger loans to larger businesses.

In parallel with this move, Square (and Amazon) continue to expand their credit offerings. When small businesses have more cash, they can generate more growth. And that’s good news for any company that takes a cut of each transaction.

There is a long, storied tradition in Hollywood of actors starving themselves, and/or getting into insanely good shape for a role. Remember the dramatic buffness of Demi Moore in G.I. Jane, Robert DeNiro in Cape Fear, or Chris Pratt for Guardians of the Galaxy? But does that type of physical commitment deserve an Academy Award? Reebok president Matt O’Toole thinks so.

Mr. Bailey: Let's celebrate the work that takes place BEFORE the cameras roll w/ a new award: Best Fitness Trainer. https://t.co/tYb1fWGpoIhttps://t.co/iFGIgXDrZn

— Reebok (@Reebok) August 9, 2017

O’Toole published an open letter to new Academy president John Bailey through the brand’s site, lobbying to get fitness its very own Oscar category. O’Toole reasons that if there’s a statue for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, why not abs?

The best scenes and storylines today often require amazing physical transformations, and actors and actresses rely heavily on a small field of expert trainers to get them in fighting, flying and filming shape.

The Academy should celebrate the craft of fitness.

For the last 36 years the Academy has awarded Best Makeup and Hairstyling, which has defined the standards of beauty for generations. And the industry’s leading sound mixers have been recognized since 1930 for bringing emotion to even the quietest moments in cinema. For a time, all these artists were also unrecognized.

Why not also reward the people who keep our role models in peak condition?

There’s something about “Best Fitness Trainer” that sounds a lot more MTV Movie Awards than Oscar night. Obviously, Reebok has a vested interest in getting such an award recognized, but all that bias aside, and as ridiculous as it sounds at first, maybe O’Toole has a point. If other physical and aesthetic arts like wardrobe, hair, and make-up are considered and awarded, what makes pecks, abs, and glutes all that different?

Ryan Graves, Uber’s senior vice president of global operations, is stepping down after reports that he was noticeably absent in March. He’ll continue his role on the board of directors, but will no longer be a part of day-to-day operations. Graves was one of Uber’s first employees.

Here is his note to employees:

From: Ryan Graves
Date: Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 9:41 AM
Subject: A big transition
To: Uber Team

What: The latest ad in Adidas Originals “Original is never finished” campaign.

Who: Adidas Originals, Johannes Leonardo

Why we care: What fashion-forward future is this? Darkened ice baths, Matrix-like oxygen chambers, weed-chuffing go-kart rides… This latest Originals spot is like Xanadu for the streetwear crowd. The campaign’s launch spot won the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Music in June, and the brand’s Q2 2017 earnings report boasted sales up 28% in North America. Here it keeps those stylishly surreal vibes consistent. Plus, that’s exactly how Kendall Jenner sleeps, right?

No one is more excited for the upcoming total solar eclipse than NASA. Not only does it let them dabble in party planning, but they get to see their particular field of science taking over social media. To get everyone else excited about the momentous celestial event taking place on August 21, NASA researchers took a break from the office to hop on Reddit for an AMA, where they answered the internet’s burning questions about the eclipse and whether it’s worth the traffic headache to go see it.

NASA also wants you to know that animals are too smart to look into the sun during eclipse and the earth won’t be tasked with caring for 7 million blind field mice in the wake of the eclipse:

However, be aware of “the chickening” where animals, chickens in this case, react to the solar events, despite not being able to read extremely helpful websites (*cough* ) that report on such things:

And for anyone debating whether or not to make the drive to the path of totality, NASA seems to think it’s worth it.

If you do make it to the path of totality, here’s what to say to impress your friends:

But if you don’t want to make the drive or miss it due to an extreme traffic situation, NASA has you covered:

But, seriously, NASA says it is worth the drive and they are actual rocket scientists.

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

By now you’ve probably heard all about the memo that got erstwhile software engineer James Damore fired from Google earlier this week, even if you haven’t read it. While it’s hardly his onlyquestionable claim, this suggestion of Damore’s is particularly bizarre: “Relying on affective empathy–feeling another’s pain–causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.”

Who’s really being emotional here? Ironically enough, this man has written 10 pages against empathy–and yet this is exactly what he seeks from his coworkers. He implores them to acknowledge his frustration and respect his point of view in the same language used by diversity advocates whose tactics he objects to, and whose foundational assumptions–about coding aptitude and cognitive development, among other things–he rejects:

We need psychological safety and shared values to gain the benefits of diversity.

Treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group.

These two remarks are nothing if not calls for empathy–for more, not less, “emotional engagement.” Seemingly without meaning to, Damore has offered up an important reminder: Try as we might to keep empathy and emotion out of our work–to look at things dispassionately, in a fact-based way, and with limited biases–we have all visceral, emotional reactions, some of which we aren’t even fully aware of. That reality makes for complicated relationships with other human beings, to say the least.

And downplaying it has caused some serious damage already.

Related:Three Tough Lessons On Bias From The Google Memo

Clickbait Culture’s Emotional Paradox

I’m old enough to remember the rise of metric-driven strategy in Silicon Valley. Around a decade ago, web companies routinely tested hundreds of home pages against each other to eke out percentages of positive conversions, the dark side of which designer Doug Bowman epitomized in his famous “41 shades of blue” departure letter:

I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

But excitement–or, really, any emotional reaction–wasn’t part of Bowman’s job description. So the mind-set Damore calls for has existed for quite some time; it’s been tried out, and it’s largely failed. Yes, this way of thinking in the tech world has been boon to objective decision-making in some quarters. But it’s also become an easy way to distance ourselves from the foils of humanity, to rely on numbers instead of intuition, and to focus on petty tasks and petty concerns.

Not incidentally, it’s also the reason why your social feeds are filled with uncles and cousins internet-yelling about whether or not President Obama is an American citizen. Because the paradoxical consequence of approaching technology in an “emotionally unengaged” way opens the door for users to engage with it as emotionally–and un-empathetically–as possible.

Even though we as users might not feel good witnessing online fights and tirades, it’s hard to stop scrolling and refreshing to see what happens next. What began inside Twitter or Facebook as a well-meaning data-driven initiative–to keep you immersed in the feed for as long as possible–translates in the real world into a stressful and divisive experience, whether you’re actively commenting or just passing by. When you reduce a complex and individual person into a number, user engagement becomes a game.

In this sense, Damore’s suggestion to treat people as individuals is dead-on; it’s his proposal for how to do that that’s ass-backwards. Coupled with the rise of advertising as a major revenue stream for major tech firms, those of us who work in the sector are still doing just about anything to keep users on our platforms longer, but we don’t always stop to ask whether users are happy or productive or kind to each other while they’re there. Engagement is engagement, which means being “emotionally unengaged” is already something tech workers are taught (and paid) to do all too well.

Related:The Real Root Of Google’s Gender Problem Starts At Birth, But It Isn’t Biology

Raw Emotion Pays, Until It Doesn’t

Twitters business model is drama

— Amber ????????‍???? (@amberdiscko) July 7, 2017

Both of Twitter’s cofounders Ev Williams and Biz Stone have expressed their regrets on the service’s shortfalls. “The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes,” David Streitfeld wrote in the Times last May. “Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.”

“If I learn that every time I drive down this road I’m going to see more and more car crashes,” Williams told Streitfeld, “I’m going to take a different road.

Twitter’s ambivalence toward salacious behavior and its focus on short-term growth goals have together proved unsustainable. Its user growth has long been stalled and the company’s stock is collapsing. Countless public figures are announcing “Twitter diets” and moving off of the service. And it’s not just Twitter, of course; Williams is right to call out “the internet” as a whole. The biggest internet companies, from Facebook and Google to Uber and Airbnb, all saw massive returns by relying on data. But lately they’ve all had to deal with increasingly serious, and all-too-human, problems and pressures.

Contrary to Damore’s appeal, it’s actually dangerous to pretend we can divorce emotion from our work. That’s where empathy comes in. Instead of ignoring what’s human, we need to account for emotions first, and use them from the very beginning to direct everyone’s collective energies toward good.

That won’t be easy to do. But if you can set aside the context in which he offers them, Damore actually has two good pieces of advice for accomplishing that. Creating more psychological safety and treating people as individuals make great sense as ways to temper maximally emotional yet minimally empathetic experiences–both of using technology and of working someplace that builds it. What if we designed and built products that prioritized people having meaningful and productive interactions with each other, instead of focusing solely on metric gains? What if we found sustainable ways of earning revenue that benefit both the company and the consumer, instead of resorting to ones that just make the numbers go up?

As some have pointed out already, Damore likely had to have enjoyed considerable emotional “safe space” to feel comfortable sending his memo to coworkers. But his preferred approach would actually remove the few safe spaces tech companies have managed to carve out for underprivileged populations. Damore imagines this would make things more “fair.” Perhaps had he been a little more emotionally engaged and more empathetic, he’d see it for the spiteful illogic that it is.

Ash Huang is a designer and writer in San Francisco. Visit her at ashsmash.com and follow her on Twitter at @ashsmash.

Can you really put someone into a leadership role at a major company if they intend to work only, say, 20 or 30 hours a week?

Jody Miller, the cofounder and CEO of Business Talent Group, believes it’s not only possible; it’s the smart thing to do. This is a way of “expanding your labor market” and “allowing you to hire people who are fantastic” but just don’t want to grind for 60 or 70 hours a week, she says.

A big key, Miller explains, is designing jobs differently, so that you split up what needs to be accomplished among several senior people.

Miller acknowledges that such an arrangement comes with costs: “You have more human beings to manage. . . . There is a communication issue. There is a little bit of a double-teaming issue.” But she maintains that the “efficiency and productivity and ultimate satisfaction of a workforce that includes people who have the choice of how much they want to work just far outweighs the other factors.”

You can listen to my entire interview with Miller here:

The Bottom Line is a production of Capital & Main. Rick Wartzman is director of the KH Moon Center for a Functioning Society at the Drucker Institute and the author of four books, including his latest, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America.

David Levin became CEO of McGraw-Hill Education three years ago, soon after the underperforming company was sold to a private equity group. One of his first acts as part of his recovery plan was to take his leadership team on a trip to India. “We went to classrooms to [observe] formal education and informal education in the streets, and we saw quite extraordinary things in the way a society at a very different point of its development was coping with poverty and learning.”

Levin recalls meeting a man, Suneel, who lived on the streets and had “taught himself to read, and amazingly, he’d also taught himself how to code, and then he’d gone on to create this incredible set of digital dictionaries, which would work on cell phones, designed to basically empower people like himself.”

He says this encounter, along with others in India, made them better understand “the incredible human capacity” for learning, and how technology has the potential to create self-driven learning experiences. It helped him define their purpose as a company, “which wasn’t selling books, but it to unlock the potential of every learner. It helped us reconnect the soul and mission of McGraw back to itself, which had become somewhat disconnected. That can happen in a company [that’s been around since 1888].”

The trip became a catalyst for taking the conventional textbook publisher from print to digital, a transformation that he had been tasked with by the new owners. At the time Levin started, only 23% of the company’s higher education revenue was from digital sales; today it stands nearly 70%.

Show, Don’t Tell

Levin’s leadership is behind the company’s move to engage with students, the ultimate end users of their products, with whom they had failed to connect in the past. Now the company “goes to customers, meeting students, holding forums. You want students to be passionate . . . feeling there’s a benefit in the product because they’ve got more choice and more agency in their learning.”

The company also actively works with students to get their feedback, “We are interested in students’ experience with the product: Did it help them? Are they excited about how it helped in their success? How did it help them? Would they recommend it to their peers? Did they use the features (such as reports) to aid their study efforts?”

Such feedback allows the company to create digital textbooks that meet students where they are, supporting them through their homework, personalizing a pathway for their learning. For example, “if you know something, a gateway opens to allow you to track your progress. If you don’t know something, it turns to say, ‘Well, you obviously are missing a prerequisite here, you’re not going to chapter four. I’m going to take you back to chapter one because you’ve got to learn that.’ So, the book is supporting you in a very direct way,” Levin says.

Under the old economic model, the company was in the business of selling books. Now, Levin says, “we are focused on a new model to improve educational outcomes for students—help them get better grades, complete their courses, and graduate from college. How do we wean ourselves off the very high-priced textbook and come out with much more affordable digital offerings?”

Though the average digital college textbook, at $75, is half the price of one of the company’s print textbooks, that’s still quite high for students from low-income backgrounds, and the company could be doing more to bring down prices even further. And, focusing more on digital offerings, which lower production (and environmental) costs of digital books seem to be a good way to do that.

Being Vulnerable As CEO

To build an internal learning culture that falls under the company’s overall mandate for unlocking learning, they have created an internal online platform, Spark, where Levin posts personal stories and direct communications with the team.

Last year Levin shared a story on Spark about his recent trip with his mother to celebrate her 90th birthday. They had visited the town in Lithuania where she was from, and where the Nazis had murdered all the other members of her family. The story inspired 127 people to post their own stories, “I think it gave license for others to share.”

He has also used the platform to engage when the company had done something wrong. In 2015, a high school student in Texas posted a video on Facebook about a caption they read in a World Geography textbook that McGraw-Hill had published. It read, “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.”

“I read the caption and immediately felt appalled,” Levin says. The use of the word, “workers”–for Africans who were forcibly brought to America as slaves created an outpouring of comments on Facebook and elsewhere. The incident was “very painful for the public and our employees.”  The company issued a correction (“Many Americans are descendants not of voluntary immigrants, but of some 12.5 million Africans, enslaved and forcibly transported to the Americas.”), and offered a free, corrected book to those who had already purchased it.

Levin also took responsibility for the error, writing on Facebook (and Spark), “We made a mistake. We are deeply sorry that the caption was written this way. While the book was reviewed by many people inside and outside the company, and was made available for public review, no one raised concerns about the caption. Yet, clearly, something went wrong and we must and will do better.”

In response to the incident, Levin says the company has increased the number of reviewers for their textbooks to reflect greater diversity, and to create a more transparent Wikipedia-like process for editing books, “We changed the way we work and edit to find ways to incorporate more “cold reads,” done by people who have not previously read the work to ensure a fresh perspective on materials in near final format. We reached out to experts with knowledge and expertise in different cultures to help us with product development.”

When I asked him what he had personally learned from the incident, Levin said, “I think [in] the role of the CEO, it’s really important to able to be vulnerable . . . say sorry and able to say there was a mistake. Because if you can’t own up to that . . . how could you expect to create culture where people can make mistakes?”

Correction: This article previously stated that at the time of Levin’s hiring, 23% of the revenue came from digital, rather than 23% of the revenue from just its higher education division.

The so-called vinyl revival notwithstanding, old music formats do in fact die. Some of the earliest recorded music, for instance, was pressed on 78rpm records made of an extremely brittle material called shellac. And those records, like their early vinyl-based counterparts, are deteriorating and threatening to disappear forever.

But not if the Internet Archive has anything to say about it. The San Francisco-based nonprofit, best known for backing up huge chucks of the web at archive.org, recently digitized 25,000 vinyl and shellac records dating from the late 1800s through the 1950s. Like this 1927 recording of the Hawaiian song “What Are The Wild Waves Saying?” or these spoken word fairy tales from 1935. The project “currently focuses on discs that are less likely to be commercially available—or available at all in digital form,” says the website, with a particular focus on underrepresented artists and genres.

Here’s one of 25,000 discs, a 1940s recording of “The Happy Monster,” by Chubby Jackson and His Orchestra:

The audio section of the Internet Archive has been around for years (check out this 2004 upload of the original Ledbelly song famously covered by Nirvana in 1993, embeded below), but with this massive injection of vintage, downloadable sounds it becomes a treasure trove of audio for music buffs, nostalgic grandparents, and DJs alike.

Among fun ways to explore the records, according to the Archive’s Jeff Kaplan:

• “Twitter feed of newly digitized 78’s is fun and addictive: one every 10 minutes. Addictive…
• To list the high bitrate transfers, most recently uploaded first
• Find those that say “Blues” in the metadata, “ragtime“, “yodel or yodelling“
• Find those that have been reviewed recently…
• Find those on the Paramount label.
• Find those that are in very good or near mint condition
• Find Victor recordings 1903-13 (but beware because ½ of our recordings have no dates) [the Archive needs your help with that.]”

You can read more about how the Internet Archive once sought to digitize 40,000 VHS tapes.

The dumpster fire at Uber HQ rages on. Benchmark Capital, one of the company’s investors with members on its board, has filed a lawsuit against former CEO Travis Kalanick accusing him of fraud, violation of his fiduciary duty, and breach of contract. Uber is listed as a nominal defendant in the filing.

The lawsuit, uncovered by Dan Primack at Axios, says Kalanick attempted to ensure his return to Uber’s upper ranks by stocking the board with allies. (Last June, Kalanick asked the board to add three new seats of his choosing. Kalanick has since taken one of those seats after he left his CEO post. Two are still empty). Benchmark says it never would have agreed to this ask had it known about Kalanick’s gross mismanagement of Uber. The complaint references Kalanick’s relationship to the culture of gender discrimination at Uber, the mishandling of a rider’s rape records, and the acquisition of a self-driving car company that “allegedly harbored trade secrets stolen from a competitor.” All this is to Uber’s detriment, says Benchmark.

The firm is seeking to have the agreement related to those three seats voided, returning the board to eight members and effectively kicking Kalanick off the board.

Another podcast is making the jump to TV:2 Dope Queensis headed to HBO next year for four hourlong specials. The comedy podcast, which is hosted by Broad City regular and Portlandia writer Phoebe Robinson and former Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams (who can currently be seen in the excellent Netflix film, The Incredible Jessica James) is a great fit for HBO, which has a long history of showcasing up-and-coming comics. The show is also a natural for television—or at least more natural than Gimlet Media’sStart-up, which Zach Braff is turning into a sitcom, a move that kicked open the podcast-to-TV pipeline. I’m guessing the 2 Dope Queens foray onto HBO will look a lot like one of their many live shows.

2 Dope Queens, which is produced by public radio powerhouse WNYC, features Robinson and Williams who introduce a rotating cast of standup comics like Naomi Ekperigin, Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone, and Maria Bamford, who perform 10-minute sets. The show also gets visits from big-name stars like Kevin Bacon and Jon Hamm, and even a few people without meaty last names.

Based on her statement in the press release, Williams is as excited as we are by the news: “We are so stoked to be partnering with HBO for these specials. Excited to add a couple more Khaleesis to the network!”