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Costco just added a registry service so you can buy wedding gifts in bulk

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Brides and grooms can now register for bulk wedding gifts. Costco has teamed up with MyRegistry.com for a new registry service for special occasions like weddings and baby showers. Price-savvy parents-to-be and soon-to-be spouses can register for everything from bargain bedroom sets, Signature Housewares wedding china, bulk diapers (you’ll need ’em!), playroom furniture, and even fine art.

The best part of the service is that guests don’t need to pony up for Costco’s annual membership fee to shop the registry. And if you prefer cash as a gift—of course, so you can fill your cart with Costco’s renowned extra virgin olive oil and signature bacon—the registry lets couples set up a free fund to receive cash via PayPal, with a minimal fee.

As Brides points out, this isn’t Costco’s first trip down the aisle. The very big box store is a one-stop shop for weddings for their members, offering everything from wedding food (yum, Kirkland meatballs) to flowers, invitations, wedding rings, and even their honeymoons.

Read moreThe Choreography Of Design, Treasure Hunts, And Hot Dogs That Have Made Costco So Successful


Snap stock is tanking again after user growth slows down

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This is not good news for Snap Inc. The parent company of Snapchat saw its shares tumble in after-hours trading today after it reported disappointing user growth in its Q2 2017 earnings. It’s only the second earnings report since Snap went public in March, and hopes for a turnaround are deteriorating. Shares fell to $11.90 after hours, an all-time low. Snap debuted on the NYSE at $17 a share. It fell below that price a month ago and hasn’t recovered. The company reported daily active users growth of 7 million to 173 million total, but analysts were expecting about 8 million new users, CNBCreports. You can check out Snap’s full earnings release here. We’ll have more after the call later today.

[Screenshot: Google]

#FireMcMaster, Not Damore: Twitter Bots Are Thriving, And They’re More Lethal Than Ever

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James Damore, the Google engineer recently fired for his controversial memo on workplace diversity and women in tech, has quickly become a cause célèbre for the political right. He’s already appeared on at least two conservative YouTube broadcasts, and his memo has received praise from right-wing publications like Breitbart. But according to researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Damore’s story has also gone viral, thanks partly to a network of Twitter trolls and bots with ties to the Russian regime.

“Russia frequently amplifies content related to the far-right in both the U.S. and in Europe, but it does so opportunistically,” the researchers write. “It’s easier to amplify something people are already talking about than to create a trend out of thin air.”

Twitter bots—bits of automated code that post to the service—have become a disturbingly big force in worldwide political rhetoric, promoting viral partisan memes and fabricated stories that can dominate the news cycle. While some bots on the service are innocuous, like automated tools that share genuine news stories on a particular topic or send out emergency weather alerts, many are designed to manipulate people into believing they’re actual humans sharing interesting news.

“Humans are vulnerable to this manipulation, retweeting bots who post false news,” write a group of Indiana University researchers who studied Twitter bots around the 2016 election. “Successful sources of false and biased claims are heavily supported by social bots.”

Some political bots are created by individual Twitter users looking to promote their own views, drive traffic to their own websites, or simply gain attention and influence. They’ve made appearances in U.S. politics at least since the 2010 Senate campaign in Massachusetts, when Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley.

“At the time, the bots were very, very simple, and they were used to attack the Democratic candidate,” says Emilio Ferrara, research assistant professor at the University of Southern California, who has studied social media bots.

Since then, they’ve become more sophisticated, partly in an effort to seem more human. Instead of just posting a handful of partisan messages every hour, for example, they might intersperse commentary on different subjects.

Experts say the practice has been particularly adopted by Russia as part of a rapid-fire, all-media propaganda campaign that a 2016 RAND Corp. report dubbed “the firehose of falsehood.” In just the past week, Russian bots have reportedly promoted Damore’s story, gone after former attorney general Loretta Lynch, and taken up a far-right call for President Trump to fire National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. Before that, Russian bots were part of a well-documented disinformation campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, harnessed to spread right-wing messages during this year’s election in France, and used to influence political discussions at home in Russia.

Other countries have used Twitter bots for political purposes as well: A report by Samuel Woolley, director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Project, points to bots deployed by pro-government forces in China, Mexico, and Turkey, among other countries. In some cases, bots have been used to stifle conversation around controversial subjects or social movements, posting endless streams of spam tagged with particular hashtags until actual humans can’t get a tweet in edgewise.

“We’ve observed examples of that, for example in Mexico, where large amounts of bots are created to prevent people from coordinating social movements on Twitter,” says Filippo Menczer, professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University.

And when they do post about political topics, the links, images, and ideas they share can spread quickly through networks of like-minded people.

“If you have some very polarized agenda ordinarily that a set of bots is pushing, those are more likely to become viral in the respective echo chamber where the bots operate,” says Ferrara.

Propaganda bots might be bad for democracy, but bot spam traffic of any kind is also bad for business at Twitter and other social networks. Bots don’t click on ads, Menczer observes. And they can cast doubt on social services’ audience metrics and alienate real users by drowning out posts they actually want to see.

“If people think that the platform is full of bots, then they will leave, and the platforms won’t make money from ads,” he says.

A research paper published earlier this year by Menczer, Ferrara and other researchers estimates that between 9% and 15% of active Twitter accounts are actually bots. Twitter has cautioned that “research conducted by third parties about the impact of bots on Twitter is often inaccurate and methodologically flawed.” Twitter estimated in its quarterly report last week that “false or spam accounts” accounted for less than 5% of monthly active users as of the end of last year but acknowledged the issue presents a risk to the company.

“Our actions to combat spam require the diversion of significant time and focus of our engineering team from improving our products and services,” Twitter told investors in its quarterly report last week. “If spam increases on Twitter, this could hurt our reputation for delivering relevant content or reduce user growth and user engagement and result in continuing operational cost to us.”

The company declined to make anyone available for an interview with Fast Company, but a spokesperson pointed to a June blog post highlighting efforts to stop spam and misinformation.

“When we do detect duplicative or suspicious activity, we suspend accounts,” wrote Colin Crowell, VP of public policy, government, and philanthropy, in the post. “We also frequently take action against applications that abuse the public API to automate activity on Twitter, stopping potentially manipulative bots at the source.”

But as bots become more complex and humanlike in their behavior, researchers say it naturally becomes harder and more expensive to detect them. Automated tools can use machine learning to identify bots fairly accurately, but they’re not without false positives, says Menczer. And if services automatically take down suspicious accounts too aggressively—using bots to take down bots—they risk being accused of censorship when they accidentally ban humans for sharing controversial political content.

Ultimately, social media bots may prove similar to email spam, he says. While huge numbers of automated junk emails still travel the internet every day, modern filtering methods mean most never make it to anyone’s inbox, and many users are now sophisticated enough to disregard the spam they do come across. Continuing research might help weed out unwanted bot posts on social networks, now that the issue has been firmly identified as a problem.

“I don’t think the problem will ever be completely eliminated,” Menczer says. “But it will possibly make it better, so that people are not exposed to a huge amount of misinformation, that way that we are today.”

Do avid Twitter users actually watch anything on Twitter?

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Earlier today, CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter asked the following question on Twitter:

The overwhelming consensus, based on the replies to his tweet? Never. Keep in mind Stelter and, presumably, many of his followers are representative of Twitter’s core user base—media types. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to invest in live streaming, as CEO Jack Dorsey and others reiterated during the company’s most recent earnings call; Twitter doubled its live content this year, streaming 1,200 hours in the past quarter.

By Twitter’s count, 55 million people watched live content on the platform last quarter—an increase of 10 million from Q1. If anything, the results of Stelter’s (very informal) poll might confirm what we already suspect: There may not be much overlap between Twitter’s most active users and the folks watching live content on Twitter.

Electric Truck Company Chanje Has A Plan To Clean Up Urban Freight

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While Tesla develops an electric semi-truck–which may be in production by 2019 or 2020–a startup has designed another type of electric delivery truck for city use, and it’s ready now. By this fall, you might see one of its sleek white trucks sitting silently in front of your apartment building to make a delivery, and instead of belching diesel exhaust, it will have no emissions at all.

“Where we see the problem is in the city, where people live,” says Bryan Hansel, CEO of Chanje, the California-based startup making the new medium-duty trucks (commercial trucks are classified as “medium-duty” when they weigh more than 14,000 pounds and less than 26,000 pounds; the Chanje vehicle could also be called a delivery van, and could potentially be used for anything from delivering Amazon orders to local groceries). “That’s where the pollution is, and so if you put a vehicle in that market where there’s no tailpipe–so there’s zero contribution to noise or air pollution at the point of distribution where people are–we think that’s the unlocking move that’s been overlooked.”

“Where we see the problem is in the city, where people live.” [Photo: Chanje]
Large delivery companies are interested in fully electric vehicles–recognizing that medium-duty diesel trucks are responsible for 18% of the greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector, along with other air pollution–and already have some on roads, though the numbers are relatively small. “For these fleets that are tens of thousands of vehicles, one hundred doesn’t matter,” says Hansel. “It just doesn’t make a difference. What they’ve been saying for a very long time is ‘We need thousands, and nobody can produce them.'”

Until now, medium-duty electric trucks haven’t been available at a mass scale. For large manufacturers, Hansel says, these trucks haven’t been seen as an important market segment. When some smaller companies have made electric trucks, they’ve done so by retrofitting existing internal-combustion trucks to add electric motors. Chanje designed its new trucks from the ground up.

“If you think about an electric vehicle, it is fundamentally different,” says Hansel. “If you take an [internal combustion] engine out of a vehicle, you don’t have brakes, you don’t have steering, you don’t have heat. All of the elements are reliant on that energy source. If you remove it, you’ve got to reengineer everything. So taking an existing vehicle that was leveraging that technology and trying to put an electric drive system in just is inefficient.”

“If we can generate the energy in a clean way, we know we’ve got a completely clean solution.”[Photo: Chanje]
The trucks were developed in partnership with the Hong Kong-based FDG Electric Vehicles Limited, which owns 50% of the company, over the last five years; Chanje launched a company in May 2015. The first trucks are being manufactured in China, and the company plans to quickly open an assembly plant in the U.S. to reduce freight cost and import duties and create local jobs. When it sells or leases the product to large companies with depots that have hundreds of vehicles, it will also offer an on-site renewable energy system for charging the vehicles. “If we can generate the energy in a clean way, we know we’ve got a completely clean solution,” he says. The vehicles can go about 100 miles on a charge, well within the range of a typical daily delivery route.

The vehicles are economical to produce and operate. “If you’re generating your own energy, you’ve got no fuel costs,” says Hansel. “Because of the design, you’re basically got no maintenance costs. If you start moving to autonomous, you are going to have no labor cost.”

“We think we can fundamentally reduce the number of miles driven, whether it be in the package or product delivery market or in how people get to work.” [Photo: Chanje]
Inside, the trucks use technology such as route optimization to also reduce the number of miles each truck has to drive (and reduce congestion on roads). While the company is launching a delivery truck first, it plans to use the same platform to make vans that could be used for commuters or in place of school buses.

“We think we can fundamentally reduce the number of miles driven, whether it be in the package or product delivery market or in how people get to work,” he says. “If we can put some intelligence on the ground, which is what this is built on, I think it enables a fundamental shift in not only the efficiency of each mile, but that reduces the number of miles total.”

Is Silicon Valley In Denial Over The Threat Of An “Unthinkable” War With North Korea?

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The situation with North Korea has been brewing for years, across several presidencies, going clear back to Bill Clinton. Kicking the can down the road has long been more politically expedient than confronting the belligerent communist nation.

Over the past year, North Korea began to seem more dangerous, with the combination of missile tests and threatening language toward South Korea and the U.S. And this week, when Trump threatened North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury like the world has never seen before,” the situation seemed headed for a moment of truth.

Regrettably, it’s a situation that involves weapons that can kill many millions of people at the push of a button, and a couple of decidedly volatile and unpredictable world leaders. A war—or even an accelerating movement toward war—could, needless to say, have a range of effects on tech companies, all of them serious.

Companies like Apple, Microsoft, and other hardware makers have most of their products manufactured in Asia. Thousands of components suppliers are located in Asia, many on the Korean peninsula. Apple lists 16 South Korean companies in its 2017 supplier list. One of the biggest, Samsung, is the largest supplier in the world of semiconductors, displays, and memory for consumer tech devices. (It’s also, of course, the biggest phone maker in the world.) LG produces display components and phones, among many other things.

All told, South Korea has more than 100 major companies providing products and services all over the world. War in East Asia would be a many-dimensioned tragedy, and one of those dimensions is that the global smartphone industry would pretty much grind to a halt.

In the Valley, few people are seriously worried about war, nuclear or not. Yale professor of management and political science Paul Bracken told me that for most tech leaders, the idea of war against North Korea is still nothing to immediately act upon.

“It seems to me that in the American consciousness, it’s still unthinkable that there could be a war that could destroy significant parts of the Korean industrial base,” Bracken said. “I don’t think it’s been absorbed yet that that could happen.”

Bracken is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and advises private equity funds, accounting, and insurance companies, as well as several arms of the U.S. government. The “unthinkable” mind-set might explain why the U.S. stock market barely reacted to Trump’s provocative “fire and fury” threat (although the CBOE Volatility Index jumped 11% and markets in South Korea and Japan fell.)

The procurement people at large tech companies who manage supplier relationships are very likely now beginning to think about alternative sources for the components they buy from East Asian companies, Bracken told me. But, he said, it’s unlikely this thinking has reached the point where an officer is compelled to go before the board of directors and request funds for an official study into the situation.


Related: Using Cyberattacks To Stop North Korean Nukes Not Easy, Experts Warn


But events over the next several months could make the unthinkable seem thinkable. The U.S. and North Korea have taken a few steps on an escalation path that could lead to war. (This article in the Economist describes just how easily this process could progress.) Until earlier this week, the situation looked like a small, noisy, belligerent country challenging a superpower, while the superpower relied mainly on behind-the-scenes diplomacy and sanctions to control the situation. Trump’s “fire and fury” comment, arguably, transformed the relationship into one based on threatening each other with the most powerful weapons in the world.

A Years-Long Recovery

If this tit-for-tat dynamic was to continue and advance beyond words to aggressive actions, symbolic or otherwise, the situation could take on the appearance at least of an escalation toward war. Such situations are subject to all manner of miscommunications and misjudgments on both sides that can push the situation to the brink in unimaginable ways.

If war in East Asia began to seem inevitable, technology businesses in that part of the world would be disrupted. Workers at manufacturing facilities and suppliers would stay home from work. Orders might run way behind or go unfilled.

The crisis could also generate a humanitarian crisis that could put severe stress on South Korea and China in social, political, and economic ways. If a military attack by the U.S. and South Korea on North Korea seemed imminent, millions of North Koreans would likely rush over the border to South Korea and China.

Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin recently spoke with a South Korean tech leader who said that eventuality is his worst fear. The executive added that it could take years for South Korean officials to restabilize the region. And it could take years longer for tech companies to get back to producing and delivering their products on time.


Related: The Dangerous Mission To Undermine North Korea With Flash Drives


U.S. tech companies are increasingly dependent on China, both for component parts and manufacturing, and for the masses of consumers it hopes to win there. A military conflict on the Korean peninsula could also put China, a sometimes hesitant ally of Pyongyang, into a defensive position against the U.S., and would strain those business relationships. “China is getting to be a much tougher environment for U.S. technology companies on a number of fronts, from intellectual property to rules and regulations,” Bracken said.

With so much of the world’s manufacturing and components supply in the region, the global tech economy would suffer, which would pull down the rest of the U.S. economy.

The long-term effects could break in many different ways. One Valley executive told me the U.S. economy could actually benefit, because some suppliers and manufacturers might see East Asia and especially South Korea as too risky a place to do business and decide to move operations to the U.S. If that were to happen, the cost of tech products might increase (due to the cost of new infrastructure builds and more expensive labor), but so might job growth here at home.

Of course, war in the nuclear age is too high a price to pay for any positive economic outcomes. Bracken says the world needs to get used to a nuclear North Korea. Any realistic opportunity to neuter the nation using military force passed long ago, he believes. The risks are just too great. While it’s doubtful North Korea could actually deliver a nuclear payload to the continental U.S., it’s quite possible it could deliver one to Seoul or Tokyo.

What’s needed now is a calm, long-term, bilateral containment plan that at no time pushes Kim Jong Un into a corner where pushing the red button seems like the only option.

Snapchat CEO: Our dancing hot dog is “the world’s first augmented reality superstar”

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Snap’s stock is down by nearly 16% at the moment, but there’s no stopping Snapchat’s dancing hot dog filter. During the company’s second-quarter earnings phone call today, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel announced that the popular filter—which has spawned a cavalcade of memes—had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times in Snapchat since its debut.

“Our dancing hot dog is most likely the world’s first augmented reality superstar,” Spiegel boasted. Internet fame is all well and good. Next, expect Snap to continue to look for a way to monetize that dancing dog.

Snap has stressed the metric of revenue generated per user and its potential for growth, but the company’s Q2 numbers don’t necessarily reflect that. To put things in perspective: Facebook currently generates $19.38 for every user in North America, while Snap makes $1.97.

Read moreWhy Snap’s acquisition of Bitmoji may be one of its smartest moves yet in its battle against Facebook

Google cancels crisis meeting after alt-right “doxxing” intensifies

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Google was set to have an all-hands meeting of its 60,000 employees today to talk about the recent diversity uproar set off by James Damore’s viral memo. Damore said there were reasons why females are under-represented at Google, among them the fact that the gender is more prone to neuroses. Views like that one led to Damor’s firing and subsequent embrace by conservative outlets like Breitbart News.

“Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall,” Pichai says in the email.

Just half an hour before Googlers were supposed to talk it out, CEO Sundar Pichai announced the meeting was off. Members of the alt-right had begun posting pictures and data about Googlers who objected to Damor’s treatise in the hopes of embarrassing them and making them targets of further ridicule.

Alt-right poster boy Milo Yiannopoulos posted the Twitter profiles of eight Googlers to his Facebook page with the caption “Looking at who works for Google it all makes sense now . . .”  Meanwhile, a message board at 4chan called “politically incorrect” contains names and data for a number of other Google people, apparently to invite scorn and harassment. Here’s a sampling from that thread:

After being dismissed by Google for violating codes of conduct, Damore took to Google-owned YouTube yesterday to discuss the memo and the aftermath with alt-right personality Stefan Molyneux.

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


Pilot at error in fatal crash of innovative ICON plane, say federal investigators

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The National Transportation Safety Board released its final report today on the fatal May crash of an Icon A5 plane on the banks of California’s Lake Berryessa. The federal agency ruled that the accident was the result of the pilot’s “failure to maintain clearance from terrain while maneuvering at a low altitude. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s mistaken entry into a canyon surrounded by steep rising terrain while at a low altitude for reasons that could not be determined.”

The $250,000 A5, which I flew in around the time of its spring 2016 launch, is marketed as being safe for just about anyone to fly, and as a sea-light sport aircraft, has a lower threshold for a license than some other airplanes. The May 8 crash killed Icon employees Jon Karkow, 55, and Cagri Sever, 41. And while the company is continuing to mourn the loss of the two men, the NTSB’s report is also good news for Icon, as it establishes that there was nothing wrong with the plane itself.

After a rough year—which also included layoffs, production cuts, and changes to a controversial purchase agreement, which sought to limit the company’s liability—the company recently announced in a press release that the first 2018 Icon A5s will be delivered in September, and that production is expected to ramp up through the remainder of 2017 “and then accelerate rapidly throughout 2018.”

From CEOs’ Top Habits To Smarter Decision-Making: This Week’s Top Leadership Stories

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This week, we picked up a few new productivity habits from Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Susan Wojcicki; learned what successful people do to make good decisions; and ditched a common three-word expression that may discourage some people from taking us seriously.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of August 6:

1. Productivity Secrets From Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Susan Wojcicki, And More

It’s no surprise that the most successful CEOs have adopted hacks and habits to help them stay on top of their game. While some of them–like dedicating time for “deep work” and kicking off the workday early–are common productivity practices, others might surprise you. For example, Mark Zuckerberg does not“eat the frog” first thing in the morning.

2. How Successful People Make Decisions Differently

It’s not just in your head: Successful people do make good decisions, and not just based on intuition (though that certainly plays a part). As Stephanie Vozza reports, the secret is in their method of evaluating choices. For one thing, it helps to recognize that the outcomes of some decisions have minimal consequences, and for another, it’s important to know whether you’re in the best frame of mind for deciding something in the first place.

3. This Three-Word Phrase Is Subtly Undermining Your Authority

Some things are just better left unsaid. One of them? “To be honest”–or variations of it, like “let me be frank” or “honestly.” Even if you have the best of intentions, it might send the wrong signal in certain business contexts. Here’s why, and how to expressions like this one.

4. This Is What Personality Tests From Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, And Uber Employee Reveal About Gender Differences

After the Google memo broke last weekend, debate has raged as to whether biology, psychology, and personality traits can account for women’s lower representation in tech. But when Good&Co analyzed personality tests at leading tech companies, it found no meaningful differences between male and female Googlers. At Uber, on the other hand–which is struggling with a work culture beset by discrimination allegations and worse–men ranked 32% more “socially assertive” than women employees. Perhaps culture has a bigger impact than biology.

5. This Startup Wants To Kill The “Mommy Track” Once And For All

Even in the age of remote work, it’s still sometimes taboo to ask for a flexible schedule. Some employees who risk it are punished by being taken out of the “career fast-track.” But startup Werk wants to change all that. Founded by two women previously in high powered careers, the company offers a job board that only lists jobs with a degree of flexibility–whether that’s location, hours, or “the ability to leave the office on short notice.” Also, those jobs all need to have a path to promotion, this way career advancement is never an open question.

Why Julie Klausner Devoted An Episode Of Her TV Show To Mocking Woody Allen

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“Am I wrong in thinking Elle Fanning is Dakota’s younger sister?” Julie Klausner asks. We’re discussing some fresh news about the actress with the equally famous sibling: she’s just signed on to co-star in Woody Allen’s next film.

Klausner is not wrong. At 19, Elle is younger by four years.

“Dakota must have aged out of the casting pool for Woody,” she says, dryly.

Julie Klausner [Photo: Craig Blankenhorn, courtesy of Hulu]
Julie Klausner has no illusions about whether she—the thirtysomething creator and star of Hulu’s acid-hot comedy, Difficult People—would herself be eligible for a Woody Allen role. Even if the iconic, problematic filmmaker was enchanted by Klausner’s visage or vibe, it’s unlikely he’d ever audition her now. Not after the comedian devoted an entire episode of her TV show to the moral conundrum an Elle Fanning might grapple with in booking a Woody Allen movie.

Difficult People is a show about two pop culture-obsessed outsiders fumbling and flailing on the path toward legit careers in show business. The leads, played by Klausner and real-life simpatico sidekick, Billy Eichner, are quick and cutting—with opinions about everything but few true convictions, if any. In an episode from the show’s just-released third season, “Strike Rat,” Julie Kessler’s convictions are put to the test when she is quasi-inadvertently cast in the new Woody Allen project.

Klausner grew up loving Allen’s movies and idolizing him as a creator. (“He was my everything,” she insists.) Annie Hall was her favorite movie. She wrote a term paper about Hannah and her Sisters in college. Then came lackluster efforts like Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, and she began to lose interest. Even Allen’s late-period highlights, like Match Point and Midnight in Paris, didn’t do much for Klausner. She thinks audiences may have graded them on a cinematic curve, thanks to their proximity to recent dreck like Scoop and Anything Else. Nothing could have prepared her, though, for how profoundly awful she found 2009’s Whatever Works.

[Photo: Linda Kallerus, courtesy of Hulu]
“I thought it was not only the most offensive movie that he’s ever made, but one of the most offensive movies to women that I’ve ever seen in my life,” Klausner says. “I was shocked. It was almost violent to women, it just insulted us so deeply.”

That film features not so much a May/December romance, but a February/Next February one. Woody Allen apparently thought Evan Rachel Wood’s character, who would have been 19 years old, would obviously be attracted to Larry David’s character, who would have been Larry David age, on the strength of his curmudgeonly wit. Furthermore, dialogue intended to signal the female lead’s lack of sophistication came across as utter stupidity.

[Photo: Linda Kallerus, courtesy of Hulu]
“It was like, has Woody Allen ever met a woman?” Klausner says. “It really bummed me out. And that he never really got any shit for it was really disappointing. Beyond the shit from his personal life.”

Woody Allen’s personal life is what actors usually have to defend themselves against when they appear in his movies. Allen’s marriage to adopted daughter Soon-yi Previn, and the allegations about his biological daughter, have been conflicting fans of Manhattan for decades. What’s unsettling about Allen’s personal life, though, tends to bleed over into his art with an infinite fixation on absurdly younger women. Separating the art from the artist is difficult in Woody’s case, which is something he actually explored to dazzling effect in 1997’s Deconstructing Henry. What’s brilliant and daring about the “Strike Rat” episode is that it almost entirely omits Allen’s personal life to focus on what sucks about his art. Klausner and her writing team shoot that sacred cow with one of those weird bolt guns from No Country for Old Men, and then they butcher it.

[Photo: Barbara Nitke, courtesy of Hulu]
They go after Woody Allen’s art from every angle: His technophobia, his over-reliance on old (male) creatives seeking fresh (female) muses, his subtext-free dialogue, his reverence for wonky jazz and fishing hats, and his almost MAGA-like nostalgia for a time when affirmative action didn’t exist and women had only recently won the vote. “Strike Rat” takes special inspiration, however, from a recent Woody Allen debacle that largely goes unmentioned: his Amazon series.

[Photo: Barbara Nitke, courtesy of Hulu]
While Allen was shooting Crisis in Six Scenes—with star Miley Cyrus, naturally—reports emerged that his heart was nowhere near the vicinity of this project. According to Klausner, the evidence is in the finished project. The camera hardly moves. Some of Miley Cyrus’s lines make Evan Rachel Woods’ lines from Whatever Works sound like Nicole Holofcener dialogue in comparison.

“As bad as you think the Woody Allen Amazon series is, you have no idea,” she assures me. “It really feels like a sendup of a Woody Allen project. It’s shocking.”

[Photo: Linda Kallerus, courtesy of Hulu]
She and her team of writers, which includes Scott King and co-star Cole Escola, watched the series for the same reason that the character Julie on Difficult People agrees to audition for a Woody Allen show: for the chance to make fun of it. Having her own TV show has proven to be a fun method for Klausner to air out personal, derisive opinions in public.

“Our characters are people who don’t care who’s listening. They want to take back being a hater,” she says. “Most of it has to do with the fact that they’re not terribly self-aware, but also they’re very confident their opinions are right. I think people watching who are so careful about having to say the right thing or they get in trouble—online especially—will hopefully find some vicarious joy in watching characters who don’t self-censor and either hold unpopular opinions or hold popular opinions that aren’t voiced.”

[Photo: KC Bailey, courtesy of Hulu]
This kind of shade extends to relatively benign opinions, such as Andrea Martin’s concise dismissal of Les Misérables (“It’s too long, too confusing and too much drama for what you take away.”) Speaking her mind offline, however, has gotten trickier since Klausner’s profile has risen with Difficult People.

Early last year, the comedian tweeted a few jabs about young, waifish actress Zendaya hailing herself as a role model for tweens at the Kids Choice Awards. Klausner’s contention was that the willowy star might set unobtainable body standards for impressionable viewers. It was not well received. Klausner sincerely apologized, and deleted the offending tweets. She has since mostly restricted her more candid opinions to private conversations and the mouths of her fictional characters.

[Photo: Barbara Nitke, courtesy of Hulu]
Woody Allen seems to have largely avoided a similar moment of reckoning, though. Despite the objective failure of his Amazon series, and diminishing returns for recent films like Irrational Man and Magic in the Moonlight, Woody Allen has maintained his sky-high cultural cachet without ever owning up to his flaws–cinematic or otherwise. He’s still thee Woody Allen, he still books A-listers for his annual movies, and he has in no way been hampered by the events around his life, nor the uneven quality of his recent work.

While a lot of people still feel cagey about being a Woody Allen fan, there is a pronounced difference between the regard people hold him in and the way the public feels about Bill Cosby, who is also mentioned in the “Strike Rat” episode of Difficult People. Klausner has a typically pithy way of explaining why that might be.

“If there were like 45 other instances of Woody molesting other people, there would probably be more of a conversation,” she says. “But who knows, the news cycle isn’t over yet.”

Will Smith uses “Carpool Karaoke” to shill his new not-bottled water

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While Carpool Karaoke is ostensibly about James Corden living out his fantasy of singing with his childhood icons and favorite singers, Will Smith used his ride in the passenger seat as an infomercial for Just Water. That’s his new paper-based bottled water, which will supposedly “completely disappear” after its served its purpose like the Easter Bunny.

The idea came about when his son, Jaden Smith, took up surfing and noticed a bunch of plastic bottles floating around the sea. When he complained to his dad about the pollution, the water company was born. “The concept for the company came from a child who wanted to protect the ocean,” explained Smith. The “child” also wants to protect his trademarks. He recently filed suit against Hampton Creek for using the phrase “just. mayo” on its vegan mayonnaise, according to Bloomberg, which Smith claims violates a trademark agreement.

While water seems like a weird sideline for a movie star, don’t forget that George Clooney is a billionaire not because of his acting, but because of his tequila.

If you want to watch Corden get jiggy with Smith, watch the rest of their Carpool Karaoke outing here:

Interior Design Students Are Using Their Skills To Brighten Spaces That Are Usually Ignored

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On a given Monday, Wednesday, or Friday morning, around 40 people file through the basement floor of St. Paul’s House on a quiet block of 51 Street in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. Some come with carts and bags; others with nothing much at all. All are homeless; all are in need of the free meals that the staff of St. Paul’s serves three days a week.

Until this week, the room, which welcomes over a hundred people each week, was functional–but far from comfortable. No wall divided the main dining room from the tiny bathroom in the vestibule; there was no table on which the staff could organize the plates that cycled through their visitors’ hands. When it comes to places like St. Paul’s House, which has been serving the homeless population of New York City since 1945, interior design, Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) associate professor Carmita Sanchez-Fong tells Fast Company, “is rarely front of mind.”

Called the Integrated Service-Learning Project (ISLP), the program puts students and volunteers to work redesigning various underserved spaces throughout the city. [Photo: Carmita Sanchez-Fong/FIT]
A program that Sanchez-Fong oversees at FIT is reframing the role of interior design in community-centered organizations, one project at a time; St. Paul’s House is just the latest. Called the Integrated Service-Learning Project (ISLP), the program puts students and volunteers to work redesigning various underserved spaces throughout the city, at no cost to the beneficiary organizations like St. Paul’s House.

Most of the students who participate in the program sign up through Sanchez-Fong’s interior design classes, but the program accepts volunteers from other schools, as well as locals with a passion for furthering ISLP’s work; they can register interest through a form on the ISLP website. The students and volunteers oversee and carry out the implementation of their own visions, and are tasked with forging relationships with vendors around the city to source supplies and materials at little or no cost.

To make the overhauls happen without disrupting the daily work of the organization for longer than a week, the FIT students have to work fast. On a hot Wednesday at the end of July, Lisbeth Jimenez, an FIT alumna and junior designer at a New York-based architecture firm (many graduates return to volunteer on ISLP projects), is meticulously laying out a herringbone wood floor pattern with the help of Sam Williams, a regular volunteer at St. Paul’s House since 2001. They’re struggling to cut the wood panels to line up with the tiles already installed in the vestibule.

“We could have gone with a regular staggered pattern for the floor, but we decided to take it a step further with the herringbone–having a patterned floor makes it unique, makes it feel like a home,” Jimenez tells Fast Company. She and Williams realign the ruler to sliver a little more off a panel. It’s meticulous work, and they remain focused: They’ve already been working on the space for six days, ripping up the old floor, prepping the walls for new paint, and building the much-needed wall between the dining area and the bathroom–and they only have three more to finish so St. Paul’s can open the dining room to visitors the following week.

“We could have gone with a regular staggered pattern for the floor, but we decided to take it a step further with the herringbone–having a patterned floor makes it unique, makes it feel like a home.” [Photo: Carmita Sanchez-Fong/FIT]
“There are many limitations, but they force us to be more creative,” Sanchez-Fong says. The St. Paul’s dining room is just 16 by 34 feet; the budget the ISLP team had to complete the overhaul was just around $3,000, granted by the nonprofit Hope for New York and FIT. But their goals were clear: To make the room feel like a home, and to equip the staff of St. Paul’s with a design that would allow them to better serve the people coming in.

In the face of issues like homelessness and access to meals in a city as inhospitable as New York can be for those living on its streets, interior design factors in as an afterthought, if at all; beautifying spaces is often seen as an unnecessary luxury. Sanchez-Fong thinks otherwise. “What I say to my students is that we have to see interior design as an engine of social change,” she says. “How can we use our skills to begin to tilt the balance of inequality in our city? How can we have a positive impact on people?”

Understanding at how Sanchez-Fong consolidated her belief into a program necessitates going back to 2012, when New York was still reeling in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. One of Sanchez-Fong’s Materials and Methods for Construction students at the time lived in Long Beach, an area particularly devastated by the storm. She asked Sanchez-Fong how their class might be able to help, and by the following year, the Interior Design Relief Project, made up of Sanchez-Fong’s students, was organizing to equip 17 Long Beach families with design proposals to implement in the reconstruction of their homes (a handful of the families worked with their contractors to incorporate aspects of the students’ designs into their new homes). With their work in Long Beach wrapped, the students looked to Sanchez-Fong and asked: What’s next?

[Photo: Carmita Sanchez-Fong/FIT]
She didn’t have an answer, so she asked her church, which in turn directed her to Hope for New York (HFNY), an organization that partners with over 40 local nonprofits that serve marginalized populations throughout the city. Through HFNY, which makes grants of several thousand dollars to FIT to carry out their work, Sanchez-Fong’s program, now known as ISLP, became connected with the Bowery Mission Women’s Center, a supportive home for women who have experienced homelessness due to abuse or violence. The ISLP students drew up proposals for the building’s laundry room. The small, cramped room, with exposed pipes, cracked concrete floors, and no place to sit, received a patterned tile floor, a white park bench, and warm tangerine walls to cover the plumbing. Unlike their work in Long Beach, the ISLP volunteers didn’t stop at design proposals–Bowery Mission provided the team with a contractor, and they carried out the renovation themselves.

Since then, ISLP has completed around two projects per year; earlier this year, a team of students revamped the offices of Restore NYC, a nonprofit that works with victims of sex trafficking. The project was the first in two years that did not come to Sanchez-Fong’s attention through HFNY; the organization had reached out to FIT directly.

When Sanchez-Fong saw the need, she agreed to bring the ISLP team in to redo the space. “When I met with them in that 800-square-foot room, I saw 28 people sitting all over the place–on the floor, on chairs, just focused on their work,” Sanchez-Fong says. But there was no private room in which law enforcement could meet with the victims seeking help from Restore; when a victim would arrive at the office, the nonprofit’s employees would have to scatter to nearby coffee shops to ensure privacy. “It was unimaginable,” Sanchez-Fong says. “I told them we would build them a conference room and a private consult room; we were able to give them the kind of space to really help them function.”

We “will make this place much more beautiful; as people walk in, they’ll be able to feel the love, and feel that it’s their home, not just a soup kitchen.”[Photo: Carmita Sanchez-Fong/FIT]
The St. Paul’s House renovation, Williams says, “will make this place much more beautiful; as people walk in, they’ll be able to feel the love, and feel that it’s their home, not just a soup kitchen.” As Jimenez and Vila work on the floor, Emily Vila, a current FIT student, has been hard at work spackling the walls and sanding and painting the room’s various doors. Where the walls were once painted a clinical blue, with a wooden panel running along the bottom at chair-level, they’re now soft teal–per the request of the St. Paul’s staff, with whom the ISLP consulted through the redesign process–and the lower half of the wall will be covered in patterned wallpaper.

A metal serving table, donated by Benjamin Moore, will rest at the back of the room, Sanchez-Fong says, to allow the staff to serve people and easily access the kitchen, which leads out into the backyard. The harsh ceiling lights are being swapped out for smaller fixtures, sourced from the industrial lighting company Coronet–like Interface and Medusa, the companies which provided the flooring for the St. Paul’s space, Coronet has become a longstanding partner of FIT’s in their work. “The industry has been incredibly supportive from the beginning,” Sanchez-Fong says. “If we didn’t have their support, we couldn’t do these projects.”

For the students, the opportunity to translate their classroom learning into tangible work keeps them engaged–and in the case of alums like Jimenez, coming back. “This is firsthand experience,” Vila says. “I’m learning a lot about materials, a lot about resilient floors, a lot about what needs to go into commercial spaces and why. Every single aspect of this project fits into interior design fully.”

Sanchez-Fong, though, is thinking even bigger. In the fall of 2015, the AIA New York Center for Architecture invited Sanchez-Fong and her students to present a panel on how the program is creating partnerships to bring about social change; after the discussion, Sanchez-Fong says she had representatives from other local universities and companies coming up to her asking how they could get involved. FIT’s position as an academic institution in the city, forging connections between the nonprofit sector and the materials industry, could, she says, signal a new direction for public-private partnerships in the design space. “It’s my hope that just like we have Doctors Without Borders, we will one day have Interiors Without Borders, and this is where it’s being born,” Sanchez-Fong says. “Higher education could be a combustion of creativity, ethics, sustainability, and social justice.”

Julie Klausner explains why her TV show is the anti-“Handmaid’s Tale”

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When Fast Company spoke to Julie Klausner about the incredible Woody Allen episode of her TV show, Difficult People, she had a lot to say. Not all of it made it into the article. Below is a quote that succinctly sums up everything that makes Klausner’s show a necessary balm for these uncertain times in America.

Difficult People takes place in this alternative universe where gay men and other LGBTQ people and women are the center of the story, and it’s our story. That’s something that’s a diametric opposite to not only other TV shows, but just the way the country works right now. I’d like to say that we are the utopia to the Handmaid’s Tale dystopia. We like to show outsiders thriving, even if we’re in pain while we do it. We’re in charge and the cisgender straight men on the show are completely subservient.”

Mark Zuckerberg has been quietly hiring over 100 engineers for his philanthropic projects

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Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have pledged to give away 99% of their $45 billion fortune. But where philanthropists of yore wrote checks, the Facebook founder is hiring engineers. Nearly 100 of them, in fact—all working in support of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), which oversees the couple’s investments in education, medicine, and other areas of priority.

CZI has quietly added 93 people to its engineering team in just the last 10 months. And that number will continue to grow: Based on recent job postings, the organization is looking to fill another 27 roles in product and engineering. Indeed the CZI team has grown so remarkably fast that its leader, chief technology officer Brian Pinkerton, has decided to quit.

“I’m looking forward to exploring work that allows me to go deeper on a narrower set of challenges,” Pinkerton wrote in a farewell email obtained by Recode.

CZI’s current initiatives include integrating an AI company acquired in January, developing tools for personalized learning, and mapping all human cells. Those engineers, we have to imagine, are pretty busy.


SoundCloud gets the investment lifeline it needs to survive—for now

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After weeks of speculation over what might be next for SoundCloud, the troubled music streaming service just secured a $170 million investment from the Raine Group and a Singapore-based company called Temasek. It’s also getting two new top executives. Kerry Trainer, former CEO of Vimeo, will replace cofounder and longtime CEO Alex Ljung, who will stay on as chairman of the company’s board. Michael Weissman, formerly Vimeo’s COO, will carry that same title over to SoundCloud as well.

For now, the investment and badly needed leadership change puts to rest the widespread media narrative that SoundCloud is doomed to run out of money and fail. But the 10-year-old startup still faces the daunting task of forging a viable business model in the unusually difficult business of streaming music, in which even much bigger players have difficulty turning music (and the steep costs required to license it) into profits.

Last month, rumors of Ljung’s imminent departure gave way to a much starker reality for the company: Its financial struggles forced it to lay off 40% of its staff and shutter two of its offices, sending remaining employees into a freaked-out tailspin (some of them have since left voluntarily) and sparking fear that SoundCloud could disappear into the graveyard of failed startups (which, I think, would be bad for everyone). The company may have avoided that fate for now, but it has a ton of work ahead if it wants to avoid finding itself in the same scenario again.

This Egyptian Cartoonist Is Taking A Stand On Women’s Rights Through Her Art

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There’s a long, troubling history of political cartoonists being persecuted, arrested, and even killed because of their art. But try as oppressive governments and extremist groups might, cartoonists continue to challenge authorities and bring controversial issues into focus despite the risks involved with their profession–or, in some cases, the added liability of being a woman.

Egyptian artist Doaa el-Adl is considered one of her country’s most famous cartoonists for her creatively critical depictions of political and social concerns, such as government corruption and female genital mutilation. Back in 2012, el-Adl was actually charged with blasphemy for her cartoon that appeared in the Al Masry Al Youm newspaper, showing an angel pompously informing Adam and Eve that they’d be more than welcome to stay in the Garden of Eden–that is, if they voted for the right candidate. But whatever pushback el-Adl has received, there’s been accolades to cushion her, namely being the first woman to receive the Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate’s Journalistic Distinction award for caricature in 2009 and being one of BBC’s 100 Women of 2016 honorees.

“At the beginning of my career, I was not aware of what my role should be. But by the time I realized that, I knew I had to make a difference as a female cartoonist,” el-Adl says in an interview with Channel 4 News. “That’s why the women’s causes depicted in my cartoons are an integral part of me, as I faced many of these situations myself.”

Check out more of el-Adl’s work here.

Hollywood’s bad summer movies are driving a decline in movie ticket sales

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While some people may point at The Emoji Movie as the root of all that is wrong with Hollywood, The Wall Street Journal reports that the problem goes much deeper than a single misfire featuring Patrick Stewart as a poop emoji.

WSJ reports that movie attendance has dropped by 5%, compared with the same period in 2016, and revenues are down, too, dipping just 2.9%, thanks to higher ticket prices making up for the lack of ticket sales. On Aug. 2, AMC shares dropped 27% in one day, the WSJ reports.

While films like Beauty and the Beast, Wonder Woman, and Get Out fared well at the box office, they were the anomalies in a year full of box office disappointments. Instead of giving moviegoers more badass female leads and genre-bending horror films, Hollywood keeps throwing gobs of money at an unwanted fifth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, more Transformers movies, and putting $175 million into King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and then clutching their pearls in shock that no one wanted to see them. But rather than cranking up Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” and doing a little introspection, they are probably just going to blame Netflix and HBO, completely ignoring the fact that Netflix’s Okja and HBO’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks were a hell of a lot better than The Mummy. 

The one thing that consumers and movie theaters alike are looking forward to is Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which is hitting theaters in December. The CEO of AMC theaters called the film “a gift from heaven.” Read the WSJ’s full analysis here while thinking about how many people had to think that Emoji Movie was a great idea for it to get made.

This Andy Warhol-Inspired Toy Line Funds Help For Other Artists

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For the uninitiated, the Dunny may seem like a strange pop cultural beast. It’s a line of vinyl toy rabbit figures, all with the same squat body, spherical head, and oddly tube-shaped ears. Their one defining characteristic is differing paint jobs, sort of like beanie babies for edgier, artistic-minded adults. Toy manufacturer Kidrobot stamps out sets in limited runs, giving them a rare collectible vibe.

The company’s latest release, which launched this June, is Andy Warhol themed: There’s TV Dunny, whose face is painted to resemble a TV airing a color-test pattern (On back of each head is Warhol’s famous quote, “In the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.”) And Brillo Dunny, whose body is swirled in red and white, its visage emblazoned with “Brillo Soap Pads” in that brand’s iconic blocky script. Words like “New! on one ear and ‘Shines Aluminum Fast” across its belly drive home the feeling of a walking advertisement.

Brillo Dunny, whose body is swirled in red and white, its visage emblazoned with “Brillo Soap Pads” in that brand’s iconic blocky script. [Photo: courtesy Kidrobot]
Same goes for a Campbell’s Dunny, whose head sports a large recognizable Campbell’s logo with a tiny all-caps subscript–“CONDENSED”–beneath it and “Tomato Soup” written on the creature’s little tummy. (That one comes in a couple different color variations.) Yet another Dunny looks like it was simply covered in banana-themed wallpaper.

It’s an extension of a sold-out line that started in 2016, as part of a unique partnership between Kidrobot and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Warhol Foundation, which has a $327 million endowment gave out roughly $12.7 million last year to various nonprofit groups supporting its mission to encourage contemporary visual artists and arts writers.

It’s the Andy Warhol Dunny. [Photo: courtesy Kidrobot]
In recent years, Warhol has been growing its endowment with licensing deals like the one with Kidrobot, and also by selling off some of its inventory of original artwork in hopes of eventually being able to increase its annual grant making even more. Its total endowment has jumped $42 million since 2015. So far, annual payouts have stayed at about the same level, but the group has reportedly said it would like to up that by at least 30%.

Michael Hermann, the group’s director of licensing, says in an email the merchandising deal with Kidrobot fits Warhol’s “non-conformist vision” with a “fresh take on his legacy” that should allow the group to eventually more generously fund those who aren’t quite at the toy deal level.

The Warhol Foundation has given away over $275 million since its inception in 1987. On the writing side, it funds programs like the arts writing initiative, which supports everything from criticism to research with project-based grants of up to $50,000. On the art-making side, the group works with Creative Capital, an independent foundation that funds individual projects, which Warhol currently backed with a 10-year, $15 million grant to spur commissions.

“The response to the line has been stellar.” [Photo: courtesy Kidrobot]
The organization does regional re-granting through partner arts groups in cities like Albuquerque, Baltimore, Chicago, and Houston, where it hopes it can spot emerging artists that need a patron. Those grants are generally small (up to $7,000), but the group has given several hundred of them over the last decade. That builds on a history of such work: Another program called The Warhol Initiative was originally designed to grow a collaborative network, offering 64 small and mid-sized arts organizations $125,000 and professional consulting to help them expand and build stability.

This isn’t the foundation’s first foray into toy land; there was another experiment a couple years ago with a group called Medicom Toy, which put out an artistic take on Andy Warhol himself as an action figure. Dunnys, which are primarily sold online and via a handful of vinyl toy retailers, appear different because the toys themselves act as a sort of canvas to riff on others work. (The Los Angles artist Sket One, for instance, did this personification of Sriracha.)

Kidrobot actually debuted its first Warhol-inspired Dunnys in 2016, but remains vague how many are in circulation and what the plan is for future rollouts, other than to say they are definitely coming. Everything is limited edition and often resold online as collectable, so that sense of mystery ostensibly adds to its street cred.

For this summer’s release, Kid Robot made 24 different 3-inch models. [Photo: courtesy Kidrobot]
“The response to the line has been stellar,” says creative director Frank Kozik in an email. Kozik, who gained his own cult following making collectable concert posters for Nirvana and the Beastie Boys, says it was Kidrobot that approached Warhol about the idea with the pitch that this was a play on the love and respect that Warhol showed for popular products and making art more accessible.

For this summer’s release, Kid Robot made 24 different 3-inch models (for instance, there’s three different takes on that soup can) that sell for around $12, but in so-called “blind-boxes” so they’re more collectable–like baseball cards. There’s also an 8-inch version of some designs variation that goes for $250. Among the earlier offerings, some 20″ Warhol Dunnys went for as much as $3,000. The company has trotted out at least one 4-foot tall version for a special occasion. Such giants are generally made to order and start at $5,000.

Uber’s Ice Cream Day is leaving everyone des(s)erted again

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You would expect Uber’s annual Ice Cream Day to give you brain freeze, but instead it’s freezing people out.

Uber users in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, D.C., Boston, Miami, Toronto, Seattle, Atlanta, and Dallas can supposedly open their apps today, select UberICECREAM, tap “request,” and sit back and wait for a truck to deliver a free ice cream cone. But that’s only if they can even get that far. Twitter is filled with horror stories of people hoping to sweeten the possible last day on Earth (too dark?) with a free ice cream but instead finding that the dessert is already unavailable. Get in line, people. We placed an ice cream order with Uber back in 2012—and we still haven’t received it. WHERE’S THE ICE CREAM WE ORDERED, UBER?

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