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Laverne Cox Details The Trans Movement’s History In This Beautifully Illustrated Video

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What:Time Marches Forward & So Do We, a video illustrating the long history of the trans movement

Who:The ACLU, actress/activist Laverne Cox, and illustrator Molly Crabapple

Why we care: As the fight for trans rights rages forward against dangerous rhetoric and baseless violence against the community, the ACLU is calling for a quick time-out to give everyone a primer on the history of the trans resistance in America.

With illustrations from artist Molly Crabapple and narration from actress and activist Laverne Cox, this video details the start of the LGBT movement and the continued push for visibility, equal rights, and protection for the trans community today, despite the current administration that is clearly opting for erasure over inclusion.


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Uber investors want Benchmark off board a day after it sued founder for fraud

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A group of Uber shareholders is asking Benchmark Capital to give up its seat on the company’s board of directors a day after the venture capital firm filed a lawsuit against former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick for fraud.

Axios first revealed the full letter, which apparently has been making its way around Silicon Valley. It accuses Benchmark of violating its fiduciary responsibilities by forcing Uber into a public relations disaster—effectively holding the company “hostage”—when it asked for Kalanick’s resignation and launched a suit against him. This has brought ill will against the company, the letter says. As such, this group of board members has asked Benchmark to divest of enough shares so it is not entitled to a seat on the board. The letter was signed by Sherpa Capital’s Shervin Pishervar, Yucaipa Companies’ Ron Burkle, and Maverick’s Adam Leber, according to Axios.

Since the beginning of the year, Uber has been running from one public relations debacle to the next. And it’s suffered a number of departures, both as a result of an investigation into its culture and possible discriminatory practices, and because people are tired of the drama just leaving.

The public bickering between board members will likely go unnoticed by Uber’s riders and drivers. But if the company was already having difficulty attracting a new CEO, the infighting probably isn’t helping. Regardless of how this shakes out, it seems the suit is doing damage to Benchmark’s brand. Already some startups are saying they aren’t so keen on taking money from a litigious VC that’s less supportive of founders than it purports to be.

Here’s the group’s request, from its email:

Naturally, we share your concerns about the problems that the Company has confronted in recent months, but we are greatly concerned about the tactics employed by Benchmark to address them, which strike us as ethically dubious and, critically, value-destructive rather than value enhancing.

Specifically, we do not feel it was either prudent or necessary from the standpoint of shareholder value, to hold the company hostage to a public relations disaster by demanding Mr. Kalanick’s resignation, along with other concessions, on a few hours’ notice and within weeks of a personal tragedy, under threat of public scandal. Even less so your escalation of this fratricidal course–notwithstanding Mr. Kalanick’s resignation–through your recent lawsuit, which we fear will cost the company public goodwill, interfere with fundraising, and impede the critical search for a new, world-class chief executive officer. Benchmark has used false allegations from lawsuits like Waymo as a matter of fact and this and many actions has crossed the fiduciary line.

Benchmark’s investment of $27 million is worth $8.4 billion today and you are suing the founder, the company and the employees who worked so hard to create such unprecedented value. We ask you to please consider the lives of these employees and allow them to continue to grow this company in peace and make it thrive. These actions do the opposite.

Accordingly, we would request that Benchmark help the Company realize its full potential by allowing the necessary work to be done in the Board Room rather than the Courtroom. To this end, at this point, in light of your suit against the Company, we believe it would be best, and hereby request, that Benchmark remove its representative from the Company’s Board and move promptly to divest itself of enough shares in the Company so as to cease to have Board appointment rights. We have investors ready to acquire these shares as soon as we receive communication from Benchmark that they are willing to withdraw their lawsuit and sell a minimum of 75% of their holdings.

We are also asking for a symbolic Board of Directors vote on this matter at today’s Board meeting to show how the Board of Directors stands on this lawsuit brought against the company, its founder and the 15,000 employees of Uber who have all worked so hard in concert to create the fastest growing company in history.

This Simple Box Serves Up Running Water And Clean Electricity In Remote Locations

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Off Grid Box, an Italian startup, was founded to bring clean water and renewable energy to the millions of the people in the world who still live without. The box itself is a simple container, measuring six by six by six feet. With solar panels on top and water treatment inside, it can help remote communities with both off-grid energy and easily accessible filtered water. Founder and CEO Emiliano Cecchini has sold a few of the units, but he worries he’s not yet found the formula to take his invention to scale.

After three years on the market, Off Grid Box is a trusted enough product that 28 individuals and organizations have bought the container at $15,000 and up. Half the units went to nonprofits in Madagascar, Nigeria, Rwanda, Colombia, and elsewhere; another half to “cool guys that had a camper in the middle of nowhere, who want to be green, cool, resilient,” says Cecchini. One washed away to the Pacific Ocean: a unit that sat on the shore of Bantayan Island, in the Philippines, until it was caught by a 2014 typhoon.

“It’s not easy to find the right financing strategy, mentors, and accelerator programs.” [Photo: Off Grid Box]
But Cecchini, who is Italian, doesn’t feel the startup is yet at a point where it can ramp up sales and production, and get itself on stable financial footing. Selling one unit at a time isn’t particularly profitable (including after-sales) and it doesn’t get enough Off Grid Boxes out there in the world. “We’re looking for the next system to scale,” he says. “The idea came three years ago and, yeah, we’re kind of struggling to make it bigger. Back in Italy, it’s not easy to find the right financing strategy, mentors, and accelerator programs.”

Off Grid Box was recently selected for the 2017 cohort of the Mass Challenge accelerator program, in Boston, where Cecchini will hone a new business model. Instead of selling units to cool guys and NGOs, it now plans to install them where they are needed and then charge end-customers for access. For a few cents a day, people will able access clean water and clean power at a station continually attended by local people. “The new model is pay-as-you-go micro-payments, local contractors, and local empowerment,” Cecchini says.

The new business model is getting a thorough test in Rwanda, where the startup plans to install units in 18 villages. The government has commissioned 14 contractors to work on rural electrification, and Off Grid Box is partnered with three of them so far, Cecchini says. By 2020, it hopes to be serving 420,000 end-customers.

“The new model is pay-as-you-go micro-payments, local contractors, and local empowerment.” [Image: Off Grid Box]
Inside the container is a five-stage micro-filtration tank that takes in dirty water and produces an odorless, transparent, bacteria-free drinkable water, Cecchini says. A family of four pays 12 U.S. cents (100 Rwandan Francs) to fill up with enough water for the day. At the same time, each unit has solar panels sufficient to allow 300 families battery packs subsidized by the startup. These hold enough power to run three LED lights for four hours and to charge two mobile phones.

While in the U.S., Cecchini is signing up impact investors and donors, who can monitor their projects remotely and online. Each installation costs about $15,000–which comes out of a joint financing pool. He thinks the units can generate 10% profitability and that there will be further revenue opportunities to grow the business in the future. Ideally, the boxes will become community hubs, with Wi-Fi and associated commercial activity. “Once we add connectivity and we have people attending all day, we have a strong financial business model. The Wi-Fi opens up services that could be backed by venture capital.”

This Startup’s Tech Could Rewire Podcasts–And Make Alexa Way Smarter

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For all the enthusiasm—not to mention dollar signs—buzzing around the art of podcasting over the last few years, it still suffers from one major flaw: The actual content of podcast episodes, like that of radio streams and other non-music audio found online, remains walled off and locked away inside impenetrable waveforms, far from the reaches of search engines and the content personalization algorithms that power what we read, see, and hear every day. But like so many things in life, there’s a startup looking to change this.

Audioburst is a Tel Aviv-based company with a mission so simple it’s hard to believe it hasn’t already been accomplished by a tech giant: It ingests millions of hours of audio per week, transcribes it, breaks it into chunks, and indexes it so it can be searched. Earlier this week, Audioburst launched a web search tool that lets you scour bits of audio from thousands of sources like radio stations and podcasts. So not only can it search across many popular podcasts, but it’s capturing audio from radio broadcasts, which until now have been beamed through the sky to radio receivers and web streams, only to be forgotten. The results of Audioburst’s search are still a little rough, but the idea is super-promising.

“We’ve built a machine that constantly listens to a variety of audio that’s being broadcasted and uploaded as podcasts,” says Audioburst founder and CEO Amir Hirsh. “As it’s listening, we do things to the audio to make it easy to use.”


Related:How These NPR and Netflix Veterans Aim To Reinvent Podcasts


Devices like your laptop or smartphone are great at finding text-based information and even images online, but come up empty-handed when the answers we seek happen to be buried inside the ones and zeros of audio files.

It’s kind of insane, really: We’ve been able to quickly and easily search the vast expanse of the web for over 20 years, yet digital audio remains stuck in 1995. Imagine, though, if you could search for a news topic, a sports team, or anything else people say that gets recorded, and get results not as a list of blue links, but as a series of play buttons. And when you hit play, you’re taken directly into the snippet of audio that pertains to whatever it is you were looking for. That’s what Audioburst’s new search engine does. The results are not perfect or comprehensive, but it can be quite useful for finding mentions of specific people, places, and topics.

Say you’re interested in meditation, for example. A search for that brings up a recent episode of NPR’s “Fresh Air” featuring Robert Wright talking about his new book on Buddhism and mindfulness. You can click and listen to the first relevant snippet or zoom out and play the entire episode. Then there are a few other public radio shows discussing meditation, all of which seem timely and relevant. Very cool. Further down the page, however, is a news clip about a meditation instructor who was inexplicably killed by a police officer. Probably not what you were going for! In many cases, the search functionality is somewhat crude and it sometimes misses the mark, but it’s nothing a little time and machine learning can’t fix.


Related:Product Hunt Pushes Into Podcast Discovery


Its new browser-based search engine is just the latest interface for Audioburst’s technology. The company also offers a stand-alone audio transcription service, as well as an API that lets app developers build Audioburst’s audio library, search functionality, and personalization into their apps and voice-controlled devices. The company is also exploring potential integrations with connected cars.

The service’s integration into voice control platforms like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant seems like Audioburst’s most ripe and promising prospect. Imagine, for instance, if instead of Alexa’s robotic voice updating you on the weather—or pulling in a one-size-fits-all NPR news radio stream, Amazon’s Echo devices could weave in personalized, relevant audio snippets from actual broadcasts. Audioburst’s existing integrations with Alexa and Google Assistant aren’t quite that tight, but the potential here is huge, especially in the escalating voice platform war.

Remembering “Wag the Dog” as we ponder Trump’s North Korea tweet

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Wag the Dog, Barry Levinson’s political satire in which Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman fabricate a war to divert attention from a presidential sex scandal, turns 20 this year. The film has found new relevance in the age of Trump, when seemingly impulsive tweets–often fired off on a Friday–have served to distract the public and media outlets from more pressing topics. But there is no more pressing topic than nuclear war, and so Trump’s tweet this morning, in which he warned North Korea’s Kim Jong-un of consequences should he act “unwisely,” is especially disturbing, as was his warning earlier this week of “fire and fury.”

Some see a distraction tactic. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. But whether it’s intentional or not, the weekend news cycle has been set.

Why You’re Tweeting Jokes About Your Impending, Fiery, Radioactive Death

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One of the major criticisms of The Blair Witch Project, a chief progenitor of the found footage craze, is that it was unrealistic to suggest that the lead character would in actuality keep filming the terrifying events of the movie. However, the reason Heather Donahue never puts the camera down is baked right into the mockumentary’s premise. The character clings to her role as documentarian while her woodland romp deteriorates into a certain deathmarch. It’s a psychological defense: If she is making a documentary, her situation can’t truly be as dire as it seems—which is why she keeps filming until the bitter end.

Your Twitter timeline is probably clogged with jokes about nuclear war right now for a similar reason.

Since Twitter jokes have become our default setting for processing unsettling news, why should we react any differently as the news escalates from “unsettling” to “apocalyptic”? Making jokes keeps us at arm’s length from the situation. By engaging in a running commentary on the war of words between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, we might as well be describing an episode of a TV show, rather than our own potential demise.

Dystopic jokes and Handmaid’s Tale memes dominated discourse all year, but as the nuclear threat escalated this week, things have gotten serious–and by that I mean, the amount of jokes about nuclear annihilation has reached a serious threshold.

Some of the jokes have been about specific elements of our potentially impending doom, like the corniness of Trump’s use of the phrase “fire and fury.

Another subset of the nuclear winter jokes have been ones that focus on a fear of not being able to live to see promising pop culture projects come into fruition.

And finally, another strain of jokes has been all about the insufficiency of making jokes to truly protect us at a time like this.

How are you coping? Are you really afraid? Let us know on–where else–Twitter.

Some Analysts Have Doubts About Consumer Reports’ Dismissal Of Microsoft’s Surface Line

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On Thursday, Consumer Reports said that it could no longer recommend Microsoft’s Surface tablets and laptops. It based its statement on its annual user survey, which found that a quarter of all Surfaces malfunction within two years of use. That’s a sweeping commentary of a whole line of machines.

Overall, the publication’s sample consisted of 90,000 readers who own PCs and tablets. That may sound like a lot of data points, but that’s for owners of all models from all manufacturers. When I asked Consumer Reports on Friday afternoon for the number of people in the survey that own Surface devices, they would not provide the figure. “In order for a brand to be included in our survey, the minimum number is 300,” said spokesman James McQueen. “That’s according to our internal survey team.”

Writing before Consumer Reports disclosed that threshold, some analysts said that the publication doesn’t have the data to back up its blanket dismissal of the Surface. The two-year ownership window Consumer Reports studied might skew the sample toward older Surface models. It might include many devices older than the Surface Pro 4, and not many of the new Surface Books, noted Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi. “If I am correct in my assumptions of which models are part of the sample and I look at the most aggressively priced Surfaces, Surface RT, and Surface 3 could make up a large proportion of this sample,” Milanesi wrote in a blog post for the research firm’s clients on Friday. “While the assessment of those specific products might be correct, it is certainly not a reflection of the Surface current lineup.”

Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Patrick Moorhead says he’s used every mobile Surface device ever produced for extended periods. “Besides some momentary issues with early 2012 Windows RT devices and 2016 [models using Intel Skylake processors], which were fixed in software updates, I have not had issues,” Moorhead writes in an email to Fast Company. His personal experience, of course, is anecdotal. But he adds, “What CR is lacking is any kind of root cause or segmentation across product lines that show that a 2017 product should not be purchased based on something arising in 2014.”

And Microsoft came to its own defense early Friday with this statement from Panos Panay, the charismatic frontman who manages the Surface line, about the Consumer Reports judgment:

In the Surface team, we track quality constantly, using metrics that include failure and return rates—both our predicted 1-2-year failure and actual return rates for Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book—are significantly lower than 25%,” writes Panay. And: “Surface also ranks highly in customer satisfaction. 98% of Surface Pro 4 users and Surface Book users say they are satisfied with their device.

But as longtime Microsoft blogger Paul Thurrott points out, Panay’s factoids don’t directly counter Consumer Reports‘s contention that a quarter of Surfaces break down within two years. As for his own experience, “Anecdotally, I’ll point to the fact that the three Surface Book models I’ve used have all had reliability problems,” Thurrott wrote. “And that, contrary to that, my Surface Pro 4 has never had any issues at all. Because that’s why the Surface Book and Pro 4 reliability issues are so vexing: Some never have issues, but others never stop having problems.”

All this matters because Consumer Reports has a strong reputation for being rigorous, thorough, and fair. It’s trusted. Millions of people check in with their research before risking their money on an expensive piece of tech gear. On the other hand, Microsoft has done an impressive job with the Surface line over the past few years, and the machines have improved significantly since first making the scene back in 2012.

Consumer Reports is one of the few sources we have left for independent third-party data on PC reliability—publications such as PC Magazine and PC World having ended such studies in recent years—so what it says matters. That’s also why it’s concerning that it would pan the reliability of a whole line of computers without telling us exactly how many people actually had problems, and what the problems were. When I asked spokesman McQueen for more granular data on CR‘s Surface findings, he said that the publication wouldn’t be providing such details.

Twitter Could Totally Ban Trump But That Won’t Happen

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If there was ever a week that makes the case for and against Twitter, this one was it.

Let’s recap: On Tuesday, President Trump told reporters, in no uncertain terms, that he would take swift action against North Korea, and that any threats involving the country’s considerable nuclear capabilities would be “met with fire and fury.”

In regards to Kim Jong-un, Trump said, “He has been very threatening beyond a normal statement, and as I said, they will be met with fire and fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

North Korea, in turn, lobbed a threat to attack the U.S. territory of Guam. “Let’s see what he does with Guam,” Trump countered on Thursday.

This is a topic that Trump, as he is wont to do, has previously discussed on his mouthpiece of choice, Twitter—much to the chagrin of North Korea’s leadership. So it follows that this morning, Trump issued yet another threat via Twitter:

I don’t need to explain just how irresponsible it is for Trump to escalate this posturing, and to do so on a public platform like Twitter. As othershave written, there’s a case to be made for booting Trump from Twitter, and today’s tweet only cements it.

In fact, by Twitter’s own definition, Trump’s tweets about North Korea might qualify as behavior that incites or promotes violence (albeit not targeted at another Twitter user). From the Twitter Rules:

We believe in freedom of expression and in speaking truth to power, but that means little as an underlying philosophy if voices are silenced because people are afraid to speak up. In order to ensure that people feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs, we do not tolerate behavior that crosses the line into abuse, including behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another user’s voice.

Any accounts and related accounts engaging in the activities specified below may be temporarily locked and/or subject to permanent suspension.

  • Violent threats (direct or indirect): You may not make threats of violence or promote violence, including threatening or promoting terrorism.

In the past, the targets of Trump’s innumerable Twitter rants have sometimes been private citizens, like union leader Chuck Jones or Lauren Batchelder, a college student who told Trump he wasn’t a “friend to women.” Both were on the receiving end of threats from Trump supporters following his tweets. As New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote back in December, Trump should be no different from any other Twitter user within the context of the platform, which means Twitter technically could revoke his tweeting privileges as it sees fit.

From Manjoo’s column:

As a corporation, Twitter is under no First Amendment obligation to let Mr. Trump use the service. It gets to make its own set of speech rules within its own walls, and among those rules is a prohibition on using the service to incite harassment. Earlier this year, the company suspended several Trump supporters who appeared to run afoul of those rules. Twitter has said that its policies apply to every user.

All this means Twitter could ban Trump. And, not surprisingly, users, including actor and former Obama aide Kal Penn, are campaigning to send complaints to the company over his violent language.

But it’s a catch- 22: If Trump is kicked off Twitter, the company risks being accused of political censorship and violating the “freedom of expression” it claims to hold dear. In allowing Trump unfettered access to its platform, however, Twitter amplifies an account whose content qualifies as abusive behavior under its own rules and, with this week’s activity, could put the U.S. in danger. (If letting Trump tweet means letting him potentially goad volatile dictators into nuking the U.S., I might opt to ban Trump and weather the cries of censorship—but Jack Dorsey I am not.)


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


One precedent for a Trump ban, if there is one, is the case of former Breitbart editor and alt-right celebrity Milo Yiannopoulos, who was ousted from the service last summer after harassing actress Leslie Jones and encouraging his followers to do the same. It was only after a campaign led by Jones that the company took action, making Milo one of the most prominent figures the service has banned yet (it also suspended other alt-right accounts late last year). Perhaps if a person more popular than Trump were to become the target of his harassment, Twitter might be prompted to change its Trump tune. Keep in mind that Milo’s follower count numbered 388,000 at the time; the President’s personal account currently has 36 million followers.

Twitter’s caution also reflects a tumultuous time in the tech industry, even more so since the election. Witness the response to Google firing James Damore, the employee who wrote the now-infamous memo criticizing the company’s diversity initiatives—and, says Google, perpetuating stereotypes and violating its code of conduct. One of Damore’s claims was that Google’s “left bias” effectively silenced anyone who was ideologically different. Can you imagine the backlash if Twitter banished Trump on similar grounds?

The company’s been around for just over 11 years, and Trump is only the second president to use its service while in office. Chances are, Twitter hasn’t fully thought through what it means for the most powerful person in the country to use its platform, let alone what to do when that person uses Twitter to issue policy announcements and threats to world leaders.

And let’s not forget one thing: however much Trump needs Twitter, Twitter needs Trump. They need the engagement, the user growth—fleeting though it may be—and the cable news airtime. “If somebody else uttered the exact same words that I uttered, they would say, ‘what a great statement, what a wonderful statement,'” Trump told reporters on Friday, responding to criticism about his North Korean rhetoric. Perhaps? But Trump isn’t just somebody else. And he’s certainly not just any Twitter user either.


Elon Musk says his startup’s AI is the first to beat e-sports’ best gamers

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It’s not clear if artificial intelligence will take away all our jobs, but according to Elon Musk, it is going to take away our e-sports supremacy.

This afternoon, Musk tweeted that a bot built by his non-profit, OpenAI, beat several of the world’s best players at the video game, Dota 2. 

In an accompanying blog post, OpenAI wrote that its bot had been undefeated over the last few days in Dota 1v1, a “complex game with hidden information [in which] agents must learn to plan, attack, trick, and deceive their opponents. The correlation between player skill and actions-per-minute is not strong, and in fact, our AI’s actions-per-minute are comparable to that of an average human player.”

What’s particularly impressive about the feat is that winning in Dota tasks players with building intuition about what their opponents will do, and building a corresponding game plan.  “Our bot has learned—entirely via self-play—to predict where other players will move, to improvise in response to unfamiliar situations, and how to influence the other player’s allied units to help it succeed.”

The next step for OpenAI is to build a team of Dota bots that can both compete, and partner with, human players.

With AIs having won at chess and Go, and now an e-sport, perhaps another next step is for Musk to reframe his argument with Mark Zuckerberg–over whether or not AI is dangerous to us–toward whether it can win all the games.

You can rewatch the OpenAI bot’s beat-down of its Dota competition here.

I’ve Interviewed Hundreds Of Job Candidates, And These Three Things Are Deal-Breakers

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Nervousness goes with interviewing like scrambled eggs goes with hash browns. You pretty much always find them together.

In other words, everyone I know–myself included–walks out of the conversation feeling a little iffy. Even if, on one level, you know you did a great job; there’s another part of you that’s questioning if you used that industry phrase correctly.

But, as the saying goes, we’re our own toughest critics. And while reflecting and looking for areas for improvement can be worthwhile, beating yourself up over a comparatively small interview mistake is a waste of time.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates, and it’s true: The very best job applicants stood out, and I still remember them to this day. But, to be honest, I didn’t then (nor do I now) obsess over someone giving an answer or two that was “just OK.” I understood that it was an awkward situation, and sometimes, people needed to find their footing.

Now, with all of that said, there were also some answers that were shockingly, unforgivably bad. I like to think you already know not to say any of these things, and so, the point is for you to feel reassured that you steered clear of the memorable-for-the-wrong-reasons answers.

But if you happen to see yourself in any of the answers below, change it ASAP!

1. They Told Me They Never Got Something Wrong (Ever)

I’m a big fan of the classic: “Tell me about a time you failed.” In fact, I was most likely to ask it of very impressive candidates. That’s because if someone’s used to getting things right, I also want insight into how they’ll respond when things go wrong.

Well, to this day I still remember the person who could not think of one time–ever, in his entire life–that he’d failed. We sat there in silence, as he looked at me. I asked if, maybe he’d ever missed a deadline, taken a risk that hadn’t paid off, gotten a bad grade on a paper, missed making a sports team…anything. And his answer was no, he couldn’t think of a time he’d ever been anything but successful.

As far as my follow-up question, he’d also never once had to ask anyone for help.


Related:Three Job Interview Mistakes You Think You Avoided But Actually Didn’t 


Clearly, his goal was to put his best foot forward as someone who could be counted on to get things right. However, this lack of an answer is the worst response I’ve ever heard to this question.

I couldn’t move him forward in the process because one of two things was true: Either he really never had failed (in which case, who knows how he’d cope if he did in a new role), or more likely, he had at some point like everyone else, but he didn’t have the self-awareness to know or the self-confidence to know it didn’t define him.

(If you’re wondering, here’s a four-step plan to answering the question correctly.)

2. They Said Something Inappropriate

Have you ever heard the rule that you shouldn’t post anything on social media–unless you’d be OK with your boss and grandmother reading it? The same goes for interviews.

More than one candidate referred to people of a different race, gender, or background in an offensive way or using inappropriate language, and they were all disqualified.

I think these applicants thought it would be OK because they weren’t using the specific words that would get someone fired on the spot. But to be clear, no matter how casual the environment might be, or how comfortable you feel, do not say anything offensive or vulgar (even as a joke).

You’re signing up to represent their company, and they aren’t going to want someone who uses that language to speak for them. Plus, you run the risk of offending the person speaking to you.

3. They Acted Like They Were Better Than Everyone Else

One candidate rubbed me the wrong way because though he was well-qualified, he was very pompous. In nearly every answer, he spoke poorly of others to lift himself up by comparison. This included other applicants as well the people he’d have been charged with helping in his role.

He acted like he had the role in the bag: not in a confident, I earned this way; but with an “You’d be an idiot not to hire me” kind of arrogance. (If you struggle with this, here are great tips on looking confident, not cocky.)

I knew we’d made the right choice to pass him over when, afterwards, he came to our office demanding an explanation. He asserted: “I know for a fact I should’ve moved forward ahead of other people you chose.” This proved my point: Because he didn’t get his way, the only conclusion he could draw was that I must not be good at my job (and he wanted to tell me so). Clearly, not the kind of person people will line up to work with!


Related:These Are The Worst Answers To The Most Common Interview Questions


I don’t know if you’ve spotted it, but there’s one other thing all of these candidates had in common. They were all certain they were 100% in the right with their answers. So, the very fact that you’re reading an article about interview nerves and mistakes shows that you’re someone who reflects and cares.

And that right there tells me your interview went better than you think.


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

More From The Muse:

Murder, Fake News, And Hacking Concerns Cloud Disputed Kenyan Election

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Kenyan protesters took to the streets after a tense Friday election resulted in a disputed victory for incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta. The opposition party blasted the vote as a “charade,” claiming results had been manipulated by a hacker using the credentials of a recently murdered election official.

As Kenyatta—elected to another five-year term—called for unity, opposition leader Raila Odinga asked his followers to demand justice, but underscored that he was not calling for violence. There were reports on Twitter and Al Jazeera that police had used tear gas and live bullets to disperse protesters. As unrest grew in Nairobi’s and Kisumu’s neighborhoods, the government said it had mobilized 180,000 security officers to grapple with more dissent, the BBC reported.

On Saturday, officials and witnesses told Reuters that police had shot and killed eleven people during protests since the election results were announced Friday night. The Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights said that at least 24 people, including a 6-year-old child, had been killed.

“With growing reports of demonstrations and heavy gunfire in some areas, it is important for security forces to work to deescalate—not escalate—the violence,” said Otsieno Namwaya, Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The police should not use tear gas or live ammunition simply because they consider a gathering unlawful.”

“I don’t control anybody,” Odinga told CNN on Thursday. “What is happening is that people just want to see justice. We also hope that the security forces are not going to use excessive force.”

John Kerry and other international observers in the country urged calm and said the results—which showed an unexpectedly wide margin of 1.4 million votes for Kenyatta—were acceptable, and that a review of the election should be conducted through the courts. Former President Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan, has urged the country to reject “tribal and ethnic hatred” and to “work together no matter what the outcome.”

“If anything was electronically fiddled with, there is a way to go back and absolutely ascertain what happened in the polling station,” Kerry said on Thursday. Kerry—who in 2004 conceded to George W. Bush amid questions about voting in Ohio—did not discount the possibility of election tampering. But he and other international observers said the electoral system appeared mostly fair, in part because votes were collected electronically and then approved by multiple party officers from both parties at each polling station using paper forms. “So by paper ballots, there is a protection of each and every Kenyan’s vote.”

Odinga, who raised an unsuccessful legal challenge to the 2013 election, has said that his party would not return to court, but also said he would accept the results if it turned out he had lost “fairly.”

The opposition claimed that a hacker had tampered with results by using the credentials of a murdered election official, Chris Msando, whose tortured body was found outside Nairobi late last month. The commission chairman said that there was only a failed attempt to hack into the country’s voting system, and rejected the opposition’s argument over evidence that, he wrote on Facebook, is “obviously and plainly falsified and contains elementary errors.”

Fears of ethnic violence have been stoked by memories of the 2007 presidential election, which left over 1,200 people dead and thousands more homeless, and led to charges by the International Criminal Court that Kenyatta had committed crimes against humanity (the case was dropped after the Kenyan government refused to hand over evidence).

Added to the mix is the impact of fake news at a time of turmoil along political and ethnic lines. In the first-ever study aimed at quantifying the prevalence and impact of false information during an election campaign in Africa, researchers with GeoPoll found that 90% of respondents in Kenya reported having seen false or inaccurate news in relation to the general election.

Among the operatives working on the campaigns were two executives from Aristotle, an American data firm working for Odinga. They were deported last weekend over an alleged visa violation. The men, who had been in the process of converting their tourist visas, were detained by government-linked men who drove them around for hours, locked them up, temporarily confiscated their electronics, and tried to gain access to one of their computers.

Along with data and polling analysis, Aristotle said it was helping with debate prep, polling, and digital and TV advertising; it declined to say what it was being paid for its services. Aristotle told Fast Company that much of its work involved figuring out ways to fight fake news.

“Everything of this sort that happens in Kenya is politically motivated,” John Aristotle Phillips, the company’s founder and CEO, told Kenya’s The Nation after he was deported. “It’s symptomatic of a political clique that’s losing its grip.

Kenyatta’s campaign, meanwhile, raised eyebrows in May when it reportedly contracted for $6 million Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that aided Donald Trump’s victory. The Robert Mercer-backed company has worked on campaigns around the globe and courted controversy for its use of data and personality profiling. Its parent company, SCL Elections, has been involved in campaigns from Nigeria to Ukraine.


Related: Trump’s Big-Data Gurus Worked On The Kenyan Election, Amid Concerns Over Fake News And Hacking Allegations


Cambridge Analytica has not responded to Fast Company‘s request for comment, but a spokesperson for the firm told the BBC that the company was not involved in any negative advertising in Kenya, and that it “has never advocated the exploitation of ethnic divisions in any country.”

Some reports had linked another political consultancy, U.K.-based BTP, to the Kenyatta campaign. But CEO Mark Pursey told The Daily Beast that those reports were”fake.” “We declined,” he said.

The U.S. State Department on Thursday urged candidates to refrain from allowing their supporters to turn violent. “We welcome the [election commission’s] commitment to fully investigate any allegations of fraud, with the engagement of all election stakeholders,” a statement said.

President Trump, who spoke to Kenyatta in March, has yet to comment on the election.

Here’s the cover of Charlottesville, Virginia’s daily newspaper after last night’s torch rally

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“Fire and Fury” went the headline, a reference to President Trump’s recent threat against North Korea. Reporters and editors for Charlottesville’s Daily Progress newspaper are ground zero this weekend as white nationalists descend on the Virginia city for a so-called “Unite the Right” rally.

Last night, in an evening that ended in violence, hundreds of torch-bearing, far-right protesters gathered at the University of Virginia, uttering chants like “You will not replace us.” Several injuries were reported, and it’s not over yet. The paper reports that 2,000-6,000 protesters are expected to attend this weekend, and the National Guard will be on standby in anticipation of civil unrest. Read more real-time coverage from the Daily ProgressTwitter feed.

Deadly violence erupts in Kenya following contested, fake news-fueled election

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A day after protests and riots erupted in the wake of Kenya’s contested election, the country’s commission on human rights said that at least 24 people, including a 6-year-old child, had been killed during clashes with police in the worst political violence in the country in a decade.

As many sought to avoid the kind of violence that followed elections a decade ago, Kagwiria Mbogori, chairman of the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights, told the Washington Post that “there has been excessive use of force and misuse of firearms by security personnel dealing with members of the public who are exercising their right to peaceful assembly in accordance with our constitution.” Government officials rejected reports of police shootings, while observers and reporters posted images and claims of police aggression on Twitter.

On Saturday, after months of political campaigning riddled with “fake news” on all sides, one senior official warned social media users that police will arrest those sharing information deemed inflammatory. According to Deutsche Welle, several people have already been detained.

The election has been called historic in many positive ways, but it has also been marred by a number of controversies, including the murder of a key election official last month, the recent deportation of a U.S. polling firm that had been working for the opposition party, and the involvement of the Trump campaign’s data firm, Cambridge Analytica, in the winning campaign.

Official results said incumbent president Uhuru Kenyatta was elected to a second five-year term with 54.2 percent of the vote to Raila Odinga’s 44.7 percent. But Odinga alleged a cover-up, saying the vote data had been manipulated by a hacker using credentials from the murdered election official. He hasn’t yet produced sufficient evidence to back up those claims.

International observers in the country for the vote, including John Kerry, have called the process credible and urged the opposition to seek legal remedies to their complaints. Kerry assured voters on Thursday, “if anything was electronically fiddled with, there is a way to go back and absolutely ascertain what happened in the polling station.”

Can You Finally Unplug On Your Next Vacation? Better Question: Should You?

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In an ideal world, your vacation would be for relaxing and taking time off from work, and that would be easy to do. After all, the career benefits of vacationing are well established. Research shows that vacations decrease stress and burnout, and the more you relax during vacation, the better you perform once you’re back.

But it might be counterproductive to encourage everyone to completely unplug from work while they’re vacationing. This notion is understandably taboo, but there are a few reasons why it might be possible–and even preferable–not to treat vacation like a total tech detox, and still come back feeling rejuvenated.

Great Expectations, Not So Great Results

Back to that ideal world for a second: In it, everyone who ever goes on vacation can just set an out-of-office message, power down Slack, and then use their phones for nothing more than Yelping the best taco shacks and snapping selfies all vacation long. But take one look at all the gobs of unused vacation time that Americans leave on the table year after year, and you’ll get a sense of how many people implicitly see that as an unworkable proposition.

Yes, the unfair pressures of certain work cultures and of overly demanding bosses can keep many of the most guilt-free vacationers office-bound. But for others, it’s the expectation that you’re only doing it right when you ditch work completely that can cause anxiety, stress, and feelings of guilt when you fail to do that. What if you love your job so much that it actually makes you happier to do some light work from the road than it would to go off the grid?

Worse still, the notion that the only way to vacation is to completely unplug might discourage you from even trying. The idea of having to catch up on unanswered emails or of falling out of sync on key projects might lead you to stay home–even when your boss is encouraging you not to. After all, research indicates that even when proper vacation time does pay off, its effects are short-lived, with pre-vacation stress and burnout levels returning after less than a week.

So if giving yourself license to check in on email every other day during your week away is what gets you to book that flight and actually enjoy yourself once you’re there, why not do it?

It’s About Personality

Your personality–the default behavioral tendencies and dispositions that make you unique–already determines your vacation preferences, whether you realize it or now. Unsurprisingly, people are happiest when they choose vacations that match their personalities. So if you’re more of a hedonistic, laid-back person who isn’t super career-driven, just be honest with yourself about that! You won’t have much trouble switching off and enjoying yourself. But if that’s not your personality, you need to be honest with yourself about that, too.

Maybe you’re an inquisitive, curious person. In that case, you’ll want to use your vacation to focus on your hobbies, learn new skills, or catch up on your reading–which might actually involve using technology and thinking about work. That’s likely to be even truer if your personality makes you ambitious, career-focused, and competitive–you may even want to minimize strict leisure time (like lying around on the beach) and stay connected so you don’t miss out on the news, social media updates, and any opportunities that might come up. In short, who you are determines how you should vacation.

No matter what they say, most organizations want you might think of as “spiritual workaholics”–people who, because they fit so well in their roles, are able to find meaning and purpose in their work, which in turn motivates them to devote lots of deal of energy to their jobs. Yet this ideal employee is often driven by dysfunctional personality characteristics, including compulsive tendencies, counterproductive perfectionism, neuroticism, and an inability to let go.

As a result, this type of person tends to sacrifice important aspects of their personal lives–not just vacation time but also social and romantic relationships–as well as their health, in the service of their careers. It’s okay to be career-driven, but it’s not okay to never take vacation. If checking in on work periodically helps you feel connected to what you care about while you’re kicking back, do it. That compromise might even help you train yourself to ease up on your workaholism in the long run.

Maybe You Just Need A New Job

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that while more people should probably be taking more restorative vacations, being able to easily step away from work might not be an unmistakable sign of a healthy work mentality. It might just mean that you just hate your job.

If you’re really craving a vacation–or lamenting the fact that your vacation will be over soon–take a second to think about why. If you love nothing more than shutting down your work email on Friday afternoon and feel mildly depressed whenever Sunday night rolls around, pay attention to that feeling. Being able to step away from your work is healthy, but avoiding it like the plague might not be.

Since vacations, much like weekends, are only likely to provide a short-term fixes to your work troubles, you may be better off getting to the cause of the problem and switching to a job you actually enjoy.

Why Yvonne Orji’s Molly Is The Most Necessary Character On “Insecure”

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Much like so many other social issues plaguing the world, pay inequality between men and women is most definitely still “a thing”–and it’s even more of “a thing” for black women. The disparity in pay because of gender is dramatic enough, but when it intersects with race, the numbers become even more stark. According to the Economic Policy Institute, black women with comparable educational attainment to white men have been consistently paid far less. For example, the average wage for black women with advanced degrees is $31.57 compared to white men in the same category earning $48.27.

The pay gap for black women has sparked its own day of awareness, Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, which falls on July 31 to underscore the extra seven months after April’s Equal Pay Day that black women would need to work in order to catch up. With all the hard data backing up the implicit experience of so many black women, it’s only natural that this topic would work its way into pop culture, most recently so in HBO’s Insecure.

Issa Rae’s YouTube series turned major cable comedy became an instant phenomenon for anyone who just likes smart writing and good TV, but even more so for the black community.

Couched in the comedy are real issues facing the black community like the need for therapy and, of course, pay inequality–and Yvonne Orji’s character Molly has somehow become the lightning rod for both.

Toward the end of season one, Issa’s suggestion that Molly try therapy to help process her behavior was instantly rebuffed, which, unfortunately, is often the case for many black people–a stigma that’s rooted in a number of reasons that include a lack of black therapists, the lean on religion to pray problems away, etc. However, at the start of season two, we see a skeptical, yet nonetheless present, Molly in a therapy session–with a black female, no less.

[Photo: Justina Mintz, courtesy of HBO]
“There are black therapists who messaged me on social media saying, ‘tell Molly that it’s not all bad! There are good psychiatrists out there–it’s not a dirty word!'” Orji says. “I think they’re hoping this is portrayed in a way that encourages people to go and seek their services.”

And people have.

In addition to the willingness to seek therapy, Orji has also seen her character influence women to try and close that pay gap, a story arc that’s playing out in Insecure‘s current season.

“One lady even said thanks to this episode, I was able to go in and ask my boss for a raise. I know I’m still getting less than what I deserve but I’m getting more than I was before,” Orji says.

Orji credits those real-life results to Rae and showrunner Prentice Penny’s specific vision for Insecure, as well as their commitment to writing in stories that are rooted in something personal.

[Photo: Justina Mintz, courtesy of HBO]
“They keep it grounded in truth and in reality,” Orji says. “As long as it’s happened before or they know someone that it’s happened to, it goes in because they never want to be reaching for straws and making stuff up. And it helps [us as actors] have that truth to ground us in our performances.”

As tied to personal experiences as the storylines on Insecure may be, there aren’t always clear-cut answers for some of the topics that are broached in the show, which, in Orji’s opinion, is a strong suit. Take, for example, Molly’s all-too brief romance with Jared (Langston Kerman). All was well between the two until Jared disclosed to Molly that he had hooked up with a guy in the past. It was something Molly couldn’t get over but her friends weren’t necessarily in consensus with her.


Related:“Insecure” Star Yvonne Orji On Creativity And Color On TV


“What we do really well on the show is we lob topics–we don’t ever give you a yes or no answer, like this is right or this is wrong,” Orji says. “We throw it up and we have discussions. We have some characters who feel a certain way about a topic and some of our characters who feel another way about it. That’s all you could ever ask, is for people to have real human conversations and dialogue that leads to, at least if nothing else, understanding.”

[Photo: Justina Mintz, courtesy of HBO]
Starting those dialogues around mental health and pay inequality in the black community–and more importantly among black women–is a large part of Insecure‘s continued success. The show gracefully walks the line of bringing up these vital issues without coming across heavy handed. And the deep resonance from that within the community is something Orji is still learning to process.

“For us, it’s like, we’re making TV and we know the significance [of the show] but then it’s like no, this is really a moment for [black people] that encompasses so many different things,” Orji says. “It gives you some pause and it gives you a moment to put things in perspective.”


Why Supercell Brought The Builder From “Clash Of Clans” Into The Real World

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It takes a certain kind of person to dedicate themselves to ephemeral work. To know that not long after it’s finished, it’ll be gone. Just ask any graffiti or Subway sandwich artist. And after five years of building structures just so they could be destroyed, even the Clash of Clans‘ video game character The Builder reached his breaking point.

The other week, the mobile game character decided to leave the insanely popular mobile game, in a video that now has more than 51 million views. On Friday he let fans know where he went–turns out it was Brooklyn. Anyone strolling down Old Fulton Street saw a giant statue of the game’s P.E.K.K.A. character, with a note to New Yorkers from the Builder.

Created by long-time Supercell agency Barton F. Graf, the statue was accompanied by an 18-foot Tesla Tower to act as an elaborate phone charger for passersby. The Builder is also on Instagram and LinkedIn, keeping people up to date on his IRL adventures. There’s also a contest for fans to Photoshop the Builder in their own favorite real-world locale.

Barton F. Graf executive creative director Jeff Benjamin says the idea was to mark the game’s five-year anniversary in a fun, unique way, that also celebrated one of its unsung characters. “We wanted to tell the story of the Builder because, he’s an unlikely hero,” says Benjamin. “He builds these things that everyone plays with and it al gets destroyed. But he hasn’t been a main hero that we’ve explored, so it seemed like a good story to tell.”

For all the game’s award-winning and hilarious ads over the years (remember AngryNeeson52?), the agency works very closely not only with the Supercell marketing client, but also the Clash of Clans game developers themselves. This time, Benjamin says they also consulted the fan community. “One of the things we did was look at what the players were loving, who they were playing with,” says Benjamin. “A lot of the great ideas over the years have been born out of the community, out of mining some of the conversations we see on Reddit and elsewhere, where we can chat with them. So they’re a very important part of the process.”

Barton F. Graf founder and chief creative officer Gerry Graf says the P.E.K.K.A. statue attracted fans of all types. “We were setting up the installation in Brooklyn (on Friday) morning when two cops came over, and our head of production went over with the permits,” says Graf. “And they said, ‘No, no, we just want to know if that’s P.E.K.K.A.’, and asked if they could take a few pictures.”

Graf says the long-term goal has been to make Clash of Clans into a Pixar, Warner Brothers, Disney-style group of characters. “So that they’d exist in the game, but would always be venturing out into other places. This is a great first step in that direction,” says Graf. “I think for fans, it just shows them how big this world is, and it’s a great way to bring the world of Clash to people who haven’t heard of it yet.”

The brand and agency won’t say just how long The Builder’s real-world sojourn will end, but that fans should expect more. Already, The Builder has posted flyers around Los Angeles, asking for project suggestions and giving fans a hotline to call.

(833)284-5374

A post shared by The Builder (@clashofclans) on

“Somebody called the Builders Hotline and asked if he could dragon-proof their house,” says Graf.

“And we’re going to do it!” laughs Benjamin.

GoDaddy never hosted the Daily Stormer—and no one can tell who does

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The news last night that GoDaddy is dropping its customer–neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer–over an incendiary post about the Charlottesville murder victim led to the misunderstanding that GoDaddy actually hosted the site’s content. GoDaddy gave the Daily Stormer 24 hours to move its domain to another provider, but some reports indicated that the Daily Stormer had to move all its content from GoDaddy to another host. In fact, GoDaddy was just the registrar of the domain DailyStormer.com, not the site’s actual content. While GoDaddy does also offer hosting services, it never provided them to the Daily Stormer, GoDaddy told Fast Company in an email.

So who does host the site’s content? It’s impossible to tell, because that information is hidden by the Daily Stormer’s security provider, Cloudflare. The San-Francisco based company routes traffic to and from its clients site through Cloudflare’s servers in order to provide security, for instance, against the denial of service attack the Daily Stormer claims it suffered, as well as optimization to speed web traffic. A side effect is that searching for the host of the Daily Stormer on the lookup engine Whois reveals only the name CLOUDFLARE.COM, not that actual host.

We asked Cloudflare if it felt motivated, in light of the recent events, to reevaluate its relationship with the Daily Stormer. Reiterating the policy it’s stated many times in the past, Cloudflare told us that it does not drop clients based on the content of sites, unless that content is illegal:

Cloudflare is aware of the concerns that have been raised over some sites that have used our network. We find the content on some of these sites repugnant. While our policy is to not comment on any user specifically, we are cooperating with law enforcement in any investigation.

We recently dug deep into the relationship between dozes of hate sites, including the Daily Stormer, and about a dozen tech companies that provide them services, including Cloudflare. You can read our feature story on hate sites and tech companies here.

Google drops neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer in about 3 hours

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Neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer rocketed to international recognition over the weekend when GoDaddy announced that it would stop being the registrar for the site’s domain. (This is different from hosting the site’s content, a service GoDaddy didn’t provide to the Daily Stormer, the company told us.)

After GoDaddy dumped it, the Daily Stormer registered its domain with the Google Domains service. That was revealed by checking dailystormer.com in the free Whois lookup service, provided by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization that oversees domain management. Domain registration with Google appears to be a self-service affair, so it’s possible Google didn’t even realize it had neo-Nazis as new customers.

We reached out to Google for comment, and its response was quick. It emailed a statement from a spokesperson saying, “We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service.” By the time Google sent out its statement, it had not only been contacted by Fast Company, but excoriated on Twitter.

We also spoke with Google and got a breakdown of how it all happened:

— We don’t want our services used to incite violence

— Domain was registered at 7.51 PDT

— Announced cancellation by 11:02 PDT

— As soon as we were made aware that Daily Stormer had registered its domain with Google, we began taking action to remove them for violating our terms of service.

This story was updated at 11:40 a.m. PDT.

Welcome To The Third Nuclear Era: Trump And The Point Of No Return

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


The past seven days have been, arguably, the worst week for the worst president in modern history.

Within the span of seven days, President Trump thanked a foreign adversary for expelling U.S. diplomats from their country, stoked tensions with North Korea to the point that Kim Jong-un threatened to attack Guam, and waited two days to grudgingly condemn a neo-nazi rally even after an anti-racist activist was run over by a white supremacist–and only issued that repudiation after a raft of bipartisan outcry over his weak initial response. Our commander-in-chief achieved all this even as a federal investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia heated up.

These recent events are symptomatic of an America out of control and in decline, its demise hastened by the executive body tasked to strengthen it. This week, the call came from inside the house–the White House, to be precise–and its message was: “We’re f***ed.”

As more members of the GOP finally issue the condemnation of Trump’s bigotry that they should have made the day he launched his campaign by denigrating Mexican immigrants, it is possible the U.S. has finally reached a turning point–a pivot, if you will. This is not the presidential pivot longed for by political and media pundits, the ones who proclaim it occurs whenever Trump achieves a miraculous feat, like reading off a teleprompter without being egregiously racist.

Instead, it is the pivot of our citizenry from a naive maybe-he-won’t-be-so-bad optimism to a cold-eyed assessment of our grim reality. Our executive branch not only coddles white supremacists, but employs them; our president praises dictators and sends “best regards” to maimed patriotic protesters. Even Trump’s lackeys–Huckabee, Ryan, Sessions—  felt compelled to condemn the nazis Trump was so slow to explicitly refute.

It may be possible–albeit tremendously difficult–for the U.S. to rebuild from the destruction of not only Trump’s presidency, but the shift in political culture his campaign catalyzed, if we are willing to acknowledge its severity. But there is one exception to this plausibility: nuclear war. The deployment of nuclear weapons would mark the point of no return. It is an option that Trump embraces with his trademark bravado.

The Third Nuclear Era

In 1945, when nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer accepted a certificate of appreciation praising him for helping create the atomic bomb, he accepted it with a warning.

“If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of the nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people of this world must unite or they will perish,” he said.

“This war that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them in other times, and of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some misled by a false sense of human history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that.”

In other words, if he built it, they will bomb. But over the following decades, the fear of nuclear war faded along with the demise of the Soviet Union, as mutually assured destruction was followed by a push for non-proliferation. These decades of uneasy limbo were followed by the election of Donald Trump: a pathological narcissistobsessed with nuclear weapons since 1984, when he proclaimed he could learn all he needed to know about them in an hour and a half.

While Trump’s policy positions shifted over the years, his obsession with nukes remained steady, whether when he was betraying his openness to dropping them on Pakistan and France in 1987, proclaiming their use was inevitable in 1990, or musing in 2016, “If we have them, why not use them?” Last week, Trump followed that daydream up with a specific threat against North Korea, stating the authoritarian regime would see “fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen” and tweeting, “Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!”

When an autocrat is cornered and flailing–as Trump is thanks to both Robert Mueller’s Russian interference investigation and by domestic policy failures like TrumpCare–he often lashes out violently to consolidate power. Trump has thus far followed the typical autocratic pattern ofscapegoatingminorities, but this tactic can only take him so far, especially given the public backlash to the racism the nation just witnessed in Charlottesville. There is only one domain where Trump wields absolute and unparalleled power, free from the Congress he despises and the public he reviles, and that is his control over the nuclear arsenal. He already wields these weapons rhetorically, and it is naive to assume he will stop there.

Given how chaotic Trump’s six-month rule has been, it is tempting to label Trump’s rhetoric as a distraction–but a domestic American distraction does not translate abroad. North Korea’s bloody leadership, upon hearing Trump’s threat of “fire and fury”, is not going to think, “Oh, Trump’s just trying to divert the U.S. media from the Russia scandal” but will instead accept his words as a threat. Their vow to take out Guam, however abhorrent, was in response to a statement from the President of the United States.

Might Trump actually use nuclear weapons? He certainly isn’t ruling out the option, and there is nothing to hold him back from doing so: No congressional approval is needed. If Trump decides to use them, he will use them because he can, and because he does not appear to adequately process the consequences of using them. When addressing North Korea’s aggression toward Guam, Trump told its governor the nuclear threat will improve tourism.

Trump’s rise was predicated on denial: that he’d lose the primary, that he’d lose the general election, that his autocratic ambitions would be curtailed by our systems of checks and balances. It all happened anyway. It is time for the GOP and others wielding power to accept that with Trump, the worst-case scenario is the most likely scenario. It took the GOP two years to staunchly condemn Trump’s embrace of neo-nazis. When it comes to nuclear weapons, there is no such luxury of time.

The “false sense of history” of which Oppenheimer warned has made willful blindness the default response to rising autocracy and growing nuclear threat. For that trajectory to change, U.S. officials must confront not only the horrors of the past, but the urgent threat of the present, and take any steps possible to curb the president’s ability to obliterate our future.


Sarah Kendzior is a journalist and scholar of authoritarian states.


Here’s the transcript from Trump’s “racism is evil” speech

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In the wake of the violence that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, President Trump’s refusal to explicitly denounce hate groups like the KKK and neo-Nazis drove the news cycle on Sunday and into today. Trump finally denounced such groups in a press conference this afternoon, during which he also boasted about the economy and vowed to hold those responsible for the violence accountable.

Below is an excerpt:

And as I have said many times before, no matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws. We all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God.

We must love each other, show affection for each other, and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry, and violence. We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans.

Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.

Check out the full transcript of the speech over at the New York Times.

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