It’s a race to the virtual bottom! HTC said today it is slashing the price of its Vive VR headset and ecosystem from $799 to $599, and it will keep it at that price for the “foreseeable future.” In a blog post today, Vive’s Matthew Gepp said the price reduction will “make the system available to an even broader audience,” which is a nice way of saying c’est la vie to all those annoyed customers who paid the old price. The move comes less than a month after Facebook-owned Oculus slashed the price of its high-end Rift and Touch VR bundle for the second time this year. Last month, our Daniel Terdiman wrote that cutting prices is one of the main things the consumer VR industry needs to do if it wants to bring the technology mainstream.

The eyeballs of tweens and teens are always coveted by advertisers. According to new data from eMarketer, both Instagram and Snapchat will see usage rates rise in the double digits among the younger demographic in the U.S. and U.K. over the next year. Meanwhile, Facebook’s growth will continue to slow.

In fact, Facebook will see a usage decline in the 12 to 17 age group, according to eMarketer. There’s a growing demographic of “Facebook-nevers,” which are younger social network users who simply avoid Facebook altogether.

The real winner here is Snap, whose stock has been flailing on numerous reports that it doesn’t have a solid path to monetization. A rabid and growing audience of younger users will likely help show its worth as a viable business, and will attract more marketers to the app. Of course, this is good news for Facebook-owned Instagram, too; although, eMarketer points out that while Instagram is still bigger in the U.S., Snapchat has more users in the age group 12 to 17 and 18 to 24.

We’ll see if this helps Snap’s stock price. You can read the full eMarketer report here.

Last Friday, actor and comedian Kal Penn issued his letter of resignation from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, following Donald Trump’s refusal to outright condemn the actions of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Penn’s letter was also signed by the other 16 members of the PCAH, creating a mass exodus of the committee that president Ronald Reagan instituted in 1982 as “an advisory committee to the White House on cultural issues”–an idea that was all well and good until Trump.

Update:All members have now resigned. Per @politico, PCAH is an official agency, that makes this the 1st White House department to resign pic.twitter.com/kk7buaVr9G

— Kal Penn (@kalpenn) August 18, 2017

The real question is why now? The biggest and brightest red flag that Trump could care less about the arts or culture came in March when he proposed to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Musician and entrepreneur Paula Boggs has served on the PCAH under four administrations and offered some insight to what took so long for the PCAH to resign, and the enduring importance of the arts, especially under Trump.

Fast Company: What was it about Charlottesville that was the tipping point? That is to say, why now with this resignation and not sooner?

Paula Boggs: My first instinct was to resign from the President’s Committee for the Arts and the Humanities on or before January 20, 2017. Committee members were informed by then executive director Megan Beyer that we could serve until action was taken by the next administration. All of us on the committee cared and care deeply about the many programs and projects we oversaw, and none more so than TurnAround Arts, a program that pairs artists with some of our nation’s lowest performing schools that has resulted in rising test scores, higher attendance, and other success metrics.

Like many of us, I stayed on to help ensure a successful transition of TurnAround Arts to the non-governmental Kennedy Center. Even after that transition was complete, I was marginally hopeful. By remaining on the committee, my colleagues and I could use that platform to advocate for NEA and NEH funding in the current federal budget cycle even as the administration zeroed out funding for both in the budget it submitted to Congress.

I am someone who has worked in and with both Republican and Democrat administrations and value bi-partisanship. Across the four administrations I’ve served (Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Obama) I never doubted our president’s commitment to American values, even when I disagreed with his policies, positions, or tactics. Each of those presidents brought our country together during times of national trauma. As stated in our letter, this president’s statements in the aftermath of Charlottesville, relating to neo-Nazis are so inconsistent with American values that, for me, remaining on the Committee became untenable.

FC: In what ways do you think the arts and humanities can contribute to unifying this country?

PB: There is no “America” as we know it without the arts and humanities. Artists across all mediums along with writers, geographers, philosophers, historians, theologians, and linguists can choose to use our gifts to help America move towards a more perfect union–a union where we have empathy for “the other” even when we disagree.

Through music, dance, fine art, acting, design, architecture, and the like we touch every American. We artists and writers have a powerful reach and through its use, even when our voice is angry, frustrated, or depressed, we can make a difference. Kendrick Lamar helps America move towards a more perfect union, just as Bob Dylan and Nina Simone did a generation ago, and Woody Guthrie before that. And we can find parallels across the arts and humanities. We may even choose to use our platform borne from the arts in ways wholly separate from the art we create. No matter what you thought of his policies or of the man personally, Ronald Reagan was an example of an artist who rose to meet the responsibilities of citizenship.

Google and Oreo appear to be teaming up for the latest version of Android. The operating system once code-named Android O is now officially named “Android 8.0 Oreo,” marking the second time Google has gone corporate for its dessert-themed nicknames. (The company used “KitKat” for Android 4.4 back in 2013.) Android Oreo’s main features include stricter battery-saving requirements for apps, picture-in-picture mode for videos, and a snooze button for notifications.

Google says 11 vendors plan to launch new Android Oreo phones or update some existing handsets by year end, but upgrade timing for specific phones is still unclear. Google’s own Pixel and Nexus devices should get the update soon, though, and a new framework in Oreo called Project Treble is supposed to allow faster updates for new devices going forward. Google is also expected to announce some new Pixel phones with Oreo on-board in the near future–just in time to take on the iPhone 8.

Here’s something Bonnie Tyler probably didn’t foresee when she released her soon-to-be hit song “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in 1983: That in the futuristic-sounding year of 2017, there would be a literal total eclipse (of the sun, in this case) and that, in the process of getting pumped for the rare event, millions of people would listen to her song on little computers that stream music from signals beamed wirelessly from the sky, as if by magic. But here we are!

In the hours leading up to the eclipse, Spotify saw a 2,859% increase in U.S. streams of the song compared to the same period two weeks ago. This presumably includes streams of the lesser-known cover version by Jill Andrews that Spotify included on its “Total Eclipse” playlist. But the original Bonnie Tyler version (which is on another eclipse-themed playlist being hyped on Spotify’s “Browse” tab) has seen over 106 million streams in total.

The song also shot to the #1 spot on iTunes and saw a 500% increase in digital sales, according to Nielsen. The boost presumably means a spike in royalty payments for Tyler, the record label, and songwriter Jim Steinman. How much? We may never know. But it’s a one-time sum the song’s creators may not see again until April 8, 2024, when the sun is blocked by the moon once again.

If you want a salad from the market at the Calafia Cafe in Palo Alto, a restaurant, and market run by the ex-Google chef Charlie Ayers, you can pick a pre-packaged salad from a case or visit a salad bar. But you also now have a third option: Sally, a salad-making robot, can prepare one of a thousand possible custom salads in around 60 seconds.

“The issue with packaged salads is that people can’t customize them,” says Deepak Sekar, inventor of the robot and founder and CEO of Chowbotics, the startup marketing Sally. On the robot’s touch screen, customers can choose a chef-created salad, and the robot will carefully measure out each pre-chopped ingredient–or someone can select any combination they want of 21 ingredients including kale, seared chicken breast, olives, and walnuts.

If the current trial of the robot at Calafia goes well, the market may eventually stop making packaged salads and could also decide to scrap the salad bar. The machine avoids any of the potential germs of customers handling food at a self-serve station and keeps produce refrigerated, helping avoid food waste.

In one beta test, at the Silicon Valley startup hub GSVLabs, “we were easily selling 40 or 50 salads a day,” he says. “That’s a pretty small office, like 150 people. We’re finding in bigger offices people end up eating more, and many times we get requests to refill the machine in the middle of the workday because it runs out so quickly.” A third party, either a catering company or a restaurant, handles refilling ingredients.

Ayers and another former Google chef worked with the startup to create a set of recipes to program into the robot, including unusual options like a green tea-coconut dressing (in theory, the coconut oil helps the caffeine in the green tea more easily reach the brain, energizing office workers after lunch). Chowbotics has tweaked the product as it runs beta tests. After a few people forgot to put down a bowl before ordering their salad–and cherry tomatoes flew everywhere–engineers redesigned the machine so it won’t dispense a salad unless a bowl is in place.

Fast-food restaurants, which typically only offer a few options for salads, have also already expressed interest. Sekar believes that the robot could also be useful in places like the Bay Area where restaurants struggle to keep cooks because of the high cost of living. The robot can’t make a salad fully from scratch–humans still need to chop and peel the ingredients and then deliver them. But Sekar believes that could also be automated in three to five years as vision and AI tech improves enough to adjust to the different shape and size of an individual vegetable or nut. For better or worse, the technology will reduce the need for labor in restaurants.

Sekar also sees a market in popular quick-service salad chains. “If you look at a Sweetgreen, there’s a huge line going out of the door all the time,” he says. “What we are hearing is that many of their customers walk away because they don’t want to wait for that long. These salad chains actually want to put a Sally inside as well. So if some people don’t want to wait in the line, they can go to a Sally that can make a salad far faster than a human.”

There was a moment in modern marketing–and it was just a moment, right around the time social media still felt like a new, fun club we all just joined, but not yet a required media outlet–that a well-timed tweet from a brand to acknowledge, pay tribute to, or joke about a cultural event would be well received, and maybe even thoroughly enjoyed. The Oreo dunk heard ’round the (advertising) world, perhaps a well-timed Denny’s or Arby’s tweet. But then, as with all great ideas, soon rumbled the rest of the herd, and before you knew it White Castle was #NeverForgetting.

Which brings us to the solar eclipse. It’s Zeitgeist City across the Internet and brands could not let the opportunity go by. It’s not that many of these are that terrible in isolation, it’s just all together it feels… shudder… ugh.

So if you haven’t burned your retinas out trying to stare down the sun with a discount pair of eclipse glasses, these tweets might just do the job.

Looking to watch the #SolarEclipse? ☀️ Check out this easy DIY pinhole projector using our Munchkins® donut hole treats box! ???? pic.twitter.com/wbEwJyBdWU

— Dunkin' Donuts (@DunkinDonuts) August 19, 2017

Total Eclipse of the Hearth #Eclipse2017pic.twitter.com/kywTxNir6n

— Cracker Barrel (@CrackerBarrel) August 21, 2017

The solar eclipse is today! Make it the most epic day, night, day, night of summer. ????, ????, ????, ???? #BecauseSummer#Eclipsepic.twitter.com/t4Je9N7sAm

— Malibu Rum (@maliburumus) August 21, 2017

We're so ready for #SolarEclipse2017. RT if you'll be watching our FB LIVE coverage straight from #OasisoftheSeas today at 2:30PM EST. pic.twitter.com/HQelZEKied

— Royal Caribbean (@RoyalCaribbean) August 21, 2017

wow, unbelievable. a mooncake on a plate looks EXACTLY like an eclipse. sorry to blow your mind on https://t.co/iCgltxh1t3 today. pic.twitter.com/pOdYnXgyRn

— Denny's (@DennysDiner) August 21, 2017

The #SolarEclipse2017 is a once-in-a-lifetime Ring!*

*But, for real, Chicken Rings are NOT NASA-approved lenses, you guys. pic.twitter.com/5ql2WKevIp

— White Castle (@WhiteCastle) August 21, 2017

Wear special glasses when looking at the perfect alignment of 3 Pringles. The deliciousness can be blinding. #PringlesStack#Eclipse2017pic.twitter.com/e8dBLoF6O0

— Pringles (@Pringles) August 21, 2017

Today, we celebrated a momentous astronomical event in America with the dawn of the All-New Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross. #TotalEclipseCrosspic.twitter.com/Ts56oFRqS2

— Mitsubishi USA (@mitsucars) August 21, 2017

Whatever you do today, make sure you go to Krispy Kreme for a taste of #ChocolateGlaze (US/CAN) pic.twitter.com/14Z9kvCYIU

— krispykreme (@krispykreme) August 21, 2017

Hostess has declared Golden CupCakes the official snack cake of the eclipse. #SolarEclipse2017pic.twitter.com/dnCJx0yqPr

— Hostess Snacks (@Hostess_Snacks) August 21, 2017

With so many attempts, one brand was bound to try something that was actually pretty great–and that honor fell to perhaps the most aptly named snack of all, nailing the reactive tweet below.

Lol ok https://t.co/lobyuNOkee

— MoonPie (@MoonPie) August 21, 2017

Blue Apron shareholder Ahmed Chaudhry has filed a complaint against the meal-delivery company for “misleading” and “untrue statements” in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission leading up to its public offering. The suit also takes aim at the underwriters of Blue Apron’s IPO (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Global, and Barclays Capital) and is filed on behalf of all purchasers of Class A common stock.

The lawsuit alleges that Blue Apron failed to disclose the following issues before its IPO:

1. the Company was experiencing delays at its new factory in Linden, New Jersey, which would force the Company to delay new product roll-outs;
2. the Company had already decided to reduce advertising expenditures in the second quarter of 2017, which would depress sales in future quarters;
3. the Company was aware of Amazon’s efforts to enter the meal-delivery business and that Amazon was looking to acquire assets to help it in this regard; and
4. the Company was experiencing issues delivering meals to customers on time and with of the all ingredients, which was hurting customer retention rates.

Blue Apron has had its fair share of trouble lately. Since debuting in June at $10 a share, its stock price has fallen by nearly half. Over the summer, Amazon announced its acquisition of Whole Foods Market and began expanding its meal-kit offerings. Meanwhile, Blue Apron acknowledged setbacks with its new fulfillment center in Linden, New Jersey, during its first earnings call.

Even before it went public, the company had issues. Its marketing spend, for example, was impossibly high: $94 per customer. Its path to profitability looked so harried, based on its prospectus, that it caused me to ponder whether the company would even exist in five years.

This morning, Anna Ruth Williams and Cooper Pettway found each other in the Delta Sky Club in Portland, awaiting a once-in-a-lifetime experience. They were going to fly with the eclipse.

A Redditer had already caught wind of this potentially spectacular flight, Delta 2466, which is how Williams learned of it. Normally, this is a routine transcontinental flight, but today would be different–the plane happened to be traveling through the “path of totality” during the solar eclipse. The paths of the sun and the moon were going to intersect in such a way that one would blot out the other for a course that bisected the continental United States–an event last seen in 1918.

Williams was in Portland for business, Pettway for pleasure. Both were booked on the same Atlanta-bound flight. The two, along with dozens of other passengers, were going to have front-row seats for a celestial light show.

When they got to the airport, other passengers were abuzz, unsure of what would happen. Some travelers were normal commuters who just happened to have booked a special treat; others reserved this flight specifically for the view. One man timed the end of his Alaskan vacation intentionally to catch this flight. Pettway counts himself in that bucket–he was less than 1,000 miles away from his millionth mile traveled on Delta, and thought a nice way to ring in the event would be to travel through complete darkness for a minute or two.

While boarding, people wondered about what, exactly, would happen. What would passengers see? Would the plane be able to actually show the eclipsed sun? Which side would be the good side to sit on? Flight attendants, too, were excited. Some took days off to work this specific journey.

Then the travelers sat and waited. No word yet from the captain about what was in store. Finally, about 20 minutes in, the captain spoke, giving a countdown for the event–the plane, which departed at 8:35 a.m., would hit totality at around 10:10. About a half hour in the air, the plane caught up with the eclipse; the sky began to slowly darken. “It started getting like dusk,” says Williams. Still, no one on the plane really knew which side to sit on to get the best view.

The problem was that the plane was heading directly toward the sun. So while the travelers would get a view of the darkness, they wouldn’t necessarily see the eclipse in action. The captain had an idea, but he needed to get approval first. “Once we approach totality,” the captain said over the loudspeaker, “we’ll ask traffic control if we can do some maneuvering.” He added, as any concerned captain ought to, a warning: “I do caution you all again, you won’t be able to look directly at the sun.”

“The pilot kept saying that we were heading right into the sun,” says Pettway, describing the flight to me. The hope was that, right when the plane was in complete totality, the captain would move it just a bit so the passengers could get a glimpse of the sun. The captain, however, wasn’t sure he would get the go-ahead. The skies were filled with other planes and it could prove unsafe to move out of the flight path. The passengers waited to see what would happen.

Finally, when the sky completely dimmed to blackness, the plane veered toward the right. Then, out of the left side of the plane, passengers got the view of a lifetime.

“It was just a big black circle of dusk,” says Pettway. Complete darkness surrounded the aircraft, but along the horizon was light. “If you tilt your head very low or really high you could see stars,” says Pettway. “It was very spectacular.” While many others on the plane didn’t have the eclipse glasses that allowed for human eyes to look at the sun, Pettway came prepared and was able to view the fiery orb turn to black.

Williams, on the other side of the plane, got a similar, albeit different, view. While in darkness, she was awed by the curvature of the planet. Around the sides was a bright light of the non-eclipsed world. “I just noticed it getting darker and darker,” she says. Around her was a world in a shadow, and beyond the horizon was bright light.

Another surprise was in store for Pettway. Right when the plane reached the point of totality, he hit his millionth mile. The captain came on the PA and congratulated him, and the crew handed him a card–all while the plane was enveloped in darkness for those many minutes.

The moment of totality was fleeting–maybe four minutes–and both Williams and Pettway were bereft of description. It was a convivial moment, say both travelers, describing the event. Williams moved the bags at her feet so her seatmate could crouch and get a good view. Other passengers did similar moves. The riders were together, looking out, and seeing a truly otherworldly experience. “You’re in one small physical space and everyone is experiencing the same thing,” says Williams. “That doesn’t happen very often.”

And then it was over, and the plane chugged along. The sky got darker and darker until it hit blackness, and once again it began to get lighter and lighter. A few hours later, the flight landed, and the real world recommenced.

Both Pettway and Williams deplaned and tried to describe the event: It was cool, spectacular, like nothing they’d ever seen before. The people in the plane oohed and aahed. They all took pictures with their phones and attempted to document the glory.

But now it’s over. Perhaps in another hundred years a similar story will be told.

Jerry Brown, the governor of California, is not one to be cowed by federal backtracking on environmental regulations. His promise back in December that California “will launch its own damn satellites” should Trump defund the NASA operations that track climate change has become something of a rallying cry for the environmental resistance.

California should hold onto that stubbornness. The state has long been a leader in environmental policy and strong economic growth, but to keep both categories trending upward amid a retrograde national framework, it will have to double down on innovation and what San Francisco-based nonprofit Next 10‘s founder F. Noel Perry describes as “climate policy 2.0”–which means tackling the state’s housing and transportation woes.

For the past nine years, Next 10 has released an annual report entitled the California Green Innovation Index, which tracks the state’s economic growth alongside its environmental policies. Over the course of the report’s existence, Perry’s organization has tracked how California’s per-capita GDP has grown by around $5,000 per person–nearly double the national rate–and its emissions have dropped by 12%. Job growth, in that time frame, exceeded national rates by 27%, largely driven by developments in the tech sector. This year, the report, developed in collaboration with Beacon Economics, a California-based research and consulting firm, reinforces how the state’s progressive environmental policies have grown alongside the economy–a dynamic that flies in the face of arguments favored by Donald Trump, who prefers to believe that clean energy equates to economic destruction. But the 2017 California Green Innovation Index also shows that the effects of the state’s efforts to support innovation and implement carbon-reduction policies are reaching a plateau–and issues a call for the public and private sectors to step up their game.

For the state that was the first in the nation to adopt energy efficiency policies on everything from buildings to televisions, it may seem a difficult task to pinpoint where exactly there’s room to create more emissions-curbing regulations. It’s not. It’s the transportation sector.

Transportation accounts for 38.5% of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report; transportation-related GHG actually increased 2.7% in 2015, likely due to lower gas prices and the state’s economic boom. “When the economy is doing well, people have jobs and people drive more,” Perry tells Fast Company. So there is, on the one hand, the Silicon Valley-esque elite class, who may be hopping in single-occupancy vehicles and speeding away on weekend trips. But that’s hardly the whole picture. The same forces that have created economic epicenters like Silicon Valley in the state have also precipitated a crisis in the housing market’s inability to keep up with demand, and that has pushed employees further and further away from where it is that they actually work.

While Silicon Valley is but one slice of California, it’s instructive to focus on it when talking housing and transportation issues. The workforce there is not one for carpooling: Around 75% of employees in the region drive themselves to work solo, and just over a quarter of office developments in the Bay Area lie within a half mile of a node in the region’s woefully inadequate public transportation network. With counties like San Mateo and Santa Clara adding only 22,000 units in the face of 167,000 new jobs between 2010 and 2014, lower-income workers have gone in search of affordable housing–often more than 100 miles away–in areas that aren’t served by public transit. By 7 a.m., the region’s roads are a gridlocked hell.

This is the knot that needs to be unraveled in order for the state to progress on its climate and economic goals, says Adam Fowler, a research manager at Beacon Economics who worked on the report. “Until we increase the housing supply, this issue is only going to compound,” Fowler says. Developing a more robust housing and transportation infrastructure will both create jobs, and enable more jobs to remain in the state’s economic centers. And alongside those shifts, California needs to aggressively pursue a shift to zero-emissions vehicles (ZEVs). There are promising signs in that regard, Perry says; in the first quarter of 2017, 5% of the vehicles purchased in the state were electric. But the state’s 13,282 charging stations are nowhere near enough to support the widespread use of ZEVs; currently, that equates out to just about .05 changing stations per vehicle.

Investments in ZEV infrastructure and housing, along with continued growth in renewable energy developments–in 2015, California brought its share of renewable energy generation up to 21.9%, and reached 8.5 jobs in wind and solar for every one job in fossil fuels–will enable the state to pursue its tandem economic and environmental efforts. With other states and countries looking to California to keep the U.S.’s progress on track, that task will just become more necessary, Perry says. After Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accords, Jerry Brown launched the Under2 Coalition, a subnational global climate leadership memorandum of understanding which will convene a group of 177 regional and city-level leaders next year to commit to environmental progress. “California will continue to do this work–our climate policies are separate from the federal government, and they have not hindered economic growth,” Perry says. “But we do need a new set of policies.”

It began in the middle of the night: a nagging idea that Christian Weber couldn’t shake. That there had to be a better way. That he had the better way.

After 20-plus years camping in a million different ways at Burning Man, the annual 70,000-person summer arts festival held in Nevada’s hot and windy-as-hell Black Rock Desert, in 2014, Weber came across something new: a friend’s hexayurt.

Increasingly popular on the playa (shorthand for the Black Rock Desert), the hexagonal shelter offers insulation, complete darkness, and respite from the withering heat or bitter cold. That helps explain why there are now well over 1,000 hexayurts in use every year at Burning Man. Weber loved the structure, the way several people could fit inside, and how cool the inside temperature was. He considered building one for the following year’s event, when he would lead a Burning Man camping group of 350 people.

Four months later, in the dead of night, he woke up at his home in Napa, California, his brain afire with inspiration. “I couldn’t get the idea out of my head,” Weber tells me during a recent interview. “I started to think about [adapting] the walls of a hexayurt together so they fold up into one piece. I thought about doing it with fabric. I got my origami book out and did some drawings.”

The result was the Shiftpod, a sturdy, insulated, easy-to-construct camping shelter that weighs 64 pounds but transports easily. At 77-by-13-by-13 inches, it’s big enough to fit a queen-sized bed and plenty of gear. Most people can stand up in it.

Originally, Weber planned on making a limited number of Shiftpods for campmates. He told his friends what he was doing and posted an online order form, thinking that maybe 30 people might want one at about $800 a pop. “Someone leaked it on Facebook,” he says. From there, he adds, “people were sending me money, people I didn’t even know . . . that year, we delivered 300 units out to the playa.”

Arriving in the desert that August, in 2015, I saw a Shiftpod for the first time. As someone who, like Weber, had explored countless Burning Man camping methods, I was intrigued by how a Shiftpod could both keep the dust out and be set up in less than five minutes. It looked like a lunar habitat–conversation piece!–and you didn’t freeze overnight. There’s nothing else like it. So prior to Burning Man 2016, I bought one.

In my camp alone last year, there were five Shiftpods and more than 1,000 on the playa. By then, Weber had sold his green-fracking operation and launched Advanced Shelter Systems Inc. (ASSI), the Napa-based company that’s turned his late-night Burning Man lodging idea into a multimillion-dollar business whose market extends far beyond the U.S. festival circuit—so far, in fact, that it requires an entirely new currency.

From Festival Hut To Rescue Shelter

Napa is most famous for being one of the world’s great wine-growing regions. Yet even a place dominated by miles of stunningly beautiful wineries has its share of nondescript office parks. And on a recent summer morning, I’m sitting in one with Weber to hear about everything that’s happened with Shiftpods over the last couple of years.

Although the shelters were built with Burning Man’s uncompromising conditions in mind, Weber told me that Burning man attendees, or “Burners,” now make up less than half of his customers. Attendees of other festivals have become dedicated buyers, as evidenced by a photo on the wall of a couple hundred Shiftpods set up at Further Future, an elite music and lifestyle event that the Wall Street Journal says should definitely not be called“Burning Man for billionaires.”

Originally sold for $800, Shiftpods have now progressed to a 2.0 model, and are currently available on sale for $1,299, down from their full price of $1,499. ASSI has also introduced a Shiftpod Mini (“A 110-pound [woman] can put that over her shoulder, hike that into a festival, take it on a plane,” Weber says) and a tunnel system that links two Shiftpods together.

But Weber’s story doesn’t end with the sale of thousands of high-end tents to festival goers. He remembers that when he returned home from Burning Man 2015, a fire was raging in Northern California that eventually killed four people, destroyed more than 2,000 buildings in several towns, and displaced thousands.

“I got back in my car and drove back to Burning Man [and] retrieved 20 Shiftpods . . . from storage,” he said. “We washed them, cleaned them, and rehabbed them” with the intent of donating them to the NGO that was coordinating relief efforts.

But he was rebuffed–the NGO only wanted money. Eventually, Weber donated a few Shiftpods to individual families, but the experience gave him a quick education in the realities of bureaucracy and process on the ground after disasters.

A Place For The Displaced

From the beginning, ASSI had committed to giving away one Shiftpod for every 20 it sold. But now, Weber was inspired by a larger need for shelters for disaster and emergency management. “There’s 53.4 million forcibly displaced in the world right now because of wars and politics,” Weber says. “A lot of them are living in shanty shacks with blue tarps, so we’re trying to create a low-cost, easy-to-ship, easy-to-set-up unit that people can live in for up to five years.”

You can find ASSI shelters all around the world. They’re in Haiti, Japan, and Nepal. In Greece, they’ve been used to warm up refugees as soon as they emerge from the ocean. Weber says ASSI worked with a software company to donate 200 Shiftpods to the city of Honolulu for disaster response and to help house the homeless in the Nation of Hawaii. And last year, when a hurricane was bearing down on Florida, Weber got a call asking for a thousand units. “We had a few hundred,” he says. “We put them on a trailer and were ready to go.”

This past June, 40 local, state, and federal agencies got together in Cape Blanco, Oregon, for Operation Triton 32, an emergency management exercise geared toward training the military, police, and other local first responders in this remote area to prepare for what could someday be a catastrophic earthquake.

ASSI was asked to bring some of its Shiftpods and new products, including the Shelterpod and Responsepod.

“We were pretty impressed as a whole,” says Jordan Fanning, the emergency operations center coordinator for the town of Brookings, Oregon. “Our first experience was meeting at the airport, and we hadn’t planned for [rain]. It was going to be an outdoor meeting. All of a sudden, there was a downpour. We had a Shiftpod. We ended up using it as our makeshift meeting room.”

Even better, folks from a couple of the Air Force agencies that were on hand appreciated the pods because they could be quickly set up after being flown in on helicopters. “When the Chinook landed,” Weber says, “we could set up a unit before the rotor blades even stopped turning.” 

And Shiftpods are sturdy: The force of the rotors never blew any of them down. (In a test at John Brown University in April, one of the shelters was put in front of a giant fan and subjected to increasingly strong winds. Only when gusts hit 109 miles an hour did the pod break loose and go flying.)

Fanning says the city of Brookings is considering buying several dozen Shiftpods as a way to ensure that essential employees have shelter in the event of a major quake. “If we could stick 40 to 50 of these in [a shipping container],” he says, “then we have the ability to respond to the incident [quickly] without having to wait for FEMA or the state.”

He wants to find a solution for that. “Our goal is to set up kits for individuals to take with them that have a shelter, water filtration, and everything you need for a family of four to survive for 30 days,” Weber says. “And to build systems for up to 1,600 people [that can be stored] in one container.”

An obvious customer would be large companies in earthquake zones (like Silicon Valley) that have big parking lots and plenty of space to both store and set up emergency shelters. “You could literally walk out the door, pop open the [container] doors, and set up camp,” Weber says. “All the systems—radio, satellite communications—spool up, turn on, and you’ve got a disaster camp in a box.”

He calls this the Shelterpod Disaster Camp, and you can draw a straight line between it and his Burning Man camp. The kits, Weber says, are “basically our 40-foot shipping container that we use at Burning Man. And every year we unload our camp out of the container and use our container as our kitchen. It literally has fold-down tables [and] air conditioning . . . and when we’re all done, we throw it back in the container, and it’s ready to go for next year.” ASSI would lease the kits to companies or agencies, or donate them to organizations that need them when disasters strike. 

Sheltercoin

While ASSI is willing to eat some of the costs of its donations, it’s still a for-profit business with a bottom line. That’s why, in searching for ways to help subsidize costs, the company created an all-new cryptocurrency.

Meant to be launched in the coming weeks, ASSI’s Sheltercoin will be modeled after Bitcoin and similar systems. If enough value can be vested in Sheltercoin, ASSI would be able to recoup a lot of the donated funds, even as it helps streamline the process for putting money into the hands of those on the ground in disaster areas.

To start, ASSI will hold what’s known as an initial coin offering, or ICO, in which people will buy Sheltercoin with dollars. In conjunction, the company plans to offer Shiftpod customers “steep discounts” if they buy with Sheltercoin instead of dollars.

If a significant number of people buy Shiftpods with the cryptocurrency, Weber hopes, that will prop up Sheltercoin, and ideally raise the currency’s value. The more the value increases, he reasons, the lower ASSI’s true costs on the Shiftpods it donates. “The more people use the coin, the higher the value of the coin, because there’s a limited quantity,” Weber says. “The higher the value, the more equipment we can purchase, the more people we can train, and the more product we can have ready to ship.”

At the same time, Weber hopes to be able to use Sheltercoin as a way to put money in the hands of relief workers who would otherwise have to wait days, or even a week or more, to receive funds sent through traditional methods. “With blockchain [the technology underlying the cryptocurrency], I can send it right to somebody’s phone,” Weber says. “And they can take it to a local company that takes bitcoin for cash and transfer the funds to them in exchange for the local currency.”

Currency exchangers, he adds, are often some of the first people to arrive in emergency situations.

Will it work? Weber thinks so, arguing that Sheltercoin could be the first cryptocurrency backed by a solid company with a global mission and an actual product. He believes a lot of new cryptocurrencies are nothing more than an idea or concept. “We are a well-established company with a hot product going into a huge market,” he said. “So we should be able to create a lot of demand for the coin.”

Heather Vescent, a futurist and expert in alternative currencies, agrees that the thirst for cryptocurrencies these days is “ridiculous.”

Vescent, who doesn’t have any firsthand knowledge of ASSI’s plans, lauds the company’s strategy for building a cryptocurrency around its social values. But she cautioned that ASSI and those using Sheltercoin would have to be disciplined and not allow the coin to be used in ways that are counter to those values.

And while she noted that there’s plenty of potential for a new coin to have huge gains, volatility in the cryptocurrency market could very easily lead to big losses for Sheltercoin’s backers.

As for when he will launch the ICO, he says he’d initially kicked around the idea of doing it the same night that the Man (Burning Man’s namesake effigy) burns. The festival, and its community, he says, are “our roots, so we’re not going to forget where we came from.”

“I always thought going to Burning Man was my release and my hobby,” Weber continues. “Now I’m able to take a lot of stuff I’ve learned out there and turn it into a product I can share with the world, and help a lot of people not only have fun, but who need help and shelter.”

Who Targets Me is a U.K.-based project that monitors your Facebook feed to see which parties and candidates are trying to influence your vote. Their goal is to increase transparency in election advertising, and to keep a lasting record to hold politicians accountable for their advertisements.

When Google fired the writer of a controversial document, in which he insisted that the company’s lack of female employees stems from biological differences, the company didn’t realize that it was handing the extreme right a poster boy.

In an interview with the engineer in question, James Damore, a Canadian right-wing vlogger asked if there were people who, like gay men at “all-male universities from 100 years ago,” felt they needed to hide their conservative identities at Google. Damore concurred: “There are people who are not on the left that feel like they need to stay in the closet and not really reveal themselves, and actually mask and say things that they don’t believe.”

Comparing themselves to a historically persecuted group, and leaning on the language of the oppressed to do it, is becoming right-wingers’ preferred tactic for laying claim to a minority identity they feel is under assault. Damore himself uses this rhetorical turn in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, decrying his firing as public shaming at its worst:

Whether it’s in our homes, online, or in our workplaces, a consensus is maintained by shaming people into conformity or excommunicating them if they persist in violating taboos. Public shaming serves not only to display the virtue of those doing the shaming, but also warns others that the same punishment awaits them if they don’t conform.

This isn’t the first time the right has cast itself as being preyed upon by the ferocious left. Remember the year Bill O’Reilly and his ilk declared that Christmas, still the most celebrated holiday in America, was under attack?  Self-marginalization, regardless of the merits, has become a useful tactic.

“They are trying to stamp conservatism and libertarianism out entirely, cutting off our distribution and revenue channels,” former Breitbart staffer Milo Yiannopoulos wrote in an August 15 Facebook post. “This is the great shuttering. War is upon us.”

The idea, seemingly held not just by white nationalists and neo-Nazis but also by many conservatives and libertarians as well, is not just that a certain set of beliefs is being pushed out of public discourse (which might otherwise be decried simply as censorship), it’s that the group of people who hold them are being targeted and victimized.

Student who attended Charlottesville white supremacist rally leaves Boston University after backlash https://t.co/saV2uaAkAXpic.twitter.com/fgcWvfBHk4

— TIME (@TIME) August 18, 2017

Where Ethnicity-Based Rights Activism Came From

This difference is crucial because it marks a coopting by the far right of what’s been dubbed the “ethnicity-and-rights model” of activism, employed throughout U.S. history by a number of minority groups to make legislative strides. “Ethnicity, following the precedent of the black civil rights movement, has offered the dominant paradigm for political advancement,” the British theorist Alan Sinfield wrote in a 1996 essay. Later, the women’s and LGBT rights movements both followed that precedent, defining themselves as a category by virtue of exclusion from the political order, then using that identity to lobby for civil rights and political representation.

According to Vassar Professor Vinay Swamy, who studies gender, sexuality, and citizenship around the world, this model is distinctly American. Typically in the U.S., when people speak of themselves as a minority group, “the vocabulary and syntax is about rights,” he says.

But by appropriating this model, those on the far right are doing something different. “Ethnic” groups usually point to some sort of immutable quality as the source of their persecution, at least within political and social contexts–for instance, race, gender, or sexuality as popularly constructed. The extreme right, however, is trying to craft its minority status around political views first and foremost. While there’s undeniably a racial component, many of their rhetorical claims aren’t built on whiteness alone.

“If you don’t racialize, if you don’t tribalize, you will go extinct,” one right-wing Charlottesville protester told Splinter News. “We’ll be a minority soon, and do you think we’ll get a reservation? Do you think we’ll get affirmative action? If we don’t adopt an ethnocentric mind-set, we’re finished.”

If it seems preposterous that a group whose interests and ideas have largely dictated social mores in this country for most of its existence could possibly be facing persecution, that’s because it is. As of 2016, there are 11% more people who identify as conservative than there are people who check the box for liberal, according to Gallup. 

But it’s this fear that the gap is narrowing that’s fueling the far right’s adoption of the ethnicity model as a means of maintaining dominance in the current climate. And it’s already influencing political changes. Think of Fisher v. Texas and other cases launched expressly to claw back affirmative action policies at universities. Think also of President Trump’s push to ban travel from Muslim-majority countries, or his executive order to hire more border guards, or his promise to keep trans people from working for the military, and the attack on Planned Parenthood’s government funding.

That the right’s use of the ethnicity model has proved at least somewhat successful highlights the model’s inherent fragility and limitations. Historically, the groups that have used it to the greatest effect have gained enough momentum to achieve major legislative and electoral victories, but their efforts are prone to breaking down. More than 50 years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there’s still ample work for Black Lives Matter activists to do; second-wave feminism scored Title IX and an array of cultural changes before giving way to a more politically fragmented third wave. Before long, these movements tend to collapse into more finite identity groups, which form the basis for so-called “identity politics.”

Is There Any Getting Past “Identity Politics”?

Last year, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla controversially posited that identity politics cost Hillary Clinton the election by fragmenting Democrats rather than uniting them. She had reached out to some groups while alienating others, Lilla determined, rather than appealing to a broader set of values. In his view, this was a doomed strategy, because it divides people by identity group, then forces coalition building to win the majorities required to govern in a democratic system. “Those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it,” he cautioned in the New York Times.

Though Lilla notes conservatives have been using identity politics longer (the KKK is rooted in this methodology, he says), a breakdown may be coming for the right–no matter how resurgent white nationalists and their allies may appear today. In the wake of the activist Heather Heyer’s death in Charlottesville, many conservatives have distanced themselves from neo-Nazis and racists. Republican lawmakers including Marco Rubio, Orrin Hatch, Paul Ryan, Todd Young, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen all spoke out against white supremacy and the violence they incited.

Some have also put space between themselves and Trump, who was late to condemn the far-right groups that gathered in Virginia and then rolled his remarks back, calling the removal of “beautiful” Confederate monuments a “sad” tearing-apart of U.S. “history and culture.” Even Damore has said he doesn’t support many extreme-right activists who have claimed him as their own. “Just because someone supports me doesn’t mean I support them,” he told CNN.

For those on the left, some of the theories that have led to an “identity politics” backlash may point the way out of it. “Intersectionality,” the idea put forth by academic Kimberle Crenshaw, provides a vocabulary for discussing how various identities, and forms of oppression based on those identities, inform one another. But those nuanced conversations haven’t yet generated an alternative to the clearer-cut ethnicity model of rights activism that we’re used to. Until a new model emerges, fighting along “ethnic” or identity lines alone will continue to be a losing battle.

The feature first appeared in 2014 and allows Facebook users to mark themselves “safe” if they are in the area of a calamitous event like a terror attack or a natural disaster. The feature will now get a permanent home inside Facebook’s mobile apps, the company has announced. Users will now be able to access the Safety Check page to see where the feature has been activated as well as get information about the event.

The strange blue dogs began appearing on the streets of Mumbai on August 11, reports the Guardian. After local residents surmised that their bright blue fur could be the result of swimming in a polluted river, they approached the pollution control board to ask that it investigate a local manufacturing company that they suspected could be illegally dumping dyes and other pollutants into the river. On Wednesday the pollution control board confirmed as much and the manufacturing company was shut down. An animal welfare company has managed to catch some of the dogs and wash the dye off and noted that they appear to be unharmed in other ways.

The U.S. automaker is exploring setting up a joint venture with China’s Anhui Zotye Automobile Company to build electric vehicles in the country, reports Reuters. Not only is China the world’s largest automaker, the government is pursuing aggressive goals to have electric and plug-in hybrid cars make up 20% of vehicles on the road by 2025. The reasoning: It would help cut back on the pollution affecting many large Chinese cities. If the Ford-Anhui Zotye joint venture goes forward, the two car companies would create an entirely new brand for the electric vehicles to be sold under.

We already know that college degrees come at a high cost. Last year, the average student debt load was $37,172, according to analysis by higher education expert Mark Kantrowitz.

Some jobs in growing fields, however, pay well and don’t require a bachelor’s degree. CareerCast crunched the numbers (salary data and growth outlook from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) to identify the top 10 jobs. Many are in healthcare, but you’ll also find electrician, plumber, executive assistant, and broadcast technician in the mix.

However, CareerCast’s analysts found that web developer is not only a promising full-time path, but also one of the best jobs for part-time and freelance work in 2017. The IT industry usually places a premium on advanced degrees, but the BLS says associate’s degrees will do, and the annual median salary is $66,130 with a forecast of 27% growth.

Nearly half of all college students in America end up dropping out, an epidemic quit rate that’s poised to cause some serious economic trouble: Most jobs today require some form of higher education, leaving a gap of 3 million qualified candidates by 2018 that spikes to 16 million by 2025.

This achievement gap already costs the U.S. as much as $2.3 trillion annually in lost gross domestic product because less-than-qualified U.S. workers end up underperforming. At the same time, for those struggling to get ahead, a diploma also represents one of the surest ways to ensure upward mobility. People without a college education are three times more likely to live in poverty.

Burns says that most of UIA’s school presidents realized they were doing an awful job at keeping students enrolled, particularly those who from low-income households, first generation, or students of color. “[They said], ‘Clearly we’re all pretty united in a sense of urgency around this. Is there a way we can work together because working alone is a waste of time energy and money? And at the end of day, students are the ones who are paying the price.'”

One alarming trend: Despite receiving financial aid, roughly 4,000 seniors who have good grades may quit school because of small outstanding scholastic debt. The sums are often less than $1,000–but in many cases, such balances make them unable to register for their next batch of classes.

UAI and its partners will spend $4 million on micro-debt forgiveness, which will be managed by in-network academic advisors to use at their discretion over the course of the next five semesters. Half of the money is coming primarily from the Gates Foundation and Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation & Affiliates but the other half is a school match. Because every project that UAI does is carefully vetted beforehand, all institutions agree to double whatever philanthropic amount is directed toward their campuses.

The estimated award per student is projected to be about $900, but students can’t apply; administrators, who are adhering to an internal formula designed to spot the best candidates, will identify candidates and offer the one-time surprise infusion. “We know there’s variation across the 11 [schools] but we want to find the students who are low income, on track to graduate within a year—so they’ve already got a lot of effort behind them and it’s not too far ahead—but they have some unexpected costs,” she says.

The concept of micro-debt relief has already proven effective at Georgia State University, a UAI affiliate that started its own retention granting program in 2011 to try to support the 1,000 or so students that it was losing each semester of extremely small tuition balances. Georgia State’s program is open to all students, not just seniors. Historically, it has 75% of those with more than a year to go are still enrolled 12 months later, while 60% of senior recipients go on to graduate within the same year that they receive assistance.

“Completion grants have been a critical part of our efforts to help students persist and succeed,” added Tim Renick, GSU’s vice-provost in a press release about the new effort.

Burns expects UAI disbursements to cover only about half of the coalition’s students in need. That’s partly because of limited funding but also necessary because it’s a wide-scale experiment. Not aiding everyone creates a sad but necessary control group, allowing future funders to better compare the power of small, emergency cash allowances for those who received them versus those who didn’t.

More broadly, however, she hopes that UIA’s investment encourages other schools to act similarly. “This signaled where they should be focusing their attention,” she says. “These are many of the most innovative universities, who are saying, ‘These are things that are worth your limited time energy and money.'”

Nancy, the podcast from WNYC that tells stories from the LGBTQ community, is headed into the office—but it needs your help.

The show, which is hosted by Kathy Tu and Tobin Low, has just launched its new season and they’re focusing on how the LGBTQ community interacts with the modern workplace. At a time when LGBTQ job protections are under threat at the federal and state level, it’s an important question. To tell those stories, though, Nancy needs people willing to speak up about whether or not they’re out on the job and what that has meant for them personally, professionally, and financially. Specifically, they are looking for “difficult, funny, embarrassing, surprising stories.” If you have a story to tell, take their survey here.

To kick off their new season, the show starts with a Pride event held in a very unlikely workplace—the Pentagon. It’s a surprising story about the brave civilians, military personnel, and even officers who organized a Pride event at the Department of Defense’s headquarters shortly after the repeal of the controversial “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. Listen here.

Read more: 4 Charts That Illustrate The Bias Against LGBTQ Workers In The Nonprofit World and Six Steps For Finding LGBT-Friendly Employers

The Taser is thought to be a “less than lethal” alternative to a firearm during aggressive police encounters. But in a new tally, Reuters has counted 1,005 incidents in the U.S. in which people died after police stunned them with the electrical weapons, most since the early 2000s. The Taser was ruled to be a cause or contributing factor in 153 of those deaths—far more than the 24 cases the company has counted.

According to court records, police reports, and news stories from 1983, as well as reports by other organizations, Reuters found that

• Nine in 10 of those who died were unarmed and one in four suffered from mental illness or neurological disorders, according to Reuters.
• In nine of every 10 incidents reviewed, the deceased was unarmed.
• More than 100 of the fatal encounters began with a 911 call for help during a medical emergency.
• More than 400 incidents included court documents that had detailed accounts of the incidents, and a fourth of those showed that Tasers were the only form of police force.
• In 193 out of a total of 442 wrongful death cases filed after the deaths, cities and their insurers paid a total of $172 million, but due to confidentiality, the actual value of awards in legal settlements is certainly higher than $172 million.

Tasers save lives, say police officials and Axon Enterprise, the company that makes them, citing independent studies showing that when deployed correctly—according to “guidelines” Axon offers to police—Tasers reduce injuries among both officers and the people they subdue. Steve Tuttle, the company’s vice president for communications, said they are “the safest force option available to law enforcement.”

But amid widespread concern about police use of force, there is no authoritative data about fatalities involving Tasers or any weapon used by police. The Taser is one of the most widely used: More than 90% of U.S. police agencies use them, and they have been deployed more than 3 million times in the field, says Axon.

The company says that only 24 people have ever died from Tasers—18 from fatal injuries in falls caused by a Taser strike, and six from fires sparked by the weapon’s electricity. Not a single person, the manufacturer says, has died from the direct effects of the Taser’s powerful shock to the heart or body. Axon called the Reuters report misleading because most of the deaths also involved other use-of-force and because the autopsies had not been peer-reviewed, even though courts don’t require that standard.

Read more:See a map by Reuters of fatal police encounters that involved Tasers. 

The probability of dying from a Taser in a police encounter may be impossible to calculate, researchers say, given a lack of official data on their use, the fact that deaths often have more than one cause, and other complexities. Partly due to ethical constraints, little scientific research exists on how Tasers affect people in mental health crises, people under the influence of drugs, those with heart defects, and those who may be pregnant.

Axon also keeps a record of deadly incidents involving Tasers, but the company doesn’t share that data. After learning of the Reuters investigation, Axon sent a memo to law enforcement groups summarizing some of the key points of the Reuters report, describing them as “not new” and promising to provide “key resources” to repudiate its findings.

A History Of Lawsuits

As its stun guns took off in the early 2000s, the company also began to face dozens of lawsuits over injuries and deaths. It prevailed in most of its legal cases, but in 2009 it revised its safety warnings to say that exposure of the electrical weapon to a person’s chest risked causing cardiac arrest.

In April the company changed its name from Taser International to reflect, it said, a new focus on body cameras and digital evidence. Board member Hadi Partovi, who was also an early advisor and investor in companies like Facebook and Dropbox, told Fast Company that he’s been pushing for the shift in focus since he joined in 2010. “As soon as the company embarked on this new business, I remember having the conversation that this is a much larger opportunity, and if we succeed at it, the name of the company is going to need to be reinvented—the entire business is going to reinvent the company.”

Stemming what it has called false accusations about its products and defending the company and its police customers was one of the reasons Taser began to focus on video evidence to begin with. When the company launched Evidence.com in 2009, co-founder and then-chairman Tom Smith said that police video could slice Taser’s own legal costs in half.

While its body cameras are thought to be the most widely used among U.S. police—and as it builds up its expertise in software—most of its business still comes from Taser weapons.

It’s Up To Police To Decide How They’re Used, Says Axon

In a quarter of the 1,005 fatalities examined by Reuters, a quarter involved people suffering from mental illness. Amid cuts in government-funded mental health services, police encounters with those people have become more common: 1 in every 100 police calls involves a person with a mental health disorder, according to research by the American Psychiatric Association. Police experts worry that Tasers are used too often by officers when handling those encounters.

“Cops have been turned into mental health workers on the street,” Ken Wallentine, former chief of law enforcement for the Utah Attorney General, who advises police departments on use of force, told Reuters. “I fear that some police training and some police practices have allowed the crowding out of persuasion,” he said, “and the Taser has become the default tool.”

Officially, Axon warns police against using the weapons on people who exhibit “extreme agitation” and “bizarre behavior.” More recently, the company has warned police against using Tasers on someone “who is actually or perceived to be mentally ill,” but that specific recommendation is not included in a list of warnings it gives to police departments, which have full discretion in designing polices for the weapon’s use.

Related: How Will We Police The Police?

The company’s warnings do not prohibit Taser use on people suffering from mental illness. “It doesn’t say, ‘You shall not use this on someone that may be emotionally disturbed,'” Tuttle told Reuters.

The news agency called its report the most thorough accounting to date on Taser use, relying on court records, police reports, and news stories from 1983, as well as reports by other organizations, including Amnesty International. The Reuters report used stricter criteria to determine which cases to count, but it nevertheless is still 44% larger than the 700 reported by Amnesty at the end of 2016.

Updated to include Partovi quote and background on lawsuits and incidents involving those suffering from mental illness.