There’s a strange kind of art imitating life going on with the film, Home Again. Reese Witherspoon’s character has a deceased filmmaker father, who specialized in a narrow genre. His Lincoln Center retrospective would have apparently been thick with classics about “truth in the bedroom, the agony of love, and the humor of it all.” First-time writer/director Hallie Meyers-Shyer freely admits, though, that these are the kinds of movies she herself aspires to make. Of course, they’re also the kind many associate with her mom, Nancy Meyers.

At some point in the past decade or so, romantic comedies seemed to have all but disappeared from the box office. Even before then, many of them had begun to degenerate into something close to self-parody. Nancy Meyers’s movies, however–like Something’s Gotta Give and The Intern–are cut from a different cloth. They transcend genre. They resonate. They navigate complex emotional spaces while remaining funny and sweet enough to hit viewers like a warm blanket on a cold day. And now, following in the tradition of Meyers, who produced Home Again, Hallie Meyers-Shyer has also made a film with loftier ambitions than the standard-issue rom-com.

This particular relationship comedy has an unwieldy plot, so buckle up.

In Home Again, Reese Witherspoon plays Alice, a creative recently separated from Michael Sheen’s Austen. She’s just moved with her two young children into her deceased auteur father’s house in Hollywood, while reinventing herself as an interior decorator. During a crazy night of blowing off some 40th birthday steam, Alice and a few pals befriend three younger men, and Alice intimately befriends one of them. Due to circumstantial factors, she ends up inviting these men to stay in her guest house while they finish the film deal they’re in the middle of making–one that will deliver them financial independence. Not-quite-ex-husband Austen doesn’t exactly love this idea.

As a child, Meyers-Shyer lived for set visits and screenings. By the time she made it to high school, she was writing films of her own. These early efforts were mostly just practice, though. Her first exposure to the process of actually writing a movie arrived when Charles Shyer asked her to collaborate on a project–an adaptation of the children’s book Eloise. (She was 20 years old at the time.) The prodigal daughter learned a lot from the experience and continued writing her own scripts more seriously afterward while attending film school.

Meyers-Shyer had been playing around with the idea of Home Again for some time before she told her mom about it. Once she did, though, Nancy Meyers loved the idea and encouraged her to continue pursuing it. After trading notes back and forth on subsequent drafts, Hallie eventually asked her mother whether she’d ever consider producing the film with her. She said yes right away.

You may be wondering at this point whether Nancy Meyers gives great screenwriting notes. Her daughter was delighted. If not surprised to learn that yes, in fact, she does.

“My mom has a really innate sense of pace and structure,” Meyers-Shyer says. “I’ve gone to film school and I’ve read books, and she’s never read any of those, but she just has an inner clock, like ‘this should start happening around here.’ If you’ve seen any of her films, she really holds your hand throughout the experience of reading one of her scripts. They’re very well structured and they’re sound. So, working together on this, she really helped me with pace and with layering the characters.”

“Sometimes I’d read a draft as George, and then I’d read it as Teddy, and then I’d read it as Alice,” she says. “It was a way of making sure each character has something to do in each scene and represents themselves by saying the thing that they would say.”

One thing she enjoyed about directing that she hadn’t anticipated, though, was placing Easter eggs in her movie. During the opening, for instance, viewers see a poster for a film starring Alice’s mother (Candice Bergen), and it’s called Lola In Between. That’s the name of a script she wrote in high school. It’s a joke for maybe 10 people on the planet.

“When you’re the director, your movie is like a personal photo album,” she says. “You put a lot of yourself into it.”

As Meyers-Shyer puts it, “I don’t think going to see Thor is gonna get you in the mood.”

Dr. Tara Swart advocates for a four-day workweek based on how stress affects the brain.

“About 20 years ago, it was seen as really important to be strategic rather than tactical,” says neuroscientist Tara Swart. But advances in her field, combined with the shifting demands of modern employers, have begun to change that. “Now, I think an understanding of the cognitive sciences is going to be the thing that makes people thrive.”

Indeed, as Swart points out, there’s a growing understanding that deeply human capabilities–the skills, including those rooted in emotional intelligence, that aren’t so easily automated–may be rising in value in the future job market. But from a brain-science perspective, she explains, many of those core skills have always been among humans’ most valuable evolutionary assets. “The ‘executive functions’ of the brain are the highest functions of the brain,” Swart says, and those include the ability to:

1. regulate our emotions
2. suppress our biases
3. switch between tasks
4. solve complex problems
5. think creatively and flexibly

Here’s Swart’s take on why those brain skills are so crucial as the workplace evolves, and what it takes to optimize them.

A lot of people are framing the launch of the new iPhone X as Apple’s chance to revive a flagging iPhone business. The last couple of phone releases, it’s said, have not delivered the kind of blockbuster power Apple needs to sustain growth.

Now comes the 10th anniversary iPhone X–the super phone, the mold breaker, and Apple’s best chance for another huge hit!

I’d argue that that’s a skewed way of looking at things.

You often see a bar chart showing iPhone sales growing steadily since it launched in 2007, then leaping up in 2015 with the release of the iPhone 6. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were indeed a departure. They gave consumers the larger screens they’d been waiting for—the right product at just the right time. It was a huge hit, pushing Apple’s total revenues up 28%. (Apple gets about two-thirds of its total revenues from iPhone sales.)

Should we judge the iPhone business on whether Apple can repeat or exceed that hit? Maybe not. Maybe the iPhone 6 was a one-off, an outlier. Tastes can change rapidly, faster than technologies. The chance to perfectly match a strong consumer desire with something as basic and utilitarian as a size change just doesn’t come along every day.

If you just remove the bar on the graph that represents the iPhone 6 sales in 2015, you see a smooth and predictable increase in iPhone sales from 2014 to 2016. The jury’s still out on full-year 2017 sales. But if you look at the quarterly iPhone revenue numbers this year, they’ve beaten each of the same quarters in 2016.

And remember this is all happening against the backdrop of thinning smartphone sales globally over the past few years. It’s become much harder to find people who are buying a smartphone for the first time. It’s also been shown that people are holding onto their smartphones longer these days before upgrading.

Apple will be introducing a bunch of brand new features in the iPhone X–like facial recognition, wireless charging, and augmented reality stuff– which I’m sure it hopes will open a brand-new chapter for the device. The company would love another hit like the iPhone 6, but it may be that all Apple has to do is convince a significant part of its user base to spend a few hundred more than they normally would for an iPhone upgrade.

Video: Can Apple’s iPhone X Break Its Losing Streak?

The iPhone X is expected to start at around $1,000 and move up depending on memory. Apple almost certainly had to jack up the selling price to pay for the expensive new OLED display, wireless charging, and 3D laser systems in the new phone, but it probably didn’t do so at the expense of its normal high margin. And let’s not forget about the new iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. Apple may slap attractive price tags on those phones so that they sell in high numbers. We’ll see all the prices tomorrow, but rest assured that Apple marketing has thought all this through very, very carefully.

So let’s not start blowing the horns of doom if consumers don’t flock to lay down the plastic for the (expensive) new phone—not yet at least. But let’s do tune into our live blog for the play-by-play Tuesday starting at about 9 a.m. The presentation at Steve Jobs Theater starts at 10 a.m.

Apple is holding its annual fall product-launch event at the newly minted Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California, today. The tech giant is expected to announce a glut of new gadgets and products, including three new iPhones and updates to the Apple Watch and Apple TV. The event starts today at 10 a.m. Pacific Time (1 p.m. ET) and will begin with a keynote from CEO Tim Cook.

As usual, if you want to watch live, you need to do so on Apple’s Safari browser. More specifically, you’ll need to be using a device that runs iOS 9 or later or a Mac computer that runs macOS 10.11 or later. You can access the live-stream link here.

Our Mark Sullivan and Harry McCracken will be on hand in Cupertino with all the latest announcements, which you can view in real time on Fast Company‘s live blog.

Of course, a number of details have already leaked, including news last week that Apple is expected to release a phone called the iPhone X. Mark has more on that here. He also wrote about how today’s event could mark a turning point for the Apple Watch. The company is rumored to be readying its Apple Watch Series 3, one of which will have an LTE chip inside for cellular connectivity–no iPhone required. For more on that, check out Mark’s preview here.

Happy Apple Day.

For 20 years, I’ve taught at the University of Houston, the most racially and ethnically diverse research university in the United States. I recently asked my class of 60 graduate students whether their political, social, and cultural beliefs aligned with their grandparents’. About 15% of the students said yes or pretty close, while the remainder described everything from mild embarrassment to mortification when it came to their family members’ politics.

One African-American student said he saw eye to eye with his grandparents on just about every issue except the one that mattered most to him: He couldn’t come out to his grandfather even though the rest of his family knew he was gay. A retired pastor, his grandfather was “dug in” around homosexuality. A white student talked about her father’s habit of addressing waiters in Mexican restaurants with “hola, Pancho!” She had a Latino boyfriend and said it was humiliating. But when I asked these students whether they resented their grandparents or were willing to sever bonds with family members over political and social divides, the answer was no across the board.

You might think that the exhaustively documented polarization of American society would lead to more social interaction; if we’ve hunkered down, ideologically and geographically, with those we perceive to be just like us, doesn’t that mean we’ve surrounded ourselves with friends and people with whom we feel deeply connected? Shouldn’t “you’re either with us or against us” have led to closer ties among the like-minded?

In fact, the opposite is happening. At the same time that cultural and political sorting is on the rise, so is loneliness.

Hardwired For Connection, And Not Getting It

In his 2009 book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, the journalist Bill Bishop observed that in 1976, fewer than 25% of Americans lived in places where the presidential election was a landslide. In other words, we lived next door to, and attended school and worshiped with, people who held different beliefs than ours. We were ideologically diverse. In contrast, in 2016, 80% of U.S. counties gave either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton a landslide victory. Most of us no longer even live near people who are all that different from us in terms of political and social beliefs.

This shift has tracked closely with another pattern over a similar time period. In 1980, approximately 20% of Americans reported feeling lonely. By 2010, according to AARP researchers, that figure had more than doubled. University of Chicago neuroscientist John Cacioppo defines the phenomenon as “perceived social isolation,” which basically means that we experience loneliness when we feel disconnected. Maybe we’ve been pushed to the outside of a group that we value, or we lack a sense of true belonging. At the heart of loneliness, Cacioppo believes, is an absence of meaningful social interaction–an intimate relationship, friendships, family gatherings, or even community or work group connections.

As members of a social species, we derive strength not from our rugged individualism but from our collective ability to plan, communicate, and work together. Our neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence. As Cacioppo explained in a 2013 TEDx Talk, the key to reaching adulthood “is not to become autonomous and solitary, it’s to become the one on whom others can depend. Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to favor this outcome.”

Cacioppo points out that biological machinery of our brains warns us when our ability to thrive and prosper is threatened. Hunger is a warning that our blood sugar is low and we need to eat. Thirst warns us that we need to drink to avoid dehydration. Pain alerts us to potential tissue damage. And loneliness tells us that we need social connection. He explains, “Denying you feel lonely makes no more sense than denying you feel hunger.”

Yet we do deny our loneliness. We feel shame around being lonely (as if feeling lonely means there’s something wrong with us), even when it’s caused by grief, loss, or heartbreak. This isn’t just sad–it’s actually dangerous. We’ve evolved to react to the feeling of being pushed to the social perimeter by going into self-preservation mode: when we feel isolated, disconnected, and lonely, we try to protect ourselves. That means less empathy, more defensiveness, more numbing, and less sleeping. In this state, the brain ramps up the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening–narratives that often aren’t true and exaggerate our worst fears and insecurities.

If Fear Is How We Got Here, How Do We Get Out?

To combat loneliness, we must first learn how to identify it and to see that experience as a warning sign. Our response to that warning sign should be to find connection. That doesn’t necessarily mean joining a bunch of groups or checking in with dozens of friends. Numerous studies confirm that it’s not the quantity of friends but the quality of a few relationships that actually matter.

But if you’re anything like me, and you find yourself questioning the idea that starvation and loneliness are equally life-threatening, consider this 2015 meta-analysis of studies on loneliness, in which researchers found the following: Living with air pollution increases your odds of dying early by 5%. Living with obesity, 20%. Excessive drinking, 30%. And living with loneliness? It increases our odds of dying early by 45%.

No, there’s no evidence that sorting ourselves into politically distinct enclaves has made us lonelier; it’s not that simple. But one core variable driving that society-wide compulsion also happens to compound loneliness, and make it so life-threatening: Fear. Fear of vulnerability. Fear of getting hurt. Fear of the pain of disconnection. Fear of criticism and failure. Fear of conflict. Fear of not measuring up.

I started my research six months before 9/11, and I’ve watched fear change our families, organizations, and communities. Our national conversation is centered on, “What should we fear?” and, “Who should we blame?” I’m not an expert on terrorism, but after studying fear for 15 years, here’s what I can tell you: Terrorism is time-released fear. Its ultimate goal is to embed fear so deeply in the heart of a community that fear becomes a way of life. This unconscious way of living then fuels so much anger and blame that people start to turn on one another. Terrorism is most effective when we allow fear to take root in our culture. Then it’s only a matter of time before we become fractured, isolated, and driven by our perceptions of scarcity.

In a hardwired way, the initial trauma and devastation of violence unites human beings for a relatively short period of time. If during that initial period of unity we’re allowed to talk openly about our collective grief and fear–if we turn to one another in a vulnerable and loving way, while at the same time seeking justice and accountability–it can be the start to a very long healing process. If, however, what unites us is a combination of shared hatred and stifled fear that’s eventually expressed as blame, we’re in trouble.

If leaders race to serve up an ideological enemy to rally against, rather than methodically identifying the actual perpetrator, we’ll be emotionally distracted from the unraveling that’s really taking place in our homes and communities. When this happens, what feels like a rallying movement is really a cover for fear, which can then start spreading over the landscape. As fear hardens, it expands–becoming less of a protective barrier and more of a solidifying division. It forces its way down in the gaps and tears apart our social foundation, already weakened with those delicate cracks.

Our Bunkers Can’t Protect Us

In the U.S., our three greatest fault lines–cracks that have grown and deepened due to willful neglect and a collective lack of courage–are race, gender, and class. These are conversations that need to happen; this is discomfort that must be felt. Still, as much as it’s time to confront these and other issues, we have to acknowledge that our lack of tolerance for vulnerable, tough conversations is driving our self-sorting and disconnection.

Can we find our way back to ourselves and to each other, and still keep fighting for what we believe in? No and yes. No, not everyone will be able to do both, simply because some people will continue to believe that fighting for what they need means denying the humanity of others. That makes connecting outside our bunkers impossible.

I do believe, however, that most of us can build connection across difference and fight for our beliefs if we’re willing to listen and be vulnerable. But if we’re not even willing to try, the value of what we’re fighting for will be profoundly diminished. True belonging has no bunkers. We have to step out from behind the barricades of self-preservation and brave the wild. When we race to our customary defenses–of political belief, race, religion, you name it–we don’t have to worry about being vulnerable or brave or trusting. We just have to toe the party line.

Except doing that is not working. Ideological bunkers protect us from everything except loneliness and disconnection. Huddled behind them, we’re left unprotected from the worst heartbreaks of all.

This article is adapted with permission from Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone by Brené Brown. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Copyright © 2017 by Brené Brown. All rights reserved.

One of the first things I noticed when I arrived at RuPaul’s DragCon NYC, just after 10 a.m. last Sunday, was that the drag convention was sharing the Javits Center with a rug show. By the time I left four hours later, I’d seen half a dozen khaki-clad veterans of the carpeting industry snap selfies with seven-foot-tall drag queens in 10-inch lacquered pumps. Clearly something was catching.

Since its Los Angeles debut in 2015, DragCon has pulled in such massive crowds that organizers decided to go bicoastal with the live event this year, which mirrors the success of the show it’s based on.

One 21-year-old DragCon attendee proudly informed me that she hails from South Plainfield, New Jersey, the same town where Michelle Visage, Ru’s chief deputy on Drag Race and a persona in her own right, went to high school–and that she’d started watching “four or five years ago.”

Teenagers and even younger children, many accompanied by parents, waited on long lines to hug their favorite queens. They crowded up to tables for a chance to paint glitter onto every available square patch of skin. By lunchtime, a third of the cosmetics at Sugarpill’s makeup table were marked as sold out. A marketing coordinator at Scruff told me that the majority of people snapping selfies at the gay hookup app’s photo booth were young women and girls. “I’ve been constantly saying, ‘If you’re under 18 I can’t let you back there!'”

Take a close look at the fierce and fabulously painted faces in Fast Company’s portraits from this weekend–you’ll undoubtedly be seeing more of them.

As you probably heard, Hillary Clinton dusted herself off from the rubble of the 2016 presidential election, emerged from a long walk in the woods, and has written a sure-to-be best-seller. Yes, Clinton chronicled her version of her historic presidential run and published it, and not on a blog on her personal server, either, but in an actual book, even though, as Wonkette noted, “at least ten men told her she shouldn’t.” Now, that succinctly titled book, What Happened, has already reached the top of Amazon. The book was released today and, at last check, it was the No. 1 best-selling title on the U.S. version of the site. Apparently, it’s the perfect thing to read while sipping on a mug of male tears.

AMC, A&E, Discovery, and Viacom are almost ready to launch a streaming bundle without sports channels such as ESPN, according to the Wall Street Journal. Reportedly dubbed “Philo,” the service will cost less than $20 per month, and will soft-launch in the coming weeks.

As Variety notes, the name Philo is based on the company providing the technology. The company got started at a Harvard incubator four years ago, and has provided streaming TV channels to students on college campuses. While Philo’s website still contains links to the education component, the main page now touts “the future of TV” and asks people to sign up for more details.

It’s still unclear exactly what the new bundle will cost, what channels it’ll include, or how it’ll work in general. But it’s likely to be just the start of new streaming bundles that drop sports programming in pursuit of lower prices. With Discovery acquiring Scripps, for instance, the network is reportedly considering its own bundle for around $4 per month.

Apple is unveiling the iPhone 8 today, and while some of the details have leaked (face-scanning security! wireless charging! $1,000 price tag!), there’s still room for speculation. That’s where Seth Meyers comes in. On Monday night’s episode of Late Night, Meyers started a few rumors of his own about the new iPhone‘s features. He believes consumers will respond to the phone’s new rotary dial, as well as thefree 30-second warranty, “pre-lost headphones,” and the automatic voicemail deletion service, “cause ain’t no one listening to that s#@!” Perhaps the best rumored feature, though, is a reconfigured Siri who will comfort you whenever you read something unsettling about North Korea or Donald Trump in the news.

Cheap leather goods abound, but when it comes to beautifully crafted leather bags and wallets, prices can be astronomically high. This is something that Rae Liu discovered while working for the designer Alexander Wang, helping him launch his handbag and footwear lines.

“It quickly became clear to me that brands are heavily inflating the price of leather,” Liu says. “Part of this has to do with supply-chain inefficiencies, but part of this is because people will pay a lot to get leather that they know is high quality.”

This results in cheaper prices. Tote bags cost $140 while wallets cost as little as $75. Leatherology is now working on making products easily customizable. Almost every item in the collection can be monogrammed, and the brand has just launched a new painting program, where customers can choose a design and have it hand-painted onto their bag, a look that Goyard made famous. Leatherology has also chosen not to stick a big label on the products, but to keep its branding subtle.

The proliferation of brands like Leatherology–whose model is similar to brands like Everlane and Cuyana–marks a shift in consumer behavior. “Consumers are more informed than ever since they can educate themselves online,” Liu says. “At one time, a designer label was a mark of quality. But we firmly believe that consumers are much more interested in value than in big names on their bags.”

Since its earliest days, workgroup collaboration phenom Slack has had a big, audacious goal: It’s wanted to kill email. And though the dream isn’t yet reality, the company has made major progress. Slack now has 6 million daily active users; 2 million of its users are part of 50,000 organizations that pay for the service. (That 6-million-user total is up from 500,000 in early 2015, a figure that seemed dazzling at the time.)

In my own purely anecdotal experience as a Slack user here at Fast Company, the service is an extraordinarily potent slayer of internal email: My inbox is nearly 100% free of messages from my colleagues. But it’s still full of missives from people outside of our company who I work with for one reason or another.

Today, at its first-ever conference, Slack is announcing a major effort to accomplish for inter-company communications what it’s already done for intra-company ones. A new feature, launching as a beta for paid customers, called Shared Channels lets two Slack-using organizations interact in spaces available to users from both sides. They can be public or private (the latter feature isn’t yet available in the initial version, but will be coming along) and include interface refinements such as corporate logos that appear as part of everybody’s avatars so that it’s clear who works for which outfit.

April Underwood, Slack’s VP of product, told me that Shared Channels are part of the company’s “march to make Slack more useful for more types of customers and more types of work,” particularly as larger organizations sign on to use the service. Along with Slack users benefiting from Shared Channels, Underwood expects the new feature to help boost the company’s growth as people from multiple companies in a channel learn from each other about the most effective ways to use the service and get more out of it. “This is the first time we’ll have inter-company network effects for Slack,” she says.

For now, Shared Channels don’t permit more than two organizations to interact; Underwood says that opening the feature up further is an intriguing idea, but Slack wanted to take things one step at a time.

More Languages, More Competitors

Slack is used in 100 countries and 55% of users are outside the U.S.; it has 330,000 weekly users in Tokyo alone, which doesn’t sound that far off the total of 420,000 in New York City. But despite the fact that it’s long been obvious that the service’s appeal is global, it’s only been available in one language: English. Now the company is launching internationalization for French, German, and Spanish, with Japanese on the way. I asked Slack cofounder and CEO Stewart Butterfield if there was any particular reason why the new languages are debuting at this particular point in time. “We’d liked to do everything at the same time and have everything done back in 2013,” he said. “This has been a big priority for a long while.”

Support for additional languages, like Shared Channels, is part of Slack’s effort to keep on growing. Its success so far has spawned a whole category of Slack-like services. Last November, for example, Microsoft introduced Teams, a new Office 365 component that’s pretty much a Slack for Microsoft-centric organizations. A startup named Redkix offers a Slack-esque service that wants to make email more useful rather than killing it. And Atlassian, whose HipChat predates Slack and often gets mentioned in the same breath, announced a new Slack rival called Stride last week.

So far, Butterfield says, the existence of Slack wannabes has been no more than “a very mild impediment” to the company’s growth efforts: “It’s usually a couple of extra questions for our salespeople in the larger organizations.” Speaking about Microsoft’s offering in particular, he said that he thinks “they’re probably a year, a year and a half away from having a product that’s feature-complete enough to be competitive.” For now, however, he says that he’s been issuing a challenge to the reporters he’s talked with: “If you can find us a customer who’s using Microsoft Teams with more than a couple thousand people, we’d love to hear about it.”

Katrina Virts was looking at data from the World Wide Lightning Location Network, a network of sensors that tracks global lightning, and noticed it almost right away: a peculiar line of lightning strikes that stretched nearly straight across the Indian Ocean. Testing a theory, she and her colleagues at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, compared the lightning map to maps of exhaust plumes from a global database of ship emissions, and found a shocking correlation: Thunderstorms above two of the world’s busiest shipping lanes seemed significantly more powerful than storms in other areas of the ocean.

In a new paper that tries to understand how this works, Virts and a team of other atmospheric scientists looked more closely. They studied the locations of 1.5 billion lightning strikes from 2005 to 2016, and found nearly twice as many strikes on average over the major routes ships take across the northern Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca and into the South China Sea, compared to adjacent areas of the ocean with similar climates.

Because the areas of increased lightning are far wider than the shipping lanes themselves, the researchers say the effect probably isn’t due to bolts striking ships directly. The increase in lightning also “cannot be explained by meteorological factors, such as winds or the temperature structure of the atmosphere,” they write.

Instead, they argue, the likely culprit is the ships’ emissions. The team hypothesizes that aerosol particles of soot and nitrogen and sulfur emitted in the engine exhaust of ships “act as the nuclei on which cloud drops form, and can change the vertical development of storms, allowing more cloud water to be transported to high altitudes, where electrification of the storm occurs to produce lightning.” As a statement published alongside the study explains:

Where the atmosphere has few aerosol particles–over the ocean, for instance–water molecules have fewer particles to condense around, so cloud droplets are large.

When more aerosols are added to the air, like from ship exhaust, water molecules have more particles to collect around. More cloud droplets form, but they are smaller. Being lighter, these smaller droplets travel higher into the atmosphere and more of them reach the freezing line, creating more ice, which creates more lightning. Storm clouds become electrified when ice particles collide with each other and with unfrozen droplets in the cloud. Lightning is the atmosphere’s way of neutralizing that built-up electric charge.

It’s “the first time we have, literally, a smoking gun, showing over pristine ocean areas that the lightning amount is more than doubling,” said Daniel Rosenfeld, an atmospheric scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was not connected to the study. “The study shows, highly unambiguously, the relationship between anthropogenic emissions—in this case, from diesel engines—on deep convective clouds.”

Thornton notes that ships burn dirtier fuels in the open ocean away from port, spewing more aerosols and creating even more lightning. One upside to this nearly continuous trail of shipping exhaust: Scientists hoping to better understand how aerosols affect cloud formation now have another place to focus their attention (not to mention more fodder for understanding and debating humans’ impact on the climate).

Related: Free Shipping Is A Lie

It’s thought that the global shipping industry sends more than $5 trillion of goods through the South China Sea every year, and that nearly 100,000 ships pass through the Strait of Malacca alone. Most ships crossing the northern Indian Ocean follow a narrow, almost straight track between Sri Lanka and the island of Sumatra. East of Sumatra, ships travel southeast through the Strait of Malacca, around Singapore and northeast across the South China Sea.

Humans, naturally, have been making it rain for a while now. An early ancestor of the geoengineering technologies some are pushing as a way to counter the effects of climate change, rainmaking was developed in part by Kurt Vonnegut’s brother Bernard in the 1940s in order to help farmers with drought-plagued croplands. The technique is still used to seed clouds, especially in China, where the government reportedly spends hundreds of millions on billions of tons of artificial rain a year (the blue skies that follow a government-ordered storm are often spectacular). And researchers at places like NASA use large lightning rods in order to trigger lightning and protect rocket launches, for instance.

The new shipping study is another reminder that we’re also capable of changing the weather by accident, in ways we don’t totally understand and often without even realizing it. It’s also a reminder that starting to realize it can be as simple, sort of, as comparing a couple of maps and asking a few questions.

The Apple Watch took a big evolutionary step forward today with the introduction of the Apple Watch Series 3, the first Apple wearable to pack the direct internet connection needed to declare independence from a paired iPhone.

Apple also announced a version of the Series 3 Watch with no LTE connection on board.

The internet-connected version of the Watch connects to the internet using the on-board LTE radio. With that connection, Watch apps should become more informed and useful when the paired iPhone isn’t nearby, constrained only by the small size of the display.

The new Watch follows the same general design scheme as its predecessors, but is marked off by a bold red top to its digital crown.
The design challenge Apple faced with the Series 3 was putting a power-hungry LTE radio and antenna inside the device, with a large enough battery to power them, while still keeping the Watch’s slim figure.

Apple pulled this off in part by building cellular antennas into the display, and using an electronic SIM instead of a physical card. The LTE Watch is only 0.25 mm thicker than previous watches, and is the same width. Like other Apple Watches the Series 3 comes in 42mm and 38mm sizes.

Beyond LTE, the new Watches have a new dual-core CPU that’s 70% faster than the previous model, a more energy-efficient Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chip, and a barometric altimeter to determine elevation. As with before, the new Watches also contain a GPS radio for mapping and fitness functions, and are water resistant for swimming workouts.

The new Watch runs the watchOS 4 operating system. (Check out our overview for the major features.) The OS lets the new Watch create a direct Bluetooth connection with third-party health devices, makes loading music on the Watch easier, and features the Siri watch face that uses AI to give you helpful notifications throughout the day.

The Apple Watch, remember, was originally intended by its makers to help us keep our noses out of our phones and engaged in real life. Previous Watches did that by showing us glanceable notifications on the wrist that could often be ignored, rendering the reach into pocket or purse for the phone unnecessary. This new Watch may do the same thing, but by stealing functionality from the phone. We’ll still see ignorable notifications, but we’ll be more able to respond on the Watch instead of the phone.

The Apple Watch Series 3 comes a variety of materials, colors, and band styles. The basic aluminum version starts at $399 with cellular–available in nine countries and on all four U.S. carriers to start–or $329 without it. (Apple gave no word on how much cellular service will cost.) Preorders start on September 15, and the Watch will start shipping a week later on September 22.

The Apple TV is getting a revamp with a focus on 4K HDR video. Dubbed Apple TV 4K, the new streaming box supports sharper videos with much greater color detail.

This assumes you have a 4K HDR television, and that the video in question supports the new format. Netflix and Amazon already support 4K HDR for some of their videos–an Amazon Prime app is coming later this year, rather than in the summer as Apple previously announced–and Apple is adding 4K HDR to some iTunes movies. Remarkably, those iTunes purchases will have the same price as HD movies, and users who’ve purchased HD films already will get upgraded to 4K HDR for free.

Beyond 4K HDR, the new Apple TV sports an A10X Fusion chip that’s twice as fast as the current Apple TV, and has four times the graphics power.

Apple also announced an update to the TV app for Apple TV and iOS devices. In addition to on-demand video, the app now pulls in live sports from streaming sources such as ESPN.

Those improvements don’t come cheap, however. The latest and greatest Apple TV is even pricier than its predecessor at $179. That’s about $90 more than the Roku Premiere+, and $110 more than the Chromecast Ultra, both of which also support 4K HDR. And while Apple plans to keep the old Apple TV around, it’ll still have the same starting price of $150.

For more coverage of Apple’s September 12 event, head to Fast Company’s live blog.

Apple Music just gave its listeners another small perk over other music services. As it unveiled the Series 3 version of the Apple Watch today, Apple also showed off a new feature for music subscribers: The smartwatch now streams songs from Apple Music natively, without the need to connect to an iPhone.

The native watch streaming gives Apple Music a small leg up over its chief rival Spotify, which is reportedly still working on its first app for the Apple Watch. With 150 million listeners, Spotify is still ahead of Apple Music (which has about 40 million subscribers), but by baking its music service into more products like the Apple Watch and forthcoming HomePod, Apple hopes to shrink Spotify’s lead, at least among Apple product devotees. A Spotify rep declined to offer an update on the company’s smartwatch app development timeline.

Apple Tuesday announced the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, the successor phones to last year’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.

The new phones are visually similar in size to their predecessors, though Apple says it has reinforced the glass to make it the most durable ever used on a phone. The iPhone 8 has a screen size of 4.7 inches while the iPhone 8 Plus has a 5.5-inch screen.

Both phones also support wireless charging through the Qi standard. This allows the iPhone to charge by lying flat on charging mats from vendors like Mophie and Belkin.

The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus come with some notable under-the-hood improvements. Both phones use a new “A11 Bionic” chip that’s 25% to 70% faster than its predecessor based on scenario, and boosts graphics performance by 30% at half the power.

The new phones use the same LED displays as the iPhone 7 line, but Apple adds in its TrueTone technology (already used in the iPad), which automatically adjusts the white level and brightness of the screen based on the lighting conditions around the device. The phones’ stereo speakers are also 27% louder than those of the Phone 7.

As for cameras, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus still have 12-megapixel shooters, but Apple has improved the sensors to let in 83% more light. And while dual cameras are still exclusive to the Plus models, Apple has added optical image stabilization to the standard iPhone 8. Video now supports 1080p resolution at up to 240 frames per second, and Apple says the cameras are calibrated for augmented reality.

The new phones run the new iOS 11 operating system. (See our overview.)

Is It Enough?

Since the launch of the iPhone 6 line in 2015, which sported larger displays than earlier models, Apple’s phones have not had the same blockbuster power. Neither the iPhone 6s line, nor the iPhone 7 seemed to pack enough features needed to compel many users to upgrade. (The iPhone 7 Plus was the exception, because it added dual cameras–an innovation that seemed to be reflected in surprisingly strong sales.)

The new iPhone 8 line is launched in the shadow of Apple’s tenth anniversary iPhone X, which packs a lot of new features. The iPhone 8 costs significantly less, but the big question is whether it packs enough new functionality to get iPhone buyers to forget about the high-end phone and upgrade from their old iPhone.

The iPhone 8 starts at $699 for the 64GB model–that’s $50 more than the iPhone 7, but with twice the base storage–while the iPhone 8 Plus starts at $799. The phones are available in black, silver, or gold. Preorders will begin on September 15, and the new iPhones will ship on September 22.

“I want us to stay in Seattle,” said Jeff Bezos.

A few weeks ago, that statement—made in 2005 by Amazon’s founder and CEO—was relayed to me in a company conference room by John Schoettler, the company’s vice president of global real estate and facilities. A few days ago, Amazon said it was looking to build out $5 billion in new offices and hire 50,000 to create a duplicate of Seattle, which it’s dubbed HQ2. The place for which it longs has “strong local and regional talent—particularly in software development and related fields,” as well as a “stable and business-friendly environment,” according to a dedicated website. “We want to find a city that is excited to work with us, and where our customers, employees, and the community can all benefit.”

At first glance, maybe it seems disingenuous that Schoettler brought up Bezos’s blunt statement given the obvious timing of the HQ2 plan. (Not that Amazon should have blabbed to me in advance: It didn’t even let Seattle leaders know.) Or maybe the move was, as the local paper’s unsigned editorial insists, the outcome of the city’s “poor planning and anti-business posturing”? Many local and state officials weighed in with their responses to the notion of a Seattle replicant elsewhere in North America; many considered it a surprising move. But given how, as I reported last month, Amazon’s nonstop growth has already transformed Seattle, the decision isn’t entirely surprising. Nor was Schoettler quoting Bezos out of keeping with the new plan.

The company has outstripped Seattle’s geographical and recruiting capacity. Amazon already owns or leases over 8 million square feet with an existing plan to expand to 12 million square feet over the next few years. It’s already the single-biggest downtown tenant, with 90% of prime real estate there, and among the largest footprints of any non-manufacturing business across the region. The second-biggest Seattle property occupier is Safeco, with 411,000 square feet. (Microsoft has more office space in its suburban campus and outposts, but they started building long before the current boom at lower cost and low density.)

Seattle may not technically be a “company town,” but Amazon now occupies more than twice as many square feet as any other company in any other big U.S. city. In contrast, San Francisco, which has about 20% more office space than Seattle, has only a handful of companies approaching 1 million square feet, and that includes Google.

Related: Amazon’s Can Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Reboot “The Best Music Scene In The World?

Then there’s the problem of hiring tech workers: Amazon has thousands of jobs it’s trying to fill now and in the near future, and expects to hire on the order of 10,000 more beyond that in Seattle based on its current rough target of 50,000 as it continues to build out and grow. The University of Washington, to which Amazon donated $10 million last year toward a new computer science building, and other regional schools can only mint so many qualified candidates, and Amazon can only poach a finite number of workers from other local companies.

Convincing people to move from anywhere but other super-hot housing markets to Seattle is a stretch as well, even with the salaries on offer. And opening a Microsoft-like satellite campus in the region doesn’t help with recruiting: The kinds of employees Amazon focuses on want a college campus/lifestyle mall-style work location, not an isolated suburban commute.

There is some truth to one complaint, however. Seattle’s city leadership across decades and many different sets of mayors and city councillors has done a terrible job—albeit, maybe not quite as terrible as San Francisco, New York, and some other metropolitan areas—at providing and executing a comprehensive plan for increased housing density paired with affordable housing. Pro-density forces have always contended with NIMBYs, and developers here, as elsewhere, naturally want to follow the money and build the most expensive houses, condos, and apartments the market can sustain.

As a result, Amazon’s massive influx of jobs and money caused house and rental prices to skyrocket—the fastest rising in the country. Unlike previous booms, this isn’t driven by illusory stock values but actual revenue and profits that drive sales and stock ownership (and sales of stock) by employees and executives at many different companies, including the thousands of Apple, Facebook, and Google employees located in the region. That’s kept the market on fire, and it’s unlikely to drop. Many locals hope it just slows down. The city’s culture is at stake, some say, in spite of efforts like those of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to foster the local art scene.

And even as Seattle has increased its minimum wage and has extremely low unemployment, housing costs far outstrip the gains in income for those even at the median income in Seattle—$75,000 in 2015, and likely near $80,000 today. Seattle has a larger per-capita homeless population than any major city in the U.S., after the far-larger metropolises of New York and Los Angeles.

Amazon has become a better corporate citizen in recent years. Its campus buildout has resulted in mostly attractive buildings and interesting spaces, as well as a diversity of locally owned restaurants. Its charitable giving and support of nonprofits downtown has finally stepped up to approach the scale of company it is. The local buzz is that it’s had to become a better employer, too, especially after a devastating New York Times article in October 2015 recounting employees crying at their desks. It hasn’t become warm and fuzzy, but it’s taken some edge off its sharpness as it competes for employees and needs things from the community.

However, Amazon’s announcement even seemed to take the mayor’s office by surprise. “My office will immediately begin conversations with Amazon around their needs with today’s announcement and the company’s long-term plans for Seattle,” Mayor Ed Murray said in a statement. “And we will coordinate with [Washington Governor Jay Inslee] to convene key business and community leaders to plan for our future growth and response to this announcement. I look forward to working with Amazon to secure their long-term, successful future in the heart of Seattle.”

There’s suspicion among some leaders and local businesspeople that HQ2 is a plan to extract concessions from Seattle and Washington, while also demanding huge amounts of tax deferrals and credits in the city the company picks. With two HQs, the company can pit the two cities against each other for future divisions and buildouts. (The New York Times crunched the data and the criteria Amazon’s made part of its HQ2 RFP, and landed on . . . Denver!)

Seattle city councilperson Kshama Sawant, elected as a socialist and who is a robust advocate for a livable wage, released a statement comparing Amazon’s plan to tactics used by another major local employer, Boeing, which officially moved its headquarters—and a small number of staff—to Chicago in 2001: “For decades, Boeing executives and billionaire shareholders have carried out systematic economic extortion by pitting cities and states against one another, forcing a race to the bottom for the living standards of workers, and crushing labor unions.”

Related: Why Amazon Is The World’s Most Innovative Company Of 2017 

Amazon, always aggressive in strategy, will certainly pursue whatever leverage it can. But the fundamental truth is that there are limits to growth to recruit and retain the employees Amazon wants at the density of office space it needs within the limits of the ability to move them between home and work each day. Amazon, like Facebook and tech companies in the first tier of the pantheon, have ambition and growth that sometimes seems constrained only by the size of the internet. Cities have more physical limits.

What: Whiskey Fist, an NSFW short film made in response to labor-exploiting branded content.

Who: Filmmaker Gillian Horvat

Why we care: In 2015, Jameson Whiskey held a short film competition called First Shot. The brand asked for submissions that evoked “the great and/or unexpected things that happen when you fear less and let life in.” Gillian Horvat, a budding filmmaker who won the Best Midnight Short award at SXSW that year, had considered entering the contest. Then she read the fine print and subsequently considered the whole thing a matter of creative exploitation. This realization soured her on the very concept of branded content. It also inspired her to create something in response.

“I don’t think movies are content,” Horvat writes on the Kickstarter page for the film she ended up making as a rebuke to brands. “I think they’re magic, I think they’re more real than real life. I make films or movies or smut or whatever you want to call it, and I do it because I want people to feel shit, not to sell shit.”

Considering what happens during the 10 minutes of Whiskey Fist, Horvat should rest well-knowing nobody will be using it to sell anything. The surreal, self-aware film follows a male intern at a toxically misogynist branding agency as he gets impregnated from a sex act involving a whiskey bottle. The film manages to mock brand culture and masculinity–while promoting women’s reproductive rights–all in one ridiculous package. Perhaps more short films should be made out of spite instead of corporate-sponsored contests.

Apple today unveiled the tenth-anniversary iPhone X, in possibly the most anticipated product announcement since Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone in 2007. The new phone–pronounced “iPhone 10”–is meant to be a departure from previous iPhones and an evolution in the way we use smartphones.

The “X” contains a number of features that are completely new to iPhones, including 3D facial recognition technology and an OLED display.

It’s a departure visually, too, forgoing the rounded metal edges and back for an all-glass front and back with a stainless steel frame around the edges.

OLED Display

It’s the first iPhone with a super-bright 5.8-inch “Super Retina” OLED display with 2436 x 1125 resolution (supplied by Samsung). The front of the phone is almost completely taken up by it. The edges of the display curve downward into the design of the sides of the phone. There’s a small rectangular inlet at the top of the phone for the front-facing cameras and facial recognition sensor. The display is brighter, more colorful, and more power-efficient than the LED displays of past iPhones. It also uses Apple’s TrueTone, which adjusts white levels and brightness based on the ambient light around the device, and it supports HDR video.

Under the hood, the iPhone X is powered by a new 6-core A11 Bionic processor, which also appears in the iPhone 8.

The iPhone 7 line was somewhat waterproof, but was not guaranteed as such by Apple. The company now says the iPhone X is water and dust resistant, but at the moment it’s unclear whether it has an IP68 rating as previously rumored.

Facial Recognition

In the absence of the home button and TouchID, the new iPhone X uses new 3D facial recognition technology–branded as “Face ID”–as the main authentication method for unlocking the phone and doing Apple Pay transactions. Apple says the method has a 1 in a million chance of being unlocked by someone else’s face.

The facial recognition sensors have some fun applications, too. New 3D “Animoji” for Messages that move with the movements of your head, mimic your facial expressions, and can even say your words. The head and face movements are tracked by a new 3D laser/sensor on the front of the phone.

Home Button Functions

The functionality of the home button has been distributed to other parts of the phone. How do other basic phone functions work without the home button? Users can tap the screen to wake it from sleep and swipe up to get back to the home screen. A thin horizontal bar at the bottom of the phone’s apps will serve as a place to swipe up to move between apps. The iPhone’s side button will also get some new duties. Double clicking the button will bring up Apple Pay, while pressing and holding the button will activate Siri.

Cameras

The iPhone X features two 12-megapixel rear-facing cameras, with quad-LED flash and optical image stabilization. The front facing camera is 7-megapixels and includes a background-blurring Portrait Mode similar to what debuted on the iPhone 7 Plus last year.

Battery

The “X” comes with a significantly larger battery than the iPhone 7, lasting two hours longer on a charge. It also features Qi wireless charging like the iPhone 8, but Apple is also creating its own mat that can charge multiple devices (including an Apple Watch). The mat is coming next year, and Apple says it’s working with Qi to incorporate the underlying technology, called AirPower, into other wireless charging devices in the future.

iPhone X starts at $999 with 64 GB of storage. Preorders begin on October 27, and the phone starts shipping on November 3.