What: The first trailer for the summer 2018 comedy Action Point.

Who: Jackass alumni Johnny Knoxville and Chris Pontius.

Why we care: Most theme parks strive to create the illusion of danger, but at New Jersey theme park Action Park, the danger was real. (There were 10 fractures and 45 head injuries in the summer of 1985 on one ride alone.) It’s the perfect setting for a new movie from the guy who first got on TV by shocking himself with a taser. In the tradition of Bad Grandpa, Johnny Knoxville’s forthcoming film, Action Point, finds a fictional context to wrap around Jackass-y stunts. Knoxville plays the owner of a theme park who tries to boost attendance by making the rides more dangerous. This premise ensures plenty of neck-snapping stunt-options–and the attendance of every single person who grew up in New Jersey in the ’80s, amid Action Park’s original reign of terror.

Watch the first trailer below.

Cambridge Analytica’s improper access to Facebook user data turned into a firestorm for the social media giant this past week. Four days later, CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally responded, publishing a Facebook post in which he made a familiar vow to do “what it takes to protect our community.” He also conceded that Facebook has “made mistakes” and needs to “step up.”

But the post was as noteworthy for what it did not contain. Zuckerberg did not, for example, mention the role that Cambridge Analytica’s work may have played in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He did not acknowledge that Facebook has had ample time (four years, in fact) to audit and shut down apps violating its terms of service. And he did not show emotion or validate user anger, instead striking the tone of an objective investigator.

Most importantly of all, Zuckerberg did not address the central role that user data plays in Facebook’s business model. “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” he wrote, carefully skimming the surface of the complicated questions that the Cambridge crisis has raised. Indeed, Facebook does have a responsibility around user data—and a business imperative. Lose users’ data, and you lose their trust, setting off a downward spiral that could jeopardize Facebook’s money-making machine.

Rather than engaging these issues, Zuckerberg spent the bulk of the post outlining three practical steps that Facebook plans to take to investigate and prevent abuse of the company’s trove of personal information. First, it will investigate apps with “suspicious activity” that have, in the past, had access to users’ friend data in the same way that Cambridge Analytica once did. Second, the company will automatically remove app developers’ access to a user’s data if the user has not opened the app for three months. And third, the company will better surface a tool that allows users to control app permissions, which now sits deep within the privacy settings menu.

Perhaps Zuckerberg is saving his chance to speak from the heart for later tonight. At 9 p.m. ET, an interview that he conducted with CNN will air during Anderson Cooper 360.

In the flower industry, there are two big holidays that matter: Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. That’s why UrbanStems, a flower delivery startup, decided to launch on Valentine’s Day in 2014. “It’s a well-known fact that these two days generate a huge amount of business for flower brands,” says Megan Darmody, the brand’s director of press and partnership.

UrbanStems now wants to change the culture of flower-giving. Rather than thinking of them as a gift that a man gives a woman, UrbanStems wants women to consider buying bouquets for themselves or for their friends.  To that end, the brand has collaborated with Bumble on a bouquet designed for women to give to the important women in their life. One version of the bouquet even comes with a deck of cards that features thought-provoking questions designed to spark conversations among friends, like “What are your professional goals in the next year?” UrbanStems also partnered with Vogue to create bouquets designed by the magazine’s fashion editors.

The Tempe Police Department released a video Wednesday showing the final seconds before Sunday’s fatal crash involving a self-driving Uber car in that Arizona city.

The video ends before the collision itself, but it may be still be disturbing to some:

The video includes footage from a camera facing the outside of the car, with crash victim Elaine Herzberg appearing to be obscured by darkness until just before the collision, when she’s visible wheeling her bicycle across the street. Herzberg doesn’t appear to see the oncoming SUV. Footage from inside the car shows its supervising driver, whose facial expressions appear to confirm that she only spotted Herzberg at the last moment. The driver appears to be looking down for much of the footage, though it’s difficult to determine whether her eyes were actually averted from the road.

Tempe Police Vehicular Crimes Unit is actively investigating
the details of this incident that occurred on March 18th. We will provide updated information regarding the investigation once it is available. pic.twitter.com/2dVP72TziQ

— Tempe Police (@TempePolice) March 21, 2018

It’s unclear to what extent the darkness would have impaired the vehicle’s sensors. “While darkness can limit the vision of the cameras, radar functions equally well in day or night,” Bloomberg reported yesterday. “Lidar actually functions better in the dark because the glare of sunshine can sometimes create interference, said Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who works on autonomous vehicles.

To Rajkumar, there’s little doubt that “lidar would certainly have detected an obstacle.” Any shortcoming would likely be ascribed to classification software “because it was an interesting combination of bicycle, bags and a pedestrian standing stationary on the median,” he said. Had the software recognized a pedestrian standing close to the road, he added, “it would have at least slammed on the brakes.”

Friends of Herzberg have had harsh words for Uber, including calling for the company to be “shut down,” The Guardian reports. Herzberg had “struggled with homelessness” but was starting a new job, according to the report.

The Tempe Police Department and National Transportation Safety Board continue to investigate the crash, and Uber has halted its self-driving car tests for the time being.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg told CNN tonight that he’d be “happy” to testify before Congress regarding the scandal over Trump-connected data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica obtaining personal info on up to 50 million Facebook users.  “The short answer is I’m happy to if it’s the right thing to do,” Zuckerberg. “What we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge. If that’s me, then I am happy to go.”

He also apologized right out the gate in the interview, saying “This was a major breach of trust and I’m really sorry this happened.” He outlined several steps that the social network will do in the coming months to address the problem, including ensuring that developers don’t get access to such data and investigating every app that obtained such info “from before we locked down our platform” in 2015.

The company is looking to raise the half-billion dollars before a rumored IPO in 2019, reports Reuters. If DJI can raise the funds, it would value the company at around $15 billion–almost double its valuation just three years ago. The funds would be used by DJI to expand into drone technology in the construction, agriculture, and energy sectors. DJI is currently the world’s largest drone maker by revenue and owns 70% of the global consumer and commercial drone market.

Amazon’s former VP of voice and natural user interface shopping Assaf Ronen was hired by Uber earlier this month to be the company’s new head of product, but now the job offer has been withdrawn, reports Recode. The reason for the withdrawal of the job offer centers around a discrepancy related to the length of Ronen’s stint at Amazon. Uber reportedly was under the impression that Ronen was still working for the e-retail giant when they hired him, when in fact Ronen left the company at the end of 2017. This discrepancy disqualified Ronen for the job. The withdrawal of Ronen’s job offer was confirmed to Uber employees in a memo from CEO Dara Khosrowshahi:

Team:

I wanted to let you know that we have had withdrawn our offer to Assaf Ronen.

Hiring is, quite literally, the heart and soul of our company and rescinding Assaf’s offer was not a decision we took lightly. I also recognize that it’s one more disruption for our stellar Product organization. But when it comes to who joins our team, we have very clear expectations, and this was the right thing for us to do.

There is one silver lining: we have a strong bench. Effective today, Manik Gupta, who was recently promoted to VP, will take over interim leadership of the overall Product organization. As I said last week, Manik has an amazing reputation in Silicon Valley and has been an incredible mentor and coach for many at Uber. I trust him completely to keep the Product team firing on all cylinders as we continue to create the best experience for riders and drivers around the world.

Onward –
Dara

If one good thing has come out of the horror of the Parkland massacre, it’s the sight of young Americans standing up to a political system that doesn’t benefit them. When thousands of students walk out of classrooms in the middle of the day, it’s a sign of a new generation rising perhaps: a changing of the old order for a new one.

Generations X and Y (and younger) could use more of this kind of activism because it’s not just gun culture that needs fixing. Across many areas–from social security funding to climate change to health spending–the current political settlement isn’t geared toward youth. It’s geared toward baby boomers (born 1946 to 1964) and their parents, who’ve saddled the rest of us with an increasingly bleak future.

As Bruce Cannon Gibney writes in A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, the boomers have satisfied their needs by squandering our inheritance. They’ve passed unfunded tax cuts that we’ll be paying off for years. They’ve protected Social Security checks while leaving us with trillions in student debts. They’ve waged NIMBY campaigns against new housing while protecting the value of their condos. They’ve elected pussy-grabbers and child molesters while lecturing us about personal responsibility.

Gibney says it’s time to look to a new generation of leadership focused on the future. The Clintons, Bushes, and Trumps–all boomers–aren’t going to look out for the younger generations in the way someone younger would. “For the past several decades, the nation has been run by people who present, personally and politically, the full sociopathic pathology: deceit, selfishness, imprudence, remorselessness, hostility . . . ” he writes. “Unless younger generations remove the boomers from power soon, the next quarter century will be even worse than the last one–a parade of missed opportunities and bad choices.”

I asked Gibney how we, the young, and relatively young, can take back the agenda. If the boomers have transferred the nation’s wealth to themselves, investing only in priorities that pay out in their lifetimes, how can we reorient the system? Here are a few ideas based on his book.

Forgive All Student DEbt

Student debt, now valued at more than $1.4 trillion, is a big drag on generations X and Y, curbing their ability to start businesses, buy houses, and seek out better lives. “Government borrows much more cheaply than students and may as well use its advantage by assuming many student debts directly,” Gibney writes. Federal loans carried interest rates of between 4.3% and 6.8% in 2015-2016, while 10-year Treasury debt traded at just 1.8% in mid-2016.

One recent study from the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College estimated that student debt relief would cost about the same as last year’s tax cut (about $1.5 trillion), but would have vastly more positive economic impacts. Of course, paying off student tuition fees is a bit like paying the debts of bankers after the financial crisis: It rewards financiers who prey on students. But better the government address this issue now “before crushing debt derails younger lives prematurely and the costs arrive, compounded, via the back doors of welfare and other programs,” Gibney says.

Raise Taxes On Older People

Though Gibney decries the state of public finances, he says we need to spend more to secure the future. There’s a big difference, he says, between investing in education, infrastructure, and climate resilience, and simply giving money away to corporations and political donors. Investing at least brings hope of some return. He wants $8.65 trillion more in total public expenditure, with about $3.6 trillion of that going to fix the nation’s deteriorating roads, bridges, and train systems.

To pay for this, Gibney would raise taxes, particularly on boomers, because “they did not pay their fair share of taxes, as the national debt and general decay attest,” and because, unlike younger generations, they tend to have more wealth that can be taxed. He would also end state property tax caps that see boomers enjoy substantial rises in real estate prices without paying more to the government, and increase inheritance taxes, which serve to curb dynastic wealth. “Doing so would be downright republican (lowercase), given that low inheritance taxes are oddities in a nation founded, however glancingly, in opposition to inherited privilege,” he says.

A Better Cost-Benefit Analysis Of Health Costs

U.S. healthcare spending will make up a fifth of the entire economy by 2020. We spend far more than other countries on medicine without getting better overall results. No serious reform benefiting generations X and Y can avoid cutting spending in this area. Gibney favors cost-benefit analysis–or, to use a more charged term, rationing. Arguably, the amount we spend on healthcare already rations other priorities anyway. “Social programs are supposed to do the greatest social good, not cater to false sentiments about kindly geriatrics,” he writes. “Costly interventions to drag a life out a few unproductive months, at the price of a lost generation of children do not balance in the Benthamite books.” (Bentham, an English philosopher, argued that society should do the most good for the most people, even if the cost to a small number of citizens is high.)

Give Young People A Chance In Office

If generations X and Y want different policies, they need different political leaders. Gibney suggests a test when deciding who to vote for. Does a politician advocate ideas for the next four years, or investments that pay out over the next 40 years? The latter is more likely to help.

Then, the question is: Who is going to pay for that spending? At the moment, boomers pass laws–like the Republican tax cut last year–that are all about today and nothing about tomorrow. “The sociopaths’ goal is to wring every last dollar from the system, and any investment that could not be fully realized within boomer lifetimes [is] to be avoided,” Gibney writes.

Other ideas–not advocated by Gibney specifically–might include setting age limits on who can run for higher office. Why do you need to be 35 to run for president, but somehow being in your 70s or 80s is just fine? (Trump is 71 and and Joe Biden is 75). At the same time, generations X or Y could do with their own AARP. After the NRA, the retired people’s association may be the most powerful lobbying group in Washington, D.C., immediately putting other generational groups at a disadvantage.

Gibney’s agenda may seem like an unfair attack of one generation on another. But then the current political settlement is already a form of generational redistribution. Seniors may tell you that they’re merely reclaiming what they paid into the system. But Social Security and Medicare don’t nearly pay for themselves. The way we’re dealing (or not dealing) with entitlement programs, climate change, and the national debt means building huge liabilities for future generations to pay. Our current policies in these areas effectively dictate our future political choices.

Gibney expects Trumpian politics to dominate the 2016 midterms (even if Trump’s party doesn’t actually win). But, after that, he hopes a new type of politics, driven more by the interests of gen X and Y than boomers, emerges. In 2020, issues like Medicare, Social Security, climate, and the debt may be more on the agenda than now.

“The strongest argument for getting rid of the boomers, aside from 30 years of policy failure, is that older people don’t change a lot. They don’t adjust their views of the world,” Gibney says. “How many more times are the Bushes, Clintons, Trumps, and Bidens going to run? How many times do we have to keep electing the same people and expect a different result?”

Of course Nicole Byer, hilarious host of the fail-friendly cooking show Nailed It, has not seen many cooking shows herself.

Part of Nailed It’s addictively watchable shtick is that the contestants are inexperienced bakers, so why not throw a neophyte host into the mix as well? It’s not just the contestants and host who are newbies, though. Netflix’s latest original cooking show is catching a lot of cooking show-agnostic viewers, too.

Although Byer had only seen Chopped and Cupcake Wars Kids before being asked to host the show (she’s more of an HDTV kind of person), she glommed on to the concept right away.

“People failing is very funny,” she says. “People falling down is very funny too, so it’s almost like people falling down while baking.”

The contestants do fail reliably often on Nailed It, but the mockery they incur isn’t mean-spirited. There’s encouragement and commiseration interwoven between laughs. Byer and Torres simply hang back and quietly narrate the contestants’ mistakes in real time, whether it’s forgetting to add flour or not cutting cookies into a cookie-shape before baking them. The cohosts are sometimes bewildered by these omissions, but mostly they’re enthralled. Mistakes mean the final product is going to be extra janky.

When the contestants present their ecce homo-like recreations side by side with the originals–a self-portrait face cookie, for example, with Cheetos for lips instead of frosting–they’re laughing along with the hosts. Since they’re not professionals, everyone is in on the joke.

“I genuinely love disasters,” Byer says. “I like ugly things, so it’s easy to find the positive in something that looks wild.”

Although the premise is certainly a deviation, and most other cooking shows don’t reward their winners by firing a cash cannon at them, what truly sets Nailed It apart is its host.

“I used to be a nanny so I know how to be family-friendly. I just choose not to be,” Byer says. “But kids like me. I’m like a big ole cartoon character.”

There is only one aspect of the show that emerged organically but is regularly tossed in the recycling bin.

“I make so many dick jokes I can’t even tell you. So many,” Byer says. “They were focused on making the show family-friendly, but when you’re on set for 12 hours, your true colors come out, and I love a good dick joke.”

Sounds like the perfect ingredients for an R-rated gag reel.

The company stepped up to deny the reports in Kenyan newspaper Business Daily that it was preparing to introduce autonomous flying taxis in the nation for testing purposes, reports Bloomberg. The Business Daily, citing Kenya Civil Aviation Authority director-general Gilbert Kibe, reported that Uber has sought government approval to test drones that could carry as many as four passengers and wanted to introduce the service by 2020. After the report broke, an Uber spokesperson told Bloomberg,“We have no plans to introduce drones.” Although Kibe confirmed in the report that Uber had in the past asked if it was something the government would consider, but “it was not a formal conversation.”

The U.S. electronics retailer giant has cut ties with China’s Huawei Technologies citing increased scrutiny of Chinese tech firms by the U.S. government, reports Reuters. A source told Reuters that Best Buy will stop selling Huawei devices over the next several weeks. The move follows both Verizon and AT&T scrapping their plans to sell Huawei devices after some in Congress lobbied against the idea. A Best Buy spokesperson would not comment on the specifics of the report, only saying, “We make decisions to change what we sell for a variety of reasons.”

This is the first time the free YouTube app has earned the honor, previously only coming in as high as third place. As TechCrunch reports, the YouTube app has been climbing the App Store’s top grossing charts since the video giant launched subscription service YouTube Red in 2015. YouTube Red costs $9.99 a month and allows subscribers to watch YouTube content ad-free as well as offers users exclusive videos and music. YouTube’s No. 1 spot was first noticed by data app analytics site Sensor Tower, which reported that the YouTube iOS app grossed around $14 million in February 2018–a 133% year-over-year increase.

Born in Brooklyn in the 1960s, the decade that saw Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make history as the first human beings to walk on the moon, Darren Aronofsky, like many kids of his generation, idolized astronauts. “My favorite book was this pop-up book on Spacelab that I leafed through so many times, I eventually had to tape up the book to hold it together,” the filmmaker recalls.

Call it early training for One Strange Rock, the new 10-part documentary series about Earth that marks the Oscar-nominated director’s first foray into television. Produced by Aronofsky’s Protozoa Pictures, Jane Root’s Nutopia, and Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment, the ambitious docu-series premieres March 26 on the National Geographic Channel. It’s narrated by Smith and explores life on Earth, looking into the origins of life, how all life is interdependent, and what it would take to foster life on another planet. One Strange Rock features commentary from astronauts who have had the experience of observing, from way up in space, the big blue ball that we humans call home. Among them: Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian astronaut to command the International Space Station; Mae Jemison, a member of the first class of astronauts to go into training after the 1986 Challenger accident and the first African American woman to go into space; and Peggy Whitson, who recently returned from her third trip to space during which she set a NASA record for the most cumulative days in space–665 total–for any American astronaut.

Aronofsky wanted to make a cinematic doc series that would combine footage shot in space and on Earth. He was able to tap European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli’s to serve as cinematographer and film Whitson during her recent stay on the International Space Station. “He knew how to shoot,” says Aronofsky, who equipped Nespoli with a RED HD camera. “I more gave him the visual language that we were looking for that would differentiate the footage you normally see from the inside space station.”

Like any director, Aronofsky wanted the lighting to be just right: “The first thing I said to him was, ‘Hey, is there any way we can turn off those fluorescents and let the sun and the planet Earth and the moon light Peggy?'”

The filmmaker also gave Nespoli tips on what type of lensing to use and directed him to employ a cinema verité style.

To his amazement, Aronofsky was able to communicate with Nespoli via email to offer immediate feedback on the footage the astronaut was shooting. “I had no idea you could just email an astronaut,” Aronofsky says. “For some reason, I thought it was like Apollo times where it would take a long time to reach them.”

While it would seem there would be little or no relation between the feature films Aronofsky has directed and nature and science documentary filmmaking, he did use a technique that he has employed in his previous work. “A kind of signature thing I’ve done in my last few films has been following characters through their landscapes. I started that in The Wrestler, and I continue it through Mother! And that was something we knew we were going to do with the people in One Strange Rock. You can see that in the trailer,” Aronofsky says.

“I don’t think there’s a sequence that doesn’t have something that has some type of wow factor,” he says. Two in particular had him in awe: one that reveals the largest lava lake in the world and another in which a grandfather and his grandson collect seafood from beneath an ice shelf in northern Canada as the tide goes in and out.

Beyond the nonstop visual wows, One Strange Rock is impactful on an emotional level when the astronauts go beyond science talk to share their personal feelings about seeing the Earth from way up among the stars. “One of the things we learned from making this show is that the trip into space is not just an adventure, but a spiritual transformation, or a personal transformation of perspective and psyche,” says Ari Handel, Aronofsky’s producing partner at Protozoa Pictures. “So that adds a different layer, and that’s something we really tried to capture in the series.”

There isn’t an overt message warning about the dangers of climate change in One Strange Rock. The focus of the series is really on showcasing the beauty, wonder, and weirdness of our planet. But as science buffs–Handel is a neuroscientist-turned-filmmaker, and Aronofsky is a trained field biologist whose dad is a high school earth sciences teacher–as well as human beings who care about the environment, both men do hope the audience will become sensitive to the fragility of humans’ only home. “Our main goal was to give people a perspective shift,” Handel says. “To get them to look at some of the systems of this planet through new eyes so they can see what an amazing place it really is and how we all take it for granted.”

The company, best known for its Firefox web browser, has suspended its advertising on Facebook, the company announced in a blog post. The move is directly due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal currently engulfing the social media giant, which saw tens of millions of Facebook users have their personal information shared through a third-party app without their consent. From Mozilla’s blog post:

We understand that Facebook took steps to limit developer access to friends’ data beginning in 2014. This was after Facebook started its relationship with Cambridge University Professor Aleksandr Kogan, whose decision to share data he collected from Facebook with Cambridge Analytica is currently in the news. This news caused us to take a closer look at Facebook’s current default privacy settings given that we support the platform with our advertising dollars. While we believe there is still more to learn, we found that its current default settings leave access open to a lot of data–particularly with respect to settings for third-party apps.

If Facebook does improve its default privacy settings in favor of users, Mozilla says it’s open to returning to advertising on the platform. Until then, it’s taking its ad dollars elsewhere.

Yes, in the future you may be able to shoo away annoying delivery drones. Amazon has been granted a patent for a drone that understands bystanders’ arm and other body movements, reports GeekWire. The patent describes a number of gestures the drone could recognize. Waving your arms in a shooing manner would alert the drone to stop flying in your direction while waving your hands in a guiding motion toward your body would let the drone know you’re inviting it in for a landing. The patent also says the drone can recognize audible cues, such as shouts, so if all else fails you can just yell “Stop hovering over my lawn!” like a crazed madman to get the drone to bugger off.

[Image: Amazon/USPTO]

Kalpana Kotogal can vividly recall the first moment she felt the slap of racial discrimination. “I was probably 9 or 10 years old, definitely old enough to have a sense of race,” she says. At a now-defunct pizza place in Cincinnati in the 1980s, where she and her family were “decidedly brown,” they waited (and waited) in the vestibule while other parties were seated ahead of them.

What happened next would inspire Kotogal, together with Stacy Smith from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, and actor, producer, and educator Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni of the Annenberg School, to craft the inclusion rider in 2016. It had a moment in the spotlight when Frances McDormand added those words to the end of her acceptance speech at the 90th annual Academy Awards.

“I remember very distinctly my parents’ discomfort and embarrassment and anger kind of mounting,” she explains. They understood what was happening, Kotogal recalls, and were trying to shield their kids from it. But she was old enough to pick up on that kind of attack on dignity and the feeling of powerlessness.

“It was small,” Kotogal admits, “in the big scope of the injustices that underrepresented groups have experienced or are currently experiencing in our country.” However, the moment gave her empathy to others who face discrimination of all kinds.

Related: Anita Hill Gets Real About Sexism, Race, And How Far We Still Have To Go

It would be one of a series of moments that would inform Kotogal as she went from being an advocate and organizer for underrepresented groups to eventually becoming an attorney and partner at Cohen Milstein specializing in civil rights and employment cases.

Early Seeds Of Activism

For instance, at just 11 years old, Kotogal attended Children’s International Summer Villages. The peace education organization brings kids from around the world together for camps focused on building understanding across cultural backgrounds and offers leadership development for youth around justice, sustainability, and peace. “That was a galvanizing moment for me, too,” she says, and she now serves on the organization’s board.

From there she helped to start an organization in middle school and high school that worked on local environmental issues in Cincinnati schools. “It was small potatoes,” Kotogal contends, but it gave her valuable insight into how upper-class environmental issues and the environmental issues of people living in urban areas are not necessarily the same thing.

“My worldview was evolving, and activism and service was part of it,” she says, but she credits her parents for seeding this urge to organize. “They encouraged my sister and me to think about the world we want to live in, and be active agents in making that change from the time we were kids.”

By the time she got to Stanford, she started bringing together her passion for environmental issues with social justice. “I came out of college with an economics and an environmental studies degree and went to work with Green Corps as an organizer,” she says. “By the time I went to law school, I had three years of professional organizing and many years of student organizing behind me, and a worldview that was informed by all of that,” says Kotogal.

Standing Up Against Powerful Interests

The path through law school was clear, says Kotogal: She wanted to be a class action litigator. “I had a really clear concern about power and balance in society, in particular why it felt like the political and policy process was often captured by more powerful interests, leading to bad outcomes that weren’t necessarily in the public’s interest,” she explains. Class action litigation seemed to be the legal analog of organizing to build collective power to make a broader social change, she explains.

As such, she’s represented a class of female sales employees in a Title VII and Equal Pay Act case against Sterling, one of the nation’s largest jewelry chains. Kotagal also represents transgender beneficiaries of federal health insurance who have challenged the denial of transition-related care as discriminatory.

Related: What Is An Inclusion Rider? Explaining Frances McDormand’s Oscars Speech

So where does the inclusion rider come in? It actually functions differently than class action, as it focuses on one person’s star power to negotiate for more diverse and inclusive hiring both in the cast and on the crew of a production. Since the Oscars, a few A-listers have come forward to state that they’d be using it in future productions, including Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan, writer, and director Paul Feig, and actress Brie Larson. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have come forward too, according to DiGiovanni who worked on the rider with Smith and Kotagal and currently serves as the head of outreach for Affleck and Damon’s production company.

“What appealed to me so much about the inclusion rider and what continues to appeal to me about it, is that while it relies upon star power,” says Kotagal, “the group that is intended to be benefited by the rider is not the stars, it turns on them using their power to change the face of the industry.”

Kotagal believes it’s really important at this moment to talk about workers who don’t have the kind of bargaining power that these stars have, and who are not in a position to be benefited by the inclusion rider. “I’m talking about independent contractors, domestic workers, home healthcare aids. They are the people who make our own work possible.” She cites Ai-jen Poo, head of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, who reflected on the invisible millions on a recent episode of of the radio show Marketplace whose immigration status or wage and hour laws and discrimination laws don’t cover. “It’s interesting because they are invisible in some respects, but very visible in other respects,” she says. “Those are the people that I think we have an obligation to figure out how to lift up,” says Kotagal.

Change Will Take More Than Star Power

It’s going to take commitment on all sides to make a change, Kotagal believes. “There’s a legislative fix on some of these issues that Frances McDormand and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, as powerful as they are, can’t individually affect,” she says. As for her role, Kotagal says she and her practice are committed to continuing to seek out injustices and represent those workers in litigation to seek redress. “We see that both as an important piece of getting justice for those people,” she adds, “but also as a crucial tool for corporate accountability and teaching corporate actors that you can’t get away with that kind of conduct.”

She’s making sure that the firm looks inward, too. As chair of the hiring and diversity committee, she sees how the profession is not as diverse as it could be, despite its workers’ intellectual understanding of the value of diversity in the workplace. But on the most personal level, Kotagal is working on changing things as well.

“My husband and I are raising two mixed race boys,” she explains, and they have made a commitment to raising them with an awareness of the privilege that comes from being male in this society. Alongside that, she says they are working to flip gender norms and stereotypes and thinking about what masculinity should look like, and also preparing them for what it means to be mixed race in America today. “I would say that I have multiple dimensions of this for me,” Kotagal contends,”the personal, the professional, and the political. Hopefully, they all align.”

Innovative businesses pride themselves on finding a single solution that solves two seemingly disparate problems. But there’s a glaring one that has yet to be addressed on a large scale. Some 70 million working-age Americans have criminal records, making it difficult to find jobs. Meanwhile, employers are struggling to hold down turnover and stem the costs–both financial and cultural–of an expensive, inefficient, bias-ridden hiring process. So-called “fair chance hiring” is an opportunity to tackle both these issues, but with the exception of several noteworthy organizations and criminal-justice reform advocates pushing for change, few employers know what it is.

Until recently, I was one of them. The idea behind fair chance hiring is exactly as it sounds: that as an employer you’re willing to give a fair chance to ex-offenders. Get it right, and you’ll tap into an enormous pool of qualified, diverse talent with a wide range of experiences–applicants with personal and professional backgrounds you’ll rarely encounter by fixating on elite credentials. Still, putting fair chance hiring into practice can be daunting and confusing. Here’s how I’ve learned to do it successfully.

Related: When The Gap In Your Resume Is Time Spent In Prison

Be Clear And Consistent About Disqualifiers

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not protect workers from employment discrimination based on criminal history. However, the Equal Opportunity Commission has outlined circumstances under which it may enforce Title VII when convictions are used as a proxy to screen out protected groups, particularly people of color, who are disproportionately incarcerated. That’s one reason the National Employment Law Project (NELP), an advocacy group, recommends assessing candidates case by case, particularly with regard to:

• The nature and gravity of the offense or conduct;
• the time that has passed since the offense or conduct and completion of the sentence; and
• the nature of the position sought.

If you can’t reasonably assert that someone’s conviction should keep them from the nature of the work they’re applying for, you could be out of compliance in some states with stricter standards than those in place at the federal level (like California, where employers are required to account for the above three factors). For example, if a person has a recent history of embezzlement, a finance role might not be a good fit. If they’ve been convicted of identity theft, it likely doesn’t make sense to hire them onto your the HR team. However, if someone has a minor drug charge from five years ago and they’re applying to be a customer service rep, ask yourself how that’s relevant for the role.

This doesn’t mean you can’t be consistent about disqualifiers, though–quite the contrary: The clearer your rules, the more open you can be to assessing different applications thoughtfully–and the broader and fairer your candidate pool will become.

Related: The Job Site Wants To Help People With Criminal Records Secure Good Jobs

Don’t Go It Alone

There are a few organizations that can help you put in place a fair chance hiring program and even connect you with qualified applicants for jobs. Defy Ventures, The Last Mile, and 70 Million Jobs have educated my own team on how to work with fair chance candidates, helping us build empathy and respect for people who are often unfairly overlooked. Almost every community has nonprofits that help people transition out of the prison system, so don’t hesitate to use those resources.

Offer Training And Set Clear Expectations

Depending on the job requirements or your work environment, you may need to give a bit of extra training and support to fair chance employees. In prison, most inmates don’t have access to the internet, so helping people get comfortable with new technology is a huge way to break through barriers. Similarly, providing very clear expectations around work responsibilities and office etiquette can make sure everyone’s on the same page and set up for success. This additional effort pays dividends; according to the ACLU, fair chance employees are typically retained at higher rates, which can significantly lower your overall recruiting and training costs.

Set Up An Internship Program

One of the most successful fair chance initiatives I’ve worked on has been an internship program. It lets us assess whether a given career path is the right fit while giving the candidate a chance to build skills and earn a fair wage in the process. Several high-potential candidates have moved to full-time roles at my company after joining as interns.

Never Forget There’s A Person Behind Every Job Application

For fair chance employers committed to social justice, there’s a temptation to shout your efforts from the rooftops. But while you should certainly advertise that you’re open to considering ex-offenders, think twice before identifying fair-chance hires internally (let alone prodding them to talk to the press).

My organization’s culture tends to encourage fair chance employees to talk about their personal histories if and when they’re comfortable; we want all our team members to bring their whole selves to work. But it’s always smart to follow their lead. Revealing who they are–even when the goal is to commend and inspire–could create a stigma or sense of “otherness.” Inform managers so they can help support their employers, but always leave it up to the individual to decide how and whether to discuss their experiences.

Some of our best employees have a conviction history, and we’d be a weaker organization without them. With the perspectives that ex-offenders bring, companies can better understand their customers, become more diverse, and ultimately reach stronger business outcomes. If your hiring process is set up to quickly dismiss people with criminal histories, you’re already missing out on the talents of a 70 million-strong workforce–a competitive disadvantage if ever there was one.

Robert Gill is director of people operations at Checkr, a background screening platform.

What: The official red-band trailer for Deadpool 2.

Who: Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Zazie Beetz, and director David Leitch (Atomic Blonde).

Why we care: The first Deadpool movie defied most people’s expectations. A passion project for failed Green Lantern star Ryan Reynolds, 2016’s Deadpool threw out the superhero rulebook by packing in excessive R-rated violence and meta-humor so self-referential it stops just short of having the top and bottom of the frame come together to wink at the audience. The movie went on to smash box office records, making over a quarter-billion dollars worldwide in just its opening weekend. (It ended up topping out at $783 million.) The stage is now set for a sequel that comes out swinging with somehow even more swagger, unencumbered by the baggage of establishing an origin story or fears of taking a box office bath. In the first official trailer–a teaser dropped back in February–we catch up with Reynolds’s scarred-up, seemingly indestructible antihero as he faces off with Josh Brolin’s bionic-eyed, seemingly indestructible antihero Cable. As the trailer makes clear, Deadpool 2 will also serve as a launchpad for the eventual X-Force movie, which is definitely happening. Catch Deadpool 2 in theaters on May 18.

ProPublica and Mother Jones released the results of a sweeping investigation today that underscores the pernicious problem of age discrimination in tech. Over the last few years, the news outlets say, IBM shed some 20,000 American employees over 40, roughly 60% of its total U.S. job cuts during the time period. The investigation relied, in part, on personal accounts of more than 1,100 former IBM employees who shared their stories.

Here are five notable findings from the report:

• Strategic conversion: The company allegedly converted job cuts into “voluntary” retirements or resignations as a way to avoid rules that require public disclosure of mass layoffs.
• Churn and burn: The company reportedly “pushed out” workers over supposed “performance issues,” but then brought them back on as contract employees with lower pay and fewer benefits.
• NDAs and muzzles: Some former IBM employees were allegedly strong-armed into signing agreements that prohibited them from going to court or talking about their experiences.
• Hiring from without: Some employees targeted for layoffs were encouraged to apply for other positions within the company, but IBM allegedly advised hiring managers not to hire them.
• One more thing: Because life is terrible, many of the workers reportedly had to train their own replacements.

Age discrimination is illegal under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, but it’s notoriously difficult to prove. In its response to ProPublica and Mother Jones, IBM said, “We are proud of our company and our employees’ ability to reinvent themselves era after era, while always complying with the law.

Do check out the full report here.

What: New ad by Dwayne Johnson for the “Chase Greatness” collection of his ongoing Project Rock collaboration with Under Armour.

Who: Under Armour, Seven Bucks Creative

Why we care: It’s basically a TLDR origin story for The Rock crossed with a lifestyle motivation video. At this point, Johnson can sing, act, and pump iron with the best of them. His expanding training gear line–from T-shirts and bags to shoes and more–has been a popular seller for Under Armour since it launched in 2016. In this campaign, created by Johnson’s own Seven Buck Creative (launched last year and named for the $7 he had to his name), we get a whiff of the style and story that may go into much heavier ad rotation leading up to 2020. You’re welcome.